Introduction: Affinities as an Invitation to Think Differently

Why does a woman who discovers relatives she never knew she had, feel so moved when she recognises a family resemblance with them? What does it mean when a life is changed through the serendipity of a chance encounter? How is it possible to have an affinity with a place? What is happening when someone feels almost literally transported to another place or time by a chance encounter with a smell or a texture or a song? In each of these cases, some kind of potent connection is being made, and experienced viscerally and personally. In this book I want to suggest these kinds of connections are affinities, and to explore what they are and how they seem to matter so much. Affinities do matter, and I suggest that taking them seriously and exploring them opens up new and exciting possibilities for conceptualising living in the world.

I am going to argue that affinities are potent connections that rise up and matter. They are encounters where it is possible to identify a spark or a charge of connection that makes personal life charismatic, or enchants, or even toxifies it. Affinities are those connections that feel ‘kindred’ in some way, or make things kindred, whether or not they involve a family or kinship link as conventionally defined, and indeed we shall see that affinities can take shape between elements other than people too. Crucially, affinities are personal connections that have potency. They can be affinities of opposition, alterity or negativity, just as much as affinities of resemblance, empathy and closeness. They can involve ephemeral and ethereal yet somehow defining and elemental connections, and even epiphanal ones. They may feel of us, in ways that seem inscribed or seared into us and yet they also seem to live beyond us and can feel capricious, anarchic, other-worldly and even lyrical and poetic. Affinities involve fascination, wondering and puzzlement, often about their very potency and ineffability.

The potency of the connections is the point, and that is where I want the focus of the book to be. Let me make it clear straight away therefore that this is not a book about kinship systems, where ‘affines’ are formally conceptualised as a specific category or order of kin (usually seen as kin by marriage). Indeed it is not a book about kinship in that sense at all, although I am interested in connections that feel kindred in some way. Neither is it a book that uses affinity as a device to study people who are strongly attracted to certain things, or pleasures, or behaviours, or indeed to other people. Both of these examples involve seeing affinities as to do with the fixed points that they connect (people, kinsfolk, pleasures, behaviours, things), and make the assumption that it is these fixed points, and possible correlations or patterns in them, that are of interest. Such an approach might tell us that young men of a particular social class are strongly attracted to online gaming for example.

My approach to affinities, however, is to understand them as connective charges and energies that are of interest in themselves and not because of what they connect. It is the character and potency of the connections that I want to explore, more than the points that they put in relation. Central to my arguments about affinities is that they constitute animate or living connections, and hence I focus a great deal on concepts like flows, forces and energies. Always something is thought to be moving, flowing, seeking, encountering, making and even forcing connection. Affinities are essentially living, and they are lived through multidimensional encounters and sensations in personal life.

Given that affinities are lived, they are also, ironically perhaps, parochial. I use the term parochial here not in the pejorative sense that has come to characterise it in recent years as the petty or insubstantial, but in a stronger, active and experiential sense to mean the medium and means through which we encounter the world. My reasoning is that our activity of living is always done locally (locally to ourselves) through the medium, as it were, of our own personal ‘parish’. I had been thinking about parochialism and its connection with the concept of personal life in this way for some time, when I came across Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful interpretation of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Parish and the Universe’, in his introduction to Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. Following Kavanagh, Macfarlane suggests that the parochial is ‘not a perimeter but an aperture: a space through which the world [can] be seen’ (Macfarlane, 2011: xv, my emphasis). This idea of an aperture on the world echoes the argument I want to make that the parochial is not an insubstantial quality of existence, nor is it a fixed locale, but instead – and in keeping with the concept of personal life (Smart, 2007) – it is nexus, medium, mode and locus for our engagement with the world and, as such, it can sometimes channel potent connections, or affinities. It is how affinities can feel powerfully and simultaneously of us, and beyond us.

Perceiving and apprehending affinities in these kinds of ways means we need to allow ourselves to think differently and openly, even or especially when we feel confined by conventional disciplinary orientations. It is in this sense that I want to suggest that affinities, as I develop them in this book, constitute an invitation to think and theorise differently. They invite us to imagine connections, charges and energies that cannot be contained within, or done justice by, existing sociological modes of thought. They tantalise and beckon us to think more boldly, freely and poetically about how we understand living in the world.

The book is therefore written as an invitation, a beckoning, a suggestion of an orientation, rather than as a treatise or a framework. I do not ‘cover’ all possible ‘types’ of affinity (indeed I do not deal in ‘types’ of affinity at all). Instead, I take you on a journey through examples and illustrations of what affinities can involve, woven together with an alternating and cumulative argument about how we might understand their potencies. I want to encourage you to imagine and attune to affinities as potent connective charges and energies. I want to tantalise and beckon you to imagine and then reimagine affinities in your own fields, and in your own personal lives as well for that matter. In the pages that follow I show what happens when we shift our lenses and lexicons to be able to capture or attune to affinities that I argue come alive in sensations. I go on to suggest that understanding affinities means we need to be able to apprehend energies, forces, flows and charges which can take shape as ineffable kinship, or ecological connection, or the ‘socio-atmospherics’ of personal life. The three parts of the book – part 1, ‘Sensations of Living’; part 2, ‘Ineffable Kinship’; and part 3, ‘Ecologies and Socio-Atmospherics’ – correspond to these sets of ideas and they constitute layers in the cumulative argument. Thereafter, I conclude the book with a discussion of ‘Affinities in Time’, arguing that the allure and enigma of time is crucial in all this, but that we need to see beyond conventional linear understandings of temporality to be able to appreciate in what ways. In the conclusion I also return to consider the possible implications, for sociology in particular, of accepting the invitation of affinities to think differently.

To do all this I have adopted a somewhat unconventional approach to writing and compiling the book, which is inspired by ‘facet methodology’ – an approach developed by colleagues and myself at the University of Manchester (Mason, 2011). The main premise of facet methodology is that we can use ‘flashes of insight’ gained through an exploration of strategically and artistically chosen facets of a problem – rather than attempting (and usually failing) to describe and document all dimensions of the problem in its entirety. The argument is that these ‘artfully’ chosen facets can offer strongly resonant and evocative forms of understanding and insight.

What this means for the book is that I have structured each of the three main parts to allow me to present a carefully chosen range of facets, whilst embedding these in a cumulative argument about affinities. Each part of the book is structured in the same way, beginning with an introduction that asks why the concepts developed in that part might be useful. Each then takes the reader on a journey through a set of ‘facets’ – in part 1 these are ‘facets of sensation’; in part 2 they are ‘facets of ineffable kinship’; and in part 3 they are ‘facets of ecologies and socio-atmospherics’. The facets are drawn from a range of sources that I have chosen because they express or illustrate something important or resonant about the energies of affinity. These sources include the arts and literature, current affairs, broadcast radio, poetry, music, academic research, and various forms of creative and autobiographical writing. Each facet, in a sense, is a stand-alone piece, and some of them contain analysis and commentary to feed into the argument about affinities. And yet it is best for the facets to be read together and in sequence, because there are threads that link them,...