https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073917722214
Emotion Review
Vol. 11, No. 1 (January 2019) 3­–12
© The Author(s) 2017
ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/1754073917722214
journals.sagepub.com/home/er
Introduction
In what follows, we propose “affective arrangement” as a working
concept for the philosophical and interdisciplinary study of
affect and emotion. This concept—and the broader perspective
it engenders—can help theorists and researchers come to terms
with the ways in which affect is prompted, modulated, and specifically
formatted in sociomaterial settings.1 Among other
things, we hope to make a contribution to the recently emerging
interdisciplinary perspective on situated affectivity (Colombetti
& Krueger, 2015; Griffiths & Scarantino, 2009; Stephan,
Wilutzky, & Walter, 2014). More generally, the concept of an
affective arrangement can help to connect work in the field of
cultural affect studies with other recently productive areas of
scholarship on affective phenomena. In cultural theory, affect is
often not understood in terms of individual mental states, but
rather in terms of interactive dynamics between multiple actors
and actants in sociomaterial settings (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010;
Massumi, 2002; cf. Wetherell, 2012, for critical analysis). There
are many pretheoretical examples of presumed instances of
“transpersonal” affective dynamics—for instance, in infant–
caregiver interaction, in situations of engaged dialogue, in quarrels
or arguments, in crowd behavior such as protests or riots, or
in the immersive practices of interactive media. Yet, it is difficult
to grasp the precise modes of affective relatedness in a
given environment, the triggers and conduits, the situational
framings, and settings of these scenes of mutual affecting and
being affected. Likewise, the ontological import of proposals
describing such relational affect is often unclear. Is it individual
affective states that get embedded or even “extended” in addition
to their being experienced by individual subjects? Is a
stronger claim warranted, for example that individual affective
states and relational affect are co-constitutive and thus ontologically
on the same footing? Might one even hold that affective
relations are prior to and constitutive of the entities or “agencies”
related, as some posthumanist approaches seem to suggest
(see Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010)? The concept of an affective
arrangement will endow us with a framework to approach these
Affective Arrangements
Jan Slaby
Rainer Mühlhoff
Philipp Wüschner
Institute of Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Abstract
We introduce the working concept of “affective arrangement.” This concept is the centerpiece of a perspective on situated affectivity
that emphasizes relationality, dynamics, and performativity. Our proposal relates to work in cultural studies and continental
philosophy in the Spinoza–Deleuze lineage, yet it is equally geared to the terms of recent work in the philosophy of emotion. Our
aim is to devise a framework that can help flesh out how affectivity unfolds dynamically in a relational setting by which it is at
the same time modulated in recurring ways. With this orientation, this article contributes to the interdisciplinary study of situated
affectivity and to the theoretical and conceptual unification of distinct strands of research from several disciplines.
Keywords
affect, affective arrangement, relationality, situatedness
Author note: Our work on this article was part of the research activities of Subproject B05 of the Collaborative Research Center 1171 Affective Societies at Freie Universität
Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from 2015 to 2019. We have greatly benefitted from a number of critical readers of earlier drafts, among them Jule
Govrin, Philipp Haueis, Antje Kahl, Imke von Maur, Christian von Scheve, Jorinde Schulz, and Yasemin Ural. Likewise, we thank the audiences of several working meetings and
colloquium sessions in the Collaborative Research Center 1171 Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. We also thank three anonymous reviewers who engaged in-depth
with our material, providing many valuable hints for improving our article.
Corresponding author: Jan Slaby, Institute of Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, D-14195 Berlin, Germany. Email: slaby@zedat.fu-berlin.de
722214EMR0010.1177/1754073917722214Emotion ReviewSlaby et al. Affective Arrangements
research-article2017
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4  Emotion Review Vol. 11 No. 1
issues. It provides an angle to focus on the ways in which putatively
“transpersonal” affect unfolds in the sites and settings of
social life.
In our understanding, affective arrangements are heterogeneous
ensembles of diverse materials forming a local layout that
operates as a dynamic formation, comprising persons, things,
artifacts, spaces, discourses, behaviors, and expressions in a
characteristic mode of composition and dynamic relatedness.
Our approach facilitates microanalyses of affective relationality
as it furthers both an understanding of the entities that coalesce
locally to engender relational affect, and also the overall “feel,”
affective tonality or atmosphere that prevails in such a locale.
The proposed concept is an analytical tool—provisional and
open-textured yet sufficiently determinate—to help researchers
get a grip on complex inter- or intra-actional settings in which
affect looms large.
We set the stage by providing an overview relating relevant
ideas from cultural affect studies to recent developments in
interdisciplinary work on affect and emotion, especially to the
“situated affectivity” debate. We then characterize the gist of the
concept of affective arrangement in some detail and develop it
further by way of discussing the example of teamwork arrangements
in contemporary work cultures. In the remainder of the
article, we discuss further characteristics of affective arrangements
in a condensed way: their potential idiosyncrasy or
“crankyness,” their multi-track historicity, and various modes of
individual involvement. In closing, we provide a brief outlook
towards possibilities for putting the concept to work in empirical
research on affect and emotion.
To get our perspective articulated in the space of a single
article, we can focus only on the bare contours of approaches to
affect in cultural studies, in relation to some core ideas from the
situated affectivity literature. Inevitably, we will create a somewhat
straightened outlook, omitting detail, and bypassing some
contested issues. Our hope is that our working concept, once
articulated in a compact way, will provide a backdrop against
which controversial issues might subsequently be addressed.2
Setting the Stage: Affect, Emotion,
Situatedness
In this section, we briefly run through some recent strands of
work at the intersection of the philosophy of emotion and interdisciplinary
emotion research and relate these approaches to
work on affect in cultural studies. As our proposal draws on all
these perspectives while aspiring to inform and endow them in
turn, this part sets the stage for what is to come. In our subsequent
elaboration we give a prominent role to ideas from cultural
studies and continental philosophy, yet our working
concept will be generic and versatile enough to be adaptable to
different theoretical settings. The goal throughout is to develop
our points in a way accessible to emotion experts not familiar
with cultural affect theory.
