The Politics of Negative Emotions 9781529228816

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The Politics of Negative Emotions

THE POLITICS OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS



Global Discourse Books in the series were first published as special issues of our Global Discourse journal. The Global Discourse book series is an interdisciplinary, problemoriented series of applied contemporary thought operating at the intersection of politics, international relations, sociology and social policy. The series scope is broad, encouraging interrogation of current affairs with regard to core questions of distributive justice, wellbeing, cultural diversity, autonomy, sovereignty, security and recognition. Authors are encouraged to explore the international dimensions and implications of their work.

Also available Reflections on Post-Marxism Laclau and Mouffe’s Project of Radical Democracy in the 21st Century Edited by Stuart Sim The Limits of EUrope Identities, Spaces, Values Edited by Russell Foster and Jan Grzymski

Find out more at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/global-discourse

THE POLITICS OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS Edited by Dan Degerman

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 374 6645 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2023 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​2879-​3 hardcover ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​2881-​6 ePdf ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​2880-​9 ePub The right of Dan Degerman to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editors and contributors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: blu inc Bristol University Press use environmentally responsible print partners. Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors

vii viii

Introduction: Feeling Our Way through Politics Dan Degerman 1

2

3 4

5 6

7

8

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Anger, Fast and Slow: Mediations of Justice and Violence in the Age of Populism William Davies ‘We Will March Side by Side and Demand a Bigger Table’: Anger as Dignity Claim Karen Adkins Moving between Frustration and Anger Mary Carman The Resentment–​Ressentiment Complex: A Critique of Liberal Discourse Sjoerd van Tuinen Green Shame: The Next Moral Revolution? Martha Claeys Against Comfort: Political Implications of Evading Discomfort Ditte Marie Munch-​Jurisic For Love and for Life: Emotional Dynamics at the World Congress of Families Sara Kalm and Anna Meeuwisse The Functionality of Affects: Conceptualising Far-​Right Populist Politics beyond Negative Emotions Julia Leser and Florian Spissinger Moral Economies of Exclusion: Politics of Fear through Antagonistic Anonymity Søren Mosgaard Andreasen

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1

10

31

54 74

95 111

135

156

177

The Politics of Negative Emotions

10

Contesting the Politics of Negative Emotions in Educational Policy Making: A Ban on Asylum Seekers’ School Visits in Finland Iida Pyy, Anniina Leiviskä, and Jan-​Erik Mansikka

Index

200

223

vi

List of Figures 2.1 9.1 9.2 9.3

Am I mansplaining? The ‘others’ The ‘others’ The similar logos of HRW (left) and HRS (right) as they appear on their respective webpages

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53 183 183 186

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Notes on Contributors Karen Adkins, Philosophy Department, Regis University, Colorado, USA Søren Mosgaard Andreasen, Department of Child Welfare and Social Work, Artic University of Norway Mary Carman, Department of Philosophy, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa Martha Claeys, Centre for Ethics, University of Antwerp, Belgium William Davies, Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths University of London, UK Dan Degerman, Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, UK Sara Kalm, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden Anniina Leiviskä, Department of Education, University of Helsinki, Finland Julia Leser, Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University, Germany Jan-​Erik Mansikka, Department of Education, University of Helsinki, Finland Anna Meeuwisse, School of Social Work, Lund University, Sweden Ditte Marie Munch-​Jurisic, Department of Cross-​Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Iida Pyy, Department of Education, University of Helsinki, Finland Florian Spissinger, Institute for Political Science, University of Leipzig, Germany Sjoerd van Tuinen, School of    Philosophy, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the Netherlands viii

Introduction: Feeling Our Way through Politics Dan Degerman Anger, fear, grief, shame and other negative emotions have been at the heart of political events in recent years. These are emotions that have long been subject to suspicion in political scholarship. There are some good reasons for this. Negative emotions can be politically destructive, leading people to act rashly and without due concern for democratic principles or fellow citizens. Arguably, the rise of far-​r ight populism and the protests against restrictions during the COVID pandemic both testify to this. But, in condemning the vices of negative emotions, it is easy to overlook their virtues. They can, for example, accurately signal that we have been wronged, that we have done something wrong, or that something we value is threatened, and motivate us to act to redress the situation, sometimes in concert with other people. Indeed, the capacity of emotions like fear and anger to do just this has been on display in the Black Lives Matter and climate change movements. This volume brings together perspectives from philosophy and political science to shed new light on negative emotions in public life, highlighting both the constructive and destructive potential of these experiences. Each chapter investigates what recent political events in different parts of the world reveal about the political character of an emotion or particular set of emotions. These include much-​discussed emotions, like anger and fear, and less prominent ones, like frustration and discomfort. The overall result is a dynamic set of tools that can help us better understand and navigate our current crises. However, the chapters in this volume do not directly address the question of what it is about negative emotions that makes them negative. Indeed, in reading this volume, one might be struck that a common theme across most of the contributions is that whatever is negative about these emotions, it is not that they are always morally or politically bad. In fact, they are often good. Beyond this, the contributors might find little agreement about what makes an emotion negative rather than positive or, to put it more technically, what determines the valence of an emotion, if that is even a coherent concept. 1

The Politics of Negative Emotions

This reflects an ongoing debate within emotions theory. Some would say that anger, fear, sadness, and other negative emotions share some quality that justifies their categorization. Others would say that no such quality exists and that this category of experience and its positive counterpart are merely matters of convention, and that, moreover, this convention harmfully restricts and obscures the diverse character of some emotional experiences. Settling this question is not necessary to have a productive debate about the role of negative emotions in politics. Regardless of whether we think the emotions we call negative share some quality or if they are united by convention alone, we have a sufficiently good sense of which experiences this refers to here and now to understand why someone might think that anger, fear, and discomfort might be discussed in the same book. Still, by way of introducing this volume, a brief overview of the philosophical debate on emotional valence is useful, as it will provide readers with yet more resources to critically evaluate the contributions in this volume and in their own encounters with emotions in public life. This debate broadly corresponds to the two sides mentioned above. On the one side are people like Robert Solomon, a towering figure in emotions theory who famously argued that emotions are essentially judgments. He contends that there is and can be no coherent concept of emotional (bi)valence (Solomon 2001; see also Solomon and Stone 2002). Solomon observes that positive and negative emotions are relatively new folk psychological categories. The particular emotions in either category do not have a single, unifying positive or negative quality that explains why they belong there. When people call an emotion or set of them negative, several disparate qualities may be implied, including but not limited to practically bad, morally wrong, painful, unhealthy, involving avoidance tendencies, or entailing a negative evaluation. Meanwhile, calling an emotion positive may mean it involves some opposite quality, such as practically beneficial, morally good, pleasurable, etc. Yet, Solomon points out, it is easy to think of archetypal negative emotions that sometimes involve positive qualities. Take anger, for instance. Anger can be painful when its object is a betrayal by someone we love. But anger about a political injustice might feel pleasurable, especially when it provides an escape from a prior situation of unnamed suffering. It can be practically bad in some situations but beneficial in others, and so on. And the same occurrent anger can simultaneously involve positive and negative qualities of different kinds. Anger can be painful because it is directed at an offence by someone we love, morally good because it alerts us that we have been wronged, and practically bad because it provokes the offender to further hurtful actions. Archetypally positive emotions can also involve a mix of qualities. Love can be pleasurable but morally bad, and so on. What this indicates, according to Solomon, is that emotions are multidimensional. While some of these dimensions have polarities, their 2

Introduction

sheer multiplicity means that attempts to sort emotions into positive and negative ones are misconceived and likely to undermine serious research. Thus, Solomon would rather we not speak of negative emotions or, if pragmatic considerations mean that we cannot avoid the term, be as clear as possible by what we mean when we label an emotion as negative (see also Colombetti 2005). But others have defended the idea of emotional valence from various theoretical perspectives. These defenders acknowledge that valence can and has been conceived in many different ways, but that it can be coherently articulated. Jesse Prinz (2010) is the most prominent proponent of what is called the feeling theory of emotion, which takes it that emotions are essentially constituted by bodily feelings. He argues that different emotions entail either a reward marker that signals ‘more of this’ or a punishment marker that signals ‘less of this’. So, negative emotions like fear or shame contain a component that ‘marks them as something to diminish, resist, avoid, or otherwise do away with’, while positive emotions like joy or pride ‘contain a component that marks them as something to sustain or repeat’. Prinz recognizes that these emotions may sometimes involve other components that might be understood as either positive or negative and that components of different polarities may coexist in the same emotional experience. But, in the philosophy and science of emotion, valence refers to or at least ought to refer to whether an emotion entails a reward marker, meaning that it is a positive emotion, or a punishment marker, meaning that it is a negative emotion. Another influential perspective on emotion is perception theory. Within this school, articulations of valence are informed by the understanding that emotions are essential evaluative experiences. For example, Fabrice Teroni (2018) argues that an emotion’s valence corresponds to ‘the polarity of the value of which it is an experience’. Hence, fear is a negative emotion because it is an experience of danger, while pride is a positive emotion because it is an experience of success. Whatever valence is taken to be, its defenders consider it indispensable to our understanding of emotions for two reasons, both of which are relevant in public life. The first relates to the ontology of emotions. Some argue that valence, positive or negative, is a necessary feature of emotion and that it is even what distinguishes emotions from other experiences, like cognitions or perceptions (Charland 2005). The second relates to the explanatory value of emotions. Negative valence in the feeling theory or perception theory sense can explain why an emotion like fear often involves pain, negative cognitions, and avoidance behaviour (Prinz 2010; Teroni 2018). These qualities, in turn, explain why fear is such a powerful motivational, epistemic, and communicative factor in human life (see Brady 2018). Of course, someone like Solomon might point out that we can acknowledge that a particular instance of fear or some other emotion involves these qualities 3

The Politics of Negative Emotions

and, hence, use it as an explanation without reducing them to some core negative valence that it supposedly has in common with anger, sadness, and other negative emotions. Regardless, it should be clear from this that insisting that there is a well-​ grounded distinction between positive and negative emotions does not imply that one is committed to the idea that the emotions that belong to the former category are morally or politically good while the latter is bad. On the accounts discussed above, the negative valence of an emotion can drive good outcomes, just as the positive valence of an emotion can drive bad outcomes. With this in mind, let us now survey the contributions that make up this volume. The first four chapters focus on anger, perhaps the most debated negative emotion, and closely related experiences, including resentment, ressentiment, and frustration. In Chapter 1, William Davies articulates a novel distinction between two kinds of anger that play an important role in contemporary politics. Inspired by Daniel Kahneman’s concepts of slow and fast thinking, Davies argues that we can productively distinguish between fast and slow anger, with either kind presenting both political promises and perils. Fast anger is what people often seem to have in mind when they caution against the emotion. It is an automatic and consuming reaction to a perceived wrong that outpaces reflective thought, which is liable to lead us to lash out against our ‘better’ or, perhaps more aptly, slower judgment. Slow anger, by contrast, accumulates over time through multiple experiences of perceived injustice and memories of those experiences. Reflective thought is integral to the process that engenders slow anger. But the recruitment of thought or reason in this kind of anger does not mean it is necessarily politically desirable. Davies warns that the accretion of slow anger without substantive opportunities for political expression leads to ressentiment, which he characterizes as a pathology in which a person’s anger becomes inner-​ directed, and they blame themselves for their suffering. The alternative is resentment, in which the build-​up of anger is directed outward, and they blame others for this suffering. In this form, the potential for anger to fuel political action is considerable, but whether it is ultimately politically beneficial depends on who or what is blamed. Right-​wing populists have proven themselves adept at using fast anger to tap into stores of slow anger to stimulate sudden, short-​term, and sometimes violent and often destructive outbursts of political action. To deprive them of this resource, Davies urges that democratic institutions must find ways of mediating between the different kinds of anger, transforming it into a form ‘that is neither too fast nor too slow’. Karen Adkins sets out a more straightforwardly positive case for anger in Chapter 2. She takes issue with Martha Nussbaum’s famous critique of anger, which argues that anger is irrational and morally and political 4

Introduction

harmful because it intrinsically involves a payback wish. But this is wrong, Adkins argues. Many significant instances of anger do not involve a payback wish. Instead, they have at their core a demand for dignity. That is because anger itself is often a response to a violation of personal or bodily dignity. Adkins illustrates this by drawing on examples from the Me Too movement and the discrimination, violence, and microaggressions against women that the movement drew attention to. Under the right conditions, the anger that arises in response to these kinds of injustices can take political form; that is, it targets not an individual offender but norms, laws, or institutions. Adkins observes that this does not mean that anger is always personally or politically effective. Expressing anger is risky, especially for women and people of colour whose anger is often used as a basis for ridiculing and dismissing their political demands. Moreover, sometimes anger is just about payback and making others suffer because of a perceived wrong. Nevertheless, Adkins urges, anger is a more complicated phenomenon than its opponents admit, and we must try harder to listen to it in public life. The next chapter turns to an emotion that is closely related to anger but deserving of attention in its own right, namely, frustration. In Chapter 3, Mary Carman provides a pioneering analysis of frustration, its political relevance, and its links to moral anger. Carman defines frustration as an affective and intentional state that arises in response to an opposition. So defined, frustration bears some resemblance to moral anger. But Carman stresses an important difference between the two. Moral anger is directed at an opposition that appears to be deliberately caused by another agent. As such, Carman says, drawing on Peter Strawson’s vocabulary, it is a reactive attitude because it pertains to our standing in interpersonal relationships. By contrast, frustration occurs in response to an opposition for which no agent appears to be responsible, and even if some person is involved in the opposition, they are not recognized as responsible for the event. Frustration can, hence, be understood as an objective attitude because it pertains to our relationship to non-​agents –​e.g. traffic queues, bad weather, or malfunctioning computers –​that are not part of our standing in interpersonal relationships. Nevertheless, frustration is closely connected to moral anger, a connection illustrated by the fact that moral anger often originates in frustration. Examining the 2019 student protests in South Africa, Carman highlights two salient aspects of the transition from frustration to moral anger. The first is a transformation of the evaluation of the situation, whereby what was perceived as an opposition becomes perceived as a wrongdoing. The second is an accumulation of frustration because the opposition that engenders it is persistent and amplified by an erosion of communal trust. In Chapter 4, Sjoerd van Tuinen challenges the common distinction between the two titular emotions. Political scholars often distinguish 5

The Politics of Negative Emotions

between resentment, on the one hand, which is a rational and authentic emotion that is essential to democracy, and ressentiment, on the other, which is an irrational and inauthentic emotion that is inimical to democracy. Van Tuinen rejects the distinction between the two as conceptually strained and analytically barren. The conceptual strain stems, firstly, from its reliance on a questionable standard of rationality as adherence to liberal norms and, secondly, from a dubious psychologized understanding of authenticity. The result is that ressentiment is little more than a pejorative label for people we disagree with politically. According to van Tuinen, a more productive distinction for shedding light on our contemporary political predicaments is a Nietzschean one between active and reactive affects. Through deploying this conceptual pair, van Tuinen argues that it becomes clear that while emotions and political actions are inextricably entangled, social justice can only be grounded in the latter. The next two contributions turn our attention away from anger and its affective relatives to examine shame and discomfort. In Chapter 5, Martha Claeys explores the moral and political implications of ‘green shame’, defining it as ‘the shame one feels when knowingly behaving in ways that have a severe negative impact on the environment’. While Claeys ultimately argues that this emotion has significant constructive potential, her argument is nuanced and qualified. Firstly, she distinguishes it from green guilt. Many people may feel green guilt about acts like flying or not recycling, meaning that they affectively experience their failure to behave correctly in these instances, but their felt guilt is focused only on the particular act. As such, green guilt is easily ameliorated and unlikely to bring about substantive behavioural change. By contrast, while green shame may also be triggered by such failures, it involves the sense that one has not simply failed to perform a task but failed to live up to the basic requirements of a dignified life. Claeys shows that there are good reasons to think such an encompassing feeling can drive the sorts of behaviours required to address climate change. But in highlighting the promise of green shame as an experience, Claeys does not invite us to practice green shaming. She observes that green shaming would violate the dignity of others, which we have a duty to avoid. Nevertheless, as long as green shame is rooted in intrinsic and well-​g rounded worries about dignity, it may be a vital force in the moral revolution we need to avoid a climate catastrophe. Ditte Marie Munch-​Jurisic also draws attention to an underappreciated emotion in Chapter 6. Munch-​Jurisic argues that discomfort is more than a private emotional experience; it can also be collective and public. Comfort and discomfort, Munch-​Jurisic observes, are powerful factors in our public lives. They influence, for example, who we associate with and what we say to whom, and often do so in subtle and visceral ways, as gut feelings that fly under our cognitive radar. Through our desire to evade it, discomfort 6

Introduction

can, thus, contribute toward entrenching inequality, discrimination, and other injustices, even while its influence remains unrecognized. While we are perhaps intrinsically attracted to comfort and repelled by its opposite, Munch-​Jurisic argues that in pursuit of a more just society, we are dutybound ‘to expose ourselves to discomfort’. She thinks it is especially important to subject ourselves to what she terms ‘interaction discomfort’, which refers to the unease people may experience when interacting with people belonging to groups they perceive as substantively dissimilar from their own. Munch-​ Jurisic recognizes that this is a demanding duty. But, if we are serious about addressing the implicit biases that fuel many injustices, we must find ways of living up to it. The second half of the volume takes an empirical turn. Notably, this coincides with a shift in focus from the constructive potential of negative emotions to their political abuses and abusers, particularly on the political right. In Chapter 7, Sara Kalm and Anna Meeuwisse shed light interplay between emotions and collective identity through a case study of a prominent far-​r ight organization. The World Congress of Families (WCF) consists of anti-​gay, anti-​feminists, and anti-​abortion activists, conservative religious leaders, and right-​wing politicians motivated by the goal of promoting Christian family values. Kalm and Meuwisse attended the 13th annual conference of the organization in 2019, and their analysis explores the primary data they gathered during this event. Using a carefully crafted analytical lens drawing on theoretical and sociological work on social movements, they demonstrate the role that both positive and negative emotions play in mobilizing and sustaining WCF activists. Particularly important in this regard, Kalm and Meuwisse suggest, are love and hate. These emotions are engendered through speeches, songs, text, and other symbolic resources that stress a range of dichotomies. The most general of these is ‘us and them’, while more specific ones include ‘good and evil’, ‘moral and hedonic’, ‘traditional and liberal’, etc. Julia Leser and Florian Spissinger similarly highlight the mixture of positive and negative emotions fuelling the far-​right in Chapter 8. They argue that the characterization of the far-​r ight supporter as an angry, fearful and hateful individual, driven purely by negative emotions, is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, equating the far right with negative emotions conceals the ambivalence of political affect, by wrongly implying that negative emotions are inherently irrational and destructive. Secondly, the emotional caricature of the far-​right supporter gives the false impression that the reasonable average citizen automatically rejects the politics of fear, rage and hatred, and, so, the far-​r ight is forever confined to the margins. Comforting as that view may be, it is misconceived. To demonstrate this, Leser and Spissinger compose an analytical framework that emphasizes 7

The Politics of Negative Emotions

the functionality of affect. This concept is meant to highlight the capacity of emotions, both negative and positive, to align individuals with communities by creating sticky networks of people, things, and ideas. They proceed to apply this concept to analyze ‘the affective practices and performances’ of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a party which has notoriously become a significant force in recent German politics. Leser and Spissinger draw on a wealth of primary data gathered through interviews and conversations with AfD members, as well as through ethnographic observation at party events. Their study illustrates that the far-​r ight does not have to manifest or excavate dark, hidden emotions that most people either do not have or would never admit to. Rather, an important part of what enables the far-​ right to make its extraordinary views appealing to an increasing number of people is its ability to speak to ‘ordinary affect’. Still, the far right does rely on some negative emotions to appeal to and attract new supporters. In Chapter 9, Søren Mosgaard Andreasen shows how fear is used to legitimize exclusion, policing, and humiliation of Muslims among far-​r ight activists and their sympathizers. More specifically, he draws attention to the use of what he calls ‘fear appeals’. These are ‘forms of multimodal rhetoric intended for political persuasion and the manufacture of consent’. Introducing us to another far-​r ight organization, the Norwegian Human Rights Service (HRS), Mosgaard Andreasen explores the use and character of fear appeals in three HRS publications. These publications villainize Muslims in different ways through text and imagery. Mosgaard Andreasen argues that these examples have in common that they frame their targets as faceless, unapproachable, and approachable, the antithesis of the idealised Norwegian self. This constitutes an effect that he calls ‘antagonistic anonymity’, which ultimately enables the far right to frame itself as the defender of liberal democracies even while seeking to undermine its principles. Chapter 10 presents a case study from another national context to explore the political impact of negative emotions. Iida Pyy, Anniina Leiviskä, and Jan-​ Erik Mansikka examine the emotional dynamics surrounding immigration and education in the small Finnish city of Oulu. Specifically, it examines how the nationalist Finns Party was able to ban the practice of having asylum seekers visit schools in the city to share their experiences with pupils. A similar ban had previously been rejected. It was only after some asylum seekers were implicated in a series of sexual assaults, that the ban gained traction. Using Nussbaum’s work on emotions, Pyy et al argue that the Oulu case is an instance of emotion-​driven backlash politics. Supporters of the ban took advantage of the sexual assault case to whip up a storm of fear and anger that effectively swept aside democratic rules and principles. The authors argue, however, that the solution is not to purge emotion in general from educational policy, but to instead seek to engender positive emotions 8

Introduction

like love, compassion, and hope, which, on the Nussbaumian account, are key to a healthy democratic culture. References Brady, M. S., 2018. Suffering and virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Charland, L. C., 2005. The heat of emotion: Valence and the demarcation problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (8–​10), 82–​102. Colombetti, G., 2005. Appraising valence. Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (8–​10), 82–​102. Prinz, J., 2010. For valence. Emotion Review 2 (1), 5–​13. Solomon, R. C., 2001. Against valence. In: Solomon, R. C., ed., Not passion’s slave. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 135–​147. Solomon, R. C. and Stone, L. D., 2002. On “positive” and “negative” emotions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 32 (4), 417–​435. Teroni, F., 2018. Emotionally charged –​The puzzle of affective valence. In Tappolet, C., Teroni, F., and Konzelmann Ziv, A., eds., Shadows of the soul: Philosophical perspectives on negative emotions. London: Routledge, pp. 11–​19.

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Anger, Fast and Slow: Mediations of Justice and Violence in the Age of Populism William Davies

We live, it has been said, in an ‘age of anger’ (Mishra, 2017). The rise of populism and cultural conflict in liberal democracies has been widely attributed to a heightened power of affect in public life, with resentment, hostility and rage playing a critical role in the mobilisation of support for the ‘hyper-​leaders’ that drive nationalist parties (Davies, 2018; Gerbaudo, 2019). Where liberal government seeks to appeal to individual self-​interest (primarily understood as enhanced economic welfare), populist politicians and parties address feelings of injustice and status anxiety, channelling a far wider range of moral emotions. Not unrelatedly, digital media platforms have established new spaces of cultural and political conflict, where trolling, hostility and scapegoating are common, and which are mediated by graphics as much as text (Phillips, 2015; Seymour, 2019). The important role of emotions within contemporary populism is becoming better understood (Demertzis, 2013; Salmela and von Scheve, 2017; Wahl-​Jorgensen, 2018; Cossarini and Vallespín, 2019). In particular, anger has been recognised as a crucial emotion in the current political landscape, seeing as it has the capacity to mobilise people around a sense of injustice. It has long been recognised that anger is an ‘action’ emotion that propels people in certain ways, whether for good or ill. It is also a reactive emotion, in that it is typically linked to some past injury or slight that it seeks to redress or avenge. It has powerful political properties, if it can be released in a coordinated fashion (Lyman, 1981). Whether anger is focused on the appropriate target, or whether it is diverted towards some substitute, is another question altogether. 10

Anger, Fast and Slow

Yet when we speak of the political arena being disrupted by ‘anger’, this can summon up some quite heterogeneous types. First, it often refers to feelings of resentment that have been building for years or even decades, lacking any adequate political release (Magni, 2017). This is associated with a gradual disillusionment with mainstream politics, and a disengagement from democratic participation (Mair, 2013). The concept of ‘left behind’ people and spaces became something of a cliché in the aftermath of the UK’s referendum on EU membership and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign victory. However, ethnographers have shown that feelings of anger among economically and culturally marginalised populations were indeed brewing for many years prior to 2016 (Cramer, 2016; Hochschild, 2016). This is anger that is sedimented over a long period of time and held in reserve. It potentially forges whole political and moral identities. Second, there is the anger that is acted out in political argument, media debates and social media ‘wars’. The ‘anger’ that is attributed to Trump or to trolls is not one that derives from the past, at least not in the absence of any psychoanalytic excavation. Rather it is performed in real time, causing disruption via its speed and unpredictability. If anything, it makes it more difficult to talk about the past (as a set of empirical experiences), as it is constantly provoking more immediate reaction. Whether this anger is authentically felt, or whether it is a type of prank played on the rest of us, is impossible ever to fully establish. Nevertheless, it constantly generates new anger, before any previous grievances or past statements can be properly addressed. In the ‘attention economy’, angry behaviour is a tactic for drawing attention, while feelings of anger are frequently provoked by the misrepresentations, discriminations and oversights that inevitably occur in this frenetic media landscape. Lying between these two ideal types, we might also note a third type that plays an important role in mediating economics and politics. Economic psychologists have noted that we are affected by losses of status and income far more than we are by gains (Payne, 2017). Put in the context of capitalist development, this means that we can experience years of gradual improvements in welfare, without any commensurate increase in life satisfaction, but experience acute pain and indignation in the immediate aftermath of any losses (as in a recession). It is telling that support for populist parties in Europe correlates more closely to the rate at which unemployment has increased than to aggregate unemployment (Algan et al, 2017). Similarly, the crucial Mid-​Western counties that swung from Obama to Trump in 2016 had all experienced a plant closure during the 2016 presidential campaign season (Davis, 2017). Populist support is more closely associated with feelings of relative deprivation (failing to keep up with others) than with objective deprivation (Pettigrew, 2017). Sudden localised downturns of economic prosperity and status might produce a 11

The Politics of Negative Emotions

particularly acute form of anger in the medium term, which can convert more easily into political mobilisation. One way of distinguishing these three different species of anger is via the different chronologies involved. The first is anger that accumulates over the long term, married to entrenched feelings of injustice and resentment that do not find adequate political expression in the near term. The second is anger as a form of rhetorical and somatic performance and combat that exists in real time, with immediate affective prompts and consequences. The third is an anger that reflects recent changes in the distribution of status and welfare in society. These are all variants of anger, but they offer different ways of relating past and present. Where anger is ‘pent-​up’, it sees the past exerting an overbearing influence on the present; where it is sheer performance, it obliterates memory or empirics, focusing all attention on the present. Undoubtedly, each of these has political implications, and may often be assembled in certain ways to achieve political ends. Successful demagogic leaders will often have the ability to channel all of them, synthesising long-​ term resentments, current fears and insecurities, and the spectacle of a live event, to produce a moment of mass affective expression. Without some kind of political resolution –​justice –​the pain of the past continues to haunt the present, but the effect of relentless ‘real-​time’ anger is to make such resolution impossible to carry out. This is a common dynamic effect of populist leadership, which speaks to anger, cultivates it, but never resolves it. One response to demagoguery is to say that anger –​or even emotion in general –​has no place in politics and must be eliminated. This is both empirically and politically naïve. As numerous feminist scholars have argued, anger has positive political attributes (for example, Lorde, 1981). But how do we distinguish ‘good’ anger from that of the demagogue? How might we resist the tendency to lump all anger together, as if everything –​Twitter, Trump, #MeToo, Fox News, Brexit –​were all just symptoms of a diffuse atmosphere of blame and hostility? One way is to consider that spaces and times need to be defended, so that anger about the past can be articulated, without being either ignored (such that it is sustained for even longer) or expressed via a kind of real-​time rage that exists solely in the present. In this chapter, I propose disaggregating anger by considering its different chronologies and speeds, and exploring the different political attributes of each. The aim is not to specify what normatively ‘good’ anger consists of, which would be to deny the spontaneous and extra-​normative dimensions of anger, let alone to prescribe how or when we should be angry. But the rise of populism has generated some simplistic and confused accounts of anger that fail to recognise its varieties, its benefits and its harms. My hope is that this chapter will shed some sociological light on the contemporary political moment by highlighting the divergent ways in which anger can mediate political temporality. It is structured as follows. In the next section, I outline 12

Anger, Fast and Slow

some of the key properties of anger, reviewing recent arguments within political philosophy and affect theory regarding the status (and benefits) of anger. Anger, I argue, has properties in common with both justice and violence, and can pull towards either pole depending on the pace at which it is exercised. I then turn to different ‘speeds’ of anger in turn, starting with the ‘slow’ anger that accumulates over time, then turning to the ‘fast’ anger that briefly seems to abolish the past altogether. In conclusion, I offer some reflections on what moderation might look like, not in the sense of less anger, but in the sense of a thoughtful, purposive anger, which is neither nostalgic nor explosive.

What is anger? Arguably the most famous definition of anger belongs to Aristotle: ‘an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one’s friends’ (Aristotle, 2015: 1382–​3). This definition does not perfectly capture every possible case of (what we describe as) ‘anger’. In particular, it assumes that anger is necessarily felt towards those who are responsible for some ‘slight’, whereas it is eminently possible to feel and direct anger towards a blameless substitute, such as traffic or some inanimate object (Miceli and Castelfranchi, 2019). However, Aristotle’s definition does draw our attention to a number of key elements of anger that have been fought over by conflicting traditions of psychology and philosophy. These conflicts reveal some of the ambivalences of anger, which hovers between conscious and unconscious action, subjective judgement and physical response, visions of justice and the urge to violence. First, Aristotle highlights the somatic and affective nature of anger (the ‘impulse’ and the ‘pain’). Anger is something that is embodied to some extent, and which is likely to translate into some kind of action. For positivist sciences of emotion, this embodied dimension represents the full extent of anger, showing itself in facial and other behaviours, as one of a fixed number of ‘basic emotions’ (Leys, 2017). Angry feelings and behaviour can be studied as objects independently of what explains them or what they intend towards. William James (1884: 190), in his famous somatic theory of emotion, writes we feel ‘angry because we strike’. Anger is something that comes over us as a distinctive state of physiological and behavioural being. By itself, the physical and affective state of anger does not tell us anything about the world. Reduced wholly to various symptoms (such as facial expression and heart rate), anger exists wholly independently of the type of ‘slight’ Aristotle speaks of, or any other type of injustice or harm committed in the past. This allows us to speak of ‘angry behaviour’ as a form of spontaneous violence that is wholly disruptive, rather than representative of 13

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anything. This strips anger of any evaluative or cognitive capacity. Instead, it opens up philosophical, neurological and evolutionary questions about the autonomic nature of our reactions and their physical correlates (Massumi, 1995). But these are assumed to exist independently of conscious and discursive accounts of why we are angry, or what we are angry about. However, Aristotle’s definition draws our attention to a second quality of anger that pulls against this tendency. Anger is typically accompanied by a sense of indignation that something in the past has produced a wrong that needs to be repaid in some way. It includes a desire for retribution, to create some kind of balance between pain suffered and pain repaid. This points to the intentional dimension of anger, which is foregrounded in philosophies which view emotions as ways of acting meaningfully and judgementally towards a goal in the world (Solomon, 2004; Sartre, 2015). The risk, of course, is that angry exchanges can continue indefinitely and escalate if they are not accompanied by a resolution mechanism, in the form of justice and proportionality. It is for this reason that Martha Nussbaum believes societies need transition mechanisms that move them from moral economies of anger (based around desire to repay harm) to those of justice, where a key property of the latter is precisely that it allows us to leave pain and anger behind (Nussbaum, 2016). Nussbaum’s argument is that, if we are serious about achieving some kind of balance for past wrongs and harms, anger is not a reasonable means of achieving this. Repaying a wrong does not, in fact, improve the situation of the wronged party. Only if anger is born out of jealousy (and I want to stop you enjoying what you have) does it achieve what it sets out to. Law, on the other hand, provides us with the physical protection we need from harm, without requiring us to inflict suffering on wrong-​doers ourselves (Nussbaum, 2016: 4). The question of balancing out harms needs, therefore, to be divorced from the somatic and impulsive dimensions of anger, which belong to our physiological make-​up where ‘it derives very likely, from its evolutionary role as a “fight-​or-​flight” mechanism’ (Nussbaum, 2016: 39). For Nussbaum, anger is –​at best –​a type of stunted judicial mechanism, and at worse it is brute violence. Yet, Nussbaum’s negative evaluation of anger rests heavily on a teleological argument, of whether it achieves the outcomes that it purports to seek. Anger does not successfully ‘settle up’ (other than where it is wholly focused on status imbalances), she argues, whereas law does. Against this, Srinivasan has argued that anger can be normatively justified, even when it produces a worse outcome, if it is nevertheless an appropriate response to injustice and oppression (Srinivasan, 2018). We can be justified in our anger, even when our anger makes the situation (including our own) worse. Srinivasan’s argument echoes a long line of feminist political critique, which treats anger as a potentially positive force in bringing oppression to light and 14

Anger, Fast and Slow

resisting it (Lorde, 1981; Holmes, 2004). Recognised as a ‘power emotion’ and an ‘action emotion’, it becomes an indispensable part of political engagement and mobilisation, of a sort that will not simply wait for legal and representational means of moral redress (Schieman, 2006; Demertzis, 2019). There is no guarantee that anger will improve the state of the world, but it can nevertheless perform a type of embodied judgement and disruption of oppressive structures. Anger therefore brings questions of justice into orbit with those of affect, embodiment and violence. As in Jean-​Paul Sartre’s account of emotion, it sees conscious intentions (which have objects in the world) enter a kind of ‘magical’ alliance with unconscious bodily movements (Sartre, 2015: 47). In its optimal form, anger manages to marry justified indignation to bodily action in the world, potentially including violence. But of course, this optimal state may be the exception rather than the rule. It may be that we feel angry for a set of good reasons that we can articulate but not act on, and that we behave angrily elsewhere for no apparent reason at all. For various reasons, the moral quality of anger and the physical response of anger can become detached, and angry behaviour then appears irrational and violent, like a causa sui. ‘Good’ anger is not allergic to violence, but it is at least in touch with moral reasons and memories of past harms. As Hannah Arendt (1970: 64) wrote, ‘rage and violence turn irrational only when they are directed against substitutes’. Part of the problem of anger, as a political phenomenon, is that its value depends on being in the right place at the right time. This is impossible to guarantee, indeed anger that was entirely measured and deliberate would cease to be anger, and become something else (as Nussbaum hopes). There is an intrinsic risk in angry responses, that they might be excessive or harmful to an innocent party, or to the angry person themselves. Angry responses are necessarily extra-​juridical and in some sense self-​legislating. But there is a converse risk, namely that anger gets ‘bottled up’ until no type of release or action is possible, and injustice comes to seem permanent. This points to the chronological dimension of anger that concerns us in this chapter, namely that anger varies in the time that elapses before a reaction occurs. Frederick Douglass noted that if the expression of rage can be delayed somewhat (though not supressed or averted), it allows for an ‘investigation of whatever has caused it’ (Sokoloff, 2014). The extent to which anger successfully balances and fuses claims to justice with embodied action is a question of the speed at which the exchange of recognition and harms takes place. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has famously distinguished ‘thinking fast’ from ‘thinking slow’, where the former ‘operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control’, while the latter ‘allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it [and is] often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and 15

The Politics of Negative Emotions

concentration’ (Kahneman, 2012: 22). Perhaps, therefore, we can speak also of ‘anger fast and slow’, which points to the two potential poles of anger. The former pulls towards an automatic physical response, which cries or lashes out before thought has had time to intrude or establish any kind of delay. This is anger as physiological affective reaction, of the sort that James (1884) describes in ‘What is An Emotion?’, and which Nussbaum appears to have in mind when she speculates that anger has an ‘evolutionary’ function. The latter pulls towards restorative justice, but grants excessive power to memory and mental self-​restraint, such that anger is never released. Neither of these is normatively objectionable in and of itself, save for where they become overbearing and break away from the other pole. A wholly automatic anger is impervious to reasons, while anger that exists solely in the conscious mind becomes melancholic. Borrowing Kahneman’s terms in this way potentially illuminates how anger can and does go wrong: when it becomes too fast and violent on the one hand, and too slow and restrained on the other. The anger currently reshaping politics in liberal democracies is arguably a combination of both.

Slow anger The institutions of law, finance and the market are interlocking ways of establishing a sense of balance in society, that is, of sustaining the belief that scores have been settled. All of them assume that, with the aid of recording mechanisms (such as witness statements and book-​keeping), past, present and future will be woven together in a system of accountability, which levels everything out. It was Nietzsche’s (2013) great insight that ideals of market exchange and of moral exchange share a common origin, in the notion of an indebted subject who would be compelled to pay what they owe, either back to society (in the form of a punishment) or to a creditor (in the form of a repayment). There is something utopian in the idea that all forms of pain, loss and suffering can be successfully captured via formal systems of accountability and repayment. Nietzsche viewed Christian morality as the most all-​ encompassing effort to achieve this, encouraging individuals to believe that all forms of suffering were being recorded in a metaphysical balance sheet, to be repaid and settled in the next life. ‘What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering itself, but the senselessness of it all’, he wrote (2013: 54). By making sense of all suffering, Christianity sought to eradicate indignation, and thereby worldly action. Today, we can point to the surveillance and calculation technologies that subject all of our actions to a constant moral evaluation, on behalf of potential creditors (Lazzarato, 2012). The equally utopian ideal of the ‘spot market’ implies a type of synchronic exchange, in which all forms of mutual obligation are created and 16

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then settled in a single instant, without any form of continuing relationship or ‘externality’. These devices purport to place pain in a moral-​economic grid of calculation and just deserts. Being always extra-​juridical in nature (that is, leaking outside of formal norms and codes) anger points to the inadequacy of such efforts to create an adequate ledger of human suffering over time. In that respect, anger is a vital mode of meta-​critique of systems of evaluation and accountability which are themselves critical in nature (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Boltanski, 2011). Precisely because it emanates from the body as much as from reason, anger is potentially a means of subjecting regimes of denunciation and blame to renunciation and blame. Sloterdijk identifies this moment of extra-​ juridical judgement: ‘When the public order is accused of malfunctioning or of being a part of the problem (we might think of preferential treatment in court proceedings), individuals can take themselves to represent justice as wild judges’ (Sloterdijk, 2012: 65). The difficulty, as Nietzsche and Freud both emphasised, is that dominant systems of accounting, accountability, justice and moral responsibility are all predicated on seeking to channel, rationalise and constrain the expression of injustice and blame. In the process, anger becomes trapped, and turns into something that lacks active embodied expression. For Nietzsche, Christian morality was founded precisely on a renunciation of violent retribution against those it despised, therefore producing a psychology of ressentiment, which repressed the anger and thereby made it impossible to release. Freud’s notion of ‘melancholia’ rests on a similar understanding, namely that individuals incapable of recognising the external source of their suffering (which for Freud was a loss of a loved person or object) would cling on to the suffering instead, and attribute its cause to themselves (Freud, 2005). In both cases, a failure to engage intentionally and meaningfully with the source of suffering (external to oneself) creates a turn inwards, towards repetitive self-​punishment and a refusal to let go of the pain. Pathologies of ressentiment and melancholia are exactly why attempts to eradicate anger, or to rationalise it via mechanisms of law and economics, may ultimately produce a far worse problem that is sustained well beyond the time horizons of the original injury. One lesson of Nietzsche and Freud is that no formal normative system of exchange and accountability is fully adequate to capture and make sense of suffering, and there must be space for a form of self-​legislating, angry denunciation, or else this will get repressed and do even greater harm over time. Scholars of political emotions have argued that ressentiment needs to be distinguished from ordinary resentment, if we are to understand different types of political mobilisation, especially in the age of populism (Salmela and von Scheve, 2017; Demertzis, 2019). Ressentiment is a type of blockage, an 17

The Politics of Negative Emotions

excess of conscience, which gets in the way of political action or expression. Resentment, on the other hand, can be seen as an entirely practical, indeed necessary, political emotion that responds to a perceived wrong of some kind. Resentment is arguably an integral feature of democracy and egalitarianism, inasmuch as it targets the hoarding of privilege and power as bad in and of itself, and not only on utilitarian grounds (Engels, 2015). Ressentiment, by contrast, (like melancholia) turns away from the world of action and denunciation, and towards a feeling of isolated helplessness and shame. Lacking an external object to blame and punish, punishment turns inwards. There are good reasons to suspect that neoliberal ideology and rationality is especially prone to generate these affective states. Neoliberalism seeks to re-​activate subjectivity, but in the particular form of a morally endowed, responsible debtor, who is accountable for the full costs and benefits of all their choices, risks and decisions, both inside and outside of the market (Rose, 1996; Lazzarato, 2012; Cooper, 2017; Feher, 2018). Economic rationality becomes all-​engulfing, emptying society of non-​calculable forms of voice and critique (Foucault, 2008; Brown, 2015; Davies, 2014). This is a heavily moralised vision of individual agency, which combines with extensive infrastructures of surveillance and evaluation, to ensure that suffering always returns to the individual who has earned it by virtue of their character, effort or lack of foresight. Eventually, neoliberalism becomes a moral framework for the allocation of punishment, regardless of utility (Davies, 2016). What is potentially psychologically devastating about neoliberalism is the relentlessness of evaluation that it perpetuates. Liberal governmentality historically witnesses multiple spheres of worth, resting on incommensurable instruments of evaluation (such as ‘social’, ‘economic’ and ‘political’) (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006), operating in tandem with instruments of normative ‘discipline’ that are restricted to specific times and spaces (Foucault, 1991). But neoliberalism is characterised by ‘economic imperialism’, in which all behaviour is judged according to a single measure of monetary cost and benefit, and non-​market activity is judged according to its potential impact on market values (Fine, 2002; Foucault, 2008). Combined with pervasive technologies of control, such as those of social media platforms, there becomes one all-​encompassing measure of worth, without any ‘outside’. Responsibility, especially for debt and past mistakes, becomes overbearing and inescapable, raising the likelihood of some kind of depressive collapse. In this context, populism serves as a potentially healthy re-​activation of political subjectivity and of anger, but only because such things have lain dormant for so long. Magni’s empirical analysis of populist voters finds that they express high levels of anger, combined with low levels of political 18

Anger, Fast and Slow

‘efficacy’: they are indignant about injustice, but have very low confidence that the mechanisms of liberal democracy are adequate to represent or respond to this injustice (Magni, 2017). The anger exists, but not in the form of any action or expression. It is what Hochschild refers to as the ‘deep story’ of perceived endemic injustice, which is experienced but never publicly represented (Hochschild, 2016). Whether or not the populist leader is morally credible in their promise to deliver justice and compensate for past suffering, they are at least willing to denounce the established system (of markets, finance and law) which presently promises to settle things up. Such leaders do not require trust in order to acquire support; they simply need to call out the existing system through which responsibility and suffering is presently distributed (Hahl et al, 2018). The tipping point between liberal hegemony and populist ascendency is very often some form of establishment corruption, which conveys the sense that norms of punishment and repayment do not apply to those who oversee them. Populism is typically defined as a rhetoric that opposes a morally pure ‘people’ against a corrupt ‘elite’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017; Müller, 2017). The ‘elite’ is exposed as having ‘rigged the system’ in its own favour, suggesting that dominant moral-​economic codes are a sham. The financial crisis was an epic example of this, inasmuch as the handlers of risk and credit were exempted from the austere debtor morality that their instruments applied to everyone else. This seems to be a powerful trigger for activating anger. As Arendt observed, ‘if we inquire historically into the causes likely to transform engagés into enragés, it is not injustice that ranks first, but hypocrisy’ (Arendt, 1970: 65). This implies that the enforcers of responsibility are permitted to behave irresponsibly, which simultaneously de-​legitimises formal mechanisms for allocating blame and suffering, and legitimates the informal one of anger. The populist leader seizes such opportunities to convert ressentiment (inner-​ directed rage) into resentment (outer-​directed rage). The passage of time that precedes this reversal slowly adds to the accumulation of anger, in ways that escape formal and public efforts to account for suffering. Sloterdijk refers to the formation of ‘rage potential’ and ‘rage banks’, which build up thanks to the patient deferral of any political action (Sloterdijk, 2012: 60–​ 2). The indebted, depressed subject, who lacks belief in their own efficacy in the world, is manifestly not enraged or even angry. However, we might nevertheless view the sustained suppression of resentment and political anger as a series of deposits in a ‘bank’, which can later be seized in the form of violent political expression. Reflecting on her five-​year ethnography, which concluded in 2016, Hochschild writes ‘looking back at my previous research, I see that the scene had been set for Trump’s rise, like kindling before a match is lit’ (Hochschild, 2016: 221). The passage of time was reflected in the quantity of unreleased rage. 19

The Politics of Negative Emotions

Fast anger ‘Slow anger’ builds up over time, accumulating thanks to the power of human memory, and the felt injustices of the juridical and economic mechanisms which purport to settle scores. It is deposited as a type of ‘externality’, every time a bureaucratic, legal or financial penalty is set, which (inevitably) fails to fully account for the contingencies and complexities of the case. It is remembered and thought about to excess, becoming pathological in the form of melancholia and ressentiment. ‘Fast anger’ suffers from the opposite problem. There is a complete circumvention of thought or memory, and a kind of ecstatic revelling in the present, as if past and future do not exist. The somatic and violent dimensions of anger become everything, and there is a brief liberation from conscious intentions, honesty or reasons. If ‘slow anger’ is a thwarted desire for moral retribution, emanating from the conscious mind and memory, then ‘fast anger’ is closer to an autonomic and physiological action or reaction, that is prior to conscious thought. When it reaches its violent extreme, anger loses its indignant quality (which is what makes it a political emotion) and becomes a kind of indecipherable rage. But in the process, there is a loss of subjectivity or intentionality about the anger, which poses questions about its authenticity as anger. Rather as affect theorists and scientists of facial expression would assume, anger becomes purely behavioural and performative –​a set of recognisable body movements, which do not possess any signification. It illuminates nothing about the world or subjective intention. This loss of interiority is described by Sloterdijk as follows: ‘In the case of pure rage there is no complex inner life, no hidden psychic world, no private secret through which the hero would become understandable to other human beings. Rather, the basic principle is that the inner life of the actor should become wholly manifest and wholly public’ (Sloterdijk, 2012: 9). This type of violent emotion is a limiting case for what can be described as ‘anger’, seeing as any sense of injustice, past harm or retribution has evaporated, and the body becomes autonomous. Anger may not escalate to this level of meaningless rage, but may nevertheless come too quickly and too easily, to the point where it fails to find objects to attach itself to. Instead, it is spewed out in various directions, to an extent that raises doubts as to whether it is meaningful or serious. Melanie Klein’s theory of the paranoid-​schizoid position refers to the tendency to ‘split’ all negative aspects of the self, and project them outwards onto the world, such that everything is deemed bad and oppressive, and the self is beyond reproach. But such a self is very hard to meaningfully engage with at all. Klein describes encountering patients in the paranoid-​schizoid

20

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position, full of anger and resentment, but lacking any real concern with what it was focused on. In one case she writes of a man for whom: very strong feelings of frustration, envy and grievance came to the fore. When I interpreted … that these feelings were directed against the analyst and that he wanted to destroy me, his mood changed abruptly. The tone of his voice became flat, he spoke in a slow expressionless way, and he said that he felt detached from the whole situation. He added that my interpretation seemed correct, but it did not matter. In fact, he no longer had any wishes, and nothing was worth bothering with. (Klein, 1997: 19) Part of his ego had temporarily ‘gone out of existence’, leaving him in a state of ‘detached hostility’ (Klein, 1997). Anger becomes a way of living entirely in the present, as a way of avoiding any reflection or engagement with the past, or one’s own inner psychic life. But for the same reason, it is empty of any signification. This type of hostility banishes memory and, with it, empirical evidence of wrongdoing and harm in the past. It is sheer unaccountability, in the sense that it refuses to take stock of what has happened or to gauge its fairness. Instead, it revels in unfairness and an absence of any measure. Nothing captures this as well as the figure of Donald Trump, whose ecstatic performances exist in a constant state of ‘real time’ and are never inhibited by past statements or facts. Trump’s refusal to be bound by the record (including records of his own words) makes him the perfect vehicle for an affective politics that seeks to eradicate the past as a set of verifiable empirical experiences. Just as Klein describes, Trump’s performances are a form of ‘detached hostility’, which veer between the irate and the ‘flat’, making it impossible to tell if he is really angry, or what he is angry about. Anger of this nature adds to the amount of violence and pain in the world, initiating new transactions of harm. The enraged person becomes what Sloterdijk calls a ‘pain donor’, distributing pain to others who currently lack it. Survey evidence on attitudes of nationalist voters indicates a commitment to ‘authoritarian values’, which translate into greater use of violence across society, in relation to criminals, terror suspects and children (Norris and Inglehart, 2019). Use of torture is viewed positively. While we can speculate about how childhood experiences might forge such attitudes, there is no sense in which these preferences relate to any perceived injustice. Instead, there is simply a view that levels of violence in society are too low, and inhibited by liberal norms and laws. The assumption is not that pain needs repaying, as in a liberal or neoliberal moral economy, just that there should be more of it.

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The Politics of Negative Emotions

For multiple reasons, the internet seems ideally suited to the cultivation of ‘detached hostility’, of a sort that is perpetually acted out, but never fully interrogated or explained. First of all, the massive over-​abundance of information to which we are subjected in the digital age requires us to adopt ‘post-​comprehensive’ techniques of navigation and selection, which sideline semiotic problems of critique, interpretation and representation, in favour of techniques for the grabbing of attention and physiological responses (Andrejevic, 2013). We are constantly subject to techniques of emotional manipulation, which are founded in theories that treat emotion as wholly physiological and behavioural (Davies, 2015; McStay, 2018). Meanwhile, we (wittingly or otherwise) subject others to emotional manipulation in the way we communicate online: it has been shown that tweets with a high level of ‘moral emotion’ travel more virally than those without (Brady et al, 2017). Thus, online interaction becomes a constant cybernetic cycle of stimulus and response, but without pauses in which thought might interrupt autonomic responses. The emotion that is triggered and monitored online is conceived as wholly real time, a data point in an unceasing flow of behaviour, rather than a judgement or intention that relates to the past (Davies, 2017). Twitter exchanges are a case in point. First of all, every Twitter user can feel resentful that they do not get as much attention as those with more followers than them, of which there will always be some (hence journalists receive particular hostility in this domain). Unlike the marketplace or legal system, Twitter has no mechanism for establishing that a distribution of value (in this case, attention) is ‘fair’ and finished. Attention can be gained either through a spontaneous attack on others (trolling) or through some impassioned denunciation of a deep injustice, that is going unrecognised by ‘mainstream’ institutions. Often the two are combined as a type of ‘call-​ out’: an alleged moral bad is shared online, to prompt resentment (and potentially a ‘pile-​on’) against the target. However, attention is never the same thing as recognition, and no matter how much attention might be gained, there is never the satisfaction of being properly understood or heard. Indeed, the more attention there is, the greater the chance of being mis-​represented and mis-​recognised in the scrum. In this context, misunderstanding and selective quotation are not deviations from the communicative norm, but central to the forms of exchange that take place. The pursuit of attention is fundamentally at odds with the pursuit of mutual understanding (Seymour, 2019; Smith, 2019). Twitter is a machine for increasing the overall levels of anger in the world. The problem with this kind of case is its presentism. Where social life is reduced to a cybernetic interplay of attention (the behaviour of brains and eyes) and affective behaviour (emojis, facial movements, expressions of outrage) there is an eradication of self and of memory, meaning that claims 22

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of injustice and harm are reduced to their mere appearance. When Christine Blasey Ford testified to the US Senate in 2018, that then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in 1982, including acute memories and empirical details of the effect it had had on her, Kavanaugh’s response was a demonstration of how ‘slow anger’ can be smothered with ‘fast anger’. He became visibly and physically enraged, wept, lashed out at the Clintons, claimed persecution and declared that he ‘feared for the future’. Reports of the past were rebuffed with pure affective performance in the present. Affect is how the present is first encountered (Berlant, 2011), but for the same reason affective interventions and manipulations can make the present overbearing, and quash other forms of cognition. Speed of reactivity is an essential feature of this mode of anger, as it closes down the possibility of a purposeful and empirically based anger, which takes time to be expressed and heard. Speed and hostility produce a self-​ reinforcing cycle, which is the essential property of the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’. The danger of lawlessness for Hobbes was that it becomes rational to attack others before they attack you: rapid response is everything when it comes to self-​defence. The origins of digital computing lie precisely in the need to accelerate calculation and anticipation to super-​human speeds, in the paranoid context of aerial warfare and nuclear threats (Galison, 1994; Edwards, 1997). Violent conflict tends to accelerate social exchange, and an acceleration of social exchange comes to feel more like conflict (Virilio, 2006). The ‘real-​time’ nature of the 24/​7 media cycle, which removes moments of interruption for critical reflection and recuperation, arguably renders public dialogue closer to a form of combat, in which respondents must rely increasingly on instinct, first impressions and the power of surprise, as is the case in war (Crary, 2013; Davies, 2018). There is no ‘down time’. The ‘flame wars’ and ‘culture wars’ of social media escalate partly because they lack interruption. The anger of Trump, Kavanaugh and Twitter trolls is of a nature that lacks interiority and belongs rather to a type of cyborg that has learnt ‘anger’ as a code. Sartre writes that ‘if emotion is play-​acting, the play is one that we believe in’; however, the ‘detached hostility’ of anger performances struggles to suspend our disbelief (Sartre, 2015: 41). Anger becomes sheer performance, what Lazzarato terms a ‘power sign’, that executes a change, rather than refers to something (Lazzarato, 2014: 86). This can certainly, however, damage the possibility of mutual semiotic comprehension, because it has the advantage of moving at speed. If mutual recognition is necessarily slow (potentially, in the case of psychoanalysis, very slow indeed), then diversion through fury and hostility is extremely fast. It renders shared reality and a shared past impossible to attain, since it does violence to the basic semiotic tools through which human beings can understand one another and recognise others’ experiences as real and meaningful. Misunderstanding 23

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and misrepresentation becomes the normal mode of social exchange, making discourse feel like violence. Fast anger operates without any consciousness of time, but nevertheless leaves a residue over time. Rather than the type of ‘rage bank’ described by Sloterdijk (namely a build-​up of internal resentment that can eventually be converted into political action by the right leader), the staged cybernetic anger of trolls and demagogues produces a slowly more conflicted and violent world. Being wholly expressive and embodied, this is an anger that lacks any normative or interpretive capacity, but has the effect of reducing the political possibilities of normative and interpretive discourse. As Arendt (1970: 80) argued, ‘the practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world’. For the vast majority of us, who lack the power of the angry celebrity, we deposit our staged anger in the ‘banks’ owned by Silicon Valley, where it provides data for the proprietors and their algorithms to learn more about patterns of sentiment and affective behaviour. In the terms of Mark Hansen, this anger should not be understood as ‘feedback’ on past experiences, so much as ‘feed-​forward’ of behavioural responses to be mined and analysed at some future date for some as-​yet unspecified purpose (Hansen, 2015).

Conclusion The analysis presented in this chapter seeks to shed light on the ambivalences of anger, as a way to understand the ambivalent promises and dangers of populism. Anger is political and emancipatory to the extent that it fuses well-​g rounded feelings of injustice and indignation with an embodied capacity and tendency to act and denounce. It brings the thinking mind and the acting body into a type of alliance and rhythm, just as walking and public assembly can do. It also frees politics from the limits of established normativity and established modes of denunciation, bringing both risks and new possibilities. It is possible to imagine a form of populism that seized precisely this mode of anger, speaking simultaneously to the truth of past suffering, and to the impulse to respond and disrupt. Judis (2016) notes that populism can be either ‘diadic’ or ‘triadic’. ‘Diadic’ populism pits ‘the people’ against the ‘elites’ who hold power and privilege, and is typically associated with the Left. This harnessing of anti-​elite resentment is in some ways the essence of democracy (D’Eramo, 2013; Engels, 2015; Mouffe, 2018). ‘Triadic’ populism, associated more with the nationalist right, adds a third party to the moral economy of anger, in the form of the immigrant, refugee, the European Union, Jew or ‘welfare scrounger’. The message of the nationalist is that ‘the people’ have been betrayed by ‘the elites’, who are guilty of prioritising the third party over the real people. Anger and blame therefore descends on both the elite and this foreign minority that has 24

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infiltrated society. The power of the demagogic leader is to take ressentiment that has accumulated over the long term, exploit the economic downturn of the medium term, and then unleash anger on the ‘elites’ and the third party, where the latter may have played no demonstrable role in the harms and wrongs of the past. An excess of memory and moral culpability in the population (manifest as shame) is married to a complete vacuum of interiority on the part of the leader and affective media performances, such that pain can be harnessed and directed against entirely blameless others. In the terms I am using here, ‘triadic’ populism seizes the opportunities presented by the bifurcation of ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ anger. The accumulation of unexpressed, melancholic anger goes unrecognised, until it is suddenly lanced by the injection of a type of attention-​grabbing violence that offers it a cathartic release. This is the collision of two different ideas of agency, which are very unalike, but have both been cultivated under neoliberalism. The first is that of the moralised, responsible self, who can only blame themselves for whatever harms they encounter over time. This is the debtor self, who must constantly demonstrate good character in the eyes of credit scorers, workfare contractors and auditors. This aspect of neoliberalism constantly leaks unaccounted-​for resentment every time an individual is blamed for something that is beyond their control. The second vision of agency is of an asemiotic cyborg self, who is reducible to the performance of neural and technical codes. Such a self is not endowed with moral conscience but is increasingly being mobilised by infrastructures of real-​time stimulus and surveillance, which constitute the platform economy. As the history of the philosophy and science of emotions testifies, anger means very different things, depending on whether one factors in memory, intention and meaning (Leys, 2017). Both are symptoms and causes of prolonged depoliticisation and withdrawal from democratic participation, as seen across liberal democracies from the 1980s onwards (Crouch, 2004; Mair, 2013; Streeck, 2017). Psychologically and psycho-​analytically, democracy offers what neither law nor economics can, which is to publicly represent forms of suffering and harm that do not breach formal rules. It ensures that, even while rules of exchange are in place and upheld, that anger can nevertheless be voiced, heard and understood, to the effect that the system does not capture human pain in its entirety. The depressed self (which turns anger inwards) and the cyborg self (which performs anger as meaningless behaviour) are twin responses to a politics that has radically downgraded the power of intentions and voice. Resentment towards those who seem to still possess public voice and be listened to, such as commentators, experts and cultural elites, grows commensurately with the decline of mass participation in democracy. The question this leaves us with is how we can make the right kind of time for anger, which might also be the basis of a ‘diadic’ populism which 25

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names the source of suffering in a more reasoned and empirically grounded fashion. This might require us to produce new ways of writing, publishing and narrating (or re-​purpose old ones) that can represent experience of harm with enough time-​lag for it to be thought about and understood, but not so much time-​lag that memory has got polluted by melancholia, ressentiment and misleading nostalgia. New ‘utopias of writing’ need imagining (Seymour, 2019). Nixon poses the question in relation to ecological and colonial devastation: How do we bring home –​and bring emotionally to life –​threats that take time to wreak their havoc, threats that never materialize in one spectacular, explosive, cinematic scene? Apprehension is a critical word here, a crossover term that draws together the domains of perception, emotion, and action. To engage slow violence is to confront layered predicaments of apprehension: to apprehend –​to arrest, or at least mitigate –​often imperceptible threat requires rendering them apprehensible to the senses through the work of scientific and imaginative testimony. (Nixon, 2011: 14) For Nixon, this is a task for writers and artists to take up. There are also questions for our media and democratic infrastructures, of how they can be designed in such a way as to let anger be heard and recognised, rather than just be seen as spectacle or detected as behaviour. This is a challenge of pacesetting –​allowing for an anger that is neither too fast nor too slow. Acknowledgements A very early version of this chapter was given as the 2018 Annual Lecture for the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions. I am grateful for the invitation to give that lecture. The lecture and subsequent chapter benefited greatly from comments and suggestions from Ben Gook and Lydia Prior, and I am very grateful to both of them for their help. References Algan, Y., Guriev, S., Pappaioannou, E. and Pasari, E. (2017) The European trust crisis and the rise of populism, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, BPEA Conference Drafts, 7–​8 September. Andrejevic, M. (2013) InfoGlut: How Too Much Information is Changing the Way We Think and Know, Abindgon: Routledge. Arendt, H. (1970) On Violence, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Aristotle (2015) Rhetoric, London: Aeterna Press. Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boltanski, L. (2011) On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, London: Polity. 26

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Boltanski, L. and Thévenot, L. (2006) On Justification: Economies of Worth, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brady, W., Wills, J., Jost, J., Tucker, J. and Bavel, J. (2017) Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28): 7313–​8. Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cooper, M. (2017) Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cossarini, P. and Vallespín, F. (2019) Populism and Passions: Democratic Legitimacy after Austerity, Abingdon: Routledge. Cramer, K.J. (2016) The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Crary, J. (2013) 24/​7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso Books. Crouch, C. (2004) Post-​Democracy, London: Wiley. D’Eramo, M. (2013) Populism and the new oligarchy, New Left Review, 82, Jul–​Aug. Davies, W. (2014) The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition, London: Sage. Davies, W. (2015) The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing, London: Verso. Davies, W. (2016) The new neoliberalism, New Left Review, 101: 121–​34. Davies, W. (2017) How are we now? Real-​time mood-​monitoring as valuation, Journal of Cultural Economy, 10(1): 34–​48. Davies, W. (2018) Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World, London: Jonathan Cape. Davis, M. (2017) The great god Trump and the white working class, Jacobin, 2 July. Demertzis, N. (2013) Emotions in Politics: The Affect Dimension in Political Tension, New York: Springer. Demertzis, N. (2019) Populisms and emotions, in P. Cossarini and F. Vallespin (eds) Populism and Passions: Democratic Legitimacy after Austerity, Abingdon: Routledge. Edwards, P.N. (1997) The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Engels, J. (2015) The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy, State College, PN: Penn State Press. Feher, M. (2018) Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fine, B. (2002) “Economic imperialism”: a view from the periphery, Review of Radical Political Economics, 34(2): 187–​201. Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin. 27

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Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–​79, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Freud, S. (2005) On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, London: Penguin. Galison, P. (1994) The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Wiener and the cybernetic vision, Critical Inquiry, 21(1): 228–​66. Gerbaudo, P. (2019) The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy, London: Pluto. Hahl, O., Kim, M. and Sivan, E.W.Z. (2018) The authentic appeal of the lying demagogue: Proclaiming the deeper truth about political illegitimacy, American Sociological Review, 83(1): 1–​33. Hansen, M. (2015) Feed-​Forward: On The Future Of Twenty-​First-​Century Media, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hochschild, A.R. (2016) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, New York: The New Press. Holmes, M. (2004) Feeling beyond rules: politicizing the sociology of emotion and anger in feminist politics, European Journal of Social Theory, 7(2): 209–​27. James, W. (1884) What is an emotion, Mind, 9(34): 188–​205. Judis, J. (2016) The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, New York, NY: Columbia Global Reports. Kahneman, D. (2012) Thinking, Fast and Slow, London: Penguin UK. Klein, M. (1997) Envy & Gratitude and other works 1946–​1 963, London: Vintage. Lazzarato, M. (2012) The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lazzarato, M. (2014) Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Leys, R. (2017) The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lorde, A. (1981) The uses of anger: women responding to racism, https://​ blackp​ast.org/​1981-​audre-​lorde-​uses-​anger-​women-​res​pond​ing-​rac​ism Lyman, P. (1981) The politics of anger: on silence, ressentiment and political speech, Socialist Review, 11(3): 55–​74. Magni, G. (2017) It’s the emotions, stupid! Anger about the economic crisis, low political efficacy, and support for populist parties, Electoral Studies, 50: 91–​102. doi: 10.1016/​j.electstud.2017.09.014 Mair, P. (2013) Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, London: Verso. Massumi, B. (1995) The autonomy of affect, Cultural Critique, (31): 83. doi: 10.2307/​1354446 McStay, A. (2018) Emotional AI: The Rise of Empathic Media, London: Sage. Miceli, M. and Castelfranchi, C. (2019) Anger and its cousins, Emotion Review, 11(1): 13–​26.

