5 Sometimes, feeling and emotion words do not always correspond. This idea represents Vygotsky’s argument on the relation between thought and words (Vygotsky, 1987: 250), that feeling is expressed but completed in the word as emotion. This means that feeling is restructured as it is articulated consciously through words as an emotion. The feeling goes through a transformation as it finds utterance in words—it becomes like an object that can be reflected upon.
6 The analytic object of textualization includes the printed word, graphic images, spoken utterance, and even the messages given off in social settings by such behaviors as bodily movements and positions (which we correctly refer to as body language), gestures, facial expressions, and so on. In
discursive meaning, creating the full spectrum of emotion.
For instance, laughter offers subversive liberation from what these theorists call the “univocal” appearance of naturalness of our social world (e.g., Baudrillard, 1981, Bakhtin, 1981).
Such theory assumes that what is shared is oppressive.
Laughter is a particular kind of expression, imbued at once with a myriad of possibilities: appreciation, surprise, recognition, irony, sarcasm, understanding, sympathy, disgust, enjoyment, puzzlement, concern, disdain—an embodied political position, a kind of representation. In critical pedagogy camp, Peter McLaren also considers laughter as “a political refusal…reinvoking the fool and itinerant clown as pedagogical agents of resistance”
(McLaren, 1993: 287). Subversive humor only expresses the discontents of the present. Like Scott (1990) argues that we should not see any basic contradiction between mild and strong, hidden and open forms of subordinate protest. His framework abolishes a contradiction of long standing between apparent apathy and protest, “false” and “true”
consciousness. Subversive humor expresses the discontent with anger, frustration, fear and anxiety. These emotions are responses to the “social experience of indignities, control, submission, humiliation, forced deference and punishment” associated with any form of domination (Scott, 1990: 111-113).However, for social movement activists, the evolutionary force from laughter is quite different from traditional strategies in social movement such as underground press and sit-in protest to combat institutional hegemony. The political joke or humor may reveal certain fact in the school or educational field and represent the implication of irony and satire, but it depends on the proper timing and sense of humor without faithful commitment for educational change. That is, sometimes laughter has the implication of nihilism in this sense. In my opinion, laughter is the inner mechanism of buffer, but laughter is impossible to subvert dominant hegemony.
4.Emotion in Teachers’ Everyday Lives
(1) Emotion and Practice
As I discussed above, emotions can be managed in accordance with certain conventions, that there is some intentionality involved in the expression of emotion.
Hochschild (1983) has argued that emotional life is largely socially-regulated by ideologies of feeling, operating through a series of “feeling rules” which prescribe how individuals ought to feel in various situations: an individual who does not happen to feel spontaneously in accord with a particular rule will engage in a form of “emotion work” to try to act the appropriate emotion or to influence in the way others feel. In my opinion, Hochschild’s discussion of
“feeling rules” offers insights as to how such discourses—which embody ideologies of feeling—influence
processes whereby teachers try to adapt to disappointment of their expectations of relationships with educational system.
Teachers have internalized the feeling rules, and they engaged in different levels of acting effort: surface acting does not obscure what is really felt, but under more powerful pressure deep acted feeling obscures the authentic, even for the actors themselves. This is the so-called feeling rule sharing some formal properties with other sorts of rules. It delineates a zone within which one has permission to be free of worry, guilt, or shame with regard to situated feeling. That is, feeling rules refer to guidelines for the assessment of fits and misfits between feeling and situation. Feeling is subject to individual and social management, that “in managing feeling we contribute to the creation of it” (Hochschild, 1983:
18), that our senses of what emotions are culturally specific (Lutz, 1986; Rosaldo, 1984), and that “there are complex linguistic and other social preconditions for the…existence of human emotions” (Jagger, 1989: 15). In addition, Thoits refers to feelings that do not fit norms for emotions as deviant emotions. As she expresses, “emotional deviance refers to experiences or displays of affects that differ in quality or degree from what is expected in a given situation”
(Thoits, 1990: 181). Thus, the deviant emotions produced in such conflicting positioning must be consciously managed or unconsciously repressed in order to fit the prevailing definition of the situation.
