The Managed Heart. Arlie Russell Hochschild
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[deep acting, Method acting].
Surface and deep acting in a commercial setting, unlike acting in a dramatic, private, or therapeutic context, make one’s face and one’s feelings take on the properties of a resource. But it is not a resource to be used for the purposes of art, as in drama, or for the purposes of self-discovery, as in therapy, or for the pursuit of fulfillment, as in everyday life. It is a resource to be used to make money. Outside of Stanislavski’s parlor, out there in the American marketplace, the actor may wake up to find himself actually operated upon.
* In each instance the individual indicates awareness of acting on a feeling. A passive stance toward feeling was reflected in other examples: “I found myself filled with pride,” “My stomach did a trapeze act all by itself.”
† It also presupposes an aspiration to feel. The man who fought against love wanted to feel the same about his former wife as he thought she felt about him; if he was a limited idea to her, he wanted her to be that for him. A courtly lover in twelfth-century France or a fourteen-year-old American female rock fan might have been more disposed to aspire to one-sided love, to want it that way. Deep acting comes with its social stories about what we aspire to feel.
* In An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski points out an apparent contradiction: “We are supposed to create under inspiration; only our subconscious gives us inspiration; yet we apparently can use this subconscious only through our consciousness, which kills it” (1965, p. 13). The solution to this problem is the indirect method. The subconscious is induced. As Stanislavski notes: “The aim of the actor’s preparation is to cross the threshold of the subconscious…. Beforehand we have ‘true-seeming feeling,’ afterwards ‘sincerity of emotion.’ On this side of it, we have the simplicity of a limited fantasy; beyond, the simplicity of the larger imagination, [where] the creative process differs each time it is repeated” (p. 267).
* The mind acts as a magnet to reusable feeling. Stanislavski advises actors: “Imagine that you have received some insult in public, perhaps a slap in the face, that makes your cheek burn whenever you think of it. The inner shock was so great that it blotted out all the details of this harsh incident. But some insignificant thing will instantly revive the memory of the insult, and the emotion will recur with redoubled violence. Your cheek will grow red or you will turn pale and your heart will pound. If you possess such sharp and easily aroused emotional material, you will find it easy to transfer it to the stage and play a scene analogous to the experience you had in real life which left such a shocking impression on you. To do this you will not need any technique. It will play itself because nature will help you” (1965, p. 176).
* We commonly assume that institutions are called in when individual controls fail: those who cannot control their emotions are sent to mental hospitals, homes for disturbed children, or prisons. But in looking at the matter this way, we may ignore the fact that individual failures of control often signal a prior institutional failure to shape feeling. We might ask instead what sort of church, school, or family influence was unavailable to the parents of institutionalized patients, who presumably tried to make their children into adequate emotion managers.
* Scientific writing, like scientific talk, has a function similar to that of covering the face and genitalia. It is an extension of institutional control over feeling. The overuse of passive verb forms, the avoidance of “I,” the preference for Latinate nouns, and for the abstract over the concrete, are customs that distance the reader from the topic and limit emotionality. In order to seem scientific, writers obey conventions that inhibit emotional involvement. There is a purpose in such “poor” writing.
* I heard the rationale for this company regulation discussed in class on February 19, 1980. (It was also stated in the training manual.) Whether it has ever been enforced, and with what result, I don’t know.
4
FEELING RULES
A restless vitality wells up as we approach thirty.
—Gail Sheehy
Measuring experience against a normative model set up by doctors, people will be as troubled by departures from the norm as they are troubled by [Gail Sheehy’s] “predictable crises” themselves, against which medical norms are intended to provide reassurance.
—Christopher Lasch
Since feeling is a form of pre-action, a script or a moral stance toward it is one of culture’s most powerful tools for directing action.1 How do we sense these scripts or, as I shall call them, feeling rules? In this chapter we discuss the various ways in which all of us identify a feeling rule and the ways in which we discover that we are out of phase with it—ways which include noting the duration, strength, time, and placement of a feeling. We explore the areas of love, hate, grief, and jealousy, to which these private rules apply.
The purpose of this effort is to expose the outlines of a private emotion system. This system, as we saw in Chapter Three, involves emotion work (deep acting). Feeling rules are what guide emotion work by establishing the sense of entitlement or obligation that governs emotional exchanges. This emotion system works privately, often free of observation. It is a vital aspect of deep private bonds and also affords a way of talking about them. It is a way of describing how—as parents and children, wives and husbands, friends and lovers—we intervene in feelings in order to shape them.
What are feeling rules? How do we know they exist? How do they bear on deep acting? We may address these questions by focusing on the pinch between “what I do feel” and “what I should feel,” for at this spot we get our best view of emotional convention. The following snapshots of people caught in moments of emotional deviance, moments in which they stand naked of convention, are not exactly candid shots since people pose even in their confessions. But they are clear pictures of how people see their own actions in relation to emotional convention. And just as we may infer from conscious emotion work the possibility of unconscious forms of it, so we may infer the possibility of unconscious feeling rules, harder to get at but just as probably there.2
How do we recognize a feeling rule? We do so by inspecting how we assess our feelings, how other people assess our emotional display, and by sanctions issuing from ourselves and from them.3 Different social groups probably have special ways in which they recognize feeling rules and give rule reminders, and the rules themselves probably vary from group to group.4 On the whole, I would guess that women, Protestants, and middle-class people cultivate the habit of suppressing their own feelings more than men, Catholics, and lower-class people do. Our culture invites women, more than men, to focus on feeling rather than action; it invites Protestants into an inner dialogue with God, without benefit of church, sacrament, or confession as an intermediary structure; and it invites those in middle-class occupations to manage feeling in service jobs. To the extent that it does these things, the very ways in which we acknowledge feeling rules reflect where we stand on the social landscape. Indeed, the amount of interest people have in feeling rules and emotion work may tend to follow these social lines.
How do we recognize a rule reminder? We can experience it as a private mumbling to ourselves, the voice of a watchful chorus standing to the side of the main stage on which we act and feel.* We also receive rule reminders from others who ask us to account for what we feel.5 A friend might ask, “Why do you feel depressed? You’ve just won the prize you’ve always wanted.” Such friends are generally silent when we feel as they expect us to, when events visibly explain our feeling. A call for account implies that emotional conventions are not in order and must be brought up to consciousness for repair—or, at least in the case of weak conventions, for a checkup. A wink or ironic tone of voice may change the spirit of a rule reminder. Such gestures add a meta-statement: “That’s the feeling rule, all right, but we’re disregarding it, aren’t we?” We are reminded of the rule by being asked to disregard it.
We also know feeling rules by the way others react to what they think we are feeling. These external reactions or “claims”—both as they are intended