War and Media Network

What is the relationship between emotions and broader collective cultural and political life? How might the dynamics of emotion be shaped and modulated to a political process of better governance and an enhancement of the public’s engagement within the contemporary public sphere? What might political leadership and electoral deference look like in a political sphere irretrievably changed and necessarily attuned to the rise of therapeutic language within popular culture? What can journalists do to enhance mannered and inquiring political coverage? These are some of the challenging themes of Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror. This book continues the author’s engagement with the psychosocial politics of popular culture and politics already undertaken with considerable success since earlier work such as Disciplines of Delight (1994). This book similarly uses a detailed knowledge of object relations psychoanalysis and the psychology of human relations in a study of contemporary political times. It reflects upon the role, and potential mobilisation of, emotions in debates, representations and potentially the political practice of governance in an ‘age of suspicion’ dominated by the spectre of terrorism.

Emotional Governance is one of a number of texts that has emerged within cultural and media studies since the late 1990s dealing with emotion; for example, Sarah Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) exemplifies recent provocative scholarly work on the cultural politics of various emotions – shame, hate, fear, disgust and, less often, hope. Richards similarly weaves current concerns about the interrelationship between the psychic and cultural production of emotion, referencing variously: the role of popular media; the ethical and political demands upon journalism in an emotionally volatile period defined as post 9/11 and the nature of collective identity. He asks how to inspire public political engagement in a post-Diana era with its attendant decline of public deference to traditional bastions of institutional respect. Richards thus situates his exploration of ‘emotional governance’ within the key themes that inform our current political times. He underscores the management of emotion as central to current powerful leaderships whether political, corporate or socio-cultural and, unsurprisingly, the emotional impact and media coverage of terrorism as a key issue in liberal democracies. The book acknowledges the pressing task facing many governments of managing social tensions and conflicts in a world where globalisation has accelerated an awareness of inter-faith and inter-ethnic relations and where immigration and the viability of the nation-state for mediating collective popular identification with others has challenged democratic institutions. Richards also acknowledges the obligation facing journalists who play a key role in building the emotional environment in which politics occurs , brokering the relationship between the political elites and the people to ensure a deliberative democracy.

Provocatively, he argues that ‘containment’ is a psychoanalytic model that offers a template for the management of public feeling. Unbearable images of famine, bomb victims, war causalities or riot scenes proliferate on our TV screens. The voice-over of a correspondent or newsreader may offer contrasting images of ‘good social objects’ to introject, providing a sense of hope and fortitude. Yet, ‘rottweiler’ journalistic culture which attacks and polarises debate by default undermines the potential of news to contain, instead intensifying and exacerbating social and political divisions to provoke public anxiety or simply turn us off through the boring repetition of superficial political clashes.

Emotional Governance reviews current thinking on the rise of therapeutic culture in the latter part of the twentieth century, the dominance of therapeutic discourses in popular media and the increasing way we, the public, live our lives with a greater attentiveness to our intimate relationships. The media foremost have popularised the axioms that emotional work is the key to self-fulfilment or discovery and that emotion is a marker of self-credibility and of the authenticity of public figures –including politicians - via such criteria as emotional transparency. Academics have charted the inexorable slide of mainstream politics into media-managed sound bites and personality contests. Few have attended to the psychic underpinnings of this trend. Richards’ contribution is to argue for serious consideration of the emotional dimensions of citizenship via analysis which avoids a polarisation of reason and emotion: an inevitable fallback critique of any attempt to engage with the political via psychoanalytic concepts.

Richards unpicks the concept of a ‘democracy of feelings’ to interrogate what democracy might mean in the light of emotional freedom of expression. Firstly, he highlights the problem of the liberal state in managing racism and other expressions of politicised hate. The psychoanalytic precept that negative feelings cannot be dealt with by repression or censorship, that they must be confronted and worked through, given psychic space, is applied to collectively-held negative feelings and public space. Richards’ model of informed journalistic debate is one arena in which this working through could take place. He highlights the centrality of the media in managing the affective economies of emotional response to terrorism. Here, he follows on from research into journalism’s role post 9/11 such as Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan’s (eds.) Journalism After September 11 (2002). Richards contends that an horrific event such as a massive terrorist attack provokes our inherent drive to know the reality of it – the moment of blast, the displaced body parts, the debris of possessions. Journalism’s role is to provide information on the sequence of events, elicit survivor accounts, chart repair. The emotional labour any journalist must ideally undertake involves reporting which ‘does not avoid the empirical object of dread’ but attempts contextualisation and complex reflection.

The problem of dispassionate politics is manifest in low voter turnout over the last three decades and a widely articulated popular cynicism about mainstream politics per se. Yet, public passion is sometimes present and Richards suggests that there has been a dearth of research into the coalescence of a global public around international celebrities from sport, entertainment and politics. The emotional investments in figures such as Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela signal a potentially vast and complex proportional representation system buoyed up by media presence and underpinned by audience interest. Richards argues that the emotional aridity of much mediated politics stems from what we could perhaps understand as a performance of visceral emotional engagement which actually masks a rigid stylised reportage in which scorn, pessimism and a defensive ‘bias against hope’. Some professional groups, such as the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, and work on ‘peace journalism’ have sought to instil critical reflexivity on the part of journalists to their positioning within, what Richards identifies, as the nodal point between political, emotional and media literacy.

The last quarter of Emotional Governance explores the dynamics of public fear in response to terrorism. Richards suggests that his generic model could be applied to fear of crime, environmental catastrophe or epidemic. Current risk averse, risk fearful cultures are perhaps the implicit backdrop here. Richards argues that there is little evidence of the British government inflating public anxiety about terrorism on the domestic front despite the abstract language preferred to describe international events. In contrast, the mediatised discourse of the ‘war on terror’ as an apocalyptic war on evil both in its official USA government version and in its reiterations in headlines and editorials inevitably comes under attack. Similarly deconstructed is the one-dimensional representation of the terrorist as a pragmatic and rational subject driven to violence by the failure of all other avenues to promote a good cause. Richards also highlights the role of terrorists as media producers – the televising of post-attack scenes, release of beheading videos, screen grabs of bin Laden’s pronouncements – all illustrating the relatively new factor of the direct address to publics by terrorists. Less convincing for this reviewer was the proposal for ‘emotional audits’ of public passions through polling results to establish, via psychodynamic theory, group anxieties, defences and impulses of Muslim, non-Muslim and terrorist groups. This is, as Richards acknowledges, a quite crude model and should be taken perhaps as a provocation for further research into the complex constitution of the national public mind. The aim is for data to guide emotional management and containment of the full range of feelings towards publicly perceived dangers, risks or fears.

This is a rich book and its strengths lie in its capacity to provoke further work on both contemporary political debates and policy: asylum and immigration, international terrorism, possession of economic resources, climate change and environmental risk would all benefit from Richard’s approach. Some would argue that Richards’ sketches of adversarial political journalism are too sweeping and would similarly question his focus on political leaders over more functional political groups. But this is an important book that bravely links emotions and mainstream politics and contains a provocative plea for a contingent and critical deference by individuals to their elected political leaders properly enabled via an educated engagement by our media representatives.

Review by Heather Nunn
Reader in Media dn Cultural Studies
Roehampton University

to top