Affective turn, social sciences and communication

The border that separates the public from the private is increasingly fragile. There are continuities in both dimensions of life, and it is more common that attitudes are observed in public spaces that, until not long ago, were destined to be expressed only in intimate spaces. We refer, for example, to emotions. This emotionalization of public life is precisely one of the elements that gives rise to what is known in social sciences as the Affective Turn.

The term “Affective Turn” was used for the first time by American sociologists ^{Clough and Halley (2007)}. The basis of their initial proposal was to go against the basically discursive orientation of social constructionism. For ^{Clough (2008)}, affect must be understood as an ontology of those phenomena that do not depend on human consciousness or linguistic communication. The author defines affect as the body’s ability to affect and be affected, a condition that is related to being alive.

Regarding the Affective Turn, ^{Lara and Enciso (2013)} state that:

This has been defined mainly by two theoretical urgencies: the interest in the emotionalization of the public life, and the effort to reconfigure the production of knowledge aimed at expanding such emotionalization. Therefore, affection and emotion appear as the new affair that is strongly seducing the social sciences, causing an academic movement that focuses on “what it feels like” (pp. 101-102).

According to the same authors, “we could (wrongly) summarize the affective turn as a change in the conception of affection that has come to modify the production of knowledge and the very logic of the disciplines” (^{Lara & Enciso, 2013, p. 102}).

Based on the previous assessments, we consider pertinent the question about what impact this affective turn has had on the production of knowledge in the field of communication, whose hybrid and dynamic nature has generated many disagreements about the particularities of its object of study. We assume that communication research has as its object of study the “processes of production of meaning” (^{Fuentes, 2008}). As the author states:

At the center of our object of study, communication, there are not only the “messages” or the “contents”, but also the relationships, established and investigated through their multiple mediations, between the production of meaning and the identity of the social subjects in the most diverse sociocultural practices (p. 113).

The contributions of the Affective Turn to communication can be seen, for example, in Sibila’s reflections on La intimidad como espectáculo (^{The intimacy as a spectacle) (2008)}. In this work, the author addresses how the digital communicative ecology transforms people’s ways of relating and, ultimately, the subjectivities, understood as fluctuating and resilient. The display of intimacy, of the private, in the digital public space, provokes “a displacement of that internalized subjectivity towards new forms of self-construction” (^{Sibila, 2008, pp. 27-28}).

For ^{Sibila (2008)}, what is suggestive about this blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private is that it generates a new refuge for the privacy of the subjects that:

It not only denotes an exclusive concern for the small stories and the particular emotions that afflict each subject, but also an evaluation of the political action -exterior and public- only from what it suggests about the personality of the agent -interior and private- (p. 72).

The interiority of the people -sphere in which practically all affective and emotional expressions were previously destined-, then becomes essential to formulate new questions about the public, about the outside world. Therefore, the importance of considering the affects, and of talking about the emotionalization of the public.

The Affective Turn implies conceiving emotions as a fundamentally sociological problem, without this implying the denial of their biological nature. From this point of view, emotions cannot be understood only as human accessories, but must be seen as an indivisible part of the bodily experiences of the subjects. Body and emotions go hand in hand.

Without being a homogeneous theoretical current, the Affective Turn has been nourished, especially in the last decade, by various lines of reflection and research from sociological, historical and anthropological perspectives. It can hardly be attributed indisputable premises and a perfectly determined object of reflection. The tendency that it has granted has been to provide sociological visibility to a set of topics -with the emotional and affective at the center- that has been slightly legitimized in the field of social sciences (^{Abramowski & Canevaro, 2017}). And the field of communication has not been, as we shall see, the exception.

Emotions, communication and body

Generally, the reflections on communication, body and emotions are grounded in the theme or phenomenon of interpersonal communication, not so much of mediated communication. In every situation of interpersonal communication, messages that cannot be understood solely from their informative content are exchanged. Emotions are always displayed, whether in a more intense and direct way or in a subtler way. The people who are communicating are bodies that affect and are affected, subjects that feel and express different states of mind. This is how ^{Izquierdo (2000)} explains it:

As interpersonal communication does not occur in the void, it is necessary to take into account the goals, needs, desires, moods, expectations and learning of people, including the conceptual representation of feelings and knowledge of the norms of emotional interaction in the context, when directing attention, interpreting and responding to the emotion elicited by a relational event (p. 136).

