Abstract
Studies on affect and affective atmospheres have been a topic of increasing interest in marketing, particularly in the management of consumption and retail spaces where service providers attempt to orchestrate a prescribed, collective affective response in consumers. This paper draws on the work of Sara Ahmed and Margaret Wetherell to bring the subject back to the fore, providing a more fine-grained theorisation of how individuals land in such atmospheres. We articulate surfacing and sticking as key dimensions of landing, highlighting the heterogeneity of our landing, whereby affect is individually felt through bodily reactions due to how our personal affective history intersects with the socio-political context. Using a poetic affective attunement method, we capture intensely affective atmospheres, namely spirit-permeated religious settings in Brazil; demonstrating how landing results in different orientations or disorientations through which often elided emotional experiences come into view, privileging some subjects and objects whilst disadvantaging others.
Introduction
Affect is an equivocal word which has been used variously to cover everything from individual physical disturbances, bodily activities and emotional states to more general modes of influence, movement and change (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). Affect, as a driver of action, is often viewed as the ‘first window through which we encounter environments of consumption’ (Hill et al., 2014: 388). In line with the affective turn in the social sciences, we have seen a surge in interest in the study of affect in consumer research, most notably in managing the affective atmospheres of consumption spaces (Biehl-Missal and Saren, 2012; Hill, 2016; Hill et al., 2014; Hill et al., 2021; Cheetham et al., 2018; Higgins and Hamilton, 2019; Linnet, 2013; Steadman et al., 2020; Yakhlef, 2015). This has provided an extensive ontological and epistemological upheaval, allowing us to examine aspects of life that have hitherto been missed (Lorimer, 2005) and expanding our ways of sensing the world by taking into account non-representational and embodied perspectives (Canniford et al., 2018; Patterson and Larsen, 2019; Scott and Uncles, 2018; Stevens et al., 2019). Despite the plethora of work on affect theory and atmospheres, the way in which subjects land in affective atmospheres has yet to be fully theorised.
To date, much of the literature assumes that our arrival into a given atmosphere is immediate and automatic, we open a door and are instantly through the threshold. Recent research has problematised this by foregrounding the collective journey into and out of affective atmospheres, highlighting how the servicescape can prepare us affectively for an event (Steadman et al., 2020; Hill et al., 2021). But what about our unpreparedness? And those affective atmospheres that somehow derail us momentarily? To better understand the heterogeneity of landing, whereby atmospheres cannot always be carefully orchestrated by service providers, nor uniformly felt by consumers, our study focuses on two extreme cases of ‘being affected’ in highly affective atmospheres, namely spirit-permeated religious settings in Brazil. In unpacking the lived experience of the first and second authors, we use a poetic method (Canniford, 2012; Rojas Gaviria, 2016; Sherry and Schouten, 2002) to capture and communicate these intense atmospheres.
In our examination of landing in affective atmospheres, we adopt a more-than-representational (MTR) approach (Barron, 2019; Lorimer, 2005; Wetherell, 2012), as a means of freeing our analysis from the shackles of predominantly discursive representations of the phenomenon under study. In the shadow of non-representational theory, which has sought to better address the ‘more-than-human and more-than-textual, [of our] multisensual worlds’ (Lorimer, 2005: 83), MTR encourages us to weave the representational (discursive) and the non-representational (felt) in a less dichotomous and more holistic manner (Anderson and Tolia-Kelly, 2004). We argue that sociological perspectives (Wetherell, 2012; Ahmed, 2014a) are required to foreground the in-betweenness and intensities of affect and overcome the division between the discursive and the felt, the biological and the cultural. We therefore distance ourselves from psychological definitions of affect, which focus on a narrow and restricted set of basic emotions. This division only serves to reinforce a binary (gendered) logic between a pre-personal (or impersonal) masculinised affect and a feminised, personal emotion, thereby excluding the social from any analysis and ‘under-describ[ing] the work of emotions’ (Ahmed, 2014a: 230).
In theorising the process of our landing, we slow our arrival into affective atmospheres down, capturing the ‘impact of arrival’, and highlighting how it is, in fact, mediated and how individual subjects both affect and are affected by an atmosphere. Rather than a linear understanding of landing, we take a relational perspective to understand how the subject comes into relation with the atmosphere. To do so, we foreground our orientation (Ahmed, 2006) in landing in affective atmospheres; this orientation is not a fixed or definitive arrival, but a becoming. In this sense, our landing shapes us beyond merely impacting our moment of arrival. Examining the process of landing therefore problematises arrival into (and out of) affective atmospheres by shedding light on the invisible, personal, politicised and structural histories which orient or disorient subjects. For Ahmed (2014a), landing is the outcome of a process yet part of a continuous affective becoming whereby affect that circulates between subjects and objects ‘lands’ on individual or collective bodies. We expand on her theorising by shifting the focus to how subjects land in affective atmospheres for a more fine-grained understanding of how our orientation within an atmosphere reveals certain subject positionings which have long-lasting effects. Rather than context-less, we argue that landing is impregnated with our own (micro) personal affective biographies (Steadman et al., 2020) and mediated by a (macro) socio-political context (Ahmed, 2006; Biehl-Missal and Saren, 2012). Our contribution to the growing body of work on affect and atmospheres opens up new perspectives on the political locatedness of subjects in affective atmospheres, bringing to light overlooked subject positionings and trajectories which are temporal and context-specific and the power dynamics which underpin them.
Atmospheres which impress
The retail and service literature has long since realised the significance of atmospherics (Kotler, 1973); carefully crafted sounds, scents and visuals in customer environments can increase sales (Bitner, 1990; Yakhlef, 2015). Moving beyond external, physical atmospherics, Tombs and Kennedy (2003) argue that consumers’ behaviours and social contexts can act as environmental stimuli which help or hinder the enjoyment of the experience; the curation of servicescapes, then, may not always invoke a uniform and desired affective response on the part of consumers. Blanketed and prescriptive retail atmospherics delight some but may invoke undesired aversion and even disgust in others (Stevens et al., 2019). A single consumption environment can therefore engender ‘multiple pockets of atmosphere’ (Cheetham et al., 2018; Steadman et al., 2020: 16) so that consumers may not always get caught up within a shared (social) feeling. Our theorising of how we land in affective atmospheres therefore follows others (Arsel and Bean, 2013; Linnet, 2013; Steadman et al., 2020; Hill et al., 2021; Yakhlef, 2015) in tempering some of the earlier, more deterministic models of servicescapes.
