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Basu
,
Cold Intimacies
,
Eva Illouz
,
nationalism
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Manisha Basu (English)
As I began to read Eva Illouz’s 2007 book Cold Intimacies, I realized that this was one of those rare books that spoke around and across the boundaries of distinct regimes of knowledge. Indeed, as it moved deftly from modern selfhood to postmodern role-playing to the ontic self produced in the conjunction between psychology and new media, and again between Durkheim’s sociology, self-help pamphlets, and traditions of romantic love, it drew in, perhaps demanded even, different disciplinary responses. In particular, I think there are two principal conceptual energies that impel Illouz’s book in these different directions for thinking. The first is an emphasis on the fluidity, the malleability, and the infectious intermixing of rigid binaries like public and private, rational and emotional selves, the surprise of love and the regularities of the market.
The other and deliciously contrasting impulse is an emphasis on stasis. For instance, when in talking of “the writing down of emotions,” Illouz says, “The reflexive act of giving names to emotions in order to manage them gives them an ontology, that is, seems to fixate them in reality,” and later again, when she refers to the ontic self arrested in the intersection between psychology and new media, she is bringing to the foreground “the colonization of time and space” that underlies visions of fluidity. With these two conceptual energies as a kind of framing device, I am going to shift Illouz’s analysis to a slightly different domain of analysis—that of colonial and postcolonial studies with particular reference to the South Asian context. I hope that such a shift is not too cavalier on my part, because of course Cold Intimacies gestures toward this movement when it extends its analysis of interpersonal relations to the imagining of nation and in particular, when it draws attention to Benedict Anderson’s emphasis on style in his diagnosis of the nation as imagined community.
Illouz points out how if “Victorian emotional culture had divided men and women through the axis of the public and the private, the twentieth century therapeutic culture slowly eroded and reshuffled those boundaries by making emotional life central to the workplace.” At the same time, Partha Chatterjee ,in an of-quoted articulation, has argued that the colonial situation and the response of nationalists to the critique of Indian tradition had already in the nineteenth century introduced a new flexibility in dichotomies like public/private, inner/outer, and spirituality/ materiality.
With the expansion of modern European powers into the Empires of the Orient, the Western male subject, fashioned on a principle of rational self-conscious individuality was confronted with a problem: How was he to practice slavery, oppression and exploitation of native men in the colonies who, as men, were rational individuals and, hence, equally deserving of freedom and dignity in the public sphere? Given this pressure to legitimize practices of domination, the public and private realms are reconfigured in terms of the colonial projects and their nationalist responses.
This reconfiguration involved the simultaneous effeminization and hypersexualization of Hindu Bengali men by colonial administrators who must naturalize the regularities of British imperial expansion, and by extension of British patriarchy. As a result, British women and Bengali men were both deemed incapable of rational political life because they were plotted on a continuum with one another. In response, at least the early Indian nationalists, many of whom were western educated, accepted the domination of the latter in the spheres of rationality, public works, impersonal bureaucracy, and modern education but maintained their cultural superiority in the ‘inner’ sphere, traditionally the domain of Indian women.
The modern Hindu Bengali woman was a key figure in this discussion—the nationalist text had painted her as the very repository of tradition, untouched by the profanity of the material world. But at the same time, she needed to have some idea of the world outside the home, into which she could even assay as long as it did not taint her core self. It is this latter criterion which loosened the boundaries of the home from the yoke of confines earlier defined by purdah to a more flexible, but nonetheless culturally determinate domain constituted by the differences between socially approved male and female conduct. The essence of woman had to be initially ossified in terms of certain culturally visible spiritual qualities, but once this was so, the domain constituted by differences clearly marked for the Hindu middle-class Bengali woman her "superiority over the Western woman for whom, it was believed education meant only the acquisition of material skills to compete with men in the outside world and hence a loss of feminine (spiritual) virtues” (Chaterjee). In other words, the binaries remained rigid for the western woman—she was a static figure who could be either feminine or masculine, either spiritual or material, either of the inner or of the outer world—whereas the Hindu woman was superior precisely because she was endlessly fungible and able to lubricate the boundaries between private and public spheres.
