Cold Intimacies

The Making of Emotional Capitalism

Eva Illouz

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745658070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

It is commonly assumed that capitalism has created an a-emotional world dominated by bureaucratic rationality; that economic behavior conflicts with intimate, authentic relationships; that the public and private spheres are irremediably opposed to each other; and that true love is opposed to calculation and self-interest.
Eva Illouz rejects these conventional ideas and argues that the culture of capitalism has fostered an intensely emotional culture in the workplace, in the family, and in our own relationship to ourselves. She argues that economic relations have become deeply emotional, while close, intimate relationships have become increasingly defined by economic and political models of bargaining, exchange, and equity. This dual process by which emotional and economic relationships come to define and shape each other is called emotional capitalism. Illouz finds evidence of this process of emotional capitalism in various social sites: self-help literature, women's magazines, talk shows, support groups, and the Internet dating sites. How did this happen? What are the social consequences of the current preoccupation with emotions? How did the public sphere become saturated with the exposure of private life? Why does suffering occupy a central place in contemporary identity? How has emotional capitalism transformed our romantic choices and experiences? Building on and revising the intellectual legacy of critical theory, this book addresses these questions and offers a new interpretation of the reasons why the public and the private, the economic and the emotional spheres have become inextricably intertwined.

1

The Rise of Homo Sentimentalis

Sociologists have traditionally conceived of modernity in terms of the advent of capitalism, the rise of democratic political institutions, or the moral force of the idea of individualism, but have taken little notice of the fact that, along with the familiar concepts of surplus value, exploitation, rationalization, disenchantment, or division of labor, most grand sociological accounts of modernity contained, in a minor key, another story: namely descriptions or accounts of the advent of modernity in terms of emotions. To take a few glaring yet seemingly trivial examples, Weber’s Protestant ethic contains at its core a thesis about the role of emotions in economic action, for it is the anxiety provoked by an inscrutable divinity which is at the heart of the capitalist entrepreneur’s frantic activity.¹ Marx’s alienation – which was central in explaining the worker’s relation to the process and product of labor – had strong emotional overtones, as when Marx, in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, discusses alienated labor as a loss of reality, in his words, a loss of the bond to the object.² When Marx’s “alienation” was appropriated – and distorted – by popular culture, it was mostly for its emotional implications: modernity and capitalism were alienating in the sense that they created a form of emotional numbness which separated people from one another, from their community, and from their own deep selves. Or still we may evoke Simmel’s famous depiction of Metropolis which contains an account of emotional life. For Simmel, urban life creates an endless flow of nervous stimulations and stands in contrast to small-town life which rests on emotional relationships. The typically modern attitude, for Simmel, is that of the “blasé,” a mix of reserve, coldness and indifference, and, Simmel adds, always in danger of turning into hatred.³ Finally, Durkheim’s sociology is – perhaps surprisingly for the neo-Kantian that he was – most obviously concerned with emotions. Indeed, “solidarity,” the linchpin of Durkheim’s sociology, is nothing but a bundle of emotions binding social actors to the central symbols of society (what Durkheim called “effervescence” in the Elementary Forms of Religious Life).⁴ (In the conclusion of Symbolic Classifications,⁵ Durkheim and Mauss claim that symbolic classifications – cognitive entities par excellence – have an emotional core.) Durkheim’s view of modernity was even more directly concerned with emotions as he tried to understand how, given that the social differentiation of modern societies lacked emotional intensity, modern society still “held together.”⁶

My point is clear enough, and I do not need to belabor it: unbeknown to them, canonical sociological accounts of modernity contain, if not a full-fledged theory of emotions, at least numerous references to them: anxiety, love, competitiveness, indifference, guilt are all present in most historical and sociological accounts of the ruptures which have led to the modern era, if we only care to scratch its surface.⁷ My broad claim in this book is that when we recover that not-so-hidden dimension of modernity, standard analyses of what constitutes modern selfhood and identity, of the private–public divide and its articulation on gender divisions, become seriously altered.

