Emotional Governance: New Ideas on Media and Democratic Leadership

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Emotional Governance Politics, Media and Terror

Barry Richards

Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror

Also by Barry Richards CAPITALISM AND INFANCY (editor) IMAGES OF FREUD CRISES OF THE SELF (editor) DISCIPLINES OF DELIGHT THE DYNAMICS OF ADVERTISING (with I. MacRury and J. Botterill)

Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror Barry Richards Professor of Public Communication Bournemouth University, UK

© Barry Richards 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 13: 978–0–230–00839–7 hardback ISBN 10: 0–230–00839–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Preface and Acknowledgements Chapter 1

viii

Introduction: The Case for Emotional Governance

1

The three levels of emotional regulation Emotional governance The problem with psychology Preview

1 4 7 10

Part I

19

A Democracy of Feelings

Chapter 2

Shaping the Public Mind

21

Shapers and movers The psychosocial matrix The age of suspicion The reality of the group mind

21 24 25 25

Chapter 3

30

The Rise of Therapeutic Culture

Audiences want affect The nature of the therapeutic The damaged princess Authentic expression or fake sentiment?

30 33 35 40

Chapter 4

43

Global Passions

Charisma and its alternatives Boring: the problem of dis-passionate politics The inrushing world Parliaments of feeling

43 44 48 52

Part II

55

Chapter 5

The Bias Against Hope Journalism as Emotional Labour

The emotional public sphere News consumption and anxiety management Containment and the media Emotional work in news production Keeping calm about terror

v

57 57 58 61 64 66

vi Contents

Chapter 6

Rottweilers Savage Democracy

72

The national conversation The damage Cultures of attack Any passion is better than none?

72 73 78 79

Chapter 7

83

Challenging the Media Bias

Emotional agendas in journalism Web space The three literacies Journalism and the regulation of public feeling

83 85 87 88

Part III

The Search for Connection

91

Politics as Emotional Labour

93

Hoping for something Politics and popularity The leader as person Reparation Authenticity on stage The wrong hands on the levers of power?

93 94 96 99 101 104

Chapter 9

107

Chapter 8

Poor Emotional Governance

The anti-smirking campaign and other failures Terror and impoverished thought

107 113

Part IV

121

Terror in the Public Mind

Chapter 10

The Four Factors of Fear

123

The political importance of the fear of terrorism Historical context: war without end? What makes us anxious? Some conclusions

123 128 130 135

Chapter 11

137

Terrorism and the Emotional Public

Why and how to conduct an emotional audit Polls and passions Are terrorists on another planet?

137 138 149

Chapter 12

156

From Emotional Audit to Communication Strategy

The binary media discourse of terror Public-media interactions Improving emotional governance around terror

156 162 164

Contents vii

Part V

Repairing Leadership

Chapter 13

Market Failures

169 171

The language of political marketing Political marketing and a political psychology of emotions Marketing and the crisis of leadership Fear, security and the limits of political marketing

171 172 176 180

Chapter 14

183

Deferring to Reality

Emotional education Fantasies of renewal Leadership and reality

183 184 188

Notes

195

References

205

Author Index

215

Subject and Name Index

218

Preface and Acknowledgements Amidst the profusion of theory and commentary on topics such as ‘emotionalisation’ and ‘therapeutic culture’, this book aims to build an argument for placing the management of emotion at the centre of leadership, whether political, corporate or socio-cultural. It seeks to identify some more or less universally applicable concepts, pertaining to the individual and collective emotional lives of citizens, and to suggest that there are opportunities for leaders to develop communication strategies which will increase the chances for effective and enriching democratic cultures to develop. The book also addresses the problem of terrorism, in that the broad politics of terror, the media coverage of terrorism, and the public’s feelings around it, provide most of the examples and case studies. Not only is terrorism a topic around which strong emotions arise, but it is also – and in large part because of its emotional impact – a key issue in the present development of liberal democracies. Academic writers have a particular difficulty, in this age of academic over-production. So much is written, and so much of it is destined to be little read. It can be hard to sustain faith in the value of the academic project, as one scrabbles about in the analysis of fine-grained detail when what most people want and need to see is the bigger picture. But if the devil is in the detail, so also is the prize of an understanding which reflects and connects with the complexity of the world. The task is to embed the systematic rigour in conceptual and empirical work, which characterises the academic project at its best, into the larger brush strokes which can be seen from outside academia. Academia is not for most of its inhabitants the place of unhurried reflection which it may once have been for some, nor is it necessarily any easier to take the long or broad view from there than anywhere else. In fact, the opposite may at times be true. The growth of higher education as a social institution has been accompanied by the fragmentation of much intellectual labour into ever-multiplying subspecialisms. In seeking to overcome the limiting effect which this can have on the development and circulation of ideas, by bridging across the fragmented field, one risks falling in the cracks between different audiences. This book has no doubt failed to make many of the connections it could, but hopefully for some readers at least it will provide viii

Preface and Acknowledgements ix

encounters with helpful new ideas, and an excursion into territory where the familiar and unfamiliar come up against each other in fruitful ways. I am indebted to a number of colleagues and friends, over a long period, for helpful comments on drafts of different parts of the book, and on work that fed into it, and for conversations about different aspects of politics and communication: Philip Boys, Mark Brayne, Joanne Brown, Andrew Cooper, Christine Daymon, Karl Figlio, Pat Holland, Roman Gerodimos, Justin Frank, Andrew Hoskins, Dan Jackson, Stephen Jukes, Darren Lilleker, Kevin Moloney, James Park, Gavin Rees, Richard Scullion, Philip Seib, Chindu Sreedharan. My deepest thanks are to Jo and Maria, and the book is dedicated to them.

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1 Introduction: The Case for Emotional Governance

The three levels of emotional regulation This book is about the fundamental problem of how human societies manage the passions and anxieties of their members. This is a problem in two senses. It is an intellectual problem in that we do not fully understand the complex dynamics of our collective emotional life, and it is a practical problem – perhaps the deepest there is, posing greater threats than any political or ecological crisis – in that the destructive emotions which have always fuelled strife and war continue to ignite around the world, with increasing unpredictability in times of rapid global change on all fronts. So although the book focuses on certain issues which may be thought of as being in the politics-and-media area of academic study and of public debate, it is also a contribution to thinking about these larger problems, in the simple, progressive belief that improved understanding of collective emotions can help to limit some of the damaging mobilisations of those emotions, and can stimulate their more life-affirming forms. Very broadly speaking, there are three levels on which a society manages emotion.1 1. The cultural processes of everyday life, meaning the ways in which the ordinary exchanges between people and the mundane practices of life provide us with channels and structures for the raw materials of human sentiment. 2. Institutional structures, from the constitutions of states to management structures in organisations. 3. Communications in the public sphere, namely the content and style of the messages (political, commercial, corporate) which surround us. 1

2 Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror

1. Firstly, the most basic of these is that of the rudimentary fabric of culture, as expressed in the conversations and rituals and other shared practices of everyday life, and in the structures and habits of the familial and intimate sphere. In the often taken-for-granted processes of work routines, leisure activities and interpersonal exchanges are found the deepest and broadest resources for the management of emotion: for containing anxiety, neutralising anger, alleviating guilt, satisfying needs for attachment and pleasure, and so on. In much of the contemporary world, especially in liberal democracies, this ambient and infrastructural resource is now found in a fusion of popular culture and consumer culture. In popular entertainments and in the symbolic and material world of consumption we can find profound resources for emotional self-management. In a previous work (Disciplines of Delight, 1994) I argued that consumption-based popular culture provides powerful ways of confronting and managing the basic tensions and anxieties of modern life. It does so by offering experiences which combine libidinal pleasure and autonomy with a sense of social membership and, ultimately, of reconciliation with the limits placed on us by that membership through the actions of authorities representing the collective other. In recent decades the ‘therapeutic’ turn in popular culture, of which more later, has added considerably (albeit in a mixed way) to our resources for emotional regulation. 2. Secondly, ‘above’ this deep cultural stratum there is another still very fundamental level of societal material for the management of emotion. This is at the level of the dominant institutions of a specific society, including the fundamental constitution of its polity, its policing and justice systems, its educational and welfare institutions, and the bodies through which its economic life is organised. There are extensive bodies of research and writing on emotions in education, and in health and welfare services, parts of which (e.g. remedial education, the general educational focus on ‘personal development’, and the mental health services) are to a degree explicitly projects of emotional repair or regulation. The role that commercial corporations play in the emotional lives of their employees has long been studied within management research and by human resources specialists. Less studied to date are the ways in which the basic rules of a society as laid down in its constitution and in its civil and criminal law are important influences on the shaping, expression and management of emotion amongst its citizens. The scope for important work in this field is indicated in an interesting review of the origins of the USA constitution by Glenn Swogger, Jr. (2001). He stresses the psychological

Introduction: The Case for Emotional Governance 3

sophistication of the constitution’s founders, for example in their awareness of negative and selfish aspects of human nature, and of the need to contain narcissistic aspects of leaders, and notes how the constitution embodies a ‘tense balance between optimism and pessimism’ (p. 358). Constitutions must provide ways of managing and coordinating conflicting interests in a society that provide models for how individuals manage their own internal conflicts. According to the political sociologist Mabel Berezin (2002; 2003), the security brought by the democratic nation-state orders emotional life on a template of security, confidence and comfort.2 More specifically, the forms that democratic processes take provide models or channels for feeling, and help define our emotional stances towards government. There are a number of important debates here which could be opened up by the use of psychological analysis. For example, the sociologist of emotions Jack Barbalet (2006) has suggested that the secret ballot generates feelings of impotence and loneliness in the voter, who knows that his or her individual vote is in itself almost certain to be of little significance and who will therefore be pulled towards shame and depression, and may disengage politically as a consequence. In contrast, the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1950) saw the secret ballot as the essence of the psychological maturity of democratic systems, in that it provides a clear space for individuals to take full responsibility for their choices. We can see then that examining the emotional meanings of political forms may raise more questions than it answers, but is likely nonetheless to enhance our overall understanding of politics. Similarly, criminal law and the judicial system express and reinforce particular ways of defining personal responsibility and ways of managing antisocial, guilty, reparative and retributive feelings. There will again be competing psychological evaluations of how these feelings are best managed. All these issues concerning emotion, democracy and the law could be the subject of a complementary inquiry to the one pursued here, but will not be addressed in this book. 3. Our concerns here will be with the third level, the one least rooted in the deep social fabric but still a very potent level of emotional management: that of communications. In a way this takes us back to the deepest level, that of everyday life, since the communications of which we speak here are those that swarm around the everyday media sphere, the public communications that comprise much of the ordinary person’s experience of politics and commerce. The difference is that on the deepest level we are talking about direct interpersonal interaction and


the individual’s material, sensual experiences of shopping, sport and so on. Here, at the ‘upper’ level of mediated communications, we are talking about shared experiences of the symbolic communications produced for public consumption via the broadcast and print media and/or via the web.3 These communications (whether they are about politics, or about consumer goods) will use, often as their main raw material, symbols and meanings residing at the deepest levels of culture, but the development of communication strategies and the production of specific messages is an activity that occurs at specific social locations. These are increasingly specialised ones, some of them of relatively recent origin (political aide, speech writer, press and communications officer, marketing communications manager, advertising copy-writer, director of corporate communications, public relations consultant, etc.). They are deliberate activities which, in principle, are much more open to change and reshaping than are the basic symbolic components of culture found in the first level described above (though these can of course themselves change, sometimes quite swiftly). In another previous work (The Dynamics of Advertising, with Iain MacRury and Jackie Botterill, 2000) I ventured into the study of one specific area of managed communication as a vehicle for emotional management, namely advertising for consumer goods and how it interacts with the anxieties of its consumer audiences. In this book I am turning, with partly similar aims, to the study of political communications, as a broad category of increasingly managed communication with large potential for use in citizens’ emotional self-regulation. This in turn brings us into thinking about the media, not only as the conduit for politicians’ messages to us but also as a major, autonomous producer of political communications. ‘The media are American’, it used to be said,4 with reference to the global influence of American culture. Today, it would be more accurate and illuminating to say ‘the media are emotional’.

Emotional governance This book takes some ideas which have been developed recently in studies of how our media help to shape our politics. It combines these ideas with a psychological approach to understanding the relationship between leaders and the public. The result is a new language for understanding political leadership, and a contribution to the development of a new style of leadership. This new style is not mere style, but carries


with it a change of substance, in a growing concern for the emotional dimensions of the public and its opinions, and of the political issues which confront us. There are already signs that this development is spontaneously underway, but the book argues for a more strategic approach, which it calls ‘emotional governance’, a deliberate and sophisticated attention, through mass-mediated communications, to the emotional dynamics of the public. It is commonplace to observe that much of what we see around us in the social world is determined not only by material and formal institutional power but also by processes in the symbolic realm, in the play of images and words, in contesting rhetorics and in propaganda wars. And it is increasingly common to hear social scientists and others recognise that this importance of the symbolic means, or at least includes, the importance of emotions. The cultural turn in sociology has been followed by an affective turn. An understanding of the sources and nature of affect or emotion in the individual can now be seen as essential to understanding culture, and specifically in understanding the nature and effects of the intensive communication practices which increasingly fill our public sphere with symbolic and rhetorical material. The rise of the therapeutic – and with it the growth of needs for emotional management – is occurring in all social spheres, from the intimate to the international. We can see this reflected in a spectrum of academic work, running from, for example, studies of the ‘emotionally intelligent’ manager in the organisation (Fineman, 2000; Goleman et al., 2002), through analyses of ‘spin’ by national governments (Franklin, 1998; Jones, 2000), and of forces driving social movements (Goodwin et al., 2001) to the theory of ‘soft power’ on the international stage (Nye, 2004). What do these researches, or rather the activities they study, have in common? In all these phenomena, at whatever level of social grouping they occur, there is strategic and tactical communication management based on some understanding (even though this may be largely implicit) of the symbolic and emotional significance of particular communications. The economic power of the corporation and the effectiveness of its relationships with all stakeholders rest increasingly heavily on the management, through external communications, of its brand values, its corporate image and its reputation. Also, good internal communications which are sensitive to the anxieties and emotional needs of employees are necessary to secure the morale, commitment and creative participation of people within organisations.


At the international level, the military and economic power of the US is insufficient to impose its preferred arrangements in Iraq and elsewhere, and the ‘War on Terror’, if it has meaning and legitimacy at all, is fundamentally a hearts and minds operation. Public diplomacy, in which attempts are made to manage collective perceptions of and emotional responses to the image of a nation, is now an essential component of conduct on the international stage. This observation does not prejudge any activity of this sort. Any particular public diplomacy objective may be part of an effort towards good emotional governance, or may be part of, for example, a manipulative strategy based on a neoimperialist agenda. At the level of national government, the ascendancy of image and affect is such that we can now speak, as does the political marketing theorist Nicholas O’Shaughnessy (2003), of the ‘symbolic state’. For example, the restoration or maintenance of a good-enough sense of citizenship amongst enough people, and the creation of a more inclusive and cohesive national culture, depend in large part on the success of government communications in striking emotional notes that inspire identification and strengthen prosocial impulses. The term ‘governance’ is used here in a wide sense, much broader than ‘government’ or ‘management’ as understood organisationally, to mean basically the general management of society. Following Colin Crouch (2005), it includes the exercise of power within the polity (by government, and via the law), mechanisms for the conduct of economic life (the market, and corporate hierarchy), and patterns of social connection such as the association, the community and the network.5 Emotional governance takes place in all these modes, and also, as we will see, in the content of the media and its effects upon media consumers. The general concept of ‘governance’ is attracting positive interest at present from growing numbers of academics in various disciplines. For some, this goes against the grain. ‘Governance’ implies a top-down process, and as such it may attract the spontaneous suspicion of those who tend to reserve their appreciation for bottom-up processes, that is for the activities of those who are governed, ruled and managed, not of those doing the governing. There is a widely-felt antagonism to power, shared by neo-liberals and by those of left-liberal outlook, an antagonism which might lead some to study ‘governance’ only in order to critique it. Perhaps this element of the left-liberal mindset is much weaker now that it was, but many of those working in social theory, psychoanalytic studies, and media and cultural studies have tended in


the past to generate critique of, and often outright opposition to, the policies and agendas of governments and other authorities. This book has its academic sources in those disciplines, yet it identifies with the project of governance. As such, perhaps the book is part of a post-9/11 shift in the concerns of some intellectuals (though its basic ideas had been developed prior to that date), a shift towards an appreciation of the value and the difficulties of political authority. This sympathy with the tasks of democratic governance is accompanied by an analysis of the failure of governments, and of the political classes generally, to move emotionally with the times. It also foregrounds a highly critical assessment of the role of political journalism in contributing to the currently poor quality of emotional governance. Amongst the most difficult and pressing tasks facing many governments now is the management of social tensions and conflicts flowing from globalisation, around issues of global terrorism and how to understand and respond to it, inter-faith and inter-ethnic relations, immigration, and attitudes to the nation-state and to its democratic institutions. The need for sound emotional governance is particularly acute around these issues. But so also is the resistance to it from many sides. Overcoming this will require new skills from leaders, and new attitudes amongst the public. Emotional governance involves, amongst other things, taking the intuitive knowledge that advertising and public relations professionals may claim of some of the techniques of emotional communication, and placing it in a broader framework of principles and responsibility. So, unlike much of the other recent work in the field of politics and emotions, this book seeks to conjoin a psychoanalytic sociology of emotions with a focus on the mediation and management of political communications, in the belief that communication management is a necessary component of contemporary politics and a vital skill of democratic leadership.

The problem with psychology This belief sits uneasily alongside traditional modes of commitment to democracy, for which ‘management’ in any form may be an antithetical principle. Another important area of resistance to the idea that democracy needs some psychologically-oriented management is to the very idea of the ‘psychological’. It is striking how marginal psychology is to a lot of academic research on politics, especially in the area of politics and the media. In some other areas of media research, for example


into the effects of advertising and of violence on-screen, it is clear to everyone that psychological questions are central. But in much current work on politics in the media, and particularly on the relationship of mediatised politics to political participation, this is not so. We might speculate that this is because of a deep preconception which sees politics as a worldly discipline defined by its distinction from the inner life of the individual: a ‘masculinist’ preconception, it might be called, which is prepared to admit the feminising discipline of psychology to the worlds of leisure and consumption but not to affairs of government. However there is now a strong trend within academic research which is focusing on emotional dimensions of politics, albeit in different ways, and so what was previously a rather marginal concern in political psychology is now becoming mainstream political studies. This work has profound implications for how the relationship between reason and emotion is understood, and the traditional dichotomous opposition of reason and passion has come under serious challenge. For example the work of George Marcus and his colleagues (Marcus et al., 2000; Marcus, 2002; 2003) has promoted an argument for the integration of emotion into political psychology, based on a neuropsychological model of mental functioning. This model is very different in content from the one adopted here, although its implications for understanding politics may be similar. There is also a strong critique of rationalistic psychology from scholars writing about politics from backgrounds in psychoanalytic theory, where the reason/emotion dichotomy has never held sway (e.g. Barshack, 2000; Richards, 2004a; Rustin, 2001; Clarke, Hoggett and Thompson, 2006). Of course most studies of politics and media audiences must have some sort of psychology involved in them, if only implicitly, in order to conceptualise how audiences do things like make electoral choices and decide which media to consume, and how, if at all, they are influenced by what they consume. The most common psychological models in use are rational choice ones: people are seen as cognitive, rational actors making cost-benefit analyses or assessing ideological values. An influential example is the heuristic model of opinion formation, which says that when confronted with political choices, people will create heuristic devices to make sense of the task and generate some solutions. They will for example look to the party they support, and the leader they like, for guidance on what to think. This is seen as rational because it saves them the effort and anxiety of making a decision entirely independently.


This is a kind of psychology for which we do not need a specialised discipline of psychology. Rational choice models are available in economics, philosophy and common-sense. Unfortunately they are not adequate. A specialist psychology is needed to understand the irrationality of human behaviour, and to assess its role in specific contexts such as electoral participation. So psychology is required in the interdisciplinary effort to study politics and the media because it brings irrational dimensions of the political process under scrutiny. Of course this view would not be shared by all psychologists; some are happy to work in rationalist paradigms. But the argument of this book will be that these leave important parts of the problem unreached. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say ‘non-rational’ rather than ‘irrational’, so as not to pre-emptively narrow judgement about the precise nature of the processes involved. ‘Irrational’ implies disorder, or at least contradiction. Yet a decision may be taken on emotional not calculative grounds and still be quite consistent in its effects with rational calculations of interest. It would certainly be more tactful to use the term non-rational, since there is sometimes an aversion to entertaining the idea that human affairs are conducted irrationally. The rationality of the electorate seems at times to be a sacred principle amongst some political scientists and commentators. It is not hard to understand why: as good democrats we want to believe that people are basically rational and not swayed by emotional impulses when fulfilling their duties as citizens. It would seem to demean the electorate to suggest otherwise. There are three reasons to set aside this protective sensibility. Firstly, as social scientists we should be more interested in truth than dignity. Secondly, we may find that if we undertake to explore the depths of human unreason, we might emerge with more confidence in the capacity of reason to prevail, and more understanding of how this might be achieved. The third reason centres on the question of responsibility. In many political debates there is a lot of blaming going on, that is to say attributions of responsibility for the problem to others, whether the ‘other’ is the out-of-touch or self-serving politician, the cynical or crass journalist, or the irresponsible or ignorant citizen. Psychological inquiries which examine the complex needs and motives which are often expressed in mundane behaviour can re-focus the attention of all participants on their own responsibilities for the problems we face. In popular perceptions of psychology it is frequently understood as absolving people of responsibility for their failings as citizens: ‘it’s not


their fault they are delinquent, they have been traumatised, they suffer from low self-esteem, they have been excluded’, and so on. Some kinds of psychology do seem to understand their mission in this way, as offering a simplistic environmentalism which typically lays the blame on an abstract ‘system’ (an approach which in the electoral context might run along the lines of: ‘it’s not their fault they don’t vote, the system doesn’t recognise their identities’). Other kinds, however, including the kind of psychoanalytic approach we will be drawing on in this book, are primarily concerned to identify the nature and extent of the individual’s responsibility for her or his actions, however much these also need to be understood in their social-systemic contexts. This approach does not absolve ‘the media’, but it does suggest a wide and complex distribution of responsibility for the ills of democracy. With these considerations in mind, this book aims to develop an analysis of emotional governance in a style that will appeal to the ‘general reader’, who may not be based in any of the disciplines that it draws on but who has an open-minded interest in the problems and possibilities of contemporary politics.6

Preview Part I

A democracy of feelings

This section introduces more fully the idea of emotional governance, the informed management – so far as is possible – of the emotional dynamics of the political public. It sets out key ideas which underpin the arguments of subsequent sections, and anticipates some of the objections which may be raised to them. Centrally, it outlines the emergence of ‘therapeutic culture’, thus setting the context for the analyses pursued in the rest of the book. Its diverse material includes commentary on topics ranging from changing entertainment genres on UK television to mass suicides, a discussion of what we mourn when we mourn the deaths of public figures, and an analysis of ‘boredom’. These and other topics are woven together in an account of contemporary cultural change and what this change means for politics, in particular for the communication of politics to the public. This account can be summarised as follows. Chapter 2 argues that publics are formed and re-formed in the processes of public communication. These processes are best analysed by an interdisciplinary approach which recognises the psychological dimensions of mass publics. The political public is formed by political communications, in the sense primarily of the communications of politicians and of jour-


nalists to media audiences. In assessing the impact of these communications, we need to take account of the cultural context, not least because it shapes the informal discourses which moderate the more formal ones. In this respect, the typical public in developed democracies has radically changed over the last three to four decades. There is an enveloping climate of suspicion, and, as Chapter 3 will show, our popular and civic cultures are now deeply emotionalised, in a ‘therapeutic’ mode. This is defined primarily in terms of how we now increasingly reflect on and in a sense manage our emotional lives, in order to achieve greater personal contentment and possibly also better functioning in some areas of activity. We have not changed at some fundamental level of our human nature as a consequence of these shifts. People 50 years ago were of course as full of emotions as they are today. However, the public presence of emotion has been much increased, as seen in the scale of some instances of public mourning. In exploring this issue, this section includes a new analysis of the public response to the death of Princess Diana, and a critique of recent hostile accounts of the rise of the therapeutic. These eruptions of affect, and other trends towards greater expressivity, have led some to fear the rise of an irrational, sentimental politics, in which large numbers of people are vulnerable to charismatic manipulation. This is a crucial issue, to be discussed later on. In much recent commentary, though, it is more the lack of passionate engagement in politics which has been troubling commentators. In Chapter 4, a discussion of the ‘bored’ voter will show how a psychological level of analysis adds to the understanding of political engagement, and is essential to the development of communication strategies aimed at revitalising democracy. Another overarching dimension of socio-cultural change is globalisation. Both as economically-driven homogenisation and unification, and as the export and universalisation of political, ethnic and religious conflicts, globalisation underpins key features of contemporary publics. Publics remain fundamentally national in their nature, and can remain so alongside or within the emergence of a global public. These national entities are threatened, however, by the import of divisions from the global stage, and by powerful flows of feeling around ethnic, religious and other cultural differences. Herein lies one of the most urgent needs for emotional governance. While at a fundamental level people are no more ‘emotional’ than they were, the long-standing neglect of the emotional dimensions of


the public by politicians, public authorities and professionals is no longer sustainable. This neglect has not of course meant that public figures do not on occasions strike powerfully emotional notes in their communications with the public. Nor has it meant that there have been no manipulations of public feeling. The neglect has been rather in the lack of sustained, open-minded consideration of the emotional dynamics of the public. This would involve some analysis of the emotional meanings of policy choices and communication strategies, and of what these meanings imply for the life of democracy. The absence of such analysis is now increasingly consequential, and the neglect less tolerable. Thus the need for more skilled emotional governance is more widely felt. Practitioners of this governance need to involve themselves in the great ‘democracy of feelings’ which is the constant emotional accompaniment to formal democracy. Part II

The bias against hope

In this part of the book it will be argued that the media, and political journalists in particular, have a crucial role to play in the provision of this governance, by facilitating – and to some extent exercising – leadership roles in the national and transnational democracies of feeling which we now inhabit. However, their present contribution to the democratic process is, in its emotional dimensions, deeply problematic. There are growing numbers of critics of journalism’s negativity, its cynical and pessimistic framing of political issues which can be said to add up to a systematic bias against hope. Some have put this in a broader cultural context, for example Deborah Tannen in her important description of our ‘argument culture’ (1997). Others, from within or close to journalism, have focused on how changes in the media industry and in the relations between journalists and politicians have laid the ground for the now-prevailing culture of journalistic contempt for democratic leaders. Chapter 5 will explain the concept of ‘emotional labour’, as a way of understanding the role and responsibilities of journalists. Developed in sociological studies of service workers, this concept can be deployed to understand how journalists mediate feelings as well as facts to their audiences, and thus play a crucial role in building the emotional environment within which politics happens. The psychoanalytic concept of containment is presented as a model for the management of public feeling. The reporting of terror attacks is taken as an example to illustrate how journalism can be more or less containing of the anxieties of the public.


Adversarial and cynical journalism tends to make the news less rather than more containing, even to play an emotionally toxic role in political culture, in that it can intensify public anxieties, exacerbate social divisions and enervate democracy. In Chapter 6 it will be argued that the roots of this confrontational journalism lie at least as much in cultural changes as in the market economics of the media industry. The same broad current of post-1960s cultural change that brought emotionalisation and therapeutic culture also brought oppositionality to the forefront of public debate, and dark suspicions of all public authority to the hearts of the cultural elite who dominate much mediatised political discourse. The result to date is a set of deeply entrenched professional values based on an emotional stance which is central to the professional identities of many of the individuals involved. However Chapter 7 proposes that there are signs of change, and the influence of therapeutic sensibilities could come to be felt within journalism as they have in many other professions. For example, current initiatives from within the profession to rethink war and conflict reporting may contribute to the emergence of a new journalistic style which replaces the ‘rottweiler’ approach with a more civil and thoughtful model for the media’s relationship to political authority. It will be argued that journalists need higher levels of ‘emotional literacy’, not only to enhance their own professional satisfaction and well-being, but to underpin their contribution to the public sphere. Also, the potential of the web to enhance that contribution is noted. Part III

The search for connection

Next, the idea of emotional labour is applied to politicians and their tasks of communicating with and governing the public. A key context, outlined in Chapter 8, is the increasing convergence between politics and popular culture, including some aspects of celebrity culture. The increasingly emotionalised domain of popular culture offers new opportunities as well as new imperatives for politicians to extend their communication repertoires in response to demands for emotional connection with voters, and for qualities such as ‘empathy and ‘contact’. Noting the rationalistic bias of much research in political science, we draw on psychoanalytic theories of individual development in proposing a model of democratic leadership based on the concepts of containment, reparation and authenticity. Containment is seen as a process whereby a social institution or public figure can play a crucially constructive role in the dynamics of the collective public mind. It


involves acknowledging and sharing the anxieties of the public, and modelling ways in which they can be tolerated without recourse to divisive language and policies. Reparation, in psychoanalytic understanding, is also essential to emotional well-being. It is the basis of all altruistic and public-spirited action. It has deep psychic roots in individuals’ recognition of their own aggressive impulses and potential for destructive thoughts and behaviours, and in the consequent needs to help, to restore, to cure, or to make good in some way. (It can however easily be conscripted into political causes which do not in effect contribute to these outcomes.) Behaving and communicating in a way which facilitates containment and reparation requires public figures to put more of their personal selves into the public domain, and to be seen to be doing so authentically, although the differentiation of the authentic from the false is of course problematic. This model can, in theory at least, distinguish clearly between democratic emotional governance and demagogic emotional manipulation. A selection of recent, mixed examples of communications about terrorism from both the Blair and Bush governments is dissected in Chapter 9 in order to ground this distinction in practice, following the analysis of some messages from the UK 2005 General Election campaign as a case study in poor emotional communication. In both election and terror discourses, weak or misjudged attempts at emotional governance, or at emotional manipulation, are found to be the norm. The urgent desire to connect with the electorate has not yet driven politicians to embrace better communication strategies which could both aid the general public in its efforts to improve its emotional selfmanagement, and secure an electoral advantage for one party. Part IV

Terror in the public mind

This Part offers a case study in emotional governance. Chapter 10 examines the complex amalgam of psychological and societal forces which determine the nature and sources of fears about terrorism. Chapter 11 introduces and applies the idea of conducting an ‘emotional audit’ of the public, in this case to map out the distribution of fear, anger and other feelings on the issue of terror. In Chapter 12 we move on to examine the production by media and politicians of the public discourse on terror in the US and UK. It shows how that discourse is impoverished, cognitively as well as emotionally, and polarised, between a simplistic ‘War on Terror’ paradigm and its oppositional equivalent. The former sees it as the expression of an absolute inhuman evil, the latter as the expression of a sense of injustice and


frustration which, however extreme it may be in this form, we can all identify and to a degree sympathise with. Both these models of terrorism are based on emotional one-dimensionality, and linked to empirically unsupportable assertions about the nature of the terrorist threat. Neither model can therefore contain the range and depth of public feelings (of anxiety, anger, resentment and guilt especially) which circulate around the topic, and so those feelings can then continue to circulate with increasing toxicity. A third model found in the media discourse is simply fear-based: it construes terrorism as above all an explosive force which must not be provoked. This whole discourse, given its emotional inadequacy and lack of containment functionality, is likely to build public anxiety diffusely, rather than to defuse it or guide it to appropriate targets. It is also contributing to the erosion of social cohesion in these countries, and to the undermining of trust in the capacity of democratic states to respond effectively to terrorism. Examples of good emotional governance around the threat of terrorism are hard to find. Although security is an area where governments traditionally tend to enjoy higher levels of public approval and support than elsewhere, it is also one where in the UK and US they are at risk of serious collapse of trust, unless a degree of greater emotional realism is brought to bear on the communication strategies around it. The impact of the media discourses of terror on terrorists themselves also comes under consideration when the emotional audit of the public and its sub-groups is seen in relation to the audit of news content. Part V

Repairing leadership

Finally, we ask what the analyses developed in the rest of the book imply for the future of democratic leadership, and how the therapeutic trend and the development of the emotional public may be related to a revival and redefinition of democratic process. In relation to globalisation, we are witnessing the development of a world public around global media and some degree of cultural homogenisation and convergence. This carries exciting possibilities for change in the dynamics of public emotion. For example, interventions to provoke or contain anxiety can now more easily be made across national boundaries, and though effective containment is still fundamentally a national project, it must closely address the events on the world stage which increasingly influence the ways in which anxiety is mobilised. And in relation to the emotionalising of society, there have been in recent years some changes in politics which may be favourable to creative responses to


the ‘triumph of the therapeutic’, for example in the rise of political marketing and its emphases on communication management and on aesthetic dimensions of politics (Axford and Huggins, 2002), which are discussed in Chapter 13. Although widely (and sometimes rightly) scorned as manipulative, these trends at least create a space for focusing on emotional aspects of politics. Indeed marketing has always in a sense been about emotional messages. However, in party political advertising, where we might expect to find the most development of a marketing-led sensitivity to public emotions, we often find insensitivity. Moreover there is a limit to the overall applicability of the marketing paradigm in politics. This is shown clearly in the key case of terrorism, where security considerations take precedence over marketing ones, and where the citizen is in a more dependent relationship to the government than the consumer is to the producers of goods and services. There is a much older topic in political psychology that is clearly of relevance to the discussion of how the political class can respond to the need for emotional governance. This is the personalities of leaders. The capacities for offering containment and reparation are all fundamentally linked to personality. Personalities change with cultural change, to a degree, in the sense that individuals can change with their cultural environments, but more in the sense that new generations bring new personality types. The dynamics of generational renewal and leadership change are discussed, especially in relation to the nowdominant appeal of youthfulness in aspiring leaders. The possibility of securing leaders with good emotional literacy, or of requiring a ‘sentimental education’ for aspiring leaders, is discussed. The analysis in Chapter 14 also stresses the importance today of how leaders invite identification from others, what narratives they give of failure, recovery, damage and repair in their own experiences, and what qualities of emotional contact with others they convey. It highlights the value today of leaders bearing scars of one kind or another, and of their offering narratives about themselves which acknowledge their flaws. It suggests that emotional governance should now be an explicit item on the agenda of national leaders, thus adding a crucial dimension to recent arguments for the ‘restyling’ and ‘narrativisation’ of politics. Further, we argue that changed political cultures call forth different types of people for leadership roles. Also, the ‘compression’ of public space which has dissolved boundaries between spheres of activity has opened up possibilities for public figures in other spheres to contribute to political leadership (e.g. figures from the world of pop music in rela-


tion to global poverty issues). For all these reasons we can expect significant diversification in the personal histories and emotional styles of political leaders in the coming years. In particular, the presentation of politicians themselves as damaged but repaired persons will play an increasingly significant role not only in electoral contests but in the general relationship of citizens to leaders. The book ends hopefully (and in keeping idealistically with an objective the present UK government has proffered of restoring ‘respect’) with an argument for a renewal of deference as the public’s contribution, which the media will need to initiate and support, to the repair of leadership. This cannot however be deference in a traditional sense; it will need to be a critical deference, a reflexive respect aware of its own ambivalence. This state of mind will always defer to its own reality sense, and therefore to those leaders whose presentations of reality are judged to be most real, i.e. whose personalities seem most authentic and whose policy analyses and prescriptions seem most grounded in reality. Since the latter can be hard, if not impossible, for an ordinary person to judge, the importance of the former is set to increase. Amidst the much-documented (though often over-simplified) collapse of trust, we must imagine new forms of respect that are emotionally realistic, in that they acknowledge the scale of contemporary disillusionment, but which can help to facilitate the work of leadership, and to define sustainable contracts between leaders, media and publics.


Part I A Democracy of Feelings


2 Shaping the Public Mind

Shapers and movers Who are ‘the American people’? What is ‘the British public’? The ‘public’ today is, throughout the world, a complex and changing phenomenon. This is a challenge for marketers, who need to know how to address the consuming public. And it is a problem for politicians, most of whom are looking for the most effective and inclusive ways of speaking to their electorates. What is at stake here, in the politicians’ search for that elusive connection with citizens, is not primarily the electoral success of this or that party or leader, but the success and contentment of our societies. The most serious threats today to the developed democracies come from within our societies. Notwithstanding the reality of some external threats, we must be most concerned about the new social divides which have opened up in our ‘postmodern’ social landscapes with their greater ethnic and cultural diversity, their internationalised post-industrial economies, their inequalities and their moral flux. In particular, since 9/11 and the terrorist attacks on Madrid and London, many Western countries have faced increasingly acute threats to social cohesion, centring around the apparent rejection of liberal democracy by some Islamist groups and the concomitant fear that Muslims face alienation and hostility1 from the rest of their national home publics. Managing such tensions and averting serious conflict has become a key task of government, a major part of which is concerned with the emotions triggered or generated by the insecurities and – at least for some – the disappointments of modern life. ‘Emotional governance’ means a deliberate and sophisticated attention to the emotional dynamics of the public, as part of the work of 21


government as well as of corporations and non-governmental social authorities. If effectively pursued, it will enhance the prospects for national leaders to speak authentically and inclusively to their publics, and thereby increase their capacity to shape patterns of public feeling. The fears of social engineering or even of totalitarian government which the phrase ‘emotional governance’ may evoke for some readers will be addressed in various parts of the book. It will be argued that contrary to these fears, the development of proactive emotional governance could be a crucial contribution to the maintenance and enhancement of robust and secure democracies, through the optimal management of the powerful and sometimes destructive emotions which are always at work in any social collective. What futures can be imagined for the publics to which we all belong? And in particular, what is the future for the political public, for the public as citizens? Can we shape the public of the United States, or of the United Kingdom, or of anywhere, in such a way as to strengthen democracy and deepen social cohesion? This book is a small contribution to the large work of finding positive answers to this question. It may be objected that the phrase ‘shaping the public’ is a curious, even a dangerous, one. One might think that a ‘public’ is not a plastic entity, a thing to be shaped. It is just there, changing all the time but under the influence of deep historical forces – changes in the economy and in culture, developments in technology, and so on – which while not quite beyond all control are certainly beyond any deliberate design. But that is too accepting of the superficial appearance of the public as an objective reality. On further reflection it is clear that any public is, in part at least, produced by those who study it. This is most simply and obviously the case in relation to opinion polls. These tell us what our fellow citizens think in aggregate, which otherwise we would not know with such breadth and clarity, if at all. This knowledge then influences what we individually think, or are prepared to report that we think. This is a major example of reflexivity, of the ways in which monitoring, surveillance, information flows and feedback circuits of various sorts are intrinsic to the functioning of modern society. Publics are also shaped by those who seek to address them, including – crucially – politicians. Communications professionals of various sorts also have substantial formative influence on the public’s definition of itself. Journalists and marketing communicators are foremost in wielding this influence, and it will be an argument of this book that the communications professions do not always recognise in full the heavy responsibility they carry for the kind of public which we are or might become.

Shaping the Public Mind 23

So publics are shaped, whether inadvertently or by design. Who else contributes to that shaping, apart from journalists, marketers, politicians and opinion researchers? We can see that there are others, who help to create us as a public, who are not professional public communicators nor pollsters, though at a given moment they may be deliberately addressing the public. This includes intellectuals, artists, leaders in business and the professions, athletes and other celebrities, indeed anyone in the public eye, however briefly, who has something to offer in answer to the question of what the world is like and how we can best live in it. Many of these answers involve talk about feelings, and so direct us to the emotional dimensions of the public and its shaping. They are frequently not original, and may indeed often seem clichéd. The football manager philosophising after a game, the actor describing a battle with addiction, the television personality reflecting on her childhood, the writer of pop song lyrics defining love, the novelist presenting the inner lives of characters, the crime victim’s relative speaking of their loss, and the care worker interviewed in a documentary – to list a few notional examples – all contribute for better or worse to our shared cultural resources for managing our emotions. Directly or indirectly, they all report on their emotions and how they handle them. They are all ‘public counsellors’, in the sense of being people who offer us counsel on, or an example of, emotional selfregulation. Of course we need the media to bring us these contributions, but they emanate from outside the actual business of professional mass communication, and are less likely to be beholden to the pragmatic, commercially-driven models of communication that characterise marketers, many journalists and – some would say – too many politicians. Such pragmatism has its necessary and large place in the world, but we also need the more autonomous contributions of other public figures. At their best, these may originate in the resourcefulness of the public itself, and its capacity for creativity and change. We should therefore not lose sight of the influence of the public counsellors of popular culture, the arts and everyday life, and of the public’s capacity for reshaping itself. But in the chapters that follow, we will focus on the professional roles of journalists and politicians in contributing to shaping the public, and specifically to the process of public emotion management. Their task will be seen as that of expressing and guiding public emotion. To an extent, therefore, the implicit background perspective is that of the public authorities. As was noted in Chapter 1, this is relatively unusual in a book whose main academic sources are in the characteristically ‘critical’ trades of social theory,


psychoanalysis, media and cultural studies. Those readers whose natural preference is more for criticising authority than empathising with it can hopefully still find the ideas here of value, even when they may lead to specific policy positions which they oppose.

The psychosocial matrix In any case we should not suggest that the public is entirely malleable, putty in the hands of skilled communicators, nor that ‘public opinion’ is just an echo chamber for the voices recorded by the pollsters. While we are as a public what we imagine ourselves to be, our imaginations are not fully controlled by the definitions on offer in the public communications which surround us. There are other forces feeding into the continual process of forming the public. Some are material, while others stem from psychological needs. These needs are endlessly elaborated and played with in all forms of communication, but have their fundamental sources in the biosocial substrate of human life – needs for nurture, attachment, safety and satisfaction. This psychological dimension of the public is not well-recognised in social and political research, and requires a broadening of the usual conceptual frameworks found in opinion research, audience studies, psephology and other ways of studying the public. It requires an interdisciplinary framework, and specifically what has been called in academic language a psychosocial one. While as individuals we are in a deep sense formed by our social experience, we also confront the social world as something outside us to which we relate. An awareness of how the psychic and the social interact, of how the mind of the individual and the institutions of society are connected, is in this view essential to understanding the social world. In the particular kind of psychosocial approach which informs this book, developments at a societal level, such as trends in public opinion and consumer behaviour, are seen to be influenced by the emotional responses of individuals to messages they are exposed to in the public field, especially when these responses are mediated by unconscious processes. Further, we will be considering collective dimensions of these processes. Our focus is on the ‘public’, which – however we define it – refers to a collective entity. So we will in part be looking at unconscious aspects of the collective, public mind. The processes by which this mind is shaped, knowingly or not, include containment, identification, collusion, reparation and splitting, and will be elaborated on in following chapters.


The age of suspicion There is nothing at all unusual these days about an interdisciplinary type of approach; one of the main developments in the social sciences in the last few decades has been the blurring and breaching of disciplinary boundaries. There is however still something unusual about an approach which places emphasis upon the ‘unconscious’, and even more so one which makes use of a notion of the ‘public mind’. The appearance of the psychoanalytic term ‘unconscious’ may invoke the stereotypical image of the mad Freudian, whose obsession with sexual meanings and the bizarre is out of touch with reality and therefore of little practical consequence. Alternatively, especially when paired with the concept of the ‘public mind’, it can trigger fears of the threatening, unscrupulous Freudian whose mission and whose power, whether on behalf of political or commercial interests, is to manipulate the collective mind of the public. This threat was portrayed in the scenario sketched a half century ago in Vance Packard’s 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders. Packard offered one of the first analyses of modern public communication which could lead people to assume the worst about the motives of those communicating with them en masse. The more naively trusting public of the mid-twentieth century was thus placed on the path towards habitual distrust, and led along it by commentators extending and generalising the kind of analysis Packard offered.2 We shall return later to the question of manipulation, which is foremost in some popular misunderstandings of psychoanalysis.3 Anyway, far more is at stake here than the reputation of psychoanalysis. The fear of manipulation now extends way beyond the patchy use of Freud by marketers, of which Packard wrote, and has come to include the great majority of public communications, whether they emanate from commercial corporations, politicians, or government bureaucracy. All messages in the public domain are now viewed with suspicion by some, perhaps most, of their intended audiences, and many messages are assumed to be attempts to deceive and manipulate us. (At the same time, though, we continue to be influenced by many of these messages, sometimes powerfully. Neither as individuals nor as a public do we occupy one simple mental position.) Recent debates about this crisis of trust are therefore an important context for much of what follows in later chapters.

