Emotional States

Sites and spaces of affective governance

Eleanor Jupp, Jessica Pykett, Fiona M. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472454058
• eBook ISBN: 9781317144571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

What is the political allure, value and currency of emotions within contemporary cultures of governance? What does it mean to govern more humanely? Since the emergence of an emotional turn in human geography over the last decade, the notion that our emotions matter in understanding an array of social practices, spatial formations and aspects of everyday life is no longer seen as controversial. This book brings recent developments in emotional geography into dialogue with social policy concerns and contemporary issues of governance. It sets the intellectual scene for research into the geographical dimensions of the emotionalized states of the citizen, policy maker and public service worker, and highlights new research on the emotional forms of governance which now characterise public life.

An international range of empirical field studies are used to examine issues of regulation, modification, governance and potential manipulation of emotional affects, professional and personal identities and political technologies. Contributors provide analysis of the role of emotional entanglements in policy strategy, policy implementation, service delivery, citizenship and participation as well as considering the emotional nature of the research process itself. It will be of interest to researchers and students within social policy, human geography, politics and related disciplines.

1 Introduction

Governing with feeling

Jessica Pykett, Eleanor Jupp and Fiona M. Smith

A ‘more human’ government?

In May 2015, following a return to power of a right-wing Conservative UK government, and resultant despair from the UK left about the failures of its political imagination, a new arrival appeared on the bookstands of popular political non-fiction. Entitled More human: designing a world where people come first (Hilton et al., 2015), the book is written by a former adviser to the current British Prime Minister David Cameron, and is a call to both the left and the right to radically rethink government, politics and policy. The book opens with an anecdote about the treatment of a family on a budget airline flight that frames the rhetorical question: ‘Why can’t we just treat each other with kindness and decency, like human beings?’ (p. 2). What follows is an exploration of what this might mean across strands of government, business, education, urban planning, the food industry and more, with key themes of the need for more ‘empathy’ and care, smaller-scale and thus closer government, and less ‘bureaucracy’.

From a left-wing perspective, the book is easy to ridicule. Nick Cohen (2015), for example, provided a rapid dismissal of Hilton’s platitudes in light of the emotional misery created by Cameron’s inhumane welfare reforms. It remains to be seen whether Hilton, architect of the previous government’s widely dismissed ‘Big Society’ approach (Runswick-Cole and Goodley, 2011), has produced an intervention which will have much traction within contemporary political and policy debates. Notwithstanding this, we would argue that his book encapsulates and expresses something that has been apparent for at least the last decade of political discourse in the UK and elsewhere. It reflects a new enthusiasm for an emotionally attuned approach to government which sees emotions as constitutive of the very workings of government and policy. More human therefore forms part of a broader genre of writing that has popularised emerging ideas about the emotions and the self within government and governance. Like many of its predecessors, it calls up particular advances from neuroscience, behavioural economics and social psychology to rethink what we know and understand – often evoked via science and ‘hard’ evidence – about human nature. It then reimagines the more ‘humanised’ policies which should follow, whether that is rerouting traffic in New York City or implementing more home visiting schemes in healthcare. Indeed, Hilton draws attention to the international nature of this phenomenon, even whilst remaining primarily focused on UK policy and politics.

Putting aside the politics of the arguments, which will be explored further below, an interesting starting point is to reflect on the inclusive and appealing nature of Hilton’s propositions. On one level, a call to be ‘more human’ is hard to disagree with (although, as Terry Eagleton (2015) witheringly points out, ‘rape and genocide are human too’). There is something inherently engaging about considering emotions, the intersubjective warmth and friction of human interactions and feelings, in shaping public policies aimed at increasing human happiness. It is easy to understand why this kind of policy ideology has been popularised – arguably worldwide – above other strands of economic and political analysis (which nonetheless may remain important within policy regimes). Talk about feelings and human nature draws us in. Indeed this strand of governance and management is attractive in a commercial sense too, with international institutions and organisations willing to pay considerable sums for toolkits and training in new forms of emotional literacy.

While this book is primarily concerned with the ‘emotional state’ of the UK, it is clear that emotional governance and emotional politics have global resonances which remain under-researched. We may take examples of the emotionalised rhetoric in US political debates as indicative of the growing salience of public and political expressions of emotion, for instance Donald Trump’s recent invocations of fear, hate and disgust of both migrants and America’s Muslim population as part of his 2016 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Or we might consider the significance of moving images of President Obama’s tearful responses to ongoing gun crimes against innocent children, or the anger inspired by the seemingly intransigent racial injustices faced by Black US citizens. Further examples of such emotional politics might be found in the recent global appeal of wellbeing and happiness measures across several nation states, posed as a corrective to the dominant focus on economic growth at the expense of ‘more human’ considerations. So, too, emotionalised work and relationships might be viewed as essential to sustaining social movements, whether resistive or not (Aminzade and McAdam, 2002), and to geopolitical issues of conflict, security and peace-building (Crawford, 2000). In the summer of 2015 the circulation and affective force of an image of a drowned child in the Mediterranean within the Western media seem to have generated an unexpected shift in international policy as well as popular attitudes about migration, although these feelings may in themselves obscure the more complex politics of migration, international discord on the provision of refuge and national immigration policies themselves shaped by highly emotional dynamics (which is explored by Forkert et al., Chapter 12, in this volume).

