(Un)Fixing habitus: affective transactions and the becoming body

ABSTRACT

How might emotional life be best explained and accounted for in sociological theory? How is it that phenomena that seem so subjectively fleeting, and fundamentally individual nevertheless display remarkable relationality and regularity? Recent work in sociology and the social sciences attempts to address such questions from a variety of conflicting perspectives, some of which foregrounds the ‘affective’ and ‘cultural’, over and against the ‘emotional’, ‘interactive’ and ‘structural’, while others still aim more towards synthesis and integration. This paper attempts to theoretically account for the constitution of emotional life from a primarily dispositional perspective, via a reframed conceptualization of the habitus, refracted through the sociology of affect and emotion, and grounded on a dynamic, process ontology. This process-relational approach is related to some recent work from the ‘process world view’ and here we specifically focus on the work of A.N. Whitehead. The key notion of ‘affective transactions’, derived from the late work of Bourdieu, is reframed within this processual perspective, and related to the dynamics of emotion and power. The paper suggests that the individual body, engaged in a process of relational becoming, is constituted and re-constituted via ongoing and iterative transactions with the environment, giving rise to patterns in emotional practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• emotion
• power
• habitus
• process ontology

‘The foundation of all understanding of sociological theory – that is to say, of all understanding of human life – is that no static maintenance of perfection is possible. This axiom is rooted in the nature of things’ (Whitehead [1933] 1967, 274)

Turning things over:

How might emotional life be best explained and accounted for in sociological theory? How is it that phenomena that seem so subjectively personal, immediate, fleeting, and fundamentally individual nevertheless display remarkable pattern, relationality, and regularity? Recent work and debate in sociology and the social sciences attempts to address such questions from a variety of often conflicting perspectives, some of which foregrounds the ‘affective’ and the ‘cultural’, over and against the ‘emotional’, ‘interactive’ and ‘structural’, while others still aim more towards synthesis and integration (Turner & Stets 2005, Heaney 2011, Hopkins et al. 2009; Burkitt 2014; Wetherell 2012, von Scheve 2018, Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Seyfert 2012; Slaby 2017). Indeed, these very questions, and the associated approaches, could be considered to be quite ‘trendy’. The sociology and politics of knowledge production and the circulation of concepts in the social science (and especially sociology) is as bedevilled by fashions and trends as everyday life, if not more so. This is often poorly disguised under the language of ‘turns’ which might be better conceived as (proto) ‘movements’, based, as they are, on formal and informal associations and a swathe of self-validating practices, such as citation networks (Heaney 2011). To address the question of the constitution of emotional life, this paper will engage with some recent debates in sociological theory surrounding a number of these ‘turns’ which form the broad intellectual context for this paper, including the ‘ontological turn’, the ‘emotional turn’ the ‘affective turn’, and the ‘relational turn’. All these arenas of study, of course, interrelate and interpenetrate in various ways across the literature, but, in-part, because of this interpenetration, a number of problems and conceptual confusions are evident. The approach taken here is explicitly synthetic and aims at the clarification and integration of concepts. The key contribution is to offer a reframed conceptualization of the habitus, refracted through the sociology of affect and emotion, and grounded on a dynamic, process ontology.

While the primary aim of the paper is to defend the habitus and a primarily dispositional approach to the explanation of social action and the constitution of emotional life¹, it also aims to address some problems associated with this concept, especially in its Bourdieuian incarnation, and its often-problematic reception. A second issue concerns the relationship between and the integration of affect and emotion. Until quite recently, discussion and conceptualization of these concepts has tended to occur in isolation and has been concentrated around different relative positions of the intellectual field, with affect being more associated with cultural studies, and emotion associated with sociology, social psychology, and perhaps human geography (Gregg & Seigworth 2010, Wetherell 2012; Burkitt 2014). Aspects of this have recently been reviewed by von Scheve (2018), who attempts to address these issues from a specifically ‘relational’ perspective, foregrounding the importance of ‘affective relations’. While sympathetic to this approach, the argument here is that, by re-placing these concepts and viewing them from within a ‘process world view’ a clarified and more coherent model of the constitution of emotional life may be gleaned. In other words, that the integration of these concepts, if it is desired at all, may lie in the answer to a prior, ontological question: one that foregrounds process as ontologically prior to relationality.

This foregrounding of process is key to what follows. In most approaches associated with the various turns in which relations and relationality have recently been revisited (including von Scheve’s), the notion of process is very often (and offhandedly) linked to and subsumed under the notion of relationality. Especially within relational sociology phrases such as ‘processual and relational’ abound. (Emirbayer 1997; Dépelteau 2018b). Yet, I suggest that, while no doubt related, these are distinct concepts, and that the processual, and the implications of a process ontology, remain underdeveloped in most contemporary relational approaches, including those addressing affect, emotion and habitus. The aim here is to prioritise the processual as a general social ontology, specifically drawing on Whitehead, and from there to build a model of the constitution of the body and emotional life. To this end, the paper proceeds by, firstly, analyzing and clarifying the concept of habitus before turning to the more probabilistic and potentially processual conceptualization of that concept in the late Bourdieu. Secondly, we turn to the ‘process world view’ in general, and to the process ontology of Alfred North Whitehead in particular. There are many reasons to focus on Whitehead here. Given his often-forgotten influence on the development of social theory, and his contemporary relevance for some proponents of affect theory, it is surprising that his work is mostly neglected in the sociology of emotions. As we hope to show, his entire process philosophy is grounded on the notions of feeling and emotion and, as has been demonstrated with other specific philosophers such as Spinoza or Heidegger, may be productively integrated within a process-relational approach to these concepts, and to the habitus, in sociology. Finally, before concluding, we will bring the analysis together, advocating for a renewed understanding of the constitution of the habitus based on a processual understanding of affective transactions.