Emotion seems the structuring structure in Bourdieu sense that make it possible for the world to be intelligible to us while, at the same time, configuring our bodies as disposed to certain feelings and actions. These feelings themselves may become habitual so that it is possible for certain people to produce patterns of responses to situations that tend to characterize them. In my opinion, the usual deviant emotions in schoolteacher’s everyday lives include perplexity, mope/boredom, and anger/resentment. Generally speaking, perplexity is trouble or confusion resulting from complexity. Then, boredom is a type or form of anxiety about the lack of meaningfulness of an activity, a condition and (possibly) a life,” and boredom is “restless”, “irritable”
and presses one to construct meaning. Similarly, mope means to give oneself up to brooding, or to become listless or dejected situation. Finally, resentment is often used with a feeling of indignant displeasure or persistent ill will at something regarded as a wrong, insult, or injury. In short, resentment is a feeling of deep and bitter anger and ill-will.
All of these three emotional statuses in schoolteachers’
everyday lives represent the characteristic of the deskilling teachers7: it means the constructing process of alienation and
7Deskilling is one type of alienation. Seeman (1959) defines five variants of alienation: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation, and self-estrangement. In a later article, Seeman (1972) revised these categories and defined six variants of alienation: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, cultural estrangement, self-estrangement, and social isolation. In educational studies, Apple (1995) is a significant scholar to identify how the centralization of curriculum design might lead to deskilling teachers. Apple shows that deskilling carries with it certain characteristics, such as “rule orientation”, “greater dependability” and “the internalization of the enterprise’s goals and values” (Apple, 1995:
isolation from their teaching. If I can propose the proper example about deskilling teachers, LeCompte and Dworkin using the terms burnout and quitting behavior (deviant emotions) to refer to teachers’ everyday lives would be a good one. Burned-out teachers suffer from entrapment; that is, teachers without goals, on the contrary, students without purpose; they are alienated, but cannot quit. They define burnout as follows: “Burnout is an extreme form of role-specific alienation characterized by a sense that one’s work is meaningless and that one is powerless to effect changes that could make the work more meaningful. Further, this sense of meaninglessness and powerlessness is heightened by a belief that the norms associated with the role and the setting are absent, conflicting, or inoperative, and that one is alone and isolated among one’s colleagues and clients” (LeCompte & Dworkin, 1991: 94).
However, it is important for us to notice “elements of good sense as well as bad sense” (Gramsci, 1971) in emotional issue. Of course, teachers are not passive internalizers of pregiven social or cultural messages. This involves a continual process of compromise, conflict, and active struggle to maintain hegemony. Like Willis (1977:
175) says in Learning to Labor, “Social agents are not passive bearers of ideology, but active appropriators who reproduce existing structures only through struggle, contestation and a partial penetrations of these structures.” In Willis’s context, penetration refers to those instances where students has developed responses to school and work that see the unequal reality they will face. Their rejection of so much of the content and form of day to day educational life bears on the almost unconscious realization that, as a class, schooling will not enable them to go much further than they already are. The culture the lads create inside and outside their schools actually constitutes a rather realistic assessment of the rewards of the obedience and conformism that the school seeks to extract from working-class youths.
(However, I need to remind readers that informal cultural resistances sometimes may act in contradictory ways that ultimately tend to be reproductive.8)Like Bourdieu uses
“practical knowledge” and “sense of practice” to describe the practical dimension of action. Actors are not rule followers or norm obeyers but strategic improvisers who respond dispositionally to the opportunities and constraints offered by various situations.