An important point of contact between our proposal and the
existing literature lies with recent approaches that have put forward
situated, social-relational, enactive, embedded, or even
“extended” accounts of affectivity. The seminal article by the
philosophers Paul E. Griffiths andAndrea Scarantino “Emotions
in the Wild” (2009) has crystallized key aspects of this development—combining
evolutionary, ethological, and social psychological
considerations with naturalist philosophy of emotion.
Griffiths and Scarantino align emotion theory with work on situated
cognition, undertaking a move of dismounting from
assumptions of psychological internalism similar to what
authors such as Hutchins or Clark had previously done in the
field of cognition research (e.g., Clark, 1997; Hutchins, 1995).
In particular, they stress social relationality, skillful engagement
with the world, environmental scaffolding, and dynamic “coupling”
of emoting organism and environment, pointing to existing
work in psychology emphasizing such features (e.g., Frijda,
1986; Parkinson, 1995). We share the interdisciplinary spirit of
this article and of the debates it ignited; however we want to
expand the scope of these perspectives further by taking up
impulses from cultural studies and continental philosophy.
Another line of work with important resonances to our
approach is contemporary work at the intersection of phenomenology
and cognitive science, where there is a focus on the
enactive embeddedness of sense-making organisms in their
environment (Froese & Fuchs, 2012; Thompson, 2007;
Thompson & Stapleton, 2009) and likewise on embodied interaction
and corporeal “interaffectivity” (De Jaegher & Di Paolo,
2007; Fuchs & Koch, 2014). These lines of work have informed
efforts to radicalize the philosophical understanding of situated
affectivity into accounts of “extended emotions,” where the
token emotional state is said to constitutively involve parts of
the emoter’s environment (Krueger, 2014; Krueger & Szanto,
2016; Slaby, 2014). So far, however, little interaction has taken
place with this work and the likewise highly productive scholarship
on affect within cultural studies (partial exceptions are
Colombetti & Krueger, 2015; Protevi, 2009; Slaby, 2016).
In order to get a sense of how these philosophical approaches
might be brought in resonance with work in cultural studies,
some clarification on the particular understanding of affect and
on affective relationality within cultural studies is in order (see
e.g., Clough & Halley, 2007; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010;
Massumi, 2002). Most of these approaches assume a version of
a dynamic, non-categorical, and relational understanding of
affect that aligns with the philosophical tradition of Spinoza,
although these links are often not developed in detail.3 In the
Spinozist process-ontological perspective, affect is construed as
dynamic, relational, and thus primarily “transpersonal”—as
opposed to something that goes on in the interior of an individual
subject. Affect—which Spinoza construes as: relations of
affecting and being affected in the immanence of the one “substance”—is
what unfolds between intra-acting “bodies” whose
potentialities and tendencies are thereby continuously modulated
in mutual interplay.4 On the most radical construal, this
means that affective relations are ontologically prior to individuated
actors and actants—they are, as Karen Barad puts it in a
different context, “relations without pre-existing relata” (Barad,
2007, p. 139).5 Accordingly, Barad’s term intra-action can be
used instead of “interaction” to mark this distinction linguistically
(other philosophers have adopted this way of speaking,
see, e.g., Rouse, 2002).
Slaby et al.  Affective Arrangements  5
With this orientation, the Spinoza-inspired perspective on
affect is not too far off from what gets theorized in philosophy
under the label of “enactivism,” where relational processes of
organism–environment coupling are taken to continuously
shape and reshape—“enact”—the boundaries between organism
and life-sustaining ambient. Dynamic processes of organism–environment
intra-action take precedence over individual
corporeal and mental states (see Colombetti & Thompson,
2008; Di Paolo, 2009; Thompson, 2007). Likewise, in this perspective,
processes of formation and development are prioritized
over their transient “products,” for example, affective
states or dispositions.6
This understanding of affect as dynamic transindividual processes
implies that affect is different from emotions as usually
understood. Yet, there is a place for emotions within this perspective,
namely as recurring sequences of affective intra-action
that have come to be culturally coded, that is, categorized, narrativized
(e.g., in terms of “paradigm scenarios”; see De Sousa,
1987) and subjected to normative regulation with regard to
communal “feeling rules” (see Hochschild, 1979). Thus, one
need not assume a sharp rift between affect and emotion. In
effect, proponents of cultural affect studies adopt what resembles
a developmental constructivist approach that takes relational
affect to be primary and emotion, including “subjects” of
emotion, to be derivative. Yet once emotional dispositions and
repertoires have consolidated, they play important roles in how
communal and individual affectivity plays out—a potent
approach is thus well-advised to have “affect” and “emotion”
among its central concepts.7
In light of this, the distinction between affect and emotion
can be treated as a pragmatic contrast between research perspectives
with different emphases. Where the focus is on emotion,
the interest lies with consolidated patterns of affective
relatedness viewed from the perspective of persons or collectives
and their articulated self-understanding (e.g., in terms of
established emotion concepts such as anger, shame, fear, or
sadness, and the discursive practices that draw on and further
stabilize these categories). Where the focus is on relational
affect, the research interest concerns dynamic situatedness and
processes of becoming: ontogenetic dynamics that are formative
of subjects and their emotional orientations, yet often
escape reflective capture by those involved, at least initially. It
is here where the present proposal makes its specific contribution:
The goal is to develop a working concept that can help
theorists and researchers grasp the unfolding and local modulation
of relational affect in a way that allows “zooming-in” to
local constellations of elements that give rise to specific relational
domains of affecting and being affected. The concept of
affective arrangement enables researchers to approach complex
orchestrated formations of affective intra-action beyond the
ambit of individual emotional awareness.8
Affective Arrangements: General
Characterization
By “affective arrangement” we mean a material-discursive formation
as part of which affect is patterned, channeled, and
modulated in recurrent and repeatable ways. Key to such
arrangements is that they bring multiple actors into a dynamic,
orchestrated conjunction, so that these actors’ mutual affecting
and being affected is the central dimension of the arrangement
from the start. Accordingly, the concept does neither pertain to
sociomaterial settings nor to affective relationality alone—but
to both in their mutually formative combination.