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Mishra, P. (2017) Age of Anger: A History of the Present, London: Penguin. Mouffe, C. (2018) For a Left Populism, London: Verso Books. Mudde, C. and Kaltwasser, C.R. (2017) Populism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Müller, J.-​W. (2017) What Is Populism?, London: Penguin UK. Nietzsche, F. (2013) On the Genealogy of Morals, London: Penguin UK. Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Norris, P. and Inglehart, R. (2019) Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M.C. (2016) Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Payne, K. (2017) The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Changes the Way We Think, Live and Die, London: Hachette. Pettigrew, T. (2017) Social psychological perspectives on Trump supporters, Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 5(1): 107–​16. Phillips, W. (2015) This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rose, N. (1996) The death of the social? Re-​figuring the territory of government, Economy and Society, 25: 327–​5 6. doi: 10.1080/​ 03085149600000018 Salmela, M. and von Scheve, C. (2017) Emotional roots of right-​wing political populism, Social Science Information, 56(4): 567–​95. Sartre, J.-​P. (2015) Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Abingdon: Routledge. Schieman, S. (2006) Anger, in J. Stets and J. Tuner (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, New York: Springer. Seymour, R. (2019) The Twittering Machine, London: The Indigo Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2012) Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, J.E.H. (2019) Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sokoloff, W.W. (2014) Frederick Douglass and the politics of rage, New Political Science, 36(3): 330–​45. Solomon, R. (2004) Emotions, thoughts and feelings: emotions as engagements with the world, in R. Solomon and Q. Solomon (eds) Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers On Emotions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Srinivasan, A. (2018) The aptness of anger, Journal of Political Philosophy, 26(2): 123–​44. Streeck, W. (2017) How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System, London: Verso.

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Virilio, P. (2006) Speed and Politics, Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press. Wahl-​Jorgensen, K. (2018) Media coverage of shifting emotional regimes: Donald Trump’s angry populism, Media, Culture & Society, 40(5): 766–​78.

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2

‘We Will March Side by Side and Demand a Bigger Table’: Anger as Dignity Claim Karen Adkins

Introduction The subtitle of this chapter may read as paradoxical if not outright oxymoronic.1 At first glance, the physical experience of anger seems anything but dignified. When we are angry, our faces flush, our voices move up in both pitch and volume, our language use is more simplistic, we may stammer or swear, we gesticulate wildly; in the most extreme cases, we can stamp around or threaten (if not commit) acts of violence against objects or other creatures. In other words, the experience of anger seems to manifest nothing if not the absence or loss of dignity; our emotions overwhelm our rational brains, and we respond to the world in simplistic if not childish or violent fashions. And yet, I very much mean to defend the idea that some anger, particularly the liberatory anger of those on the margins, has at its core an assertion of personal and political dignity. To be specific, I claim that the use of dignity that is present in feminist political anger is not of the zero-​sum variety (women gain status through men’s loss of status), but as a claim of worth. Proponents of feminist political anger argue that women count too, and women deserve dignity and respect (in employment, in their domestic lives, in their bodily integrity, in their reproductive decisions, and so on). It is the absence of their dignity and recognition that is the injury; their anger is an assertion of presence and a demand for recognition. This demand does not require the lessening of another’s dignity. We can see a version of this dynamic in both individual and collective expressions of anger.2 Let me lay out some defining terms and the map of the argument. I will follow a rough version of Robert Solomon’s definition of anger as 31

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a fundamentally juridical emotion; he describes anger as the ‘register[ing] of displeasure that the world does not obey our expectations’ (Solomon, 1993: 228). Solomon’s description of anger as a juridical emotion is helpful; it indicates the ways in which anger represents rationality and emotionality fused (anger is a judgement). Where I depart from Solomon (and other commentators) is in broadening the definition of anger in at least two respects: first, while I do believe anger always has a target, it seems clear to me that the target of anger is not always a person, contrary to most scholars. Second, I contend that, while anger generally expresses a desire for action, that action is not always or necessarily punishment or revenge (many scholars of anger pin a desire for punishment, down-​ranking, or revenge as the objective of anger). Liberatory anger fits the general definition, but the motivator of the anger is more particular: it stems from an identity of marginalisation, and functions to protest the marginalisation. A woman’s anger at discovering she is paid less than her male colleague with similar qualifications, experience and achievements is liberatory anger –​she is angry because her gender is a justification for discrimination. She may feel anger when someone cuts in front of her in a line, but this anger is almost certainly not liberatory –​she probably does not connect it to her gender. I also differentiate anger from rage; anger is a judgement, whereas rage seems fully emotional. It is hard to see a rational component to rage. Anger can be channelled or directed, because it has rational input; by contrast, rage consumes or overwhelms us.3 Most basically, my argument is that often the expression of anger (particularly when from those who are marginalised) is an expression of dignity. Here, I mean ‘dignity’ in the Kantian sense of an expression of autonomy. Expressions of anger are demands for recognition respect from others –​demands that must occur (and must occur angrily) because of pervasive or violent erasure or disrespect. The crucial element I will return to in this defence of feminist anger is the desire for recognition respect –​ in other words, the audience of anger varies when the aim is recognition respect, as opposed to revenge. With feminist anger, we often find it directed towards fellow women as likelier supports of recognition, as opposed to those who motivate the anger. My defence of anger emerges in part as a response to Martha Nussbaum’s account of anger (2016), which in my view overly personalises anger and thus rids it of liberatory potential. My argument at its core is that if expressions of anger are frequently dignity claims directed at changing the status quo of personal or structural violations of dignity (in which a group’s value is not recognised), then anger cannot be as Nussbaum describes. Expressions of anger are frequently dignity claims directed at changing the status quo of personal or structural violations of dignity. Therefore, anger cannot be as Nussbaum describes, but is instead often liberatory anger.4 To develop this position, I will first explore individual expressions of anger, which 32

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function as a reassertion of bodily integrity or autonomy after its violation. Anger here is key to a recovery or reassertion of self, and it often functions protectively –​as a reassertion of boundaries. I will argue that the absence of anger can be problematic. The discussion of collective expressions of anger is more complicated. Part of this complication is due to the fact that, too often, scholarly critiques of anger take particular expressions of anger (especially when violent or revengeful) to be identical with the emotion in toto. But if, following Bickford (2011), we see the emergence of political anger as evidence of moral and political judgements in contestation (p•1029), liberatory political anger becomes more interesting –​it expresses and protests social and political erasure. It is at its heart an assertion of voice; a move of political expansion, expression, and inclusion –​a demand for more voices in political dialogue. Dignity here is less about protection, and more about expression or extension (of collective voice, identity, demand), which requires and invites a direct response, and in so doing is inherently riskier than individual expressions of anger. These risks are often connected to the manner of its expression and they vary depending on the degree of marginalisation or vulnerability of those expressing the anger (or correlatively, the degree of status and entitlement of those receiving the anger). In this way, anger’s relationship to other emotions (I will briefly discuss contempt and fear) can be charged and precipitous. There are good reasons to be cautious and strategic about ways in which we express our anger, given these complicating factors. In particular, fear is an effective policing or surveillance mechanism that works to limit anger’s expression or its connection to political action. Women cannot take the recognition of their dignity or worth for granted; and in particular, dignity claims can provoke violent responses (Manne, 2018).

Nussbaum’s account of anger In general, anger is held in low esteem by philosophers; even where it is accounted for positively or neutrally, it is rarely seen as having political value.5 I will use Martha Nussbaum’s discussion as my primary touchpoint (2016). Nussbaum’s account of anger limits its utility in part due to its vengeful and narcissistic aspects; she notes that even when anger rightfully identifies a harm or unjust act, it too frequently represents a desire for retribution or status degradation of the offender (2016: 21–​6). Even if the retribution or down-​ranking remains at the status of wish-​fulfilment rather than action, it is still too crude to achieve justice, in Nussbaum’s view; this attitude reduces human relations to a struggle for domination and control, and ‘substitutes one inequality for another’ (Nussbaum, 2016: 29). Nussbaum acutely critiques anger at least in some of its manifestations. However, I think this viewpoint is incomplete, because it reduces human relations and status to a zero-​sum 33

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tussle; I can only gain status if you (at least theoretically) lose it. Control and domination are fixed assets over which we compete. But as Nussbaum herself acknowledges, we can see offences not merely as offences against individuals but against human dignity as such (2016: 27). It seems to me that anger is a more complicated phenomenon than this status-​based argument. Nussbaum’s account of anger is based on her reading of Aristotle. She identifies the major features of anger as a desire for retribution or revenge (actual or imagined) in response to a down-​ranking of status to oneself or someone close to one (Nussbaum, 2016: 17). Her discussion focuses on anger as a result of or leading to ‘status-​injury’ (2016: 21), which implies a specific degradation of what had been an otherwise un-​degraded status. Nussbaum’s arguments on anger are well-​g rounded in ancient texts, particularly Aristotle’s accounts of anger in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric. His understanding of anger (and other emotions) is suffused with the weight of status as a comparative differentiation of others’ worth in an elite society. Aristotle’s list of the conditions that prompt anger includes being disparaged in front of five classes of people: ‘his rivals, people he admires, people he wants to be admired by, people whose good opinion he seeks, people who seek his good opinion’ (Rhetoric b24). All of these classes of people are defined by comparative evaluations that tend to the transactional, people who I judge smarter or more admirable than me, those whose respect or admiration I seek as an asset. This sort of status-​focus dominates Nussbaum’s discussion; while she acknowledges that status injury does not define all manifestations of anger (2016: 21), she does not specifically discuss what those other kinds of manifestations might look like and why they might be worth considering. More to the point, status injury, for Nussbaum, is a conceptual and psychological dead end; those who focus on real or imagined status injuries do so out of ‘narcissistic’ or ‘obsessive’ motivations (2016: 21). I do not want to dispute that some anger absolutely is focused on real or imagined status injuries, and that some of its manifestations are directed at rectifying those injuries. But it seems clear to me that anger is a much more complex emotion. There are two principal limitations to Nussbaum’s account of anger. First, this account of anger reduces it to its target, and presumes that the target is exclusively external and generally personal. Philip Fisher’s restatement of Aristotle makes this clear: ‘This flaring up of anger informs us about how much we care for this person’s regard, and how injured we are by any sign of contempt on his or her part’ (2002: 192, emphasis added). But anger can be directed without care for another’s regard. I am not worried about my self-​regard when I get angry at myself for failing to meet an important deadline; my anger at a traffic jam or an unexpected and significant increase in my property tax is not directed at a person and has nothing to do with somebody’s regard for me.6 Second, this account of anger is primarily individual in nature; it is ill-​suited to accounts of collective anger 34

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(which is, of course, where much political anger manifests). Nussbaum’s language in her account is persistently individual; anger is expressed by a person, towards ‘some other person or thing’ (2016: 18). While Nussbaum’s account of political anger references the fact that groups and collectivities will sometimes use anger as a defence, it is clear from her discussion that she thinks this account is inadequate. Nowhere does she legitimate the idea that a collective can articulate or express anger.

A dignity-​based account of anger I want to suggest that much of the political anger we see and hear reflects not an active degradation of previously healthy status, but a recognition of persistent, systematic and oppressive absence; the idea that a whole set of bodies, voices or identities have been excluded or silenced from political presence and respect. In other words, instead of the comparative and competitive language of zero-​sum status (we fight over comparative status), the language of presence and absence better captures the tenor and purpose of much anger, particularly liberatory anger. Nussbaum seems to presuppose a zero-​sum understanding of anger and its uses towards status.7 Rather, I want to claim, anger is often most directly an expression of self (individually or collective) –​the assertion of an identity that has been ignored or disregarded. To develop this idea, I want to ground it in Stephen Darwall’s account of recognition respect and second-​personal standing (1977, 2004). His account of recognition respect is simple: ‘to have recognition respect for persons is to give proper weight to the fact that they are persons’ (1977: 39). In other words, recognition respect (as opposed to appraisal respect, which is grounded on specific capacities or expertise, and is not necessarily moral) is a Kantian form of respect of a person who has autonomy, someone who is an end in themselves. Darwall’s extension of this idea by developing specific second-​personal reasons for recognition respect helps us see the importance of feminist anger as dignified. Darwall contends that some of our moral claims are agent-​relative claims of dignity, and lodged within a network of relations (2004: 46). When I ask someone to stop manspreading on the bus seat between us, Darwall would say that ‘this is something we can and reasonably do claim or demand of one another, or equivalently, that we are responsible to one another for this forbearance’ (2004: 46–​7). In other words, to make this claim is to assert that my existence should matter at least minimally to the other, that I should be recognised by the other. As Darwall claims, ‘[t]‌o be a person just is to have the authority to address demands as a person to other persons, to be addressed by them, within a community of mutually-​accountable equals’ (2004: 51, emphasis in original). There’s no specific claim to expertise or specific knowledge, rather a basic moral demand of recognition. While technically there’s a loss for my bus-​seat 35

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neighbour if he respects my request –​he loses a small amount of bus-​seat real estate –​in no meaningful sense can this be understood as a loss of status. Further, the premise of mutuality is important; recognition works symmetrically. I should be polite in making my request to stop manspreading, and assume obliviousness rather than malevolence. It is a claim of reciprocal accountability; we ought to matter to one another, and we ought to act as if this is the case. In short, anger can be a demand for recognition from peers that has not been forthcoming. A claim of equal standing, dignity and respect is not made into a vacuum but to a specific community of equals, and it requires mutuality to be upheld. This claim has been hinted at by other writers, including by Aristotle. He defends some manifestations of anger by noting that those who are not angry at the things they should be angry at are thought to be fools, and so are those who are not angry in the right way, at the right time, or with the right persons; for such a man is thought not to feel things nor to be pained by them, and since he does not get angry, he is thought unlikely to defend himself; and to endure being insulted and put up with insult to one’s friends is slavish. (Ethics IV.5, emphasis added) Solomon gestures to a similar idea when he observes that ‘[t]‌he ultimate object of our emotional judgments is always our own sense of personal dignity and self-​esteem’, though here he limits the sense of dignity to interpersonal considerations of status (Solomon, 1993: 129). These accounts are consistent with a defence of liberatory anger, particularly with respect to the idea of anger as a means of defending oneself; it is wrong to put up with repeated insults to one’s humanity or autonomy.8

Anger as an expression of bodily integrity Assertions of dignity through anger look different depending on what prompts them. Here I want to explore the idea that we can become angry as a way of expressing or reclaiming boundaries of selfhood, typically after violation. This is often an individual expression of anger; I am reclaiming or reasserting my body or self that has been violated or disregarded. Fisher describes that material of anger as ‘the will’ (2002: 14); in other words, anger is ultimately an expression of selfhood. To phrase it as simply as possible, anger is a way of saying, ‘I am here. You cannot simply impose yourself on me. You cannot deny my autonomy.’ Reclaiming boundaries of selfhood does not need to be a grandiose act and, indeed, it sometimes occurs after relatively small violations. Feminist conversation around the phenomena of mansplaining and manspreading 36

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indicates this. These are ephemeral social aggressions in both cases, but still aggressions –​they are moments where men physically or verbally disregard the presence of women. And women’s responses to mansplaining and manspreading can vary, but at their core, they are responses that reassert worth and presence. While the previous section’s discussion of manspreading may not sound like much of an example of anger, it is clear that phenomena like manspreading and mansplaining, in part due to their pervasiveness, do provoke anger in women. The #manspreading and #mansplaining hashtags on Twitter each have hundreds of posts of women recounting these everyday experiences, or documenting them, or even (in two separate and amusing cases) generating handy flowcharts so that someone can recognise whether or not they are mansplaining.9 The feeds are rife with expressions of both humour and anger, and tellingly, the anger is directed on the feeds towards other readers (as opposed to a real-​time expression to the manspreader or mansplainer). If we are thinking of the dignity in anger as a bid for mutual recognition, these Twitter feeds represent women getting recognition from each other that they have been violated. In other words, these Twitter feeds represent the persistent invisibility of this anger’s direct expression –​women who express violation too often get dismissed by the objects of their anger, so they redirect their anger to an audience that will recognise and validate their anger. While mansplaining and manspreading are smaller incidences of boundary violation, we see the same two-​stage dynamic in more profound boundary violations such as rape or domestic abuse.10 In particular, rape survivors often characterise the kind of violation of rape as damaging to identity; their very sense of themselves as an autonomous person is attacked by the rape. Susan Brison (2002: 48–​9) describes dissociation from the body both during and after a violent attack, as an immediate way of coping with trauma. Chanel Miller, the woman raped by Brock Turner in 2015, regularly uses language of identity-​alienation or damage in her victim impact statement, saying that she did not ‘want her body anymore’, became isolated and silent after the rape, had ‘no power, no voice’, and that the opposing counsel tried to ‘trick [me] out of my own worth’, and described having to ‘relearn my real name, my identity’ (Miller, 2016: 1, 2, 4, 8).11 There are other references along this line in a relatively brief statement, but the final reference to relearning her own identity most sharply indicates the fullness of the sense of erasure that rape brings with it. The attack is not simply a violent physical and sexual attack but one that ruptures a sense of self, and requires recovery or reconstruction. Equally telling is the timing in these accounts; many of the references in rape or domestic assault literature to a denial or erasure of self are paired with a delayed recognition of anger that comes alongside or precipitates a recovery of self. ‘I have to relearn that I am not fragile, I am capable, I am wholesome, not just livid and weak,’ Miller writes (2016: 9), linking her 37

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experience of anger with her experience of an un-​chosen self and a gruelling and protracted process of reclaiming an identity. While Miller repeatedly writes of a desire to get past her anger, Susan Brison further contextualises this sense of anger, noting that when she finally started to experience anger after her own violent rape it provided her ‘painful shooting signs that I was coming back to life’ (2002: 13). Brison employs an explicitly spatial metaphor in exploring the idea of coming back to life after a violation like rape; ‘[w]‌e have to learn to feel entitled to occupy space, to defend ourselves’ (2002: 14). If aggressions like mansplaining, manspreading, or rape are all ways in which men simply act as if women are not present or worthy of recognition, women’s experience of anger is a basic way in which they can assert presence in the face of this denial of existence, to reclaim the borders and rights of their own bodies and voices. Abby Stein’s study of victims of domestic abuse contends that a delayed demonstration of anger can be a sign of an emerging sense of agency, and can help women survive and leave abusive relationships (2011: 40). Linda Martín Alcoff (2018) gestures to this reversal, noting that for both rape survivors and those who survive childhood abuse, transforming their feelings of grief or shame into anger is therapeutically productive. ‘[F]atalism and resignation can be replaced by empowerment and a sense of possibility’, which crucially sometimes comes from the hearing of others’ stories, rather than the direct reflection on one’s own trauma (Alcoff, 2018: 145). This account of anger fits Alison Jaggar’s concept of anger as an ‘outlaw emotion’, where the emotion is a protective recognition of a situation of ‘coercion, cruelty, injustice, or danger’ (1992: 161). While Jaggar’s account of outlaw emotions sounds simultaneous –​almost as an early-​alert warning of danger –​anger as expressed by rape and abuse victims can often be quite delayed from the situation of cruelty or violence. But the core concept is the same –​the emotion signifies the recognition of self-​protectiveness in the face of injustice. Indeed, the absence or active suppression of anger may be an indicator of a perceived absence of agency or control. Brison observes that for many rape victims (she includes herself in this tally) feeling anger towards an assailant is extremely difficult (2002: 74–​5). She connects it directly to the radical violation of self-​control and agency that rape represents. Leslie Jamison’s stifled anger in a department meeting illustrates similar dynamics. Jamison (2018) presents a daunting report of how many women in her department report sexual harassment from faculty in the last year (more than half) only to have a colleague dismiss the numbers out of hand as groundless. Her anger is self-​directed and stifled: ‘I clenched my fists … [I]‌struggle[d] for words just when I needed them most … [I dug] my nails into my palm’ (2018: 30). She is angry at being silenced and diminished, and of course not just on her own behalf, but on behalf of the women in the department who are collectively dismissed in this moment.12 She writes about how her anger gets 38

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blocked and stifled, refused by those who should be able to receive it –​the stifling of the anger is the stifling of any political response. Soraya Chemaly (2018: 59) reveals why women stifle their anger, noting that women often try to conceal or stifle their anger due to sexist stereotypes about angry women. This ‘risky stoicism’ can have pernicious effects; Chemaly describes women forgoing or delaying medical treatment or care out of a fear of being labelled angry. Stein describes the risk of a ‘volcanic’ expression of rage if a woman suffering domestic violence suppresses it for too long (2011: 40).13 If Brison’s account describes almost a passive numbness to agency through the absence of anger, Chemaly’s and Stein’s arguments go still further; the active suppression of anger is a case of women willing their own lack of agency. Suppressing anger tends to be lauded by scholars and public figures as a sign of our more rational and noble selves, but our angry selves might be telling us something we really need to hear. Protecting oneself in the face of dehumanising treatment sometimes requires extreme action. Lisa Sánchez González describes her tenure fight as a woman of colour in terms that reveal her deep alienation. ‘[Going to the room where my FOIA-​requested materials were collected,] I told myself it was an archive and the person I was researching was dead. That was how I allayed my rage, tucking it away until I arrived each night at the gym, where I furiously pounded out the anger on the treadmill or the punching bag’ (in Matthew, 2016: 88). The only way Sánchez González could do the laborious work of researching her appeal for a racist and sexist tenure denial was by utterly depersonalising the work; she was researching not just a remote person, but a person who did not even inhabit the world. Presuming nonexistence is necessary for her not to experience her anger; once she is done with her daily work, the anger floods back, and she has to find a safe outlet for its expression. This dignity-​b ased argument extends Céline Leboeuf ’s (2018) phenomenological defence of anger at antiblack racism. Utilising work from Frantz Fanon and George Yancy, Leboeuf makes a persuasive case that anger at racism has a constructive function. Specifically, Fanon’s and Yancy’s recognition of their own alienation when they encounter the white gaze14 is an angry recognition, but a productively angry recognition; they recognise the ways in which the white gaze refuses to recognise or see them as fully human (Leboeuf, 2018: 17). This anger is productive; it foments action (not least an active resistance of the white gaze (2018: 22). Leboeuf ’s claim is that the phenomenon of anger at racism functions to mark the absence of recognition. I agree and extend this; liberatory anger also functions positively, as a discrete assertion of self and voice. This assertion of self is present in some of the passages Leboeuf discusses. Yancy’s imagined response to a white woman he encounters in the elevator who protectively clutches her purse is evocative: ‘Miss, I assure you that I am not interested 39

The Politics of Negative Emotions

in your trashy possessions and I especially have no desire to humiliate you through the violence of rape nor are my sexual desires outside my control’ (in Leboeuf, 2018: 23). Yancy’s distinction between the woman’s ‘trashy’ possessions, and his assertion of his self-​control, are both clear markers of identity and autonomy; he is not simply rejecting an objectifying white gaze, but asserting his dignity and humanity in opposition to this gaze. This is not simply a personal claim, but a political claim of dignity. While Yancy’s expression of anger has comparative elements (observing the woman’s ‘trashy’ possessions as of no interest to him), the major claim of the anger to me is one of self-​control and self-​presence. Responding to dehumanisation by angrily demanding recognition is a way of reasserting self or identity.

Anger as assertion of political presence The kind of assertion of identity and integrity that I have just described does not just get expressed individually; collective expressions of anger function to assert political voice or identity. Consider the present chapter’s title, as seen on many signs at Women’s Marches in 2017: ‘We will march side by side and demand a bigger table.’15 ‘Demand’ is the language of anger, impatience, and frustration; a protest of demand is expressing exasperation with the futility of playing nice, asking politely, hoping for recognition. Demanding a ‘bigger table’, as opposed to fighting for a seat in political musical chairs, is a straightforward expectation of recognition and inclusion, and it is a collective, and not zero-​sum, statement. We (as women, as people of colour, as immigrants, as LGBTQ folks) are here; you cannot ignore us, you cannot silence us.16 Most basically, I want to claim that political anger is a dignity claim in the sense that groups are demanding recognition respect; they are announcing their presence, as well as demanding acknowledgement and inclusion in politics. Audre Lorde (1997[1981]), in writing about racism within the women’s movement, captures the distinction between zero-​sum fighting (‘hatred’ in her account) and anger as dignity. ‘Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is the grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.’ Anger here is explicitly about the ways in which identity is diminished or selectively erased, and it demands a political response. She describes the anger she and other women of colour experience in the feminism movement as the anger of ‘exclusion … racial distortions, of silence … betrayal, and coopting’ (Lorde, (1997[1981]): 278). Hatred is oppositional and competitive, and seeks domination –​as such, it is politically counterproductive, per Lorde’s account. To distort, betray or coopt someone is to violate their agency; to use them as a mere means for one’s own ends (as a token, say). Anger marks failures of recognition, and seeks improvement. Lorde’s defence of women’s anger is an assertion of collective will that demands acknowledgement and attention. 40

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This first aspect of political anger is about its response (a response to erasure). We can also differentiate political anger from personal in terms of its target. Nussbaum describes the target of anger as individuals and their status, but in the case of liberatory anger, I contend that the target is often practices or laws, and the objective is change. As Myisha Cherry phrases it, ‘anger is not about revenge but reform’ (2019: 161). Anger is regularly interpreted as negative if not destructive, but Cherry repudiates this in favour of a kind of optimism. An angry demand for change is a bid to a future, and an expectation that things can be better than they are. To be sure, sometimes these dignity claims occur in a context of violation or dismissal. In other words, individuals or members of groups who believe they have been systematically marginalised or denied respect or attrition may express political anger as a response to this denial. Alcoff (2018: 201) describes an anonymous but clearly collective campaign of some women to write the names of rapists on the walls of women’s bathrooms at Brown University in 1990.17 This was clearly a strategy chosen out of frustration; as Alcoff notes, women were angered with the persistent absence of institutional response to charges of sexual assault. The decades-​later list of ‘Shitty Media Men’ is functionally similar to those anonymous bathroom accusations, if more permanent and immediate due to its digital nature.18 These kind of lists, which name specific transgressors and are posted publicly, come close to compatibility with Nussbaum’s account of anger as revenge; there is certainly the potential for real reduction of status for those who are publicly named and shamed. On the one hand, the facts do not attest much in terms of status reduction; of the 72 men named on the Shitty Media Men list, only 11 appear to have suffered any sort of professional harm as a result of the naming (five were fired, six resigned). Crucially, of those 11, the most common response was an apology with no admission of responsibility, as in ‘I’m sorry others found my behavior hurtful, whereas I thought I was just being exuberant/​affectionate’. Only one of the men made a full public acknowledgement of his behaviour. But I would argue that the purpose of these angry lists is what deserves our attention; it seems clear that the intention behind both the bathroom lists and the media list was primarily prophylactic in nature. These lists were written to and for women. Women’s bathrooms (at the time) were women-​only spaces; the media list contains cautions that it represents only rumours, and is never to be shared with a man. Given that whisper networks are a longstanding informal tactic for women to be prepared for possible harassment, it seems pretty straightforward that the intent of the list was so that women working in media would have some knowledge of possible harassers in their workplace.19 In short, the purpose of the lists was not revenge, but simply as a protective tactic for other women. The existence of these networks also points to their secondary function of consciousness 41

The Politics of Negative Emotions

raising. They alert women who might otherwise be unaware that sexual assault and harassment are a problem in these campuses or industries, and that informal whisper networks are the best available means of protecting and informing women, since formal processes are either ineffective or non-​ existent. (The bathroom postings, after all, occurred before most American universities had meaningful Title IX processes for adjudicating claims of sexual assault.) The liberatory anger I see is generally an anger at lack of recognition, voice and process for recognition and adjudication. Myisha Cherry’s call for anger as a demand for reform fits here; while convention tells us that anger leads one to dwell in the past on old grievances, it must not always be the case.

Experience versus expression of anger As part of this discussion, I want to draw a distinction between the experience and the expression of anger, particularly when done collectively.20 I contend that some of the criticisms of anger we see in the philosophical and psychological literature (and there are many) are actually criticisms against either rage or particular expressions of anger (through violence, for instance), as opposed to the experience and value of the emotion itself. The experience of anger is subjective: the physical, emotional and intellectual responses I have to an infuriating scenario or person (my description of myself when someone cuts me off in traffic, say). My expression of anger –​what I do with that anger, how I direct that anger towards others, in ways that are publicly visible –​may vary depending on a whole host of factors (are my children in the car with me, am I running late, is this a stressful day).21 As Bickford (2011: 1029) reminds us, emotions like anger are simultaneously personal and deeply social. Some critiques of anger in the scholarly literature seem directed more at certain kinds of expressions of or responses to anger (say, through violent rhetoric or actions) than simply the basic experience or emotion of anger. Critical discussions of anger are often really critiques of violence or revenge, rather than the emotion itself. Emily Katz Anhalt’s (2017) bracing analysis of anger in ancient Greece, for instance, argues that anger is politically destructive, but generally seems to equate the experience of anger in Greek myths to the specifically violent and vengeful ways in which anger is expressed. In the Greek world, anger generally follows status injuries, and its expression leads to destructive cycles of vengeance (where the destruction is not merely of the person expressing the anger, but sometimes, the city-​state on whose behalf the person acts, such as Hector in the Iliad). But the examples Anhalt examines are invariably ones in which the anger is expressed through violence. There are certainly good reasons to be critical of anger expressions through physical violence or status competition, and Anhalt writes compellingly about the futility of those sorts of competitions, 42

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the tendency of anger in its heat to deny empathy to the person to whom the anger is directed, and the way in which angry vengeance can become destructively addictive. Her analysis should serve as a cautionary note to any argument about anger. But the caution, in my view, applies to how we publicly express the anger, not the validity of the anger itself. This critical analysis does not seem to apply to the anger of a silenced rape victim or a marginalised group asking for political recognition.22 Let me illustrate this with an anecdote. Around ten years ago, residential students on the campus where I work woke up to find racist and anti-​Semitic graffiti on the doors of some of the rooms in which students of colour lived. A small group of faculty organised a ‘speakout’ on the quad to both raise awareness that this sort of hatred was being freely expressed on our campus (if anonymously and at night), and as a way of publicly condemning the hate and committing to a more consistently welcoming campus. Hundreds of people attended the speakout, and many of them spoke powerfully, but one of my colleagues made the statement that most stays in my head. As one of our few faculty members of colour, who had consistently challenged the university to be more inclusive, she expressed her deep anger at the ways in which students of colour, already feeling marginalised on campus, were the ones who were burdened the most. She described her first response to hearing about the graffiti, saying ‘I wanted to burn a fist [the Black Power symbol] into the lawn.’ (Needless to say, this did not occur.) This moment stays with me because the university is endlessly expected to be a site of rational discussion. My colleague spoke in measured tones –​because she had to, so as not to be dismissed as an ‘angry’ colleague –​but she was describing her righteous anger at systematic exclusion and harassment of only a few students. While many faculty and administrators spoke at the event, they mostly spoke in line with their professions and their advanced degrees; they spoke mournfully or philosophically, and connected the current racism to past historical events. My colleague’s comments stood out in part because of their directness, their expression of emotion, and because they were coming from a professor, not a student. Her ability to articulate her anger was politically important. University leadership attended the speakout, publicly expressed shock at the events (sadly but unsurprisingly, these were far from the first instances of public harassment or bigotry on campus), and acknowledged (for the first time in my experience) the destructive effect of this kind of harassment. Their words indicated that they heard what previous speakers had said; they publicly committed to changes at the speakout, and then instituted those changes. In no way can my colleague’s anger be described as violent or vengeful, but it is clearly anger being expressed. It reminds us that how we choose to express and enact our anger is deeply, strategically important. While some public expressions of anger can be powerful and effective, scholars dispute the legitimacy of courtroom uses of anger. Nussbaum rejects 43

The Politics of Negative Emotions

the idea of victim impact statements at trials, in large part because she views them as provoking retribution by stirring up angry emotions (Nussbaum, 2016: 194–​5). They would have an aggravating and disproportionate effect on sentencing, she argues, due to this emotional manipulation. First and most basically, there is good empirical evidence to support Nussbaum’s concern that victim impact statements can have a disproportionate and unequal effect on criminal sentences, particularly in capital cases (see Bendes, 2016: 272, 281). However, at minimum I think it is worth differentiating between the expression of anger in a legal context and in a political context. The kind of anger expressions I am defending are political anger demands for group or class inclusion in political activity. But even here, it is also important to recognise the ways in which some of these legal expressions of anger are at the same time political expressions of anger that are entirely consistent with my account. Sarah Sorial (2016: 303) defends anger in victim impact statements as a performative demand for recognition, and differentiates between institutional recognition (from a court) and community recognition (from a jury as a stand-​in for the community). I want to propose a counter-​interpretation of victim impact statements, consistent with my claim of dignity. Consider the example of rape victim statements. As we have seen, anger is not an automatic expression rape survivors experience and, indeed, it is a difficult emotion for some rape survivors to articulate, because the experience of rape is so dehumanising. As such, the anger of rape survivors can be the hard-​earned result of reclaiming a self that has been damaged. Indeed, when Nussbaum claims that non-​ anger does not always entail non-​violence (as, for instance, in response to violent attacks), she argues that ‘self-​defense is not morally equivalent to aggression, nor is the defense of decent political institutions equivalent to their subversion’ (2016: 219). This is precisely the tenor I see in rape victim impact statements, and more broadly in much liberatory political anger; anger as a form of self-​defence in light of persistent dehumanisation. Victim impact statements serve as the kind of protective reclamation of identity in the face of dehumanisation. This individual protectiveness, when done publicly and formally as in a courtroom, can have a political effect of claiming voice on behalf of a larger group. Consider Chanel Miller’s powerful victim impact statement that she read at Brock Turner’s sentencing. In her memoir, she describes her response to the statement going viral, and her receiving a deluge of emails and cards of support and affirmation from other victims of sexual assault. ‘The statement had created a room, a place for survivors to step into and speak aloud their heaviest truths, to revisit the untouched parts of their past … How do you come after me, when it is all of us?’ (Miller, 2019: 252). While she did not intend her statement to be anything other than a personal account of the brutal effects of her assault, in its publication it becomes a means for assault victims to 44

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claim their shared identity and demand recognition. In this, the protective function of individual angry statements is linked with a collective political assertion of anger. While the experience of anger as a response to injustice is understandable and defensible by this account, differences between victims and aggressors means that sometimes we have to be careful about the means and extent to which we express anger. As I will discuss more in the next section, anger is clearly raced and gendered in its expression. That is to say, some bodies are more entitled to express their anger (even to do so violently or vulgarly), are not punished and may even be socially rewarded for their expressions of anger. Women and people of colour (to take just two identities of many) may experience anger, but have to be careful and strategic in their choice of whether and how to express it.

Anger, contempt, fear Because, by my reckoning, political anger is often an expression of dignity rather than simple revenge, its relationship to contempt and fear is complicated. My (our) anger is a demand for respect that has previously not been given. While respect is not a finite resource, it is indeed sometimes a habitual resource –​we respect those we have always respected, and are sometimes slow to lose respect for someone who acts in a way that would otherwise merit our loss of respect. Correlatively, respect is not automatically given for those who are habitually seen as invisible or mere means only; someone who routinely treats service workers as automata is unlikely to respond to a demand for recognition from their local cashier in a constructive fashion. Thus, political anger and political contempt23 can be related. Fisher observes that ‘Aristotle returns again and again to the fact that we feel anger in response to what we see as contempt, or a sign of contempt’ (2002: 183). If liberatory political anger is sometimes in response to contempt, then its expression may be risky. Openly expressing anger to a public or community that holds you in contempt can be dangerously liberating for those in power; people who ascribe to political contempt may feel more entitled to act violently or aggressively in response to the expression of political anger.24 When marginalised people ask for rights and respect, they often do so from a position of credibility deficit (Fricker, 2007). Thus, to petition the public for recognition or rights by expressing anger can be strategically risky; it can be all too easy to dismiss a group when they express anger. Demanding recognition respect in these circumstances can be perilous; the demand may be met with violence. This is why there is a relationship between anger and fear; the emotions can be present simultaneously, or can foment the other. Lorde (1984[1981]: 131) suggests that ‘[f]‌or women 45

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raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation. In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives depended on the good will of patriarchal power … if we accept our powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us.’ For Lorde, fear functions as a policing mechanism; it keeps our anger in check. Accommodating oppression means being acclimatised to fear; expressing anger negates the identity that was there before, and may destabilise a system. Demanding a change in an untenable situation is deeply risky. The flip side of the gendering and racing of anger is also telling. As I alluded to above, the psychological literature reveals a clear double standard in who is entitled to express their anger. There are persistent disadvantages for women and people of colour in expressing their anger; they are judged more harshly and critically, and can lose influence in deliberations or negotiations through expressions of anger. By contrast, white men can be permitted and even rewarded by public (even violent or vulgar) expressions of anger.25 To that end, there are ways in which collective political anger absolutely can manifest the sort of zero-​sum dynamic Nussbaum describes in her account –​particularly when it is expressed by white men. Christa Hodap’s (2017: 15, 18) analysis of the men’s rights movement, following Michael Kimmel, notes how strongly language around being cheated or denied privilege is bound up within the movement. The idea that women have ‘taken’ privileges or resources from men (by asking for child support, by charging them with rape) is a revenge narrative: a woman took something (privilege) from a man, and the man will reclaim it at her expense. This form of anger is closer to Nussbaum’s account, as it is clear that the anger expressed is not simply in terms of revenge, but at a specific material loss that is identified, however inaccurately, as due to another person or group. Similarly, Jared Sexton’s year immersed in Trump followers and rallies reflects many encounters with white anger of the resentful, zero-​sum character. He observes that Trump supporters lived their lives steeped in unbelievable anger. They were either poor or less rich than they thought they should be … and all they wanted in the fucking world was to blame somebody … Trump wasn’t the cause; he was the disease personified. He was repeating to this group of people, in a voice they’d been dying for, the very thing they’d always wanted to hear. Someone was to blame. (Sexton, 2017: 94) This anger reflects precisely the qualities Nussbaum and Aristotle see. Anger is directed at another person or group, it is associated with a desire for revenge or lowering of status (Sexton documents the increasing threats 46

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of violence and menace in Trump rallies), and the security of the angry person’s status comes only with the lowering of someone else’s status (in this case, people of colour or immigrants who are accused of wrongly taking benefits and privilege away from white voters). Michael Kimmel explicitly uses this language in his analysis of white men’s political anger at their declining economic fortunes: ‘[g]‌ender and racial equality feels like a loss to white men: if ‘they’ gain, ‘we’ lose. In the zero-​sum game, these gains have all been at white men’s expense’ (Kimmel, 2013: 16). Kimmel’s analysis of what he calls an attitude of ‘aggrieved entitlement’ includes multiple examples of this zero-​sum assumption being carried into specific actions (domestic violence, school shooters, workplace mass shooters), where men try to take explicit action to redeem their sense of what they have lost. In her analysis of Tea Party voters in the American South, Arlie Hochschild (2016) articulates a ‘deep story’ of rural white anger that is very much in keeping with this zero-​sum paradigm: Tea Party voters believe that others (people of colour, women, refugees) have ‘cut ahead of you in line’; they have unfairly appropriated scarce resources unavailable to the white rural American (2016: 139). Zero-​sum anger is all too present, and increasingly and dangerously expressed. The kind of surveilling dynamic Lorde (1997[1981]) describes through fear has its disturbing male counterpart in freely expressed anger. Kate Manne (2018) describes misogyny as a policing mechanism; she recounts instances of male aggression, large (domestic abuse, rape, mass murder of women) and small (mansplaining, insults) all as angry and aggressive tactics designed to put women back in their place (2018: 63, 110–​11).

Conclusion While it is clear that many people think of and express anger in zero-​ sum terms focused primarily on status, I contend that anger is a more complicated phenomenon. Both personally and politically, anger can function as an expression of dignity and selfhood, whether protectively or defensively, after a boundary violation, or collectively, as a demand for political recognition and inclusion. In particular, the language of presence/​ absence is more appropriate to understand much political anger from those on the margins, or those who have been violated; anger serves as a way of asserting one’s dignity, and to bid for respect. It is equally clear that public expressions of anger can be dangerous and risky, particularly for those on the margins directing anger at well-​established institutions or structures. While there are risks for women in expressing their political anger, there are correlative risks in their stifling of their personal and political anger. We need to stop dismissing the red faces and raised voices, and listen for the claims being made on us. 47

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Acknowledgements My thanks to Brittany Davis, Debbie Gaensbauer, Lisa Garza, Liz Grassi, Sue Sci, and Rebecca Vartabedian for productive conversations around the use and abuse of anger in public. Thanks also to Dan Degerman for helpful and insightful feedback. Finally, my deepest appreciation to the anonymous reviewer for giving careful and serious comments to the draft, and phrasing the commentary in a profoundly collegial fashion. Notes 1

2

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9 10

The title of this chapter is borrowed from a slogan used in a poster at the Women’s March, displayed in the endpaper of Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad (2018). This use of anger is seen in other liberatory political movements, but I will focus almost entirely on feminist anger in this discussion. It also seems obvious to me that the distinction between anger and rage is not sharp, that anger can become rage (it seems less obvious to me that the reverse happens). Thanks to my anonymous reviewer for helping me phrase the core argument as clearly as possible. For critical discussions of anger, see Nussbaum (2016) and Anhalt (2017). Discussions of anger that give it philosophic merit but limit it from political value include Jaggar (1992), Fisher (2002), and Solomon (1993). See Bickford (2011) for a discussion of anger that attends to its political relevance. One reviewer fairly points out that I maybe should worry about my self-​worth if I regularly miss deadlines! This is a fair point if habitually done (and for the record, I am generally on time with my work), but it seems to me that in isolated instances of tardiness, our principal direction of the anger is not at our self-​regard, but rather the material consequence of the tardiness (if on myself). Another reviewer points out that even in the case of the tax increase, regard may be present –​for instance, initial anger at a tax increase may abate if it is clear that the increase represents a just improvement to standards of living. I agree with this observation, but would contend that anger does not require it. A reviewer raises a concern that Nussbaum’s account is not specifically zero-​sum but merely evaluative. I think that in at least two places, her account of anger is phrased in explicitly zero-​sum fashion, particularly when she captures what she sees as the mistaken thinking of those who succumb to anger. When she describes down-​ranking as ‘reversing positions’ (Nussbaum, 2016: 28), this clearly indicates zero-​sum manoeuvring (status is traded); similarly, what she sees as the error of anger is a failed attempt at status reversal. ‘Doing something to the offender does not bring back dead people, heal a broken limb, or undo a sexual violation. So why do people somehow believe that it does?’ (2016: 21–​ 2). People’s false belief that their vengeful anger will restore their peace of mind, per Nussbaum, seems directly zero-​sum. And to be clear, it seems hard to defend some expressions of anger, particularly those that are expressions of rage, as dignity claims. I do not intend this account of feminist anger to describe all expressions of anger, merely to recover meaning in anger that too often gets dismissed or disregarded. For an illustrative flowchart, see the Appendix. Indeed, the dynamic I describe is apparent in other accounts of trauma and response; Susan Brison (2002) sees similar patterns of trauma experience and recovery in Holocaust survivors, soldiers who see combat, and other survivors of trauma (with perhaps different timetables of response). But since I am focused on feminist anger, I will limit my discussion 48

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11

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to rape and domestic violence survivors. I also note that men are also the victims of rape and domestic violence. Abby Stein finds a similar dynamic in women who are victims of domestic violence, describing dissociation as a coping strategy of disengagement from abuse (2011: 37). It is striking that in Jamison’s very insightful article, she skilfully recounts private or domestic expressions of rage, but that several of her accounts of public anger are of its deliberate suppression and management. Describing Uma Thurman’s red-​carpet comments on Harvey Weinstein after public revelations of his longstanding sexually predatory behaviour, she notes that Thurman’s anger was the story, ‘the raw force of her struggle not to get angry … summoned the force of her anger’ (Jamison, 2018: 30). Women’s public anger is still so unusual that its visible suppression is noteworthy. And I do use ‘rage’ here deliberately; the implication of Stein’s argument is that stifling legitimate anger for too long leads to an explosion of fully emotional and unpredictable rage. I use this term as George Yancy defines it, a combination of ‘poisonous assumptions and bodily perceptual practices … [that see black bodies] as different, deviant, ersatz’ (Yancy, 2013). Fuller versions of the sign begin with the observation that ‘We will not fight other women for one of the limited seats at the table’, which efficiently repudiates zero-​sum approaches to politics. Similarly, in the early era of AIDS activism, the slogan ‘Silence =​death’ was an angry slogan as well as a demand for political recognition and inclusion. Deborah Gould (2009: 91–​100) discusses the political use of anger in the LGBTQ movement in response to the AIDS crisis. I observed this at my own university (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) at the same time. https://​shi​ttym​edia​menl​ist.wordpr​ess.com/​. None of this is to say that there are not significant ethical and legal risks with sharing this sort of information online, per Daniel Solove (2007). The range of behaviour named on the list varies widely, some of it seems not to rise anywhere near the bar of harassment, and the permanence of the list’s preservation means that it is technically always findable in searches for the men’s names. Indeed, the fact that one accuser has filed suit against the creator of the list speaks to these risks. The psychological terms for this distinction are arousal and expression, respectively, but I prefer ‘experience’ to ‘arousal’. Robert Solomon (1993: 100) makes a parallel observation when he notes that emotions like anger may ‘‘erupt’ only in certain isolated moments, but the anger may exist for years, unexpressed and even unrecognized’. Indeed, it is surely relevant that the ancient world Anhalt (2017) analyses so compellingly contains few places for the people to speak on their own behalf in the political realm; the women who were the political prizes in the Trojan War were not citizens but booty, as Anhalt acerbically notes. Political discourse in the ancient world was a conversation between the elites, primarily about their own interests. I understand contempt as an active or hostile form of disrespect. Kate Manne’s description of misogyny’s expression captures this –​the idea that men are entitled to a certain kind of care, and when it is denied or repudiated by women, it is outrageous. ‘Who does she think she is?’ Manne’s hypothetical misogynist asks himself (2018: 107). See for example Thomas (2003), Butz and Plant (2006), and Salerno and Peter-​Hagene (2015). In particular, Butz and Plant’s prediction that perceptions of hostility would have symmetric effects on cooperation (that is to say, that white people would become 49

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nervous about working with black people after hearing of hostility at comparable rates to black people’s nervousness about working with white people after being told of their hostility) was not proven; their data showed that indeed, white participants reported nervousness about working with hostile blacks, but that black people did not (Butz and Plant, 2006: 1071). Butz and Plant conclude that this reflects that worries about being biased are strongly influential to majority group behaviour (2006: 1072); I read this in reverse, as reflecting long-​held coping strategies black people have for working successfully in majority-​white settings.

References Alcoff, L.M. (2018) Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation, Medford: Polity Press. Anhalt, E.K. (2017) Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, New Haven: Yale University Press. Aristotle (2018) The Art of Rhetoric, translated by R. Waterfield, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aristotle (1980) Nicomachean Ethics, translated by D. Ross, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bendes, S. (2016) Share your grief but not your anger: victims and the expression of emotion in criminal justice, in C. Abell and J. Smith (eds) The Expression of Emotion: Philosophical, Psychological, and Legal Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 263–​86. Bickford, S. (2011) Emotion talk and political judgment, The Journal of Politics, 73(4): 1029–​37. Brison, S. (2002) Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Butz, D. and Plant, A. (2006) Perceiving outgroup members as unresponsive: implications for approach-​related emotions, intentions, and behavior, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(6): 1066–​79. Chemaly, S. (2018) Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, New York: Simon & Schuster. Cherry, M. (2019) Love, anger, and racial injustice, in A. Martin (ed) The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy, New York: Routledge, pp 157–​68. Darwall, S. (2004) Respect and the second-​person standpoint, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 78(2): 43–​59. Darwall, S. (1977) Two kinds of respect, Ethics, 88(1): 36–​49. Fisher, P. (2002) The Vehement Passions, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gould, D. (2009) Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hochschild, A.R. (2016) Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, New York: New Press. 50

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Hodap, C. (2017) Men’s Rights, Gender, and Social Media, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Jaggar, A. (1992) Love and knowledge: emotion in feminist epistemology, in A. Jaggar and S. Bordo (eds) Gender/​Body/​Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp 145–​71. Jamison, L. (2018) I used to insist I didn’t get angry. Not anymore, New York Times Magazine, 30 January: 30. Kimmel, M. (2013) Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, New York: Bold Type. Leboeuf, C. (2018) Anger as a political emotion: a phenomenological perspective, in M. Cherry and O. Flanagan (eds) The Moral Psychology of Anger, London: Rowman & Littlefield, pp 15–​29. Lorde, A. (1984[1981]) The uses of anger, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Berkeley: Cross Press:124–​133. Manne, K. (2018) Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matthew, P.A. (ed) (2016) Written/​Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Miller, C. (writing as Emily Doe) (2016) Victim impact statement at State of California v. Brock Allen Turner trial, www.docume​ntcl​oud.org/​docume​ nts/​2852​615-​Stanf​ord-​Vic​tim-​Let​ter-​Imp​act-​Statem​ent-​From.html Miller, C. (2019) Know My Name: A Memoir. New York: Viking. Nussbaum, M. (2016) Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salerno, J. and Peter-​Hagene, L. (2015) One angry woman: anger expression increases influence for men, but decreases influence for women, during group deliberation, Law and Human Behavior, 39(6): 581–​92. Sexton, J.Y. (2017) The People are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage, Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint. Solomon, R. (1993) The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, Indianapolis: Hackett. Solove, D. (2007) The End of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, New Haven: Yale University Press. Sorial, S. (2016) Performing anger to signal injustice: the expression of anger in victim impact statements, in C. Abell and J. Smith (eds) The Expression of Emotion: Philosophical, Psychological, and Legal Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 287–​310. Stein, A. (2011) Engendered self-​states: dissociated affect, social discourse, and the forfeiture of agency in battered women, Psychoanalytic Psychology, 29(1): 34–​58. Thomas, S. (2003) Men’s anger: a phenomenological exploration of its meaning in a middle-​class sample of American men, Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 4(2): 163–​75. 51

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Traister, R. (2018) Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, New York: Simon & Schuster. Yancy, G. (2013) Walking while black in the ‘white gaze’, The New York Times, (Opinionator), 1 September. Appendix: Mansplaining, the flowchart Kim Goodwin, digital designer and author, created one of the flowcharts for mansplaining that went viral. She noted that she did so because multiple male colleagues had asked for guidance; the chart is reproduced in Figure 2.1 https://​twit​ter.com/​kim​good​win/​sta​tus/​1020​0295​7226​6438​657

52

newgenrtpdf

Figure 2.1: Am I mansplaining? Yes

Did she ask you to explain it?

Not mansplaining

No Yes, by a fair amount

53

About the same, or I’m not sure

Would most men with her education and experience already know this?

No

Did you ask if she needed it explained?

Yes I did not ask

Yes; she said no

Probably mansplaining She has more She has more, and is a well-known expert

Definitely mansplaining Just stop talking now

ANGER AS DIGNITY CLAIM

Do you have more relevant experience?

Yes; she said she did

3

Moving between Frustration and Anger Mary Carman

Introduction In February 2019, at the start of the South African academic year, students at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and other institutions around South Africa engaged in a series of protests, some of which carried on throughout 2019. The catalyst for the protests was, along with a lack of affordable accommodation, the threat that returning students with historic debt would not be allowed to register for the academic year. Before then, Wits had been relatively calm with only a few disruptions since the #FeesMustFall protests of 2015 and 2016, when students across the country protested above-​inflation fee increases and, ultimately, demanded that fee-​free tertiary education at public universities be pursued. Part of the motivation for the fee-​free demand was to increase access to tertiary education for qualifying students who would otherwise be excluded by financial factors, in pursuit of meaningful social change and wider social justice (Commission of Inquiry into Higher Education, 2017: 17). Despite apartheid’s ending over 20 years ago, those financially excluded from university are disproportionately black students. So, after waiting decades for the promises of democracy to materialise, frustration among the new generation of South Africans, in what remains a highly unequal society, fed into growing resentment that ‘fertilise[d]‌’ the ‘roots of the revolution’ (Godsell and Chikane, 2016: 59). Then, after the #FeesMustFall protests achieved government commitment to pursuing fee-​free education and the implementation of various measures to ensure that students from impoverished families would not be financially excluded, the reality of historic debt and unaffordable accommodation highlighted how tertiary 54

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education remained inaccessible to many. Students engaged in a new round of protests in 2019. The South African student protests are often discussed in terms of anger, rage and violence, but they illustrate, too, the presence of political frustration. Frustration is widely recognised to be closely connected to many cases and expressions of anger in a political context. The moral anger of working class people that drives the rise of populist movements in the United States (US), United Kingdom and Europe, for instance, is closely related to a sense that their interests are not being represented, that they lack political representation and a vote –​frustration at an inability to make themselves heard (see Hochschild, 2016; Schafer, 2017). What these cases have in common is a desire for some need to be addressed by those in power, growing recognition that the need is not or is only inadequately being addressed, and mounting frustration that not enough is being done. As that frustration mounts, it moves into other emotions like moral anger, as well as open expressions of those emotions, such as through protests. While there is a growing philosophical literature engaging with the moral and political value of anger, especially the moral anger of the oppressed or marginalised in response to kinds of wrongdoing like injustice, frustration has not been engaged with philosophically in any detail. Yet, if we are to develop our understanding of the intricacies of the various forms that anger can take, the centrality of frustration to many cases of anger in a political context provides a prima facie case for attending to frustration carefully. In this chapter, I thus explore whether the prima facie case can in fact yield anything substantial. My focus will be on cases like the student anger where there is a build-​up of frustration as certain needs are continuously only inadequately addressed, if at all. My exploration is in two parts. In the following two sections, I develop a deeper philosophical understanding of the state of frustration, in general, as an affective and intentional state. As will become apparent, frustration is intricately connected to other emotions, like moral anger. This invites us to take a step back from the individual state and adopt a broader narrative of how a build-​up of frustration moves into something like moral anger, which is what I do in the second part of the chapter. Adopting a broader narrative brings out two important aspects to the movement between frustration and moral anger. The first is that the movement involves a transformation from simply responding to some opposition to viewing that opposition as wrongfully imposed by an agent. The second is that, in the cases that are my focus where there is a build-​up of frustration, the movement is a response to a persistent opposition that is compounded by an erosion of trust, confidence and hope within a moral community, which ultimately changes the very nature of the opposition into a form of wrongdoing. Examining the relationship between frustration and moral anger is thus insightful for the purposes of moral philosophy because 55

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it throws into relief how the nature of an opposition can change, along with our responses to it.

Frustration as an affective state What might we be referring to when we talk about ‘frustration’? This is not a throwaway question because we talk about ‘frustration’ in various ways, both in everyday English and in professional disciplines like psychology. We can refer to an external condition or event as a frustration, for instance. We can also use ‘frustration’ to refer to the state that a person is in, which is the person’s reaction to the external conditions or event. It is thus necessary to spend some time describing what this thing we call ‘frustration’ is. I begin by defining the state of frustration as an affective state that arises in response to an opposition. I then argue in the next section that frustration is an intentional state, much like other emotions to which it is intricately connected, such as moral anger. Unlike moral anger, however, frustration is not a reactive attitude. One way we use ‘frustration’ is to refer to an external condition or event that is blocking the implementation of a plan or the attainment of a goal. The heavy traffic, for instance, is a frustration. It is a frustrating event that prevents me from getting home on time. Further, along with provocations and loud noises, frustrations are a kind of aversive event that can produce negative affect in the person (Berkowitz, 1989). Indeed, according to the once-​influential frustration-​aggression hypothesis for human aggression, frustrations and the associated negative affect can give rise to aggressive behaviour (Dollard et al, 1939; Berkowitz, 1989). More recent psychological work on emotions also uses ‘frustration’ in this way, to describe the thwarting of, or imposition on, a person’s goals, where an event of goal frustration is a precursor to or constituent of emotions like anger, annoyance, disappointment, fear, shame or anxiety. We also use ‘frustration’ in another way, to refer to a mental state that we are in. Sitting in traffic when the lights are out, you grind your teeth and rattle the steering wheel. You are not doing so out of anger; you just want to get home and cannot. Here, the heavy traffic is the frustration, the frustrating event, and you yourself are frustrated. Frustration in this second sense is an emotion or, if not a full-​blown emotion, at least a state that we can be in. My focus in this chapter is on this state of frustration, which has two important features that I will now go over: it is an affective state and it is a response to an opposition. The first feature is that the state of frustration is an affective state; it is a feeling state. While there is not much research on the feelings of frustration themselves, as opposed to the various emotions that frustration is involved with, frustration is ‘unpleasant affect’ (Lazarus, 1991: 322). Given the lack 56

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of research on feelings of frustration, we can perhaps reflect on our own experiences, where it seems that frequently, too, frustration involves a feeling of helplessness or a sense of powerlessness –​if the WikiHow page for coping with frustration is anything to go by, at least.1 Relatedly, frustration involves physiological arousal and typically motivates expressive actions, such as rattling the steering wheel in traffic. Moving on from the affective side, a second feature of the state of frustration is that it is a response to some kind of opposition to the attainment of our goals, where that opposition could be something internal to us –​a lack of confidence or skill, say –​or something external to us, such as the heavy traffic. As a response to an opposition, we can make sense of how external conditions and events can be aversive and frustrating: as frustrations, they pose an opposition to the attainment of some desire or goal. The way frustration is a response to an opposition is well developed within an appraisal theoretical approach for emotions, within which much of the contemporary psychological work on anger and frustration that I draw on in this chapter is conducted. According to a general form of the appraisal approach, there are regularities between particular kinds of situations and the components of emotional episodes (where components include changes in appraisal, action tendencies, somatic responses, expressive behaviour and experiences of feelings), and the situations influence the components by way of a cognitive appraisal (Moors, 2014). So, for instance, according to the appraisal theory pioneer Richard Lazarus, frustration is an appraisal component of an emotion; it is ‘the amount of unpleasant affect related to the interruption of ongoing tasks and behaviour or the blocking of a desired goal’ (Lazarus, 1991: 322). Crucially, as Lazarus emphasises, frustration is not simply a causal reaction to an opposition that is the interruption of ongoing tasks or blocking of a desired goal; it is a response to an opposition apprehended as an opposition. When the opposition to our desires and goals is apprehended in a different way, what was simply frustration can turn into other emotions like anxiety, guilt, shame, sadness, envy, jealousy or disgust (1991: 223). More specifically with regard to anger, if the oppositions are apprehended not merely as an opposition or thwarting of goals but as a harm, then non-​moral anger can arise (Miceli and Castelfranchi, 2019: 14). If the opposition is apprehended as a specific kind of harm, namely a wrongdoing, which is an unjustified harm ‘responsibly inflicted by an agent to a victim’, then moral anger, what Maria Miceli and Cristiano Castelfranchi (2019: 14) refer to as resentment, can arise. Now, Lazarus (1991) in fact denies that frustration is an emotion, instead proposing that it is a component appraisal of an emotion, while others suggest that an emotion is a response to frustration but frustration is not itself an emotion (Britt and Janus, 1940). Other theorists, however, do think 57

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of frustration as an emotion, and I am inclined to do so as well (see, for instance, Harmon-​Jones et al, 2017; Ihme et al, 2018). Regardless of what position we adopt, frustration is an affective state that can be difficult to tell apart from other emotions and may, in practice, not actually be something that we can tease out from those emotions. In fact, Bierzynska et al (2015) hypothesise that the reason why frustration has been so little studied, in neuroscience at least, is because it is constituted in varying degrees by other emotions. While I acknowledge the intricate connection of frustration to other emotions, there is nevertheless an important conceptual difference to draw out between frustration and emotions like moral anger, even if in practice frustration is not so cleanly distinguished, a difference I turn to in the following section.

