AnaMartaGonzale 2013 IntroductionEmotional TheEmotionsAndCultura

Introduction
Emotional Culture and the Role of Emotions

in Cultural Analysis
Ana Marta González
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In recent years the emotions have become a dominant theme in all areas of
knowledge. It is thus important to know what they are, what causes them, how
they are expressed, how they affect the cognitive processes, what they tell us
about ourselves and about others, and how to tell the difference between authentic
emotions and bogus ones.
With the burgeoning of perspectives on the emotions, we are also increasingly
aware of the complexity of studying them, particularly because they involve a
curious confluence of natural and cognitive elements that has always puzzled
researchers. However, it is precisely this confluence that makes the emotions a
privileged starting point for the study of what is human and what makes them a
gateway for the study of culture.
Indeed, from a certain perspective, the characteristic duality of the emotions
is proof of the singular stature of human life, neither purely organic-natural nor
purely rational. This mixed character suggests a special role for the emotions in
cultural life, since culture can also be characterized as mediation between nature
and reason. Not surprisingly, then, although human emotions certainly have an
organic dimension that is partially shared with non-human animals, they usually
involve highly complex cognitive elements whose adequate expression cannot be
abstracted from the cultural resources at hand. Were we to bypass the various
cultural expressions of emotions, we would risk missing what makes them
recognizably human.
Emotional Regimes
Accordingly, emotion studies can benefit from cultural analysis as much as cultural
analysis can benefit from the study of emotions. A promising way to bridge the gap
between both fields is the notion of an “emotional regime,” by which is meant the
social expectations regarding adequate emotional expression in any given context.
Meeting existing emotional expectations has obvious consequences for social
Copyright 2013. Routledge.
bonding, but human bonding itself is not as easy as it might seem at first sight. As
Thomas Scheff notes, while “bonding in the animal world is based on unambiguous
physical and chemical signs … in the human world it depends on language, a vast
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2 The Emotions and Cultural Analysis
system of signs and signals, mostly arbitrary in nature, and therefore ambiguous
in meaning” (Scheff 1990: 8). Ambiguity is a central feature of emotion. This
is made obvious by simply surveying the existing literature on emotions, which
immediately reveals the variety of epistemological approaches to the nature of
emotions. As Pugmire observes, “no simple conceptual model will serve for every
example of what would normally be recognized as an emotion” (Pugmire 2005:
11). The same could be said of the term feeling, whose relationship with emotion
cannot be reasonably denied, even if emotions cannot be reduced to feelings.
The ambiguity of emotions is not just a matter of their nature, but is also
reflected in the eventual ambiguity of their meaning. The latter, however, is
partially overcome through their contextualization in emotional regimes, which
regulate their expression and create social expectations that determine the range
of meaningful emotions for any given situation. Emotional regimes are possible
because emotions are not merely physical episodes, but embody values, even if “not
every valuation is emotional” (Pugmire 2005: 16). Since those values can be found
to be adequate or inadequate responses to the realities at hand, we can be expected
to learn to regulate our emotions accordingly. In other words, the embodiment of
values is expected to follow certain “feeling rules” (Hochschild 1979). Those rules
vary from one society to another, constituting specific emotional regimes, which,
in turn, can be unveiled through the analysis of emotional episodes. At any rate,
to the extent that these feeling rules form the backbone of the emotional regime of
each society, the analysis of emotions can provide us with relevant cues not only
about what those implicit rules are, but also about the eventual “emotional anomy”
that can follow social and cultural change.
The analysis of emotions can certainly reveal important aspects, often veiled,
of the existing social structure. The development of the sociology of emotions,
especially in the late 70s with the works of Arlie R. Hochschild (2003a, 2007)
and Thomas Scheff (1990, 1997), showed how much social knowledge awaits us
in the analysis of emotions. Since then, studies on the emotions—from different
perspectives and in different social spheres (Kemper 1990, Barbalet 2002), notably
in the field of organizations (Fineman 2007, Bolton 2005) and health professions
(Bolton 2000, Theodosius 2008)—have flourished.
At the same time, emotions are not only or even primarily a reflection of certain
structures; they announce the agents’ response to events perceived as significant
and, in this sense, emotions are also a vehicle of relational subjectivity, which uses
certain structures and interprets the available cultural means. Therefore, in order to
understand what is at stake in certain emotional responses, it is necessary to know
the cultural context in which the interaction takes place. This is also why “history
provides a much needed perspective for sociological research on emotion at least a
benchmark against which to assess the current data” (Stearns 1988: 4). Further, to
the extent which emotions are carriers of meaning, it is possible to understand them
as cultural events, but of a peculiar kind, for, unlike other cultural manifestations,
such as technical or artistic artifacts, the meanings and relationships built into
emotions are not distanced from the subject, not the result of the projective right of
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Introduction 3
the subject, but are rather an expression of a self receptive to culturally mediated
meanings. As Pugmire notes:
The ways culture and forms of social life bear on our emotional capacities do not
take any one simple form. It may be that culture enables and shapes some kinds
of emotion, partly through the expectations regarding emotion it implants (about
love, rights, or honor, for instance). Social and cultural forces together with
historical contingencies can also allow basic emotional capacities to flourish
or can starve them and thus prefigure what people are able to make out of their
emotional lives. Virtues here (as elsewhere) attach not just to individuals but
also to aspects of culture, as Plato saw in his comparison of types of society to
types of soul. (Pugmire 2005: 6)
It is precisely when we venture into the understanding of other societies’ emotional

