The human ‘copying machine’: mimicry, medicine and theatricality

Posted on June 20, 2012 by

In 1859 Charles Darwin, musing on the way insects transform their appearance to fit in with their surroundings, asked: “why, to the perplexity of naturalists, has Nature condescended to the tricks of the stage?” Yet nature condescends to theatrical tricks among humans too. Our compulsion to mimic each other’s postures, gestures and facial expressions – to catch each other’s yawns, sway in time with tightrope walkers, or strain while watching an athlete – has proved a puzzle which continues to intrigue psychologists and physiologists. For Victorian men of science, mimicry was frequently regarded as deviant and pathological: among the “feeble- minded”, women and “the lower races, a tendency to imitation is a very constant peculiarity,” wrote George J Romanes in 1883.

However, by the beginning of the 20th century, involuntary copying was increasingly understood to be a key psychological mechanism, responsible for learning, socialisation, empathy and even morality. Since the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ in 1994, the idea that our bodies helplessly echo each other now extends to the operations of the brain itself, sparking vigorous debates in neuroscience and beyond about a new era of human interconnectedness. An enduring problem associated with the idea that we are, to quote the psychologist James Sully, mere “copying machines” is the unsettling connection between mimicry and theatricality. It is no coincidence that Darwin, writing about shape- shifting butterflies, complained of their theatricality: such insects refuse to be pigeonholed, confounding the lepidopterist’s neat categories. Both theatre and mimicry conventionally evoke slippery insincerity and superficiality, undermining notions of a secure identity and raising the unnerving possibility that we are not entirely in possession of ourselves.

Woody Allen's Zelig, a man who compulsively imitates those around him

My current research charts the collision of theatre and medicine in the cultural history of involuntary mimicry. Theatre appears as a leading metaphor in scientific writing on motor mimicry from the 1850s onwards. Moreover, in filmic and literary treatments of the phenomenon, alarming involuntary copying is also often entangled with theatre and its vicissitudes. In H G Wells’s short tale ‘The Sad Story of a Dramatic Critic’ (1894), for example, the hero cannot help replicating the histrionic attitudes he witnesses nightly in the theatre. In an “infection of sympathetic imitation”, he is forced to perform “agonising yelps, lip- gnawings, glaring horrors” and so on, leaving him with the alarming feeling of being “obliterated”. While for Wells imitation festers in the auditorium, the protagonist of Woody Allen’s 1983 film Zelig, a man compelled to transform his appearance to replicate whichever person or object is closest to him, becomes a theatrical attraction (before becoming demonised amid a national panic about infiltration).

While images of theatricality conventionally harbour anxieties surrounding involuntary mimicry – it obliterates selfhood, it threatens borders – theatre and performance have also been a key part of the scientific study of imitation. We might expect to find rotary event recorders, video cameras and fMRI scanners among the technologies associated with the experimental history of motor mimicry, but it is a surprise to discover that scientists have also entered theatrical environments (from séances to sporting matches), used theatrical techniques (from acting and directing to the creation of emotional audiences) and encountered theatrical problems (from overacting and embarrassment to forgotten lines) in their efforts to provoke, scrutinise and measure involuntary imitation.

In 1872, Darwin observed that at leaping matches, “as the performer makes his spring, many of the spectators, generally men and boys, move their feet”. Two decades later, in Sully’s studies of children, the nursery was repeatedly turned into a tiny theatre when the psychologist pretended to laugh and cry, all the while observing the response of his infant audiences. In 1933, Clark Hull reported making his laboratory assistant Miss H into an actress: while she pretended to carry out tests, all the while swaying back and forth, Hull surreptitiously attached a rotary event recorder to the unwitting subject’s clothes with string and measured any imitative swaying that ensued. In 1986, a group of researchers in Australia became performers themselves, enacting scrupulously choreographed routines in the laboratory, and filming their audiences’ responses (Bavelas, Black, Lemery and Mullett, 1986).

The performativity of experimentation has been has been highlighted by philosophers of science, including Robert Crease (1993) and Andrew Pickering (1995), yet the more problematic world of theatre also provides a suggestive lens through which to chart the embodied and emotional texture of modern laboratory life. While Darwin complained that the theatrical deceptions of mimicry seemed to mock or evade the scientific quest for knowledge, the modern history of motor mimicry is intimately tied to the ‘tricks of the stage’. Theatre’s slippages between seeming and being have historically expressed all that is unnerving about the possibility that we are mere ‘copying machines’; conversely, misdirection, sleight of hand, pretence and dissimulation have been turned to account as scientists seek to understand the imitating body.

Tiffany Watt-Smith is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English and Drama and the Centre for the History of the Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London. This article first appeared in Wellcome History magazine. 

The New Left’s vision for grassroots philosophy clubs

Posted on June 11, 2012 by

I’ve been researching philosophy clubs and the phenomenon of grassroots philosophy for an academic project I’m running called Philosophical Communities. The research has taken me in many different, interesting directions: 18th century coffeehouses, 19th century radical Corresponding Societies, the Chautauqua movement, the Lyceum movement, the Workers Education Association…and so on. It’s taken me deeper and deeper into the realm of ‘adult education’ – I’ve realised that in some ways grassroots philosophy organisations like the London Philosophy Club and Philosophy in Pubs are filling a vacuum left by the decline of organisations like the WEA and university extramural departments.

One of the things I’ve recently been exploring is the role of the New Left in trying to revive grassroots philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s. The New Left in the UK were a movement of left-wing thinkers that started in Oxford in the 1950s and spread to London and beyond in the 1960s. The New Left typically rejected the rigid economic determinism and authoritarian party structure of Marxism-Leninism, they celebrated the power of culture to shape attitudes, and they also celebrated the grassroots development of political consciousness in the working class, beyond the Communist Party, through clubs, discussion circles, lending libraries and other forms of adult education. They believed in culture, basically, as a transforming force in society.

The movement included the cultural critic Raymond Williams, who spent several years working in the Oxford extramural department on community education; the historian EP Thompson, whose The Making of the English Working Class explores the history of popular radical clubs in the 19th century, as well as Stuart Hall, Robin Blackburn, Eric Hobsbawm, Perry Anderson, Christopher Hill and others. It also led to a journal, the New Left Review, which is still going 50 years later, and to the publishing firm Verso, which still publishes a lot of radical philosophy, mainly from the continent – reflecting the original New Left’s fascination with the work of radical continental philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, Gramsci and Marcuse. You can read a fascinating account of the evolution of the New Left by Stuart Hall here.

Raymond Williams, who was deeply committed to adult education and university extension

The New Left are an interesting point in the development of the history of emotions. One of the positions some of their members took was that ‘the personal is political’ – our personal lives, including our emotions, are part of culture, therefore just as infused with politics as, say, labour conditions. Peter Brooker describes Raymond Williams’ notion of a ‘structure of feeling’:

[It was a] flexible conjunction of the two realms of ‘objective’ structure and ‘subjective’ feeling, suggesting how personal emotions and experience (‘meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt’, 1977) are shaped in the thought and consciousness, and take a social form in observable texts and practices. It differs in intention therefore from the abstract and reductive Marxist vocabulary of an earlier era and from Marxism’s later, poststructuralist and anti-humanist mode.

You can see the intellectual value of such an approach in EP Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, particularly in the brilliant analysis of the emotional structure of 19th century Methodism, which Thompson memorably described as ‘psychic masturbation’, and how that fed into the political consciousness of the working class in the 19th century (too much psychic masturbation, not enough agitation, in Thompson’s view).

But what particularly interests me about the New Left, from the point of view of my research project, is their emphasis on community engagement, adult education and grassroots discussion / philosophy. Thinkers like Williams, Hobsbawm and Thompson wrote excellent scholarly works and also dedicated themselves to extramural work.

I’m interested in the New Left’s experiments in establishing clubs. Stuart Hall tells us:

In the early years the Club (later the London New Left Club) attracted to its weekly meetings audiences of three or four hundred, drawn from the whole spectrum of the left. For a time it provided an extremely important, lively, often contentious focal point for people with no other formal political commitment. It differed from the typical left organization or sect in that its purpose was not to recruit members but to engage with the political culture of the left on a very broad front, through argument, debate, discussion and education.

The Club became an important independent centre for left politics in London, particularly after it found a permanent home—through another of Raphael Samuel’s nerve-rackingly risky but brilliantly innovative ventures—in the Partisan Café in Carlisle Street. This was the first left ‘coffee bar’ in London, with a clubhouse and library on the floors above. On the fourth floor it housed the offices of ulr, later to become those of nlr. Following the merger, a number of New Left clubs sprang up around the country. The last issue of nlr which I edited, number 12, listed thirty-nine in various stages of political health. The clubs reflected, in programme and composition, the cultural and political character of their localities: the Manchester and Hull Left Clubs were close to the local labour movement; the Fife Socialist League was linked, through Lawrence Daly, to an independent socialist movement amongst miners in Scotland; the Croydon and Hemel Hempstead Clubs had a more ‘cross-class’ or even ‘déclassé-new-town’ feel to them.

The clubs became focuses of local campaigns – against racism or slum-lords in London, for example – and also a network for national political struggles like the CND movement. And they were also places of free discussion, learning, ideas, debate. They were supposed to be non-hierarchical and grassroots, in opposition to the rigid centralised structure and block votes of the Communist Party.