This book explores these issues via focusing primarily on one context, the UK (but with other non-UK comparisons). However, it is also important to note that within the UK state there are diverse geographies of policy-making and practice, whether that is in the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, meaning that a range of policies apply specifically in England rather than the whole of the UK, or whether it is reflected across a range of local administrations in relation to local government. Thus a number of the chapters engage with emotions in policy, policy-making and citizenships in the devolved administrations of Scotland (Anderson, Chapter 6, Smith et al., Chapter 15) and Wales (Pykett et al., Chapter 5), while some examine aspects of local governance (Collins, Chapter 13).

Overall, the book seeks to unpack the seductive attraction of feelings-talk itself as something we also need to acknowledge, lest we describe or evoke emotions as an end in themselves (Pile, 2010). However, we seek to go beyond such allure to explore the economic and political values and currencies of emotions. We ask what happens when emotions become entangled with government and policy. We are interested in advancing understandings of how emotions are put to work, how they circulate and perform, whether in the service of government agencies, policy practitioners or citizens and communities. We consider how emotions create and sustain new relationships of power and modes of governing, but also how they might disrupt governance regimes, surface in unexpected ways and places, generate new identifications and solidarities, and perhaps shift policy and politics, as in the example of refugee policy above.

The book therefore has at its centre ambivalence, contradiction and the always unstable nature of emotions and their geographies. It unpacks the cultivation and reproduction of embodied and emotional notions of selfhood experienced by the citizen, policy-maker and public service worker, arguing that emotionalised states are more than a new set of vocabularies, techniques, objects or sites of governing. Rather, they signify contradictory political imperatives. On the one hand, there is a common-sense, evidence-based and apparently progressive drive to govern ‘more humanly’, in sometimes highly personal and interventionist ways. On the other hand, emotionalised states and their governments also somehow govern less – by rejecting the modernist social contract between state and citizen, renouncing the notion of a highly rationalised state bureaucracy in favour of personalised forms of self-government. This is even more evident given that this novel enthusiasm for emotionally attuned government comes at a time of radical state roll-back in neoliberal democracies such as the UK and USA.

However, as already noted, within and in between these explicitly emotionalised techniques of governance, other kinds of emotions inevitably circulate and may contest their rationalities. Therefore, as well as the work involved in governing the emotional states of citizens, we are interested in emotional forms of governance, highlighting the ways in which the work of state agencies, civil servants and public services always involves emotional negation, excess, dilemma, rhetorical fantasy, as well as emotional celebration and commitment. In charting the politics of both these emotional forms of governance and related efforts at governing emotional states, the book identifies crucial points of contestation and activities of resistance which explicitly address the aforementioned seductive allure of ‘more human’ modes of governance.

The book therefore stands at the intersection of, on the one hand, a burgeoning social science literature that places emotions centre stage across a range of fields of enquiry and, on the other, a simultaneous interest in emotions from politicians and policy-makers. Its contributors introduce a range of empirical sites, from school inspection regimes to immigration policy, early intervention with children and urban regeneration initiatives. In order to explore emotions within governance we examine spaces of public policy-making (Part II), public service delivery (Part III) and citizenship and participation (Part IV). The book is organised along these lines, after two chapters in Part I that explore broader issues around researching emotions and governance. Before introducing these, we turn to consider some theoretical and methodological trajectories around social science research on emotions.

