Objectifying Emotions and OOR

13 February 2013

(just some rough thoughts on a recent discussion)

Pressing on the Objectification of Emotions

Today, in my Critical Discourses of Education course, one of my brilliant colleagues presented on her prelimary “keyword” analysis of how the concept of “emotional literacy” is used in the context of education-based discourses. Very interesting discussions and ideas followed! While I do not have time to get into the details of defining emotional literacy, I will say that I was interested in how she talked about the objectification of emotions, and so I pressed on her definition and use of the word, “object” in relation to “emotion”.

She talked negatively about how many people describe their emotions as if they are some “external object” that can be pushed aside to be dealt with later, detaching it from one’s body. She said that emotions are a social-relational thing that is far more complex than the singular sense we often use to distinguish our feelings. I agreed, but pressed further on how this is still not objectifying it, since it (the social-relational characteristic) is still an object solidified via another, perhaps, more complex set of mediated processes, which we agree or disagree on in via the act of deliberation.

She, then, included an example of how a person can feel angry, but this experience is not social if they were to go to their room to cool off by themselves versus experiencing it with another person. From what I gathered, I understand that she argued that the two are different experiences of anger, which can lead to variant expressions of it, but to learn about its exigence, or why this emotion came to be, the human-to-human relations must happen in some fashion.

I agree that anger manifests in a multitude of ways. It is not singular, nor are its expressions and manners in which others receive or deny its presence in a human-social experience. Yet, I disagree that it is not social, when a person decides to seclude themselves, let’s say, in their room to cool off.

Emotions are wrapped up in cognitive, physiological, and discursive processes; sets of descriptions that could amount to a barrage of things listed in a Latourian Litany of sorts. But, as a person who believes in the idea that nonhumans, too, are just as incorporated into the corporeal of the social, I think that one’s room and its contents become part of the lived social experience of cooling off in a room of one’s own.

One could respond in anger by tearing an old photo, kicking a chair over, lying in bed, screaming into a pillow, or even writing about it in a journal, etc. The objects within the room introduce a set of potential relations and means by which to cool off, releasing one’s anger in a variety of creative or mundane ways. These object relations affect the mediating process of handling one’s anger, or even deliberating about it, (as is the case of journaling).

Allthistosay, one’s emotion, as I argue, still has the potential to become a solidified object of inquiry or passive experience, regardless of other human interaction. And, whether we deliberate on it, objectify it as an external thing, or internalize it, it is still a mediated thing: emotion. This anger experienced in the body is also mediated in a multitude of relations – both human and nonhuman. If a person is critical of the externalizing of anger, objectifying it in this way, and arguing that this is a negative process of thinking, I am trying to suggest that, while this may be true in some cases, one must consider how we cannot escape its objectification.

Just as Latour, Mol, and Law argue that all things exist in a mess of relations, I am suggesting that anger is multiple and many ontologically, according to such relations. Yet, most of us seem to create a more solid version of an emotion, such as anger, to simplify the complexity of it, manage it, and deal with it in whatever way available to us.

Rhetorically, then, I am suggesting that, through these mediations, things too gain suasive potentialities; consider how pillows become excellent venting devices, due to their sound dampening properties, or how writing in a journal becomes a series of relations to aid in one’s “self”-deliberation to come to a new understanding of what one has just experienced. Depending on the available means of mediation, by which objects can carry cultural and personal rules of engagement, we make decisions based on the set of relations available to us.

Objects, too, can affect the ways we come to know the object that is anger. While these properties of an object may reside in the sociocultural-human-based experience, the thing itself still affects both being and knowing.