Sports Fans:A Phenomenological Study of Affective Sharedness

In our society in which the public expression of emotions is rather frowned upon, sports fandom is one of the rare occasions where it is possible and acceptable to experience and express strong forms of communal feelings. Sports is an arena that allows us to bond with other people and to experience the joy of collectively living through emotions. But it also reveals the dark side of strong emotional bonds: from the exclusion of others to the open use of violence against them. It is thus highly relevant to gain a better understanding of sports audiences and the societal dynamics evolving around them. The project Sports Fans: A Phenomenological Study of Affective Sharedness considers the experiences of sports fans as relevant and informative examples of how our affective life is related to others and how certain feelings are experienced as shared with others. Drawing on these experiences, it investigates and differentiates affectivity in its relationality and sharedness. The main research agenda is to identify the specific forms of emotional experiences facilitated through being a fan. The leading questions are: What modes, types, and degrees of affective sharing can be found in sports fans? What kinds of communities are involved in their shaping? To what extent does being a fan enable qualitatively new forms of affective states? The project is the first to bring together three research approaches that have not been in much of a dialog so far: a concern based account of human affectivity to be found in contemporary philosophy of emotions; works by the early phenomenologist Max Scheler, Edith Stein und Gerda Walther regarding affective sharing; and sociological research on sports fans. To achieve this, a triangulation of conceptual work, phenomenological analysis, and collaboration with empirical observations provided by research partners from sociology will be employed. The proposed project is expected to advance our understanding of sports fans by improving our conceptual tools for describing the forms of affective sharing that are constitutive of them. The usefulness of the findings, however, is not restricted to that domain. Sports fandom is a model situation for studying the interconnectedness of social identity, group membership and affectivity. The conceptual repertoire developed in the study of sports fandom is expected to contribute to a better understanding of the affective structures in contemporary societies.

The overall aim of the project has been to contribute to a better understanding of the relationality of our affective lives with a special focus on various types of affective sharing. For that purpose, the project considered sports audiences as relevant and informative examples for the way in which affective states are shared with others. Against this background, the project set itself the task of investigating, differentiating, and clarifying forms of affective sharedness by drawing on phenomenological insights from phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, and Gerda Walther and discussing them in the context of current philosophy of emotion. In terms of a theoretical intervention, the project contributed to what might be called a phenomenological turn in the philosophy of emotion, claiming that, at least in the case of affective intentionality, the intentional and the phenomenal aspect of an experience cannot be separated. This phenomenological turn in the philosophy of emotion fits well with trends in social science emotion research which emphasize that it is impossible to draw a neat separation of cognitive and biological processes within an emotional episode. This turn asks for the development of new concepts and research methods that emphasize relationality (rather than individual states), process (rather than stable conditions), interaction (rather than isolated capacities), and embodiment (rather than a dualistic image of mind and body). The project contributed to that development, also in the context of the CRC Affective Societies with which it has been associated. In particular, the project advanced the concept of emotional sharing (originally introduced in classic phenomenology) and adopted from sociological research the concept of social collective as the kind of community that enables emotional sharing and, at the same time, is constituted and maintained by it. This conceptual framework enables researchers to focus on the social-relational dynamics in specific socio- material settings (like a stadium), instead of reducing phenomena of collective affectivity either to physiological processes like emotional contagion, imitation of mimicry, or to cognitive processes like social appraisal or shared evaluation. It is a common diagnosis that our world, and politics in particular, has recently become less rational and more affective. The concepts advanced in this project contribute to a better understanding of how emotional or affective ways of mobilization work, thus contributing to a more nuanced evaluation of their risks and potentials.