But, you may ask, why should we do that? Wouldn’t focusing on such a highly subjective, invisible, and personal experience as “emotion” undercut the vocation of sociology, which has been, after all, chiefly concerned with objective regularities, patterned action, and large-scale institutions? Why, in other words, should we fuss and mess with a category without which sociology has done, thus far, quite well? There are, I think, quite a few reasons.^8/9

Emotion is not action per se, but it is the inner energy that propels us toward an act, what gives a particular “mood” or “coloration” to an act. Emotion can thus be defined as the “energy-laden” side of action, where that energy is understood to simultaneously implicate cognition, affect, evaluation, motivation, and the body.^10/11 Far from being pre-social or pre-cultural, emotions are cultural meanings and social relationships that are inseparably compressed together and it is this compression which confers on them their capacity to energize action. What makes emotion carry this “energy” is the fact that it always concerns the self and the relationship of the self to culturally situated others. When you tell me “you are late again,” whether I feel shame, anger, or guilt will depend almost exclusively on my relationship to you. My boss’s remark about my being late is likely to shame me, a colleague’s is likely to make me angry, but if it is my child waiting for me at school, it is likely to make me feel guilty. Emotion is certainly a psychological entity, but it is no less and perhaps more so a cultural and social one: through emotion we enact cultural definitions of personhood as they are expressed in concrete and immediate but always culturally and socially defined relationships. I would thus say that emotions are cultural meanings and social relationships that are very compressed together and that it is this compact compression which confers on them their energetic and hence their pre-reflexive, often semi-conscious character. Emotions are deeply internalized and unreflexive aspects of action, but not because they do not contain enough culture and society in them, but rather because they have too much.

For this reason, a hermeneutic sociology which wants to understand social action from “within” cannot do that adequately without paying attention to the emotional coloration of action and to what actually propels it.

Emotions have another cardinal importance for sociology: much of social arrangements are also emotional arrangements. It is trivial to say that the most fundamental division and distinction organizing most societies around the world – that between men and women – is based on (and reproduces itself through) emotional cultures.¹² To be a man of character requires one to display courage, cool-headed rationality, and disciplined aggressiveness. Femininity on the other hand demands kindness, compassion, and cheerfulness. The social hierarchy produced by gender divisions contains implicit emotional divisions, without which men and women would not reproduce their roles and identities. And these divisions in turn produce emotional hierarchies, whereby cool-headed rationality is usually deemed more reliable, objective, and professional than, say, compassion. For example, the ideal of objectivity which dominates our conception of the news or of (blind) justice, presupposes such male practice and model of emotional self-control. Emotions are thus organized hierarchically and this type of emotional hierarchy in turn implicitly organizes moral and social arrangements.

My claim is that the making of capitalism went hand in hand with the making of an intensely specialized emotional culture and that when we focus on this dimension of capitalism – on its emotions so to speak – we may be in a position to uncover another order in the social organization of capitalism. In this first lecture, I show that when we view emotions as principal characters in the story of capitalism and modernity, the conventional division between an a-emotional public sphere and the private sphere saturated with emotions begins to dissolve, as it becomes apparent that throughout the twentieth century middle-class men and women were made to focus intensely on their emotional life, both in the workplace and in the family, by using similar techniques to foreground the self and its relation to others. Such new culture of emotionality does not mean, as Tocquevillean critics fear, that we have withdrawn inside the shell of private life;¹³ quite the contrary, never has the private self been so publicly performed and harnessed to the discourses and values of the economic and political spheres. The second lecture explores more fully the ways in which modern identity has indeed become increasingly publicly performed in a variety of social sites through a narrative which combines the aspiration to self-realization with the claim to emotional suffering. The prevalence and persistence of this narrative, which we may call as shorthand a narrative of recognition, is related to the material and ideal interests of a variety of social groups operating within the market, in civil society, and within the institutional boundaries of the state. In the third lecture, I show how the process of making the self into an emotional and public matter finds its most potent expression in the technology of the Internet, a technology which presupposes and enacts a public emotional self and in fact even makes the public emotional self precede private interactions and constitute them.