Emotions within social science research

Although this book does not aim to provide a philosophical or sociological summary of existing research on emotions, it is helpful to provide some background context on the major developments in this area in order to avoid overstating the novelty of our focus on emotions within governance regimes. Historical and sociological accounts provide ample commentary on the sixteenth-century Reformationist ‘disenchantment’ of emotional life and its later reflection within the emerging ‘spirit’ of capitalism (Weber, 1974, cited in Williams, 2001: 20). So, too, classic texts recount the civilising imperatives associated with emotional management and manners developed throughout the modern Enlightenment period, during which emotions as bodily sensations were viewed with mistrust and were also highly classed (Elias, 2000 [1939]). Sociologist Simon Williams provides a particularly helpful journey through the place of the emotions in twentieth-century sociological thought, illuminating its vitalism, sensuality/sensibility and its focus on irrationality and the passions through the founding work of Weber, Durkheim, Simmel and Marx. He notes a particular renewal of interest in the sociology of emotions during the 1980s and 1990s, stemming from the contributions of feminist and queer theorists. They established more embodied and gendered accounts of emotions, as well as incorporating neuroscientific advances in understanding the centrality of emotions to processes of cognition. Such advances in social and scientific theory provided a radical challenge to Western binaries of (feminised) emotion and (masculinised) reason, which paved the way for the development of a sociology which ascribed value to both the material and the discursive aspects of personal emotion. Hence the work of sociologists including Deborah Lupton and Bryan Turner has been important in promoting a view of emotions as ‘embodied sociality’ (after Lyon and Barbalet, 1994: 48, cited in Lupton, 1998: 4). This perspective aims to confront the limitations of ‘overly’ socially constructionist accounts of emotions (such as that offered by Rom Harré) and structuralist perspectives (e.g. Marx, Durkheim and, later, Hochschild). Such approaches are said to give little time to the physiological or embodied aspects of emotions, and to the potential for individual actors to shape their own emotions outside of predefined rules of comportment (see Lupton, 1998: 21). But at the same time this notion of ‘embodied sociality’ put the social contexts of emotional experience centre stage, appreciating the contingency of embodied emotions across cultures and over time, acknowledging the importance of norms in shaping the experience of emotions and recognising the socially situated (gendered, racialised, classed) nature of the interpretation and meaning of emotions.

The embodied nature of emotions was to become one of the most salient features of the sociology of emotions at the end of the twenty-first century, and reflected the aspirations of sociology itself to become, in some sense, ‘more human’. For example, Elizabeth Grosz’s emphasis on emotional flows and ‘leaky bodies’ pointed towards the fleshy materialism of the human body as an animal (Grosz, 1994, in Lupton, 1998: 87), troubling boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, order and chaos. Feminist theorists spoke out vociferously against the apparently unembodied rational man and feminism’s own dismissal of biologism and neurologism (Wilson, 1998; Sedgwick and Frank, 1995). They sought to reclaim a definitive materiality of emotions through an attention to its biopyshical and somatic dimensions and through the development of theories of affect. This movement was further buoyed by insights from the emotion sciences, affective neurosciences and psychology. Work as diverse as that of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who provided a new account of the brain functions of the emotion of fear, and psychologist Silvan Tomkins, who set out to identify and classify inherent biological affects, has been influential in rethinking the potential value of the biological sciences to understanding the sociology of emotions. This move has also been subject to critical scrutiny. For example, Papoulias and Callard (2010) provide an account of the problematics posed by the adoption of biological concepts in cultural studies. Furthermore, there has by now been substantial debate as to the precise distinctions between affects and emotions (see Pile, 2010). Nonetheless, it is clear that the ‘affective turn’ has had a significant impact on the way in which sociologists, cultural theorists, contemporary neurophilosophers, human geographers and political scientists alike conceptualise embodied emotions. Political scientists such as Martha Nussbaum (2001, 2013) have insisted on the centrality of emotions to ethical reasoning, human intelligence and political culture, whilst others argue that the neurosciences herald a new era of political theory which should more closely examine the neurobiological and genetic precepts of social and political behaviour (Hibbing, 2013) and ultimately protect ‘policy from the undulating passions of the madding crowd’ (Neuman et al., 2007: 7). Nikolas Rose (2013: 3) has proclaimed that ‘the biological century’ in which we now live requires a new kind of sociology and a new politics of life.

And yet these biologically driven accounts of the passionate body politic and the neurobiological political subject have also been widely resisted. For many, there is still a dangerous political scientism at the heart of accounts which seem to reduce complex social and relational feelings to their biological correlates, as if they were unmediated by social structures, history, culture or intersubjective experience. Thus for social psychologists, including Margaret Wetherell (2012), whose approach informs that of some of the contributors to this book (Clarke, Chapter 9, Newman, Chapter 2, Jupp, Chapter 10 in this volume), there is a focus on human emotion as a set of affective practices, which contributes to, but can also disrupt, wider affective patterns. This highlights the distributed nature of emotions which exists between individual subjectivities and shapes the structures and institutions of collective life (see Hunter, Chapter 11 in this volume).

An important issue for such analysis is thus around how emotions are understood to move beyond individual subj...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: governing with feeling
• PART I Approaching emotional governance: feminism and gendered labour
• PART II Emotions in public policy-making
• PART III Emotions in public services
• PART IV Emotions of citizenship and participation
• Index