# taz.de -- 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.
(IMG) Bild: Eva Illouz (re.) und Julia Encke während der Lecture auf dem taz.lab 2015.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
8 May 2015
## AUTOREN
(DIR) Marion Bergermann
## ARTIKEL ZUM THEMA