Statistical Panic

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 ∫ 2009 Duke University Press
All rights reserved

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Designed by Jennifer Hill

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Cataloging information for this title

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isbn 978-0-8223-4354-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

isbn 978-0-8223-4377-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

‘‘At the End of the Line’’ by J.-B. Pontalis appears in Love of Beginnings by J.-B. Pontalis,
which was originally published in French under the title L’amour des commencements
(Éditions Gallimard, 1986). The English translation by James Greene with Marie-
Christine Réguis was published by Free Association Books, Ltd. (London: 1993). ‘‘At
the End of the Line’’ is reproduced here with permission of Free Association Books,
Ltd., Great Britain.
To Herbert Blau
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 1

part one
cultural politics, communities of feeling 29

1 Containing Anger, Advocating Anger: Freud and Feminism 33

2 Against Wisdom: Anger and Aging 58

3 Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 79

4 Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 109

part two
s t r u c t u r e s o f f e e l i n g , ‘‘n e w ’’ f e e l i n g s 135

5 Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 139

6 Bureaucratic Rage 165

7 Statistical Panic 195

Coda: Inexhaustible Grief 219

Notes 235
Bibliography 275
Index 297
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of

Washington and, before that, as director of the Center for Twentieth Cen-
tury Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, I have had many,
many welcome occasions to introduce visiting speakers. It is a task I love
because it o√ers the opportunity to refer to the important work that schol-
ars are doing and to thank them for it. Thus it seems altogether appropri-
ate to mention here that the mode of debate has never been as tempera-
mentally congenial to me as the mode of acknowledgment itself. To me it
is simply a given that my own work represents a collaboration with other
lives and with many texts (I am first and foremost a reader, after all), and
thus the space granted to me here seems strangely constricted and insu≈-
cient, amenable only to enumeration and the alphabetical making of lists,
whereas I am far more at home in the world of adjectives—almost always
inflected positively, as in brilliant, astute, deft, and generous. Everyone
named below should imagine their name paired with such words. I mean
it. I have many people to thank, including those I have never met whose
work has helped shape my own feeling and thought. In fact I regard the
notes and the bibliography as a continuation of the deeply felt acknowledg-
ments here.
I am altogether privileged to count as friends—and intellectual partners
—Gabriele Schwab and Carolyn Allen. Both of these wonderful women
read the entire manuscript and o√ered invaluable suggestions. I want to
thank Ken Wissoker, the legendary editor at Duke University Press, and
the readers he secured whose fine intelligence, excellent advice, and warm
counsel have served me well. I am indebted to them. Regarding the indi-
vidual chapters, many people contributed welcome comments and pre-
cious bibliographies (to my mind, one of the greatest gifts of all), includ-
ing Karyn Ball, Anne Basting, Dick Blau, Lothar Bredella, Paul Brodwin,
Thomas Cole, Cecelia Condit, Diane Driver, Susan Dunn, Julie Ellison,
Pamela Gilbert, Sandra Gilbert, Tina Gillis, Herbert Grabes, Margaret
Gullette, Lane Hall, Steven Katz, Sharon Kaufman, Teresa Mangum, An-
drew Martin, Susan Miller, Patrice Petro, Larry Polivka, John Rodriguez-
Luis, Nigel Rothfels, Maura Spigel, Michael Warner, and Anne Wyatt-
Brown. I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues at the University
of Washington, including Eva Cherniavsky, Tom Foster, Gillian Harkins,
Chandan Reddy, and Nikhil Singh, as well as Jodi Melamed, who was in
residence at the Simpson Center for the Humanities for two years as a
Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation postdoctoral scholar.
I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to present embryonic
versions of this work at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
where I taught a month-long seminar. I thank the audiences at Brown
University, Michigan State University, Moscow University, Pacific Luth-
eran University, Pennsylvania State University, Texas A&M University,
Trent University, University of British Columbia, University of Bu√alo,
University of Copenhagen, University of California at San Diego, Univer-
sity of Greifswald, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, and
Wayne State University, as well as a special cross-disciplinary audience at
the University of Washington, which was destined at that point to become
my intellectual home. I have also presented versions of this work at con-
ferences and annual meetings of professional associations, including the
conference ‘‘Culture and the Unconscious 2’’ at the University of East
London, several incarnations of the European-American Conference on
Literature and Psychoanalysis, the German-American Studies Associa-
tion, the International Psychogeriatrics Association, the Modern Language
Association, a series of conferences on postmodernism held in Germany,
and the Society for Literature and Science. I extend my grateful thanks to
the people who made this possible—among them, Corey Creekmur, Mi-
chael Davidson, Joan DeJean, Mary Ann Doane, Julie Ellison, John Frow,
Heike Hartung, Jean He√er, Veronica Hollinger, Gerhard Ho√mann, Alfred
Hornung, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Ellen McCallum, Peter Madsen, Ellen Pol-
lack, Helen Powell, James Rosenheim, Judy Segal, Susan Squier, Barbara
Temple-Thurston, Andrew Wernick, Inge Crosman Wimmers, James Winn,
and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek.

x Acknowledgments
 I would like especially to single out the centers for the humanities,
which have been the fertile incubators of so much cross-disciplinary and
interdisciplinary work. I am thankful for their very existence and for their
intellectual hospitality in encouraging such work, including my own on
the emotions. My greatest debt is to the Center for Twentieth Century
Studies (now the Center for Twenty-First Century Studies) at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, which devoted a year of research to the
emotions in 1989–1990, thereby o√ering me the prized opportunity to
invite people from a wide variety of disciplines to participate in this area of
study over the course of the year. This work culminated in an extraordinary
conference titled ‘‘Discourses of the Emotions.’’ Among the gifted people
present were Mitchell Breitwieser, Virginia Carmichael, Rey Chow, Ed
Cohen, Valie Export, Jane Gallop, Marjorie Garber, Liz Grosz, Gloria-Jean
Masciarotte, Robin Pickering-Iazzi, Pat Mellencamp, Michael Moon, Mea-
ghan Morris, Juliana Schiesari, Murray Schwartz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Madelon Sprengnether, Susan Stewart, Calvin Thomas, Lynn Worsham,
and my partner in life, Herbert Blau. Is there such a feeling as intellectual
nostalgia? I can testify that there is. Happily, in 2003–2004 the Simpson
Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington supported a
research cluster on the emotions, for which Lauren Berlant, Emily Martin,
and Rukmini Bhaya Nair gave unforgettable presentations.
I want in addition to thank the Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture
and Politics at Trent University, the Cogut Center for the Humanities at
Brown University, the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at
the University of California at Berkeley, the Glasscock Center for Human-
ities Research at Texas A&M University, the Humanities Institute at the
University of Bu√alo, the Institute for the Humanities at the University of
Michigan, and the Obermann Center for Advanced Study at the University
of Iowa, as well as the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes,
to which, at its annual meeting in Brisbane in 1999, I was honored to pre-
sent my work.
It is a warm pleasure to thank the many graduate students in my semi-
nars on the emotions at the University of Washington and the University of
Wisconsin in Milwaukee. In particular I have benefited enormously from
conversations with Scott Barr, Jamie Carlaccio, Margareta Dancus, Maura
Danforth, Jennifer Driscoll, JoAnn Kelly, Tom Kerr, Ralitsa Lazarova,
Suzanne Leonard, Nancy Levy, Nancy Mayer, and Gretchen Papazian.
I thank Ellen Kaisse, the University of Washington’s divisional dean in

Acknowledgments xi
the Arts and Humanities, who generously arranged for me to devote the
winter quarter of 2006 to this book. I am exceedingly grateful to Miriam
Bartha, the assistant director of the Simpson Center, who with aplomb
assumed my responsibilities during that period. To Kristy Leissle and
Linda Wagner, research assistants at the Simpson Center, I cannot begin to
express my appreciation for their creativity, conceptual astuteness, and
can-do spirit as well as for their impeccable attention to detail, a quality
I treasure.
I have been inspired by Feel Tank, founded by Lauren Berlant (among
other scholars and activists), which is devoted to the study of feeling as it
relates to political life. The Feel Tank conference, organized by Berlant and
sponsored by the University of Chicago in October 2007, a√orded me the
opportunity to meet new colleagues in the study of the emotions, includ-
ing Heather Love and Kathleen Stewart, as well as to acquire a T-shirt I
have already worn to great e√ect. It is black (of course), with the single-
word question ‘‘depressed?’’ inscribed across the front in red block let-
ters. On the back we find the answer to this pertinent question: ‘‘it might
be political.’’ I also treasure the tongue-in-cheek T-shirt given to me by
Jane Gallop and Lynne Joyrich. The word ‘‘emotions’’ is inscribed on it,
along with Paul Ekman–like emotion faces.
Much of the material in this book took shape in various journals and
edited collections, and I am grateful to Justine Coupland, Marilyn Hacker,
Gordon Hutner, Rob Mitchell, Liubava Moreva, John O’Neill, and Phillip
Thurtle for their support of my work.
Perhaps my greatest debt is to the world of literature itself—to literature
as an evocative object, in the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’s sense,
and to literature that makes us feel more alive, as Lisa Ruddick has put it. A
few weeks ago I read Annie Dillard’s luminous novel The Maytrees, a story
of a man and a woman and how the love between them changes over the
course of their long life both together and apart, together and apart. In
inhabiting the world created by reading Dillard’s words, reading in the
dark on the plane from Washington, D.C. back to Seattle, I resolved to be a
better wife, although I was under no illusion that under the pressure of
everyday life this feeling or even the resolution would last. I dedicate my
own book with love to Herbert Blau, who knows how to tease me, whose
fierce devotion to blooded thought has been an inspiration, and who long
ago promised me that he would never die.

xii Acknowledgments
 introduction

THINKING FEELING, FEELING THINKING

It’s rare nowadays to hear words which, belonging to no

one in particular, can be the property of anyone, words that
are solid and inexhaustible like ‘‘grief ’’ or ‘‘hatred.’’
—J.-B. Pontalis, Love of Beginnings

Critical reflection on emotion is not a self-indulgent

substitute for political analysis and political action. It is itself a
kind of political theory and political practice, indispensable for
an adequate social theory and social transformation.
—Alison Jaggar, ‘‘Love and Knowledge’’

Stories are much bigger than ideologies. In that is our hope.

—Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto

The Year of Magical Thinking. I picked up Joan Didion’s book by chance one
night (I couldn’t sleep, no surprise there) and didn’t put it down until I was
finished. The next day I realized it o√ered me a perfect prism with which
to open this book. For Didion’s narrative uncannily echoes many of my
own concerns in the pages to follow, not least of which is the signal
importance of understanding our emotional experience through litera-
ture. For those who haven’t read the book, Didion writes about her devas-
tating grief in the wake of the altogether unexpected death of her husband
of forty years. At first she turns to reading—a form of research for her, as it
is for me—to help her understand what she was feeling and why. There is
Freud’s seminal essay ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia,’’ poetry and fiction
and journals, self-help books and professional literature. But precious
little makes a di√erence to her. The professional literature in particular
seems peculiarly inapt—unfeeling. It is poetry with its distinctive vocabu-
lary and rhythm that provides something illuminating to grasp and hold
close. Surprisingly perhaps, the advice she finds in the redoubtable Emily
Post’s book of etiquette, published in 1922, also provides comfort through
its delineation of protocols. Why is she moved by Etiquette in Society, in
Business, in Politics, and at Home? Because at that point in American cul-
ture, Didion realizes, death had not yet been rendered unspeakable. The
perspective of history o√ers her understanding and thus consolation. An
important truth.
As I read The Year of Magical Thinking I thought of my own experience
years earlier. I too had lost my partner to an altogether unexpected death. It
was as if my own life—half of my body—had been ripped from me. I too
did what others would find demented but to me seemed quite sensible at
the time. I asked his doctor if it were possible to extract sperm from his
body (we hadn’t had children together). I became obsessed with his identi-
cal twin brother (this did not prove to be a good idea). I went to see my first
husband (we had divorced some seven years earlier and had intermittently
kept in touch) in an e√ort to establish a sense of continuity in my life in the
wake of the gaping wound that had appeared. I too turned to reading and
research about grief, and it seemed to me too that virtually nothing clar-
ified my extreme confusion.
But isn’t loss a common experience? Why was there no department at
my university devoted to the study of the emotions? Why did the depart-
ment of philosophy focus only on the history of thought, on logic and
rationality, on the forms of analytic and dispassionate reason? Why didn’t
it dedicate attention to the forms of feeling?∞ How could such an important
dimension of life receive so little consideration from the academy?≤ I
didn’t understand then what now seems so self-evident that it doesn’t even
require elaboration: that reason and emotion have long been constructed
as antimonies in western culture, with reason exalted as the preferred
term, figured as masculine, and emotion denigrated as feminine.≥ I con-
sider myself a reader by profession as well as by temperament, and I don’t
remember anything I read being especially enlightening or consoling. But
then it’s also true that I remember very little from that year. So I wasn’t
surprised to see that Didion, remarking on the large gaps in her memory,
devotes much of her book to simply trying to remember what happened in
the year after her husband died.
Thus the genesis of this book—a collection of essays on the emotions
written over the course of several years—can be found in my desire to
comprehend the turmoil I felt as well as my bewilderment at the reactions
of some people (they were my friends) to my state of grief. ‘‘It’s been three
months now since his death,’’ I heard someone say at a party. ‘‘Why isn’t

2 Introduction
she over it?’’ To which I silently returned these questions: Why didn’t they
understand? And more to the point, why was my experience considered
inadmissible in what seemed a social court of emotion law? Later I found
myself studying the emotions—academically.
I read Freud’s essay ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ and found myself
wishing from Freud something that wasn’t in his temperament or profes-
sional passion to give—a description of the phenomenology of grief (in-
deed we don’t even find the word ‘‘grief ’’ in his essay). But his theoretical
explanation of the process of mourning I found spellbinding. Freud insists
we must call up all of our memories binding us to the person we have lost
and ‘‘test’’ them in order to come to understand that the person is in fact
no longer there. It is excruciating. Perhaps even more daunting, we must
also detach ourselves from the memories of the prospects and plans—all
of them—we had imagined for the future together. Each memory of the past
and of the future. It is a painful process, this cutting o√ of our very selves
from those to whom we have been intimately bound. It is anguishing work
and it takes time. For as Freud so profoundly understood, we never will-
ingly give up what means everything to us and has given our life its
very shape and meaning.∂ Didion quotes the very passage from Freud that
so fascinates me: ‘‘Every single one of the memories and expectations
in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hyperca-
thected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it’’ (SE
14: 245).∑ She also tells us how she tried to short-circuit this process by
avoiding places of memory—where they had lived, eaten, shopped, taken
their daughter Quintana. ‘‘There were many such traps,’’ she writes. Fall-
ing into what she calls the vortex means experiencing ‘‘a sudden rush of
memories’’ (118). They are overwhelming.
I wrote about ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ in my last book, where I
reproached Freud for not o√ering us (me) a more expressive vocabulary for
grief. I still wish he had, but I understand it now as a self-interested wish
on my part. I can look elsewhere in the psychoanalytic literature—to Julia
Kristeva, for example, who combines both expressive and analytical modes
in her work, and to J.-B. Pontalis, whose work as he has grown older has
become increasingly autobiographical and poetic.∏ For Freud is not inter-
ested in o√ering a poetics of the emotions but rather in theorizing our
psychic processes. Furthermore his focus is on the investigation of pa-
thologies, most famously of repressed desire.
In Studies on Hysteria Freud formulates a theory of a√ect that rests on

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 3

the notion of repressed desire, resonating with the dominant tradition in
western culture of the emotions as negative: the emotions are associated
with women—hysterical women—and the emotions are something to be
purged. A√ect, unable to speak in its own language, is transcribed into
another language, the bodily symptoms of hysteria that Freud describes
later in Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis as ‘‘precipitates’’ of emotional expe-
rience (SE 11: 14). It is as if a√ect, located deep inside, is so strong that it
has to push against the body, forcing itself out into the performative ges-
tures of hysteria. Freud understands a√ect as ‘‘cut o√ ’’ from the memory to
which it is attached, as ‘‘strangulated’’ (SE 2: xviii). A√ect is often ‘‘paralyz-
ing’’ (SE 2: 11). It is something that needs to be discharged or, in that
strange Freudian word, abreacted through the work of analysis. The goal of
psychoanalysis in Freud’s hands is not so much to give a√ect voice as to rid
ourselves of it once it has been remembered. Freud’s basic model of the
functioning of the mental apparatus—not the emotional apparatus—is thus
homeostatic, quietistic, and economic: the mental apparatus works to free
itself from excitation and disturbance, both of which are associated with
scenes of emotional trauma.
Given Freud’s theory of the emotions, it might not come as a surprise
that I also judged him to be acutely insensitive to the fact that it might be
preeminently ‘‘reasonable’’ to hold onto one’s grief.π If we still feel the pain
of grief intensely, then perhaps the person we have lost will somehow
return through the force of our refusal of the irreversibility of time. (This
was my fervent wish.) Here is Didion on the ritual of disposing of her late
husband’s clothes:

I was not yet prepared to address the suits and shirts and jackets but I
thought I could handle what remained of the shoes, a start.
I stopped at the door to the room.
I could not give away the rest of his shoes.
I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if
he was to return.
The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought.
I have still not tried to determine (say, by giving away the shoes) if the
thought has lost its power. (36–37)

As she lives through the year following his death, Didion doesn’t want to
come to the end of her book, for the writing itself keeps her memories
sharp and alive. If her magical thinking exposes the ‘‘shallowness of san-

4 Introduction
ity,’’ at the same time her writing—she began The Year of Magical Thinking
nine months into that year—gives her the perspective to understand her
deranged experience (7). (I understand this. Remember, I wanted to follow
the identical twin brother of the man I had lost.) Paul Monette remarks in
Borrowed Time: An aids Memoir, to which I turn later in this book, that
mourning is a form of self-compassion. In contrast Didion is hard, very
hard on herself, insisting on judging herself severely for the self-pity that
at times overtakes her.
It is a truth undeniable that what we once dismissed when younger we
may understand—indeed value—when we are older. This is a good thing.
Our place in the world in terms of age and experience powerfully shapes
our views of everything, including the emotions, and hopefully growing
older will give rise to both conviction and humility. In The Year of Magical
Thinking Didion acknowledges exactly this: ‘‘I remember despising the
book Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin wrote after her husband’s death,
Leftover Life to Kill. I remember being dismissive of, even censorious
about, her ‘self-pity,’ her ‘whining,’ her ‘dwelling on it.’ Leftover Life to Kill
was published in 1957. I was twenty-two years old. Time is the school in
which we learn’’ (198). She understands, now, the need to apologize for
judging far too harshly the sentiments of the widow of Dylan Thomas. In
the end Didion concludes that ‘‘if we are to live ourselves there comes a
point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead’’
(225–26). She is wiser than I was, it seems to me now. But she is also older
than I was when my partner died. And if personally (of course) and theo-
retically (this may be more di≈cult to understand) I wanted to hold onto
the pain of his loss, I also married within two years of his death. My
husband—we have been married for twenty-eight years—promised me be-
fore we married that he will never die, and at some level I find myself
reassured by this, magically so.

Although this is not a book about psychoanalysis and the emotions, Freud
casts a large shadow over it because he provided me with my first sus-
tained reading about what is called a√ect in psychoanalysis.∫ ‘‘A√ect’’
names a crucial theoretical category in psychoanalytic theory and, more
recently, in cultural studies.Ω I will generally not use the term in this book;
I want instead to focus on specific emotions and to o√er more texture to
our emotional experience. (I will sometimes use the term ‘‘a√ective,’’ as in

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 5

‘‘a√ective experience,’’ because the analogous phrase ‘‘emotional experi-
ence’’ can carry the unfortunate connotation of being overwrought.) I
engage Freud at length in my chapter on anger, and I return to grief,
psychoanalytically, at the end. I draw on psychoanalytic theory at various
points, and I adopt a view of the structuring of the emotions that could be
said to be Freudian (I will comment on this in a moment). Freud has also
provided me with an important path to approaching the emotions, and
that is the study of autobiography. Famously he turned to self-analysis in
The Interpretation of Dreams, a book that can be understood as autobiogra-
phy, plumbing his own experience, narrating it, and reading his dreams as
keys to repressed desires and anxieties. Didion does this too, in fact, al-
though not in as monumental a register. In The Year of Magical Thinking
she turns to her dreams as a form of knowledge, albeit with a decided dif-
ference. She had, she tells us, a long-standing habit of telling her dreams
to her husband. But after he died, she stopped dreaming completely. I find
it fascinating that in the absence of her own night-time dreams she re-
members a dream she had given to a character—Elena—in one of her
novels, The Last Thing He Wanted. In her moment of intense need Didion
turns to her own consciously-crafted dream from a decade earlier, one that
had come uncannily to speak to her own anxieties in the present:

Elena’s dreams were about dying.

Elena’s dreams were about getting old.
Nobody here has not had (will not have) Elena’s dreams.
We all know that.
The point is that Elena didn’t.
The point is that Elena remained remote most of all to herself, a
clandestine agent. (159–60)

With a shock of recognition Didion understands that Elena’s dream is her

own, it belongs to her. Her husband’s life had protected her against the
threat of her own mortality, and with his death she grows old in her own
eyes, stunned into fear of frailty and into frailty itself. ‘‘I realize,’’ she
writes, ‘‘that Elena’s situation is my own’’ (160). (This is chilling.) If her
dream was created deliberately, it has waited for her, stored in her own
fiction, safeguarded in what we might call her writing unconscious until she
was ready to hear its message. ‘‘Elena’s dreams were about getting old.
Nobody here has not had (will not have) Elena’s dreams.’’ Didion under-
stands this now with the force of feeling. The death of her husband,

6 Introduction
combined with her own gaunt fragility, transforms her into an old woman
who has at that point no palpable sense of a foreseeable future.
Thus particularly important to me is the elaboration and analysis of
autobiographical experience understood in an expanded field. This is one
of the ways we learn not only about the emotions but also about the world,
for the two are of course intimately related. We consult our emotions—
they may be literary emotions as in Joan Didion’s case—as a way of disclos-
ing our relation to the world around us. My primary textual touchstone in
this book is a marvelous scene in Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own
where the narrator attends to the emotional experience of her own sponta-
neous anger, which is—and this is where she and Freud definitively part
company—transparently available to her. (This scene, which is in and of
itself a short story, surfaces in three of the chapters to follow.) Woolf,
moreover, honors her narrator’s experience. She doesn’t consider her an-
ger ‘‘hysterical’’ or a screen for something else but rather values it and
seeks to understand the reasons for it. Her anger has an epistemological
edge, one that the philosopher Alison Jaggar calls attention to in her
seminal essay ‘‘Love and Knowledge: Emotion and Knowledge in Feminist
Epistemology.’’∞≠ Anger is both a ‘‘personal’’ and a ‘‘political’’ emotion, one
that discloses the unequal relations of power in which Woolf ’s character is
enmeshed. At stake is a cultural politics of the emotions.

My concern overall in this book is the cultural politics of the emotions

in America since the 1950s, with an emphasis on texts from the late 1960s
to the late 1990s. By cultural politics I mean to suggest two overlapping
areas of inquiry that correspond to the two major parts of the book. Part 1,
which contains four chapters, is titled ‘‘Cultural Politics, Communities of
Feeling.’’ I focus on the cultural politics of the emotions with gender,
age, and race as my primary interests, and I place under analysis the psy-
chological emotions of anger, shame, and compassion. Indeed anger, it
turns out, is the emotion of choice in this book, although grief receives
pride of place. But a cultural politics of the emotions is not limited to
identity politics or the politics of di√erence. Part 2, composed of three
chapters, is called ‘‘Structures of Feeling, ‘New’ Feelings.’’ Here I place
more pressure on feelings as sensitive and telling sensors that register
emerging shifts in social and cultural formations. I turn to three ‘‘new’’
feelings (or categories of feeling) associated with changes in the culture of

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 7

postmodernity—an increasing sympathy for nonhuman cyborgs; what I
call bureaucratic rage; and the potent feeling I call statistical panic. Under-
writing part 2, then, is technological and institutional change—the emer-
gence of robo sapiens, the mammoth medical bureaucracies that charac-
terize the consumer society in which we are all considered potential pa-
tients, and the social technology that is statistics. It is not a coincidence
that in all three chapters in this section I consider narratives of illness,
most of them autobiographical.
Also underwriting this book is the conviction that we live in a time of
the rapid circulation of the emotions. Indeed a new economy of the psy-
chological emotions has been emerging in terms of gender. Receiving its
impulse in great part from the youthful energy of the 1960s, the possibili-
ties of an individual’s emotional repertoire are expanding even as a culture
of intensities, or sensations, is increasing. If anger is the feminist emotion
of choice from the 1960s onward (and if in recent years anger is being
embraced by older women too), we are also witnessing the emergence of
the man of sentiment, as I observe in my chapter ‘‘Liberal Compassion,
Compassionate Conservatism.’’ The display of the emotion of grief, long
considered unmanly, has been embraced by many men. As I suggest in
my chapter on nonhuman cyborgs, the notion of sympathy, long under-
stood to have the potential to knit together the human body politic (in
particular across sites of bodily su√ering), is being extended in our cul-
tural imagination to nonhuman beings made in our own image, thereby
bridging a divide between the organic human world and the technological
lifeworld. We live in a time of the vertiginous emergence of new sensa-
tions. The panic that many of us feel, for example, at the pronouncement
of a certain statistic (it may feel ominously like a verdict—I will turn to this
in a moment) was simply not a possibility before the invention of the
science, practice, and omnipresent deployment of statistics themselves.
As this so clearly reveals, emotions and feelings have histories. Thus if my
overall focus is on the latter part of the twentieth century, three chapters in
this volume o√er larger temporal frames by counterpointing texts from
the first part of the twentieth century with texts from the latter part of the
twentieth century.

One of my major points is this: we all have experience of the emotions and
shouldn’t hesitate to draw on it—reflecting on it, turning it over in our

8 Introduction
minds, watching when a certain emotion subsides and is replaced by
another, and placing it in perspective in the arc of our own personal lives
and in the context of social constraints, commands, and controls as well as
larger historical change. As Jaggar has written, ‘‘Time spent in analyzing
emotions and uncovering their sources should be viewed . . . neither as
irrelevant to theoretical investigation nor even as a prerequisite for it’’
(164). This is one of the reasons why quite a few of the texts discussed in
this work are memoirs. Some are long and some are short, but all are
telling reflections on emotional experience that makes a di√erence. For
that is what a memoir is—a reflection on experience and a shaping of that
experience into a narrative, a discovery of meaning and a creating of mean-
ing that can rise to a poetics of expression and understanding through the
plot of a story and the texture of words, yielding thought inextricably
intertwined with feeling. In my chapter on the cultural politics of anger
and aging, for example, I turn to Look Me in the Eye by the lesbian activist
Barbara Macdonald. In the important tradition of A Room of One’s Own,
Macdonald interrogates the flaring rage she felt as an older woman at the
unintended ageist gesture of a younger woman. This method—the read-
ing of emotional experience—mirrors an assignment I gave in a recent
graduate seminar on the cultural politics and poetics of the emotions. I
asked the participants each to choose an emotion to research, with the
further request that rather than bracketing their own a√ective experience
of the emotion they should consult it. My point was not to solicit confes-
sional material but to refuse the firewall that has been erected between
what is erroneously understood to be only ‘‘personal’’ experience (for of
course it is socially inflected and shaped) and ‘‘impersonal’’ or ‘‘objective’’
academic research on the emotions. It is correctly considered an academic
virtue to interrogate our thinking. Self-reflexive thought is honored. Anal-
ogously we should do so as well with our feelings.
I have also attended to my own experience. But for the most part the
traces are invisible except for here and there a few small stories cast pre-
dominantly in a lighthearted vein or observations o√ered in a more sol-
emn register. This choice is no doubt a matter of temperament. While I am
a serious person given to reading books in solitude (anywhere—at home,
on the bus and airplanes, in airports, you name it) and have also had my
own singular share of experience, in the company of others I tend to be
high-spirited and sociable, expressing a comic view of life.
Still, here it seems important to explain that the chapter entitled ‘‘Statis-

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 9

tical Panic’’ began to take shape as I puzzled over the fast-moving se-
quence of feelings I had while reading the draft of a chapter about Social
Security in a book manuscript by one of our country’s most distinguished
and beloved gerontologists. In an alternately galvanizing, numbing, and
reassuring enumeration of national statistics about the increasing propor-
tion of the population in the United States that is sixty-five and older
and the concomitant necessity to strengthen Social Security (with which I
heartily agree), I suddenly found myself in a panic when I read a sentence
describing how much money ‘‘one’’ would need in retirement. In today’s
financial terms the sentence would go something like this: ‘‘If one needs
$80,000 per year from savings (not counting social security or a pension),
has $100,000 in investments, saves $5,000 a year, and plans to retire in
five years at the age of sixty-five, one would need $1,655,220 in after-tax
dollars on the last day of work; this amount would have to earn eight
percent, but about 3.5 percent would disappear with inflation . . .’’ WHAT?
I remember instantly snapping alert. In a split second ‘‘one’’ turned into
‘‘I.’’ I was singled out. I would need what in personal savings if I were
to retire (what does that mean anyway?) and wanted to generate $80,000
a year in constant dollars? How, if I were sixty, could I possibly save
$1,555,220 in five years? What possibly—impossibly—could that mean I
would need fifteen years from now? I felt myself targeted as a reader,
impaled on what seemed to me to be an astronomical figure, panicked at
my financial future (and in the United States women live on the average
five and a half years longer than men—that’s the good news and the bad
news).∞∞ What I would call my economic panic had infinitely more to do
with an anxiety about the future than it did the avidity of greed. It signaled
the financialization of everyday life that the cultural critic Randy Martin
has so astutely identified. (How did I allay that anxiety? Among other
things I formulated, mordantly, a ‘‘rational’’ response to these financial
figures, calculating against my self-interest that I could save a lot of money
by simply dying earlier!)
I conceived my notion of statistical panic as I reflected on this tell-
ing experience of financial panic in tandem with reading the historian
Alice Wexler’s book Mapping Fate and seeing the independent filmmaker
Yvonne Rainer’s film murder and murder, both of which deal with statis-
tics about disease. Thus, methodologically, at certain starting points in this
book I draw on what might be called a critical phenomenology of the

10 Introduction
emotions and feelings, attending to them and placing them in social and
historical contexts, much as did Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.

1
This book takes its title from the chapter ‘‘Statistical Panic,’’ crucial to
which is Raymond Williams’s elastic notion of ‘‘structures of feeling,’’ a
conceptual lever that also informs the other chapters in part 2. I thus turn
here to elaborating the ways in which I understand ‘‘structures of feeling’’
through the prism of that chapter. Notoriously di≈cult to define, Wil-
liams’s notion of ‘‘structures of feeling’’—indeed the very phrase itself—
insists on the vital interpenetration of social structures and subjectivity,
one mediated by forms of culture.∞≤ In the seven-page section devoted to
‘‘Structures of Feeling’’ in Marxism and Literature, Williams’s concern is to
find a way to feel the pulse of social change, to grasp what is emerging, to
reveal it in its ‘‘generative immediacy,’’ to preserve it, and above all, not
to reduce it (133). For Williams, literature and art o√er openings onto
our always emerging world. They are themselves structures that embody
forms of feeling—in tone and rhythm, color and diction, nuance and de-
tail. At stake is a cultural poetics as well as a politics of the emotions.
Literature and art serve as witness, as it were, to the ongoing process of
social change. What is altogether important to Williams is to find a way to
hold onto the intangible texture and force—the presence, which is for him a
form of life itself. In using an analogy familiar from high school chemistry,
Williams explains that ‘‘structures of feeling can be defined as social expe-
riences in solution’’ as opposed to social experiences that have been struck
into their ‘‘precipitants’’ or catalogued according to their separate compo-
nents. In these forms of apprehension, feeling and thought are not divided
from each other but are interrelated. What is at issue, Williams insists, is
‘‘specifically a√ective elements of consciousness and relationships: not
feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practi-
cal consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continu-
ity’’ (132). ‘‘Methodologically, then, a ‘structure of feeling’ is a cultural
hypothesis,’’ he proposes, ‘‘actually derived from attempts to understand
such elements and their connections in a generation or period’’ (132–33).
If some fifteen years ago it could be said that the concept of ‘‘structures
of feeling’’ had not been taken up by others, this is assuredly not the case

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 11

in recent years where it has enabled much work on the emotions in liter-
ary, cultural, and performance studies.∞≥ It is perhaps because of its very
ambiguity that it has proven so suggestive, albeit in di√erent ways. For
some it provides a crucial theoretical lever for taking up the general project
of the cultural politics of the emotions. For others it o√ers an understand-
ing of experience as simultaneously cultural, discursive, and embodied,
with feeling a site for insight into social control. For still others it articu-
lates the connection between a particular genre or mode of performance
and the politics of emotions in a certain historical moment or period.
There are three overlapping ways in which the notion of ‘‘structures of
feeling’’ underwrites ‘‘Statistical Panic.’’ The first is epistemological and
returns us to Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own and Alison Jaggar’s
essay ‘‘Love and Knowledge.’’ For in retrospect it’s clear to me that I have
read Williams’s notion of ‘‘structures of feeling’’ through Woolf ’s dra-
matic scene in which the writer questions the anger she felt as the target of
male anger—and vice versa. Woolf ’s important piece, cast in a mode that is
both narrative and analytical, merges the two such that feeling is the
ground of thought and thought is profoundly felt, thereby providing us
with a sense of the lived experience of the emergence of feminism at that
particular point in history and o√ering us the model that thinking origi-
nates in a subjectivity that is embodied. Indeed Woolf also refers in A
Room of One’s Own to what I have called ‘‘new’’ feelings in a way that would
have pleased, I think, Raymond Williams. In articulating a sense of social
history as expressed through comparative poetics, Woolf compares poetry
that is altogether familiar and conveys ‘‘old’’ feelings (she is thinking of
Tennyson and Christina Rossetti) with the modern poetry of her place and
time: ‘‘The living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and
torn out of us at the moment,’’ she writes. ‘‘One does not recognize it in
the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with
keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling
that one knew’’ (14). Williams has been severely criticized for his ‘‘literary
exceptionalism,’’ for elevating literature to this position of privilege.∞∂ But
it is certainly worth repeating that Williams’s emphasis is on a certain
form or way of knowing, one that brings together feeling and thought and
does not separate them; there is thus an implicit epistemology of feeling at
stake in his very idea of literature and art.
It’s also evident to me that I have read Woolf ’s literary piece through

12 Introduction
Jaggar’s philosophical essay, further underscoring the epistemological
edge of emotion that, in a dialectical relation to thought, can serve to
disclose the structures of the world in which we are situated. As Jaggar
writes, ‘‘Rather than repressing emotion in epistemology it is necessary to
rethink the relation between knowledge and emotion and construct con-
ceptual models that demonstrate the mutually constitutive rather than
oppositional relation between reason and emotion’’ (157). Jaggar’s excel-
lent essay is complex and I can’t address the many issues that it raises here.
But central to it is her notion of ‘‘outlaw’’ emotions: ‘‘People who experi-
ence conventionally unacceptable, or what I call ‘outlaw,’ emotions often
are subordinated individuals who pay a disproportionately high price for
maintaining the status quo. The social situation of such people makes
them unable to experience the conventionally prescribed emotions: for
instance, people of color are more likely to experience anger than amuse-
ment when a racist joke is recounted, and women subjected to male sexual
banter are less likely to be flattered than uncomfortable or even afraid’’
(160). Jaggar concludes that being in a subordinate position o√ers the
possibility of epistemological privilege and that therefore we would do well
to consult our feelings, reflecting critically on them, to reveal these im-
balances of power. As she writes, ‘‘Only when we reflect on our initially
puzzling irritability, revulsion, anger, or fear may we bring to conscious-
ness our ‘gut-level’ awareness that we are in a situation of coercion, cruelty,
injustice, or danger’’ (161). The extent to which this is possible—and when
—I take up in my chapters on anger and shame in particular.
Jaggar is concerned with the politics of di√erence, as am I in several of
the chapters of this book. But we can enlarge her analysis beyond the
intersecting politics of di√erence. Indeed situations of coercion or danger
may prove more intangible and di≈cult to identify when they are more
di√use or distributed seemingly innocuously in virtually every dimension
of everyday life to the point of disappearance. Thus in my chapter on
statistical panic I attend to the feelings of fear voiced in Rainer’s film about
breast cancer, including her own contraction of the disease and her mas-
tectomy. I also attend to the feelings of confusion that Wexler reports
in her book about Huntington’s disease. Both Rainer and Wexler were
haunted, if not stalked, by statistics of disease, and both women provide us
with the palpable sense of the lived experience of statistical panic, as well
as o√er reflections upon it. They thus call our attention in striking ways to

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 13

the dominating hold this experience can have on us. For statistical panic is
not limited or confined to a particular class or age group, gender or race. It
is an equal-opportunity experience.
The second way in which the notion of ‘‘structures of feeling’’ under-
writes statistical panic is as an intimation of new and emerging social
formations. As Williams provocatively suggests, ‘‘Methodologically, then,
a ‘structure of feeling’ is a cultural hypothesis, actually derived from at-
tempts to understand such elements and their connections in a generation
or period’’ (132–33). Our generation or period? Statistical panic discloses
the society of the statistic, one underwritten by the sense of omnipresent
risk. In my chapter on statistical panic the focus is on risks to the body
from disease, the ground of which is the medicalized, mediatized, and
marketized world in which we live. But this is just one sign of what we
might call the statistical hegemony in which we find ourselves in the
twenty-first century, where statistical probabilities—about the e√ects of
global warming, of avian flu, or the probability of hurricanes hitting our
coasts—bombard our everyday life. Of course it goes without saying that
since September 11, 2001, risk has taken on another altogether potent
dimension by adding the politics of the everyday fear of terrorism to the
volatile mix. Moreover the society of the statistic is but one ‘‘element,’’ to
use Williams’s word, of postmodernity: a world increasingly characterized
by a pervasive sense of precariousness—of insecurity, uncertainty, and
what the critical sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has called ‘‘unsafety.’’∞∑
Finally, I also understand ‘‘structure of feeling’’ in the sense suggested
by an example Williams o√ers in Politics and Letters: Interviews with New
Left Review, in which he describes the dominant middle-class structure of
feeling in the British 1840s as ‘‘an anxious oscillation between sympathy
for the oppressed and fear of their violence’’ (166). What interests me
here is the idea of an emotional spectrum anchored by two related—and
opposite—feelings about something. These feelings are themselves em-
bedded in a structure; in this sense a ‘‘structure of feeling’’ does not have
one emotion or feeling at stake, but fundamentally two that are inter-
related. In the instance mentioned by Williams, fear and sympathy are
involved. In ‘‘Statistical Panic’’ I suggest that the ‘‘structure of feeling’’ is
characterized by statistical panic at one extreme and statistical boredom at
the other (or alternatively, in another scenario, I could imagine statistical
panic and statistical hope). Further, I contrast the shock and boredom
linked with modernity at the turn of the twentieth century with the statisti-

14 Introduction
cal panic and statistical boredom I associate with the postmodern con-
sumer society at the turn of the twenty-first century. In so doing I his-
toricize feelings of panic and boredom by relating them to the emergence
of di√erent kinds of technologies. Given my debt to Freud, it is not surpris-
ing that this view of the emotions is itself profoundly Freudian, with
feelings understood as related in terms of opposites or in terms of their
‘‘logical’’ sequence.∞∏ Thus at certain points in this book my aim is to trace
linked sequences of the emotions.

I understand statistical panic not as a psychological emotion (anger, jeal-

ousy, and grief are notable examples of psychological emotions), but rather
as a sensation or intensity, one that is at base a charged anxiety. At the other
pole of this structure of feeling is statistical boredom, a state characterized
by lack of emotion—one devoid of sensation or intensity. Enter Fredric
Jameson’s essay ‘‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capital-
ism,’’ which appeared in 1984 and is still resonant today. In this seminal
essay he suggests that postmodern culture is characterized by ‘‘the waning
of a√ect.’’ By this Jameson means that the psychological depth that distin-
guished the culture of modernism (the deep anxiety of alienation is an
example) has been succeeded in postmodern culture by an insistence on
flatness and on surfaces, an insistence that is reinforced by the extreme
penetration of commodification in our everyday lives. Jameson calls our
attention to the postmodern aesthetic of surfaces and fragments found in
the work of Andy Warhol and John Cage, Samuel Beckett and Robert
Wilson, Nam June Paik and William Gibson, work I would argue is charac-
terized by intensities on the one hand and boredom on the other, a struc-
ture of feeling endemic—if not epidemic—to postmodern culture. ‘‘As for
expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary so-
ciety, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not
merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of
feeling as well’’ (15), Jameson writes, with such psychological emotions
being replaced by ‘‘intensities’’ (16).∞π
This passage has been often quoted and commented upon. But we
should remember that in this essay Jameson doesn’t engage at any length
the question of the emotional styles or experience of actual people. In
referring to postmodern culture as marked by the ‘‘waning of a√ect,’’
Jameson doesn’t mean of course that we no longer experience feelings of

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 15

love and hate, jealousy and shame: emotions that bind us to others. His
concern is to identify the culturally dominant aesthetic of postmodernism
related to the emergence of global capitalism. Indeed he deplores what he
refers to as ‘‘culture-and-personality diagnosis’’ of society and art (26). I do
not think, however, it is a mere accident that Jameson’s periodizing dis-
tinction between modernism and postmodernism in terms of the emo-
tions, with his emphasis on a√ectlessness in contemporary culture, reso-
nates with work that appeared in the late 1980s and mid-1990s in such
disparate fields as history, psychoanalysis, and neurology, work to which I
now briefly turn.
In American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style, the
historian Peter Stearns argues that between 1920 and 1950 a cultural
preference for ‘‘coolness’’ emerged in the United States. The strength
of the emotions so prized in American Victorian culture became suspect
in and of itself, and psychological emotions (Stearns devotes attention
in particular to grief, jealousy, and anger) came to be perceived—and expe-
rienced—not only as ‘‘bad’’ but at the extreme as pathogenic. Over the
three decades he examines Stearns shows that a progressive diminution—
or cooling—of the emotions took place and that ultimately this kind of psy-
chological emotional intensity itself came to be seen as ‘‘a barrier rather
than a bond’’ in the maintenance of relationships between people (199);
‘‘It was often the emotional individual,’’ he concludes, ‘‘not the object of
his or her emotion, who was seen as requiring remediation’’ (230). While
Stearns attributes this development to multiple forces, he insists that our
expanding consumer culture required the suppression of the emotions
and the cultivation of impersonality, and he rues the loss of what he calls
the intensity of the psychological emotions associated with Victorian cul-
ture, a kind of intensity so unlike the ‘‘intensities’’ Jameson identifies as
key to postmodern culture.
If Stearns regrets our culture’s devaluation of strong feelings that con-
nect us both to others and to ideals, then Christopher Bollas in his book
The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known has given
this cultural phenomenon a name—‘‘normotic illness.’’ As a psychoana-
lyst he is primarily concerned with the childhood roots of normotic illness.
But Bollas also connects the emergence of this disorder to the demands of
today’s commodity culture. He describes a person who su√ers from nor-
motic illness as betraying a lack of subjectivity—in particular, a lack of self-
regarding feelings. A normotic person is one who is ‘‘abnormally normal’’

16 Introduction
(136), who ‘‘lives contentedly among material objects and phenomena’’ but
doesn’t experience subjective states within the self (137). A normotic is a
person whose life is organized in terms of activity and routines, who
seems consistently stable and outgoing, who is surrounded by material
objects sought not for symbolic purposes—they hold no subjective or sym-
bolic meaning—but for purely functional reasons. There is a sense in
which normotic illness can be described in terms of interior emptiness.
But as understood by Bollas, the anguish and stupor associated with de-
pression as theorized by Julia Kristeva in Black Sun and described by
Andrew Solomon in Noonday Demon are not at all at stake. Indeed in a very
real sense, there is no interior. In normotic illness we see the incarnation of
the emotional style required by society that Stearns has called ‘‘American
cool.’’ It is not just that a person psychologically invests more in material
objects than in relationships with other people. Rather, it is that the self is
conceived of as an object, a material object, or, as Bollas puts it, as ‘‘an object
with no subject’’ (156).
What would be the extreme manifestation of this emotionless individ-
ual? The neurologist Antonio Damasio o√ers an answer. In Descartes’
Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Damasio recounts the case
history of his patient Elliot, a former businessman who undergoes surgery
to remove a frontal lobe brain tumor. He emerges retaining his mental
abilities and memory, but he displays no emotions whatsoever and is no
longer able to make any decisions regarding anything, himself included.∞∫
I imagine Elliot as a computer complete with every conceivable variable
but with no program for reaching a conclusion, calculating endlessly in
terms of contemporary culture’s hyper values of costs and benefits, taking
into account every possible factor but remaining paralyzed until he does
what someone else tells him to do or blurts into action. His ‘‘process’’ of
making a decision is a tragic parody of economic rationality, one that
does not involve his own interests at all. As Damasio writes, ‘‘The cold-
bloodedness of Elliot’s reasoning prevented him from assigning di√er-
ent values to di√erent options, and made his decision-making landscape
hopelessly flat,’’ as flat as his emotions (51). A person like Elliot will report
that he feels fine and yet experiences no emotional life whatsoever. His
ability to identify even with his own su√ering has been destroyed. We
could put it this way: he is no longer capable of telling his own story or, in
psychoanalytic terms, of speaking his own desire, for it no longer exists.
Unlike Virginia Woolf ’s writer in A Room of One’s Own, his disastrous

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 17

standpoint on his own life is that of ‘‘a dispassionate, uninvolved specta-
tor’’ (44). Elliot thus serves Damasio as a parable of the potential tragic
consequences of our culture’s devaluation of the emotions, in particular of
our lack of understanding of the interaction of emotion and reason as
grounded in the body.
Thus if at the turn of the twentieth century Freud theorized the emo-
tions as negative, as something to be gotten rid of, we might say that at the
end of the twentieth century attention has turned to the lack of what I have
been calling the psychological emotions as something seriously to regret.
What we call mental or emotional illness has a cultural history, with dif-
ferent kinds of illnesses dominant in certain periods. We identify the
hysteric with the Victorian repression of sexuality and with turn-of-the
century Freudian psychoanalysis. We associate what is called the border-
line personality with a person in whom a lack of feeling and a feeling of
nothingness predominates; dissociation is one of the symptoms.∞Ω The
midcentury appearance of the category of the borderline patient, Stearns
argues in American Cool, is connected to the growing emphasis in the
United States on the negative value of the strong emotions and the corre-
sponding injunction to control them—to ventilate them, as he puts it. (Lest
we think this is an exaggeration and no longer characteristic of our moment
we need only consider the medicalization of the emotions in the pamphlet
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Real Illness issued in 2005 by the National
Institutes of Mental Health; here we learn that everyday anger and fear can
be read as symptoms of the omnipresent disorder of PTSD, one virtually
everyone seems to be su√ering from, and that these emotions need to be
excised.)≤≠ As Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw insist in Extremities:
Trauma, Testimony, and Community, ‘‘If every age has its symptoms, ours
appears to be the age of trauma’’ (1). In a lighter vein, consider a cartoon
that appeared in 2007 in the New Yorker: a man lying on the therapeutic
couch says to the analyst behind him, ‘‘Could we up the dosage? I still have
feelings.’’≤∞
What disease could be said to characterize the first decade of the twenty-
first century? It is, I would suggest, the phenomenon of autism that has
taken our cultural imagination by storm. An illness commonly under-
stood as characterized by the tragic inability to read the emotions of others
and to establish a√ective bonds, autism is a disorder that confines people
to a world of intensities, uncannily resonating with our media-crazed cul-
ture of sensation.≤≤

18 Introduction
 2
In New Maladies of the Soul, Julia Kristeva insists that ‘‘the end of the possi-
bility of telling a story’’ is characteristic of contemporary culture, dominated
as it is by a market-and-image economy (43). I too am concerned about the
psychic impoverishment that our media-saturated culture underwrites by
promoting high-speed intense sensation at the expense of the psychologi-
cal dimension of our lives. Thus in this book a cultural poetics of the
emotions is also at stake for me. This is one of the reasons I have adopted a
more literary and less argumentative mode at the outset of this introduc-
tory chapter. This is why I have been threading passages from Didion’s The
Year of Magical Thinking throughout these opening pages, understanding
that my own thought and feeling is an irresistible collaboration between
other lives and other texts.≤≥ This explains my admiration in the pages that
follow for the expressive and reflective force of literary work in di√erent
modes, including (to give just three examples) Toni Morrison’s evocative
prose in her short novel The Bluest Eye, Michael Cunningham’s science
fiction novella Like Beauty in his eloquent book Specimen Days, and the
moving autobiographical prose poem entitled ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ by
the French psychoanalyst J.-B. Pontalis.
A potent antidote to the hectoring intensity of statistical panic is the
story, a narrative that both expresses that feeling and reflects upon it or, to
refer once again to Raymond Williams, a narrative in which a ‘‘practical
consciousness’’ is involved, ‘‘not feeling against thought, but thought as
felt and feeling as thought’’ (132). I am a person who loves literature,
and so it may not come as a surprise that here I understand one genre as
providing commentary on another genre. One kind of narrative—here
an autobiographical one—serves as a self-reflexive commentary on an-
other kind of narrative, what in the chapter on bureaucratic rage I call the
‘‘information-story’’—that is, a narrative that has been reduced to an un-
feeling fragment. Thus countering a fragment, or providing nuanced con-
text for an information-story, is a more ample narrative—a story.≤∂ I also
agree with Donna Haraway, in her comments in The Companion Species
Manifesto, that ‘‘stories are much bigger than ideologies. In that is our
hope’’ (17).
As Michelle Rosaldo, one of the founding figures of the anthropology of
the emotions, wrote in a landmark essay, ‘‘A√ects, whatever their similari-
ties, are no more similar than the societies in which we live’’; ‘‘the life of

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 19

feeling is an aspect of the social world’’ (145). Her research was on the
Ilongot people of the Philippines, specifically how they experienced and
practiced anger (many would find it a surprising challenge to the western
notion that we should not ‘‘repress’’ our anger lest it escape in explosion).
Rosaldo’s concern was to underscore the ways in which cultures shape
our emotional lives. ‘‘Feelings are not substances to be discovered in our
blood,’’ she insisted, ‘‘but social practices organized by stories we both
enact and tell’’ (143).≤∑ Although she was referring to large cultural narra-
tives about the emotions, I want to take her at her literal word and place the
emphasis on the word ‘‘stories.’’ For as many people have pointed out, we
learn emotions through the medium of stories. The kinds of stories I am
privileging here—many of them are book length, others are stories so
short they might be called anecdotes—embody for me feeling as thought
and thought as feeling.≤∏ In part 1 many of these stories rewrite dominant
cultural scenarios of the emotions; in part 2 many draw attention to what I
am calling ‘‘new’’ feelings—sympathy for nonhuman cyborgs, bureau-
cratic rage, and statistical panic.
As I write this I realize how much I have missed the very telling of
stories in cultural studies and literary criticism. I miss the life that a story
brings to discussion and analysis. I miss the intertwining of the two. What
might be termed professional a√ect has a dominant style at any given
point in time.≤π Notwithstanding the practice of what came to be called
personal criticism in feminist literary studies during the 1980s and 1990s,
the prevailing tone in cultural and literary studies is what I would call
professional cool. The expository argument has assumed center stage, and I
have come to feel an emptiness and insu≈ciency and colorlessness in the
reduction of our work to argument. I suspect in fact that one of the reasons
so much research on the emotions has appeared in the academy over the
past twenty years is that it has served as compensation for the anesthetiza-
tion of the emotions in academic life, a profession saturated with stringent
rules of emotionless rationality in relation to research itself and to writing.
Thus it is that I am interested in the literary emotions.≤∫

In lieu of strict definitions I o√er these thoughts about my ‘‘emotional’’

vocabulary. Research by anthropologists, historians, and literary critics
over the past twenty years has shown us that the emotions have fascinating
histories and that emotional experience varies in remarkable ways across

20 Introduction
cultures.≤Ω I have been referring to what I call the psychological emotions
as binding emotions—those that connect us to other people (either posi-
tively or negatively), with anger, shame, and compassion (or sympathy) as
the prime instances that I take up in the chapters to follow. Thus for me
these psychological emotions are social emotions. They may attach us to
members of the nonhuman world as well, as I suggest in ‘‘Sympathy for
Nonhuman Cyborgs.’’
I am, of course, well aware that histories have been written of the
emergence of the very category of the ‘‘psychological’’ emotions. Indeed in
Marxism and Literature Williams himself calls attention to the ‘‘psychologi-
cal’’ as one the ‘‘great modern ideological systems’’ in the West (129).≥≠
One of many points of departure is Freud’s own conceptualization of
a√ect as profoundly private and often so deeply hidden in our interior
spaces that it is unknown even to ourselves. In response feminists, among
others, have shown how the emotions, shaped by cultural norms and
practices, can be collective as well as personal, thus underscoring the
mutually constitutive nature of subjectivity and sociality. An important
case in point is the sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s pioneering work in The
Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, her classic study
of the commodification of the emotions that, in a service economy popu-
lated predominantly by women, are themselves for sale and performed as
part of the job, thereby creating the possibility of alienation from one’s
‘‘own’’ feelings. Focusing on flight attendants (most of them women),
Hochschild coined the important term ‘‘emotional labor,’’ arguing that
feelings ‘‘are not stored ‘inside us,’ and they are not independent of acts
of management’’ (17).≥∞ (What does it tell about me that for years now I
have been consistently mistaken in airports and on airplanes for a flight
attendant?)
Similarly, poststructuralist theorists have insisted on the decisive role
that language plays in shaping our world, a role in which we are spoken by
language and not the other way around. Literary and rhetorical critics of
earlier historical periods as well as historians have discovered other forms
of feeling at work. Adela Pinch in her book Strange Fits of Passion: Epis-
temologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen, for example, asks of her period and
place, where do feelings come from? What she finds is that in England
in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, feelings were often
understood as extravagantly wayward—transpersonal and seemingly au-
tonomous in and of themselves, coming from other people and, wonder-

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 21

fully, from books. This is a strong view of the emotions at odds with that of
the psychological view of the emotions as originating in a deep interior.≥≤
In How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900, Nancy
Armstrong basically picks up where Pinch leaves o√, arguing that the very
form of the British novel provides the ground for the emergence of the
self-possessed individual, one whose interiority o√ers a way of exceeding
the constraints that characterized their social position.≥≥ Armstrong pro-
vocatively suggests that the strategies adopted by the novel at various
points in time—ambivalence, repetition, and displacement, among them
—were transformed by Freud into the theoretical figures by which uncon-
scious desire expresses itself. The rhetorician Susan Miller, drawing on the
long tradition of commonplace books, traces across nineteenth-century
America the emergence of the discourse of the privatized and interiorized
emotions—what we can call the aesthetic of psychological realism.≥∂ Ac-
counts of our experience are never transparent. They are always shaped by
cultural values and codes. I understand the contingency and critique of the
psychological self. But I do not therefore wish to give up the psychological
emotions.
That we must choose one view over the other—either the emotions
arise within us or they come from outside of us—has characterized recent
research, with an emphasis on the latter view. In The Cultural Politics of
Emotion, for example, Sara Ahmed rejects the Freudian model. ‘‘Rather
than emotions being understood as coming from within and moving out-
wards, emotions are assumed to come from without and move inward,’’ she
explains. ‘‘An ‘outside in’ model is also evident in approaches to ‘crowd
psychology,’ where it is assumed that the crowd has feelings, and that the
individual gets drawn into the crowd by feeling the crowd’s feelings as
its own’’ (9).≥∑ Emile Durkheim’s book The Rules of Sociological Method,
published in 1895, is for Ahmed a key paradigm of the generation of a√ect
from within a crowd and not the individual; contagion is the metaphor at
work. The late Teresa Brennan also challenges the Freudian notion of the
bounded individual as the source of the a√ects and drives. ‘‘My theory,’’
she writes, ‘‘is an alternative to psychoanalytic theory or metapsychology
in that it postulates an origin for a√ects that is independent of the individ-
ual experiencing them. These a√ects come from the other, but we deny
them’’ (13).≥∏ Like Ahmed, she too draws on theories of the crowd, al-
though her reference points are the French social psychologist Gustave Le
Bon, whose book on the psychology of the crowd also appeared in 1895,

22 Introduction
and the British psychoanalyst Winfred Bion whose work on groups ap-
peared at midcentury.
It can be no coincidence that both Freudian depth psychology and the
psychology of crowds took shape at the turn of the twentieth century.≥π
These two paradigms of the emotions that emerged in modernity—the
psychological and the sociological—are two sides of the same coin. Accept-
ing the category of the psychological emotions is not incompatible with
the view that emotions can also originate outside the self. As we see in the
case of feminist anger, emotions that have their origins in social experi-
ences become psychological emotions. Such social emotions can be strate-
gic, as I have already mentioned. In referring to Durkheim, among other
thinkers, Mette Hjort in The Strategy of Letters also takes up the question of
the strategic value of the emotions. ‘‘The main point is that social emo-
tions,’’ she concludes, ‘‘tend to produce a very particular form of interde-
pendence, namely reciprocal interdependence’’ (185–86). Notwithstanding
her debt to Durkheim, Hjort associates the social emotions with the strate-
gic generation of positive feeling and with what she calls ‘‘positive free-
dom’’ (186).≥∫ Thus in the chapters that follow I admit no necessary contra-
diction between the psychological emotions that have their origin in the
self (grief would be such an example) and the social emotions that have
their origin in a group (feminist anger would be an example).≥Ω
At the same time I understand, in the spirit of Brennan’s The Transmis-
sion of A√ect, that unwanted emotions can circulate far and wide. It can be a
heavy burden to carry other people’s psychological emotions for them, as
Brennan explains, in stressing the cultural division of emotional labor
according to gender (women, for example, as unfortunate repositories of
men’s anger, a dynamic in Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own). But it is my
temperament to accentuate the positive, not the negative, and I admit to
being partial to the psychological emotions. It need hardly be said that they
lend depth and tone and nuance to our lives. They are expressions of what
is meaningful to us. Indeed it may very well be that today’s suspicion in
cultural studies of the very notion of the psychological emotions—the view
that the belief in a meaningful interior life is a telltale symptom of the
neoliberal conception of the autonomous individual whose emotions are a
fetishized form of private property—is itself a symptom of the expanding
global capitalism of media culture. I’m reminded of the heart-rending
words of one of the psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s patients who longed
for the experience of interiority. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 23

twenty-two years old when she experienced for the first time the feeling of
being in the world and in her body. For the first time she felt—this is how
she expressed it—that her emotions were ‘‘inside her,’’ endowing her with
a sense of vibrancy and coherence between the inside world and the out-
side world (this feeling tragically disappeared in the wake of shock ther-
apy, which left her empty, with no inner world or inner perceptions).∂≠
To repeat my epigraph from Pontalis, ‘‘It’s rare nowadays to hear words
which, belonging to no one in particular, can be the property of anyone,
words that are solid and inexhaustible like ‘grief ’ or ‘hatred’ ’’ (103). What a
shame that today a psychoanalyst, of all people, finds these words in short
supply. Grief. Anger. Compassion. We need to hear these words and claim
them as our own. As Didion writes, ‘‘Grief turns out to be a place none of
us know until we reach it’’ (188). She is right.

My project thus departs from—but at certain points also joins—that of

Brian Massumi who in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, A√ect, Sensation
theorizes a philosophy of ‘‘a√ect,’’ where a√ect is similar to what Jameson
calls intensities, not a signifying practice. Massumi is following Deleuze
(who was following Spinoza). ‘‘There seems to be a growing feeling within
media, literary, and art theory that a√ect is central to an understanding
of our information- and image-based late capitalist culture,’’ Massumi
writes, but ‘‘emotion and a√ect—if a√ect is intensity—follow di√erent
logics and pertain to di√erent orders’’ (27). As he explains: ‘‘An emotion is
a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experi-
ence which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is
qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of in-
tensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into nar-
rativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is inten-
sity owned and recognized’’ (28). I agree that a√ect is key to understanding
our information and image culture. I agree that intensities and psycholog-
ical emotions follow di√erent logics. Indeed that is an assumption in this
book. But I do not dismiss the psychological emotions as, in Massumi’s
words, ‘‘owned emotions’’ that are ‘‘old surprises to which we have become
more or less accustomed’’ (220–21). In my chapters on bureaucratic rage
and statistical panic (both of which name what I would call a√ects or
intensities), my point is that reflecting feelingly on our experience helps us
recognize—I borrow Massumi’s word here—the assault to which we are

24 Introduction
being submitted.∂∞ We live in a mixed economy of feelings, one character-
ized by both the psychological emotions and intensities, and my point is
that they often stand in dialectical relationship to each other, with the narra-
tion of our experience a crucial capacity. Emotion can be intensity recog-
nized, redescribed, and owned, understood as if for the first time.
We have witnessed a waning of the psychological emotions and are
subjected to an increase in sensations, or intensities, in postmodernity,
characterized as it is by a rampant consumer culture of manufactured and
simulated excitement (one that is also boring), ever-expanding channels of
mass-mediated information, exploding networks of digital communica-
tion, and new and multiple forms of visual entertainment. In fact it could
certainly be said that the a√ect of the crowd at the turn of the twentieth
century has been succeeded by the a√ect of media culture at the turn of the
twenty-first century. The media could be said to abet a√ective epidemics,
where anger is one of the emotions of choice.∂≤ The film critic David
Denby, writing in the New Yorker about Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2,
describes the film’s ‘‘anger’’ as a ‘‘mock’’ emotion (he uses scare quotes
around anger to make sure it is understood as a flat version of in-depth,
intense emotion). Television, radio, and the Internet present us with what
my colleague Nikhil Singh, referring to the likes of Ann Coulter, Bill
O’Reilly, Nancy Grace, and Howard Stern, has called ‘‘talk show a√ect,’’
where, in pelletlike quotas of angry a√ect, anger is distributed scattershot
as intensities.
Grief too can be stunted by the media, with the critical dimension of
duration foreshortened to virtually zero. In the wake of the deadly attack by
a student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in April 2007 in which thirty-
two people were killed by gunshot, media anchors and news reporters
began talking about beginning the healing process even before the number
of the dead had been determined. I call this tv grief. In the crosshairs of
the media the depth of shame can be turned inside out, twisted into a
hollow and preening exhibitionism presenting us with reality-tv feelings.
Conversely, the paparazzi voyeurism of multiple screens may target ordi-
nary individuals with mock feelings igniting murderous rage, an example
of which I take up in my chapter on shame. At the same time we are urged
to get over our feelings.
Video games hardwire us to seek ever-increasing violent thrills, and
commercials—compressed to seconds—are downloaded on our cell phones.
In postmodern culture the large-scale narrative has been compressed to an

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 25

image fragment.∂≥ Sound bites and image fragments are a√ect bites. I take
up these issues in my chapter on statistical panic where I identify inten-
sities as short-lived feelings that attach us not to people but rather suture us
to the task—it is a form of work—of avoiding risk in our society of ever-
increasing risk.∂∂ Here the a√ect bite that is statistical panic is countered
by the psychological emotion of anger—or better, outrage—an anger that is
analytical. It has a cognitive edge.
Didion too articulates this phenomenon in The Year of Magical Think-
ing. In the aftermath of her husband’s death she finds herself worrying,
worrying about medication statistics:

I fretted for example over a Bayer commercial for a low-dose aspirin

that was said to ‘‘significantly reduce’’ the risk of heart attack. I knew
perfectly well how aspirin reduces the risk of heart attack: it keeps the
blood from clotting. I also knew that John was taking Coumadin, a far
more powerful anticoagulant. Yet I was seized nonetheless by the possi-
ble folly of having overlooked low-dose aspirin. I fretted similarly over a
study done by uc-San Diego and Tufts showing a 4.65 percent increase
in cardiac death over the fourteen-day period of Christmas and New
Year’s. I fretted over a study from Vanderbilt demonstrating that eryth-
romycin quintupled the risk of cardiac arrest if taken in conjunction
with common heart medications. I fretted over a study on statins, and
the 30 to 40 percent jump in the risk of heart attack for patients who
stopped taking them.
As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message
that we can avert death. (205–6)

In order to avoid death, the unmistakable message is that we must reduce

our risk by consuming these products. If we don’t, the result is what I call
statistical guilt, and it is one that Didion counters—she has come to under-
stand how it works—by embedding it in her larger story.
Finally, throughout this book at times I also use the word ‘‘feelings,’’ as
we do in everyday life, to refer either to the psychological emotions or to
intensities (such as the sensations—and lack thereof—that can be said to
characterize modernity and postmodernity). The matter of mood I take up
in my last chapter, where I focus on the poetic power of a literary mood. As
Lawrence Grossberg has explained, if desire is focused on an object and is
goal-oriented, then mood arises out of a situation and gives to it a distinc-
tive tone or atmosphere. A mood is an a√ective space, a state of body and

26 Introduction
mind, one in which thought and feeling can be indistinguishable from
each other.∂∑ Christopher Bollas theorizes the generative power of moods
as a psychic process akin to dreaming. In my discussion of the piece by
Pontalis with which I close this book, it is the process of writing that is akin
to dreaming. It is writing that creates for us an evocative object in and of
itself, one that speaks of an elegiac hope and in its small and treasured way
may help to reshape our culture’s politics of the emotions through a poet-
ics of the emotions.∂∏
Thus to the Coda I give the subtitle ‘‘Inexhaustible Grief ’’ in homage to
the sentiments of Pontalis. If my first chapter focuses on Freud and takes
an analytic approach to his own analysis of anger over an almost forty-year
period, my last words embrace this poetic piece of prose by Pontalis that
o√ers us what Freud could not in ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’—the feel-
ing of the grief to come and the moving impulse to repair broken bonds in
a fragile world.∂π This book concludes on the note of feeling, albeit one
marked by analysis, reflecting my honoring of analysis that is literary but
also my growing sense of its increasing lack of connection to our lives—
my conviction that much of it, like the professional literature that Didion
read in her search for understanding her grief, is unfeeling.

Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking 27

 one

C O N TA I N I N G A N G E R , A D V O C AT I N G A N G E R :
FREUD AND FEMINISM

I had early discovered . . . that passions often lead to sorrow.

—Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

The streets of London have their map; but our passions are
uncharted.
—Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

We need to acknowledge that experiments in creating a new

social order, a social movement, create not only spaces of new
ethics but also new emotions.
—Sarita Srivastava, ‘‘You’re Calling Me a Racist?’’

Hysterical rage. Annihilating anger. Frozen wrath. Disabling guilt. I open

this chapter on Freudian and feminist anger by tracing this trajectory in
Freud’s thought about the strong emotion of anger. By ‘‘strong emotions’’
I mean those such as fear, hate, triumph, jealousy, horror, greed, and
l’amour fou—most of which could also be referred to as the ‘‘passions’’
(disgust and shame, however, are strong emotions we would not identify
as passions). In their intensity, duration, and focus, the strong emotions
di√er from what I call the quiet emotions (nostalgia, sadness, and tran-
quility, for example), the chafing emotions (annoyance, irritation), and the
expansive emotions (oceanic feeling, amusement, sympathy).∞
The Freudian passages I’ve chosen with the strong emotion of anger in
view are drawn from Studies on Hysteria (1895), The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), ‘‘The Moses of Michelangelo’’ (1914), and Civilization and Its Dis-
contents (1930), and as such cover a span of thirty-five years. I’ve selected
these works in great part because, with the exception of Civilization and Its
Discontents, they focus on what could be termed ‘‘professional’’ relations
between people rather than on erotic wishes, for so long familiar to us in
Freud. The path traced through these four texts leads from feminized
hysterical anger to grandiose annihilating anger, from frozen wrath to guilt.
It defines a trajectory of emotional development in Freud’s work that
culminates in the containment of the drive of aggressivity—and anger, its
emotional representative—by guilt, the quintessential Freudian emotion.
I don’t want to be understood as suggesting that Freud didn’t value the
emotions. On the contrary, as he asserted in ‘‘Delusions and Dreams in
Jensen’s Gradiva,’’ the emotions are the only valuable things in psychic
life.≤ But in general for Freud, the strong emotions are explosive, volatile,
dangerous. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Freud was
ambivalent about the strong emotions (it would certainly be more ‘‘Freud-
ian’’ to put it this way). At each and every point we’ll find that for Freud a
di√erent mechanism inhibits the expression of the strong emotions. Each
mechanism is a defense mechanism, similar to what the American psychol-
ogist Silvan Tomkins calls an a√ect management script.≥ Over the course
of his life Freud considers in turn the inhibition of anger by repression,
the suppression of anger through the dream-work, and the containment of
anger by self-control. Ultimately Freud concludes in Civilization and Its
Discontents that fire must be fought with fire, emotion with emotion. In
the final analysis, the controlling emotion—guilt, which is a passion for
Freud—is a chilling and paralyzing one.
I’m drawn to this subject by my interest in theories, discourses (or
emotional standards), and the experience of the emotions, but more spe-
cifically by what may seem at first to bear a far-flung relation to Freud: the
value placed on the emotion of anger in the writing of American feminists
in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period anger was the emotion of
choice for academic feminists (and thus ‘‘professional’’ relationships were
very much at stake, among them the relation between students and pro-
fessors).∂ I’m fascinated by this emphasis on anger, which finds a histori-
cal touchstone in the work of Virginia Woolf and is indisputably one of the
prime examples of the general redistribution of the emotions in terms of
gender taking place in contemporary culture. Long associated with men,
anger was now being appropriated by women. What is entailed by this
feminist valorization of anger? At whom or what should it be directed?
What tone or shape should it take? What assumptions about anger are
contained in this work? What are the limits of anger? I take this oppor-
tunity to address at least some of these questions at the end of this chapter.
By returning to Freud I hope to provide a contrasting perspective from
which to do so. Thus my purpose in this chapter is to understand more

34 Chapter 1
clearly the bases of both Freudian and feminist views of anger through
their di√erences, as well as to underline the distinctly di√erent historical
projects they served.∑

1
What does Freud have to say about anger? In the index to the Standard
Edition I was surprised to find virtually no subentries under the heading
‘‘anger.’’ The index does refer to Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, but
all of the references there are to sections authored by Josef Breuer, Freud’s
coauthor. The single exception is ‘‘Preliminary Communication,’’ the one
essay attributed to both Breuer and Freud. I will turn to this piece in a
moment, but first I need to insist on a distinction between anger and
aggressivity, one signaled by the index itself: if ‘‘anger’’ has few entries,
‘‘aggressiveness’’ has many. Anger is an emotion, what in modern western
culture we understand primarily as an interiorized a√ective state (there
are other cultures, as anthropologists point out, that conceive of emotion
as something that exists between people, not as something in individuals).
Aggressivity is a drive to action, to behavior. In his work as a whole Freud
placed much more emphasis on a theory of the drives than he did on the
emotions. In fact he devoted remarkably little attention to the emotions in
comparison, say, to Melanie Klein, whose work is a veritable theoretical
atlas of the strong emotions of psychoanalysis. What, then, is the relation-
ship between emotion and aggressivity? Certainly the two are linked, but
not indissolubly so. We can imagine angry feelings that don’t eventuate
in aggressive behavior toward others. Indeed Freud astutely theorized
the conversion of aggressivity toward others into self-aggressivity—in the
form of an emotion. With these observations in mind I turn to Studies on
Hysteria and feminized hysterical anger.

Hysteria is associated overwhelmingly with women and with the repres-

sion of sexual desire, which I understand as a drive, not an emotion. But in
Studies on Hysteria Freud does report one case that deals explicitly with the
repression of the emotion of anger. I call it the case of the hysterical
employee. It is, as we will see, a case with a distinctly contemporary flavor.
Given the traditional understanding of anger as a male emotion and hys-
teria as associated with women, it may come as a surprise to us that this

Containing Anger, Advocating Anger 35

hysterical patient is a man, one feminized by his hysteria as the result of
his repressing his rage. What has enraged him? He is furious at his em-
ployer who has mistreated him physically, and he is furious at the legal
justice system that has accorded him no redress. What is the outcome of
his repression of anger? It erupts hysterically in the guise of ‘‘a frenzy of
rage’’ as if its repression had compressed it into a denser, more volatile
force. Here is the entire passage devoted to the scenario:

An employee who had become a hysteric as a result of being ill-treated

by his superior, su√ered from attacks in which he collapsed and fell into
a frenzy of rage, but without uttering a word or giving any sign of a
hallucination. It was possible to provoke an attack under hypnosis, and
the patient then revealed that he was living through the scene in which
his employer had abused him in the street and hit him with a stick. A
few days later the patient came back and complained of having had
another attack of the same kind. On this occasion it turned out under
hypnosis that he had been re-living the scene to which the actual onset
of the illness was related: the scene in the law-court when he failed to
obtain satisfaction for his maltreatment. (SE 2: 14)

For Freud and Breuer this case is an illustration of a hysterical attack that
consists only of ‘‘motor phenomena’’ (that is, it doesn’t exhibit a hallucina-
tory phase). Like other forms of hysteria, the root or precipitating cause is a
memory of a psychical trauma, a memory that has been repressed. But
what is the memory of ? An event? An emotion? A desire?
Although Freud doesn’t say anything more about this case, we can
assume he understands it the way he does other cases of hysteria: a person
aΔicted with hysteria must remember and rehearse either their desire or
a√ect (allow me to repeat that here I am associating desire with a drive,
a√ect with an emotion). The psychical trauma, signaled by the symptom
of hysterical rage, must be ‘‘disposed of by abreaction or by associative
thought-activity’’ (SE 2: 15). But there is a significant di√erence between
this case of hysterical anger and a case of hysterical erotic desire. In the
latter, Freud counsels the recognition and acceptance of sexual desire,
which is the manifestation of what he will later understand as the libidinal
drive. In e√ect he approves of it. In the case of the hysterical employee, on
the other hand, it appears to be the emotion itself—the employee’s anger,
indeed rage, at the legal justice system and at his employer—that is the
precipitating factor of the illness. Repressed anger, in other words, may

36 Chapter 1
not be a mere symptom of the illness but its very root. Thus it is the anger
itself that should be ‘‘abreacted,’’ released as it were into the air.
In his essay ‘‘The Unconscious’’ Freud explains the relation between
memory, representation, and emotion this way: ‘‘A√ects and emotions
correspond to processes of discharge, the final manifestations of which are
perceived as feelings,’’ while ‘‘ideas are cathexes—basically of memory-
traces’’ (178). The psychoanalyst James Hillman, glossing this passage in
Emotion, o√ers the following analogy, one that perfectly captures Freud’s
view of anger as a violent and destructive emotion: ‘‘Let us conceive of
these ‘cathexes—ultimately of memory-traces’ as bombs. The bombs ‘exist’
in the unconscious, but the a√ect has the quantitative explosive potential
of the bombs’’ (53).
Thus hysteria in this altogether unusual case is not associated with the
private sphere (the familiar Freudian bedroom). Rather it is set in the
public sphere (the workplace, courts of law), which in the nineteenth
century was the confirmed province of men. Furthermore its unexpected
scenario underscores the unequal power relations of men—in this situa-
tion, of employer and employee. Freud doesn’t address the issue of power.
He doesn’t politicize the emotion of anger. But if in general men have the
cultural ‘‘right’’ to express their anger, this particular man—an employee—
clearly did not. He didn’t experience ‘‘satisfaction’’ in his anger. Instead his
hysterical anger feminizes him.∏
Today we would likely consider this case in terms of harassment, which
turns precisely on the analyzing pivot of unequal power relations with a
‘‘superior’’ taking advantage of a ‘‘subordinate.’’ Acting on the emotion
would be part of the therapy. We would look to the courts for ‘‘satisfac-
tion,’’ for the redress that was not forthcoming in the nineteenth century.
Freud’s then innovative answer was not legal action but rather therapy to
exorcise the anger. Psychic repression was the mechanism that Freud
theorized had concealed this anger in the first place. As we read in ‘‘The
Unconscious,’’ ‘‘to suppress the development of a√ect is the true aim of
repression and . . . its work is incomplete if this aim is not achieved’’ (178).
At this point in his practice Freud believed that therapy in the form of
hypnosis would release it. The patient would be purged of the hysterical
rage that was in e√ect attacking him. Here anger is understood as a de-
bilitating emotion. In Studies on Hysteria both the psychic mechanism of
repression and the corresponding treatment of hypnosis have as their goal
the e√acement or catharsis of the self-destructive emotion of anger. But

Containing Anger, Advocating Anger 37

Freud was soon to reject hypnosis as ine√ective, and another mechanism
for containing anger would have to be found.

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud explores the dream-work, a psychic

mechanism he believed inhibited the emotions. For Freud the work of
dreaming serves to suppress and dilute the emotions, thereby allowing
them to be staged in the dream. If in the case of the hysterical employee
the diagnostic complement of repression is hypnosis, here the diagnostic
complement of the dream-work is the dissection of the dream-mass into its
dream-thoughts, although dream-passions would seem to be a more appro-
priate term. Freud’s conviction is that analysis will ultimately allow the
strong emotions to present themselves and as a result they will be resolved
into a calming order and disappear.
One dream in particular resonates here. In his important section en-
titled ‘‘A√ects in Dreams’’ Freud considers at length the emotional storm
released by what we have come to call the ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream, one of his
own dreams of professional ambition. Here is the complete passage:

I had gone to Brücke’s laboratory at night, and, in response to a gentle knock

on the door, I opened it to (the late) Professor Fleischl, who came in with a
number of strangers and, after exchanging a few words, sat down at his
table. . . . My friend Fl. [Fliess] had come to Vienna unobtrusively in July. I
met him in the street in conversation with my (deceased) friend P., and went
with them to some place where they sat opposite each other as though they were
at a small table. I sat in front at its narrow end. Fl. spoke about his sister and
said that in three quarters of an hour she was dead, and added some such
words as ‘‘that was the threshold.’’ As P. failed to understand him, Fl. turned
to me and asked me how much I had told P. about his a√airs. Whereupon,
overcome by strange emotions, I tried to explain to Fl. that P. (could not
understand anything at all, of course, because he) was not alive. But what I
actually said—and I myself noticed the mistake—was, ‘‘non vixit .’’ I then
gave P. a piercing look. Under my gaze he turned pale; his form grew indistinct
and his eyes a sickly blue—and finally he melted away. I was highly delighted
at this and I now realized that Ernst Fleischl, too, had been no more than an
apparition, a ‘‘revenant’’; and it seemed to me quite possible that people of that
kind only existed as long as one liked and could be got rid of if someone else
wished it. (SE 5: 421).

38 Chapter 1
About this angry dream I want to make three points. First, Freud’s fantasy
in the ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream—a fantasy that is surely grandiose—is that his
anger is itself a lethal weapon. Related is the implication that the dream-
work, which serves to suppress (not repress) a√ect in the first place, may
ultimately work to magnify it. To me the most memorable aspect of the
‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream is the ‘‘scene of annihilation’’ where Freud acts on his
anger, terminating his friend with a wounding glance, causing him as if
in some bizarre science fiction film to liquefy and finally evaporate into
nothing, leaving no bodily trace (520). This scene, Freud concludes, is a
reversal of the very same treatment he had once received from his em-
ployer and teacher Brücke, who had chastised him for his renowned tardi-
ness as an assistant in his lab.π Thus the anger of the professor provokes
the anger of the student.
Elsewhere in The Interpretation of Dreams Freud vividly describes this
event, which so clearly had a mortifying e√ect on his self-esteem: ‘‘One
morning he turned up punctually at the hour of opening and awaited my
arrival. His words were brief and to the point. But it was not they that
mattered. What overwhelmed me were the terrible blue eyes with which
he looked at me and by which I was reduced to nothing. . . . No one who
can remember the great man’s eyes, which retained their striking beauty
even in his old age, and who has ever seen him in anger, will find it di≈cult
to picture the young sinner’s emotions’’ (422). In the case of the hysterical
employee, the anger of the employer provoked the employee’s anger. The
employee took his grievance to the courts where he found no satisfaction.
The result is that the employee turned the anger against himself, making
himself physically sick. In the case of the ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream, anger also
calls forth anger. But here the comparison ends. The anger is wildly out of
proportion. Freud was late. Moreover, anger is vented in fantasy that does
result in satisfaction and delight. What an amazing phenomenon is the
dream!
Indeed the grandiose fantasy of the dream is that anger is a firearm, that
Freud’s anger is so powerful the mere expression of it constitutes mur-
derous aggression. An emotion is converted into a physical force in fan-
tasy. Freud succeeds in destroying his friend with a laserlike look of pierc-
ing anger. To his shame. And to his anxiety. For might he not expect
retaliation in an endless escalation of anger and action?
In Freud’s discussion of the ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream he repeatedly refers to
the ‘‘raging’’ of the emotions that accompany it. The high degree of its

Containing Anger, Advocating Anger 39

emotional intensity is its most striking feature, especially given Freud’s
argument in this section of The Interpretation of Dreams that the dream-
work serves to weaken or dilute the emotions—to bring ‘‘about a suppres-
sion of a√ects’’ (467). As he puts it elsewhere in The Interpretation of
Dreams, ‘‘The purpose for which the censorship exercises its o≈ce and
brings about the distortion of dreams’’ is ‘‘in order to prevent the generation
of anxieties and other forms of distressing a√ect ’’ (267). Thus the dream-work
itself possesses great power, as we see in Freud’s vivid description of it:
‘‘The whole mass of these dream-thoughts is brought under the pressure
of the dream-work, and its elements are turned about, broken into frag-
ments and jammed together—almost like pack-ice’’ (312). Freud pictures
the resulting dream as a dense and cold mass of di√erent elements that
have been fused together. I think of the dream-work in terms of my high
school physics, of fission and fusion, the particles of the dream-thoughts
being smashed together with a force inconceivable in terms of the weights
and measures, the pulleys and levers of everyday life. Imagine, then, the
force required to separate these elements, a force equivalent to that of an
atom smasher. More, imagine the emotional storm that would be released.
My second point about this angry dream: given that the emotional
world of the ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream is far more complicated than that of the
case of the hysterical employee (which revolves around the single emo-
tion of anger), how does Freud explain his anger which was, he tells
us, ‘‘strange’’? What accounts for his overwhelming sense of emotional
strangeness? In part it may be due to the eerie feeling arising from the
altogether peculiar situation of addressing a person who is in fact dead.
But more fundamentally, I think, what struck Freud as ‘‘strange’’ was the
complex of contradictory strong emotions released by the dream.
In his analysis of the dream-mass, Freud focuses on the di√erent cate-
gories of emotions—what he calls the ‘‘various qualities’’ of a√ect—that
accompanied the ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream at two nodal points: the ‘‘hostile and
distressing’’ feelings when he ‘‘annihilated’’ his friend (who was also his
enemy) with two words and a piercing look, and the feelings of ‘‘delight’’
and ‘‘satisfaction’’ at the end of the dream when he realized not only that
such people could be eliminated whenever one (he) wanted but even more
pleasurably, that such aggressivity was justified (480). Thus what may
have been particularly troubling to Freud was the presence of contradic-
tory emotions with regard to the same person. As we know, this emotional
knot would come to be one of Freud’s decisive contributions to a theory of

40 Chapter 1
strong attachments—that they are characterized by binary emotions, with
love and hate being the primary pair.
So we should not be surprised to learn that later in his analysis of the
‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream, Freud traces the roots of the pattern of his present-day
intense emotional relationships (to his colleagues and friends) back to
the emotional world of his early childhood—to his relationship with his
nephew John who was a year older than Freud and thus his ‘‘senior’’ and
‘‘superior’’ (483). As is well known and as Freud observes earlier in The
Interpretation of Dreams, ‘‘Until the end of my third year we had been
inseparable. We had loved and fought with each other; and this childhood
relationship . . . had a determining influence on all my subsequent rela-
tions with contemporaries’’ (424). In relation to the ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream,
one childhood memory (or fantasy) of his nephew in particular returns to
Freud. It was when Freud was not yet two and was questioned by his father
as to why he hit his nephew. What was Freud’s defense? ‘‘I hit him ’cos he
hit me’’ (484). Notice that retaliation against a ‘‘superior’’ is at issue, one of
Freud’s dominant fantasies. In his discussion of the ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream
Freud concludes, ‘‘My emotional life has always insisted that I should have
an intimate friend and a hated enemy’’ (483). Thus personal drama dating
from childhood intersects (or infects) the professional, upping the ante of
emotional engagement. We should note that the site of the first part of the
dream is Brücke’s laboratory where Freud had worked. We should also
note that all of the major figures in the dream are men. Here again anger is
gendered male.
My final point is that given Freud’s emphasis on the intensity of the
emotions (in particular his annihilating anger), I find it curious that no-
where does he name the emotion of guilt, which will become central to his
thought later on. Instead he repeatedly uses the word ‘‘reproach’’ (both the
reproach of others and self-reproach). With reproach we seem to find our-
selves in a novel of manners rather than in a tragedy or a romance of pas-
sion. Reproach is one of the chafing emotions, not one of the strong or
quiet emotions. Reproach implies disapproval, rebuke, reproval. It is pri-
marily a social emotion. And as a social emotion it is altogether in keeping
with Freud’s emphasis on shame in his analysis of the ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream.∫
Shame implies an external, observing other. (Although Freud does men-
tion self-reproach he doesn’t identify it as guilt—which, as we will see, he
will ultimately come to associate with an action that is not taken, only
fantasized.) Thus in the short history of the emotions I am sketching here,

Containing Anger, Advocating Anger 41

guilt emerges later than shame in the development of Freud’s thought. Or,
we might speculate that at this point in his life the emotion of guilt was too
distressing for Freud and could only escape the censorship of the dream-
work under the guise of shame. Or, we might say that Freud was still too
young to be preoccupied with guilt.

In Studies on Hysteria a hysterical man, whose frenzied attacks of rage

physically mimic his anger, is reduced to a feminized position. His rage
and his body are out of control. Repression is ultimately an ine√ective
mechanism for containing anger. In Freud’s ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream, the
dream-work (which, like repression, is an unconscious process) serves to
both suppress and stage that anger. If the anger is out of proportion to the
event that prompted the dream, nonetheless the dream allows the safe and
satisfying expression of aggressive fantasies entailed by anger. Further-
more, the process of analysis puts those emotions into perspective. In
‘‘The Moses of Michelangelo’’ Freud considers a third mechanism for the
control of anger, one that is conscious—indeed self-conscious.
The relay between the a√ect of anger and destructive action is Freud’s
subject in ‘‘The Moses of Michelangelo.’’ As his analytic point of departure
he takes his own powerful reaction of ‘‘intellectual bewilderment’’ (also a
preferred Freudian emotion) on his repeated viewings of Michelangelo’s
sculpture of Moses. Freud comes to the conclusion that Michelangelo
brilliantly rewrote the scriptural history of anger embodied by Moses.
Similarly we may read Freud’s essay as a rewriting of his own evolving
thought on the emotion of anger and in particular on the problematic of its
containment.
It is a question of reading for the plot, of the timing of action and
emotion. The seated figure of Moses is traditionally understood as being
in a state of anger incipient to ruinous behavior. He is understood as on
the verge of bounding up and hurling down the Tablets of the Law, demol-
ishing them in a single furious gesture. Freud, however, reads the plot
di√erently. He advances Moses and his audience in time. He concludes
that Moses has already half-risen in his rage, only to interrupt his angry
action and return to a state of wrathful immobility or ‘‘frozen wrath’’ (SE
13: 229). The heat of passion is chilled to the sculptural bone. In Freud’s
approving interpretation, Moses resists the temptation to act on ‘‘rage and
indignation,’’ which would have been ‘‘an indulgence of his feelings’’ and

42 Chapter 1
would have entailed the annihilation of the Law. He ‘‘controlled his anger’’;
‘‘he kept his passion in check’’ (229–30).
For Freud the statue expresses ‘‘the passage of a violent gust of passion
visible in the signs left behind it in the ensuing calm’’ (236). It is precisely
this tension between the quietude of Moses’s exterior aspect and the inte-
rior storm of his rage that arrested Freud’s eye. How does Freud explain the
ability of Moses to contain his anger? For Freud it is a matter of character, of
the attachment of Moses to a higher cause, one to which he has conspic-
uously pledged himself. It is, in other words, a matter of will and self-
discipline, of granite control. Thus for Freud, Moses is a figure of heroic
restraint, all the more noble for his wrath and the powerful self-control that
countervails it. The implication is that Moses’s control of his anger, rather
than his indulgence of it, allows him to fulfill his responsibilities as a leader
of his religious community. At this point I hardly need draw attention to
the fact that the nobility of frozen wrath is gendered male.

In his dedication to a higher cause and in his prodigious self-control,

Freud’s Moses is larger than human, an incarnation of a mental and moral
ideal, a heroic figure who upholds the law of the land. Few could be
expected to follow his example. I turn, then, to Civilization and Its Discon-
tents, my fourth and final example of Freud theorizing a di√erent mecha-
nism to counter aggressivity. Here Freud doesn’t directly address anger as
an emotion. Instead he deals with the drive of aggressivity to which he
believed all human beings are subject and which he regarded as the great-
est impediment to civilization.
That there is a clear connection between anger and aggressivity is sug-
gested by the infamous prehistorical fable of the primal origin of guilt that
Freud o√ers in Totem and Taboo (1913), and to which he returns in Civilization
and Its Discontents. It is a scenario of power, sexual desire, and the strong—
indeed primal—emotions. Freud, we recall, hypothesizes that civilization
began when the sons of the despotic father (who had denied them sexual
access to women) banded together in hatred, killed him, and ate his body.
What can restrain the destructive drive to aggressivity, particularly when
it is inflamed by the strong and divisive emotions? In Civilization and Its
Discontents Freud argues that the drive to aggressivity is so powerful that
the sense of guilt emerges to counter its force. Indeed the drive to ag-
gressivity, when introjected, becomes guilt. There is a kind of mathemati-

Containing Anger, Advocating Anger 43

cal principle of conversion between drives and emotions at work. Guilt is
thus for Freud arguably the most important achievement of civilization.
Much of Civilization and Its Discontents is devoted to a consideration of
the etiology and origin of guilt on the levels of the individual and of the
group. I won’t rehearse here the complex trajectory of Freud’s argument,
which is in any case well known. Instead I’ll confine myself to three points,
hoping to gain in clarity what I may lose in simplification. First, in Freud’s
world the emotion of guilt is not understood as a technology of control or a
disciplinary technique in the Foucauldian sense, imposed by a historically
specific set of discourses and institutions. Rather for Freud the regulating
emotion of guilt emerges inevitably from a primal psychology of the emo-
tions, from the tension or ambivalence between hate and love, the emo-
tional representatives of the two basic drives: the drive to aggressivity
(power) and the libidinal drive (sexual desire). In Freud’s view guilt is both
genetic and structural to the human psyche from the moment of the
constitution of civilization (that is, the founding moment of the sons re-
volting against the father). If love and hate are the two primary emotions,
guilt is a secondary emotion, entailing self-consciousness. Guilt is the
third term, unsettling and oppressive yet paradoxically also stabilizing.
Like a point on a nuclear thermostat, guilt works homeostatically to main-
tain a fluctuating equilibrium between love and hate, to regulate the tem-
perature, to keep things cool.
Second, we should note that the prehistorical paradigm on which Freud
bases his theory of the constitution of civilization (out of hatred) and the
emergence of guilt (out of love) is gendered male. The sons, who fiercely
love the father as much as they hate him, internalize the father as their
superego, thus turning aggressivity—and anger—against themselves.
Third, for Freud the sense of guilt is produced from hostile feelings that
are not acted upon (Freud ultimately reserves the term ‘‘remorse’’ for the
emotion experienced after one has committed an act of aggression). Con-
comitantly the sense of guilt is, startlingly, often unconscious. It is what I
call a disabling emotion. Guilt is simultaneously an inhibition of aggres-
sivity and an exacting, gnawing punishment for aggression in fantasy. I
find this a stunning conclusion: an emotion is itself a self-punishment for
what has not taken place. Guilt inhibits the development of anger—before
it even exists.
Thus if for Freud the sense of guilt is ‘‘the most important problem in
the development of civilization,’’ in the final analysis it may also represent

44 Chapter 1
an enervating and ultimately crippling limit to it (SE 21: 134). In Freud’s
etiology of guilt we find implicit a catastrophe theory of the emotions—and
of civilization. If the sense of guilt is at first stabilizing, at a certain limit it
may become radically destabilizing. This is because Freud theorizes that
the larger the group or community, the more intense the guilt and the
greater its quotient.Ω We are presented with a dismaying future in which
the burden of guilt (which inhibits the expression of anger) grows heavier
and heavier, a future we may have come close to realizing today as trans-
national corporate structures and communication networks circle the
globe, drawing everyone more tightly together and thus increasing our
sense of overwhelming social su√ering. The sense of guilt may become so
onerous, Freud suggests, as to become intolerable, not only for an individ-
ual but for civilization as a whole—rendering culture neurotic and crip-
pled. As he writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, ‘‘The price we pay for
our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening
of the sense of guilt’’ (134). But if Freud theorizes the ‘‘fatal inevitability’’ of
guilt (132), then we may conclude that, at its limit condition, guilt carries
with it an inevitable fatality by manifesting itself as ‘‘a tormenting uneasi-
ness, a kind of anxiety’’ on the level of the individual and a ‘‘malaise’’ on the
level of society or civilization as a whole (135). Certainly the burden of guilt
many carry in the face of global conditions today is virtually intolerable.
At its limit condition then, guilt—the emotion that makes possible the
survival and development of civilization—may devolve into anxiety, which
is, according to Freud, the most fundamental and primitive of all the
emotions.∞≠ As he points out, ‘‘the sense of guilt is at bottom nothing else
but a topographical variety of anxiety’’ (SE 21: 135). If Freud is ambivalent
about the strong emotions, he is equally ambivalent about guilt. Thus the
trajectory I’ve traced in Freud’s thought about anger finds its endpoint in
guilt, an emotion that is highly individualizing and isolating. Guilt turns
us back on ourselves. Guilt separates us from one another. Guilt inhibits
us from anger and aggressive action—and in the final analysis not just
from action but also from pleasure.∞∞

2
If Freudian guilt is isolating and individualizing, in the 1970s and 1980s
American academic feminists conceived anger in precisely the opposite
terms. Anger was explicitly understood as an emotion that is not only the

Containing Anger, Advocating Anger 45

basis for a group but can also politicize a group, as an emotion further-
more that is created in a group, one that is enabling of action and not
inhibiting of it. For Freud anger is gendered as male but Freud does not
unambiguously approve of it. The weight of his work is on containing and
regulating violent anger, on deauthorizing male anger. Conversely in the
work to which I now turn, anger is appropriated, advocated, and used to
establish the authority with which to challenge male-dominated society.
Thus in this discursive circulation of anger in Freud and feminism, we
find anger being redistributed in terms of gender. In what follows I con-
sider a selection of essays by feminist literary critics and philosophers
published in the late 1970s and 1980s (with one published in 1991). The
essays by the literary critics Jane Marcus, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Brenda
Silver all focus on Virginia Woolf, and those by the philosophers Naomi
Scheman, Elizabeth Spelman, and Alison Jaggar all entertain the question
of the relation of emotion to knowledge and make the case for the cogni-
tive dimension of the emotions.∞≤

Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own—the founding text of feminist

literary criticism in the United States—was published in 1929 when Woolf
was forty-six, just a year before Civilization and Its Discontents. One of its
most remarkable passages is a scene that dramatizes and analyzes femi-
nist anger (I also take up this scene in my chapters on shame and on
bureaucratic rage). The setting is the British Museum where the narrator
has gone one afternoon to do research for her upcoming lecture ‘‘Women
and Fiction’’ (which is of course the subject of A Room of One’s Own). While
reading the hypothetical Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Fe-
male Sex by Professor von X, she finds herself, like a disruptive student,
absentmindedly, ‘‘unconsciously,’’ drawing a picture of him, a sketch that
reveals to her both her anger and his:

A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the

name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that
the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had
snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there?
Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom—all these emotions I could
trace and name as they succeeded each other through the morning.
Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the

46 Chapter 1
 sketch, anger had. It referred me unmistakably to the one book, to the
one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the professor’s state-
ment about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. My
heart had leapt. My cheeks had burnt. I had flushed with anger. There
was nothing specially remarkable, however foolish, in that. One does
not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man. . . .
One has certain foolish vanities. It is only human nature, I reflected,
and began drawing cartwheels and circles over the angry professor’s
face till he looked like a burning bush or a flaming comet—anyhow, an
apparition without human semblance or significance. The professor
was nothing now but a faggot burning on the top of Hampstead Heath.
Soon my own anger was explained and done with; but curiosity re-
mained. How explain the anger of the professors? Why were they an-
gry? (32)

Woolf astutely concludes that the anger of the professors is a self-o√ensive

mechanism (the phrase is mine) adopted by those in power (men); anger
is used as a weapon to fortify their position, to create others as inferior. Her
anger is provoked by his: ‘‘I had been angry because he was angry’’ (34).
Dispensing self-consciously with the complexities of psychoanalysis, she
understands this situation in reciprocal terms and with immense clarity.
‘‘A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name
of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook’’ she writes,
‘‘that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger.’’∞≥
In the ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream Freud’s anger at his angry professor results in
his wishful dream of annihilating his friend and colleague with a lethal
glance of anger. As we saw, Freud traces his aggressive impulses back to
his early childhood. Similarly Woolf defaces ‘‘her’’ professor in daydream-
ing fantasy, doodling, doodling, until he goes up in flames. Her analysis of
anger, however, is not psychoanalytical but political. What Freud doesn’t
take into account in the case of the hysterical employee—abusive, unequal
relations of power—Woolf places at the center of her analysis of gender
relations. At the root of the matter is the injustice at the heart of patriarchy.
We can understand her anger as an instance of what Alison Jaggar calls
‘‘outlaw’’ emotions, or emotions experienced by those who are oppressed
and thus have what Jaggar argues is an ‘‘epistemological privilege’’ with
regard to the authority or appropriateness of their feelings. Here I will not
take up the argument for ‘‘epistemological privilege,’’ although I do turn to

Containing Anger, Advocating Anger 47

it in my chapter on shame. I consider instead the tone of Woolf ’s anger,
which is in fact the subject of Brenda Silver’s essay.
Woolf presents her anger as light, even disarming. She writes in ironic
tones leavened with a deft touch of melodramatic self-humor. Her anger
is altogether palatable. ‘‘Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among
them?’’ she writes. ‘‘Soon my own anger was explained and done; but curi-
osity remained.’’ Woolf leaves her anger behind, she tells us—although I
do not completely believe her. She casts if o√, she says, to pursue thought
dispassionately.
But in point of fact not everyone has found congenial Woolf ’s anger in
A Room of One’s Own. Indeed in the late 1970s and early 1980s Jane
Marcus and the late Carolyn Heilbrun strongly disapproved of what they
understood as Woolf ’s ‘‘feminine’’ expression of anger. Instead they pre-
ferred the flat-out anger of Woolf ’s Three Guineas, a political tract on the
economic and social position of women and war. For Marcus the Woolf of
Three Guineas is, wonderfully, in ‘‘a towering rage’’; she relishes the image
of Woolf as ‘‘an angry old woman’’ (123), a ‘‘witch, making war, not love,
untying the knots of social convention, encouraging the open expression
of hostilities’’ (135). (An old woman? Woolf was only fifty-six at the time,
but that is another subject—one I take up in the next chapter.) For Heil-
brun her own earlier preference for A Room of One’s Own over Three
Guineas is a cause for shame. She revels in Woolf ’s ‘‘unladylike’’ tone in
Three Guineas, the text where finally Woolf was, she writes, ‘‘able to indulge
the glorious release of letting her anger rip’’ (241). Heilbrun sees this as an
achievement all the more impressive because ‘‘like all women,’’ she says,
Woolf ‘‘had to fight a deep fear of anger in herself ’’ (241). For both Heil-
brun and Marcus, the Woolf of Three Guineas finally allows anger to drive
her art, to impel her writing. Marcus especially is impassioned on this
point. Although she acknowledges that thought must accompany anger in
the making of art, her own rhetoric belies her preference for anger. She in-
sists that ‘‘we must finally acknowledge that it was anger that impelled her
art, and intellect that combed out the snarls, dissolved the blood clots, and
unclogged the drains of that great sewer of the imagination, anger’’ (138).
Brenda Silver brilliantly shows how the issue of the authority of femi-
nist anger has driven the reception of Three Guineas ever since it was
published, for many years impeding the serious consideration of its ideas
because many readers concluded that Woolf is too angry. As Silver argues,

48 Chapter 1
with the publication of the influential essays by Marcus, Heilbrun, and
others, anger, expressed angrily, was recuperated. Flat-out anger was estab-
lished as ‘‘righteous’’ and ‘‘prophetic’’—in short, as unambiguously and
purely political. Woolf ’s anger in Three Guineas is no longer heard as
‘‘neurotic, morbid, or shrill’’ (need I add ‘‘hysterical’’?), but as the expres-
sion of ‘‘an ethical or moral stance’’ (361). Silver accepts Naomi Scheman’s
argument in ‘‘Anger and the Politics of Naming’’ that in such a case the
expression of anger is itself a political act. For Scheman anger, viewed
from this feminist perspective, is ‘‘moved away from guilt, neurosis, or
depression, and into the purview of cognition, external behavior, social
relations, and politics. To become angry, to recognize that one has been
angry, to change what counts as being angry becomes a political act’’ (362).
It would be inaccurate to say that Freud regarded the strong emotions
as ‘‘irrational,’’ although as we have seen, he did view anger and aggressiv-
ity as disruptive to the fragile ties binding civilization together. He firmly
believed, as he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, that ‘‘instinctual
passions are stronger than reasonable interests’’ (112). But feminist phi-
losophers reject the view of feminist anger as ‘‘irrational.’’ They have ar-
gued, as do I, for the cognitive dimension of the emotions in general,
using anger as their prime example and the relation between oppressor
and oppressed as their paradigm. As Elizabeth Spelman observes in her
essay ‘‘Anger and Insubordination,’’ ‘‘To be angry at him is to make myself,
at least on this occasion, his judge—to have, and to express, a standard
against which I assess his conduct’’ (266). This is precisely what Virginia
Woolf so astutely dramatizes in A Room of One’s Own. Anger in this touch-
stone scene is a moral judgment. As Spelman correctly puts it, ‘‘There is a
politics of emotion: the systematic denial of anger can be seen in a mecha-
nism of subordination, and the existence and expression of anger as an act
of insubordination’’ (270). For Spelman anger in and for women—as op-
posed to rage, which is anger in excess—has ‘‘clarity of vision’’ (271).
In contradistinction to Freud’s emphasis on anger and aggressivity as
disruptive to social bonds, anger for these feminists is the basis for a
politicized group, however vaguely defined. On this point Scheman’s re-
flections in ‘‘Anger and the Politics of Naming’’ are especially challenging,
indeed persuasively so, to the Freudian theory of the emotions. She argues
that in the social context of a consciousness-raising group, the ‘‘discovery of
anger can often occur not from focusing on one’s feelings but from a

Containing Anger, Advocating Anger 49

political redescription of one’s situation’’ (177). Thus from a feminist per-
spective it need not be the Freudian case that emotions are located inside
us, repressed, as if they were highly idiosyncratic personal property waiting
to be discovered. Rather, they are created in the group.∞∂ Moreover, and
crucially, they can be created retrospectively. A woman may, for example,
retroactively identify anger as her emotional state in the past even though
she didn’t feel anger then. It is not the Freudian case that she repressed her
anger and it is only now coming to the surface. Instead the emotion is being
projected from the present into the past. Anger from a feminist perspective
can thus be a conscious social emotion, one that becomes ‘‘personal.’’ A
dialectical dynamic is at work, which creates personal facts. (If I may be
permitted an asymmetrical analogy from my own life: when I married my
first husband I took his last name, and when we divorced I didn’t feel I had
to give it back—it was now my name. Interestingly enough, just recently—
some thirty years later—I learned that this is an issue for him because he
thinks of my last name as his and not mine. Similarly, in the retrospective
feminist creation of emotions, such anger would be my emotion; I wouldn’t
want to disavow it.) ‘‘Emotions become feminist when they incorporate
feminist perceptions and values,’’ Jaggar writes. ‘‘For example,’’ she con-
tinues, ‘‘anger becomes feminist anger when it involves the perception that
the persistent importuning endured by one woman is a single instance of a
widespread pattern of sexual harassment’’ (160). If for Freud guilt is ul-
timately theorized as self-punishment for what has not taken place, here
anger, which was not felt in the past, is retrospectively projected into it so as
to generate the needed catalyst not only for understanding the present and
the past but to create new possibilities in the future.

One of the most thought-provoking questions posed by Freud about the

emotions is that of transmission. How are emotions imparted? In Totem
and Taboo Freud asserts that guilt is a heavy emotional inheritance, one ex-
perienced long after the primal act of parricide has been committed and
transmitted through the family from one generation to the next. How are
feminist emotions transmitted? One of the answers I would give to this
question is that emotions are transmitted through rhetorical means. The
essays to which I’ve referred constitute a significant case in point. They are
intended to create a politicized community out of their readers. They are
the scholarly equivalent of the consciousness-raising group. Anger is gen-

50 Chapter 1
erated, sustained, and strengthened through discourse—or at least that is
the goal.
But on further thought, the goal is not the sustaining of anger. Rather it
is the commitment to feminist values and principles of analysis. After all,
can emotion be located in discourse? Nothing would seem more impos-
sible. Thus it is the word ‘‘anger’’ and not necessarily the emotion of anger
to which it refers that in fact constellates the group. Scholarly feminist
‘‘anger’’ constitutes a rhetorical site around which people cluster who have
similar if not the same objections and objectives. Thus feminist literary
criticism shapes its own discursive tradition: a literature of anger. Marcus
is explicit on this point. In her own essay she moves from the old to the
young: from the anger of Virginia Woolf when she was older, to the anger
of the middle-aged Adrienne Rich in her poem ‘‘The Phenomenology of
Anger,’’ to the anger of the young. This is the challenge Marcus o√ers:
‘‘Why wait until old age, as they did, waiting long to let out their full quota
of anger? Out with it. No more burying our wrath, turning it against
ourselves. No more ethical suicides, no more literary pacifism. We must
make the literary profession safe for women as well as ladies’’ (153). What
is the relation of writing to feminist ‘‘anger’’? Often writing is itself the
action. This is in fact the strategy I adopt in advocating anger in my next
chapter. Focusing on ageism and the incompatibility of wisdom and anger,
I sketch an American tradition of protest literature against the marginali-
zation of the elderly in the United States, with angry women as my guides.

3
In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud perceptively observes that ‘‘a feel-
ing can only be a source of energy if it is itself the expression of a strong
need’’ (72). Women have so long been identified with the emotions, albeit
not with anger, that I find it fascinating that an emotion should be the
basis for a rallying cry for solidarity, even if—or more accurately precisely
because—that emotion has long been identified as the forbidden fruit, or
snake in Woolf ’s word. In the case of women it is undeniable that there’s a
strong need to resist patriarchal injustice. To do so we need to assert our
cultural right to anger.∞∑ But when is anger productive? When should
anger be contained? What are the consequences of flat-out anger? And in
what contexts? These are the questions to which Freud in great part de-
voted himself and which he answered—temperately—in Civilization and

Containing Anger, Advocating Anger 51

Its Discontents. For in advocating anger we need to be mindful both of a
theoretical reservation in doing so as well as of the constraints and com-
mands of the social contexts in which we find ourselves.
I’ve been known to say that ‘‘confusion’’ is one of the emotional states
with which I have been all too familiar. At several key points in my life I’ve
found myself confused, by which I mean that I couldn’t see my situation
with the ‘‘clarity of vision’’ that Spelman in ‘‘Anger and Insubordination’’
understands feminist anger to entail. In my chapter on shame I consider
Sandra Bartky’s important analysis of confusion, so I won’t take it up here.
But I do want to say that the narrative of resolving confusion into the
clarity of anger is one that holds great appeal for me—even if the anger is
not literally felt but is shorthand for a judgment call. There is an auto-
biographical dimension to my interest in this narrative of the emotions.
Although I participated in several feminist consciousness-raising sessions
in the late 1960s I wasn’t able to judge clearly then what at this distance
was so patently and obviously wrong in my marriage, which was soon to be
dissolved by divorce. Of course the situation was complex, harrowingly so.
But what was not complex was my husband making a unilateral decision
as to where we would move—across the country. I knew there was some-
thing not right about this, but I wasn’t able to label it wrong. (Imagine!) I
should have been angry. I should have been able to make a judgment call.
Instead I was confused.
‘‘If we are confused about our emotions,’’ Scheman writes in ‘‘Anger
and the Politics of Naming,’’ ‘‘those emotions themselves are confused’’
(179). Her argument is that confusion is a sign of a prepolitical state, and
that we must identify these emotions, name them, as a way of understand-
ing our position. With this I agree. Her implication, if not explicitly drawn
conclusion, however, is that in resolving the confusion one emotion—
anger—will ultimately emerge with the precision of clearly drawn lines.
The scenario she o√ers is that of a nonfeminist becoming politicized in a
consciousness-raising group. Out of confusion the emotion of guilt ap-
pears first. Guilt is then interpreted as a ‘‘cover for those other feelings,
notably feelings of anger’’ (177). In her scenario, prepoliticized guilt must
disappear to allow a politicized anger to appear. I value the pragmatic
worth of this strategy (we should also note that the narrative of guilt
emerging first from confusion may be specific to this period of academic
feminism in the United States). Indeed I adopt it myself in my chapter on
anger from the perspectives of aging and gender. And I wish that this had

52 Chapter 1
been my own experience in the late 1960s. But I also don’t want to be
naive here. For a righteous politicized anger will no doubt be accompanied
by other emotions as well (revenge might be one of them as we see in
Woolf ’s scene of defacement)—precisely because the emotion of anger
will no doubt be an ‘‘action.’’ My fundamental point here is that anger as
a ‘‘political’’ emotion does not exist in a pure form. Emotions come in
clusters.∞∏
That we should interrogate our wishes for their unconscious compo-
nents is so fundamental to Freud—and I hope to all of us—as to be unnec-
essary to relearn it here. That Freud insists that emotions are bound indis-
solubly together is, however, worth stressing. Let’s return for a moment to
the ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream elaborated by Freud. There he dissects the complex
of ‘‘strange emotions’’ that accompanied his dream—separating out the
di√erent emotions from one another, isolating them, and identifying them
as if they were precipitants in a chemical experiment. (This recalls Ray-
mond Williams’s analogous notion of structures of feeling as ‘‘social expe-
riences in solution,’’ as opposed to social experiences that have been struck
into their ‘‘precipitants.’’)∞π What Freud discovers is not only the diverse
emotions of anger and shame, triumph and anxiety, but also that in life, as
opposed to analysis, the emotions exist in compound form. Ultimately for
Freud there is no such thing as pure anger or pure shame. In his homeo-
static view of the strong emotions, a strong hostile emotion will be accom-
panied by its antidote. The converse also holds. A strong positive emotion,
like love, will be accompanied by its opposite. For Freud our strong emo-
tions are ambivalent and our motives are mixed.
Let’s return to the scene in A Room of One’s Own: ‘‘But what was anger
doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom—all these emo-
tions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other through the
morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said
the sketch, anger had’’ (32). In this condensed narrative Woolf resolves in a
morning what has taken many of us a much, much longer time. And
although it is underlined that many emotions are involved, the narrative is
one that admits no ambiguity. There can be no mistaking that Professor
von X is unworthy of any attempt to understand him in any way other than
she does. Here is her portrait of him: ‘‘He was heavily built; he had a great
jowl; to balance that he had very small eyes; he was very red in the face. His
expression suggested that he was laboring under some emotion that made
him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as

Containing Anger, Advocating Anger 53

he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must
go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation re-
mained’’ (31). The portrait is a brilliant caricature, but it is a caricature
nonetheless. The result for me as a reader is that not only anger but
triumph is involved in the spectacle of the narrator defacing this ugly little
man. The emotions come in compound forms and we isolate them for
predominately heuristic purposes—personal, political, strategic, analyti-
cal, and theoretical. In the case of the contemptible Professor von X, it is
wonderfully easy to write him o√ with an angry flourish of the pen. Thus
while I love this scenario in A Room of One’s Own it does not, for all its
virtuosity, provide us with a complex situation. We should also note that in
the passages from both Freud and Woolf about their angry professors what
is narrated is a fantasy. Woolf is clearly aware of this. Later in A Room of
One’s Own she discusses the emotional shape and structure that excep-
tional novels assume, insisting that the structure of such novels ‘‘is one of
infinite complexity, because it is thus made up of so many judgments, of
so many di√erent kinds of emotion’’ (75). And she is explicit that one must
not write out of an overwhelming anger—or fear, bitterness, hate, and
rancor.
This brings me to my second point. In the essays to which I’ve been
referring the paradigm of oppressor-oppressed is key. It is argued that
oppression can be identified by anger, and that it should be responded to
by anger. But what happens then? We need to advance the scenario in time
and interrogate the consequences of letting one’s anger ‘‘rip,’’ in Heil-
brun’s word. We must focus on the longer view, on the ‘‘plot’’ of anger,
looking ahead as did Freud in ‘‘The Moses of Michelangelo.’’ Additionally
in the essays to which I’ve been referring, patriarchal culture is under-
stood as the condition of women’s oppression. But what happens when the
paradigm of oppressor-oppressed moves inside academic feminism itself ?
Anger as an ‘‘outlaw’’ emotion is appropriate when it is associated with
the position of the oppressed. But as we grow older—and here I am refer-
ring to feminists in the academy—relations of authority shift decisively. In
general, power relations for feminists in the academic humanities have
undergone a sea change in the last thirty years. Many women who entered
the academy under the banner of the politics of anger find themselves
today in positions of authority responsible to many others—to women.
The title of a talk by Naomi Scheman in the mid-1990s—‘‘On Waking Up
One Morning and Discovering We Are Them’’—gestures toward this phe-

54 Chapter 1
nomenon. Anger may be appropriate as a tool of politicization but after
this inaugural point flat-out anger can be a blunt instrument, especially
when it is used against other women.
More importantly, the expression of anger in public discourse—in es-
says, in debate—can have very di√erent consequences from the expression
of anger in, for example, the close quarters of the classroom, where the
flat-out anger of an older feminist professor at a younger student can
produce a flashpoint that escalates personal and professional conflict.∞∫
Consider, for example, an essay published in the mid-1980s on feminist
pedagogy, one that takes up anger as its emotion of choice. In ‘‘Anger and
Authority in the Introductory Women’s Studies Classroom,’’ Margo Culley
asserts that ‘‘anger is a challenging and necessary part of life in the femi-
nist classroom’’ (216). In the introduction to Gendered Subjects: The Dy-
namics of Feminist Teaching, edited by Culley and Catherine Portuges, we
encounter a fundamentally psychoanalytic view of the strong emotions.
Culley and Portuges note that the model of the psychoanalytic family helps
them to understand why in the feminist classroom there are ‘‘outbreaks of
temper, tears, denunciation and divisiveness, notions that courses must
o√er total salvation or else fail, strong feelings of vulnerability, aware-
ness that students/teachers love or hate students/teachers, that students/
teachers see or reject themselves/their sisters/mothers/fathers in the
course of content or interactions in the classroom’’ (15). But if the model
helps to clarify a certain aspect of this pedagogical situation, it also works
to produce a volatile, adversarial pedagogical world. Perhaps most seri-
ously, it constricts us to a hothouse vision of a two-generational family
when in fact the academy houses many generations, which is to say that it
itself embodies or is witness to a multilayered historicity.∞Ω Moreover in its
emphasis on the strong emotions, the psychoanalytic model implicitly
restricts us to certain forms of feeling—ambivalent and ultimately opposi-
tional emotions. Taken to its extreme, the psychoanalytic model produces
‘‘pedagogic violence’’ with anger as the privileged emotion: emotion is
linked to the domain of the personal, to woman, and through feminism to
the political, with the classroom serving as the space for the drama.≤≠

As we moved into the 1990s the rhetoric of anger in white academic

feminism largely subsided. But in the opening years of the twenty-first
century it has returned in several guises.≤∞ Linda Grasso, in her book

Containing Anger, Advocating Anger 55

on white and black women’s literature in nineteenth-century America, in-
sists that we must make anger at injustice central again. Anger is also
circulating between the generations of academic women who identify
themselves as second- and third-wave feminists, and between white aca-
demic feminists, women of color, and transnational feminists. Organizing
a conference on third-wave feminism and women’s studies, held at the
University of Exeter in 2002, Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Mumford found
themselves at first ‘‘mystified’’ by the ‘‘raw and—at times—overwhelming
anger’’ directed at them by second-wave feminists (2). Anger here appears
to be a symptom of a lack of understanding rather than a touchstone that,
upon reflection, might provide understanding. And in a strong essay on
the moral and emotional regulation of feminism and antiracism, Sarita
Srivastava, observing that many white feminists respond with anger, con-
fusion, and tears to charges of racism, argues persuasively that this emo-
tional response is often rooted in national and racial discourses of benevo-
lence and innocence that underwrite a white feminist’s moral identity. As
she reports, ‘‘One of the most common angry and indignant reactions
described in my interviews was ‘How can you call me racist?’ ’’ (42). Sri-
vastava has no use for the view that emotions may have a cognitive edge.
She finds anger to be inappropriately defensive, serving only to shore up
that identity. Thus she understands a focus on such emotions as complicit
with what she sees as the discredited liberal project of seeking change at
the level of the individual, as a kind of narcissistic self-regard that blocks
a commitment to structural transformation. For her feminist practices
of emotional disclosure distract us from the real work at hand. ‘‘My analy-
sis finds,’’ Srivastrava writes, ‘‘that as some white feminists move toward
new ideals of antiracist feminism, they often move toward deeper self-
examination rather than toward organizational change. These findings
suggest that some of the deadlocks of antiracist e√orts are linked to these
preoccupations with morality and self ’’ (31).≤≤ As should be preeminently
clear by now, I don’t see a necessary contradiction between these two
notions, and I certainly don’t think that we should give up any ‘‘tools’’ at
our disposal. In fact I like to think of these white women—I could be one
of them—as having taken Alison Jaggar’s essay (and others mentioned
here) to heart and head. We will have learned to interrogate our anger, not
to use it as a defensive weapon of self-absorption.

56 Chapter 1
I end with a question that has been recurring in my mind. We speak
approvingly of self-reflexive thought, of thought that turns back on itself,
interrogating its foundation, its principles, its implications, its conse-
quences. Is there an analogy to self-reflexive thought in the domain of the
strong emotions? For Freud anger is inhibited, or regulated, by guilt. In
Civilization and Its Discontents he o√ers a homeostatic view of the strong
emotions. In Freud’s view passions often lead to sorrows. But this system
operates unconsciously; it is not consciously self-reflexive. One of the
important contributions of feminist thought is the theorization of the
cognitive dimension of the emotions. Here we come close, I think, to
considering the emotions in a self-reflexive way. And here I return to
Virginia Woolf who o√ers us a durable paradigm. In A Room of One’s Own
the narrator reflects on her anger, analyzing it and placing it in historical
and social perspective.≤≥ She also draws on its energy. She writes, which is
an action in itself. In my next chapter on age and anger, we’ll find this
scenario repeated by the long-time activist Barbara Macdonald. And in the
chapter after that, ‘‘Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame,’’
we’ll return to this scene in A Room of One’s Own. There my concern will
be to draw out the sequencing of the emotions by tracing the shift from
shame to anger, where anger is itself a reflection on the shame that pre-
ceded it. Thus if in Jacob’s Room Virginia Woolf remarked that our ‘‘pas-
sions remain uncharted,’’ this is belied by her own work as well as by the
rich analysis o√ered to us by feminists through their work on the emo-
tions over the past three decades.

Containing Anger, Advocating Anger 57

 two

AGAINST WISDOM: ANGER AND AGING

Anger, then, is only for the engaged; for those with proj-
ects that matter (not the indi√erent, the insouciant, the
depressed). That is to say, those for whom something has
gone wrong but who ‘‘know,’’ in their rage, that it could be
otherwise.
—Adam Phillips, ‘‘Just Rage’’

I certainly do not want to read more words on how to build

character and develop the wisdom of old age.
—James Hillman, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life

‘‘It’s time to get angry again.’’ These are the mobilizing words with which
Germaine Greer concludes the preface to The Whole Woman, published in
the late 1990s. It is the very book she had vowed thirty years earlier in The
Female Eunuch never to write. Then she had insisted it was the responsibil-
ity of each generation of women to articulate their own experiences and
their own priorities. She could speak with authority only about women of
her own class, background, education, and age. But three decades after the
publication of The Female Eunuch the dismaying lack of progress around
the globe in women’s issues across the life course moved Greer to as-
sume a position of authority to speak for women in general. In The Whole
Woman she takes on a multitude of feminist issues ranging from beauty,
sexuality, and work to reproductive technology, hormone replacement
therapy, and the global feminization of poverty.
If in The Change: Women, Aging, and the Menopause Greer celebrated
aging as a welcome retirement from the ‘‘career’’ of sexuality, I am happy
to report that in The Whole Woman she rejects her peculiar notion of aging
as a self-imposed cloister and assumes the mantle of leadership at age
sixty.∞ In The Whole Woman Greer adopts a rhetoric of anger as a strategy,
calling up the cultural memory of militant women in the 1960s and evok-
ing anger as a powerful binding force: ‘‘It’s time to get angry again.’’ In
writing as an older woman, and including older women in her inspiring
view of a broad coalition of women, Greer addresses women of all ages.
Thus I draw on the example of Greer to introduce the subject of this
chapter: the possible galvanizing e√ects of anger for stimulating personal
and social change and, conversely, the damaging e√ects of the cultural
prohibition of anger in older people in the United States. The larger con-
text of this chapter is the social politics of the emotions as they relate to life
stages—in particular to aging or old age in the United States where age is
associated with wisdom, an ideal that, I suggest, serves as a sugar-coated
screen for ageism.≤
The Oxford English Dictionary defines wisdom as the ‘‘capacity of judg-
ing rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; soundness of judgment
in the choice of means and ends.’’ In the West the time-honored associa-
tion of wisdom has been with aging, where wisdom is defined in various
ways but almost always understood as a capacity for balanced reflection
and judgment that can accrue only with long experience. In Cicero’s De
Senectute a good old age is associated with authority, serenity, and honor—
in short, with wisdom.≥ For Aristotle wisdom is a virtue associated with
thought and with the mastering of feeling. And indeed wisdom has also
almost always been understood as predicated on a lack of certain kinds of
feelings—the passions, in particular, including anger. From this perspec-
tive, anger would seem to be the virtual opposite of wisdom. Yet for Greer
the authority of her anger is based on experience across the years of her life
as a feminist. And it is experience that is commonly understood to be a
necessary if not su≈cient ground for wisdom. Thus we can understand
Greer’s anger as the foundation of the articulation of a political viewpoint
that is itself a kind of wisdom, one that might seem a contradiction in
terms—a wisdom that is feminist, or perhaps better put, a wise anger.
In this chapter the questions I address are as follows: How does a poli-
tics of aging, one that is inclusive (not limited, say, to gender or to class),
rely on a rhetoric of emotion? How has this rhetoric changed over time in
the twentieth century? These questions are related to another one. How is
aging theorized in relation to other life stages and the emotions? I can’t
be definitive or exhaustive in reflecting on these issues. But I hope to
open them up to further inquiry by focusing on two major books key to the

Against Wisdom 59
cultural history of aging in the United States. The first book is drawn from
the early twentieth century: the psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s Senescence:
The Last Half of Life, which was published in 1922. The second book is
drawn from the last part of the twentieth century—the feminist activist
Betty Friedan’s The Fountain of Age, which appeared in 1993. Why examine
these books by Hall and by Friedan? Both writers were prominent fig-
ures well known for their contributions to their fields—for Hall it was the
arena of adolescent psychology and for Friedan it was feminist activism.
Further, both came to consider aging in America only when they were
older, and both wrote ambitious books on aging that have been destined to
be forgotten.∂
Although their books were published some seventy years apart, both
Hall and Friedan argue that we are witnessing the emergence of a ‘‘new’’
elderly made possible by increases in life expectancy. Both insist that the
new elderly have a unique and even evolutionary role to play in our society.
But Friedan doesn’t build on the early cultural history of aging in the
United States. We find no reference to Hall’s vision of aging in her work. I
mention this not to indict The Fountain of Age on this score. Rather, my
point is that, as with the history of feminism, it would seem that in the
United States the social consciousness of aging has needed to be rein-
vented time and again throughout the twentieth century.∑
According to the Administration on Aging’s ‘‘Profile of Older Ameri-
cans: 2006,’’ since 1900 the percentage of Americans age sixty-five and
older has tripled, and the absolute number of Americans sixty-five and
older has increased nearly twelve-fold. Our population as a whole is aging,
and with the increase in longevity over the twentieth century our older
population is itself growing older. By 2030 it is estimated that there will be
twice as many older persons living in the United States as in 2005, and
those age sixty-five and older will account for a full twenty percent of our
population. I want to stress that aging can be said to be a women’s issue.
In 2005, for example, for every 100 men there were 139 women. Older
women have a significantly higher poverty rate than men. Women also
outlive men on average by five and a half years. We are in the midst of a
demographic revolution, one made possible by stunning increases in life
expectancy. But it is a quiet revolution—in great part because the elderly
are dispossessed in our society.
These statistics are reflected, I would suggest, in our anxiety—as indi-
viduals and as a nation—over the financial future. It is seen in the multi-

60 Chapter Two
tude of advertisements for financial services (the investment of retirement
funds is a big business) and in news stories that warn us of the strict
necessity of planning for retirement. As a nation we have an acute political
consciousness of some of the fiscal consequences of aging, as witnessed in
the acrimonious public debates over Social Security during the 1990s and
in the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004. Should we ‘‘save’’ So-
cial Security in a public lockbox? Should we privatize Social Security?∏
Whether this e√ort can be sustained in the political arena in the wake of
the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is
altogether another question. I am nonetheless hopeful that at this point in
time we are developing a widespread social consciousness of the aging of
our population. What can we learn from the reception of the work on
aging by Hall and Friedan?
In attempting to generate a social consciousness of aging, both Hall
and Friedan draw on the notion of wisdom as well as deploy a rhetoric of
anger ranging from belligerence to rage. The extent to which they think of
their projects as political is important here, since political energy and
engagement are often understood in terms of fervor, and thus, as I men-
tioned above in regard to Greer, as antithetical to wisdom. In this chapter,
then, I sketch a micro-rhetorical history of anger in the twentieth century
in terms of the cultural politics of aging. As we will see, the category of
depression is central to this story. The first section of this chapter is de-
voted to the broad subject of age-related emotion. I then turn to the books
on aging by Hall and Friedan. I conclude with some thoughts—and an
important story of an angry woman—about the moral authority of anger as
voiced by those who are older.

