Affective Transactions: Rethinking Emotion, Power & Habitus

This paper will address a number of current debates within social theory and the sociology of emotions concerning the concepts of affect, emotion, and habitus. My aim is to offer and defend a dispositional theory of social practice, based on a somewhat-reframed conceptualization of the habitus, which draws on and critiques not only the work of Bourdieu and Elias, but also the process ontology of Alfred North Whitehead. This question, at its most general, is concerned especially with the constitution of ‘emotional habitus’, and the relationship between emotions and power. It is approached from a distinct theoretical perspective, here called process-relational realism. This suggests that the individual body, engaged in the process of relational becoming, is constituted and re-constituted via ongoing and iterative 'affective transactions' with the (social, cultural, and natural) environment. Such transactions give rise to patterns in emotional practice, which relate to power in a variety of ways, and are historically, structurally, and culturally variable; that the socially-embedded, embodied individual’s affective transactions are mediated via a specific, normative and transformable affective or emotional regimes. Drawing on and contributing to recent work on these issues (Burkitt, 2014, Wetherell, 2012, von Scheve, 2017), I hope to demonstrate the utility of the 'process world view' for rethinking and re-integrating these concepts not only at the level of theoretical abstraction but also for the design of concrete empirical research.