History of emotions new year round-up 2012

Posted on January 11, 2012 by

The history of emotions starts 2012 in good health and promises to continue to be a thriving and growing area of historical interest, both among scholars and more widely in the year ahead. By my reckoning there were at least 20 international conferences in the field in the last twelve months, hosted in locations including London, Oxford, Berlin, Geneva, The Hague, Copenhagen, Aix-en-Provence, Istanbul, Bucharest, Adelaide, and San Diego.

Emotions in History: Lost and Found by Ute Frevert

Notable books in the field published in 2011 included Patrick Coleman’s Anger, Gratitude and the Enlightenment Writer, Susan Matt’s Homesickness: An American History (see interview with Susan Matt on this blog), and Ute Frevert’s Emotions in History: Lost and Found (the Natalie Zemon Davies Lectures). Two history of emotions book series have been launched, one edited by Ute Frevert and Thomas Dixon for Oxford University Press, the other edited by Susan Matt and Peter Stearns for the Univeristy of Illinois Press.

Several special issues of journals have come out or are forthcoming devoted to various aspects of the history, philosophy, and science of emotions, as well as to social and cultural theories of affect (see the archives of the History of Emotions email list for details). In 2012 there will be more such journal numbers forthcoming, including one on Emotional Styles edited by Benno Gammerl as a special issue of Rethinking History.

At Queen Mary, we hosted events in the last twelve months on ‘Mastering the Emotions: Control, Contagion and Chaos, 1800 to the Present Day’ and on ‘Wandering Feelings: The Transmission of Emotion in the Long Nineteenth Century’. In September 2012 we will be hosting the Society for the Social History of Medicine’s biennial international conference – on the theme of ‘Emotions, Health and Wellbeing’. Our colleagues running centres for the history of emotions in Berlin and Australia have very active programmes of research and events, and many more centres are springing up in Europe, and around the world, and entering into collaborations on all sorts of projects.

The History of Emotions email list has been growing rapidly and now has over 900 subscribers. Anyone who subscribes to the list is welcome, indeed encouraged, to post announcements about events and publications of relevance to the broad area of history of emotions.

This blog, launched eight months ago in May 2011, currently receives about 2,500 visits per month. Thanks to the efforts of the members of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, including our new blog editor and Policy Director Jules Evans, and also the guest bloggers he has recruited, there have been fascinating posts on a wide range of historical, political, and cultural topics. If you would like to suggest a topic for a blog or offer to write a guest post yourself, do get in touch.

Some of the most read posts of the last few months have been:

Åsa Jansson’s review of the latest Lars von Trier film: ‘The story of Melancholia‘.

Thoughts on Lucien Febvre inspired by conferences at The Hague and at Queen Mary: ‘Sensibility and history‘.

Jules Evans on ’emotion work’ in the Occupy movement: ‘Occupy your heart chakra‘; and on assisted suicide: ‘Suicide and the law: Stoics versus Christians‘.

Tiffany Watt-Smith’s reflections on laughter inspired by a talk by Quentin Skinner: ‘Laughter and control‘.

Finally, two recent guest bloggers have posted great pieces about the history of love.

Sally Holloway, in the most popular post of 2011, wrote about the language and symbolism of the heart in 18th-century courtship: ‘Love darts and broken hearts‘

And, starting 2012 on a romantic note, Lesel Dawson reviewed Simon May’s new history of love: ‘A longing for belonging‘.

Happy new year!

p.s. You can now follow us on Twitter @emotionshistory

A Longing for Belonging

Posted on January 6, 2012 by

This is a review of Simon May’s Love: A History, by guest-blogger Lesel Dawson, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Bristol University. She is the author of Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (OUP, 2008), and is currently working on a project on revenge tragedy, from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon to Tarantino’s Kill Bill, focusing in particular on depictions of mothers as agents of vengeance. She writes a blog for the Huffington Post.

When I first moved to the UK I was struck by how pessimistic everyone seemed (a far cry from California where everyone commands you smilingly to ‘Have a nice day!’). However, after living in the UK for almost twenty years, I’ve come round to British grumpiness as having unexpected practical and psychological benefits. In life, as in weather, if you expect the rain you bring an umbrella and are pleasantly surprised when the sun comes out. However, Simon May has claimed that there is at least one area in which the Brits (along with the rest of the Western world) are die-hard optimists.

In Love: A History, May argues that today’s view of love as selfless, unconditional, and open to all, is the product of our need for something sacred in an increasingly secular world; it plays a key role in our search for moral value, ‘enabling each of us to become an authentic being amid a crumbling and spiritually insufficient collective identity’ (239). May believes that this view not only distorts the thoroughly conditional and self-interested nature of love, but also inhibits the possibility of the real give-and-take necessary for healthy intimate relationships with friends, family, lovers and spouses. Exploring some of the key ideas about love found in theology, philosophy, psychology and literature from Hebrew scripture to Proust, May attempts to explain how this view of love has come into being; he points out some interesting similarities and tensions between major movements and thinkers, and puts forward his own view of love as being part of a wider need for humans to feel that they are ‘at home in the world’ (7). For May, love is a desire for ‘ontological rootedness’, granting (or undermining) a person’s sense that s/he ‘exists as a real, legitimate and sustainable being’ (36).

