Emotions as Commodities

Capitalism, Consumption and Authenticity

Eva Illouz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351810593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Capitalism has made rationality into a pervasive feature of human action and yet, far from heralding a loss of emotionality, capitalist culture has been accompanied with an unprecedented intensification of emotional life. This raises the question: how could we have become increasingly rationalized and more intensely emotional?

Emotions as Commodities offers a simple hypothesis: that consumer acts and emotional life have become closely and inseparably intertwined with each other, each one defining and enabling the other. Commodities facilitate the experience of emotions, and so emotions are converted into commodities. The contributors of this volume present the co-production of emotions and commodities as a new type of commodity that has gone unseen and unanalyzed by theories of consumption – emodity. Indeed, this innovative book explores how emodity includes atmospherical or mood-producing commodities, relation-marking commodities and mental commodities, all of which the purpose it is to change and improve the self.

Analysing a variety of modern day situations such as emotional management through music, creation of urban sexual atmospheres and emotional transformation through psychotherapy, Emotions as Commodities will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, Marketing, Anthropology and Consumer Studies.

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Part I

Liberating the self

Emotional experiences and moods

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Chapter 1

“It is all included – without the stress”

Exploring the production of relaxation in Club Med seaside resorts

Yaara Benger Alaluf

Tripadvisor reviewer MariaM99 describes the Club Med resort where she spent her holiday as “the ideal place to relax and let your troubles & stress melt away,” a place where she was “able to easily escape the stress of life.” Similarly, JeanPaulLanfranchi writes that Club Med was exactly the resort he needed to regenerate himself “after a tough period of stress at work.”¹ To the casual reader, there is nothing remarkable in these reviews. After all, seaside resorts are supposed to be relaxing. But this assumption has a history which explains why relaxation is widely taken for granted as part of contemporary holiday-making. Some might say that the sea is relaxing. Yet, even if we accept this claim as given, seaside resorts, including those run by Club Med, are much more than a beach: they are a whole industry. My aim in this chapter is to explore how this industry produces the experience of relaxation which we so naturally attach to it. Through the example of relaxation in Club Med resorts, I want to demonstrate the process of the commodification of emotions in tourism and to illustrate how a specific touristic site leads to a defined emotional experience – in the case of Club Med seaside resorts: the Emodity of relaxation.

The chapter consists of two main parts. After a theoretical introduction, I will highlight three historical processes which enabled the construction of tourism as an emotional industry: (a) the emotional idealization of nature; (b) the emotional consequences of the differentiation between work and leisure; and (c) the standardization of tourism, which I argue has expanded tourism’s emotional dimension. Following the exploration of these cultural conditions, I will trace the emergence of relaxation as a tourist demand, which contemporary vacation resorts address. The second part of the chapter is dedicated to the task of uncovering the production and supply of relaxation in Club Med resorts. Through the analysis of 55 online reviews written by vacationers, I examine the influence of the resort experience on the emotional state of its customers according to my inference of three main characteristics of a Club Med vacation: spatial differentiation, blurring of economic exchange, and focus on the individual. Through each of these sections I will analyze the contribution of the specific characteristic to the production of relaxation in light of the subjective descriptions of the reviewers.

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Tourism as an emotional industry

The tourist industry is a good case for the study of the commodification of emotions. It is one of the world’s largest economic sectors and integrates economic and emotional aspects on a global scale.² Indeed, much has been written about tourism as a commodity (e.g., Burkart and Medlik 1974; Cohen 2004; Urry 1990, 1995; Watson and Kopachevsky 1994).³ This literature includes some discussion on the intangible products of this industry: Bell and Lyall (2002) emphasize that tourism’s value is mainly aesthetic; Coleman and Crang (2002) relate to tourism as a market of experiences; for Friedberg (1993) tourism is “the experience of ‘foreign’ spaces” (Ibid.: 3) as well as a commodified traveling experience (Ibid.: 59); Watson and Kopachevsky (1994) stress that the tourist experience includes the consumption of “signs, symbols, cultural experiences” (Ibid.: 649–650).

The experiential quality of tourism is certainly acknowledged in these accounts, i.e., it necessarily includes a cognitive or sensual engagement – but what exactly characterizes this experience, and how it is commodified? This question has been addressed by two sociologists of tourism, John Urry and Ning Wang, who perceive the tourist experience as basically constructed vis á vis our experience of daily modern life (Urry 1990: 1–2; Wang 2000: 92). What forms the tourist experience is therefore difference: the experience and its anticipatory expectations are constituted in the light of, and in contrast to, certain non-tourist experiences. That is what makes the tourist experience both multiple and contingent.