Frustration as an intentional state Frustration is intricately connected to other emotions, raising questions about its status as a distinct emotion. Nevertheless, in this section I argue that frustration is conceptually different to an emotion like moral anger and should be regarded as a distinct affective state. The difference lies in their intentional natures. To show this, I first introduce the intentional nature of emotion and argue that frustration is an intentional state. I then turn to the important difference between frustration and moral anger that arises because of their respective intentional natures, namely that moral anger is a reactive attitude, but frustration is not. In the philosophical literature on emotion, emotions are widely accepted to be intentional states (for discussion, see Deonna and Teroni, 2012: 3–​6). Intentionality, in this sense, is not to do with deliberate and intentional actions. Rather, it is to do with the way in which emotions and other mental states are about or directed at something. We can bring out the aboutness of an emotion by asking questions like, ‘What are you angry about?’ or ‘What are you afraid of?’ For emotions, such questions make sense because anger and fear are indeed about or directed at something. You are angry about the fee increase, or I am afraid of the lion. What an emotion is directed at is its intentional object, where the object of an emotion could be a material object but also an action, event, state of affairs, idea, and so on. If you are angry about the fee increase, for instance, the object of your anger is a state of affairs: the increasing fees. If I am afraid of the lion, the object of my fear is a material object: the lion. An emotion is then about that object as being a certain way, which philosophers typically describe as the emotion’s representing the object as being that way. In moral anger, the fee increase is represented as a wrongdoing. In fear, the lion is represented as frightening. Pure feelings like an itch do not share this intentional nature. When I have an itch on my toe, I cannot ask, ‘What is 58

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my itch about?’ as my itch does not represent my toe as being itchy. It just is itchy. Frustration, as an affective state involving an appraisal, is intentional in this kind of way. As we have seen, frustration is not just a causal reaction to an opposition. It is a response to an opposition as an opposition. As such, frustration is directed at some object –​the heavy traffic, say –​and the object is represented as being a certain way, as an opposition to my wanting to get home on time. When the opposition is represented in a different way, a different emotion arises. For instance, when I realise that I will miss an important deadline because of the traffic, I become angry at the traffic. My anger is still directed at the traffic, but now it is represented as harmful. In both cases, I am responding to the same opposition, the heavy traffic, but the opposition, as the emotion’s object, is represented differently. Then, when another driver dangerously cuts in front of me, my anger turns into moral anger, representing the traffic as a deliberate and unjustified wrongdoing of drivers like that. I may even become angry at the driver rather than the traffic, as an agent behind the wrongdoing. I am still responding to the same opposition, the heavy traffic, but now the object of my anger has shifted to who I take to be behind the opposition, as a wrongdoing. Now, an implication of being intentional is that emotions can be appropriate or inappropriate by being subject to standards of correctness, in terms of whether they accurately represent how things are (Deonna and Teroni, 2012: 6–​7). That is, if moral anger, say, is a response to a wrongdoing like an injustice and is directed at some object represented as a wrongdoing, then that anger can be appropriate or inappropriate by being correct or incorrect, depending on whether the object of anger really is a wrongdoing or an injustice (see Srinivasan, 2018, for such an argument). Further, because of this intentional nature, we can reflect on our emotions and learn something about ourselves and our situations. By reflecting on moral anger, for instance, we could learn that we are in a situation of injustice (see Jaggar, 1989). Similarly, in virtue of being a response to an opposition as an opposition, frustration is about that opposition represented in a certain way. So, frustration can be appropriate or inappropriate by having correctness conditions in terms of whether what it is about really is the case –​that is, whether the object of frustration, such as the heavy traffic, really is an opposition to achieving one’s goals. We can learn, too, from reflecting on our frustration. As Andreas Elpidorou highlights in a discussion of frustration in Jean-​Paul Sartre’s early work: ‘The very presence of frustration is ontologically significant for it reveals something important about our worlds and social existenceK It informs us of when something valuable to us … is outstanding, incomplete, or unachieved’ (Elpidorou, 2017: 256). 59

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Despite being intentional, frustration differs from an emotion like moral anger in its intentional nature because of what it is a response to. Many theorists working on anger, both moral and non-​moral, argue that anger arises from oppositions that are ascribed to intentional and controllable factors. Anger is typically characterised by an appraisal of things being under the control of an agent, for instance (Keltner et al, 1993). At the very least, anger is typically characterised by an appraisal of there being an efficient cause for the harm where, in many cases and especially for moral anger, the appraisal is of an efficient cause as under agential control (Miceli and Castelfranchi, 2019). It is here that an important difference arises: moral anger is a reactive attitude, but frustration is not. As Peter Strawson famously describes them, reactive attitudes like resentment or gratitude are part of our standing in interpersonal relationships with one another. By standing in interpersonal relationships, it matters to us ‘whether the actions of other people … reflect attitudes towards us of goodwill, affection, or esteem on the one hand or contempt, indifference, or malevolence on the other’ (Strawson, 2008: 5–​6). When we undergo a reactive attitude, we react ‘to the good or ill will or indifference of others towards us, as displayed in their attitudes and actions’ (2008: 10–​11). As Strawson discusses, the reactive attitudes are opposed to an objective attitude, where adopting an objective attitude towards another involves seeing the person as a ‘subject’ for ‘treatment’, such as the subject of a social policy to be managed in a certain way. If we are to modify a reactive attitude, one way we can do so is by adopting an objective attitude, in which we ‘view the agent himself in a different light from the light in which we should normally view one who has acted as he has acted’ (2008: 9) –​‘he’s only a child’, we might explain, or ‘That’s purely compulsive behaviour on his part’. Many of our reactive attitudes are part of our standing in a particular type of interpersonal relationship, a moral relationship, where we respond to others as agents within a moral community with moral obligations to ourselves and to others. Moral anger, especially in the form of resentment, is a reactive attitude of this sort. As such, moral anger indicates our standing in moral relationships with others. In contrast, we experience frustration in response to a whole range of frustrating factors, from traffic to computers, that are not part of our standing in interpersonal relationships, let alone moral ones. If we try to modify our frustration, we do not do so by adopting an objective attitude and view the object ‘in a different light from the light in which we should normally view one who has acted as he has acted’, firstly because the object of frustration may not be an agent at all and secondly because we do not necessarily view the frustrating factor as something that has exercised agency or that an agent has deliberately brought about. Even when we do experience frustration in response to a person, we are not reacting to their action or attitude 60

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as indicative of their good or ill will, so much as responding to them or their actions as a subject for treatment. That is, frustration is more like an objective attitude than a reactive one. ‘I’m not angry at you,’ we might say, ‘just frustrated that you decided to do x rather than y.’ ‘Yes, but my hands were tied,’ might be one response, but another could just as easily be, ‘I deliberately chose x: why won’t you respect my agency and get angry for once!’ So, while frustration is an intentional state like an emotion such as moral anger, it is nevertheless importantly different. Moral anger is a reactive attitude, but frustration is not.

Moving between frustration and moral anger In the first part of the chapter, I developed a deeper philosophical understanding of the state of frustration. As we have seen, frustration is an affective and intentional state that is a response to an opposition to the attainment of some goal, where it is a response to an opposition as an opposition. Frustration, however, is not a reactive attitude. Nevertheless, the fact that frustration is intricately connected to other emotions, including reactive attitudes like moral anger, and the fact that frustration is not itself a reactive attitude invite us to take a step back to examine what is going on when frustration moves into moral anger. In this second part of the chapter, I thus analyse the movement between frustration and moral anger to draw out what insights it can provide for the purposes of moral philosophy. In the current section, I show how adopting a broader narrative to examine the movement highlights two aspects to the movement. The first is that the movement between frustration and moral anger is one of transformation, involving a change in apprehension of the same opposition. The second is that, in the kinds of political cases in which I am interested, the opposition is not a one-​off opposition, but is compounded by an erosion of trust, confidence and hope within our moral community. This compounding, I argue, changes the nature of the opposition into a wrongdoing, something which a broader narrative that looks at the relations between frustration and moral anger highlights. In the next section, I turn to assessing how the movement could be appropriate, based on these two aspects. To develop my analysis, I draw on the example of the South African student anger from the opening of the chapter and another example, the formation of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in the US in the late 1980s. The example of the formation of ACT UP, as discussed by James Jasper (2014), neatly brings out the change in apprehension of an opposition in a move between frustration and moral anger, which is why it is useful to introduce it here. ACT UP was formed in the US following a 1986 Supreme Court ruling that upheld a state law criminalising consensual oral and anal sex between adults. As Jasper describes it, the moral shock 61

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within the gay and lesbian community following the ruling ‘produced radical direct action out of the desperate mood that gays and lesbians had initially felt under the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic’ (Jasper, 2014: 14). The preceding ‘desperate mood’ is plausibly one form that frustration can take, with the thwarting of one’s goals and the build-​up of frustration as oppositions remain, with no sign of a solution or reprieve. In the case of ACT UP, the oppositions related to the AIDS epidemic that was decimating the gay and lesbian community in the US in the 1980s with no sign of a cure and with little being done or money being spent by the government to tackle the crisis (Aizenman, 2019). Following the moral shock of the upholding of a law criminalising consensual oral and anal sex between adults, then, ACT UP was formed ‘based on explicit anger when they [the gay and lesbian community] concluded that their own government was against them’ (Jasper, 2014: 210). Jasper describes how, when the movement explicitly adopted anger, they attributed blame to the government, whereby ‘AIDS was no longer an epidemic but a genocide’ (2014: 210). As we have seen, two places where moral anger and frustration differ is with respect to what it is a response to and whether it is a reactive attitude. Frustration is a response to an opposition, whereas moral anger is a response to a wrongdoing; frustration is not a reactive attitude, whereas moral anger is. By adopting a broader narrative and looking at the movement between frustration and moral anger we thus see that the move from frustration into moral anger is a move from apprehending an opposition as just something thwarting one’s goals, to apprehending an opposition as a wrongdoing. So, in moving from a response to an opposition to a response to a wrongdoing, we ascribe agency and a wrong where before we might not have, adopting a reactive attitude that is part of our standing in moral relationships with one another. In this way, frustration transforms into moral anger. The example of ACT UP draws out this transformation strongly: from being an epidemic, AIDS becomes a genocide. Adopting a broader narrative, however, also allows us to look more closely at why there might be such a change in apprehension in the first place, where frustration could transform into anger in at least two ways. In one way, frustration transforms into anger not because the nature of the opposition changes, but because our understanding of the opposition changes to recognise that an agent was wrongfully involved in the opposition all along. In the other way, we respond to a change in the opposition, where it becomes a wrongdoing due to an agential input that might not have been there before. In this second way, the nature of the opposition changes, not just our understanding of it. As I shall now discuss, a broader narrative highlights how, in many cases of political frustration transforming into moral anger, the second is at play. 62

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I am interested in cases of political frustration, like the formation of ACT UP or the South African student anger, where there is a desire for a need to be addressed by those in power, growing recognition that the need is not or is only inadequately being addressed, and mounting frustration that not enough is being done. The frustration mounts, eventually transforming into emotions like moral anger. Sometimes, there might be a catalysing event that brings about the change. Jasper, for instance, uses the ACT UP example to illustrate how a moral shock, like the court ruling, can reignite a protest movement. In the case of the student anger, a fee announcement catalyses expression of anger and protest action, which simmers down until mounting frustration transforms yet again into moral anger following another catalysing event, such as the opening of registration for the academic year. Such a case illustrates how the movement between frustration and moral anger need not be linear; it can be fluid and recursive, nevertheless still involving a change in how a set of oppositions are apprehended. In any event, it is important that the moral anger in such cases is not a response to a one-​off and isolated event. It arises out of a build-​up of frustration in response to oppositions that are compounded by a failure to be addressed. It is useful at this stage to return in more detail to a conception of that important form of interpersonal relationship, a moral relationship, that underpins a reactive attitude like moral anger. As Margaret Urban Walker describes, a ‘moral relationship’ is ‘a certain disposition of people toward each other and the standards they trust, or at least hope, are shared’ (Walker, 2006: 23). For her, morality ‘consists in trust-​based relations anchored on our expectations of one another that require us to take responsibility for what we do or fail to do, and that allow us to call others to account for what they do or fail to do’ (2006: 23). In order to support moral relationships, we require attitudes of confidence in shared standards, trust among each other that we will respond to the shared standards, and hopefulness that those in whom we place our trust are worthy of that trust. Quite plausibly, then, scenarios where there is a build-​up of political frustration are scenarios where our reasonable expectations of one another as members of the same moral community with shared standards are continuously not being met, undermining our confidence, trust and hopefulness, thereby damaging our moral relationships, an important form of interpersonal relationship. The oppositions we face thereby take on an altered status in their contribution to chipping away at our trust-​based relations. The South African student anger illustrates this well, given the racial history and current racial and economic inequalities of the country. It is black students who are disproportionately excluded from university for financial reasons, while others in the same moral community are not harmed 63

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in the same way. The financial inaccessibility is thus one opposition, but it is compounded by being part of a wider set of social injustices within a moral community whose members are not effectively responsive to promoting shared standards across the board in pursuing social change. The financial inaccessibility takes on a new nature as an opposition to achieving social justice that is also wrongdoing through being an instance of failure within a moral community. So, when political frustration mounts and transforms into moral anger, there is movement from a response to an opposition to a response to wrongdoing, a movement from a non-​reactive attitude to a reactive one. As a reactive attitude like moral anger is underpinned by our moral relationships, we can make sense of why there is a shift to a reactive attitude in virtue of the fact that mounting oppositions, which might once have been mere oppositions, start to undermine our confidence in shared standards, our trust, and our hopefulness. In this way, the opposition is compounded and is itself transformed into a form of wrongdoing.

Assessing the movement If both frustration and moral anger are intentional, the movement between them is a movement from one intentional state to another. If both can be assessed for appropriateness in terms of whether they correctly represent how things are, then we can assess whether the movement is itself appropriate in terms of whether it correctly represents a change in either our understanding of an opposition, or in the nature of the opposition itself. What remains, then, is to establish how a movement from frustration to moral anger can be appropriate. In this last section, I critically look at three parts to the movement, thereby developing the analysis that a broader narrative of a political context involving frustration and moral anger can provide. In order to establish whether the movement between frustration and moral anger is appropriate, we must be clear on what the various moving parts are. Consider the example of ACT UP. From despair in response to the AIDS crisis, the despair, understood here as a form of frustration, transforms into moral anger in response to the AIDS crisis, where the AIDS crisis is no longer apprehended as an epidemic but instead as a genocide. But not only is there a change in how the AIDS crisis is apprehended, there is also a change in what the despair and moral anger are directed at: from despair about the AIDS crisis, to anger at the government and its representatives for being behind the genocide. In this example, we can thus draw out at least three parts to the movement, each of which can be assessed for appropriateness. The three parts are: (1) a change in response to the same opposition; (2) a

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change in ascriptions of agency, quite generally; and (3) a change in the object of the emotion. The first part to the movement is a change in response to the same opposition. For example, when frustrated that my internet at work is not working, I respond to the broken internet as posing an obstacle to my attempts at productivity. When I become angry that it is not working, I respond to the broken internet, but this time as a harm. Or, take some examples from the political context like ACT UP and the student anger. Despair and frustration about the AIDS crisis as an opposition to the welfare of the gay and lesbian community in the US in the 1980s transforms into anger in response to the AIDS crisis as a wrongdoing that has been inflicted on that community. Frustration among the new generation of South Africans at the financial inaccessibility of the country’s tertiary institutions as an opposition to achieving social change transforms into anger at the financial inaccessibility as a wrongdoing that harms attempts at achieving social change. This first part to the movement can be assessed in terms of whether the frustration and anger are in fact responses to the same opposition. Frustrated by my lack of internet all day at work, for instance, I might get angry at my partner for forgetting to pick up cat food on the way home. My original frustration was in response to the lack of internet, but my anger is in response to something disconnected, my partner’s forgetfulness. While frustration might be causally connected to my anger by priming me to respond in a high-​arousal way, the frustration is nevertheless incidental to my anger. Even if each of my frustration and anger alone are appropriate, the movement between frustration and anger is not because the connection between the two is incidental. Contrast this with the ACT UP and student anger examples where the anger is a response to the same opposition as the frustration –​the AIDS crisis and financial inaccessibility –​ albeit apprehended in a different way. Here, the move is a change in response to the same opposition and is appropriate in this sense, at the very least. The second part to the movement is a change in ascriptions of agency, quite generally, and the third part is a change in the object of the emotion, which involves ascribing agency to a particular object. These two parts are closely related because, often, in ascribing agency, we ascribe agency to a particular object, which can become the object of our anger. Nevertheless, it is worth keeping them distinct as it is possible to be angry about some set of oppositions without finding a specific agent responsible for them. The second part of the movement, then, is the very general sense of apprehending the oppositions as arising from some agent’s actions, while the third part is a shift to viewing a particular object as the agent. To illustrate the second part, let us go back to my internet example. When frustrated that my internet at work is still down after a day, I get angry that someone broke it or that someone has not fixed it, but I am not angry with any

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specific person. What was just an opposition is now something that some agent, somewhere, has imposed or allowed to continue. Or take the ACT UP example. From frustration at a series of oppositions imposed by the AIDS crisis, there is a change to ascribe agency behind those oppositions. From an epidemic that is beyond anyone’s initiation or control, the AIDS crisis becomes a genocide that some agent has driven. When assessing the appropriateness of this part of the movement, it is necessary to establish if the change in how the opposition is apprehended reflects a genuine failure of agency on behalf of some agent, somewhere, who could or should do something. That is, if the movement is to be appropriate, there must be a sense in which the opposition to which we are responding can genuinely have been imposed by an agent. If, for instance, the internet was down because a rat chewed through the network cables, then my anger would be inappropriate: no one deliberately ‘broke’ the internet. If I come to learn that the rat was released by a wily saboteur for precisely this purpose, however, then my anger could be appropriate. Here, the move into anger involves my coming to recognise that an agent was involved in a meaningful way in the opposition all along. What about a political context? Is it appropriate to view the AIDS crisis as a genocide? Or, in a case like the student anger in response to the inaccessibility of the universities, where the reasons behind the inaccessibility are diverse and structural, is it appropriate to view the inaccessibility as the result of an agential cause? At this stage, we need to return to the broader narrative. These examples, remember, are not examples of anger in response to one-​off instances of opposition. They are examples of a desire for some need to be addressed by those in power, growing recognition that the need is not or is only inadequately being addressed, and mounting frustration that not enough is being done. The move into anger after a build-​up of frustration in such a case, then, is a response to an opposition that is being compounded by a failure to address it. This suggests that we are not just recognising an agential involvement that was always there, but that the nature of the opposition is itself changing. In order to get to grips with whether the nature of the opposition is changing and thus that a movement into another emotion is appropriate, we need to bring in the context of the moral relationships that underpin reactive attitudes like moral anger. Let us return to the example of the student anger with a bit more detail to flesh out how this might look. The FeesMustFall protests kicked off in October 2015 when Wits and other universities around the country announced above-​inflation fee increases for 2016. In response to the protest action and following consultations, the state president announced that there would be no fee increase for 2016. Protests resurged in 2016 when fee increases were announced for 2017. Nevertheless, steps were put into 66

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place to alleviate the financial burden facing many students, including the expansion of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) and the ruling party actively pursuing a policy of fee-​free education for qualifying students. The management team at institutions like Wits acknowledged the challenges posed by student funding and drafted pledges to work towards free tertiary-​level education. (For a sample of statements, see Nzimande, 2016; Wits University Senior Executive Team, 2016; SABC News, 2018; Ramaphosa, 2019.) After agreements were reached, 2017 and 2018 passed in relative calm, at Wits at least. A solution and relevant actors had been identified and time given for progress to be made. Frustration at the lack of success of those in power to effect change, as an objective attitude, need not yet amount to finding them engaged in a wrongdoing. After all, one can recognise the difficulty of the task at hand and still be frustrated. Nevertheless, as promises were not met satisfactorily from one year to the next, frustration again mounted as those actors who were now held responsible for tackling the oppositions failed to do so, and eventually surged into expressions of anger in February 2019, when protests at Wits and elsewhere erupted after students with historic debt faced not being able to register for the year, along with an inept NSFAS, a lack of affordable accommodation and, in general, a perceived lack of will to act on promises to effect meaningful change. The students’ expectations that efforts would be undertaken to make tertiary education financially accessible in such a context would seem reasonable, given the explicit commitment, actions and precedent set by university executives and representatives of the government, such as the state president and the minister of higher education. Yet, those expectations were repeatedly let down or inadequately met by those in power. If reasonable expectations are being dashed by members of your moral community, the trust-​based relations anchored to them suffer. As frustration builds, confidence in shared standards erodes, as does trust that others will respond to those standards, and hopefulness that those who we trust are worthy of that trust. In a context of promoting trust and confidence in shared standards, then, a failure to adequately address the original opposition when one is reasonably being held responsible for doing so compounds the opposition by damaging trust, confidence and hope, thereby changing its very nature. In this way, the compounding of the opposition is something that can reasonably arise from the actions and inactions of agents, without saying who, exactly, is doing what. As such, a transformation from frustration into anger and the associated change in apprehension from a non-​agential opposition to an agential opposition, quite generally, can be appropriate because it is a movement that is brought about by the actions and inactions of others in your moral community. Similarly, in the ACT UP example, there are quite plausibly commitments to shared standards in virtue of being citizens of a democratic country like 67

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the US, along with reasonable expectations that those in power have a responsibility to promote these standards. Part of those shared standards are the wellbeing of all citizens, yet one class of citizen suffers disproportionately in the AIDS crisis. Even so, the government, through its representatives such as the Supreme Court justices, actively compounds the harms facing those citizens. In a context of having reasonable expectations of those in a position of power, as well as a context of promoting trust and confidence in shared standards, again, the opposition is compounded by an erosion of trust, confidence and hope due to the actions and inactions of those in the same moral community. The third part to the movement is a change in the object of the emotion and is closely related to the second part. On the first day with no internet, for instance, I am frustrated that I am not able to conduct internet work; the object of my frustration is the broken internet, represented as an opposition to my being productive. But on the third day when I eventually call the support centre, my anger is directed at the technicians for not yet fixing the network. The object of my anger is now the technicians, who I apprehend as being the agents behind a wrongdoing, the continuing broken internet. The same goes for political frustration where there can also be a shift in object: from frustration at the oppositions, such as those imposed by the AIDS crisis, there is anger at a particular object, the government, who is now seen as engaging in genocide. The government, as an institutional agent, could be the particular object of anger, but specific individuals in their capacity as representatives and decision makers of the institution can be targeted, such as the Supreme Court justices or the president. Similarly, from frustration at the inaccessibility of the universities, there is anger at the government and university management for failing to make the universities accessible. Here, too, specific individuals may be the objects of anger, such as the minister of higher education or the vice chancellor of a university, in their capacity as representatives and decision makers of the government and university, respectively. This change in object can also be assessed for appropriateness, this time in terms of whether the object of the anger can really be seen to be responsible for the oppositions in some way. Whether an object of anger in a political context is appropriate, however, can be hard to pin down, especially anger in response to structural wrongs, where anger can be about the wrongs without there being clear agents behind those wrongs. Certain institutional agents, like the government or university management, or even the individual officials representing the institution, can become the objects of anger despite their not being directly responsible for the wrongs. In the case of ACT UP, for instance, the anger of the protest movement had a clear object, the US government and its representatives, even though the oppositions imposed by the AIDS crisis were not directly imposed by 68

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the government or its representatives. Recognising and understanding the involvement of agency that has been present all along, however, is only one way the transformation can happen. A second way is if the nature of the opposition itself changes, where we can then ask if the object of anger was involved in the compounding of opposition in such a way that they can reasonably be held responsible for its becoming a wrongdoing. A broader narrative of frustration and anger within a context of moral relationships throws into relief how the situation can be more complex in just this way. In a democratic country like the US, the government and its representatives can be reasonably expected to look after its citizens. If these expectations are reasonable then, when a certain sector of the population is already marginalised and bearing the brunt of an epidemic like AIDS, and when comparatively little is being done or money being spent to tackle the AIDS crisis by those in power, a court ruling that further harms that community can undermine confidence in shared standards, such as those upheld by a democratic state and its relations to its citizens, trust among each other that we will respond to the shared standards, and hopefulness that those in whom we place our trust are worthy of that trust. In an explicit act that compounds the oppositions being faced by undermining confidence and trust, the government and its representatives can be an appropriate object of anger. This broader narrative of frustration and anger within a context of a breakdown of moral relations helps us to identify how anger in such a case can be appropriate, beyond simply looking at who is directly responsible for a particular opposition. What about the example of the anger expressed in the student protests? While anger was directed at a range of objects, one of those objects among protesters at Wits was the university management for failing to be sufficiently responsive to the student demands, and particularly the vice chancellor. As the Wits Student Representative Council (SRC) tweeted at the beginning of the resurge in protests in February 2019, ‘The frustration felt by students at the hand of management mandated the SRC to take up action in the form of mobilisationK’ (Wits SRC [@Wits_​SRC], 2019). But as the vice chancellor of Wits highlights, the above-​inflation fee increase announced in 2015 that led to the first round of protests was due to a lack of state subsidies for the public universities and, in principle, vice chancellors and university management around the country were on-​board with student ideals but hamstrung by the practicalities of running an academic institution (Habib, 2019). Given the financial demands of fee-​free education and the financial reality of the various universities, the hands of the university management were genuinely tied, raising a challenge to whether they were appropriate objects of the anger. A response from a management team highlighting the structural causes behind the opposition is a means of denying agency for the oppositions, and rejecting their being proper objects of anger. 69

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Nevertheless, we are looking at a build-​up of frustration within a context of our standing in moral relationships, and where denying agency for the original opposition is not necessarily sufficient for denying agency for the compounded opposition. In response to initial challenges of anger, university management released statements of commitment in favour of fee-​free education and recognition of the financial hardships facing many students. Students could have a reasonable expectation that the management was committed to shared standards revolving around the pursuit of social justice. Nevertheless, each year when a new challenge arises, the institutional response tends along the lines of reiterating commitment to the cause while pointing out that addressing the challenge requires systemic change beyond the capacity of the institution –​denying agency. While the structural nature of the problem may be the unfortunate truth, such denials of agency nevertheless chip away at confidence in those shared standards, shaking trust that others in our moral communities will respond to the shared standards, and questions the hopefulness that those in whom we place our trust are worthy of that trust. In a situation of mounting political frustration that undermines trust in each other, the challenge is not only to tackle whatever the original opposition is. It is to rebuild or sustain those trust-​based moral relationships. When assessing when the object of anger is an appropriate object, we thus cannot just look at who might be responsible for the original opposition, such as the inaccessibility of the universities, but also at how that opposition is compounded into a wrongdoing by a breakdown of trust and confidence in a joint pursuit to tackle it. And here we might find that the object of anger, such as the university management or vice chancellor, is an appropriate object because of other actions that compound the opposition and undermine that trust and confidence, such as prioritising the financial and academic wellbeing of the university as a whole. This, of course, raises important questions about what actions would avoid undermining trust and confidence and, given other constraints, the same actions could still be chosen as the best way forward. The analysis offered here is not aimed at a critique of those chosen actions, only as an assessment of whether an object of anger is an appropriate object. And, as part of a moral community with shared commitments and standards, an object of anger like the members of university management could still be an appropriate object, even if their hands are legitimately tied, because of their being committed to shared standards within the same moral community, a commitment that certain of their other actions nevertheless undermine.

Conclusion Many cases of political anger and expressions of political anger centrally involve frustration, where typically there is a desire for some need to be 70

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addressed by those in power, growing recognition that the need is not or is only inadequately being addressed, and mounting frustration that not enough is being done. The frustration mounts, eventually moving into other emotions like moral anger. Despite this centrality, frustration has not been engaged with philosophically in any detail, even though attending to frustration could increase our understanding of the intricacies of the various forms that anger can take in a political context. I thus offered a deeper philosophical understanding of frustration, arguing that, while frustration is an intentional state in response to an opposition as an opposition, it is not a reactive attitude. This has important implications for moral philosophy because frustration is intricately connected to a range of other emotions, including a reactive attitude like moral anger, inviting us to adopt a broader narrative of how a build-​up of frustration moves into something like moral anger in a typical political context. Adopting a broader narrative, I argue, brings out two important aspects to the movement between frustration and moral anger. First, the movement involves a transformation from simply responding to some opposition to viewing that opposition as imposed by an agent; second, in cases where there is a build-​up of frustration, the movement is a response to a persistent opposition that is compounded by an erosion of trust, confidence and hope within a moral community, thereby changing the nature of the opposition into a form of wrongdoing. These two aspects allow us to examine the relationship between frustration and moral anger in a way that draws out insights for moral philosophy because it throws into relief how the very nature of an opposition can change, thereby providing us with a rich analysis of moral anger arising out of frustration. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the organisers and participants of the Emotions and Punishment conference held at the University of Kent in June 2019 for their insights and input on a previous version of this chapter. I would also like to thank Dan Degerman, Paul Muldoon and Samantha Vice for their time and helpful comments. Note 1

www.wiki​how.com/​Cope-​With-​Frus​trat​ion

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Moors, A. (2014) Flavors of appraisal theories of emotion, Emotion Review, 6(4): 303–​7. Nzimande, B. (2016) 2017 University fees media briefing, SA Gov Speeches, www.gov.za/​speec​hes/​minis​ter-​blade-​nzima​nde-​2017-​uni​vers​ity-​fees-​ media-​brief​i ng-​19-​sep-​2016-​0000 Ramaphosa, C. (2019) The ANC’s 2019 election manifesto, www.poli​tics​ web.co.za/​docume​nts/​the-​ancs-​2019-​elect​ion-​manife​sto SABC News (2018) Ramaphosa notes ANC commitment to free higher education, 13 January, www.sabcn​ews.com/​sabcn​ews/​ramaph​osa-​notes-​ anc-​com​mitm​ent-​free-​hig​her-​educat​ion/​ Schafer, A. (2017) Return with a vengeance: working class anger and the rise of populism, https://​items.ssrc.org/​democra​ cy-p​ ape​ rs/r​ etu ​ rn-w ​ ith-a​ -​ vengea​nce-​work​ing-​class-​anger-​and-​the-​r ise-​of-​popul​ism/​ Srinivasan, A. (2018) The aptness of anger, Journal of Political Philosophy, 26(2): 123–​44. Strawson, P.F. (2008) Freedom and resentment, in P.F. Strawson Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, Oxford: Routledge, pp 1–​28. Walker, M.U. (2006) Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wits SRC (@Wits_​SRC) (2019) The frustration felt by students at the hand of management mandated the SRC to take up action in the form of mobilization, in order to get management to agree to the concessions that they had once agreed but reneged on., Twitter, 5 February. Wits University Senior Executive Team (2016) Wits fee increase for 2017, 5 December, www.wits.ac.za/​news/​lat​est-​news/g​ ener​ al-n ​ ews/2​ 016/f​ eesm​ ustf​all2​016/​sta​teme​nts/​wits-​fee-​incre​ase-​for-​2017.html

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The Resentment–​Ressentiment Complex: A Critique of Liberal Discourse Sjoerd van Tuinen

Introduction Part of our ideological heritage is a widespread contemporary discourse in social and political theory that distinguishes ‘resentment’ from ‘ressentiment’, defending the former and dismissing the latter (Rorty, 2000; Barbalet, 2001; Meltzer and Musolf, 2002; Demertzis, 2006; MacLachlan, 2010; Murphy, 2012; Darwall, 2013; Fassin, 2013; Rushdy, 2018). While the definitions of these terms vary, their use is more constant. The emphasis on resentment is coterminous with a generally progressive stance on the passions that react against forms of social injustice, albeit with an ugly face. At stake is, for example, the defence of moral indignation of working and middle class voices over the exorbitant bonuses for the managerial elite, or the exoneration of black rage over entrenched racism. In contrast, the emphasis on ressentiment stems from a more conservative point of view, in which inequality is seen as a fact of nature and passionate resistance in the name of justice is portrayed as mendacious and harmful. The aim is to defend liberal democracy against inappropriate or unnecessarily polarising expressions of anger. Democracy would require ‘good losers’ willing to self-​sacrifice in the interest of socio-​political stability. At the same time, liberal and conservative voices tend to agree in one respect: whereas resentment is deemed essential for democratic practice, ressentiment is considered its nemesis. The former is the felt need to remedy wrongs; the latter is a toxic brew of botched revenge, humiliation, backbiting and spite. While resentment can be legitimated as long as it is instrumental in guarding shared norms of justice, there is always the threat of its ‘sliding’ into a self-​authorising ressentiment. For instance, Michael Ure (2015) states that resentment is a necessary, but insufficient, virtue of democratic practices 74

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that are committed to mutual respect, equality and justice. For these practices to persist, legitimate grievances must at all cost be prevented from getting stuck in ‘a radical envy and a deep hatred of existence that identifies virtue with victimhood’: ‘Resentment is the raw material; ressentiment is a lack of hygiene’, and hence we ‘need to understand how socio-​political resentment can slide into ontological ressentiment in order to avoid totalitarian or perfectionist politics’ (Ure, 2015: 601, 610). The problem with this distinction is that it is mostly theoretical, and that it presupposes a highly idealised and universally shared conception of the political realm –​indeed, a ‘totalitarian or perfectionist’ one. In reality, I argue, the slide is impossible to localise and, as soon it becomes topical, has already occurred. Elisabetta Brighi (2016) observes a ‘relative hegemony’ of ressentiment due to recent failures in the politics of recognition, for example among Muslims who are treated as less than full members of postcolonial societies. She asks, how are we ‘to cope with failure while holding on to emancipatory, counter-​ hegemonic, and self-​affirming political practices’ instead of merely solidifying established identities? Yet acknowledging this difficulty does not keep her from defending the moral value of resentment in response to failures of justice. Focusing on the Paris terror attacks of 2015, she raises the apparently unsettling but ultimately self-​referential question: ‘Is the current wave of global terrorism fueled by resentment or ressentiment?’ (Brighi, 2016: 427). Rather than seeking to give a new answer to this question or providing criteria that would contribute to an ever more refined distinction between resentment and ressentiment, what needs to be investigated is the function of such a differentiating exercise. Why is it necessary to constantly protect the socio-​political order from the risk of moral corruption in these terms, and for whom? Far from wanting to downplay the social and political significance of collective sensibilities, the focus here is on the attempts to interpret and legitimate some at the cost of others. Invariably, one of the main authorities invoked in these attempts is Nietzsche. This is all the more surprising as Nietzsche never actually made any distinction between resentment and ressentiment. On the contrary, he would arguably have denied its relevance to his own understanding of justice. It is therefore by way of a historical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment in its cultural and socio-​political context that a critique of the mainstream discourse on the reactive attitudes becomes possible. At stake are the principle and possibility of politics in the age of the ‘domestication’ (Lyman, 2004) of moral sensibilities. I will argue that the many attempts at distinguishing resentment from ressentiment frame these attitudes in the form of a false problem. This problem not only incorporates some reactive sentiments at the cost of a depoliticisation of others, but also obscures the conditions of political action and judgement as such. 75

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The argument will proceed in two steps. First, a historical distinction is made between three problems that play a key role in the evaluation of reactive attitudes, those of their rationality, their authenticity and their justness. It is then argued, by way of a critique of the distinction between moderate and excessive resentment and a deconstruction of the distinction between unreflective and self-​conscious ressentiment respectively, that the first two problems are ill-​posed. These problems concern differences in degree, and are therefore always prone to the relativism of what, retrospectively, can be called ‘the resentment–​ressentiment complex’; however, the true problem with retributive passions concerns a difference in kind, not between resentment and ressentiment, but between active affects and passive or reactive affects. This ‘demoralisation’ of the problem of reactive attitudes by means of a historico-​systematic reorientation leads to the concluding claim that while moral sentiments and political actions are always entangled, only the latter constitute the ground of social justice.

The problems of rationality and authenticity A first moral ground for the contemporary distinction between resentment and ressentiment is usually found in classical liberal theory, namely in the difference between a reasonable resentment and a self-​legitimating ressentiment. Resentment is defined as a retributive feeling of injustice, which is essential for our mutual recognition as equal citizens. Because benevolence does not suffice in the pursuit of justice, Adam Smith argues that resentment is necessary for demanding redress, even if it is also ‘the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind’ (Smith, 2009: 47). While ‘harsh and turbulent’, his contemporary Joseph Butler finds it to be ‘one of the common bonds, by which society is held together’ (Butler, 2017: 70). The problem is that the gratification of resentment has an intrinsic tendency towards excess. Under the aegis of moral justification, it can quickly become self-​defeating and a threat to social life, where it may trigger counter-​ resentments. In order for true justice to exist, and for resentment not to deteriorate into rancorous memory, both Smith and Butler emphasise that revenge should never be more than a means to an end. It is a necessary evil that only becomes morally good when balanced with our natural pity and compassion by deliberative reason. The challenge of resentment therefore lies in its moderation and its proportionate acting out. This moral uprightness as well as the tendency to action are lacking in ressentiment. As a category in moral and political discourse, ressentiment has gradually come to absorb the function and significance of resentment, such that resentment’s negative and irrational connotations now overshadow its positive and more reasonable aspects. This is due to Nietzsche’s conceptualisation, but it is also the consequence of a historical shift in public 76

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culture. The rise of liberalism coincides with the rise of civil society and a new public sphere in 18th century Europe. Together with indignation, resentment could be regarded as the reactive but necessary counterpart to the enthusiasm that formed the impassioned drive of the French Revolution, notwithstanding its role in the terror that followed. In the following, more complacent period, however, the term acquired the additional connotation of a suspicion about the prevailing humanism. It was not only the notion that passion can be subordinate to reason that became questionable, the authenticity of the passions themselves was at stake. In The Present Age (2002 [1846]), Søren Kierkegaard complains that the public culture of courageous speech and concrete action had dissolved into lethargy. Comparing his own time with the prior ‘revolutionary age’ characterised by a certain revelatory rawness, he diagnoses a ‘passionless, sedentary, reflective age’ dominated by ‘ressentiment and abstract thought’ (Kierkegaard, 2002: 63, 96, 33). The struggles for freedom and equality immediately preceding the time of Kierkegaard could only be experienced evasively, through the lens of scepticism and cowardice, as if they consisted of nothing but satire. Whereas the revolutionary age was characterised by exemplary deeds, and pre-​modern times were known for the fearlessness of religious faith, in his own age nobody was capable of devotion to anything beyond their immediate self-​interest. Everywhere a prudent passivity prevails over immediate action, such that passions, including that of resentment, were disconnected from enthusiasm and internalised as ressentiment: ‘just as in a passionate age enthusiasm is the unifying principle,’ Kierkegaard writes, ‘so ressentiment (misundelse) becomes the negatively unifying principle in a passionless and very reflective age’ (Kierkegaard, 2002: 72, translation modified). We thus discover a second moral ground for the contemporary distinction between resentment and ressentiment, the former being active and sincere and the latter overly reflective and self-​deluding. At best, ressentiment is a frustrated resentment turned inward; at worst, it is a smouldering envy that was never meant to see the light of day. Either way, once there is ressentiment, the time for authentic resentment is over. Those who cultivate indignation are increasingly seen as the representatives of a rotten culture, actors in a spectacle without dignity, sustainability or credibility. This is also documented by writers such as Fyodor Dostoevky and Gustave Flaubert. Ceaselessly dissecting human life in its basest motives, they became the literary prophets of a whole society’s misanthropic truth: no matter whether we are above or below, we are all crooked slaves beyond healing. But what is this literary gesture if not a paradoxical appropriation and embodiment of the ressentiment that always already binds the author to those he seeks to distinguish himself from? Kierkegaard struggled for an anachronistic spiritual enrichment of life. But when he opposes a desire 77

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for the true life to the sober, calculated existence of the bourgeoisie, his contempt can hardly hide his own boredom and passivity –​something he knows all too well, since his rapturous phrases never succeed in becoming more than relentless irony (Conway, 2015: 134). How, if not by scolding the mediocrity of others, could he reckon himself superior? In failing to make a plausible difference, does he, like Dostoevsky and Flaubert, not effectively universalise the modern pathologies –​ressentiment, hysteria, anxiety, boredom and so on –​of the bourgeoisie? Bernd Stegemann has shown that the 19th century resentment of ressentiment played a key ideological role in the legitimation of socioeconomic inequality. (Stegemann, 2017: 147) Its anti-​liberalism was not just the trademark of a literary existentialism that attempted to overcoming the decadent culture into which it was born. It was also the replacement of the narrative of class opposition with that of failure of individual character. Capital is not bad, humans are bad. In the general neuroticisation of social conflict, the only justified form of ressentiment would be that of cynicism, a sophisticated, self-​conscious sense of impotence, whereas the very idea of real praxis is repressed from the outset. Deprived of its earlier role as defender of the general interest, the bourgeoisie implicitly confirmed its own exploitation of the working classes and simultaneously arranged with their hatred, since, precisely to the extent that the proletariat failed to find solace in the blessings of hard labour, its wounds were in fact its own and therefore well-​deserved. In the words of Reinhard Olschanski: A ressentimental master-​morality of self-​sacrifice declares the hatred for the dominating class as ressentimental hatred, as a slave revolt that merely externalizes the general corruption with which everyone is afflicted instead of locating it in one’s own inner life and bending it into a self-​hatred for one’s own wickedness. (Olschanski, 2015: 45–​8, my translation)

The problem of justice While the phrasing of Stegemann’s critique of existentialism suggests that a similar critique could be made of Nietzsche, it is precisely this dialectic of human culpability and sacrificial realism, of nihilistic nausea (Ekel) and compassion (Mitleid) in which ressentiment turns back on itself, that also forms the bone of contention in Nietzsche’s polemic with the liberal moralists of his time (Nietzsche, 2006a: essay III, §14). His refusal to indulge in the ‘absurd’ is what sets him apart from his predecessors in moral theory, as well as from most of the discourse on ressentiment that has since become dominant. It will lead him to pose the problem of ressentiment in entirely new terms.

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Nietzsche agreed with the diagnosis that general servility has displaced modern politics into morality and the symbolical order. His historical context was the new German Reich (1871–​1918) of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, a state constituted by the specific conjuncture of Protestant Christianity and the failure of the bourgeois revolution, which he despised for its reactionary particularism and racism. He regarded the gradual growth of modern democratic movements, including socialist and anarchist worker movements but especially bourgeois liberalism, as symptoms of the destiny of the West: nihilism. For him, too, the chaos of public opinion and its hypocritical bursts of sentimentality, the inevitable despotism of the ‘herd’, meant a gradual demise of the very power of organisation of modern life. Yet what is unique about Nietzsche is his attempt to free the concept of ressentiment from its entrapment in the reflexive pessimism of his contemporaries. Along with Wagner, Nietzsche identifies both Dostoevsky and Flaubert as the great decadents of his age. They personify a general reactivity, a form of agency that disavows its own activity and that sees everything in the jaundiced perspective of decline and decay, with the ‘retrospective weariness’ of the latecomer and epigone who believes the future to be already a thing of the past (Nietzsche, 2007: II, 5). Instead of their hypocritical oscillation between a heroic assumption of ressentiment and a much too clever resignation –​their ‘bad conscience’ –​Nietzsche seeks a new naivety, the ‘innocence of becoming’. This makes him closer to Charles Baudelaire, whose artistic attitude to the present was one of untimely affirmation rather than liberation or redemption. The aim of his writing, indeed the task of the ‘artist-​philosopher’ as Nietzsche sees it, is to create an alternative point of view whenever the reactive affects of one’s own time threaten to overtake critical thought. At stake is the possibility of beginning again, a rupture of time. What this means politically becomes clearer when we recall that Nietzsche borrowed the concept of ressentiment from Eugen Dühring’s Der Wert des Lebens, in which it is argued, along the lines of the classical liberal philosophy of resentment, that ‘the feeling of justice is a ressentiment and belongs together with revenge’ (Dühring, 1881: 176). Having initially accepted revenge as a means for self-​preservation and defending honour in his most ‘English’ book, Human, All Too Human (2005 [1878]), Nietzsche soon polemicised against it, as it would legitimate anti-​Semites and anarchists, among whom ressentiment blooms. The defence of ressentiment by Dühring is an attempt ‘to sanctify revenge with the term justice’ (Nietzsche, 2006a: II, 11; III, 14; see also Elgat, 2017). The main problem for Nietzsche is not the risk of infinitisation inherent to revenge or the lex talionis, as it was for Smith and Butler. Rather, it is the very notion that justice would be merely a sublimation of the feeling of past grievances, since this glorifies not only revenge but all the reactive impulses that derive from it. 79

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Nietzsche’s objection is twofold. First, resentment and indignation are not instruments for protecting and maintaining order, but sources of moral degeneration in which aristocratic values of excellence and vigour are sacrificed for a more mediocre society. The reason for this is the pettiness of revenge, which, precisely to the extent that it is considered proportionate and civil, implies and demands general equality or reciprocity. The administering of revenge would be merely the re-​enforcement of social recognition by means of punishment, which is problematic not because it leads to more suffering but because it associates suffering with a frustrated sense of entitlement and an attachment to past humiliation. As Nietzsche makes Zarathustra teach, out of the revenge ‘towards time and its “it was” ’ is born the ‘spirit of revenge’ that constitutes the metaphysical element of our existence: the grudging thinking (nachdenken) that (a) opposes being to becoming and decreases our capacity to affirm suffering and overcome ourselves, and (b) condemns the aspiration for justice to gratuitous suffering inflicted on the self (Nietzsche, 2006b, II ‘On Redemption’). Second, the valuation of the reactive affects overlooks a more noble class of affects that constitutes the true source of justice, the active ones. ‘The active man, the attacking, aggressive man is always a hundred degrees nearer to justice than the man who merely reacts’ (Nietzsche, 2006a: II, 11). For how could revenge lead to justice? Only if someone first had the power to determine an equivalence between damage and suffering, and thus to derive pleasure from cruelty. Only in this case, Nietzsche argues, is justice no longer a reactive demand directed at the past, but an active determination of the future. As long as the measure is already given, by contrast, we can only subject ourselves, but realism –​ resignation, adaptation –​cannot lead to justice. To find a moral meaning in suffering implies that the world is already divided into victims who seek compensation for an internalised trauma and culprits who must internalise pain. But this division is only the rationalisation of a pain that has no intrinsically rational sense apart from a freedom to act rather than a settlement of accounts. Acting is therefore the only way to externalise and justify suffering. The challenge is to act our pain itself as a stimulant, not for moral payback but ‘for life’. Nietzsche thus brings about a complete inversion of perspective, based on a genealogical expansion of the historical scope of the concept of ressentiment far beyond the perspective of the psychologists of his time: It is true that resentment and vengefulness lie at the basis of Western morality and its insatiable need for moral vivisection. However, this testifies not to its noble and civilised but to its corrupt and servile nature. Just as the man who reacts is like a ‘headless frog’, ‘English psychologists’ operate like frogs in a swamp (Nietzsche, 2006a: III, 15; I, 1). They everywhere seek the low motivations that sustain morality but refuse to question this morality itself. 80

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They sniff around, historicise a little, add a dash of evolution, and ask what the purpose of ressentiment is. But for Nietzsche, ressentiment has no use value except for its further proliferation. He thus reinterprets the derivation of the notion of justice to resentment as the ultimate self-​rationalisation of ressentiment. It is essentially a modern distortion, Nietzsche argues, since part of justice has always consisted precisely in the attempt to impose laws on the backward-​looking passions and so put an end to the ‘senseless ravages of ressentiment amongst those inferior’ (Nietzsche, 2006a: III, 14; II, 11). More untimely and incommensurate than the differences between moderate and excessive resentment or between self-​reflexive and unacknowledged ressentiment, his own difference between active and reactive affects –​or in slightly more psychological terms, between happy contempt or sullen vengefulness –​is all the more important and necessary for a critical understanding of the reactive attitudes and their tense relation to justice. If the dialectical overcoming of ressentiment remains stuck in negativity and the post-​Christian passion for moral and physical suffering, then its active overcoming must take the form of a transfiguration of the past itself, that is, of the mixing up of the past with divergent becomings of the present.

Just sentiments Now that we have reconstructed the historical evolution in the problematisation of resentment/​ressentiment, we can turn to attempts at distinguishing them. Today, there is again widespread agreement among social and political theorists that resentment arises in a morally legitimate response to those who have deliberately insulted, injured, deprived or discredited us or those we solidarise with. Resentment is of a piece with the recognition of the other as a free and accountable fellow and, in turn, with being recognised as such oneself (Strawson, 1974; Williams, 2005; Fukuyama, 2018). While its expression may not always be compatible with the law, and it is often at risk of becoming irrational and immoral, it is difficult to imagine any idea, let alone any practical politics, of (social) justice without it. At the same time, there is a strong consensus that not all forms of resentment are equally justified. There is a fine line separating righteous indignation from self-​righteous indignation, for example, between the juridical contestation of bureaucratic arbitrariness and the vandalising of public buildings or even terrorist attacks. Moreover, some resentments, for instance, that of African Americans over police violence, seem more authentic than, say, white supremacist anger over the removal of confederate monuments or the perceived unfairness of affirmative action policies. Despite the structural transformations of the public sphere since the time of 18th century coffee houses and 19th century newspapers, what remains constant 81

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in the contemporary discourse on political affect are the well-​worn twin problems of rationality and authenticity. What has changed, perhaps since the mid-​20th century rise of the ‘resentment-​paradigm’ (Schneider, 2019) in social science in response to the historical experience of fascism and rightwing extremism, is that both problems now also tend to get framed in terms of the moral opposition between resentment and ressentiment. Accordingly, ressentiment would be the uncivilised and inauthentic form of resentment, just as resentment would be a more constructive and pure articulation of the feeling of injustice. The postulate that this is more than a theoretical distinction, and that it must be made time and again, appears beyond contestation. Let us therefore have a critical look at how the problems of rationality and authenticity are currently being tackled.

Rationality While there could be no sense of justice without a sense of being wronged, legitimate resentment is always triangulated. It presupposes a moral or social norm in terms of which it is justified. I resent you stealing something from me, because we share certain moral commitments, such as the concepts of private property or the utilitarian pursuit of self-​interest. As a consequence, however, there is always a danger that the question of the ‘right’ political reason depoliticises the wrongs that induce resentment in the first place. For Smith, resentment is legitimised in conformity with a shared notion of communicative action in public space. Since resentment is ‘the most odious, perhaps, of all the passions’, Smith argues, it must be ‘properly humbled and entirely brought down to the level of the sympathetic indignation of the spectator’ (Smith, 2009: 76) –​that is to say, not the level of those who act and fight for change, but the level of those who observe how others act. Smith presupposes a depoliticised equilibrium between benevolence and resentment, but the problem is that these are not harmonious among themselves. Contemporary social theorists like (John Rawls 1971, 533) or Robert Solomon, too, concentrate on how to avoid or preempt envy and ressentiment through an ethics of competition or standards of equity and transparency (Solomon, 2015). However, in this way the question of justice is overshadowed by the procedural sufficiency of those who judge others for not playing by the rules of fairness and sportsmanship –​in other words, conformity to those rules that hold a liberal society together but that may well be part of the structural causes of the very injustices that the resentments in question are reacting against. Insofar as resentment remains triangulated by the moral standards of mutual respect, equality and social justice, our sight of the political cause of a more deeply entrenched ressentiment therefore remains blocked. 82

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To return to the example from the United States, almost immediately after the first Black Lives Matter protests in 2013, the movement was chastised for reinforcing racist stereotypes of angry or overly expressive black people. By focusing on the angry black man and woman, Black Lives Matter was seen to be counterproductive to liberal-​democratic politics. As an overdose of anger, it was considered a threat to the public peace, which must be suppressed in the name of the greater good of consensus, deliberation and majoritarian rule. This shows that the right to angry speech is itself a marker of cultural dominance, whereas racial subjectivity is predicated on the suspended agency from which it ensues. The obsession with procedural rationality neglects the more substantive protest by interpreting it as a loss of control and as a potential prelude to violence. Yet engaging in a politics of rage and fury may be precisely the way in which Black Lives Matter and related movements can criticise respectability politics as a constitutive element of white supremacy, whereby black people are forced to alter their public behaviour to gain access to the rights that come with white personhood (Hooker, 2016; Thompson, 2017: 460). In directly confronting the hegemony of narratives such as that of the American Dream, excessive resentment could well deserve exoneration as a political practice. As Audre Lorde once put it: ‘Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change’ (Lorde, 1984: 129).

Authenticity More persistent than the problem of the disproportionality of resentment, and apparently less susceptible to ideology critique, is the problem of its authenticity or integrity. Resentment becomes suspicious when, for example, it is corrupted by a sour grapes phenomenon. As Bernard Reginster puts it, ‘the fundamental difference between ressentiment and resentment is that resentment appears to presuppose the condemnation of its object and constitutes a reaction of disapproval to its occurrence, whereas ressentiment rests on the implicit endorsement of the very values embodied by those towards whom it is directed’ (Reginster, 1997: 296; see also Merton, 1968: 209–​10). This stance is illustrated by the contemporary discourse, dominant in North America, about the ‘angry voter’. Whereas there may have been times when the resentment of the masses made the status quo tremble, today politicians and the media actively engage in the cultivation and exploitation of resentment. By sowing division and generating fake news, they channel resentment into a rhetorical direction ‘that frustrates citizens’ desires while upholding the very structures that inflame civic resentment in the first place’ (Engels, 2015; see also Cramer, 2016; McVeigh and Estep, 2019). This leads ‘angry white men’, otherwise powerless to improve their 83

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increasingly precarious living and working conditions, to displace their resentment onto cultural issues that actually naturalise and consolidate both their socioeconomic condition and the accompanying feelings of bitterness, shame, and fear –​perhaps first of all the fear of equality. ‘You/​Jews will not replace us’, the white supremacists chant. Or as one social scientist comments: ‘Discourses of resentment encode reactions to a sense of loss, powerlessness, and disenfranchisement; they consolidate feelings of fear, anger, bitterness, and shame’ (Banning, 2006: 83). In addition, there is also the discourse about ‘spoilt citizens’ and ‘pampered consumers’ who can no longer live up to the demands of emancipated life and long for authoritarian leaders mainly out of spite and fear of giving up privileges. This is a discourse that is perhaps more at home in Europe, where the gradual demise of social democracy articulates in revolts of the middle classes, easily dismissed as ‘professional protesters’ and ‘weekend anarchists’. In Germany, the massive protests against the Stuttgart 21 railway station project as well as the Thilo Sarrazin’s attacks on supposedly lax immigration laws led to the neologism of ‘anger-​citizens’ (Wutbürger), which designates older and relatively well-​to-​do citizens who refuse to participate in civil society out of a supposedly misplaced contempt for arrogant elites. Whether or not there is a rational and emancipatory core of resentment hidden underneath ressentiment, in both examples the argument appears to be that the destiny of inauthentic resentment is ressentiment. Failing to address the true causes of injustice or injury leads to the introversion and multiplication of resentment. Many therefore replace the old distinction between rational and irrational resentment with the distinction between a socio-​politically virtuous and accurate resentment and a vicious and unreliable ressentiment. Whereas social indignation and resentment ‘in their genuine form’ respond to the real causation of lack or harm, as Rahel Jaeggi (2019) argues, once they are diverted into free-​floating projections, they become indeterminate, infinite and ‘unreal’ in their persistence and vehemence. Such a differentiation seems all the more desirable at a time when the regression of the darling affect of liberal identity politics –​resentment –​can count on too much understanding from media that rely on outrage as their main source of profit. As the editors of a contemporary magazine bemoan, one can be envious of the hegemony of angry white men in this respect: The reduction of white resentment to economic concerns now has been thoroughly debunked. But the exhausting examination of white resentment –​mostly by white people, who perhaps were the only ones shocked by the overwhelming white support for Trump –​has overshadowed any political possibilities for the affect beyond rallies blanketed with MAGA [Make America Great Again] hats. Maybe this 84

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is because the resentment hasn’t been identified as such. (Compare with Anderson, 2016; Breitbart, 2011 and Wang and Goodman, 2018.) The suggestion here is that there also exist less mediated, more pure resentments that do more justice to inequalities at the level of class, race or gender. By implication, justice increasingly becomes a question of the originality of concerns. But how do we measure this originality? In fact, if the dismissal of ‘PC’ and ‘woke culture’, climate denialism, xenophobia and misogyny were really only ‘codifications’ of a more basic anxiety over socioeconomic dispossession, then what guarantees that the resentments over any other perceived lack of recognition are more immediate or trustworthy? Here one risks a regression into the older opposition between reasonable and excessive resentment. Resentment would still be reasonable to the extent that its causes can be deciphered and appropriated by the social scientist, whose task then becomes the reorientation and whitewashing of its articulations according to more objective standards. While this task may be necessary and effective, it has an undeniably patronising effect. It may even confirm the hegemony of some resentments at the cost of those ressentiments that never lead to political action but only articulate in silent resignation over past atrocities. The diagnosis of ressentiment, even if it is meant as an instrument in ideology critique that refuses to psychologise and focuses solely on structural conditions, is never far from blaming the victim. To the extent that contemporary resentments over identity are actually deemed irreducible to socioeconomical concerns, by contrast, what more could authenticity mean than the sincerity of the resentful? In this case, the problem is that the subjective identification with a minority position always bears the danger of becoming part and parcel of an identity politics that, if it does not deny or even blame suffering, tends to replace class politics with a moral discourse that incorporates and conserves social divisions. As Wendy Brown famously puts it, the investment in our ‘wounded attachments’ inevitably reiterates a feeling of powerlessness that substitutes action and thereby makes them all the more unredeemable (Brown, 1995: 52). The ensuing rancour and recrimination towards one’s perceived oppressor are at the same time a kind of renunciation of freedom or power. Struggles for recognition are therefore increasingly inseparable from the call out culture that is the cultural politics of neoliberalism. Perhaps what is being overlooked in the search for both objective and subjective criteria in the determination of the authenticity of resentment is that our grievances may well be much more contingent and less our own than we think. Even if we abstract from the role of the various parties that have an interest in the exploitation of our emotional lives, our pain is almost always overdetermined by a large variety of flows of sensations and feelings 85

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that surface in different and displaced ways. As Sara Ahmed has shown, this means that the relation between pain and social injustice is much more fortuitous than we are morally inclined to think (Ahmed, 2010: 30–​1, 191–​ 203). In the age of male sensibility and liberal guilt, the risk is that those who feel strongest or articulate themselves in the loudest fashion automatically and rightfully prevail (Ellison, 1999). Indeed, it is precisely the fear of such anarchic ‘explosions of feeling’ under the veil of ‘righteous indignation’ (Nietzsche, 2006a: III, 18, 14) that could unite contemporary progressives with Nietzsche, as it implies the impossibility of critically distinguishing subject-​positions and organising any form of counter-​hegemonic solidarity. These problems suggest that the contemporary discourse on the difference between resentment and ressentiment is not that different from the 19th century discourse of authentic ressentiment. To be sure, this distinction now tends to function under inverted conditions: it is the minorities and historically marginalised and traumatised whose resentments seem a lot less reactionary or neurotic than the hyper-​reflexive ressentiments that saturate our media, and a lot more empowering. As Elizabeth Warren retorted against Joe Biden’s ‘angry’ criticism in the run-​up to the democratic primaries: ‘I am angry and I own it.’ But does the spectre of nihilism simply disappear once we live up to our resentments and identify with them? To the extent that such a reflexive appropriation of resentment has nothing to do with guilt or defensiveness, clarity instead of silence could lead to action and forge new intersectional alliances (Lorde, 1984: 133). As the more hegemonic obsession with white male anger shows, however, there is no guarantee that clarity does not turn cynical. On the contrary, the undecidability of the authenticity of resentment raises the suspicion that this criterion, too, remains predicated on an established distribution of privileges and differences. As Brown observes, this means that identity politics ‘is as likely to seek generalized political paralysis, to feast on generalized political impotence, as it is to seek its own or collective liberation. Indeed it is more likely to punish and reproach … than to find venues of self-​affirming action’ (Brown, 1995: 403). Even in its most immediate expression, resentment is therefore prone to function in an ideological way. Here too, the hackneyed distinction between resentment and ressentiment is only a relative and abstract distinction that presupposes a more fundamental non-​distinction.

