Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding

by Margaret Wetherell

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in affect and emotion. Scholars want to discover how people are moved, and understand embodied social action, feelings and passions. How do social formations ′grab′ people? How do roller coasters of contempt, patriotism, hate and euphoria power public life? This book systematically reviews research on affect and emotion in neuroscience, social psychology, sociology, and political science. It develops a critique of the ′turn to affect′ and argues for an approach based on affective practice. It provides new analyses to explain how affect travels, settles, circulates and coalesces.

Genres: Research, Psychology

192 pages, ebook

First published February 13, 2012

Reviews

[John Carter McKnight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Affect - or the expression of emotion - has been the subject of a lot of social science research. Unfortunately, much of it is vague, undefined, handwavey or downright woowoo. Wetherell clears through the mess, slicing through previous scholars' arguments, assembling the rigorous bits, critiquing work in a broad range of related sub-disciplines from neuroscience to social psychology.

Wetherell is a deft critic and a clear, logical thinker. Yet, the book is missing a final chapter in which she puts forth a coherent theoretical and methodological approach to affect of her own, which is what costs this book its fifth star for me. One is left with a clear sense of the shortcomings of others' work, but without a guide to how to apply a coherent theory of affect to a research problem. That book apparently is yet to be written, but in the meantime, I've got a forest of sticky tabs in this book as reminders of what not to do.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't tell if Wetherell's misreadings (or totally unnuanced readings) of Massumi's Parables for the Virtual are intentional or not. I'm quite critical of the deluzian thread in ontological approaches to affect (such as Massumi's), but in our critiques let's be sure not to misrepresent other people's intellectual work. Other examples abound, but just one to demonstrate the most egregious misrepresentation:

"Affect, in Massumi's account and in NRT, may occur beyond consciousness but this does not mean that it is asocial." (Whetherell 58)

"Intensity [Massumi's term for affect] is asocial, but not presocial—it includes social elements but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of functioning and combines them according to a different logic." (Massumi 30).

Be sure to have primary texts on hand when reading this one.....

Also missing from this book is an examination of approaches to affect coming out of queer studies, performance studies, and queer of color critique. Where are references to Muñoz, Reddy, Love, Flatley, Gould, Ferguson, Nyong'o, Cheng, Doyle, Ngai, Cvetkovich, Kazanjian, Eng...? the only attention to queer of color scholarship is Ahmed's work in phenomenology, and even then (in just a few pages), only because of the methodological approach is legible to social scientists like Wetherell.

Social science texts like this reify the supremacy of its own epistemologies to its own detriment, leaving the rest of the humanities out to dry. The author's disgust for the last twenty to thirty years of work in cultural studies is apparent, yet no where do the actually deal with what cultural studies actual is. Lolz

Also, where is the last chapter of this book? It ends as if Wetherell grew tired of repeating the same thing over and over. That same thing being her superior formulation of the affective-discursive. For the better, I don't think I could handle a whole other chapter of that.

[Kathrina · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thorough and critical examination of current research in the body/mind relation and the circulation of affect through physical bodies and social bodies. Neurobiology, psychoanalysis, cultural politics all contribute to the investigation, but stops short of textual affect. Feels like it's missing a last chapter.

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

See review on my blog: https://serendipbits.wordpress.com/20...

[Yassir Morsi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read; Wetherell’s Affect and Emotion is a comprehensive investigation into the ways feelings are woven into social life; moving from abstract definitions to concrete practices,

The start of the books stakes out a middle path between reductive emotion psychology and social constructivist or untethered theories of discourses by defining “affective practice”; this concept helps explain the interlocking flows of body, discourse, history, and context through which affect emerges.

The body itself is a set of fleeting physiological events (blushes, heartrate etc) belong to ongoing flows

Wetherell also critiques approaches that treat affect either as ineffable “excess” or purely representational, and resurrects the concept of “emotives”: speech acts and gestures that bind inner feeling to collective norms.

In the end, across the seven chapters, Wetherell argues affect is neither private feeling nor raw force, but a relational practice that circulates through bodies, meanings, institutions, and media

[Melvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

great overview of affect studies across the disciplines. quite theoretically dense, but I think I managed to pull out useful tidbits to elaborate the concept of affective practice. I would have liked more methodological guidance on how to operationalize affective practice, however

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]