Sympathetic Sentiments: Affect, Emotion and Spectacle in the Modern World

Abstract: A companion volume to Sensational Subjects: The Dramatization of Experience in the Modern World (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Both volumes analyse the culture of sensationalism, as it has developed over the modern period, with particular reference to the role of ‘feeling’, and the performance of feeling, as aspects of individual experience and cultural identity. This volume takes up the links between sensibility, sympathy and the modern spectacle of suffering, as aspects of a distinctive cultural configuration that has evolved in parallel, over the same period, along with ‘sentimentality’ as its conventionally disparaged other face.

This develops out of earlier work which explores ‘modernity as culture’, situating modernity in the context of everyday life as it reveals tensions between the ‘rational’, instrumental orientation to the world and our actual experience and consciousness of it. In a culture of sensationalism, this results in a simultaneous fragmentation and diffusion of modern experience, along with attempts to reassert control, whether through the rationalization of experience to measurable uniformity and its reproduction as simulation, or through a manic mobilization against threats characterized as breakdown, as evil, hence presenting us with a reconstituted sense of the world as a scene of melodrama. This latter manifestation of the culture of sensationalism in turn renders problematical the whole arena of morally-inflected public debate and the possibility of moral engagement with the plight of the other.