Politics and the Emotions

The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies

Paul Hoggett, Simon Thompson, Paul Hoggett, Simon Thompson

• Editorial: Continuum
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441186270
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Politics

Politics and the Emotions is a unique collection of essays that reflects the affective turn in the analysis of today's political world. Contributed by both prominent and younger scholars from Europe, US, and Australia, the book aims to advance the debate on the relation between politics and the emotions. To do so, essays are organized around five key thematic areas: emotion, antagonism and deliberation, the politics of fear, the affective dimension of political mobilization, the politics of reparation, and politics and the triumph of the therapeutic. In addition, each chapter includes a case study to demonstrate the application of concepts to practical issues, from the war on terror in the UK and the AIDS activist organization ACT UP in the US to women's liberation movement in New Zealand and Dutch policy experiments. Politics and the Emotions provides an accessible introduction to a rapidly developing field that will appeal to students in political theory, public and social policy, as well as the theory and practice of democracy.

1

Introduction

Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson

Social science and human feelings

It seems odd that, while acceptance of the role of the emotions in public and political life was once commonplace, it is only now being rediscovered after decades of neglect. The Greeks debated the role of the emotions in public rhetoric, Machiavelli analysed the contribution of love and fear to the exercise of power, and Hume examined the contribution of the moral sentiments to human reason. But for much of the last century political studies eschewed consideration of the emotions. It was assumed that political subjects were essentially rational actors busily maximizing their strategic interests even while sometimes constrained by their limited information-processing abilities. This strange and lopsided account of the political subject split cognition from emotion, and reason from passion. To some extent, what happened in political studies simply echoed what was going on elsewhere in the social sciences, where, throughout much of the period after the Second World War, the grip of positivism and behaviouralism was powerful. Only slowly was this tide to be turned: first, through what has sometimes been referred to as the ‘discursive turn’ in the social sciences – that is, through the interest in language, meaning and discourse which gathered force in the 1980s; second, and more recently, through what is sometimes referred to as the ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences.

This renewal of academic interest in human feelings has been greatly facilitated by a number of traditions and disciplines. One strand within continental philosophy, focusing primarily on the affective dimension of our feeling lives, can be traced from Nietzsche through Bergson and Scheler to the postmodernists such as Deleuze and Guattari (1999). Almost as enduring has been the contribution of psychoanalysis, from Freud through Klein and Lacan to the present day (Anderson, 1992; Dor, 1999). More recently, developments in mainstream psychology involving the work of Ekman (1994), Plutchik (2002) and Tomkins (2008) have facilitated greater understanding of the different categories of human feeling, including distinctions between basic and secondary emotions. Contemporary psychological theories in turn have influenced and been influenced by advances in neuroscience which have provided scientific evidence of the distinctive location, functioning and organization of the ‘feeling brain’ (Damasio, 2000; Dennett, 1992). Finally, the human sciences themselves, particularly sociology (e.g. Hochschild, 1983), have provided us with ways of understanding the cultural and institutional organization of feelings, so that we now are beginning to realize that, although feelings are individually experienced, they are often embodied in the cultures of occupations and corporations.

Of course, it might be argued that by means of these theoretical developments the social sciences have done no more than begin the long process of catching up with the world that unfolds around them. It seems bizarre that the determined refusal to admit the feeling world into the social sciences and political studies occurred in a global society characterized by eruptions of nihilistic hatred (the Holocaust and, later, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda), rule by terror and paranoia in successive communist regimes, the background threat of Mutually Assured Destruction and its flashpoints during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, later, the Tehran hostage crisis. To brighten the landscape, the refusal to admit feelings also occurred at the same time as the waves of hope-fuelled progressive social movements swept across the West in the 1960s, Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, and the ‘Arab Spring’ today. Indeed, to bring matters up to date, we have seen repeated evidence of the powerful and formative role of human feelings in public life in the last decade from the waves of contagious panic which fuelled the crash in the financial markets in 2008, to the triumph of Barack Obama’s ‘politics of hope’ over the Republicans’ ‘politics of resentment’ in the same year.

