|
"Acts of Translation: Emotion and Political Communication "
by Mabel Berezin
My first book Making the Fascist Self (Berezin 1997) dealt with public political ritual in Fascist Italy. The popular, as well as scholarly, perception was that fascists and Nazis (distinct political entities that were often conflated) held mass rallies that fueled the political passions of entranced and deluded subjects. In the past twenty years, social scientists and historians have re-visited the interwar period. We now know that the image of the deluded populace was more of a post-war construction than a historical fact.
In MFS, I questioned whether public political rituals were potent vehicles of political communication. My answer vis a vis Italy was yes and no. Public events imposed the regime upon the populace when they interrupted the daily rhythms of work and leisure. On the other hand, this imposition did not necessarily lead to intense identification with either fascism or the regime. The content of political communication was indeterminate.
In the process of doing this work, I began to think more systematically about emotion and what it meant for political engagement. Fascist rallies were examples of emotion imposed from above. In the end, I concluded they were not very emotional. How, I asked myself, could a political sociologist rigorously address the issue of emotion? Although I will focus this comment on my own work, emotion is an emerging interest among culturally oriented political sociologists (see for example, Barbalet 1998; Jasper, Goodwin and Polletta 2001; Massey 2002; Emirbayer and Goldberg 2005).
I address emotion in two ways: first, theoretically (Berezin 2002) and second, methodologically in an extended project on the political culture of the right in contemporary Europe. Space limitations require that I be telegraphic. Emotion as an entity is natural and innate. This is not a controversial statement no matter what body of literature one looks to. History and culture, time and space, determine the expression of emotion and provide the epistemological categories by which we classify the varieties of appropriate and inappropriate affect. While the distinction between the ontological and epistemological dimensions of emotion may blur empirically, it is necessary to maintain the distinction for analytic purposes.
The central problem for social scientists is the identification of the social mechanisms that transpose a feeling state into an emotional action. One way to get analytic purchase on these problems is to theorize the possible ways that emotions and events might interact. Some aspects of social and emotional life are ordinary and expected—predictable and routine. Some events are extraordinary and range from natural to man-made disasters to the serendipitous confluence of unexpected events that are an often unacknowledged part of the fabric of social life. Predictability and unpredictability characterize events and emotions and point to different ontologies of emotion as well as epistemological approaches to emotion within the social and natural sciences. Jusxtaposing predictability and unpredictability against emotions and events yields four analytic categories presented in detail in Berezin (2005).
1. Predictable Emotions and Predictable Events
Death and birth are the only truly predictable human events—although their timing is contextual. The widespread trans-cultural presence of birth and death rituals attests to their emotional significance. Birth and death represent the realm of emotion and nature that has engaged moral philosophy and biology.
2. Predictable Emotions and Unpredictable or Contingent Events
Even in a stable society, ordinary events are contingent. Rational choice posits that when confronted with unpredictable events individuals make choices based on the principal of maximizing utility. Rationality is thus a predictable anti-emotion.
3. Unpredictable Emotions and Predictable Events
Institutions structure predictable events. Certain emotions are appropriate to each institutional setting. Institutions that pattern events are: private such as the family (patterning love and marriage); or public, such as the market (jobs and organizations) or the polity (the states and citizenship). The legal system regulates criteria of participation or membership in these various institutional arenas. What is unregulated in the legal sphere is the range of emotional responses and correspondingly appropriate actions that individuals may engage within those institutional settings. This is where culture, surveillance and emotion management come in.
4. Unpredictable Emotions and Unpredictable Events
The realm of pure contingency has been the area where the social and natural sciences intersect. Within politics, violence and ethnic conflict has been a core subject.
In my work on Fascist Italy, I concentrated on category 3--how the state attempted to institutionalize emotion. I argued that for the fascist period family, embodied in the “cult of the mother,” and religion, “the popular culture of Roman Catholicism, trumped fascism as a site of collective emotional engagement. The French National Front is the narrow focus of my current research; the broader focus is Europeanization. I situate the upward and downward trajectory of the Front in a field of political events occurring between 1997 and 2005. In this research I shift to category 1 and 4.
I begin with the assumption that emotion, absent or present, is constitutive of political engagement. I identify a series of events that generated collective emotional engagement and that intersected with the shifting trajectory of the National Front. The events that I analyze are the 1998 French regional elections; the 1998 World Cup Victory; the 2002 Presidential election and the 2005 rejection of the European Constitution. By analyzing the National Front’s role in these events coupled with the reaction of various clusters of political actors, I am able to develop an analysis that permits me to link political attraction and disaffection to broader institutional and macro-level processes of political change. The Front story is the reverse of the fascist story. In the French case, events forced a cross section of citizens into public space to express their emotional attachment to the institutions of the French state from Republicanism to social welfare.
In the course of my research, I have come to view emotion and emotions such as fear, anger, joy, sorrow, as physiological states that individuals or collectivities rapidly translate into cognitions, rhetorics, symbols, institutions and events. In short, the study of emotion and political communication requires that we engage acts of translation that are analytically cognizant of the links among body, mind, and polity—nature, culture and the state.
Mabel Berezin is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University.
REFERENCES
Barbalet, Jack. M. 1998. Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Berezin, Mabel. 1997. Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Inter-war Italy. In the "Wilder House Series in Culture, Politics and History". Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Berezin, Mabel. 2002. “Secure States: Towards a Political Sociology of Emotion”. In “Sociology and Emotions,” Jack Barbalet, ed. Sociological Review Monograph. London: Basil Blackwell: 33-52.
Berezin, Mabel. 2005. “Emotions and the Economy.” In Handbook of Economic Sociology, 2nd edition, Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, eds. New York and Princeton: Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press: 109-127.
Emirbayer, Mustafa and Chad Alan Goldberg. 2005. “Pragmatism, Bourdieu, and Collective Emotions in Contentious Politics,” Theory and Society 34: 469-518.
Jasper, James, Jeff Goodwin and Francesca Polletta, Eds. 2001. Passionate Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Massey, Douglas S. 2002. “A Brief History of Human Society: the Origin and Role of Emotions in Social Life.” American Sociological Review 67: 1-29.
|
