Beyond the deliberative subject? Problems of theory, method and critique in the turn to emotion and affect

Abstract

This article explores some of the issues for policy scholars arising from the increasing attention paid to ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ in contemporary social science. One such issue is in the focus placed on detailed ethnographic methods and interpretive forms of analysis, and the problem this raises for drawing out connections to changing regimes of governing and wider shifts in policy and politics. A second lies in the modernist traditions of policy studies, traditions which privilege the rational actor and deliberative subject. This article uses my own recent research to tease out some issues of method and of theory in conducting a research project that seeks to connect individual working lives to some of the major cultural and social change in Britain over the last 60 years. The article begins by outlining the project and some of the issues raised in interpreting ‘emotion’, then goes on to show how I tried to link ethnographic data to wider questions of policy and power. The final section offers two different critical repertoires that have the capacity to link emotions and emotion work to analysis of shifting governmentalities and material conditions of work. Throughout my aim is to enhance the possibility of interdisciplinary conversations by introducing concepts and analytical framings from beyond the traditions of policy studies.

Keywords:

• emotion and affect
• ethnographic methods
• interpretive analysis
• changing regimes of governing

Acknowledgements

Some of the material in this paper originally appeared in J. Newman, Working the Spaces of Power: Activism, Neoliberalism and Gendered Labour (Bloomsbury, 2012).

Notes

1. The deliberative subject has of course been the focus of different disciplinary interventions, not all of which conform to a modernist tradition: see for example Fischer (2003), Young (1990). However within mainstream public policy, deliberation tends to be viewed as a means of reconciling interests between subjects using rational argument and debate. Interests are considered to be a property of the individual self rather than as socially constituted, and although they may be transformed – in part – through communicative practices, this is a product of rational argument rather than a reflection of the multiplicity of identity associated with a post structural understanding of selfhood.

2. ESRC seminar on Third Party Governance, De Montford University, 12–13 March 2012.