Rossetti's depiction of Dante's idealized beloved, Beatrice

Although May does not differentiate between the love felt for one’s spouse, child, friend, or country, the exaggeration of love’s meaning is perhaps most evident in romantic love, which at various moments has been thought to offer the lover a means of self-completion, purification, or transcendence. As May’s book makes clear, a number of traditions require that the lover achieve psychic distance from the beloved in order to attain higher goals. Looking across various approaches, I cannot help but wonder if the very process by which the human beloved is elevated to a higher ideal (or seen to embody abstract notions such as beauty and truth) might secretly depend upon not knowing the person all that well. In the Renaissance one of the best cures for lovesickness was sex, not only because it allowed the (usually) male lover to satisfy his desires, but also because intimate knowledge of the beloved was thought to disabuse the lover of his dreams. By actually getting to know the mistress, the suitor would have to relinquish his private self-created fantasy of the beloved in favour of a living, breathing human being.

Unfortunately, some men didn’t find this a very good exchange; for them intimacy with the beloved led, not to an appreciation of her particular qualities, but rather to a sense that they had been duped into believing that someone disgusting was beautiful. Many Renaissance poems, which oscillate between elevating and vilifying the mistress, reproduce this tension, demonstrating the ways in which idealization and misogyny are really two sides of the same coin. Although May does not focus on gender, one can imagine how some of his arguments could be used to demonstrate the ways in which idealistic constructions of love have helped to foster unrealistic ideas of women, contributing to the ways in which women have alternatively been seen as objects of veneration or disgust.

Although May’s account purports to offer a sceptical view of love, his views are a far cry from the materialism of the Roman philosopher, Lucretius, or the subversive radicalism of Freud (both of whom he discusses), or even from some popular ideas which see it as a pathology or addiction. Moreover, despite his warnings about the dangers of overloading love with meaning, he does not think that love needs to be confined to the object of affection in order to flourish. Rather, love—understood by May as a desire for grounding in the world—is always destined to have a ‘double orientation’ (247), directed both at the love object and beyond him or her. Such a view, as May highlights, draws on the writings of (amongst others) Plato, Augustine, and Freud. Indeed, ultimately May can be seen as a reconciler of various philosophies, synthesizing and critiquing approaches while adding his own particular spin.

This is not meant to belittle his achievement. For in addition to offering a history of love and a warning about love’s deification, Love: A History is also a guide to loving well, which May believes should be founded on hard-work, patient cultivation, and a realistic apprehension of the beloved. If May neglects anything, it is the irrational, anarchic, and destructive aspects of desire, and the psychological structures underlying these. And while May draws a sharp line between a possessive desire to control another (which is not love) and love’s true possession based on submission (‘In love as in music, to submit and give ourselves is the only way genuinely to possess’, 247), I wonder if the two are really so distinct. Nonetheless, Love: A History is an intelligent, thought-provoking, and (at times) lyrical contribution to the history of love, which engages interestingly with some of its key philosophies and contemplates how we might ensure that our passionate attachments can deepen and endure over time. In the end then, what at first glance looks like May’s scepticism turns out to be his psychological strategy for love’s cultivation. Although most of us would struggle to achieve the constancy of love advocated in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 116’—a love ‘That looks on tempests and is never shaken’—if we take May’s eminently sensible advice to heart, we might at least find ourselves a bit better prepared for some of love’s storms.

Suicide and the law: Stoics versus Christians

Posted on January 5, 2012 by

In the UK today, the Commission on Assisted Dying published the results of its year-long inquiry today, recommending that English law be changed so that it is legal to assist the suicide of anyone over 18 suffering from a terminal illness with a prognosis of less than a year.

Prime minister David Cameron has said he has no intention of changing the law, which at present treats any assistance as murder or manslaughter. He’s set out his stall as a Christian prime minister, so doesn’t want to wade into such a contentious moral issue. But nonetheless, the Commission’s recommendation is another blow in the centuries-old tussle between the Stoics and the Christians over the right to take your own life.

Socrates is sometimes taken as a champion of suicide, because he drank the cup of hemlock after being sentenced to death for impiety: indeed, one of the leading campaign groups for the right to die in the US was called the Hemlock Society. In fact, in the Phaedo, which describes Socrates’ last moments, Socrates argues that suicide is a crime against God, because our lives belong to God, not to us, therefore we’re harming something that doesn’t belong to us – a position that would later be adopted by St Augustine. Socrates doesn’t think he’s killed himself, rather he’s obeyed the execution order of the Athenian court (and also the order of his daemon, who tells him not to flee Athens).

As the Centre’s director, Thomas Dixon, has argued on this blog, it was really Socrates’ descendants, the Stoics, who insisted on humans’ moral right to end their own lives. For the Stoics, suicide is (or can be) an expression of our autonomy and dignity as rational humans. It is the ultimate lifestyle choice. Seneca wrote: “Just as I choose a ship to sail in or a house to live in, so I choose a death for my passage through life.” We may have little control in our lives, but we always retain the final option of taking our own lives, if the circumstances of our life become too unpleasant – though naturally, as Stoics, we would take our lives with unflappable efficiency rather than stormy passion.

