Keynote speakers
Welcome and Introduction: Emotion, Political Economy and Power
Roy Coleman University of Liverpool, UK
The symposium is concerned less with defining and calibrating emotions (in some measurable sense) and more concerned with documenting the emotional hegemonies associated with affective processes of rule or challenges to that rule albeit in specified contexts. Why emotion and political economy? Why now? We wish to explore the increasing salience of the emotional (its fabrication, encouraged excesses or denial) in processes and practices of political economy. In many respects a concern with the social, economic and political power of emotion has been a feature of earlier sociologies (from Durkheim to Gramsci to Weber) but has fallen away or been over-psychologized in contemporary sociology or subject to manipulations in management studies. This short introduction charts the thinking behind the symposium with reference to emotionologies, state power and urban rule.
Neoliberal affects
Ben Anderson Department of Geography, Universality of Durham
What kind of thing is neoliberalism? And how might we understand the grip, tenacity and seduction of neoliberal reason in the midst of and after the most recent financial crisis? Drawing on exploratory work on contemporary forms of hope, boredom and other relations to possibility in the midst of processes of precaritization, in this paper I explore the political consequences of understanding neoliberalism as an atmospheric kind of thing that becomes part of structures of feeling that are always more than neoliberal. I conclude by speculating on what concepts of atmospheres and structures of feeling might mean for how we think and encounter the relation between political economy and emotion.
Narcissistic Rage and Neoliberal Reproduction
Earl Gammon Department of International Relations, University of Sussex
Employing Heinz Kohut’s self-psychology, this presentation explores the socio-psychical dynamics of neoliberalism’s resilience following the global financial crisis. It draws on Kohut’s unique conception of narcissism as a normal phenomenon that follows its own path of development with the emergence of the self. Obstructions, though, in narcissistic development can result in impaired self-esteem and self-confidence, a lack of empathy and aggression against others and the self. It is argued neoliberalism fosters and is reinforced by narcissistic configurations that impede attainment of a more stable sense of self. The inability to attain narcissistic fulfillment through neoliberal sociality contributes to defensive and compensatory reactions that entrench its logic, with the manifestation through economic performance of the phenomenon Kohut referred to as narcissistic rage. The presentation calls for a therapeutically-attuned politics that addresses popular neoliberalism with empathic responsiveness, encouraging new idealisations and patterns of identification that promote more stable self-states.
Challenging state suicide and other neoliberal fantasies
Shona Hunter Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds
In this paper I draw on the arguments in my book Power, Politics and the Emotions, to offer a way of thinking about the state as a differentiated relationally enacted fantasy entity which comes to be through what I call ‘relational politics’. I develop this approach in an effort to respond to critiques of the neoliberal state which continue to prioritise its disciplinary powers and which themselves often remain framed through (unstated) liberal rationalist assumptions around who and/or what is inside or outside of the state, who and/or what is acted upon by such a disciplining state and by implication who and/or what can or can’t affect change. From the point of view of a feminist psychosocial decolonially informed analysis of how the state comes to be such critiques can feed into, rather than challenge cynicism around state failure relating to its incapacity to resolve the troubling anxiety producing problem of social inequality. They risk supporting rather than averting the (neo)liberal fantasy ideal of the state that they seek to critique.
Rather than abandoning the state to its melancholic suicide via neoliberalism, I am interested in exploring the possibilities for renewal and reparation which potentially come from ‘within’ the state through its relational politics. Not by its institutional structures and processes, but from its ongoing everyday ethical life. It is this multiple, messy and uncontrollable agency constitutive of the everyday state, rather than the idealised coherent singular abstracted state of (neo)liberal fantasies, that the idea of relational politics seeks to capture. By focusing on relational politics, I am drawing attention to the way in which the state comes to be through the ongoing negotiation of subjective loss, which is at its heart, a process of constantly resisting hegemonic foreclosure around difference. There is always (potentially) resistant agency within the state. It is therefore through this focus on relational politics that we can start to ask different questions around power/agency and subjectivity in the enactment of the state itself. My aim is to shift analytic attention away from ‘big’ politics conceptualised through ideas of institutional structures, social norms and ideologies to what Tess Lea thinks of as ‘the normative state of being the state’ where ‘being the state is the self, a self-state which shapes desire and emotional investment, the visceral medium through which the myth of rational state enterprise is vivified’ (Lea, 2012, pp. 116–117). From this point of view on relational politics the state is, after all, not that different from other sorts of everyday relations. To abandon it would be to abandon ourselves.
