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In this article I propose a relational understanding of emotions which I believe overcomes many of the dualisms in previous sociological attempts to understand this realm of social life. I also suggest that it is rare in such studies for the object under scrutiny to be defined, and attempt to answer the question of what it is we are exploring when we approach emotions. The view is put forward of emotions as complexes rather than things, ones that are multi-dimensional in their composition: they only arise within relationships, but they have a corporeal, embodied aspect as well as a socio-cultural one. They are constituted by techniques of the body learned within a social habitus, which produces emotional dispositions that may manifest themselves in particular situations. Furthermore, these techniques of the body are part of the power relations that play an important part in the production and regulation of emotion. Using examples of emotions like love and aggression, I argue my central thesis - that emotions are not expressions of inner processes, but are modes of communication within relationships and interdependencies.
This article explores how the concept of agency in social theory changes when it is conceptualised as a relational rather than an individual phenomenon. I begin with a critique of the structure/agency debate, particularly of how this emerges in the critical realist approach to agency typified by Margaret Archer. It is argued that this approach, and the critical realist version of relational sociology that has grown from it, reifies social relations as a third entity to which agents have a cognitive, reflexive
In this chapter I argue that emotions are experienced primarily as structures of feeling which give meaning to relational experience.These feelingscan be articulated through speech genres or discourses which give them form as specific emotions that have a place in the emotional vocabulary of a culture. Thus, I seek to distinguish between feeling and thought and attempt to trace the complex process through which feelings become emotions. This involves a reconsideration of the relation between body and thought, and the material and the ideal, as it appears in the work of various thinkers. Central to this is the role of image-schemata (Johnson, 1987) that mediate between the recurring relational patterns of bodily activity in the world, which makes experience meaningful, and the symbolic structures of the social group that can be used to articulate bodily feelings metaphorically. Feelings and emotions, then, while in a complex relationship to one another, are not always identical: they can in fact diverge, giving rise to the ambiguous nature of much emotional experience. Finally, all of this is considered in the light of power relations and the way that emotional dynamics play a central role in power.Anglo-Saxons who are uncomfortable with the idea that feelings and emotions are the outward signs of precise and complex algorithms usually have to be told that these matters, the relationship between the self and others, and the relationship between self and environment, are, in fact, the subject matter of what are called 'feelings'-love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc. It is unfortunate that these abstractions referring to patterns of relationship have received names, which are usually handled in ways that assume that the 'feelings' are mainly characterized by quantity rather than by precise pattern. This is one of the nonsensical contributions of psychology to a distorted epistemology (Bateson, 1973: 113).What Bateson has to say above is perhaps still true today nearly thirty years after his words were published: that when Anglo-Saxons think of the emotions they tend to think in terms of quantity or substance rather than about patterns of relationship. We tend to believe that our anger, envy, or grief is like an object contained inside us that we can reflect upon and work with. And yet when one thinks about it more analytically, emotions only have sense and meaning in the context of relations to other bodies, both human and non-human. When we get angry it is usually because another person or some group of people have denied
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