Postemotional - Society Joanne Pearson, on the politics of social manipulation In our consumer culture of later modernity, an important question is how, and how far, our emotions are manipulated by the media and advertising.
This is a moral issue that arises with the collapse of a religious culture in which ideals and virtues were defined by its narratives, and with the availability of global communication. These make us vulnerable to being manipulated on a mass scale by globallydominant manufacturers. George Ritzer drew attention to the level of manipulation in late-twentieth century society in The McDonaldization of Society (1992).
He theorised that McDonalds was the epitome of late modern values of efficiency, quantification, calculation, predictability and control - a model of "rationality" which has permeated society as a whole. In Postemotional Society (1997) the Croatian American sociologist Stjepan MeStrovié extended this theory to include the ordering and manipulation of emotions. Mestrovi¢ uses the term "postemotional" to the media takes the place of the Devil in making people do things preaching of hell fire. Thus religious ritual, including Christian liturgy, has developed to inspire awe and wonder through the manipulation and conditioning of the emotions of participants. And the worshippers who participated in such rituals did so because they came to expect specific experiences which in some way seemed authentic, but which were also repeatable. Despite Christianity’s hegemony in the West, however, centuries of fragmentation have ensured that such emotional manipulation does not take place on a global scale.
Rather, Pentecostal evangelism may lift the emotions of a few million people, highly ritualistic Roman Catholicism may work for a few more million, stark Calvinism may help some, and the rituals of silence in Quaker meetings work for others. But none of these are seen as particularly ‘sinister’ in the way that, for example, Televangelism in the United States is popularly perceived.
From this example we can start to put our finger on the difference between Mestrovi¢’s understanding of postemotionalism, McDonaldization and even Disneyfication on the one hand, and earlier cultural conditioning claim that our emotions have now also become ‘ caught up in the global marketing machine that has become known as McDonaldization. Mechanised into simulated norms, emotions are now ‘bite-size, prepackaged, rationally manufactured . . .— a "happy meal" of emotions — that are consumed by the masses’ (1997: xi). Such quasi-emotions, manufactured by self, others, and the culture industry, form the basis for the widespread manipulation indicated in other spheres by Ritzer.
Undoubtedly, our emotions have long been conditioned. Religion has done so not only through the fostering of values, but also by consciously manipulating emotions through liturgy and the of emotions on the other. Postemotionalism has a more sinister edge simply because it is more efficient, more mechanised, more controlling: it reaches more people, on a global scale, because it is specifically manufactured in a media-saturated society. It is not that postemotionalism did not exist before the twentieth century; it just couldn’t exist in the same way, with the same potential for manipulation, before the massive technological developments of the past hundred — and more particularly the past twenty — years. Television culture’s dynamic of display, particularly in confessional programmes such as Trisha and Kilroy, and also in the "entertainmentspeak" of news "McNuggets", provokes the mechanical treatment of sof 60 June 2003 highly emotional phenomena such as ethnic violence.
Whilst Hitler exploited the manipulation of emotions on as large a scale as he could with the Nuremberg rallies, he was not in a position to boast on prime time television about the genocide being committed by the Nazis. The brutality at Auschwitz, although high-tech, was low-visibility because of the elementary state of the information media at the time.
Later atrocities, however, leave even less room for the whining excuse of ‘we didn’t know’. News media is now at such an advanced stage that one can have the details of the latest outbreak of ethnic violence sent directly to one’s mobile phone! Serb leaders in the 1990s openly announced their genocidal aims on CNN, and the low-tech weapons of "ethnic cleansing" — stabbing, strangling, rape —- were most certainly high-visibility. War and suffering are now immediate, broadcast straight into our living rooms; death is now "live".
We can no longer claim ‘we didn’t know’, if we ever could. But our response, MeStrovi¢ claims, is glazed: ‘we’re confused (because we can’t make out the victim) and we have compassion fatigue (because all sides seem worthy of our sympathy)’ (1997: 13). Rather than being unemotional, we have become postemotional, approaching emotion via mediacontrolled constructs which inform us as to when we should exhibit a vicarious indignation, or "niceness", or other pre-packaged emotion. This may well be the new stance by which postemotional people try to absolve themselves from any sense of obligation or sense of responsibility — the media takes the place of the Devil in making people do things!
It is, however, the lack of responsive action to which MeStrovié wants to draw our attention in his work on postemotional society. Although accepting that "postemotional types" can "feel" quasi-emotions such as indignation and compassion, he argues that they are unable to put these feelings into appropriate action. Instead, once a "happy consciousness" is established, people obey without thinking in a society without opposition, in which the peer group is manipulated.
Interesting correlations immediately spring to mind when faced with such an argument. Quentin Crisp argued that we rail against the orthodoxies of our parents only to embrace without question the orthodoxies of our peers. When Bob Geldof recently (May 2003) travelled back to Africa, he lambasted Europe for its ‘disgusting’ attitude towards the suffering there. But the orthodoxy of the peer groups which temporarily fell in behind Live Aid in 1983 seems now to have given way to newer orthodoxies — the right Adidas trainers or the right cut of jeans.
According to postemotional theory, this is because people have not been informed of their required emotional response, since the interests of the media are in product placement rather than international sof 60 June 2003 | Every time a : good time! — issues. And whilst one might cite the huge protests against war in Iraq which took place around the world as evidence against postemotionalism, it is not only in the UK that the majority of people eligible to vote are too apathetic/ uninterested to do so.
Compassion fatigue? Perhaps. But this is not the same thing as postemotionalism. Compassion fatigue assumes that there is an emotion so overwhelming as to be debilitating, preventing us from seeing that there is anything we can do in a world beset by suffering and injustice. It is the equivalent of the postmodern version of anomie, in that there is so much to be done that one does nothing. But Metrovié posits postemotionalism as an alternative to postmodernism. Postemotionalism instead aims to bring back into focus that which most embarrasses scholars who are still caught up in Enlightenment rhetoric concerning ‘knowledge’ — and that is the role of the emotions.
The idea of a society in which competing narratives, mass simulations, and the recycling of pasts in which what one sees is what one wants to see (or what government, educators or institutionalised religion want one to see) challenges us to move beyond postemotionalism. It is necessary for us to wake up, open our eyes, become aware, and take action. There can be no claims to innocence; naivete is not an excuse. If we are to avoid the manipulation which is characteristic of postemotional society, we are required:to engage in an ethically responsible hermeneutic of suspicion which focuses on the mass manipulation of emotions and allows us once again to become (and act) as passionate individuals.
An interesting question emerges for the religions of this postemotional society: how far do religions, new religious movements and post-religious movements adapt and market themselves by offering social ideals and personal experiences, and how do they find the ability to be critical?
Dr Joanne Pearson is a Lecturer in the School of Religious and Theological Studies at Cardiff University, where she teaches Wicca, Paganism, and Religion and Magic. She has research interests in the above and in the development of new and non-Christian theologies, and is the editor of ‘Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World’ (1998; Edinburgh University Press), ‘Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age’ (2002; Ashgate) and author of ‘A Popular Dictionary of Paganism’ (2002; Routledge Curzon).