Cold Feeling: How Late-Capitalism Creates Emotional Prudishness
I:
INTRODUCTION
A
cold, lifeless personality and communication style is thought to be caused by
childhood development, according to psychoanalysis and attachment theory. Pop
culture is full of examples of people who were raised by cold parents,
developing an “avoidant attachment style”: a cold individual who rationalizes
their feelings to an extreme, intellectualizing their intimate relationships
and having struggles with being passionate or with getting emotionally invested
in a person or a project.
In
this article I want to raise the hypothesis that besides individual factors (genetics
and childhood development), there are economic and socio-political influences causing
a shift towards “emotional prudishness” in society in general. Using the Marxist
framework of historical materialism, I argue that the hyper-rationalization of
emotional life is partially caused by changes in the material relations of
production.
Pop
psychology has also created a sharp divide between “feelers”, people who are
attuned to other people’s emotions, passionate individuals who try to not hurt
other people’s feelings, and “thinkers”, people who are blunt and direct about
their opinions even when they will offend others. In the past decades, we have
two new forms of communication: cold feeling and hot thinking.
Cold feeling is a rationalization of emotions, a way of being logical and
calculated in order to not offend others by always talking about
feelings in a way devoid of passion. Hot thinking is an “emotionalization” of
thoughts and opinions, a way of being passionate and provocative in
argumentation in order to intentionally offend others. These communication
styles have been politicized in the past decade as well, with the American
liberal-left appropriating the former (cold feeling) and the alt-right
appropriating the latter (hot thinking).
This
article examines cold feeling: a communication style which mixes the vocabulary
of “therapy-speak” with the ideology of managerialism to emphasize values such
as communication, transparency and political correctness. It represents a way
of always talking about your feelings and emotions in the most depersonalized, lifeless,
soulless and robotic way.
II:
MANAGERIALISM, THERAPY-SPEAK AND COMMUNICATION
In her
book “Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism”, sociologist Eva
Illouz describes the historical development of managerialism as appropriating
the vocabulary of psychotherapy in order to increase productivity. The harsh
and aggressive style of management of the 19th century had to be replaced
by a “soft” management style in the early-to-mid 20th century,
geared towards incentives and encouragement rather than punishment and
aggressivity: “In contrast to capitalists, who had frequently been portrayed
as greedy and selfish, in the new ideology of management, the manager emerged
as rational, responsible, and predictable, and as the bearer of new rules of
standardization and rationalization”1. Communication strategies
traditionally employed by therapists and clinical psychologists were
appropriated by managers, who were learning how to “listen with empathy”, be
attentive to the worker’s needs and encouraging them to communicate their
displeasures and concerns.
In
certain contexts, this attitude may be even more condescending and oppressing
than the traditional “authoritarian” style of management. Slavoj Zizek gives
the example of two types of fathers2: if you are a small child who
does not want to visit his grandmother, the modern “permissive” type of father
might tell you something like “You know how much your grandmother loves you,
and how happy she would be if you visited her. Despite this, I am not forcing
you to visit her, you should only visit her if you really want to”. Now the
irony is how every child knows that there is a much stronger pressure to visit
your grandma in this message than if you were to simply be told to obey, the
message is not only that you have to visit your grandmother, but that you must
love to do it, you must “obey out of your own free will”, and you are not even
allowed to complain because “technically” you were not forced to do anything.
This is capitalism with a friendly face.
What
is more concerning is how the circle went around back to its initial place:
from our private lives, to the corporate world and back to our intimate
relationships again. The passion-less communicative style of cold feeling has
been adopted from the language of therapists, managers and HR workers who are
trying to politely tell you to screw off in corporate-speak, back into the
culture of relationship advice. This is an excerpt from a 1985 handbook of
marriage communication advice:
“1.
On a sheet of paper, complete each of the following sentences in as many
different ways you can. Make your responses specific, concrete and positive.
