Ordinary Relationships

A Sociological Study of Emotions, Reflexivity and Culture

J. Brownlie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137318763
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent theorizing tends to position ordinary relationships as something we have lost, yet the nature of these relationships is not seriously engaged with. Drawing on rich empirical data, this book questions epochal claims about contemporary emotional lives, setting out to be explicit about the nature of ordinary relationships.

Part I

1

What We Talk about When We Talk about Emotion Culture: The Role of Culture, Reflexivity and Emotions

In this chapter I start by sketching some existing work on emotion culture, with therapeutic culture presented as a specific case. In doing so, I make two main arguments. The first is that despite bringing together the words ‘emotion’ and ‘culture’, sociological accounts of emotion culture are often curiously underengaged with the actual nature of culture and emotions or with the role of reflexivity. The second is that the claims made about such cultures, while usually sweeping, often rest on discursive shifts; and that ‘experiences’ of these shifts tend to be highly selective. Through developing these arguments, my aim is to highlight dimensions currently underconceptualized and underresearched in accounts of emotion culture. As well as the multifaceted nature of culture, reflexivities and emotions, these also include the significance of the non-narratable, the non-verbal and, relatedly, the importance of ‘doing’. As shown later in the book, the last of these, what we ‘do’, as well as how we are ‘there’ for others, matters, not just because it shifts the focus away from talk but because it describes emotional practices that are meaningful in, and of, themselves. A unifying, but again under-recognized, thread running through these dimensions is the significance of relationships.

Culture

Emotion culture

Thoits (2004) writes that ‘emotion culture’ concerns ‘beliefs about the nature, causes, distributions, values, dynamics of emotions in general as well as of specific feelings, such as love, anger, and jealousy’ (2004, p.362). These beliefs, she suggests, constitute a ‘folk knowledge passed down from one generation to the next’ and, in Anglo-American societies, include, amongst others, that women are more emotional than men, that the intensity of emotions passes with time, that uncontrollable emotions are undesirable among most groups other than the very young and that a failure to follow emotional norms is a sign of mental distress. Others that can be added to this list, and which have their roots in the therapeutic ethos, include the ideas – engaged with empirically later in the book – that it is ‘good to talk’ about emotions, and that one’s emotional life is shaped by childhood.

Work on the shifting nature of emotion culture has a long history within sociology, particularly in North America (Riesman, Glaser and Denney, 2001; Mestrovic, 1997; Wouters, 2007; Stearns, 2004; Stearns and Stearns, 1986). However, as we will also see in relation to work specifically focused on therapeutic culture, the assumed cultural shifts that underlie this work have not always been examined in a representative or differentiated way. In Elliott and Lemert’s (2006) study of ‘New Individualism’, for example, the empirical element is focused on a select number of ‘hyper-globalists’ and their confessional therapeutic practices in a digital age. Here, the explanation for the lack of focus on ‘the poor’ is that in the mediated world, the emotional lives of the relatively privileged are more visible (2006, p.11). Similarly, in Hochschild’s (2012) recent exploration of the outsourcing of personal activities, a broad analysis of cultural change is offered but, while there is an endnote which refers to a survey, there are few details about it and her central claim that we are increasingly outsourcing aspects of our personal lives to professionals again rests only on a few case studies.

The empirical basis of emotion culture, therefore, is not always fully developed, though work in this area is potentially conceptually rich. Despite Illouz’s (2007) suggestion that the sociology of culture has tended to ignore emotions, some of its most significant concepts, including Raymond Williams’ ‘structure of feeling’ (1979), have been concerned exactly with how culture is experienced emotionally. For Williams the structure of feeling relates to the lived emotional experience of a culture – the relationship between individuals and social formations which are not necessarily formally recorded (Harding and Pribram, 2009). These are the experiences, perceptions and values which exert an influence on the social and the cultural now, not in the past. Accessing these structures means engaging with dimensions of social life which sociology has arguably struggled with ‘the ensemble of cultural imaginings, affective experiences, animated objects, marginal voices, narrative densities, and eccentric traces of power’s presence’ (Gordon, 2008, p.25).

For some commentators, such as Harding and Pribram (2009), for instance, Williams’ concept of structure of feeling is not linked strongly or directly enough to power relations. The relationship between structural and cultural change, however, is key to how theorists think about shifts in emotion culture (Cancian, 1987) and, as we will see, culture more generally. Structural patterns shape culture but, at the same time, these patterns and institutions also grow out of cultural changes and, without longitudinal work, as Thoits (2004) argues, it is difficult to unpack their interplay. Often, she suggests, culture lags behind structural changes, so that what we think we should do lags behind what we actually do. In Part II of the book we find in relation to emotions talk that, while we accept the cultural premise that it is good to talk about emotions, in practice we often choose not actually to do so. This particular gap, as we will see in Part II, resonates with Hochschild’s (2004) recognition of the disjunction between cultural shifts and what she calls ‘old feelings’ that remain structured by our (gendered) biographies.

