Ute Frevert, Centre for the History of Emotions
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin
The Emotional Turn
The history of emotions has been experiencing an upsurge of academic interest lately. Research centers of various forms and scopes have been established, focusing on this new and burgeoning field; major historical journals have engaged in debates about its potential gains and expectations. Publishers are eager to include relevant literature in their programs and series, thus inviting further research.
Historical science is by no means the only discipline that has directed its focus onto the study of emotions. Unsurprisingly, philosophy took the lead. Already in Antiquity philosophers attempted to describe and explain affects and passions and to define their relationship with what they perceived as reason. Moreover there is no point in talking about an ‘emotional turn’ in Psychology, since it had been genuinely interested in emotions and emotion regulation since its emergence as a discipline in the late nineteenth century. Yet the advent of neuroscience and the improvement of neuroimaging techniques helped to boost research on emotions and how these interact with various modes of cognition. (See Plamper, 2015, chapter 3.)
In the humanities, literature and theater studies scholars were fast to join the growing community of researchers working on emotions. This was not difficult since their main ‘material’ concerned emotions. According to Aristotle tragedy was supposed to arouse pity and fear in order to eventually restore emotional balance through katharsis. During the late eighteenth century, the stage was considered to be the best instrument for imparting moral values and improving the public, by instilling ‘good’ emotions and uprooting ‘bad’ ones. Literary texts, above all the new (epistolary) novel, had always centered around (more or less passionate) feelings. It was not only the ‘Age of Sensibility’ that inspired a veritable wave of sentimentalism and tearful emotional soul-searching among readers. Several decades later, in his 1869 seminal novel L’éducation sentimentale, the French writer Gustave Flaubert embarked on writing “the moral history of the men of my generation; the history of their feelings to be more precise” (Flaubert, ed. Bruneau, 1991, 409). There was a widespread assumption that novels, good or bad, were about people having, following, discovering, hiding, repressing, and shying away from strong feelings. It was therefore a matter of course that literature scholars researched emotions and analyzed their meaning, function, and expression.
The literary language of emotions is also relevant to historians, who are less concerned about the poetics of emotions, but do take an interest in how emotions were produced, experienced and practiced by means of writing and reading about them. In this vein, Robert Darnton studied readers’ responses to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s bestselling novel Julie, or the New Heloise from 1761 and found multiple evidence in contemporary letters about women and men being moved to tears by the heroine’s unhappy fate (Darnton, 1985, 215-256). Lynn Hunt suggested that reading sentimental novels actually taught people to feel empathy and embrace the new gospel of human rights (Hunt, 2007).
Neither Darnton nor Hunt would consider themselves as historians of emotions. Yet their work has a lot to tell about how certain people felt about certain things at a certain time and how such feelings were encouraged or even intentionally elicited by new media. Hunt even went to great lengths to defend her claim that “imagined empathy” served as the foundation of human rights. And she harshly criticized her “own discipline of history [that] has for so long disdained any form of psychological argument” (Hunt, 2007, 32; 34). However, this was only partly true. Biography, as a standard genre of history writing, had always made use of ‘psychological’ reasoning, in direct or indirect ways. To explain great men’s actions historians often resorted to popular psychology, referring to happy or unhappy childhood experiences as well as deep emotional moments to interpret a hero’s motives. Some even attempted to introduce psychoanalytical concepts. But the new creed of ‘psychohistory’ deeply suffered from an overdose of dogmatic Freudianism and thus failed to gain a wider appeal.
Hunt’s criticism of her discipline still finds plenty of evidence, especially if one substitutes ’psychological’ with ‘emotional’. Academic historiography, founded and crafted in the nineteenth century, was not particularly keen to explore emotions as a topic of serious research. Although many history books (above all those written during the period of strong nationalism) overflowed with passionate language, authors hardly ever reflected on their own use of emotion words and images. They also refrained from systematically searching for emotions in their sources and analyzing them in terms of functions, modes and causes. Only those who had become interested in cultural history or were exploring the mechanisms of historical understanding became interested in “mental structural contexts”, in “passions and pains” or in the development of national feelings and sensibilities (Jensen & Morat, 2008; Frevert, 2014). These interests, however, remained largely marginal in the profession. Even when in the late 1930s the eminent Annales historian Lucien Febvre (1973) urged his colleagues to pay more attention to sensibilities and start a broad investigation of human emotions, his advice was not followed. It took until the early 2000s that historians warmed up to the idea and started to participate in the ‘emotional turn’, first through individual research (see, for example, Reddy, 2001; Frevert, 2011; Boquet & Nagy, 2015), later with more collaborative and institutionalized efforts.
In January 2008 a new research center was inaugurated at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Under the guiding assumption that emotions matter to and in human development, a team of historians set out to explore the hows, whens and whys.[1] The Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions in London and the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence: History of Emotions followed suit in 2008 and 2011 respectively.[2] Since then, major historical journals have initiated debates about the potential gains and promises of the approach (Eustace et al., 2012; Biess, 2010). Conferences are being organized at a pace and frequency that both testify to and nourish the fast-growing interest in the field.
How to do the history of emotions
There are multiple ways of “doing” the history of emotions, and there is more than one reason to focus on emotions as a field of historical inquiry. Some historians are interested in emotions from the perspective of historical anthropology that concentrates on the human body and practices related to the life cycle (childbirth and childhood, health and illness, family relations, death etc.). As much as such practices have a history and change with history, emotions are equally perceived as historically variable. In as far as they are regarded as connected with bodily processes they are supposed to be influenced by the body’s changing appearance and function over space and time. At the same time cognitive elements of directionality and appraisal link emotions to social contexts and material environments that also undergo historical change. In this vein, to historicize emotions means to analyze how emotions change over time, due to societal influences, economic forces, political interventions, and religious framings. Thus love among family members, for instance, should not be considered as an eternal or universal feature of human life, and nor should compassion for other people’s or animals’ suffering. Both emotions and their practice depend on certain institutional settings and incentives, in whose absence other emotional – or non-emotional – practices prevail.
Anthropological studies have already contributed greatly to highlighting the cultural plasticity of emotions. They have also sent a warning that scholars should refrain from using their own emotion knowledge in order to interpret other people’s feelings. The way that people feel (and about whom and what) follows culturally specific trajectories that eschew timeless generalization. Emotion knowledge and emotional practices are embedded into multiple layers of cultural meaning. Like anthropologists, historians are thus well advised to carefully dissect those layers and work towards a contextualized notion of emotion that takes into account temporal, spatial and social differences.
Within – and beyond – the broader range of historical anthropology, historians of emotions have taken a keen interest in the social construction of subjectivities. As much as the concept of ‘self’ (defined as a way to perceive oneself as part of one’s world) has undergone multiple revisions and re-framings since the early modern period, emotions have attracted more or less attention as conscious or unconscious assets of that perception. Working with first-person accounts (diaries, letters, autobiographies, memoirs) can bring these emotions under the spotlight and allow them to be investigated as factors that motivate people to social action at certain historical moments.
At the same time, emotions are not a person’s exclusive property. As human beings have come to rely on feelings in order to communicate, these feelings have to be identified and interpreted. The language of emotions, so to speak, has to be a common language – common, at least, within the social environment to which an individual belongs. Depending on its main content, whether religious, magical, economic or political, the language of emotions carries a specific form and fulfills different functions, in speech and writing as much as in bodily gestures and mimics. This invites historians to direct their attention to social groups and, in modern times, to institutions in order to uncover their (more or less hidden) emotional curriculum. How social groups and institutions define their emotional style is bound to have repercussions on how their members feel and express emotions and what kind. Being a soldier, for instance, exerts different emotional pressures and expectations compared with being a factory worker or a chamber maid. Being a soldier in a conscripted army demands different emotional qualities compared with being part of a mercenary or professional army. The same holds true for women who serve as professional or voluntary military nurses, in campaigns either related to the honor of the nation (as an all-encompassing concept), or to the interests of a local warlord.