My point in bringing colonial and nationalist projects into the discussion is not a mere nominalism, but rather I think in some way to follow Illouz’s lead as she attempts to map how the self produced in the nexus between psychology, the language of productivity and the commodification of identity is further transformed and shaped by internet technology. In other words, in a situation where dichotomies like east and west or spirituality and materiality endlessly fold into one another through the neo-colonial traffic in alterity, how do we map popular understandings amidst the Indian middle-class, for instance, that ‘psychology’ is a ‘western’ luxury necessitated by the relentless materiality of that culture? How then do ‘eastern’ practices like yoga combine so seamlessly with ‘western’ psychology to provide a narrative of self-realization and infuse the materiality of the workplace with the spirituality of family and home? In what ways do we begin to theorize the packaged and codified re-entry of these forms into the newly liberalized Indian market when we witness management trainees in a swanky office building in Mumbai meditating after a long day of work, but this time not in response to a loin-cloth wearing ascetic, but rather a theater screen beaming an American CEO leading their meditation from his office in San Francisco. Is the apparent fluidity here undergirded by a stasis in which difference as a function of time and historicity is itself apprehended and arrested?
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Cold Intimacies
,
Eric Dalle
,
Eva Illouz
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Eric Dalle (Comparative Literature)
Professor Illouz began her talk with an overview of her general research project which she describes as “how capitalism transforms the self.” That is an issue I have been struggling with in my own examination of Mainland Chinese literature beginning in the 1980s. This was, therefore, my personal point of departure in addressing some of the issues in Cold Intimacies.
As Mainland China moved away from high Maoism to a no-holds-barred global capitalism, major changes in the narration of the human subject have highlighted the relationship between economic conditions and psychological and emotional characterization. Beginning in the 1980s, writers began to purposefully write against the previously prescribed Maoist protagonist. They accomplished this by characterizing main characters that were often physically weak, maimed, prone to emotional outbursts, or severely mentally deficient.
My research thus far had concentrated on this particular time period of literature, so after reading Cold Intimacies I became curious about the current representation of the self as performed by the media and pop culture. As China has become a global economic competitor, has an emotional lexicon similarly been mobilized to treat the understanding of the self?
The answer is a resounding yes, and Professor Illouz in her justification for focusing her work on American pop culture and media gave some of the reasons why. Illouz stated that there is a global condition that facilitated the importation of the psychological model of business. Although this importation does undergo a cultural filter, it nonetheless is an importation of an emotional model of the self that is intertwined with capitalism. This model of the self had developed in the United States within corporate culture, and it is from here that it has spread worldwide.
In rummaging through recent scholarship on popular culture in China, I found much work that describes importation of a ‘vocabulary of the self’ (though not referring directly to the notion of “emotional capitalism”). I found interesting work on this in work looking at the popularity of women’s lifestyle magazines beginning in the 1990s. Woman’s magazines and pictorials are not new to Chinese popular culture. Similarly after 1949, the Maoist agenda necessitated pictorials and magazines to provide the model of behavior within the new society.
