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foreign
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hi my name is Rob bodice I'm a senior
research fellow at the center for the
history of experiences at Tampa
University in Finland and an Adjunct
professor at the department of social
studies at medicine at McGill University
in Montreal
today I'm going to introduce the history
of anger
or rather I'm going to disrupt the
history of anger
title of my lecture is simply anger but
I've added a question mark
because I want to emphasize
a fundamental principle of the history
of emotions
which is to abandon any assumption that
present day emotional categories
especially Western categories like anger
that have been essentialized and
universalized by certain psychologists
can easily be identified in the
historical record
the risk in setting out to look for
anger or any other emotion defined in
Modern English
is that historical traces will be
translated and transformed to fit the
preconceived idea
leading not to a greater understanding
of the felt past but to a corruption
of past experience
this principle shouldn't be too
surprising and every other respect
historians reject both anachronism and
tibiology
we don't that is begin with the present
with end points and ask how we got here
it felt experience is historical
and of course this is the major claim of
the history of emotions at least as far
as I see it
then anachronism and teleology have to
be carefully guarded against
it's my opinion that anyone who sets out
to look for anger or love or Joy or
disgust or any other emotion in the past
will automatically
flirt
with the risk of anachronism
the very starting point of I'm going to
research the history of anger
excuse the search
according to the assumption that
something called anger can be found
everywhere and in every time
it assumes that whatever situated word
or words
are used in a historical context
whatever the form of bodily expression
or facial expression whatever
inter-subjective practices there may be
that these can be translated both
linguistically and experientiously
experientially into anger
as understood according to
a certain contemporary psychological
category in the West
now some emotion researchers would find
such a possibility attractive
and you know it would be extremely
convenient
those who say that human emotions are
Universal
built in deeply evolved
uh automatic autonomic
who say that emotions are essentially
fixed
have a very limited appreciation of the
possibilities of human experience and a
pretty thin understanding of human
history but they cleave to this notion
of a sort of universal human machine
because it is politically and
economically and epistemologically and
experimentally
beneficial to do so
Unfortunately they cleave to a fiction
should historians go looking for what
they might call
anger-like feelings based on a
presentist notion of what anger
essentially is
they will probably find it and they will
probably be able to make statements
generalizing about Connections to the
Past threads of continuity how we got
here from there and so on
but this is to mix teleology with
anachronism
reversing the cart through the archives
in order to find which way the horse
must have gone is bad history with bad
methods
gearing history in this way will
populate the narrative desired by the
historian but it will never reveal that
which was a particular or peculiar or
that which has since been lost
these things won't show up
unless the expectations of present-day
readers of human emotions are disrupted
and defamiliarized
the possibility of the discontinuity of
the felt past has to be entertained
otherwise history is devoid of mess it's
devoid of richness and ultimately is
devoid of historicism
now on the face of it this would suggest
that the history of emotions is
practically impossible
it's stymied by the fundamental
methodological barrier to the formation
of a research topic
just stating
I want to research the history of anger
so squashes the initiative at the outset
fortunately there are other Sounder
approaches
and I'm going to spend the rest of this
lecture trying to exemplify them
the first is to use history critically
to upset Orthodox assumptions
so you can go about looking for claims
of the universal presence of anger and
you can test those claims
outside of the ballooning field of the
history of emotions there have been
generations of historians not to mention
philosophers literary critics who have
freely and uncritic uncritically
