Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy
Editor-in-Chief:
Nobuo Kurata, Hokkaido University, Japan
Editors:
Michael Davis, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
Tetsuij Iseda, Kyoto University, Japan
Kerrin Artemis Jacobs, Hokkaido University, Japan
Hidekazu Kanemitsu, Hosei University, Japan
Shunzo Majima, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Seumas Miller, Charles Sturt University, Australia, and TU Delft, Netherlands
Kengo Miyazono, Hokkaido University, Japan
Taro Okuda, Nanzan University, Japan
Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Japan
International Editorial Board:
Ruth Chadwick, University of Manchester, UK; Peter Danielson, University of British Colombia,
Canada; Asa Kasher, Tel Aviv University and IDF Military Colleges, Israel; Lee Shui Chuen, National
Central University, ROC (Taiwan); Andrew Light, George Mason University, USA; Toni RønnowRasmussen, Lund University, Sweden; Peter Schaber, University of Zürich, Switzerland; Randall
Curren, University of Rochester, USA© 2024 Center for Applied Ethics and Philosophy, Hokkaido University
Printed in Japan
ISSN 1883 0129 (Print)
ISSN 1884 0590 (Online)
All queries should be directed to:
The Editor-in-Chief, Center for Applied Ethics and Philosophy
Faculty of Humanities and Human Sciences
Hokkaido University
N10 W7, Kita-ku, Sapporo 060-0810, Japan
jaep@let.hokudai.ac.jp

CONTENTS

Theory a Body Can Do
Bruises, Becomings, and Affects in Pole Dance ― ―――――――――――――――――――――――― 1
Caitlin Coker

A Sense of Relation: Defining ‘Affect’ ― ―――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――10
James D. Letson

ii﻿ ﻿Editorial Note
The Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy is an interdisciplinary journal that covers a wide rangeof areas in applied ethics and philosophy. It is the official journal of the Center for Applied Ethics andPhilosophy (CAEP) at Hokkaido University. The aim of the Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy
is to contribute to a better understanding of ethical and philosophical issues by promoting research invarious areas of applied ethics and philosophy, and by providing researchers, scholars and students
with a forum for dialogue and discussion on ethical and philosophical issues raised in contemporarysociety. The journal welcomes original and unpublished regular articles and discussion papers on
issues in applied ethics and philosophy.

Nobuo Kurata

Editor-in-Chief

Many thanks to Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy reviewers
The Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy would like to thank the following individuals forgenerously reviewing manuscripts for us between February 2023 and January 2024. The support andexpertise of these professionals promote and maintain the high quality of the journal’s content. Thankyou very much.

Richard Stone

Shunichi Miyajima

Kengo Miyazono

Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy Vol. 15

1

Theory a Body Can Do
Bruises, Becomings, and Affects in Pole Dance
Caitlin Coker

Associate Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Human Sciences, Hokkaido University

Abstract and Keywords
Since the affective turn in the social sciences, the mind-body dualism which affect theory was
designed to overcome lingers in writings about affect and the body. To overcome this dualism,
I rely on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophy and map out their becomings in a third
region of emerging and circulating affects. At the same time, I criticize Deleuze and Guattari
for portraying becoming as intensely physical and yet not considering it through actual physicalpractice. I argue that dance practice is an experiment in becoming and affect, and I develop
a concrete and affective illustration of becoming through empirical research on pole dance
practice, especially focusing on the phenomenon of bruising.
Keywords: affect theory, empirical research, anthropology, body, performanceThis paper is based on case studies of bruising in poledance and a theoretical framework of becoming thatis employed in the Japanese-language paper “I could
die—Feeling Affect in the Becomings of Pole Dance
Practice” published in the Japanese Journal of Cultural
Anthropology (Coker 2022a).

1. Why Dance? Why Affect?
Dancing is addictive. Why? Some people might think
it is because it is fun. Perhaps it is fun, but that is notalways the case. Sometimes it is hard, and sometimes
it is frustrating, because no one can control their bodycompletely, and no one can perform their ideal dance all
the time. I venture to say that dance is addictive because
it is the body in pure, sheer movement in flux, in which
one can feel possibilities and limitations dynamically
flow through the body. Dance is a performance that isoften watched, perhaps because the viewer can see andeven feel this phenomenon from dancing bodies. If I
were to hypothesize the attractive quality of dance, it ispure affect springing forth from the dancer’s body as its
site.
There are many definitions of affect across different
disciplines, but I specifically refer to the theory thatengendered an affective turn in the social sciences fromthe 2000s. Brian Massumi’s (1995) essay “The autonomy

of affect” has been pointed to as the catalyst for thisturn. According to Massumi, affect is precognitive, prepersonal, pre-discursive, nonconscious intensities thatcirculate in and among our bodies (Massumi 1995,
2002). Affect differs from emotion in that emotions areintensities that are captured and socio-linguisticallysituated into a personal narrative that makes sense.
Affects often don’t make sense- they include the
lived paradoxes, latent possibilities, and linguisticallyirreducible complexities of when feelings circulate
the body. Massumi’s affect begs us to look at thatwhich escapes being neatly organized by symbols or
narratives and is seated in the body, especially sensationand movement; however, he clearly states that hedoes not intend to position affect in the body half ofthe mind-body dichotomy, and that affect is instead
the point from where mind, body, and all of existence
emerges. Massumi’s discussion of affect draws fromneuroscientific experiments, the idiotic and yet powerfulrhetoric of former US president Ronald Reagan, and theactual economic effects of certain mindsets or beliefs; thetheorization of affect based on the aforementioned casesis largely based on Baruch Spinoza’s concepts of affect(affectus in the original Latin) and affection (affectio in
the original Latin) (translation from Curley in Spinoza
1985:625, 662). Spinoza defines affect, as so far as it canbe known, as increasing or decreasing the body’s “powerof acting, or force of existing” (Spinoza 1985: 542).

2

Massumi’s conception of Spinoza’s affect is as follows:“a body’s capacity to enter into relations of movement
and rest… this capacity he (Spinoza) spoke of as a
power (or potential) to affect or be affected” (Massumi
2002:15). Massumi, who translated the English version
of a Thousand Plateaus, also draws on how Spinoza’s
philosophy is developed in the philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari (hereinafter referred to as
D&G).
In this paper, I will clarify and thus develop theidea of affect through an affective and ethnographic
approach to pole dance. As an anthropologist, I begin
not with a desire to develop a philosophical concept
but with a need to understand what is happening in
the real physical practice that I find in the field; it isfrom this need to understand that I employ and develop
the philosophical theory of affect. Taking an affective
approach to affect means that not only will I discuss
affect as an abstract concept, but I will try to make thereader themselves feel the specific and visceral affects
that I personally encountered and felt. This is the strengthof anthropology, in that it has the power to transmit
what happened and what was felt in the field throughthe experience of the researcher (Navaro-Yashin 2012,
Skoggard and Waterston 2015, Stewart 2007). I want
the reader to feel the pains and the joys that arise whenpeople pole dance. While thinking, feeling, and maybe
even moving together with the reader, I will develop an
idea of affect empirically grounded in the practice ofpole dance.

2. Affect, Becoming, and DanceFirst, I would like to introduce one problem with how
Massumi’s affect was employed by the social sciences,and how this paper aims to overcome this problem byfocusing on D&G’s becoming and the emergence ofaffect in pole dance. Next, I will outline specificallyhow I interpret and map out D&G’s becoming and theemergence of affect within them.
Affect theory in the social sciences has been criticized
for upholding the very Cartesian mind-body dualismthat it was trying to overcome by reducing the seatof affect to the unconscious body (Cromby & Willis
2016; Leys 2011, 2017; Martin 2013; Mazzarella 2009;
Navaro-Yashin 2012; Newell 2018; Smith, Wetherell &Campbell(eds)2018; Wetherell 2012). Recent literature
has attempted to complement this approach with thesemiotic dimension of affect: to state it very basically,
this dimension includes how what is said and what thatmeans for us also influences the way we feel (Wetherell2012) or how the meanings that material things orenvirons have for us hold sway on how we feel (NavaroYashin 2012; Newell 2018). While this is an important

Theory a Body Can Do Caitlin Coker

aspect for affect, it borrows from the so-called mentalside of the mind-body dichotomy to compensate forthe emphasis on the biological body, and thus I argue
that it doesn’t provide an ontological framework that
overcomes mind-body dualism. This is problematic
because mind-body dualism cannot consider the
instantaneous arising of affect that envelops our wholebeing and propels us forward in life. For this reason, I
rely on “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal,
Becoming-Imperceptible…,” the tenth chapter in D&G’s
A Thousand Plateaus (D&G 1987 (1980):232- 309), andin the next section I will outline my reading of D&G’s
affect that moves past this dualism.
D&G’s original term for becoming is the Frenchterm “devenir” (D&G 1980: 284), and I understand thisbecoming as becoming something other than oneself(D&G 1987: 315-6). D&G also draw from Spinoza andstate that affects increase or decrease an individual’s
power to act and thus “affects are becomings” (1987:299).
However, affect is not limited to the individual level
because “it is the effectuation of a power of the pack thatthrows the self into upheaval and makes it reel” (1987:
280). As I will explain in detail later, an encounter witha certain “pack,” specifically beginning with an outsider
that lures one into their group, brings one to experimentwith themselves, being affected by that group, perhaps
manifesting affects from the group, and their bodies
become a base for these affects to circulate. I think thatthe state of being affected and becoming something
different entails living differently, thinking differently,
and feeling differently. The unfathomable number ofdifferences that exist in this world are subsumed andmade invisible as they are logically categorized into
certain forms of representation and knowledge in anarray of social institutions. Becomings are experiments to
manifest these multitudinous differences as one realizes
hereunto unknown affects. Overall, one encounterssomething different, enters into a state of becoming thissomething-different, and is affected in different ways; toput this another way, I could also say that one is affectedby something- different, enters a state into which they
can live/think/feel differently, and pass through a stateof becoming something-else. The process of becoming
and the circulation of affects are in an intertwined
relationship.
In D&G’s chapter on becomings, their examplesof affect are mostly from music, visual art, literature,and film, and there is a lack of references to dance. I
wonder: if the fundamental of affect and becoming is aphenomenologically corporeal, visceral passage fromone state to another, then wouldn’t dance be the arena for
affects? While dance does rely on verbal communication
to think about how to make dance, it is unique because
it is a nonverbal form of performance. If there is any
physical practice that attempts to follow the flow ofJournal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy Vol. 15

affects and tests one’s capacity to affect and be affected,
dance is it. If there is any physical practice that can go
the furthest in asking what a body can do, a guiding
question when thinking about affect, it is dance. Dance
can teach us more specifically what happens with the
body and what processes occur in the circulation ofaffects.
This paper will not focus on dance works that arepresented on stage, but on the practice of dance in thestudio. While D&G focused on the finished worksof music, literature, and so forth, the practice andcreation behind those works can only be known throughrecollections from its creators or writers as well as
through D&G’s inference. This paper will not only
develop becoming through theory grounded in empiricalresearch, but that research is conducted through thedancing body of the researcher, myself. Throughconducting the physical practice of which I write, I havean understanding that courses through my feelings, mymuscles, my body. This creates a more specific andconcrete exposition of the becomings and affects in poledance, in such a way that it creates a map not only of
individual becomings (as in D&G’s examples) but of thepath towards and through becomings ad infinitum.

