Eva Illouz zum Nachlesen: Mehr Emotion wagen?

Wie viel Gefühl verträgt eine Gesellschaft, die nach Gerechtigkeit strebt? Dieser Frage ging Eva Illouz auf dem taz.lab 2015 nach. Ein Transkript.

Eva Illouz (re.) und Julia Encke während der Lecture auf dem taz.lab 2015. Bild: Wolfgang Borrs

Am 25. April trafen die Soziologin Eva Illiouz und die Journalistin Julia Encke auf dem taz.lab 2015 für eine Lecture, samt anschließender Diskussion zusammen. Die Veranstaltung, kuratiert von und ermöglicht in Kooperation mit der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, fand in englischer Sprache statt. Das Transkript des Vortrags von Eva Illouz bilden wir im folgenden – ungekürzt – ab. taz

Eva Illouz: Thank you very much for inviting me, I love to be in Berlin. Your newspaper is a very important one I think and I'm always happy to support it in one way or another.

And I'm also happy for the opportunity to think about a topic, about which in fact I have not really thought and more have research as it was said just previously, research emotions in the private sphere, trying to show really how the private sphere is structured by public processes, I would say, or at least institutional processes and so this is for me almost the first time that I have to think about the presence of emotions in politics.

„I am not saying that emotions are irrelevant to modern politics

Let me start then. Modern politics displays a paradox. Or modern liberal politics displays a paradox. It is fundamentally based on the assumption of rationality. That is on the assumption that citizens must choose leaders rationally. And on the assumption that the public sphere is the site of deliberation and debate.

And yet, modern politics having become mediated by images, print media, story-telling, an endless flow of media stories and media images. So, modern politics is particularly proned to the display, the diffusion and the manipulation of emotions.

Of course, there is a way in which we could say that this is not new and that the ancients, Plato, and Aristotle even more obivously, long understood the relationship between emotions and political discourse between narrative and rhetoric.

But I would say that they probably cannot provide us as guides to analyse what is happening today in modern polities. Because I think they had a qualitatively different understanding of the role of emotions, since it concerned mostly the effect which leaders, and charismatic leadership in particular, had on the emotions of their listener.

Their view of emotions was that it constituted a kind of manipulation, of effective manipulation of the speech, of the orator, of the leader. Whereas I think that emotions, as I am going now to explain in fact, I think that emotions in contemporary politics should be understood in structural terms and we should really invent, this is what social sciences do, they try to map out the reality what we do with new concepts that we do not necessarily have in everyday in ordinary language.

Emotions in the political process

So, what I am saying is, that, I am not saying that emotions are irrelevant to modern politics, but I am saying that the politics that the emotions of the politics of liberal polities demand maybe a qualitatively different analysis of the process involved than the one usually used in the analysis of rhetoric.

So just to give a very trivial example, the use of images of modern politics surely changes something to the formation of political opinions and attitudes, and most crucially to the process by which emotions are diffused. Not only how I acquire emotions, but also to the process of contagion of emotions inside the social body.

I am going to submit the following proposition: And it is that emotions not only inhere in the political process, in the modern political process, but also that they are not necessarily unwelcome or inimical to the political process. Or rather, if they are, I think we should need new terms how they are and when they are unwelcome.

„The traditional view that we should separate emotion and rational opinion-making is simply not true in my opinion

So emotions inhere in the political process and are even sometimes, and we need to start with that proposition, they are sometimes even beneficial to it. What do I mean?

Let me take a very famous research by the neuropsychologist António Damásio who has showed that deliberative rationality, that is the very kind of rationality that is involved in decision-making must be, in order to be functional and to be really rational, must be informed by emotions because only through emotions can you form an attitude. An emotional attitude towards objects.

That is, only through emotions can you hierarchise your preferences and figure out what is most urgent, what is most important to you. And it would seem that this would be crucial for the process for example of voting or forming a political attitude. So we cannot imagine, I mean if the voters were entirely rational, what they would do, for loaning Antonio Damasio's study, is that they would list attributes of each one of their candidates and then they would try to figure out according to the list of attributes they would try to decide who to vote for.

That does not help people vote. They vote with a kind of I would say rough emotional complex that orients their political attitude. And that is good, too, that is my point, that is good too because without it, we could not form what we call rationality.

