Emotional Imperatives of Late Modern Society and their Possible Social Consequences

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine the main “imperatives” of contemporary emotional culture, which may provide special research optics for a deeper understanding of late modern society. The author begins with a definition of emotional culture — based on the body of works in sociology of emotions — and identifies dominant emotional norms and their corresponding perceptions, which bear the nature of imperatives in people’s everyday experience and serve as an extension of social values. These emotional imperatives include rational control over emotions, a compulsive desire to be and look happy, avoiding negative feelings, individual guilt from any sort of failure in social life, grievance that takes the form of righteous indignation, and others. These “imperatives” are in some respect contradictory, reflecting different aspects of life, but generally subject to the logic of late modern society, and can have important implicit social consequences such as broken social ties, “chronic” feelings of depression and frustration, fatigue, bad moods, increased anxiety and fears and many other implicit consequences, such as the emergence of new forms of solidarity. As a result of global events and the resulting social crises, these imperatives may change, thereby allowing us to trace how people’s lived experiences are changing. The list of emotional imperatives is not by any means full, and the same goes for their description, but through the outlined emotional imperatives the author attempts to describe theoretically contemporary cultural configurations of lived experience through leading emotional norms.