plan of Recurrent Training, was out of her hands, and by putting herself in the role of a flight attendant and her listeners in the role of an angry passenger, she hoped to show how she removed her anger. In fact, she also reduced the anger in the class; like the back-seat snickerer, the finger-drummer relented. The right to anger withered on the vine. There was an unfolding of legs and arms, a flowering of comments, the class relaxer came forth with a joke, and the instructor’s enthusiasm rose again along the path readied for it.
FEELING AS SUSCEPTIBLE TO PREVENTIVE TACTICS
To consider just how a company or any other organization might benignly intervene in a work situation between the stimulus and the response, we had best start by rethinking what an emotion or a feeling is. Many theorists have seen emotion as a sealed biological event, something that external stimuli can bring on, as cold weather brings on a cold. Furthermore, once emotion—which the psychologist Paul Ekman calls a “biological response syndrome”—is operating, the individual passively undergoes it. Charles Darwin, William James, and the early Freud largely share this “organismic” conception.* But it seems to me a limited view. For if we conceive of emotion as only this, what are we to make of the many ways in which flight attendants in Recurrent Training are taught to attend to stimuli and manage emotion, ways that can actually change feeling?
If we conceive of feeling not as a periodic abdication to biology but as something we do by attending to inner sensation in a given way, by defining situations in a given way, by managing in given ways, then it becomes plainer just how plastic and susceptible to reshaping techniques a feeling can be. The very act of managing emotion can be seen as part of what the emotion becomes. But this idea gets lost if we assume, as the organismic theorists do, that how we manage or express feeling is extrinsic to emotion. The organismic theorists want to explain how emotion is “motored by instinct,” and so they by-pass the question of how we come to assess, label, and manage emotion. (See Appendix A and B.) The “interactional” theorists assume, as I do, that culture can impinge on emotion in ways that affect what we point to when we say emotion. Drawing from the organismic and interactional traditions described in Appendix A, I think of emotion as more permeable to cultural influence than organismic theorists have thought, but as more substantial than some interactional theorists have thought. In the view described at the end of Appendix A, emotion is a bodily orientation to an imaginary act (here I draw from Darwin). As such, it has a signal function; it warns us of where we stand vis-à-vis outer or inner events (here I draw on Freud). Finally what does and does not stand out as a “signal” presupposes certain culturally taken-for-granted ways of seeing and holding expectations about the world—an idea developed in Appendix B on the naming of emotions. It would be possible to connect the ideas of this book with entirely different ones about emotion, but my perspective on emotion developed partly out of my research for this book, and to me it offers the best account of how deep institutions can go into an individual’s emotional life while apparently honoring the worker’s right to “privacy.”
FEELING AS CLUE
Feeling as it spontaneously emerges acts for better or worse as a clue. It filters out evidence about the self-relevance of what we see, recall, or fantasize. The exact point at which we feel injured or insulted, complimented or enhanced, varies. One flight attendant described her “anger” boundaries as follows:
Now if a man calls out to me, “Oh, waitress,” I don’t like it. I’m not a waitress. I’m a flight attendant. But I know that sometimes they just don’t know what to call you, and so I don’t mind. But if they call me “honey” or “sweetheart” or “little lady” in a certain tone of voice, I feel demeaned, like they don’t know that in an emergency I could save their little chauvinistic lives. But when I get called “bitch” and “slut,” I get angry. And when a drunk puts his hands right between my legs—I mean, good God!
The company, as she saw it, preferred a different anger line for her:
Now the company wants to say, look, that’s too bad, that’s not nice, but it’s all in the line of public-contact work. I had a woman throw hot coffee at me, and do you think the company would back me up? Would they write a letter? Bring a suit? Ha! Any chance of negative publicity and they say, No. They say don’t get angry at that; it’s a tough job, and part of the job is to take this abuse in stride. Well, I’m sorry. It’s abuse, and I don’t have to take it.
This flight attendant saw that the difference in interest between management (getting more happy passengers) and labor (getting civil rights and pleasant working conditions) leads each to give different answers to the question of how much anger is warranted by how much “insult.” Insofar as anger can be a prelude to action, the company’s position on anger is a practical matter. Perhaps for this reason, this clash of interest was made exquisitely obscure in the Recurrent Training class on self-awareness. Infused into a lecture giving tips on how to reduce stress and make working more pleasant was a company-oriented view of what is worth getting angry about—which is not much. The broad array of techniques for averting anger was offered as a protective cloak, but just who was being most protected from anger—the worker or the company—remained vague.
Relevant to both trainer and student is the proposition that emotion, like seeing and hearing, is a way of knowing about the world. It is a way of testing reality. As Freud pointed out in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), anxiety has a signal function. It signals danger from inside, as when we fear an overload of rage, or from outside, as when an insult threatens to humiliate us beyond easy endurance.*
Actually, every emotion has a signal function. Not every emotion signals danger. But every emotion does signal the “me” I put into seeing “you.” It signals the often unconscious perspective we apply when we go about seeing. Feeling signals that inner perspective. Thus, to suggest helpful techniques for changing feeling—in the service of avoiding stress on the worker and making life pleasanter for the passenger—is to intervene in the signal function of feeling.
This simple point is obscured whenever we apply the belief that emotion is dangerous in the first place because it distorts perception and leads people to act irrationally—which means that all ways of reducing emotion are automatically good. Of course, a person gripped by fear may make mistakes, may find reflection difficult, and may not (as we say) be able to think. But a person totally without emotion has no warning system, no guidelines to the self-relevance of a sight, a memory, or a fantasy. Like one who cannot feel and touches fire, an emotionless person suffers a sense of arbitrariness, which from the point of view of his or her self-interest is irrational. In fact, emotion is a potential avenue to “the reasonable view.”* Furthermore, it can tell us about a way of seeing.†
Emotion locates the position of the viewer. It uncovers an often unconscious perspective, a comparison. “You look tall” may mean “From where I lie on the floor, you look tall.” “I feel awe” may mean “compared with what I do or think I could do, he is awesome.” Awe, love, anger, and envy tell of a self vis-à-vis a situation. When we reflect on feeling we reflect on this sense of “from where I am.”1
The word objective, according to the Random House Dictionary, means “free from personal feelings.” Yet ironically, we need feeling in order to reflect on the external or “objective” world. Taking feelings into account as clues and then correcting for them may be our best shot at objectivity. Like hearing or seeing, feeling provides a useful set of clues in figuring out what is real. A show of feeling by someone else is interesting to us precisely because it may reflect a buried perspective and may offer a clue as to how that person may act.
In
