Affect, practice, and change: Dancing world politics at the Congress of Vienna

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 theorizing 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 attention (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 conversation 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 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 original 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 peoples’ ‘routines, knowledge making . . . and the prioritization of certain kinds of information’ (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 backdrop 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 practice to be studied. Globally, dance epitomizes that, as ‘patterned actions that are embedded 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 contingent, 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 demonstrates 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 tables behind closed doors but also on dance floors. Varying dance performances offered Congress participants affective opportunities to embody different political communities and imagine conflicting trajectories for a new European political order.

To proceed with this argument, this article first critically reviews PT’s current focus on individual agency and reflection in the second section. This helps to highlight the benefits of studying affect for understanding how practices change which are further elaborated in the following section. Discussing how affect imbues practices with change, the third second section reflects on its aspects (place, time, and bodies), before demonstrating affective changes in and through practices. Building on this discussion, the fourth section reconstructs international sociability at the Congress of Vienna by focusing on dance. In a comprehensive study of letters and diaries, substantiated by newspaper articles and secret service reports, the emotional intensities of Congress attendees are revived to record affective changes in and through dance. The fifth section concludes the article.

Practices continuously change (Bueger and Gadinger, 2015: 456). In initial structural explanations, however, the ubiquity of change often fell ‘out of sight’, as Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2012: 14) observed. By contrast, in more recent (historical) sociological readings of practices, many of which found inspiration in the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Luc Boltanski, and Bruno Latour (Martin-Mazé, 2017; Mulich, 2018; Pouliot and Cornut, 2015), and in normative-hermeneutic accounts (Lechner and Frost, 2018), questions of change moved into the focus, with internal understandings predominating. Finding their origins in the actions of individual performers, changes in these accounts are often either considered to be largely pre-reflective in that they simply occur through what practitioners are doing, making them ‘unintentional, non-directional, and unpredictable’ (Hopf, 2018: 705) or they are understood to originate in reflective deliberation (Bode, 2018; Hopf, 2018; Neumann, 2002). Following Ted Hopf (2018: 688), it is this latter type that ‘account[s] for the kind of meaningful and significant change that we mostly care about in the study of world politics.’

With this focus, PT is in the position to address critiques of lacking emphasis that, according to Jonathan Joseph and Milja Kurki (2018: 93), ‘obfuscate[s] more than assist[s] in [understanding] . . . complex world political processes.’ However, limiting significant political changes to being grounded in individual reflection also means that these accounts do not consider the often unobservable affective constellations in-between practitioners in this process. It is for this reason that significant changes appear to merely emerge in the extraordinary beyond the specific everyday in which practices are being performed.

To further elaborate this point, this article turns to the moment that reflective processes are being initiated, that is, the observation of external conditions. Following Hopf (2018: 689), the possibility to observe is rooted in the everydayness of practices. Being able to habitually perform practices, not least because they contain repetitive elements (Bueger and Gadinger, 2015: 456), frees practitioners to mentally step aside and observe. Hence, practitioners initiate processes of reflection while performing practices at the same time. However, by concentrating only on ‘the role of individual agency’ (Bode, 2018: 295), the simultaneity of performing and observing causes practices and external conditions to emerge in reflective practice contributions as ‘lasting’ in a ‘static present’ (Jonas, 1954: 513), meaning that they are unaffected by spatio-temporal constellations. This is because trying to make sense of external conditions by comparing them to practitioners’ experiences and previous social interactions (Bode, 2018: 298−299) favors aspects that are discernible to practitioners during reflection.

However, ‘not everything can be understood through the empirical method of mere observation’ (Eisler et al., 2020: 156) because it only partly accounts for the transpersonal complexities of ‘sensory, affective, and aesthetic experiences that together constitute the lived dimension of social life’ (Ross, 2019: 28). Hence, practitioners-cum-observers do not appear as recognizing that external conditions only acquire meaning as such through them granting practice changing status via these sensory, affective, and aesthetic experiences. They are also not characterized as being aware of the complexities of these experiences in which their position is affected by practices and these conditions.

Experiencing practices and external conditions as being, rather than becoming, the latter appear therefore in recent PT accounts as ‘present to me without drawing me into . . . [their] presence’ (Jonas, 1954: 515; similarly in Ross, 2019: 31−32). In other words, arguing that practice changes with a significant impact on world politics are only triggered by external conditions ‘takes a rigorous separation of mind and body for granted’, as Dirk Nabers (2017: 420) puts it for the IR literature on crisis. Similar to these understandings of crisis, also conditions for change are seen in reflective PT as ‘existing independently’, not acknowledging that they ‘only acquire meaning through our mental activities’ (Nabers, 2017: 420) and affective dynamics in transpersonal constellations. This turns reflection into a process ‘wielded by humans as atomistic, isolated, units’ (Cornut, 2018: 718) in which change is initiated by conditions that temporarily surface, which have to be addressed, rather than seeing them as permanent attributes of their everyday lives. In doing so, the agency of others, performing practices that the observer identifies as external conditions, is (unintentionally) taken away.