In the 1990s, these magazines drastically changed their overall project. Now, instead of the agrarian modern woman assisting in the work unit, the front cover of these magazines shows a solitary woman, in a business suit, with laptop. Accompanying this portrayal is a new lexicon of emotions geared toward the purpose of personal success through interpersonal relations. For example in 1999 one magazine ran an article called the “Thirty Traits of the Talented Woman” which lists among these traits: sensitive to the feelings of others, but not suspicious, intelligent, sharp-witted, independent, self-respecting, generous.”1
The reason for highlighting some similarities that I have found between the rise of the “homo sentementalis” as outlined in Cold Intimacies and the contemporary Chinese popular culture is not to suggest a completely parallel narrative between different contexts. Rather I see within the examples an intricate relationship between a desire for success and a parallel need for an emotional lexicon to express this striving for this success. This is shown in parts of chapter one which detail the adoption of psychological models by American corporations. If we are to agree that there is a modern appeal to quantitative emotional comprehension within the public/private sectors in which the capitalist subject inhabits, must we also look at the contribution to productivity? Why else, I would ask, should American corporations swiftly incorporate the various permutations of emotional self-reflexivity if in the end there is no perception of a monetary benefit? But what is actually gained and what is at stake when (as it is argued) that the persuasions of therapy, productivity, and feminism provide the rationale for extracting the emotional from the affective and sanitizing it into the “model of communication”?
I believe that the previous questions were addressed by Professor Illouz as she attempted to explain what she saw as the “political” aspect of the concept of emotional capitalism. This discussion ended our round table, but I found it extremely relevant to many questions that still remained for me. Illouz stated that she did not necessarily see a political agenda, but she immediately retracted and stated that there is perhaps one but it comes with many contradictions. What inspired my question is a need to figure out why the psychological model was so readily adopted by American corporations throughout the 20th century.
Finally, as argued in Cold Intimacies, the precondition of communication is the “suspension of one’s emotional entanglements” so that the project of the self might undergo evaluation, bargaining, and quantification. At what point can an individual categorize the self, so that one in the end one does not discriminate between affective emotions and their quantification? This was the final question that I posed at the end of my response, and again Illouz addressed this issue in explaining what she saw as the relationship between affect and emotion. In my reading of the conclusion to the last chapter, there is a separation of ‘emotion’ as a mechanism for categorizing and describing the self and ‘affect’— which was brought up in the following discussion as perhaps a narrative of affect.
In the end, I believe that the resounding consensus of the panel is that Cold Intimacies is a provocative work that resonates in diverse fields and allows us all to respond and reflect upon our own research from a fresh perspective.
1For this part of the presentation, I referred to the article “The New Chinese Woman and Lifestyles Magazines of the Late 1990s” found in Perry Link ed. Popular China: unofficial culture in a globalizing society
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Begging the Question of Emotional Capitalism
Written by Bianca Isaki (Asian American Studies Program)
Eva Illouz’s Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007) is a compilation of three Adorno Lectures she delivered in Frankfurt in 2004. This pedestrian statement, which I grabbed from an “About This Book” blurb from googlebooks.com, actually says a lot about the book’s pedagogical tone, its seemingly resolute antipathy to Foucault (not unknown to Frankfurt School theorists) and its coevalness with a burgeoning literature on cultural structures of feeling and affect (Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Michael Hardt – as well as other theorists of “biomediated” bodies – Antonio Damasio, Ilya Prigione, and some of William Connolly). But, for me, the best thing about Cold Intimacies wasn’t its genealogies and theory-archive so much as Illouz’s readings of popular culture – You’ve Got Mail and those who labor in the Internet-dating world.
Illouz definitely underlines that Internet-dating – with its projects of self-cultivation, articulation, representation, and marketing – are work. The wide-ranging apparatus under which these people - and to varying degrees, all of us – now labor is what she nominates “emotional capitalism,” defined as “a culture in which emotional and economic discourses and practices mutually shape each other, thus producing…a broad, sweeping movement in which affect is made an essential aspect of economic behavior and in which emotional life – especially that of the middle classes – follows the logic of economic relations and exchange” (Illouz 2007:5). The plan for Cold Intimacies is “to uncover another order in the social organization of capitalism” (4) because this un/re-covery “seriously alter[s]” what and how we usually analyze the “modern subject, the private-public divide and its articulation on gender divisions” (Illouz 2007:2). This other organization – emotional capitalism – takes form in “the psychological persuasion, the self-help literature, the advice industry, the state, the pharmaceutical industries, the Internet technology”; taken together, they constitute a “progressive fusion of the market repertoires and languages of the self” (Illouz 2007:108). Key components of this fusion were the language of psychology, a feminism that brought the public discourses about rights into the private sphere, and the new articulation of desire through the economic lexicons and instruments of consumer culture.
