Communication as Constitutive Transmission

At a glance, affect theory is at significant odds with the conception of communication outlined at the start of this chapter. In fact, a closer look at affect as rendered in Chapter 2 suggests that it is defined against com-munication as we know it. Recall, for instance, that affect precedes and exceeds subjectivity as well as the discursive and ideational, that it is dis-tinguished from emotion on the grounds of the latter’s symbolic capture, and that it meets intersubjectivity and interpretation with indifference.

Affect prioritizes relational intensities which unaccountably permeate and (dis)organize sociomaterial worlds, and especially corporeal experi-ence, precisely because they evade articulation and representation.

On the one hand, affect swirls all around communication, as that inef-fable “stuff that goes on beneath, beyond, even parallel to signification”

(O’Sullivan, 2001, p. 126), or “the capacity of interaction that is akin to a natural force of emergence” (Beyes & Steyaert, 2012, p. 46). Yet it can hardly be said to cooperate, operating on its own register distinct from linguistic processes and powerfully “unassimilable” for just that reason (Massumi, 1995, p. 88). Defiantly beating to its own elusive drummer, affect flouts constructions of meaning and somehow orchestrates world-ings anyway. Affect appears not only to surround but also to overpower, communication. The linguistic turn shudders.

How, then, could affect ever ally with communicative theories of working and organizing, bent as they are on demonstrating the efficacy of human discourse? Certainly, many constitutive, dialogic accounts of communication have acknowledged its embodied and emotional charac-ter but, just as surely, affect theory is a leap too far. What is inter action without the individuals, those precious speaking and feeling subjects, who engage in intersubjectivity? Is it not the human struggle over mean-ing, above all, that makes things matter ?

Against such antagonistic readings, we argue that affect and communica-tion need one another to facilitate lively engagement with the late -capitalist landscape portrayed in Chapter 1 . Affect theory calls into question long and deeply held, yet constricting, notions about what communication must be in order to qualify as a robust process. Specifically, much communication theory continues to celebrate the hard -won battle whereby communication ascended to its rightful constitutive pedestal against the foil of “mere” transmission.

Affect theory resoundingly validates transmission as a constitutive process, whereas communication can help affect theory address something of a black

box: the how of affective transfer. We begin by examining more closely what happens to communication, as we now know it, through an affective lens.

What Becomes of Communication Defined

as Human Interaction That Makes Meaning of the World?

As sketched earlier, most contemporary accounts designate communi-cation as the realm of (a) language, understood as a human system of signs and symbols put to use in verbal and non -verbal (i.e., embodied but unstated) ways; (b) discourse, loosely defined as narrative formations, and their everyday practice; (c) intersubjectivity, pursued and achieved in and through interaction; and/or (d) the contestation and negotiation of meaning, which crafts the world by collaboratively making sense of it, through ongoing interpretation. Of course, these renditions overlap and offer only a distilled sampling, but they illustrate the tie that binds — namely, a view of communication wherein signification and subjectiv-ity are of utmost concern. Put crudely, signification reigns as the central activity of social construction, and the status of the human subject engag-ing in and with signification is a pivotal problematic.

These issues are not discarded by affect theory, but they do assume a more modest place. The linguistic turn is not so much repudiated or under-mined as it is called to humility. Symbols retain ontological force, tangled up with other kinds of participants, but their use is not the ontological force.

So what, more precisely, becomes of subjectivity? It is certainly not irrelevant, but it is also not the main show, and it is decidedly vulner-able. However, affect theory generally means this in a different way than familiar poststructuralist claims to the fragmentation and fragility of identities as discursively constituted. For affect theory, subjectivity is vul-nerable in that it is hybrid —plural and precarious, colliding at various discursive intersections, yes, and constantly interrupted, disjointed, dis-persed, and crossbred because it is “caught up in things” (Stewart, 2007, p. 86). Subjectivity is not simply relational in that it is constituted within discourse; it is relational in its dependence on the sociomaterial matrix that gives it life and form to wriggle within and against that enabling matrix, with which it constantly breeds (Butler, 2015; Roberts, 2005).

Subjectivity becomes post -human, in short.