The reality of the group mind Firstly, though, we need though to deal at a little more length with a particular suspicion some will have about the approach taken in this


book, concerning the concept of the ‘public mind’. A number of readers will feel somewhat uncomfortable with this term. Most of us freely use the notion of the ‘public’, and many are happy to speak of the ‘mind’. Joining the two, however, is not a simple matter. For some, it is a category mistake: a ‘mind’ is seen as, by definition, a property of an individual. For others, the ‘public’ is simply an aggregation of individuals, and we do not need an obscure, unobservable notion of a shared ‘public mind’ to explain it. Theodore Kemper (2002, p. 62), for example, prefers the term ‘emotions in groups’ to the ‘antiquated’ idea of a group mind. There are of course differences between the individual mind and ‘group’ mind, and the latter is to some extent a metaphor. However these differences do not weaken the argument that a public can be seen as a collective emotional entity, subject to an overall process of influence by events and by leaders. We will not go into the philosophical issues here, but will point briefly towards some strong evidence for giving this concept, or some version of it, its necessary place in understanding social phenomena. There are plenty of examples of collective psychology with which we are familiar. Amongst the most dramatic and best-known of these are the instances of mass suicide amongst religious sects which have been reported in recent decades, and which are modern, mass-mediated examples of a phenomenon stretching far back in time. It may be helpful to remind ourselves of the relatively recent catalogue. In Guyana in November 1978, over 900 members of the American People’s Temple poisoned themselves. In Texas in April 1993, 86 members of the Branch Davidian sect immolated themselves. In October 1993, 53 people killed themselves with primitive guns and other weapons in Vietnam. In 1994 and 1995, 74 members of the Order of the Solar Temple were found dead in three fires in Switzerland and Quebec. Thirty-nine members of Heaven’s Gate were found poisoned in March 1997, in California. And in March 2000 at least 235 people were burnt in a church in Uganda. In some of these cases it may not have been clear how many of the deaths were actually murders (in Guyana, Texas and Switzerland, some of the dead had been shot, perhaps involuntarily). However they are commonly (and accurately) referred to as ‘mass suicides’, and sinisterly bizarre though this phenomenon is, most people accept the term and thereby the implication of a collective mental process of some sort. Some common features of these episodes give clues as to the content and dynamics of this process. All of the above examples involve charismatic leaders, and all, except the Vietnamese one which differs in


several respects, involved ‘doomsday’ sects, which preached the imminence of the end of the world. Most were at odds with the authorities: the ‘Jonestown Massacre’ occurred after some members of the sect had killed a US senator and some journalists who had been inspecting their colony and had left with some sect members presumably taking the opportunity to get out. The Branch Davidians had been besieged for three months by US police. The leaders of the Order of the Solar Temple had been pursued for various criminal activities, including money-laundering and gun-running. There are of course striking similarities between these groups and some terrorist organisations, despite the obvious and crucial difference that the latter seek to kill others as well as, or instead of, themselves. The power of charismatic leaders, the conflicts with the state, the belief in impending cataclysm, and a vision of death and destruction as redemptive or liberatory, all characterise many contemporary terrorist movements as much as the ‘cults’. We will return to some of these features of terrorism in Part IV. For now, however, the point is that these groups demonstrate the human capacity for ideas and anxieties to grip the minds of a number of individuals simultaneously and for these people then to act in concert, even in irrational and self-destructive ways. Whatever their individual takes on the situation, whatever the doubts and perplexities they entertained, the people who died were, in their deaths, part of a group mind. That is to say, a sufficiently large segment of the mind of each person involved had been colonised by the collective passion. In the field of individual psychology it is fairly widely accepted that the study of disordered individuals, or of the minority of people at the extremes of a distribution of some characteristic, can throw light upon the workings of the well or ordinary person, or upon the minds of the many in the middle range. The most profound achievement of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s was probably the propagation of the insight that there is no absolute division between normal and abnormal. Some schools of psychology such as psychoanalysis had argued, long before the 1960s, that the same processes underlay all human functioning, sane and insane, mainstream and marginal. What differs between the psychotic individual and the wellenough one is the balance of forces at a particular time, not the basic nature of the mind and its workings. So also in the field of social psychology, we can assume that processes observed in marginal groups, however extreme and destructive, can point to the workings of the normal group, where they will be


found in milder or very infrequent form, or perhaps be transmuted into more benign variants. If a ‘collective mind’ can be observed in some settings, therefore, it will exist in others, albeit probably less conspicuously and – for much of the time – without disastrous effects. In fact evidence of this is not hard to come by. There are many examples in the field of sport. Take the outbreaks of joy, disappointment and venom which can seize the majority in a crowd of many tens of thousand. And at the small group level of the sports team, consider the extraordinary phenomenon of the home advantage. This produces one of the most systematic effects in football statistics: year in, year out, nearly all teams perform on average better at home than away. This mundane effect must be due to a complex combination of various factors, including the influence of familiar material surroundings, raised confidence based on expectation, and the impact – on both individual players and on the small group of the team – of the psychological processes at work in the surrounding larger group of the crowd. There should be no dispute about the ubiquity and consequentiality of ‘group mind’ processes in small, face-to-face groups of maybe a dozen or so people, as these processes are so easily observable in many settings and are something which most of us experience directly. Long traditions of work in both social psychology and in group therapy have produced extensive evidence of them, from experiments and observations, and from clinical settings. However the examples discussed so far show how the phenomenon of collective, shared states of mind occurs in larger groups as well: scores or hundreds of people living together as a community, tens of thousands assembling for a sporting event. There is, admittedly, a further step to the mind of the national public with which we are concerned here, since the community and the crowd have a co-presence which the nation cannot offer. At least it cannot do so literally, materially; this of course is where the importance of the mass media in creating and sustaining modern publics is so evident. The national public exists within the public sphere of shared mediaspace, and the circulation of emotionally-laden words and images within that space generates the psychic co-presence which underpins the national ‘public mind’.4 Although the group states of mind discussed above have a cognitive, and often to a degree rational, component (for example, shared belief about the details of the end of the world, or shared knowledge of the rules of the game), what gives them their potency is the emotion which they mobilise in group members.


There are various levels at which, and modes by which, this emotion can be organised nationally. We can perhaps usefully distinguish between the national psyche and the public mind. The national psyche is a relatively stable historical structure, not all of which may be very active at any given time, which underpins the public mind. The latter is a more volatile and contingent phenomenon – it is the forces in play in a given situation. Yet the public mind may also influence the national psyche, in that repeated waves or patterns of public feeling may leave deposits or marks which become incorporated over time into the national psyche, so changing it. This may be what is happening in a number of countries at present in respect of the emotionalising trend which is discussed in the next chapter.

3 The Rise of Therapeutic Culture

Audiences want affect The public has always been ‘emotional’, in the basic sense that shifts in public opinion, trends in social behaviour, patterns of consumer and electoral choices, and other expressions of the public’s will are in part determined by emotional factors, whether these are seen as residing in the psychological make-up of individuals or in the symbolic content of the media messages to which we are exposed, or both. There may still be some ultra-rationalistic theories of the public (which may picture, for example, the consumer or the voter as making strictly reasoned choices on self-interested grounds), but there are now broad consensual grounds for seeing emotion as a essential constitutive factor in what the public wants at any given time. Moreover in recent times the place of emotion in civic culture has been changing. It has become a more visible, more explicit and more prominent part of everyday life, of many professional discourses and of policy agendas. We have been moving away from the emotional inattentiveness which had previously characterised public discourse. There has been a process of emotionalisation. Let us use a particular fragment of historical data on the British public as television audience as a starting point for discussing this phenomenon. The fragment1 is from television viewing figures for the week ending 23 April 1967 (the day of St. George, patron saint of England, when the English public celebrates its national self). In that week the most watched television programme in the UK was the variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Crime series featuring elderly gentleman policemen were numbers 2 and 3, and the quiz Take Your Pick was number 4. Ratings figures then were in terms of numbers of homes, 30

The Rise of Therapeutic Culture 31

and the Palladium show was watched in 7.8 million homes – perhaps by 20 million people. The next three ranking slots, from 5 to 7, were filled by soaps – the two episodes of Coronation St. for that week, and something called Market in Honey Lane, about cheerful Cockneys in a street market which might have been a rose-tinted premonition of East Enders. In the week ending on 23 April 39 years later, in 2006, the first 15 places across the five major free-to-air channels were all soaps – episodes of Coronation St., East Enders, and Emmerdale, with audiences of 10.5 down to 7.9 million – apart from one episode of the sci-fi thriller Doctor Who at number ten and one of Heartbeat (a long-running ‘soapy’ drama with repeated series over 14 years) ranked eleventh.2 Television schedules and ratings are an easy but important way of illustrating social and cultural change. Television viewing is the way that most people chose to spend the greatest part of their leisure time – over 25 hours per week on average across all age groups is the kind of figure to emerge from studies in various countries. Television watching is arguably a major factor in creating or sustaining the national culture, culture that is in the sense of shared everyday experience. So here we may have a measure of how British culture has changed in the years since 1967. The spring of 1967 was perhaps a threshold, just before the first ‘summer of love’ and before the hippie culture flowed widely over the West. Of course it was some years before the many and diverse longterm effects of that culture, that latest efflorescence of Romanticism (Martin, 1981), became fully apparent, in drug culture, in sexual and social disinhibition, in ethical capitalism, in various ‘New Age’ consumption patterns and beliefs, and so on. In the late 1960s we were on the threshold of those changes. So what do these audience ratings separated by some dramatic decades suggest to us about the directions of change? At first sight they may not speak to any dramatic transformation: soaps and crime were among the dominant genres then as now. But there are important shifts. Firstly, the big audiences are not quite so big, eroded as they are by the proliferation of channels, though by any standards they are still national, and very occasionally East Enders does draw 20 million. And secondly, it is now overwhelmingly the soaps (and sometimes ‘reality TV’) which command the top ratings. The content of most soaps is sometimes said to be social realism, but that is misleading if not wrong. The realities of social life in London’s East End are not what East Enders is about. Jobs and social problems are there, but as


backdrop not dramatic narrative. The main narratives in such programmes are about emotional life – about feelings and relationships. They are about psychological not social realism. How ‘real’ this ‘realism’ is may of course be disputed. But the centrality of emotional life, however ‘realistically’ portrayed, to the popularity of soaps has been registered in many of the academic studies of this genre. This has been particularly through the observation that soaps embody the ‘melodramatic imagination’, as proposed by Ien Ang in her influential work on Dallas (1985; 1996).3 Today’s massive dominance of soaps constitutes the emotionalisation of broadcast entertainment. This point can also be made if we consider changes within the other genres which have continued to thrive under the shadow of the soap. The crime series, for example, has become radically reoriented to the personality, feelings and relationships of the policeman or investigator. The central character, representing justice and the law, is now a psychologically complex, often troubled character, whose complicated emotional life is a major part of what we enjoy when we watch – take for example, from a roll-call of recent British crime drama heroes, Morse, Rebus, Jonathan Creek, Jane Tennison, Dr. Sam Ryan and Judge John Deed. At number three in our sample week in 1967 was No Hiding Place, which featured the wooden and severe (and aptly named) Inspector Lockhart. He would be a problematic curiosity from another age if he appeared alongside any of today’s agonised, self-examining and self-doubting defenders of the law. And in The Bill, a staple part of the nation’s crime diet is served in explicitly soap format and style. The dominance today of psychologically-skewed, emotionally attentive programme content can even be seen in some genres where we may not expect it. In Blind Date the game show met lonely hearts; contestants took their pick not of which box to open as in Take Your Pick in 1967 but of prospective sexual partner, providing they were prepared to report on the development (or not) of the relationship and the feelings they had about the other. In The X Factor, a singing talent contest acquires an emphasis on the emotional experience of the contestants and their exchanges with judges. The rise of genres such as the chat show, the daytime talk show, the docudrama and – most recently and controversially – reality TV also testify to increasing interest in personal experience and in the emotional dimensions of life, nowhere more so than in Big Brother, where therapeutic sensibility is channelled into intensive character assessments (albeit in a sometimes shrill and exhibitionistic milieu). Even at the theatrical, confrontational pole of the talk show genre, it may be possible to find evidence of some ‘thera-


peutic’ values at work. Peter Lunt and Paul Stenner (2005) discuss the Jerry Springer show, and argue that alongside the expression and polarising of feeling it is also in part about reflection and the management of emotions, and can be seen as an ‘emotional public sphere’.

The nature of the therapeutic We could continue at length about television programming, and the presence across much peak-time viewing of feeling-oriented rather than action-oriented content. Where now are the Westerns of the 1960s, full of characters of few words whose inner lives were, if they were seen to exist at all, simple shadows of their outer lives, and to whom the expressive and reflective agendas of today’s heroes would have made no sense? We could also spend even longer describing many other different sources of evidence, outside of the media, for the emotionalisation of the contemporary public (see Richards and Brown, 2002). The rapid growth of counselling practices and professions is one obvious sociological pointer to this trend, as is the spread of self-help groups, and various forms of consultancy and training which focus on personal, interpersonal and group dynamics. There is however not a lot of evidence from social surveys for an emotionalising process. That is for two reasons. One is that survey researchers have tended not to ask questions which might reveal it, being more concerned with the content and strength of cognitive beliefs and attitudes. The other is that even if they had been trying to investigate it, a multiplechoice question is not the best way to do it. But there are major sources of evidence in changes in media content, in a range of social practices and institutions, and also in other well-documented cultural trends, which it may be helpful to mention here. One of these is the growing preoccupation with the body, its health and its pleasures. Concerns with diet, interests in alternative medicine and in the psychosomatics of stress are all part of this trend, as is the rise of ‘fitness’ as a lifestyle value, and the associated use of symbols of sport in the design and marketing of a wide range of goods. Indeed, we might speak of a general ‘sportisation’ of everyday life, typified by the way in which items of sportswear such as trainers and joggers have become everyday clothing. There is also what can be called the sexualisation or eroticisation of everyday life. Broadcast media output, across a number of genres, now contains much explicit conversation, frequently humorous, about sexual activities and pleasures. Strongly erotic visual images of the body were virtually proscribed from public space at the start of the 1960s, but


are now commonplace in outdoor advertising as well as on television and in print. There are a number of ways we might try to generalise about and understand phenomena such as sportisation and eroticisation. Some theories of social change can help to provide a vocabulary for talking about these changes: the integration of the carnivalesque into consumer culture, the aestheticisation of everyday life, the increasing extent to which we live our lives as performances or spectacles for others, and the move to an ‘experience economy’, are all examples of accounts of social change which bear upon these phenomena. However they can be subordinated to another account, the one offered here, which focuses on the increasingly expressive and explicitly emotional nature of everyday life and of our public culture. To some extent the greater expressiveness we now indulge in has a narrowly hedonistic quality, but there is another dimension to it which should be emphasised, which links it to the quest for self-discovery and self-fulfilment. Despite the different uses made of it, some of which will be discussed later, the term therapeutic culture is a suitable shorthand for the collection of values and aspirations which gather around this quest.4 Seen in this cultural context, sexualisation – while sometimes simply hedonistic to the point of animal oblivion – can also be embedded in relationships and in emotional reflexivity. Sportisation is not only about an aura of physical prowess and technique, but is also about passions, their importance to the individual, and their regulation. Therapeutic culture is about emotional expression, but not in a simple cathartic way: it is about reflecting on and seeking to manage emotions, in however unsophisticated a manner. It is also about finding the, or a, truth of life, by locating what is believed to really matter most in feelings and relationships, rather than in work, outward achievements and possessions. What has happened can be seen partly as a shift in the public/private boundary, an opening out into public culture of experiences which were previously reserved for the private domain. However there has probably also been a shift in a boundary within us as individuals. It would be difficult to assemble direct evidence for this, but it is likely that as a result of the emotional tutelage offered in the public sphere people have more far-reaching conversations with themselves and their intimates now than was previously the case. In other words, in the private domain as well as in the public, there is greater expressivity, and more explicit and reflective emotionality. The concept of therapeutic culture is a complex one that lends itself to a fuller explanation than is necessary in this context, though we will


return shortly to review the major debate around it. The basic ideas of relevance here are that we have undergone a very extensive emotionalisation of culture in recent decades, and that this trend is linked to the widespread increase in reflexive self-monitoring that a number of social theorists have taken to be an essential feature of contemporary society. Simply put, it is not just about feelings and their expression but also involves thinking about and managing feelings, about being reflexive towards our emotional selves. One of the earliest and still most complex formulations of this idea was in the work of Philip Rieff (1966), though the more empirically-focused work of Paul Halmos (1965) was also an important early contribution. Both were concerned with the impact on society of influences from psychotherapy, especially in its psychoanalytic forms. Since their groundbreaking work, social and cultural change in both the USA and UK (for example the huge expansion of therapeutic professions and practices such as counselling, and the rise of everyday discourses of emotions and relationships) has greatly enlarged the pictures they drew of how therapeutic values were influencing these societies. There has also been a growth in academic and professional attention paid to emotion, not only in the emergence of the sociology of emotion5 but also in psychologically-based studies dealing with a number of ‘emotionals’ – the idea of emotional intelligence, popularised by Daniel Goleman (1995); the goal of emotional literacy, as promoted for example in the UK by the organisation Antidote;6 the process of emotional learning, as theorised in the psychodynamic tradition;7 and the concept of emotional labour, to which we will return in the next chapter. The use of these particular concepts usually implies that we have an increasing capacity to reflect on emotional experience, and that our culture is acquiring an increasingly reflexive temper. The work of sociologists such as Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Zygmunt Bauman on the rise of reflexivity in various social fields is widely known. Moreover Giddens in particular (e.g. 1992) has tried to link this to the deeper levels of the individual’s emotional life, and suggested that in recent decades we have come to be much more attentive to the qualities of our intimate relationships. However there are sharp divisions of opinion over how to evaluate this trend, and indeed over what it actually consists of.

The damaged princess Critics of the therapeutic trend, however, may concentrate less on the reflexive and more on the increasingly expressive mode of everyday


emotional life, and see this as sentimental or manipulated in character. Some authors have decried the trend as cultural decline,8 while others have a more mixed or positive assessment, linking it to gains in individual autonomy and reflexivity.9 The controversy about the meaning and merits of the trend to reflexive emotionalisation was most clearly shown in the debates over the public response to the death of Princess Diana. 31 August 1997, the date of her death, is an illustrative moment for emotionalisation. Was the global mourning which followed her death a case of ‘faking it’, of a histrionic pseudo-grief confected by the media or indulged in by a sentimental public desperate to idealise somebody? Or was it the clearest demonstration to date of the extent to which members of national publics can now acknowledge their feelings and provide for some shared expression and management of them? Despite the great river of ink that has flowed in commentary on the meanings of Princess Diana’s death, there is still more to be learnt from reflection on the extraordinary public response to it. James Thomas’ (2002) ‘people’s history’ of that response cautions us against accepting too simple a view of it as a shared experience, as does a reading of much of the scholarly literature on it (e.g. Merck, 1998; Walter, 1998). To an extent the nation was, Thomas suggests, ‘divided in grief’, as much as parts of it may have sentimentally coalesced. But the scale of the response is unquestionable. Pollster Robert Worcester (1997) estimated that over 20 million Britons (nearly half the adult population) signed or wished to sign the book of condolences; over a million lined the funeral route, and a global audience of many millions watched the service. One of the questions central to this debate is what the mourning of a public figure is all about. When people are said to be grieving the death of someone whom they did not personally know, face to face, they are sometimes aware that some of their feeling stems from an association to a personal bereavement they have previously experienced.10 Private grief can be reawakened or intensified on the occasion of a public death. We condense the dead celebrity with an image of someone we do or did know, as perhaps in the case of the man who did not cry when his daughter died but did for Diana, of whom we might say that Diana’s death enabled him to cry for his daughter. But then in such cases we are not really mourning the celebrity. Perhaps the man cried for Diana as well, as another young woman tragically killed, but then many young women are tragically killed every day, and he does not take to the streets to mourn them.


Independently of this, there are three other possible things which grief for someone not known personally might mean. One is what we might think of as ‘realistic’ grief, that is, a painful regret that someone who was a force for good in society has been lost, and that our society will be the poorer for that. Many of the Diana mourners had this understanding of their own grief. To some extent we must take this at face value, as we can see the real basis for this response in Diana’s commitments to using her influence as a global icon to promote specific good causes and to popularise some general values of caring and of global citizenship. We should also note though that there did not appear to be a clear sense of how she was different in this respect from many other people who have served others and then died, but whose deaths did not produce this response. The second kind of grief potentially involved is of a less selfless kind. This is where the dead person was in life the object of identification (consciously or unconsciously) by individuals in the public, and the death of the celebrity has the meaning to those individuals of a death of a part of themselves. Diana’s high profile as an oppressed wife, as a person of disordered appetites, as a girl-become-woman through many painful struggles both inside herself and with others, her own identifications with a range of acutely suffering groups, and her general status as a victim all obviously gave many people a number of potential modes of identification with her. The quality and meaning of grief then experienced will be determined by what specific identification an individual had made, especially whether it was with Diana as a damaged person, or with her as resilient and repairing. Those who think that ‘the country went mad’ (or that much of the world did) around the funeral may see the reaction as grief of this second sort; there is a sort of madness in mourning the death of the real person when what is fundamentally important to you is a part of your own self. But we all do that sort of thing all the time. In particular, it is inevitable that we will use famous people in this way, as material for identifications. It is not however inevitable that a massive public display of these invested feelings will follow the death of their object, and though Diana’s suitability for a wide range of perhaps quite diverse identifications explains the availability of much affect around her death, we still have to explain how and why that affect became expressed as publicly as it did. But let us consider that there is a third type of grief, which more so than the previous two is specific to the death of a public figure. The first two types occur in relation to public figures but can also arise in relation to the death of a private individual that one knows.


In watching Diana smile and talk with others on television, each member of the global audience could experience her presence and – for many people, it seems – take enjoyment in it. This of course is one thing which television (and radio, to a lesser degree) provides for us: it widens enormously the range of people who live in our midst, whom we can include in our emotional neighbourhood. We ‘know’ them, and can then ‘miss’ them in a way analogous to missing someone whom we really know, that is someone whom we interact with. However it is an analogous mode, not an identical one: we do not interact with the famous, and do not really know them, however avidly we may read about and watch them. They are not in the face-to-face exchanges we have with others in which the most important relationships of our lives are normally sustained. This is why our mourning them is not a variant of the grief we feel for people we really knew. So what is the specific grief evoked by the death of the public figure? It stems from the fact that public figures represent to us the containing fabric of the social,11 and their deaths represent the partial or threatened unravelling of that fabric. In their fame, in their familiarity, in their apparent possession or embodiment of the public sphere, they represent society itself. In their deaths they leave an anxiety, a loneliness and a need to remake society. In our sociological understandings, we know that society consists of institutions of various sorts, which outlive or transcend individuals. But in our spontaneous emotional responses to events around us, we are not following sociological theory much, if at all. We are, however, according to a key axiom of psychoanalytic theory, continually influenced by our earliest experiences. The baby does not know that it lives in a society composed of enduring institutions. It knows only that there are distinctive personal presences on which it depends. At this primitive, infantile level of experience of the social, it is the physical individuality of other persons which constitutes society. The more famous someone is, the more likely it is that they carry this meaning, this function of representing society in some very general way, though the quality of the fame is more important than its quantity, and the place which the person occupied in society is important. It may be that royal personae have far deeper roots in unconscious images of society than do chat-show hosts, because of their historical role as embodiments of the state. It is also the case that by reason of what they did in life, and have come to represent in the public mind, some people express more than others the selfunderstanding of a culture at a particular point in time, and so may


transiently carry an especially intense representation of the life of the whole culture. For this reason we may be able to explain why Diana’s death sparked such a response. She partook of the meaning of royalty as constitutive of British society (and in a more mythological way, as representative of society in the abstract). Yet she was not a proper royal, and became defined as one who fought the royals, from within but on our behalf. She was both the Princess and the representative of the people, with a female sexuality which could occupy both domains. She thus occupied a centre-stage position in the theatre of celebrity and glamour, a sexual queen of hearts. Moreover this was not any old struggle between sovereign and subjects, or between the new and the old. It was often noted that Diana was depicted as fighting the old establishment on behalf of certain principles – the principles of openness, warmth and self-determination which a prevalent form of contemporary subjectivity takes to be defining of itself. Polling data suggests she had the support in this fight of two-thirds of the British public (Worcester, 1997). So her life dramatised the struggle of the age between the fading power of traditional institutions and the emergent power of the ‘postmodern’ self, that is, the informal self focused on fulfilment, with a new conception of its social responsibilities. She died at a time in her life when she was maximally symbolic of this struggle – scarred, reflective, but still young and on the threshold of many things, and with the media attending hotly to all nuances of her relations with the royals. So there was a circumstantial factor behind the vastness of the response to her death. A few years later, a chapter or two further on in her personal narrative, and the resonance might have been much less. As it was, though, she symbolised in a most intense way a key contemporary struggle of the self. Diana was emblematic of the therapeutic self, of the sexual subjectivity typical of today’s therapeutic culture. This is the culture in which great importance is attributed to emotional life, in which the exploration and disclosure of feelings is considered necessary, in which the universality of pain and conflict is assumed, and in which the quest for inner emotional truths is regarded as having prime value. It is a culture in which ‘emotional literacy’ and ‘emotional intelligence’ are seen as invaluable personal assets. We now live in a therapeutic culture, and Diana’s embodiment in life of many of the key features of this culture was the basis for the quasicanonisation of her that took place after her death. At that moment


she became us. Her premature, ugly death tapped into a timeless theme in that it signalled the vulnerability of life in a general sense, of young and privileged life particularly, but more dramatically it foregrounded the historically specific theme of the therapeutic project which she had represented, and to which we as a culture are now committed. Collective expressions of mourning for a public figure have the function of reasserting the strength of the cultural fabric which has been thinned or torn by the death. The form they take may provide a specific reassertion of the particular values which the dead person represented. In this case, many of the values of the therapeutic culture – spontaneity, expressivity, the transcendence of social difference through feeling – were easily realised in public space, in their contradictory nature. Instant rituals such as laying flowers and writing condolences may contain elements of both authenticity and histrionics, and amidst everything that was said and done during the public responses we could all easily find some things that do not ring true. But however we judge the quality of the response on this occasion, it was widely recognised to be registering the full entry of Britain into the age of emotional expressivity, or as we are putting it here, into therapeutic culture. Diana was the occasion for this ceremonial registration because she represented so much of that culture – in her own consumption of various forms of therapy, in her aspirations to help others, in her life project of finding and redefining herself, and in her identity as a damaged object.12 One striking feature of therapeutic culture is the great public interest in emotional damage and in the struggle to repair it. In this cultural context, those who are publicly seen to be damaged and to be struggling to repair themselves may acquire a powerful aura of authority. Diana was beginning to assemble some authority for herself, and to exercise it in relation to certain issues. This was in many respects an unexpected development, though it was part of a wider process in which the uniqueness of royalty has been challenged, which in turn is part of the wider context often thought of as a massive crisis of authority.

Authentic expression or fake sentiment? Over 40 years ago Philip Rieff expressed very forcefully the crisis of moral authority in the therapeutic age. He suggested that Freud’s great insight into the unconscious bases of received moralities meant that


for the reflective post-Freudian individual, no morality could any longer be received, handed down from the parental generation, because we knew that we believed it only out of love for and fear of our parents, not because it was right, or right for us. Like Rieff, the analysis offered here seeks neither to decry nor idealise the development of therapeutic culture. ‘Therapeutic culture’ is a complex and multivalent development in which there is increasing emotional expressiveness of different types, and which has potentials for growth in compassion and in reflexivity as well as for selfishness and contrivance. The trend is a mixed one requiring ongoing assessment. But this culture certainly is with us, and our task is less to develop some overarching rhetoric about it than to assess its practical effects and its practical possibilities in specific social contexts. Unfortunately a conceptually careful and empirically grounded approach has not been taken by some of the critics of therapeutic tendencies. Foremost amongst these is Frank Furedi (2003), who has produced the most prominent, wide-ranging and hostile account of the therapeutic. At this point, a few comments on Furedi’s approach may help to deal with some of the objections to the ideas offered in this book. Furedi himself refrains from defining ‘therapy culture’ as he calls it because it is ‘still in the process of becoming’ (p. 23). This however allows him to define it implicitly in any way that serves his rhetorical purpose of attacking it. He sees it as being all about the imposition of expert discourse, such that the prescription of expert therapy is always the aim. He utilises the old critique of psychiatric expertise to claim that it pathologises and reifies what are ordinary human predicaments, and in so doing imputes weakness, deficit, vulnerability and damage to ordinary people who if they were not influenced by therapeutic language and ways of thinking would be going about their business with spontaneous stoicism. He accuses the therapeutic worldview of individualism, specifically of ‘emotional determinism’, implying at times that it is ridiculous to think that early emotional experiences matter to the adult, and adds the charge (based, as are a number of his points, on a highly selective raid on the literature), that it is hostile to pro-social emotions such as love. He also repeats the complaint made by many critics of psychotherapy that it is a-moral, that it makes excuses for people by replacing an ethic of responsibility and guilt with accolades for those who confess their sins. The concept of therapeutic culture on offer here can be clearly separated from the object of these criticisms from Furedi and others. It is wrong to claim that therapeutic culture is only about the dissemination


of expertise (though professional empire-building is inevitably a regrettable feature of it); it is also a spontaneous movement in popular culture. In its most influential expert forms, it does not pathologise, reify or infantilise, though examples of such processes can surely be found amongst some therapeutic experts, as they can elsewhere. It is hospitable to interdisciplinary understandings, and would give its ‘emotional determinism’ a place alongside sociological and other explanations. By the same token it seeks to reconcile an ethic of individual responsibility with a contextual understanding of the sources of human action. The critics of the therapeutic also tend to overstate the influence of therapeutic values on politics. Following Furedi, Vanessa Pupavac (2004a; 2004b) offers sweeping condemnations of UN-led efforts at international governance on the grounds that they have often been driven by a reductive ‘emotionology’ which sees conflicts as psychologically based. Her critique uses an ‘either-or’ logic which means that increasing attention paid, for example, to the psychological consequences of war and conflict must be at the expense of considerations of history and justice. However, many critiques of the emotionalising process, and of the therapeutic culture of which it is a part, do address a fundamental problem which arises in any attempt to put emotions at the centre of an analysis of cultural change or of a prescription for political renewal. This is the problem of the apparent ease with which, in many historical contexts, emotion can be mobilised around oppressive ideologies or channelled into destructive movements. This problem is taken up both in the next chapter and later ones.

4 Global Passions

Charisma and its alternatives The argument of the book is for attention to be paid to the emotional dimensions of citizenship. This argument is partly based on observations of an increasing public emotionality – but this may evoke concern because much as some people may welcome the emotional loosening it brings, many fear the consequences, especially for politics. The historical experience of emotionalised politics is often disturbingly anti-democratic. Also, a deep principle of much thought since the Enlightenment has been to separate and polarise emotion and reason. If we are being emotional, we cannot be being reasonable, so the received wisdom has it. One of Freud’s key insights, however, was that the capacity for rational and realistic thought, and for considering the interests of others, can be securely established only on the basis of an integration of thought with feeling, such that emotion is contained by rather than split off from reason. A policy on crime, for example, or on immigration, that is effective, widely supported and stable as well as just, can be achieved only when the full range of public emotions involved – fear and anger as well as compassion and hope – have been acknowledged and managed. An optimal integration and balance of reason and emotion is easy to prescribe in theory, but hard to achieve in reality. The danger of emotion uncontained by reason and available for manipulation was well expressed some years ago by the anthropologist Charles Lindholm (1990) in a classical analysis of destructive charisma. He suggested that charismatic cult leaders like Jim Jones and Charles Manson meet a basic human need for some kind of irrationalist paroxysm, or more precisely a transcendental experience of merger: a ‘primal impulse to 43


self-loss’ (p. 36). Following a familiar line of sociological analysis, Lindholm’s suggestion was that modernity and its rationalisation of life render us increasingly desirous of immersion in such an experience. However, he concluded that there is no inevitability of periodic collapse into subjection to a charismatic figure, because there are in modern secular society a number of alternatives to charisma, which can give ‘a mild and tamed taste’ (p. 176) of its psychic fervour. These include the ethic and the experience of consumption, benign forms of nationalism, the idolisation of heroes in the worlds of sport and entertainment, absorption in good relationships with family and friends, the regressive experiences available within psychotherapy, and – above all – the romantic lovers’ dyad, which offers idealised attachment and a measure of self-loss in a way that is not usually threatening to others in the society at large, nor to social order. Lindholm’s analysis raises the question of how a secular society manages the passion that will inevitably continue to arise in the political domain, both amongst its own willing subjects aspiring to rationality, and from ‘outside’ in the form of attacks upon liberal society by charismatic leaders and faith-based movements. A moderated charisma, based on an individual’s authentic presentation of a damaged and repaired self, and of a commitment to reality, will be offered in Chapter 14 as one way of doing this.

Boring: the problem of dis-passionate politics While we rightly fear the prospect of social division, and of emotively charged national or religious identities dominating mass opinion, one of the main problems about emotions in politics which has preoccupied researchers in many democratic countries in recent years is not that of demagogic excess. On the contrary, it is the problem of an apparent deficit of feeling, manifest in a lack of real engagement with the democratic process. There have been irregular but overall declines in electoral participation in many countries over the last three decades.1 Turnouts in some recent elections have been low enough for the legitimacy of the democratic process to be questioned. It is feared – though the evidence for this is sometimes a bit less extensive than the anxiety – that the decline in voting expresses profound mistrust and disaffiliation. Turnout in the 2001 UK General Election was at a lowest-ever 59 per cent, and prompted substantial research activity2 additional to the

Global Passions 45

large and long-standing body of work on questions of engagement, trust and discrimination in the democratic process (e.g. the longitudinal studies of the British Social Attitudes project). In the General Election of 2005 the decline was arrested, but at 61 per cent the level was still lower than in most elections in the last 60 years, and levels of concern about electoral disengagement remain high. Researchers have offered different views on the nature and extent of this form of ‘democratic deficit’, and a range of explanations for it.3 These explanations reflect, to some extent, their different views of politicians and political institutions, of the efficacy of the media, and of the moral condition of the public. Thus at one time or another all parties involved have been held responsible for this problem. Some analysts blame politicians and other traditional authorities for being, allegedly, more corrupt, or self-serving, than they used to be, or for being either out of touch with the public, or cynically pandering to public prejudice. In all these scenarios they are blamed for destroying the credibility of the democratic process. Others blame the media for presenting political debate as an inconsequential knockabout, or obscuring it with scandal, or ‘dumbing down’. And the public itself is blamed, for its irresponsible indifference to our shared civic life, often explained by its individualised, consumerist approach to the common weal, or its simple ignorance of the world, or for its immersion in ‘therapy culture’, which is seen by Furedi and other critics as responsible for people turning away from their civic responsibilities in favour of navel-gazing. The hostility to therapeutic culture is often linked to a rationalistic approach to understanding behaviour, including (and especially) political behaviour. As an exploration of how a psychosocial analysis of electoral disengagement might add usefully to existing knowledge about this problem, by focusing in contrast on its emotional dimensions, let us take the issue of boredom. This is a most interesting category, a word of obscure etymology that is used widely with a somewhat incomplete meaning. We would probably agree that something is ‘boring’ if it is not interesting to us, but that begs the question of why it is not interesting. The dis-interest is not entirely bland: there is also an element of negativity in its meaning, in its links with ennui, annoyance and tediousness.4 It is frequently reported that non-voters find politics ‘boring’. To some degree this perception of elections as boring, as emotionally dead, is a creation of journalists: MORI have shown that the view of the 2001 UK General Election campaign as outstandingly boring was partly an artifice of so-called reporting,5 and that this


pre-judgement by journalists itself helped to lower turnout. But we know from the abundant research on non-voting and political disengagement that, especially amongst the young, contemporary politics is not in the right emotional register. The self-reports of ‘boredom’ which emerge in a number of research studies could refer to a number of quite different states of mind, with very different implications for making politics less ‘boring’. We can identify at least six different states of mind which people could be referring to when they say they are bored by electoral politics. i)

Ignorance: something about which one knows little, or not enough to understand what is going on, can be ‘boring’, like watching a game where one cannot follow play because one does not know the rules. If politics bores for this reason, this is a question of voter incompetence, and there may be remedies in educational approaches, and in changing media treatments of politics. ii) Sophistication: conversely, we can be ‘bored’ by something that is too familiar, simple or superficial. An educated or intelligent voter may find the rituals of mediatised politics lacking on these grounds. In a study for the then Independent Television Commission (ITC) after the 2001 UK election,6 23 per cent reported that television coverage of politics was ‘too shallow’. This is a question of voter competence, one where the remedy is definitely not in improving the voter but in raising the game of politics itself, and/or its media presentation. iii) Contempt: this is the attitude of those radically alienated from democratic politics such that they find it unworthy of their attention. Where it exists in depth this attitude takes the problem well beyond the issue of voting, and beyond the more broadly defined issue of political participation, towards the realm of radical disaffiliation from society. iv) Felt exclusion: here the felt alienation is not total though it may be very powerful. It is based on a sense that one is not represented in the process, because the groups in which the individual’s sense of personal identity is based do not seem to be sufficiently present there. This we can see as a partisan alienation; it is commonly found in the statements that there are not enough women, or black people, in Parliament, and politics is then ‘boring’ because it is felt to belong to others. Here the ennui of boredom clearly has that edge of annoyance. Remedies must be at least partly institutional, though there is a communication component insofar as voters may perceive less representation than there actually is.

Global Passions 47

v) Indifference: if some received wisdom about why people don’t vote is true, this is another common form of boredom. Elections ‘bore’ because their outcomes make no perceived difference. This could be for one of two reasons. One is the alleged convergence between parties; the other is the non-salience of party political issues. Either way voters are bored because the process does not appear to affect them; they are uninterested because they believe it does not affect their interests (and may believe it does not affect others either). Twenty-five per cent of the ITC’s respondents agreed that coverage was not relevant to them. There will be diverse views on how to deal with this sort of boredom, depending on whether one agrees with the ‘bored’ one’s perspective. vi) Decathexis: cathexis is a technical term from psychoanalysis, referring to the way in which we invest mental energy in people and things around us. For us to do so these people and objects must be meaningful and in a broad sense desirable. We will therefore tend not to cathect things with which we do not feel some degree of cultural identification or connection. Un-cathected people and objects will be experienced as lifeless and ‘boring’. While the partisan alien (see iv above) may want to be included in the system, the culturally disconnected will be less concerned with identity representation and will feel a deeper and more pervasive alienation from politics, at aesthetic and almost existential levels. Sociocultural changes of recent times (not least the advent of therapeutic culture, amongst other liberalising and ‘postmodern’ trends) have produced powerful new cultural divisions, though these are likely to fade with time, between those who have been deeply influenced or shaped by the changes, and those who (at least partly for reasons of age and generation) seem to have been less profoundly affected. Politics will be de-cathected by generational cohorts of new cultural subjects if it is felt by them to be rooted in the old culture and largely impervious to the new. The remedy for decathexis is therefore a reconnection of politics with other areas of social life. Somebody coming from any one of these six states of mind could say in a survey or focus group that politics is ‘boring’. It would however be unwise to aggregate all such statements, and to conclude that politics needs to be made more interesting or exciting. Only the last of the six states of mind listed above points in that direction, though it does so emphatically. It is the least recognised and understood kind of


‘boredom’. If however this kind of boredom is commonplace then the strategy of ‘restyling’ politics,7 which does involve making it more exciting in particular ways, would – if successful – significantly expand and reinvigorate the electorate. And an important part of this complex strategy would involve an effort to remedy the ‘emotional deficit’ in political communications,8 which are failing to connect with their audiences’ emotionalised agendas. These agendas do not necessarily mean that the public is degraded, and less capable of democratic deliberation or of building an inclusive and humane public culture. But they do mean that those involved in communicating with the public, whether for commercial or political purposes, must do so in ways cognisant of the new emotionality of the public.

The inrushing world In discussing the emotionalising trend and therapeutic culture we have been oriented more towards the psychological end of the psychosocial spectrum, though it connects directly with all sorts of changes at organisational and societal levels – the content of media output, the growth of counselling and related professions, the nature of management styles, and so on. A second major trend of change in the public which we must also consider is one which we must begin discussing at the macro-social end of the spectrum, though in unpacking it there are many implications for the identities and inner feelings of individuals. In a word, this trend is globalisation. The national public in most countries is becoming globalised. Globalisation is a potentially confusing concept, with different meanings in economics, politics and culture. We can propose two different broad meanings of it which are most relevant to understanding the socio-cultural phenomenon of the public. In the first, it refers to whatever processes of cultural homogenisation might be taking place transnationally. We are familiar with descriptions, typically hostile ones, of the global reach of brands and commodities, of the huge international corporations which manufacture and market them, and of the spread across local cultures of a uniform imagery, of functionally and semiotically standardised goods and packaging. One influential contribution from sociology to this literature is George Ritzer’s McDonaldisation thesis,9 actually a subtle account of processes of rationalisation which bring some benefits to the consumer as well as power to the corporations. However we might evaluate the trend (and of course we would be wise to avoid too quick and sweeping a judgement either

Global Passions 49

way), there is little doubt that it is happening, and in many countries a full set of internationally homogenised brand presences is now well-established, and is an important part of the cultural context for political communications. The idea of globalisation as cultural homogenisation is familiar and well-documented, and any complete approach to understanding modern publics could not fail to register this. Linked to it is another less recognised and more emergent development, which is the formation of a body of world public opinion. This is usually taken to refer to the spread of democratic values and humane principles. The increasing global dominance of market-based societies and democratic states is producing some convergence in values. A Gallup international survey of 57,000 adults in 60 countries in 1999 found substantial levels of consensus on some basic questions about life; for example in 53 of the 60 countries, either good health or a happy family life were rated as the most important things in life. Surprisingly perhaps religion came in the bottom two, the least important of the items ranked, in 48 countries. More recent work by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris (2003) shows a high convergence around democratic values in most countries surveyed, although they also identify a serious divide between ‘Western’ and Islamic countries on gender equality and on ‘self-expression’ values. The rejection of the latter in many Islamic countries shows the limits of therapeutic culture’s global reach so far, and also constitutes, argue Inglehart and Norris, a serious impediment to democracy, despite the espousal of democratic values in many of those countries, since these values underpin successful democratic institutions. But more important than any substantive convergence at present is the existence now of a process which over time will be likely to generate a sense amongst us that we are part of a world public. As we noted earlier, a public is in part produced by the efforts of people who study it, who reflect it back to itself and so call it into self-conscious being, as a thing ‘for itself’. There are now growing strands of social research which have the potential to call into being a world public. As well as the occasional surveys done by Gallup and other commercial agencies, there are a number of studies of social values across many countries, and others of the values embedded in marketing and other public communications. The American political scientist Frank Rusciano and his colleagues have begun to develop operational and theoretical definitions of ‘world opinion’.10 Of course the conduct of full transnational surveys is complicated and costly. But to the extent that this work proceeds and is reported


outside of academic journals, and so enters into public awareness, we will find our membership of a world public increasingly reflected back to us and thereby becoming more of a reality. Once, national publics came into psychological being when print media addressed their readerships as members of a national community – as Benedict Anderson (1991) argued in his celebrated study of nations as ‘imagined communities’. What were essentially print communities provided the basis for the imaginative construction of national publics. Now, when the screen-based media of television and internet, along with continued input from print media, address those national publics as component parts of a world public, so will that public come into psychological being. As Diana’s death is significant for the emotionalisation of publics both national and global, so 11 September 2001 dramatically marked and deepened the emotional impact of globalisation. For one thing, it brought intensive examples of this process, when reactions across the world to the attacks were collated and compared. While this produced sharp divisions within countries, especially around the issue of antiAmericanism, it also carried forward the coalescence of national publics into a global public, and gave many people a sense, however fraught, of international citizenship. Of course the solidity of these developments depends on economic and political processes as well as on this internationalisation of public opinion – on the globalisation of markets, and the strength of the United Nations and other international bodies. Nonetheless if a global public is to emerge effectively, it is essential that we have opportunities for the reflexive appraisal of our own opinions in the light of what we know about others, and this process depends on public opinion researchers and on those involved in public communications. If these professionals provide an internationally-oriented content for screen-based media, then the screen communities will be the basis for the global public, and a process will be in train which will crystallise and consolidate consensual values. This may all sound too cosy by far. What about the terrible and profound conflicts which blight the world, of which September 11 itself was an expression? This brings us to the second meaning of globalisation. While the first is about homogenisation, convergence and consensus, the second is about conflict. In this sense of globalisation, to be globalised is not to be made part of an inclusive transnational community. It is instead to be made part of the set of conflicts which divide the world, to have their battle-lines imported into a national community, to have the protagonists of global conflict appear as actors within one’s national public. The two meanings of globalisation – the

Global Passions 51

development of a world public and the expansion of conflicts – are of course not exclusive. Both are real, and both becoming more important. The emergence of some global consensus in a multi-civilisational world is not inconceivable. A well-known reference point for the conflict scenario is the controversial account of global conflict given by Samuel Huntington in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilisations. His well-known argument is that since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of state socialisms, the world stage is dominated by differences and conflicts between ‘civilisations’. Nation states remain the principal actors on the world stage, but they are grouped into seven or eight associations, each based on ancient cultures or civilisations distinguished primarily by religion. In recent years, and acutely since 9/11, the scenario of a clash between the Islamic and Western civilisations has been pre-eminent, though we have recently been anxiously aware of others such as those on the Indian subcontinent between Islam and the Hindu civilisation, or, in what was Yugoslavia, between Islam and the Orthodox one, or in Sri Lanka between Buddhist and Hindu, and so on. Huntington tends to see the drivers of these conflicts in some intrinsic proclivity of adherents of different religions to fight each other. We might take a different view of the basic dynamics of these conflicts, but still agree that at least as a descriptive account his picture of civilisations (or perhaps cultures would be a better term) often at odds with each other does capture an important dimension of politics globally, with repercussions on opinions and values within nations. Freud warned us, as we sit in the partly secular civilisation of the West, never to underestimate the strength of the religious impulse, and the closing years of the last century showed this to be good advice. The image of a ‘nation at ease with itself’ (the then Prime Minister John Major’s vision for 1990s Britain) rapidly unravels when put in this global context. A nation cannot put itself at ease when the tone and content of some of the exchanges amongst its people are in part determined elsewhere – if for example there are strong responses in British ethnic or religious minority communities to events in the Middle East or in Kashmir. And (since the first draft of this chapter was written) the bombings of London in July 2005 have shown it is not just ‘exchanges’ that may be involved but deadly attacks. The British public and its political leaders are at the time of writing still absorbing the meaning to us of these bombings, in which young men brought up in Yorkshire killed fellow Britons. Addressing the emotional as well as the political causes and consequences of these attacks is the most


urgent task for emotional governance in the UK. Or to take a different example, the anti-globalisation movement, which ironically of course must itself be global, is another conduit for global issues to influence debate and dissent within Britain as elsewhere. So while the emotional public is at the centre of this book, it is clear that we cannot understand it adequately outside the context of globalising forces.

Parliaments of feeling What is the relationship between the two processes, emotionalisation and globalisation, which we have been considering? Each of the two trends is working at different levels, sometimes in contradictory ways. As well as the tension between consensus and conflict that characterises globalisation, emotionalisation is poised between authenticity and quackery, between self-responsibility and sentimentality. The emotionalisation process and associated advent of therapeutic culture, while probably underway in many national publics, is linked with the social trends we call postmodern and with a high development of consumer culture. It is unlikely therefore to be fully global; it depends on the hospitality of different civilisations to its values. In many national contexts, however, the trend to emotional reflexivity is strengthened by some aspects of globalisation, for example by the increasing presence in everyday life of images and goods from other countries and cultures, which add to our repertoires for self-expression and hedonistic self-development, and also nudge us towards more reflection on our identities and our feelings. What about national identity? The globalisation of the public does not mean that it ceases to exist as a distinctive national entity. Thenation-state, despite the growth of corporate power and of other forces that are weakening it, is still a force to be reckoned with. Globalisation may proceed alongside resistant or emergent forms of local culture, as in the transnational coordination of advertising strategies that are tailored to local cultures, or in the rise of indigenous programming in developing countries whose television industries are increasingly part of the global market. Opinion polls continue to confirm the great importance most people attach to their national identity, and television in particular plays a major role in sustaining this identity. The mass media still address and help to construct national publics. For most public communications, the national public is the target audience, and knowledge of it is sought as the elixir of commercial and political success.