regimes that we best appreciate the specifics of our own emotional culture, which
qualifies as “emotional” in an emphatic, redundant sense.
Emotional Culture
Indeed, while the expression “emotional culture” could generically designate any
culture with its own particular “emotional regime,” it can be used in a more specific
and emphatic sense to designate a culture marked by an increasing presence of
emotions in public life that both positively evaluates the manifestation of emotions
and, at the same time, stresses the need for an adequate “emotional management.”
Taken in this latter sense, emotional culture describes contemporary Western
societies well because they are increasingly individualistic societies, culturally
marked at the same time by the romantic longing for emotional authenticity and
by the modern requirement of rational control and the cultivation of feeling. Both
elements belong together, and, as many authors have noted, are at the roots of
some seemingly contradictory features of contemporary culture (Bell 1979).
Actually, Hochschild herself interpreted the research that unfolded after her
seminal work on emotional management as a sign of the “vital link between larger
social contradictions and private efforts to manage feeling” (Hochschild 2003b:
202).
Taken together, the ideal of self-expression and the requirement of emotional
management represent two poles of our contemporary emotional culture, which
help us understand both the increasing presence of emotions in all spheres
of cultural life, as well as the specifically late-modern way of confronting the
challenge every society has to face: the challenge of social order.
In the case of Western societies, which have undergone profound processes of
deinstitutionalization, the burden of social order is now being increasingly placed
on the shoulders of individuals themselves who are increasingly left to make use
of the resources of scientific reason and to seek professional help. As Stephen
Fineman remarked, “emotion work is crucial to social regulation” (Fineman 2007:

5).
Although this is not the place to carry out an in-depth reflection on anomy
and individualization, it should nevertheless be noted that the very process of
modernization, which has fostered individualization,1 has also provided us with a
specifically modern way of dealing with emotions, based on the achievements of
science and the development of instrumental reason. Indeed, if the individualization
process goes together with the deinstitutionalization of former ways of social
control of the emotions, it also encourages individual emotional management
based on the skillful use of the knowledge and resources provided by modern
psychological and medical science. In this context a prominent place is reserved
for therapy so that we have reason to talk of a therapeutization of society (Furedi
2004, Illouz 2008).
Even if we have reasons to doubt the ability of instrumental reason to preserve
the genuine content of emotional experiences and to foster social cohesion, the
proliferation of courses on emotional management, as well as the expectations
placed on counseling professionals to provide help in this realm, represents a
specifically modern way of confronting the potential dangers implicit in anomic
emotional life, in face of the decline of other, more traditional social forms of
emotional control.
Obviously, the fact that individual work on the emotions is crucial to effective
social regulation does not involve the absolute absence of social norms about
emotional regulation. In late-modern societies, however, clear social norms seem
to exist only in the context of professional relationships, so that the rest of our
social world is increasingly left on its own, without clear regulation—or else it
inherits the kind of diffuse “regulation” that arises from market practices. After all,
“consumption, like production and distribution … does crucial social work, not
only sustaining human lives and social institutions but also shaping interpersonal
relations” (Zelizer 2011: 429).
However, in lieu of clear institutionalized norms of emotional behavior,
managing one’s emotions seems increasingly a matter of “emotional intelligence,”
which requires the individual ability to empathize and interpret the feelings of
others. Nevertheless, this requirement is a sign of the ambivalent character of
the deinstitutionalization of emotional behavior, which, on the one hand makes
room for individual autonomy and creativity, but, on the other, places the
interpretative burden of each social interaction entirely on the individual. The
“defensive myth” (Scheff 1990: 12) of individualism cannot obscure the fact that
de-institutionalization of behavior and emotions is a Janus-faced process.
1 The term “individualization” is used here to designate in a very general way the
process of differentiation undergone by modern societies, although in contemporary debate
this meaning is often conflated with a specific interpretation of this process (Martuccelli
2010). For a critique of modern theories of individualization see Corcuff et al. 2010.
Introduction 5
Of course, if there is to be society at all, a lack of emotional norms can never

be absolute. Hence, along with more or less residual persisting traditional norms,
contemporary societies tend to reproduce the emotional norms developed in the
professional context in social life at large. Thus, for example, studies in sociology
of culture such as those carried out by Eva Illouz, have shown the ways in which
therapeutic relationships, originally framed within the context of a professional
relationship, have been exported and translated into all realms of society, from the
world of management to that of talk shows (Illouz 2003). It is not strange, then,
that contemporary emotional culture often takes the form of therapeutic culture
(Furedi 2004, Illouz 2008).
Now, therapeutic culture is marked by two components particularly relevant
for understanding the contemporary self: reflexivity and the psychologization of
experience.
While reflexivity has often been signaled as one of the defining features of
late-modern societies by theorists such as Beck, Giddens and Lasch (1994),
Arlie R. Hochschild (2003a: 77) and Eva Illouz (2010) are among the first to
connect reflexivity with contemporary emotionality. They have, in different
ways, persuasively argued that contemporary selves are not only highly reflexive
selves, but, specifically, emotionally reflexive selves who continually turn to their
emotions for self-knowledge and try to influence them in an endless effort in self-
improvement.
In this regard, it must be highlighted that emotional reflexivity often involves
paying more attention to emotions themselves than to the realities that the
emotions are intentionally pointing at. This is an aspect of what we could term
the “psychologization of experience,” which, from a philosophical point of view,
precedes the globalization of the therapeutic model of relationships and the
subsequent prominence of psychological science in all spheres of social life.
Psychologization, as we use the term here, means that attention is focused on
the subjective impact of the emotion, rather than on the object of that very emotion.
In this way, psychologization prefigures a specific sort of narcissism (Pugmire
2005). “A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy,” Tolstoy
writes in The Cossacks. “At such times it seems to him that there is nothing on
earth more splendid and interesting than himself.” Yet, more important in this
context is that psychologization also prefigures a specific distortion of social life,
whereby interest in emotional processes replaces interest in the realities that are at
the origin of those very processes. This happens, for instance, every time private
emotional reactions to any event receive more attention than the event itself and
its possible relevance for public life. Psychologization undermines the objective
references of culture that make possible meaningful interaction and exalts the
relevance of the emotion itself and the emotional experience above all. While this
feature has surely been amplified by the influence of media culture, as such it is a
defining mark of the psychologization of experience we recognize in many cultural
phenomena nowadays (Mestrovic 1997), most prominently in the development of
a “confessional culture.”
The very definition of the private and the public spheres is at stake in this shift.
The kind of community of feeling created by public exposure of personal drama
is not so much a community as an interested reciprocal transaction: I listen to
your sorrows in the hope that you will eventually listen to mine and thereby, in a
society of victims, we both reach our desired moment of glory (Erner 2006). The
disclosure of privacy is the price paid for desired social recognition and inclusion.
The price may be too high, though. As Frank Furedi rightly pointed out, among
the paradoxical effects of the development of a confessional culture, with its
absorption into the internal life of the self, is “the steady erosion of the sphere of
private life” (Furedi 2004: 40). When the private realm is under public scrutiny,
its privacy disappears.
And public life doesn’t fare much better because its proper content loses interest
in light of the emotional apotheosis of the self. Politicians have learned this and,
assimilating the therapeutic ethos, try to “forge an emotional bond with the public”
(Furedi 2004: 60). In order to be persuasive they have to look emotional. At work
behind this requirement is the cultural ideal of authenticity (Taylor 1992). Yet, in
projecting this ideal upon political life we are also eroding the very meaning of the
public sphere, which is to direct our attention to the public good, not to the more
or less fascinating character traits of a particular person. As Richard Sennett once
put it,
When a culture shifts from believing in presentation of emotion to representation

