Presumed Intimacy: Parasocial Interaction in Media, Society and Celebrity Culture E-Book
Chris Rojek
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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
‘Presumed intimacy’ refers to a relationship that requires instant trust, confidence, disclosure and the recognition of vulnerability. Chris Rojek investigates the impact of relationships of ‘presumed intimacy’, where audiences form strong identifications with mediated others, whether they be celebrities, political personae or online friends. Arguing that the way the media are able to manage these relationships is a significant aspect of their power structure, the core of the book is an investigation into the complicity of the media in encouraging presumed intimacy and the cultural, social and political consequences arising from this. Beyond this, it examines how intimacy is performed as a masquerade in many social settings – the scripts we follow in social settings that try to manufacture a shortcut to intimacy.
A compelling look into mediated relationships in the network society, Presumed Intimacy will be a key contribution to the critical analysis of society, media and culture.
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Seitenzahl: 471
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
Epigraph
Title page
Copyright Page
1: Living with Statistical Men and Women
Familiar Strangers
Moral Density and Human Sympathy
Para-Social Interaction
The Cult of the Individual
Notes
2: Chimerical Risk Management
Fugitive Democracy
Bystander Mentality
The Unity of Nearness and Remoteness
Notes
3: The Shockwaves of Trauma
What About Category A Responses?
Notes
4: The Lost Neighbour Proposition and the Collateral Damage Problem
Collateral Damage
Panoptical Intimacy
Notes
5: Horizontal Frontierism: The Juggernaut of Character
Mythical West
All Hail the Horizon
Notes
6: The Accentuation of Personality
Carl Schmitt: The Charm of Romanticism
Personality Cult
Lifies
Mediation and Mediatization
Notes
7: Vertical Frontierism: Four Case Studies
The Inimitable
The Sorcerer
The ‘Cyclone’
The Sex Symbol
Head Tennis Among the Union of Watchers
Notes
8: Cracks in the Mirror
The Ordeal of Kenneth Bigley and the Psychology of Torture
‘Sub-optimal’ Presumed Intimacy: The Hurricane Katrina Speech
Institutionalized Intimacy
9: The Gestural Economy
Speech Illustrators and Emblems
Notes
10: Institutional and Counter-Institutional Gestural Economies
Kowtow
The British Academic Research Excellence Framework (REF)
Counterfeit Commerce
Notes
11: Nuda Veritas
The Invisible Committee
The Road Ahead
Notes
References
Author Index
Subject Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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One of the most striking characteristics of the new mass media – radio, television, and the movies – is that they give the illusion of face-to-face relationship with the performer … We propose to call this seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer a para-social relationship.
Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl
When I first got out in the yard I heard groups of men talking about how Sarah was going to marry Jim or how Frank had betrayed Susan, I thought, ‘Damn, these cats all know each other and their families. That's odd.’ But after a few minutes I realized they were talking about soap operas. Television in prison is the great pacifier. They love Basketball Wives because it is ‘T and A’ with women of colour. They know how many cars Jay-Z has. But they don't know their own history. They don't understand how they got here. They don't understand what is being done to them. I tell them to read and they say, ‘Man, I don't do books.’ And that is just how the empire wants it. You can't fight power if you don't understand it.
Mumia Abu-Jamal (political prisoner in the USA, serving life without parole)
As the term accountability implies, people want to know how to trust one another, to make their trust visible, while (knowing that) the very desire to do so points to the absence of trust.
Marilyn Strathern
Copyright Page
Copyright © Chris Rojek 2016
The right of Chris Rojek to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, 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 the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7110-9 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7111-6 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rojek, Chris.
Presumed intimacy : parasocial interaction in media, society and celebrity culture / Chris Rojek.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-7110-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-7110-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-7111-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-7111-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Social interaction. 2. Intimacy (Psychology)–Social aspects. 3. Celebrities. 4. Mass media–Social aspects. I. Title.
HM1111.R65 2015
302–dc23
2015012744
Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon
by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives PLC
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
Epigraphs:
Donald Horton & R. Richard Wohl (1956) ‘Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction’ Psychiatry 19 (3): 215–29. Reprinted by kind permission of The Washington School of Psychiatry.(http://www.wspdc.org)
Marilyn Strathern (2000) ‘The Tyranny of Transparency’ British Educational Research Journal 26 (3): 309–21. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
1Living with Statistical Men and Women
Modern democracy is speared with a sharp paradox. Formally, it is a body of life and blood equals, primarily consisting, at the level of experience, of empty apparitions. For the greater part we are oblivious to the details of the real circumstances and destines of the human species of which we are a part. Yet we glimpse fractured aspects of them through media transmissions of various sorts. It is certainly not out of the question that we may be moved by the apparent circumstances, conveyed via the media, relating to multitudes of people, who we have never met, do not know and, in all probability, will never know. For a variety of reasons, relating chiefly to the force of the media in organizing moral density, we may have the temerity to feel that we belong to their story and vice versa. Notwithstanding this, for the most part we confine ourselves to issues surrounding our families and friends. Of course, some of us are passionately devoted to justice and matters of human dignity involving the lives of others. Nearly everyone respects a person of this stamp, even if they disagree with their specific political views. However, despite paying lip service to venerated Enlightenment ideals of individual responsibility and civic action, we are wary, highly provisional, travellers in the art of global human fellowship. The global media provide an outline of the conditions of the lives of the aggregate. As watchers we are party to the shallow surface of what we see. Because the TV eye and the world wide web seems to be empowering in exposing data for us, we may even affect to grasp a little bit more than the ordinary person might know about what is going on, out there in the world of people who are separated from us by the magnitude of distance. (1) Some of us care enough to dig deeper. There are cases of individuals in the affluent societies of the West forsaking all, to engage in struggles that are situated way beyond their doorstep. A case in point is the activism and horrific death of the 23-year-old American protester, Rachel Corrie, killed in 2003 by an Israeli armoured bulldozer, while protesting against the policies of Palestinian land clearance. (2) The Rachel Corries of this world are brave, idealistic, worthy of our respect. (3) Still, they are very much exceptions to the rule. We may register global emergencies, injustice and suffering but for the most part we let them pass us by as distant, glancing relations having no direct, durable bearing on our personal responsibilities or sense of self. This is not necessarily a cause for self-reproach. How can knowledge of the global aggregate be anything other than shallow? The numbers in the world are so huge and diverse that their details exceed the capacity of the individual brain to capture them. We identify with the lives of others, but only with strings attached. Our lives, and the lives of those immediate relations who depend upon us, impose obligations and duties that are too relentless and unyielding. Their clamour for our attention, even while we register and feel for the pain and mortality of others, is insistent. So we devote the greater part of our lives to pursuing our narrow, private ends and those of the kith and kin networks to which we are attached.