Anxiety

That is something that people who study voting should really take into consideration. This research in the neurophysiology of emotions and the neurophysiology of rationality. Let me give you another example: Also what I mean here, George Marcus has showed that moderate levels of anxiety facilitate the search for and processing of political information among voters.

Events that generate anxiety, for example, will make people who are normally indifferent to the news look for information. And for people who normally consume the news, it will make them read more than one newspaper, read several newspaper, and therefore have a kind of more sophisticated level of information.

So anxiety is entirely conducive, if you want here, to the process of the formation of opinion and even to a better or more sophisticated, more complete process of formation of opinion.

This, again, simply suggests that the traditional view that we should separate emotion and rational opinion-making is simply not true in my opinion. They do go in hand quite well. And I would say also, the same is true about, for example anger that is expressed in the sentiment of injustice.

„I don't think that religion or morality are necessarily the area from which we should get our normative guide lines“

We would view anger that denounces inustice, and that expresses itself as moral indignation, in fact as entirely congruent with a good political order. Therefore, if we have established that emotions are not necessarily negative, that in fact they can even be positive and crucial to the political process, I am going to ask, this is going to be the main purpose of this very short presentation, I am going to ask then, when are emotions negative in politics? When are they unwelcome?

Now, I do not have an extensive response, as I said I do not research this topic at all, and I cannot review all the cases in which emotions are unwelcome, but I am going to offer one proposition. I think one proposition is enough in one paper just to think about.

But before I answer my question, I want to dispell another commonly held view or opinion. Since the question I am asking is when are emotions unwelcome in the political process, I think a fairly, I would say, well I am going to use the word, a fairly lazy way to answer that question would be to take the long list of negative emotions that we have, you know, envy, contempt, anger, hatred etc. and say oh, well, we don't want those in the political process. Again, I am sceptical of that strategy. Because the reason why we view some emotions as negative is often from two stand points.

One, it is from a moral stand point, from the stand point from the moralists or the religious clergy, a very long religious and moral tradition which has classified some emotions as more negative than others, and i don't think that religion or morality are necessarily the area from which we should get our normative guide lines.

Which does not mean they cannot inform politics, but I don't think they should be the exclusive spheres of meaning providing our normative guide lines to think about politics. That is my first thing to say.

Socially useful emotions

And the second, also, the second main claim is that what can feel negative from a subjective stand point is not necessarily negative at all from a macrosocial, from a structural stand point. And let me give you just a few examples of what I mean here, very quick examples of what I mean.

The 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his book De Cive famously suggested that fear is constitutive of the state of nature. And that it is fear that will make people enter in a social contract. And not the love of others and not as we would say today the desire to help each other.

„Anxiety is the motivational structure that brought a big macro change in Europe“

Not some altruistic motive, but some in fact contrarily self-interested motive and the fear that someone is going to kill us. The fear of death is extremely powerful in Thomas Hobbes' view of why and how people should get together and form a covenant and a society. So here, obviously, fear is able to be converted into something thas has good political status, which is the formation of the social contract.

To take an even clear, and famous again, another famous example, of what I mean here, in the 18th century, Bernard de Mandeville in his famous Fable of the Bees argued that greed and envy could generate positive social goods such as commerce and exchange.

And that these negative emotions which were certainly condemned by the Christian church, greed and and envy, were converted in fact into socially useful emotions, because they encouraged if you want economic activity. They encouraged consumption and they encouraged production and work.

Or still, to use another very famous example, for Germans, as you remember in the Weberian account of the development of capitalism, it is the anxiety that is generated by the deus absconditus, the god that you do not see, the god that is hidden.

So it is the anxiety that is generated by the deus absconditus that has not revealed to us whether we have been elected or not. That anxiety is the motivation, it is the motivational structure that brought a big macro change in Europe, such as making labour into a worthy activity, into a morally worthy activity.

You remember, this is the question that Weber asks, how it is that an activity such as labour which is viewed entirely as contemptible becomes actually a morally worthy activity. And what does that is the anxiety that is produced by the protestant theology of the deus absconditus.

