Passionate

A packet of soft brown sugar informs us that ‘Since 1878 our passionate team have been making and packing high quality sugar on the banks of the River Thames.’ There is an inadvertent touch of grotesque comedy to this: Tate and Lyle's employees seem to be Dickensian monomaniacs, kept alive by their inexhaustible enthusiasm for making and packing sugar and their sentimental attachment to the banks of the River Thames. How does this bizarre sentence come to be distributed around the supermarkets of England?

The simple answer is that ‘passionate’ is a marketing cliché. Skimming a single month of The Times digital archive (January 2019), one encounters people who are passionate about pizza, about challenger brands, about holidays, about motorhomes, about training pastry chefs, about ‘meaningful’ alternatives to smoking cigarettes, and about active living as a way of recovering from spinal injuries. Not to mention Staffline, an expanding recruitment agency which is reportedly ‘buying Passionate About People’. The suspicion of bathos around some of these passions suggests that the usage is hyperbolic, and this is confirmed by its ready resort to adverbial amplification: it is not uncommon to be ‘deeply’ or ‘truly’ passionate about something, and a random search indicates that ‘hugely passionate’ is almost a fossilized phrase. When postgraduate students advertising for tutoring work describe themselves as hugely passionate about reading or mathematics, it is with a dizzying implication that merely to be passionate is, already, no longer enough.

Arguably, though, these observations do no more than move the enigma a step back. Historically, being ‘passionate’ has not been an unequivocally admirable quality, certainly not in the commercial and professional contexts where the word now thrives. ‘Passion’, much more than its near-synonyms ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’, has often connoted a disorderly motive force, diametrically opposed to ‘reason’. People who are ‘passionate’ in this sense are impulsive, unstable, sometimes violent, driven in many instances by anger or sexual desire; they do not seem to be ideally qualified for manufacturing sugar or designing motorhomes. So the question remains: how did ‘passionate’ become something that everyone in the job market would like to be perceived as being?

The first of these quotations is the ending of the stanza about Synge from ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, and the other two are the last lines of ‘The Fisherman’ and ‘A Prayer for Old Age’ respectively.¹ That is, in all three of them ‘passionate’ has the character of a conclusion: a tangle of images and feelings comes out (as one says of an equation) in that charged adjective. This, finally, is how the poet wants to speak, who he wants to be. The word names an ideal.

Another source of suggestion is the word's surprisingly frequent appearance in obituaries. Something like a funerary convention makes it easy to say that the deceased was passionate about ancient languages, or gun control, or Shropshire. This usage is of course compatible with the current marketing sense, but it predates it by several decades. It suppresses the word's ambivalence through the framing power of genre: we know in advance that everything that is said will be complimentary, so the positive aspects of being passionate come naturally to the front. The word's built-in imputation of unreasonableness and disruption softens, in affectionate retrospect, into the image of a spirited individuality.

Although they are different in register, these two deployments of the word exemplify the same move, which is to redeem the chaotic or rebarbative potential of ‘passion’ by rendering it unworldly – Yeats by attaching it to literature, and the obituarists by applying it to the dead. Placed at a slightly reverent remove from the everyday transactions of life, the epithet constitutes a special sign of genuineness, a Sunday-best of human feeling. Yeats heightens this already elevated position when he hopes to be seen as a foolish, passionate man: the pairing gives the passionate man access to the well-known paradoxes of the Fool, so that the unworldly overtones border on a sort of folk-tale saintliness. These implications make the word's later appearance in marketing discourse a little ironic: the restaurateur or investment adviser who claims to be ‘passionate’ is promoting his business by representing himself as incorrigibly unbusinesslike.

The irony is not very profound, however. It is normal, after all, for the purchasers of commodities to envisage an extra margin of value that goes beyond commodity exchange: that is what constitutes a really good deal. Tourists seek a destination which is not touristy; shoppers comb prêt-à-porter racks for the feeling of a bespoke fit; recruiters try to pick out the applicant who will go above and beyond. The image of the ‘passionate’ service provider addresses this hope: it is precisely when the transaction is most obviously an economic one that there is the greatest need for reassurance that it is not economic at all, but expresses a gratuitous human impulse. Considered purely as an advertiser's move, ‘passionate’ is a promise that the buyer will get, not only more than they pay for, but more than could ever be priced. The absurdity of the Tate and Lyle packet comes from its pushing this rhetorical motif beyond the limits of plausibility. The obvious alternative account of the sugar makers' motivation – that this is their job and they do it to earn money – presses embarrassingly up against the back of the adjective.

In other words, the ubiquitous use of ‘passionate’ in marketing is – not to get too nuanced about it – a lie, and the lie is given away by a couple of small but interesting breaks in the continuity of the word's evolution. One is its migration, on the whole, from third-person to first-person application. Traditionally, it has been a way of describing not oneself but somebody else: that is self-evidently the case in obituaries, but it can also be seen, for example, in a long-standing convention of attributing a ‘passionate’ nature to perceived inferiors – women, foreigners, sinners, the young.² Whether it is complimentary, derogatory, or affectionately patronising, this externality makes sense because of an understanding that to be passionate is of the order of naivety: passionate individuals, carried by their impulses they know not where, are the last people who could stand back and describe themselves. Passion is seen in them by an observer. In its marketing use, however, being passionate is almost always something that is being directly claimed by the speaker. Celebrities routinely describe themselves as such in interviews, companies on their websites, school leavers in their applications to university. The assertion is therefore marked by a kind of internal alienation. Like the formulaic poses of holiday selfies or Instagram party snaps, it is a first-person statement with a covert third-person orientation, because ‘I’ is a brand which I am promoting. It presents a self that is designed for somebody else; the ‘passionate’ man speaks as his own line manager.

The resulting contradiction inside the word is deepened by a residual connotation: the idea that passionate people are helpless. This implication is reflected in the various definitions offered by the 1989 OED: ‘Affected with passion or vehement emotion; dominated by intense or impassioned feeling … Subject to passion; swayed by the passions or emotions; easily moved to strong feeling; impressible, susceptible.’³ Passionate individuals are affected, dominated, subject, swayed, moved: consistently with the word's older connections with ‘passivity’ and ‘patient’, they seem to have no agency but to be blown about by uncontrollable gales of emotion. This dimension of the word's semantics is flatly incompatible with the requirements of the market. Contrast the OED's terms, for instance, with a nine-point characterisation that appeared on the website of the World Economic Forum in 2016. According to this version, produced by a business psychologist rather than a lexicographer, ‘what defines passionate people’, among other things, is that they are obsessed, don't waste time, are optimistic, get up early, take risks and ‘are all about their work’.⁴ It is striking, of course, that these passionate people, unlike the OED's kind, are model corporate employees. But it is also noticeable that they are the masters of their own lives. So far from being swayed or easily moved, they marshal their time and their feelings in the service of an unremitting intention. ‘Passionate’ has been quietly converted into its opposite: once a kind of personal helplessness, it is now a kind of personal power.

What has happened, in one word, is that to be passionate has become a commodity.⁵ It possesses exchange value because of the valued qualities we have seen to be attached to it: authenticity, spontaneity, energy, self-forgetfulness and so on. But entering the market changes its nature. If it is to be a commodity, it must necessarily be something that the passionate person owns, otherwise they would not be able to sell it. So it ceases to be a force that dominates or moves me and becomes instead an object at my disposal, a vehicle of my self-assertion. In that sense, the word displays a deeply typical process: capitalism exploits a natural resource by objectifying it, instrumentalising it, refining and packaging it on the banks of the River Thames.