Feelings

Stephen Frosh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136993893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

Everyone talks about their feelings, but what exactly are they? What are the distinguishing features of feelings, and how do they differ from emotions and affects? How do our feelings influence the kinds of people we are, and the sorts of communities and societies in which we live?

In this wonderful short book, acclaimed author Stephen Frosh interrogates the terrain of feelings and asks how this 'hidden' dimension of the self helps shape our worlds. The book provides an accessible and thought-provoking introduction to the major debates around feelings in the modern world.

Feelings is an accessible and engaging resource for students, academics, and indeed anyone with an interest in gaining a better understanding of this fundamental area of life.

1

WHAT DO YOU FEEL?

If we are to take feelings seriously, then we should at least be able to say something about what they are. What is it to feel something? Does the linguistic parallel between ‘having’ a feeling and to feel in the sense of touch mean anything, and if so what is it that we touch when we feel? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003, p.17) writes that her book, Touching Feeling, ‘records the intuition that a particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions.’ If something is ‘touching’, it moves us to feel; if we feel something we also touch it. Feeling also has a sense of motion about it, captured in the idea that to feel deeply about something means to be ‘moved’ by it. Brian Massumi (2002), another doyen of contemporary theory, extends this idea by linking feeling to the movements of the body. ‘When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name,’ he writes (p.1), ‘two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time. It moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving.’ This takes motion and feeling to be closely linked: the former gives rise to the latter, the latter feeds back to the former. But the idea of ‘being moved’ is not quite the same as ‘movement’ in this bodily sense. It rather suggests that feeling changes something within us; it is a happening that makes something shift, reflected in an awareness of a mobile, unsettling state.

Feeling is bound up with touch and motion, with bodies, flows and fluctuating states of mind. Amongst the complications here there is a definitional knot of affect, emotion and feeling that is hard to penetrate and may be unnecessary, though there is also something principled about trying to sort it out. As we unpick this knot, it becomes apparent that our ‘experience’ of feeling may be distinct from what others see in us and what is revealed by our bodily actions (often termed ‘emotion’). Many commentators are also interested in how both emotion and feeling are derived from, or interlaced with, some kind of non-linguistic intensity that is not in itself nameable or directly perceptible, but nevertheless has effects. Antonio Damasio (2003, p.6) announces:

The gist of my current view is that feelings are the expression of human flourishing or human distress, as they occur in mind and body. Feelings are not a mere decoration added on to the emotions, something one might keep or discard. Feelings can be and often are revelations of the state of life within the entire organism – a lifting of the veil in the literal sense of the term.

There seems to be a level of agreement that feelings are the conversion of an affect or emotion into a symbolisable form. We can pronounce on our feelings, albeit with difficulty and approximation, and perhaps this is what constitutes them as modes of human action. It also makes the commonly held polarity between emotion and cognition, or feeling and knowing, harder to sustain. If feeling is emotion plus words, then it is also the place at which this polarity collapses. And anyway, as we know from our everyday experience without need of any theorist to tell us, words often cause as well as express feelings. Indeed, they may be the most common causes of feeling states: what one person says to another, what we read or hear, are amongst the surest sources of feeling, of being worked on or moved, of being touched by something.

What does that easily identifiable sense of being moved or touched mean, however, and is it really the case that we know what we feel? Perhaps the issue here is one of making connections between emotion as a kind of automatic, ‘unmediated’ response to events and feeling as a more integrated, known-about or interpreted version of this. How can we connect our way of feeling, the ‘state’ we are in, with what is actually happening to us? Is it possible to mistake one’s feelings and believe, honestly, that one is feeling something that one is not ‘actually’ feeling? Or does feeling always speak the truth of experience, even when it is misconnected to the situation? If I feel angry or frightened as a paranoid response to what is going on around me, then it makes sense to say that the feeling is actually what I have, but it is out of tune with ‘reality’ (the feeling is genuine, but wrong). But can I believe I am happy when actually I am sad? If so, is that a mode of lying to myself, a kind of pretence in which one part of my mind hides the truth from another part, so that somewhere ‘inside’ I do really know what I feel, even if I believe I don’t? The infinite regress here is obvious, but it does not necessarily mean that the idea is wrong. Perhaps it really is the case that we rarely completely understand our feelings, or that our feelings often fail to match our emotions, or that both feeling and emotion are regularly at odds with the reality of our situation. Or maybe it is the other way around, that there are times when the feelings we have fit into a version of ourselves that we try to maintain (as calm, emotional, wise, irritable, decisive, cold or warm), and that these produce the supposedly automatic emotions, or at least mitigate them. Maybe it is not a simple matter of feelings being accurate or not. Perhaps what is going on is rather more that they are crafted, that they are worked-upon to produce some kind of effect, and not just passively experienced.