As the trans personal flow of sensory force that animates worlds by tra-versing bodies, affect enlivens but also disrupts the subject, enticing “it”

into other arrangements or leaving it crumpled on the floor like last night’s attire. This is how affect is pre personal: it is “prior” to, or necessary for, the constitution of subjectivities as well as “the individual” who comes to inhabit them. It is extra personal in that it transcends the emotional borders of skin, capable of rendering selves irrelevant, inept, or entirely undone.

Notice the contrast with a typical communicative focus on the personal, which presumes pre -bounded people who enter into and leave

interaction, even if the particulars of their selves are made and unraveled within that or successive exchanges. Here, the sensory force that awakens and deadens scenes takes center stage, even as “the human” players are not taken for granted.

In this spirit, Stewart (2007) offers a post -human translation of the eth-nographic eye/I, which becomes object -ified and thrown toward “she.”

However, she is not a stable third -person, and certainly not an objective observer with a god’s eye or a bird’s view. She is a feeling, knowing, becoming, and constantly disrupted body -vessel, a self only known —and a thousand times lost —in and through affective flow:

“She” is not so much a subject position or an agent in hot pursuit of something definitive as a point of contact; instead, she gazes, imag-ines, senses, takes on, performs, and asserts not a flat and finished truth but some possibilities (and threats) that have come into view in the effort to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer.

(p. 5) This move provides a glimpse of how reflexivity unfurls in affect the-ory, less concerned with the researcher’s subject positionality and curi-ous instead about the ontological politics evolving as a body of research mingles with other (not necessarily human) bodies in practice.

As with subjectivity, affect theory does not disregard signification either, but its ontological mattering gets a serious makeover. Stewart (2007, p. 3) explains that ordinary affect

works not through “meanings” per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dra-mas, and social worldings of all kinds. The question they beg is not what they might mean in an order of representations, or whether they are good or bad in an overarching scheme of things, but where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance.

MacLure (2013) clarifies that this shift in focus is not a rejection of sig-nification but, rather, a reworking of its significance: “The critique of representation does not deny that it does indeed happen” (p. 559) or that representational logic is useful as it allows us to navigate a steady sea of meaning with other durable interlocutors. But it is crucial to acknowl-edge that “words collide and connect with things on the same ontological level , and therefore language cannot achieve the distance and externality that would allow it to represent —i.e., to stand over, stand for and stand in for —the world” (p. 660, emphasis added).

This is exactly why affect theory, like other relational ontologies, emphasizes sociomaterial production (i.e., doing worlds, or the enactment

of hybrid agencies) instead of social construction (i.e., knowing the world through language). Approaches based on social construction empower lan-guage over matter, holding that language matters more because it makes things matter. However, such a claim can only stand if we ignore that language is (also) matter. Words too must materialize on page, screen, or embodied voice, for example, to matter at all. Talking and listening are mate-rial as well as social practices that enlist human and nonhuman participants.

It is therefore not entirely in “our” power to speak, or silence, the world into being. This is the move toward humility: signification, still potentially powerful, becomes another mode of mattering . We might say —with less arrogance and tongue in cheek —that “words matter ,” and “language is still a thing .”

This demotion of the ontological status of language explains why intersubjectivity, as the negotiation of shared meaning through language between already established subject -entities, is beside (literally, alongside) the point. It may help to recall here affect theory’s claim that sens ibility arrives on sense - ability . The point is that meaning moves among us mate-rially , for instance, through physical senses and objects. Meaning is spat, thrown, whispered, torn up, and poured. It slaps me in the face, averts your eyes, quivers in his throat, and takes wing as a butterfly in her stomach.

Massumi (1995) refers to this ubiquitous capacity of communication as the expression event (see also Grossberg, 1982) —that dynamic flow of tran-sitory intensities which constitutes relations as always indeterminate, and which is drained of blood, or erased altogether, when semantics or semiotics are privileged. Reviving this eventfulness, Riley (2005, p. 3) situates language as an agentive conduit for affective flow that “exerts a torsion on its users.”

She observes that “there is a forcible affect of language which courses like blood through its speakers” (p. 1) and “stands somewhat apart from the expressive intentions of an individual speaker” (p. 5) —“an affect which seeps from the very form of the words” (p. 2) and from “common twists of speech which themselves enact feeling, rather than simply and obediently conveying it as we elect” (p. 3). Here the question is not so much “How to Do Things with Words, as Austin’s title had it, but how words do things with us. And that ‘with us’ —as distinct from ‘to us’ —is pivotal” (p. 3).

