The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Introduction: Feel Your Way

Every day of every year, swarms of illegal immigrants and bogus asylum seekers invade Britain by any means available to them... Why? They are only seeking the easy comforts and free benefits in Soft Touch Britain. All funded by YOU – The British Taxpayer! (British National Front Poster)¹

How does a nation come to be imagined as having a ‘soft touch’? How does this ‘having’ become a form of ‘being’, or a national attribute? In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I explore how emotions work to shape the ‘surfaces’ of individual and collective bodies. Bodies take the shape of the very contact they have with objects and others. My analysis proceeds by reading texts that circulate in the public domain, which work by aligning subjects with collectives by attributing ‘others’ as the ‘source’ of our feelings. In this quote from the British National Front, ‘the others’, who are named as illegal immigrants and bogus asylum seekers, threaten to overwhelm and swamp the nation. This is, of course, a familiar narrative, and like all familiar narratives, it deserves close and careful reading. The narrative works through othering; the ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘bogus asylum seekers’ are those who are ‘not us’, and who in not being us, endanger what is ours. Such others threaten to take away from what ‘you’ have, as the legitimate subject of the nation, as the one who is the true recipient of national benefits. The narrative invites the reader to adopt the ‘you’ through working on emotions: becoming this ‘you’ would mean developing a certain rage against these illegitimate others, who are represented as ‘swarms’ in the nation. Indeed, to feel love for the nation, whereby love is an investment that should be returned (you are ‘the taxpayer’), is also to feel injured by these others, who are ‘taking’ what is yours.

It is not the case, however, that anybody within the nation could inhabit this ‘you’. These short sentences depend on longer histories of articulation, which secure the white subject as sovereign in the nation, at the same time as they generate effects in the alignment of ‘you’ with the national body. In other words, the ‘you’ implicitly evokes a ‘we’, a group of subjects who can identify themselves with the injured nation in this performance of personal injury. Within the British National Front, the ‘we’ of the nation is only available to white Aryans: ‘We will reinstate the values of separatism to our racial kindred. We will teach the youth that one’s country is the family, the past, the sacred race itself . . . We live in a nation that is historically Aryan’.² This alignment of family, history and race is powerful, and works to transform whiteness into a familial tie, into a form of racial kindred that recognises all non-white others as strangers, as ‘bodies out of place’ (Ahmed 2000).³ The narrative is addressed to white Aryans, and equates the vulnerability of the white nation with the vulnerability of the white body. ‘YOU’ will not be soft! Or will you?

What is so interesting in this narrative is how ‘soft touch’ becomes a national character. This attribution is not specific to fascist discourses. In broader public debates about asylum in the United Kingdom, one of the most common narratives is that Britain is a ‘soft touch’: others try and ‘get into’ the nation because they can have a life with ‘easy comforts’.⁴ The British Government has transformed the narrative of ‘the soft touch’ into an imperative: it has justified the tightening of asylum policies on the grounds that ‘Britain will not be a soft touch’. Indeed, the metaphor of ‘soft touch’ suggests that the nation’s borders and defences are like skin; they are soft, weak, porous and easily shaped or even bruised by the proximity of others. It suggests that the nation is made vulnerable to abuse by its very openness to others. The soft nation is too emotional, too easily moved by the demands of others, and too easily seduced into assuming that claims for asylum, as testimonies of injury, are narratives of truth. To be a ‘soft touch nation’ is to be taken in by the bogus: to ‘take in’ is to be ‘taken in’. The demand is that the nation should seal itself from others, if it is to act on behalf of its citizens, rather than react to the claims of immigrants and other others. The implicit demand is for a nation that is less emotional, less open, less easily moved, one that is ‘hard’, or ‘tough’. The use of metaphors of ‘softness’ and ‘hardness’ shows us how emotions become attributes of collectives, which get constructed as ‘being’ through ‘feeling’. Such attributes are of course gendered: the soft national body is a feminised body, which is ‘penetrated’ or ‘invaded’ by others.