The historian EP Thompson talking at Glastonbury festival, 1986

With all their weaknesses, the clubs signified the project of the New Left to be a new kind of socialist entity: not a party but a ‘movement of ideas’. They were a sign that, for us and for the left, the ‘question of agency’ had become deeply problematic…

What type of organizational leadership did these strategies presuppose? The metaphor to which we constantly returned was that of ‘the socialist propaganda’. As EP Thompson put it in the New Reasoner:

The New Left does not propose itself as an alternative organization to those already in the field; rather, it offers two things to those within and without the existing organizations—a specific propaganda of ideas, and certain practical services (journals, clubs, schools, etc).

The New Left were trying to forge a better relationship between intellectuals and the people (though of course that very project presupposes a gap to be crossed):

The notion of a ‘socialist propaganda of ideas’ was, of course, borrowed directly and explicitly from William Morris and the relationships forged in the Socialist League between intellectuals, struggling to make themselves what Gramsci called ‘organic’, and the working class.

As we put it in the first issue of nlr:

We have to go into towns and cities, universities and technical colleges, youth clubs and Trade Union branches and—as Morris said—make socialists there. We have come through 200 years of capitalism and 100 years of imperialism. Why should people—naturally—turn to socialism? There is no law which says that the Labour Movement, like a great inhuman engine, is going to throb its way into socialism or that we can, any longer . . . rely upon poverty and exploitation to drive people, like blind animals, towards socialism. Socialism is, and will remain, an active faith in a new society, to which we turn as conscious, thinking human beings. People have to be confronted with experience, called to the ‘society of equals’, not because they have never had it so bad, but because the ‘society of equals’ is better than the best soft-selling consumer capitalist society…

This position may seem naive and has certainly been dubbed ‘utopian’ and ‘populist’ since. But it was populist in the Narodnik sense of ‘going to the people’ and in terms of what they/we might become, rather than in the sense of massaging popular consent by cynical appeals to what the people are said by their betters to want…As Edward Thompson, its main architect, put it in the New Reasoner:

What will distinguish the New Left will be its rupture with the tradition of inner-party factionalism, and its renewal of the tradition of open association, socialist education and activity directed towards the people as a whole . . . It will insist that the Labour Movement is not a thing, but an association of men and women; that working people are not the passive recipients of economic and cultural conditioning, but are intellectual and moral beings . . . It will appeal to people by rational argument and moral challenge. It will counter the philistine materialism and anti-intellectualism of the Old Left by appealing to the totality of human interests and potentialities, and by constructing new channels of communication between industrial workers and experts in the sciences and arts.

This sounds to me a fascinating project. Of course, you can see where it could go wrong. The Narodnik metaphor is revealing: that was a movement in 19th century Russia of aristocratic intellectuals going to the people to educate them and teach them to read (while also learning from them how to farm etc). But some of them got beaten up for being suspicious metropolitan radicals and perhaps for being patronising. There’s a tension there between the intellectual and the people, which I think public thinkers like Williams felt when they re-visited their working class roots. But at least they had the guts to confront it rather than retreating into institutions or their own sophisticated cliques.

Another potential problem: were these clubs allowed to develop their own ideas, or was it still a question of correctly learning the ‘propaganda’ made by the Oxford intellectuals at the centre? Hall writes:

We hoped that the clubs would develop their own independent organization, leadership and channels of communication (perhaps their own news-sheet or bulletin), leaving the journal free to develop its own project. But we lacked the resources to bring this about, which exacerbated in the clubs feelings that they had no control over the journal, and in the editorial board the fear that a journal of ideas could not be effectively run by committees. It was, in effect, this last issue and the cross-pressures associated with it which finally precipitated my own resignation from the editorship of New Left Review in 1961.

Of course, the New Left was a failure. It helped pave the way for the student uprisings of 1968, which were also a failure. It also helped prefigure the Occupy movement, which will be a failure. It seems to me that adult education, like the history of socialism, is a series of failures, but the failures accumulate and maybe something is gained over time. And, in times like ours, it is inspiring to look back on moments where a generation of thinkers were filled with hope, idealism, energy and a belief in popular human consciousness and its capacity to grow and improve society. At least they tried.

Where is the New Left now? Verso Books (which grew out of the New Left) seems to have retreated into philosophical sophistication focused entirely on continental poseur-sophists like Slavoj Zizek, and to have lost any interest in connecting with ordinary people. I emailed them asking if they’d like to suggest speakers for the London Philosophy Club. They were pretty snooty and patronising. Verso constantly ridicule Alain de Botton (quiet rightly) but what does it say about them as a socialist publisher that a Swiss multi-millionaire is doing more community engagement than they are? There’s also the New Left Project, which includes the young polemicist Dan Hind, who has written a book called Common Sense calling for more community assemblies. I also asked him to speak at the London Philosophy Club – he was apparently too busy trying to get media coverage.

There are still some members of the New Left with that old spirit of grassroots community engagement. I met Derek Tatton, who runs the Raymond Williams Foundation, at the Philosophy In Pubs conference in Liverpool on Friday. He still runs discussion circles in his hometown of Leek, with support from the website Open Democracy. You can read an article about it here. Derek wondered about the term ‘philosophy club’, and prefers discussion circles – after all, there are many such organisations which discuss science, or literature, or economics, or psychology, or all these topics. Fair enough – I guess my definition of philosophy involves the practice of reflection and discussion rather than any particular topic.

What’s interesting about such clubs today, by the way, is how they often combine philosophy with psychology and even (horror of horrors) with self-help and personal development. Look at the Occupy London movement, for example, which would have seminars on ‘body work’ and meditation side-by-side with talks on Marx or Gramsci. Interesting times…

Solving Happiness

Posted on June 6, 2012 by

Here’s a long essay I wrote in the New Inquiry, a US magazine, about how governments are trying to solve the problem of happiness. It begins with a quote from Aldous Huxley’s preface to Brave New World: ‘

The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call “the problem of happiness.

Here’s another quote from the piece:

The linchpin of liberalism, forged from centuries of violence between Catholics, Protestants and Jews, is the idea that people should be free to pursue their own version of well-being, without interference from the state. As Sir Isaiah Berlin pointed out in his 1958 essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty,” liberalism assumes that reasonable people may disagree on the definition of the good life.  Seeing as an entire population is unlikely to agree on one comprehensive definition of the good, any attempt by a government to find a “final solution” to the problem of happiness will likely end in coercion, oppression, and even totalitarianism. Governments should therefore confine themselves, Berlin argued, to protecting our negative liberty, our freedom from interference by others, rather than trying to enhance our positive liberty, our spiritual fulfillment, our self-actualisation. This warning sounded wise to policymakers after World War II and the horrors committed by Stalin and Mao on their citizens “for their own good.”

However, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western governments needed a new mission to fulfill. So, just as Nietzsche predicted, at the end of history, the last men invented happiness. A handful of social scientists and policy makers insisted that the liberal mission was not complete, because although citizens in the west were free, they were not happy. They seized on the “Easterlin Paradox,” a graph that economist Richard Easterlin had plotted in 1974 to show that, while GDP has risen since the 1950s, our national happiness levels (based on how happy we report ourselves to be between one and ten) have stayed flat. This, then, should be governments’ new mission: to lift our happiness.  

The missionaries quickly found new demons to dispel. Western society was suddenly beset by a range of profound social and behavioral epidemics — drug addiction, alcoholism, obesity, depression, anxiety, consumer debt — all of which emerged (according to the technocrats of well-being) from people’s chronic inability to make intelligent life choices. Classical liberalism was based on a flawed model of human nature, in which we were assumed to be rational autonomous sovereign beings. In fact, as the new fields of behavioral economics and neuropsychology showed, we are irrational, unconscious, self-deceiving, dopamine-craving animals whose desires are shaped by our environment and culture.  To complete the liberal project of emancipation, then, we need a final revolution: to be freed from ourselves.

This project takes us well beyond the limits of Berlin’s “negative liberty” and into the dreams of the ancient Greek philosophers, particularly Plato and Aristotle, who both insisted it was the proper function of the state to enhance the well-being or eudemonia —  or meaningful happiness — of their citizens. This final revolution turns policymakers from bland technocrats into something closer to Plato’s exalted law-giver, who combines in their person the physician, the tutor, and the priest. That’s not far from the role envisaged by economist Jeffrey Sachs, one of the prophets of the new politics, who describes his work as “clinical economics,” combining economics with ethics, psychology, politics, health care, and cultural anthropology into a form of total politics designed to heal entire nations.

But the new politics of well-being faces two criticisms. Can a government really teach people to be happier? And what gives governments the right to indoctrinate people in their particular version of happiness in the first place? Policymakers’ answer to both these criticisms is “we have discovered the scientific formula for happiness. It’s been proven to work, therefore we have a moral obligation to teach it to our citizens.”

Is the Coalition ditching Every Child Matters?

Posted on May 30, 2012 by

There’s a very interesting cover story and editorial in this week’s Times Educational Supplement, suggesting that the Department of Education under the Coalition government is in the process of quietly ditching New Labour’s flagship children’s policy, Every Child Matters (ECM).

