Rationalist social science systematically demotes affect in identity formation.

Evidence

The affective bond becomes more central whenever the combinatorial/symbolic dimension of language operates less automatically. From this perspective, affect is absolutely crucial in explaining the operation of the substitutive/paradigmatic pole of language, which is more freely associative in its workings (and thus more open to psychoanalytic exploration). As we have seen, equivalential logic is decisive in the formation of popular identities, and in these substitutive/equivalential operations the imbrication of signification and affect is most fully visible. This is the dimension that, as we recall, early theoreticians of mass society saw as most problematic, and involving a major threat to social rationality. And in contemporary rationalist reconstructions of social sciences, from structuralism to rational choice, this is also the pole that is systematically demoted at the expense of the combinatorial/symbolic one, which allows for a ‘grammatical’ or ‘logical’ calculation. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 448

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ch3-4 crowd-theory worries about affect that Laclau re-reads as constitutive rather than pathological. — connects to: Suggestion was an unexplained mechanism that supposedly explained everything about crowds — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 86; Social Identity Theory largely ignored emotion despite defining it in — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 2252; Suppressing the affective origins of thought yields intellectual sterility

Broader Connections

• Social Identity Theory largely ignored emotion despite defining it in #corroborates (0.95) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2252
• Suppressing the affective origins of thought yields intellectual sterility #complicates (0.75)