However, global media society insistently imposes a counter-life upon us. We are constant, often furtive, watchers of the lives of others. Usually, we become activated only when the media seize upon an event, episode, incident or emergency deemed worthy of public attention. Even then, our emotional connection is tenuous and capricious. We live in a world of statistical men and women. Typically, our leaders speak of abstract numbers, rather than flesh and blood people, and champion or condemn them through briefings via press attachés and researchers rather than direct experience. There is a real sense in which relations in democracy are stamped with the mark of being once removed. Much of the mandate for official action is sheer word magic. The political challenge in the art of political rhetoric is to utter passable empathy with others. The combination of democracy and the global media impose presumed intimacies of the counter-life upon us. Not to care about the lives of others, or the condition of the planet, is to risk being stigmatized as selfish, irresponsible and heartless. Fiormanti (2014) shows convincingly that credit ratings, growth figures and other ‘hard data’ have a powerful influence in public debate. But he also raises the point that these numbers are often misleading and are typically selectively constructed and applied in order to suit the needs of vested interests. Presumed intimacy can be a political tool. It gains votes. In public life its assembly and presentation often follow hidden agendas. Global statistical men and women constitute a multi-dimensional category. Yet they are generally politically represented too us in no more than one or two dimensions. Can we really know the lives of those who live in politically troubled areas such as Sudan, Syria, the Gaza or North Korea? Can we truly grasp the actual context in which they find themselves or the indivertible forces which they confront (with only a slender chance for inserting their own agency to make a difference)? Yet governments and activists reduce complexity by making schematic statements about the lives of others in these geo-political hot spots. This should not be a cause for surprise. Social statistics are not independent of social relationships. Rather, the correct way to analyse and understand them is to see them as products of social relationships (Best 2001). If we incubate and exhibit presumed intimacy for the lives of others, it is partly because our propensities in these respects are framed by political leaders and media pundits. It would be rash to proclaim that the fundamentals here are new. Humans have always passed their lives with others who are obscurely acknowledged, but never encountered. They are impenetrable features of our social landscape. Their co-existence is recognized as a fact of life, but it hardly prohibits us from going about our own lives. It has been ever thus. At the same time, possessing awareness about the lives of others is a more prominent aspect of what might be called, favoured identity, that is, the positive status differentiation which represents a relevant, decent, caring person. The sheer volume of data about the lives of others that we are privy to, is unprecedented. Everyday cable, satellite and other forms of digital communication carry fact-finding bulletins and op-ed pieces on conditions in distant places, the geography, culture, religion and history of which are fuzzy to us, but about which we feel obscurely connected. Numerical force is frequently the basis for moral force.
News about the lives of others is often troubling or downright bad. The media tend to concentrate upon dramatic episodes that correlate with high human interest potential because this is what wins ratings wars. In communicating troubling data to us, they have developed codes of propriety and conventions of disclosure to convey and register emotions in an approved, acceptable manner. These instruments of exchange marry up with emotional management technologies developed in professions and occupations where handling and communicating bad news is a significant element in case-load performance (Furedi 2003). In this study, the term presumed intimacy will be used to refer to the skills required to provide concrete feedback to an individual who has done something wrong, to deliver bad news to those who may be dismayed or troubled by it, and to assert authority over those with whom one disagrees at work or in other public settings. It is a tool to smooth-out awkward situations and avoid negative or destructive behaviour. Typically, it works through the disclosure of empathy and offers an action plan to overcome blockages, disruptions or difficulties of one sort or another. In a wired-up world, where more people are in one way or another in touch with each other than ever before, it is ubiquitous. Agents of persuasion use statistics about the relationships of opportunity, risk and threat with statistical men and women as the pretext for moral and economic action. The role of the media in delineating these issues for the public is decisive. However, framing only has purchase because we spend a large part of our life alone or with others, not acting, as such, but secretly watching.