Non-representational theory (NRT) (Thrift, 2008) has been instrumental in paving the way for less deterministic ways of capturing affective atmospheres. This has allowed consumer theorists to account for both the affective and sensual in human and non-human actors, forces and entities (Hill et al., 2014, 2021), capturing ‘unrepresentable phenomena’ (Hill, 2016: 157) such as immaterial forces (Patterson and Larsen, 2019; Canniford et al., 2018), agentic material objects (Epp and Price, 2010) and previously overlooked embodied practices (Molander & Hartmann, 2018; Scott and Uncles, 2018; Stevens et al., 2019). This body of work affords insight into how atmospheres ‘touch, invade and permeate people’s bodies’ (Biehl-Missal and Saren, 2012: 170), exploring how marketers can or cannot purify, prescribe and manage affective atmospheres (Hill, 2016).
Recent research has focused on the social processes of creating and managing atmospheres by examining consumer journeys in and out of these atmospheres (Steadman et al., 2020; Hill et al., 2021; Higgins and Hamilton, 2019). Hill et al. (2021) note how atmospheres are shared and can lead to emotional transformations through ‘entrainment’ and ‘collective effervescence’. As such, atmospheres can ‘intensify and climax in pleasurable outbursts of shared emotion and behaviour’ (3). However, they warn that consumer responses can be heterogenous, resulting in ‘misalignments’ if consumers are not adequately prepared or activated and that atmospheres can therefore ‘fail’. Moving beyond a top-down managerial perspective of orchestrated atmospheres and building on the journey-work of Steadman et al. (2020) and Hill et al. (2021), our study foregrounds the subject, protagonising the personal, intense, discursive, embodied and affective responses that can occur as subjects land in these atmospheres. Whilst this previous work has focused primarily on how dominant groups can collectively impose an atmosphere, we consider the outsiders which Hill et al. (2021) observe can shift or derail a collectively crafted atmosphere.
Previous work on affect by Massumi (1996) or Thrift (2004) has shown the significance of taking the ephemeral and non-representational seriously, yet, by focusing primarily on what is beyond words, they tend to ignore the ‘messiness’ of social life. This work is not fully able to theorise how affect shapes our lived experience; as work in sociology makes clear (Ahmed, 2014a, 2014b; Wetherell, 2012), we must also consider how affective representations mobilise and ground all our experiences. As noted above, the marketing literature (Biehl-Missal and Saren, 2012; Hill, 2016) on affective atmospheres has successfully bridged these two bodies of literature to provide visceral analyses of consumption spaces. We build on this work by focusing on how consumers land in affective atmospheres for a more nuanced understanding of how we engage with consumptionscapes through ‘roller-coasters of affect’ (Wetherell, 2012: 59). We argue that affect cannot be subjectless but rather is felt in the ‘dramatic’ and the ‘everyday’ of social analysis and as noted by Hill et al. (2014), it is important not to ignore the particularity of scenes and relations.
Wetherell’s (2012: 4) conceptualisation of affect as ‘embodied meaning-making’ is useful in that sense (in terms of feeling both sensation and emotion) is fused with sense (‘meaning making’). We therefore echo the work in human geography (Anderson et al., 2005; Anderson and Tolia-Kelly, 2004; Dewsbury et al., 2002; Lorimer, 2005) which calls for MTR rather than NRT, arguing that it better encompasses both unconscious flows and conscious presentations of studied phenomena. Both bodily and cognitive elements help us sense and make sense of affective atmospheres. MTR allows us to break free from a narrow and restrictive set of binary emotions which are either negative or positive, as well as categorical politics of identity (Lorimer, 2005). In focusing on the subject landing in affective atmospheres, we turn to Ahmed’s body of work (2004a, 2004b, 2006, 2014a, 2014b) for our own theorisation of what atmospheres ‘do’ to bodies and how they ‘affect’ subjects and objects. In considering how objects and subjects ‘impress upon us’, we elucidate the deeply personal and political locatedness of our landing in atmospheres.
On landing
Ahmed’s (2004a, 2004b, 2014a) contributions to the field of body-politics have been instrumental to understanding the power of affect. For Ahmed (2014a), emotions are not ‘in’ people but rather ‘shape’ people, therefore, by examining how affect materialises in a socio-political environment, creating surfaces and boundaries on objects of our fear, disgust, hate and in equal measure, love and devotion, we can understand moments of emotional impression. We draw on Ahmed’s body of work, focusing specifically on her concept of orientation to understand how subjects land in affective atmospheres. Our orientation (Ahmed, 2006) provides us with anchoring points, allowing us to carve out and find our way in the world. Which way subjects ‘turn’ or are oriented is therefore important as different subjects, objects and indeed, worlds come into view. It is only in moments of disorientation, which we will focus on in our findings, when we feel discomfort or are called into question that we are made aware of our orientation. This disorientation can therefore be both uncomfortable and enlightening as we are forced to ‘turn somewhere else’ which ‘might open up different horizons’ (Ahmed, 2006: 157). That is we become aware of what lies ‘behind’ the body and the ‘conditions of our arrival’ so that a momentary ‘dislodging’ of our world affords us reflexivity and an opportunity to begin again (159).
Orientation brings into view some of the hidden affective forces which drive our actions, many of which are eventually delimited by social action so that who can do, feel or desire what becomes regulated. Over time, as subjects, we become turned ‘toward’ certain objects and not others in this ‘affective economy’ (Ahmed, 2004a) whereby certain subject positions become materialised. The orientation taken as we land is the result of dynamic interactions. By focusing on landing, we shed light on the multiple relational elements of these (mediated) atmospheres. As we have examined, atmospheres are constantly under construction and emergent (Anderson, 2009; Hill, 2016; Hill et al., 2014; Thrift, 2004; Wetherell, 2012), therefore, the concept of landing in them is problematic, as, by virtue of participating in them, we necessarily become part of this emergence. As a result, it is impossible to account for all possible landings. However, by focusing on landing, we can draw attention to the contexts in which we land and how we participate in these atmospheres, that is, the different subject positions which can be taken and how atmospheres can be heterogeneously felt (Steadman et al., 2020).