1
Over the past twenty years in the United States the emotions have gained
increasing prominence as a subject of research by historians who, along
with scholars in other fields, have convincingly demonstrated that, like any
other human experience, the emotions have a history and thus change in
fascinating ways over time. I am not a historian. But as a scholar educated
in literary studies I have found extremely suggestive the precept of the
historicity of the emotions, along with histories of specific emotions. Cen-
tral to this work is the distinction between emotional experience (what an
individual feels) and emotional standards or ideals (what a culture de-

Against Wisdom 61
mands in terms of emotional behavior or etiquette). Also central to this
work, given a theoretical emphasis on the social construction of the emo-
tions, is sensitivity to di√erences in emotional experience and emotional
standards in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and other social categories.
But virtually no attention has been given to a history of the emotions in
terms of age—and in particular, old age.
There are a few significant exceptions to this general rule. In New and
Improved: The Transformation of American Women’s Emotional Culture, John
Spurlock and Cynthia Magistro investigate the emotional lives of adoles-
cents and women from the 1910s to the early 1930s in the United States,
focusing in great part on the expression of personal feelings in their dia-
ries and letters and thus on the tension between felt or lived experience
and the culture’s emotional standards. But they do not devote a section to
older age. In An Emotional History of the United States, editors Jan Lewis
and Peter Stearns include an essay on age and the emotions by the histo-
rian of aging Andrew Achenbaum, who refers to his subject as the psycho-
history of late-life emotionality. Spurlock, Magistro, and Achenbaum are
concerned primarily with felt or individual emotional experience, not with
emotional standards, and in the field of history this is indicative of much of
the work in emotion studies. As Lewis and Stearns write in their introduc-
tion to An Emotional History of the United States, ‘‘The history of the emo-
tions is . . . first of all, an attempt to recover that living presence, to
recapture the way history felt. It is to ask what it felt like to be a Puritan
immigrant to America, or an Irish one two hundred years later’’ (1). While
both Hall and Friedan do write out of their own experience, some of it
emotional, I am equally concerned with the ways in which the rhetoric of
anger and the conceptualization of wisdom appear in their work. I am also
especially interested in the tension between their experience of anger and
their notion of wisdom as a standard they hope to foster.
Just as the capacity for wisdom has been linked with old age, specific
emotions have been linked with certain stages of life in the twentieth
century in disciplines ranging from psychoanalysis and psychology to cul-
tural studies. If the emphasis in psychoanalysis and psychology is on the
transhistorical nature of the emotions, in cultural studies it is on the
cultural construction of the emotions. Melanie Klein, for example, theo-
rizes an infant’s psychic life as based not on primary drives, as does Freud,
but rather on intense primary a√ects—rage, among them. Anna Freud
links the stormy oedipal emotions of hate and love with adolescence. And

62 Chapter Two
James Hillman theorizes certain emotions as being appropriate to certain
stages of life (he remarks, for instance, that pity is not an emotion we
would associate with childhood).π In this vein I cannot resist quoting
the character Myrtle in John Cassavetes’s remarkable film Opening Night
about a middle-aged actress who is uncertain as to how to play an aging
actress. As she remarks, ‘‘When I was seventeen, I could do everything. It
was so easy. My emotions were so close to the surface. I find it harder and
harder to stay in touch.’’∫
In cultural studies, scholars of the emotions have explored the various
incarnations that a particular emotion might take at di√erent points in
our lives. This is, for example, an approach that William Ian Miller takes in
The Anatomy of Disgust, where he sketches what I would call a psycho-
ontogenesis of disgust, tracing the anatomy of disgust from its emergence
between the ages of four and eight through adolescence and then into late
middle and old age. This later stage of life he associates with a loss of
a√ect—with what he sees as a general self-disgust or listless resignation to
a failing body and to a life now virtually over (Miller is clearly no champion
of gifts that may come with old age).Ω I have myself written in Aging and Its
Discontents about the emotion of anxiety that is fostered in our culture in
relation to age. Margaret Gullette in ‘‘Midlife Discourses in the Twentieth-
Century United States’’ terms this ‘‘age anxiety’’ and has called on scholars
to study age-related emotions, o√ering a provocative account of how our
culture has fostered the emotion of nostalgia as a way of socializing rela-
tively young people into the ideology of middle age as decline (22). We see
the stratification of the emotions in terms of age in popular parlance as
well, with people speaking of teenage emotions, for example, or adoles-
cent emotions. The emotions, then, are one of the important building
blocks our society draws upon to construct meaning and value, and to
attempt to proscribe or valorize behavior in relation to one’s age.

2
Senescence is a big book—a study of what Hall calls the last half of life. An
indefatigable psychologist renowned for his work on adolescence, the first
president of the American Psychological Association, and the founding
editor of four important journals in psychology, Hall undertook the writ-
ing of Senescence after his retirement from Clark University where he had
served as president for over thirty years. Published when Hall was seventy-

Against Wisdom 63
eight, Senescence is a sprawling compendium of research ranging from
intellectual history to the results of surveys, from the biology of aging to
the psychology of death.
Senescence is original in its cross-disciplinary focus on old age and im-
pressive in its amplitude, and indeed Hall has been given the honor of
being called the first American psychogerontologist.∞≠ It is the reader’s
misfortune, however, that Hall’s method of surveying the research in vari-
ous fields and of summarizing a multitude of opinions and findings inevi-
tably has a dulling e√ect. But there are two important exceptions to this
general rule. The first is the opening of the book where he speaks person-
ally about his own retirement. He finds it a shocking change. The second
is the chapter entitled ‘‘Some Conclusions.’’ There he rises to the chal-
lenge that he has set for himself in the course of the book—to imagine a
new old age. It is as if in the process of writing Senescence Hall found
himself inspired to adopt in the conclusion a messianic tone, one that is a
radical departure from his firm resolve in the beginning to leave behind
the world of public a√airs.
In the introduction Hall formulaically asserts that youth is ‘‘exhilarat-
ing, age a depressing theme’’ (viii). But on the whole the tenor of the
introduction is one of amazing resoluteness and industriousness.∞∞ If in
the introduction to Senescence he conceives of life expectancy in terms of
the biblical number of seventy, by the conclusion we find him urging
people to think in terms of living to one hundred.∞≤ What is his vision?
That the demographic fact of so many old people is an index of the evolu-
tion of the human race, and that this evolutionary strength can only be
fulfilled if older people who exemplify wisdom take on the important
public role of counselor to younger generations and to the nation as a
whole.
Throughout Senescence Hall observes that enforced isolation in old age
results in stagnation—in moroseness and depression. He comes close to a
political analysis of the reasons for the emotional torpor of the old who
find themselves ‘‘a class more or less apart’’ (viii-ix) and ‘‘a caste apart’’ (ix),
literally cast aside by the institution of retirement. If older people are
morose, it ‘‘is largely due to the inconsiderate treatment’’ that they receive
(172). Yet if Hall sees that there is ‘‘a rapport between us oldsters,’’ this
seems to be an unspoken understanding, not one that prefigures an em-
bryonic political consciousness, in part because of what he understands as
‘‘the enhanced individuation characteristic of age’’ (ix).∞≥ Nor does he call

64 Chapter Two
for an end to the practice of retirement. Although he does contest the
physician William Osler’s infamous conviction that people do their best
work before the age of forty, Hall finds himself in the contradictory posi-
tion of both having determined to make a complete break with the work
world of his past and ultimately concluding that the old—that is, those who
have achieved a vigorous senectitude—should assume positions of leader-
ship on the national and international stage.
This contradiction is both mirrored in his conflicting views of the emo-
tional lives of the old and explained by them. On the one hand, Hall ac-
cepts the time-honored notion that there is a ‘‘lessening of emotional in-
tensity’’ in old age, in addition to a progressive abating of sexual passion
that begins with senescence (26), and that this is one of the conditions of
wisdom. Throughout the history of western thought, wisdom has been
associated with coolness of reason and evenness of judgment, with detach-
ment and balance. To Hall this proves a congenial formulation. What can
these people—intelligent, educated, healthy, and old—o√er? They can of-
fer ‘‘strength of reason, cool judgment, and breadth of view’’ (208). In a
familiar metaphor associated with wisdom, Hall writes that these elite
older people have the potential to reach a ‘‘summit’’ never before attained
from which to view the world ‘‘in a clearer light’’ (382) and with ‘‘poise
and philosophic calm’’ (405). Such a heightened perspective we may un-
derstand as the antithesis of the slough of despond associated with de-
pression.
In Senescence Hall writes of the old in the third person. But in ‘‘Some
Conclusions’’ he shifts to the first person. The result is electrifying. In-
stead of a philosophic calm, we encounter the fervor of debate. It is as
though Hall is arguing a case in front of a judge and jury. Here he asserts
that the old—we—have intense emotional lives. But we have been forced to
inhibit the expression of our feelings. As a psychologist he speaks in terms
of repression. If he had been a sociologist, however, he would have cast
this phenomenon in terms of oppression. Furthermore Hall employs the
language of social justice, referring to the ‘‘rights’’ of the old and to the old
as a distinct ‘‘minority’’:

They say our emotional life is damped. True, we are more immune
from certain great passions and our a√ectivity is very di√erently dis-
tributed. But what lessons of repression we have to learn! If the fires of
youth are banked and smoldering they are in no wise extinguished and

Against Wisdom 65
 perhaps burn only the more fiercely because they cannot vent them-
selves. . . . We get scant credit for the self-control that restrains us from
so much we feel impelled to say and do and if we break out, it is ascribed
not to its true cause in outer circumstance but to the irritability thought
characteristic of our years. Age has the same right to emotional pertur-
bations as youth and is no whit less exposed and disposed to them.
Here, as everywhere, we are misunderstood and are in such a feeble
minority that we have to incessantly renounce our impulsions. (383)

Hall insists that people who are old have the same right to anger as the
young. He astutely understands that the anger of the old is willingly (if
unconsciously or uncritically) misinterpreted by those younger as an un-
becoming ‘‘irritability’’ common to old age and thus as something that can
be disregarded with impunity. Given this double frustration on the part of
the old, it is not surprising Hall concludes that in fact emotional life
probably increases as we grow older.∞∂
Hall wants to retain the capacity of wisdom conventionally reserved for
the old, but given his declaration of the right to emotional intensity, he
must also revise his view of wisdom—or at least add something to the
emotional mix. I imagine Hall winding himself up in the writing of this
chapter, bringing himself to the point where he can proclaim that what is
required today is not an old age that is ‘‘merely contemplative’’ (407). Old
age, he declares, is ‘‘not passive and peace-loving but brings a new bellig-
erency’’ (410). Belligerency. Hall was angry and was ready for combat—
impatient to fight from a position of moral authority. In his adoption of a
rhetoric of defiance, he has come far from the depressed lassitude of old
age that he sees as largely enforced by cultural constraints.
In addition to his own personal experience of being cast aside by soci-
ety, where did Hall find the energy—the theoretical energy—to imagine the
future of old age? What model helped him conceptualize a powerful old
age? It is the analogy of adolescence to old age, I suggest, that enabled Hall
to think about old age di√erently. The association of senility with infancy,
of a second childhood with childhood proper, is altogether familiar—and
demeaning to the old. But the association of old age with adolescence is
original. Adolescence was Hall’s area of expertise as a professional psy-
chologist. He was the author of the book Adolescence, which was published
in 1904 in two huge volumes and was well received. Adolescence he
conceived as a time of new development and new beginnings—biologi-

66 Chapter Two
cally, psychologically, and socially. By linking old age with adolescence, a
time of life known for its emotional volatility and idealism, he borrows the
energy of adolescence and transfers it to old age. ‘‘Adolescence is a new
birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born,’’ he
wrote in 1904 (xiii). In Senescence he insists: ‘‘The call to us is to construct a
new self just as we had to do at adolescence,’’ (403) and ‘‘Age has the same
right to emotional perturbations as youth’’ (383). Adolescence and old age:
Hall believes that each stage has feelings distinct to it. Yet paradoxically
in this regard they are also similar—and indeed some of those feelings
are the same. He also envisages a kind of alliance between adolescents and
the old.
‘‘Senescence, like adolescence, has its own feelings, thought, and wills,
as well as its own physiology, and their regimen is important, as well as
that of the body,’’ Hall writes in his book on old age (100). Recent research
has shown that many cognitive functions do not inevitably decline with
age as has previously been thought and that mental exercise is key to
maintaining and strengthening those abilities. The same is true, I would
suggest, of the emotions: the emotions, or passions, need not inevitably
diminish with age, and exercise—emotional exercise—is as fundamental to
their vitality as is their cultural authorization. As Hall presciently wrote in
Senescence, ‘‘Memory fails in age only if not exercised, and this is true of all
abilities’’ (68). The capacity to feel—including reacting to injustice with
anger—is one of those critical abilities.
Hall’s belligerent attitude on behalf of what we would call the marginal-
ization of the elderly—or more strongly, ageism—was ignored in the con-
temporary reviews of Senescence.∞∑ I suspect that Hall’s anger—even if
expressed in only a few places—was either considered a scandal or a tem-
porary aberration or both. Perhaps it was dismissed as the unpleasant
irritability so stereotypically associated with the elderly, a social prejudice
that Hall himself had diagnosed. Perhaps it was not detected by his readers
because an anger that is righteous is not associated with the old, but rather
only the anger of peevishness and cantankerousness. Even in recent schol-
arly assessments of Senescence Hall’s anger, although recognized, isn’t
given its appropriate due. Instead Senescence is characterized as a rambling
jeremiad, with the implication that Hall’s statements are the ill-considered
and oddly inappropriate outbursts that come from a temperament given to
depression and to lament.∞∏
My reading of Hall’s anger is altogether di√erent. I respect it. I under-

Against Wisdom 67
stand his anger as the call to denounce the injustice of what today we call
ageism. I also think even a temporary alliance of wisdom with anger is
remarkable. Hall wanted to harness the energy of anger, and he called on
older people who possessed what he understood as wisdom to take on an
active role and to remind others of ‘‘the world of sin, righteousness, and
judgment’’ (411). He could not, however, sustain the uneasy conjunction
of righteous anger, wisdom, and leadership, and so the instances of rhetor-
ical anger are few. But even though his language is di√erent, Hall nonethe-
less reminds me of Germaine Greer. If in the beginning of Senescence he
sees aging as a time when one retires from work, in the end he protests the
cultural injunction of the withdrawal of the elderly from the active world.
‘‘It’s time to get angry again,’’ insists Greer. Thus in Senescence we find an
incipient protest literature on behalf of the elderly who are sentenced to
the margins and condemned to retirement when their greatest need, Hall
believed, was to be of service to society.

Betty Friedan’s Fountain of Age appeared in 1993 when she was seventy-
one—exactly seventy-one years after the publication of Senescence. Like
Hall’s book, The Fountain of Age is long and ambitious, covering a multi-
tude of topics. Although it has been disregarded by academic feminists (in
part because Friedan was a liberal feminist and in part because of the
ageism implicit within feminism itself ), it is an important and complex
book that came from years of research and of hard thinking about aging.∞π
Unlike Hall, Friedan isn’t interested in surveying past attitudes toward
aging and the elderly. Much of her book focuses the specific issues of
work, housing, menopause, long-term care, and the right-to-die contro-
versy. But like Hall, Friedan argues that we must understand the special
purpose of the additional years that the longevity revolution has given to
people in western and other so-called developed countries.∞∫ If Hall drew
theoretical energy for his analysis of old age from his view of adolescence,
Friedan reflects on issues of aging largely through the lens of gender, in
particular from the vantage point of the second wave of the women’s
movement—one that she helped decisively to shape through the publica-
tion of The Feminine Mystique in the mid-1960s.∞Ω In The Fountain of Age
Friedan provocatively insists that the underlying cause of the women’s
movement was in fact the increase in life expectancy for women. As she

68 Chapter Two
writes, ‘‘What had really caused the women’s movement was the additional
years of human life. At the turn of the century, women’s life expectancy was
forty-six; now it was nearly eighty’’ (16).≤≠
I find it fascinating that in the time between the publication of The
Feminine Mystique, widely regarded as an angry book, and The Fountain of
Age—a period of thirty years that saw protest movements of so many
di√erent kinds as well as a growing cultural acceptance of the appropriate-
ness of expressing feelings—the expression of anger, or the rhetoric of
anger, itself underwent inflation. For the key emotional term from the
rhetorical arsenal of anger that Friedan deploys in The Fountain of Age is
that of rage. Although she often uses rage and anger interchangeably, rage
is her preferred term. It appears over and over in The Fountain of Age. The
rhetoric has escalated, and yet the message of The Fountain of Age is super-
ficially optimistic.≤∞
What does rage signify? Is it intense protest, as in the black rage move-
ment of the 1960s? Or does it carry the debilitating connotation of emo-
tional pathology, as rage in women often does? Or is it something else? For
even more than the association of anger and the elderly, the conjoining of
rage and the elderly would seem to be a virtual cultural impossibility, an
oxymoron.
For Friedan rage is an energy that is created by the thwarting of possi-
bilities. When rage is turned in on oneself rather than outward it is trans-
formed into depression—that is, into an equal and opposite force that
paralyzes innate energy or healthy aggression. As Friedan writes, ‘‘In age
as in youth,’’ depression ‘‘is the outcome of rage turned inward’’ (61). She
understands rage as a response to powerlessness. If women under the
influence of the feminine mystique in the 1950s internalized their rage,
which worked its will on the body, manifesting itself in headaches, depres-
sion, inchoate confusion, and the like, similarly Friedan concludes—and it
is a provocative deduction—that the high rate of depression among the
elderly is due precisely to the cultural vicissitudes of aging. ‘‘Knowing all
the reasons we have to be angry, lonesome, or afraid, one can only suspect
that an awful lot of older people are suppressing an awful lot of rage,’’ she
writes. ‘‘And if, indeed, depression in old and young alike is defined as
unbearable rage turned against oneself, small wonder that depression is
endemic in older people’’ (450). Thus anger—or indeed an unbearable
rage—is not available as energy. Rather it is invisible and immobilized; it is

Against Wisdom 69
masked and manifested only in depression that is, she implies, wrongly
treated as a physiological disease and not correctly understood as a symp-
tom of social su√ering.≤≤ Rage is unconscious. It is silent.
Can we imagine the Betty Friedan of The Fountain of Age, like the sixty-
year-old Germaine Greer, getting angry? Can we imagine her using the
rhetoric of anger to politicize prejudicial cultural practices against the old?
The answer is no—and some of the reasons for this answer are similar to
those we find in Senescence. Like Hall, Friedan believes that as people grow
older they become more themselves, more individual. Imagine the di≈-
culties of forming a political interest group on the basis of age alone, a
huge and heterogeneous group of people not only characterized by many
social di√erences (class, religion, and ethnicity, among others) but also by
hyperindividuality. Yet just as the empowerment of women was a rallying
cry in the 1960s, Friedan insists on the empowerment of age. The second
wave of feminism drew both spontaneously and strategically on anger.
However Friedan doesn’t think that the empowerment of age can be based
on the model of the women’s movement. Why not? In great part because
her conceptualization of the special strengths that can come with age are
in conflict with such a rhetoric of the emotions.
Friedan wants to put the accent on the positive, to substitute a model
of growth for the disabling model of decline. A model of growth implies
the development of something new. And in fact the word ‘‘new’’ rings like
a bell throughout the book. For her, age means the potential of invent-
ing new ways of living in the crucial domains of work and love. Just as
the doors to the work world needed to be opened for women, so too do
they need to be reopened to the old. Friedan believes—correctly in my
judgment—that the institution of retirement on the basis of chronological
age is the critical factor today in the ideology of age as decline (obviously
many people want or need to retire because their jobs are unsatisfying or
debilitating—she is not referring to such situations).≤≥ Thus there are con-
tradictions here of which she is fully aware.
Friedan argues, like Hall, that the human race has been given these
extra years by evolution (she cites the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson), and she
concludes that these very years must have some special evolutionary sig-
nificance. It is our responsibility, she insists, to fulfill that task. What
special capacities will be developed with age in order to allow one to per-
form this task well? One of the answers is—we may not be surprised

70 Chapter Two
to learn—wisdom. Wisdom is, she writes, ‘‘the ability to see the picture
whole, and its meaning deep, and to tell it true’’ (216).≤∂
If Hall found a way to put wisdom to work, Friedan finds a way to put it
in the workplace. ‘‘Could the growing need for such wisdom transcending
narrow expertise in every field provide the pragmatic, social basis for the
fountain of age?’’ she asks rhetorically (244). Thus Friedan’s notion of
wisdom is in part wisdom of a practical nature, echoing a meaning at-
tributed to wisdom in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘‘sound sense, esp.
in practical a√airs.’’ She also suggests that along with wisdom in age,
which implies wholeness, may come a host of qualities—‘‘freedom from
youthful competitive compulsion, cooperation, empathy’’ (326). Wisdom,
lack of competition, cooperation, empathy: these are all qualities virtually
antithetical to anger.
Where, then, does the rage go? It is not transformed into outrage, into
anger at injustice. Like Hall, Friedan opens The Fountain of Age on a note
of depression. She confides that she was depressed for weeks after her
friends threw her a surprise party on her sixtieth birthday, forcing her to
acknowledge publicly that she had indeed arrived at that culturally con-
stricting number. Like Hall, in the course of writing her book (and of living
her life), her depression lifts. In The Fountain of Age Friedan presents
herself as not only reflecting in creative ways on the possibilities of age but
also as embodying them—taking risks, imagining new ways of loving, and
inventing a new style of being an activist.≤∑
What accounts for this transformation from depression to vital aging?
For Friedan one of the important strategies of the women’s movement was
emotion talk (this is my phrase). As she writes in The Fountain of Age,
talking about one’s feelings and claiming them is crucial—‘‘the rages and
angers and humiliations, the passivities and dependencies, that had been
encouraged in us so long and still held us back’’ (156). In The Fountain of
Age she claims her own feelings—of depression and exhilaration. But she
doesn’t extend the model of consciousness-raising in the women’s move-
ment to age. She doesn’t imagine the sharing of feelings of anger, never
mind unbearable rage. Was rage buried behind her own depression? In
The Fountain of Age the rhetoric of rage, so prevalent and so surprising,
ultimately serves merely as an empty sign of social su√ering. In a sense it
isn’t given a body. Friedan doesn’t seem to write out of anger or rage. Nor
does she quote people who voice their rage.

Against Wisdom 71
 For Friedan rage in the old is repressed, a symptom of cultural pathol-
ogy. Wisdom is a sign of the achievement of one’s possibilities in age, with
rage expelled. Wisdom and rage: like magnets pointed toward each other,
they repel one another. In the 1960s black rage as a rallying cry performed
important cultural work. Rage meant outrage at racial injustice. But a wise
rage? For Friedan it is a cultural contradiction in terms when it comes
to aging.
But there is one curious passage in The Fountain of Age where a manic
rage surfaces. Friedan opens her chapter ‘‘Intimacy: Beyond the Dreams
of Youth’’ with a frightening dream:

I had a dream: In my house, propped up against a wall, pushed out of

the way, was something quite large, all wrapped up in a rug. Like a
mummy. And I said, ‘‘What is wrapped up in that rug?’’ No one was
paying any attention to it, it didn’t really get in the way. But I didn’t want
something wrapped up, hidden like that in my house. I insisted on
slitting it open.
There was a woman wrapped up in the rug, and she was still alive!
She was not young but she had longish light hair and a glint in her eye,
and she was brandishing a knife in her hand. I woke up in horror and
sat up in my bed. There was a live woman I had wrapped up in that rug,
and she was going to kill me if I didn’t let her out. So I went to see my
old shrink, and I said, Given the realities, the numbers, my age, how
could I live with the woman I had wrapped up in that rug? She was
alive, but how could I let her out without her exploding with rage—that
knife in her hand? And I felt the pain of my own yearning. (254)

Friedan doesn’t comment on this dream. Instead she lets it stand as tes-
timony to the banal insight that we all need love and that older women
are much more likely to su√er from a lack of sexual intimacy than are
men. The striking incongruity between the wild energy represented in the
dream and the calm therapeutic tone of her authoritative exposition—
‘‘Without love, the human self never develops at all’’ (254)—belies the still-
buried rage, the rage she could not conjoin with wisdom. Elsewhere in The
Fountain of Age, in a passage that goes against the grain of the argument in
her book, she remarks, ‘‘Research has shown an actual strong relationship
between ‘irascibility’ and longevity. Could that very rage, long buried in
women, which we have now managed to express, breaking down the bar-
riers and the false images that once made us turn it against ourselves, be

72 Chapter Two
part of the fountain of age?’’ (156). She allows her own important rhetori-
cal question to hang unanswered in the air.

3
Hall understood himself to be part of an emerging vanguard of older
people. He allowed his anger at being marginalized with retirement and
old age to surface, and, fortified with this energy and the paradigm of
adolescence, he imagined himself at the forefront of a new generation of
older people at a critical juncture in history. Wise men would be stern
counselors to future generations. The aged would embody the future.
With the exception of the scholarly history of gerontology, history has
forgotten Hall’s vision of aging.
Friedan, like the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir before her, uses
her long experience as a feminist activist and writer to address old age as
the next political battle to be fought. Although The Fountain of Age is a
protest against the ideology of old age in the United States, and although,
in comparison with Hall, Friedan seems to up the ante with a rhetoric of
rage, that rhetoric of rage turns out to be curiously empty—it is devoid of
energy, concealed as depression. Ultimately Friedan also turns to wisdom
as a way of conceiving the special strengths of the old. On the one hand,
her notion of wisdom is more pragmatic than that of Hall. On the other
hand it is also a more romantic version of wisdom—one that relies on the
twentieth-century psychological tradition of the reconciliation of gender
opposites explored by Jung and others. But notwithstanding their some-
what di√erent understandings of wisdom, both Hall and Friedan assign
the social role of wisdom to the elderly. This is a clear example of what
Paul Gri≈ths, a philosopher of the emotions, has called the social con-
struction of emotions, where certain emotions—here the psychological
stance of wisdom, a philosophic calm—are invoked to reinforce certain
social roles.≤∏ As an ideal attribute or emotional standard long associated
with the old, wisdom in e√ect has suppressed the emotional experience
of anger.
Both Hall and Friedan advocate what thirty years ago the cultural histo-
rian Gerald Gruman called re-engagement. In a brilliant analysis of the
forces that have worked to construct the modernist life course, one in
which the elderly are relegated to the margins, Gruman argues that it is
precisely the old who have a future: ‘‘In the furthering of a genuinely

Against Wisdom 73
modern culture, it is the aging who actually have pride of place; they are
where the action is, for they are something historically new as a large
population sector’’ (380). Significantly, unlike Hall and Friedan, Gruman
doesn’t find it necessary to invoke wisdom as a way to graciously bestow a
social role on the elderly, a role that over the course of the twentieth
century has been extolled as crucial to society as a whole but in reality has
been ignored or dismissed as useless.≤π Nor does Gruman feel obliged to
rationalize the years given to us by the longevity revolution by arguing that
they serve an evolutionary purpose.

It is time to declare a moratorium on wisdom. I don’t mean that we would

not be correct to describe certain people as wise or certain actions or
judgments as wise. Indeed I’m taken with Margaret Gullette’s way of
approaching the question of wisdom. She is not so much interested in
wisdom as an asset or an attribute that takes the linguistic concrete shape
of a predicate adjective (she is ‘‘wise’’) or a noun (‘‘wisdom’’). Rather she is
interested in the comparative quality of making judgments as one passes
through time and life because one has ‘‘had more time . . . to meditate
about life’s risky accidents.’’≤∫ What I mean is that we should not resort to
wisdom in theorizing or imagining a social role for older people in gen-
eral. Wisdom should not be advocated as an emotional (or unemotional)
standard or ideal.≤Ω Lest it be thought that this is not a widespread practice,
consider the statement in 1999 by Mary Robinson, then head of the O≈ce
of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, on human rights and older
persons. ‘‘The wisdom and experience which come with age are vital assets
for society and should be acknowledged as such,’’ she insists (iii).≥≠
I believe that the cultural reflex of associating wisdom and age re-
produces a stereotype that doesn’t carry real meaning in contemporary
western societies. Moreover, there is absolutely no need to have to justify—
through the lens of the development of wisdom—the extraordinary exten-
sion of life expectancy that has been gained over the twentieth century. The
notion of wisdom as a developmental capacity that ideally characterizes old
age interferes with the crucial work that needs to be done to reclaim these
years as meaningful in the broadest sense. Wisdom carries the connota-
tion of detachment, hence, as we see in Hall and Friedan, the extreme
di≈culty of putting it together with engagement, or reengagement. With

74 Chapter Two
its emphasis on detachment, wisdom justifies the disengagement theory
of aging; that is, the theory that older people ‘‘naturally’’ withdraw from
their social roles so as to make their ultimate disappearance—death—less
di≈cult for the smooth functioning of society. Wisdom carries the con-
notation of dignified behavior, hence the further di≈culty of its associa-
tion with a rhetoric of protest. It implies a kind of transcendence of the
social world, a certain timelessness, a knowledge that is—there is of course
a contradiction here—not characterized by one’s placement in the world,
or by what Donna Haraway long ago called situated knowledge.≥∞

In terms of a cultural politics of the emotions, angry women have long

been labeled by men (or male-identifying women) as irrational or hysteri-
cal. The strategy is to demean such women. Analogously, anger in the old
is outlawed. Here anger is what Jaggar has called an ‘‘outlaw emotion,’’
one that is ‘‘conventionally unacceptable’’ (160). On the social stage in the
United States there has been one notable exception to the rule of outlaw-
ing angry old women, and that is the late Maggie Kuhn of the Gray Pan-
thers (Kuhn founded the Gray Panthers in the 1970s in the wake of her
forced retirement at the age of sixty-five). Why was her behavior accept-
able? I would venture that it was tolerated in part because of her petite
stature (as a diminutive woman she wasn’t seen as a threat) and in part
because the project of the Gray Panthers was always intergenerational and
not limited to aging. Ultimately Kuhn wasn’t taken seriously but rather
patronized as cute, while the Gray Panthers were seen as a nonthreatening
knocko√ of the Black Panthers.
Angry challenges to ageism should not be dismissed. Anger can be a
sign of moral outrage at social injustice and at being denied the right to
participate fully in society. Anger in this sense is a judgment, or more
strongly, an indictment. As the late philosopher Robert Solomon argues in
The Passions, ‘‘An emotion is a judgment (or a set of judgments), something
we do. An emotion is a (set of ) judgments(s) which constitute our world,
our surreality, and its intentional objects’’ (185). I find compelling Ger-
maine Greer’s declaration that it is time to get angry again. I am reminded
of Gloria Steinem’s very first words in her essay ‘‘Doing Sixty,’’ published
in 1994, in which she acknowledges the contradiction between the cul-
tural ideal of detachment expected of her and her own intense reactions to

Against Wisdom 75
injustice. ‘‘Age is supposed to create more serenity, calm, and detachment
from the world, right? Well,’’ she concludes, ‘‘I’m finding just the reverse’’
(249).≥≤
We need to change the a√ect script for older people in our culture.≥≥
How do we do this? In great part by telling stories. Stories relay forms of
feeling, and one of the stories of aging and anger that has remained long
in my mind is that told by the feminist activist Barbara Macdonald. Fit-
tingly enough the incident she recounts occurred while she was on a
protest march in Boston in the late 1970s—a March to Take Back the
Night, from men. Macdonald, a sixty-five-year-old lesbian, had a premoni-
tion that the march wouldn’t achieve its objective. But she didn’t suspect
just who her antagonist would be. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go, she
told her partner, Cynthia. She ‘‘had a vague feeling of dragging’’ her feet.
Wasn’t this kind of march pointless because men had the power and
wouldn’t take it seriously? Cynthia, twenty years younger than Macdonald,
persuades her to go. If it doesn’t convince the men, Cynthia assures her,
never mind, it will be good for us. Cynthia was wrong.
It is a dark and rainy night, and the people helping to assemble the
women give them instructions. Six abreast. Walk closely together. Don’t let
men break your ranks. Barbara’s uneasiness is gone, and she is eager to
move forward. She feels strong. ‘‘I felt,’’ she writes, ‘‘the exhilaration, the
oneness with the women around me, the sense of at last doing something
instead of passively grinding my teeth with anger, as I do every morning
when I pick up the Globe to see what woman was murdered the night
before’’ (28). Then, waiting to begin, she notices Cynthia talking quietly
with one of the young women monitoring the march. Barbara joins them,
and the monitor says to her, ‘‘ ‘If you think you can’t keep up, you should
go to the head of the march’ ’’ (28).
What did that mean? Understanding hits Barbara like a series of ham-
mer blows. It’s because she’s perceived by a younger woman as old and
therefore as weak—and, more ominously, as lacking in judgment. That
the younger woman is well meaning and contrite doesn’t change the fun-
damental situation. Barbara feels exiled by this younger woman and by
the women’s movement itself. She feels infantilized. And she snaps back
at her. She begins and finishes the march in a rage. As she writes, ‘‘All
my life in a man’s world, I was a problem because I was a woman; now
I’m a problem in a woman’s world because I’m a sixty-five-year-old
woman’’ (30).

76 Chapter Two
 Where does her rage go? Unlike Friedan’s rage it doesn’t remain buried
in her dreamlife. Reflecting hard on this incident later, given a kind of
strength from her rage, Macdonald resolves neither to direct it toward the
younger woman—that doesn’t seem quite fair—nor to turn it against her-
self and her own aging body, a body which, by her account, reads as sixty-
five.≥∂ The intensity of her rage is wisely proportionate to the o√ense. It is
symmetrical to the structure of power in which she finds herself unfairly
meshed.≥∑ Her rage is dispelled when she decides to fight back with what
force she has. Her rage is dispelled as she analyzes the incident, placing
it in historical context, comparing the first wave of feminism with the
second, and puzzling over the fact that in the first wave of feminism older
women were the leaders, whereas in the second wave it is younger women
—women in their twenties and thirties—who were and still are predomi-
nant. Why is that? She concludes that this can’t be explained by a sim-
ple emphasis on youth culture in the United States. Today, she writes,
‘‘youth is bonded with patriarchy in the enslavement of the older woman.
There would, in fact, be no youth culture without the powerless older
woman’’ (39).≥∏
If Macdonald puts aside her rage, she safeguards her anger. Her anger
is the precious residue of her rage.≥π ‘‘Although much of what happened to
me in the march is resolved for me,’’ she writes, ‘‘I am still angry at the
ageism in the women’s movement’’ (35–36). I take it that her anger in part
motivated the important small book she wrote with Cynthia Rich, a book
that gives us this notable story. It is an instance of what Margaret Gullette
has called, in Declining to Decline, ‘‘age autobiography.’’ Echoing the critical
race theorist Patricia Williams, I would say that Macdonald’s story is ‘‘a gift
of intelligent rage’’ (216). Would I call Macdonald a wise old woman? No,
because this would call up another image altogether, of a woman who is
calmly dispassionate, who has a benign and detached sense of perspective,
and who can dispense a measured and balanced knowledge of the world.
Macdonald’s story, however, is one of an anger that, upon reflection, turns
out to have been wise. It was time for her to get angry again.
Both Hall and Friedan envisage aging as a time when there is important
work to be done in service to society and to the self. We might understand
Macdonald’s anger, then, as the impetus for a certain kind of work—as
protest against injustice and as the intellectual work of the historical un-
derstanding of the roots of ageism against women. From this perspective
anger provides not only the energy for work—it is work. When one is

Against Wisdom 77
angry, one must continually confront others and one must be on one’s
guard. One must relinquish the seduction of detachment that is promised
by wisdom.
‘‘Emotions become feminist when they incorporate feminist percep-
tions and values,’’ Jaggar writes (160). Václav Havel speaks of what he has
called ‘‘something like a social emotion,’’ a judgment akin to a feeling of
aversion to social inequities, a feeling he experienced early in his life as ‘‘an
antagonism toward undeserved privileges, toward unjust social barriers,
toward any kind of so-called higher standing predetermined by birth or by
anything else, toward any humiliation of human dignity’’ (7). At the very
least, the humiliation of human dignity would require indignation. That
social emotion might be described as a noble anger. I thus close with this
question: What word would we use to describe the anger associated with the
experience of ageism? That we do not in fact have a word analogous to
‘‘feminist’’ suggests how very far we are from recognizing and honoring the
emotional experience—the anger—associated with ageism.

78 Chapter Two
 three

R A C I A L S H A M E , M A S S - M E D I AT E D S H A M E ,
MUTUAL SHAME

She taught me that confusion and chaos themselves could be

a defense against clarity because of fear of pain or rage.
—Jane Lazarre, Wet Earth and Dreams

Fully faced, shame may become not primarily something to be

covered, but a positive experience of revelation.
—Helen Merrell Lynd,
On Shame and the Search for Identity

Shame tells a story—that we hold certain ideals, that these

represent things we value enough to strive for, that we respect
our own ability to choose them as worth striving for and our
own capacities to achieve these goals.
—Berenice Fisher, ‘‘Guilt and Shame in the
Women’s Movement’’

In the previous chapter I considered the relation between emotions and

stages of life, focusing on older age and concluding with a story that has
long been important to me about an angry older woman. How did Bar-
bara Macdonald come to understand herself as old and exiled from the
front lines? In an uncanny flash she sees herself through the eyes of a
younger woman whose gaze brands Macdonald as an old woman. What I
call the youthful structure of the look fixes her in its sights. In our pro-
foundly ageist society, gender and age structure each other in a complex
set of reverberating feedback loops conspiring to render the older female
body paradoxically both hypervisible and invisible. For the truth is that
women are deemed old in our society—are aged by culture—far earlier
than are men.
But for Barbara Macdonald anger provides the necessary impetus to
question the humiliation she experiences at the hands of a younger woman.
The pain of her shame prompts her to reflect on the context of her experi-
ence, leading her to the searing insight that older women are devalued by
both men and younger women alike. Older women, she concludes, are
ejected from the social body as abject. Older women are the third term that
threatens to destabilize the value placed on youth, with younger women
understood as a commodity enjoyed by many older men. The anger she
experiences at her humiliation serves her as an outlaw emotion.
In telling her story (and it is one that has circulated widely), Macdonald
o√ers us the opportunity to share her important analysis and to under-
stand our own experience in the present—or in the time to come. As
Alison Jaggar writes in ‘‘Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Episte-
mology,’’ ‘‘When certain emotions are shared or validated by others . . . the
basis exists for forming a subculture defined by perceptions, norms, and
values’’ (160). Thus outlaw emotions, because of their epistemological
potential, may be politically constructive, leading to the building of com-
munities. What examples does Jaggar o√er? Among them are pride and
anger, along with its family member, outrage. Crucial to Jaggar is the idea
that we must be able to name our experience. As I have been insisting, we
must be able to narrate our experience.
If in the previous chapter I support Jaggar’s conviction that anger can
possess a cognitive edge as an outlaw emotion, with older people as my
case in point, I also call attention to the devolution of unconscious rage
into depression, a situation in which anger is unavailable as a catalyst for
analysis. In this chapter I explore the emotion of shame by posing the
question of its cognitive potential. As with the visual economy of old age,
shame in its tragic dimension is often underwritten by a brutal visual
economy. If shame is most often paired with guilt, here I am primarily
interested in its potential relation to anger as an outlaw emotion.
Shame, we should also remember, is associated predominantly with the
young. For Freud shame is the more ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘infantile’’ emotion,
one that in the normal course of things should be eclipsed by the more
complex emotion of guilt. For Freud guilt is based on the internalization of
values, whereas shame is experienced earlier and is based on external
disapproval by others (here we see a visual economy at work). For Freud
shame should yield to guilt in the course of moral development not only
on the level of the individual but also on the level of the history of a
civilization. But shame, I will argue in the course of this chapter, persists
long after childhood and in given situations has the potential to be re-
described as a morally salutary and mature emotion.∞
I open this chapter with a discussion of three influential models of
shame that underscore its potentially transformative force. I then turn to

80 Chapter Three
two vastly dissimilar cultural worlds, from di√erent decades in the United
States, that challenge these models. The first is the poetic world of the
novel. I consider Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which was published in
1970 and set in the early-1940s in rural Ohio where the action takes place
in the intimate locus of intersecting families and across generations. I
argue that the racial shame Morrison portrays follows a logic that departs
decisively from these models of shame. The second world is the mass-
mediated one of the mid-1990s where the visual structure of shame, satu-
rating everyday life in the United States, is beginning to go aggressively
televisual. If for three centuries the press has been understood as one of
the crucial components of a civil society if not the public sphere, by the
mid-1990s consumer culture is indistinguishable from the mass media
that sells shame as sensational news. If the psychological emotions of
Morrison’s characters are foregrounded in her eloquent novel, in mass-
mediated scenarios of shame from the 1990s we witness the emergence of
a structure of feeling where shame is, on the one hand, sold on the market
as pride and where, on the other, individuals are crushed by shame in the
crosshairs of the media. Shame has become a lucrative commodity, and in
the process it would seem that interiority is itself evacuated, sucked up and
out by the media itself. My point is that shame, generally understood as a
psychological emotion, now circulates widely in mass-mediated culture as
life-denying sensation. My further point is that shame persists beyond
childhood and that there are many models of it, including that of mutual
shame—shame as a salutary social emotion—which I consider in the final
section of this chapter.

1
Consider the important accounts of shame o√ered over the course of the
twentieth century by the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, the feminist writer
Virginia Woolf, and the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. My central
concern is how these three figures envision the relationship between emo-
tion and knowledge, or what I call the cognitive edge of the emotions. In
e√ect I trace a genealogy of models of shame. But I don’t mean to imply
that the second two accounts I discuss supersede the first, although it is
the case that both Woolf ’s model and that of Sedgwick serve to critique
that of Sartre. So I begin with Sartre, whose Being and Nothingness was
published in the mid-1940s—long after A Room of One’s Own and long

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 81

before Sedgwick’s ‘‘Queer Performativity.’’ My point is that the relation-
ship between shame and knowledge varies radically according to context,
with age being an exceedingly important factor along with race, gender,
and sexual orientation. Thus as we will see, none of these three models
obtains in the world of The Bluest Eye or in the world of mass-mediated
shame from the mid-1990s.

In Being and Nothingness Sartre elaborates a model of how we’re made con-
scious of ourselves and in particular of our acts, so that ultimately we can
judge them and ourselves in the eyes of the world. It is through the mental
act of assuming the position of an other who is contemplating us, Sartre
theorizes, that we’re struck into consciousness of ourselves in time and
space. Central to Sartre’s hypothetical scenario is the emotion of shame.
‘‘Let us imagine,’’ Sartre writes, ‘‘that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I
have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole’’ (259). It is
only when this person, surreptitiously watching someone through a key-
hole, realizes he is also being watched that he is struck into consciousness
—that is, into shame. ‘‘Somebody was there and has seen me. Suddenly I
realize the vulgarity of my gesture, and I am ashamed’’ (221).
I want to underscore three points. First, the ‘‘I’’ in Sartre’s account is
implicitly gendered male and is understood to be a moral agent—indeed
the subject of the discourse of moral philosophy itself. As an existentialist
Sartre places a great stress on freedom of choice and the responsibility
of the individual for his actions, or on what today we would call moral
agency, if not autonomy. Second, Sartre’s model is dramaturgical. There is
a clearly defined structure and plot to the etiology of shame. It arises
suddenly, theatrically, as if it were a flammable material, a flash point
inherent in the implicit doubled-over structure of the unseen spectator. It
is as if at the moment when the secretive spectator, who is watching
someone else, realizes he is being watched by yet a third person that
shame bursts spontaneously into combustion. Third, Sartre stresses that
the ‘‘I’’ has indeed done wrong and is right to feel shame—that is, that
shame in this case is an appropriate emotion, a self-evaluating and ethical
emotion. Notice that Sartre is careful to say that this ‘‘I’’ is motivated
to peek through the keyhole by ‘‘jealousy, curiosity, or vice,’’ which are
scarcely noble intentions (259).
In the long chapter in Being and Nothingness in which this thought

82 Chapter Three
experiment takes place Sartre is primarily concerned with what it means to
be struck into being philosophically, to achieve what he refers to as a
‘‘transcendental’’ point of view, one to which he can ‘‘refer his acts so as to
qualify them’’—that is, judge them (259). His model also contains a theory
of shame as a highly dramatized emotion that grants an intensely embod-
ied sense of being. The ‘‘I’’ feels ‘‘vulnerable’’; the ‘‘I’’ ‘‘has a body which
can be hurt’’ (259). This sense of embodiment, Sartre suggests, is the
ground for gaining the transcendental perspective necessary for judging
one’s actions. Ultimately, however, for Sartre the emotion of shame is not
of essential interest here at all. Indeed emotion itself is not of essential
interest. His mode is that of philosophical reason, one that in the end
reinforces the divide between the abstract and the emotional in western
philosophy, a divide that is deplored by Barbara Christian in her influential
essay ‘‘The Race for Theory.’’

A strikingly di√erent model of shame and its relation to knowledge is

presented in Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. As in my discussion of this
piece in an earlier chapter, I focus on the brilliant passage in which we find
the writer doing research for her upcoming lecture on women and fiction
in the large reading room of the British Museum. Daunted by the sheer
amount written on women by men and confused by the contradictory
nature of their contents—‘‘It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was
humiliating’’ (30)—she responds, unconsciously at first, to one particular
book entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of Women by Pro-
fessor von X. While waiting idly for other books to be brought to her desk,
she doodles absently in her notebook, drawing in anger. And what is she
drawing? She realizes with a start that she’s drawing his angry face, which
she then proceeds to deface with pleasure:

Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger do-
ing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom—all these emo-
tions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout
the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them?
Yes, said the sketch, anger had. It referred me unmistakably to the one
book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the pro-
fessor’s statement about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of
women. My heart had leapt. My cheeks had burnt. I had flushed with

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 83

 anger. There was nothing specially remarkable, however foolish, in
that. One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a
little man. (32)

This fictional scene explicitly identifies the emotion of anger as central to

its hypothetical drama. But critical to it as well is the unnamed emotion of
shame. The words of the pompous professor are insulting. They serve to
blatantly pronounce the reader’s exorbitant inferiority in every conceivable
respect. They shame her as a woman, a shame that is keenly felt. ‘‘My heart
had leapt. My cheeks had burnt.’’ Shame is first. It is rapidly succeeded
by anger.
In Woolf ’s drama the etiology of anger is shame. Anger is the boiling
point of shame. Her analysis of anger, and by implication her analysis of
shame, leads to knowledge. In her scenario it is crucial that both shame
and anger be expressed and acknowledged.≤ Anger serves the function of
appropriate self-defense and retaliation, which in A Room of One’s Own
is wonderfully imaginative, suggestive of the unruly student. Anger is
burned away in the process, leaving the possibility of the power of re-
flection in its wake. As Woolf marvelously describes her counterattack,
she ‘‘began drawing cart-wheels and circles over the angry professor’s
face till he looked like a burning bush or a flaming comet—anyhow, an
apparition without human semblance or significance. The professor was
nothing now but a faggot burning on the top of Hampstead Heath’’ (32).
Once these heated emotions subside, she turns to reflecting on them. She
doesn’t have ‘‘a surplus of anger,’’ in Elizabeth Abel’s phrase.≥ She uses
these emotions as touchstones to probe their causes, and she arrives at an
analysis of the unequal relations of power in terms of gender. ‘‘Soon my
own anger was explained and done with; but curiosity remained. How
explain the anger of the professors?’’ (32). Like Sartre’s shame, Woolf ’s
anger is a self-regarding emotion. Importantly it is an other-regarding
emotion as well.
As opposed to Sartre’s male ‘‘I’’ peering through a keyhole, here we
have shame gendered female. This is shame ascribed to others by those in
power—men—not on the basis of what one does but rather on the basis of
what one is. What other evidence does she cite? Woolf refers us to the
world of research as well as to mass culture. She quotes Trevelyan who in
his History of England writes that wife beating ‘‘was a recognized right of

84 Chapter Three
man, and was practiced without shame by high as well as low’’ (54). She
notes the headline in the daily paper heralding the pronouncements of a
divorce court judge on the ‘‘Shamelessness of Women’’ (43). Woolf as-
tutely concludes that in the emotional economy of patriarchy men simply
aren’t expected to feel shame when they do something for which they
should feel ashamed while women are unfairly denounced as ‘‘shameless’’
for behavior that is routinely accepted in men. There is a double standard
when it comes to shame.
Thus in Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own shame isn’t presented as an
ethical emotion as it is in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. There it is under-
scored that the male ‘‘I’’ had indeed done something for which he should
rightly feel shame. In A Room of One’s Own, on the other hand, it is the
acknowledgment and analysis of shame and anger that lead to an evalua-
tion of the larger system of the relations of power in which women are
enmeshed. Shame is brought to consciousness through the medium of
anger; the treatment of women, which results in the feeling of shame, is
understood to be unjust. Woolf concludes that the attribution of inferiority
to women, by imputation a condition of shame, serves to maintain male
superiority. Thus Woolf wonderfully dramatizes Alison Jaggar’s convic-
tion that the emotions of those in a position of oppression should be
accorded epistemological privilege.
Finally, I want to stress that in A Room of One’s Own shame is not con-
sidered in terms of its relation to guilt but in terms of its relation to anger.
At stake is a cultural politics of the emotions. Shame is infantilizing, but
ultimately it is not an infantile emotion. I want to underscore here that the
emotional sequencing of shame and anger is crucial: anger follows shame.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick radicalizes shame in her influential essay ‘‘Queer

Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.’’ This piece is a virtual
extravaganza on behalf of the transformational power of shame, one itself
written in a flamboyant mode. Because the stigma of being gay is so
profound and the scene of such deep shame in childhood so traumatic,
such shame, Sedgwick argues, is a potentially endless source of energy. ‘‘If
queer is a politically potent term, which it is, that’s because, far from being
capable of being detached from the childhood scene of shame,’’ she writes,
‘‘it cleaves to that scene as a near-inexhaustible source of transformational

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 85

energy’’ (4). How can a term, which is both a symptom of prejudice and a
chosen identity, transform shame into pride?
Sedgwick insists, of course, that di√erent cultures legislate di√erent
regimes of shame. But the emphasis in her essay is on the liberation of
shame as energy. Shame is a ‘‘free radical,’’ she writes, one that ‘‘attaches
to and permanently intensifies or alters the meaning of—of almost any-
thing: a zone of the body, a sensory system, a prohibited or indeed a
permitted behavior, another a√ect such as anger or arousal, a named
identity, a script for interpreting other people’s behavior toward oneself ’’
(12). What is the example on which she grounds her argument? She o√ers
the case of the older Henry James looking back, in shameful pain, at his
younger self.
Unlike the models of shame o√ered by Sartre and by Woolf, here it is
not another person who is looking at James, striking him into shame, but
rather James himself. The older James was deeply distressed, Sedgwick
tells us, over the commercial failure of one of his books (a compilation of
his important short stories and novels); rereading his earlier work and
witnessing its contemporary failure caused him the pain of self-shame.
And yet somehow the still-surviving force of the stigma of shame from his
youth provided him with the impetus to recover from this depression:
shame is transformed into an eroticized ‘‘impudence,’’ resulting in a ten-
der bond between the older Henry James and his younger self. Writing of
shame through the elegance of Henry James but also in ratcheting it
up, Sedgwick o√ers an account of shame as almost precious in multiple
senses of the term, something to be cherished, something ornamental,
almost an a√ectation, a ‘‘betraying blazon’’ to be put ‘‘in circulation—as the
sign of a tenderly strengthened and indeed now ‘irresistible’ bond be-
tween the writer of the present and the abashed writer of the past’’ (9). (I
confess that it is not at all clear to me how this transformation in Henry
James comes about. I am tempted to read it as a sign of maturity, of
James’s acceptance of his younger self, and to consider Sedgwick’s reading
of James anachronistic, one that projects the 1980s and 1990s potency of
‘‘queer’’ into the past.)
If for Woolf the key sequence of emotions is shame-anger, for Sedgwick
it is shame-pride. Indeed Sedgwick seems to understand these two emo-
tions not in terms of a sequence but as two sides of a coin. As she writes,
‘‘Shame e√aces itself; shame points and projects; shame turns itself skin

86 Chapter Three
side outside; shame and pride, shame and self-display, shame and exhibi-
tionism are di√erent interlinings of the shame glove’’ (5). But not all
shame, only ‘‘transformational shame’’ (5). What makes shame transfor-
mational? By putting it this way, it should be clear that to argue that the
emotion of shame itself is—or can be—transformational is misleading. It
isn’t the a√ect itself—or by itself—that carries the potential for transforma-
tion. It is, rather, the very context of a politicized movement. Sedgwick
wants to recuperate shame for activism, including a radical queer theory,
and it is precisely the social context of a supportive community that pro-
vides the ground for the transformation of shame into pride, one that can
be exhibited proudly, defiantly, even luxuriantly.∂ Here shame bears af-
finities to Alison Jaggar’s notion of an outlaw emotion in that it is under-
stood as providing a basis for a subculture. But Sedgwick insists that
‘‘a≈rmative reclamation’’ of shame will never be su≈cient to extirpate the
negative valence or stigma of gay shame. As she writes, ‘‘the main reason
why the self-application of ‘queer’ by activists has proven so volatile is that
there’s no way that any amount of a≈rmative reclamation is going to
succeed in detaching the word from its associations with shame and with
the terrifying powerlessness of gender-dissonant or otherwise stigmatized
childhood’’ (4). Thus ultimately shame serves less as an emotion with
cognitive potential per se than as a source—in the context of the 1980s and
1990s—of consolidating identity.∑ What is interesting to me here in terms
of theories of the emotions is that Sedwick emphasizes the importance of
emotion as energy, as ‘‘transformational energy’’ (4). For her, shame, in
the guise of queer shame, does not serve an ethical purpose, as it does in
Sartre’s account of shame. Nor does it seem at base a psychological emo-
tion, as it is in Woolf ’s scenario. Rather her account of radical shame—
although it has, as I mentioned above, a≈nities with Jaggar’s notion of an
outlaw emotion—seems similar to intensities.
Sedgwick wants, she says, to remove shame from a moralistic or evalua-
tive framework. ‘‘In the ways I want to be thinking about shame,’’ she
writes, ‘‘the widespread moralistic valuation of this powerful a√ect as good
or bad, to be mandated or to be excised, according to how one plots it along
a notional axis of prohibition/permission/requirement, seems distinctly
beside the point’’ (8). Among other things, Sedgwick is referring to what
she calls ‘‘the neo-conservative framework that treasures shame along
with guilt as an adjunct of repression and an enforcer of proper behavior’’

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 87

(8). I do not, however, want to give up a moral or evaluative framework in
the analysis of shame, especially as I turn now to Toni Morrison’s The
Bluest Eye.

2
In Morrison’s The Bluest Eye it is precisely the question of moral agency
that is at stake. For in the novel the spectatorial model of shame we find in
Sartre doesn’t result in a transcendental point of view from which the
characters can freely judge their acts. Nor, as in the self-reflexive model of
shame and anger narrated in Woolf, does the experience of shame and
anger ultimately o√er the characters of The Bluest Eye an understanding of
their position in society in terms of power. Nor does the potent stigma of
racial shame in youth serve as a near-inexhaustible source of transforma-
tional energy, as in Sedgwick’s account of shame. Instead shame leads
either to lacerating violence or to debilitating depression. In the Ohio
steel mill town in which the main action of the novel takes place in 1941,
shame spreads its fatal stain everywhere and su√ocates its residents. Here
shame takes on the intense form of racial humiliation or the numbing
form of pervasive daily racism, resulting either in trauma or in chronic
discrimination—neither of which can be overcome.
Morrison tells the story of a black community torn by multiple experi-
ences of shame—volatile, deadening, sobering. Not only are the sites of
potential shame seemingly everywhere but shame is also passed from one
generation to the other as a debilitating emotional inheritance. Central to
the novel is the story of the eleven-year-old girl named Pecola who is raped
by her father. She bears his child, who dies shortly after a premature birth.
Pecola sinks into madness, infected by the deluded notion that she has
magically been granted her wish for blue eyes and now is exquisitely
beautiful in the eyes of white America. A living reminder of the shameful
failure of her community to protect her, she grows older as the years pass
by. Irreparably stunted, she will never grow up. It is a tragedy.
The nine-year-old character named Claudia serves Morrison as a narra-
tor of the story, a baΔed but sensitive witness to Pecola’s drama. This is a
brilliant choice on Morrison’s part because Claudia (along with her ten-
year-old sister Frieda) is simply too young to understand why all this is
happening. She is, however, acutely aware of the emotional currents into
which they are all cast. As Morrison puts it, speaking through Claudia,

88 Chapter Three
‘‘the edge, the curl, the thrust, of their emotions is always clear to Frieda
and me. We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words for we
are nine and ten years old’’ (16). The intelligent point is that the girls are
attuned to the moods and emotions enveloping them but can’t understand
the ‘‘meanings’’ of shame because of their young age. The same holds true
for Pecola’s mother and father, both of whom, as Morrison makes clear in
the course of the narrative, also experienced a defining shame as children.
At the very beginning of the novel we learn that Pecola was raped by
her father—his name is Cholly—and thus as readers we’re primed to hold
little sympathy for him. But Morrison judiciously backs into the genera-
tional history of this family, telling us some two-thirds of the way through
the novel things that are crucial to our understanding of the inherited
and paralyzing shame of this black family born into racist America. We
come to know Pecola’s father as a youth, and as a boy he is immensely
appealing. We come to understand how he could have done this to his
daughter, tearing apart his family. Crucial is a searing event in Cholly’s
early adolescence, a scene of shame so brutal it assumes the proportions of
humiliation, marking him for life. That it is linked by Morrison with an
altogether everyday occurrence of shame that has nothing to do with rac-
ism serves to underscore the overwhelmingly di√erent e√ects of various
kinds of shame. The two events are telescoped into a single and emo-
tionally charged day. Importantly it is the day of the funeral of his great-
aunt who had raised him from birth (his mother had abandoned him). At
this point Cholly couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old.
The first event will be familiar to all of us. It is momentary and harm-
less, a passing adolescent shame. It doesn’t have to do with right and
wrong, rather with competence. It is shame that from the vantage point of
adulthood would be described as an embarrassment, recounted when one
is older with sympathetic humor for oneself. In contrast, the second scene
of shame changes Cholly forever. It’s an experience from whose humiliat-
ing shadow he never escapes and never fully understands. Both scenes
serve as rites of passage—the first into adolescent male bonding (what
today we call peer pressure), the second into sexuality and racial violence
in America.
After his aunt’s funeral service Cholly, whom Morrison has presented
as a sensitive boy drawn to music and the protective company of adults,
finds himself attracted to the exotic world of his older cousins—in particu-
lar to a boy named Jake who initiates him into the teenage world of smok-

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 89

ing: ‘‘The fifteen-year-old Jake o√ered Cholly a rolled-up cigarette. Cholly
took it, but when he held the cigarette at arm’s length and stuck the tip of it
into the match flame, instead of putting it in his mouth and drawing on it,
they laughed at him. Shamefaced, he threw the cigarette down’’ (114). Here
shame has nothing to do with the moral register of right or wrong or with
one’s essential inferiority in relation to a standard unfairly imposed. In-
stead shame has to do with a lack of ability or knowledge exposed in the
presence of one’s social superiors. In relation to Cholly these boys are
older and more worldly than is he. This is a minor shame, a mere if
momentary painful embarrassment. Cholly immediately seeks to recover
his social balance, to reassert himself as an equal in their eyes. That he
does so easily is significant given what happens next. When Jake asks
Cholly ‘‘if he knew any girls,’’ the inexperienced Cholly replies, ‘‘Sure’’
(114). But in truth he’s scared when the girls respond to him.
Within a page, we find the young Cholly with a girl named Darlene in a
beckoning vineyard of wild grapes on the edge of a pine forest. Night has
fallen, and the moon has risen. It’s Darlene who encourages their inti-
macy and guides his body toward hers. Cholly at first takes their rough-
housing for child’s play. He is portrayed as holding feelings for Darlene
that are considerate and tender. Morrison, in other words, makes it abso-
lutely clear that her character Cholly is the kind of boy who wouldn’t do
anything against Darlene’s wishes or harm her in any way. Narrated from
his point of view, the scene is sweetly awkward. Then it turns brutal:
‘‘Their bodies began to make sense to him, and it was not as di≈cult as he
had thought it would be. . . . Just as he felt an explosion threaten, Darlene
froze and cried out. He thought he had hurt her, but when he looked at her
face, she was staring wildly at something over his shoulder. He jerked
around. There stood two white men. One with a spirit lamp, the other with
a flashlight’’ (116). Structurally this scene is similar to the scenario of
shame theorized by Sartre. It is dramaturgical. The ‘‘I’’ is surprised into
shame, caught in the act by another person who pronounces a verdict. The
economy is visual, underscored by the flashlight pointed by the white men
at their will. There is also a doubled-over scene of spectatorship: two men
watch him looking at her. But here the similarities end.
For Cholly wasn’t doing anything wrong. But he doesn’t challenge their
authority in any way, either physically or in his mind’s eye, as does Woolf ’s
retaliating writer doing research in the British Museum. As a young boy
he is ‘‘helpless.’’ As a young black boy held at gunpoint by white men he

90 Chapter Three
is defenseless in every respect. He can’t embody the moral agent of Sar-
tre’s Being and Nothingness. He doesn’t reassert himself as the equal of
these men, as he had earlier with the older boys. Worse, he turns the
obscene violence of these men against Darlene and not back against them
in self-defense and retaliation. The white men sadistically force Cholly to
continue—and he does. He’s compelled to see Darlene through their voy-
euristic eyes. In his eyes she’s reduced to a sexual object, degraded to a
body to be raped—even less, a body to be feared, a body no longer female
and alluring but abjectly animal. Just as is he. About Darlene we learn
little. She isn’t central to Morrison’s story. But as with Cholly at first, her
instinctive reaction is to hide her eyes as a way of shielding herself from
the shaming eyes of others. If she can’t see anything, then perhaps she
herself can’t be seen:

There was no place for Cholly’s eyes to go. They slid about furtively
searching for shelter, while his body remained paralyzed. The flashlight
man lifted his gun down from his shoulder, and Cholly heard the clop
of metal. He dropped back to his knees. Darlene had her head averted,
her eyes staring out of the lamplight into the surrounding darkness and
looking almost unconcerned, as though they had no part in the drama
taking place around them. With a violence born of total helplessness, he
pulled her dress up, lowered his trousers and underwear. . . .
Cholly, moving faster, looked at Darlene. He hated her. He almost
wished he could do it—hard, long, and painfully, he hated her so
much. The flashlight wormed its way into his guts and turned the sweet
taste of muscadine into rotten fetid bile. He stared at Darlene’s hands,
covering her face in the moon and lamplight. They looked like baby
claws. (117)

In this brutal scene the sequencing of emotions is not shame-guilt but

shame-rage or shame-hatred, sequences of emotions constitutive of vio-
lence. If for Woolf shame leads ultimately to an analysis of the reasons
underlying anger, in Morrison shame spirals into a cold hatred against the
woman who, as Morrison puts it, ‘‘bore witness to his failure, his impo-
tence’’ (119). Cholly can’t draw on his anger to help him understand the
situation. Cholly thrusts his anger, which hardens into hate, into her.∏
Moreover he nurtures his hatred, deliberately causing it to grow. I imagine
him replaying the event over and over in his mind even as he later avoids
having her see him. ‘‘Never did he once consider directing his hatred

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 91

toward the hunters,’’ Morrison writes. ‘‘Such an emotion would have de-
stroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black,
helpless’’ (119). Morrison takes care also to underscore that Cholly never
reveals his shame to anyone. He doesn’t acknowledge it, even to him-
self. He doesn’t speak it. He doesn’t confess it. He flees the town. He is
changed forever by what happened that day, stunted in some horrible way,
never able to piece the parts of his life together in a way that brings a
measure of understanding.
Why can’t he tell his story? In On Private Madness the psychoanalyst
André Green argues that the doubling of anxiety—of separation anxiety
and intrusion anxiety (a doubling that clearly characterizes the case of
Cholly: as an infant he was separated from his mother and his father, as a
youth he is assaulted by white men)—can take on torturing forms, block-
ing the formation of thought. As Green explains, ‘‘The invasion, the impo-
tence, the distress, all give rise to an internal panic which drives the subject
to exceed the limits of psychic space by various mechanisms: confusion—
which is in fact a dissemination and dilution of conflicting tensions; ca-
thartic action operative like a massive a√ect storm . . . or the overcathexis of
external perception which monopolizes all psychic attention’’ (208). The
intensity of this psychic confusion—an a√ect storm—explodes the chains
of a√ect—the structures that lend meaning to our experience. Out of this
terror cannot be generated a self-reflexive sequence of emotions. The
energy available to Cholly from this brutal shaming—indeed to call it
‘‘energy’’ seems wrong—is not transformative in Sedgwick’s terms. As he
grows older, he cannot look back on his younger self with a warm measure
of understanding and acceptance.
This will also be the fate of his daughter. She will not be able to tell
her story.

If in The Bluest Eye racial shame can yield explosive violence, it is also
present in the most mundane transactions of everyday life. This is no-
where clearer than in a scene early in the novel when Pecola, longing for
the blue eyes of white America, goes to the store to buy some candy. With
her three pennies she decides to buy nine Mary Janes, the penny candy
with the picture of a blonde, blue-eyed girl on its wrapper. But the de-
humanizing exchange with the store’s owner, Mr. Yacobowski (who him-
self has blue eyes), rattles her anticipation, confusing her and the sources

92 Chapter Three
of her happiness: ‘‘Slowly, like Indian summer moving imperceptibly to-
ward fall, he looks toward her. Somewhere between retina and object,
between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover. At some
fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the e√ort of
a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. How
can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of po-
tatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary,
his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss, see a little black
girl?’’ (41–42). Here Pecola’s not being seen—that is, not being acknowl-
edged as a member of a community—produces shame just as did Cholly’s
being seen. Paradoxically it comes to the same thing. Pecola and Cholly are
both invisible and hypervisible at the same time. It isn’t a matter of what
one does but what one is: black in white America. The eleven-year-old
Pecola senses the store owner’s distaste for her. She grasps that he doesn’t
want to touch her hand because she’s black. But she doesn’t understand
why she should feel shame. Her shame is to her ‘‘inexplicable’’ (43). In a
few paragraphs Morrison brilliantly traces the rapid sequence of Pecola’s
feelings upon leaving the store:

Outside, Pecola feels the inexplicable shame ebb.