References
Hunter, S. (2015) Power, Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance? London: Routledge.
Lea, T. (2012) When looking for anarchy, look to the state: fantasies of regulation in forcing disorder within the Australian indigenous state. Critique of Anthropology, 32(2), 109-124.
Conceptualizing Postemotional Justice in the Courts
Stjepan Mestrovic Department of Sociology, Texas A & M University
Over 95% of persons who are charged with a crime in the United States are convicted, and the incarceration rate is the highest in the world—well above China, Russia, and nations that are commonly depicted as not having a Western human rights tradition. This seemingly totalitarian trend in a democratic society is achieved through a combination of the following techniques: the plea bargain, vague definitions of conspiracy, the Reid Technique and Reid-like techniques of interrogation, and minimum mandatory sentencing laws. But this modernist depiction of the legal justice system fails to account for the fact that at every step of the legal process and at the heart of each of these techniques there is an allusion to the Natural Rights tradition of the accused being innocent until proven guilty, of possessing Constitutional rights, being treated with dignity and respect, having access to the most fair judicial system in the world etc. I attempt to explain this anomaly broadly by applying what I call postemotional social theory. The ancient tradition of Natural Rights is re-interpreted, re-conceptualized, and subjected to desiccation of emotional import. Interpreting the theories of Thorstein Veblen, David Riesman, Emile Durkheim and others, I conceptualize postemotional legal justice as Veblen’s predatory use of the peaceable tradition of Natural Rights, Riesman’s other-directed and shallow misuse of inner-directed principles, and Durkheim’s original understanding of anomie as “derangement,” not the erroneous misunderstanding of it as “normlessness.” Case studies are used as illustration.
Neoliberal Stigma Power
Imogen Tyler Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
What role does stigma play in (re)producing social inequalities in the context of neoliberal capitalism? This paper draws together sociological research on poverty, racism, disability, stigma and shame, with geographical perspectives on the activation of stigma at different scales (governmental, policy, media industries), to consider the function of stigma as a central technique of neoliberal governmentality. This approach has been inspired by Loïc Wacquant’s argument that one of the major characteristics of neoliberalism is conditions of heightened stigmatization for minority subjects ‘in daily life as well as in public discourse’ (2008: 24–5). This argument is supported by empirical research, for example John Hills and Peter Taylor-Gooby in the UK, have detailed a growing stigmatisation of poverty (Taylor-Gooby, 2013; Hills, 2015). Similarly, the ESRC- project, ‘Shame, social exclusion and the effectiveness of anti-poverty programmes: A Study of Seven Countries’ (2010-2012) details a marked shift from policies concerned with alleviating poverty shame, to forms of policy making designed to activate stigma in ways which ‘support the unequal distribution of resources in society’ (Walker, 2015). This paper seeks to further explicate an account of stigma as a cultural and political economy through which neoliberalism is socially realised. In doing, it departs from Goffman-esq micro-sociological accounts of stigma, turning instead to ‘minority knowledges of stigma’ within postcolonial and critical race theory, work on class and value and disability studies. Drawing on this alternative lineage of stigma-thinking, the paper explicates how neoliberalism is legitimated through the activation and proliferation of (historical) stigmas, tried, tested and reworked strategies ‘of domination, dispossession, expropriation, exploitation, and violence’ (Weheliye, 2014, p. 1).