Politics and ressentiment It is this current interpretative impasse that I propose to call the ‘resentment-​ ressentiment complex’: the more they are confused, the greater the need to distinguish between the two becomes, especially, but not only, when combined with the attempt to safeguard rational governance from ‘populist’ or ‘extremist’ passions. What the constant recurrence of this non-​distinction 86

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reveals is a tendency to leave it up to our moral sensibility rather than critical thought to set the unity of measure for political action. This begs the question whether the difference between resentment and ressentiment, no matter whether it is set in terms of proportionality or authenticity, is ultimately only relative to the point of accommodation for bourgeois eyes and has no meaning beyond them (Dolgert, 2016: 361). I regard it as proof of the tenacity of the resentment–​ressentiment complex that even Nietzsche, despite his categorical rejection of any role for the reactive attitude in guarding justice, has always remained a reference for the attempts to salvage resentment from ressentiment in the name of a progressive agenda. While simultaneously treated as an immoral genius or a radical conservative, some authors even credit Nietzsche for being one of the first to warn us of the ‘slide’ of resentment into ressentiment. William E. Connolly, for example, insists that ‘[y]‌ou do need to draw upon the powers of resentment and indignation from time to time, as Nietzsche himself emphasizes, but you seek to do so in ways that do not allow those resentments to slide into ressentiment’ (Connolly, 2011: 66; see also Hunt, 2013). But isn’t the wish the father of the thought here? Whereas the advice to act on our suffering makes sense at existential and moral levels, or perhaps within the confines of a small-​scale agon of nobles, it ignores Nietzsche’s actual rejection of any kind of politics based on vindicatory passions, a rejection which could be phrased in the stark words of Brown, namely that every reactive form of politics is ‘a practice that reiterates the existence of an identity whose present past is one of insistently unredeemable injury’ (Brown, 1995: 73). As little as Brown does Nietzsche distinguish resentment from ressentiment. He leaves no doubt that justice, for him, could never follow from any kind of revenge. Rather, it originates in the good will that prevails among those of roughly equal power to come to terms with each other –​with each other’s ‘actual active emotions (Affekte) such as lust for mastery, greed and the like’ (Nietzsche, 2012: 259) –​through economic and military settlement. Justice is essentially a matter of the ‘composition’ of ressentiment, of turning revenge into a question of exchange and calculation as opposed to any immediate reaction. In particular, it is the invention of a legal system that delays and depersonalises both actions and injuries: ‘“just” and “unjust” only start from the moment when a legal system is set up (and not, as Dühring says, from the moment when the injury is done)’ (Nietzsche, 2006a: II, 11). The social function of the law is thus not an abstractly conceived levelling in the interest of fairness or social rights, but a counterbalancing of ressentimental interpretations of justice. Not even obligation-​law serves the creation of a sense of guilt, but precisely its repression. Despite his abhorrence of the anarchism of feeling, Nietzsche’s argument is rooted in an anarchism of the political act. Contrary to the modern 87

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transformation of law as activity into a knowable object of science, he understood positive law as an art, thereby inverting traditional hierarchies. The law stands above justice as art stands above truth (Berkowitz, 2006). Instead of taking the distinction between just and unjust as a natural given, Nietzsche localises justice in the moment of the rational composition of the social. From this it follows, first, that the conditions of justice are not themselves rational. As a ‘bestiality of the act’ rather than the ‘bestiality of the idea’ (Nietzsche, 2006a: II, 22), their ‘rationalisation’ is itself irrational or at least pre-​rational. This emphasis on the transgressive nature of the political act puts Nietzsche’s critique of reactivity at light-​years remove from those who argue that anger is always normatively or rationally inappropriate (for example Nussbaum, 2016: 31). Second, justice is opposed to authenticity. It is found precisely in the forgetfulness and impersonality of an act, and in the happiness that arises from the exercise of the power to act; it does not derive from grievances over one’s past. Ressentiment, by contrast, castrates justice and takes its life from it at the same time that it conceals its own will to power. By turning the initial measuring of social equilibrium into the fetishisation of injustice, itself a caricature of an ‘original’ justice, it dooms social justice to be the form in which justice is repressed and sublimated (Kofman, 1993: 42–​9). As a consequence of this complete overhaul of our conception of justice, it appears that Nietzsche cannot qualify as a philosopher of social justice in any contemporary sense. Within the social sphere, the law may well sanctify a form of revenge, albeit in the heavily mediated form of rights and duties. But reactivity, according to Nietzsche, is not what makes the law just. On the contrary, this justification lies in the domain of politics –​that is, the domain of action instead of feeling. To be sure, this argument does not just affect exonerations of rage against sexism or racism, but also more conservative attempts to defend a moderate resentment. In effect, justice is only what is enacted and what does not exist outside its enactment. It both precedes and exceeds social triangulation. While Nietzsche’s brash vitalism raises many new and difficult questions, however, they need not get in the way of our main concern here. As it stands, we can speak of a legitimacy of social ressentiment, to the extent that it is the inevitable but already rationalised consequence of the asymmetrical establishment of social order with its winners and losers. However, this reactivity or vengefulness could never be guiding in the further struggle for social justice, since it inherently keeps scratching old wounds. Precisely due to its being rendered socially latent, it tends towards rampant growth and arbitrary raging rather than to its own dissolution. For Nietzsche, the much-​feared slide of resentment into ressentiment therefore seems to be the necessary discontent of civilisation. This is not at all to contest that it is necessary to repoliticise 88

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the state monopolies on force or finance when a society tends to inequality and the exclusion of minorities, especially when the law is primarily endorsed as necessary to depoliticise rage. But it cannot be done on the basis of a distinction between legitimate resentment and illegitimate ressentiment. Resentment has only relative standards and ressentiment shows it. What entitles Nietzsche to dismiss resentment along with ressentiment when it comes to justice is precisely his concern with the possibility of politics as such –​that is, not a politics within the confines of social subordination, but with the only true political event: the production of new practices and rules as much as alternative values we can live by. In many ways, this argument anticipates Hannah Arendt, whose high-​ minded contempt for the ‘social’ equals Nietzsche’s. Indispensable for protest and revolt, she recognised resentment as that ‘legitimate hatred that makes you ugly nevertheless, the well-​founded wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse’ (Arendt, 1968: viii). Far from being the basis for yet another liberal argument, however, legitimacy for Arendt is a category that belongs to morality and law, not to political action. What characterises the latter is that it is by definition unexpected, unruly, and irreducible to any social distribution of possibilities: ‘[A]‌ction can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis’ (Arendt, 1958: 184). As Nietzsche had done before, Arendt argues that true political acts are only possible in the form of new beginnings, that is, as revolutionary moments which are as exceptional as justice itself. The examples Arendt gives of such moments are Thucydides and Pericles, precisely those founders of state and lawgivers that Nietzsche admires. Pointing to the Greek term archein, meaning to begin, to lead and to rule, Arendt argues that true action does not adhere to the laws of history. More universal than any relation of domination and exploitation, political action has ‘an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries’ (Arendt, 1958: 170; see also Haider, 2018) and prefigures forms of solidarity and collective empowerment that are transversal to existing social and legal relationships. In fact, the outstanding or the exemplar would be impotent if they did not have a chance of enlisting the co-​acting of others. Inseparable from its actualisation in affective relations with a plurality of others, the power to act is therefore the very raison d’être of public life: ‘action, though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of a new process’ (Arendt, 1958: 168–​9). As Arendt points out, political action is especially immune to the questions of authenticity or truthfulness. In politics, nobody is the author 89

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of their own life (Siemens, 2005). Her description of public life bears a remarkable resemblance to Kierkegaard’s depiction of the revolutionary age as an age of tumultuous action in contrast to a post-​revolutionary age of feeling. Instead of the enthusiasm, participation, decisiveness, decorum, authority and defiance that characterised the golden age of liberal politics, our age confuses politics with the social sphere in modern life, and as a consequence has replaced the virtues of active civility with the narcissism of professional politicians and their passive spectators, as well as with impartial calculations and the reflectivity of ethical committee members. In particular, it confuses political acts with emotions that cannot be confirmed in public life. For this reason, Arendt would probably have been as horrified over, say, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, as she was over the tendency to cultivate moral grievances in lieu of political action in the French Revolution (Arendt, 2006: 49–​105). As much as Nietzsche and Arendt locate politics in action, it does not follow that suffering is irrelevant to politics. To expunge politics from collective moods and thereby arrive at an alternative conception of the political made up solely of exceptional events would be an even graver idealism than the one found in liberal ideology, which subordinates the passions to rational interest. It is never sufficient to distinguish the autonomy of the political from the affective determinants that shape the modes of operation in political conflict and impact its potential outcomes. On the contrary, action always erupts from the inextricable entanglement of moral sentiments and politics. As Ahmed argues against Brown, there is no pure action, since it is impossible to separate the action that could lead to change from the reactions that feel, interpret, resist and metabolise what happens. At stake is precisely the contingency, fragility, change and unpredictability of (concerted) action. It takes perseverance and momentum to achieve a more just order, and this achievement may well be sustained by ressentiment. Neither is a pure reaction. The passions are the waverings of the mind that either increase or diminish one’s power to act. Thus anger or ‘against-​ness’ (Ahmed, 2010: 172–​8), as constituent affect of feminist politics, is not fully determined by the past but also open to future transformations. Nevertheless, these transformations do not make the passions themselves political. Instead, they make it possible to see them from a political point of view –​that is, not the perspective of their dismissal or exoneration, but that of their causes and their passage into action. On the one hand, Ahmed reminds us that ‘although injustice cannot be measured by the existence of suffering, some suffering is an effect of injustice’ –​‘of the repetition of some actions rather than others’ (Ahmed, 2010: 196). This suggests that, notwithstanding Nietzsche’s claim that acts considered in themselves can never be just or 90

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unjust (Nietzsche, 2006a: II, 11), their repetitive composition can be. If this were not the case, no normative distinction between Trumpist politics and the civil rights movement would be possible. What ultimately constitutes the non-​reducibility between politics and social therapy, on the other hand, is the only possible redemption of suffering. Between reaction and action there is no equipollence, as between effect and cause. For Nietzsche, any attempt to rationalise reactivity is itself still the expression of a reactive life. The older problems of proportionality and authenticity thus dissolve into the problem of justice. What matters in politics is the distinction between, on the one hand, emotions such as resentment and ressentiment, which are only ever effects, and, on the other hand, the actions that provide their (de)legitimating grounds. This finally returns us to that other problem we set out with, namely ‘how to cope with failure while holding on to emancipatory, counter-​ hegemonic, and self-​affirming political practices’. We have not given an answer to this question, which belongs to political judgement and only secondarily to academic theorisation. But we hope to have shown that it must be answered outside the limitations and ambivalences of mainstream parameters. In liberal and conservative discourses, the vexed problem of the difference between resentment and ressentiment will always be in need of unravelling, but in reality there is no such problem. Worse, the industrious obsessing over vindicatory feelings, especially when carried out under the mask of critical theory, effectively suppresses the political and bears the unmistakable sign of nihilism, that is, the decline of our capacity to act politically. Acknowledgements I am grateful for Dan Degerman’s editorial comments. I also thank Elisabetta Brighi for her feedback during review of this chapter, which has led me to amend the articulation of some of the conclusions of this piece. References Ahmed, S. (2010) The Cultural Politics of Emotions, New York: Routledge. Anderson, C. (2016) White Rage. The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, New York: Bloomsbury. Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Arendt, H. (1968) Men in Dark Times, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. Arendt, H. (2006) On Revolution, London: Penguin Books. Banning, M.E. (2006) The politics of resentment, JAC, Journal of Rhetoric, Culture and Politics, 26(1): 67–​101. Barbalet, J. (2001) Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure: A Macro-​ Sociological Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 91

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Berkowitz, R. (2006) Friedrich Nietzsche, the code of manu, and the art of legislation, Cardozo Law Review, 24(3): 1131–​49. Breitbart, A. (2011) Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!, New York: Grand Central Publishing. Brighi, E. (2016) The globalisation of resentment: failure, denial, and violence in world politics, Millennium. Journal of International Studies, 44(3): 411–​32. doi: 10.1177/​0305829816643174 Brown, W. (1995) States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Butler, J. (2017) Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, D. McNaughton (ed) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connolly, W.E. (2011) World of Becoming, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Conway, D. (2015) “The happiness of slight superiority”: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on resentment, Konturen, 7: 132–​66. doi: 10.5399/​uo/​ konturen.7.0.3655 Cramer, K. (2016) The Politics of Resentment, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Darwall, S. (2013) Honor, History & Relationship, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Demertzis, N. (2006) Emotions and populism, in: S. Clarke, P. Hoggett and S. Thompson (eds), Emotions, Politics and Society, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, pp•103–​22. Dolgert, S. (2016) The praise of ressentiment: or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Donald Trump, New Political Science, 38(3). doi: 10.1080/​ 07393148.2016.1189030 Dühring, E. (1881) Der Wert des Lebens: Popular Dargestellt, Leipzig: Fue’s Verlag. Elgat, G. (2017) Nietzsche’s Psychology of Ressentiment: Revenge and Justice in On the Genealogy of Morals, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Ellison, J. (1999) Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-​American Emotion, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Engels, J. (2015) The Polemics of Resentment: A Genealogy, University Park, PN: Pennsylvania State University Press. Fassin, D. (2013) On resentment and ressentiment. The politics and ethics of moral emotions, Current Anthropology, 54(3): 249–​67. doi: 10.1086/​670390 Fukuyama, F. (2018) Identity. The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Haider, A. (2018) Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, New York: Verso. Hooker, J. (2016) Black lives matter and the paradoxes of U.S. black politics: From democratic sacrifice to democratic repair, Political Theory, 44(4): 448–​69. doi: 10.1177/​0090591716640314

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Hunt, G. (2013) Redeeming resentment: Nietzsche’s affirmative ripostes, American Dialectic, 3(2/​3): 118–​47. Jaeggi, R. (2019) Regression, ressentiment and the crisis of democracy, working paper, https://h ​ scif.org/w ​ p-c​ onte​ nt/u ​ ploa​ ds/2​ 018/0​ 4/S​ hortfina​ lRes​sent​imen​tReg​ress​ion2​019.pdf Kierkegaard, S. (2002 [1846]) Two Ages: A Literary Review, A. Hannay (trans) London and New York: Penguin. Kofman, S. (1993) Nietzsche and Metaphor, D. Large (trans) London: The Athlone Press. Lorde, A. (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Lyman, P. (2004) The domestication of anger: The use and abuse of anger in politics, European Journal of Social Theory, 7(2): 133–​47. doi: 10.1177/​ 1368431004041748 MacLachlan, A. (2010) Unreasonable resentments, Journal of Social Philosophy, 41(4): 422–​41. doi: 10.1111/​j.1467-​9833.2010.01508.x McVeigh, R. and Estep, K. (2019) The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment, New York: Columbia University Press. Meltzer, B.N. and Musolf, G.R. (2002) Resentment and ressentiment, Sociological Inquiry, 72(2): 240–​55. doi: 10.1111/​1475-​682X.00015 Merton, R.L. (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure, New York: The Free Press, 1968. Murphy, J.G. (2012) Punishment and the Moral Emotions: Essays in Law, Morality and Religion, New York: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2005) Beyond Good and Evil, R.P. Horstmann and J. Norman (eds), J. Norman (trans). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2005) [1878]) Human all Too Human, (ed) K. Ameriks and D.M. Clarke, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, § 33. Nietzsche, F. (2007) Untimely Meditations, in D. Breazeale (ed), R.J. Hollingdale (trans) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2006a) On the Genealogy of Morality, in K. Ansell-​Pearson (ed), C. Diethe (trans) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2006b) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A Book for All and None, in A. del Caro (trans) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2012) Beyond Good and Evil, R.P. Horstmann and J. Norman (eds), J. Norman (trans). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M.C. (2016) Anger and Forgiveness. Resentment, Generosity, Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Olschanski, R. (2015) Ressentiment. Über die Vergiftung des Europäischen Geistes, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

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Reginster, B. (1997) Nietzsche on ressentiment and valuation, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57(2): 281–​305. doi: 10.2307/​2953719 Rorty, A.O. (2000) The dramas of resentment, The Yale Review, 88(3): 89–​ 100. doi: 10.1111/​0044-​0124.00417 Rushdy, A.H.A. (2018) After Injury. A Historical Anatomy of Forgiveness, Resentment, and Apology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schneider, R. (2019) The rise and fall of the resentment paradigm (ca. 1935–​1975), lecture at Princeton University, 19 October. Siemens, H. (2005) Action, performance and freedom in Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Nietzsche, International Studies in Philosophy, 37(3): 107–​26. doi: 10.5840/​intstudphil20053738 Smith, A. (2009) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in R.P. Hanley (ed) London: Penguin. Solomon, R.C. (2015) A Passion for Justice: Emotions and the Origins of the Social Contract, Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield. Stegemann, B. (2017) Das Gespenst des Populismus: Ein Essay zur Politischen Dramaturgie, Berlin: Theater der Zeit. Strawson, P. (1974) Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, London: Methuen. Thompson, D. (2017) An exoneration of black rage, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 1116(3): 457–​81. doi: 10.1215/​00382876-​3961439 Ure, M. (2015) Resentment ressentiment, Constellations, 22(4): 599–​613. doi: 10.1111/​1467-​8675.12098 Wang, E. and Goodman, M.S. (2018) A note on resentment, www.can​opyc​ anop​ycan​opy.com/​conte​nts/​a-​note-​on-​res​entm​ent Williams, B. (2005) Reasonable resentment, In the Beginning was the Deed. Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp 122–​4.

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Green Shame: The Next Moral Revolution? Martha Claeys

Introduction In Swedish there is a word for the shame one feels when taking an airplane: ‘flygskam’. In addition to flying shame, Swedes also speak of ‘tågskryt’ (train bragging) and ‘smygflyga’ (flying in secret) (Hoikalla and Magnusson, 2019). People know that flying produces greater carbon emissions than taking the train or even driving. Many care about this fact yet fly anyway. Behaving in ways that are harmful to the environment when other options are known, studied and available is increasingly associated with the feeling of shame, at least in highly educated, middle class circles. It will not be long before we coin words or phrases for meat shame or carnivore shame, plastic shame, or shopper’s shame, to name a few (though probably more catchy versions of them). There are many ways in which we could reduce our carbon emissions but choose not to. I call the shame that sometimes accompanies these choices ‘green shame’. In this chapter, I examine what place shame has in the pursuit of the greening of society. Is flygskam useful, and does it actually lead to a better state of the world? Are we moving the world towards a more sustainable state when we feel shame about certain behaviours that contribute to rising global temperatures, when there are alternatives available? I argue that we do, but only under specific circumstances, and with a cautious eye for the moral pitfalls of shame. I start by outlining my understanding of shame and distinguish it from associated feelings like guilt or embarrassment. I define green shame and distinguish it from green guilt. Then, I distinguish between the act of green shaming and of feeling green shame. I argue along with Martha Nussbaum that 95

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shaming is undesirable across the board, and is likely to backfire if we want it to contribute to a greener society (Nussbaum, 2004). Nussbaum argues that shame should not be used as a punishment or deterrent for morally condemnable behaviour, and that shame is often unreliable. But feeling shame is distinct from urging others to feel it, as Nussbaum acknowledges in her account of constructive shame. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Jennifer Jacquet argue that shame can play a crucial role in engendering moral revolutions (Appiah, 2010, Jacquet, 2015). On their account, shame is morally useful because it deters people from doing something that is morally condemnable, and it does so with more potency than mere rational conviction through argumentation. I conclude that green shame can contribute to the pursuit of greening society if the perils of shame are taken into account, that is, if shame comes from a personal realisation that one’s behaviour is not merely harmful but undignified, and if the standards of what it means to live a dignified life are under constant critical scrutiny. Furthermore, I argue that even though shame is an individual matter, and the greening of society requires institutional and structural change rather than individual change, shame can be helpful to push on us a sense of urgency and create a broad support base and a demand for drastic institutional revisions.

An account of shame Shame is the emotion we feel when we think we have acted in ways that are contrary to the behaviour of a dignified person. The idea that shame occurs when you fail to reach a certain minimal standard or ideal is common among shame philosophers (Taylor, 1985; Rawls, 1999; Deonna et al, 2012).1 My concept of shame takes this minimal standard to be the basic requirements of what a person takes dignity to mean. My idea of shame is intentionally broad, and therefore works well with the phenomenology of shame as an emotion with very diverse objects. People have ideas about what it means to have dignity and live a dignified life. If they fail to live up to the basic requirements of a dignified life, they may feel shame. Dignity is often a container term that obscures rather than helps a discussion move forward. But this openness of the term is useful for my take on shame. Whatever meaning a person gives to dignity, that is what determines when they feel shame. Say someone thinks that to live a dignified life means living up to certain beauty standards, or having a job that is meaningful and stimulating to them. They experience shame when they are confronted with their failure to live up to those standards, or when they get refused for the jobs they apply for time and time again. If someone believes that dignity entails adhering to certain moral standards, then failing to meet them evokes shame. 96

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However, the mere failure to meet standards of personally defined dignity does not necessarily cause shame. It seems important that the failure is perceived to be one’s own, or at least meaningfully tied to the self (Taylor, 1985; Kristjánsson, 2002: 118; Thomason, 2018: 88). This is why humiliation might miss its target if the person undergoing it is not convinced that they are sinking below what dignity requires through their own doing. The humiliator’s goal is to publicly show up an undignified person by making them do things that are shameful, or pointing things out about them that are (rightfully or not) considered shameful, like making them do things that emphasise their animality, or displaying their missteps. But humiliation misses its intended effect if the humiliated person does not think they have sunken below what dignity requires in any way. The difference between being humiliated and feeling ashamed is whether the blow to dignity is perceived as one’s own failure. But not all failures are shameful. In shame, the failures are specifically tied up with dignity. They encompass the whole being of a person. Guilt also comes up when we feel to have failed somehow, but the failure does not affect our whole sense of self and dignity. Guilt is about breaking a rule that is commonly accepted, with a specific act, but breaking it does not affect self-​image in the way that shame does (Taylor, 1985: 89; Williams, 1993: 84; Morgan, 2008: 14; Nussbaum, 2016: 128). About the same act, some people might feel shame whereas others only feel guilt. Say someone wants to lose weight. In the first case, the weight loss is a goal a person has set for themselves but failing to meet it will not damage their sense of dignity. Losing some weight is not central to their idea of what dignity requires, it is merely something they want to do, perhaps because they think they will feel more energised, or live longer. Imagine a second case, where someone thinks a dignified person has self-​control, and not being slim is perceived as a failure of self-​control. Now imagine both of them indulging in a pack of fries. It seems likely that the first person feels guilty, while the second feels shame. In the first case, eating a pack of fries might have been ‘breaking’ the rules, and sets the person back in achieving their goal, but they are not hit in her dignity, because their sense of dignity does not depend on whether they do or do not lose weight. In the second case, indulging in a pack of fries feels like a failure beyond merely breaking a self-​set rule. The failure to them feels like a failure of their whole person, as if they are lacking the self-​control a person with dignity would have, in their mind. Whereas the person feeling guilt merely thinks they have failed in an act, the person feeling shame thinks they have failed as a person. Shame is not the same as embarrassment either. To be embarrassed is to feel socially awkward and out of place (Nussbaum, 2004: 203). It is an uneasy feeling in response to small failures, but often these failures are known to not be real failures at all. Think of someone tripping or spilling something, and 97

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then quickly looking around with a tomato-​red face chuckling nervously. They know that tripping over that loose stone in the pavement could happen to anyone, and it does not say anything about their personal competence to walk the streets. The feeling of embarrassment is confined to a very specific moment in time, and is inevitably tied up with being watched or being seen (Tracy and Robins, 2004). What makes the act embarrassing is precisely that it is seen. That is different in the account of shame that I present. Even though shame is often felt as a desire to hide or cover up, the external spectator does not have to be around physically for their eyes to be felt. Shame does not end when no one is watching. The desire to cover up is not a desire not to be seen, but rather one to not exist, to disappear entirely. The one who judges is not the other, but the self. Shame is an inner blush first, before blood actually colours our cheeks red. Of course, our concept of what it means to live a dignified life is to a large extent socially informed. We determine beliefs about dignity explicitly in discussion about what is good and praiseworthy, and implicitly by following examples around us. Depending on social context, and someone’s fundamental cares, however, everyone’s concept of dignity is personalised, and there is great variety in concepts of dignity. There is great variety in sources of shame then, too. Who feels shame and in what circumstances has to do with self-​image, the level of attempt at moral coherence, and what it means for you to be a flourishing version of yourself. But what that means is under constant discussion, and fundamental disagreements about the content of a dignified life are at the heart of the most brutal clashes between human beings. Even among those who have knowledge about the climate crisis, understand the arguments, are explicitly concerned about the future, and for whom a change of behaviour is among the possible options without too many financial and social repercussions, real change in behaviour is rather seldom. People keep flying, keep eating meat, keep buying goods wrapped in plastic, myself included. A major reason for this is governmental policy making. How are we expected to choose alternatives to airplanes if the train costs an arm and a leg? How do we expect people to reduce their plastic use if there are no rules on how companies are allowed to pack their product? But another reason, I propose, is that people do not see it as a failure of dignity to keep up destructive behaviour. People feel ‘green guilt’, as Jennifer Jacquet puts it (Jacquet, 2015: 45). But guilt, as she argues, often fails to bring about real change because, as guilt focuses on one act, it is easily bought off. In the commercialised world of ‘green gadgets’ like bamboo toothbrushes, void eco logos and reusable straws, a clean conscience is for sale. When booking a flight or bus, there is now often the option to pay an extra, voluntary fee to supposedly make the trip carbon neutral. ‘Just as the rich could buy their way out of penance, the rich 98

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can now presume to buy their way out of environmental destruction and its associated guilt’, Jacquet writes. But many of these financial transactions only give the buyer an impression of green living. Not that guilt isn’t motivating, it can, in some ways, be a healthy response to many of our problems. The flaw comes when guilt is misguided and we find relief in shopping rather than activism, or when guilt over collective problems is used to improve oneself rather than to strategically consider the collective whole. (Jacquet, 2015: 57) What we need for people to change their behaviour (and what they demand from policy makers) is not mere guilt, but shame. I am not arguing for shaming policies, or encouraging people to shame one another or calling each other out. These policies have counterproductive effects and are morally questionable, for reasons I will explain later. But people will not change their behaviour towards the environment as long as they do not believe that their behaviour is below what a dignified person would do. As Nussbaum puts it: about some things in society, ‘it is too easy to say, “Let’s not do A again.” We need to say, “Let’s not be this way any longer” ’ (Nussbaum, 2004: 212). Let’s not be greedy to the extent that other living organisms must suffer for our wants. Let’s not let our desire for instant gratification do irreversible damage to the planet. Let’s not be weak-​willed about sustainable action. Let’s educate ourselves to the best of our abilities to resist ignorance about the accelerating temperature rise and how to counter it. Let’s not be indifferent to the suffering of future generations. Let’s not be selfish. Let’s not live and think ‘après nous, le déluge’. All these aspirations are matters of the whole self, and therefore failing to meet them brings shame rather than the feeling of specific guilt.

Green shame and the greening of society Does green shame change behaviour? A common argument against shame’s moral value is that shame is not a motivator for behavioural change at all, but rather a paralysing emotion. Shame is counterproductive in this sense. The person who feels shame is not motivated to change or improve, but rather to avoid the confrontation. Shame causes the person to focus on the self, rather than the situation they are in, making them blind to possible positive actions. Shame thwarts action rather than encourages it. The psychologist James Gilligan has shown that people who are made to feel shame often struggle with feelings of alienation (Gilligan, 1996). The shame adds insult to injury, rather than steering the ashamed person in a progressive direction. Nussbaum suggests that shame and fragile egos are not only the consequences of moral transgressions, but 99

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just as often the sources of misconduct. Shaming the trespasser would then be ‘like using gasoline to put out a fire’ (Nussbaum, 2004: 236). Julia Annas argues in a similar vein that shame is likely to be linked to a ‘broken spirit’, and the loss of self-​respect (Nussbaum, 2004: 231). This loss, in turn, seems more likely to trigger morally condemnable behaviour than if self-​respect was intact. Entitled shame, as Kate Manne calls it, can give rise to anger, violence, and feelings of resentment (2018: 121). Not only can shame bring about negative behaviour, it can lead one to decide to end one’s behaviour once and for all. Shame is often given as an explanatory reason for suicide (Lester, 1997). Kate Manne argues that shame for one’s own failure in some extreme cases even brings about desire to kill the onlooker. A common explanation for ‘family annihilation’, the rare phenomenon where (mostly) men mass-​murder their closest family, is that the idea of a loss of respect from one’s family was so unbearable for the family annihilator that it seemed easier to simply kill those whose respect could be lost (Manne, 2018: 121). Shame is destructive in all these senses. Guilt seems more productive here, because the negative feeling is not aimed towards the whole self but rather at a specific act of rule breaking. In the case of green shame, these warnings should also be taken to heart. But we should distinguish between shame as a tool that can be used to enforce behavioural change on others, by actively shaming them for certain behaviour, or shame as the personal feeling of failure to reach a standard of dignified behaviour. Shaming can take on the form of invitations to shame, holding up flaws for public viewing, and stigmatisation, Krista Thomason writes (2018: 177). But the feeling of shame itself need not be connected with these acts of collective attention. The shaming that Thomason describes is problematic for all the arguments given above that emphasise the risk of paralysis and broken spirit. But the feeling of shame as an internal blush even in the absence of external judgement does not face the same risks necessarily. Nussbaum is clear about this point: her book presents arguments about shame as a tool for punishment, to deter future malignant behaviour. She talks about the act of shaming others: about having shoplifters parade around with a sign marked ‘thief ’ in front of the store they stole from, about publicly indicating drivers with a history of drink driving through signage on their vehicles (Nussbaum, 2004: 228). Such shaming has proved not to deter future criminal behaviour (2004: 235), and if it does, it comes at the great cost of harming the person’s self-​respect –​a price we should not be willing to pay (2004: 227). Do these claims entail that there is no place in morality for the feeling of green shame whatsoever? Nussbaum leaves open the possibility for something like ‘constructive shame’ to exist. Crucially, however, that constructivity is not found in the act of shaming. She does not condemn the feeling of shame itself as a moral motivator. 100

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Some forms of shame indeed have a positive ethical value … [Shame] goads us onward with regard to many different types of goals and ideals, some of them valuable. … It often tells us the truth: certain goals are valuable and we have failed to live up to them. And it often expresses a desire to be a type of being that one can be: a good human being doing fine things. (Nussbaum, 2004: 176) Nussbaum writes about constructive shame, the kind of shame that results from critical and careful self-​examination. Hans Maes’ idea of asymmetry can be helpful to understand the difference between shaming and feeling shame (Maes, 2005). He argues that there is an asymmetry between what you can say about yourself, and what others can say about you. Maes writes about the appropriateness of pride, and claims there is a morally relevant difference between ascribing yourself a certain trait, and having others ascribe it to you. The same asymmetry goes for shame, but in the opposite direction. The fact that a person feels shame does not make it legitimate for others to call them out or actively shame them. Nussbaum convincingly argues that it is morally problematic to publicly call other people out on their undignified behaviour, because this would be in violation of their dignity. But we can say to ourselves that we have behaved in undignified ways, without violating our own dignity. Even stronger, the fact that we take our dignity seriously is why we feel so strongly when we go against it by acting in certain ways. Shame can make us retrospectively evaluate our choices, but the aim to avoid shame can equally prevent us from engaging in future behaviour that would infringe on our idea of a dignified life. Shame is us protecting our own dignity in ways that others cannot without thereby also violating our dignity. Nussbaum’s argument is focused on the state’s complicity in the shaming. That involvement is highly problematic. Institutionalising shaming makes the prime protector of the social conditions for self-​respect and dignity at once a threat to those very conditions. The fact that the state is complicit in the shaming makes a large difference. People will continue to stigmatize other people, and criminals are bound to be among those stigmatized. For the state to participate in this humiliation, however, is profoundly subversive of the ideas of equality and dignity on which liberal society is based. (Nussbaum, 2004: 232) Shaming others is harmful because it poses a threat to dignity. We have a duty to respect dignity in others, and shaming another is in direct opposition with this duty. But if that threat is absent, shame is not morally negative per se, and can even be a great tool of resistance. 101

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Jacquet argues that precisely for this reason shame can be effective as a tool used against institutions and organisations (Jacquet, 2015), if at least we beware to distinguish real policy changes as a response to shame from mere ‘greenwashing’.2 In the case of Greenpeace shaming large whaling companies, for instance, there is no dignity harmed as long as the act is directed at the abstract institution rather than at an individual. The same goes for calling shame on Primark for underpaying its workers. It might be appropriate to shame companies where it would not be appropriate in the same situation to shame individuals. In my account of shame, which focuses on dignity as the linchpin for feeling shame, it might seem quite hard for a company to experience shame, as a company is not the kind of thing that does or does not have dignity. But we might imagine the people in charge having some sort of image of what is means for a company to be good. Then we can also imagine them experiencing emotions about the company when the company fails to live up to what it means to be a good company. In shaming a company, then, there is no dignity of an individual harmed, but rather the question of what a good company should be is invoked, and the company is urged to reconsider whether they live up to that idea by being called out on malpractices. Feeling shame can be constructive, and perhaps more so than guilt. As Jacquet argues, guilt entails the risk of being bought off or misled. As shame concerns the whole person, the change that needs to come about to soothe shame cannot be captured in one act, or a (financial) transaction that relieves one’s conscience, like buying bamboo toothbrushes or paying an extra fee on an otherwise extremely polluting low-​cost flight. Shame is relieved only when a person consistently acts in ways that do not reflect undignified character traits, but virtuous ones instead. The change that shame can potentially bring about is a sustainable change in character. The person feeling shame is ashamed about their greed, their selfishness, or carelessness for instance, and wishes they did not have these traits. They will look for ways to act that reflect generousness, modesty, concern and empathy instead. An investment in a bamboo toothbrush does not ease such an uncomfortable feeling.

Does green shame change behaviour for the better? The second claim one could doubt is whether the consequences of shame really are good. Even if shame does motivate us to change our ways, it is not a given that it actually compels us to change our behaviour for the better. The objects of shame have often been the most natural and unproblematic or morally irrelevant human traits. Menstruation, for instance, or body hair on females, are to this day the locus of taboo and shame (though periods are more talked about than before, and there are models with hairy armpits 102

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who proudly grow their body hair, we still have a long way to go). That we feel shame about our sexual desires, for instance, does not mean it is right for us to suppress or deny them. People, women disproportionately, are often ashamed about having a high number of bed partners, because having a smaller number is (wrongly) connected with values like trust, piety, cleanliness and purity.3 People living in poverty often experience shame about their financial status, even if they are victims of intergenerational poverty where there is no link between the actions and capabilities of a person and their financial status (Walker et al, 2013). This kind of shame is not a good guide for our behaviour and should be questioned and revised. If shame can be aimed at the wrong objects, shouldn’t we be sceptical about its role as a moral indicator? Nussbaum argues that shame is an unreliable ground for law-​making, since shame is typically distorted. Just like disgust is often projected at harmless and non-​contagious objects, like the human body or entire human communities, shame is often normatively unreliable too. She argues against one particular kind of shame that is harmful. Primitive shame is the shame we feel because we are limited, dependent and vulnerable beings who are not entirely at ease with this status. We wish to be autonomous and in control, and are ashamed of anything that allows vulnerability to seep through. Specifically, Nussbaum argues, anything that reminds us of our mortality is considered shameful and even disgusting. Our decaying bodies, our excrements, and anything that is reminiscent of our animal nature is the object of deep, but morally unreliable shame stemming from a narcissistic preoccupation with our own completeness and a desire for control (Nussbaum, 2004). People still feel shame about their natural bodies. Women trim away their body hair. Menstruation and masturbation remain taboo topics. We feel shame about trying and failing at our ambitions. All this does not seem productive at all. And yet, sometimes shame can be at the heart of the most important moral revolutions. Anthony Kwame Appiah shows how the adherence to an honour code plays a fundamental role when it comes to making moral revolutions happen (Appiah, 2010). Using several historical examples like slavery, duelling and Chinese foot-​binding, Appiah argues that real change did not come about until the general code of honour had changed. For moral revolutions to happen, it is not enough to know that one thing or the other is the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do needs to become the dishonourable thing to do. In previous moral revolutions, Appiah writes: ‘what transpired was not so much a change in moral beliefs as a revolution –​in which honour was central –​in practices. It wasn’t the moral arguments that were new; it was the willingness to live by them’ (Appiah, 2010: 161). This last sentence brings us back to the puzzle about the climate crisis: why is there a dissonance between what people believe should happen, and what people actually do? 103

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Why do people keep making these exceptions for themselves? And what will it take to get people to start applying the rules to themselves in the same way they do to others? Appiah argues that it is essential to understand the mechanisms of codes of honour and dishonour, of pride and shame, to change the behaviour of large groups of people. He does not say that the sensitivity to honour is a good thing per se, but it is an inevitable human psychological mechanism, and we may as well use it in service of human achievement. In these moral revolutions, shame functions as the counterpart of honour. The honour code you adhere to consists of certain standards of goodness. If you yourself meet the standards, you’ll have self-​respect; and if you yourself fall short, you will have contempt for yourself, which is shame. If someone doesn’t feel shame when they fail (or, at least, when they fail badly) that shows they don’t adhere to the code. We say they are shameless. (Appiah, 2010: 177) Shame is the emotional testimony that someone adheres to an honour code in theory yet deviates from it in practice. As Appiah emphasises though, that does not mean this honour code is also a moral code. Some honour codes have historically turned out to stand directly in opposition to morality –​ think of slavery, or honour killings still happening today. It is true that shame is often misdirected and should not be trusted at face value. Shame is a bad indicator of moral truth because of its history of taking the ‘wrong’ objects to be shameful, like menstruation or the sexual appetite of women. But every emotion, or any motivation for that matter, can lead us astray without proper examination. Shame is a reflection of what we believe a person with dignity should (or rather should not) do. But of course, this idea of a dignified life and what constitutes it can take better or worse forms and is open for criticism. The problem here does not lie with shame itself, but with the concept of dignity that precedes it. Shame is merely the mechanism that helps us live up to our concept of a dignified life. But what that life entails is open for revision and critical reflection. Turning back to green shame then, the question is: is green shame the result of an adherence to an honour code that is morally righteous? What is the concept of a dignified life that brings about green shame? It can be one of two things: either the person who feels green shame thinks caring for the environment is part of what a dignified human should do, or they think a dignified person is regarded well by their peers and living sustainably is a way to do so. That second source of green shame, which comes from an external pressure rather than from an internal preoccupation with the environment, seems less noble than the first. But, if it comes to making society greener, we might not care about motivation, as long as those acting from a desire 104

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to be well-​thought off behave in the exact same ways as those motivated by an idea that living with respect for the planet is part of a dignified life. To debate about whether sustainability should be part of our concept of a dignified life, we need to discuss with each other and give well-​informed arguments as to why we should care about preserving life on this planet, and why this is something we should take as part of what it means to live a dignified life. Such arguments have been convincingly made, from multiple angles: some point at harms for us personally (European Commission, 2019). Others point to the disadvantages for humans in general and argue that we have a global responsibility for matters like distributive justice and consideration for specifically vulnerable groups and future generations (De-​ Shalit, 1995; Mazor, 2010; Nawrotzki, 2014; Allison, 2017). Yet others refer to the inherent value of the environment and of life, human or otherwise (Beckerman and Pasek, 2001: 127). Those arguments make a convincing case that living with respect for life and the planet is a good element to include in one’s idea of a dignified life.

Is green shame really the most efficient option? A third objection one could give concerns the efficiency of shame in bringing about behavioural change. Even if shame can cause behavioural change, and even if it can do so for the better, is this really the most efficient way to bring about the greening of society? The urgent issues of the climate breakdown need to be addressed on a large scale, and having large companies change their ways by implementing quota or norms has a significantly more drastic effect than making individual changes in behaviour. Seventy-​one percent of all greenhouse gases are emitted by 100 companies (Griffin, 2017). The most effective way to bring these large-​scale polluters to cut back on carbon emissions is either to offer them a juridical framework in which they are simply not allowed to get away with their current practices, or to give them economic incentives to do so. Shouldn’t we be focused on these policy measures instead of focusing on shame in the individual? Flygskam might deter some from flying as often as they would otherwise have. But having governments subsidise train traffic and tax flights would be an immediate incentive for all individuals to change their travel choices, whether they care about the environmental reasoning or not. Besides, focusing on shame in the individual assumes that people have a choice to behave otherwise. But, as is often rightly pointed out, to have these options is a privilege of the relatively well-​off. Assuming that everyone has the option to behave otherwise and should be held accountable if they fail to do so is rightfully called socially unjust and exclusive. Gilets jaunes stand opposite to –​so the gilets argue –​middle class, intellectual circles that have the means and luxury to live sustainably. In some circles, words like flygskam 105

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are coined to name a prominent feeling, while in other circles, the climate emergency is not even on the radar of concerns, let alone there being a need to name a feeling of shame for acting unsustainably. It is right to object that great change must be institutional and governmental. But that does not mean we cannot make efforts on the scale of the individual as well, if at least these efforts do not pose debilitating financial or social repercussions for us. For a democratic government to charter laws and regulations focused on climate justice, these implementations need to be carried widely throughout the population, or even be demanded from (large groups of) the people. The idea that caring about the climate is part of a dignified life, and the shame that goes with that, helps speed up this process of demand. The more people feel uncomfortable with flygskam, the louder their voices pressuring the policy makers to take steps concerning these issues will be. The more they will come to the streets to ask for subsidised train travel. It is up to the government to facilitate the people in the choices they want to make, but the people need to feel the urgency of making a certain choice first. Shame makes these matters urgent. In Belgium, the shame felt about a blackface figure that traditionally accompanied the local version of Santa Claus led to the widely carried ‘Pete pact’,4 in which public companies, schools, and broadcasting networks pledged not to use the blackface caricature. Many Belgian and Dutch adults, including myself, felt the hard pinch of shame for having enjoyed this tradition that made black fellow citizens uncomfortable and that sustained racist stereotypes. The shame hits especially hard in admitting that many people downplayed and defended the tradition when it first came under fire. The annual protests that are now slowly leading to policy change are partly fed by these flares of shame for past ignorance and indulgence. All this being said, why should we turn to shame to achieve this? Would it not be more efficient to focus on positive reinforcement mechanisms, like feelings of pride or accomplishment, the Swedish tågskryt, for instance, than the punishing, uncomfortable emotion of shame? Again, such an approach does seem vital as well, and it holds up with regards to external reinforcement or punishment (where shaming was shown to be unconstructive). Yet mechanisms of positive reinforcement do not exclude the possible work feeling shame can do. On the contrary, the positive and negative mechanisms are both sides of the same coin. And of that coin, I would argue along with other philosophers that the uncomfortable side makes matters more urgent than the comfortable one.5 Having a velvet-​patted chair in front of us that is kind of hard to reach might not convince us to leave our chair if our current one is actually quite comfortable. But being uncomfortable on our current chair urges us to get up and endeavour to reach the velvet-​patted chair, even if it does prove quite a challenge. 106

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Returning to the Belgian Black Pete example, my intuition is that it was not mere guilt that ignited the protests, and guilt would not have caused the same cry for change. Shame about the past ignorance and condonement or even active defence of a racist tradition, rather than mere guilt, made the protests urgent and the demanded repairs drastic. Feeling shame about once having condoned such a tradition means that one takes oneself seriously, as a person who was wrong in the past, and can be held accountable for that. You do not exempt yourself from responsibility, even if individual responsibility is only a small part of the puzzle. It also means that you see improvement possible, and that you engage in a discussion with yourself about how that can be done and what it means to live a good life.

Conclusion Words like flygskam can indicate feelings that help us in the pursuit of greening our society. Green shame can be a motivator to change stubborn behaviour, and it can give rise to a public outcry for the large-​scale governmental policies that could tackle climate injustice most efficiently. I proposed that we understand shame as a mechanism that polices our sense of dignity. Green shame can be just this: the uncomfortable inner blush that alarms us when we are crossing certain lines that we have set in the hopes of living a dignified life. But to advocate for shame is not without danger. Shame has a bad reputation, and for good reasons. Shaming others harms the dignity and integrity of that person. Shame can be paralysing and detrimental to one’s self-​conception. Many natural and harmless things have been the object of shame, like ‘quirky’ bodies, sexual orientation or loss of material status. But these harms are not inherent to the emotion of shame. They come about because we were worried about the wrong things, or because we forced the shame on someone else. It then comes down to examining our own concept of a dignified life, and constantly reassessing it in discussion with others. If shame springs from a worry about dignity that is well-​thought out, if it is an inner blush rather than a tool to use on others, and if it concerns changes that are within reach and will not pose debilitating financial or social threats to us, shame can help us on our way to make moral revolutions happen. It does so by its effect on individual behaviour, but even more so by making change urgent and thus encouraging people to demand radical action from policy makers and companies, while creating a broad support base for these changes. Notes 1

This concept of shame is not uncontested. Krista Thomason argues that, instead of the failure to meet an ideal, shame is caused by the tension between one’s self-​concept and 107

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2

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one’s identity. When experiencing shame, we feel ‘overshadowed by some aspect of our identities that we do not necessarily see as part of who we are’ (Thomason, 2018). Though I am highly sympathetic to large parts of her view, in the case of green shame, I think some version of the ideal view of shame is recommended. A person experiencing green shame is ashamed precisely because they realise that their choices do reflect something about who they are, and exactly this is what causes their shame. Greenwashing is the name for a marketing strategy that companies use to deceptively spin their image to a more environmental-​friendly one than is actually the case. In popular media, this topic is often phrased as the ‘stud’ versus ‘slut’ debate. There is some interesting literature about the internalisation of these gendered sexual norms (Armstrong et al, 2014; Fjær, 2015; Staff, 2009). The ‘Pete pact’ was put forward in 2016 by the Flemish-​Dutch culture house De Buren. It was signed by several children’s television channels and toy stores, and the Catholic and public school networks, among others, see Decker (2016). For an argument made in favour of this point, see for instance Elpidorou (2018), who argues for the discomforts of boredom specifically, and compares them to pain, which ‘is a mechanism that both signals the presence of harm and motivates us to change our behavior in order to protect ourselves’ (2018: 326). Specifically regarding shame, philosophers have often argued in its favour by pointing to its discomfort as an incentive for change; see Morgan (2008) on shame, or Kristjánsson (2002), who writes that ‘shame is as important a warning sign in the moral realm as fever is in the realm of physical health’ (p 114), or Thomason (2018) who describes that we can use the painful feelings of shame as ‘a warning and reminder’. In popular discourse, it is telling that Al Gore urged viewers of his documentary about the climate crisis to recognise an inconvenient truth, see Gore and Guggenheim (2006), or that Greta Thunberg spoke to the attendants of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos in January 2019 and told them ‘I don’t want you to be hopeful, I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act’ (Thunberg, 2019).

References Allison, E. (2017) Towards a feminist care ethic for climate change, Journal of Feminist Studies, 33(2): 152–​59. Appiah, A. (2010) The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, New York: W.W. Norton. Armstrong, H., Hamilton, L.T., Armstrong, E.M. and Seeley, J.L. (2014) “Good Girls”: gender, social class, and slut discourse on campus, Social Psychology Quarterly, 77(2): 100–​22. Beckerman, W. and Pasek, J. (2001) Justice, Posterity, and the Environment, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. De-​Shalit, A. (1995) Why Posterity Matters, Environmental Policies and Future Generations, New York: Routledge. Decker, M.d. (2016) Vaarwel Zwarte Piet, Leve Roetpiet, De Standaard, Mediahuis. Deonna, J.A., Rodogno, R. and Teroni, F. (2012) In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. European Commission (2019) How will we be affected?, https://​ec.eur​opa. eu/​clima/​polic​ies/​ada​ptat​ion/​how​_​en

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Elpidorou, A. (2018) The good of boredom, Philosophical Psychology, 31(3): 323–​51. Fjær, P.S. (2015) “I’m not one of those girls”: Boundary-​work and the sexual double standard in a liberal hookup context, Gender and Society, 29(6): 960–​81. Gilligan, J. (1996) Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes, New York: G.P. Putnam. Gore, A. and Guggenheim, D. (2006) An Inconvenient Truth, Paramount Classics. Griffin, P. (2017) CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017, London . CDP Worldwide, https://b​ 8f65c​ b373​ b1b7​ b15f​ eb-c​ 70d8​ead6​ced5​50b4​d987​d7c0​ 3fcdd​ 1d.ssl.cf3.rackc​ dn.com/c​ ms/r​ epor​ ts/d​ ocume​nts/​000/​002/​327/​origi​ nal/​Car​bon-​Maj​ors-​Rep​ort-​2017.pdf Hoikalla, H. and Magnusson, N. (2019) As ‘flying shame’ grips Sweden, SAS ups stakes in climate battle, Bloomberg. https://​b8f65​cb37​3b1b​7b15​ feb-​c70d8​ead6​ced5​50b4​d987​d7c0​3fcd​d1d.ssl.cf3.rackc​ dn.com/c​ ms/r​ epo​ rts/​docume​nts/​000/​002/​327/​origi​nal/​Car​bon-M ​ ajo ​ rs-R ​ epo ​ rt-2​ 017.pdf Jacquet, J. (2015) Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool, New York: Pantheon Books. Kristjánsson, K. (2002) Justifying Emotions: Pride and Jealousy, London and New York: Routledge. Lester, D. (1997) The role of shame in suicide, Suicide and Life-​threatening Behavior, 24(4): 352–​61. Maes, H. (2005) Bescheidenheid, Trots En Ijdelheid, Eindhoven: Damon. Manne, K. (2018) Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, New York: Oxford University Press. Mazor, J. (2010) Liberal justice, future people, and natural resource conservation, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 38(4): 380–​408. Morgan, M.L. (2008) On Shame, New York: Routledge. Nawrotzki, R. (2014) Climate migration and moral responsibility, Ethics, Policy & Environment, 17(1): 69–​88. Nussbaum, M.C. (2004) Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, M.C. (2016) Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, New York: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1999) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Staff, K. (2009) The sexual double standard and adolescent peer acceptance, Social Psychology Quarterly, 72(2): 143–​64. Taylor, G. (1985) Pride, Shame and Guilt. Emotions of Self-​assessment, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thomason, K.K. (2018) Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Thunberg, G. (2019) Our house is on fire, www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​ U72x​kMz6​Pxk. Tracy, J.L. and Robins, R. (2004) Putting the self into self-​conscious emotions. A theoretical model, Psychological Inquiry, 15(2): 103–​25. Walker, R., Kyomuhendo, G.B., Chase, E. and Choudhry, S. (2013) Poverty in global perspective: is shame a common denominator?, Journal of Social Policy, 42(2): 215–​33. Williams, B. (1993) Shame and Necessity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Against Comfort: Political Implications of Evading Discomfort Ditte Marie Munch-​Jurisic

Introduction Why do some situations make us more uncomfortable than others? We typically think of feelings of discomfort and comfort as highly individualised and subjective. In this chapter, however, I argue that visceral gut feelings like discomfort are not merely private emotional experiences but in a certain sense collective and public. To illustrate this point, consider the following testimony from a young African American man: ‘I feel like I’m disturbing people by just being there. Like, people feel uncomfortable when I walk in. I guess I’ve kind of become numb to it after so many years. Like, this is just my life, and it’s just something that I’ve gotten used to, unfortunately.’ (Story of Access, 2018) Imagine this young man interviewed for a job by three white men. His interviewers appear uncomfortable in his presence. Registering their discomfort, he also begins to feel nervous. If we attribute the tension in the room to individual psychology, we have told only half the story. It is well-​established that we find it easier to interact with people who resemble us –​for example, in terms of ethnicity, gender, and social and economic class (Danyluck and Page-​Gould, 2018). The people with whom we share these characteristics increase our visceral wellbeing and make us comfortable. Emotional synchronising and empathising become easier when we share the same experiences or cultural background (Barrett, 2017; Bloom, 2018). We are drawn to people in whose company we feel comfortable and we avoid

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situations and people that make us uncomfortable. Feelings of discomfort usher us in certain directions, often without our explicit awareness. The statement quoted above takes place in the context of the contemporary United States, where perceptions of race play a central role in social interaction. Evidence on implicit biases suggests that we can adapt our thought experiment to any particular social, political and geographical location, varying the example to the social identities of the setting: a woman before an all-​male panel of interviewers (gender); or one wearing a hijab before a panel of European Christians or secularists (religion, ethnicity); a first-​generation academic from a working class background before a panel of distinguished university professors (class) and many other parameters (appearance, weight, disability, and so on). In each of these cases, the discomfort in the room is the product of a specific political context, not mere individual psychology. In her studies of hiring processes, Lauren Rivera shows that employers cite a so-​called ‘cultural fit’ as one of the two most important qualifications for a job candidate. Moreover, 70 per cent of employers cited cultural fit as more important than technical qualifications. In her own words, her study shows that ‘hiring is more than just a process of skills sorting; it is also a process of cultural matching between candidates, evaluators, and firms’ (Rivera, 2012: 1000). The value of being comfortable around someone (because of a perceived cultural fit) outweighed concerns about productivity alone. Because it feels easier and more comfortable to be in the midst of the recognisable, the safe, the familiar, our gut feelings direct us to choose the company of people we perceive to be like ourselves. Interestingly, Rivera’s study sheds light on the fact that the operation of implicit biases in this context is not merely automatic and unconscious, as often assumed. In her interviews, employers explicitly mention ‘cultural fit’ as a qualification they seek. This is an explicit judgement of a candidate’s prospective fit within the corporate, business, or team culture. Nonetheless, it is important to understand that the feeling of comfort in a situation or in the company of a person is rooted in deep physiological processes, not merely cognition. It is metabolically costly to be in environments that are hard to predict and easier (and more comfortable, physiologically) to be in situations and with people that we find recognisable (Theriault et al, 2020). Thus, while employers seek a fit within the culture of their workplace, they are likely evaluating the comfort they personally feel with a candidate. In political theory and philosophy, political emotions are typically identified narrowly as emotions and feelings that are displayed in public, political life. Important work has sought to understand how emotions like shame, disgust and contempt shape the politics of nations and their political leaders (Nussbaum, 2010; Kelly, 2011; Bell, 2013). But this particular tradition has given little attention to political dimensions of more covert 112

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forms of affect like comfort and discomfort.1 The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the political dimensions of deep, physiological experiences of negative affect and to draw important implications for the practice of not only emotion theory, but political theory as well. If we want to increase social mobility and foster environments where everyone has equal access to educational and career opportunities, we have a moral and political duty to expose ourselves to particular kinds of discomfort that are the products of implicit biases. Living up to this duty requires a better conceptual framework for understanding feelings of discomfort. We need a more nuanced vocabulary for what discomfort can be. To progress in this direction, drawing on findings in experimental psychology and the constructivist theory of emotions and affect, I introduce the concept of bias discomfort and its more specific subtype interaction discomfort. Aided by philosophical theories on the structural dimensions of prejudice and bias, I argue that these concepts can help agents recognise how and when the specific experience of interaction discomfort is distorting their ability to connect with others. To be clear, I am not encouraging agents to ignore, silence or bury their negative affective states or the multiple kinds of negative emotions that may arise out of them –​anger, guilt, shame, or indignation, to name just a few possibilities. Nor am I arguing that this range of negative emotional and affective states are necessarily counterproductive or politically undesirable (Srinivasan, 2018), nor attempting to water down differences and conflicts between privileged and underprivileged groups (Mouffe, 2005; Dixon et al, 2012). On the contrary, my goal is to argue that an increased awareness and toleration2 of negative affective states can be a key resource in promoting social and political change. Of course, it would amount to what Laurent Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’ to imagine that mere awareness and conceptual attention would be enough to dismantle these processes (Berlant, 2012). As philosopher Laurencia Sáenz-​Benavides has meticulously detailed, emotional phenomena are not only ‘shaped by oppressive structures, they also play an instrumental role in sustaining and reinforcing them’ (Sáenz-​ Benavides, 2019: 3). Understanding how these engrained emotional responses take the form of social habits that sustain the dominant political structures also helps us recognise why these structures are so pervasive and hard to change. With these cautions in mind, this chapter presents a principled and normative argument for why agents –​out of a concern for justice and a fairer distribution of possibilities for upward social mobility –​have a duty to expose themselves to interaction discomfort. This duty primary targets members of a privileged majority who are already well-​connected and equipped with access to a network of opportunities, but under certain conditions, minorities would also would also benefit from engaging in a more conscious 113

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and purposeful exposure to discomfort.3 I use the second half of the chapter to discuss some of the immediate challenges that my proposal faces. One set of objections confronts the practical feasibility of the proposed conceptual framework: how exactly is one supposed to identify a specific feeling of discomfort as a byproduct of implicit biases? A related concern is that my reliance on a constructivist view of emotions encourages an unproductive kind of relativism, in which there is no right or wrong interpretation of an affective state. I answer these concerns with some specific examples of techniques to help identify and manage instances of interaction discomfort and by discussing what long-​term institutional and societal strategies should be enabled. Another set of objections confronts the ethical standard and scope of the proposal: Why should disadvantaged minorities be included in this duty to feel uncomfortable? Is it not unreasonable to demand this extra emotional labour4 of disadvantaged minorities who are already exposed to a considerable amount of interaction discomfort on a daily basis? With reference to the debate over the imperative of integration between Elizabeth Anderson and Tommie Shelby, I argue that minorities are only obliged to expose themselves to interaction discomfort in places of formal social integration: institutional environments in both the public and private sphere (schools, organisations, clubs, companies, and so on). Another ethical concern is whether my proposal invites irrational behaviour by demanding a greater exposure to discomfort (Gendler, 2011). By encouraging agents toward emotionally charged and cognitively taxing situations, could the proposal even worsen relations between minorities and majorities? Will agents feel compelled to ‘fake’ being comfortable or compensate by being overly welcoming? I reject these criticisms on the basis that each rests on a flawed idea of authentic and false emotions and a false dichotomy between rational and unbiased behaviour.

How can discomfort be political? A fundamental basis of this chapter is that affective states of comfort and discomfort are shaped by the social and political. But, to begin with, what is this broader phenomenon of affect? I draw on a constructivist view of emotions where affect is the flow of feelings and unidentifiable moods, of which we are not necessarily explicitly aware, occurring in the background of our conscious thoughts. We often feel a range of moods –​excited, jittery, irritable, annoyed, or simply uncomfortable –​without knowing why. The same applies to sensations of calm, peace, and comfort (Posner et al, 2005; Barrett, 2017). Affect is sometimes a component of an emotion but not all kinds of affect become constructed as emotions. This is because affect is part of the larger phenomenon of interoception, a form of inner 114

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perception. In the words of neuropsychologist Lisa Barrett, interoception is the ‘brain’s representation of all sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system’ (Barrett, 2017: 56). Some of these sensations are transformed into emotions, but not all. If I feel irritable during a morning meeting, I might simply interpret my affective sensation as a sign of hunger but I may also understand my affect as a feeling of frustration at a colleague who missed an important deadline. Whether my state was in fact evoked by my colleague or my hunger is an open question. The cause of an affective state cannot always be settled (Stephan and Walter, 2020). Many studies have, however, found that negative affect often has a spillover effect and influences our judgement and perceptions of the world. To cite just one example, interviewers were found to rate job candidates higher on sunny days than on gloomy days (Clore and Schiller, 2016). Because affect is part of this larger system of interoception, it never turns off, not even when we sleep. From birth to death, we are always in some affective state, whether calm or aroused, comfortable or uncomfortable. Even when we are not consciously aware of affect, it influences how we behave, think, and perceive situations and interactions. In Barrett’s words ‘the human brain is anatomically structured so that no decision or action can be free of … affect’ (Barrett, 2017: 72). As a result, like many other contemporary theories, the constructivist view of emotions rejects the dichotomy between feeling and cognition and emphasises that feelings or affect, and the whole body as such, are always involved in the way we experience and perceive the world (Sullivan, 2015; Colombetti, 2017; Barrett, 2017). As philosopher Susan Sullivan puts it: ‘The knowledge that an organism has –​about the world, about itself, about others –​has a bodily basis. Human beings … come to know things through our physiological, affective transactions with the world’ (Sullivan, 2015: 14). If affect is always lingering in the background of our thoughts, how can such rudimentary visceral phenomena entail a political dimension? To understand this, we need to consider the phenomenon of emotional synchrony. Different scholarly fields have given the phenomenon a variety of names: attunement, mirroring, mimicry, and emotional contagion (Hatfield et al, 1993). It is, for example, the irresistible urge to yawn following the yawn of someone else. It is also the unconscious coordination of body language that we see in pleasant interactions. But emotional synchrony is more than mere coordination of facial expression and bodily gestures. More fundamentally, emotional synchrony makes us feel better at a very basic physiological level. By synchronising breathing and heartbeats, for example, we help maintain each other’s visceral state of wellbeing (Barrett, 2017: 195ff). It is important to emphasise again that we do not necessarily notice these deep forms of synchrony. Sometimes we are aware of these physiological 115

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changes and sometimes we are not. But they are always present, part of how our brain interprets and models the world. As a consequence, we experience some interactions as more or less pleasant than others. Often we cannot articulate, or put a finger on, precisely why an interaction made us feel a certain way. But the guiding force behind such encounters is hardly accidental and cannot be attributed solely to individual differences in personality. Research in the psychological sciences demonstrates that it is simply easier to synchronise and therefore empathise and interact with people who resemble us. Empathising become easier when we share the same experiences or background so that, as psychologist Paul Bloom argues, ‘empathy distorts our moral judgements in pretty much the same way that prejudice does’ (2018: 31). In a job interview, for example, it is easier for interviewers and interviewees to communicate and connect with each other when they share the same socially and culturally inherited scripts for how to display a politely interested and engaged attitude. As we have already seen, Rivera’s research has documented how important this kind of ‘cultural fit’ is for a job offer to materialise (Rivera, 2012). The flip side of these synchronising processes is that agents experience what I call interaction discomfort: they display various signs of discomfort when interacting with individuals they perceive as belonging to other groups. This affective phenomenon has been well documented by testimonies of minority groups and research from social psychology under different names: ‘intergroup anxiety’ (Stephan, 2014; Jacoby-​Senghor et al, 2016; Hagiwara et al, 2017), ‘racial stress’ (Sullivan, 2015), ‘white discomfort’ (Applebaum, 2017), and ‘white fragility’ (DiAngelo, 2011). Many of the studies and testimonies mentioned here refer to an American context focused on race, but I use the concept interaction discomfort as a broad, neutral umbrella term that also covers the unease and discomfort agents experience when interacting with people from groups they perceive as dissimilar because of gender, class, ethnicity, dialect, disability or appearance in general (Bloom, 2018: 31; Munch-​Jurisic, 2020).5 Recall the opening quote from the young African American man who observes the discomfort of his interactions with white Americans. The testimony does not cite an explicit, intentional form of discrimination, but speaks plainly to the wearying, damaging effects of such everyday encounters. Like explicit bias, subtle forms of bias also lead to high stresses in minority populations. These covert forms of discriminations leave the recipient with physiological and affective states of stress, for example a tight stomach, racing heartbeat or blushing (Sullivan, 2015: 144–​6). Despite the fact that this experience of negative affect is felt by a specific individual, we should not understand it as a mere reflection of their own private and individual emotions. The specific experience of interaction discomfort is public, in a certain sense, because it is shaped by the social and 116

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political environment of the individual. As the work of political philosopher and theorist Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates, racial stigmatisation (and its negative affective consequences) should not be understood as mere ‘private thoughts, isolated in the mind of discrete individuals’, because these thoughts ‘enjoy a certain public standing, coloring the meanings of interactions even among people who prefer that these meanings not apply’ (Anderson, 2010: 53). For a stereotype to have such ‘public standing’, it has to be common knowledge in a relevant society or context: everyone understands its meaning without necessarily endorsing it (Anderson, 2010: 62). When the discomfort of a particular situation arises as a consequence of internalised stereotypes and implicit social biases with this kind of public standing, it is best understood as interaction discomfort. In such cases, understanding the discomfort as individual and subjective does not provide sufficient explanation for the phenomenon, particularly considering the ubiquity of discomfort in such interactions. Following the work of philosopher Sally Haslanger, the specific phenomenon of interaction discomfort cannot fully be captured through an individualist methodology but demands us to apply a wider lens to identify ‘patterns in attitudes that gives rise to the pattern of actions which, in turn, constitutes the social fact’ (Haslanger, forthcoming: 1). In their core, social phenomena like interaction discomfort are best understood as ‘systems, and parts of systems, that involve more than individuals and their attitudes’ (Haslanger, forthcoming: 1). In sum, the phenomenon of interaction discomfort arises as a byproduct of specific social and political circumstances, including biases towards and stereotypes of specific groups, which are inherited and internalised to the point that they materialise in our affective, physiological habits. A mere individualist, psychological account of interaction discomfort is insufficient to explain the multiple factors (political, material, cultural, historical) that give rise to these types of affective phenomena in a particular social context.