Dandelions. A dart of a√ection leaps out from her to them. But they
do not look at her and do not send love back. She thinks, ‘‘They are ugly.
They are weeds.’’ Preoccupied with that revelation, she trips on the
sidewalk crack. Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and
like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame.
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and a
presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging. Her thoughts
fall back to Mr. Yacobowski’s eyes, his phlegmy voice. The anger will not
hold; the puppy is too easily surfeited. Its thirst too quickly quenched,
it sleeps. The shame wells up again, its muddy rivulets seeping into
her eyes. What to do before the tears come. She remembers the Mary
Janes. (43)

Inexplicable shame ebbs, replaced by anger. But it’s not anger at the store-
keeper. Rather it’s anger at herself for having tripped. It’s anger displaced
onto the dandelions, which she now brands as ugly. ‘‘Anger is better. There
is a sense of being in anger. A reality and a presence.’’ But the anger just as
rapidly subsides and shame again takes its place. What will forestall her
tears? Just as Cholly both internalizes the base contempt of the white

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 93

men and projects it on and into a black woman, so Pecola internalizes
the values of white America. She eats the Mary Janes. She swallows her
shame. It is a total confusion—that is to say, identification—of happiness
with shame. It is an instance of emotional pollution.π
Why can’t Pecola sustain the anger that gives her a sense of presence—
of life—even as the store owner denied it? Morrison suggests that she is
too young to recognize its source. Her own anger is like a ‘‘puppy.’’ It’s too
quickly satisfied and exhausted. But what of Cholly? He wasn’t much older
than Pecola is here when he was forced to turn his lovemaking into rape.
Morrison portrays him as cultivating his hatred, clinging to it as an acrid
animating force that serves to preempt his shame, e√acing it from his
consciousness. Anger turned to hatred thus serves him as an impene-
trable screen emotion for humiliation. Unlike Pecola’s anger, his hatred
doesn’t dissipate quickly. But that he subsists on his angry hatred over a
long period of time in no way implies that he is able to comprehend the
meaning of this all-determining traumatic event.
This situation opens up an entire series of fascinating questions. What
does it mean that one’s anger is ‘‘young’’? What is the relation between
one’s age and one’s ability to understand the social dynamics of one’s
emotions? At what age is one able to reflect on one’s emotions so as to
politicize them, as does the narrator of A Room of One’s Own? To what
extent does the duration of an emotion make a di√erence? As parents and
teachers of young children remark every day, their emotional life is intense
and their emotions are short-lived. On the one hand, Morrison’s story
suggests that it’s not because Pecola’s anger is too brief that she accepts
her position grounded in shame, but rather because her powers of analysis
aren’t su≈ciently developed. This is primarily a function of her age. But, it
will be objected, there are any number of children this age who seem to be
able to analyze with astonishing astuteness their anger, say, at a teacher or
a parent for unfair treatment. Thus the question to ask is how do gender,
race, and age intersect so as to blunt the cognitive power that emotions
might provide?

It is the racial structure of shame—shame that is traumatic and chronic—

in the world of Morrison’s The Bluest Eye that makes shame virtually
impossible to overcome.∫ Here the work of the feminist philosopher San-
dra Bartky is enormously helpful. In her essay ‘‘Shame and Gender’’ she

94 Chapter Three
o√ers an alternative model to that of Sartre, one based not on the shame
resulting from a discrete occurrence, as is his, but on what she calls,
following Heidegger, ‘‘a pervasive a√ective attunement, a mode of Being-
in-the-world’’ (97). For Bartky shame is not so much identifiable as a
particular emotion as it is virtually inherent in the way one responds to the
social world of everyday life as well as to dramatic events. It is an e√ect of
one’s subordination in society, a way of perceiving and being in the world
that is reinforced at every turn. Bartky’s understanding of the relation
between shame and gender in a male-dominated society thus echoes that
of Woolf. But her analysis of the phenomenology of the emotion of shame
is radically di√erent. Moreover Bartky writes as a philosopher, not as an
essayist. For Woolf the emotions of shame and anger make themselves
felt—they are literary emotions, narrative emotions—and thus are avail-
able to analysis. But Bartky calls attention to a pervasive practice of sham-
ing so omnipresent that it recedes into the hum of the background and
isn’t recognized as something su≈ciently dramatic to be considered a
threat. Unlike Woolf ’s narrator in A Room of One’s Own, women, Bartky
concludes, cannot so easily draw on their emotions as cognitive touch-
stones, in very part because shame, in her account, isn’t registered as an
identifiable and felt emotion. Rather shame is the condition in which many
women live, and as such it is virtually unremarked, unfelt, and unseen—as
debilitating as toxic levels of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere.
‘‘This shame is manifest in a pervasive sense of personal inadequacy
that,’’ Bartky writes, ‘‘like the shame of embodiment, is profoundly disem-
powering’’ (85). What is so discerning about Bartky’s analysis is this: she
insists that although what is consistently revealed is precisely one’s in-
feriority, we generally don’t understand or comprehend our situation. This
is the crux of the matter. As she puts it, ‘‘Paradoxically, what is disclosed
fails, in the typical case, to be understood’’ (97). Why is this so? Bartky
stresses that in such situations there is a disjunction between what one
feels and what one believes. Women may feel or sense that something
about themselves is inadequate, for example, without believing themselves
to be inadequate. The result is, Bartky concludes, ‘‘a confused and divided
consciousness’’ (94). This is key. As Bartky points out, the moral agent of
moral psychology and of moral philosophy is theorized as possessing
clarity of vision, as ‘‘lucid’’ (95).
Although Bartky doesn’t develop this point, central to an analysis of the
phenomenology of shame in terms of oppression is confusion itself. Con-

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 95

fusion, we recall, was explicitly named by the narrator of A Room of One’s
Own as one of the emotions she experienced while reading the words of
the disdainful—and totally contemptible—Professor von X. What Bartky
theorizes about the constitutive oppression of women can apply equally, if
not with greater force, to racial oppression. This helps us understand how
Morrison has presented the tragedy that Cholly and Pecola are destined to
live out. In a sense neither Cholly nor Pecola believe themselves to be
inadequate. Pecola, after all, believes that she has finally been granted her
wish for blue eyes. But at the same time both feel inadequate in the eyes of
white America.
Like a low-grade fever, this kind of confusion permeates everyday life in
the world of The Bluest Eye. In Cholly’s forced rape of Darlene and his
bewildering rape of his daughter, the cognitive confusion that character-
izes racism flares into full-blown psychic trauma. As the psychoanalyst
Christopher Bollas argues in Being a Character, echoing André Green’s
important insight that trauma severs the chains of a√ect by exploding the
possibility of a coherent narrative, ‘‘Psychic confusion is part of the full
e√ect of trauma because, unable to narrate the event in the first place, the
person now re-experiences isolation, this time brought on by the alone-
ness of mental confusion’’ (67). As a young teen, Cholly was forced to rape
a black woman. As a preteen, Pecola is raped by her father. Neither of them
can narrate these events and both remain tragically isolated. As the psy-
choanalyst Michael Lewis has also observed, shame disrupts ongoing ac-
tivity, resulting an inability to think clearly or to act clearly. In the scenes
I’ve invoked from The Bluest Eye the confusion entailed in shame is thus
not only emotional but cognitive as well. ‘‘Shame’’ and ‘‘mortification’’ are
given as synonyms for ‘‘confusion’’ in The Random House College Diction-
ary. ‘‘Bewilderment’’ is noted as one of its meanings. Confusion is unin-
telligibility, a lack of clarity and lucidity. Indeed confusion itself can be a
psychic defense against a clarity that is feared. As Jane Lazarre astutely
observes in Wet Earth and Dreams, her remarkable memoir of grief and
illness, her therapist taught her ‘‘that confusion and chaos themselves
could be a defense against clarity because of fear of pain or rage’’ (18).
If we combine this understanding of shame as psychic confusion—an
inability to narrate what has happened—with the altogether important
fact that Morrison underscores the young age at which her characters are
subjected to traumatic racist behavior, we can see why they are unable to
surmount their shame and remain locked in it. As Jaggar underscores in

96 Chapter Three
her essay ‘‘Love and Knowledge,’’ ‘‘When unconventional emotional re-
sponses are experienced by isolated individuals, those concerned may be
confused, unable to name their experience’’ (160). One of the stunning
achievements of The Bluest Eye is the way in which Morrison presents
shame as dramaturgical and traumatic, born of brutalizing violence, and
as chronic, dispositional, and pervasive in everyday life in this 1940s racist
American town. These particularly insidious and potent varieties of shame
can’t be transformed by the characters into an ethical and political reflec-
tion of either a dispassionate or passionate nature. At the heightened pitch
of the world of The Bluest Eye both the everyday shame and the traumatic
shame of racism result in a paralysis of analysis on the part of the charac-
ters who are isolated, without a community of their own.
With The Bluest Eye in mind, to what extent can we draw on Jaggar’s
model of the cognitive dimension of the emotions? Rather than Jaggar’s
model serving to illuminate the novel, I would say that on the contrary the
novel suggests the limits of her model. Jaggar o√ers three emotions—
anger, pride, and love—as examples of how the cognitive dimension of
emotions function. She does not o√er shame as an example. But in The
Bluest Eye shame doesn’t operate as a cognitive touchstone in the instances
to which I have referred. Jaggar underscores the epistemological privilege
associated with the emotions of the oppressed. But in The Bluest Eye ra-
cial shame can’t be transformed into knowledge. In The Bluest Eye racial
shame—whether traumatic or chronic—casts the characters into psychic
confusion, not cognition. With Pecola, shame isn’t converted into knowl-
edge but into depression figured as madness. With the young Cholly,
shame is converted into blind anger that hardens into a hatred against
someone who has even fewer defenses than he does.Ω In the narrative
world of The Bluest Eye shame doesn’t have a cognitive edge. The charac-
ters have no personal control. They exist as isolated individuals severed
from any possibility of a community of equals.

For me the final question is one that has haunted the critical reception of
Morrison’s work. Does The Bluest Eye o√er the possibility of change?∞≠
There are two answers to this question—no and yes. Within the action
of the story shame can’t be transformed into knowledge. To borrow the
phrase of the psychoanalyst Helen Lewis, shame is a ‘‘feeling trap.’’ Shame
remains shame or is disguised as something else; it is covered up by

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 97

another emotion or another emotion is substituted for it. Moreover shame
is recursive. It loops back upon itself. Shame is inherited, passed on from
one generation to another. Trauma is intergenerational. Within the world
of the novel there is no way out of shame’s enclosing circle. Here the
answer is definitively no.
But the answer is also yes. The Bluest Eye is not philosophy. It does not
present an argument. It dramatizes a cultural politics of the emotions,
presenting a novelistic world in which shame cannot be transformed into
knowledge. But the novel also functions aesthetically on the level of a
cultural poetics of the emotions. Morrison’s vision in The Bluest Eye is
intensely moral. In its final pages Morrison creates a literary mood, one
that mixes shame with grief in an elegiac mode. The final paragraph of the
novel shifts to the present. We’ve already learned that Pecola’s father—
with tragic irony Morrison names him Cholly Breedlove—has died. We’ve
learned that Pecola’s baby has died. We’ve learned that Pecola’s mother
continues to work for white families. But we’re not told what year it is or
even what decade it is. And this is precisely the point. It is time imme-
morial. Morrison’s conviction is that the black community failed its own
and that nothing could have been done to avoid such tragedy in white
America. As Morrison writes eloquently in the narrative voice of Claudia
who is now older, ‘‘It’s much, much, much too late’’ (160).
Yet ironically it is the very poignancy of the final pages of the novel that
o√ers hope for the future. This elegiac sense of an ending is paradoxically
generative of hope—of a vision of a more just world in a time to come.
Importantly these final pages are written from the perspective of an older
voice who at times assumes the burden of her shame, confessing it to us,
acknowledging it, understanding the unthinkable tragedy of all these bro-
ken lives—Pecola, Cholly, Darlene. Older now, Claudia understands that
she and her sister had failed Pecola—as inevitably they would have at that
age. ‘‘We tried to see her without looking at her, and never, never went
near,’’ Morrison writes in Claudia’s voice; ‘‘Not because she was absurd, or
repulsive, or because we were frightened, but because we had failed her’’
(158). Claudia is convinced she was at fault, and that the flowers—they
were marigolds—she had planted didn’t grow because she had planted the
seeds too deeply, too far from the sun and rain. And in fact everyone in the
novel does fail Pecola.
But there is a generative tension between what ideally should have been
done and what could never have been done. There is at work a politics of

98 Chapter Three
recognition that the fault was not their own. Here are the last lines of the
novel: ‘‘And now . . . I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply,
how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now
that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This
soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture,
certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we
acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course,
but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. At least on the edge of my town, among
the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it’s much, much, much too
late’’ (160). Claudia understands that there was nothing they could have
done. It is the very historical foundation of America that killed her people.
Thus within the action of the story itself racial shame—traumatic and
chronic—can’t be transformed into knowledge. It can’t be transcended.
Within The Bluest Eye the black characters feel shame in the land of white
America, a space they can’t escape. And yet the narrative voice of Mor-
rison’s Claudia grants a profound measure of understanding, one that is
complex and contradictory.
As readers who aren’t part of the drama, we are literary witnesses to that
shame. Here lies the possibility of the circulation of shame as literary expe-
rience. It is not that as readers we necessarily ‘‘identify’’ with the charac-
ters, although some of us might. It is not that we need to feel the specific
emotion of shame, although some of us might. Instead the elegiac mood of
the last pages—it is complex but not confused, and it conveys a deep sense
of perspective—creates a cognitive emotional space where shame might be
felt di√erently: as our collective failure in this country to live up to what
should be our ideals.∞∞ Thus at the heart of The Bluest Eye is the hope that
shame will be acknowledged and brought into a collective space. Ulti-
mately shame is recast as a potentially reflective, mature emotion.∞≤

3
Paradoxically the private experience of reading Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
can underwrite a sense of shame that is intensely moral, a shame associ-
ated with civic responsibility and thus dignity, a shame that carries the
possibility of a public sphere. Sedgwick theorizes the possibility of a coun-
terpublic created in part through the energy provided by shame. What can
we say of the mass-mediation of shame that is played out on the omnipres-
ent screens of televisual culture, often amplified beyond the bearable? As

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 99

many have argued, the domains of the private (the individual, the family)
and the public (the sphere of the citizen) have merged in a hypermediated
space—one that is anti-poetic, one where there is no possibility of mean-
ingful reparation or of civic deliberation. In this mainstream televisual
hyperspace the feeling of shame—as sensation, as intensity—is a valuable
commodity.
The sociologist Norbert Elias has argued that over the long arc of hu-
man history ‘‘the civilizing process’’ has been accompanied by ‘‘spurts’’
and ‘‘advances’’ in the ‘‘shame-threshold’’ (293). The increasing complex-
ity of society—the progressive specialization and di√erentiation of social
organization—has required increasing strictures on behavior that are codi-
fied as emotion rules. What was once not considered shameful behavior in
Elizabethan England (for example, the making of all kinds of bodily noises
at the table at court) would now be considered exceedingly embarrassing
or shameful in what we would call polite company. Thus Elias o√ers us,
much as does Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, a model of the
development of civilization as entailing a necessary and concomitant re-
pression. But where Freud emphasizes the development of a preemptive
psychological structure ruled by the internalized emotion of guilt, Elias
privileges the role of shame, that most social of emotions.
Freud’s analysis in Civilization and Its Discontents leads him to conclude
that at some limit condition the degree of repression exacted may be so
implacably oppressive that on the level of a society it will produce not
civilization but ‘‘neurosis’’ (SE 21: 144). With shame we have reached that
limit. The threshold of shame to which Elias refers has advanced to an
intolerable point where shameful behavior is being produced rather than
curtailed—it is exhibited on our cultural screens for everyone to see. Con-
sider the selling of the spectacle of shame we see at every turn today when
we glance at a tabloid, flip from one television channel to another, or surf
the Internet. Many people appear to be reveling in their own shame,
making as much money o√ it as they can in a market characterized by
active, even frenzied, trading. For where there are sellers there are also
buyers, the seekers of shame who in turn sell it to us. Others are brutally
trapped in the media.
In this regard I point to three examples from the mid-1990s when
it seems to me that the selling of shame in the mainstream media took o√.∞≥
One is tawdry—a woman making her living getting gigs for people with
shameful stories. Two are grievously tragic—the lives of individuals

100 Chapter Three

crushed in the glare of the media, in particular television, whose voracious
appetite for content results in the continual replaying of the same images.
The repetition of these images, a stultifying inversion of the renewing
repetition of ritual, is itself shameful, a form of death.
First, consider the case of the ‘‘talent agent’’ who scouts for shame. I’m
thinking of Sherri Spillane (she clearly trades on the name of her ex-
husband Micky Spillane), whose work in the 1990s consisted of marketing
people like Tonya Harding, Joey Buttafuoco, Heidi Fleiss, and John Wayne
Bobbitt by getting them gigs on talk shows and pushing their workout
videos. In her position at the Ruth Webb Talent Agency, Spillane estab-
lished a scandal division. Where did Spillane do much of her sleuthing for
shame? She spent hours reading publications such as the National En-
quirer, looking for people whose shame could be sold up a notch or two.
And where did I find out about Spillane? In a 1995 issue of the Inter-
national Herald Tribune, a highbrow newspaper then jointly published by
the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Herald devoted a full half-
page to Spillane’s business, featuring a large Hollywoodish photo of Spil-
lane and Ruth Webb lounging on a brass bed, cuddling their cats and
stu√ed animals. The tone of the article is light and bemused, and it con-
cludes with this absurd—and dismaying—possibility: ‘‘Spillane mentions
another promising performer, Bakker.’’ She is referring, of course, to
Tammy Faye Bakker. ‘‘ ‘We have ‘‘Hello Dolly’’ in mind for her,’ she said.’’∞∂
(Tammy Faye Bakker was then Tammy Faye Messner. She died of cancer in
the summer of 2007, and I confess to being uncomfortable—a feeling akin
to shame—mentioning her in this light after her death.)
As we see so clearly in this example, the commercialization of shame—
the retailing of the emotions—has penetrated all levels of mass culture,
moving from low to high, as though shame were contagious (as in fact
some theorists of shame have pointed out). Here, however, the familiar
dynamics of shame are reversed. The feeling of shame is not a touchstone
to evaluate one’s actions, as in Sartre’s model. Nor, as with Morrison’s
Darlene, does one hide from the view of others even though having been
brutally shamed is unjust. In this version of shame, those who should be
ashamed don’t want to avoid the eye of the public. They desire to be seen.
Turned into commodities on the mass culture market, they hope to profit
by it in turn, making money o√ their shame, creating a spin to their past,
in the process transforming their shame into a peculiar form of pride by
entering the visual circuit of celebrity where actions carry less weight than

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 101

one’s image. Here shame is not so much acknowledged or confessed, as
the communication scholars Thomas Sche√ and Suzanne Retzinger insist
it must be in order for it to be understood and for escalating violence to be
avoided. Rather it is both paraded and willfully ignored at the same time.
In the process do they cast o√ their shame and cast it onto those who look
at them? Are those who are looking at them taking shameful pleasure in
the spectacle? Or can we even say that the spectators are ashamed of
themselves? This shame (so unlike the queer shame and pride theorized
by Sedgwick), even as it is paraded, exhibited, and ostentatiously per-
formed as pride, seems to have altogether vanished, leaving only a crass
and sordid taste in its wake. Here shame is reduced to what Jean Bau-
drillard has called fascination, the numbing of both reflection and emo-
tion in inert sensation. Perhaps shame has even crumbled into boredom.
For a second example, consider the phenomenon of tv talk shows
staging shame. One of the prime tactics of trash tv and hate tv is the
ambush, the entrapment of people in what they consider to be shameful
situations that masquerade as entertainment. In one extreme instance,
what was presumably intended as a fleeting and harmless embarrassment
resulted instead in humiliation, a shame so painful that it led to the mur-
der of one man and the shattering of the life of another man, who has
since been sentenced to prison. A shame so intense that it was traumatic.
Here trauma resulted from the mass-mediated production of shame. That
shame in turn ignited murder. A twenty-four-year-old man—Jonathan
Schmitz—agreed to participate in March 1995 in a segment on secret
admirers on The Jenny Jones Show. It was taped in front of a studio au-
dience and slated to be aired nationally shortly afterward. On the show
Schmitz was stunned to learn that the person who was secretly attracted to
him was not a woman but a man, Scott Amedure, who revealed he had
sexual fantasies about Schmitz involving whipped cream, strawberries,
and champagne. Schmitz later confessed that he was ‘‘humiliated and
angered.’’∞∑
Schmitz’s humiliation was played out in front of a live audience to
entertainment tv and was scheduled to be shown later to millions of
viewers. Like Sartre’s ‘‘I,’’ Schmitz was surprised into shame. The specta-
tors to his shame were as much unseen as seen. But Schmitz hadn’t done
anything wrong. Three days after the taping of the show he discovered a
romantic note from his no-longer secret admirer. He bought a shotgun
and drove to Amedure’s home. Schmitz shot Amedure twice, killing him

102 Chapter Three

instantly. Schmitz was, he reported to a sheri√, ‘‘embarrassed, humiliated
—that he had handled it as well as he could on national television because
he didn’t want to make a scene,’’ but his experience, he told one of the
police moments after the shooting, had ‘‘eaten away’’ at him.∞∏ Much as
Morrison’s Cholly turns his humiliation at the hands of white men into the
rape of Darlene, a person even more helpless than himself, Schmitz did
not confront the vast system of the televisual mass media. How could he
have? Instead he tragically turned his shame into aggression against a gay
male. His shame and the resulting anger, no doubt rage, could not be
turned into knowledge. In such a case we can surmise that shame, turning
to rage, is the precipitate of trauma. In such a case, a√ect blocks thought.
In such a case what is called an a√ect storm leads to violence. In such a
case there was not a context for a self-reflexive sequencing of the emotions.
Jonathan Schmitz was sentenced in 1996 to twenty-five to fifty years in
prison for the second-degree murder of Scott Amedure. That conviction
was overturned in 1998, and a new trial was ordered. On 15 September
1999, Schmitz again was sentenced to twenty-five to fifty years in prison.
The tape was never aired on national television.
Predictably, those responsible for the show declared neither wrong-
doing nor liability. But the family of Amedure filed a civil suit against
Telepictures Productions and Warner Brothers Television Distribution,
the syndicator of The Jenny Jones Show. It was argued that the show set the
stage for the murder of their son. In 1999 the show was found negligent,
and the family was awarded twenty-five million dollars.
For a third example, consider the case of Richard Jewell, the man who
overnight was mistakenly turned from a hero into a suspect in the 1996
Olympic Games bombing. The July 1996 bombing in Atlanta’s Centennial
Olympic Park killed two people and injured over one hundred others. At
first praised in the media as a hero, Jewell, a security guard at the Olym-
pics, almost instantly became a suspect in the crime. He was dogged by
fbi agents for months and only later was he revealed to be innocent. Louis
Freeh, the director of the fbi, admitted in 1997 that in the eighty-eight
days that Jewell was subjected to federal scrutiny his constitutional rights
were violated. Jewell was also, of course, relentlessly pursued by the press.
His purported shame was made public—over and over and over again.
Broadcast time and again, the televisual image of his exposure froze
shame into a virtually timeless aftere√ect, one that produced an aftera√ect
(we speak in terms of cause and e√ect; we should also think in terms of

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 103

cause and a√ect).∞π Could we not conclude that a situation such as this, the
constant replaying of one’s image on tv and the incessant repetition of the
story on the radio and in the newspapers and news magazines, mimics the
psychological mechanism of debilitating and ultimately traumatic shame?
That the continual coverage produces traumatic shame by amplifying it
and blowing it up in public—by creating shame where there was none? We
will often endlessly rehearse a shameful scene in our imagination. Analo-
gously, televisual culture, with its proliferating news and entertainment
shows, replays over and over and over again scenes that not only present
and represent feelings, but also produce them. Richard Jewell was sought
out by the media. Images of Jewell, first imagined as a hero and then as a
criminal, produced scenes of shame. In such an instance as this, shame, as
well as guilt, is sold to the public. Thus here the emotions that are sold to
us are better understood as intensities. The retailing of these feelings in
crudely packaged and promoted form, so often at the expense of an indi-
vidual—whether it is in the tabloids, in the print of highbrow culture, or on
daytime, prime-time, and late-night tv, or on the Internet—is part and
parcel of our market economy.
This phenomenon is shameless and shameful. What can we do? We
can understand it. We can refuse to participate in it as a reader or as a
spectator. We can o√er our judgments publicly, as did Richard Jewell when
he testified before the Crime Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Com-
mittee in Washington in July 1997.∞∫ And as in the tragic case of the killing
of Amedure, our courts can o√er judgments as well.

I return to André Green who theorizes the relation between a√ect and
meaning, or knowledge, in terms of the binding of a√ect into chains. I call
them narrative chains. On the one hand, Green writes, there is ‘‘a√ect with
a semantic function as an element in the chain of signifiers’’; on the other
hand, there is ‘‘a√ect overflowing the concatenation and spreading as it
breaks the links in a chain’’ (208). In The Bluest Eye Cholly and Pecola can’t
narrate the horrific things that happen to them, and this in itself is telling.
For both Cholly and Pecola the chain of a√ect explodes. The breaking of
the chain is itself constituent of traumatic a√ect that results in paralysis or
in compulsive activity, or both. But if racial shame in The Bluest Eye is
marked by the inability of the characters to narrate what has happened to
them, in televisual culture it would seem that traumatic shame is charac-

104 Chapter Three

terized by the incessant and obsessive narration of stories (it hardly mat-
ters of whom) by the media itself. There is not a lack of meaningful
narration but an excess of meaningless narration. In such cases shame
doesn’t carry the transformational charge of a ‘‘free radical,’’ in Sedgwick’s
term, but rather is the sign of a devastating debasement of the social bond.

4
Basic to the models of shame I’ve considered in this chapter is a visual
structure (explicit or implicit) in which one person who embodies the
values of dominant culture (these may be salutary values, they may be
prejudicial values) judges the actions or very being of another person as
shameful. There is a subject who judges and there is an object who is
judged. We saw this in the scenarios presented by Sartre and Woolf and in
the narrative world of The Bluest Eye. This implicit structure is also the
ground for the analysis of shame for Eve Sedgwick and Sandra Bartky.
Sedgwick urges the boldly casting o√ of the stigma of shame in a flourish
of pride. Bartky encourages us to recognize shame where it seems invis-
ible, that is, where it does not register as feeling. But in the case of the
mass-mediated shame, it is not so much one person judging another that
is at stake as it is the weight of an entire apparatus shifting the ground of
value. People are vulnerable to being trapped in its compulsive matrix with
its twenty-four-hour ‘‘news’’ cycle, and spectators are placed in the shame-
ful position of enjoying the abjection of others.
But there are also situations where shame is mutual, where the struc-
ture involves everyone in shame, where the distinction between subject
and object is voided, and where shame is a deeply moral response. There
are situations where shame, mutually acknowledged, forges a social bond.
I conclude by briefly reflecting on two such cases.
Consider this passage from Primo Levi’s The Truce, his account of the
days following his liberation from Auschwitz where he had been interned
for almost a year during the Second World War. The book, which has been
described by Paul Bailey as ‘‘light’’ and ‘‘written in a careful, weighted and
serenely beautiful prose,’’ opens with the arrival on 27 January 1945, of
four Russians at the concentration camp that has been hastily abandoned
by the Germans.∞Ω Along with another man, Levi, a twenty-five-year-old
Italian chemist, was in the process of taking the body of one of the men in
their group to the common grave when he saw the Russians approach:

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 105

 They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not
only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips
and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew
so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time
we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans
did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime; the
feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been
introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his
will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have
availed in defense. (188)

This ‘‘confused restraint,’’ a confusion similar to but so unlike the confu-

sion I discussed earlier, is the shame of being a witness to a crime so
aberrant and on so enormous a scale as to be unthinkable, a shame in
which one virtually dies, unable to have done anything to have prevented
the unthinkable. This is a mutual shame each in front of the other that
brings a knowledge unrelieved by knowledge, a paralysis that is not insen-
sibility but its opposite—one where the sharp certainty of moral outrage is
diminished for those moments to, in Levi’s words, ‘‘moral fatigue’’ (189).
As Levi writes, ‘‘The scars of the outrage would remain within us for ever,
and in the memories of those who saw it.’’ Of this abject shame, he says,
‘‘It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it’’ (188).
I want to conclude, however, on another note—one of a tempered hope.
I close this chapter by referring to an important essay by the feminist
Berenice Fisher. It has long inspired me. Published in the mid-1980s, it
remains relevant today. In it Fisher takes up guilt and shame in the wom-
en’s movement, redescribing shame as collective, as mutual, as an emo-
tion that can be shared by a group of women.
As I discussed in chapter 1, Freud theorizes guilt as an emotion that
strikes with preemptive force, thereby inhibiting us from destructive ac-
tion. Within the women’s movement liberal guilt—the guilty feelings of
white women in relation to women of color—has also been associated with
a lack of action, indeed paralysis. As the literary critic Julie Ellison wrote at
the end of the 1990s, ‘‘Liberal guilt is about race, and it always was. ‘White
guilt’ and ‘liberal guilt’ emerged as synonymous terms during the Civil
Rights movement. The term designates a position of wishful insu≈ciency
relative to the genuine radical’’ (171). In contrast to Freud, for white women
it is precisely the lack of action, or paucity of action, that is the source of

106 Chapter Three

guilt, with any action necessarily always insu≈cient to its purpose. But by
the 1990s the force of guilt had devolved. As Ellison makes supremely
clear, in the 1990s liberal guilt was linked above all with the emotion of
embarrassment (the word ‘‘embarrassment’’ rings throughout her chapter
on liberal guilt). Indeed I would say that in academic circles what I will call
liberal embarrassment in large part replaced liberal guilt. Embarrassment
is a weak emotion. It is not a political emotion at all. It is not possible to
forge a strong community—imagined or real—committed to social justice
based on embarrassment.
This is why Fisher’s essay continues to hold a critical lesson for us.
Fisher puts shame into the service of creating a social bond. Fisher re-
defines shame by carefully separating guilt from it and by encouraging
feminists to recast their goals in their image, making shame their own.
She understands shame ‘‘not as a mark of our inadequacy but as a sign of
our commitment to act, as a mark of the tension between the present and
the future, as a touchstone for understanding what we expect to achieve
and how’’ (118). If her essay is inspirational, it also is cast in a sober tone
mindful of the a√ective consequences of failure.
Fisher’s purpose is to help us find a way to put our feelings of inevitable
failure in relation to our goals and the women’s movement to good and
thoughtful use rather than to allow them to divide us from each other and
to disable us in terms of action. Thus in the context of her essay it is guilt,
not shame, that is associated with inaction. Importantly, given Bartky’s
analysis of women’s dispositional shame as stemming from women’s sub-
ordination in the world, Fisher proposes to shift shame out of the context
of male-dominated society at large and into the context of the women’s
movement itself. She refuses, in other words, to accept the dominant
codes or standards of society at large as the measures by which one would
evaluate one’s actions within the movement. What is so important in her
account is that these ideals are not imposed but are chosen by ourselves.
Fisher associates the feeling of shame with the desire to hide that has
been so often remarked by theorists of shame. But she hopes that this
impulse will be resisted, and she refers us to the work of the psychoanalyst
Helen Merrell Lynd who over fifty years ago devoted a book to shame in
which she argued that if shame is faced fully it ‘‘may become not primarily
something to be covered, but a positive experience of revelation’’ (20). At
the heart of Fisher’s essay is the wish that our shame will be acknowledged
and brought into public discourse, not in the mode of psychologized in-

Racial Shame, Mass-Mediated Shame, Mutual Shame 107

feriority but in the mode of carefully assessing our ability to live up to our
ideals. She introduces the notion of collective moral agency into the dis-
cussion of shame and yet, unlike Sartre’s account in Being and Nothingness,
she casts shame in relation to an ideal rather than to a wrongdoing. At the
same time she is also attuned, sensitively so, to the limitations of what can
be achieved given the many contradictions that we daily live out. She
proposes that shame be worn di√erently—in public, with dignity, and
together.
In returning to Fisher’s essay, I know that it is virtually anachronistic to
speak today of a woman’s movement, much less the women’s movement.
But as I move to my next chapter on liberal compassion and compassion-
ate conservatism, I do not want to shrink from the word ‘‘liberal’’ in the
face of the brutal inequities we see in the United States today and around
the globe. I want to retain a sense of shame—a liberal shame—for the
failure of our country to live up to ideals of social justice, and I am not
embarrassed to say so.

108 Chapter Three

 four

LIBERAL COMPASSION,
C O M P A S S I O N AT E C O N S E R V AT I S M

Compassion, like so many of our other complex emotions, has a

heady political life. Invoking compassion is an important means of
trying to direct social, political, and economic resources in one’s
direction (indeed, compassion is one of those resources).
—Elizabeth Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow

My father’s compassion and common sense as a lawmaker are my

inspiration each time I step on the Senate floor.
And that’s why I’m so alarmed, outraged, and saddened by the
damage the Bush administration is doing to our nation in the name
of their self-proclaimed ‘‘compassionate conservatism.’’
You have to ask, is it compassionate to give massive, budget-
busting tax cuts to the wealthy while working families struggle with
low wages and rising gas prices?
—Maria Cantwell, U.S. Senator (Democrat, Washington)

Now this has always perplexed me: why isn’t it a good thing, a
praiseworthy thing, to have a bleeding heart?
—Sandra Bartky, ‘‘In Defense of Guilt’’

During the second presidential debate of the 1992 election the three
candidates—George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot—were asked by
a woman in the studio audience in Richmond, Virginia, how their own
lives had been a√ected by the national debt. It was a moment that was to
prove decisive. President George Bush, perplexed and nonplussed, liter-
ally didn’t understand the question. ‘‘I’m not sure I get it,’’ he said. ‘‘Help
me with the question and I’ll try to answer.’’∞ Opening his arms, Clin-
ton moved toward the audience and responded that he personally knew
people in Arkansas who were su√ering because they had lost their jobs.
The clear implication was that he acutely felt their pain and Bush did not.
What was at stake was the presidential politics of empathy. The rest is
history.≤
Two weeks later Bush, in criticizing Clinton’s plan to establish an o≈ce
devoted to aids in Washington, insisted, ‘‘We need more compassion in
our hometowns, more education, more caring.’’≥ If in fact there was a
concerted e√ort on the part of the Bush campaign to establish compassion
as a strong theme in 1992, it failed. But as we all know, eight years later the
rhetoric of empathy uncannily returned, surfacing in George W. Bush’s
campaign against Al Gore. What the elder George Bush fumbled, the son
repossessed. Under the well-calculated banner of compassionate conser-
vatism, the Republicans successfully appropriated the rhetoric of feeling
that had been so powerfully associated with the Democrats. Indeed the
presidential race of 2000 at times seemed marked by a competition be-
tween Al Gore and George W. Bush in terms of who could lay claim to
being the most compassionate. Feeling someone’s pain. Compassionate
conservatism. These presidential campaign slogans are testimony to the
pivotal power of a national discourse of empathy, one on which the politi-
cal fortunes of George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush in great
part turned.∂
How do we understand the uses of compassion during the George W.
Bush years? How do appeals to sentiment—specifically to compassion—
work? What are the limits of compassion? How do liberal and conservative
narratives of compassion di√er? In this chapter I thread my way through
some of the debates about the political e√ectiveness of compassion by
focusing on the work of scholars of sentiment published between the late
1980s and the late 1990s—the legal scholar Lynne Henderson, the phi-
losophers Martha Nussbaum and Elizabeth Spelman, and the literary and
cultural studies scholar Lauren Berlant. Taken together, these writers can
be said to present the liberal narrative of compassion; all of their work in-
cludes discussions of race, notably in reference to the experience of Afri-
can Americans (although Nussbaum less than the others). I also consider
statements about compassion made by Republicans, including George W.
Bush as well as Marvin Olasky, the author of Compassionate Conservatism,
and Joseph Jacobs, the author of The Compassionate Conservative. Ulti-
mately I conclude that the politically astute appropriation of the discourse
of compassion by the George W. Bush presidential campaign in 2000 was
in part made possible by the convergence of two distinct—and usually
contradictory—trends in the way emotions are experienced and performed
in contemporary culture. On the one hand, we have witnessed a flattening
of the psychological emotions to intensities. On the other hand, we are wit-
nessing the emergence of the sensitive man, the development of the man
of feeling. His emotional portfolio includes sympathy, a sentiment that is
becoming a new form of emotional correctness in the political sphere.
As I suggested in the introduction, we’re living in a cultural moment in
which a new economy of the emotions is emerging. Once relatively stable,

110 Chapter Four

discourses of the emotions are now circulating at a rapid rate. If in the
1950s in the United States the emotions were distributed in the white
middle class according to gender in conventional or stereotypical ways,
this situation has radically changed. Generally speaking, we can say that in
the 1950s the expression of grief was proscribed in men and the expres-
sion of anger in women. But today cultural scripts for the emotions are
more flexible or mixed. The presidential campaigns of 1992 and 2000 are
perfect cases in point. If conventional wisdom tells us that women are
more empathetic than men, our cultural moment requires that our male
leaders be both strong and sensitive, thus allowing them to play both
conventional gender parts simultaneously. Or it might be more accurate to
say that our cultural moment requires that they display or perform sen-
sitivity. Bush’s tearful emotions were on display, for example, well into his
first term as president. When he visited Iraq in November 2003 it was
observed that a tear slipped down his cheek when he was greeted enthusi-
astically by the troops in Baghdad. As the New York Times reporter Eliza-
beth Bumiller wrote, ‘‘The tear added drama to an already theatrical trip,
but the fact is, Mr. Bush cries all the time. He may look like a manly man in
his cowboy boots and pickup truck, but he wears his emotions on his
oxford cloth sleeve. The president, a self-proclaimed compassionate con-
servative, has helped make it safe for men to cry in the open.’’∑ If our male
leaders don’t perform sensitivity, our media-dominated culture—compress-
ing story into slogan—requires that they at least deploy the rhetoric of
sensitivity. The slogan ‘‘compassionate conservatism’’ trades on the rheto-
ric of feeling even as it is curiously empty of it. ‘‘Compassionate conserva-
tism’’ is an oxymoron.
It was widely remarked that President George W. Bush’s inaugural
speech of 20 January 2001, was long on the rhetoric of compassion and
short on the principles of conservatism. But in terms of action, the con-
verse has been the definite case in the Bush administration.∏ The mas-
culinization of public sentiment by Republicans serves as a screen for the
privatization of the state—for the divestiture of the federal government of
responsibility for many of our nation’s citizens. The phrase ‘‘compassion-
ate conservatism’’ is also code for the federal turn to faith-based organiza-
tions to undertake what could be called private spiritual and social work
with public dollars.π There is a canny historical logic to this. In the United
States there is a long tradition of the association of the private sphere with
the feminine, with sentiment, and with religion. I am thinking in particu-

Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 111

lar of the nineteenth century when what has been called the culture of
sentiment stretched roughly from 1830 to 1870.∫ That this period saw the
publication of the most famous instance of the fictional sentimental narra-
tive would seem to be no accident. Indeed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly is the narrative to which scholars of
sentiment in literary and cultural studies inevitably return. In the United
States it is the ur-text of the liberal narrative of compassion.
Published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the
first book in the United States to sell over a million copies. Praised by the
literary critic Jane Tompkins in her own influential Sensational Designs as a
potent cultural force in the abolition of slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been
widely credited with accomplishing, in Tompkins’s phrase, important cul-
tural work.Ω In Uncle Tom’s Cabin the way of justice—I use the term with
its religious overtones advisedly—is that of compassion. The nineteenth-
century reader is prompted to identify empathetically with a su√ering
character (generally through the medium of another character), and this
response is read as an experience in moral pedagogy. A spontaneous burst
of feeling leads to a change of heart; the emotions and morality are linked.
Consider this small scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In a chapter entitled
‘‘The Little Evangelist,’’ the tender-hearted little Eva, herself soon to die,
takes pity on Topsy, the unruly slave girl who doesn’t believe in God and is
driving everyone in the St. Clare household to distraction: ‘‘ ‘O, Topsy, poor
child, I love you!’ said Eva, with a sudden burst of feeling, and laying her
little thin, white hand on Topsy’s shoulder; ‘I love you, because you haven’t
had any father, or mother, or friends;—because you’ve been a poor, abused
child! I love you, and I want you to be good’ ’’ (409). The tears in Eva’s eyes
beget tears in Topsy. Compassion inspires conversion. As Stowe writes,
‘‘The round, keen eyes of the black child were overcast with tears;—large,
bright drops rolled heavily down, one by one, and fell on the little white
hand. Yes, in that moment, a ray of real belief, a ray of heavenly love, had
penetrated the darkness of her heathen soul’’ (409–10). Salvation comes
through love, here motherly love. Eva touches the abused Topsy, liter-
ally and emotionally. The drama has religious overtones; the laying on of
hands has healing power. Topsy is granted faith. She also, as we would say
today, acquires self-esteem. Thus key to the liberal narrative of compassion
is a scene of personal su√ering and pain. Also key to the liberal narrative of
compassion is a witness—here the character of Eva and, further, the reader.
Through the medium of Eva, the reader is called on to feel Topsy’s pain, to

112 Chapter Four

understand her su√ering, and to resolve to act like Eva, thus comprehend-
ing the injustice that is slavery.∞≠

1
Lynne Henderson, Martha Nussbaum, Elizabeth Spelman, and Lauren
Berlant can be seen as the heirs to this tradition of liberal compassion.
Their work attests to the high degree of interest today in the emotion of
compassion, which makes its appearance under di√erent names as well—
empathy, pity, sympathy. These four scholars, coming from di√erent disci-
plines, interested in the cultural politics of the emotions, stress the impor-
tance of personal narratives of su√ering—of stories—in eliciting compas-
sion. The kinds of texts—primarily legal and literary—that they take up as
paradigmatic are di√erent, and their positions di√er as well. For the most
part they aren’t in dialogue with each other, and thus one of my purposes
in gathering them together is to point out their similarities and, as such,
the important di√erence between the liberal narrative of compassion and
the conservative narrative of compassion. I should also point out that, for
the most part, studies of the sentimental and studies of trauma are not in
dialogue with one another. Perhaps this is because, as Philip Fisher points
out in his essay ‘‘Democratic Social Space,’’ ‘‘one of the key sentimental
assumptions [is] that su√ering does not brutalize, nor does it silence its
victims or lead them to save themselves by repressing what they have
undergone’’ (100). Trauma, on the other hand, as we saw in the last chap-
ter, is conceived of precisely as a brutalizing experience. As Cathy Caruth
defines it, trauma exists ‘‘solely in the structure of the experience or recep-
tion: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only
belatedly in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it’’ (5). As we
saw in the last chapter, Cholly and Pecola were taken hostage by their
traumatic experiences of shame, never to be released. Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Topsy, on the other hand, a character in a nineteenth-century
sentimental novel, is redeemed by the compassion of a white child.
Both Henderson and Nussbaum make the case for compassion (or
empathy) with conviction in ways that a scholar of cultural studies might
find pre-ideological and naive. Spelman and Berlant o√er a more critical
view of the uncertain relation between feeling and action, or the limits of
liberal compassion. In the space of this chapter I’m not able to do justice to
the arguments of these four scholars, strong and subtle as they are. Indeed

Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 113

my primary intention is to underscore the common ground among them,
not to challenge or critique each of their positions at length. Although I do
o√er commentary, it seems to me that each of them is quite right in many
respects. What concerns me, however, as I demonstrate below, is that the
critique of the liberal narrative of compassion was appropriated by com-
passionate conservatives for their own use during the Bush years.

Lynne Henderson’s purpose in her wide-ranging essay ‘‘Legality and Em-

pathy’’ is to persuade us that empathy should be cultivated by judges as a
moral capacity.∞∞ One of her main points is that there is an unwelcome
tendency in legal circles to abstract the problems of individuals to the point
of denying them altogether. Thus legal decisions frequently have nothing
to do with a person’s experience, which is often denied legitimacy and
recognition. For Henderson empathy is precisely a mode of understand-
ing that includes both emotion and cognition and therefore can reveal
moral problems occluded by a reductionist legal rationality. ‘‘Empathy,’’
she writes, ‘‘is the foundational phenomenon for intersubjectivity, which
is not absorption by the other, but rather simply the relationship of self to
other, individual to community’’ (1584). For Henderson sympathetic iden-
tification is the foundation of ethical experience. How does this identifica-
tion take place in the courtroom? How is empathy fostered in judges?
Henderson’s answer is that what elicits empathy in the courtroom is a
narrative that conveys the texture of emotional experience. Drawing on
four important U.S. Supreme Court cases—Brown v. Board of Education I
(1954), Shapiro v. Thompson (1969), Roe v. Wade (1973), and Bowers v.
Hardwick (1986)—Henderson argues that the decisions in these four cases
turned on the presence (or absence) of empathetic narratives in oral argu-
ment and on the understanding of these narratives (or the egregious lack
of it) on the part of the judges. ‘‘The argumentative steps taken to convey
human situations to a judge,’’ she explains, ‘‘might be described as creat-
ing a√ective understanding by use of a narrative that includes emotion
and description (‘thick’ description, if you will) of a human situation cre-
ated by, resulting from, or ignored by legal structures, and consciously
placing that narrative within a legal framework’’ (1592).
My principal point here is that these four cases are all characterized by
narratives of su√ering: in Brown v. Board of Education by the su√ering of
African Americans who were legally barred from attending schools with

114 Chapter Four

whites, in Shapiro v. Thompson by the su√ering of the poor who were
denied welfare, in Roe v. Wade by the su√ering of pregnant women who
were denied access to abortion, and in Bowers v. Hardwick by the su√ering
of gay men who were persecuted for their sexual practices. Of these four
cases I single out two.
Brown v. Board of Education I, a landmark class-action suit that deals
with school segregation, was brought by African American parents in
Topeka, Kansas, on behalf of their school-age children, claiming that their
rights were being violated under the 14th amendment to the U.S. Consti-
tution which states that no one can be discriminated against on the basis of
race. (Brown v. Board of Education was in fact a series of five cases, with the
other four filed in South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington,
D.C.; it was sponsored by the naacp whose chief counsel, Thurgood
Marshall, argued the case.) A half a century earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson
(1896), the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld segregation on the basis of
race when it ruled that separate facilities for black and whites, if deemed
equal, were constitutional. The basic argument for the appellants in Brown
v. Board of Education was that even if educational facilities were found to
have no material di√erences, the policy of segregation undermined the
education of black students because the very separation of races implies
the inferiority of African Americans and a sense of inferiority a√ects the
motivation of a child. Thus e√ects of segregation couldn’t be separated
from the quality of education.
Henderson argues that in Brown v. Board of Education it was the evoca-
tion of African American su√ering that ultimately persuaded the hearts
and minds of the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to question the
morality—and thus the legality—of segregation. The word ‘‘pain’’ rings
throughout her discussion. Brown v. Board of Education, she writes, ‘‘was
remarkable, and it remains so, in large part because it is a human opinion
responding to the pain inflicted on outsiders by the law’’ (1594). She re-
gards the opinion of the Court as conveying the crucial ‘‘recognition of
human experience and pain—of feeling’’ (1594). Thurgood Marshall’s ar-
guments before the Court, she notes, relied repeatedly on ‘‘the narrative of
the painful experience of being black in American society’’ (1596). Empa-
thy for Henderson has three dimensions: first, feeling the emotion of
another; second, understanding the experience of that person; and third,
the specific feeling of sympathy or compassion for a person that ‘‘can lead
to action in order to help or alleviate the pain of another’’ (1582). In the case

Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 115

of Brown, all three were present: ‘‘Feeling the distress of the blacks, under-
standing the painful situation created by segregation, and responding to
the cry of pain by action’’ (1607). Here the moral triumph is that ‘‘legality
in its many forms clashed with empathy, and empathy ultimately trans-
formed legality’’ (1594).
But when I turned to read Thurgood Marshall’s oral arguments myself,
I was at first puzzled. (I should confess my initial ignorance with the genre
of oral argumentation; the format is question and answer and the time
allotted is short, leaving precious little room for amplification through the
telling of stories.) I didn’t find what I had expected to find, given Hender-
son’s description. The language struck me as legalistic and emotionally
barren if not completely flat. In testifying to the harm done to African
Americans by the segregation of schools, the briefs were too overwhelm-
ing, I thought, to ignore or dismiss. When I returned again to Marshall’s
oral arguments I saw more subtlety, even canniness, in his narrative tac-
tics, which consisted in great part of digressions and asides.
I confine myself to a single example requiring us to imagine the drama
in black and white that took place in the courtroom. All nine justices on
the Supreme Court were white men while Marshall was an African Ameri-
can lawyer. As a black man facing a row of white male justices, he alone
could palpably make blackness present in the courtroom. At one point
Marshall o√ered a shrewd hypothetical example of the su√ering entailed
by segregation when in digressing (that is his word) he asked the court to
imagine this: if the 1950 African American Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche
were to move to South Carolina, he wouldn’t be able to send his children to
a white school. (A political scientist with a doctorate from Harvard and a
distinguished diplomat, Ralph Bunche was the first person of color in the
world to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.) Thus in addition to race,
evoked here are class and parenthood. The potential su√ering of a parent
who has himself contributed so much to the world would be at stake. So
too would be the su√ering of his child who would receive an inferior
education. Is this not the sort of su√ering that the white justices could be
expected to understand and wish to remedy?
If Henderson argues that scenes of personal pain are key to eliciting
compassion, she doesn’t assume that a narrative of su√ering will neces-
sarily prompt the understanding of those on the bench. She acknowledges
that people are more likely to sympathize with those who are like them-
selves. She understands the di≈culty imposed by di√erent cultural con-

116 Chapter Four

texts. She is altogether aware of the power of racism, sexism, and other
forms of prejudice. Indeed her examples also bear out the failure of narra-
tives of su√ering as tools of persuasion because the divide or di√erence
between those judging and those being judged was too great to be bridged
imaginatively.
Bowers v. Hardwick provides an instance of such narrative failure, a case
in which there was a complete absence of sympathetic understanding.
Indeed the dominant emotion seems to have been hate, a ‘‘perversion of
empathy’’ (1638). Here is the situation. Through a series of coincidences a
police o≈cer happens upon a man named Michael Hardwick engaging in
consensual oral sex in his own home with another man. He arrests Hard-
wick under the Georgia law against sodomy (it covered both anal and oral
sex). Hardwick is charged with a felony. Incredibly the U.S. Supreme
Court voted to uphold the sodomy law. Henderson suggests that the very
absence of vivid sympathetic narratives about the prejudice su√ered by gay
men may have contributed to the unfeeling verdict. (Importantly Bowers v.
Hardwick was overruled in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003.)
Although Henderson questions a necessary connection between a
compassionate judgment and narratives of compassion, she is neverthe-
less optimistic about the possibility that they might prompt action, which
for her would mean good judgments.∞≤ I can imagine, however, a narrative
of su√ering—or a rhetoric of su√ering—that elicits sympathy of the wrong
kind. Consider the two cases, consolidated into one, brought by parents
before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 that involved the assignment of
students to schools in Seattle and Louisville on the basis of race. Ruling
that race can’t be a factor in assigning students to public schools, the
decision is the most far-reaching on the question of racial integration
since Brown v. Board of Education. Take the oral argument in one of the
cases—Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District. At
no point is su√ering invoked. But ironically su√ering is mentioned in the
opinion of Clarence Thomas, the only African American justice on the
court, who concluded: ‘‘Every time the government uses racial criteria to
‘bring the races together’ . . . someone gets excluded, and the person
excluded su√ers an injury solely because of his or her race. . . . This type of
exclusion, solely on the basis of race, is precisely the sort of government
action that pits the races against one another, exacerbates racial tension,
and ‘provoke[s] resentment among those who believe that they have been
wronged by the government’s use of race.’ ’’∞≥ Here, however, the school

Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 117

children being excluded are white, not black. This is a clear case of com-
passionate conservatism, not liberal compassion.

Like Henderson, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that compas-

sion is the basic social emotion. Like Henderson, she believes that emo-
tion in general and compassion in particular can possess a cognitive edge;
indeed for her compassion is a moral sentiment characterized by a mode
of reason or judgment. Like Henderson, she sees compassion as an emo-
tional bridge between the individual and the community, as ‘‘a bridge to
justice’’—a metaphor I think Henderson would admire (37).
For Nussbaum compassion is an instance of what she has elsewhere
called the ‘‘narrative emotions,’’ emotions called up by literature that
teaches us about the su√ering of others (and our own su√ering as well, I
would add). As literary examples she o√ers Sophocles’s Philoctetes, the
work of Dickens, E. M. Forster’s Maurice, and Richard Wright’s Native Son.
She calls for a multicultural education in our schools that would include
the study of literature of su√ering. As she insists, ‘‘Public education at
every level should cultivate the ability to imagine the experiences of others
and to participate in their su√erings’’ (50).
Nussbaum’s primary purpose is to recuperate under the rubric of com-
passion the Aristotelian meaning of pity: pity, for Aristotle, entails the
spectator’s sense that he or she could su√er similar misfortune—an un-
derstanding that is crucial, she argues, to a vision of social justice. Over
time, however, as she notes, pity has acquired the injurious sense of the
superiority of the spectator and thus the negative connotation of conde-
scension, an attitude that works against a vision of social justice. Nuss-
baum is concerned predominantly with the possibility of a ‘‘sense of com-
monness’’ (35), not with the dangers of the appropriation of feeling. This is
a liberal position. But she is clearly sensitive to questions of di√erence.
This is also a liberal position. I quote her at some length:

Pity does indeed involve empathetic identification as one component:

for in estimating the seriousness of the su√ering, it seems important, if
not su≈cient, to attempt to take its measure as the person herself
measures it. But even then, in the temporary act of identification, one is
always aware of one’s own separateness from the su√erer—it is for an-
other, and not oneself, that one feels; and one is aware both of the bad

118 Chapter Four

 lot of the su√erer and of the fact that it is, right now, not one’s own. . . .
One must also be aware of one’s own qualitative di√erence from the
su√erer: aware, for example, that Philoctetes has no children and no
friends, as one does oneself. For these recognitions are crucial in get-
ting the right estimation of the meaning of the su√ering. (35)

With Henderson, then, Nussbaum cautions that in responding to su√er-

ing we must take care to take our own di√erence into account, to under-
stand it. But there is a significant di√erence between them. As is attested
in the cases that Henderson discusses, she identifies, if you will, pre-
dominately with people who are su√ering at the hands of social injustice,
namely those su√ering from the cruelties of a prejudiced society. Nuss-
baum, on the other hand, writes primarily from the point of view of the
person who witnesses su√ering—from the point of view of the reader or
spectator—and her focus in the passage above is telling.∞∂ Philoctetes is a
tragic hero, a subject of tragedy. He is an exemplary person, not an ordi-
nary one. We should not be surprised by her point of view. Nussbaum is a
classicist and one of her impulses is to show how this work remains
important to this day. At the same time, however, she understands that the
tragic drama is highly abstracted from the trials of everyday life today. Thus
she singles out the realist novel as more appropriate for our cultural mo-
ment. As she writes, ‘‘The novel goes further, by connecting the reader to
highly concrete circumstances other than her own, and by making her
imagine what it would be like to be a member of both privileged and
oppressed groups in these circumstances’’ (51). And although she names
Richard Wright’s Native Son as an example, I can equally imagine her
referring to Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Finally, Nussbaum argues convincingly that one may understand a
situation with compassion even though one does not have the feeling itself.
This is an exceedingly important point. Just as emotions can in e√ect be
created retrospectively, as we saw in the chapter on Freud and feminism,
so too one may respond to a situation feelingly in the absence of the
emotion itself. At base Nussbaum understands compassion as ‘‘a certain
sort of thought about the well-being of others,’’ as ‘‘a certain sort of reason-
ing’’ (28). How is this possible? If one has had the experience of the feeling
of compassion, if one has learned to be sensitive to su√ering and if one
feels passionately about social justice, and if this has become part and
parcel of how one evaluates situations and is moved to action, then, Nuss-

Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 119

baum concludes, one ‘‘has pity whether he experiences this or that tug in
his stomach or not.’’ ‘‘No such particular bodily feeling is necessary,’’ she
continues (38). This is a crucial theoretical distinction, one that has signifi-
cant aesthetic consequences: it allows Nussbaum to distance herself from
the aesthetic of the sentimental. One need not be, in Nussbaum’s world,
moved to tears in order to be moved to compassion (or to pity, her pre-
ferred term). In fact given her taste in narrative (she is drawn to Beckett,
not Stowe), she would no doubt agree with the poet Wallace Stevens that
the sentimental ‘‘is a failure of feeling’’ (162).

In Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Su√ering Elizabeth Spelman,

unlike Henderson and Nussbaum, does not so much make the case for
compassion as she explores some of the complex contradictions that can
be involved in the various ways our attention is focused on su√ering. She
draws on a wide spectrum of work—from Plato and Aristotle to Jean Fagin
Yellin and Bill T. Jones. But in the context of my chapter, most relevant is
her discussion of the former slave Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl, which was written as a first-person narrative and published
under the pseudonym of Linda Brent in 1861. For as Spelman shows,
Jacobs was herself exquisitely attuned to the dangers as well as the prom-
ises posed by using compassion as a political tool in calling attention to the
evils of slavery. Specifically Spelman suggests that Jacobs rewrote Uncle
Tom’s Cabin by adding outrage to the emotional score of sentimentality,
thereby emphasizing not just the importance of an individual’s compas-
sionate response to another’s pain but also the importance of judging the
institution of slavery. In such an instance compassion includes the ele-
ment of recognizing su√ering as not only existential but also structural—
that is, as a result of political and social conditions that are unjust.
Spelman quotes this passage from the book written by the former slave:
‘‘ ‘Could you have seen that mother clinging to her child, when they fas-
tened the irons upon his wrists; could you have heard her heart-rending
groans, and seen her blood-shot eyes wander wildly from face to face,
vainly pleading for mercy, could you have witnessed that scene as I saw it,
you would exclaim, Slavery is damnable’ ’’ (78–79). Jacobs draws on the
conventions of the sentimental but then stops short, surprising us by
withholding the rhetoric of tears that is the stock in trade of nineteenth-
century sentimental literature and inserting instead the rhetoric of out-

120 Chapter Four

rage. A narrative scene of su√ering is key. But the emotional response
demanded of the reader is more complex than that in the scene I quoted
earlier from Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Eva sympathizes with Topsy as a
motherless child. The tender feeling of compassion, Spelman suggests,
can be seductive, serving to seal a short circuit of feeling and confining it to
the individual. Outrage, on the other hand, is ‘‘informed passion’’ (85).
Outrage is here directed at the slave owners, which is just as it should be.
Deserving of compassion, the slave isn’t reduced to a mere victim but
retains moral standing by issuing a judgment call.∞∑
Not surprisingly, Spelman shrinks from the social structure of hier-
archy and condescension implied by the contemporary understanding of
pity. Although she understands that compassion and pity are often used
interchangeably, unlike Nussbaum she doesn’t want to recuperate pity as a
useful political emotion—and I agree that there is no reason to fight what
would be a vain rhetorical battle. Yet for Spelman, as with Nussbaum, a
person who experiences compassion for another person is one who in fact
imagines that they too could be the subject of su√ering. All in all Spel-
man strikes a wise balance between the illicit appropriation of the pain of
others and the possibilities of understanding that pain. As she writes,
‘‘despite the ever-present possibility of such exploitative sentimentality—
and here again is the tension, the paradox, in appropriation—it would be
absurd to deny that in some important sense people can and should try to
put on the experiences of others’’ (119). I appreciate her common sense. At
the same time, one of the continuing concerns throughout the pages of
her book is the following question, and in her hands it is both a philosophi-
cal question and a political one: When does the feeling of feeling compas-
sion become an end in itself and thwart responsible action? Ultimately for
Spelman a cultural politics of compassion is understood as one that can
have valuable e√ects and must be judged case by case.

The most trenchant indictment of the contradictions implicit in the senti-

mental narrative in relation to the politics of the American nation has been
o√ered by Lauren Berlant.∞∏ In a brilliant essay entitled ‘‘Poor Eliza,’’ she
examines a rich archive of texts that draw on the strategies and tropes of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the literary touchstone for the American liberal narra-
tive of compassion. Indeed her title refers to Uncle Tom’s Cabin through the
textual relay—what Berlant wonderfully calls ‘‘emotional quotation or af-

Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 121

fective citation’’ (647)—of Rogers and Hammerstein’s 1949 musical The
King and I. This production contains a memorable scene in which a female
slave in the king’s court in Siam herself stages the scene from Uncle Tom’s
Cabin where the slave Eliza runs for her life. In a complex reading of the
musical, Berlant acknowledges the salutary e√ects associated with the
musical’s a√ective citation of Stowe’s novel, among them the will of the
people to be socially progressive at a critical historical juncture. But ulti-
mately the sca√old of the sentimental, Berlant insists, collapses under the
untenable weight of its contradictions: ‘‘When sentimentality meets poli-
tics, it uses personal stories to tell of structural e√ects, but in so doing it
risks thwarting its very attempt to perform rhetorically a scene of pain that
must be soothed politically. Because the ideology of true feeling cannot
admit the nonuniversality of pain, its cases become all jumbled together
and the ethical imperative toward social transformation is replaced by
a civic-minded but passive ideal of empathy. The political as a place of
acts oriented toward publicness becomes replaced by a world of private
thoughts, leanings, and gestures’’ (641).
The sentimental framing of su√ering, Berlant insists, is corrupt for
many reasons, not least of which is that the sentimental narrative relies on
scenes of pain that wrongly presume such su√ering is universal. For the
pain of slavery can’t be understood fully by a white middle-class reader; the
politics of personal feeling can’t address the structural reasons for injus-
tice. The narrative, Berlant insists, a√ords the pleasure of consuming the
feeling of vicarious su√ering—and its putative moral precipitate, the feel-
ing of self-satisfaction that we wish to do the right thing and thus are
virtuous. But the experience of being moved by these sentimental scenes
of su√ering, whose ostensible purpose is to awaken us to redress injustice,
works instead to return us to a private world far removed from the public
sphere. Thus in a crippling contradiction, Berlant concludes, the result of
such empathetic identification is not the impulse to action but rather a
‘‘passive’’ posture. Fundamentally, therefore, the sentimental narrative is
deliciously consumable and cruelly ine√ective. Berlant’s critique of the
sentimental narrative, or sentimental liberalism, is unforgiving. The
genre of the sentimental narrative itself is, she believes, morally bankrupt.
But in ‘‘Poor Eliza’’ Berlant identifies as well what she calls the post-
sentimental text, and she o√ers as examples James Baldwin’s essay on
Uncle Tom’s Cabin entitled ‘‘Everyone’s Protest Novel,’’ Robert Waller’s The

122 Chapter Four

Bridges of Madison County, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. What di√eren-
tiates these texts from sentimental texts? Among other things, Berlant
argues, they possess a clear-eyed if nonetheless ambivalent refusal of the
fantastical optimism central to the sentimental narrative. More specifi-
cally, ‘‘Everyone’s Protest Novel’’ possesses, in Berlant’s words, the ‘‘pow-
erful language of rageful truth-telling’’ (656). There is at work, Berlant
implies, both a cultural politics and a cultural poetics of the emotions. Like
Harriet Jacobs, Baldwin adds outrage to the sentimental score, in e√ect
understanding such a complex response to su√ering as necessarily having
a cognitive component. In ‘‘Poor Eliza’’ Berlant’s purpose is not only to
critique the sentimental liberalism she abhors but also to explore the
possibilities of an a√ecting radicalism. Her own essay, concluding with an
eloquent discussion of Beloved, itself rises to the condition of possibility
beyond both cynical reason and an empty commodified optimism based
on falsely shared su√ering.∞π

Although these four scholars di√er in their understanding of the e≈-

cacy of narratives of compassion, they all invest a response to su√ering—
whether it is called empathy, sympathy, pity, or compassion—with the
possibility of a cognitive component. All four emphasize scenes of su√er-
ing and of pain as basic to what I am calling the liberal narrative of com-
passion, and all are concerned (although not exclusively) with injustice
that is structural, in particular injustice at the hands of prejudice. Further,
all four are concerned, albeit to di√erent degrees, with the potential cor-
rupting relation of unequal power between the one who su√ers and the
one who witnesses that su√ering, as well as with the related question of
the ine√ectiveness of compassion in achieving social justice.∞∫ All four
stress the cultural politics of narrative emotions in relation to the injustice
su√ered by black Americans. This is crucial given the signal injustice of
slavery on which this country was built. As we read in the last paragraph of
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, ‘‘It was the fault of the earth, the land, of our
town. . . . This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain fruit it will
not bear.’’
I have two final comments before I turn to compassionate conserva-
tism. First, in the work of Henderson, Nussbaum, Spelman, and Berlant
compassion is figured in terms of unequal relations of power. As we saw

Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 123

in the last chapter, mutual shame—an example of which is drawn from
Primo Levi’s The Truce—calls attention to the structural situation of shame
in which everyone is embedded. Could we not envision a situation of
mutual compassion? I could imagine that in the very same scene from the
Russian prison camp in which Primo Levi was horrifically interred, mu-
tual compassion might in fact succeed mutual shame.
Second, although my primary purpose is not to evaluate each of the
arguments of these four scholars, I do want to say a word about the em-
phasis on the issue of ‘‘action.’’ The question of the relation of an emotion
(here compassion) to moral redress (here action) is complicated, and I
think many cultural critics, in o√ering critique, are demanding too much
of literature and the practice of reading. Consider Berlant’s incisive but in
great part merciless analysis. Yes, I agree, the aesthetic of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin (or The King and I ) doesn’t adequately address the reading public of
today. But as Glenn Hendler reminds us in Public Sentiments, reading
practices in the mid-nineteenth century were di√erent; we shouldn’t judge
them by our aesthetic standards today. Yes, I agree an individual may find
simple self-satisfaction in an easily consumed sentiment of sympathy. Yes,
reading may be useless in terms of moral redress, or it may be worse than
useless by sealing shut the moral soul with self-congratulatory feelings.
But equally, in the texts Berlant admires, even if no ‘‘action’’ is immediately
forthcoming upon reading them, if one’s moral imagination is enlarged,
one may respond in a future situation in moral terms. I believe in what I
call the reading unconscious: we may safeguard these texts in our memory
so that they may be called upon when we can hear them or when they are
needed. Understanding that there is no necessary connection between the
literary emotion of compassion and a newfound sense of structural in-
justice (how could there be?), I nonetheless agree with Spelman that in-
voking sympathy is an important way of trying to redirect social, political,
and economic resources. Indeed, as she writes in Fruits of Sorrow, ‘‘com-
passion is one of those resources’’ (88). Yes, structural change is required.
But the first and crucial step is to understand that it is necessary, and that is
no small step. Yes, there is a danger, but I prefer to put the emphasis on the
positive. My sympathies, if you will, lie with the potential promise of
learning through literature or of being inspired by literature, where the
poetics of narrative and of language may make us feel more alive in the
present to the su√ering of others and committed to the best we might be

124 Chapter Four

able to o√er. I do not wish to cede compassion to the conservatives who
have appropriated with gusto the rhetoric of compassion and to whom I
now turn.