Habitus and disposition:

Despite the various controversies and criticisms surrounding the concept of habitus it has, in recent years, not only endured but appears to be flourishing. In a variety of books and scholarly collections of various types (Wacquant 2014a; Wacquant 2014b; Friedman 2016; Silva 2016) the concept has been placed at the centre of both empirical and theoretical research, especially in its Bourdieuian incarnation, and increasingly in relation to emotion (Wetherell 2012; Burkitt 2014, Matthäus 2017). While these discussions point to the ongoing relevance and contested nature of the concept of habitus within sociology and beyond, they also speak to wider struggles regarding the status of theory and theorizing across the field. At the centre of these most recent debates, the work of Loïc Wacquant and especially his defence of the concept as both empirical object and method of inquiry, has acted as both foil and lightning rod for a variety of criticisms (Wacquant 2014a; Wacquant 2014b). While, for Wacquant, these interventions are intended to bolster, defend, and extend the work of his mentor, Pierre Bourdieu, and to reaffirm the utility, flexibility and importance of the concept of habitus as the cornerstone of a dispositional theory of action, for others, such work amounts to, if not a betrayal, then perhaps a dilution or corruption of Bourdieu’s approach, and are to be resisted and challenged (Crossley 2014; Paradis 2014; Atkinson 2015). At issue in many of these criticisms appears to be a question of purity – to detach the concept of habitus from the rest of the ‘holy’ Bourdieuian trinity of capital, field (or the quaternity, including doxa) is dilute and ‘derelationalize’ it in various ways. Yet Wacquant is clear that the concept can be defended as a ‘multi-scalar’ and ‘detachable capsule’ for dispositional theory; that it may be studied independently of a specified field, and at different levels of analysis (Wacquant 2014b). Furthermore, in this view, the habitus is conceived as being an inherently complex and layered structure with cognitive, conative, and affective components (Wacquant 2014a, see also Decoteau 2016). It is such a methodological and conceptual pluralism that is also advocated here, which resonates with the late articulation of the concept in Bourdieu’s own work.

That habitus might be considered to be even more central to sociological research, today, in the twenty first century, will likely be greeted by many with dismay. As is by now well-known, the concept has been subjected to a raft of criticisms from within and beyond sociology (Archer 2007, King 2000, Jenkins 1992, Mouzelis 2008 etc). For Archer, for instance, the concept is fundamentally deterministic, and an example of both ‘central conflation’ and sociological imperialism; even if it could be seen to have been useful at one point, the complexity of contemporary social life requires a degree of reflexivity precluded by habitus (Archer 2007). For others, it is, or has become, a sociological cliché – little more than the ‘theoretical icing on an empirical cake’ (Maton 2008, 63). For Diane Reay, the term has become a sort of ‘“intellectual hairspray” … bestowing gravitas without doing any intellectual work’ (Reay 2004, 432). While I am somewhat sympathetic to these perspectives, I wish to suggest that there is a degree of conceptual confusion surrounding the concept, which often stems from a lack of appreciation of the nature of dispositional concepts and a dispositional theory of social action.

Much of the conceptual confusion surrounding dispositional concepts are of two varieties: intensional and extensional. Extensional confusions refer to the scope of the concept of habitus – these primarily tend to confuse habitus with habit, and interpret it as a socially-determined, blind reflex (though see Crossley 2013, for an interesting discussion of the relationship between habit and habitus). Such confusions themselves tend to rest on more fundamental intensional confusions about the meaning of the concept, and dispositional concepts more generally.

It is peculiar that, despite the fact that habitus is repeatedly defined in terms of dispositions, that the characteristics of dispositions and dispositional concepts are rarely addressed in the literature. This is one source of the conceptual confusion surrounding the concept. Yet, all of Bourdieu’s writings on the topic define habitus in this way. In an early, perhaps best known, formulation, they are defined as ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (Bourdieu 1977, 72, original emphasis), and this is repeated in his more recent writings (Bourdieu 2000).

Thus, for Bourdieu, the notion of disposition is central to habitus yet only rarely (in English) does he discuss the problems and properties of dispositions (or dispositional concepts) themselves in any real detail, except to say that he is aware that they are regularly (and ritualistically) condemned (Bourdieu 2000, 136). This is left to the philosophers, and indeed, would probably be considered a ‘scholastic’ exercise by him in any case. Yet, I suggest that, because of this, confusion arises, often of his own making. A few words, pace Bourdieu, are needed on dispositions before we continue. ²

Dispositions and dispositional concepts have been hotly debated in philosophy, and analytical philosophy in particular (see Choi and Fara 2012 for a detailed review). For the most part, they have been seen in negative terms, particularly by positivists, often viewed as unscientific because non-observable. One useful discussion on the nature of dispositions is found in Morriss, specifically in relation to concepts of power (1985, second edition, 2002). Morriss begins with the distinction between dispositional and episodic concepts – the sugar cube is soluble (dispositional), the sugar cube is dissolving (episodic). The former refers to ‘relatively enduring capacities’, the latter ‘report happenings or events’ (Morriss 2002, 14). Thus, common examples refer to the ‘fragility’ of the china cup as being a disposition or, as Morriss (following Kenny) suggests, the intoxicating capacity of whiskey is also a disposition (see also Choi and Fara 2012). There are, he says, two primary confusions that attach to dispositional concepts: the exercise fallacy and the vehicle fallacy. The former, I think, particularly relevant here, concerns the confusion of a disposition with its exercise, which Morriss very effectively demonstrates in relation to power (itself a dispositional concept, he argues). One can never observe a disposition, merely its manifestations, which is why ‘operationalization’ in science can be problematic for such concepts. Dispositions are potentialities, these can never be observed, and it is ‘incoherent to apply an operationalist approach to evidence to dispositional terms (Morriss 2002, 16). Indeed, in certain circumstances, dispositions might never be manifested. A fragile cup remains fragile, even if it never breaks, a sugar lump retains the disposition to be soluble even on Mars, in the absence of (liquid) water. The deployment of dispositional concepts is always a reference to a hypothetical event and is thus, as such, not directly observable. The whiskey in the bottle retains the capacity, the disposition, the ‘power to’ intoxicate and the possession of that capacity should not be equated to its exercise, the drinking of the whiskey. Neither should we confuse this capacity with its vehicle, the alcohol.