However, Urry and Wang differ in their answer to the second question, concerning how this experience is commodified. For Urry, tourism is the visual consumption of sights and places through what he calls “the tourist gaze,” implying that the antithetical experience emerges as an effect of aesthetic signs which are out of the ordinary (Urry 1990: 3). Following Cohen’s analytical distinction between sightseers, who seek novelty, and vacationers, who seek change (Cohen 2004), Wang claims that the holiday tourist’s need for change is etched into “the temporal structure of modernity” (Wang 2000: 91). From his point of view, what is commodified is “free time” (Ibid.: 109–110).

Although I accept Urry and Wang’s conception of tourism – and especially holiday-making – as an antithetical experience, my argument differs from theirs in two key ways. First, I focus on emotion as the cardinal object consumed in twentieth-century recreational tourism, and its commodification as the source of the contrasted experience. Indeed, emotional aspects of the tourist experience are present in Urry and Wang’s studies as well as in other works on tourism.⁴ However, neither of these consists of a clear argumentation of emotion as a commodity which is produced and consumed through tourist activity. Second, via the example of relaxation as an Emodity fabricated in Club Med resorts, I aim to explain how specific sites and activities are deliberately designed to manipulate emotional experiences. In this sense, those spatial and temporal qualities which were interpreted by Urry and Wang correspondingly as the essence of the antithetical tourist experience, are reconceptualized here as components of a set of mechanisms by which the resort shapes the emotional experience. By highlighting the emotional essence of tourism, I wish to unravel the reciprocal relation between emotional experience and economic industry. From this perspective, “leisure” is seen as a realm of production increasingly focused on creating and inducing intense emotional experiences, be they exciting or relaxing.

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What makes tourism an ideal realm for the commodification of emotions? Whereas it is a truism that any experience has an emotional dimension, the key question here is whether this experience is framed and labeled as emotional. This labeling is a necessary condition since the commodification of emotions presupposes their constitution as objects. The objectification of emotions is achieved only once “emotional experience is organized, labeled, classified, and interpreted” (Illouz 1997: 3) within a specific cultural frame. As a matter of fact, emotion has not always been considered a clear object of the tourism experience, but has emerged more recently as a core aspect of tourism; for this reason alone, this claim demands careful examination. My goal here is not to tell the story of contemporary tourism, therefore I will concentrate only on the components of the history of tourism which have turned this industry into a potential field for the commodification of emotions.

Travel, and even organized travel, existed in pre-modern societies. However, it is widely accepted that tourism is a modern phenomenon (Cohen 2004; MacCannell 1976; Urry 1990; Wang 2000). The word “tour” was first used – in the sense we use it today in the term “tourism” – in the early eighteenth century (Wang 2000: 3). The “Grand Tour,” a journey taken by young aristocrats around canonical sites in Europe, with the aim of developing their education, is usually given as the birth of tourism as a modern phenomenon, and it became firmly established at this time (Berghoff 2002). The aristocratic practice of “taking the waters,” that is, bathing in and drinking mineral waters in search of medical cure, also emerged around this time. These two practices laid the foundation for holiday-making. Although until the nineteenth century tourism was clearly limited to the upper classes, by the second half of the century the commercialization of tourism allowed growing sectors of society access to the tourist experience, thus “democratizing” tourism (Urry 1990, 1995). Over the course of its development, three major processes have tightened the link between tourism and emotions: the emotionalization of nature, the distinction between work and leisure, and the standardization of tourism.

The emotionalization of nature

For hundreds of years, the increasingly secularized western tradition saw nature not as a space of divine revelation or for individual recreation, but as a dangerous and alien place. By the end of the seventeenth century, travelers (themselves a privileged few) still described nature as sublime, powerful, and terrifying (Bell and Lyall 2002: 4–6; Corbin 1994). The colonization of the New World and the spreading domestication of lands in Europe started to change people’s attitude towards nature: “mythological explanations of nature faded; unproductive land was seen as ugly; and domesticated, inhabited landscape was seen as beautiful, and how it should be” (Bell and Lyall 2002: 7). Although nature was less frightening and subordinated to human needs to an unprecedented extent, these needs were essentially material. Nature was not a focus of tourism yet.

