The Structural Conditions of Democratic Feeling

• In Event: Structure in Motion

Abstract

Theories of affect in the humanities and social sciences often stress the ways that affects are shared amongst collectives. Emotions, feelings, orientations, impulses, and experiences have a unique way of traveling through and uniting groups, while simultaneously breaking down the physical and mental barriers between people often presumed by liberal individualists. While this insight from the affective turn is intuitively true, the mechanism by which these affects unite collectives is often un- or poorly-explained. This severely limits the analytical and normative utility of affect theory: not only do we have little purchase on how and why affective ties bind some and not others (or even what “binding” might mean in this case), but we also have little sense of the distinction between desirable affective unities (for example, the affective unities that promote democratic empowerment) and undesirable affective unities (for example, the affective unities underlying xenophobic populism).

This paper attempts to address these analytical and normative limitations. It begins by surveying affect theorists’ treatments of the possible mechanisms underlying collective feelings, distinguishing between biological, social, and mystical accounts of affective unity. It then builds on these treatments to develop a unified theory of collective affects through Raymond Williams’ understanding of “structures of feeling.” It argues that social structures are the material and discursive conditions for affective connections, but that the nature of these structures determines affect's political life. It then concludes by drawing on Hannah Arendt and and Hannah Pitkin’s accounts of the empowering and problematic implications of affective unities and mass politics for popular democratic empowerment.

Author

• Callum Ingram, University of Nevada Reno