Hera Cook on William Reddy

Posted on September 13, 2013 by

Dr Hera Cook is an historian of emotions and sexuality at the University of Otago, Wellington, with current interests in emotional management and inequality. Here she reviews William Reddy’s new book for the History of Emotions Blog.

William Reddy is a historian whose work is notable for interdisciplinary depth and an accompanying adventurousness. I have learned a lot from his work and I admire these qualities, which are evident in The Making of Romantic Love. Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia & Japan, 900-1200 CE. The book uses three case studies to illustrate the claim that “sexual desire is not universal” (34). The culture of Medieval French troubadours has traditionally been supposed to provide origins of romantic love in “Western culture.” Reddy compares that sexual culture with two other elite cultures that existed during a similar period; Bengal and Orissa in what is now India and Heian Japan.

Over the past fifteen years, Reddy has engaged with the anthropological literature on emotion, as well as publishing extensively on the application of cognitive and affective neuroscience to definitions of emotion and the use of these ideas in relation to historical evidence. Many neuro-philosophers and neuroscientists argue that “all emotions are associated with activated thought “materials,” that is with cognitions, and emotions are, in practice, indistinguishable from aspects of cognitive processing” (7). Reddy took this conception of emotions as cognition and developed the concept of ‘emotives,’ which are performative speech utterances such as ‘I love you’ or ‘I hate you’. The individual is enabled to discover what they feel through the process of shaping their complex internal experiences into a specific utterance (Reddy, 1997, 2001). Reddy expands this to encompass insights from cognitive behavioral therapy, according to which a person’s emotional temperament consists of an array of “chronically accessible thought material, developed over a lifetime of patterned repetitions and habituations” (7, 371-73).

These ideas provide him with the basis for an approach to romantic or sexual love that is free of what he describes as “Western-specific notions,” such as “passion,” “appetite” or “drive” (6).

The book begins with the statement: “In a common Western way of feeling, romantic love is paired with sexual desire. The lover feels both at once, yet the two feelings are in tension with each other” (1). This recourse to a taken-for-granted “Western” cultural unity is problematic as sexual beliefs vary considerably across heterogeneous populations even within countries. Two decades of research into sexuality in British society suggests to me that romantic love is no longer perceived to be in tension with sexual desire, if it ever was so outside strongly religiously engaged sectors of society. In most of the book, it is the “commonsense Western notion of sexual desire” or appetite that is central and this, I would agree, is central to our conception of sexuality (106).

Reddy defines romantic or sexual love as a “longing for association.” He prefers the term longing because, he claims, “desire has been used as a “synonym for lust, meaning appetitive cravings for sexual release, and because of love’s opposition to lust.” He chose association as “a general term that can refer to any significant relationship” (6). This definition of romantic or sexual love, raises the question; what is the role of the body and specifically the genitals in the experience of “longing for association”?

Rejection of any role in ‘emotion’ for body parts or systems other than the brain, or for the purpose of signaling emotion (blushing, gestures, etc) to others has been an important part of Reddy’s methodology in his previous emotions research. As explained above, he argues that “emotions are, in practice, indistinguishable from aspects of cognitive processing” (7). Hence, any role for the rest of the body is excluded from the “longing for association.” Reddy rarely makes this rejection of bodies explicit, rather he subsumes physical bodies and their functions in the concept of appetite or desire, and any mention of involvement of the body in sexual love is treated as a cultural construction. He believes that “the presumption …sexual desire [is] a powerful bodily appetite” is likely to fade from view as have other “emotional states that were considered extremely common,” giving hysteria and acedia as examples (16). He goes on to explain that “present-day experimental evidence [on sexuality] offers little support for the age-old Western doctrine that there is a sexual appetite that is comparable to hunger or thirst” (16, see also 10). This rejection of the link between sexual desire and what he sees as the uncomplicated appetite of hunger highlights Reddy’s lack of attention to bodies; what of anorexia, bulimia and rising levels of extreme obesity? Any and all of our bodily processes are subject to shaping by culture. There is no category of culturally unmediated bodily appetites from which to withdraw sexual desire. As this suggests, Reddy rejects the existing concept of sexual appetite without providing an answer to questions as to how brain and body do interact to produce action. And the result of Reddy’s rejection of the role of the body in sexual attraction is a term that could apply to any strong affective relationship.

Reddy uses “longing for association” as a basis to compare the medieval French elite conception of romantic love with that in parts of South Asia (Bengal and Orissa) around the twelfth century and with the imperial elite in Heian Japan. The claim that the Western cultural conception of embodied sexual responses differs from those of entirely separate cultures seems incontestable – how could it be otherwise? It is, however, difficult to assess the differences on the basis of the account the book offers. The South Asian evidence largely refers to a single sect, notwithstanding the fact, which Reddy explains, that Vaishnavism and related cults or practices sat within a context of many Indian cults. Did people inhabit a culture of only one sect or did they move from sect to sect according to their needs? What relevance did the beliefs of this sect have to this society? The Devidasis, or temple women, who are described interacting with males were a form of courtesan or geisha who lived outside the mainstream of their society. There were apparently middling groups or castes who rejected the sexual attitudes of this cult but there is no description of the impact of this in what was a highly stratified society. The Japanese evidence consists of poetry and narratives written by elite men and women. It is considerably more detailed than the South Asian sources and closer to the type of material available from France.

In the south of France, the tenth to twelfth century is believed to have seen rapid changes in sexual mores, as a result of the Gregorian Reforms. The reforms included the rejection of clerical marriage and the imposition of life-long marital monogamy on the elite, accompanied by insistence that “all sexual behaviour, all sexual longing, all sexual pleasure was bound up with the realm of sin and profoundly dangerous to the soul” (106). In the tenth century, these ideas, which came from the church fathers, had little purchase. By the late twelfth century, re-marriage due to annulment was much less available, excluding the children of serial sexual relationships from inheritance and their mothers from a secure position. This severely diminished the possibilities available to those rare elite women who were sufficiently beautiful, clever and manipulative to move from partner to partner at the highest levels of the French courts and to their would-be partners. Reddy argues that in response to these Gregorian reform induced changes, romantic love was constructed by the troubadours as fin’amors, a pure and powerful motivating force that could bring sexual partners together in “innocent bliss” free of lust (32). This provides the basis for the long-standing claim that medieval French troubadours created the concept of romantic love, which allegedly continues to shape “longing for association” in “Western culture” today.

There appears to be sufficient evidence to make a comparison between Japan and France, though that for South Asia is more limited. Reddy’s focus is, however, almost wholly on the responses that are analogous to fin’amor and part of his scheme of cognitive emotion, while the embodied experience that the Troubadours and the Church denigrated as lust is reduced to the concept of appetite. He argues that the elites in Bengal and Orissa and Heian Japan had “quite different category schemes for understanding what Christians divided into “bodily” and “spiritual,… [they] simply did not distinguish “appetites” from other types of motivational forces, nor did they group the sexual appetite with hunger or thirst” (5). So how did they treat the embodied element in sexual love? I came away from the book without convincing answers. Reddy commented about Japan and South Asia that “there is no indication in the documents that members of these elites regarded sexual release as inherently pleasurable.” (5). I am unsure what Reddy means by sexual release – the conception of orgasm as release of tension may well be a cultural construction but “sexual release” is a Western cultural euphemism or synonym for orgasm and he appears to be implying that there is no evidence these elites regarded sexual orgasm as pleasurable. This is not credible. Reddy does not explain the construction of embodied experience because he does not believe it is part of the category of emotion. The extent to which readers share this belief may well determine the extent to which they find the book convincing. The book does, however, ask the reader to take a comparative perspective seriously. Reddy’s effort to look beyond his discipline and his cultural framework makes for a challenging and at times rewarding reading experience.

Return to the Introduction to the William Reddy Round-table

Read Katherine Clark’s review.

Read David Lederer’s review.

Read William Reddy’s response.

David Lederer on William Reddy

Posted on September 13, 2013 by

Dr David Lederer is an historian of medicine, madness, sexuality, and religion, especially in the early modern period, at NUI Maynooth.  Here he reviews William Reddy’s new book, for the History of Emotions Blog.

During the Summer of Love in San Francisco, everything was political: simply making out on the campus lawn at UC Berkeley (in blatant violation of the do-not signs) signaled political activism.  Analogously, radical German communes organized by Rudi Dutschke and other student leaders adopted the free-love mantra, ‘Wer zweimal mit derselben pennt, gehört schon zum Establishment’ (Whoever sleeps with the same person twice already belongs to the establishment) during an era of violent street fighting in Berlin.  From chants of ‘Liberté, Egalité, Sexualité’ on the barricades of Paris to the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, love was in the air. And despite the obvious paradox suggested in a related (and rather more vulgar) axiom about peace, people appeared willing to fight for love.

Some emotions have been more politicized than others. Fear is perhaps the emotion most easily instrumentalized for political propaganda, as evidenced in the fall-out from the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks, and historical interest in it, dating back at least to the work of Jean Delumeau in the 1970s, shows no signs of abating.  Two important collections resulting from the 2007/8 cycle on ‘Fear in History’ conducted at the Davis Centre in Princeton have only just been published: Facing Fear, edited by Michael Laffan and Max Weiss, and Fear Across Disciplines, edited by Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier.