That old technological determinist, Marshall McLuhan (2001) knew this only too well. He famously speculated that ‘cool’ technologies of audio-visual communication would galvanize human sympathy, break down social, political and cultural divisions and create ‘the global village’. For McLuhan, it was inevitable that watchers of the world would unite. History has not turned out like that. On the contrary, cool technologies have proved fully compatible with thin readings of social reality. Greater data about the lives of others does not necessarily assist sound moral judgements or moral action. Our lives are passed in a condition of data overload. Under its sway, we find it difficult to work out what data to believe and what to question and reject. The more informed we are, the more we hedge our bets, since we are conscious that the information upon which our perspective is founded is necessarily partial. For every point of view, there is a counter-point of view. Modern men and women are mostly sharply conscious that they lack the knowledge and time to decide on global issues by themselves. Democracy is a proxy form of government which empowers elected representatives to take these decisions for us, and to subject themselves to accountability via the due electoral process. This has ramifications for the emotional density of the counter-life they share with others.
Amid a sense of obscurity about the lives of statistical men and women, naked fear is an element that it would be unwise to underrate. Since 9/11 the West has learnt to view globalization more widely than questions of deregulation and outsourcing. (4) The terrorist threat, itself mostly obscure, is acutely stressed by the authorities, especially in metropolitan cultures. Vigilance and awareness are promoted as public necessities. It is short sighted to soldier on without even a dim awareness of the world out there and the hidden risks that it conceals. But it is a peculiar feature of modern life that this awareness, which can be like lighting blue touchpaper when it comes to emotional transference, is actually a darkling place where it is difficult to see the wood for the trees. 9/11 has been instrumental in standing the logic of vulnerability upon its head. We are inured to thinking of men and women in the developing world as worthy recipients of aid. The unbearable, patronizing backdraft of this outwardly benign Western outlook has been rightly deplored by critics (Moyo 2009). Now the statistical men and women who share our world may take our jobs, claim welfare benefits that we have paid for and may plot and take steps to kill us. Removed intimacy is the opposite side of the coin of presumed intimacy. That is, the social condition in which presumed intimacy based in care and respect for the lives of statistical men and women is withdrawn and inverted by redefining them as a threat or risk.
This darkling sensibility in the public mind is exploited and developed by political leaders of all stripes. Presumed intimacy can turn into aggression in the wink of an eye. It also points to something sociologically important, and little considered, in the ways that we go about relating to others in the world. What does it mean to live with statistical apparitions? And how is this category used by leaders for the ends of power and influence? And what does it mean to be a furtive watcher?
Familiar Strangers
Goffman (1963) put ‘the nod count’ (the number of people with whom we are on ‘nodding terms’), at a hundred. The core consists of primary relationships with family and friends. Nonetheless, a considerable proportion fall into the fascinating and little understood category of ‘familiar strangers’ (Milgram 1992: 67–9). That is, persons who populate our known social landscape, yet with whom we never interact beyond a glancing recognition. Like the famous ‘lost letter experiment’, the subject reveals Milgram's lifelong interest in the nature of modern altruism. (5) The springboard for this research question was the anonymous people Milgram saw regularly on the station platform where he caught his subway train into Manhattan. The familiar stranger relationship is not the absence of a relationship, but a ‘special kind of frozen relationship’ (Milgram 1971: 71). Basic to it is a history of principled non-communication and the acceptance of this as the normal state of affairs. This supports a system of non-negotiated, restraining conventions which is mutually accepted, but turns out to be rather odd on closer inspection. For example, you are more likely to ask a total stranger for the time than a person that you have seen for years but never spoken to. Why? What is the inhibition that stops us from asking someone who we have watched as a familiar stranger for months or years, and what is behind the preference for asking a bona fide stranger? Doubtless, it is a matter of not wishing to be emotionally beholden to familiar strangers. The glance or the nod are enough.
Still, Milgram held that in exceptional circumstances familiar strangers may become ‘real people’. As an example, he (1992: 68) refers to a woman who slipped and hurt herself on a Brooklyn street, close by her apartment. She had been known as a familiar stranger by another resident for years. The resident immediately came to the assistance of the woman. Not only that, she organized an ambulance and accompanied her to the hospital to ensure that she received proper care. This suggests that triggering real interaction seems to be associated with out-of-routine encounters. Yet typically, the chief identifying characteristic of familiar strangers is that they remain recognized but unknown to us. By extension, we do not want to know more about them.
The analytical import of Milgram's discussion is that there are latent ‘background expectancies’ in social relationships with persons who are manifest to us as strangers in everyday life. (6) There are unwritten rules that govern the extent of our moral involvement with men and women that we do not directly know. Familiar strangers seem to switch to direct encounters only when a crisis or emergency occurs. Milgram (1971: 74) is very much a man of his time in posing the question: ‘Is there any way to promote solidarity without having to rely on emergencies and crises?’ However, this over-dramatizes the occasions in which familiar strangers become ‘real people’ for us. For example, should you bump into the man who has sold your bottle of mineral water to you for years, some form of greeting, more elaborate than a nod, is highly likely. The decisive factor in unfreezing the relationship is not the presence of an emergency or crisis, but a de-routinized encounter. Yet in our day the question of using this as a basis for constructing solidarity seldom arises. Routine and semi-detachment are ascendant. When they do break down can we really be certain that it leads to emotionally satisfying, durable relationships? As we shall see in the last chapter of the book, the de-routinization that accompanied the Occupy demonstrations in the autumn and winter of 2011 to 2012 established the broad notions of the 99 per cent and the one per cent. But at the society-wide level there is little evidence that the notion of the 99 per cent has endured. It has not moved from a rhetorical interjection to revitalize civic life into an actual, meaningful force capable of marshalling and directing transformative collective behaviour.
