Civilization, as it is often practiced today, is really manufactured, inauthentic civilization. -Stjepan Meštrović
Welcome to Part II of this series reflecting on the ideas of Stjepan Meštrović as propounded in his 1997 work Postemotional Society. Please consider the chilling ramifications of the above statement. Meštrović's thesis is complex, broadly applicable to almost every aspect of our culture; yet, the theory is coherent, relying on application of the same notion to various currents of thought. Part I was long. Part II will underline just how far short Part I fell of being exhaustive. By way of introduction, I re-post here two paragraphs from Part I. Beyond that, I think one could find sense by jumping into this diary. Of course, in my admiring opinion, most of what Meštrović says is fresh enough and important enough to justify study, and the serious student will want at least to skim Part I as well.
The heart of this discussion is the ideas of Stjepan G. Meštrović, Professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M, concerning what he calls the “postemotional society.” I first noticed this thinker’s name on a list of expert witnesses at war crimes trials. Upon investigation, I discovered that I share with him not only a burning concern with human rights and war crimes-- he has also analyzed at length and with great insight several other issues I have been worrying in my own mind. As you will see, many salient and troubling behaviors right here on dailykos are brought into sharp focus when viewed through the lens of an other-directed, post-emotional analysis.
The term post-emotion intentionally parallels the term post-modern. It does not refer to an end of emotion, but rather to a transformation of emotion from an idiosyncratic inward force to a commodified quasi-intellectual force suitable for manipulation by the self and others. In postemotion, the connection between feeling and action is severed, authenticity is lost, and mass manipulation is empowered. Peer group replaces government as the means of social control. All the following citations are from Postemotional Society by Meštrović except where otherwise stated. Keep in mind that this was published in 1997, which explains the references to Clinton, the Balkans, and other then-current topics and the lack of reference to the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations. For those with eyes to see, the cogency of this analysis with respect to these latter barbarisms is painfully obvious.
By the time I got to the end of writing Part I, I was trying to give up my vision of providing a convincing overview of the concept of postemotion. As with all important ideas, it will not be condensed. Perhaps I am slower than some, but for me it is necessary to spend time re-reading passages, considering examples, examining my own reactions, and generally being in the discomfort of not fully grasping before even gaining enough clarity to parrot back the basics, much less apply them to the world I observe. Thus, the rest of this series will treat various aspects of postemotionalism without attempting to explain everything nor to tie every part to the whole. I find these ideas highly enlightening and cogent, but the proof is left to the reader.
What I said in Part I is even more true today: I see postemotional forces at play everywhere I turn. The explanatory power is exceptionally broad and paradigm changing. It is also daunting in that, to the extent that Meštrović’s views are accurate, changing the social and institutional dysfunction which fills most of us with apprehension will be next to impossible with current approaches. Something is missing--call it community or solidarity—without which effective communal action will not arise.
As a final bit of confession of my personal biases/introduction, let me say that the most solid conclusion I have reached with respect to the implications for action of the postemotional society is a conviction that humans must practice spending time in solitude, focusing on their internal experiences. I have always been a proponent of meditation, prayer, and other such practices, but always from a non-rational spiritual perspective. I had a wry laugh at my denseness the day I realized that this sociological study has lead me to exactly the same conclusion from a more rational approach. Meditation or its cousin is good for the individual. Meditation or its cousin is necessary for society--as an antidote to disempowerment. So, my commitment is to personal time in quiet refection and to promotion of widespread commitment to a daily practice which involves being present with one’s inner habits and conditions.
Put plainly, I believe that the context--the emotional falseness--of most political and other discussions today renders them incapable of effecting change.
A final side note: one lesson for anyone organizing action is that (s)he would do well to include hokey-seeming exercises in which individuals experience immediate emotional commitment to their mates in addition to an abstract mutual commitment to ideas.
It is my intention in a future effort simply to offer examples that I interpret as representative of postemotionalism. But now we will focus on inauthentic community, magical solutions, faux-interpretations of the Enlightenment, tensions between rational thought and emotion, and the confusing presence of widespread barbarity alongside the increasing refinement of civilization.
Marcuse, false consciousness, emotions, and the fake Enlightenment Project
In the following passage, Meštrović takes the notion of aura, especially as put forward by Walter Benjamin in his widely read essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," as a springboard for modulating insightful social theory by including the role of human emotions.
