Emotion and Social Theory

Corporeal Reflections on the (Ir) Rational

Simon Williams

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781446227428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The emotions have traditionally been marginalized in mainstream social theory. This book demonstrates the problems that this has caused and charts the resurgence of emotions in social theory today.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, both classical and contemporary, Simon Williams treats the emotions as a universal feature of human life and our embodied relationship to the world. He reflects and comments upon the turn towards the body and intimacy in social theory, and explains what is important in current thinking about emotions. In his doing so, readers are provided with a critical assessment of various positions within the field, including the strengths and weaknesses of poststructuralism and postmodernism for examining the emotions in social life.

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INTRODUCTION: WHY EMOTIONS, WHY NOW?

Banished to the margins of Western thought and practice, the ‘scandal’ of reason, emotions have enjoyed something of a reversal of fortunes in recent years. The ‘fractious child’ of modernity, emotions have truly come of age. The sociology of emotions, for example, is now a thriving sub-field of inquiry, the implications of which are slowly but surely permeating throughout the discipline as a whole. Key questions here include the following: What precisely are emotions? In what ways are emotions socially structured? What role does emotion play in the shaping of social structure itself? Do more differentiated societies produce a more ‘refined’ emotional vocabulary? And how might traditional divisions such as reason/emotion, mind/body themselves be rethought in the process?

Debates continue to rage, as these very questions suggest, as to what precisely emotions are and how they should be studied. The sociology of emotions in this respect, given a variety of competing perspectives and multiple research agendas, is perhaps a ‘victim of its own success’ (Wouters 1992: 248). All the contributors to Kemper’s (1990a) volume, for example, can be seen as actively engaging with, or contesting, traditional sociological divisions such as the biological versus the social, micro versus macro, quantitative versus qualitative, positivism versus naturalism, prediction versus description, and managing versus accounting for emotions. A useful starting point here, given these debates, is to see emotions as complex, multifaceted human compounds which arise, sociologically speaking, in a variety of sociorelational contexts, including fundamental processes of management, differentiation and change linking larger social structures with the emotional experiences and expressions of embodied individuals (Gordon 1990). This in turn suggests the need, as noted above, to work ‘both ways’ so to speak, from the social shaping of emotions by social structure to the emotional shaping of social structure itself (ibid.).

It is really, however, only within the past decade or so that a distinct corpus of work, mainly American in origin, has begun to emerge. Kemper, for example, traces the beginnings of American sociological interest in emotions back to the ‘watershed’ year of 1975, arguing that, by the brink of the 1980s, the sociology of emotions was truly ‘poised for developmental take-off’ (1990b: 4). Landmark texts here include Hochschild’s (1983) The Managed Heart and The Second Shift (1990), Denzin’s (1984) On Understanding Emotion, together with a variety of edited collections, including Franks and McCarthy’s (1989) The Sociology of Emotions, Kemper’s (1990a) Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions, and three recent British volumes: Fineman’s (1993) Emotion in Organizations, James and Gabe’s (1996) Health and the Sociology of Emotions, and Bendelow and Williams’ (1998a) Emotions in Social Life. To this we may add other recent contributions from Australian scholars such as Lupton’s (1998a) The Emotional Self, and Barbalet’s (1998) Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure, alongside calls, by Game and Metcalfe (1996), for a more Passionate Sociology in general.¹ A Passionate Sociology, these authors suggest:

... celebrates immersion in life, a compassionate involvement with the world and with others ... a sensual full-bodied approach to knowing and to practices of knowledge such as reading, writing, teaching ... Passion, social life and sociology only exist in the in-between, in specific moving social relations. (1996: 5)

Despite this promising start, much still remains to be done in order to redress this traditional neglect. The roots of this neglect, as we shall see, lie deeply buried in the history of Western thought, which has sought to divorce mind from body, nature from culture, reason from emotion, and public from private. Emotions as such have tended to be dismissed as private, ‘irrational’ inner feelings or sensations, tied, historically, to women’s ‘hysterical’ bodies and ‘dangerous desires’. Here the dominant view, dating as far back as Plato and receiving a further Descartean twist in the seventeenth century, seems to have been that emotions need to be ‘tamed’, ‘harnessed’ or ‘driven out’ by the steady hand of (male) reason.² These views in turn have been forged into sociological orthodoxy at both the theoretical and methodological levels.