To further understand landing, we expand on Ahmed’s (2014a) notions of surfacing and sticking as key dimensions of landing. Taken together, these two facets of landing demonstrate how the personal interweaves with the socio-political in concrete and particular ways. Surfacing is felt as an ‘intensification of an experience’ (Ahmed, 2014b: 99), often sensed as pain as our skin ‘becomes a border that feels’ (100). Through the surfacing of affect, our skin mediates our relationship between the inside and the outside, making us aware of our orientations and of our body, the surface comes to our attention. A skin surface does more than merely contain our emotions, it enables others to ‘impress upon us’ (Ahmed, 2004b: 29) so that the surface comes to have its own weight and sensibility as it comes into contact with other subjects and objects. It is through surfacing that bodies materialise and become aligned, so that we begin to comprehend how worlds are oriented toward some bodies and objects over others (Ahmed, 2006). Through surfacing we fix ‘an other’ to a subject or object (Ahmed, 2004b: 30), orienting ourselves toward – or away – from these bodies, and thus creating borders of distinction and judgements.
This fixity is due to sticking, resulting from the saturation and transference of affect which binds to some objects or subjects over others. Sticking is therefore the consequence of histories of contact between subjects and objects which Ahmed (2014a) shows can result in ‘figures of hate’, say, within discourses on migration, racism or terrorism. For example, Ahmed (2004b) sees racism as a particular form of intercorporeal encounter, whereby a racial other is perceived as threatening and particular histories are re-opened in the process. Stickiness therefore binds bodies and objects into social relationships, it twists us ‘into particular configurations’ (Wetherell, 2012: 156) and requires further investigation as to why certain emotions stick to some subjects and objects and not others and who is privileged and who is disadvantaged as a result.
As we land in affective atmospheres, we need to consider how our personal affective biography surfaces and how a socio-political context sticks to bodies. Whilst Ahmed aims to describe how affect circulates across large-scale cultural domains, in taking a MTR approach to weave the representational (discursive) and the non-representational (felt) through a poetic method, we analyse our own subject positionings as researchers. Focusing on individualised, intimate and self-reflexive moments of surfacing and sticking, we further consider the socio-cultural, political and historical contexts of how affective atmospheres are felt by recognising and reflecting on our situated knowledge. We show how our perceptions of our lived experience depend on our landing and that this landing is flexible (not homogenous) in materialising particular kinds of subject positionings (Ahmed, 2006).
Poetic affective attunement for getting into the Spirit[ual]
Our data emerges from an extended ethnographic study on spirit possession in Brazil. We explored a diversity of religious settings which rely upon the embodiment – and disembodiment – of spirits. As such, our research setting presents particularly intense affective atmospheres where our and other bodies, material objects (in the form of offerings), ritualistic music, and of course the spirits themselves, collide. Whether this possession is real or not is insignificant to this research, instead, we focus on how we affect and are affected by these atmospheres, paying particular attention to the way in which we land in said atmospheres.
Data were collected in São Paulo by the first and second authors from 2016 to 2019, during which period the second author was resident in Brazil. In our fieldwork, we took part in numerous religious services and rituals across various spirit-centred faiths, namely homegrown neo-Pentecostal and Afro-Brazilian religions, taking on the role of religious consumers for first-hand, embodied experiences. We compiled rich fieldnotes, videos and photographs and turned to poetry as a means of compressing data, crafting ‘metaphoric generalisability’ (Furman et al., 2006: 334) and versifying our disorientations upon landing in these affective atmospheres. Although we also interviewed local consumers and this necessarily informs our analysis, their narratives are not directly captured in our poetic endeavours. Rather than transcribing other voices (Canniford, 2012) we ‘inscribed’ our landing in these turbulent atmospheres. It is therefore worth noting that whilst there are emic differences between these competing faiths (Chestnut, 2003) in that they do not operate on the same socio-economic playing field (Rodner and Preece, 2019), in focusing on our own affective experience, we came to both religions as ‘outsiders’, not ‘entrained’ in the workings of either’s atmosphere (Hill et al., 2021). Our data therefore acknowledges the different cultural and economic power dynamics of these religions; neo-Pentecostalism draws on its North American ancestry (Mariano, 2005) and is widely accepted among Brazilian society whilst Afro-diasporic faiths, such as Candomblé and Umbanda, herald their West African roots as a source of spiritual legitimacy and are still highly stigmatised (Almeida, 2004) but our analysis does not always draw out these distinctions. Due to our focus on our own, personal affective biographies (Steadman et al., 2020), we found both atmospheres turbulent, intense and eye-opening.
Given that affect combines the bodily and the cognitive, the non-representational and the representational in driving our action, we turn to poetic methods as a means of capturing the ‘visceral resonance’ of the consumptionscape (Sherry and Schouten, 2002: 218). Previous studies have shown the value of poetry as a way of foregrounding the researcher’s personal experience, capturing the emotive experience of the research process (Sherry and Schouten, 2002), acknowledging ‘emotional demands’ (Downey et al., 2007: 736), revealing embodied and emotional biases (Canniford, 2012) and also hidden vulnerabilities (Downey, 2019; Rojas Gaviria, 2021). Although this paper is not methodological in nature, we extend this body of work by introducing poetic affective attunement to not only ‘witness’ the field (Canniford, 2012) but also introspectively consider our own subject positioning within it.
Poetic methods allow for novel insights, both methodological and theoretical, in giving voice to more actants, allowing us to further conceptualise the forces which are not easily seen or heard (Canniford, 2012). In this way, poetry lends itself well to MTR perspectives, capturing the ‘affective-discursive’ of social action (Wetherell, 2012), where subject and object categories can be blurred. Following Canniford (2012), data were first coded and sorted before being brought into the poetry. Poetic translation then allowed us to ‘decentre the human’ and recognise the active role that the inanimate plays (396). We also use poetry as a researcher-reflexive tool, further demonstrating its ability to capture the lived, embodied experience, particularly in heightened emotive and affective moments and to provide therapeutic and cathartic relief (Schouten, 2009; Sherry, 2008). In capturing our emotional reverberations, poetry allowed us to evoke holistically what otherwise could go unnoticed and could not be articulated, bringing us closer to the data in unusual ways by sifting through data to sort out words, phrases, sentences from both interviews and our own notes and reframing them to consciously evoke emotion through literary devices such as rhythms, imagery, etc.
We combined a poetic witness approach (Canniford, 2012) with a methodological attention to affective attunement to better understand how we landed in affective atmospheres. Attunement, according to Ahmed (2014a), is a mood that is shared with others. However, as she notes, this is not exhaustive, as it is possible to be attuned to, or ‘in harmony’ with, some bodies and not others. Attunement therefore requires emotional labour, ‘you have to work to be attuned to those who are already “in the room”’ (Ahmed, 2014a: 224). In our use of the poetic method, we introduce ‘poetic affective attunement’ as a way to further reflect upon the poet-researcher’s subject positioning. As poetry is felt, it allowed us to represent our experience; moreover, this process is highly reflexive in connecting the researcher with the researched. In line with MTR, the performative role of what these textual representations do provided a further level of analysis as part of our sense-making in writing this paper.