Critical theorists have neglected the role of the emotions; their focus on mechanical reproduction as the phenomenon that destroys authentic aura is unintelligible…. In the end, critical theory offers a counterfeit vision of the Enlightenment that has become the unexamined staple of many if not most contemporary social theories.
p. 80
Critical theorists have written on the commodification and mass reproduction of music, information, art, popular music, and all sorts of other phenomena except emotion. It is true, as [Theodor] Adorno claims, that culture has been “pre-digested,” pre-handled by hundreds of thousands of others before it reaches the consumer, such that it becomes cultural “baby-food.” But it is not only, let us say, listening to music that follows a formula and comes to the consumer second-hand. Feeling also frequently follows a formula and arrives stale in contemporary cultures. Curiously, even in his discussion of fascism, Adorno offers no insights into this important domain beyond noting that authoritarian leaders have “to mobilize irrational, unconscious, regressive processes.” The more important point is that fascist leaders must manipulate standardized feelings. Hitler was the prototype Barney and Friends: Nearly everyone must experience the same feelings and there is almost no room for dissent. Let me repeat that Herbert Marcuse’s notion of the “happy consciousness,” found in One-Dimensional Man, is still remarkably relevant in this regard.
p. 81
I find the baby food metaphor especially useful in conceptualizing my current reaction to public discussion, both here on dkos and more generally. I’m talking about debate over the issues of the day, as determined by sources whose integrity in selecting “news” has long since been irreversibly impeached. Take for example an argument between standardized versions of conservatism or “Republicans” vs. historically unreal versions of liberals; or perhaps pragmatic liberals vs. passé liberals; and so on. I have failed as yet to come up with a single snarky summary of my response to these mostly superficial, fact-starved, ideological discussions of the “important” facts of the day. So many salient, even determinative, well-researched underlying forces are regularly ignored in favor of a rationally and emotionally coherent narrative. It’s all just so mushy, so pre-processed, so overly determined by forces well beyond the control all but a very few.
The frustrating "discussions" I refer to usually take place in a context and tone which strongly imply a belief that what one thinks matters, that results in the real world will be affected. A painful example which comes to mind is the heart-felt, intense debating on dkos on the night the U.S. began dropping bombs on Libya. Almost completely disregarded was the obvious fact that the decision had been made--that none of the competing opinions of this group of liberals would have the least effect. But we all felt free, even obligated, to express our views.
… It is a paradox of contemporary cultures that they simultaneously promote individualism as well as automated reactions…. The contemporary consumer is not just a mass automaton, as [Theodor] Adorno claimed, but an agent convinced that he or she possesses some degree of freedom to choose group identities, and this belief makes the agent a target of manipulation by corporations who pitch advertisements in relation to specific subgroup versions of emotional reality. And heightened consciousness of this fact will not alter matters…. This results in a postemotionally complex “mass society” of competing groups in which people believe that they are individualists. This is a much more dangerous state of affairs than Adorno envisioned because the masses are too happy to know that they are being manipulated.
p. 81
Meštrović paraphrases and enlarges on Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man [1964]:
Loss of conscience due to satisfactory liberties granted by an unfree society makes for a happy consciousness which facilitates acceptance of the misdeeds of this society. It is the token of declining autonomy and comprehension.
Happy consciousness is commensurate with Riesman’s focus on the other-directed type’s obsession with niceness, and, of course, culminates in the McDonald’s happy meal. Marcuse elaborates:
The Happy Consciousness—the belief that the real is rational and that the system delivers the goods—reflects the new conformism which is a facet of technological rationality translated into social behavior…. Torture has been introduced as a normal affair, but in a colonial war which takes place at the margin of the civilized world. And there it is practiced with good conscience for war is war…. Otherwise, peace reigns…”the Community is too well off to care!”
p. 82
The closing quotation from the above sparklingly clear and prescient passage was written in 1964. Perhaps many of us can only now begin to grasp the depth of meaning here--only, that is, in light of Iraq, Afghanistan, drones, Guantanamo, admitted waterboarding, extra-legal territories and ad hoc judicial systems. Before habeas corpus was disappeared.
Marcuse concludes his book with a call for liberation from the false consciousness of one-dimensional society. This liberation is to be achieved, vaguely, by grasping some magical form of authentic rationality to offset the false consciousness wrought by capitalist and technical systems of rationality. In this regard, Marcuse’s conclusion does not differ from Max Horkheimer’s The Eclipse of Reason, wherein Horkheimer also seeks a “pure” rationality as salvation from the “false” rationality of modernity.