I’m not repeating her strategy in order to frame a discussion of what is wrong with it, but I want to push it a little. The idea that knowing more will change what we know for the better is riddled with assumptions and fallacies that all of us involved in a tertiary level of the liberal education project know well. It is this better-ness that many of Illouz’s respondents and questioners seemed to be striving towards during the latter half of the roundtable. Everyone seemed to agree that Cold Intimacies had indeed “uncovered” an important dimension of capitalism, and was eager to set that discovery to work.
Respondent Eric Dalle (Comparative Literature) asked for a comment on how Illouz’s analytical framework might travel to “post-ideological China” (this is the phrase that Lung-Kee Sun uses in The Chinese National Character: From Nationhood to Individuality (M.E. Sharpe 2002), but I suspect Dalle’s meaning fits within Sun’s framework), where the New Chinese Woman is now more likely to be iconized as a solitary female in a business suit and laptop instead of a pre-1990s image of a women’s collective serving the poor wholeheartedly. Perhaps, Dalle suggested, the successful person put forth by the business world in China might be oriented by emotional capitalism’s new lexicon of interpersonal relationships.
Manisha Basu (English) focused on another dynamic of emotional capitalism – the articulation of fluidity (for example, the irregularities of the market) and stasis (as in the reflexive act of naming emotions in order to give them an ontology). She proposed that such an apparatus might be articulated within the neoliberal/ neocolonial project in India by allowing difference itself to be apprehended and arrested. On the neoliberal side, it could allow us to approach a corporate meditation class in India that is being led by its CEO in San Francisco via satellite. And, an instrument that can “capture” difference is useful to (neo)colonial configurations of the New Bengali Woman – a figure whose capacity to be a repository of tradition also allows her to venture in the modern world. (A digression - this operation is precisely what Anjali Gera Roy describes – but does not provide an argument for – in “Bhangra Remixes,” a chapter in India in Africa, Africa in India (Indiana UP, 2008) which the “Intimacy, Domesticity, and the Nation: South Asia and Beyond” IPRH reading group read this earlier this month). An audience member later speculated that the success of religion-affiliated Internet dating sites contradicts Illouz’s claim about the increasing rationalization of romantic object choice. I think that Basu’s suggestion that the development of technologies for apprehending difference (like religious values) and locating them in intimate sites (like a love-object) has explanatory power here, but this isn’t the way the discussion proceeded.
Finally, in the most gentle terms, Alejandro Lugo (Anthropology-Latina/Latino Studies) pushed Illouz to account for her research site (middle-class U.S. culture) and her focus on a narrow strain of second-wave feminism. I was most on board with this response because it points to the ways that capitalism takes particular forms as it articulates with site-specific histories, terrains and cultures. Illouz’s response had something to do with the capacity of the U.S. to spread culture via globalization, generally glossing Lugo’s insistence on the specificity of her research sites. I later followed up with a question about politics: how does it matter that emotional capitalism’s convergence between psychology and feminism happened in the U.S.?
I pointed to the specificity of the U.S. settler colonial context in which the early twentieth- century psychological discourses Illouz discusses (especially, Freud’s 1909 lectures at Clark University) were taken up because, I believe, that specificity matters a lot. Psychology (Illouz doesn’t differentiate between psychology and psychoanalysis) was instrumental in elaborating a psychological interiority, which thus became a vector for projects that were trying to make sense of a huge influx of immigrants, nationalizing naturalization, and disavowing the displacement of indigenous nations. Cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, and a transnational America could create a citizenry across seemingly insurmountable differences by projecting a liberal imagination of abstracted “hearts and minds.” I’m schematizing here but, my point is that the politics of psychology get “uncovered” when we see them within the project of building a white settler colonial society over and against the historical and ongoing displacement of indigenous nations. And, insofar as psychology signaled the onset of emotional capitalism, neither can be divorced from the production of the U.S. as a “nation of immigrants” and a white-centering “multiculturalism”.