The duty to choose discomfort So far we have established that, when rudimentary affective states reflect implicit biases, they are not merely individual or private but also social and public in an important sense. Most of us evade discomfort in favour of comfort, often in unconscious and implicit ways, and the consequence of these behaviours patterns poses a problem for equal treatment of social groups. The default to select for people and environments that make us feel at ease tends to privilege majority groups, reflecting and further leveraging existing generational advantages and perpetuating an unequal status quo. Principles of justice and equal access to opportunity therefore require us to expose ourselves to more interaction discomfort. 117

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It may seem an overstatement to argue that unconscious and seemingly benign preferences in social interactions contribute substantially to inequality. But plenty of research demonstrates just that –​how in-​group favouritism and helping behaviours materialise as forms of exclusion. As Banaji and Greenwald put it: ‘discrimination of even the most apparently well-​ intentioned kind –​helping members of in-​g roup –​has significant impact on those who are not part of the in-​g roup and those who are’ (Banaji and Greenwald, 2013: 143). The effects of such favouritism are subtle and become visible only when tracking them based on their structural accumulation in a given society. Nonetheless, the foundation of these processes rests on simple, seemingly innocent questions: Who can help you write the essay for your university application? Who will mentor you about your future career prospects? What other advantages are received in the form of small favours, invitations to social outings, and so on? When our employment decisions favour the sort of people whom we meet for coffee, the company of our coffee dates becomes a political problem. Individuals without connections are at every level disadvantaged by their diminished access to similar resources. Worse yet, the advantages of networks are leveraged and multiply with time, opening doors to new rooms that remain closed to outgroups. The downstream effects of evading interaction discomfort are therefore dramatically different for members of majority and minority groups. Consider the following testimony of an African American man on how he deals with the exposure to interaction discomfort in the public space: ‘I have to make sure that I have given enough space between myself and another patron or another commuter on the train just to make sure that I am not making someone uncomfortable. I have to make sure that my hands are visible when I walk into certain spaces so they make sure I don’t –​I’m not stealing. I try to make sure I make eye contact with people who may or may not be security or managerial staff, just to ensure, you know, I’m not here to hide anything. I watch my tone to make sure that I don’t come off as threatening. Just leaving the house some days, you know, sometimes it’ll just keep you at home and just keep you away from everything.’ (Story of Access, 2018) For someone in the position of a socially disadvantaged minority, the option of evading interaction discomfort –​ staying at home –​ often entails a loss of opportunities because access to jobs is often granted and mediated by members of the affluent group. In contrast, for a person with a privileged background, there is little or no cost to evading uncomfortable environments, situations and people; for them, the social world is relatively comfortable and easy to navigate. Instead of being profiled as suspicious 118

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and followed around a store, white Americans are met with a welcoming smile or small gestures of respect and consideration –​what Sullivan calls ‘microkindness’ (Sullivan, 2015: 132, 154). Because of this disparity, an agent’s standing in society imposes different obligations to consciously engage with environments where they experience interaction discomfort. The greatest duty lies with members of the majority group in gatekeeper positions, those with influence over a job market, educational opportunities, and so on. The duty to actively choose discomfort is also incumbent on members of minority groups although, as I will detail in the discussion below, this obligation is secondary and neither as urgent nor demanding as the duty of the majority. If we wish to dismantle the unequal status quo that unconscious affective and physiological habits help to perpetuate, agents need a better vocabulary for the varieties of discomfort that they experience. Following the constructivist theory of emotion, a fundamental assumption of this chapter is that we need a concept for an emotional state to recognise or perceive it. Without concepts like interaction discomfort, agents will not be able to understand their discomfort as a byproduct of implicit biases. Though agents will still experience the same negative affect, such conceptual frameworks will enable them to evaluate the potential influence of discomfort on their choices and actions.6 Let us consider again the example of a young African American man before a panel of white interviewers. If the interviewers –​committed to principles of equal opportunity –​merely let their gut feelings guide them towards a candidate whose presence feels familiar, recognisable and comforting, they risk biasing their decision against the African American candidate and unconsciously reproducing a status quo that none would defend on a principled level of reasoning. By questioning the temptation to choose the candidate who feels right, employers can scrutinise their own impulses and the concrete qualifications of the candidate with the understanding that their interaction discomfort in relation to some candidates may be a product of implicit biases. The suggestion is not that employers should renounce any reliance on gut feeling but rather to broaden the notion of their scope, so as to understand how they may prod them in undesirable ways. With a concept like interaction discomfort, an interview panel would be able to engage in critical discussion on whether their evaluation of candidates lives up to the standards of stated diversity goals. Let us now apply a similar logic to the perspective of the young man on the other side of the table. To what extent can minorities benefit by acting against the impulse to avoid interaction discomfort? If the young man has arrived well-​prepared but still feels nervous and uncomfortable, then he might leave the room, afraid that his nervousness reflects his lack of qualifications or even a flaw in his individual psychology. A critical reflection on the 119

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broader political context of his discomfort enables him to realise that the tension in the room is not merely his own but a reflection of the structural and systemic inequalities of American society, operating beyond individual control and through internalised affective habits. The suggestion is not to return to the classical, implausible dichotomy between emotion and reason. In the above examples, critical reflection should not be understood as an independent cognitive mechanism free of affect. The semantic exercise of naming the discomfort is in and of itself a form of emotional differentiation –​inseparable from the process of feeling something and experiencing something emotionally. More specifically, my proposal is an expansion of the constructivist idea that the recategorisation of negative affect can be a powerful strategy for individuals to cope with stressful affective states. Studies have shown that students who suffer performance anxiety achieve higher scores on university entrance exams when they can conceive their anxiety as a sign that they are excited and that their body is coping. This kind of ‘stress reappraisal’ has also been proven to be beneficial for people with fear of public speaking or singing (Jamieson et al, 2013; Barrett, 2017: 189). Using a similar approach, studies in experimental psychology have begun to explore how negative affect stemming out of racial bias can be mitigated through recategorisation (Lee et al, 2018). In contrast to constructivist models that categorise discomfort as purely physiological and individual (Barrett, 2017: 183–​8), my point is that some forms of discomfort are a product of an agent’s social and political environment. It is insufficient to conceive of the well-​known phenomenon of imposter syndrome as a private problem that each agent should tackle individually (Olah, 2019). In some cases, it will be psychologically beneficial (as well as descriptively true) for agents to situate their nervousness and negative self-​esteem within a larger structure of social and political systems. To sum up, if we are able to properly identify some forms of discomfort as originating from implicit biases, we may be better equipped to devise strategies for managing such affective states and mitigate the harms of ‘going with our gut’.

Managing interaction discomfort In the remaining part of the chapter I qualify my argument by considering two sets of objections. The first set of objections concern the practical feasibility of the proposal; the second set pose ethical questions about the duty to choose discomfort. One common objection to the constructivist view of emotions is that it is too optimistic about the prospects of recategorising and reappraising affect. Many are sceptical that cognitive control can be exercised to make us reassess and re-​experience negative affect. In short, the scepticism lies 120

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in the thought that merely thinking about nervousness as interaction discomfort can be successful in changing the experience of the affective state. It would indeed be naïve to imagine that agents could exert anything close to complete control over their affective negative states. Reassessing an affective state and assigning it a public standing may not even lessen the discomfort individuals experience. As we have discussed, rudimentary affect like discomfort does not necessarily have a transparent, straightforward intentionality. We can often pinpoint whether a feeling of discomfort is a sign of general bodily discomfort like hunger or an upcoming flu but the interpretation of discomfort as an emotion is a more ambiguous process. The moment agents begin to interpret their discomfort, they endow this affect with cognitive content, meaning and intentionality. In this process, there can be multiple, competing interpretations of what discomfort signifies in a given situation. This is why both the situational and conceptual context is fundamental to how agents interpret their discomfort (Munch-​Jurisic, 2020). We cannot always determine whether a specific interpretation of an affective state is accurate. For both theoretical and practical consequences, it is important to take this potential indeterminacy seriously. To avoid unwarranted determinism, not all cases of uncomfortable interactions should be invested with political and social significance. On the other hand, it would be equally dubious to disregard –​a priori –​the possibility that some uncomfortable interactions are best labelled as interaction discomfort. The challenge for a specific agent is, in other words, to balance between these two possibilities and to ensure that their interpretation of their affective state is warranted. A related concern questions the practical feasibility of this duty to feel uncomfortable. What strategies can be devised to ensure this process of recategorising discomfort toward socially productive ends? Here I focus primarily on members in the privileged majority who bear the primary duty to expose themselves to more interaction discomfort. I will return to the particular and thorny case of the obligations of minorities in the next section. Because we have already established that the source of interaction discomfort is a political context, it would be insufficient to merely advocate for various, seemingly benign individualist strategies of showing more kindness to minorities in day-​to-​day interactions. As I discuss in the next section, such individualist strategies have their own set of ethical problems if not handled appropriately. Instead, the primary focus should be on long-​ term institutional and societal strategies to create environments that can account for and manage interaction discomfort so as to enable minority access to opportunities for social mobility.7 We find a promising model in Elizabeth Anderson’s advocacy for The Imperative of Integration: ‘The ideal of 121

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integration envisions a restructuring of intergroup relations, from alienation, anxiety, awkwardness, and hostility to relaxed, competent civil association and even intimacy; from domination and subordination to cooperation as equal’ (Anderson, 2010: 117). Anderson’s project is specifically focused on the social, economic and political problems of racial segregation in the United States. For her, equality of opportunity can become possible only through securing daily interactions between white and black Americans. Her argument builds on the so-​called ‘contact hypothesis’, originally put forward by social psychologist Gordon Allport (Allport, 1958), which proposes that the best way to overcome in-​group/​out-​group animosity is to create environments where the opposing groups interact to create a new, shared ‘we identity’ –​a super structure that diminishes perceived differences. The contact hypothesis is one of the most widely tested claims in social psychology and recent meta-​analyses confirm its robustness (Anderson, 2010: 125; Paolini et al, 2018). The best environments for the contact hypothesis to unfold and succeed are in what Anderson calls places of ‘formal social integration’: institutional environments in both the public and private sphere (schools, organisations, clubs, companies), where authorities can secure and cultivate optimal conditions for intergroup interaction. The case of the United States Army constitutes one such interesting case of success, in which ‘being in the army’ is able to supersede the different racial and social identities of the soldiers (Anderson, 2010: 125).8 It is more difficult to successfully manage integration in unstructured and informal settings because agents spontaneously (and often unconsciously) seek out peers with shared social characteristics. However, positive experiences with formal social integration can have a spillover effect on informal social integration. If agents learn how to practise integration under formal and structured settings, for example by acquiring competence and ease in intergroup interactions, the same habits will help them alleviate the anxiety and stress they feel in informal social interactions (Anderson, 2010: 124). The most important evidence for the contact hypothesis appears in its long-​term effects (Pettigrew and Hewstone, 2017). Research shows that early experience with integration, such as in schools, leads both minorities and majorities to be more comfortable with interracial interactions and to lead more integrated lives, for example by living in integrated neighbourhoods (Anderson, 2010: 127). It is important to repeat that my call for integration and for agents to go against their feeling of comfort is not motivated by a goal of promoting intergroup harmony (Dixon et al, 2012), but by a concern for justice –​this is where I depart from the prevailing objective in contemporary contact theory. As the cases of the integration of the American military and school desegregation demonstrate, disadvantaged groups profit considerably from top-​down, formalised policies that mandate increased contact despite 122

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feelings of discomfort (arising from both implicit and explicit biases), because they afford them access to opportunities of upward mobility that they were previously denied (Hannah-​Jones, 2019; Johnson and Nazaryan, 2019). Promoting integration or a common group identity will not necessarily eliminate implicit or even explicit biases in the individual. As one African American officer puts it when asked to reflect on his 30-​year career in the military: ‘The longer you stay, the more you can see that racism knows how to hide itself. But it’s there’ (Moskos, 1986). He concludes, nonetheless, that it does count as ‘progress of a sort’ to be in an environment without explicit forms of racisms. As he puts it, ‘I know some of those white sergeants are racists, but they never once let anything slip’ (Moskos, 1986). Similarly, from the perspective of equality of opportunity, we can consider it a step in the right direction if an employer with entrenched implicit homophobic biases hires an openly homosexual employee. It would be naïve to imagine that the implicit biases of this employer will vanish into thin air because of his daily interactions with his new employee. But, even if the employer’s treatment of his new colleague is driven by external motivations (such as a fear of being seen as intolerant), progress has been made.9 The employer has gone against his inclination to choose a familiar, comfortable candidate. For the employee this matters significantly: it is a professional opportunity that would have been otherwise denied. What are the best conditions for uncomfortable encounters in such formal intergroup settings? This is a critical question that goes beyond the scope of this chapter. Several strains of research are already exploring the topic, but more investigation is needed (Paolini et al, 2018). My core argument, however, is that decisions makers, elites, technocrats and gatekeepers have a special obligation to actively engage with different communities and environments where they feel uncomfortable and uneasy, in short to embrace or at least tolerate interaction discomfort. First, because such authorities play an important role as ‘norm entrepreneurs’ to induce their subordinates to follow norms of civility in intergroup relations (Anderson, 2010: 124). Moreover, if such authority figures are physically and socially segregated from groups with minority backgrounds, they will not feel accountable for or to them (Anderson, 2010: 124, 131). One concrete example of such practices is the model of ‘reverse mentoring’ where CEOs and similar leading figures are coupled with an employee of a minority background to learn and better understand their experiences (Wingard, 2018).10 How optimistic should we be about the practical implementation of this kind of model that directly advocates for more exposure to discomfort? Several strains of research have pointed to limitations of the contact hypothesis (Dixon et al, 2012). One important finding is that experiences with negative contact between outgroups can reinforce intergroup 123

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animosity and lead to increased avoidance behaviour (Paolini et al, 2016). As Allport warned, not any kind of contact will do (Allport, 1958); research has documented repeatedly that if we expect an encounter to be uncomfortable, we typically opt for avoiding it (Paolini and McIntyre, 2019). However, even if we allow that mandated integration can in some cases worsen intergroup relations, this does not necessarily outweigh the reasons to promote integration for the sake of justice and equal access. The work of dismantling persistent institutional segregation is necessary despite its pains. As Nikole Hannah-​Jones puts it while refuting the common notion that the integration policies of ‘busing’ in North America failed: ‘The remedy for such segregation may be administratively awkward, inconvenient, and even bizarre in some situations, and may impose burdens on some; but all awkwardness and inconvenience cannot be avoided’ (Hannah-​Jones, 2019). The policy of busing students outside of their local school districts brought immediate results in desegregating schools, eliminating apartheid-​like educational conditions in the Southern states and radically changing the trajectory and lives of black children who gained access to quality schools (Johnson and Nazaryan, 2019). In these terms, the policies of mandated integration were successful; white Americans opposed them so vigorously not because they were ill-​conceived or ineffective, but exactly because they were such an effective tool of desegregation (Hannah-​Jones, 2019). To prevent this kind of reactionary backlash from majority groups, one central challenge is to make the necessary interaction discomfort of such mandated encounters tolerable. Organisations and institutions are responsible for creating open, respectful epistemic environments that encourage agents to engage with their perplexity, nervousness and anxieties –​what Medina calls epistemic friction (Medina, 2013: ­chapter 1). As detailed in the previous section, it is my contention that the first step in this direction is to provide agents with the conceptual tools to name their discomfort as interaction discomfort. Of course, as I argue elsewhere, there is no guarantee that reflecting on discomfort engenders moral learning (Munch-​Jurisic, 2020). Any intervention that encourages discomfort or epistemic friction must accept this limitation and be sensitive to the fact that agents may understand and interpret their discomfort through a wide range of lenses, which may be valid in their own right or at least relevant to consider.

The costs of choosing discomfort Another set of possible objections against my proposal are ethical, concerned with problems that may confront agents who take their obligation to engage with interaction discomfort seriously. One particular worry concerns the 124

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emotional costs suffered by minorities. Considering the fact that many minorities are already exposed to interaction discomfort on a daily basis, it can be argued that my proposal demands too much of such communities. Are they not already overloaded by this kind of emotional labour? A related set of questions is whether increased interaction, commonly difficult and uncomfortable, really is beneficial for the minority –​whether it will grant them more equal access to opportunities. Philosopher Tommie Shelby criticises Anderson’s integration model on this point, arguing that we should whenever possible avoid adding to the burdens of the oppressed (Shelby, 2014: 284). Shelby questions the core of the ‘contact hypothesis’ and the underlying assumption, also present in my argument, that minorities have to bear the burden of increased interaction discomfort now to decrease implicit biases among the majority in the long run. While allowing that both the privileged and disadvantaged have a role in redressing injustices, and that it is not in principle unjust for the disadvantaged to incur some costs of social reform that will ultimately bring benefits, Shelby stresses the tipping point of such costs and when minorities should refuse to play this role in the moral reform of the privileged. From the perspective of the disadvantaged group, some costs should never be accepted, such as a loss of self-​respect. Other costs, like increased vulnerability to discrimination and hostility, should only be imposed when absolutely necessary and with the provision that the most disadvantaged may opt out (Shelby, 2014: 284). The central problem for both Anderson’s model and my argument ‘against comfort’ is the presumption that modern western societies are primarily challenged by implicit biases and other subtle forms of structural discrimination, and that explicit racism and other forms of direct discrimination are things of the past. Anderson’s optimism may have been warranted in light of writing during the presidency of Barack Obama. But is my model ‘against comfort’ tenable in an era of Donald Trump and rising white ethno-​nationalism throughout the western world? Let us accommodate Shelby’s criticism by returning to the example of the young African American who faces interaction discomfort at a job interview. If offered the job, the young man may gain access to an environment where he is likely to experience increased stress and interaction discomfort (Anderson, 2010: 180–​81). In light of Shelby’s criticism, the question to consider is whether this additional emotional toll will be outweighed by the benefits of the new job (better pay, broader networks, increased opportunities), but also whether he can rest assured that explicit racism and practices of social exclusion have been rejected in the prospective work environment. If this minimum has not been met, we cannot speak of a moral duty to choose more discomfort, nor should we expect such self-​sacrifice and heroism of an already vulnerable minority (Shelby, 2014: 282). 125

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As a point of comparison, let us now consider the case of the African American man who discloses that merely leaving the house can sometimes be difficult because of the toll of interaction discomfort and general climate of suspicion towards him. Though clearly sympathetic, Anderson’s position would object to this impulse to withdraw to a safe community. In her model, the imperative of integration exists not just at the formal level of institutions but also though informal social integration. Anderson is explicitly against models of benign ethnocentrism put forward by scholars like Shelby and Iris Marion Young that endorse self-​segregation based on social identity (Anderson, 2010: 186). In this case, I agree with Shelby that Anderson’s model sets the demands for integration too high. While it may be practically necessary for minorities to endure the daily chores of interaction discomfort in formal institutional settings (if the minimum requirements discussed above are fulfilled –​no explicit discrimination, and so on), it is unreasonable to require that they also seek out discomfort in informal settings, for example by moving to a mixed neighbourhood (with the risks of increased stigma, direct discrimination and hostility). As already stated, the daily stress and discomfort that even subtle forms of discrimination produce are well documented for their physiologically damaging effects (Sullivan, 2015: ­chapter 3). Often, agents belonging to the majority group do not notice their own signs of discomfort and aversive behaviour (Dovidio and Gaertner, 2004). Though the contact hypothesis predicts that the display of such biases will diminish with time and increased intergroup interaction, it is too big a burden to ask an already encumbered minority group to also give up the comfort and safety in the private sphere of their lives. Furthermore, residential integration and close social contact do not necessarily increase interaction or social ties. One can live in a mixed, diverse neighbourhood without forming close friendships with one’s next door neighbour (Shelby, 2014: 275). Proximity does not necessarily entail intimacy or belonging. More importantly, as Shelby points out, a minority’s desire for a culturally homogeneous community is not necessarily borne out of political commitment, but simply out of the ‘intrinsic pleasures and comfort that come from being around people with similar life experiences’ (Shelby, 2014: 273). For black Americans who choose to formally integrate in institutions, black communities may be places of refuge from the strains of an unwelcoming, predominantly white society. In sum, while Anderson’s model of integration is based on the idea of reciprocity (‘For blacks to achieve racial equality, blacks need to change, whites need to change, and we need to change’; Anderson, 2010: 186), I place the primary duty to change on the majority group, specifically on people in positions of influence, and in proportion to their level of influence: CEOs more than mid-​level managers, managers more than workers.11 This position does prompt another set of objections. Namely, that (i) minorities could 126

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find it offensive or hurtful to know that majorities are choosing to interact with them despite their discomfort, and because (ii) merely exposing oneself to interaction discomfort could have cognitive and epistemic costs (Gendler, 2011). The first concern is worth taking seriously. Certainly, no one likes to be in a social setting where someone is visibly uncomfortable because of your presence. On a principled level, as we have discussed at some length above, the duty to endure this extra level of emotional labour exists only in formal institutional settings and in situations where the disadvantaged group can see a clear purpose or gain. There seems to be, however, another underlying assumption at play in the objection –​that our emotional expressions are revelations of some true self –​which I do think we have good reason to question. This assumption relies on a now largely outdated understanding of emotions as reactions that emerge naturally and spontaneously from within, so that it is possible to detect when someone is acting against their so-​called natural inclinations through so-​called ‘micro expressions’ –​tiny manifestations that reveal the true emotion beneath. This is the premise in the basic emotion view advocated by Paul Ekman (2004; 1992).12 It is, however, premature to conclude that a display of interaction discomfort by a member of a majority group necessarily reveals a negative attitude towards a minority or that their efforts to engage in intergroup contact are dishonest. As many philosophers have argued, it is not justified to assume that these physiological affective habits reflect the ‘deep self ’ of the agent: the principles and values that the agent consciously and reflectively endorses (Saul, 2014; Zheng, 2016; Levy, 2017). In some cases, it is important to recognise that the discomfort may signal an effort to break with one’s affective physiological habits. Another ethical concern to consider is the view that exposure to more interaction discomfort could carry damaging cognitive and epistemic costs. A variation of this objection has been put forward by philosopher Tamar Gendler.13 When agents attempt to regulate their behaviour and suppress their biases, she argues, these efforts can have significant epistemic costs. Gendler refers to an experiment in which white people with implicit but low racial biases performed worse at a cognitive task after interacting with black people. Her conclusion is that agents belonging to the well-​intentioned but implicitly biased group are faced with a tragic dilemma of choosing between acting ethically (but potentially irrationally) or acting rationally (but potentially unethically) (Gendler, 2011: 57). Gendler’s argument details the processes that leads to interaction discomfort: It really is both emotionally and cognitively taxing to interact with people that we feel less comfortable around.14 But her conclusion of a tragic dilemma sets up a false choice between acting without bias (according to our ethical standards) and acting rationally. If stereotyping leads 127

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an employer to choose a weaker job candidate on the basis of her personal comfort and their mutual and easy familiarity with one another, then it is stereotyping that potentially steers them towards irrationality: making the wrong hire for the job. Rivera’s studies demonstrate the frequency with which comfort trumps qualifications (Rivera, 2012).15 A further problem with Gendler’s view of the issue –​ that it is epistemically costly to oppose one’s intuitions and gut feelings –​is that it underestimates the emotional and moral costs of acting against one’s explicit principles. If an employer is explicitly committed to principles of anti-​ racism, anti-​sexism and equal access to opportunity, then the realisation that one has perpetuated inequality with an implicitly biased decision can also trigger a feeling of discomfort –​a form cognitive dissonance that I have previously described as awareness discomfort: the uncomfortable feeling of becoming aware of one’s one biases and the lack of alignment between one’s principles and behaviour (Munch-​Jurisic, 2020). The pursuit of justice, then, may incur short-​term costs but can be rational on reflection and in the long run.16 To attain the goal of more equal societies, majorities as well as minorities should become better at tolerating and even embracing interaction discomfort. This is no easy task, requiring us to think of aversive affect in novel terms. More work is needed to lay out exactly how we can learn to re-​conceptualise discomfort as potentially morally productive, not something to be avoided. The groundwork for this approach is already being laid out by a range of contemporary voices in philosophy who argue that negative affective states like discomfort, distress and anxiety can be valuable because they literally and physically force us to pause and reflect on our situation (Medina, 2013; Applebaum, 2017; Bailey, 2017; Lukianoff and Haidt, 2018; Kurth, 2018). There are also good reasons to be sceptical of discomfort and its potentially damaging effects (Munch-​Jurisic, 2020). When arguing as I do that both minorities and majorities should actively seek out more interaction discomfort, a central concern is how to structure and mediate intergroup settings. The best settings for intentional interventions are formal, institutional environments where it is possible to cultivate the right conditions for intergroup interaction, but much more work is needed to understand exactly how and under what conditions these interventions are successful. The possibilities for far-​reaching political and social change rest to a large extent on the mitigation of implicit, affective biases, not just the barring of explicit discrimination. Affective states may be experienced individually, but they often reflect emotions that are not entirely private and personal, but social and public. A critical understanding of the political dimensions of deep, physiological experiences of negative affect will make minorities as well as majorities better equipped at tackling difficult and 128

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awkward interactions in the public space, and it is the central argument of this chapter that the possibilities for social and political change are themselves dependent on the way that individuals interpret and manage their affective states. Funding This work was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Carlsberg Foundation under grant no. CF16–​0580. Acknowledgements Many thanks for comments and suggestions for earlier versions of this chapter to editors and reviewers at Global Discourse, Michael Ure, Milicent Churcher, Ruth Rebecca Tietjen, Charlie Kurth, Patel Krupa, Laurencia Sáenz, Pedja Jurisic, Lisa Barrett, Jordan Theriault, Mallory Feldman, the audiences during my talks at the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Lab, Northeastern University, April 2019, the workshop on ‘The Politics of Emotions. Historical Insights and Contemporary Challenges’, University of Braga, January 2019 and the special session on ‘Gut Feelings’ at the Annual Meeting for the Danish Philosophical Association, March 2019, and to the members in my research group for Criminal Justice Ethics at Roskilde University: Jesper Ryberg, Thomas Søbirk Petersen, Sune Lægaard, Kasper Lippert-​Rasmussen, Sebastian Holmen, Søren Sophus Wichmann, Rune Klingenberg, Frej Klem Thomsen and Kristian Kragh. Notes 1

2

3

4

The so-​called ‘affective turn’ in cultural studies has, however, involved a more explicit focus on affect, especially Sara Ahmed and her focus on the politics of bad feelings (Ahmed, 2005; Leys, 2011). In contrast, my focus in this chapter is on the notion of affect as it is used in the cognitive and affective sciences, but I share Ahmed’s understanding of affect as relational and political. The concept of toleration has a long disputed history, but here I rely on political theorist Lars Tønder’s understanding of toleration as a physiologically painful experience that may nonetheless be beneficial and potentially transformative for citizens who can thus become more openminded towards outgroups (Tønder, 2013). In the following my use of minority refers not necessarily to a numerical category, but to a socially and economically disadvantaged group that face explicit or subtle forms of discrimination from a privileged majority group. It is important to note that the same person can belong to a minority in one situation and a majority in another. The categories of minority and majority are not stable and fixed but depend to some extent on the social role and context. The term ‘emotional labor’ is originally coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in 1983 and describes the emotional demands of workers in the service industry (exhibiting positive attitudes, smiling, being welcoming) (Hochschild, 2012). Today, many use the term for self-​sacrificing and other-​serving behaviour that is rarely recognized or compensated appropriately; for example, when minorities are asked to give testimony on how it feels 129

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5

6

7

8

9

10 11

12

13 14

15 16

to be oppressed or when minorities are asked to assume the responsibility of mentoring other minorities in their workplace. Another form of bias discomfort, awareness discomfort, is the discomfort that individuals feel when confronted with the fact of their own implicitly biased attitudes, a phenomenon often discussed in literature and research about implicit bias (for review, consult Hahn and Gawronski, 2019). As I’ll discuss later, the precise content and origin of these affective states are indeterminate. It is, in other words, not possible to pre-​determinate or predict what emotion agents construe based on them. More on the indeterminate nature of racial bias, consult Madva (2019). More on the role of concepts in emotion construction and experiential blindness: Barrett (2017: ­chapters 2 and 3). For a similar line of reasoning, see Miranda Fricker’s concept of hermeneutical injustice (2007). Obviously, the necessary scale and challenge of this task is enormous and far beyond the scope of this chapter. While a formal policy of integration improved social mobility for people from otherwise disenfranchised backgrounds, the increase in representation has not achieved full equity in terms of promotion rates (Han, 2017). The extent of integration within the American military is an interesting and complex case study but scholars agree that it is a unique and meaningful reference point to understand what to expect when mandating inclusivity in social institutions (Bailey, 2019; Moskos, 1997). For a recent review of the status of the inclusion of minorities in the US military, see Rohall et al (2017). Studies show that even less egalitarian individuals respond to uncomfortable confrontations by exhibiting less prejudiced behavior simply to avoid being called out (Monteith et al, 2019). For more concrete strategies, consult Madva (2016) and Saul (2016). Robin Zheng discusses a similar model where one’s level of responsibility for promoting structural change depends on one’s particular social role (Zheng, 2018). For a rebuttal of Ekman’s version of the basic emotion theory, see Barrett (2017) and Lindquist et al (2012). Jennifer Saul’s analysis of Gendler’s paper inspired this objection (Saul, 2016). Recent findings from intergroup interaction experiments confirm these tendencies. For review see Paolini et al (2016). Kathy Puddifoot (2017) launches a similar critique of Gendler. Alex Madva targets Gendler’s argument in a similar fashion by arguing that anti-​racist ideals (for example, endorsing compensation for racial injustice) can also be rational (Madva, 2016).

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Medina, J. (2013) The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, New York: Oxford University Press. Monteith, M.J., Burns, M.D. and Hildebrand, L.K. (2019) ‘Navigating successful confrontations: what should I say and how should I say it?’ in R.K. Mallett and M.J. Monteith (eds) Confronting Prejudice and Discrimination, London: Academic Press, pp 225–​48. Moskos, C. (1997) All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way, New York: Basic Books. Moskos, C.C. (1986) Success story: blacks in the military, The Atlantic, May, www.thea​tlan​tic.com/​magaz​ine/​arch​ive/​1986/​05/​succ​ess-​story-b​ la​cks-​ in-​the-​milit​ary/​306​160/​ Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political, New York: Routledge. Munch-​Jurisic, D.M. (2020) The right to feel comfortable: Implicit bias and the moral potential of discomfort, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, doi: 10.1007/​s10677-​020-​10064-​5 Nussbaum, M.C. (2010) From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law, New York: Oxford University Press. Olah, N. (2019) “Impostor syndrome” is a pseudo-​medical name for a class problem, The Guardian, 19 October, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​commen​tisf​ ree/​2019/​oct/​16/​impos​tor-​syndr​ome-​class-​unf​airn​ess Paolini, S., Harris, N.C. and Griffin, A.S. (2016) Learning anxiety in interactions with the outgroup: towards a learning model of anxiety and stress in intergroup contact, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 19(3): 275–​313. Paolini, S., Harwood, J., Hewstone, M. and Neumann, D.L. (2018) Seeking and avoiding intergroup contact: future frontiers of research on building social integration, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 12(12): e12422, doi: 10.1111/​spc3.12422. Paolini, S. and McIntyre, K. (2019) Bad is stronger than good for stigmatized, but not admired outgroups: meta-​analytical tests of intergroup valence asymmetry in individual-​to-​g roup generalization experiments, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 23(1): 3–​47. Pettigrew, T.F. and Hewstone, M. (2017) The single factor fallacy: implications of missing critical variables from an analysis of intergroup contact theory, Social Issues and Policy Review, 11(1): 8–​37. Posner, J., Russell, J.A. and Peterson, B.S. (2005) The circumplex model of affect: an integrative approach to affective neuroscience, cognitive development, and psychopathology, Development and Psychopathology, 17(3): 715–​34. Puddifoot, K. (2017) Dissolving the epistemic/​ethical dilemma over implicit bias, Philosophical Explorations, 20(sup1): 73–​93, doi: 10.1080/​ 13869795.2017.1287295. Rivera, L.A. (2012) Hiring as cultural matching: the case of elite professional service firms, American Sociological Review, 77(6): 999–​1022. 133

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Rohall, D.E., Ender, M.G. and Matthews, M.D. (2017) Inclusion in the American Military: A Force for Diversity, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Sáenz-​Benavides, M.L. (2019) Instruments of power: how emotions contribute to oppression, PhD thesis, Birkbeck College, University of London. Saul, J. (2016) Good and bad implicit bias stories, Doing Justice to the Social, 11th NOMOS Meeting, 6 June, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Saul, J. (2014) Implicit bias, stereotype threat, and women in philosophy, in K. Hutchison and F. Jenkins (eds) Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, New York: Oxford University Press. Shelby, T. (2014) Integration, inequality, and imperatives of justice: a review essay, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 42(3): 253–​85. Srinivasan, A. (2018) The aptness of anger, Journal of Political Philosophy, 26(2): 123–​44. Stephan, A. and Walter, S. (2020) Situated affect, in T. Szanto and H. Landweer (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions, London: Routledge. Stephan, W.G. (2014) Intergroup anxiety: theory, research, and practice, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 18(3): 239–​55. Story of Access (2018) Directed by Stanley Nelson, www.yout​ube.com/​ watch?v=​o_​_​5​xvIE​3bU Sullivan, S. (2015) The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression, New York: Oxford University Press. Theriault, J.E., Young, L. and Barrett, L.F. (2020) The sense of should: a biologically-​based framework for modeling social pressure, Physics of Life Reviews, www.science​ dire​ ct.com/s​ cien ​ ce/a​ rtic​ le/p​ ii/S​ 15710​ 6452​ 0300​ 04X​ doi:10.1016/​j.plrev.2020.01.004 Tønder, L. (2013) Tolerance a Sensorial Orientation to Politics, New York: Oxford University Press. Wingard, J. (2018) Reverse mentoring: 3 proven outcomes driving change, Forbes, www.for​bes.com/​sites/​jason​wing​ard/​2018/​08/​08/​reve​rse-​mentor​ ing-​3-​pro​ven-​outco​mes-​driv​ing-​cha​nge/​ Zheng, R. (2016) Attributability, accountability, and implicit bias, in M. Brownstein and J. Saul (eds) Implicit Bias and Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press. Zheng, R. (2018) What is my role in changing the system? A new model of responsibility for structural injustice, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 21(4): 869–​85.

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For Love and for Life: Emotional Dynamics at the World Congress of Families Sara Kalm and Anna Meeuwisse

Introduction In March 2019, the World Congress of Families (WCF) held its 13th international conference in a palace in Verona, a city with the marketing slogan ‘the city of love’. This location of the congress was no coincidence. Besides being the setting of Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, Verona is also known for political conservatism and close links to ultra-​Catholic and far-​r ight movements (Friedman, 2018). The WCF has been defined as a hate group by Southern Poverty Law Center and the Verona congress was largely described in the media as a meeting of ‘haters’ with a ‘medieval agenda’ (Balleck, 2019: 385–​7). The Verona setting enabled the participants and speakers to counter such accusations by drawing on the city’s symbolism when presenting themselves instead as defenders of (heterosexual) love and married life. The love theme was widely referred to in speeches, on banners and in the music played at the congress, and it was clearly important to the collective identity and self-​presentation of this gathering. However, its definition of love was strongly questioned by the opponents. Tens of thousands of feminists from several countries gathered in Verona to protest against the conservative values and anti-​ feminist policies proposed by the WCF (some wearing red robes and white bonnets like the oppressed women in the dystopian world of The Handmaid’s Tale) and the event was widely covered in the media.1 The congress lasted for three days, consisted of speeches and seminars, and ended with a ‘Verona Declaration’ and a popular ‘March for the family’ attracting a few thousand participants. 135

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The WCF serves as an umbrella for interconnected organisations that promote Christian conservative values internationally. It gathers conservative and religious NGOs, politicians, and scholars who work together on ‘pro-​ family’ issues, and against a perceived ‘global liberal agenda’ that promotes abortion and birth control, female emancipation, gender theory, and sex education in schools. The near-​annual congress was initiated in 1997 by the US-​based Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society and the International Organization for the Family (IOF), with key sponsors from the US evangelical, Catholic and Mormon right, and with support from a growing list of political allies in different parts of the world, including in Europe. In Italy the congress was co-​sponsored by, among others, the municipality of Verona, and organisers also included pro-​life and conservative groups from Italy and Russia.2 As Doris Buss and Didi Herman (2003) have shown, the WCF and their allies paradoxically oppose globalism while vigorously advancing it through transnational mobilisation for conservative social change. Studies also confirm that there are close ties and personal overlaps between the US Christian right and several European ultra-​ conservative networks that have emerged in recent years (Bob, 2012; Datta, 2018; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2018). Since much indicates that the WCF network is mobilising for cultural and political issues on the basis of a shared collective identity, and against a clear adversary, it carries features of a social movement (Diani, 1992; Della Porta and Diani, 2006: 20–​22). Although the study of emotions and social movements has expanded in later years, as we will see below, the more specific topic of emotions and conservative/​reactionary movements is still understudied. In this text we approach the WCF as an intriguing case which allows us to study how negatively and positively charged emotions are intermixed in demands for political change. We will study how emotions are used in the typical movement efforts to create a collective identity and to mobilise. We therefore want to explore how the WCF speakers turn passive emotions into active ones, how they use positive emotions such as love to move and convince their followers, and how positive and negative emotions are combined to strengthen the collective identity and the willingness to fight for the cause. As we will see further below, the rhetoric is powered by the appeals to both positive and negative emotions, to both love and hate.

Social movements and emotions The WCF is a meeting for individual as well as organisational (religious, political, social) actors. We approach them as participants in a conservative social movement. The definition of a social movement is that actors are involved in collective action aiming at social or political change, and their characteristics include a distinct collective identity, dense informal 136

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networks between participants, and conflictual relationships with identifiable opponents (Della Porta and Diani, 2006: 20–​22). These characteristics all seem to be in place for ‘our’ actors. For sure, the WCF actors differ to some extent in priorities and motivations, but that is compatible with the notion of social movement which is broader than for instance the narrower and more specific notion of ‘campaign’ (Della Porta and Diani, 2006: 21). Another possible objection is that WCF participants are elite level actors whereas social movements are supposedly bottom-​up processes. But later research has shown that transnational movements often involve both grassroots and elite players (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Kalm and Uhlin, 2015). In our case, many but not all of the participants had elite positions (although, as we will see, they did not always present themselves as such) –​as religious leaders, as national government ministers or European Parliament members, for instance. As Neil Datta have demonstrated, and as the ‘March for the family’ that ended the congress made clear, these elite leaders have links to popular grassroots movements that perform large scale manifestations organised by, for instance, Hazte Oír and La Manif Pour Tous (Datta, 2018). In social movements scholarship, emotions were for a long time largely disregarded. Scholars working in the previously dominating ‘resource mobilisation’ tradition (represented by, for example, McCarthy and Zald, 1977) typically prioritise issues such as the organisation of the movement, resources and the movement’s relationship to the environment. The organisation itself and the resources it can muster are considered to play a more significant role for mobilisation and commitment than, for example, dissatisfaction, a strong ideology or charismatic leaders. The ‘political process perspective’ –​a development of the resource mobilisation perspective –​emphasises the importance of the historical and political context (the ‘political opportunity structures’) and compares the development of social movements in different systems or countries (McAdam et al, 1996). If individuals are noticed at all in these perspectives, they are presented as rational actors and emotions are largely ignored. More culturally oriented perspectives on social movements such as ‘framing’ (Snow and Benford, 1988) and ‘collective identity’ (Melucci, 1995) scholarship have also been criticised for a cognitive bias (Goodwin et al, 2000). Framing is understood as central for social meaning construction; an active process which highlights some but not other aspects of reality. Through ‘diagnostic’, ‘prognostic’ and ‘motivational’ framing processes, movement leaders interpret and present the topic of concern in particular ways, which furthermore invites particular kinds of mobilisation and action (Snow and Benford, 1988). However, despite the fact that motivational framing implicitly refers to emotions, framing theory has as a rule overvalued cognitive dynamics and undervalued emotional ones (Erickson Nepstad and Smith, 2001; Goodwin et al, 2001; Schrock et al, 2004; Young, 2001). 137

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The traditional negligence of emotional aspects is somewhat surprising given the topic of collective action, which so clearly depends on emotional impetuses for mobilisation (Goodwin et al, 2001: 6–​7; Gould, 2001; Jasper, 2011). However, and as part of the broader ‘emotional turn’ in the social sciences (Lemmings and Brooks, 2014), in recent decades the central role of emotions for mobilising members for the social movement cause has been recognised and explored (Goodwin et al, 2001; Flam and King, 2005; Jasper, 2011; Van Ness and Summers-​Effler, 2018). A finding in this literature is that movement leaders use emotions in order to foster collective identity but also to mobilise: to turn sympathisers into activists. Crucially, some emotions are passive and tend to cripple action, whereas others are conducive to political action. Active emotions make people take on a more confrontational and less acquiescent attitude towards authorities and opponents (Klandermans, 2015: 227). Movement leaders hence need to strive for inculcating active rather than passive emotions. Oft-​mentioned examples of passive emotions are shame, sadness, guilt and resignation; among the active ones are anger, pride and moral outrage (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006; Schieman 2006; Klandermans, 2015). While there is a growing body of literature on the role of emotions in progressive social movements, there is, as yet, only limited work on the emotional activities of conservative social movements (Stein, 2001 being one of the few; see also Kuhar and Paternotte, 2018). We approach this task by creating an analytical framework based on literature on the sociology of emotions, on the role of emotions in social movements, but also on Sara Ahmed’s work on hate groups (Ahmed, 2004). Ahmed explores precisely the expressions of love and hate, and focuses on racist, nationalist and anti-​immigrant movements. We find that much of what she argues is also applicable to the actors at the congress that we are concerned with here. In the literature on social movements and emotions, it is overwhelmingly ‘negative’ emotions like anger, contempt and moral outrage that are considered active and motivating. But lately, some researchers have argued that positive emotions, such as love and hope, also have strong mobilising potentials (such as Kleres and Wettergren, 2017). In this study, we are particularly attentive to how negative and positive emotions are combined in calls for mobilisation, as has been seen in populist calls for action (compare with Levinger, 2017). Jasper discusses such combinations as ‘moral batteries’, and argues that it is precisely through the contrast between positive and negative emotions that they become effective tools of mobilisation, ‘just as a battery works through the tension between its positive and negative poles’ (Jasper, 2011: 291). We have distilled from the literature a few distinct but often interdependent and overlapping processes which tend to be conducive to turning passive into active emotions, and that encourage collective identity building. These 138

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are presented below, followed by a discussion on the moral battery that specifically combines love and hate.

Symbolic identity building It is vital for a movement to develop a sense of collective identity, in order to install active emotions and withstand the many challenges that its activists will meet. Collective identity is constructed through a variety of mechanisms (Della Porta and Diani, 2006: Chapter 4). But among the more important ones is meeting with other activists in large gatherings. The sense of being part of a collective is a powerful feeling, which is especially intense when participants are present in the same location, as when rallies and demonstrations are organised, or at conventions of the type studied here. Collective identity is also built through symbols and performances. To Carl Death, who writes about intergovernmental conferences, international gatherings have a quality of ‘spectacular theatrics’: ‘The rituals of diplomacy, the speeches, media statements, rolling news coverage and routine confrontations between protestors and police are used to communicate particular norms, expectations, and standards of conduct to watching audiences’ (Death, 2010: 7). In the case of social movement conferences, like the WCF, such communications are not only directed outwards, towards the public one wants to convince –​even if this is important, too –​but also inwards, towards the participants, whose unity and collective identity are enhanced through the same theatrics and symbols. The whole battery of rituals, symbols and reports on confrontations with the outside world are important for making the group visible to itself. They enable participants to see themselves as a group confirmed through the imagined gaze of the outside world.

Inculcating pride and courage One important process for successful mobilisation is the replacement of shame with pride. This is the case when progressive movements declare themselves proud of an aspect of their identity which has previously been seen as shameful and worked to their subordination. ‘Gay pride’ and the slogan ‘I’m black and I’m proud!’ are such examples. Through such articulations, movement leaders handle existing shame and turn it into an active and focused anger. Research has shown that the same dynamic exists in conservative, reactionary and nationalist movements (Scheff, 1994, Goodwin and Jasper, 2006: 619–​20). Arlene Stein writes: ‘If religious conservatives’ shame is linked to a sense of victimhood, they are drawn to political rhetoric which identifies this victimhood, locates a cause, and offers them the possibility of seeing themselves as strong, independent beings’ (Stein, 2001: 126). 139

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In order to keep sympathisers in an activist mode, it is also important to couple pride with strength and courage. Activists in some social movements find themselves in tension with the established norms in society. As far as their convictions reflect ideals that many people sympathise with, but are not ready to fight for, they may enjoy a certain admiration. But at the same time, they are seen as difficult, as troublemakers and outsiders (Jacobsson and Lindholm, 2016: 10–​12). Activists must therefore handle the stereotypes and the generalised images that other people have of them, which may involve emotional costs that are so high that people drop out of activism. And for those that stay, it requires continuous ‘emotion work’ (compare with Hochschild, 2003), to deal with experiences of ridicule, silencing, contempt or anger directed towards them (Jacobsson and Lindholm, 2016: 103–​17). It is therefore important for movement leaders to inculcate strength and courage, which can assist activists when dealing with surrounding society.

Us and them Whether active or passive emotions are induced to an important extent has to do with identity, especially how the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is constructed. Successful mobilisations often rely on a combination of an idealised self-​conception and a negative conception of the opponent. The distinction between us and them is not always framed in a hostile manner, but this has often been the case within conservative and reactionary movements. ‘We’ are then constructed as morally superior, acting out of the common good. At the same time, the opponent is demonised as immoral, weak, disgraceful, and driven by shady motives. When this is taken its extreme, the opponent is placed outside of the realm of moral obligation, which can justify severe measures, including violence (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006: 626; Snow and Owens, 2014: 666). Emotions that are related to morality, such as indignation and outrage, may have a particularly activating effect. Especially if such indignation is shared by a collective, so that this moral arousal is coupled to a sense of belonging and identification with a group (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006: 620; Snow and Owens, 2014: 676). Furthermore, moral anger can be described as a ‘power emotion’ in the sense that people feel potent and powerful when they experience it, which also makes action more likely (Schieman, 2006). Movement activity is always based on an analysis of the social problem one wants to tackle, which is often called the ‘diagnostic’ dimension in problem framing activity (Snow and Benford, 1988). Among other things, it includes a perception of causality and an idea of who or what that is responsible for the problem. In general, the more concrete is the attribution of blame, the greater is the potential for activism and arousal (Kemper, 2006). So, if one 140

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can put the blame on identifiable persons or groups, it is more likely that anger energy can be directed towards change than if blame is found in abstract structures and faceless processes like globalisation or capitalism. And, even worse, from this perspective, if the perception is that oneself is to blame for the problem, the result is likely to be sadness, shame, and passivity (Kemper, 2006: 100; Brysk, 2013: Chapter 4).

Moral batteries: love and hate We have already mentioned that WCF has been described as a hate group, yet presents itself as fighting for love, which in turn has been questioned by its opponents. Sara Ahmed argues that politics often ‘involves a struggle over who has the right to declare themselves as acting out of love’ (2004: 122). She observes that it is common practice for hate groups to describe themselves as organisations of love on their websites. This way they turn the description of themselves as haters upside-​down, as they then claim to be acting out of love instead of hate. The logic is that they claim love to the nation, the group, or the Aryan race so much so that when someone steals or threatens these things retaliation must be tough. What matters is that this arousal of hate is secondary to the primary emotion, which is love of the object. ‘Because we love, we hate’ (Ahmed, 2004: 43). This reversal of hate into love makes it possible for the group to associate themselves with positive emotions, and it also makes their struggle appear redemptive instead of aggressive (Ahmed, 2004: 123). For this emotional turnaround to work, it is essential that the object of love is convincingly described as injured or threatened by one’s opponents. The threatened object is often connected to ordinariness. It is the majority culture which is threatened: it is our home, our normal ways, our form of life that are under existential threat. And this threat comes from the others, those who oppose us –​often the corrupt elite in its different guises. Hate is often distributed onto an array of figures, Ahmed explains. It may be directed to, for instance, foreigners, mixed racial couples, and liberal elites, or all at the same time. These diverse figures are united in being different from ‘us’, and they are seen as constituting a common threat (Ahmed, 2004: 44–​5). A second turnaround thus takes place, in which those that have labelled them hate groups –​the liberals, multi-​culturalists, feminists, cosmopolitans –​ are perceived as the real haters. In effect, ‘we’, nation-​loving, race-​loving people are not the ones that hate, but instead the target of these people’s hate. And what is more, these people hate not only us, but also the object of our love –​the nation, the race, the majority lifestyle. ‘By being against those who are for the nation (anti-​racists, anti-​fascists and so on), such critics can only be against the nation; they can only be against love’ (Ahmed, 2004: 123). 141

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World Congress of Families 2019 Some notes on research methodology Our analysis is based on data from the WCF conference ‘The Wind of Change: Europe and the Global Pro-​Family Movement’, held in Verona on 29–​31 March 2019, which we attended in full. The data consists of our notes from the conference as well as transcribed and –​when needed –​translated speeches from the gathering. All speeches at the conference were published online and could be downloaded, which enabled full coverage and literal transcription. Our analysis focuses on socially shared emotional patterns and the social effects of emotions (compare with Ahmed, 2004). Such an interest in emotions as performative phenomena makes representations of emotions in speeches at movement meetings an excellent source for studies. Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison (2008) even argue that the only way to distinguish emotions (which are inherently private) is through practices of representation but, more importantly, that representations matter since they shape social and political processes. In addition to listening to the speeches live on-​site, we read the transcribed speeches several times in order to identify and analyse the emotional dynamics at play and how these were used as mobilising strategies. We also coded the material in order to identify different themes relating to identity building and mobilisation. In addition to paying attention to emotions that are clearly referred to, we also noticed the use of symbols and other expressions of emotional language, such as metaphors or figures of speech (compare with Koschut, 2018a; 2018b). In the following analysis, we present quotes from the speakers that illustrate important elements of the emotional dynamics created at the congress and discuss the observed symbols.

Performances and symbols that unite Symbols can bind together people in collective identity. They can also produce memories of collective action that can make people feel attached to the movement long after they have left the gathering (Collins, 2001). The WCF made quite extensive use of symbolism and performances. We have already discussed the choice of Verona as the location. At the opening, there was a ritual flag handover; the hosts of the preceding WCF in Moldova passed an organisational flag to the new Italian hosts. Such rituals help to create a sense of continuity. The opening ceremony also contained dance performances and music that were either directly about families being united in a mission, or that with a stretch of imagination could be interpreted as such. Examples include the Italian song ‘Mamma ti voglio bene’, the 1985 all-​stars song ‘We are the world’, Coldplay’s ‘A sky full of stars’, and Diplo’s ‘Get it right’. While the music played, moving words were projected onto 142

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a screen –​these included words such as ‘love’, ‘family’, and ‘mother’ in different languages. Occasionally, the background music was accompanied by recordings from the speakers in Italian, English, or other languages, saying for example: “When … you see the joy and beauty of a man and a woman and a child, how can your hearts not be moved?”, “In East and in West, as in North and in South, the family is the only structure that satisfies the need for committed love and care”. The audience applauded enthusiastically at this, and the atmosphere was exuberant. It was clear that the WCF had put quite a lot of resources into marketing and branding. They had produced a promotional video, called ‘Never stop being amazed’. This two-​minute clip features a handsome, well-​built and hipster-​looking man with tattoos and rolled-​up sleeves, who looks intensely into the camera while moving about a sparsely furnished room, contemplating the stars and the galaxies, and the wonders of life. As he describes the family as the “quintessence of the universe’s creative expansion”, the footage shows a white family composed of a man, a woman, and two children running hand in hand towards the viewer while the sun sets over a vast rural landscape.3 The WCF also had a logotype which decorated everything from walls to the canvas bags that was handed out to participants. The logo had a stylised image in which a blue figure is placed below a red figure, each holding a half of the same heart. It was meant to evoke Shakespeare’s story of Romeo and Juliet –​the famous balcony scene, and at the same time ideal heterosexual love in general. Besides the logo, the congress also featured a tag line, ‘Winds of change’, which many of the speakers referred to in their addresses. That tag line signalled a sense of hope, and that everything would soon be going in the right direction. Social movements can benefit from having some intellectual forerunner, a symbolic figure that can create unity and lend an intellectual air to the project. In the case of the WCF, this role was assigned to Gilbert K. Chesterton, a British lay theologian and poet who lived between 1874 and 1936. Numerous speakers referred to him, and he was cited in the promotional video clip mentioned above. He was always referred to by his last name only (‘As Chesterton wrote’) signalling both the speaker’s relaxed attitude to his intellectual refinement, and the existence of a shared frame of reference between speaker and audience.

The object of love: ‘the natural family’ ‘The natural family’ is the term that the WCF uses for describing the married, heterosexual family with biological children, which is at the centre of their concern. This is at the same time an ideal that individuals should strive towards, and a guiding principle for societies and states. As a guiding principle, it derives its power from being understood precisely as ‘natural’. 143

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The speakers made use of different arguments to this effect: it is God’s will; it is a requirement for the survival of the state; but it is also an anthropological and historical fact that the natural family is the way that humans have always and should always organise their life. Consider the following quote of Brian Brown from the IOF, and also the chair of the WCF: ‘Your excellencies, friends, brothers, and sisters, we are here to today to defend, to promote, to lift up something so basic, something so true, something so beautiful: family. It is very simple. In the beginning, in human history, a man, a woman, and a child, there was a family. Across the steppes of Asia plains of Africa, in cities, in villages, there is a family. … This truth, this tripartite truth of man, woman, children, goes beyond any culture, any religion, people of different creeds, faiths, colours, nations –​that is what the World Congress of Families is about.’ Proposing this religiously neutral and culturally universal term is doubtlessly a conscious strategy, as it enables people who have little else in common to unite around this general ideal form. Not only is the natural family an intrinsic good, it is also presented as a necessity in terms of its consequences. If the natural family fails, we all face disastrous consequences: demographic crisis, disease, poverty, criminality, a loss of meaning, and the entire fall of the Western civilisation is just around the corner if we cannot save the natural family from disintegration. The signifier ‘the natural family’ has a metonymic quality in that it functions as an umbrella term that covers different but associated meanings. Speaking in the name of the natural family allowed the speakers at the conference to touch on a diverse array of themes and construct an associative link between them. Children were an important theme. Movement studies have long noted that presenting oneself as championing particularly innocent groups is an effective way of gaining adherents and sympathisers –​and children are perhaps the quintessential innocent group (Brysk, 2013: 78). “[T]‌his Congress defends the weakest: children”, Italian Northern League politician Massimiliano Fedriga stated in his speech. And Matteo Salvini, at the time Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, asserted: “It’s my duty and my right as a father, and Italian, a man and a minister to defend the rights of those who have no voice: the children”. The theme of child protection is not only emotionally and morally legitimising. As pointed out by Elisa Bellè and Barbara Poggio (2018: 129) it also makes it possible to avoid a direct attack on homosexuals, thereby conveying an impression of moderateness. The speakers talked about many different threats that children face today. Some mentioned dangers such as child labour, child soldiers, child poverty, abuse and paedophilia. But first and foremost, the identified problems were 144

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ideological, that is, the ‘gender ideology’ allegedly promoted in various ways by the elites (compare with Bellè and Poggio, 2018). An anti-​gender position has been noted among conservative movements in several countries, and it may function as a ‘symbolic glue’ that unite diverse actors in movement (Kováts and Põim, 2015; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2018; Korulczuk and Graff, 2018). Several negative things and policies were attributed to gender ideology. For instance, sexual education in schools was seen as a great problem, as this ‘morbid education’ –​as the Italian priest Don Fortunato di Noto called it –​eroticises children and destroys their sexuality. Another threat was the various anti-​discrimination measures and practices in schools and pre-​schools. Massimiliano Fedriga retold a game that he had witnessed, in which boys were dressed as princesses and girls as knights, and he explained that such games were not about anti-​discrimination but about inculcating gender ideology into children. Overall, ‘gender ideology’ was the greatest threat against children identified by the congress participants. It destroys their minds and souls; it deprives them of love and security. It was argued that it takes away their right to a mother and a father by replacing them with gender neutral terms such as ‘parent 1’ and ‘parent 2’, and that it muddies their given and obvious sexual identity by suggesting that genders are fluid and changeable. The natural family as a loved object also includes a defence of women, in line with traditional patriarchal discourse. Like children, women were threatened in many different ways, according to the speakers. The spokeswoman from the organisation ProVita said that women’s bodies are exploited by ‘the pharmaceutical industries, the fertility industries, the assisted reproduction industries, contraception, abortion, the factories of children who use egg donors who exploit and delude the women who receive the implants’. We did not hear any speaker that explicitly wanted women to leave the labour market, but many emphasised the danger that women now are not free to choose traditional motherhood. Katalin Novak, Hungary’s Minister of State for Family, Youth, and International Affairs, talked about the risk that modern society forces women to give up on their privileges: “We women have the privilege to bear a child, we women have the privilege to deliver a child, we have the privilege to breastfeed a child –​ let’s not give up on these privileges!” Sara Ahmed (2004: 43) claims that in conservative groups’ rhetoric, the object of love is often described as something very ordinary. This was true here too. The natural family has in this narrative been around throughout human history. It was portrayed as an important part of our culture, and the way that most of us choose –​and it was now under great threat from a politically correct minority. Elisabetta Gardini, at the time a Member of European Parliament for Forza Italia, explained: “They say they are against the dictatorship of the majority and I agree, I too am against the dictatorship 145

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of the majority. But even more so, I am against the dictatorship of the minority. It is time to say enough!” There was a lot of emphasis on how simple the matter at hand –​the natural family –​really is. It has a common-​sensical quality, and is available to all (in contrast, one guesses, to complicated gender theory). One way of conveying this was by referring to something that one’s children have said, signalling both the simplicity and the truth of the message, taking into account the classic trope of children as truth-​tellers (think of H.C. Andersen’s fairytale ‘The emperor’s new clothes’). On the topic of battling secularism, for instance, American Republican politician Ed Martin said the following: “One of my children said to me … ‘too many churches are empty, dad’.” A variant was the revelation of truth when one is close to children. Matteo Salvini: “Last night when I slept next to my two children, I wondered who in Italy today and in the world could be bothered by the word ‘mum’ or the word ‘dad’? It is these simple truths that are now under attack.” The WCF delegates talked a great deal about how much they loved the natural family. The men often presented themselves or were presented by others in the following way: ‘X is happily married to Y and is a proud father of Z children’. The women speakers, who had leadership positions and hence successful careers, underlined that their family role was most important. Novak said: “I have my political and professional career, I am Member of Parliament, but it is much more important that I am the daughter of my mother and my father, the sister of my brother, the wife of my husband, and the mother of our three children.” And Angela Vidal Gandra De Silva Martins, Brazil’s National Secretary of Women, Family and Human Rights, retold approvingly a conversation with her female Harvard professor. On the question of how to balance career and family commitments the professor replied that ‘[T]‌here is no balance, my family comes first, and then the rest.’

