Creative affects: affective phases in creative work processes

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Creative affects: affective phases in creative work processes

Bjørn Schiermer

To cite this article: Bjørn Schiermer (2021) Creative affects: affective phases in creative work processes, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 22:3, 421-440, DOI:

10.1080/1600910X.2021.1997777

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1997777

Published online: 21 Nov 2021.

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Creative aﬀects: aﬀective phases in creative work processes

Bjørn Schiermer

Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

ABSTRACT

The paper investigates the wide spectrum of affects characteristic of creative practice. It is centred on an empirical case study of the different creative phases that characterize the work of a group of professional newspaper cartoonists. The study explores the analytical possibilities of an object-oriented and affect theoretical approach to creative practice. It is loosely inspired by the phenomenology of affectdeveloped by British-Australian feminist and cultural scholar, Sara Ahmed. After a short sketch of the lacunae of traditional sociological theories of action as regards creativity, and an explanation of my selective adaption of Ahmed’s work to cover these lacunae, I move on to the empirical section. I begin by analysing the typical affects of the work phase in which the cartoonists struggle to choose what to draw. Next, I delve into the affects belonging to the phase of the actual drawing, a phase characterized by longer moments of intense affective immersion. I then attempt to map some of the means by which the cartoonists preserve affective strength and freshness (of the drawing) during their work processes. Finally, I investigate the collective sideto the work of the cartoonists and how collective and creative affects may intensify or reinforce each other.

KEYWORDS

Aﬀect; collectivity; creativity;

object-oriented;

phenomenology

Introduction

This essay investigates the different genres of affects to be found in prolonged creative practice. It is largely empirical, building on a case study of the creative and affective aspects of the work processes of a sample of professional Danish newspaper cartoonists.

Standard sociological theories of action are increasingly criticized for their lack of interest in creative practice. I concur with this criticism. In this paper, by mobilizing the work of British-Australian feminist and cultural studies scholar Sara Ahmed, I try to make good use of resources from cultural theory and phenomenology to ameliorate this situation. Ahmed’s work contains an array of inspirations: a phenomenological attention to actual experience and practice, an object-orientated perspective that attends to the action of (non-human) objects in our practical relations to them, and a special focus on the role of the aﬀective in the production of the mutual‘orientations’

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

CONTACT Bjørn Schiermer [email protected] Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Postboks 1096 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway

https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1997777

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and‘directions’that emerge between subject and object(s). Finally, Ahmed’s frame also has a collective dimension, which makes it especially interesting for a sociological theory of action.

The essay, however, is not primarily driven by a theoretical ambition. Rather, the empirical case study of the cartoonists is meant to demonstrate the analytical potential of a certain reframing of Ahmed’s critical phenomenology of aﬀect when it comes to the empirical analysis of creative action.

The essay proceeds as follows. First, I briefly revisit traditional sociological theories of action and discuss their lack of attention to creative phenomena. I then engage in an admittedly selective reading of Ahmed, seeking to make her object-orientated phenomenological approach fruitful for studies of creative practice. I highlight the tight associ- ation between non-instrumental attitudes and the ‘delegation’ or ‘distribution’ of action to the object at the centre of the practice in question, and I enforce a more relationalist perspective on action than the one found in Ahmed’s work. I also seek to further develop the collective aspects of Ahmed’s analysis, showing how collective affects may enforce and intensify creative affects. A note on data and methodology follows.

After these theoretical and methodological considerations, I then begin the empirical analysis of the various phases of the cartoonists’work processes and the different affective profiles of these processes. Ifirst investigate the typical affects of the phase in which the cartoonists struggle to generate ideas about what to draw. I then dive into the affects belonging to the phase of actual drawing, the phase characterized by longer moments of intense affective immersion. Next, I map some of the means used by the cartoonists to preserve the affective strength and freshness of their ideas and drawings and to secure the maximum of affective transfer to their audience. Finally, I investigate the collective side to the work of the cartoonists and how collective and creative affects may intensify or reinforce each other.

Creativity and sociological theory of action

Sociological theories of action have never really been interested in creativity (Joas2005;

Latour 2005, 43ﬀ.; Ingold 2007; Sennett 2009; Schiermer 2019, 2021). Individualist accounts, often inspired by economic theory and thinking action in terms of means- ends calculation, tend to emphasize transparent planning and to separate it from execution. Obviously, if action consists of carrying out a premeditated plan, it is diﬃcult to see the surprising or unexpected as anything but disturbance or hindrance, let alone to treat phenomena such as creativity or improvization as inherent to agency.

Moreover, while they may insist on the ‘ideal typical’ or ‘idealized’ nature of their models, the proponents of these models continue to think of action and rationality paradigmatically on the basis of a calculative and means-ends-centred template (Joas2005, 38–40; Schiermer 2019). The aﬀective, emotional and bodily dimensions are typically seen as something that clouds the transparency of calculative processes. In compliance with Western dualist thinking, the individualists thus tend to think of all limitations to subject-centred transparency in terms of‘behaviour’, that is, as‘determined’from the

‘outside’, ultimately as mechanical in‘nature’ –Max Weber’s theory of action is a case in point (e.g. Weber1978, 3–62; Weber2012, 85). The individualistic and economically inspired account thus develops a blind spot in relation to forms of practice which are by

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no means reducible to‘mere behaviour’, but which are nevertheless (partly) non-transparent to the actor, bodily embedded, without a clearly formulated and premeditated goal, and rather motivated by intrinsic forms of (joyful) gratiﬁcation.

The‘structural’accounts do no better. It goes without saying that perspectives that emphasize‘structure’,‘norms’,‘institutions’,‘stability’,‘order’, or‘reproduction’in one form or another have diﬃculty in accounting for creativity. Proponents of the structural view – from early Durkheim to Parsons, from Bourdieu to more poststructuralist accounts such as the ones found in Judith Butler or discourse analysis – have sought to sidestep these diﬃculties. Yet, they are still routinely blamed for forgetting the

‘freedom’or‘agency’of ‘the individual’, for being deterministic, and for being unable to articulate transformation or change.¹

A third and (even) more heterogeneous cluster of theories may be characterized as

‘inter-subjectivist’(Reckwitz2002) or‘relational’(Emirbayer 1997). This group, which includes thinkers such as Simmel, Mead, Goﬀman and Habermas, is obviously better equipped to engage with open-ended processes. Unfortunately, they rarely push in this direction. Often, rather than decentring the individuals in their actual interactions, they remain–as Simmel and Goﬀman do, each in his own way–ultimately imprisoned by an individualist outlook. Or they abandon the phenomenological level in favour of a focus on problems of coordination and collective action (often related to language use or communication). American sociologist Mustafa Emirbayer has recently sought to market

‘relationality’as a distinct approach to agency (Emirbayer1997). Yet Emirbayer, it seems, still does not really activate the object. He does not distribute action but remains too close to traditional ontological distinctions between the subjective and the objective and does not suﬃciently break with the passive role attributed to the latter.

Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of aﬀect

To move beyond these blind spots, I want to suggest another framework for studying creative action: the affect-oriented phenomenology of Sara Ahmed. My idea is that a selective and reworked version of Ahmed’s phenomenological perspective may prove fruitful for close and nuanced analysis of creative practices and the different affects typically belonging to them.

This may indeed seem a rather unexpected or even controversial choice, for several reasons. For one – and without any intention to criticize this all-important string in Ahmed’s work–what I want to do with Ahmed’s perspective amounts to a‘de-politici- zation’of her work and her engagement with both concepts of aﬀect and phenomenology. Instead of engaging politically with prominent negative emotions such as shame, pain or fear (and their unequal and unjust distribution and circulation), I wish to focus narrowly on forms of aﬀect intrinsic to cognitively complex forms of acting and reasoning that– as in the case of humour and caricature drawing– involve intensive informational processing, problem-solving and bodily skill development.

Moreover, and perhaps what is even more central to Ahmed’s critical approach to phenomenological analysis, I leave behind what one may call its‘structural’or‘objecti- vist’aﬃnities. With this expression, I simply maintain that Ahmed is strongly interested in issues of reproduction of gender roles or, better: in the naturalization and incorpor- ation of repressive heteronormative ‘positions’ and ‘orientations’ sedimented in

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various Western objects and/or material infrastructures or standard interiors (2006, 2010). According to Ahmed, the subject’s attitude or reaction towards these objects is sedimented in habits. Ahmed foregrounds Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to describe how this development of ‘the right tastes’is also an ability to ‘taste in the right way’

and thus to articulate and enact the objects with their affects in certain determinate ways – or to learn to appreciate certain objects (say, bodies of the opposite sex) and depreciate others (e.g.2006, 129ff.,2010, 35, 36). On the one hand, these standards are more or less unproblematically ‘incorporated’ through repetition among the majority, while they, on the other hand, for those who are not attuned to the vectors and affects entailed in the heteronormative orientations, lead to a significant degree of self-oppres- sion and (violent) work on the body proper. In this sense, as Ahmed writes, her work is largely about the ‘restriction[s] [of] possibilities for action in the present’ (2006, 130, emphasis in original).

Consequently, what Ahmed doesnotdescribe is how the subject may also expound, articulate, animate certain objects, other objects, alternative objects, to make them

‘taste’better or tastemore. In other words, her critical determinism tends to ignore subjective contributions when it comes to enacting the objective. We turn up the loudspea- kers if we want to dance. We move our bodies to become aﬀected by the music (on this enactment of action from the subjective side, see, paradigmatically, Gomart and Hennion 1999).²The claim of this paper is thatcreativeaction–and most human agency entails creative aspects–can only be described satisfactorily by relating the two dimensions in a series of relational circuits. Granted, to understand creative action, we must‘decentralize’

the subject, not backwards into structures shaping its actions behind its back, but for- wards into the objects present at the scene of action. This is indeed what Ahmed does in brilliant ways. Yet, equally, we must focus on how this decentralization, relocation or distribution of action is paradoxically co-initiated by the subject, that is on the

‘non-teleological strategies’ used in this distribution, the processes of giving oneself over to the object and forgetting about oneself, the implicit search for intensity, joy and excitement, in short, the diﬀerent ways of becoming aﬀected.

To foreground these insights, I shall add two interrelated ‘components’to Ahmed’s perspective. Thefirst has to do with the very sense orfeelingof creative affect. In the lit- erature, this component is often pictured as sentiments or moments of‘flow’(Csikszent- mihalyi1971) or‘self-transcendence’(Joas2005). This conception needs to be connected to Ahmed’s perspective. As indicated, my idea is that the very sense of joy and self-forgetting intrinsic to these forms of action has to do with their non-instrumental or‘non- teleological’character (Joas2005). Phenomenologically speaking, creative affectissimply the experience of distribution or allocation of agency to the object. It is only when we give ourselves over to what we are doing that the fun begins.

My second addendum to Ahmed’s sketch is that it is crucial to emphasize the rela- tionalcharacter of what happens in these happy moments. I wish, in other words, to focus on the interplay between object and subject in creative practice. How does the subject work to become affected by the object? Which skills or tricks does it use to enact recalcitrant objects, to affect them, energize them? And vice versa: how does the object affect the subject; how does it seize or take hold of the subject in turn?

This double focus permits us, I argue, to open a space for the unexpected and creative and to avoid the tired alternative between (structural and) objective determinism, on the

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one hand, and old-school Husserlian subject-centrism and humanism, on the other. It also permits us to make a decisively more empirical and nuanced phenomenological analysis. Granted, certain strong objects– a joke, a pop song, a drug, a photograph of a loved one, the ambience of a certain place– may be extremely affective and orientational without much need for subjective and relational enactment. But, intuitively, we only speak of creative action when the subject enacts the object‘creatively’, that is, provokes new possibilities or properties to surface in the object, further enhancing, negotiat- ing or calibrating its affective and orientational powers. In this sense, a roller coaster ride is clearly objectively affective, yet it is only creatively affective if the subject has done something to successfully deepen the experience of it, something which develops or cul- tures its affective profile or the orientations it offers. I think we make such (micro-)enactments all the time. It follows that most of our practices do indeed entail creative moments in one way or another.

This is not the only modiﬁcations to Ahmed’s phenomenology of aﬀect that I wish to make. I also want to elaborate on thecollectivedimension of her work. Consider how she depicts this dimension in her objective phenomenology.

Thinking of affects as contagious does help us to challenge what I have called the‘inside out’ model of affect by showing how affects pass between bodies, affecting bodily surfaces or how bodies surface. However […] to be affected by another does not mean that an affect simply passes or‘leaps’from one body to another. The affect becomes an object only given the contingency of how we are affected, or only as an effect of how objects are given. (2010, 36) Collective transmission of affects has to do with‘how objects are given’. But what does this really mean? Here Ahmed opens for a certain degree of individual contingency;

different persons may feel the object–the atmosphere of a room for instance–differently depending on their own mood when arriving in that space. Nevertheless, the connection between, on the one hand, the orientations and (positive and negative) affects offered by this or that object and, on the other, its collective status, its degree of general popularity and prevalence is crucial to Ahmed. For the individual, much depends on the ability to assume these popular or‘normal’orientations and affects, that is, to participate correctly in the‘coherence’or‘alignment’taking place around this or that popular object in the (heteronormative) way it prescribes:

Objects are sticky because they are already attributed as being good or bad, as being the cause of happiness or unhappiness. This is why the social bond is always rather sensational.

