Passion and reason: Notes on a contested relationship

Affirmation

As indicated, the cultural positioning of passion follows from its strength as a disposition, even when its affirmations are mobilised reactively against something rather than simply for something. As a collective disposition, passion can involve forms of solidarity and participation as well as the celebration of communal values and pleasures. The directness and scale of passionate feelings have often been seen to connect closely with ideas of the ‘popular’, their ‘unruliness’ making them a part of popular resistance to the institutionalised rationality of elite orders. Here, with degrees of self-consciousness, a ‘breaking out’ from imposed constraint occurs through various expressions and manifestations, including, but not limited to, forms of social and political action. Such a view of passion as a necessary property of ‘spirit’ in the commitment to forms of resistance is found, for instance, in the political perspectives of 19th Romanticism and in much language of political struggle since. The positive connotations mobilised in this kind of usage have perhaps given political passion a default value as ‘good’ and served to displace the use of the term from instances (for example, Nazi ideology) which involve criminally unethical routes taken by intense feeling. That is to say, ‘bad passion’ of this kind is open to assessment as not really passion at all.

The affirmations of strongly individualised passions, when they do not, as above, concern forms of ethical or social commitment, are often positioned culturally as precarious in character, a position making various connections with ideas about the treacherous dimensions of the ‘pleasurable’, the risks of the obsessive and the possible deceptiveness of intense romantic attachment. Self-declared passions, although they can certainly be taken as sincere, have a tendency, noted earlier, to be a licensed form of self-congratulation, sometimes involving a measure of calculated overstatement (‘I am passionate about Italian cooking’) or edging into promotional discourse, as is often the case with statements by politicians (‘I am passionate about inequality’).

Manipulation

Concern about practices of ‘manipulation’ is perhaps the single most dominant theme in media and cultural research, even if vocabularies of analysis differ greatly. Manipulation, the strategic management of subjectivity in relation to political and economic interests, has raised a number of issues concerning definition as well as forms and processes, but appeal to the affective, including the generation of intense feeling, has been a frequent point of reference. Studies in the various ideological profiles of nationalism would be one example here, while studies in the ‘propaganda’ undertaken by governments during wartime, both historical and contemporary, have viewed the directing of passions in the service of distraction and distortion as a key part of communicative design (see, for instance, the account in Jowett and O’Donnell, 2011). In these contexts, the propensity for passion, far from being a resource for resistance, has been seen as a ‘weak link’ in the integrity both of individual and group behaviours, the site on which independence and critical judgement are open to modes of systemic compromise. Against this risk, a forensic rationality has figured as the main anti-manipulation, anti-ideology requirement. Within the history of media and cultural studies, one longstanding example of anxieties about manipulation would be those surrounding advertising. Advertising has received a wide range of approaches using different analytic frameworks, quantitative and qualitative, as well as drawing on various theories. Nevertheless, the explanation of its power has tended to remain rather elusive, despite the illuminating data and arguments of many studies over the years. With different emphases, it is frequently regarded, among other things, as a means for generating ‘false passions’, which become attached not just to the objects being advertised (in the reinforcement of a commodity fetishism) but to broader life values, perceptions of self and aspirations to ‘improvement’. Analysts have differed in the way they see their chosen examples either as working a kind of ‘bypass’ on reasoning, in which appeal is made covertly or otherwise to the emotions in a way which largely escapes rational scrutiny, or as working with ‘bad reasoning’, in which (within the constraints of trading law) emotionally suffused propositions are made about the values of the product, propositions which are false but nevertheless widely believed. Too much emphasis of the latter kind (upon a ‘literal’ level of deception) can lead to a situation in which people are viewed chiefly as victims of their own credulity. However, the real nature of the emotional work carried out by advertising and forms of promotion remains challenging to plot. It is interesting here that, in an essay on the subject, Raymond Williams ([1961] 1980) saw advertising as essentially a ‘magic’ system, trading on the complex non-rationality of a form of fantasy (‘a highly organised and professional system of magical inducements and satisfactions, functionally very similar to magical systems in simpler societies’, p. 185).

