Emotional capitalism names the systematic mobilisation of emotions as productive resources under neoliberal conditions. Where industrial capitalism suppressed emotionality as disturbance to mechanical efficiency, contemporary capitalism exploits emotions to drive consumption, motivate labour and generate engagement.
This marks a fundamental shift in capital’s relationship to subjectivity. Disciplinary capitalism aimed to produce docile bodies performing repetitive tasks. Emotions threatened this regularity. Workers were expected to suppress feelings and function as reliable components within production systems.
The valorisation of emotionality
Neoliberal capitalism reverses this relationship. Emotions become economically valuable. They constitute raw material for corporate communication, marketing and workplace culture. Subjects are expected not to suppress but to display and perform emotions.
The transformation reflects material changes in production. When manufacturing dominated, physical labour could be mechanically extracted from unwilling workers. Immaterial production requires different capacities. Communication skills, creativity and affective engagement cannot be coerced. They require voluntary emotional investment.
Corporations now explicitly demand emotional skills in performance evaluation. Employees must demonstrate enthusiasm, passion and commitment. Technical competence alone proves insufficient. Workers must emotionally identify with corporate missions and display appropriate affects.
This creates what Eva Illouz terms “emotional labour.” Workers must manage their feelings to meet organisational requirements. Service workers must smile and project friendliness regardless of actual mood. Knowledge workers must exhibit excitement about projects. This emotional performance becomes integral to labour itself.
Distinction between feeling, emotion and affect
Understanding emotional capitalism requires conceptual precision about affective states. These terms are often conflated but name distinct phenomena.
Feelings are objective, narratable and possess duration. They can be recounted in coherent narratives. Grief, contentment and unease exemplify feelings. They structure experience over time and integrate into identity.
Emotions prove performative, intentional and goal-directed but fleeting. They emerge in specific situations and aim toward objects. Anger directed at injustice, fear responding to threat, and joy celebrating success exemplify emotions. They possess functional character and dissipate when situations change.
Affects remain eruptive and momentary. They flood consciousness without clear intentional structure. Affects resist narrative integration. They mark intensity without stable meaning. The sudden surge of panic or rush of elation exemplifies affective experience.
Emotional capitalism exploits primarily the performative qualities of emotion. Corporations commercialise emotional meanings and cultivate appropriate emotional responses. The temporality matters. Emotions prove more manipulable than feelings precisely because they are fleeting and situation-specific.
Emotionality and acceleration
Emotional capitalism thrives on acceleration. Rationality requires duration and contemplation. It proceeds methodically through argument and evidence. Emotionality operates faster. It generates immediate responses and bypasses reflective judgment.
As neoliberal capitalism dismantles continuity and integrates instability to enhance productivity, emotionality becomes essential. Rapid market fluctuations, constant organisational restructuring and perpetual innovation require subjects capable of quick emotional adjustment.
The accelerated pace of communication further promotes emotionalisation. Digital platforms favour immediate reaction over sustained reflection. The temporality of social media privileges emotional discharge over rational deliberation. Content provoking strong emotional responses circulates more rapidly than complex arguments.
This generates feedback loops. Acceleration promotes emotionalisation. Emotionalisation enables further acceleration. The result is communicative environments structured around affective intensity rather than rational exchange.
The commercialisation of emotion
Consumer capitalism systematically commercialises emotional experience. Products are marketed not through functional description but through emotional association. Advertising cultivates desires and promises emotional fulfilment through purchase.
Brands function as emotional repositories. Consumers develop attachments to corporations that supposedly share their values. The relationship between consumer and brand mimics personal connection, generating loyalty that transcends rational calculation of value.
Experience industries exemplify emotional commercialisation. Tourism, entertainment and hospitality sell curated emotional states. Consumers purchase not goods but feelings. The commodity is the affective experience itself.
Digital platforms intensify these dynamics. Social media commodifies social connection. Users generate emotional content that platforms monetise through advertising. The emotional labour of maintaining online presence becomes unpaid productive activity.
Emotional exploitation in the workplace
Workplaces increasingly demand total emotional investment. The concept of work-life balance becomes obsolete when work colonises affective capacities formerly outside employment.
Corporations cultivate cultures emphasising passion and purpose. Employees should love their work and identify with organisational missions. This emotional identification makes exploitation feel like self-realisation.