Other PT contributions, while continuing to concentrate on reflective deliberation, have called this focus on exogenous conditions as the sole stimulus for change into question, demonstrating that significant political changes can also originate in practices themselves (Schindler and Wille, 2015; Stappert, 2020). However, identifying different interpretations of past events as the reason for such changes still disregards the transpersonal character of practices. In doing so, also these contributions account for an extraordinariness in practice changes that their location in the everyday does not warrant. Rather, when Annika Björkdahl et al. (2019: 126) write that the everyday oscillates ‘between the unconscious and conscious’, then this alludes to an in-between that continuously permeates practice performances. As Adler and Pouliot (2011: 4) insinuated in their definition of practices as ‘competent performances’, practices always imply the existence and acceptance of an other, even if the other is reduced to an audience. Considering this in-between exceptional spatio-temporary intermittences of otherwise stable practices turn into transpersonal continua by refocusing on the specific assemblages that practitioners are situated in. In other words, practices are continuously subject to change in an everyday in which people try to take their place in the world and make sense of it (Kessler and Guillaume, 2012: 118; Mannergren Selimovic, 2019: 131). As the next section shows, these continua of change are initiated by affect.

A first indication for this initiation is to be found in another well-known practice definition. For Andreas Reckwitz (2002: 249), a practice is ‘a routinized type of behavior which consists of several elements interconnected to one another.’ One of these elements is ‘states of emotion’. Indeed, this emotional aspect is central for Reckwitz (2017), as he subsequently expounded in more detail: practices evoke emotions, allowing people to express and negotiate them in collectivity. Hence, affect encourages or discourages people to continue to act together. It is therefore less the observable materialization of practices through bodies that constitutes the social meaningfulness, to which Adler and Pouliot (2011) alluded in their definition, and ultimately change, but it is primarily to be found in-between bodies during practice performances (Hutchison, 2019: 287).

Previous contributions to PT, however, remained skeptical towards emotional aspects, arguing that such a focus would create ‘an “outside” world according to . . . internal mental dispositions and feelings.’ While Jérémie Cornut (2018: 718) concedes that considering emotions ‘may open the rationalist black box of the human brain to explain the frequent departures from “rational” behaviour’, it still shares ‘with rationalists an individualistic conception of agency.’ However, as recent IR scholarship (Beattie et al., 2019: 138; Hutchison and Bleiker, 2014: 492) demonstrated, emotions are not to be reduced to merely individual physical intensities but there is also a collective dimension that connects and transcends individuals. To prevent reading the following paragraphs as a continuation of what has been critiqued in the previous section, the collective dimension of emotions is termed affect. This understanding coincides with IR scholarship, discussing it ‘as embodied transpersonal movements that often exceed individual subjects’ (Solomon and Steele, 2017: 276; also Åhäll, 2018; Ross, 2019). While Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison (2018: 331) note that affect is often unconscious and unreflective in the sense of being ineffable in contrast to individual emotions, affect still leaves room for directed processes, as further elaborated below, but it rules out affect as driven by rational, reflective processes.

Operating with affect as transpersonal embodied becoming, the remainder of this section first investigates the elements through which affect permeates practices. Emerging from encounters between bodies (Pile, 2010: 9), affect not only permeates in-between them but these encounters also occur in a specific place and time (Anderson, 2006: 736−737; Scheer, 2012: 201). Considering these interrelations allows the recoding of affective changes in and through practices in the final section, demonstrating that significant world political changes can root in the affective transpersonal constellations of everyday practices.

To exemplify the impact of affective dynamics on practice changes, this article turns now to the Congress of Vienna and the dancing that took place between September 1814 and June 1815. Dance is not the only cultural practice that allows reflecting on affective dynamics. As recent scholarship has demonstrated (Mahiet, 2019; Ramel and Prévost-Thomas, 2018), also music provides for affective encounters to facilitate conflict resolution and Vienna was no exception. Ludwig van Beethoven even composed his only polonaise during the Congress, dedicating it to the Tsarina. However, as mentioned, dance is a particularly multidimensional practice and it was the one practice all attendees could participate in. In fact, so much dancing was going on that the Austrian field marshal Charles-Joseph de Ligne feared that the Congress would end up in failure, allegedly complaining that ‘le Congrès danse, mais il ne marche pas [the Congress dances, but it does not progress]’(cited in Fournier, 1913: 273).