Although each lecture can be read separately, there is an organic link between them and a cumulative progression toward the main goal of these three lectures, namely to draw the contours of what I call emotional capitalism. Emotional capitalism is a culture in which emotional and economic discourses and practices mutually shape each other, thus producing what I view as a broad, sweeping movement in which affect is made an essential aspect of economic behavior and in which emotional life – especially that of the middle classes – follows the logic of economic relations and exchange. Inevitably, the themes of “rationalization” and “commodification” (of emotions) are recurrent topics running throughout all three lectures. Yet, my analysis is neither Marxian nor Weberian in that I do not presuppose that economy and emotions can be (or ought to be) separate from each other.¹⁴ In fact, as I show, market-based cultural repertoires shape and inform interpersonal and emotional relationships, while interpersonal relationships are at the epicenter of economic relationships. More exactly, market repertoires become intertwined with the language of psychology and, combined together, offer new techniques and meanings to forge new forms of sociability. In the following section, I will examine how this new mode of sociability emerged and what are its core emotional (imaginary) significations.

Freud and the Clark lectures

If I had to forget my training as a cultural sociologist as well as my deep-seated suspicion of assignable dates to major cultural shifts, and if I was nonetheless forced to choose a date which marked the transformation of American emotional culture, I would pick 1909, the year Sigmund Freud went to lecture in America at Clark University. In five broad-sweeping lectures, Freud presented, before an eclectic audience, the major ideas of psychoanalysis, or at any rate those ideas which would find a resounding echo in American popular culture, such as slips of the tongue, the role of the unconscious in determining our destiny, the centrality of dreams for psychic life, the sexual character of most of our desires, the family as the origin of our psyche and ultimate cause of its pathologies. It is rather strange that many sociological and historical analyses have offered us elaborate and sophisticated accounts of psychoanalysis in terms of its intellectual origins,¹⁵ or its impact on cultural conceptions of the self, or in terms of its relationship to scientific ideas, but have overlooked a simple and glaring fact, namely that psychoanalysis and the wide variety of dissident theories of the psyche which followed had, by and large, the primary vocation of reshaping emotional life (although of course it seemed to be merely interested in dissecting it). More exactly, the many and various strands of clinical psychology – Freudian, Ego psychology, Humanist, Object-Relation – formulated what I suggest calling a new emotional style – the therapeutic emotional style – which has dominated the American cultural landscape throughout the twentieth century.

What is an “emotional style”? In her well-known Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer suggests that every age in the history of philosophy “has its own preoccupation … ” and that “it is the mode of handling problems” – what Langer calls their “technique” – rather than what they are about “that assigns them to an age.”¹⁶ I use the term therapeutic emotional style for the ways in which twentieth-century culture became “preoccupied” with emotional life – its etiology and morphology – and devised specific “techniques” – linguistic, scientific, interactional – to apprehend and manage these emotions.¹⁷ Modern emotional style has been shaped mostly (albeit not exclusively) by the language of therapy which emerged in a relatively short period running from the First World War to the Second World War. If, as Jürgen Habermas put it, “The end of the nineteenth century saw a discipline emerge [psychoanalysis], primarily as the work of a single man … [Freud],”¹⁸ I would add that this discipline quickly became more than a discipline, that is, a specialized body of knowledge. It was a new set of cultural practices which, because they were in the unique position of being located in the realm of scientific production as well as in the twin realms of elite and popular cultures, reorganized conceptions of self, emotional life, and even social relations. Recalling Robert Bellah’s expression about the Protestant Reformation, we may say that the therapeutic discourse has “reformulated the deepest level of identity symbols,”¹⁹ and it is through such identity symbols that the reformulation of a new emotional style took place.

An emotional style takes place when a new interpersonal imagination is formulated, that is, a new way of thinking about the relationship of self to others and imagining its potentialities. Indeed, interpersonal relationships – like the nation – are thought of, longed for, argued over, betrayed, fought for, and negotiated according to imaginary scripts which fill social closeness or distance with meaning.²⁰ Thus, I would argue that Freud’s greatest impact on culture has been to reformulate the relationship of the self and its relationship to others through a new way of imagining the position of the self vis-à-vis one’s past. Such interper...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Rise of Homo Sentimentalis
• 2 Suffering, Emotional Fields, and Emotional Capital
• 3 Romantic Webs
• Index