Quite evidently, there is no automatic link between the emotional style of an institution or social group and the feelings of a member of that institution or group. As much as the social and institutional framing of individual emotions should not be underestimated, it should not be overstated, either. Historians interested in the dynamics of change might actually find it challenging to explore processes of divergence and its consequences. The history of state socialism in Eastern Europe serves as a case in point. Imbued with strong emotional messages of political cohesion and historical telos, youth organizations, student associations, trade unions and the like all worked incessantly towards aligning their members’ emotional make-up to objectives set by the ruling party. Although these organizations reached and included millions of citizens they were ultimately unsuccessful in enlisting and commandeering their emotions. What had worked for several decades, failed once the state’s emotional appeals lost credibility and clashed with individual disappointments and expectations on a massive and publicly visible scale.
Why do emotions matter, and what for?
In a nutshell, the current boom in emotion studies – not just in history, but also in the social sciences at large, including behavioral economics as well as affective computing and neuroscience – reflects the contemporary surge in emotional politics, both in the private and public sphere. In personal relations, be it among lovers, friends, colleagues, or peers, emotions are increasingly used as a major communicative code. The salience of emoticons is a case in point, and only one of many. Furthermore, emotions are ubiquitously addressed when it comes to selling commercial products and services as well as political messages. This surge is due to many factors, among them and most prominently the shift in systems of governance that can be observed in Europe, North America, and Australia. As these systems target the self and enhance the quest for self-optimization and self-management, they have become aware of emotions as main motivators and switch mechanisms that spur people’s actions and non-actions. At the same time, emotions seem to be the last hidden continent: knowledge is in scarce supply, while demand increases exponentially, in politics, business, management, health industry, and interpersonal relations.
In the contemporary ‘Western’ world of advanced capitalism and democratic rule, emotions have come to enjoy a high status, both in the private sphere and public arena. In people’s private lives, emotions play a pivotal role, and they are generally regarded and appreciated as something radically subjective. It is claimed that a person’s feelings are perfectly and only theirs. They belong to their inner self, and they are what make them lively, human, authentic, and unique. When the self was reinvented in the 1960s and 1970s as the site of multiple forces striving for hegemony, one thing was beyond doubt: that the self is, above all, an emotional self. Emotions thus appear and are valued as prime markers of individuality.
This does not mean that they have to be expressed in the same way as they are felt. There might be situations in which someone prefers to hide their feelings and pretend. One might then put on a face, seem ‘cool’ – without forgetting that this is nothing but a façade. At the same time, people expect others to respect their true feelings. Hurting someone’s feelings has become a major offense. Some self-help manuals suggest a different strategy. Their message is: No one can hurt your feelings unless you allow it to happen. You are the master of your own feelings and can use your freedom to feel as you like. (See, among others, Illouz, 2008; Maasen et al., 2011.)
As descendants of the therapeutic age, contemporaries happily receive the message and start ‘working’ on their emotions to make them even more their own, immune to external interventions or infringements. They have learned to ‘listen’ to their emotions (assuming that they tell them how to behave and live their lives) and be ‘good’ to themselves (fostering positive emotions and general well-being). Thanks to Daniel Goleman’s bestselling book on ‘Emotional Intelligence’, many individuals have become better at reading their own as well as other people’s emotions and using their allegedly ‘natural’ faculty of empathy. Goleman based his arguments on research conducted by two US psychologists. In the late 1970s, they measured people’s ability to “perceive emotion, integrate emotion to facilitate thought, understand emotions and to regulate emotions to promote personal growth” (Salovey & Mayer, 1990; Goleman, 1996; 1998). Published (and hidden) in scientific journals, this research saw a surge of interest once it was popularized and turned into didactic advice in the mid-1990s. Goleman’s success – his book was translated into forty languages and sold five million copies – prompted him to set up counseling agencies and training labs that have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises. Emotional intelligence has since been incorporated into management techniques and is widely used by human resources staff in many countries.