Groups cohere around a shared orientation toward some things as being good, treating some things and not others as the cause of delight. If the same objects make us happy– or if we invest in the same objects as being what should make us happy–then we would be orientated or directed in the same way. […] Happy objects are passed around, accumu- lating positive aﬀective value as social goods. (2010, 35)

The‘social bond is always rather sensational’.³Ahmed targets a certain genre of objects, what she calls‘happy objects’ –say, the idea of the heterosexual family or the idea of mar- riage–yet any object placed at the centre of collective attention develops or strengthens its ‘orienting’qualities. The collective is affective in its own right but these collective affects cannot be thought of as separate from the objective affects. Paraphrasing the late Durkheim, there is no collective without an object (1995, 232, 239). When humans gather emphatically, they gather around something; when they share something,

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and expound, cultivate and invest in the shared, they become‘orientated and directed in the same way’. In this sense imitation or suggestion is objective. The shared orientation is brought about by the shared object, yet its very sharing, the sheer fact that it is‘pass[ed]’

‘around’, leads to a further‘accumulation’of‘aﬀective value’.

I wish to reinforce Ahmed’s analytical vocabulary by further developing this idea of a collective surplus of‘accumulation’of affect. At another instance, Ahmed talks about the collective as a sort of affective accelerator or ‘intensifier’ (Ahmed and Schmitz 2014, 99). Since the late Durkheim, we have known that we (also) instrumentalize objects to satisfy our need for, or our enjoyment of, collectivity or communality.

Pushing Ahmed further in this direction, we could insist that ‘feeling aligned’ or knowing that one ‘faces the right way’ (Ahmed 2010, 37) – metaphorically or phys- ically – often provokes a certain self-enforcing dynamic: we want to feel more ‘alignment’, to establishmore ‘relations of proximity’ with other bodies, more‘coherence’.⁴ And how do we do so? Extrapolating freely on inspirations from Ahmed, we could say that we do so by expanding and cultivating the object together, further developing its (‘happy’) qualities, dreaming about it together, pressing more nuance, more (‘happy’) facets and more attraction and desire into it. This, in turn, strengthens collective ties, and so on.

Remaining indebted to Ahmed’s vocabulary, we could say thatintensifyingthe collective often takes place through anintensificationof the object’s affects and a further development of its ‘orientational’ and ‘directional’ qualities – and vice versa. Basically, emphatically sharing things and practices together with others makes these things more orientational and affective. You may enact God alone, but God is more energetic when (successfully) enacted collectively. The same goes for a roller coaster ride or for dancing at a techno party.

Aﬁnal clariﬁcation: the analysis in this paper contains no observation of the technical and material (objective) infrastructure used by the cartoonists in their practices of drawing, although, of course, this material frame plays a crucial role in the processes of ‘orientation’ taking place inside of these practices. For reasons of space, I have centred on the most prominent (phenomenological) relation: the relation to the main object,the object at the centre of a given practice. This object may be material or imma- terial. It may be an idea–it may even be, as we will see, the ardent wish to have an idea.

But it may also be an artwork or a drawing affecting you, and positioning you in very concrete terms (again, based on relational enactments), just as it may be a joke you hear, a theme you talk about, or a football game you watch or participate in. This should not be taken to mean that Ahmed’s phenomenological work is reducible to the phenomenological relation to the singular energetic object. In fact, inQueer Phenomen- ology, Ahmed mostly uses the term‘objectivity’in a more physical and interrelational (Heideggerian) sense, speaking, about how ‘arrangements of objects’ – a table with chairs, for instance – may structure space, orient bodies and/or gather people (2006, 79–92). Still, as is clear from her analysis of‘happy objects’, many of her phenomenological analyses focuses on ‘intentional’objects in a more traditional phenomenological sense (see, for instance,2006: 25ff., 2010,2014, 209–211, 218ff). It is just that Ahmed – in contrast to Husserl – treats such intentional objects as a point of departure and not as a result.

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A note on data

The empirical material for this paper comes from a case study of caricature drawing. In the last months of 2018, I conducted 10 interviews with a range of professional cartoonists doing mainly ‘political’caricature and all working for major Danish newspapers.

Seeking to achieve variation as to possible empirical perspectives (Flyvbjerg 2006;

Ragin and Becker 2009), I interviewed two women and eight men who were at diﬀerent stages in their careers, ranging from being in their mid-thirties to almost retire- ment age. All informants are anonymized. The names used below areﬁctional.

The basic idea behind a case study is toconstructrepresentativity. In this sense, the practices of the cartoonists are chosen as a case to be studied because they are presumed to entail essential or typical aspects of creative behaviour.

The creative processes engaged in by the professional cartoonists are subject to more explicit reflection and articulation than would be typical for layman creative action. The cartoonists must comply with daily and weekly deadlines that place significant pressure on them: they must be inventive and creative on time. Basically, they must, every day, find a new idea that works and then draw it. It is my contention that this constant and condensed pressure for inventiveness, combined with the journalistic and communication-centred work environment, contributes to making the cartoonists articulate observers of their changing affective and creative states. But not only that. The cartoonists turn out to be especially skilled practitioners of the non-instrumental or distribu- tive side of creative practice. The (ultimately impossible) attempt to subject creative efforts to mastery, instrumentalism and professionalization results in the somewhat opposite effect of making the newspaper cartoonists ‘strategic’experts in dealing with the non-purposive aspects of creative processes. This paradox makes the cartoonists’

work processes extraordinary suitable for a case study of creative aﬀects. In short, the cartoonists know ‘how to distribute action’: they have explicit knowledge about how to entice reluctant ideas to come closer, how to relate to and enact complex objects – drawings and portraits, notably – and how to become oriented and aﬀected by these objects in turn.

Having ideas

Thefirst and most prominent object to be relationally enacted among the cartoonists is the very idea of what to draw. Also, ideas are phenomenological objects–and extremely affective at that. They stand at the centre of practices of enactment and cultivation, and they affect bodies and minds. But how to have ideas? How to call them forth? This is the questions at the centre of thefirst phase of the cartoonists’work.

