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DOI: 10.1177/0170840617709307 www.egosnet.org/os
Moving Institutional Logics
Forward: Emotion and
Meaningful Material Practice
Roger Friedland
Department of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University, USA
Abstract
Institutional theory, and the institutional logics approach in particular, lacks the feelings that produce, sustain and disrupt institutional practice. This is due in part to rational, instrumental understandings of the individual in practice, and in part to the cognitive and linguistic understanding of that practice, sustained by classification, qualification and belief. Emotion, a joining of language and bodily affect, is ready at hand for institutional theory. There is increasing recognition that emotion is a powerful device for institutionalization and de-institutionalization. In this essay, I consider emotion’s position in institutional theory and how we might position it in an institutional logics approach. I will argue that emotion not only mediates institutions, but can itself be institutional.
Keywords
Emotion, affect, institutional logic, institutional theory, material practice, substance, value
Institutional theory, and the institutional logics approach in particular, lacks feeling, the passions and fears that produce, sustain and disrupt institutional practice (Friedland, Mohr, Roose, & Gardinali, 2014b; Voronov, 2014; Voronov & Vince, 2012). This is due in part to rational, instru-mental understandings of the individual in practice, and in part to the cognitive and linguistic understanding of that practice, sustained by classification, qualification and belief. Emotion, a joining of language and bodily affect, is ready at hand for institutional theory. There is increasing recognition that emotion is integral to institutionalization and de-institutionalization. In this essay, I consider how emotion has been positioned in institutional theory and how we might position it in an institutional logics approach. I will argue that emotion not only mediates the formation and reproduction of institutions, but is sometimes itself institutional.
Feeling Our Way Back to the Future
Institutional theory, as various scholars have pointed out, has been cognitive in its orientation. Lawrence and Suddaby, who pioneered the “institutional work” approach, explicitly suggest that
Corresponding author:
Roger Friedland, New York University, 239 Greene St, New York, CA 10003, USA. Email: [email protected]
we look to cognitive, as opposed to affective, elements in accounting for practical action (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006, p. 218). In the institutional logics approach, Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury emphasize “vocabularies of practice” and modular “categorical elements” that can be decomposed and transposed (Thornton et al., 2012). Institutional logics, they argue, focus attention and thereby activate schema of action, identities and goals which both provide accessible “knowledge struc-tures” through which situations “congruent” with those structures are interpreted and social inter-action is ordered such that these become the premises of decision-making at both the micro and macro levels (Thornton et al., 2012, pp. 83–91, 93–95). In their approach neither identities, nor goals, which necessarily contain evaluative elements, have any emotional content, shaping action primarily through cognition (pp. 86–87). Changing situations offer “opportunities for cognitive change” (p. 100). While we know that emotions effectively focus attention, for Thornton et al. institutional logics operate through a semantic register, through “specialized vocabularies” that condition decision- and sense-making (2012, p. 96). Although they recognize in passing that “emo-tional energy” is an element powering the social interactions that generate the common meaning of a situation, and variable identification with an identity and a logic is a critical determinant not only of which logics prevail and the extent to which they depend on regulative and normative pressures, emotion is not itself theorized as part of their micro-foundations of an institutional logic. “The effects of institutional logics are mediated through the cognition of social actors interacting with other social actors in negotiation and cooperation” (Thornton et al., 2012, p. 102).
Given their critique of the neglect of persons and the social negotiation of meaning in institu-tional logics approaches, one would expect emotion to be theoretically salient in the “inhabited institutions” approach (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006). It is not. While Hallett and Ventresca are quite correct that “institutions” are often deployed as abstract uniforms “ready to wear,” the inhabited approach they outline specifies neither the role of emotion in persons’ readiness to wear it, nor in whom one is when so dressed.
Hallett and Ventresca exemplify their approach through an insightful and subtle re-reading of Gouldner’s account of the displacement of personalistic, trust-based management by a new rational-ized, impersonal managerial regime that used sanctions to enforce compliance with rules in a gyp-sum mine (Gouldner, 1954). Their account is, in fact, suffused with feeling. The movement from informal to formal authority, from worker autonomy to bureaucratic rule, was based both on a movement from craft to industrial understandings of work, and on a shift from supervisors who shared a social life with workers outside the mine towards managers who did not. The actual forms of bureaucracy—whether ignored ritual forms, forms mutually accepted by managers and workers, or conventions enforced by sanctions—depended on social interactions in the mine itself. There was no invariant bureaucratic logic; each system had its own pathway to comparable productivities.
Hallett and Ventresca argue that it is through “social interactions” that institutions are “inhab-ited,” “infused with meaning” and different types of bureaucracy are “produced” (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006, p. 226). Yes, but: the social interactions that condition the actual operation of bureaucratic forms are not institutionally neutral either. They depend on what value is at stake and are grounded not only in the positionality of workers and managers within the firm, but in other institutional logics. The value of life, in terms of mine safety regulations, is tied to “representative bureaucracy” and the solidarity between managers and workers it promotes, whereas the value of profitability is linked to “punishment-centered bureaucracy” and its antagonisms. Human life and profit, of course, have a primary locus: family and capitalism. Workers and managers seem to be negotiating domain-specific constellations of institutional logics.
The social interactions of the previous “indulgent” pattern were grounded in, as Gouldner argues, kinship and friendship, or as one of the workers recounted, in a “fine sentiment.” Because so many of the workers knew each other personally, interactions were informal. As a result,
“everybody’s sociable” and Gouldner describes “friendly and highly egalitarian relationships between supervisors and workers.” As Gouldner remarks, quoted by the authors: “For a man can-not easily behave in an impersonal, sternly rule-prescribed fashion towards his kinsmen, or for that matter, toward his old friends” (Gouldner, 1954, p. 56; Hallett & Ventresca, 2006, p. 223).
Bureaucratic form comes to the mine as a new structure of feeling, “made felt through changing
interactions between the workers and the management” (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006, p. 224). The
new manager was “ignorant of the magic words of condolence and congratulation.” Trust was grounded in feelings of love, friendship and solidarity, of the conventions and feelings of family tied to craft versus the objectified impersonality of business tied to industry. There is an institu-tional phenomenology to be developed, an emoinstitu-tional register which is part and parcel of its oper-ability, an emotional link between who we are and what we do.
Scholars have recently called for affect and emotion to be added to Thornton et al.’s “y-axis” in delineating attributes of an institutional logic or as necessary to account for field emergence (Grodal & Granqvist, 2014; Toubiana, Thornton, Creed, & Zietsma, 2014; Voronov, 2014). That presumes that they were not always already there.
Emotion is a constituent of social life in classical and post-structural social theory, as well as in continental philosophy. “The hallmark of moral authority,” wrote Émile Durkheim, “is that its psychic properties alone give it power” (Durkheim, 1995, p. 210). Moral authority is an emotion we feel, an emotion thought through collective representation, both of these sustained through the sensuous excitement generated by movement around the totem, the “group incarnated” (Durkheim, 1995, pp. 209, 212, 222, 239).1 “It is the nature of moral forces expressed merely by images that
they cannot affect the human mind with any forcefulness without putting it outside itself, and plunging it in a state describable as ‘ecstatic’” (Durkheim, 1995, p. 228). Totemic representations both bring forth and recall the emotions of moral authority, an authority that is both outside and inside the individual, transcendent and immanent. It is through these external objects that people “comprehend those feelings” of collective force (Durkheim, 1995, p. 221). Contra Kant, Durkheim derives our very capacities for causal thought, our capacity to impose our categories on nature, to dare explain the ways in which one thing “participates” in another, from these emotions, from this “mental effervescence” (Durkheim, 1995, p. 238). Indeed, it is that emotion, “that energy alone,” understood as a manifestation of an impersonal force immanent in the world, that is the “real object of the cult” (Durkheim, 1995, p. 191).
