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.
Inside out and outside in
What do I mean by the sociality of emotion? Before I can answer this question, we must firstly register what might seem too obvious: the everyday language of emotion is based on the presumption of interiority. If I was thinking about emotions, I would probably assume that I need to look inwards, asking myself, ‘How do I feel?’ Such a model of emotion as interiority is crucial to psychology. Indeed, the emergence of psychology as a discipline had significant consequences for theories of emotion: by becoming an ‘object lesson’ for psychology, emotions have been psychologised (White 1993: 29). In a psychological model, I have feelings, and they are mine. As K. T. Strongman states, ‘Above all, emotion is centred internally, in subjective feelings’ (Strongman 2003: 3). I may express my feelings: I may laugh, cry, or shake my head. Once what is inside has got out, when I have expressed my feelings in this way, then my feelings also become yours, and you may respond to them.14 If you sympathise, then we might have ‘fellow-feeling’ (Denzin 1984: 148). If you don’t understand, we might feel alienated from each other (Scheff 1994: 3).15 The logic here is that I have feelings, which then move outwards towards objects and others, and which might even return to me. I will call this the ‘inside out’ model of emotions.
In critiquing this model, I am joining sociologists and anthropologists who have argued that emotions should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990; White 1993: 29; Rosaldo 1984: 138, 141; Hochschild 1983: 5; Kemper 1978: 1; Katz 1999:2; Williams 2001: 73; Collins 1990: 27). I want to offer a model of sociality of emotion, which is distinct from this literature, as well as informed by it. Take Durkheim’s classic account of emotions. He argues in The Rules of Sociological Method that sociology is about recognising constraint: ‘Most of our ideas and our tendencies are not developed by ourselves but come to us from without. How can they become a part of us except by imposing themselves upon us?’ (Durkheim 1966: 4). Here, the sociological realm is defined as the imposition of ‘the without’ on the individual subject. This demarcation of ‘the sociological’ becomes a theory of emotion as a social form, rather than individual self-expression. Durkheim considers the rise of emotion in crowds, suggesting that such ‘great movements’ of feeling, ‘do not originate in any one of the particular individual consciousnesses’ (Durkheim 1966: 4). Here, the individual is no longer the origin of feeling; feeling itself comes from without. Durkheim’s later work on religion suggests that such feelings do not remain ‘without’. As he notes: ‘This force must also penetrate us and organise itself within us; it thus becomes an integral part of our being and by that very fact this is elevated and magnified’ (Durkheim 1976: 209). For Durkheim, then, emotion is not what comes from the individual body, but is what holds or binds the social body together (Collins 1990: 27).
This argument about the sociality of emotions takes a similar form to the psychological one, though with an obvious change of direction. The ‘inside out’ model has become an ‘outside in’ model. Both assume the objectivity of the very distinction between inside and outside, the individual and the social, and the ‘me’ and the ‘we’. Rather than emotions being understood as coming from within and moving outwards, emotions are assumed to come from without and move inward. An ‘outside in’ model is also evident in approaches to ‘crowd psychology’, where it is assumed that the crowd has feelings, and that the individual gets drawn into the crowd by feeling the crowd’s feelings as its own. As Graham Little puts it: ‘Emotions run the other way, too: sometimes starting “out there” – and Diana’s death is a prime example of this – but linking up with something in us so that we feel drawn in and become personally involved’ (Little 1999: 4). The example of Diana’s death is useful. An outside in model might suggest that feelings of grief existed in the crowd, and only then got taken on by individuals, a reading which has led to accusations that such grief was inauthentic, a sign of being ‘taken in’.16
Indeed the ‘outside in’ model is problematic precisely because it assumes that emotions are something that ‘we have’. The crowd becomes like the individual, the one who ‘has feelings’. Feelings become a form of social presence rather than self-presence. In my model of sociality of emotions, I suggest that emotions create the very effect of the surfaces and boundaries that allow us to distinguish an inside and an outside in the first place. So emotions are not simply something ‘I’ or ‘we’ have. Rather, it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others. To return to my argument in the previous section, the surfaces of bodies ‘surface’ as an effect of the impressions left by others. I will show how the surfaces of collective as well as individual bodies take shape through such impressions. In suggesting that emotions create the very effect of an inside and an outside, I am not then simply claiming that emotions are psychological and social, individual and collective. My model refuses the abbreviation of the ‘and’. Rather, I suggest that emotions are crucial to the very constitution of the psychic and the social as objects, a process which suggests that the ‘objectivity’ of the psychic and social is an effect rather than a cause.