Who is the enemy? Social movements need a collective identity in order to spur action. Such identities are often worked out in the contrast between an idealised self and a morally corrupt other. The moral charge of the self/​other distinction tends to be very confrontational in reactionary groups that play on the tension between love and hate. Many different enemies were mentioned at the WCF. This is in line with Ahmed’s (2004) observations among racist and anti-​immigrant groups who distributed blame across different agents. Some were concrete individuals. Ann Kioko of CitizenGo Africa pointed out Justin Trudeau, Theresa May and Barack Obama. All of them were accused of Western ‘homo-​imperialism’ in relation to Africa, of spreading information about family planning and of facilitating abortion. Jewish investor and philanthropist George Soros was 146

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repeatedly identified by various delegates as a malevolent enemy to the family. It was also suggested that the thousands of feminists that gathered in Verona to protest the WCF were paid to do so, although it was not explicit who the orchestrator was. Matteo Salvini called the protestors ‘alleged feminists’ who demonstrate ‘for a fee’. More general categories such as ‘liberals’, ‘globalists’, and ‘feminists’ and ‘the media’ all got large portions of the blame. For each, there was a reversal of the meaning that is commonly associated with them. For instance, liberals were consistently referred to as intolerant as they denied the conservatives the right to speak their mind. Feminists restrained women by denying them the liberty of choosing how to live. And globalists were accused of denying cultural and political pluralism as well as for replacing authentic relationships with cold individualism and consumerism. The main enemy-​ category was referred to as the ‘gender ideologues’. This umbrella term covered all that fight for sexual and reproductive rights, LGBT activists and all that sympathise with the idea that one should have some say in the definition of one’s sexual and gender identity (compare with Kuhar and Paternotte, 2018). As Theodore Kemper (2006) pointed out, the more concretely one can assign causality for a problem, the more likely it is that people will be motivated to take action. In this case, however, assigning blame to categories seemed to work quite well. When blame is allotted to many, it becomes malleable and transferable, and can thus satisfy many different interests and political agendas. It also seemed not to cool down emotions but to fuel hate. Sara Ahmed argues that whereas anger is directed towards particular individuals, hate is directed towards categories of people, and towards individuals that are seen to represent the hated categories (2004: 49). Hate directed towards multiple categories also makes it possible to connect groups that may have little in common into one major enemy figure. In the quote below, Giorgia Meloni, party secretary of the conservative political party Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia), connects proponents of gender ideas to the anonymising and alienating forces of capitalism: ‘[A]‌nything that defines us this day and age is the enemy of those who would like us to no longer have an identity and just become slaves, the perfect consumers. And so national identity, religious identity, gender identity and family identity are under attack. I must not be able to define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother –​no, I must be citizen x, gender x, parent 1, parent 2. I must be a number. Because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity, when I no longer have roots, then I’ll be the perfect slave at the mercy of huge financial speculation. The perfect consumer.’

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The enemy’s power and malicious motives By creating linkages between categories, it is also possible to portray the enemy as extremely powerful, a Goliath set up against one’s own little David. To David Snow and Peter Owens, this is a necessary yet paradoxical move for reactionary or conservative movements: in order to recreate or reinforce structures of power, they need to portray themselves as the real victims (2014: 664). This was quite blatant in the case of the WCF. Within the conference were ministers from several country governments, religious leaders, leaders for large transnational organisations, and representatives of the old European aristocracy. The conference location in an old palace signalled both refinement and power as it was located at the central square. By all objective measures, these were people of both influence and resources –​elites. Yet, they kept insisting that they were the victims and that the enemy was almost all-​powerful. Radoš Pejović, of the Serbian right-​wing movement Dveri, asserted that “enemies of the family have joined forces in attacking, and we must stay strong in defending the family”. This allegation that the enemy is extremely powerful became particularly conspicuous when directed at groups normally understood as subordinated. Lucy Akello, Member of Parliament from Uganda –​a country known for repression of LGBT rights –​talked about a “hyper radicalised sexual front which [is] played out almost on a daily basis where the homosexual and transsexual are having a filled day because they have fully co-​opted the state”. A very clear example of the conspiratorial worldview came from Ignacio Arsuaga of organisations CitizenGo and HazteOír: ‘The enemies of natural family, in all countries, infiltrated in almost all institutions, all structures of power. They control the authority of mainstream media, corporate media; they control the parties, the parties on the left, but also most of the times, the parties on the right. They run many non-​profit organizations, funded by liberal foundations, like George Soros Open Society Foundation. They manage also most of significant international multilateral organizations, like the UN, the Council of Europe or the European Union. The enemies of the family have multiple faces. They are the heir of Antonio Gramsci, the cultural Marxist, those that replaced the class struggle with gender struggle and identity politics, they are the radical feminists wanting to impose their supremacist policies on everyone. They are the abortion industry; they want to earn more money killing babies. They are the gender ideologues and also the LGBT totalitarians that control the minds of our sons and daughters. They want to impose the silence or they want to shut us up as we have seen here in Verona, with the World Congress of Families. They are also the secular liberals; they want to prohibit our faith to play any role in the public life of our societies. Sometimes 148

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they fight each other but most of the times, they work together in a coordinated way to impose their radical worldview.’ Abortion, denial of binary gender identities, reproductive techniques and especially surrogacy were main targets for disgust. Meloni described the enemy as “those who want to buy life and think they can wrench a child from the womb because they’ve bought it” and pastor Jim Garlow from Well-​ Versed Inc. talked about ‘enemies of truth’ who were guilty of “first, coming after us with abortion, killing new-​borns within the womb, secondly, the re-​definition of marriage, and more recently, the issue of no longer gender specificity of male and female”. Our general impression was also that the delegates were rather preoccupied with their enemies. They spent at least as much time talking about their enemies as about their own programmes and values. It was clear that they laboured with the images of themselves as haters, oppressors, ‘medieval’, against rights of women, children and minorities, and so on. The way they handled these stereotypes was largely by turning them around and accusing their enemy of exactly the same thing. This is very near what Ahmed’s analysis leads us to expect. The WCF needs to portray itself as standing for what is good –​for love and for life –​to counter its label as haters, and this is most effectively done through reversal. The opposing side was on the one hand portrayed as hating and wanting to silence ‘us’. This theme was evident when referring to the ongoing protests outside the building, but also in continuous references to the media coverage preceding the conference. This could even be expressed in a joking manner. A woman from ProVita began her speech by saying: “First of all, I want to thank my husband because he unhooked the chains that he uses to force me to stay home every day, and allowed me to come here to Verona.” Eduard von Habsburg, who served as ambassador of Hungary to the Holy See, jokingly said: “We have heard so much about … us here being medieval, and I wanted to make a confession: I love the Middle Ages.” Besides hating those represented by the WCF, the opposing side was also understood to hate its object of love: the natural family, the nation, civilisation and Western culture generally. The opponents, for their part, advocated “ideologies of death that destroy man and human reality”, claimed Jacopo Coghe, deputy chairman of the WCF. Allan Carlson, the founder of the WCF, stated: “Our foes have chosen to embrace a culture of death.” According to Ugandan politician Lucy Akello, the enemy also wanted to annihilate Africa by attacking the African family. And Levan Vazadze, presented as a Georgian businessman and scholar, called the enemies “sorcery demons” and “cynical perverts”, who exert “sodomising pressure” in many countries. The message that this conveys is that it is the enemies that are the real haters, while all that ‘we’ do is to love (the family, children, women, nation, God). 149

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The cultural war and how to fight it The enemy that emerging is not a respected opponent, engaged in a fair battle. Instead, they are devious and scheming. The logic that follows, again harking back to Ahmed, is that the enemies are taking our object of love away, and because we love it so much, we need to fight them back. “The natural family is under attack all over the world … This is a global war”, said Ignacio Arsuaga. Princess Gloria of Thurn and Taxis explained that “the real honest ideological battle is not anymore between East and West … the fight that we have today, you cannot win with arms and fighter jets and tanks; because it’s the ideology that goes against the natural life of a human being.” According to the speakers, the complete disaster was just around the corner. Marriages suffer, families suffer, children suffer, depression, suicide, drug addiction and violence explode, Western civilisations implode and people are turning away from God. Several delegates evoked the image of a historic juncture where you can either continue on the destructive path or re-​establish the natural family (and all that goes with it) and face a brightening future. Movement organisers have to balance the depiction of the acuteness of the problem with care to avoid resignation. If audiences get to feel that the situation is beyond remedy, passive emotions will take over and activism subside. At the WCF, delegates emphasised that there was indeed some cause for hope. There were some positive signs, they asserted. For instance, ‘family-​ friendly’ governments had come to power in countries such as Hungary, Brazil, Moldova, Italy and the US under Trump. In other news reporting, developments in these countries are often described as undemocratic and at risk of turning into fascist regimes. Drawing on populist discourse, the delegates asserted that they could properly interpret the popular will, that this will was on their side and that they were joined together in the struggle against politically correct elites. American author and blogger Steve Turley put it this way: “Populations are re-​asserting their nations, cultures, customs, traditions, and, most especially, their religious traditions as a mechanism of resistance against the anti-​cultural proposition of globalisation and its secular aristocracy.” There was therefore room for cautious optimism. In the suggestive language of Levan Vasadze: “Make no mistake, the dragon is not dead and his death will last long and the agony will prove bloody, but the trend is evident.” As noted by Jacobsson and Lindblom (2016), movement leaders need to prepare their activists for the reproaches that they will surely meet in contact with the surrounding society. Such measures were evident at the WCF. Javier Villamor of CitizenGo, for instance, explained that it was important not to be afraid but to be strong and confrontative. The enemies attack and insult us, and even if they look peaceful, they surely are not. Ignacio Arsuaga similarly stressed the need to be confrontational, even at the cost 150

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of insults and mockeries. ‘Yes, I know I am repeating this word: confront. Please make leaders, politicians and decision-​makers fear you.’ Sometimes, however, a better strategy could be to be friendly even to those that question you. Eduard von Habsburg proposed a Twitter strategy of avoiding blocking enemies, and even retweeting their messages when there is something that you can agree on. He joked: “Remember when St. Peter asked Jesus, how often should I not block my opponent on Twitter –​seven times? And Jesus said seventy-​seven times.” For the same purpose of encouraging activism, the WCF speakers also emphasised their moral uprightness and the heroic qualities of the audience. Find confidence in that it is us who are on the rights side, was the message, it is we that follow God’s will and fight for eternal and unchanging values in the face of weakness, unnaturalness and moral decay. Steve Turley again: “We are not right-​wing losers. We are not medievalist throwbacks. We are the future, we are a pro-​life, pro-​child, pro-​family future. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that the secular world can do about that.” There was also a whole lot of emphasis on heroism. All delegates of the congress received a ‘family hero’s diary’ for taking notes. On the back it was explained that: ‘A hero is a person who sparks hope in the world, and the world needs heroes.’ Jacopo Coghe said in his speech that: “The world needs heroes, today more than ever we need heroes. And you are the heroes, you here in this room.” Brian Brown asserted that: ‘[W]‌e walk in the footsteps of heroes. We are in the same line of people that here in Italy said, as Christians, no more gladiatorial combats, no more murder for pleasure … We come from the same line of heroes that said, no more slave trade, this is against the basis of human dignity and it must stop. Now, there were many that mocked them. Looking back, it seems obvious they were right … they were a small group that stood up no matter what. They were mocked but they would not be silenced.’

Conclusion In order to contribute to the limited research on emotions in conservative social movements this chapter analyses the emotional dynamics of the WCF conference ‘The Wind of Change: Europe and the Global Pro-​Family Movement’, held in Verona in March 2019. Emotions play a crucial role in mobilising and invigorating the followers of this conservative movement and also in trying to strengthen its legitimacy in relation to the media and the public. Both positive and negative emotions as well as symbols and metaphors are used as important building blocks in the emotional work that holds the movement together. To gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms, we have looked more closely at how passive 151

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emotions are turned into active, how the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are constructed, and how the combination of positive and negative emotions functions as moral batteries that help motivate engagement. Sacred symbols and positive emotions are crucial in order to instil a belief that the movement, contrary to the accusations and unlike the opponents, is respectable and works for the common good; they are vital for the movement’s (idealised) self-​image and the shared ideology. The combination of positive and negative emotions contributes to a binary construct of good–​evil, true–​false, devout–​impious, moral–​hedonic, responsible–​irresponsible, traditional–​liberal, and so on. Such binary codes are used for moral justification of one’s own movement and demonisation of the opponents’ in order to strengthen the followers’ indignation, courage and readiness to fight back. The fact that the WCF has managed to gain support among a variety of influential stakeholders, as well as among citizens in several European countries, indicates skills to reach people emotionally and normalisation of an agenda that was previously considered extreme right and taboo. Acknowledgements

This work was conducted as part of the research project ‘Civil society elites? Comparing elite composition, reproduction, integration and contestation in European civil societies’, supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, reference number M17-​0188:1). We thank Professor Carlo Ruzza and the reviewer for valuable comments on an earlier version of the chapter. Notes 1 2

3

See, for example, Giuffrida (2019). Among the many speakers at the congress were Italy’s vice-​PM Matteo Salvini, its Minister for the Family and Disabilities (Marco Bussetti) and Hungary’s Minister for Family, Youth and International Affairs (Katalin Novak). Besides politicians and representatives for pro-​ family organisations, the WCF was attended by religious leaders such as the Catholic bishop of Verona (Giuseppe Zenti), the Archbishop of San Francisco, the Most Rev. Salvatore Cordileone, the Syrian Catholic Patriarch of Antioch (Ignatius Joseph III Yonan), and Orthodox Archbishop Anthony of Budapest and Vienna. Another category was the old European aristocracy (referred to by an activist as ‘zombie aristocrats’) represented among others by Princess Gloria of Thurn and Taxis, Prince Louis de Bourbon and Eduard von Habsburg. However, there were two speakers who dominated the scene through repeated appearances: Brian Brown, president of Washington DC based IOF, and Allan Carlson, John Howard Senior fellow and founder of the WCF. See www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​lDB​Scp-​WSRk

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The Functionality of Affects: Conceptualising Far-​Right Populist Politics beyond Negative Emotions Julia Leser and Florian Spissinger

Introduction In politics, it is common to frame emotions in negative terms as a manifestation of undesirable, irrational, illegitimate or even immature political conduct. The far right in particular has seemingly been perceived as an affective space that harnesses and amplifies a multiplicity of negative emotions. As part of a wider ‘affective turn’ (Clough and Halley, 2007) in the study of politics, scholars and observers have increasingly engaged with emotional dynamics in political arenas. They have particularly characterised far-​r ight politics by the use of fear (for example, Wodak, 2015), rhetoric of rage and anger (Cox and Durham, 2000; Ebner, 2017; Mishra, 2017) and expressions of hatred (Blee, 2002; Garland and Treadwell, 2012; Emcke, 2019). To conceptualise the affective trajectories of far-​r ight politics, some authors have bundled a multiplicity of negative emotions in the form of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ‘ressentiment’ (Betz, 2005; Salmela and von Scheve, 2017). In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche has imagined a person who is driven by ressentiment to be the opposite of a ‘noble man’. He has explained that ressentiment is both the condition of the dominated, who suppress their negative emotions, and the source that legitimises their vengeance towards their adversaries. The figures in Nietzsche’s normative concept are construed as rather abstract moral figures that eventually enable an evaluation of the legitimacy of their political conduct. 156

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The political discourse in Germany has witnessed the emergence of a new version of the moral figure driven by ressentiment and an array of negative emotions: the Wutbürger, which translates literally to ‘irate citizens’. The term was established by the German journalist Dirk Kurbjuweit (2010), and the figure is frequently invoked in contemporary political debates to epitomise both the rise of far-​right populist politics and the underlying, threatening nature of those political constellations for liberal democracies. In contemporary debates, the Wutbürger are mainly associated with the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident’s (PEGIDA) ‘evening strolls’ and the Alternative für Deutschland’s (Alternative for Germany, AfD) constituency. The Wutbürger are imagined as political subjects who are driven by their negative emotions and, as such, are placed with similar political agents, such as Michael Kimmel’s ‘angry white men’ (2017), in a cluster of ‘anti-​democratic’ (Salzborn, 2017), ‘ignorant, irrational, misinformed nationalists’ (Brennan, 2016: 23). In other words, the political conduct of the Wutbürger is dismissed as illegitimate in view of the (negative) emotionally charged nature of their motivations and intentions. Within such a frame, political affects are understood to be the antipode of rational, trustful and democratic politics, and the politics of affect are framed as the source of fake news and unreasonable decisions. A few problems have arisen from the dualistic conception of political affects. The close association of negative emotions with the far right interferes with the understanding of political affect as inherently ambivalent because negative emotions ‘are mobilized as easily by the political right as by the left, as the histories of disgust and paranoia illustrate so well’ (Ngai, 2007: 5). Furthermore, the emergence of negative political emotions on the periphery of politics might signify increasing adoption of the rather comforting perspective that the racist and nationalist political activities that are associated with the politics of fear, rage and hatred are exclusive features of the political margins and not the mainstream. Yet, as Michael Billig (1995: 7) has argued, while ‘nationalism is expected to deal with … dangerous and powerful passions’, it ‘cannot be confined to the peripheries’. On the one hand, negative emotions are not exclusively mobilised by racist and nationalist political agents, and they cannot be confined to the political fringes of far-​ right politics. On the other hand, there is still uncertainty about the role of affect in far-​r ight politics, and ‘like other forms of politics, backlash politics are likely to be characterised by more complex and dynamic emotional cultures’ (Busher et al, 2018: 402) than just ‘dangerous and powerful passions’. This chapter builds on the conceptual devices of Sara Ahmed (2014) and Kathleen Stewart (2007) to outline a post-​dualistic understanding of political affects which permits us to embrace the complexities and ambivalences that characterise the emotional dynamics in political arenas. The first part of the chapter discusses the ambivalence of affect in the context of far-​r ight politics. 157

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Instead of devaluating affective politics by highlighting negative emotions, this approach highlights the functionality of affect. Thus, the chapter considers what affects do in far-​r ight politics and how they constitute an affective offer that is perceived as appealing. The second part of the chapter analyses the affective practices and performances of the German party AfD.1 By more closely examining the impacts of the AfD’s affective practices, which include cynicism, the chapter illustrates how the use of ‘ordinary’ affects contributes to transforming the legitimacy of expressing far-​r ight views in public realms, which can in turn further an understanding of how these agents render their political projects identifiable and appealing. Finally, the chapter argues that the affective practices of the AfD challenge more liberal ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild, 2016) and contribute to the normalisation of far-​r ight discourse. This chapter is based on research that is part of the BMBF (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) funded research project Strangers in their own land? On the malleability of national narratives using Political Laboratories (PoliLab) (2018–​21). This project aims to study how the nation is done in narratives and practices and focuses on the logics of national exclusion (Pates and Futh, 2018) and the role of affective articulations of national identity (Leser et al, 2019). The study is based on 150 narrative interviews with various groups in Germany. In addition, it entailed ethnographic exploration of the practices, articulations and affective politics of the ‘German people’ with particular attention to agents and networks of the far right. This chapter ultimately argues that an ethnographic lens and analytic focus on the affective politics of far-​r ight agents and networks can further an understanding of the recent surge of the far right in Europe and the US. This study is based on formal interviews and informal conversations with AfD politicians and supporters as well as ethnographic observations of AfD campaign events. For the interviews, we approached members of the AfD via e-​mail and stated the goals and methods of the research project. Since the AfD campaign events that we observed were public events, no announcement of our presence was necessary. Unlike in the interviews, we were part of an ‘interested public’, albeit as silent observers with specific interests; therefore, we did not conduct our research openly. These events allowed us to observe performances for and interactions between AfD sympathisers instead of witnessing a performance for us as researchers. Still, we do not conceptualise the public events as a more ‘natural’ setting compared to the interviews; rather, the two settings function as different contexts that produce unique performances.

Beyond negativity: the ambivalence of affects The notion that negative emotions threaten the democratic process is tied to the normative philosophical tradition that considers ‘good’ politics to 158

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be a realm that is guided by rationality and freed of ‘passions’.2 In liberal political philosophy, an ‘ideal’ politics is construed as a rational process, while affects are conceptually marginalised (for example, Rawls, 1996; Habermas, 1998).3 Such normative, traditional thinking positions affects as ‘the other’ of rational politics and therefore considers them to be apolitical, alarming, irrational, populist or threatening to democracy (Weber, 2007). In this context, ascribing affectivity to the conduct of a political adversary can operate as a mode of devaluation and delegitimisation.4 If political affects are supposed to be threatening and irrational per se, then a detailed analysis of political affects in the context of far-​right populist politics would be futile. It seems that the existing literature with a focus on negative emotions has frequently reproduced the devaluation of affect without furthering an understanding of how the politics of affect actually operate. Among many scholars and observers, a pejorative attitude vis-​à-​vis negative emotions is a dominant stance towards far-​r ight politics, whereas affects are considered oppositional to truth and rationality. The framing of political agents as motivated by negative emotions reflects a political technique to undermine their standing and to discredit their legitimacy. Yet, scholars and activists from several disciplines have challenged the devaluation, depoliticisation and irrationalisation of affect when emphasising its productivity, particularly within affect theory (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010) and the sociology of emotions (for example, Hochschild, 2019). Political theorists have stressed the democratic potential of love (Hardt and Negri, 2005; Nussbaum, 2013) and the political necessity of affects in general (Mouffe, 2000). The politics of activists have been especially analysed as intertwined with pride, solidarity and hope but also with despair, anger and shame (Gould 2009). These scholars, among others, have proposed a post-​dualistic perspective of the role of affects in politics and offered insight into the rationality and productivity of affects by conceiving of rationality and affects not as mutually exclusive but as ‘intertwined’ (Illouz and Finkelman, 2009). Curiously, German populist politicians have embraced and asserted the significance of political affects as positive in nature. For instance, the AfD politician Marc Jongen diagnosed a lack of ‘thymotic energy’ in Germany’s political landscape and proposed that more rage and anger would be necessary.5 Furthermore, affective utterances of fear and worry among AfD politicians and supporters have been approached as embodied and hardly refutable arguments; one example is when far-​r ight protestors enact themselves not as the Wutbürger but as besorgte Bürger (‘concerned citizens’), thus insisting on the legitimacy of their affective utterances (Bröckling, 2016). In this regard, it is apparent that political affects have an empowering function while simultaneously challenging both the devaluation of affect and the dualism of truth and affect. During an election campaign in 2016, the 159

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AfD politician Georg Pazderski said, ‘[p]‌erception is reality. That means that what you feel is reality, too’ (quoted in van Laak, 2016). While this statement supports the truthfulness of emotions, it also manifests the ambivalence of affect in contemporary politics. The ambivalence of affect can be demonstrated more generally for particular ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions as well. Love, for instance, may not only contribute to justice (Nussbaum, 2013) but also legitimise national closure and exclusion (Ahmed, 2014). Conversely, a merely normative critique of ‘negative emotions’, such as anger, tends to ignore their emancipatory potential (for example, Lorde, 2007). In the context of queer feminist affect theory, Brigitte Bargetz has recommended moving ‘beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect’ (2015: 580). This chapter promotes the application of the concept of affective ambivalence as a theoretical foundation for research on far-​r ight populist politics of affect. Furthermore, it starts with neither a pejorative gaze from the outside (‘irate citizens’) nor an appreciation-​searching gaze from the inside (‘concerned citizens’). Such a theoretical lens allows us to move beyond an essentialist or normative definition of political affectivity as merely a misleading feeling or, on the contrary, a truthful ‘reality’. A focus on affect in general can offer insight into social, cultural and political life, which is reflected in the turn to affect (Clough and Halley, 2007; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010). Yet, we do not need to celebrate or problematise affect per se. Rather, we should recognise that affect is on the move, and we might scrutinise how the ascriptions and articulations of affect operate and the actual impact of affects. Embracing the ambivalence and contested normativity of affect can clarify how affects are involved in political discourses and practices. Thus, we understand affect to be a generic term that comprises emotional phenomena that are embedded in power relations and influential in social, political, cultural and historical contexts (compare with Cvetkovich, 2012).6 In this regard, affects in the form of social practices (compare with Wetherell, 2012) are able to question established boundaries as well as regulate and (re)produce orders and boundaries (Ahmed, 2014; Penz et al, 2017). In analysing contemporary far-​right politics, we refer to theoretical approaches that extend beyond dichotomic and normative conceptions of, for example, rational/​irrational, objective/​subjective or negative/​positive emotions. The following section briefly introduces theoretical approaches to the functionality and performativity of affects.

Beyond normativity: the functionality of affects In Strange Encounters (2000), Ahmed engages with postcolonial theory to argue that processes and relations of othering work through ‘economies of vision and touch’. She has further developed this argument in The Cultural 160

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Politics of Emotion (2014) by demonstrating that emotions shape social worlds and bodies (such as ‘economies of hate’ in regard to ‘bogus asylum seekers’ or ‘global economies of fear’ in the context of terrorism). Based on the philosophy of Judith Butler, Ahmed has suggested that different worlds and bodies materialise not only through the discursive repetition of norms but also through affective dynamics in which ‘subjects become invested in particular structures’. She has explained that ‘emotions show us how power shapes the very surface of bodies as well as worlds’ (Ahmed, 2014: 12). Ahmed has argued that social objects are constituted through the circulation of affects. No object is inherently worthy of compassion, and no object is innately hateful. Rather, a social object must be made that way. According to Ahmed, affects are not private properties of individuals but ‘play a crucial role in the “surfacing” of individual and collective bodies’ (2014: 117). From her perspective, affects are functional in the sense that they ‘align individuals with communities’, thereby forming connections between elements ‘by sticking figures together’ (2014: 119). Kathleen Stewart (2007) has similarly examined the trajectories and arenas in which affects circulate. She has focused on ‘ordinary affects’ and thus promotes a post-​dualistic conception of affects and emotions: Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. They’re things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something. (Stewart, 2007: 1–​2) Since Stewart has understood ordinary affects as ‘giv[ing] things the quality of a something to inhabit and animate’ (2007: 15), the politics of affect assume a different perspective. Stewart has emphasised that affects do not have inherent or attached meaning. The charging of someone or something with affect would rather be a matter of circulation, movement and resonance, and the significance of affect ‘lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible’ (Stewart, 2007: 3). From this perspective, and through her mode of writing, Stewart has urged us to explore beyond the spectacular and dramatic to take into account the ordinary and seemingly mundane modes by which affects circulate and generate scenes, situations, worlds and objects in their trajectories. Thus, Stewart has encouraged engagement with the sociomateriality of affects and attention to the dynamics, relations and interruptions that affects create 161

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between bodies. In these relations, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, (2010: 2) have argued, ‘lie[s]‌the real powers of affect, affect as potential: a body’s capacity to affect and to be affected’ –​which is why, according to Stewart, what affects do is inherently political: ‘There’s a politics to being/​ feeling connected (or not), to impacts that are shared (or not), to energies spent worrying or scheming (or not)’ (Stewart, 2007: 16). Politics, in this conceptualisation, are a matter of performance, enactment and practice, and the ways in which affects shape bodies and social worlds become analysable as a site of ‘ontological politics’, which, according to Annemarie Mol, concern ‘the way in which problems are framed, bodies are shaped, and lives are pushed and pulled in one way or another’ (Mol, 2002: viii). According to Mol, ontology is enacted through practices. Following this argument, the ontology of affects –​including the normative classification of certain emotions as negative –​needs to be considered as an effect of practices. Such an understanding allows us to grasp affects in terms of their ambivalences, as they are not regarded as democratic or anti-​democratic, emancipatory or dangerous, or positive or negative per se. Efforts to classify affect as one or the other and the attachment of affect with certain groups can be analysed as political practices themselves. Based on the philosophies of Ahmed, Stewart and Mol, we explore how affects are practised and performed, and we approach our research objects as ‘a tangle of potential connections’ (Stewart, 2007: 4). This approach can interrogate how affects attract negative perceptions in the first place as well as how morals and normativities become (un)done in ‘affective practices’ (Wetherell, 2012: 4). In this regard, it is less important to identify negative affects than to consider what affects can or are able to do, for whom, how and why. We conceptualise affects as situated in social practices and inherent to performances with the potential to shape things and bodies. Such an approach is promising for ethnographic inquiries into a wide array of social phenomena and issues, especially the politics of the far right in Europe and the US. Both Arlie Russel Hochschild (2016) and Katherine Cramer (2016) have ethnographically engaged with rural supporters of Donald Trump and the Tea Party to investigate their emotional attachments to politics. In Germany, Nitzan Shoshan (2016) has examined the political imaginaries of neo-​Nazis and how their ‘political delinquency’ is a product of governmental procedures ‘that appeal to affective states generally, and hate in particular’ (Shoshan, 2016: xiv). Both Hilary Pilkington (2016) and Katherine Blee (2018) have studied affects and what they do in the realm of racist activism. Blee has specifically examined emotional dynamics as relational mechanisms that impact the stability of racist activist groups, which is significant to the entry and exit of activists in particular groups (see also Latif et al, 2018). Meanwhile, in her study of the English Defence League, Pilkington (2016: 228–​30) has considered 162

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the affective dynamics within the movement and how ‘affective bonds’ are performed through a sense of ‘togetherness’ to constitute a collective and ‘enhance the pleasures associated with activism’. In a similar manner, this chapter questions what affects do when practised in far-​r ight populist arenas. It adopts the German party AfD as an example to argue that affects embody political moves and strategies, such as criticising and refuting political antagonists, regulating and intervening in political discourse, and accumulating political resources (electorate, funding, candidates). Notably, affects are the pillars for delivering a narrative about ‘us’. According to far-​right agents, what ‘we’ are and what ‘our’ politics should be are matters of performing identities and conveying narratives that are embodied in affective practices (compare with Kinnvall, 2018). Finally, a focus on the affective practices in far-​right politics –​which necessarily thinks beyond negativity to take account of more ‘ordinary’ and unspectacular practices and performances of affect –​does not imply downplaying or overlooking the politics of exclusion but rather subtly nuancing potentially overlooked facets of enactment and performance that have contributed to the success of far-​r ight political organisations in Europe and the US. Attention to several dimensions of the more ‘ordinary’ affective dynamics can provide insight into the normalisation of far-​r ight politics.

Affective dimensions of far-​r ight populist politics in Germany In Germany, the AfD has increasingly attracted academic attention as the first far-​right populist party in federal parliament since the end of the Second World War and as a reflection of the wider trend of parliamentary politics shifting to the right across Europe (Decker, 2016; Grabow, 2016; Özvatan and Forchtner, 2019; Schwörer, 2019). The AfD was founded in 2013 by Bernd Lucke as a political response to the Euro crisis. As the party increasingly gained the support of voters, it quickly evolved from a largely conservative and rather neoliberal party into a conglomerate of differing and contested political stances. Increasingly, the far-​r ight internal organisation Der Flügel (The Wing), which was founded in 2015 by Björn Höcke and André Poggenburg, has been influential on the AfD’s overall composition and political objectives.7 Scholars have struggled to explain the electoral successes of the AfD, and a rising number of hypotheses have yielded scarce empirical evidence (Dellenbaugh-​Losse et al, forthcoming). The only sound empirical evidence concerning the AfD constituency is the circular finding that right-​wing attitudes and views, especially in regard to immigration, are the main motivation for people to vote for the AfD (Arzheimer and Berning, 2019; Hansen and Olsen, 2019). To comprehend the current surge in far-​r ight 163

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politics and make particular sense of their growing establishment in parliamentary politics, we refer to scholars who have proposed profound analyses of the performance and enactment of far-​right agents as means of presenting themselves as appealing to mobilise potential supporters. According to Christoffer Kølvraa and Bernhard Forchtner (2019: 227), ‘[t]‌hrough (visual) rhetoric and various other modes of performativity, the extreme right imagines, aestheticizes and presents an “ideal extreme-​r ight subject” with whom comrades and potential followers might identify’. A closer examination of the far right’s affective practices and performances could clarify how these agents render their political projects identifiable and appealing. Yet, we argue that instead of addressing their politics of negative emotions, such as hatred and fear, which classify their projects as illegitimate from the outset, we need to understand how they enact themselves as politically legitimate through affective practices that enable opposition to ascribed negativity.

Mitigating feelings towards non-​belonging At the end of 2018, we met with members of a local AfD regional association in the small town of Limbach-​Oberfrohna in rural Saxony to discuss their views of the dimensions of German national identity. The discussion rapidly shifted to who, from their perspective, does not belong to the ‘German people’ but still claims to be a part. The AfD member Rainer Peters (pseudonym) expected newcomers –​‘migrants, refugees’ –​ to perform in a particular manner to become German: ‘In my opinion, it is very simple to see who really needs our protection and who just wants to access our social security funds: that is, gratitude. If I’m grateful that I’m here, I’ll take it kind-​heartedly, and I’ll take it humbly what I’m given’. He believed that newcomers should be grateful and humble to honour the generosity of Germans in accepting them into the country. Generosity and gratitude, as they are expressed in this situation, form an affective or rather symbolic, fictitious and imagined relation between one social group (‘us’) and another (‘them’) by assigning meaning to these groups via affects. Referring to oneself as a generous person and expecting others to act humbly to demonstrate appreciation for ‘our’ generosity is a decidedly elegant and civilised manner of performing a moral superiority that, on closer inspection, accompanies ‘our’ national identity (Leser et al, 2019). In articulating the logics of national exclusion in an affective frame of moral emotions, the AfD member who was interviewed produced a hierarchical relation of power between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that was embedded in a narrative of a civilised nation that generously protects those who it deems deserving while simultaneously eschewing rather disagreeable affective articulations. 164

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Neither the AfD events that we attended nor our conversations with AfD-​affiliated persons yielded any situation or experience involving an open articulation of hatred towards those who are considered different. Yet, the politics of exclusion are still instrumental in articulations such as the above claim, as it remains a powerful mode of differentiating between those who belong and those who do not in a seemingly legitimate manner rather than through hateful articulations. Shoshan (2016) and Blee (2018: 63–​71) have argued that hatred in far-​r ight politics operates as a pejorative classification that impacts those who are classified as ‘hateful’. In our research, hate was a feeling that members and supporters of the AfD refrained from expressing explicitly.8 According to Blee (2018: 69), all emotions are ‘socially and politically encouraged (or forbidden)’ to some extent. Hochschild (2016: 15) has added that political realms are governed by ‘feeling rules’ that dictate how one should feel about particular political and social issues. In many contexts, expressions of hatred are socially sanctioned or at least discouraged, which indicates a social disagreeability of particular affective expressions. In this regard, far-​r ight political agents tend to disguise and mitigate their rhetoric of exclusion and find appropriate and legitimate forms to express far-​r ight attitudes. Feelings are never only personal, subjective or intimate, as they are always political. The act of performing emotions in the political realm is inextricably related to the question of legitimacy. Based on our observations, the performance of legitimate political conduct was crucial for the AfD to transfer its messages to audiences and thus create a social space in which relations, identifications and attachments can emerge and flourish.

The ‘cultural intimacy’ of AfD meetings In autumn 2019, three of the six new states in Germany held regional parliamentary elections in addition to the local government and European Parliamentary elections that took place earlier in the year. In the elections in Saxony and Brandenburg, the AfD managed to gain 27.5 percent and 23.5 percent of the votes, respectively. Although the AfD did not become the dominant party in these states in this election, it still achieved its most impressive results to date. In the year preceding the elections, regional AfD organisations had intensified their campaign efforts, particularly in rural areas. The party sought to provide social spaces in which potential supporters could connect, relate and identify with the political projects of the AfD; thus, they organised a myriad of gatherings and meetings with the interested public in club houses and city halls in villages and cities across East Germany. We were able to attend many such AfD events, which occurred on at least a weekly basis and attracted between 15 and 100 sympathisers. In March 2019, Jörg Urban, the AfD president of Saxony, organised a meeting entitled ‘Homeland Saxony’ in Großpösna near Leipzig. The event 165

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was attended by about 20 people, most of whom were older men. Urban used the event for campaigning purposes and spoke about the AfD manifesto for approximately one hour. The subsequent discussion with the audience was filled with laments about the current state of politics and, in particular, the shortcomings of the current government in Saxony led by the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands, CDU). Although the AfD had been part of the Saxonian parliament since the election in 2014, it seemed that few changes had been achieved, according to several of the discussants. Eventually, a man in the audience addressed Urban as follows: ‘Maybe we need to be more courageous, and maybe we need to start talking to our fellow men about the AfD. It’s not uncommon to withhold your opinions. But that’s dangerous. This has been going on for decades, and now we’re being dragged into the mud because we’re telling it as it is.’ Another member of the local AfD organisation pridefully added, “we’re expressing our opinions. We’re standing behind our manifesto. We are the mediators in the villages, the spearheads of the AfD”. The audience responded, and several people whispered affirmative words to their neighbours. The AfD member emphasised, “we’re proud of it!” Jörg Urban, standing in the middle of the room, addressed the man who was concerned about publicly expressing his opinions: “Just mention the principle of freedom of speech. What are you allowed to say today and what is forbidden? We need to establish a sensibility in order for people to start thinking: ‘Isn’t it strange that I’m not allowed to say certain things? … How can it be that I can’t talk normally without having to be afraid to be sanctioned in one way or the other?’ ” An older man in the audience reacted: “I was born in the former GDR, and back then, you weren’t allowed to say anything. Today, when you speak up, people say you’re a right-​winger … Today, we’re facing the same conditions as in GDR times. And people need to realise it!” The audience became agitated, and Urban tried to calm them by saying, “yes, everything is getting worse. At the station at night, women aren’t able to disembark the train on their own anymore. Reality is showing us: we need to engage with politics! And we need to have the courage to address problems and meet the people!” Jörg Dornau, another AfD member, addressed the audience: “This is why you need to talk to your children, talk to your grandchildren, your relatives, colleagues, neighbours. Wake the people up! Send them to the ballot boxes!” During the event, the participants discussed their experiences with the dominant feeling rules and the measures that they could take to actively change the trajectory of these feeling rules in affecting their political 166

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lives. Within the ‘safe space’ that was created by the event organisers, they could enact themselves as feeling ‘free’ without fear of any modes of social sanctioning that were applied outside of that space. Moreover, the space that the AfD created on that evening in the small city of Großpösna provided an affective offer that resonated with the participants and established a sense of connection and belonging to a small collective of ‘courageous’ and like-​ minded people who share knowledge of ‘what is really going on’. Such events facilitate the ‘performance of cultural intimacy’, which Michael Herzfeld (2019: 135) has identified as ‘a vital aspect of what constitutes [the] appeal’ of populist politics.

Cynicism as embodied critique On 6 July 2019, members of the AfD met in Leinefelde, a small town in Thuringia. The occasion was the fifth ‘Kyffhäuser’ meeting, which is an annual event organised by Der Flügel. Like many of the AfD’s staged performances, the Kyffhäuser meeting was livestreamed on Facebook, which allowed a larger interested audience to virtually attend and comment on the meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, the livestream depicted a large conference room in which about 200 people, most of whom were men, were sitting around long tables that were decorated with white tablecloths and German flags. The podium in the front was decorated in the AfD colour blue, and the motto of the meeting –​‘The East is rising’, which implies the assumed electoral successes of the AfD in the upcoming elections in three Länder in East Germany –​was written on a blue wall next to the symbol of the Kyffhäuser monument. The meeting began with solemn music, during which the audience stood up, and several flag bearers approached the podium at the front of the room. They were followed by the AfD presidents of Saxony (Jörg Urban), Thuringia (Björn Höcke) and Brandenburg (Andreas Kalbitz), among other speakers. The music stopped, and a five-​minute opening film was screened that contained a montage of images of crowds, flags, speeches by AfD politicians, applauding audiences and previous Kyffhäuser meetings. The video, which was accompanied by atmospheric music, further displayed statements and images of male AfD politicians, who were claiming that the ‘existence of our country’ is at stake because of the ‘caste of politicians detached from reality, hostile to the people and arrogant’ yet now ‘being driven against the wall at full throttle’. As an analogy to the peaceful revolution in 1989, Saxony and Thuringia were presented as ‘the heart of the resistance’. According to the film’s statements, the AfD was not only the ‘last evolutionary chance’ but ‘already fighting against time’, which is precisely what it ‘owed’ to both ‘ancestors’ and ‘children’. After the end of the film, Andreas Kalbitz was introduced enthusiastically as ‘probably the next Prime Minister of 167

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Brandenburg’. In his 29-​minute opening speech, he elaborated on the narrative of the film: ‘It’s about changing this country, securing it, and to be able to face our grandchildren and children and never having to expose ourselves to their question: What did you do back then? What did you do back then when the ‘rhombus of horror’ Angela Merkel … drove this country up against the wall [long applause]. I don’t want to have to say that I was busy paying off my terraced house during that time. Because a paid-​off terraced house is worth absolutely nothing in the caliphate … The German people, that is us [long applause]. And this people is not negotiable. And we resist the attempt of watering us down. To declare all that as arbitrary. We are currently experiencing the great arbitrariness. Family has become everything. Yes [long drawn out, in a cynic tone], the family is under the special protection of the Constitution. Naturally, that becomes arbitrary in the moment where everything can declare itself a family: Two women, a piece of furniture. I don’t know, two pieces of furniture, a man. I don’t know [laughs briefly]. In the end, everything is a family. … And then I look at this parliament, ‘Bundestag’ [laughs sarcastically; applause] and I have to say … particularly the ‘rhombus of horror’ Angela Merkel, who has taken an oath to preserve and increase the welfare of the German people. They do not. And we demand nothing other than compliance with this basic law. And we do it stringently … We have no desire to let ourselves be distorted by these laws, to let ourselves be fobbed off with individual cases. My patience has run its course. I have no more patience with established politics. And we have no more time either.’ Like the opening video, Kalbitz’s speech did not create an atmosphere of hate, and it contained no discernible demonisation of the ‘other’. However, it presupposed anti-​Muslim conspiracy theories, such as the ‘great replacement’ theory. The objects of Kalbitz’s attacks were rather ‘the rhombus of horror Angela Merkel’ and, later in his speech, the ‘blurred Greens’, which Kalbitz depicted as an apocalyptic threat to ‘the welfare of the German people’ that produces a sense of anger at ‘those up there’. Interestingly, despite the seriousness of the threat to the survival of the German people that Kalbitz was addressing, he repeatedly laughed and invited the audience to join in his laughter. For instance, he ridiculed Angela Merkel’s signature hand pose and used ‘rhombus’ as a code that is presumably known to his audience. Overall, Kalbitz’s speech reeked of cynical and sarcastic humour and mockery in a way that resembled the affective performances of AfD politicians in the events that we have observed since the end of 2018. Cynicism was performed through the speaker’s explicit 168

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laughter about the establishment as well as via the numerous cynical allusions and codes that ridiculed political opponents, such as the Green Party, as disinformed, unobjective or unrealistic. We consider these cynical performances to be affective practices of embodied criticism which Margaret Wetherell has described as modes of ‘embodied meaning-​making’ (2012: 4). As embodied criticism, cynicism potentially operates as both a powerful and appealing political tool under particular circumstances.9 Kalbitz’s cynical laughter and overall attitude can be considered an affective offer to the physically and virtually present members of the ‘imagined community’ of AfD supporters. The cynical performance enables a reversal of the relation between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ whereby instead of positioning the ‘elite’ on top, laughing about ‘them’ enables those who laugh in a superior position to look down on them. Yet, the invitation to laugh relies on shared knowledge, as a joke that is not understood is not effective. Especially at the beginning of our fieldwork with AfD meetings, we, as participants in these events, were unable to laugh or applaud at the right moments because we lacked knowledge of the applied codes and had no implicit understanding of what functions as a ‘joke’ for them. Gregor Benton (1988: 40) has discussed the ‘joke’s characteristic implicitness’ as follows: ‘[t]‌he audience cannot but take an active role if the joke is to succeed; it must “fill the gaps, complete the hints, trace the hidden analogies” ’. For a joke to ‘work’, there must be implicit knowledge and particular shared assumptions among the audience. The implicit knowledge in the context of the Kyffhäuser seemed to consist of, among other elements, the certain threat that Muslim migrants would replace the ‘imagined community’ of ‘the German people’. There seemed to be no need for explicit articulations of hate when anti-​Muslim conspiracy theories are presented as self-​evident truths. The ‘great replacement’ and ‘Islamisation’ that have been induced by chancellor Merkel’s ‘betrayal of the German people’ and supported by the ‘imbecility’ of the Green Party are implicitly referenced by AfD politicians as matters of fact. Failure to share this implicit knowledge and rejection of the truth are templates for cynical jokes. To attest to the ‘truth’, it seemed sufficient to operate with indirect codes, such as the ‘rhombus of horror’, without the need to directly address ‘facts’ that everybody already knew. For Herzfeld (2019), populism as a performative mode is characterised by the political use of such ‘actual truths’: ‘Populist performances draw on a repertoire of culturally intimate secrets –​the features of everyday life that official discourse shields from the eyes and ears of outsiders, but that in reality “everyone knows” ’ (Herzfeld, 2019: 123). The affective offer of cynical laughter requires an ‘imagined community’ with a shared epistemological repertoire in order for the audience to accept the offer and laugh about its implications together. Laughing together 169

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ultimately operates as a demarcation that allows ‘us’ –​a conspiratorial ‘truth community’ –​to confront ‘those’ who are far removed from reality. The affective offer invites people to believe in the personal and group-​specific possession of the truth, such as that expressed by the leading slogan of the AfD: ‘Courage to tell the truth’. Meanwhile, it attributes the misjudgement of reality to political opponents. This is comically exaggerated when political opponents are characterised as unable to distinguish between people and pieces of furniture. Political opponents become a symbol of madness, and where madness reigns, clairvoyants cannot react in any other way than to laugh cynically and ‘in the knowledge’ that the apocalypse is imminent, which they watch ‘with waking eyes’, as stated in the opening film. Therefore, such bitter, cynical laughter operates as an affirmation of the self-​aggrandising belief in the superiority of AfD supporters. Kalbitz’s speech invited the audience to laugh at the views of others and rise above them together. Ultimately, from such a sublime position, all statements and actions that correspond to one’s own ‘truth’ appear to be legitimate. The cynical laughter sharply differentiates between not only those who laugh and those who are laughed at but also those who can understand the joke and those who do not believe ‘the truth’. The cynical gesture does not presuppose but produces these diametrical political subjects in the first place. At the same time, the order of these subjects is reversed: it is not the AfD community that represents post-​truth and fake news but rather their political opponents –​‘we’ stand above holding the truth about the endangered future, while ‘they’ are blind. In such a reading, the speaker and audience constitute a conspiratorial community that is continuously reproduced in cynical speech. This notion became apparent in Kalbitz’s invocation of a community: ‘And the fact that you are here is a signal of strength, of cohesion, and I wish that we use this meeting to recharge and gather strength. I never feel as free as here in this sphere, among like-​minded people where one can speak without reservations. Where one notices how much ambition and how many good people we have.’ The power of Kalbitz’s affective offer derives from the reinforcement of his community’s perceived truths.

Conclusion Our political activity is determined by the stories that we tell ourselves, the threats that we believe are most imminent and the voices around us to which we can relate the most. Far-​r ight populist parties, such as the AfD, 170

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are actively working to provide political narratives and identities as well as create spaces and opportunities for people to affirm and certify their beliefs. Such work embraces the power of affective practices that contribute to legitimising the expression of far-​r ight views in public realms, which had formerly been unacceptable. On 2 June 2019, the CDU politician Walter Lübcke, who is known for his pro-​migrant attitudes, was found dead in his home in Kassel. The far-​r ight terrorist Stephan Ernst is suspected of having shot him. The incident was followed by an outburst of hate speech on social media platforms, where right-​wing extremists expressed joy about Lübcke’s assassination, insulted and ridiculed the late politician, and announced further murders. A few days after the killing, the ARD television programme Kontraste broadcasted a report on how PEGIDA protestors in Dresden reacted to the murder.10 The video depicted one of the protestors saying, ‘compared to the left-​wing extremist threat, one murder every two or three years for reasons of hate seems relatively normal’. Another man stated, ‘in my opinion, Mr. Lübcke is a Volksverräter [traitor of the people]. A man who recommends his own people to leave the country if they don’t agree with the refugee policy is, in my opinion, a Volksverräter’. None of the interviewees expressed grief or regret; on the contrary, the murder was framed as a logical consequence of failing politics. For instance, one man in the video commented that the politician ‘had it coming’. In this regard, Ruth Wodak (2019: 197) has suggested that the increasing normalisation of far-​right attitudes is accompanied by a progressing ‘shamelessness’ and predicted that we would experience a ‘post-​shame era’. ‘Post-​shame’ implies a powerful transformation of affective constellations and registers of feeling. The concept further reveals that the diagnosis of having entered a ‘post-​truth’ era is misleading, as it only reproduces a dualistic conception of affect versus rationality or emotion versus truth. A transformation of the registers of feeling can additionally build on Hochschild’s (2019) concept of ‘feeling rules’, as such rules appear to have a crucial function in the realm of politics and are inherently subject to contestation and transformation. We argue that feeling rules can be transformed through affective offers that permit the utterance of formerly unsayable things and acceptance of formerly unacceptable modes of conduct. The affective politics of the AfD actively contest notions of liberal ‘feeling rules’, and attempt to foster social spaces in which such rules do not apply. From this perspective, the AfD does not ‘use’ emotions to ‘seduce’ people to adopt far-​r ight views; rather, they create enabling spaces in which people can freely express their far-​r ight views without the need to ‘feel bad’ about them or fear social sanctions. These efforts are subtle and unspectacular, yet they have gradually and persistently advanced the normalisation and social acceptability of far-​r ight attitudes. 171

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Thus, ‘shameless’ expressions are being enabled, and AfD supporters are reproducing themselves as a superior ‘truth community’ to allow for performances of complete self-​assuredness. Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

7

8

9

10

We consider the AfD a far-​right populist party based on its promotion of völkisch nationalism, chauvinistic welfare nationalism, racist, in particular anti-​Muslim/​Islam sentiments, and traditionalist and anti-​feminist ideas (compare with Salzborn 2017). Borrowing Michael Herzfeld’s definition of populism (2019: 122), we understand it as ‘a performative mode of political action in which potentially offensive speech, mannerisms, and attitudes are rendered legitimate as alternatives to establishment values and practices’. While there is an established convention among some scholars of distinguishing between emotions, feelings, passion and affect, in this chapter, we understand affect as a generic term that comprises emotional phenomena (compare with Ahmed, 2014). Judith N. Shklar’s (1989) The Liberalism of Fear therefore is an exception in the field of liberal political philosophy. Brigitte Bargetz and Birgit Sauer (2015: 93–​6) historically locate the devaluation of affect in a liberal dispositive of feelings. They identify this powerful dispositive as a bourgeois, gendered, heteronormative, racialised, and Euro-​centric order. ‘The separation of politics and feelings is thus a … political mechanism of domination that limits political agency and enables the exclusion of specific groups and their interests and needs from the political sphere’ (2015: 96). See Jongen (2016). We further acknowledge that affects escape stable and consistent definitions (compare with Cvetkovich, 2012; Thrift, 2004). Affect theory and studies on affects are, as Thrift (2004: 60–​3) explained, inter-​and transdisciplinary enterprises, and affects can be and are being translated in multiple ways, for example, in psychoanalytic, naturalistic, physiological, relational, and interactional frames. While the Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, VS) considers the entire AfD a Prüffall (test case) since January 2019, Der Flügel has been –​as well as the AfD youth organisation, Junge Alternative (Young Alternative) –​classified as a Verdachtsfall (suspected case). Thus, Der Flügel is not yet classified as ‘extremist’, but the VS is currently collecting evidence. Blee has further argued that even if ‘hatred’ is rejected by racist activists as a form of pejorative classification, acts of violence against conceived ‘others’ ‘might well be considered conceptually equivalent to hate crimes even when individual perpetrators are not immediately motivated by emotions of intergroup hatred’ (2018: 70). Studies on the Alt-​Right show the digital circulation of visual memes, pointing out the importance of irony, cynicism, mockery and ‘insider jokes’ for the success of the far right (for example, Tuters, 2019; Hawley, 2017; Nagle, 2017). See www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​rTvN​qMSn​iAU

References Ahmed, S. (2000) Strange Encounters. Embodied Others in Post-​coloniality, London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Ahmed, S. (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 172

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Arzheimer, K., and Berning, C. C. (2019) How the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and their voters veered to the radical right, 2013–​2017, Electoral Studies, 60: 102–​40. doi: 10.1016/​j.electstud.2019.04.004 Bargetz, B. (2015) ‘The distribution of emotions. Affective politics of emancipation’, Hypatia, 30(3): 580–​96. Bargetz, B. and Sauer, B. (2015) Der affective turn. Das Gefühlsdispositiv und die Trennung von öffentlich und privat, Femina Politica, 24(1): 93–​102. Benton, G. (1988) The origins of the political joke, in C. Powell and G.E.C. Paton (eds), Humour in Society. Resistance and Control, London: Macmillan Press, pp 33–​55. Betz, HG. (2005) Against the system: radical right-​wing populism’s challenge to liberal democracy, in J. Rydgren (ed), Movements of Exclusion: Radical Right-​Wing Populism in the Western World, Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, pp 25–​40. Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism, London: Sage. Blee, K.M. (2002) Inside Organised Racism: Women in the Hate Movement, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Blee, K.M. (2018) Understanding Racist Activism: Theory, Methods and Research, London and New York: Routledge. Brennan, J. (2016) Against Democracy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bröckling, U. (2016) Angst, in R. Feustel, N. Grochol, T. Prüwer and F. Reif (eds) Wörterbuch des besorgten Bürgers, Mainz: Ventil, pp 21–​5. Busher, J., Giurlando, P. and Sullivan, G.B. (2018) Introduction: the emotional dynamics of backlash politics beyond anger, hate, fear, pride, and loss, Humanity & Society, 42(4): 399–​409. Clough, P.T. and Halley, J. (eds) (2007) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cox, M. and Durham, M. (2000) The politics of anger: the extreme right in the United States, in P. Hainsworth (ed) Politics of the Extreme Right: From the Margins to the Mainstream. London: Bloomsbury, pp 287–​311. Cramer, K.J. (2016) The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Cvetkovich, A. (2012) Depression: A Public Feeling, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Decker, F. (2016) The ‘alternative for Germany’: factors behind its emergence and profile of a new right-​wing populist party, German Politics and Society, 34(2): 1–​16. Dellenbaugh-​Losse, M., Homeyer, J., Leser, J. and Pates, R. (forthcoming) Toxische Orte? Faktoren der regionalen Anfälligkeit für völkischen Nationalismus, Berg, L. and Üblacker, J. (eds) Rechtes Denken –​Rechte Räume, Bielefeld: transcript. 173

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Ebner, J. (2017) The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-​right Extremism, London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Emcke, C. (2019) Against Hate, Cambridge: Polity Press. Garland, J. and Treadwell, J. (2012) The new politics of hate? An assessment of the appeal of the English Defence League amongst disadvantaged white working-​class communities in England, Journal of Hate Studies, 10(1): 123–​42. Gould, D.B. (2009) Moving Politics. Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Grabow, K. (2016) PEGIDA and the Alternative für Deutschland: two sides of the same coin?, European View, 15(2): 173–​81. Gregg, M. and Seigworth G.J. (eds) (2010) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Habermas, J. (1998) Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats, Frankfurt/​Main: Suhrkamp. Hansen, M.A. and Olsen, J. (2019) Flesh of the same flesh: a study of voters for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the 2017 federal election, German Politics, 28(1): 1–​19. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2005) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Books. Hawley, G. (2017) Making Sense of the Alt-​Right, New York: Columbia University Press. Herzfeld, M. (2019) How populism works, in D. Theodossopoulos and B. Kapferer (eds) Democracy’s Paradox. Populism and its Contemporary Crisis, New York: Berghahn Books, pp 122–​38. Hochschild, A.R. (2016) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, New York and London: The New Press. Hochschild, A.R. (2019) Introductory essay. Emotions and society, Emotions and Society, 1(1): 9–​13. Illouz, E. and Finkelman, S. (2009) An odd and inseparable couple: Emotion and rationality in partner selection, Theory and Society, 38(4): 401–​22. Jongen, M. (2016) Der Parteiphilosoph der AfD, Frankfurter Allgemeine, 15 January, www.faz.net/​aktu​ell/​poli​tik/​inl​and/​marc-​jon​gen-​ist-​afd-​politi​ ker-​und-​philos​oph-​14005​731.html Kimmel, M.S. (2017) Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. New York: Nation Books. Kinnvall, C. (2018) Ontological insecurities and postcolonial imaginaries: the emotional appeal of populism, Humanity & Society, 42(4), 523–​43. Kølvraa, C. and Forchtner, B. (2019) Cultural imaginaries of the extreme right: an introduction, Patterns of Prejudice, 53(3): 227–​235. Kurbjuweit, D. (2010) Essay. Der Wutbürger, Spiegel Online, www.spie​gel. de/​spie​gel/​print/​d-​74184​564.html

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Latif, M., Blee, K., DeMichele, M. and Simi, P. (2018) How emotional dynamics maintain and destroy white supremacist groups, Humanity & Society, 42(4): 480–​501. Leser, J., Pates, R. and Spissinger, F. (2019) Befindlichkeiten des Demos. Zur politischen Funktion von Affekten im Zeichen des Rechtspopulismus und einer ‘Krise’ der Demokratie, in N. Burzan (ed) Komplexe Dynamiken globaler und lokaler Entwicklungen. Verhandlungen des 39. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Göttingen 2018, http://​publik​atio​nen.soz​iolo​ gie.de/​index.php/​kongre​ssba​nd_​2​018/​arti​cle/​view/​1036 Lorde, A. (2007) The uses of anger: women responding to racism, in A. Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, pp 124–​33. Mishra, P. (2017) Age of Anger: A History of the Present, London: Allen Lane. Mol, A. (2002) The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mouffe, C. (2000) Politics and passions: introduction, Ethical Perspectives, 7(2): 146–​50. Nagle, A. (2017) Kill All Normies. The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-​right and Trump, Winchester: Zero Books. Ngai, S. (2007) Ugly Feelings, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M.C. (2013) Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Özvatan, Ö. and Forchtner, B. (2019) The far-​right alternative für Deutschland in Germany: Towards a ‘happy ending’?, in A. Waring (ed), The New Authoritarianism. Vol. 2: A Risk Analysis of the European Alt-​Right Phenomenon, Stuttgart: ibidem, pp 199–​226. Pates, R. and Futh, M. (2018) Die Nation und ihre Affekte: Eine Untersuchung über die Auswirkungen unterschiedlicher Begrifflichkeiten, ZDfm 3(2), 188–​94. Penz, O., Sauer, B., Gaitsch, M., Hofbauer, J. and Glinsner, B. (2017) Post-​ bureaucratic encounters: affective labour in public employment services, Critical Social Policy, 37(4): 540–​61. Pilkington, H. (2016) Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rawls, J. (1996) Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Salmela, M. and von Scheve, C. (2017) Emotional roots of right-​wing political populism, Social Science Information, 56(4): 567–​95. Salzborn, S. (2017) Angriff der Antidemokraten. Die völkische Rebellion der Neuen Rechten, Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Schwörer, J. (2019) Alternative für Deutschland: from the streets to the parliament?, in M. Caiani and O. Císa (eds) Radical Right Movement Parties in Europe, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp 29–​45.

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Shklar, J.N. (1989) The liberalism of fear, in N.L. Rosenblum (ed) Liberalism and the Moral Life, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp 21–​38. Shoshan, N. (2016) The Management of Hate: Nation, Affect, and the Governance of Right-​wing Extremism in Germany, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stewart, K. (2007) Ordinary Affects, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thrift, N. (2004) Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect, Geographiska Annaler, 86(1): 57–​78. Tuters, M. (2019) LARPing & liberal tears. Irony, belief and idiocy in the deep vernacular web, in M. Fielitz and N. Thurston (eds) Post-​digital Cultures of the Far Right. Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US, Bielefeld: Transcript, pp 37–​48. Van Laak, C. (2016) Gefühlte Realität. AfD-​Wahlkampf im Berlin. Deutschlandfunk, www.deut​schl​andf​unk.de/​afd-​wahlka​mpf-​in-​ber​lin-​ gefueh​lte-​realit​aet.1773.de.html?dram:art​icle​_​id=​365​806 Weber, F. (2007) Emotionalisierung, Zivilität und Rationalität. Schritte zu einer politischen Theorie der Emotionen, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 36(1): 7–​21. Wetherell, M. (2012) Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, London: Sage. Wodak, R. (2015) The Politics of Fear: What Right-​wing Populist Discourses Mean, London: Sage. Wodak, R. (2019) Entering the ‘post-​shame era’: the rise of illiberal democracy, populism and neo-​authoritarianism in EUrope, Global Discourse, 9(1): 195–​213.

