Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of humans. There are jobs at every socioeconomic level that place emotional burdens on the worker, but these burdens may have little to do with the performance of emotional labour. Among the less affluent, where work is often deskilled and boring and the work process beyond the worker’s control, the emotional task is often to suppress feelings of frustration, anger, or fear—and often to suppress feelings of any sort. This can be a terrible burden, but it is not in itself emotion labour. Factory workers, truck drivers, farmers and fisher-people, forklift operators, plumbers and bricklayers, chambermaids in transient hotels, and backroom laundry workers do no on the whole have their emotion work as closely subjected to occupational strictures as those who are in positions of catering to business people, or managing a corporations economic obligations. There are, however, many workers who, in promoting a product or a company, transform their show of personality into a symbol of the company, a clue to the nature of its product. These workers are seldom making the major decisions, but in one way or another they represent the decision-makers—not simply in how they look or what they say but in how, emotionally speaking they seem. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
The advertising maxim “Never sell what you do not believe in” calls for an act of faith. However, since many workers do not earn as much as their bosses do, they are less likely to be, in a sense, really sold. They are more likely to see emotional labour as no more than work to be better at counting costs. Still higher up are the big corporate decision-makers. For them, political, religious, and philosophic beliefs become more “job relevant,” and the bones between self and work are many and diffuse. Here years of training and experience, mixed with a daily carrot-and-stick discipline, conspire to push corporate feeling rules further and further away from self-awareness. Eventually, these rules about how to see things and how to feel about them come to seem “natural,” a part of one’s personality. The longer the employment and the more rewarding the work in terms of interest, power, and pay, the truer this becomes. At the very top of the upper class are the tycoons, the imperial decision-makers. They assume the privilege of personally setting the informal rules to which underlings eagerly attune themselves, rules designed to suit their own personal dispositions. Their notions of what is funny, what to beware of, how grateful to feel, and how hostile one should be to outsiders will become an official culture for their top employees. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
This position of having so much power is more than the license to indulge emotional idiosyncrasy, for the idiosyncrasies of the powerless can be happily ignored. It is a subtle and pervasive way of dominating through the enforcement of latent feeling rules for subordinates. Interestingly enough, at the other extreme of the class ladder employees may enjoy almost complete freedom from feeling rules, although they have no right to set them for others. They enjoy the license of the dispossessed. To sum up, jobs that place a burden on feelings are common in all classes, which is one reason why work is defined as work and not play. However, emotional labour occurs only in jobs that require personal contact with the public, the production of a state of mind in others, and (except in the true profession) the monitoring of emotional labour by supervisors. It is mainly in these jobs, where deep and surface acting form an important part of the work, that hating the job can prevent one from doing the job well. What a person does at work may bear an uncanny resemblance to the “job description” of being the child of such a worker at home. Big emotion workers tend to raise little ones. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Mothers and fathers teach children letters and numbers and manners and a World view, but they also teach them which zone of the self will later be addressed by rules of work. As research on this topic of the family training ground for the transmutation suggest, working-class parents prepare the child to be controlled more by rules that apply to overt behaviour whereas middle-class parent typically prepare them to be governed more by rules that apply to feelings. There is a distinction between two types of “family control system,” the positional and the personal. In the positional control system, clear and formal rules determine who gets to decide what and who gets to do what. The right to make rules is based on formal attributes, such as age, gender, and parenthood. A “positional family” is not necessarily authoritarian or emotionally cold; it simply bases authority on impersonally assigned status and not on personal feelings. Positional appeals, therefore, are appears to impersonally assigned status. For example, to her son who keeps saying he want to play Twirly Curls Barbie Doll by Mattel, a mother might appeal to gender status: “Little boys do not play with dolls, dolls are for your sister; here, take a He-Man, Masters of the Universe, instead.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
In the personal control system, what matter far more than formal status is the feelings of parent and child. Parents back up their appeals by such statements as “because it would mean a lot to me,” or “because I am very tired.” Appeals are also aimed at the child’s feelings. A mother using personal control in the situation above might say: “Why do you want to play with Twirly Curls Barbie Doll? She is so boring. Why not play with He-man?” In positional families, control works against the child’s will. In personal families, control works through that will. Thus a child who says “I do not want to kiss grandpa—why must I kiss him always?” will be answered in different ways. Positional: “Children kiss their grandpa,” and “He is not well—I do not want any of your nonsense.” Personal: “I know you do not like kissing Grandpa, but he is unwell and he is very fond of you.” In the personal family, the child appears to have a choice. If the child questions a rule invoked by the parent, the situation is further explained and the alternatives more clearly elaborated. Given the situation and the positional family, the child is told to act according to a rule, and any questioning of it is answered by an appeal to immutable status: “Why? Because I am your mother, and I say so.” The positional child is told what to do and asked to accept the legitimacy of the order. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Working-class families are generally more positional, and middle-class families more personal. Middle-class parents are more likely to sanction what they later infer to be a child’s feeling and intent whereas working-class parents are more likely to sanction behaviour itself. A child asked to “love Aunt Tori” might revel by refusing to love Aunt Tori. The child asked to feel ambitious and “love school” might rebel by hating and disdaining success. If authority in the middle class is more expressed though feeling rules and emotion management—if it is more through these than through riles of outer behaviour that we are governed—hen we would do well to examine rebellion as rebellion against dictates in the realm. A middle-class mother is far more likely to punish her son for losing his temper than for engaging in wild and disruptive physical play. His loss of temper, not his wild play, is what is intolerable. The middle-class child seems to be especially subject to three messages. The first is that the feelings of superiors are important. Feeling is linked to power and authority because it is the reason adults often give for the decision they make. The child grows sensitive to feeling and learns to read well. The second is that a child’s own feelings are important. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Feelings are worth paying attention to and can be honoured as reasons for doing or not doing something. The middle-class child’s own sense of power is bonded more closely to feeling than to external display. One latent message in the free-school education of the 1960, designed almost exclusively for middle-class students, was that personal feelings are near sacred objects of attention and deserve frequent and detailed discussion. The third is that feelings are meant to be managed—monitored, sanctioned, and controlled. Thus when Tennessee spills milk on his mother’s rare 17th century antique Persian rug (a sickle-leaf, vine scroll and palmette vase-technique carpet, produced in the city of Kerman in the 1600s, part of the Clark Collection), he will be punished less for damaging the rug than for doing it in anger. His transgression is not possessed in not managing his anger. It seems, then, that middle-class children are more likely to be asked to shape their feelings according to the rules they are made aware of. At the very least, they learn hat it is important to know how to manage feeling. In a sense, the true middle-class lesson may be set forth in learning it is through the art of deep acting that we make feelings into instruments we can use. In reviewing this research on the family, I have frequently used the terms “middle-class child” and “working-class child,” but I do not mean to suggest that one is trained to do emotional labour and the other is not. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Middle-class parents whose jobs do not involve public contact may train their children to accept positional authority, and less affluent parents whose jobs do involve public contact may train their children to accept personal authority. More precisely, the class messages that parents pass on to their children may roughly as follows. Middle class: “Your feelings count because you are (or will be) considered important by others.” Less affluent: “Your feelings do not count because you are not (or will not be) considered important by others.” However, some times class level does not matter. It may also depend on if the parents resent their children or love them. Cutting across the class messages may be other messages about emotional labour. The two main ones would be as follows. “Learn to manage your feelings, and learn to attune yourself to feeling rules because doing this well will get you places” (emotional-labour occupations). And “Learn to manage your behaviour because that is all the company will ask of you” (nonemotional-labour occupations). Upper-class parents doing emotional labour may combine these messages “Your feelings are important” and “Learn to manage them well” whereas lower-class emotion labourers may stress only the “Manage them well.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Conversely, upper-class parent who do not specialize in emotional labour may emphasize “Your feelings matter” without stressing “Manage them well.” And lower-class parents doing physical or technical work may see no relevance in either message. How feelings are dealt with in families may be determined not so much by social class as by the overall design of emotional labour, which is itself only loosely related to social class. Further, in our society the personal control system extends far beyond the family; it operates, for example, in schools that stress the development of autonomy and emotional control and in jobs that call for a capacity to forge useful relationships. Similarly, the social guardians of the positional control system are found not only in working-class families but in the traditional churches to which they go, and to some extent in the schools, where they learn to manage their behaviour in ways that will be useful on the job. If jobs that call for emotional labour grow and expand with the spread of automation and the decline of unskilled labour—as some analysts believe they will—this general social track may spread much further across other social classes. If this happens, the emotional system itself—emotion work, feeling rules, and social exchange, as hey come into play in a “personal control system”—will grow in importance as a way through which people are persuaded and controlled on and off the job. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
If, on the other hand, automation and the decline of unskilled labour leads to a decline in emotional labour, as machines replace the personal delivery of services, then this general social track may come to be replaced by another that trains people to be controlled in more impersonal ways. The transmutation of emotional life—the move from the private realm to the public realm, the trend toward standardization and commercialization of emotive offerings—already fans out across the whole class system. Commercial conventions of feeling are being recycled back into individual private lives; emotional life now appears under new management. Talking at dinner about encounters with an irate customer or watching the moves of host and participant on television giveaway programs opens the family home to a larger World of feeling rules. We learn what to expect outside, and we prepare. In the United States of America, this public culture is not simply public; it is commercial. Thus the relation between private emotion work and public emotional labour is a link between a commercial and commercial spheres. The home is no longer a sanctuary from abuses of the profit motive. Yet the marketplace is not without images of the home. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
The atmosphere of the private living room, which many employees are ask to recall as they are at work in the office, has already borrowed some of the elements of that office. The principles of commerce that govern exchanges in the office are supposed to be softened by the analogy to a private home, a home remote from commerce. However, for a quarter of a century now, private relations between friends and kin have been the basis for living room “parties” at which kitchenware, cosmetics, or (more recently) wedding packages are sold. Similarly, to build a market for air travel, the airlines use the idea of a private family and the feelings one would have there. Airline training strategists borrow from the home the idea of a place where that sort of borrowing does not go on. Yet in a culture like ours, it does. Thus it is in the family that we assess our bonds to the public culture and search out ways in which we may be monitored there. It is in the family—that private refuge, that haven in a heartless World—that some children first see commercial purposes at close hand and prepare for the call from central casting that will let them display their skills on a larger stage. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
In an essay, Cynthia Ozick describes a comment she once overheard at a party: “For me, the Holocaust and a corncob are the same.” Ozick understands his comment to mean that for a writer, all experience is equal. Literature has no moral content, for it exists purely in the domain of the imagination, a place where only aesthetics matter. Thus, a poet may freely replace the Holocaust with a corncob. Poetic language is only a game of words; the poet need not and in fact should not worry about social responsibility. Literary language is purely self-referential. Law, however, has not been much tempted by the sound of the first voice. Lawyers are all too aware that legal language is not a purely self-referential games, for legal interpretive acts signal and occasion the imposition of violence upon others. In their concern to avoid the social and moral irresponsibility of the first voice, legal thinkers have veered in the opposite direction, toward the safety of the second voice, which speaks from the position of “objectivity” rather than “subjectivity,” “neutrality” rather than “bias.” This voice, like the voice of “We the People,” is ultimately authoritarian and coercive in its attempt to speak for everyone. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
In both law and literature there are theorists who struggle against their discipline’s grain. Literary theorists such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Gayati Spivak, and abdul JanMohamed are attempting to read specific verbal and visual texts against complex cultural codes of power, assertion, and domination which these texts both reflect and, indeed, reinforce. Legal theorists such as Mari Matsuda, Pat Williams, and Derrick Bell juxtapose the voice that allows theorists to discuss liberty, property, and rights in the aspirational mode of liberalism with no connection to what those concepts mean in real people’s lives with the voices of people whose voices are rarely heard in law. In neither law nor literature, however, is the goal merely to replace one voice with its opposite. Rather, the aim is to understand both legal and literary discourse as the complex struggle and unending dialogue between these voices. The metaphor of “voice” implies a speaker. I want to suggest, however, that both voices I have described come from the same source, a source I term “multiple consciousness.” It is a premise of this article that we are no born with a “self,” but rather are composed of a welter of partial, sometimes contradictory, or even antithetical “selves.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
A unified identity, if such can ever exist, is a product of will, not a common destiny or natural birthright. Thus, consciousness is never fixed, never attained once and for all; it is not a final outcome or a biological given, but a process, a constant contradictory state of becoming, in which both social institutions and individual wills are deeply implicated. A multiple consciousness is home both to the first and second voices, and all the voices in between. As I use the phrase, “multiple consciousness” as reflected in legal or literary discourse is not a golden mean or static equilibrium between two extremes, but rather a process in which propositions are constantly put forth, challenged, and subverted. Cynthia Ozick argues that “a redemptive literature, a literature that interprets and decodes the World, beaten out for the sake of humanity, must wrestle with its own body, with its own flesh and blood, with its own life.” Similarly, Mari Matsuda, while arguing that in the legal realm “holding on to a multiple consciousness will allow us to operate both within the abstractions of standard jurisprudential discourse, and within the details of our own special knowledge,” acknowledges that “this constant shifting of consciousness produces sometimes madness, sometime genius, sometimes both. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The mask, id est, the ad hoc adopted attitude, I have called the persona, which was the name for the masks worn by actors in antiquity. The human who identifies with this make I would call “personal” as opposed to “individual.” The two above-mentioned attitudes represent two collective personalities, which may be summed up quite simply under the name “personae.” I have already suggested that the real individuality is different from both. The persona is thus a functional complex that comes into existence for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience, but is by no means identical with the individuality. The persona is exclusively concerned with the relation to objects. The relation of the individual to the object must be sharply distinguished from the relation to the subject. By the “subject” I mean first of all those vague, dim stirrings, feelings, thoughts, and sensation which follow in on us not from any demonstrable continuity of conscious experience of the object, but well up like a disturbing, inhibiting, or at times helpful, influence from the dark inner depths, from the background and underground vaults of consciousness, and constitute, in their totality, our perception of the life of the unconscious. Just as there is a relation to the outer object, an outer attitude, there is a relation to the inner object, and inner attitude. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
It is readily understandable that this inner attitude, by reason of its extremely intimate and inaccessible nature, is far more difficult to discern than the outer attitude, which is immediately perceived by everyone. Nevertheless, it does not seem to me impossible to formulae it as a concept. All those allegedly accidental inhibitions, fancies, moods, vague feelings, and scraps of fantasy that hinder concentration and disturb the peace of mine even of the most normal human, and that are rationalized away as being due to bodily causes and suchlike, usually have their origin, not in the reasons consciously ascribed to them, but in perceptions of unconscious processes. Dreams naturally belong to this class of phenomena, and, as we all know, are often traces back to such external and superficial causes as indigestion, sleeping on one’s back, and so forth, in spite of the fact that these explanations can never stand up to searching criticism. The attitude of the individual in these matters is extremely varied. One human will not allow oneself to be disturbed in the slightest by one’s inner processes—one can ignore them completely; another human is just as completely at their mercy—as soon as one wakes up some fantasy or other, or a disagreeable feeling, spoils one’s mood for the whole day. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Likewise, a vaguely unpleasant sensation puts the idea into one’s head that one is suffering from a secret disease, a dream fills one with gloomy forebodings, although ordinary one is not superstitious. Others, again, have only periodic access to these unconscious stirrings, or only to a certain category of them. For one human they may never have reached consciousness at all as anything worth thinking about, for another they are worrying problem one broods on daily. One human takes them as physiological, another attributes them to the behaviour of one’s neighours, another finds in them a religious revelation. These entirely different ways of dealing with the stirrings of he unconscious are just as habitual as the attitudes to the outer object. The inner attitude, therefore, is correlated with just as definite a functional complex as the outer attitude. People who, it would seem, entirely overlook their inner psychic process no more lack a typical inner attitude than the people who constantly overlook the outer object and the reality of facts lack a typical outer one. In all the latter cases, which are by no means uncommon, the persona is characterized by a lack of relatedness, at times even a blind inconsiderateness, that yield only to the harshest blows of fate. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Not infrequently, it is just these people with a rigid persona who possess an attitude to the unconscious process which is extremely susceptible and open to influence. Inwardly they are as weak, malleable, and “soft-centered” as they are inflexible and unapproachable outwardly. Their inner attitude, therefore, corresponds to a personality that is diametrically opposed to the outer personality. I know a man, for instance, who blindly and pitilessly destroyed the happiness of those nearest him, and yet would interrupt important business journeys just to enjoy the beauty of a forest scene glimpsed from the carriage window of his Ultimate Driving Machine. Cases of this kind are doubtless familiar to everyone, so I need not give further examples. “And now I ask, can ye say aught of yourselves? I answer you, Nay. Ye cannot say that ye are even as much as the dust of the Earth; yet ye were created of the dust of the Earth; but behold, it belongeth to him who created you. And I, even I, whom ye call your king, am no better than ye yourselves are; for I am also of the dust. And ye behold that I am old, and am about to yield up this mortal frame to its mother Earth. Therefore, as I said unto you that I had served you, walking with a clear conscious before God, even so I at this time have caused that ye should assemble yourselves together, that I might be found blameless, and that you blood should not come upon me, when I shall stand to be judged of God of the things whereof he hath commanded me concerning you. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
