What Holds Us Together

Popular Culture and Social Cohesion

Barry Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367102647
• eBook ISBN: 9780429923821
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Faced by the increasing divisiveness and volatility of electoral politics, and the rise of illiberal fundamentalisms, the social sciences may seem to lack the imagination necessary to make sense of the world. In this unusual book of political psychology, based on the idea that we hold ourselves together through a combination of restraint and release, the author draws on psychoanalysis and its creative interpretations of everyday experience to consider the current malaise of politics in relation to the huge vitality of popular culture. In a wide-ranging analysis, that links topics as diverse as our experience of public utilities, the rise of counselling, and the weakened impact of sexual scandal, he concludes with the proposal that a reconstruction of nationalism could make an important contribution to the renewal of democratic politics.

CHAPTER ONE

The popular disciplines of delight

Modalities of containment

The concept of containment figures prominently in much of what follows. By containment, I mean that people are “held”, emotionally, by the forms of popular culture that they consume. We are held together, psychically, by our internal capacities for self-integration, and by any confirmations of our selfhood and identity that we find in the external world. Foremost among these will be the experiences of recognition, acceptance, and reassurance which other people can give us in our interpersonal interactions, although containing experiences can also be available in our dealings with organisations of various sorts and in our consumption of culture.

In this book, the use of this concept draws heavily on psychoanalytic formulations of the idea of containment, including the original one found in the work of Bion (1962), but at times I might extend the term beyond stricter psychoanalytic definitions, towards a process which is sometimes captured in a more everyday, less technical way by the term “holding”. This term also has a technical provenance in the psychoanalytic theory of Winnicott (1960), who uses it to refer to the “holding environment” provided by the mother or primary carer in the earliest months of life, not least in the processes of physical care of the baby. While the idea of “containment” as used here has some connotative affinity with Winnicottian “holding”, in that both are about supporting a sense of safety at a deep psychic level, the developmental functions of the “environment mother” cannot be taken on by cultural forms and societal structures, though perhaps they can be echoed or recalled for the developed psyche of the adult. In any case, debates about the technical meanings of these two terms, and the relationship between them, have continued without resolution among psychoanalytic writers (for example, Ogden, 2004; Symington & Symington, 1996), which gives some licence for the somewhat heterodox use adopted here.

The psychoanalytic literature on both these concepts mainly focuses on their importance in understanding the relationships necessary for healthy psychological development, and for effective therapeutic work; that is, they focus primarily on the carer or therapist as container/holder. However (as will be discussed more in Chapter Five), they have also had important application in discussions of how institutional environments such as children’s homes or psychiatric residential units have an impact on individual states of mind. I am extending such uses to a societal level, and am proposing that, as well as playing a developmental role, the institutions and cultural forms of a society have an ongoing and necessary role in stabilising the adult psyche. They offer us a range of resources for emotional self-management.

My argument in Disciplines of Delight was that some major forms of popular culture offer very effective emotional containment in their combination of high levels of both pleasure and of societal constraint. They facilitate individual expression while also confirming social membership, thus enabling us to find ourselves as sensual individuals while reconciling us to the necessary authority of the societal other. Through them, we can “perform” the balance between release and restraint that is necessary to hold us together. They offer the reassuring and rewarding creations of human society as an antidote to our fundamental anxieties. In various ways, they can receive our anxieties, process them, and return them to us as tolerable—in fact, pleasurable—experiences.

In all, they are deeply functional for both individuals and, at a very fundamental level, for social cohesion. Individuals who are not held together adequately through the combined functioning of internal and external containers can suffer in ways that do not impinge damagingly on others except those close to them. Alternatively, they might, over time, constitute a risk to social cohesion, whether this is because they engage in antisocial behaviours, crime, or violent politics, or, at lower levels of disturbance, just do not have the emotional resources to be actively good citizens.