It is significant that the word ‘passion’ and the word ‘passive’ share the same root in the Latin word for ‘suffering’ (passio). To be passive is to be enacted upon, as a negation that is already felt as suffering. The fear of passivity is tied to the fear of emotionality, in which weakness is defined in terms of a tendency to be shaped by others. Softness is narrated as a proneness to injury. The association between passion and passivity is instructive. It works as a reminder of how ‘emotion’ has been viewed as ‘beneath’ the faculties of thought and reason. To be emotional is to have one’s judgement affected: it is to be reactive rather than active, dependent rather than autonomous. Feminist philosophers have shown us how the subordination of emotions also works to subordinate the feminine and the body (Spelman 1989; Jaggar 1996). Emotions are associated with women, who are represented as ‘closer’ to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement.

We can see from this language that evolutionary thinking has been crucial to how emotions are understood: emotions get narrated as a sign of ‘our’ prehistory, and as a sign of how the primitive persists in the present. The Darwinian model of emotions suggests that emotions are not only ‘beneath’ but ‘behind’ the man/human, as a sign of an earlier and more primitive time. As Darwin puts it:

As Darwin puts it:With mankind some expressions, such as the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood, except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition. (Darwin 1904: 13–14)

Such an evolutionary model allows us to return to the ‘risk’ of emotions posited through the attribution of ‘soft touch’ as a national characteristic. The risk of being a ‘soft touch’ for the nation, and for the national subject, is not only the risk of becoming feminine, but also of becoming ‘less white’, by allowing those who are recognised as racially other to penetrate the surface of the body. Within such a narrative, becoming less white would involve moving backwards in time, such that one would come to resemble a more primitive form of social life, or a ‘lower and animal-like condition’.

The hierarchy between emotion and thought/reason gets displaced, of course, into a hierarchy between emotions: some emotions are ‘elevated’ as signs of cultivation, whilst others remain ‘lower’ as signs of weakness. The story of evolution is narrated not only as the story of the triumph of reason, but of the ability to control emotions, and to experience the ‘appropriate’ emotions at different times and places (Elias 1978). Within contemporary culture, emotions may even be represented as good or better than thought, but only insofar as they are re-presented as a form of intelligence, as ‘tools’ that can be used by subjects in the project of life and career enhancement (Goleman 1995). If good emotions are cultivated, and are worked on and towards, then they remain defined against uncultivated or unruly emotions, which frustrate the formation of the competent self. Those who are ‘other’ to me or us, or those that threaten to make us other, remain the source of bad feeling in this model of emotional intelligence. It is not difficult to see how emotions are bound up with the securing of social hierarchy: emotions become attributes of bodies as a way of transforming what is ‘lower’ or ‘higher’ into bodily traits.

So emotionality as a claim about a subject or a collective is clearly dependent on relations of power, which endow ‘others’ with meaning and value. In this book, I do not want to think about emotionality as a characteristic of bodies, whether individual or collective. In fact, I want to reflect on the processes whereby ‘being emotional’ comes to be seen as a characteristic of some bodies and not others, in the first place. In order to do this, we need to consider how emotions operate to ‘make’ and ‘shape’ bodies as forms of action, which also involve orientations towards others. Emotions, for the British National Front, may pose a danger to the national body of appearing soft. But the narrative itself is an emotional one: the reading of others as bogus is a reaction to the presence of others. Hardness is not the absence of emotion, but a different emotional orientation towards others. The hard white body is shaped by its reactions: the rage against others surfaces as a body that stands apart or keeps its distance from others. We shouldn’t look for emotions ‘in’ soft bodies.⁵ Emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time, as well as through orientations towards and away from others. Indeed, attending to emotions might show us how all actions are reactions, in the sense that what we do is shaped by the contact we have with others. In Spinoza’s terms, emotions shape what bodies can do, as ‘the modifications of the body by which the power of action on the body is increased or diminished’ (Spinoza 1959: 85).

So rather than asking ‘What are emotions?’, I will ask, ‘What do emotions do?’. In asking this question, I will not offer a singular theory of emotion, or one account of the work that emotions do. Rather, I will track how emotions circulate between bodies, examining how they ‘stick’ as well as move. In this introduction, my task will be to situate my account of the ‘cultural politics’ of emotion within a very partial account of the history of thinking on emotions. I will not offer a full review of this history, which would be an impossible task.⁶ It is important to indicate here that even if emotions have been subordinated to other faculties, they have still remained at the centre of intellectual history. As a reader of this history, I have been overwhelmed by how much ‘emotions’ have been a ‘sticking point’ for philosophers, cultural theorists, psychologists, sociologists, as well as scholars from a range of other disciplines. This is not surprising: what is relegated to the margins is often, as we know from deconstruction, right at the centre of thought itself. In the face of this history, my task is a modest one: to show how my thinking has been informed by my contact with some work on emotions.