identified anger everywhere
precisely because there was no impetus
to disrupt the universality of human
nature in any respect
now there is a growing
multi-disciplinary consensus which comes
from social psychology and transcultural
Psychiatry and social neuroscience
neurofilosophy and history of emotions
about the formation of emotional
experience through the unstable Dynamic
relationship of biology and culture
such that feelings are always situated
contextually and temporally specific
this means that there is a wealth of
literature that has put modern Western
emotions everywhere and in every time
that needs to be overhaul
Revisited and revised
so first and foremost the history of
emotions is a revisionist project
to exemplify the history of emotions as
a revisionist project I'm going to
upturn one particular Orthodox
understanding about anger that is
commonly known
I'm going to focus on the supposed Rage
of Achilles in The Iliad
and we're going to try to show the
potential of this just one example to
unlock both an emotion history of
antiquity and an emotion history of
modernity
so though I was trained as an historian
of 18th and 19th century Britain I have
since 2006 also been teaching and
researching classical Antiquity in part
because I'm determined to hone a
theoretical and methodological toolbox
in history of emotions that can work for
any place or period
my interest
initially was peaked by a colleague
a classicist
who gave the first lecture of a
co-taught core course on education in
classical Athens
it was the very beginning of my first
post-doctoral job and I was really in at
the deep end reading Homer and
thucydides and Plato and Aristotle and
lots of others for the first time
we were studying Homa as a a core text
that was present in classical Athens
that was part of if you like an
educational curriculum In classical
Athens
now we were reading Robert fagel's 1990
translation of Homer's Iliad and it
begins
like this
rage goddess sing The Rage of pelia's
son Achilles murderers doomed the cost
the akayans countless losses
and after that first year we ditched uh
bagels and we got a new translation
Stanley Lombardo's 1997 translation and
that begins like this
rage sing goddess Achilles rage black
and murderous that cost the Greeks
incalculable pain
now there are clear differences in
Translation choices and Emissions but
the central theme is established
similarly Achilles rage was murderous
the goddess or Muse was solicited to
sing of it
and this murderous rage caused an
indefinite amount of pain or loss of
life
now that colleague who piqued my
interest on both occasions he asked
quite pointedly about the significance
of what he called the first word in the
western Canon
being rage
if Rage which is sometimes given as
wrath and sometimes simply as anger
if this is what the Iliad was about and
if the Iliad was the most important and
Central text In classical Greek culture
what was it that this rage was supposed
to teach
if Achilles was the hero favored by the
Gods
then of what value could this murderous
rage be
what example was it supposed to set how
could it be virtuous
how can heroism and rage coincide
and so for two years at the beginning of
my professional career we debated and
puzzled with enthusiastic students the
value of extreme anger
and I understood very quickly that we
were unlikely to get anywhere as long as
we were imprisoned in Modern English
but I didn't appreciate
the extent to which we were fully
immersed in an Orthodoxy of translation
practices that dated back to the early
17th century
so the first English translation that
was done from the Greek
was George Chapman's from 1611.
and it began like this
Achilles baneful wrath ReSound oh
Goddess that imposed infinite Sorrows on
the Greeks
then we have John dryden's 1700
translation which began
the wrath of pili's son o Muse ReSound
whose dire affects the Grecian Army
found
and you can go right down to Richard
Latimore's celebrated translation of
1951.
where we are treated to more or less the
same kind of thing
his Iliad begins
sing goddess the anger of pelia's son
Achilles and its Devastation which put
Payne's thousand-fold upon the akines
at the very latest celebrated
translation By Carolyn Alexander begins
in similar form
wrath sing goddess of the ruinous Wrath
of pilius sun Achilles that inflicted
woes without number upon the akayans
only one translation in this uh
four century long tradition
deviates from the Orthodoxy but it's
often overlooked
Thomas Hobbes of Leviathan Fame offered
the following in 1675.