The same author affirms that “people manifest through their verbal and non-verbal behavior a tendency to share the emotions of others (emotional contagion), even in cases in which emotions are not intentionally communicated” (^{Izquierdo, 2000, p. 136}).

The notion of “emotional contagion” enunciated in the previous paragraph is related to what ^{Collins (2009)} calls “emotional energy” in the chains of interaction rituals. For Collins, the rituals of interaction are situations of physical co-presence that demarcate the participants from the others and that differ according to two major dimensions: the coincidence degree of the participants in their shared focus of attention, and the intensity of the emotional linkage that arises between them. The central core of any ritual of interaction involves a process in which the participants develop a common focus of attention and in which their bodily rhythms and their emotions enter into “reciprocal consonance” (^{Collins, 2009, p. 71}). What increases or decreases the emotional energy is the consonance of communicative gestures and emotional rhythms between the participants of a certain ritual. Emotional energy accumulates in memories, ideas, beliefs and symbols, and is recycled in conversational networks, in internal dialogues and in chains of interaction rituals that take place subsequently.

The above mentioned clears up the relationship between emotions and communication, a link that will be resumed later. Now is the time to ask ourselves what happens to the body, what role does it play in the expression of emotions. As ^{Scribano (2009)} points out:

What we know about the world we know by and through our bodies, what we do is what we see, what we see is how we divide the world. In this “there-now” the devices for regulating sensations are installed, through which the social world is apprehended and narrated from the expropriation that gave rise to the situation of domination (pp. 144-145).

Social subjects know the world through their bodies, and that knowledge is given by perceptions, sensations and emotions, felt and experienced in, from and by the bodies.

For this reason, it is also strange that the subject of emotions has been excluded for so long from social and cultural analyses, characterized by a predominance of macro-social approaches. This exclusion, furthermore, has to do with an androcentric gaze that relates the masculine with the objective-rational (and the fair and appropriate), and the feminine with the emotional (and the lacking and incomplete): “The masculine becomes, thus, the measure of all things, the universal point of view” (^{Fabbri, 2011, p. 4}).

The sociology of emotions has a background of more than four decades (^{Bericat, 2016}) in the sociological field. This does not mean that previously there were no sociological approaches to the emotion, to the affective dimension of the social, but without a doubt, the presence of the emotional dimension was something residual until well entered into the seventies of the 20th century. In “The sociology of emotions”, ^{Bericat (2016)} offers a very detailed state of the contributions of the sociology of emotions to sociological thought.

One of the main achievements of the sociology of emotions is that “it opens an important horizon of social study, also necessary for the development of sociological metatheories that correct the rationalist bias which affects almost all of them” (^{Bericat, 2000, p. 149}). All the proposals emanating from the sociology of emotions are based on the consideration that most human emotions are nurtured and make sense in the framework of our social relationships:

The nature of emotions is conditioned by the nature of the social situation in which people feel. They are an expression, in the body of individuals, of the very rich range of forms of social relationship. Loneliness, envy, hatred, fear, shame, pride, resentment, revenge, nostalgia, sadness, satisfaction, joy, anger, frustration and a host of other emotions correspond to specific social situations (^{Bericat, 2000, p. 150}).

Although the research about emotions in the field of social sciences is not new, in the Latin American space it would take a few more years for the proliferation of works on emotions and affectivity, being incorporated at the end of the 1990s and already the beginning of the XXI century. One of the lines of reflection that has aroused the greatest interest has precisely one of its central elements in the body, since it recovers the body and the affectivity as elements that affect and are affected. This current is part of the so-called Affective Turn, which we already referred to in the first part of this text, a turn towards the body and against the privilege of the study of the meaning and the discourse (^{Lara & Enciso, 2013}). The gaze is placed, then, on the bodies and the senses, and not on the discourses. Despite the fact that we understand the centrality of the body and the senses, ultimately any approach to these elements will go through a story of the person carrying the body, of the sentient person. Moreover, the body is in itself a discourse loaded with meaning, therefore the Affective Turn cannot, we understand, discard any approach to the discourses.

Despite the growing interest in the body-affectivity relationship, there is a huge gap between the studies of the body and the studies of emotions, something that worries several authors (^{Sabido, 2011}; ^{Scribano, 2013}). We share this concern and we comprehend that body and emotions cannot be understood independently. To that end, we agree with ^{Denzin (1985)} when he states that emotions are not found in the subject neither in its body, but in their relationship, in what is between one and the other.