Emotions and objects

One way of reflecting on this history of thinking about emotion is to consider the debate about the relation between emotion, bodily sensation and cognition.⁷ One could characterise a significant ‘split’ in theories of emotion in terms of whether emotions are tied primarily to bodily sensations or to cognition. The former view is often ascribed to Descartes and David Hume. It would also be well-represented by the work of William James, who has the following formulation: ‘The bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact... and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion’ (James 1890: 449). Emotion is the feeling of bodily change. The immediacy of the ‘is’ suggests that emotions do not involve processes of thought, attribution or evaluation: we feel fear, for example, because our heart is racing, our skin is sweating. A cognitivist view would be represented by Aristotle, and by a number of thinkers who follow him (Nussbaum 2001: 10). Such theorists suggest that emotions involve appraisals, judgements, attitudes or a ‘specific manner of apprehending the world’ (Sartre 1962: 9), which are irreducible to bodily sensations. Some theorists have described emotions as being judgements (Solomon 1995), whilst others might point to how they involve judgements: the emotion of anger, for example, implies a judgement that something is bad, although we can be wrong in our judgement (Spelman 1989: 266). Of course, many theorists suggest that emotions involve sensations or bodily feeling as well as forms of cognition. But as Alison M. Jaggar has suggested, the shift towards a more cognitive approach has often been at the expense of an attention to bodily sensations (Spelman 1989: 170). Or when emotions are theorised as being about cognition as well as sensation, then these still tend to be presented as different aspects of emotion (Jaggar 1996: 170).

To begin a rethinking of the relation between bodily sensation, emotion and judgement we can turn to Descartes’ ‘The Passions of the Soul’. Whilst this little book may be full of problematic distinctions between mind and body, its observations on emotions are very suggestive. Descartes suggests that objects do not excite diverse passions because they are diverse, but because of the diverse ways in which they may harm or help us (Descartes 1985: 349). This is an intriguing formulation. Some commentators have suggested that Descartes argues that emotions are reducible to sensations insofar as they are caused by objects (Brentano 2003: 161; Greenspan 2003: 265). But Descartes offers a critique of the idea that objects have causal properties, suggesting that we don’t have feelings for objects because of the nature of objects. Feelings instead take the ‘shape’ of the contact we have with objects (see Chapter 1). As he argues, we do not love and hate because objects are good or bad, but rather because they seem ‘beneficial’ or ‘harmful’ (Descartes 1985: 350). Whether I perceive something as beneficial or harmful clearly depends upon how I am affected by something. This dependence opens up a gap in the determination of feeling: whether something is beneficial or harmful involves thought and evaluation, at the same time that it is ‘felt’ by the body. The process of attributing an object as being or not being beneficial or harmful, which may become translated into good or bad, clearly involves reading the contact we have with objects in a certain way. As I argue in Chapter 1, whether something feels good or bad already involves a process of reading, in the very attribution of significance. Contact involves the subject, as well as histories that come before the subject. If emotions are shaped by contact with objects, rather than being caused by objects, then emotions are not simply ‘in’ the subject or the object. This does not mean that emotions are not read as being ‘resident’ in subjects or objects: I will show how objects are often read as the cause of emotions in the very process of taking an orientation towards them.

If the contact with an object generates feeling, then emotion and sensation cannot be easily separated. A common way of describing the relation between them is as a form of company: pleasure and pain become companions of love and hate, for example, in Aristotle’s formulation (2003: 6, see also Spinoza 1959: 85). The idea of ‘companions’ does not do the trick precisely, given the implication that sensation and emotion can part company. Instead, I want to suggest that the distinction between sensation and emotion can only be analytic, and as such, is premised on the reification of a concept. We can reflect on the word ‘impression’, used by David Hume in his work on emotion (Hume 1964: 75). To form an impression might involve acts of perception and cognition as well as an emotion. But forming an impression also depends on how objects impress upon us. An impression can be an effect on the subject’s feelings (‘she made an impression’). It can be a belief (‘to be under an impression’). It can be an imitation or an image (‘to create an impression’). Or it can be a mark on the surface (‘to leave an impression’). We need to remember the ‘press’ in an impression. It allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace. So not only do I have an impression of others, but they also leave me with an impression; they impress me, and impress upon me. I will use the idea of ‘impression’ as it allows me to avoid making analytical distinctions between bodily sensation, emotion and thought as if they could be ‘experienced’ as distinct realms of human ‘experience’.