oh goddess sing what woe the discontent
of theta's son brought to the Greeks
leaving aside Hobbes obscure choice to
mention Achilles mother rather than his
father it's definitely Achilles father
in the Greek
the word discontent hardly rings in the
same way as anger Rage or wrath
how does one man's discontent bring
about woe to a whole Army
now had we pursued that question we
might have come nearer the mark
and I'll come back to this
the chief problem with the English
translations
is that Achilles anger or rage or wrath
is marked as murderous
when in fact the entire period in which
Achilles is under the sway of this
passion if that's what it is he is
entirely withdrawn
he does not wield a sword much less kill
anyone
both Latimore and Alexander in more
recent translations 20th century 21st
century translations imply a kind of
passive connection between Achilles
anger or wrath and the woes or pains
that it inflicts
but those texts from the 1990s that I
was teaching with in in 2006 and seven
make the connection much more active
Achilles is a killer
but Achilles only kills in anger in The
Iliad only after he is explicitly
relinquished that category that is
usually translated as rage
and thus these English translations
confound the plot
my students and I and my colleagues
struggle together to understand the role
of Rage in The Iliad precisely because
English translations had made it
pretty much impossible to understand
so my provocation here
is that The Iliad is not about Rage or
wrath or anger at all
and there really isn't anything for it
but to turn to the Greek
and see what are actually the first
lines of The Iliad so with apologies in
advance for my pronunciation it really
is All Greek to me and I'm no classicist
but still
these are the opening lines of The Iliad
meaning Achilles
algae attacke
again
apologies all around
but the first word here is manin the
accusative singular of mainness and it's
this word Manis that all these
translators down the ears have
translated as anger
rage and Wrath
what does Achilles Manus do
it makes him withdraw it makes him
become Sullen and obstinate
it makes him fundamentally inactive
Achilles doesn't act in Anger at all in
the Iliad
until after he relinquishes this mayness
all the acts of violence
and the desecration of Hector's corpse
this these actions toward the end of The
Iliad that are usually associated with
Achilles rage
only take place after his mainness is
put aside
this is the only way to begin to
understand the shift in Iliad from
Achilles inactivity to his activity and
it affords us a framework of
understanding why the Greeks thought
Manis
was virtuous and praiseworthy
after all
The Iliad begins with a plea to the
muses not simply to sing
but to praise this Manus the second word
of The Iliad aide
has canonically been translated as sing
but it could just as well have been
translated as praise for Achilles Manus
is virtuous it's favored by the Gods
and it's a sign of that favor
now numerous Scholars have pointed out
that Manis is a special and a rare word
in The Iliad it's reserved for Achilles
and for the Gods
and it's distinct from the more prosaic
anger of the other characters who tend
to suffer kolos
now Carlos is rooted in the body it's
like a bile or gall
and from colors we get the humeral
substance of cola which is bile
and it's been preserved in modern
languages
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in a variety of ways
so in English a choleric person is
ill-tempered or angry and the French
colera is the common usage word for
anger
it's rootedness in bodily disorder or
disease is preserved in the disease
cholera
so this is a kind of prosaic anger and
this is the kind of anger that Achilles
rarely experiences
um it's it's worldly and achilles menus
is something else
in its connection with the gods Achilles
menus is Cosmic in its magnitude and its
importance
Leonard Milner has called Manis Cosmic
sanction
with the power to rewrite a world that
has been put out of shape by a profound
threat to the social order
in most instances maleness is Unleashed
by a God to prevent a human who acts
like a god from overreaching the limits
of his nature but it's also used to keep
the order of the Gods itself in line
Achilles is not a God but he is a
demigod
having an immortal mother more
importantly he is a king
a king of equal status to Agamemnon
so this is the uh important background
to the uh the beginning of Achilles
menos Agamemnon strips Achilles of his
prize a slave girl called bryceus
as compensation for having to give up
his own prize
crisis
he's compelled to give up crisis to her
father who is a priest of Apollo
initially and against Cosmic and ritual
Notions of justice and Order
Agamemnon had refused to Ransom crisis
whereupon Apollo had visited a Great
Plague upon all the amassed Greeks
this is the mainness of Apollo and the
collective suffering it causes compels
Agamemnon to change his mind in order to