Global Passions 53

On the other hand, if we examine the ethico-political dimensions of therapeutic culture, we find some strong transnational values. There is a universalistic assumption carried by its preoccupations with feeling; commonality of feeling is seen as the basis for a universal personhood and therefore, at least implicitly, for a global citizenship. Where all persons are considered equal, and where ideas of self-determination are strongly held (which is the case in therapeutic outlooks), then it is appropriate to speak of a ‘democracy’ – in this case, of a ‘democracy of feeling’. To do so does of course raise many questions: conceptual questions about whether a term like democracy can be applied to a condition of culture, and evaluative questions about the social nature and impact of therapeutic culture. Even without full answers to these questions, it might be fruitful to play with the concept of democracy in relation to the life of the emotions. Firstly, the democratic principle of freedom of speech has an analogue here, in the principle of freedom of emotional expression. This throws up the question of which feelings may be considered inadmissible to the public domain. This old problem of the liberal state – the problem of how to manage racism and other politicised forms of hate – is given a new twist in the therapeutic age, owing to the therapeutic axiom that the repressed will return. It is a precept of psychoanalysis, and some other schools of therapy, that negative feelings cannot be properly dealt with by attempts to deny them psychic space: they must be acknowledged, confronted, and ‘worked through’. The same must apply to collectively-held negative feelings and public space. From this standpoint, socio-political strategies of censorship and exclusion are at best flawed and at worst counterproductive. Secondly, the idea of a democracy of feelings leads to the question of the means by which the ‘will’ of our feelings is exercised. How do feelings take effect in the public sphere; how are they democratically mobilised? At the level of the nation or any other large community it must be by some form of representative democracy of feelings. If we all now have the right to our feelings, and are emotionally enfranchised, so to speak, and encouraged to use our emotional votes, then for whom or what do we cast our votes? We can perhaps conceive of public life in the broadest sense, including large areas of popular culture, as constituting the parliamentary field for our democracy of feelings. Our elected representatives are any figures who represent our feelings, people onto whom some of us have projected our desires and fears. The processes of projection and identification can be seen as a very powerful and effective method of registering votes. Princess


Diana, we are told, had a ‘constituency of the rejected’. Constituencies in this democracy are not geographical, nor demographic, but psychological. There is no periodic General Election; voting is going on all the time, automatically, through the ordinary life of mediatised culture, in which public figures wax and wane in popularity, media presence and audience interest. There is a huge and complex proportional representation system, and no clear limit to the number of seats available. This depends on how many people can be held in mediaspace and so perform some representative function at any one time. Moroever there are both national and global parliaments of feeling, the latter based on the emergent global public. While the research on this has focused as noted above on values convergence, another crucial strand in its development is the coalescence of a global public around world ‘celebrities’ from sport, entertainment and politics. For example, some leaders of nations emerging from a dark age into democratic light have enjoyed international, if not global, approbation – people such as Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and most famously Nelson Mandela. The emotional investments made by millions of people worldwide in such figures is an important factor in the development of a global democracy of feeling. Both at national and international levels, the parliamentary metaphor for the place of emotions in the political process brings into sharp focus the questions of whether the democracy of feelings is organised into any kind of party system, and whether there is, could be or should be a government, a party or coalition of dominant feelings, that seeks to legislate for the people as a whole. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, whose naively searching essay on democracy was mentioned in Chapter 1, saw democracy as a whole as an expression of psychological maturity. But within democracies of feeling there will be voices which are regressive and anti-democratic. This chapter has suggested that in the long run this problem (often framed as the risk of charismatically toxic leadership) may be played out on a global stage, as may its apparent ‘opposite’ in the cultural de-cathexis of politics. For now, however, the parliament of feelings sits primarily for the nation, and it is to the national theatres of mediatised politics that we now turn.

Part II The Bias Against Hope


5 Journalism as Emotional Labour1

The emotional public sphere Part I introduced a conception of the public sphere, or of our civic culture, as a highly complex field of emotional forces. The disposition of these emotions at any given time will shape the contours of public opinion, will broadly determine the range of political alternatives which are on offer, and will set parameters and probabilities for the kinds of participation which people will engage in. (As we will discuss in more depth later, this includes at present the kind of perverse participation expressed in terrorist attacks.) Of course this emotional public sphere exists intertwined with the traditional public sphere of rational debate, of formal democratic institutions and processes, and so on. Indeed the emotional dynamics of the public sphere can exist only in and through the everyday operation of those processes. But they can and must be taken as a discrete object of study. What are the roles of the media in this complex force-field of collective, public emotions? There are three main sources of public feeling, over and above the psyches of all those individuals who comprise the public and who are its emotional raw material. The first is ‘events’: things that happen and that necessarily provoke emotional responses. Some of these events (such as, say, demonstrations or riots) are of course to a large degree products of the public mood rather than sources of it, but they also take their place as events to which we respond. Some events, such as natural disasters, do not have roots in public emotion. Others emanate from distant contexts so appear as external events to the domestic national public. The second is, loosely speaking, ‘statements’ – communications from public figures. Most important are those statements by national 57


political leaders, the ultimate guardians of our security and well-being, though senior figures from all public authorities are also especially important. Indeed any public figure, including celebrities however ‘unpolitical’, transient and insubstantial their presence on the public stage may be, can contribute to the national conversation of feelings – the continuous process by which feelings of all sorts about all things are expressed, registered, contested, defined, and so on. As noted in Chapter 4, there are no restrictions on candidacy for the ‘Parliament of feelings’. Those in positions of leadership and responsibility differ however in that they have, or should have, the aim of managing public feelings in particular ways, such as avoiding panic, avoiding scapegoating, sustaining optimism, and so on, depending on what topic they are issuing statements about. But whether intentionally or not, any public statement may either assist in or detract from the task of containing public feeling around a particular issue. ‘Statements’ are often in response to ‘events’, as the examples to be given will show. Because they are also, in the age of managed communication, usually crafted with an eye on how they will be responded to by and through the media, they are interwoven with the third category below, but can be separately analysed. The third source is ‘mediations’, i.e. inputs from the media. This covers two broad and overlapping types of input. Firstly it includes all those ways in which the media bring the statements of public figures to us, by framing them, selecting from them, contextualising them or associating to them, focusing on parts of them, editing and elaborating on them. Secondly it includes all those separate inputs which journalists and other media professionals make to public debate through their own commentaries and other contributions. There is a substantial trend for the proportion of this kind of input to increase relative to that of simply giving the news (insofar as such simple giving has even been possible) and to the simple transmission of ‘statements’.2 The second and third of these sources, namely ‘statements’ and ‘mediations’, more or less comprise the field of emotional governance. Our interest in this Part of the book is in ‘mediations’; Part III will deal with ‘statements’. The next two sections of this chapter go some way into psychological theory (specifically, into some ideas developed in postFreudian psychoanalysis) in order to sketch a model of our emotional relationship to news.

News consumption and anxiety management There are wide and long-standing debates about the relative contributions of the media and politicians to political debate, and we

Journalism as Emotional Labour 59

will not here go into the arguments about, for example, whether it is journalists or public relations people and other ‘communication managers’ who are the primary definers and authors of the news (see, for example, Moloney, 2006; Salter, 2005). We can assume, however, on the basis of a very large amount of academic research into phenomena such as media ‘agenda-setting’ and ‘framing’, as well as on the basis of everyday observation, that ‘mediations’ are an identifiable and hugely important input to the emotional public sphere, and potentially therefore to the work of emotion management which goes on there. And while various forms of mediated entertainment (chat shows, television drama and so on) make increasingly important contributions to the emotional public sphere, we will focus here on news as, arguably, the heart of the mediated public sphere, notwithstanding the increasing importance of sport and other forms of entertainment as key sites for the development of civic culture. We are familiar with analyses of news which have stressed its anxiety-provoking tendencies rather than its containing capacity, for example in the characterisations of news agendas as generating ‘moral panics’ about street crime, asylum seekers, the MMR vaccine, and so on.3 Here public fears have arguably been generated and spread by the national press, though each case is different. There is also the time-honoured tradition of denigrating the form of the mass media, especially television, as intrinsically bad for us, turning us into passive consumers of mind-destroying entertainment (a traditional view that continues to be put forward, most recently and influentially by Robert Putnam, 2000). There are however also a few references in the media studies literature to the key place of modern media in the ordering and holding structures of society. The US academic Jib Fowles (1992) has been arguing for some time that television has therapeutically structuring functions, and has described the cathartic and restorative experiences it offers. In 1994 the UK academic Roger Silverstone suggested that television, through the routines of repetitive programming, provides ‘an expression and reinforcement of the containing temporalities of everyday life’ (p. 19), and that more broadly we can derive a sort of ontological security from the fact that television is a constant resource in our lives offering a variety of ways in which we can insert ourselves into networks of relationships and communities of various sorts.4 These more positive images of television are linked to a longstanding appreciation of the potentially integrative functions of the mass media, as providers of culturally unifying experiences (especially in relation to radio, in the mid-twentieth century, then television), of


spaces for democratic debate (especially in relation to the print media, though also in relation to public service television and now the web), and so on. But the specific psychological processes that might be involved in these beneficial aspects of the media have not been looked at very closely, though there has been much recent academic interest in the psychological uses to which soaps and reality TV programmes can be put, a number of them seen as positive. This more psychological and more benign view of media content needs to be taken up in relation to the study of news, which for Silverstone – as he goes beyond his theorisation of television as a psycho-cultural form to consider the effects of particular kinds of content – ‘is the genre in which it is possible to see most clearly the dialectical articulation of anxiety and security – and the creation of trust – which overdetermines television as a transitional object’ (p. 16). The approach to be developed here uses the language of ‘containment’ rather than that of the ‘transitional object’ (see Note 6 below), but Silverstone’s point about news as a key site for the management of anxiety still holds.5 News is not however the most popular place that people choose to go to when they seek psychic sustenance from television, or indeed the print media. They are more likely to watch soaps, crime drama or reality TV, or to read the sports pages or lifestyle supplements. News is more likely to be thought of as bringing distress, even as lodging traumatic material in our minds, and is undoubtedly avoided by many people not because they are totally uninterested in the world but because they cannot easily tolerate the painful content of many typical bulletins. On the other hand there is some evidence that the more distressed people are by an event in the world, the more they consume news media (Boyle et al., 2004). What the news also provides us with, alongside images of conflict and pain, is ourselves. It does so by providing an account or model of ourselves which identifies our responses to world events, both through reports of what public opinion is said to be on specific issues and through ‘vox pops’ – the use of short interviews with members of the public to illustrate public attitudes. However it is rare for any such presentation to support the picture it paints with proper, systematic data on public opinion. A revealing study by Lewis, Inthorn & WahlJorgensen (2005) has shown that in over 90 per cent of cases where television news programmes make reference to public opinion, often in strong statements about what it allegedly is, they do so entirely without data. The freedom with which they generalise from a few vox pops or from their own preconceptions means that the images of our-


selves which we are offered may be quite unrepresentative. Yet they may have considerable influence, and may even have the power to become partly self-fulfilling since we look to the news to tell us what is going on, including what is going on in ourselves, and adjust our outlooks accordingly.

Containment and the media This self-fulfilling influence of the media can be understood using psychoanalytic concepts, which emphasise how our transactions with the external world can affect us in deep and unconscious ways. We are always unknowingly projecting parts of ourselves into the environment, personal and impersonal. In other words our perceptions of the external world are always influenced by our ‘inner worlds’, in particular by the anxious and desiring parts of the self (which are often hidden from ourselves, and which psychoanalysts may refer to as ‘unconscious phantasy’). It is partly through projecting our unconscious fears and needs onto the external world that we come to see the world as containing threats and rewards of various kinds. According to psychoanalysis, there is a constant cycle of projection and (re)introjection which is part of our ongoing experience of the world. If the projection is intense and is accompanied by only a limited capacity for taking in reality, that is for seeing what is actually out there, then the result will be a worldview which is dominated by unconscious phantasy. Moreover, there is then likely to be an unfortunate feedback loop, in that the phantasy-based experience of the external world will be taken in by the individual and will reinforce the affective structures of the inner world. Sometimes the projection may more or less match what is independently out there. Someone may have a tendency to see the world in a paranoid way, and always be finding threat in the actions of others towards them, but they may still on occasions actually be under attack in some way. This sort of match is unlikely to have good consequences; the paranoid worldview will become more deeply entrenched, and the depth of fear and rage that accompanies it will disable the person’s attempts to respond effectively to the real threat. In other cases, however, a correspondence between projection and reality may be helpful, if it is a positive, adaptive part of the self that is being projected. If we perceive an object out there as having qualities which match and extend a projected part of the self, we can reintroject that part in strengthened form. If the part in question is, in


psychoanalytic terms, ‘ego’-based, in other words is a rational, thinking and frustration-tolerant part, then our exchanges with the environment will be beneficial. The result can be described as ‘containing’ because the ego capacities of the individual for thought and for living in the world have been strengthened, a process which has both emotional and cognitive dimensions.6 As we consume news we might be given reportage or editorial material, or vox pops, which can stimulate or elicit our own capacities for reflection on and understanding about the distressing content of the news (rather than offering a cliché and so encouraging us, by example, to indulge in our defences against it). If that happens, then those capacities for rational and reflective thought may be introjectively strengthened. It is in fact through the process of introjection that psychoanalysis sees us initially acquiring, early in our emotional development, the basic features of our selves. Specifically, it is the internalisation of the containing function that produces the apparatus of our minds, the basic capacity to think. The capacity for thoughtful reflection and the ability to manage our own fears and desires (that is, the capacity for emotional self-regulation) are seen as the product of the interaction over time between the baby and the mother, or caregiver. The baby projects its phantasies into the mother, who needs to be able to acknowledge them. Psychoanalysts usually call this ‘projective identification’, because it is not just a projection by the baby but also a reception by the mother, who – albeit unconsciously – recognises and identifies with the projections, for example in her understanding of how distressed her baby might feel when hungry or wet. The mother’s responses will hopefully convey to the infant both a sense of recognition and also a model of how to modulate and tolerate distress. Her capacity to contain the baby’s fears and pain will over time be transmitted to the developing infant, and provide a template and material for the growth of its capacity for self-containment and for a realistic, thoughtful relationship to its environment. There are clearly differences between this concept of an interpersonal process of containment, as developed in contemporary post-Kleinian theory, and the idea of containment through the public, collective process of media consumption. Some psychoanalysts would object to this extension in its use, but it can be defended as a legitimate use of the term. It is similar to the idea, in psychoanalytic work on organisations,7 that the external environment can carry projections of internal conflicts, which means that the progress and outcome of the conflict in the external world will impact upon that in the internal


world via introjection of the conflict scenario as it progresses. This may result in an altered balance of power between the protagonists in the internal conflict, that is between different parts of the self, and in more or less containment of the anxieties and destructiveness involved. Differences remain though between these developmental/interpersonal and adult/societal models of containment, between the mother and the media as potential containers. In the latter there is no projective identification and no co-mentality because there is no other individual mind to receive or share feelings. And often there is no time-line of reciprocal exchange, along which projective identification leads8 to detoxification and reintrojection. So the news may bring us both the anxiety-provoking ‘event’, and a way of managing the anxiety, all at once, so the projection of badness and possible reintrojection of less toxic material is all more or less simultaneous. The unbearable images of famine or bomb victims continue to appear and to resonate, at the same time as the voice-over or other footage may have given us images of aid workers representing hope and fortitude.9 In this respect the news is like a lot of commercial advertisements, in which the strategy is to bring us both an anxiety and its containment at once, on the same billboard or the same page, or within a brief television spot, tying the relief brought by containment to the product being advertised.10 This may or may not make advertisements effective, commercially, but it certainly can make them interesting to us, and means they are an important segment of the range of anxiety-management experiences which our media offer. Advertisements, news and television in general all contribute powerfully to what may be called ‘the containing matrix of the social’ (Figlio and Richards, 2003). As Karl Figlio and I have suggested, this matrix extends beyond media, to the whole social environment. Moreover, material aspects of our civic surrounds can also play a containing role. The provision in public spaces of free light, for example, represents for us powers of nurture and protection, and principles of equity and order. We can introject from it and from other public utilities a good social ‘object’, which contributes to our internal sense of safety, freedom and plenitude.11 This sort of argument about containment applies a fortiori to the media environment, which, while also impersonal in the sense that newspapers and television screens are not people, is densely populated with images of people, sometimes of a compelling nature. We are often in a state of somewhat libidinised attention when consuming media, due to the content of the popular press and of television output which


though not actually sexualised a lot of the time is largely about pleasure in various forms (though as acknowledged earlier this is not usually so, admittedly, for the actual moments of news consumption). And we could go back here to the ideas referred to in the previous section about the general psychic meanings of television as a medium per se to explain its power.12 Or we could invoke the sociological axiom that in the era of late modernity and vanishing tradition it is the media which have taken over from traditional authorities key powers to shape our minds. What is of concern here now is to try and go beyond these generalities to explore the potential for media consumption, and news consumption in particular, to provide opportunities for the introjection or reintrojection of elements which may help in the toleration and management of feelings we have about events in the world, and so provide a more containing basis for citizenship. The stress is on the potential for containment rather than the actual occurrence of it, as a lot of news is currently disappointing in its failure to realise this potential. Too often, it seems, as will be illustrated in the next section, the news seems to feed the roots of nameless dread, rather than converting it into reality-based concern as should happen in successful containment proper. Nonetheless, exploring the news using this concept can contribute to strategies for the containment of public anxiety and of toxic material in the public sphere. This is the main practical reason for conducting this kind of analysis, as part of a wider effort to enhance the quality of the news we get. Journalism’s traditional ethics of objectivity, accuracy and responsibility would be deepened by developing sensitivity to the broader emotional impacts of its work, and the potential for news to provide some containment could be realised more often.

Emotional work in news production Alongside the concept of containment, another key concept in understanding the dynamics of the emotional public sphere is that of emotional labour. This concept was originally formulated in 1983 by the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2003). She defined it as ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display’ (p. 7), as required for the performance of a particular occupational role – that is, the use of emotional signals in relating to others as a component of wage labour. Her classic study was of flight attendants and of the smiling and other kinds of emotional positivity they


must produce in their dealings with passengers. Her analysis has been assimilated by some into a simple critique of alienated labour, but as she pointed out (p. 9), ‘Emotional labour is potentially good.’ It can bring benefits to those for whom it is performed, and need not necessarily damage the labourer. And in many of the studies which have followed on from hers, the idea of emotional labour has been applied to nursing and other caring occupations, as well as to other service industries (for example Smith, 1992). It can be extended further to include all those situations where someone is managing their own feelings and their expressions of them as a necessary part of an ongoing occupational role. This would include those occupations like journalism where the recipients of the emotional labour are not usually in direct face-to-face contact with the labourer. Of course, television journalists, when on camera, are in a sense physically present to their audiences, and so their bodily behaviour does then have some signal value. But in all the circumstances of their work, journalists whether knowingly or not, in print or broadcast, must use their emotional responses to the world in the course of their professional practice, and the products of their labour – media content – will for better or worse reflect these responses and how they are managed by the individual journalist. And the products of this labour then have a direct impact upon those for whom they were produced. Journalism is then one of the few professions whose practice has a direct emotional effect beyond the immediate interpersonal setting of the workplace. For most of us the products of our work do not have much influence on the feelings of others beyond those we directly deal with (though in some retail or service jobs where the public is dealt with in volume, these people may be numerous). For some, though, their actions are of substantial emotional consequence to many people they never meet. For example the decisions senior corporate managers take may have effects on the emotional states of thousands of employees remote from them. As we have noted, advertising creatives are constantly colouring the emotional life of the general public. Indeed, as advertising has become more aesthetically-driven, its practitioners have arguably entered territory traditionally held by musicians, artists, filmmakers and novelists, as powerful definers of the affective parameters of shared civic culture.13 Politicians and some other people in public life, including of course those in the expanding category of ‘celebrity’, are also amongst those whom we may think of as having the largest influence on the public discourse of feeling, by expressing particular feelings or by the


articulation of emotionally-laden values. But we can often distance ourselves from the utterances of public figures, seeing them as a class apart. We can acknowledge that they please or annoy us, and excite or bore, but we do not – consciously at least – feel them to be inside us. We react to them, so it seems to us, rather than being constituted by them (even if at an unconscious level there is an important sense in which we are constituted by public figures, as was shown in our discussion of Diana in Chapter 3). But journalism is us: it is our eyes and ears, or our windows to the world. We see with it, or look through it. Because of this, its emotional tone will resonate deeply inside us, and we are identified with its affective qualities. When we pick up the familiar paper, or watch the assured presence and listen to the authoritative words of the television newscaster, we are both finding out something of what’s happening in the world, and finding ourselves in relation to it, as our emotional responses are stimulated and steered by the content of what we read or see, by the emotional tone of the presentation, and by the degree of containment it offers. We can suggest the following sketchy model of emotional news consumption, which brings out the influence of the emotional aspects of its production. In the same moment of consumption, I as reader or viewer learn some facts, and also have an initial emotional reaction to them. I will elaborate on and may revise that reaction later, perhaps, as I learn more facts (and imbibe the emotional dimension of another journalist’s phrasing of them), and as I think about the news and possibly talk to people about it. Overall the feeling-tones of the various news items I encounter on a topic will build up quietly in the back of my mind, maybe as a quite complex aggregation of diverse and sometimes contradictory affects, and will be a major element in the development of my views. The effect here is likely to be subtle and cumulative, the effect of many mundane instances at the micro-level of repeated exposure to small components of the news.14 Also, these exposures are usually within the routines of everyday life, and so will be influenced by the emotional tone and agenda of the domestic space (see Note 5). But the much less researched emotional inputs in the production phase of the life of news need equal consideration as determinants of the emotional experience of news consumption.

Keeping calm about terror Some items of news are however unavoidably dramatic in their impact, and in contrast to the mundane drip of ordinary news flow they can be


experienced as overwhelming. Here we might see especially clearly how journalism contributes, or has the potential to contribute, to the management of public emotion, and what obstacles there might be to carrying out the emotional labour involved in journalism in ways that offer containment to audiences. As an example we will discuss the emotional labour dimension of the reporting of terrorist attacks. This area is not yet colonised by a single professional orthodoxy of approach to the extent that political reporting is. However, a review of practice to date suggests that there is a risk of media coverage (driven by images, and now also by ‘citizen journalism’) focusing increasingly on raw terror and so providing less material for processing trauma. Reviewing studies of the coverage of 9/11, one is struck by the diversity of accounts which media analysts and researchers have given of how the media in the US and the UK handled the task of reporting the attacks. Thus James Carey (2002) found that on September 11 itself and in the few days that followed, the major US television networks were poised, thorough and factual, speaking in a ‘tone of calm reassurance that checked any incipient panic’. However, as the week progressed, this coverage degenerated. No authoritative framework of understanding was supplied by the government. In that vacuum, broadcast content turned to more horror replays, speculation and patriotic fervour. Nonetheless, newspapers (especially the New York Times) took over the journalistic leadership of providing a calmer and more reflective space. Similarly, Simon Cottle (2002) examined UK current affairs programmes with studio audiences in the period after 9/11, and found them to offer a space for discussion and reflection which was a vital resource for deliberative democracy, despite the producers’ ‘agoraphobic’ needs for control. In contrast to these more positive accounts, Elizabeth Anker (2005) argues that from the outset US television framed the attacks in a melodramatic mode, by conjoining repeated clips of the planes and the towers collapsing with the pronouncements of political leaders in order to create a Manichean framework of understanding based on images of innocent and virtuous victimhood (the US melodramatic national identity, she argues, which predated 9/11), villainy and heroic retribution. She bases this argument on an analysis of Fox News from 17.00–18.00 hours on 9/11, noting that by 5.36 p.m. Fox was using footage of bin Laden firing guns and superimposing it on the tower collapse clips. This melodramatic narrative, she claims, blocked discussion of causes, effects and understandings of the attacks.


According to Martin Montgomery (2005), American newspapers took a little longer to converge around a narrative of this sort. He studied newspaper headlines in the days after the attacks, and also looked at White House press conference transcripts and speeches by President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell. He notes the movement in newspaper headlines from the uniform predominance of the words ‘attack’ and ‘terror’ on day one to a more diverse set of words on day two, when ‘evil’, ‘war’, ‘America’, and ‘day’ are also all prominent, to a convergence around ‘war’ on day three. By then the language of war had become prominent in government statements, and Montgomery argues that although the press initially questioned the application of the concept of ‘war’ here, the media failed to prevent this language taking decisive hold of the public understanding of the attacks, and so laid the ground for subsequent military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. However Gwen Bouvier’s (2005) reading of the BBC’s television coverage during the hours after the news first broke tells another different story. She identifies shifts in the discourse of reportage. In the opening phase the primary concern is with establishing factually just what had happened, and was happening. In the second phase a framework for talking about the events emerged which was focused on notions of warning, risk and threat. In this initial attempt to process the images, and to find some way of talking about them, the emphasis is on whether it could have been prevented, and on how and by whom the attack might have been anticipated. We might see this as news scripts giving expression to a search, or plea, for the protective parent, or as an accusation that there had been a parental failure to protect, or as a wish for reality to have been different. Then there was a third phase in which this effort after meaning is disturbed by what Bouvier calls a ‘reality effect’, namely by the arrival of further dramatic imagery of the towers collapsing. And even in the second phase, where some analysis was arguably emerging, it seemed as if some of the emerging commentary had been suspended in sheer contemplation of the horror. The diversity of these accounts reflects to some extent the political and theoretical differences amongst the academic analysts. But it must also testify to a diversity of treatments given to the attacks, across different media outlets, as the picture of their ambition and devastation emerged. In a review of some of the American studies, Philip Seib (2005) suggests that television news organisations’ over-reliance on visual images, which of course is intensified at times of dramatic events, can increase


the incomprehensibility of events. By the time they broaden their coverage to include more contextual information, he argues, ‘the public may have become so focussed on the singular act that the larger issues do not receive the attention they deserve’ (p. 3). This points to the possibility that as well as providing or relaying simplistic narratives (as in different ways most of the studies suggest it did), media coverage – especially but not only television – may fail to provide much narrative at all, dealing instead in awe-struck repetitions of moments of raw terror. In an opposite movement to the arguably excessive intrusion of comment and analysis into most news, it seems that in some major instances of reporting on tragic events where death and trauma abound, the news media may find themselves unable to provide sufficient framing, and to sustain a commentary which could begin to manage the panic and to orient the public to the possibility of comprehension. Of course the rolling news format is part of the problem here; steps towards restabilising the self cannot smoothly fill the hours, and as new viewers switch on they too will want to see the moments of original horror. And there may be an element of editorial irresponsibility, of a deliberate reliance on audiences gathering around those moments. Also we must expect that the collective efforts of journalists across the period of shock will to some degree reflect the response of an individual, whose faculties we expect to be unsteady for a period of time. (Viewed from this angle, Carey’s positive evaluation, if accurate, highlights the achievement of the US networks’ news personnel.) But these difficulties highlight how the demands for emotional labour which their work always makes of journalists can in some situations become almost impossible to meet. We need journalists to show us what is going on, and how terrible the world can be, but we also need them to be people who have seen the terror and its victims and are able to contemplate and withstand it. The mere structured appearance of the newspaper, with headline and byline, or the journalist’s appearance on screen or in sound, all testify to the possibility of some processing of the trauma. As Sreberny (2002) points out, this function of the media at times of trauma is not fundamentally different from their everyday role in providing an ordering and containing function, but it has a more intensive and acutely important effect at such times. Zelizer and Allan (2002), in their introduction to the volume in which some of these studies appeared, see journalism as having a key role in the movement of whole populations from trauma to recovery, through sequential stages of establishing safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection with ordinary life.


In this respect, the recent emergence of participatory or citizen journalism is a potentially problematic development. The use by news organisations of photos taken by members of the public and of breathless reports by eye-witnesses or other people on the spot, delivered by e-mail or blog or text message, clearly offers an enhanced immediacy and variety of image and narrative, and promises to enrich and expand the very nature of news. Allan (2002) notes the valuable information provision function of online sources on and after September 11, and the sharp increase in the use of material provided by the public in coverage of the 7/7 London bombings. At the same time, this development carries the risk of reducing further the scope for the news to provide some containment of our anxieties as we learn from it about the latest stories of terror and suffering (Hoskins, 2006). ‘Citizen journalists’ may be unlikely to feel they must meet standards of professional composure. They are less likely to offer us the experience of hearing from someone who is not just reporting their own sensations but who has tried to take the measure of the tragedy and is able to tolerate the experience of it sufficiently to produce an overall account of it.15 The professional reporters who do this are for their audiences the first witness on whom we depend for a narrative, and who represent in their relatively composed functioning the possibility for containment of whatever fears the event may provoke. However it is not easy to see what might maximise this containing function in everyday reporting and editorial practices. When something as dreadful as a massive terrorist attack happens, we are all stunned, and in various ways we all need to know something of the reality of it – the weird moment of blast, the displaced body parts, the pathetic debris of possessions. We need journalists to bring this to us, to get the survivor accounts, the basic sequence of events, the numbers, and so on. Since these needs are partly based on reasonable information demands, and stem partly from efforts to come to terms emotionally with what has happened, we can ask of journalists that they meet them fully. Since however the same needs also stem partly from our morbid appetites for the dreadful, we ask journalists to do this without giving us gratuitous opportunity for thoughtless immersion in the horrific physical reality and in primitive emotional responses to it. And the longer we stay in those feelings of terror and inchoate anger, the more vulnerable we are to having our responses to the trauma captured by simplistic ideological positions, of all descriptions, which feed off what psychoanalysts might call emotional primitivity. This requires a considerable capacity for emotional labour


on the journalist’s part, in producing reports which do not avoid the empirical object of dread but which also carry the possibility for contextualisation, reflection and stabilisation. This would enable us all to move on from the stage of entranced horror into complex thought when we have another terrorist attack to come to terms with.

6 Rottweilers Savage Democracy1

The national conversation We referred in the previous chapter to some ways in which today’s political journalism does not offer constructive inputs to the emotional public sphere, both in the well-documented tradition of ‘moral panic’ and in the impoverished images of ourselves, the public, which are too often presented. In this chapter we will describe what can be seen as the most important and the most malign of the media’s present contributions to the processes of emotional governance, in the UK, USA and elsewhere. This is the cynical and adversarial journalism which dominates much reporting and editorialising. This particular malaise of our media may hold part of the responsibility for the problems of voter apathy and general citizen disengagement from the democratic process in many countries, especially amongst the young. Of course politicians must also be called to account over these and other problems. But at this point we will entertain the view that styles of political journalism are part of the problem, and that those involved in mediating politics to the people have responsibilities which they have not yet faced.2 Our national mass media provide the stages and the ground rules for much of the ‘national conversation’, and so are highly influential in determining whether it is conducted in a civil way. In particular, they will set standards of courtesy, and model modes of engagement. They could, for example, show us how to approach politics in an openminded way, driven by humane curiosity about the world and the wish to understand other people’s positions. Which programmes least embody the ideal of civic discourse as civil conversation, based on courtesy and a wish to discover things about other people and the world? In case this talk about civility and 72

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courtesy gives the wrong impression, let it be clear that we are not going to put the argument that television news has been dumbed down, or taken over by brash, celebrity-obsessed journalism. There are serious questions to ask about the tabloid coverage of politics, but we are more concerned here about problems at the serious, ‘broadsheet’ end of the media spectrum. Is it possible that a broadcast genre often celebrated for its integrity may be more damaging to our political culture than a lot of ‘tabloid’ style programming? We all know about the rottweilers, the aggressively challenging interviewers who bite lumps out of politicians. They are often applauded as they do so, and feted as a major democratic advance on their forbears, the deferential interviewers who let politicians get away with murder. Brian McNair (1995, pp. 86–87) notes the ‘commonplace assumption that [their]…approach is both legitimate and necessary’, and that they ‘confront the politician with what the public wants to know’. He concludes that they provide ‘an important if sometimes flawed means of broadcast analysis and interpretation of political rhetoric’ (p. 88). However another possibility must be considered: that these dogs are a threat to the public, in the sense that their clamorous barking is a form of pollution which impairs the moral quality of democratic life in our public space. Or to take a more extreme analogy: their mauling of politicians provides a spectacle like those of criminal entertainments where vicious dogs are let loose on some other despised creature, and the worst is brought out in the audience. Of course the sceptical persistence of an interviewer may sometimes perform an importantly useful role in opening an aspect of political reality to public gaze. But amongst the rottweilers, scepticism is enveloped in cynicism and hostility, in an attitude which on a daily and basic level is likely to have a number of adverse effects on audiences.3

The damage This attitude is likely to promote cynicism about politics, it gratuitously polarises arguments and people, and it militates against creative thinking about problems in society and how to tackle them. Overall it brings a negativity and fractiousness to the emotional tone of our politics. This is in an age when the decline of traditional party affiliations and the rise of personal and emotional agendas in many areas of life means that the emotional appeal of politics is of increasing importance. These are obviously serious charges against an influential form of media content. Not only are the rottweilers accepted, they are probably


widely popular. And in many cases it is easy to see why this is so. They can transmute instantly into loveable labradors. When not baring their teeth, they may come over as humorous, warm and decent people. Their approach to personal topics is often sensitive, and their treatment of non-politician interviewees is usually very respectful. Arguably this makes their contribution to political culture all the more damaging, as they are easily identified with and have high credibility. They are probably seen as nearer to the ‘television news reader’, who is trusted by 66 per cent of the population to tell the truth, than they are to the ‘journalist’, trusted by 19 per cent.4 However a number of voices have questioned the trends towards attack and disrespect in news and current affairs presenting and in British political journalism as a whole. Some are from within journalism, such as John Lloyd (2002; 2004), who has played a leading role in the debate in the UK. Lloyd analyses recent developments in relations between politicians and journalists (especially the 2003 ‘Gilligan affair’ involving the BBC and the UK government’s case for going to war in Iraq – see Chapter 10, Note 10), and argues that the role of the media should consist not in opposition for its own sake but in pursuit of the possibility of objectivity in reporting. In this chapter we will offer a psychodynamic formulation of this argument, that cynical and adversarial coverage is eroding democratic politics. At first sight this may seem inconsistent with Lloyd’s position; he argues against the ‘journalism of attachment’ proposed by Martin Bell (1997), in favour of a return to an ideal of objectivity. So to advocate a focus on the emotional dimensions of journalism, as will be done here, may seem like a contrary project. It will hopefully be clear in the following pages that this is not so, and that the arguments for ‘emotional literacy’ to be enjoined on journalists would in practice bring a greater degree of emotional temperance. Some politicians too are fighting back, and other critical voices are from academia. Steven Barnett (2002) has identified four phases of political journalism in the UK. From the post-war ‘age of deference’, in which journalists were ‘fawning and submissive’ to politicians, we have passed through the ‘age of equal engagement’, when both interviewers and their subjects were prepared to engage in civil debate, and then the ‘age of journalistic disdain’, in which journalists adopted attitudes of ‘detached scepticism’. Now, he argues, we are in an ‘age of contempt’, in which journalists have moved from informed questioning to a ‘relentlessly negative approach’ and to ‘unthinking ridicule’ of politicians. Barnett likens his historical model to accounts of the evolution


of American journalism in the same period. Larry Sabato (2000) has described three phases, in which the journalistic role in the USA has gone from ‘lapdog’, to ‘watchdog’, then (circa 1974) to ‘junkyard dog’. In the current ‘junkyard’ phase, journalists conduct themselves in ways that are ‘rude, arrogant and cynical’. Similar analyses of the USA have been provided some time ago by Fallows (1996) and Patterson (1994). As well as this kind of historical framing, there is experimental evidence of the negative impact of negative journalism. Capella and Jamieson (1997) conducted three experiments which linked voter cynicism with media content in which style dominated over substance and discussion of ‘strategic’ issues (such as the horse-race aspects of electoral politics) was preferred to straightforward and informative coverage of pertinent issues and facts. (See also Note 2 below.) It may however be hard to capture in experimental research the insidious effects of manner and style rather than content. For this, subtle qualitative analysis is necessary. For example, an analysis by the author of a small sample of interviews on the BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme in 2003 yielded a typology of common forms of attack by interviewers. Giving new life to an old cliché, these could be called ‘soundbites’. We can expect the same types to be found in television interviews, where the visual cues of facial expression and other body language can enhance their delivery. In this typology there are three main categories of bite: accusing, bossing, and wedge-driving. Accusations come in five different subtypes. Interviewees are accused, usually in slightly less direct language than this, of being fools, weaklings, chameleons, bigots or liars. Bossing comes in various forms, all intended to construct the interviewee as the moral inferior of the interviewer. Common forms include fingerwagging (usually conveyed in tone of voice), chopping off (interrupting an answer and moving the interview on), and the Parthian shot (closing a topic or a whole interview with a damning aside). Lastly, wedge-driving involves a form of questioning that is designed to demonstrate that whatever policy or practice with which the interviewee is trying to solve a problem or resolve a conflict will inevitably fail. The interviewer is in effect pressing the case that ‘the shit will hit the fan’, or ‘the wheels will come off’, or that the interviewee is being unrealistic in some way, and that whatever antagonisms are involved in the issue to hand are irreconcilable ones. Why are the accusatory, contemptuous and cynical words of interviewers a problem? What is their impact on audiences? Evidence from


audience research would be necessary to answer that question fully and with scientific confidence, but this may be an instance where we do not need to wait for that kind of evidence, but can take a position on the basis of our experience as citizens. We can reasonably propose that there are two serious risks here to the health of our political culture. 1. One is linked primarily to the accusing tendency, though it is also reinforced by contemptuous bossing. It is that respect for politicians, confidence in the democratic political process and belief in the sphere of politics as a worthy field of human endeavour are further eroded. Of course trust in politicians and in politics may have been in crisis anyway for other reasons, to do with the limits and flaws of political institutions, and the shortcomings of individual politicians. But instead of encouraging us to see these problems as potentially remediable, rottweiler interviewing leads us to despair and to call a plague on all their houses. There is a constant nurturing of suspicion, an expecting the worst of people, and a risk therefore of a judgemental attitude becoming habitual, with an assumption of a moral difference between the journalist who is in the right and those reported who (at least when they are politicians) are in the wrong. The inculcation of despair about politics is not only because it is presented as adversarial ritual. Nor is it only because one politician after another, across the political spectrum, is treated as a potential or actual fool, weakling, chameleon, bigot or liar. It is also because the interviewers, with whom as audience we spontaneously identify, take up one contradictory position after another. In order to retain a confrontationist stance with different interviewees, the interviewer must first adopt one position, then – with equal relish – its opposite. As BBC presenter John Humphrys has pointed out (Donovan, 1997, p. 135), he cannot believe in all positions. So we are schooled by the presenters as our role models in the assumption that positions are things to be adopted for argument’s sake only. There is a current of urbane nihilism in this, and it carries us far beyond a subtle use of devil’s advocacy to clarify a debate, into a world where we have argument for argument’s sake (at which point most people close down on politics, as they do on Parliamentary knockabout) and where nobody can be believed. Comprehensive cynicism, or an impractical idealistic rejection of the world as it is, are the only positions then available. 2. Secondly, there is an effect likely to flow from the wedge-driving practice, which seeks to demonstrate that problems are unresolvable and conflicts are absolute. If it has any effect on how the audience understand politics, this must encourage views of the world as hope-


lessly ridden with unmanageable antagonisms. Such views either lead in turn to more cynical despair, or feed fundamentalisms of all kinds. This compulsion of journalists and especially interviewers to try and drive wedges into conflicts, even into negotiations as they are taking place, is one area where we may wonder at times about how aware some journalists are of their responsibilities in the political process. The wedge-driving proclivity of interviewers also invokes impoverished ways of thinking amongst audiences, for whom new resolutions and creative compromises are less likely to be entertained as they fall outside the poles of antagonism to which the interview constantly returns. Audiences are schooled in fractious, contemptuous and despairing ways of talking about politics; we are pushed away from deliberative democracy, and towards a declamatory for/against type of discourse. Overall this has a corrosive effect on thinking. Now it is a piece of conventional wisdom in media research that the media cannot tell us what to think, but they can tell us what to think about. In fact this power of agenda-setting can amount to a power to tell us how to think. At least it aspires to that: the recurrent message of much political journalism, and especially of the radio and television interview, is that we must think in cynical and pessimistic ways. We must assume that politicians are adopting incoherent or unworkable positions, and that they are striving to hide inconsistencies, cover up failures and deny conflicts with colleagues or allies. Politics is often implicitly presented as the domain of self-serving careerists, if not as actually corrupt. There are two issues here that should be noted. One is the complicity of politicians in their own humiliation. Despite robust examples over the years of refusals to be ‘kebabbed’, as ex-Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock once put it, many allow themselves to be bullied and pilloried with regularity. There seems to be a variety of motives for this. Some politicians have said how much they enjoy the antagonistic encounters with interviewers, seeing them as another part of the pleasurable scrapping of politics, perhaps implying that there is a harmless theatricality to these contests. Others seem to grit their teeth and accept it unquestioningly as a price of the job, a regrettable necessity in which the main thing is not to get upset. And of course there is the view that politicians have made a major contribution to the evolution of the interview by their increasing use of it as an opportunity to make particular statements regardless of the questions, and by their schooled evasiveness, tactics which provoke the interviewer into more aggressive questioning just as the news management techniques of government


have hastened the descent of the press into junkyard journalism. To say this does not condone the rottweiler style, but does help to explain its rise, even if the growth of news management was itself a response to an already disrespectful and wayward fourth estate. The second is the relationship of aggressive interviewing to the question of interviewer bias. One research study (Babad, 2001) has found that more dominant and aggressive interviewers show more preferential behaviour. Where interviewers are self-indulgently expressive, as is increasingly the case, the possibilities for differential treatment of interviewees via non-verbal channels are greater. Even though interviewers appear uniformly hostile to all, subtle differential effects may build over time in relation to individual politicians, if not parties, or occasionally swamp an individual interview. So although systematic bias is not now always such a major issue in media treatments of politics, the fierceness of the rottweilers may vary in more idiosyncratic ways.

Cultures of attack Overall, we need to ask where this rottweiler distemper comes from, and what sustains it. Let us consider two socio-cultural sources of the phenomenon, one on the supply side and one on the demand side. On the supply side, Tannen (1997) puts attack journalism in the context of an ancient oppositional culture stemming from an Aristotelian assumption that truth is gained through opposition, a corrosive mindset in which politicians and others are implicated as much as journalists. However this does not explain the recent rise of attack journalism, which requires some socio-cultural analysis. Many of today’s leading rottweilers, while very varied as characters, are people whose intellectual formation was inevitably much influenced by the radicalisation of the intelligentsia which occurred in Britain and the USA in the seventies. While the theories of revolution which led this radicalisation are no longer widely held, they have left a broad legacy in an underlying worldview which is still prevalent amongst liberal/left people, especially in academia and the media, and elements of which are even a part of popular common-sense. This worldview starts from the assumption that most authorities, and especially political leaders, are probably corrupt, or incompetent. The habits of critique and denunciation which were so proudly cultivated by the radical avant-gardes of three and four decades ago are now often, in unsophisticated form, the normal reflex of the ‘sophisticated’ citizen, even of the ordinary person


in the street. In this worldview, as John Lloyd has pointed out, truth is assumed to be always hidden, requiring aggressive digging to reveal it. It is also imagined to reside ultimately and only in conflict; politics is seen as basically about the fomenting and exploitation of conflict, and the role of national political leaders is often to conceal conflict or pronounce false solutions to it. This mindset is perhaps better seen as an emotional toning of outlooks rather than as a substantive cognitive worldview. It now predominates in the treatment of politics across all media outlets, and feeds the rottweilers in their urges to tear up the delicate compromises and uneasy alliances which politics partly consists of. And too much political journalism appears to be guided more by this suspicious and acerbic mood of the elite5 rather than by considerations of what would best contribute to a forward-looking and inclusive democratic culture. On the demand side, we need to ask why audiences are prepared to watch the rituals of aggressive cross-examination to the extent that they are. Barnett (2002) in fact partly blames audiences, in his argument that a major driver of the ‘age of contempt’ is the deregulation of the media, which has led to increased competitive pressures on journalists and editors to appeal to audiences with displays of nastiness and other forms of circulation- and ratings-boosting sensationalism. We should be wary of analyses that rest too heavily on the basically elitist assumption that mass audiences always want the cheap and the nasty, but there is clearly some appetite for blood amongst the audiences of programmes based on attack journalism. There are two complementary ways to understand the origins of this. One is that we are all influenced by the general culture of contempt which, as argued above, has been a negative fall-out of the radicalisation of the intelligentsia. We may not all spontaneously embrace it with as much enthusiasm as our metropolitan opinion-leaders in the media elites, but we have enough of it to be willing spectators of various blood-sports. The current popularity of various forms of ‘nasty TV’ in quiz shows and reality TV is evidence for this.