And yet the Stoics were also theists – their ethics are based on the idea that we should calmly accept whatever circumstances God sends us. So how could they justify suicide? They seem to get round this paradox by arguing it’s acceptable to kill oneself if God sends you a sign or a summons that it’s time to shuffle off. Thus Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school, killed himself after he tripped and broke his toe in his old age. He took this as a sign from God summoning him to end his life, and killed himself by either holding his breath or starving himself, according to different reports. His successor, Cleanthes, likewise killed himself in advanced old age by starving himself. Stoics seemed to think it was acceptable to kill yourself if you were either very old, or are facing the prospect of torture, imprisonment or execution by a tyrant. In that instance, suicide is an expression of autonomy – you are denying the tyrant the ability to imprison you or take your life by ending it yourself, on your own terms.

Thus Cato the Younger, after losing a key battle in the Roman Civil War, killed himself rather than be taken prisoner by Augustus Caesar. Likewise Seneca kills himself when accused of treachery by the emperor Nero (as shown in the painting by Rubens above). Both Cato and Seneca try to stage-manage their deaths, to be the ‘authors of the script of their dying’, as the thinker Charles Leadbetter puts it. They both follow the script laid down by Plato in the Phaedo – Cato actually spends his last hours reading the Phaedo (obviously skipping over the passage condemning suicide) – and both their suicides became famous scenes, often portrayed in paintings like that of Rubens above, as instances of pagan virtue and courage.

Yet it’s worth noting that, in both instances, death eluded their ability to stage-manage it. Cato failed to kill himself outright, and spent his last moments in agony. Seneca slit his wrists, but the blood flowed too slowly to kill him. So he slit veins and arteries in his legs, but that didn’t work either. So he took a poison, but again it took too long to take effect. So finally his servants carried him into a steaming hot bath. There, he dripped water onto his servants, saying he annointed them. I find that pathetic, in the old meaning of the word: Seneca desperately trying to maintain his dignity while his carefully stage-managed death keeps on going wrong. The steam from the bath finally suffocated him, apparently.

The Stoic defence of suicide was accepted by Roman law, and suicide remained legal under Christian law until the 4th century BC, when St Augustine returned to the Platonic position that our lives are not ours for the taking. By the 12th century, Christian theologians, while celebrating many aspects of Stoicism and revering the likes of Seneca as quasi-saints, were careful to argue that the Stoics got the issue of suicide very wrong. In fact, the word ‘suicide’ comes from the neologism suicidium, from a 12th century Christian tract written against Seneca. During the Renaissance, when Seneca and Stoicism enjoyed a big revival, thinkers again pondered whether the Stoics or the Christians were right about suicide. The most famous speech in the English language is, in fact, a consideration of just this issue:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them?

By the eighteenth century, as Christianity declined as a cultural force in Europe, and people’s belief in the supernatural began to weaken, philosophers and writers dared to voice their support for people’s right to kill themselves, should life become unbearable. David Hume, for example, attempted in an essay called On Suicide, written in 1755, to ‘restore men to their native liberty by showing that [suicide] may be free from every imputation of guilt, or blame, according to the sentiments of the ancient philosophers’. Hume argues that ‘such is our natural horror of death no man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping’. But Hume did not dare to publish his defence of suicide in his lifetime – his essay was published posthumously in 1783.

Today, the Stoics seem to be winning the argument. The baby-boomer generation, like the Stoics, are increasingly demanding the right to stage-manage their own deaths, to make their deaths the ultimate lifestyle choice.

Suicide finally became legalised in the UK in 1961, while assisted suicide was effectively decriminalised in 2010 by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). Since then, there have been around 40 instances of assisted suicide in England and Wales which were not prosecuted. But the area is still murky: the DPP says it is OK to assist suicide if the final act is taken by the dying person, but if the assistant gives the final injection, they can be (and are) tried for manslaughter.

It’s one of the most difficult, painful areas to consider and discuss. Perhaps today the debate is moving beyond the Stoic versus Christian argument about ‘whose life is it anyway’, and is particularly focused on how we can protect the vulnerable from being pressured into dying by others.

Love darts and broken hearts

Posted on December 19, 2011 by

Studying the language used to describe the making and breaking of marriages grants us a unique insight into the expression of emotions such as love, joy, sorrow and loss. In the eighteenth century, couples engaging in troubled courtships drew extensively upon the language of the heart, conceptualising their hearts in particular ways according to their changing romantic misfortunes.  They used terms such as ‘heart’, ‘chest’ and ‘breast’ interchangeably in their letters, while ballads even placed a lover’s heart in the breast of another. However notions of the ‘afflicted’, ‘diseased’, ‘plagued’ and ‘broken’ heart each had subtly different meanings, and were used in a particular way to denote the various stages of romantic breakdown. This began when the heart was initially cut or pierced by love, which began to pull on their heartstrings when matters took a turn for the worse. This resulted in disease or damage to the heart, which finally broke or died within them. Notably absent in their discourse were descriptions of the heart suffering on the cross, or the Catholic imagery of the heart bleeding or on fire.