In other words, emotions are not ‘in’ either the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects. My analysis will show how emotions create the very surfaces and boundaries that allow all kinds of objects to be delineated. The objects of emotion take shape as effects of circulation. In suggesting emotions circulate, I am not offering a model of emotion as contagion (see Izard 1977: 106). The model of emotional contagion, which is often influenced by Silvan S. Tomkins’ work, is useful in its emphasis on how emotions are not simply located in the individual, but move between bodies.17 After all, the word ‘contagion’ derives from the Latin for ‘contact’. In this model, it is the emotion itself that passes: I feel sad, because you feel sad; I am ashamed by your shame, and so on. In suggesting that emotions pass in this way, the model of ‘emotional contagion’ risks transforming emotion into a property, as something that one has, and can then pass on, as if what passes on is the same thing. We might note that the risk is not only a theoretical one. I have experienced numerous social occasions where I assumed other people were feeling what I was feeling, and that the feeling was, as it were, ‘in the room’, only to find out that others had felt quite differently. I would describe such spaces as ‘intense’. Shared feelings are at stake, and seem to surround us, like a thickness in the air, or an atmosphere. But these feelings not only heighten tension, they are also in tension. Emotions in their very intensity involve miscommunication, such that even when we feel we have the same feeling, we don’t necessarily have the same relationship to the feeling. Given that shared feelings are not about feeling the same feeling, or feeling-in-common, I suggest that it is the objects of emotion that circulate, rather than emotion as such. My argument still explores how emotions can move through the movement or circulation of objects. Such objects become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension.
Emotions are after all moving, even if they do not simply move between us. We should note that the word ‘emotion’ comes from the Latin, emovere, referring to ‘to move, to move out’. Of course, emotions are not only about movement, they are also about attachments or about what connects us to this or that. The relationship between movement and attachment is instructive. What moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place. Hence movement does not cut the body off from the ‘where’ of its inhabitance, but connects bodies to other bodies: attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others. Movement may affect different others differently: indeed, as I will suggest throughout this book, emotions may involve ‘being moved’ for some precisely by fixing others as ‘having’ certain characteristics. The circulation of objects of emotion involves the transformation of others into objects of feeling.
My argument about the circulation of objects draws on psychoanalysis and Marxism (see Chapter 2). I consider, for example, that the subject does not always know how she feels: the subject is not self-present and emotions are an effect of this splitting of experience (Terada 2001: 30). From Freud onwards, this lack of self-presence is articulated as ‘the unconscious’. Working with Freudian psychoanalysis, I will show how objects get displaced, and consider the role of repression in what makes objects ‘sticky’. But I also suggest that the lack of presence does not always return to the subject, or to the ‘scene’ of trauma (castration), upon which much psychoanalytic theory rests. Drawing on Marx, I argue that emotions accumulate over time, as a form of affective value (see Chapter 4). Objects only seem to have such value, by an erasure of these histories, as histories of production and labour. But whilst Marx suggests that emotions are erased by the value of things (the suffering of the worker’s body is not visible in commodity form), I focus on how emotions are produced.18 It is not so much emotions that are erased, as if they were already there, but the processes of production or the ‘making’ of emotions. In other words, ‘feelings’ become ‘fetishes’, qualities that seem to reside in objects, only through an erasure of the history of their production and circulation.