Any passion is better than none? The second way of understanding audience acceptance of cynical journalism is to do with how the serious media treatment of politics is traditionally a rather dry business, lacking the everyday repertoire of human feeling. This may be partly attributed to the traditions of masculinised hyper-rationality around politics, based on the assumption


that everyone is making hard calculations and that feelings do not or should not come into it. But the emotional aridity of mediatised politics is also a function of its lack of emotional complexity. While stylised forms of ideological passion (for ‘the American people’, ‘the British people’, the National Health Service, the pound, ‘education’, and so on) are routinely expressed by politicians, the messier side of emotional life is not part of the media discourse of politics. Little airtime is given to exploring how complex the emotional bases of these rhetorical passions and of policy commitments may be, nor to how both politicians and citizens are influenced in their political decisions by negative feelings such as guilt and envy, and by mixed feelings of doubt and ambivalence. The black-and-white quality of political theatre can be seen psychologically as a function of projection. One aspect of this psychologically fundamental process (see, for example, Laplanche and Pontalis, 1980; Hinshelwood, 1989) is that undesirable or intolerable aspects of ourselves are seen as belonging to other people. In this case, politicians are available to all of us, not just journalists, as targets for our projections – as people whom we can see as embodying the weaknesses or vices we know or fear ourselves to be capable of. Projection occurs between individuals, and between social groups, when it is often a major contributor to inter-group tensions and conflicts. ‘The pot calling the kettle black’ is a well-known old formulation of this concept, although in psychological theory it does not matter if the kettle is sparkling silver: the pot may still project its blackness onto it and see it as black. The concept of projection clearly illustrates the function of psychology in locating responsibility: it requires those doing the projecting to acknowledge their own shortcomings and to stop imagining that these faults are only in other people. We all project; journalists cannot be singled out for special criticism here. But as privileged participants in the public sphere they have a special responsibility. They are managers of the media stage on which the dramas of democracy are played out, and so should do their best to ensure that they do not encourage by example the tendency to project. Projective processes distort perceptions and deepen conflicts; they are one of the most common and serious threats to healthy democracy. Unfortunately the situations we have when politicians and journalists confront each other in public now are ones where mutually reinforcing projections are likely to be at work. In the news conference and studio it seems that a dynamic of confrontation has become established which generates the unedifying exchanges complained of by


voters. When two self-idealising groups meet neither side is likely to take responsibility for itself. Politicians’ traditional refusal to admit to fault meets journalists’ self-righteousness. Being under attack for your sins or errors (real or alleged) makes it more likely you will projectively deny them, so defensiveness and the blaming of others by politicians is intensified. This in turn fuels the journalistic appetite for blood, and heightens their projection of badness into politicians, forcing the latter into further projection elsewhere to avoid feeling very bad about themselves. The result is a primitive, repetitive form of theatre, which offers at best a very impoverished modelling of democratic discourse. Of course it is a key responsibility of the media to help create a space for politics in which personal and emotional factors can be subjected to a calm and rational scrutiny. But what we can call the emotional deficit (Richards, 2004) in mediatised political discourse, the absence of a spontaneous and full range of emotional expression, leaves audiences hungry for anything which engages the passions and brings some psychological life and colour to the intellectually demanding work of figuring out what is best for us as a society. If all that is on offer is a kind of courtroom drama featuring the theatrical cross-examination of ‘guilty’ persons (politicians) by interviewers fired with righteous passion, then people will go for that. Here we find the impact of the more expressive, emotionalised culture we now inhabit, but only in the form of licence to interviewers to seek particular dramatisations of issues. But excessive consumption of this kind of material brings on a fever of negativity in a disillusioned audience, not clear thinking by an engaged citizenry. It may succeed at times in exposing the worst of politicians, but it risks bringing out the worst in all of us. Put in terms of an emotional labour analysis, the situation in political journalism now is that we see a rigid, stylised emotional labour process, in which, whatever the issues, a majority of journalists adopt modes of inquiry and reportage which are highly coloured, emotionally, by pessimism and scorn. The overall effect is of a massive bias, not in any specific political direction, but against hope. Journalists are projectively filling the public sphere with their own negativity. In a striking inversion of the occupationally-required positivity of the flight attendants studied by Hochschild (see Chapter 5), many political journalists seem obliged to approach their work, and many of the people on whom they are reporting, with an obligatory negativity and incivility of purpose. And this often seems to be ‘deep acting’, in Hochschild’s terms: they are not putting it on, but have deeply internalised the negative professional values, towards which their own inner dispositions may anyway have been favourable.


Psychologically, what is this about? Cynicism is often seen as a defence against the fear of disappointment. In publicly managing their emotional relation to politics as they do, with defensive distance and cynicism, journalists are encouraging us all to adopt the same defence against the anxieties of hope. Current news output is thus dominated by an emotionally defensive frame which is at once detached, oppositional and polarising. Consequently it is unable to provide a space for thinking through the emotional complexities of political issues and for working through and containing public anxieties. In other words there is an emotional labour process of poor quality here, which – given the political importance of how emotion is managed in the news – is a serious threat to the health of democracy.

7 Challenging the Media Bias

Emotional agendas in journalism What is the alternative to the journalism of attack and despair? Some of today’s interviewers, journalists and columnists convey a sense of the intellectual and emotional complexity of politics. In Barnett’s historical account, there was a brief period in between deference and cynicism, when journalists approached politicians as equals, in a spirit of constructive engagement, and interviewing styles were grounded in courtesy and intellectual curiosity rather than scalp-hunting. Perhaps we can hope for a restoration of this approach, as part of a larger ambition for our media to make more positive, respectful and emotionally complex contributions to political debate. There are some signs within journalism of developments which might lead in this direction, although their starting-points are elsewhere in the field of debates and issues in journalistic practice. They are emerging primarily from professional considerations about the human costs to journalists of reporting on wars and other traumatic events, and from ethical/political concerns about the impact on audiences of traditional ways of reporting on conflict. The ‘peace journalism’ model developed by Jake Lynch and Annabelle McGoldrick (2005) from the work of Johann Galtung seeks to install a place for reflexivity and critical self-awareness in the journalist’s mindset, in which the journalist’s own part in the sequence of cause and effect between media and the world being reported on can be considered. While primarily concerned with the adverse impact on audiences of the traditionally decontextualised and polarising reporting of conflicts, it also addresses the journalist’s emotional stance to the subject being reported. It requires reflective precision in the use of emotive words, 83


and an attention to the emotional complexities of conflicts. If applied to the role of domestic political journalists, the peace journalism paradigm would bring under scrutiny the emotional and cognitive framing which they give to their reports, and the constricted, pessimistic understandings of politics which they generate.1 Another source of new thinking about journalism is in the practical moves to equip field reporters with better ways to handle the emotional impact upon themselves of reporting on traumatic situations – witnessing battles or attack aftermaths, interviewing combatants, victims, relatives, and so on.2 The Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma has been leading work in this field, primarily in the provision of training events and also in research. It aims to inform working journalists about trauma and its effects, and to raise awareness within media organisations about the impact of trauma coverage on news professionals and on news audiences. This agenda is closely linked to two concepts of increasing influence in a range of professional fields: emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1995) and emotional literacy (Park et al., 2004; Orbach, 2001). They are variously defined by others, but there are usually quite deep differences in the meanings associated with the two terms. Emotional intelligence tends to refer to qualities within individuals, on the model of cognitive intelligence. Emotional literacy may have a more relational connotation, for example in the work being done in the UK by the organisation Antidote (the ‘Campaign for Emotional Literacy’) to develop emotional literacy in schools, where it is seen as a function of the organisational culture of the school. But both these terms usually refer to some capacity, which can be observed in individuals, to identify emotions in oneself, to reflect on them and to manage them in adaptive ways that enhance performance and enrich experience. Although the psychotherapeutic orientation of the Dart Centre’s work necessarily focuses most directly on the emotional selfmanagement of the journalist, and on reducing the risk of posttraumatic stress disorder and other adverse psychological consequences amongst media professionals, it also necessarily looks downstream in the flow of news, to the effects on audiences of different styles of reporting. We can usefully conceive of the processes of news production and consumption as involving a chain of affect, along which emotions are transmitted, modified, amplified or blocked. The chain will start with the members of the public involved in the news story in any way, and continue through the reporters, cameramen, editors and others involved in the field or newsroom, and end with the audiences

Challenging the Media Bias 85

of the news. At each link in the chain an expression of emotion may be put in, taken out or ignored, emphasised, interpreted or redefined. The news product that reaches the audience is of critical importance in the process of emotional governance, whether the topic is a political issue where there will be an abundance of ‘statements’ as well as ‘events’ and ‘mediations’, or whether it is an accident or crime or other topic where the ‘event’ far outweighs any ‘statements’ that might have been made by authority figures. In either case, the degree of emotional intelligence or emotional literacy deployed by the journalists involved will be a major factor in the precise shaping of the news report, item or package. So in keeping with the times, journalism is moving towards recognition of the importance of emotion in the process and products of its everyday practice, though the influence of traditional precepts is, no doubt, still strong. These include the idea that emotion has no place in the work of journalism, whether it threatens to intrude in the evaluation and recording of the facts, or to destabilise the mind of the reporter on the battlefield. It is improbable that the culture of journalism will easily be influenced by high-falutin academic studies of public emotion. But extending the study of emotion in news production to its role in news consumption would create a comprehensive research agenda (which of course will have to include audience research – i.e. studies of how the news is actually interpreted and experienced), the scope of which would include the whole circulation and processing of affect from news production to news consumption to public opinion and back again into news production.

Web space3 There is already one place where we can see something of what more ‘containing’ news might look like, which is on the web. Of course the web is also implicated in the fragmentation of news audiences, with the profusion of web news pages taking people away from mass broadcast bulletins and the national press (although many of the most popular news sites are of course the web versions of those still-dominant sources). Moreover, if users took systematic advantage of the choice offered by the web it would mean that they chose to consume only the news, that is the topics and the views, which they want to hear, to a much greater extent than results from one’s choice of national newspaper. But since increasing numbers of people, young people especially, now cite the web as their main source of news,4 there clearly are also possibilities here for deeper and better versions of the news to grow in influence.


One reason for optimism about this derives from the basic nature of the web as a medium. Unlike the ephemerality of daily and weekly print media, and the constant flow of the broadcast media, the web provides a space where material can be held and remain fully accessible over time. The average citizen does not consult the archives of the print media, nor does s/he record and replay news bulletins or documentaries which may have provided background information from the recent or more distant past which is relevant to understanding a present day issue. But the better news sites on the web provide abundant contextual material (Q and A pages, briefing notes, and the like) which is instantly accessible from the breaking news pages, and which offers the curious reader a quick and easy way of getting some background to what they are reading about. Links to other sites and the extraordinary and growing power of search engines mean that all kinds of gaps in knowledge can be filled by someone with an internet connection, a little time and sufficient appetite. This significantly reduces the practical obstacles to developing political literacy. This functionality of the web is not in itself a direct contribution to emotional governance; that would depend more on the content of the material accessed. But the capacity of the web – or in specific, real terms, of website editors – to store selected information, and organise it so that it is at our fingertips when we might need it, is a major indirect contribution to the emotional management of news audiences. It offers a sense of agency and of the capacity to know. To borrow a term favoured by some psychoanalysts, it provides a kind of ‘holding environment’, analogous to that which Silverstone saw as offered by television (see Chapter 5), in which anxiety can be modulated. Perhaps more accurately it is potentially a ‘holding space’, a facilitative, structured space within which the individual can explore, learn and develop understanding and confidence. In the UK, the role of the BBC as a public service web publisher (though somewhat at odds with its present funding via television licence fees) is particularly important, both for the scale of didactic current affairs content held online and for its quality. The websites of the ‘quality’ press and of other news organisations are also valuable carriers of instructional material, though it is often harder to find systematic tutorials on certain issues than on the BBC site. The potential value of this learning space can be understood in the context of the low levels of political knowledge to be found in many established democracies. Popular understanding of current affairs is low, and may be a major reason for citizen disengagement, if people


are alienated from politics by exposure to news which they do not understand. ‘Citizen incompetence’ is, we might reasonably assume, bad for democracy anyway, since it means that the public do not have the means to follow debates, but it will be the more so if people are turned off politics because they don’t understand it. We do not like to feel ignorant or incompetent, and are likely to leave situations where we feel that way. The possible importance of ignorance, or political illiteracy, as a factor in disengagement has not been examined in studies of electoral and other forms of participation, although as we noted earlier (Chapter 4) references to ‘boredom’ as a reason for turnoff may disguise a sense of ignorance. It must of course be remembered of the web that ‘All human life is there’, as a British national newspaper used to say of itself, and that applause for the potential of some sites to contribute to a renewed public sphere must be accompanied by awareness of the very different potential of other sites. To date, despite the scope for online policy deliberation and for a virtual ‘civic commons’,5 the web may have done more to encourage centrifugal and sometimes destructive tendencies amongst those who feel themselves to be outside the democratic public sphere; the influence of jihadist websites, for example, will be discussed in Chapter 11.

The three literacies But aside from the potential of the web as a vehicle for everyday political education, there is a more general point to be made here, which is two-fold. Firstly, the development of emotional literacy in the political field will be served by raised levels of political literacy, in that the ability of citizens to understand news reports will enrich their emotional responses to them. The more you know about something the more likely it is that you will experience a wider range of feelings about it, and be more able to process those feelings. This is admittedly a major simplification which ignores the power of strong ideological frames to put all factual knowledge to the service of the same worldview and the same limited emotional repertoire: no amount of historical knowledge will dislodge the bigot from their chosen narrative and its way of dealing with facts. But for the average non-ideological citizen, more information is likely to support a wider and deeper emotional involvement. Secondly, both political and emotional literacy are partly dependent on a third kind of literacy: media literacy, defined by Ofcom as ‘the


ability to access, understand and create communications in a variety of contexts’ (Ofcom, 2005).6 The capacities for both citizenship and now also, in a therapeutic culture, for emotional development are heavily dependent on what is publicly available in the mediatised world. The relationship between the three literacies is so close, perhaps, that we could see political and emotional literacies as being major components of media literacy. From this angle, the rather general media literacy concepts of critical viewing and critical analysis of media content can be defined more closely in terms of capacities for political and emotional understanding. Why else would we want to access and understand communications if not to develop as citizens and as persons? And how can we do this if not via the news and the spheres of art and entertainment to which the media give us access? There are still, and will remain, some non-mediated routes to such development, but what use is media literacy if it does not help us do this?

Journalism and the regulation of public feeling Journalists work at the nodal point where these three literacies converge. They also, in their self-appointed roles as judges of the political class, and as definers of the nation’s psyche, have a major part in determining the vicissitudes of the emotions as they emerge in the political process. Unfortunately this contribution from the news to democratic process is too often a damaging one. Today’s predominant approach to interviewing politicians is a key component of this contribution. We have also noted the significance of vox pops, which are often another problematic contribution. They often seem to represent polarised positions which are very light on thought, in keeping with the news media’s relentless search for hopeless conflict. Or they offer only blank or cynical shrugs, another version of the de rigueur hopelessness. But there is clear potential for positive influence: if vox pops showed more people giving expression to uncertainties and to acknowledgement of the complexities of many issues, they would model very different kinds of citizenly emotion to those which we typically see, and give a stronger sense of the richness and potential openness of public opinion. And like the impoverished and misleading views of ourselves we are too often served with, images of a more complex and reflective public can be partly self-fulfilling. Is it too much to hope that some journalists may be ready for a particular kind of sentimental education, whether in emotional literacy programmes or some other form, which would enable them to choose


their words and their emphases with some careful attention to the part they play in the emotional labour process of political culture? That is an empirical question, and needs putting to the test. It involves the suggestion that journalism should have a therapeutic dimension to its objectives. This will seem preposterous to many people, perhaps especially to many journalists. The acidic critics of the self-serving, softheaded therapy culture which they see all around could make endless fun of the idea that journalists, of all people, must take expert care of the mental health of their audiences. This is not quite the aim; what defines therapeutic culture at its best is not the compulsory importation of psychotherapeutic expertise into various professional settings. Rather it is the growing realisation within certain professions and other types of public practice that many of the contributions we make to the public sphere and to civic space have emotional consequences, and that with today’s broadened definitions of social responsibility these consequences need to be understood, and, as far as possible, managed. This is a ‘therapeutic’ objective not in the sense of personal therapy for individual members of the public but in the sense of contributing to the containment and processing of public emotion.


Part III The Search for Connection


8 Politics as Emotional Labour

Hoping for something In this Part of the book we will extend the concept of ‘emotional labour’ to the work of politicians. Although they are not positioned to insinuate themselves into our minds in the way we have suggested that journalists are, they are the people – our leaders – to whom we traditionally look for words and deeds to calm our fears and to direct our passions. It is the governors of our nation who, at the basic levels of the psyche, are expected to be the sources of emotional governance. It may seem out of touch to suggest that this is still the case today, when the common response to the mention of a leading politician is, outside of partisan circles, a dismissive if not contemptuous one.1 We will argue, however, that politicians do still have the power to exercise emotional governance, to get beneath the cynical defences against hope which, with much tutelage from the media, so many people deploy. This argument is based partly on psychological theory. Despite the long-standing crisis of authority of all kinds, we as individuals typically still have an internal image of good authority. Without this, one is emotionally in the position of the child who is or feels completely abandoned, and has no hope of ever finding care from a parental figure. Consciously we may have joined the party of despair, and on principle have no belief in any actual politician or party. Unconsciously most of us still believe in the existence of a good leader – which is why the cynical populace, unable to see any goodness in the political class, is vulnerable to the appeal of a charismatic newcomer or ‘outsider’ who promises something completely different. We must retain this belief as a matter of psychic survival, since to abandon it would be to drain our 93


internal emotional worlds of a basic source of comfort and hope. The striking bitterness which many express towards politicians comes partly from the experience (whether justified or not) of disillusionment and the draining of hope, but beneath that we must continue to hold some reserve of hope, or else we would all be in states of clinical despair. Typically our hope is attached to things outside of politics, to relationships (especially sexual relationships) and to such things as lottery tickets, football tournaments, the pursuit of hobbies, or the prospect of mundane pleasures such as a favourite meal. But it remains available for capture within the political sphere. The state is the ultimate inheritor in the psyche of the power once exercised over us by parental figures, and so the words of someone representing or seeking to embody state power can, if effective, play a major role in bringing reassurance or excitement to us as citizens. The key phrase here is ‘if effective’, and we will be seeking to understand this better. Perhaps a starting-point in the search for what constitutes this effectiveness will be a recognition by the politician of this power. One thing that makes for an absence of charisma in an individual is the absence of a sense that the person is aware of and understands the power which is potentially at his or her disposal. The argument that the power to exercise emotional governance exists can also call on some evidence from our everyday experience of public responses to problems or risks. A dominant theme in much media coverage of issues and crises of all sorts is ‘Why didn’t/won’t the government do more?’ At the same time as we may be relentlessly critical of government actions, or what we believe those actions to be, we are repeatedly calling on government to do more, to intervene, sort out, support, resolve, reform and so on. Some of this, of course, is fed by electoral competition and the need of the current opposition to denigrate the work of the current government. Some is fed by the media culture of attack-on-all-fronts. And some may stem from the sheer lack of alternatives – there is no-one else to appeal to. But the continued recourse to demands upon or pleas to government suggests (unsurprisingly, since we still for the most part consent to be governed) that we still somewhere believe in the possibility of a government which is good and which has the power to improve our lives and therefore to be an object of our positive emotional interest.

Politics and popularity In late capitalist societies it is primarily popular, consumer-oriented culture which generates or presents to us the objects of public emo-

Politics as Emotional Labour 95

tional interest. Popular culture underpins the rise of the ‘therapeutic’, emotionalised culture we now inhabit, and so it is in the arrays of people mediated to us through popular culture that we are most likely to find capacities to exercise emotional governance. To some extent, the expansion in recent decades of mediatised popular culture has entailed a transfer of emotional governance functions from government and other formal or traditional authorities, such as the classical professions of medicine and teaching, to the ‘personalities’ of screen and stadium and to the narratives provided by key forms of popular culture such as pop music, television dramas and tabloid journalism. But the basic day-to-day processes of emotional regulation have always been conducted in the texture of everyday life and the popular culture of the time, so any such shift has not been a fundamental one. However, the increasing pre-eminence of popular culture, and the increasingly emotionalised nature of that culture, mean that a deliberate realignment of politics with popular culture is necessary if democratic politics is to re-establish stronger emotional contact with the electorate. John Street (1997, p. 3) has noted the basis for this realignment, in that the relationship of politics and popular culture ‘is founded on the passions that are generated, both by politics and popular culture.’ Without more emotionally engaged electorates, the liberal democracies will be ill-equipped to deal with the problems of rising fundamentalism and other aspects of globalisation, climate change, and population growth, not to mention the ongoing business of economic and social management, all of which will require more emotional commitment from citizens to policies which will have to include more restrictive and unwelcome elements. This realignment requires politics to insert itself into popular culture in ways that connect with the intensifying emotionality of the age, and so to regain for itself the maximum capacity for emotional governance. This need not take the form of literal insertion into the mediaspaces of popular culture, such as the Prime Minister on the talk show sofa (though these may be important elements in government or party media strategy). Nor does it mean that politicians have to become ‘celebrities’ in the usual, part-denigratory sense of the word. Street (2004) discusses more complex conceptions of celebrity, and points to the link between contemporary celebrity and affective connection with audiences. Some individual politicians do become raw material for the celebrity-making machine of the ‘tabloid’ media, and while often trivialising and prurient this may create opportunities for offering audiences some emotional engagement with the business of politics.


There is also the possibility for non-celebrity politicians to use the existing occasions and spaces for addressing the public (the speech, news conference, etc.) in ways that link with the emotionalised imagery and vernacular of popular culture, that demonstrate affective connections and continuities between everyday life and political issues, and offer forms of emotional governance such as acknowledging the range and depth of audience affects, mobilising some feelings and seeking to restrain others, clarifying and modelling emotional responses, and reflecting on emotional involvements. A recent example of success in this sort of endeavour is the election of David Cameron to the leadership of the Conservative Party in the UK. It was widely agreed by commentators that his victory over the initial favourite David Davies owed most to the style conveyed in his speeches and interviews, since there were few debates in the campaign about substantive policy issues. Using his ability to create a sense of empathic contact with his audiences, Cameron promised a new kind of Conservatism that would embody therapeutic values – that would be empathic, tolerant, inclusive, authentic, and creative. How long he will be able to sustain his leadership once the policy implications of his approach become clear to more traditional elements in the Conservative Party remains to be seen, and will be a further test of his skills in emotional leadership.

The leader as person At the time of writing the Labour Party has not chosen a successor to Blair to lead the party at the next General Election, but the manner of Cameron’s ascent to the Conservative leadership suggests that the capacity to provide effective emotional governance may be more explicitly an issue than it has been in previous electoral contests. The two previous UK General Elections this century have shown how little impact there has been on electoral politics of the changes wrought in popular culture by the rise of the therapeutic – and how urgent it is therefore for politics to restyle itself, as John Corner and Dick Pels (2003) put it, in this direction. The 2001 General Election campaign was in many ways quite a traditional affair, dominated by debate about taxation, public services, economic management and Europe. It did not give any support to the ‘therapeutic culture’ hypothesis, nor to the idea that the emotionalisation process which by the end of the twentieth century had transformed popular culture might by then have been influencing politics.


The choice between Tony Blair and the then Conservative leader William Hague as national leaders was widely presented and understood in terms long familiar to electorates: dynamic and confident leader in office vs. implausible leader of divided opposition. There was no new psychology there; indeed not much psychology at all, beyond a sense that Hague’s ‘personality’ was part of the problem for the Tories. As the cartoonists told us, Hague was a boy-man, fundamentally unable to inhabit long trousers however clever he is or matey he tried to be. This raises the question of the relationship between the personalities and images of politicians. A psychoanalytic approach would tend to assume that there must have been something deep in Hague’s psyche which lent itself to this public perception of him. Politicians’ ‘personalities’ are not imagistic artefacts spun from nothing by the media; they connect with deep and enduring aspects of the politicians’ selves. They involve ‘deep acting’, and you cannot act deeply into roles that you cannot strongly identify with. So we may suggest that the Hague problem was that in some way he lacks an ingredient of inner authority and so did not inspire confidence. Of course it has long been recognised that voters are choosing leaders on the basis partly of their personalities, though the older term ‘character’, with its connotations of deep values not superficial presentation, would for some be a more acceptable way of stating this. We know that we are presented with candidates as objects of trust as well as parties with different policies, and trustworthiness is a question of individual character. However this factor of trust is now becoming increasingly personalised, as alternative bases of trust in party traditions (whether based in economic interest, ideology or vague sentiment) become ever weaker. There is now more space for personality factors such as Hague’s inner attachment to his pubertal self, or whatever the weakness in his public image as potential leader may have been attributable to. We now need more than to be able to trust politicians in role, since in our suspicious frame of mind we can rely less on cultural and institutional role structures, whether these are patrician, technocratic, fully democratic, or theocratic.2 So political leaders have, to an increasing extent, the task of presenting themselves as persons to be trusted for their intrinsic qualities. This does not mean that we are at the end of ideology, nor of values-based agendas, but that we are amidst a cultural transformation in which policies and politics in the traditional sense are becoming more enmeshed with the personal, with psychological


considerations and with emotionality. Emotional qualities are increasingly registered and scrutinised, and judgement of them is more part of the political process. Traditional political considerations are not now occluded, nor is public life being asymmetrically invaded by the private and personal. But traditional separations between domains are no longer viable. The processes of compression and implosion described by theorists of the post- or late-modern world (e.g. Harvey, 1990) need to be understood in psychic as well as sociological terms (Richards, 2000). They result in the compression together in the same social and psychic spaces of the personal, feeling subject and the public figure. The personality of the politician is bound up with the policies s/he represents, and voting is – at least potentially – a complex choice between packages of pragmatic, ideological and emotional values. Moreover different elements of the self are compressed in postmodern culture, such that a single public individual can represent to us a collection of psychic qualities. While perceived leader strength may continue to be a key quality, we are prepared to see a strong or competent or principled leader as having other qualities as well – sexual appetite, a history of alcoholism, a vulnerability to depression – in ways that do not necessarily damage them electorally. The political leader as pristine figure is now difficult if not impossible to sustain, and in any case is no longer required for maximum legitimacy. One way of describing this development is to say that politicians now have a clear and major task of emotional labour to perform. They must present themselves as individual persons of particular emotional make-up, who in terms developed early in the study of group dynamics (see Talcott Parsons’ and Robert Bales’ 1955 landmark study) can offer themselves as expressive leaders as well as task-oriented leaders. More is demanded of leaders than previously. They must now be seen as themselves attuned to newly dominant values of expressivity and spontaneity. Moreover, our contemporary cultural concerns are not just with the expression of emotions but also with their management. As we discussed in Chapter 5 in relation to the news media, a fundamental part of the everyday management of emotion is containment. So politicians must also be seen to offer some containment of the emotions of their public. Like other social institutions and cultural forms, politics is increasingly assessed by the public for what it offers emotionally, and has to make more active contributions to the emotional labour of containing those feelings circulating in the public domain. Furthermore, the task of containment is now much more complex than it was. The


organisational consultant James Krantz (1998, pp. 87–88) notes that as old institutional arrangements disappear in waves of social change, ‘Many anxieties, formerly contained, become “dislodged”, others are stimulated by the fact of change, and still others are elicited by the frightening and unknown conditions we often face.’ Emotional labour has always been part of politics at a fundamental level; political leadership has always been an exercise in feeling management. But there are new qualities to the emotional role of political leaders. There is both a stronger imperative to take on emotional labour in a personally-oriented and explicit way, as described above. And there is greater opportunity for influence through the undertaking of this labour. This lies in the much greater potential for awareness of the emotional dimensions of everyday life, in the increased selfquestioning and self-examination characteristic of our therapeutic times. With this awareness comes greater scope for choice, and for the deliberate management of feelings in certain ways to achieve certain outcomes. Politicians are managers, not only in the technocratic sense of their management of the national economy but also in the sense that they (foremost amongst other public figures, and media professionals) are charged with the management of massive national reserves of feeling. To recognise this, and to speak of the possibility that this emotional management might be conducted artfully, is not to invoke a nightmare of social engineering. As in small face-to-face groups, and as in organisations, so at the level of national culture: the effective management of emotional dynamics could lead to the development of supportive and creative relationships, and to a vigorous and enabling democratic ethos.

Reparation We have so far identified one key concept for evaluating the products of this labour, in the idea of ‘containment’. Emotional governance should aim at the containment of the public. We must now introduce a second, which is that of reparation, and to do so must make another excursion into psychoanalytic theory. Reparation is a concept which is of major importance in the Kleinian tradition of psychoanalysis (Hinshelwood, 1989, pp. 396ff). In that tradition, aggressive and destructive impulses are seen as something intrinsic to human nature which in the course of our early psychological development we all have to deal with. In particular, as we


become aware of how our actions may affect the external world and especially the people in it, we become aware of our ability to hurt and to damage, especially to hurt those close to us. This awareness is painful, because we also have inbuilt impulses to love, and because we as small children fear damaging those on whom we are dependent. So it prompts us to check aggressiveness in our behaviour, but we cannot completely extinguish the production of aggressive thoughts and feelings. These will continue to bubble up inside, perhaps often unknown to us except on occasions, as when a person might realise, with surprise, that he or she has just said something aggressive, for example something competitive, sarcastic or rejecting. The constant flow of aggressive ‘phantasy’, as the Kleinians call unconscious feeling, whether it is acted upon or not, leads to a constant sense of guilt, again usually unconscious, and to a general wish to make amends, to repair the damage done in unconscious phantasy. This is the root of the reparative urge, which is the major source in adult life of much altruistic, pro-social behaviour. Psychoanalysis is here pointing to the complex and to a degree contradictory nature of human behaviour. It is not saying, reductively or cynically, that we are good only because we are afraid of the consequences of being bad, or because we are atoning for sins real or imagined. It is saying, though, that pure spontaneous altruism is illusory, and that real generosity of spirit emerges from internal struggle, and from successful confrontation with our destructiveness. In any case, it is hardly necessary to buy fully into a Kleinian perspective in order to appreciate the importance of reparation in human affairs. The popularity of crime fiction and drama is one indication of how concerned in general we are with questions of destructiveness, guilt and responsibility. More specifically, some recent developments in criminal justice recognise the importance of reparative encounters between criminals and victims, in a broadly similar way to that in which the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation sought reparation within South Africa. In the context of everyday democratic politics, even where there is no event to provide a focus in actual history for a reparative process, the concept is of no less importance. We routinely experience the social and material world of which we are a part as damaged or diseased, whether through the neglect or malice of others or through our own actions in, for example, making understandable but selfish choices about how to travel, what to buy, what schools to get our children in to, and so on. The inequalities, injustices, waste and pollution


in the world are not – in our unconscious phantasy worlds – neutral natural phenomena but states of illness and wound which we want to cure. We therefore need leaders whose primary motivation to be in politics is to lead in the enactment of reparative measures towards the social and material world, and who can give us confidence that some effective reparation can be made. Leaders who enable us to feel that our societies can be improved will be able to access powerful reserves of reparative ambition amongst the public. They might also enable us to feel hopeful that we as individuals can come to terms with and contain our darker sides, though this is moving into clearly ‘therapeutic’ territory and may be expecting more influence of societal change on individual destiny than is possible. More plausibly, the reparatively-driven leader will facilitate a shift in the public, collective mind towards more optimism about our shared future, away from despair that our greed as consumers is bringing environmental disaster, or that our violent propensities and the frailness of our social ties are leading inevitably to lawless gun cultures, and so on. Such shifts will not be achieved by magical thinking which abolishes the problems of sustainability and violence, but by rhetoric which frames such issues with the realities (whatever they might be) of their scale and urgency, and of our complicity in them, yet also, crucially, foregrounds our reparative resolve and other resources for dealing with them. Of course all leaders are going to say they stand for healing social ills and divisions. The differentiating factor is likely to be the extent to which any individual leader is actually driven by mature reparative wishes.3 Does s/he have the strength of reparative impulse, and the general emotional resources, to be able to facilitate the emergence of these qualities in the public? Moreover, for us to respond to any of the personal qualities of a leader, they have to be communicated to us. But how will we be able to tell that the communications we are receiving are not false, that the image presented to us is a reflection of the real person, and not an artifice? This takes us to the issue of authenticity.

Authenticity on stage There is abundant journalistic commentary on the personalities and interpersonal relationships of politicians. However there is a major contradiction in the mediatised discourse about politicians as people. On one (extreme) view this is where politics is really at. For example in the UK in recent years it may have seemed at times as if Britain’s


relationship to Europe would be determined by the outcome of tensions in the relationship between Prime Minister Blair and Chancellor Brown, who have held somewhat different views about the speed and terms of British integration with Europe. At the present time, there is a ‘media frenzy’ around when the PM will step down, whether a coterie around Brown has attempted a ‘coup’, and whether some of the PM’s allies will seek to prevent Brown becoming the new Labour leader and PM. There are few clear political differences between the two men, and it is widely assumed that the conflict between them – on which to a considerable degree the composition of the next government rests – is a long-standing personal rivalry. Contrastingly, it is said (by many politicians and some commentators, though perhaps not believed much by their audiences) that this personality and relationship stuff is mere titillation, with the real business being in the impersonal spheres of policies, procedures, debates and so forth, that is in politics conventionally defined. What is certain is that the psychological stuff, whether important or not, is intended to be backstage.4 The political stage, as politicians seem to want to constitute it, is not for the performance of psychological drama. It is instead primarily for the pantomimes of partypolitical knockabout, and for ritualised communication: mechanical denunciations of opposing parties, and canonical celebrations and exculpations of one’s own. The rationale usually given for this rituaistic, empty and alienating style is that it is necessary to be on message, and to convey confidence, clarity and consistency. Without this public show of certainty, a politician or party would be dismembered by a media eager for any sign of alleged weakness or prevarication. It would be wise not to underestimate the destructive impulses of political journalism, and the power of its belief that the public will somehow benefit from foregrounding every weakness (real or not) in every leader. But from a psychodynamic viewpoint, we would see such liturgical performances of politicians as driven not only by a deliberate communication strategy and the need to defend themselves against the wolves of the press, but also by anxiety, by a need to be right. The responsibilities of public life are heavy, and the costs to others of politicians’ errors can be great. One way of dealing with the burden of guilt and anticipated guilt which this engenders is to decide that we are always right, and they are always wrong. Put as simply as that, this position is absurd, and of course there is constant conflict within parties, so politicians do not actually experience themselves in this


tribally unified way. Nor do they really believe individually that they are always right. Nonetheless the public incantations must help the political actors to manage their guilt and anxiety. The use by parties of total communication management strategies will fuse these personal gains with the assumed tribal benefits of remaining ‘on message’, and greatly increase the rigidity of speech. Moreover their presentation of themselves as uniformly right necessarily dominates audience perceptions. What we are being served up with in this one-dimensional theatre is then one of two things. Either we know they don’t mean it, and we are confronted with politics as a charade unworthy of our respect and engagement. Or we believe they do mean it, and we conclude they are self-deluding. In each case we are confronted with a variety of what some psychologists, using Donald Winnicott’s (1965) term, call ‘False Self’ functioning. To a degree we must all function in a False Self way in many everyday contexts. A certain amount of artifice is necessary for social life to proceed; it is a concomitant of the roles and rules which must regulate social behaviour. It is just not practicable for us to be totally ‘spontaneous’ all the time: we need scripts to guide us through our social interactions. In party politics however we see a highly inflated degree of False Self functioning, an extreme dependence on the script – and moreover on a script which is remarkably predictable and dull. The rise of ‘spin’ and of political marketing (discussed at length in Chapter 13) is perceived to have exacerbated this problem. Moreover the cultural changes of the last three decades have affected the way in which we view False Self functioning in many areas. In an increasingly informalised culture, it is seen to be less necessary. In a society valuing expressivity, it is seen as an impediment to optimal functioning. And in a world where authenticity is increasingly used as a benchmark for judgements of many kinds, any contrivance is viewed with suspicion. So while communication management regimes have been increasing the supply of False Self performances to the broadcast media, the audiences of those media have been demanding more True Self material, more authenticity and spontaneity. They have been finding this – or at least many of them believe they have – in genres such as reality TV, chat shows, some lifestyle programming, and so on.5 A deep and widening cultural gap has therefore come to exist between politics and many citizens, with exaggerated False Self functioning on one side of the divide and mediatised forms of authenticity on the other. This disconnection is rooted in complex cultural developments which we should not summarily judge. As we saw in Chapter 3, there


is a vigorous debate on the merits or otherwise of the new demands for authenticity, between those who see this trend as being overall a sign of creative liberalisation and cultural enrichment and those who see it as fake sentimentality. For those who offer a total condemnation of the contemporary thirst for the authentic, there is no problem for politics: it should not worry about its cultural disconnection, because the wider culture is at fault, and should be restored to an earlier condition. But for others, whatever their positions in the debate, party politics has a problem in the gross, stylised inauthenticities of its everyday discourse, which render it profoundly unattractive or uninteresting to many voters.

The wrong hands on the levers of power? Once we start with such questions about the emotional maturity and authenticity of political leaders, however, we rapidly arrive at much more acutely serious issues than might be disclosed by the analysis of ritual and falsity in Parliamentary question time or the President’s addresses to the nation. We have to entertain the possibility that those who lead us are not just entrapped in mechanical adversariality but that they are driven by fevered or twisted views of the world and by malign motives. It may seem naïve to put it like this, when so many people (at least amongst the intelligentsia broadly defined) are so nonchalantly sure that their leaders are indeed madmen, or are at the least seriously deficient and irresponsible people. Of course we can entertain the possibility of this, it may be retorted, since we live with the fact of it. Yet perhaps the greater naivety is in the blasé failure to register how far our expectations have fallen, not from some imaginary ideal of the past but from a normative model of how as citizens we should relate to our leaders. The mental health of national political leaders is an area where sober and well-grounded assessments may be hard to come by. To all the usual difficulties and uncertainties which surround the work of psychological assessment and psychiatric diagnosis is added the hostility or protectiveness of partisan judgement, or the bitter disappointment of the erstwhile supporter, all in the context of a volcanic media environment. The body of sophisticated research in this area6 is not large and influential enough, and perhaps not clear nor consistent enough in its findings, to have taken root in journalistic frames and given the public some groundrules or benchmarks to work with. To illustrate the difficulties we will take a recent noteworthy example of leader personality analysis. Justin Frank’s psychoanalytic study of


George W. Bush (Frank, 2006) argues that the world’s superpower is led by an individual who is severely damaged and dangerously disturbed, and cannot be trusted to conduct himself on the world stage in a fully rational and reality-oriented way, and whose destructiveness often has the upper hand in his dealings with the world. This is the first full study by a leading clinician of an incumbent American president (perhaps of an incumbent national leader anywhere), and so it assumes a particular responsibility, and risks having a degree of political impact not usually attached to psychoanalytically-informed ventures into the world of politics. Frank’s analyses of the president may not have the currency and reach of some journalists’ commentaries, but the book has sold 35,000 copies to date and so his observations are likely to find their way into the pot of words and images from which Americans will draw materials on which to base their voting decisions next time around, and which people worldwide will use to assess American foreign policies. Of course this type of psychoanalysis ‘at a distance’ will not be influential on those who disdain psychoanalysis, or who are sceptical of its application in this way, but for some readers it has undoubtedly provided a compelling confirmation of their worst fears. It is well theorised, not a casually slung together barrage of accusatory diagnoses, and is informed as all good psychoanalytic work is by a compassion for its subject. Its basic argument is that George W. Bush has an inability to tolerate pain and anxiety, stemming probably from an early life in which he was parented by an inaccessible, often absent father and a stern, distant mother. There was little opportunity for him to learn to acknowledge or face up to difficult feelings. For example, when his younger sister died from leukaemia in 1953, there was no funeral, and George W. learnt of her illness only after her death. According to Frank, this fundamental incapacity to confront suffering in himself underlies a number of personality characteristics of the president, beginning with his hyperactivity as a child. In his adult life he has consistently shown a superficiality and disconnection, masked by a ready affability. He has been through a period of alcoholism, and shown the kind of rigidity often found in alcoholics; Frank offers a suggestive discussion of the American people as in an equivalent passive relationship to the President as the ‘alcoholic family’ can be to a rigid and angry alcoholic father. He has immersed himself in a religiose fundamentalism, with its simplistic outlook and certainty. He has, Frank argues, displayed an omnipotent carelessness about the law (both in his youthful delinquency and his


business dealings), and defensive, perverse uses of language. And most seriously, he has shown signs of sadism, of an indifference to life, suffering and the basic welfare of people. On this account, we could not see genuine reparative wishes as part of the motivational nexus which drives the President. As a careful quasi-clinical study which seeks to ground its analysis in evidence, this raises some vexing questions more powerfully than would the usual left-liberal dismissal of a disliked or hated President. If the analysis is basically correct, how valuable or important is democracy if it can empower this degree of pathology? Can a democracy be protected against the success of this kind of leader? Or perhaps the analysis is flawed, and is wrong to attribute to George W. Bush a delusional and malign tendency comparable to Hitler (p. 117). Surely in the complex organisational and factional politics at the centre of a sophisticated nation there will be group processes (not least selfpreservative ones) that will check the advance of the borderline psychotic or psychopathic person; and if somebody with a poor grip on reality does actually get to the top, in the circles of people around a president there will be enough individuals of sufficient strength and reality-sense not to let a seriously delusional worldview take over a whole government. But maybe not; we know from studies of groups in other settings that a group can collude with its leader in a denial of reality. To go into these issues more fully we would need to draw on a range of studies of American political culture, of the Washington environment, and of leader psychologies. Our concern here is more with the public and the impact on the public of different leadership styles and communications. We will turn to the latter in the next chapter, though will find, once we have begun to see politicians as emotional labourers, that questions about their personal selves and about their mental health will recur, and must be attended to.

9 Poor Emotional Governance

The anti-smirking campaign and other failures One thing that was new about ‘New’ Labour was arguably the attention paid to the emotional tasks of political leadership, to intuiting the anxieties of the public and seeking to respond to them. This attention entered into policy development as well as communications strategies: ‘New Labour is perhaps the first government genuinely committed to the view that presentation is part of the process of policy formation’ (Franklin, 1998, p. 4). The student who when asked to define ‘emotional labour’ said ‘Tony Blair’ (Smith, 1999) was correct. Some of the emotional attentiveness comes from Blair’s own self. He is the first premier with a social self formed during the Sixties, and so has styles of thought, speech and demeanour which are attuned to the reflexive and emotionalised modes of today. And some comes from the muchcriticised practices of communication and image management. Evaluations of these differ, from Left and Right excoriations of the cynicism and anti-democratic nature of ‘spin’ to other more complex and potentially favourable assessments.1 But beneath these arguments we can see wide acceptance that the political scene is more about emotions and their management than it used to be, and that politicians and their advisors are intensely involved in certain kinds of emotional labour, whereby through new modes of personal presentation they are able to contribute most effectively to the mass-mediated management of public feeling. Yet in the 2005 election, as in 2001, Labour pulled back from developing its strength in this area. The battle lines in 2005 were drawn around the economy for Labour, and for the Conservatives around immigration. As for the core, general issue of trust, this was 107


potentially very dangerous for Labour, mainly because of the ‘WMD’ (weapons of mass destruction) problem: the failure to find WMDs in Iraq and the suspicions that the case for invasion had been knowingly inflated. But as things developed, trust was actually a less prominent issue than might have been expected, at least on the surface. However one novel, and at times quirky, strand of the Conservative campaign did attempt to exploit the issue of trust in the PM, and in so doing reached into some dark corners of the electoral psyche. This strand began with the Conservative poster campaign and its theme of ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ The appeal here is to an inner state of mind in the individual, which, the slogan implied, the Conservatives knew about, and shared. The slogan offered recognition and validation of this mindset, and so tried to build a sense of spontaneous and psychological connection between the Conservatives and the public. However it fell far short of the requirements for good emotional governance. Posing questions such as ‘How would you feel if a bloke on early release attacked your daughter?’, these posters spoke to the know-all and self-righteous parts of their audiences, and conscripted legitimate concerns (about over-lenient sentencing, hospital hygiene, and so on) into simple attacks on the government. They aimed to flood the reader’s mind with angry resentment, and thereby cancelled the possibility of thinking about the problems of the criminal justice system or health service in more rounded and complex ways. Moreover, the address to the inner person took a curious turn when the then Conservative leader Michael Howard said on 5 April that the Prime Minister was ‘already secretly grinning’ at the prospect of victory. Here, a claim to knowledge of the PM’s inner mind was used, along with a comment on his outer facial expression – a reference to ‘smirking politics’ – to tap the public distrust of Blair. This moved the trust issue away from the invasion of Iraq, where politically the Conservatives had no clear blue water between the PM and themselves, to a generalised psychological space where alleged states of mind and emotional characteristics are being judged rather than policies or decisions. The notion of a ‘smirking politics’ is of course a vacuous one. Yet vacuous ideas may have considerable purchase on the public mind. The cinema advertisement offered by the Conservatives suggested they clearly saw value in this anti-smirking campaign: to a musical soundtrack of ‘Take that look off your face’, there were various clips of the PM, most with a characteristic smile or broad grin.

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The idea of a ‘secret grin’ gave this kind of personal attack on the PM an extra ingredient. As in ‘Are you thinking…’, there is a claim to know something about inner states of the person. Howard’s later introduction of the phrase ‘simple longings of the British people’ continued this theme of divining inner truths. While it is routine for politicians of all stripes to claim (usually without much evidence) that ‘I know what the British people will believe/want/ etc…’, there was a trend here for the Conservatives to become particularly involved in a message strategy which posits them as the experts in and guardians of the nation’s feelings. Both here and in the ‘thinking’ slogan, the Conservatives’ campaign took us into a more psychological territory than Labour inhabited. In principle, this could be an effective strategy – though its meaning for the nation depends on which feelings are identified and valorised. The anti-smirking message was emphasised again as we entered the final week of the campaign, as it had been at the beginning and various points throughout. Front-bencher Liam Fox claimed that the PM had a ‘secret smirk’ at the prospect of another victory, and unveiled a hi-tech changing image 3-D poster showing the smile being wiped off the PM’s face. Howard treated a gathering of party workers to a poem: ‘People have had enough of spin and smirk, they just want someone who’ll make things work.’ Labour finally joined in this business of diagnosing the mental state of their opponents. For example their leader in the Welsh Assembly Rhodri Morgan (2005) suggested2 that a ‘retro-fetishism’ lay behind the Conservatives’ proposals to restore matrons to their former glory as the key to combating infections in hospitals, this formidable maternal image being, he suggested, especially attractive to former public schoolboys. A schoolboy theme also appeared in the Liberal Democrats communications effort. One of their Party Election Broadcasts was a short comedy about ‘The boy who cried wolf’, a schoolboy Prime Minister who insisted there was a wolf and would not apologise even when the woods had been searched and no trace of one had been found. The surprisingly violent phrase which they took up, ‘Give Tony Blair a bloody nose’, also originates in the school playground, albeit most fittingly belonging in a public school setting of the 1950s where it was considered right to mete this punishment to a cad. This LibDems’ play with images of childishness ironically captured their position as the child of the party system: small, inexperienced in running things, looking forward excitedly to a coming day of real adult involvement.