of it, so that individual experiences reported accurately come to seem expressive,
then the public man loses a function, and so an identity. As he loses a meaningful
identity, expression itself becomes less and less social. (Sennett 1977: 108)
Culture is a realm of shared meanings; it is only through certain artifice and

convention that different people with different experiences are able to overcome
private differences and share in the same world. It is only through certain artifice
that we come to inhabit the same social space. If authenticity, understood as
spontaneous manifestation of emotions, and hence as lack of artifice, is to become
the standard by which to measure all dimensions of human life, then the modern
distinction between the private and the public realm is no longer clear.
The turning point for these changes, in Western societies at least, is usually
situated in the cultural revolution in the 60s with its replacement of the 18th-century
idea of courtesy by the 19th-century one of authenticity. However, as pointed out
by Eva Illouz, the origin of this revolution can be traced back much further to the
progressive influence of therapeutic culture and psychology on popular culture,
the contemporary bearer of Romantic ideals, and the shaping of lifestyles.
In any event, since the 60s, the presence of emotional elements in Western
discourse and public life has been in crescendo, in a movement strengthened by
globalization both in its intensity and its geographical reach. This increase can be
seen in the evolution and global transmission of advertising praxes, television and
literary contents, etc., which, in general, reflect an apparent growth of emotionality.
Introduction 7
Late Modern Emotional Selves
According to Illouz, modern emotional selves are characterized by the relevance

given to object-centered emotions, fictional emotions, and, most importantly,
to what she has termed “meta-emotions,” which are second-order emotions
or emotions consciously developed about emotions, as seen in the different
manifestations of the self-help culture.
It is true that, in one way or another, emotions have always revolved around
objects. Objects present themselves as “carriers” of emotions both in an ordinary
way—the admiration we feel when contemplating a painting, for instance—and in
a deeper way, when we associate personal experiences to that particular painting.
However, a significant feature of contemporary selves, as developed in the context
of consumer culture, is that the emotional connection between the self and certain
objects can result in a “commodification of feeling,” which has been shrewdly
exploited by marketing practices (Illouz 1997).
Cultural products are special carriers of emotions, which, as it was assumed
in the theory of catharsis, may have an educational value in real life. Aristotle’s
insistence, in the eight book of his Politics, on the relevance of music in the
education of youth comes to mind in this context; its justification lies precisely
in the alleged impact music has on the emotions and thus on the formation of
character (Aristotle 1991). Something similar could be said of the relationship
between music and therapy. The relationship between the poetic representation of
emotions and the emotions generated in the public conscience has always intrigued
philosophers. The point is that fictional emotions are real emotions no matter their
fictional origin. In a way they are even more pure than natural emotions because
artifice deprives natural emotions of all elements that could divert attention from
their meaning (Sennett 1977: 111). Art may help us recognize, understand and
deepen the meaning of emotions that, in a less detached manner, we experience in
ordinary life (Pugmire 2005: 184).
Now, in the context of mass culture, fictional emotions have colonized the
public sphere, resulting in what Adorno called the “institutionalization of the
imagination,” which is perhaps a new sort of “artifice” in charge of developing a
novel social and emotional language. Indeed, media culture has become a powerful
agent of emotional socialization, fostering a new kind of emotional self whose
relationship with real life seems mediated by narratives and fictional characters to
a greater degree. Daydreaming, “an activity which mixes the pleasures of fantasy
with those of reality” (Campbell 2005: 89), has become the fabric of daily life,
as well as a powerful engine of consumption. Thus, analysis of media narratives
becomes a privileged source for understanding contemporary emotional language
and culture.
Yet, the most characteristic feature of modern emotional selves, according to
Illouz, is the development of “reflective emotions” or “meta-emotions.” Again,
these have always existed, as is evident in stoic strategies of self-control (Sorabji
2000). However, the subject matter of modern meta-emotions, as shown in
contemporary self-help culture, has a distinctively modern function: to protect