Let us take an example that will be returned to later in this book, that of ‘feeling sad’. On the face of it, this seems like a feeling that people do not actively choose, but rather one which comes upon them as a consequence of things that happen. These things often involve loss, especially catastrophic losses of people or property, but also (as Freud, 1917a, pointed out in his account of melancholia) of symbolic losses such as the loss of an ideal; or of a future possibility; or, of course, of love. The lost ideal might even be an idea of oneself. We might be made sad by feelings of shame, or self-disappointment, or failure in a project, or the crassness of our own acts, or the damage we realise we have done. The sadness then flows without intention: the characteristic ‘feeling-questions’, if it can be put like that, might be, ‘how can I deal with what has happened, how can I bear the weight of loss, how can I stop myself drowning in all these uncontrollable tears?’ These kinds of question are all to do with being positioned as the object of a feeling – the sadness that one suffers, not that one chooses. In this way sadness seems different from more ‘positive’ emotions; not that these are not also passively ‘suffered’ (‘Surprised by joy’, as Wordsworth (1815) has it, in a poem that is actually about intense loss), but people devote themselves to finding happiness in ways that one might not suppose to be the case with sadness.

But is this really so? It does not take too much effort to find examples of sadness being sought as well. Tragedies in the theatre and film, in literature and song, are pretty popular and seem to have the effect of making people feel better about themselves. Maybe this is a consequence of what the Greeks called ‘catharsis’; that is, these tragedies evoke feelings which are then ‘worked through’ and made sense of, restoring order to mental uncertainty and making for a more manageable psychic economy. Equally, it seems like sadness has its own rewards, and we pursue it almost as much as we pursue happiness. Could this be an example of the workings of what Freud (1920) rather controversially called the ‘death drive’? Is there a way in which humans are only complete when the destructive or nihilistic or simply ‘negative’ sides of our personalities allow themselves to be expressed? Or is something more subtle at work here, something that has to do with terms like ‘depth’ or ‘intensity’, in which any feeling is sought after as an alternative to feeling nothing at all, and the more intense or ‘deep’ that feeling is, the more it is experienced as, in an important sense, ‘pleasurable’. Perhaps, thought of this way, it makes sense to consider sadness as something that we might enjoy. More generally, it may be that the sense of being alive is tied up with the capacity to feel: without some implication of ‘depth’ or intensity in our lives, we wither away. Boredom may be the symptom of such a withering. Sadness, on the other hand, may be a painfully intense response to the loss of something that is life-enhancing, but it has the virtue of being a lively way of responding: at least the loss has been registered and felt. As will be discussed later, failure to feel sadness, like the failure to mourn, may be more disturbing than the state of sadness itself.

Awareness of this last point forms the basis of a major strand of contemporary psychoanalytic theory derived from the work of Melanie Klein. Kleinians propose that what they term the ‘depressive position’ involves coming to terms with ambivalent feelings, and recognising that the destructive urges we have within ourselves are often directed at the people we love. ‘Depression’ in this sense is an active welding together of love and hate, a kind of moral stance in which the damage done is recognised and absorbed, and in which the concomitant feeling of sadness is actually a healthy way to do emotional work. It is also the source of artistic creativity, in that the urge to make reparation for destructive impulses is translated into the construction of an artwork; this suggests that the capacity to feel something is necessary for art to be produced. Once again, the key feeling here is not happiness, nor even in a narrow sense the pursuit of happiness; it is also not something passive, as merely a ‘feeling that overcomes one’. The capacity to feel sad, to embrace sorrow and then to articulate it so that something new is made of it, is a fundamental sign of mental health, supplying the basis for being able to relate constructively to the world. As already noted, this makes the capacity to feel into an ethical position. One is only fully human if one can experience intensity, if there is some ‘internal’ resonance and a developed ability to make connections between feeling states (love and hate, for example). Without that, there is only either the paranoid world of the split psyche, in which everything painful is expelled into the outside world, or a kind of narcissistic surface obsession. In this last case, the fear of feeling becomes the motivating source for a manipulative attitude towards the world, and other people are related to only as objects of power for fear they will get too close and cause feelings (sadness, loss) that the vulnerable subject cannot control.

