Hugh Ortega Breton
posted 10 October 2007

Public life as we knew it is no longer the same since media events like the death of Princess Diana and the explosion of hysterias in Anglo-American culture as documented by Elaine Showalter amongst others. There is an emotional tilt to public debates of all kinds; much more of the traditionally private is seemingly public but in a new form, and as a result there is an increased prominence of emotional expression.

The introduction to Public Emotions provides a useful background to the disciplines that have attempted to explain emotion in public life thus far. The book is described as a collection of ‘yardsticks’ and ‘testing grounds’ for measuring change and exploring the way public emotions are understood in different disciplines. The aim is to develop a research agenda on the determinacy of emotions in public structures that goes beyond the concern for political meanings demonstrated in conventional Cultural Studies.

Perri 6 claims that political theory should be about how institutions live, and his Neo-Durkheimian theory is central to explaining how different types of rituals, via their different emotive productions, enable different interests to live together. He claims that they fix and privilege certain emotions over others according to different time-oriented commitments and beliefs. Rituals are seen as effective in making people accountable and committed in an interlocking holistic system, thereby maintaining institutional cohesion. The emotions these rituals produce make this accountability possible, and each ritual will ideally counter the other’s excesses. This is not a functionalist schema, however; it includes conflict as part of these processes. This theory therefore places rituals of all kinds, from sporting media-events to sending email jokes around the office, at the centre of everyday life and their importance is based upon their emotional aspects making people feel connected. This is a very dry, but perhaps necessary start to the collection because it provides a model with which to analyse emotional practices. It is very abstract and systemic, as one would expect from a sociological-systems approach; it would have benefited from some concrete examples of how different emotions are constructed and expressed through rituals.

This is exactly what we get in Paul Richards’ chapter, which offers a number of narratives from the wars in Sierra Leone during the 1990s to illustrate how the performance of music and dance functions to engender cohesion in military groups and how the particular character of music links the performance of group rituals to the performativity of some of the atrocities of war. The two are linked by the idea of ‘unassigned intentionality’, the idea that non-normative behaviour is exceptionally justified by some higher authority or ideal (such as religion or the nation). Spontaneous or emotional behaviour in the heat of the moment can be seen as a direct expression of this higher ideal. The glory of the suicide bomber comes to mind, as does lying to Parliament to win support for a war through fear.

This is certainly an original use of theories of musicality and psychology. The author chooses however to idealise musical and dancing rituals, seeing their positive effects as the norm, and so therefore having in some way ‘gone wrong’, (in the Sierra Leone examples) in order for them to give rise to negative, violent acts on others (p81). Richards does acknowledge that music can indeed be a force for bad, namely war violence, but this value laden opposition of good and bad seems to miss too much out of the equation.

The author does not acknowledge that the ‘going wrong’ is a common consequence of the conflict of interests involved in wartime and politics more generally, and would have occurred with or without the music. He opts for the idea of ‘covert social construction’ to account for the ‘unassigned intentionality’ that takes the form of violent acts of war ‘rehearsed’ in their musical rituals. This seems to reduce the responsibility of the subjects involved. He does not mention the possibility that traditional musical rituals can be intentionally adapted by political leaders to generate the solidarity that makes it easier for people to carry out violent actions in war with less traumatic consequences for themselves.

There is a lack of specificity as to the meaning of terms such as ‘performance’ and ‘rehearse’, when the activities that are referred to are foremost experiences in and of themselves as well as potentially acting as rehearsals for future events in the opinion of the author. The description of emotion, relying as it does on psychological delineations, also falls wide of the goalposts, one only has to look at the Anglo-American experience recently to know that fear is not simply a lower or instinctive emotion but constructed and represented in the same way as all emotions are, as subjectively rooted yet somehow normatively fixed to different opinions and situations by virtue of constructing an imagined dominant consensus.