Grete talks aboutﬁnding‘gold’.

You know when you have found gold. You can feel it in your whole body when you have found that funny thing. (Grete 40.35)

Magne tells me:

My wife often says,‘So, now he’s whistling, now he is all set’, once I’ve got my idea. Drawing it is not always the hardest part, most often it’s having it and, like, redeeming it. […] Now the weight is lifted oﬀmy shoulders. (Magne 12.30)

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Becoming inspired makes you want to continue, to develop and investigate the idea right away. The emergence of the object is profoundly energizing. Etymologically, the Latin

‘insparere’means‘breathing’- breathing life into mind and body.

But who breathes? Where does this aﬀective energy come from? Where does the idea come from? The subject, you might say. On the phenomenological level, this is simply not the case. The ‘funny thing’that Grete mentions is not something she invents, but something she‘ﬁnds’or‘discovers’. On the one hand, its surfacing is not simply acciden- tal or arbitrary. Grete is good–especially talented–in having ideas. On the other hand, it is not something she can control or decide upon wilfully. There is a moment of‘contingency’(Ahmed2010, 36), which results from the fact that the creative process entails uncontrollable and unpredictable agencies. We are dealing with ideas, which may be

‘enticed’but cannot be‘forced’(Weber2012, 140). Certainly, action is truly distributed here. We cannotfind a singular point of origin of agency. It is a question of relation. So how, really, to affect objects to affect you creatively?

Luckily, the cartoonists are experts in dealing with the non-purposive. One example of this is the purposive dealing with the deadline, consciouslyusing ittobecome invested:

I sort of like the pressure. I think most cartoonists work up until deadline. It is, like, our

‘rush’. It is a problem for me if I have too many days to complete a task; I know that I will only turn it in in the very last minute. That pressure is part of it all. (Magne 11.13) The professional regime imposed upon these ultimately uncontrollable creative moments produces pressures and stress. Will the ideas arise before the deadline? This pressure height- ens the stakes. Magne uses the‘pressure’to create a kind of‘rush’, a sense of acuity. The disquieting feeling that the object is not yet complete (see Souriau2015), that it wants something from you which you do not yet really know how to deliver, strengthens its hold of your mind as the deadline approaches. You getcon-centrated. You get focused.

The trick of the trade, however, is to avoid becoming too determinate andﬁxated at this point. The craving for an idea too insistent. The cartoonists use several diﬀerent tricks to avoid cramping up. Maren tells me that:

It is really draining to sit there in front of this nice and clean sheet of paper, knowing that now you must do a truly great drawing. So, I have a really large piece of paper, on which I make a number of small doodles, a multitude of small boxes with pictures in them, where I test diﬀerent ideas. (Maren 9.30)

As Weber noted (2012, 339, 340), it leads nowhere to try to command these creative processes. This merely drains you of energy. Rather, you must work in the opposite direction and give up control. This is because creative agency involves ‘objective’ beings, here ideas, which must do their part. This entails distribution of agency and thus moments of non-purposiveness on the part of the subject. You may start to

‘doodle’around, and suddenly this may trigger an idea. Or you come across something interesting, something that interestsyou, something thatmakes youcurious. Some cartoonists deliberately undertake everyday routines, ‘mechanical’ tasks and chores, or pursue physical activities – exercizing, going to the toilet, chopping ﬁrewood – to lessen control and thus to make room for the ideas to come at their own pace.

Ultimately, it is only through such a rather controlled renouncement of control that the new idea–the idea that we do not yet know of– may emerge. It must come from

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‘without’, as it were, through processes of enticement that we cannot fully rely on. Ideas have their own will. Here we see how important it is for an analysis of affect to draw in both the objective and the subjective side: You must position yourself right if you want to become affected–and be positioned in turn–by the object. To my knowledge, Ahmed engages neither such whimsical or capricious objects nor such conscious attempts at enactment and distribution of agency. I think her rather determinist stance restrains her from entering into these fragile relational enactments. Still, her perspective on objective and affective agency presents a crucial step towards a fruitful analysis concerning such objects.

I wish now to investigate what is often–but far from always–the subsequent phase in the cartoonists’work: the phase of‘flow’(Csikszentmihalyi1971), that is, of (sometimes) prolonged stretches of affective intensity experiencedwhile drawing. These moments are seen by the cartoonists as the affective centre of their creative enterprise. Yet getting into the‘zone’is not necessarily easy.

Working with ideas: drawing

Once an idea emerges, it can be drawn. On the face of it, the phase of drawing often amounts to little more than execution of the already thought-out idea.

When you sit down and do the drawing, having had the idea, then it’s just manual labour.

(Lars 5.50)

At this point, Lars shows little‘aﬀection’towards the drawing phase. It is merely instru- mentalized as just a means to an end, reduced to a mere materialization of what was already in the mind of the cartoonist. This is the scenario of Weberian goal-orientated action. Here, unlike Maren’s experience, cited above, the phase of planning or having ideas is separate from the phase of execution, mind separate from body. Considering this, it is less surprising that the very execution of goal-rational action (this is clear from Lars’tone) is‘aﬀectless’ – ‘it’s just manual labour’. Boring. Without intensity.

I think Lars is simply wrong, however. Or better: I think he is not used to understand or conceptualize what goes on here in distributed terms. Action, it seems,mustbe placed inside the subject. As is already apparent from our discussion of Ahmed’s work, this is simply not a good way to think action, let alone creative action – at least not if we want to deliver an extended and phenomenologically interesting description of it. At any rate, the idea must be explored, enriched, tested, questioned, further unfolded, sometimes even drastically transformed, and this can only happen with the pen in hand. This is, however, the moment where‘alien’ –objective–agencies really take over a large part of the action. It is also where pleasure–forms of‘internal gratiﬁcation’ –really starts to make itself felt. It is where a new genre of aﬀect emerges. More than the phase of gener- ating ideas, the phase of drawing–and developing these ideas while drawing–comprises

‘autotelic’moments. The idea must open itself up; it must start to unfold its complex internal landscape before us and invite us in; it must draw us into its embrace, seize us and hold us, like when we‘fall’asleep or in love (Merleau-Ponty2014, 166; see Joas 2005, 167–170). The non-instrumental or non-teleological nature of these processes or moments is salient. These are also the exact moments where the sheer continuation of the activity becomes a goal on its own.