Through poetic affective attunement we sought to pay attention to our bodies and our orientations to understand what was affecting us in the field and how we affected it. This allowed us to uncover the source of our feelings of disgust, shame or discomfort by critically reflecting on our own ‘disorientations’. Upon becoming disoriented, we also made emotional discoveries, tapping into feelings of closure, hope and catharsis. As such we foreground how our personal affective biographies and the socio-political context shaped our lived experience. Indeed, the poetic affective attunement process expands on Canniford’s (2012) methods in taking a confessional tone and allowing us insight into the drivers of our action, both conscious and unconscious. By adopting a ‘radical vulnerability’ (Saville, 2020) we acknowledge our many privileges (able, white, Western, educated, etc.). This puts us at a distance from many of the vulnerable consumers our research focuses on; we are not vulnerable consumers, however, our data evidences the vulnerabilities we experienced in these encounters.
In line with Saville (2020), through our poetic attunement we sought to suspend our egos and attempt to develop solidarities, recognising our biases, blind spots and weaknesses as researchers, crafting a set of three ‘good enough’, vulnerable poems (Lahman et al., 2019). Our poetic inquiry allowed us to iterate between the theory and our own experiences of landing, thus illustrating the different facets of landing, namely surfacing and sticking. Although all three poems are about landing and illustrate dimensions of both surfacing and sticking, for analytical purposes, we focus solely on the surfacing of affect in
Turbulence and crash landings
Surfacing of affect
Set against the backdrop of a neo-Pentecostal mega-church in Brazil,
…despite my careful planning and continued enthusiasm,
nothing could have prepared me for the storm that lay ahead,
where severing me out of your life appeared to be the key to your happiness.
Orchestrated or improvised on your part,
your timing was golden.
And as I head out to the Temple for the very first time,
I leave the house still feeling puzzled, saddened
by your sudden and irrevocable change of plans.
Future plans from which you had erased me completely.
Like Steadman et al. (2020) and Hill et al. (2021) we see how the affective journey precedes the arrival into the atmosphere, landing is more complex than simply entering an unfamiliar space. As this is the first visit, although the poet-researcher lacks the appropriate ‘training’ or ‘entrainment’ (i.e. familiarity with the beliefs and rituals) for a mega-church service, ‘nothing could have prepared [her] for the [emotional] storm’ of her broken marriage. What ‘lies behind’ in her personal affective biography is brought to the fore. Arriving at the Temple, a venue renowned for offering a transformative experience through the power of faith healing, providing solutions to all of life’s problems (Chestnut, 2003), the poet-researcher is already emotionally weighed down by the trauma of her own failed marriage. According to Ahmed (2014a: 4), emotions ‘shape the very surfaces of bodies’ through orientations towards and away from others. In this case we can see that the poet-researcher has already been ‘subjected to’ her partner’s reorientations away from their union.
Due to the poet-researcher’s own emotional vulnerabilities at the moment of her arrival into the affective atmosphere, her body becomes a surface that feels. Ahmed (2006: 3) argues that the ‘orientations we have toward others shape the contours of space by affective relations of proximity and distance between bodies’ so that our orientation influences how we relate to objects and others. In this case, the poet-researcher’s sense of disorientation becomes clear in the poem:
(my) Temple stands tall amidst the eyesore landscape that surrounds it.
And as I walk into its cavernous hall
I become conscious of the watchful eye of the hundreds
of ushers and usherettes around me,
Of the over-the-shoulder glances of the faithful.
Initially feeling small and observed and not fully inhabiting the space in which she finds herself, over the course of the poem the poet-researcher reorients herself. She moves from outsider to insider, aligning herself to the ‘collective effervescence’ (Hill et al., 2021) as the physical, social and phenomenological space that the Temple has to offer ‘strikes a chord’ with her, making her reorientation propitious:
I listen carefully to the words that fill this mammoth space,
In awe by the magnitude of it all,
I start soaking up, for my research and my soul, the message of the Pentecostal church.
Atmospherics play a central role in this consumption experience and are clearly curated as a form of mood management (Hill, 2016). This implies a motion and directedness toward and away from objects and others, orchestrated through lighting, music, charismatic preaching and collective praying. Indeed, by charging its congregants with affect, affective responses are institutionalised in order to generate strong emotional responses (Higgins and Hamilton, 2019; Hill et al., 2021). Making an impression on the poet-researcher’s surface, the Temple services reorient her toward something new:
Structureless, sermonless, tediously long,
The services here are like nothing I have seen before.
The charismatic Pastor is master of this universe –
Coaching us through a whirlwind of emotions.
Anger, pain, determination, forgiveness, renewal, gratitude, and of course love.
His booming voice and soothing whispers
Shepherd us through a truly cathartic experience.
His message of hope resonates within us all,
And I soon realise that I am no exception.
Energies exhausted – soul shattered
The promise of new a beginning envelops me, like morning dew on my skin.
Although the poem inscribes an individual experience, we can see how landing is relational, it is always the result of interaction (Hill et al., 2021). We experience the world not in ‘isolation’ but ‘in relation to others’, both tangibly and intangibly (Stevens et al., 2019: 817; Hill, 2016) as these others shape the surfaces of our bodies. This underscores the dynamism and emergent properties of atmospheres, our landing in them is thus necessarily heterogenous, depending on the orientations and subject positions taken. Furthermore, these intense feelings are located in the phenomenology within shared social life. What the poet-researcher shares with her spiritual ‘brothers and sisters’ is not memories of Pentecostal rituals or learnt behaviours (Hill et al., 2021) but shared emotions of need, heartbreak and hope. Landing is thus not a random, irrational, act of non-representational becoming (Thrift, 2008) but rather a relational, temporary-bound encounter that takes its meaning from how the affective biography connects (or does not) with the social organisation and patterning of the religious service.
Disorientations help question the ‘sensuous certainty’ (Ahmed, 2006: 84) of who we are and what we feel, making us feel like bodies out of place, made evident in the acute self-awareness of ‘Exorcism’. Disorientations afford us the opportunity of reflection. Being ‘knocked off course’, particularly in the site of trauma, anxiety or stress can be the ‘gift’ we need to make us realise that we are in fact ‘orientated towards something’ in the first place (Ahmed, 2006: 19). In the Pentecostal church, the poet-researcher’s pain surfaces:
Above all, it is the love therapy sessions that strike a chord with me,
Where the ‘help’ on offer is particularly close to the bone.