Holding together these different theoretical traditions is a challenge.19 There is no glue, perhaps other than a concern for ‘what sticks’. Indeed, the question, ‘What sticks?’, is one that is posed throughout this study. It is a reposing of other, perhaps more familiar, questions: Why is social transformation so difficult to achieve? Why are relations of power so intractable and enduring, even in the face of collective forms of resistance? This book attempts to answer such questions partially by offering an account of how we become invested in social norms. The work to which I am most indebted is the work of feminist and queer scholars who have attended to how emotions can attach us to the very conditions of our subordination (Butler 1997b; Berlant 1997; Brown 1995). Such scholars have shown us how social forms (such as the family, heterosexuality, the nation, even civilisation itself) are effects of repetition. As Judith Butler suggests, it is through the repetition of norms that worlds materialise, and that ‘boundary, fixity and surface’ are produced (Butler 1993: 9). Such norms appear as forms of life only through the concealment of the work of this repetition. Feminist and queer scholars have shown us that emotions ‘matter’ for politics; emotions show us how power shapes the very surface of bodies as well worlds. So in a way, we do ‘feel our way’.
This analysis of how we ‘feel our way’ approaches emotion as a form of cultural politics or world making. My argument about the cultural politics of emotions is developed not only as a critique of the psychologising and privatisation of emotions,20 but also as a critique of a model of social structure that neglects the emotional intensities, which allow such structures to be reified as forms of being. Attention to emotions allows us to address the question of how subjects become invested in particular structures such that their demise is felt as a kind of living death. We can see this investment at work in my opening quote: the nation becomes the object of love precisely by associating the proximity with others with loss, injury and theft (see also Chapter 6). The presence of non-white others is even associated by the British National Front with death: ‘Britain is Dying: How long are you just going to watch?’.21To become the ‘you’ addressed by the narrative is to feel rage against those who threaten not only to take the ‘benefits’ of the nation away, but also to destroy ‘the nation’, which would signal the end of life itself. Emotions provide a script, certainly: you become the ‘you’ if you accept the invitation to align yourself with the nation, and against those others who threaten to take the nation away.
The emotionality of texts
But there is still more. For a book on emotions, which argues that emotions cannot be separated from bodily sensations, this book may seem very orientated towards texts.22 I offer close readings of texts, with a concern in particular with metonymy and metaphor: my argument will suggest that ‘figures of speech’ are crucial to the emotionality of texts. In particular, I examine how different ‘figures’ get stuck together, and how sticking is dependent on past histories of association that often ‘work’ through concealment. The emotionality of texts is one way of describing how texts are ‘moving’, or how they generate effects.
I will also consider the emotionality of texts in terms of the way in which texts name or perform different emotions. Naming emotions often involves differentiating between the subject and object of feeling. When we name an emotion we are not simply naming something that exists ‘in here’. So a text may claim, ‘the nation mourns’. We would pause here, of course, and suggest the ‘inside out/outside in’ model of emotion is at work: the nation becomes ‘like the individual’, a feeling subject, or a subject that ‘has feelings’. But we would also need to ask: What does it do to say the nation ‘mourns’? This is a claim both that the nation has a feeling (the nation is the subject of feeling), but also that generates the nation as the object of ‘our feeling’ (we might mourn on behalf of the nation). The feeling does simply exist before the utterance, but becomes ‘real’ as an effect, shaping different kinds of actions and orientations. To say, ‘the nation mourns’ is to generate the nation, as if it were a mourning subject. The ‘nation’ becomes a shared ‘object of feeling’ through the ‘orientation’ that is taken towards it. As such, emotions are performative (see Chapter 4) and they involve speech acts (Chapter 5), which depend on past histories, at the same time as they generate effects.
When we talk about the displacement between objects of emotion, we also need to consider the circulation of words for emotion. For example, the word ‘mourns’ might get attached to some subjects (some bodies more than others represent the nation in mourning), and it might get attached to some objects (some losses more than others may count as losses for this nation). The word ‘mourns’ might get linked to other emotion words: anger, hatred, love. The replacement of one word for an emotion with another word produces a narrative. Our love might create the condition for our grief, our loss could become the condition for our hate, and so on (see Chapter 6). The emotion does its work by ‘reading’ the object: for example, others might get read as the ‘reason’ for the loss of the object of love, a reading which easily converts feelings of grief into feelings of hate (see Chapter 7).