Three possibilities

My point is clear here, and this is really I would say, theoretically this should be my main point, we should really make a distinction between individual and the structural analysis of emotions in politics. And without that I think we will not be able to move very far.

What do I mean then by structural? This is what I want to describe briefly before I move to answering the question I asked. So again, given that I am not a specialist, I have separated three possibilities of a structural analysis of emotions, there could be more. But I think these three seem to be quite important, so even if there are more, I am happy to stay with them.

One level of a structural analysis or structural existence of emotions would be a level that I would call, which would be the aggregation of many individual emotions. Such as, for example, take the example of the collective anger. Which ends in demonstrations, mass protests, social movements, social revolutions etc.

„The mass protests in Israel of 2011 were the aggregate effect of many different emotions“

These movements are often the result of an individual emotion. Which, you have many people having emotions, and I would say all kinds of emotions, it could be anger, but not only, it could be disappointment, it could be hatred, it could be many different people have different kinds of emotions which we could label broadly and a broad label of opposition to or dissatisfaction with or something like that.

These emotions are in turn, what sociologists say is that they are framed by elite groups. Such as political leaders, head of social movements, journalists, elite groups which then frame those emotions and transform them into a coherent social movement.

Think for example of the French Revolution. Of the role of the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals in framing, in providing what sociologists call a cultural framing for social discontent. The framing effect of elites, of newspapers, of intellectuals enable us to speak about structural emotions that are located at the societal level and that are the aggregate effects of many individual wills and emotions and that feed back into society.

Individual anger becomes a collective or political anger

So for example, to take a very famous example in Germany, if you take Michael Kohlhaas, famous character of a Kleist novel, you remember that he is very angry, he is the victim of an injustice and his anger remains I would say a private emotion until he starts, until he does two things: One is to raise, to make a big discourse, a formal discourse, a moral discourse that is listened by many when he goes to the court, when he appeals to officials and he makes a principle discourse of justice. And two, when he recruits others that are going to help him to attack the person who did big injustice on him.

That individual anger becomes a collective or political anger, as soon as Michael Kohlhaas is able to mobilize institutions, mobilize general discourse, moral discourse and political discourse of injustice and to recruit others around him. Or to take still another example, the mass protests in Israel of 2011 were, I think, the aggregate effect of many different emotions which were framed by the media.

I mean there was a struggle between the political elites which said these are very spoilt brats of rich neighbourhoods, which are simply whining over the fact that they cannot have a nice appartment in Tel Aviv. There was this interpretation and many other interpretations which says no, this is a much more fundamental discontent and anger.

And so there was a struggle over the appropriate framing of these emotions, until, at a certain point, the emotions involved in the discontent were stabilized if you want, you had a kind of commonly received claim that this was a social protest that protested the high costs of living. So that is the first level of a structural existence of emotions in politics.

Eva Illouz während ihres Vortrags auf dem taz.lab 2015 Bild: Wolfgang Borrs

The second level is located at what Raymond Williams, the great british literary theorist called structures of feeling, which designate to opposite phenomena. Feelings points to, first, when we say structure of feeling, it points to a kind of experience that is incohate, that defined who we are without being able to just say what is this who we are.

And yet the notion of structure also suggests that this level of experience has an underlied pattern that is systematic rather than half fathered. So think for example of fear, I am going to go back to this example. Think of fear as an underlying structure of feeling of liberal polities after 9/11. Especially after the US.

This is a kind of, I would say free floating climate, a general atmosphere, a feeling that exists in between media stories and in between our relationship to our political representatives. It is an affective register that is underlied and produced by media images, stories, international relations, policy measures by the state etc.

Hope or despair

So, I think here we can speak of emotional moods, climates or affective registers, whatever terminology you want to use, which are created by media images, by media stories, that are relayed by politicians and by policy making. Which may or may not be related to one single event, but which then settle, kind of settle in a society.

They crystallize and they settle in a society. I think that 9/11 is a good example, we could speak also of the Cold War as being a very good example of that structure of feeling in which fear and the fear of communism and the fear of the Soviets was really structural to the American political psyche.