Renato – my favourite of Pastors – teaches us that
Begging and chronic carping tears couples apart,
Where the former shows weakness and a lack of self-love,
And the latter shows dissatisfaction and lack of respect.
Resonating deep within my heart,
I listen to the eulogy of my (soon departed) marriage.
My pain no different to that of my Pentecostal brethren,
Raw and real, I too need saving.
The initial disorientation triggers an emotional awakening and surfacing of until-then-muted vulnerabilities (Saville, 2020). Disorientation reveals the hidden attachments that pull us in given directions and through an eventual reorientation of the body, we are able to ‘attain objects that previously were not attainable’ (Ahmed, 2006: 100).
With every Temple visit,
My soul and my data file fill up in ferocious competition with each other,
My once extended fieldwork becomes my emotional awakening.
I embrace the Pentecostal message more than I could have ever imagined,
Its positive psychology and its touch of magic,
Have helped me as a person, more than a scholar.
Within a ‘contact zone’ of circulating affect between actants we can more fully understand how ‘others impress upon us and leave their impressions’ (Ahmed, 2014a: 194). These others include objects which also play a part in the poet-researcher’s affective reorientation. A spiritual exorcism illustrates how affect also circulates through objects which have agency:
As one last attempt to recover what is now lost,
I embrace the magic on offer at the Temple –
And contribute an item of your clothing to an after dark exorcism,
To cleanse (from a distance) those demons that dwell deep inside you.
In this exorcism, the husband’s shirt is related to in an attempt to move toward the ‘other’ and to regain proximity in the relationship. The object thus represents the other which can be ‘cleans[ed]’ by ‘the healing powers of’ Jesus via the Pastor:
Raising your shirt high above my head,
I join in the collective force emanating from the faithful.
Through the exorcism, the relationship surfaces once again, not only in the corporeality of the poet-researcher (Murphy et al., 2019; Scott and Uncles, 2018) but in the shirt as well. Rather than simple lines of causation and neat emotion categories (e.g. Molander & Hartmann, 2018) we see messy, shifting, flexible and over-determined figurations; embodied meaning-making in practice:
Did you feel it?
That spiritual agency – seeping into your bones.
When you finally put your darling shirt back on,
Will the healing of your frigid heart finally begin?
Whilst the poet-researcher goes through a series of emotional changes, these are embedded in affective interaction routines and rituals and take shape in relation to them as well as her ongoing personal identity and narrative project which pre-dates and continues after these changes (Steadman et al., 2020; Hill et al., 2021).
Surfacing is most clearly illustrated in the climax of the poem, where the intensification of the experience and the pain, hurt and anxiety is visualised, materialised and expelled:
Ignited by the roar of our Pastor,
Electrified by the wants and needs of the multitude,
I have learned how to channel negativity and expel it from within.
Losing myself in the thunderous prayers of those around me,
Frenzied by the energy that engulfs the hall,
I visualise my troubles, I visualise my pain.
The poem communicates the affect which circulates in the ‘roar’ of the Pastor, in his dramatic gestures and facial expressions, he is in control, sweeping the congregants up into the affect, impressing upon their surfaces. Whilst the poet-researcher was originally fearful and unreceptive, resulting in a ‘crash’ landing due to being orientated away from this unfamiliar context, we see how, through time, an embodied reorientation has taken place as she has found a sense of empowerment through moving ‘toward’ the congregation and a sociality of the affective atmosphere (Hill et al., 2021). Surfacing centres on the othering of some bodies over others (Ahmed, 2014a) as the affective distinctions of subjects create bodily surfaces. Here, we see a surfacing of collective bodies that become aligned to the church and its message of hope against ‘others’, such as the poet-researcher’s estranged husband, who should be ‘expelled’ out of one’s life. In this case, surfacing reorients the poet-researcher as individual outsider towards a ‘collective effervescence’ (Hill et al., 2021), whereby her emotions come into contact and intertwine with those of the congregation. This results in intensifying the experience as the accumulated affect weighs down or impresses on these subjects as a collective and provides an anchor with which the poet-researcher can move forwards.
Through ‘Exorcism’ we illustrate the role of surfacing in the orientation taken when landing. Our data demonstrates how action can reshape surfaces and reconstitute relations so that a crash landing can become a cathartic and empowering experience. The reason why landing is heterogenous is that affect is not only shaped by the atmospherics and by the bodies and objects in the space, but also by what we bring to the affective atmosphere ourselves. Here, the poet-researcher’s emotions surface as she inadvertently brings her failed marriage to the research setting, so that the affective atmosphere affects her due to how it intertwines with her personal biography. Her initial disorientation allows her to come to terms with her circumstances and start anew, made evident in the poem’s finale:
From the soles of my feet to the tips of my fingers,
I free my spirit, I start anew,
In the exorcism of my broken heart, I tell you once and for all to get out of my life,
‘SAI’
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Bodily manifestations of affect are intensely located in a nexus of relations and although performed primarily physically, these actions uncover a rhetoric of unfairness, loss and heartbreak which are more long-lasting and have been coming in and out of focus over months. The severity of the landing therefore depends on the orientation taken, the subject is not always in control but, through an interaction and negotiation process, can reorient and reshape their ongoing personal identity. In this case we see a transformation from the subject positioning of the victim to a more empowered identity, the poet-researcher finds collective consolation amongst other wounded consumers. Whereas Hill et al. (2021) found collective effervescence be a pleasurable experience, we show it is more complex, combining both pleasure and pain, despair and hope. Moreover, we see how landing in an affective atmosphere, although a seemingly mysterious process, has a pace, a chronology, a pattern of unfolding and a loose logic.
Sticking of affect
Our second affective atmosphere is an Afro-Brazilian religious sanctuary located in the outskirts of São Paulo. In separate poems,
The sanctuary is more than just a place of worship for followers of Afro-Brazilian religions; it is where the faithful congregate to perform spirit possession and spiritual cleansing rituals, the latter of which was the purpose of our visit. Afro-Brazilian places of worship, and Candomblé terreiros (temples) in particular, tend to be located in periphery of urban centres and attract a working-class demographic (Rodner and Preece, 2019). Although marginalised within the wider Brazilian society, for the faithful, the Sanctuary and its rituals symbolise a spiritual emancipation from the shackles of a colonial heritage. Our arrival at the Sanctuary is experienced as another ‘crash’ landing, as objects and subjects, including other people’s pasts and anticipated futures (Steadman et al., 2020) entangle with the poet-researchers’ own personal affective biographies in distinct socio-political contexts.
