Political Emotions

Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, Ann Reynolds, Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, Ann Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136956027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Political Emotions explores the contributions that the study of discourses, rhetoric, and framing of emotion make to understanding the public sphere, civil society and the political realm. Tackling critiques on the opposition of the public and private spheres, chapters in this volume examine why some sentiments are valued in public communication while others are judged irrelevant, and consider how sentiments mobilize political trajectories.

Emerging from the work of the Public Feelings research group at the University of Texas-Austin, and cohering in a New Agendas in Communication symposium, this volume brings together the work of young scholars from various areas of study, including sociology, gender studies, anthropology, art, and new media. The essays in this collection formulate new ways of thinking about the relations among the emotional, the cultural, and the political. Contributors recraft familiar ways of doing critical work, and bring forward new analyses of emotions in politics. Their work expands understanding of the role of emotion in the political realm, and will be influential in political communication, political science, sociology, and visual and cultural studies.

Chapter 1
On Affect and Protest

Deborah Gould¹

This essay begins in anxiety. My own but also others’, or at least what I take to be their anxiety. I will come to mine by way of theirs which, in my surmise, is about the potential of protest to bring about social disorder and change. Consider the nineteenth-century French social psychologist and sociologist Gustave Le Bon, for example. In his famous book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895/1960), Le Bon reveals his deep concern about the growing power of “the masses” (p. 16). Influenced by his knowledge of the French Revolution and likely even more by the social upheavals of his own day, Le Bon is convinced that the masses are determined “to destroy utterly society as it now exists” (p. 16). Although he notes that crowds can be virtuous and heroic (p. 19), his overriding concern was their negative qualities, especially with regard to one variant of the “crowd,” mass movements. Crowds, he asserts, “are only powerful for destruction” (p. 18); they display “extreme mental inferiority” as well as an “incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit,” and an “exaggeration of the sentiments” (pp. 4, 35–36). The crowd, Le Bon asserts, is “the slave of … impulses” and “guided almost exclusively by unconscious motives” and instincts: “its acts are far more under the influence of the spinal cord than of the brain” (p. 36). He sounds anxious. I mention Le Bon because, as a sociologist who studies social movements, my own intellectual lineage goes back to him, if mostly ashamedly, and indeed is still haunted by his psychological theory of mass political action, which reduces contentious politics to the instinct-driven, unconscious, irrational, and destructive behavior of unruly mobs.²

This essay explores that lineage as a way to set up my argument that those of us interested in the sources of and blockages to contentious political action must attend to affect. And that is precisely where my own anxiety enters. Le Bon might plausibly be considered one of the first theorists of affect and contentious politics, but in the story he tells, protest, protesters, and emotion all come out looking bad.³ How then to attend to the emotional dimensions of collective political action without augmenting that sort of mistaken and derogatory narrative?

While sociologists who study movements are aware, perhaps too aware, of this earlier literature’s derision of protest, cultural studies scholars who have turned toward affect and the political may be unacquainted with the intellectual history of the sociological study of protest and thus less attuned to some risks entailed in focusing on the affective dimensions of contentious politics that this history reveals. One goal of this essay is to bridge these different disciplinary knowledges by providing a brief history of the social scientific study of protest.

Laying out this intellectual history has a political purpose as well. Psychologically reductive accounts that pathologize protest and protesters did not die out in the nineteenth century but rather continue to circulate widely today. The corporate media, politicians, and others with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo frequently describe social justice activists as driven by emotion (which they pit against reason) and protest activities as irrational and childish, rather than a legitimate mode for expressing political grievances. Consider the following example, where a Washington Post columnist describes AIDS activists angrily acting up at the Seventh International AIDS Conference in Florence in 1991. The protesters “failed to use [their] brains,” were “self-defeating,” acted “nonsensically,” and had created an atmos phere in which there was “no place for reason” (Cohen, 1991). Or, con sider this more recent example from the 1999 “battle in Seattle” where tens of thousands of activists targeted a meeting of the World Trade Organization. Here, an industry representative construes protesters demonstrating against corporate-driven globalization as simply unintelligible. As the police began using tear gas against demonstrators, a CNN reporter turned for comment to the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, who stated that he was “struck by how loopy some of the protesters were,” adding that they were “shouting a lot of crazy different messages” (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, 1999). Examples of this sort of delegitimation of activism are plentiful. Headlined “Protesting Too Much,” a recent editorial in the New York Daily News about student protesters at New York University taking over a university cafeteria and demanding greater financial transparency by the university dismissed the protesters as “young and stupid” (Editorial, 2009).

Especially given the persistence of narratives that cast protesters as unthinking and irrational, the question, again, is how to attend to the emotional dimensions of contentious politics without bolstering such accounts, or, even better, in a way that helps to challenge such negative depictions of social change activism. A few sociologists who study social movements have initiated an emotional turn in the literature that attempts to do precisely that. Their turn toward emotion depathologizes the emotions of protest and illuminates otherwise obscured aspects of contentious politics. In my view, however, this turn has not yet gone far enough. Some leading scholars in the field have pulled their analytical punch by conceptually taming emotion, and they have done so in part because the social movement field is haunted by its “crowd literature” pre-history.