However, dancing was not merely a pastime for Congress attendees. Rather, by performing different dances, ambivalent potentialities of world political imaginations could be enacted. To demonstrate these potentialities, this article deliberately does not focus on the polonaise, ‘the epitome of aristocratic elegance’ (Vick, 2014: 51). Rather, it discusses two other dances: the minuet, at the time of the Congress already in decline, but still widely enough performed to alleviate negotiations in Vienna, intended to reestablish peace and reverse the political changes of the French Revolution, while the rising popularity of waltz provided for opposite world imaginations by embodying liberal, national sentiments.

Considering Tom Lundborg’s (2009) Deleuzian reading of the event, recording the interrelations between place, time, and bodies during these two dances in each sub-section therefore not only shows changes in practices but it also allows to condense affective dynamics that in the case of dance as an international practice became protracted throughout the nineteenth century. Each sub-section then investigates changes through these dances that affected world political imaginations.

This article brought PT into conversation with the study of affect in IR to further our understanding of how practices change. It demonstrated that even practices as ordinaries, rooted in and constitutive of peoples’ everyday life, can change in a way that they have transformative effects on world politics. With this focus on affect, it supported Adler and Pouliot (2011: 1) in arguing that PT helps IR to ‘zoom in on the quotidian unfolding of international life and analyze . . . [how the everyday impacts on] the “big picture” of world politics’.

This is because affect permeates practice performances, causing them to change. By continuously reshuffling constellations of place, time, and bodies, affect leads to changes in practices that often remain at first unnoticed, as they are relatively marginal adaptations. However, rooted in these everyday adaptations are potentialities to transform world politics, as affect is meaning-making in the sense of people creating affective memories and developing emotional knowledge about themselves, their fellow practitioners, and their life-worlds through contingent and ephemeral encounters during practices.

To exemplify this role of affect and demonstrate that significant world political changes are rooted in everyday practices, this article reflected on dance as a political practice at the Congress of Vienna. Transformations to ballroom dancing that were popularized in Vienna happened not only because of changing fashions but also because of the specific meanings embodied in them. Dances such as the minuet still evoked transboundary images of the world. They were not free of power relations, as during dancing bodies not only act but also are being acted upon. In Vienna, dancing the minuet was meant to sustain a trans-European dynastic order, making their performances political by affectively reassuring its members of their commonalities and of their position in this hierarchical order. At the same time, dancing the waltz contested these transboundary images by embodying liberal, national sentiments. With the rise of the latter, ballroom dancing was freed from its previous statism, providing space for individual interpretation and offering permanent contact points with fixed partners. This transition did not stop then and there, but later in different affective constellations also the waltz came to be considered unsuitable to perform national sentiments in the crumbling Eurasian empires, being replaced by Hungarian csárdás, Czech polkas, Polish mazurkas, and kolos in the Balkans.

As the Congress demonstrated, affective adaptations often take place in antagonistic processes of becoming. This opens pathways for future research. While Hopf (2018: 705) is right in arguing that ‘we are going to need to abandon any hopes of predicting social change’, considering affect when studying how practices change can still sensitize us for the politics involved in these processes. Accepting change as continuous and inevitable, questions of continuity may receive more consideration, encouraging the discipline to investigate how people manage to find stability in the ambiguity of continuously changing practices and how this helps them to engage with change in an unprepossessed way. Indeed, recent contributions to diplomatic as well as peace and conflict studies (Behr and Devereux, 2020; Holmes, 2018) have begun to think in this direction by questioning essentializing conceptualizations of peace and understanding differences as opportunities for cooperation, rather than sources of conflict. While still a novelty in IR, other disciplines have shown (Croft, 2015; LeBaron et al., 2014; Mahiet, 2019; Urbain, 2007) that the affective potentials of dance (and other cultural practices such as) deserve further investigation, as they can have positive practical implications to identify communalities and eventually build identities while not renouncing diversity.

Earlier versions of this article have been presented at several occasions. For comments and encouragement, I am grateful to the participants and particularly to Hartmut Behr, Gunther Hellmann, Anne Holthoefer, Adam Humphreys, Florian Kerschbaumer, Erik Ringmar, Brent J. Steele, Thomas Thurnell-Read, and Atsuko Watanabe. I also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and constructive critique.