What these off-centre fragments illustrate is the powerful swirl of feeling around images of authority. This is very likely in any election campaign, as in a representative democracy, elections are fundamentally about leaders. For this reason, demands that they should be about ‘policies, not personalities’ can miss the mark. Howard was correct to stress the choice of leader which the election offered. The public perceptions of party leaders offer us choices about what kind of polity we want or feel we must settle for. These choices are expressed as questions about what kind of person we can trust (or distrust least), what capabilities we demand, what sensibilities we value, whose language do we feel most comfortable with, and whose presence in power do we think will most enhance our national life. The 2005 UK General Election probably saw these questions more sharply and persistently raised than in any previous one, and in the next General Election, with ideological bloc differences between and within parties becoming even less obvious, this is likely to be even more the case. The parties’ key slogans in the final days tied in – for better or worse – with the positions the leaders had by then acquired in public esteem. The LibDems’ ‘The real alternative’ could trade on their then leader Charles Kennedy’s status as someone perceived to be less tainted by spin and lies, but thereby also called into play their chronic positioning problem as the minor, outside party. The Conservatives’ ‘Taking a stand’ clearly echoed the Howard campaign’s stress on issues of national identity, crime and school discipline – the stand was a righteously defensive one, offering us protection from invaders and yobs, and identifying Howard with the reassuring, unreconstructed authority figures of policemen whom yobs fear and of matrons who will brook no dirt. As such it reinforced both the effectiveness of this approach amongst some groups, and the narrowness of the campaign’s and leader’s appeal. Labour’s comparatively ineffectual-sounding ‘Forward not back’, while intended to echo the stress on economic stability and on the move to greater social justice, may have had subliminal counter-effects amongst some voters. Its ‘no reverse gear’ association risked reviving the link between Blair and Thatcher (‘the lady’s not for turning’), generally not a helpful one for the PM, while its connotations of Blair as military leader – advance not retreat – were precisely what the campaign strategy had sought to avoid, in the context of the increasingly unpopular military involvement in Iraq. However, the attacks specifically on Blair by the other parties combined to detonate some explosive mixes of anti-war feeling, Little


England-ness, chattering-class contempt and free-floating resentment. The result was the disappearance of Labour’s majority in a good number of marginals, and the return of a significantly weakened Labour government. But from an emotional governance perspective we are less interested in the question of who won than in questions about the psychosocial impact of the aggregate campaign. Where did the campaign leave political authority as a whole in Britain? With what images of leadership did the British people enter the third term of Blair’s premiership? In pursuing their anti-smirking campaign as they did, the Conservatives were aiming partly to find some common ground with those of more social-democratic or liberal inclinations, who might not be attracted by nationalist rhetoric but who were disaffected over Iraq or anti-terrorism or student fees, and whose disaffection was focused on Blair. But in doing so they drew on a deep-seated tendency in human nature, which is to feel resentful towards the current leadership, whoever that may be. It is said that people become ‘bored’ or ‘disillusioned’ with leaders, but it runs deeper than that. In this submerged, non-rational area of mental life, as the sociologist Hans Schoeck (1966) suggested, ‘to be a leader is a crime’, and we as followers feel resentment and envy towards the people who have power over us and who loom large on our screens and front pages. It is inevitably a tempting opportunity for a long-term opposition to tap into this reserve of feeling. However the reinforcement it offers to this knee-jerk resentment is not good for any of us in the long run. The childish anxiety that our leaders are contemptuously smirking at us and routinely lying to us, and the resentment at their power, can, if encouraged in this way, increase the risk of alienation from democratic life and from the public sphere. Another, more focused, form of resentment also drove the emphasis in the Conservative campaign (or at least in many media treatments of it) on immigration and asylum. There are as we know some toxic feelings of hatred amongst white Britons towards foreigners and nonwhites, especially ethnically Asian Muslims, which can be mobilised. However, many years of polling data suggest these extreme feelings are not of widespread strength amongst the British public. More common is an anxious, rivalrous resentment, producing negative feelings which range from ungenerous to hostile. So in the immigration/asylum debate, as in the trust issue, resentment is central. Of course the main issues ought to be about how much this feeling is justified (whether by the actions of the leaders or


by the effects of the strangers’ presence), but we also need to understand that free-floating resentment can become attached to these issues.3 Whatever policies they are proposing, the responsibility of politicians raising legitimate issues around immigration and asylum (economic costs and benefits, social consequences, security risks) is to engage with resentment, identifying its causes in the external world, while noting that these may not explain it fully, and pulling it away from hatred and towards humanity and reason. The contributions of all participants in this campaign can be assessed against this criterion, though there are fine judgements in applying it. In any case, an election is often a time for some of the worst in a nation’s psyche to be exposed, and what emerges from the bits of the 2005 campaign discussed here is that a strong streak of resentment runs through the British public, towards leaders and strangers alike. The effect of the Conservative campaign on perceptions of political authority was to put resentment at the centre: resentment at the leader per se, and at the alleged failure of the current leadership to protect us from the demands of also-resented strangers. Their own positive assertion of leadership was, as Rhodri Morgan’s exotic observation suggested, cast in a psychologically retrogressive mould: simplistic images of formidable paternal and maternal strength, good and necessary perhaps in children’s literature but inadequate for framing the capacity for more complex emotional resources which leaders now need. Labour’s representations of its own authority, and of the alleged fraudulence of the Conservative claim to authority, were for the most part simply laid out along the dimension of competence. Don’t go back to the bad old days of inflation and instability; stay with the steady hand of Labour on the economic tiller, generating greater affluence for ‘hardworking families’ and funds for public services investment. Notwithstanding the real achievements which may have been invoked here, both in economic management and in refurbishing the welfare state, this appeal was disappointingly limited. It made little reference to any values-based issues which, we might have supposed, remain a key differentiator of the parties, and are an essential element in the legitimacy of government. And it sought to exclude references to the Iraq War and to the PM’s leadership around that issue. This strategy may have underestimated the extent to which it might have been possible to neutralise the virulent antipathy towards Tony Blair that had developed between 2001 and 2005, especially but not only in reaction to the Iraq War. In a five day period leading up the start of the campaign, a majority of references to the PM’s personality


on broadcast TV news bulletins carried negative implications, according to analysis performed by the media research institute Media Tenor (http://www.mediatenor.com). The American pollster Frank Luntz reported on BBC2’s Newsnight at the start of April 2005 that when his ‘people meter’ technique was first given a run-out in the UK at the start of the campaign it showed remarkable hostility to the PM. This reflected the way in which for some time prior to the election Blair seemed to have attracted a breadth and depth of vituperation not seen since Margaret Thatcher divided the country, with less robust countervailing sentiment being expressed by his supporters than Thatcher continued to enjoy from hers well into her decline. Yet Luntz’ final focus group for Newsnight showed a strong shift in sympathy and respect for the PM, in response to the defences he had been obliged to give of his actions. Moreover an ICM/Guardian Poll in the final week suggested there was still a lot to work with in terms of the PM’s perceived strengths – the majority thought he is ‘respected ‘ and ‘charismatic’. The Labour campaign generally eschewed a more psychologicallydriven approach. It instead made familiar appeals to the health of the economy and the risks of returning to Conservative rule – issues not without powerful psychological dimensions (the second Party Election Broadcast [PEB] was a short political horror movie about Howard’s past), but within the parameters of traditional rationalistic and knockabout politics, unlike the more creative messaging of the Conservatives’ campaign described above. The Prime Minister was kept out of all but the first PEB, while Michael Howard featured strongly in all Conservative ones. The absence from Labour’s campaign of a clear, values-led personification of what the government stood for left a large, asymmetrical gap, and gave the Conservatives a space which they were able to exploit to some electoral advantage. But neither of the two main parties offered an enriching, credible model of political authority. Labour returned to a Wilsonian claim of go-ahead administrative skill. The Conservatives returned, at least in rhetoric, to the comforts of incipient authoritarianism. Overall, we probably have to conclude that the campaign as a whole, in its advertising and other marketing-led features, damaged the emotional vitality of British democracy, not dramatically, but as a contribution to the slow erosion of the emotional basis for viable leadership.

Terror and impoverished thought Our second example of poor emotional governance will be drawn from a consideration of how President Bush (and to a lesser degree Prime


Minister Blair) have spoken about terrorism.4 Many of Bush’s communications to the American people about terrorism have rested on two secular concepts. One is ‘freedom’, or ‘liberty’, and the other is the implacable evil embodied in al Qaeda. From the immediate aftermath of 9/11 to the present, ‘freedom’ has been posed variously as the virtuous protagonist in the War on Terror (‘Freedom and fear are at war’, 09.01; ‘We’ve seen freedom conquer evil before’, 11.05), as precious object to be defended (‘They hate our freedoms..’, 09.01), as inspiration (‘..people willing to risk everything for the dream of freedom’, 05.06), and as the fundamental teleological principle of history (‘The advance of human freedom – the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time…’, 09.01; ‘…freedom is the destiny of every man, woman and child on this Earth’, 11.05; ‘…liberty is the right and hope of all humanity’, 01.06). A comprehensive analysis of the whole Bush discourse across all his statements might be necessary to establish fully what the concept of freedom means to him, and what rhetorical purposes it serves, but our interest here is in exploring how it might function at a deep psychological level in addressing the desires and fears of his audience. At times he appears to fix it to the idea of democracy. In claiming that ‘the advance of freedom is the great story of our time’, he refers to the five-fold increase in the number of democracies in the world between 1945 and 2006. At other times, it is at least as much about social and cultural freedom (including ‘our freedom of religion’, 09.01) or about the economic opportunities of capitalism, as it is about democratic political rights per se. There may be some potentially good reasons for the use of the language of ‘freedom’ in this broad way. It may function inclusively, as the very great majority of Americans could be expected to identify with it sentimentally, however it is defined. Indeed, it offers a path to a global cross-faith human identity, since there is a ‘universal desire to live in liberty’ (11.05). And it may convey in a broad way something of what Islamist terrorism stands for, insofar as terrorist groups may wish for the spread of ‘unfreedoms’ – draconian forms of sharia law and highly restrictive cultural norms. But it seems unlikely that such apocalyptic use of a loose term will help in effective emotional governance, that is to say in containing anxiety and thereby facilitating rational thought and action. Nor does it easily invite reparation; the meaning of ‘freedom’ in the context of psychological development is to be found in the processes of individuation and separation from parents and family, not in


the concomitant, reparative strand of acknowledging the loss and damage which these processes may entail. If we follow Frank’s analysis of the President (discussed in Chapter 8) we would not be surprised at his avoidance of any more complex discourse involving the acknowledgement of inner pain. Bush’s usage invokes ‘freedom’ as an absolute and mysterious power, and as such it speaks to the omnipotent and unreasoning parts of the public mind. This risks crystallising amongst the public a reflection of the totalitarian impulse embedded in the terrorist mind. It conscripts public support for counter-terrorism into a spiralling competition between triumphalist rhetorics (the ‘unstoppable power of freedom’, 11.05, vs. the will of Allah). It thereby validates the terrorists’ arrogant estimation of their own importance, and also limits the space for pragmatic deliberation and assessment of specific threats since all forms of threat are assimilated into the single, epic struggle. Psychologically, the risk is that this can demote reality in public discussions of terrorism and what to do about it. The complex and variable realities of how the terrorist impulse originates, and how it is nurtured and organised in different contexts, may be occluded by the relief and the excitement of a grandiose narrative. This critique of how ‘freedom’ has been constructed as, one might say, an object of worship for the American public, and of the stultifying effects this may have on public debate, must itself be run past another argument. This is that the task of leadership in situations of crisis and threat necessarily involves finding some words which convey a dramatic and compelling message. Without such binding rhetoric, it may be impossible to evoke and sustain the public confidence and social cohesion necessary for the crisis to be effectively managed. For example, we are currently seeing a number of national and international figures beginning to search for the rhetorical means to build popular support for measures to tackle climate change. Because of the particularly powerful resonance of ideas of ‘freedom’ in American political and popular culture, they will inevitably be drawn on as a rhetorical resource in the public discourse around terror. And when this happens, they will mobilise deep feelings in which mature appreciations of ‘freedom’ as a political and cultural value will be mixed with reactions stemming from earlier stages of emotional development. These may include angry and ambivalent adolescent demands for independence and protection, and may also tap into the primitive delights and fears of the young child claiming its psychic autonomy. As a term at large in the emotional public sphere, ‘freedom’ is a wild card.


Ideally, those engaged in contributing to that discourse would have some awareness of the emotional forces which may be called into play by the simple appearance in print or a broadcast clip of a phrase built around the word ‘freedom’. This may seem to be a quite unrealistic aim, until we note that some contributors to the emotional public sphere – advertising creatives – are very aware of the emotional freight that simple words may carry, and seek to direct that freight to particular destinations (with particular behavioural consequences). The advertising of classic American goods such as cars, colas and jeans has long made use of the language and imagery of freedom, seeking to link the aspirations and fantasies around it with particular consumption choices. An equivalent measure of emotional literacy, and a greater sense of responsibility and shared national purpose than commercial copywriters are called upon to deploy, could reasonably be asked of political speechwriters, and of political leaders themselves. The second term in the President’s discourse around terror which we will examine here is that of ‘evil’. This may require less deconstruction; even the most casual analysts of the politics of the War on Terror know that al Qaeda is construed as ‘evil’, and that the category of evil has an important wider role in the presidential cosmology (the ‘axis of evil’, etc.). In relation to terrorism, evil is defined as the absence of conscience. Terrorists are ‘an enemy without conscience, and they cannot be appeased’ (11.05); they are ‘determined and brutal – unconstrained by conscience or the rules of war’ (12.05). As a general definition of evil, if one wants to use the term, this may concur with both some everyday and more philosophical conceptions, in that conscience is arguably what makes us human, and ‘evil’ is that which lacks humanity. But as a description of terrorists, it is not true to say they are without conscience. Terrorists have consciences, or superegos in psychoanalytic terms; they acknowledge authority and duty, right and wrong. The problem is that their superegos are commanded by creeds in which duty can encompass savagery. Technically, it could be said conscience here has been invaded by what psychoanalysts mean by the term ‘perversion’, which is a fundamental confusion between good and bad. When this results in behaviour so extreme and pitiless as required of every suicide bomber in Israel or Iraq, as well as the 9/11 hijackers and other spectacular terrorists, it may seem like academic hairsplitting to point out that there is ‘conscience’ in their actions. But if truth and accuracy are the benchmarks for public communication, we have to point this out, not for the sake of correctness per se but because untruths will make their claim on public feeling if they are allowed to


go unchallenged in the public sphere. In this case the idea of terrorists as unconstrained by conscience is accompanied in the presidential rhetoric by the notion of their implacability, their insatiable aggression. ‘And if we were not fighting them in Iraq [and elsewhere], they would be on the offensive, and headed our way’ (12.05); ‘their dark vision of hatred and fear’ (01.06). Again, there is an inaccuracy here. The terrorists’ own vision, as they see it, is of paradise, of light, happiness and justice. To overlook this is to mislead the public about the complex and human nature of the threat, placing before us instead an image of a rampant, evil force which knows no bounds, and which celebrates its own demonic and disgusting nature, or, like some primeval beast, knows no other. The risk here is of stimulating the most primitive and paranoid anxiety in the public, an unspeakable dread of an inhuman force. The problem with that, of course, is that such a terrorised public will not be very capable of rational deliberation about the best ways to counter terrorism. Critics of the War on Terror would at this point say yes, of course that is the problem because that is the intent of the rhetoric: to manipulate the public into supporting military actions in the belief that only these will save them. And those critics are right to challenge the ‘dehumanisation’ and ‘demonisation’ of terrorists in some official discourse. Terrorism is not a visitation of non-human evil but emerges from perverted forms of humanity, and this is a crucial element in the psychological realities of the contemporary world. Good emotional governance always seeks to promote awareness and understanding of reality, and to strengthen the public capacity to confront reality, whether this means the external realities of material life or the emotional realities of all our inner selves. However two points must be made here about this critical analysis of the discourse of ‘evil’. The first is the qualification that (as will be discussed in Chapter 12) terrorism itself functions to evoke primitive terror amongst publics to whom it is addressed, irrespective of how media and politicians interpret it. The second is that to accept the critique of ‘demonisation’ does not in any way require us to adopt the position that terrorism is a legitimate option. Indeed (as will be argued fully in Part IV) the critics of the War on Terror themselves lose touch with the psychological reality of terrorism when they overlook or rationalise its gratuitous destructiveness. The point is not that terrorism, because it is human, is less sinister than we may fear, but that in our humanity we are capable of such malign and sinister attacks on others.


At this stage of the argument it is clear that the pursuit of good emotional governance is closely interwoven with policy debates. However, it is not reducible to them. The implications of the analysis above are that political leadership should in its communications about terrorism convey to the public a realistic understanding of the psychological nature of problem,5 and should be alert to the risks of slipping into a complementary totalitarianism when seeking a symbolic language with which to rally or reassure the public. Neither of these goals is exclusively tied to any one counter-terrorism strategy or foreign policy, and could in principle be pursued at the present time by both supporters and opponents of identity cards, and by advocates of military action against Iran as much as by those demanding withdrawal from Iraq. However, in practice, in the elaboration of a communication strategy, it may prove to be progressively harder to reconcile these emotional governance goals with some specific political objectives. In that case the objectives themselves should come under scrutiny. Emotionally realistic, complex and containing messages should be available to support any policy that is sufficiently oriented to the complex realities of the world. We noted that the concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘evil’ are deployed in a secular way by Bush. However the latter concept especially is close to a theological discourse, and the appearance elsewhere in the President’s communications of explicitly Christian messages raises a general issue about the ground rules of emotional governance. A first requirement if communications are to function in a containing way is that the person(s) addressed should recognise themselves in the address. To put that another way, they should feel correctly identified by the sender of the message. In the developmental context, the baby is contained by its experience of the mother’s empathy with it, her intuition of its needs. In the sphere of public communication, the whole of the public addressed must ideally be able to accept the way in which it is defined (explicitly or implicitly) in messages to it. One obvious problem in the communications of President Bush to the American public is that in some of them he explicitly posits his audience as a Christian one. ‘In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may He watch over the United States of America.’ (09.01). And, quoting a Christmas carol, ‘God is not dead, nor [does] He sleep, the Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail, with peace on Earth, good-will to men.’ (12.05). And, signing off the State of the Union Address and many other speeches, ‘May God bless America.’ Yet despite the growth of some fundamentalist Christian churches, and the rise of conservative Christian influence in some elite circles


and policy debates, Christianity is in relative decline in the USA. Kosmin, Mayer and Keysar (2001), in their major study of religious identification amongst Americans, found that 76.5 per cent described themselves as Christian in 2001, a substantial fall from 86.2 per cent in 1990. Moreover, in 2002 the Pew Research Center found that only 67 per cent of Americans believed the US to be ‘a Christian nation’, and 84 per cent thought it possible to be a good American without Judeo-Christian values. So Bush’s hailing of his people as Christian is not only unnecessary but will severely limit his chances of being able to cohere the American public. One in four will be likely to experience at least moments of de-identification with his words. Less tangibly, anyone who has any awareness that not all Americans are Christians will – however strong may be their own identification with his sentiments – know that their President has drawn a dividing line amongst the American public. Some of them may then consequently feel emboldened to do the same themselves, and become aggressive ideologues, but even amongst those not so inclined there will be those for whom this reminder of religious difference will add (albeit if silently) to their general experience of social division. This is an example of how a simple phrase or cliché fed even just occasionally into the emotional public sphere, whatever its particular content, can reverberate across time to exacerbate social divisions. In the same fashion, other kinds of statement could evoke and strengthen more constructive feelings of inclusiveness. Politicians may be quite heavily constrained, in their choices of some words and phrases, by the context and topic of a speech. When Bush speaks on immigration (05.06) religious references are almost absent, apart from a closing reference to ‘one nation under God’, and there is an emphasis on contradiction, complexity and restraint which is absent from his discourse on terror. Indeed, in his immigration address there are some statements which are exemplars (if rather rudimentary ones) of good emotional governance: a call on his audience to recognise the depth of their feelings (‘immigration stirs intense emotions’) and the legitimacy of opposing positions (‘Americans are trying to reconcile these contrasting images’ – of support for and opposition to immigration), and pleas for ‘rational middle ground’ and for a ‘reasoned and respectful tone’. American culture, not surprisingly, has more capacity for emotional realism in the area of immigration and diversity than it does in relation to terrorism. Such psychologically-tinged messages are more frequent in the language of Blair. While sharing Bush’s inaccurately simple view of the


psychology of terrorism (‘There’s no morality so far as they’re concerned’, 09.01), he is more ready to recognise contradictions within his public towards the issue. His wish though is to dissolve these contradictions, by ‘eliminating our own ambivalence’ towards terror (which feeds ‘the poisonous propaganda that the root cause of this terrorism somehow lies with us…and not with them [the terrorists]’, 09.05). Whatever the merits and demerits of this attack on the ‘apologist’ position, which is discussed more in Part IV, it is not good emotional governance to call for the simple abolition of any constituency of feeling. Especially when in the States, Blair’s language has clearly shaped itself to the discourse of freedom. ‘And just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify it around an idea. And that idea is liberty.’ (07.03) It may also share some of the absolutism noted in Bush’s concept of ‘freedom’: we need ‘..a defence of freedom as absolute as their fanaticism’ (11.05). Some strains of this freedom theme also appear in British speeches: ‘… their [Americans’] way of life and ours is lit by the same light of freedom, the same love of democracy, the same fellowship of reason’ (11.04). Although there is more variety and reflectiveness in the Prime Minister’s language of terror than in the President’s (e.g. ‘terror won’t be beaten by toughness alone’ – 11.04), its overall impact on the public is, we might guess, similarly problematic. Both rely on monolithic concepts, are triumphalist rather than reparative, and do not offer the containment which communication of a firm hold on the complexities of reality can bring.

Part IV Terror in the Public Mind


10 The Four Factors of Fear

The political importance of the fear of terrorism1 In this chapter we will follow up on the foregoing discussions of terrorism in the emotional public sphere, and take a closer look at the fear of terrorism. We will set out a model of the dynamics of public fear, in which the origins of fear will be seen as four-fold. The model can be applied to fears of many things, such as crime, environmental catastrophe, or epidemic, but in keeping with the emphasis through much of this book the example of the fear of terrorism will be taken as a vehicle for the presentation of what is actually a generic model. The example will be followed through in the next two chapters. In Chapter 11 we will examine how the fear of terrorism is distributed across the UK population, how it varies in level and expression and is combined with other feelings. In Chapter 12 we will consider how the discourses of terrorism found in the media are likely to have an impact on different groups of the public, including on terrorists themselves. Overall this Part of the book presents, as a case study, fears of terrorism and the issues they raise for emotional governance. Before we proceed to a sketch of the model, there is another foursome to outline. There are four reasons for the choice of the fear of terrorism for a case study here, and as the main empirical theme of the whole book. 1.

The intensity of the fear

Firstly, in both the UK and the USA, terrorism is now well-established high up on the inventory of things people are worried about. It goes up and down the rank order, depending on fluctuations in perceived levels of terrorist threat, and on variations in the urgency of other 123


issues. But it has for some years usually been in the top five of public concerns on both sides of the Atlantic. In a MORI poll of Londoners in September 2005, it topped a list of four global threats: 38 per cent saw it as the most serious, above global warming (35 per cent), HIV/Aids and population growth (MORI 09.05). In MORI’s long-running series of polls on what people see as the most important issues facing Britain today, defence/foreign affairs/international terrorism has since 9/11 been near the top of the ratings. In February 2006 it topped the poll, named by 34 per cent of respondents as one of the three most important issues (MORI 02.06).2 At the same time in the US, terrorism stood fourth in the Gallup list of ‘the most important problems facing the country today’. With 9 per cent of nominations it was behind Iraq (22 per cent), poor leadership and the economy in general, both on 10 per cent (Gallup, 02.06). A different poll in January 2006 had also put it fourth, behind Iraq, the economy and healthcare (Roper Center, 01.06b). In January 2005 it had topped a poll of issues for the President to put at the top of his agenda (Roper Center, 01.05). 2.

The consequences of the fear

Secondly, these strong, widespread and persistent fears have the potential to bring about very considerable practical consequences. How much people fear terrorism, and in what way, will influence a) their everyday behaviour; b) their behaviour in the event of a major attack, which is not of direct interest to us here but is of course important for resilience planning and disaster management; c) their support for different anti-terrorist strategies; d) the likelihood of terrorist groups influencing elections and other aspects of the democratic process in target countries; e) the prospects for social cohesion in a society where there are substantial minorities of adherents to the religions or causes in the names of which terrorists claim to be acting. One very important behavioural correlate of high terror-anxiety is that people are willing to give support to a wide range of counter-terrorism measures. Strong majorities have been recorded in the UK (though not admittedly amongst its Muslim communities) in support of prioritising anti-terrorism over civil liberties, and of measures such as deporting radicals to countries that may use torture, detaining terror suspects for up to three months, a provision the government has been unable to

The Four Factors of Fear 125

secure Parliamentary approval for (ICM 07.05), increasing stop and search powers, and introducing identity (ID) Cards (Populus 06.06). Americans are more cautious about stop and search, but would similarly welcome national ID cards, and put up with intensive security on all mass transit systems (Gallup 04.06). Publics in both the UK and US would support far more stringent and intrusive domestic counterterrorism measures than their governments have so far committed to. 3.

The politics of the fear

There has of course been much discussion of the use of the terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ by journalists and politicians. The saying that ‘one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’ is well-known and probably widely accepted, so that for some people an aura of political incorrectness hangs over the terms,3 and news organisations have deliberated over whether and how to use them. Added to this debate over how to name certain kinds or examples of violence, there is also the debate about the substance and degree of the ‘terrorist’ threat. A large body of commentary and critique in the media and in academia (of which one recent example is the book by Richard Jackson, 2005) has propagated the view that the terrorist threat (whatever names one gives to it) has been magnified out of all proportion, with the primary sources of this magnification being the USA and British governments. Different political agendas are often seen to be at work here. In the USA, President Bush’s approval ratings were very high immediately after 9/11, and his critics have argued that sustaining an intense rhetoric of the War on Terror has been his strategy for maintaining popularity. In the UK, Prime Minister Blair’s critics have been more likely to accuse him of the opposite sin: not of electionoriented war-mongering but of dogmatic arrogance, of flying in the face of popular opinion in his support for the US-led international War on Terror. British public opinion did indeed come to oppose the Iraq War, though as noted above, and as we will see in Chapter 12, there remains strong popular support for various domestic counter-terrorism measures. Another critique of official anti-terrorist agendas, one of libertarian colour and more generalised scope, sees these agendas as the current expression of a phenomenon intrinsic to the activity of governments: the drive to create an enemy, an alien other towards whom popular disaffection can be displaced. This critique was advanced in the UK in 2005 by a BBC2 television series entitled ‘The Power of Nightmares’,4 which gave a substantial boost to the popular understanding and appeal of the argument that the ‘terrorist’ is largely


an imaginary ‘Other’, a paranoid vision or moral panic foisted upon us by self-serving governing classes. Both these debates – about whether or when the word ‘terrorism’ should be used, and about the scale of the ‘terrorist’ threat – are debates about the mode of emotional governance to be employed in the contemporary world. They are about how to shape, channel and manage feelings about contemporary political violence, how to respond to public anxieties, whether and how to mobilise or to reassure, and how to link specific threats with broad issues of the day such as globalisation and cultural diversity. The politics of the fear of terrorism are therefore a strong test of many of the capacities required for effective emotional governance. They also illustrate some of the basic tensions between governments and citizens in the contemporary world. For example, American citizens have substantial confidence in their government to protect them from future attacks, and optimism about the war on terrorism remains high. In April 2004, 78 per cent had a ‘great deal’ or a ‘fair amount’ of such confidence, while in January 2006, 64 per cent still reported that they had some such confidence in the Bush administration (Gallup 01.06). The deepening crisis in Iraq5 probably accounts for the drop between these two dates, but had clearly not eroded the majority base of trust in government to protect against and to vanquish terror. Yet, oddly, in March 2004 a majority (53 per cent) also thought that the government was covering up intelligence failures before 9/11, and as many as 42 per cent (and rising) apportioned blame to the Bush administration for the attacks (Gallup 04.06). Moreover in a survey conducted in January 2006, 80 per cent of respondents were of the view that another large-scale terrorist attack on the USA producing heavy casualties was likely in the near future (Roper Center 01.06a), so the confidence in government does not, apparently paradoxically, extend to a belief in its capacity to protect. The British public is also more satisfied than not with its government’s handling of the terror threat (ICM 03.04; MORI, 10.05b). Yet 87 per cent think another attack is likely to happen (MORI, 10.05b), and there is a strong feeling that the government’s prosecution of war in Iraq has increased the chances of terrorist attacks on the UK (72 per cent think there is a contribution from the UK’s Iraq involvement – MORI, 10.05a). It is especially difficult in the UK at present to discuss confidence in the government’s anti-terrorist strategy – or indeed confidence in any aspect of government – without taking the Iraq War into account. Although the Blair government has since won another


election victory, and the increasing unpopularity of the war has therefore not dominated the political landscape, it seems likely that a deep fault-line has been created between on the one side those who fundamentally believed the military action to be foolhardy or criminal, and on the other those with pro-invasion or more complex or mixed positions, and that British political discourse will be fractured around that line for some time to come. A clear retrospective view of how the 2003 Iraq action and events associated with it (the Gilligan and Kelly affairs especially6) impacted on trust and suspicion in UK politics is not yet available, and may be hard to achieve now that additional issues to do with Islamist jihadism in the UK have since July 2005 become prominent. We can however draw one strong conclusion from the profiles of public opinion illustrated above (and it should be noted that the few examples which have been given are drawn from and are typical of a large body of polling data). This is that substantial confidence in governments to deal with terrorism, and a wish to give them much stronger powers to do so, coexist with high levels of suspicion and blame in relation to their competence and at times their integrity as protectors of their peoples. There is a high degree of ambivalence, of trust and suspicion in contradictory co-existence. In order to trust a government to protect its people against attack, we must trust its capacity to perceive and understand the source of the attack. This is often a matter of trust in the competence of the government, rather than trust in its moral integrity, although the two cannot always be cleanly separated, and there is always a moral dimension. In relation to the Iraq War, for example, the competence of the intelligence arm of government has been a major issue for inquiry and debate. This debate, however, overlaps with debates about the morality of government, not least in relation to its use of the intelligence it received. So in relation to foreign policy and terrorism there are clearly interlinked debates about competence and probity, with questions of trust being linked to the very basic issue of how the problem of ‘terrorism’ is named. As such, the territory of terror should provide a fruitful one for examining the present nature of and future prospects for emotional governance. 4.

The nature of the fear

Finally, terror is a key issue for today, combining as it does rapid and recent developments in globalisation with long-standing tensions in democracy and with the permanent power of primitive states of mind,


to produce dramatic mediatised scenarios which, whether real, fictional, predicted or feared, can exert unparalleled hold over our imaginations. The growing attention paid by novelists and philosophers to the meaning of terror in the modern world7 suggests its significance for our general reflections on the prospects for humanity. Whether terrorism is a greater or lesser threat in statistical, probabilistic terms than other destructive phenomena, it presents us with the experience of a threat which by its nature is more intense and terrifying than almost any other. It signifies the collapse of some of the fundamental restraints on which society is based. Environmental disasters, major accidents, epidemics and other calamities may be more materially destructive in their effects, but do not involve individual people turning mercilessly violent against other people. Given this licence to kill which terrorists issue to themselves, it does not need hysterical interventions by the media for terrorism to take on a horrifying presence in the public imagination. It combines the horror of a freakish mass murder with the fearsome ubiquity of a global and inexorable force. This is the terror in terrorism, the loss of human feeling which it embodies and the catastrophic breakdown of human society which it threatens. Whether or not that material threat is realised, the sustained terrorising of a public may cause levels of trust in others and in the safety of public spaces to be seriously impaired, so there is long-term damage to the social fabric and to social capital (see Norris et al., 2003).

Historical context: war without end? Most debates about terror since 9/11 have been conducted with reference to, or in the shadow of, the War on Terror. In order to explore the cultural and psychological dimensions of our experience of this twenty-first century phenomenon, we need to consider its relationship to what went before. It has often been remarked that the War on Terror replaced the Cold War. This observation can however be understood in several different ways. 1.

Geopolitics

Firstly it may be taken in the context of a broad geopolitical understanding. The end of the Cold War and globalisation have brought new tensions, of which the Middle East has become the principal regional focus, and Islamicist perceptions of the need to defend Islam against ‘the West’, especially the US, have become a key expression of


those tensions. Moreover the nature of war and of political violence have changed. War is less of a state-centred, industrial enterprise, and is increasingly a non-territorial, asymmetric phenomenon involving non-state agents (King, 2004). Supporters of the War on Terror may see in this analysis an argument for it as a necessary successor to the Cold War, in order to defend liberal democratic societies against the global successor, as enemy of those societies, to Soviet military power and to the dangers of subversion which communism was seen to pose. This geopolitical analysis may also be shared by some opponents of the War on Terror, who recognise the importance of the new problems of security but see it as a misjudged or diversionary response to them. 2.

Deconstruction

In contrast, as noted above, other critics of the War on Terror may reject the idea that there are radically new problems of security which must now drive foreign and domestic policies to the extent that they do. They deconstruct the rhetoric of the War on Terror, and see it as the latest strategy by western politicians to fabricate an external enemy. This may be in order to win elections, to rationalise military interventions for which the real reasons lie elsewhere, to justify domestic regimes of increased social control, or simply to maintain belief in the legitimacy of government and its power to protect its citizens. Sometimes the deconstructionists’ ire is directed at what they see as manipulation of the public by scare-mongers in the media, albeit in the service of government.8 3.

Psychology

Distinct from these geopolitical and deconstructive approaches, there is a third way to understand the succession from ‘Soviet bloc/evil empire’ to ‘terrorist network/axis of evil’. This focuses on emotional and cultural dimensions; we could describe it as based on a sort of psychological realism. It takes the standpoint of the general public and what they actually fear. The principal fear of the UK public from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War was not of communist subversion, nor of Russian conquest, but of nuclear annihilation. For those decades in the last century the most extreme form of fear, which we can call terror, was attached to ‘the Bomb’ – to the image of the world being laid waste by gigantic explosions, a cataclysmic firestorm and deadly radiation. While ‘terrorism’ has not (and could not) fully replace that monolithic, totalised object of fear, it has brought apocalyptic images which now occupy some of the same space in the collective psyche as


did ‘the Bomb’. There is the same apocalyptic fear around a vision of instant and indiscriminate destruction, the same rhetoric of a global confrontation with evil,9 and in each phenomenon some apparent readiness for self-destruction – first the ‘MAD’ doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, and now – in reality, not just in theory – the suicide terrorist. (For the protagonists, it is not simply self-destructive in either case. ‘MAD’ was a device for deterrence, not a prediction of events; today’s Islamist terrorist believes in eternal rewards in heaven.) Insofar as today’s apocalyptic images of terror are strongly visual, and full of current and recurrent death, they are more compelling than the imagination of nuclear holocaust which had to work with only limited visual material and little-known historical accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The popular idea in the 1960s that nuclear war would bring a ‘four-minute warning’, followed by instant obliteration of everything, was a comforting fantasy, far removed from the realities of a nuclear strike. Today we have profuse media accounts of the moment of terrorist attack and its aftermath which spare us little empirical detail. Still, this greater assistance to the imagination today does not cancel the continuities which exist, at a phenomenological level, for western publics between nuclear war and terrorism: the sudden shattering of the material fabric of everyday life, the source of the threat in a shadowy, demonic Other with global presence, the rallying calls to show resilience and to defend freedom, the fatalism engendered. On this approach, the continuity of the two ‘wars’ is therefore (in part at least) a psychic one, as seen in the genealogy of anxiety rather than in the patterns of geopolitical conflict or in the rhetorical strategies of governments.

What makes us anxious? The equivalence or continuity of fears of the Bomb and of terrorism points to the first of the four factors of fear. The continuity, at the level of individual experience, is rooted in fundamental psychological processes, in our capacity for fear of cataclysm. This is a feature of individual psychology, which is reproduced at the societal level. It is a constituent of human nature, and thus will remain a given and relatively constant factor in contemporary societies. What varies are three other factors, all media-related, reflecting the three main sources of public feeling, outside of the individual psyche, outlined in Chapter 5 (‘events’, ‘statements’ and ‘mediations’). The variation of these factors determines how much the capacity for fear is mobilised, what threat or risk


it is most attached to, and whether and how it may come to dominate political agendas. So the four factors of fear are: 1. The underlying psycho-cultural tendency to fear. 2. The reality, nature and extent of the threats to which that fear is attached (‘events’). 3. Government strategy for managing communication about these threats, and other official communications about danger (‘statements’). 4. The dominant media discourses about them (‘mediations’). These factors may all influence each other to a degree, though none entirely determines any other. They are all involved in any instance of public fear, whether the fear is of pension fund collapse, water shortages, avian flu, or terrorist attack. In order to understand why the terrorist threat has assumed such prominence in recent years, and what the significance of that threat is for understanding politics today, we need to consider these factors in turn. 1.

The underlying psycho-cultural tendency to fear

An underlying capacity for fear is always present in us, individually and collectively, and seeks to attach itself to whatever threats there may be in the external environment at a given time. This means that it is a subjective force which will always be ‘looking’ for an objective threat to which to attach itself. It is, we might say, a ‘neurotic’ strand in society. In other words the suggestion is that there is a psychological constant at work in the public impact of the terrorist threat, an underlying capacity for fear of catastrophe. This may also feed into anxieties about environmental and other natural disasters not directly related to political conflict, but fear of terrorism is the leading expression at present of this constant capacity for fear. It is constant not only in the sense of being always available, but also in being relatively stable in level. Societies may differ in basal levels of this fear; we might speculate that in those with histories of repeated catastrophe, the psychic development of individuals will reflect this in higher levels of fear. But in the short to medium term, in any given society this will be a constant. Though the object of fear will change, the capacity for fear – and specifically for catastrophic fear of the kind aroused by terrorism – may as suggested above be regarded as part of human nature, i.e. part of our psychic and cultural make-up. So this first factor shifts around in terms


of its focus but it does not contribute much to an increase or decrease in the overall level of public fear. In understanding public responses to terrorism we have to be aware of this relatively constant factor of the archetypal level of experience, and the latent imagery there which can be mobilised by different threats at different times. 2. The reality, nature and extent of the threats to which constant fear is attached Although when viewed on a long time scale it may be that anxiety about the Bomb ebbed as the Cold War collapsed, poll data does not suggest a clear link between the degree of threat and the level of anxious concern. MORI’s archive shows that the defence/foreign affairs/international terrorism cluster of issues did not feature strongly as a concern through the period from 1974, when these polls began, until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Neither the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, nor any peaks of Cold War tension before that, had any significant effect on the level of concern. So anxiety is not always in direct proportion to the real level of threat, as we also know from studies of the fear of crime, and it seems that neither is this the case in relation to terrorism. It can be argued that the real threat posed by terrorism has not increased, and has even decreased, during the last decade when public fears about it have mounted. The number of terrorist attacks has declined globally since the early 1990s, and although statistics on the global frequency of attack conceal major national differences, in statistical terms the British public is less at risk of a jihadist (or any other kind of) attack now than it was of an IRA attack for many years. It is noteworthy then that terrorism has risen on the political agenda in the UK in the period after IRA attacks were most frequent. However, the increasing scale of the most severe attacks (9/11 and Madrid most obviously) has served to heighten public anxiety, and there is sometimes a directness of address from perpetrators to publics as their intended victims (e.g. in video statements made by suicide bombers for consumption by mass publics), of a kind which was absent from Republican terrorism. So although in one statistical sense the extent of the terrorist threat may not be greatly increasing, the experience of it is being intensified. 3. Government strategy for managing communication about the specified threats, and other official communications about danger For governments, there is always a fine line between open-ness and adequate preparation on the one hand, and panic-inducement on the


other – between the twinned risks of spreading panic and colluding with denial. (There is also a history of difficulty around the question of whether terrorist and pro-terrorist voices should be censored – see, e.g., Carruthers, 1996.) The effectiveness of government communications concerning terrorism depends on the nature of their address to our collective reserves of anxiety. This is where government communications may tap the expertise of marketing communications in ‘pressing the buttons’, and where the ‘instincts’ of the copywriter and of the journalist for the anxieties of audiences and readers are crucial. Such skills do not always lead to the playing up of threats and the obvious provocation of anxiety. One common way of dealing with anxiety is to deny it, and communications professionals may choose to ally with that psychic manoeuvre as much as they at other times incite anxiety. This tactic is common in commercial advertising, and familiar also in official communications, e.g. some government communications and media commentary during the BSE (‘mad cow disease’) crisis may be seen as engaging in denial (see Gerodimos, 2004). Of course, the situation is fundamentally complicated by electoral competition. Campaign managers’ calculations about the shorter-term impact of certain messages in winning or losing votes may not correspond with others’ judgements about the long-term effects of those messages on the quality of public debate and understanding. In this respect the situation in the UK ought to be more favourable to the development of an informed and rational discourse around terror, because there has been a high degree of consensus to date between the two leading parties on approaches to terrorism. Also, despite the scale of the 7/7 attack in 2005, and the questioning it evoked about why it had occurred, the UK has not had a 9/11 (nor an Oklahoma) to generate such a large and volatile reserve of fear and anger as exists in the US. In contrast it seems clear that in the 2004 USA election both sides did try to capitalise on public anxiety about terrorism (and as the exit poll referred to earlier in this chapter showed, there was a lot to capitalise on). There is also in the UK a long tradition of fairly low-key government communications about risk in this area. In 2004 the ‘Preparing for Emergencies’ booklet was delivered to all homes, describing basic general rules for how to behave in emergencies (‘Go in, stay in, tune in’). It was the first such guidance to be distributed universally since ‘Protect and Survive’, which was a handbook for surviving a nuclear attack, was published in 1980. This was perhaps an indication of the equivalence of Terror and the Bomb in the official as well as the public


mind. Though the two booklets differ in some respects, they share a tendency towards collusion with denial; neither can be read as a panicmaking publication. A recent aberration from this tradition has been in the statements of some leading public figures10 that a major terrorist attack here is ‘inevitable’, instances of the UK government and other authorities appearing to let an alarmist note dominate communications strategies. On the whole, though, official communications in the UK have not served to inflate public anxiety about terrorism. If anything, despite the abstract rhetoric of the War on Terror favoured by the government in describing the international scene, on the home front government communications have been low-key and have tended to dampen the impact of some contributions from the media.11 There is little evidence that the UK government is actively responsible for the rise in base levels of public anxiety about the domestic threat, and on both sides of the Atlantic there appears to be some effort towards as much transparency as can be achieved in this area.12 Nonetheless the potential interests of many governments in simplifying and emphasising the threat may lead to an inflation of public alarm, as also may pressures towards greater transparency in, and less censorship by, government. 4.

The dominant media discourses about the threats

A long history of social-scientific studies of moral panics and media effects shows that overall the contributions of the media to the public discourse of terrorism (whether in concert with government strategies or not) have tended in the direction of amplifying the threat.13 There are long traditions of editorial panic-inducement in this area. And in any case we hardly need the labours of academic research to reveal for us the uninhibited address that headline writers can make on almost any topic to the anxieties coiled within their readers. The mediatised discourse of the War on Terror as an apocalyptic war on evil is indeed a cataclysmic one, both in its official USA government version and in its countless reiterations in headlines, editorials and comment columns. It would be a mistake though to leave our analysis of the media discourse there, for two reasons. One is that, as will be seen in Chapter 12, there is another model of terrorism present in public debates, albeit with less prominence, which is of the terrorist not as ‘evil’ but as a basically pragmatic and rational agent, driven to violence by the alleged failure of all other ways to promote a just cause. This may mitigate the fear of terrorism as absolute evil, and may deflect some anger


and fear towards the USA or whichever power is held responsible for the injustice. As will be argued, this is a similarly one-dimensional model of terrorism, but for better or worse it may counteract some of the simple catastrophic anxiety stimulated elsewhere in mediaspace. The second is that we must also analyse the relationships not only between media and publics but also between media and terrorists. To a degree terrorists are usually media artefacts of some sort, but they are also media producers, and consumers. The apparent aim of much of what is described as terrorism is to instil fear and thereby to influence public opinion (Nacos, 2002), e.g. in the televising of post-attack scenes, the release of beheading videos, and bin Laden’s messages, which bring the general public into direct contact with the terrifying core of terrorism, and which illustrate the relatively new factor of more direct address by terrorists to target publics, whether these ‘publics’ are potential jihadists or national electorates in democratic countries. The terrorists’ understanding of public anxieties and how to mobilise them will therefore be of importance, as will the publics’ perceptions of terrorists. This approach therefore brings us to consider the media discourse of terrorism as a series of mediatised exchanges between terrorists and publics. In these exchanges the voices of terror meet the anxieties of the public. Whatever the realistic level of threat, the psychological reality of terror, both episodically in the enactment of terrorism and continually in the imaginations of target public and terrorist alike, is a central component of the media discourse. Thus for example the fact that the terrorist threat is perceived by the public to be increasing can be understood as a response to inflation in the rhetoric of terrorists.

Some conclusions So we are led to the conclusion that the main engine of the rising fear of terrorism in the UK at present is the media discourse, but with the important qualification that this now includes the direct mediation of terrorist communications which engage powerfully with the first factor, that is with the capacity of the public for fear, by presenting us with images or promises of the eruption of murderousness and nihilism. This approach also highlights the need to consider how terrorist groups and individuals may be influenced by these exchanges, which will also be considered further in Chapter 12. But in any case, identifying the four factors and considering their inter-relationships, as outlined above, already enables us to develop


some important arguments. Academically, it makes a case for bringing a certain kind of political psychology into this area, and attending to the psychological dimensions of public responses to terror. It also leads us to contest the ‘deconstructionist’ position described earlier: the view that the high level of public concern about terrorism is an artefact of government propaganda, or of manipulation by scare-mongers in the media. This view overlooks, amongst other things, the psychological quality of the threat posed by terrorism. And politically, it challenges the view which says that the problem is not terrorism, but is Israel/Palestine, the western intervention in Iraq, US oil-fired imperialism, or whatever. Of course in a historical sense, much contemporary terrorism is rooted in the global dynamics of capitalism, but that does not mean it is purely a kind of secondary symptom which does not have a reality and significance of its own. So in conclusion we may assert that: • Contemporary terror about terrorism is not fundamentally the product of a politically-contrived mythology, though this may amplify it in some national contexts. • It stems from psycho-cultural reserves of anxiety, triggered by the nature of terrorist attacks. • It is directed and sustained by media provocation. • Increasingly, the media strategies of terrorist groups contribute to the anxiety-building. These conclusions have emerged from a preliminary application of a four-factor model of the generation of fear. The model suggests that there are opportunities for politicians, public authorities and journalists to contribute to a more realistic and more rational discourse of terrorism and anti-terrorism. The next two chapters consider this possibility more closely.