It seems high time to conclude that Marcuse and other critical theorists begged the question of what constitutes pure or authentic rationality. To keep pursuing their Holy Grail amounts to a new form of mysticism that requires faith, not any sort of rationality. I contend that this pursuit of an illusory, perfect rationality is itself postemotional. It constitutes Enlightenment fundamentalism, not enlightenment.
p. 82
Ah, my dear and certain friends, this one is hard to swallow. The Holy Grail of an authentic rationality is mere mysticism. (Quick, someone alert RandomActsofReason.) Consider on dkos how a belief in an unassailable logic, a passionate embrace of "Enlightenment values" is fantasized so often as the ultimate arbitrator, the sure referee of all disputes--the more pure rationality. Now try a look in the mirror. Please don't be too crestfallen. May I remind you that compassion is the glue that binds authentic community? You see, ...
… Other-directed and postemotional types could not care less whether they are consuming the real thing or an artificial reproduction. Aura really presupposes an authentic community context which is no longer possible.
p. 83
The supreme irony in critical theory is that in its venting of rage at capitalist mass commodification as a criticism of one aspect of Enlightenment-based modernity, it commodifies the Enlightenment…. [Zygmunt] Bauman and Jurgen Habermas follow the critical theorists in that next time the “right” manipulation of the Enlightenment project will yield positive results, including an ethic of tolerance, and that the negative results can be avoided…. I submit that this assessment constitutes a postemotional attachment to a distorted vision of the Enlightenment.
This is because the Enlightenment was about more than individualism, human rights, science, rationality, and other phenomena that are glorified by modernists. The Enlightenment was also about civil and religious wars, mass executions, witch hunts, colonialism, slavery, and other unsavory phenomena…. [Critical theorists] have given us a Disneyland version of the Enlightenment. The have McDonaldized it….
p. 84
Thus, the so-called Enlightenment project is really a postemotional counterfeit of the Enlightenment. Contemporary devotees of the Enlightenment live emotionally in an idealized past. The dead emotional relics of the Enlightenment animate their reveries, and blind them to the chaos, disarray, and evils all around them, in the West as well as the non-West. When they confront these unwelcome realities, the reaction is stereotypical…. Ethnic hatred in the West, when it erupts, is rationalized away as an aberration. The solution offered for the suffering caused by the unbridled capitalism in formerly Communist nations has been to offer still more “pure” capitalism. The result really is the attitude uncovered by Baudrillard: “We” will live in our Disneyesque utopia, and all the others “must exit.” Pluralism and tolerance for “us” in the West, and ethnic hatred for “them.”… In the USA, it is a multiculturalism that so often fails to make contact with reality, internationally or domestically.
p. 86
Unspeakable evil is exposed in this simple sentence: Ethnic hatred in the West, when it erupts, is rationalized away as an aberration. An aberration. A close examination of "aberrations" in our America Disney culture of empty tradition and saluting of icons yields a rogues gallery of offenses against humanity: rightwing domestic terrorism, drugged soldiers brutalizing civilians, open discussion of torture--are you for or against?, rapid death raining from the skies to slaughter families at home, disregard of laws and even, incredibly, disregard of the entire legal system when creating the military commissions, and so on.
Thus is information weakened, diluted. An aberration means not worthy of lengthy consideration. Slip it to the side of the mind, the wide-spread pornography, the drug addictions, the collapsing infrastructure and concentrating economy. Show a postemotional type a photo of an American soldier clowning above his civilian victim, and you will find a voyeuristic gaze complemented by a brazen exploitation of the circumstance to promote, according to temperament, the deep compassion of the viewer, or his jaundiced humor in the face of the worst. Of course, everyone will be eager to be on the correct side of war crimes, just for the record. Some individualists may dare to question the official version of events, thus burnishing their credentials in the outside-the-box-thinkers camp.
A photo of an America soldier clowning above a murdered young Afghani. Compassion is the glue of solidarity. Compassion, where it exists, is not strained.
It falls as the gentle rain from heaven on all beneath.
