Source: https://pixabay.com/en/anger-angry-bad-isolated-dangerous-18615/

News coverage of protests and the activists which engage in them forms into patterns; media tends to highlight the extreme, irrational, angry, and violent segments of collective action (Corrigall-Brown and Wilkes 2012; Winter and Klaehn 2005). We can turn to the recent example of the Black Lives Matter movement shown shouting down presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

Why does the nature of news media depictions of activists’ emotional expressions matter? Evoking the wrong emotion in the public can alienate potential supporters. In the United States emotion and rationality are still often treated as dichotomous and mutually exclusive perspectives (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001). Being classified as overly emotional or having the improper emotional response can undermine activist attempts to be considered legitimate in the eyes of the public.

Any extreme emotion has the potential to backfire but anger in particular is a contentious emotion. Anger is rooted in a sense of injustice or unfairness. Stearns and Stearns (1986: 211) trace the development of cultural meanings attached to the expression of anger; as they write, “[the] goal of restricting anger…forms an important part of the American character ideal over a two-hundred-year span.” The authors argue the present focus on emotional control reflects an Enlightenment-era commitment to democratic egalitarianism. This represents a shift away from traditional hierarchal social organization where anger is justified as a tool for exercising power. Following this line of thinking, expressions of anger may be interpreted as emotional manipulation or an attempt to circumnavigate legitimized ‘civil’ consensus-building processes. Differences in emotional expressions and their perceived legitimacy may distinguish who makes a “worthy victim” and thus who has claims worthy of petitioning for change. Thus, emotions can be a liability for social movements. To understand the means through which emotions can inhibit social movements we should probe the question of why news media relies on the trope of the “perpetually angry activist.”

Sociologists who study mass media have long focused on how the profit imperative guides the structure and content of news broadcasts. Mainstream news media organizations (including but not limited to NBC, CNN, FOX, ABC, and CBS) are corporations which are ultimately motivated by a drive to make money for their owners and shareholders. In order to make a profit news media must demonstrate to companies looking to advertise their products that they have a captive audience of consumers. News organizations prefer harmony amongst their coverage; previous coverage tends to beget future coverage. As a result of these patterns, imagery that is “familiar, expected, and compatible with the mainstream experience” tends to get the most coverage (Doerr, Mattoni and Teune 2013). News media follows a logic of safety which assumes that which has garnered rating in the past will continue to capture the attention of viewers in the future. Testing a novel and innovative approach can be deemed dangerous and a potential threat to profit if news media producers cannot be sure viewers will tune in. If news media has previously shown activists affiliated with a particular social movement as angry, they may select current video clips which replicate these prior broadcasts to present a consistent story and maintain their viewership.

Clearly, journalists make decisions about what stories to cover and what angle to pursue within these constraints. In addition to modeling past coverage, news media may depict activists as angry due to the sources from which they collect their information.  Previous research has found journalistic recountings reflect the sanctioned perspectives of businesses and government (Silcock 2008; Wilkes 2015). The logic of safety cultivates a tendency to rely on the government and the economic elite for information (Ryfe 2006). The tendency to defer to ‘official’ sources is facilitated by bureaucratic affinity between news organizations and these sources. What is bureaucratic affinity? It means news media and the government and corporations are structured in similar ways. Government and large businesses usually have a dedicated public relations department with whom news media have established relationships and thus can contact quickly for comment. The government and corporations may support framing activists as angry because social movements are often contesting their claims to and enactment of power. Social movements may not be provided with the opportunity to challenge official narratives; social movement organizations, especially newly-emergent social movement organizations, may not have easily-identifiable “point” people whom news media can locate without additional effort while under tight deadlines to ask for their perspectives.

News media routines result in depictions of activists which emphasize angry emotional expressions. Obviously, sometimes activists are upset. I am not claiming news media has fabricated these instances. What I am claiming, however, is that the news media does not reflect the full scope of activists’ activity. The nearly-sole focus on anger and the failure of news media to depict a diversity of circumstances and a range of emotional expressions matters for the success of activists’ campaigns for social change. Shifting these depictions may mean targeting their institutional roots in traditional forms of media and constructing their own narratives which activists can control through social media.

Additional Reading:

1. Corrigall-Brown, Catherine. 2012. “The Power of Pictures: Images of Politics and Protest.” American Behavioral Scientist 56(2): 131-134.

2. Doerr, Nicole, Alice Mattoni, and Simon Teune. 2013. “Toward a Visual Analysis of Social Movements, Conflict, and Political Mobilization.” Pp. xi-1 in Advances in the Visual Analysis of Social Movements. Eds. N. Doerr, A. Mattoni, and S. Teune. Bradford, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Ltd.