restore order and end Apollos menus
but as compensation for having to give
up his own prize and in order to not
lose face he takes Achilles prize in
turn
Achilles then Cuts all ties with all the
Greeks who implicitly condone
agamemnon's actions by allowing them to
happen
Agamemnon has threatened the delicate
social structure of Kings among Kings
also upending carefully observed rituals
about the share of plunder
his unjust seizing of bryceus signals A
disruption of the order of worldly
things A disruption that follows quickly
on the heels of his disruption of cosmic
things
Agamemnon twice wrist mainness first of
Apollo second of Achilles by acting out
of all regard to deeply embedded and
encoded ritual practices concerning
status exchange and honor
Achilles mayness is praiseworthy
because it will ultimately restore
things to the way they're supposed to be
and in the meantime it causes blood to
flow in rivers among the Greeks
the function of Achilles Manus for the
majority of the action in The Iliad is
not for him to unleash violence
personally but for him to withdraw from
violence
Achilles is nothing but restraint in his
mainness
he's marked by inaction
sometimes he restrains himself and other
times he's restrained by the goddess
Athena or by theta's mother
and if you look at this first century
Fresco from Pompeii you'll see that this
is where Achilles Manus is first
transformed by Athena into control and
withdrawal
and it's worth noting in passing
that most ancient depictions of Achilles
do not portray any visible or obvious
facial expression certainly not one that
we would associate with rage
if you're looking for an archetypal sign
of anger in facial affect you won't find
it in Achilles
in another depiction this time on a cup
dating to 480 BCE which captures the
moment of bryceus being removed to
agamemnon's custody you can see Achilles
sitting motionless wrapped in mourning
shroud the only visible expression being
the placement of his hand on his
forehead
this is a recognizable Motif not of
anger but of grief
while it might serve to see this as a
physical gesture of his personal grief
in the contest it makes sense to
interpret it as a visible sign of his
mainness
he is inert grieving not merely the
state of his personal Fortune but the
state of the world
this state that befits the hero's name
Achilles is a compound a Greek words for
grief
and an army
and so
Achilles simmers Away by the ships his
Mane is continuing to be the cause of
the archive struggles
how
well it's a withdrawal designed to
unleash hell upon their Kinds by
allowing Hector and the Trojans the
advantage in battle
with the chief source of military
resistance out of the picture
the Trojans have the advantage and they
they slaughter the archives and this is
the will of Zeus
but Zeus's mainness is actually in this
case the active adoption of the Manus of
Achilles Zeus becomes in moneless terms
the active agent of Achilles menus
Zeus exceeds to the request of Achilles
via his mother theaters that their
cayennes should all suffer for the
transgressions of Agamemnon
transferring the unusual
human maleness of demigod Achilles to
the cosmic sanction of an actual God who
justly punishes the whole social group
associated with he who put the world out
of sorts
the impact of Achilles menus only gives
way when he unleashes patroclus his
comrade his friend his lover
onto the Trojans wearing Achilles own
armor
the route of the achians by this point
is sufficient punishment for the
injustices done to Achilles honor and in
sending patroclus into battle as if he
were Achilles himself Achilles takes the
first step to rebuilding those bonds
that were Shattered by Agamemnon at the
outset of the Epic
patroclus's death
is experienced not simply as the death
of a loved one but as if this were
Achilles own death
such was the identity between them
and it ignites in Achilles a profound
grief that finally
launches him into activity and into
battle
the modern translation tradition almost
inevitably confuses this return to
activity as a continuation of Achilles
rage
it's mixed in with other powerful
passions love and grief but
there's this undercurrent of Rage that
goes from start to finish
it's only reasonable by what you might
think of as sort of our standards of
what constitutes Rage or wrath
that the extraordinary violence that
issues forth from the hands of Achilles
must be borne by that Rage or wrath
but insofar as Achilles actions are
undertaken out of grief
and for the benefit of all of his
comrades
we have to see his relentless
murderousness
as the sign that his main is
theme of The Iliad
has actually ended
and so with this we complete the
revision
to say that Achilles menus was rage and
to say that this rage was murderous is
to commit a double error
now I have tried to submit a novel
suggestion
for a new translation
of the first two words in Western
literature it's not particularly poetic
but it is more literal
which is to say