„To save the American mega insurance company AIG from collapsing was also an emotional measure“

But we can speak also of a climate, certainly this is relevant in Europe, we can also speak of a climate of hope or despair. So I would say there are dominant affective registers in the political vocabulary of a country. So an affective register I would say is more diffuse and more enduring than very precise emotions that can be short lived.

And I think that Dominique Moïsi who wrote a famous book on the geography of emotions, trying to characterize the world with dominant emotions. So his thesis that American culture and the culture of the Middle East differ profoundly because one is a culture of fear and the other one is a culture of humiliation, I think that what he is really telling us is that there are different affective registers in each one of these societies.

And the third structural level of emotions in politics is what I would say, the emotions that are produced by the strongest actor in liberal polities, namely the state. Which initiates actions and events that have an emotional meaning and emotional effects on the citizens. We can think for example of what I would call policies of hope as when the American Federal government gave hundreds of millions of dollars to save the mega insurance company AIG from collapsing.

That was not only an economic measure but also an emotional measure. We can think also of the politics of memorialization which is organized around such feelings as grief or guilt or forgiveness. Politics of memory, which is initiated by the state. And such politics takes place as I would say, I would say what is the politics of memory, it is in fact a state-emotional act.

The political act is the emotional act

It is a state-emotional ritual. It is a state-emotional ceremony in which what you display, if you want, is a grief, loss, guilt, forgiveness etc. So, all these are emotions that exist at the structural level, they are public, they are externalized, whether at the level of collective movements, whether in public spheres, whether at state policies.

And I would say that in each one of these cases, the ways in which emotion makes meaning or produces meaning in the political sphere, in each case, it is different.

„Political emotions should be thought of as a structural phenomena“

Movement or protest, for example a social movement or what we call a protest vote, this is emotion as politics, the political act is the emotional act and the emotional act is the political act. In the second case of the public sphere, the affective registers that are produced by the kind of collaboration between policy making and media images, I would say this is a representational way of making emotions present in the body politic.

And the third case of the state, I would say this is a perfomative way of making or creating emotions. Performative means that when I say, when a state says, I officially apologize to the Armenian population, to the Jewish population, to the Palestinian population, the state is actually doing, creating an emotion simply by saying it, and this is possible because the state is the strongest actor, it has the possibility of doing this emotional performative act.

So, let me summarize what I have said so far, I have said that an emotion that is negative for the individual, from a moral psychological stand point, is not necessarily so from a collective or social stand point. And I have also said that political emotions should be thought of as structural phenomena. Not as the rhetorical effect of politician's discourse which is how it has been thought traditionally. But rather as entities that inhere in the structure of liberal polities.

To that extent, there is no way to long for a rational emotion, unless political sphere, I think this is something that derives quite clearly from what I say. It means that from a normative standpoint, we should not necessarily strive for a politics that has more reason in it.

Liberal polity as an answer

And here, I think that the liberal, the traditional liberal theory of the public sphere as a politics that is governed by reason, patchy Habermas, I am sorry, I think that theory is simply wrong. Or, you know, if it is right, I think it puts the philosopher, the political philosopher in the absurd position of constantly bemoaning and whining the fact that the politics is too emotional. And I don't think this is a very productive fact.

If emotions are intrinsically, as I said, a part of politics, then we should understand them as inhering in it and we should try to, having this understanding, we should try to redirect emotions, these emotions, as emotions.

„Nussbaum thinks that we should put compassion and love at the center of liberal polities. I don't find it personally extremely interesting“

So this is why, I mean Judith, I much more like the account of Judith Shklar, the philosopher Judith Shklar, who presented liberalism, she said liberalism is the political theory that abhors fear more than any other thing. And what she meant by that is that in the 17th century, when people had been persecuted and when there had been wars of religion, there is this search, this collective search in Europe for new political order in which people would not fear the people who governed them.

And liberal polity is really an answer to that, it is about creating a framework in which no one is afraid. In that sense, so Judith Shklar I think puts really an emotion, the lack of fear into the heart of liberalism. And I think this is more convincing.

Martha Nussbaum's recent book on political emotions is also important and follows in fact that strand because she also offers a model of the good polity as based on emotions and not on reason. She continues Shklar's intuition about the emotional condition of liberalism, namely saying that what is at the heart of liberalism is a certain emotional condition.