 
The initial damage to a lover’s heart was caused by a metaphorical weapon such as an arrow or dagger which was said to cut or pierce it. The image of the heart pierced by love was frequently depicted on love tokens such as staybusks to symbolise the initial injury made by love, and the beginning of a lover’s commitment (see the image on the left, a Welsh treen staybusk love token from 1777). This mirrors Petrarch’s description of the first time he encountered Laura, dramatising ‘the bow and all the arrows that have pierced me, / the wounds that reach the bottom of my heart.’ Such injuries were frequently described by lovers writing letters to one another, with the Reverend Charles Powlett describing how the events of his troubled courtship with Anne Temple had ‘cut me to the Heart’ in 1790. This damage could be done deliberately, with Richard Law attempting to reassure the object of his affection Jane Townley in 1816 that his pleading to marry her should not ‘be construed to planting Daggers in your Breast.’

The symbolism of the wounded heart was shaped by competing religious and classical discourses, centring on the spear which pierced the heart of Jesus and the arrows fired by Venus’s son Cupid, which inspired love in unsuspecting individuals. In the etching ‘Little Cupid’s a Mischievous Boy’ (1829, see below), Cupid sits on the fence holding an arrow ready to shoot at a milkmaid. She dangles her heart from a chain held in her hand, while her hapless suitor bears a heart shot through with two arrows on his shirt. This would have alerted those viewing the image that he had received the initial wound of love, while the heart she held in her hand remained vulnerable to attack.

 

 

 

The heart wounded by arrows was granted increasing prominence in the celebration of Valentine’s Day in the 1820s and 1830s, as demonstrated by Cruikshank’s etching of the month ‘February’ in 1837 (Fig. 3.) It depicts an enraptured suitor joyfully clutching the place where an arrow shot by his beloved has entered his heart. Above him, a man with open arms waits with eager anticipation for an arrow to strike him in the chest.

 


Once the initial wound had been made to a lover’s heart, they were particularly vulnerable to becoming diseased or afflicted by romantic strife. Writers may have been influenced by the language of ballads such as ‘Phillida Flouts Me’ (written c. 1600) which likened love to a fatal plague, wailing ‘Oh what a Plague is Love / I cannot bear it.’ Other poems in 1797 described soldier’s wives as ‘languid and sick at heart’ due to separation from their spouses. The chaplain’s daughter Anne Temple drew upon these discourses of sick or diseased hearts when describing her suitor Charles’s pain in 1794, writing after the death of his mother that ‘I would speak comfort and consolation to you, but alas! I know from too fatal experience that the heart in affliction like yours refuses it as vain and ill times.’ Richard Law also described his heart as ‘plagued’ by Jane Townley in November 1817, cruelly addressing her as ‘thou inveterate Plague of my heart.’

For lovers such as the tailor’s daughter Sarah Hurst, their failing courtships were enough to cause ‘my Heart strings to part.’ Such terminology was part of the legacy of ancient conceptions of anatomy, where the tendons or nerves were thought to brace and sustain the heart. As Abraham Taylor preached in his treatise of 1730, when ‘our heartstrings break, if we rely on Christ by faith, we may have abundant support.’ The heart’s ‘strings’ were thus seen to govern the workings of the heart as an organ, holding it together and ultimately breaking when it failed. Heart-strings described in poetry were seen to throb, suffer or burst due to the high passions of love; in As you like it, a poem, addressed to a friend (1785), the muse experienced ‘Her heartstrings throbbing’ while the protagonist of Quashiba’s Return (1791) described how ‘my heartstrings were rent into twain; / And my breast did with jealousy burn’ as Quashiba had wronged him.

The final stage of a lover’s sorrow was the breaking or death of the heart; as Sarah Hurst wrote in her diary during her separation from Major Henry Smith in 1759, ‘My Heart dies within me.’ Sarah may have been influenced by the book of Samuel in the Old Testament, where the foolish Nabal’s ‘heart died within him’ as he was avenged by God. The expression may also have arisen from ballads such as ‘Phillida Flouts Me’, where the hero described how love ‘so Torments my mind / that my heart faileth.’ Other ballads simply anticipated the possibility that the heart might break, with one figure who ‘thought that my Heart would been broken’, and another whose heart was ‘ready to break’, but not actually doing so. While the broken heart of the lover was irreparably damaged by suffering, the human heart broken by sin could be healed by God, with psalms promising that ‘The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart’ and Luke sent by God ‘To heale the broken harted.’

By describing their hearts as easily (and sometimes deliberately) damaged by others, courting couples crafted the heart as a vulnerable organ which could be irreparably damaged by love. Their hearts were variously cut, stabbed, pierced, wounded, torn apart, plagued and diseased, as the damaged heart was associated with physical injury to the body as well as providing a metaphor for their misfortune. This richly detailed language was influenced by a range of sources including ballads, poems, scripture, classical mythology and contemporary prints, providing lovers with a unique vocabulary with which to understand and express their anguished emotions.