The most interesting idea of this chapter is the Durkheimian one of ‘effervescence’ a concept, referring to the ‘co-ordination of group emotional excitement’ to the point of fixing specific ideas about morality, identity and other collective representations. One could perhaps cite xenophobia as a consequence of co-ordinating this emotional excitement as well as the atmosphere of social movements. In fact an opportunity is missed here to conjecture upon how effervescence occurs in ‘mass’ mediated societies such as our own, and to draw comparisons from the evidence presented here. The aim of the chapter is to suggest the substantive mechanisms that generate effervescence in the Sierra Leone case. The focus on musical rituals, which are apparently constant in the life of maturing Sierra Leonese, is at the expense of giving sufficient weight to influential politico-economic factors contributing to the violence in this conflict.

Stephan Feuchtwang describes the organisation of emotions and responsiveness in Chinese culture based up on research of spirit writings taken from early 20th century Taiwan. This is to furnish a comparison of the organisation of emotion in Chinese and Anglo-American cultures. Similarities, Feuchtwang claims are occluded by the influence of Greco-Roman distinctions between creativity and rationalism, praxis and theory. He makes a distinction between public memory, personal emotions and history. He establishes a complex inter-relationship of different institutions of varying strengths, some sanctioned and others prohibited that constitute the representation and understanding of emotions.

Hélène Joffe looks at how, in the absence of a specific object of anxiety, there is a search for an object upon which to fixate, and develop that general anxiety into a specific, objectivised fear. In other words, she uses a psychodynamic approach to outline the process of ‘othering’ in times of perceived crisis and danger, and extends this approach to elaborate on clearer understandings about the characteristics of the anxious group. For example the construction of others through representation can help maintain the status quo by providing a focus for anxiety, reinforcing or modulating social norms, as has occurred with civil liberties in relation to the terrorist threat, and give the appearance that leaders are in control, by characterising numerous types of others as ‘out of control’. Joffe cites obesity and smoking as two familiar targets, but the pathologising of terrorists and ‘size zero’ models are two of doubtlessly many more examples of the problematisation of unhealthy behaviour that illustrate a social-psychodynamic process. Joffe rails against the pathologising that is fashionable in some areas of social-psychological research, but claims psychodynamic structure also has the potential for positive and progressive solutions to social problems; psychodynamic theory used properly is not there simply to describe when things go wrong.

Stephen Frosh takes the post-war history of German psychoanalysis as a ‘case history’ to illustrate what goes wrong when intolerable problems are repressed at the level of competing organisations. This is an interesting story of psychoanalysis turned back onto itself that shows that not even psychoanalysts in all their wisdom are immune to repression, denial or the emotions of envy, guilt, and shame. This piece introduces some theory applying psychoanalysis to organisational strategy in crisis, in particular reactive decisions or policies that attempt to stave off conflict or conceal fragmentation resulting from political and moral disapgreements.

Andrew Cooper also uses the concept of repression, understanding it as a practical strategy in concealing information from public discourse. He goes on to suggest that when such information is revealed, it can be increasingly difficult to discern what is real and what is not because of the contestation of truth claims. He wants to know whether it is because we, as a social group, have problems bearing certain historical realities, because of their emotional unpleasantness, that we often choose to conceal the truth on matters of public interest. He attempts to hold in tandem concepts of historical reality and the ambiguity or unverifiability of what is real to explain the status of truth. The concept of discourse complements this idea as a group of rules governing what can and cannot be said, resembling in this regard the post-Kleinian psychoanalytic ideas of container and contained, with the unconscious located in the language being used, rather than totally absent from what is mediated.

Cooper uses as evidence the questioning of claims of child abuse, considering how the testimonies of alleged victims were inherently ambiguous. This ambiguity he believes is down to the conflictual character and trauma of the experiences requiring verification. If there are arguments over truth claims it is down to emotional conflict. This is a dense chapter with many interesting points worthy of discussion dealing as it does with the nexus of historical reality and the subjective (re)structuring of that reality through perception and story telling. Cooper seems to be suggesting that we cannot get away from phantasy, as it is precisely that part of our consciousness which makes experiences meaningful.