The research front that Milgram does not expand very much, is the question: What role do the media play in humanizing familiar strangers by introducing new categories of screen amity and fluid sub-communities organized around celebrity culture and the counter life of recognition with the lives of others? To be clear, our immediate environment remains peopled with familiar strangers with whom a nod count still means something. At the same time, the field of screen apparitions in life has multiplied and vastly grown. With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and other social networking sites and digital chat rooms, we live under the illusion of ‘being connected’. Celebrity culture is the global village of the present day (McLuhan 2001). Most of us may have nothing but a vague knowledge of rural life conditions on the Ivory coast or political relations in the Ukraine, but we know about the Kim (Kardashian) sex tapes and how Kim is handling the challenges of motherhood with West, her baby daughter; and we are aware of what Chris (Martin) and Gwynneth (Paltrow) went through in their ‘conscious decoupling’ and the tough road they face in bringing up their children on different sides of the Atlantic. Celebrity culture insistently imposes onto our radar private, emotional data relating to public figures who are socially and geographically remote. We feel close to them, or at least, well informed about key aspects of their private lives. You may be totally unaware of the personal traumas being faced by the person who works in the office with you, but you know what Mel Gibson and Oscar Pistorius went through in their respective, very different trials with the media. The cases of celebrity culture and statistical men and women require a rethink of both Goffman's notion of ‘nod count’ and Milgram's concept of ‘familiar strangers’. Unprecedented media expansion constitutes a technological re-casting of relationships with others, which is partially based in a history of principled non-communication. One interesting aspect of this is social networking. This has contributed much to our general sense of being connected. We receive postings from people we may know slightingly, or who post because they share the same surname, or went to the same school or university. Even if we make no direct response we are conscious of these wraith-like presences in the background. Yet, while we record communication with others in this format, we do not necessarily reciprocate. We are conscious of relationships, but we deal with them by principled non-communication.
An embarrassing irony for the philosophy of modern liberalism is that the concept of individual autonomy to which it cleaves is articulated at a moment in which consciousness of co-presence is greater than ever before. Even the most diehard neo-liberal is conscious of being alone, together. Consecutive to the autonomy to act however I please, so long as it does not damage the interests and wellbeing of others, is now a freedom to record the intention of others to communicate with me without my taking any action whatsoever to reciprocate. Certainly, social networking makes Goffman's nod count of a hundred seem hopelessly outdated. The disconnected awareness we have of familiar strangers has proliferated and become more hierarchical, with layers of celebrity culture and ranks of statistical men and women crowding in for our attention. It is part of the social landscape and contributes to our sense of modern personal and social order. Yet, save for exceptional circumstances, we go through our whole lives without making contact, and with no more than superficial, fleeting knowledge of the apparitions and the actual conditions of life in which they are situated. Even in the closer world of celebrity culture, we scarcely have the means of discovering what is really going on in the lives of public figures. Which, of course, is not to say that, as with statistical men and women, they are not without weight in the cultural, political and economic conduct of our everyday lives.
Conversely, it must be granted that social networking partly unfreezes the essence of not knowing, which Milgram (1971) attributed to the concept of familiar strangers. Social networking is not only about recording, snooping, the absence of communication or the political positioning of a measureless entity to support vested interests. It is a relatively new form of communication and social association. Its format encourages exchanges that reward displays of personal disclosure and screen amity. As with the pen-friend culture of old snail-mail days, screen amity is perfectly capable of building ties with people separated from each other by great spatial and cultural magnitude. But why bother with a pen friend when you have instant contact available to Skype at your fingertips? Through these means we may acquire a deeper sense of the lives of others. Yet the exchange is not natural. It does not unfold in the way that a direct, physically co-present relationship develops. It is a semi-detached, removed relationship, which often complies, in obvious ways, with the logic of commercial media culture. For many of us, screen friends are becoming more numerous. It is too early to reach conclusions about how they influence moral density, that is, our awareness of the mutual rights and obligations that obtain between people. Yet unquestionably, their presence constitutes a new relational hub in ‘society’.
During the course of this, old notions of co-presence are being recast. An interesting new insight into this may be gleaned from work on new digital technologies of communication. Researchers into the psychological and social consequences of webcam have devised the concept of the technology being ‘always on’. (Miller and Sinanan 2014: 54–60). That is, webcam is left in the background while we get on with cleaning the house, cooking or writing an essay, without paying attention or having a direct conversation with the pixillated other. Webcam is therefore compatible with two types of intimacy. The first is face-to-face, often intense, conversation. The second is ‘the intimacy of taking for granted the co-presence of the other’ (Miller and Sinanan 2014: 55). A few words of explanation are necessary. When we are ‘always on’ we are digitally co-present, but physically absent from our nominated interlocutor. But what does it mean to be ‘co-present’ in these circumstances? We allow a webcam interlocutor or a webcam familiar stranger into our dwelling space, just as we bring our boss in our work appraisals ‘into confidence’ about the reasons for not reaching our work targets having to do with personal relationship problems. A new gestural economy has emerged in which a high degree of personal disclosure is accepted as a quality of good civility. But it is by no means clear if disclosure is clarifying reality or a personal technique to manipulate outcomes.