All societies must, therefore, offer some modalities of containment to their members. These might or might not draw on popular culture. They can be more or less effective, and must do their work amid whatever forces might also, in any given society, be actively working in the opposite direction, not to strengthen containment, but to undermine or corrode the internal capacities for containment in some members of that society. The effects of inequality, poverty, and social exclusion are not only apprehended in external measures of material deprivations, illnesses, and reduced opportunities, but also felt in internal struggles against anxiety and fragmentation, and in diminished collective resources of emotional capital.

In later chapters, we go beyond the study of popular culture, noting its increasing importance relative to other possible modalities of societal containment, and considering the overall societal implications of this shift. However, before then, the general concept of a societal modality of containment is illustrated and elaborated through case studies of key forms of popular culture.

The heart of the popular

What makes popular culture popular? Why are we so passionate about the forms of sport and music that now reach around the globe? What is the appeal of the experiences that many people see as their main pleasures in life, with which they seek to fill their leisure hours and around which their social lives might be organised? Whether we are applauding or bemoaning the influence of popular culture, we pay very little attention to this most basic of questions: why this? Why these particular activities, these forms of expression?

This chapter offers an answer to that question. It focuses on three particular forms of popular culture. Two of these are now the most dominant forms in their global reach: association football and pop–rock music. The third is the diffuse, almost limitless, domain of consumer culture, our discussion of which involves a brief excursion into the countryside.

Although all sports excite passionate involvement among those who play or follow them, the twentieth century saw football rise to a unique position of primacy in global popular culture. The two most populous countries in the world were not represented at the 2014 World Cup finals, but global television audience figures for the final match of nearly one billion suggest there is, none the less, a prima facie case for seeing it as the most widely followed international sporting event, or, at least, holding joint first position with the Olympics. Because of its place in popular culture, football is now also heavily populated by an international plutocracy. Also, it is part of the international world of soft power, as in the successful Qatari bid to host the World Cup in 2022, but both of these developments depend on its power to capture audiences.

Notwithstanding old stereotypes of footballers and football crowds, the game itself embodies a high level of development of the civilising process. This is because the taboo on which the game entirely rests is a particularly stringent one: it is a taboo on touching by hand. So, the rules of the game embody an intense form of social prohibition: we are manually focused creatures, and to be deprived of the use of our hands is to subject ourselves to an especially invasive restraint. Yet, the same time, the game offers a wide range of opportunities for the satisfaction of aggressive and aesthetic impulses and needs. The force of the taboo rests not only on the negative threat of exclusion or punishment. It also derives from the positive experience of observing it, from the delights of participation.

In this combination of restraint and release, football embodies a dramatic representation of social membership, in the general sense of belonging to human community. It has an intrinsic appeal, a major part of which is that it mimics society as a whole. At the same time, it is the vehicle of some of today’s most powerful partisan identities. Identities often involve some measure of idealisation of the group or collective with which one is identifying, and that is certainly the case with football partisanship.

Idealisations can differ importantly in quality, being more or less defensive, and their social significance will differ also according to their object; compare the fascist politics of an emotional investment in an idealised “white Britain”, purged of bad elements, with the democratic politics, albeit not unproblematic, of an image of an idealised multi-racial Britain, purged of conflict. However, the extent to which football—like any other sport—is a constructive and reconciliatory force in society depends upon its universal, intrinsic appeal outweighing its appropriation by partisan sentiments (necessary and, at times, constructive though the latter might be). That universal appeal, the glorification of the game itself, might involve some idealisation of society, which we are to hope will outweigh the glory of winning, the idealisation of the in-group. It is captured in the rituals around particularly important matches, as I have tried to show in an essay on the FA Cup Final (Richards, 2014).