It should read praise God like Menace
Manis is not a mere passion and cannot
be equated readily with the way that
modern psychologists have defined
emotion it doesn't just come from within
it has social and it has Cosmic stimuli
and in my reading it makes more sense to
translate Manis as Menace
I mean mainly this
obvious reasons to connect mainness with
Menace not least because they sound
almost exactly the same
but because Menace carries with it
an implicit uh affective disposition
it's a threat
as well as an implication of violence uh
potential violence
that defines the actions of its subject
and disrupts the experience of all in
that world who encounter it
main is after all doesn't merely
describe the feeling of Achilles it
underscores and it justifies all of his
inactions and the course of the war
until he finally gives it up and rejoins
The Fray
now today Menace as a noun is understood
as
a person or a thing that's likely to
cause harm a threat or danger when it's
applied in the singular
but also a threatening quality or
atmosphere
and in the context of The Iliad
precisely such a threat is warranted
because of the social and ritual rupture
caused by agamemnon's treatment of
Achilles
so in pursuing
the most canonically Orthodox example of
extreme anger in Western literature I've
actually ended up with something else
entirely something akin to grief to
explain Achilles actions at the end of
The Iliad and something akin to a
divinely endorsed withdrawal
that allows the Greeks to be slaughtered
through the absence of Achilles presence
and through his refusal to engage
or act in violence
now you might ask why on Earth is any of
this important or irrelevant these are
mythical figures
they're not even recognizably human
especially in the case of Achilles who's
a demigod you know this is all um
far-fetched
but as I said at the beginning The Iliad
was the central cultural and pedagogical
text in Greek culture for centuries
it was from this Epic which people
learned by heart
that Greek culture Drew its
understanding of virtue and Power
it was the main intertext of Plato's
Republic
and
even where the iliads examples of
personal conduct and
feeling were contested as in the
Republic where you know they're fiercely
debated
they are still Central to the argument
of what makes
virtuous action
the iliad's importance in real human
experience over a very long time
therefore cannot be overstated
and it's I think really vitally
important to carry out this kind of
revisionist analysis
as we've seen Modern English appraisals
of the Menace of Achilles have had a
hard time understanding how it could be
that Achilles was the hero of the Epic
and much of this confusion comes from
that conceptual slippage and translation
that makes rage out of Manis and out of
kolos such that Achilles rages all the
way through the Iliad
by a whim of translation the affective
repertoire of the Epic has been
flattened out the plot rendered
incomprehensible and achilles virtue
made nonsensical and a really strange
upheaval that actually then makes
Achilles the hero into Achilles
the villain
through this process of revision
the history of emotions I think becomes
doubly productive
first it rewrites the affective context
of The Iliad and the hundreds of years
in which it was a central cultural and
political text
but second it focuses scrutiny
on the context in which translations
insisted on the central theme of Rage or
wrath
in this respect the Rage of Achilles
points us to a history of anger not in
antiquity
but to a history of anger since the 17th
century
the context strategies and politics of
the translators themselves becomes the
vehicle for a history of anger at far
remove from ancient Greece
these translations should not simply be
discounted
but explained
and here I'm I'm only going to gesture
at some of the important contextual
generalities about the place and
politics of anger since early modernity
who or what was allowed to be angry for
whom or what was anger just
what purpose did anger serve
first to begin to approach this you have
to take a long view of the place of
extreme anger in Christianity extending
all the way back to early Medieval Times
for most the wrath of God was considered
righteous just and necessary serving as
a corrective to the failings of humanity
and this was a view maintained into the
20th century although by then by a
minority
C.S Lewis uh he of Narnia Fame
famously stated in 1940 that God shouts
in our pains it's his megaphone to Rouse
a dead world
God is angry the medium of this anger
was human suffering
so if righteous anger was the purview
only of God
what right had mere mortals to it
Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt say of
colonial era America that only God was
entitled to be wrathful not humans
and this is not to say that nobody
experienced or practiced rage but rather
its appearance especially among
so-called civilized men and in women was
arresting and evaluated almost entirely
negatively
its appearance among less Gentile whites
and among the indigenous and enslaved
populations was even more disparaged as
evidence of a raw nature and Beyond
self-control
as Nicole Eustis has demonstrated the
language of rage and a fury
was applied not to the elite but only to
the animalistic to forces of nature to
those deemed Beyond Reason and
self-control
Eustis says that the articulation of
anger was linked to the assertion of
self which was a severely restricted
activity in the 18th century rage and
fury were the province only of the Wild
and the fierce
foreign
occasion
practices of anger among Elite men were
Justified as a form of mastery
an emotion Next to Godliness Maybe
controlled and measured according to the
circumstances but for most of early
modernity rage and wrath were distinctly
unchristian experiences
the 18th century fascination with
classical texts
contained I think inevitably a disquiet
about the Heathen World in which ancient
actors operated
somebody like Achilles styled as a
demigod who communed with the plurality
of unchristian gods whose maineness in
turn aped these gods
could hardly be fitted into
any easy Christian mold of virtue
whether in his sulky withdrawal or in
his Grievous return to battle Achilles
heroism
looked barbarous
Christian eyes
the application of the word rough to his
actions immediately signaled to an early
modern audience
that here was a beast ungovernable
a violent force of nature a villain
now while Eustis notes that in the later
18th century Americans in particular
became more comfortable with certain
expressions of
wrath especially in the context of
lording it over the beastly British
enemy
on the whole it remained an inhuman
state
even if in later generations
the expression of anger came to be more
widely accepted among Elite white men as
a marker of their status
it remained both restrained by custom
and checked by codes of religious
morality and honor
among those likely to have any
familiarity with Greek texts in the 18th
and 19th centuries
it was really unlikely that a reader
would identify with the figure of
Achilles
it was far easier
and far more morally acceptable
to express the distance between
this ancient Heathen monster
and the Civilized Restraint of the
Modern Man
The Iliad therefore was literally
Rewritten to fit with the social status
of Rage for elite Christian white men
I think the 20th century saw a return to
the proscription of anger and to ever
more elaborate statements from
scientific quarters about the need for
its control
as Fernandez and Matt sum up
anger is something which quote must be
swallowed
the fact that Achilles restrains himself
for most of the Iliad which might have
made him an icon of anger management for
20th century readers is undermined
already by the Orthodoxy which is by
this point well established that
Achilles is a man lost to rage
which brings me ultimately back to that
one outlier among the English
translations by Thomas Hobbs
hobb's choice to make mainness into
discontent
was a means of making Achilles socially
acceptable and politically accessible to
the elite men of his times or perhaps to
himself
discontent or maybe
um resentment
would have been a valid vehicle for a
sense of social and political Injustice
and especially so for a king
there were a few readers I think who
sought such an identification
and indeed Hobbs translation has been
derided and despised by many usually on
Poetic grounds but I think
there's this powerful Orthodoxy playing
against uh this translation which is
justifiably more complex
in the later 19th century William
Gladstone also um
had an attempt at shaking up received
wisdom about virtue and vice and heroism
in The Iliad
saying that
all of these modern translations and
understandings are far removed from what
the Greeks would have understood
and in the 20th century various
classicists have marked the distance of
the feelings of the poet and izakayan
audience from the modern reader
so these things that I'm saying they're
not they haven't been uh they have been
iterated before by other people in
slightly different ways
but for the most part
we can see a tendency towards an
Orthodoxy and we can see the context and
the strategies and the politics of the
translators themselves becoming a
vehicle
for a history of anger at far remove
from ancient Greece
okay so let me
try to tie up some threads and wrap this
up
what have I done here
through a process of revision I've tried
to show the history of emotions
becomes a productive project
and in general I want to say that
the history of emotions is a producer of
emotion knowledge
alongside a range of other disciplines
that strive to say what emotions are
what they mean how they work and what
they do
but the most critical eventual
intervention of History
is to deny a universal answer to any of
those questions
at the core of historical knowledge
production about emotions is to try to