What might such a discussion suggest to us regarding the habitus and the more complex level of humanity? Well, if we consider the habitus as a dispositional concept, then charges of determinism appear to be misplaced. Dispositions may exist but go unexercised and remain unmanifest. Let us imagine that I am disposed to shyness; that it is part of my habitus. To take an extreme example, I may be dispositionally shy but placed in solitary confinement by an evil dictator. In this case, the disposition may remain within me, but never be given an opportunity to be expressed.³ Less dramatically, I may be a shy person and not feel shy when with my family or in each and every social situation. To suggest otherwise is to reduce shyness into a reflex, an automatically determined response to a stimulus, like blinking in bright light, or to translate a disposition to the status of either a reflex, or a law. But this is not what we usually wish to convey when we deploy the term habitus. Rather, my disposition to manifest shyness (via blushing, or feeling uncomfortable) is conditional on a variety of factors, such as my more generalised feelings of confidence and ‘wellbeing’ on a particular day, the specific actions I am engaged in, the number and composition of the people in the situation, the situation itself, and so on. That my shyness is not exercised in a specific situation does not mean that I am not a ‘shy person’, but that I am prone to shyness in certain situations and not others. It is a question of probability (which I return to below) rather than one of certitude or mechanical necessity and linked to specific ‘ecological’ contexts or social worlds. As Ryle writes, dispositional concepts and statements act as ‘inference tickets’, allowing us to expect or even (occasionally) predict certain (re)actions by certain individuals in certain circumstances (Ryle 2000, 119).⁴ Yet, there is a difference between the simple dispositions of sugar cubes, what he calls ‘single track dispositions’, and the higher-grades of dispositions surrounding human ‘second nature’, such as gregariousness (or shyness), the ‘exercises of which are indefinitely heterogeneous’ (Ryle 2000, 44).

Thus, that one may be disposed to a certain type of action or practice should not be considered in any way to be deterministic. Rather, it is a question of probability – a shy person is more likely to manifest shyness in a given situation than a non-shy person. It is the conjunction of position (thesis) and disposition (diathesis), of ‘skilled agent and pregnant world’ (Wacquant 2014a, 3), that matters. Therefore, to consider the habitus as being, in some way, inherently deterministic appears to be mistaken if habitus is considered a dispositional concept with dispositional properties. Furthermore, a key aspect of human dispositions is that they are socially acquired. As Bourdieu writes, ‘(t)o deny the existence of acquired dispositions, in the case of living beings, is to deny the existence of learning in the sense of selective, durable transformation of the body through the reinforcement or weakening of synaptic connections’ (Bourdieu 2000, 136). As such, bodily experience – the body as ‘memory pad’ – is central to habitus formation (Bourdieu 2000, 141). This also suggests that dispositions might also be unlearned or modified over time, depending on experience.

As suggested, this understanding of habitus as a dispositional concept links it to the question of power, specifically ‘power to’, another dispositional concept. Again, for Morriss (2002), and for Lukes (2005), the primary or foundational meaning for the cluster of concepts commonly collected under the rubric of ‘power’ is that of ‘power to’. Within the power literature ‘power to’ is commonly defined as a capacity for action, a dispositional concept, that is prior to the more relational concept of ‘power over’ or domination (‘A has power over B to the extent that she can get B to do something she would not otherwise do’ in Dahl’s (1957, 202–3) well-known formulation). Habitus then, I suggest, is fundamentally bound up with ‘power to’, as a capacity for action interpretation and practice, and that both are relationally and contextually constituted (Haugaard 2008). Yet, as I will argue below, habitus is also related to power over and, more fundamentally, is in-part constituted by power relations.

Thus, if we accept that habitus refers to a complex of dispositions, and is itself a dispositional concept, then many of the critical arrows miss their target. Indeed, many of these appear to rest on outdated readings of (especially) Bourdieu’s own writings, who himself often presented the concept in problematically deterministic terms in some of his earlier work, as he bent the ‘stick too far’ in the opposite direction (Bourdieu 2000, 63–64; see also Silva 2016).⁵

Habitus in the late Bourdieu: towards a processual Reading:

In recent years a number of important contributions have emerged in which the concept is given more careful treatment and attention (Silva 2016). What is remarkable in this newer work is the prominence given to the later works of Bourdieu’s oeuvre, especially Pascalian Meditations (2000). It is here that a mature conceptualization of the habitus is offered, one which is central to Wacquant’s most recent interventions (Wacquant 2014a, 2014b). In this work, Bourdieu repeatedly clarifies the concept and responds to a variety of criticisms – that the habitus is monolithic, immutable, inexorable, exclusive, and so on – which ‘scholastic’ readings reduce the notion to (Bourdieu 2000, 63–64). Against these, Bourdieu offers a fuller, more embodied and more dynamic version of habitus; one which, importantly for us here, places a renewed importance on the role of affect and emotion for the social constitution of the body. It is here that his sens practique, the practical knowledge (that too-often appeared as simply or only cognitive mental schemata, though see Lizardo 2004) becomes a fully embodied form of ‘corporeal knowledge’, derived from the exposure and openness of the body to the world. We are, he writes, echoing Marx⁶ (and, indeed, Heidegger):

disposed because we are exposed. It is because the body is exposed and endangered in the world, faced with the risk of emotion, lesion, suffering, sometimes death and therefore obliged to take the world seriously (and nothing is more serious than emotion, which touches the depths of our organic being) that it is able to acquire dispositions that are themselves an openness to the world, to the very structures of the world of which they are an incorporated form … We learn bodily. The social order inscribes itself in bodies through this permanent confrontation, which may be more or less dramatic but it is always largely marked by affectivity and, more precisely, by affective transactions with the environment (Bourdieu 2000, 140–1, original emphasis).⁷

This habitus, far from being deterministic, is a generative, adaptable engine of social action that rests on ‘affective transactions’ with the environment, through which the social order is inscribed in bodies. This dynamic understanding of habitus has been outlined in earlier work. For instance, the work of Weik (2010), in addition to highlighting the influence of Leibniz on Bourdieu as well as the resonances between their ideas, argues, against critics such as King (2000) that, rather than being deterministic or ‘a structure in an essentialist sense’ the habitus is better understood as ‘a generative mechanism or a creative force that produces things rather than merely reproducing them … a force following an individual trajectory determined by individual occasions’ (Weik 2010, 493). These approaches chime well with more recent, ‘psychosocial’ versions of the habitus (Reay 2015, see also Matthäus 2017), and point the way towards a more dynamic and processual reading of both habitus and affect in Bourdieu’s late work. While aspects of this have been discussed under the label of ‘emotional habitus’ by a number of scholars (Gould 2009; Illouz 2006), a concept problematized by others (Scheer 2012), here I wish to develop these relations in a different way.