So I am not discussing emotion as being ‘in’ texts, but as effects of the very naming of emotions,23 which often works through attributions of causality. The different words for emotion do different things precisely because they involve specific orientations towards the objects that are identified as their cause. As such, my archive is full of words. But the words are not simply cut off from bodies, or other signs of life. I suggest that the work of emotion involves the ‘sticking’ of signs to bodies: for example, when others become ‘hateful’, then actions of ‘hate’ are directed against them (see Chapter 2). My archive is perhaps not ‘an archive of feelings’ to use Ann Cvetkovich’s beautiful formulation. Cvetkovich’s method involves ‘an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions’ (2003b: 7). Feelings are not ‘in’ my archive in the same way. Rather, I am tracking how words for feeling, and objects of feeling, circulate and generate effects: how they move, stick, and slide. We move, stick and slide with them.
The texts that I read circulate in the public domain, and include web sites, government reports, political speeches and newspaper articles. Although the book involves close readings of such texts, it is not ‘about’ those texts. They do not simply appear as texts in my reading. Clearly, I have chosen these texts and not others. The texts evoke what we could call ‘cases’. Three cases inform my choices of texts: reconciliation in Australia (Chapters 1 and 5 on pain and shame); responses to international terrorism (Chapters 3 and 4 on fear and disgust), and asylum and immigration in the UK (Chapters 2 and 6 on hate and love). Each of these cases shows us the very public nature of emotions, and the emotive nature of publics.24 They are also cases in which I am involved, which matter to me, in my contact with the world.
To name one’s archive is a perilous matter; it can suggest that these texts ‘belong’ together, and that the belonging is a mark of one’s own presence. What I offer is a model of the archive not as the conversion of self into a textual gathering, but as a ‘contact zone’. An archive is an effect of multiple forms of contact, including institutional forms of contact (with libraries, books, web sites), as well as everyday forms of contact (with friends, families, others). Some forms of contact are presented and authorised through writing (and listed in the references), whilst other forms of contact will be missing, will be erased, even though they may leave their trace. Some everyday forms of contact do appear in my writing: stories which might seem personal, and even about ‘my feelings’. As a ‘contact writing’, or a writing about contact, I do not simply interweave the personal and the public, the individual and the social, but show the ways in which they take shape through each other, or even how they shape each other. So it is not that ‘my feelings’ are in the writing, even though my writing is littered with stories of how I am shaped by my contact with others.25
The book has a shape of its own, of course. It does not take shape around each of these cases, as if they could be transformed into objects, or moments in the progression of a narrative. I have instead taken different emotions as points of entry. Even though I am challenging the idea that there simply ‘are’ different emotions, ‘in here’, or ‘out there’, I also want to explore how naming emotions involves different orientations towards the objects they construct. In this sense, emotions may not have a referent, but naming an emotion has effects that we can describe as referential. So each chapter takes a different emotion as a starting point, or point of entry, and does not ‘end’ with the emotion, but with the work that it does.
The book begins with pain, which is usually described as a bodily sensation. I begin here in order to show how even feelings that are immediate, and which may involve ‘damage’ on the skin surface, are not simply feelings that one has, but feelings that open bodies to others. My analysis introduces the concept of ‘intensification’ to show how pain creates the very impression of a bodily surface. I also consider how pain can shape worlds as bodies, through the ways in which stories of pain circulate in the public domain, with specific reference to the report on the stolen generation in Australia, Bringing Them Home. The second chapter turns to hate, exploring how feelings of injury get converted into hatred for others, who become read as causing ‘our injury’. In examining this conversion, I consider how hate circulates through signs, introducing the concept of ‘affective economies’. I show how hate works by sticking ‘figures of hate’ together, transforming them into a common threat, within discourses on asylum and migration. My analysis examines how hate crime works within law, and asks how the language of hate affects those who are designated as objects of hate.
