Emotions, Media and Politics

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509531431
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Étude des média

Emotions have long been neglected in media research, although their role is a vital ingredient in shaping our shared stories and the ways we engage with them.But emotions, as they circulate through the media, can also be divisive and exclusionary.

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen makes the case for researching the role of emotions in mediated politics. Drawing on a series of studies, she explores the complex relationship between emotions, politics and media. The book includes analyses of how Facebook structures emotional reactions; the anger of Donald Trump; the use of personal storytelling in feminist Twitter hashtags; the role of emotionality in award-winning journalism; and the communities created by political fandoms.

Essential reading for scholars and students, this important volume opens up new ways of thinking about and researching emotions, media and politics.

CHAPTER ONE
Taking Emotion Seriously: A Brief History of Thought

In this chapter, I discuss why scholarship on news media and political life has been so slow in taking account of the place of emotion. The chapter begins by highlighting the suspicion of emotion embedded within the fabric of Western liberal democracy. This has meant that emotion has been viewed as the enemy of good citizenship – a view which informed the attention granted to emotion in the study of news media, as well as in other related disciplines. Nonetheless, there has been a turn to questions of emotion in recent years across the humanities and social sciences. For political communication scholars, important insights have been gained from research focused on the increasingly close relationship between politics and popular culture. In the study of news media, however, there has been a particular emphasis on journalistic objectivity, which has led to a strong aversion to emotion, often embodied in a fear of “sensationalism.” This, alongside the fact that journalism studies has developed only relatively recently as a discipline, explains the late emergence of research on journalism and emotion. The chapter takes a closer look at how this research has taken shape, examining work on journalistic practices, texts and audiences which has informed this book.

The historical neglect of emotion in political life: celebrating rationality

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

(Alexander Hamilton)

The way we have viewed the relationship between emotions, media and politics has been shaped by the framework of liberal democratic theory – the dominant mode of political organization in Western democracies. Built into the liberal ideal is an idealization of the rational, dispassionate and informed citizen, coupled with a clear understanding that emotional citizens make for bad subjects. Theorists have argued that political decision-making must be untainted by the passions, partialities and particularities which we all possess. Emotions are treated as “among the least reliable and most extendable human capabilities – merely private states with no proper place in intellectual deliberation over politics” (Ross, 2013, p. vii). Liberal democracy has been characterized by an “irrational passion for dispassionate rationality” (Rieff, 1979, cited in Williams, 2009, p. 140; see also Cepernich, 2016). As George Marcus and his coauthors put it:

[The] Western tradition tends to derogate the role of affect in the public sphere. Being emotional about politics is generally associated with psychological distraction, distortion, extremity, and unreasonableness. Thus, the conventional view is that our capacity for and willingness to engage in reasoned consideration is too often overwhelmed by emotion to the detriment of sound political judgment. As a result, theories of democratic practice proclaim the importance of protesting against the dangers of human passion and political faction by building up institutions, rules, and procedures – all intended to protect us from our emotional selves. (Marcus et al., 2002, p. 2)

It is no coincidence that emotional engagement has been viewed with suspicion, while rationality has been widely celebrated as the panacea for good citizenship. The origins of this conception can be traced back to the birth of liberal democracy. As a political philosophy, it evolved in reaction to the long-standing dominance of the church and absolutist sovereigns (Holmes, 1995). These forms of governance were premised on the service of docile subjects, who were largely devoid of political agency and rights and considered incapable of rational political decision-making. This, in turn, necessitated the valorization of rationality, usually in opposition to emotion. As Zizi Papacharissi argued: “In the process of breaking the monopoly on knowledge held by the church and monarchies, frequently by affective means employed to control the masses, it became essential for scholars to prioritize reason and rationalization as a means of intellectual empowerment and greater enlightenment” (2015, p. 11).