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I end up laughing a bit over myself, while I invent this or that. (Willy 21.00)

The lack of mastery–following from the delegation of action–opens the way for surprises. This is the very engine room of creative action. Willy laughs over his lack of control. He feels like a mere witness to what he is doing. And, of course, he laughs somewhat retrospectively. In the moment, he serves the object. He has only reﬂexive access to these phases. When he is in them, he does not really know what happens, it is only after- wards he becomes surprised by his own actions. This is creative bliss.

Unfortunately, the professional cartoonist cannot remain in the drawing phase for too long.

Time is short, so I have to complete [the drawing] and move on. Because [otherwise], I could have developed and worked upon this drawing for a whole day, you know. I could just have continued drawing ever more strange objects if you like. (Willy 20.00)

Of course, we all know about this genre of affects. It may be that we do not always experience them emphatically; still, they count among the most important sources of joy, sat- isfaction and psychological well-being in our lives. Delegating agency is profoundly affective, in a positive sense. Being unable to do so, or being hindered repeatedly in doing so because of external circumstances–for example by recurring waves of‘restruc- turing’,‘rationalization’or‘effectivization’of work processes–is alienating and seriously impairing in the long run (see Rosa2019).

However, as Willy’s comments illustrate, affective embeddedness may actively assert itself against the attempts to regiment it from‘without’. Even while the cartoonist may initially see the emergingfigures on the paper or the screen as a result of a preconceived idea, it istheywho end up instrumentalizing the cartoonist fortheirneeds. After all, Willy cannottreat them strategically. He becomes affected. Gives himself over. And he must then actively detach himself to come back: he must‘move on’. He must enforce detachment. He must set his alarm. He must negotiate the emergent agencies’hold on him in advance to make sure they release him in good time before the deadline. The affective agencies found inside our creative practices not only help us to instigate these practices, but they also retain us there. Like the Sirens in Homer’s‘The Odyssey’, they possess a form of affective power, a power of joy, a certain potential to overrule external pressure.

Yet the energeticflash of a new idea and the (long) moments of embedded intensity are not the only forms of affect characteristic of the work of the cartoonists. They must also think about how the drawing (or the idea) affects their audience. Certainly, they wish to create a strongly affective object. This also leads to reflections as to how the affects of the original idea can be retained in the drawing.

Retaining aﬀective impact

The cartoonists sometimes talk about a drawing in terms of its vibrancy or‘freshness’. Just as the ﬁrst or second ‘take’ (recording) of a rock song may contain a form of energy or authenticity, which is missing from later recordings, so a‘fresh’drawing of an idea retains traces of aﬀects that tend to disappear in later versions. Obviously, this has to do with transmitting an immediate and bodily imprint of an object or idea rather than expressing the depths of one’s soul.

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The problem faced by the cartoonists is that the idea–even the good idea–quickly loses at least part of its initial vigour or force. He or she must act fast.

[T]heﬁrst sketches are the most important ones, since that is when I am most turned on and [clearly see that], like,‘this is a funny turn’,‘this is a funny situation’. Well, the fourth time you read it, it’s not that funny anymore and if you only then start to draw, you run a risk.

[…] To maintain that enthusiasm and alertness, I try to draw as much as I can already by the ﬁrst reading of the text. (David 30.00)

The objective contours of the idea are most intensely felt in the initial phases of the work.

Using an expression from Ahmed, we could say that the‘orientations’ entailed in the creative idea or object soon lose some of their contour or their force. The idea stops telling you, clearly, what to do. David therefore starts to draw as soon as the inspiration comes. As is clear from the following remark by Are, such immediate drawing also works as a barrier against idiosyncrasy.

Interviewer: Theﬁrst time you get the idea, you are seized by it in a diﬀerent way?

Deﬁnitely, and if it lies around for too long, then it might die a little. […] I have several ideas archived that I do not even have sketches on but merely notes. They may be stored for a long time, but if I then draw them in one fresh cut, it still may turn out very well. But if you think for too long, then you lose that [freshness]. Because you become familiar with it, you forget what it was all about originally, and then may be tempted to overplay it […]. And then you may risk that the receivers, who have not participated in the half year long process of matu- ration, do not understand zip. (Are 54.30)

Once you lose this immediate aﬀective impact, you may be tempted to exaggerate or

‘overplay’the idea. Once the object withdraws, apparently, the subject seeks to compen- sate. At any rate, if you mess too much with an idea, you lose your feel for the opportu- nities it contains, and the possible ways it may be developed. On the other hand, and old idea may keep its salience if it is not worked with too much but safely stored. The point is still, as Are expresses it, to develop the drawing in one‘cut’as soon as the idea opens-up to you for theﬁrst time. Maren, who like several of the cartoonists also does caricatural live portraits, makes additional observations.

You know, since you have a fresh gaze for [observing] people, theﬁrst time [you see them], then it easier to draw them. I have tremendous diﬃculties in drawing people I know well.

Something comes between. Often you may want to retain friendly emotions: ‘this is my friend’,‘I do not want to offend anyone’. Then the drawing normally does not become as successful as when it is thefirst time that I meet the person. [When I see people for the first time,] I see very clearly how they will look in the drawing. (Maren ca. 22.00)

Fundamentally, Maren grapples with the same problem as Are: it is easier to see a person’s bodily particularities thefirst time you meet her. Yet here another concern surfaces, which may equally curtail the ability to become affected and orientated by the object. For Maren, feelings of considerateness towards the model may insert themselves between her and her drawing. Here the point is not merely that Maren fears negative reactions to her caricatures and so consciously refrains from painting the less becoming traits of the person in question, but that considerateness as such numbs initial‘objective’ orientations and affects.

Finally, boredom. The case of a completeabsenceof aﬀective embeddedness is itself interesting. Such complete absence is often the consequence of being forced to repeat

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something against one’s will. Drawing ideas, the orientations of which have already been exploited and exhausted, is tiresome or even loathsome. It aﬀects the body negatively, just like having to taste something one knows is distasteful.

I feel like, if I have drawn a person too often and made fun of them, then I start to feel phys- ically ill if I have to draw them again. If I struggle too hard, because I cannot somehow get it right, then it ends with a totally cramped up drawing. It may look like Lars Løkke [former Danish PM], but it is totally bereft of energy, because you have been sitting there messing around with the ears and all,ew. (Are 52.10)

The only way to dispel or avoid the sense of loathing resulting from the absence of affect is tofind new objective possibilities, new sides to the object, new challenges, new things to test and explore, new orientations it may suddenly give off.

I hate to repeat myself since the state budget needs to be passed [in the assembly] every year.