Until recently, love received rather less attention from historians (although several posts on this blog show this is changing). William M. Reddy’s global comparison elevates the transcendental (rather than sexual) aspects of love as a political force to a serious level of strategic discussion. At first glance, his chosen subject is surprising for several reasons.  In his seminal Navigation of Feeling, Reddy developed a working theory of interdisciplinary praxis and applied it to the French Revolution, his primary area of chronological and geographic expertise.  In the first part of the Navigation, he engages cutting-edge developments in the neurosciences, cognitive psychology and cultural anthropology to develop an historical method somewhere between the universalist claims of hard-wired biology and the absolute cultural relativity of Foucault.  Emotions, he claims, are both innately human and socially learned, outfitting individuals with the tools for self-representation; emotives.  For the historian, emotives can be sourced in language and framed as ‘… a foundation for a politically useful reconception of the relation between individual and collectivity, that is, a reconception of liberty’. (Navigation, 113)  In part two, Reddy compellingly applies his method to the instrumentalization of sentimentality in the language of the French Revolution, particularly poignant during the Terror.

Reddy’s scholarly decision to move outside his comfort zone in Making Love is anything but arbitrary.  Rather than an attempt to rewrite medieval history from without, he marshals his test-tubes and beakers from the previous experiment to take his queries to the next logical level: to demonstrate the potential adaptability of his method by means of a global trans-cultural analysis.

Romantic or courtly love is the chief subject of Reddy’s new comparative experiment.  Reddy contrasts its medieval genesis in the trobairitz/troubadour ballads of Occitan tradition with similar poetic expressions in the bhakti puranas of twelfth-century South Asia (Bengal and Orissa) and waka incantations of Heian Japan and, both of which, he claims, lack the Western dualistic division between love and lust.  This time, his theoretical introduction is adumbrated; Making Love builds directly upon the foundations of Navigation and students might consult the Navigations first, as this is truly a continuation of the previous inquiry.  A brief foray into post-Kinsean sexology is followed by a cultural anthropology of romantic love, conceived as ‘longing for association’, in three different cultures.

Biologically, Reddy slots in with the current consensus on brain plasticity, which indicates that behaviors are reinforcing:  ‘We do not, inevitably, grow ever more “horny” if deprived of sex’ (p.10).  In fact, the opposite may be the case, as desires can be culturally activated and even ritualized through chronic accessibility and frequent repetition.  Therefore, longing for association is not only a product of the biological imperative, but also a structural aspect of human communities:  ‘Present day experimental evidence offers little support for the age-old Western doctrine that there is a sexual appetite that is comparable to hunger or thirst’ (p.16).  Once again, his introduction assumes familiarity with part one of the Navigation (e.g. conceptualization of ‘emotives’) and, therefore, the uninitiated might find it difficult.

The body of evidence is divided into two parts, with the first three chapters detailing the emergence of courtly love in Europe, admittedly Reddy’s primary focus.  It arises in the context of Gregorian Reforms to marriage and sexuality as an aristocratic reaction to the over-simplified conflation of a complex social longing for association into the sinfulness of lust.  Courtly love is isolated in aristocratic speech in relationship to property, office holding and violence in a flexible kinship-reckoning system.  Faced with religious limitations on their ability to forcibly assert claims, thereby undermining useful ambiguities of legitimacy, advocates of courtly love operated in a shadowy realm of honor, open secrets and spaces of silence.  Noble women, who operated capably within that realm to claim offices, titles or lands – albeit often through male intermediaries – embraced courtly love as a liberating ideal that extolled charismatic virtues of romance within an aristocratic/familial code of honor.  Courtly love offered channels to vent frustration with the simplistic Gregorian condemnation of concupiscence as a physical appetite and therefore did not encompass the complex aristocratic longing for association also based upon titles, land, honor, dress, manner and education.  As Reddy astutely concludes this section: ‘Listening to sermons… they must have sensed that marrying… a high-ranking peer… simply to satisfy a sex drive would have been like buying a farm because one was hungry’(219).

The final two chapters comprising part two synchronically compare twelfth-century Western dualism with longing for association in bhakti Vaishnavism and among the Heian elite; neither culture recognized a gulf between sublime emotional love and desire-as-appetite, exhibiting instead a more holistic view.  While Reddy is cautious that his results are in no way indicative of a monolithic view of ‘Hindu’ or ‘Buddhist’, he remains convinced that neither of his comparative test cases entertain notions of sexual ‘appetite’ as understood in the West.  In Bengal and Orissa, for example, there was an important distinction between coarse, this-worldly, particular desires (generally, bhava; sexually, rati) and universalist refined moods (rasa; shingara rasa).  However, both were equally acceptable, the latter simply sublime and worthy of pursuit (especially among social superiors), as they pointed toward more universalistic and transcendental values.  Chapter four focuses on kingship and worship at the temple of Purushottama in Puri, where bhakti spiritualism included ritualized enactments of sexual liaisons, songs full of the love-lust of shringara rasa and a twelfth-century outpouring of poetry and drama celebrating enobling romantic affairs.  The religious complexities of ‘puranic Hinduism’ and Tantric sectarianism are elaborated vis-à-vis the prevailing political hierarchy.  Still, despite the lack of duality in the political structure (i.e. an independent and competing religious organization like the papacy), Reddy is able to enumerate similarities in the elaboration of the spiritual code of practice at court in bhakta spiritualism in South Asia and the European ideal of courtly love.

From the perspective of many Western observers, Japanese eroticism found its ultimate expression in the shunga woodblocks of okiyo-e artists during the Edo period of the late-18th and early-19th centuries.  Not least among them, Katasushika Hokusai and Utamaro Kitigawa, subsequently influenced a whole generation of European painters from Eduard Degas, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin to Pablo Picasso.  However, the Japanese spiritual tradition of elegance and compassion inherent in longing for association was rooted more deeply in Buddhism and indigenous kami worship.  In twelfth-century Heian Japan, just as in Orissa, no distinction was made between elevated love and sexual desire.  However, as with all this-worldly desires, longing for association was fraught with the same inevitable disappointments and sorrows.  In the Heian context, the combination of sadness with possibilities for spiritual consolation from one’s partner is witnessed in a great range of emotional material.  Earlier forms of social, kinship and gender structure, especially those ushered in by the adoption of Chinese patriarchal virtues and a centralized ritsuryō state system in the eighth century, later broke down during the tenth, which saw an increase in localized patrimonial interests.

An accompanying revival of indigenous kami traditions is manifest in waka  poetry, a verse form of love incantation exploiting word associations and puns from human spirituality and nature.  One such verse, the anonymous Gossamer Years diaries a wife’s attempts wife to move her husband, a bureaucrat, to greater attentiveness vis-à-vis his other wives and lovers, lyrically mixing her tears with raindrops as pleas for consolation.  The Tale of Genji provides another view of Heian emotional subjectivity (controversially interpreted by some scholars as ‘modern’) in depictions of the amorous liaisons of an imperial chancellor.  Genji wanders through his life detached, while the fleeting and episodic nature of his love encounters are punctuated by spiritual longing for an unattainably fulfilling physical union.  Throughout, each individual experience is infused with a deeper spiritual experience, whether these be with elegant ladies of court or ardent courtesans; neither is elevated above the other, all being part of an almost dreamlike wandering through life’s frustrations.  Literature once again provides Reddy with a yardstick to compare values in the longing for association in Occitan lyric (e.g. William of Aquitaine), Sanskrit poetry (Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda) and waka verse.

Ultimately, to what extent does Making Love succeed in this comparative experiment?  Certainly, Reddy must be applauded for his courage in his attempt at a truly global culture analysis which incorporates sensitivity both to specific historical contexts and their linguistic expressions of love within the framework of a rigorous methodological and theoretical framework.  If his generalizations are based largely upon the culture of the ruling elite, then this is surely fair in terms of availability of sources and in an attempt to accentuate the political significance of love in three very different constellations.  It must be left to area specialists to verify the validity of his regional interpretations, though the presentation of the most recent secondary materials appears thorough and commendable.  In that sense, he succeeds in illustrating the unique dualist character of Western romantic love against the backdrop of two synchronic non-European cultures without recourse to a crude Euro-centric model of modernity.  Overall, Making Love is as finely crafted and enjoyable as the subject itself – the politics of love as a holistic social and cultural ideology, rather than a mere elemental force or universal biological appetite.

Nonetheless, after comparing notes with colleagues and, given the present forum, I find myself mulling over several questions which might be useful for discussion.  First is a simple question of interpretation: Is there really such a clear consensus among medievalists about the seminal role of William of Aquitaine as an anti-Gregorian troubadour?  Second is a request for a further elaboration of his analysis of Bengal society and the noble character of its more universalist courtly performances of rasa as a legitimizing force in caste structure.  Finally, there is a question of tone.  Reddy focuses on Church reform without reference to the language of desire in medieval Christian spirituality; one thinks here of the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, Jean Claude Schmitt or Bernard McGinn.  Asian spiritually certainly figures far more prominently throughout Making Love.  I couldn’t help coming away from the book with greater empathy for the harmonious image derived from his Asian case studies, which appeared less prone to dialectical struggle and the European aristocratic proclivity for violence.  If that is indeed so, perhaps a closer look at twelfth-century Khmer culture during the civil wars might provide another interesting contrast?