This is not to suggest that problems do not persist with Bourdieu’s account of the habitus, even in this late work. Bourdieu remains, in the end, firmly rooted within the neo-Kantian tradition, as becomes especially evident in his late lectures on the state (Bourdieu 2014). Here, Kant himself, and his neo-Kantian inheritors – especially Cassirer, Weber, and Durkheim – are the intellectual backdrop to his epistemology, which underscores his conception of habitus. There remains an inherent dualism in this vision, one which foregrounds epistemology over ontology, which is different to the processual approach taken here. Indeed, like many relational sociologists, Bourdieu too is inattentive to the processual, even if this emerges somewhat more clearly in his later work.

The process worldview: since feeling is first

In what follows I wish to take inspiration from this late articulation of the concept, but to reframe it from an alternative ontological position. This position rests on a process ontology – what Fararro calls the ‘process world view’ – and especially the work of Alfred North Whitehead (Whitehead [1929]1978). As Rescher demonstrates, there is a lineage of process philosophy that stretches from Heraclitus to Whitehead that passes through Leibnitz, Hegel, Pierce, James, Bergson, and Dewey, and continues up to the present day (Rescher 1996; 2000, see also Mesle 2008). Perhaps most recently, in sociology, it is associated with the work of Andrew Abbott and his approach to ‘processual sociology’ (Abbott 2016) and is one component of the ‘ideational core’ of relational sociology (Dépelteau 2018a), especially the ‘trans-actional’ or ‘process-relational’ perspective of Dépelteau in particular (2018b). Recent scholarship has seen a veritable explosion of interest in the work of Whitehead. He has been championed as an early example of a ‘constructive postmodernism’ (Griffin 1993, Keller and Daniell 2002), whose cosmology may be read as a precursor to the ‘new’ quantum theory that was just coming into being towards the end of his life (Eastman and Keeton 2004; Epperson 2004). His work has influenced the development of the new, emergent field of ‘speculative realism’ within contemporary continental thought, and the post-human, Object Oriented Ontology of Harman, Bryant and others (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011). It has been directly influential on and praised by Deleuze (1993), for whom he was ‘the last great Anglo-American philosopher before Wittgenstein’s disciples spread their misty confusion’ (Deleuze 1993, 76, see also Shaviro (2009), and Halewood (2005a)). It is often via this Deleuzian line that his work appears, sometime problematically, within ‘affect theory’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Massumi 2002; see also Wetherell 2012). Within social science and social theory more generally, Whitehead is acclaimed by figures such as Latour (2008), Haraway (2008), and Butler (2012). In psychology, his work is championed by Stenner (2008), and has more recently been the subject of an extensive sociological treatment by Halewood (2011).

Whitehead was also quite widely cited by key sociological figures in post-classical period. His work was particularly influential on both Parsons and Homans and could be considered the philosophical backdrop to both theorists’ work (Fararo 2001; Weik 2004). More recently Fararo, also a Whiteheadian, makes bolder claims regarding the ‘process world view’ and the founding fathers of sociology. He argues that Mead, Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel all share an underlying process ontology (Fararo 2001). Indeed, Whitehead had a direct influence on the late Mead (1932; on which see Thomas 2016), the late Merleau-Ponty (2003; on which see Hamrick and Van der Veken 2011) and might be considered to be a (semi-detached) member of the American Pragmatists. The point is that much of classical social theorizing rested on (often implicit) process ontologies, which are again coming back to prominence, especially in relation to contemporary relational sociologies, which aim to place relations and processes, rather than substances and things, at the centre of social research (Emirbayer 1997). Yet, even here, the concept of process very often remains the ‘junior partner’ within the relational turn, assumed, subsumed, and underdeveloped in comparison to relationality.⁸

Here, I will briefly outline some key aspects of Whitehead’s approach. In his earlier work in the philosophy of science (Whitehead [1919]2004) he begins by protesting against the ‘bifurcation of nature’ which has dominated Western thinking. This is the separation of reality in to two separate spheres, namely ‘the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness’; the separation of an objective, external realm and an internal, subjective one; the warmth and redness of the fire and the molecules and electrons in combustion (Whitehead [1919]2004, 30). This dualistic splitting of nature is problematic; there is, for Whitehead, one nature and this encompasses all of existence. For the natural philosopher, he writes, ‘everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick and choose’ (Whitehead [1919]2004, 29). The redness of the sunset and the molecules and waves by which it is explained are all ‘nature’. The task is to show how they are relationally connected, not to set up two artificial and autonomous realms of reality.

This approach ‘solves’ the micro–macro problem in that all ‘things’ are viewed as constellations of relationally interconnected processes, and was explicitly designed to overcome the dominant, Cartesian dualism in philosophy. For the conventional scientists of his era, time and space were expected to provide the ‘embracing relations’ for this unity of nature. However, these familiar notions are themselves considered to be abstractions from more fundamental elements, which he here terms events, and time is understood as an abstraction from the passage of events (Whitehead [1919]2004, 34).

This eventful conception of reality becomes much more complex in Process and Reality (Whitehead [1929]1978). Within Whitehead’s wider system, then, in place of events, the more fundamental building blocks of reality become, what he terms, ‘actual occasions’ or ‘actual entities’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 18). These are ‘the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real’ (ibid). This is his ‘ontological principle’ – actual occasions are ‘complete existents’, the basic units of being. Other than actual entities there is nothing, nonentity, nothingness; ‘the rest is silence’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 43). They are ‘the ground from which all other types of existence are derivative and abstracted’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 75).⁹ These actual occasions are not and should not be taken to be substances. He writes: ‘an actual entity is a process, and is not describable in terms of a morphology of a stuff’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 41). Indeed, his entire project is to replace the substantialist ontology of most of Western philosophy with a processual one (in a somewhat similar fashion to Leibnitz and his ‘monads’). These occasions are, rather, processual units, ‘drops of experience, complex and interdependent’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 18). ‘Concrescence’ is the name given to the process of becoming that is an actual occasion. It is the ‘real internal constitution’ of the actual occasion in question (Whitehead [1929]1978, 212). Actual occasions ‘appropriate’ elements from the universe outside themselves and make them their own. This appropriation is termed a ‘prehension’ or, in its positive guise, a ‘feeling’. Actual occasions are a mode of the process of feeling the world; they are constituted by their prehensions.