In the expanding universe of popular music, with its proliferating genres, there can be no such global coming together of all its devotees. Indeed, it is far from obvious that we can talk of pop/rock music (Regev, 2013) as a single, broad phenomenon, so varied are its forms. Still, I suggest that the general development of popular music in the second half of the twentieth century created new spaces for internationally shared and compelling cultural experiences. Often seen as the core of popular cul ture, pop music is inviting territory for any examination of the emotional dynamics of the popular. The role this music plays in facilitating adolescents’ separation from their parents has long been widely recognised, and, since musical subcultures supporting young people’s “identity” work began to flood mass culture in the 1950s, most people alive now in the developed world, and many outside it, have had the opportunity to participate in that kind of musically based self-development. Moreover, many of us have found it continues to be an indispensable resource long after the chronological adolescence has run its course. For the post modern subject in a world of flux, the work of stabilising the self is never done. We are constantly revisiting the anxieties and achievements of emotional development, with music acting as a guide to both for many people.

An important part of this work is undertaken in the context of intimate relationships, particularly in the making and breaking of attachments to sexual partners. In the vicissitudes of love life, we recapitulate the joys of union and the pains of separation and loss which were first experienced on the developmental journey, and pop music offers abundant articulation of, and containment for, the anxieties associated with loss. The blues music of the mid-twentieth century is a powerful language of loss which has deeply shaped pop music and which continues to be drawn on directly by new generations of artist. All music represents societal disciplines through the structures and conventions of its form, and all music presents opportunities for deep engagement with both desire and anxiety, along with models of how turbulence and loss can be survived and managed. However, pop music does this in highly accessible ways that, alongside the celebrating of romantic love, also confirm the reality principle, that loss is loss.

Contemporary popular culture is entwined with consumer culture, and there is much potential for object relations psychoanalysis to illuminate our lives as consumers. In both our experiences of goods themselves, and of the promotional communications designed to interest us in them, we can find evidence of the ways in which popular culture provides us with objects and images that we can then use to manage ourselves emotionally. The role of advertising is crucial in this process, in the ways that advertisements can offer particular resolutions of psychic tensions. In a study I conducted with Iain MacRury and Jackie Botterill, we argued that this typically involved some resolution of the conflict between desire and authority. To that end, advertisements act as a cultural resource, a set of templates perhaps, available to all those people who noticed them, whether or not they were influenced to make purchases of any particular goods. (See Richards et al., 2000.) A key material object in the popular cultures of all developed consumer societies is the car. This is an object capable of evoking regressive satisfactions in the offer of safety within a pseudo-maternal body, as well as bearing the more familiar excitements of sexualised self-experience as powerful. These pleasures are paired with psychic risks: for example, the exposure to the guilt that is always at hand when aggressive impulses are given licence to be expressed. As well as the very libidinal and aggressive dimensions of the car, there is also an important dimension of its appeal linked to the simple fact of its bestowing mobility upon its driver. It endows us with the capacity of controlling movement of the self, and, in a superhuman way, thus linking the baby’s pleasure in early mobility with modern cultural valorisations of individual freedom to move and travel.

However powerful the unconscious resonances of the car and driving might be, any pleasures they deliver for the individual can only be received within a highly constricting environment of rules and limits, both physical and legal. The ordinary recurrent pleasures of “motoring” derive from its being embedded in the tasks and leisure activities of everyday life, from the moderated exercise of libidinality and from skilfully and safely dealing with the challenges posed by the encounter of the car’s power with the constraints presented by roads, other traffic, and the parameters of civilised behaviour.

The car is, therefore, part animal, part model citizen, both wrapped in a technophiliac package. It is, on the face of it, a very different kind of thing in the unconscious to the gentle British countryside, whose pastoral idyll is the technophobe’s retreat. The countryside is also usually thought of as a counterpoint to consumer society, a balmy escape from it. Yet, at the same time, it is impossible for us not to “consume” it, as our routes to access it are partly commodified, and images of it are deeply embedded in popular and promotional culture. Also, like the car, the countryside’s appeal rests on its combination of a deep libidinal register, as in our experience of its beauty, with the order and constraints imposed by human society, which we encounter in the ways that historical human labour has fundamentally shaped the agrarian countryside. Moreover, the symbolism we use to describe our sensuous encounter with the countryside indicates that, at least in our unconscious experience, it is, like the car, a body. The significance of this for our experience of the nation we inhabit is picked up in Chapter Six.