So, to summarize, since Goffman's day, the nod count of familiar strangers has grown massively and proliferated new relations of presumed intimacy. New media have augmented the social presence of statistical men and women, and celebrities. These ‘familiar strangers’ are people with whom there is no history, and little obvious prospect, of communication in the social landscape. Not all forms of social networking avoid principled non-communication. The type of communication that occurs, its intensity and social meaning, is the subject for another study. In this book my focus is upon emotional relations in which the history of communication takes the form of principled non-communication. Despite permeating into our lives mostly as screen presences, the subjects with whom we do not communicate and have no history of communication are not blank slates. To be sure, a characteristic of modern life is that we often know a good deal about the private lives of others, before we meet them. The data about statistical men and women are certainly uneven, but can be accessed without too much trouble. A visit to Wikipedia now provides a window on a good deal of the world. Of course, much is left out of Wikipedia accounts. But that is precisely the point about the social category of statistical men and women; that is, in our counter-life as secret watchers we do not need or, generally, seek to access, anything more than superficial data about them. Flanking this category, is the qualitatively distinct category of celebrity culture. This is also defined by a history of non-communication. But, unlike the category of statistical men and women, interaction with celebrity culture is with famous personalities, about whom much private data percolates into, and is retained by, the public domain. Celebrity blogging sites and web chat rooms affect to offer a backstage pass to the real lives of the famous. They provide the patina of emotional closeness that affords status differentiation for participants. In the case of celebrities and statistical men and women, social interaction around presumed intimacy is commonplace. The emotional intensity of this interaction varies according to setting and content. If a celebrity is involved in a scandal, or statistical men and women are caught up in an ‘incident’ or ‘emergency’, our emotional interest magnifies. In both cases our response is aided, abetted and some might say, orchestrated by the media. The remarkable thing to note, which is the real subject of this book, is that personal, emotional involvement occurs without a history of communication or any real prospect of direct communication. We live our lives with familiar strangers. The relationships that we have with them are second order, that is they are not based in bloodline or direct kinship. Nevertheless, at the level of meaning, they often give our lives direction and a rewarding sense of place and purpose. Yet familiar strangers are also apparitions whom we never encounter and never really get to know.
Moral Density and Human Sympathy
Since they obviously influence the emotional composition of populations, statistical men and women and celebrities have bearing upon moral density. That is, the background expectancies of obligations and responsibilities that we recognize with each other. In the history of non-communication a palpable moral dimension exists. In its original formulation, Durkheim (2013: 202) insisted that moral density is inextricably tied to physical density. As the division of labour concentrates populations into urban settings, with well-defined national boundaries, ‘the mutual acting and reacting with one another’, which is the basis of moral density, increases. ‘This act of drawing together morally’, writes Durkheim (2013: 202) ‘can only bear fruit if the real distance between individuals has itself diminished’. The awareness of moral density is enshrined in human rights legislation and debates. However, the dynamics that compel us to exercise these moral provisions in the form of concrete action are fuzzy. Nearly everyone would say that they feel some sort of responsibility to help those who are in urgent need. But this is again, closely bound up with issues of setting, content and hidden motivation. Our responses are structured by presenting need as a temporary emergency, incident or episode. The questionable rider to this is that action will produce lasting solutions. In an earlier work, I coined the term ‘event consciousness’ to refer to an orientation to the world that presents social reality as a succession of disconnected incidents, emergencies and events (Rojek 2013). (7) Event consciousness privileges the episodic over the structural and rooted processes. Need in the third world is a grinding, perpetual sorrow that requires a major transfer of resources from affluent societies and well-off strata (Bourdieu 1999; Easterly 2007). By framing it through the lens of event consciousness, supplied via television and other branches of the media, the causes of sorrow are often mis-attributed and the solutions prepared in its name misfire. Incidents, episodes and emergencies are not adventitious. They are the result of traceable structures and identifiable processes. But this level of interpretation is confined to the lecture hall or the ‘serious’ media. The main currents of popular media are events or episode based.
Our lives play out amid a vast aggregate of statistical men and women. When we speak of ‘aggregate’ we are referring to the seven billion with whom we presently co-exist. When an emergency or incident occurs which puts some of them in danger, through, for example famine, earthquake, industrial catastrophe, most of us immediately empathize with them. We have a relationship of presumed intimacy with them, which proceeds on the basis that we ‘know’ their pain, we ‘care’ and we are prepared to ‘act’. The same species of presumed intimacy prevails for many of us in our relationships with celebrities. Because we know so much more about their private lives, it is apt to be more intense and enduring. Some of us follow the private lives of stars like Rhiannon, Lana Del Ray, Justin Bieber, Oscar Pistorius, Kanye West or Kim Kardashian, so that they become virtual members of our kith and kin networks to whom, in some cases, we maintain life-long attachments. How are we to explain the contagion of emotions that pass with the utmost ease and facility from one person to another when physically and socially remote statistical men and women or superstars are portrayed as being at risk?
One answer emerged over two and a half centuries ago. It was provided by the philosopher David Hume (1742). In common with other Enlightenment figures, he sought to develop the concept of society as a community of moral and material interests in conditions in which, through rapid industrialization, competing individual interests and prejudices run amok. He found the seat of community in the passions, especially the capacity for sympathy. For Hume (1742) sympathy is a natural passion without which human society cannot abide or prosper. Sympathy extends beyond the affect of limited company to describe all social relations. It runs through human confederacy like blood through a vein.
