The Affectivity of the Forms of Capitals

Chapter Four develops the understanding that Bourdieu’s forms of capitals have affective properties and propensities, arguing that they need to be understood as skills and capacities for lubricating success in a particular field, and emphasizing how capitals work in the specific everyday moments and encounters where relationality matters and class is made, patrolled and reproduced. The forms of capitals that Bourdieu and others have developed are themselves ‘affective’ in that how they work stems from an assemblage of material, temporal, spatial, and relational factors and their affects. Affective competence is the embodiment of hierarchical social relations that explain how social magic happens. The chapter also argues that what is traditionally theorised as capital convergence is an affective transference that transmit relations of distinction and the maintenance of who gets to define morals, ethics and values.