3. Reading D&G’S “Becoming-Intense,
Becoming-Animal, BecomingImperceptible”
Whereas Cartesian mind-body dualism separates thelife of the body into two opposing quadrants of mind
and body, D&G map our existence through two planesof perception. These two planes are irreducible to mindbody dualism and instead are a cartographic approachto a different ontology. I think that we inhabit these twoplanes simultaneously but also lean towards one or theother depending on the situation and our state. Becoming
occurs in a no-man’s land that is located between thesetwo planes. Before I discuss becoming, I will explain thetwo planes below.
The first is a plane of organization, differentiation anddevelopment; it is our lives in which we are organized as
subjects by different social institutions, like the family
and the nation as well as psychology and religion,and the contents of our worlds are differentiated andcategorized by their forms and functions. It is on thisplane that what we feel is represented and symbolized asemotions and organized into our personal narratives andmemories. The world on this plane is perceived throughhow we are taught to understand our everyday lives,
ourselves, and our places in contemporary society.
The second is the plane of immanence, consistency,
and composition- a plane that is imperceptible in thefirst plane. Here, ourselves and the things in our lives

3

are not perceived by their classification, their function,or their meaning, as in the first plane. D&G write that on
this plane “unformed elements and materials dance thatare distinguished from another only by their speed andthat enter into this or that assemblage depending on theirconnections, their relations of movement” (1987(1980):
255). In this plane things in themselves are not decided
by comparison and classification but exist as sheer
dynamic particles and affective intensities. Throughbecoming, we are moving closer to this second plane.
This brings us to the area of becomings between
the two planes. It is here that one can realize latentpossibilities through creative experiments withindifferent relations among different actors. These creative
experiments begin with an encounter with an outsider
and a run-in with a certain deviant group (such as secretsocieties, a pack of wild animals, or criminal groups)that causes one to try something different and become
something other than oneself. Below are two of D&G’s
examples of becomings that illustrate these encounters
and the creative experiments that follow it.
The first example is the becomings that D&G find in
Carlos Castaneda’s anthropological work The Teachingsof Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Castaneda
1968). In his research about shamanism in Mexico,
Castaneda becomes the disciple of the sorcerer Don
Juan. In this process, Castaneda smokes peyote andencounters a water bowl and a dog, which is suggested
to be Mescalito, the spirit of peyote (Castaneda 1968:48-9), and what happens afterwards is what D&G calla becoming-dog and a becoming-molecular (D&G
1987(1980): 248-9). After smoking, Castaneda is thirsty
and begins drinking from a water bowl that Don Juanplaced on the floor. When the dog (Mescalito) alsobegan drinking with him, Castaneda could feel the water
emerging from each of his pores as fibers of light, sothat he had a mane of light similar to the dog’s. Then,
Castaneda plays with the dog in a way that they could
control each other’s movements through their own. In
this process, Castaneda completely forgot that he washuman (Castaneda 1968: 42-4). This becoming-dog
suggests how becoming is not something that one cando alone, but requires an encounter with other entities,
like a spirit/dog and water, and also is not some logical,
goal-oriented process, but is instead a passage throughdifferent states with uncertainty, which is one major
characteristic of play (Caillois 1961: 7). It is also play inwhich one fully commits oneself, to the point of letting
go of who they once were.
D&G also raise the example of Hans, a pediatricpatient of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. D&G
explain Hans’s feelings not in the psychological languageof Freud that portrays that horse as representative ofunconscious hang-ups, but as simply being overwhelmedby the affective aspect of the horse he encounters in4

the road (D&G 1987(1980): 257-8). Being afraid andyet entranced with the horse at the same time, Hans
undergoes a becoming-horse. This process is notdifficult, nor abstract; instead it is a specifically physicaland creative experiment in movement. For example,
whereas the violent horse flings around its large penis,for Hans this affective movement may be to bare hisknees. Hans doesn’t imitate, nor does he aim to become
the horse per-se; rather he is passing through a state of
becoming-horse in the present progressive. If we ask
what a body is, Hans may never become a horse; but if
the question is what a body can do, Hans may feel andexude a similar affective force as the rampaging horsethrough a becoming-horse. This state is pushing outsideof the first plane, it is pulling upon the sheer relations inmovement and stillness and the circulation of affects inthe second plane, and it is unfolding in between the twoplanes, before moving onto the next becoming.

4. Becoming-pole-dancer, Becoming-pole
We can see in these examples how becomings emerge
and intertwine with affects, and these details are crucial
for the design of this research. First, becomings emerge
from an encounter with someone/something different
than oneself and from outside of one’s social milieu.
This paper focuses on the pole dance practice of students
in a pole dance studio; thus, in their becoming-poledancers and becoming-pole, they encounter a veteranpole dancer and the pole dance community from whichthese becomings emerge. Although this history is not
well-documented, from my interviews with pole dancers
I found that a large portion of the physical pole-dancemoves were created in gentleman’s clubs and strip clubs
in the U.S. as well as Japan in the 1990s (Coker 2022b).
Pole dance began to be learned by mostly women as
fitness outside of the club context in the 1990s in the US
and the 2000s in Japan, and pole sports has begun to berecognized as a legitimate competitive sport from the2010s through increased media coverage of pole sports
competitions and their champions. Pole dance still carries
the deviant image and thus stigma of sex work, andyet it is also being recognized as an acceptable form offitness, sports, and dance; thus, it occupies an ambiguous
position in society. This social positioning of poledancers as so-called outsiders, in a sense, is conducive tothe process of becoming.
S e c o n d , D & G e x p r e s s l y s t a t e : “ A ff e c t s a r e
becomings” (D&G 1987(1980): 256). It is certainly
affects that drive these encounters and the passage
through different becomings, and it is also encounters
and the emerging of different relations that allow affectto spread among bodies and subsequently augment
or diminish their power of activity. Dance practice

Theory a Body Can Do Caitlin Coker

is an experimentation in affect that creatively probes
what a body can do. With pole dance, not only is it anonverbal form of performance but also it demonstrates
a relationship with the stainless-steel pole in mid-air thatmakes it different from ordinary ways of moving on the
ground and with gravity. These specific characteristics
allow for the affects and becomings in pole dance to bequite pronounced and exaggerated, as I will portray inthe next section through my fieldwork.
Next, I will introduce and discuss case studies frommy fieldwork on pole dance to develop the ideas of
becomings=affects. I began fieldwork on pole dancein 2015 when I started working at a small show pub
called “Café Panic Rabbit 84” in southern Osaka (seeCoker 2022b) and attending lessons in Kyoto. This
fieldwork method is called participant-observation, but
this research is heavily based on participation; I couldn’t
write fieldnotes when I was working and dancing, so
I wrote them directly afterwards or the next morning.
From 2018, I expanded my research to include pole
sports and pole dance competitions, attending two larger
studios in Osaka and Kyoto. I kept fieldnotes about
my experience in the studio and at competitions, and I
conducted semi-structured and unstructured interviews
with pole dancers in-person as well as structured
interviews online.
As I trained and performed pole dance, I interactedwith a large number of pole dance practitioners; thispaper especially draws on interactions with 32 people
who trained together with me on a regular basis of about
five days a week, responded to structured interviews,
and provided me with photographs. Their ages ranged
from their 20s to their 50s, with women in their 30s
being the most prevalent. Although they are not featured
in this paper, there are also women in their 60s who
participate in this research and practice pole dance
vigorously. While women are more common, there
were ten men who participated in this research andprovided photographs. While I am applying this male/
female dichotomy for the convenience of describing theparticipants in this research, I will point out that there
were participants who seemed to blur the binary of male/
female, but they are not featured in this paper.

5. Moving towards the Second Plane in Pole
Dance Becomings
Specifically, I will discuss becomings=affects byintroducing a phenomenon that all practitioners seemedto share: bruising from friction between or collisionof the body and pole (see figure 1 and figure 2). Thisbruising will have different forms and meanings andyet point towards similar becomings and affects. The
body stays on the pole and above ground by pressing

Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy Vol. 15

5and squeezing bare skin against the pole. Let me use
the metaphor of walking: when we walk on the ground,
our feet press into the floor, and with each step we fall
once and catch ourselves with the other foot. Moving up
on the pole is similar, in that the practitioner maintains
contact with one part of the body to free up another,which then latches onto the pole by pulling away fromit or pushing against it. To stay up on the pole, theysqueeze and then push or pull the pole not only with theirhands, but with many different body parts, including but
not limited to the back of their knees, the front of theirknees, their shins, the tops of their feet, their shoulders,the inside of their elbows, the inside of their thighs, andtheir armpits. When this body part is not accustomed tobeing pressed against the pole in this manner, it often
bruises. They are resisting the pull of gravity, and thatcauses friction between the skin and the pole. In addition
to this challenge, new pole moves often feel strange anduncomfortable, and they may have trouble coordinating
the body to achieve stability on the pole. Often, after
they become accustomed to a certain movement andpractice it regularly, bruising will no longer occur in thatparticular location.

