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.

Illusio, Social Gravity and Social Magic: Purpose, Motivation and Aspiration

Chapter One focusses on underutilized concepts of illusio, social gravity and social alchemy/magic to consider everyday affective notions such as aspirations and orientations as key to thinking about how everyday processes of embodied meaning making are central to the affective economies that create and replicate inequalities. The chapter argues that Bourdieu’s concepts of social magic and social gravity are relations of affective affinity, unequal moments are settings heavy with the hierarchical transmission of affects. Illusio is especially useful for considering economies of intensity, motivation and purpose.

Symbolic Violence and Affective Affinities

Chapter Five considers how tastes, ethics, morals, values, aesthetics and the like are all key to thinking about modes of distinction and the dissemination of symbolic violence. These phenomena are situated as an affective economy, where engagements and entanglements with things and people in specific social spaces summon emotions and feelings that are the very moments where inequalities shift from being immanent and imminent to being present and felt. Symbolic violence is therefore an affective violence. The chapter discusses the concept of social death and how tastes and morals are relations of affective affinity. The experience of symbolic violence is an affective experience of lack, that is, a lack of sticky affinities with the ‘right’ things.

Introduction: Towards a Bourdieusian Sociology of Affective Affinity

This chapter makes the case for the importance of an ‘affective Bourdieu’ firstly by arguing why considerations of affect are buttressed by Bourdieu (or at least a theory of practice) and why Bourdieu’s theory of practice also needs a better conceptualisation of affect. It then outlines antecedents for the theory of affective affinities, especially pointing to Mason’s work on affinities. The chapter then presents a table of Bourdieu’s concepts with their definitions placed alongside new definitions that highlight affect. Overall, this chapter sets the scene for theorising the concept of affective affinities as important for considering the connections between class, emotions and affect.

Homo Economicus Must Die: Towards a Figure of the Accumulated Being

Chapter Seven makes the argument, like many others, that the dominant figures used to stand in for humans, such as Homo economicus and cultural dupe, are anthropological monsters. The chapter also sketches the problem of the figure of the inspirational meritocrat, which aligns with the rise of the happiness and wellness industries and with individual stories of heroically overcoming hardships in movies and media profiles. The Bourdieusian model of the reasonable accumulated being is then put forward as a way of overcoming the problems of those figures as it considers how affective affinities mediate everyday struggles and strategies that move beyond the rational, ideological and entrepreneurial.

Conclusion

The Conclusion sums up the main arguments, summarizes the conceptual developments and specifies the vitality of a theory of affective affinities.

Fields, Settings, Atmospheres

Chapter Three rearticulates the methodological and ontological concept of field as having distinctive affective atmospheres and structures of feeling, making an argument for thinking differently about broad social fields and specific social settings. This chapter opens up Bourdieu’s fields towards thinking across multiple fields and incorporating broader affective economies into specific fields, and also to consider how some of Bourdieu’s concepts might still work in spaces that cannot be considered a field. It uses the examples of literature and ‘gastrophysics’ to discuss the implications of thinking within and across fields and settings.

Stasis and Change: Innovators, Affective Poles, Reflexivity, Irony

Chapter Six considers aspects of social change through a Bourdieusian lens. It outlines the autonomous and heteronomous poles of fields, emphasising their affective nature. The chapter uses the examples of subversive innovators and how the importing of illusio from different fields can affect an individual’s disposition to illustrate how change occurs. It then examines recent social changes around the rise of reflexivity, irony, cynicism and anxiety. In a precarious global labour market, where even the well-educated experience forms of insecurity about the future, reflexive and ironic ways of being are becoming normalized, while mental health issues effect an ever-greater proportion of the population. This produces a relation of cruel optimism. If the illusio of specific fields increasingly come under scrutiny as being unachievable, unsustainable or violent, this may open a space for emancipatory social change.

Habitus: An Affective Reservoir of Immanent Dispositions

Chapter Two builds on the traditional definition of habitus and on its recent developments to argue that habitus needs to be thought of as an affective reservoir of immanent dispositions, where affinities stick and are primed across an emotional trajectory to instinctively react in some situations or reflexively deliberate in others. The chapter emphasises oft-overlooked aspects of habitus such as conatus and the cathectic, and points to how different orientations towards illusio can be an important limitation for an individual’s practice. The sensations and feelings we experience in certain social situations accumulate in dispositions over time. Dispositions are therefore enacted, that is they emerge or spring forth at any given time through affinities. Habitus is essentially an antenna to detect the feel of a space, a capacitor that stores affinities and a transformer that then regulates an array of performative dispositions.