So how do we form such impressions? Rethinking the place of the object of feeling will allow us to reconsider the relation between sensation and emotion. Within phenomenology, the turn away from what Elizabeth V. Spelman calls the ‘Dumb View’ of emotions (Spelman 1989: 265), has involved an emphasis on intentionality. Emotions are intentional in the sense that they are ‘about’ something: they involve a direction or orientation towards an object (Parkinson 1995: 8). The ‘aboutness’ of emotions means they involve a stance on the world, or a way of apprehending the world. Now, I want to bring this model of the object as ‘about-ness’ into dialogue with the model of contact implicit in Descartes.⁸ Emotions are both about objects, which they hence shape, and are also shaped by contact with objects. Neither of these ways of approaching an object presumes that the object has a material existence; objects in which I am ‘involved’ can also be imagined (Heller 1979: 12). For example, I can have a memory of something, and that memory might trigger a feeling (Pugmire 1998: 7). The memory can be the object of my feeling in both senses: the feeling is shaped by contact with the memory, and also involves an orientation towards what is remembered. So I might feel pain when I remember this or that, and in remembering this or that, I might attribute what is remembered as being painful.

Let’s use another example. The example that is often used in the psychological literature on emotions is a child and a bear.⁹ The child sees the bear and is afraid. The child runs away. Now, the ‘Dumb View’ would be that the bear makes the child afraid, and that the bodily symptoms of fear are automatic (pulse rate, sweating, and so on). Functionalist models of emotion, which draw on evolutionary theory, might say that the fear has a function: to protect the child from danger, to allow survival. Fear in this situation could be an instinctual reaction that has enhanced successful adaptation and thus selection.¹⁰ Fear would also be an action; fear would even be ‘about’ what it leads the child to do.¹¹ But the story, even in its ‘bear bones’, is not so simple. Why is the child afraid of the bear? The child must ‘already know’ the bear is fearsome. This decision is not necessarily made by her, and it might not even be dependent on past experiences. This could be a ‘first time’ encounter, and the child still runs for it. But what is she running from? What does she see when she sees the bear? We have an image of the bear as an animal to be feared, as an image that is shaped by cultural histories and memories. When we encounter the bear, we already have an impression of the risks of the encounter, as an impression that is felt on the surface of the skin. This knowledge is bodily, certainly: the child might not need time to think before she runs for it. But the ‘immediacy’ of the reaction is not itself a sign of a lack of mediation. It is not that the bear is fearsome, ‘on its own’, as it were. It is fearsome to someone or somebody. So fear is not in the child, let alone in the bear, but is a matter of how child and bear come into contact. This contact is shaped by past histories of contact, unavailable in the present, which allow the bear to be apprehended as fearsome. The story does not, despite this, inevitably lead to the same ending. Another child, another bear, and we might even have another story.

It is not just that we might have an impression of bears, but ‘this bear’ also makes an impression, and leaves an impression. Fear shapes the surfaces of bodies in relation to objects. Emotions are relational: they involve (re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to such objects. The bear becomes the object in both senses: we have a contact with an object, and an orientation towards that object. To be more specific, the ‘aboutness’ of fear involves a reading of contact: the child reads the contact as dangerous, which involves apprehending the bear as fearsome. We can note also that the ‘reading’ then identifies the bear as the cause of the feeling. The child becomes fearful, and the bear becomes fearsome: the attribution of feeling to an object (I feel afraid because you are fearsome) is an effect of the encounter, which moves the subject away from the object. Emotions involve such affective forms of reorientation.

Of course, if we change the bear to a horse, we might even get to the father.¹² If the object of feeling both shapes and is shaped by emotions, then the object of feeling is never simply before the subject. How the object impresses (upon) us may depend on histories that remain alive insofar as they have already left their impressions. The object may stand in for other objects, or may be proximate to other objects. Feelings may stick to some objects, and slide over others.¹³ In this book, I offer an analysis of affective economies, where feelings do not reside in subjects or objects, but are produced as effects of circulation (see Chapter 2). The circulation of objects allows us to think about the ‘sociality’ of emotion.

Source
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Introduction: Feel Your Way. Second edition. Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Literature