As with the WMD saga, and the HN51 breakout last year, these cases scream out for verifiability; there is a chronic uncertainty about what is true and what is not. Unfortunately Cooper does not make any suggestions as to why he thinks this is the case here and now and why not before. This is because he believes there is something inherent to emotional conflict that produces this uncertainty. This idea however does not stand up when tested against the consistent and many varying types of such mediated events. What would have been more interesting would be to look at how this emotional conflict is itself generated and why such a desire appears to exist for such uncertainties. Overall Cooper’s hypothesis is very ambitious; he is forced to ‘make real’ particular experiences with either insubstantial or absent evidence and rests too much weight on his ontological concept of emotional conflict. Without sufficient argument to support this, his truth claims appear to be normative and his interpretation lacks historical awareness of how discourses are living and breathing representations influenced by manifold discourses which may appear to have little to do with the one in question.

Michael Rustin discusses the history of psychoanalysis, showing how the different strands and normative assumptions existing in different paradigms might reflect the concerns of their times, because these analysts have been mindful of the social context: the British Post-Kleinian concern with ‘borderline’ and narcissistic disorders and weakened social solidarity in recent times is one example. This is a potentially fruitful hypothesis that is not sufficiently developed here. Very general descriptions of socio-economic change are not sufficiently supported by evidence of change in the dominant ways of thinking about society and people. It is possible that such changes in the focus of psychoanalysis are determined in part by changing social organisation over time without analysts creatively responding to these changes, but simply reacting to changes in the types of patients who visit them. Rustin’s piece is a brief history within this frame, providing a useful introduction to the basic tenets of the distinct branches of European psychoanalysis and fitting them into a wider social context. One does not get any sense however of how this relationship is perhaps more symbiotic, with psychoanalysis influencing culture generally through its representation and use in art, cinema and advertising.

Susannah Radstone opens the section devoted to looking at the cultural, historical and political dimensions that house different affective formations. Her interest is in illustrating, through psychoanalytical theory, how unconscious feelings may characterise or partly structure the form of discourses, including public and academic ways of thinking. As her example she takes trauma theory, a recently developed approach to looking at representations of and subjective experiences of hugely disturbing events. Radstone draws a parallel between trauma theory and the Manicheanism of discourses of victimhood, which polarise positive and negative sentiments in the victim and the perpetrator respectively. In addition, she focuses upon the creative tendency of trauma therapy where the analyst is responsible for knowing what the traumatised patient cannot know by virtue of their expertise and the effects of the traumatic event on the patient.

Contemporary Western culture is full of narratives built around experiences of trauma, aggression and pleasure, the most common example being the suffering experienced through the Second World War, but there are other tales of hardship and overcoming the odds such as Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump and The Color Purple. Radstone’s conclusion is that trauma theory offers a number of positions to the reader, namely the ability to oscillate between the victimhood of the sufferer or victim and the assurance and authority of the analyst, where ‘common to both is the denial and displacement of aggression’ (p195).

The second ‘case study’ of this final section, by Corinne Squire, looks at public representations advocating the interests of HIV sufferers, as well as interviews with HIV sufferers themselves, to gauge what they feel entitled to in terms of recognition and provision for coping with the disease. This approach treats entitlement claims as a form of emotional expression and attempts to draw useful distinctions between the now familiar emotivist discourses found in health and sexuality public discourses (a la MacIntyre’s (1984) general critique of the emotive character of contemporary political and social debates) and the emotionalised articulation of ‘entitlement-talk’. These are murky waters indeed that are not sufficiently clarified here. This concept of entitlement is very close to the contemporary discourse of rights: what people ‘feel’ they should have by virtue of their marginalised or excluded status, whether it is according to social deprivation, health, sexual or other lifestyle criteria. Although warning against generalisations, Squire’s piece nonetheless seems to fall into quite vague descriptions of entitlement. This is probably in some part due to the unconventional approach to entitlement as an emotion: Squire does not convincingly make a case for viewing entitlement-talk and publicity in such a way. The difficulty with making a case for the significance of the emotional aspects of discourse is that it is all too easy to underestimate the real and imagined empirical and interpretive features and contexts of any given practice.