11 Terrorism and the Emotional Public

Why and how to conduct an emotional audit An emotionally realistic way of talking about terrorism, or indeed about any topic of democratic debate, can be developed only when the full spectrum of public feeling about and around it has been recognised and is being attended to in some way. Of course the public is deeply heterogeneous, so ‘spectrum’ may be too simple a word here. The emotional public sphere is a multi-dimensional space full of complex patterns or structures of feeling in constant interaction with each other. The major patterns and dynamic interactions in play around a topic should be identified and understood by any party wanting to influence debate or events in that area. Whether the party in question is, for example, a government department, a healthcare trust, a police force, a campaigning group, or a political party fighting an election, its chances of putting together a successful communication strategy will be enhanced by a thorough understanding of the emotional dynamics of the public. While such an understanding may be arrived at in a number of ways, it is most likely to be reliable and rich if it has been gained in a systematic and thorough way. This would mean conducting a comprehensive audit of the nature, distribution and strength of the emotions involved. Effective emotional governance calls for an ongoing process of affective audit. In this chapter we will examine what such an audit would look like in relation to the issue of contemporary Islamist terrorism in the UK. The fairly simple model offered for doing this could however be applied to any other issue. Model building in the social sciences is often relatively easy. The complex and difficult parts of emotional audit are in the applications of the model, that is, in the assessment of 137


specific, substantive collections of various data. (How deep do certain feelings run? Who speaks for whom? Why may polling data be contradictory?…) Still, having a clear basic framework and a firm set of principles for its use can be facilitating, and it will hopefully be demonstrated here that taking up the model of emotional audit can generate valuable, indeed necessary, inputs to the development of inclusive and effective communication strategies. The simplest approach is to take each distinct interest group or ‘public’ around the issue and to use polling results and other forms of research data to map out the feelings predominant within each one, as well as to use psychological theory to infer what those feelings might be. In the terms of psychodynamic theory, this could involve trying to establish what impulses, anxieties and defences were typically to be found in each group. If original research can be conducted to supplement the existing data, so much the better. ‘Publics’ can be identified a priori in various ways; often a demographic variable may provide the key to differentiating between different publics. Polling data (though often a rather blunt instrument) may also be used to help define various publics and sub-publics, as in the example below, in addition to that data being used to audit the emotional states of each group. Sometimes combinations of variables will be necessary, and a mix of methods (in particular, linking poll data with psychoanalytic understandings of collective mental processes).

Polls and passions So, in relation to Islamist terrorism, we have, as a first approximation, the following five distinct (though complexly overlapping) groups, defined by a combination of binary religious categorisation (Muslim vs non-Muslim) and an equally crude characterisation of broad position on the politics of terrorism. We should note that the Muslim population of the UK as a whole is around 3 per cent of the total (that is, around 1.8 million people).1 1. The compliant non-Muslim public, i.e. those who broadly support (or do not oppose) current government policy, including the action in Iraq and a range of anti-terrorist measures at home. 2. The dissident non-Muslim public, oriented around opposition to the Iraq War and to some anti-terrorist measures. 3. The majority Muslim public, which is opposed to terrorism but which tends to oppose the Iraq War and some counter-terrorism measures.

Terrorism and the Emotional Public 139

4. The minority Muslim public, which is ambivalent to or supportive of terrorism. 5. The terrorist groups themselves and their immediate supporters. What we might think of as ‘the general public’ comprises the first four groups. Some poll data does not enable us to differentiate any of the groups within that aggregate, but nonetheless we will try to establish what we know about the emotions which are to be found within each of these groups. 1.

The ‘compliant’ non-Muslim public

The most obvious affect to be found in this group is fear. The polling data reviewed in Chapter 10 outline the strength of this fear, expressed in terms of its ranking amongst issues of national concern. It can also be expressed in data about people’s predictions of further attacks, e.g. the 82 per cent of Londoners who in September 2005 believed that another attack on their city was likely (MORI 07.05). 49 per cent of a national sample believed there would be another suicide bombing in Britain within a year (MORI 02.06). The proportion was 63 per cent amongst Sun readers, suggesting that fear is more concentrated amongst lower socio-economic strata. The fearful group will though include members of the dissident public as well as the compliant. A better indication of the size of the compliant group, and the nature of its feelings, is in data about support for counter-terrorist measures. We have noted that there are large majorities in favour of many such measures. For example, over 70 per cent support a general package of measures even at the price of losing some civil liberties (ICM/G 07.02 and 08.05). 61 per cent of Londoners support more money for police counter-terrorist work, even at the cost of higher taxes (and even, for 54 per cent, at the cost of as much as £100 p.a. to the council tax payer) (MORI 10.05a and b). Around 70 per cent offer support for increased stop-and-search powers,2 and over 60 per cent for ID cards.3 Data from Populus shows that support for such measures is usually if not dramatically higher amongst lower socio-economic groups. 63 per cent support indefinite detention of terror suspects (ICM 04.04) and in the same poll other counter-terrorist measures again received similar levels of support at around two-thirds of the sample. This data both indicates the size of the public which is supportive of the War on Terror in at least some of its forms, and suggests the importance of fear as a characteristic affect within it. Of course the polls do not directly examine the fear, but their results would make little sense


unless we assume that people are fearful, and in their responses (whatever political judgements we may make of them) are appealing for greater protection. This appeal distinguishes the compliant from the dissident public, who as will be seen manage their fear in a different way. From these findings we may infer that the size of this ‘compliant’ public has in the last four or five years been around two-thirds of the general population (though this figure will probably include some from the Muslim population, i.e. from group 3 below), and that it is skewed a little towards lower socio-economic groups. A similar indication comes from data on general questions about support for the War on Terror: 66 per cent approved the policy of ‘war against Al Qaeda’ (ICM 03.04). It does not require any more than a common-sense psychology to expect that in this public there is also likely to be anger, in addition to fear. This anger we might expect to be directed primarily at the terrorists themselves and those presumed to be supporting them, though some of it may be felt, at least potentially, against the UK government or civil authorities for having allegedly failed (on 7/7) to protect the British public. In this regard, there is a more generalised background sense of anger about the weakness of the relevant authorities into which anger about the terrorist threat can tap. For the most part though members of this public see terrorist attacks as inevitable and unstoppable. Some of the anger may be a relatively straightforward reaction to the brutality of terrorism. Some, as just noted, may derive more from a general sense of being insufficiently protected (whatever the basis in reality for that feeling). And some will be fed by another more general state of mind, one in which punitive and blindly retributive impulses are dominant. There will be some retributive impulses at large in this group, though of course in relation to Islamist attacks the appropriate target for retribution is often elusive or intangible, since it is widely understood that other Muslims or Islam are not to blame. Nonetheless, anxieties amongst Muslims and others about an ‘Islamophobic’ backlash focus on this public as the major source of such a reaction, and it would not be hard to find here instances of hostile stereotyping of Muslims or of Arabs. On the whole, however, those fears of Islamophobia have not been matched by a broad upsurge of generalised hostility. There is an important qualification to this conclusion. This is in the findings that 61 per cent feel that ‘ordinary Muslims in this country do


not do enough to denounce extremists’ (MORI 02.06), and 61 per cent agree that Muslim leaders could do more to condemn extremist violence (YouGov 02.06). So at the low-key end of the anger spectrum in this group there is some resentment against UK Muslims in general. Moreover there are expressions of retributive anger against those who can be identified as involved in or supporting terrorism. Around two-thirds think the seven-year sentence for inciting hatred imposed on extremist cleric Abu Hamza was not long enough (MORI 02.06 [65 per cent]; YouGov 02.06 [69 per cent]). As many as 81 per cent agreed that ‘those who stir up hatred should be deported even if it would endanger them’ (YouGov 02.06). 59 per cent approved the reintroduction of the death penalty for terrorist murders (ICM 04.04), suggesting an impulsive rather than pragmatic source of at least some of this support for counter-terrorism (since the prospect of the death penalty is of course unlikely to deter Islamist attackers). The 47 per cent who would accept governments assassinating terrorist leaders (ICM 03.04) may have been expressing a similar lack of calculation. In summary, we can say that there is a compliant non-Muslim public which seems to comprise around two-thirds of the population, and amongst whom there are extensive (if complex) reserves of fear and anger. Possibly as many as half of the general population, or two-thirds of this group, are in their anger driven at least on occasions by unthinking retributive impulses. Critics of the War on Terror point out the scope it affords for the projection and externalisation of fears of many kinds (irrespective of whether it can be justified by the nature of the terrorist threat), and the fear we have identified in this public is likely often to have a paranoid quality, with the associated tendency to oversimplify issues, e.g. by reducing the problem of terrorism to a matter of ‘evil’ (see Chapter 9 above, and Chapter 12 below). 2.

The ‘dissident’ non-Muslim public

In the polls referred to above, the numbers taking positions opposite to those of the ‘compliant’ majority vary somewhat. On the counterterrorism ‘package’ questions, 17 per cent are opposed (ICM/G 07.02 and 08.05), leaving 10 per cent ‘Don’t knows’. Larger minorities, averaging around 30 per cent, can be found taking oppositional views on specific issues, ranging from 20 per cent who thought Abu Hamza’s sentence was not too lenient (MORI 02.06) to 43 per cent not approving the assassination of terrorist leaders (ICM 03.04). On specific putative protective measures, such as stop-and-search powers, other increased policing and indefinite detention, opposition is at most around 30 per


cent (ICM 03.04; ICM 04.04; MORI 10.05a; Populus 07.05), with very few ‘Don’t knows’. So there is a public here, possibly as large as 30 per cent of the general population, some members of which may individually be as fearful in an everyday sense as those in Public 1, but which is not driven primarily by fear in its political choices since it opposes the introduction or extension of protective measures. We do not know from the polling data how this public rationalises these choices. Some may accept the preventive value of the measures but believe that civil liberties and community relations are threatened and that this is more important. Some may think they are ineffective, while others may think they are not needed as the threat is much less than the government would have us believe. Those in this group who are fearful respond to their fear not like Public 1 by supporting more protective local measures but by strategies such as attacking the global role of the USA and UK, especially in the Middle East, which they see as the fundamental cause of the threat. Identifying the characteristic feelings of this group from poll data is difficult as there is less direct evidence about them than for group 1. However by calling in broad knowledge of the political landscape we can suggest that the distinguishing affect of this group is anger. This has been most obviously directed at the USA and UK governments for their part in Iraq, but may extend to many other actions of Western governments, and others seen as prosecuting the War on Terror, which this group tends to see as a sort of phoney war against a partly imagined enemy (or one created by American actions). There are multiple sources of this anger. Some comes from informed and politically committed analyses of the history of the Israel/Palestine situation, the Middle East generally and other conflict zones in which Western power is seen by some as a malign force. Some comes from the psycho-cultural trend described in Chapter 6, the increasing hatred and angry contempt for authority in all its forms but especially state power (and especially the power of one’s own state and that of the USA), a feeling which can be hooked onto critiques of the War on Terror with very little intellectual effort or knowledge of terrorism being involved. But the strongest source of anger characterising this group at present stems from an opposition to the initial action in Iraq, whether on ethical, ideological or pragmatic grounds. Especially in the UK this is an anger at the government’s decision to press ahead with military action despite large-scale popular opposition. There was in fact a majority in favour of intervention at the time the decision was taken,


but the anti-war movement has nonetheless questioned the democratic legitimacy of the decision. Amongst the more fearful members of this group, those who are anxiously aware of the possibility of terrorist attack, the anger may be compounded by the belief that the government’s action has put us at greater risk of terrorist attack. (Some in Public 1 may also believe that the occupation of Iraq has increased this risk, but do not hold the government responsible for that, since they see the action there as essentially right despite that risk.) A portion of the anger is therefore self-protective, but by far the greater portion of it is moral anger. Members of Public 2 are angry at what they see as the moral failures of their government and state. In psychoanalytic terms it is superego anger, not of the same primitive, punitive kind as may be seen amongst Public 1 towards terrorists, but nonetheless sometimes still marked by a different kind of simplistic thinking and laziness of mind in which dissent per se and the claim of moral superiority over government are given automatic credence. Critics of the positions taken by this ‘left-liberal’ public sometimes see its characteristic anger as stemming from guilt about the role of the West, historical and/or current, real and/or imagined. Driven perhaps by a diffuse sense of guilt about the affluence and security of the West, the individual feels anger at having been implicated in particular events which s/he sees as crimes, and here there is much scope for personal reserves of private guilt, unconnected to world events, to find an opportunity for displaced expression and hoped-for expunction by projection onto political leaders who can then, perhaps, be overthrown. 3.

The majority Muslim public

Polling data indicates that between one-half and two-thirds of Muslims in Britain, possibly more, consistently report feeling strong attachments to British society and see a profound gulf between themselves and terrorists. In one poll (MORI 07.05) as many as 86 per cent attested strong feelings of belonging to Britain (though in less strong terms than the 95 per cent saying the same about Islam). 52 per cent disagreed that Islam was incompatible with the values of British democracy. On the measure of agreement with leading Muslim figures, the winner by a long way was the English convert and prominent moderate Yusuf Islam, with 49 per cent backing (Populus 12.05). A survey in June 20064 (Populus 06.06) showed 65 per cent agreeing that their community needs to do more to integrate properly with British society. 48 per cent even agreed that the intelligence services have the right to infiltrate Muslim organisations and 47 per cent agreed that


Muslim preachers should be monitored more closely. A lower number (35 per cent) said they would be proud of a family member who joined the police, one of several indications that this 50–65 per cent ‘attached’ majority is not fully attached on some specific issues. Alongside its declared commitment to Britain this group is aligned more with ‘dissident’ Public 2 than with ‘compliant’ Public 1. Opposition amongst this group to the principle of the Iraq War is less likely to be based on the traditionally left-leaning sympathies of the British Muslim electorate, than on the fact that it was a Muslim country that was invaded (23 per cent said they would feel anger if a family member joined the British army and thereby was prepared to fight against Muslims in other countries). 50 per cent of the Populus sample took the view that the British invasion of Iraq was the principal reason for the 7/7 attacks. We might nonetheless reasonably assume that at least some of this group share the fear of further attacks experienced by many in the non-Muslim public. However the Populus survey has a surprising finding in this regard: Muslims are less likely to think that further suicide bomb attacks in the UK are coming than do the general population. 49 per cent of Muslims think any more such attacks are unlikely, compared to 16 per cent of the general population. Only 42 per cent think they are likely, compared with 78 per cent of the general population. An ICM poll in the same month (ICM 06.06) recorded the still lower figure of 32 per cent thinking that an attack in the next 12 months is likely. This may reflect the fact that it is Muslims (albeit of a relatively rare, jihadist type) who are seen as the source of the threat, and so it is as Muslims who know their communities better than non-Muslims that people in this group are able to remain at a distance from panic-inducing newspaper headlines, and to keep a better sense of proportion. Alternatively, it may reflect a degree of denial or wishful thinking concerning how much influence jihadist ideas have gained within sections of British Islam (see Section 3 below). Our audit of affects needs to consider what emotions are suggested by this poll data. We can note the considerable level of ambivalence or contradiction within this group. This is not surprising given the structural position of this group in community relations, ‘between’ the nonMuslim majority and the jihadists. Many Protestants and Catholics in the UK or USA might find themselves feeling similarly compromised if fundamentalist Christians were bombing gay clubs or abortion clinics. For example, 49 per cent of the Populus Muslim sample said they are offended by non-Muslims being suspicious of Muslims on public trans-


port, but 48 per cent said they could understand this, and 18 per cent said they too would be anxious if someone who looked Muslim had a large backpack. The government is criticised over Iraq by 50 per cent but also, by 56 per cent, for not combating Muslim extremism enough. So there is a combination, sometimes contradictory, of anger and fear, with an admixture of blame and possibly denial. There is also ambivalence around general questions of integration. Only 44 per cent think that modern British values are not a threat to the Islamic way of life (Populus 07.06), and only 29 per cent agreed that immigrants ‘should adopt the values and traditions of British culture’ (MORI, 08.05), yet in the latter poll there were few major differences between the national sample and the Muslim subgroup on questions about specific values. There is one further pattern of feeling which the audit must register in this group, which we can identify by starting from other poll data but then again going beyond survey results to draw on other evidence and on theoretical inference. There seems to be a consensus amongst many Muslims (both in this group and even more so in group 4 below) that they are negatively viewed by the rest of British society (74 per cent think they are viewed with suspicion by their fellow-citizens – Populus 07.06), and negatively represented in the media. Many nonMuslims, at least those of left-liberal persuasions, agree with this, and so the notion of Islamophobia has acquired wide currency and influence. The systematic evidence required to test fully this assumption of endemic Islamophobia in the media is not available, but it is important to raise questions about the assumption, and necessary to do so here since if the emphasis on Islamophobia is not simply justified by what is out there in the British media and in British society generally, then it must say something about the emotional states of mind of those (Muslims and others) who are preoccupied with it. We would have to conclude that there is a paranoid edge to the outlook of those involved – and as discussed in Chapter 2 this would not be at all unusual or surprising in this age of suspicion. Here, this general cultural trend could be reinforced by the fact it may be more comfortable to focus on the shortcomings of the national media than to confront shortcomings within the Islamic community. We can easily find some ‘anecdotal’ reasons for doubting at least the cruder versions of the Islamophobia thesis.5 Moreover there is some evidence emerging from a recently completed study of Muslims in the UK and USA (see Ahmad, 2006; Gillespie, 2006) of a tendency for people to report ‘Islamophobia’ in terms so vague and exaggerated that their case lacks plausibility. Of course a lot depends here on what


is seen to constitute anti-Islamic material. 86 per cent of British Muslims were personally offended by the publication in Denmark of cartoons of Muhammad (ICM 02.06). However a growing belief amongst the political classes that some of these sensitivities are misplaced perhaps prompted Prime Minister Blair’s call in June 20066 for Muslims to give up the ‘grievance culture’. He was referring here less to the charges of domestic Islamophobia than to the belief that the West is systematically oppressing Muslims in different parts of the world (58 per cent believe Britain’s foreign policy is anti-Muslim, and 51 per cent have some sympathy with a holy war against the West – YouGov 07.06).7 This belief can provide the frame for Muslim evaluation of domestic counter-terrorist measures, which – problematically for the successful implementation of those measures in a socially cohesive way – are often seen as an attack on Islam. In all, then, the audit for this group reveals an intense, complex array of affects: attachment to Britain, yet insecurity in it; anger, fear, blame of the government, and perhaps a measure of denial of the influence of militant jihadism within British Islam, along with what are probably excessive accusations against the media and a sense of grievance in relation to the global situation and to counter-terrorism. 4.

The minority Muslim public

The same Populus poll referred to above (06.06) however also found that 16 per cent of British Muslims would accept suicide attacks on military targets in the UK, 13 per cent of British Muslims think that the 7/7 suicide bombers should be regarded as ‘martyrs’, and 6 per cent think that suicide attacks on civilian targets can be justified. 2 per cent said they would be proud of a family member who joined al Qaeda. A poll earlier in 2006 (ICM 02.06) had found similar results. Seven per cent thought Western society to be decadent and that Muslims should seek to destroy it, if necessary by violent means. 14 per cent approved of attacks on Danish embassies in the cartoon controversy; 12 per cent approved placards calling for the killing of those who insult Islam, 13 per cent approved violence against those deemed by religious leaders to have insulted them. Only 4 per cent approved of al Qaeda attacks on Western targets, yet 20 per cent had ‘sympathy with the feelings and motives’ of the 7/7 bombers. Perhaps most disturbingly and surprisingly, 40 per cent would support the introduction of Sharia law in parts of Britain. That higher figure echoed some findings from a slightly earlier Populus survey (Populus 12.05). Then, 37 per cent reported agreement


with the statement that Jewish people in the UK were legitimate targets as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East, and 28 per cent of 18–24 year olds said suicide bombings against military targets could be justified. That survey also asked for statements of support for individual Muslim leaders, with a number of extremist clerics receiving backing from percentages of the sample such as 13 per cent for Abu Hamza al-Masri, now jailed for inciting murder and racial hatred, and 18 per cent for Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a leader of the global Muslim Brotherhood. Overall, the findings of these polls suggest that somewhere between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of British Muslims can positively identify with terrorism within the UK, and that a higher proportion, possibly in excess of one-third, may on particular issues subscribe to or condone some aims and methods of global jihadism. Even the smallest of these figures could mean, if extrapolated across the whole Muslim population in the UK, that over 90,000 people sympathise with terrorist violence. While still a small minority overall (for example it is less than half than the number of BNP voters in the 2005 UK General Election, which stood at over 191,000), this number is far in excess of the few thousands identified by the security and intelligence agencies as suspected of direct involvement in terrorist-related activities and organisations.8 There is at the time of writing an important debate about the extent to which explicitly violent jihadist teachings, or at least ideas sympathetic to terrorism, have gained influence within British Islam. Sookhdeo (2005; ISIC, 2005) argues that the majority of mosques and other community institutions in the UK have been taken over by groups representing, or having affinities with, the global militant Islamist movement. Other studies tend to support the ‘official’ line taken by government and by many Muslim leaders that it is only a ‘tiny minority’ who have serious sympathy for terrorism. Awan (2007), for example, states that ‘no other British mosque’ had allowed itself to become the centre of jihadist preaching (most notably by al-Masri) as did the Finsbury Park mosque in London. This debate is beyond our scope here, and would need more social intelligence and careful ethnographic research to settle it. But whatever the scale of jihadist penetration in the UK, we must note that polling data suggests there is potential for influence amongst a sizeable minority of British Muslims – maybe as much as 15–20 per cent, possibly even more if we allow for some people suppressing their real views and sentiments in survey replies. Amongst this minority we find both


anti-western, anti-government anger and a sense of grievance much more intensely and less ambivalently developed than in the Muslim majority. Correlatively, identifications with Britain will be weaker or more conflicted. Around 10 per cent of British Muslims feel little or no sense of belonging or loyalty to Britain (11 per cent – MORI 07.05; 7 per cent ICM 02.06). A somewhat larger number think Islam is incompatible with British democracy (14 per cent MORI 07.05; 18 per cent MORI 08.05). We might also expect to find here the greatest popularity of conspiracy theories (e.g. that 9/11 was an Israeli/USA plot), though of course these have a febrile life amongst the more suspiciously-minded individuals in all groups. Data from one of the above polls (Populus 12.05) suggests that they have wide currency amongst Muslims as a whole: 46 per cent agreed that Jews are in league with Freemasons to control the media and politics. This minority group, whatever size it is estimated to have between 5 per cent and 30+ per cent of the total Muslim population, is the most difficult to audit as there is least known about it in systematic social research. Loosely speaking, it must be characterised by high levels of anger, of a type combining self-righteous moral anger against the ‘West’ (not unlike some of that seen in Publics 2 and 3 – the ‘grievance culture’) with an aggressive desire for the advancement of what are seen as Muslim interests. Added to this is the much-reported sense of social disenfranchisement felt by many Muslim youth, which – if reports of its wide extent are accurate – probably generates feelings of worthlessness and humiliation (a theme which, as will be discussed in the next section, appears in literature on the psychology of the terrorist). There may also be complex and ambivalent feelings towards many aspects of British popular culture, where anxieties about sexuality and self-worth are likely be at stake. Assessing more closely what kind of emotional needs this group brings to the national debate is an important task for future research. 5.

Terrorist groups and their immediate networks

In some ways more is known about actual individual terrorists than about the minority public who may sympathise with them. Yet in considering how communications through the national media can help to shape and support counter-terrorism strategy, the terrorists themselves are rarely considered as audience or as participants in the national conversation. They are usually seen as irremediably outside the public sphere, as having totally excluded themselves from the democratic


conversation. This may be true at the level of ideology and of political purpose, and – as will be argued below – is true also in a psychological sense, in that there must be in terrorists a fundamental emotional disconnection from their human surroundings. However elective departure from the emotional public sphere is not possible, because the emotions circulating in human interaction will impact in one way or another on all those present. Autistic children remain highly sensitive to and influenced by the emotional communications carried by the behaviour of those around them, despite the massive defences against human contact which autism partly consists of (Tustin, 1992). In a similar way we can expect that the powerful flow of emotions in national mediaspace will have impact on the terrorists, even though they may view all media content (apart from their chosen jihadist sources) as total propaganda which they totally reject. One would have to live a life hermetically sealed from all media content and from all casual conversations about events in the world to have a chance of avoiding influence of some sort from the emotional public sphere. Opinion poll data is of course not what we have got to work with here. Instead the emotional audit must turn to what is known about the social organisation of terrorism and the psychology of terrorists, and must also draw upon psychological theory to help build a picture of the emotions which are likely to be involved and which are in the mind of the terrorist as a consumer of the mediatised narratives of terror. A separate section will be given to this here, since the possibilities for influencing terrorist behaviour through mass-mediated communications, i.e. through the ways in which terrorism is presented and discussed, have hitherto not been explored. This will also involve a bringing together of the components of emotional audit in this case, by considering some of the dynamic inter-relations between groups.

Are terrorists on another planet? Indeed, at the centre of this exploration is the question of how Islamist terrorists relate to their faith communities. For some time, some of the authorities in the UK had been warning of an intensifying threat from terrorist cells based in the UK, but it was not until after 7/7 there have been such great efforts to understand the development of these cells, by looking at the relationships of the July bombers to their local and faith communities. This investigation is now a widely-agreed security priority, and is seen by many as requiring us to look closely at the depth of anger felt by many young people in Muslim communities, and thus


tracing a common thread between groups 3, 4 and 5 above. It raises a fundamental question about the relationship of extremist groups to their society. Do our current forms of terrorist threat have an intrinsic and necessary relationship with the communities from which the terrorists come and whose ultimate interests they purport to advance? Or are the cells more akin to cults, marked by a fundamental ethical and emotional disengagement from all the people and realities of everyday life around them? This question is central to the emotional audit of the micro-public of terrorists. In some cases, where terrorist organisations are strong, relatively stable and relatively large, they may play significant if ad hoc roles in welfare provision or policing in their communities, as with the IRA and Hamas. In those situations, it is clear that there is a lot of active support in the community, and wider passive support or acquiescence, and that this support helps to sustain the scale and success of the terrorist strategy. The al Qaeda network, with its mobile, completely clandestine and time-limited groupings, is obviously in a different type of relationship to its ‘host’ community. Yet fears that cells can and do grow only in the fertile soil of culturally segregated and disaffected communities are still widespread. In the UK at present, the alienation of large sections of the Muslim community, especially young people, from British society as a whole, is often seen as an important, perhaps crucial, factor in generating the risk of further terrorist attacks. The precise relationship between terrorist cell or individual and the wider Muslim community may not always be clearly specified, but there are general fears that parts of the community may tolerate, condone, collude with or otherwise increase the likelihood of the adoption by a very few individuals of active jihadist paths which lead to terror. It is certainly plausible on common-sense grounds that widespread and profound bitterness may enable those individuals to feel that what they do or plan to do is justified, and that they have some tacit licence to proceed – if a clearly ambivalent one – from their own communities. Hence the prominence in current UK counter-terrorist strategies of engaging with the Muslim communities, and seeing action in and through them as a key to preventing malignant radicalisation. Both the Home Office and the police are very active on this front, for example through the police National Community Tension Team. After the 7/7 bombings a set of seven working groups of leading Muslims was created by the Home Office and asked to come up with various ways to ‘prevent extremism together’9 (Home Office, 2005).


There are also some more academic reasons, and some political ones, for seeing actions addressing Muslim populations as a whole, and actions within their communities, as fundamental to counter-terrorism. The study of group dynamics teaches us that marginal individuals are often expressing something for the whole group. And some psychological studies of terrorists appear to show that they are ‘normal people’, indistinguishable from their peers (as argued particularly by forensic psychologist Andrew Silke (e.g. 2003). Moreover, the political arguments of many across the political spectrum assume that Muslims have objective reasons to be aggrieved, in the manner described above, and that grievance feeds extremism, even while a majority may continue to disavow terrorist strategies. There is both a chill and a comfort to this approach. The chill comes from the disturbing thought that the 7/7 terrorists really were ‘homegrown’, or at least that the soil in which they grew as terrorists included spadefuls of today’s Britain, whether one emphasises therein the inequalities and racism of the dominant society, or the inwardness and bitterness of Muslim sub-societies. The comfort is in the idea that a solution to the problem is within our reach: if we currently provide the environment necessary to succour terrorism, then we can also strive to change that environment, and to remove or at least much reduce the chances of murderous militancy developing. The approach may however be mistaken, in at least some respects. The previous, small occurrence of ‘home-grown terrorism’ in Britain – the Angry Brigade of the early 1970s – required no collusive or ambivalent cover from any substantial section of society. This would scarcely have been forthcoming in a then still politically and culturally quite conservative nation. Instead it erupted from a certain kind of revolutionary polemic directly igniting destructiveness in a few intense and secretive individuals. The 7/7 bombers similarly appear to have lived part of their time in a parallel universe to their families and friends. It may be that the sufficient condition for terrorism is the combination of inspirational sources with a handful of disturbed individuals. This of course does not fit the ‘terrorists are regular guys’ theory, but that theory anyway lacks common-sense plausibility. Some non-ideological mass murderers lived very normal lives outside of their murdering activities, but we would not be led to conclude that they were psychologically average. So perhaps the problem is better stated in terms of a fundamental disconnection between terrorists and their societies, rather than in terms of a basic connection or even continuity between them and their


communities. They are split off from their immediate material and emotional communities as well as from the more distant and imagined general ‘society’. Siddique Khan, leader of the London 7/7 bombers, and Mohamed Bouyeri, killer of Theo van Gogh in Holland, had histories of community involvement, but in Bouyeri’s case this had ceased long prior to the murder (Anthony, 2004), while in Khan’s case the picture is of a very split-off double life. Only by understanding terrorists as being psychologically in a parallel universe, or – to use another telling everyday metaphor – on a different planet, can we make sense of their readiness indiscriminately to annihilate others around them in their own society. Yet terrorists (home-grown, emigre or peripatetic) are members of something, whether that is a para-military organisation, a defined movement or an elusive ‘network’. This is one thing that differentiates them from non-ideological (though equally focused and other-worldly) killers such as Shipman, West and Nilsen.10 An article by the German sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina (2005) has thrown valuable light on how the loose, shifting, complex structure of al Qaeda has been able to generate such tightly organised, committed and disproportionately effective action by small cells. These are held together, and linked with strong psychological bonds to the rest of the ill-defined network, by a transcendent sense of time and purpose. To survive in a cell, and to get its promised benefit of salvation (as in, for example, a sense of fullness instead of an empty-feeling self, or an experience of dramatic strength for the inwardly humiliated), you have to buy totally into the transcendence of quotidian society. Knorr Cetina writes of the ‘“futural” mode of living’, in which the future triumph of jihad (and possibly its entwinement with personal death) is the vertex of a transcendent temporality. The key to entering this mode is to be found in the media artefacts of texts, images, commentary and speeches which serve as a corpus of mobilising material, and which hold together the global affective community of terrorist jihadists.11 Elsewhere, especially in the Middle East, that community may be represented by people who are far more really embedded in their communities of origin. And of course at a global level, there are deep – if complex – links between Islamist terrorism and some components of geo-political reality, in the status of Muslims as oppressed people in a number of key conflicts. That does not however mean that our ‘home grown’ or imported terrorists are living in empathic contact with their own part of geopolitical reality, namely Britain. Nonetheless, despite the root of contemporary UK terrorism in a global flow of transcendent meaning, there is still a crucial value in


engagement with the communities in which terrorists live, even if they ‘live’ there in body alone. That value is of course to pragmatic counterterrorism intelligence efforts, and lies in the information about oddities and goings-on which a close and reasonably trusting engagement may bring. But alongside this practical strategy, a deeper and clearer analysis of the relationship between (potential) terrorists and their communities is needed, since our understanding of this relationship will influence the development of official communication strategies around terrorism, and also more specific issues such as how counter-terrorist objectives should shape policing. This aspect of the relations between the state and citizens of Muslim background is likely to be one of the key issues in determining social cohesion in Britain in the coming years. It will certainly influence how many Muslims see the British state. How we see the genesis of home-grown terrorism will also influence how non-Muslims see Muslims. Downplaying the ideas that there is collusion with or tolerance of terror amongst Muslim communities may be helpful (though levels of support here for suicide bombers in Palestine and Iraq, and other indices of the significant size of Public 4 as described above, limit the overall truthfulness of this strategy). It would not release Muslim leaders from the responsibility of making the most emphatic denunciations of terrorism, as long as attacks continue to be dressed in Islamist language, but it would enable all parties to focus more effectively on the twin drivers of attacks in niche jihadist global media outputs and in the formation of small groups based on visions of the cataclysmic road to the sublime. If this argument is accepted, it seems to undercut the case made earlier for seeing terrorists as participants in the emotional public sphere, and for exploring the impact on them of the media discourse of terrorism. When individuals’ worldviews are so rigid and narrow as to permit only one, over-arching interpretation of any communication from any source, and when their own self-identity is so absolutely framed as ‘other’ to the whole discourse of the national media, what are the possibilities for any influence? The answer to this lies in the vulnerability of individuals who are driven by delusion to communications which touch the delusional nerve, that is to say, which can address the emotional bases of the delusion or its emotional costs to the individual. Psychodynamic analyses of the motivational bases of terrorism have identified a number of states of mind likely to be involved. Some authors (for example Akhtar, 2002) see the roots of terrorism in humiliation – not necessarily in actual, objective experiences of humiliation,


but in a deep inner sense of having been humiliated. The direct origins of this must lie in the early family experience of the individual, though the patterns of unconscious phantasy and communication enacted in families will bear the stamp of their historical and cultural context, so that the ‘external’ world of politics, of collective experiences in the real world (whether the collective is national, ethnic or religiously defined) are at least one of the indirect sources of the experience. The individual tries to deal with the experience of humiliation by identifying with a social group who have been subjected to humiliation or oppression and then rising up on their behalf to attack those believed to be responsible for their bad treatment. There is a strong identification with victimhood in the psychological profile of terrorism; the act of terrorism is to avenge alleged victims, and to prevent others in the future. Some jihadist texts provide evidence of the importance of humiliation, in their references to the crimes of the infidels against Muslims, though of course the impression given by suicide bombers in their video statements is, in contrast, one of overwhelming arrogance and grandiosity. The contrast is superficial, however; the overbearing certitude and triumphalism can be understood as a grandiose defence against the inner experience of humiliation and shame. In Akhtar’s view, this defence is part of the personality structure of ‘malignant narcissism’ which the proto-terrorist has developed to protect the self from further humiliation. The jihadist’s purpose is to wipe out the humiliation by wiping out those who in some way represent it (which can be any people not wholly identified with the jihadist’s cause). Victimhood is to be transformed through vengeance.12 As a final observation on the likely patterns of affect at work in the terrorist, we can note the possibility of the terrorist feeling guilt. On the face of it, the mindset which has to be adopted to become a jihadist recruit and to prepare for participation in or facilitation of an attack is one which can banish guilt, any awareness of which would of course be disabling for the terrorist. However, although some terrorists may have ‘psychopathic’ personalities in which the capacity for guilt has never really developed, it is plausible to assume that others have to expend enormous mental energy in suppressing or deflecting the possibility of guilt rising into awareness, using their ideological mantras and reassurances from their media materials and the idealised leader figures featuring in them. To summarise the emotional audit of this ‘group’: we have listed fantasies of transcendence, the sense of humiliation and of the most profound grievance along with a passion for reprisal, defensive grandiosity,


and probably guilt, as amongst their key defining emotional attributes. How these might play out in the contestation of meanings in the mediatised public sphere is one thing we will examine in Chapter 12. In conclusion, before we turn directly to the media, it may also be useful to reemphasise here, paradoxically alongside their ‘otherworldliness’, the acute media-sensitivity of terrorists in planning their actions. While the calculation of political effect via public opinion has been central to previous terrorist movements such as the IRA, for today’s Islamist terrorist, functioning in a new media environment of globalised and omnipresent news, attacks are conceived much more as media spectaculars (Kellner, 2004; Richards, 2004b). The fact that killing for them is also a sacred duty adds to rather than detracts from the media-centric nature of jihadism, in that the dutifulness of the ‘martyrs’ can be celebrated on the global stage. So there are various reasons to expect that the media discourse around terrorism may in at least some indirect ways have influence on terrorists. What form this might take is to be explored in the next chapter where we continue the emotional audit but turn our attention from audiences to media content.

12 From Emotional Audit to Communication Strategy

The binary media discourse of terror The kind of emotional audit illustrated in the previous chapter can contribute practically in shaping policy (here, counter-terrorism policy), and in informing community interventions. Our focus is on the use of emotional audits in the development of communication strategies. Emotional governance is conducted primarily through mass-mediated communications, and to conclude this case study we need to look at what communication strategies and media discourses currently exist, what impact we might expect these to have on audiences in the light of what we know about the emotional profile of the public, and what are the priorities for future communication work. The basic objective is not to find techniques for promoting particular policy objectives or party-political interests, but to enhance the development of a public discourse which will make for the best possible democratic process. This will be a discourse in which accurate, relevant and in-depth information of many sorts is easily available and routinely underpins news reports, but also be one in which the emotional investments in and responses to the given issue of all groups in a society are acknowledged, discussed and processed. This would maximise the chances of different ‘publics’ feeling included in policy debates, and so being prepared to buy into or accept policy directions which were not their own first choices. The aims and responsibilities of different agents in this process can involve difficult tensions. Obviously most organisations involved in public communication – the political, commercial, and cultural bodies whose communications provide much of the content of our public sphere – have axes to grind, and will want to achieve particular aims in 156

From Emotional Audit to Communication Strategy 157

their communication activities. But as the doctrines of public service and of corporate social responsibility insist, they also have duties to maximise the public good, which in media and communication terms means contributing to public conversations which are inclusive, respectful, truth-seeking and open-ended. To this traditional list of democratic values, the idea of emotional governance adds the requirement of emotional literacy. There may not always be a contradiction between sectional and public interest, in that organisations or individuals who are seen to be making good contributions to the common weal (by making insightful, facilitative or creative inputs to public debate) may gain favour and credibility for their more partisan messages. But there are certainly some contradictions between two sets of principles of communication management: on the one hand those required for good contributions to the emotional public sphere, and on the other those established in the worlds of political and commercial persuasion, where manipulation of feelings rather than acknowledgement of and reflection upon them has been the norm. Ideally, mapping the distribution of emotions amongst the public should be accompanied by a similar audit of mediaspace, which would enable us to identify the emotional content of the messages from relevant authorities, and consider their relationship to the profile of public emotion, and also to assess the emotional contributions from journalists and other mediators of those messages. However, conducting an emotional audit of the contents of the media around a certain topic is in some ways a more demanding exercise than auditing the public. While there are familiar procedures, based on self-report and on clinically-derived inferences, for finding out what people feel (which in the previous chapter we sought to use mainly in the analysis of polling data), assessing the emotional meaning of news media content is not a well-trodden path. There are difficult methodological questions about whether emotion can be said in some way to reside in the text or images, or is entirely in the minds of the audience, in which case just studying the media content itself may not be legitimate. Still, media content analysis of other sorts is a well-established area of media research, and it may be that the methods used in such analysis can be adapted for the purpose of emotional audit, or that other, existing data can be used, as we have used polling data for auditing the public mind. To date there is not a large body of work on media discourses of terrorism. One of the first systematic studies of the media discourse of terrorism was by Schlesinger, Murdock and Elliott (1983). In their analysis of UK television news in 1981–82, they identified an ‘official’


way of talking about terrorism, which tended to essentialise it as illegitimate and criminal. The ‘alternative’ way saw the term ‘terrorism’ itself as propaganda; it recoded ‘international terrorism’ as explicable frustration and legitimate aspiration. Schlesinger et al. also described an ‘oppositional’ perspective, fully supportive of terrorism, and a ‘populist’ one, demanding a no-holds barred war on terrorists. Much more recently Norris et al. (2003) have described the War on Terror frame (which is probably somewhere in between the ‘official’ and ‘populist’ modes of the Schlesinger et al. study) as the dominant media treatment of the terrorism issue in the USA. Building on these studies,1 we can offer the hypothesis that two models of contemporary terrorism are predominant in media references to terrorism. One is of an absolute and largely incomprehensible force (the Absolute Model), the other is of a reactive and comprehensible phenomenon (the Reactive Model). The first of these can be seen as similar to the War on Terror model as described by, amongst others, Norris et al. (see Chapter 9). The pair are very similar to the ‘official’ and ‘alternative’ models described by Schlesinger et al. In the first, terrorism is seen as something requiring little or no explanation. It is an absolute force for destruction which brooks no compromise, to which the only adequate response is its eradication. It is well-illustrated (as discussed in Chapter 9) in many statements by President Bush and others in the American administration, as well as by Prime Minister Blair and other UK politicians. In the second, terrorism is a rational response to overwhelming oppression and hopelessness. It is an understandable if tragic choice by people who have few or no better alternatives. This model is typified by a statement in 2004 by the then UK Liberal Democrat MP, Jenny Tonge, who said that she could imagine herself becoming a suicide bomber if she were a Palestinian (Happold, 2004). Some data from a preliminary study conducted by the author offer considerable support for the two-models hypothesis, although with an important modification. The study was of references to terrorism and terrorists in the British national press in two sampling periods in February and November 2003. Recording and coding was undertaken of any sentence where there was some reference to the nature, origins or causes of terrorism. Such statements are usually either quotes from or are attributed directly to a politician or other public figure, or are expressions of opinion by journalist, columnist or editor, or contributor to the Letters page. The statements which comprise the corpus of selected cases are usually brief; one rarely finds extended analyses of the terrorism phe-


nomenon even in the ‘broadsheet’ press. They are often taken from political speeches or interviews, and so typically have a ‘soundbite’ quality, in the sense that they have been crafted to convey a key message in a very condensed and powerful way. The contributions of journalists too have been subjected to rigorous editing disciplines designed to strip them down to the most economical and succinct form. The sample is therefore largely composed of ‘micromessages’, condensations of meaning into small information spaces. They may sometimes seem simplistic or uninformative, but individually and cumulatively they can have major impact. Like the headline and the advertising slogan, they are targeted to colonise key locations in our mental maps of the world. The data collected confirm that in the UK media at present there are two models of terrorism which predominate.2 We can therefore talk about these models as the major ones in the contemporary media discourse of terrorism. The first of these is that referred to previously as the Absolute Model. This offers an understanding of terrorism as an absolute force, which need not be analysed but which must be met with an equally absolute determination and force to defeat it, which means basically eradicating it by force – the War on Terror scenario. It sometimes has explicit links to notions of disease, or of evil (Alford, 1997). Its deployment is often linked to affirmations of determination to fight and to overcome the threat (Sparks, 2003). An example is from Tony Blair at a press conference in November 2003: ‘to meet their will to inflict terror with a greater will to defeat it…to rid our world of this evil once and for all’ (www.guardian.co.uk). Another is George Bush’s statement at the same press conference: ‘We see their utter contempt for innocent life. They hate freedom, they hate free nations.’ The second model of the hypothesis, the Jenny Tonge, ‘I’d do it myself’ or Reactive Model, has not been found in the media discourse with the same frequency as the Absolute Model. Although passionately stated in a few places – for instance, ‘I know the depth of pain in me that can seek revenge’ (Jo Berry, 2003, the daughter of a politician killed by the IRA) – it has so far been rarely encountered as such. What is present with highest overall frequency is what can be called the Retaliation Model, in which terrorism is seen as largely if not entirely reactive, but in the specific sense of occurring in retaliatory response to perceived attacks on the Islamic world. Examples include ‘Yet if we do [invade Iraq], we will be exposed to the most deadly assault we have faced for 60 years’ (Voice of the Daily Mirror, 2003), and ‘If you make war on a Muslim country you expect a response’ (Tony Benn, cited in


Prince, 2003). In the sample periods here, this always refers to the pending or recent invasion of Iraq, although of course the Israel/ Palestine situation is widely believed to be the most important underlying provocation. The Retaliation Model is commonly deployed in connection with opposition to the Iraq invasion, and can be seen as a variant of the Reactive Model, while the Absolute Model tends to be linked to support for the allied action in Iraq. Also, there is a substantial occurrence of another model that can be called the Inevitability Model. This is not intrinsically about the causes of terrorism but is a comment on its nature: it sees it as an unstoppable force, and destructive attacks are therefore inevitable, at least until it is eradicated or its causes removed. For example, ‘Blair tells MPs it is “inevitable” that al Qaeda will try to attack Britain’ (Hughes, 2003). This is not really a ‘model’ in the sense that the Absolute and Reactive Models are, and it does not offer a full ‘theory’ of terrorism. In fact it is compatible with both the Absolute and Reactive Models. Finally there are a few other models or part-models, which occur infrequently, for example one which links terrorism to migration and asylum, and sees the increasing number of asylum seekers as a cause of terrorism (because terrorists are in their number). There are complex relationships between these models. They are not logically exclusive; for example, the Inevitability Model may, as noted, be linked with any of the others, though it is most frequently and clearly associated with the Absolute Model. The original hypothesis about the importance of the Reactive Model can be seen to be supported, in that the Retaliation Model is a variant on this. While it does not necessarily represent the terrorist as a ‘reasonable’ actor taking the only remaining option for political protest, it does basically locate the terrorist act in a rationally comprehensible cause-and-effect sequence, implying that if the proximate cause were removed the threat would disappear. The typical expressions of this model are however not couched in a language of empathy with the terrorist, nor one of calm analysis of the global politics of Islam, but are uttered in a spirit of foreboding, of often angry, helpless fear. This both matches and complements the quality of angry resolution, righteous and unreflective, which is found in the Absolute Model. It is as if this War on Terror model says ‘We are going to get them’, while the Retaliation Model says ‘They are going to get us’, which makes it powerful raw material for what is called a ‘politics of fear’ (e.g. Altheide, 2003). Do any of these models represent competent and trustworthy analyses of the nature of the threat? It is necessary here to move beyond


the strictly academic exercise of identifying the dominant features of the discourse, and to suggest that they do not. On the contrary, each micro-encounter with one of them – a line read in a newspaper – adds to the microdynamics of the process whereby we find ourselves disabled in thinking about terrorism. Why are these models inadequate? It is because they are high on rhetoric, low (often zero) on analysis and evidence. Terrorism is neither the expression of an absolute inhuman evil (Absolute Model), nor the expression of an ordinary frustration with which we can all identify (Reactive Model), nor is it the embodiment of an explosive force which at all costs must not be provoked (Retaliation Model). It may at times involve elements of phenomena akin to any or all of these, but cannot be reduced to any one of them. The Absolute Model (and its Inevitability corollary) denies the functionality, the history and the politics which underpin terrorism, and the dynamic of global inequalities and confrontations from which it issues. Its reiterations of resolution to prevail are derived from domestic propaganda in conventional warfare, and may be ill-designed to restore morale in the long, invisible and obscure War on Terror. It posits us in the West as ultimately triumphant, although at the same time some of its proclaimers insist that we must inevitably suffer further death and destruction from terrorists. Moreover it gives us no reason to understand why we will triumph, other than to see it as the victory of good over evil, of the sanctified might and determination of our leaders, soldiers and spies. The Reactive Model (which is probably more common in influential left-liberal circles than in the data here) denies the depth and intractability of the hatred, and the murderous quality to the anger. It ignores the fundamentalist outlook which rationalises and sustains the terror, not least and increasingly through the belief in martyrdom. The Retaliation Model also, albeit in a different way, blocks out the historical depth and psychic complexity of the problem. It does this not so much by denial but simply by ignoring these dimensions: it is fixed solely on the consequences to the domestic public of doing something which provokes a terrorist attack. It offers a counsel of fear, implying that if a course of action would do this, then it should be avoided, irrespective of any other moral or political considerations, and so is open to the obvious charge of cowardice. All models are at best one-dimensional, and are unable to contribute helpfully to the realistic management of fear amongst the domestic public. Overall, however, the clearest feature of the media content


sampled here is the absence of much curiosity and complexity of thought, and of much evidence, about the nature and origins of terrorism. There are perhaps some signs, in the time since this sampling, that the 2005 London bombings have deepened reflection and inquiry in the UK into the roots of jihadism. But on the evidence we have so far, an emotional audit of media discourses of terror both in the UK and the USA points primarily to their impoverished qualities. The ‘Absolute’ model offers the brittle certainties of triumphalism, the ‘Inevitability’ model a kind of cynical passivity, the ‘Reactive’ model a false domestication of the threat, and the ‘Retaliation’ model a discursive mechanism for exacerbating fear.