The emotions of catastrophe

Posted on December 16, 2011 by

This is a guest post by Michael Facius, M.A, a Research Fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He is currently finishing his PhD thesis on “Chinese knowledge and globalization in 19th century Japan”. His new research topic explores the role of emotions in the history of disasters in Japan.

Aerial shot of the Fukushima nuclear plant, under creative commons

Disasters and catastrophes connect with a wide range of emotions: affected individuals and communities in shock and agony, the bereaved mourning for the dead, politicians and disaster managers emanating professional calmness. After the first shock is overcome, anger and frustration might kick in when the “blame game” begins and recovery efforts are slow. Those who have been spared the experience might donate out of feeling of sympathy.
While the above depicts a set of familiar emotional reactions to disasters, there are wide variations in different times and cultures. After the Japanese triple disaster on March 11, many Western observers were surprised by the stoic attitude inhabitants of areas affected by the disaster displayed in the face of the loss of their home, family and livelihood. If this had happened in Europe or the United States, some speculated, mass panic and anti-social behavior would have been the ugly consequence.

It is not implausible to assume that different cultures exhibit different emotional responses to disasters. The anthropologist Greg Bankoff coined the term “cultures of disaster” to describe how communities adapt to the frequent exposure to hazard and disaster over time. In the Philippines, he argued, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions wove the population into a “fabric of disaster” that made them embrace bahala na, a kind of active fatalism, vis-à-vis a cruel nature. So would it not be natural if the “earthquake nation” (Gregory Clancey) Japan had developed comparable emotional coping mechanisms, even if they seem strange and exotic to us?

Yet, cultural difference is not the sole factor in determining emotional reactions to disasters. It was not the Japanese Tenno who was “impressed by the stoic and heroic manner of the people who had obviously been through a bad and trying time, suffering heavy losses”, but Queen Elizabeth II., as the Times reported upon her visit to a village afflicted by a flood in 1953.

On the other hand, in a recent workshop on post-Fukushima Japan, a participant who had been in Tokyo at the time the disaster struck related that in the days and weeks following the disaster many Tokyoites sensed that the calm and subdued atmosphere might devolve into panic, including looting and mass flight, any minute.

After the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which devastated much of the Kanto area centered on Tokyo and killed more than 100.000 people, rumors sprang up that members of the Korean minority were taking advantage of the situation by looting, setting fires and poisoning wells. Emotional tension in the wake of the disaster combined with anti-Korean resentments and led to massacres with a death toll of somewhere between 2.000 and 6.000.

Still, even though there are examples of moral breakdown such as the above, empirical research has shown that in general mass panic and anti-social behavior are not a huge issue in post-disaster situations anywhere but are, on the whole, “disaster myths”. In reality, people tend to pull themselves up and help others.

Where do these myths come from? Pop culture, and the genre of disaster film in particular, plays an important role in framing our expectations about emotional and behavioral reactions to disasters. This became obvious after the terror attacks of 9/11 when victims and spectators repeatedly stressed how the whole event felt “like a movie”.
The link binding disasters as events to their perception as movie-like is not just empty association. Theater studies scholar James Thompson has recently made the point that contemporary post-disaster aid is best described as a performance, that aid organizations and the media work together to stage relief and rebuilding activities in particular ways. Disaster coverage is scripted on the one hand to satisfy expectations about appropriate emotional reactions of the affected population and on the other hand to elicit a culturally defined set of emotional reactions in the viewer.

The coverage of the relief efforts after the South Asian Tsunami in 2004 depicted communities affected by the disaster as helpless victims unable to cope and rebuild their lives without help from (Western) aid organizations. In return for the aid, recipients staged “rituals of gratefulness” such as dances and opening ceremonies for rebuilt schools and houses. The question of whether help is actually needed becomes secondary in this game of aid performance.

In the case of the post-Fukushima coverage, different staging strategies were employed. Crying or desperate disaster victims were excluded from most news reports in the West so as not to unsettle the exoticist notion of some singularly Japanese samurai (or worse, kamikaze) spirit shared by many reporters and viewers – a feedback loop of cultural stereotyping and a validation of the emotional regime that governs our responses to disaster.
One particular striking (if failed) attempt at staging disaster emotions can be found in a mail sent to a well-known Japanese intellectual by a correspondent of a major German news outlet. The correspondent wanted to know whether there was a “typical Japanese approach” to the “very surprising fact” that the Japanese stayed in Japan in spite of radiation leaking from the Fukushima-Daiichi plant. The intellectual refused to answer the question and tried to explain what was wrong about it, but the correspondent did not seem very eager to rethink her standpoint and eventually gave up.

These are some examples for the many ways in which studies in the history of emotions and disaster research intersect. In fact, I would like to argue that disasters cannot be fully understood without adding emotions to the equation. Emotions are not just part of a response to disasters. They play a crucial role in making us experience an event as disaster in the first place.

How to bridge the Two Cultures?