The sociomateriality of language itself, and the hybrid agencies entailed in its use, begin to come into relief. For example, during the 2016 U.S.

presidential elections, the word “tweet” was lingered upon like a tasty treat, stretched out and flung on various tongues across various scenes, a missile of trivialization and emasculation that could never be caught red -handed, exceeding its designated meaning with the feeling texture of the word itself, and flooding campaign venues with irrepressible if fleet-ing delight (e.g., “a man you can bait with a tweet . . .”). John Oliver’s viral takedown of the potent name “Trump” (as opposed to the original

“Drumpf”), as it materializes capitalist dreams with brassy public flexes of success, emblazoned in outsized gold and block lettering across one

phallic object after another, and blurted from the mouth like a belligerent triumph, lends another unforgettable example.¹

When it comes to matters of meaning, then, affect theory highlights its material transfer, and it is in this charged transmission that meaning comes to matter . As with the first two revisions of communication pro-posed in this chapter, language is still about forging connections, but the links of most interest are not emerging maps of signification but, rather, relational intensities born of contact.

A novel vision of communication begins to emerge through affect theory:

as transmissive and constitutive, or constitutive because transmissive. As outlined earlier, transmission models of communication are generally cast in opposition to constitutive models. Transmission is dismissed as the anti-quated notion that interaction is simply a passive channel through which humans relay information and express an already formed world. Hence, communication becomes constitutive —the interactive production of mean-ings with tangible consequence —on the back of transmission, or through its denigration. Affect theory unsettles this binary with a robust reading of trans-mission, which highlights, among other things, how language exerts powerful relational pulls beyond meaning effects. It thereby calls us to reconsider the vitality of a trans personal, rather than inter personal or intersubjective, model of communication, which would prioritize how signs, symbols, and meanings are felt, unleashing and accumulating intensities, as they pass through and connect bodies of all kinds, skipping from one scene of encounter to the next.

Transmission, in this sense , “makes a difference.” It galvanizes those distinc-tions and reladistinc-tions that offer up inhabitable worlds, and it makes those worlds mobile and contagious —in a word, “communicable.” Communication as the transmission of affect is a constitutive process, albeit even more transient and unruly than communication as we have known it until now.

A Slippery Slope: What Else Then Becomes of Communication?

Thus far, we have seen how affect theory treats communication as cur-rently defined: ongoing human interaction that gives meaning to the world.

Guided by the linguistic turn and numerous strands of social construc-tionism, this definition grants top ontological billing to the signifying operations of language such that discursive activity becomes the primary constitutive force, and communication as transmission appears outmoded and impotent. Without rejecting the efficacy of language, affect theory calls it to ontological modesty while expanding appreciation of the ways in which it is efficacious. Specifically, affect theory reframes signification as one mode of mattering, on ontological par and colliding with others, and it points curiosity toward relational effects of language and interac-tion that go missing amid preoccupainterac-tion with meaning effects, particu-larly the generation and travel of sensory intensities. In sum, affect theory retains interest in discursive activity, but it redirects attention from the

construction of coherent meanings to their erratic material circulation. It asks how signification moves around like other matter and becomes sensed and impactful. Ahmed’s (2014) work on affective economies of hate that trade in “metonymic slides” —gatherings of signs, discourses, and objects that become stuck together and garner communities of investment through circulation —provides an excellent example of one such approach.

Affect theory thus prompts us to double back toward transmission and challenge feeble accounts thereof. It hints at a productive redefinition of communication as the constitutive process of affective contact and trans-mission , or elaborated, as the encounter, conduction, and transduction of energetic intensities that move worlding , in the multiple senses of move-ment developed in Chapter 2 . “Conduction” and “transduction” are two key traveling potentials of encounter, as currently understood in affect theory. By conduction, we refer to the transfer of sensation and feeling among proximate bodies (again, human and nonhuman) acting as fertile if unwitting producers and carriers. Transduction refers to the transfer of felt forces of potential, or the imminent virtual, from one relational actu-alization (i.e., tangible bodies or scenes) to another, enabling emergence and transformation into something else as yet unknown (Massumi, 1995).