Affective arrangements are not sharply demarcated from
their surroundings. Yet often there is an acutely sensible difference
in affective intensity between a discernible inside and an
outside. Affective arrangements are performatively open-ended,
capable of expanding into their ambient by extending the range
of participant entities and agencies.9 On the face of it, though,
what gives affective arrangements their contours is thresholds
of intensity. There is more going on in terms of relations of
affecting and being affected in the region of the arrangement
than is beyond that region. If we may hint at a psychological
factor at this point already, affective arrangements often exert a
“pull,” a kind of active allure, potentially drawing individuals
into their ambit by offering them occasions for immersion
within a sphere of resonance and intensity.10 One might speak of
affective arrangements as affective affordances as they present
“prepared occasions” for getting affectively involved or
immersed in specific ways.
Given this broad characterization, it is not surprising when
we say that affective arrangements are nearly ubiquitous in
social life. A great number of sociomaterial constellations can
come to function as an affective arrangement and might thus be
analyzed in the way outlined here. An instructive class of
examples for our purposes are corporate work environments,
from the classical factory and ordinary offices to stock market
trading floors. Other examples can be found in everyday sites
of interaction such as public transportation, street corners,
commercial environments such as shopping malls, or sport stadiums,
and also in many other organizational settings such as in
school classrooms or seminars of higher education. Another
class of affective arrangements, which might be called “ritualistic,”
are found in the vicinity of ceremonial regimes such as
Christmas, Ramadan, election campaigns, birthdays parties or
funerals, and so on.
Beyond their many differences, analyzing these diverse
examples from the one conceptual perspective of “affective
arrangements” promises to shed light on the way affective interactions
between individuals are a defining component of what
these constellations actually are. A workplace, a public site, or a
ritualistic space are not just there and then get somehow filled
up with affective interactions between people. The concrete
nature of established affective dynamics—be they relatively
spontaneous (such as in public spaces), partially orchestrated
(such as in corporate offices), or passed on by traditions (such as
in rituals)—is instead an essential aspect of these arrangements.
The analytic perspective of affective arrangements envisions
heterogeneous ensembles of dynamically intra-acting elements
as a local operational space for affectivity, foregrounding a register
of intensity and relational dynamics.
We have chosen the term “arrangement” not least because it
is an apt English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s terms
6  Emotion Review Vol. 11 No. 1
agencement and agencement machinique (Deleuze & Guattari,
1972/1986, 1987; see also Buchanan, 2015; Nail, 2017).11 In
Deleuze and Guattari’s work, the concept of agencement does
not refer to an organically integrated unity of parts—as would
be suggested by the English term assemblage—but to a specifically
composed layout of heterogeneous elements that are
brought together according to a mode of composition that is not
homogenizing (see Nail, 2017, p. 22). While one can easily
think of compositions that flatten their parts into a seamless
whole, an agencement is a fragmentary, open-textured formation:
a concatenation of components that keep their distinctness
(even their “individuality”) no matter how densely they are
entangled. Still, in an affective arrangement there is a characteristic
mode (or multiple such modes) of relatedness that holds the
elements together: a specific tangle of relations of affecting and
being affected. In their dynamic interplay, the elements of the
arrangement sustain a local sphere of affective intensity and
thereby both trigger and structure characteristic affective relations
as well as agentive routines.12
This means that affective arrangements are not merely spatial
or material configurations or set-ups—not heaps of matter in
a place that then, in addition, gets somehow infused with affect.
Rather, affect—in the form of dynamic tangles of affective relations—is
the vital core of an affective arrangement, it is what
links all participant components and agents and what provisionally
demarcates the overall formation from its surroundings. An
affective arrangement is always in operation, always “on.” It is
the ongoing, “live” affective relations within the arrangement
that constitute zones of higher relative intensity compared to
what is outside. Thus, affect neither comes before nor after the
other elements but inheres in the immanence of the whole. One
might say, again with a nod to Deleuze and Guattari, that the
concept affective arrangement pertains primarily to the event of
a simultaneous affecting and being affected in a setting, yet part
of the point of the concept is to make salient a layout of contributory
elements that enable such events to unfold in the way
they do (see Nail, 2017).
It is key for our purposes that affective arrangements can be
approached from two prima facie distinct vantage points,
namely (a) that of an organizational set-up (a number of concrete
elements specifically arranged so as to approach a certain
functional architecture), and (b) that of its intensive processuality,
its ongoing affective dynamics, sometimes approaching a
kind of “flow”—played out either as an overall atmospheric
tonality or as characteristic patterns of affecting and being
affected, offering potential for immersive absorption and displaying
a drive towards transformative rearrangement of elements,
operations, and boundaries.13 Part of the point of our
approach is that these two perspectives are the two sides of the
same coin—they need to be approached together, on pain of losing
the point of the concept of “affective arrangement.” What
we have in mind is neither merely a concatenation of elements
arranged in line with an organizational blueprint, nor just a zone
of affective intensity, but an in each case unique and local combination
of both.