Public-media interactions We can now consider what emotional impacts this media discourse is likely to have on the various publics that we have identified and described. It is a binary, Manichean discourse (Kellner, 2004), and so is likely to pull the different groups of the public towards one or other of its poles. It could also be argued, following Archetti and Taylor (2005), that its lightness on information could raise fear levels by contributing to the information-vacuum which the public suffers about terrorism. A comprehensive empirical analysis of these interactions would require a more extensive analysis of media content which could then be linked up with information on media consumption patterns amongst the different publics. But on the evidence available here we can pull out some of the main points to be taken from considering public-media interactions. We will assume that all groups are exposed to all the models, since the basics of a discourse in a certain area all tend to be found in basic news coverage of it. Public 1, the compliant non-Muslim public, will have its tendencies to rely on over-simplified ideas strongly reinforced. It will drift towards the kind of essentialist (and therefore in its own way fundamentalist) account of terrorism offered by the Absolute Model, and be more ready to subscribe to paranoid aspects of the struggle against terrorism. It may as a result be less inhibited in its indulgence in impulsive retribution. Its fear levels will be raised by the Inevitability and Retaliation Models, giving further reason for it to seek safety in a fundamentalist account and in more desperate demands for state protection. It will reject the Reactive Model, and add some more anger to its affective repertoire, in contemptuous dismissals of those who seem to suggest that terrorists are legitimate, and should be given what they want.


In its consumption of this media discourse, Public 2, the dissident non-Muslim public, will experience a hardening of its position equivalent to that felt in Public 1. It will rail more at the inadequacies of the Absolute Model and the perceived iniquities of various counterterrorism measures, and be more easily satisfied with the Reactive Model. Its sense of guilt will be more firmly projected onto UK political leaders, and any increase in fear levels induced by the Inevitability or Retaliation Models will also serve in conscience-management in that the anticipation of punishment can dull the pain of guilt. Public 3, the majority Muslim public, will be likely to find that its ambivalence and confusion is intensified, since the discourse offers little material for the creative resolution of conflicts or for the development of identities in ways that might transcend the binary choice on offer. In the Absolute and Reactive Models it simply reproduces the two sides of this group’s equivocation. In the long run, though, faced with little other than the choice between the Absolute and Reactive Models as basic explanatory frames, we could predict that this group will tend to shift towards the Reactive Model, as the Absolute one may be seen to require so total an identification with a non-Muslim perception as to imply some abandonment of Islam. Public 4, the minority Muslim public, was discussed in Chapter 11 as a group whose feelings shadowed those of terrorists themselves, so they will be discussed here together. Given our patchy knowledge of the states of mind of these groups, it is possible only to make some speculative observations. Firstly, the usual rhetoric of the War on Terror and other variations of the Absolute Model actually offers an aggrandisement of the terrorist, as one engaged in an epic struggle with the West. It can therefore feed the belief that terrorism is a transcendent escape from humiliation, or from victimhood. It responds positively to the terrorist attempt to dominate global mediaspace with apocalyptic imagery, by acknowledging the epochal, cataclysmic power of the terrorist project. Following Ringstrom (2002), we can suggest also that it mirrors the rigid Manicheanism of terror, and so adds to the triumph of the terrorist who can more easily imagine the capitulation of the world to his banal vision. The Inevitability Model will also stimulate the grandiosity of the terrorist, whose determination, resources and skill it assesses so highly, while the Retaliation Model posits the jihadist warrior as an implacable defender of honour, as someone not to be messed with. The Reaction Model, meanwhile, can provide powerful emotional succour for the terrorist on another emotional front, that of guilt-management. This model says to the (proto-)


jihadist, in whose mind there will somewhere be some doubt that Allah is not the only judge, that the world will forgive. Indeed, when propounded by voices within the UK it suggests that forgiveness is forthcoming from the heartlands and hearts of the ‘aggressor’ nations who are to become the jihadists’ victims. When seen in this way it can be argued that the understanding and condonement offered by the Reaction Model could undermine any last restraints which the human capacity for censure and guilt may have placed on the development of the active warrior. In all, then, the media discourse of terror, while at one level often attempting to dismiss terrorism and to place the terrorist in a terminal position outside the human community, is at the same time through all of the models it offers attesting to the power of terror, and inviting the terrorist to take up the history-making role which he imagines for himself. In general it seems as if the models on offer selectively map on to different groups of the public, and reflect and reproduce the onedimensional weaknesses of or contradictions in the emotional stances of each group. Positive feedback circuits between group mindset and discursive model are therefore likely to be set up, and to minimise the chances of new understandings breaking through. For the minority Muslim and terrorist groups, all models in the discourse may feed into the self-narrative of holy mission.

Improving emotional governance around terror What this analysis suggests is the need for a new public discourse of terrorism which brings together the strands represented by the different models, so checking the tendency of the public to split into constituencies based around one-dimensional models. We must find additional ways of referring to the terrorist enterprise which are less amenable to conscription into the terrorists’ self-aggrandising worldview. The aim would be to create an emotional public sphere in which all emotions are acknowledged and in which different political positions must compete in terms of providing the best management and containment of the full range of feelings. One criterion of good management would be the restriction of opportunities for particular reserves of feeling to support intensifying cultures of grievance, or of complacent self-righteousness, or passivity. A simple step in this direction would be for politicians and others with the opportunity or need to make public statements about terrorism, and the journalists who write or speak about it, to juxtapose the


models more. In the study reported above, there were no examples of the different models being presented alongside each other in the same speech, press conference or news item. Thus although the overall public discourse contains all models, discreet experiences of news consumption feature only one at a time, which – unless individual news consumers are able constantly to make connections – will tend to create emotional ghettoes in the public mind, mental spaces where only one kind of feeling can be exercised. Explicit connections across model understandings, acknowledgements of other feelings while one particular emotional issue is being attended to, and other ways of integrating the discourse would all help to create a more complex discourse in which more dialogues and fewer stand-offs take place. Another way in which to picture improved modes of emotional governance is to consider more specific and substantive areas of policy choice. For example, consider your own views on the set of civil liberties issues around counter-terrorism – identity cards, more intrusive policing and so on, which as we have seen are important differentiators within the British public. Consider how you would feel in two different circumstances: one if you believed that government had completely ignored the views you hold, and the other if you had the experience of government policies completely conforming to these views. In either case, what problems of emotional management do you present the government with? On the simplest of models, there are in this situation four possible types of public feeling to manage, though only two will be present in any given scenario (the centre and right columns – see Table 12.1). If you are for more policing and you get it (cell A1), might you feel a measure of guilt at the discomforts brought to those who are on the receiving end of this policing? If you are for preserving civil liberties, and they are preserved intact (cell B2), might you feel some anxiety at the thought of being less protected than you might have been? For those political leaders advocating the defence of existing civil liberties against what are seen as misguided War on Terror attacks on them, the main problem is probably how to manage the public fears about terror and the well-documented yearning for stronger policing against it, in the event of a civil liberties approach winning out (cell A2). Those people beset by these fears need to be reassured that the government is aware of and sympathetic to them, and that they will not be ignored by those in power who might be seen as having more protected lives. They need to be persuaded that the liberal agenda has pragmatic, security value as well as abstract ethical merit. If this does

166 Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror Table 12.1

Matrix framework for emotional audit Scenario 1: Actual policy = New security measures

Scenario 2: Actual policy = Defence of civil liberties

Public opinion type A: A1 Main concern with Preferred policy terrorist threat; implemented support for more stringent security measures (The ‘compliant’ public)

A2 Preferred policy not implemented

Public opinion type B: Main concern with civil liberties; support for their defence (The ‘dissident’public)

B2 Preferred policy implemented

B1 Preferred policy not implemented

not happen, a large section of the public will be left feeling abandoned and so will be vulnerable to demagogic incitement to simplistic prejudice, whether diffusely xenophobic or specifically anti-Islamic. For those politicians advocating stronger security measures in order to deal with what is seen as a new kind of threat, a major problem in the event of their policies being implemented will be the feelings in cell B1, the fears and resentments of those who doubt the need for such measures and distrust the motives for introducing them. Such people will be left feeling claustrophobic, perhaps, or painfully controlled, unless their anxieties and mistrust are acknowledged and contained by the communications announcing and defending the measures. Another problem in Scenario 1, however, is that of how to manage the public sentiments which support these measures (those sentiments in cell A1). The risk for politicians here is of communicating about the policies in ways that collude, or seem to collude, with (and thereby incite) the paranoid, punitive and generally regressive feelings which as we saw in Chapter 11 may be bound up in calls for more policing, for identity cards, etc. If that were to happen it would thereby lead – via another route to that represented in cell A2 – to the strengthening of those feelings in the pool of public emotion. In Scenario 1 these feelings could be governmentally-sponsored, while in Scenario 2, where the government is over-emphatically preoccupied with the


defence of civil liberties, these feelings may gather defensively and in opposition to the government around what some of which we may still call the ‘tabloid’ media. Either way the vigour and spread of these potentially toxic emotions would be enhanced. Similarly in Scenario 2, there is a potential problem of collusion with psychologically regressive elements in the views of those in the ‘successful’ group (cell B2). These elements are expressed in a tendency to denial of the reality of terrorism and to harbour paranoid feelings about the government, the police and others in authority, instead of in relation to ‘asylum-seekers’ or ‘al Qaeda’. Politicians who campaign successfully for civil liberties or human rights limits to counter-terrorism measures must beware that their success does not stoke self-righteous but self-deluding indignation about an alleged Big Brother government. The tasks of emotional labour facing political leaders in this area (as in most others) are therefore complex and demanding. Alongside the usual political work of building support for a particular approach, there is also the work of attending to the feelings of those on opposing sides of the argument. The basic principle to be followed can be derived from a simple tenet of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, that the choice of a rational and evidence-based approach can be more easily and securely made when the nature and power of irrational passion has been explored and confronted. In the field of counter-terrorism which we are taking as an example (as in many others), there are two types of such passion: the reactionary cravings for sameness, certainty and punishment, and the liberal hatred of restriction, government and moral absolutes. To express these inversely, we could speak of the liberal idealisation of individual freedom, and the reactionary hatred of weakness; of course there are many other terms that could be used to capture this dimension of difference, which is important in many areas of post-Left/Right politics. Moreover, hanging over passions in the policy debates is the terrorist passion itself, and the conflicting ways of understanding it which we have found in the media discourse. The task of ‘exploring and confronting passion’ is difficult not only because of the painfulness of encounters with destructive forms of passion but also because of the leader’s need to take a stand, and thereby to risk breaking with a group of the electorate, by coming to some essentially moral judgement about particular forms of passion. There may be very little conceptual space for other non-Manichean alternatives between the ‘Absolute’ and ‘Reactive’ models of terrorism. However something similar to the successful New Labour 1990s slogan


‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ may provide an opportunity to bridge the emotional chasm between them.3 This might enable an absolute moral condemnation of terrorism to be made which did not alienate the dissident or liberal public because it went alongside a plausible affirmation of commitment to global justice. As argued in Part III, though, effective containment of conflicting passions will not emerge simply from the right message, but will need the psychological involvement of leaders in a particular way. An empathic understanding of the anxieties, projections and idealisations of one’s opponents is required, and a preparedness to remain in contact with those emotional realities through all stages of a political debate.

Part V Repairing Leadership


13 Market Failures

The language of political marketing For some people the answers to many if not all of the questions posed in this book, questions about how political leadership can be renewed, lie in the application of marketing principles to politics, or in ‘political marketing’ as it is called (Newman, 1999; Lees-Marshment, 2001; O’Shaughnessy and Henneberg, 2002). In this chapter we will therefore consider the nature of political marketing and its relevance to the project of emotional governance. In the background to this discussion are debates about what political marketing is, since there is no single clear definition of it. What it means must depend on what is meant by a ‘market’, and we would be wise to problematise the notion of a market and to hesitate before naming its essential features. And even if we were clear and agreed on what a market was, we would still have to decide whether political marketing meant importing marketing techniques from commerce into politics, or whether it meant drawing out the intrinsic market features of politics, or approaching politics as if it were a market, or what (see, for example, Moloney, 2006). And then there are the questions of what is the product, what is the exchange, and so on. It has often been noted that in political consumption there can be a major discrepancy between choice and outcome: the party you vote for is not necessarily the party you get. Choice in politics is individual, but outcome, unlike in markets for consumer goods, is collective. There is also the question of how the market paradigm relates to the consumption paradigm; the two are often treated as the same, but there are ways in which a model of the citizen as consumer does not necessarily imply a market relationship between citizens and government, or 171


citizens and politicians. Lilleker and Lees-Marshment (2005), in their commentary on a comparative set of essays on political marketing internationally, propose that its growth is a function of the growth of political consumerism, which in turn is due to the global reach of consumerism and of a popular culture in which the consumer is sovereign. While very plausible as a broad brush characterisation, this statement needs to be grounded in studies of how in specific national cultures political marketing has arisen as a response to some ‘consumerisation’ of citizenhood. And of course it has to engage with the view that the consumer’s sovereignty is a myth generated largely by deceitful marketing communications, as well as with claims that political marketing has led to declining participation, as a result of voters being turned off by its techniques, rather than being a response to the shrinking of the electoral market. And these debates do not consist of purely ‘academic’ or semantic questions with no practical consequence. The questions need to be answered at some point, if we are really to know what we are talking about when we talk about political marketing, and if we are to understand the impact that developments placed under this rubric are having on politics, and what the future of these developments is: which are likely to prosper, which should be encouraged and which not. Lilleker and Lees-Marshment are keenly aware of how national differences influence the development of political marketing, and discuss the main factors which need to be taken into account: differences in electoral and party systems, in the role of leaders within parties, in resources available for marketing, and in political cultures. Nonetheless much of the theory of political marketing is presented in fairly universalistic mode. We will keep with that mode, and will offer some observations which, if accurate, are intrinsic to the phenomenon of political marketing, however it is defined and wherever it is practised.

Political marketing and a political psychology of emotions Firstly let us outline what can be seen, within the argument of this book, as the positive side of political marketing, both as an actual trend within political practices, and as a way of understanding politics. The emergence of political marketing carries with it the possibility for the emergence of political psychology, from its current position on the margin to a more central position in academic, professional and popular understandings of what electoral politics is about. Of course at

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one level psychology is always part of our understanding, because psychological factors are obviously important in electoral choices. But this obviousness often fails to be fully reflected in theories of choice or in communication strategies. Moreover when psychology is explicitly taken on board, it is frequently in a rationalistic form that fails to engage with the emotional drivers which partially determine a great deal of human behaviour, including citizen behaviour. Political marketing can open up a space for a certain kind of political psychology that focuses on emotions. It can therefore show the need for a psychology of the emotions as an important ingredient in the mix of theories which should inform political research, in the way that it informs some areas of marketing research. There is an understandable negative reaction to this proposal with which we have to contend. For some people, the mention of emotions in the context of political marketing (indeed of politics generally) connotes some strong negatives: manipulation, triviality, a move away from democratic deliberation on the issues towards a politics of charisma, with its potential for demagogy and for destructive mobilisations of emotion. But the argument here in reply is that notwithstanding these risks, an emotionally sensitive political marketing carries a potential for deepening and strengthening the democratic process. Let us take some simple examples of issues in campaigning. The Democratic primaries in the USA in 2004 produced characterisations of the candidates drawn from a very familiar repertoire. Some were literally of character, as these Guardian profiles show. ‘But, for all the heroics of his military career, and outspokenness in condemning the Vietnam war on his return, critics within the Democrat party and within his own camp have complained that it is the lawyer, rather than the soldier, who is most often to the fore in Kerry’s personality, with his guarded, analytical character failing to enthuse supporters in the way that other candidates have roused the troops. …..Personally, even his closest admirers admit he can be longwinded and shy. To others, he’s just boring or stand-offish. Stiffness may count against him head to head with the “folksy” Bush.’ (Tempest, 2004). In contrast, the ‘youthful’, ‘photogenic’ John Edwards had a different quality, which could be presented as an asset in a contest with Bush. ‘.. Edwards certainly never plays down what he regards as his ordinariness, saying it has given him an understanding of the problems


faced by working class voters…. “If I can be on a stage with George Bush in a debate in 2004 with my background, what I’ve spent my life doing [as a lawyer pursuing compensation claims against negligent corporations and doctors], wouldn’t you love to see it? I can beat this guy. I can beat this guy.”’ (Jeffery, 2004). Edwards’ combative career as an ‘ambulance chaser’ may be less glorious than Kerry’s as a war hero, but he was able to present his personal combativeness in an ebullient, accessible way that is – at least potentially – an electoral asset. The point to note is that we are in policy-free territory here, where candidate attractiveness knows no ideological or calculative constraints, but is a matter of candidate personality and its impact on citizens’ emotional responses to the choices available. Other characterisations of candidates were not related to their characters or personalities, but to geography. Kerry’s New England base was often compared unfavourably with Edwards’ Southern-ness. While the psychology of the candidates is not at issue here, the psychology of voters certainly is. Beneath all the complicated psephological calculations that may be used to estimate the advantage or disadvantage given by a candidate’s particular regional identity, it is assumed that many voters like candidates who are ‘like’ themselves, and that for some this may be a decisive factor, ahead of ideology or self-interest (at least where these are weakly defined). This is the territory of voters’ identifications, with how strongly people use geography in their own narratives of who they are, and with our needs for leaders with whom we can feel some shared identity – whatever different things a ‘Southern’ identity might mean to different Southerners. Cultural identifications based on region, or on ethnicity, religion or class, are often obscure in meaning, and always emotionally charged.1 So here is another policy-free and emotionally-laden area. We must note though that it is not a simple need for the leader to have the same identity as the follower. A fundamental issue in the emotional dynamics of political leadership is the tension between the wish to have leaders who (we feel) are like us, and the need for leaders who are different, who we believe can lead because of their exceptional qualities (van Zoonen, 2004, pp. 82–85). The personality contrast between Kerry and Edwards also drew some of its meaning from this tension. Another related issue in leader/follower dynamics is the need for leaders to be seen as robust, energetic and vital. Kerry’s cancer did not seem to play much part in the primaries, nor in the UK was Blair’s

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heart problem of any apparent significance in the 2005 election. Here is another example of an issue which most people respond to more through emotionally-based imagery than with informed, rational deliberation. Most of us do not know enough about supraventricular tachycardia and cardioversion treatment to have had much idea of what the episode of symptoms and treatment which the PM was reported to have experienced in October 2003 implied for his future capacity to remain an energetic and resilient leader. We note that the Queen was informed at the time. We have a nostrum of armchair folk medicine which puts all heart problems in a ‘serious’ category. We might think that five hours emergency hospital treatment involving general anaesthesia does not normally signal a minor condition. But on the other hand, we have another folk medical imagination which can imagine a substantial blip caused by an excess of coffee, with no long-term implications; and we also know that many serious conditions can be successfully managed, with performance in life unimpaired. In the end, if Blair’s health had ever become an election issue, our judgements about it would be filtered through dense layers of folk wisdom (i.e. of shared feeling and fantasy) and of speculation fed by anxieties about illness and vulnerability. These mundane examples are typical of hundreds we could find in the contemporary political scene of well-known influences on voting decisions which can only be understood psychologically – or more specifically, which require a psychology of emotion to understand them. They are also examples of issues with which political marketing, or at least some branches of it, must be concerned – the management of candidates (in their characters and identities) as brands, and in the case of a leader health scare, a crisis in product reputation. Why, however, might the arrival of political marketing open up these issues to the kind of depth-psychological understanding of emotion which this book is advocating? This is possible because marketing in the consumer goods sphere has been concerned throughout its history with addressing the emotionality of the consumer (O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy, 2003). Notwithstanding the influence in marketing theory of cognitive and rational-choice models of consumption, marketing overall has functioned as a principal means by which consumer culture has brought greater emotional expressivity and variety to everyday life. In stating this we are entering what is obviously a very large and to some degree controversial area of social and cultural history, and can do no more here than simply state the position from which we are approaching


political marketing. It is a position best illustrated by considering the role that advertising played in the cultural history of societies such as the US and the UK in the last century. Whatever moral judgement we make of that role, it has been well-documented by a number of historians of advertising and by writers on consumer culture (e.g. Marchand, 1985; Lears, 1994; Fornas, 1995) that advertisements for consumer goods and services have contributed substantially to the public discourse of emotions which has gained increasing prominence on the societal stage. So can we expect political marketing to do something for political culture comparable to what consumer marketing has done for consumer culture, namely to effect a significant emotionalisation of the citizen’s experience of politics? It would not do so as an operation carried out on a passive citizenry, but might function in this way if it provided (through the imagery and rhetoric it produced) a resource for citizens to use in their everyday meaning-making. Or may it at least bring to the study of the political process a greater awareness of the emotional dimensions of campaigning, of citizen engagement, of political literacy and of other key issues facing political parties and institutions? Alternatively, may the changes in politics we might expect from the development of a psychologically-informed political marketing be less welcome?

Marketing and the crisis of leadership We have already alluded to one very negative scenario which would be the first to appear in some people’s minds in answer to that question. This is the scenario of political marketing as a project of manipulating emotions, at best trite, at worst sinister. Political marketing is seen here in the same way as commercial advertising was in the many critiques of it produced in the second half of the last century.2 Its address to the emotions, via its concerns with symbols, images, personalities, impression-management and so on, is construed as cynical. In this scenario, political marketing degrades political culture, promoting image above value and blind sentiment above reason. There are important issues raised by this critique, just as there were by the critiques of commercial marketing. However some studies of the social meanings of advertising has established a much more complex picture. Commercial advertising contributed to widening popular emotional repertoires as well as to the maintenance of certain stereotypes; at times it encouraged the growth of self-reflexivity, though it also fed

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unthinking consumerism. From a psycho-cultural viewpoint, the discourse of marketing characteristic of consumer culture plays an important role in the complex processes of emotional regulation which go on in contemporary society. As debates about the role of advertising show, such regulation can be seen either as an oppressive imposition upon or as a benign support for individuals in their strivings for psychic stability and fulfilment.3 In the field of politics, marketing is especially liable to be seen as a malign force because of the prevalence in political communications of negative messages, attacking other candidates and parties. This occurs to a far greater extent, proportionately, than do direct attacks on competitor brands in the market-place for goods and services. Responsibility for this may not lie entirely at political marketing’s door; the negativity may reflect the much greater ambivalence which citizens have to their leaders than consumers have to consumer goods. But whatever the reason, much political advertising is put in the service of this negative campaigning. To the extent that this occurs, any enhanced effectiveness of campaigning which marketing brings is a disbenefit, a contribution to weakening the democratic process. We can refer back to the case study of the UK General Election of 2005, presented in Chapter 9. Nearly all the examples from this considered there were products of the marketing strategy adopted by campaign planners, and as we will see the negative impulse of much political marketing (expressed in campaign themes, slogans and advertising) is likely to be a baleful influence on democracy, comparable in its toxic impact to the continual effects of political journalism described in Part II. There is considerable research into the negative effects of negative political advertising (Ansolabehere and Iyengar, 1997; Dermody and Scullion, 2003), effects which will be magnified when advertisements reflect rhetorical themes running through all campaign communications. To an extent, politicians are in a no-win situation. Some commentators and voters call for them to have certain qualities, such as sensitivity, strength, and determination. Yet when they give signals of having such qualities, in situations where they are called upon to do so, then they can be accused of manufacturing them for the cameras. Their situation is similar to that of the commercial advertiser, whose advertisements must constantly seek ways of making claims for a product that will circumvent the audience’s habitual dismissal of claims. Some consumers remain cynical about all messages; others, however, are prepared to be influenced by claims which can stake out a new relationship with the audience.


Moreover, there is a difference between the commercial and political communication spheres which may be to the advantage of politicians. Politics is a form of public service, and while many voters may see the search for power as a complete equivalent of the commercial search for profit, there is in politics the possibility of an appeal to social values, as embodied in the individual leader, which may sidestep some cynicism. The trend in consumer goods advertising to draw more on social values (such as care for the environment, or gender equality) may also be of assistance here, insofar as it habituates us to see marketing as a sphere for contesting values not just for competing brands. How can the positive potential of political marketing, as a principled appeal to the emotions of the citizen, be maximised? For some clues we can return briefly to the examples used earlier. It would not be possible to try to take the personalities or the cultural identities of candidates out of an election and just concentrate on ‘the issues’. A study by Hahn, Iyengar and Norpoth (2002) confirms that news consumers want ‘candidates as people’ stories. In the Kerry-Edwards competition, one option for each campaign would have been to behave like a brand manager adjusting to the competition with a strategy of appropriating the rival’s characteristics, e.g. by Kerry showing that he can be spontaneous, or Edwards demonstrating gravitas. Alternatively each candidate could have stuck solely to his established brand values, by foregrounding his own distinctive characteristics as strengths, perhaps presenting them in greater depth and complexity. From a non-partisan standpoint, attempting to assess the overall impact of political marketing on political culture, what is important is not so much the choice of strategy as the way in which it is executed. Here the basic choice is between honest and dishonest ways of developing a candidate’s public personality. If it is done with a basic fidelity to the truth of who the person is and of what they are like, it stands a good chance of retaining or increasing audience engagement, since we know in the age of reality TV that what audiences are increasingly seeking, and with increasing sophistication, is authenticity. Recent studies have shown this to be a key concern of reality TV audiences (see Chapter 8). Authenticity of conduct is now valued over rectitude of image and stance. Strategies for marketing the authentic personal identity of the candidate will therefore be likely to increase public interest in a campaign, and also to bring longerterm partisan advantage to those parties who pursue them since the increasingly rare reserves of trust and respect are now likely to follow authenticity.

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Audiences are not only detached consumers of people appearing in the media. They identify with public figures. This inward, emotional connection is a major driver of our outward engagement with cognitive, rational issues in the ‘real’ world. In other words, emotion and reason are inextricably linked, not intrinsically separated and opposed. How would a political marketing approach informed by this kind of psychology handle the issue of cardiac malfunction in a prime minister? Again, the basic principle should be honesty, on the grounds that the contemporary public (which is person-focused and healthconscious) is inevitably going to be closely interested in its leader’s health, and has been schooled in the principle that in matters of illness we should face the truth. However, as pointed out earlier, the public is not competent to interpret the medical facts, and our judgements will be influenced by our personal anxieties and defences around illness. Moreover, there are potential risks to national security in freely publicising reports of a premier’s illness. There are also potential risks to public confidence in government. So around this sort of issue there will swirl a powerful mix of feelings, with fear of loss and death, suspicion and vulnerability amongst them, even if often below the surface of our attention. Nonetheless we might hope that a path could be found across this difficult terrain which sought to contain these feelings rather than to deny them, by dealing as far as possible with the realities of the situation. This includes not only the medical realities but the reality of popular beliefs and feelings. Downing Street’s management of communications about Blair’s tachycardia lacked an acknowledgement that many people would take this to be a serious episode; the breezy attribution of the problem to a bit too much coffee (even if this were an authoritative medical view) was likely to leave suspicion and anxiety that too little a measure of the truth had been dispensed. Can political marketing, through attentiveness to audience emotions, provide more balanced communications, and offer a newly purposeful and informed reach into the imagination of the electorate? By helping to craft narratives of politicians as persons, it could facilitate emotional identification by citizens with the political process, facilitate a ‘narrativisation’ of representative democracy (Kline, 1997), and help to bring political dimensions to the self-identity of the postmodern citizen. Or will it fall victim to the culture of suspicion which now prevails, and add to the disenchantment of the distrustful citizen who fears emotional manipulation?


Fear, security and the limits of political marketing Whatever the possible benefits and costs of applying political marketing to the political domain, we must now consider the limits of its application. We encounter these limits if we try to bring a marketing approach to bear on the core case study of this book. There is very little in the political marketing literature about terrorism or war. Exponents of political marketing would have to try and fill this gap if they were to develop it as a comprehensive approach to politics. Here we need to ask what we can learn about political marketing from a consideration of how terrorism impacts on the public. It will be seen that we find here a limit to the applicability of the political marketing paradigm. There is no doubting the importance of terrorism as a political issue, as discussed in some detail in Part IV. We are well aware that Cabinet ministers and police chiefs have said that a major attack in the UK is inevitable. Yet the concern about terrorism is not only about the likelihood of attacks in the UK; it influences many people’s understanding of foreign policy more generally, and filters into debates about domestic issues such as immigration and asylum, crime prevention and multiculturalism. And perhaps most disturbing of all is the evidence that the presence of the terrorist threat, whether realistically perceived or not, can be a major factor in determining electoral outcomes. Firstly, the result of the general election in Spain in March 2004 was decisively influenced by the Madrid bombings. Whether one takes the view that the switch of voters to the Socialists was out of fear, or anger at the government’s misguided first response of blaming the attack on ETA (the Basque separatist organisation), there is no doubt that the bombs changed the result. While there were no real party issues in Russia in 2004, an important element in the background (and this even before Beslan) was the spectre of terrorism, and the perceived strength of Putin as a leader perceived to be capable of bringing protection against this threat was a prominent feature of the election campaign (Oates, 2006). Similarly in the USA in 2004 the relative ‘strength’ of Bush and Kerry was a key issue, and here there was the additional complication of a video of Osama bin Laden released via al Jazeera a few days before polling. It was very hard to assess the impact of this on voting, and it was also unclear what specific outcome bin Laden might have wanted it to achieve. Perhaps the aim was simply to have some presence, to be seen as a player in the election, and there is a lot of evidence (from opinion monitoring for a long period before the election, and from

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exit poll data) that concern about terrorism was high enough for this to be easily achieved.4 These examples point to one way in which political marketing appears to have some purchase on the problem. ‘Strength’ is a feature of leader image, or in marketing terms can be seen as a leader brand value. So it may be thought that political marketing can gain some partisan advantage for a party or individual leader by applying techniques of brand management to this area. For example there is as yet no credible ‘strong’ alternative to the War on Terror in the USA or UK. There is no leader or party brand that is seen to represent judgement and the capacity for restraint on the one hand, and resolution and strength on the other, in equal measure. The War on Terror has monopolised ‘strength’. But taking up the challenge, for example to break that monopoly, poses some problems for political marketing. Firstly we are in a zone of negative experience, often uncomfortable territory for marketers, negative in the sense both of the fearful emotions involved, and in the sense of the public wanting an absence of something. People want safety, they do not want bombs, but policy strategists will not get many practical ideas from a focus group about how best to achieve this for them. Secondly the suspicion that political marketing is about manipulating images may be strengthened if it is seen to be about merely creating a rhetoric of ‘strength’ around a particular individual. The only potential solution to this problem lies in the principle of fidelity to the actual qualities of the individual leader. In this respect, newfangled political marketing brings us to an old principle of leadership. Thirdly and most fundamentally, there are certain preconditions for marketing interventions which may be lacking in this area. In marketing paradigms, consumers have to know something about the product and the brand in question, and about alternatives. In relation to security matters, this may not sufficiently be the case. The flow of information about risks and opportunities necessary for the elaboration of consumer discourse and for the development of marketing strategies may not be possible in this area of politics. In Lees-Marshment’s (2001) model of the political marketing process, the first and fundamental stage is market intelligence, finding out what voters need and want. Yet in relation to terrorism and other security issues, voters do not know what they need and want other than, as we have noted, the absence of terror. They cannot know what is needed to achieve that because they lack the necessary security expertise. It is


security intelligence not market intelligence which has to drive policy – however imperfect that security intelligence may be. If political marketing is, as O’Shaughnessy (1999) suggests, based on eliciting the ‘latent wants’ of the electorate, it cannot apply here since the public has no latent wants. On security matters as on some defence issues we stand in a different kind of relation to the state from that which holds in other spheres of policy. The state in the face of terror is more in loco parentis, and there is not a marketing relationship between parents and children. Here it is necessary for us to have a degree of blind faith in government, something different from the kind of trust that can build up through repeated exchanges between agents in a market. In security matters there is arguably no exchange as such, and with no exchange you cannot have ‘marketing’. The state gives us protection, but we do not give anything in return, other than permission for it to carry on protecting us in its necessarily clandestine way. So, while ‘relationship marketing’ is sometimes seen as the vehicle for political marketing,5 in the area of security we do not have the conditions for a ‘relationship’ in the sense required by relationship marketing. But there may be another way in which political marketing can contribute to the politics of anti-terrorism. This is by the marketing of democracy as a generic product, and of values antithetical to terrorism. While unfortunately at election times there is typically even less space for this than usual, it may be that this is where the future of political marketing primarily lies.

14 Deferring to Reality

Emotional education What are the possibilities for emotional education in the field of politics? Can we imagine something for politicians akin to those developments in education and health care, where those who perform emotional labour are increasingly seeking and receiving training for that work? And if we could, would it really contribute to the development of an inclusive and well-functioning polity? Do we revive old proposals for personality screening of political candidates (which could be embellished with new tests for emotional intelligence or emotional literacy)? If leader psychopathology acts as a catalyst which can potentiate destructiveness within a government or nation, this is not a completely mad idea. But such a proposal would hardly be in tune with the times, and of course any screening process would be totally politicised. Do we offer workshops to politicians on therapeutic uses of the rally or the party political broadcast? That sounds a little more zeitgeist-friendly, though still implausible. If there is room in the electoral competition, however, for genuine consideration of the common good, alongside the consuming preoccupations with particular party prospects, that sort of suggestion may not be completely unrealistic. And there is potential electoral gain for the leader who can offer a healing presence, as there is commercial gain for the brand that can colonise the resources of reparative feeling amongst the public. Both as citizens and as consumers, we the public like to be reminded of our better selves, and will identify with and support the leader who does this for us. This identification will be deepest when the reminder is realistic, that is when we are not being idealised and flattered by a seductive leader but are instead being realistically complemented by someone who also recognises our weaknesses. 183


Or do we focus on the other side of the equation, and seek to educate the public in the emotional dynamics of politics, whether in relation to the feelings around specific issues, or in relation to general questions of democracy, representation, and leadership. On both specific and general accounts, this is a major project within the citizenship agenda. It would amount to building a more mature electorate, one that does not make lazy and impractical demands on its political leaders but takes responsibility for itself, while also recognising that leaders may often know best. If this seems too wide and impossible a task, there may be a way of focusing it more, by concentrating on the opinion leaders and the gatekeepers of understanding and affect, namely journalists. Their formative inputs to the emotional public sphere are, as we have seen, in need of much enhancement. This approach could be part of a strategy of aiming for cultural change, rather than engineering change in one or other protagonist group (politicians or public). Whatever the means, the end is the emotional education of the discourse of politics, and the establishment of good practices of emotional labour on the political stage.

Fantasies of renewal This book has offered a prescription for changes in leadership style, and although there is no intrinsic reason why these changes would be beyond the reach of current leaders (some of whom have indeed begun to embody them), the depth of cultural ‘restyling’ involved is such that the changes would be likely to require new leaders of different cultural and personal formation. Before saying something about the new types of leader this would involve, however, let us look at the general phenomenon of leadership change, and what risks and opportunities for enhanced emotional governance which it brings. The content of change can never be entirely separated from the mere fact of change. It is widely believed that there is a natural cycle of enthusiasm and exhaustion which means that any leader, any government, is going to run out of steam, when the ideas and values which drove it at the outset have run their course – the job has been done, or proved to be impossible, or time has moved on and new ideas are needed. From this viewpoint, a change of leader is seen to offer a revival not only for the party or government but possibly for the electorate, if s/he is seen to bring some new and attractive qualities to the political scene and draws interest to it. The removal of any leader who has done more

Deferring to Reality 185

than, say, six or seven years could refresh the polity. By these means the ‘spiral of cynicism’ about politics may be checked. On the other hand, a change could be a stimulus to further disengagement, because the new leader is seen as more of the same, or as worse than what went before, and/or perhaps because the leadership selection process was obsessively or melodramatically tracked in the media and was therefore a ‘turn-off’ to many citizens. Looking at how public opinion in the UK has responded over the past 25 years to changes in leadership of the three major parties, we can see that changing a leader has often had short-term positive effects on party fortunes.1 In some cases it also seems to improve public perceptions of politics (as measured by satisfaction with leaders). In four of the five cases where both measures were raised in the six months following election (compared to the last six months of the previous leader’s time), the new leaders (Kinnock, Major, Cameron and – less clearly – Blair) were all replacing distinctly older or differently styled figures, representatives of an earlier generation and of a passing culture. This might seem to support the idea that there is a natural tendency for citizens to be enthused and to become more respectful when they have a sense that a leadership change is a generational renewal. This matches common-sense nostrums about the merits of ‘fresh’ approaches, the need for ‘new blood’ and so on, and everyday assumptions about the simple passage of time producing ‘staleness’ and ‘tiredness’. But there are different assumptions written on other patches in the quilt of common-sense which we wrap around ourselves. These speak of the value of ‘experience’, and the need to be in for the ‘long haul’. And from the viewpoint of psychological theory, as well as that of everyday experience, we know that people can value continuity as much as they value innovation. We respect sustained achievement, stamina, adaptability and longevity in other fields, so why not in politics? It is well-known in organisational contexts that a change of leader can as easily evoke anxiety or resentment, as positive excitement. Yet the hope persistently springs that a new leader can revive both party and polity. The impulse to enact a leadership change may be particularly strong within a party that feels itself to be stagnant or divided. Receptivity to a leadership change amongst the public will be especially positive where there is a clear rationale for the change in a generational difference between outgoing and incoming leaders, expressed either simply in age terms or perhaps in more symbolic ways.


The striking rise in ratings for his party and himself achieved by David Cameron in the first phase of his leadership of the Conservatives is the major recent example of this in the UK. Cameron’s mission appears to be to modernise the Conservative Party, both in style and policy substance. His youthful informality, directness and articulacy have so far facilitated the successful pursuit of that project, although the strength of a possible backlash within his party remains to be tested. The fact of youth, or at least the image of youthfulness, has of course at least since President Kennedy been a potent force in politics, linked with the rise of the televisual. The attractiveness of ‘youth’ is often taken to be self-evident, but needs to be understood in deeper terms if we are to get the measure of the dynamics of feeling around mediatised leadership. Psychodynamically there are three major elements in the appeal of youthfulness. 1. One is defensively narcissistic: we are unconsciously drawn to the youthful figure to help us set aside the realities of decay and death. Contemplation of a youthful face on screen may not pull as many triggers to anxiety as does that of an aged one which can remind us more insistently of our own ageing and mortality. 2. Another is aggressively Oedipal: we see the youthful leader as triumphing over the hated elder figures who populate our imaginations as stand-ins for the negative images of parents. Attacking though it is, this enthusiastic support for the young pretender is also basically defensive, as it enables us to evade the painful feelings of ambivalence which pervade our feelings around internal images of authority. We can identify just with the negative feelings, of envy and resentment at authority’s power, and forget the positive ones of gratitude for the protection and nurturance which parental and other authorities have given us. There is inevitably a self-limitation on this kind of support for the young leader, as s/he will soon themselves come to represent the kind of bad image of authority (the unsympathetic, oppressive, or corrupt older figure) whom they replaced. Yet it seems to be gaining in potency as a force driving public sentiment, partly because of how televised politics increasingly brings us the actual bodies of politicians in all their variegated degrees and patterns of ageing, but more because of the cultural changes which mean we now deeply suspect incumbent authority per se and regularly seek the purity of youth. This one-sided solution to the Oedipal conflict between the generations is as unrealistic and


as bad for us and our democracy as is the narcissistic enjoyment of a fresh face. 3. The third is more benign: it is in the positive identification with hope and with progress which we may be making when we are drawn towards a new, youthful leader. In this mode of relating to youthfulness we remain realistic in our expectations; we are not celebrating an attack on the old but taking pleasure in the creativity and confidence of a new generation and the prospects for both change and continuity in the future. If linked to a general belief in progress, this element in our underlying feelings may lead us to believe that the new leader can, as someone shaped by later and better times, bring improvements. The unrealistic and self-limiting nature of the first two of these elements in the popular support for a new youthful leader explains why the moment of disillusionment is typically so inevitable and so severe. This will be especially so when the new leader has played to and played up the narcissistic and Oedipal elements in the public mind. And when the disillusion with the individual leader comes, then the electorate’s disaffection with the political system is likely to deepen. People may feel that they have had imposed on them the experience of another false dawn, and their cynicism will thereby be deepened. Such false dawns are partly the product of media enthusiasms for the new leader, but are also of our own construction. We evacuate old leaders in surges of envy, resentment, or disappointment, and hope thereby to be free of further attacks of those feelings, and of the ambivalence we normally have towards leaders. When this arises anew, we may feel more hemmed in by reality, and may be more vulnerable to leaders offering illusions. Illusion is a dangerous contaminant of hope. Hope per se is a vital source of politics (and much else), though some people experience it as a dangerous fever which must be cooled by cynicism. But when mixed with illusion, hope is unrealistic, and is based on fantasies of perfect worlds where everything is young and fresh (Ronald Reagan’s ‘morning in America’), or where authorities of all sorts are perfect, and not really authorities at all. These illusions generate demand for governments of ‘some hallucination’, to borrow a phrase from Tony Blair. When a new leader taps into this sort of hope and fires it up, as we have noted, trouble lies ahead. The inevitable disappointment will add further twists to the spiral of cynicism. But this risk has its basic source


not in the opportunism or misjudgement of politicians but in the nature of the public mind. Like the individual mind, the collective one constantly seeks refuge in idealisations, polarisations and false hopes. Great skill and care are needed to tread a path which enables a leader to make a potent emotional connection with a party and the wider electorate without raising false hopes, ushering in a false dawn and thereby adding to the problem in the long run. But such a path is at least in principle there to be found. Finding it and keeping to it demands qualities in a leader which we have tried to begin to conceptualise here, with reference to a range of ideas including the concepts of emotional labour and emotional literacy, as well as the well-established idea of emotional intelligence, and the psychodynamic theories of containment and identification. Of course it is not only youth, as a leader characteristic, which has the power to animate changes of leadership or determine the outcome of national elections or party leadership contests. The great and growing public interest in the personalities, relationships and lives of all figures in the public eye, characteristic of therapeutic culture, can bring other features to the fore.