Addressing the body-emotion relationship also implies giving a central role to the senses, to the sensory dimension of human life. And we must not lose sight of the fact that “the senses are everywhere” (^{Bull et al., 2006, p. 5}). They mediate the relationship between idea and object, mind and body, self and society, culture and environment (^{Howes, 2014, p. 21}). Like bodies, emotions are always situated, individually expressed, but always shaped by the culture.

From a sociocultural perspective, the relationship between emotions and body can be approached from the notion of cultural dispositions. Emotions are present in these corporal dispositions, and are related to social and cultural constructed discourses. These ideas are fundamental in the proposal of ^{Le Breton (1992/2001}, ¹⁹⁹⁹, ²⁰⁰²⁾ whose contributions we have previously recovered. Along the same line, ^{Bolaños (2015)} states that “the body is the vehicle of meanings of culture and space in which emotions, feelings and sensory elaborations fit” (p. 184).

Communication, body and emotions go hand in hand: “the power of expression of the word is not different from the power of the body, since language is the expression of the body itself” (^{Verano, 2009, p. 611}). In the next section we will delve into the emotional dimension of communication.

Body(ies) and corporality(ies) as basic axes for the emotional approach of human communication

The body is one of our main vehicles of communication with the world. From the body and with the body we create significance and give meaning to everything that surrounds us, thus we can speak without hesitation of the significant potential of the body. And hence, also, that it is necessary for communication research to consider the body as a complex object of reflection that can contribute entirely to the views around the social world that communication sciences build.

As a social and cultural construction, the body is the carrier of meanings. The body speaks of the subject and, at the same time, communicates features of the social environment that the person inhabits: “We are a body, understanding as such that reality where the private and the public, the intimate and the exposed, are combined. Each feature of our body speaks of what our passage through life is like” (^{Corres, 2007, p. 212}).

Thereby, thinking about the body implies taking into account the uses that are made of it, uses that depend on cultures (^{Noguez, 2009}). As ^{Connell (1995)} affirms, society is a reflexive bodily experience, so it is not very useful to present completely biological or completely constructivist approaches to the body. As in the case of emotions, it is more pertinent to think about the body from perspectives that consider social interaction and reflexivity. Following ^{Vergara (2009)}:

From a sociology of bodies and emotions, we can embark on the path to find clues that lead us to: understand the meaning that the actors give to their practices, identify conflictual nodes that emerge in these daily un-derstandings, account for how the society that is made body can be tracked from the analysis of certain social emotions (p. 36).

And it is that the body has no meaning outside its context, “it is clinging to the fabric of meaning” (^{Le Breton, 1992/2001, p. 37}). Or what is the same, “bodies are covered by our individual and collective histories” (^{Weeks, 1999, p. 177}).

The above mentioned demonstrates the importance of thinking about the body from its relationship with communication and emotions. From a socio-phenomenological perspective, ^{Schütz (1993)} introduces a suggestive idea to articulate the body and intersubjective communication. The author speaks of intersubjective understanding and defines it as the observation, on behalf of the observer, of the other person's body movements, which become indications of the experiences that the other person experiences.

As we have already mentioned, the body speaks about the society in which it lives, and how the body is conceived in a society is an indicator of the ways in which the person is conceived. Although it seems that the body is seen as a representation of the culture and society in which it is found, “we cannot separate its representations on the one hand and how the body is lived on the other, they cannot be separated as if they were different perspectives, or as if they were antagonists” (^{Aguilar-Ros, 2004, p. 51}). In the body “nature and culture, biological condition and social learning, physiological aspects and incorporated sociabilities are found united, gathered and fused” (^{Vergara, 2009, p. 35}). The biological and the sociocultural are absolutely linked when speaking of the bodies.

A few decades ago, the body was treated as a biological and natural phenomenon, and as such, it was attended almost exclusively by medical and biological disciplines. Very occasionally it was considered from a social and cultural perspective, hence it was not conceived as an object of study proper to social research. Fortunately, decades later, the body has been gaining legitimacy in sociology, anthropology and history, three of the disciplines that have dealt with it the most.

The body is highly ritualized and “cultural logics are inscribed in the bodies” (^{Le Breton, 2002}). For the subject, his body is the most immediate thing in the world. But the body, as we said, does not belong only to the order of the individual: “The body is social, socialized and sociable, just as the social is corporal and embodied” (^{Varela, 2009, p. 97}).