List
those things your partner is currently doing that make you feel cared about and
loved. “I feel cared about and loved when you … ”
Think
back to when you and your partner were first dating. What did “your partner say
or do then that he doesn’t say or do now?” “I feel cared about and loved when
you … ”
Now
think of all those things you’ve always wanted your partner to do but were
afraid to ask for. “I would feel cared about and loved if you would … ”
2.
Review your responses and rank them by number in order of their importance to
you.
3.
Read your responses to your partner. Put an X next to those your partner feels
he cannot do for you just now.
4.
Listen as your partner reads this list to you and indicate which of your
partner’s needs you cannot meet just now.
5.
Exchange lists. Select three desires from your partner’s list that you can
agree to satisfy over the next three days.”3
Now
in 2023, we can retroactively look upon this cultural development almost as if
it was preparing us for Chat-GPT. This de-contextualization and de-personalization
of one’s emotional life could have been generated by an AI language model: even
if it presents itself as communicative, in many ways, the opposite effect is
held. Talking is to doing as imagination is to reality: instead of
acting out or somehow actively living one’s emotions, one has to simply
talk about them, to detach from them and logically communicate them according
to some rational, business-like framework. Here is another example from 1974:
“Once
you’re aware of your thoughts and feelings, let your partner know them. If
you’re afraid, say so. Perhaps together you can discover what you are afraid of
and why, and perhaps your partner can help you find ways of overcoming your
fears gradually. Then as you move along the way, you will be acting in
accordance with your feelings, not in spite of them.”4
Like
Eva Illouz correctly notes: “Writing down an emotion “locks” it in space in the
sense that it creates a distance between the experience of the emotion(s) and
the person’s awareness of that emotion (...) When locked into literacy,
emotions become objects to be observed and manipulated (...) The control of
emotions, the clarification of one’s values and goals, the use of the technique
of calculation, and the decontextualization and objectification of emotions all
entail an intellectualization of intimate bonds”5. Under late-stage
capitalism, emotions become a commodity to be bought and sold. Today’s infamous
political correctness is just another cultural product of the material
relations of production: the infection of managerialism into our private and
public lives. “To say “I feel hurt” allows little discussion and in fact
demands immediate recognition of that hurt. The model of communication thus
pulls relations in opposite directions: it submits relationships to procedures
of speech which aim at neutralizing the emotional dynamic as that of guilt,
anger, resentment, shame, or frustration, etc.; yet it intensifies subjectivism
and emotivism, making us regard our emotions as having a validity of their own
by the very fact of being expressed.”6
In
fact, today’s obsession over communication runs along an ironical paradox. On
one hand, the change in the material relations of production involve an
increase in technological development as well, which is an overall increase in the
globalization of information. We quite literally communicate across the globe
at speeds faster than ever before in the history of the world, with the help of
phones and the internet. On the other hand, less and less people feel heard.
This is a product of alienation: closeness in distance and distance in
closeness, which is the primary defense mechanism of capitalism: “feeling
lonely in a crowd full of people”, being interconnected ‘at a safe distance’.
Quite ironically, when everyone says that “communication is important”, everyone
means something different by the word “communication”. Like I said in my
previous article:
“When
two partners break up, what very often happens is that both of them will accuse
the other of "not communicating enough". In reality, both of them
were talking to themselves in front of each other, because both of them were
playing a different "language game" to use a term borrowed from
Wittgenstein. For example, if one partner says "You never help me, you're
so unreliable!", the other might hear this as part of the "Stating
the facts" language game, like saying "World war I started in
1914", so they might respond by citing facts about how actually "I
got the car insurance yesterday and I bought some groceries too". But the
first person was not playing the "citing the facts" game, they're playing
the "words as reassurance" game. And neither of those two games
("citing the facts", "words as reassurance") are the
default or "normal" way to use language. So both partners will accuse
the other one of not communicating and not speaking enough.”7
This
is the real meaning of “communication is important”, between the lines the
actual message is: communication is important, as long as you communicate
according to my own rules, my own language game!. We can analyze “cold
feeling” in general as one, huge, meta-language game created by the modern
relations of production, with roots in managerialism and therapy-speak –
communication is important as long as you do it in a soft way, making sure that
you respect people’s feelings as some alien phenomenon that arises out of thin
air, and you are not allowed to question what causes people’s feelings
and desires, nor to change them (seduction is frowned upon), you simply have to
respect people’s feelings. Moreover, emotions and feelings must be talked about
all of the time, but in an emotion-less, robotic way. If one tendency of the
cultural logic of late-capitalism is to de-sexualize sexuality, in an almost Sadean
way, then we can also consider cold feeling as a form of ‘de-emotionalizing
emotions’.