But, I mean I frankly didn't find that Martha Nussbaum's response was very satisfactory. She thinks that we should put compassion and love at the center of liberal polities, and I don't know, I just didn't find it very, I don't find it personally extremely interesting, to tell you the truth. So, if that is the case, let me ask again how we are then to criticize normatively the use of emotions in politics?

Fear

If emotions per se are not a problem, if negative emotions cannot always predict a negative societal outcome, then how shall we criticize emotions? I just have one suggestion. Not more, again, because this is not my topic. I am going to say that when an emotion covers, hides a self-interest, a collective self-interest, when it is used to cover a self-interest, and when that emotion blocks discussion and public debate and political participation, it is actually a very negative emotion.

„Netanyahu's regime was also born as a regime based on fear“

I try to think of what kind of emotion would qualify, would respond to these criteria I just defined. And for me, the emotion that is most dangerous, I would say, to the political process today, certainly viewed from Israel and I will say a few words about it right now, is the emotion of fear. The emotion of fear. So, i will just conclude, I have another five minutes as a conclusion, five, seven minutes to conclude by reflecting, I would like to reflect on fear. And its highly negative role in my opinion in politics.

Thomas Hobbes, the author of the Leviathan famously declared that when he was born, his mother gave birth to twins. Him and fear. Which may, you know, it is interesting because he then went on to become the philosopher of fear. And we may wonder similarly if Netanyahu's regime was not also born as a Hobbesian twin, as a kind of very particular view of Jewish history and as a regime based on fear. That is why I would call Netanyahu really a regime.

What characterizes that regime is the constant invocation of fear. Just to give you an example, renewing his intention to hold on his controversial and by now very infamous speech before the American Congress, this was back in February, Netanyahu summed up his political philosophy at a Likud conference in February, just a few months ago. He said: “I went to Paris, not just as the Prime Minister of Israel, but as a representative of the entire Jewish people.”

I didn't know that. I don't know who appointed him exactly. “Just as I went to Paris, so I will go any place I'm invited to convey the Israeli position against those who want to kill us. Those who want to kill us are first and foremost any Iranian regime that says out right it plans to destroy us. I will not hesitate to say what is needed to warn against this danger and prevent it.”

So I think we have here one of the secrets for Netanyahu's uncanny, one has to say that it has been an uncanny political success. One is that his self-appointment as the proud and forceful representative of world Jewry and his constant apocalyptical invocations of imminent and overwhelming danger for the Israeli nation and the Jewish nation as a home.

A new type of fear

So, we usually think it is interesting, as Judith Shklar, like Judith Shklar usually think of fear as being the prerogative of you know, rogue regimes, premodern regimes, abusive regimes, terror regimes, anything that is not democratic and that is bad, illicits fear. And illicits fear from the rulers to the governees. But I think that we are witnessing is that fear is becoming more and more democratic, that is a dominant feeling in democracies as well, and it is an emotion that is manipulated by political elites in order, I would say simply, quite often in order to justify foreign policy.

As if political emotion, fear is theatrical. In regimes of terror, this is obvious. Because there are show trials, we burn books in public, we set up public executions and we spread terror to intimidate what we designate as our internal enemies. This is what characterizes a terror regime, it is the theatralization of fear.

„A poll taken in 2004 in the USA showed a strong connection between thinking that civil liberties can be suspended for security purposes and watching a lot of TV news, going to church and voting Republican“

In democracies, which were based on the absence of fear, I think we are witnessing increasingly a new type of fear in which fear is present. It might be a bit less theatrical although it is also sometimes theatrical, you know, see Daish, the Islamic State. And it spreads often in a less centralized way.

And it is provoked by often what we view as our outer enemies, not our inner enemies. And it is conveyed often more indirectly through the televised spectacle of the news. So during the Cold War, or when we look at images of terror attacks, 9/11, the Islamic State, all of that create disgust, panic, fear and, what they do is that they create also, they reinforce a kind of solidarity within democracies.

Such fears can have a deep impact on the politics of democracies. For example a poll that was taken after 9/11 in the USA showed that a majority of those polled had become more conservative. Thus, suggesting a direct link between fear and conservative political orientation. Another poll taken in 2004 in the USA showed a strong connection between thinking that civil liberties can be suspended for security purposes and watching a lot of TV news, going to church and voting Republican.