Within some accounts of manipulation, popular subjectivity and its passions start to seem like sites colonised by external agents for their own ends more than areas effectively ‘open’ for the growth of resistance and alternatives. A sense emerges of the spaces of passion as extensively cultivated, even foreclosed upon, according to an external agenda of profit and, perhaps, of political quiescence (Andrejevic (2011) looks at some aspects of current practice here and see Hochschild (2012) on developments around ‘homelife’). Although the problems for political action posed by too negative a view on this have been widely recognised, contrasting assessments of contemporary consciousness, and of the strategic forces at work in resourcing it, clearly remain a major point of debate for radical political projects internationally. The idea of the ‘contamination’ of consciousness by the affective appeals of popular media has had more widespread articulation too. This is well illustrated by the positive reception given to Neil Postman’s (1985) book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Postman’s pessimistic verdict, as well as linking with perspectives in media research, connects back to more general anxieties about the role that the diverting, displacing emotional satisfactions offered by media might play in forms of cultural control.

Deliberation

Deliberation, the analytic processing of issues across the available range of evidence and argument, has become a stronger focus for inquiry both in political and in media research. There has been an emphasis on the range of spaces, resources and capacities that variously work to aid or to block practices of deliberation by citizens, thereby encouraging or limiting effective participation in democratic politics. Although the media have an historic role as a principal resource for civic deliberation, they have, of course, also figured in many contemporary accounts as an agency of deliberative constraint, one that works through the limitations and distortions of the information they provide as well as the diversions to deliberation that they offer.

Habermas (2006) has quite recently glossed the nature of deliberation in the following terms:

The deliberative paradigm offers as its main empirical point of reference a democratic process, which is supposed to generate legitimacy through a procedure of opinion and will formation that grants (a) publicity and transparency for the deliberative process, (b) inclusion and equal opportunity for participation, and (c) a justified presumption for reasonable outcomes (mainly in view of the impact of arguments on rational changes in preference). (p. 413)

He then goes on to note that:

Deliberation is a demanding form of communication, though it grows out of inconspicuous daily routines of asking for and giving reasons. In the course of everyday practices, actors are always already exposed to a space of reasons. (Habermas, 2006: 413)

The idea of the ‘rational citizen’ pursuing their routine deliberative work has been subject to a number of questions about the realism of conventional expectations – just how much time, energy and competence might be required to ‘live up to’ the standards which various models of democratic participation suggest? We can note here how Habermas himself talks of deliberation’s ‘demanding’ nature. Moreover, in the context of a process mostly defined in terms of its rationality, where do emotion and passion fit into the deliberative picture? In the next section, I want to examine further aspects of this question, including the relevance for cultural research. However, here it is instructive to note how the philosopher David Hume (2003) saw the relationships in what has become a much-discussed passage from his A Treatise on Human Nature (1739/40):

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. (T 2.3.3.4. 2003 edition, 295)

Hume defends this proposition, which he notes might seem an ‘extraordinary’ one, by pointing to the fact that passions can only come into contradiction with reasons in instances where (a) the passion is founded on false supposition or (b) where the passion leads to actions which are grounded in incorrectly assumed correlations between causes and effects and which therefore prove to be inadequate actions. These ‘exceptions’ might nevertheless be seen to still allow considerable scope for passion–reason conflict and they certainly work to qualify any categorical idea of reason’s ‘slavery’ and ‘obedience’. What Hume is establishing here is the primacy of volition in human nature, whatever the rational or irrational settings in which this occurs and leads to action. He is opposing a view that would displace passion from the picture and install reason as the primary and sufficient agency. However, as suggested, Hume is not entirely consistent. In elaborating further his arguments about ‘exceptions’, he remarks that ‘the moment we perceive the falsehood of any supposition, or the insufficiency of any means, our passions yield to reason without any opposition’ (T 2.3.3.7). This proposition seems to be headed rather vigorously in the opposite direction to the ‘slavery’ idea and it is not surprising that there is a literature of discussion concerning how, if at all, these different emphases can be squared (for a recent account, see Brett and Paxman, 2008). Hume’s own subsequent ‘disavowal’ of certain sections of the Treatise should also be noted.

Although pitched in a very different language, recent writing on politics and culture has also wanted to note the extent to which, as Liesbet Van Zoonen (2004) puts it, ‘emotions function as a trigger for our cognitive capacities’ (p. 48) and the extent to which the affective has a key role in generating and guiding deliberative processes. Van Zoonen has also noted (2005: 64) how Max Weber observed of politics that dedication to it can only be generated and sustained by passion. This is a point that partly follows Hume in its sense of the relative priorities in the origination of action in motives but one that also gives emphasis to the idea of passion as a ‘commitment’ to ideas which may themselves have had a varied origination.

