Description
Much work on emotions and affect in IR depends on rejecting traditional rationalist models of political decision-making and action. Emotions, often figured as socially produced and reflexive categories of feeling, shape political outcomes outside of – or sometimes through – rational action. Affect, on the other hand, consists of embodied and ‘visceral’ dispositions. As Brian Massumi argues, affect is a force that operates autonomously, prior to, and below conscious cognition, reconfiguring political relations in a way that cannot be grasped by reflective frameworks. A large body of work has now demonstrated the role of emotions and affect in international politics, tracing the political effects of or way in which discourses produce fear, anxiety, guilt, etc. But are there other ways to theorise the relationship between embodied feelings and political action? In this paper, I draw on Alain Locke’s pragmatist approach to value theory. Locke understands values as guides for social action, but such values are neither universally given nor individually conceived but derived from affective responses to objects within concrete social situations or events. Locke, then, provides a pragmatist take on the role of affect and emotions in shaping action by emphasising how feelings function to signal different value commitments. By reframing affect within a value-centric pragmatist tradition, this paper suggests new pathways for theorizing the role of emotion in IR, enriching this expanding body of literature.
