![]()
Chapter 1
Introducing the confessing society
[T]he confession became one of the Westās most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have since become a singularly confessing society. . . . Western man has become a confessing animal.
(Foucault 1998: 59)
If something useful about the present can be taken from Foucaultās (1998) argument that Western man has become a confessing animal and that confession has become the most valuable technique for producing truth in society, we will argue that we live in a confessing society. One of the primary arguments made by Foucault (1998) is that verbalisation has become a central method through which people make themselves visible to themselves and to others, and that people come to know who they are through verbalisation. In his writing, psychoanalysis is used as an example of how previous Christian practices of confession have been appropriated by a secular scientia sexualis (Foucault 1998), which has spread to most aspects of private life. In this context, confession does not specifically limit itself to the confession taking place in church, but also signifies the most private and intimate relationships that we have with our lovers, family, friends and ourselves. Confession has been scientised.
Keeping the concepts of confession and verbalisation in mind, we can see how there are numerous contemporary practices in which we are invited to speak about ourselves, making our dreams, wishes, aspirations, fears and faults, for example, visible to ourselves and others, not the least in the media: reality TV shows such as Big Brother and Nanny TV; or online social communities, such as Facebook and Twitter (Andrejevic 2004; Ouellette and Hay 2008). Although not as prominent, we can see how confession operates in the public display of emotions shown by politicians in relation to a āscandalā, such as when someone is caught for drink-driving or drug use. These public displays of emotions could be seen as related to a wider ethos of emotions that is prominent in the present day. This ethos, in the example of the politician, directs the focus on the appearance and the display of emotions, rather than on the politicianās actual actions (see Furedi 2004; Dahlstedt 2008). Feeling takes precedence over action and emotion is contrasted to rationality. For example, during the 2010 election campaign in Sweden, the Swedish prime minister was construed as a rational, well-prepared politician who wanted to show that he was responsible and able to run the country for another four years. A few days before the election, a reporter asked the prime minister if ābrainā is sufficient, or if there might also be a need for āheartā in politics. This question illustrates how the brainā heart dualism is mobilised as a concept with which to describe politics in terms of emotion as a contrast to rationality. It further illustrates how, in the present time, the media is an important channel through which confession and power operates; namely, life becomes medialised and politics becomes a display of emotion (Swanson and Mancini 1996; Kellner 2003).
Verbalisation (disclosure) is thus, we argue, one of the most prominent features of the confessing society. One could argue that āthere is a transhistorical human need or psychological compulsion to confessā (Taylor 2010: 6). Connected to this type of society are numerous scientised practices in which psychology and therapy play a crucial role.
A therapeutic ethos
As argued above, emotions appear to play a crucial role in contemporary society. Through the use of the language that is made available through psychology and medicine, citizens are construed as fragile and vulnerable people who need support to handle their emotions. If they disagree with this support, they are considered to be in denial or to be repressing their ātrueā feelings (see Furedi 2004; Ecclestone and Hayes 2009). Furedi (2004) connected this āethos of emotionsā to what he called a ātherapeutic cultureā. This culture directs its interests towards the problem of an emotional deficit rather than the emotion itself. According to Furedi, social problems are, now more than ever, considered to be emotional problems, and because emotion is connected to the self, a preoccupation with the self emerges. The method for handling social problems is thus directed at the individual.
The idea of a diminished sense of self that suffers from an emotional deficit is promoted through a therapeutic culture. A low self-esteem level is regarded as a disease that needs to be cured, which is connected to a sense of emotional vulnerability. By distancing oneself from others and by focusing on oneself, it is possible to increase self-esteem and find meaning in life. The idea of emotional vulnerability is connected to a fear that people cannot handle feelings of isolation, disappointment and failure; by pathologising negative emotional responses, events that were previously routine are now reshaped into an encouragement for people to feel traumatised and depressed. Emotion is thus medicalised, and people can be treated as pathologies that require therapeutic intervention. Emotions are encouraged, but they also need to be cured and moderated.