Leadership and reality At all stages in the life of a government, the emotional resources brought by the national leader to the emotional public sphere, and what presentations of the leader’s self she or he negotiates with the dominant national media, are of paramount importance in defining the political culture at any given time. At this point it might be useful to remind ourselves why there has been such neglect of the emotional dimensions of politics, especially those related to leaders. There is a tendency in democratic cultures to downplay the importance of leaders and our emotional responses to them. As good democrats we think that such things should not be important. It is policies and their effects on people that matter, we say, not our feelings about the individuals representing those policies. We want to believe that people are basically rational and not swayed by emotional impulses of like or dislike, and it would seem to demean the electorate to suggest otherwise. We also fear the demagogic potential of charisma, and may bemoan the arrival of entertainment celebrities in politics as signalling a degradation of the democratic process. But, as has been repeatedly argued here, all this misses something. This is the power of what some social scientists now call ‘narrative’,


which in this context means the appeal of the ‘stories’ which candidates for leadership tell about themselves.2 The importance of leader narratives stems from a powerful group psychology in us, the ancient dynamic of leadership which persists beneath the normative disenchantment of popular discourse about politics. Our relationship to leaders, whether they inspire or disappoint us, is at the heart of politics – and so also at heart of disengagement from politics. At a general level, we recognise this. There is much written on feelings about leaders in general – we know there is a crisis of authority, a long-term decline of deference. Whatever degree of responsibility we think the media have for this process, we can see that disenchantment with political leaders has spiralled to the point where it is apparently a kind of rumbustious common-sense to see all politicians as villains. The question is, can an individual leader break out of this spiral? The answer is yes, if she or he can make a certain kind of emotional connection with the public. This is because the same cultural changes which have brought the crisis of authority (individualism, detraditionalisation, consumerisation, informalisation and other trends often aggregated as the coming of the ‘postmodern’) have also brought the emotionalisation of society. ‘Narrative politics’3 is therefore likely to be increasingly focused on emotionalised narratives. So although contemporary culture is deeply suspicious of leaders, it also is increasingly amenable to leaders who can make emotional connections with audiences, by presenting themselves more openly as complex and interesting personalities (and therefore as objects of popular attention and identification) than is usual for politicians. It seems then that we are still waiting for leaders who can powerfully revive not just a party but the whole democratic process, by responding to the demand for life in all areas to be lived through narratives of feeling, of personal struggle, and of personal relationships. These are leaders who in style and in substance will inhabit their personal selves whilst acting politically, who will be aware of their feelings, motives and impulses, who will be able to make judgements based on that knowledge of where they are emotionally. They will command attention and respect because of the emotional authenticity or inward realism with which they speak, and because of the way in which they can combine an ordinary immersion in everyday passion with an exemplary management of feeling. This is a high demand. How will this capacity to connect be manifest? It is far removed from familiar and simple ideas of ‘electoral attractiveness’. We are talking about more substantial, specific and


complex qualities, at the centre of which is an emotional authenticity, an honesty and an open-ness to experience which people can recognise and appreciate, and correspondingly less reliance on False Self modes of rhetoric, and an ability to offer a more reflective stance on their own practice. More specifically, these qualities will include: 1. The capacity to set aside formulaic and defensive clichés in interviews and speeches, especially the wholly predictable and repetitive attacks on other parties. There is evidence from the research on declining turnouts that inter-party ‘yah-boo’ (theatrical namecalling) is a significant source of electoral disengagement. Even more seriously, the combination of ‘attack politics’ and ‘attack journalism’ turns the public sphere into a bearpit in which constructive exchange and deliberation are impossible. 2. The readiness to take responsibility for their errors and misjudgements and to admit to their conflicts, doubts and uncertainties, without compromising determination and decisiveness. Of course the latter might not be possible without some concomitant change in journalistic practice and media culture, so that it would not be ‘political suicide’ for a leader to not conform to prevalent notions of strength and authority. 3. The capacity to convey an inspiring emotional commitment to certain values, traditions or moral ideals while also conveying a firm reality sense and thus not feeding damagingly unreal fantasies (whether these are consciously held idealisations or ‘unconscious phantasies’ of perfection, to use the psychoanalytic term). Speculatively, we might imagine that a leader bringing these new capacities for emotional governance would be likely to be someone whose own biography carried a strong story of emotional difficulty and repair, and who was therefore in a good position to address a populace of individuals increasingly aware of their own emotional difficulties, and increasingly inclined to define themselves and others in terms of their emotional selves. As we try to judge the qualities of leaders from their mediatised presences, which improved television technologies bring to us with increasing vividness, we are likely to find ourselves more willing to listen to and be guided by someone who, as far as we can sense from their bodily, interpersonal and public conduct before us, has endured suffering and found a hopeful and reparative way forward from it. This psychic narrative, however, can emerge from a life which has not been blighted in any obvious way; it is ultimately more about


internal states of mind and their development than about gross trauma and struggles in the external world. Still, a person who exudes good fortune and fulfilment will also need to convey a capacity for being troubled within themselves if they are to be able to occupy this space of ‘therapeutic’ leadership. In psychoanalytic terms, this is simply to be authentic and realistic about oneself, since we are all familiar internally with trouble; we are made of internal conflicts and anxieties. The public is also ready to accept more complicatedness, deviance even, in a potential national leader than we in the UK have hitherto been asked to. (An alcoholic may at some point regain the leadership of the third largest party but, unlike in the USA, that is the closest that we have come so far in this era of mediatised politics to having a known phenomenon of substantial sexual or psychiatric aberration at the centre of power.) Basically however it is the qualities of authenticity and emotional reflexivity (the basis of an internal reality-sense) that will count, whatever biography and identity they are attached to. They will count because they will bring us to listen to what the leader bearing these qualities has to say. The messages must be grounded in a convincing interpretation of the world, which – if there is to be good emotional governance – must be a realistic one. In relation to terrorism, and the scenarios of global strife and domestic fragmentation with which it is linked, the realities involved are large and complex. On many occasions we may not be in a position to judge the soundness of particular statements. The only bit of reality of which we can be sure is our own feeling about the issue, so sometimes the only judgement we can make (and here we are typically not talking about a conscious level of deliberation) is whether the person seems to us to know of our feelings and to understand them. This does not mean that we have to feel agreed with, but we do need to be noticed and contained. Only at that point, when we are reasonably well contained by an authentic and trustworthy person, will we be able collectively to try to extend ourselves as citizens, to make compromises or sacrifices for a common good – in short, to enter a politics of reparation. Whether this has yet happened in a modern mediatised polity is a matter for debate – a debate that would partly rehearse partisan arguments but would also deepen and complexify our understanding of what constitutes leadership. The cultural changes demanding this model of emotional governance have been gathering around us for the last two or three decades, but political leaders in that period have not on the whole showed much sign of breaking the mould of leadership cast in


pre-therapeutic times. Of course the ‘system’ matters too, as well as individual leaders, in the sense that deep and long-standing cultural precepts within the political ‘village’ cannot easily be overturned. Also, what matters most is the need for politics to deliver security and wellbeing for all, and communication styles are not always a priority. But, as achieving social cohesion and democratic inclusiveness become increasingly problematic and necessary, leaders who want to deliver on their basic tasks must contribute as much as possible, in their public communications, to reinvigorating an inclusive democratic culture. The argument presented here has been that this must involve attending to the emotional core of the relations between leaders and public. As Part II hopefully showed, the task is not for politicians alone, and could not be so in a thoroughly mediatised political culture. Journalists must examine their working assumptions more closely and think about how to enhance their massive input to political culture and to the shaping of attitudes towards politicians and politics. The final word should however be about us, the governed public. We should try to break with the hallowed tradition of simply blaming politicians for all social ills, however much incitement there may be from the media to continue it. We should make realistic demands of leaders, and encourage those who give realistic answers. We should not be satisfied with finding politics ‘boring’, yet beware of finding easy excitement in it. And perhaps most fundamentally we should rediscover our capacity for deference. This may sound absurdly naïve to some people, and to others perhaps like a sinister invitation to give ourselves up to those who will exploit and not protect us. Either way it may seem like an authoritarian pursuit of a repressive, hierarchical world which has been, or ought to be, lost for ever. It depends on what we might mean by deference. The deference to leaders which can be imagined in a therapeutic world is not that of the past, of automatic deference to an abstract role or institution per se. Like much else in contemporary culture it would be personalised, in that it would be shown to individuals on the basis of their presence as persons in the emotional public sphere. And it would be contingent and critical; we would be selective in allocating it, and it would be subject to ongoing review. It would be shown to those individuals whose repeated socio-emotional performances on the public stage enabled audiences to believe in their presentations of reality – that is, whose accounts of themselves as persons seem authentic, and whose accounts of the world are authoritative and convincing. The deference would be to the grasp of reality (that is of reality in both internal and


external worlds) which an audience judged someone to have. On this scenario, political leaders would be seeking to draw upon their awareness of their own internal worlds of feeling and experience in order to communicate effectively with their publics, both to elicit some emotional identification and involvement from their audiences and to explain their policy decisions. Of course policies are, or should be, responses to external problems, not expressions of internal emotional states (although they are inevitably infused with feeling by all of us). And ordinary citizens can sometimes go a long way in making their own informed judgements about policy issues, independently of what politicians say to them or how they say it, by researching the issues. For most ordinary people, however, fully informed and evidence-based rational choices between policies cannot be made, as the evidence is not available to them, especially in relation to questions of foreign policy or security but also in relation to more complex domestic issues. We have to some extent to take on trust various things we are told. Whom we trust, when there are competing versions on offer, will in a therapeutic culture increasingly depend on whom we trust to have presented themselves truthfully, not only in their avoidance of outright deceptions (of the kind which lead to scandals if exposed), but also in the truthfulness and openness of their routine daily presentations of self. We as therapeutic citizens are more likely to follow our intuitive judgements about the trustability of someone we ‘know’ through television and radio, and to believe (or not) what they say, than we are to trust our prejudiced guesswork about who is more at fault in a distant conflict. Moreover, since in many of their frequent presentations of self leaders will be making statements about specific policy issues, their audiences will have opportunities to judge how they manage emotion around those issues (their own emotions and those of others), and those judgements will contribute to overall assessments of their authenticity, reflectiveness and realism. Good emotional governance around policy issues will therefore not only be to the general public good, but will also enhance the public standing of all those who provide it. This book has not systematically mapped out where the basic idea of emotional governance would lead if we were to use it to judge between parties and policies. To a considerable extent it is not intended to be used for this, but to foreground a principle which all political actors should attend to, and its ‘neutrality’ is claimed or implied at certain points in the book. However, emotional governance is about values, in that it is about what we hold to be important. So as well as being a


general principle of political action, it will also tend to lead to some positions and policies rather than others. In the democracy of feelings, where many voices speak for impulsive and defensive elements in the public mind, good emotional governance will always favour the party of the inclusive ego. This is the party committed to recognising and dealing with the realities of psychic life as well as those of the external world, and to creating an emotional public sphere in which reflective and reparative states of mind prevail.

Notes Chapter 1 Introduction: The Case for Emotional Governance 1 We will not enter into the important philosophical and empirical debates about how to define ‘emotion’, in relation to cognate terms such as feeling, affect, and mood, and how to differentiate its types (see, e.g., Jasper, 2006). Such definitions would be necessary for a full grounding of the analysis offered here in the sub-disciplines of political psychology, political sociology, sociology of the emotions, and the philosophy of mind. In the present context, though, it will suffice to use the terms emotion, feeling and affect interchangeably and in a common-sense way to refer to the full range of affective states, positive and negative, which would in everyday usage be associated with those terms. This rudimentary but fit-for-purpose usage will be complicated by the way in which the psychoanalytic approach adopted here tends to think in terms of unconscious feelings, a notion at odds with much (though not all) common-sense. However, accounts will be given in later chapters of unconscious aspects of mental life which hopefully explain the specific examples used, without entering into definitional debates. 2 Berezin has a conception of emotion as episodic in action (2002, p. 47), in contrast to the view taken here that emotion is a continuous, intrinsic aspect of all psychic, political and social life. Nonetheless her notion of an ‘empathetic state’ (p. 49) where ‘it is possible to live in empathy and generosity with one’s fellow citizens’ could sit well alongside the idea of good emotional governance to be developed in this book. 3 Of course the levels cannot be easily separated in empirical reality. Broadcast sport for example comes in media packages which are products of highly managed communication (studio and commentary formats, sponsorship, and so on), yet also delivers an immediate sensuous experience of the sporting activity. The whole field of broadcast entertainment is both crafted communication (by scriptwriters et al.) and yet is also an important source for many people of the deep symbolic language for understanding life. 4 The title of Jeremy Tunstall’s 1977 book. 5 It therefore has a similar breadth to the terms governance and governmentality as used by writers following the approach of Michel Foucault (e.g. Palmer, 2003; Rose, 1989) but as used here is not linked to the conceptual and rhetorical agendas of Foucauldian studies. 6 At the same time, the novelty of its approach in synthesising different sources of ideas and defining new concepts will make it of value to academics and students in, particularly, politics (especially political communication), media and cultural studies, sociology, social psychology, psychoanalytic studies, and management theory. 195

196 Notes

Chapter 2

Shaping the Public Mind

1 This hostility is commonly though misleadingly called ‘Islamophobia’, and is discussed in Chapter 12. 2 Amongst its many successors, a television documentary series broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK in 2003, ‘The Century of the Self’, by Adam Curtis, captured much public interest with its disturbing picture of Freud as the inspiration for public relations and marketing. 3 In an earlier book (Images of Freud, Dent/St. Martins Press, 1989), I have described and tried to explain the extraordinary misunderstandings of Freud which have proliferated in both scientific and popular psychology and which have misled so many people into rejecting psychoanalysis. Despite its many shortcomings, psychoanalysis is in my view the most important gain in human self-understanding of the last century, especially in some of its post-Freudian forms. Readers who take a different view need not however find themselves at odds with all of the analyses in this book, though I hope they will find that the use of psychoanalytic thinking which is presented in this book offers them some new ways of thinking about its value. 4 Shared mediaspace is not the only underpinning of the shared ‘public mind’. Corresponding to the most basic level of emotional regulation (see Chapter 1), there is the rudimentary fabric of culture, particularly the fabric of family life and of child-rearing practices which impart common experience and shared mentality to a people. For De Mause (2002), child-rearing is the basis of the ‘emotional life of nations’. However in increasingly cosmopolitan societies including people with very different early childhood experiences it is the contemporary media which will provide most shared emotional and cultural material.

Chapter 3

The Rise of Therapeutic Culture

1 Source: Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board archive held at Bournemouth University. 2 Source: Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, www.barb.co.uk, Weekly Viewing Summary. 3 In this conceptualisation the ‘emotional’ may sometimes be subordinated to the ‘aesthetic’ (e.g. Geraghty, 1991), although for van Zoonen (2003) it is clear that soaps’ prioritisation of the private sphere is primarily an opportunity for the audience to experience the emotions of the characters. She also suggests – very much on the lines of the present argument – that soaps, while often used as a denigratory metaphor in media commentary on politics, have ‘engaging qualities …[which] could raise politics to a more sympathetic and honourable level’ (2003, p. 109). 4 For a more systematic account of the features of ‘therapeutic culture’, and the evidence for it, and the relationship of this concept to linked ideas in social theory, see Richards and Brown in Johansson and Sernhede, eds., 2002. 5 For example Bendelow and Williams, 1998; Lupton, 1998; Barbalet, 2006. 6 Park et al., 2004.

Notes 197 7 8 9 10

For example Salzberger-Wittenberg et al., 1983. For example Lasch, 1978; Anderson and Mullen, 1998; Furedi, 2003. For example Elliott, 1996. This was reported about their reactions to Diana’s death by some of the respondents in the study of UK television audiences described by Turnock (2000). 11 For further elaboration of this idea, see Chapter 6, and Figlio and Richards (2003). 12 This point was made by Kath McPhillips in a collection of some of the earliest academic reflections on Diana’s death (Re:Public, 1997). Some of the other contributors to this collection (Barcan, Burchell, Nava, Sofoulis) also offer analyses which concur with points made here.

Chapter 4

Global Passions

1 See Forethought, 2003; Pintor and Gratschew, 2002. 2 CYPU, 2002; Diplock, 2001; Sancho, 2001; Electoral Commission (2002); TRBI, 2002. 3 E.g. Putnam, 2000; Johnston and Jowell, 2001. 4 See New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Brown, 1993, p. 262). 5 Worcester and Mortimore, 2001. 6 Sancho, 2001. 7 See Corner and Pels, 2003. 8 See Richards, 2004. 9 See Ritzer, 1993 and 2006. 10 See Rusciano, 1998. Amongst the important recent studies of social values are those based on the World Values Surveys by Inglehart et al. (1998), Inglehart and Welzel (2005), and Norris and Inglehart (2004).

Chapter 5

Journalism as Emotional Labour1

1 Parts of this chapter are based on a talk given in London on November 2005, in a Tavistock Clinic Public Policy Seminar on emotions and journalism (‘Emotional News’), and on a lecture on ‘Containment functions of the media’ in the Tavistock Clinic Scientific Meeting Series in February 2006. 2 For some journalists the idea of a ‘newspaper’ is giving way to that of a ‘viewspaper’, whether that is viewed positively (e.g. Simon Kelner, the editor of the UK daily The Independent, quoted in Rusbridger, 2005), or negatively (see Mayes, 2004). In any event, the trend for commentary and interpretation to increase in quantity relative to simple reportage has been shown in a number of studies of news content (e.g. Patterson, 1994; Deacon et al., 2001). It has also spread to other sectors of journalism (see Hodgson, 2007, on sports journalism). 3 Critcher (2003) has updated earlier work using the concept of moral panic. 4 Silverstone also made links with psychoanalytic theory, in that he also suggested that television functioned in a way comparable to a Winnicottian ‘transitional object’, being both a stimulus for the private imagination and the representative of social otherness. The English psychoanalyst Donald

198 Notes

5

6 7 8

9 10 11

12

13

14 15

Winnicott saw a ‘transitional object’ as something, e.g. a favourite soft toy, which in the child’s experience is somehow both a part of itself and an external object in the world, and so played an important role in the process of establishing self/other boundaries. See Winnicott, 1971. As such it is part of the repertoire of anxiety management techniques culturally available to us. See Stuart Allan’s review (1999, Chapter 5) of a number of studies of news consumption as one of the array of practices which make up a distinctive cultural milieu. Ethnographic fieldwork by Mirca Madianou (2005a; 2005b) has also explored the particularities of how news is embedded in the anxieties and other emotions of everyday life. Rustin, 2001, p. 124; Bleandonu, 1994, p. 157. For example Jaques, 1951; Menzies-Lyth, 1989; Bronstein, 2001, p. xx. As those familiar with the terms of the primary theorist of containment the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion will know, this occurs via the processes of maternal ‘reverie’ and ‘alpha function’, which processes and detoxifies the raw ‘beta elements’ of experience (Bion, 1967). The ‘beta elements’ or their equivalent remain on display despite having undergone some transmutation. These dynamics of advertising are explored in Richards et al., 2000. ‘Object’ is a psychoanalytic term which has unfortunate connotations of unhumanness. Technically however it means any object of feeling in the mind of the individual, and therefore quite often refers to an image of a person or something (in this example the public utilities) perceived as having personal qualities, which are not what ‘object’ connotes in everyday language. Interestingly, there is probably an abundance of material in the young child observations, conducted as part of many psychotherapeutic and professional training courses (Reid, 1997), which could help to understand those meanings, by illuminating the part that television plays in the life of very small children. See Lears, 1994. This is not to claim that ad slogans are supplanting the novel, for example, as profound contributions to the affective capital of a culture, but that they play an important role in translating those capital resources into a widely-available public language for our self-definitions. These ‘microdynamics’ of news media effects are discussed further in Chapter 12. Nonetheless ‘participatory journalism’, as Yip (2006) terms the use by established media of content produced by private individuals, will be likely to reflect the diversity of the public in the kinds of emotional experiences which it embodies and promotes. As such, as its advocates argue (e.g. Gillmor, 2006), it also has potentials to enrich if not transform journalism.

Chapter 6

Rottweilers Savage Democracy1

1 Parts of this chapter have been given as talks at the Political Studies Association Annual Conference (Reading, 2002), and a Royal Television Society Symposium (Cardiff, 2003). 2 Doctoral research conducted at Bournemouth University by Dan Jackson has found experimental evidence for this corrosive impact of negative journal-

Notes 199 ism. Following studies by Cappella and Jamieson (1997), Iyengar (1991) and Valentino and Beckmann (2001), Jackson has found lower levels of engagement and of felt citizen efficacy amongst a group exposed to ‘strategic’ commentary compared to a group given more factual and analytical media content. ‘Strategic’ commentary centres on conceptions of politics as a game or battle in which the main topic of interest is the strategies adopted by the combatant parties and individual politicians to gain or maintain power. 3 In the UK the best-known examples of rottweilers are John Humphrys of BBC Radio 4’s ‘flagship’ Today programme and Jeremy Paxman of BBC2’s heavyweight daily Newsnight. But they are just the best-known practitioners of a technique that is now the professional norm for legions of on-air journalists, and is the extension via speech of the exasperated, superior stance of many newspaper analysts and columnists. 4 These were the percentages recorded by MORI in the 2006 data from their ‘Trust in professions’ poll. 5 The psychodynamics of this mindset in individual journalists will vary. Judging from short passages in one of his books, Jeremy Paxman (the BBC presenter whose approach to his politician interviewees is, famously, informed by the question ‘Why is this bastard lying to me?’) may be animated in his hatred of the political authority figure by a general preoccupation with the badness of authority stemming from his experience as an English public schoolboy in the 1950s and 1960s (Paxman, 1991). Conceivably, an upper-middle class experience of decaying yet still oppressive authority also underpins the cynicism of some other exponents of attack journalism.

Chapter 7

Challenging the Media Bias

1 ‘Peace journalism’ has been the object of various critiques, both professional (e.g. Loyn, 2003) and academic (e.g. Hanitzsch, 2004). However its critics focus on what they see as inadequacies in its understanding of journalism’s place in the resolution of conflicts, and not on the questions it raises about journalists’ self-management of their feelings. 2 An Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project is currently underway at Bournemouth University looking at how journalism trainings prepare people for this, and at how journalists’ capacities for ‘emotional literacy’ can be enhanced. See http://media.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/emotionsandjournalism.html 3 Some of the material in the rest of this chapter featured in a talk given on 24 November 2004 at a seminar hosted in London by Ofcom, the UK communications and media regulator, on Emotional/Political Literacy and the Media. 4 And although television news remains the most trusted news source, 67 per cent of children aged 12–15 say that they trust most of what they find on the internet (Ofcom, 2005). 5 As advocated by Stephen Coleman, e.g. Coleman and Gotze, 2001. 6 Or, in a definition unpacking the idea of ‘understanding’ a little, as ‘the ability to access, analyse, evaluate and create messages across a variety of contexts’ (Livingstone, 2004).

200 Notes

Chapter 8

Politics as Emotional Labour

1 ‘Bollocks to Blair’, declares a large car window sticker (Wimborne Road, Bournemouth, August 2006). There is no context given, no issue named; we could guess the car owner is angry about Iraq, or about the legislation against fox-hunting, or about something else, but in a culture of contempt for leaders the comprehensive and absolute judgement expressed in this rear windscreen is understandable (even if almost meaningless, in practical terms) and acceptable. 2 If we are citizens of theocracies we may perhaps bury our suspicions under the mountains of faith, though even in that circumstance we may still have to choose between leaders competing to represent the god, and need to use our experience of their individual qualities to do so. 3 Reparation is not always what it seems. Kleinian theory differentiates ‘manic’ and ‘obsessional’ reparation from the real thing, because there can be magical or ritualistic attempts to repair (Hinshelwood, 1989) which are driven by attempts to avoid the pain of recognising the damage. 4 Except, of course, when they deliberately choose to ‘go personal’ (van Zoonen, 2004, Chapter 5; Corner, 2003, p. 76), an increasingly common choice but one still seen as a superficial and optional add-on to the real business of politics. 5 Studies of these genres have emphasised the importance of authenticity in their appeal – see, for example, Hill, 2002; Jones, 2003; Wilson, 2003. 6 See, for example, Graham Little’s subtle discussions of leader personalities (Thatcher, Reagan and Fraser) in the context of a theory of leadership types (Little, 1989), the complex account of Richard Nixon in the biography by Vamik Volkan et al., 1997, and the extensive work of Jerrold Post (e.g. 2003; 2004) and of Stanley Renshon (1998).

Chapter 9

Poor Emotional Governance

1 The negative views can of course draw heavily on the link between emotions in public life and the spectres of demagogy and intolerance, which can easily eclipse the less tested, unfamiliar model of politics as a place for constructive engagement with emotional life. 2 To ePolitix on 29 April, 2005 (http://www.epolitix.com). 3 Both Nicolas Demertzis (2006) and Simon Clarke (2006) have recently argued for the importance of understanding resentment (and the more specific Nietzschean concept of ‘ressentiment’) in the political sociology of emotions. 4 The speeches quoted from here are: Bush 09.01: to Joint Session of Congress and the American People, 20.9.01. 11.05: to US Naval Academy, 30.11.05. 12.05: televised address to the nation on Renewal in Iraq, 18.12.05. 01.06: State of the Union Address 31.1.06. 05.06: televised address to the nation on Immigration Reform, 15.5.06 Blair 09.01: interview with CNN, 16.9.01. 07.03: to US Congress, 18 July 2003.

Notes 201 11.04: annual Mansion House speech, 15 November 2004. 09.05: to UN Security Council, 14.9.05. 11.05: to Lord Mayor’s banquet, 14 November 2005. 5 This could be easier than conveying a good understanding of the actual scale of the problem, where security considerations obviously limit the extent to which knowledge can be shared, and where sound intelligence is anyway sometimes scarce.

Chapter 10

The Four Factors of Fear

1 The polls referred to in this chapter, accessed from the websites of leading UK and USA polling organisations, are as follows: ICM (http://www.icmresearch.co.uk) ICM 02.03 Britain decides: Iraq, 10–11 Feb. 2003. ICM 03.04 (for BBC2 programme Newsnight) Iraq, 10–11 Mar. 2004. ICM 07.05 (for the News of the World) Bombs and ID cards, 8–9 July 2005. MORI (http://www.mori.co.uk) MORI 10.05a Londoners support police terrorist response, 22–26 Sept. 2005. MORI 10.05b Post London Bombings Survey, 26–28 Sept. 2005. Populus (http://www.populuslimited.com) Populus 06.06 (for The Times and ITV News) Political attitudes, 1–16 June 2006. Gallup (http//poll.gallup.com) Gallup 01.06 Terrorism in the United States, 20–22 Jan. 2006. Gallup 02.06 Most important problem, 6–9 Feb. 2006. Gallup 04.06 Most Americans say major changes needed to intelligence agencies, 16–18 Apr. 2006.

2

3

4 5

Roper Center (http://roperweb.ropercenter.uconn.edu) Roper 01.05 CBS News/New York Times Poll, 14–18 Jan. 2005 Roper 01.06a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll, 24–25 Jan. 2006. Roper 01.06b NBC News/Wall St Journal Poll, 26–29 Jan. 2006. In the most recent data (MORI, July 2006), in a typical fluctuation, it is placed third (named by 36 per cent of respondents), after race/immigration/ asylum issues (38 per cent), a cluster which draws some of its salience from fears about terrorists, and crime (37 per cent). The National Health Service and education typically complete the top five of this list, with frequent changes of rank order amongst them. Usually all other issues are some way behind. As implied, for example, by the title of a recent academic conference: ‘The Error in “Terrorism”? Political Violence and the Media’, Southampton Institute, November 2004. Directed by Adam Curtis, whose series on ‘The Century of the Self’ we noted in Chapter 2. By early 2006 it was becoming common for the post-invasion situation in Iraq to be described as approaching civil war; hopes that the security situation might improve were fading and US casualty figures were still rising.

202 Notes 6 Andrew Gilligan is a journalist who in May 2003 claimed on BBC radio that the government had ‘sexed up’ its dossier on Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction; his source, the government scientist Dr. David Kelly, committed suicide later that year after his identity as the source was revealed. While an official report published in January 2004 (Department for Constitutional Affairs, 2004) exonerated the government of blame in relation to both the dossier contents and Kelly’s suicide, assumptions that the government, and especially the Prime Minister, were culpable in various ways have become axiomatic in much media commentary (see Lloyd, 2004). 7 For example Gray (2003), Honderich (2006), Amis (2006) and Updike (2006). 8 A striking example of it is an article by Mark Almond, an Oxford historian, who argues that a 2004 BBC docu-drama entitled ‘Dirty War’ was, despite its strong critique of current provision for civil defence, part of a government-inspired propaganda campaign to frighten people about something which is not actually a serious threat to us (Almond, 2004). 9 An evil force which – in nuclear science as in jihadism – understood itself to be a world-transforming force (see Weart, 1988). 10 See Appleton, 2004. These have included Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Home Secretary David Blunkett, former head of M15 Eliza ManninghamBuller, former chief of the London Metropolitan Police Sir John Stevens, and the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone. 11 From August 2006, the UK government has a webpage giving sober (if general to the point of vagueness) information about its method for assessing threats, and about the current level of threat (http://www.intelligence.gov.uk). (Like the US system, also posted on an integrated ‘intelligence community’ site, it has five levels, though with different nomenclature. The August 2006 UK level is ‘Severe’, which at the fourth point on the scale is one notch higher than the American current level three, ‘Elevated’.) 12 This conclusion would be strongly contested by those who feel that, for example, the military presence at Heathrow Airport in February 2003 was an unnecessary and deliberately alarmist move by the Government. We cannot go into the evidence for and against this claim here, although this instance shows how the principles of emotional governance are intertwined with political judgements. 13 From the ‘populist’ discourse noted by Schlesinger et al. (1983), to the ‘frame’ of the War on Terrorism discussed by Norris et al. (2003); see Chapter 12. See also Chernak (2003), and Altheide (2003) who links the WoT to traditions of crime reporting.

Chapter 11

Terrorism and the Emotional Public

1 This characterisation of the different groups to be described in the following case study is based on a scrutiny of relevant data in the online archives (from September 2001 to the present) of five major polling organisations in the UK (ICM, Ipsos-MORI, NOP, Populus and YouGov). The polls referred to in this chapter are as follows; all data was accessed from the websites of the organisations concerned.

Notes 203 ICM (http://www.icmresearch.co.uk) ICM 07.02 Guardian Poll, 26–27 July 2002. ICM 03.04 (for BBC2 programme Newsnight) Iraq, 10–11 Mar. 2004. ICM 04.04 Terrorism survey, 23–24 Apr. 2004. ICM 08.05 Guardian Poll, 12–14 Aug. 2005. ICM 02.06 (for Sunday Telegraph) Muslims, 14–16 Feb. 2006. ICM 06.06 Guardian Poll, Muslims, 16–21 June 2006. MORI (http://www.mori.co.uk) MORI 07.05 (for The Sun) Attitudes of British Muslims, 21–22 July 2005. MORI 08.05 (for BBC) Muslims take pride in British way of life, 8–9 Aug. 2005. MORI 10.05a (for GLA) Londoners support police terrorist response, 22–26 Sept. 2005. MORI 10.05b Post London Bombings Survey, 26–28 Sept. 2005. MORI 02.06 (for The Sun) Perceptions of cartoons, 9–10 Feb. 2006. Populus (http://www.populuslimited.com) Populus 07.05 (for The Times) Terrorism, 8–10 July 2005. Populus 08.05 (for The Times) Political attitudes, 22–24 July 2005. Populus 12.05 (for The Times) Muslim poll, 9–19 Dec. 2005. Populus 06.06 (for The Times and ITV News) Political attitudes, 1–16 June 2006. Populus 07.06 (for The Times and ITV News) Muslim 7/7 poll, 1–16 June 2006.

2 3

4

5

6 7

YouGov (http://www.yougov.com) YouGov 02.06 (with Sunday Times) Danish Cartoons, 9–10 Feb. 2006. YouGov 07.06 (with The Sun) London Bombings – One Year On, 4–6 July 2006. 69 per cent, ICM 04.04; 70 per cent, Populus, 08.05. 65 per cent, ICM 07.05; 61 per cent, Populus 07.05. Such figures may be lower when not collected in the aftermath of an attack, but majorities in favour of support for ID cards, for example, have frequently been recorded – even reaching 82 per cent in one poll (ICM 02.03). Even when confronted with a question which said ID cards would cost us £93 each (in an ICM poll for the organisation ‘Say No 2ID and the database state’, 02.06), 52 per cent still affirmed they were a good idea. Populus survey for The Times and ITV News, 1–16 June, n=1131; see ‘Muslim Britain split over “martyrs” of 7/7’, Alexandra Frean and Rajeev Syal, The Times 04.07.06. For example, after the death of the first British Muslim soldier to be killed in the War on Terror, two UK newspapers associated with right-wing views carried the front page headlines ‘Proud to be a Muslim, soldier and British’ (Daily Telegraph, 4.7.06) and ‘British Muslim, British Hero’ (Daily Mail, 4.7.06). For example in his speech to the World Affairs Committee in Los Angeles, 1 Aug. 2006. The wide scope, deep roots and powerful effects of this outlook are analysed by Buruma and Margalit (2005).

204 Notes 8 The Counter-Terrorism Unit of the New York Police Department has estimated that there are up to 1500 UK members of just one nexus of jihadist organisations. ‘Banned Islamists spawn front organisations’, Ian Cobain and Nick Fielding, Guardian, 22.7.06, pp. 14–15. 9 Over a year later it is not clear to what extent these recommendations have been accepted, or effectively implemented. 10 Some of the UK’s most notorious serial killers of recent decades. 11 Awan (2007) describes the growth and content of ‘virtual Islamo-Jihadist media’. 12 Notably, some non-psychoanalytic writers on the psychology of terror agree on the central importance of these factors of identification with victims and vengeance: see, for example, Silke ed., 2003.

Chapter 12 Strategy

From Emotional Audit to Communication

1 This is the starting point of a project on ‘News Media and the Dynamics of Terrorism’, currently underway at Bournemouth University. Some initial findings from it are reported in Richards (2007), and summarised later in this chapter. 2 Full details of the sampling and of the frequency data are given in Richards (2007). 3 At the time of writing some commentators are suggesting that Prime Minister Blair’s recent speeches (Los Angeles, August 2006) are outlining a message of this ‘Tough on terror, tough on the causes of terror’ sort.

Chapter 13

Market Failures

1 As the ‘Michigan’ model of voter behaviour acknowledges of party identifications (see Bartle and Griffiths, 2002). 2 See Chapter 2 on Packard, 1957; also Nava et al. (1997), Richards et al. (2000), Leiss et al. (2005) for analyses of these critiques, and for alternative accounts of the cultural significance of advertising. 3 See references in Note 2 above. 4 See Chapter 10, and Voeten and Brewer, 2004. 5 See the discussion of theories of political marketing by Henneberg (2002).

Chapter 14

Deferring to Reality

1 The data referred to in this paragraph was gathered from the MORI archive (www.mori.com). 2 For the concept of narrative in the social sciences, see Andrews et al. (2000), Cobley (2001). 3 As one media commentator has called it: see Mark Lawson, ‘Some mistake?’, The Guardian G2, 9 October 2003.

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Author Index

Ahmad, F. 145 Akhtar, S. 153 Alford, F. 159 Allan, S. 69, 70, 198 Almond, M. 202 Altheide, D. 160, 202 Amis, M. 202 Anderson, B. 50 Anderson, D. 197 Andrews, M. 204 Ang, I. 32 Anker, E. 67 Ansolabehere, S. 177 Anthony, A. 152 Appleton, J. 202 Archetti, C. 162 Awan, A. 147, 204 Axford, B. 16 Babad, E. 78 Bales, R. 98 Barbalet, J. 3, 196 Barnett, S. 74, 79, 83 Barshack, L. 8 Bartle, J. 204 Basanez, M. 197 Bauman, Z. 35 Beck, U. 35 Beckmann, M. 199 Bell, M. 74 Bendelow, G. 196 Berezin, M. 3, 195 Berry, J. 159 Bion, W. 198 Billig, M. 197 Blake, A. 204 Bleandonu, G. 198 Botterill, J. 4, 204 Bouvier, G. 68 Boyle, M. 60 Brewer, P. 204 Bronstein, C. 198

Brown, J. 33 Buruma, I. 203 Capella, J. 75, 199 Carey, J. 67 Carruthers, S. 133 Chernak, S. 202 Clarke, S. 8, 200 Cobley, P. 204 Coleman, S. 199 Corner, J. 96, 197, 200 Cottle, S. 67 Critcher, C. 197 Crouch, C. 6 Day Sclater, S. 204 De Mause, L. 196 Deacon, D. 197 Demertzis, N. 200 Dermody, J. 177 Diplock, S. 197 Dodd, A. 200 Donovan, P. 76 Elliott, A. Elliott, P.

197 157, 202

Fallows, J. 75 Figlio, K. 63, 197 Fineman, S. 5 Fornas, J. 176 Fowles, J. 59 Frank, J. 104, 115 Franklin, B. 5, 107 Furedi, F. 41–42, 45, 197 Geraghty, C. 196 Gerodimos, R. 133 Giddens, A. 35 Gillespie, M. 145 Gillmor, D. 198 Golding, P. 197 215

216 Author Index Goleman, D. 5, 35, 84 Goodwin, J. 5 Gotze, J. 199 Gray, J. 202 Gratschew, M. 197 Griffiths, D. 204 Hahn, K. 178 Halmos, P. 35 Hanitzsch, T. 100 Happold, T. 158 Harvey, D. 98 Henneberg, S. 171, 204 Henry, G. 197 Hill, A. 200 Hinshelwood, R. 80, 99, 200 Hochschild, A. 64–5, 81 Hodgson, G. 197 Hoggett, P. 8 Honderich, T. 202 Hoskins, A. 70 Huggins, R. 16 Hughes, D. 160 Huntington, S. 51 Inglehart, R. 49, 197 Inthorn, S. 60 Itzkowitz, N. 200 Iyengar, S. 177, 178, 199 Jackson, R. 125 Jamieson, K. 75, 199 Jaques, E. 198 Jasper, J. 195 Jeffery, S. 174 Jhally, S. 204 Johnston, M. 197 Jones, J. 200 Jones, N. 5 Jowell, R. 197 Just, M. 202 Kellner, D. 155, 162 Kemper, T. 26 Kern, M. 202 Keysar, J. 119 King, J. 129 Kline, S. 179, 204 Knorr Cetina, K. 152

Kosmin, B. 119 Krantz, J. 99 Laplanche, J. 80 Lasch, C. 197 Lears, T. 176, 198 Lees-Marshment, J. 171, 172, 181 Leiss, W. 204 Lewis, J. 60 Lilleker, D. 172 Lindholm, C. 43–4 Little, G. 200 Livingstone, S. 199 Lloyd, J. 74, 79, 202 Loyn, D. 199 Lunt, P. 33 Lupton, D. 196 Lynch, J. 83 MacKuen, M. 8 MacRury, I. 4, 204 Madianou, M. 198 Marchand, R. 176 Marcus, G. 8 Margalit, A. 203 Martin, B. 31 Mayer, E. 119 Mayes, T. 197 McGoldrick, A. 83 McNair, B. 73 McPhillips, K. 197 Menzies-Lyth, I. 198 Merck, M. 36 Moloney, K. 59, 171 Montgomery, M. 68 Moreno, A. 197 Mortimore, R. 197 Mullen, P. 197 Murdock, G. 157, 202 Nacos, B. 135 Nava, M. 204 Neuman, W. 8 Newman, B. 171 Norpoth, H. 178 Norris, P. 49, 128, 158, 197, 202 Nye, J. 5

Author Index 217 Oates, S. 180 Orbach, S. 84 Osborne, E. 197 O’Shaughnessy, J. 84 O’Shaughnessy, N. 6, 171, 175, 182 Packard, V. 25, 204 Palmer, G. 195 Park, J. 84, 196 Parsons, T. 98 Patterson, T. 75, 197 Paxman, J. 199 Pels, D. 96, 197 Pintor, R. 197 Polletta, F. 5 Pontalis, J.-B. 80 Post, J. 200 Prince, R. 160 Pupavac, V. 42 Putnam, R. 59, 197

Silke, A. 151, 204 Silverstone, R. 59–60, 86 Smith, P. 65, 107 Sookhdeo, P. 147 Sparks, C. 159 Squire, C. 24 Sreberny, A. 69 Stenner, P. 33 Street, J. 95 Swogger, G. 2 Tannen, D. 12, 78 Taylor, P. 162 Tempest, M. 173 Thomas, J. 36 Thompson, S. 8 Treacher, A. 204 Tunstall, J. 195 Turnock, R. 197 Tustin, F. 149 Updike, J.

Reid, S. 198 Renshon, S. 200 Rieff, P. 35, 40 Ringstrom, P. 163 Ritzer, G. 48, 197 Rose, N. 195 Rusbridger, A. 197 Rusciano, F. 49, 197 Rustin, M. 8, 198 Sabato, L. 75 Salter, L. 59 Salzberger-Wittenberg, I. 197 Sancho, J. 197 Schlesinger, P. 157–158, 202 Schoeck, H. 111 Scullion, R. 177 Seib, P. 68

202

Valentino, N. 199 van Zoonen, E. 174, 196, 200 Voeten, E. 204 Volkan, V. 200 Wahl-Jorgensen, K. 60 Walter, T. 36 Weart, S. 202 Welzel, C. 197 Williams, S. 196 Wilson, S. 200 Winnicott, D. 3, 54, 103, 198 Worcester, R. 36, 39, 197 Yip, J.

198

Zelizer, B.

69

Subject and Name Index advertising/advertisements 4, 7, 8, 16, 34, 42, 63, 65, 108, 113, 116, 133, 159, 176, 177–178, 198, 204 al-Jazeera 180 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf 147 anger 2, 14, 15, 43, 70, 133, 134, 140ff., 148, 149, 161, 162, 180, 187 Angry Brigade 151 anti-psychiatry 27 Antidote (Campaign for Emotional Literacy) 35, 84 anxiety 2, 8, 15, 38, 44, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 86, 102, 103, 105, 111, 114, 117, 124, 130, 132ff., 165, 179, 185, 186, 198 argument culture 12, 78 authenticity 13–14, 40, 52, 101ff., 178, 189–190, 191, 193, 200 BBC

68, 74, 75, 76, 86, 113, 125, 189, 199, 201, 202, 203 Benn, Tony 160 bin Laden, Osama 67, 135, 180 Blair, Tony 14, 96, 97, 102, 107, 108, 109, 110–113, 114, 119–120, 125–126, 146, 158, 159, 160, 174–175, 179, 185, 187, 200–201, 202, 204 Blunkett, David 202 Bouyeri, Mohamed 152 Brown, Gordon 102 BSE (‘mad cow disease’) 133 Bush, George W. 14, 68, 105–106, 113ff., 118–120, 125–126, 158, 159, 173, 174, 180, 200 Cameron, David 96, 185–186 cathexis 47, 54 celebrity/celebrities 13, 23, 36–37, 39, 54, 58, 65, 73, 95, 188 charisma 11, 26, 27, 43–44, 54, 93, 94, 113, 173, 188

citizen journalism 67, 70 Cold War 51, 128–130, 132 collusion 24, 134, 151, 153, 177 compassion 41, 43, 105 Conservative Party 96, 97, 107–113, 186 constitution (of USA) 3 consumer culture/the consumer/consumer goods 2, 4, 16, 24, 30, 34, 45, 48, 52, 59, 94–95, 101, 135, 149, 171, 172, 175–176, 177–179, 181, 183, 189 containment/container 12, 13–14, 15, 16, 24, 38, 43, 58, 59, 60, 61ff., 66, 67, 69, 70, 82, 85, 89, 98–99, 101, 114, 118, 130, 164ff., 168, 179, 188, 191, 198 crime drama 30ff., 60, 100 Curtis, Adam 196, 201 Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma 84 Davies, David 96 decathexis see cathexis depression 3, 98 despair 76, 77, 83, 93, 94, 101 Diana, Princess 11, 36ff., 50, 54, 66, 197 Edwards, John 173–174, 178 elections Russia (2004) 180 Spain (2004) 180 UK (2001) 44, 45, 46, 96, 107 UK (2005) 14, 44, 107ff., 175 USA (2004) 133, 173, 180 emotional audit 14, 15, 137ff. emotional intelligence 5, 35, 39, 84–85, 183, 188 218

Subject and Name Index 219 emotional labour 12, 13, 35, 64ff., 69–70, 81–82, 89, 93ff., 98, 99, 106, 107, 167, 183, 184, 188 emotional learning 35 emotional literacy 13, 16, 35, 39, 74, 84–85, 87ff., 116, 157, 183, 188, 199 emotional public sphere 33, 57ff., 64, 72, 115, 116, 119, 123, 137, 149, 153, 157, 164, 184, 188, 192, 194 emotionalisation viii, 13, 15, 29, 30ff., 42 43, 48, 50, 52, 81, 95, 96, 107, 176, 189 Enlightenment 43 ETA 180

Iraq

False Self 103, 190 Fox, Liam 109 Fraser, Malcolm 200 Freud, Sigmund/Freudian psychoanalysis 25, 40, 43, 51, 196

Labour Party 77, 96, 102, 107–108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 Liberal Democrats 109–110, 168 Livingstone, Ken 202 Luntz, Frank 113

Galtung, Johann 83 Gilligan, Andrew 74, 127, 202 globalisation 7, 11, 15, 48ff., 95, 126, 127, 128, 155 guilt 2, 3, 15, 41, 80, 81, 100, 102–103, 143, 154–155, 163, 164, 165 Hague, William 97 Hamas 150 Hamza, Abu 141, 147 hippie culture 31 home team advantage 28 Howard, Michael 108–110, 113 Humphrys, John 76, 199 identification 6, 16, 24, 37, 47, 53, 119, 148, 154, 163, 174, 179, 183, 187, 188, 189, 193, 204, 209 see also projective identification identity (ID) cards 118, 125, 139ff., 165, 166, 203 introjection 61ff. IRA 132, 150, 155, 159

16, 68, 74, 108, 110, 111, 112, 116, 117, 118, 124, 125, 126, 127, 132, 136, 138, 142, 143, 144, 145, 153, 169, 170, 200, 201, 202, 203 Islam, Yusuf 143 ‘Islamophobia’ 140, 145–146, 196 Jackson, Dan

198–199

Kelly, David 127, 202 Kennedy, Charles 110 Kennedy, John 186 Kerry, John 173–174, 178, 180 Khan, Siddique 152 Kinnock, Neil 77, 185 Kleinian psychoanalysis 99–100, 200

Major, John 51, 185 Manningham-Buller, Eliza 202 mass suicides 26–27 media literacy 87–88 Morgan, Rhodri 109, 112 mourning 11, 36ff., 69 narcissism 3, 154, 186, 187 narrative/narrativisation 16, 32, 39, 67, 68, 70, 87, 95, 115, 149, 164, 174, 179, 188ff., 204 New Labour 107, 167 Nilsen, Dennis 152 Nixon, Richard 200 paranoia/paranoid 61, 117, 126, 141, 145, 162, 166, 167 Paxman, Jeremy 199 peace journalism 83–84 political marketing 6, 16, 103, 171ff., 204 political psychology 7–10, 16, 136, 171ff., 195 popular culture 2, 13, 23, 42, 53, 94–95, 96, 115, 148, 172

220 Subject and Name Index post-Freudian psychoanalysis 41, 58ff. post-Kleinian psychoanalysis 62 Powell, Colin 68 projection 53, 61ff., 80–81, 141, 143, 168 projective identification 62–63 public diplomacy 6 Putin, Vladimir 180 rational choice 8–9 Reagan, Ronald 187, 200 reality TV 31–32, 60, 79, 103, 178 reflexivity 17, 22, 34, 35, 36, 41, 50, 52, 83, 107, 176, 191 reparation 3, 13–14, 16, 24, 99ff., 106, 114, 115, 120, 183, 190, 191, 194, 200 resentment 15, 108, 111–112, 141, 166, 185, 186, 187, 200 Romanticism 31 secret ballot 3 Shipman, Harold

152

soap operas 31–32, 60, 196 soft power 5 ‘spin’ 5, 103, 107, 109, 110 splitting 24, 43, 152 Stevens, Sir John 202 symbolic state 6 Thatcher, Margaret 110, 113, 200 therapeutic culture viii, 2, 5, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 30ff., 45, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 59, 88, 89, 95, 96, 99, 101, 188, 191, 192, 193, 196, 198 Tongue, Jenny 158 unconscious, the and unconscious mental processes 24, 25, 37, 38, 40, 61–62, 66, 93, 100–101, 154, 186, 190, 195 victim(hood) 154, 163 vox pops 61–62, 88 West, Fred

152

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