Symbolic Violence and Affective Affinities

Chapter Five considers how tastes, ethics, morals, values, aesthetics and the like are all key to thinking about modes of distinction and the dissemination of symbolic violence. These phenomena are situated as an affective economy, where engagements and entanglements with things and people in specific social spaces summon emotions and feelings that are the very moments where inequalities shift from being immanent and imminent to being present and felt. Symbolic violence is therefore an affective violence. The chapter discusses the concept of social death and how tastes and morals are relations of affective affinity. The experience of symbolic violence is an affective experience of lack, that is, a lack of sticky affinities with the ‘right’ things.