Max Weber analysed value rationality as an emotional state. Value rationality has a conceptual affinity to “affectual” action, action determined by “the actor’s specific affects and feeling states” (Weber, 1978, p. 25), one of Weber’s four types of social action. Each—value and affect—is done “for its own sake,” the difference between them located in the former’s “self-conscious formulation” and its “planned orientation” (Weber, 1978, p. 25). For Weber values are not simply valid ideas, but “value feelings” (Weber, 1975, p. 182).2 Indeed, in his catalogue of religious states associated with
the quest for salvation, Weber argued that they were all “sought for the “sake of emotional value,” transitory, subjective states of “psychic extraordinariness,” actions to which are “imputed” “meta-physical meaning” (Weber, 1958a, p. 278). And in his analysis of Calvinism, he made “anxiety” over divine election the driver of its followers’ ascetic and methodical rationalism (Weber, 1958b, p. 112). Although he excluded the “emotional contents” of value as a basis for defining a value, for making a causal interpretation, or even as an individual’s basis for engaging in social action, he recognized that feelings are an essential basis of valuation (Weber, 1975, p. 183).3
Turning to continental philosophy, Martin Heidegger, who sought to upend the explanatory power of instrumental rationality, argued that the affectual is the primordial register in which Dasein—literally “there being,” Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of human being—is in the world, and by implication, that worldhood, as a structure of significance, is also affective, the way
things “matter.” “Dasein’s openness to the world is constituted existentially by the attunement of a state-of-mind” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 177). Dasein’s being in the world, its “there,” is not primordi-ally cognitive and discursive, but practical and affectual, based on a projective understanding of the affordances, the possible purposes, of an equipped world on the one side, and on what Heidegger calls “states of mind,” or “moods,” affective states on the other (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 174–175). “Mood,” Heidegger writes, is “prior to all cognition and volition, and “beyond” their range of dis-closure” (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 173, 175). Purpose and affect are essential to worldhood. One brings things near in the way that they matter, out of “becoming affected in some way” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 176). Affect here is a way in which we submit ourselves to the significant world, a world that shows itself by our being “affected” by it. Understanding of possible projects of an equipped world and states of mind, or mood, are equiprimordial and interlocked. “A state-of-mind always has its understanding… Understanding always has its mood” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 182). These affective states simultaneously maintain the “Being of the ‘there’” and “cover up” our own Being, our “thrownness” into that equipped world (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 173–175, 182). In this phenom-enology the objective and the affective are co-implicated.
Institutions and Emotions
These thinkers all question the bracketing of emotion from institutional category, valuation and significance. But in what sense is emotion institutional? The dominant approaches treat emo-tions as the individual “raw materials” out of which instituemo-tions, or social movements seeking to transform them, are made (Jasper, 2011; Voronov, 2014). Those who study the role of emotions in social organization largely treat them as natural media, individual attributes whose expression is regulated in conformity with institutional or organizational expectations, what Hochschild has termed “feeling rules” (Hochschild, 1979, 1983), or which are mobilized and evoked in order to create or sustain institutions or the social movements targeting them (Creed, Hudson, Okhuysen, & Smith-Crowe, 2014). Emotion, in these approaches, offers an energetic mechanism for institutionalization.
In the dominant understanding emotions are human resources or social media—such as the tendency of structurally subordinate women to convert “feelings” into resources and to be differ-entially charged with the task of “emotional work” (Hochschild, 1983); Lewin’s positing of anxiety induced by the inadequacies of ordinary modes of behavior as a psychological source of readiness for organizational change (Golsorkhi, 2015, p. 189); Creed and his co-authors’ analysis of the way that shame sustains institutional forms through self-regulation based on “systemic” understandings of what constitutes shameful deviations from norms or prescriptions and “episodic shaming” of deviations from those norms (Creed et al., 2014); Quattrone’s account of Jesuit “self-accountabil-ity” operating through inculcation of confusion, pain and shame (Quattrone, 2015); Taylor’s account of moral outrage, love and identity formation in the sustenance of self-help social move-ments seeking to normalize stigmatized identities (Taylor, 1996; Taylor & Leitz, 2010); Jasper’s account of how hope, anger and “affective loyalties” are both means and ends of social movements (Jasper, 2011, see also Collins, 2001, 2004)4; Grodal and Granqvist’s analysis of the ways in which
affect mediates the behavioral effects of expectations generated by discourse in the emergence of the nanotechnology field (Grodal & Granqvist, 2014); or a scarce source of investment in Goodwin’s study of the affective trade-offs between family and political mobilization in the Huk rebellion (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001).
For Pierre Bourdieu all fields depend not just on their own principles of classification, but on an emotional investment, a “visceral commitment,” an embodied “interest” in the stake within them (Bourdieu, 2000, pp. 98–99, 101–102). This is the energy of habitus, a “desire to be” (Bourdieu,
2000: 150). If the internalized and incorporated classifications, the “practical taxonomies” that co-constitute the reality of a field derive from the transposition of position vis a vis the field’s domi-nant form of capital into disposition, they are “grounded in a prereflexive belief in the indisputed value of the instruments of construction and of the objects thus constructed” (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 25; 1990, p. 146; 2000, pp. 99–100). Habitus, a manner of being “there” in the world, equips indi-viduals with a capacity to enter, invest and act in a field, generating competition for the dominant form of capital thereby sustaining the illusio, “the unjustifiable investment,” that what is at stake in a field actually has value (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 250; Bourdieu,1998; Bourdieu, 2000, p. 102; Friedland, 2009). For Bourdieu emotion is a medium for the incorporation of the world, for being able and wanting to be inhabited by it. As in Heidegger’s pairing of understanding and state of mind, the objective possibilities immanent in practice, le sens pratique, and the affects they afford and depend upon are twinned. The making of habitat into habitus, he argues, is affective, on the one side a body “exposed and endangered in the world, faced with the risk of emotion, lesion, suffer-ing, sometimes death,” and on the other, characterized by a “love,” a “visceral attachment of a socialized body to the social body that has made it” (Bourdieu, 2000, pp. 140, 143, 145). For Bourdieu emotion is paradigmatically a medium for domination. Sexuality and love are mediations of gendered domination, one’s “investment in the domestic space” being the “initial form of the
illusio,” the familial order a sexed structure of domination in which women accede to the symbolic
violence of men (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 166). Love is the first illusio. A child learns to invest in “the social game” by becoming an object for familial others, by being valued through the value with which he identifies himself (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 166). Likewise in romantic love, a person falls in love with a partner whose habitus is harmonious with his or her own. “Two people can give each other no better proof of the affinity of their tastes than the taste they have for each other… Love is… a way of loving one’s own destiny in someone else and so of feeling loved in one’s own des-tiny” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 243). Sexual desire is an eroticization of domination (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 21). Love is then a de-politicization of erotics, known by its difference from the power relations habitually inscribed in sex. Love between adults is a “miraculous truce,” an almost mystical sus-pension of the sexual domination standing as the foundation of all forms of domination in which masculine social reproduction trumps feminine physiological reproduction (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 112; Friedland, 2009). Love is constituted through renunciation of mutual objectification, not its affordance of mutual subjectification.
