Anxiety is a moral–emotional problematization
We need a concept of anxiety that will help us make sense of its current scope and intensity. We can achieve this by understanding anxiety as an embodied attention-grabbing means of gaining moral insight into our problems of living.
As a sociologist, I am interested in the moral interface between persons and the sociological fields in which they move about. Within the painful moral–emotional tension that urges us to pay attention to our agency, we continuously (re)articulate our capacity for freedom and belonging, adaptation and direction, and life and success.
Several theorists have explored the intersubjective features of moral attention to the self – Foucault (1997) with the hermeneutics or care of the self, Archer (2007, 2004) with social reflexivity and second-order emotions, Davis (2012, 2020) with emotional predicaments, Reddy (1999) and Gould (2001) with ambivalence, Otero (2020) with cynicism, Martuccelli (2006) with ordeals, Etzioni (2017) with moral wrestling, Taylor (1989) with transvaluation, Scheff (1990) with processed shame, Durkheim (1985) with enlightened dis/obedience, and many others.
The following characteristics inform my view of anxiety.
First, this work proposes a broad conception of anxiety as a modality of emotional experience that involves a personal interest in one’s ability to affect outcomes for the better. For example, if I am concerned about defending my rights, how I appear to others, exercising sound judgment, or maintaining good health, I experience anxiety. Anxiety is an experience of becoming interested in one’s agency in the face of painfully anticipated outcomes over which we believe that we have a response-ability.
Second, anxiety is a modality of emotional experience in which one’s existing capacity to overcome emotional pain is dissatisfactory. Anxious experience is a personal representation of a recurring painful mental state that enlists one’s moral (i.e., deliberate, effortful) agency – the power of one’s intention. Anxious experience is a state of in-tension born of a pattern of painful feeling. It is a feeling of resistance to and responsibility for recurring painful feeling.
Third, anxiety is a moral–emotional effort at moving through unwanted and recurring feelings of in/security. Painful feeling becomes inner tension when it promotes moral attention to the personal power one would like to have over feeling threatened. This lack of power becomes a problem of interest, albeit a diffuse one. Experiences of anxiety/interest motivate a deliberate search for means to achieve increased emotional security through greater clarity about the object of threat and what to do about it.1
Fourth, anxiety is a moral–emotional effort at problem-solving – an attempt at ‘feeling otherwise’ through emotional problematization. Painful inner tension promotes self and social transformation. The attention anxiety draws onto one’s agency can bring about individual as well as collective change.
By considering the moral ‘shoving power’2 of anxiety, sociologists can explore what people seek to change about themselves, how they seek to do it, and the setting in which they feel impelled to engage in such efforts. As a deliberation-invoking modality of our emotional experience, anxiety/interest brings together the biological, psychological, and sociological dimensions of human social practice in moral responsibility.
Sociologists have studied the moral shoving power of anxiety in social change efforts. Emotional dissatisfaction can give way to social anxieties (Hunt, 1999) through the labor of cultural (Illouz, 2008) and moral (Becker, 1963) entrepreneurs. This labor clarifies objects of fear and desire and shapes common anxieties (i.e., threats for which we feel responsible) through new diagnoses, treatments, stories, jokes, skills, and habits. Novel emotion concepts like ‘gay pride’ (Gould, 2001) can transform the individually experienced predicaments generated by structurally embedded ‘ordeals’ or ‘hardships’ (Martuccelli, 2006) into culturally carried, collectively experienced forms of anxiety/interest. ‘Problems that have no name,’ like mid-20th-century suburban housewives’ deep dissatisfaction with lives defined by ideals of femininity, can be brought into awareness and reorient our lives when articulated as the ‘feminine mystique’ (Friedan, 1963).
Anxiety as a sociological concept: fields of moral–emotional tension
What are the sociological features of anxiety as moral–emotional suffering? A basic idea in the account of contemporary forms of suffering in this book is that we are moved to act in the world by a desire for emotional security. Feelings of security are inevitably bound to our social situation (i.e., culture, morality, status, power relations, structural im/possibilities). They are ultimately based on the fact that we are individuated and relational, knowledgeable and purposeful, energy-driven and vulnerable. We desire a sense of freedom, connection, understanding, direction, vitality, and power.
Like all experiences, anxiety is a perception generated by a person immersed in a sociological universe. It is helpful to map out this universe based on six fields of moral–emotional tension. These represent the sociological dimensions of anxious experience as such, as a way of paying attention, or of being interested.
We experience a core moral problem in each field of in/capacity. In the field of social organization, we generate the experience of our individuality (who am I?), while in the field of social evaluation, we generate that of our value (what is my importance?). Both of these fields pertain to our relations with the group. In the field of cognitive prediction, we generate the experience of our reflexivity (what do I know?), while in the field of cognitive aspiration, we generate that of our existence (where am I headed?). These two fields involve our relations with consciousness. In the field of affective regulation, we generate the experience of our energy (how do I feel?), while in the field of cognitive valuation, we generate that of our powerfulness (how strong am I?). Both of these fields pertain to our relations with stimuli.
The fields of social organization, social evaluation, cognitive prediction, cognitive aspiration, affective regulation, and affective valuation are the sociological spaces in which we generate our anxious experiences. We may experience ourselves as fluent when we move through these spaces, in which case we are content and move relatively smoothly through the inevitable experiences of in/capacity that punctuate our lives. We produce the moral–emotional tensions of anxiety when repeated experiences of unresolved emotional in/security promote a moral resistance to inchoate feelings of bumpiness and irregularity. The yearning to objectify this diffuse, unarticulated threat is an interest in exercising power over an emotional in/security pattern by transforming it into a moral–emotional problem.
What are the typical moral–emotional problems that mobilize our intention to transform our agency in the sociological universe in which we are immersed? What are the emotional in/securities over which we may seek to exercise moral responsibility via new forms of embodied in/capacity? In short, what are the sociological categories of anxiety?
Identity anxiety is the in/secure urge to conceptualize our individuality. This moral–emotional tension promotes taking responsibility for our personal desire for freedom by differentiating from the group and occupying a distinct territory (e.g., me, woman). At the collective level, identity anxiety encourages a collective desire and responsibility for freedom from another group (e.g., LGBTQ+, nationalists).
Status anxiety is the in/secure urge to conceptualize our value. This moral–emotional tension implicates taking resp...