Example: Workplace Arrangements
For the purpose of further illustrating our working concept, we
now take a detailed look at the example of teamwork, especially
in the so-called “knowledge work” sector. Developed in
response to the influence of early cybernetics and group
dynamic research, teamwork is a management paradigm
designed to foster a-hierarchic and self-regulatory collaboration
in small groups of employees. Increasingly, teamwork is
facilitated by a full spectrum of technological devices such as
email, instant messaging, group ware, and real-time collaboration
tools. Teamwork is often connected to project-orientated
workflow; it aims to hold each individual accountable for contributing
to a project as a whole, instead of having each
employee pursue a separate task in a chain of specialized functional
roles (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2006, pp. 115–116). To
this end, teamwork operates by engaging the individuals not as
functional agents within the confines of a certain work station
but as full persons—and that is, as affective agents, be it in
direct or in remote communication. As Melissa Gregg puts it in
her 2011 ethnographic study of work cultures, there is an
increasing degree of “intimacy” in current white-collar work
relations, as work extends to involve an affective and psychological
register of one’s own social behavior while also
encroaching upon the private realm of homes and family life by
means of full-time connectivity. According to Gregg’s analysis:
[T]he social bonds developed between co-workers in the office are a
contributing factor in extending work hours. Loyalty to the team has the
effect of making extra work seem courteous and common sense . . . The
“team” is an accommodating signifier. It helps to express engagement
and commitment when loyalties lie not with the organization or even
necessarily the job, but with the close colleagues who are the main point
of daily interaction. (Gregg, 2011, p. 85)
This highlights a crucial point about affective arrangements:
They are local set-ups that work by targeting and harnessing
the domain of personal and affective relations between individuals.
Affective arrangements—such as teamwork settings
in corporate offices—both generate, stabilize, and exploit
affective relations; relational affect is what these constellations
“run on.”
We now take a closer look at how exactly the affective interplay
in a work team unfolds to produce such effects. With
respect to this question, the approach developed here does not
single out one particular explanatory mechanism of interaffectivity,
be it emotional contagion, entrainment, or rhythmic
attunement. All these mechanisms might be involved in the
concrete dynamics of a particular team—for instance, panic in
facing an unforeseen complication might spread in a team by
contagion, as panic cues are transmitted through the team’s
communication channels. For a new team member it might
require practice and take some time until they get entrained
with the group’s culture and affective style; and indeed, the
pace and timing of routines, interaction rituals, and the daily
flow of work, meetings, reports, small talk, socializing, etcet-
Slaby et al.  Affective Arrangements  7
era, might be a result of mutual rhythmic attunement that often
unfolds preconsciously. While all these mechanisms are likely
involved in the unfolding and stabilization of a teamwork
arrangement, we consider it a strength of the approach outlined
here that it allows covering a spectrum of phenomena of interor
intra-affectivity. Instead of settling on one single mechanism,
the aim is to make visible a relatively closed domain of
mutual co-constitution and stabilization of affective relationality—a
local set-up capable of recruiting multiple types of
affect-generating, affect-intensifying processes.
Along these lines, the Spinozean conception of affect as relations
of affecting and being affected allows us to emphasize one
salient qualitative phenomenon of affective intra-action that is
vital to teamwork: The mutual balancing of (asymmetric)
“affective roles,” filling differential “affective niches” in a team.
In many team formations, one or several individuals for instance
might be seen to adopt the role of “alpha players” or “leaders,”
while others seem to be framed into a role of following and reassuring
others’ decisions and opinions. Some might be performing
as “go-to guys” for problem solving or hard decisions to
take; others might find themselves in the role of a “general
drudge,” always feeling responsible, always being available
online, but never being approached as leading expert. Some
might be framed into the role of an “organizational talent” or of
an easy scapegoat, some might seem quick-tempered and attention-seeking,
while others turn out as altruistic, or quickly feeling
guilty, or finding themselves framed into a mode of
self-sacrifice, displaying a sensibility for mitigating conflicts
and keeping team spirit up. To further complicate matters, all
this interferes with overarching regimes such as gender roles,
cultural habits, and common sense behavioral expectations. Yet
in all these examples, the perspective of affective arrangements
suggests that the contouring of these affective roles within the
interactions of a concrete team is the result of subtle forms of a
reciprocal affective interplay: who can speak more, concentrating
attention on himself?; who will be the leading figure in a
meeting?; who has a hard time to be listened to?; who is making
jokes, whose jokes are really laughed at?; who is rolling their
eyes or sighing on certain comments or certain topics, who is—
on the level of such subliminal affective resonances—able to
resonate with others so as to influence and control group decisions
and implicit norms?
The point of looking at such microdynamics from the perspective
of affective arrangements is to take the emergence of
(affective) roles and character traits not as a result of individual
psychology (such as it is in fact operationalized by modern
human resource management and psychology) or societal encoding
(such as, e.g., in deterministic theories of gender roles), but
as the dynamically stabilized product of a process of relational
coconstitution, which builds on individual traits, but not in a
deterministic way.14 Which role an individual plays is only in
part due to their individual affective disposition, to another part
it is a result of the relational framing and arrangement within the
context of the particular group. This mutual balancing effects a
nonsymmetric distribution of affective roles within a group,
which is usually not detrimental to the functioning of the team.
To the contrary, the coherence of a team results from a heterogeneous
but yet mutually codependent topology of affective niches,
filled by actors performing certain affective roles which are thus
always to some extent self-alienating and group dependent. This
is a point where Karen Barad’s conception of “intra-action,” in
the way we are applying it to the context of relational affecting
and being affected, is an apt term to highlight how within a
group—which is primarily a processual whole—different individuals
manifest secondarily as results of patterns of intra-action.
This perspective also allows for the same individual to assume
different affective roles in different affective arrangements.