In the conventions of worth approach, Boltanski and Thévenot understand actors’ critical capac-ities to agree about the goodness of common goods, to establish relations of equivalence through “things that count,” as a “cognitive ability” or competence (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, p. 32; Boltanski, 2012, pp. 55, 92). Even the discernment of hidden “passions” lurking behind virtuous intentions that would otherwise qualify civic worth is a cognitive capacity (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, p 114). Emotion is localized in one world of worth, that of inspiration with its relations of creation: “Evidence takes the form of an affective state, a feeling that is spontaneous, involuntary, and fleeting…” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, pp. 162–163). Emotion has a greater presence in their later works. In Boltanski’s understanding of the polities, critique is driven by the “anxiety” of injustice, justice itself is a “feeling”: “the incessant murmur attesting to the indignation, pain and anxiety triggered by the feeling of injustice” (Boltanski, 2012, p. 28). And in his elaboration of modes of action beyond justice—fairness, violence and love—Boltanski sources emotion at the interface between regimes of action, as a manifestation of the failure of equivalence or a trace of what cannot be recognized, the element of love in justice, for example (Boltanski, 2012, pp. 76, 162, 292; see Friedland & Arjaliès, 2017). And in Thévenot’s subsequent theorization of modes of engagement—project and attachment for example—emotions play a more manifest role both as constituents of “cognitive formats” as “ease and “self-confidence,” and as signals of “trying
moments”—anxiety, dis-ease, humiliation—in modes of engagement that cannot be sustained, called into doubt by other modes, revealing “the engagement from the starting point of a moved and emotional body” (Thévenot, 2007, p. 414; Thévenot, 2012; Thévenot, 2013, pp. 166–167).
Questions of identification and investment, as well as the solidarities of practice, and hence the formation of groups through the institutional logics these sustain, are all trans-institutional ways in which passions can be institutionally positioned (Friedland, 2017; Voronov & Vince, 2012). In Selznick’s institutionalism, identification with an institutional value is an emotional basis of iden-tity (Kraatz & Flores, 2015). Zietsma, likewise, has shown the ways in which emotional invest-ments in institutional values generate the energies out of which institutions are both maintained and transformed (Zietsma, 2014). Zietsma compares a Canadian advocacy group for a degenerative disease in which there was a highly emotive tension between the logic of care and science, and a Japanese social enterprise organized by socialists and housewives into cooperatives and workers’ collectives. In both it was the emotional energies invested in values that drove the development of organizational forms. The first led to a structural differentiation of the two elements; the second adapted contradictory elements—entrepreneurship and democratic representation—to make them consistent with the organization’s core values. In both, an emotional investment in values enables resistance, reproduction and recombination.
An affective “human nature” plays a mediating and animating role in a number of Boltanski and Thévenot’s “worlds of worth.” For example, although the market world depends on an “emotional
distance between the situation and oneself, control with respect to one’s own emotions,” they argue
that it is love that powers interest, the market’s engine. “Interest is thus their real motivation, the property of their self that makes them be themselves by wanting to obtain satisfaction. One
suc-ceeds through the strength of this desire, because one loves. Real life is what people want to acquire” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, pp. 197, 200).5 The goods of the market are things “toward
which competing desires for possession converge.” Because market objects register the desire of others through conventions of priced competition, one also desires others’ desires. Market worth is a vehicle for coordination around a common good, a good registering the commonness of our “love” of “real life.” This casting of the market suggests cognitive competences are affectively charged, that cognition is effective because it is affective.
Where emotion mediates the development of institutional logics, an exogenous invariance of emotions as feelings is often assumed. Where basic emotions (like anger, fear and disgust, for example), their physiology, including their physiognomy, as facial signals or signifiers, are univer-sal, approaching emotions as institutional intermediaries—as conveyors, signs, resources or instru-ments—seems appropriate (Ekman, 1993; Ekman & Friesen, 1975; Weigel, 2012). Such emotions can be instruments through which institutions are sustained or disrupted even if, indeed especially because, the emotion has no meaningful interior relation to the conventional practices of an institu-tion or the values at play in its operainstitu-tions. Affects prior to and independent of representainstitu-tion and cognition, and hence of intention, can best function as institutional intermediaries. They do not constitute meaning; they validate and mark it. On the one side their universality and independence of intentional objects are compelling evidence of the reality of the domain of socially constructed goods. On the other their corporeality converts spoken goods into our human singularity.
But many emotions are hardly basic—greed, loyalty, patriotism, acquisitiveness, possessive-ness, bravery, reverence, piety, objectivity, romantic love—but rather part of institutional forma-tions involving complex material, cognitive, practical, evaluative and affective elements. Such emotions may not only mediate the elaboration and reproduction of an institutional logic; they are institutionally constituted and constitutive. The commitment to a value, engagement in the prac-tices by which it is produced, can entail a way of being that is constitutive of their coherence and actionability, essential to both the subjectivity and objectivity an institutional logic entails. This is
not just an emotional state triggered by that value’s violation or realization, such as shame, anxiety or pride, ancillary pains and pleasures of practice. Specific emotions may be afforded or given by that value and its normative and practical equipment.
Ways of doing and being may be co-implicated both within and between institutions. Romantic love, for example, not only has its own institutional architecture; it is an integral part of moderni-ty’s larger configuration. “Intimacy is an institution rather than a measure of a mature psyche,” writes Eva Illouz (2012, p. 71). In several works Illouz points to the ways in which the affectivity of love is tied up with the constitution of modern selfhood, its agency through willful and passion-ate choice, its worth through recognition based on the sharing of an independent “emotionally naked and intimate” self (Illouz, 1997; 2007; 2012, p. 39).