To the extent that classical social theorists in general and sociological scholars in particular turned their attention to these issues, the tendency has been to define human actors in largely ‘disembodied’ terms as rational agents who make choices based on ‘utility’ criteria or ‘general value’ orientations (Turner 1991). This view, with its heavily ‘cognitive bias’, finds its fullest expression perhaps in contemporary versions of rational choice theory (Coleman and Fararo 1992).³ Conscious ratiocination rather than the emotional foundations of action, was seen as most important, with little room left for the ‘lived’, ‘mindful’ or ‘emotionally expressive’ body as the intercorporeal, intersubjective basis of social order, conflict or exchange. The emotional body through the sociological stress upon rational economic action, became ‘external’ to the actor who appeared as a rational, disembodied, decision-making agent (Turner 1991).

Bodies and emotions then, at least according to standard accounts of their history, have tended to enjoy a rather ethereal, implicit existence within sociology. Reasons for this apparent neglect are manifold, including the suspicion of biological reductionism and its associated essentialist baggage, a conceptualization of human agency linked to the capacities of the rational mind, and the fact that the so-called ‘founding fathers’ of sociology were all men – the grand-masters of their craft. Locating themselves squarely among the geisteswissenschaften, sociologists have tended to perpetuate rather than challenge the dualist legacies of the past, in which mind and body, nature and culture, reason and emotion, public and private have been artificially separated and rigidly reinforced.

To leave things here, however, would be to do both classical and contemporary sociology a gross injustice. Emotions, as we shall see, together with their associated bodily themes, have their own secret history within sociology itself. As with so much other sociological inquiry, the work, implicitly or explicitly, is ‘already there’; it just needs re-reading in a new more emotionally informed, corporeal light. What then did these founding fathers have to say about the human body and emotions?

Classical sociology: the ‘(ir)rational’ shaping of society?

Marx’s early work on the problem of estrangement from our species-being through alienating modes of production (Marx 1959/[1884]), together with his abiding interest in issues of class conflict (Marx 1967), implies much about the human condition, including feelings of anger, bitterness and resentment (Denzin 1984; Turner 1984; Barbalet 1998). In sketching out his alternative vision of society in which inequality and exploitation would be a thing of the past, Marx had much to say about the material foundations and preconditions of true human happiness in a non-reified order based on a social ontology of humankind and a sensuous embodied ethic. To the extent that this socialist mode of production is based on people cooperating with and caring for each other, then Marx’s vision, as Bologh (1990), points out accords with feminine values and a feminine form of life. On the other hand, however, his critical transformation of Feuerbach’s sensualist materialism, his emphasis on heroic action (the proletariat) and the overcoming of an external enemy (the bourgeoisie), together with his problematic assumption that community, in the absence of private property, could be achieved without self-destructive conflict or political oppression, represents yet another ‘masculine vision’ of the world (ibid.: 267–71). Marx’s emotional legacy, therefore, remains ‘mixed’, both liberation and oppression all at once.⁴

Turning to Durkheim, his positivist emphasis on social facts as ‘things’ in themselves and society as a reality sui generis would appear, at first glance, to have little to do with emotions, or the body for that matter. Again, however, this is only a partial reading. From Suicide (Durkheim 1951/[1897]) in one way, through Primitive Classifications (Durkheim and Mauss (1975/[1902]) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim 1961/[1912]) in another, it is indeed possible to trace here a series of more or less promising Durkheimian insights into the socioemotional currents of society and the sacred fires of collective effervescence upon which they rest. Our lives for Durkheim (1960/[1914]), given his commitment to the homo duplex character of human beings, have something like a ‘double centre of gravity’; one which captures both the sacred and profane, rational and irrational dimensions of the world and our experience within it. The rational demands of society, from this perspective, are intimately related to the sacred ‘irrational’ fires of collective effervescence. This in turn, for writers such as Shilling, provides us with a ‘powerful account of the sensual and potentially volatile foundations underpinning social order and change’ (1997a: 196). The emotionally ‘saturated’ bases of action, in this respect, can either ‘solidify or render ineffective those internal(ized) controls which have been seen as a prerequisite of civilized life’ (ibid.). In these and other ways, the ‘extra-rational’ senses and carnal sensualities of embodied human beings, it is claimed, are central to the ‘binding’ and ‘unbinding’ of social relationships within modernity, including the ‘limits’ of the rationalist Enlightenment project itself (Mellor and Shilling 1997).