Here, our approach is less geared towards an explanatory but
rather towards a critical purpose: It is less about explaining why
a certain individual is playing a certain affective role in a certain
team, and more about providing a way to conceive of the team
as a dynamic form of individuation, running between full determination
(e.g., by societal or managerial arrangements) and full
contingency (e.g., as a result of the random configuration). As a
long tradition of post-Marxist critique of knowledge work highlights,
teamwork is the default “plane of organization” in many
dominant management paradigms. It is actively and intentionally
arranged by a whole dispositif of techniques, from “team
building” workshops and “group retreats” to new communication
technology and specific architectural designs of contemporary
office spaces (see Berardi, 2009; Boltanski & Chiapello,
2006; Bröckling, 2016; Gregg, 2011). From our perspective,
these techniques of arranging and orchestrating professional
interactions at work are only half of what needs to be addressed
by an effective critique of capitalist production in the knowledge
work industry. For a structural and organizational set-up
only works when it is taken “live,” when it turns into an intensive
milieu of affective relatedness that unfolds to some extent
spontaneously and unpredictably—hic et nunc.
When dynamic affective patterns emerge and stabilize provisionally,
we might speak of them as the “plane of consistency”
of the affective arrangement, always going beyond what was
planned and orchestrated by measures such as team building. So
it is not that teamwork per se—in the abstract—is making for
the arrangement, rather, in each case it is the specific team, with
its in each case concrete affective bonds, interaction routines,
use of remote communications technology, and typical patterns
of affective reciprocity in a setting. These patterns are in part
stimulated, orchestrated, and arranged by the overarching formation
(the managerial set-up, by technological infrastructure,
i.e., “plane of organization”)—but at the same time they also
arrange themselves in processes of reciprocal balancing and
accommodation, in creative adaptation, and in lived spheres of
affective resonances and dissonances (Mühlhoff, 2015) within
the setting at hand (“plane of consistency”).
Accordingly, the affective dynamics involved in teamwork
are not a mere dimension of subjective experience or an epiphenomenon
of the actual collaboration, neither are they a product
of an “affective labor.” Much rather, they are a vital register
fueling work itself. In teamwork, affect is performative in the
sense that work is increasingly performed by affecting and
being affected—be it because the group dynamic unleashes
8  Emotion Review Vol. 11 No. 1
creativity, commitment, and a higher level of energy, or be it
because the group dynamic creates, for each individual, a specific
“affective niche” where he/she is addressed according to
their specific affective dispositions. At this, the affective
arrangement of a workplace comprises the full history of each
of its individuals—sedimented into individual dispositions and
repertoires—but also that of the team as a whole and of the various
architectural, organizational, and technical features that
contribute to the arrangement’s operations.
Further Characteristics: Crankyness,
Historicity, and Individual Involvement
In this section, we sketch several further relevant aspects of
affective arrangements in order to round out our exposition and
prevent misunderstandings. First, we discuss the potentially
“cranky” character of affective arrangements in order to counter
the tendency to assume too much in the way of orderly organization.
Second, we hint at the dimension of historicity to counter
the impression that our concept might refer predominantly to
the synchronic scaffolding of affect. Third, we approach the
issue of individual involvement and discuss the ambivalence
between an outward allure and a potentially draining, exploitative
“backside” of affective arrangements. In this context we
also take up the theme of individual affective dispositions.
Strange Compositions
Researchers approaching putative affective arrangements might
be inclined to focus on “purposes,” “intentions,” or “strategies”
that are presumably at work in—or stand behind—the constellation
at hand. Such an orientation, while potentially insightful,
risks molding affective arrangements in a too linearly rational
direction. This orientation should accordingly be counterbalanced,
which might be done by elaborating upon another central
feature of affective arrangements. In fact, as Deleuze and
Guattari have stressed repeatedly, their agencements machinique
are usually not smoothly functioning, literally “well-oiled”
machines, but potentially cranky, deranged, partly out-of-joints,
in one word: strange compositions (Deleuze & Guattari,
1972/1986, Chapter 9).15 They often are the result of tinkering,
deliria, pathological processes, historical drift, or accidental
encounters. This crankiness might be part of their affect-generating
potency, and it might also in part account for their robustness,
that is, a given affective arrangement’s capacity to absorb
or accommodate mishaps and accidents.16 For a mundane example,
think of a workplace that has found an awkward balance
between its coworkers (or coworkers and machinery, office
space, customers, etc.) that might be utterly elusive or even
“mad” to outsiders or novices, yet “works” well enough for
those on the inside.
In a related context, Ian Buchanan has pointed out that
Freud’s concept of a “Komplex” (as in “Oedipal complex” or
“castration complex”) is a terminological precursor of
Deleuze and Guattari’s term “agencement” (Buchanan, 2015,
p. 383). Conditions resembling Freudian “complexes” are
often played out as idiosyncratic “lived arrangements” that
might include fetishes, tics, or other extravagant components.
In working with the concept of an affective arrangement, theorists
and researchers should reckon with such local antics
and idiosyncrasies (see also Guattari, 1995). It is part of the
descriptive power and scholarly excitement of cultural affect
studies that it actively seeks out constellations in which affect
is “machinated” in unruly, surprising, sometimes manifestly
crazy ways—by arrangements whose characteristic might be
that they don’t quite work in previously intended ways
(Buchanan, 2015, p. 384). This imposes further limits on the
degree and reach of theoretical elaboration. It is mandatory
that affective arrangements be specified locally, grounded in
the observation of concrete affect-intensive sites and domains.