Squire is not critical enough of the discourse of entitlement perhaps because she views AIDS sufferers unqualifiedly as victims. People will speak in this way because it is the dominant mode of representation in a particular time-space, without questioning its suitability, because it gives expression to a certain type of subjectivity, allowing one to re-define oneself in these terms; the point being that HIV sufferers may not in fact be considering other means to their desired ends that may not require re-definition because they are not suggested, supported or represented by dominant discourses and organisations in the health and sexual welfare sector. Squire provides evidence of the different ways entitlement is expressed, sometimes by the same person, and this suggests that entitlement-talk may involve contradictory if not unconscious dimensions as with other types of emotional expression. A deeper exploration of these emotional responses in their lived context of using services would provide a more thorough evaluation of the ideological aspects of HIV discourse and how entitlement claims making is at odds with the dominant discourse of individual responsibility and risk.

Today’s emotivist advocacy discourse takes for granted a very dispassionate and uncompromising consensus about individual responsibility for one’s health, which crucially means only ‘innocent victims’ are likely to be ‘included’ in the new social frame of entitlements. This is the real problem facing those battling against the stigma towards AIDS, and to a lesser extent smokers and the obese. What brings them together is the moral judgement that tacitly claims these people lack self control.

Amal Treacher looks at how the past endures in the present and thus impinges upon the future of nations. Treacher’s chapter is on ‘masculinity, emotion and post-colonialism in the Egyptian context’, but also on the effects of foreign aid, fiscal policy and defeat by Israel. The experience of intolerable shame, anxiety and uncertainty are cited as factors contributing to the current malaise of Egypt’s masculine political culture. It is not clear how ‘focusing on painful aspects of their [the men] political lives’ is in any way more revealing than an appraisal of their perceived successes and failures in the political sphere viewed through a more vari-focal lens. Nevertheless the aim of this chapter is a restorative one, to help these men recover some dignity and sense of purpose, ‘to forge a political future anew when the ego is most needed and yet paradoxically at its most fragile’. This fragility is a result of colonialism and post-colonial failure, but not, it would appear from Treacher’s piece, from post-colonial theory. The reason seems to be a political one, that future improvement in the Egyptian polity can be helped by facing up to the failures of the past instead of repressing them and thus becoming haunted by them.

Given the characterisation of Egyptian men in politics offered here it would seem that rather too much reflection upon the failure of past dreams may have already occurred and that it is only for the benefit of marginalised, self-interest groups that such a standpoint should be taken. Not for Treacher. The solution lies in facing up to this shame and mourning the losses it cannot abide so that a new future may be forged, no longer hindered by ‘resignation of thought and passive complicitness’. There is a deep exploration of the concept of shame and the reasons why it exists. Some methodological comments are also made, usefully, on not pathologising key players and national cultures or reifying complicated socially constructed forms. Also how we can know what feelings are in existence and the extent of their effects on public culture, and the problems of reductionism and freezing the historical are also attended to. It is a shame that more space was not devoted to exploring the possible solutions to these problems.

This collection is certainly useful as an introduction and sample of the theorists and researchers analysing emotion. Whether each of them stands up as a yardstick to comparative work in the field is a tall order. This book certainly provides the student of human behaviour with signposts to potentially fruitful applications of social theories of emotion. Some of these essays however are guilty of focusing too much on emotional practices at the expense of situating them in their social contexts. Hopefully this will be the advent of more detailed and rigorous researches into public emotions by specialists within the public communication field.