A Poststructuralist Approach to Political Emotions and the Question of Agency
Creators: name: Akkaraca Kose, Melike
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: Question of Agency
Emotions
Poststructuralist methdology
Discourse analysis

description: Draft paper presented at the Conference on Agency and Subjectivity: Rethinking Poststructuralism, Faculty of Philosophy, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, 26<sup>th</sup> January 2022. https://www.ucm.es/agencysubjectivityconference/ This paper was prepared as a part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No.896311 <strong>A post-structuralist approach to political emotions and the question of agency</strong> This paper discusses if one can study the emotions in politics within the framework of the post-structural discourse theory (PDT – specifically the Essex School) in an ontologically and epistemologically compatible way. While there is a growing literature which adopts PDT for politics and policy analysis, it comes with its own unique theoretical challenges, one of which is certainly the issue of agency and subjectivity. Furthermore, putting emotions into the center of political discourse analysis amplifies the epistemological problem since the common view in the literature is that emotions or affect in general are deeply subjective in Cartesian sense and extra-discursive. PDT argues that the human subject is positioned within language and discourse as a place from which it can speak and act. However, it rejects to make a choice between conceptions of subjectivity either as a passive effect of structures or as an active self-determination and proposes a dynamic account of the relationship between structure and agency. In moments of crisis and dislocation, subjects become active agents when they can no longer ‘go on’ in performing their normal practices and regular routines and in return, they identify with new objects, discourses or ideologies. This methodologically opens the prospect of choice and freedom for the subject enabling the empirical analysis to take into account decisions, choices and interpretations made by the political subjects[1]. Furthermore, affects and passions come to the fore in those moments of agency but they also play a significant role in accounting for the persistence of sedimented structures, as they foreground the enjoyment subjects procure from their identifications. PDT (dis)solves the epistemological question concerning the emotions as follows: While affects and bodily enjoyments arise within discourse, they can be observed only indirectly in the form of identities, practices and significations they bring into being and which materialize them[2]. Thus, affect is non-discursive in itself but it can be translated into discourse in a positive and substantive manner – for instance as emotions or fantasies.[3] The view that the emotions are ‘containers’ which channel affects into discursive phenomena for social circulation of affect[4] and therefore, that they are subject to discursive construction and re-construction processes in society and politics has a great potential to deal with both the ‘artificial’ contradictions between the agency and subjectivity, and the epistemological concerns about the ‘collective emotions’. [1] Glynos, Jason, and David Howarth. “Structure, Agency and Power in Political Analysis: Beyond Contextualised Self-Interpretations.” Political Studies Review 6, no. 2 (May 2008): 155–69. [2] Laclau, E. (2004) ‘Reply’, in S. Critchley and O. Marchart (eds) Laclau: A Critical Reader, London: Routledge. [3] Eric Van Rythoven and Ty Solomon. Encounters between affect and emotion: Studying order and disorder in international politics [4] Eberle, Jakub, and Jan Daniel. “‘Putin, You Suck’: Affective Sticking Points in the Czech Narrative on ‘Russian Hybrid Warfare’: Affective Sticking Points in the RHW Narrative.” Political Psychology, June 28, 2019. Eberle, Jakub, and Vladimír Handl. “Ontological Security, Civilian Power, and German Foreign Policy Toward Russia.” Foreign Policy Analysis, November 27, 2018.
description: Draft Paper