Emotion as power: capital and strategy in the field of politics

ABSTRACT

Recent work across the social sciences have converged on the issue of emotion. In the vanguard of these advances has been the sociology of emotions, broadly defined, which, in various guises – structural, cultural, critical, social psychological, positivist and so on – has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the emotional dimensions of social life, and its centrality to the explanation and understanding of social action. In this paper, and building on previous work, I wish to make a contribution to an increasingly important interdisciplinary sub-field – the political sociology of emotion – and to reconsider and explain the increasingly important role of emotional practice, understood as the strategic deployment of emotional capital, in contemporary party politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• power
• party politics
• emotional capital
• political capital
• Bourdieu

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Swartz is of course correct to say that Bourdieu himself does not think in terms of this power to/power over distinction (Swartz 2013, p. 43), but I think it underplays the potential in Bourdieu’s conceptual tool kit to limit it to the study of the three types of power he suggests (p.45), i.e. power as resource (capitals), power concentrated in fields (fields of power), and a version close to 3D power (symbolic power and violence) – though Lukes has issues with the scope of ‘embodiment’ as well as a perceived lack of reflexivity in Bourdieu’s work (Lukes 2005, p. 143). Yet, as Haugaard has argued, ‘the most basic way in which habitus relates to power is relative to empowerment or power to’ (Haugaard, 2008, p. 194), and a fuller treatment of Bourdieu and the concept of power remains to be completed.

2. The ‘freezing’ of many party systems across the world, especially in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, both reflects and maintains the ‘freezing’ of collective political identities around the same period (see for instance Lipset and Rokkan 1967).

3. He writes: ‘Within one agency or one institution, party guaranteed the two constitutive elements of democracy: representation, on the one hand, and hence government by the people; and procedural legitimacy, on the other hand, or government for the people’ (Mair 2013, p. 81).

4. The cartel party is a type of party that is ‘postulated to emerge in democratic polities that are characterized by the interpenetration of party and state and by a tendency towards inter-party collusion. With the development of the cartel party, the goals of politics become self-referential, professional and technocratic, and what substantive inter-party competition remains becomes focused on the efficient and effective management of the polity’, thus hastening the development of ‘audience democracy’ (Katz and Mair 2018, cited in Mair 2013, p. 83, fn5).

5. A critic might suggest that, while this might all have held until recently, where the impact of the global financial crisis of 2007–8 may be seen in terms of a re-politicization process and a potential reversal of at least aspects of the processes discussed here, especially in the European context. However, I would suggest that the rise of right-wing populism is already accounted for within Mair’s analysis. He writes that these very processes give rise to a decline in opposition with party systems, that, when coupled with the gap between voters and parties, and the growing gap between popular responsiveness and professional or governance responsibility within mainstream parties, makes for ‘fertile breeding grounds for populism’ (Mair 2013, p. 140). Elsewhere, he writes of the ‘new form of opposition’ that is emerging, and the ‘growing divide in European party systems between parties which claim to represent, but don’t deliver, and those which deliver, but are no longer seen to represent’ (Mair 2011, p. 164). The argument I am making here, that emotions flow in to the void created by the mutual withdrawal of voter and party, whether in populist or mainstream, system or anti-system varieties, remains valid.

6. Citizen’s become, as Sennett wrote a long time ago, ‘the passive spectators to a political personage who offers them his intentions, his sentiments, rather than his acts, for their consumption’ (Sennett [1977]2002, p. 261).

7. Political capital is a ‘form of symbolic capital, credit founded on credence or belief and recognition or, more precisely, on the innumerable operations of credit by which agents confer on a person (or on an object) the very powers that they recognize in him (or it)… the politician derives his political power from the trust that a group places in him (Bourdieu and Thompson 1991, p. 192, original emphasis).

8. Elsewhere Bourdieu writes: ‘The political field is the field par excellence for the exercise of symbolic capital; it is a place where to exist, to be, is to be perceived. A man (sic) of politics is in large part a man known and recognized; it is no accident that political men should be particularly vulnerable to scandal, scandal being the generator of discredit and discredit being the opposite of the accumulation of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 2014, p. 192).

9. As Swartz (2013, p. 68) and others have noted, the influence of both Cassirer’s relationism and Weber’s ‘social spheres’ is clear evident here. Indeed, for Weber, the political sphere, within which action is ‘oriented toward the acquisition of social power’ is very close to Bourdieu’s definition of the political field (Weber et al. 1978, p. 938).

10. He writes: ‘the more advanced the process of institutionalization of political capital is, the more the winning of “hearts and minds” tends to become subordinated to the winning of jobs…It is thus easy to understand how political parties can be brought in this way to sacrifice their programmes so as to keep themselves in power or simply in existence’ (Bourdieu and Thompson 1991, p. 197).

11. ‘The habitus as the feel for the game is the social game embodied and turned into a second nature. Nothing is simultaneously freer and more constrained than the action of the good player. He quite naturally materializes at just the place the ball is about to fall, as if the ball were in command of him – but by that very fact, he is in command of the ball. The habitus, as society written into the body, into the biological individual, enables the infinite number of acts of the game – written into the game as possibilities and objective demands – to be produced’ (Bourdieu 1990, p. 63).

12. Bourdieu writes: ‘Thus as a result of the hysteresis effect necessarily implied in the logic of the constitution of habitus, practices are always liable to incur negative sanctions when the environment with which they are actually confronted is too distant from that to which they are objectively fitted. This is why generation conflicts oppose not age-classes separated by natural properties, but habitus which have been produced by different modes of generation, that is, by conditions of existence which, in imposing different definitions of the impossible, the possible, and the probable, cause one group to experience as natural or reasonable practices or aspirations which another group finds unthinkable or scandalous, and vice versa’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 78).

13. She has written in the past that ‘I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem “walled off.” And sometimes I think I come across more in the “walled off” arena. And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that’ (Crockett 2016).

14. Newman’s (2008) book, used in corporate emotional intelligence training worldwide, is called, without reference to Bourdieu, Illouz, or anyone else from the sociology of emotions tradition, Emotional Capitalists: The New Leaders. See: https://www.rochemartin.com/.

Additional information

Funding

Aspects of this paper were developed as part of a project funded by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant [SG150566].

Notes on contributors

Jonathan G. Heaney

Dr Jonathan G. Heaney is a lecturer is Sociology in the School of Social Science, Education, and Social Work, and an Associate Fellow of The Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast. His main research interests are bound up with the intersections and dynamics of emotion and power as an ongoing, theoretical and empirical, research agenda. His current research explores these issues primarily from a political sociology of emotions perspective, focusing on, what he calls, the ’emotional state’, and on party politics more generally. He is currently the Coordinator of the European Sociology of Emotions Research Network (RN11), and a member of the Sociological Association of Ireland.