Figure 2
Collages made from photographs of bruises provided by researchcollaborators

Figure 1

This bruising is a physical manifestation of the
becomings through which the pole dancer passes. First, it
demonstrates the uncertainty of this transformation, since
we can assume that most do not try to bruise themselves
on purpose. For example, a young woman in her 20s who
enjoys golfing and puppies, told me that “when I had firststarted pole dance I had bruises all over my legs all thetime;” I was there for this informant’s first lesson, when
she and a friend giddily tried a beginner’s pole dance
lesson. I watched as her friend stopped attending lessons,but this woman gradually attended more frequently- fromonce a week to three or four times a week- by herself,
subsequently rising into the more advanced lessons andinstalling a pole in her home. I noticed that as she madeadvancements in her skill level, she seldom had bruises
on her legs. These bruises, as well as the fading of thebruises, are physical outcomes of changes in the relations
in movement on the second plane of immanence.
Figures 1 and 2 were composed not merely to portraythe bruises in pole dance, but to transmit that affectto the reader. I hope that the reader can imagine how
different body parts collide with or squeeze into the poleand how that may hurt. I also want the reader to imagine
and feel the rush of energy, in other words the sheer
affects, that would be required for the practitioner to6

not notice, or to only minimally feel these bruises. One
informant in her 20s, who competes at the international
level and specializes in tricks that require a high levelof flexibility, told me that “it is pain that only lasts for asecond, so I don’t really mind it much.” Pain becomes aregular part of pole dance, and I could often hear criesof pain accompanied by laughter in the attempts at new
tricks. I argue that this is the sign of them being pulled
towards the second plane of pure affects and the capacity
to feel these affects in new relations. As their energy forthis practice is augmented by the affects realized throughpole dance, pain becomes drowned out by the magnitudeof other positive affects.
Affects, by definition, cannot be verbalized, but theseparticipants were able to vaguely describe the natureof the positive affects in pole dance. Some told me thatpole dance was “fun (tanoshii);” when I asked what
was fun about it, I was often told that being able to dosomething new, that “sense of achievement (tasseikan)”
was fun. This is quite in line with the idea of becoming,
because through creative experimentation one can enter
new relations and be able to do something different,
thus augmenting or diminishing their energy. When pole
practitioners can enter a new relationship with the pole,it leads to physical discomfort, bruising, and oftentimes
pain, but being able to do something new augments theirenergy, which is their experience of “fun.”Being able to do something new can be called
becoming-pole-dancer, since it is from the encounter
with the somewhat-deviant group of pole dancers inwhich the practitioner becomes able to generate affects
similar to those moving through pole dancers. This could
be moving around or up the pole fluidly, stopping in an
impressive pose, or displaying their bodies in a sensual
way, in general. However, I think there is a point wherepractitioners go beyond trying to become-pole-dancer
and towards becoming-pole; This is where they create
their own moves and styles based on their relationshipwith the pole becoming stable in the air like the poledoes. Perhaps this is because becomings do not occur
through imitation, and each practitioner finds their own
way to encounter pole-dancer-ness and thus pole-ness.
This way of encountering can never be settled and neverlead to a complete achievement of pole-dancer-hood orpole-hood, leading practitioners to repeat incomplete
experiments when they train. This suggests why they
continue pole dance even though they receive bruises
and pain, something that they were not hoping for in thefirst place.
I noticed one practitioner who attended five or six
times a week, as I did, and even if she had business trips,
she would often visit local pole dance studios on those
trips. Pole dance classes are often held at night after theparticipants finish work, ranging anywhere from 6:30 to
10:00 pm, and she visited these lessons as well. I asked

Theory a Body Can Do Caitlin Coker

her why she attended so much despite of her busy work,and she nonchalantly replied, “to release stress (stresshassan).” She is a salaried worker at a major company,and yet she doesn’t want to go home and relax after
a hard day at work and instead wants to go to a poledance studio where the instructors will make her work
physically, doing backbends, spinning around the pole
upside down, and performing tricks that require strengthand flexibility. Rather, doing these things seems to giveher energy; even when I met her coincidentally at thegrocery store after a lesson at around 9pm she smiled
and laughed at the chance encounter. In the end, we took
a picture in the prepared foods section, while both of us
were undoubtedly hungry as we hadn’t had dinner yet.
Although pole dance is strenuous, the practice’s
affects augment our capacity for activity. It isparadoxical- the more energy one exerts, the moreenergy one gets. In the process, not only the pain but
also any other negative affects- feelings of irritation or
stress, even hunger or sleepiness- often are wiped away
and the body is replenished with positive affects frompole dance. This is a prime example of the nonconscious
passage from one state to another that is a becoming
while it is affect in itself.
While bruising is an effect of the preliminary
becomings in pole dance, an absence of bruising is
the outcome of the repetition and continuation of thisbecoming. For becomings aren’t a static state but apassage from one state to the next. The practitioner
cannot stay in the same state but must always be moving,
training, and then attempting a new move, a new trick, a
new performance. If they try to do nothing and stay in thesame place, their becomings and affects will fade, just as
their bruising fades. There was one practitioner, a woman
in her 30s who worked as a part-time model, and she also
practiced about five or six times a week. However, she
didn’t participate in competitions, only performing inrecitals held at the studio. I asked why she practiced so
frequently, and she said that she was afraid of losing theabilities that she had gained. I could understand- she wasquite skilled, but it was not the case that she was flexible
or strong from the beginning. These were all pathways
in her body that she opened from her experiments inpole dance, and she was aware that they were pathways
that would close to her if she did not continue movingon the pole. If we ask what this suggests for becomings,
we can consider how once affects emerge, that doesn’tmean that they sediment in a static way; they may moveaway from the practitioner and fade with time, like thebruises themselves. Becomings come from an encounter,and one becoming leads to the next. The physicalpractices and thus bodies continually change each day.
Perhaps dancing is addictive because it is sometimes
nearing completion, sometimes getting farther awayfrom completion, and always never complete. This

Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy Vol. 15

uncertainty generates a fluctuation of affects that lift one
up before letting one down and then lifting one up again.
The dancer cannot control it, and the only thing they
can control is the choice to stop or to keep going. If theystop, those becomings and those affects will fade, but ifthey continue, their body will be hurled further throughunpredictable becomings and unknown yet latent affects.
Another possibility is that the practitioner may
go completely to the second plane and self-destruct.
Deleuze and Guattari state that it is important forsomeone to stay in between planes one and two, and ifthey were to completely go to the second plane, theywould be destroyed. One example they give of thiskind of destruction are drug addicts; perhaps they canexperience the second plane, maybe even create greatart from that experience, but going too far will lead totheir destruction. In the case of pole dance, it can lead toheavy and even fatal injuries, either destroying the bodyby pushing it too far or falling from the three or fourmeter heights of the pole. Pole dance demonstrates theimportance of being moderate in a becoming and notcompletely going to the second plane of immanence.
It is in the in-between zone of the becomings that thepractitioner can experiment and move through different
affective states.

6. Moving Away from the First Plane in Pole
Dance Becomings
The previous section focused on becomings as apassage towards the second plane without completely
arriving there. In the next section, I will discuss how
becomings are a passage that is moving away fromexistence on the first plane.
These bruises also become a physical symbol of
their pulling away from the first plane of organization,in which they are an office worker or a housewife, andtowards a certain outsider in society, that of the poledancer. It all begins with the encounter with the poledancer and of course the encounter with the pole. While
talking about bruising to an instructor, I was informedthat some students quit pole dance once they learn about
the bruising that will occur; for example, women who
model professionally will have difficulty working if they
are covered in unsightly bruises. Having strange bruises
all over one’s body won’t make it easy for anyone to leada so-called normal life in Japanese society, especially not
women.
In contrast, the participants who provided me withpictures of their bruises instead found a positive meaning
in them: bruises were often called a “badge of honor”
by instructors as well as the practitioners in that they
are a symbol for their hard work at pole dance. Thesesame practitioners undoubtedly know that bruises are

7

recognized as something else in general society; forexample, the women would often jokingly say that they
hope others don’t think that they are victims of domestic
violence if their bruises are spotted at work. Thissuggests an interaction between the becomings and thefirst plane of organization- by reclaiming the meaningof their bruises, practitioners first deterritorialize
the meaning of bruises from general society andreterritorialize that meaning within the context of thepole dance studio.
The pole dance studio is a somewhat deviant group inthat it exists outside of the productive working society
and carries with it a certain degree of social stigma, atthe same time that it is ambiguous because of its partial
acceptance as a competitive sport, as evidenced in media
coverage of Japanese pole dancers who win internationalpole dance competitions. While D&G’s examples ofoutsider groups are extreme- like vampires, packs of
mice, secret societies, and so forth- this example ofthe pole dance studio community as an outsider groupexhibits the complexities and ambiguities that come withreal life practices of becomings.
Aside from the bruises, there were other physicalcharacteristics that made participants feel theirdisconnection from their social selves in the first plane.
One of this research’s participants, a woman in her 30s,
works as a pharmacist and often shared how pole dancing
affected her work life. As her shoulders grew in widthfrom the muscle required for pole dance, people aroundher would often exclaim “your shoulders!” or clerks at
clothing shops would suggest sizes for tops that were too
small for her, unaware of how wide her shoulders were inproportion to the rest of her body. Another woman in her
40s who always had immaculately curled hair and wellapplied makeup, looking like a proper kind of woman in
Osaka society, said that when she felt muscle sorenessfrom pole the next day at work, she was happy andfelt like it was her secret. On several occasions, I also
have been told something about my appearance or mymuscles- often people make comments about my backmuscles or my biceps when I show them my pole dance,
before even commenting on the dance itself. In Japanesesociety, especially, the ideal for women seems for them
to be round, with soft body lines, and this practice ofpole dance pushes its female practitioners outside ofthis ideal. The more one practices pole dance, the more
pronounced their muscular structures will become, taking
them further away from the gender norms for womenin Japanese society. The aforementioned pharmacist
chooses her clothing in order to camouflage the size ofher shoulders, and thus women who work daytime jobs
can also find ways to blend their muscular pole bodies
back into the image of a typical woman in Japan. Also,
women who work as pole dancers in clubs or bars often
try to approximate themselves again with gender norms

8

in the first plane, of getting their bodies ready for theheterosexual male gaze, by putting in several pads orbras underneath their costumes. The more pole dancers
approach the second plane of immanence, of diving into
the pure affects of pole dance in trying to become stablein the air like the pole, in other words a becoming-pole,the more they are pulled away from the gender norms in
the first plane.
The deviation from gender stereotypes regarding
physical appearance in the first plane were the mostmarked for women, but men in this study also discovered
adversity in general society regarding their pole dance
practice. For example, one heterosexual man in his 20s
who participated in this study stated that he was chided
as being homosexual when he quite his day job andbegan seriously training in pole dance. Another recalledthat he was told by others that men pole dancing werekimoi, meaning gross. Both men who told me this have
won national and international competitions, and we
can think that they include these stories of simplified
derisions in the process of organizing their narrative as
one of overcoming adversity.
Another male participant in his 30s demonstrates
more accurately the ambiguous nature of how hispole dance training, or rather pole dance becomings,
affected his category as an adult male in the first plane.
When he first competed in Japan’s national pole dancecompetition in Osaka, his mother came to watch as asign of support. Since practitioners who place highly inthese competitions are often celebrated on tv programsor newspaper articles, it is not surprising that he wasproud of his score and assumed others would be as
well. He told one of his work superiors at an after-work
drinking party about his hobby and his competition
success. Instead of his superior congratulating him as heexpected, he was told “instead of doing that, you should
do something that contributes to society.” Although theaforementioned participant successfully worked a fulltime office job and trained at the same time, showing up
to the studio in a suit on weekday nights and spending
his weekends and holidays training, his work-placesuperiors still expect him to sacrifice himself more forsociety, which can also be interpreted as one patriarchal
extension of the nuclear family. His becomings in poledance pulled him away from the gender norms operating
in one part of his society, the older generation at his
workplace.
This participant married a female pole dancer fromthe same studio, and as of the writing of this paper, they
currently perform and appear in competitions together.
In my fieldwork, I have also encountered a heterosexual
couple in their 40s who competed and opened a chainof pole dance studios together, as well as a heterosexual
couple in their 40s who competed and then began ashow pub together; both couples have children. There