Concepts from practice theory—for example, agency, practice,
performativity, normativity, field, habitus, etcetera—are
helpful to approach affective arrangements and chart their
salient characteristics.17 Yet, given this potential strangeness
of the compositions in question, theorists must reckon with
limitations in the potency of these concepts, as they might
incline one to expect more in the way of structure, meaning,
strategy, or rationality than is actually there. While useful,
these concepts should be employed with caution to prevent
local specificities and antics from being blocked from view.18
Multi-track Historicity
This potential “messiness” helps direct attention to another
important dimension of affective arrangements: their multitrack
historicity. Affective arrangements are usually not formed ad
hoc, but they emerge out of multiple formative trajectories, for
example, histories of fine-tuning, of combining and recombining
of components, of accommodation to various forms of
resistance or failure, histories of reform, of expansion, of transformation,
but also sheer historical accident. The components of
an arrangement follow their own developmental trajectories—
including the historical developments of various registers of
forms, modes of expression, regimes of signification, or artistic
genres—but the arrangement itself has likewise a history, or
rather: multiple strands of becoming.19 Accordingly, affective
arrangements might be cautiously considered as “conservation
devices” in which histories of interaction and of collective
habituation have become sedimented, so that the ongoing affectedness
that transpires within the arrangement is a differential
reenactment of past processes.
This multi-track historicity obviously includes the (in itself
multidimensional) habituation of the participating individuals
according to the affective requirements and possibilities of an
established arrangement. For example, theater-goers or football
fans but also consumers have to deal with various requirements
to express and enact affectivity in line with the demands and
local specificities of the affective arrangements they enter into.
We are highlighting the historicity here also because the
initial design of our proposal might suggest a prioritizing of
the synchronic orientation, as the focus is on what unfolds
presently, in “live” scenes of affective relationality. But while
Slaby et al.  Affective Arrangements  9
it is true that an affective arrangement is impossible without
ongoing processes of affecting and being affected, this does
not preclude but rather entails a complex temporality. The
momentary unfolding of a scene of relational affect is a process
of becoming, that is, a temporal sequence in which past,
present, and future are complexly entwined. Accordingly, even
the study of present affective dynamics within an arrangement
is inevitably also a “bringing to live” of a sedimented past, as
this ongoing formative history is differentially reactivated in
the scene at hand.20
At some remove from this focus on the liveness of an affective
arrangement, the constellations in question might also be
broken up into their elements for purposes of analysis. In this
perspective, it makes sense to focus selectively on the different
formative histories of various contributing elements of an
arrangement. For example, one might study the history of a certain
style of architecture in order to better understand how
exactly it is implicated in present-day affective dynamics in a
specific urban setting.
Individual Involvement and Affective
Dispositions
The point about the multi-track historicity raises the issue of
individual involvement. How exactly, and by virtue of what
characteristics and abilities do individuals become (and remain)
“part of” affective arrangements? In a significant number of
cases, affective arrangements lure individuals into their positions
by providing opportunities for attachment. For example:
It feels good to be a spectator at a play or a football game, sitting
in an audience can have a mesmerizing effect that captures
attention and freezes one temporarily in one’s place, immersive
experiences such as in gaming or in the use of social media are
often inherently pleasurable. In a teamwork arrangement, there
is often an obvious element of pleasurable attachment or sheer
fun on the surface, while the involvement has a backside where
pressure is exerted or work-related processes get intensified to
the point of exhaustion. Accordingly, the outward attraction of
affective arrangements must not be confused with structural
transparency. Beyond the superficial allure that draws individuals
(in selective ways) into the arrangement, an affective
arrangement’s overall organization and strategy is usually more
complex and might remain largely opaque to those in its sway.
Relatedly, one must not underestimate the complexity and the
individual idiosyncrasies that attachments within affective
arrangements might encompass. Individuals attach in all sorts
of ways, including ways that seem to bring more pain than
pleasure. Berlant’s work on “cruel optimism” presents instances
of identity-constituting attachments to arrangements whose
operations can over time be quite detrimental to the well-being
or flourishing of the individuals that engage in them, even
given substantial reflexive insight into these matters (see
Berlant, 2012).
Furthermore, of systematic importance is the fact that individuals
enter into arrangements with their own specific affective
dispositions, that is, with their individual capacity to affect and
be affected in concrete ways. In line with the relational understanding
of affect, we understand these affective dispositions as
the sedimented remainders of a person’s prior history of beingin-relation
(see Mühlhoff, 2015). Accordingly, these dispositions
will likely share central characteristics with interpersonal
affective arrangements, that is, their partly accidental, idiosyncratic
(and thus not entirely predictable) character.21
Despite this potential uniqueness, an individual repertoire of
affective relatability must be at least minimally compatible with
a social domain’s affective arrangements for the individual to be
able to figure in the arrangement in adequate ways. In cases of
gross discordance or misfit, an agent is either incapable of any
affective involvement whatsoever—thereby, in some cases, putting
the arrangement itself on the brink of breakdown—or will
react with feelings of dissonance and displeasure upon coming
close to the constellation in question.
Relatedly, it can frequently be observed that individuals
develop their own “working arrangements” in order to better
cope with the demands of socially prevalent affective arrangements
(see Buchanan, 2015, p. 383). This adds a more active
component to the picture, as individuals indeed “arrange” their
immediate surroundings intentionally in response to an affective
arrangement already in place. For example, if a workplace
has a harsh culture of pressuring, measuring, and evaluating
employees and publicly shaming those that perform poorly,
individuals might cultivate their own protective arrangement in
order to still be able to thrive in that environment—for example,
by setting up their office or cubicle space in accommodating
ways or by seeking the company of friendly colleagues
during breaks. Families are another case in point, just think of
kids’ or adolescents’ many ways of navigating around parental
demands. These individual “working arrangements” slot into
the overall affective arrangements in specific ways (cf. Ahmed,
2006, pp. 10–11, on affective place-making).22 This points to a
nested structure of interlocking arrangements, from individual
dispositions and coping patterns via various micro- and mesoscale
assemblages all the way up to larger cultural formations
and even entire affective or emotional cultures at large. Though
nested, these interrelations will rarely be linear, rational, and
predictable, but rather specific, varied, and subject to frequent
change.