The following four chapters work to refine and develop these concepts about emotions in embodiment and language, showing how fear, disgust, shame and love work as different kinds of orientations towards objects and others, which shape individual as well as collective bodies. In Chapter 3, I show how fear is attributed to the bodies of others, and how fear is intensified by the possibility that the object of fear may pass us by. My analysis examines the spatial politics of fear and the way fear restricts the mobility of some and extends the mobility of others. Responses to terrorism work as ‘an economy of fear’, in which the figure of the terrorist gets associated with some bodies (and not others), at the same time as the terrorist ‘could be’ anyone or everywhere. In Chapter 4, I analyse how disgust works to produce ‘the disgusting’, as the bodies that must be ejected from the community. Working with a model of disgust as stickiness, I suggest that disgust shapes the bodies of a community of the disgusted through how it sticks objects together. My analysis examines speech acts, which claim ‘that’s disgusting!’ in response to September 11, exploring how cohesion (sticking together) demands adhesion (sticking to), but also how the object of disgust can get unstuck.
In Chapters 5 and 6 on shame and love, I show how objects of emotion not only circulate, but also get ‘taken on’ and ‘taken in’ as ‘mine’ or ‘ours’. In Chapter 5, I examine how expressions of shame, in speech acts of ‘apologising’, can work as a form of nation building, in which what is shameful about the past is covered over by the statement of shame itself. Shame hence can construct a collective ideal even when it announces the failure of that ideal to be translated into action. With reference to reconciliation in Australia, and the demand that governments apologise for histories of slavery and colonialism, I also show how shame is deeply ambivalent: the exposure of past wounds can be a crucial part of what shame can do. In Chapter 6, I examine how love can construct a national ideal, which others fail. By considering how multiculturalism can work as an imperative to love difference, I show that love can work to elevate the national subject insofar as it posits the other’s narcissism as the cause of injury and disturbance. Love is conditional, and the conditions of love differentiate between those who can inhabit the nation, from those who cause disturbance. In both these chapters, I examine how the objects of emotions can be ‘ideals’, and the way in which bodies, including bodies of nations, can take shape through how they approximate such ideals.
The final two chapters ask how emotions can work within queer and feminist politics, as a reorientation of our relation to social ideals, and the norms they elevate into social aspirations. Different feelings seem to flow through these chapters: discomfort, grief, pleasure, anger, wonder, and hope. The focus on attachments as crucial to queer and feminist politics is itself a sign that transformation is not about transcendence: emotions are ‘sticky’, and even when we challenge our investments, we might get stuck. There is hope, of course, as things can get unstuck.
This book focuses on emotions. But that does not make emotions the centre of everything. Emotions don’t make the world go round. But they do in some sense go round. Perhaps, unlike the saying, what goes round does not always come round. Focusing on emotions is what will allow me to track the uneven effects of this failure of return.
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Notes
1 The poster was downloaded from the following web site: http://members.odinsrage.com/nfne/nf_bogus_asylum_nfne.a6.pdf The British National Front web site can be found on: http://www.nf.co.uk Accessed 30 September 2003.
2 See http://www.nfne.co.uk/intro.html Accessed 21 February 2004.
3 In Strange Encounters (2000), I offer an approach to ‘othering’ by examining how others are recognised as strangers, as ‘bodies out of place’, through economies of vision and touch. I will be building on this argument in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, by focusing on how relations of othering work through emotions; for example, othering takes place through the attribution of feelings to others, or by transforming others into objects of feeling. In making such claims, I am drawing on a long history of Black and critical race scholarship, which contests the model of race as a bodily attribute, by examining discourses of racialisation in terms of othering (hooks 1989; Lorde 1984; Said 1978; Fanon 1986; Bhabha 1994).
4 We might assume that in government rhetoric in the UK, the nation is not imagined as being white in the way that it is in the British National Front, especially given the official endorsement of a policy of multiculturalism. The differences between fascism and neo-liberalism should be acknowledged, but we should not assume the difference is absolute. As I will argue in Chapter 6, the nation is still constructed as ‘being white’ in multiculturalism, precisely as whiteness is reimagined as the imperative to love difference (‘hybrid whiteness’).
5 It also follows that we should not look for emotions only where the attribution of ‘being emotional’ is made. What is posited as ‘unemotional’ also involves emotions, as ways of responding to objects and others. I will not be equating emotionality with femininity. See Campbell (1994) for an important critique of how women are ‘dismissed’ through being seen or ‘judged’ as being emotional.
