Bourdieu and Affect
A Bourdieusian contribution to studies of affect provides a more comprehensive understanding of the everyday moments that make, transform and remake the social contours of inequality, and how those relations are contested and resisted. By teasing out the affective elements already implicit in concepts like habitus, illusio, cultural capital, field and symbolic violence, this book develops a theory of affective affinities to consider how emotions and feelings are central to how class is affectively delineated along with material and symbolic relations. This includes theorising habitus as one’s history rolled up into an affective ball of immanent dispositions, an assemblage of embodied affective charges. Sketching fields as having their own affective atmospheres and structures of feeling, while considering everyday settings that the concept of field cannot capture. Drawing upon illusio, social gravity and social magic to unpack how the embodied nature of the forms of capital mean they operate in affective economies mediating transmissions of affective violence. The book concludes by critically engaging with aspects of social change due to the rise of reflexivity, irony and cynicism and proposing the figure of the accumulated being to challenge the dominance of homo economicus.