© David Lederer, National University of Ireland Maynooth

Return to the Introduction to the William Reddy Round-table

Read Katherine Clark’s review.

Read Hera Cook’s review.

Read William Reddy’s response.

 

Katherine Clark on William Reddy

Posted on September 13, 2013 by

Dr Katherine Clark is a medieval historian at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. Here she reviews William Reddy’s new book for the History of Emotions Blog.

William Reddy ends his study of the emergence of romantic love with the observation that although the modern sexual revolution in the West hinged on the liberation (and validation) of desire, we would do well to examine how “the longing for association, its place in Western practices shaped by the evolving conventions of romantic love, has continued to move many individuals” (392).  Reddy focuses on three important trans-cultural moments in the history of the “longing for association,” a term he prefers to the more loaded “romantic love”: medieval Europe and Bengal and Orissa in the twelfth century, and tenth- and eleventh-century Heian Japan.  Reddy focuses on the persistent contest between love and desire in Western thought, and the burdens and costs this dualism has created.  Our modern obsession with love relationships and marriage as the ultimate vehicles for self-actualization, Reddy concludes, remains deeply constituted by (or more accurately, against) fears of sexual exploitation, as well as being perpetually entangled with social modes of norming and normativity even as we strive for authentic and personally fulfilling romantic connections.

Reddy unravels this problem via a tour-de-force through post-structuralist theory, Orientalism, and his own pioneering efforts (developed in his earlier book, The Navigation of Feeling), to investigate “emotives”—speech-acts that demonstrate the interaction between human agency and cultural socialization—as historical evidence.  Reddy asserts that while the Asian courtly and religious texts in his study dealt with the appropriateness and efficacy of physical pleasure in various situations, medieval European authors labored decisively within a “a polarity between love and lust drawing all details of sexual conduct and sexual partnerships into its field of force” (369).  Although the cultures under investigation shared similar socio-political structures—courtly culture, elaborate ecclesiastic or temple liturgies, monasticism, and significant reform movements—they produced strikingly different emotional landscapes for expressing both the longing for association and the fear of pollution.  The Making of Romantic Love examines the West’s problematic relationship with desire, both to itself in matters of the heart, and through its misapprehensions of love traditions in non-Western cultures, since the West’s obsession with “desire-as-appetite,” projected onto Asia, is a fundamental component of Orientalism.

Reddy’s interpretive model hinges on the idea that romantic love or “longing for association” is itself a deeply subversive response to social and political forces; he identifies “longing for association” as an expression of emotional autonomy for historical subjects, particularly for those living under oppressive social or moral regimes. Thus Reddy turns to the Gregorian Reform in Europe in the mid-eleventh century as a major driver of mind/body, love/lust dualism in European thought about romantic love, and a key force in its invention. Reddy accurately summarizes the sensibility of early Christian and medieval theologians who considered carnal desire as an “appetite,” and notes the persistent expression of this attitude throughout the Middle Ages.  Obsessed with fears of pollution and mistrust of desire, Reddy argues, the rising establishment of the medieval Church in the period of Gregorian Reform catalyzed a response among the European nobility that instituted fin amors, or “courtly love” as a rejection of the notion that love or “longing for association” must necessarily be construed as pure appetite, and thus inevitably devoid of virtue and sinful.

Many scholars have recognized the long shadow that Gregorian Reform cast over society in the later Middle Ages.  At the turn of the twelfth century, however, the Gregorian Reform movement did not primarily function as a philosophical campaign against the general concept of desire; rather, it had gained momentum as a ‘renovation’ of clerical practices (initially monastic, later engaging the secular clergy) whose “appetites” were more narrowly defined than Reddy suggests.  Reddy is right that Gregorian reformers, Peter Damian in particular, engaged themes of pollution and appetite in a new way and with an eye toward rebuilding the Church with greater rigor and asceticism, but Reddy misses the nuance (developed by scholars such as Dyan Elliott, for example, in her 1999 collection of essays Fallen Bodies) that these new and intense critiques concerning appetite and desire specifically targeted the clergy and its vices.  This intense focus on the disciplining of the clerical body, particularly concerning clerics’ proximity to the altar and the Eucharist, had significant ramifications as the Gregorian Reforms extended to the reform of lay practices towards the turn of the thirteenth century. Reddy’s claim that the Gregorian reformers were “sex-obsessed” as they attempted to strengthen clerical authority by purging its practitioners of sexual ‘contamination’ (by women and by homoerotic associations within clerical circles) is doubtless correct, but medieval reformers operated within a much different context from the nineteenth-century “sexologists” to whom Reddy compares them.

There is no doubt that the Gregorian Reform had far-reaching effects beyond the clergy, and scholars of the Middle Ages have amply demonstrated that its ripple effects fanned out in a gradual, complex, and contested fashion in many ways across the later Middle Ages.  Reddy sees a clear cause-and-effect between Gregorian Reform and troubadour response, particularly in the poetry of William IX of Aquitaine, but the courtly poetry of the troubadours and trobairitz of southern France flourished well before Gregorian reformers shifted from internal campaigns against clerical vice to a more global attempt to regulate lay morality and religious practice through a “reformed” clergy.  There also might have been some influence on Mediterranean love poetry from the Muslim courtly tradition, which would be worth investigating for the prominent roles that sexuality and desire played in the poetry of the caliphates’ courts.

Gregorian Reform did not have an instant impact on the noble courts of Southern France, either—the troubadours continued to develop until the Albigensian Crusade imposed more institutional ecclesiastical authority over the region, nearly a hundred years after William IX, making it a bit of a stretch to say that William of Aquitaine introduced all the “basic elements of courtly love” (92). The fin amors poetry he created was definitely a move towards the phenomenon that was termed “courtly love” in the nineteenth century, and provides many components of it, especially the public, performative interaction between high-status men and women that explores longing and desire for both sexes—the aspect that European courtly love shares most in common with its counterpart literature in Heian Japan.

The earliest troubadours, particularly William, were unabashedly carnal—fin amor had more to do with the privilege and nobility of the poet and the elevated context of the court than a sublime quality of amor expressed in their lyrics.  Over time, troubadour poetry became increasingly refined and even spiritualized, particularly as this form of court lyric caught on among the trouvères of northern France and the minnesänger in Germany in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries, suggesting a displacement rather than incorporation of the physical consummation of fin amor in these genres.

Reddy’s identification of troubadour culture as a site for exploring the “longing for association,” however, is evocative and invites further contemplation. He is absolutely correct that complex social play, debate, and experimentation take place in the ‘speech acts’ of troubadour texts and that the struggle between the nobility and the clergy over the indissolubility and sacramental nature of marriage form a context for this literature.  These lyric poems, particularly William’s, however, are not easily isolated as a response to a Gregorian attack on desire-as-appetite.  Indeed, it would be instructive if Reddy directly engaged Stephen Jaeger’s contention in Ennobling Love (1999) that courtly texts failed to rehabilitate desire and establish a cult of ‘ennobling love’ (one that elevated and ennobled the lovers) by linking the physical and spiritual self.  According to Jaeger, Heloise was one of the few twelfth-century writers discoursing on love able to fully conceptualize “the union of body and soul in romantic passion” in a form that subordinated desire to love without vilifying it as a mere appetite (Jaeger, 164), whereas Reddy puts Heloise and William the Troubadour squarely in the same camp.

Concerning the relationship between fin amors and medieval French nobles’ longing for both lands and love, Reddy revisits George Duby’s dualistic church vs. aristocratic model of marriage to good effect (Duby, The Knight, the Lady, and The Priest:  The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, 1983).  Reddy’s concept of “emotives”—the process by which individuals form their identity and experience emotions through the speech acts that express them—provides an interesting way to interpret the complicated changes in medieval marriage in the twelfth century.  Reddy notes that courtly literature unfolds in a “world in transformation” (165) in which “the game of fin’amors must have seemed especially worth playing to those twelfth-century men and women who could not recognize their own experience of ‘sexuality’ in the church’s harsh theology” (166).

I would have liked to see the medieval chapters of this book structured around this broader theme of social transformation rather than pinned so closely to Gregorian Reform as a war on “appetite.”  The early twelfth century was characterized by extraordinary intellectual exploration within the ranks of the clergy itself on the subjects of love, desire, and feeling. Religious men and women pushed back against various new strains of authority, only for much of this intellectual experimentation to be shut down when the institutional Church, effectively a papal monarchy, came to assert ever greater influence over laypeople’s lives in the thirteenth century.  Reddy would also do well to complicate Duby’s aristocratic vs. ecclesiastical models of marriage by noting that some articulations of courtly love eventually became useful to the ecclesiastical project of making sacramental marriage more palatable to the laity.

As Caroline Walker Bynum and other scholars of medieval culture and religious history have noted, there is a deep longing for association expressed in religious texts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that defies a strictly dualistic approach to the sacred vs. the secular; this point needs fuller recognition in Reddy’s discussion.  Likewise, Stephen Jaeger’s Ennobling Love provides ample evidence of “longing for association” in monastic and mystical texts expressing passionate friendship; these texts illuminate a long monastic tradition in which personal relationships were ennobled because they were infused with longing for both God and for other people as objects of spiritual devotion.  These texts offer quite a different perspective and tone from the writings of Gregorian canonists and reformers and provide excellent case studies for examining the dynamic relationship between rhetoric and feeling.  Bynum’s now foundational observation that twelfth-century mystical and hagiographical texts closely intertwined body and soul, employing the experiences of the flesh to allow both men and women to explore the “full sensual and affective range” of divine love, could yield new insights based on Reddy’s theory of emotives and their role in creating and expressing emotion.[1]

Reddy clearly finds a dualistic relationship between love and lust indispensable for a comparative framework that places Western romantic love in a global perspective, and in many ways his argument is persuasive and engaging. Other dualisms in The Making of Romantic Love are not quite as rewarding:  the lay/clerical binary that Reddy applies to the medieval West was almost certainly more ambiguous and complicated than he presents here, and this particular dualism forecloses some of the most interesting navigations of feeling that medieval European history offers.

Return to the Introduction to the William Reddy Round-table

Read David Lederer’s review.

Read Hera Cook’s review.

Read William Reddy’s response.

 

[1] Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast:  The Religious Significance of Food To Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987) 275; also ibid., Fragmentation and Redemption (New York, 1992) and Jesus as Mother:  Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Los Angeles, 1984).

Reddy Round-table

Posted on September 13, 2013 by

William M. Reddy is a pioneer historian of the emotions. His 2001 book, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions is one of the landmarks in the field. His most recent book, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012) promises to become another. To mark the publication of this ambitious, stimulating, and surprising new volume, the History of Emotions Blog solicited reviews from three scholars with interests in different aspects of Reddy’s new study, and Professor Reddy kindly agreed to provide a response.

Katherine Clark is a medieval historian at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. Her review centres on the question of whether the Gregorian Reform of the church in the eleventh century should be construed as a war on sexual appetite.

David Lederer is an historian of medicine, madness, sexuality, and religion, especially in the early modern period, at NUI Maynooth. His review reflects on politics, biology and method in the history of emotions.

Hera Cook is an historian of emotions and sexuality at the University of Otago, Wellington, with current interests in emotional management and inequality. Her review wonders about what place might be found for the human body in Reddy’s new history of love.

Finally, William Reddy himself reflects on and responds to the issues raised by these three reviews, in some cases reasserting the argument of his book and in others agreeing with criticisms.

A final note for those interested in learning more: supplementary images and videos illustrating the themes of the book are available through the dedicated website for The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia & Japan, 900-1200 CE. 

 

Disturbing Practices

Posted on September 5, 2013 by

Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality and Women’s Experience of Modern War, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Reviewed by Jane Mackelworth

‘The problem for the historian of sexuality is how to explore the sexual past, even the modern past, without falling back on … seductively simple labels’ (p. 52).

Laura Doan’s latest book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of sexuality and particularly its methodological practice. Yet scholars interested in the critical practice of history more broadly should also take note, for Doan suggests that if researchers in other fields incorporate sexuality into their historical analysis, it could open up a richer understanding of past lives.

Disturbing Practices is a natural successor to Doan’s earlier Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (2001) but makes an important theoretical departure. Doan argues that her earlier project was flawed in that it was too informed and structured by our modern understanding and conception of sexual identity. Doan reports that this gave her a sense that she “knew more about the sexuality of women in that period than they did themselves” (p. xi). Her current work seeks to counter this and to consider alternative methods for historians of sexuality.

Disturbing Practices reads like a call to action. One of its key tenets is its assertion that historians should engage more fully with Queer Theory as a methodological approach. Doan acknowledges and details the uneasy tension between the two disciplines yet argues that a combination of approaches could see a new form of Queer Critical History which would ask different questions about the past. By this Doan means that we should never take for granted “regime[s] of truth or knowledge” (p. xii) or a priori assumptions. Rather we should interrogate and question these. She includes within this a need to deconstruct our current ‘regime of sexuality’ (p. xii). In utilising queer theory, historians would probe that which is taken for granted (our current categorizations of gender, sexuality or class for example).

As Doan explains, the history of sexuality first emerged as a genealogical endeavor, a quest to find, recover and identify examples of same sex desire, and identities in the past. While Doan emphasizes the importance, value and ongoing relevance of this ‘recovery’ history she argues too that it can hold ‘few surprises’ because it is founded on seeking antecedents of modern day arrangements and identities.

When Queer Theory first emerged it sought to destabilize and challenge the idea of fixed sexual identities. While this threatened the genealogical project to some extent Doan argues that it also opened up new possibilities for historians, new ways of seeing the past.

However, Doan argues that the discipline of history has yet to fully realize the possibilities opened up by Queer Theory. She suggests that when historians do incorporate Queer Theory into their archival work the preoccupation is often with ‘queerness as being’ i.e. that a certain individual has a queer identity (p. xv). Doan suggests that this is, in effect, another version of the ‘genealogical impulse.’ It still aims to categorise, to delineate and to name.

Doan suggests that in restricting ourselves to ‘queerness as being’ we allow the past to elude us. She draws on Lee Edelman’s premise that; “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (p. viii) Doan argues that we should instead concern ourselves with queerness as method. We should explore how structures of knowing operated in the time we are studying. Quoting Joan Scott’s canonical paper she asserts that we must seek to uncover how sexual difference ‘is established, how it operates, [and] how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world’ (p. 4).

Doan illustrates her argument with several case studies drawn from the First World War period and from later reflections on those years. She revisits the topic of her 2006 article, ‘Topsy Turvydom: Gender Inversion, Sapphism, and the Great War’ to argue that ‘gender inversion’ or appropriation of masculine clothes during the First World War years was not a signifier of same sex desire (at least for the vast majority of people) despite becoming so in later years. In further chapters Doan looks, for example, at the trial of Violet Douglas-Pennant noting the language that was used (or not used) throughout her trial. She looks too at the close friendship of Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker who served during the First World War who did not appear (at the time) to conceive of their friendship in romantic or erotic terms.

Doan notes that as historians we must resist the desire not only to impose later categories of understanding on women such as Douglas-Pennant, Chisholm and Knocker, but to resist the desire to categorise and name altogether arguing that ‘a preoccupation with sexual identity … obscures the variations, deviations, and complications of actual lives of individuals who were unaccustomed to sexual self-reflectivity’ (p. 162).

Having also studied papers, letters and diaries of women during the first half of the twentieth century myself, I echo Doan’s observation that women of this period do not easily fit into preconceived categories or identities and recognize the need for forms of history and for a queer critical history which acknowledges and allows for this. I want to suggest one or two possible examples of ways in which we can approach same sex (and opposite sex) relations in the past which may enable us to ask different questions, and to move beyond a focus on identity and categories.

For example, drawing on methodologies from the history of the emotions we can consider the lives of women in the first half of the twentieth century through an analysis of expressions and meanings of love. We may learn more when we explore, not identity, nor a prevailing sense of ‘being’ but perhaps ways in which women chose to live their lives together. This seems, to me, a way of considering the past on its own terms. How did women understand their lives together? How did women represent, express their love and friendship for another? How did they make sense of this? Doan notes that she did not find ‘private papers’ disclosing innermost thoughts about romantic desires, sexual entanglements, preferences or inclinations during the First World War period. However, while it is true that documents are rarely self-reflexive I would argue that they do contain evidence of professions of love and belonging. And so what is of interest is not how we may categorise those women today (or then) but how we can make sense of the ways in which women described or represented their feelings for one another.

Considering the role of space or material culture can also open up new questions. How did women share space together? What did it mean to set up home together? What does it mean when women received joint Christmas presents? Or exchanged rings?

This type of approach means that we focus less on the things that we can’t identify, which are unknowable and start with the things which we do know.

While the history of sexuality covers a multitude of topics, its gravitational pull, as Doan notes, concerns the history of same sex love. Some topics covered in the history of sexuality sit within this field only because they deal with the lives of people who would be identified as LGBTQ today. Therefore their inclusion within the discipline is dependent on categorization and taxonomies. For example, a project detailing the domestic life of married men and women would not (arguably) belong, or rather would not cite itself, in the History of Sexuality unless aspects of a couple’s sex life, contraception for example, were touched upon. Whereas a similar project concerning the lives of two men sharing a home may well be found in the History of Sexuality because it concerns same sex lives. Therefore, the existence of a History of Sexuality discipline can actually end up reinforcing categories and identities by what it includes and excludes. And conversely other areas of history are able to restrict their attention to the expected ‘categories’ within their field and to an expectation of what will be found, thereby excluding certain aspects of love and desire.

Therefore, if we are seeking a critical queer history of sexuality, how do we decide what’s in and what’s out or rather who’s in and who’s out? How far should our taxonomical categories today be used to structure research interests and research groups? Similarly, if historians of sexuality adopt queer theory wholeheartedly, while other historians do not, then these divisions and separations could be reinforced.

Jane Mackelworth is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the History of the Emotions, Queen Mary. She is researching Love, Home and Belonging in (Sapphic) Friendships, 1900–1960.

If anyone is interested in discussing further ‘What is the History of Sexuality’ then please come to the new IHR History of Sexuality seminar series which starts in January 2014. Our first session will be a discussion on this topic. Details to follow.

 

Live Like A Stoic Week: November 25 – December 1

Posted on September 4, 2013 by

In the last week of November, Live Like A Stoic Week is happening for the second year. Everyone who is interested in Stoicism, or who practices it today, is encouraged to take part, get involved in an event or activity, and help spread the word.

Last year, Stoic Week attracted participants in schools, universities and philosophy clubs around the world, and generated articles in the Guardian, Independent, The Philosopher’s Magazine and the Huffington Post. We want to make this year’s Week even bigger.

How you can get involved:

We’d love it if, once again, Stoic Week events take place all over the world. This could be as simple as organizing a discussion on Stoicism in your local cafe or pub. It could mean local clubs, schools or philosophy departments organizing a debate on a Stoic question or theme, such as ‘can philosophy be a form of therapy?’ or ‘is virtue sufficient for happiness?’ If you’re a teacher or a lecturer, you might get your class to discuss Stoicism and to consider some of the Stoics’ practical techniques for changing our emotions.

We’re organizing a public event in London on Saturday November 30. We’ll have more details soon on that.

It would be great if any bloggers interested in Stoicism used the week as an opportunity to share their own experience of Stoicism. Has it helped you? Do you think it has relevance in modern life? Which ideas or exercises have you found particularly helpful? Write a blog post or make a YouTube video, and be sure to mention Stoic Week and to help spread the word. Send Patrick Ussher or another project member the link, and we’ll share it with our followers.

You can also get involved in our annual study of the practical effects of Stoic techniques. Pick a technique or spiritual exercise from the Stoic Handbook, and then try it out every day, keeping note of the impact on your beliefs, emotions and actions. Then fill in the Stoic questionnaire we provide, and send it back to us. You might also want to share your experience more informally via a blog or YouTube video. We’re working on the Stoic Handbook now and will have it finished by November.

The week is organized by the Stoicism and Therapy project, which is run out of Exeter University. The project brings together classicists, philosophers, psychotherapists and journalists, who share an interest in the practical and therapeutic use of Stoicism today. Project members include Professor Christopher Gill and Patrick Ussher from Exeter University, Dr John Sellars from Birkbeck University, psychotherapists Tim LeBon and Donald Robertson, occupational therapist and author Gill Garrett, and Jules Evans from Queen Mary, University of London. You can watch a video featuring the project members here.

We hope Stoic Week will increase public interest in Stoicism, and bring its therapeutic power into people’s lives.

Everyday love and emotions in the twentieth century

Posted on September 2, 2013 by

Dr Claire Langhamer is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Sussex. Her research and publications focus on aspects of everyday life in the 20th century, and in particular on the history of love. Her most recent book is The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (which has been reviewed in the Telegraph and the Guardian).

Here she asks whether the Mass-Observation Archive can help us to write the history of emotion ‘from below’. This post first appeared as the eighteenth piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’ online symposium. 

What I want to talk around in this post are the intersections between History from Below and the History of Emotion. What might a history of emotion ‘from below’ look like, how do we get at it and how might it re-frame our understanding of the period I am particularly interested in – the mid-twentieth century? I’m approaching the 1940s and 1950s as decades when the meaning and status of feeling seems to be particularly contested. Tensions between a need for self-discipline and desire for self-expression, anxieties about the impact of war and secularisation on moral standards, and concern about the future of the family, coalesced into a post-war discourse of emotional instability. Within this context the correct management of emotion was a political as well as a personal matter and became a marker of effective citizenship in a rapidly changing world. And yet, I want to argue, emotion itself could drive social and political change, acting as a vehicle for the operation of agency within everyday life. It was also increasingly seen as a legitimate basis upon which to assert knowledge claims about the world and carve out a place within civil society.The historical study of emotion is, of course, founded upon the assumption that feeling is framed by time and place.[1] ‘Emotions themselves are extremely plastic’ observes the medievalist Barbara Rosenwein, ‘it is very hard to maintain, except at an abstract level that emotions are everywhere the same.’[2] The so-called ‘emotional turn’ has generated diverse approaches rooted in the various schools of historical practice within which scholars operate. Some approach emotion itself as – to borrow from Joan W. Scott – a ‘useful category of historical analysis’.[3] Ute Frevert, for example, has recently published a highly suggestive history of the emotional economy of emotions; in 2012 a themed issue of Rethinking History edited by Benno Gammerl sought to expand the scope of historical approaches to emotion by introducing the concept of ‘emotional styles’.[4]Elsewhere Thomas Dixon has usefully charted the intellectual history of the keyword at the heart of the emotional turn.[5] Others continue to explore individual emotions such as love, anger, fear and anxiety across different time periods and locations.[6] Within the British context work by Stephen Brooke, Marcus Collins, Martin Francis, and Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher has illuminated the political, cultural, social and economic dimensions of love for example[7] whilst Luisa Passerini and Simon May have mapped its intellectual history.[8] Over the last few years I’ve also been working on a social history of twentieth century love.[9]

Nonetheless attention to emotional standards and codes still characterises the work of a significant body of emotion researchers – an approach for which the early work of Peter and Carol Stearns provided a point of departure.[10]  We undoubtedly know a great deal more about how ordinary people were instructed to behave in their emotional worlds than about the messiness of actual emotional practice.[11] The history of emotion has often looked more like history from above than from below, privileging cultural and intellectual history approaches and neglecting lived experience. More recently this tendency has been challenged by those keen to explore the everyday use of emotion within ordinary lives and who have drawn attention – as Mike Roper puts it – to ‘the significance of the material, of bodily experiences, and of the practices of daily life in which emotional relations are embedded.’[12] For historians such as these, the identification of sources that allow us to move beyond a top-down reading of emotionology is crucial. Sometimes this simply means reading prescriptive sources against the grain. So, for example, when utilising advice literature such as magazine problem pages, we might attend to the dynamic interplay between adviser and the advisee looking for points of contestation as well as acquiescence. In basic terms this is simply about acknowledging that people do surprising and subversive things with emotional codes and that the fuzzy space between prescription and practice is a dynamic one. Or we might look to particular bodies of material such as contemporaneously generated life history texts to explore the ways in which ordinary men and women constructed their emotional lives for different audiences. These sources can illuminate the complex and contradictory ways people employ particular emotions, actually interact with supposedly dominant emotional codes, and move between what Barbara Rosenwein has described as specific ‘emotional communities’, or what Benno Gammerl conceptualises as spatially defined ‘emotional styles’.[13]

In my own work I’ve found the material held in the Mass-Observation Archive particularly helpful. Mass Observation emerged out of the broader documentary impulse of the 1930s and took it in new directions.[14]  Employing a mixture of research forms including diary and questionnaire writing, essay competitions, social survey and ethnography it provides routes into people’s affective worlds, operating as an archive of feeling.  The navigation of emotion was, and remains, central to the self-fashioning of its volunteer writers for example, and Mass-Observation frequently asked them to record their feelings as well as their attitudes. When thinking about my paper for the ‘history from below’ workshop at Cambridge I looked back over the ‘directive’ texts the organisation sent to its mid-century panel noting the extent to which feeling (sometimes underlined for emphasis and distinguished from ‘views’ or attitudes) was a category of enquiry. ‘How do you feel about negroes?’ (June 1939), ‘What are your own personal feelings about death and dying?’ (March 1942) ‘What do you feel about the recent bombing of Germany? (Dec 1943), ‘How do you feel now that the war is over in Europe, and how does this compare with how you expected to feel?’ (June 1945) ‘How do you feel about blindness and blind people?’ (May 1947) ‘How do you feel about Attlee, Churchill, Bevin, Cripps and Bevan?’  (July 1950). In August 1950 virtually the entire directive was a solicitation of feeling: question one asked for ‘present feelings’ about a range of national groups from the Japanese to the Americans; the next question asked ‘What particular bits of music, if any, give rise to strong emotions in you? Describe your feelings when you hear the music in question.’ A third block of questions in the same directive focused on diet but even here it was felt necessary to solicit feelings about using margarine instead of butter. The final question asked ‘Do you ever cry in the pictures….how far, if at all, do you feel ashamed on such occasions?’

But does such material facilitate history from below? It rather depends on who counts as ‘below’; as ‘a relatively humble historical actor’. Describing mid-century Mass-Observers as ‘ordinary’ is certainly not unproblematic. Those who volunteered to write in diary or directive form were, and remain, a distinctive group of people, not least because they believed their own thoughts to be worth recording. Other motivations for participation over the years have included a sense of citizenship, a commitment to self-improvement and the wish to be creative. Emotional disturbance could also drive participation. ‘I frequently write to release pent-up emotion of a turbulent sort’, confessed a Cricklewood housewife in 1937.

‘Happiness I can express through normal channels – the children can cook sweets in the kitchen, I can buy 1lb of fresh herrings for supper etc. – but depression and disappointment make me mute with misery. Instead of giving the children a good whack when they annoy me, I repress my anger and remonstrate with them, afterwards perhaps pouring out my passions on paper.’[15]

Those who wrote undoubtedly self-censored and self-fashioned. They composed and re-composed their lives and viewpoints allowing access to forms of everyday philosophy forged in the midst of massive social and economic change. They were explicitly encouraged to navigate the boundaries of public and private, feeling and argument in their writing. With a predominance of lower middle-class and upper working-class participants, Mass-Observation’s panel was not representative in the way we understand the term today, but Mass-Observation understood its volunteers to be ‘ordinary, hardworking folk’, who were ‘intelligent and interesting enough to want to help us.’[16] Their writings do not provide access to a ‘typical’ experience – if such a thing exists – nor are their accounts unmediated. Rather, they offer what Dorothy Sheridan has described as ‘collective documentary.’[17] ‘The observers are cameras with which we are trying to photograph contemporary life’, the organisation explained, ‘…subjective cameras, each with his or her own individual distortion. They tell us not what society is like, but what it looks like to them.’[18]

Mass-Observation’s interest in what it identified as ‘ordinary’ British people led it to supplement self-observation with social observation. Running alongside the diary and directive output of its volunteer panel was research activity which spanned all areas of mid-century life; from the public house to people’s homes, from capital punishment to dogs in war. Love and commitment attracted their sustained attention. When a team of investigators set up camp in Bolton, Lancashire – or ‘Worktown’ as they named it – courtship was an area marked out for participant observation. When they investigated the public house, sexual banter was included amongst the recorded conversation. When they followed Bolton holiday-makers to Blackpool they, perhaps voyeuristically, ‘combed the sands at all hours, crawled around under the piers and hulkings, pretended to be drunk and fell in heaps on couples to feel what they were doing exactly, while others hung over the sea-wall and railings watching couples in hollowed-out sandpits below.’[19] A pencil drawing of a couple’s embrace illustrated a report on a pre-war dance where ‘the people danced very close: with the bent arm – which meant that the hands were near the heads of couples…And because there was not much room it meant a good deal of shuffling.’[20]But there is more to Mass Observation’s interest in ordinary people’s emotional lives than a voyeuristic observation of the sexual lives of the masses. Competitions provided one way of generating self-observation and reflection by working-class people across the duration of the Worktown project. The material generated by the 1938 ‘what is happiness?’ competition, for example, offers ways into the narration of working-class selfhood.[21]  After the war two major surveys of attitudes towards capital punishment that Mass Observation conducted on behalf of The Daily Telegraph asked ‘How do you feel about capital punishment?’  Mass Observation’s determination to understand the complexity of opinion formation on capital punishment distinguished it from other post-war pollsters who were satisfied with a yes/no response to the question. In its 1949 survey The Press and its Readers,  Mass Observation defended its use of statistics as a “means rather than an end,” declaring an interest in  “the live dynamic whole of feeling and behavior”[22] Feelings were, then, crucial: a 1948 internal report asserted that “the ‘how do you feel about…’ question, by avoiding the issue of ‘why do you think this or that’ provokes the less-conscious, more purely self-expressionist reply.”[23]

But what might this material actually tell us about mid-century Britain? And how does it contribute to a history from below – whatever we take that formulation to mean?  I think at a fundamental level it tells us that feelings were seen to matter in this period, and because of that the feelings of ordinary people on a whole range of issues are accessible to us: this material helps us to get at people’s sense of themselves in the world. It also suggests that the history of emotion might provide a useful lens through which to view the critical concept at the heart of any history from below: agency.

Finally, then, I want to say something about agency and emotion: what does emotion mean and what is it held to do in the mid-century? Here I want to think across two areas: love and death – or more precisely the status of emotion within debates about capital punishment and the status and meanings of romantic love. I choose these two purely because I’ve been working on them and am trying to draw out the links between them.

First, then, the place of emotion within the postwar capital punishment debate. Why does this matter? Here I’m interested in emotion as a category of analysis. The status of emotion within post-war liberal democracy was contested even as the feelings of ordinary men and women were increasingly made public. The hanging debate provides a case study in how emotion and its implied opposite reason were conceptualized, and deployed, within the expanded postwar public sphere by a range of actors. For many politicians, proper decision-making was held to necessitate the suppression of feeling and the exercise of logic. There was a gendered element here; a distinctly masculinist discourse of emotional restraint within the male dominated houses of Parliament, was set against the uncontrolled emotion of the implicitly feminized world beyond. Classed conceptions of national character were also significant. Emotional control had long been seen as a marker of social status, as Martin Francis suggests, “the notion that self-restraint was a key component of national identity was a staple of impressionistic (and usually self-congratulatory) writings on the ‘English character’ that flourished in this period.”[24]  The debate about capital punishment was therefore a debate about the proper place of emotion within public life and the appropriate participation of those deemed to be particularly prone to sentimentality. Whose voices should be heard and on what grounds might they intervene?

Second, to love: here I’m interested in the ways in which the claim to emotional authenticity could be used as a tool for subversion, resistance and personal transformation, particularly when feelings, experience and cultural expectations were out of step with each other. This relates to my wider interest in the ways experience operated as a source of knowledge across the mid-twentieth century, and in the degree of trust ordinary people put in feeling as a basis for action and understanding. In effect then, I’ve been looking at the power of the claim to be really in love. Romantic love facilitated claims to autonomy on the basis of feeling. Expertise was embodied: it rested within the lover because the veracity of emotion was difficult to dispute. Claims to authentic love could pitch children against their parents, spouses against each other and citizens against the state.  The destabilising power of love rested, at least in part, in its resistance to expert intervention even as it became an ever more ubiquitous aspect of popular culture and commerce. Romantic feeling therefore constituted a site upon which claims to agency could be asserted.

***

Mass Observation operated across the categories of ordinariness, experience and feeling to generate material that consistently illuminated individual agency in the midst of extraordinary change. Its founders argued for ‘anthropology of ourselves’ – not history from below as such, but a curiosity driven exposition of everyday life pursued through myriad research forms. At the heart of the Mass Observation Project lay the subjective realm of feeling, or rather, ‘the live dynamic whole of feeling and behaviour’. A history of emotion which – like Mass Observation – takes the everyday seriously can open up a range of new questions about old topics. A history of feeling ‘from below’ offers a distinctive lens through which the dynamics between and within social groups, as well between individuals, might be better understood.

[1] For a recent survey of the field see Susan J. Matt, ‘Current Emotion Research in history: Or doing history from the inside out’, Emotion Review 3:1, 2011, 117-124.

[2] Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Writing Without Fear about Early Medieval Emotions’, Early Medieval Europe, 10: 2 (2001), 229-34, 231.

[3] Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, The American Historical Review, 91:5, December 1986, 1053-1075.

[4] Ute Frevert, Emotions in History – Lost and Found (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2011); Benno Gammerl (ed.), ‘Emotional styles – concepts and challenges’, special issue of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 16:2, 2012, 161-317.

[5] Thomas Dixon, ‘“Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis’, Emotion Review, 4:4, October 2012, 338-344.

[6] See for example Rosenwein Anger’s Past; Joanna Bourke Fear: a Cultural History(London: Virago, 2006).

[7] Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics. Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left, from the 1880s to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Marcus Collins,Modern Love. An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-century Britain,(London: Atlantic, 2003); Martin Francis, The Flyer. British Culture and the Royal Air Force 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution. Intimate Life in England 1918-1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

[8] Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love. Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics in Britain between the Wars (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999); Simon May, Love. A History (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2011).

[9] Claire Langhamer, The English in Love. The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[10] Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, The American Historical Review, 90:4, 1985, 813-836.

[11] For a comparative account of Western emotionology see Cas Wouters, Sex and Manners. Female Emancipation in the West, 1890-2000 (London: Sage, 2004).

[12] Roper, ‘Slipping out of view’, 69.

[13] Rosenwein, Emotional Communities; Gammerl, ‘Emotional Styles’, 164.

[14] On the intellectual climate within which Mass-Observation emerged see Hubble,Mass-Observation and Everyday Life.

[15] MOA, Day Survey 81, ‘Why I write for Mass Observation’, October 1937.

[16] MOA, File Report A26, ‘They speak for themselves. A radio enquiry into Mass Observation with Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge’, 1 June 1939, 2.

[17] Dorothy Sheridan, ‘Anticipating history: historical consciousness and the ‘documentary impulse’’, paper presented at The Second World War: Popular Culture and Cultural Memory Conference, July 2011.

[18] Mass-Observation, First Year’s Work, 1937-38 (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1938), 66.

[19] MOA, Worktown Collection, (hereafter WC), box 60, Book drafts on Blackpool, 60-F, sex, 27. On the class and gender assumptions that informed some of Mass-Observation’s work in Bolton see Peter Gurney, ‘“Intersex” and “Dirty Girls”: Mass-Observation and Working-class Sexuality in England in the 1930s’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 8:2 (1997),  256–90

[20] MOA, WC, box 48, Leisure activities, fairs and dance halls, 48-C, dance halls and dances, ‘St Peters and St Paul’s dance’, 3.

