Text by Sara Martinez Belendez (Freie Universität Berlin)
Photo by James Vaughan, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This essay explores the affective and psychological dimensions of a childhood encounter with a hairdryer and examines the extent to which non-human agents carry affective meanings and influence human experiences. Drawing on the Berlin School of affective society, it delves into the entanglements between humans and their tools. Combining Actor-Network Theory (ANT) with psychoanalysis to analyze the evolving relationship between me and the hairdryer, I argue that it becomes an extension of my father's care and love, leading to an unconscious evolution and mutation of my relationship with it. I will discuss how psychological theories on transference mechanisms provide insight into individual mental processes that create potential spaces of conversation. Finally, I end with a reflection on the dialectics between anthropology and psychology, emphasizing the potential of combining these fields to understand the entanglement of humans with the non-human and exemplifying this with my anthropologified body as an interpreter of affective dimensions and the transformative power of such encounters.
The Hairdryer
I’m four years old and standing on a toilet seat, clean and tucked in a way too big bathrobe. What happens next leads to the writing of this essay 18 years later. Standing on the toilet of my childhood home, I have my first conscious encounter with the hairdryer. A hairdryer is basically a little machine that blows warm air. In the early 19th century electric vacuum cleaners emerged in the domestic space. The practice of using the airflow of this machine for hair drying inspired the invention of the first hair dryers in the 1920s. These early models were heavy and large making for the alienlike image of women in beauty salons reading magazines with a bulky bonnet drying their curls. But it was not until the 1950s (Sherrow 2006, 169f.) that models for domestic use were developed. Since then, hairdryers have slowly found their way into many homes such as mine in the early 2000s. In the hands of my father, this little machine became a childrendryer. The trigger of goosebumps and tickling. The catalyst for the innate response to warmth accompanied by love. This essay dives into the affective and psychological dimensions of this encounter. The main question that drives the argument is on the extent to which non-human actors carry and have agency on affective experiences. It is but a proposal of inquiry, with little space for a deep dive into the waters that Psychology and Psychoanalysis are. Nonetheless, anthropology’s affinity to postcolonial and feminist theories has put anthropologists in the position of exploring questions and themes not seen as objective or scientific in other fields while still preserving, this being a whole branch of internal discussions, its place in the Ivory tower of Academia. And maybe it is in the intersections with other academic fields such as Psychology, that the potential of this specificity in Anthropology comes to light. The question posed is to what extent in the dynamics between humans and their tools the latter become an extension of them.
Affect in Anthropology
Let’s look at affect[1] and caring through an anthropological lens. The Berlin School of Affective Societies[2] has put affects and emotions at the center of its inquiries. In this context, it has paved the way for us, its students, to take seriously the affective dimensions in anthropological endeavors and their studied fields. Emotions are defined by cultural and linguistic imaginaries (Lynch 1990, 93) that do not grasp my relationship with the hairdryer. Affects, on the other hand, are a category with less baggage underlining resonance processes between humans and their surroundings. Whereas emotions are charged with complex and preconceived notions, affects unfold in the uncharted (Röttger-Rössler 2021, 240ff.). This is a thought that the 21st-century anthropology student in me sees critically. It opens a whole layer of questions around anthropology’s entanglement with colonialism and its ongoing obsession with unexplored spaces (Clifford 1997; Appadurai 1998; Tsing 2011). Nonetheless, regarding the topic of my relationship with the hairdryer, the uncharted affect fills my mind with notions embedded in more-than-human entanglements and Actor-Network-Theory.
When I argue that the hairdryer becomes an extension of my father’s care and love, what I mean, is that it acquires the quality of making me resonate with that caring. It resembles, what Donna Haraway (Haraway 2020, 24) has defined as becoming with. For Haraway this involves a practice of worlding and world building that is not based on the illusion of separate, discrete entities, but rather on the interconnectedness of all beings (ibid.). If we further shift our scrutiny away from the actors and towards the relationships, Bruno Latour’s (2005) Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) brings an emphasis on connections to the discussion. He invites us to see the social world in networks of actors (both human and non-human), each of whom has agency and can influence the actions of others. ANT assumes that these relationships are constantly being negotiated and transformed, and that they shape the way in which knowledge and power are distributed within society.[3] So, it is in Haraway’s (1991) and Latour’s (2005) sense that the hairdryer interlaces with my surroundings and my resonance with them. The decisive point here lies in the realization that this relationship has not only been a mere mirroring of learned emotions that routine or ritual have impregnated in me. I find that the relationship gained a life of itself, it has unconsciously evolved and mutated.