A truly
profound communication style with actual depth would go beyond the simple “transparent
communication” of feelings, intentions and desires. Have you ever been in a situation
where you had something “on the tip of your tongue”, not in the sense of not
being able to remember something, but in the sense of not being able to put
your feelings into? The truth is that the inner reality of emotions and desires
is violent and inconsistent from the very beginning, often times impossible to
be put into words, and more than that: when we can’t put something into words,
it’s usually because we can’t put it into thoughts either. We just get a
vague feeling that we need to say something without being able to articulate
into words what exactly it is, not only to the other person, but in our own
internal monologue as well. What is the best, however, is when someone else can
put into words for us what we have wanted to say for all eternity but we just
couldn't articulate it properly! So if "communication" is what it's
important, perhaps what is truly passionate is when I communicate in your place
and you communicate in my place (“I know what I mean by what you said”). To
paraphrase Hegel: the secrets of the Egyptians were secrets for the
Egyptians themselves – what is mysterious about the other is sometimes a mystery
for them too. A profound communication that goes beyond cold feeling and “therapy-speak”
can seek to articulate explicitly what was implicit in the other’s unconscious
all along: to reveal to the other person something that not even they know
about themselves (but that may seem retroactively obvious). When someone
manages to put into words what we felt the need to say but weren’t able to
properly articulate, they are quite literally helping us think.
This
goes for our own internal monologue too, since like Jacques Lacan well said in
his third seminar: we are both the senders and the receivers of our own
speech8. When I speak, I not only make myself heard by the
other, but I also hear my own voice. When I write, I read my own words. Hence,
my subjectivity is always "split in two", and this is what Lacan
calls the split subject (denoted by $): I am the one who speaks and the one who
hears myself speak at the same time, therefore me needing to interpret my own
unconscious vibes, so that I (the first "me") can finally be able to
articulate into words what I (the second "me") wanted to say for all
my life.
III:
MASCULINITY, FEMININITY AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION
A
wrong tendency is to attribute to all of human history realities that have been
true about our social reality only for the past few decades or centuries. A
heated debate today is had over the shift in “masculine and feminine energies
in society”: conservative writes believe that we live in a crisis of
masculinity, in which qualities such as strength and aggressivity are sacrificed
for qualities such as “softness” and being “nice and tolerant”. Louise Perry, the
feminist writer of the book “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution”, has a
different opinion9: she believes that pornography, casual sex, the
acceptance of BDSM and other products of the sexual revolution have created a
culture which promotes loveless sex and abhors attachment, favoring a tiny
proportion of men, hence arriving at the opposite conclusion: it is femininity
which is under attack by the advent of “cold capitalism”. So, which one is it?
My
concept of cold feeling allows us to see that both of them are like the blind
men peeping the elephant from a different perspective – neither masculinity nor
femininity are “under attack” today, what is under attack is passionate
emotional investment (which has to be tightly regulated and controlled by
schemes of intellectualization), a move which is of course going to affect the
way in which both masculinity and femininity manifest themselves, since men and
women are both emotional, but they tend to experience emotions differently, on
average.