In an effort to prepare us for our arrival, and ‘activate’ our affective responses (Hill et al., 2021), regulars to the Sanctuary paint us a picture of what to expect in this utopian space, which promises to “wash away our woes:”
In this haven of greenery,
In this land of mysticism,
In this sacred space,
Nestled in a forgotten nook of a bustling city
…
I arrive at your sanctuary armed for battle,
my witchdoctor in tow, my hopes held high.
With bags full of ingredients to ‘wash away my woes’, to ‘strengthen my soul’,
to renew my ‘spirit’, to ‘delight my senses’, or so I am told.
Excerpt from ‘Urubu’
But find only the ‘aftermath of a busy weekend’:
Littered with the remnants of the weekend’s solicitations
For love, for lust
For health, for riches
Left for the Gods
Ingested by the vultures!
The putrid stench of rotting food
As I pick my way through stale rivulets of alcohol and urine
Excerpt from ‘Cemetery’
Indeed, it is the obvious absence of subjects and the remains they left behind that gives the lingering affect more potency, so that the material objects and the imagined invocations that once were create a palpably ‘heavy’ affective field:
Everywhere I step there is melted wax, ashes, residue of food, decrepit roses, spilt drink.
I cautiously tip toe over this now abandoned bedlam,
Trying hard, in vain, to not disturb the stale ambience.
But its aura presses heavily against me
…
the cackles and grunts of the possessed revellers somehow still echoing in my ears.
With every step I feel it crawling up my body, through my feet, across my spine, and into my head.
‘Urubu’
Under the cascading waters of the cachoeira
3
,
ahhhhh
clear and refreshing, I savour, in anticipation, its caressing virtues.
‘Urubu’
The sticking of affect, that is, making certain objects (and as we will see, animal subjects) the object of our disgust and fear, is a coping mechanism (Ahmed, 2014a). The unfamiliar has the potential to be dangerous and through sticking, we are able to materialise and compartmentalise our fear onto certain figures; if not, we risk becoming overwhelmed with emotion. Thanks to stickiness, emotions are capable of moving across to other bodies, creating a ripple effect of affect (Ahmed, 2004b: 120) so that through ‘sticky associations, emotions move sideways between signs, figures, objects as well as backward (through historicity)’. Over time, certain figures can become sticky with affect. Stickiness is not random, figures become sticky as certain histories are erased and others are upheld. However, that does not mean that these histories are always shared. Indeed, although both poet-researchers felt disoriented at the Sanctuary, they chose different figures to move away from, to ‘other’, in passing their ‘affective judgement’ (Ahmed, 2014a); for the first author it was the capuchin monkeys, whilst for the second author, it was the vultures that were cause for alarm.
In ‘Urubu’ we see the vultures become the object of the poet-researcher’s affective judgement, sending ‘shivers down [her] spine’ and getting stuck ‘under [her] skin’:
Tainting the blue sky with your blackness, there you are - Urubu
With your crocked neck, elongated wings, and insatiable scavenger appetite,
You overshadow our spiritual work.
Affect settles on the figure of the vulture, forming the hated objects as ‘fearsome’ (Ahmed, 2014a). Moreover, this affect spreads beyond the confines of the Sanctuary, both spatially and temporally (Steadman et al., 2020; Hill et al., 2021), the poet-researcher feels the vultures’ ‘presence’s viscosity stretching far beyond the boundaries of [the] space’. Therefore, the vultures are felt to have the power to ‘sully’ the second poet-researcher’s spiritual offering for her son
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, depicted here as a ‘hollow wax head [… which] embodies [her] child, in spirit [and] in matter’:
Beautiful yet disturbing, I find myself unable to let go
…
How can I expose my child’s agentic head to the harm that you – Urubu – could cause him?
Hovering over the skies above, you threaten to feed off his bounty,
to pick at his soul, to sully his being.
With their (menacing) gaze, the vultures surveil the poet-researcher’s uneasiness at the Sanctuary, making her feel out of place, vulnerable and exposed. The vultures are not inherently fearsome per se but are actively constructed as a repulsive threat by the poet-researcher by contrasting them with the innocence of her child (Ahmed, 2014a). As Ahmed (2014a) shows, anxiety is reframed as ominous potential that cannot be contained, allowing the poet-researcher to re-position herself so that she is no longer the one out of place, but rather this ‘other’ is the cause of her feelings of discomfort. As a result of this ‘sticking’, the poet-researcher is twisted into a particular configuration so that she can take on a normatively positive position through the subject position of the hero of the narrative whilst the vultures become villains. We see how affect charges certain subject/objects with meanings.
As well as viscerally embodied, affect is tightly bound with power relations. Here, we see how disgust construes an ‘aboveness’ and ‘belowness’ of bodies, objects and spaces (Ahmed, 2014a: 89), whereby affect intertwines with cultural circuits of value as some get categorised as disgusting and others not (Ahmed, 2004a). As Westernised subjects in this unfamiliar environment, what to locals may seem a source of cleanliness and rejuvenation, we interpret as filthy, highlighting our privileged position. Rather than simply having disgust or fear stick to a subject, we see a relational activity whereby by excluding ‘others’, (in the case of ‘Cemetery’, it is the monkeys that are the ‘fearsome figure’,) the poet-researcher is marking her difference by attempting to remove herself due to the intensity of the atmosphere and in the process, othering herself. In a reflexive process, she becomes the body out of place (Ahmed, 2014a) within the poem and object of disgust from the perspective of the monkeys:
What was that gringa doing?
She walked as though on egg shells,
Seemingly terrified to put a foot wrong!
Uncomfortable in her pristine - but unflattering - white clothing
She wasn’t from around here
Snob!
Blind to the magic of this land
Seeing only the repugnant
In the circle of life
Avoiding the underbelly of her own lifestyle!