“I say unto you that I have caused that ye should assemble yourselves together that I might rid my garments of your blood, at this period of time when I am about to go down to my grave, that I might go down in peace, and my immortal spirit may join the choirs above in singing the praises of a just God. And moreover, I say unto you that I have caused that ye should assemble yourselves together, that I might declare unto you that I can no longer be your teacher, nor your king; for even at this time, my whole frame doth tremble exceedingly while attempting to speak unto you; but the Lord God doth support me, and hath suffered me that I should speak unto you, and hath commanded me that I should declare unto you this day, that my son Mosiah is a king and a ruler over you. And now, my brethren, I would that ye should so as ye have hitherto done. As ye have kept my commandments of my father, and have prospered, and have been kept from falling into the hands of your enemies, even so if ye shall keep the commandments of my son, or the commandments of God which shall be delivered unto you by him, ye shall prosper in the land, and your enemies shall have no power over you. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“However, O my people, beware lest there shall arise contentions among you, and ye list to obey the evil spirit, which was spoke of by my father Mosiah. For behold, there is a wo pronounced upon one who listeth to obey that spirit; for if one listeth to obey him and remaineth and dieth in one’s sins, the same drinketh damnation to one’s own soul; for one receiveth for one’s wages an everlasting punishment, having transgressed the law of God contrary to one’s own knowledge. I say unto you, that there are not any among you, expect it be your little children that have not been taught concerning these things, but what knoweth that ye are eternally indebted to your Heavenly Father, to render to him all that you have and are; and also have been taught concerning the records which contain the prophecies which have been spoken by the holy prophets, even down to the time of our father, Lehi, left Jerusalem; and also, all that has been spoken by our fathers until now. And behold, also, they spake that which was commanded them of the Lord; therefore, they are just and true. And now, I say unto you, my brethren, that after ye have known and have been taught all these things, if ye should transgress and go contrary to that which has been spoken, that ye do withdraw yourselves from the Spirit of the Lord, that it may have no place in you to guide you in wisdom’s paths that ye may be blessed, prospered, and preserved. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
“I say unto you, that the human that doeth this, the same cometh out in open rebellion against God; therefore ne listeth to obey the evil spirit, and becometh an enemy to all righteousness; therefore, the Lord has no place for one, for one dwelleth not in unholy temples. Therefore if that human repenteth not, and remaineth and dieth an enemy to God, the demands of divine justice do awaken one’s immortal soul to a lively sense of one’s own guilt, which doth cause one to shrink from the presence of the Lord, and doth fill one’s breast with guilt, and pain, and anguish, which is like an unquenchable fire, whose flame ascendeth up forever and ever. And now I say unto you, that mercy hath no claim on that human; therefore one’s final doom is to endure a never-ending torment. O, all ye old human, and also ye young humans, and you little children who can understand my words, for I have spoken plainly unto you that ye might understand, I pray that ye should aware to a remembrance of the awful situation of those that have fallen into transgression. And moreover, I would desire that ye should consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into Heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
“O remember, remember that these things are true; for the Lord God hath spoken it,” reports Mosiah 2.25-40. Thou Eternal Source, Author of all created being and happiness, I adore Thee for making humans capable of religion, that one may be taught to say: “Where is God, my Maker, who giveth song in the night?” However, degeneracy has spread over our human race, turning glory into shame, rendering us forgetful of Thee. We know it is Thy power alone that can recall wandering children, can impress on them a sense of divine things, and can render that sense of divine things, and can render that sense lasting and effectual; from Thee proceed all good purposes and desires, and the diffusing of piety and happiness. Thou hast knowledge of my soul’s secret principles, and art aware of my desire to spread the gospel. Make me an almoner to give Thy bounties to the indigent, comfort to the mentally ill, restoration to the sin-diseased, hope to the despairing, joy to the sorrowing, love to the prodigals. Blow away the ashes of unbelief by Thy Spirit’ breath and give me light, fire, and warmth of love. I need spiritual comforts that are gentle, peaceful, mild, refreshing, that will melt me into conscious lowliness before Thee, that will make me feel and rest in Thee as my All. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Please fill the garden of my soul with the wind of love, that the scents of the Christian life may be wafted to others; then come and gather fruits to Thy glory. So shall I fulfill the great end of my being—to glorify Thee and be a blessing to humans. May the Communion of Thy Sacrament, O Lord, both purify use and makes us one, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Please deliver us from evil, Lord Jesus Christ! We eat Thy Body, which was crucified for us, and we drink Thy blood, which was shed for us: may Thy holy Body prove our salvation, and Thy holy Blood the forgiveness of our sins, both now and forever. Being fed with Heavenly Food, and refreshed with the eternal Cup, let us give unceasing thanks and praise to the Lord our God, entreating that we, who have spiritually received the most holy Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, may be freed from carnal vices and be made spiritual. O God, Who are eternal salvation, and inestimable blessedness, grant, we beseech Thee, to all Thy servants, that we who have received things holy and blessed, may be enabled to be holy and blessed evermore. God of righteousness, God of mercy, God of immortality and life, God of brightness and glory, we pray and beseech Thee, that being refreshed by Divine gifts, we may be preserved by Thee for Thyself unto the bliss which is to come; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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