3. Goodwin, Jeff, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta. 2001. “Why Emotions Matter,” Pp. 1-24 in Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Eds.  J. Goodwin, J. M. Jasper and F. Polletta. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

4. Silcock, B. William. 2008. “The Battle of Ideological Images: CNN vs. FOX in Visual Framing of the Invasion of Iraq.” Electronic News 2(3): 153-177.

5. Stearns, Carol Zisowitz and Peter N. Stearns. 1986. Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

6. Wilkes, Rima. 2015. “Political Conflict Photographs and Their Keyword Texts.” Journalism Studies. Released early online.

7. Winter, James and Jeffrey Klaehn. 2005. “The Propaganda Model Under Protest” Pp. 164-186 in Filtering the News: Essays on Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model ed. J. Klaehn. Black Rose Books: Canada.

At the end of 2014, there were an estimated 19.5 million refugees worldwide. This crisis was drawn once again into sharp light as Syrian refugees flooded Europe in recent months. Many of these people are families with children, forced to flee their homes or risk their safety.

Join us Friday, October 16, 12:00pm – 1:00pm EST for a virtual roundtable discussion on migration and the refugee crisis. Our panel of experts span the social sciences and humanities to examine issues of refugees and migration ranging from ethics, family studies, and geo-political. Register today as seating is limited!

Our Panelists

Dr. Immanuel Ness is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Editor-in-Chief of The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Ness’ research focuses on labor, urban political economy, migration, imperialism, and social mobilizations, worker insurrections, strikes, solidarity in Global North and Global South.

He is a labor activist who founded the New York Unemployed Committee, Lower East Side Community-Labor Coalition and labor organizer for several unions.

Dr. Serena Parekh is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University, where she also holds the position as Director of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program. Her primary research interests are in social and political philosophy, feminist theory, continental philosophy, and the philosophy of human rights.

Dr. Parekh has contributed to noted journals such as Hypatia, Philosophy Compass, and The Southern Journal of Philosophy. She is also the Editor of the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy.

Dr. Reenee Singh is a family therapist based in London at the House Partnership. She is also Co-Director at the Tavistock and UEL Family Therapy and Systemic Research Centre as well as Editor of the Journal of Family Therapy.

Singh holds a particular interest in the intersection of therapy, race and culture. She attributes her personal history and cultural context, growing up in India and having lived and worked in Singapore, as an influence her approach to therapy, research, supervision and training.

Doubtless I am not alone among the contributors to Sociology Lens in having been exposed, during my first year as an undergraduate, to an array of foundational thinkers in sociology (and anthropology) who present human history as a movement away from ‘traditional’, ‘face–to–face’ or ‘kinship–based’ societies, towards those in which interaction and identity is less relational, and more individualized. Such theorizing is not only limited to the classical sociologists who wrote in the 1900s, like Ferdinand Tönnies and Émile Durkheim; it resurfaces again in the sociology of the 1990s. In the writings of Anthony Giddens, “the self” is seen less as a product of interactions and relations with others, and more as a matter of individual “self–fashioning.” Or, as Giddens (now Baron Giddens) wrote in 1991, “in the context of a post–traditional order, the self becomes a reflexive project” (p. 32).

And yet, this literature on individualization and self–fashioning as the signature mode of existence in ‘modernity’, associated not only with Giddens but also with Ulrich Beck and Zygmunt Bauman, becomes increasingly difficult to square with the ongoing proliferation of apparently ‘social’ measures and projects: from ‘social enterprise’ or ‘social business’ and ‘social return on investment’, to the even more ubiquitous social media platforms and social marketing initiatives. In the UK, the National Centre for Social Marketing describes social marketing as an approach that uses behavioural economics (see Roger Tyers’ post for Sociology Lens here) to change behaviour for the benefit of “society as a whole.” Similarly, the UK’s national body for social enterprise describes such enterprises as businesses that “trade to tackle social problems…when they profit, society profits.” And the New Economics Foundation’s vision of social return on investment tools are described as alternatives to conventional cost–benefit analysis, which “does not consider anything beyond simple costs and price.” Social return on investment tools thus incorporate “social factors” when accounting for the value generated by an investment.

But what exactly is going on here? For some, perhaps, these methods for generating and measuring ‘social’ value may be nothing more than a smokescreen for the extension of market rationalities into previously insulated domains of our lives. David Harvie, for instance, has argued that the apparently well intentioned moves towards social investment in the UK are “designed to harness community based ethical concerns for the purposes of profit–making.” (It is perhaps not without significance that Harvie identifies Anthony Giddens, the sociologist who purported to describe a movement toward individualization, as a key figure in reconstructing the ‘welfare state’ as the ‘social investment state’.) The danger, Harvie notes – and Eve Chiapello has made a parallel point in her ongoing work looking at ‘social investment’ in the French housing sector – is that social investors demand not only a clearly defined social impact, but a “competitive” rate of return. Since what monetary units or ‘units of capital’ do is make the profitability of different ventures comparable, Harvie argues, a social investment in probation work in, say, Peterborough will force those probation workers “to compete with probation workers in Liverpool, the waged workers and unwaged volunteers running a youth employment skills project in East London [and] the workers employed by FTSE100 Companies.”

