The Managed Heart. Arlie Russell Hochschild
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Managed Heart - Arlie Russell Hochschild страница 16
![The Managed Heart - Arlie Russell Hochschild The Managed Heart - Arlie Russell Hochschild](/cover_pre667435.jpg)
They were also taught how to feel properly toward them: “The clinician must never respond in anger or with intent to punish, although he might sometimes have to restrain or even isolate children in order to prevent them from hurting themselves or one another. Above all, the staff were expected to be warm and loving and always to be governed by a ‘clinical attitude.’”17 To be warm and loving toward a child who kicks, screams, and insults you—a child whose problem is unlovability—requires emotion work. The art of it is passed down from senior to junior counselor, as in other settings it passes from judge to law clerk, professor to graduate student, boss to rising subordinate.
The professional worker will implicitly frown on certain uses of emotion memory. The senior counselor of disturbed children will not allow herself to think, “Tommy reminds me of the terrible brat I had to babysit when I was thirteen, and if he’s like that I’ll end up hating him.” Instead, she will reconceive Tommy in another way: “Tommy is really like the other kid I used to babysit when I was fourteen. He was difficult but I got to like him, so I expect I’ll get to like Tommy despite the way he pushes me away suspiciously.”
A proper way to experience the child, not simply a proper way to seem to feel, was understood by everyone as part of the job. And Cohen reports that the young caretakers did admirably: “To an extraordinary degree they fulfilled these expectations, including, I am convinced, the expectation that they feel sympathy and tenderness and love toward their charges, despite their animal-like behavior. The speed with which these college students learned to behave in this way cannot be easily explained in terms of gradual learning through a slow process of ‘internalization.’”18
In more circuitous ways, too, the formal rules that prop up an institution set limits to the emotional possibilities of all concerned. Consider, for example, the rules that guard access to information. Any institution with a bit of hierarchy in it must suppress democracy to some extent and thus must find ways to suppress envy and resentment at the bottom. Often this is done by enforcing a hierarchy of secrets. The customary rule of secrecy about pay is a case in point: those at the bottom are almost never allowed to know how much money those at the top get each month, nor, to the fullest extent, what privileges they enjoy. Also kept secret are deliberations that determine when and to what level an individual is likely to rise or fall within the organization. As one University of California administrative memorandum explained: “Letters concerning the disposition of tenure review cases will be kept confidential, in order that those involved not hold grudges or otherwise harbor resentment toward those unfavorably disposed in their case.” In this situation, where the top depends upon being protected from the middle and the bottom—from “those involved” as the memo put it—leaks can cause panic.19
Finally, drugs of various sorts can be used to stimulate or depress mood, and companies are not above engineering their use. Just as the plow displaced manual labor, in some reported instances drug use seems to be displacing emotional labor. The labor that it takes to withstand stress and boredom on the job can be performed, some workers have found, by Darvon and Valium. Workers at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, for example, found that nurses in its medical department gave out Valium, Darvon, codeine, and other drugs free and without prescription. There are a number of ways, some of them company-sponsored, to “have a nice day” on the job, as part of the job.20
AN INSTRUMENTAL STANCE TOWARD FEELING
The stage actor makes the finding and expressing of feeling his main professional task. In Stanislavski’s analogy, he seeks it with the dedication of a prospector for precious metal He comes to see feeling as the object of painstaking internal mining, and when he finds it, he processes it like gold. In the context of the theater, this use of feeling is considered exciting and honorable. But what happens when deep and surface acting become part of a day’s work, part of what we sell to an employer in return for a day’s wage? What happens when our feelings are processed like raw ore?
In the Recurrent Training class for experienced flight attendants at Delta Airlines, I observed borrowings from all types of acting. These can be seen in the ways students an swered when the instructor asked how they tried to stop feeling angry and resentful at passengers:
If I pretend I’m feeling really up, sometimes I actually get into it. The passenger responds to me as though I were friendly, and then more of me responds back [surface acting].
Sometimes I purposely take some deep breaths. I try to relax my neck muscles [deep acting with the body].
I may just talk to myself: “Watch it. Don’t let him get to you. Don’t let him get to you. Don’t let him get to you.” And I’ll talk to my partner and she’ll say the same thing to me. After a while, the anger goes away [deep acting, self-prompting].
I try to remember that if he’s drinking too much, he’s probably scared of flying. I think to myself, “he’s like a little child.” Really, that’s what he is. And when I see him that way, I don’t get mad that he’s yelling at me. He’s like a child yelling at me then, [deep acting, Method acting].
Surface and deep acting in a commercial setting, unlike acting in a dramatic, private, or therapeutic context, make one’s face and one’s feelings take on the properties of a resource. But it is not a resource to be used for the purposes of art, as in drama, or for the purposes of self-discovery, as in therapy, or for the pursuit of fulfillment, as in everyday life. It is a resource to be used to make money. Outside of Stanislavski’s parlor, out there in the American marketplace, the actor may wake up to find himself actually operated upon.
* In each instance the individual indicates awareness of acting on a feeling. A passive stance toward feeling was reflected in other examples: “I found myself filled with pride,” “My stomach did a trapeze act all by itself.”
† It also presupposes an aspiration to feel. The man who fought against love wanted to feel the same about his former wife as he thought she felt about him; if he was a limited idea to her, he wanted her to be that for him. A courtly lover in twelfth-century France or a fourteen-year-old American female rock fan might have been more disposed to aspire to one-sided love, to want it that way. Deep acting comes with its social stories about what we aspire to feel.
* In An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski points out an apparent contradiction: “We are supposed to create under inspiration; only our subconscious gives us inspiration; yet we apparently can use this subconscious only through our consciousness, which kills it” (1965, p. 13). The solution to this problem is the indirect method. The subconscious is induced. As Stanislavski notes: “The aim of the actor’s preparation is to cross the threshold of the subconscious…. Beforehand we have ‘true-seeming feeling,’ afterwards ‘sincerity of emotion.’ On this side of it, we have the simplicity of a limited fantasy; beyond, the simplicity of the larger imagination, [where] the creative process differs each time it is repeated” (p. 267).
* The mind acts as a magnet to reusable feeling. Stanislavski advises actors: “Imagine that you have received some insult in public, perhaps a slap in the face, that makes your cheek burn whenever you think of it. The inner shock was so great that it blotted out all the details of this harsh incident. But some insignificant thing will instantly revive the memory of the insult, and the emotion will recur with redoubled violence. Your cheek will grow red or you will turn pale and your heart will pound. If you possess such sharp and easily aroused emotional material, you will find it easy to transfer it to the stage and play a scene analogous to the experience you had in real life which left such a shocking impression on you. To do this you will not need any technique. It will play itself because nature will help you” (1965, p. 176).
* We commonly assume that institutions are called in when individual controls fail: those who cannot control