In each of these case studies (which were examined in greater depth and detail in Disciplines of Delight), a common pattern emerges. We see that the magic of football, the rich appeals of popular music, and the power of the car as an object of consumer desire all depend upon a particular kind of experience. They all offer a combination of intense pleasure with high levels of social discipline. The pleasures involved are fundamentally of a bodily, sensual kind, and the particular power of these cultural forms lies in their ability to deliver such pleasures to a maximum, while also strongly affirming the social rules that must govern us if human society is to be feasible. They provide a particularly intense encapsulation of the experience of being human. Cultural forms that can do this have the power to bring people together through a universal experience based on a fundamental commitment to membership of a human collectivity.

Elias’s sociological theory (1978, 1982) of the development of human societies can be seen as providing a historical framework for this analysis of contemporary culture, and an explanation for why the dynamic of pleasure and restraint is so compelling. His account of the “civilising process” suggests that, as the division of labour in human societies increases and produces widening networks of interdependency, regimes of impulse management are increasingly adopted in order to avoid or manage conflicts with others or impingements upon others, and to facilitate co-operative living. The emergence of modern states with their monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is a major contribution to this process. However, from a pessimistic Freudian perspective, the costs of this civilisational repression are potentially catastrophic, since the unruly forces of libido and the deathly potential of aggression are always on the edge either of overturning civilisational repression and breaking our social bonds, or of destroying us individually from within, through neurosis and madness. Eliasian theory posits that this problem of potential catastrophe can be addressed in the evolution of cultural forms that permit “controlled decontrolling” (Elias & Dunning, 1986). A leading example of this development in the civilising process is sport, as seen in the account of football given above.

Essential to such phenomena is that, fundamentally, control remains in place, and, indeed, is strengthened by its relaxation. The containing effect of such cultural forms is based on the way that they demand confrontation with, and basic acceptance of, the societal “other”. In Freudian terms, this can be seen as a reconciliation or, at least, a truce, between superego and impulse, managed by the ego (with the support of society as auxiliary ego as well as superego object). In other words, some degree of psychic integration has occurred. Containment and integration can be seen as different moments of the same process.

It is not only impulse which is the object of containment: anxiety is also at the heart of what is “contained”, as will be seen in later discussion of Bion’s model of container–contained. Impulse meets societal other and gratification is mixed with boundaries and the safety of community. Anxiety meets societal other and, again, safety is found in reassurance, in the detoxification of fear.

In Chapters Three, Four, and Five, it will be argued that popular culture is becoming increasingly important as a container of impulses and anxieties, especially so as the popular becomes increasingly inflected by what will be described as “therapeutic culture”. Politics, meanwhile, is becoming an increasingly ineffective container, mainly, though not entirely, as a consequence of the cultural trend towards deep suspicion of authority. There is a malign feedback process here, since the credibility of politics in any society—and, thereby, the stability of its political institutions—depends on the political process having some power to contain its citizens and their psychic needs. Hence, the call at the end of Chapter Five for considering the renewal of the democratic nation-state as a key container in the field of politics.

CHAPTER TWO

The containing matrix of the social*

A note on method

This chapter is an experiment in cultural analysis. Rather than use an artefact, such as a novel, film, or painting, we base our analysis on two personal experiences. An artefact, which is available to anyone, has the advantage that anyone could compare what we say about it with his or her own view, and arguments could be tested against each other. The advantage of personal experience is that the the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION The frailties of liberal democracy
• CHAPTER ONE The popular disciplines of delight
• CHAPTER TWO The containing matrix of the social
• CHAPTER THREE The therapeutic culture hypothesis
• CHAPTER FOUR Containment and compression: politics in the therapeutic age
• CHAPTER FIVE A new psychosocial theory of nationalism
• REFERENCES
• INDEX