Actor-Network-Theory and ‘Becoming with’ in Psychoanalysis
This relationship that mutated out of a parental act of care in my childhood, I argue, can be fruitfully analyzed by combining the ideas of “becoming with” and ANT with psychoanalysis and transference. Nancy Chodorow (1999) defines transference as the way in which objects come to life psychologically. She leans on Sigmund Freuds take on the subconscious as a place where internal and external realities melt. From this perspective, according to Chodorow, only through a relationship involving transfer between these two realities, an object becomes real. She poses that many psychoanalytical approaches study the human based on the effects of childhood on the psyche, creating a tension between the relation of past and present (Chodorow 1999, 33). The underlying thought I want to delve into is that although these processes of meaning-creation have their origins in childhood, they are not fixed in that spatial frame. Rather the present is shaped by the way in which we give meaning to past emotions and events (ibid., 13ff., 17). As a possible approach to the study of human entanglement with the non-human, these psychological theories give an insight into the individual workings of the mind. In this way, the body-hairdryer relationship acts as a red thread that makes transference processes physical throughout my biography.
During my adolescence, the hairdryer disappeared from my conscious map of the world. Its home was the cupboards and bathrooms of my friends with long hair and demanding cuts. This sudden but unnoticed disappearance had a lot to do with the other significant care and love giver in my life. My mom. In her ongoing campaign against wasting electricity and global warming, she had severed the house of hairdryers, AC, and whatever other noisy electricity consumers she considered dispensable. Only in our late teens, my sister and I managed to smuggle one little hairdryer into the house, and it wasn’t until years later that I started to understand the weird feelings of guilt and attraction that this banning linked to the little air blowing machine. Looking for the first time at the hairdryer with the gaze gained from my studies, I started to understand the conflict that my two parents had put into the hairdryer. And it was only years later that I realized to what extent this conflict became an intrinsic part of the physical and sensorial reaction of my body to the hairdryer.
Outlook on the Dialectics of Anthropology
Since affects discussed in this way are an almost purely academic discourse, one could say they unfold in the minds of students and readers of academic papers, that they live in this perspective on the world. It is here where a space of learning how to tune into affective dimensions of human experiences emerges. At this point, the last agent I want to introduce into the discussion is the one Brian Massumi (1995) posed as an important site of knowledge production: the body. If affects are understood as bodily references to the world, the body has become the measurement tool for affects. Through my anthropologified body, an example becomes articulated in the language of academia. My body starts to understand my obsession with this little machine and its warmth in a new way. It is not just because a human body possibly likes warm environments, it is because this specific warmth, this specific sound, this specific windy quality of the hairdryer make me feel the reassurance that I deserve care and warmth, that I deserve tickling and goosebumps. That I am deserving of love. In the discourse around affect and agency the question arises: where do my body and the hairdryer start and end?[4] And so, I find an answer to my obsession on the toilet seat of my childhood home. The childrendryer has become an anthropologist-dryer.
Notes
[1] Leaning on Birgitt Röttger-Rösslers article “Multiple Belongings. On the Affective Dimensions of Migration”, in the following affects are interpreted as bodily references to the world that bond people to their corporality, that is, to their social and spatial environments with all their senses (Röttger-Rössler 2018, 242).
[2] The Research Center 1171 Affective Societies is a collaborative project based at the Freie Universität Berlin that investigates affects and emotions as essential factors of coexistence in twenty-first century’s societies.
[3] Here it might be useful to mention the definition of the social in ANT as a “fluid visible only when new associations are being made” (Latour 2005, 79). The domain of study moves from the object to the “brief flashes” (ibid.) when this fluid moves and changes.
[4] In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway (1999) proposes the cyborg as “a condensed image of both imagination and material reality” (ibid.,7) that “defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household” (ibid., 9). I have not seen the space to include this intersection between human and machine into the argument, but the here presented hairdryer makes for a fit predecessor of the highly political and biotechnological cyborg of the manifesto. An example of inquiry could be the blurring of boundaries between humans and machines in the household, also considering the psychological dimensions of such relationships.
References
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Chodorow, Nancy (1999). The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture. Yale University Press.
Clifford, James (1997). Routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Harvard University Press.
Haraway, Donna (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. Routledge.
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Klein, Melanie (1952). Some Theoretical Conclusions regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant. In: The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 8: Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 61–94. Hogarth Press.
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Tsing, Anna (2011). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press.