The ‘affective turn’ and mediated culture

Across media and cultural studies, there has been a continuing shift towards addressing emotional work more directly and an engagement with questions of ‘feeling’, including the nature and consequences of pleasure, that have a long history in the field. Analysis of feelings is strongly present in The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1957) and matters of affect are explicitly there in Williams’ much-cited phrase ‘structure of feeling’ (for an early example of his own usage, see Williams, 1961). Feminist work has been of primary importance not only in placing emotions more firmly on the research agenda but of looking more closely, and sympathetically, at the dynamics of various forms of cultural pleasure (see, for instance, O’Connor and Klaus, 2000). It is therefore perhaps not useful to talk of an ‘affective turn’ here in a way directly comparable to the recent shifts occurring in politics, the social sciences and geography, for example (Crociani-Windland and Hoggett (2012) offer a wide-ranging critical overview of work concerning politics). Recognition of the importance of the emotional dimension was there in the formative moment, although since then there has been a deepening of analytic exploration.

Across a number of discipline sites, there has also been a re-theorisation of the idea of ‘affect’ that moves it away from being a synonym for ‘emotion’ and locates it within much more ambitious conceptual space as an idea about the structuring of subjectivity (Gregg and Seigworth (2010) bring a range of commentaries together, while Leys (2011) offers a vigorous critique of some dominant tendencies she sees to be at work in the broader ‘turn’). At the level of sustained analysis, Ahmed (2004) opens up debate around ‘affective economies’, locating forms of emotional experience and their modes of expression within frameworks of formal and informal power. Mankekar (2015), in the course of a detailed inquiry into cultural identity and transnationality, pursues an argument about the ‘webs of relationality’ (p. 15) which the circulation of affect produces, involving the interconnection of private feelings and public sentiment. This kind of approach has its origins in cross-disciplinary intellectual developments, but it has also been encouraged by the intensification of mediated culture and the arrival, with social media, of new forms of the relationship between media and consciousness, now including the kinds of consciousness associated with production, not just consumption.

As I noted, the placing of a stronger emphasis on feelings has nearly always involved implied if not explicit propositions concerning the relationship with reason and rationality. Sometimes, these have been articulated in a sharply adversarial way, as part of a counter-polemic against the perceived dominance of established forms of rationality and the inequalities, including of gender, they help perpetuate. However, much interesting work has been committed to investigating further the terms of interconnection and mutual dependency that exist between affect and cognition, between passions and reasoning. I indicated some brief examples of this, following the way in which Hume set an early precedent both for the recognition of passion as a central and positive agency in the direction of human activity and for flexibility in considering its relationship to reason. In particular, a number of scholars in political philosophy, reacting against established ways of thinking within their discipline, have followed through on this perspective with a notable tightness of focus and argument. I want to look more closely at an example of this before assessing the broader implications for cultural analysis.

Cheryl Ann Hall (2007) makes the case for ‘recognising the passion in deliberation’ in an article which examines the very different ways in which a dichotomy between reason and passion has been articulated, noting the manner in which this opposition ‘plays a central role in reinforcing inequalities of gender, race and class’ (p. 82). Her argument gains originality from its identification of the problems that often follow from simply championing greater recognition of ‘passion’ when this is conceptualised as entirely separate from deliberative process (‘it perpetuates a rationalist conception of what deliberation entails’ (2007: 85)). Putting the emphasis on passion as a form of ‘caring’, she notes the way in which ‘passion is the affective manifestation of value’ (2007: 91), observing that passions often originate in various kinds of reasoning as well as becoming attached as motivators to further actions of rational processing. Her account importantly extends to forms of political activism, (an issue also raised prominently in Ahmed, 2004), forms where passion–reason interactions are likely to be different, given the modes of physical commitment involved, from those occurring in political discussion (the area receiving most emphasis in theories of democratic practice). ‘Recognising’ passion, in her view, requires that it be seen as already involved in deliberation, not a factor which has been omitted from, and now needs ‘adding’ to, deliberative practice. The omission has been in the conventional view of that practice.

