2024-10-13 12:13:00
For several years it has been fashionable in the academic world to more elegantly study the broad field of feelings – emotions. There are approaches, often well-funded special areas of research, in art theory, linguistics and literary studies. There are intra-academic reasons for this, but probably also simple secular reasons of an increasingly complex world and the emotional challenges it offers. When Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz presents an emotional theory of modern consciousness, people prick up their ears.
With books like “Why Love Hurts” and “The Salvation of the Modern Soul,” Illouz created a separate area between popular sociology and time diagnostics, which in the age of mindfulness may seem like the academic equivalent an hour on the yoga mat. . Our emotional life follows the rules of the market: this is the central thesis of the scientist, born in Morocco in 1961 and who now teaches, among others, in Paris and Jerusalem.
Illouz explained this thesis in a surprising way, in texts on postmodern forms of love that ranged widely from Proust to “Sex and the City,” usually combined with a rather predictable and choreographed critique of capitalism and its so-called consumer culture. After love, it makes sense to deal with the immediately higher category: feelings as a whole.
“Be aware of your feelings, then you will be authentic and lead a truly meaningful life”: Emotional authenticity has become the seal of authenticity for mental health and happiness, writes Illouz, a message present at all levels of high culture and popular, it is also endlessly recycled by the “colonous psychological consultancy industry”. But Illouz is not concerned with these conceptions of feelings – as error or as truth.
Instead, for her, emotions are “stylized moments of being, moments in which we engage with a situation in a certain way, sometimes hopelessly.” In the next 400 pages it is not clear what these “stylized moments of being” are and to what extent they are to be understood epistemologically – and it is not even clear what kind of work Illouz actually wrote here: the examples refer to a book published by an academic publisher sometimes treated too essayistically, many of the central concepts remain completely obscure, such as that of hope, so much so that the ideas of Robert Schuman and Martin Luther King suddenly seem to be just two sides of the same coin.
Emotions as an arm of society
When it comes to making a diagnosis of the times, the array of theorists cited often seems like a dusty who’s who of left-wing social criticism: Pierre Bourdieu, Émile Durkheim, Édouard Louis. At the same time, an “we” is used, which leaves it unclear who he is referring to. However, “Explosive Modernity” exposes a fundamental idea for our time: precisely because “we” understand ourselves as individuals and use our feelings as a kind of final justification, “we” forget how little our intimate experience is just ours – “to extend to a certain extent the feelings, the arm of society into the self”.
Feelings would thus become the reality through which the individual perceives himself and much of his social world; They transform themselves into the basis and object of social relations and in this way acquire an objective reality, which in turn makes it emotional. Illouz uses as an example the complex of anger and disappointment cultivated by populists of our time.
The book “Explosive Modernity” contains very interesting approaches to the emotional physiognomy of modern consciousness; It is not a complete sociology of emotional movements between modernity and postmodernity.
Eva Illouz: Explosive modernity. Translated from English by Michael Adrian. Suhrkamp, 447 pages, 32 euros
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