‘Cemetery’
In this way, affective responses to atmospheres, such as fear or disgust, help re-establish distance between bodies, materialising a potential ‘apartness’ of bodies (Ahmed, 2014a: 63), for example through the way affective value sticks (is assigned) to certain figures. The ‘residue of failed aspirations’, that is, the hopes and dreams for a better future which the faithful are asking for in their rituals is experienced as ‘bone chilling’, ‘disquieting’ and even ‘haunting’. The impression of the misery experienced and recounted to us by the faithful (poverty, illness, etc.) during our data collection weighs on the poet-researchers and re-surfaces in the affective atmosphere of the Sanctuary before sticking to the figure of the monkeys/vultures. The personalisation of affect is therefore a product of relational histories made up of repeated interactions, narratives and habitual body routines, the social valuing and differentiation is turned into flesh through these histories as ‘sticky surfaces’. The stickiness binds the participating signs and bodies together into a social relationship, erasing other histories and re-asserting privileged positions. Borders between an imagined ‘us’ and ‘them’ are constructed when we feel the ‘other’ has gotten too close; the mere proximity of the other is ‘felt as nakedness or as an exposure on the skin surface’ (Ahmed, 2014a: 83), resulting in visceral reactions.
Our poetic renditions of the Sanctuary reveal how affect does not impress on us in uniform nor homogenous manner. Even when we experience a ‘shared feeling’, say, of disgust, evidencing a ‘shared leaning’, we do not necessarily experience this in exactly the same way due to different orientations and personal histories (Ahmed, 2014a). Both poet-researchers were disoriented in this unfamiliar environment but their bodies were impressed on in different ways, whilst the second poet-researcher feels protective of her own child’s wellbeing which threatens to be ‘sullied’ by the accumulated desolation the atmosphere points to, the first poet-researcher feels the weight of her socio-economic privilege as a body out of place. In both cases, emotion emerges from cultural, socio-political and personal exchanges which result in the sticking of affect. In the absence of human figures, the first poet-researcher’s affective judgement means turning away from the monkeys, for the second poet-researcher, it is the vultures. These figures therefore provide the poet-researchers with meaning and resonance to try and make sense of the Sanctuary and their place within it. In this way the Sanctuary is reformulated, not as a utopian space but rather as a marginalising space of exclusion. We are actively constructing and re-constructing the world, for ourselves and for each other. Landing is thus not set in stone, but rather, highly flexible and dependent on the socio-cultural context and its histories.
Of course, if the poet-researchers had visited the Sanctuary during the weekend, this experience may have been very different, demonstrating the significance of when we land for how we land and therefore the orientation we take in landing. It is likely, however, that even if we had witnessed the weekend celebrations themselves, as outsiders coming from privileged subject positions, the inherent structural socio-economic inequalities would mean that our affective responses would have necessarily been unpleasant and ‘entrainment’ alone would not have been sufficient (Hill et al., 2021). As the power structures are laid bare, there is a powerlessness (with regards to the vultures) and guilt (with regards to the monkeys) that sets in which conceals certain socio-political relations.
Discussion
Cleared for landing
In furthering the body of work on affect and affective atmospheres (Biehl-Missal and Saren, 2012; Cheetham et al., 2018; Hill et al., 2014; Molander & Hartmann, 2018; Steadman et al., 2020; Yakhlef, 2015) our theorising has focused on how subjects land in affective atmospheres. Moving beyond conceptualisations of how atmospheres can be managed and controlled by marketers, we have taken a researcher-centric perspective, building on existing marketing studies of embodiment (Scott and Uncles, 2018; Stevens et al., 2019) to understand how subjects and objects impress upon us in affective atmospheres. In line with Ahmed (2017: 10), we aim to ‘bring theory back to life’ by adopting a reflective, up-close-and-personal analytic approach, showing that theory does not need to be ‘abstracted from everyday life’ but can be close to the skin. In adopting sociological conceptions of affect, we foreground the subject, arguing that the intensity of our landing depends on our orientation at the time of our arrival, and how this is sensed through surfacing and sticking which account for wider histories of contact.
As Wetherell (2012: 126) argues, studies of affect without a subject are ‘so incredibly vague’. Surfacing and sticking thus provide us with analytical tools for understanding our orientations and how these can change throughout the journey into and out of affective atmospheres (Hill et al., 2021). Our theorisation of affect demonstrates that sensations and emotions do not land on subjects in a mysteriously homogenous way (Massumi, 1996; Thrift, 2004). Even Ahmed’s work, in focusing on waves of public feeling, often presents affect as something diffuse with no originating point. Instead, we show that subjects land in certain orientations in affective atmospheres and through embodied meaning-making, represent incoming information (the affective) in order to guide action. As such, landing is a relational activity which links the semiotic and the discursive. How we land affects our entire experience or affective journey, although, as our findings show, we can slowly reorient ourselves. Landing is therefore strongly site- and context-specific. To fully analyse landing, there is a need to understand the personal affective history of the individual (as Steadman et al., 2020 show) and how this history surfaces, as well as the socio-political contexts of the atmosphere and how this sticks. Ahmed does not fully account for how affect moves us as individuals and how the micro- of the personal affective biography comes into relation with the socio-political at a collective level.
Landing in affective atmospheres therefore presents a major methodological conundrum in that it requires the study of movement, forces and bodies which are sometimes below the threshold of representation. By taking a MTR approach (Lorimer, 2005), we attempted to think in an integrated way about the specificities of how the ‘body-brain-narrative-feeling-response-context-history’ are entangled (Wetherell, 2015: 75), bridging the affective and the discursive and arguing that it is impossible to completely escape representation as that is how we ‘make sense’ of the world. We argue that disembodied accounts are insufficient, there is a need to look at how interactions unfold as landing is inherently relational. To do so, we adopted poetic methods which have been shown to allow for multi-sensory accounts of affective atmospheres (Canniford, 2012). We introduce poetic affective attunement as a means of inscribing rather than just transcribing the field.
Poetic affective attunement
Poetic affective attunement allows for the unpacking of our corporeal, affective responses, orientations and judgements, so that we can critically reflect on our own personal affective biographies and therefore our own biases as researchers. As Ahmed (2006) shows, as subjects we reproduce the lines we follow and becoming a member of a community means following a direction. As researchers, it is therefore particularly important to question these directions. More than a mere ‘culture shock’ or a lack of shared religious belief, our landing captures complex personal histories as well as wider power discourses. In fact, during our data collection we observed and participated in much more ‘shocking’ experiences such as collective spirit possession which we found less unsettling than a comparatively calm and idyllic Sanctuary. Our choice of focus was therefore on those humbling experiences (Saville, 2020) which best illustrated how our bodies registered the affective intensities of the field, intensities that we were seemingly unprepared for. Hill et al. (2021) noted the problems outsiders face when they lack proper entrainment, poetic affective attunement allowed us to unpack why landing is heterogeneous and individually felt and how it can lead to collective effervescence as orientations align, but emphasises that this is certainly not always the case.