understand and reconstruct affective
contexts
this critical Endeavor to disrupt raises
the question
uh
if it's not this emotion that's been
assumed then what is it
the historian then has to supply a new
reading of the affective context that
resists teleology and anachronism
specific experiences and practices of
feeling are analyzed for the ways in
which they're situated in place and in
time
thus with the Menace of Achilles the
story of rage is replaced first with The
Virtuous withdrawal of a divinely
favorable Warrior whose abstention from
active violence causes the armies of his
allies major setbacks in the war
as Achilles relinquishes this Menace he
becomes active again but he becomes
violent and bloody only in grief
particular compound in ancient Greece of
emotional social and bodily pain which
in turn carries practices of anger
in turn this leaves us to explain the
story of Rage as a central motif of The
Iliad as a product of modernity's
evaluation of excessive anger
now since the Iliad isn't about anger
after all
despite the general Orthodox assumption
that this is exactly what it's about
we should be alerted to the wealth of
possibilities concerning anger in other
contexts
the primary primary barrier to being
able to uncover the history of any
particular emotion or bundle of cognate
emotions is the presentest assumption
that a particular emotion exists
objectively as part of the stock of
human feelings and that the emotion is
in the present sufficiently rigorously
defined for all times and all places
these assumptions
have to be rejected
one has to be cautious with translation
yes but not only because our emotions
are not reducible to the words that
signify them
Robert a Caster has shown the lengths
that you have to go to in avoiding
casual translations of historical
feeling categories into recognizable
Modern English ones
by reducing an emotional experience to
its lexical form and then translating it
we lose the whole drama of what it is or
was to emote in context
an emotional process might be registered
by a lexical reference that is an
emotion word
but it also involves evaluation and
response
socaster says
the emotion properly understood is the
whole process and all of its constituent
elements the little Narrative of
dramatic or dramatic script that is
acted out from the evaluative perception
at its beginning to the various possible
responses at the end subtract any
element of the script and the experience
is fundamentally altered without a
response even one instantly rejected or
suppressed
there is only dispassionate evaluation
of phenomena without an evaluation even
one that does not register consciously
there is mere seizure of mind and body
that is about nothing at all
now it's precisely for the reason that
much of this process tends to happen
unconsciously or with
um instantaneous or as if natural
responses that I tend to reject
cluster's Illusions to acting or
performing
fully endorse the tenor of his argument
and completely agree with the notion of
a cultural script
the thing is culture scripts are not
like screenplays people learn cultural
scripts without necessarily knowing that
they're part of what looks only from the
outside like a drama
an actor learns a script fully intending
to read it as if naturally but the
process and the drama are always already
telegraphed an emotional drama
is much more of an improvised
improvisization
improvisation
the reading of scripts that everyone
knows but which are invisible the
practice of culture as if it is nature a
dynamic set of interacting cognitive
processes that seem unconscious
and ultimately this points all of us to
the scripts
that run in our own context to
everyone's contextual situation in the
present
when contemporary scientists tell people
what anger is they're actually active
agents in the formation of what anger is
and what it looks like and what it
sounds like as well as what it does
depending on the power and authority of
those formative agents the definition of
anger will become increasingly narrow
people may find that their experiences
conform to it
or that their experiences do not
their major consequences either way
in any case we're surrounded by evidence
of the contextual and place-time
specific construction of anger the
Contemporary mobilization of anger as a
political practice whether it's through
social media or on the streets as a
vehicle for social and environmental
justice or as a vehicle for extremism
is all subject to the kind of analytical
scrutiny that the history of emotion
supplies for emotional context in the
past
history may not be the best discipline
for the interpretation of the present
but at the very least it provides the
kinds of critical questions that that
denaturalize and de-essentialize present
emotions exposing them for what they are
namely political constructions situated
Scripts
contextually and temporally specific
practices
thanks very much
[Music]