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By the end of the seventeenth century, some philosophers and theological scholars in France and Britain marked the beginning of a transition in the perception of nature. Natural theologians and Enlightenment naturalists ceased to see nature as an analogy between human and universe or between the physical and the spiritual and started to interpret nature as an expression of God – a meaningful spectacle (Corbin 1994: 22–26; Daston 2004: 101–102). However, travel for non-commercial purposes still focused on art and classic culture, as demonstrated in the case of the “Grand Tour.” Raw nature did not have a “secular” emotional appeal yet. Only with the rise of Romanticism did uncivilized nature become a point of interest and curiosity. Romantic thought led both to the aesthetic appreciation of nature’s authenticity and to a new intellectual and reflective interest in the emotional authenticity of the self.⁵ Increasingly, nature was attached to concepts of authenticity, harmony, and sensitivity, and the emphasis was put on the individual experience, pleasure, senses, and emotion (Bell and Lyall 2002: 7–8; Urry 1990: 20).

The distinction between work and leisure

The distinction between the work sphere and the leisure sphere became clearer during the second half of the nineteenth century as an effect of the regularization of industrial time. This distinction is usually discussed in the context of the emergence of consumerism, simply because the combination of defined free time and stable wages led to the swift expansion of “consumerist leisure” (Illouz 1997: 27; Stearns 2001: 49–50). However, this distinction designates not only specific space, time, and activity for each of the states – work and leisure – but also distinct emotional repertoires.

The wish to “buy” a different emotional experience during leisure time is expressed in Stearn’s words regarding the first decades of industrial capitalism:

[t]he unpleasantness of much industrial work had long been recognized. Gradually, some of the workers involved decided that, while the unpleasantness could not be reversed directly, it could be mitigated if labor could bid for a better life off the job.

(Stearns 2001: 56)

The reduction of working time and the democratization of holiday-making starting from the last decades of the nineteenth century converted leisure into an affordable mechanism for emotional alternation. Holidays away from the city offered release from the monotonous work, the harsh discipline in the factories, the crowded urban space, and a general liberation “from boredom and frustration” (Cross and Walton 2005: 63).

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The standardization of tourism as leisure

Gradually, and markedly after the Second World War, tourism transformed from a luxury into a commodity: standardized, rationally produced, and accessible to the masses (Berghoff 2002; Watson and Kopachevsky 1994). This development was supported by managers and theoreticians who believed that the organization and rationalization of leisure time would contribute to workers’ morality and health, and consequently lead to industrial efficiency (Bailey 1978: 57–60; Meller 2013: 11). Although many scholars, following the “Frankfurt School” spirit, have criticized the rationalization of tourism as turning it into a staged and patterned practice (MacCannell 1976; Watson and Kopachevsky 1994), it does not follow that the rationalization of tourism is incompatible with its emotionalization. In typical neo-Marxist style, Watson and Kopachevsky stress that in consumer society, leisure time “becomes another routinized, packaged, commodity, thereby failing to be anything like a carefree, relaxed, alternative to work” (Watson and Kopachevsky 1994: 645). However, apart from ignoring the phenomenological fact that many people do find relief in their free time, as will be shown later, a central flaw of the “staged consumption” argument derives from its simplistic interpretation of the commodification process.

In a post-Fordist reality, standardized and rationalized production does not necessarily result in a homogeneous product and an alienated experience of consumption. On the contrary, many products have become a platform for endless possibilities of individual consumer experiences (Lash and Lury 2007). One of the main outcomes of the standardization of tourism is that, being standardized, the vacation becomes predictable: it requires less planning and less active and conscious involvement of the tourist (cooking, searching for attractions, etc.), hence opening up more space for individual emotional experience.

Demanding relaxation

The constitution of relaxation as a central emotional experience to be achieved in holiday-making can be seen as the outcome of the intersection of three processes: the rise of the spa and seaside resort industry, the democratization of leisure time and the creation of mass tourism, and the emergence of the psychological concept of “stress” (Benger Alaluf 2016). From the late eighteenth century onwards, Western Europe witnessed the widespread growth of spas and seaside resorts. Although the use of nature for human purposes was not new, by this time the instrumentalization of nature in search of a (secular) personal transformation was restricted to physical alternation (health, cure) and modified facilities (baths, pools) (Adams 2015; Beckerson and Walton 2005). Goin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Emotions as Commodities
• Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Emotions
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Emodities or the Making of Emotional Commodities
• Part I Liberating the Self: Emotional Experiences and Moods
• Part II Ideal of Intimacy: Relational Emotions
• Part III The Ideal of Mental Health and Self-Improvement: Emotional Self-Monitoring as Commodity
• Toward a Post-Normative Critique of Emotional Authenticity: Conclusion
• Index