Affect, practice, and change: Dancing world politics at the Congress of Vienna
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| Author | Felix Rösch |
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836720954467 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836720954467
Cooperation and Conflict
2021, Vol. 56(2) 123 –140
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836720954467
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Affect, practice, and change:
Dancing world politics at the
Congress of Vienna
Felix Rösch
Abstract
How do practices change? To approach this in practice theory (PT) is a widely debated question.
This article brings PT in conversation with the study of emotions in International Relations by
considering the role of affect in practice changes. For it is affect that permeates the placiotemporal
and bodily constellations during practice performances, continuously provoking changes in and
through practices. In initiating this conversation, this article adds to current PT literature by
arguing that world political transformations not only find their origin in external conditions,
identified as such through individual reflection, but also in affective dynamics of the everyday. To
elaborate this more theoretical argument, this article evolves against the empirical backdrop of
dancing as an everyday international practice at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815). Affect that
permeated dances in Vienna not only substantiated changes in this practice but, with the waltz
replacing the minuet as the preferred dance among international political decision-makers, also
changes through it occurred. While the minuet embodied collective sentiments of a transboundary
European elite, the waltz helped to further national imaginations of world politics.
Keywords
affect, change, Congress of Vienna, dance, nineteenth century, practice
Introduction
Almost a decade has passed since Raymond Duvall and Arjun Chowdhury (2011: 337)
observed that ‘the analysis of practices falls short of offering satisfying ways of theoriz-
ing change in international politics.’ Even today, while pooling many different approaches,
practice theory (PT) is united in identifying the issue of change as requiring further atten-
tion (Cornut, 2018; Hopf, 2018; Loh and Heiskanen, 2020; Mulich, 2018; Schindler and
Wille, 2015; Stappert, 2020). To address this issue, this article brings PT into conversa-
tion with the study of affect (Åhäll, 2018; Fierke, 2013; Hutchison and Bleiker, 2014;
Koschut, 2018), as so far affect has only been mentioned ‘en passant’, to use Monique
Corresponding author:
Felix Rösch, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Coventry University, Priory Street,
Coventry CV1 5FB, UK.
Email: felix.roesch@coventry.ac.uk
954467CAC0010.1177/0010836720954467Cooperation and ConflictRösch
research-article2020
Article
124 Cooperation and Conflict 56(2)
Scheer’s (2012: 199; emphasis in original) words, when it comes to practices, apart from
some notable exceptions (Bially Mattern, 2011; Solomon and Steele, 2017).
Studying affect as processes of becoming, what Todd Hall and Andrew Ross (2015:
848) captured in the term ‘affective dynamics’, supplements recent PT discourses that
locate politically significant practice changes in the cognitive abilities of practitioners.
There is disagreement if these abilities are being stimulated only by exogenous factors,
making endogenous factors negligible, or if substantial changes might not also be rooted
within practices themselves (Schindler and Wille, 2015; Stappert, 2020). However, there
is agreement that such processes of change are being initiated by deliberate reflection.
Studying affective dynamics, by contrast, shifts scholarly attention to the transpersonal
constellations that emerge during practices. In doing so, this article returns to PT’s origi-
nal intention of theorizing in-between (Bueger and Gadinger, 2015: 451), as it helps to
understand that individual cognitive abilities are not the only reason for practices to
change. Rather, what appear to be unconscious, unreflective adaptations are outcomes of
directed and transpersonal affective processes in which further politically significant
changes are rooted.
To disentangle these processes, this article concurs with Emanuel Adler and Vincent
Pouliot (2011; also Schindler and Wille, 2015) in arguing that changes happen in and
through practices, but it is affect that drives them. Affect informs changes in practices
because its bodily constellations in place and time are constantly reformulated. Hence,
affective context-dependency (Bleiker and Hutchison, 2018: 328) prevents people from
replicating practices. At the same time, affect initiates changes through practices with the
potential to have world political implications. Affect shapes practices by informing peo-
ples’ ‘routines, knowledge making . . . and the prioritization of certain kinds of informa-
tion’ (Crawford, 2019: 229). In doing so, it prescribes potentialities of giving meaning to
the (im)material world that surrounds people and the inter-human relations in which they
are tied.
To elaborate this theoretical argument, this article evolves against the empirical back-
drop of one particular practice at one particular event – dancing at the Congress of Vienna
(1814–1815) – for three reasons. First, dance provides for a particularly insightful prac-
tice to be studied. Globally, dance epitomizes that, as ‘patterned actions that are embed-
ded in particular organized contexts . . . and are socially developed through learning and
training’ (Adler and Pouliot, 2011: 5), practices are ‘ordinaries’ (Berlant and Stewart,
2019: 5). As such, practices such as dance help people deal in collectivity with the con-
tingent, unstable, and ephemeral mundanities of life in an attempt to find stability and to
learn to understand and accept their emotional complexities in this process (Kowal et al.,
2017; Militz, 2017; Mills, 2017). Second, despite this ubiquity, dance is still treated as
one of those ‘little nothings’ in International Relations (IR) (Huysmans and Nogueira,
2016: 310). So far, dance has only occasionally been mentioned in the IR literature;
mainly as a metaphor (Åhäll, 2019; Solomon, 2019), and its potential to resolve conflicts
(Head, 2013), to perform political protests (Mills, 2017; Shapiro, 2016), and to teach
(Rösch, 2018) has been touched upon. Hence, this article also serves as an intervention
to consider the politics of dance more widely. Finally, dancing at the Congress demon-
strates that even changes to practices as ordinaries can affect politics on the international
stage. In Vienna, a post-Napoleonic order was not only instigated across negotiation
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