The philosophical belief in the rationality of individuals and their ability and right to participate in politics followed on from the Renaissance. As an intellectual revolution, it heralded a renewal of interest in the ideas of Ancient Greece and Rome, and alongside it, a rediscovery of ideas of science and human rationality. Renaissance scholars embraced a humanist approach, emphasizing human dignity and the capacity for reason. The emergence of ideas of individual rationality gradually chipped away at the supremacy of sovereigns and the church and paved the way for the legitimation of individual rights, including liberty and equality. This resulted in transformations in political thought, which gradually came to reflect a belief in the possibility of democratic societies premised on the participation of rational dispassionate citizens (see also Held, 2006).

As a result of this historical trajectory, democratic thought struggled with the relationship between rationality and passion in political life. Passions were widely viewed as an inevitable part of human nature, but one which ought to be controlled and channeled. Recent rereadings have suggested that liberal political thought is, in fact, suffused with concern about emotions (Illouz, 2007). As philosopher Susan James noted:

This wider concern with the importance of directing the passions is reflected in works aimed not specifically at rulers, but at a broader and predominantly male élite who occupy, or will occupy, positions of power. Taking over an ancient tradition, these treatises tend to identify the acquisition of self-knowledge with the ability to master and manipulate passion, and to associate both with a process of cure. (1999, p. 4)

In other words, if passions are undeniably part of our essential beings, we must become masters of human nature to tame these passions. As liberal thought developed over time and grew to encompass ideas of democratic governance and citizen rights and participation, the preoccupation with the question of how to control the emotions of the citizenry became ever more salient. On the one hand, a successful democratic society relies on involving citizens as rational and constructive participants in politics. But, on the other hand, such participation dictates the need to manage their passions – as individuals and collectives.

In response to this conundrum, Enlightenment thought became heavily invested in the celebration of rationality. For example, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), one of the figures most closely associated with the movement, defended a normative hierarchy of knowledge based on the primacy of reason over the crudeness of the “senses.” For Kant, all “our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason” (Kant, 1998, Part 1.2.2.i). Emotional subjects are seen as “bad” subjects because emotion precludes the rationality required for political decision-making (Marcus, 2010, p. 6).

The elevation of reason over sensation reflects a broader preoccupation with the management of emotion in Western societies. As Norbert Elias argued in The civilizing process, Western civilization has always relied on affect control structures – systematic mechanisms which regulate individual behavior to ensure the smooth functioning of society. The control of aggression has been one of the key engines of modernity. Elias stipulated that when “the power of a central authority grows, if over a larger or smaller area the people are forced to live in peace with each other, the moulding of affects and the standards of the drive-economy are very gradually changed” (2000, p. 169). To Elias, no “society can survive without a channeling of individual drives and affects, without a very specific control of individual behavior” (2000, p. 443). His account highlights the centrality of emotion in everyday life – and the importance of governing its expression.

Emotion in scholarship on politics and news media

The concern with the control of emotion, and the preference for disembodied rationality over embodied emotionality, has spilled over into the understanding of how emotions circulate through news media and shape public life. Much of the work on the relationship between media and democracy takes as its vantage point Jürgen Habermas’ (1989) influential notion of the public sphere, which shares key premises with liberal democracy. The public sphere is the site between the state and civil society where citizens deliberate on matters of common concern – facilitated through both face-to-face interaction and media. Habermas developed his ideas through a historical reconstruction of bourgeois publics in England, France and Germany in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In writing about the rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere as a historical, empirical case study, Habermas also articulated a normative ideal for how citizens ought to participate in public life; a vision of how democracies ought to function. Central to this normative ideal is the belief that citizens ought to hold government accountable through public discussion. The discussion should be rational, open to all those with an interest in the issue, and participants in the discussion should be judged on the merits of their arguments, rather than on their social status. In his articulation of the public sphere ideal, Habermas implied that emotional expression, appeals and argument should be barred from the deliberative process to ensure its rationality.

Habermas has been particularly influential among scholars interested in mediated politics because his account demonstrates the centrality of news media to democratic societies (see Dahlgren, 1995, pp. 7–8). As such, the notion of the public sphere is a widely used shorthand for the institutions – including media – through which citizens deliberate about the common good and hold government accountable, or the “realm of social life where the exchange of information and views on questions of common concern can take place so that public opinion can be formed” (Dahlgren, 1995, p. 7). Because of its conceptual importance, the notion of the public sphere is widely used in literature on media and participation.