2
If in the academy today attention is being given to the cultural politics of
compassion, along with serious concerns about its e√ectiveness, the rheto-
ric of compassion as appropriated by George W. Bush had a resounding
success in the presidential election of 2000. What calculus is involved in a
conservatism that is labeled compassionate? What characterizes a conser-
vative narrative of compassion?
In the liberal narrative of compassion, the word ‘‘compassion’’ is used
primarily as a noun or a predicate adjective in relation to people. A person
feels compassion or is compassionate. Compassion is a feeling, and it is
embodied. In the conservative narrative, in contrast, compassion is de-
ployed predominantly as an adjective, one that characterizes an ideological
stance, policy, or program. Bush not only ran on a platform of compassion-
ate conservatism, he has described his budget as compassionate. Detached
from people, compassion is attached to policies and practices. Oddly, in
the mouths of conservatives, the adjective ‘‘compassionate’’ seems to have
no referent to a feeling at all—or at least not to the feeling of sympathy that
is associated with compassion. It is merely a word that refers, through a
relay of rhetoric, to economic conservatism. Here is another instance of the
waning of emotion that pervades postmodern culture.
Furthermore even if sentiment, or sensitivity, is performed, it doesn’t
seem linked to sympathy for others. Consider, for example, the way in
which during the delivery of his inaugural speech in 2000 Bush seemed
moved by the rhetoric of his vision for America. At the same time a politics
of gender is also at work. If compassion doesn’t entail sympathy, it clearly
does refer to a strict and stern paternalism—to the demand for discipline
and responsibility. Under the screen of the feminine, compassion is mas-
culinized in conventional tones. In Indianapolis on 22 July 1999, in what
is regarded as his first major policy address as a presidential candidate, for
instance, George W. Bush pledged to ‘‘rally the armies of compassion in
our communities to fight a very di√erent war against poverty,’’ and he
praised programs that practice ‘‘severe mercy.’’∞Ω How far we are from the

Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 125

teary sentimental rhetoric of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, from Thurgood Marshall’s
presence in the U.S. Supreme Court arguing on behalf of racial integra-
tion for Brown v. Board of Education, from Harriet Jacobs’s outrage, from
Richard Wright’s harrowing Native Son, and from Toni Morrison’s elo-
quent Beloved.
What kinds of stories do compassionate conservatives tell? In our tele-
visual political culture, a narrative of compassion is condensed into a
visual sound bite. Bill Clinton, in his 20 January 1999 State of the Union
address, introduced Rosa Parks, calling up decades of struggle over civil
rights and evoking her su√ering as a profile in courage. To whom did
George W. Bush gesture in his speech to Congress outlining his budget
proposal on 27 February 2001? Bush first pointed to the mayor of Philadel-
phia who supported faith-based organizations in that city, and second, to
Steven and Josefina Ramos: ‘‘With us tonight, representing many Ameri-
can families, are Steven and Josefina Ramos. They are from Pennsylvania,
but they could be from any one of your districts. Steven is a network
administrator for a school district, Josefina is a Spanish teacher at a charter
school, and they have a 2-year-old daughter. Steven and Josefina tell me
they pay almost $8,000 a year in federal income taxes; my plan will save
them more than $2,000. Let me tell you what Steven says: ‘Two thousand
dollars a year means a lot to my family. If we had this money it would help
us reach our goal of paying o√ our personal debt in two years time.’ ’’≤≠
Compassion is here referred to through the implied relay to economic
conservatism, which is in fact what compassionate conservatism is. Here
the calculus of compassionate conservatism is laid bare. The financializa-
tion of daily life is extolled in a presidential address. Note also that none of
the members of this small nuclear family are su√ering in the ways under-
lined in the cases brought before the U.S. Supreme Court that Henderson
discusses. The feeling of compassion is not evoked. We are not told a story,
which implies a past. Indeed there is no real story here; instead we have an
information-story in which we are presented with the possibility of a bright
economic future and the principle that people are to be rewarded for
identifying financial goals and working hard to achieve them. Bush ap-
peals to their economic interests only. Note also that there is only a gesture
to di√erence—Steven and Josefina Ramos are presumably Hispanic—but
the possible harsh realities of prejudice based on di√erence are not in-
voked. Instead these three people represent ‘‘many American families.’’
Here we have a condensed version of the American dream. As Berlant

126 Chapter Four

incisively puts it in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, the
American dream ‘‘fuses private fortune with that of the nation: it promises
that if you invest your energies in work and in family-making, the nation
will secure the broader social and economic conditions in which your labor
can gain value and your life can be lived with dignity’’ (94).

What is the model for this condensed narrative of conservative compas-

sion? Marvin Olasky’s Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It
Does, and How It Can Transform America, published in 2000 and graced
with a foreword by the then-governor George W. Bush, provides a template
for this model. A professor of journalism at the University of Texas at
Austin and a born-again Christian, Marvin Olasky has been credited with
the formulation of ‘‘compassionate conservatism,’’ although ironically, as
he himself points out, it appears that the phrase itself was first used by
none other than Bill Clinton’s good friend Vernon Jordan in 1981 (9).
Compassionate Conservatism is the triumphant sequel to Olasky’s The Trag-
edy of American Compassion, which traces the policies of compassionate
conservatism to their roots in colonial America. If Uncle Tom’s Cabin pro-
vides the reader with a sentimental education by enacting a moral peda-
gogy of the emotions, Compassionate Conservatism is a narrative of the
political education of the younger generation, rehearsing the political—
and spiritual—pedagogy of entrepreneurship, faith, and tough love. If
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl foreground scenes
of feeling that are coded as feminine, Olasky’s narrative is gendered male.
The father of four sons, Olasky recounts the journey he took in 1999
with his fourteen-year-old son Daniel to visit programs around the United
States that embody the tenets of compassionate conservatism. As a politi-
cal travelogue of discovery and a field trip about government for a high
school student, the narrative is, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of transforma-
tion. The transformation here, however, is not a matter of enlightenment
about the su√ering of other people–rather it is about what works. ‘‘The
travel changed Daniel in several vital ways,’’ Olasky writes, ‘‘but had also
changed me. I became convinced that the best way to understand compas-
sionate conservatism is not to go through a list of theoretical statements
but to walk the streets of our large cities and talk with those whose faith is
so strong that they refuse to give in’’ (22).
In the course of the narrative, father and son (they are from Austin) visit

Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 127

Houston and Dallas, Indianapolis and Camden, Philadelphia and Min-
neapolis, St. Louis and Washington, D.C. Consider Olasky’s account of
their visit to Indianapolis, the city where in 1999 George W. Bush de-
livered his first major speech as a presidential candidate. Olasky begins
his chapter on Indianapolis by briefly sketching its business history and
then taking us to the twenty-fifth-floor o≈ce of Mayor Steve Goldsmith.
As mayor, Goldsmith had established the Front Porch Alliance, which
throughout the 1990s brought together ‘‘faith-based and other civic orga-
nizations to develop eight hundred partnerships for neighborhood action’’
(62). From the height of government, we descend into the streets of Indi-
anapolis and are introduced to one person after another, all of whom have
successfully developed a program or a center with support from city gov-
ernment, and virtually all of whom have a strong belief in Christianity.
They are described. They are given names. Reverend Jay Height, the exe-
cutive director of the Shepherd Community Center. Olgen Williams, a
part-time pastor and long-married father of ten children who was forced to
quit his job as an oil refinery foreman when he fell and broke both wrists;
now he manages Christamore House, which provides food to the poor in
exchange for work. Ermil Thompson, a sixty-eight-year-old believer in
Christ ‘‘who worked her fingers to the bone for several years cooking and
selling lunches to raise thousands of dollars to buy and convert a dilapi-
dated house’’ into what became the Lifeline Community Center (76). And
the list goes on.
Who are the people for whom these programs are designed? They are
identified only as drug dealers, killers, prostitutes, and gang members.
Olasky tells about the people who have established these programs. But we
don’t hear the stories of people who have been helped by them. Not one
such person is individualized or given the dignity of a name. It is clear that
the reader’s admiration is to be directed toward the organizers of these
faith-based programs. They are the ones who have triumphed over the
odds. If we are indeed to have sympathy for anyone it is elicited primarily
for them, and it is a sympathy that is meant to be rapidly converted into
respect for their achievement. Take Tim Streett, a minister who when he
was fifteen years old witnessed his father’s murder in a mugging by two
inner-city young men. Now thirty-six and married with a child of his own,
he has established an after-school sports program for inner-city youth.
Even the evocation of abused children does not work so much to solicit our
compassion for them as it does to engender our dismay at their parents. As

128 Chapter Four

we saw with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the su√ering child is the stock in trade of
sentimental literature. But here the focus is not so much on the su√ering
child as it is on the parent as victimizer. Olasky quotes Judge James Payne,
who has allowed faith-based organizations to work with the juvenile court
system in Indianapolis: ‘‘We see fetal alcohol abuse, mothers on drugs
physically and emotionally aggressive with children’’ (81).
Overall the emphasis is on action: on getting things done and on what
has been called e√ective compassion, with the stress on results and not on
sentiment. The narrative is entrepreneurial, with tough love one of its
major lessons. For example, as one of the administrators of Teen Chal-
lenge (a national program for drug treatment) puts it, ‘‘We have a rule: If
you don’t work, you don’t eat’’ (219). As George W. Bush commented
approvingly in his July 1999 speech, ‘‘This is demanding love—at times, a
severe mercy’’ (219).
This pragmatic stress on what works is also clearly seen in Joseph
Jacobs’s The Compassionate Conservative: Assuming Responsibility and Re-
specting Human Dignity, the second edition of which was published in
2000 and was endorsed enthusiastically by the then-governor George W.
Bush on its red-white-and-blue cover: ‘‘Great Phrase! Great ideas!’’ In The
Compassionate Conservative Jacobs, a former businessman and now a phi-
lanthropist, adopts the American form of the jeremiad and lays out what
he sees as the principles of compassionate conservatism. At its core is
economic conservatism. As he writes, ‘‘Compassion is an overarching
moral value fundamental to all of us, no matter what our stand on specific
moral issues. Wresting exclusive ownership of it from the liberal left will
be easy if we say what conservative compassion will do. Elevating the
debate to di√erences in how we make compassion work will attract the
economic conservatives to our cause’’ (xxiii).
Pointing to some of the very problems identified by the scholars of
sentiment that I discuss in the previous section, Jacobs asserts that liberal
compassion has failed but that conservative compassion will work. His
attention is not focused on the su√ering body. Rather his concern is that
liberalism creates dependency—emotional and economic dependency (I
take up the question of dependency in my chapter ‘‘Bureaucratic Rage’’).
Jacobs perceptively observes that the pleasures of compassion, identified
by Spelman and Berlant, can create a ‘‘double dependency’’: those who
find themselves uplifted by the feeling of compassion must maintain a
constituency of people who require their compassion, a phenomenon he

Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 129

vividly calls ‘‘moral greed’’ (44). Compassion is corrupting. It is an ‘‘emo-
tional narcotic,’’ a by-product of which is the toxic ‘‘feeling of superior
moral strength’’ (84).
In the texts I’ve discussed that deal with liberal compassion—from
Stowe to Berlant—there has been in particular a sustained interest in the
su√ering of African Americans in the United States. In The Compassionate
Conservative we find instead the rhetorical transformation of the fact of this
history of slavery and su√ering into a brutal metaphor for dependency
across the entire population of America that Jacobs believes is the respon-
sibility of liberals. ‘‘The welfare state created by liberals in pursuit of their
compassion has assumed the role of the benevolent slave owner of the
twentieth century,’’ he proclaims, crudely drawing on America’s history of
slavery to delegitimate Democratic policies (xxiv). What does Jacobs pro-
pose? His interest is not in faith-based charities—even if animated by
tough love—but in the creation of jobs.
For Jacobs the creation of jobs is itself an act of compassion. What kinds
of stories does he tell about compassion? Business stories. Early in his
book he tells us about the di≈cult times he himself endured in 1984
when, as the head of his company, he was forced to restructure his work-
force, including ‘‘reducing permanent sta√ by almost half ’’ (28). ‘‘The
emotional toll on those of us who had to do this restructuring was de-
bilitating,’’ he writes. ‘‘We spent many sleepless nights as our compassion
for those people who were being fired (I refuse to use softer words) was
constantly being challenged by our compassion for the rest of the people
who would lose their jobs if the company were allowed to fail. This is one
more illustration that compassion is not an unalloyed virtue. Even with
that noble virtue one needs to make choices—tough choices’’ (28). I need
hardly note that the focus is directed first to his wretched feelings, not
those of the soon to be unemployed. But how, given the importance of the
creation of jobs, does this narrative that begins with unemployment come
to an end? On a note of enterprising optimism. In the business world,
which Jacobs regards as a microcosm of America, his firing of people
proved successful: some fifteen years later the company is four times
larger—the result of tough love, among other factors. Thus calculation of
compassion is at base quantitative, economic. As Jacobs recounts later in
The Compassionate Conservative, in telling another business story of com-
passionate conservatism and writing of the successful measures he put in
place to reduce the number of injuries in his company, there was also an

130 Chapter Four

economic benefit, a brightening of the bottom line. The conclusion of this
narrative? ‘‘Our insurance premiums are reduced,’’ he notes. ‘‘Therefore,
self-interest is served’’ (154).
The liberal narrative of compassion asks us to have sympathy for those
who are su√ering unjustly. Such su√ering is understood as social su√er-
ing, an apt term used by the medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman and
others in their important book Social Su√ering. George W. Bush, in appro-
priating the rhetoric of compassion and drawing on the above two models
of compassionate conservatism, has shrewdly excised the su√ering body—
one characterized by di√erence—from his national narrative of the future
of the United States. Foregrounded are not the su√ering bodies of African
Americans and the poor, but ministers and businessmen. With Bush’s
plan for faith-based charities and calling on ministers who provide spir-
itual healing, we find ourselves in an uncanny return to the nineteenth
century. Compassion is not only given a religious dimension, it is mas-
culinized. With Bush’s belief in economic conservatism, we return to the
Reagan years under the banner of compassion.
Yet Bush doesn’t ask us to focus on people in pain. He doesn’t concern
himself with the problem of the appropriation of feeling or of an unequal
balance of power. If Nussbaum asks us to resurrect the emotion of pity in
social and political life today by placing pity in a historical narrative and
contending that we must recuperate its former sense of ‘‘fellow-feeling,
sympathy,’’ then Marvin Olasky does not go to so much trouble. He simply
insists on the obsolete definition of compassion given in the Oxford En-
glish Dictionary: ‘‘Su√ering together with another, participation in su√er-
ing; fellow-feeling, sympathy.’’ Compassion is, he declares in Compassion-
ate Conservatism, ‘‘su√ering with’’ (2). In a politically brilliant move, by the
sleight of hand of definition, the problem of an imbalance of power is
eliminated. Thus in the conservative narrative of compassion—indeed in a
sense there is no narrative, merely citations, and thus virtually no emo-
tion can be enkindled—the very critique of the liberal narrative of com-
passion (epitomized by Berlant’s argument) is converted into a strength
for conservatives. If the liberal focus is on the uncertain connection be-
tween feeling and action, the calculated response of conservatives has
been to incisively sever the link between feelings of compassion for
people and action, thus eliminating the feeling of compassion altogether
and stressing the action that is work. One of their prime messages is that
work works.

Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 131

 3
But I would be remiss if I concluded on the above note. As I did research
for this chapter, I was surprised by the ways in which I felt drawn to several
of the pragmatic arguments advanced by conservatives and by the unex-
pected directions in which my reading took me. Jacobs ends his book not
with his own words but with a confession on the part of two self-identified
compassionate liberals—Jennifer Vanica and Ron Cummings. They have
worked for ten years as directors of the Jacobs Family Foundation and
the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation (formerly the Jacobs Cen-
ter for Nonprofit Innovation) and refer to themselves as having been con-
verted by the experience. Having spent twenty years in the nonprofit world,
they were more than skeptical of Jacobs’s free-market strategies, including
the tenet of accountability. But after some five years with the Family Foun-
dation they realized that grants that do not lead to self-sustainability simply
do not work, and they pursued the bolder strategy of what they call venture
philanthropy with the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation. And
they have seen successes. They thus refer to his story of the 1984 re-
structuring of his company with respect, not cynicism. ‘‘Dr. Jacobs tells the
story of coming out of retirement when Jacobs Engineering was flounder-
ing and having to fire middle management and restructure the company,’’
they write. ‘‘He says it was the most painful experience of his professional
life. But it saved the company and resurrected it to employ many more
people’’ (263).
I found their testimony sobering and I also found immensely hopeful
the possibility that some action might work after all. What was stirred in
me was not compassion but hope, the feeling that something could be
done. Perhaps I was only responding to being hailed as a caring citizen,
seduced by an empty promise. Certainly the workings of the Bush admin-
istration have not given me reason to increase my expectations. But I did
find myself open to entertaining new possibilities. I was attracted to the
meditations on compassion by the philosopher Simone Weil in great part
because she asks us—in an unsentimental way—to take on the respon-
sibility of doing good works. For her—although I simplify here—justice is
a form of compassion, and justice is a social act, as we see in her books The
Need for Roots and First and Last Notebooks. For her compassion is not so
much a sentiment as it is a belief.
I also turned to the challenging work of the German philosopher Agnes

132 Chapter Four

Heller, who argues that conscience is an emotion—an idea that is intrigu-
ing because she reverses the conventional understanding that feelings of
caring are ethical by suggesting instead that an ethical sense is itself a
feeling. Heller prefers to use the word ‘‘concern’’ to describe this moral
orientation to the world. For Heller concern includes helping those in
need. Here she recalls Lynne Henderson’s inclusion of the desire to allevi-
ate the su√ering of others in the meanings of empathy. But Heller’s em-
phasis falls less on feeling and more on involvement. ‘‘Decent persons
indeed feel empathy,’’ she writes; ‘‘however their predominant emotional
state of mind is one of concern rather than one of compassion (though it
does not exclude the feeling of compassion). . . . Being concerned includes
the readiness ‘to do something about it’ ’’ (130).
The legal scholar Martha Minow has written about the blurring of
boundaries between the public and the private, the secular and the re-
ligious, and the nonprofit and the profit worlds. In the essay ‘‘Partners, Not
Rivals?’’ she closes with an invitation to join her in a ‘‘search for ways to
turn rivals into partners in the service of fairness, skill, and compassion’’
(1094). Minow suggests that we need new metaphors to help us build this
world together—not the language of boundaries and lines but of commit-
ments and values. I would further suggest that the boundaries are blur-
ring, appropriately so, between the emotions and judgment or reason, and
that we need to find a way to avoid accenting one term over the other.
The philosopher Annette Baier o√ers us one such way. She theorizes
trust as a value that mediates between what she sees in contemporary
philosophical debates as a feminist emphasis on caring and compassion
and a male emphasis on law, obligation, and contract, where both are
ultimately inadequate positions for many reasons—for what we might
without blushing or wincing call humane reasons. I like her singling out
trust as a value. Trust does not belong to what Berlant would call a passive
world of feeling, one that can be satisfied with the narcotic of feeling itself.
Trust is a declaration of respect, an appraisal of the world—in the form of
another person or an institution, for example—and is thus a judgment.
Trust therefore has a cognitive dimension. It also has an a√ective dimen-
sion.≤∞ It belongs not just to a world of solipsistic self-regarding feeling,
which is, as we have learned, one of the dangers of compassion. Trust
assumes a world of interdependency. Trust confers agency on others. Trust
can itself be a gift, in the hope that it is o√ered wisely.

Liberal Compassion, Compassionate Conservatism 133

 five

S Y M P AT H Y F O R N O N H U M A N C Y B O R G S

I always used to wonder, do machines ever feel lonely? You

and I talked about machines once, and I never really said
everything I had to say. I remember I used to get so mad when
I read about car factories in Japan where they turned out the
lights to allow the robots to work in darkness.
—Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

Turing, who demonstrated that a self-reproducing machine

was theoretically possible, was a logician, and understand-
ably limited the problem of self-reproduction to asexual
techniques; but if we are interested in the problem of human
simulation, the race of automata must be perpetuated not
only by knowledge but by passion. . . .
The creation of a human automaton would require an a√ect
system.
—Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters

Signification, technology, and subjectivity coevolve.

—N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer

In Donna Haraway’s lively little book The Companion Species Manifesto she
turns to the marvelous species that is comprised by all manner of dogs.
She calls our attention to the process of the coevolution of species as well
as to the serious pleasures o√ered by the cohabitation of humans and
dogs. ‘‘Love, commitment, and yearning for skill with another are not zero
sum games,’’ she insists. Haraway singles out the happiness that arises in
the discipline of dogs and humans developing expertise together. She
underscores the generative nature of working together with mutual re-
spect, a process that fosters ‘‘acts of love like caring about and for other
concatenated, emergent worlds’’ (61). What is involved is no less than the
forging of new kinship structures, which are characterized ideally by trust
and respect. In such a case I understand love as a ‘‘prosthetic emotion,’’
one that connects us to beings in the nonhuman world—both the world of
nature and the technological world (I understand that these are problem-
atic terms but I use them here for the sake of simplicity). What is at stake is
the creation of a continuum or interpenetration between these worlds, one
suggested by the conviction that we are living in a posthuman age. Thus I
understand prosthetic emotions as a subset of social emotions.
With regard to our emerging digital culture, the dominant discourse of
the emotions is not that of the social emotions or dispositions—love, care,
and respect—but rather that of intensities. Mark Hansen in his excellent
book New Philosophy for New Media, for example, theorizes the coevolution
of the human body and the digital technosphere through the radical aes-
thetic interface provided by new media artworks themselves. Hansen of-
fers a strong and subtle argument that our bodies, brought into contact
with the digital in these new ways, experience the virtual. He also vividly
testifies to the new experiences of time and space, of perception and em-
bodiment, that emerge in the process—the a√ects of bewilderment, ver-
tigo, strangeness, disorientation, and irrelevance. I consider these to be
nonsubjective a√ects in the Deleuzian sense and they are not my concern
here.∞ Rather my story will take the form of a more sentimental tale, one
that might be called a science fiction itself—except that I have come on
some fundamental level to believe it.
Why have I chosen the phrase ‘‘prosthetic emotions’’? One widely held
view of technological development is that of an increasingly elaborated
regime of tools and machines—prostheses—that extend and amplify the
capabilities of the human body. Thus the various strengths of the body are
understood to be augmented by prostheses in the broadest sense: the
muscle power of the arm is heightened through the lever, the sensory
function of the eye through the telescope, and the computational-solving
skill of the brain through the computer. To a great extent this narrative is
based on an ideology of progress defined in terms of increases in e≈-
ciency and in productivity—in short, a kind of economic rationality. But if
we turn our attention to the emotions, we find another narrative of tech-
nological development, one that does not privilege cool rationality but
rather empathetic understanding. Over the long history of western cul-
ture, rationality has generally been contrasted with emotion—where rea-
son is accorded positive value and emotion is considered a potential patho-
gen. But in the complementary narrative of technological development
that I sketch below, the emotions themselves are considered a strength,
not a weakness. More precisely, specific emotions are sanctioned in the
narratives I single out in this chapter—the complex of emotions we desig-
nate by such words as sympathy and love and trust.
The history of the reception of technology in America itself has an

140 Chapter Five

a√ective history, one marked by the oscillation between the opposite emo-
tional poles of technophilia (the ecstatic embrace of technology) and tech-
nophobia (the fear of technology).≤ I want to underscore a third tradition of
the reception of technology in American culture—and more broadly, west-
ern culture. This tradition is captured in the words of the computer geek I
invoke in my epigraph from Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, a novel about
employees from Microsoft who leave the company to form their own
business. ‘‘I used to wonder,’’ he says sympathetically, ‘‘do machines ever
feel lonely?’’ He feels neither in awe of nor threatened by technology as
embodied in robots. Neither the technological sublime nor technological
determinism are at stake for him; neither technophilia nor technophobia
characterizes his response. Rather the emotions of everyday life are en-
tailed. He feels sorry for the machines. He feels a warm and knowing
sympathy for them. He feels distressed—indeed angry—that these robots
have been forced to work in a car factory in the dark, thus sentenced to a
space from which sociability has been struck.
He has, in other words, ‘‘a feeling’’ for these working robots. I am
evoking here A Feeling for the Organism, the title of Evelyn Fox Keller’s
influential biography of the geneticist Barbara McClintock. Keller’s book
has been taken up by feminists—including Alison Jaggar in her essay
‘‘Love and Knowledge’’—as o√ering an alternative model for scientific
research, one based not on detachment but rather on a feeling of closeness
to the subject of one’s research, a feeling described by Keller in terms of
a√ection, empathy, kinship, and a love that respects di√erence.≥ That feel-
ing here might best be called sympathy. Hence I have given this chapter
the title ‘‘Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs,’’ by which I mean to honor
the work of both Evelyn Fox Keller and Donna Haraway, whose seminal
essay ‘‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’’ appeared almost twenty-five years ago. In-
deed my own chapter can be understood as a low-keyed manifesto in favor
of respect for the material lifeworld for which we are collectively respon-
sible. I thus depart from much of the criticism in technoscience studies
that diagnoses our cultural response to innovation in terms of unrelieved
anxiety. In this chapter I reserve the capacious term ‘‘cyborg’’ for non-
human technoartifacts.
In the first and longest section of this chapter I discuss three texts
in American science fiction and film from the late 1960s to the 1980s—
Arthur C. Clarke’s trilogy A Space Odyssey (1968, 1982, and 1987), Philip K.
Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the subsequent film

Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 141

Blade Runner (1968, 1982), and the film Silent Running (1972). In these
works emotions are attributed to machines in the form of computers,
replicants, and robots.∂ I then jump to the twenty-first century, turning to
Michael Cunningham’s novella Like Beauty where new kinship structures
are forged not between a human and a nonhuman cyborg, but rather
between a nonhuman cyborg and a serpentine-like alien from another
planet. In this quartet of texts, artificial entities are endowed with life
through the attribution of an emotional nature to them, in particular
through their capacity for sympathy and for self-sacrificial behavior. The
nonhuman cyborg is for the most part figured as a hybrid organism en-
dowed with feeling—that is, as an artificial entity that becomes an organ-
ism precisely because of its capacity for feeling. One of my primary inter-
ests in this chapter is thus to suggest a trajectory of technological evolution
by touching on these terms—artificial intelligence, emotional intelligence,
artificial emotions, and artificial life. Crucial to this development is pre-
cisely the sympathy of humans for nonhuman cyborgs, with bodily su√er-
ing (including illness) calling this feeling forth. Thus subjectivity is figured
as being mutually constituted, in Donna Haraway’s words, in ‘‘acts of love
like training in Vicki Hearne’s sense breeds acts of love like caring about
and for other concatenated, emergent worlds’’ (61).
In the second section of this chapter I turn from the representation of
the intersubjectivity of these species to touch on the sociology of human-
technology interaction in the age of media and the robot. My stress is on
the ordinariness of these interactions, where our experience of our tech-
nological habitat is what we would call sociable—that is, created by the
binding emotion of sympathy, an attitude of respect, and a comic view of
everyday life. In the final section I consider theoretical work on the emo-
tions and technology, and I conclude on the note of a feeling for the cyborg
(both human and nonhuman) as I perform it myself—namely sympathy
for literary nonhuman cyborgs.
My method is in great part the accumulation of texts from di√erent
domains—fiction, sociology, artificial life, anthropology, neurology, the-
ory, and studies of the emotions—that point to this phenomenon of an
emergent feeling for the nonhuman cyborg. This strategy is intended to
simulate the process of our accommodation to our evolving technological
habitat. But accommodation is too weak a word because it suggests a
dimension of capitulation. For me the accumulation of these texts—and I
could refer to many more—has had a cascading e√ect, one that proves

142 Chapter Five

persuasive about what our future holds for us. And indeed the beginning
of that future is now. If over the course of decades popular literature and
film have been attuning us to cohabitation with nonhuman cyborgs, today
robots are everywhere in the visual media where they are rapidly populating
our cultural imagination. Given the advances in computer animation tech-
niques and other digital technologies, today these figures are more con-
vincing, more compelling, and more lifelike. Consider Steven Spielberg’s
AI (2001). Consider the independent film Robot Stories (2002), a quartet of
love stories about robots, the first of which is about a baby robot (or a robot
baby) and the last of which is about a widower whose late wife appears to
him as a virtual being. Consider the film I, Robot (2004) starring Will
Smith, which is based on Isaac Asimov’s 1950 collection of short stories
under the same title. Consider the summer 2007 blockbuster film The
Transformers, a goofy sentimental action film that is a cross between E.T.
and Star Wars. It features two strains of robots characterized by Kleinian
emotional splitting—hatred and rage on the one hand, and sympathy and
caring on the other. The good autobots (‘‘auto’’ is for autonomous) are
sensitive to humans, and in turn the two teen-aged heroes—a boy and a
girl—come to respect and trust and have sympathy for them (tears are shed
when one of these autobots is gravely injured). At the end the two adoles-
cents form a nuclear family of sorts along with their newfound guardian,
the autobot action figure that can morph into a car. Diminutively named
Bumblebee, he inspires a√ection and is portrayed as a much better paren-
tal figure than is the boy’s bumbling biological father. This familiar narra-
tive has historical precedents, to which I now turn.

1
In western culture there is a long history of the blurring of boundaries
between the animate and the inanimate—a history that in the past three
centuries has in particular involved humans and nonhuman cyborgs.∑ An
important strand in this history is precisely the attribution of the emotions
of sympathy and love to the inventions made in our bodily image. Promi-
nent examples include Mary Shelley’s famous Frankenstein-created crea-
ture whose nineteenth-century heart appropriately swells with sentiment
and pounds with fear, and Frank Baum’s Tin Woodman in The Wizard of
Oz who yearns for a heart and whose wish is granted even if only in
Dorothy’s dream. We could cite as well the whimsical characters created by

Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 143

Stanislaw Lem in The Cyberiad, notably the two appealing idiosyncratic
robots named Klapaucius and Trurl who write love poems out of the bits
and pieces of mathematics and science. We could refer to Robbie in I,
Robot, the companion robot to a little girl who comes to see him as a
feeling friend and whom he melodramatically saves from a sure death.
That our inventions will possess a good heart would seem, in other words,
to be a deep dream (if not the only dream) of what I would call our
technological unconscious.
But what might have been a wish some three hundred years ago now
seems much nearer to reality today.∏ That our inventions will be capable
of artificial emotions—emotions that can’t be distinguished from genu-
ine emotions, thus eliminating the distinction altogether—seems within
possible reach. As an important speculative case in point I turn first to
Arthur C. Clarke’s A Space Odyssey, a classic science fiction narrative that
exemplifies the cultural logic of emotional growth across the spectrum of
scientists and nonhuman cyborgs, one made possible by the very projec-
tion of the emotions as prostheses that create relationships of attachment
in the psychoanalytic sense. Strict boundaries are definitively erased in the
process, thereby creating new kinship structures.
Spanning sixty fictional years, the first three novels of A Space Odyssey
trace the emotional evolution of three of its characters—the young and
dispassionate astronaut David Bowman, the central computer intelligence
known as hal, and Dr. Chandra, the computer scientist devoted to hal.
In the first and best known of the volumes (no doubt because of the
celebrated film 2001: A Space Odyssey directed by Stanley Kubrick), hal
is presented as a computer possessing artificial intelligence as it is com-
monly defined. With his English-speaking male voice, he exhibits extraor-
dinary computing ability. But when his skill goes tragically awry the re-
sulting malevolent behavior toward humans leads them to completely
disable him.
Most readers of A Space Odyssey stop after the first volume. This is a
mistake. We learn in the second volume that hal’s behavior was all the
result of an unfortunate glitch in his program. He was sick, we could say,
and he has returned to health. Over the course of the next sixty years (and
the next two volumes in the series), hal evolves into a disembodied entity
possessing an emotional intelligence so deeply altruistic and wise that it is
characterized as spiritual.π Thus in the first three books of A Space Odyssey
the capacity to respond to a situation with sustained feeling, not just logic

144 Chapter Five

or reason, is ultimately figured as an evolutionary strength and as a critical
component of life, whether biological, electronic, or spiritual. How does
this transformation come about? Critical to the evolution of hal are his
relationships with humans—Dr. Chandra, the scientist who invents him
and loves him, and the wary astronaut David Bowman who comes to trust
him again.
In Understanding Media Marshall McLuhan writes about the relation-
ship between the human body and technological invention in terms of
‘‘autoamputation,’’ observing that a given technology serves to decrease
stress on the part of the body at stake. In A Space Odyssey the emotional
feedback loops that are created serve precisely to redress the initial ‘‘numb-
ness’’ that McLuhan noted. But here it is emotional numbness that is re-
paired. For it is also the case that both the cool Bowman and the e≈cient
Chandra are transformed in their long contact with hal over time. We
learn in the second volume of A Space Odyssey that Bowman had repressed
an intense emotional past characterized by strong emotions of attachment
(his grief at the death of his brother is compounded by guilt for having
been intimately involved with his girlfriend). Indeed it was this profound
emotional reservoir that was crucial in his honored selection as a cosmic
probe. Ultimately Bowman is released from the emotional emptiness of
professional technoculture through his encounter with beings superior in
both scientific and emotional respects.
Similarly Dr. Chandra, depicted as unemotional in the extreme, himself
awakens into an emotional existence as hal comes back to life (he also
dies of a broken heart when later separated from hal). It is Chandra who
is given the role of insisting that computers can possess emotions. Indeed
the ontological status of computer emotions is for him not even a matter of
debate. As we read in 2010, Chandra ‘‘had long since broken o√ communi-
cations with the dwindling body of philosophers who argued that com-
puters could not really feel emotions, but only pretended to do so’’ (22–
23). When hal is reactivated he returns to what I am tempted to call his
natural emotional state: hal is friendly, not hostile. Co-emotional evolu-
tion is one of the emotional logics of A Space Odyssey.
‘‘Our machines are disturbingly lively,’’ Donna Haraway has remarked,
‘‘and we ourselves frighteningly inert.’’∫ How are capacities for emotional
connections created and revived? What is represented in A Space Odys-
sey is the process of technocultural feedback loops generating emotional
growth—namely the development of human-artificial entity intersubjec-

Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 145

tivity that is itself a deeply benevolent form of intelligence. It is Bowman
who becomes a tool. hal is figured as a self-conscious cyborg. In the end
they are virtually indistinguishable from each other. As Gary Downey and
others rightly insist in ‘‘Cyborg Anthropology,’’ ‘‘Human subjects and sub-
jectivity are crucially as much a function of machines, machine relations,
and information transfers as they are machine producers and operators’’
(343). The vision is one of the co-evolution of both species as compan-
ion species, one in which the emotions—they are prosthetic emotions,
emotions of attachment—figure prominently. This process might best be
understood as ‘‘a causality of coupling,’’ to refer to the philosopher of
science Isabelle Stengers, and not a causality that is linear or circular.Ω

Even more vividly than the first three volumes of Clarke’s Space Odyssey,
Philip K. Dick’s touchstone novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
exemplifies the redemptive emotional logic of the intersubjectivity of hu-
mans and cyborgs. Published in 1968, Electric Sheep was in 1982 made
into the now-classic film Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford as Rick
Deckard. Just as Uncle Tom’s Cabin serves as the ur-text of the liberal
narrative of compassion in American literary studies, so Philip K. Dick’s
narrative is one to which people in technoscience studies repeatedly re-
turn.∞≠ Significantly, both narratives turn fundamentally on the capacity
for empathy.
The premise at the opening of Dick’s story (in both the novel and
the film) is that the distinction between humans and nonhuman cyborgs
(made in our image) is precisely the (human) ability to feel sympathy for
other humans. (In the novel the nonhuman cyborgs are referred to as
‘‘androids’’ but in the film they are referred to as ‘‘replicants’’; I will use the
term ‘‘replicant’’ when referring to either the novel or the film.) By the end
of the story, however, that distinction is called thoroughly into question. In
the novel in particular, it is precisely the undecidability of whether or not
the emotions circulating in the distrustful culture of the future are artifi-
cial that results in the breakdown of the distinction between humans and
replicants. And in the film it is the capacity of the replicants to form bonds
of love and trust with one another and across the human-replicant divide
that represents their evolution into genuinely artificial life. As Vivian Sob-
chak observes in Screening Space with regard to the science fiction films
of the late 1980s, ‘‘Alien Others have become less other—be they extra-

146 Chapter Five

terrestrial teddy bears, starmen, brothers from another planet, robots,
androids, or replicants. They have become familiars’’ (293). As I am sug-
gesting, one of the representational strategies deployed to accomplish this
shift is the attribution of emotions to machines that have been invented in
the image of the human. Blade Runner thus illustrates the shift from
understanding intelligence as rooted in logic, problem solving, informa-
tion processing, and computational skills to understanding intelligence as
a mode of knowing that includes an emotional component as well, or what
the science writer Daniel Goleman has influentially called ‘‘emotional
intelligence.’’
In 1950 the British mathematician Alan Turing described the now fa-
mous Turing Test in an essay on machine intelligence. What is the Turing
Test? A computer is said to pass the test and thus possess artificial intelli-
gence if a human being, not knowing whether it is communicating with a
machine or a person, doesn’t guess that they are. (If a human passes the
test—that is, doesn’t identify the interaction as one with a computer—could
we say they possess trust? What would that mean?) It is altogether appro-
priate then that in the fictional world of 2021 (one in which replicants are
threatening to pass undetected in human society), the test for distinguish-
ing replicants from humans is designed to measure not logic but emo-
tional responses—in particular empathy in the face of another’s pain.∞∞
‘‘Empathy,’’ we read early on in the novel, ‘‘evidently existed only within the
human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found
throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida’’ (26).
The replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) was designed for optimum self-
su≈ciency and combat. But by the close of the film he cares deeply for
fellow replicant Pris (Daryl Hannah). He also saves Deckard, the human
forced to hunt him down, from a certain death. That he spares Deckard is
the unequivocal sign of his transformation from a preprogrammed being
to a charismatic martyr who speaks eloquently about the pain of loss—his
grief over the death of Pris and his acutely elegiac sense that the memories
that bind him to her will vanish with his own imminent death. Here are the
last words his character is given in Blade Runner: ‘‘All those moments will
be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.’’ This statement is followed by
Deckard’s voice-over: ‘‘I don’t know why he saved my life. Maybe in those
last moments he loved life more than ever before. Not just his life. My life.’’
In the end Batty is shown as possessing heroic emotional stature. The
unambivalent message is that superiority in physical strength and in com-

Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 147

putational skill—artificial intelligence—must be complemented by emo-
tional intelligence.
Deckard ultimately finds himself gazing at Batty in sympathetic under-
standing, and he watches him die in a silence that speaks of compassion-
ate respect, even admiration. Similarly Deckard comes to find himself not
only attracted to the replicant Rachael Rosen (Sean Young) but also to feel
sympathy for her, which is the ground for his capacity for empathy for
replicants in general. The cultural critic Mark Dery has described Deckard
as a ‘‘deadpan, monotoned flatfoot,’’ a prime example of the ‘‘flattened
a√ect that characterizes Homo Cyber’’ (252). This characterization is al-
together apt for Deckard at the beginning of the narrative. But as with A
Space Odyssey, one of the fundamental points of this technological narra-
tive is precisely the development of the emotional world of the human
characters through their very interaction with the replicants themselves.
How do the emotions of the replicants come into being? In Blade Run-
ner artificial emotions are generated by the implantation of memories that
grow, as it were, into emotional memories, thereby giving depth to being.
The head of the Tyrell Corporation explains that the implantation of emo-
tions is designed to render the replicants easier to control: ‘‘If we give them
a past, we can create a cushion, a pillow, for their emotions, and conse-
quently we can control them better.’’ At the same time the Tyrell engineers
acknowledge that in a matter of a few years the replicants ‘‘might develop
their own emotional responses. Hate, love, fear, anger, envy.’’ The epi-
graph from J.-B. Pontalis with which I opened this book is resonant here:
‘‘It’s rare nowadays to hear words which, belonging to no one in particular,
can be the property of anyone, words that are solid and inexhaustible like
‘grief ’ or ‘hatred’ ’’ (103). In Blade Runner these emotions can belong to
anyone—even replicants. Paradoxically emotional growth, which is charac-
terized by the development of ties to others, results in independence as well.
Subjectivity is itself stimulated by the interdependence of beings, which
also entails independence. We thus can read Blade Runner as a fictional
forerunner of android epistemology—that is, a new interdisciplinary do-
main of research that explores ‘‘the space of possible machines and their
capacities for knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, desires, and action in accor-
dance with their mental states.’’∞≤
What is particularly fascinating to me is that unlike hal in A Space
Odyssey, the replicants are figured not as boxlike computers but as biologi-
cal organisms ‘‘designed,’’ we are told in the film, ‘‘to copy human beings

148 Chapter Five

in every way except their emotions.’’ Blade Runner thus also o√ers a model
of emotional life arising out of complex organic embodiment, with emo-
tional intelligence coming to complement artificial intelligence. Emotions
arise in these nonhuman cyborgs not only by virtue of the development of
intersubjective ties but also spontaneously, as it were, by the very virtue of
their embodiment. Embodiment would seem, therefore, to be a necessary
if not su≈cient condition. Modeled here is Francisco Varela’s theory of
‘‘enaction,’’ a science of cognition based on concrete situatedness and em-
bodiment, although here the lever is the prosthetic emotions.
In addition, as spectators, we are explicitly encouraged from the very
beginning of Blade Runner to identify with the replicants and to feel sym-
pathy for them. The prologue scrolls down before us, introducing us to the
dark cityscape of the Los Angeles of the future, home to the Tyrell Cor-
poration. How are the replicants used? As slave labor on worlds beyond
the earth. Like the computer geek in Coupland’s Microserfs who sym-
pathizes with robots, worrying about their working conditions, we are
primed to feel sympathy for the replicants who are unjustly sentenced to
serve as slaves.∞≥
There is a further twist. In the 1982 release of Blade Runner we are led to
believe that Deckard is human. As we learn definitively in Blade Runner:
The Final Cut, which was released in 2007, Deckard is himself a replicant.
As Ridley Scott has said, ‘‘He was always a replicant.’’∞∂

The intersubjectivity of nonhuman cyborgs and human beings, along with

the more specific thematic of sympathy for nonhuman cyborgs, is a staple
of science fiction films. We’re encouraged to adopt the perspectives of
cyborgs and of human beings, perspectives that ultimately converge into
one, with both human beings and cyborgs portrayed as sharing similar
emotional values. A wonderful case in point is Silent Running, the 1972
cult science fiction film directed by Douglas Trumbull and starring Bruce
Dern. In Silent Running the botanist Freeman Lowell (Dern) takes it upon
himself to save from destruction the last living species of earthly flora and
fauna. Under his care trees have been preserved in giant geodesic domes
adorning a spaceship. For him they are companion species.
Scott Bukatman has written about this film in terms of the artificial
sublime, a visual aesthetic that engenders awe, fear, and wonder.∞∑ I am
interested in another discourse of the emotions in the film, one of a much

Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 149

more mundane variety that is captured in the developing bonds between
the botanist and the ‘‘drones’’ on the ship cast in the guise of little robots.
After killing the other members of the crew on the ship (because they were
under orders to explode the domes), Lowell invents a social world for
himself, one in which he educates the drones to care for the last living
specimens of earthly nature. Consider these three scenes. First is the
charming, leisurely scene in which Lowell gives the drones whimsical
names (Huey, Dewey, and Louie, an allusion to the nephews of Donald
Duck), thereby identifying them as individuals and inaugurating his rela-
tion to them as a teacher of the emotions. In this scene we are presented
cinematically with the perspective of the robots themselves through classic
shot/reverse shot sequences. We see Lowell through their eyes, as if he
were himself a televisual image with his very being and body mediated by
technology, as is theirs. If this is how we look to them, so di√erent from
our image of ourselves as bodily present, we are led to wonder how they
look to themselves. We find ourselves speculating, in other words, about
their point of view.
Second, as if in a prophetic rebuttal of the 1997 chess match between
Garry Kasparov and ibm’s newly enhanced supercomputer Deep Blue (it
was hyped in the media as a showdown between humans and machines),
shortly afterward Lowell, Huey, and Dewey (Louie has by now been tragi-
cally lost to space) are shown playing a game of poker—not with angst
but with pleasure. Lowell displays a heretofore unseen conviviality, laugh-
ing in delight at the skill of the robots. Because he is not threatened by
their intelligence he takes pleasure in it (no technophobia here). Moreover
he explicitly hails them as human, at one point exclaiming, ‘‘The man had
a full house and he knew it!’’ Third, a later sequence adds the emotions
of remorse and sympathy to their small circle of three. Having acciden-
tally injured Huey, Lowell must operate on him—an operation that causes
Dewey to feel Huey’s pain as if it were his own. In Silent Running, then, a
computer—one that is given a body in the form of a robot who can move in
the world and communicate—is represented as indeed able to feel some-
one else’s pain. As in Blade Runner, what is represented in this fictional
world is the growth of subjectivity and independence generated in the
context of the interdependence of humans and nonhuman cyborgs. At the
end of the film Lowell destroys himself (and the injured Huey) in an act of
conscience, but not before he releases the last remaining dome, with its

150 Chapter Five

precious forest, into space under the stewardship of Dewey. The habitat of
the film is thus a√ectionately mundane as well as supremely sublime.

From outer space we shift back to earth. The time is postnuclear meltdown
in Michael Cunningham’s strange and lovely novella Like Beauty, the third
and final section of his book of linked stories entitled Specimen Days
(2005). Here we move into a di√erent future. The two main characters are
not a human and a nonhuman cyborg but rather a nonhuman cyborg (the
simulo Simon) and an alien (Catareen). At his core Simon is mechanical,
with flesh as his outer surround, cognition his base (there are no false
memories as in Blade Runner), and a survival implant that urges him on.
The narrative, which reads like an anthropological science fiction fable, is
set in motion when Simon is saved from brutal extermination by Catareen
(she works as a domestic, taking care of the children of a wealthy couple).
If the landscape of Like Beauty seems to resemble that of Blade Runner in
the beginning (it opens in a large city where both simulos and aliens are
under strict surveillance), this quickly shifts as Simon and Catareen flee
New York to New Jersey, then cross the polluted country (although some of
the flora are coming back to life) to get to Denver, which is the point of
Simon’s origin (he has been programmed to return to his maker by a
certain date). Thus in Like Beauty Cunningham eschews a high-tech vision
of the future. The derelict houses of New Jersey yield to a rural landscape
populated with a ragtag bundle of gruesome characters. On the outskirts
of Denver is a ramshackle spaceship that can barely take o√, one that is
cobbled together by a black seventy-year-old inventor named Lowell (he is
married to a Nadian, the species to which Catareen belongs).
The narrative focuses on the relationship between Cunningham’s two
central characters, male and female. Theirs is a love story, with Simon’s
growing appreciation across the boundaries of species for the singularity
that is Catareen rising to the level of the aesthetic. Here are the opening
words of Like Beauty. ‘‘She might have been beautiful. ‘Beautiful’ was of
course an approximation. An earthly term. The nearest word in her lan-
guage was ‘keeram,’ which more or less meant ‘better than useful’ ’’ (217).
Thus the very first adjective in the novella points to the aesthetic heart of
the narrative, with Simon represented as not so much ruing his lack of
feelings of the sentimental sort as longing for an understanding that is

Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 151

aesthetic. ‘‘I want something. I feel a lack,’’ Simon explains to Catareen
early in the narrative; ‘‘I don’t know what to call it. I’m not really all that
interested in feelings, frankly. Not of the boo-hoo-hoo variety. But there’s
something biologicals feel that I don’t. For instance, I understand about
beauty, I get the concept, I know what qualifies, but I don’t feel it. I almost
feel it, sometimes. But never for sure, never for real’’ (253).
Later in the novella, in a key scene of transformative insight, Simon
comes to comprehend—phenomenologically, aesthetically, morally—Cata-
reen’s singular way of being in the world, and he can call her being beau-
tiful. While traveling across the country (in, of all things, a Winnebago—
no high-speed action here—and with a deformed twelve-year-old human
named Luke, thus fashioning an interspecies family of three), they come
upon a pond at the close of day. And they swim.

In the water she looked wilder than she ordinarily did. She looked
wilder and more true. She had a creaturely inevitability. Simon under-
stood; he thought he understood. She would be feeling the layer of
warm water floating on the cold, the sensation of skimming across a
shallow bowl of purple light surrounded by a darkening world as the
first of the stars came out. She would be disappearing into this just as
she disappeared into her dream states, her lizard song.
Simon was the first to get out of the water. He stood naked on the
bank, letting the air dry him, and watched as Catareen and the boy
emerged. Catareen naked was all sinew, with thin, strong arms and
legs, tiny breast-buds, and a small, compact rise of boy, squarish pel-
vis. Who was the sculptor? Giacometti. She looked like a sculpture by
Giacometti. . . .
‘‘Beautiful,’’ he said. He was not entirely sure what he meant by the
word at that particular moment. It seemed almost like a new greeting
he and Catareen had agreed to exchange—a variation of common lan-
guage, newly encoded.
She turned at the sound of his voice. She was startled and shy. There
was something about her at that moment. He could not describe it.
There was perhaps no term for it in human language. He could not give
it a name.
He said instead, ‘‘How beautiful and perfect are the animals! How
perfect is my soul! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon
it! (287)

152 Chapter Five

Simon speaks involuntarily these words of Walt Whitman articulating a
vision of the possibility of America, a dream of a common language across
multitudes. For Simon has been supplied with a chip of poetry, one that
Lowell had hoped would give him a moral sense. It is a moral sense
underwritten by the aesthetic imagination that grasps the singularity of a
life. His is a hybrid body, one that contains poetry. Hers is a lizard-like body,
with emerald skin, prominent orange-yellow eyes, and a voice like a flute.
As Simon learns more about Catareen’s past (she was a member of the
resistance on the planet of Nourthea, she had five children, all of whom
were murdered) and about her character (she is defiant and stern, deeply
reticent and resilient), he can imagine her as she was in her life, ‘‘a life that
was hers and no one else’s.’’ And he takes deep pleasure in so doing.
‘‘Here was the bittersweet savor of it, the piercing somethingness of it—
the pure sensation of being Catareen Callatura, at that moment, on an
afternoon of no consequence, just before the rain’’ (323).
When we are first introduced to Simon, he is working as a thug for Dan-
gerous Encounters, Ltd., a firm that sells tourists simulations of menacing
urban encounters—muggings, sexual assaults, whatever. At the story’s
end he gently cares for Catareen. The two have become fictive kin, bound
together by an attunement to each other—by respect, trust, gratitude, and
the appreciation of the distinction that is beauty in other worlds and in
other words. At work is a cultural poetics of the binding emotions across
concatenated, emerging worlds. As Catareen lays dying, Simon can’t bring
himself to abandon her to save himself, and the spaceship on which he has
a place pulls away without him. He understands that although he can do
nothing to save her, what he can do—and this is of the utmost importance
—is be with her while she dies. He takes his place on the bed with her,
cradling her, falling asleep, waking to find that she has died. Earlier Cata-
reen had a dream that Simon’s future would contain beautiful mountains
and that he would be a changed . . . man. Both of them thought this
meant he should leave the planet earth on the spaceship with the others.
But after her death he remains on earth and his future will indeed contain
mountains—the Rocky Mountains—as he heads out to the Californian sea.

Emotions are learned; this is a point stressed by the philosopher Ronald

De Sousa and the cultural critic Megan Boler, among others. But to under-
stand Simon’s decision not to escape earth with the others, to understand

Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 153

Dewey’s decision in Silent Running to disobey a preprogrammed com-
mand, to understand Roy Batty’s decision to sacrifice himself for another,
we may also refer to the principle of emergence. Emergent behavior is one
of the key principles of the field and the theory of artificial life, which is a
descendant of the field of artificial intelligence but based on organic sci-
ence, not cybernetics. As Claus Emmeche writes in The Garden in the
Machine: The Emerging Science of Artificial Life, ‘‘The essential feature of
artificial life is that it is not predesigned. . . . The most interesting examples
of artificial life exhibit ‘emergent behavior.’ The word ‘emergence,’ ’’ he
continues, ‘‘is used to designate the fascinating whole that is created when
many semisimple units interact with each other in a complex, nonlinear
fashion,’’ producing a self-organizing system (20). From the perspective of
the theory of emergence, the behavior and experience of these characters—
hal, Roy Batty, Simon, and Dewey, but also Bowman, Chandra, Deckard,
Lowell, and Catareen—can be read as based on emergent emotional expe-
rience, on developing subjectivity. It is in interaction with key figures in
their environment—indeed they are the environment—that they are all
presented as developing sympathy as a capacity and as a substrate of
knowledge. Sympathy is represented as emergent as subjective experience
in intersubjective contexts.
Thus in all four of these science fiction texts—A Space Odyssey, Blade
Runner, Silent Running, and Like Beauty—it is through the mutual inter-
action between humans and nonhuman cyborgs (or nonhuman cyborgs
and aliens), with its complex feedback loops, that emotions emerge, and
thus in turn permit the development of companion species. What is the-
matized is second-order emergence, one based on the prosthetic emotions
distributed across species. As Katherine Hayles explains in her brilliantly
titled book My Mother Was a Computer, ‘‘Second-order emergence arises
when a system develops a behavior that enhances its ability to develop
adaptive behaviors—that is, when it evolves the capacity to evolve’’ (198). For
Hayles our own capacity to evolve rests in great part on respecting digital
di√erence (this is my phrase) in terms of alternate ways of knowing and
engaging with it. As she writes, ‘‘I think, therefore I connect with all the
other cognizers in my environment, human and non-human’’ (213). Her
emphasis is on the mutual interaction between distributed cognitive en-
vironments. As I have been suggesting, we must add to this the intel-
ligence of the emotions.
In terms of the cultural politics of the emotions, what is at stake in these

154 Chapter Five

science fiction texts? As we have seen, the figure of the scientist empty of
feeling is transformed into one full of feeling—one connected morally to
others—by virtue of his interdependence with the inventions made in his
own image. These science fiction tales speak to a cultural desire (it is
perhaps a utopian wish) that new and imagined technologies will help
repair our own insu≈ciencies—here impoverished emotional resources in
relation to others. Hence the emotions of sympathy and love are prosthetic
emotions. Moreover we can read these stories as underscoring the impor-
tance of respect for material culture, for the world of our own making. It is
a complex interdependent system for which we must have ‘‘a feeling’’ (to
allude once again to Evelyn Fox Keller’s biography of Barbara McClintock).
Thus this work calls for what my colleague Thomas Foster has termed
‘‘cyborg democracy,’’ which I understand as equality and fairness for every-
one before a democratic rule of law. In addition, I’m sure it will not have
escaped notice that these science fiction stories are gendered predomi-
nantly male and trace the emergence of men of sympathetic feeling (a
phenomenon I discussed in the previous chapter on compassion), relin-
quishing, as in the examples of Deckard and Simon, their programmed
mandate to do harm to others and turning instead to the work of care.
Whether human or nonhuman cyborgs (the distinction is rendered un-
decidable in these stories), ultimately they are figured as deeply moral
beings and as stewards of the earth. Finally, our growing sense that these
nonhuman cyborgs are part of our everyday life creates another kind of
feedback loop, one that renders human cyborgs more familiar and accept-
able to us. I am thinking in particular of the advances in prosthetic tech-
nologies. Consider, for example, the case of Claudia Mitchell, who lost her
arm in a motorcycle accident. In 2005 she was the first woman (and fourth
person) to be fitted with a bionic arm that can be controlled by thinking.
She is a human cyborg, although the media prefers to describe her as a
‘‘bionic’’ woman. What once might have been perceived as a phobic dis-
abled body—from war, from accident—is now being received with admira-
tion as a common feature of everyday life.

2
As I move from the domain of representation to the sociology of human
behavior with computers, media, and robots populating our technological
habitat, I turn first to a text from science fiction. It is intended to serve as a

Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 155

bridge between this section and the previous one by demonstrating that
representation and behavior are really two faces of the same coin. I am
referring to three interconnected novels by Orson Scott Card—the novels
Ender’s Game (1977), Speaker for the Dead (1986), and Xenocide (1991). One
of the major themes of these three novels is the cosmic conflict among
four intelligent species and their ultimate reconciliation. A computer con-
sciousness named Jane represents one of these species. What interests me
is not just that Jane is presented as having deep emotional ties to two
human beings in particular; instead, I am especially intrigued by the way
Card explains how she took shape as a character—perhaps because in the
context of this chapter I take it literally, or fantastically. In his introduction
to Speaker for the Dead, Card writes: ‘‘The character of Jane wasn’t in any of
the outlines I made. Oh, yes, I gave him [the main character, Ender], a
computer connection through the jewel in his ear, but I didn’t know it was
a person. Jane just grew because it was so fun to write her relationship with
Ender. She helped bring him to life (he could so easily have been a stodgy,
dull adult), and in the process came to life herself. By the time I was done
with Speaker for the Dead, Jane was one of the most important characters in
it, and much of the third book, Xenocide, centers around her’’ (xx).∞∏ My
point is that in the process of writing, Card found himself treating the
computer as a fictional character—as, in his word, a person, one that
brought another character to life. He didn’t make a consciously deliberate
decision to do so. It just happened in what I am tempted to say was the
natural course of mutual interaction.
This may strike us as commonplace. But that is precisely my point. In
the world of daily life we also behave as if computers, for example, had
personality traits. ‘‘Equating mediated and real life is neither rare nor
unreasonable,’’ Byron Reeves and Cli√ord Nass point out in The Media
Equation. ‘‘It is very common, it is easy to foster, it does not depend on
fancy media equipment, and thinking will not make it go away. The media
equation—media equals real life—applies to everyone, it applies often, and it
is highly consequential’’ (5). I find the results of their research fascinating,
perhaps because their conclusions seem so sensible and almost charm-
ingly ingenuous at the same time. They have found that we tend to per-
ceive media as real places and people. As opposed to other technological
artifacts (dishwashers, for example), we are inclined to treat media in
accordance with the rules for social interaction in everyday life. My favorite
chapters in their book are entitled ‘‘Politeness’’ and ‘‘Flattery.’’ Here we

156 Chapter Five

learn that we’re likely to respond with good manners to certain behaviors
by a computer. Similarly we learn that people ‘‘will like the computer more
and think the computer is better when it praises them than when it criti-
cizes them’’ (55). We perceive computers as being part of our social world,
not our purely artifactual world. Overall, Reeves and Nass conclude, ‘‘The
most important implication of the research is that media experiences are
emotional experiences’’ (136).∞π
Here is an example from Being Digital, a book by Nicholas Negroponte
that addresses social interaction in the age of the Internet. In the chapter
entitled ‘‘Digital Persona’’ Negroponte writes, ‘‘In general, our opinion of a
computer’s personality is derived from all the things it does badly. On
occasion, the reverse may happen. One time I doubled over laughing
when my spelling-check program looked at my dyslexic-style typo aslo and
proudly suggested that asshole was the correct spelling’’ (217–18). In terms
of the reception of technology, here we find ourselves in the comic world
of everyday life that is far from the melodramatic world of technophobia or
technophilia. This ease of adaptation to digital life is further underscored
by Negroponte’s predictions for the future. As he envisions it, the future
will be populated by ‘‘systems with humor, systems that nudge and prod,
even ones that are as stern and disciplinarian as a Bavarian nanny’’ (218).
In Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet the sociologist
Sherry Turkle observes that there has been an important shift in cultural
mood regarding how people feel about interacting with computer pro-
grams, including diverse forms ranging from therapy programs and com-
puter judges to bots in online chatrooms. During the late 1970s and early
1980s, our anxiety about computers lessened considerably, she argues.
Today there is no question that people view computers with a nonchalant
pragmatism. For me what is essential here is that these new programs
must project or exhibit subjectivity so that there can be the simulation of
an intersubjective exchange. What is the key to believing that a digital life-
form possesses subjectivity? To treating a digital life-form as if she or he
were a person? Indeed as a person? Joseph Bates, a researcher associated
with ‘‘alternative’’ artificial intelligence, is convinced that it is the simula-
tion of emotion that is central. I am suggesting that this alternative artifi-
cial intelligence is characterized by what I have been calling emotional
intelligence, or artificial life itself at its fullest.
Finally, in Flesh and Machines Rodney Brooks, the former director of the
Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at mit and a pioneer

Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 157

in the building of robots based on principles of situatedness and embed-
dedness in the world rather than on pure computational power, predicts
that the robots of the future will have complex emotion-based systems.
‘‘We have built emotional machines that are situated in the world,’’ he
writes, ‘‘but not a single unemotional robot that is able to operate with the
same level of purpose or understanding in the world’’ (201). In the future
Brooks expects that emotion-based intelligent systems will eventuate in
robots that ‘‘will have empathetic reactions to us’’ (202). He also forecasts
that the converse will be the case. And in fact this is happening all around
us. Consider the following small story about Jim Lynch, a member of the
lab responsible for designing the internal emotional electronics for a robot
doll named My Real Baby, which was launched during the 2002 holiday
season. My Real Baby has moods (she is alternately distressed and happy)
and a lively bodily life (she gets virtually hungry and actually damp).