Anthropologists studying that even more ubiquitous ‘social’ domain, social media, have, however put a rather different interpretive spin on this apparent return of the social. Daniel Miller, for instance, is a long–time critic of the sociologists like Bauman who view consumption as a manifestation of individualism and individualization, rather than as a social process through which persons are made via their relationships (see here and here). In a precursor article to his 2011 ethnography of Trinidadian Facebook use, Tales from Facebook, Miller argued that Facebook “radically transforms the premise and direction of social science,” challenging the assumption with which this blog post started, that “human societies exhibit a slow but constant trajectory away from what are taken to be an earlier state in which people lived in communities, based around close kinship ties and devotion to immediate social relationships” (pp. 2–3). Facebook, argues Miller, allows us to once again recognize that persons can be understood as sites of social networking, and that our acts become meaningful because of our place in a particular network. Miller in fact goes further, arguing that Facebook parallels very closely the Melanesian Kula exchange systems with which anthropologists are so often preoccupied, and thus “exemplifies what anthropologists mean by the word culture” (p. 19).

How might these two approaches – Harvie’s critical response to the return of the social in ‘social investment’ as a cynical extension of the market into community ethics, and Miller’s embrace of social media as the ‘proof’ of what anthropologists and sociologists have been saying about meaningful human interaction all along – be reconciled? One possible solution is offered by William Davies’ recent article for the European Journal of Social Theory, in which he describes the ‘return of social government.’ Davies directs the Political Economy Research Centre at Goldsmiths, and is the author of the recently published The Happiness Industry, a critical take on the rise of well–being measures, something that he sees, along with the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, as part of the return of social government.

Davies’ understanding of ‘the social’ starts, like Mitchell Dean, with Michel Foucault’s understanding of the birth of ‘society’ as an object of government in the eighteenth century: thanks to new statistical techniques for measuring, surveilling and intervening in populations (the same techniques that early sociologists would use for their studies), ‘society’ or ‘the social’ became an empirical object that was also something that needed to be managed. Society, for Foucault (and Dean and Davies), emerged at the boundaries of the newly emergent ‘free’ or liberal market, which created possibilities for putatively spontaneous interactions, and the sovereign state, which claimed to rule an antagonistic mass of unruly subjects through legal means. The excess, ‘society’ or ‘civil society’, filled the gap between the individual interests of the marketplace and the sovereign will of the state.

Then, in the mid–twentieth century, in the context of an ideological battle between state socialism and ‘free’ market capitalism, ‘neoliberal’ thinkers like Friedrich Hayek challenged the notion that state planners could ever measure or commensurate the will of the populace; instead, governance was to be carried out through the market. As Davies puts it, in Hayek’s view, “the market arguably rescues the spontaneity of the ‘social’, even while it abandons its normative and general dimension. The market, from a Hayekian perspective, is a spontaneous social order” (p. 8). Hence the disappearance of the ‘social’ from late twentieth century governance (and late twentieth century social theory, which seemed sometimes to ventriloquize the Hayekian vision of individual preference formation – Giddens might call it “self–fashioning” – in the marketplace).

The point of Davies’ paper is, however, to make sense of the re–appearance of social investment, social media, and social interaction in what might seem like a ‘post–neoliberal’ period. Falling somewhere between Harvie and Miller in his analysis, he suggests that the rise of social media may in fact offer a serious challenge to market logics that went unforeseen by neoliberals like Hayek. Where Harvie’s criticism of social investment is based on the idea that units of money or capital render different investments comparable, and so would force social investments to compete with other, more profitable (less ‘social’) endeavours, Davies suggests that social media or social networking itself offers an alternative to ‘price’ that could displace market–based organization:

“Social media offers a technology which formalizes everyday social life, in ways that are neither reducible to price, nor deduced from centralized statistics … The everyday user performs their social life via Facebook, Twitter et al., while the expert contributes to this new formatting of the ‘social’ through application of methodological techniques for spotting the movement of trend and behaviours…when computer power is decentralized, and operative in everyday social interaction, [the Hayekian] claim for the indispensability of the market begins to disintegrate” (p. 13)

This is an intriguing claim, although Davies is not entirely hopeful in his conclusions. A new mode of generating spontaneous order through social networking that does not rely on price can just as easily be deployed as part of a ‘pre–emptive’ state security apparatus based on ‘profiling’ your interactions (on which see this open access paper by Marieke de Goede and Louise Amoore). Or, as The Ippolita Collective put it in their recent reader for the Institute of Network Cultures, profiling is the “promise of freedom automated: contextualized advertising, research into users’ sentiments to provide personalized, tailored ads in order to maximize click–through sales” (p. 60, emphasis added). And, Ippolita remind us, Facebook, more than any other social media platform, has been brought to the world through the efforts of venture capitalists like Peter Thiel, who has taken from Hayekian neoliberals a belief that freedom exists in the marketplace, but has come to reject the notion that “freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Further Reading:

Davies, William. 2015. The Return of Social Government: From ‘Socialist Calculation’ to ‘Social Analytics’. European Journal of Social Theory, online first. [Paywall]

Dean, Mitchell. 2010. What is Society? Social Thought and the Arts of Government. The British Journal of Sociology, 61(4), pp. 677–695. [Paywall]

Miller, Daniel. 2010. An Extreme Reading of Facebook. Open Anthropology Cooperative Press. [Open Access]

(Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Igualtat_de_sexes.svg)

One of sociology’s main critiques revolves around neoliberalism, and its implications on everyday life in a capitalistic society. Yet, individuals do not comprehend what these implications are for those who identify as LGBTQ. As of recently, there are a plethora of articles illustrating some of the consequences that occur in this new neoliberal society. For example, John P. Elia and Gust A. Yep stated in their article, “Sexualities and Genders in an Age of Neoterrorism:”

Neoliberalism often creates the illusion of LGBTQ acceptance through visibility of these identities as consumers while leaving the underlying oppressive structures (e.g., hierarchical notions of sexual and gender differences in U.S. society that ultimately create symbolic and material harm) unexamined and untouched. These notions and practices are becoming more and more normalized and unchallenged. (Elia & Yep, 2012; 880)

With increased media coverage pertaining to Marriage Equality and Trans visibility, American society portrays a more inclusive, and accepting society for the LGBTQ community. However, it is just a rouse. What one does not see are many hate crimes committed in the United States, never to be revealed or discussed, to maintain an illusion of acceptance; or, symbolic acceptance. But what is symbolic acceptance?

Elia and Yep do not provide an exact definition for this idea of symbolic acceptance, but we can extrapolate one based on the quote above, and, they further state, “as a result, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the passing of hate crime legislation and enforcement, and the right to serve in the military have become primary concerns of the gay and lesbian movement and the hallmarks of inclusion in the social and cultural fabric of the United States” (Elia & Yep, 2012; 885). This is the best way, I believe, to define symbolic acceptance. The passage of laws and adjusting the legal system is just symbolism: it does not change people’s ideologies, or their practices, in actuality. Symbolic acceptance is omnipresent ideology pervading societal views and norms. Yet, you cannot define it without the idea of symbolic wreckage.

Symbolic wreckage can be best summarized as the violence against particular individuals and groups: however, the definition cannot stop there. To further symbolic wreckage, it can be explained as, “the symbolic violence against sexual or gendered people who do not fit in or who are not productive are discounted, shunned, or worse yet become symbolically annihilate” (Elia & Yep, 2012; 884). Moreover, this symbolic violence is possible since, “law and policies that attempt to change this cultural landscape have, in general, followed neoliberal principles and ideologies that focus exclusively on inclusion and incorporation rather than redistribution of political and economic resources and deep transformation of the social system” (Elia & Yep, 2012; 884). The best example of this is the federal passage of Marriage Equality. Although it is a milestone for people of all sexual identities to marry their loved one, it is not without its cost. Marriage Equality is, essentially, geared towards the homonormative bunch of LGBTQ individuals; cosmopolitan gay white men. The passage, indeed, change some of the cultural landscape of American society. However, it still favors those same individuals who consume the most in a society, and incorporates them back into the prestigious rankings. If this is true, how can one attempt to solve the issues of symbolic acceptance and wreckage? Audre Lorde would argue poetry as the healer of such atrocities.

According to Lorde, poetry is, “…that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding” (Lorde, 1984; 36). It is not until we learn to give a life to our experiences, of the everyday oppressions, that we will be able to birth a new way of understanding and reinvention of society. As Lorde said, it is only when we turn our language to ideas, and our ideas into action, when change can occur. Lorde’s progression, I believe, holds current until present day.

Current researchers should investigate what is it about the body of LGBTQ people of color that provokes (symbolic) violence. Could it be American LGBTQ people are living in a postcolonial society? Or, the idea that homosexuality is a Western trait/something not “natural” to people of color in the West? These questions may be rhetoric researchers can pose, which could also, challenge notions of what it means to be LGBTQ and a person of color. Lorde would believe this is a great start to the politicization of poetry. As author Jose Muñoz states, “we must vacate the here and now for a then and there” (Muñoz, 2009; 185).

Suggested Readings:

• Jose Muñoz. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. (2009).
• John P. Elia and Gust A. Yep. “Sexualities and Genders in an Age of Neoterrorism.” Journal of Homosexuality, (2012), 59:879-889.