ECM was launched in 2002, partly in response to the failure of English schools to prevent the abuse and death of Victoria Climbie, the eight-year-old girl who died in 2000. ECM led to the merging of schools and child support services, the creation of a Children’s Commissioner, the broadening of Ofsted statutory requirements for schools to include children’s ‘well-being’, and the creation of a new ministry – the Department for Children, Schools and Families. It also, I’d suggest, helped pave the way for the national introduction of Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning into primary schools in 2002 and secondary schools in 2007.

Ed Balls, minister for Children, Schools and Families, rapidly built a huge empire on the back of ECM, ‘with responsibilities for everything from schools and children’s centres to ‘families with multiple problems’, domestic violence and youth services’.

As the TES says:

ECM had a huge impact on everyone working in education. Schools suddenly had to ensure that they were looking after all aspects of pupils’ lives. Their breakfast clubs multiplied, and they built close links with social services, health authorities and the police.

Some teachers felt the move went too far, requiring huge efforts to protect every child from instances which were, thankfully, the horrific exception. Besides, ECM conspicuously failed to make sure such instances never happened, as the Baby P case showed in 2007, in Haringey, the same district where Victoria Climbie lived and died. Michael Shaw, editor of TES, writes that the “darker irony” was that ECM ended up getting blamed for Baby P’s death.

How had a former education director with a background as a headteacher ended up the boss of social workers? Why had Haringey’s child protection work been inspected – and given a thumbs up – by a schools watchdog? The answer was Every Child Matters.

Make way, munchkins!

In 2010, when the Coalition government came to power, there was a quiet but definite shift in priorities:

The day after the coalition was formed, the Department for Children, Schools and Families was renamed the Department for Education. The department’s rainbow motif, complete with brightly coloured cartoon children – derisively referred to as ‘munchkins’ by Conservative advisors – was ditched in favour of austere, dark-blue lettering. And when Michael Gove took office in Sanctuary Buildings it was as the secretary of state for education, not children.

The Coalition also quietly pushed a shift from well-being to achievement. Schools no longer had a statutory right to promote children’s spiritual, social and emotional well-being, and Ofsted would no longer grade them on this:

Under Ofsted’s new inspection framework, introduced in January, the number of points that schools are graded on has been reduced from 27 to just five. Overall effectiveness, pupil achievement, quality of teaching, pupil behaviour and safety, and leadership and management are covered. But specific grades on pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, and the extent to which they ‘adopt healthy lifestyles’, develop workplace skills and ‘contribute to the school and wider community’ have been dropped. It is a change that children’s charities fear will be to the detriment of some of their most vulnerable pupils.

Government advisors have expressed scepticism about Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning, and it’s likely to be dropped from many schools’ curricula as a result of the shift in focus from well-being to achievement. And several local councils have, since the election, split education services from social services.

Michael Shaw worries that the huge reforms in the education sector – the shift from comprehensives to academies and free schools, and potentially (if Gove is to be believed) the shift from free schools to for-profit schools  – could cause institutional confusion, allowing some children to drop through the safety net:

some child protection agencies are now confused about who their contact should be. Do they still ring up the local authority, or should they be setting up new relationships with the academy chains – or even each individual school? Meanwhile ministers seem to regard the initiative’s goals as distractions from schools’ core purpose. No longer do children need to ‘enjoy and achieve’ – just achieve…local cutbacks are making it harder for schools to bring in specialised support.

Another concern, to my mind, is that the new ‘free market’ in education means academies and free schools are incredibly wary of bad publicity, and so could cover up any instances of child abuse they come across, rather than risking bad publicity and its impact on charitable donations and their haloed image as perfect schools. I saw this happening at private schools, and wouldn’t like to see this ‘hush culture’ spread to the state sector, where there needs to be some universal statutory protection in place. The one area where you shouldn’t give too much freedom to individual schools is in how they handle instances of child abuse, otherwise you end up with what happened in Catholic schools all over the world.

Making sense of past emotions: a view from Denmark

Posted on May 28, 2012 by

Louise Øhrstrøm Poulsen is a PhD student at the University of East Anglia. Her thesis is a study of metaphor and emotion in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. 

The Open Air Museum, near Copenhagen

Why do emotions matter in historical research? How does our understanding of emotion affect our research? Are emotions just another discourse, or is the study of emotions something different which is in need of a particular set of theoretical and methodological tools?

On a sunny Friday in May, fifty students and scholars met at The Open Air Museum near Copenhagen to reflect on some of these questions. As PhD student Camilla Schjerning mentioned in the introduction to the seminar, the setting of the seminar could not have been more suitable. Gathering to discuss ‘making sense of past emotions’, we found ourselves among historical houses and fields which school children, families and tourists explore every day, engaging their imagination, senses and emotions in order to get an idea of how people used to live in Denmark.

Professor Michael Roper from University of Essex opened the seminar with a paper entitled “The Unconscious Work of Social History”. Inspired by psychoanalysis, he suggested that we should understand history as a relationship, in the sense that the way in which we engage with our historical sources is always affected by our own emotions and sensibilities, whether consciously or unconsciously. Explaining how his background and sensibilities had shaped his professional research, Roper stated that we need to work on our subjectivity and empathy in order to re-awaken the power of the past in our minds and thus be able to answer the simple, yet complicated question: “How can we work with historical sources?”

Dr. Claire McLisky then presented her postdoctoral research on emotions in a colonial context. According to McLisky, there has been a tendency among postcolonial scholars to look at emotions as yet another thing the coloniser would enforce on the colonised, and very few postcolonial scholars have drawn on recent research by emotion scholars such as Stearns, Rosenwein and Reddy. In her project, McLisky is engaging with these scholars and is using historical sources, such as art and letters, to try to reconstruct the emotions of the colonised. She is interested in the concept of “emotional economies” as a possible way of understand the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised.

The next papers dealt with specific historical sources and discussed how these sources perform emotion. Professor Otto Ulbricht from Kiel University presented his work on Early Modern Ego-documents such as diaries and letters. According to Ulbricht, these documents do not hold many emotion words, yet, when you study the context they are written in, they do perform a wide range of emotions and oppose what Rosenwein calls “the grand narrative” (that emotions in medieval and early modern societies were more primitive).

The Head of The Saxo Institute at University of Copenhagen, Tine Damsholt, presented research on emotions in public and semi-public space in late-eighteenth-century Copenhagen. Copenhagen. Using theories on performativity and thus understanding emotions as something you do, Damsholt analysed how emotions were enacted and performed through literature, pantomime, tableaux and patriotic celebrations in late-eighteenth-century Copenhagen.

Finally, two guest speakers from museums in Denmark had been invited to present. Curator, Thomas Lyngby, presented a paper on how arrangement, atmosphere and mental life in urban houses in the Danish upper classes in the eighteenth century revealed a hierarchy inthe homes, and how performance of emotion would be dependending on the location in the home. Camilla Mordhorst, Museum of Copenhagen, closed the seminar with a paper on the longing for presence in the historical exhibition.

Louise Øhrstrøm Poulsen

Making Sense of Past Emotions was an interesting seminar which raised many important questions within the field of the history of emotions.Many thanks to the organisers, Camilla Schjerning and Peter Wessel Hansen from The University of Copenhagen. The seminar was a great opportunity to be introduced to different ways of working with emotions in history as well as to meet other students and scholars who are doing research in this fascinating developing field.

James O’Shaughnessy on how the Tories got the well-being bug

Posted on May 25, 2012 by

One of the interesting things about the politics of well-being is how, in the UK, it began as a movement on the Left, through figures like Geoff Mulgan (the head of Blair’s policy unit), and Richard Layard, but then managed to cross over and become a cross-party consensus, both in the Lib Dems (through people like Richard Reeves, Nick Clegg’s policy advisor) and even more surprisingly in the Conservative Party. Who would have thought David Cameron would push forward ‘national well-being measurements’, create a National Citizens Service, inaugurate parenting classes, and double the funding for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?

As I’ve discussed over the last couple of days, there is a Neo-Aristotelian consensus now, of politicians, policy wonks and even civil servants who believe humans can achieve flourishing and governments and civil society can help them in that journey. This includes Neo-Aristotelian Tories such as David Willetts, Ferdinand Mount, and Oliver Letwin – who wrote his thesis on Aristotelian ethics and the emotions (I reviewed it here).

This week, I met one of the Neo-Aristotelians on the Right: James O’Shaughnessy, formerly head of Cameron’s policy unit, which Cameron sadly scrapped last year and replaced with a civil service-run unit  (a mistake, I fear). James left government to become a ‘social entrepreneur’ with a particular focus on integrating Positive Psychology into education.

We met in the RSA, and James told me about how the Conservatives got into the ‘well-being agenda’, how he became a convert to Positive Psychology, how it fits into the new reformed education landscape, and why he thinks the future of well-being education is not grand national programmes like Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) but rather smaller evidence-based experiments. The interview will hopefully be used in an article but I thought blog-readers would enjoy the full transcript.

The politics of well-being  arguably began as a New Labour phenomenon, through people like Geoff Mulgan and Richard Layard. So how did it get taken up by the Conservative Party? 