Theory a Body Can Do Caitlin Coker

is also a younger heterosexual couple in their 20s whoteach pole dance, operate a pole dance bar, and perform
in competitions and events together. When I visitedtheir pole dance bar, the female pole dancer was fully
clothed in laid-back black stretch pants and working
behind the bar making drinks. It was her male partner
as well as another young man who were dancing on
the pole on top of the bar, before stripping down tot-back style underpants. The clientele were two female
university students and me. I vividly remember the other
women laughing and having a good time while the men
danced for them. They asked, “where do you buy that
underwear in the first place?” referring to the t-backunderpants, before searching for the underwear brandon their smartphones and laughing. They were enjoying
the scantily clad dancing men, but they also remarked
on how they like men but could also see themselves
dating women. This example suggests how these poledancers deterritorialize categories in the first plane andthen reterritorialize their gendered bodies to create newpockets of society that allow new possibilities for how
gender and sexuality can be lived.

7. Reading D&G’S “Becoming-Intense,
Becoming-Animal, BecomingImperceptible”
In this paper, I introduced the emergence ofMassumi’s affect theory and acknowledged one problem
with affect theory in the social sciences, namely the
lingering of Cartesian mind-body dualism. I argue
for the necessity of a clear ontological framework to
overcome mind-body dualism and suggest a return to
the theorization of affect in D&G’s becomings, in which
our existence is not understood through the division ofmind and body but through the mapping of two planesof existence, with becomings unfolding in between the
two. Further, to chart how becomings unfurl, I propose
the application of empirical research on dance. This
paper argues that pole dance is a preferable performance
form for analyzing becomings because of its demanding
physical exertion and bodily transformation as well as
its ambiguously deviant social standing. Through poledance, it becomes clear how becomings are specificallyphysically practiced beginning with an encounterand proceeded by creative experimentation within
relationships with the pole and others.
The discussion of becomings in pole dance beganwith clarifying the pulling towards the second plane, therealm of the imperceptible. The bruising in pole danceis unique in that it makes the imperceptible movement
and affects of pole dance visible for a short period oftime; similar to becomings, they also arise and vanish ina manner that is uncontrollable by the practitioner. The

Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy Vol. 15

practitioner can only guide the passage from one state
to another by choosing whether to follow through with
their encounter with pole dance and continue training orwhether to stop.
The photographs of bruises were provided to allow
the reader to be able to imagine how the body creates
different relationships with the pole and on the pole bypressing different parts into it. Not only did I intend forthe reader to feel the pain through these photographs, but
I hope that they can feel how the volume of affects andaugmentation of energy, which practitioners expressed
as “fun” in pole dance practice could possibly drownout these sensations of pain, wipe out negative affects ingeneral, and spur the practitioner to continue pole danceas a part of their life. At the same time, I hoped for thereader to imagine the danger of pole dance moving too
far towards the second plane, and the possible injury anddeath awaiting the practitioner.
The bruising is also a symbol of how the practitioner
pulls away from the first plane through their encounter
with pole dancers and the pole. I portrayed how theypulled away from the first plane only to reterritorialize
their bodies and reinvent that first plane by redefining
the meaning of the bruise. This was especially true forfemale pole dancers, but I also digressed from the topic
of bruises to discuss how male pole dancers are deviatingfrom stereotypical gender norms in their society.
Furthermore, I suggested how they use preexisting
categories of the married couple or the night/sex industry
but reinvent what their bodies can do in those categories.
This paper clearly outlined how Affects=Becomings
emerge in specific physical practice. One might think thatpracticing and attempting to hone a skill like pole dance
couldn’t possibly create a becoming, but I illustrated how
the uncontrollable creative experimentation hurls thepractitioner towards unknown affects, which further spurthe practitioner to continue experimentation and further
becomings. While D&G’s examples of becomings
are with clearly deviant groups and abstract passages
through bodily states, these empirical examples were theopposite: real life on the first plane is more ambiguous,and bodily becomings drawing towards the second plane
are more concrete. To be specific, in real life, presented
here through empirical research, pole’s deviance is notclear-cut and depends on who is talking and in what
context. Also, in real life, bodily transformations arevisceral and can be felt by the researcher, and possibly
even the reader through photographs and descriptions.
Whereas D&G’s examples of becomings draw frommostly works of fiction or representations of becomings,
this paper bases its idea of becomings on empiricalresearch not only understood by me verbally or visually
but through my own moving muscular sinewy body on
the pole- theory grounded in the researcher’s own body.
In other words, this is theory that only the body can do.

9References
Caillois, R. (1961 (1958)), Man, Play and Games (Le Jeaux etles hommes), Trans. Meyer Barash, Glencoe, IL: The Free
Press of Glencoe, Inc.
Castaneda, C. (1968), The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way
of Knowledge, Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Coker, C. (2022a), ‘I could die—Feeling Affect in the
Becomings of Pole Dance Practice (Shinukamo—Pouru
Dansu Jissen de Joudou wo Taigen Saseru Seiseihenka)’,
Japanese Journal of Cultural Anthropology (Bunka
Jinruigaku), 86(4): 617-634.
Coker, C. (2022b), ‘Dancing Sensuality- An Anthropologyof Eroticism as seen from Pole Dance (Danshingu
Kannou- Pouru Dansu kara mita Erosu no Jinruigaku)’, An
Anthropology of Sensuality—Overcoming the Sensational
Turn (Kannou no Jinruigaku—Kankakutekina Tenkai wo
Koete), Kyoto: Nakanishiya Publications.
Deleuze, G. & F. Guattari. (1980(1987)), Mille plateaux:Capitalisme et schizophrénie, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Massumi B. trans.,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Leys, R. (2011), ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical
Inquiry 37(3): 434–472.
Leys, R. (2017), The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique,
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Martin, E. (2013), ‘The Potentiality of Ethnography and theLimits of Affect Theory’, Current Anthropology 54 (7): 14958.
Massumi, B. (1995), ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Cultural
Critique 31: 83-109.
Massumi, B. (2002), Parables for the Virtual, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Mazzarella, W. (2009), ‘Affect: What is it Good for?’, In S.
Dube (ed.), Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation,
Globalization, pp. 291–309, London, UK: Routledge.
Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2012), The Make-Believe Space: Affective
Geography in a Postwar Polity, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Newell, S. (2018), ‘The Affectiveness of Symbols: Materiality,
Magicality, and the Limits of the Antisemiotic Turn’, Current
Anthropology 59(1): 1-22.
Skoggard, I. & A. Waterston (2015), ‘Introduction: Toward
an Anthropology of Affect and Evocative Ethnography’,
Anthropology of Consciousness, 26(2): 109–20.
Smith, L., Wetherell, M. & G. Campbell (2018), Emotion,
Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present. London,
UK: Routledge.
Spinoza, B. (1985), The Collected Works of Spinoza,
E.M.Curley trans., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stewart, K. (2007), Ordinary Affects, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Wetherell, M. (2012), Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science
Understanding, London, UK: Sage Publications.

A Sense of Relation: Defining ‘Affect’   James D. Letson  

10

A Sense of Relation: Defining ‘Affect’
James D. Letson

Graduate School of Humanities and Human Sciences, Hokkaido University

Abstract
Despite being a relatively popular subject of enquiry among the social sciences and humanities
in recent decades, ‘affect’ remains an elusive phenomenon. This paper, rather than trace thedevelopment of affect theory in order to pick apart the work of previous scholars, instead
explores research that has – implicitly or explicitly – tied affect(s) to relations and relationality.
Engaging with anthropological theories of affect and relationships as a form of ‘empiricalphilosophy,’ as well as with ethnographic data from my own fieldwork, this work seeks to providethat which has eluded previous theorists of affect: a definition of the phenomenon that is broad
enough to cover its many aspects, while remaining concise enough for practical application. In
doing so, I come to define affect as no more or less than, the experiential aspect of relationality .
Keywords: Affect, Relationality, Anthropology, Collective effervescence

Introduction: Punk Affects
The room is dark and warm, and roughly square. At
one end is a stage, standing at about waist-height, while
opposite it is a booth containing sound and lighting
equipment, and a small, curved counter which acts asboth reception and bar. This is one of Japan’s many
‘livehouses’1 (small-scale, independent live music venues– see Namai 2019), located in a not-very-salubrious
neighbourhood in Sapporo, the main city on Japan’s
northernmost island of Hokkaido. The basement room
has around 50 people in it who are variously chatting,buying or drinking cans of beer, or simply catching theirbreath. Four of the city’s local hardcore punk bands have
performed already and everyone is waiting for the final
band. The headline act are very popular in the local punkcommunity and beyond, being one of the representative
artists of ‘Japacore’ (Japanese-style hardcore punk –see Letson 2021; 2022), who have been active in theinternational underground punk scene for almost four
decades. There is a particular anticipation hanging in theair; after being on hiatus for two-and-a-half years due to
COVID-19-related restrictions, the band are returning to
the stage.
The musicians appear and start casually tuning theirinstruments and checking the sound. A few stray cheers
and whistles emerge from the crowd as a kind of pressure
seems to build in the air. The vocalist appears, steps up
1 ライブハウス (raibuhausu).

to the microphone and offers a casual greeting, “hey! It’s
been a while.”2 Distorted electric guitar chords blast outof the speakers and the drummer explodes into a hectic
beat. The audience cheers and the twenty-or-so people
nearest the front of the stage bunch closer together,pumping their fists and moving their bodies in time withthe music’s rapid tempo. Two people right in front of thestage start ‘moshing’ – shoving, pushing, and smashinginto each other with aggressive, violent bodily contact(see Overell 2014; Riches 2011). Another person joins
them, then another, soon six or seven people are involved
and I feel a compunction to lend myself to the fray.
As I push my way through the crowd towards the‘mosh pit’ (the name given to the area immediately
in front of the stage where most moshing occurs),
I recognise one of the participants as an importantinterlocutor, informant, and fieldwork collaborator. His
help, advice, and information have been invaluable tomy anthropological research on the punk community in
Sapporo. I grab his shoulder from behind and shove him,
hard. He careens into another mosher and bounces backinto me. His face splits into a wicked grin as he takes
hold of my arms and swings me towards the biggest knotof activity. Soon we are all cannoning off each other ina chaotic mess of limbs, hair, and sweat. Some of the
impacts are hard enough to raise bruises the next day, but
in the moment nobody seems to care.
Not all the audience react in this manner, however.
2 や、久しぶり！ (ya, hisashiburi).

Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy Vol. 15

Indeed, as far as I was able to count from my in-thethick-of-it vantage point, there were never more thanseven or eight people in the mosh at any one time.
Some left, others joined, most moshed until the end of
the song. The majority of the audience choose to enjoy
and participate in the show in different ways. While asmall circle opens up in the crowd to simultaneously
accommodate and contain the violence of the mosh pit,
those outside it move their bodies, nod their heads, pumptheir fists, cheer, clap, tap their feet, sing along, crosstheir arms, drink beer, or enact some combination of any
or all of the above.
How do we explain these differences in behaviour?
How should we interpret the physical aggression ofmyself and my fellow moshers towards our friends
and peers? How do we account for those that chose
not to join the mutual violence? Everyone in that spaceexperienced the same stimuli; the same atmosphere,
the same music, the same sights and smells. Everyone
had been waiting for this during the privations of
COVID-19 and everyone who was there had deliberately
chosen to be there. Everyone there knew each other,and was familiar with the music of the band. I havebeen conducting ethnographic fieldwork with the
Sapporo punk community for over 3 years, and I did
not notice anyone there that night who was ‘new’ or‘unknown’ to the scene. All of the participants wereactive and committed members of the same subculturalcommunity, and thus all had at least a level of shared,
embodied, cultural knowledge regarding the music,
its style and themes, and the meanings of these vis-àvis community identity. As such knowledge forms thebasis of subcultural identity and belonging (Haenfler
2014; Thornton 1995), and as music and dance is sucha powerful tool for the realization of social integration(Durkheim 1995; Turino 2008), it would be reasonable toexpect most – if not all – of the crowd at the livehouse to
be caught up in the ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim
1995 – see below) of the mosh. However, only a very
few found themselves swept up in such a manner by theintensity of the moment. So why and how did this sharedexperience result in such an array of physical reactions?
Clearly the live music experience works in a complex
and non-linear fashion, but what exactly connects thecause with the effect(s)?
The answer lies in understanding affect. What affects
were at play in the situation at hand, and how did theyinteract with the body/minds of the audience? If weunderstand this, then we can understand why people
from the same social group may have such different
reactions to the same stimulus. However, in order to do
this, it is necessary to answer a much more fundamental,
and indeed, much more difficult question: what is affect?

11

The Big Question: What is Affect?3‘Affect’ has become something of a buzz word in
the humanities and social sciences in recent decades(Leys 2017) and anthropology has been no exception.
Despite it being the object of a large number of variedstudies across disciplines, exactly what affect isand what it means remains open to debate. Broadly
speaking, it pertains to the processes through whichhumans experience and process sensory and emotional
stimuli. In psychology, the term is used more-or-lessinterchangeably with ‘emotion’ (cf Tomkins 1992).
However, in the other social sciences, affect is often
assiduously separated from it, instead being understoodas a “pre-personal” phenomenon (Massumi 2002;
Stewart 2007). In other words, it can be understood to
be stimuli which have the potential to elicit emotion, but
before they have been cognitively processed as such.
As Brian Massumi puts it, it may be considered “thecapacity to affect and be affected” (Massumi 1980 [1987]:
xvi). As such, social theorists often place it in opposition
to cognition and intellect, being related more to studiesof the body, the senses, and the emotions, than to thought
and ideas (Leys 2011; 2017). However, as will become
clear below, this dichotomous approach has raised more
problems than it has solved, and more recent scholarshiphas sought to illustrate the symbiosis of affect andcognition, rather than their separation.
While current research trends have sought to transcend– or, at the very least, bridge the gap between – themind/body binary which has been implicit in previous
literature, a definition of affect which comprehensively
incorporates all the aspects of this phenomenon remains
elusive (Lutz 2017). Anthropologists, in particular, with
their focus on ground-up theorizing based on long-term
participant observation and ethnographic data (Malkki2007), have long sought an understanding of affectwhich reflects the complex, nuanced, ‘messy’ realities ofeveryday human life (for example, Stewart 2007; Nishii& Yanai et al 2020).
In this paper, rather than trace the development ofaffect-related anthropological theory as an exercise intheoretical genealogy (for such a review, see DeAntoni2019), I instead engage with it as a form of ‘empiricalphilosophy’ (Mol 2002: xiii-ix), grappling with theideas that allow us to ‘think with’ affect (cf Lévi-Strauss1963). Most studies of affect take as their starting point
the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza – most commonly
noted as one of the principal opponents of Descartian
philosophy in Europe (cf Deleuze & Guattari 1987; Leys
3 Parts of this paper have been adapted from the author’s
Masters thesis ( 修士論文 ), which is available on request from
Hokkaido University Graduate School of Humanities andSocial Sciences.

122017). While Spinoza does appear in my outline of affecttheory, I begin with a consideration of Émile Durkheim’sconcept of ‘collective effervescence.’ By starting witharguably the first modern sociological theory to posit
a mutual relationship between affect and cognition, I
show how affect theory has been inherently concernedwith the sensual experience of relationships, even if thishas not always been explicitly recognised. From this,I put forward a definition of affect as, ‘the experiential
aspect of relationality,’ which seeks to provide a concise
yet comprehensive concept of this fundamental facet ofhuman experience.

Values of Intensity: Émile Durkheim’s‘Collective Effervescence’
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, firstpublished in 1912, Durkheim brings together
ethnographic data from a number of sources in aconsideration of what he considers to be the most‘basic’ or ‘primitive’ forms of religious activity inhuman society. While the obvious social evolutionism
underpinning this enterprise would be anathema formost current scholars, this work nevertheless provides
important insights into the behaviours apparent in thesocial physicality of communal events. In doing so, heprovides a view of collective behaviour as both cause
and effect of the interplay between affect and cognition.
For Durkheim, religious, and particularly ritual
activity is simultaneously a practice and a representationof a collective mental state. These representative
practices are furthermore “the product of an immense
cooperation that extends not only through space but also
through time” (1995: 15). That is, collective behaviour
maintains a group’s connections to its shared history
and worldview, while at the same time (re)creating themental and emotional bonds of sociality necessary forsuch behaviour in the first place. Thus, a collective act is
not only a physical affirmation of communal bonds, butalso a semiotic representation of the community itself.
At the centre of this concept is the idea of social orcollective ‘effervescence’ (Durkheim 1995). That is, theheightened experience of communality that provides theimpetus for crowds or groups to act in ways which inother social contexts would be considered unacceptable,
or even immoral (Durkheim 1952). Beyond the religious
ecstasies of Durkheim’s collective effervescence, themost obvious examples of this phenomenon are rioting,looting and other forms of social unrest, although it
is entirely possible to include the musically inspired
violence of the mosh pit here, too (see Overell 2014;
Riches 2011). In this conception, people are seen as
capable of such behaviours only when energized by“a sort of electricity [that] is generated from their

A Sense of Relation: Defining ‘Affect’   James D. Letson  closeness” (Durkheim 1995: 217). Furthermore, thiscollective intellect, simultaneously effervescing fromand transcendent of the individuals involved, is coconstitutive of the physical actions which are both amaterial manifestation and a semiotic representation of
the shared thoughts and experiences of the crowd.
In his earlier work, Suicide (1897), Durkheim explains
the creation of such a state as a dialectic process.
People in close proximity experience the same affective
stimulus while also perceiving that those around them
have experienced it, as well. This collective psychophysiological experience combines with the semiotic
cognition of each individual, who simultaneously
imagines that those around them – having experienced
the same phenomenon – are concurrently thinking inthe same way. Thus, the collective state is born from “apenetration, a fusion of a number of states within another,
distinct from them” (Durkheim 1952: 77). In addition,
those nearby who are not experiencing this collective
mental state may still add to it, by feeling pressured toconform to the emergent social behaviour due to theirclose proximity to it. In short, collective effervescencemay be described as an affectively experienced ‘social
force’ (ibid).
For Durkheim, a social force is a pressure born fromthe social group, which compels the individual to act ina way that conforms to the norms of said group. Despite
pointing out the necessity of what he refers to as anindividual’s personal ‘disposition’ in determining how
one is affected by social forces, Durkheim consistently
frames his ideas in a way which infers that the individual
has no real power to resist them (cf Durkheim 1952: 75;
1995: 367-369). Such pressures are vaguely defined and‘felt,’ rather than understood. As such, in contemporary
understandings they can be considered to be affective innature (Mazzarella 2009).
As Giddens (1976) has pointed out, such a view
reduces individual agency to the point where it becomespractically non-existent. The implication of Durkheim’s
theories is that the moment one enters a group, one is
no longer able to act as one would when alone. If one
considers this point in tandem with the micro-social
theories of scholars such as Erving Goffman (1956),
or the socio-ecological theories of Gregory Bateson(2000) or Bruno Latour (1993) in which individual
agents (human and/or non-human) are constantly acting
in relation to one another, it may be considered true, up
to a point. However, it denies that people possess theagency to act strategically within the group in order topursue their personal goals. Thus, while it is possible
to view society as a sui generis phenomenon whichapplies certain forces and pressures on its members, it
is also certain that its relationship with those individual
members is not as simple or as one-way as Durkheim
infers.

Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy Vol. 15

Furthermore, as Gross (2006) and Lukes (2007)highlight in their comparisons of Durkheim with thephilosophy of John Searle (1995), social forces are
posited as the results of the group’s ability to assign
power and status to objects or people that are separate
from their ‘natural’ meaning. Such an argument restson the notion that this representation is founded whollyon the semiotic power of symbolic language (Gross
2006). As such, in much the same way as he prioritised
the social at the expense of the individual, so too
does Durkheim give primacy to the linguistic (and,by extension, the cognitive) over the affective and thesensual.
Despite these criticisms, to which careful attention
must be paid, it is clear that his work provides an ideal
starting point from which to consider problems related
to the affective nature of sociality. In particular, hisview that the emergence of a given collective behaviour
stems from a process which is simultaneously sensualand cognitive, affective and semiotic (Mazzarella 2009).
Although it is imperative that anyone who seeks tofollow this theoretical approach does not give primacy to
one over the other.