What might this mean in relation to the idea of the crafting of feelings? It will be obvious that what is being referred to here is not some cynical piece of manipulation, in which there is deliberate generation of feelings for effect, the model for which might be the phial of tears used by actors in the theatre. Crafting here indicates primarily an engagement with seeking after feeling that seems to characterise life. It means that we work on our feelings in an active way, not just in response to the demands made on us. On the whole, that is, living a life means seeking feeling rather than avoiding it; it means engaging in some way with intensity, rather than closing ourselves down.

There are considerable risks attached to this, however. Openness to feeling clearly means openness to hurt; it makes us vulnerable. For many people, such vulnerability is very hard to tolerate, as if it is bound to lead to a situation in which they are exploited and damaged by others, or injured in some other way. As Judith Butler, amongst many others, has pointed out, this terror of vulnerability – for that is what it is – is in reality a fear of dependency, and this in turn must have its roots in the unequivocal fact that we are all dependent on others in early life, and in most significant senses right throughout life too. Butler describes what she calls a ‘conception of the human’ as one in which:

[W]e are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself, and by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others: this conception means that we are vulnerable to those we are too young to know and to judge and, hence, vulnerable to violence; but also vulnerable to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other.

(Butler, 2004, p.31)

This slightly dense quote gestures towards awareness that in being dependent we are vulnerable, and that this sets up a situation in which openness to others – and hence to the feelings of loss and damage that they may cause – places us in their power. The question is, why should this be anxiety producing? Put like that, it does not seem so hard to imagine an answer. Presumably, if one is the kind of person who expects others to be untrustworthy, who for example assumes they will be hostile or unreliable, then being dependent upon them is going to feel like a dangerous position to be in. And why should one have such expectations? Evolutionary psychologists, with their paranoid version of human nature, would probably say that we are hard-wired to behave as if we are at risk from predators, and so need to ensure that we set up the conditions under which we protect ourselves from them. These conditions involve attachment to reliable others (parents, notably, which is one reason why having an abusive parent is so harmful), but also the adoption of a self-protective character-armour in which others are allowed to get close only when they have clearly proven themselves to be benign. The world really is hostile and we have to watch out for ourselves all the time.

Perhaps we can avoid being drawn down this speculative funnel into prehistory, but instead explain the situation in rather more obvious ways. In our dependent state, we learn from early childhood onwards whether others are trustworthy or not; we build conscious and unconscious expectations of how we are going to be treated. If we get what some psychoanalysts refer to as ‘good enough’ parenting, using terms like ‘holding’ or ‘containing’ to indicate the way the people we are in contact with cope reliably and without excessive anger with our infantile demands and impulses, then we are more likely to gain a sense of ourselves as cared-for and indeed as worthy of care, and others as likely to be supportive and loving. If this is not what happens, then we are more likely to be paranoid and defensive, assuming that the world and its inhabitants are deeply untrustworthy, even hostile in relation to ourselves. This is not a once-and-for-all situation: the experiences of early childhood, whether good or bad, can be overturned by later events, whether they are loving ones that make up for loveless childhoods, or betrayals that destroy a conception of the world as just. The point is that opening ourselves up to feelings, especially those that occur in the context of treasured relationships, is a matter of being able to tolerate dependency and vulnerability; and this in turn is something which many people find hard, because their experience of the world is of a place in which dependency is often trashed. This, as they say, is not rocket science. Elaborating on grief, Butler (2004, p.23) also writes:

What grief displays … is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control.

