HuK-Forum: Against Affect and for Emotion

Departing from the present-day free-floating assertions about affect the presentation will offer their critical appraisal. It will question it as a sociological tool of analysis. This will be accomplished by discussing „affect as it“, “individual affective wiring”, and “affect is relational” to show that these ideas either already have been covered and researched by the sociologists of emotion and/or can be studied only indirectly via indicators which are at present missing or poorly specified. The second part of the presentation will turn to a more general question of what it is we want to know when we study affect or emotion. The

current Sociology of Emotions suffers from an overabundance of case studies, relying on a rather arbitrary theory-mix. To counteract this tendency it makes sense to think back to various sociological grand theories. The presentation will offer examples illustrating what research agenda each implies.