On this account then, there is no real surprise at the transfer of emotions. For Hume, human sympathy is innate. When one of us ships water, natural sympathy produces a ‘correspondent feeling’ in ‘all human breasts’ (Hume 1742). Adam Smith (1790: 10, 12) too defined human sympathy as ‘our fellow feeling with any passion whatsoever … (which) derives from … the situation which excites it’. So there you have it. In the classical Enlightenment tradition, the transfer of emotions is a reflection of the innate quality of human sympathy that enables everyone to recognize vulnerability and suffering when the circumstances arise. Routinely, we may think of ourselves as separate, self-absorbed individuals. But when a crisis and emergency occurs we come through in our true colours and assume the mantle of ‘team world’. This account possesses a high feel-good factor, because it points to a common thread of human decency running through life. By the same token it is obviously unsatisfactory. For decency is not always applied when others are obviously in pain and distress. We may profess to feel their pain, to care and to act when statistical men and women or celebrities are in extremis. But on a society-wide basis, action is very uneven, and for most, may run no deeper than a glib statement of sympathy.
Hume (1751) himself later moderated his position. He found himself wondering if sympathy in mankind is not in fact unequally distributed by the same social divisions that divide people into what he referred to as ‘clubs and companies’ (Mullan 1988). In other words, he came to believe that the intensity of human sympathy is not universal. Rather, it is rationed via social attachments and choices. We care for others, but we do not do so equally or indiscriminately. Smith (1790) added a further reservation by proposing that the intensity of sympathy is an inverse of physical and social distance. The capacity to imaginatively ‘change places with the sufferer’ (Smith 1790: 10), diminishes with physical and social magnitude. That is, generally speaking, human sympathy for our kith and kin and fellow countrymen and countrywomen is greater than for people who are not connected to us by bloodline or who are foreign nationals. In fine, Hume and Smith recognized equilibrium between physical proximity and human sympathy. Where physical proximity is absent, both took the view that emotional disequilibrium must follow. This is also, by the way, the essence of Durkheim's (2013) position in The Division of Labour. While we can recognize the validity of the argument to relations of sympathy in our own time, the hub of screen-friend relations and the collateral expansion of the category of statistical men and women in social consciousness through the media-sphere mean that Smith's formula of an inverse relationship between the strength of sympathy and physical distance can no longer be taken for granted. Human sympathy has moved from merely being tied to physical proximity to co-presence. To put it in a nutshell, the instant, electronic representation of emotional need has the power to overcome the magnitude of physical distance. Particularly when exceptional circumstances obtain, statistical men and women may become symbolic causes célèbres, marshalled into emotionally meaningful relationships with us by a numinous esprit de corps. Attention has shifted from viewing sympathy as an innate characteristic of the human species to the relations of power that make emotional identification with others, with whom we have no history or prospect of communication, possible.
Para-Social Interaction
Although massively under-developed since Milgram's untimely death, the concept of familiar strangers resonates with most readers. From the 1950s, Horton and Wohl (1956) were working with the parallel idea of para-social interaction. This is a concept with more powerful emotional implications for the conventional senses of social responsibility and reciprocity than Milgram's concept of familiar strangers. It refers to relationships of presumed intimacy between media figures and network spectators. Robert Merton (1946) strayed into this ground in his account of the astonishing achievement of the singer and radio star Kate Smith who, during the Second World War, raised $39 million war bonds in a marathon of one day of broadcasting. His (1946: 83. 142) analysis noted the relationship between feigning personal concern and manipulation. He argued that in the newly emerging arena of television media figures consciously call upon audiences to become emotionally involved not only with the content of the broadcast, but to identify with them as personalities. The ordinariness and apparent authenticity of media figurers were components of a newly emerging performative economy in which relationships of communication over the airwaves produced emotional identification between audiences and performers. Merton's (1946) account concentrates on the new potential of media celebrities to direct the will of strangers in preferred trajectories. He called this ‘mass persuasion’. He did not advance further to explore the undergrowth of social psychology of emotional identification with media figures.
It was left to Horton and Wohl (1956), writing at the dawn of national network television in North America, to forge a path into this area through their investigation of para-social relationships. They maintained that audiences were forming close emotional relationships with media figures (news readers, anchor men, chat show hosts, weather men, etc.) that went far beyond interludes of air-time broadcasting. Emotional identification with media figures is the heart of the para-social relationship. For Horton and Wohl (1956) it permeates spectators' cognition of the social components of everyday life and spills irresistibly into ordinary behaviour. (8) In a word, para-social relationships alter the balance of emotional attachment we have with others. Horton and Wohl (1956) surmise that these secondary relations were competing with primary (kith/kin) relations in the organization of social life. What is more, TV producers and directors were exploiting this new emotional economy by encouraging TV figures to become, not merely presenters, but personalities by adopting forms of behaviour and engineering organized settings of exchange that refer to domestic conditions. Bespoke forms of presentation were introduced and exchanged using stylized linguistic cues (wisecracks, catch-phrases, deadpan jokes, off-the-cuff remarks, self-deprecation, sharing apparently private thoughts) and, in some cases, making on-screen revelations or engaging in emotional disclosure. This was reinforced by set design that strategically employed domestic furniture, potted plants, framed family photographs, coffee tables, sofas, cushions, rugs and so on in order to convey the impression that the studio is an extension of the home. All of this contributed to a televisual ethos of emotional disclosure. In this vein, Barry King (2008) later introduced the notion of the para-confession. That is, the institutionalized revelation of celebrity secrets, which often involves ritualized celebrity repentance, designed to increase bonding with audiences. He argues that this has become an accepted part of talkshow culture. Its objective is to draw the audience into confidence. The ethos of the para-confession is to magically transform a star in trouble into a friend in need. The underlying aim is to boost audience ratings and the persuasive authority of the star. An atmosphere of staged authenticity is perpetuated (MacCannell 2011: 22–8). That is, an artificial environment, based upon the obliteration of spatial divisions and emotional barriers to elicit the veneer of co-presence and open exchange between familiars. The fundamental goal of these settings is to achieve accelerated intimacy between spectators and media figures. (9) The para-social confession is the institutionalized expression of relations of para-social interaction which soak much deeper in popular culture.