This ‘underground wing’ of Durkheim’s sociology, one centred on collective effervescence and the emotional ‘sensing’ of society, is something we shall return to in the next chapter. For the moment, however, it is sufficient to note that a fundamental dualism remains within Durkheim’s sociology, as the very notion of homo duplex suggests: an ‘antagonism’, echoing Freud, in which our ‘joys’ can never be ‘pure’, movements in one direction throwing the other or our ‘two natures’ out of kilter (Durkheim 1960/[1914]: 328–30). While according emotions more than a peripheral role in the sacred constitution and ritual affirmation of society, Durkheim moreover continues to view them in largely ‘extra-rational’ or ‘irrational’ terms. The division between reason and emotion, in short, is upheld rather than unravelled through this ‘irrational’ device.

If Durkheim’s sociology reveals a rich, albeit ‘irrational’ emotional vein within it, then these issues take on altogether new dimensions in the sociological deliberations of Weber. The irrational and emotional were no mere intellectual problems for Weber; rather they were deeply felt within his own personal life. Intellectually, Weber was strongly Kantian in spirit, believing that the only truly usable concept of free will is one linked to rationality, a view which resonates, contra Nietzsche’s more radical reading, with Weber’s own ‘conservative’ interpretation of Goethe (Albrow 1990). The direct heir of Protestantism, German Idealism, Luther, Calvin and Kant, Weber was indeed opposed to the ‘romantic quest for “experience”’ and the search for identity in ‘emotional life’ (ibid.: 46). The truly ‘human person’, he believed, was one ‘guided by reason, who transforms impulses and desires into a systematic lifeplan, exercises choices, and can improve the world’ (Hillier 1987: 196). By all accounts, Weber was ‘terrified’ of an inability to control his own sexual impulses (Mitzman 1971), restraining a ‘demonic passionateness’ which, according to his wife Marianne ‘burst out’ from time to time, with a ‘destructive blaze’ (Weber 1988; Albrow 1990).

Although fundamentally polarized, the formal opposition between reason and feeling – crystallized in his famous types of action – was in fact dynamic for Weber. Rather, both sides of these seeming dichotomies were maintained – the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious, the individual and the universal – through creative activity. This, he believed, could result in one ‘intensifying’ the other. As Albrow states:

While ... rational action had a special place in Weber’s thinking about method, he was emphatic that the sphere of the emotions was at least of equal importance as a field of sociological investigation, precisely because the analysis of rational action invariably comes up against these irrational forces. (1990: 129)

The irrational was everywhere for Weber pervading all aspects of life and religious behaviour. The experience of life was ultimately a ‘pre-rational mystery’, and the roots of action were always, in the last instance, ‘shrouded in darkness’ (ibid.: 130). Reality itself, on this count, was profoundly irrational, a situation in which reason inevitably confronted its own ‘limits’. Even within the realm of scientific ideas, Weber insisted, ‘inspiration plays no less a role ... than ... in the realm of art ... whether we have scientific inspiration depends upon destinies that are hidden from us, and besides upon “gifts”’ (1948: 136). On this basis, Weber proclaimed, ‘nothing is worthy of man as man [sic] unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion’ (1948: 135) (my emphasis). Many different types of rationality coexist, moreover, and what may appear ‘rational’ from one perspective or value sphere may appear wholly ‘irrational’ from another. Reason and emotion, the rational and the irrational, therefore, were inextricably intertwined in Weber’s view of the world and his own tortured place within it.