Caution is in order, for this shift opens a proverbial can of worms that may prove more “productive” than anticipated. Presuming that the circulation of language and meaning is not the only means of affective contact and transmis-sion, what then? Do other modes of transfer also entail communication such that the very term no longer belongs to the realm of human discourse? Are we equipped for the ramifications of this? Scholars studying quantum phys-ics (Barad, 2003, 2007, 2014), bio -semiotphys-ics (see Kohn, 2013), and material semiotics (see Law, 2009), for example, have long pursued affiliate questions.

But the potential dividends of studying other material “languages,” or sign systems, for organization and communication studies remains to be seen. A foray into what is arguably the most expansive treatment of affect transmis-sion to date can help to clarify the daunting proposition at hand.

In a provocative case for heightened attention to the transfer of affect, Brennan (2004) hosts an often dizzying encounter among demarcated fields, such as psychoanalytic theory and practice, social theory and philosophy, neuro and biological sciences, and theology. Her goal with this wide arc is to theorize the sociomateriality of affect transmission, or in her words, the fact that “the social or psychosocial actually gets into the flesh” (p. 25):

What is overlooked, in the rearguard actions of those who defend the social construction of persons, is the way that certain biological and phys-ical phenomena themselves require a social explanation. While its well-springs are social, the transmission of affect is deeply physical in its effects.

(p. 23) While controversial (see Forum, 2006), Brennan’s account raises several prospects pertinent to the redefinition of communication earlier. First,

she demonstrates that the claim to affect transmission is all but incontro-vertible; available evidence in multiple fields confirms that feeling which courses through one body can most certainly enter another. Second, such energetic transfer can take multiple forms (e.g., alignment through conta-gion or complementary opposition through projection) that move through several channels. Chief among the avenues of contagion is what she calls

“olfactory communication,” also known as chemical entrainment, wherein pheromones emitted into the atmosphere by one or more bodies elicit con-sequential physiological responses (e.g., hormonal fluctuations) in others.

Palpable physiological changes are also induced through “nervous commu-nication,” or electrical entrainment, such as that entailed in touch, sound, and sight, especially through varying intensities of rhythm and vibration.

Lest such pathways be hastily dismissed as biologically determined matters, predictable mechanisms of stimulus and response that belong to the physical sciences and hardly count as “communication,” Brennan builds a compelling case for the complicated interpretive labor required and its sociomaterial inde-terminacy. In a nutshell, in any encounter, a “horizontal or heartfelt axis of communication that imbibes molecular information directly from the other”

collides with “the vertical or historical line of personal affective history,” or tailored accumulations from previous interactions that bodies bring —and, often, drag like baggage —to a scene (p. 86). Complex, volatile, and custom-ized processing akin to linguistic communication is therefore always involved.

The simultaneous operation of multiple modes of communication suggests

“that we regard the human being as a receiver and interpreter of feelings, affects, attentive energy” (p. 87) in far more complex ways than presently recognized. Brennan specifies the human body as a particular kind of vessel for affective flow by revealing its engagement in constant, plural, and parallel communication activities. “Parallel” is an important term here. She argues that language, interpretation, and meaning are not the sole province of con-scious social interaction and sensemaking, practices that are of course also physical, as argued earlier. Rather, human bodies alone practice several forms of knowing through doing, which can all be usefully regarded as interpretive practices that make meaning out of sensory information. Brennan goes so far as to call for “understanding fleshly languages as languages” (p. 141), as homologous modes of communicating: “Such knowledge is a chain of com-munication and association in the flesh (with its own anchors in the brain) that is also structured like language and functions in a parallel way (p. 23).”

“that we regard the human being as a receiver and interpreter of feelings, affects, attentive energy” (p. 87) in far more complex ways than presently recognized. Brennan specifies the human body as a particular kind of vessel for affective flow by revealing its engagement in constant, plural, and parallel communication activities. “Parallel” is an important term here. She argues that language, interpretation, and meaning are not the sole province of con-scious social interaction and sensemaking, practices that are of course also physical, as argued earlier. Rather, human bodies alone practice several forms of knowing through doing, which can all be usefully regarded as interpretive practices that make meaning out of sensory information. Brennan goes so far as to call for “understanding fleshly languages as languages” (p. 141), as homologous modes of communicating: “Such knowledge is a chain of com-munication and association in the flesh (with its own anchors in the brain) that is also structured like language and functions in a parallel way (p. 23).”