There is, too, an historical intimacy between the passions of love and the instrumental strategy of capitalism. Illouz elaborates the emotional co-constitution of romantic love and capitalist com-modity consumption, which conjointly evoke, elaborate and sustain specific forms of affectivity. It is not just that the phenomenology of romantic love and certain forms of commodity consumption parallel each other in their freely chosen, liminal, evanescent, hedonistic and episodic intensities. The historical formation and cross-class diffusion of the rites of romantic love over the course of the twentieth century were on the one hand tied to new forms of leisure consumption outside the family and the social group, and on the other hand, commodities, particularly ego-expressive and leisure goods (cars, dining out, movies, travel), were marketed by drawing on the templates of erotic romance such that the goods themselves became “objects of desire” (Illouz, 1997, pp. 35–37, 47, 82). Advertising cut beauty from character and soldered it to sexuality. “Consumer culture put desire at the center of subjectivity, and sexuality became a sort of generalized metaphor of desire” (Illouz, 2012, p. 43). Love morphed into an invisible consumption good and consumption an occa-sion and an expresocca-sion of romantic desire. Illouz writes:
Consumption and romantic emotions have progressively merged, each shrouding the other in a mystical halo. Commodities have now penetrated the romantic bond so deeply that they have become the invisible and unacknowledged spirit reigning over romantic encounters. (Illouz: 1997, p. 11)
Romantic love is today based on the ontology of the authentic, essentialized and sexualized self. Illouz shows how the rise of a therapeutic style in the United States was associated with a particular understanding of the emotions of personhood as a “true self” who endures a “psychic suffering.” The modalities by which these emotions are accessed, communicated, measured and made into individual capacities bear on economic productivity, the mode of coordination within the corpora-tion, the vehicles through which marriages are managed and pre-marital sexual encounters achieved, and political identities are formed and affirmed through “recognition” (Illouz, 2007, 2012).6 “Therapeutic” practices are premised on a belief in something like a substance—here, the
normative, realized self—which is “never given a clear positive content” (Illouz, 2007, p. 48). Emotion’s nature, its production and productivity form a particular constellation in modern marriage. The emotional, “authentic” and ever-developing, sexualized self is the ontological ground of modern marriages based on romantic love, an autonomous self expressed, revealed, formed and recognized in interactions sustained by introspective choice in its name (Illouz, 2012, pp. 38–39, 91, 99). In this order, emotion is the cause, not the consequence, of commitment, a will-ful manifestation of an “authentic” self; sexuality—unlinked from marital morality—becomes a central element of personhood, an autonomous pleasure and a primary visual criterion of mate selection; love becomes a basis of social mobility played out in large, anonymous, socially unregu-lated marriage markets in which players trade mate attributes including the new criteria of sexiness and personality, the outcome of which reflects one’s inner value (Illouz, 2012, p. 53). Men, not
women, are inclined to emotional disinterest as a manifestation and instrument of their masculinity, their market power and their attempts to counter the devaluation inherent in female abundance (Illouz, 2012, pp. 85, 102–104). In the absence of group regulation and closure of mating and mate pools, market dispositions provide the template for choosing. Illouz writes:
The triumph of love and sexual freedom marked the penetration of economics into the machine of desire. One of the main transformations of sexual relationships in modernity consists in the tight intertwinement of desire with economics and the question of value and one’s worth. In its very essence, it is economics that now come to haunt desire. (Illouz, 2012, p. 58)
This ground is very different from early modern Western marriage where two individuals who know their value by objective social statuses engage in a publicly visible and socially regulated, ritu-alized courtship among a small number of socially stratified potential mates issuing in mutual prom-ises—like sexual abstinence and fidelity—understood as issuing from interior moral characters, commitments whose consequence is the full affectivity of love (Illouz, 2012, pp. 30–31). In this regime it was men, not women, who had to first resolutely manifest their feelings (Illouz, 2012, p. 63). Emotion was here part of one’s moral equipment, tied to acts, not personalities, an affect of practice. In Foucauldian spirit joining ontology, practice and telos, Illouz presents us with a probing synthetic analysis of the inter-institutional ordering power of an episteme and the migration of its techniques. How and what we feel are given by and give us the institutional domains that affect us.
Institutions may have an emotional specificity, not just as vehicles or instruments of institution-alization, but as constituted through the practices characteristic of an institution. And reciprocally what we do, our practice, may itself be animated by a regime of feeling, such that our emotions are part of an institution’s production functions, the regimes of practice in which we engage and by which we are engaged in a particular way.7 These emotions may not only bring us to work; they
may be part of our work, part of what makes that work work.
Institutional affect and effect are likely co-implicated. Emotional “work,” including the work necessary not to have or reveal emotions, so central to the Enlightenment vision of the modern subject, is ubiquitous. What we do, what we value and how we feel are bound up one with the other in ways we do not yet understand. Rather than just “feeling rules,” we should consider the possibil-ity that the rule, or regime, of specific emotions is part of the constitution of an institutional logic. Rather than just considering the ways in which emotions condition institutionalization, we should also probe the ways in which emotions are institutionally constituted and constitutive. We cleave to institutional ways of doing because of the way they make us feel; indeed, we are the way they make us feel. Institutions are ways not only of doing, but of being. We are moved and move by and through them, not just as grades, but kinds, of fuel. Affects ground the good in specific ways; the practices through which those goods are produced and circulate in society may depend on them.8
Shame, Shame, Shame
“We all swim in a sea of shame, all day, every day,” Creed and his co-authors remind us (Creed et al., 2014, p. 283). I can pose the difficulty of thinking the relation of emotion and institution through Creed et al.’s exquisitely crafted essay on shame as a source of institutional reproduction and change (Creed et al., 2014). Creed and his co-authors posit shame as a social emotion through which individuals are motivated to sustain “standards of behavior” independently of coercive sanc-tions and material rewards. The model works through anticipation of emotional sanctioning by self and others of deviations from the “law”—norms, prescriptions, driven by one’s emotional attach-ment to a social group who live by those norms, “preserving valued social bonds” being its primary
engine.9 Working from social phenomenological premises, the cognitive meanings of things derive
from social interaction, so then one can argue that cognitions are rooted in social affect for the group from which the meaning is derived in the first place.10 Social emotion is here a medium
through which interaction is soldered to the meaning of things.
Shame, as an institutional mechanism, operates evaluatively through reductions in social stand-ing within a group (Creed et al., 2014, p. 279). “People maintain social bonds principally through ongoing reciprocal ratifications of their standing as valued persons within a social group” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 281). Their evaluative framing has a kinship with the evaluative reality “test” in Boltanski and Thévenot’s orders of worth approach in which “beings” are qualified as more or less worthy by the requisites of a regionalized justice and the requirements of qualification necessary to coordination (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). But here it is the “valued community,” or the “value of bonds,” not the value grounding the community, that has primacy. Affective commitments to “institutional elements” are commitments to groups (Creed et al., 2014, p. 288).11
The value of social bonds is their ability to satisfy individuals’ “need for recognition,” not their ability to produce, realize, incarnate or enact a particular value (Creed et al., 2014, p. 282). The actual content of systemic shame—what is shameful—is a medium for group membership, for being a “valued person” within it (Creed et al., 2014, p. 31). Institutional prescriptions are compel-ling, they argue, “because they are rooted in social bonds” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 283). It is the affect of the valued social bond, not the value as affect that animates the practices around which the social group is formed, that powers the system in this model. The cultural is reduced to the social.
