WOODWARD, Kathleen, Statistical Panic. Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions, Durham, Duke University Press, 2009, 226 p.
ISBN 9780822343776
RÉSUMÉ
In this moving and thoughtful book, Kathleen Woodward explores thepolitics and poetics of the emotions, focusing on American culturesince the 1960s. She argues that we are constrained in terms of gender,race, and age by our culture's scripts for “emotional” behavior andthat the accelerating impoverishment of interiority is a symptom of ourincreasingly media-saturated culture. She also shows how we can beempowered by stories that express our experience, revealing the valueof our emotions as a crucial form of intelligence.
Referringdiscreetly to her own experience, Woodward examines theinterpenetration of social structures and subjectivity, considering howpsychological emotions are social phenomena, with feminist anger,racial shame, old-age depression, and sympathy for non-human cyborgs(including robots) as key cases in point. She discusses how emerginginstitutional and discursive structures engender “new” affects that inturn can help us understand our changing world if we are attentive tothem—the “statistical panic” produced by the risk society, with itsnumerical portents of disease and mortality; the rage prompted byimpenetrable and bloated bureaucracies; the brutal shame experienced bythose caught in the crossfire of the media; and the conservativecompassion that is not an emotion at all, only an empty politicalslogan.
The orbit of Statistical Panic is wide, drawingin feminist theory, critical phenomenology, and recent theories of theemotions. But at its heart are stories. As an antidote to the vacuousdramas of media culture, with its mock emotions and scattershotsensations, Woodward turns to the autobiographical narrative. Storiesof illness—by Joan Didion, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Monette, and AliceWexler, among others—receive special attention, with the inexhaustibleemotion of grief framing the book as a whole.
BIOGRAPHIE
Kathleen Woodward is Professor of English at the University ofWashington, where she directs the Simpson Center for the Humanities.She is the author of Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions and the editor of Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations and The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture.