Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions
336
Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions
336eBook
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Overview
Referring discreetly to her own experience, Woodward examines the interpenetration of social structures and subjectivity, considering how psychological emotions are social phenomena, with feminist anger, racial shame, old-age depression, and sympathy for non-human cyborgs (including robots) as key cases in point. She discusses how emerging institutional and discursive structures engender “new” affects that in turn can help us understand our changing world if we are attentive to them—the “statistical panic” produced by the risk society, with its numerical portents of disease and mortality; the rage prompted by impenetrable and bloated bureaucracies; the brutal shame experienced by those caught in the crossfire of the media; and the conservative compassion that is not an emotion at all, only an empty political slogan.
The orbit of Statistical Panic is wide, drawing in feminist theory, critical phenomenology, and recent theories of the emotions. But at its heart are stories. As an antidote to the vacuous dramas of media culture, with its mock emotions and scattershot sensations, Woodward turns to the autobiographical narrative. Stories of illness—by Joan Didion, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Monette, and Alice Wexler, among others—receive special attention, with the inexhaustible emotion of grief framing the book as a whole.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822392316 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/16/2009 |
| Series: | e-Duke books scholarly collection. |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 435 KB |
About the Author
Kathleen Woodward is Professor of English at the University of Washington, where she directs the Simpson Center for the Humanities. She is the author of Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions and the editor of Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations and The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture.
Read an Excerpt
STATISTICAL PANIC
Cultural Politics and Poetics of the EmotionsBy KATHLEEN WOODWARD
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4377-6
Chapter One
CONTAINING ANGER, ADVOCATING ANGER: FREUD AND FEMINISMI had early discovered ... that passions often lead to sorrow. -Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. -Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
We need to acknowledge that experiments in creating a new social order, a social movement, create not only spaces of new ethics but also new emotions. -Sarita Srivastava, "You're Calling Me a Racist?"
Hysterical rage. Annihilating anger. Frozen wrath. Disabling guilt. I open this chapter on Freudian and feminist anger by tracing this trajectory in Freud's thought about the strong emotion of anger. By "strong emotions" I mean those such as fear, hate, triumph, jealousy, horror, greed, and l'amour fou-most of which could also be referred to as the "passions" (disgust and shame, however, are strong emotions we would not identify as passions). In their intensity, duration, and focus, the strong emotions differ from what I call the quiet emotions (nostalgia, sadness, and tranquility, for example), the chafing emotions (annoyance, irritation), and the expansive emotions (oceanic feeling, amusement, sympathy).
The Freudian passages I've chosen with the strong emotion of anger in view are drawn from Studies on Hysteria (1895), The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), "The Moses of Michelangelo" (1914), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), and as such cover a span of thirty-five years. I've selected these works in great part because, with the exception of Civilization and Its Discontents, they focus on what could be termed "professional" relations between people rather than on erotic wishes, for so long familiar to us in Freud. The path traced through these four texts leads from feminized hysterical anger to grandiose annihilating anger, from frozen wrath to guilt. It defines a trajectory of emotional development in Freud's work that culminates in the containment of the drive of aggressivity-and anger, its emotional representative-by guilt, the quintessential Freudian emotion.
I don't want to be understood as suggesting that Freud didn't value the emotions. On the contrary, as he asserted in "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva," the emotions are the only valuable things in psychic life. But in general for Freud, the strong emotions are explosive, volatile, dangerous. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Freud was ambivalent about the strong emotions (it would certainly be more "Freudian" to put it this way). At each and every point we'll find that for Freud a different mechanism inhibits the expression of the strong emotions. Each mechanism is a defense mechanism, similar to what the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins calls an affect management script. Over the course of his life Freud considers in turn the inhibition of anger by repression, the suppression of anger through the dream-work, and the containment of anger by self-control. Ultimately Freud concludes in Civilization and Its Discontents that fire must be fought with fire, emotion with emotion. In the final analysis, the controlling emotion-guilt, which is a passion for Freud-is a chilling and paralyzing one.
I'm drawn to this subject by my interest in theories, discourses (or emotional standards), and the experience of the emotions, but more specifically by what may seem at first to bear a far-flung relation to Freud: the value placed on the emotion of anger in the writing of American feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period anger was the emotion of choice for academic feminists (and thus "professional" relationships were very much at stake, among them the relation between students and professors). I'm fascinated by this emphasis on anger, which finds a historical touchstone in the work of Virginia Woolf and is indisputably one of the prime examples of the general redistribution of the emotions in terms of gender taking place in contemporary culture. Long associated with men, anger was now being appropriated by women. What is entailed by this feminist valorization of anger? At whom or what should it be directed? What tone or shape should it take? What assumptions about anger are contained in this work? What are the limits of anger? I take this opportunity to address at least some of these questions at the end of this chapter. By returning to Freud I hope to provide a contrasting perspective from which to do so. Thus my purpose in this chapter is to understand more clearly the bases of both Freudian and feminist views of anger through their differences, as well as to underline the distinctly different historical projects they served.
1
What does Freud have to say about anger? In the index to the Standard Edition I was surprised to find virtually no subentries under the heading "anger." The index does refer to Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, but all of the references there are to sections authored by Josef Breuer, Freud's coauthor. The single exception is "Preliminary Communication," the one essay attributed to both Breuer and Freud. I will turn to this piece in a moment, but first I need to insist on a distinction between anger and aggressivity, one signaled by the index itself: if "anger" has few entries, "aggressiveness" has many. Anger is an emotion, what in modern western culture we understand primarily as an interiorized affective state (there are other cultures, as anthropologists point out, that conceive of emotion as something that exists between people, not as something in individuals). Aggressivity is a drive to action, to behavior. In his work as a whole Freud placed much more emphasis on a theory of the drives than he did on the emotions. In fact he devoted remarkably little attention to the emotions in comparison, say, to Melanie Klein, whose work is a veritable theoretical atlas of the strong emotions of psychoanalysis. What, then, is the relationship between emotion and aggressivity? Certainly the two are linked, but not indissolubly so. We can imagine angry feelings that don't eventuate in aggressive behavior toward others. Indeed Freud astutely theorized the conversion of aggressivity toward others into self-aggressivity-in the form of an emotion. With these observations in mind I turn to Studies on Hysteria and feminized hysterical anger.
Hysteria is associated overwhelmingly with women and with the repression of sexual desire, which I understand as a drive, not an emotion. But in Studies on Hysteria Freud does report one case that deals explicitly with the repression of the emotion of anger. I call it the case of the hysterical employee. It is, as we will see, a case with a distinctly contemporary flavor. Given the traditional understanding of anger as a male emotion and hysteria as associated with women, it may come as a surprise to us that this hysterical patient is a man, one feminized by his hysteria as the result of his repressing his rage. What has enraged him? He is furious at his employer who has mistreated him physically, and he is furious at the legal justice system that has accorded him no redress. What is the outcome of his repression of anger? It erupts hysterically in the guise of "a frenzy of rage" as if its repression had compressed it into a denser, more volatile force. Here is the entire passage devoted to the scenario:
An employee who had become a hysteric as a result of being ill-treated by his superior, suffered from attacks in which he collapsed and fell into a frenzy of rage, but without uttering a word or giving any sign of a hallucination. It was possible to provoke an attack under hypnosis, and the patient then revealed that he was living through the scene in which his employer had abused him in the street and hit him with a stick. A few days later the patient came back and complained of having had another attack of the same kind. On this occasion it turned out under hypnosis that he had been re-living the scene to which the actual onset of the illness was related: the scene in the law-court when he failed to obtain satisfaction for his maltreatment. (SE 2: 14)
For Freud and Breuer this case is an illustration of a hysterical attack that consists only of "motor phenomena" (that is, it doesn't exhibit a hallucinatory phase). Like other forms of hysteria, the root or precipitating cause is a memory of a psychical trauma, a memory that has been repressed. But what is the memory of? An event? An emotion? A desire?
Although Freud doesn't say anything more about this case, we can assume he understands it the way he does other cases of hysteria: a person afflicted with hysteria must remember and rehearse either their desire or affect (allow me to repeat that here I am associating desire with a drive, affect with an emotion). The psychical trauma, signaled by the symptom of hysterical rage, must be "disposed of by abreaction or by associative thought-activity" (SE 2: 15). But there is a significant difference between this case of hysterical anger and a case of hysterical erotic desire. In the latter, Freud counsels the recognition and acceptance of sexual desire, which is the manifestation of what he will later understand as the libidinal drive. In effect he approves of it. In the case of the hysterical employee, on the other hand, it appears to be the emotion itself-the employee's anger, indeed rage, at the legal justice system and at his employer-that is the precipitating factor of the illness. Repressed anger, in other words, may not be a mere symptom of the illness but its very root. Thus it is the anger itself that should be "abreacted," released as it were into the air.
In his essay "The Unconscious" Freud explains the relation between memory, representation, and emotion this way: "Affects and emotions correspond to processes of discharge, the final manifestations of which are perceived as feelings," while "ideas are cathexes-basically of memory-traces" (178). The psychoanalyst James Hillman, glossing this passage in Emotion, offers the following analogy, one that perfectly captures Freud's view of anger as a violent and destructive emotion: "Let us conceive of these 'cathexes-ultimately of memory-traces' as bombs. The bombs 'exist' in the unconscious, but the affect has the quantitative explosive potential of the bombs" (53).
Thus hysteria in this altogether unusual case is not associated with the private sphere (the familiar Freudian bedroom). Rather it is set in the public sphere (the workplace, courts of law), which in the nineteenth century was the confirmed province of men. Furthermore its unexpected scenario underscores the unequal power relations of men-in this situation, of employer and employee. Freud doesn't address the issue of power. He doesn't politicize the emotion of anger. But if in general men have the cultural "right" to express their anger, this particular man-an employee-clearly did not. He didn't experience "satisfaction" in his anger. Instead his hysterical anger feminizes him.
Today we would likely consider this case in terms of harassment, which turns precisely on the analyzing pivot of unequal power relations with a "superior" taking advantage of a "subordinate." Acting on the emotion would be part of the therapy. We would look to the courts for "satisfaction," for the redress that was not forthcoming in the nineteenth century. Freud's then innovative answer was not legal action but rather therapy to exorcise the anger. Psychic repression was the mechanism that Freud theorized had concealed this anger in the first place. As we read in "The Unconscious," "to suppress the development of affect is the true aim of repression and ... its work is incomplete if this aim is not achieved" (178). At this point in his practice Freud believed that therapy in the form of hypnosis would release it. The patient would be purged of the hysterical rage that was in effect attacking him. Here anger is understood as a debilitating emotion. In Studies on Hysteria both the psychic mechanism of repression and the corresponding treatment of hypnosis have as their goal the effacement or catharsis of the self-destructive emotion of anger. But Freud was soon to reject hypnosis as ineffective, and another mechanism for containing anger would have to be found.
In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud explores the dream-work, a psychic mechanism he believed inhibited the emotions. For Freud the work of dreaming serves to suppress and dilute the emotions, thereby allowing them to be staged in the dream. If in the case of the hysterical employee the diagnostic complement of repression is hypnosis, here the diagnostic complement of the dream-work is the dissection of the dream-mass into its dream-thoughts, although dream-passions would seem to be a more appropriate term. Freud's conviction is that analysis will ultimately allow the strong emotions to present themselves and as a result they will be resolved into a calming order and disappear.
One dream in particular resonates here. In his important section entitled "Affects in Dreams" Freud considers at length the emotional storm released by what we have come to call the "Non Vixit" dream, one of his own dreams of professional ambition. Here is the complete passage:
I had gone to Brücke's laboratory at night, and, in response to a gentle knock on the door, I opened it to (the late) Professor Fleischl, who came in with a number of strangers and, after exchanging a few words, sat down at his table... . My friend Fl. [Fliess] had come to Vienna unobtrusively in July. I met him in the street in conversation with my (deceased) friend P., and went with them to some place where they sat opposite each other as though they were at a small table. I sat in front at its narrow end. Fl. spoke about his sister and said that in three quarters of an hour she was dead, and added some such words as "that was the threshold." As P. failed to understand him, Fl. turned to me and asked me how much I had told P. about his affairs. Whereupon, overcome by strange emotions, I tried to explain to Fl. that P. (could not understand anything at all, of course, because he) was not alive. But what I actually said-and I myself noticed the mistake-was, "NON VIXIT." I then gave P.a piercing look. Under my gaze he turned pale; his form grew indistinct and his eyes a sickly blue-and finally he melted away. I was highly delighted at this and I now realized that Ernst Fleischl, too, had been no more than an apparition, a "revenant"; and it seemed to me quite possible that people of that kind only existed as long as one liked and could be got rid of if someone else wished it. (SE 5: 421).
About this angry dream I want to make three points. First, Freud's fantasy in the "Non Vixit" dream-a fantasy that is surely grandiose-is that his anger is itself a lethal weapon. Related is the implication that the dreamwork, which serves to suppress (not repress) affect in the first place, may ultimately work to magnify it. To me the most memorable aspect of the "Non Vixit" dream is the "scene of annihilation" where Freud acts on his anger, terminating his friend with a wounding glance, causing him as if in some bizarre science fiction film to liquefy and finally evaporate into nothing, leaving no bodily trace (520). This scene, Freud concludes, is a reversal of the very same treatment he had once received from his employer and teacher Brücke, who had chastised him for his renowned tardiness as an assistant in his lab.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 1
Part One: Cultural Politics, Communities of Feeling 29
1. Containing Anger, Advocating Anger: Freud and Feminism 35
2. Against Wisdom: Anger and Aging 58
3. Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 79
4. Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 109
Part Two: Structures of Feeling, "New" Feelings 135
5. Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 139
6. Bureaucratic Rage 165
7. Statistical Panic 195
Coda: Inexhaustible Grief 219
Notes 235
Bibliography 275
Index 297