The authors identify systemic shame as a Foucauldian disciplinary power, a “technology of subjectification,” quoting Foucault, that “imposes a law of truth on him” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 282). Foucault’s history of sexuality, which tackled the guilt and shame associated with Western sexuality, hinged on the ontological specificity of that sexuality—as aphrodisia for classical Greek or flesh for the early Christian, for example, as well as on the practices through which the self was formed and the teloi towards which those practices were oriented (Foucault, 1980). Foucault did not separate cognition and emotion, as Creed et al. do, in which cognitions “set the stage for social control” through prescription, while emotion provides the “impetus for compli-ance” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 283). As Foucault pointed out in the case of classical Greek homo-eroticism, it was the difficulty of controlling the force of aphrodisia that was a source of anxiety for the free male citizen, not the homosexual acts themselves (Foucault, 1990). The stylization of erotic desire was part and parcel of subject formation, of the constitution of free personhood. Emotion was not external to cognition. Likewise in the case of American same-sex desire and practice, wouldn’t one expect different emotional registers to be variably associated with this sex depending on whether it was constituted as immorality, mortal sin, congenital disease, family pathology, mutual pleasure, citizenship right, or love?12 The causal status of the ontology and its
co-implication with emotion is implicated where Creed et al. point to ontological contest through “sensemaking” as the critical site through which resistance to institutional prescription is effected. Foucault also pointed to the ways in which pleasure and desire were not exterior to modes of disciplinarity, the way in which power itself constituted pleasure, specifically a disci-plinary knowing of pleasure that is constitutive of the pleasure itself, the pleasure of a specific way of its knowing, and of the power that constitutes it via the eroticization of power that ensues (Foucault, 1978, pp. 44, 78). A Foucauldian would likely object to Creed and his co-authors’ universalization of systemic shame as a mechanism of subjectification and their marginalization of ontology and purpose in the constitution of and operation of social emotion. Shame may be an institutionally specific emotional register tied to particular types of value and the practices they undergird, to the nature of the subjectivity it affords and the social bond that depends on it.13
social bonds are weaker (Creed et al., 2014, p. 290). The ways in which affect conditions and constitutes the nature of that sociality is not addressed.
It is not that their approach is “wrong”, but if affect has an institutional specificity, this gets complicated. Sexual subjectification in Foucault’s analysis is tied to the ontology and telos around which it is organized. The Foucauldian would presume the same for “social emotions.” Creed et al. are well aware that we need to investigate other social emotions, like pride or contempt for instance, and their role in the “evaluation and preservation of valued social bonds” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 297). The connection between shame and recognition suggests a particular subjectivity and social-ity, unlike that which one would expect to find in ascetic Protestantism, for example, where the ontology of grace made the judgement of others ultimately irrelevant. We are confronted by a daunting task if it is not just the feeling of the social that matters, but the social construction of feelings and the ways in which particular social forms are constituted through those feelings and vice versa. Institutions may operate in specific emotional registers, emotions that have become so conventional that we take them for granted, whether the possessive individualism and acquisitive greed integral to the market, the prideful aggressiveness associated with the nation-state, the relent-less curiosity and objectivity of the scientist (Macpherson, 2011; Voronov, 2014). If particular affects, or affective regimes, are afforded by particular values or practices, an institutional logic obtains where we are affected by the affects it affords, and where those affects are part of the effects effected through its practices.
My argument is not that value and group commitments are unrelated. But starting with substan-tive values, I suspect, is more likely to take one towards institutional specificity and the co-consti-tution of emotion and instico-consti-tution; starting with the social group, towards trans-instico-consti-tutional emotional mechanism. Creed et al. remind us (citing Hallett & Ventresca, 2006, p. 216) that in institutionalization it is not simply what people ‘do’ that matters, but what they do ‘together’” (Creed et al., 2014, p. 277). Every single element—what, do, together, as well as affect, is at stake and potentially in play in an adequate theorization of the role of emotion in institution. The speci-fication of the relations between them is yet to come.
The ways in which affect, social bonds, ontology, telos, practice and institution are co-impli-cated, and with respect to the same domain (sexuality) and the same affect (shame) around which Creed and his co-authors center their work, are suggested by Amy Schalet’s comparative ethnog-raphy of teenage sexuality in the United States and the Netherlands (Schalet, 2011). Schalet con-trasts the ways in which Dutch middle-class parents “normalize” this sexuality by allowing their adolescent children to have sex in their homes, whereas American parents “dramatize” it by forbid-ding it. She lays out the divergent “cultural logics” grounded in two models of individualism— interdependent and antagonistic—within which these divergent behaviors make sense (Schalet, 2011, p. 83). If the Dutch emphasize self-regulation of their children and put primary value on
gezelligheid, “togetherness,” which they also use as a mechanism of control, the Americans use
coercive and rule-bound regulation and put primary value on autonomy (Schalet, 2011, p. 16). These are tied to specific parental sexual ontologies, one based on the consensual pleasures of love in which there is no shame and little gender differentiation, and the other on sex as the operation of uncontrollable hormones which have nothing to do with love, are freighted with bodily shame, gender antagonism, and excluded from the family home (on shame, see Schalet, 2011, p. 34). For Dutch parents their teenage children’s erotic love is a vehicle for the exercise of self-regulation, whereas for Americans it is a manipulative danger to their developmental autonomy. Subjectification in the first is based on self-regulation in the context of a familial social bond, in the second in a rebellious breaking-away from parental authority in part through the secret sex itself. These differ-ences are tied to the institutions that have hegemony in the two societies: family and state in the first, market and religion in the second. The emotional content of sexuality not only diverges in the two societies, it is tied to particular discourses, forms of sociality and institutional contexts, which
cohere in what Schalet terms a “cultural logic.” Emotion, ontology and practice, including the very practice of individuality and sociality, are co-implicated.
Emotion and Institutional Logics
To locate emotions in institutional logics, I need to say what I think they are. Institutional logics are orders of meaningful material practice with persistent forms and visible effects. Institutional logics are manifest in persistent interlocked constellations of subjects, practices and objects. The materi-ality of that practice is located in the corporemateri-ality of subjects and in the obdurate qumateri-ality of things (Figure 1).14 The meaning of that practice is located in a language of goods. Institutional logics
practically join goods and objects with specific effects or productivities, as well as goods and sub-jects endowed with and animated by specific identifications, emotional investments and ways of being, affording capacities to be particularly affected.15 They join what we do and who were are.
Institutional logics are simultaneously orders of objectification and subjectification, that is, orders of material practice that depend on and afford the particular subjectivity of subjects and objectivity of objects, which in turn depend on these same orders of practice (see Figure 1).16
Figure 1. Institutional Logics and their Constitutive Elements.
I conceptualize the goods grounding an institutional logic as institutional substances. The kinds of goods I have in mind are market value, property, God, salvation, nation, sovereignty, security, information, scientific knowledge, artistic beauty, popular representation, nature, accountability, health, romantic love.
Institutional goods are unobservable, non-phenomenal, ontologically subjective. Although institutional logics are orders of valuation, a substance is not a value. The value term typically
refers to a subjective relation to the world, valorization a value ascribed by a subject, as in Selznick’s classic notion of institutionalizing as “to infuse with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand,” a “prizing of the device for its own sake” (Selznick, 1984 [1957], p. 17). A sub-stance, unlike a value, cannot be reduced to something subjectively imprinted on an exterior object or device, and certainly not just for its own sake.
The ways in which the effects and affects condition and are conditioned by institutional goods is an empirical question. I hypothesize a parallel ordering of object effects and bodily affects. As a first crude and very provisional approximation I would suggest a tripartite classification: transver-sality, affinity and institutional specificity. The institutionally specificity of objects and emotions, with the corresponding problem of the relation between internalist and constructionist theoretical stances, affords parallel classifications (Arjaliès & Friedland, 2014).