For Bourideu, practice refers to action that is oriented to practical outcomes, is strategic, and is largely organized by unconscious schemes, so that it operates an intuitive skill or tact. Practice cannot follow “logical logic” first because of its relation to time. Bourdieu stresses that for practice, unlike
8 We should consider the possibility that resistance is not only choice against domination but conformism, ritualism, or euphemism, even sitting on the fence. For instance, Woods (1979: 71-72) notes in his work The Divided School, there are many modes of pupil adaptation to be found in schools—conformity, ritualism, retreatism, colonization, intransigence, and rebellion being the major ones. To focus on resistance as the only form opposite to cultural reproduction is to ignore much of what happens in reality. Emotional reaction which is quite different from resistance could be
logic, “its temporal structure, that is, its rhythm, its tempo, and above all its directionality, is constitutive of its meaning”
(1977: 81). Practice requires instantaneous judgments anticipating future actions, as when “a player who is involved and caught up in the game adjusts not to what he sees but to what he fore-sees…in response to an overall, instantaneous assessment of the whole set of his opponents and the whole set of his team-mates, seen not as they are but in their impending positions.” He does so under conditions of “urgency” that “exclude distance, perspective, detachment, and reflection” (1977: 81-82).9 In sum, emotional expressions are strategic, playing roles on forms of action, and actions occur in situations. Thus, emotions are experienced positionaly in terms of merging and establishing boundaries in one’s relationship with others.
(2) Structure of Feeling
Collins (1990) identifies two types of emotions: (1) solidarity experiences based in interaction. There could be face-to-face interaction or another interaction through technology, shared emotion, a shared focus of attention, and a mutual awareness of this focus. In the educational context, this shifts teachers’ awareness from themselves to the structural issues. Thus, this will form the possibility of
“structure of feeling in teacher’s community” borrowing from Raymond William’s concept structure of feeling.10 In my opinion, structure of feeling is a significant mechanism for mobilization of emotion, which brings the possibility for social transformation. Williams (1977: 132-133) describes this as a “social experiences in solution.” He talks of structures of feeling to indicate the sense people have of changing social meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt in the present moment. Williams is indicating the sense of changing meanings and values by which people act in the present moment, in a social context that is not ossified but is a continuous and living present. Thus,
9 Bourdieu gets certain insight from Goffman, who argues that social life could be understood as a form of “strategic interaction.” His dramaturgical analysis suggests that, in practice, social life is a game, that human activity is strategic (contingent on the responses of others) and is unscripted (Goffman, 1969). However, Goffman’s arguments seem to ignore the unconscious side in action.
10 In the similar argument, Giambattista Vico’s “sensus communis” is originally a notion of the shared “communal sense” that facilitates communicative understanding. The proper translation in English is
“communal sense” or “joint understanding.” Sensus communis is based upon experience which results in acquiring the common good through living in the community (Schaeffer, 1990). In addition, we should also clarify two interesting terms related to this issue: verstandigung and einverstandnis. Einverstandnis (in Habermas’s writings) translates as “a well-grounded agreement”—that is, one that has been reached in a process of genuine argumentation (discourse). On the contrary, verstandigung suggests less the state of having reached agreement than the process of
meanings and values are not stable and fixed but are in a constant process of change and modification, so that while people may not have clear ideas about the way these meanings and values are changing they nevertheless feel this in their social relations. In other words, Williams contrasts feeling to discursive elements such as worldview and ideology which are linguistic and textual.
Furthermore, in its ideal situation, the structure of feeling in teacher’s community enables solidarity among schoolteachers, through emotional responses to educational events or policy and so on, which is shaped by certain activities occurring within the context of socially organized space. Thus, different teachers’ divergent emotional expressions and opinions function as the collective identity process via story-telling or life narrative. This process, as a social transaction, engages the various schoolteachers in a communicative relationship: that is, the storyteller and reader/listener create a “we” involving some degree of affective bond and a sense of solidarity: told and retold, “my story” becomes “our story” (Davis, 2002). Thus, I agree completely that narratives will facilitate collective identity, as Rosaldo (1984: 143) says, “Feeling are not substances to be discovered in our blood, but social practices organized by stories that we both enact and tell. They are structured by our forms of understanding.” In short, within culture public and private narratives or emotional expressions often overlap and intermesh, private narratives become public which offer opportunities for narrative disclosure or emotional expression around educational concern.11
In my opinion, the emotional energy from intense solidarity with similarly positioned people can create collective identity. Collective identity provides a meta-perspective on one’s self. When collective identity is formed around previously repressed deviant emotion, the meta perspective provided by collective identity can allow room for the legitimization of these emotions. When one can see one’s self from a meta perspective, one can come to see one’s own experience as part of a larger pattern rather than an individual experience of fear, inadequacy, lack of fulfillment, depression, or unhappiness. What’s more, Collins (1990: 31) emphasizes that high emotional energy is experienced as “solidarity feelings, moral sentiment, the enthusiasm of pitching oneself into a situation, or being carried along by it.” Emotional energy is long-term level of enthusiasm, personal strength, a sense of social connectedness, and/or willingness to initiate interaction. On the contrary, perplexity, mope/boredom and anger undermine potential participation in subversive activity.
They are the result of feeling overwhelmed with negative expectations. As Collins (1990: 43) states, “truly powerful
11 For instance, Summers-Effler (2002) points out that when collective identity is formed around previously repressed deviant emotions, the meta perspective provided by collective identity can allow room for the legitimization of these emotions. That is, one’s own experience is part of a larger pattern rather than an individual experience of fear, depression, or
persons do not become angry in a sense, because they do not need to; they get their way without it.” Thus, Collins suggests that an emotional motivation for action offer a base for explaining the resilience of power structure as well as the potential for social change. The commitment to process and action requires a radical rethinking of values and what counts as knowledge. Central to the reconceptualization of values and knowledge is an emphasis on the importance of everyday life’s experience and emotions in particular as a barometer of both oppressive and liberatory experiences.
Thus, how to shift emotional energy from anger/resentment to joy and commitments becomes the task of critical pedagogy.
Perplexity followed with high emotional energy manifests itself as anger/resentment, which is the temporary energy to overcome an obstacle. Collins (1990: 44-45) points out righteous anger which is the emotional outburst shared by a group against persons who violate its sacred symbols. Such
anger only happens when there is a previously constituted group; one cab predicts that righteous anger is proportional to the amount of emotional charge of membership feelings around particular symbols. On the contrary, Collins also states that low emotional energy results in feelings of
“depression, alienation, and embarrassment” (1990: 31). I would also add that low emotional energy is a feeling of mode/boredom. Critical pedagogy emphasizes language of hope is required to inspire subversive action. I think large amount of emotional energy can create the hope necessary for subversive activity despite realistic appraisals of potentially deadly risk. High level of emotional energy is a crucial step in connecting anger to social change. Thus, Collins (1990: 31) states that high emotional energy is experienced as “solidarity feelings, moral sentiment, the enthusiasm of pitching oneself into a situation, or being carried along by it.” That is, high emotional energy is a feeling of positive expectations for language of hope.
ee=emotional energy
Figure 1. The Emotional Requirement for Subversive Action
Although Paulo Freire (2004) in Pedagogy of Indignation sees anger as the appropriate response to obscene violations
of human rights and social injustices; anger is a tool that will enable all those who yearn for social justice to recapture
their human dignity and avoid falling into cynicism. I do not totally agree Freire’s argument here; indeed, I still think about revolutionary actions that are based on “joyful”
commitment not universal envy or existential resentment, as Nietzsche (1968: 68) states: “being able to dance with the feet, with concepts, with words: do I still have to say that one has to be able to dance with the pen?”12 In my eyes, social change must occur in euphoric moods which affirms collective identities and beliefs, as well as their strategies. As Durkheim sensed, “collective ritual and gatherings suggest that you are participating in something bigger than you: you are part of history, or you are morally sanctioned, or you truly belong to a group. The emotion of rituals reinforce cognitive and moral visions as well” (Jasper, 1997: 197).