[21] Gazeley and Langhamer, ‘Happiness in Mass Observation’s Bolton’, History Workshop Journal, 75, 2013.

[22] Mass Observation, The Press and its Readers. A Mass-Observation Survey(London, 1949), 8.

[23] MOA, File Report (hereafter FR) 3028, ‘The Qualitative Approach to Market Research,’ August 1948, 6a.

[24] Martin Francis, “Tears, Tantrums, and Bared Teeth: the Emotional Economy of Three Conservative Prime Ministers, 1951-1963,” Journal of British Studies, 41, no. 3 (July 2002): 354-87, at 362.

Is there such a thing as ‘skeptical ecstasy’?

Posted on August 30, 2013 by

We all love a bit of ecstasy, don’t we? Not the drug (though that’s a form of ecstatic experience) but, more broadly, those moments of expansion, elation and awe we sometimes feel, when our heart-strings seem to vibrate in harmony with the universe, when the vast, black and empty cosmos seems suddenly to radiate with love. We’re all into that, yeah?

The ecstasy of Father Jean Birelle, from the Louvre

If, like me, you’re a bit of a mystic hippy, you might attribute such ecstatic moments to God, and interpret them as a connection to the divine. Making a ‘divine attribution’ adds to the experience. You may feel ‘God loves me!’, you may feel profoundly accepted and forgiven, you may take your feelings as proof of His special favour.

This is where it get tricky. The certainty that usually accompanies ecstasy can lead to various nasty side-effects for you and for your society.

People in the grip of ecstasy are often convinced that the world had radically changed, normal rules no longer apply, that they are in a new Age of Love. They may abandon their jobs and families, dance naked in the streets like the Ranters of the English Civil War or the Ravers of the Summer of Love. And it’s what Californians call ‘a major buzz-killer’ when they calm down and realize the Age of Love hasn’t arrived, and, in the words of Steely Dan, ‘all those day glo freaks who used to paint their face, they’ve joined the human race’.

Again and again, collective outpourings of ecstasy have ended in orgies of scapegoating, as Cohn’s book explores

It gets more dangerous when the ecstatic hordes decide that a particular individual or group stands in the way of the Age of Love, and therefore they must be banished or executed. Again and again, throughout history, moments of collective ecstasy have degenerated into bloody orgies of scapegoating. Ecstasy often leads to a supercharged version of the ‘Us versus Them’ mentality. A group feels mystically fused together, and then refuses to tolerate bystanders or outsiders. It’s like a homicidal version of the Hokey Cokey: either join the dance, or die.

The Enlightenment was built, after centuries of religious violence, on the basis that religious ecstasy is dangerous and we need to contain it, marginalize it, even pathologise it as ‘enthusiasm’. As philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith recognised, ecstasy is a threat to reason, tolerance, industry and public order. We need to lock it up.

And yet, like King Pentheus trying to lock up Dionysus, somehow ecstasy always escapes. Over the last three hundred years, there have been various ecstatic resistance movements, from Methodism to Pentecostalism, from rock and rave to football hooliganism and fascism. Considering the global rise of neo-Pentecostalism today, ecstasy does not seem to be going anywhere. The Enlightenment’s War on Ecstasy has failed.

So here’s my question: could there be a skeptical ecstasy? Could we rehabilitate ecstatic experiences, and somehow de-toxify them of their tendency to fanaticism and scapegoating?

Richard Holloway’s liberal evangelism

This brings me to Richard Holloway’s Leaving Alexandria, which came out last year, and which is that rare thing – a book about Christianity that actually sold well in the UK. Its success is not surprising, as Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, has quite a tale to tell – from failed monk to horny missionary in Africa, from socialist priest in the slums of the Gorbals, to his time ministering among the dying during the AIDS epidemic. Finally, fatally, Holloway is made a bishop, and he has a serious run in with the evangelical wing of the Anglican communion.

The crisis comes at the Lambeth conference of 1998, where a ‘pincer movement’ of evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics vote that homosexuality is ‘incompatible with Scripture’. Holloway is disgusted by the homophobic hatred and bile expressed by the evangelicals, and offended by their utter certainty that they know God’s opinion on matters of sexuality and gender.

His stance in solidarity with the marginalized is admirable, but rather than trying to defend it with reference to Scripture (the gospels, say), as would befit a bishop, he brings out a book called Godless Morality the year after the conference, suggesting that we leave God out of public discussions of morality. The idea of God, he comes to believe, simply muddies the waters of civil debate. Who knows what God thinks anyway? Archbishop Carey denounces the book, and Holloway’s own congregation vote him out. This offends Holloway but really, what did he expect – if God should be left out of public discourse, then what’s the point of bishops?

He ends the book in a mood of weepy elegy, declaring that Christianity is ‘on its last legs’, that the Anglican communion is ‘unraveling’, that God probably doesn’t exist, and religions deserve no more respect or obedience than other artistic creations like, say, the works of Proust or Nietzsche (who he quotes repeatedly). He admits that evangelical churches may be growing, but that’s only because they peddle easy answers – not like Richard, the heroic skeptic. He briefly wonders if there could ever be a ‘liberal evangelism’, one not so sure of itself, one less keen to pronounce and condemn, open to the possibility it’s wrong.

I think there could be a liberal evangelism – a form of spirituality that is open to ecstatic experience but also socially inclusive, non-homophobic, and humble as to its own truth-claims. But it would need to have a little more faith than the thin gruel offered us by Holloway. Never mind God, he doesn’t even believe in free will. The central assertion of his memoir is that we can’t choose our path in life, nor improve our characters through practice – instead, time reveals to us who we essentially and immutably are. Time reveals that Holloway is an uncertain and vain man, and it couldn’t have been any other way. I find this sort of genetic fatalism depressing and, in Holloway’s case, self-serving. If there is one thing I like about Christianity, it’s the belief in second chances and the possibility of liberation from sin and suffering. Give me that over Holloway’s genetic fatalism any day.

Towards a skeptical ecstasy

So what would a ‘skeptical ecstasy’ look like? Let me attempt an answer:

1) People want and need channels for ecstatic experience. They give our lives meaning and colour, they free us from boredom, and they make us feel less separate from other people and from God and / or Nature.

2) We need to be careful in our search for ecstasy, and aware that it’s not an unmitigated good, that it can harm ourselves and others.

3) There are better and worse channels for ecstasy – anti-social channels which direct us towards self-destruction or violence against outsiders, and pro-social channels which direct us towards compassion and love. There is ecstasy which seeks to police borders (we’re in and you’re out) and ecstasy which knocks down borders (we’re different but at a deeper level we’re the same).

4) Having ecstatic experiences doesn’t make you special or unique. Everyone feels ecstatic sometimes. What counts is what it leads to. Many artists have felt divinely inspired, for example, but few of them have actually turned that inspiration into good art. Likewise, many spiritual seekers have had ecstatic experiences, but not all of them have built genuinely good lives. Ecstatic inspiration is not enough, it needs to be supported by beliefs, learning and daily practices.

5) Don’t think you’re better or holier than other people because you have moments of ecstasy. You may simply have a more emotional temperament. Likewise, don’t think you’re less spiritual because you don’t have such experiences. There are many ways to lead a good life – sobbing, babbling, passing out and waving your hands in the air are not essential.

6) Don’t be too sure you know what God wants. Test your intuitions. Be open to the possibility you’re wrong. Have a flexible, experimental and open-minded attitude to your ecstatic experiences. It’s OK not to have all the answers.

7) Ecstatic experiences don’t give your arguments special status in the public square. You need to give reasons for your arguments, and expect to defend them rationally. Bodily sensations are not an argument.

8) Above all, we need to watch out for the tendency to scapegoat in ourselves. We need to watch for the tendency to project our shadows onto others, to blame outsiders for our own divided and unhappy natures. That demon is within us all, and ecstasy often lets him out. Jesus warned again and again, don’t judge others, don’t point the finger, love your enemies, love those different to you, love those who society looks down on, cross the road to help them. If your ecstasy isn’t serving that end, then it’s just a self-congratulatory feeling.

St Paul, writing to a young church that was fixated on speaking in tongues and other ecstatic phenomena, put it well:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

In Defence of FEELS, or, Art and Affect

Posted on August 23, 2013 by

Dr Jem Bloomfield is an academic, playwright and critic, with particular expertise in early modern theatre. His PhD was on the production history of John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. He is the author of the quiteirregular blog. Here Jem discusses the new use of the word ‘feels’ to mean, well… what exactly?

I forget which of my friends suggested that “this new use of the word ‘feels’ instead of ‘emotions’” could usefully “die in a fire” as soon as feasible.  If I’ve come across it enough to recognize what they were referring to, I suspect the term is hopelessly old hat on the internet.  Possibly even as old hat as saying “old hat”, a phrase which has ironically become obsolete due to the fashion for old hats brought on by steampunk or neo-Victorianism or cold ears or some such.  But you do see a lot of “feels” on display online these days.  The announcement of a new Doctor Who, or Frances Barber’s casting in Julius Caesar, or the discovery that Britten and Auden collaborated on an adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi, have been known to lead to declarations that I HAVE ALL THE FEELS UPON THIS SUBJECT.