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Moral Economies of Exclusion: Politics of Fear through Antagonistic Anonymity Søren Mosgaard Andreasen

Introduction This chapter examines three interlinked publications by the Norwegian extreme-​right civil society organisation Human Rights Service (HRS), to explore how illiberal political logics are legitimised through discursive technologies of xenophobic populism against Muslims and Islam. Hosting a widely distributed (primarily via Facebook) social media platform, HRS lends itself as an important case to examine how forms of far/​extreme-​r ight political persuasion are manufactured and increasingly pushed from the outer fringes to enter the mainstream of Norwegian public/​political debate through circulation of digital demagogy. I focus here on unwinding some of the threads within ongoing developments of Norwegian anti-​Muslim illiberalism that I suggest are of particular significance, namely the organised manufacture and circulation of what I term ‘fear appeals’. Illustrative of the type of conflict performance that I am interested in examining, the HRS recently published a commentary stating that: This is the unpleasant truth. Islamists are known for their use of terror and other forms of violence across the world in the places where Islam sprouts and grows … all attempts to diminish or abolish a totalitarian political ideology disguised as religion (Islam) is a defence of democracy. It is allowed to defend one’s own country against foreign-​hostile attacks like Islamism. (HRS, 2018a)

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To track the semiotic conditions under which ‘fear appeals’ are systematically enabled and circulated against Islam/​M uslims in Norway via HRS publications, I draw on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (2001[1985]) discourse theory and on Sara Ahmed’s (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Herein, I examine three HRS articles published online during 2017–​18 (henceforth referred to as ‘the photo case’) and the formal properties of the HRS webpage from which articles have been disseminated. My argument falls along three main lines. First, I unpack the HRS webpage as a meta-​discursive framework to discuss how the embedment of a distinct liberal democratic and human rights agenda serves as an ideological basis for sanctioning anti-​ Muslim, illiberal political logics of exclusion. Second, I analyse the textual content of the photo case, which frames several secretly taken photos of Norwegian Muslims. I argue that a discourse about ‘cultural revolution’ can be seen as an appeal to audiences to form a specific type of unambiguous, exclusionist social entity within a social imaginary of a righteous fight for survival: a predatory majority. Third, I consider six photos featured in the photo case that depict mainly veiled Muslim women in the Norwegian public space. I suggest that the combination of text and photos constitutes a particular way in which to construct conflict, as Muslims are consistently framed through a discursive effect I term ‘antagonistic anonymity’. Reinforcing suspicious and fearful interpretations, antagonistic anonymity invites responses of defensive, ‘righteous’ aggression in a struggle constructed as intractable. I argue that the application of antagonistic anonymity and the systematic application of (endangered!) liberal democratic values/​ human rights can not only be understood as a discursive precondition for the justification of potentially violent forms of exclusion, but also represents an ongoing attempt at a hegemonic intervention to transport sentiments of anti-​Muslim illiberalism from the fringes towards the dominant cultural outlook (for a similar argument, see Fekete, 2014).

(Islamo)phobic discourse analysis ‘Fear appeals’ can be understood as specific forms of multimodal rhetoric intended for political persuasion and the manufacture of consent; that is, discursive closure in advanced media democracies. HRS fear appeals specifically invite consent to exclusion, policing, and micro-​humiliating routines against Muslim identities, as they are constructed as a ubiquitously present yet faceless threat for Norwegian society that audiences are encouraged to ‘document’. As a social phenomenon, fear has been theorised not only as ‘a discursive strategy, but also as an increasingly influential symptom of modern life’ (Ahmed, 2004: 71). In line with Ulrich Beck’s (2008) notion of a ‘risk society’, Frank Furedi (2006) suggests that fear has become a widespread structural issue –​a prevailing force that dominates the 178

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public imagination as a ‘culture of fear’. My argument, however, tracks Sarah Ahmed’s idea that collective modes of anxiety, insecurity and fear derive from the circulation, amplification and negotiation of semiotic performances –​ highly mobile, ‘sticky’ language that involves the gradual intensification of perceived threats towards designated others. Developing this position, Hisham Ramadan and Jeff Shantz (2018) argue that collective, affective responses towards a range of social and political issues in mediatised societies are increasingly influenced by systematic articulations of fear appeals into ‘phobic discourses’. Understood as a specific way of talking about and understanding the world, or an aspect of it, phobic discourses specifically support social stratification and persistent fear and distrust against certain categories of designated ‘others’, thereby suppressing the conditions of possibility for curiosity, interest and empathic engagement. As suggested by Kumar (2012), such ‘phobic entrepreneurs’ work to fix meanings in ways that resonate economically or politically with specific political agendas by accumulating and sticking a multitude of ‘free-​ floating’, abstract fears to specific groups and identities. Evidence suggests that phobic entrepreneurial work –​the use of internet platforms and social media to tactically expose mass audiences to phobic discourses –​is becoming increasingly significant for political processes of discursive closure in advanced mediatised democracies (see also Asad, 2007; Butler, 2009; Wodak, 2015). Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001: 112) definition of discourse as ‘an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre’, I suggest that phobic discourses may become constitutive forces as they fix unstable flows of meaning into a prevailing yet often latently present social optic of threat linked to specific key identities, relationships and events. The fear appeals produced by HRS can thus be approached analytically as moments within a wider phobic discourse about religion, migration and national belonging in Norway. That is, an attempt to fix a web of meanings within a specific domain through which the fluidity and multiplicity of possible understandings about Muslim/​Norwegian identities are reduced and temporarily stabilised (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 112–​15). These fixings form phobic nodal points around which a partial stabilisation of the horizon of plausibility for what can be thought and said about the relationship between ‘Norway/​Norwegians’ and ‘Islam/​ Muslims’ emerges. More specifically, this occurs as a specific arrangement of relations between descriptive concepts (termed ‘elements’) that block the sliding of privileged signs –​the ever-​present ‘flow of differences’ –​around nodal points (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001[1985]; Laclau, 1990: 99–​100). While nodal points, or key identities, thus often represent ‘floating signifiers’ (terms that mean very little in and by themselves), they acquire meaning through chains of equivalence and difference that link different elements and weave together conceptual spaces to establish identities relationally (Johansson, 179

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2011: 199). Whereas the term ‘nodal point’ refers specifically to the relational crystallisation of key identities (‘Norway’ and ‘Islam’), ‘floating signifier’ refers to particularly open elements that different discourses struggle to render meaningful (Jørgensen and Phillips, 2002: 28). Here, the term ‘myth’ refers to a complex type of floating signifier –​a space of representation that brings together a multitude of positive but rather vague ideas connected to the past (Laclau, 1990: 61). The myth therefore works by inserting paradoxical stability into an experienced, dislocated present by stating its instability and incorporating it within a clear and coherent narrative of belonging/​non-​ belonging and perpetrators/​victims. To more precisely consider the relationship between affect and HRS fear appeals as well as how affect relates to political and moral perception and practice, I combine discourse analysis with Ahmed’s (2004) theory of emotions and the work of Judith Butler (2009) and Arjun Appadurai (2006). For Ahmed, the ways in which emotions (such as fear) manifest depend on histories and pre-​existing stereotypes and prejudices. These, in turn, depend on authorised voices with the power to reiterate certain identities and associate them with certain bodies and symbolic markers: ‘The different words for emotions do different things precisely because they involve specific orientations towards the object that are identified as their cause’ (Ahmed, 2004: 13). In this sense, the relationship between affect and discourse is an economic one: whom and what we fear, and how we express and act on our fear, is the outcome, rather than origin, of the circulation of alterity and ideas about danger. It points to the analytical position that feelings do not reside objectively in subjects or objects, but are effects that come to ‘stick’ to identities through processes of affective distribution (for example, as asylum seekers have gradually become associated with international terrorists; Ahmed, 2004: 74). HRS fear appeals may thus take part in shaping the public’s view of Muslim identities. In the photo case, for example, audiences are invited to perceive Muslim identities as obscure, faceless and the embodiment of a multitude of anxieties within Norwegian society. These appeals are ‘modes of regulating affective and ethical dispositions through a selective and differential framing’ that may ultimately limit the epistemological capacity of the Norwegian public to perceive Muslim identities as ‘grievable’ and therefore worthy as lives in the fullest sense (Butler, 2009: 1). This implies that a certain interpretive act discreetly takes hold in primary affective responses towards others and that these affective responses are invariably mediated and enact certain interpretive frames (Butler, 2009: 34). Such frames must circulate in order to establish their hegemony, as this brings out –​or, rather, is –​the iterative structure of the frame (Butler, 2009: 12). In and through reiteration and circulation of fear appeals, feelings may therefore become: ‘ “fetishes”, qualities that seem to reside in objects, only through an erasure of the 180

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history of their production and circulation’ (Ahmed, 2004: 11). Appadurai (2006: 49–​53) claims that the construction and circulation of ‘fetish feelings’ and ideas about the vulnerability of a national majority in the presence of a minority is a key step in the process of transforming otherwise benign majority identities into ‘predatory majorities’. Predatory identities are defined as those whose social construction and mobilisation invite the extinction of proximate social categories, which come to be read as a volatile deficit and a liability to the very existence of a vulnerable ethnos, an endangered national/​cultural ‘us’ (Appadurai, 2006). My understanding of vulnerability is here inspired by Vincent Sacco and William Glackman’s (2000: 42) description: ‘feelings of susceptibility and openness to attack that influence the processes by which definitions of criminal danger are constructed and regarded as salient bases for action’. When HRS fear appeals about an impending cultural revolution fetishise and construct an exclusive sense of victimhood and vulnerability for Norwegian majority identities in relation to a Muslim minority (which is designated as the affective figure of a common threat), such messages may thus become pretexts for the ‘righteous’ violence of a predatory majority. Analysis of the photos in the photo case reveals a particular way of framing the conflictive relation between the self and other that systematically blocks the humanity and competing subjectivity of the ‘Muslim other’ (what I term ‘antagonistic anonymity’). In this context, I draw on ‘Holger Pötzsch’s (2011)’ idea of an ‘epistemological barrier’ to unpack how visual rhetoric is a discursive effect in its own right. Following Pötzsch, an epistemological barrier can be defined as a technique of representation through which the other is systematically constructed as a faceless, socially inaccessible, yet ubiquitously present threat (2011: 8). In this case, the barrier enables a chain of equivalence that incorporates all Muslim identities –​regardless of differentiations such as class, ethnicity, age or political standpoint –​under a single hegemonic discursive identity: the antagonistically anonymous, yet potentially omnipresent agent of ‘cultural revolution’ (2011: 9). Thus, phobic discourse analysis can be conceptualised as an exploration of how undercurrents of discursive ‘closure’ (the mainstreaming of understandings of complex and unstable events and identities) may come about specifically in and through discursively produced moments of emotional engagement. When sufficiently reiterated, such affective moments may play an important role in transforming existing moral perceptions and enabling radical victimisation, so long as it is publicly perceived as necessary to avoid greater evil. As convincingly shown by Ruth Wodak (2015, 2019), phobic entrepreneurship and discursive construction and manipulation of fear above all provide opportunities for the subversion of democratic processes and political transformations (including repressive processes), which might otherwise generate visible dissent. 181

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HRS Initially founded as a blog by the Norwegian journalist Hege Storhaug in 2001, HRS has developed into an active media platform predominantly promoting an anti-​Muslim and anti-​immigration agenda often fused with a struggle against the oppression of women (Sultan and Steen, 2014: 17). Typically, posts on HRS are commentaries or rewritings of news stories posted by either Storhaug or the daily manager of HRS, Rita Karlsen, although content by various guest-​writers frequently appears. HRS currently publishes two or three blog entries per day, which are virtually always about the supposedly harmful societal consequences of Islam and ‘non-​European immigration’. Such commentaries are often designed in relation to news stories broadcast in established media that enable connections between migration/​Islam/​violence. Likewise, anti-​Muslim/​immigration content is produced in close connection with key events, such as Christmas, New Year and Constitution Day. In this sense, the HRS webpage functions as an affective almanac of antagonistic anxiety with messages designed specifically to resonate with national celebrations and contexts of emotional concentration. The organisation has links to the Norwegian populist far-​r ight party, the Progress Party (PP), which according to Bangstad (2015: 56) has ‘lavished state funding on its long-​standing supporters among far-​r ight civil society activists in Norway’ including HRS. Until recently, HRS received 1,835,000 NOK in state funding in addition to private donations. However, state funding was reduced to 1,335,000 NOK in 2018 following the photo case, which stirred some public debate concerning the ‘societal value’ of the organisation. Illustrative of the reciprocal relationship between the PP and HRS, the decision to reduce funding was commented on by prominent PP member and former Minister of Justice (2016–​18), Per-​Willy Amundsen, who noted on Facebook: ‘I do not accept cuts in the funding for HRS. The government throws away money on the Left’s naïve immigration organizations while cutting support for HRS’ (Amundsen quoted in Blaker, 2018). Although HRS identifies itself as a ‘think-​tank’, the Norwegian Centre for Anti-​Racism (NCAR) characterises HRS as a ‘Muslim-​hate organization’ (Sultan and Steen, 2014: 1, 17). Emphasising its tabloid and emotional framing and effect, HRS outputs are virtually always supplemented by either a particular style of fear-​evoking, antagonistically anonymous images of the Muslim ‘other’, or humanised and individualised images of perceived political/​ideological allies (see HRS, 2019f, 2019g). This dramaturgy of course serves to reinforce the emotional impact of textual agendas on audiences and thus invite heated, affective conflict engagement. The present chapter specifically deals with three interlinked HRS publications that I refer to as the photo case. In October 2017, HRS made a call for photographic material to ‘document the contemporary period’ and 182

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Figure 9.1: The ‘others’

Source: HRS, 2019a, 2019b

Figure 9.2: The ‘others’

Source: HRS, 2017c, 2019d

subsequently published a set of articles on their webpage under the headline ‘Rights [i.e. HRS] documents the cultural revolution’ (HRS, 2017a, 2017b, 2018b). These publications featured photographs taken in secret of apparently arbitrary Muslims in the Norwegian public space thus identifying real people and real faces as ‘enemy others’. As observed by Wodak (2015: 30), there is a blurring of boundaries or even a continuum from less to more extreme right-​wing political beliefs and ideologies. For the sake of analytical clarity, I suggest defining HRS as an extreme-​r ight organisation, because HRS subtly encourages violence and micro-​humiliating performances against those who are designated as enemy others. However, such invitations are not overt and are often transmitted through coded language and statements such as ‘it is allowed to defend one’s own country against foreign-​hostile attacks like Islamism’ (HRS, 2018a). Three distinctive criteria furthermore qualify HRS as a particularly relevant case for examining the legitimisation of illiberal logic through xenophobic populism and fear appeals. First, HRS is a state-​funded civil society actor that is embedded in the public and political debate; it is considered one of the ‘specialist’ societal actors officially invited by the state to comment on 183

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certain Norwegian Official Documents (NOU), expert reports that form the basis of future policy and legislation. For example, HRS was invited to comment on the influential Norwegian report ‘NOU 2017:2 Integration and trust: Long-​term consequences of high immigration’ released in 2017 in the wake of the European refugee situation. Second, HRS constitutes an actor that increasingly has been able to gain attention in the mainstream Norwegian media via strategies of ‘scandalization’ (see Wodak, 2015: 11–​ 12). Finally, it represents a type of extreme-​r ight news media outlet that is extensively circulated –​content from the HRS webpage was shared close to 2 million times in 2018 via Facebook (Storyboard, 2018). In conducting analysis of the HRS photo case, I have examined publications by HRS in the period from September 2018 to June 2019, as well as 36 of its articles and commentaries published in the period 2016–​19 (available in HRS, 2019e). The photo case has been chosen for analysis because, on the one hand, it represents one of the most radical attempts by HRS to promote anti-​Muslim illiberalism and shift the boundaries for the ‘sayable and doable’ in Norway. On the other hand, the photo case was subjected to considerable (predominantly negative) media attention around the time of its publication and has thus been widely circulated. My analysis focuses on the technical means of discourse through which HRS fear appeals are enabled in the photo case, and has been constructed following the methodological strategy outlined by Marianne Jørgensen and Louise Phillips (2002: 38–​40). I have specifically examined how the fixation of privileged signs in relation to other signs in the texts of the three articles creates meaning. A key analytical step was to locate nodal points and investigate ‘how they are defined in relation to other signs in the discourse’ (Jørgensen and Phillips, 2002: 6). Specifically, I searched for chains of equivalence/​difference to examine the conceptual spaces that emerge in the discourse and how they are relationally organised. For example, the nodal point ‘Norway’ emerges through a chain of elements such as ‘alienated’, ‘betrayal’, ‘the people’, ‘living room windows’, ‘our own home, Norway’ and ‘foundational pillars’. When considering how the nodal point ‘Islam’ is rendered meaningful through interconnected elements such as ‘cultural revolution’, ‘Islam dominates’ and ‘foreign hostile attacks’, it becomes visible how the discourse is gradually organised as the nodal points ‘Islam’ and ‘Norway’ are constructed in relation to one another in terms of their mutually exclusive properties. In this way, the following analysis can be seen a mapping exercise of the discursive means through which this contingent relationship is attempted sutured.

The moral economy of exclusion The HRS webpage can be conceptualised as a meta-​discursive frame through which various ‘knowledge’ claims and political imaginaries are 184

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presented to internet audiences. I consider meta-​discursive frames to be important, not only because they may produce positioned spectators and clearly contribute to constraining and enabling certain interpretations, but also because the frame as a constitutive outside ‘tends to function, even in a minimalist form, as an editorial embellishment of the image’ (Butler, 2009: 8). In the case of HRS, the webpage www.rig​hts.no functions as the meta-​discursive frame through which fear appeals are made accessible. Of course, such frames do not unilaterally decide interpretations; nor do interpretations emerge as the spontaneous act of a single mind, but as a consequence of a field of intelligibility that helps to form and direct our responsiveness to the impinging world (Butler, 2009: 34). That said, the less we are aware of the structuring constraints that contribute to guiding our responsiveness, the more powerfully they can determine our outlooks by setting the agenda and enabling certain interpretive outcomes without being open to challenge. We may initially notice how the features of the HRS webpage and online identity formation are explicitly aligned with –​and thus pre-​position audience engagement within –​an ideological architecture representing human rights concerns and liberal democratic values. The discursive gate of the organisation, implied by its name, Human Rights Service, signals that we are supposedly dealing with information from an institution devoted to the protection of vulnerable groups. Indeed, as the resemblance of the two logos Figure 9.3 illustrates, it appears that the image of HRS has been designed to be associated with the legitimate human rights organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW) (see Figure 9.3). The encryption of liberal democratic/​human rights codes in the meta-​ discursive frame represents a particularly persuasive device. As a sign of social responsibility, the mimicking of the HRW logo provides a certain ‘discursive surface’ that invites a reading of HRS narratives as the product of an institution concerned with the protection and justice of people at risk of abuse –​an organisation of ‘love’. This alignment has an important function in that it makes calls for radical political transformations readable through a hegemonic script about fairness, justice and social responsibility and embeds fear appeals in ideological undercurrents about vulnerability and justifiable forms of protective violence. HRS’s emphasis on liberal democratic values and human rights is further underpinned in its official mission statement, where the following is claimed: To HRS, integration or inclusion is at its core about free citizens of a liberal and modern democracy as Norway recognizes and accepts a mutual platform of values based on the pillars of democracy: gender equality, equality between people no matter their national, ethnic, caste, tribe or clan background, freedom of speech and religious freedom. 185

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HRS believes that the core values in our democracy are: • Equality between people no matter ethnic, national or religious belonging • Gender equality • Religious freedom • Freedom of speech • Respect for the individual • Respect for the individual’s sanctity • Loyalty to the welfare and nation-​state (HRS, 2019e). Ahmed (2004: 42) observes that it is indeed a common theme within so-​called hate groups to declare themselves as an ‘organization of love’ on their websites. This reversal (we do/​say these things because we love, not because we fear or hate) can be understood as a form of recontextualisation that has proven to be quite effective in constructing persuasion (Ahmed, 2004). The mission statement and the logo are within this reading about stabilising the (ideological) boundaries of the discourse produced by HRS within certain ‘compassionate’ frames of interpretation. Chains of equivalence (inclusion, free citizens, liberal and modern democracy, mutual platform, equality, freedom, respect, loyalty, and so on) are mobilised to stabilise an organisational identity that appears to be the incarnation of ‘good’, liberal democratic, ‘modern’ values. I want to suggest that an ideological figure of what we may term ‘democratic virtue’ is assembled here that moves sideways through a metonymic and ‘sticky’ relationship between these signs and symbols to merge with appeals to fear and exclusion of the designated ‘Muslim other’. Indeed, it is through ‘democratic virtue’ that HRS fear appeals become invitations to exclusion that may appear not to ‘need’ public Figure 9.3: The similar logos of HRW (left) and HRS (right) as they appear on their respective webpages

Source: HRW, 2019; HRS, 2019h

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contestation or critique. More specifically, it works as a discursive technology to manufacture consent through what Laclau and Mouffe (2001: 138) term a relation of subordination; that is, the attempt to reproduce and reinforce certain social relations in a way that may potentially ‘block’ audiences from seeing them as unjust because they are rendered ideologically implicit. The projection of fear appeals through human rights principles –​a regime of truth often perceived as ‘natural’ and universal –​is in this sense important precisely because it enables, and positions audiences within, a certain type of moral economy. By ‘moral economy’, I mean how the inherently unstable conditions of possibility for thinking and speaking about ‘rightful’ or ‘obvious’ exclusion are more or less present and distributed across various identities and relationships. In this sense, fear appeals are economic: they circulate and accumulate between different figures, symbols and bodies in relationships of always relative and constructed webs of difference. Within the moral economy of exclusion nested in HRS discourse, the struggle against Islam, and inherently its practitioners, is more specifically configured in terms of a natural, neutral and necessary quest for democratic righteousness and the safeguarding of a supposedly increasingly marginalised group of white, ethnic Norwegians. This framing is precisely what allows for a specific mode of discursive consumption and production of affect. The objective is to stabilise audience engagement with HRS publications as readings oscillate between ‘virtuous’ democratic codes, that is, chains of equivalence associated with justice, decency and justifiable forms of self-​defence, and the actual content of a discourse about exclusion of the threatening, designated ‘Muslim other’. As also noted by Ahmed (2004: 44), emotions such as fear and hate involve precisely such a process of sliding or association, whereby ‘ “feelings” take us across different levels of signification, not all of which can be admitted in the present’. The point is that the explicit mobilisation of the symbolic power of human rights subtly synchronises the demands of exclusion with dominant cultural insignias of social responsibility and prevailing logics about when, and against whom, violence can be justified. It engenders an affective, moral economy that distributes the conditions of possibility for righteous violence, the significance of human life, in a highly differential, stratified way.

Cultural revolution The first output of the photo case was published in October 2017 as HRS, through its webpage, invited audiences to submit photographic material to ‘document’ Islam’s influence on Norwegian society and what they term the ‘cultural revolution’. Introducing the project, HRS claims: Norway is changing fast. Increasingly, Islam dominates the public space. We are alienated. Join a unique project to document the contemporary 187

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period. … In the future, we will often make use of visual means to show our readers what is happening to our dear Norway. Islam’s growth is happening rapidly. It is seen every day in our larger cities, especially the capital. (HRS, 2017a) While it is difficult to argue that discourses as such have ‘beginnings’, the text illustrates how audiences ‘enter’ discourses through specific and often strategic opening sequences. As an opening sequence to the photo case, we may consider the text more specifically as a tabloid-​positioning frame that sensationalises everyday reality and translates otherwise complex social phenomena into uncomplicated form. As argued by Ahmed (2004: 32), sensational stories of this kind can certainly work by turning fear and anxiety into a sort of media spectacle, a commodification of victimhood, and an outrage industry in which ‘our’ fear of ‘them’ actually produces a certain kind of excited, sublime enjoyment rather than fear as such. The representation of the relation between Norway and Islam through elements such as ‘dominating the public space’, ‘alienating’ and ‘growing rapidly’ carves out two clear-​cut, mutually exclusive nodal points. Ensuring clear insides and outsides, dangers and safeties, the nodal points are separated by an antagonistic frontier between the interior and exterior in a claim about legitimate Norwegian identity and citizenship. This frontier (dear Norway/​Islam dominates) has a very specific function as it prepares the ground for a nativist, body-​political imaginary about a supposedly seamless, yet threatened and vulnerable, Norwegian national community. The frame of war implied by the term ‘revolution’ can be seen in the moral economic sense as an effort to minimise the sense of threat and social belonging towards some, and maximise it towards others. The concept of culture plays a significant role here as a floating signifier, when HRS goes on to state: Culture migrates with people, and as more people migrate, the culture and religion they bring with them become stronger, especially when the last mentioned is Islam. And especially Islam is pressing itself onto our streets, an Islam which at its core is a set of rigid principles and a harsh legal system. This is a fact … this is truly our time’s cultural revolution. (HRS, 2018b) The text projects a vision about ‘culture’ as a zero-​sum game implying that ‘Norwegian culture’ (freedom, respect, equality and so on) is reduced as a consequence of an Islam that ‘becomes stronger’ via immigration. I suggest that the impossibility of reducing ‘culture’ to a particular body is precisely what allows fear to ‘crawl sideways’, be distributed and indeed accumulate affective value as a consequence of not having a fixed referent (Ahmed, 188

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2004: 47). People who are designated as a threat, as agents of revolution, inhabit certain bodies, certain signs, and such ‘floating’ associations are particularly prone to circulate and stick to entire categories of fear bodies insofar as they resist literalisation (Ahmed, 2004: 76). This illustrates why finding the appropriate floating signifier, in this context ‘culture’, is central in the discursive and ideological production of xenophobic populism and fear appeals. The floating signifier, ‘culture’, somewhat steadied through elements of antagonistic anxiety (such as domination, alienation, rigid principles), may consequently contribute to the production of fear in practice precisely because it allows many disparate ‘free-​floating’ fears and images to congeal and attach to an abstracted and decontextualised figure of the designated ‘Muslim other’. ‘Culture’ thus represents a particular instance of constitutive ambiguity. As an open conceptual space, ‘culture’ invites audiences to ‘saturate’ the discursive blank spot with antagonistic anxieties within the boundaries of the discourse on cultural revolution (see also Pötzsch, 2011: 166). In line with the thought of Laclau and Mouffe (2001), I suggest that successful fear appeals are partly about the presence of floating signifiers that are strong enough to transform a field of difference into a clear logic of equivalence. This is precisely what the floating signifier of ‘culture’, used here in terms of unnegotiable bodies of norms and differences (‘pressing itself onto the street’), may be capable of as it installs (all) Muslims within an essentialist, pathological framework. It streamlines social space and allows ‘Islam’ to become a phobic nodal point constitutive of imaginaries about a harmonised, modern Norwegian demos/​people without internal complexities. Within this context, to announce a cultural revolution is to construct a dislocation in the sense of Laclau (1990) –​a ‘lack’ or ‘void’ created by the perceived failure and potential subversion of a political system or social paradigm; in this case, for example, ‘multiculturalism’ and the idea of a liberal welfare state. By introducing a rupture in the normalised order of things and a potential for subversion, dislocations have a certain productive capacity. That is, they invite attempts, or make attempts seem appropriate, to fill the ‘void’ and rearticulate the dislocated ideologies and discourses. In this sense, the instrumentalisation of ‘their culture’ as a floating signifier is about evoking a sense of dislocation of the Norwegian political regime, in particular with respect to immigration, through the articulation of Norwegian white ‘liberal culture’, often championed as ‘modernity’, as a fetishised object threatened by hostile subversion. This reading is more precisely enabled in the text above through a particular type of post-​colonial savagery imaginary often found in civilisational missions. We may here move on to consider, for example, how the description of Islam as ‘rigid principles and a harsh legal system’ reflects what Verena Stolcke (1995) has identified as culturally racist 189

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justification of fear. This is a central discursive gambit in so far as extreme and far-​right actors and activists across Europe have quite successfully replaced ‘race talk’ with ‘culture talk’ to reconstruct a semantic terrain on which ideas about social and ideological superiority and inferiority can be unfolded legitimately (Bangstad, 2015: 50). This implies that the discursive subproperties of xenophobic populism –​what we might term ‘orientalist culture talk’ –​are about the reproduction of racism, namely, a system of social inequality characterised by ethnic dominance, power relations between dominant white and ethnic minority groups, and the presence of everyday discriminatory discourses and other social practices (van Dijk, 2002: 98). It is about designating the presence of ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslims’ in Norway as a vehicle of painful dislocation, of premodern, unhealthy societal splinters incarnating a static, violent and undemocratic cultural system in an otherwise healthy, modern society (see also Said, 2003[1973]; Ekman, 2015). The discourse about ‘cultural revolution’ thus lends itself as an ideological basis for fear appeals and sanctioning exclusion of subversive agents –​ all Muslims –​precisely because they are constructed as ‘outside’ the cultural conditions, the ‘modern norms’ of what is taken to make a human fully recognisable, fully worthy. I suggest here that the construction of a dislocation (revolution) via the floating signifier ‘culture’, and the productive capacity this implies, can be understood in greater detail when read through the experience of vulnerability. I will explore this argument further in the following section by drawing on the anthropology of Arjun Appadurai (2006) in his Fear of Small Numbers.

Manufacturing predatory majorities According to Appadurai (2006: 51), the creation of a capacity to mobilise legitimate narratives of injury within the public domain as a collective resource of narratives of victimhood is the ‘key step in turning a benign social identity into a predatory identity’. Appadurai’s thought invites us to reflect on the construction of HRS fear appeals specifically in terms of the discursive enabling of reversed victimology and an ontological terrain of collectively perceived vulnerability. I suggest that the construction of vulnerability in and through the HRS discourse about ‘cultural revolution’ can be understood as two interconnected discursive layers. First, vulnerability is enabled via a process of arousing perceived dispossession through the invocation of a nativist nationalistic myth of the endangered ‘people’s home’. Laclau, (2005: 76) emphasises that if the social order is perceived to have been dislocated or disturbed, the invocation of myths often becomes a mechanism with particular persuasive appeal through which discursive closure and perceptions of order/​balance may be (re)established. In launching the myth of the people’s home, HRS states: 190

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We are alienated in our own home, Norway. Last year HRS decided to photo-​document ‘the cultural revolution’ which is happening outside our living room windows … This is perhaps our time’s greatest political betrayal. A completely outdated outlook on people and society is allowed to attach deeper and deeper roots in that which was once the home of the Norwegian people with foundational pillars in Christianity. (HRS, 2018b) The text articulates a moment of dislocation and shapes a mythology of the ‘home of the Norwegian people’ in which the body of the white, Christian Norwegian population ‘naturally’ fits. This occurs through chains of equivalence, such as ‘alienated’, ‘betrayal’, ‘the people’, ‘living room windows’, ‘our own home, Norway’ and ‘foundational pillars’. The myth of the ‘people’s home’ is thus about perceptions of loss or stolen enjoyment. More precisely, it is about promoting an understanding of in-​group members in terms of the safety and proximity associated with the cultural ‘safe space’ of the living room and the idea that ‘our home’, the hitherto undisturbed nation state, is infiltrated, penetrated by Islam, ‘attaching roots deeper and deeper’. Elements such as ‘the home’, ‘living room’ and ‘foundational pillars’ thus induce moments of vulnerability precisely by implying the imminent collapse, the dislocation of the place-​as-​property where one is safe, loved and respected. Second, and perhaps more importantly, when related to the context of the photos that I will address subsequently, the discursive production of vulnerability is enabled through a specific kind of gendering, namely the discursive positioning of women’s bodies and ‘womanhood’ as signifiers of victimisation, abuse and enslavement. Illustrative of these tendencies, HRS claims that: many who (especially) wear the hijab probably do not do it as a result of personal, free will. The exceptions are first and foremost those who are ideologically motivated. Those who actually work in organizations and religious communities to upheave our democracy … seldom can you make hijab users responsible for the democratically destructive values they are spreading through their face garments. (HRS, 2017b) In this context, the hijab is used and reproduced as a signifier of ultimate oppression that effectively reaffirms Norwegian/​Western sovereignty as an avatar of ‘liberty’. Women who wear the hijab are positioned as either in need of being freed (and in a sense, made fully human) by Western formulas of secularism, or, as ‘ideologically motivated’ agents working to ‘upheave democracy’. As womanhood is cast as a symbolic site on which fear appeals of barbarism, domination and impending alienation are presented, specific 191

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types of racialised (coloured, burka-​wearing) bodies emerge and are ‘stuck’ together into a seemingly coherent, recognisable figure of fear, repulsion and regulation. The discourse about ‘cultural revolution’ and its promise about threatened majorities frame HRS’s invitation for audiences to submit photos of the ‘growth of Islam’. More importantly, it mounts a series of photos of mainly Muslim women in the Norwegian public space that indeed were published. These photos, and the discursive effects they engender, are at the centre of the following discussion.

Antagonistic anonymity and epistemological barriers: the photos The photos published in the photo case are described by HRS as allegedly neutral ‘street photography’ to ‘document the contemporary period’ (see Figures 9.1 and 9.2). The camera angles, the filters used to manipulate the photos, and the subjects photographed mostly from behind all suggest that those who shot the images were secretly doing so without the consent of the people being ‘documented’. It is important to recognise that the very invitation for audiences to photograph designated ‘others’, as well as the circulation of such photos showcasing apparently arbitrary Muslims in public without their knowing or consent, has certain fascist undertones. It is about the transformation of democratic citizenship into everyday policing of designated ‘others’. Here liberal citizenship is reconceptualised into a form of vigilant ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ performing inherently dehumanising routines of surveillance. The role of citizens as the police who monitor and discipline is translated into the task of restoring democratic virtue, which becomes the guarantor for ‘our’ threatened survival. Similar to rituals of public shaming, Butler (2009: 24) suggests that such enactments of surveillance, of showcasing designated ‘others’, produce iconic versions of the population in which the lives and identities of some are rendered human, grievable and worthy of respect, and others less grievable, less fully human. This differential distribution of grievability across populations, symbolised in and through the veiled woman, is precisely what generates ‘implications for why and when we feel politically consequential affective dispositions such as horror, guilt, righteous sadism, loss, and indifference’ (Butler, 2009: 24). The photos depict mainly women and children. We can of course only speculate as to why this is the case. What is clear, however, is that photography offers a different discursive experience than texts. Susan Sontag (2003: 67) argues that photos have a ‘sticky’, persuasive quality and an ability to haunt the mind of the spectator. She observes that emotions are ‘more likely to crystalize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan’. Anthony Blair (2012: 270) writes that ‘visual arguments constitute the species of visual 192

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persuasion in which the visual elements overlie, accentuate, render vivid or immediate, and otherwise elevate in forcefulness a reason or set of reasons offered for modifying a belief, an attitude or one’s conduct’. The figure of the veiled, Muslim woman has been subject to relentless gazing and orientalist fantasies across Europe that effectively construct this object as a potent signifier of otherness and danger. In political struggles across Western Europe, the rhetoric of ‘defence of liberal values’ is thus often mobilised as an affective avatar against Islam. Here the headscarf is often used as an emblematic trigger symbol of that struggle with a potent capability to spark off negative emotional reactions (Wodak, 2015: 152). Riding on a sense of shared emotions, values and a sense of righteousness, such trigger symbols do important work in making fear appeals ‘tick’ as they connect and bind people together in heightened, collective affect (Abdel-​Fadil, 2019: 24–​5). As we can see, the photos published by HRS depict scenes from everyday life and show mainly anonymous, small groups or individual Muslim women in various places in public. Contrary to HRS claims about neutral street photography, the photos specifically invite audiences to see the shadowy figures as representing the so-​called revolution, the ‘growth of Islam’ and ‘Islam’s domination of public space’. This reading is enabled and influenced through a specific discursive mechanism that I term ‘antagonistic anonymity’. I define antagonistic anonymity as a pattern of support and restraint for perceiving others in which individuals or groups are obscured and made unintelligible in such a way that the conditions of possibility for identifying dialogue, contact and peaceful interaction as possible options are reduced. Indeed, antagonistic anonymity constructs an intimidating, unapproachable identity based on the very incomprehensibility of the target. It reinforces suspicion and a fearful frame of interpretation in which people are invited to assume the worst about the target group and discouraged to acknowledge individual personhood and the possibility of common goals. Two analytical levels within the antagonistic anonymity identified here are relevant to address. The first has to do with the technicality of the photos and the specific way they are presented to audiences on the HRS webpage. Photographed from behind, or from a distance, the subjects –​made to represent the generic Muslim and Islam –​are deprived of humanising features and social surfaces. Voiceless, faceless and without the ethical imperative and moral ‘authority’ posed by the face of the other as described by Levinas (2002: 516), the people portrayed become socially sterile, unknowable, and in a certain sense, cease to be ‘people’. When looking into the eyes, the enemy disappears. The opposite is, of course, just as true. Strikingly, virtually all the photos appear to have been manipulated. Either they have been edited with a filter rendering them completely black and white or they are arranged in cold, stony and unfriendly blue/​grey/​ black tones that are closely associated, of course, with the emotion of fear. 193

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Likewise, ­photos 4, 5 and 6 have been edited so that they have a circular focus on the people depicted surrounded by an impenetrable black shadow. It also appears that the shadows have been added to many of the photos so that the people are virtually cloaked in darkness and obscurity.This compilation of supposedly realistic ‘street photography’ constructs a visual claim about Muslims as shadowy, dark and dangerous ‘others’. Wodak (2015: 7) has described this strategy as the fictionalisation of politics. That is, ‘the blurring of boundaries’ in political argumentation between the real and the fictional, the informative and the entertaining, which constructs a reality for the viewer that appears ordered and manageable, and thus presents a deceptively simple illusion in contrast to the very real complexity and pluralism of present-​day societies. Above all, the cold, contactless framing invites fear, bias and prejudice to run amok. Emotional emphases are key features of phobic mobilisations and this framing may prime precisely the type of paranoid, claustrophobic impression that ‘they’ –​and the suggested threat towards ‘our dear Norway’ –​are everywhere, outnumbering ‘us’, closing in, which qualifies to be defined as sociocultural phobia. It represents a distinct discursive process by which fearful emotions are attempted to be mobilised and deployed to produce certain antagonistic identities that claim to be undebatable truths and convincing commonsensical rationalisations. The second level of anonymity has to do with intertextuality: the metonymic character of the burka and the headscarf. The showcasing of veiled women, as a metonymic gesture, thus concentrates orientalist associations about the barbaric denial of women’s rights under Islamic culture and law in contrast to norms about gender equality in the West (Wodak, 2015: 154). When positioned as a ‘growing domination over our dear Norway’, the photos exploit and exacerbate a dominant background of meaning, a cultural icon of the ultimate, threatening ‘other’, which in Europe today is identified with veiled women of colour. In this sense, the bodies of generic Muslim women are instrumentalised as a collective stereotype and image of the ‘enemy’ to illustrate and depict the threat posed by religious fundamentalism and symbolise female (sexual) oppression. As an example of what Ramirez (2006) terms ‘neo-​colonial sexism’, the women are seen as being forced to veil and abstain from ‘Western’ clothing –​liberty, rationality, autonomy and the superiority of the Norwegian/​European selfhood –​and are cast as cultural/​ideological ‘automatons’ likely to serve as a crowd obedient to the assumed Islamic extremist agenda of domination. Taken together, the two dimensions of antagonistic anonymity and the ubiquitous absence of individuality and personhood can enable an ‘epistemological barrier’ between a seemingly harmonised, united Norwegian ‘self ’ threatened by a cultural revolution schemed by seemingly homogeneous, united, evil ‘enemy others’ (Pötzsch, 2011: 53). The epistemological barrier works on audiences precisely by suppressing 194

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awareness of the inherent contingency of taken-​for-​granted social orders (for example, how various majority/​minority relations are made and unmade throughout history) and blocks the heterogeneity in viewpoints and values of the other (Pötzsch, 2011: 55). It backgrounds all other class, educational and professional markers of identities of the subjects and invites habits (a doxa) of distrust against those who are actively barriered. Hence, these barriers contribute to stabilising the unknown as unknown and the threatening as threatening as they ‘veil the alternative frames that inhere the potential to reposition subjects and to reinstitute the political as a constant negotiation of precarious, partial, and temporary grounds’ (Pötzsch, 2011: 26). The important point here is to notice how phobic constructions may ‘naturally’ step in to fill the gaps, the discursive blank spots, in what has been rendered unapproachable behind epistemological barriers and thus reified as anonymous and obscure. Such frames of interpretation work most effectively to differentiate between the identities, and ultimately the lives, we can apprehend as valuable from those we cannot. Butler (2009: 3) argues that our epistemological capacity to apprehend an identity and a life as worthy is fundamentally dependent on that life being produced according to norms that qualify it as a life or, indeed, as part of life. Visuals that effectively deface the other, and the discourse of ‘cultural revolution’ that frames them, have serious political potential to grant ‘us’ opportunities to inflict violence righteously against an excluded ‘barbarian’ enemy. They may help resolve the social obligations and ethical tensions that might otherwise keep such extreme forms of exclusion at bay (Pötzsch, 2011: 159). In this sense, HRS fear appeals work to ontologically shapeshift the people portrayed into ‘empty’ symbolic vessels, signs, ciphers of uncivilised Islam –​the subjugated who should be liberated, policed (or destroyed?) by the enlightened rules of human rights and ‘Western’ culture. In this sense, xenophobic populism may serve to legitimise anti-​Muslim illiberalism and moral economies of exclusion as a form of ‘liberalism’. Thus, the HRS photo case, organised in and through the application of antagonistic anonymity, constructs Muslims as a particular type of existential fear object: an incommensurable, incomprehensible and unthinkable body of terror to which ‘we’ must respond by appropriate means to counter ‘revolution’ and impending ‘domination’. In doing so, an ideological pretext is enabled for the discursive disappearance of their grievability and humanity.

Conclusion To explore further the forces that enable the workings and dispersion of fear appeals against designated ‘others’ in advanced media democracies, we must build a broader discussion of the ways in which fear appeals are produced, shared and normalised in systematic ways through ecologies of interlinked 195

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populist far-​and extreme-​right online networks. Such networks may feed into and empower one another in their engagement of audiences, and audience engagement may solidify as they ‘oscillate’ in and between various interlinked networks. This chapter has attempted to create some traction for such a discussion by examining the specific discourse-​technical means through which Islam is constituted as an object of fear in publications by HRS in Norway. I have explored how the meta-​discursive framings of the HRS webpage position audiences within a moral economy of exclusion. The social rejection of the ‘Muslim other’ is in this context constructed as a necessary, morally justified defence of human rights, liberal democracy and a supposedly vulnerable ‘home of the Norwegian people’. I subsequently examined how a series of photos published by HRS showcasing Muslims in the Norwegian public space contribute to the discursive construction of fear. Reinforcing impressions of intimidating, unapproachable identities, textual and visual elements produce a specific discursive effect that I defined as ‘antagonistic anonymity’. Antagonistic anonymity specifically invites consent to the idea that the respective (non)identity can be, and indeed ought to be, opposed under the application of all means available to ensure the existence of a vulnerable majority self. As Butler (2009) suggests, our capacity to respond with outrage, opposition and critique depends in part on how the differential norm of the human is circulated in our culture. There are indeed ways of framing that will bring the human into view in its frailty and precariousness that will allow us to stand up for the value and dignity of human life, to react with outrage when lives are degraded or eviscerated without regard for their value as lives (Butler, 2009: 77). This form of counterframing can be achieved, first, by insisting on showing the faces and telling the stories of those who are designated as ‘other’, and by unpacking the reasons, motivations and beliefs underlying different world views, and in this sense, actively apply humanising strategies and emphasising the shared precariousness of our lives, whenever the opposite is attempted; and second, by encouraging and supporting the politics of hope, rather than the politics of fear and negative emotions, which are seemingly the two master passions that are able to bring about the paradigms of inclusion and exclusion. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the reviewer and the editor of this book for their constructive and helpful comments. References Abdel-​Fadil, M. (2019) The politics of affect: the glue of religious and identity conflicts in social media, Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, 8(1): 11–​34. 196

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Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Appadurai, A. (2006) Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press. Asad, T. (2007) On Suicide Bombing, New York: Columbia University Press. Bangstad, S. (2015) The racism that dares not speak its name: Rethinking neo-​nationalism and neo-​racism, Intersections, (1): 49–​65, https://​doi.org/​ 10.17356/​iee​jsp.v1i1.26 Beck, U. (2008) World at Risk, Cambridge: Polity Press. Blair, A. (2012) Groundwork in the Theory of Argumentation: Selected Papers of Anthony Blair, London: Springer. Blaker, M. (2018) Regjeringen Reduserer Støtten til Human Rights Services, Nattavisen Økonomi, 9 October, www.net​tavi​sen.no/​na24/​regj​erin​gen-​ reduse​rer-​stot​ten-​til-​human-​r ig​hts-​serv​ice/​342​3544​809.html Butler, J. (2009) Frames of War. Brooklyn: Verso. Ekman, M. (2015) Online islamophobia and the politics of fear: Manufacturing the green scare, Ethnic and Racial Studies, (38)11: 1986–​2002. Fekete, L. (2014) Anti-​fascism or anti-​extremism?, Race & Class, (55) 4: 29–​39. Furedi, F. (2006) Culture of Fear Revisited, London: Continuum. Hisham, R. and Shantz, J. (2018) Manufacturing Phobias: The Political Production of Fear in Practice, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. HRS (2017a) Rights dokumenterer den kulturelle revolusjonen, Human Rights Service, 1 October, www.rig​hts.no/​2017/​10/​r ig​hts-​dokum​ente​ rer-​den-​kul​ture​lle-​revol​usjo​nen/​ HRS (2017b) Rights dokumenterer den kulturelle revolusjonen (2), Human Rights Service, 3 October, www.rig​hts.no/​2017/​10/​r ig​hts-​dokum​ente​ rer-​den-​kul​ture​lle-​revol​usjo​nen-​2/​ HRS (2017c) Ulikheter Og Mørkemenn, Human Rights Service, 8 September, www.rig​hts.no/​2017/​09/​ulikhe​ter-​og-​morkem​enn/​ HRS (2018a) Islamisme og demokrati, Human Rights Service, 18 December, www.rig​hts.no/​2018/​12/​islami​sme-​og-​demokr​ati/​ HRS (2018b) Den kulturelle Revolusjonen I Oslo bilde for bilde, Human Rights Service, 20 August, www.rig​hts.no/​2018/​08/​den-​kul​ture​lle-​revol​ usjo​nen-​i-​oslo-​bilde-​for-​bilde/​ HRS (2019a) Kakerlakk er forbudt, Nazi er innafor, Human Rights Service, 8 April, www.rig​hts.no/​2019/​04/​kakerl​akk-​er-​forb​udt-​nazi-​er-​inna​for/​ HRS (2019b) Innvandring Fører Til Eksplosiv Utgiftsøkning I Kommunene, Human Rights Service, 3 May, www.rig​hts.no/​2019/​05/​innvan​drin​gen-​ forer-​til-​eksplo​siv-​utgift​sokn​ing-​i-​kommun​ene/​ HRS (2019d) Varsler Nytt Holocaust-​Innvandrere Behandles Som Jøder På 30-​Tallet, Human Rights Service, 2 May, www.rig​hts.no/​2019/​05/​ vars​ler-​nytt-​holoca​ust-​innv​andr​ere-​behand​les-​som-​joder-​pa-​30-​tal​let/​ 197

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HRS (2019e) Publikasjoner, Human Rights Service, www.rig​hts.no/​publik​ asjo​ner/​ HRS (2019f) Møt en av Europas modigste journalister på onsdag i Oslo!, Human Rights Service, 20 May, www.rig​hts.no/2​ 019/0​ 5/m ​ ot-e​ n-a​ v-e​ uro​ pas-​modig​ste-​journ​alis​ter-​pa-​ons​dag-​i-​oslo/​ HRS (2019g) Islam skal ikke anerkjennes som trossamfunn, Human Rights Service, 16 May, www.rig​hts.no/​2019/​05/​vil-​ikke-​ane​rkje​nne-​islam-​ som-​tros​samf​unn/​ HRS (2019h) Human Rights Service, www.rig​hts.no/​ HRW (2019) About us, Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org/​about-​us Johansson, A. (2011) Constituting real cutters: a discourse theoretical analysis of self-​harm and identity, in A.E. Sjölander and G.P. Jenny (eds), Tracking Discourses: Politics, Identity, and Social Change, Lund: Nordic Academic Press, pp 197–​224. Jørgensen, M. and Phillips, L. (2002) Diskursanalyse som teori og metode, Frederiksberg: Roskilde Universitetsforlag. Kumar, D. (2012) Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Laclau, E. (1990) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London: Verso. Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason, London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2001[1985]) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Levinas, E. (2002) Ethics and the face, in D. Moran and T. Mooney (eds) The Phenomenology Reader, London: Routledge, pp 515–​28. Nietzsche, F. (1989[1886]) Beyond Good and Evil, New York: Random House. Pötzsch, H. (2011) Between constitutive absence and subversive presence: self and other in the contemporary war film, PhD thesis, Tromsø University. Ramirez, A. (2006) Sexismo neocolonial, El País, 8 October, https://​elp​ais. com/​dia​r io/​2006/​10/​08/​opin​ion/​116025​8412​_​850​215.html Sacco, V.F. and Glackman, W. (2000) Vulnerability, loss of control and worry about crime, in J. Ditton and S. Farrall (eds) The Fear of Crime, Dartmouth: Ashgate. Said, E. (2003[1973]) Orientalism, London: Penguin. Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador: New York. Stolcke, V. (1995) Talking culture: new boundaries, new rhetorics of exclusion in Europe, Current Anthropology, 36(1): 1–​24. Storyboard (2018) Norway top sites in 2018, Storyboard, http://​sto​rybo​ ard.news/​yeari​nrev​iew/​no/​2018/​sites Sultan, S. and Steen, R. (2014) Høyreekstremisme I Norge Trender og Utvikling, Oslo: Antirasistisk Senter. Van Dijk, T.A. (2002) Ideologies, racism, discourse: debates on immigration and ethnic issues, in J. ter Wal and M. Verkuyten, Comparative Perspectives on Racism, Ashgate: Aldershot, pp 91–​108. 198

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Wodak, R. (2015) The Politics of Fear What Right-​Wing Populist Discourses Mean, London: SAGE Publications. Wodak, R. (2019) Entering the ‘post-​shame era’: the rise of illiberal democracy, populism and neo-​authoritarianism in EUrope, Global Discourse, 9(1): 178–​91.

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Contesting the Politics of Negative Emotions in Educational Policy Making: A Ban on Asylum Seekers’ School Visits in Finland Iida Pyy, Anniina Leiviskä, and Jan-​Erik Mansikka

Introduction Finland is a small northern European nation of only 5.6 million people with a rather homogenous population. It has a relatively strong welfare model, resulting from and intertwined with social and political development in which the comprehensive, state-​r un education system has played a crucial role. Especially during the last decades of the 20th century, high-​quality public schooling for all citizens was effective in levelling out social and economic differences in Finnish society (Sahlberg, 2015). However, in recent years, the political climate in Finland has been strongly influenced by global phenomena such as the immigration crisis and changes in the global economy. As in other European countries, one of the distinctive features of this political change has been the rise of right-​wing populism and the emergence of nationalist movements. The parliamentary election in March 2019 demonstrated the force of these movements in Finland, as the leading anti-​immigration party, the Finns Party, came very close to winning the election, losing only by one seat to the Social Democratic Party. The political rhetoric of the Finns Party, and anti-​immigration parties in general, is often characterised by an appeal to negative emotions, which are typically directed against immigrants and asylum seekers who are perceived as a threat to the prevailing national identity and to the stability of society (for example, Ahmed, 2004; Kinnvall, 2018). Accordingly, a recent survey shows Finland to be one of the more racist countries in 200

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Europe when it comes to racial discrimination and harassment speech experienced by people of colour (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2018). In this chapter, we analyse a recent case of local policy making in Finland strongly affected by the expression of negative emotions. Our case is situated within the field of education and concerns school visits, which are a common practice in Finnish comprehensive schools. Schools get visitors from all around the world, from academics to politicians and businesses, and they are also places for civil service and social impact work by the third sector. Our case example1 deals with asylum seekers’ visits to local schools and day-​ care centres in the city of Oulu in Finland, organised by Red Cross Finland and a local non-​profit social work organisation. The original purpose of the visits was to encourage mutual reciprocity: for the asylum seekers, the visits provided important learning experiences in terms of language and integration; for students and teachers, they were a way of actualising the goals and aims of global citizenship education and intercultural education established in the Finnish National Core Curriculum. According to the representatives of the school staff and the employees of the non-​profit organisations present during the visits, the visits had provided for students opportunities to learn about different languages and cultures, among other things. The visitors were both men and women and well-​known by the staff of the organisations involved. In 2018, city councillors from the Finns Party had complained to the city council concerning asylum seekers’ school visits. At that time, however, the complaint was dismissed as it was viewed as problematic in terms of the Finnish Non-​Discrimination Act. In early 2019, the police in Oulu announced suspected sexual assaults and abuse of minors in the region in the summer and autumn of 2018. Some of these cases involved suspects who were asylum seekers. This announcement was followed by heated public and social media discussions in the Oulu region after which the city administrators received several complaints regarding the visits. Thus, the issue was reviewed in January 2019, and the city of Oulu decided to ‘temporarily discontinue’ (ban) all school visits by asylum seekers and refugees. The ban was not put to a vote in the city council but the decision was made by a single official, the city’s Head of Education and Cultural Services, to ‘quiet things down for a while’ (Yle, 2019b). This case can be seen as an example of backlash politics in the context of educational policy making. Aoki (1995) describes backlash politics as ‘lashing back’ at those who have wronged you but points out that there is also a more subtle meaning to the term; namely, the idea of ‘backlash of “getting back to,” “returning back to,” or “restoring” a real or imaginary status quo ante of a simpler time, before those that prompted one to “lash back” were on the scene’ (1995: 1468). Through our case example, we argue that negative 201

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emotions might have problematic consequences for democratic values and political decision making in liberal democratic societies. We propose that the ban on school visits in our case is a typical example of policy making motivated by negative emotions and based on the stigmatisation of a group of people by ethnicity and race, which often (as in our case) leads to abandoning collectively established values and democratic guidelines. Our case is also illustrative of the way how, by creating a culture of fear, the type of policy making exemplified by the ban significantly diminishes the possibilities of democratic institutions, such as the comprehensive school, to reinforce social cohesion and reduce social inequalities in society. As a theoretical framework for our analysis, we will primarily utilise Martha Nussbaum’s writings on political emotions, and especially The Monarchy of Fear (Nussbaum, 2018), in which she discusses the potentially harmful effects of negative political emotions for democracy and democratic institutions in the context of a polarised political culture. Although Nussbaum’s work on political emotions is not without limitations and has also been subject to critiques (for example, Harphap, 2002; Srinivasan, 2016; 2018;Gleason, 2018; Cherry, 2019), Nussbaum’s work provides a particularly fruitful analytical tool for both understanding the consequences of politics of negative emotions and for indicating alternative ways for addressing the political issues associated with the case of Oulu. We will first outline the ongoing theoretical discussion on the significance of emotions in politics with a specific emphasis on negative emotions in backlash politics. As Nussbaum’s work has a particularly central role in our case analysis, a large part of this section addresses her theory of political emotions. Then, utilising Nussbaum’s work as our primary frame of reference, we move on to analysing our case example from the perspective of negative political emotions and their potentially destructive consequences in democratic politics. Finally, we propose an alternative course of action for addressing the visits of asylum seekers to Finnish schools; one which takes the following of democratic procedures as its starting point and suggests that the reinforcement of positive political emotions can strengthen democratic citizenship in the long term. This suggestion is in line with the objectives of Global Citizenship Education, promoted by both UNESCO and the Finnish National Core Curriculum.

The role of emotions in anti-​immigration and populist movements The role of emotions in politics has received increasing attention in the social sciences since the 1990s, and it has been studied from the viewpoint of various disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, neurology, philosophy and political theory (Cossarini, 2014). In political 202

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theory, the significance of political emotions was a long disregarded topic. This is largely because, in the predominant liberal and deliberative traditions, emotions were considered as potential threats or disturbing factors to reasoned debate (Hall, 2002; 2005; Mouffe, 2000; 2005; Nussbaum, 2013) and inferior to the faculty of rationality (Ahmed, 2004). However, this opposition between reason and emotion has been challenged by demonstrating the interconnected nature of rationality and emotions in political decision making and moral judgement (De Sousa, 1987; Nussbaum, 2001; Muldoon, 2008). Several political theorists have argued that emotions are in a vital role in the formation of collective identities and in social life more generally (Mouffe, 2000; 2005; Nussbaum, 2001; Ahmed, 2004). In addition, there has been a growing interest in the nature of affects as ‘public feelings’ (Berlant, 2004), meaning that emotional states are seen as shared and communal experiences rather than personal or private sensations (Ahmed, 2004; Butler, 2004; Ngai, 2005). Along with the increasing interest in the role of emotions in politics, a branch of research focusing on negative political emotions has emerged (for example, Ahmed, 2004; Banks, 2014; Petersen, 2010). Particularly relevant to our case are the works examining the role of negative emotions in the so-​called backlash politics, especially anti-​immigration parties and right-​wing populism (Alexander, 2013; Kinnvall, 2018; Latif et al, 2018, Salmela and von Scheve, 2017; 2018). In these studies, negative emotions, including fear, anxiety, anger and resentment, are seen as dimensions of political action, which enable defining grievances and translating them into collective mobilisation. In the case of right-​wing and anti-​immigration parties and movements, this mobilisation typically occurs through the rhetorical invigoration of a national identity, founded on the idea of national greatness and nostalgic visions of the past (Ahmed, 2004, Kenny, 2017; Kinnvall, 2018; Latif et al, 2018). For instance, in her article on the emotional appeal of populism, Catarina Kinnvall (2018) examines how populist rhetoric engages in the discursive construction of fear, anxiety and threat in relation to immigration, and further supplies a promise of relief and redemption through the restoration of national values and idealised images of a past order. Moreover, populist rhetoric typically also channels anger and resentment by indicating who is to blame for the current predicament (Kinnvall, 2018). In her book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Sara Ahmed describes in a similar way how negative emotions, such as hate and fear, operate as devices in cultural and political processes of marginalisation and othering. For instance, she illustrates how the anti-​immigration rhetoric utilises hate to portray immigrants, asylum seekers and other people appearing as ‘foreign’ in some way as illegitimate intruders and as threats to the existence of an ‘I’ or a ‘we’. Hate is thus employed to legitimise actions against these perceived threats (Ahmed, 2004). 203

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While the aforementioned literature discusses how negative emotions are constructed and contained by populist movements and anti-​immigration parties, the work of Chantal Mouffe focuses on the ontological analysis of the role of emotions (or ‘passions’, Mouffe, 2005: 24) in the formation of ‘the political’ (Mouffe, 2005: 8) and thus provides a deeper understanding of the emotional dynamics involved in political life and identity formation. Mouffe’s work is also particularly important from the viewpoint of our case because it provides an explanation for the emergence of right-​wing populist movements in Europe and sheds light on how the negative, antagonistic emotions associated with these movements might be channelled and contained democratically. According to Mouffe (2005: 24–​5), political emotions are the motivational forces that allow people to identify with collective identities that are central to their sense of self. Furthermore, she argues that political identification involves establishing a boundary between ‘we’ and ‘they’ and thus it always includes a possibility of antagonism and the emergence of friend/​enemy relations (Mouffe, 2005: 11). However, Mouffe (2005: 25) emphasises that a sufficient degree of polarisation between different identity groups is the very condition of possibility of political mobilisation because, without opposing political camps, political emotions required for such mobilisation cannot arise. According to Mouffe (2005: 69–​70), the conditions that enabled the rise of right-​wing populist parties in Europe resulted precisely from consensus-​oriented politics and the lack of sufficient political alternatives of political identification. Populist movements were able to offer an emotionally appealing alternative to the homogenous ‘establishment’ and thus provided for people the channel of political identification that had been missing from mainstream politics (Mouffe, 2005: 70). In Mouffe’s (2005: 70) view, these developments highlight the need to recognise the affective dimensions of politics and create more channels for the mobilisation of political emotions within democratic politics. Another scholar who has recently addressed the significance of negative emotions in populist politics and political polarisation from a philosophical perspective is Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum’s work has particular relevance to our case as she has provided broad and detailed discussions of the significance of political emotions in democratic politics and, in The Monarchy of Fear (2018), she focuses on the role of negative emotions in the American polarised political culture. Nussbaum is a representative of the so-​called cognitivist account of emotions in which emotions are seen as intimately associated with cognitive, evaluative judgements or at least partially composed of judgements (Harpham, 2002; Hunt, 2006, Srinivasan, 2020). However, in her theory of political emotions, which she has elaborated in several of her works over the years (2001, 2004, 2013, 2016, 2018), Nussbaum also strongly associates the importance of emotions in politics with their motivational 204

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force. Nussbaum (2013: 11; 2001, 31) points out that political emotions are ‘eudaimonistic’ in the sense that they are connected with the experiencing person’s viewpoint and their view of a worthwhile life, and therefore pure reasoning or abstract principles alone rarely provide sufficient motivation for political action. Moreover, for the same reason, emotions are important for guiding political arguments and judgements. Accordingly, Nussbaum (2012: 232, 2013: 4) criticises the earlier tradition of political liberalism for not sufficiently recognising the epistemological value of emotions in democratic politics. Nussbaum argues that supporting the construction of a decent, well-​ functioning democratic society requires that political emotions are connected to a normative vision of a good life (for example, Nussbaum, 2013: 6), which gives justification to political emotions and thus makes certain emotions more desirable and worthwhile than others (for example, Nussbaum 2013: 2). Nussbaum stresses that even though this vision is always incomplete and under constant redefinition, it must be grounded in a common ‘set of normative goals’ with a ‘definite moral content’ (Nussbaum, 2013: 16). For Nussbaum (2013: 16), this content includes equal respect for persons, a commitment to equal liberties of speech, association, and conscience, and a set of fundamental social and economic entitlements. Nussbaum defines her own understanding of this normative vision as a form of ‘political liberalism’ (Nussbaum, 2013: 6), which derives from her theory of justice, the Capabilities Approach (CA) and belongs to the same ‘family’ of liberal political conceptions of justice as Rawlsian political liberalism (Nussbaum, 2013: 118). Nussbaum’s CA can be understood as a ‘partial and minimal account of social justice’ (Nussbaum, 2006: 71), which entails the following central normative assumptions: first, societies should provide for individuals opportunities to achieve wellbeing; and, second, wellbeing should be understood in terms of capabilities, that is, people’s real abilities and freedoms to achieve valuable functionings. These features of CA illustrate Nussbaum’s vision of justice to which public emotions and their expressions should be connected (Nussbaum, 2013: 16). Another important insight in Nussbaum’s theory of political emotions is that emotions are not simply a fact of political life but are shaped by social contexts and norms (for example, 2018: 12). Moreover, emotions can either destabilise a community or produce better cooperation and enhance justice, and thus Nussbaum argues that influencing the formation of desirable political emotions is a way of constructing a healthier democratic culture (2018: 12). Accordingly, Nussbaum carefully distinguishes between different types of emotions –​positive emotions of compassion love, and hope, and negative emotions of fear, anger, disgust and shame –​and discusses both the pernicious and constructive consequences that emotions can have in political life (for example, Nussbaum, 2013: 201–​202; 2018: 12–​13). Nussbaum’s 205

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central concern therefore is not whether emotions play a significant role in democratic politics but, rather, how different emotions should be addressed and dealt with in democratic societies. Since emotions have a strong motivational force, Nussbaum warns that they can also be easily exploited and monopolised by people with ‘less appetizing’ aspirations (2013: 256). Accordingly, Nussbaum highlights that, while recognising the significance of political emotions for democratic politics, political theorists should also acknowledge the potential dangers associated with them. In her own words, ‘[e]‌motions can be very bad; but they are an essential part of human life, including the struggle for justice, so we should try to imagine how they can become the best that they can be’ (2012: 250). In her book, The Monarchy of Fear (2018), Nussbaum elaborates on the aforementioned remarks through her discussion on the role of negative emotions in populist politics in the United States under the Trump administration. While the book focuses on the American context, the phenomena that Nussbaum addresses, including political polarisation, populist rhetoric, xenophobia and political exclusion, are currently being witnessed in democratic societies all over the world, especially in association with right-​wing populism and anti-​immigration parties. Nussbaum (2018) pays special attention to fear as the root of other negative emotions and demonstrates how fear undermines citizens’ capacities for constructive deliberation across the different poles of the polarised political culture. Moreover, Nussbaum (2018) provides elaborate analyses of how fear and the derivative emotions of anger, disgust and shame become manifest in populist politics, taking the form of Islamophobia, racism and misogyny. Importantly, she suggests that negative emotions may be countered through the cultivation of more constructive, positive political emotions, and that this cultivation must be accompanied by appropriate institutional arrangements, which Nussbaum exemplifies through the idea of a reformation of American public schools. This role of education as an institution that is particularly crucial for reinforcing democracy is also relevant to our case. Nussbaum’s work on political emotions has also been subject to several criticisms. Due to space limitations, we are unable to address all these critiques, and many of them also lie beyond the scope of this chapter or bare little relevance to our case example. However, there are also several critiques that are relevant to our analysis. These critiques suggest that Nussbaum’s theory of political emotions is too optimistic and limited by an individualistic liberal mindset due to which it disregards the political realities of today’s societies (for example, Wierzbicka, 2003; Srinivasan, 2016; 2018; Gleason, 2018). It has also been argued that the full eradication of negative emotions, especially anger, from politics is not advisable, especially from the perspective of minority struggles, where anger often functions as a crucial motivational and mobilising force (for example, Bell, 2009; Srinivasan, 2016, 2018; 206

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Cherry, 2019). Moreover, cultivating compassion and other positive civic emotions has been seen as insufficient for resolving the issues of an already polarised political culture. We will address these critiques in the following section, where we discuss our case example through Nussbaum’s theory of political emotions.