In the context of these perspectives, we might ask where a notion such as ‘affective intelligence’ or ‘emotional intelligence’ fits in (Leys (2011) reviews the use of ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ both as synonymous and as differentiating terms). For these categories would seem to describe a certain kind of intelligence to be offset against other kinds. They therefore might be seen to run the risk identified by Hall of reinforcing, if only implicitly, too firm a dichotomy between the factors at work in a way which hinders, if it does not entirely block, perception of the manner in which they are often intertwined in real-life mental processing, including acts of deliberation. Many uses of ‘emotional intelligence’, and certainly of the looser, more openly metaphoric idea of ‘emotional literacy’, indicate it as more an aspect of awareness, of perceptive scope, than as a kind of processing itself – to show emotional intelligence is to ‘pick up’ on what is happening affectively both within the self and within social situations in a way which is inclusive, which does not operate reductive foreclosures. That information is then available for kinds of decision and action. Earlier, I cited Liesbet van Zoonen on emotional intelligence as a kind of ‘trigger’ for cognition. In a widely cited article from within the framework of psychology, Meyer et al. (2008) write that

Emotional intelligence concerns the ability to carry out accurate reasoning about emotions and the ability to use emotions and emotional knowledge to enhance thought. (p. 511)

What is interesting here is the way in which this definition includes both the operation of reason upon emotions and the use of emotions in improved reasoning. Despite the emphasis on interactivity, however, it is explicitly a reason-centred account. The writers are intent on measuring ‘EI’ through experimental research design in a way that both in its theoretical frameworks and its methods would not help answer those questions about perception, meaning and experience in contexts of power which figure strongly on the agenda of media and cultural inquiry.

Taking this latter kind of inquiry down to the level of specific examples, where various forms of deliberation and outcome can be tracked, is a vital complement both to theoretical debate and to direct engagement with those ‘blind-spots’ regarding emotional life to be found in democratic institutions and procedures (recently addressed in Nussbaum, 2013). Plotting specific inter-relations as they appear in different kinds of situation or discourse type usefully pushes beyond the generalities of typology. It works towards the goal of trying to achieve a more expansive, detailed and theoretically informed sense of how feelings work and how they are experienced, including through the many routes that variously and often directly employ media. Harding and Pribram (2002) use a case-study of the public displays of grief following the death of Princess Diana in 1997 to raise questions both about the theories and methods that might be applied in ‘locating emotions’, connecting Williams’ idea of the ‘structure of feeling’ to broader contexts of power relations, including relations of gender. In respect of ‘evidence’, they note how, among other sources,

The constitution of feeling and its part in the creation of subjectivity within contemporary power relations can be traced through an examination of journals, diaries and other forms of personal writing (2002: 421)

As this suggests, close analysis of the discursive organisation and expression of emotions is a necessary constituent. What is said about feelings, by whom, how and in what circumstances? What are the aesthetical forms related to the different emotional states and their articulation? It is important to register that within this framing, ‘emotions’ and ‘reason’ will still be notionally separate, even if ‘intelligence’ can include them both, since this separation is a logical precondition of their being seen as interactively at work in a range of life situations, including modes of deliberation. The refusal of sharp dichotomy cannot usefully take the form of some kind of ‘soft’ fusion, since this gives up on the complex dynamics that the work I have cited from rightly sees as central and under-recognised. Among other things, it would preclude attention to the different strengths in which emotional and reasoning elements are in combination, as well as to their variety. The contexts and manner in which passions can block or ignore reasoning, or conversely, in which tightly rationalistic perspectives can exclude the indications of ‘emotional intelligence’, are among the things that it is important to know more about. This needs to occur alongside documentation of the cultural contexts and practices in which, to use Meyer et al.’s phrase, an ‘ability to use emotions and emotional knowledge to enhance thought’ is displayed.

Much of the inquiry exploring ‘passion’ in media and cultural settings will want to engage with its topic in quite specific forms and contexts; a lot of it will rightly not wish to pursue explicitly the linkage with reasoning or with the political. However, the tensions, contradictions and mutualities outlined above will continue to be an inevitable dimension of those intensities of feeling, mediatised or otherwise, which the word is used to identify. These intensities, active in everyday individual consciousness and various in their nature as constituents of the self and of social relations, lie at the core of lived culture.