Эмоциональные императивы позднесовременного общества и их социальные последствия

Социологический журнал. 2021. Т. 27. № 2. С. 25–45.

Simonova O. A.

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.

Keywords: социология эмоций, эмоциональная культура, emotional culture, the sociology of emotions, emotional imperatives, эмоциональные императивы, late modern society, позднесовременное общество

Publication based on the results of: Моральные эмоции в отношениях неравенства: регуляция и социальные последствия (российский контекст) (2021)