Posted on December 12, 2011 by

Lisa Jardine, centenary professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London, put forward an interesting essay on Radio 4 on Sunday, looking at CP Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’, and the rise of technocratic government (you can read her essay here). She said:

The scientist, novelist and British civil servant CP Snow is probably best remembered for his controversial lecture The Two Cultures And The Scientific Revolution, on the gulf of incomprehension separating the arts and sciences, delivered in 1959. In it he argued that in spite of the increasing importance of science, British intellectual life continued to be dominated by the traditional humanities. Today his argument continues to resonate, though perhaps now economics has joined science as a specialist field which baffles those who have received only an arts education.

A year after his Two Cultures lecture, Snow expanded on his argument and gave it an added sense of urgency in his 1960 Science and Government lectures, delivered at Harvard. He warned that at a time when specialist scientific understanding was indispensable, those charged with taking vital political decisions had no proper grasp on the issues. “One of the most bizarre features of our time,” he wrote. “Is that the cardinal choices have to be made by a handful of men who cannot have a first-hand knowledge of what those choices depend upon or what their results may be.”

She continued:

[I]t is, in my view, high time that we renewed and intensified our efforts to realise Snow’s as yet unrealised goal. Because as I see it, the issue today is not whether the sciences or the humanities get more funding out of the shamefully small pot currently allocated to higher education. It is rather whether the educated elites in both sectors are prepared to stand side by side to insist that informed, educated debate is needed wherever political policy has to be formed in so-called “technical”, “specialist” areas of life. Which today means those number and formula driven disciplines with which the humanities-trained struggle to engage.

In current debates about GM crops, nuclear energy and climate change, the public at large – including governments and senior administrators – are liable to be swayed by the most persuasive of the advisers or interest groups, because they are not equipped with the knowledge or the reasoned strategies needed to judge. Many of them are dismayed by any argument that involves number and maths.

Currently, this tendency to be swayed by experts is most clearly to be seen in the field of economics. Recently two nations within the European Union, Greece and Italy, have replaced their elected prime ministers by so-called technocrats – men with a significant track record in finance, but not experience of government at local or national level.

In the case of Italy, the entire cabinet consists of financial specialists. The non-elected prime minister’s people head “governments of national unity” which pursue policies for which nobody in the electorate voted. Indeed, they are not expected to consider the interests of the public, except insofar as introducing austerity measures sufficiently swingeing to satisfy the international markets is supposed ultimately to ensure the solvency of the nation as a whole.Are we really comfortable leaving grave political decisions to technocrats whose successes have been measured in terms of investment yields?

The rule of a few wise men is oligarchy, not democracy. So democracy depends upon our being able to sustain informed debate in the fields of science and economics. Each and every one of us has to take responsibility for the decisions that shape the future of the nation as a whole. But we will only be able to do that if those we have elected to govern us can master the technical aspects of difficult decision making – and if we in our turn are able to follow their arguments.

How could we create a better dialogue between the two cultures? I would suggest the divorce begins at A-Level and continues at university, and is the product of over-specialisation forced on young people too early. Focusing entirely on one subject throughout university leaves people unprepared for the complexity of life. It reduces the richness of their experience, denying them the opportunity to consider ideas and research from other disciplines. And it inspires the ridiculous ‘culture wars’, where the sciences and humanities see each other as rival countries to be attacked or raided, because there are so few people who are comfortable in both worlds.

One solution might be to move to a system closer to the American model, where students can major in one subject while still being able to study and attend lectures on other subjects. It could even become compulsory for undergraduates in sciences to take one course in humanities, and vice versa.

And we need more generalists, more people able to see the benefits, and to understand the aims and language, of both cultures. We have many excellent examples of that at Queen Mary. Another great example is Jonah Lehrer, the writer of Proust was a Neuroscientist. If you haven’t read the book, I very much recommend it: he looks at 12 or so figures from modernist literature, and shows how their ideas anticipated recent advances in neuroscience. His aim, explicitly, is to build a ‘third culture’ that bridges the arts and sciences. (The image at the top is from Scientific American, and is designed by Matt Collins).

 

Uncontrollable dancing

Posted on December 6, 2011 by

I’m fascinated by the idea of uncontrollable dancing. It seems a world away now, but it was once a familiar cultural phenomenon. In ancient Greek culture, for example, we read of the wild followers of Dionysus, also known as ho lysios or ‘he who grants release’. His followers were, apparently, released from all the prohibitions of civilisation, and would whirl and dance around until they achieved a state of mind called enthousiasmos, or ‘having the God within oneself’.

In the Middle Ages, there were frequent outbreaks of dancing mania, also known as St Vitus’ Dance or dancing plague, because the mania was sometimes thought to be a curse sent by St Vitus, patron saint of dancing. Those afflicted would end up dancing in front of his shrine, praying to be released from their ordeal. In 1278, 200 people were seized by the mania in Germany, and danced on a bridge over the river Meuse, causing it to collapse. There was a particularly bad outbreak in 1518, when a lady, Frau Troffea, started to dance in a street in Strasbourg. Within a week, 34 people joined her, and within a month, there were around 400 dancers, some of whom eventually died from exhaustion.