Outlook
Our exposition of the concept “affective arrangement” has
implicitly combined two distinct methodological orientations.
Taken in its full complexity, “affective arrangement” is a philosophical
concept that aims at bringing out the unique constellation
of a particular affect-intensive site of social life. It drives
toward disclosing the operative essentials of a given domain in
terms of local “machinations” of relational affect. In this, the
concept works somewhat like a diagnostic category in an
endeavor that resembles personalized medicine—albeit not for
afflicted individuals but for local segments of public life. The
methodology associated with this employment of the concept is
a qualitative, interpretive, and also a constructive procedure at
10  Emotion Review Vol. 11 No. 1
some remove from empirical investigation of social domains.
Philosophy and cultural studies, in this emphatic sense, are not
“underlaborers” assisting other, allegedly more empirical undertakings,
but activities sui generis in pursuit of disclosing and
articulating reality.23
On the other hand, much in the foregoing has pointed to
aspects of potential empirical research methodologies. For
instance, social scientists, ethnographers, or researchers of
media who approach a social domain might use “affective
arrangement” as an explorative concept that guides their charting
of the material layout and functional design of social spaces,
domains, or media platforms, focusing on those elements and
their structured interplay that are presumably instrumental to
the reliable production and/or continued circulation of affect.
For example, the ethnographic study of ritual might map out
elements of the material propping and staging instrumental to
the unfolding of affect during the ritualistic performances. In the
sociology of organizations, the design of offices and workplaces
might be approached with an eye to those factors and arrangements
which likely play a role in realizing the predominant
forms of affective interactions or affective atmospheres in these
settings. Even the study of individual experience by means of
qualitative interviews can make use of the concept, as interviewees
might be asked about salient elements of spatial settings
and local arrangements and about these items’ presumed
roles in generating moods or atmospheres.24
What all these empirical endeavors have in common is that
they do not have to assume the full notion of an “affective
arrangement,” with all its contributing factors in play, but might
highlight selected dimensions, or focus on different elements of
an arrangement sequentially during the research process.
Accordingly, reckoning with an affective arrangement within
empirical research can take the form of an orientating blueprint
which might be coarse-grained and selective initially, with
details being filled in as new data emerge. The research process
can go back and forth between provisional arrangement sketches
and their correction and elaboration in the light of new material.
The best case scenario for the interdisciplinary study of
affect is that the concept of an affective arrangement keeps these
two distinct methodological tracks in resonance with one
another. Just as “plane of organization” and “plane of consistency”
cannot be torn apart, despite presenting different analytical
angles on a given arrangement, we suggest that conceptual
and empirical work be closely aligned. Theoretical elucidation
of complex affective arrangements will be more potent when it
stays informed by empirical research of the presumed arrangements
and their various components and modes of composition.
Empirical work, in turn, will be less prone to reductionism or
simplification when it keeps reckoning with complex and oftentimes
unique constellations that may exceed whatever can be
established by empirical methods—and sometimes also that
which “makes sense” in conventional ways. With “affective
arrangement” we have a complex working concept that has a
foot each within the qualitative and the quantitative, without
being split up artificially. We hope that it will be put to use productively
in future research on affect and emotion.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
 1	 This endeavor has been motivated by our work, as philosophers, in
an interdisciplinary project on affect that combines social sciences,
anthropology, and cultural studies (www.sfb-affective-societies.de).
We have sensed the need for working concepts that can bridge the theoretical
(phenomenological, hermeneutic) study of human affect and
emotion with the empirical investigation of affective phenomena. The
idea is to have a conceptual terrain on which theoretical and empirical
perspectives can get entangled and be mutually informative, without
undue imposition in either direction.
  2	 We will provide hints to relevant literature in many fields that touch on
our concerns, yet it has to be noted that we can only present a relatively
narrow selection of what has become a massively productive and wideranging
area of scholarship and research—no longer can a single article
cover all the ground that is relevant to the ideas presented here.
  3	 This philosophical background is of course highly complex and multifaceted,
and notably thoroughly metaphysical as it includes the choice
of a process-ontological instead of a substance-ontological framework
(cf. Massumi, 2002). This has to be kept in mind when the impulse
arises to critique affect theory for some presumed oddities on the surface
level of its formulations. Leys (2011) is an example of how a
critique of the turn to affect can slide into a mostly futile rebuttal that
misconstrues what is at issue in the field. See Seyfert (2012) for a
concise explication of the theoretical core of affect studies. Blackman
(2012) has provided a detailed genealogical study of this line of
work, including discussion of its sometimes conflict-ridden relation
to more mainstream strands of emotion theory. Schaefer (2015) likewise
attempts a balanced theoretical and genealogical reconstruction.
Wetherell (2012) offers a rigorous elucidation and critical analysis of
affect studies from a social science perspective.
 4	 Russ Leo (2016) has provided a lucid reconstruction of Spinoza’s
treatment of the conceptual field of affect (affectus, affectiones,
affectio), especially by contrasting it with Descartes’ treatment of the
passions.
  5	 Barad’s quantum-physics-inspired slogan can seem exaggerated from
the viewpoint of analytical ontology. A weaker claim that suffices for
our purposes is that there are relations that do not supervene on intrinsic
properties of the entities related—non-supervenient relations, in
short (Esfeld, 2004; see also Ladyman, 2014, for an overview of key
approaches in the metaphysics of relations).
 6	 See Kwek (2014) for a reconstruction of Spinoza’s conception
of power as the capacity to affect and being affected (see Spinoza,
1677/1985). Kewk puts emphasis on the aspect of receptivity or sensitivity
(being affected), so that it becomes clear that the potentialities
of bodies—in the sense of power (potentia)—at issue always include
their agentive and their receptive capacities. See also Balibar (1997),
Gatens and Lloyd (1999), and especially the Deleuze branch in the
Spinoza reception, Deleuze (1988b, 1968/1990).