Emotional socialization – how we learn about emotion culture and how this in turn shapes what we do – plays a part in how these social structures are reproduced. While families, in whatever form, remain key to how culture in general is produced (Langellier and Peterson, 2004), we still know relatively little about how as adults we continue to learn about, embed or resist cultural knowledge about emotions in our everyday life.

One of the most significant concepts for thinking through how this happens has been that of emotion norms, most notably Hochschild’s (1983; 2004) work on feeling and expression rules. Work on the norms of emotion culture, on their construction and regulatory impact, highlights how they create not only social solidarities but also socioemotional inequalities or economies of gratitude (Clark, 1997; 2004). The nature of such inequalities is beginning to be explored by those interested in emotional capital (Cahill, 1999), including those who have investigated how economic value comes to be extracted from emotions at a cultural level through the therapy industry, talk shows, self-help literature, women’s magazines and reality television (Skeggs, Thumim and Wood, 2008; Illouz, 2008).

Whether concerned with the interactional or the broader sociocultural level, there is no reason why this focus on capital needs to mean that we downplay the relational. For Nowotny (1981, p.148), who coined the term, ‘emotional capital’ is relational in three core ways: we pass emotional resources on to those we care about; these resources are themselves relational, that is, they involve skills and knowledge which are to do with relationships; and resources are built up through families and other relationships over time. As Lynch and Lyons (2008) observed, emotional support is intrinsic to our capacity to activate emotional and nurturing capital in the first place.

The conceptualizations outlined above, which arise out of work on emotion culture, are engaged with directly or indirectly in the rest of the book but I want now to turn to a form of emotion culture that has dominated recent sociological writing.

Therapeutic culture

Coined by Rieff in 1966 as the ‘triumph of the therapeutic’, the therapeutic turn has since been conceptualized in various, not always complementary ways, including, as Nolan (1998) notes, in terms of the psychological society, the culture of narcissism and the fall of public man. In the last ten years or so, there has been a particular re-engagement with these themes: both in North America through historical documentation of the rise of the therapeutic (Moskowitz, 2001) and the influence of Freud (Illouz, 2007), and also through an exploration of the role of self-help and of the therapeutic in popular culture (Shattuc, 1997; Hochschild, 2003) in relation to the state (Nolan, 1998) and in the context of international development (Pupavac, 2005). There have been similar developments in the UK (Furedi, 2004) and in Australia (Wright, 2011). What these different authors mean by ‘therapeutic’ or ‘therapy’ culture varies, but some of the following features appear in most social scientific accounts:

• a focus on the self

• an emotivist ethic where emotions are understood to determine our actions and to act as ‘a form of moral referencing and self-understanding’ (Nolan, 1998, p.7), so that their expression becomes a prerequisite for mental health or wellbeing

• the emergence of a new therapeutic elite and a concomitant disengagement from informal relationships of support

• the pathologization of human behaviour and an increased tendency to see oneself as victim of an abused past or environment

• a reduction of belief in the inevitability of suffering

• an understanding of therapeutic discourse as a formal expert knowledge system, but also a diffuse cultural system (Illouz, 2007) which shapes ordinary everyday practices across educational organizations, child-rearing, welfare and justice.

The more this culture is written about in academic and popular spheres the more reified it becomes, so that it now appears to be unquestioned in sociological accounts of other issues (see, for example, Misztal’s (2011) recent account of vulnerability). Berlant (2004, p.11) suggests that a culturally dominant culture is one seen as ‘common sense’, and sociological accounts have come to understand the therapeutic in these terms. Despite sociologists increasingly taking on board Castoriadis’ (1987, p.3) argument that there is no privileged ‘point of view outside history or society’ (McLeod and Thomson, 2009; Smart, 2007), those writing about the therapeutic often end up adopting what Nancy Fraser (2007) has called an externalist approach. Here theory is invoked to condemn reality while the impact of this reality for the sociologist is sidestepped. From such commentaries on the therapeutic, academics alone emerge as immune from therapeutic governance.