Nowadays, it is too limiting to confine para-social interaction to the relationships between media personalities and spectators. The electronic eye of the media has turned statistical men and women into screen presences with whom emotional relationships are built and developed in spite of the absence of physical co-presence. The media are adept at personalizing these conditions of life and presenting dilemmas as objects with which spectators can rapidly transfer emotional investment. In the process, there has been an explosion in social consciousness of the throng of statistical men and women and celebrities, that we recognize as having ‘relations’ with, and about whom we seek to be informed. Parallel to the bonds that we have with family, friends, fellow students and co-workers, we conduct relationships, often of appreciable emotional intensity, with familiar strangers with whom we pass through life, but never directly encounter.
It comes as a jolt to observe that we pass our lives conversant with what might be termed second order relationships with people with whom we never communicate. It might be said that the novel and poetry played this role in traditional culture. But today's celebrities and statistical men and women are not experienced or interpreted as fictional characters. They are real flesh and blood people whose existence is understood to be independent and consecutive with our own. The mental apparatus that handles this information is heavily influenced by the media. One consequence of the enlargement of the media is to populate ordinary life with ‘uninvited guests’ (Mullan and Taylor 1986). We pass our time with a batch of TV news readers, characters in soap operas, musical icons, sports stars, famous actors, actresses and swathes of nameless statistical men and women, who furnish our lives with vital aspects of fragmented meaning. This is indeed one dimension of what Horton and Wohl (1956) mean by para-social interaction, but the scale of their concept needs to be much enlarged to take account of the scope of modern mass communications. Because of media saturation, it is perverse to submit that our knowledge and ontological identification with the lives of others is confined to celebrity culture. The same channels of communication that supply us with data about the lives of the famous and the glamorous, provide information about ordinary people from whom we are separated by the distance of physical space and the banal necessities of culture. The human sympathies that we develop with them may not be built upon the sculpted, granular knowledge that allows some of us to identify closely with celebrities. All the same, it admits the presumption of intimacy. Consecutively, questions of content and context relating to, inter alia, the extremity of their plight, our knowledge that they are on the edge of the abyss, is perfectly capable of eliciting the rapid transfer of deep emotions. The media switchpoint that permits cathexis with people who are nameless, unmet and unknown to us is a major influence in our contemporary personal sense of personal identity and civic membership. Yet the psychological forces and depth of commitment involved are strangely under-examined. When we pledge £10 or $20 to a global media event like Live Aid (1985) and Live Earth (2007) we may bask in the light that we have made a concrete difference to our starving brothers and sisters, or to the fate of the planet itself. Yet the impulse that underwrites charity is also connected to fiscal prudence. The same emotional intensity behind a charitable donation may be switched to resisting an increase in the attempts of the state to increase personal taxation to combat poverty in the developing world or correct climate change (Easterly 2007, 2014). The worry that afflicted Hume in later life, namely that human sympathy is not a universal constant, but is disproportionately allocated through self-interest with ‘clubs and companies’, has lost none of its force. Further, we should recognize the possibility that a pledge to donate money is merely an example of votive behaviour. That is, it is a statement of intentionality which may never be realized. The purpose of making a pledge to ease suffering in others that will never be delivered is to garner social approval. Votive behaviour carries the appearance of presumed intimacy, but what is often driving it is the demand for recognition, approval and acceptance.
The moral density of our relationships with strangers with whom we communicate on the basis of para-social relationships is not indiscriminate or constant. Dramatic events, incidents and emergencies, such as a terrorist attack or an epidemic, inject the outward conditions and emotional circumstances of strangers more insistently into our moral universe. We presume to have meaningful knowledge and, in some cases, develop strong opinions, about others who mostly exist for us as screen apparitions. The ubiquity of the media, and the obligations of individuals to fulfil the mundane requirements of the division of labour, mean that ordinary knowledge about the lives of others is both plentiful and superficial at the same time.
The Cult of the Individual
This is a far cry from ‘the cult of the individual’ that Durkheim (2013) envisaged as emerging in moral density as mechanical solidarity gives way to organic solidarity. Before coming to the question of this social category it is necessary to prepare the ground by briefly setting down the main differences between the two types of solidarity. In making the distinction, Durkheim (2013) was stressing the more complex social differentiation, diversity of roles, beliefs, sentiments and values in the organic form, as opposed to what he took to be the relatively undifferentiated conditions in the mechanical form. Under mechanical solidarity, individual conscience corresponds closely to collective conscience (collective authority, belief and values). This correspondence is usually expressed in a tribal or religious vernacular. Rituals, in which personal deviation from collective beliefs are subject to censure. Under organic solidarity, where the division of labour is appreciably more complex, personal roles, beliefs, sentiments and values have, relatively speaking, greater autonomy. Under organic solidarity the content of collective conscience is more secular, humanistic and rational. In these conditions, respect for the individual becomes a type of humanistic civic belief system. Respect for personal dignity and material wellbeing are shared throughout society. These collective beliefs are not abstract, but focused and realized in ordinary inter-personal relations. Thus, respect is not merely a theoretical matter, but a practical undertaking. It is buttressed by the state working in conjunction with a variety of associations that Durkheim envisaged establishing in the workplace and the community. The purpose of this partnership is to conceive, operationalize and monitor individual rights and check abnormality to ensure healthy social equilibrium. This is what Durkheim means by the term, ‘the cult of the individual’.