Just as affect theorists in cultural studies might benefit from a brief history of the social scientific study of protest, sociologists engaged in the emotional turn within the field of social movements might benefit from discussions about affect occurring within cultural studies. In an effort to do some of this transdisciplinary bridging, the bulk of this essay explores how attention to affect can strengthen our analyses of political action and inaction. I begin with Le Bon and return to him at the end to remind us of the risks entailed in this turn toward affect and in order to suggest ways to undertake this affective turn that retain important insights from the crowd literature while avoiding its worst features.

Le Bon, Collective Behavior, and Affect

Like many thinkers of his age, Le Bon pits emotion against reason, and crowds, in his view, are dangerously under the sway of emotion. In a crowd, he argues, each individual’s personality, even his or her self-interest, is subsumed by the collective mind which directs individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and actions “in an identical direction” (p. 32). The individual in a crowd “is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will …. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct” (p. 32). The feelings exhibited by a crowd, Le Bon asserts, are “very simple and very exaggerated” (p. 50). Even more, in a crowd feelings are transmissible from one individual to another: indeed, sentiments in crowds possess “a contagious power as intense as that of microbes,” a quality that one observes “even in animals when they are together in number”: “A panic that has seized on a few sheep will soon extend to the whole flock.” It is no different with human beings: “In the case of men collected in a crowd all emotions are very rapidly contagious” (p. 126). Driven by instincts and unconscious motives, and infected by the unruly passions of those around him, the individual in a crowd becomes irrational, “induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests” (p. 32). As a unit, the crowd is illogical, unreasonable, and reckless, inclined toward extremism and anarchic disorder. Collective political action, in this rendering, is nothing more than unthinking, impulsive, irrational, destructive group behavior.

Le Bon’s The Crowd strongly influenced the study of group behavior through the middle of the twentieth century. Scholars in this “collective behavior” field echoed, for example, Le Bon’s emphases on the role played by unconscious processes in group behavior and placed emotion, understood as natural impulses that interfered with reason—emotion as irrationality, in other words—at the heart of their explanations.⁴ Also like Le Bon, they pathologized those who engaged in contentious politics, viewing that sort of collective action not as struggles over power but rather as the emotionally-driven working out of participants’ psychic distress. Protests arose when a structural strain—for example, massive unemployment or an economic depression—disrupted the normative order and ostensibly excited “feelings of anxiety, fantasy, hostility” among individuals (Smelser, 1962, p. 11; as cited in McAdam, 1982, p. 9); emotionally and psychologically distraught, individuals turned toward rash, impetuous, frenzied, disruptive group behavior.⁵ Individuals engaged in protest, then, not because they had political grievances but because social changes made them psychologically unstable and emotionally overwrought. Scholars in this literature bought into and upheld a normative split between the psychological and the political, relegating all things psychological to the private realm; they thus understood protest as a dangerous seepage of the psychic into the political realm where rational deliberation should reign. In contrast to legitimate actors in the polity, protesters violated that public/private split, and their actions proved them to be, in different versions of this literature, self-evidently alienated from society and unfulfilled in their personal lives; narcissistic and arrested in their development; perhaps even latently homosexual.

The eminent political scientist Harold Lasswell, for example, argues that “[political] agitators as a class are strongly narcissistic types …. Sexual objects like the self are preferred, and a strong homosexual component is thus characteristic” (Lasswell, 1930/1986, p. 125). Another influential social analyst, Eric Hoffer, describes protesters as frustrated individuals, “fanatics” who are drawn to a cause because as individuals they are “perpetually incomplete and insecure” (Hoffer, 1951, p. 80). Protesters, in his view, are motivated not by political grievances but rather by the psychological trauma of living an unfulfilling life: “A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence” (p. 41). Because the fanatic or “true believer” is driven by psychological needs, appeals to reason cannot wean him or her from the cause (p. 81). In the similar appraisal of sociologist William Kornhauser, movements are driven not by participants’ rational analyses but by submerged psychic trauma and consequent magical thinking: “Mass movements are not looking for pragmatic solutions to economic or any other kind of problem. If they were so oriented, their emotional fervor and chiliastic zeal … would not characterize the psychological tone of these movements. In order to account for this tone, we must look beyond economic interests to more deep-seated psychological tendencies” (1959, p. 163; as cited in McAdam, 1982, pp. 17–18).

For scholars in this early collective behavior literature, in short, protest, regardless of political content, is simply a form of acting out, an exp...

Table of contents

• New Agendas in Communication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 On Affect and Protest
• Chapter 2 Televising Guantánamo
• Chapter 3 Babies Who Touch You
• Chapter 4 The Transmission of Gothic
• Chapter 5 Feeling Bad in 1963
• Chapter 6 Three Poems and a Pandemic
• Chapter 7 In the Air
• Chapter 8 Archive, Affect, and the Everyday
• Chapter 9 The Halting Grammar of Intimacy
• Chapter 10 Servicing the World
• Chapter 11 Thinking about Feeling Historical
• Selected Bibliography
• Index