By contrast, in Illouz’s estimation, emotional capitalism has contradictory effects that cancel each other out such that she can say; “emotional capitalism doesn’t have a politics.” Her answer suggests that her analysis of emotional capitalism exists in a space that isn’t yet situated within capitalism’s political economy or cultural politics. Yet, most of the respondents pressed up against this limitation; we/they wanted to know what an analysis of emotional capitalism can do. Specifically, how do Illouz’s findings allow us to approach different kinds of modern subjects - therapy-patients, housewives, CEO-meditation instructors, a Mexican working-class, and Jdate.com clients? The point (as Illouz acknowledges) is to see how capitalism’s “intertwining of rationality and emotionality” happens in and through the production of modern subjects (Illouz 2008). But the picture of emotional capitalism’s materiality offered by Cold Intimacies is fractured; Illouz “suggest[s] that there is no direct continuity between social spheres and that they do not necessarily mirror one another” (Illouz 2007:92). This is a plea for a method of working out from “a deep understanding of the concrete cultural practices of ordinary actors” (Illouz 2007:93). Otherwise, the aleatory capacity of the singular gets engulfed by a too-quick a priori prediction about how something will “behave” (Illouz 2007:92). Put plainly, we need to know how something works in order to determine what it does and Cold Intimacies is working on the first part of that process.
My point is that I don’t think that this order of investigation works so well when we’re talking about social relationships under capitalism. Even theories of aleatory capitalism don’t suggest that capital produces difference for nothing. Rather, capitalism funds social transgressions in the short run, but only to exploit them in the end. Instead, Gayatri Spivak has suggested “begging the question” – showing how something works by first presuming that it does. Capitalism is useful as an analytic precisely because it describes processes that create value by trading on hierarchies of difference – the main difference being that between the differential between necessary and surplus labor. However, as feminist, marxist and queer analyses have shown (I’m thinking of the sociologist Roderick Ferguson in particular), hierarchies of race, gender, nationality, and, apparently, emotional appropriateness can also be exploited to produce differentials in social value. Begging the question would allow us to ask; how does emotional capitalism shore up, re/produce, extend, broaden, deepen, entrench or otherwise exploit hierarchies of difference?
This project offers a nuanced view of the ways that a language of emotion has been taken up into the waged-workplace and consumer culture; and I appreciate its attention to singularity and its eruption in strange and unexpected places like Internet-dating sites. But, as I indicated earlier, are we assuming too much when we risk thinking that we can know more by bracketing objects of study, and further, that knowing more will change how we know what we know for the better? This assumption shares at least morphology with Illouz’s “hyperrational fool, somebody whose capacity to judge, to act and ultimately choose is damaged by a cost-benefit analysis, a rational weighing of options that spins out of control” (Illouz 2007:113). Illouz was talking about a brain-damaged man trying to set a date for an appointment with a neurologist. She was comparing him to the Internet-dater who (mis)applies her economic literacy in her search for true love – or at least marriage, romantic happiness or a good time. I’m wondering if the same misapplied faith – that knowing more happens only in advance of seeing what the “big picture” is. The analogy, however misfitting, is with scholarly projects that bracket attempts to describe capitalist phenomena from their systemic location within productions of exploitation and hierarchy. I’m suggesting that the singularity of capitalism demands presuming that it has a politics (a systemic production of inequalities) and then showing how it does. This untimely order of analysis might better key to the asymptotic relationship between academic production and historically material struggles for lasting social redistribution, which, after all, will determine what any scholarship means in the long run.
Illouz, E. (2007). Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Malden, MA, Polity Press.
Illouz, E. (2008). Author's Roundtable II: Eva Illouz. Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Urbana, Illinois.
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