Thus, the notion of feeling, of prehending, is at the very root of Whitehead’s metaphysics. Elsewhere, he writes that ‘the basis of experience is emotional. Stated more generally, the basic fact is the rise of an affective tone originating from things whose relevance is given up’ (Whitehead [1933]1967, 176). This fundamentally (what he calls) emotional character is applied to all types of experience, at all levels of existence – his metaphysics is grounded on a radical universalization of experience, characterised as ‘feeling’. This terminology is of course unusual: the flower ‘feels’ water at its roots and sunlight on its petals, and so on. We would likely use ‘affect’ where he says ‘emotional’, but not affect as it is generally understood, as passively being affected. Here, by contrast, there is a ‘reaching out’ toward the environment suggested by the notion of prehending or what he calls the ‘prehensive faculty’ of the body that is important to the model I will outline below (see also Martin 2011, 167). The key point here is that an actual entity is constituted by its feelings, its prehensions, which, at higher grades of perception may become various senses like touch, smell and so on. Importantly, the distinction between the human and the non-human is itself a matter of degree. At the higher phases of experience, ‘consciousness is no measure of the complexity of complete experience … consciousness is the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not necessarily its base’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 267).

There are, as such, degrees of agency in Whitehead’s universe, which is itself seen as ‘a creative advance into novelty’.¹⁰ Furthermore, for Whitehead, it is the ‘how’ of becoming that is key. His principle of process maintains that ‘the how an actual entity becomes constitutes what the actual entity is … (i)t’s “being” is constituted by its “becoming” (Whitehead [1929]1978, 23, original emphasis). Experience, then, understood ‘affectively’, constitutes the actual entity.

So far, so abstract. Actual entities represent the most fundamental level of analysis for Whitehead. At a macro level, this philosophy of organism is ‘concerned with the givenness of the actual world, considered as the stubborn fact which at once limits and provides opportunity for the actual occasion’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 129). At this level, an aggregation of actual entities is called a ‘nexus’. While the individual actual occasion may be considered a (speculative) metaphysical abstraction, a nexus (plural nexūs) is ‘a set of actual entities in the unity of the relatedness constituted by their prehensions of each other’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 29). This unity emerges from a process of transmutation of simple physical feelings at the micro level and gives rise to the unified feeling of a whole. When a nexus displays certain criterion of ‘social order’ it is termed a ‘society’.¹¹ We habitually treat such societies as if they were one unified actuality, such as (the span of life of) a tree, or a person, or a dog, or a chair, or a star. It is the typical level of human experience. It is in this sense that Stengers’ suggests that, for Whitehead, ‘it is always societies that we study. All is sociology’ (Stengers 2002; cited in Halewood 2011, 87; see also Fararo 2001, 66).

There are a number of things that we might take from this brief and partial encounter with Whitehead. Firstly, that process, relational becoming and perishing, are the primary attributes of existence – the really real. Secondly, that creativity, the ‘creative advance into novelty’, implies a trajectory, a ‘life history’, a route of events at the micro level of actual occasions that construct and constitute the subject (superject), but without a teleology. Thirdly, that ‘affectivity’ is the defining or primary characteristic of experience, occurring in some form at every level of existence, and that it is constitutive of an emergent superjectivity. What Whitehead offers, above all, contra Kant, is a ‘critique of pure feeling’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 113).

Thus, the Whiteheadian universe has a pulse; it is dynamic and engaged in a process of becoming. All that is solid melts into events. Furthermore, this view is fundamentally relational as well as processual. Indeed, the entire universe is for him ‘an organic extensive community’. To be an actual occasion (an event) ‘means that the entity in question is a relatum in this scheme of extensive connection’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 288–9). At every given ‘epoch’ or instant, the universe is a complex of interrelated events, which is never complete. It is ‘always passing beyond itself’ in its creative advance (ibid). While such a relational view is now prominent within contemporary sociology, here the processual nature of nature is foregrounded.

Such speculative metaphysics is clearly not for everyone.¹² Yet I hope to show below how such an ontological grounding of process is of benefit to both social theory and the conceptual lenses we use to view the social world of emotional life. There are also, I think, clear correspondences with the (late) Bourdieu and his more affective conceptualization of habitus. Whitehead, of course, does not address the notion of habitus directly. Nevertheless, I suggest, one may be derived from his writings. As we have seen, Whitehead offers a decidedly constitutive conception of reality, which applies equally well to human social reality. The subject-superject is effectively emergent from its experience of its environment – that ‘how an actual entity becomes constitutes what the actual entity is … (i)t’s ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 23, original emphasis). In the case of humans, rather than speaking of actual entities, we are to speak of ‘societies’ – when a nexus exhibits ‘social order’, it is called a ‘society’. This social order is derived from a ‘common element of form’ shared by its constituent occasions whose prehensions impose a ‘condition of reproduction’. When the members of the society enjoy, what he calls, a ‘genetic relatedness’, this gives rise to a serial ordering. He writes that ‘the nexus forms a single line of inheritance of its defining characteristic. Such a nexus is called an ‘enduring object’. It might have been termed a person in the legal sense of that term … The nexus ‘sustains a character’ and this is one of the meanings of the Latin term persona’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 34–5, Whitehead [1933]1967, 201-8). Thus, the human being is such a society for Whitehead, and fundamentally, an embodied one. It is by ‘reason of the body that, with its miracle of order, that the treasures of the past environment are poured into the living occasion’ (Whitehead [1929]1978, 339). The implication is that, here too, at the macro-level, how a body becomes constitutes what a person is.