self-worth and foster authenticity. The contemporary rise of narratives of the self
in both traditional and virtual media in which emotional expression comes to the
fore is a highly significant indication of the path taken by late modern subjects
living in the conditions of liquid modernity when in search for and in the process
of compositing their own identity. Very often this path involves a process of self-
examination aimed at the “unlearning” of certain “negative” emotions such as
guilt—a process which is usually mediated by professional help—as well as an
effort to develop “positive emotions” in the face of adverse circumstances or
even personal failures. In both cases, psychology and therapy become central to
contemporary self-experience (Furedi 2004, Illouz 2008).
Insights into Emotional Culture
Emotional culture and emotional selves could be approached as two sides of a

single reality, insofar as cultural realizations can be taken as traces of human
subjectivity (González 2011). While every cultural realization falls short of
realizing the whole of human subjectivity, it nevertheless captures an aspect of
it, which finds expression in the world of objects. The meanings and values with
which human beings organize their experience find thereby an objective place in
the world. In this way, we come to understand earlier cultures and in this way, too,
we try to understand our own.
The language we speak, the words we choose, the literary genres we develop,
the music we listen to, the movies and series we watch, the clothes we buy, etc.
are not irrelevant for understanding the values we hold, the fears we have, the
frustrations we suffer, the indignation we feel, the hopes we cherish, and ultimately
for understanding how we come to terms with the world we inhabit. In analyzing
the emotional dimensions of contemporary cultural products we obtain important
insights about ourselves and how we try to make sense of our lives.
In different ways, all these themes are present in the contributions included
in this volume, which is structured in two parts. The first of them, entitled
Emotions, Culture, and the Self is intended to provide us with a general frame
for understanding both the relevance of emotions for cultural analysis, as well
as two prominent features involved in contemporary emotional culture, already
introduced above: the psychologization of experience and therapeutization of the
self.
“Emotions and Culture,” by Robert C. Roberts, presents us with a philosophical
analysis of the concept of emotion, aimed at gaining a better understanding of
its potential relevance for an analysis of culture. Prof. Roberts argues that the
conception of emotions as concern-based construals is better adapted to the
emotional analysis of culture than alternatives such as feeling theories, judgment
theories, and research approaches focused on neurology or evolutionary history.
The two bases of individual differences in emotional response—how the subject
Introduction 9
conceives the situation at which his emotion aims, and how the subject cares
about that situation’s elements—underline the cultural differences in emotional
response. Three ways in which emotions vary culturally are object range (the range
of things emotions of a given type can take as objects), evaluation (how the culture
evaluates emotions of a given type, such as fear or anger), and distinctiveness of
type (emotions, such as romantic melancholy, that seem to be local to only some
cultures).
Joseph E. Davis’s chapter, “Emotions as Commentaries on Cultural Norms,”
exemplifies the kind of cultural and social knowledge gained through the analysis
of emotions, precisely through the meta-emotions involved in the accounts given
by his interviewees. Drawing on interviews with people dealing with sadness and
anxiety after broken relationships, Prof. Davis demonstrates how their emotional
predicaments reveal cultural norms of self, feeling, and relationship. At issue in
these predicaments are the “social” emotions. Emotions like shame, guilt, pride,
and so on, as theorists like Charles Taylor (1985) and Margaret Archer (2000) have
shown, emerge in our relations with other people, nature, and social institutions.
These emotions involve our sense of self-worth and incorporate a picture of what
is important to us in our lives. At the same time, he argues, they also necessarily
reference the normative standards, moral rules, and visions of the good life
that constitute the cultural order. Though we may feel an emotion wrongly or
irrationally, the evaluation it represents expresses our commitments and judgments
about what obligations, expectations, and ideals we confront and our relation to
them. Emotional predicaments, dilemmas arising from failure experiences and
emotional deviance, are a rich source for cultural analysis, because our efforts to
account from them bring these otherwise taken-for-granted and latent evaluations
out into the open. One of the insights emerging from this chapter is that people
often resort to medical language in order to make their emotional experiences
more tolerable and to maintain their self-image.
Departing from a different philosophical tradition, Lourdes Flamarique’s
contribution, “From the Psychologization of Experience to the Priority of
Emotions in Social Life,” sheds light on the phenomena of the psychologization
of experience while exploring its cultural roots. The ubiquity of emotions in many
areas of contemporary culture permits us to speak about a “panemotivism.” This