We are body, we see, we live, we perceive the world through our body. And this perceptive experience cannot occur if it is not through sensations. Our body is the first thing that makes us aware of our being and our presence in the world: “In the face of ambiguity and lack of definition, the body of the subjects is their palpable ‘truth’, the only certainty in uncertain moments” (^{Muñiz & List, 2007, p. 7}).

It is necessary to transit, according to ^{Sabido (2016)}, “from the study of the body to the study of bodily experience, highlighting the sensitive dimension” (p. 66). In other words, the body must not only be seen as a “knot of living meanings” (^{Esteban, 2004}), but also as a perceptive body, which is what the shift from the sociology of the senses to the sociology of the perception (^{Sabido, 2016}).

Thus, one cannot speak of the body outside of the experience of the body itself:

The body can only be understood in the experience of itself, which is carried out throughout the entire process and which needs the world as a correlate of its action. In other words, the human body is the condition of consciousness as it is a subject in dialogue with the world (^{Noguez, 2009, p. 51}).

For ^{De Certeau (1996, p. 131)}, subjectivity is the journey, and the body is the map. And it is that the body is not reduced to its form. Everybody is signified in the context of a determined space and time.

Thinking about communication from a perspective that integrates the corporal-affective

Our relationship with the world goes through the sensations we experience with the body. The world is not only a world narrated and constructed discursively. It is, above all, a bodily experienced world.

Despite the fact that the field of communication seems to be clear that its object of study are the processes of production of meaning, it continues to be a significant predominance of studies on broadcast media -and today, above all, digital media are analyzed-, in detriment to the interpersonal communicative phenomena.

Consolidating the idea of the production of meaning as an object of study of communication allows to open up conceptual spaces and articulate, as we have tried to do in this essay, the emotional (with the body in the center) and rational dimensions as ingredients deployed in the communication situations, understood as processes of production/ construction of meanings.

The conceptual triangle that articulates body, communication and emotions gives a lot of itself to continue thinking about the ways in which we communicate, in order to try to solve our communication problems and to continue bringing to light that which was archived for decades: the interest in unmediated communication. The affirmation that this interest was archived is supported by documentary works that represent a great contribution to knowing what has been investigated in the academic field of communication. This type of meta-research work reveals that the media (first the press, radio and television, and since the end of the 20th century the Internet and digital media) continue to be the central object of study in the field of communication research.

Looking back at the unmediated does not imply disowning the importance of the media and digital technologies in current societies. This look that integrates the corporal and the affective also involves understanding how the media and, above all, digital technologies, are contributing to the construction of new subjects and the emergence or expansion of new ways of expressing emotions. Even new ways of experiencing them, of feeling them.

Therefore, it seems important to us that the field of communication participates in the Affective Turn, which has burst into the field of social sciences. And it seems so to us because we do not conceive situations of communication between people in which the senses, the affections and the sensations are absent, in addition to the more rational-argumentative discourses. We are body, and from our body we communicate. Our body produces meanings and, simultaneously, receives those emitted by our peers, with whom we interact on a daily basis. The body, emotions and, in general, the affective dimension of the world forge a suggestive conceptual space for the field of communication to offer more complex explanations about people in the present world.

As we have demonstrated throughout the essay, thinking about the relationship between communication and emotions makes it important to reinstate the contributions of the Affective Turn in the social sciences. Communication, in a broad sense, is a central element for human life, it is the basic condition of life in society and can be understood as a network of interactions in which people build and share meanings and interpretations about themselves, about other people and about the environment they inhabit.

Our body is the first channel of communication with the world that we people have. We are aware of our environment, of objects and of other subjects, because we have perceptive awareness of our body, and because from our body outline we constitute the images we have of others and we are capable of interacting with them.

Our relationship with the world is given by the body, hence this can be considered as the universal space. It is from the bodies that human beings signify their environments, they give meaning to other beings, to the space and time they inhabit. Therefore, we cannot understand ourselves as bodies if it is not from the significant display that we emit towards others from our body outline. And, at the same time, we cannot understand our societies if it is not through what our bodies communicate about them. Whether as a producer of meanings, as a receptacle of meanings in face-to-face situations, or as a body-thinking subject from which the consciousness of oneself and of others emanates, the body is our main vehicle of communication with the world. For all of the above, attending to the communicative potential of the body, and in general everything that refers to the emotional and affective dimension, is compelling for the field of communication.