The case of Oulu: negative political emotions in action In this section, by utilising Nussbaum’s work as our primary analytic framework, we shed light on the problematic consequences of negative emotions in the processes of political decision making in the case of Oulu and demonstrate how education can contribute to the construction of a healthier democratic culture through the cultivation of positive emotions. We begin by analysing what kind of emotions were at play in the political decision making in our case and how these emotions might have contributed to the decision to ban the school visits. As we indicated in the introduction, asylum seekers’ visits to schools were infrequent, supervised and they served the aims of intercultural and global citizenship education established in the Finnish National Core Curriculum. The visits were organised by well-​known non-​governmental organisations (NGOs), welcomed by teachers, students and parents, and announced as free of security risks by the police. However, after the announcement of the suspected sexual assaults in Oulu, online discussions fuelled fear and hatred towards refugees and asylum seekers. Instant connections were made between the investigated sexual assaults and the school visits. The actual conditions of the visits were largely disregarded and even a fake photo of one of the suspects visiting a local school was posted online. It was later discovered that the photo had been taken at a public event in a different location (Yle, 2019b). Due to the heated discussion, the city administrators received several complaints regarding the visits from people claiming to be concerned parents. According to the city’s Head of Education and Cultural Services, parental concerns were the major cause leading to the decision on the ban. However, he also admitted suspecting that many of the comments and complaints came from outsiders. Namely, the complaints were not in line with the information received from the schools, which stated that the feedback from parents had been positive and that families and students had hoped for more visits in the future. No negative experiences or incidents were reported. The police also confirmed that they had not been informed of any safety risks related to the visits (Yle, 2019a; 2019b). One of the members of the city council, who signed the original plea for the ban in 2018 and was supportive of the decision in 2019, pointed out that 207

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the concerns about the school visits were not directly associated with the fear of sexual abuse. Apparently, a greater worry was that visits encouraging cultural exchange would obfuscate the ‘real differences between cultures’ (Yle, 2019b). A specific concern had been expressed over different ‘roles of women’ in these cultures (Yle, 2019b). Moreover, the council member in question suggested that a ‘more Western-​minded multicultural education’ could be taught at school. He suggested that it would be better if the visitors were already Finnish citizens or originally from European countries as such visitors would more likely share the values of the Finns. The council member also pointed out that the critics had been concerned about asylum seekers ‘forming relationships’ or networking during their visits in schools and day-​care centres (Yle, 2019b).

Rhetoric of populism: misinformation and the construction of fear The school visit ban in Oulu can be seen as exemplifying the type of discursive construction of fear, anxiety and threat in relation to immigration, refugees and asylum seekers, imbued by populist rhetoric, which has been described by Kinnvall (2018), Ahmed (2004) and Nussbaum (2018), among others. It is also an example of the type of stigmatisation where the actions or attributes of one or few members of an ethnic, religious or racial group are extended to concern the whole group with the result of diminishing the individuality of the representatives of the group (for example, Parekh, 2012). The school visitors were not among the suspects of the assault cases; rather, they were people who were well-​known and trusted by the NGOs that organised the visits. Hence, rather than being based on the facts concerning the assault cases or the conditions of the visits, the fear expressed by citizens and the members of the city council seemed to result largely from stigmatisation, prejudice and superficial generalisations. The decision to ban the school visits might have involved many different types of fears: fear of the unfamiliar (cultural differences); fear of sexual abuse actually happening; fear of continuous complaints and discontent among citizens; or fear of further right-​wing radicalisation in the area if the city did not demonstrate that sexual abuse and assault were taken seriously. According to Nussbaum (2018), fear is a primordial feeling that often has little to do with rationality. Our case example would seem to demonstrate this as the judgements were hasty and the process of decision making did not include considering other possibilities or conclusions. Fear thus functioned in our case as a ‘narrowing emotion’ (see Nussbaum, 2013: 320–​22), especially regarding rational deliberation. Considering both, the fact that the concern expressed by the parents was said to be the main reason for the decision to ban the visits while the decision makers were actually unsure of the real source of the complaints, and the received positive feedback from 208

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the school communities regarding previous visits, the decision on the ban seems lacking rational justification. First, the decision was rushed through and was not put to a vote in the city council. Second, the fact-​based arguments against the ban that were considered salient a year before (January 2018), especially the fact that the ban would offend the Non-​Discrimination Act, were dismissed. A reasoned process of political decision making would have involved addressing the relevant laws and the facts concerning the visits and, for instance, calling different stakeholders to discuss the future of the visits as well as the safety of the schools. In this case, fear seems to have been the motivating force leading to a premature decision on the ban. Nussbaum (2018) admits that fear itself is not necessarily problematic (it has had an important evolutionary purpose, among other things, for example, 2018: 5, 44) but in the context of politics, fear often creates unproductive distrust and disrespect among citizens and thus can lead to stigmatisation and othering (for example, 2018: 1–​3, 7–​8). As indicated by Kinnvall (2018), it is particularly characteristic to populist rhetoric that it addresses people’s fears through indicating that social stability and wellbeing can be regained through the restoration of national values and the social order that prevailed in the past. Accordingly, it typically portrays people appearing as ‘foreign’ as a threat to the unity of the nation (for example, Ahmed, 2004). This type of idealisation of national values and the representation of a homogenous national identity was also clearly present in the case of Oulu and particularly exemplified by the comment of the city councillor who suggested a ‘more Western-​minded multicultural education’, involving visits from Finnish citizens or citizens of other European countries. However, this type of Eurocentric citizenship education would be in clear contrast with the goals of global citizenship education as expressed by the Finnish National Core Curriculum (EDUFI 2014: 16). Moreover, the councillor’s suggestion seems to be based on a deeply problematic assumption that interactions or ‘relations’ across cultural and ethnic boundaries are somehow inherently harmful (abusive), which is also indicative of racial stigmatisation and prejudice, both rooted in fear.

Anger as a political emotion in the case of Oulu In addition to fear, the sexual assaults associated with our case evoked outrage and feelings of anger among the citizens of Oulu. As indicated above, Nussbaum sees anger as one of the negative political emotions typically having detrimental consequences to democratic politics. Nussbaum’s critical perspective on anger as a political emotion follows a long line of thought that derives from Seneca (1995) but is also followed by more recent thinkers such as Glen Pettigrove (2012). Nussbaum (2016) has argued against anger for its moral wrongfulness, for it being a barrier to reasoned judgement, and –​perhaps most importantly –​for its unproductivity when it comes to 209

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establishing friendship, cooperation and a future-​oriented mindset in the context of democratic politics. Nussbaum sees anger as a particularly problematic political emotion because it can result in unjust and wrongful actions due to its interference with reasoning (Nussbaum, 2016: 29).2 Anger often focuses narrowly on one’s own relative status in society and thus seeks for retribution by lowering the status of other persons or groups (in this case, immigrants and asylum seekers) in order to raise one’s own status (Nussbaum, 2016: 20–​21). Nussbaum refers to this form of anger as ‘status anger’ (for example, Nussbaum 2016: 21, 55, 92, 107). Sometimes anger also involves a direct desire for the misery of others, and thus takes the form of retributive anger (Nussbaum 2016: 21–​ 3). Nussbaum argues that this ‘payback anger’ (for example, Nussbaum 2016: 55) is ‘especially poisonous when people use it to deflect attention from real problems that they feel powerless to solve’ (2018: 69) such as in our case the broader issue of immigration and the successful integration of immigrants in society. In our example, the ban itself and especially the heated discussions that preceded it can be seen as displaying both ‘status anger’ and ‘payback anger’ as their focus was on the suspects’ ethnic background. These discussions can be seen as lowering the status of immigrants and asylum seekers in society with the consequence of elevating the status of Finnish citizens, instead of focusing on the actual harms caused to the victims. The ban perhaps created a soothing yet deceptive feeling that at least something had been done to the issue even though the abuse cases had no connection to the school visits. It is especially noteworthy that the Finns Party council members and the citizens initiating the complaints wanted to ban all asylum seekers’ visits to schools and day-​care centres regardless of their former activities, gender, occupation or criminal background. This indicates that every person being part of this group was seen as a threat, simply by being an asylum seeker. The ban thus highlights the distinction between Finnish citizens and asylum seekers, and indicates that the latter do not have the same status or deserve equal liberties and rights in Finnish society. Moreover, the ban can also be viewed as a sign of payback or punishment to the asylum seekers who were denied access to one of the central institutions of Finnish society, and thus prevented from becoming better integrated to society through interactions with Finnish citizens. Furthermore, one of the most problematic features of the ban is that it can be seen as validating hate speech as a form of legitimate speech in democratic politics. Following Bhikhu Parekh (2012), hate speech can be defined as a form of speech that presents an individual or a group as an enemy and as a legitimate object of hostility. It defiles the dignity of the members of the target group by reducing their personal features to uniform characteristics of the group in question. Hate speech is likely to have long-​term consequences for 210

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the public political culture because, by stigmatising the members of the target group and refusing to accept them as equal members of society, it encourages a political climate where discriminatory treatment progressively becomes customary. Thus, it affects public opinion and denies the very possibility of inclusive and equal public sphere, which is a crucial constituent of liberal democracy. In our case, individuals who committed crimes belonged to a certain ethnic or cultural group, and the crimes committed by particular individuals led to the stigmatisation of an entire group and their banishment from public schools. However, while anger clearly had a negative influence on both public discussion and the processes of political decision making in the context of our case, labelling anger as inherently detrimental to democratic politics oversimplifies the complexity of the role of anger in politics more generally perceived. In fact, the understanding of the significance of anger in contemporary political theory is far from unified: in recent decades, several feminist scholars have defended anger and other negative emotions as politically and morally appropriate responses to oppression (Bell, 2009: 167). Anger has been defended as a mode of protest against oppressive structures because it enables recognising the wrongs and helps the subjects to maintain their self-​respect (Bell, 2009: 168; see also Murphy, 1988: 17; 2003: 77). Some feminists have also highlighted the direct or indirect epistemic value of anger: anger can be seen as an indicator of the type of knowledge that only the oppressed group has of their position (Narayan, 1988) or, alternatively, by observing how their emotions are received by others, the subordinate group may indirectly gain awareness of their position in the moral community (Frye, 1983; see also Bell, 2009: 168). It has also been argued that anger is important and morally valuable insofar as it bears witness to injustice, even in cases where protest turns out unproductive or fruitless (Bell, 2009: 168). Furthermore, it has been suggested that anger can be seen as valuable and justified if it helps generating social change (Lorde, 1984). Similar ideas on the justifiability and usefulness of political anger have also been presented by Cherry (2019), Jackson (2018) and Srinivasan (2016; 2018; 2020), among others. Some of the critiques have also been directed directly to Nussbaum: as a response to Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness (2016), Jackson (2018) points out several theoretical difficulties, one of which is Nussbaum’s claimed tendency to equate anger to hatred, revenge and retribution. Against this interpretation, Jackson holds that anger can be either virtuous or vicious (2018: 753–​6, 766), virtuous anger playing an important role in the struggle for social justice and the maintenance of civil society (Jackson, 2018: 749). Jackson (2018) and Srinivasan (2016; 2018) both argue that Nussbaum’s defence of positive political emotions might even result in furthering injustice, because by denying the significance of anger she conceals the fact 211

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that anger is unjustified only from the perspective of the privileged groups, as it threatens the status quo that secures their privileged position. Srinivasan (2016; 2018) thus fears that Nussbaum’s criticism of anger presents unjust features of political life as inescapable and neutral, and thus risks aggravating the very injustices she seeks to resist. While we agree with these critiques in the sense that political anger can in many cases serve an important purpose in struggles for social justice, we would also like to point out that these critiques disregard an important distinction that Nussbaum makes between different types of anger. Although Nussbaum seeks to demonstrate the moral dubiousness and potential harmfulness of status anger and payback anger, which were primarily manifested in our case example, she also recognises a third form of anger that can be seen as politically productive and morally justified. Nussbaum refers to this form of anger as ‘transition-​anger’ (2016: 35–​40; 2018: 74–​5). While status anger and payback anger typically manifest in hate speech and stigmatisation3 in the way exemplified by our case, transition-​anger can be described as a desire for fairness, as it transforms negative emotions into indicators of injustice and thus might result in positive action. Hence, its focus is not on wishing harm to other groups of society (Nussbaum, 2016: 35–​7). However, in our case example the anger expressed by citizens took a detrimental form of status and/​or payback anger; a productive transition-​ anger would have involved a detachment from the outrage that followed the abuse cases and replacement of this outrage by the intention to move forward, toward correcting the problems that gave rise to the emotion in the first place (Nussbaum, 2016: 28–​31, 33, 93; 2018: 75–​7). In our view, Nussbaum’s transition-​anger exemplifies her more general outlook on the role and significance of political emotions in democratic politics and the way these emotions should be addressed. Namely, transition-​anger receives its justification from being closely tied to a set of normative goals and a moral content –​the respect for persons and the improvement of society –​and it converts negative, detrimental emotions into rational, fact-​based and future-​oriented decision making (Nussbaum, 2013; 2016; 2018). Negative emotions that are not associated with normative goals, such as retributive anger, do not receive such justification and thus their expression should be suspended in democratic politics. Hence, taking into account Nussbaum’s distinction between politically harmful forms of anger and the justified transition-​anger, the contrast between Nussbaum and her critics diminishes. Moreover, Nussbaum’s critics see potential dangers in the normalisation of anger in democratic politics, and especially recognise the potential misuse of unjustified anger (see Srinivasan, 2016). We suggest that our case exemplifies this kind of misuse because the anger is directed to an 212

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unprivileged minority by the members of the majority. As Srinivasan (2016) aptly points out, it is also a feature of our political reality that many confuse their misplaced rage for justified anger. Those galled by the loss of white privilege, or who blame immigrants for their poverty, are an obvious case … the right to voice justified anger will inevitably be abused by those without justification. This is perhaps the most plausible case for restricting the place of anger in our public discourse, and for praising the virtues of civility and calm: A normalization of anger in the public sphere might lead to a general and violent degradation of political life. Indeed, we might think this to be the case today.

The ban’s incompatibility with education guidelines and democratically established principles As our case demonstrates, the particular risk with political decisions that are reached because of negative political emotions is that they might be incompatible with and thus lead to a rash rejection of democratically established laws and procedures and educational policies or guidelines. Accordingly, such decisions gradually begin to undermine democratic core values and principles. From this point of view, it is highly problematic when established laws, policies and guidelines are prematurely overruled because of negative emotions, even if those emotions were provoked by events such as those exemplified by our case. Instead, such events should lead to careful assessment of emotions before acting on them or using them as grounds of policy making. Hence, while it is important that citizens have the opportunity to participate in municipal decision making, this participation should take place through certain politically established channels, such as city council hearings and elections. In our case, the decision to ban the visits was made by a single official under pressure from certain voices from the public. Even more importantly, the ban violates several general policies and principles that have been established through democratic processes, such as the Finnish Non-​Discrimination Act, the Finnish National Core Curriculum, and the aims associated with UNESCO’s Global Citizenship Education (GCE) framework. GCE has been formed to guide and orient civic education in educational systems globally, and one of its central purposes is to encourage intercultural dialogue in a non-​hierarchical manner (see for example, UNESCO, 2014; Wintersteiner et al, 2015). GCE is also closely linked to the values expressed in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The cultural rights and integration of immigrants and other minority groups are among the core themes of GCE. 213

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Although UNESCO’s GCE is not legally binding on the level of individual states, the member states’ governments are expected to strive to implement its central aims through national legislation and policies. Accordingly, in addition to GCE guidelines, the policy making involved in our case example is also in contrast with the aims of intercultural education established in the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education. This contrast is exemplified particularly well in a paragraph under the heading ‘Cultural diversity as richness’: In basic education, people from varying cultural and linguistic backgrounds come together and get to know many different customs, communal practices and beliefs. The pupils learn to look at issues from the perspectives of other people’s life situations and circumstances. Learning together across the boundaries of languages, cultures, religions and beliefs creates a setting for genuine interaction and communality. Basic education lays the foundation for global citizenship that respects human rights and encourages the pupils to act for positive change. (EDUFI, 2014: 16) Evidently, documents such as GCE and the Finnish National Core Curriculum are policy documents rather than philosophically justified normative visions in Nussbaum’s sense. Nevertheless, they represent the results of careful policy planning and have been established with the general good and welfare of society and people in mind. This does not mean that they should be immune to criticism or revision. This criticism, however, should be founded on fact-​based evaluation and carried out with the assessment of the wider, long-​term goals of the democratic society in mind.

An alternative to the ban: strengthening democracy and giving value to positive emotions We have indicated that emotions can be more or less constructive or destructive for the community and its sense of togetherness. From a Nussbaumian perspective, negative emotions such as those associated with our case ­example –​fear and retributive anger in particular –​should either be transformed into transition-​anger and the striving for social justice or be replaced with political goals that might benefit the whole of society in the long run. But what would this mean on a practical level in the context of our case? Is appealing to civic compassion or to the aims of GCE futile or inefficient in the kind of polarised political landscape as exemplified by our case? Is the polarisation irreversible? In what follows, we will address these questions through our critical engagement with Nussbaum’s proposal for a politics of positive emotions. We propose alternative courses of action for 214

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handling the case of Oulu and offer two suggestions that could reinforce democracy in cases such as ours. The first proposal concerns an alternative course of action for the ban and emphasises the need to follow democratic procedures, established laws and principles. The other suggestion focuses on long-​term development and highlights the role of education as an institution that can support the generation of a less polarised political culture. As indicated earlier, Nussbaum sees the cultivation of positive emotions as having a central role in the productive transformation of the democratic culture. In The Monarchy of Fear (2018), she portrays love as the opposite of anger, as it ‘consists of seeing the other person as fully human, and capable of some level of good and change’ (2018: 216–​17). Thus, political love primarily refers to the idea of treating others as fellow human beings and seeing others as equals regardless of their different views and is connected to the recognition of common humanity. Accordingly, love is an emotion that allows people to work towards common goals with an orientation to future. In both Upheavals of Thought (2001) and Political Emotions (2013) Nussbaum discusses compassion4 in detail and defines it as vital for promoting equality and inclusion in society.5 Nussbaum’s idea seems to be that political love and compassion enable the understanding of individuality of other persons and thus prevents the stigmatisation of an entire group based on actions of individuals. Accordingly, compassionate citizens would perhaps be less likely to resort to cultural essentialism, stereotyping and hate speech or be led by fear and anger in the way as exemplified by our case example. In addition to love and compassion Nussbaum (2018: 203ff) also turns to hope. She mostly focuses on the cultivation of hope as an opposite to fear (2018: 203–​205, 211). Nussbaum also emphasises that for democracy to operate, citizens need to trust one another; they need to have an orientation to the future and a will for action, both of which are central aspects of hope. Hope is associated with the uncertainty of the future but involves the expectation of a positive outcome. Hope is first and foremost not about individual aims but intrinsically social in nature and wrapped up in the web of our social relations (compare with Jacobs, 2005). In Nussbaum’s version, it is also connected to the ‘Socratic virtue’ of critical self-​examination, involving the challenging tasks of taking personal risks, searching for critical arguments, and making uncertain initiatives in the quest of finding a common cause with one’s political opponents, even if one does not share or accept what they believe in (Nussbaum, 2018: 213–​15). However, as already pointed out, Nussbaum’s appeal to love, compassion and hope can be challenged for being insufficient for addressing the reality of democratic politics. It has been suggested that Nussbaum’s work is overly optimistic about our capacity to create and sustain institutions of liberal justice despite the realities of oppression (Srinivasan, 2017: 1) and is also strongly influenced by the Anglo-​American ethos of optimism, search for 215

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happiness, and individualism (Wierzbicka, 2003: 598). From the perspective of Mouffe’s (2005) agonistic pluralism, Nussbaum’s politics of positive emotions is based on an inadequate understanding of the nature of the ‘political’. Political polarisation –​a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ –​is, according to Mouffe, at the heart of all political action and thus negative emotions can never be fully abolished from politics. The primary task of democratic politics is therefore the sublimation and channelling of destructive emotions to forms that are more compatible with central democratic values (Mouffe, 2000; 2005). Gleason (2018) makes a similar point by drawing attention to the nature of contemporary populist politics which, according to him, resembles a ‘wrestling match’ rather than reasoned argumentation, and thus he challenges Nussbaum’s belief in respectful argument and people’s willingness to work for a common cause. The aforementioned critiques thus question from different perspectives the applicability and plausibility of Nussbaum’s politics of positive emotions in the context of contemporary democratic societies. While we clearly recognise that Nussbaum’s suggestions are demanding and do not provide ‘quick fixes’ to the current issues of contemporary societies, we still suggest that there should be a conscious effort to put some of Nussbaum’s ideas to practice through democratic politics. It is detrimental if democratic institutions fail to perform the tasks that allow citizens to trust these institutions and have faith in the democratic society in general. In our view, the situation is not likely to improve through democratic politics that seeks to normalise polarised conflict and the expression of negative emotions. Rather, such politics is likely to increase the polarisation and instability of society and create more permanent barriers between different groups of people. What is required for the stabilisation of the democratic culture is citizens’ commitment to at least some overarching and common political goals and visions. Our first suggestion on the alternative handling of the case of Oulu particularly questions the implementation of the ban. We suggest that instead of immediately banning the school visits, the city administrators should have followed ordinary political procedures in their decision making. This would have involved a temporary suspension of judgement, followed by public discussions and hearings and, finally, putting the ban to a vote in the city council. Following official democratic procedures would have allowed hearing and taking into consideration different views and perspectives concerning the ban as well as considering other possible courses of action. Concerning the sensitivity and controversiality of the issue, public discussions and hearings could have been organised where different aspects of the case, including facts and emotions, could have been discussed. This could have opened the possibility of forming common and more justified views regarding the case and how it should be addressed. It would have also enabled a more extensive participation of the citizens of Oulu, which would have 216

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further strengthened the democratic legitimacy of the decision. Moreover, the negative consequences such as the loss of the benefits brought forth by the school visits and the potentially increased juxtaposition between the asylum seekers and the majority population could have been avoided. We evidently do not suggest that all negative political emotions can or should be suppressed or that people should simply be able to replace them with positive emotions. But we do not think that Nussbaum’s theory of political emotions requires this6; rather, it must be recognised that changing the course of the political culture’s development is a long-​term process, which brings us to the second important point concerning the alternative handling of this case. Evidently, positive emotions are not wonder remedies to a polarised political culture that is already inflicted by fear and anger. They do, however, have a significant role in citizenship education. Fostering positive political emotions can promote a long-​term process of transforming the political culture toward a healthier and more cooperative form. The school visits, which originally provided fruitful opportunities to reduce group stigmatisation and establish trust between asylum seekers and the residents of Oulu, are a good example of the kind of concrete educational and institutional practices through which positive political emotions can be cultivated. Thus, we share Nussbaum’s view that educational institutions can, at their best, encourage people to become more compassionate and virtuous if they are genuinely guided and oriented by a comprehensive normative vision of a just society (for example, Nussbaum, 2013: 3; 1997: 14). However, we do not wish to underrate the difficulty of producing such a vision that would permeate all political parties.

Conclusion In the past few decades, emotions have received increasing attention in the social sciences, and several political theorists (for example, Mouffe, 2000; 2005; Nussbaum, 2001; Ahmed, 2004) have argued that emotions have a crucial role in the formation of collective identities and in social life more generally. At the same time, many Western democracies have become characterised by political polarisation, linked to the rise of backlash movements with nationalist sentiments. Our case example demonstrates how negative emotions can be central motivators for political decision making and how they can thereby deteriorate citizens’ mutual trust and prevent cooperation that is required to sustain a democratic society. As the interviews and news addressing the ban show, the sexual assault and abuse cases were utilised to justify the political decision making that rested largely on xenophobia and prejudice and the associated emotions of fear and anger. Furthermore, the decision also sends a signal that hate speech and prejudice can be accepted as legitimate 217

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grounds for political decision making. We suggest that the ban does not remedy the fear of some of the citizens of Oulu, but rather reinforces it by stigmatising a group of people, possibly giving a signal that the fear and anger towards asylum seekers was justified. Thus, by reinforcing a culture of fear, the ban significantly diminishes the possibilities of schools and other democratic institutions to reinforce social cohesion and reduce social inequalities in a manner that has historically been characteristic to the Finnish comprehensive school. Following Nussbaum, we have emphasised the importance of fostering positive political emotions such as civic love, compassion and hope, which are important for a healthy democratic culture. However, we also recognise the critiques directed to Nussbaum’s theory, and thus we have stressed the need to acknowledge the central significance of democratic institutions and education for reinforcing a healthier political culture. Attention should be paid, first, to the protection of the prevailing democratically established procedures, practices and principles, including the laws and institutions of the democratic society. While societies should engage in the continuous pursuit of social justice and emotionally healthier political culture, certain democratically established policies, procedures and principles provide protection from the destructive effects of negative political emotions in political situations such as the one we have introduced through our case. In our case, these policies, procedures and principles include laws such as the Finnish Non-​Discrimination Act, educational policy documents such as the Finnish National Core Curriculum and UNESCO’s GCE, and democratic procedures through which political decisions are typically reached on a municipal level in Finland, all of which were disregarded in the decision making process in our case. Second, much more work can be done in the educational institutions to develop a form of global citizenship education that involves a clear focus on political emotions supporting cooperation and the pursuit of common visions. Dewey (1997: 87) has already claimed that democracy is about ‘conjoint communicated experience’ where ‘each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own’, which breaks down ‘barriers of class, race and national territory’. Such a conception of democracy, still relevant today, is not given but something to strive for. It cannot survive by itself but requires an educational practice that is flexible and adjustable to the changing circumstances of society. The reality of political polarisation and the increase of negative emotions in politics must thus also be recognised and addressed in educational institutions through an appropriate form of citizenship education. Even the relatively homogenous Finnish society will face the need to address an increasing amount of issues concerning immigration, diversity 218

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and pluralism in the future. Democratically established laws and principles are required to safeguard the rights of minorities. However, what is needed even more is citizens’ motivation to follow these principles. In this quest, both discussing emotive politics and seeing the value in the positive political emotions required for cooperation are crucial. Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

In this chapter, we limit our sources of information to the online news of Yle (Finnish Broadcasting Company) released in the period between January and March 2019. Yle is a public service broadcasting company that is 99.9 percent state-​owned and tax-​funded. It is politically and financially independent, but governed by the Act on Yleisradio Oy; its primary role and objective is to act as a supporter of democracy in Finland (Yle, 2019c). Nussbaum lists three key ways anger might lead us astray: the ‘obvious error’, when anger is misguided because it is based on wrong information; the ‘status error’, when the relative status of a particular value is seen as hugely important, and the ‘payback error’ involving irrational thinking (magical fantasies of divine justice and ‘closure’; Nussbaum 2016: 29) and retributive thoughts that distract us from our orientation to future and the opportunities of influencing this future (2018: 80–​81). Nussbaum subsumes these under her concept ‘radical evil’, referring to human beings’ tendency to exclude, subordinate, stigmatise, and to inflict shame on others (due to hierarchisation, disgust, and envy; for example, Nussbaum, 2013: 3, 9). Nussbaum distinguishes between compassion and empathy. She holds that even though compassion (brotherly love) is closely related to empathy, it extends from it. Compassion is something that one feels for a person who suffers through no fault of their own. Thus, according to Nussbaum, one can be empathetic without being compassionate, for instance, by understanding the experience of someone without having compassion for the person’s trouble (2001: 302, 327–​9). Nussbaum further differentiates between ‘extended’ and ‘limited’ compassion of which the latter is often awakened by an individual narrative of distress. This narrow or limited compassion can be harmful and misleading, especially if it draws attention away from generally accepted and recognised principles. The former refers to preferred, more general, civic compassion (Nussbaum, 2013: 317). Also, Nussbaum acknowledges that it would be too optimistic to believe that a loving vision of a society would be enough; the society needs structures, institutions and laws in protecting democracy and its central values. She writes: ‘We certainly don’t want to wait until most people love each other before we protect the civil rights of the vulnerable’ (Nussbaum, 2013: 315–​16).

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Lorde, A. (1984) Sister Outsider, Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. Mouffe, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political, London and New York: Routledge. Muldoon, P. (2008) The moral legitimacy of anger, European Journal of Social Theory, 11(3): 299–​314. Murphy, J. (1988) Forgiveness and resentment, in J.G. Murphy and J. Hampton (eds), Forgiveness and Mercy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 14–​34. Murphy, J. (2003) Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits, New York: Oxford University Press. Narayan, U. (1988) Working together across differences: some considerations on emotions and political practice, Hypatia, (3): 31–​47. Ngai, S. (2005) Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. (1997) Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2004) Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2006) Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Nussbaum, M. (2012) Teaching patriotism: love and critical freedom, University of Chicago Law Review, 79(1): 213–​50. Nussbaum, M. (2013) Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2016) Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2018) The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis, New York: Simon & Schuster. Parekh, B. (2012) Is there a case for banning hate speech?, in M. Herz and P. Molnar (eds), The Content and Context of Hate Speech: Rethinking Regulation and Responses, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 37–​56. Petersen, M. (2010) Distinct emotions, distinct domains: anger, anxiety and perceptions of intentionality, The Journal of Politics, 72(2): 357–​65. Pettigrove, G. (2012) Meekness and “moral” anger, Ethics, 122(2): 341–​70. Sahlberg, P. (2015) Finnish Lessons 2.0, New York: Teachers College Press. Salmela, M. and von Scheve, C. (2017) Emotional roots of right-​wing political populism, Social Science Information, 56(4): 567–​95. Salmela, M., and von Scheve, C. (2018) Emotional dynamics of right-​and left-​wing political populism, Humanity & Society, 42(4): 434–​54. Seneca, L.A. (1995) On anger, in J. Cooper and J.F. Procone (eds), Seneca: Moral and Political Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 1–​117. 221

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Srinivasan, A. (2016) A righteous fury: review of Martha Nussbaum’s anger and forgiveness, The Nation, 30 November, www.thenat​ion.com/​arti​cle/​ a-​r ighte​ous-​fury/​ Srinivasan, A. (2017) Comments on Martha Nussbaum’s “accountability in an Era of Celebrity” ’, Inaugural Lecture at the Dickson Poon Law Centre, King’s College, London, 9 March, www.kcl.ac.uk/​law/​c-​ppl/​inaugu​ral-​lect​ ure-​ser​ies/​amia-​sri​niva​san-​nussb​aum-​kcl-​acc​ount​abil​ity.pdf Srinivasan, A. (2018) The aptness of anger, Journal of Political Philosophy, 26(2): 123–​44. Srinivasan, A. (2020) The political limits of compassion, unpublished, http://​users.ox.ac.uk/​~corp1​468/​Res​earc​h_​fi​les/​Nussb​aum%20-​%20po​ liti​cal%20e​moti​ons%20pap​er_​P​algr​ave.pdf UNESCO (2014) Global citizenship education. Preparing learners for the challenges of the twenty-​first century, https://​unes​doc.une​sco.org/​ark:/​ 48223/p​ f0000​ 2277​ 29?posInS​ et=1​ &quer y​ Id=​71222​c78-​8e19-​40e2-​9a45-​ 42002​63e1​bf4 Wierzbicka, A. (2003) Emotion and culture: arguing with Martha Nussbaum, Ethos, 31(4): 577–​600. doi: Wintersteiner, W., Grobbauer, H., Diendorfer, D. and Reitmair-​Juárez, S. (2015) Global Citizenship Education: Citizenship Education for Globalizing Societies, www.demokr​atie​zent​rum.org/​fileadm ​ in/m ​ edia/p​ df/M ​ ater​ iali​ en/​ Global​Citi​zens​hip Education_​Final_​english.pdf Yle (2019a) Oulu bans asylum seeker visits to schools, 31 January, https://​ yle.fi/​uuti​set/​osa​sto/​news/​oulu_​bans_​asyl​um_​s​eeke​r_​vi​sits​_​to_​scho​ols/​ 10623​356 Yle (2019b) Selvitimme, miksi turvapaikanhakijoiden päiväkoti-​ ja kouluvierailut nähtiin Oulussa uhkana ja mistä niissä oli kyse, 5 February, https://​yle.fi/​uuti​set/​3-​10629​501 Yle (2019c) This is Yle, updated 13 September 2019, https://​yle.fi/​aihe/​ artikk​eli/​about-​yle/​this-​is-​yle

222

Index References to figures appear in italic type. References to endnotes show both the page number and the note number (231n3). A activism  mobilising social movements for  138, 139, 140, 150, 151 racist  162–​3 agency  ascribing  65–​6 denying  69–​70 suppression of anger and lack of  38–​9 two ideas of  25 aggressive behaviour  frustration–​aggression hypothesis for  56 of men  47 righteous  178, 181, 187, 195 Ahmed, Sara  86, 90, 138, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 157, 160, 161, 178, 180, 181, 186, 187, 188, 189, 200, 203, 208, 209, 217 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)  61–​3, 64–​5, 66, 67–​8, 68–​9 Alcoff, Linda Martín  38, 41 Allport, Gordon  122, 124 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)  158, 163 ambivalence of affects  159–​60 creating spaces to express ‘shameless’ views  171–​2 ‘cultural intimacy’ of meetings  165–​7 cynicism as embodied technique  167–​70 election successes  163, 165 Kyffhäuser meeting  167–​70 mitigating feelings towards non-​belonging  164–​5 perceived truths  169–​70 transforming registers of feeling  170–​2 ambivalence of affects  158–​60 Ancient Greece  42 Anderson, Elizabeth  117, 121–​2, 123, 125, 126 anger  5, 10–​30 absence of  35, 38–​9 chronological dimension of  15–​16, 23

in decision to ban asylum seekers’ school visits  209–​13 defining  13–​16, 31–​2 fast  4, 16, 20–​4 as juridical emotion  32 justification for  14–​15, 211 moving to justice from moral economies of  14 Nussbaum’s account of  14, 16, 32, 33–​5, 46, 48n7, 88, 209–​10, 211–​12, 219n2 payback  5, 210, 212 performances of ‘detached hostility’  21–​2, 23–​4 populism and  18–​19, 24–​6, 46–​7, 55 positive and negative qualities of  2 potential misuse of unjustified  212–​13 at racism  39–​40, 83 risky expressions of  45–​6 slow  4, 16–​19, 23 status  11, 34, 42, 46–​7, 210, 212 suppression of  38–​9 three types in political arena  11–​12 see also dignity, anger as; moral anger; moral anger, moving between frustration and; political anger ‘angry voters’  83–​4 ‘angry white men’  46, 47, 83–​4, 84–​5, 86, 157 Anhalt, Emily Katz  42 antagonistic anonymity  178, 181, 196 HRS photo case  intertextuality  194 technicality and presentation  193–​4 anti-​Muslim conspiracy theories  168, 169 Appadurai, Arjun  180, 181, 190 Appiah, Anthony Kwame  96, 103–​4 appraisal theory for emotions  57 Arendt, Hannah  15, 19, 24, 89, 90 Aristotle  13, 34, 36 army, United States  122–​3, 130n8 Arsuaga, Ignacio  148–​9, 150–​1

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asylum seekers’ school visits in Oulu  8–​9, 200–​22 background to ban  200–​2 negative political emotions in action  207–​17, 217–​18 anger  209–​13 incompatibility of ban with guidelines and principles  213–​14 misinformation and construction of fear  208–​9 politics of positive emotions as an alternative  214–​17, 218 purpose of visits  201 role of emotions in anti-​immigration and populist movements  202–​7 authenticity, problem of  76–​8, 83–​6 awareness discomfort  128, 130n5 B backlash politics  201, 217 negative emotions in  202–​7 Banaji, M.R.  118 Bargetz, Brigitte  160 Barrett, Lisa  111, 114, 115, 120 basic emotion view  127 bathroom lists  41 Berlant, Laurent  23, 113, 203 bias discomfort  113 see also interaction discomfort biases, implicit  113, 117, 123, 127 in hiring process  112, 116, 123 recognising interaction discomfort as arising from  119–​20 Billig, Michael  157 Black Lives Matter  83 Black Pete, Belgian  106, 107 Blair, Anthony  192–​3 blame, assigning  140–​1, 146, 147 Blee, Katherine  156, 162, 165, 172n8 bodily integrity, anger as expression of  36–​40 boundary violations  35–​6, 36–​7 Brighi, Elisabetta  75 Brison, Susan  37, 38 Brown, Brian  144, 151 Brown, Wendy  18, 85, 86, 87 Butler, Joseph  76 Butler, Judith  179, 180, 185, 192, 195, 196, 203 C Capabilities Approach (CA)  205 Chemaly, Soraya  39 Cherry, Myisha  41, 42, 202, 207, 211 Chesterton, Gilbert K.  143 children  protection of  144–​5 as truth-​tellers  146 Christian  conservative values  136 morality  16–​17

CitizenGo  146, 148, 150 citizenship education  207, 209, 213–​14, 217, 218 climate crisis  6, 98, 103–​4, 105–​6, 107 collective expressions of anger  33–​4, 40, 41–​2, 46, 47 collective identity, building  139 identifying the enemy  146–​7 performances and symbols that unite  142–​3 role of emotions in  203, 204 ‘us’ and ‘them’  140–​1, 204 compassion  215, 219n4, 219n5 Connolly, William E.  87 conspiracy theories  anti-​Muslim  168, 169 enemies of ‘natural families’  148–​9 constructive shame  100–​1 constructivist view of emotions  113, 114–​15, 119, 120 contact hypothesis  122 limitations  123–​4, 125 contempt  45 Cramer, Katherine  11, 83, 162 ‘cultural fit’, hiring processes and  112, 116 ‘cultural intimacy’ of populist politics  165–​7 cultural revolution  187–​90 culture talk  190 culture war, fighting  150–​1 cynicism, performing  167–​70 D Darwall, Stephen  35, 74 Death, Carl  139 dehumanisation, anger in responding to 39–​40, 44 democracy  citizenship education for  218 HRS agenda for human rights and liberal  178, 185–​6, 187, 190, 195, 196 phobic entrepreneurship and subversion of  181 democratic politics  and ambivalences of affect  158–​9 anger and  211–​13 decline of mass participation in  25 policies, procedures and principles to protect  213–​14, 216–​17, 218–​19 political emotions in  204–​6 political polarisation in  202, 204, 206, 216, 217 positive emotions in  215–​16, 217 resentment, ressentiment and  74–​5 democratic virtue  186–​7, 192 Der Flügel (The Wing)  163, 167, 172n7 desegregation  122, 124 ‘detached hostility’, anger performances of  21–​2, 23–​4 Dewey, J.  218 ‘diadic’ populism  24, 25–​6

224

INDEX

digital media platforms  10, 22, 23 dignified life, concepts of  96, 98, 103, 104, 105, 106 dignity  concepts  98 and shame  96–​7, 101, 104, 107 shaming and threat to  101–​2 dignity, anger as  4–​5, 31–​53 absence or stifling of anger  38–​9 account of  35–​6 anger, contempt and fear  45–​7 assertion of political presence  40–​2 experience versus expression of anger  42–​5 expressions of bodily integrity  36–​40 liberatory anger  32, 33, 35–​6, 39–​40, 41, 42, 44, 45 and Nussbaum’s account of anger  32, 33–​5 discomfort  6–​7, 111–​34 affective states of comfort and  114–​15 bias discomfort  113 costs of choosing  124–​9 duty to choose  113–​14, 117–​20, 125 ethics of proposal to seek exposure to  114, 124–​5 interaction discomfort  116–​17 managing interaction discomfort  120–​4 minorities and interaction with  111, 114, 118, 119–​20, 125 as political  114–​17 domestic abuse  37, 38, 39, 47 Dűhring, Eugen  79 E economic losses and anger  11–​12, 47 Ekman, Paul  127 elites  claiming to be the victim  148 contempt for  19, 24–​5, 84, 141 reversal of relation between ‘the people’ and  169 Elpidorou, Andreas  59 embarrassment  97–​8 emotional  differentiation  120 manipulation  22, 23, 44 synchrony  115–​16 emotions theory  2–​4 empathy  116 the enemy  146–​7 fighting back  150–​1 power and malicious motives  148–​9 epistemic friction  124 epistemological barriers  181, 194–​5 expressions of anger  collective  33–​4, 40, 41–​2, 46, 47 versus experience of anger  42–​5 gender and race in entitlement to  45–​7

F ‘family annihilation’  100 family, ‘natural’  143–​6 far-​r ight populist politics  7–​8, 156–​76 affective dimensions in Germany  163–​70 ambivalence of affects  158–​60 ‘cultural intimacy’ of meetings  165–​7 cynicism as embodied technique  167–​70 Finns Party  200, 201, 210 functionality of affect  160–​3 methodology  158 mitigating feelings towards non-​belonging  164–​5 Progress Party  182 transforming registers of feeling  170–​2 see also Alternative für Deutschland (AfD); Human Rights Service (HRS) fast anger  4, 16, 20–​4 favouritism, in-​group  118 fear  3–​4, 178–​9 ‘crawling sideways’  188–​9 culturally racist justification of  189–​90 populist rhetoric of  206, 208–​9 relationship between anger, contempt and  45–​7 fear appeals, HRS  8, 177, 178, 184, 185, 186–​7 culture as a basis for  189, 190 enabling reversed victimology  190 shaping public’s view of Muslim identities  180, 181 within a wider phobic discourse  179 ‘feeling rules’  165, 166–​7, 171 feeling theory of emotion  3 fetishes  180–​1 fictionalisation of politics  194 Finnish National Core Curriculum  201, 202, 207, 209, 213, 214 Finnish Non-​Discrimination Act  213 Finns Party  200, 201, 210 floating signifiers  179–​80, 188, 189 flygskam (flying shame)  95, 105–​6, 107 Forchtner, Bernhard  163, 164 Ford, Christine Blasey  23 Foucault, Michel  18 Freud, Sigmund  17 frustration  as an affective state  56–​8 as an intentional state  58–​61 political  54–​6, 71 a response to an opposition  57, 59 frustration, moving between anger and  5, 55–​6, 61–​4, 70–​1 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)  61–​3, 64–​5, 66, 67–​8, 68–​9 assessing movement  64–​70 South African student protests  54–​5, 63–​4, 65, 66–​7, 69–​70 functionality of affect  160–​3

225

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G gender ideology  145 Gendler, Tamar  114, 127 Gleason, P.  202, 206, 216 governmentality  18 green guilt  6, 98–​9 green shame  6, 95–​110 ability to change behaviour  99–​102 account of shame  96–​9 changing behaviour for better  102–​5 discomforts of  106, 107, 108n5 efficiency for behavioural change  105–​7 focusing on large companies  102, 105–​6 green shaming and feelings of  99–​102 greenhouse gas emissions  105 Greenwald, A.G.  118 group identity, promoting  122–​3 see also collective identity, building guilt  97, 100, 102, 107 green  6, 98–​9 H Hansen, Mark  24 Haslanger, Sally  117 hate  anti-​immigration rhetoric of  203 articulation in far-​r ight politics  147, 165, 171 groups  138, 141, 186 see also World Congress of Families (WCF) love and  138, 141, 186 as opposed to anger  40 speech  171, 210–​11 hijab  191, 193, 194 hiring processes  awareness discomfort and  128 comfort trumping qualifications  128 ‘cultural fit’  112, 116 discomfort of interviewee  119–​20, 125 overcoming implicit bias  123 questioning gut feeling  119 Hobbes, Thomas  23 Hochschild, Arlie  11, 19, 47, 55, 140, 158, 159, 162, 165, 171 Hodap, Christa  46 honour, codes of  103–​4 hope  215 Human Rights Service (HRS)  8, 177–​99 background  182–​4 ‘cultural revolution’  187–​90 fear appeals  8, 177, 178, 184, 185, 186–​7 culture as a basis for  189, 190 enabling reversed victimology  190 shaping public’s view of Muslim identities  180, 181 within a wider phobic discourse  179 frontier between Norway and Islam  188 funding  182 Islamophobic discourse analysis  178–​84

liberal democratic and human rights agenda  178, 185–​6, 187, 190, 195, 196 manufacturing predatory majorities  190–​2 meta-​discursive frame of webpage  184–​5 mimicking of HRW logo  185, 186 mission statement  185–​6 moral economy of exclusion  184–​7 myth of the people’s home  190–​1 photo case  178, 180, 181, 182–​3, 183, 184, 187–​8, 191, 192–​5 antagonistic anonymity  193–​4 epistemological barriers  194–​5 Human Rights Watch (HRW)  185, 186 humiliation  97 I identity  non-​belonging and national  164–​5, 209 politics  84, 85, 86 promoting group  122–​3 symbolic identity building  139 see also collective identity, building implicit biases  113, 117, 123, 127 in hiring process  112, 116, 123 recognising interaction discomfort as arising from  119–​20 imposter syndrome  120 information, over-​abundance of  22 integration, formal and informal social  122–​4, 126, 128 interaction discomfort  116–​17 costs of choosing  124–​9 dealing with exposure to  111, 118, 125 duty to choose  113–​14, 117–​20, 125 making tolerable  124 managing  120–​4 minorities and  111, 114, 118, 119–​20, 125 interoception  114–​15 interpersonal relationships  60, 62, 63 intertextuality  194 Islamophobic discourse, analysis of  178–​84 J Jackson, T.  211 Jacquet, Jennifer  96, 98–​9, 102 Jaggar, Alison  38, 59 Jamison, Leslie  38–​9, 49n12 Jasper, James  61–​2, 138, 139, 140 Jongen, Marc  159 juridical emotion, anger as  32 justice, problem of  78–​81, 87–​9 K Kahneman, Daniel  15–​16 Kalbitz, Andreas  167–​8, 169, 170 Kavanaugh, Brett  23 Kierkegaard, Søren  77–​8 Kimmel, Michael  47, 157 Kinnvall, Catarina  163, 200, 203, 208, 209

226

INDEX

Klein, Melanie  20–​1 Kølvraa, Christoffer  164 Kyffhäuser meeting  167–​70 L Laclau, Ernesto  178, 179, 180, 187, 189, 190 the law  87–​8, 89 expressions of anger in  43–​5 Lazarus, Richard  56, 57 Leboeuf, Celine  39, 40 liberatory anger  32, 33, 35–​6, 39–​40, 41, 42, 44, 45 lists of transgressors  40–​2 Lorde, Audre  12, 15, 40, 45–​6, 47, 83, 86, 160, 211 love  215 ambivalence of  160 and hate  138, 141, 186 object of  143–​6 political  215 Lübcke, Walter  171 M Maes, Hans  101 Magni, G.  11, 18–​19 Manne, Kate  33, 47, 100 mansplaining  36–​7, 53 manspreading  35–​6, 36–​7 media cycle  23 Medina, J.  124, 128 melancholia  17, 18 Meloni, Giorgia  147, 149 men, ‘angry white’  46, 47, 83–​4, 84–​5, 86, 157 men’s rights movement  46 meta-​discursive frames  184–​5 Miller, Chanel  37–​8, 44 misogyny  47 Mol, Annemarie  162 moral anger  55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 140–​1 reactive attitude  60, 61, 62, 64 moral anger, moving between frustration and  5, 55–​6, 61–​4, 70–​1 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)  61–​3, 64–​5, 66, 67–​8, 68–​9 assessing movement  64–​70 South African student protests  54–​5, 63–​4, 65, 66–​7, 69–​70 moral economy of exclusion  184–​7 moral relationships  60, 62 breakdown in  63, 69, 70 moral revolutions  96, 103–​4, 107 Mouffe, Chantal  24, 113, 159, 178, 179, 187, 189, 203, 204, 216, 217 Muslims, legitimising illiberal politics of exclusion towards  cultural revolution  187–​90 frontier between Norway and Islam  188 HRS fear appeals  8, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185, 186–​7, 189, 190

HRS photo case of Muslims as ‘others’  178, 180, 181, 182–​3, 183, 184, 187–​8, 192–​5 Islamophobic discourse analysis  178–​84 moral economy of exclusion  184–​7 Muslim women’s bodies  191–​2, 193, 194 predatory majorities and  190–​2 myths  180, 190–​1 N national identity, non-​belonging and 164–​5, 209 nationalist parties and movements  10, 139, 157, 200 attitudes of supporters of  21, 157 Finns Party  200, 201, 210 role of emotions in  202–​7 triadic populism of right-​wing  24–​5 see also Alternative für Deutschland (AfD); far-​r ight populist politics; Human Rights Service (HRS) neoliberalism  18, 25, 85 Nietzsche, Friedrich  16, 17, 75, 78–​81, 86, 87–​9, 91, 156 Nixon, R.  26 nodal points  179–​80, 184, 188, 189 Nussbaum, Martha  44, 112, 160, 208, 209 anger  14, 16, 32, 33–​5, 46, 48n7, 88, 209–​10, 211–​12, 219n2 political emotions  202, 203, 204–​7, 209–​10, 217 politics of positive emotions  215–​16, 217, 218 shame and shaming  95–​6, 97, 99, 100–​1, 103 transition-​anger  212 victim impact statements  43–​4 O Olschanski, Reinhard  78 oppression, anger as a response to  14–​15, 211 ordinary affects  161 ‘outlaw emotions’  38 P paranoid-​schizoid position  20–​1 Parekh, Bhikhu  208, 210 passive emotions, turning into active emotions  138–​41, 150, 151–​2 Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident (PEGIDA)  157, 171 payback anger  5, 210, 212 perception theory  3 performance anxiety  120 Pete pact  106, 107 phobic discourse analysis  178–​84 phobic entrepreneurs  179, 181 photo case, Human Rights Service (HRS)  178, 180, 181, 182–​3, 183, 184, 187–​8, 191, 192–​5 antagonistic anonymity  193–​4 epistemological barriers  194–​5

227

THE POLITICS OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

Pilkington, Hilary  162–​3 polarisation, political  202, 204, 206, 216, 217 efforts to resolve issues of  207, 214–​15 political affect  157 ambivalence in far-​r ight politics  158–​60 authenticity and  83–​6 in far-​r ight populist politics in Germany  163–​70 functionality of  160–​3 rationality and  82–​3 political anger  11–​12, 31, 35, 40–​2 at asylum seekers’ school visits  209–​13 feminist  31, 32 involving frustration  70–​1 justifiability and usefulness of  211 liberatory  33, 38, 44 relationship to contempt and fear  45–​7 political emotions  112–​13, 202, 203 in asylum seekers’ school visits  207–​17 cultivating positive  206, 207, 217, 218 Mouffe on  204 Nussbaum on  202, 203, 204–​7, 209–​10, 217 political love  215 political polarisation  202, 204, 206, 216, 217 efforts to resolve issues of  207, 214–​15 politics of affect  157, 159, 160, 161 populism  anger of populist voters and supporters 18–​19, 46–​7, 55 ‘detached hostility’ of anger performances  21–​2, 23–​4 ‘diadic’  24, 25–​6 discourse on elites  19, 24–​5 leadership  12, 19, 25 links between economic downturns and support for  11–​12, 47 offering alternatives to ‘establishment’  204 political frustration of supporters of  55 real time, disruptive anger of  11, 12, 21 rhetoric of misinformation and fear  206, 208–​9 rise of  10, 55 role of emotions in  10, 202–​7 time for anger  24–​6 ‘triadic’  24–​5 ‘wrestling match’ of contemporary  216 xenophobic  177, 183, 190, 195 see also far-​r ight populist politics positive emotions  2, 3, 4, 217–​18 for an alternative handling of asylum seekers’ school visits  214–​17, 218 appeal to  143–​6 combining negative emotions with  138, 141, 152, 186 cultivating political  206, 207, 217, 218 Nussbaum’s politics of  215–​16, 217, 218 positive reinforcement mechanisms  106 ‘post-​shame’  171

Pötzsch, Holger  181, 189, 194, 195 predatory majorities  178, 181, 190–​2 pride, inculcating courage and  139–​40 primitive shame  103 Prinz, Jesse  3 Progress Party (PP)  182 public expressions of anger  43–​5, 49n12 R race, gender and expression of anger  45–​6 racial stigmatisation  117, 202, 208, 209 racism  40, 190 anger at  39–​40, 83 explicit  123, 125 in US Army  123 racist activism  162–​3 racist stereotypes  83, 106, 116–​17 rage  19, 20, 39 ‘banks’  19, 24 as distinct from anger  32 rape  37–​8, 44 victim statements  37, 44–​5 rapists, lists of  40–​2 rationality  203 expressions of  43–​5 of ‘good’ politics  158–​9 problem of  76–​8, 82–​3 recognition respect  32, 35 demands for  40, 45–​6 registers of feeling, transformation of  170–​2 resentment  4, 11, 12, 25, 57, 60 distinguishing ressentiment from  17–​18 gratification of  76 resentment–​ressentiment complex  6, 74–​94 authenticity problem  76–​8, 83–​6 democracy and  74–​5 just sentiments  81–​6 justice problem  78–​81, 87–​9 politics and ressentiment  86–​91 rationality problem  76–​8, 82–​3 residential integration  126 respect  35, 45, 186 loss of  100 see also recognition respect ressentiment  4, 17, 19, 74, 156 distinguishing resentment from  17–​18 see also resentment–​ressentiment complex retributive anger  5, 210, 212 revenge  anger and desire for  32, 34, 41, 47 justice and  76, 79–​80, 87 narrative of men’s rights movement  46 revolutionary age  77, 90 Rivera, Lauren  112, 116, 128 S Sanchez Gonzalez, Lisa  39 Sartre, Jean-​Paul  14, 15, 23

228

INDEX

schools  desegregation  122, 124 WCF criticism of policies in  145 see also asylum seekers’ school visits in Oulu self-​defence, anger as a form of  44 self-​respect  100, 101, 104, 211 selfhood, reclaiming boundaries of  36–​40 Sexton, Jared  46 shame  96–​9 constructive  100–​1 difference between shaming and feeling  101 and dignity  96–​7, 101, 104, 107 post-​  171 pride replacing  139 primitive  103 ‘wrong’ objects of  102–​3, 107 see also green shame shamelessness  171–​2 shaming  95–​6, 100–​2, 107 difference between feeling shame and  101 large companies  102 Shelby, Tommie  125, 126 Shitty Media Men list  41 Shoshan, Nitzan  162, 165 Sloterdijk, P.  17, 19, 20, 21 slow anger  4, 16–​19 smothered by ‘fast anger’  23 Smith, Adam  76, 82 social integration, formal and informal  122–​4, 126, 128 social movements and emotions  136–​41 inculcating pride and courage  139–​40 love and hate  141 symbolic identity building  139 ‘us’ and ‘them’  140–​1 see also World Congress of Families (WCF) Solomon, Robert  2–​3, 14, 31–​2, 36, 82 Sontag, Susan  192 Sorial, Sarah  44 speech, right to angry  83 Srinivasan, A.  14, 59, 113, 202, 204, 206, 211, 212, 213, 215 status anger  11, 34, 42, 46–​7, 210, 212 Stegemann, Bernd  78 Stein, Abby  38, 39 Stein, Arlene  138, 139 stereotypes  of Muslim women  194 racist  83, 106, 116–​17 Stewart, Kathleen  157, 161–​2 stigmatisation  117, 202, 208, 209, 211, 218 reducing  215, 217 Stolcke, Verena  189 Story of Access  111, 118 Strangers in their own land?  158 Strawson, Peter  60 student protests, South African  54–​5, 63–​4, 65, 66–​7, 69–​70

suffering  16–​17, 90–​1 Sullivan, Susan  115, 116, 119 surveillance of the ‘other’  192 T target of anger  32, 34, 41 Teroni, Fabrice  3, 58, 59 theory, emotions  2–​4 Thomason, Krista  97, 100, 107–​8n1 transition-​anger  212 ‘triadic’ populism  24–​5 Trump, Donald  anger performances  11, 21, 23 negative emotions under administration of  206 supporters of  11, 19, 46–​7, 84–​5, 162 Twitter exchanges  22, 37, 151 U unemployment  11 UNESCO Global Citizenship Education (GCE) framework  213–​14 Urban, Jörg  165–​6 Ure, Michael  74–​5 ‘us’ and ‘them’  140–​1, 164, 204, 216 V valence  2–​4 victim impact statements  37, 43–​5 victimhood, narratives of  148, 181, 190 violence  anger expressed through  42–​3 fast anger and  20, 21, 23–​4 ‘righteous’  181, 183, 187, 195 slow  26 W Walker, Margaret Urban  63 Wetherell, Margaret  160, 162, 169 white men, ‘angry’  46, 47, 83–​4, 84–​5, 86, 157 Wodak, Ruth  156, 171, 179, 181, 183, 184, 193, 194 women  anger  31, 32 absence or stfling of  38–​9 as assertion of political presence  40–​2 as an expression of bodily integrity  36–​9 public expressions of  43–​5, 49n12 risks in expressing  45–​6 deserving of dignity and respect  31, 35–​6 discursive positioning of women’s bodies  191–​2, 193, 194 veiled  191, 193, 194 WCF and portrayals of  145, 146 World Congress of Families (WCF)  7, 135–​55 combining of positive and negative emotions  138, 141, 152 inculcating pride and courage  139–​40

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THE POLITICS OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

love and hate  141 social movements and emotions  136–​41 symbolic identity building  139 turning passive emotions into active emotions  138–​41, 150, 151–​2 umbrella organisation  136 ‘us’ and ‘them’  140–​1 World Congress of Families (WCF), Verona conference 2019  135, 142–​51 emphasis on heroism  151 enemy’s power and malicious motives  148–​9 feminist protests  135

fighting culture war  150–​1 identifying the enemy  146–​7 ‘the natural family’  143–​6 opening ceremony  142–​3 performances and symbols that unite  142–​3 portrayal as victim  148 promotional video  143 research methodology  142 Wutbürger (irate citizens)  84, 157 Y Yancy, George  39–​40

230