Psychologists now think these outbreaks are an extreme example of ‘social contagion’, or perhaps a reaction to adverse circumstances like economic depression: think of the acid house parties that spread across the country in the recession of the early 1990s. I remember seeing people at nightclubs in the 1990s who literally could not stop dancing, though of course they were on a lot of drugs.

We still see remnants of this idea of uncontrolled ecstatic dancing in our own more straight-laced times. Musicians used to say someone ‘got the funk’ – a word which historians think comes from the African word lu-fuki, meaning sweat, as if ‘the funk’ is some sort of sweat-lodge shamanic training. People also speak of ‘getting loose’, ‘getting down’, ‘working it out’, ‘getting into the groove’: all of this suggests, to me, that when we dance, we somehow re-connect with what contemporary psychologists call our automatic-emotive thinking system, which seems to respond particularly to patterns, beats or loops. Perhaps dancing allows us to re-connect to this system and somehow ‘work out’ emotions or drives that our rational civilisation forces us to inhibit.

Even if we don’t see many examples of uncontrolled or involuntary dancing on the streets, alas, we still see references to it in the arts. Here, for example, is an example of a Dionysiac-esque outbreak from the BBC comedy, The Mighty Boosh.

There’s the enthousiasmos of the Blues Brothers in a church run, appropriately enough, by the godfather of funk, James Brown.

The famous T-Mobile advert is, from one point of view, a recreation of a medieval outbreak of dancing mania:

My favourite example is Baloo losing control of himself in the Jungle Book.

The Story of Melancholia

Posted on November 28, 2011 by

Kirsten Dunst as Justine, 'trudging through grey woolly yarn' in Melancholia (©2011 Zentropa Entertainments ApS27)

What is melancholia? In Danish writer and director Lars von Trier’s latest film Melancholia, it is a planet. The planet is, perhaps, in turn a metaphor for melancholia. Which brings us no closer to an answer. The film has been described by one critic as ‘one of the strangest, most beautiful things in recent cinema’, while another called it ‘entirely ridiculous, often quite boring’. Regardless of its entertainment value, however, for anyone with a scholarly interest in the emotions Melancholia raises some questions worthy of consideration. Von Trier suggests that the idea for the film came from his psychoanalyst, who told him that ‘melancholics will usually be more level-headed than ordinary people in a disastrous situation, partly because they can say “What did I tell you” … But also because they have nothing to lose.’

In von Trier’s film, Melancholia is the name of a rogue planet that crashes into earth, causing its destruction. The story depicts the lives and relationships of a handful of people in the lead-up to this Armageddon. It centres upon the sisters Justine and Claire, who are portrayed as each other’s conceptual and visual opposites; from disposition and outlook on life to hair colour and accent. We see Justine sink further and further into the throes of what is presumably meant to be ‘clinical depression’. Claire tries to care for her, a frustrating task. Meanwhile, the planet Melancholia moves closer to earth. Claire’s husband John assures his wife and their son that the planet will pass the earth by. The ‘fly-by’ will be a spectacular sight, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but the planets will not collide, Melancholia will continue on its way and all will be well. But Claire is anxious and scared. John eventually discovers that he is wrong and proceeds to take a lethal overdose of pills rather than face the end of the world. Justine, who has been barely functioning, remains calm as disaster strikes. The world is evil, she says, and does not deserve to continue.

It has been suggested that the script grew out of von Trier’s own experience of ‘depression’, but calling the film ‘Major Depressive Episode’ would not, perhaps, have had the same artistic and melodramatic ring to it. What, then, is ‘melancholia’ meant to convey to the viewer? How important is the choice of word here? Is the film trying to describe the experience of that which medicine calls depressive illness? Melancholia does not feature as a medical diagnosis in either the ICD-10 or the DSM-IV-TR, yet the term pops up every so often in both popular and medical writings. It is evident that the word has no simple, clear meaning.

‘Melancholia’ has been used to denote a vast number of things throughout history. Once upon a time, it was a disease resulting from an excess of black bile in the body. The word has also (and sometimes simultaneously) been used to describe a raving madness, the pain and torment of male artistic genius, and profound religious guilt. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, and particularly during the second half, melancholia was a mental disease frequently diagnosed among British asylum populations. One prominent late-Victorian physician defined this illness as ‘mental pain, emotional depression, and sense of ill-being, usually more intense than in melancholy, with loss of self-control, or insane delusions, or uncontrollable impulses towards suicide, with no proper capacity left to follow ordinary avocations, with some of the ordinary interests of life destroyed, and generally with marked bodily symptoms.’ The medical diagnosis melancholia began to fall into disuse in the early twentieth century, though it has continued to emerge in psychiatric literature from time to time until the present. In recent years, a group of clinicians have been working for a reinstatement of melancholia as a medical diagnosis separate from depression – a more severe mood disorder characterised by ‘vegetative dysfunction’ and ‘psychomotor disturbances’, and ‘verifiable by neuroendocrine tests’.