This conveys the sense of how powerful feelings can at times throw us off balance; we might call this, with all the connotations it has of being disturbingly out of control, ‘getting into a state’. There are some nice ambiguities here. A ‘state’ in the obvious sense in which it is being used, means ‘a condition in which a thing is’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary). To be completely clear, it needs to have an object, such as ‘a state of health’ or ‘a state of well-being’ or ‘a state of anxiety’. The default position, when such an object is not specified, seems always to be the negative, referencing something like falling apart. To say that someone is ‘in a state’ means that they are in a mess either physically, their clothes and appearance demonstrably awry, or psychologically. The two things generally go together, with physical discomfiture signifying mental imbalance – childishness, foolishness, misery, madness. The opposite of this, with which it is implicitly compared, is to be in a mental ‘state’ of calm reason, a peaceful state of mind, a stately mind in which things are in their place and nothing is out of order, nothing so upsetting, surprising or alarming that it is capable of damaging one’s equanimity more than fits in with one’s usual state of being. Being ‘in a state’ signifies the kind of being flooded by feeling that most people do not seek, but rather lament – a situation in which they lose control of themselves, and approach what is usually called ‘breakdown’.

This kind of being in a state indicates how profoundly we are troubled by feelings when they are too powerful for us to hold, when they master ‘us’ rather than are used by us. Note the confusion in this terminology: what is the ‘us’ here if not a person (or ‘subject’) of which feelings are part? The answer seems to be that the ‘us’ or singular ‘I’ (the ‘ego’ in Freudian terminology) is seen as a centre of consciousness characterised at its best by rational agency (it is in control of itself), informed and fleshed out by feelings, but not under their sway. The person who is too much at the mercy of feelings is in a state; whilst this can refer to too much joyousness (as in manic states) it usually refers to sadness or anxiety, and always to a sense of having lost the stable centre of oneself. Yet this ‘decentredness’ is nowadays recognised as a characteristic of human subjectivity. Freud (1917b, p.285) commented that some of the opposition to psychoanalysis was because it seeks to prove ‘to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.’ The French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1999) has made the idea of decentring into a key element in his own theory. Butler (2005, p.52), building on the idea that each human subject is from the start infiltrated or constituted by the presence of others, notes that, ‘If the other is always there, from the start, in the place of where the ego will be, then a life is constituted through a fundamental interruption, is even interrupted prior to the possibility of any continuity.’ These claims, by no means confined to those influenced by psychoanalysis, suggest the contestability of the notion that we are rational centres of consciousness in control of ourselves, managing our feelings within constraints and only occasionally thrown off balance by them. It seems, rather, to be the other way around. ‘The thrall in which our relations with others hold us’ is closely connected to the flowing of feeling through our veins, and this constitutes us as subjects always ‘off balance’, always in some kind of state. If we are not, then perhaps we are no longer quite alive.

There is another resonance of the formulation being ‘in a state’. This is the connection between ‘state of mind’ and ‘social state’ – whether it is the formal ‘State’ in which we might live, or the state in which we represent ourselves to others. Feelings are personal but they are certainly not private, both because they are communicable to others – and indeed it is almost impossible not to communicate them – and because they often have others at their source (as in sadness due to loss, happiness due to love, fear due to threat). Writ large, they might also be generated by the State, or into the State: think of feelings of nationalist pride, for example, or the waves of emotion that might ride through a polity after a tragedy of some kind. Think, too, of how the media operate to influence and perhaps even manipulate emotion; how elections are fought, wars declared, riots provoked. As we shall see later, public feelings and the way groups manage them are intimately connected with the apparently personal feelings of individuals; this is part of what it means to be a ‘social subject’, a human who grows up and resides in a community. This has its good and bad sides, and one can argue the toss: how easily we are influenced, how deeply we might be helped by expressions of sympathy and solidarity, how the capacity to feel other people’s feelings, or at least to understand what they feel, might be central to what makes us human. These things bring pain and trouble, they put us in a state, but that, to a considerable degree, is what we are for.

2

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 What do you feel?
• 2 How do you feel?
• 3 In touch with your feelings?
• 4 Feeling funny-peculiar
• 5 Oh, misery!
• 6 Are you happy now?
• 7 Hateful feelings
• 8 Intimacy and love
• 9 Public feelings
• 10 Make me feel better, please
• References
• Index