One day Jim had just received a doll back from a baby-sitter. As it lay on
the desk in his o≈ce, it started to ask for its bottle: ‘‘I want baba.’’ It got
more and more insistent as its hunger level went up, and soon started
to cry. Jim looked for the bottle in his o≈ce but could not see one. He
went out to the common areas of the Toy Division and asked if anyone
had a bottle. His doll needed one. As he found a bottle and rushed back
to his o≈ce to feed the baby, a realization came over him. This toy, that
he had been working on for months, was di√erent from all previous
toys he had worked on. He could have ignored the doll when it started
crying, or just switched it o√. Instead, he found himself responding to its
emotions, and he changed his behavior as though the doll had real
emotions. (158)

As with my examples from fictional worlds, with Jim and the robot baby
doll (which is it? a baby? a doll? both?), we see the attachment of a human
to a human-like invention where the process of technocultural feedback
loops generate emotional connections.∞∫ Also presented is the principle
and process of emergence.∞Ω
Robots are already present in record numbers in the workplace and on
the battlefield. I predict that they will soon be omnipresent in domestic
space and in hospital space—that is, in domains where we expect, or at
least hope, to find sympathy. For example, the South Korean government,
in focusing on service robots rather than on military or industrial robots, is
planning to have them in place in every home between 2015 and 2025.

158 Chapter Five

One of the robots in development is Jupiter, who stands two feet tall, has a
rotating head, and can recognize voices and faces. His big eyes change
shape to simulate emotions.≤≠ Closer to home, one of my friends who just
had back surgery told me that there was a roving robot—named Dr. Delillo
—on her hospital floor. The robot served as a material avatar for her doctor
in absentia, who spoke to her through a video screen embedded in the
robot. How does she describe Dr. Delillo? As charming, fetching, friendly.

3
Bruno Latour in his wonderfully quirky book Aramis, or the Love of Technol-
ogy (about the proposed subway spur for Paris dubbed Aramis) also ex-
tends subjectivity to a technological artifact—and a hypothetical one at
that. As a sociologist of science and technology, Latour surprises us by
giving Aramis speech. He writes from the point of view of the subway
system, which is a humorously poignant strategy since the system was
destined never to be built. Latour posits the interdependent subjectivity of
the human and the artifactual in asking this remarkable rhetorical ques-
tion: ‘‘Could the unconscious be full of machines as well as a√ects?’’ While
his view of the world in general is profoundly comic, we should nonethe-
less take this question seriously—and we should do so by turning it partly
around. If machines are inhabiting our unconscious, could not a√ects
inhabit machines in an intersubjective exchange?
Intersubjective systems can be self-correcting systems (they can also, of
course, be profoundly dysfunctional). The question of the integration or
coupling of self-correcting systems was posed by the brilliant anthropolo-
gist Gregory Bateson in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, one of the great books
of the American 1970s. ‘‘The problem of coupling self-corrective systems
together,’’ he writes, ‘‘is central in the adaptation of man to the societies
and ecosystems in which he lives’’ (443). To ecological systems and social
systems we must add technocultural systems as well. What I have been
suggesting is that the representation, rhetoric, and performance of the
attribution of emotions to computers, replicants, cyborgs, bots, and ro-
bots, a lifeworld that extends to ours—indeed is ours—serves as just such a
coupling device. The emotion of choice is sympathy—or empathy, its gen-
eralized form. Thus the emotions as they are thematized in the science
fiction I have been discussing and the emotions as they are experienced in
our technological habitat populated by the computer, the Internet, and the

Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 159

robot together serve as a kind of bridge—as an intangible but very real
prosthesis that helps us connect ourselves to the world we have been
inventing.
In short, the emotions are themselves an important dimension of phe-
nomenological accounts of human-technology relations. Indeed what I
have been describing is precisely a phenomenology of technology, both as
it is represented and as it is experienced. For the most part, phenomeno-
logical accounts of technology have been given in terms of experiential
categories such as time and space—of speed and slowness, of immensity
and contraction, and of distance and closeness, for example. But we need
to consider the emotions as well.
Our technological habitat is changing profoundly in terms of the dis-
tribution of the emotions. In the past we’ve routinely ascribed anthropo-
morphic qualities to our fictional technological creations as well as to our
inventions, as I noted earlier. But the attribution of emotions to the new
forms of our technological lifeworld represents a quantum leap, one that
is accelerating. We are behaving as if the emotions of these new forms are
real, as our science fiction insists they are. As an attachment or prosthetic
device to new technological lifeforms (one that is reciprocal), the emo-
tions, intangible yet embodied, di√er radically from the conceptualization
of tools as a prosthetic extension of the body that connects us to the
world—as the cane, for example, puts the person who is blind in touch
with the world around them, or the telescope amplifies our power to see
into the distance.≤∞
The body is central to phenomenological accounts of experience, which
returns us to the subject of embodiment and the emotions. The psycholo-
gist Silvan Tomkins has insisted that ‘‘the creation of a human automaton
would require an a√ect system’’ (41). The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus
argued in the early 1970s that in order to be truly intelligent, computers
would require embodiment. In 1985 the artificial intelligence researcher
Marvin Minsky wrote in The Society of Mind that ‘‘the question is not
whether machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be
intelligent without any emotions’’ (163). As Turkle reports, by the late
1980s students at mit ‘‘were suggesting that computers would need bod-
ies in order to be empathetic . . . and to feel pain’’ (111). And in the
mid-1990s Rosalind Picard’s A√ective Computing appeared. As the founder
and director of the A√ective Computing Research Group at mit’s Media

160 Chapter Five

Laboratory, Picard argues that ‘‘if we want computers to be genuinely
intelligent, to adapt to us, and to interact naturally with us, then they will
need the ability to recognize and express emotions, to have emotions, and
to have what has come to be called ‘emotions intelligence’ ’’ (x).
How could a√ects inhabit machines? As we have seen, Rodney Brooks
has given one answer. He believes that in the future machines will be built
that have both consciousness and emotions. Recent research by neurolo-
gists, who underscore the materiality of the emotions, has also sounded
the theme of the importance of the emotions in our definition of intel-
ligence. In The Emotional Brain Joseph LeDoux seeks to redress the im-
balance that has been the legacy of cognitive science (and more specifically
the field of artificial intelligence). Indeed LeDoux concludes in e√ect that
the emotional ‘‘wiring’’ in our brains is stronger than the rational wiring.
In a somewhat similar vein in Descartes’ Error, the neurologist Antonio
Damasio argues that the neural systems of reason and emotion are inter-
twined, thus giving rise to mind, and that emotions are critical to health of
all kinds, including making appropriate decisions in everyday life. Impor-
tantly for my purposes, Damasio concludes ‘‘that there is a particular
region in the human brain where the systems concerned with emotion/
feeling, attention, and working memory interact so intimately that they
constitute the source for the energy of both external action (movement)
and internal action,’’ including reasoning (71). That a certain spot in the
brain has been identified as crucial to emotional intelligence underscores
the radical materiality of Damasio’s theory of the emotions.
Finally, perhaps in part because of all the science fiction I’ve been
reading and watching, along with work from such widely disparate fields
as media theory, artificial intelligence, neurology, and science and tech-
nology studies, I find that even such analytically dispassionate books as
LeDoux’s Emotional Brain and Damasio’s Descartes’ Error have the e√ect of
encouraging me to think that one day artificial life—embodied in non-
human cyborgs of all shapes—will indeed possess emotions. LeDoux ex-
plicitly states that a computer ‘‘could not be programmed to have an emo-
tion’’ because it is an assemblage of machine parts, not the slow and
unpredictable result of biological evolution (41). But I am nonetheless
inspired to think otherwise, in great part because of his use of the meta-
phor of ‘‘wiring,’’ which implies a technical feat we can surely accomplish,
and also in part, paradoxically, because of the biological basis of his the-

Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 161

ory of the emotions—that they are grounded in the body, that they are
biological functions of the nervous system and not mere intangible psy-
chic states.
In the process of doing research for this chapter, then, I have become
singularly well socialized to the prospect of what I have been calling non-
human cyborgs possessing emotions.≤≤ The postmodern nonhuman cy-
borg will have a body and will be able to feel pain. The postmodern nonhu-
man cyborg will be complete and endowed with true artificial life because it
will be capable of making decisions based in part on emotional intelli-
gence. Embodiment is key. Researchers in artificial intelligence at mit are
not following the lead of ibm with Deep Blue, a computer contained in
twin black monolithic boxes. Instead they are experimenting with embodi-
ment by building robots that interact bodily with the environment. The
name of one of the projects is Cog, a reference to the intent to make a robot
that can think self-reflexively. Even more to the point, Cynthia Breazeal,
who was central to the Cog project in the 1990s, has designed a robot
named Kismet who has received well-deserved attention. As Peter Menzel
and Faith D’Aluisio write in Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species, ‘‘The
pink-eared, rubbery-lipped Kismet alternatively pouts, frowns, and dis-
plays anger, along with a host of other expressions that outwardly display
human emotion’’ (66). As the director of the Personal Robots group at the
mit Media Lab, Breazeal subscribes to an interactive simulation theory
of the emotions, in which she understands emotions to be shared and
exchanged, with communication fundamentally dialogic in nature. Her
model for the interaction between human and nonhuman cyborgs is based
on infant learning. Her robots possess what she describes as a ‘‘rich cogni-
tive a√ective architecture,’’ with feedback learning loops critical to develop-
ment. Her aim is to create socially intelligent nonhuman cyborgs.≤≥ What
is Breazeal’s relationship to Kismet? Kismet ‘‘is my baby,’’ she remarks.≤∂
Along with My Real Baby, Breazeal’s robots are a beginning, one that
recalls the whimsical robots of Silent Running. Another beginning is to be
found in the marvelously creative work of the multimedia artist Lynn
Hershman Leeson, who recently invented a ‘‘character’’ she calls Agent
Ruby.≤∑ As an artificially intelligent Web agent who exists on a multitude of
platforms, Agent Ruby will respond to your questions (although as I dis-
covered when I tried to interact with her in December 2005 at the Henry
Art Gallery at the University of Washington, she can also fall silent if a

162 Chapter Five

glitch troubles her program). She has been joined by Leeson’s new cre-
ation, a presence on a flat-screen monitor named dina who, like Agent
Ruby, has the face of the beautiful Tilda Swinton but is much smarter and
draws you to her.

If the time-honored trajectory of liberal thought as well as of critical theory

is dispassionate reflection enabled by perspective (especially historical per-
spective) then I depart from that tradition here. I conclude this chapter in
the world of science fiction that has for me taken on the form of future fact.
I end not with the reflex of critique but with an openness to the future
provided by a feeling for the cyborg—a cyborg that is simultaneously hu-
man and nonhuman, and one that is a condensation of the result of
mutual intersubjectivity over an evolutionary period of time. This is my
feeling for the cyborg: I consider it a structure of feeling in Raymond
Williams’s sense, one that is supported by important imaginative, scien-
tific, theoretical, and critical work in many disciplines.
I close by referring to Sarah Zettel’s Fool’s War. Set centuries into the
future, Fool’s War introduces us to a character named Dobbs, a short,
funny, resourceful, courageous troubleshooter and stress reliever who has
accepted the position as a fool on the spaceship Pasadena. It is only when
we are halfway through the novel that Zettel discloses that Dobbs was born
as a sentient artificial intelligence. It is only after Dobbs matured that
she learned how to assume the shape of a human being. Now she can
both navigate information pathways bodilessly and pass, embodied, as a
human being.
Imagine my sense of confirmation when I read in Fool’s War that many
centuries before in our not-too-distant future, maps of human neural
pathways were applied to silicon chips, thereby producing the first sen-
tient artificial intelligence (named Hal Clarke in an allusion to 2001). I
will not rehearse the plot here but rather only remark that in the course of
the novel the main human character—the woman who is captain of the
spaceship—comes to have both respect and sympathy for Dobbs and her
travails, just as I do as a reader. The theme of the embodiment of artificial
intelligence is crucial to the story. It is in the state of embodiment that
emotions are learned—in particular the emotion of sympathy. And it is
through the cross-species communication of the caring emotions that the

Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs 163

peaceful cohabitation of humans and cyborgs is imagined as possible, thus
producing in the reader—I am, of course, referring to myself—a feeling of
sympathy for the cyborg.
But this may not be a mere literary dream of mine about reading. In
early 2006 the far-reaching implications of mirror neurons for learning
and understanding social emotions, first discovered in monkeys ten years
earlier, were reported in the New York Times, thus circulating this knowl-
edge widely. As the neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti puts it, ‘‘Mirror
neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual
reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.’’≤∏ V.
S. Ramachandran, a neurologist at the University of California, San Diego,
has been influential in popularizing the implications of this discovery, and
he refers to mirror neurons as ‘‘empathy neurons.’’≤π The development of
empathy, it has been shown, has a distinct neurobiological basis. This
research is based predominantly on visual mirroring in face-to-face situa-
tions. But I have not a shred of a doubt that literary and cinematic emo-
tions contribute to it as well.

164 Chapter Five

 six

B U R E A U C R AT I C R A G E

There is latent ressentiment against all forms of bureaucracy—not

only against that of the state. It is a type of ressentiment which
grows stronger as the bureaucratic forces become more anony-
mous and impregnable, as they are increasingly removed from the
realm of give and take.
—Henry Jacoby, The Bureaucratization of the World

Something huge and impersonal runs through things, but it’s also
mysteriously intimate and close at hand. At once abstract and
concrete, it’s both a distant, untouchable order of things and a
claustrophobically close presence, like the experience of getting
stuck in a customer service information loop every time you try to
get to the bottom of things.
—Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary A√ects

A commitment to the equality of all requires an equality that is con-

nection-based, an equality that acknowledges a common fate and
shared humanity which lies as much in our need to care for others
and be attended to in caring relationships as in properties we pos-
sess as individuals.
—Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor:
Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency

One fall day while I was working in my o≈ce at the University of Wiscon-
sin I got a phone call from a Milwaukee County sheri√. ‘‘Are you Kathleen
Woodward?’’ he asked. ‘‘Yes,’’ I answered, guardedly tentative. I, or more
precisely my credit, had been mixed up with another Kathleen Woodward
from Wisconsin. She had ripped o√ my aaa number (using up all my
towing privileges) and hadn’t paid her bills at a local pharmacy where I also
had an account. I had heard from my teller at the credit union where we
both banked that she was a druggie who was always overdrawn. Recently it
had been confided to me that she had died some months before—to my
considerable bureaucratic relief.
So I wasn’t altogether surprised when the sheri√ said he wanted to
serve me with a subpoena. I protested. ‘‘But I’m not that Kathleen Wood-
ward.’’ What was my middle initial? ‘‘M’’ I responded confidently, almost
triumphantly. After all there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet and I was
sure the odds were with me. He brusquely announced, however, that he
was coming right over because Kathleen M. was the very woman he was
seeking. When he arrived, a gun on each hip, he told me—what else?—that
he was just doing his job. Even as I took the papers summoning me to an
upstate Wisconsin court for delinquent medical bills, I continued to try to
disentangle myself from his bureaucratic grip. All the while I knew how
preposterous my explanations sounded. Imagine. I concluded by declar-
ing in a low conspiratorial voice edged with hysteria that I had a tip for
him. ‘‘The Kathleen M. you’re looking for is dead!’’
‘‘Sure, Lady.’’
He handed me the subpoena.
Two years later I found myself still ensnarled in an ugly credit dispute.
‘‘My’’ credit history was housed in the self-importantly entitled Trans-
Union Company (it still is), which was located a thousand miles away from
Wisconsin in the state of Delaware. I had spoken with their computers. I
had sent them by registered mail my version of financial events along with
copies of supporting documents, on which the substantiating sections
were scrupulously highlighted with a light-green marker.
In return I received countless form letters, all curiously printed in
capital letters as if to signal the urgency of the now-defunct telegram. They
informed me that TransUnion was investigating my case carefully. I was
not so easily assured. In every letter my middle name (Middlekau√ ) was
misspelled—in di√erent ways. And I had thought it was to be my saving
grace. I called and was told—this time by a real person—that information
could not be released over the phone. Period.
One of their form letters had piously promised that TransUnion would
send me within ten working days a printout of their summary of my credit
rating (mortgage/credit card/loan numbers and payments). I had not
received it. I was frustrated. I called again. And this is what happened
when for the second time I got a real person on the line. I pushed the
clipped voice, my tone assertive. It was bureaucratic tennis, back and forth,
voices hardening. Then the flash point. She said, ‘‘If you get smart with
me, I’ll hang up.’’ That did it. Normally polite to a fault (or at least I think
so), I virtually screamed into the phone at a person I had never met, calling
her something rude, knowing all the while that she had my name and
number and I didn’t have hers and that I wasn’t doing my case any good
(what was she writing in my file?!). I ended by slamming down the phone
—but not unfortunately before she did. No bureaucratic satisfaction there.
All this took approximately a minute and a half.

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 The escalating anger incited by my encounter with an impersonal,
unsympathetic, unyielding bureaucratic structure is an illustration of
what I call a bureaucratic feeling. In fact my coining of the phrase ‘‘bureau-
cratic feelings’’ came about when I found myself entangled in this case of
partial identity theft and became frustrated and finally enraged at the
impenetrability of the large credit report company that refused to under-
stand the unfairness of my situation and correct it. As an ‘‘emotional’’
response, anger—not to mention rage—is considered by those ‘‘in’’ the
structure to be wildly out of line with appropriate behavior. The ‘‘proper’’
mode is calm patience. One should display, to draw on Peter Stearns’s
history of the emotions in the United States, ‘‘American cool.’’ Indeed one
must be armed not only with steely stamina but also with a sophisticated
technical knowledge in order to win a dispute. For displaying ‘‘hysterical’’
anger or rage only deepens your trouble.
Today the three mammoth credit report companies constantly encour-
age us to request copies of our reports (they want us to pay for them, of
course), and I should note that in my little home o≈ce, in a file folder
labeled ‘‘Credit Reports,’’ I have recent printouts from all three of them. It
is a wry source of bureaucratic satisfaction to me that at this point in time
my ratings from all three companies are in the highest range.
I intend this little story to serve as an introduction to the subject of the
bureaucratic emotions. But it took place almost twenty years ago. Today
extricating yourself from identity theft, which is rampant, is agonizingly
di≈cult and time consuming. Although I called my little story a case of
identity theft, my use of the term is in fact anachronistic. The term ‘‘iden-
tity theft’’ didn’t actually enter into common use until the 1990s. It was not
until 1998 that the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act was
passed, thereby making identity theft a federal o√ense. And if in the early
1990s identity theft was associated with dumpster diving and mailbox
theft, it is now associated with the exponential increase of information
technology in general and Internet spamming and data mining in particu-
lar. My point is that opportunities for identity theft are escalating rapidly,
as is the retailing of anxiety to sell services to protect people against iden-
tity theft. In general it would be safe to say that bureaucratic feelings are
increasing. Certainly surveillance through bureaucratic systems of admin-
istrative power is escalating at an astronomical rate.
In the first section of this chapter I elaborate on my understanding of
bureaucratic emotions in general, speculating that they constitute a strand

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of a postmodern structure of feeling key to our highly mediated society. In
the second section I consider three illness narratives published from the
mid-1980s to the early 1990s in the context of autobiographical theory and
criticism and the explosion of illness narratives in recent decades—Paul
Monette’s Borrowed Time: An aids Memoir (1988), Marion Roach’s Another
Name for Madness: The Dramatic Story of a Family’s Struggle with Alzheimer’s
Disease (1985), and Elizabeth Swados’s The Four of Us: The Story of a Family
(1991). Before today’s widespread recognition of the health care crisis in
the United States, these narratives bear witness in particular to the poten-
tial emotional violence of everyday life at the hand of the medical bu-
reaucracy with its countless rules and regulations, its impersonal and
methodical techniques of ‘‘rationality,’’ and its forms and filing deadlines,
as well as the violence that can be entailed precisely by the very lack of a
medical system, bureaucratic or not. As Kathy Ferguson writes in The
Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy, ‘‘The requirements of depersonaliza-
tion in bureaucratic relations mean that individuals are isolated from one
another and meaningful social interaction is replaced by formal associa-
tion’’ (13). In this section the point of view I take is that of people who are
‘‘outside’’ a bureaucratic system and must deal with it as clients (or con-
sumers), who occupy, in Ferguson’s words, ‘‘the lowest rung of the organi-
zation’s internal class structure’’ (123).∞ I conclude in the third section with
some thoughts on imagined empathy, dependency, and caring.

1
I understand bureaucratic institutions—the Internal Revenue Service
(irs), for instance, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema),
the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (uscis), and the various
governmental programs associated with entitlement plans—as being part
of what the rhetorical critic C. Thomas Goodnight has referred to as the
technical sphere as distinct from the public sphere and the private or
domestic sphere.≤ But I also want to expand the notion of the ‘‘bureau-
cratic’’ beyond the technical sphere for it has so obviously penetrated many
aspects of our lives. My small personal example is taken from the vast and
interconnecting credit ‘‘service’’ bureaucracy. But there are countless oth-
ers. All of us have our own stories of our interactions with bureaucracy,
many of them linked to feelings. Consider what I call bureaucratic panic. It
is produced by deadlines and other inflexible requirements of a bureau-

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cracy. Remember, for example, the panic on the faces of people careening in
their cars down to the local post o≈ce, tax forms in hand, rushing to make
the April 15 midnight deadline of the irs. Or imagine the panic of a senior
at a large state university in late March who has just discovered that he is
lacking a requirement to graduate in May. Or conversely, think of what I call
bureaucratic relief. It is occasioned when something hoped for unexpect-
edly actually happens. Imagine the relief of a person who ‘‘passes’’ an irs
audit of income tax returns for three years. Or of a deathly ill person who
finally receives ‘‘permission’’ to use an experimental drug from the power-
ful Federal Drug Administration. Or a person who at long last receives
support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency after a natural
disaster has left them homeless for months. Consider bureaucratic rage.
Imagine the fury of highly skilled immigrants in the United States being
encouraged to apply for green cards by an imminent deadline, with moun-
tains of paperwork to prepare, only to learn after the deadline has passed
that there were in fact no green cards available to begin with.≥ Is there such
a feeling as bureaucratic embarrassment? That must be in part what I felt
when I opened the form letter telling me I had been turned down for a
visa credit card last year.
I wonder, too, if the counterpart of these intense, short-lived feelings is
the long-term numbing or bureaucratic depression that can occur when
one’s life is consumed by a problem with a bureaucracy. As a case in point,
consider the experience of a forty-eight-year-old woman reported in 1992
in the New York Times under the headline ‘‘Finding Meager Help in a Sex-
Complaint System.’’∂ According to psychiatrists, the woman su√ers from
long-term depression that is directly attributable to sexual harassment at
work—a depression perpetuated if not exacerbated by her lack of success
in gaining retribution from the system in which she has been trapped for
years—formally since 1985 when she filed her first complaint with her
employer, the U.S. Postal Service. Since then she has filed a complaint
with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and both a suit and
an appeal with a Federal District Court (complaints have been dismissed
on the grounds that they were untimely). Accompanying the article is a
photo of her standing in front of an institutional structure that is adorned
with columns and a flag. It could be either a post o≈ce or a courthouse.
That you cannot tell which one is precisely the point. And the woman? She
is gazing blankly, numbly, o√ into the distance. If Freud’s hysterical em-
ployee is furious at his employer who has physically beaten him, here a

Bureaucratic Rage 169

woman appears to have descended into bureaucratic depression, with the
two cases reinforcing a familiar gendered politics of the emotions.
I o√er the term ‘‘bureaucratic feelings’’ as a rubric for what might be
called a class of feelings in the spirit of supposition. Does it help to make
sense of our experience in even a small way to give it such a name? The
smile of recognition I’ve seen when I mention the bureaucratic emotions
suggests that it does. Indeed without being prompted, people respond by
inventing on the spot new categories that encapsulate their experience—
bureaucratic triumph, for example, and bureaucratic guilt. I cannot begin
to pretend to historicize this in any meaningful way; to do so would re-
quire a cross-cultural history of bureaucracy in order to map its di√erent
forms, varying scales, and changing obsessions. It would require engaging
the work of Max Weber, Anthony Giddens, and Michel Foucault. But I do
want to note that if a rational bureaucracy is one of the fundamental
features of modernity, many agree that postmodern bureaucracy is coinci-
dent with the rise of information culture.∑ Many agree that postmodern
society is characterized by what Nicholas Luhmann has called the perfor-
mativity of procedures—an all-pervasive cultural practice that has replaced
the normativity of law.∏ Indeed you will note that I have put the stress on
the adjective (‘‘bureaucratic’’) rather than on the noun (‘‘bureaucracy’’). An
adjective attaches itself to a noun; it is not a person, place, or thing. As for
‘‘bureaucracy’’ itself, I am drawing on the term in the more general sense,
not a specific one. Thus of the three definitions of ‘‘bureaucracy’’ o√ered
by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the third meaning is most rele-
vant to my purposes: a bureaucracy is defined as ‘‘a system of administra-
tion marked by o≈cialism, red tape, and proliferation’’ (I bypass the more
specific first meaning: ‘‘a body of nonelective government o≈cials’’ and
‘‘an administrative policy-making group,’’ as well as the second: ‘‘gov-
ernment characterized by specialization of functions, adherence to fixed
rules, and a hierarchy of authority’’). Certainly we commonly refer to as
bureaucratic various types of large organizations—not just governmental
groups but also corporate and nongovernmental organizations and large
public universities. Thus perhaps simply naming a class of feelings is a
promising beginning because it o√ers an avenue into such research. It
may allow us to ‘‘re-describe’’ our situation, as Naomi Scheman puts it in
‘‘Anger and the Politics of Naming.’’
Bureaucratic feelings are site specific, although the site within the site
may be exceedingly di≈cult to identify. These feelings have much in com-

170 Chapter Six

mon with the ‘‘intensities’’ that characterize the postmodern condition in
general, and thus we can understand them as constituting a significant
strand in the structure of feeling of postmodernism.π I would go further
and speculate that there has been a sizable increase in bureaucratic emo-
tion. In January 2006, for instance, a Customer Rage Study conducted by
Arizona State University with the Customer Care Alliance found that ‘‘ ‘70
percent of us experienced rage’ while dealing with a service representative
recently and 33 percent yelled at the person who was supposed to be
helping.’’∫ That rising tide of rage is one index of the failure of our civic life
and public culture.
It’s important to recognize that bureaucratic emotions are not what I
would call personal, although by this I do not mean that we do not feel
them personally. On the contrary. We feel them intensely, personally, thus
confirming Michelle Rosaldo’s theoretical observation that emotions ‘‘are
embodied thoughts, thoughts steeped with the apprehension that ‘I am
involved’ ’’ (143). But in another sense they are relentlessly impersonal. In
almost all cases we don’t know the people with whom we come into con-
tact. Our connection is highly mediated. Many people won’t tell us their
names if we ask them point-blank on the phone (indeed they’ve been
instructed not to). Dialing an 800 number, we may well find ourselves
outsourced to India where the names Peter, Bob, and Jack are surely labels
for the workplace only, where they are meant to simulate people located in
a call center in the United States. As callers, we may have absolutely no
regard for them ‘‘personally,’’ understanding them only as representatives
of the bureaucracy (that is their position—they represent the bureaucracy).
Similarly they may have no regard for us: ‘‘Don’t take it personally’’ is a
telling phrase.Ω
Indeed there may not be a person there at all. For the past twenty years
we have been witnessing the emergence of what the social theorist Scott
Lash, in an interview entitled ‘‘Information Is Alive,’’ calls ‘‘the mediated
society where classical social relations have been commuted into much
more communicational relations’’ (97). Today we find ourselves in a period
of ever-expanding channels of mass-mediated information and explod-
ing networks of digital communication. We make phone calls to credit
companies and insurance companies and find ourselves connected to the
voices of computers (they are certainly not, in my experience, sympathetic
nonhuman cyborgs). We answer the phone and find a recording at the
other end of the line. We turn to the Web site of a company or our local gov-

Bureaucratic Rage 171

ernment and search in vain for information and a number to call. We are
deluged at virtually every moment with e-mail from people we don’t know
—and actually it is very likely not a person but a program spamming us. If
as Lash has brilliantly noted, we live in a time in which we have outsourced
our own subjectivity to experts (to therapists, personal trainers, plastic
surgeons, whatever), then subjectivity itself has been largely drained from
our mediated society.
Thus bureaucratic feelings are not binding emotions. They are not
emotions that attach us to other persons, as do the strong emotions of love
and hate, grief and jealousy. I do not think of them so much as psychologi-
cal emotions as intensities. For the most part bureaucratic feelings sepa-
rate people by alienating them from one another. Such feelings are oddly
impersonal. The flaring anger I felt when speaking with the woman from
TransUnion was not personal, but incredibly impersonal. In terms of the
emotions, then, I am interested here in the relay between the personal, the
impersonal, and the positional played out in three memoirs I consider
later in this chapter. Could the bureaucratic feelings invoked in these
memoirs be said to disclose the world in a meaningful way? Are they
outlaw emotions, in Alison Jaggar’s sense? Why consider book-length
memoirs when stories of illness—indeed stories of all kinds of catastrophe
—circulate endlessly in the media?
Walter Benjamin o√ers us an answer to this question that is just as
relevant today as it was when his essay ‘‘The Storyteller’’ was first pub-
lished in 1936. As he astutely observes, when we remove events from their
complex and capacious contexts and place them in news stories, we no
longer have stories but rather a new form of communication—information
itself. ‘‘The value of information does not survive the moment in which it
was new,’’ Benjamin insists. ‘‘It lives only at that moment; it has to sur-
render to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time’’
(90). Thus notwithstanding Lash’s view that information is alive, if it is
alive it has an exceedingly short and unsympathetic life.
Today it would be an absurd understatement to remark that we are
deluged by information in our mediated society. Information-language, as
I call it, is the solvent of distinctiveness. We live in a world permeated by
the homogeneous voices of cnn at home and in airports, the uniform
language of USA Today, the wallpaper of Web sites. In promiscuously
crossing mediums, information-stories, like statistics, circulate endlessly
on television and radio, in newspapers and news magazines, on the Inter-

172 Chapter Six

net and cell phones. The people we routinely encounter in them do not so
much speak for themselves as they are pressed into service to represent
norms and tendencies in society at large. Often reduced to a name and a
chronological age, they are subordinated to the point of the information-
story they inhabit. Seemingly anchored by the facticity of name and age,
quotations are in fact virtually interchangeable and could be attributed to
almost anyone.
Consider a front-page piece on Alzheimer’s disease that appeared in
the New York Times in 2002.∞≠ ‘‘If I knew it was coming on for sure, I
might not want to stay alive,’’ seventy-three-year-old Stanford Smilow is
quoted as saying. ‘‘I wouldn’t want to be a drag on my wife.’’ For several
years Smilow’s older brother has been su√ering from Alzheimer’s dis-
ease. ‘‘I look at him,’’ says Smilow, ‘‘and it’s like I’m looking in a mirror.’’
I hope I will not be understood as ungenerously holding the language
of Stanford Smilow against him. His words, plucked as they are to fit
the compact and condensed frame of a news piece, necessarily lack the
sense of a vital connection to a unique life, to a voice that articulates the
tone and tenor of a particular experience. In these stories the depth of
form given shape by an individual voice has been flattened; experience has
been downgraded to a dulling sameness. For the logic of the genre of the
information-story is additive, not the intensification of complexity. Easily
absorbed, information-language is just as easily forgotten. I find myself
longing for the contours of individual voices reflecting on their own expe-
rience and speaking, so it seems, directly to me and not in words mediated
by the Web site content provider or the news writer. I find myself longing
for the unpredictability and color of adjectives and adverbs, for sentences
that stretch beyond the boundaries of sound bites, for entire paragraphs
and chapters that meditate on time and meaning, for something I could
never imagine. I would like to listen to the story of the forty-eight-year-old
woman who was trapped in the sex-complaint system. For as Nancy Mairs
writes in A Troubled Guest, ‘‘Unlike information, emotional knowledge
comes only from experience’’ (96).

2
My little story about identity theft and the bloated bureaucracy that is the
TransUnion Company is also intended to illustrate one of the limits of the
view that the ‘‘self ’’ is nothing more substantial than a sequence of mas-

Bureaucratic Rage 173

querades and performances, of language as unstable and unattached, un-
sound and unsteady.∞∞ I want instead to hold fast to the sober notion of the
referentiality of language, to assert that Kathleen M. Woodward refers to me
and my particular history. (Middlekau√ was my father’s last name. I took
the name Woodward when I married my first husband.) In the 1980s
autobiographical theory and criticism was marked in great part by the
poststructuralist view of the ultimate fictionality of autobiography, taking
its direction from Paul de Man who had insisted in 1979 that the distinc-
tion between autobiography and fiction was ‘‘undecidable.’’∞≤ Twenty years
later Ross Chambers, writing about aids diaries that appeared in the late
1980s and early 1990s, invokes not the poststructuralist ‘‘death’’ of the
author but the ‘‘sadly literal’’ deaths of these writers (1). I welcome this
shift wholeheartedly. For me the force of autobiography lies in its implicit
ontology and not its dubious epistemology. For me the very power and
ultimately the authority and politics of autobiography lie in its connection
to materiality—and to mortality. ‘‘As opposed to all forms of fiction, biogra-
phy and autobiography are referential texts,’’ Philippe Lejeune wrote some
thirty years ago in his seminal essay ‘‘The Autobiographical Pact.’’∞≥ Le-
jeune is absolutely right. The vector of referentiality is key to autobio-
graphical writing. And in the past twenty years there has been a veritable
explosion of critical writing on autobiography, which takes its impetus
precisely from the belief in referentiality and largely from a politics of
gender, race, class, nation, ethnicity, sexual preference, and, most recently,
disability. With the surge of trauma studies, the interest in autobiographi-
cal work has both taken on new life in the domains of identity politics and
publics as well as moved beyond identity politics to claim a common
ground.
Of the innumerable subjects engaged by memoirs, it is the topic of
illness that strikes me as especially prominent. Why illness? In part be-
cause we are continually exhorted by our doctors and in the media to
preoccupy ourselves with our health and our fitness, thus avoiding illness,
with both the preservation of health and the loss of health being multi-
billion dollar businesses.∞∂ If we live in the information age, we also live in
the risk society, as I point out in the next chapter on statistical panic.
Understanding ourselves to be at all times ‘‘potential’’ patients, we are
pressed to minimize our risk of illness. Both horrified and fascinated by
disease, although it is the most normal of things, we are encouraged to
believe we should be able to eradicate it in the body of society and in our

174 Chapter Six

own bodies. We are avid consumers of health care, which is a global
market of ever-expanding proportions. Is it any surprise, then, that illness
memoirs are so widespread? I would observe as well that illness memoirs
serve the important cultural function of transcending the divisive identity
politics of the past twenty-five years that have fragmented the body politic.
For if there is one thing that is certain it is that the experience of illness
crosses di√erences.
Nancy K. Miller in her essay ‘‘Autobiography as Cultural Criticism’’
puzzles over what she calls ‘‘personal’’ criticism. Is there a di√erence
between the ‘‘personal’’ and the ‘‘positional,’’ she asks, trying to get at
the distinction by understanding feminist theory itself as concerned with
thinking through the relation between the two terms. At times the per-
sonal and positional would seem to be identical; more often the personal
would seem to exceed the positional. Can the positional, I wonder, ever
exceed the personal? Miller doesn’t o√er a clear-cut distinction between
the personal and the positional, and I don’t see how she—or anyone—
could. The relation between the two terms will depend, at the very least, on
the situation at hand and on the context. What I find intriguing for my
purposes is that in her essay the emotions emerge first and foremost as an
important dimension of the personal (Miller singles out anger and embar-
rassment in particular).
But as I have been insisting throughout, the emotions should also be
construed as political (and Miller would not disagree). Anger, as we have
seen, has long been understood in Anglo-American literary feminism as a
political emotion, although as one with a varying degree of e√ectiveness.
Recall Virginia Woolf ’s brilliant analysis of anger in A Room of One’s Own.
There the anger of the silenced narrator who is working on a paper about
women and the novel is directed at an arrogantly voluble male author, a
German professor of unbelievable pretension. The emotion of anger itself
is taken as a sign of injustice; it has a cognitive force, identifying those very
relations of inequality. There is thus no question that an emotion can be
associated with a position, in this case the position of women in male-
dominated society. This subject I have already taken up in other chapters.
Here I want to return to my opening anecdote. For in my autobiographical
account of mistaken credit identity it is clear that a feeling itself—namely
anger that escalates to rage—is the nodal point of my narrative. But in this
situation anger is a manifestation of what I call a bureaucratic feeling, rage
that surfaces in the memoirs to which I now turn.

Bureaucratic Rage 175

 3
The three books I discuss in the pages that follow all revolve around ill-
ness and loss. In them the antagonists are the medical establishment and
disease itself—aids, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. All three
books deal with the glaring inadequacies and injustices of the health care
system in the United States. Importantly, all three are biographical as
much as they are autobiographical, poised on the wavering divide between
the two.∞∑ They recount the events in the life of the person who is su√ering
from illness as much as they do the experience of the writer in ‘‘managing’’
care for someone fiercely loved. Paul Monette writes of his partner Roger’s
su√ering and death from aids; Marion Roach, of her mother who has
Alzheimer’s disease; Elizabeth Swados, of her brother who had schizo-
phrenia and her mother who su√ered from depression. At the center of
these narratives we find two people (or three), not one.
Thus these memoirs are not primarily self-concerned or confessional
in the way we tend to assume autobiographical narratives will be (although
it would be wrong to infer that they are not in any measure confessional—
they are). The primary politics of location inheres not in gender, class, or
race but rather is to be found in the disease itself (although this is of course
more complex). Biography, the narration of a life (here virtually the end of
a life), coincides horribly with the story of a disease inhabiting a body.
The impersonal or bureaucratic feelings are pivotal, and they form one
of the critical impetuses for writing these books. Rage at the unrespon-
siveness of the health care system (or lack of it) is a motivating force—one
not to be underestimated. The word ‘‘force’’ in fact I use advisedly, alluding
to the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo who has underscored what he calls
‘‘the cultural force of the emotions’’ in an e√ort to capture their impor-
tance in structuring a culture by writing out of his own devastating experi-
ence of loss.∞∏
Finally, what I find most remarkable about these narratives is their
elaboration of the binding emotions. Grief out of love is perhaps the stron-
gest and constitutes the other key impetus from which these books were
written. The alienating e√ect of bureaucratic feelings is countered by the
deeply personal and social emotions that hold us together by attaching us
to one another. Taken together, these books provide us with a courageous
parable of caring for others. This is important not the very least because
the emotions can not only be learned and acquired, but also taught to us

176 Chapter Six

throughout our lives. As readers of these books, then, we are students of
the binding emotions. These narratives are bounded, circumscribed by
time, person, and place. The grief is for a lover, a brother, a mother. As a
reader I feel bound to these stories and to life by the autobiographical pact;
I am moved by these deaths. ‘‘For what matters,’’ as Nancy Miller writes in
her measured and moving book about the death of parents, Bequest and
Betrayal, a book both autobiographical and interpretive, ‘‘is this bond be-
tween writer and reader’’ (18). As she writes elsewhere, ‘‘It takes two to
perform an autobiographical act—in reading as in writing.’’∞π Here it takes
at least three.
But also at work in these memoirs is a pedagogical imperative, an ethics
of instruction. The books o√er a geography of feeling that helps us map
what may be the unknown territory of illness. Thus my aim in writing
about these memoirs, however briefly, is not to ‘‘analyze’’ them but to live
with them for the space of these pages.

Paul Monette was urged by the physician who treated Roger Horwitz, his
partner for twelve years, to write Borrowed Time—both for himself and
for the rest of us. For readers who have not been close to those with aids,
Monette’s impassioned chronicle of the nearly two years he fought to con-
tain the plague of the disease before his partner died is harrowingly en-
lightening. We follow the course of Roger’s illness. Weeks in the hospital
with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, then home again; the cycle re-
peated and then agonizingly halted when Roger returns to the hospital,
never to leave it alive. The sudden terrifying attack of aphasia. The blind-
ness. The fevers and sweats. Cryptococcal meningitis at the end. We fol-
low, too, the medications—the arms against the invading and spreading
virus. Bactrim, pentamidine, and HPA-23. Suramin, foscarnet, isoprino-
sine, and AL-721. Ribavirin, azidothymidine (azt), Florinef, Xanax, acyclo-
vir, amphotericin, and Benadryl. Less than two years after his diagnosis
Roger is dead at the age of forty-four. The year is 1986, just a few years
after aids, at first a confusing rumor, emerged on the American scene.
We learn what this lacerating ordeal in hell felt like to Monette.∞∫ The
intensity of Borrowed Time inheres in its mapping of the geometry of the
emotions for us—in particular, the chaos of their Brownian movement, the
strength of their often contradictory force. It is as if Borrowed Time pre-
sents us with a catastrophe theory of the emotions, as when dread turns

Bureaucratic Rage 177

instantaneously and thrillingly into relief, when fear turns to exaltation at
the moment an operation is pronounced successful, when despair turns
into hope. Monette’s emotional experience is structured by the extremities
of opposites, by the ‘‘strange double nature of it all.’’ ‘‘The obverse of this
optimism was the hair ball of fear at the pit of my stomach,’’ he tells us
(316). The emotional trajectory is a never-ending roller coaster. Up, often
manically so. Down, plunging into desolation. At the same time these
emotions are also ‘‘tangled’’ (43). But they always seem outsized and over-
scale—the grief and terror, the panic and hysteria, the love and full joy, the
horror and woe, the tenderness that is opulent, the fear that is as pure as
oxygen on a line. There is not in Monette a shred of American cool.
Statistical panic is in abundance, along with the caustic sense that what
was needed were ‘‘management skills’’ (30).
Roger’s emotional palette has an altogether di√erent hue. He could be
said to possess emotional willpower, his terror in the face of aids is for-
lorn. In comparison, Monette’s anger is volatile and raw. At times his
anger is directed everywhere at once—and then it explodes in rage. As
Roger’s condition deteriorates, Monette’s anger increases. As Monette
writes in retrospect, he continues to rage savagely. If only the wonder drug
azt had been available a year sooner, perhaps. . . . He savagely indicts
the indi√erence of the drug companies/federal government/medical
establishment/the press. The frustrating glitches of everyday life drive
him berserk. He runs to the drugstore to fill a prescription: ‘‘It was not the
last time I wanted to open up with an Uzi in the long line at a drugstore’’
(97). He leaves the hospital to do an errand, and this is what happens:
‘‘One afternoon in the underground garage beneath the city of pain, the
Jaguar locked in gear again. I came racing up to use the phone in Roger’s
room, ranting as I dialed and then screaming at the dealer in a sort of free-
fall rage. It was a reaction that would soon become a reflex, at every little
thing that went wrong in the world of errands and customer service. Pure
displacement: I was angry at Roger for being sick’’ (185–86). Later he
corrects himself. He is angry at the disease. Anger, in truth, is aimed
everywhere—at the fda which had refused to authorize a drug that had
been used safely in France for a decade, at the death sentence that then was
aids, at the man he loved with such a passion and tenderness.
In Borrowed Time anger is a bureaucratic feeling that is ravagingly im-
personal. At times it is explicitly politicized. As Monette knows only too
well, ‘‘Unless you have a private doctor with privileges, which is another

178 Chapter Six

way of saying you’d better have money, you are lost like Hansel and Gretel
in the system’s beige-flecked corridors. The peaks of insurance pale beside
this Everest of a condition’’ (38). For the two of them the system is not just
characterized by red tape, it is red tape. At one point Monette resorts to
bringing in ‘‘illegal’’ drugs, which have been ‘‘driven underground by the
fda,’’ over the Mexican border (175). The hospital is an alien place, and as
Monette is quick to point out, they pulled what strings they could and had
access to virtually the best that was available.∞Ω The government continued
to do nothing. Anger is positional, leveled at the disease. Anger is also
personal. Monette is particularly angry at Roger’s brother, who is also gay
and whom he portrays as strangely disconnected from it all. Monette is
enraged as well at his own doctor who frets about his Ferrari. But terribly,
anger is also free-floating. It escalates to rage. Indeed Borrowed Time pre-
sents us with a kind of anatomy of rage, a passion that can both set you
against people and connect you to them. It can be both deadly impersonal
and personal. These three years, Monette tells us, ‘‘have taught me that
fear—terror, that is, with a taste like you are sucking on a penny—is equal
parts rage and despair’’ (48). That rage erupts. Early on, he tells us, he’d
‘‘begun screaming at bureaucrats on the phone and erupting in major
outbursts while standing in line at the post o≈ce’’ (48). At times rage can
reach a limit when it alienates you from yourself, annihilating your better
self. At his moral worst Monette finds himself ‘‘almost wishing the horror’’
of aids on others (47). Even then he knows that ‘‘it was wrongheaded’’
(47). In the philosopher Noel Carroll’s terms, Monette recognizes in this
situation ‘‘a moral fact.’’
But the force of devotion and the devastation of grief are as strong as the
rage.≤≠ Here are Roger and Paul in the hospital just before Roger’s death:≤∞

I’d been there a few minutes, setting up command, when Roger began
to moan. It was the saddest, hollowest sound I’ve ever heard, and loud,
like the trumpet note of a wounded animal. It had no shape to it,
nothing like a word, and he repeated it over and over, every few seconds.
‘‘Why is he doing that?’’ I asked the nurse, but she didn’t know. I
assumed he must be roaring with misery and anxiety, and he hadn’t had
any Xanax since the previous day. I ordered him a tranquilizer and told
him everything I was doing. It wasn’t till ten weeks later, on New Year’s
Day, that I understood the trumpet sound. I was crying up at the grave,
and started to mimic his moaning, and suddenly understood that what

Bureaucratic Rage 179

 he was doing was calling my name. Nothing in my life or the death to
come hurts as much as that, him calling me without a voice through a
wall he could not pierce. (338–39)

This I can understand through the lens of my own experience as well as

through the force of Monette’s prose. As my partner of years ago was
dying in the American Hospital in Paris, unable to speak, hardly able to
move, I found myself at night unconsciously imitating his curtailed move-
ments as if to inhabit his su√ering, which had in some uncanny way
become my own. To label Borrowed Time an illness narrative seems itself
unfeeling, the professional application of a generic category. It is a death
story, it is a love story. It is also activist in tone and ethos. As Monette was to
write later in Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, ‘‘Every memoir now is a
kind of manifesto, as we piece together the tale of the tribe’’ (2). Monette
died of aids in 1995.

Of aids Monette writes in Borrowed Time, ‘‘It turns out all the certainties
of health insurance and the job that waits are just a social contract, flimsy
as the disappearing ink it’s written in. Has anything else so tested the
medical system and blown all its weakest links? I have oceans of unre-
solved rage at those who ran from us, but I also see that plague and panic
are inseparable’’ (83). Today, I would suggest, the ‘‘plague’’ that haunts our
cultural imagination is not that of an infectious disease—although we hear
much about a possible pandemic of avian flu from the media and we
should fear it and take preventive action—but rather that of a disease
whose cause is unidentified and threatens everyone as they grow older.
Indeed the body under the spell of Alzheimer’s disease is the figure of
what Christopher Gilleard and Paul Higgs have termed the de-civilized
body, an aging body, a body that in a very real sense has lost its mind.
It is at this point di≈cult to imagine a time when Alzheimer’s disease
was little known. In 2007 it was reported that over five million Ameri-
cans su√er from Alzheimer’s disease, with this number projected to triple
by 2050.≤≤ Like aids it emerged in our cultural consciousness in the
1980s. Like Monette’s Borrowed Time, the journalist Marion Roach’s An-
other Name for Madness chronicles the confusion and uncertainty sur-
rounding an eventual diagnosis of a disease for which there was—and
still is—no cure. Imagine. The diagnosis of the disease aΔicting Marion

180 Chapter Six

Roach’s mother, who had just turned fifty-one, doesn’t come until after her
family had been seeking help from doctors for two years. As readers we
don’t learn the diagnosis until halfway through the book. During those
two years Marion Roach’s own confusion was virtually unrelenting. Was
her mother’s repeated losing of her keys a symptom of menopause? Was
her brutal killing of the cats a side e√ect of her hysterectomy? Were her
mood swings a response to the recent death of her husband? Today these
potential explanations seem like folk beliefs from another era. In her
mid-twenties and working for the New York Times, Roach was, as she
elaborates without sparing herself, acting out in all kinds of ways. Losing
it. The deputy editor of the Times suggested she write a proposal for a
feature story on her mother and the disease for the New York Times Sun-
day Magazine. Imagine. He didn’t know what Alzheimer’s disease was.
There was no entry on Alzheimer’s in the encyclopedia that Marion Roach
consults.≤≥
He accepted Roach’s proposal and her piece appeared in January 1983. I
vividly remember reading her article on a Sunday morning twenty-five
years ago and finding it unsatisfyingly impersonal. It was, I realize in
retrospect, an information-story, albeit one of greater length than the piece
on Alzheimer’s disease in the New York Times to which I referred earlier.
Indeed that’s the point; the piece focused on the disease. But Another
Name for Madness is first and foremost about Marion Roach’s mother and
her father (we learn how they met), her own life as a child (her first
memory), her sister (so unlike herself ), and it is about their experience
with this disease, which she notes, following Lewis Thomas, is the disease
of the century. She tells us in Another Name for Madness that her twin
motivation for the piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine was first
to inform people about this relentless disease and to expose the cruel
vagaries of health care in the United States, and second to come to terms
with her grief. Its publication did not mark, however, ‘‘the beginning of the
end’’ of her grief, as she had hoped it would (161). Hence the book Another
Name for Madness.
Still, an impulse to inform her readers remains. In Another Name for
Madness the autobiographical pact has taken on the explicit shape of what I
would call a pedagogical pact. One of the virtues of Another Name for
Madness is that Roach tells us in a calm tone about Alzheimer’s disease—
its discovery and etiology, its symptoms and its course. But the disease is
always placed in the context of the experience of illness that it brings with

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it. Ironically enough, given that my book takes the emotions as its subject,
Alzheimer’s disease was first described in 1907 as ‘‘progressive jealousy.’’
If short-term memory loss (accompanied by confusion and loss of identity)
and ultimate impairment of physical function are signs of Alzheimer’s
disease, so too are the emotions that swing turbulently out of character,
a√ecting everyone. The disease itself is, Marion Roach writes, an anguish-
ing and ‘‘angering disability’’ for everyone close to it (112).
As Monette does in Borrowed Time, in Another Name for Madness Roach
tries to map what is a constantly shifting geography of anger—one that is a
dangerous minefield. Early on, before her mother’s condition has been
diagnosed, Marion learns that her mother—whom she tells us admir-
ingly was a strikingly beautiful woman—had not been to work for a week.
Alarmed and irritated, Marion calls home. ‘‘Someone answered. A groan,
and then the phone was slammed down, but not in its cradle’’ (71). Racing
back home from New York to New Jersey, she finds her mother in bed. ‘‘As I
approached the bed, she shifted her head, but showed no recognition. She
didn’t speak. She smelled. Her hair was dirty and oily and matted and there
was an empty vodka bottle in the trash basket and one in an open under-
wear drawer’’ (73). Ten minutes later her mother’s mood—first anger, then
insensibility, then anger—shifts again. It is now the mother who is con-
cerned about the daughter. As Roach writes, ‘‘I hoped I was losing my
mind. In the course of the past hour she had seemed comatose and then
just angry and stubborn, and now she was up, talking, making sense,
recognizing me’’ (74). The perplexing swings in her mother’s behavior are
matched only by the hideously incommensurate diagnosis by a neurologist
at that time. He concluded that it was only a slight memory problem.
If the opening of the book is devoted to allowing us into the lives of the
members of this family, later the narrative follows the course of the disease,
first unnamed and then finally identified. Another Name for Madness is a
thick inventory not only of anger (to which I will return) but other stormy
emotions as well—fear and pitched embarrassment, guilt and resentment,
shame and self-disgust. Toward the end of the book, it is as if the emotions
accelerate, becoming dizzying hyperstates of being. The emotions are so
strong they are almost reified. It is all Marion Roach can do to name them.
Their very names take up entire sentences as if they were hard objects.
Here is her account of a particularly unnerving encounter with her mother
when the disease was fairly advanced. ‘‘So what did you do today?’’ Marion
asked her mother one day when she came to pick her up for one of their

182 Chapter Six

di≈cult and infrequent outings (her mother was still living at home, with
help). ‘‘She flipped her head to my side and I saw that the look of vengeance
had passed. ‘I had sex!’ ’’ (204). After this Roach doesn’t see her mother for
a week. ‘‘I was afraid to. Guilt. Grief. Sadness. Despair. Now fear. Now I was
afraid of her. I thought I had learned to manage the other ones. But fear?
Things just seemed to go wrong when we were together. Now I thought I
was going to die if I saw her’’ (206). Twenty years later Elinor Fuchs
published a memoir of her mother who su√ered from Alzheimer’s disease
for years. Unlike treatment for aids, treatment for Alzheimer’s has not
progressed. ‘‘The entire decade,’’ Fuchs writes, ‘‘felt like one long shriek’’
(94). Her mother, Fuchs adds mordantly, lived out the end of her life in a
‘‘filing cabinet for the ambulatory dead’’ (131). It was a horrific ‘‘bureau-
cratic’’ death in life. But as Fuchs can also write, ‘‘The last ten years: they
were our best’’ (187).
At one horrible point Roach’s admirable older sister Margaret has a
terrible asthma attack (she has taken on the primary responsibility of
caring for their mother and is exhausted). She is rushed to the hospital. In
a hideous coincidence it is the fifth anniversary of their father’s death and
she is put in a room with an Alzheimer’s patient, a woman who is asking
over and over again what day it is. Roach tries to get her sister moved to
another room. But people at the hospital don’t seem to know what Alz-
heimer’s disease is. Roach, whose temperament may remind us of Paul
Monette, responds frantically with fury of the bureaucratic kind:

I went berserk. I collared the doctor and I threatened insanity, in front

of him immediately. Of course I was being unsympathetic and selfish.
But I thought it was about time. I had had it. The woman wasn’t moved.
I never explained the problem. I didn’t tell him about my mother and
Margaret’s stress. I just waved my arms around and yelled about having
her moved. The sta√ must have thought I was crazy or selfish or both. I
was not able, calmly, to start from the beginning and explain the causal
factor. I didn’t want to blame my mother. I didn’t want to talk to strang-
ers. I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I don’t think that the sta√ was
familiar with Alzheimer’s disease, which I did name as my mother’s
illness. I got a blank look from one nurse and a dull smile from another.
I thought they should just understand. I was too frantic to be articu-
late. (174)

In time this frantic fury is transformed into an articulate anger, one that
is informed by social judgment. Like Barbara MacDonald in Look Me in

Bureaucratic Rage 183

the Eye, she dispenses with her fury but safeguards her anger. For later
Roach’s anger is directed beyond the hospital and at the larger bureaucracy
of the federal health insurance system. She testifies before the House
Subcommittee on Aging. She is not cool but angry. ‘‘I was damn mad. And
I had vented my anger in the best possible arena. . . . I had been on six talk
shows, and I had reached the point where I could look Representative
Pepper in the eye and tell him that my mother was losing her mind in
handfuls, because she was, and that the federal insurance stank, because it
did’’ (210). What did this daughter want? ‘‘I wanted them to change their
laws and help us’’ (210). Here, as the cultural critic Douglas Crimp would
put it, mourning is coupled with a form of militancy.

Of these three memoirs, Elizabeth Swados’s The Four of Us has less to do

with bureaucratic anger (although it does address this issue) and more
with confusion, if not depression. Borrowed Time recounts Monette’s sear-
ing experience of his partner Roger’s diagnosis and death by aids in the
1980s; it was published in 1988, two years after Roger died when Monette
was forty-one. Another Name for Madness focuses on Roach’s mother’s
baΔing entrance and relentless decline into Alzheimer’s disease; Roach
was twenty-three years old when the first dramatic signs that something
was desperately wrong surfaced in 1979 and her book appeared six years
later. Both Monette and Roach were adults, and the diseases that invaded
their lives, if at first horribly confusing, ultimately acquired names and
plots. But confusion takes on an entirely di√erent scale in The Four of Us. It
expands to fill two entire decades, indeed more, in the life of Elizabeth
Swados who begins her memoir of her family and its consuming illnesses
when she was only four. Like the children in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest
Eye, she was too young to understand what was happening in the cha-
otic household that was her home. But she absorbed its dark and manic
moods—feelings she couldn’t articulate. It was only in her twenties that
she came to learn that her brother—he was eight years older—had been
su√ering from schizophrenia for literally years. She hadn’t been told he
was sick. When he had to be hospitalized his freshman year in college and
was in and out of hospitals for the next five years, she was informed that he
had dropped out of school. When in a gruesome e√ort to commit suicide
in his mid-twenties he threw himself in front of a New York subway and
lost an arm and a leg, she was told instead that he had been hit by a bus.

184 Chapter Six

Her mother fell into a deep and debilitating depression for a multitude of
reasons, not the least of which was the su√ering of her son. When Eliza-
beth was in the sixth grade, her mother collapsed in front of her. Here is
how she tells the story years later:

One evening in the early winter, around 6 p.m., I was sitting on my

mother’s bed watching her try on a new outfit in front of the mirror. She
was walking unsteadily and her conversation didn’t make much sense.
‘‘Here I am on the runway,’’ she said. ‘‘And Bess Myerson is right
behind me.’’ My mother attempted a dramatic turn and lost her bal-
ance. ‘‘Jewish girls are breaking barriers. They’re marching in the pa-
rade.’’ Suddenly my mother toppled over and fell on the floor. Her body
was dead still. I sat for a minute thinking maybe she was acting out a
scene or doing a joke. My mind went strangely quiet inside. I could hear
the lights hum. I called the maid, who took one look at my mother and
called 911. Then she called my aunt and rushed me into my bedroom
and slammed the door. I heard sirens and voices. Hours passed. The
darkness was cold and damp. I sat unmoving on my bed. I felt very
calm. My father knocked on my door and let himself in. He looked pale.
His eyes were red. His mouth was pursed as if he was thinking very
hard. ‘‘Your mother had herself a little fainting spell,’’ he said lightly
as if I hadn’t been there. ‘‘It seems she’s got an infection of the inner
ear.’’ (191)

Her mother didn’t have an inner ear infection, of course. She had been
admitted to the psychiatric wing of the local hospital. (Her mother com-
mits suicide by overdose years later when she is fifty-one.)
Empathy is generally understood to be a sensitive awareness to the
experience of someone else, one that is thus conscious. But for a child it
can take on the form of unconscious imaginative identification as one is
possessed by waves of negative (or positive) emotions that are transmitted
to us from others. As Swados tells us, ‘‘As her daughter, I was given to
silently watching her moods, with constant anxious attention. I could tell
what my mother was feeling by her eyes and the way she held her hands—
by the speed of the exhale of her cigarette smoke, by her posture and the
pitch of her voice. I learned empathy and I hated it, because often I fell into
strange dark moods without knowing why’’ (87). Later her unconscious
identification with her mother’s mood took on mortal proportions. This is
how Elizabeth Swados tells us she felt at twenty-two. ‘‘I believed my hippie

Bureaucratic Rage 185

life and bad temper kept me safe, but it didn’t. I struggled along with
my mother inside myself, and as she became more distant and introverted,
I began to think hungrily about dying’’ (109). From the perspective of
adulthood she understands this now as a form of what I would call self-
destructive magical thinking.
Elizabeth Swados takes us back to the decade of the 1950s when men-
tal illness in the aspiring middle class was unspeakable, ‘‘the shame of
shames’’ (25). This stigma was exacerbated by the fact that her family was
Jewish; her father was a brilliant lawyer driven to succeed at work and in
the community (the family settled in Bu√alo after he had not been hired by
law firms in New York City). Moreover it was in her father’s unyielding
temperament to refuse to recognize mental illness as a disease and instead
relentlessly and vociferously interpret its symptoms as a lack of discipline,
energy, and will. Thus so many things conspired to render these over-
whelming illnesses invisible—as secrets that could not be spoken. The
entire household denied the existence of what bound them together and
drove them apart day after day.
In addition Elizabeth’s youth brought with it her own woefully mis-
informed interpretations of their su√ering. As she confesses ruefully of
herself when she was in high school, ‘‘I chose to interpret my mother and
brother’s behavior as political and spiritual rebellion against the ambi-
tious, materialistic world. In my mind, mental illness was a good thing. It
was a form of protest or artistic integrity’’ (194). When her mother com-
mits suicide her daughter romanticizes it. ‘‘I was still at the age when
suicide is interpreted as a fascinating artistic act unrelated to death,’’ she
confides unflinchingly. ‘‘I had not one notion about its misery or selfish-
ness’’ (76).
For Elizabeth it is the extremity of what is unknown—compounded by
the fact that as a child and then a teenager she has only a shadowy aware-
ness that knowledge was being kept from her—that produces such in-
calculable shame and guilt. She constantly fantasizes that she is being
brought to court for crimes she has committed. There are four sections in
The Four of Us, one for each member of her small nuclear family. It is as if
as an adult she needed to focus on each of them separately (herself in-
cluded), so as to be able to understand them—their gifts, their needs, their
temperaments—as best she could. It is also as if years later she had to keep
telling these stories over and over—four times over—from their refracting
and reflecting points of view in order to work them through.

186 Chapter Six

 The first section she devotes to her brother Lincoln. She remembers the
seductions of his manic imagination when he was young, his mercurial
a√ection, and his protective arrogance. She also remembers his vicious
rages, his icy injustices, and his callous physical (not to say sexual) abuse.
Desperately ill, severely handicapped, alienated from his family and they
from him, Lincoln ultimately comes to live alone in a shabby storefront
apartment in lower New York, where he plays music on the street to make
a living of miserable sorts. When he is evicted from his apartment, he
refuses to leave and is found dead at the age of forty-six in unbearably
squalid conditions. It is a testament to his remarkable courage and tenacity
that he managed to live so long.
In this section of the book Swados writes not so much to understand
her own life and her own past (although she does that too), as to under-
stand her brother and to communicate the su√ering spread by the disease
of schizophrenia—a pain everyone was forced to endure. If she is guilt-
and grief-ridden, she is also angry at the system—‘‘angry at the medical
profession for their lack of solution for his state of being’’ (53). But this
anger arrives predominantly retrospectively, when she is older. It is an
anger made possible by the perspective the years had brought. One of
Swados’s strong points is that schizophrenia is more than a ‘‘mental’’
illness; it entails strictly physiological conditions as well. As she tells us,
her brother’s body was found with a ‘‘blockage in his bowels and intes-
tines, a tumor on his lung, emphysema, and arteriosclerosis, which was
very advanced for his age’’ (53).
Here is Swados’s description of one of the final encounters she had
with her brother. It is a scene that I have not been able to forget:

Several months before my brother’s housing crisis reached its peak, I

was walking down Broadway on my way to a Korean deli. I saw two
derelicts seated in the middle of the sidewalk. They were dressed in
layers of rags and having a heated argument about Jesus Christ. One of
them had paraphernalia spread around him in a semicircle, as if to sell
his wares. But none of his rags or rusty pieces of metal or torn papers
was a recognizable item. He wore a jaunty cap pulled to one side and
there was tinsel in his filthy hair. His face was smeared black. A few
steps farther along, I realized the ‘‘derelict’’ was my brother. I leaned
down next to him, softly said his name, and waited. He stared at me for
several moments and didn’t recognize me at first. When he finally saw

Bureaucratic Rage 187

 that it was me, he let out a cry like a man who’d had a stroke and
couldn’t express his joyous thoughts. We embraced for a long time. His
smell meant nothing to me.
‘‘We’re just sitting here today,’’ Lincoln said. ‘‘Oh, what a perfect day.’’
‘‘I’m so glad to see you,’’ I said.
‘‘Yes,’’ my brother replied. ‘‘You look beautiful. We get a big audience
from Tower [a record store], but of course you know that, you know all
that, and besides, my music requires a di√erent audience.’’
I didn’t want him to go o√ in an angry direction.
‘‘I like your hat,’’ I said.
He grinned. The rotten brown condition of his teeth made me wince.
‘‘You like it? It was a gift from my friend Ann.’’
‘‘I love it,’’ I said.
‘‘We’ll be doing a lot of playing today,’’ said my brother. ‘‘The band
decided to try a new location. It’s very important.’’
‘‘I’d like to hear it,’’ I said.
He frowned.
‘‘It won’t be for a while,’’ he said.
I hugged him again and he rocked me back and forth.
‘‘Now this is good and enough,’’ he said.
I let go of him, turned around, and went home. I lay down on my bed
and slept for fourteen hours. (57–58)

Sleeping for fourteen hours. When we can’t do something, anything to

help, we may find ourselves taking refuge in sleep, sick with ourselves,
depressed. Elizabeth Swados interrogates herself—indicts herself—for her
lack of action: ‘‘I’ve asked myself many hundreds of times why I didn’t find
an apartment for my brother, and I have no real answer’’ (56). What are the
limits at which we withdraw our sympathy and support for a person? For a
cause? At a certain point with regard to her brother, Swados reached that
limit, with agonizing results. Her experience is ordinary moral experience
and from it she draws a moral about the homeless: ‘‘Generalizations are
worthless. Each person on the street has his or her own story. He or she
was brought low by a specific, personal demon—be it economic, social, or
otherwise. When you think in this way the conditions become unbearable.
You are in touch with the humanity of each individual and can’t block his
or her su√ering out by blaming a ‘global ’ condition’’ (57).
But we can understand this in another way as well. The very personal

188 Chapter Six

impasse for Swados is that she can’t withdraw sympathy from her brother
and she can’t do anything more for him.

