Über artivistische Interventionen. Invektivität, Medien, Moral

On the basis of two aesthetic interventions of Christoph Schlingensief and the Center for Political Beauty (ZPS) this article analyses the relationship between artivism and invectivity. In each case the underlying theatrical dispositifs are being discussed. With this, the article inquires into the respective procedures of disturbing the audience and the public. Whereas Schlingensief’s politics of form aims at creating a sphere of ambiguity, the ZPS is all about stimulating moral indignation. This also reflects the diametrically opposed capabilities of artivistic art: Controversy on the one hand, partisanship on the other.

Concessions for Concession’s Sake: Injustice, Indignation, and the Construction of Intractable Conflict in Israel–Palestine

In intractable conflicts, what factors lead populations to accept negotiated outcomes? To examine these issues, we conduct a survey experiment on a representative sample of the Jewish Israeli population and a companion experiment on a representative sample of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. We find that holding the negotiated settlement outcome constant, approval of the settlement is strongly influenced by whether it is framed as a negotiating defeat for one side—if and only if respondents are primed to be indignant—and that these effects are strongly mediated by perceptions of the fairness of the settlement outcome. Moral indignation produces a desire for concessions for concession’s sake. Such conflicts over political framing violate assumptions of the rationalist literature on conflict processes and suggest important new directions for conflict theorizing.

Reconstruction and indignation: On the transformative potential of the latest model of Axel Honneth’s Critical Theory

This paper analyses the transformative potential of Axel Honneth’s latest model of Critical Theory and is divided in three sections. Firstly, it will be presented the criticisms towards Honneth’s latest model of Critical Theory revealing the largely shared assumption that normative reconstruction is responsible for a conservative bias. The second section will focus on Honneth’s “reconstrutive turn” exposing its reasons and outcomes. (II). The third section will then discuss how reconstructive critique is related to a genealogical proviso that will metacritically denounce the increasing gap between historical promises and the institutional provisions for their fulfillment; a gap that will be the source of the potentially revolutionary sentiment of moral indignation (III). Finally, the text will sketch some brief considerations on the relation of this feeling of indignation and Honneth’s commitment to a renewed idea of socialism.

Populism and the psychopolitics of morality

Jung’s theory of complexes sheds light on populists’ identity as the “virtuous people” who are opposed to the “corrupt elites”. Their complexes underlie three well-known populist attitudes. First is their antipluralism, their sense of moral superiority toward immigrants and minorities. Second, in reaction to the failures of neoliberalism, they experience moralistic relative deprivation regarding the “undeserving” underclasses that benefit from government hand-outs. And third, as native white Christians, their moral indignation stems from comparisons with ethnic workers in the same occupations earning the same pay. This psychopolitical analysis explains much of the populists’ anger, frustration, and resentment.

Indignation for moral violations suppresses the tongue motor cortex: preliminary TMS evidence

We commonly label moral violations in terms of ‘disgust’, yet it remains unclear whether metaphorical expressions linking disgust and morality are genuinely shared at the cognitive/neural level. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), we provide new insights into this debate by measuring motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) from the tongue generated by TMS over the tongue primary motor area (tM1) in a small group of healthy participants presented with vignettes of moral transgressions and non-moral vignettes. We tested whether moral indignation, felt while evaluating moral vignettes, affected tM1 excitability. Vignettes exerted a variable influence on MEPs with no net effect of the moral category. However, in accordance with our recent study documenting reduced tM1 excitability during exposure to pictures of disgusting foods or facial expressions of distaste, we found that the vignettes of highly disapproved moral violations reduced tM1 excitability. Moreover, tM1 excitability and moral indignation were linearly correlated: the higher the moral indignation, the lower the tM1 excitability. Respective changes in MEPs were not observed in a non-oral control muscle, suggesting a selective decrease of tM1 excitability. These preliminary findings provide neurophysiological evidence supporting the hypothesis that morality might have originated from the more primitive experience of oral distaste.

The Good, the Bad, and the Nonidentity Problem

Individuals often feel moral indignation, resentment, and regret, regarding wrongs committed towards their collective in the past. However, there are good reasons to be skeptical about such beliefs and sentiments or, at least, to see them as more problematic than normally thought. Building upon my previous work, particularly concerning “Fortunate Misfortune” and the implications of the “Nonidentity Problem” for history, I consider some of the associated difficulties. I focus upon the Jewish case; which seems to express the difficulties in a particularly acute way.

Exploring the moral compass

With the advent of the internet and social media, car and vanpooling have become easily available alternatives to public transport in many parts of the world. This paper draws on publicly available data from a Facebook car and vanpooling group used by Slovenian cross-border commuters to make their journeys to and from Austria more economically sustainable. It examines public displays of moral indignation following allegations of malpractice by relatively new members whose whole purpose in joining the group was to earn a living from driving vans across borders. Vanpool users collaboratively denounce van service providers for transgressing some of the social responsibilities that ought to bind members of the group together and for their lack of accountability. The accusations which entail exaggerations, complaints, insults and threats, among other hostile verbal attacks, convey moral indignation and are similarly resisted and challenged by the drivers. They offer a window into conflicting behavioural expectations at a time of socioeconomic change and transition. The alleged lack of van providers’ accountability which, in turn, informs the van users’ displays of moral indignation is indicative of the moral relativism that emerges as a result of the relocalisation and, the nature of a contemporary global practice at a time when changes in social life are underway. The primacy of the economic return that car and vanpooling offers service providers and cross-commuters with is oriented to by the former as outstripping the social responsibilities typically related to the provision of the regulated services, and by the latter, as morally unjustifiable despite acknowledging its economic value.

Weaponising parent-blame in post-welfare Britain

This chapter examines how contested cultural austerity romances were mobilised to create high levels of public consent for ‘austere’ policy making in Britain. In particular, it considers how the classed romances of retreat and virtuous thrift came to feed the fire of moral indignation around the perceived excesses of the welfare state. The chapter analyses the reimagining of the welfare state: how welfare has been rewritten as a blockage to meritocracy and how the notion of welfare disgust was crafted. It shows how, in a state of apparently permanent austerity, new forms of hostility are directed at those seen as wasteful, irresponsible and a parasitic drain. This is evident in the so-called benefit broods, and the chapter uses the case of the Philpott family to explore how parent-blame was weaponised in in a broader ideological project that seeks to construct an anti-welfare commonsense.