6 I can direct you to the following texts, which I found useful. For an interdisciplinary collection on emotions see Lewis and Haviland (1993). For an interdisciplinary approach to emotions see Lupton (1998). For a review of psychological approaches, see Strongman (2003). For sociological collections on emotions, see Kemper (1990) and Bendelow and Williams (1998). For an anthropological approach to emotions see Lutz (1988). For a philosophical collection see Solomon (2003). And for a historical approach to emotions, see Reddy (2001).
7 The analysis in this paragraph simplifies the debate for the purpose of argument. I should acknowledge that the meaning of each of the crucial terms – sensation, emotion, affect, cognition and perception – is disputed both between disciplines and within disciplines.
8 Solomon argues that emotions are caused (as reactions), but that objects of emotion must be distinguished from the cause (Solomon 2003: 228). I am making a different claim, which is made possible by my distinction of ‘contact’ from the attribution of causality: the object with which I have contact is the object that I have a feeling ‘about’. The ‘aboutness’ involves a reading of the contact.
9 This is a ‘primal scene’ in the psychology of emotions (for a recent review of this literature see Strongman 2003). The fact that the subject of the story is a child is crucial; the figure of the child does important work. ‘The child’ occupies the place of the ‘not-yet subject’, as the one whose emotions might allow us to differentiate between what is learnt and what is innate. The investment in the child’s ‘innocence’ is vital to this primal scene. See Castañeda (2002) for an excellent reading of how the figure of ‘the child’ is produced within theory.
10 My critique of the ‘Dumb View’ of emotions, which follows from the work of Alison Jaggar (1996) and Elizabeth V. Spelman (1989) is also a critique of the assumption that emotions are innate or biological. I have avoided positioning myself in the debate between biological determinism and cultural or social constructionism, as the posing of the debate along these terms had delimited the field by creating false oppositions (aligning the biological with what is fixed, universal and given, and the cultural with what is temporary, relative and constructed). I would argue that emotions involve the materialisation of bodies, and hence show the instability of ‘the biological’ and ‘the cultural’ as ways of understanding the body. See Wilson (1999) for an interesting account of the importance of the biological to understanding emotions. Whilst I offer a different approach, which does not identify ‘the biological’ or ‘the cultural’ as separate spheres, I support her emphasis on the importance of the bodily dimensions of emotions, which she elaborates through a careful reading of Freud’s model of the role of somatic compliance in hysteria.
11 To this extent, functionalist approaches would share my preference for the question, ‘What do emotions do?’, rather than ‘What are emotions?’ (Strongman 2003: 21–37). Insuch approaches, which consider emotions in terms of their physiological effects, the function of fear may be flight, and with it, the survival of the individual organism, and the survival of the species. In my account, however, the ‘doing’ of emotions is not reducible to individual actions (though it involves action) and is not governed by the logic of reproduction of the human.
12 In Freud’s reading of the little Hans case, the fear of the horse is read as a displacement of the fear of the father (see Chapter 3).
13 It may be useful to compare my approach on the relation between emotions and objects to Tomkins’ (1963) theory of affect. As others have commented, Tomkins’ attention to affect as opposed to drive emphasises the ‘freedom’ of emotion from specific objects (Izard 1977: 52; Sedgwick 2003: 19). I am also suggesting that emotions are ‘free’ to the extent that they do not reside within an object, nor are they caused by an object. But the language of ‘freedom’ is not one I will use in this book. I will argue instead that the association between objects and emotions is contingent (it involves contact), but that these associations are ‘sticky’. Emotions are shaped by contact with objects. The circulation of objects is not described as freedom, but in terms of sticking, blockages and constraints.
14 My critique of the ‘inside out’ model is also an implicit critique of the expressive model of emotions, which assumes that emotional expressions comprise the externalisation of an internal feeling state, which is distinct and given (see Zajonc 1994: 4–5).
15 Both Denzin and Scheff are writing about emotions as social and not psychological forms. Despite this, both use an ‘inside out’ model. The former suggests emotions are ‘self-feelings’ (Denzin 1984: 50–1), even though others are required to experience the feeling. Scheff has a very problematic account of the sociality of emotions. He describes emotions in terms of the social bond, and suggests pride involves a ‘secure bond’ and shame a ‘damaged bond’. He uses war and divorce as examples of alienation (see Chapter 5, and the conclusion to this book, which critique this idealisation of the social bond). Scheff ’s model not only idealises the social bond, but also creates a model of ‘the social’ premised on a liberal model of the self, as ‘being whole’, or ‘at one with itself’.
16 The critique of the inauthenticity of grief for Diana was clear in public commentary around her death as Graham Little (1996) shows in his analysis of public emotions. As he argues, such critiques are also by implication critiques of femininity and hysteria, in which women in particular are seen as having been ‘taken in’. It is important to note here that ‘the crowd’ is itself an unstable object: early work on crowds considers the crowd as a mob, which is physically co-present ‘on the street’. More recent work considers ‘the crowd’ not necessarily as a physical mass, but as the perception of a mass, which is affected by the media, and other technologies of connection, which allow ‘feelings with’, without physical proximity. For a summary of debates in crowd psychology, see Blackman and Walkerdine 2001.
17 See Gibbs (2001) for an excellent example of the use of ‘emotional contagion’ to understand political affect.
18 In his early writings, Marx describes ‘man’s feeling’ as ‘truly ontological affirmations of his essence’ (Marx 1975: 375). In this view, alienation is a form of estrangement: the transformation of labour into an object (the objectification of labour) hence effects an estrangement from the material realm of feelings. See Cvetkovich (1992) for a reading of Marx and emotion.
19 The challenge is also to work across or between disciplines, many of which now claim emotions as a sub-discipline. It is a rather frightening task. Doing interdisciplinary work on emotions means accepting that we will fail to do justice to all of the intellectual histories drawn upon by the texts we read. It means accepting the possibility of error, or simply getting some things wrong. For me, this is a necessary risk; emotions do not correspond to disciplinary objects (the social, cultural, historical and so on), and tracking the work of emotions means crossing disciplinary boundaries.
20 Emotions are also relegated to the private sphere, which conceals their public dimension and their role in ordering social life. For an excellent analysis of the publicness of emotions see Berlant (1997).
21 ‘Britain Suffers from Alien-Made Laws – the Flame’, https://www.nfne.co.uk/aleinlaws.html Accessed 12 January 2004.
22 It might be tempting to contrast this model of ‘the emotionality of texts’ with sociological, anthropological or psychological research, which involves interviewing people about their emotional lives. A good example of such work is Katz (1999). The difference between my research and interview based work is not that I am reading texts. It is important to state that interviewing people about emotions still involves texts: here, interviewees are prompted to talk before an interviewer (‘the interview’), as a form of speech that is translated or ‘transcribed’ into a written text; the researcher then becomes the reader of the text, and the writer of another text about the text. The distinction between my research and interview based research on emotions is in the different nature of the texts generated; the texts I read are ones that already exist ‘out there’ in the public, rather than being generated by the research itself. My own view is that research on emotions should embrace the multiple ways emotions work, whether in public culture or everyday life, and this means working with a range of different materials, which we can describe in different ways (as texts, data, information). We need to avoid assuming that emotions are ‘in’ the materials we assemble (which would transform emotion into a property), but think more about what the materials are ‘doing’, how they work through emotions to generate effects.
23 Importantly, words that name a specific emotion do not have to be used for texts to be readable in terms of that emotion. The ‘publicness’ of emotions means that we learn to recognise their signs, which can include actions, gestures, intonation. So my opening quote did not have to name its rage: the physicality of how the statement ‘rejects’ the presence of others, and names that presence as injury, is a performance of rage. In particular, Chapter 4 on disgust explores how words can involve forms of action, by showing how statements of disgust are physical acts of recoiling from alien bodies.
24 But just as I argue that we shouldn’t look for emotions in soft bodies, I would also suggest we shouldn’t assume emotional publics are a particular kind of public; emotional publics are not only publics that display emotions in ways that we recognise as emotional. So, for instance, it is not that publics become emotional when politicians cry or ‘express their feelings’. Publics organised around the values of thought or reason, or indeed of ‘hardness’ or detachment, also involve emotional orientations towards objects and others.
25 Thanks to Mimi Sheller for encouraging me to think again about the personal nature of archive.