Our study thus raises methodological opportunities for consumer theorists to implement MTR in their experiencing and recording of the field under study, but also to consider how to train their bodies in capturing the affective, something which has hitherto been missing in our research methodology courses. We argue there is a need for further reflection of researchers’ own subject positionings in the field, so as to flesh out what researchers bring to atmospheres and how they affect – and are affected by – them. We follow Saville (2020) in calling for more ‘humble’ research(ers), acknowledging our powerlessness or failure in the field. Whilst, as she notes, vulnerability is usually perceived as a weakness, it can also be an asset, allowing us to be more open and empathetic researchers. Indeed, although much of the qualitative consumer research requires significant time in the field to build the relevant knowledge, we argue it is also necessary to acknowledge we are always, to a certain extent, ‘outsiders’ by the very fact that we are undertaking research. Acknowledging this can shed light on sources of discomfort which are usually suppressed in writing up data.
Whilst our poems do not explicitly transcribe our consumer data, for example the interviews we did, the data necessarily informed our experiences and accounts of these affective atmospheres. In a way, these interviews set the scene and started the circulation of affect, affecting our orientations in landing. As our findings illustrate, othering and our own ‘otherness’ is central to considerations of affect and emotion. Atmospheres in this sense are inherently political, certain subject/objects are considered ‘marginal’ whereas others are centred. In accounting for our landing in affective atmospheres, we were forced to come to terms with our political locatedness thus informing us as researchers and enlightening us about our participants. In taking our researcher-centric perspective, we seek to demonstrate that the personal is political and theoretical (Ahmed, 2017).
As Downey (2019) argues, if we are to understand vulnerable consumers or consumer vulnerabilities, we must firstly acknowledge our own. In recognising our own subject positionings and personal limitations, we paradoxically found ‘shared leanings’ (Ahmed, 2014a) with other participants in these religious spaces despite the distance which our many privileges imposed. Even without the same underlying beliefs, or entrainment (Hill et al., 2021), an analysis of our disorientations gave us insight into these vulnerable consumers’ own subjectivities and motives in turning to spiritual healing solutions, although of course, that only gave us a small glimpse into the enduring conditions of at times extreme and sustained vulnerability these consumers suffer. Rather than closing the door to uneasiness in the field, as researchers, we argue that we must investigate it. In bringing into view these often elided, unpleasant feelings we can start to unpack some wider implications for consumer research.
Implications for consumer research
Building on Steadman et al.’s (2020) and Hill et al.’s (2021) work, we show that rather than blankets of affect that envelop consumers uniformly, atmospheres should be understood as relational forces which combine with social, spatial, temporal and embodied processes. Due to our differing orientations, landing is much more emergent, ephemeral, nuanced and heterogenous than current theorisations account for and marketers need more flexible and reflexive understandings of how consumers land in affective atmospheres. In conceptualising landing, we show how our arrival, although seemingly instantaneous, is shaped by what comes before and in turn, shapes what comes after, and a focus on landing allows us to sense-make the experience through our subject positioning or orientation.
Furthermore, although felt at an individual level, landing is political – what can be pleasurable for some, can be deeply unpleasant for others. This has implications for understanding market exclusion as atmospheric borders of servicescapes go well beyond physical and temporal constraints (Hill et al., 2021). Higgins and Hamilton’s (2019) study of how religious consumption spaces can provide temporary, therapeutic escapes for consumers, for example, goes beyond a simple focus on atmospherics. However, their emphasis is still on how the servicescape shapes the consumer, whilst our research provides an alternative angle, taking a bottom-up approach by focusing on the consumer subject and how they internalise, reproduce and re-shape the servicescape in a continuous becoming. Whilst Higgins and Hamilton (2019) show that emotions are dynamic, fluctuating ‘between happiness and suffering’ (1250), we argue that by examining the surfacing and sticking of landing, a more nuanced understanding of how and why this fluctuation occurs emerges.
A consideration of landing therefore opens up new thinking about nebulous and sometimes unpleasant emotions. Whereas consumer research has tended to glorify extraordinary experiences, even those that inflict ‘negative’ experiences (such as pain in Scott et al., 2017) onto consumers (indeed, this very paper could be accused of doing the same), we must acknowledge that consumption is not only about purchase satisfaction and mood boosts. Recent embodied studies (e.g. Higgins and Hamilton, 2019; Scott and Uncles, 2018; Stevens et al., 2019) have started to consider how consumptionscapes can be unsettling but there is still much to be explored. As such, our study answers a call (Hill et al., 2021) for looking beyond moments of positive affect, foregrounding instead a myriad of complex emotions that meld both pleasure and pain. In focusing on crash landings, we examined particularly intense affective atmospheres in order to move beyond the simplistic dichotomy of negative/positive emotions; we feel more than one emotion at a time. We have, however, to a certain extent highlighted the unpleasant side of atmospheres, showing how our unpreparedness for (disorientation in) certain environments affords valuable insight into the diverse subject positionings which can be taken as these have been generally avoided in the literature. These moments of discord merit further attention in consumer research. Furthermore, as affect is always ‘turned on’ (Wetherell, 2012), there is also a need to consider the mundane as well as the extraordinary and a MTR approach provides us a model with which to more fully witness this (Lorimer, 2005). In fact, one could argue that most consumption (not least the weekly grocery shop) can be boring and unpleasant. Rather than atmospheres ‘fail[ing] to emerge’ (Hill et al., 2014: 165), they just go unnoticed as the landing is smoother and need further investigation to account for the shifting and flexible complexities of social life.
Finally, in focusing on the subject, we argue that there is a need to consider power dynamics and whose affect consumers are open to and whose they are not. Examining the process of landing can demonstrate how certain subject positionings are created in the marketplace, see for example Dion and Borraz (2017) on the creation of a classed subject in the luxury market or Badje and Rojas Gaviria (2021) on the role of affect in creating responsible subjects. Classed, gendered and racial orientations surface and stick as consumers land in servicescapes, resulting in some feeling comfortable and others as marginal ‘bodies out of place’. Whilst it is ultimately impossible to account for all consumer landings, in designing servicescapes further attention to how affect surfaces and sticks for different subjects and the underpinning gendered, racialised and classed logics at work in these servicescapes could go some way to opening up these spaces and moving us beyond the usual focus on white males (Perez, 2019).
Footnotes
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.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research is supported by BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants (SRG/170749).
