Affect, Relationality and the `Problem of Personality'

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE will consider why William James’s formulation of the‘problem of personality ’ is an important yet forgotten historicalantecedent of contemporary work across social and cultural theory that is being described as ‘vitalist ’ (Lash, 2006). New materialist vitalism is one response to what are increasingly being framed as the limits and problems of the foundational practices of sociology and cultural theory. These include attention to the stasis and mechanism of cultural inscription models that have emphasized being over becoming and structure over process, as well as a renewed interest in the problem of affect, sensation and perception (see Fraser et al., 2005; Lash, 2006). The interest in affect, or what Teresa Brennan (2004) has termed the problem of affective trans-mission, also reactivates questions that dominated and puzzled scientists and philosophers who were writing within what has now been characterized as a 19th-century science of association (Latour, 2002). These questions related to events within populations that foregrounded the question of affec-tive transmission or contagion. How was it that certain fashions, fads and trends seemed to spread throughout populations with a rapidity that seemed to defy the action of logic or rationality? How did certain fears and forms of hysteria, mania and emotion spread such that they appeared to bypass rationality and reason? What caused individuals in groups to behave in ways that might perplex, bemuse or undermine their sense of themselves as subjects in other contexts? What enabled certain individuals to command the obedience, compliance, love and adoration of others, such that they would be exalted and revered as charismatic leaders? What lay in the background to these concerns, and the concepts that guided their explanations, was both a fascination with and attempt to know and understand experiences that were ephemeral, ‘invisible ’ and marked by

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