Conversely, those who thought that civil liberties should not be sacrificed for security also had a more diverse source of news than TV, were more likely to be secular and more likely to vote Democrat. In other words, fear, I would say fear has become a part of a political ecology in which journalists who are hungry for very graphic images with high emotional impact, we have here the journalists who are looking for something that suits their professional ethos.

A powerful political instrument

We have political and economic elites invested in security, all of these reinforce mutually each other and create a conservative voter willing to suspend civil liberties. Few democratically elected heads of government have made fear as blatantly defining of their political discourse as Netanyahu. And fear is his surest and closest companion, like Thomas Hobbes' twin.

It is Iran's nuclear power, it is the Arab world as a whole, it is Europe who hates the Jews, it is the Jews themselves who have forgotten to be real Jews and presumably about to destroy Jewish civilization, it is Isaac Herzog who has betrayed the nation in going to the Munich security conference, it is the Leftists who want to sell the country to the Arabs, it is all those in short who want to bring the demise of Israel and the Jews outside and inside.

„Fear, far more than anger, justifies the aggressiveness and violence that are at the heart of a certain view of international relations“

So what has perhaps gone unnoticed, is that Netanyahu has uniquely mixed the invocation of fear, he has mixed the invocation of fear that is found in democracies and that is found in also less democratic regimes by mixing the enemies outside and the enemies inside and saying there is a straight line between the twos. The enemies inside, the left wingers who have forgotten to be Jews are serving directly the European boycotters who want actually to bring the demise of Israel.

So, we may wonder and this is my conclusion now, we may wonder why is fear so powerful a political instrument. Of course, it gives intense, immediate political benefits. Why? I want to ask why is fear so powerful actually? Well, I am going to offer three answers.

Fear, far more than anger, justifies the aggressiveness and violence that are at the heart of a certain view of international relations. In other words, today, I think that going to war out of sheer anger or sheer self-interest is more problematic than if you did it out of fear because of the immoral language in which foreign policy is shrouded.

That is, it is easier to justify military aggressiveness or domination by invoking fear, rather than by proudly claiming to be a bully. And I think this would be relevant to some of the decisions that the United States have made in the last decade, two decades or so. That is one. Fear is more compatible with our moral views of international relations than anger or self-interest. Two: Fear overrides not only thinking, but most importantly all other emotions. As evolutionary biologists suggests, fear is the emotion of pure survival. It helped us flee or fight.

Fear invades the psyche and overrides all other emotional reactions. So, if fear is well manipulated in the public sphere, it is the emotion that will win all other emotions. Such as the desire to improve my life, the compassion for the distress of others, a sense of shame at my leader's embarassing mistakes etc. The desire for survival will always trump all other desires. This was exactly what Thomas Hobbes said. It will always trump all others.

Den Audiomitschnitt des Vortrags, inklusive der Einführung von Julia Encke und der anschließenden Diskussion mit dem Publikum, können Sie im Podcast-Angebot des taz.lab nachhören.

Fear then, is likely to become dominant in order to override other emotional claims of the kind I just mentioned, such as the desire for happiness or compassion for others. It is the trump card of any political game. And finally, fear demands immediate action.

Rather than vision of the future or a long-term strategy. Fear is the emotion of the here and now, it is the emotion of not only those who lack a vision, but those, who by temperament for example Bush, want to go in now and do something about it. And that is required in fear.

So, Judith Shklar was right. A liberal polity abhors fear. She spoke about the fear that divided the leaders, the rulers, from the subjects. But we may wonder if we should not now, if we are not the witnesses of a fear she did not see. She passed away 20 years ago, she did not see, which is the fear that creates solidarity vis-à-vis enemies, some of which are real, some of which are, if not imagined, at least used too often, too easily, to suspend human and civil rights and I think fear should be particularly feared because it creates either aggressiveness, fight, or apathy, flight, and is not compatible, I think it is the emotion that is truly not compatible with democratic policies.

Therefore, if we want to maintain liberal and democratic polities, what really we should fear is fear itself. Thank you.

EVA ILLOUZ

Transkription von Audio: Marion Bergermann