Startup culture exemplifies these dynamics. Employees work extreme hours whilst experiencing this as exciting opportunity rather than exploitation. The workplace becomes community. Colleagues become family. Professional relationships absorb emotional energies previously reserved for private life.
The friendly aesthetic of contemporary workplaces serves extractive functions. Casual dress codes, recreational facilities and collaborative spaces create the appearance that work is play. This obscures intensification of labour and expansion of working time.
When work demands total emotional investment, failure becomes personally devastating. Being fired means losing identity and community, not just income. This makes workers more compliant and prevents collective organisation.
Optimisation imperatives
Emotional capitalism subjects feelings to optimisation logic. Emotions become resources to be managed and maximised. The self-help industry provides technologies for emotional regulation serving productivity.
Subjects are expected to cultivate positive emotions and eliminate negative ones. This reflects neoliberal positivity imperatives. Anger, sadness and frustration supposedly indicate personal dysfunction requiring correction.
The reality is that negative emotions serve crucial functions. They signal problems requiring attention. They motivate resistance to injustice. The demand for constant positivity eliminates these signals and prevents appropriate responses to genuinely problematic conditions.
Mindfulness and meditation become incorporated into corporate culture. These practices, which originated in contemplative traditions seeking liberation, get repurposed as productivity tools. Meditation should make workers calmer and more focused. Emotional regulation serves corporate efficiency.
The privatisation of social solidarity
Émile Durkheim understood solidarity as bundles of emotions binding social actors to collective symbols. Shared feelings constituted social cohesion. Rituals generated collective effervescence strengthening community bonds.
Emotional capitalism privatises these processes. Rather than collective emotional experiences binding communities, individuals consume emotional commodities privately. Shared rituals are replaced by personalised experiences.
Social media creates appearance of connection whilst actually isolating users. Subjects curate emotional performances for audiences but lack genuine collective bonds. The quantification of social interaction through likes and followers converts quality into quantity.
Political movements struggle against these tendencies. Building solidarity requires shared emotional experiences. Neoliberal structures individualise experience and make collective emotional bonds difficult to form and sustain.
The exhaustion of emotional resources
Emotional capitalism generates distinctive pathologies. When affective capacities become resources to be maximised, subjects experience emotional exhaustion.
Burnout results from total emotional investment without adequate recovery. The achievement subject treats emotional capacities as inexhaustible. When reserves become depleted, the system offers only further optimisation as response.
Depression emerges as inability to feel appropriate emotions. The demand for constant positivity and enthusiasm proves unsustainable. When subjects can no longer generate required affects, they experience this as personal failure.
The wellness industry commodifies recovery whilst reproducing conditions generating exhaustion. Apps promise to improve mental health through emotional tracking and optimisation. This subjects feelings to the same logic that created problems.
Authenticity and performance
Emotional capitalism creates paradoxes around authenticity. Subjects should express genuine emotions whilst performing affects meeting institutional requirements, generating what Arlie Hochschild termed “emotional dissonance.”
Workers must make required emotional performances feel authentic. Surface acting, where one displays unfelt emotions, proves exhausting. Deep acting, where one actually generates required feelings, proves more sustainable yet more invasive. The boundary between authentic self and performed role collapses.
The demand for authenticity itself becomes technique of control. When corporations require employees to bring their whole selves to work, private selfhood becomes colonised. There remains no refuge from productive demands.
Social media intensifies these dynamics. Users must appear authentic whilst curating performances for audiences. The authentic self becomes content to be produced and circulated. Genuine feeling becomes indistinguishable from performed affect.
Political implications
Emotional capitalism poses challenges for political organisation. Traditional labour movements assumed workers could recognise shared material interests. When work becomes emotionally invested identity, class consciousness becomes difficult.
Workers who love their jobs do not necessarily support labour rights. They experience workplace demands as opportunities for self-realisation. Collective organisation appears as barrier to individual achievement.
Emotional identification with brands and platforms prevents recognition of exploitation. Users defend corporations that extract their data and labour. The emotional attachment overrides rational calculation of interest.
Building counter-hegemonic movements requires developing emotional cultures opposed to neoliberal affect. Creating spaces for negative emotions. Cultivating collective joy disconnected from consumption. Practicing solidarity as shared feeling rather than individualised experience. These remain underdeveloped possibilities requiring conscious political work.