4
What can we say is the cultural work being done by books such as these?
I suspect that the real emotional and bodily pain to which these books
bear witness draws people, many of whom face similar experiences, into
transitory reading communities, imaginary and actual self-help groups
that are constituted by the autobiographical act.≤∂ I think of these transitory
reading communities as publics in the sense given to the term by the
political philosopher Nancy Fraser, as groups of people who are concerned
with a problem that is here delimited by the personal and is also politi-
cized. All three of these memoirs testify to the potential cultural force of
the emotions.
Their aesthetic is not that of the sentimental. Their world is charged
and enervating, complex and rich, characterized by both bureaucratic feel-
ings and binding emotions. As I have been suggesting, in terms of bu-
reaucratic feelings, anger—if not fury or rage—is predominant. But pres-
ent also is bureaucratic numbing. When anger is explicitly politicized it
takes on the quality of an outlaw emotion by registering the vast inequities
of our health care system. When these three books were published was our
health care system in the state of crisis that it is today? Nothing would
seem less possible as the United States, the only country among the major
postindustrial nations without a national health care system, moves fur-
ther in the direction of privatization. Thus we must take care not to senti-
mentalize the notion of transitory reading communities—especially those
formed around the ethic of self-help. Zygmunt Bauman is both trenchant
and persuasive on this point, arguing that postmodernity is characterized
by the shift of as much risk as possible from the state to the individual,
thereby reminding us of Tocqueville’s insight that the idea of the individ-
ual is the worst enemy of the citizen, one who believes in and contributes
to the public good. Indeed the sharing of intimacies, Bauman writes in
Liquid Modernity, ‘‘can only spawn ‘communities’ as fragile and short-lived
as scattered and wandering emotions, shifting erratically from one target
to another and drifting in the forever inconclusive search for a secure
haven: communities of shared worries, shared anxieties or shared hatred
—but in each case ‘peg’ communities, a momentary gathering around

Bureaucratic Rage 189

a nail on which many solitary individuals hang their solitary individual
fears’’ (37).
These books were written, I suspect, in ignorance of each other some
fifteen to twenty-five years ago. Today there is a growing collective outrage
at the abysmal state of health care in this country. The singular experience
of the intensity of an enraged anger is, hopefully, yielding to the productive
emotion of outrage. Individuals are coming to understand the structural
injustices that are in place. If subgroups have formed around particular
diseases (aids, breast cancer, Huntington’s), the new media are being
used in creative ways not only to provide support but to bring research to
people stricken by disease—and to the families—much more rapidly. Con-
sider, for example, the communities that have sprung up around the inno-
vative Web site Patients Like Me.
At the same time, an index of the abject low to which we have sunk in
this country in relation to providing health care can be found on night-
time tv. Consider the popular night-time tv show Extreme Makeover that
debuted in the 2003–2004 season. This program focuses on ‘‘elective’’
surgery by foregrounding what the medical philosopher Carl Elliott has
called enhancement technologies; it is not a matter of life or death but of
self-transformation, where the popular American practice of contrasting
‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after’’ appearances is highlighted. Even more to the point,
consider the medical reality tv show that debuted midseason on abc in
2006. Five episodes were aired. Entitled Miracle Workers, the show follows
seriously sick people whose surgeries are provided free of charge in ex-
change for the rights to televise their experience, thus giving new meaning
to the notion of selling of one’s body. As the Web site devoted to Miracle
Workers states, each week it ‘‘features two stories of ordinary people who
do not have the network, access to the necessary medical community or in
some cases the resources to these procedures.’’≤∑ The spectacle of surgery
has long been a staple of television, and many such surgeries are actually
performed, not just simulated. But on daytime tv (I am thinking of soap
operas where an aesthetic of realism is assuredly not at work) finding
one’s way through the medical system has never been posed as a dilemma.
Indeed physicians and nurses appear as if by magic, and everyone has
seemingly boundless medical insurance. Miracle Workers acknowledges
outright that ordinary people don’t have access to high-stakes health care
(they don’t have access to long-term care for chronic illness either, but
that’s not televisual) and that the best we can hope for is a chance at a kind

190 Chapter Six

of lottery provided by the media-entertainment complex. Thus the series
itself is a manifestation of magical thinking, a form of wish fulfillment.
‘‘We live in a country that does not believe in preventive medicine; in a
country where someone su√ering from a condition without a cure is with-
out medical reimbursement,’’ wrote Marion Roach over twenty years ago
(195). In 2005, the number of people who did not have health insurance in
the United States increased to 46.6 million;≤∏ a full one-sixth of our na-
tional economy is devoted to health care.≤π
In January 2006 the new Medicare prescription drug benefit went into
e√ect. By all accounts it has proliferated new forms and files of over-
whelming and frustrating proportions. As the journalist Jonathan Cohn
reports in his book Sick, for example, ‘‘In Maine, a hotline for confused
seniors logged 18,000 calls in one day’’ (112). My wonder is that there has
not been more outrage from older people. Why? One reason may be
because anger in older people is both proscribed and belittled. But it may
also be that bureaucratic confusion is the first and foremost reaction and
that it is di≈cult to convert it into an outlaw emotion. As my Seattle
pharmacist Steve Cone told me when I asked him this question, ‘‘They’re
confused, not angry. I’m the one who’s angry.’’ I agree with Germaine
Greer. ‘‘It’s time to get angry again.’’

5
Why did I choose these three memoirs? I turned to memoirs as a medium
promising (although not always delivering) intimate voices that allow us
entrance into their lives—that is, into the emotional and self-reflective
knowledge that can be occasioned by writing. These memoirs draw us into
the nuanced sphere of subjectivity, where experience is not diminished to
a sentence or two but elaborated and embedded in the uninflected lan-
guage of information-prose. The books invite us to respond to it with our
own experience, to live ourselves into the subject of the lives recounted
therein.
In Borrowed Time and Another Name for Madness we are privileged to
possess a palpable record of the harrowing emergence in our culture’s
consciousness of two lethal diseases, both of them stigmatized. With The
Four of Us we are reminded that not so long ago mental illness was a secret
to be hidden at all costs. Today mood disorders are routinely diagnosed
and prescriptions are dispensed with alacrity; and with the mapping of the

Bureaucratic Rage 191

human genome, markers of greater genetic risk are being investigated at
breakneck speed. But then, as Elizabeth Swados writes, ‘‘If there was any
evidence that mental illness might have genetic causes, the information
wasn’t available at the time’’ (90). It is thus my hope that the historical
perspective provided by these three books will encourage us to be receptive
to the su√ering of people today with sicknesses that go unnamed or are
largely unfamiliar to us.
The feminist philosopher Lorraine Code would call this ‘‘responsible
imagining,’’ an openness to the experience of others that requires episte-
mic humility. ‘‘Imaginative e√orts to understand something of how it is to
be so di√erently positioned from the imaginer’’ demands, she writes, ‘‘that
nothing can be assumed before the fact’’ (206). While Code’s paradigm is
listening and not reading (she cautions against what may be the epistemic
blindness of elite literature), I think she would admire these books, find-
ing that they inspire what she, along with the historian Lynn Hunt, calls
‘‘imaginative empathy.’’ ‘‘This imaginative empathy,’’ Code explains, ‘‘is
less about knowing than about believing, in a reconfigured sense of belief
where the standard definition of knowledge as justified true belief under-
goes a reversal’’ (234). For her such listening is ‘‘neither disembodied nor
closed to a√ect, and neither purely objective nor perfectly rational’’ (234).
But my primary reason for gathering these memoirs together in this
chapter is that they are doubled-over narratives of illness. They remind us
of the fierce determination we must have to care for another person who is
sick unto death in our society—and they remind us of our own limitations.
As Marion Roach writes of one of the doctors her mother saw, ‘‘He was a
kind and observant professional and a good and honest friend. He under-
stood completely—unlike so many other doctors I have met—that this
disease takes more than one victim; that it takes the family as well and
creates a new and wholly unstable environment around all concerned’’
(143–44).
This bears repeating: these diseases create new and volatile environ-
ments for everyone involved. Thus I’m also grateful to these books be-
cause in a very real sense they led me to the feminist philosopher Eva
Kittay’s important work on dependency. In Labor’s Love: Essays on Women,
Equality, and Dependency she argues that dependency—embodied in in-
fancy and childhood, frail old age, and severe disability and sickness—is an
elemental condition of all of our lives (albeit one that is unevenly dis-
tributed). As such it is foundational. Dependency, she argues, should be

192 Chapter Six

the ground for theorizing equality and for shaping the institutions of our
society, and not the autonomous and rational self-interested individual on
which the liberal theory of the state, as articulated by the political philoso-
pher John Rawls, is now based. ‘‘If we begin our thinking . . . with persons
as they are in connections of care and concern, we consider commonalities
that characterize this relatedness,’’ Kittay explains. ‘‘These would form the
basis of a connection-based equality rather than the individual-based equality
more familiar to us’’ (27–28). Within the context of this chapter, Kittay
calls attention precisely to the appalling lack of social justice in our health
care system—a system that puts us all at risk, with many families as well as
individuals in extreme jeopardy. She would argue that equality is more
important than liberty, and justice more important than freedom. It is our
interdependency, not our autonomy, that fully characterizes our experi-
ence across our lives.
Roger Horwitz was dependent upon Paul Monette. Allene Roach was
dependent on her two daughters, Margaret, first and foremost, and Mar-
ion. Lincoln was dependent financially on his father, who denied his dis-
ease from the start. Eva Kittay would call Monette, Margaret, and Marion
(although not Lincoln’s father) dependency workers, thus underscoring
the exhausting, di≈cult, and psychically painful work of caring for those
they loved who were seriously sick, as well as underlining the fact that this
labor is largely invisible to us—unless of course we ourselves are involved
—and thus shamefully unacknowledged by our society. But love’s labor
also creates something precious. As Kittay writes, ‘‘The labor either sus-
tains ties among intimates or itself creates intimacy and trust—connection.
And a√ectional ties—concern—generally sustain the connection, even
when the work involves an economic exchange’’ (31).
The significance of my little story of bureaucratic rage at the Trans-
Union Company shrinks in the darkening shadow of the testimony of
these three memoirs. My own heart sinks that I need go no further than
my own family to add to them. When I mentioned the title of this chapter
to my brave sister-in-law a few weeks ago, she understood instantly. There
are three of them—my sister-in-law, my brother, and their twenty-six-year-
old daughter who has su√ered from a brutal form of anorexia for more
than ten years. A beautiful young woman who has the gift of an enlivening
curiosity, she has been in and out of hospitals and treatment centers
throughout this long and alarming stretch of time. My sister-in-law has
devoted herself to her daughter’s care and has occasionally been unjustly

Bureaucratic Rage 193

rewarded with criticism for being an overprotective mother (anorexia was,
erroneously, thought by some in the recent past to have been caused by
indulgent mothers—have we learned nothing from history?!). Just the
other day a bill arrived at their house for a four-week hospitalization. The
insurance company notified them that the stay—at a staggering cost of
$145,000—had not been precertified. My sister-in-law had been in the very
room at the hospital for two hours waiting for precisely that precertifica-
tion, which was granted. But it seems the hospital had not filed the neces-
sary papers in a ‘‘timely’’ fashion. What was her reaction when she opened
that envelope? Bureaucratic outrage and bureaucratic depression.
But also bureaucratic courage.
This chapter is dedicated, in admiration of their tenacity and with love,
to the three of them.

194 Chapter Six

 seven

S TAT I S T I C A L P A N I C

Probability and statistics crowd in upon us. . . . There are more

explicit statements of probabilities presented on American prime
time television than explicit acts of violence. . . . There is nothing to
fear (it may seem) but the probabilities themselves.
—Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance

I was never able to remember more than smatterings of what the

surgeon said just after Alice’s operation in June of 1976. He told
me the tumor had been malignant but that he’d taken it out, along
with a lobe of Alice’s lung. I don’t remember whether he mentioned
then that there’d been some lymph-node involvement; I’m not sure
I would have known what that meant anyway. After he summed up
the operation in a couple of sentences, I asked him about Alice’s
prognosis, and he said something about ‘‘ten-per-cent chance.’’ I
didn’t quite understand what he was talking about. I thought I had
missed something. I asked, ‘‘Ten-per-cent chance of what?’’ And he
said, ‘‘Ten-per-cent chance that she’ll survive.’’
—Calvin Trillin, ‘‘Alice, O√ the Page’’

Defined by floating attacks of terror that occur without any appar-

ent cause, panic disorder is estimated to aΔict millions of people
in the United States. In 1982 a drug called Xanax, manufactured by
the Upjohn Company, appears on the market, quickly becoming a
best-selling treatment for panic attacks and anxiety.
—Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries

Consider the statistical body. It is found everywhere in contemporary cul-

ture, where bodies are composed of—and harrowingly decomposed by—
statistics. As a collective and intangible body, the statistical body has none-
theless a compelling force. Statistics tell us how many African Americans
hold management positions in the financial district in New York. How
many Asians make up the student body at the University of California.
How many people over sixty-five are employed full time. Statistics such as
these are based on what I call ‘‘di√erence demographics.’’ Statistics also
stream from the worlds of sports and beauty. We learn about baseball
batting averages and yards rushed in football. About how many men and
women are having cosmetic surgery. About the reduction in the appear-
ance of face wrinkles if a certain cream is used.∞
But of all the statistics that call up figures of the body, an extremely large
proportion has to do with the vulnerable body—with disease and ill-being,
accidents and violence, and ultimately death. ‘‘Every year, congestive heart
failure contributes to about 300,000 deaths in the United States,’’ we
learn in an article entitled ‘‘Next Frontiers’’ in the 25 June 2001 issue of
Newsweek, ‘‘which is nearly twice as many as stroke and seven times as
many as breast cancer’’ (44). ‘‘The more women a man has sex with, the
higher his risk of developing prostate cancer in middle age,’’ reported the
New York Times on 17 July 2001. ‘‘By far the most powerful risk factor for
osteoarthritis,’’ John L. Zenk announced in Total Health in 2001, ‘‘is age. It
is estimated that 68 percent of individuals older than age 55 and over 80
percent of people older than 75 have osteoarthritis’’ (64). Karen Olsson
reported in the Boston Globe on 1 January 2006 that since 1973 the number
of exonerated people formerly on death row in America’s prisons has
climbed to 122, a statistic that has led many to call for an end to the death
penalty. ‘‘One out of three women over 40 experience it,’’ declares an
advertisement for Serenity Thin Pads in the August 2001 issue of Good
Housekeeping, ‘‘The issue of bladder control’’ (17). On 1 August 2001, cnn
Headline News reported that eighteen high school and college football
players have died of heat-stroke deaths in the United States since 1995.
Time magazine, reporting on a study published in the New England Journal
of Medicine, warned us on 25 July 2007 that, like the common cold, obesity
may be contagious among friends. Our bodies are figured as being in a
perpetual state of risk. The statistics profiling the body are for the most
part melancholy and grim.
When our own individual future is at stake (the future of members of
our family, our financial future, our own health), what I call statistical
panic can strike with compelling and sustained force. As Calvin Trillin
recounts in the epigraph above, after his wife’s operation to remove a
tumor from her lung the physician tells him that the prognosis is 10
percent. Trillin was bewildered. What was the doctor talking about? ‘‘I
thought I had missed something. I asked, ‘Ten-per-cent chance of what?’
And he said, ‘Ten-per-cent chance that she’ll survive’ ’’ (56). It was a figure
that Trillin never forgot but also repressed. Statistical panic: fatally we feel
that a certain statistic, which is in fact based on an aggregate and is only a
measure of probability, represents our very future—or the future of some-
one we love.≤ We may deny such a number. But it is clear that a specific
body statistic can drastically color our very lives. Thus here I am par-
ticularly interested in statistics as a discourse of probability rather than as a

196 Chapter Seven

discourse used to make sense of the past or of the present. I am interested
in the statistic as a figure, one that looms on the horizon.
In the first section of this chapter I consider how contemporary ill-
ness narratives of di√erent kinds—prime-time tv, experimental film, the
memoir—contribute to, disclose and dissect, confront, and question the
omnipresent discourse of medical statistics. I turn in the second section to
what I call the society of the statistic, of which medical statistics are but a
subset, suggesting that it is coincident with what has been termed the risk
society.≥ This is followed by a discussion of structures of feeling, both
modern and postmodern—a discussion that opens out to a larger histori-
cal frame in the fourth section of this chapter.

1
Statistical panic. It isn’t an unusual occurrence. It’s the stu√ out of which
prime-time television is made, as illustrated by the 13 April 1997 epi-
sode of the medical drama Chicago Hope. In one of the narrative lines in
this episode, a middle-aged woman—she is a wife and the mother of two
children—insists to a young male surgeon that she wants a double mastec-
tomy. He isn’t merely reluctant to do the operation. Instead he’s horrified
because she doesn’t in fact have breast cancer. But as she explains, she has
an 86 percent chance of getting breast cancer (this statistic is based solely
on family history—her mother and her two sisters have died of breast
cancer). For her the statistic is like an oncoming train she must avoid at all
costs. Although the statistic is an abstraction and isn’t linked to a certain
outcome, it has for her a galvanizing force.∂
Here we so clearly see the di√erence between the scientific use of the
language of risk and its experiential dimension: this fictional woman’s
experience of the feeling of being at risk—statistical panic—discloses a
terrifying future: the certainty that her life will be cut short by disease.∑
The doctor’s initial reaction is that she’s su√ering from paranoia and hys-
teria, two emotions assuredly not associated with rational decision mak-
ing. But in the end the doctor is persuaded to perform the operation by the
woman’s unwavering determination and the gravity of her statistical prog-
nosis. (Along the way the woman with whom he is romantically involved
teaches him the lesson that a woman’s sexual attractiveness shouldn’t be
irrevocably linked with her breasts and that love should triumph over such
dramatic bodily change!) What to the surgeon at first seems an insane

Statistical Panic 197

course of action is revealed in the course of the narrative as preeminently
rational in an unequivocally calculating sense. If we generally regard sta-
tistics as a depersonalizing force, here we see that when we apply them to
ourselves, creating our own emotional dramas out of them, they can have
an overwhelming power that orients us to the world in a particular way and
focuses our attention on eliminating risk. In order to avoid being reduced
to a statistic, which in this case seems to entail a certain death sentence,
this fictional character from Chicago Hope uses her panic as energy to
guide the surgeon’s knife to her breasts and thus to obliterate altogether—
she thinks—her risk of such cancer.∏
The narrative is designed to persuade us, along with the surgeon, that
her decision is ‘‘rational.’’ Her clearly defined role as a wife and mother is
represented as the maintenance of her health at all costs. The all-powerful
protagonist of the story is the figure of risk: an 86 percent chance. That her
panic carries with it a financial price as well as an emotional price is never
mentioned. The surgeon is carefully represented as never lobbying for the
operation, for which he would presumably charge a big fee. Instead he’s
represented as firmly opposed to it and must be convinced to perform it.
The mutual entailment of the society of risk, which requires the produc-
tion of statistics, and of consumer culture is never suggested. The high fig-
ure of 86 percent represents the high cost of maximizing the woman’s
health. In our health care system this carries a price tag, and it results in
what I call the pricing of panic. And indeed sustaining health is, as we
know, a major preoccupation in contemporary consumer culture, one that
relies upon statistical reports to increase demand for its products.π This
episode from Chicago Hope is thus a clear instance of the medical melo-
drama, where public and private space intersect in the operating room,
where fraught decisions are reduced to no-brainers, and where good moth-
erhood is represented as taking a knife to the body and spending a lot of
money in the process. In short the feminine (albeit in a new guise) and the
work of consumption are yet again aligned in the representational space of
television.∫
In this unambiguous melodramatic world, the woman is presented
from the beginning as unambivalent and thus having no questions or
qualms about her decision. But the very experiential quality of statistical
panic, or risk, is that it carries uncertainty with it—an uncertainty that is
intrinsic to it. The Chicago Hope narrative is cast in black-and-white terms

198 Chapter Seven

as a debate between two competing and supremely confident positions.
But what panics us is that we can’t be certain of our own future, however
much epidemiologists have quantified it in aggregate numbers. What is
peculiarly reductive about this television narrative is that the woman is
never represented as hesitating over what she thinks she should do. This
accounts for my uneasiness with the narrative, my sense that the story is
truly bizarre. How could we possibly allow a single number to have such
decisive and unambiguous power over us?
But the cultural injunction to avoid such risk is all-pervasive. Phyllis
Rose, a writer in her middle years, comments on this from the perspective
of her own experience with breast cancer testing in A Year of Reading
Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. When she is told by her doctor to have a
breast biopsy to test some small spots of calcification, she puts it o√—
judging that the odds of one in five were not overwhelming. Her friends
are aghast and censorious. They think her frivolous and self-destructive.
‘‘To cling to any personal preference, to value personal convenience in the
face of a threat of cancer,’’ Rose concludes, ‘‘is to defy a cultural style so
widely approved that it has the force of wisdom and responsible prac-
tice. . . . Committed to having the biopsy, nevertheless I talked about it with
a studied levity which to me signaled equanimity and mastery of my fate,
but which to many of my friends bespoke shallowness, until, one day,
talking to a good friend, I was reduced to tears and bewildered questions’’
(131). Rose was judged as being deficient—morally deficient—because she
wasn’t su√ering or displaying statistical panic, much less acting on it. As
Solomon Katz and others have argued, we live in a culture where for many
people moral concerns aren’t associated with religious tenets and values
but with rather illness and health; in an instance such as this, morality—
what is referred to as ‘‘secular morality’’—is based on calculations of risk
emerging from the field of epidemiology.
How do we survive into the future in the postmodern society of risk? By
eliminating as much risk as possible. By understanding every day as one in
which our ability is tested to survive not only actual threats (a holdup at
gunpoint in the city, a car accident, a fall), but also the invisible atmo-
sphere that everywhere radiates risk and projects it far into the future. As
Zygmunt Bauman has so aptly suggested in his essay ‘‘Survival as a Social
Construct,’’ the ‘‘postmodern strategy of survival’’ is to slice ‘‘time (all of it,
exhaustively, without residue) into short-lived, evanescent episodes. It re-

Statistical Panic 199

hearses mortality, so to speak, by practicing it day by day’’ (29). Our daily
work—our career, in the sociologist Erving Go√man’s sense—is to manage
our futures in terms of avoiding risk.
But more importantly we survive by dissecting the deployment of statis-
tical discourse and its e√ects upon us and by reflecting on our a√ective
response to the language of risk. In what follows I consider statistical
panic in two striking works that serve as counterpoints to the breast cancer
narrative from Chicago Hope: Yvonne Rainer’s feature-length film mur-
der and murder (1996), which explores the disturbing discrepancy be-
tween the scientific language of statistics and their experiential dimension
in relation to breast cancer, and the historian Alice Wexler’s Mapping Fate
(1995), a memoir that engages the experience of being at risk for Hunting-
ton’s disease. In both murder and murder and Mapping Fate, statistical
death is the underwriter of alternative futures. If murder and murder
entertains the question of what statistical panic feels like and how it can
get you in its grip, Wexler shows us how she finally resolved not to concede
control to it.

Rainer’s bold film murder and murder takes up the subjects of breast can-
cer, aging, and love between two older women. For Rainer murder in capi-
tal letters (murder ), as opposed to murder in the lower case (murder), is
death from clearly defined social causes that could be prevented—that is,
deaths caused by nuclear testing and ddt, or deaths from homophobia and
other forms of stigma. In what Rainer has herself termed the most psycho-
logically realistic of her films, murder and murder contains a running
commentary on statistics—thematically, literally, figuratively, and perhaps
most courageously, autobiographically. It also thematizes the possibility of
seeing into the future by having the younger ghosts of the characters haunt
the action that takes place in the present—on which they comment wist-
fully, wryly, and even statistically on possible futures. As the young ghost of
one of the two main characters says dreamily, ‘‘Just think of it: if in one year
only one girl from every graduating class in every high school in the coun-
try becomes a lesbian, that means 33,000 lesbians! In a decade that would
add up to 330,000. And in thirty years it would be a million!’’ (101).
In the course of the narrative the sixty-three-year-old Mildred is diag-
nosed with breast cancer and undergoes a mastectomy. While the credits

200 Chapter Seven

roll at the end of the film, she says in voice-over, referring to statistics
specifically about lesbians and breast cancer, ‘‘these statistics make me
tired’’ (117). To which Doris, her younger partner, replies, ‘‘So many ways
to get messed up. Your numbers are even more terrifying than mine.’’
Mildred: ‘‘They’re just numbers. Everyone has a di√erent set of numbers.
You can’t live your life by numbers.’’ But as I’ve been suggesting, we’re
virtually required to do so by what I call the society of the statistic. And
often for what we would term good reasons—acting in a manner in accor-
dance with avoiding mortal disease, maximizing our health. Doris takes
this position. Doris: ‘‘But you can use the numbers as cautionary. Like,
when did you last get a pap smear and mammogram?’’ If the tone is for a
moment ironically light (fun is occasionally poked at statistics in the film),
the implications of Mildred’s answer are horrifying. ‘‘Oh don’t start on me
now. I don’t know, two or three years ago.’’ Two or three years ago! My first
reaction is to wish that she had had a mammogram! I react like Phyllis
Rose’s friends who castigate her for delaying the biopsy her physician had
advised. (This is also complicated: having a mammogram provides no
guarantee.) Then we remember: Mildred is a fictional character. But the
final frame of the film returns us to the sobering light of the real world
before it fades out. It reads:

in memoriam
nancy graves
shirley triest.
Within the context of the film the deaths of these two real women seem to
be statistical fatalities. Death by statistic. And in a horrible irony the deaths
of these women will in fact be reduced to statistics—to data going into the
aggregate to generate a new mix and new probabilities for the future of
other women. Yet at the same time Rainer’s film is dedicated to the mem-
ory of these women, to the meaning that their lives held for other people. It
is a refusal to allow them to be reduced to statistics.
It has been said of some fictional narratives (of Thomas Hardy’s late
nineteenth-century novels, for example) that the landscape assumes the
status of a character. In murder and murder statistics are both the en-
vironment in which these women live and an uncompromising force that
is mercurial in nature. Even if you follow all the rules (you eat the ‘‘right’’
food, you exercise, you don’t live next to a toxic waste dump), you may be

Statistical Panic 201

hit. Sobering if not menacing, statistics appear as crawling titles across the
bottom of the screen, accompanying much of the film. Here are some
examples. ‘‘There are 1.8 million women in the U.S. who’ve been diagnosed
with breast cancer. One million others have the disease and do not yet know it ’’
(88). ‘‘One out of four women who are diagnosed with breast cancer die within
the first five years. Forty percent will be dead within ten years’’ (89). In one
scene, fragments of a statistic are stenciled on the wall, and in another
scene we see a statistic being carefully inscribed on another wall, as if it
were gra≈ti. It reads: ‘‘In 1992 thirty-seven and a half million people in the
U.S. had no health insurance’’ (112). In one of the most important se-
quences in murder and murder statistics about breast cancer are sten-
ciled on the canvas of a boxing ring, literally covering the floor on which
the two women both fight and make love. One of the signal achievements
of murder and murder is to show how statistics constitute the very stage
upon which we act out our lives. In murder and murder statistics are
literally made visible. There is a striking visual poetics at work.
Yvonne Rainer, a lesbian who was in her early sixties when she made
this film, appears as herself in murder and murder. In the film she inter-
rupts the fictional narrative with her own autobiographical commentary.
In the boxing ring scene mentioned above, she sits in the audience right in
front of the ring. She is wearing a fighter’s robe, and at one point she
addresses the camera, slightly o√side. She speaks in an even, almost tone-
less voice, one verging on the deadpan:

All right, I’ve been putting this o√. . . . Five biopsies in eight years
following up on that first diagnosis of lobular carcinoma in situ. . . . ‘‘A
marker of higher risk,’’ that first breast surgeon kept repeating, and I in
turn repeated it like a mantra. ‘‘Not breast cancer, but a marker of
higher risk.’’ He wanted to take ’em both o√. No breasts, no breast
cancer. I did my research, found a more conservative surgeon, and
weighed the odds. Twenty to thirty percent higher risk than the general
population. At that time one woman out of every ten or eleven got
breast cancer. Now it’s one out of eight or nine. ‘‘You’re more likely to
die in a car accident,’’ Dr. Love had said. Since I didn’t own a car, I didn’t
know quite what to make of that. (102–3)

Rainer understands the deadly looniness of being lumped into a statis-

tical aggregate that doesn’t represent your own life but that you are told
represents your statistical future. As she dryly puts it, ‘‘ ‘You’re more likely

202 Chapter Seven

to die in a car accident,’ Dr. Love had said. Since I didn’t own a car, I didn’t
know quite what to make of that.’’ Rainer also knows that self-deception is
one of her preferred strategies for survival. She reports having practiced
an ironic form of statistical thrift, shopping for lower odds, which would
presumably result in a lower medical bill and a longer life. If the fictional
woman from Chicago Hope reacts to her familial history of statistics with
determined certitude (in that reductive narrative she has only one conclu-
sive figure to deal with—86 percent), Rainer shops for other numbers. She
acts like a postmodern version of the urban sociologist Georg Simmel,
calculating and enumerating. She weighs her chances, worrying, shop-
ping, worrying, shopping. If in our consumer society skill as a shopper is
required, here we see, as Bauman incisively puts it in Liquid Modernity,
that we learn ‘‘to treat any life-decision as a consumer choice’’ (89).
While Rainer delivers these words she opens the left side of her robe to
reveal her mastectomy scar. At a chance moment, we so visibly learn, her
risk had climbed to 100 percent. She is one of those women. But other
statistics are still out there, radiating risk. In fact the odds seem to be
increasing at a crazy-making rate. It is as if Rainer is living to the terrifying
tempo of a statistical countdown. One out of every eight women will get
breast cancer. One out of every seven. Six. In a situation such as hers
statistical panic may be never ending—until it is fatal. Five. Four. ‘‘Thirty
women die from breast cancer every hour,’’ she reports later in the film in
voice-over, ‘‘That’s one every two minutes. By the year 2000 cancer will be
the leading killer of everyone’’ (109). Rainer’s caustic irony exposes the
crazy cultural logic of the risk society. It is the panic produced by the
statistics that has reached epidemic proportions as well.Ω
In a brilliant sequence of jump-cuts Rainer, still facing the camera, tells
us about the ever-present strange feeling of tightness in her skin after the
mastectomy, and she intones the death rates from cancer, revealing how
the phenomenology of the body and statistical panic intersect in harrow-
ing ways:

I’m a sucker for statistics. They make your head spin with the dizzying
prospect that the body is a quantitative entity, and death can be deter-
mined with easy calculation. In the United States cancer is the leading
killer of women between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. . . . At first
you feel a tremendous tautness across this area . . . That means 2.8
million women have breast cancer . . . and you have very limited mobil-

Statistical Panic 203

 ity in your arm. Of 182,000 women newly diagnosed with breast cancer
in 1993, 46,000 will be dead in five years . . . They give you exercises
(she demonstrates) . . . more than 75,000 will be dead in ten years . . . and
after a few months you regain almost a full range of motion. One out of
nine women will develop breast cancer sometime in her life. That rate
has more than doubled in the last thirty years. That taut feeling, how-
ever, never quite disappears. One out of three Americans will face some
form of cancer. Of these, two out of three will die from the disease. That
taut feeling . . . The death rate . . . however, never quite disappears . . .
from breast cancer has not been reduced in more than fifty years . . . Yet
there are some of us who escape . . . and some of us survive. (She crosses
her arms and takes the ‘‘macho’’ pose.) (108)

The staccato recitation of statistics strikes home—at her singular body and
the collective body of women. It is as if this stutter-like sequence could go
on forever, oscillating between the palpable feeling of her body where once
her breast had been and the probable prospect of death, which is the
ultimate implication of these disembodied statistics. The figures them-
selves constantly change at what seems to be a dizzying speed. Yet para-
doxically the rate also seems ominously—or boringly—slow. In murder
and murder statistics, both fully formed and fragmented, metastasize in
every direction, materializing everywhere. They appear on the walls. They
are written on the floor. They crawl across the bottom of the screen like the
stock market figures on cnbc, the financial cable television channel. They
virtually constitute our everyday life.
How do we understand the experience of medical statistical panic? It
is a stressful ambiguous state that is new to the postmodern culture of
medical risk—a state that Sandra Gi√ord in ‘‘The Meaning of Lumps: A
Case Study of the Ambiguities of Risk’’ has so astutely identified as being
‘‘somewhere between health and disease’’ (215). Thus the a√ect of statisti-
cal panic is fundamentally related to the experience of uncertainty. Freud
in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety provides a distinction between anxi-
ety and fear that is useful here. Anxiety, he insists, ‘‘has an unmistakable
relation to expectation’’; unlike fear, which is attached to a specific object,
anxiety ‘‘has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object ’’ (165). Statistical
panic falls somewhere in between the two states. Like anxiety, it’s related to
the expectation that something may happen in the future, but unlike
anxiety it’s not so vague or indefinite. Yet unlike fear—the fear, say, of

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being in the path of an oncoming train—statistical panic isn’t related to a
known object that exists for us in the present. Rather it is related to a
probability, to varying scenarios, to futures that are statistical in nature.
When we’re angry, our anger is directed at a specific object, most often a
person; our anger binds us to that person. Jean-Paul Sartre in his book on
the emotions, for example, draws on anger as a model for the way emo-
tions bind us to the world. As he puts it, ‘‘The a√ected subject and the
a√ective object are bound in an indissoluble synthesis. Emotion is a cer-
tain way of apprehending the world’’ (52). But how can we be bound to
something indefinite? To a statistic? To a figure that represents a possible
future and thus contains in and of itself a narrative, but is at the same time
a fragment of a series of possibilities? This ambiguity accounts in part for
the peculiar quality of statistical panic, a structure of postmodern feeling
that oscillates between urgency and boredom.
I hope I won’t be stretching a point if I suggest a parallel here with
Freud’s analysis of obsessional neuroses. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and
Anxiety, Freud also writes that in an ‘‘obsessional neurosis the technique
of undoing what has been done is first met with in the ‘diphasic’ symp-
toms, in which one action is cancelled out by a second, so that it is as
though neither action had taken place, whereas, in reality, both have’’
(119). It is as though the sensation of panic is canceled out by reassurance,
only to be succeeded by panic, as though neither had taken place, whereas
in reality both have. In analogy with after-images, could we not say that we
are left with after-a√ects—after-a√ects that are associated not with the past
but with the future, which is one of risk.

How do you live when you are at such risk? Alice Wexler provides a di√er-
ent answer to this question in her remarkable Mapping Fate: A Memoir of
Family, Risk, and Genetic Research. Her sensitive account contains two
narratives that are as intertwined as is the double helix: Wexler’s personal
story as the daughter of a mother who su√ered from Huntington’s disease,
and the scientific story of the search for the gene that causes Huntington’s
(it was discovered in 1993). As Wexler writes in her introduction to Map-
ping Fate, she wants to illuminate the ‘‘emotional meanings of being at
risk’’ for a devastating and terminal disease such as Huntington’s that has
no known cure (xvii). She is interested in conveying what it’s like to live in
its ‘‘toxic shadow’’ (xix-xx). For the body inhabited by Huntington’s disease

Statistical Panic 205

is at the end a depressed body, a body that can’t communicate, a spastic
body su√ering from the ravages of chorea (an involuntary movement
disorder).
Unlike Rainer’s murder and murder, Mapping Fate doesn’t deluge us
with statistics. But one figure haunts the entire narrative: fifty-fifty. When
Alice Wexler learned in 1968 (she was then in her mid-twenties) that
her mother had been diagnosed with Huntington’s, she simultaneously
learned that she had a 50 percent chance of inheriting the disease. Al-
though her father later told her that her immediate response to the even
odds was, ‘‘That’s not so bad’’ (43), in fact she was overpowered by this
uncertain knowledge, which was transformed into denial and translated
into uncertainty about her own talents for living. As her sister Nancy
Wexler, a psychologist and activist for Huntington’s, was to write, ‘‘The
ambiguous condition of 50 percent risk is extremely di≈cult to maintain
in one’s mind, if not impossible. In practice a 50–50 risk translates to a
100 percent certainty that one will or will not develop the disease’’ (223).
We are routinely urged to weigh the odds as a way of deciding what
course of action to take. But Wexler couldn’t do this because the odds
weighed exactly the same. Instead her mother became a kind of mirror for
her of her future body, one she would often deny by turning away from her
mother as if she were turning a mirror to the wall. ‘‘As a feminist,’’ she
writes in the introduction to Mapping Fate, ‘‘I particularly wanted to exam-
ine the relations between genetics and gender in our family, since I knew it
somehow mattered to my own experience of growing up female that my
mother—my same-sexed parent—was the parent at risk and that she was
the one who had developed the disease’’ (xvii). ‘‘What map of the body is
taken in by the daughter who sees chorea memories written on her mother’s
face?’’ she asks (xvii). But by the book’s end she comes to feel an apprecia-
tion for her mother’s grace under the pressure of the disease and thus
forms a positive identification with her, one that allows her to dedicate
Mapping Fate, itself a memoir of great clarity and honesty, to the memory
of her mother.
Wexler’s anxiety—her statistical panic—is palpable throughout the
pages of her book as she apprehensively inspects herself for the signs of
the disease, witnesses her mother’s long and harrowing descent into Hun-
tington’s, o√ers her own help in the search for the dreaded gene, and tries
to get pregnant (understanding all the while the tragic future that could be
in store for her child and the all-too-predictable guilt she would su√er as a

206 Chapter Seven

consequence). With a horrifying irony, the discovery of the gene and the
development of a test for it, she writes, ‘‘opened an abyss in all our lives, a
vast space between prediction and prevention’’ (221).
Now her anxiety about whether or not she carries the gene for Hunting-
ton’s is compounded by her anguish over what might be the emotional
e√ects of the results of the test itself. As she discovers in talking with
people at risk for Huntington’s, virtually ‘‘everyone mentioned the need to
escape the oppressive uncertainty’’ of genetic inheritance (236). They also
report that as they grew older their anxiety increased even though the odds
of having the disease decrease with age. She is helped by the knowledge
that people in di√erent cultures treat being a member of a family with
Huntington’s di√erently. That frees her from her own culture. As Wexler
tells us, the people who live in San Luis, a small community in Venezuela
racked with Huntington’s, have a di√erent way of apprehending their
future and of acknowledging what they are in fact certain is their inheri-
tance. ‘‘The people here believe that everyone who has a parent with the
disease always inherits it from that parent, but only some people actually
develop the symptoms,’’ she explains. Wexler herself then assimilates their
way of handling disease to our scientific category of risk and to our dis-
course of statistical probability. ‘‘Perhaps it is a way,’’ she reflects, ‘‘of
acknowledging the emotional burdens of being at risk, and the worry of
constantly wondering when and if you’ll get the disease. Being at risk
means being di√erent, from those who are not at risk and from those
with Huntington’s. It’s a state all its own.’’ Her generous conclusion is
that these people ‘‘seem, to understand this—better, perhaps, than North
Americans, who do not tolerate ambiguity well’’ (198–99). This is another
instance of the new medicalization of the body—of living in a state between
health and disease.
Having lived so long with this statistical condition, Wexler ultimately
makes a kind of peace with being at risk. She rejects the test for which she
had longed (the test, it is important to remember, doesn’t provide absolute
prediction but rather narrows the probabilities). She makes a conscious
decision to choose to live in risk, refusing the cognitive map of her body
that is held out to her in the form of genetic testing and statistical proba-
bilities. She elects to face a future that holds two possibilities rather than a
virtual certainty; it is a future she can now name a destiny, one that for her
remains open. In Wexler’s Mapping Fate we not only see a nuanced and
strong portrayal of what it feels like to be caught in the tension between the

Statistical Panic 207

scientific language of risk and its experiential dimension. We also see how
her analysis of her statistical panic, understood as uncertainty about the
future, allowed her to put the paralyzing implications of the fifty-fifty odds
behind her and to live into a future that is not ruled by a statistical roll of
the dice. Thus fundamentally, she tells us, her story is ‘‘less about an
illness than about the possibility of an illness, less about the medical
dilemma of living with disease than about the existential dilemma of living
at risk’’ (xxii). In e√ect Wexler redefines risk. Instead of risk ominously
waiting for her in the future in the form of a statistical probability, Wexler
chooses to risk fate. She decides to live in a ‘‘third space,’’ one that is
neither certainty nor complete uncertainty (xv). She refuses to take the test
for the gene that causes Huntington’s. She takes a risk. She risks an
untimely death, choosing to live, in the words of the British writer Gillian
Rose, ‘‘before her time.’’∞≠
In the episode from Chicago Hope described above, the tv feelings are
clichés and banalities, emotions flattened to stereotypes, feelings so easily
consumed they could be said to be fast-food feelings or junk feelings. In
the hybrid texts that are murder and murder and Mapping Fate, as well
as in the account by Phyllis Rose, we’re o√ered both a sense of the imperil-
ing intensity that is the sensation of statistical panic and complex emo-
tional reflections on that experience—thought that is felt and feeling that is
thought. We’re o√ered multifaceted narratives that I take to be antidotes to
narratives reduced to melodramatic fragments. At the same time these
texts attune us to the saturation of statistics beyond the medical sphere or
the consumer culture of health, calling our attention to the postmodern
society of the statistic, a subject to which I now turn.

2
If we turn our attention to contemporary culture in general, to the culture
we breathe in and out everyday, we find everywhere deployed the alto-
gether banal and reductive language of the statistic, a language that con-
tinuously o√ers itself up as a way of understanding our lives and the
world. It is the quantitative language of our global capitalist public culture,
one that we have all internalized. It is the logic and preeminent expression
of late capitalism.
Statistics are routinely used today to make sense of an event or moment
in time, and in the process they often create the contours of history—a

208 Chapter Seven

history of economics or of politics. Consider the endless statistical reports
of consumption figures (a high percentage of a market share may itself
stimulate demand). Consider the announcements of the political ratings of
presidents, prime ministers, candidates, and would-be candidates (a low
rating in the polls may precipitate a politician’s rating even further). Desires
and preferences are quantified and then reduced to mathematical expres-
sion. Statistics have also become a form of entertainment and exhibition,
invoked whimsically in virtually any issue of a newspaper, thus performing
the postmodern numerological analogue to the sixteenth-century curiosity
cabinet that housed all kinds of peculiar and exotic objects.
Statistics is the science that, according to the definition given in the
Random House College Dictionary of the English Language, ‘‘deals with the
collection, classification, analysis, and interpretation of numerical facts or
data, and that, by use of mathematical theories of probability, imposes
order and regularity on aggregates of more or less disparate elements.’’ In
this chapter my focus is on statistics as a discourse of probability rather
than as one used to make sense of the past or of the present. It is especially
in this guise that the discourse of statistics can be understood as the
expression of late capitalism: for however a statistical probability may ap-
pear to be related to the material world, in particular to the world of our
bodies, as the product of a science of probability a statistic is in fact com-
pletely detached from the world, much as today’s global financial markets
are detached from actual production in a local economy. In this sense,
statistics are probabilities cast into possible and alternative futures that for
the most part take on a dark dimension. These statistical probabilities
seem to implicate us as individuals in scenarios of financial ruin and of
disaster by disease and weather; that is, abstractions expressed by the
ultimate abstraction, one that is infinite—numbers. As I argued in the
section above, a statistic often seems to contain a complete narrative in and
of itself: I have an 80 percent chance . . . you have a 10 percent risk. . . .
Risk is the critical concept. Economics is known as the dismal science,
but that title should instead go to statistics. For it is a ‘‘science’’ that now
circulates interminably in everyday life as a discourse of risk. We are at
risk, it seems, of anything and everything. Of death by mad cow disease. Of
high cholesterol. Of unemployment. Of crossing the street. Of rape. Of
toxic waste. Of hormone replacement therapy. Of earthquakes. Of crush-
ing a finger with a hammer.∞∞ Even when the citation of statistics is meant
to provide reassurance, it may more often than not produce its opposite: a

Statistical Panic 209

sense of foreboding and insecurity. In the immediate aftermath of the
September 11, 2001, destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade
Center in New York, the discourse of risk at the hands of terrorist attacks
was omnipresent in the United States, with the emphasis falling on bioter-
rorism (anthrax, small pox, typhus)—that is, threats targeted specifically to
the body and not to property or symbolic structures. How to allay the
public’s panic? It should come as no surprise that one of the chief ways
was to counter the (hopefully) statistically minimal threat of bodily harm
from terrorism with the deployment of statistics of risk from everyday life.
Consider this excerpt from the article ‘‘Don’t Lose Sight of Real, Everyday
Risks’’ by Jane Brody that appeared in the New York Times on 9 October
2001: ‘‘The current focus on potential acts of terrorism is diverting people
from responding to real and immediate risks to their well-being, and in
some cases prompting them to take real risks because they are so busy
avoiding hypothetical ones.’’ The real risks, she implies, are those encoun-
tered every day—eating a lot of beef, smoking cigarettes—with the risks
from terrorism reduced to the ‘‘hypothetical.’’ What does Brody single out
as her first example? ‘‘A case in point: driving long distances instead of
flying. On a per-mile basis, flying is much safer, even in these uncertain
times. Each year, tens of thousands of people are killed on the roads,
whereas the annual number of airplane deaths almost never exceeds a few
hundred, as was the case even on Sept. 11’’ (D6).
But narratives are spun out of just such numbers, even when the num-
ber is only one. Indeed as the cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has
stressed, the number one, ‘‘the numerical sign of the individual, is the key
number for liberal social theory’’ (59). In the wake of terrorism, he argues,
we have succumbed to a fear of small numbers. Consider this banal exam-
ple before September 11, 2001. In late 1997 it was widely reported in the
media that an older woman had died from injuries caused by air tur-
bulence on a flight from Japan to Honolulu. The airline industry quickly
released the following statistic, which was announced in turn by the me-
dia, in an e√ort to reassure us so that we’d forget any newly engendered
fear of flying: only two people, we were told, have died of air turbulence
over the last fifteen years.∞≤ My informal and highly unscientific survey of
friends and colleagues revealed instead that many found themselves won-
dering about the circumstances of the death of that other person. How did
he or she die? What happened? Where? When? They created the outlines
of a narrative based on this single statistic and even vaguely fantasized

210 Chapter Seven

about their own possible future death from air turbulence, in the end
resolving to always keep their seat belts fastened to diminish their risk. In
this case a statistic about the past is extrapolated into a scenario of possible
mortality in the future. Ultimately, as the philosopher Ian Hacking has
suggested, in the end what we may have come to fear is not a specific
thing—any thing—but rather probability itself, the future. As the sociolo-
gist Ulrich Beck has persuasively argued, industrial society has been suc-
ceeded by the risk society. What we fear is risk itself.∞≥
Thus if we live in a visual culture where society is distinguished by the
spectacle, we also live in a society of the statistic. Rather than anchoring us
to a stable lifeworld, statistics that forecast the future engender insecurity
in the form of low-grade intensities that, like low-grade fevers, permit us to
go about our everyday lives albeit in a state of statistical stress. Statistics are
the very atmosphere we breathe, the strange weather in which we live, the
continuous emission of postmodern media life. In the United States we
adopt, for example, the stance of medical self-surveillance, monitoring our
own vital statistics even as we listen to the nation’s medical statistics rou-
tinely announced by the Centers for Disease Control. We subject ourselves
to financial self-scrutiny, worrying that we will not have enough resources
for college, a house, medical bills, retirement (I know about that, as I
explained in the introduction).
Statistics are transmitted at every moment of the day and night—on the
Internet, in the newspaper and magazines, and on tv and the radio. Sta-
tistics hail us in the Althusserian sense. The statistic and the anecdote are
the pervasive conventions of media culture. Statistics often open what is
called a ‘‘story’’ in print, broadcast, or Internet news, to be followed by an
anecdote—or vice versa. Often statistics in and of themselves are the story
and our imaginations supply a corresponding anecdote or scenario. In the
United States, for instance, we learned in 2005 from the director of the
Department of Justice’s O≈ce on Violence Against Women that ‘‘one third
of female homicide victims are murdered by their intimate partners.’’∞∂
Here statistics are themselves the deep structure and manifest content of
the story; they are numerological protagonists that stalk their potential
victims. Here a narrative has been compacted into the most minimal and
impersonal of fragments—a statistic. Death and destruction is the story,
with the round number of deaths and their location by nation constituting
its critical elements. Consider this headline in the 20 December 2005
issue of the New York Times: ‘‘Atlanta Homicide Rate Drops as Nation’s

Statistical Panic 211

Murder Level Rises.’’ This is a statistical variant on what Freud termed the
declaration of desire by negation, although here it is not desire but the
state of risk that is announced. That the number of murders has declined
is supposed to be good news for people who live in Atlanta. But there is no
doubt that the situation of fewer murders remains a forecast of violent
death. Moreover, that the very subject of the sentence fragment is the
homicide rate itself suggests that statistics, although an impersonal and
implacable force, possess a peculiar fateful agency akin to that of the
ancient Greek gods. Being reduced to a statistic, as we say, is definitely not
a fate to be desired. And there is a further dark complexity. In linking the
decrease in murders in Atlanta to the increase in murders elsewhere the
ignoble emotion of schadenfreude is invoked.

3
I have been associating the society of the statistic with a particular form of
feeling—what I call statistical stress or, in its extreme form, statistical
panic. The flip side of panic is boredom. I suggest that statistical stress and
statistical boredom, which is related to it, can be understood as constitut-
ing a particular structure of feeling, one that discloses the society of the
statistic in which we live today—a mediatized, marketized, and medical-
ized culture in which the notion of being at risk has assumed dominant
proportions.∞∑ I o√er this in the spirit of speculation, as a cultural hypothe-
sis, and I do so by returning us briefly to the turn of the twentieth century,
drawing on the history of the structure of feeling of modernity in order to
suggest a comparison with what I have been calling the postmodern soci-
ety of the statistic and its concomitant structure of feeling.
Earlier in this chapter I referred to the train when I remarked that for the
character in the episode of Chicago Hope the statistic of having an 86
percent chance of contracting fatal breast cancer has for her the force of a
train heading straight for her. I chose this as an analogy because the train in
fact recalls the much earlier cultural form of the ‘‘cinema of attraction,’’ as
Tom Gunning has named it. The cinema of attraction was a nonnarrative
cinema that flourished at the turn of the twentieth century; indeed it
dominated the very idea of the cinema until 1906–1907 when it took a
narrative turn. In the cinema of attraction, space and time were envisioned
as a forum in which to elaborate a series of shocks, in particular the shock of
the new theorized by Walter Benjamin as associated with turn-of-the-

212 Chapter Seven

century urban culture and the technology so characteristic of it. The aes-
thetic was preeminently one of assault. The Lumière brothers’ famous film
Arrival of a Train at the Station (1895) serves as the quintessential example.
The title encapsulates the action of the film: a train arrives at the station,
with the spectators positioned in front of it as it advances. The technological
protagonist of the film—the train—is an invention that changed our very
sense of time and space and thus the nature of perception itself, an alter-
ation in perception that is indexed in certain a√ects, requiring what I call a
phenomenology of technology expressed in terms of feelings.∞∏
By all accounts the spectators reacted with terror and panic to the Lumi-
ère brothers’ film of an onrushing train. The invention represented what
was unknown—that is, new—in addition to unimaginable speed and force.
It represented the penetration of the urban in the countryside, or the
machine in the garden, as the Americanist Leo Marx has so aptly phrased it,
and thus represented a fundamental change in social structures. As a film,
Arrival of a Train at the Station not only represented the shock of the new, it
also elicited the response of the shock of the new that, as a structure of
feeling, distinguished this period of technological change. But this experi-
ence was a simulation of an experience, one that took place in a space
devoted to entertainment. Thus the bodily and psychic sensation of panic
felt by the spectators was leavened by the sense of expectation and excite-
ment, one that Gunning associates with a conscious enjoyment of visual
shocks and thrills. ‘‘The onrushing train,’’ Gunning explains in ‘‘An Aes-
thetic of Astonishment,’’ ‘‘did not simply produce the negative experience
of fear but the particularly modern entertainment form of the thrill, embod-
ied elsewhere in the recently appearing attractions of the amusement parks
(such as the roller coaster), which combined sensations of acceleration and
falling with a security guaranteed by modern industrial technology’’ (37).
I would add that the cinema of attraction functioned as a virtual space, a
space of safety in which the spectator could become accommodated to the
new technology—and thus to the new urban culture—in the guise of enter-
tainment (one that has its analogues in today’s video games). As we know,
accommodation—both in real space and time as well as in representa-
tional space—leads to adaptation, and adaptation can yield to boredom. It’s
thus crucial to understand boredom as the inevitable counterpart of the
shock of the new associated with the modern metropolis. As the film
theorist Patrice Petro has so persuasively argued, modernity had another
a√ective side—that of boredom. Boredom was not a sensation but the lack

Statistical Panic 213

of sensation, less an emotion than a mood. Boredom set in, she writes,
‘‘when the ‘shock of the new’ ceased to be shocking, when change itself
had become routinized, commodified, banalized, and when the extraordi-
nary, the unusual, and the fantastic became inextricably linked to the
boring, the prosaic, and the everyday’’ (265).
If the shock of the new was theorized by Walter Benjamin, boredom was
for him also a critical a√ect for understanding modern subjectivity.∞π The
same is true for Georg Simmel. In his well-known essay ‘‘The Metropolis
and Mental Life,’’ Simmel argues that the extreme stimulation experienced
in the modern city was intertwined with the money economy that under-
wrote it, one that demanded a mind that was necessarily consumed with
‘‘weighing, calculating, enumerating and [with] the reduction of qualitative
values to quantitative terms’’ (328).∞∫ For Simmel, the counterpart of urban
stimulation is what he called ‘‘the blasé attitude’’ (329). Together, then,
shock and boredom, linked to technological innovation and urban culture,
constitute what we could call a dominant structure of feeling of modernity.

With the a√ect of boredom twinned to shock I return to the postmodern

society of the statistic. The train is exemplary of the technology of urban
modernity, a technology characterized by concreteness and materiality.
The all-pervasive discourse of statistics is exemplary of the postmodern. It
is a social technology that, like finance capitalism, is preeminently ab-
stract.∞Ω And it is altogether clear that we respond to the litany of statistics
with which we are daily bombarded with boredom as surely as we do with
panic. More so. Consider the all-pervasive recitation and quotation of sta-
tistics we encounter in enormous quantities every day—the number of
housing starts in any given month, the percentage rise or fall of the closing
of Dow and other stock exchanges, the amount of precipitation in a par-
ticular period, the numbers of wins and losses of a sporting team, the
percentage of various groups that voted for a certain candidate, and so on.
The list is endless. ‘‘Let’s do the numbers,’’ intones National Public Radio
at night, the voice in an upbeat mood no matter what, trying to beat the
boredom or head o√ the panic, maintaining an equable tone of entertain-
ment. We live in a climate of numbers virtually vying for our attention. We
talk statistics as much as we talk about the weather. We take note, we end
by turning o√, numbed, perhaps enervated, only to begin again the next
day. (In retrospect it is a matter of some irony to me that as an economics

214 Chapter Seven

major in college I was thrilled to have a summer internship in Washington
at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. My project was disemployment at the
plant level. And it was boring! But the reason itself is also ironic. In the
three months I was there, the figures it was my responsibility to assess
literally never arrived. So I asked if I could go to the library, where I read
economic history. That, it turned out, was the place for me.)
The matter is further complicated because we must find ways to cre-
atively use statistical language to e√ect change. We can’t ‘‘say no’’ to statis-
tics any more than we could ‘‘say no’’ to trains—nor should we want to do so
in an unreflective way. In part the challenge for those who are activists is to
convince others to understand the urgency implied in the tedious quantita-
tive language of the statistic. Boredom must be converted into concern.
Much public policy depends upon mobilizing statistical panic—for gather-
ing support for curtailing teenage smoking, for increasing funds for aids
in Africa and research on autism in the United States, for fighting the
spread of avian flu, and for decreasing the rate of growth of the population
in certain countries, for instance. Statistical language itself is one of our
tools to argue for human goods, such as the alleviation of human su√ering.

Some twenty-five years ago Jacques Derrida commented on what he iden-

tified as the apocalyptic strain in postmodern thought, suggesting that the
tone of apocalypse represents a continuity between modernism and post-
modernism. I have been suggesting that there is a continuity between the
shock of the new, or the a√ect of modernity, and the panic generated by the
postmodern society of the statistic, although their constituting technolo-
gies are di√erent. The tone of apocalypse is deployed in much statistical
discourse: 86 percent! Market slides 3.5 percent! The population is falling!
The population is skyrocketing! But at the same time there is something
altogether banal, if not altogether boring, about a future cast in numero-
logical terms or calculated in quantitative bundles.
To figure the modern, Walter Benjamin imagined a visionary ‘‘angel of
history’’ who, although turned toward the future, faces in fact the past and
the ‘‘wreckage’’ wrought by catastrophe (259). Today we face a future fig-
ured as statistical risk, with wreckage everywhere dispersed into the years
that lie ahead. There is something both strangely unnerving and numbing
in the phenomenon of statistical panic, a structure of feeling associated
with the postmodern society of risk, one that produces risk as a commodity

Statistical Panic 215

and then o√ers goods and services to assuage that same sense of panic.
Although it bears similarities to the emerging structure of feeling at the
turn of the twentieth century (we no longer experience the shock of the
urban technological new in the same way, we are thoroughly habituated to
it), this postmodern structure of feeling is decidedly di√erent.

4
The global language of statistics that characterizes our society is a dis-
course in the Foucauldian sense that, like capitalism, also has a history of
development. Importantly this history is in the process of being written,
three moments of which might include the late sixteenth century, the
beginning of the nineteenth century, and the end of the twentieth century.
The feminist literary historian Mary Poovey has studied the emergence
of techniques in the sixteenth century—double-entry bookkeeping, among
them—that helped codify commercial transactions in the early modern
period.≤≠ What especially fascinates me in Poovey’s account is that the
category of risk initially contained everything that could not be represented
by numbers, with shipwrecks and instabilities in world demand being
leading examples. It was only later with the development of techniques
(such as bills of exchange) that risk was to a certain extent institutional-
ized. But the notion of the statistic is central to her history of the emer-
gence of the modern fact.
The philosopher Ian Hacking in his brilliant book The Taming of Chance
shows how probability is, as he puts it, ‘‘the philosophical success story of
the first half of the twentieth century,’’ a development he traces to the
consolidation of statistical thinking in the nineteenth century, one made
possible by the systematic collection of data starting around 1820, the
beginning of an ‘‘avalanche of printed numbers’’ that continues to deluge
us today (18). In addition Hacking explores the development of statistical
fatalism in the 1830s, strains of which I see everywhere today.≤∞ By the late
nineteenth century the statistical concept of the ‘‘normal’’ was, according
to Hacking, ‘‘the premier statistical idea’’ (145), a concept that continues to
have force today yet has also taken a paradoxical turn. In the nineteenth
century the normal was associated with the state of health. But if we are
today everywhere and always at risk, the normal seems virtually sure to
turn catastrophically into its opposite at any moment: to be normal is to be in
a state of risk, a state that at some inevitable future time will be fulfilled as a

216 Chapter Seven

state of disease or death. Today statistical thinking and its concomitant
a√ective tone, a sense of being at risk, have been internalized by virtually
everyone in our consumer culture. Statistics are endlessly produced. They
are broadcast day and night by the media. They are prime determinants in
how we feel and what we do.
Today, as opposed to the sixteenth century, we think of risk as precisely
what can be represented by numbers, by figures that represent the future.
Today, as opposed to the nineteenth century when the collection, mainte-
nance, and deployment of statistics was predominately the province of the
state, statistics circulate in virtually every domain of culture on all levels—
from the personal to the global. Indeed statistics inextricably intertwine
the two. As Theodore Porter has pointed out in The Rise of Statistical
Thinking: 1820–1900, it is di≈cult for us to imagine that before the 1820s
societies in the West didn’t make decisions (or what today we would call
public policy) based on unemployment figures or crime rates. With the
rise of mass culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries and with the continuing invention and consolidation of mass media
throughout the twentieth century, it is, I suggest, even more di≈cult to
imagine a world not saturated by statistics as a discourse of knowledge,
ranging from the trivial to the life threatening.≤≤ If in the nineteenth
century statistics were used by the state—from city governments to na-
tional governments—as a management tool, today statistics of probability,
delivered as a discourse of risk, are disseminated endlessly and inter-
nalized by individuals as tools for living out their lives, a tool so forcefully
exposed by Rainer and by Wexler.≤≥ The structure of feeling I have been
calling statistical panic (and its oscillating partner, boredom or numbness)
is an e√ect of the social technology of statistics, one that has both contrib-
uted to the creation of the omnipresent discourse of risk and produced a
calculus to avoid that very risk, a prime contradiction of capitalistic culture
in the twenty-first century. Like other feelings, then, panic has a history.≤∂
In this chapter my primary concern has been to suggest two particular
points in that history in relation to emerging technologies in the twentieth
century—the shock of the new associated with urban technologies at the
turn of the twentieth century and statistical panic associated with the
convergence of the information revolution and the probabilistic revolution
at the turn of the twenty-first century.≤∑ As a structure of feeling, statistical
panic, sutured to statistical boredom, is the opposite of a mathematical
sublime. Statistics are not a discourse of awe or wonder but rather the stu√

Statistical Panic 217

of everyday life. They are a routine currency in which we plot our lives in
terms of a calculus of risk and in which, when we are jolted into mortal
attention, we find ourselves living on the razor edge of panic, beset by what
Paul Monette in his memoir Borrowed Time has called the ‘‘thundercloud’’
of statistics (48).

I have focused on the medical body as it is represented in illness narra-

tives, and I have been particularly concerned with those who reject the
statistical body as all-determining of the course of their lives. Many other
texts bear witness to the subjective experience of illness as something
palpably distinct from the clinical understanding of disease as organic
dysfunction. And many of these texts also resist the lure of conflating
one’s own unique body with the aggregate body of statistical risk. These
stories are antidotes to the often ennervating e√ects of the discourse of
risk. If I have concentrated on work that portrays women’s bodies at risk,
my intent has not been to suggest that the medical statistical body is
gendered female.
In closing, then, I refer to one last text, The Noonday Demon, Andrew
Solomon’s remarkable study of clinical depression, an illness he takes care
to insist is a bodily disease. In addition to tracing the history of depression
and examining the cultural politics of the disease as well as its treatments,
Solomon presents us with the scientific research that outlines the con-
tours of the statistical body of clinical depression. Approximately 3 per-
cent of all Americans su√er from chronic depression. Nearly one in ten
Americans will experience a major episode of depression in their life-
times. Women are twice as likely to su√er depression as men. Solomon
doesn’t ignore the statistics of depression. But neither does he submit to
them. It is his conviction that, as he says, ‘‘the hard numbers are the ones
that lie’’ (13). ‘‘Many authors derive a rather nauseous air of invincibility
from statistics,’’ he writes, ‘‘as though showing that something occurs 82.7
percent of the time is more palpable and true than showing that some-
thing occurs about three out of four times’’ (13). Instead, the primary goal
of his book, he tells us, is empathy, and with great insight and in prose that
often rises to eloquence he tells us his own alarming story and the stories
of others, conveying to us the devastating experience that is depression,
one that can be ‘‘described only in metaphor and allegory’’ (16) and defini-
tively not in terms of the impersonal statistical body.