The cool contemplation of other people's suffering while one exhibits polished manners in a society that is deemed civil is only a shade less immoral than the direct infliction of suffering. Thus, civilization, as it is often practiced today, is really manufactured, inauthentic civilization.
p. 94
Authentic Community and Fake Community
…knowledge alone is insufficient for establishing communities, because communities are held together by sentiments, not cognition…. The proliferation of information has caused widespread confusion and isolation among postemotional types. The confusion stems from the fact that individuals are unable to internalize, assimilate, or contextualize the massive amounts of information. For example, despite extensive knowledge about the genocide in Bosnia, AIDS, cancer, pollution, and other phenomena, most persons seem confused about the appropriate actions to take with regard to the social problems they represent. The various “spins” put on all this knowledge by competing groups serve to Balkanize societies and to make individuals feel isolated from neighboring communities. Knowledge does not automatically translate into communal action.
p. 94
It is less than reassuring to contemplate the numerous examples for Meštrović to draw upon which have arisen or intensified since he wrote this in 1997. Guantanamo and abu ghraib serve as chilling more recent examples of the inadequacy of knowledge for personal clarity and—this goes to the heart of this community—communal action. As I have assimilated this bit of information, I have begun to reconsider my participation on dkos. The question arises:
Q: In what ways is it not a waste of time?
This train of thought leads to a form of meta:
A: It is not a waste of time to attempt to change the social dynamics in discussion here.
Many a sad martyr has passed through dkos on that brutal road. My best answer so far is to be involved in quite particular, well-boundaried causes which stand a chance of progress--side causes, causes not important enough to attract the full attention of the authenticity police.
The observant will note a contradiction with the claim that emotion has been severed from action. In contradiction to the behavior of a postemotional type, I am in this instance converting emotion into action. Nonetheless, this is not typical of me. I notice many tendencies described as postemotional. We always preach what we’re learning, right?
Beyond that, I admit to an incorrigible dream of change through education. Hence the current diary. This, despite understanding the accuracy of Meštrović’s contention:
“And heightened consciousness of this fact will not alter matters”
Meštrović's emphasis on "not" appears in the original. Only the humble stand a chance of assimilating the rock-bottom thud-producing truth of this statement. We discussed Riesman's Inside Dopester in Part I. Information alone is not enough to create authentic community. Information alone is not enough to bring political change. Neither is abstract understanding sufficient to free a person from the grip of unconscious forces such as postemotionalism.
…Communitarians seek to promote an idealized vision of community, minus its negative characteristics, that can supposedly exist alongside an increasingly bureaucratized, rational-legal, artificial, cold, and individualistic society. For those who take Tonnies seriously, this is an impossible state of affairs, and constitutes postemotional magical thinking.
pp. 95 – 96
Meštrović variously confronts Durkheim, Riesman, Tonnies and others with the “magical thinking” quality of their proposed solutions. Such would be an expected result of postemotional society, not to mention any analysis which fails to honor the determinative power of emotion In Durkheim’s defense, he could hardly be expected, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, to have imagined a world of satellite HD 52-inch televisions, networks of computers and hand-held devices, nor to have been able fully to imagine the feedback effect of this centralized, balkanizing, group world.
[Amitai] Etzioni writes of a “properly constructed” community. Such a notion is again in line with the cult of the machine uncovered by thinkers from Tonnies through Henry Adams to George Orwell, and is one of the most problematical aspects of communitarianism. . . . If modernists can flavor penicillin to taste like bubble gum and have a pink color so that children will ingest it, why not “flavor” bureaucracy with selected, nice elements of community so that the masses will consume it? It is my contention that a “properly constructed” community can never be genuine.
p. 96
… Etzioni attempts to derive a sense of community from individualism. It is doubtful whether individual self-interest is up to this task. The affect that is typically cited by communitarians is compassion. Liberal communitarians tend to write in terms of compassion for gays, women, the poor, minorities, and other specific groups designated as disadvantaged or victimized. But as stated previously, it seems to be the case that the contemporary use of “compassion” is really pity. Genuine compassion or caritas would make no distinction between the elites and those who require pity. Compassion would not be withheld from a suffering individual if he or she happened to belong to a wrong or unaccounted for group. Compassion would be the emotional glue that holds together all members of a society on the basis of a common humanity. But traditional philosophers, from Plato through Schopenhauer to Durkheim, held that compassion could never be taught. [It is learned through modeling.]
p. 97
It is certainly a daily fact of life on dkos that the level of compassion extended to particular individuals is dependent upon which category said individuals are thought to belong.
The daily diet of phoniness in postemotional societies cannot help but impact society profoundly at every level.
p. 97
If there is a summary statement of the most accessible aspect of Meštrović's theory, it is this one. We like to believe that we know the real from the unreal, but we humans are more prone than we typically acknowledge to confounding our subconscious influences with what is so.