Some objects and emotions—software and shame—are transversal in their affordances. Their significance and effects do not depend on a particular good and can be found anywhere. And recip-rocally perhaps the production of a particular good does not cease for want of them. Their function has no institutional specificity: we can use them to help us do almost anything. Others—anti-bal-listic missiles, cribs, microscopes, bonds and balance sheets, genitals, on the one side, and posses-sive individualism and collective hatred and aggression on the other—afford particular goods, their use and legitimacy tied to the fact that they are its instruments or means of production. You rarely find a crib in a military base or a church, guns in a classroom or a laboratory. The association of individual possessiveness and the capitalist market, collective hatred and the nation-state, love and the family all seem to be cases of institutional affinity. Although these have a functional delimita-tion and the producdelimita-tion of the good depends on them, their effects do not depend on their yoking to that good. And still others—sacred centers, altars, money, property, corporations, equities, brands, accounts, marital beds, heirs, art works, ballot boxes, borders, battlefields, the Eucharist, scientific reports in the case of objects, and romantic love, patriotism and piety in the case of emo-tions—have an institutional specificity: their effects depend on the goods to which they are yoked and are the occasion for their existence and deployment. The use, effects and legitimacy of these objects depend on their symbolization of an institutional good. These have a functional specificity and are part of a good’s production function. The good cannot be produced without them; the object is not effective and the subject not affective without the good. These kinds of objectivities and subjectivities call out to us. They move us and in our being moved by them, by being affected and interested, we testify to their being. These are institutional objects and emotions.
With its co-implication of the teleological and the affective an institutional substance has a kin-ship with Schatzki’s “teleoaffective structure”17—combinations of ends and “allied” emotions,
which “link” the “organized nexus” of doings and sayings, the primary elements of practice in his theory (Schatzki, 2002, pp. 77, 80; 2012, p. 15; Nicolini, 2013,pp. 164–166).18 Emotions here are
sources of “enjoy[ment],” or pain, one can or ought to experience while engaged in the practice (Schatzki, 2002, p. 80). These emotions are “embodied understandings” of practice (Everts, Lahr-Kurten, & Watson, 2011). Ends are that for the “sake of which” persons act; activities are organized hierarchically, “top[ping] off” in activities not pursuant to further activities: these are the ends of practice (Schatzki, 2012, p. 15).
The link between practice and ends/emotions, the teleoaffective structure, is normative: one should or may pursue them in practice (Schatzki, 2002, p. 80; 2012, p. 16). Schatzki’s approach to emotion largely aligns with “feeling rules” (Hochschild, 1979). Practices “reflect” or “express” the teleoaffective structures, the directionality of practice, its purposes and passions (Schatzki, 2012, p. 15; Schatzki, 2002, p. 80). Teleoaffective structure is not a production function. Neither emotion nor end has a necessary relationship to practice. Unlike institutional substances Schatzki’s ends, whether activities or “states of existence,” are neither necessary to the conduct of the practice, nor are practices necessary to the realization of the ends: “advancing career prospects, living the good
life” in his cited case of coursework, for example. The teleoaffective structure affords the intelligi-bility of practice, the mutual practical understanding of what is going on and, hence, what makes sense to do. It does not “govern” activity, nor determine what people do, but what make sense for them to do (Schatzki, 2002, p. 81). Teleology appears to be subordinate to ontology, the project or purpose to the nature of the doing. By contrast, an institutional substance is both a good and a real, uncomfortably spanning the teleological and the ontological, not just giving sense to or animating a practice, but rendering it real and actionable, effective and affective.
Institutional logics obtain where the effectivity and affectivity of material practice depend on the good.19 Subjects and objects are institutional to the extent that their subjectification and
objec-tification depend upon that good. Institutional logics are objective in a double sense. On the one hand, institutional logics operate through specific objects or constellations of objects whose practi-cal affordances produce particular effects. On the other, their operation depends on the inscription of objectives in the subjects affected by them, not just desire for the actionable, to want what can be done, but to feel the doing itself as a desirable form of aliveness, the tie between the doing and the being. Objectivity depends upon our being affected, to feel the things that matter. Affectivity is part of an object’s effects; its effects are part of the subjects’ affects. If effectivity is critical to dis-tinguishing rite and ideology from reality, affectivity is critical not only in sustaining the object as an objective, in making the actionable both into an act and an object of desire, but in affording a subjectivity not only capable of that action, but whose particular and singular subjectivity in part substantiates the reality of the realizable good. The specificity of one’s way of being is testament to the substantive reason at stake in the game.20 It is, and must be, because I am.
Effectivity and affectivity both substantiate the good. Both of these—the materiality of objects and the affectivity of subjects—have been neglected by those seeking to forward the institutional logical approach (Jones, Boxenbaum, & Anthony, 2013). Although it is the latter that concerns us here, it is reasonable to suppose that emotion would be particularly important where an institu-tional logic cannot be materialized in the object world, whether not yet or ever. This accords with Boltanski and Thévenot’s treatment of the bodily authority dominant in the cité of inspiration where formatting objects are absent. Inspired worth is “manifested by feelings and passion,” uncontrollable and unmeasurable, a passion that instills a “desire to create… along with anxiety or
doubt, love for the object pursued, and suffering” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, pp. 159–160).
Emotion is itself a form of evidence for inspired worth. Denunciations of the very world to be tested in a situation incline toward “inspired” worth “for want of objects belonging to a different nature” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, pp. 229–230).
For want of objects on which to rely, the being who seeks to reverse the situation all by himself has to collect in his person the nature in which he wants the test to shift, and by his very act has to make the higher common principle present… The worth of reference is then confused with the worth of the person who presents himself as the measure of all things; this “madness of worth” may constitute the ultimate way of unsettling a situation that holds together.
And reciprocally it should also be the case that materialization is critical where institutional logics do not have an emotional specificity, where, in terms of a certain tradition in the philosophy of emotion, emotions are not institutionally individuated (Teroni, 2007, pp. 398–399).
In positing an institutional substance I use the Aristotelian category which points to an imma-nent form of being, as its “essence,” “cause,” or principle (Aristotle, 1998, p. 229) Aristotle’s concept of substance is not the Cartesian category of substance based on material extension. For Aristotle, substance is not matter, but what makes matter a “this”, “that by virtue of which the mat-ter is in the state it is in” (Aristotle, 1998, pp. 167, 229). A substance is a unity of form and matmat-ter. Unlike Platonic and Augustinian traditions that understand the soul as a substance separate from
the body and ground cognition in universal concepts or revealed truth, Aristotelian form cannot be accessed except through the sensible manifestations of material entities. But substance cannot be reduced to that materiality either. Unlike Kantianism, in Aristotelian epistemology and ontology a subject does not impose his categories on inert matter; it is not a schema of representation imposed on external objects, not objects commanded by signs. Sensibility and intelligibility coincide, oper-ating through the identity of the human soul and the sensible object. In the act of sensation or knowing, two potentialities—on the side of the human and the things sensed or known—become actual (Bjerke, 2012, pp. 32, 63–64, 72–73). While all this is epistemologically problematic, its presumption that the unity of experience is located in the object paralleled by a consonant nature of the subject at least approaches the concertation of subjectification and objectification that I think characterizes an institutional logic.