Networks and Relations: From the‘Social’ to the ‘Ecological’
The first scholar to attempt an approach which
deliberately sought to synthesize affect and cognition
was, arguably, anthropologist Gregory Bateson. In his
early ethnographic monograph, Naven (1958), Batesonuses the eponymous ritual of the Iatmul people of Papua
New Guinea to explore, analyse, and explicate both thecultural ‘ethos’ of the Iatmul, as well as what he terms
their ‘eidos.’ The former word is borrowed from thework of Ruth Benedict, who coined the term to describe
the dominant personality traits within cultural groups,
which are both fostered and represented by socioculturalforms and structures (see Benedict 1959). That is, thebehaviours and personality traits that are considereddesirable by the group, and which manifest themselves
through cultural forms such as dance, ritual, art, andso on. The term, eidos, on the other hand, refers to theinternal logical schema that define the structure of thegroup. For instance; rules, laws, ‘common sense,’ andother codifications of what is and is not acceptable
to the group, and the commonly held concepts andunderstandings which set out how and why things aredone in a certain way. This, in turn, feeds back on thetraits or characteristics of its ethos. Or, as Bateson puts it,“ethos and eidos are the affective and cognitive aspectsof [cultural] personality (1958: 255, my emphasis). In
this way, much like Durkheim, Bateson stresses thedual nature of the causes of communal behaviour in13

its relation to culture. However, Bateson is also guiltyof the same mistake as Durkheim; namely, privileging
structural explications of the Iatmul cultural eidos,
over an exploration of the affective ethos, implying ahierarchical relation between the two. To his credit,
Bateson himself admits as much in the epilogue of
Naven’s second edition (1958: 280-302).
Following Naven, Bateson would go on to expand,revise, and refine his theories, incorporating ideas frompsychology, cybernetics, and communications theory.
This work culminated in his magnum opus, Steps to an
Ecology of Mind, published in 1972, in which he draws
together these differing strands of theory to expoundan ecological explanation of human behaviour. From
research on topics as diverse as psychopathy, cetacean
communication, and epigenetics, Bateson builds a
concept of the human mind as an ecological aggregate ofideas. The definition of the word, ‘idea’ in the book is left
deliberately vague (see Bateson 2000: 1), although it isclear from his writings that this word can be consideredas pertaining to any given immanent or emergent
phenomenon. This theory sees thought, behaviour, andeven existence as fundamentally relational. That is, noidea or phenomenon would come into being without the
specific interactions between all the myriad agents acting
in and on a specific place at a specific time. These agentsinclude anything that is exerting some kind of influenceon the emergence of the phenomenon in question, suchas historicity, genetics, environment, social context,
cultural influences, and so on and so forth.
This way of thinking constitutes a significant shift
from the scientific positivism of Bateson’s predecessors.
Here, culture, behaviour, or any kind of phenomenon,
human or non-human, is no longer seen as a fait
accompli, but as a work in constant progress. Moreover,
it is a work that, rather than being embodied in objects,
is emergent in the relationships between those objects.
Behaviour, for example, is considered by Bateson
to be based on processes of communication which
occur within overlapping contexts. While some ofthese contexts (environment, background noise, bodylanguage, and so on) can be understood as affective,
others (memory, knowledge, experience) are inherently
cognitive or semiotic. Thus, Bateson has brought us
from a conception of group behaviour as emergent froma social body that is greater than the sum of its parts, tothe notion that behaviour, as an immanent phenomenon,
is simultaneously emergent from and constitutive ofenvironmental ecologies of which the ‘human’ is one part
among many (ibid).
Bateson’s radical approach to explaining humanbehaviour arguably became one of the main foundations
for subsequent anthropological theories related toassemblage and networks of agency which include bothhuman and non-human actors (see, for example, Latour

141993). Moreover, while these ecological networks arearguably similar to Durkheim’s transcendent notion of
the collective mind, the influence of non-human actors(animate or otherwise) can now be considered an integral
part of the behaviours which emerge from any socialgroup. In addition, the idea of the social can be seen tohave shifted from one of physical proximity and ‘collective
effervescence,’ to one of emergent relationality.
Given that human experience can be considered to befundamentally relational in nature, it becomes important
to define what exactly is meant by the term, ‘relational.’
Or, in other words, what exactly is a ‘relationship?’ Putvery simply, the word indicates a connection or link
between multiple, heterogenous phenomena, as wellas their mutual influence and/or relevance within thisassociation. Moreover, as Marilyn Strathern (1995) has
illustrated, relationships may be understood as not only
complex (necessarily consisting of multiple elements),
but also holographic (similar across any order of scale).
In this way, a relationship functions simultaneously as
both a phenomenological connection and the abstract
conception of that same connection. Thus, paying
attention to relationships provides a way to bring
together the affective with the cognitive, and even the
ontological with the epistemological (ibid; Strathern2020).
However, the theories of Bateson and others do notreally go far enough in their acknowledgement of theaffective aspect of relationality. There is always theneed for researchers (and especially anthropologists
and others who rely on empirical fieldwork) to renderexperience into data, data into analysis, and analysis
into concise and understandable conclusions. Hence, it
becomes necessary at this juncture to introduce some of
the influential theories which deal explicitly with affect,as both an explicit phenomenon and an abstract subjectof theory. After doing so, it will become possible to build
a more balanced picture of relationality and the role ofaffect within it.

More than a Feeling: Affect, Cognition,
Ontology
In addition to the relational ecologies of Batesonand others, in the latter half of the twentieth century‘affect theory’ also emerged to challenge the idea thathuman experience was solely dependent on the cognitive
interpretation and physical (re)production of signs andrepresentations. In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
philosophical work, A Thousand Plateaus (1987), whicharguably popularized the notion of affect, the word isused to denote “a prepersonal intensity corresponding
to the passage from one experiential state of the bodyto another and implying an augmentation or diminution

A Sense of Relation: Defining ‘Affect’   James D. Letson  in that body's capacity to act” (Massumi, in Deleuze &Guattari 1987: xvi).
Taking the seventeenth century anti-Descartian
philosophy of Baruch Spinoza as their starting point,
Deleuze and Guattari pay particular attention to theconcept of ‘passions;’ emotions which are able to exert
power or influence over humans due to their externality(Spinoza 2000). For Spinoza (and later for Deleuze andGuattari), cognitive capacity may be disrupted or evendestroyed by an external affect when it encounters ahuman body/mind and manifests as a distinct emotion.
Indeed, the only phenomenon with enough power to rid
a person of such an emotion is another emotion (Spinoza
2000: 11).
Taking this as a foundation for further theoretical
exploration, Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual(2002), attempts to construct a comprehensive theoryof affect. In addition to the aforementioned, Massumi
draws on scholarship from literary theory and, inparticular, psychology, to expound a notion of affect as
an experience of intensity over quality. For Massumi,
affect is fundamentally external to the personal, “anonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic
remainder” (Massumi 2002: 25) that exists outside
the semiotic and semantic processes through which
the individual forms their understanding of the world.
Furthermore, by taking this ‘autonomy’ as the defining
feature of affective phenomena, he emphasises its‘potentiality.’ That is, the ability of affect to provide a
bridge between the virtual (the potential worlds formedin the mind by the imaginations and expectations
afforded by the accumulation of life-experience) and theactual (the reality emergent in the outcome of the virtualas it meets the complex stimuli of lived life).
This understanding of affect, in addition to Deleuzianphilosophy, draws heavily on psychological notionsof affect, particularly the work of Silvan Tomkins andBenjamin Libet. Tomkins’ authoritative four volume
work (1962; 1963; 1991; 1992) on the psychology
of affect remains one of the foundational texts forresearchers studying this aspect of human psychology(Frank & Wilson 2020). According to Tomkins, rather
than being separate from cognition, the processes ofthe body’s ‘affect system’ and the ‘cognitive system’
are fundamentally co-constitutive. Except in the case ofpsychological disorders, they are completely symbiotic
and thus, inseparable (Tomkins 1962). However, rather
than feeding into each other directly, they instead work inparallel, each amplifying or dampening the effects of theother as the body/brain autonomically prioritises which
stimuli to apply its finite resources to at any given time
(Tomkins 1992).
While Massumi takes up Tomkins’ notion of affectand cognition acting as mutual amplifiers/dampeners, heuses the work of Libet (1985) to support his insistenceJournal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy Vol. 15

on their separation. Libet showed that humans registereda half-second lapse between deciding on an action andcarrying it out. Following Libet’s conclusions, Massumi
posits that this ‘missing half-second’ implies that affectand cognition exist in a hierarchical relationship, whereaffect is the ‘raw’ or ‘natural’ stimulus-in-itself whichis then amplified or dampened by the brain’s cognitive
processes, contrary to Tomkins’ theory of mutual, codependent amplification/dampening. Furthermore,beyond being separate from each other, he also assertsthat affect and cognition are systems that – if not exactly
contrary to each other – operate at cross purposes,interfering more than augmenting. In his words affectis “an intimation of what comes next,” which cognition“runs counter to and dampens” (ibid: 26). Thus, implyingthat cognition, or semiotic processing, is nothing morethan a post-facto attempt to apply an explicable narrative
to what was originally a purely autonomic response toan affective stimulus that exists independent of the body
experiencing it.
Following Massumi, anthropologist Kathleen Stewart(2007) employed his theories to illustrate the affective
nature of agency, as well as the power of affect in theshaping of emergent realities within an everyday context.
For Stewart, affect can be likened to an energy that
infuses the various bodies that occupy a given spaceand provide them with the impetus for movement andaction, “an animate circuit that conducts force andmaps connections” (Stewart 2007: 3). It is, essentially,a substitute for Durkheim’s ‘social forces.’ Nonetheless,despite Stewart’s efforts to highlight the grounded natureof affect, it is still very much a phenomenon whichis understood to “[be] transpersonal or prepersonal”(Stewart 2007: 128), implying that it is something thatexists outside bodies, which must sense and interpret it inorder to function agentically.
However, according to historian Ruth Leys (2011),
Massumi and his followers cited only psychology
research that backs up their notion of the ‘noni n t e n t i o n a l i t y ’ o f a ff e c t , w h i l e i g n o r i n g o t h e r
psychological theories which have challenged thisidea (for example, Fridlund 1994; Lazarus & Folkman
1984). In doing so, they have side-lined the inherent
interestedness of affect – how it not only moves between
actors, but how it is also moved by them (Lutz 2017) –and have employed positivist ‘scientific’ approaches in
an implicit hierarchy where the humanities and social
sciences are seen to require the ‘hard sciences’ in order toprove their theories correct (Martin 2013). In short, thesescholars have excised affects from the emotions they
are inherently tied to and, in doing so, have created acategory so abstract it no longer bears much resemblance
to the lived experience of human life (Skoggard &Waterston 2015).
Essentially, while they have considered the human15