Most importantly, the rhetoric of constructing idealized communities and havens of civilization is the same rhetoric that was used by Communists and is still used to promote progress based on machinery. The habits of the mind instilled in the masses for over a century regarding mechanical progress have now been extended to the last frontier left in social life, the realm of the emotions. The McDonaldization of emotions has been an attempt to make the Enlightenment project, therapy, civilization, and communities all seem predictably “nice” and to create Disneyesque, artificial realms of the authentic.
p. 98
Treating the rational and the emotional as dualisms without adequately considering their intimate entwinement can lead to social analysis which sees matters too cleanly, lacking in nuance, particularly the nuance that we are not rational animals and that we face an ongoing challenge when we seek to understand the forces driving our own behavior. The following quotes reflect Meštrović’s caveat to certain oppositional social theorists.
...Social control is not always or unequivocally a civilizing tendency....
p. 92
...Modernity 2 [the irrational, disorganizing aspect of modernity] might serve a civilizing function even if it appears disorderly or chaotic....
p. 92
An aspect that Meštrović does not discuss is the generalization of the rational tendency to divide the world into opposites, even opposing forces. An expected result of the proliferation of quasi-emotions is that emotional life begins to partake of the this/not this tendency of thought. An example might be an emotional public event of any sort, to which people are expected to respond, say the earthquake in Haiti or the torture of a U.S. translator in Iraq. In responding to such an event, postemotional types divide people into two groups—the group whose members all respond with the appropriate borrowed-from-the-past, rehearsed,, simulated emotion, as against the out group, who are presumed to be responding with an opposite emotion, the emotion that is the not-emotion to what my “in” group is feeling. Has anyone seen this on dailykos? A person not responding with sufficient adoration becomes a racist. The quasi-emotions, the assume emotions, of love and hate balkanizing the presumed lovers from the accused haters. A person responding with insufficient criticism becomes a robot. Etc. Meanwhile, the emotional basis of these emotion/thought forms feeds back to rational thought, creating the logical absurdities we see foisted from all sides as people attempt to maintain a quasi-emotional consistency, one divorced from the unpredictable ups and downs of one’s immediate world (both inner and outer), which is to say, genuine emotion.
...the postemotional public participates vicariously in behaviors, thoughts, fantasies and emotions that are forbidden in everyday life in societies that are purportedly civilizing through books, film, magazines, and even the Internet. Modernity 2 comes through the back door of fantasies that preoccupy persons whose manners are in keeping with Modernity 1 [the rational, organizing aspect].
p. 92
Postemotionalism alerts one to the possibility that an uncivilizing process runs concurrently with the civilizing process. The perversion, disgusting habits, explicit violence, and other barbaric phenomena that have been banned from public life in Western, industrialized nations not only reappear but seem to grow stronger with time in the private realm of fantasy. "Other people's" barbaric reality--such as murders, rapes, and genocide--are watched on television by voyeurs bent on the civilizing process. This voyeuristic, vicarious aspect of contemporary social life seems to have escaped [Norbert] Elias completely.
p. 93
Meštrović suggests that litigation has taken the place of earlier, more crude, barbarities such as direct violence.
...genuine civilizing traits are a matter not of specific habits, but of certain attitudes that are compassionate and that otherwise seek to overcome the brutality that was extant in the past... This new barbarism [litigation] is dressed up in the refined use of language that characterizes all court proceedings, but this civilized gloss cannot obscure the hostile intent.
p. 93
The following, please allow me to stress and stress again, was written before the grand travesty of the Bush administration even began—before institutionalized illegal spying on Americans, drone attacks, Guantanamo, pie fights on dailykos, hide-rates on dailykos being deployed as weaponry in purge campaigns and incessant “law suits”, fake riots to shut down the democratic process, even before mass-adjudicated competitions to determine who can best sing a well-known song by conveying the perfect emotion we all know as appropriate to said song, Transporting oneself back to the normal awareness in 1997 will require an act of conscious will—this was all written before Sarah Palin, before the gleefully televised destruction of Baghdad during “Shock and Awe” week.
"Economic sanctions" on whole peoples conceal the fact that they are a barbaric recourse to the pre-Enlightenment doctrine of collective guilt in which children and other innocents are forced to suffer or even die because of the faults of leaders of the countries in which they live.
p. 94