Meanwhile melancholia has served many uses in literature and poetry, and even in political writings. It is perhaps particularly useful as a semantic device in English language writing, where few nouns exist to describe a state of mind which is at once calm, fearful, despairing, brooding, restless, hollow, and longing for something inexpressible. Von Trier’s Melancholia appears to attempt to capture this emotion, or set of emotions. However, there is also a strong undertone of the medical in the film’s narrative. Justine’s illness (it is referred to by her sister as illness) plays out like a textbook case of severe depressive disorder: retarded physical movement, hypersomnia, excessive sadness, refusal to eat, and indifference to the world around her as well as to her own personal hygiene. It is interesting that what is performed is more a medical description than an individual experience. We get little access to Justine’s emotions and virtually no invitation to identify with her state of mind; we are merely observing her the way a physician might observe a patient. Only for the briefest of moments is Justine’s ‘illness’ communicated in her own words, when she describes to her sister the feeling of ‘trudging through this grey, woolly yarn’.

What Melancholia succeeds in conveying more than anything else is that the term has no simple, single meaning, nor has it ever possessed one. The film also (though in all likelihood unintentionally) highlights the uncomfortable relationship between depression and melancholia as two (or several) disease concepts with very different histories, but which we nonetheless often want to see as synonymous. This is particularly the case with psychiatric texts which look to the past for evidence of mental illness as historically universal. But the emotions, as historians of this fascinating topic (or topics) are aware, are steeped in, indeed produced by, the language available for their expression. Thus ‘melancholia’, a word with a long and conceptually colourful and varied history, can never be simply a more eloquent or dramatic stand-in for ‘depression’, a word (and a concept or concepts) with its own historical trajectory.

Sentiments and the City

Posted on November 22, 2011 by

Camilla Schjerning of the University of Copenhagen and Mara Ferreri of QMUL’s School of Geography are both giving talks as part of the Centre for the History of the Emotions’ lunch-time seminars’ series on Wednesday November 23, from 1-2pm in Room 3.16 in Arts Two. Please contact Adam Wilkinson at the Centre if you’d like to attend. The theme of the seminar is Sentiments and the City.

Mara’s talk is called Emotional economies of vacant spaces reuse: performing ‘reactivation’. She writes:

Since the financial crisis of 2008-09, vacant commercial premises on the high street have become haunted by the spectre of the global recession. In the UK it’s been recently estimated that 1 in 7 high street shops lies vacant, approaching 30% in many town centres in the north and the Midlands. To dispel this ghost, an array of nation-wide ‘art in empty shops’ schemes and projects have called upon artists and cultural practitioners to ‘creatively’ occupy empty sites and perform urban vibrancy, a sort of relational window-dressing to project the promise of a return to economic growth.  In the promotion of such ‘pop-up’ and ‘interim’ projects, empty shops are described as anxious places that generate emotional landscapes of uncertainty and fear. In the words of a practitioner: “there’s the simple fact: an empty space attracts negative perceptions and negative behaviour.  And if that is occupied, you remove that blight.” Vacancy is seen as a contagious affect, potentially spreading to the ‘healthy’ social and economic fabric of the city unless it’s curbed in its infancy. Practices of temporary empty shop reuse are expected to intervene in this charged landscape through the production of ‘positive’ emotional and affectual urban experiences.

In London, the symptoms of the crisis of the retail sector have been less visible than elsewhere, yet ‘pop-up’ and short-term reuses have been proliferating, thanks to a variety of established and recently-formed artistic and social networks and organisations. Through in-depth and longitudinal conversations with practitioners and participants, I have attempted to explore the embodied dimensions of empty space occupation, as well as their conflictive subjective positions. Emotional accounts of these projects expose the ways in which the expectation of urban vibrancy is internalised and embodied by cultural practitioners into their everyday interpersonal relations with passers-by and shoppers. Practitioners’ personalised expression of emotions are important not as representations of some ‘authentic’ inner subjective reality, but because in the moments of vocalisation lies the possibility for a critical discussion of these practices and their position within complex urban dynamics of spatial production.

Camilla’s talk is called Behind thin walls: emotions and privacy in the early modern city. She writes:

In the autumn of 1771 an ordinary seaman on guard in Nyboder, an area in the city inhabited by the naval community, is ordered to go to a house nearby and ‘steer to order’ two quarreling seamen’s wives. While he is standing with them in their shared kitchen, attempting to calm tempers, though apparently to no avail, as suddenly one of the women lifts up her dress and exposes her behind to the other, saying ‘this is an old woman, too’! This is neither the first time that the seaman or his colleagues have been sent to the house to mediate between the two neighbours, arguing one day about the front door, the next about the disciplining of children.

This small snippet is taken from one among many – albeit one of the more colourful of its kind – conflicts, which had at its centre matters of private space and privacy and is to be found in the court materials of late eighteenth century Copenhagen. Here, a large part of the inhabitants lived their life behind thin walls in a world where privacy was a rare luxury. This meant that private space and its boundaries were wrought with strong feelings – feelings that point towards the existence of different notions of privacy within different communities in the city. Furthermore, the conflicts offer a window into the geography of conflict and how this intersected with the social and gendered topography of the city to shape notions of privacy in the early modern Copenhagen.