descriptor contains a judgment: it considers both our culture and ways of being
as marked by an imbalance divided by the rationality of the objective social
sphere and the hyper-emotionality of the subjective sphere. And it is precisely this
imbalance that is interesting—the hypertrophy of emotions, some say, in contrast
to the social and rational project of modernization.
If this diagnosis fits, the areas of human activity traditionally supported
by knowledge and rationality either are seriously threatened or have been
completely supplanted by emotional response and “the psychologization of social
experience,” i.e. that the world is primarily experienced by the responses of our
inner life. Especially affected are the moral life and the political-institutional
sphere. Paradoxically though, these spheres have undergone a process of
“privatization,” while the private sector, the traditional privacy of self, has been
subjected to a reverse process by which everything is subject to public scrutiny.
As expected, emotional responses and their public presentation follow encoded
types and therefore have a social relevance, finding a forum for communication
and interaction. The rules of emotional communication have served to promote
consumption boosted by advertising. In this chapter Prof. Flamarique focuses on
showing the correlation between these phenomena and closes with an exploration
of the resurgence of the aspiration for a universal ethic that would restore social
cohesion. In her view, if such an ethic can be achieved, it will be achieved by
using the language of emotions and psychological categories with which we now
articulate experience.
However, the cultural authority of medical language, already suggested in
Davis’ contribution, explains that much of the discourse on emotions is nowadays
framed not in ethical but in medical terms. The emotions have been a traditional
theme of medicine because of their impact on health and illness. Yet the way they
are approached nowadays is not necessarily the way they were approached in
the past. In her chapter for this volume, Pilar León-Sanz explores the concept
of emotion in medicine from the perspective of music-therapy, showing how the
different schools of medicine explained the action of music on the human body
and mind and illustrating the links between music, health, and the emotions. In
this account, Galenism is of particular importance because of its lasting influence
until the 19th century. However, the appearance of scientific medicine, with
a biological model of disease, involved the abandonment of music-therapy as
a medical treatment. Music, like emotions, was then relegated to the realm of
psychology and psychiatry. Pilar León-Sanz’s account, then, leaves us thinking
that, if we now approach emotions in medical terms, this is not so much because
medicine has broadened its scope, but rather because emotions are increasingly
analyzed in biological terms. This development, however, points to the role natural
science plays in our culture, i.e. to the way we have come to think of ourselves in
increasingly naturalistic terms.
Yet, natural science as such has no satisfactory answers to questions of meaning.
For this we have to turn to narratives and signs entertained in social interaction,
i.e. we have to turn to the analysis of cultural products; ultimately, we must view
natural science as a cultural product whose findings need to be interpreted in the
light of a more philosophical reflection that take into consideration the purpose
of humanity itself. Obviously human sciences have something to say in this
regard. Under the title of Fiction, Emotions, and Social Life, the second part of
this book brings together a number of contributions which explore the emotional
dimensions of human life that resonate in fictional works, fashion and ordinary
language, raising questions which touch on existential issues.
In fact, the analysis of cultural products from the perspective of the emotions
they convey and evoke open up a vast field of research and reflection, involving
a variety of disciplines and different methodological perspectives that here can
merely be touched on. Beyond this obvious multiplicity, however, the explicit
Introduction 11
focus on cultural products and instances of social interaction paves the way for an
emotional turn of a different import since the focus is not so much on the causal
processes that explain our feelings as it is on the perceptions and values embodied
in those feelings. In this way, the horizon of comprehension is expanded and so it
is the existential value we attribute to our feelings.
After all, no matter how the bodily effects of emotions are described,
reproduced or combatted with drugs or manipulation of the brain, the fact is that
emotions cannot be reduced to their feelings; feelings alone do not make up an
emotion. While the emotion of grief brings with it painful feelings, it cannot be
reduced to them since that pain is the organic response to personal loss. While the
way we deal with grief may vary from one culture to another, dealing with it as if it
were just another “negative feeling” would not make us necessarily more humane.
Emotions imply significant interactions of a subject in any given context, in light
of something naturally appraised by the subject to be good or bad. Thus, emotions
comprise both a relational and a narrative structure; they anticipate something
good or bad, often in light of previous experience and project this appraisal into
the present situation.