body a receiver, or even, a ‘conductor’ of affect, they
have all-too-often ignored the ability of the body togenerate or to charge affects (see Fridlund 1994).
Moreover, by insisting on demarcating where the ‘natural’
flows of affect end and the ‘complications’ of humancognition begin, they have arguably failed to escapethe essentialist dualisms which underpin much of EuroAmerican modernist thought (Nishii & Yanai 2020). In
short, not only have they failed to overcome the body/mind dichotomy, they have further conflated it with theculture/nature divide (cf Descola 2013).
In answer to this problem, sociologist Margaret
Wetherell (2012), puts forward a theory of ‘affective
practice.’ Wetherell argues that affect forms a vital
component of the everyday practices through whichhumans produce meaning. In other words, affect isinextricably linked with praxis, and together both areproductive of human understanding. Her approach
foregrounds humans’ roles in the creation of affects,
as well as in their reception, and places the body at the
point of intersection and interaction where “possibilities
and routines become…entangled together with meaning
making” (Wetherell 2012: 19). This focus on bodily
practice as part of how people simultaneously produce
and interpret meaning in response to affect provides
a counterbalance to the abstracted potentialities ofMassumi-inspired affect theories. It also brings backDurkheim’s original point that the affective and thecognitive, the embodied and the intellectual, work intandem.
Andrea DeAntoni takes this a step further. In his
work he builds on the understanding of the duality ofaffect to develop a practical approach that allows forthe complex interplay of body, mind, space, network,
discourse, material, self, non-self/other, and environment
as experienced through affect. He argues for a focus on‘feeling,’ or rather, “feeling with the world” (DeAntoni &Dumouchel 2017: 94; see also DeAntoni & Cook 2019).
The plural connotations of this verb (in English, at least),
along with the qualifying statement which informs usthat it is an action that is done together, affords theorists
a neat discursive device that pulls together the multiple
roles and influences that affect fulfils in the everyday
doings and becomings of life (DeAntoni 2019).
If “feeling with the world” provides a practicaland operative definition of what affect allows humanactors to do, there still remains the problem of clearly
defining – in a similarly practical manner – what exactly
affect is. Anthropologists publishing in the Japanese
language have, in recent years, attempted to approachaffect theory in a slightly different way. Notably, Nishii
and Yanai (2020), by returning to a direct engagementwith Spinoza’s philosophy, have sought to bypass theinfluence of Massumi and other scholars who they
feel have muddied the theoretical waters. For them,

16

affect (although they prefer Spinoza’s original term,‘affectus’) is more than just the “flipside of Westernmodernist human-centrism”4 (Nishii & Yanai 2020: 2,
my translation), affect is productive of existence. It is theexperiential process each living thing takes part in whenit “takes in that which is outside”5 (Nishii & Yanai 2020:
3, my translation). In other words, they assert that affectcan be understood as the sensual encounter throughwhich living things both experience and make senseof the relationality of being. For Yanai, in particular,
this notion of affect ties in with animist ontologies ofexistence as “whole-yet-multiple”6 (Yanai 2020: 44, mytranslation), and provides a foundation for understanding
the universal pluralities of a nature which is inclusive of– rather than separate from – humanity (see also Descola2013).
This Japanese answer to ‘Western’ theorists’ socalled, ‘turn to affect,’ affords a perspective that issimultaneously ‘non-Western,’ yet acknowledges that ina post-colonial, globalised world, no point of view canever be fully removed from ‘Western’ modes of thinking(Navaro 2017). It thus provides a deeper reading of
the consequences of Spinoza’s philosophy, carrying
the notion of affect to its furthest possible conclusion.
Moreover, by grounding it in our experience of reality,
Nishii and Yanai’s concept of affect as being constitutive
of processual existence goes some way painting a moregenerative view of embodied affect. In doing so, they
have additionally connected affect to the anthropologicalunderstanding of existence (social, natural, or universal)
as fundamentally relational.
In this way, we have come back to the entanglementof affect with relationality, as well as with cognition. It
has also become obvious that paying attention to affectaffords us a way to span the gap between the ontologicaland the epistemological. Such a potentially broad theory
hence requires a definition that encompasses all of its
phenomenological aspects, while remaining succinct andclear enough to be practically applicable to the seemingly
endless variation of everyday life, even when attempting
to theorise with it through the abstractions of academic
thought.

A Sense of Relation: Defining ‘Affect’   James D. Letson  The point I am making in this paper is not that
previous scholars and theorists of affect have been

wrong, or mistaken, but simply that they have eachprovided a piece of a larger picture.7 Durkheim showedthat the experience of sociality was affective as well as
cognitive, felt as well as understood. Bateson brought
to light the processual and mutually productive natureof relationships, of which affect is a necessary part.
Massumi and Stewart highlighted the non-linearity of therelation between affect and cognition, and the importanceof affect as potentiality. Wetherell and DeAntoni tiedaffect to both sensual praxis and to the epistemological,
while Nishii and Yanai illustrated its role in ontologicalworld-making. Although each of these theories of affecthas had its shortcomings, that does not diminish theimportance of what may be learned from them. It would
be foolish to throw the baby out with the bathwater – soto speak – by ignoring their contributions to the debate.
It is clear that affect is not only the intensity ofpotential. Neither is it neatly divisible from the emotions
it invokes or the cognitive processes by which andthrough which it is rendered understandable. It is thesense that some person, object, context or situation
matters in some way to the sensor, as well as the
emergent experience of that sense. It intimates thateither something is coming, something is emerging, orsomething has manifested. As a phenomenon or event
emerges, the affect(s) which heralded it are not somuch fulfilled, as translated by the body/mind into anembodied experience. This process may, at first, seem toplace affect prior to the emergent experience, however,affect’s mutually transformative interactions with theactors involved in its emergent context show that it is
not only ‘pre-personal,’ but also post-personal, intrapersonal, and inter-personal.
To put it more simply, affects are constantly changing
in both quality and intensity, and are simultaneously
infused within, radiate out from, and interact between
any given phenomena which are in relation to eachother. This, along with the implication that any given
stimulus can only be described as ‘affective’ if there
is a feeling body available to encounter it, leads to theconclusion that affect and experience, as well as emotion
and cognition, are more than just co-dependent, they aremutually constitutive. In short, affect is what allows us
to sense, feel, and experience our relationship with theworld around us. By the same token it is also what allows
the world around us to experience our being within it.
Hence, rather than being merely the capacity to affectand be affected, it is more accurate to say that affectis also the experience of affecting and being affected.

4 西欧近代的な人間観の裏面 (seiou kindai-teki na ningen-kan nouramen)5 外部を受け入れる (gaibu wo uke-ireru)
6 全体として「多」なる存在である (zentai to shite “ta” naru sonzai
de aru)7 Of course, there are other pieces of this picture that havenot been included here for reasons of time and word-count.
For those who wish to know more about anthropologicalcontributions to affect theory, please see DeAntoni (2019)
for a concise but authoritative guide.

Conclusion: Affect as the Experiential
Aspect of Relationality

Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy Vol. 15

This more comprehensive theory of affect requires adefinition which succinctly encapsulates all the aspects
laid out above. I contend that considering affect to be no
more or less than the experiential aspect of relationality
fulfils such a role.
If we return to the mosh pits of Sapporo Punk (asan anthropologist, I feel compelled to return things to‘the field’), and we consider affect to be at work as
the holistic experience of becoming-relations, then theanswers to the questions posed at the beginning of thispaper start to become clear. All the attendees at the
livehouse were members of the city’s punk community,
and all had made a conscious decision – and, indeed,paid a modest entrance fee – to be there. All had been
waiting to see this particular band return to the stage
following the disruption of COVID-19, and all werefamiliar the band’s music, as well as the idiosyncrasies ofJapanese live music etiquette (see Namai 2022) and withthe other members of the audience. When thought about
in this way, the affective stimuli in-and-of-itself musthave been more-or-less the same for all in attendance,
so why did we experience them in such diverse ways?
Why were so few of us caught up in the collective
effervescence-like activities of the mosh pit?
If we consider affect to be both experiential andrelational, then it is something much more than somepre-personal, pre-social ‘intensities’ flowing around andthrough the crowd like electricity through a circuit (paceStewart 2007). It is the circuit. Or, more accurately,
it is both what connects the components of the circuit
and what allows them to sense that they are connected.
Sensing a connection that is familiar allows us to hookthat feeling onto cognitive and semiotic processes
through which we amplify those feelings through aform of multiplication-by-association and – in effect– supercharge them. As these ‘supercharged’ affects
flow out from us (through our movement, breathing,pupil dilation, words, gestures, and so on), they trigger
similar processes in others as we are ‘triggered’ in turn.
Proximity and physical touch allow for more directtransference of affect without interference from otherstimuli. Thus, it becomes easy to imagine how a person
may become ‘caught in a mosh,’8 so to speak.
What about those who were affected in a different
way? This is where it becomes possible to see
affect and cognition’s mutual constitution. For theseaudience members, their familiarity with what they
were experiencing triggered a different set of semiotic
associations that worked to change, rather than charge,
the affects as they encountered them. These changed
affects were experienced by others even as others
8 This term was first coined by the heavy metal band, Anthrax,
and is the title of a song from their 1987 album, Among the
Living.

17experienced them, making for an almost exponential setof sub-circuits constantly connecting, disconnecting,reconnecting, swapping and shifting parts and places,
amplifying, interfering, and feeding back into each other.
These sub-circuits form and shape the larger affective
flows within the space as much as they are shaped bythem. The experience of the event as it is individuallysensed, felt and processed by all those involved, issimultaneously dependent on, while also forming an
integral part of, the relationships between all the actors
involved.
But what of the issue of potentiality? The sensingof our relationships with the people around us, theperformers, the venue staff, the music, and even theperformance itself, is not something that only happensin the moment. It is an ongoing conversation of mind,
body, and autonomous physiology as we simultaneously
remember and anticipate those same relationships before,
during, and after the concrete experience-in-itself. As themusic blasts from the speakers we remember past times
we have heard that same pattern of chords, notes, andlyrics; we recall our interactions and conversations (orlack thereof) with the musicians; and we anticipate where
the music will take us and how it will make us feel, as
well as how it is making us feel in the here-and-now. We
also anticipate and imagine how we want to feel (Tsai
2007). In addition to the processes outlined above, we
also act in ways that we hope will actualize the affective
potential into the form we have anticipated, even though
the complexities of relations mean that the results arevery rarely realized exactly how we imagined.
By entering the mosh, I was not only caught up in
the ‘collective effervescence’ of the moment, I was
also deliberately choosing to react to and produce
affective flows that I anticipated would enhance both
my experience and my relationships. Essentially, I
knowingly placed myself in a position where there was ahigh probability that I would get ‘carried away.’ I did so,partly because I wished to experience that very sensation,
but also because I wished to show the musicians thedepth and strength of my relief that they were able toreturn to performing after such a prolonged period of
uncertainty. Upon noticing my close collaborator in
the mosh, I also had an opportunity to (re)forge myrelationship with him in a new fashion; one of shared
physical experience.
Thus, while the eventual results of my actions may
have rested on the outcomes of variables far too complex
and multiple for me to ever hope to calculate accurately,
I was still an active player in their actualization. Hence,
through affective stimuli we sense our relationships, thissense shapes and informs our reactions, which amplify,
interfere with, or change those affects, thus reshaping andreforming our relationships in ways which are sensed,
in turn, affectively, reacted to, and so on and so forth.