What distinguishes moral density under organic solidarity is that it is more cognisant of human needs (and rational) than under the mechanical precedent. Individuals are not compelled to prostrate themselves before the mysterious ways of a supreme being, nor are they understood to be the blind servants of nature. Where the cult of the individual takes root and flourishes, it is enough to exhibit and practise respect and justice for the dignity of all, without distinction (Lukes 1973: 147–67; Fournier 2013). While Durkheim regards these qualities to be aspects of ordinary social encounters, the ultimate repository is what he calls ‘restitutive law’. That is, a legitimate, universal legal framework that recognizes the ultimate social value of individual rights.
In the course of a subsequent contribution to understanding the social glue of modern civil society, Jürgen Habermas (1996, 1998), makes an analogous case in proposing ‘constitutional patriotism’ as, among other things, the guarantor of individual rights in contemporary multi-cultural, multi-ethnic conditions. Constitutional patriotism may be regarded as the cognate of moral density. It sets out and defends the rights of the individual and, as such, presupposes mutualities and reciprocities. These are ultimately enshrined in law, but Habermas also understands them to be ordinary qualities of civil culture. Under constitutional patriotism then, respect for the individual is pronounced. It consists of the aggregate of recognized legal and supererogatory responsibilities and duties beyond kith and kin networks, that citizens acknowledge and apply in relations with each other. Durkheim's notion of moral density applies to civil relations contained by national boundaries. For Habermas, the spatial application of the idea is broader. He mainly uses it to refer to relations in the partner states of the European Union. Other writers have taken over the basic idea and applied it more freely to refer to borderless groupings in which global strangers recognize mutuality and reciprocity and the level of background expectancies relating to rights and obligations. For example, ‘care for the other’ is a primary obligation in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (2005). In this case, the other is not confined to strangers in national or federated civil society. It refers to an extra-territorial, cosmopolitan outlook to strangers in the world who are in extremis.
To return to the question of fluctuation, a moment's reflection establishes that moral density is not constant in social affairs. It undergoes cycles of amplification and recession through circumstances and representation (via media communication). In his own day, Durkheim was aware of the role that the media played in representing the Dreyfus scandal, in which an innocent French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent, was convicted and imprisoned on trumped-up charges of treason (Fournier 2013: 285–308). The Dreyfus scandal, and the subsequent campaign to pardon him, shamed the French establishment and received high levels of media coverage. While he did not comment upon it in detail, Durkheim would surely have been aware of an intensification in the moral density of ordinary public life in relation to indignation and unease with respect to the Dreyfus question. To be precise, media communication (and amplification) of the episode multiplied the volume of moral density surrounding Dreyfus as a familiar (celebrity) stranger. In the Division of Labour Durkheim (2013: 202–4) hypothesized that the prime levers determining the concentration of moral density are (a) the growth and urban concentration of populations; and (b) the number and speed of the means of communication. His only comment on the latter lever is terse to the point of being consecutively vague and suggestive. ‘By abolishing or lessening the empty spaces separating social segments’, writes Durkheim (2013: 203), ‘these means (communication) increase the density of society.’ It is unclear whether he regarded the mutuality and reciprocity in moral density produced by population growth and concentration as equivalent to that which stems from communication. Not the least of the difficulties in unravelling this question is the comparatively primitive nature of the communications of his own day. Print, telegraph, rail and the radio deliver a very different circuit for building reciprocity and mutuality than digital society, tablet culture and air travel. To prejudge here is to err. Screen amity is not necessarily the bedfellow of depth, nor is the telegraph inevitably the companion of superficial communication. Once again, content and context are important variables here. With these caveats, Durkheim clearly identifies a connection between communication and moral density. That is, moral life with others is not confined to direct physical interaction. It also embraces representation of others through the means of communication. Crucially, Durkheim cites communication as an element in the concentration of moral density. We will return to the relationship between the quality of moral life and its equation with physical nearness and remoteness later in the study. Durkheim believed that group associations, based in work and community, would emerge under organic solidarity to translate moral constitutional issues into everyday life. While today, these association do exist ( in the form of trade unions and voluntary associations), the central players of moral force are the state, corporations, interest groups and the media. This implies that neither organic solidarity nor constitutional patriotism function as Durkheim and Habermas would wish. In their accounts, the citizen is a knowledgeable, active participant in democratic processes. Above all, Durkheim saw moral density as the free reciprocal relation to impartial civic principles classified by the state, but subject to civic revision by the action of the people. Nowadays, the execution of these rights and responsibilities is not exactly freely vibrating with the state or corporations in the way that Durkheim envisaged. Contemporary conditions involve the inflection of these rights and responsibilities through the media and the vested interests that manage and control