An institutional substance is an unobservable, beyond sense and reason. It is not and cannot be phenomenal, nor is it just an idea. It is rather a virtual entity—neither a valorized object nor the evalu-ative will of a disembodied subject—which can never be present. An institutional substance is the unobservable ground and animating principle such that subjects and objects in practice can appear in its name, as its image or representative, its consubstantial avatars and agents. The relation between substance and material practice is not a semiology, but a material symbolization, an interpenetration of transcendental and earthly worlds, the absent presence that drives substantiation. Substantiation operates through excess, that both affords and requires the profusions of words, the movement of emotions, and the productive assemblage of things. Institutional substances are a significant basis of our being and our doing. Institutional substances are not reducible to attributes of objects, subjects, situations or fields, but are the basis, or the ground, upon which the practices that organize those situ-ations and fields stand. We can only know them in their particular constellsitu-ations.
An institutional substance does not fit our Humean division of fact and value, of what and why. It is both an ontological assertion of what is or can be and a valuation, a good toward or around which one can organize some segment of one’s life, both object and objective. An institutional substance bounds the ontological and the teleological, its reality as well as its orienting quality, its goodness. An institutional substance is both the basis of things and their value, the ground of both fact and desire. Like Aristotle’s unmoved mover, institutional substances are like gods: they do not move, but move us by being “objects of desire,” or love, for them (Aristotle, 1998, p. 373). An institutional substance presumes an ability to build a material world of bodies and things based on it, as its phenomenal manifestations, to make the substance real, to enact it in an object world, a realizable state. It points to what Aristotle dubbed the “final cause,” the good or signifi-cance immanent in its materialization, as an object worthy of enactment, and hence the ground of desire and care, that provides the energy of attachment which comes before and remains after any mere “having” or “doing,” an essential driver in anything we label as institution. An institutional substance is the transcendent ground of the immanent observable. It is the transom of an inex-haustible desire and of an endless objectification, exceeding any action, lying before and beyond any array of things. Institutional substance makes the social world historical, ever hungering forward, ever constructing formats in and by which to have or make it.
An institutional substance is a no-body and a no-thing. The goodness and the realness of these goods can neither be grounded in the senses nor in reason. Because they are grounded in unob-servables, because the categorical orders that parse objects and persons have a conventional rela-tion to them, because the scope of their reference is contingent, institurela-tional logics depend on substantiation, on material and discursive processes that establish both the reality and reference of this real, as well as the goodness of this good.
Those things that affect us that we do not appear to control are ideally placed to perform that function: the external world of objects and the internal world of subjects, domains entail-ing physics and physiology respectively. It is precisely because these appear to operate
independently of individual belief and will that makes them effective instruments for converting the constructed into the really real. It is these that sensualize the extra-human and give it sense. Objects, in their obdurate thereness, in their objective capabilities, their affordances, serve not only as markers of settings in which particular values are pertinent, but as “material formats” by which a particular value can be produced or enacted, and the “evidence” by which evaluation is legitimately executed (Arjaliès, 2014; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). Yoked to a particular logic, objects in their objectivity and productivity sustain the believability, the naturalness of that insti-tutional logic. It is in part because the affordances of objects often go without saying as they sustain action that belief need not be articulated, that it can remain immanent to action, sedi-mented in interlocked routines.
Subjects, in their interiority, the way they feel, their inaccessible and sometimes uncontrollable, physiologically mediated experiences, their emotional and affective investments in institutional fields, also sustain an institutional logic’s realness located both in its ability to move us and the particular way we are moved by it, in its affordance of a way of being.21 Institutional life operates
through what Kathleen Stewart has termed “ordinary affects,” “the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies and emergences” (Stewart, 2007, p. 1). Stewart argues that affects do “not work through ‘meanings’ per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds” (Stewart, 2007, p. 3). Affectivity is a sensuous element in institutional practice, the feelings inside and outside the insti-tutionally ordinary repeated and recognized ways of thinking and acting, of the happening that attends “social worlding.” It is not just via our will and our ease (Thévenot, 2013), let alone our reason, but through culturally sensuous being that we engage and are engaged by our institutional landscapes, that their meanings literally make sense.
In my account, not only is the affective component critical to the substantiation of an institutional logic, its occasion and its effects hinge on representation and meaning, and on their conjunction with other material practices. I am not versed in the voluminous empirical, theoretical and philosophical scholarship on emotion, affect and feeling. Because I do not differentiate affect and emotion, bodily affects and their representation, this puts me at variance with those who argue that affect refers to a corporeal domain both before and outside of reason, meaning and intent.22 For those following in
the tracks of Massumi, affects, unlike emotions, are non-signifying, non-intentional, pre-conscious and pre-individual autonomic experiences of intensities (Clough, 2009; Leys, 2011, 2015; Massumi, 2002).23 Emotion, in contrast, is an individual’s narration of bodily affect, feeling fearful as opposed
to fearful feeling (Clough, 2009, p. 49). For Massumi, affect as intensity is a pre-personal bodily experience, a quantitative shift in bodily excitation, that conditions the capacity to act; it is a poten-tial that precedes, and need not eventuate in, action, signification or critique.
I rather understand emotion as a meaningful material—embodied—practice, a meaning and materiality that are linked to each other in practical patterns or forms. Institutional logics are pro-ductive, intentional practices. This is consistent with Wetherell who posits affect as social practice in which there are ongoing feedback loops between interpretation and affect, discourse and bodily states, in specific social contexts (Wetherell, 2015).24 Wetherell argues:
Social actors engaged in affective practice are embodied beings for sure, but are also usually sentient, bathed in cultural practice like fish in water, usually reflexive, engaged with others in negotiating their worlds, and constantly talking and making sense. There are no neat and easy dividing lines between physical affect and discourse, or between discursive capture and affective capture, or between discursive enlistment and affective enlistment. (Wetherell, 2015, p. 152)
Relatedly, see also the practice specificity of emotion in Nicolini’s practice theory (Nicolini, 2013, p. 5).
Indeed the regular bundling of affect, discourse and material practice is what constitutes an institutional logic in my view. Take the case of romantic love, on which I have been doing empiri-cal work, where the good is unobservable, ontologiempiri-cally subjective, affectively charged, tied to our bodily equipment, and draped with multiple institutional dramas against which one judges one’s own experience and expectations. I came to affect through emotion because I have been working on romantic love as an institutional logic, an affective order of material practice. Unlike much empirical work on institutional logics which centers on their observation, diffusion or con-sequences at the level of organizational activity—whether as a sphere or an entity, neglecting the role of individuals and their interactions—this work studies the ordering of individual interac-tions, from which I infer institutional logics, rather than take them as pre-given (Zilber, 2017; see also Powell & Colyvas, 2008).25 Irrespective of its specific hormonal and attachment
mecha-nisms, it is not so easy in this case to cleave affect and meaning, feeling and cognition, emotion and belief. Based on survey research we have been analysing romantic love as a kind of emo-tional, discursive and bodily practice in intimate dyadic situations among American college stu-dents (Friedland, Mohr, & Roose, 2014a; Friedland et al., 2014b). As befits an institutional logic approach, we seek to analyse practices of love, not persons in love, and so have turned to multiple correspondence analysis (MCA)—familiar to readers for its iconic status as a graphical represen-tation of the cultural regionalization of class habitus in Distinction—which seeks to capture the patterned distributions of practices rather than the net effects of an individual attribute as a causal determinant of another.