To begin,
it is mostly a myth that women are “more emotional” than men. I say “mostly”
because the very idea that you can quantify how emotional a person is,
as if on a scale from 1 to 10, already implies viewing emotions from the
(harmful) framework of cold feeling. Men, on average, are much more likely to
experience explosive (read: passionate) outbursts of anger, and to get into
physical fights, which is absolutely an emotional act. Female gender
roles and stereotypes also include ‘logical’ or ‘rational’ tasks such as
household management. The advent of managerial political correctness and therapy-speak
attacks both masculinity and femininity from the same side: passionate-masculine
displays of strength, rage and aggressivity as well as passionate-feminine acts
of motherly care, devotion and deep attachment are getting more and more rare.
The culture of consumerism incentives a rationalization of emotion where the capitalist
business-like logic of planning and calculation must be applied to our personal
lives as well (“self-management” is a popular word nowadays). In today’s
ideological landscape, you can be as emotional as you want as long as you don’t
get too attached: short-term, superficial interactions are thus prioritized (I’ve
previously called today’s culture “ADHD society”). The rise in what Zizek calls
‘Enlightened Western Buddhism’ also supports the ideological backbone of cold
feeling: “Life is just an illusion, don’t take it too seriously, don’t get too
attached, enjoy life”10.
Because
of this, sexuality has also appropriated the interpersonal framework of cold
feeling: “emotion without emotion” it is. The main ideological battleground
today is presented as a binary dichotomy (or “spectrum”) between sex-positive
liberalism and sex-negative puritanism. However, when confronted with a binary
opposition in society, the properly dialectical (Hegelian-Marxist) analysis
should neither simply pick one of the two extremes, nor view the two extremes
as a spectrum where one tries to find a centrist compromise, a “sweet spot in
the middle” (“I am 43% sex positive and 57% sex negative”). Instead, there is a
third way: to show that each one of the two binary terms already has the
opposite term inscribed within itself from the very beginning: that sex
positivism libertinism is just a façade for a hidden sex negativism prudishness
and vice-versa. Marquis De Sade was one of the first influent writers to
showcase how excesses of permissiveness automatically imply a hidden conservative
prudishness. As Slavoj Zizek nicely puts it:
“the
paradox is that, in his work, the practice of search for sexual pleasures gets
desexualized or, more precisely, de-eroticized: since he endeavors to
dismiss all obstacles and detours and pursue pleasure in the most direct way
possible, the result is a totally mechanized cold sexuality deprived of all
twists and turns that we associate with eroticism proper. In this sense, the
Sadean subject arguably confronts us with the first form of post-human
sexuality.”11
Hence,
it is not that you have one extreme of sexual libertinism and
permissiveness and another extreme of “vanilla” prudishness: the libertinism
itself hides a secret prudishness itself. The injunction towards cold feeling in
pornography, BDSM and ‘hook-up culture’ presupposes that one is free to
physically push the limits of the body as much as possible in sexuality as
long as no one gets their feelings hurt. Contingent, chance encounters or
the very act of “losing yourself” in either the sexual act (or whatever
precedes it) are discouraged: instead, the Sadean model is a business-like,
contractual, planned out encounter, where one has to be “emotionally safe”.
Quite paradoxically, the sexual libertines of today’s age are emotionally vanilla,
so in the end, how “vanilla” or how transgressive an act is is a matter of
perspective. As Ran Graivelli, one anti-porn advocate interestingly points out:
the male porn actors keep their hands behind their back in order to not block
the camera, “so the result is that we have two people having sex with no
hands involved”12. Dating apps take the pornographic logic to an
extreme, commodifying intimate relationships and providing almost like a caricature
of it in return (as if those parody dating shows like “The Bachelor” were
slowly turning into reality, or better yet, to hypereality13).
One of the first dating websites in France advertised themselves with slogans
like “Get love without chance!” and “Be in love without falling in love!”14.
I think it is fair to say that besides genetic factors and childhood
development, the rise in managerialism, therapy-speak, political correctness
and the overall commodification of our intimate lives by mega-corporations are
also a factor in creating today’s “emotionally prude” avoidant attachment.