Conceptual distinctions

In one sense, the so-called ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences to which we have just referred is misleadingly named. This is because we can distinguish between affect and emotion as two forms, overlapping and not mutually exclusive, that human feelings can assume. Affect concerns the more embodied, unformed and less conscious dimension of human feeling, whereas emotion concerns the feelings which are more conscious since they are more anchored in language and meaning. An affect such as anxiety is experienced in a bodily way, while an emotion such as jealousy is directed towards objects (a lover, a rival) which give it meaning, focus and intentionality. The distinctive thing about anxiety is the way in which its object constantly shifts from one thing to another, almost as if the object is secondary to the feeling. Thus, whereas emotion is embedded in discourse, affect appears to be more detached from it. We typically know if someone is anxious by how they look, walk, carry themselves, by the gestures they deploy, by the tension that may be visible in their bodies; all this we register even before they speak.

In making this distinction between affect and emotion, we want to suggest that purely cognitivist accounts of human feelings, such as that developed by Robert Solomon (2007), give insufficient account of that dimension of our feeling lives which is more impulsive, indeterminate and unformed. We believe that this is important for analyses of the role of human passions in political life. Because affect is less anchored in discourse, it is more labile and fluid, and thus more susceptible to spreading rapidly through groups, even beyond face-to-face groups. Originally such movement was construed by Freud and others in terms of ‘contagion’ (Freud, 1921); nowadays we are more likely to understand it in terms of the operation of ‘affective networks’ (Hoggett, 2009, pp. 10–11). The affective dimension of feelings therefore helps us understand their unruliness and unpredictability. Nowhere is this more so than in public life where anxiety, rage, panic, paranoia and other feelings, once they gather momentum, become difficult forces to control. Political actors, such as populist politicians who seek to manipulate such feelings, are just as likely to be destroyed by the forces they try to control.

For methodological individualists, the idea that a feeling such as anxiety or guilt may be a property of a group is likely to prove puzzling. Seeing the individual as the basic unit in society, they are led to assume that feelings, like meanings and intentions, are somehow the ‘property’ of the individual. This under-socialized concept of the human subject, one shared by some traditions within mainstream psychology, is unable to see how feelings bind the group, contributing substantially to its coherence. Affect and emotion shape the structure and texture of society at its various levels, from the family group, through to organizations and beyond to the wider social movements in civil society. Various concepts have been put forward recently as ways of trying to grasp such socially structured feelings. For example, Debbie Gould, a contributor to the present volume, has suggested the concept of ‘emotional habitus’ (Gould, 2009) as a way of grasping the tacit, taken for granted, affective patterns that characterize social movement subcultures. In a similar vein, James Jasper, in his study of political mobilization, distinguishes between fleeting emotional reactions and what he terms ‘abiding affects’. These are enduring and organized feelings such as fear or anger which provide the motivational basis for political action (Jasper, 1998). Another valuable concept is that of ‘structures of feeling’, an idea developed by the Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams (Williams, 1977). For Williams, a structure of feeling may characterize a whole society or group of societies during a particular period of history. So, for example, the pervasive nature of moral and risk anxiety in advanced capitalist societies such as the United States, United Kingdom and Japan could be seen as a ‘structure of feeling’ which manifests itself in everything from the design of homes and buildings, patterns of use of outdoor urban spaces, film, art and music and even in everyday public interaction. To illustrate the latter, some of our own recent research revealed how many men living in working-class areas of the city no longer say ‘hello’ to strangers in their neighbourhood for fear of being thought of as ‘weird’ or even a ‘paedo’ (Beedell et al. 2010).

Feelings in politics: some themes

This volume is based upon a seminar series which ran over a period of 18 months between December 2006 and June 2008. The series, called ‘Politics and the Emotions’, was supported financially by the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council. We sought to use this series as a way of taking a closer look at some of the thematic areas which were emerging as foci for study and debate in political studies, and in the social sciences more widely. Some of these themes, such as the ‘politics of fear’ surrounding 9/11 and subsequent Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, were current and very topical. Others, such as the rise of therapeutic culture and its impact on public policy, related more to trends covering several decades. While work in this whole field of politics and the emotions is still quite scattered, it is now becoming easier to discern some of the contours and clusters, only some of which we have managed to include in this volume.

