The Cultural Politics of Emotion - Sara Ahmed

Introduction: Feel Your Way

For further reading on theories of emotion Sara Ahmed recommends following texts:

Campbell 1994 -> dismissing women

Lewis & Haviland 1993 -> interdisciplinary collection on emotions

Lupton 1998 -> interdisciplinary approach to emotions

Strongman 2003 ->psychological approach to emotions

Kemper 1990-> sociological collections

Bendelow & Williams 1998 -> sociological collections

Lutz 1988 -> anthropological approach

Solomon 2003 -> philosophical collection

Reddy 2001 -> historical approach

Izard 1977: 106 -> Model of emotion as contagion (Ansteckung)

Gibbs 2001 -> use of emotional contagion to understand political affect

Berlant 1997 -> Analysis of publicness of emotions (relegation to private shere)

There is a significant split in theories of emotions:

BODILY SENSATION (William James, Descartes, David Hume) VS COGNITION (Aristotele, Solomon)

BODILY SENSATION: Emotion is the feeling of bodily change. We feel fear because heart is racing and we're sweating. No thought and evaluation involved.

COGNITION: Emotions involve judgements, attitudes etc

Many theorists suggest, that emotions involve judgement or bodily feelings as well as forms of cognition. Descartes "The passions of the Soul" talks about the relation between bodily sensation, emotion and judgement (vielleicht eher Sekundärliteratur lesen). Descartes (1985, 349) suggests that objects do not excite diverse passions because they are diverse, but because of the diverse way in which they may harm or help us.

Sara Ahmed states that the distinction between sensation and emotion can only be analytic. She uses the term impression to avoid having to make the distinction between bodily sensation, emotion and thought.

"Rethinking the place of the object of feeling will allow us to reconsider the relation between sensation and emotion. ... Emotions are intentional in the sense that they are "about" something. They involve a direction or orientation towards an object. Meaning the involve a stance of the world. Emotions are both: About an object which they shape and are also shaped by contact with the object (the object can also be a memory). "

"Primal scene" in psychology of emotions: Child & Bear

"Emotions are relational: They involve (re)actions or relations of towardness or awayness in relation to an object. The are "free"."

If the object of feeling both shapes and is shaped by emotion, then the object of feeling is never simply before the subject.

According to Sara Ahmed the theory of affect by Tomkins 1963 is comparable to her approach to emotions. Emotions are "free". they are contingent (involve contact) and they are "sticky". They can stick with some objects and slide over to others. Feelings are produced as effects of circulation of objects (see sociality of emotion in chapter 2).

INSIDE OUT AND OUTSIDE IN

INSIDE OUT

According to Sara Ahmed in everyday language there are presumptions of an interiority to emotions.

The model of emotions as interiority is cruicial to psychology. I have feelings and they are mine. I can express them and they become yours too. You can respond. If you sympathize: fellow-feeling and if you don't understand: Alienation. Sara Ahmed critisizes this idea of expressions of emotions being the externalisation of an internal state which is distinct and given. The logic of this model is: I have feelings, which then move outwards towards objects and others, and which might even return to me. -> Inside Out Model The critique is that emotions should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices. For further reading on that refer to:

Lutz & 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

Durkheim 1966: 4

Sara Ahmeds Model of Sociality is informed by these texts.

Durkheim: His theory suggests that emotions are a social form rather than individual self expression. He 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, the feelings come from without. Durkheim later works on religion. For him emotions don't come from the individual body, but it is what holds or binds the social body together. (Collins 1990: 2)

OUTSIDE IN

Emotions are assumed to come from the outside moving inwards. This idea is evident to crowd psychology. The individual feels the crowds emotions as ones own. The critique on this theory is that the outside-in assumes that emotions are something "we have". Feelings become a form of social presence rather then self-presence.

Sara Ahmeds 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/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. She suggests 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 the social is an effect rather than a cause. She states that objects of emotion take shape as effects of circulation (?). How so she will show.

She doesn't offer a model of emotion as contagion (influenced by Silvan S.Tomkins). But the model of emotions as contagion is useful in its emphasis on how emotions are not simply located in the individual, but move between bodies (Gibbs 2001)

Model of contagion: Emotions pass on: I feel sad because you feel sad, I am shamed because by your shame etc. There is a risk of transforming emotions into a property that can be passed on. Shared emotions are at stake. 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, Sara Ahmed suggest that it is the object of emotion that circulate, rather than emotion as such. Her argument 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 moving. From Latin word emovere - to move / to move out. They are also about attachments. Movement connects bodies to other bodies, attachment takes place through movement. Movement may effect different others differently: emotions may involve being moved for some precisely by fixing others as having certain characteristics. Her Argument about circulation of objects draws on psychoanalysis and Marxism.

She considers 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). Freud calls this lack of self-presence the unconscious. She will show how objects get displaced and considers the role of repression in what makes objects sticky. Drawing on Marx she argues that emotions accumulate over time, as a form of affective value. She focuses on how emotions are produced. Feelings become Fetishes, qualities that seem to reside in objects, only through an erasure of the history of their production and circulation. She is concerned with the question of what sticks, or Why is social transformation so difficult to achieve? and Why are relations of power so intractable and enduring, even in the face of collective forms of resistance?

Sara Ahmed feels indebted to 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). They have shown how social forms are effects of repetitions and that emotions matter for politics and show us how power shapes the very surface of bodies as well worlds. We feel our way.

Her analysis of how we feel our way approaches emotion as a form of cultural politics or world making. Her argument about the cultural politics of emotions is developed not only as a critique of the psychologising and privatisation of emotions, 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.

The emotionality of texts

Figures of speech are crucial to the emotionality of texts (generating effects).

Sara Ahmed examines how different figures get stuck together, and how sticking is dependent on past histories of association that often work through concealment. She also considers how texts name or perform different emotions. Naming emotions often involves differentiating between the subject and object of feeling. For example 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 and they involve speech acts, which depend on past histories, at the same time as they generate effects. She states that when we talk about the displacement between objects of emotion, we also need to consider the circulation of words for emotion. Eg 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). So emotions are not in texts but are effects of the very naming of emotions, which often work 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.

Sara Ahmed tracks 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. She uses texts from public domains and shows us the very public nature of emotions and the emotive nature of publics.

Sara Ahmed wants to explore how naming emotions involves different orientations towards the objects they construct. In her book she takes a different emotion for each chapter as a starting point but does not end with the emotion but with what it does. Pain, hate, fear, disgust, shame & love.