18

Such an ontological cycle necessarily involves processesof understanding and knowing without which we would
not be able to form the very relationships we are sensing.
A chicken-and-egg style search for which one is prioris thus, ultimately, fruitless (pace Massumi 2002), andserves only to further insist on affect’s separation from
relational reality, whereas I have shown affect to be an
integral and inseparable part of it.
Affect is then, in effect, our sense of relation with theworld around us. As such, it provides a bridge between
minds and bodies, self and other, selves and others,
relations and other relations, epistemology and ontology,
inside and outside, even the past and the future. It is notjust ‘good to think with,’ or even ‘good to feel with,’ itis a mutually constitutive component of how we think
and feel, and how we connect those two together. If weconsider relationships themselves to be simultaneously
formed by and productive of their components, thenaffect also forms an essential part of the processes, notonly of sense-making, but of world-making. In otherwords, without sensing that we are in a relationship,
there can be no relationship; without relationships, there
can be no existence. Affect is thus the phenomenon thatallows us to feel and to know that we are alive and in theworld, and are intimately involved in its constant (re)creation.

References
Bateson, G. (1936 [1958]). Naven: A Survey of the Problems
Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New
Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View (2nd ed.).
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
----- (1972 [2000]). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Benedict, R. F. (1934 [1959]). Patterns of Culture. Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin.
DeAntoni, A. (2019). Affect. In Callan, H. (Ed.). The
International Encyclopedia of Anthropology [online version].
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
DeAntoni, A. and Cook, E. E. (2019). Feeling (with) Japan:
Affective, Sensory and Material Entanglements in the
Field—Introduction. Asian Anthropology 18(3): 139–53.
De Antoni, A. and Dumouchel. (2017). The Practices of Feelingwith the World: Towards an Anthropology of Affect, theSenses and Materiality—Introduction. Japanese Review ofCultural Anthropology 18(1): 91–98.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980 [1987]). Massumi, B. (Tr.).
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Descola, P. (2005 [2013]). Lloyd, J. (Tr.). Beyond Nature andCulture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Durkheim, E. (1895 [1982]). Lukes, S. (Ed.), Halls, W. D. (Tr.).
The Rules of Sociological Method. New York, NY: The Free

A Sense of Relation: Defining ‘Affect’   James D. Letson  Press.
----- (1897 [1952]). Simpson, G. (Ed.), Spaulding, J. A. &Simpson, G. (Tr.). Suicide: A Study in Sociology. London,
UK: Routledge.
----- (1912 [1995]). Fields, K. E. (Ed., Tr.). The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Frank, A. J. & Wilson, E. A. (2020). A Silvan Tomkins
Handbook: Foundations for Affect Theory. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Fridlund, A. J. (1994). Human Facial Expression: An
Evolutionary View. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Giddens, A. (1976). New Rules of Sociological Method: A
Positive Critique of Interpretive Sociologies. London, UK:
Hutchinson.
Goffman, E. (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences
Centre.
Gross, N. (2006). Comment on Searle. Anthropological Theory,6(1): 45-56. DOI: 10.1177/1463499606061734
Haenfler, R. (2014). Subcultures: The Basics. Abingdon, UK:
Routledge.
Latour, B. (1991 [1993]) Porter, C. (Tr.). We Have Never Been
Modern. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Lazarus, R. S. and Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal, andCoping. New York, NY: Springer.
Letson, J. D. (2021). Stay Punk!! Stay Free!! Subcultural
Identity, Resistance and Covid-19 in Northern Japan. Punk
& Post Punk, 10(1), 119-140. DOI: 10.1386/punk_00056_1----- (2022). AS A PUNK DANGLING FROM THE
VERTICAL SOCIETY: Punk in Northern Japan as a ‘Cultureof Transgression’. In Donaghey, J. Kaltefleiter, C. &Boisseau, W. (Eds.). In ‘Smash the System!’ Punk Anarchismas a Culture of Resistance, pp. 337-364. Bristol, UK: Active
Distribution Publishing.
----- (2023). The Elementary Forms of Punk Life: Reimagining“Collective Effervescence,” Post-COVID-19. [Masters
Thesis] Hokkaido University, 139 pages.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962 [1963]). Needham, R. (Tr.). Totemism.
Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Leys, R. (2011). The Turn to Affect: A Critique. Critical Inquiry,
37: 434-472. DOI: 10.1086/659353 .
----- (2017). The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Roleof Conscious Will in Voluntary Action. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 8(4): 529–566. DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X00044903
Lukes, S. (2007). Searle Versus Durkheim. In Tsohatzidis, S. L.
(Ed.). Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts: pp. 191-202.
New York, NY: Springer.
Lutz, C. (2017). What Matters. Cultural Anthropology, 32(2):181-191. DOI: 10.14506/ca32.2.02
Malkki, L. H. (2007). Tradition and Improvisation in
Ethnographic Field Research. In Cerwonka, A. and Malkki,
L. H. Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in
Ethnographic Fieldwork: pp. 162-187. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Martin, E. (2013). The Potentiality of Ethnography and theLimits of Affect Theory. Current Anthropology, 54(7): 149-

Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy Vol. 15

158. DOI: 10.1086/670388
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,
Sensation. Durham, MA: Duke University Press.
Mazzarella, W. (2009). Affect: What is it Good for? In Dube,
S. (Ed.) Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation,
Globalization: pp. 291-309. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical
Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Namai, T. (2022). ラ イ ブ ハ ウ ス の 人 類 学： 音 楽 を 介 し て「 生 きら れ る 場 」 を 築 く こ と (Raibuhausu no jinrui-gaku: ongaku
wo kai shite ‘ikirareru ba’ wo kidzuku koto – Anthropology
of Livehouses: Constructing a ‘Place for Living’ throughMusic). Kyoto: Kōyō Shobō.
Navaro, Y. (2017). Diversifying Affect. Cultural Anthropology,
32(2): 209-214. DOI: 10.14506/ca32.2.05
Nishii, R. & Yanai, T. (2020). はじめに：アフェクトゥス（情動）的世界への招待 (Hajime ni: Afekutusu [jōdō]-teki sekai he noshōtai – Introduction: Invitation to an Affectus (Affective)
World). In Nishii, R. & Yanai, T. (Eds.). ア フ ェ ク ト ゥ ス：
生 の 外 側 に 触 れ る (Afekutusu: Sei no soto-gawa ni fureru– Affectus: Touching the Outside of Life). Kyoto: Kyoto
University Press.
Overell, R. (2014). Affective Intensities in Extreme Music
Scenes: Cases from Australia and Japan. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Riches, G. (2011). Embracing the Chaos: Mosh Pits, Extreme
Metal Music and Liminality. Journal for Cultural Research,
15(3): 315-332. DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2011.594588
Searle, J. R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. New
York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Skoggard, I. & Waterston, A. (2015). Introduction: Towards
an Anthropology of Affect and Evocative Ethnography.
Anthropology of Consciousness, 26(2), 109-120. DOI:
10.1111/anoc.12041
Spinoza, B. (1677 [2000]). Elwes, R. H. M. (Tr.). The Ethics.
Part IV: Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions.
Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press[ebook].
Strathern, M. (1995). The Relation: Issues in Complexity and
Scale. Cambridge, UK: Prickly Pear Press.
----- (2020). Relations: An Anthropological Account. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures: Music, Media and
Subcultural Capital. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Tsai, J. L. (2007). Ideal Affect: Cultural Causes and Behavioral
Consequences. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(3),242-259. DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-6916.2007.00043.x
Tomkins, S. (1962). Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. Volume I:
The Positive Affects. New York, NY: Springer.
----- (1963). Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. Volume II: The
Negative Affects. New York, NY: Springer.
----- (1991). Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. Volume III: The
Negative Affects – Anger and Fear. New York, NY: Springer.
----- (1992). Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. Volume IV:
Cognition, Duplication and Transformation of Information.
New York, NY: Springer.
Turino, T. (2008). Music as Social Life: The Politics ofParticipation. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

19

Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science
Understanding. London, UK: Sage.
Yanai, T. (2020). スピノザと「植物人類学」：アフェクトゥス概念 の 人 類 学 的 一 展 開 (supinoza to “shokubutsu-jinruigaku”:
afekutusu gainen no jinruigaku-teki ichi-tenkai – Spinoza
and the “Anthropology of Plant Life:” An Anthropological
Development of the Concept of Affectus). In Nishii, R. &Yanai, T. (Eds.). アフェクトゥス：生の外側に触れる (afekutusu:
sei no soto-gawa ni fureru – Affectus: Touching the Outsideof Life). Kyoto: Kyoto University Press.

Notes to Contributors
1. All submitted papers are subject to anonymous peer-review, and will be evaluated on the basis of their originality, quality of scholarship and contribution toadvancing the understanding of applied ethics and philosophy.
2. Papers should be at most 8,000 words, including references.
3. An abstract of 150-300 words and a list of up to 5 keywords should be included
at the beginning of the paper.
4. Papers can be submitted any time of the year by e-mail to jaep@let.hokudai.
ac.jp . If the authors wish their papers to be included in the next volume (to be
published in March 2025), however, they are advised to submit their papers by
September 15th 2024.
5. In-text references should be cited in standard author-date form: (Walzer 1977;
Kutz 2004), including specific page numbers after a direct quotation, (Walzer
1977, 23-6).
6. A complete alphabetical list of references cited should be included at the end of
the paper in the following style:
Cohen, G.A. (1989), ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, Ethics, 99 (4):906-44.
Kutz, C. (2004), ‘Chapter 14: Responsibility’, in J. Coleman and S. Shapiro(eds.), Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 548-87.
Walzer, M. (1977), Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical
Illustrations, New York: Basic Book.
7. Accepted papers will be published in both web-based electronic and print
formats..
8. The Editorial Board reserves the right to make a final decision on publication.