European Journal of Cultural Studies

This note of commentary examines aspects of the relationship between passion and reason. It looks at how forms of interaction between the two have been conceptualised within different theories and at how attempts at correcting the under-recognition of emotion in deliberative activity have been a goal of recent studies. It suggests that ideas of mutuality as well as of tension with forms of rationality will continue to guide cultural analysis into the variety of passionate experience across a diversity of practices and contexts of power. This article is part of a themed issue entitled ‘Passion’.

Forceful debate has erupted in the Netherlands over the celebration of Sinterklaas in the 2010s. Sinterklaas festivities revolve around December 5 and the giving of presents, mostly to children. The debate centres around the figure of Sinterklaas’s helper Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). While an object of criticism for its implied racism (Zwarte Piet sports an Afro hairdo, blackface, full red lips and big golden hoops) for over half a century, the current actions and demonstrations by a group of protesters have led to rivalling Facebook groups endorsed by some 2 million Dutch, partly in response to an intervention led by United Nations expert Verene Shepherd. This article focuses on the main Facebook page, using ‘passion’ as a key analytical term for the suffering the mostly White Dutch commenters bear witness to. Against a backdrop of increased right-wing populist presence, nationalism has become acceptable again, manifesting itself as the forceful exclusion of the sentiments of non-White Dutch. The passionate defence of national heritage appears to be built on a sense of (White) suffering, which simultaneously excludes the possibility of non-White suffering. The article uses qualitative research methodology to analyse a vast number of posts, and provides more insight into the nature of meaningmaking in and around social network sites by referring to Jenkins, Ford and Green’s term everyday curation.

If there is a cultural arena today where passion plays a central and heightened role, then it is in the affecting and textural operations of celebrity. Celebrity representations are crafted out of passionate aesthetic signifiers and impassioned pleas to the senses, to the emotions and to the exaggerations of feeling that the consumer or fan is asked to register and then fully embody. Celebrity culture attempts to turn one into a passionate creature, ruled by the heart, lost in a sea of desires and desiring wants and needs, as the adoring figure that moves us, moves intimately before us. Such passions can and do go unrequited, of course; some are resisted and rejected, and some celebrity passions register as fully carnal and liberating encounters. That is to say, the plays of celebrity passion serve (hetero) normative and policed accounts of feeling and belonging in the world, fuel a desire for commodity objects and material possessions, and yet also open up the possibility for engagements that are violent, liberal and unregulated. In this article, I will explore the ways in which celebrity culture engages with passion and through the idea of it involving a modern form of the passion play. Following Lauren Berlant, I will argue that the passion ignited by the celebrity works to contain and regulate desire, and yet also offers up the opportunity for sensorial engagements that violate and resist the normative terms of desiring. I will suggest celebrity figures are themselves caught up in this passion play, suffering and feeling deeply at the same time, while channelling this violent crisis to their fans as they do so. Finally, I will write the article passionately, from an impassioned perspective, measuring and weighting my own desires in the contradictions and tensions of passion as they emerge in the body of the writer before you. This article is part of a themed issue entitled ‘Passion’.

One component in the generational experience strongly related to media is the intimate and often passionate relation that is developed towards media technologies and content from one’s formative youth period: musical genres and stars, as well as reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tapes, comics and other now dead media forms. Passion, however, is a dialectic concept that not only refers to the joyful desire and intense emotional engagement of cherished objects but also includes its dialectic opposite in the form of pain and suffering. This passion, it is argued in the article, is activated by the nostalgic relationships to past media experiences, the bittersweet remembrances of media habits connected to earlier life phases of one’s own. Taking its point of departure in generational theory of Mannheim and others, this article analyses a series of focus group interviews with Swedish and Estonian media users tentatively belonging to four different generations. Based on the analysis of these interviews, it is suggested that passion and nostalgia are produced, first, in relation to old technologies, second, in relation to childhood memories and, third, at the limits of shared intergenerational experience, that is, at the moment when one realises that one’s own experiences of past media forms cannot be shared by younger generations, and especially one’s own children.

The article explores affective economy in a humanitarian reality television. It shows the ways in which reality television is increasingly occupied with ‘doing good’ by investigating Australian originated series Go Back to Where You Came From. The international format has been sold to nine countries and produced in co-operation with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. By bringing together theorizations of affective economy and post-humanitarianism, the article examines the emotional register and moral claims attached to the imagery of asylum seekers and refugees, and the conditions of television production for gearing audience participation towards humanitarian action. In the heart of this investigation lies the question of media change and marketization of the humanitarian field that proposes new forms of solidarities and moralities in public. The article identifies not only the potential but also the critical challenges of the combination of reality format and humanitarian message.

The article examines how mediated shame in the reality show The Luxury Trap where individuals with huge debts are being scolded for ‘their lack of economic self-control’ presents a specific kind of information about class played out as intensities, encounters and experience. Drawing on studies on affective reactivity, it extends the argument of reality TV as a site for classed otherness by examining how discordant affects, such as, non-empathic reactions to others’ emotional experiences, are formed, as well as transformed on the show. The shaming process evolves through different transitory phases: the inducing, internalization and (temporarily) reduction in shame. These sequential phases disclose the reliance on the passionate aspects of shame, that is, participants’ desire to re-enter into the common by freeing oneself from that which carries the mark for exclusion. They also provide the premise for the repetitive power of affect operation intrinsically linking class and shame together, giving body and form to the un-named, to that which drive us towards affective judgements and to the un-making of subjects. This article is part of a themed issue entitled ‘Passion’.