Feelings are relevant to the study of democracy. Yet they prove difficult to encapsulate. Delving into the worlds of Michel Houellebecq, Jürgen Habermas and Emmanuel Macron, Shivdeep Grewal suggests an ‘experiential’ approach

Sad passions

Jean-Paul Gagnon writes of two states in which ‘data on democracy’ might be said to exist. One is ‘concerned with what peoples leave behind. Words.’ As a basis for research, it promises insights into the ‘total texture of democracy’.

The other ‘is lived, phenomenal, and incredibly tricky to measure’. Nevertheless, ‘it is essential to study it’.

Thinking back to 2016, one recalls the shock (though somehow not surprise) of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, an apprehension of trauma within the body politic. This intensity of feeling would seem an example of the latter form of data.

One recalls the shock (though somehow not surprise) of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, an apprehension of trauma within the body politic

Perhaps Emmanuel Macron had this in mind when, the following year, he spoke of contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq’s purchase on the ‘sad passions’ of the time. To employ Gagnon’s terminology, Houellebecq deals with the ‘knowledge held in human bodies’.

Also in 2017, Macron met with German philosopher Jürgen Habermas:

Commonly associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Habermas welcomes the consolidation of democracy and law within the European Union, yet allows that side effects might arise in the process. Among these effects are psychological disturbances we might not, at first, associate with political and economic developments. In constructing a theory of such ‘pathologies’, Habermas draws on phenomenology: ‘the study of the structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view’.

An experiential artefact

In light of the preceding, we might be tempted to apply Habermas’s theories to the process of European integration, reading the sad passions of Houellebecq’s fictional characters (and authorial persona) as examples of its unintended consequences. Yet doing so should not detract from a detail specific to the conjuncture of 2017: Houellebecq, Habermas and Macron each combined roles of theorist and practitioner.

We can, for example, understand Houellebecq’s writings and public statements as practical applications of a ‘science’, a social theory of his own devising. Macron considered Hegel’s philosophy of history in an early interview. He addressed the concept of sad passions, derived from Spinoza, there as well. And Habermas, too, has shifted between theoretical and practical orientations, albeit in the opposite direction to Houellebecq and Macron. His political journalism has informed public discussion, in Germany and beyond, for several decades.

We unearth a tangle of ideas and emotions, facts and fictions, sensations and events – a counterpart to Gagnon’s data mountain

Pondering this interplay of social science and the creation of worlds, we arrive at Gagnon’s more elusive form of data on democracy. We unearth a tangle of ideas and emotions, facts and fictions, sensations and events. A counterpart to Gagnon’s ‘linguistic artefact’, this ‘experiential artefact’ is our object of study.

In the realm of the senses

Rather than assigning Houellebecq, Habermas and Macron to three distinctive worlds, we think of them in relation to one, the bubble formed of their public appearances and statements in 2017. We zoom in, as we would with a detail from a photograph, allowing the bigger picture to fade from view.

We approach this new world without criteria for the parts that merit study and the parts that do not. This calls for a degree of naïveté, a temporary suspension of judgement. We might think of Houellebecq’s characters as real people or draw out the mythological allusions employed by Macron in describing his presidency as ‘Jupiterian’. Above all, we pay careful attention to the feelings set in motion by these thoughts.

Habermas made clear the role of writers and intellectuals in laying the groundwork for the unification of the German state, recommending a comparable effort at the European level

Despite the imaginative leap required, the experiential artefact we unearth is not altogether fictional. To borrow a term from the speculative fiction writer William Gibson, we might rather describe it as a ‘consensual hallucination’. We are not getting rid of critical judgement – just switching to a different sort. Rather than the gaze of a political scientist, ours recalls that of a psychoanalyst onto a patient’s dreams.

Thus, we draw closer to the reality experienced by citizens of contemporary European democracies, at once virtual and embodied. Facts and emotions – when these are distinguishable at all – compete for influence in this realm.

Of course, this turn to the imagination has political implications as well. Habermas made clear the role of writers and intellectuals in laying the groundwork for the unification of the German state, recommending – almost in isolation – a comparable effort of the imagination at the European level.

The strangeness of theory

Around the turn of the millennium, German philosopher Axel Honneth suggested affinities between Houellebecq and Critical Theory. One wondered at the directions in which this tradition would develop under the extraordinary pressures of then emergent political and technological realities.

To speak today of ‘Critical Theory after Houellebecq’ certainly gives rise to a cluster of associations. Perhaps, even now, researchers are documenting interests and influences common both to Houellebecq and the Frankfurt School: Schopenhauer, Huxley, Baudelaire, Tocqueville, Sade… Yet there is an eerie sense of arriving late at this scholarly gathering. We are unsure of how we got here. What persuades us to remain?

No.109 in a Loop thread on the Science of Democracy. Look out for the 🦋 to read more