Sennett (2012) writes that all social critique risks drawing a cartoon, and those who write about the therapeutic have not always avoided that danger. Most accounts are dichotomous, either valorizing the role of therapeutic experts in helping us develop projects of self (Giddens, 1991) or bemoaning the regulatory aspects of this professionalization of our emotional lives (Crossley; 1998; Rose, 1990). More recent accounts follow a similar path, choosing to accentuate either the insidious, disempowering and depoliticizing nature of the therapeutic (Ecclestone and Hayes, 2009) or the ways the therapeutic has meant a revaluing of the emotional sphere (Elliott and Lemert, 2006).

But there are also calls for more nuanced readings (Wright, 2011) which echo older debates about disclosure in popular culture having the potential to be both empowering and regulatory (Shattuc, 1997). Berlant’s work (2008, p.xi) is relevant to some of these discussions, particularly her writing on ‘intimate publics’. These, she argues, engender insider recognition but ultimately may be devalued for being, in Fraser’s (2007) sense of the term, ‘weak publics’. For Berlant, what takes place in these spaces is better understood as the ‘unfinished business of sentimentality’, where the concern is to adjust to or improvise upon the world as it is.

Certainly, as we shall see later in the book, lay accounts are more diverse, complex and nuanced than these discourses allow, suggesting that we need to nudge understandings of current ‘emotionology’ (Stearns and Stearns, 1985) beyond this ‘common sense’ of the therapeutic, towards an understanding that is both differentiated and embedded in lived experience. This grounded approach calls for, and will help create, a more nuanced conceptualization, including how we engage with a therapeutic sensibility beyond the role of the therapeutic professions. Current theorizing does not facilitate such detailed analysis. Furedi’s (2004) framing, for instance, is cosmic in scope: the therapeutic ethos, he suggests, has become a ‘cultural force’ (p.17). Culture ‘encompasses a set of beliefs about the meaning of life and offers a vocabulary through which we can make sense of an individual’s relationship to society’ (2004, p.22). Therapeutic culture, he suggests, defines human nature as vulnerable and sees people’s emotional states as the essence of their identity. But while he distinguishes between a culture of therapeutics and the practice of therapy as a technique, much of the ‘evidence’ presented for the rise of a therapeutic culture involves quantifying the provision of counselling, and our assumed reliance on professionals is key to his argument about the rise of vulnerability.

Nolan (1998, p.2), too, refers to the therapeutic culture as a ‘unifying cosmology’, a ‘set of symbols and codes’ which transcends ethnic, class and age differences and which ‘determines the boundaries of moral life’. Yet bets are still hedged: Nolan (1998, p.7), while pointing out that we live in an emotivist culture, adds: ‘This is not to say all Americans or even a majority of Americans appeal primarily to their emotions to determine how they should function within society. But it is to say that social conditions increasingly militate against other forms of moral referencing and self-understanding.’ Furedi (2004), likewise, acknowledges that we all face competing cultural claims. To this extent, he appears to pick up on Lichterman’s (1992) note of caution, that self-help culture is thin both in the sense that we engage with it ambivalently – neither completely resisting nor adapting to it – and to the extent it interacts with other cultures. Furedi still concludes, however, that the therapeutic is ‘arguably the most important signifier of meaning for the everyday life of the individual’ (2004, p.22).

One of the most important theorists writing about therapeutic culture, Illouz (2008), following Swidler (2001), opts for a pragmatic approach to understanding culture. By this she means a focus on people’s meanings and strategies though, as she acknowledges, it is when these strategies start to resonate and become institutionalized that cultures persist.

Illouz is interested in exploring this intertwining of knowledge and culture because, she argues, the therapeutic has broad cultural legitimacy. This is a legitimacy, she suggests, that has led to a cultural shift within the intimate sphere, away from notions of obligation, sacrifice and reciprocity, towards self-revelation and an increasing intellectualization of emotional lives that is not only stratified but stratifying. Specifically, she argues, the emotional styles of different classes are increasingly divergent, while those of men and women are increasingly blurred. Although relying on selective, limited empirical data, in Saving the Modern Soul Illouz concludes that our emotional lives have become subject to reflexive monitoring, especially for the middle classes and, as such, the ‘emotional faultlines’ (2008, p.150) in our society now have much less to do with gender than with class. Reflexive skills are less present in working-class lives, she posits, because working-class jobs do not demand them; middle-class culture, by contrast, is characterized by intense introspection.

At the same time as claiming that there has been a general shift to ‘emotional androgyny’ (2008, p.236), Illouz suggests that the shift towards reflexivity is more pronounced for working-class women than men, leaving them without a ‘clear common language through which to organise their private selves and to articulate a common project for two different biographies’ (2008, p.234). This is why, she suggests, worki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Death of Ordinary Relationships?
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Appendix – Participant Characteristics (Qualitative Interviews for the Someone To Talk To Study)
• Notes
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index