It was particularly taken up by Steve Hilton, who came to government from his Good Business consultancy; and by Oliver Letwin, who wrote his PhD thesis on Aristotle and the idea of eudaimonia. It’s also something David Cameron believes in, and for him it’s a way of demonstrating that Tories are not people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, which is one of the stereotypes he is trying to dispel. There’s also the sense that you can’t talk about things like family values or a broken society entirely from an economic point of view, as the Fabians do.

Some dry Tories were dismissive of it, and there was a lot of scepticism – but that’s part of the point, for Cameron to show he’s different. Personally, I think the politics of well-being is deeply conservative – the idea that life is about more than money. Some on the right are sceptical about the idea of using well-being measurements to guide policy partly because they say the data is so aggregated its meaningless, and partly because the idea that government should promote a particular philosophy of happiness is dangerous socialism.

What do you think of those criticisms? 

Well, it’s true that if you aggregate well-being measurements up to the national level, it becomes so aggregated its basically flat over time, and never seems to go up or down. But the data can still tell you interesting things at the regional or local level. And it’s a start. In politics you can’t go straight from A to Z. Policy changes take time.

Tell me why you decided to leave government and become a social entrepreneur in education. 

I have a sceptical nature, so don’t believe politicians are always the best at running things. It’s about giving people the choice over how to do things. So the idea in many areas of social policy is to let social entrepreneurs provide a range of services and then people can choose for themselves. ‘Progressive ends, conservative means’ is the mantra. In education, that means things like free schools and academies. When you pursue policies like that, the more interesting stuff is actually happening outside of policy, at the grassroots level of services delivery. So I decided to leave government and become an education entrepreneur. There’s now a flowering of opportunity in that field which I wanted to be part of.

Some people think there’s a paradox in Conservative well-being policy. On the one hand, the government has pushed forward things like national well-being measurements. But in education policy, Michael Gove has scrapped Ofsted well-being measurements, and seems to be about to scrap Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning.  

I’ll explain why that’s not a paradox. It’s an epistemic point, about who can claim to possess knowledge. The disposition of Tories is that government is a really bad place to claim epistemic hegemony superiority because of things like the lessons of public choice theory, and the power of vested interests and of Whitehall. If you are too top-down, the programmes you put forward are quickly out of date, and create worse results than if you give institutions the opportunity to experiment and choose programmes that work. As long as they properly track the outcomes of those programmes and share the information, then the market improves.

I’m a big believer in evidence-based education policy, and in the work of people like the Sutton Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation, who announced a £200 million project last year to explore evidence-based interventions for disadvantaged children. If you empower independent institutions to choose their programmes, and parents to choose their schools, then you get a much richer ecosystem than if the Department of Education creates one well-being programme for the entire country.

But in this new evidence-based ecosystem, how would schools discover which programmes worked? Would there be like a gocompare.com site? 

Good question. At the moment we’re lacking a free market in information. There are a few university departments, it’s quite a small community, everyone seems to know each other. We need a repository of evidence for well-being education.

So it sounds like the government is going to scrap Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning, which was an example of that sort of centralised top-down policy.  

[SEAL, as many blog-readers will know, was inspired by Daniel Goleman’s pop psychology book Emotional Intelligence, and was enthusiastically taken up by New Labour and introduced it into the national curriculum in 2002. The government only got round to testing if it actually worked a decade later…and found it didn’t.]

The evidence for it was fairly patchy. The position of the government is that they’re all for schools trying well-being interventions out, but the government’s responsibility is to make sure kids learn and can get jobs at the end of school. They’re open-minded about how schools get there.

Some people, including me, expected SEAL to be replaced by the Penn Resiliency Project (PRP) – a three-year pilot scheme designed by Martin Seligman, the inventor of Positive Psychology [that’s him on the right]. It was supposed to be a careful, rigorous, evidence-based intervention to improve young people’s well-being and academic performance. But the evidence after the three-year pilot was not a home run, was it? 

The results were pretty good but you need to keep repeating the intervention for it to work. I’m now working with Richard Layard to try and get funding for a four-year pilot of an intervention that combines the Penn Resiliency Project with other evidence-based interventions.

How does Positive Psychology fit into your model of education? 

I didn’t want to be providing any old education, but rather a particular vision of it, that’s deeply informed by Positive Psychology. I’d spent a reasonable amount of time talking to Martin Seligman. What’s so appealing is the growth model rather than the disease model, and the idea there’s a continuum from ill to well to flourishing. I buy into that philosophically, but it also has a strong evidence base. And what’s fascinating is the interplay with ancient philosophy and virtue ethics. The cutting edge science ties into the best that’s been thought in the ancient world, by philosophers like Aristotle. So Positive Psychology is as much about character development as well-being. It’s part of a developing view that education should be about developing character, rather than merely passing exams.

So my idea was to build a ‘whole school’ approach to building character, that stretches across the whole curriculum and extra-curricular activities, even down to the dining room and how meals are conducted and what pupils eat. Martin Seligman, for example, has talked of extending Positive Psychology into English classes.

I was organising a round-table with Marty Seligman and some others to try and create a framework for a whole curriculum that people could apply in different schools. My career plan was to build on that framework, which would be freely available to anyone to use, to create services to sell into schools. Then Anthony Seldon [headmaster of Wellington] called and asked if I wanted to come on board with the Wellington academies trust. I agreed, and started a fortnight ago. The idea is to take the DNA of Wellington, and export it into different contexts – academies, prep schools and international schools.

Wellington is clearly a pioneer when it comes to ‘character education’ – the first British school to integrate Positive Psychology into its curriculum. But how easy will it be to export that DNA? To what extent does Wellington’s ‘character factory’ depend on its financial resources, and physical assets like the grounds, the facilities, the beauty of the place? Can you export that into an inner-city academy? 

Well, we’re trying to find out. Look at KIPP charter schools in the US, which are explicitly about creating character, and which work in some pretty rough neighbourhoods. Or look at the success of the Ark academies. As a social entrepreneur you want to create the most impact, and you could argue that Wellington has less impact on its pupils because they already have a lot going for them. The Penn Resiliency Project had the most impact on the more challenged kids. But of course, a private school costs £30,000 a year for a pupil, and a state school around £5,000. So we need to find what that buys you. I would also like to try to build find elite partners for the schools, like the Royal Shakespeare Companies or Wasps rugby clubs of this world, for example, so we can try to replicate some of the College’s breadth and excellence across the group.

But the aim is not to create a new programme and introduce it into the national curriculum as a nation-wide subject? 

No. The reason SEAL didn’t succeed, why it didn’t have any longevity, was it was too centralised, it was just telling people what to do. [James’ boss at the Policy Exchange, Neil O’Brien, wrote an interesting blog this month about how the Tories hope best-practice will naturally spread through the education ‘eco-system’ through things like chains of academies – you can read it here.]

There’s a lot I like about the idea of teaching Positive Psychology in schools, but my concern is that it becomes a form of rigid indoctrination, where if you disagree with the prescribed route, you are deemed unwell, sick even. If done badly, it could easily suppress creative or critical thinking, and attempt to create happiness by rote-learning or drill-training. That’s not going to work, is it? 

Well, I think you can encourage different routes to excellence. Wellington, for example, encourages people to ‘be the best you can be’. It’s the Aristotelian idea of virtue in excellence. And you can try lots of things to try and find out what you’re best at. That’s what really encourages self-esteem: walking into a room and knowing that, of everyone there, you’re the best at some particular activity. In general, though, I don’t have a problem with indoctrination! If you’ve grown up without structures and boundaries, it’s actually a relief to have them. I think we’ve learnt what’s wrong with progressive education, with the child-centred model where educationalists felt ‘who are adults to pressure children to learn?’ The result of that was a generation with high levels of illiteracy and a massive increase in educational inequality. Free creative thinking is fine for a small group who are already quite naturally talented. But it’s really bad for those students unable to cope with it.

I’m also wary of extending the Positive Psychology dogma into every subject, so that you have positive economics, positive physics, positive history.  Shouldn’t English Literature at its best explore the dark side as well as the positive? I remember my first term in English A-Level I read Hamlet, King Lear, Heart of Darkness and Freud’s Five Lectures on Hysteria. And I loved it!  

Yes, you have to be careful about the ‘positive’ label, it can be too narrow. It’s important not to be too blinkered, you can’t simply think positive and ignore objective facts.

Finally, is there a risk you could be criticised as creating a new free market in education when you were in office, and then profiting from it once you’re out of office? 

It’s not a privatised market, that’s important. It’s not for profit. The academies are run as charities, and any profits they make have to go back into the charitable purposes of the group. The board of the charity can set my salary, but that’s the only remuneration I get from my work with Wellington.

Thanks very much, James, and good luck. 

Thank you too.

PRADA: luxury as therapy, therapy as luxury

Posted on May 22, 2012 by

Check out this new advert for PRADA, made by Roman Polanski, starring Ben Kingsley and Helena Bonham-Carter. The implication is the therapist, once intended to free their patients from false illusions like consumerism, becomes himself seduced by the luxury experience. Because it isn’t an illusion – glamour is real (such is the message anyway).