Elsewhere, the ‘genetic character’, which I consider to be suggestive of habitus, is the key to endurance for higher organisms. He writes:

Owing to the delicate organization of the body, there is a returned influence, an inheritance of character derived from the presiding occasion and modifying the subsequent occasions through the rest of the body. We must remember the extreme generality of the notion of an enduring object – a genetic character inherited through a historic route of actual occasions … Thus the question as to whether to call an enduring object a transition of matter or of character is very much a verbal question as to where you draw the line … Thus in an animal body the presiding occasion … is the final node, or intersection, of a complex structure of many enduring objects. Such a structure pervades the human body. The harmonised relations of the parts of the body constitute this wealth of inheritance into a harmony of contrasts, issuing into intensity of experience … The endurance of the mind is only one more example of the general principle on which the body is constructed (Whitehead [1929]1978, 109, emphasis added).

I wish to suggest that the habitus is the means (or the process) by which the past – past experience – is transmitted and relative endurance is maintained in the context of process and flux. That is, that the inherited ‘social order’ of events that comprise the society of the human body is a dynamic, dispositional structure, which is itself structured by (affective) experience. In other words, that Whitehead in fact has a concept of habitus in all but name, which, like other approaches, is considered as an organization of the body; this habitus is of a genetic (which is to say, generative) character and a complex structure. This is not to conceive of the habitus in terms of a substance, or as an unchanging ‘ghost in the machine’. Nor is such a position suggestive of determination – life, for Whitehead, is always and everywhere the bid for freedom and a creative advance into novelty. Rather, this habitus itself should be considered in processual terms; as a locus of relationally-constituted relatively enduring stability, which itself undergoes change – a ‘structured flux’, to use Elias’ words (Elias, 1987: 341); a transmission from past experience to future practice. The process is on-going and iterative. Such an ontological position on habitus chimes well with Bourdieu’s late conceptualization of the concept, but also shares similarities with Seyfert’s theory of ‘social affect’, which joins a Spinozist account of the body with Guyau’s approach to affective interactions (Seyfert 2012). The key difference again is the central role and account of process that forms the ontological ground here and, from this perspective, the stubborn substantialism in the Spinozist approach; what Whitehead (and, indeed, Elias) described as the ‘subject-predicate forms of thought’ (Whitehead, Griffin, and Sherburne 1978, 7).

Affective transactions and the constitution of habitus:

Combining these arguments we may be able to offer a tentative model of the process of habitus formation, from a process-relational view. The theoretical argument is that habitus, as embodied system of dispositions or tendencies, is primarily constituted by affectivity or, more precisely, via ‘affective transactions’ with the environment. In other words, that there is a genuine ‘ontological complicity’ between the organism and the environment, or body and world – a formative en-folding or weaving together that is processual, dynamic, and primarily affective. Processual corporeal historicity is the ground of social practice, and the body, processually conceived, is the ontological site of the social. Power remains a central element of these transactions, and power over relations are important for the constitution of habitus, as power is fundamental to the construction, maintenance, and transformation of the symbolic forms that legitimize emotional practice. These transactions co-constitute or ‘key’ the affective tone of the situation that give rise to a situated occasion of emotional practice in a specific relational setting, but the ‘tone’ or character of that emotional practice is proleptically structured by the habitus, on the basis on an individual’s ‘relational becoming’ – that is, the ‘life history’ of affective transactions as embodied (emotional) disposition. It is these affective transactions which gives rise to emotion as a bodily (and usually evaluative) response (‘emovere’, a ‘moving out’) to that affective experience – emotions here are considered to be practices, embodied actions, grounded in the system of dispositions (Scheer 2012; Wetherell 2012). Emotions exist in what Abbott (2016) calls the ‘thick present’ – the past, as such, does not exit – but are structured by past experience, embodied as emotional dispositions or habitus and poured into the living occasion. So, while there may be (and usually is) some correspondence in the emotions of different individuals situated ostensibly in the ‘same’ relational-environmental situation, there may also be a large degree of variance in emotional disposition. One may be more-or-less in or out of ‘key’ with the prevailing affective tone, and not only for hysteretic reasons (such as ‘social aging’), or because of class position, but also because of the dynamic (and ongoing) (re)constitution of the individual’s habitus in its concrete and particular historicity.

Thus, despite the criticisms usually levelled, habitus change is a perennial part of the social process. This is acknowledged by Bourdieu directly when he writes that: ‘Habitus change constantly in response to new experiences. Dispositions are subject to a kind of permanent revision, but one which is never radical because it works on the basis of the premises established in the previous state. They are characterized by a combination of constancy and variation which varies according to the individual and his degree of flexibility or rigidity’ (Bourdieu 2000, 161). Yet, despite his best efforts, as mentioned earlier, there are lingering dualisms in Bourdieu’s work. While aspects of these, such as the nature/society bifurcation, have been pointed out by Latour (2007) (under the influence of both Whitehead and Tarde), there are sustained inconsistencies in the manner in which the concept of habitus is presented (cognitive schema/embodied disposition), and the many antinomies that he battled against and wished to conjoin, he took to be antinomies. His focus on principles of classification, perception, of vision and division that are bound up with the habitus – the structuring structures – retain a more-or-less explicit neo-Kantianism in much of his analysis, not least, because of the formative influence that both Cassirer, and Durkheim had on his thinking (see Bourdieu 2014, 164; also 2000, 175).