Perhaps the classic expression of the power and force of the ‘irrational’, for Weber, is set out in his account of charismatic authority (Weber 1948: 245–53). A less well known example, however, concerns his analysis of the ‘erotic sphere’, an essay nested in a broader set of writings and reflections on ‘religious rejections of the world and their directions’. The erotic sphere for Weber:

Seems to offer the unsurpassable peak of the fulfillment of the request for love in the direct fusion of the souls one to the other. This boundless giving of one-self is as radical as possible in its opposition to all functionality, rationality, and generality ... The lover knows himself [sic] to be freed from the cold skeleton hands of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routine. (1948: 347)

The passionate character of eroticism, appears to the religion of brother-hood as an ‘undignified loss of self control’: a ‘loss of orientation towards either the rationality and wisdom of norms willed by God or the mystic “having” of godliness’. From the point of view of eroticism, in contrast, ‘genuine “passion” per se constitutes the type of beauty, and its rejection is blasphemy’ (ibid.: 349). A profound tension therefore, as in much of Weber’s work, exists between the brotherly ethic of salvation religion and the ‘greatest irrational force of life: sexual love’ (ibid.: 343). Although Weber was prepared to consider the joy and meaningfulness of erotic love in a disenchanted, rationalized world, it also, he thought, involved important elements of conflict, coercion and brutality. This analysis, as Bologh (1990) points out, foregrounds more recent, radical feminist accounts of all heterosexual relationships.

Here we return to Weber’s profound struggle, personal and professional, public and private, with the rational and the irrational, something which tended to give an accentuated tone to the conflicts he portrayed between reason and emotion. It is possible, nonetheless, to read Weber’s sociology as rooted in the problems of the irrational. Reason, as Albrow puts it:

had a hard task if the rest of the cosmos is arrayed behind unreason. But then that was how Weber felt. And as he never tired to reiterate, when it comes to the ultimate elements of a world-view, feeling is quite as important as reason. (1990: 131)

Ultimately, as this suggests, Weber’s vision of the world is a profoundly ‘masculine’ one. A world of ‘conflicting, mutually resistant, mutually exclusive wills and disembodied values’ (Bologh 1990: 298). It is also, as with Durkheim, one which equates the emotional with the irrational. When, in contrast, the ‘mutual struggle for recognition’ becomes a struggle for ‘mutual recognition’, then a (feminine) world of:

sociability instead of hostility, of creative generativity instead of domination and subordination, in short a world of mutual desire, mutual understanding and mutual empowerment becomes possible. (Bologh 1990: 298)

Discussion of this alternative vision of ‘erotic sociability’, in turn leads us to the work of Georg Simmel, particularly his analysis of the senses and the sociological significance of embodied gesture (Simmel 1969). For Simmel, human experience is ‘endlessly creative, multiply fragmented, inexorably conflictual, and most meaningful when in the service of individuality’ (Levine 1971: xxxvii). The conflict between ‘established forms’ and ‘vital needs’, in other words, produces a perpetual tension, itself the source of dialectical development, throughout history (ibid.: xxxix). Simmel’s views on modern life, in this respect, resonate with the Nietzschean theme of relentless individual struggle as the prerequisite of full human development.

Public order, for Simmel – based on the mutual exchange of expressive gestures – is bodily through and through. The predominance of visuality and the mutual exchange of glances, he claimed, symbolized the most direct and purest social reciprocity of all (Simmel 1969: 358). Perhaps the clearest expression of these issues is to be found in Simmel’s classic sociological essay ‘The metropolis and mental life’ (1971/[1903]). For Simmel, the psychological foundation upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected is the ‘intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’. This, he suggests, contrasts sharply with the ‘slower, more habitual, smoothly flowing rhythms of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence’ (1971/ [1903]: 325).⁵

There is no psychic phenomenon so unconditionally reserved for the city, Simmel stresses, than the ‘blasé outlook’: an ‘indifference’ to the meaning and value of distinctions between things. Instead of reacting emotionally to the numerous stimulations, fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieux, the metropolitan type reacts primarily in a ‘rational manner, thus creating a mental predominance through the intensification of consciousness ... which is furthest removed from the depths of personality’ (ibid.: 326). In adopting t...