It is also used by commercial businesses, above all in advertising. Expanding and flourishing from the early twentieth century as part of fast growing consumer societies, advertising has been, from the start, closely linked to psychological research. Selling goods is synonymous with selling emotions: this is the mantra that governs the world of Mad Man Don Draper and his more or less inventive followers. Some advertising campaigns like Benetton’s invade people’s emotional landscapes in an unusual and surprising manner. Other campaigns take a much more direct approach when goods themselves are simply labeled ‘emotion’ (for instance cars, salads, cosmetics, or cat food). A more sophisticated and far-reaching approach is currently undertaken by means of affective computing. While online media companies such as Netflix or Amazon already assess real-time consumer sentiments by closely monitoring people’s individual choices and preferences, the M.I.T. Media Lab and its spin-offs aim to train computers in recognizing human emotions. These new technologies aim not only to improve “human affective experience with technology” but also to make computers emotionally intelligent and offer new inroads into people’s feelings that can (and will) be used for commercial purposes (Affective computing http://affect.media.mit.edu/, accessed 29/01/2018; Wortham, 2013).
Apart from online businesses, there are many more institutions that try to appeal to or instrumentalize emotions. Even politics – long since perceived as a highly rational affair – has increasingly put emotions to use: politicians grieving, embracing each other, giving enthusiastic speeches, eliciting feelings of pride or disdain. Citizens become their witnesses and targets by reading or watching them, sometimes face-to-face, more often on TV or YouTube. Media, however, not only mediate between the sender and the receiver of messages: Mediation itself is fraught with emotional content. Personal interest stories dominate newspapers and TV programs. With his impassioned coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 CNN’s anchorman Anderson Cooper was appointed the face of ‘emo-journalism’, and he has kept to this new style ever since. Emo-journalism manages to invoke and engage viewers’ emotions, as much as it confronts them with other people’s emotions, tapping into their empathizing abilities. The public seems to like this according to opinion polls and sales figures.
‘Private’ emotions are thus converted into public emotions: emotions ‘felt’ and communicated in public, expressed in a language that is publicly framed, recognizable and understood. Social media act as powerful intermediaries: Individual users put their emotions on public display and invite extended audiences of ‘friends’ to witness and share them. Since 1982, so-called emoticons or smileys added to individual emails and instant messages have been making use of a collective emotional language that is highly formalized and universally applied.
Even individual emotions like love are increasingly acted out and performed in a collective and publicly negotiated idiom. According to cultural sociologists ‘emotional capitalism’ as it developed during the 20th century has hijacked and reshaped inner feelings by aligning them with emotionally coated commodities. Love thus is associated with emotionalized and emotionalizing objects (flowers, jewelry) and practices (e.g. cinema or restaurant dates). In the same vein, individual emotions and emotional settings are used in order to market ‘unemotional’ commodities such as oil or gas (Illouz, 1997; 2007).
This development lies in the background of what has been discussed as the current boom of emotion research. It inspires interest in emotion knowledge in many scientific fields, applied or theoretical. History forms part of that knowledge production for it caters to people’s need to define the present in relation to past expectations and experiences. To trace today’s surge of emotional politics back to former times, means to highlight their peculiarities and to investigate the contextual forces responsible for such tendencies. Yet historians are not only experts in diachronic analysis. They are also well versed in comparative perspectives. The fact that emotional politics currently seem to flourish in ‘the West’ more than in other regions of the world, might raise questions regarding potential limits or structural obstacles to such politics. It thus draws attention to the many diverse histories of perceiving emotions, allocating a certain place for them in private and/or public life, and valuing certain emotional practices over others.
[1] Please visit our website: https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/history-of-emotions; Ute Frevert, The modern history of emotions: A research center in Berlin, in: Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 36 (2014), pp. 31-55.
[2] For more details see: http://projects.history.qmul.ac.uk/emotions/ resp. http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/.
References
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