The graphic MCA representation of the first dominant dimension organizing the intimate, sexu-ally active field is shown in Figure 2 (Friedland et al., 2014b).
Romantic love, we found in the MCA, does have an affective order among the sexually active, an order which is also categorical, discursive, emotional and practical. Love is distinguished first by words: by each telling the other that one is in love with her/him, by the categories one uses to describe the relationship in which sexual intimacy took place, and by intimate talk. Love also has an affective specificity: those who describe themselves as loving their partners not only told their part-ners they loved them, they felt their bodies responding, they felt jealous, they wanted their partpart-ners to know them, they felt depressed if things were going badly between them, and they would feel despair if the person left them. Love also has a bodily practical specificity. Intimate sexual encoun-ters of those who are not in love are characterized by a lack of sobriety, by an absence of holding hands and intimate conversation. What love does not have is a sexual specificity: loving one’s part-ner is not associated with a particular profile of sexual practices. In a world where sexual acts and emotional intentions are increasingly differentiated (Illouz, 2012, p. 49), those who “make love” experience a distinctive bodily responsiveness to their partners that is independent of the nature of the sexual acts in which they engage. It is also independent of their moral evaluation of sex, which
is—in the second dimension—associated with the sexual acts in which they engage.26 It is not
dif-ferent kinds of sexual practices that order the passion of students’ intimate lives, but whether or not an encounter is categorized, practiced and affectively experienced as love.
Romantic love is a meaningful feeling, a state of being, a kind of personhood; it is also an institutional fact, like sovereignty or scientific truth, an unobservable substance, a potentiality that founds practices that depend on the belief that they actualize or enact it. The “making” of love depends on the belief that the good is and can be real. Niklas Luhmann, the systems theorist, wrote that “one loves loving, and, therefore somebody whom one can love” (Luhmann, 2010, p. 32). Roland Barthes, the literary theorist, writing of “affirmation” in love, of the “intractable lover,” writes: “Against and in spite of everything, the subject affirms love as value” (Barthes, 1978, p. 22).
Belief matters: we found that American college students’ belief in and about love conditioned their affective experiences. Using regression techniques this time, we modeled what attributes mat-ter most in conditioning the probability that a person experienced erotic passion, specifically whether one had had an orgasm with a person that one loved in one’s last intimate encounter (Friedland et al., 2014a). Passion here fuses two things: the category of love and a corporeal response. We controlled for the kind of sexual acts in which one engaged during the last encounter including whether one had had one’s genitals stimulated manually or orally, whether one had had vaginal intercourse. We also included a non-genital measure of activity during the encounter: whether one had spoken intimately with that partner. Every physical act dramatically increased the odds that a student had had an orgasm with a partner they loved: talking intimately, being the recipient of manual and oral stimulation and vaginal intercourse. The act with the greatest effect was talking intimately, which increased the odds of sexual passion by 500%. But even controlling for all these variables, including their self-reported attractiveness, a measure of their “sexual capi-tal” (given the eroticization of beauty) and their attachment style, a student’s institutional invest-ments in love affected the probability that he or she had experienced erotic passion. Students who did not want to marry for life were significantly less likely to have experienced it; so were students who thought romantic love a sexist construct contributing to the subordination of women; and so were students who thought there was nothing morally wrong about having sex without love. The findings were similar when we looked at affects alone—for example, feeling one’s body respond to the touch of one’s partner.27 As Durkheim showed for the most private act of suicide, sexual
pas-sion, too, has institutional determinants.
Affect responds to culture because it is itself culturally formed. My argument has a kinship with that of John Levi Martin who argues for the consubstantiality of our subjective dispositions and a
world of intentional social objects (Martin, 2011). Sustained by habit, we are dispositionally able to make aesthetic judgements about the qualities of social objects, about the “requiredness” or “oughtness” of action they entail (Martin, 2011, pp. 243, 264). Intentions are immanent to social objects paired with our own world-dependent, and hence object-dependent, dispositions enabling us to respond to their affordances (Martin, 2011, pp. 236–237). Motivation is the qualitative expe-rience of social objects, the expeexpe-rience of our habitual response to these objects (Martin, 2011, pp. 264–265). Our experience of the qualities of a field, Martin writes, are affective, calling forth in us “often visceral reactions” (Martin, 2011, p. 167). As Martin reads Dewey, we experience the quali-ties of social objects as both “affectional and volitional,” neither determinately in us nor in the objects, but in the relationship between the two (Martin, 2011, pp. 184–185). In that qualities depend on our being affected by them, this suggests that affects are in part interiorizations, or incorporations, of the objective world, that our affects respond to a material-cultural world in part because they are themselves formed by the same cultural materiality, that affects are effects, that being is part and parcel of doing and having. It suggests that in an institutional logic subjectifica-tion and objectificasubjectifica-tion are co-constitutive.
If our subjectivity is afforded by that which has value, here a substance, value cannot be securely located in the subject, a subjectivity afforded in part by the substance itself.28 Because institutional
objectification affords an institutional subjectification, because particular institutional objects ena-ble and require particular forms of subjectivity, capacities and inclinations to valuation, to invest and judge, we can easily slide from one side to the other, locating value in subjects or objects, when neither alone will be adequate. Because it addresses a practical world whose constitution is located in neither subjects nor objects, but in the incessant movement between them, a movement set in motion by the conjoint subjectification and objectification of something that exceeds both, the category of substance, rather than value, seems necessary to the task.
Institutional logics are organized around represented goods which cannot themselves be per-ceived, joined to an order of material practice organized around specific complexes of objects. There is here a felicitous alignment with the perceptual philosophy of emotion. In perceptual phi-losophies emotions are bodily, or affective, experiences of a world represented according to a particular value (Todd, 2014).29 Emotions visibly articulate non-intentional bodily affects and
val-ues as intentional objects, sadness and loss for example. It is this conjunction of a non-intentional affect and intentional “object” that is consonant with my institutional casting of emotion. In the phenomenology of the emotion it is not a knowing of the value, the intentional or “formal” object, which cognitively grounds the emotion, but the specific object to which a person responds (Todd, 2014, p. 705). Emotions do not operate as reactions to values imposed on facts; their mechanism cannot be directly assimilated to forms of value rationality, practical derivations from subjective value commitments. Rather emotions are themselves “modes of access” to value (Teroni, 2007, p. 405). One apprehends danger through fear, for example (Teroni, 2007, p. 413). It is emotion’s join-ing of affect, represented value, and object—of bodily expression, semiosis, and material format— that suggests emotion as a potent aspect of institutional subjectification, subjective phenomena which both substantiate and activate the represented materiality of institution. On the one side, the value appears to inhere in the object world itself; we justify our emotions and our evaluations based upon its non-evaluative attributes (Todd, 2014, p. 706). On the other hand it must be real because I, and indeed we, feel it, because people like me in situations like these are affected by it.
The virtual reality of value is substantiated through our affective engagement in bodily practices in an object world. It is as affected beings that institutions make sense, that codes become compre-hensible by being alive, felt in our bodies. Affect’s excess to language and code makes it an outside inside institutional signification, provides it its supplemental power in institutional subjectifica-tion, as a complement to and/or a substitute for belief. The ways in which affect and emotion