And this year there is really a lot of drama. I could choose to go back to my drawings from the last years and merely replace the faces. But that would be cheating. So, I seek a new approach. […] Even though I am capable of drawing Lars Løkke [former Danish PM] blind- folded, I print out a new photo of him and try to catch him in a new way. I think I owe it to myself, but also to the readers, that it is not a mere cliché I do over and over. (Magne 46.25) Sometimes ingenuity must be used to create the unexpected and exciting.

I know now all the tricks of the trade. I know now that I am using this trick of mine where I mix together two diﬀerent news items. There is not the same freshness or energy [as when I started my career]. This is also what happens to pop musicians. […] Something happens after ten years. There are no pop musicians who keep up the same standard all their lives. […] Often it is like they have a very creative period [when they are young] and then it dies a little. Then they merely play the old hits. (Are 55.55)

Even though there are exceptions, most rock artists seem to produce (or be found by!) their best songs while they are young. And even though it is possible to avoid stagnation by doing what Magne does–forcing himself tofind new perspectives and thus causing the object to respond in new and interesting ways–this does not really create the same affective explosions as thefirst time round. Probably, the professionalization of creative practice and its affective economy–combined with the further reinforcement of affectivity resulting from performing for an audience–cannot but result in a growingfatiqueor

‘decadence’in the long run, a certain lack of capacity to become truly aﬀected.

As is clear, the attempt to retain or capture affects in the actual process of drawing, as well as the further transmission of these affects from the drawing to an audience, are subject to deliberate procedures and reflections among the cartoonists. Effective affective transmission must be secured through all stations. This is the subject of the next section.

Aﬀective transfer

In the following quotation, Adrian talks about making a portrait. Here it is not only the cartoonist who must forget about himself to become aﬀected by the object but also the object, e.g. the person to be portrayed.

I normally tell people I am drawing that they are welcome to have eye contact with each other. […] When you have eye contact with another human being then you liven up, your eyes light up, and then you are who you are. […] I need people to transmit. And

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that is not necessarily words, but who they are must be transmitted, so that I may receive it with my antennae. And that is only possible when the two persons have eye contact; that is a good thing; then they break into laughter and so on. (Adrian 46.55)

The relation goes both ways. Not only must the cartoonist make him- or herself ready to tune in his or her‘antennae’, but the person portrayed–the object–must also be induced to‘transmit’.

You only become ‘what you really are’when you are affected by someone or something. Adrian is merely looking for the model to be ‘present’ in his or her body, but this should be understood in the right way. It is not about ‘inside’to ‘outside’. There is no psychological or mental ‘motive’ or intention using this body as a vehicle of expression, to transmit‘signs’or to express itself through verbal language. Rather, we are dealing with a body which is alive, withflesh invested with soul or spirit in its very being. In a sense, this is what affect reallyiswhen it shows itself in its most embodied guise, emerging as spontaneous bodily movements, reactions and gestures. What happens here is not about psychology or empathy. It is about pre-conscious, pre-reflec- tive and pre-linguistic bodily registers. Yet neither is it about the body as something instinctual or merely mechanic. To Adrian, it is where you show‘yourself’most primor- dially, as‘transmitting’, as an affected, and affectively oriented, being.

You feel very clearly whether [the persons] you must draw [are] present in the moment or thinking of something else. And they are present here and now when they look into each other’s eyes. Sometimes a somewhat embarrassing situation emerges; they get awkward, of course. But then I say,‘I know very well that you have landed in an unnatural situation’. Then they laugh andﬂush and get spots on their necks, but that doesn’t matter, because then they are really themselves. (Adrian 47.50)

Tricking the other to become‘present’, to‘send’, is not a question of consciousness, and least not of a conscious‘self’. It is about the ability to become aﬀected and to aﬀect others.

This happens in spontaneous laughter but also in the feeling of‘awkwardness’. At any rate, here aﬀectedness is directly present in the two bodies; they become alive, and it even shows on their surfaces.

The same goes, moreover, for the cartoonist. The artist who channels the authentic affective imprint of the other person and transmits it to paper must equally enter this pre- predicative and spontaneous register; she, also, must orient herself to become affected with equal immediacy. Some of the cartoonists explore methods where they draw extremely fast to outsmart conscious control and thus enhance the possibilities for unrestricted affect.

This is where ‘intuitive’ processes and transmissions hold sway, the power, richness and swiftness of which conscious processing cannot match (Evans 2008; Kahneman 2011;

Knorr Cetina2014). Maren makes another interesting observation in this regard.

Another interesting thing is that, normally, I have two diﬀerent pairs of glasses: The one pair I use to see far, and the other I use when I work with screen and paper. But when I am out portraying people, I only use the long-distance ones, and I think the reason is that I almost exclusively look at the person I portray and not at what I actually draw on the paper. […] Apparently, I do not really need to look closely at the drawing, because I mostly look at the model I draw. Iﬁnd that very interesting. (Maren 22.30)

Maren discovers that she only rarely looks at what shehas drawn, the drawing, but mostly at whatshe draws, the actual model or object. She is thoroughly present, in other words, in

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what she does, and renounces control. This is not where Maren experiments or plays with new possibilities, but where she portrays immediate impressions, or, as she says,‘registers without thinking’ –not realistically or mimetically, but aﬀectively.

Professional creative practice is extra vulnerable to disturbances to these autonomous processes resulting from (the unconstructive use of) stress and pressure, in the form of self-consciousness resulting from the presence of an audience or due to nervousness, or in the form of idiosyncrasies or ideologies or pre-conceived ideas of all kinds about the object or what is important to it, – all of which limit aﬀective transmission between object and subject. Yet, this claim to immediate aﬀective transmission should not be confused with neutrality or detachment –nor with a mere absence of thought and intellect. The point is rather that all the tools, devices, competences and technical or conceptual ideas‘used’by the artist or cartoonist in the creative process must be‘acti- vated’or even selected by the artwork coming into being, rather than being imposed upon it by the artist. Orientation must be truly mutual and reciprocal. Truly relational.

Maren and Adrian have all kinds of strategies to become maximally affected. Not only do they use all the tricks of the trade to try to induce the object to transmit, not only do they enact and enhance its affective emissions, but they also exploit different techniques and tech- nologies to bring themselves into the‘zone’where they can become affected. Ahmed clearly sees these complex affective circuits accessible to the micro-phenomenological eye. Still, due to the rather determinist tonality of her critical work, it seems she can only disentangle them from the perspective of the object. This blocks an analysis of the micro-dynamics of creative affect, which are only visible from a truly relationalist perspective.