It also fetishises the experience of therapy – the wealthy attractive heiress kicking off her PRADA shoes to recline seductively on the therapeutic couch, to indulge the luxury of talking about herself and her inner world (even if the therapist is actually far more interested in her outer accoutrements than her inner world). Luxury as therapy / therapy as luxury.  How deliciously bourgeois.

What is the history of emotions? Part II

Posted on May 22, 2012 by

What is the history of emotions? And why does it matter?

As part of our first anniversary at the History of Emotions blog, I asked members and friends of the Centre for the History of the Emotions to write a paragraph or two on what they thought about the history of emotions, how they got involved in it, why it mattered, and what were their favourite publications in the field.

The dozen answers below range widely. Several are by PhD students here at Queen Mary, others are by established academics. Recurring themes include the relationship between scientific and humanistic attempts to get to grips with human mental life. The recommended reading (and viewing) includes some classics in the history of emotions and some more surprising items too from the fields of philosophy and anthropology.

This series of mini-posts starts with some warm words of support from the incoming Head of the School of History at Queen Mary, Professor Miri Rubin. 

Miri Rubin
Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History, QMUL

Author of: Emotion and Devotion: The Meanings of Mary in Medieval Culture

Having the Centre for the History of Emotions, and its lively blog, among us in the School of History has been a real inspiration. We have become better historians, for being reminded of the importance – in all that we study – of tears and fears, hopes and mopes. Emotions-awareness does not redefine what we do, but it enhances our understanding and refines our sensibilities. It also makes us feel part of a vast network of lively and interesting scholars.

 

Rhodri Hayward
QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions

The history of emotions is a radical discipline.  It takes as its subject matter what appear at first instance, to be the most authentic and intractable aspects of our identities and reminds us that these things are transitory and contingent.  It teaches us that our feelings are not determined by deep psychology or biology but are instead historical constructions borne out of an accident of our language, relationships and material circumstances.  In doing this, the discipline opens up the possibility of new forms of politics and new ways of working on the self.  If our inner life is determined by the world around us then the first step to radical change or personal transformation is engagement with that wider environment.  And as recent work in the discipline makes clear, this wider environment that sustains emotions includes a vast range of elements from friendships and family structures to popular novels, pension schemes or animal experiments.

The basic idea that our emotions might be culturally relative was hammered into me from quite a young age but it has taken me ages to get to grips with the concept.  Nationalist teachers back at school in Wales were keen to remind us that the Welsh word ‘hiraeth’ variously translated as longing, grief or homesickness had no equivalent in the English language.  However it was not until I began a PhD with Roger Smith in Lancaster that I began to understand how such words were not simply rooted in different cultures or identities but also worked to construct those selfsame cultures.  Smith’s Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature (2007) provides a brilliant statement on how writing the history of psychology transforms the actual subject matter of psychology.  There is no way of disentangling emotions (or for that matter any other psychological states) from their descriptions.  When we write the history of the emotions, we make available novel descriptions and associations that in turn create new ways of understanding and experiencing our inner lives.

Although our emotional categories might be transient and rooted in particular cultures they are none the less powerful.  Anyone who has lived with small children or awkward flatmates will know that statements about inner feelings (‘I feel cross’, ‘I’m disappointed’) serve as bargaining chips as we negotiate competing agendas.  They also work, as the anthropologist, Vincent Crapanzano argued in his Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire (1992) ‘to call the context’: announcing one’s feelings changes our understanding of a situation.  Over recent years I’ve become interested in this traffic between the political shaping of the emotions and the emotional shaping of politics.  Alongside the writings of Roger Smith, Thomas Dixon and Vincent Crapanzano, I have found Kurt Danziger’s work on the history of psychological objects enormously useful here (e.g. Naming the Mind).  Danziger’s account of the how psychological categories are first constructed and then serve to coordinate political arguments or economic decisions is a good tool for interrogating the enforced fun of the current government’s happiness agenda.

 

Jen Wallis
PhD Student, QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions

When I first mention to people that I work within the ‘Centre for the History of the Emotions’, I often get an amused smirk in response – as in ‘Gosh, they really will teach anything at universities these days’. Once you talk it over, though, they generally realise it’s not all intangible trendy theory. In the history of psychiatry, for example, emotion is at the heart (and head) of the matter: the nineteenth-century asylum (my own area of study) was a site where emotions were to be calmed – or sometimes awakened, depending on the nature of the illness – and where ideas were formulated about ‘appropriate’ emotions. Investigating the point at which an emotion crossed over from the normal to the pathological is crucial, then, in understanding nineteenth-century responses to a whole range of mental illnesses.

Though not necessarily self-consciously located within ‘the history of emotions’, Barry Reay’s Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England is perhaps my all-time favourite book by a historian. Reay examines the photography and sketches of middle-class Arthur Munby, who was fascinated by the bodies of working-class women; his photos emphasised the muscular physique of pit-women and the calloused hands of his wife and maid, Hannah Cullwick. Munby’s emotional life comes across as a complex one: eroticised fascination for the body of the working woman, voyeuristic horror in the face of a woman who had lost her nose to lupus, and adoration for his wife, who he married in secret, her difference in social status both fetishised in Munby’s photographs and placing strict limitations on any public displays of affection.

 

Tiffany Watt-Smith
British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Drama and Centre for the History of the Emotions, QMUL

In 2009, Judge Daniel Rozak of Illinois was handing down a sentence on a felony drug charge when the defendant’s cousin, watching from the gallery, let out an enormous yawn. Thirty-three-year old Clifton Williams was promptly served with a 6-month jail sentence for contempt of court. ‘It was not a simple yawn’, the attorney’s office later explained to the incredulous Williams family. ‘It was an attempt to undermine the court’s authority’.

'Self-portrait, yawning' by Joseph Ducreux

Yawns, flinches, shudders, sighs, smiles, tears, frowns and pouts are never ‘simple’. Like language, these fleeting emotional expressions are slippery, their meanings shifting across different contexts, times and cultures. Of course we’ll never know what Williams really felt in the moment of his yawn. Perhaps tiredness brought on the offending gesture. Perhaps his yawn spewed forth from a maelstrom of anger and frustration, manifesting as boredom, scorn and derision. But from a historian’s point of view, the feelings behind Williams’s yawn matter less than the cultural assumptions its performance highlights. Read by the Judge as an attempt to ridicule and challenge the operation of his power, Williams yawn is very revealing indeed.

Tracing the role of emotional expressions – even ones so marginal and inconsequential-seeming as yawns – in social interaction can help us understand a great deal about cultures of the past. These minor emotional skirmishes show a great deal about how power operates in any given society, how gender, race and class roles are performed, how alliances are formed, hierarchies challenged, manners regulated, expectations swerved and confidences betrayed. Emotions bind us to our communities, our relationships forged and broken on the strength of our feelings, but in reality these negotiations may be subtle ones, taking place over a quizzical look, an almost imperceptible shrug or a giggle stifled. The fact that emotional expressions are governed by rules of display determining what is appropriate or inappropriate reminds us that emotions exist in more than one dimension. We habitually think of our feelings as private, subjective experiences, yet as the history of emotions affirms, emotions are also part of a matrix of cultural identities and social interactions too.

Historians of emotion do their work in this social dimension, shining a light on what for previous generations may have been considered too trivial and too fleeting for study. One of the things historians of emotion do well is to make the familiar strange again, reminding us of the contingency of our own assumptions about feelings through comparison with the past. Over eight-hundred years ago in twelfth-century France, yawning was not an affectation of the angry and disenfranchised, but rather the mark of an ardent young lover. While in English romances unrequited lovers sighed, in Occitan they yawned for the object of their affections, as a verse written by the troubadour Arnaut Daniel in 1170 testifies:

Day-long I stretch, all times, like a bird preening,
And yawn for her


Liz Gray
PhD Student, QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions

Emotions are personal ‘things’. They are pervasive and they are how we all connect – with each other, and with our past. They are also one of the ways, often the first way we connect with history in general. But my emotions are mine, and your emotions are yours. And the emotions I felt five years ago are related to, but not the same as, the emotions I feel today. The emotions you felt five years ago are related to, but not the same as, the emotions you feel today. So what is there to gain from studying the history of emotions?

By understanding the subjectivity of our emotions, we are able to approach history more objectively. Through studying the history of emotions we can pick apart the basis for the emotions in each historical setting. Instead of empathising with the emotional feelings we read in our sources, we can take a step back and get closer to understanding what those emotions meant to the person, people, communities we are studying. And at the same time, it allows us to take a step back and assess our own feelings and reactions towards the history we are studying.

There is one essay on the history of emotions that had a major impact on how I think about emotions during the development of my PhD project.  Paul White’s essay ‘Sympathy under the Knife: Experimentation and Emotion in Late Victorian Medicine’ (in the collection Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700-1950, edited by Fay Bound Alberti) explores the emotions surrounding the practice of vivisection in the second half of the nineteenth century. It explores the interplay between the development of theories of emotion in the nineteenth century with the emotions elicited by the actual practice of animal experimentation. This essay drew my attention to the importance the role of emotion played even in the development of theories of emotions themselves. The suffering of animals is an emotive subject in the twentieth century, but was this the case in the nineteenth century? Did the men experimenting on animals have different emotional responses to their subjects than those protesting against their practices? If, in my studies of comparative psychology I can separate the anthropomorphic emotions from the ‘scientific’ emotions, we can get closer to the psychology that was being investigated.