Here are some feels

Here are some feels

At first sight this term does appear to be a candidate for arson-related demise.  As the comments at Know Your Meme have pointed out, it is apparently redundant, childish and an imprecise stand-in for “emotions”.  It also has the potential to be intensely irritating.  However, I wonder whether it might be a more useful term than it appears.  The emphasis in memes and phrases on the inability of the speaker to process or articulate their “feels” reminded me of the stress on “affect” in various parts of the humanities.  Felicity Callard and Constantia Papoulias have distinguished between “emotion”, a defined and structured state which can be labelled and compared to other incidents or other people’s emotions, and “affect”, the immediate physical experience which we later try to process and fit into the known “emotions”.  For them “affect” is a bodily event, a surge of physical processes felt not in the mind but in the gut, along the skin and between the muscles.  In their phrase “an ‘affective event’ is not consciously apprehended, but is, rather, what happens to the body directly on the level of its endocrinology, skin conduction, and viscera”.

The shift from affect to emotion is not always unproblematic

The shift from affect to emotion is not always unproblematic

Callard and Papoulias are interested in the way “affect” may help to break down the unhelpfully rigid distinctions between mind and body which the Cartesian tradition imposes, allowing us to concentrate on the “immediacy of embodied experience” and the ways in which we engage with the world beyond identifying or representing parts of it.  When talking about art, we might find it useful to keep this category open as well, and not foreclose it too hastily by fitting it into pre-existing “emotions” which everyone has apparently agreed people are allowed to feel.  I don’t know how it feels over in sculpture or music, but my reactions to a performance are frequently a visceral jumble of criss-crossing exhilarations, queasinesses, desires and shivers.  They can’t even be called “conflicting” or “mixed emotions” because it isn’t clear how they might be opposed to each other, or what aspects of the performance each might be responding to.

I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t move to articulate, analyze and examine these responses: FEELS is not a satisfying final conclusion.  But spending more time in the “feels” phase might well alert us to aspects of the aesthetic experience which we might otherwise overlook or distort whilst identifying emotional states.  Counter-eddies, background impressions and ambivalences may come to the fore which can give us a richer account of our engagement with an artistic work – and with the world more generally.  After all, I don’t usually experience a piece of music as a set of formal structures, or a set of associated recognizable emotional states.  The last time I watched a play my mind didn’t seem to apprehend particular emotions being created onstage and instruct my body to react in compliance with the information.  At least, that’s not how I experienced it.  Rather it was my body – my lungs, my skin, my teeth, my throat – which reacted first, setting up physical states which I could then identify as relating to the content or form of the art work.  It’s that pre-analytical state, the mode where you watch the play with your toes and your knuckles, which affect can cover and which we might want to pay attention to.

So, regretfully (because I love a good snarl about words as much as anyone), I think “feels” may have its place.  It may be a category which allows us to explore our reactions to shows and rumours of shows in productive ways.  But I draw the line at that manatee.  If he wants a place in my account of art, he can put a damn top hat on and learn to tapdance.

 

THE HUGE MANATEE REFUSES TO BE EXCLUDED BY YOUR NARROW CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK. THE MANATEE OPERATES ON THE LEVEL OF ENDOCRINOLOGY. ALSO HYDROGEN AND LOLS.

THE HUGE MANATEE REFUSES TO BE EXCLUDED BY YOUR NARROW CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK. THE MANATEE OPERATES ON THE LEVEL OF ENDOCRINOLOGY. ALSO HYDROGEN AND LOLS.

This post first appeared on the quiteirregular blog in February 2013.

Book review: When God Talks Back, by TM Luhrmann

Posted on August 16, 2013 by

Around a quarter of the world’s two billion Christians now sign up to the Pentecostalist or neo-Pentecostalist belief that God talks to them. That includes some educated people like, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury. How is this possible, in an era of rising education and living standards? Is the world going mental? One social scientist who has looked into the question deeply is Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, who brought out an excellent book last year called When God Talks Back.

Members of the Vineyard Church bless the new Archbishop of Canterbury

Luhrmann spent two years among the members of Vineyard churches in Chicago and California. Vineyard is one of a new breed of charismatic Protestant churches, like Calvery Chapel, Saddleback, and HTB in the UK. This ‘neo-Pentecostalist’ sort of Christianity emerged in the 1960s, as baby-boomers raised on rock & roll and LSD returned to Christianity and sought a more intense, personal and supernatural relationship with God.

At the heart of this type of Christianity is the idea that we can build a close and loving relationship with God. The Almighty, Luhrmann suggests, has evolved in the last forty years from a distant and forbidding Father to a best friend, even a boyfriend, who loves us unconditionally, and to whom we can pour out our every thought (should I move to San Francisco, is that girl interested in me, does my bum look big in this?) God will talk back and tell us what to do, through words, images, dreams, signs and intense emotional experiences.

But how does God talk back? And isn’t hearing a Divine Voice a classic sign of psychosis? Luhrmann says that talking with God takes practice, and she follows some of the stages of training that charismatic Christians go through. Initially, for new Christians, it feels weird to pray to a God we can’t see or hear. Christian teachers encourage an attitude of ‘make-believe’, or what Luhrmann calls ‘adult play’. She quotes CS Lewis, who says of prayer: ‘Let us pretend in order to make the pretence a reality.’

One of the stunning paintings on the walls of San Marco in Florence, by Fra Angelico

Visualization exercises are a very good way of making the pretence a reality. The early Christians spoke of ‘painting the soul’ with images, and that idea inspired Christian art like the convent of San Marco in Florence, where in each room a mural depicts a scene from Christ’s life. It also inspired the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, which Luhrmann tried out and which had a profound effect on her (she writes ‘Even now I can remember the weeks we spent en route to Bethlehem’).

She traces the emotional components of prayer – above all, learning to accept the idea that God loves you unconditionally. She reflects that charismatic churches offer their congregants a form of free therapy, ‘and whereas the human therapist takes the client’s money and goes away, God sticks around for all eternity. It is a remarkably effective system, if you can take it seriously.’

Charismatic Christians believe some people are naturally better at prayer than others, but that we can all ‘improve’ at prayer. Luhrmann suggests prayer-skill is correlated with the psychological state known as ‘absorption’, which means the capacity to have ‘moments of total attention that somehow completely engage all of one’s attentional resources’, giving people ‘a heightened sense of the reality of the attentional object…and an altered sense of reality in general’. She suggests that expert ‘prayer-warriors’ have naturally high levels of absorption, but we can all develop this skill though practices like imaginative prayer.

She tested out this out via an experiment. She found 128 Christians, and gave them one of three recordings to listen to each day, for a month. One involved listening to Psalms and imagining a conversation with Jesus; the second involved trying to empty one’s mind of any thoughts; and the third involved listening to an academic lecture on the Gospels. Those participants who followed the first exercise had, by the end of the month, much more vivid images of God, more of a sense of God speaking to them, and more peace. The daily practice of imaginative prayer increased their sense of God’s reality and presence, until they really felt that God was talking to them. (Listening to the academic lectures, by contrast, made participants feel more stressed!)

The fruits of prayer, Luhrmann suggests, are emotional – peace, gratitude, joy, hope and so on – but they’re also experiential. Charismatic Christians report ‘break throughs’ after practice, where they think God talks back to them. They begin to discern certain words or images in their stream of consciousness, which they take as divine messages. They then need to test the message out by asking others in their community their opinion, or checking the Scriptures, or perhaps by asking God for further confirmations or signs.

Luhrmann’s subjects are aware that this will sound insane to most people, and they preface their descriptions of God talking back with phrases like ‘I know this sounds weird but…’ She suggests that charismatic Christians’ need for a direct connection to God comes not from some primitive rejection of modernity but from a modern, Skeptical need to really feel God’s presence in their thoughts, feelings and life, rather than trusting in the testimony of Scripture. We are all doubting Thomases these days.

Does Luhrmann herself believe Someone is Out There? She seems to be a sort of postmodernist, or magical realist, believing that we make Gods almost-real by the daily practice of imaginative prayer. In an earlier study, she lived among neo-Pagans in the UK, and participated in their visualisation exercises for several months, until one morning she saw six druids standing outside her window!

She suggests a multiple worlds theory of reality, in which different cultures create different worlds through their imaginative practices, like programmers and players co-creating World of Warcraft or Second Life. And she seems to think, by the end of the book, that you could do a lot worse than joining and co-creating a virtual world filled with compassionate people, ruled by a God who loves you unconditionally. Building a vivid and loving ‘God-concept’ is, Luhrmann suggests, good for you.

At least, it is most of the time. If you believe in an all-loving, all-powerful God who cares about us all, you have to explain why the world is in such a mess and so many lives are blighted. Evangelical Christians do this, often, by having an equally vivid sense of the Devil’s agency. And believing in devils too vividly can mess you up. One of Luhrmann’s principle subjects, a lady called Sarah who prays for three or four hours a day, slides into mental illness when she sees an ‘imp’ run across her bed and becomes convinced she is possessed. She is ultimately hospitalized, released, and then becomes adamant that God has chosen her to be an evangelist about mental illness.

The Anglican Cathedral in Second Life