Furediās (2004) argument is connected to numerous practices ā for example, in schools, in the criminal justice system, through informal relationships and by public servants, where a therapeutic ethos is mobilised. This ethos blurs the boundaries between the public and the private and points to a contradiction because it promotes the distancing of the self from others simultaneously with the systematic stigmatisation of the private, namely, informal relationships and family life. What was previously seen as confined to the private ā namely, emotions and informal relationships with oneās family ā is now regarded as a public affair and an issue to be handled by numerous institutions and experts. Informal relationships are here construed as those that create emotional distress and problems through child abuse, violence and sexual problems, for example. Such ideas about relationships can be connected to the broader ethos of therapy whereby the individual is encouraged to show openness to therapeutic management by acknowledging her feelings and problems and by seeking help to handle them. Thus, the therapeutic culture encourages a public display of feeling just as communication and disclosure become a prominent feature of this culture. By the act of disclosure, meaning is attached to the emotional pain, and the focus is thus directed to the act of reflecting and feeling in public rather than to the outcome of oneās actions. The focus on the internal thus has the external as its effect ā the erosion of private life where the experts and professionals, rather than any informal relations, are there to acknowledge the emotional deficit and to propose actions through which to manage these deficits.
We can draw a parallel between Furediās arguments and the description by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & the World (2009). Similar to Furedi, Ehrenreich describes the emergence of a therapeutic world-view in various sectors of society, including economics, politics and working life. This particular understanding of the world is based on the idea that individuals as well as society at large will become successful by thinking positively. Ehrenreich pointed out how an expanding industry around the concept of positive thinking has emerged over the last decade, with all types of products, self-help books, instructional videos, professionals and coaches of all kinds, such as life coaches, job coaches and career coaches. She sees this way of thinking as an ideology, i.e. a set of ideas and conceptual models that legitimise a certain type of domination, namely, a capitalist domination. According to Ehrenreich, the ideology of āpositive thinkingā has āmade itself useful as an apology for the cruder aspects of the market economyā (2009: 8). The basic argument is that the individual is responsible for not only his or her own success but also his or her failure: āIf optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failureā (2009: 8). If you do not succeed in, for instance, getting a job, the fault is yours and not somebody elseās. The solutions to all of the major challenges facing people today can be found in the act of looking inward and by having the right ambition, i.e. changing the individual: āIn the world of positive thinking, the challenges are all interior and easily overcome through an effort of the willā, not by āworking for social change that would benefit allā (2009: 51). There are numerous experts available to help develop positive thinking.
By reviewing policy texts from the Swedish Ministry of Education from the early 1920s, we can see that an ethos of emotion in which emotions should be disclosed and managed with the help of professionals is a contemporary construct. In the early 1920s in Sweden, for example, the public right to vote was introduced. Popular education initiatives were connected to this reform with the goal of cultivating the broad masses through public lectures, study circles and the creation of libraries (see Ministry of Education 1924; Fejes 2006). Because the masses now had the opportunity to vote, they needed to be educated about economic and social issues so that they could make sound political decisions. It was suggested that they needed to truly engage in educational activities, not only on the surface by listening to lectures, but also by following up on these lectures through reading and discussions, thereby gaining ādeeperā knowledge. Otherwise, the masses would become only superficially educated and would be dangerous to the stability of society. This reasoning can be connected to a will to regulate emotion and promote rationality. If the masses were allowed to disclose emotions, there would be a risk of poor political decisions and social upheaval. In this case, public opinion is construed to be the prisoner of irrationality (Furedi 2004: 46). The following quotation from a Green Paper by the Ministry of Education illustrates a will to civilise the broad masses and their uncultivated way of life.
Beside the direct impact the study circles have had on the membersā acquisition of knowledge, they have also been of great value in that they have contributed to the creation of sound and improved leisure time. . . . Indisputably, these modest entertainment evenings have been of great value, not least in the countryside, as a counterbalance to the uncultivated and dull/vapid leisure life that, sadly often, has been the only entertainment offered to the public.
