Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. “Chapter 5: Solidifying Affect: Structures of feeling, habitus and emotional capital” In Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage. (102-119)

• Introduction
  • personal affective order and social affective order
  • patterns are difficult to detect; can be grasped via reflection or when the pattern changes, that one noticed the existence of the pattern
  • patterns are changing.
  • So, identifying and stabilizing affective patterns need “retrospective work”
    • such a work is both describing and prescribing
    • prescribing in a sense to institutionalize the patterns
  • Bourdieu’s “habitus”
  • advocate: “affective intersectional” approach
• Habitus and Embodied Dispositions (Bourdieu’s basic concept of “habitus”)
  • social life is both individual and ordered
    • individual: about agency, improvisation and strategy
    • ordered: repetition, constraint and routine
  • “habitus:” openness and structure
  • past practice is embodied in individuals because they acquire sediment of dispositions
    • dispositions guide future conduct
    • the past into the future
    • when habitus shapes: some possibilities are practiced; other possibilities recede
  • New members: to form new patterns and to learn and practice
  • Body: memory-jogger, an accomplice of social reproduction, towards a future while muting other possibilities
  • Some notion of determinism in Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus”
• Affect and Habitus
  • emotion: non-conscious aspects of habitus
    • emotion is not conscious
  • “Affect is something the body does; it is pure action” (107)
  • Reed-Danahay argues: Bourdieu blurs distinctions between cognition and affect (knowledge and feeling)
  • Other researches on affect is not satisfying, either
  • Thus, Wetherell: a social psychology of affective embodied practice is needed to fill the gap
    • Wetherell focuses on practiced affect, or in situated affective episodes
• Cultural Capital and Social Distinction
  • Bourdieu: the social constructions frame habitus in classification
  • social value and cultural capital in habitus
    • thus, the formation of preferences
• Affect and Social Value
  • inside or outside of habitus: emotions, such as likes and disgust
• Affect and Social Class
  • specific affective style in class
• Emotional Capital
  • some affective styles: advantage
  • Illouz (1997): emotional capital: the capacity to manage emotions, or to be calm
  • Reay: strong emotions can have benefits, too. For example, in education
  • class is relevant, since without cultural and economic capital, people from the underprivileged groups cannot turn strong affect into something positive.
  • but class is not determined
  • Bourdieu’s theory is from a middle-class position
  • Skeggs:
    • middles classes: affect in an exchange relations
    • working classes: no exchange value in affect, but only pure “use-value”
• An Overview and Some Problems
  • (1) “affect can maintain, increase and diminish power, influence and social value”
  • (2) affect is about the sediments in habitus, so that individuals practice affect without thinking of it.
  • The Social psychology of affective practice
    • danger of determinism of affect
    • easy to read emotion as natural or corporeal, as something unreflective and non-conscious
    • But, what we forget is the duality: open and evolving, constraining and could be otherwise
    • suggestion: treat affect as practice, to admit affect is highly varied
  • Heterogeneity and plurality
    • habitus to be plural
    • Bourdieu’s habitus: too over-deterministic
      • but the affective practices and social groupings will not be tidy
      • identity can be complicated
    • so a wide range of affective space
      • (1) some are predictable
      • (2) some not stable
      • To be open to possibilities
• Affective Intersectionality