Interestingly enough, human emotions do not always present themselves as
closed narratives, but rather are in need of further elaboration, in the course of which
they may work as engines of social identity. We have an example of this in Rosalía
Baena’s chapter, “The Epistemology of Difference: Narrative Emotions in Personal
Stories of Disability.” This chapter represents a singular example of the confluence
of emotional culture, therapeutic culture and the social potential of emotions. In
her analysis of selected stories of disability, Rosalía Baena addresses questions
regarding the cultural and political impact of these narratives. As Wasserman
et al. have argued, perhaps the leading theoretical achievement of the disability
rights movement is the reconceptualization of disability as “interaction rather than
a condition or property of an individual” (Wasserman et al. 2005). Nevertheless,
this becomes more of a challenge when mental disability is concerned because
the rhetoric of limitations and lack of autonomy, rather than of difference and
possibility, are more prominently featured. In this context, there is also a
proliferation of Down syndrome narratives which may function as counter-stories
that preserve themselves in the face of “socially constructed and legitimated (and
demoralizing) master narratives of identity” (Frank 2010); thus, these narratives
are an act of re-moralization for those often denied social agency. Texts such as
Michael Bérubé’s Life as We Know It (1996), Jennifer Groneberg’s Road Map
to Holland (2008), Kathryn L. Soper’s Gifts (2007), Stanley D Klein and Kim
Schive’s You Will Dream New Dreams (2001), Cynthia S Kidder and Brian
Skotko’s Common Threads (2007), or the collaborative autobiography Count Us
In (1994) by Jason Kingsley and Mitchell Levitz (both living with Down syndrome
themselves) provide vivid images and stories about what Down syndrome is really
like, what it might mean, and what sense it makes. Through the contextualization
and celebration of these kinds of lives, the authors can make readers confront
their own, often unacknowledged, biases against disability. Baena approaches
these issues from the stories’ emotional impact both on the protagonists and on
contemporary readers, assuming that it is precisely the epistemological/cognitive
potential of emotions that these authors find so rewarding when projecting
emotions through their narratives.
In “Fractured Identity: In Treatment as a Symptom and Reflection of
Contemporary Emotional Culture,” Alberto and Alejandro García analyze an
unusual television production, the series In Treatment (HBO, 2008–9), as a
particularly illustrative example of several notes of our contemporary emotional
culture and its predominant therapeutic style. Their contribution assumes that
through the study of audiovisual fictions certain traits and prevailing values can
be detected, along with specific trends and lifestyles that insert themselves in the
plot as binding social norms. From this perspective, they argue that this series is
symptomatic of certain features of our contemporary emotional culture, such as
the notorious presence of emotions and speech therapy in all spheres of social
life. In order to make their point, they first examine the textual content of the
series—the explicit semantics of emotions used by the characters; secondly they
analyze the rhetorical structure of the audiovisual text, deployed to appeal to
the public’s emotions. Finally, they carry out a content analysis of the narrative
form (semantic and rhetorical) in order to understand why this series has been so
well-received both by critics and by the public. Writing on this more pragmatic
level, they conclude that this unusual television product reflects the relevance of
emotions in contemporary society as well as our particular way of coping with
them.
With Efrat Tseëlon’s chapter, “Fashion, Fantasy and Anxiety,” we move in a
different direction, although still within the realm opened up by psychoanalysis.
In her contribution, she presents us with a Freudian reading of fashion as a
characteristically contemporary emotional practice, whose connection with identity,
according to Žižek, could be understood in terms of “the phantasmic support” of
social order. Positioning the fashionable object against the experiential model of
consumption that has grown up in the past few decades, Tseëlon’s contribution
examines some emotional functions fashion encodes in the cultural unconscious.
More specifically she focuses on the role of fantasy as a compensatory mechanism
that is born at a moment of deprivation. A vehicle for unconscious displacement of
the desirable and the forbidden, fashion would constitute a transformation of the
impossible object into a fantasy of desire. Drawing on the Lacanian interpretations
of Žižek and the insights of social historians such as Norbert Elias and Zygmunt
Bauman, she draws an analogy between the anxieties unleashed by modernity
and globalization and their imaginary or symbolic equivalents. She then traces
a parallel between Phillipe Ariès’ model of attitudes toward death in Western
culture and certain functions of fashion as a visual discourse of social and psychic
phenomena. Ariès shows how the greater the denial of the horror of death in the
real, the more it returns in fantasy.
If Efrat Tseëlon’s chapter shows the potential of psychoanalysis to bring to
light the hidden elements behind cultural appearances, Annette Myre Jørgensen’s
Introduction 13
contribution illustrates the potential of linguistic analysis to unveil the emotional