Perhaps the other side of the coin, the “anxious attachment style” can be
thought of as the individuals who were not able to adapt to today’s fast-paced
consumerist society which abhors attachment (after all, was there such a thing
as “fear of abandonment” inside feudalism, where people had the opposite
problem?).
OnlyFans,
finally, marks one more step in the increase in alienation, combining all the
negative aspects of all platforms of late-stage capitalism:
1. fast-paced
consumerism geared towards short-term gratification reinforced by variable-ratio
reinforcement (in the same way that gambling addiction works)
2. alienation
(closeness “at a safe distance” through globalization)
3. pornography
addiction
4. commodification
of our intimate lives by mega-corporations
5. self-exploitation
sold as 'freedom'
6. the
rise of subscription services over the physical possession of goods
7. the
replacement of traditional markets with "neo-feudal" platform-based
rent-extraction, where one single CEO owns the entire market under which
multiple “self-employed” entrepreneurs compete with each other (as we can see too
with Uber, Amazon, Facebook…)15
8. the
rise in a self-employed class manipulated to take part in “hustle culture” in
the dream of making it “to the top”, to the point of burnout, depression and
suicide16
It is important to not
put the blame on the individuals involved in these exploitative businesses, as
both the models and the consumers on OnlyFans are victims of the
billionaires who control the platforms. The infamous “gender wars” today,
between red-pilled “alpha males” and radical feminists, are nothing but a cultural
manifestation of the same material contradictions of the neoliberal mode of
production itself. The models of masculinity and femininity promoted by both
are geared towards hyper-individualism (“we don’t need the opposite sex, we are
independent”), an obsession over obtaining wealth and material goods as well as
a tendency to overwork yourself to burnout.
“What
we nowadays call ‘growth’ is in reality random, cancerous proliferation. We are
currently living through a frenzy of production and growth that seems like a
frenzy of death. It is a simulation of vitality that conceals a deadly
impending catastrophe. Production increasingly resembles destruction.
Humankind’s self-alienation may have reached a point ‘where it can experience
its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure’.”17
-Byung-Chul
Han
NOTES AND REFERENCES:
1: Eva Illouz, “Cold Intimacies: The Making of
Emotional Capitalism”, p. 20
2: Slavoj Žižek: Political Correctness is a More
Dangerous Form of Totalitarianism | Big Think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dNbWGaaxWM
3: Hendrix, Harville, 1985, “Work at Your Marriage: A
Workbook,” Redbook, October, p. 130
4: Masters, William H. and Johnson, Virginia E. in
association with Levin, Robert J., 1974, The Pleasure Bond: A New Look at Sexuality
and Commitment, Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company
5: Eva Illouz, “Cold Intimacies: The Making of
Emotional Capitalism”, p. 40
6: ibid, p. 45
7: "The Woman" does not exist: Lacan's
formulas of sexuation vs. Neo-Jungian Phallogocentrism: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-woman-does-not-exist-lacans.html
8: Jacques Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses, p. 24
9: How porn f*cked our minds | Louise Perry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhgNz_XuAus
10: See “McMindfulness: When Capitalism Goes Buddhist”
– www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aXDTUnea1M&list=WL
11: Slavoj Zizek, Sex and the Failed Absolute, p. 163
12: Why I stopped watching porn | Ran Gavrieli |
TEDxJaffa - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRJ_QfP2mhU
13: See: “Hyperreality | Philosophy of The Bachelor” -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zEtalr5pEA
14: Alain Badiou, “In Praise of Love”, p. 6
15: See: “Technofeudalism: Explaining to Slavoj Zizek
why I think capitalism has evolved into something worse” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghx0sq_gXK4
16: See: Byung-Chul Han, “The Burnout Society”
17: Byung-Chul Han, “Capitalism and the Death Drive”,
p. 1
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