Yet, there is a potential resonance between the processual reading offered here with the recent probabilistic reframing of the late Bourdieu in the work of Strand and Lizardo (2022). In an important intervention, these authors argue that Bourdieu had what amounts to a ‘probabilistic turn’ in the 1970s based on his reading of Weber, and especially Weber’s (until recently, almost entirely ignored) notion of ‘objective probability’, which is integral to his conceptualization of action (Strand and Lizardo 2022, 412). In this view, learned, internalized, socialized probability that is generative of the dispositions of the habitus (and the expectations, interest, and anticipations it produces) is related to the ‘objective probability’ (or ‘Chance’) operating within specific fields. Time, and the experience of time, is central to this probabilism. This is especially clear, again, in Pascalian Meditations, where the probabilism that these authors correctly identify comes closest to the processual ontology advocated for here. Practice is now viewed as ‘temporalization’ – ‘practice is not in time but makes time’ (Bourdieu 2000, 206 original emphasis). Drawing on Husserl in particular, Bourdieu frames his discussion of the illusio (or subjective interest in the social game, manifesting as expectation or hope) and lusiones (or chance or objective probability in the world) in terms of ‘presentiation-depresentiation’ and the agent’s immersion in the ‘imminent forth-coming’ of the world as experienced in the present (Bourdieu 2000, 207). Interestingly, Husserl’s notion of ‘protention’ as the ‘prereflexive aiming at a forth-coming which offers itself as a quasi-present in the visible’, which is distinct from a project but nevertheless involves a projection or anticipation of the future, both evokes the Whiteheadian notion of ‘prehension’ discussed earlier, and is paradigmatically illustrated (in the extreme) by the experience of emotion (e.g. the panic and fear felt at the sight of an onrushing car) (Bourdieu 2000, 208).¹³ But Bourdieu could have easily turned to Whitehead here, for whom ‘(t)temporalization is realisation’ (Whitehead, [1925]1948, p.129), and where the potentialities of habitus become the actualities of practice. And there is again the lingering dualism, a bifurcated ‘social’ acting, albeit dynamically, on an abstract individual. Thus, processualism is only ever hinted at but never really developed. The dualisms remain, and the approach taken here, re-placing habitus within a deep process ontology, aims to overcome these dualisms. Affect, then, or ‘affective transactions’ mark the experiential interpenetration of body and world. There is a key Whiteheadian twist on this that should be underscored. The body is not or not only affected (as in ‘affectus’ for Spinoza, or ‘suffering’ for Dewey), but rather affectively experiences or affectively ‘prehends’ the environment. Indeed, it is important to stress here that the body is not in nature, it is or is of nature (there is one nature – and we must resist its bifurcation). The division between the ‘body’ and ‘nature’ is itself porous and fuzzy – as we lose and gain molecules, for instance, it is difficult to say where the body ends, and nature begins (Whitehead [1938]1985, 21). Moreover, this active aspect to affective experience here that is missing in other accounts, which is why affective transactions – in the sense that Dewey and Bentley (1949) and Emirbayer (1997) suggest it – better captures the interpenetrative process of habitus (re)formation than vague invocations of affect.¹⁴

This actively affective experience at the centre of the process model here clearly suggests the importance of the (‘society’ that is the) living, embodied individual, and the historical route of occasions that constitute its relational becoming. The key feature of animal bodies for Whitehead is their capacity for feeling and expression. He writes: ‘the human body is that region of the world which is the primary field of human expression’ (Whitehead [1938]1985, 23) – it ‘feels’ (prehends), and ‘expresses’. Affect is the primary manner in which the human body feels, emotion is a key means of human expression, and this is organized or structured by habitus. The relationship between the habitus, emotion, and power is of paramount importance. The social ‘environment’ that both Whitehead and Bourdieu allude to consists of relations of power, which give rise to a cluster of embodied dispositions and capacities for action, or ‘power to’. It is such a capacity that is ‘transmitted’ from the past occasion in to the present one, and this capacity it itself mutable and dynamic. However, as I argued elsewhere (Heaney 2011), what should not be omitted from this model is that these very relations of power are themselves characterized by emotionality; both in the lived and embodied relational situation, and within specific cultural contexts. Thus, I suggest, it is both emotions and power that give rise to this active organization of the body, which in turn give rise to our power (capacity) to act (or not to act), which is the basis of social practice. Yet, the materiality of such affective transactions should not occlude the importance of the symbolic. Bodies and habitus are not constituted in general, but in specific social, cultural and historical contexts that make up a human environment. And it is here that emotional culture – whether conceived as ‘emotional’ (Reddy 2001) or ‘affective’ (von Scheve 2018) regimes – becomes vital to the understanding of the role of power in the constitution of emotional life and practice. Indeed, ‘affective regime’ as von Scheve describes it is somewhat preferred to Reddy’s ‘emotional regime’, but both are useful as they capture the importance of power for the creation of emotional cultures – a normative affective order, constructed, maintained, and ultimately transformed via changing emotion-power dynamics within society.

Yet, such concepts would need to be reconfigured to make them more amenable to the processual ontology suggested here. Integrating the material and the symbolic within the process world view, and foregrounding this transactional approach means that we are ‘always already at the collective or situational level’ when the habitus is viewed in the way outlined here (Emirbayer and Goldberg 2005, 490). The social world is dynamically patterned through time – it is eventful, but has its own trajectory or life history – and the cultural context is differentially experienced by individuals, with their own life history, based on place, time, social positioning, and so on. Some forms of life and modes of becoming are normatively and symbolically legitimized, which affects the transactions of people in different ways. The habitus, then, processually conceived, stands at the centre of affective-emotional dynamics, and might help to integrate these often conflicting perspectives.

Conclusion: the real is processual

This paper began with a question concerning how best to account for and explain emotional life. The answer here suggests that re-placing a dispositional theory of social action, centred on the concept of habitus, within a fundamentally dynamic and processual, as well as relational, ontology, promotes conceptual clarity and allows us to reconsider the constitution and reconstitution of emotional bodies. At the centre of this are affective transactions – the lived, dynamic, and interpenetrative processes through which the organism and world experience each other. This is an ontological form of affective (and aesthetic) experience – a prehensive unity of qualitative experiential events similar to Erlebnis, which produces emotion as a culturally-mediated and reactive practice. Habitus, as relatively-enduring object, is at the centre of this transmission of affective experience through the route of actual occasions that is the lineage of the individual human body – ‘history’ embodied, generating practice, not deterministically, but probabilistically, given culture, context, and the other dynamic aspects of the ever-changing environment. Emotional life must be understood from the perspective of this entangled relational becoming.

There are a number of implications suggest by this approach for social theory and social research more generally. Taking process seriously requires a fundamental rethinking of many of our concepts. As Abbott (2016) argues, following Whitehead, the world is remaking itself instant by instant, the (‘thick’) present is all that exits, and corporeal individuals today mostly outlive the social structures that they were born into. Stability, such as the apparent patterning of emotional life, is what is most in need of explanation given such a context. This also reasserts the importance of the (cluster of events we call the) individual, and the ‘individual historicality’ of the body (and its ‘encoding’) through time via memory and embodied dispositions, born of affective experience – though expressly not in a methodologically individualist manner. Indeed, future work would hope to make this process ontology amenable to sociological enquiry. In other words, and pace Kivinen and Piiroinen (2006), that we can make an, albeit fallible and provisional, social ontology explicit, without reducing sociology to philosophy. The model here aims to do just that, and to overcome problems with ontology, with affect and emotion, with power, and with habitus, by providing an integrative approach with which to study constitution of emotional habitus, from the perspective of processualism. As Whitehead writes ‘ … how superficial are our controversies on sociological theory apart from some more fundamental determination of what we are talking about’ (Whitehead [1933] 1967, 49).