dimensions of culture at a more everyday level. Working on the COLA-corpus
from Bergen University, Norway (www.colam.org), Jørgensen’s chapter represents
an insightful incursion into teenage culture through the analysis of emotional
dimensions implicit or suggested by the use teenagers make of language—
Spanish in this case. The hypothesis is that the emotions are reflected in teenage
talk more through youth specific ways of talking than through open expressions
of emotions. Adolescents encounter new experiences on a daily basis and these
unfamiliar situations often result in new and possibly intense positive and negative
emotional reactions. These emotions however are often not yet integrated into
their experience, and even less in their language. Therefore, Annette Myre looks at
their suprasegmental way of expressing emotions through the pragmatic Spanish
markers tía/o and tronca/o and their intonational pattern, which displays a high
degree of emotive involvement by marked intonational falls, tía ↓, intonational
rising, tía ↑, limited intonational range, and phonetic lengthening tíaaaa or tíííía,
to designate anger, irritation, or indignation, for instance.
Taken together, all the contributions in this book illustrate the many ways
emotions represent a privileged gateway for cultural analysis and help us
understand the specific emotional regime of our times, our particular emotional
culture. In deciphering our emotional culture, however, we get to decipher aspects
of our emotional selves, of the ways we express and realize our humanity, as well
as the possibility and the risk of diminishing it.
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Introduction 15
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Introduction

Emotional Culture and the Role of Emotions

It is precisely when we venture into the understanding of other societies’ emotional

Fineman remarked, “emotion work is crucial to social regulation” (Fineman 2007:

Of course, if there is to be society at all, a lack of emotional norms can never

When a culture shifts from believing in presentation of emotion to representation

Culture is a realm of shared meanings; it is only through certain artifice and

Late Modern Emotional Selves

According to Illouz, modern emotional selves are characterized by the relevance

contemporary self-help culture, has a distinctively modern function: to protect

Insights into Emotional Culture

Emotional culture and emotional selves could be approached as two sides of a

contribution illustrates the potential of linguistic analysis to unveil the emotional

Fineman, S. (ed.). 2007. Emotion in Organizations. 2nd edn. London: Sage

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