Читать книгу The Managed Heart - Arlie Russell Hochschild - Страница 13

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FEELING AS CLUE

Men are estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made; one makes an instrument of himself, and is estranged from It also.

—C. Wright Mills

One day at Delta’s Stewardess Training Center an instructor scanned the twenty-five faces readied for her annual Self-Awareness Class set up by the company in tandem with a refresher course in emergency procedures required by the Federal Aviation Administration. She began: “This is a class on thought processes, actions, and feelings. I believe in it. I have to believe in it, or I couldn’t get up here in front of you and be enthusiastic.” What she meant was this: “Being a sincere person, I couldn’t say one thing to you and believe in another. Take the fact of my sincerity and enthusiasm as testimony to the value of the techniques of emotion management that I’m going to talk about.”

Yet, as it became clear, it was precisely by such techniques of emotion management that sincerity itself was achieved. And so, through this hall of mirrors, students were introduced to a topic scarcely mentioned in Initial Training but central to Recurrent Training: stress and one of its main causes—anger at obnoxious passengers.

“What happens,” the instructor asked the class, in the manner of a Southern Baptist minister inviting a response from the congregation, “when you become angry?” Answers: Your body becomes tense. Your heart races. You breathe more quickly and get less oxygen. Your adrenalin gets higher.

“What do you do when you get angry?” Answers: Cuss. Want to hit a passenger. Yell in a bucket. Cry. Eat. Smoke a cigarette. Talk to myself. Since all but the last two responses carry a risk of offending passengers and thus losing sales, the discussion was directed to ways that an obnoxious person could be reconceived in an honest but useful way. The passenger demanding constant attention could be conceived as a “victim of fear of flying.” A drunk could be reconceived as “just like a child.” It was explained why a worker angered by a passenger would do better to avoid seeking sympathy from co-workers.

“How,” the instructor asked the class, “do you alleviate anger at an irate?” (An “irate,” a noun born of experience, is an angry person.) Answering her own question, she went on:

I pretend something traumatic has happened in their lives. Once I had an irate that was complaining about me, cursing at me, threatening to get my name and report me to the company. I later found out his son had just died. Now when I meet an irate I think of that man. If you think about the other person and why they’re so upset, you’ve taken attention off of yourself and your own frustration. And you won’t feel so angry.

If anger erupts despite these preventive tactics, then deep breathing, talking to yourself, reminding yourself that “you don’t have to go home with him” were offered as ways to manage emotion. Using these, the worker becomes less prone to cuss, hit, cry, or smoke.

The instructor did not focus on what might have caused the worker’s anger. When this did come up, the book was opened to the mildest of examples (such as a passenger saying, “Come here, girl!”). Rather, the focus was kept on the worker’s response and on ways to prevent an angry response through “anger-desensitization.”

After about ten minutes of this lecture one flight attendant in the next to last row began tapping her index finger rapidly on her closed notebook. Her eyes were turned away from the speaker, and she crossed and recrossed her legs abruptly. Then, her elbow on the table, she turned to two workers to her left and whispered aloud, “I’m just livid!”

Recurrent Training classes are required yearly. The fact that a few fellow workers had escaped coming to this one without penalty had come to light only in the last ten minutes of informal talk before class. Flight attendants are required to come to the class from whatever city they are in at the time. The company provides travel passes to training, but it is a well-known source of resentment that after training, workers are often bumped from home-bound flights in favor of paying passengers. “Last time,” the livid one said, “it took me two days to get home from Recurrent, and all just for this.”

Addressing a rustling in the group and apparently no one in particular, the instructor said:

Now a lot of flight attendants resent having to commute to Recurrent. It’s a bother getting here and a heck of a bother getting back. And some people get angry with me because of that. And because that’s not my fault and because I put work into my classes, I get angry back. But then I get tired of being angry. Do you ever get tired of being angry? Well, one time I had a flight attendant who sat in the back of my class and snickered the whole time I was teaching. But you know what I did? I thought to myself, “She has full lips, and I’ve always believed people with full lips are compassionate.” When I thought that, I wasn’t so angry.

By reminding the class that ease in using company passes, like the overall 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 public life, expressions of feeling often make news. For example, a TV sports newscaster noted: “Tennis has passed the stage of trying 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 wants to seem to feel but also how well he or she succeeds in the effort to convey that feeling. Readers, it is assumed, demand at least this much unveiling.