Bachmann-Medick Doris - Structures of feeling : affectivity and the study of culture

space, the social and cultural life-world, and the thick anthropological description of historical reality. These all seem to pave the way for a new and more nuanced approach to historical description, elaborating, as does Williams, the notion of experience, in a number of different ways. These approaches thus share a certain phenomenological awareness of how experience is articulated in a close and complex interaction between humans and their environments, how it is bodily mediated, how it plays out in a particular spatial framework, and how it is inextricably invested in and dependent on social relations between humans, and between humans and social institutions. These approaches contribute in different ways to expand our understanding of culture, widening the analytical scope from masterworks and historical events to the multifarious fabric of everyday life, and moreover, to the ways in which culture is continuously reproduced (and gradually developed in still new dimensions) through the interaction between life forms and everyday practices on the one hand, and institutions and power relations on the other.

If attentiveness to the layers of affect and feeling within the historical fabric of culture is promoted by such developments in contemporary cultural studies, an even more important background stems from the fact that affectivity seems to have become an ever more important part of social life today. There is thus an urgency to understand and theorise affects and affectivity, simply in order to understand what is happening around us and to us in a world where politics, economy, and culture are becoming increasingly affect-driven. The idea that politics is often less about rational deliberation of the common good than about feelings is of course no new insight. Whether spurred by enthusiasm or by fear, politics seems to demand an affective investment, for those aspiring to lead others, as well as for those being somehow persuaded to follow or support a would-be leader. It does seem, however, that this affective dimension of politics has come to play a still more dominant role in contemporary societies, mainly due to the ways in which we handle and circulate information. On one hand, we have the well-known mediatisation of politics, making political campaigning a huge business for media professionals, who are able to turn political messages into ingeniously fabricated affective stimuli. The like/dislike-factor in politics has never enjoyed more importance than today, it seems, and investment in optimising this specific parameter has never been greater. Political sales talk is affective. It probably always was, but never more systematically than today. Moreover, political articulation is becoming increasingly affect-driven; that is, not only in terms of what politicians say to their constituents, but also of the input they receive in return from the public sphere. Political articulation is now less about collective organisation and the setting of political agendas, and more about answering questions. There are polls for everything. In this sense, political articulation has never been more massive and powerful, since there is instant and systematic feed-back on virtually every conceivable political question. But this articulation is no longer part of a coherent and explicit political view. Rather immediate reactions are sought to questions expressly devised in order to gauge certain moods. Political participation becomes an endless series of ayes and nos, sometimes broken down into to a scale of agreement from 1 to 10.