  7	 There are echoes here of work in the psychological, sociological, and
philosophical literature, for instance of the influential psychological
constructivist approach by Russell and Barrett (1999), which likewise
works with affect as a basic ingredient of cultural elaboration (albeit as
an individual-psychological, not a relational ingredient). In sociology,
symbolic interactionist approaches (e.g., Katz, 2001) stress the social
situatedness of emotions, while work in social psychology takes emotions
to be configurations of social relationships (Parkinson, Fischer,
& Manstead, 2005). See von Scheve (2016) for an encompassing discussion
of these and related constructivist approaches vis-à-vis cultural
affect studies.
Slaby et al.  Affective Arrangements  11
  8	 This does not preclude investigating emotions from this vantage point.
As mentioned before, it is reasonable to assume emotions to be consolidated
formations of relational affect that have come to be specifically
coded and narrativized. It is an interesting question whether
culturally prevalent emotion types might be analyzed as enabled and
enacted by affective arrangements. Jack Katz’s (2001, Chapter 1)
work on road rage might be read in this way, as might be several other
social constructivist or discourse analytic approaches to emotion (see,
e.g., Wetherell, 2012).
 9	 Our understanding of performativity is derived from Barad (2003,
2007). A central concept of Barad’s in this vicinity is “apparatus,” a
notion that is structurally similar to our concept of affective arrangement,
only with less focus on affect (instead, Barad foregrounds
agency as part of material-discursive practices; see also Rouse, 2002).
10	 Here, our perspective resonates with Randall Collins’s microsociological
analysis of “interactional ritual chains” and the “emotional
energy” presumably manifest in them (Collins, 2004). Collins tellingly
speaks of human actors as “seekers of emotional energy.” We
concur, only that we would prefer to speak of “affective” instead of
“emotional,” affective arrangements instead of interaction rituals, and
intra-action instead of interaction.
11	 Another related concept is Foucault’s “dispositif” (see Deleuze, 1988a).
12	 We deliberately include actions among what gets locally instigated
and modulated by an affective arrangement. We do not assume a sharp
rift between affect and agency, and advise against affect theoretical
proposals that sever these dimensions. Complicating matters, we also
do not harbor a humanistic understanding of agency (that would allow
only humans in the position of agent), but admit the possibility of
nonhuman actants. It would go too far to explain this in more detail.
As indicated, we draw on Barad’s (2007) work to back our points on
agency, performativity, apparatuses, and material-discursive practices.
13	 Deleuze and Guattari make a related point when they distinguish the
“plane of organization” from the “plane of consistency” in an agencement
(see Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
14	 Such a microsociological perspective on situated affect as a register
of social role formation is also formulated by Wetherell (2012, p.
79) with reference to the conversation analytic investigations of peer
behavior on schoolyards by Goodwin (2006).
15	 We cannot do justice here to the theoretical background of Deleuze
and Guattari’s concept of an agencement machinique and related
notions. Buchanan (2015) and Nail (2017) provide good overviews.
16	 That this is true of machines in general, if properly understood, is part
of the message of Simondon’s work on the ways of being of technical
objects. According to Simondon, an “open machine” which possesses
leeway for integrating novelty possesses a higher degree of technicity
than the closed system of a rigidly automated machine (see Simondon,
1958/1989).
17	 Valuable recent approaches to affect and emotion from a praxeological
perspective are Scheer (2012) with a focus on emotion and Wetherell
(2012) with a critical focus on affect. Wetherell’s work is less prone
to the worry voiced here as she integrates several ideas from cultural
affect studies into her account.
18	 In this, our approach jibes in part with actor–network theory (ANT).
We share the focus on the concrete aggregates of entities and factors
that make up lived reality (see Latour, 2005). An important difference
is that ANT remains comparatively neutral as to the concrete forms
of interactions and modes of association between the “actants” that
make up the networks under study, whereas the present proposal can
specify various modes of relatedness in terms of affectivity. Likewise,
the present account shares some aspects of its orientation with the field
of “assemblage theory” (DeLanda, 2006), but not its flatly aggregative
understanding of “assemblage” (see Buchanan, 2015, for critique of
DeLanda’s approach).
19	 Again, Simondon is an important source on this conception of historicity,
particularly his work on technical objects (Simondon, 1958/1989).
His distinction between elements, individuals, and ensembles can aid
in breaking down the different strands of becoming that come together
in an affective arrangement.
20	 Henri Bergson, on whom Deleuze and Guattari draw extensively, and
also Heidegger are important authors in this regard. See Slaby (2015)
for an interpretation of the entanglement of temporality and affectivity
in Heidegger.
21	 Wetherell (2012, especially Chapter 7), in her effort to deflate some
of the hype around cultural affect studies, has much to say about individually
sedimented relational repertoires of affect or affectability; her
view converges with ours in these relevant respects.
22	 See also de Certeau (1984) on more general reflections on the strategies
or tactics of appropriating social settings or domains of everyday
life for individual purposes.
23	 See Grossberg (1992, Chapter 1) for a valuable elaboration of the relevant
understanding of “articulation” as a methodology for cultural
studies.
24	 We make moderate use here of the concept of “atmosphere” in order
to speak of the forceful and holistically qualitative character of some
forms of locally arranged affect (see Anderson, 2009; Griffero, 2014).
We expect that on some, but not all occasions of affective arrangement,
the overall affective dynamics can be aptly described as
affective atmospheres. Of course, there is a vapid sense of the term
atmosphere in which nearly every spatial location would be beset by
atmospheres, so the concept requires further elaboration.
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