First, and this takes us right back to Aristotle and the Greeks, there is the relation between the emotions and political discourse, narrative and rhetoric. At times, some of the more rationalist currents within political studies have tacitly assumed that if discourse is to be truly reasonable it should be free of passion. Indeed, we have argued that at times accounts of political deliberation have posited an ideal of communicative rationality shorn of the emotions (Hoggett and Thompson, 2002). Of course such an ideal assumes that our reasoning capacities are enhanced when freed from emotion. We argue, quite to the contrary, that so long as these emotions are not overwhelming, they provide both the motivational basis for our intellectual lives and enhance our reasoning capacities. Thus, for example, George Marcus (2002) has found that moderate levels of anxiety facilitate the search for, and processing of, political information among voters: anxious voters are likely to be more discerning voters, so long as this anxiety is contained within comfortable limits. The same is true of the anger voters feel when they perceive an injustice has been done. This emotion motivates them to search out information, and to take a more critical stance towards arguments which they may have previously accepted at face value. And, in terms of their communication to others, strong feelings can make their own arguments more powerful.

For the Greeks, the use of emotion in political argumentation was the subject of much debate. Avoiding the more rationalist strain in Plato, Aristotle saw rhetoric as essential to practical debate and the ability to win over the soul of the other. More generally, we suggest that all communication has what might be called ‘affective registers’ (Newman, 2011), and such communication includes the narratives elicited through interviews conducted by political journalists. The affective register may support the narrative content as, for example, when a policymaker speaks hopefully about a new development. But the affect may not support the narrative, and it is these incongruities between affect and discourse which take us into the complexities of rhetoric – the threat lurking in the warm words of the authoritarian ruler, the condescension present in the reasoned tone of the political patrician, and so on.

Second, and this is illustrated to some extent by the contributions of Cunningham, Kaindaneh and Rigby in this volume, feelings are integral to the dynamics of conflict and post-conflict situations. This is vividly illustrated in situations of conflict where hatred of the other group is inextricably bound to love of one’s own group. Paradoxically, therefore, love, the basis for ‘fellow feeling’, can provide the platform for highly regressive and authoritarian forms of group bonding (Ahmed, 2004). The patterning of love and hate in conflict situations also provides a glimpse of the way in which feelings contribute to the dynamic ordering of public life. As Žižek (1993) has noted, since we enjoy our hatreds, they are not easily given up. In fantasy, aggressors imagine themselves to be the victim, wrapping themselves up in the victim’s moral virtue. In conflict situations, aggressors cannot be ‘educated’ out of their misdeeds; for change to occur, the emotional roots of group identities have to be understood. Change for both real victims and real perpetrators involves loss, guilt and regret, and some now argue that institutional mechanisms providing for reparative justice – for example, memorializations, truth commissions – need to be constructed if such feelings are to be worked through (Minow, 1998).

Third, the role of feelings in social movements has been a subject of considerable interest. The renewed interest in the role of passion in politics was largely prompted by the work of political sociologists in the United States such as Jeff Goodwin and James Jasper who have analysed the role of feelings such as love, shame, anger and humour in the mobilization of political and social movements (Goodwin et al. 2001). These writers have tended to draw on sociological and anthropological accounts which emphasized the way in which feelings were socially constructed through movement discourses and the ‘framing’ activities of activists and elites. Gould, for example, has looked at the efforts of gay and lesbian movement activists in the United States during the AIDs crisis in the 1980s to reshape the shame and loss that pervaded their community into pride and anger, thereby enabling this community to move from being positioned as an object of fear, anxiety and contempt to the position of an active political subject (Gould, 2001, 2002).

A fourth area where an understanding of the emotions can contribute to politics is in the area of political campaigning and communication. Ever since the early work of Philip Converse (1964), the idea that voters are rational information processors or dispassionate reasoners has been subject to challenge. The typical voter makes decisions on small amounts of information which have been selectively filtered. They make little use of abstract categories such as ‘egalitarianis...