There is still another source of affect to be dealt with which is crucial in the work of the cartoonists: collectivity– our enjoyment of emphatically sharing an object with other human beings. This is a different genre of affectivity altogether. It also creates new difficulties: as suggested in the theoretical section, collective affects and creativity are entangled in complex ways.

Collective aﬀects– and creative aﬀects

Aﬀected objects–and this goes not least for the genre of‘happy’objects that Ahmed analyses (2010)–not only prompt certain orientations but also often propel bodies towards (certain) other bodies. This is also true in a less normative or disciplinary sense. Adrian is directly moved by the idea that came to him to make contact with his wife:

Or if my wife is present, then I justhaveto tell her:‘Listen to this, will you!’;‘Isn’t’that hilar- ious?’And then I am most often sitting and smiling while telling her. (Adrian 37.30) As he insists, ‘[t]his is the stuﬀ that makes you happy; and then you feel the need to share it with someone’. Certainly, a joke, if it is a good one, wants to be passed on.

Affects – both the positive and the negative – are often collectively contagious. Not only do we often laugh because other laughing bodies affect us, but when telling (or being told) a joke we normally start laughing even before the joke is transmitted (see also Ahmed’s description of situations where you really wish you hadn’t laughed (2014, 222).) The myriad of ‘laugh-videos’ on YouTube document such instances of merely contagious laughing. Granted, here, affect (and affective transmission) seems to come into its own. As the so-called ‘James-Lange thesis’ – dating back to 1919 and

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named after the famous pragmatist and psychologist William James and physiologist Carl Lange – would have it: ‘we run and then we become afraid’ (or we smile and then we become happy). The point is that the actual bodily expression may precede its cognitive emotional realization. In a sense, this‘autonomy’of aﬀect is the very starting point for much of the contemporary interest in aﬀects (Massumi2002; Brennan 2004;

Gregg and Seigworth 2010). Bodies can make each other smile or laugh – or fear or panic–without having to really activate the intellect. Or the intellect merely delivers a retrospective conceptual understanding of what goes on. We aﬀect each other before we think. Bodies are even capable of auto-aﬀecting themselves. When you cannot stop laughing, it is just as much because laughing is funny as because the joke is.

Nevertheless, as indicated in the theoretical section, these processes are tied to an object. They take place around an object and even while not appreciating the object cognitively in any depth–for example, when starting to laugh before the joke is really understood–the bodies implicated still align and entrain around it. This entrainment produces energy:collective affectivity. However, as we also saw, now expanding on an intuition in Ahmed, the collective energies released are projected back upon the object, resulting in its further affective charging. Ahmed called this for collective intensification (Ahmed and Schmitz2014, 99). Elsewhere she writes about a form of social‘accumulat[ion]’of‘positive affective value’(2010, 35). Let us stay with the example of the joke. Probably, when Adrian goes to his wife to share the joke, the scenario plays out like this: he will smile or start laughing while telling the joke, and, most often–if, as they say, the timing is right– this display of bodily affects‘will spread’to the listener, his wife. The body of the joke- teller becomes increasingly affected by the joke (or the humorous idea) while at the same time being animated by (the anticipation of) the co-reaction of the other body. Ulti- mately, the joke culminates in the explosion of shared affect. Laughing together is certainly also a moment of collective ‘effervescence’ in the Durkheimian sense (see also Collins’analysis2004, 65, 66).

This example shows how implicated and entangled collective and creative (or objective) affect may be: a joke, a sitcom or a stand-up comedy show, a tv-debate, a sports event or a concert a becomes funnier or more intense when an audience is there (or even when canned laughter or artificial audience sounds are used). All of us who have lived through the COVID-19 lockdown know how the absence of a co-present audience impacts a concert or a football match, decisively de-intensifying it, making it less‘real’, dis-affecting it. Conversely, there is little doubt that the successful sports or culture event is characterized by a sort of self-reinforcing or self-intensifying circuit between objective and collective affects. In a sense, this is what mass-ritualis.

Yet, the same phenomenon is present in everyday interaction. It also pertains, for example, to situations in which the cartooniststhemselvesbecome the object of positive collective aﬀect. That is, situations where they manage to place themselves at the centre of collective attention. Most of the cartoonists have had experiences akin to the one related here by Are.

If people sit and laugh around you; if people lose their bearings and reallyﬁnd what you say funny. I love it. And, luckily, it happens from time to time. That is a magic moment; and it is also where we want to be ourselves; where we lose our bearings and all the heavy thoughts are lifted and so on. That is so awesome. (Are 56.30)

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The collective origin of some of these affects is salient. To be sure, laughing is in itself extremely affective, it frees you from everything that holds you down, it makes the body feel light and bubbly. Yet, these affects are reenforced or‘intensified’collectively.

Aﬀective transmissions are profoundly energizing, and nowhere more so than when you are placed at the centre of positive collective attention (Collins2004). Many of the cartoonists post their work on Facebook and admit, understandably, to registering with some interest and excitement theﬂuctuations in numbers of‘likes’. Some of the cartoonists actively cultivate a crowd around their work.

This is not just a question of narcissism, however. As they attest, you become‘lifted’. But this also means you become better, funnier, more creative, if you can tap into these energies. What you talk about becomes more interesting to you; the joke you are about to tell becomes funnier, which, of course, makes it easier to tell affectively. Conversely, as Ahmed remarks, it takes double the energy to walk the opposite way of the crowd (Ahmed and Schmitz 2014, 106). If you do not really sharewhat you talk about with your audience, then it tends to lose its power– also for you. If you do not think that your audience appreciates the object, it is hard tofind it interesting yourself (see also Ahmed 2010, 37). It withdraws. You cannot become creatively affected or oriented by it. It stops breathing life and vigour into your speech. You cannot make it interesting or funny to the audience: the result is a negative spiral.

Most of the time, fortunately, the spiral between collective and objective aﬀect turns in a positive direction. When some of the cartoonists tend to see in this a mere question of vanity or narcissism, they overlook the actions of the aﬀective object. When Adrian goes to tell his wife his new idea, he does not do so because he wants status or acclaim, but because the idea or the joke wants him to. It wants to be shared; it spills over and turns his body towards his wife, his colleagues or his audience. If his wife starts to laugh, moreover, or he receives many ‘likes’on Facebook, the joke will itself become funnier to Adrian. As Simmel saw (1997, 124), collective enjoyment entails a form of inherent ‘democratic principle’: it is only truly funny or ‘sociable’if the other laughs spontaneously, that is, voluntarily shares in the joke or the idea in question and freely entrains with the teller or sender around it.