(Ministry of Education 1924: 128)
This type of reasoning is by no means unique to Sweden. Rather, it reflects a wider conception of the threatening masses that was widespread and well established in the early 1900s and appears in different versions throughout the world. According to this line of thought, the masses are a continual problem for maintaining democratic order. For example, on the one hand, the masses are a prerequisite for the democratic exercise of power because democracy (after all) is about governing in the name of the people; on the other hand, the masses represent a constant threat because they are imagined to be led by their inner emotional impulses rather than by rationality. One of the thinkers who developed these ideas was Walter Lippmann, who was a leading political science scholar and was particularly well known, at the time, for his work on journalism and public opinion. In his famous study, Public Opinion (1922), he argued strongly that people tend to make up their minds before having defined the facts, which he saw as a serious democratic challenge. According to Lippmann, the democratic ideal would be for people to gather and analyse the facts before reaching their conclusions. With the rise of totalitarian movements and regimes, e.g. fascist, Nazi and Soviet Communist, he saw that there was a pressing need for the masses to be cultivated to become more mature and democratic. Otherwise, as he saw it, the democratic states would soon also be turned into totalitarian regimes. In the book Essays in Public Philosophy he argued that:
while the right but hard decisions are not likely to be popular when they are taken, the wrong and soft decisions will, if they are frequent and big enough, bring on a disorder in which freedom and democracy are destroyed.
(Lippmann 1955: 162)
The argument in this book connects with Furediās (2004) and Ehrenreichās (2009) arguments about a therapeutic world-view and a therapeutic culture within which the disclosing of emotions is a central aspect. To disclose oneself is, according to Furedi (2004: 42) āthe point of departure in the act of seeking help ā an act of virtue in therapeutic cultureā. We agree that therapeutic practices play a central role in the shaping of present-day society and that experts and professionals play an important part in the shaping of citizens. However, we position our work differently, mainly in two ways.
First, the disclosure of the self needs to be further emphasised as an important part of how people come to shape and understand themselves as citizens in the present day. We believe that the act of disclosure needs to be detached from any pre-understanding of the subject. In Furediās argument there is an idea that people disclose their emotion as a conscious and intentional act of seeking help in relation to a predefined problem, namely, that of oneās emotions. The problem is thus already there, predefined, and what is at stake are the cognitive processes of self-understanding by which people come to understand that they have a problem, that they wish to do something about it, and that they thereby choose to seek help. Although the above argument is one way to understand the present, we wish to propose another type of understanding that takes a decentred notion of the subject as the starting point. We will argue that the problem is not a predefined idea or entity nor is the subject predefined. Rather, the problem and the subjects emerge through the very act of disclosure. People are invited, encouraged and fostered to disclose their dreams, aspirations, beliefs, fears and much more in numerous practices and forms, as well as in numerous domains throughout society. Through this disclosure, people become objects that can be calculated, assessed, scrutinised and compared, and by processes of subjectification, people come to understand themselves as certain types of subjects with certain types of capacities. Taking this viewpoint, the disclosure of the self connects with the wider politics of governance that seek to govern and shape citizens (see Cruikshank 1999). It is through the very act of disclosure that people come to know who they are.
Second, we will argue that even though experts and professionals also play an important part in the confessing society, informal relationships represent key elements in the constitution of citizens. Verbalisation and disclosure of the self always requires an other to whom one confesses. This other might be a professional, such as a study counsellor, psychologist, doctor or social worker. However, the other could also be a friend or family member who, through this verbalisation, is positioned as an expert. Alternatively, the confession could be directed at a āvirtual otherā (see Foucault 1998) represented by a norm (see Fejes 2011). Therefore, verbalisation in this sense includes oral accounts, written accounts and self-scrutiny (reflection on the self). The role of informal relationships and āvirtual othersā becomes even more accentuated in a medialised society where the disclosure of the self is purveyed through a medium to numerous anonymous and unknown others. As we will argue, no matt...