 

Jane Mackelworth
PhD Student, Centre for the History of the Emotions and Centre for Studies of Home, QMUL

My interest in the history of the emotions stems from my training in both psychology and history. I graduated in psychology with the intention of studying for a doctorate in clinical psychology. However, after working in both clinical and health psychology departments I realized that this was not the right course of action for me. There was (at that time) a heavy focus on cognitive behavioural therapy which was based upon a very particular model of human behaviour. The emphasis was on a ‘scientist practitioner’ approach which stressed the ability to stand back from your clients, observe an objective detachment and apply a scientific framework to access the mind (and the problems) of the person sitting opposite you. Values such as empathy and others which derive from a more humanistic tradition were unpopular and seen as unhelpful. It felt to me as though there was little interest in attempting to uncover a person’s emotional experience. Rather the attention was on changing their thoughts, within a limited time frame, no matter how traumatic their previous experiences may have been. Emotions had become, it felt to me, rather a dirty residue.

Some years later I returned to study university to study history, undertaking an MA in Historical Research with a focus on social and cultural history. I realized very quickly how powerful studying history could be. Rather than just an endeavour to find out what happened history is an attempt to make meaning of the past and to slip into (albeit briefly) past minds and bodies. It quickly became obvious to me that it was impossible to understand the past without attempting to enter into the mind-set or the way of being of its inhabitants. One of the books which demonstrated this to me most clearly was Lyndal Roper’s Witch Craze (2004). As post-enlightenment beings it can be hard for us to make sense of magical beliefs. And it can be all too easily approached from a rationalist paradigm. With the wish to work out ‘what was really going on’. Trying to apply it to our modern day world, to find the parallels. But really the only way that we can understand beliefs in magic, and in witches is to suspend what we know now. And to understand it how it was then. Roper attempts to enter into the emotional mind-set of the women, and men, involved to explore the emotions at play, to understand both the fear of witches and also the belief that one was a witch. So just one example, she looks at the meaning attached to gifts given by witches:

In such interactions, objects which might seem trifling were invested with intense emotional significance. They acted as the litmus test of relations between people. This was why so much of the substance of witchcraft testimony apparently concerns the giving of objects of minute value. With the witch giving went wrong.

I think that history is at its most powerful in its study of things that we now take for granted, as though they are real, or constant. Where the emotions are taught elsewhere it is almost always from a realist point of view, as though this is fact. And so today, for example, our emotions, particularly those thought of as ‘disordered’ are seen as stemming from our biological make up, our genes. Yet even a brief historical glimpse at the experience of emotions challenges this. Emotions are always given meaning in a particular time and context. So, for example, we learn a lot about a society by seeking to understand why the emotions accompanying hysteria were generally ascribed to women.

Another piece of work I read recently and enjoyed was an article in Social and Cultural History by Claire Langhamer entitled ‘Love, Selfhood and Authenticity in Post-War Britain’.  In this article, Langhamer explores the ways in which our understanding of love changed over the twentieth century. She argues that it has become seen as a route to self-actualization, thus it has become more about a route to personal fulfillment or liberation. She suggests that Love came to be seen increasingly as being about ‘chemistry’ and ‘emotional intimacy’ rather than ‘respect’ and ‘affection’ (p. 280). This also ties in with a greater focus in the twentieth century on the right to be happy and fulfilled.

Realising that emotions are culturally, and historically experienced is a curious realization. It is immensely liberating, because we realize that the meaning we give to emotions (and therefore the way that we experience them) is so intrinsically socially constructed. However, this moment of liberation is so fleeting because it is followed so quickly by the overwhelming sense that we can only ever be products of our age, so powerful is cultural and social conditioning. Thus, the emotions that we feel now are as real (and as different) as the emotions that were felt in the past.

 

Carolyn Burdett
Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London

For me, thinking about emotions and/in history began with empathy. In November 2004, a US literary scholar, Suzanne Keen, sent a request to the VICTORIA listserv explaining that she was writing a book about empathy and the novel, and asking for respondents’ experiences of empathising while reading Victorian fiction. Her request produced a long debate, full of thoughtful and intelligent insight about reading novels. As I followed it, though, I began to feel distracted by the way in which the terms sympathy and empathy were being used. Sometimes they seemed to be interchangeable, while sometimes respondents stressed differences between them; at times, too, they were applied to either Victorian authors or to Victorian readers or to both. What struck me most, was that I couldn’t recall ever coming across the term empathy in the literature of the period. Did the Victorians empathise, I wondered; and the OED confirmed that they indeed did not. Empathy was coined in 1909 by the British-born, US-based experimental psychologist, Edward Bradford Titchener, to translate a German word, Einfühlung, which was in turn first used as a noun in an 1873 work, On the Optical Sense of Form, by the German aesthetician Robert Vischer.

My interest in empathy was also fuelled because it seemed to be becoming a more audible word in the wider culture – and especially in the political discourse of twenty-first-century Britain. Some commentators date a shift in political rhetoric – to one more overtly ‘emotional’ – to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the way in which the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, led public reaction to her death. More intriguing for me was another news story, again from 2004: namely the sacking from her opposition front bench position of the Liberal Democrat MP, Jenny Tonge. Her dismissal followed remarks she made about Palestinian suicide bombers in the Occupied Territories, when she commented: ‘If I had to live in that situation – and I say that advisedly – I might just consider becoming one myself’. Much of the subsequent debate turned on the question of whether a distinction could be drawn between empathy for, and approval of, suicide attacks. Tonge herself insisted that ‘I feel with just as I don’t agree with’. She substantiated her claim by explicitly differentiating between empathy with and sympathy for the suicide bombers’ actions. She did not, she said, sympathise with them.

This was the starting point for my research into what happens to a distinctively Victorian notion of sympathy in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and the coining of empathy in the first decade of the twentieth. In the meantime, interest in, and research about, empathy has boomed. In 2005, a quick search of the British Library’s Integrated Catalogue for ‘empathy’ produced 179 hits. Today, the BL’s new (and admittedly more inclusive) ‘Main Catalogue’ shows over 5,000 results. The tab showing ‘Creation date’ is interesting:

  1. Before 1972 (17)
  2. 1972 To 1985 (20)
  3. 1985 To 1993 (128)
  4. 1993 To 2001 (888)
  5. After 2001 (4,216)

Much of the excitement about empathy in the last decade or so has stemmed from recent neuroscientific research and, in particular, the use of fMRI scans of the brain. Beautiful coloured patterns bleed over the screen showing mimetic ‘mirror neurons’ at work: we are hard-wired for empathy, it seems. Mirror neurons explain the evolution of language, and the development of culture, we hear. For some enthusiasts, mirror neurons are at the centre of a neuroscientific revolution which teaches that ‘We are nothing but a pack of neurons’ (according to V. S. Ramachandran, the ‘Marco Polo of neuroscience’ as Richard Dawkins named him, Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition, at UC San Diego).

In its first uses, though, empathy was primarily associated with aesthetic experience. In the hands of its initial exponent in Britain, the writer Vernon Lee, empathy hovered uncertainly between being a distinctively corporeal reaction to looking at beautiful forms which affected the viscera and thus feelings of health and well-being, and a more opaque mental experience which might ultimately explain the human impulse to metaphor and symbolisation. Lee, like many late Victorians, moved between enthusiastic hope that human experience might, eventually, be explicable in terms of verifiable, testable and indisputable physiological facts and a dogged conviction that the diversity, inventiveness and strangeness of life, human feelings and histories called for other ways of seeing things. When we contemplate empathy today, this Victorian debate remains a salutary case, reminding us that how our brains fire up is likely just one small part of the story.

 

Chris Millard
PhD Student, QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions

As human beings inhabiting the twenty-first century, emotions are part of the very fabric of our existence. While contemporary experts seek to root our emotional responses in some deep evolutionary past or specific neurochemical reaction (or both), the history of emotions can show how these claims have a history of their own. Through the history of emotions, the varied ways in which human beings have understood themselves across time and space be analysed. We can seek out different understandings of emotional states that have occurred in the past without attempting to collapse them into more or less approximate versions of today’s emotions du jour. Our understanding of emotional states constitutes a substantial proportion of how we understand ourselves, and unthinkingly to hand over interpretive authority in this area to neurochemists or evolutionary psychologists seems misguided at best. An appropriately historical understanding of emotions leads to a stress on the contingency and malleability of the intellectual systems and shorthand we use in order to make sense of internal mental, psychological and emotional states.

This has an important political dimension. Criticising the Coalition Government’s Happiness Index or Paul Ekman’s reductionist emotion-faces is all very well, but meaningful and long-lasting change is most likely to come from an understanding of the historically specific assumptions that enable interior states to be flattened out, quantified, tabulated, computed or otherwise deployed to buttress any number of political projects. Such moves are only credible because of long, complicated, historical processes. These assumptions, their sources of credibility and their various consequences are a key target for the history of emotions. As philosopher and historian Michel Foucault has said: ‘[c]ritique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.’

 

Mark Honigsbaum
Former PhD Student of QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions; University of Zurich

Long before I became a journalist and even longer before I became an historian, my first love was moral and political philosophy and, though I didn’t realise at the time, it was via Hume, Rousseau, Marx, and Mill that I first became interested in the place of emotions in history. The emotions, or the ‘passions’ as Hume called them, were central to these thinkers’ visions of a more just and moral society, hence Marx’s conviction that capitalism was founded on the ‘alienation’ or misery of it’s workers and Mill’s concern to maximise the happiness of the greatest number.

Today, such preoccupations are more present in our culture than ever. From David Cameron’s ‘well-being’ index to the ‘fury’ at bankers’ bonuses and the ‘anger’ felt in Greece and elsewhere at neo-liberal austerity programmes, we are used to the idea that emotions are important objects of epidemiological regulation. But it wasn’t until I read William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling that I realised that this had not always been the case.

Focussing on the French Revolution, Reddy argues that to seek to explain the ‘Reign of Terror’ only in sociological terms is to miss something about the sea change in emotional attitudes that took place in France between 1650 and 1789. Founding his argument on an analysis of ’emotives’ or emotional gestures and utterances that have the capacity to alter the states of the speakers from whom they derive, Reddy shows how the revolution brought about a ‘flowering of sentimentalism’ – an enthusiasm for emotional expression and intimacy that was anathema to the old courtly, pre-revolutionary codes of honour and restraint. Far from being an ‘Age of Reason’, this was a period that encouraged emotional incontinence as never before.

Put that way, Reddy’s thesis sounds simplistic. Didn’t we always knows that the French Revolution fed off the passions of the mob? Yes, but until Reddy we didn’t  realise how far these passions were products of particular historical regimes and political and cultural practices. Nor did we really appreciate how the mere act of emoting could change what was actually felt. As Reddy puts it, ‘emotives are influenced directly by and alter what they “refer” to… emotives do things to the world.’

There has been much debate since about how far historians should be prepared to run with the emotives. Reddy himself presented his theory as an argument ‘against constructionism’ and at times seems to come perilously close to endorsing an essentialist view of the emotions. However, I would argue that Reddy’s real aim is to outline a third way between essentialist and Foucauldian constructivist positions by showing how power is always located in emotional control – in other words, in who gets to express and who must repress certain feelings.

At a  time of great financial and political uncertainty, when we are daily being urged by Cameron and others to ‘calm down’ lest we become infected by Greek emotionalism, these insights are more pertinent than ever. I also like to think that Mill would have had sympathy with Reddy’s approach. ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy,’ he once famously asked himself, ‘and you cease to be so.’ Now that’s what I call an emotive.

 

Rebecca Kingston
Political Science, University of Toronto

Author of Public Passion: Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice

In his recent inaugural lecture as Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University, Jeremy Waldron called on political theorists to abandon almost exclusive focus on questions of virtue (or character) and ideas of justice and liberty, issues which dominated the field throughout most of the twentieth century, and instead refocus study on questions related to the practice of political institutions (separation of powers, judicial review, etc). The underlying justification for advocating this turn rested on the practical issue that we are living in societies where people disagree and the most important political questions facing us today involve how we come to reasonable accommodation through our shared authoritative institutions (rather some ideal form of dispute resolution).  While laudable in its objective to move the field away from excessively abstract theorising, this position also demonstrates some blindness to what is central to the practice of politics and the working of institutions, and that is emotions that shape and are shaped by the political process.

In this context, the history of emotions matter because in a general way these studies help to demonstrate that ultimately individuals and groups give meaning to the institutions and practices that shape their lives. More specifically, though, in terms of my field of political theory, these studies can demonstrate that institutions are also limited in what they can do and that there is paradoxically both a certain hubris and excessive humility in thinking that political challenges can be resolved by institutional arrangements.

There is hubris because in the face of varied emotional responses and cultural contexts similar institutions function in vastly different ways; and there is excessive humility because greater focus on human emotion in history provides greater insight into ways in which we can move beyond traditional limits of political goods in security and liberty, and seek new goals of emotional wellbeing that can be effected by a much broader array of political and social strategies.

If there is any writer who has most influenced me in my reflections and for whom I have the greatest awe and respect it must be Jonathan Lear. My reading of his book Aristotle: The Desire to Understand marks a turning point in my intellectual development as it brought to me an understanding of the importance of emotion even at the core of intellectual endeavour. His more recent work Radical Hope I consider to be a masterpiece as it weaves together a deep understanding of emotional life as irreducibly tied to questions of moral philosophy and the good life and driven by a deep sense of humanism.

 

Jules Evans
Policy Director, QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions

Author of Philosophy for Life, and Other Dangerous Situations

I’m probably the least qualified in the Centre to answer the question, so let me instead say what interests me about the history of the emotions. I am particularly interested in cognitive psychology, and the intersection between our biology and our beliefs and values. Our minds, bodies and emotions are deeply affected by the meaning we ascribe to events – and that meaning is constantly changing through culture and history. We can uncover or excavate the cultural constructions that shape our emotions. The point of doing that, for me, is to help liberate us from those constructions that serve us least well and cause us most suffering.

In terms of my favourite work of the history of the emotions, I think it would be Adam Curtis’ BBC documentary, The Century of the Self – the first bit of history of emotions I ever encountered, which left a lasting impression on me and many other people who saw it.

 

Thomas Dixon
Director, QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions

For me, the point of studying the history of emotions is to liberate ourselves from contemporary psychology. By anatomising the feelings of the past, pulling apart the beliefs, bodily states, physical places and material cultures of which they were composed, we can undermine the idea that there are universal or ‘basic’ hardwired emotions that are felt by all people in all places. To use history imaginatively, to inhabit the worldviews and mental pictures of the people whose lives and ideas we study, is simultaneously to understand the past and to destabilise the present. We learn that what we feel now, how we feel it, and what we think our feelings reveal and express, is historically contingent and far from universal. Because our beliefs about our own mental states are themselves inescapable constituents of our mental lives – including, for instance, the belief in the power of involuntary invisible entities called ‘emotions’ – to study the history of ideas about emotions is itself to study the history of emotional experiences.

I first became interested in the history of emotions myself via the history of ideas, studying for my PhD between 1996 and 2000. At that time, the book that had the biggest impact on my thinking was the ground-breaking philosophical work by Robert Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Solomon’s book, first published in 1976, was one of the earliest, and the most influential, in a series of studies through which the emotions, previously side-lined by analytic philosophers, made their way into the philosophical mainstream. Solomon’s basic idea that emotions are both cognitive and voluntary – that they are thoughts and actions, rather than mere involuntary feelings – drew on both Stoic and existentialist philosophical ideas. Among pioneering historians of emotions, the author I would most strongly recommend is the French historian of the Annales school, Lucien Febvre. In his 1941 essay,  ‘La sensibilité et l’histoire’, Febvre asked how the historian could reconstitute the emotional life of the past in a more discriminating manner. Febvre’s writings on psychology and history are polemical and penetrating. They are available in an English-language edition with an introduction by Peter Burke, first published in 1973, entitled A New Kind of History.

Febvre’s 1941 essay was an invitation to his fellow historians to get to work on this fascinating new field of history; to examine representations of emotions and sensibility in conduct books, court records, paintings, sculpture, music, and novels. ‘I am asking for a vast collective investigation to be opened,’ he wrote, ‘on the fundamental sentiments of man and the forms they take. What surprises we may look forward to!’

What is the history of emotions? Part I

Posted on May 21, 2012 by

A year on from the launch of this blog, interest continues to grow apace in the field of history of emotions. I recently posted a list of our Top 10 blog posts during our first twelve months. This follow-up anniversary post surveys developments more broadly and directs readers to the most useful online resources in the field.

The international Hist-Emotion email list now has over 1,000 subscribers, and this blog has thousands of readers each month. There are several centres for the study of the history of the emotions internationally, including the MPIB History of Emotions Research Center in Berlin, directed by Professor Ute Frevert, and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800), as well our own Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London, whose activities have recently been summarised by Colin Jones and showcased in Wellcome History magazine.

Among several other groups working in this area are Les émotions et leurs langages: histoires/ territoires (Provence);  CHEP: Cultural History of Emotions in Premodernity, which ran a major conference in 2011; and EMMA: Les émotions au moyen âge.

But where should people start who want to know what all this activity is about, and why it is happening? I thought it would be useful to put together a quick guide to what the history of emotions is, and why it matters, bringing together in one place some of the most useful resources for people new to the field.

One good place to start would be a series of short interviews conducted in 2009 with Barbara Rosenwein, Keith Oatley and myself for a blog on history of emotions by ‘A Scot in Exile’, asking some fundamental questions about the nature of emotions and their history.  Another excellent, freely available, starting point is Barbara Rosenwein’s seminal 2002 article ‘Worrying About Emotions in History‘, first published in the American Historical Review. A lecture I gave in the Netherlands in 2011, entitled ‘History in British Tears: The Anatomy of Modern Emotions‘, includes some introductory reflections on the nature of the history of emotions, and also a bibliography of some of the most important classic, and more recent, works in the field.

Other pieces (not freely available) that I often recommend to newcomers to the history of emotions are a 2009 article by William Reddy in Emotion Review on ‘Historical Research on the Self and Emotions‘; a series of interviews with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein,  and Peter Stearns by Jan Plamper in History and Theory published in 2010; a forum convened by Frank Biess in German History in 2010; and a survey of the field by Susan J. Matt in Emotion Review in January 2011.

For an alternative angle on the histories of emotion and expression, especially as they have featured on television, see documentary-maker Adam Curtis’s original and thought-provoking work on ‘Learning to Hug‘.

The history of emotions is now also making its way into the syllabuses of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. The University of Cambridge offers an undergraduate ‘Themes and Sources’ paper on the history of emotions; and history undergraduates at York will be offered a ‘Comparative Histories’ module on emotions from 2012-13. At Warwick, English literature undergraduates can take a course on the idea and expression of emotion in nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry. At MA level, there are new modules on the history of emotions being offered from 2012-13 at Goldsmiths and here at QMUL.

And just in case all of this isn’t enough to whet your appetite, I have asked members and associates of the QMUL Centre for the History of Emotions to write a paragraph or two about why they think the history of emotions matters and for some of their favourite publications in the field. Those will be included in the next post.

 

Zappos and the rise of the dot.commune

Posted on May 17, 2012 by

Yesterday I went to see a talk by the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. Tony is famous around the world for the ‘happy culture’ he has created at his billion-dollar shoe company. He sees his work as a mission to ‘deliver happiness’ to the world – not just shoes, but a way of thinking about how to get the most from life, which is very influenced by the ‘happiness science’ of Positive Psychology. He goes around the world giving talks on happiness, and has written a book called Delivering Happiness, which has now been turned into a comic book.

I was a bit sceptical of the idea of a ‘happy company’ – the cynical liberal individualist in me wondered if the staff went around with forced smiles, wearily putting on their party hats to fit in with the boss’ happy philosophy. But what Tony had to say was, at the least, very interesting.

After graduating from Harvard, Tony set up his first company, which sold click-through advertising technology. He initially set it up with friends and they all pretty much lived together in the office, sleeping under the desks, like a sort of dot.commune. But then the company grew bigger and ‘we ran out of friends’. So people they didn’t know started working there – and sadly they lost that culture of intimacy and friendship. The office became a cold, atomised collection of strangers. Tony started dreading going to work at his own company! He learnt a lesson from this – as important as making profits is creating a shared culture of values.

He sold the company for $250 million (this was the late 1990s, a good time to sell a dot.com). He and a friend started a venture capital fund, and their first investment was into a shoe company called Zappos, which would do for shoes what Amazon did for books: create a website and a big warehouse, deliver reliable customer service, and beat all those little mom-and-pop independent stores through sheer size and scale. Zappos didn’t do well at first, so Tony put more money in, and became the CEO.

This time around, he and his friends put a lot of thought into creating the right culture at Zappos. They created a list of core values, including things like Positivity, Creativity, Team-Playing and so on. They had a careful interview process to make sure new recruits shared their values. Tony says they put their values first: a person might make the company loads of money, but if they don’t share their values, they get fired. ‘It’s not about what people do, but who they are’. He says the key is to get rid of the 10% who don’t share those values.

This sounds less a corporation in the neo-liberal sense, and something closer to a spiritual commune. He says: ‘Some people were sceptical about the whole ‘values culture’ thing, but they really got into it and started using the language. If you tour the company now, you can feel it. It’s absolute magic when you have a workforce who really care about the company.’

Like in that original dot.commune, Tony would ideally like all the staff to live together and hang out together as friends – or at least in the same neighbourhood. He says: ‘Initially, when we moved the company to Las Vegas, we were forced to hang out with each other after work because we didn’t know anyone else in Vegas. That took the culture to a whole other level. We’re moving to downtown Vegas now, and we hope a lot of our staff will start living downtown too, so we bump into each other a lot and are a real community.’ It’s a sort of anarchist utopianism very much born out of San Francisco, out of the post-liberal ‘rainbow tribe’ mentality of rave music (think Burning Man). Tony used to hold big raves at his loft and says he loved the spiritual feeling of being connected to a whole rave by an experience and common values.

It also reminds me of older movements in corporate well-being, like Robert Owen’s ‘happy factories’ in the early 19th century, where workers lived together, worked together, and were instilled with Owen’s Utopian values and culture. It also reminds me of Quaker companies like Cadbury’s and Rowntree’s. The Quakers were also all about creating ‘societies of friends’ in their communities and corporations, and would set up worker programmes and settlement houses to create good corporate cultures among their workers.

Henry Isaac Rowntree

Joseph Rowntree

This sort of initiative interests me partly because I’m from the Rowntree family myself. My great-great grandfather was Henry Isaac Rowntree, who set up the chocolate company. He actually wasn’t a very good Quaker – he was the black sheep of the family, who shocked his strict religious community with his worldly views and his expletive-shrieking parrot (no, really). So he left the family grocer business and set up the chocolate firm. It was his more religious brother, Joseph, who came and helped him run the firm, who really created the company’s whole ‘Quaker culture’ – my grandmother (Henry’s granddaughter) likes to tell stories of how Joseph would make the workers go on long, bracing walks over the Yorkshire moors, and how they’d all bunk off to go to the pub.

The liberal individualist in me thinks I wouldn’t last long at Zappos – I’d be one of the awkward 10% who found the whole thing too collectivist and culty. I wouldn’t be able to stop pointing out the flaws in Hsieh’s happy philosophy – like many utilitarians, he simply can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t be utilitarian. He says things like: ‘The evidence suggests it doesn’t matter what values a company has, as long as the employees really believe in them.’  Well, that doesn’t sound so great – The News of the World or Goldman Sachs had employees who deeply believed in their company’s values. The problem was the values were wack.

Then again, the Quaker in me is aware that I’ve worked at the normal neo-liberal kind of corporation, where the only culture is ‘make the shareholders more money’, and that wasn’t much fun either. So I’m a freelancer now, in a company of one. Typical ambivalent liberal.

But let me just give the Zappos culture a bit of a poke, if you don’t mind. First of all, one of the company’s core values is ‘Be Humble’. But humility is not the word that comes to mind about Tony Hsieh. He told us he saw his role as a leader as partly ‘to get out of the way’ and let things happen. But when I read Delivering Happiness, he’s there in every single drawing.

Maybe it’s a difference between British and American cultures, but the guy is not shy about sharing his successes: the first box shows him delivering a speech to a hall of cheering employees. We see him setting up his first company at school, then getting into Harvard, we see his friends tell him at graduation that they are sure he will be a millionaire – and then see him making $250 million before he’s 30.

This leads to a typical sort of TED / Silicon Valley / Law of Attraction messiah complex. It’s just so damn easy to make millions of dollars, as long as you think positive! You can make a billion, and still be a cool guy with great ethics, right? Like Google, like Facebook, like LinkedIn. Everybody wins.

But not everybody wins. These big 90s-era Silicon Valley companies succeeded because they were disruptive technologies. They undermined existing business patterns and took market share from more traditional competitors – newspapers, high street book-stores, high-street shoe companies. ‘It’s good if they do that’, Tony told me, ‘because some of these bricks-and-mortar retailers haven’t changed their culture in 25 years.’ OK, but the culture of restless innovation is a young person’s culture. Zappos, judging by the comic book at least, seems to be very much a young person’s game.

I’m suspicious of the TED / Silicon Valley Messiah complex, because it suggests that dot.coms succeed because of the genius / spiritual power of individual entrepreneurs – the gospel according to Steve Jobs. It’s a view-point born out of incredible privilege and entitlement – sort of the corporate version of Esalen, the 1960s spiritual commune outside of San Francisco. But it ignores the historical and economic factors behind the individuals’ success (they are rich young kids who got to go to Harvard and never really lost in life) and behind the company’s success (once the internet was invented, there would always be new internet companies who reacted quickest and beat more traditional companies). And it ignores the losers in the new economic paradigm. Silicon Valley may be a ‘happy valley’ but it’s not that easy for the rest of the planet to achieve incredible wealth and personal fulfillment.

It’s an elitist model of happiness – Tony invokes Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, appropriately, because Maslow was a key figure in the ‘human potential’ movement which influenced Esalen and fed into Silicon Valley’s happy culture. But whenever anyone invokes Maslow’s pyramid of needs, you can bet they think they are at the top of it – the elite, the chosen ones, the beautiful people, the TED superheroes.

Zappos was bought two years ago by Amazon. Tony sold the company to preserve its unique happy culture. Amazon follows a similar economic model – the warehouse and website, without any stores or face-to-face customer interaction – but it does it without any of the happy evangelism. It is, in fact, a ruthless company. It made £3bn in profits in the UK last year, and didn’t pay any corporate tax. That’s at least partly how it beats the competition and drives bookstores out of business. Tony talks about the importance of aligning the company’s values with its shareholders – but he says: ‘Amazon has a completely different culture to us. A Zappos employee wouldn’t do well at Amazon, and vice versa.’

Few of the Zappos employees got a say in whether the company should be sold to Amazon. For all the happy culture, it’s still run by its biggest shareholders. It’s still a power structure, where you can be fired if you don’t fit in with the boss’s utilitarian values. And the model of happiness it’s delivering is still, basically, happiness through consumption, status, wealth and power. Isn’t it?