to survive as a commercial sport. We’re beyond that now. The women’s tennis teams, too. The women are really serious players. They get really mad if they hit a net ball. They get even madder than the guys, I’d say.”2 He had seen a woman tennis player miss a shot (it was a net ball), redden in the face, stamp her foot, and spank the net with her racket. From this he inferred that the woman “really wants to win.” Wanting to win, she is a “serious” player—a pro. Being a pro, she can be expected to see the tennis match as something on which her professional reputation and financial future depend. Further, from the way she broke an ordinary field of calm with a brief display of anger, the commentator inferred that she really meant it—she was “serious.” He also inferred what she must have wanted and expected just before the net ball and what the newly grasped reality—a miss—must have felt like. He tried to pick out what part of her went into seeing the ball. A miss, if you really want to win, is maddening.
From the commentator’s words and tone, TV viewers could infer his point of view. He assessed the woman’s anger in relation to a prior expectation about how pros in general see, feel, and act and about how women in general act. Women tennis pros, he implied, do not laugh apologetically at a miss, as a nonprofessional woman player might. They feel, he said, in a way that is appropriate to the role of a professional player. In fact, as newcomers they overconform. “They get even madder than the guys.” Thus the viewers can ferret out the sportscaster’s mental set and the role of women in it.
In the same way that we infer other people’s viewpoints from how they display feeling, we decide what we ourselves are really like by reflecting on how we feel about ordinary events. Consider, for example, this statement by a young man of nineteen:
I had agreed to give a party with a young woman who was an old friend. As the time approached, it became apparent to me that, while I liked her, I didn’t want the [social] identification with her that such an action [the jointly sponsored party] would bring.… I tried explaining this to her without success, and at first I resolved to do the socially acceptable thing—go through with it. But the day before the party, I knew I simply couldn’t do it, so I canceled out. My friend didn’t understand and was placed in a very embarrassing position.… I can’t feel ashamed no matter how hard I try. All I felt then was relief, and this is still my dominant response.… I acted selfishly, but fully consciously. I imagine that my friendship could not have meant that much.
The young man reached his conclusion by reasoning back from his absence of guilt or shame, from the feeling of relief he experienced. (He might also have concluded: “I’ve shown myself to be the sort of fellow who can feel square with himself in cases of unmet obligation. I can withstand the guilt. It’s enough for me that I tried to feel shame.”)
For the sportscaster and the young man, feeling was taken as a signal. To observer and actor alike it was a clue to an underlying truth, a truth that had to be dug out or inferred, a truth about the self vis-à-vis a situation. The sportscaster took the anger of the woman tennis player as a clue to how seriously she took the game of tennis. The young man who backed out on his friend took his sense of relief and absence of guilty feelings as a clue to the absence of seriousness in his “old friendship.”
Feeling can be used to give a clue to the operating truth, but in private life as well as on the job, two complications can arise. The first one lies between the clue of feeling and the interpretation of it. We are capable of disguising what we feel, of pretending to feel what we do not—of doing surface acting. The box of clues is hidden, but it is not changed. The second complication emerges in a more fundamental relation between stimulus and response, between a net ball and feeling frustration, between letting someone down and feeling guilty, between being called names by an “irate” and getting angry back. Here the clues can be dissolved by deep acting, which from one point of view involves deceiving oneself as much as deceiving others. In surface acting we deceive others about what we really feel, but we do not deceive ourselves. Diplomats and actors do this best, and very small children do it worst (it is part of their charm).
In deep acting we make feigning easy by making it unnecessary. At Delta, the techniques of deep acting are joined to the principles of social engineering. Can a flight attendant suppress her anger at a passenger who insults her? Delta Airlines can teach her how—if she is qualified for the job by a demonstrably friendly disposition to start with. She may have lost for awhile the sense of what she would have felt had she not been trying so hard to feel something else. By taking over the levers of feeling production, by pretending deeply, she alters herself.
Deep acting has always had the edge over simple pretending in its power to convince, as any good Recurrent Training instructor knows. In jobs that require dealing with the public, employers are wise to want workers to be sincere, to go well beyond the smile that’s “just painted on.” Gregg Snazelle, who directed all the commercials for Toyota’s fall 1980 campaign, teaches his advertising students in the first class “to always be honest.”3 Behind the most effective display is the feeling that fits it, and that feeling can be managed.
As workers, the more seriously social engineering affects our behavior and our feelings, the more intensely we must address a new ambiguity about who is directing them (is this me or the company talking?). As customers, the greater our awareness of social engineering, the more effort we put into distinguishing between gestures of real personal feeling and gestures of company policy. We have a practical knowledge of the commercial takeover of the signal function of feeling. In a routine way, we make up for it; at either end, as worker or customer, we try to correct for the social engineering of feeling.* We mentally subtract feeling with commercial purpose to it from the total pattern of display that we sense to be sincerely felt. In interpreting a smile, we try to take out what social engineering put in, pocketing only what seems meant just for us. We say, “It’s her job to be friendly,” or “They have to believe in their product like that in order to sell it.”
In the end, it seems, we make up an idea of our “real self,” an inner jewel that remains our unique possession no matter whose billboard is on our back or whose smile is on our face. We push this “real self” further inside, making it more inaccessible. Subtracting credibility from the parts of our emotional machinery that are in commercial hands, we turn to what is left to find out who we “really are.” And around the surface of our human character, where once we were naked, we don a cloak to protect us against the commercial elements.
* For a summary of the views of the theorists mentioned in this chapter, see Appendix A.
* One study on rape prevention found that victims differed from nonvictims in risk situations in their “trust of feeling.” That is, victims tended to disregard their feeling of fear whereas nonvictims in risk situations tended to heed the feeling and turn back (Queens Bench Foundation, 1976).
* We may misinterpret an event, feel accordingly, and then draw false conclusions from what we feel. (We sometimes call this neurosis.) We can handle this by applying a secondary framework that corrects habits of feeling and inference, as when we say “I know I have a tendency to interpret certain gestures as rejections.” But feeling is the essential clue that a certain viewpoint, even though it may need frequent adjustment, is alive and well.
† A black person may see the deprivations of the ghetto more accurately, more “rationally,” through indignation and anger than through obedience or resigned “realism.” He will focus clearly on the policeman’s bloodied club, the landlord’s Cadillac, the look of disapproval on the employment agent’s white face. Outside of anger, these images become like boulders on a mountainside, minuscule parts of the landscape. Likewise, a chronically morose person who falls in love may suddenly see the world as happier people do.
* It is not only in the world of commerce that we automatically assume insincerity. Political reporters regularly state not only what an officeholder or candidate