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to a good number of colleagues who have read aspect of this work in earlier drafts, and to the reviewers for their attention and constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan G. Heaney

Jonathan G. Heaney is a lecturer in sociology in the School of Social Science, Education and Social Work, and a Fellow of The Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast. He has written on power and emotions, emotions and nationalism, and his ongoing work combines theoretical work on state power and emotions (the ‘emotional state), a critique of dominant approaches to nationalism from an emotions and embodiment perspective (‘embodied nationalism’), as well as more empirical analyses of the deployment of emotions as a new form of capital or power within political fields (‘emotional capital’). He is a member and former Co-ordinator of the European Sociological Association’s Research Network on Emotion (RN11), and a member of the Sociological Association of Ireland.

Notes

1 By using ‘emotional life’ here I wish to include both the affective experiencing and interpretation of the world, as well as the dispositional-emotional response to the world that are both conditioned by culture and social position. The term is taken from Bourdieu himself and his abandoned PhD thesis (see note seven below and Bourdieu 2008a, 59–60).

2 There may be linguistic difficulties to be accounted for here. In his earlier work Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), in relation to the earlier definition, Bourdieu includes a more elaborate footnote on the concept of dispositions, which, he says, has three distinct meanings. It can express, ‘the result of an organizing action’, or outcomes approximating to ‘structure’; a ‘way of being, a habitual state (particularly of the body)’ and ‘in particularly, a predisposition, a tendency, a propensity or inclination’ (Bourdieu 1977, 214). However, as Jenkins has noted, these are a ‘not an uncontradictory cluster of meanings’ (Jenkins 1992, 76). Indeed, the first designation is a clear case of the exercise fallacy, defining dispositions with their outcomes or results (of which, more below). However, as the translator of this work notes in this very footnote, the ‘semantic cluster of disposition’ is wider in French than in English, but the words offered are a good approximation (Bourdieu 1977, 214). The challenges and complexities of translation are worth bearing in mind, particularly for readers in English.

3 This example also raises the question of change in dispositions over time. I might be imprisoned as a shy person but could potentially lose that disposition over time and emerge as not shy when I am released.

4 He writes that ‘(t)o possess a dispositional property is not to be in a particular state, or to undergo a particular change, when a particular condition is realised. The same is true about specifically human dispositions such as qualities of character (Ryle 2000, 43).

5 There are, in a sense, good reasons for why he did this, some of which he acknowledges himself (Bourdieu 2000, 63–64). We have to consider the ‘space of possibilities in relation to which a concept was developed’, which would better illuminate the ‘theoretical function’, and the possible exaggerations, that attend to the work of conceptualization (Bourdieu 2000, 63). For Bourdieu, excesses of both structuralism and subjectivity in French academia in part account for his earlier exaggerations.

6 The human being ‘as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being, and because he experiences this suffering (Leiden), he is also a passionate being (Leidenschaftliches). Passion is man’s essential power vigorously striving to attain its object’ (Marx [1844]1992, 118).

7 That such mention of emotionality is rare is itself remarkable (or perhaps explicable) given that, prior to his ‘conversion’ to sociology, Bourdieu’s primary philosophical interest was in the phenomenology of emotions (Bourdieu 2008a, 59–60, 2008b, 2–3). This unfinished PhD thesis, ‘The Temporal Structures of Emotional Life’ was being supervised by Canguilhem and is also mentioned in the ‘grey literature’ (1955) of the HyperBourdieu online bibliography (see also Bourdieu 1990, 5–7).

8 This of course raises the question of Elias, perhaps the most explicitly processual sociologist of the twentieth century. Most of us, he suggests, are ‘still trapped by a powerful conceptual heritage which forces people to represent in static terms sets of events that that can be reorganized and understood only if they are perceived as parts or aspects of processes, as events in a condition of structured flux’ (Elias 1987, 341). It is indeed likely that Elias had read Whitehead and, as Kilminster notes, while this and other ‘fundamental ontology’ may have provided some stimulus for Elias’s work, his rejection of his erstwhile discipline (Elias did his D.Phil. in philosophy under the neo-Kantian Hönigswald which ended in acrimony) was complete. Sociology replaces philosophy for Elias, and the abstraction and speculations of Whitehead, Heidegger, Cassirer and others were to be overcome in favour of a concrete and testable social science (Kilminster 2007).

9 So, for instance, for Whitehead, god is an (albeit exceptional) actual entity, and so is ‘the most trivial puff of existence in far off empty space’ (Whitehead [1919]1978, 18).

10 It is interesting to note that the term ‘creativity’ was apparently coined by Whitehead himself, and as recently as 1927 (see Halewood 2011, 35).

11 There are many types of society, at various levels of complexity, such as corpuscular, structured etc.

12 Popper, for instance, considered the book a prime example of Neo-Hegalian irrationalism. He writes: ‘I just do not understand what its author wished to convey. Very likely this is my fault and not his. I do not belong to the number of the elect, and I fear that many others are in the same position’ (Popper [1945]2002, 520–26). He leaves it to the reader to judge the appropriateness of Kant’s comments on metaphysics, who could only ‘look with repugnance and something like hate upon the puffed-up pretentiousness of these volumes filled with wisdom’ (Popper ibid).

13 In what is perhaps his most processual description, he writes that: ‘Habitus is that presence of the past in the present which makes possible the presence in the present of the forth-coming … habitus combines in a single aim a past and a forth-coming neither of which is posited as such. The already-present forth-coming can be read in the present only on the basis of a past that is itself never aimed at as such (habitus as incorporated acquisition being the presence of the past – or to the past – and not memory of the past) (Bourdieu 2000, 210', see also Haugaard et al., 2021).

14 In this, the approach advocated here is similar to the ‘deep transactional’ approach of relational sociologist Dépelteau (2015), but more explicitly Whiteheadian.