At any rate, the relation between objective and collective affects is complex. In fact, it is most often impossible to distinguish between them on the experiential level. But even if the two forms of affect conflate on the phenomenological level, the dynamic of reciprocal intensification is still tangible. The athlete who is affected by the roar of the spectators in the stadium improves her performance. The musician or actor becomes more sensitive to the music or his role in the play when the concert hall or theatre is full. The speaker becomes more creative and better at expounding what she is talking about when she feels she is affectively aligned with her listeners – meaning, simply, that she feels they are interested and enthusiastic about what she says (Durkheim 1995, 212).

In short, collective affects make you better at what you are doing, more susceptible to creative affectivity – and they do so because they energize the affective relation between subject and object.

However, once more, it is important to emphasize that you do not have to be in the midst of a large crowd to beneﬁt from these mechanisms. The following quote from Are is about joint humorous‘brainstorming’.

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The chain of associations, the brainstorm; it can be incredibly funny if it’s the right people.

And there [you can be sure] some ideas will emerge.

Interviewer: There [in the brainstorm] you did really laugh?

Oh yeah, there I really f…laughed, I can tell you that.

You can never have so many ideas alone as when you are working with somebody else who has some of the same thoughts. This will always open up the palette and bring some more variation. (Are 31.30)

Undoubtedly, it is important to receive qualiﬁed and creative feedback from a person you trust professionally; cognitive interchange is crucial. And, clearly, the psychological dimension also plays a role here: you often ‘click’ with a particular person and may thus cultivate a particular genre of aﬀectual – humorous and creative – interchange with him or her. Nevertheless, the collective dimension contributes in its own right.

There are energies and sentiments present that result directly from the sentiments of resonance or interaction among the bodies and minds present. Collective affects animate the whole process. They help to create intensity and immediacy, and thus energize the objective material–to prolong, as it were, the‘chain of associations’, to open up even further the‘palette’of‘variation’ –making the idea in question more active and suggestive. This explains why brainstorming is better in company. It is not simply that two persons have twice as many ideas as one. It is that the collective moment may affect everything, energize everything. Again: Creative affect and collective affect resonate.

Conclusion

This essay has investigated the affective profiles of different phases or aspects of creative action. I analysed the energizing emotions of having ideas, I investigated the affects emerging in the consumed process of drawing and showed how the cartoonists preserve and secure transmission of the affective impact of ideas and drawings. Finally, I discussed the collective dimension. By elaborating on Ahmed’s work, I tried to substantiate, or at least put some more empiricalflesh on, an important intuition in Durkheim’s work, namely, that collectivity animates creativity. I demonstrated that we are dealing with a two-way relation.

What these empirical findings illustrate is that a sociology of creative action must bring in new theoretical tools. While we have known for a long time–a truth established not least by Hans Joas’pioneering work (2005)–that creative action goes hand in with affective and embodied intensity, we have until now lacked the conceptual tools to really investigate these non-teleological affective moments in phenomenological detail. Sara Ahmed takes us a step further. While not engaging the concept of creativity herself, she nevertheless erects a framework wherein the contributions of the objective dimension can become duly articulated. She also takes important steps towards an integration of collective affects in this scenario.

However, to further strengthen empirical sensitivity – in itself a case of relational enactment of the objective– I have made two further amendments to this scenario. I have insisted on a relational– or decentralized or distributed– account of action and sought to demonstrate its relevance for phenomenological analysis; and I have further developed the collective aspect to Ahmed’s framework. Basically, I have sought to demonstrate that we need to incorporate a new materialist Durkheim, duly equipped

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with concepts of material and objective agency, into our set of analytic inspirations. Col- lective practice is not simply structured and performed by the object that gathers, orients or‘aligns’the bodies–the object gains further power and affective strength from being placed at the centre of collective attention. On the one hand, the world we live in is always-already an affective space. It takes hold of us and orients us. It determines us on its own accord. On the other hand, we constantly enact these possible orientations and affects in new ways, provoke new objective surprises, articulate the objects in unexpected and surprising ways, try out new ways of becoming (even more) oriented and affected. This relational circuit, finally, is most often calibrated and achieved together with other human beings. This sheer fact of being together, being collective, further contributes to animate the relation to the object.

Collective affects are not merely results. And they are not reducible to fear of sanction and discipline. They are not merely normative. Collective affects are part and parcel of our relational practices with the world, intensifying and affecting these interchanges, making us and the objects we relate to even more creative.

Notes

1. For a recent review of this typical criticism (directed at post-structuralist authors), see Rae (2021).

2. Of course, adding such a dimension to her phenomenology would, I think, also make it possible for Ahmed to bring new or more substantial content to the queer perspective– as something more than mere’disorientation’(see2010, 157ﬀ.). Space does not allow me to develop this critique here.

3. Oneﬁnds like intuitions in the late work of Durkheim:’It is by shouting the same cry, saying the same words, and performing the same action in regard to the same object that [the Aus- tralians] arrive at and experience agreement […]’(Durkheim1995, 232).

4. It is no big surprise then that dynamics of’reinforcement’of’mutual focus’also play a prominent part in Randall Collins’formalisation of Durkheim’s broad idea of ritual (see Collins 2004, 47ﬀ.). However, in contrast to Ahmed, Collins and Durkheim have little room for a concept of objective aﬀect. Abiding by traditional dualism, they have too little regard for the contribution to these dynamics coming from the object (to this discussion see also Latour (2005, 13–15, 37–42).

Notes on contributor

Bjørn Schiermeris Professor at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the Uni- versity of Oslo. His sociological interest is equally divided between theoretical and empirical work.

Recent publications on creativity include:“Weber’s Alternative Theory of Action: Relationalism and Object-Oriented Action in Max Weber’s Work”,European Journal of Sociology, 60(2): 239- 281 (2019), “Learning from Willis’ Lads: Collectivity and Object-Oriented Practices”, in Bjørn Schiermer et al (Eds)Youth Collectivities. New York and London: Routledge (2021),“Enacting the Music: Collectivity and Material Culture in Festival Experience”, in Bjørn Schiermer et al (Eds)Youth Collectivities. New York and London: Routledge (2021). More detailed work on Dur- kheim and Latour:“Durkheim, Tarde, Latour…”, in Hans Joas (Ed) (2021)The Oxford Handbook of Émile Durkheim. New York: Oxford University Press.

Disclosure statement

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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