Eva Illouz: immanent critique

Something of an exception to a contemporary ‘hands off approach to self-reflexive critique, Illouz has proposed inventive ways of exploring what’s wrong with therapy culture. She is convinced that by appealing to an immanently critical posture a critical reception of therapy culture might avoid reflecting upon the cultural potentials that are being sacrificed. In regard to terminology, it should be pointed out that Illouz doesn’t make Jaeggi's, earlier discussed, distinction between a normatively charged immanent critique and an internal critique that merely exposes shortfalls and blind spots within an ideological regime. It is this latter that Illouz has in mind when she refers us to ‘immanent critique’. Illouz hopes that critique might identify therapy culture’s shortcomings by theorizing its own ‘ambiguous, contradictory properties’ (Illouz, 1997, p. 287). Consuming the Romantic Utopia (1997) locates a major tension between the avowed value commitments and the purposes embraced by a consumerist therapy culture. She observes that the self-reflexive and ‘rational attitude to the self advocated by a therapeutic mindset offers a communicative channel to contemporary needs for ‘self direction, self-knowledge and egalitarian self-assertion’. However, she also remarks on competing imperatives that encourage people ‘to conceive of themselves as a list of preferences and needs’ (p. 287). While therapeutic culture promises to help put us in charge of our lives, it does so by its package of ‘life skills’ and psychological codes. At this stage Illouz is confident that a resistance to these scripting imperatives will leak through. For, ‘as we try and control our lives thr ough the rational management of our relationships, experiences that transcend rationalization become more elusive and our longing for them all the more urgent’ (p. 287). Here, Illouz brings in results of some interviews to demonstrate that people continue to signify their not yet extinguished subjectivities via their personalizing receptions of cultural scripts. She makes the point that this kind of active reception is the luxury of a privileged class. It is available only to those who are ‘somewhat released’ from the demands of ‘effort, work, and routine’ (p. 181). However, it is not clear that Illouz's empirical study is able to supply the ground for a general critique. The significance of the empirical material seems to depend upon, but is actually unsupported by, an account of longings that seem to encounter consumer scripts as a repressive limit. Indeed, the personal touches that Illouz discovers in certain privileged receptions could even be a symptom of the endless adaptability that Horkheimer and Adorno famously recognized as vital to the hegemonic ambitions of a consumer culture: ‘Something is provided for everyone so no-one can escape; differences are hammered home and propagated’ (2002, p. 97). In any case, the resistant power that Illouz discerns in her early writings proves to be weak. A decade later she is persuaded that longings for a creative interplay with the commodifying stream have been extinguished.

Saving the Modem Soul: Therapy, Emotions and the Culture of Self Help (2008) further develops Illouz’s reflections on the grounds of a systematic critique. Here she identifies major internal tensions between the professed emancipatory investments of a therapy culture, which ‘fosters a form of sociability based on communication’ while encouraging ‘a strong individualism based on enlightened self-interest’, and its institutional purposes that aim at securing ‘the self within a network of social relations’ (p. 103). Describing this always-present tension as a ‘sociological puzzle', Illouz advocates an immanently critical approach that seeks to evaluate the therapeutic ‘from within its own horizons of propositions and claims’ (p. 20). However, immanent critique requires that we are able to demonstrate potentials in the values advocated by a given framework that are held back or distorted by its own competing purposes. So if the sociological puzzle is to become the ground for an immanent critique, Illouz has to spell out the entailments of the self-directing individualism advocated by therapy culture that appear to be contested by its practical, curing purposes. A slightly earlier study titled Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007) perhaps helps us understand why Illouz is not prepared to support her critical posture with an account of alienated cultural potentials. Illouz once more draws our attention to internal tensions in the ‘therapeutic emotional style’ (2007, p. 6). Remarking on its emancipatory investments, she points out that therapy culture joins with feminism to insist on a new kind of accountability in our interactions. A rationalization of intimate relations has transformed their ‘emotional texture' introducing expectations of equality and freedom into this domain (p. 30). But there are losses too for this rationalization ‘instills a procedural quality to emotional life which makes emotions lose their indexicality, their capacity to orient us quickly and unself-reflectively in the web of our everyday emotions' (p. 38). Under the therapeutic regime ‘emotions are increasingly disembedded and disentangled from concrete and particular actions and relationships’ (p. 38). Illouz goes on to note that, over the last decade, the commodification of emotions that bundles them into readily communicable forms has been pushed forward under the penetration of Internet technology into the private domain.

There is a clear continuity here with the proposal for an immanently critical challenge to a colonizing therapeutic ethos that Illouz talked about in Saving the Modern Soul. Cold Intimacies contrasts this idea of critique with a rejected idea of ‘pure critique’ that ‘subsumes culture in the political sphere’ and becomes ‘to a large extent the counting of the ways in which culture either emancipates or represses, delivers “trash” or “treasure”’(2007, p. 92). Illouz finds links between the straitjacket, rationalizing imperatives of the therapeutic and the colluding

‘banal’ proposal by traditional critique to reduce cultural to political life. This latter contributes to a ‘hyperrationality’ whose abstract generalizations are necessarily blind to the particularity of an irreducibly concrete private life (2007, p. 111). Drawing on Michael Walzer’s idea of the untranslatability of norms upheld by distinct values spheres, Illouz suggests that rationalizing descriptions of private life can only result in distortions of the profoundly individual ties and subjective feelings that bind the intimate sphere. She is convinced that alienations produced by this colonization (from both critical and therapeutic imperatives) will see us retreat into private worlds that, held together ‘by self-generated fantasies’, appear as ‘sterile’ and ‘disconnected from reality’ (2007, pp. 113-14).

There are some problems here. Firstly, to suggest that contemporary intimacy is all about particularizing bonds and personal feelings that would invariably encounter rationalizing descriptions as alienating intrusions sacrifices the lived complexity of contemporary intimacy. Beate Rössler (2005, p. 161) seems to be right when she underlines the centrality of the investment in a principled respect for the other in the bundle of norms that underpin expectations we have of intimate interactions. Illouz’s undifferentiated diagnosis of the alienating impacts of rationalizing ideals upon private life depends on an oversimplified, one-sided account of the intimate sphere. It also seems to depend upon collapsing distinct therapeutic purposes and critical theory interests. Therapy culture only promises to redress the emotional deficit of damaged, and to streamline emotionally overburdened, lives. Far from an alienating imposition upon particular narratives of a concrete private life, therapy culture, as Furedi forcefully reminds us, can today be dedicated to unblocking an inchoate, anxious privacy via a ‘healing’ public confession. It seems that we will need to rely on a critical theory that is interested in reflecting on ways of valuing cultural potentials to unearth the alienations that might be involved.