However, the insistence on the primacy of rationality and the undesirability of emotion and subjectivity reifies the liberal binary between rationality and emotion. In doing so, it obscures the messiness and conflict that inevitably characterize political discussion in “actually-existing democracies” (Fraser, 1992; Mouffe, 2005). As this book explores in more detail, such a position is not only at odds with lived realities, but also fails to reflect the ways in which we actually come to understand and appreciate the experiences of other people (Benhabib, 1992). More than anything, the commitment to rationality and consensus underpinning the notion of the public sphere precludes a recognition of the role of emotion and conflict in the shaping of communicative interactions (e.g. Crossley, 1998, pp. 17–18). This point is well made by proponents of radical democratic theory, who assume that politics is fundamentally shaped by conflict, tension and disagreement between groups and is therefore antagonistic in nature (e.g. Mouffe and Holdengräber, 1989). For radical democrats, the liberal desire to excise emotions – negative and positive – from political life to secure a one-sided consensus is a dangerous move that is based on an oversimplified view of the political (Mouffe, 2005). We should, instead, take seriously the role of “the passions” because these “affective forces […] are at the origin of collective forms of identification” and constitute “one of the main moving forces in the field of politics (Mouffe, 2005, p. 24). A radical democratic understanding therefore also entails the recognition that political life depends on the mobilization of emotion (see also Ost, 2004, p. 239). Media are one of the main sites through which such emotions are mobilized and collective identities formed as a result (e.g. Dahlberg and Siapera, 2007). As we shall see throughout this book, they form the basis for affectively charged battles over the common good.

The affective turn

This book accepts the insights of radical democrats, and operates from the assumption that we need to take emotion seriously as a force in mediated public life – for better and for worse. In doing so, it aligns with what has been referred to as an “affective turn” (Clough and Halley, 2007) in cultural studies and humanities disciplines, which has spilled over into the social sciences.

Over the past few decades, political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, historians and literary theorists have turned their attention to emotion. The aim of such work has been both to question the binary opposition between rationality and emotion, and to reclaim the centrality of emotion in social and political life. To mention just a few prominent examples, in political science George Marcus’ work (e.g. 2010) has given rise to the idea of “affective intelligence” as a counter to the dominant rational choice theories of voter behavior. A group of historians are now charting the history of emotions, beginning from the vantage point of William Reddy’s (2001) ground-breaking work on changing emotional regimes. Central to such approaches has been the attempt at reclaiming the emotional dimension of history – including what people felt at particular historical junctures, how they thought they ought to lead their emotional lives, and which feelings were encouraged and discouraged (Lewis and Stearns, 1998, pp. 1–2; see also Hewitt, 2017a). In philosophy, Susan James (1999) has reread key political philosophers to understand the place of the passions in their work. To social movement scholars, the question of how movements mobilize emotional engagement has, in fact, long been a central preoccupation (e.g. Goodwin et al., 2001; Staiger et al., 2010) – a tradition of work which is central to this book and discussed in more detail throughout.

Paying attention to emotions allows us to see the world in a new way: it opens up a broad array of new research questions, and to reveal things that were previously invisible. This book’s examination of how emotions circulate through various news media practices, forms, genres and platforms paves the way for new research agendas that render visible what has for so long been unseen by scholars of journalism and political communication.

Studying emotions in mediated politics

Informed by the insights of the affective turn, some scholars of politics now acknowledge the need to challenge the binary distinction between rationality and emotion (e.g. Williams, 2009, p. 150). This body of work is based on the premise that the “political brain is an emotional brain. It is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures, and policies to make a reasoned decision” (Westen, 2007, p. xv). Voters, though often well informed and politically aware, think “with their guts” (Westen, 2007, p. xv). Stephen Coleman echoes this view: his major study of “how voters feel” was carried out on the basis ...