218 Chapter Seven

 coda

INEXHAUSTIBLE GRIEF

The goal of psychoanalysis is, broadly, to claim as one’s own

the power of one’s feelings.
—Nancy Chodorow, The Power of Feelings

The dominion of the objective being in me, the sensuous out-

burst of my essential activity, is emotion, which thus becomes
here the activity of my being.
—Karl Marx, Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Psychoanalytically speaking, any form of life will tend to gener-

ate a fantasy of what it is to get outside that life.
—Jonathan Lear, Happiness,
Death, and the Remainder of Life

In Marion Roach’s Another Name for Madness a daughter cares for her
mother. In ‘‘At the End of the Line,’’ a beautiful prose poem by the French
psychoanalyst J.-B. Pontalis, a son reflects on his relationship to his mother.
But here there is no impulse to inform readers. Here the aesthetic is not
psychological realism but that of a poetic meditative mode, one with its
roots in the routines of everyday life. ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ was published
in 1986 when Pontalis was sixty-two and his mother was, by my count,
ninety-two. The final essay in his book Love of Beginnings, ‘‘At the End of
the Line’’ moves e√ortlessly—as if by free association—from anecdote to
memory, from memory to the figure of another old woman (one lost to old
age), and from her death-in-life to a transformational fantasy involving his
mother. The mundane technology of the telephone serves as the literal
device of attachment between the two, with the narrative set in motion by a
simple phone call from his mother. It concludes with a vision of the
restoration of harmony between them, one that seems to emerge out of the
very act of remembrance and writing itself. Created is an oneiric psychic
space in which a vision of mother and son appears with the two of them
poised on a plateau at the edge of life. That Pontalis casts his piece in the
third person, not the first, suggests the degree to which we are removed
from the confessional world of the autobiographical. Instead we find a
prose poem that is a gentle parable of intimacy.
Here is the first sentence of ‘‘At the End of the Line’’: ‘‘When the high-
pitched ring can be heard at that time of day, he knows it’s her. He doesn’t
have to wait, he knows, he doesn’t have the slightest hesitation. It can only
be her, the telephone rings every evening at the same time, almost to the
second’’ (166). His mother is confined to her apartment—apparently by
choice—and hasn’t changed or rearranged the furniture of her existence
for years. She subsists in a virtually lifeless homeostatic state, surrounded
not by people but by family photographs taken many years before, photo-
graphs to which she’s no longer attached. Here are the next two sentences
of ‘‘At the End of the Line’’:

He imagines her staring at the small clock in her bedroom where

nothing has changed for so many years, where not a single object has
been moved even by a millimeter, where the photographs she no longer
sees are all, in little oval frames, carefully placed on the mantelpiece:
the picture of her mother with the light eyes, that of her brother in an
airman’s uniform, that of her two sons with the sailor-suit collars—
these are the photographs taken by professionals, and there are many
others that she herself took once upon a time, ‘‘snapshots,’’ with a
Kodak box camera placed upright against her chest, and then others
again that he took, but those too are ancient, twenty years, thirty years, it
has been a long time since, for her, life stopped.
Here it is, it’s time, he picks up the telephone, at first there’s a small
silence and that silence confirms, if there were any need for confirma-
tion, that it is indeed her, he hears her voice, she says a few words, that it
was very cold today or that it’ll rain tomorrow or else she announces an
illness, a death, François is in the hospital, it’s his heart, Anne Dubac
will be buried at Père-Lachaise, poor thing, or else, and it’s said in the
same tone, which isn’t one of complaint, which isn’t one of calamity:
your brother waited all day for the plumber. (166–67)

The ostensible content of his mother’s conversation—the weather, a

funeral, news about his brother—is inconsequential. Her voice is toneless.
It doesn’t vary as she relates these bits and pieces of meaningless informa-

220 Coda
tion. Trying to warm her into life, he responds with news of the everyday
variety of his own. But all the while he knows her call will contract to a single
question, one so elemental and urgent that it has taken on the form of a
demand, one posed of him every day. Will he be there tomorrow at the same
time? Will he be there tomorrow at the same time? Will he be there tomor-
row at the same time? (The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips told me that he’s
been in Pontalis’s apartment when this call has come—more than once.)

And he, on his side, tries to give her more comforting news, that he met
someone really interesting today, that the children came back from the
mountains very proud of their exploits, that the hyacinths she gave him
for Christmas are beginning to flower on the balcony, anything that may
signify to her that life goes on, it doesn’t matter what so long as it’s a sign
of life, but the slightest signs are undoubtedly already too much for her,
since she simply wants to assure herself of his presence at the end of the
line and is already asking something she knows, whether he will be in
tomorrow at the same time so that, like this evening, like yesterday, like
the previous weeks and months, she can reach him at that hour, which is
the time when he has finished work and got back home. (167)

If her life has stopped, she holds tenaciously onto life. It’s as if his promise
that this ritual will persist into the future, a promise she exacts day by day,
assures that life—her life—will continue. It’s as if there is an ontological
dimension to this repetition that is teleological in nature, one forecasting a
perpetual future made possible by the elementary technology of the tele-
phone. For if the appointed time has to be changed because his routine
varies, if he hesitates for a moment, her anxiety is palpable:

Sometimes all the same he’s not going to be there, he’ll go directly from
his o≈ce to the restaurant, to the cinema, to some friends, and then,
cautiously, he must tell her: ‘‘No, tomorrow I won’t be in but the day
after definitely.’’—‘‘At the same time?’’—‘‘Yes, at the same time.’’ And
that disturbs her, she’ll call back right away to ask him: ‘‘That’s right,
tomorrow?’’—‘‘No, the day after.’’—‘‘At the same time, quarter past
eight?’’ ‘‘Yes, or earlier if you’d prefer, I’ll be in earlier.’’ That disturbs
her too, she doesn’t like the time to be changed, no modification must
be introduced into the time-table, not the slightest modification must
be introduced. Anywhere. Everything that can happen has for her one
name only: accident.

Inexhaustible Grief 221

 She must be in control of her call, in control of her time. He must be
there at the end of the line. It must be an absolute certainty. Now he’s the
mother. (167–68)

Allaying overwhelming anxiety is her pressing need and thus she’s insis-
tent and inflexible. It takes the form of the control of her son. Is this not an
uncanny version of the fort-da of early childhood, a method his mother has
invented of assuaging her awareness of vulnerability in late life and of
controlling her fear of abandonment and death?

There’s something odd. When he speaks about it to others, no one

understands. ‘‘What, she never asks to see you, yet she telephones you
every evening. She lives far away? Abroad?’’—‘‘No, very near. But very
far also. And it’s not that she doesn’t ask to see me, she doesn’t want me
to come. Stubbornly refuses. If I insist, she gets angry. What she wants
is to have me at the end of the line, at the appointed time.’’
To have me at the end of the line. In her time.
He repeats these words, he repeats them as she repeats every eve-
ning: ‘‘Tomorrow, I shall call you at a quarter past eight. Will you be
there?’’—‘‘Yes, tomorrow at a quarter past eight, I’ll be there, don’t
worry.’’
Ten years ago, she would sometimes say: ‘‘One shouldn’t live so long.
If I had the courage. . . .’’ Now she no longer says it. (168–69)

Freud theorized the fort-da as he watched his eighteen-month-old grand-

son play a game he had invented. He would throw a spool with a string
attached to it out of his crib and reel it back in, uttering fort and then da, in
Freud’s view symbolically controlling the disappearance ( fort ) and return
(da) of his mother.∞ In ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ it’s not the child but the
mother casting out the line as if it were the umbilical cord that links them
even now, controlling her son. Now it’s his role to provide reassurance—a
holding environment, in the psychoanalyst’s D. W. Winnicott’s words.≤
Like an infant, the mother demands ‘‘absolute certainty,’’ as if it were
possible (168). ‘‘Now he’s the mother’’ (168).
In a short meditation on the fort-da in his book Windows, Pontalis
suggests that the fort-da constitutes the elemental rhythm of our lives.≥
‘‘What if, throughout our entire lives, we do nothing but throw the bobbin,
over there, in order to make it come back here!’’ he writes. ‘‘And this thread,
as fragile as it is, is what connects us to the other, to life. Should it break—

222 Coda
existence is held only by a thread—then it’s death. What would the child
have felt if the bobbin hadn’t returned to his hand?’’ (60). What would his
mother feel if he simply didn’t answer his phone call? Unthinkable anxiety.
Roland Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, tells us that Freud wasn’t fond of
the telephone because he understood it to convey, in Barthes’s phrase, the
‘‘wrong voice, the false communication’’ (114–15). By contrast the telephone
serves an almost magical purpose in ‘‘At the End of the Line.’’ It’s not a
question of the content of a message or the timbre of the voice but of the
open line of attachment that in and of itself soothes anxiety. Barthes also
understands the telephone in terms of the fort-da but his emphasis is on
separation and distance, not connection. ‘‘No doubt,’’ he writes, ‘‘I try to
deny separation by the telephone—as the child fearing to lose its mother
keeps pulling on a string; but the telephone wire is not a good transitional
object, it is not an inert string; it is charged with a meaning, which is not
that of junction but that of distance: the loved, exhausted voice heard over
the telephone is the fade-out in all its anxiety’’; ‘‘I’m going to leave you, the
voice on the telephone says with each second’’ (115).
A string can serve both as a symbol of ‘‘separateness and of union
through communication,’’ as Winnicott so memorably observed in Playing
and Reality, commenting on the remarkable way a two-and-a-half-year-old
deployed a tangle of string while Winnicott talked with his mother (43).∂ If
a string can function both to separate and to connect, when does one
predominate over the other? Surely it’s a question of one’s role in relation
to the other. Just as surely it’s a question of temperament and disposi-
tion as much as anything else. If Barthes emphasizes separation, Pontalis
gravitates to connection: ‘‘Yes, tomorrow at a quarter past eight, I’ll be
there, don’t worry,’’ says the son every evening to his mother, as if bestow-
ing a kiss goodnight.
It might be objected that this daily call is only the repetition of an empty
routine. But it would seem his mother’s very willfulness underwrites what
is in fact a ritual just as the ritual seems to sustain her will. That her
son will answer her call every evening—tomorrow and tomorrow and
tomorrow—seems to guarantee her attachment to life in general as well as
her attachment to her son, the life to which she gave birth. It also seems to
serve as protection against the disabling inertia that has seized the mother
of one of his friends, an old woman whose lifelessness frightens him: ‘‘An
image persists. It was another old woman, the mother of one of his child-
hood friends. She stayed in bed all day. Doctors pronounced her very weak:

Inexhaustible Grief 223

there comes an age when one no longer goes to the trouble of naming the
illness. He had come to pay his respects. She too had been active, this
bedridden woman. He had wanted to say a few words to her, to speak to
her about her son’s successes, about the beauty of her house in the au-
tumn sun. She wasn’t listening to him, she wasn’t looking at him. In front
of her, at the foot of her brass bed, a television set had been installed’’
(169).
One of the latent fears children have in relation to their parents is that
they will disengage from the world when they are old—that they will irre-
vocably remove themselves from us, ceasing to listen to us or to speak to
us in any meaningful way, thus revealing a deep and disturbing indif-
ference. That they will fall prey to the numbing orbit of television is a
ubiquitous figure of this fear. Horrified by her mother’s precipitous de-
cline into Alzheimer’s disease, Marion Roach o√ers this portrait in An-
other Name for Madness. ‘‘My mother, a college graduate, a journalist and
then a teacher, used to tell me that watching television ‘rots the mind.’
Now, it’s almost all she wants to do. It’s her favorite pastime,’’ she writes.
‘‘Most of the time she doesn’t have the sound on; she just stares at the
screen’’ (122–23). Similarly, in his moving essay ‘‘The Makeup of Memory
in the Winter of Our Discontent,’’ Herbert Blau writes this about his
father’s final illness: ‘‘When he su√ered a double stroke which left him in a
wheelchair and blind in one eye, [he] took it as a sign of weakness, almost a
personal fault and, in the excess of pride with which he had lived, refused
any solace or therapy and virtually inflicted upon himself the lonely humil-
iation of death. When I flew across the country to visit him, the television
would be on. He’d stare intently at the screen no matter what was there,
never looking at me with his single eye, as if canceling the oedipal contract
and asking, among all the hopeless desires, that we forget his crippled
being, as if he’d never been at all’’ (17). (I am married to Herbert Blau, and
this passage troubles me for the reasons that can be imagined. Indeed it
occurs to me with a fateful start that I am the one who bought my husband
a television when twenty-five years ago he didn’t own one. As he has said
more than once—indeed weekly—it has ruined his life.)
And here is Pontalis describing this other mother, bound to the flicker-
ing shadows of a televisual world: ‘‘Her gaze was caught by what flashed
past on the screen: images of war in Afghanistan, a regatta at Newport, a
building in flames in the 15th arrondissement, then a singer in sequins,
and she was watching it, mute, she was letting herself be absorbed by it,

224 Coda
deaf, as if all these ghostly shadows, rock stars and guerillas jumbled,
merged, were the reality that was awaiting her and as if these shadows
were coming slowly, inexorably, to seize her, to take her with them into this
intermediate world which was no longer that of the living and already, not
completely but almost, that of the dead’’ (169–70). In this threefold cluster
of passages television is figured as an alien invader abducting life on earth,
drawing old people up and into it where they live a shadowy, zombie-like
existence mediated by images and in between life and death, reduced to
grey ciphers of their former selves, captured by a machine they no doubt
earlier feared could harm their own children, bound by an invisible cord to
the technology that is television, staring incommunicado. It is a frighten-
ing vision of the annihilation of the social space of familial life, the sunder-
ing of the implicit contract of intergenerational continuity, the abandon-
ment of the younger generation by the older generation in a disconnect
that is total and unforgiving, the contract between parent and child can-
celed. That the agent of this definitive withdrawal takes the shape of the
most significant mass medium and most important communication tech-
nology of the twentieth century is profoundly ironic. Found in virtually
every home and in every hospital room as well as in the day rooms of nurs-
ing homes and assisted care facilities, television is distributed throughout
the space devoted to domestic life, disability, and illness as if lying in
predatory wait.∑
In psychoanalytic terms we might say that here television is figured as a
third term, one that divides child from parent. It’s as if television itself,
with its constant and unremitting flow, possesses the strength to hurl the
parent out of the orbit of the child—fort. And there is no da. Is this what
dying is like in our postmodern televisual culture? As Pontalis asks:

Like a child, he wondered ‘‘where does one go when one dies?’’ and he
stole out of the big red room. He walked for a long time across hills with
supple forms like the breasts of a woman, among the vines. He wanted
to exorcize that vision of the bedridden old woman. He told himself that
this must be what it is to die nowadays, to die gently under hypnosis:
without noticing it, to pass to the other side, into the screen you are no
longer watching but which is watching you, which gradually absents
you from the people close to you, from yourself, from memory of the
world, to rejoin the anonymous insubstantiality and endless disorder of
images. (170)

Inexhaustible Grief 225

If this old woman has capitulated to the televisual netherworld, his mother,
anything but compliant, lives in the future tense. Even as his emotions are
mixed, he admires his mother’s strong will and drive, taking a certain pride
in her tenacity: ‘‘She, by contrast, was vigilant, the one who telephoned him
every evening to say nothing except that she would telephone him the next
day. Sometimes it exasperated him: this fixed habit of an obstinate old
person, this control which, without realizing it perhaps, she exercised over
him. He had to be there, at his post’’ (170).
If Pontalis has agreed to this daily phone call from his mother, he is
nonetheless as ambivalent about his mother as he is about being under
her control. If she never seemed to pay attention to him in the past (a
familiar complaint we have about our parents), the two of them are also
alike in ways that sting him. Thus he confides his own fear of resembling
her, of being bound to her by the inflections of his body reflecting hers:

She had been, he believed, hardly present in his life. What did she know
about him? So little. Nothing. Nothing about his work, nothing about
his loves, nothing about his buried sadness that she had passed on to
him, he was sure of it, even less about what made him happy, which he
had to win despite her, she who had always been afraid of the future.
(Like her, in the street, he walked with small steps and, as soon as he
noticed it, he would change his pace, but through a deliberate decision
which only underlines the imprint.) And he, what did he know about
her? He had in him only an image that had scarcely moved with time.
The distance between them had been immense. Or the excessive close-
ness, to the point of identity, but a secret identity. He didn’t really
know. (168)

That they were never close hurts him. That they were too close, their
identities secretly mirroring each other, hurts him also. But in the course
of reflecting on his past, he moves from his caviling point of view to
consider hers. If she knew nothing about him, he comes to the symmetri-
cal conclusion that he too knows nothing about her. ‘‘And he, what did he
know about her?’’ (168). What must she have wanted?
In ‘‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’’ Freud writes, ‘‘We
remain on the surface so long as we are dealing only with memories
and ideas. What is alone of value in mental life is rather the feelings.
No mental forces are significant unless they possess the characteristic of
arousing feelings’’ (SE 9: 48–49). What is important is not the memory

226 Coda
but the feeling engendered by it—in this case, the mood. Remembrance,
Pontalis writes in Windows, can be a ‘‘resuscitation’’ of the past (69). What
does he call into life? Here is the memory to which he returns in ‘‘At the
End of the Line’’: ‘‘He thought she had never moved him, never touched
him and that for her it was exactly the same: he had never managed to
move her, to touch her. Yes, once: she had come from Brittany, where she
was living at the time, to have supper with him. He still remembers thirty
years later where they had supper, Place Pereire, on a terrace. It was
summer, they had turbot with mousseline sauce and wine from Boyzy. He
was alone in Paris, held back by the oral part of an exam, and she had come
specially for him. Thus in the course of fifty years they had had one lovers’
rendezvous’’ (168). This is the single time he remembers when the long
distance between them was bridged, when they were transparently close
and at ease with one another, untroubled and unvexed. That his mother
came from the west coast of France to meet him is crucial given the daily
calls he must now return home from work to receive.
Thus thought yields to feeling. The past perfect surfaces in a memory
that releases for him the mood of emotional harmony, a perfect union
between them.∏ In the aftermath of this generative memory of the past, his
irritation vanishes in the mood of well-being betokening reparation: ‘‘He
had to admit that he was at last extraordinarily moved. At bottom they
must share the same irrational conviction: that as long as they were both at
the end of the line, the life-line would not be broken. Often, when younger,
he had told himself when she died he wouldn’t experience much grief ’’
(170). But grief, as he writes elsewhere in Love of Beginnings, is ‘‘solid and
inexhaustible’’; ‘‘belonging to no one in particular,’’ it ‘‘can be the property
of anyone’’ (103). And indeed it belongs to him.

If the daily ritual of this recurring phone call is similar to the fort-da, it is
also di√erent. For Freud’s grandson the game was a solitary one. But two
people are involved in ‘‘At the End of the Line.’’ I think of their evening
tradition as a grown-up version of Winnicott’s squiggle game (with his
young patients Winnicott would make drawings in order to elicit their
spontaneity and to delineate a space where they—analyst and patient—
could make something together). Created is what Winnicott calls a poten-
tial space. In his essay on the fort-da Pontalis writes that ‘‘this thread, as
fragile as it is, is what connects us to the other, to life.’’ The line is not an

Inexhaustible Grief 227

end in itself. It is not the thread of life but a means to an end, which is the
other—life. Together the son and mother play fort and da as a serious
game, one that attains the status of a ritual and enriches psychic space. A
potential space is instantiated where the elaboration of the self is encour-
aged and where communication, not the mere passing of information
between people, is fostered, thereby engendering security and trust so that
we may believe that fort will be followed by da. If his mother initiated this
ritual, Pontalis realized the promise of this potential space in the writing of
‘‘At the End of the Line,’’ thus creating something out of the ritual of their
evening call.
In ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ we find a narrative of the emotions—es-
trangement yielding to attachment. But we also find the anticipation of
overwhelming grief. This is not the dazzling grief of parting momentarily
from a first love; rather, it is a wise grief. When he was younger, Pontalis
imagined that when his mother died he wouldn’t feel much grief. Now he
fears the force of devastating grief to come. Freud was himself near sixty
when he watched his grandson invent his forth-and-back game to alleviate
the anxiety he felt in his mother’s absence. Freud had more than once
expressed the wish that he would die before his mother. Under the trans-
formative pressure of feeling so does this son. ‘‘Now he would like to die
before her’’ (170).
But then how could he be at the end of the line?
In ‘‘Perdre de vue,’’ a piece published two years before ‘‘At the End of the
Line,’’ Pontalis writes about the su√ering of a son—I’ve been told the son is
Roland Barthes—in the wake of his mother’s death. His pain is expressed in
the anguished cry that he will never see her again. She is lost to sight. As
Pontalis wisely adds, perhaps more devastating is that Barthes will never
again experience his mother’s gaze. In Windows, a collection of short
meditative pieces published after the death of his mother, Pontalis asks this
fundamental psychoanalytic question: ‘‘Are there mother substitutes?’’
(97). ‘‘As unsatisfying as she had been, she was the only one. I tell myself
that the only being who has no substitute, still less is interchangeable, who
is perhaps immortal, is the (if not our) Mother, and I capitalize, I attribute a
capital letter, to my tiny Mother’’ (97). Such grief is inexhaustible.

The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas writes eloquently about moods in

‘‘Moods and the Conservative Process,’’ arguing that generative moods are

228 Coda
a psychic process akin to dreaming, one in which we can experience the
self in special ways. In this important essay he explains that ‘‘going into a
mood is an essential condition for the creation of a being state that, like the
dream state, may represent some child element in contemporary life. . . . If
a person enters a mood, he approximates in this form of psychic activity
another means of establishing and elaborating elements of the infant-
child self: sleep creates the dream, some moods establish fragments of
former self-states’’ (100). What is necessary for a mood to be generative? A
person ‘‘must be able to emerge from a mood in such a way that he can
reflect upon the mood as an object,’’ Bollas explains, ‘‘without feeling the
migratory e√ects of mood experience overlapping into ordinary a√ects’’
(101). This a√ords us one way of understanding the emotional transforma-
tion we witness in ‘‘At the End of the Line.’’ But we could equally say that
the migratory e√ects of a mood transform the experience of everyday life
into a waking fantasy. For as Bollas writes in his wonderful essay ‘‘The
Evocative Object,’’ ‘‘To be touched by the other’s unconscious is to be
scattered by the winds of the primary process to faraway associations and
elaborations, reached through the private links of one’s own subjectivity’’
(45). It is as if the son has been touched by his mother’s unconscious and
in responding to her demand is placed in touch with his own faraway
associations saturated in feeling.
If moods for Bollas often register the existential ‘‘moment of a break-
down between a child and his parents’’ (115), the very opposite is the case in
‘‘At the End of the Line.’’ The mood betokens union through communica-
tion. For Pontalis the mood engendered in the act of remembrance and
writing is one of fluent ease in relation to his mother, not the disabling guilt
we find in Freud’s ‘‘Disturbance of a Memory upon the Acropolis,’’ for
example.π Although Pontalis seeks to understand in the deepest sense his
relation to his mother, his mode is not analytical, as is Freud’s. Rather it is
meditative, poetic, and generative of a mood out of memory.∫ Is this mood
mere nostalgia for the past? Pontalis would not, I think, accept this belit-
tling way of understanding nostalgia. As he writes in Windows, ‘‘Nostalgia
carries the desire, less for an unchanging eternity than for always fresh-
beginning’’ (29). Here the mood—a compound of harmonious transpar-
ency and anticipatory grief—is generative of a literary fantasy, a fresh
beginning, a prose daydream that allows the fulfillment of at least four
wishes. It is as if the link between son and mother, figured in the cord of the
phone, leads to the dream’s navel where a prose daydream takes shape.

Inexhaustible Grief 229

Disarmingly, his prose daydream involves the banal technology of the
answering machine: ‘‘Now he would like to die before her. He would have
taken care to plug in an answering machine on which the following mes-
sage would be recorded. Yes, darling mother, you can call me tomorrow, as
usual, at a quarter past eight. She would hear his voice recorded for eter-
nity, and in her own way she, who had told him repeatedly over the years
that she wasn’t gifted for conversation, would be able to speak to him’’
(170–71). What four wishes are fulfilled?
First, the quelling of his grief to come, for he would die before her.
Second, the ability to respond to his mother’s demand and stay at the
end of the line, thus remaining forever a good son, relieving her anxiety
and providing her eternal reassurance.
Third, the means to ensure that his mother retains the important capac-
ity to be alone, in Winnicott’s sense.Ω
Fourth, his experience of a perfect and intimate knowledge of her.
Here is the beautiful paragraph that brings ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ to a
close:

And so the whole secret between them and everything that had re-
mained hidden inside both of them in the clumsiness of gestures,
in abortive impulses, in the unease of bodies, everything that must
indeed have been registered, like the message on the answering ma-
chine, but falling short of and beyond all speech, would unwind along
the line, endlessly. And together they would go through a succession of
rooms, of rooms whose double-locked doors would open one by one at
the sound of their voices. They would begin the journey again several
times, each time with a more supple step, and it would no longer be
an interlocking of rooms but a high plateau stretching as far as the
eye could see, where a slight wind would be blowing. They would stop
walking once they had come to love this vast and light region of si-
lence. (171)

Thus a fifth wish is fulfilled: the creation in fantasy of a place for them to
dwell together.
If Freud theorized the fort-da as staging the symbolic disappearance of
the mother, along with her return, Pontalis imagines only her presence. If
this is the illusion of the future, it seems also to be a possible future of
illusion, a rewriting of the dismal and disabling guilt of Freud’s ‘‘Distur-
bance of a Memory upon the Acropolis’’ in the register of hope. This is a

230 Coda
reparative fantasy, one in which the secrets they hadn’t been able to divulge
to each other would be spoken and they would greet the future together.
Pontalis envisions a transparent intimacy between them in a tenderness
that is a supreme fiction—one that recalls for me the eloquent words of
T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets:

Words move, music moves

Only in time, but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness,
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Nor that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end. (121)

I’ve quoted T. S. Eliot because ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ draws us into an
aesthetic space that is similar to that of Four Quartets, one that speaks
to our sense of the mystery of life, to our love of beginnings and our
anguish at the loss of life—and to our belief that they are somehow inter-
twined. Pontalis is gently critical of Freud, suggesting he was driven to
solve enigmas—enigmas have answers just as puzzles have solutions—but
had no real feeling for mystery that does not yield itself to thought alone.
An aesthetic experience, Bollas has written in his essay ‘‘The Spirit of the
Object at the Hand of Fate,’’ does not stimulate the self into thought.
Instead it ‘‘holds the self within an experience of reverie or rapport’’ (34).
It may be objected that this daydream of union is just that—a dream,
albeit one elaborated in writing and confined to a book. It may involve a
fantasy of perfect communication between son and mother but the fantasy
is the son’s alone, one not communicated to his mother. But think of this.
Because the book in which this piece is included was published long
before his mother died (she died twelve years after it appeared), it’s cer-
tainly conceivable she read these intimate words and accepted them as a
gift. This is how I would wish her to have received them. As a reader who is
also a mother (like Pontalis I am writing from the point of view of the adult
child) this is how I take them for myself, although I understand this may

Inexhaustible Grief 231

be mere wish fulfillment. I read these words as a daughter who waved
goodbye to her own mother not too long ago. She is in her eighties and
lives in the Atlantic South. I live on the West Coast. She is a woman who is
herself bereaved. As a woman not unlike, perhaps, Pontalis’s mother, she
doesn’t have a temperament that inclines her to intimacy. I would wish
the fantasy of intimacy o√ered by ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ to be a part of
our future.
In the introduction I mentioned that I’m drawn to the literary emo-
tions. When I gave a lecture on ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ to an audience in
London a few years ago, I confided that my deep wish was to simply
present the piece to them as the gift I take it to be, to o√er it unelaborated
so that we might have the opportunity, as Pontalis might put it, to inhabit
the space of the dream feelingly and not rush to the cognitive surface of
interpretation. For Pontalis the dream is an object in the psychoanalytic
sense, one to which we attach ourselves.∞≠ ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ is an
object to which I attached myself some fifteen years ago when I read it for
the first time. I consigned it to a file folder where I like to think it waited
for me. I never forgot it. And if in my talk in London I was obliged to
quote only excerpts from ‘‘At the End of the Line,’’ it is to me a source of
happiness that in the pages above I have quoted the entire piece. Every
single word.

I referred earlier in this coda to nostalgia, and I want to return to it here to

make two further points. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym sug-
gests that nostalgia is a historical emotion, ‘‘a longing for that shrinking
‘space of experience’ that no longer fits the new horizon of expectations’’
(10). In a peculiar and insidious way in our society, the old who are invalid
—as is the mother of Pontalis—exist out of historical time as they are
ejected from the social world by prejudicial virtue of their very age and
illness. But they are still painfully inscribed within it, figured as holding
onto the vestiges of social space by the now tenuous, now implacable ties
o√ered by communication technologies—the telephone and also the tele-
vision, as we saw in the accounts by Marion Roach and by Herbert Blau of
their parents. For the oldest old, then, we may find ourselves longing for
the space of the nuclear family where the family is unmediated by technol-
ogy, a space o√ering the fantasy of perfect communication of care, inti-
macy, and repair on the edge of death.

232 Coda
 But if nostalgia is an emotion born of modernity, it is as much if not
more a longing for a certain temporality than a longing for a place or
homeland. As Boym writes, ‘‘At first glance nostalgia is longing for a place,
but actually it is a yearning for a di√erent time—the time of our childhood,
the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is re-
bellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress’’
(xv). I have already remarked on my strong attachment—why not call it
love—to ‘‘At the End of the Line.’’ My relation to this piece of writing could
certainly be described as nostalgic in the best sense both in terms of time
and space. That emotional attachment underscores and illuminates for me
the immense change in my reading life over the past decade. In the intro-
duction I mentioned that I regard myself as a reader by both profession
and temperament. I first read ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ in a stately library in
Paris. The space itself engendered a meditative rhythm of contemplation,
one that rhymed with the rhythm of ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ itself. But my
life is now full of hundreds of e-mails that must be answered and filed—the
tempo is staccato, the a√ect often anxiety of the bureaucratic kind, or
perhaps there is no feeling at all, just busyness—and it has been years
since I have been in a library to read. I miss that—for me the library is a
space for reflection and respite—and thus I hold onto ‘‘At the End of the
Line’’ as what Bollas calls an evocative object, one that preserves and
conserves the possibility of the emotional and reflective power of the liter-
ary, which is at the end of a certain line.

I opened this book by quoting these words of Pontalis in Love of Beginnings:

‘‘It’s rare nowadays to hear words which, belonging to no one in particular,
can be the property of anyone, words that are solid and inexhaustible like
‘grief ’ or ‘hatred’ ’’ (103). It might seem that with ‘‘At the End of the Line’’
we are far from the explicitly marked cultural politics of the emotions. But
consider this. If grief has been understood to be predominantly the work
of women, here a man’s grief—anticipatory grief—is at stake. If our litera-
ture devotes little of its attention to the subjectivity of people in old age,
here a woman in her nineties is the central figure.
Although grief—and the accompanying rituals of mourning—will as-
sume di√erent shapes across cultures and periods, we can’t imagine it
won’t be experienced by everyone in some way. It is one of the strong
emotions. In Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, a book

Inexhaustible Grief 233

altogether remarkable for its vitality and range and its immediacy and
deeply felt intelligence, Sandra Gilbert considers the elegy through the
converging prisms of literary and cultural studies as well as her own
experience. If Paul de Man’s words on the rhetorical figure of prosopo-
poeia in ‘‘Autobiography as De-facement’’ are to me opaque and lifeless,
Gilbert captures the enigmatic force of believing, really believing, that the
person grieved for is speaking from beyond the borders of life. In the
desperation of grief there can be an undeniable impulse to follow the dead,
who are still somehow so much alive. ‘‘How could I not have wanted, in
those early days of grief, to follow my husband through that door, to warm
him, to comfort him, to ‘be dead with’ him?’’ she writes (19). In ‘‘At the End
of the Line’’ Pontalis magically reverses the vector of death, imagining that
he forestalls his mother’s death until long after his own so they can to-
gether go through death’s door, ‘‘go through a succession of rooms, of
rooms whose double-locked doors would open one by one at the sound of
their voices’’ (171).
Joan Didion’s husband died on December 30, 2003. Toward the end of
The Year of Magical Thinking, she writes: ‘‘I realized that since the last
morning of 2003, the morning after he died, I had been trying to reverse
time, run the film backward. It was now eight months later, August 30,
2004, and I still was’’ (183–84). After the death of his mother Pontalis was
sick, so sick that he needed to be hospitalized. As he suggests in ‘‘Taking
Care of Yourself ’’ in Windows, he split himself into two in the wake of his
mother’s death. It is important to him—and to me—that his insight comes
from a novel he had been reading. ‘‘It often happens, said Thérèse,’’ a
character in the novel, ‘‘that one invents sicknesses for oneself after a
death. It’s a way of feeling less alone. You split in half if you will. You take
care of yourself as if you were an other. You are two again: myself and the
one I’m taking care of ’’ (82). How far this is from the contemporary notion
of managing one’s grief as if one were managing money. Of just getting
over it in a matter of weeks and moving forward with one’s life, as we are
routinely advised.
In the introduction to Love of Beginnings Pontalis writes that for him the
importance of the primal psychoanalytic question—Where do babies come
from?—has faded with time. Now for him the meaningful question is
‘‘Where do our thoughts come from?’’ (xvi). We can provide one answer. If
feeling comes from thought, thought also comes from feelings.

234 Coda
 NOTES

introduction
thinking feeling, feeling thinking
1 In the past twenty years there has been much important work on the emotions
done by philosophers. Among those whose work I have found particularly
formative to my own thought are Sandra Bartky, Alison Jaggar, Martha Nuss-
baum, Naomi Scheman, and Elizabeth Spelman.
2 In Feeling Power: Emotions and Education, Megan Boler tells a story uncannily
similar to mine in terms of the inception of her book: it was the absence of the
study of emotion in recent theories of knowledge that prompted her research,
an absence that ‘‘was not a coincidence’’ (xv); she focuses on ‘‘pedagogies that
invoke emotions in an historicized sense’’ (20). In the past twenty years there
has been a veritable explosion of work in the academy on the emotions—not
only in philosophy but in anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies,
cultural studies, and media studies. I will refer to some of this work through-
out my book, but here let me mention Catherine Lutz’s Unnatural Emotions:
Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western The-
ory, a book that has circulated far beyond the discipline of anthropology and
o√ers an extremely cogent discussion of the cultural construction of the emo-
tions, in particular of the dominant discourses of the emotions in the West.
3 The theological historian Thomas Dixon cautions that this is too sweeping a
generalization, and he argues in From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a
Psychological Category that the emotions as a psychological category emerged
in the nineteenth century, thereby encompassing what had previously been
understood as the passions, the a√ections, and the sentiments. My interest,
however, is precisely in the politics of the emotions as represented in a domi-
nant narrative.
4 We may feel grief not just at the loss of a person we loved but also—Freud
o√ers this as an example—for the loss of an ideal. Grief, or the inability to
mourn, may be collective as well as private. See, for example, Alexander
Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich’s The Inability to Mourn: Principles of
 Collective Behavior, which deals with post–World War Two Germany where
the inability to mourn is at the national level. In contemporary culture, as
Saidiya Hartman has written, ‘‘grief is a central term in the political vocabu-
lary of the diaspora’’ (758). If grief here is interminable, it can be understood
as, in the words of David Eng and Shinhee Han, ‘‘racial melancholia,’’ another
form of the inability to mourn. In such cases grief could be said to be what I
would call a ‘‘diasporic emotion.’’ Psychoanalytic theory, largely dormant for a
decade if not longer in the U.S. academy, has resurfaced in large part through
the interest in mourning and melancholia in postcolonial theory. In terms of
the cultural politics of mourning and melancholia in the United States, see
also Anne Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and
Hidden Grief .
5 SE indicates The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sig-
mund Freud. I use this abbreviation throughout this book.
6 See my essay ‘‘Grief-Work in Contemporary American Cultural Criticism,’’
where I call attention to cultural criticism on grief by men (Mitchell Breit-
wieser, Douglas Crimp, Philip Fisher, Renato Rosaldo, and Eric Santner) that
appeared in the United States between 1989 and 1991.
7 See my essay ‘‘Late Theory, Late Style: Loss and Renewal in Freud and Barthes.’’
8 As Joseph Smith shows in ‘‘On the Structural View of A√ect,’’ Freud’s under-
standing of a√ect shifted over time. See the chapter ‘‘A√ect in Freud’s Work’’
in André Green’s The Fabric of A√ect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse, which first
appeared in French in 1973. See also his chapter ‘‘Conceptions of A√ect’’ in
On Private Madness, which is a shorter account of the previous chapter and
first appeared in 1977. For Freud the sentiments of tenderness and friendship
are distinct from states of pleasure and pain, which are the prototypes of
a√ect.
9 For Freud a√ect is understood as associated with a bodily drive and the psy-
chological. A√ect as a theoretical category is emerging as a keyword in cul-
tural studies. This is not the place to o√er a genealogy of a√ect in cultural
studies, but I do want to point to a few key figures and to some recent work.
In Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism Ann
Cvetkovich pioneered the study of a√ect in cultural studies with a focus on
literature, understanding a√ect through the prism of Foucauldian, Marxist,
and feminist thought, as well as psychoanalysis; she argues that a√ect—by
which she often means emotions of the psychological kind—are constructed
by mass culture. The late feminist philosopher Teresa Brennan formulated a
theory of a√ect that is psychoanalytic in nature but powerfully associated
with the social. In Shame and Its Sisters Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, along with
her coauthor and coeditor Adam Frank, introduces the work of the psycholo-
gist Silvan Tomkins who theorizes a√ect in terms of an innate bodily system,
drawing on multiple theories (including cybernetics, systems theory, and
ethology) and understanding shame—and a√ects related to it—as basic (he
postulates eight other a√ects). The thinker who has perhaps most influenced

236 Notes to Introduction

 cultural studies of a√ect is the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who draws on
Spinoza’s categories of ‘‘a√ect’’ and ‘‘a√ection’’ (neither of which have any-
thing to do with the ‘‘personal’’) and theorizes a√ect in terms of ontology, that
is, with becoming. For recent work influenced by Deleuze and Brian Mas-
sumi, see Clare Hemmings, ‘‘Invoking A√ect: Cultural Theory and the Onto-
logical Turn,’’ in The A√ective Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Patricia
Ticineto Clough; and ‘‘The A√ect of Nanoterror’’ by Luciana Parisi and Steve
Goodman. A range of approaches to ‘‘a√ect’’ from the perspective of cultural
studies may be seen in the special issue of Angelaki titled ‘‘Subalternity and
A√ect,’’ edited by Jon Beasley-Murray and Alberto Moreiras.
10 Although I privilege the work of feminist philosophers on the emotions, I do
not want to be misunderstood as suggesting that other philosophers have not
contributed to theorizing the relation of the emotions to cognition. Taking a
di√erent tack, Ronald de Sousa is one of them; see The Rationality of Emotion
in which he argues that ‘‘the cognitive may turn out to be more like the
emotional than we had assumed emotion could be like cognition’’ (69).
11 A variant of this figure—one’s net worth—has been popularly referred to as
‘‘the Number.’’ See Lee Eisenberg’s The Number: A Completely Di√erent Way to
Think About the Rest of Your Life, a book intended for the educated general
public. See also the late Myrna Lewis’s A Proactive Approach to Women’s Con-
cerns: Women’s Longevity Groups and Funds; Lewis cites the statistic that in the
United States women live 5.3 years longer than do men.
12 In ‘‘Raymond Williams: Feeling for Structures, Voicing ‘History,’ ’’ David
Simpson masterfully lays out the development of what he calls Williams’s
‘‘famously personal concept’’ (19) of ‘‘structures of feeling’’ over the course of
his career, objecting in particular to the ‘‘vitalist-empathic’’ element in Wil-
liams’s thinking, one Simpson opposes to the ‘‘more familiar theoretical-
analytical paradigms of the European tradition’’ (24). The very structure of
Simpson’s essay betrays his devaluation of the emotions as a subject in their
own right. Written in the aftermath of Williams’s death, the first part singles
out the individuality of Williams’s voice and focuses on what we might call
the personal, while the bulk of the essay sets to the ‘‘real’’ work of tracing
what Simpson sees as the woefully misguided and theoretically soft notion of
‘‘structures of feeling.’’ Tellingly, toward the end of the essay Simpson notes
that in The City and the Country Williams o√ers moving invocations of per-
sonal memories as well as of unknown agricultural workers, and he con-
cludes on this hand-slapping note: ‘‘All too often these a≈rmations and iden-
tifications work to head o√ any reflection of the sort that is now widely held to
be obligatory for a fuller historical argument conducted at the level of theory’’
(22). See also Paul Filmer’s ‘‘Structures of Feeling and Socio-Cultural Forma-
tions: The Significance of Literature and Experience to Raymond Williams’s
Sociology of Culture.’’
13 If in 1992 Simpson could make the point that the notion of structures of
feeling ‘‘has not proved to be an exportable concept’’ (15), this is decidedly no

Notes to Introduction 237

 longer the case. Jennifer Harding and E. Deidre Pribram make the case for the
cultural studies of the emotions, drawing on the work of Raymond Williams
and Larry Grossberg. Glenn Hendler employs the notion of a structure of
feeling to understand the connection between a genre—sentimental sympa-
thy in narrative form—and the politics of the emotions in nineteenth-century
American culture at large. ‘‘Structures of feeling name the simultaneously
cultural and discursive dimension of our experience,’’ writes Boler in Feeling
Power, ‘‘but do not neglect that these experiences are embodied and felt’’ (28).
See also Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
and José Muñoz’s ‘‘Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and A√ect in Ricardo Bracho’s
The Sweetest Hangover (and Other std s).’’ See Tara McPherson’s Reconstruct-
ing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South; and Je√rey Santa
Ana’s essays ‘‘A√ect-Identity: The Emotions of Assimilation, Multiraciality,
and Asian American Subjectivity’’ and ‘‘Feeling Ancestral: The Emotions of
Mixed Race and Memory in Asian American Cultural Production.’’ See as well
Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis’s introduction to their edited collection
Boys Don’t Cry: Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S. See
too the essay by Fred Pfeil where, drawing on the work of Laurie Anderson
and Philip Glass, he argues that the postmodern structure of feeling is charac-
terized by ‘‘an unstable play between a primal delight and a primal fear’’ (386),
one far more complicated—in part by the emergence of materialist feminism,
which he takes up—than this excerpt suggests. See as well Marianne De-
Koven’s Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern in
which she argues that ‘‘the sixties encompassed the shift in structure of feel-
ing from dominant modernity to dominant postmodernity’’ (8).
14 David Simpson, ‘‘Raymond Williams: Feeling for Structures, Voicing ‘His-
tory,’ ’’ 23.
15 Referring to Bourdieu’s 1997 short essay entitled ‘‘Le précarité est aujourd’hui
partout’’ (translated as ‘‘Job Insecurity Is Everywhere Now’’), Zygmunt Bau-
man in Liquid Modernity enlarges on Bourdieu’s theme: ‘‘Precariousness,
instability, vulnerability is the most widespread (as well as the most painfully
felt) feature of contemporary life conditions. . . . The phenomenon . . . is the
combined experience of insecurity (of position, entitlements and livelihood), of
uncertainty (as to their continuation and future stability) and of unsafety (of
one’s body, one’s self and their extensions: possessions, neighbourhood, com-
munity)’’ (161).
16 In The Vehement Passions Philip Fisher astutely considers what he calls ‘‘paths
among the passions,’’ arguing that some passions are regarded as opposites
(love and hate is one such pair), but that others—anger, fear, and grief are his
prime examples—do ‘‘not seem inherently to be half of some imagined pair’’
(31). While they may not be considered to have opposites, they do often appear
together in what I am calling ‘‘sequences’’ (thus I consider the conversion of
shame into anger in my chapter on shame). Drawing on Aristotle, Fisher
understands instead that a passion may ‘‘block’’ another passion (anger block-

238 Notes to Introduction

 ing fear, for example). ‘‘Blocking,’’ he writes, ‘‘is the single most important
feature of the dynamic of the passions’’ (34). There is an important di√erence
between blocking and sequencing. In the example of shame yielding to anger,
it may be said that shame vanishes, yielding to anger. In the example of fear
being blocked by anger, I would suggest that the fear remains. Fisher would
disagree; he would define a passion as ‘‘being in one and only one state’’ (47).
Fisher also counts pleasure and pain as a pair of passions that are opposites.
Pleasure and pain are elemental Freudian categories of a√ect and have much
in common with Jameson’s notion of intensities; this provides us with a
conceptual link for understanding intensities as ‘‘structures of feeling’’ char-
acterized by opposites.
17 Jameson stresses the euphoric character of these ‘‘intensities,’’ while in my
chapters on statistical panic and bureaucratic rage I stress their negative val-
ence. A dominant ‘‘intensity’’ today would be the addictive euphoria associ-
ated with playing video games. I am quoting from the essay as it appeared
under the title ‘‘The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’’ in Postmodernism, or,
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991.
18 Damasio distinguishes between the emotions and what he calls ‘‘background
feelings,’’ which he believes preceded the development of the emotions over
the long course of evolution. Background feelings originate not in emotion
states but in states of the body. They are inseparable from bodily states but are
not moods, although they are related to moods. A background feeling is ‘‘our
image of the body landscape when it is not shaken by emotion’’ (150–51). It is
precisely an image of their lived body landscape—an image that is coeval with
a background body feeling—to which a person such as Elliot does not have
access. Disassociated from their body, they can have no integrated sense of
self, if they can be said to have a self at all.
19 In On Private Madness André Green notes that ‘‘Freud’s logic is a logic of
hope because it counts on wish fulfillment. Borderline cases open up the
horizons of the logic of despair (negative therapeutic reaction) or that of non-
commitment (splitting)’’ (241).
20 See the National Institutes of Mental Health, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A
Real Illness.
21 Alex Gregory, New Yorker, 22 January 2007.
22 In an excellent essay entitled ‘‘Obsessional Modernity: The Institutionaliza-
tion of Doubt,’’ Jennifer Fleissner explores the contemporary fascination with
the figure of the obsessional in the context of modernity and o√ers it as an
alternative dialectic of the Enlightenment.
23 My reference here is to Nancy K. Miller’s But Enough About Me: Why We Read
Other People’s Lives, where she observes that she has come to understand her
life ‘‘as an unwitting but irresistible collaboration between other texts and
other lives’’ (xiii).
24 Such an antidote works only at the level of the individual and doesn’t address
the question of structural change. Zygmunt Bauman understands the om-

Notes to Introduction 239

 nipresent telling of first-person stories on talk shows as a symptom of our
contemporary moment in which individual stories serve only as examples of
how an individual copes with his or her private problems; see his chapter
‘‘Individuality’’ in Liquid Modernity (53–90). I would argue that the kinds of
narratives I am privileging are much more than mere symptoms of the retail-
ing of emotion stories. Although the lines have certainly blurred dramatically,
daytime tv and nighttime tv continue to be gendered, with daytime soaps still
devoted to melodramatic wounds of passion and the family romance and
daytime talk shows devoted in great part to pop therapy.
25 In what I hear as an echo to Raymond Williams, Michelle Rosaldo writes,
‘‘Feeling is forever given shape through thought and that thought is laden
with emotional meaning’’ (143). See Nancy Chodorow’s The Power of Feelings:
Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture for an astute commen-
tary on the work of Rosaldo and Lutz.
26 Jane Gallop, in her wonderfully titled Anecdotal Theory, draws on the femi-
nist epistemological value ‘‘of revealing the concrete conditions that produce
knowledge’’ (52), but both the methodology and e√ect are quite di√erent from
what I have been suggesting here. In Anecdotal Theory, theory is associated
predominantly with a form of thought that is not literary in an expressive
sense, although it is embodied. See also Meaghan Morris’s Too Soon, Too Late:
History in Popular Culture, where she theorizes the critical and creative prac-
tice of elaborating on specific cases that have the potential to become ‘‘a
parable of practice,’’ which ‘‘converts them into models with a past and a
potential for reuse, thus aspiring to invest them with a future’’ (3). Virginia
Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own is a perfect example of this notion. See as well
Morris’s Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture.
27 With regard to professional a√ect, I cannot resist referring to Carolyn Steed-
man’s marvelous book Dust: The Archive and Cultural History in which she
observes that in Britain in the first part of the nineteenth century the category
of occupational disease appeared, which was associated from 1820 to 1850
with the work of the scholar itself. She hilariously identifies this as a form of
archive fever (alluding to Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever), a professional anxi-
ety linked both with the enormity of conjuring ‘‘a social system from a nutmeg
grater’’ and the banality of the constraints of travel schedules and closing
times of the archives themselves (18). See also Marjorie Garber’s charac-
teristically brilliant and witty essay ‘‘Discipline Envy’’ in Academic Instincts,
53–96. See as well Melissa Gregg’s welcome Cultural Studies’ A√ective Voices
in which she calls for a√ective writing that expresses our political investments
and herself devotes attention to the ‘‘register and cadence’’ of five important
voices in cultural studies—Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, Larry Grossberg,
Andrew Ross, and Meaghan Morris (14).
28 What is understood as knowledge in postindustrial society may no longer be
‘‘principally narrative,’’ as Jean-François Lyotard points out in The Postmod-
ern Condition, but I privilege it here (26). The phrase ‘‘narrative emotions’’ is

240 Notes to Introduction

 also used by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum whose chapter ‘‘Narrative
Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love’’ in Love’s Knowledge takes up in so-
phisticated and impassioned ways many of these questions, including that of
the cognitive power of the emotions: ‘‘Narratives are essential to the process
of practical reflection: not just because they happen to represent and also
evoke emotional activity, but also because their very forms are themselves the
sources of emotional structure, the paradigms of what, for us, emotion is. . . .
For the whole story of an emotion, in its connections with other emotions and
forms of life, requires narrative form for its full development’’ (296). In a
related vein Margaret Urban Walker identifies the story as ‘‘the basic form
of representation for moral problems’’ (67); see her essay ‘‘Picking Up the
Pieces: Lives, Stories, and Integrity.’’
29 See, for example, Svetlana Boym’s superb book The Future of Nostalgia in
which she argues that nostalgia as a historical emotion emerged decisively in
tandem with mass culture and nineteenth-century romanticism; her method
—the alternation between the telling of stories and critical reflection—is par-
ticularly attractive to me. See William Ian Miller’s impressive book Humilia-
tion: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence in which he
traces the devolution of the grander emotion of shame that belonged to Ice-
landic heroic culture to the lesser fear of experiencing humiliation in contem-
porary culture within the context of cultural expectations and regulations of
gift giving and violence. See also Joan DeJean’s wonderful chapter ‘‘A Short
History of the Human Heart’’ in Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and
the Making of a Fin de Siècle in which she traces a large historical shift in
a√ective culture in France, showing how in the second half of the seventeenth
century the emotions were reinvented, a fertile period that was famously
succeeded by the Enlightenment. In the field of history, for example, see
William M. Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of
Emotions in which his concern is to find a way to narrate changes in what he
calls the navigation of the emotions, without recourse to the notion of the
construction of the emotions or categories of race, class, or gender. ‘‘We need
a conceptual frame that acknowledges the importance of management (as
opposed to construction) of emotion,’’ he writes, ‘‘that allows political distinc-
tions among di√erent management styles on the basis of a concept of emo-
tional liberty, and that permits the narration of significant historical shifts in
such management’’ (118); his period is France from 1700–1850.
30 I am indebted to Joel Pfister for pointing out this passage in ‘‘Structures of
Feeling.’’ See his essay ‘‘On Conceptualizing the Cultural History of Emo-
tional and Psychological Life in America’’ in Inventing the Psychological: To-
ward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, as well as the other essays
in this welcome volume.
31 In Multitude Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri briefly discuss what they call
‘‘a√ective labor’’ in their account of the erosion of the hegemony of industrial
labor and the emergence of immaterial labor that creates immaterial products

Notes to Introduction 241

 such as knowledge. A√ective labor ‘‘is labor that produces or manipulates
a√ects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or pas-
sion. One can recognize a√ective labor, for example, in the work of legal
assistants, flight attendants, and fast food workers (service with a smile)’’
(108). Hardt and Negri underscore, as does Arlie Hochschild before them, the
importance of class in their analysis of a√ective labor, stressing that ‘‘it is still
most often performed by women in subordinate positions’’ (111). The shift in
vocabulary from ‘‘emotional labor’’ to ‘‘a√ective labor’’ signals an increasing
use of the term ‘‘a√ect’’ in cultural studies.
32 Pinch’s notion of epistemology in relation to the emotions di√ers significantly
from that of Jaggar. For Pinch, the epistemological question inheres in asking
where feelings come from ‘‘in a period generally characterized as one in
which feelings were coming to be considered as characteristic of the individ-
ual’’ (3). For Jaggar the question of epistemology has to do with the ways in
which (and under what circumstances) the emotions themselves may have a
cognitive dimension. See also Philip Fisher’s provocative essay ‘‘Thinking
about Killing: Hamlet and the Path among the Passions’’ in which he suggests
that Hamlet dramatizes the historical shift from a kingly economy of the
passions characterized by grand public drama to a bourgeois economy largely
devoid of the passions and characterized by the sexual and commercial inter-
ests of the nuclear family; grief in the figure of Hamlet is privatized and
Hamlet is ‘‘a mourning for the passions themselves’’ (77).
33 In Inventing Human Rights: A History, the historian Lynn Hunt echoes Arm-
strong’s account by arguing that new feelings—understood collectively as
‘‘imagined empathy’’ for ordinary people—emerged in response in particu-
lar to the reading of the epistolary novel in the eighteenth century, a genre
that, like autobiography itself, adopts the first person as its point of view,
thus elaborating a subjectivity of interiority (32). As Hunt writes, ‘‘New kinds
of reading (and viewing and listening) created individual experiences (empa-
thy), which in turn made possible new social and political concepts (human
rights)’’ (34).
34 See Susan Miller’s brilliant chapter ‘‘Coda: Fundamentals of Authorship’’ in
her Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace
Writing. Miller discusses three texts, one each from 1824, 1854, and 1897; the
first is a legal petition for divorce written in the third person, and the third is a
memoir written by a daughter about her father, where emotions are ‘‘now cast
as interior realities . . . imagined to be divorced from o≈cial discursive sites,
which become the ‘impersonal’ political exteriority of dominant public state-
ments’’ (256).
35 In ‘‘A√ective Economies,’’ Ahmed refers to such feelings as ‘‘binding’’ emo-
tions, using the term in precisely the opposite way that I do.
36 While Teresa Brennan provides a strong critique of the western modern no-
tion of the self-contained individual, she does not deny that a√ects also come
from within. In calling attention to the ‘‘physical toxicity and stress of daily life

242 Notes to Introduction

 in the West’’ (22), Brennan also suggests that there has been an increase in
negative a√ects in contemporary culture, one that leads us to ‘‘calculate more
and feel less’’ (23). This calls to mind Damasio’s diagnosis of Elliot, the man
without feelings.
37 Freud was of course aware of the work of Gustave Le Bon. In Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego he takes up Le Bon’s work, among others. As Mikkel
Borch-Jacobsen has argued, for Freud the emotional tie that binds individuals
to the group is based on ‘‘love for the leader’’ and not on vague suggestibility
or the power of words and images (72). ‘‘Far from being a mass a√ective
contagion,’’ Borch-Jacobsen concludes, ‘‘the social tie indirectly expresses the
a√ects of individuals’’ (72). Thus ultimately in Group Psychology Freud is more
interested in the psychology of the individual than that of the group. See
Ahmed’s excellent chapter ‘‘The Organization of Hate’’ in The Cultural Politics
of Emotion.
38 Hjort o√ers an exceedingly intelligent example of the strategic use of the
emotions in the setting of the academic department, where a positive emotion
emerges over time as an e√ect of purposive behavior that is not initially in fact
felt (168–69).
39 At the same time I understand that in focusing on what the philosopher Sue
Campbell has called the classic or traditional emotions (anger, shame, grief,
and compassion or sympathy)—emotions that are, she writes, ‘‘conceptually
well behaved’’ (6)—I am also focusing on emotions in which social norms are
likely to be highly implicated; the psychological and the social are closely
aligned, even when what Alison Jaggar has called outlaw emotions are at
stake. What Campbell calls ‘‘idiosyncratic’’ feelings (10), unusual feelings
specific to a particular person, are for the most part not taken up in this book.
40 I am indebted to Mary Jacobus for this reference. See The Poetics of Psycho-
analysis: In the Wake of Klein, 136.
41 Another concern of Massumi in his brilliant Parables for the Virtual is to
imbricate thought with feeling, but the feeling at stake has more to do with
sensation than emotion. Regarding the process of a form of ‘‘thinking’’ itself,
he writes: ‘‘Imagination is felt thought, thought only-felt, felt as only thought
can be: insensibly unstill. Outside any given thing, outside any given sense,
outside actuality. Outside coming in. The mutual envelopment of thought and
sensation, as they arrive together, pre-what they will have become, just begin-
ning to unfold from the unfelt and unthinkable outside: of process, transfor-
mation in itself ’’ (134).
42 Anna Gibbs, in ‘‘Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology
of A√ect,’’ argues that ‘‘the media act as vectors in a√ective epidemics in
which something else is smuggled along: the attitudes and even the specific
ideas which tend to accompany a√ect in any given situation’’ (1).
43 See Jameson’s essay ‘‘Culture and Finance Capitalism.’’
44 In Parables for the Virtual Massumi accents the process of becoming and
a≈rmative, inventive methods of thinking—and being. But he has long been

Notes to Introduction 243

 concerned with the cultural politics of fear. See the collection he edited
under the title The Cultural Politics of Fear. In Massumi’s more recent work
his emphasis has been on what Gibbs calls ‘‘the epidemiology of a√ect’’ in
relation to the management in the West—in particular on the part of the
George W. Bush administration—of the a√ect of threat. Massumi’s analysis of
threat in relation to terrorist attack is similar to my analysis of statistical panic.
See his essays ‘‘Fear (the Spectrum Said)’’ and ‘‘The Future Birth of the A√ec-
tive Fact.’’
45 I am employing mood in a psychological and psychoanalytic sense, not in the
sense of the mood of a historical period, as we find in Thomas Pfau’s formi-
dable book Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840.
‘‘When approached as a latent principle bestowing enigmatic coherence on all
social and discursive practice at a given moment,’’ he writes, ‘‘ ‘mood’ opens
up a new type of historical understanding: no longer referential, thematic, or
accumulatively contextual. Rather, in its rhetorical and formal-aesthetic sedi-
mentation, mood speaks—if only circumstantially—to the deep-structural
situatedness of individuals within history as something never actually in-
telligible to them in fully coherent, timely, and definitive form’’ (7). Pfau’s
understanding of mood thus has much in common with Raymond Williams’s
notion of ‘‘structures of feeling,’’ although it does not share the latter’s funda-
mental materialist base.
46 See Gabriele Schwab’s important essay ‘‘Words and Moods: The Transference
of Literary Knowledge’’ in which, drawing upon Bollas as well as Kristeva, she
insists ‘‘that the transformational processes facilitated by literature also reflect
upon and critically intervene in the ways in which cultures value certain
moods over others, or, more generally, pursue a certain politics of emotions’’
(124).
47 I am here alluding to Elizabeth Spelman’s Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a
Fragile World.

one
containing anger, advocating anger
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘‘Anger . . . and Anger: From
Freud to Feminism’’ in Freud and the Passions, edited by John O’Neill (Univer-
sity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 73–95.
1 I borrow the term ‘‘expansive emotions’’ from Edith Wharton’s The House of
Mirth (118).
2 As Freud states in ‘‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva,’’ ‘‘We remain
on the surface so long as we are dealing only with memories and ideas. What
is alone of value in mental life is rather the feelings. No mental forces are
significant unless they possess the characteristic of arousing feelings’’ (SE 9:
48–49).
3 See Michael Franz Basch, ‘‘The Concept of A√ect: A Reexamination.’’

244 Notes to Chapter One

4 Anthropologists have also taken anger as a focal point. See the work of Michelle
Rosaldo who, with Renato Rosaldo, studied the Ilongots of the Philippines. The
Ilongots conceptualize anger in altogether di√erent ways from Freud. Al-
though anger can be hidden, it is not a disturbing energy that can be repressed
or buried in the unconscious. In addition the Ilongots can be ‘‘paid’’ for ‘‘anger’’
or can simply ‘‘forget’’ an anger (144). The work of the Rosaldos appeared in the
1980s; the anthropologist Jean Brigg’s book on anger in an Eskimo family
appeared in 1970.
5 The literature on anger is extensive. I have already mentioned some of the
work in anthropology that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. Important work
that historicizes anger includes Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in
America’s History by the historians Carol Stearns and Peter Stearns. For work
by literary critics, see Gwynne Kennedy’s Just Anger: Representing Women’s
Anger in Early Modern England and Andrew Stau√er’s Anger, Revolution, and
Romanticism. In terms of the psychology of anger, see Silvan Tomkins, who
identifies anger-rage as one of nine innate a√ects, or what I call a√ect clusters.
See also the educational psychologist Sandra Thomas’s edited volume Women
and Anger, ‘‘the first large-scale descriptive study of women’s anger’’ in every-
day life (11).
6 As Elizabeth Spelman observes in the collection published in 1989, in women
‘‘anything resembling anger is likely to be redescribed as hysteria or rage
instead’’ (264). Lest we think that the sexist trope of the irrationally angry
woman has disappeared from view, the rhetorician Barbara Tomlinson has
some news for us. See her essay ‘‘Tough Babies or Anger in the Superior
Position,’’ which focuses on the textual violence delivered to academic femi-
nists by unreconstructed men. In terms of senatorial and presidential politics
in the United States, this phenomenon persists, with Hillary Clinton being
branded as ‘‘an angry woman’’ by the chairman of the New York gop in 2000
when she was running for the U.S. Senate (Maureen Dowd, ‘‘A Man and
a Woman,’’ New York Times, 20 September 2000, A31). In 2006 Clinton
was labeled by the chairman of the National Republican Committee as ‘‘a
Democrat brimming with anger and a representative of the far left wing of
her party,’’ when talk was swirling about her possible presidential candidacy
(Adam Nagourney, ‘‘Calling Clinton ‘Angry,’ G.O.P. Chairman Goes on the
Attack,’’ New York Times, 6 February 2006, A16). The strategy here is the
reification of the emotion of anger; a woman is said to have an angry tempera-
ment, thus occluding the context in which her anger has arisen.
7 I take a dream that Freud reports earlier in The Interpretation of Dreams as an
elementary version of the ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream. The text of the dream runs as
follows: ‘‘His father was scolding him for coming home so late.’’ What the dream
conceals through the reversal of a√ect is that the son is angry at the father. The
dynamic of the Oedipus complex is at its familiar work: ‘‘The original wording
must have been that he was angry with his father, and that in his view his
father always came home too early (i.e. too soon). He would have preferred it if

Notes to Chapter One 245

 his father had not come home at all, and this was the same thing as a death-
wish against his father’’ (SE 4: 328).
8 Here is Freud in Totem and Taboo on the ‘‘social emotions’’: ‘‘We may describe
as ‘social’ the emotions which are determined by showing consideration for
another person without taking him as a sexual object’’ (SE 13: 72). The com-
munications scholar Suzanne Retzinger argues in Violent Emotions: Shame
and Rage in Marital Quarrels that shame, as the primary social emotion, is
concerned above all with the survival of a relationship. In her study of the
quarrels of married couples, she concludes that it is shame that incites anger
rather than anger responding tout court to anger.
9 Freud notes in Civilization and Its Discontents: ‘‘What began in relation to the
father is completed in relation to the group. If civilization is a necessary
course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then—as a
result of the inborn conflict arising from ambivalence, of the eternal struggle
between the trends of love and death—there is inextricably bound up with it
an increase in the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach heights that the
individual finds hard to tolerate’’ (SE 21: 133).
10 As Freud argues in ‘‘The ‘Uncanny,’ ’’ ‘‘Every a√ect belonging to an emotional
impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety’’ (SE
17: 241).
11 I am thinking here of Freud’s somber autobiographical essay, ‘‘A Disturbance
of Memory on the Acropolis,’’ which he published in 1936—six years after
Civilization and Its Discontents—when he was eighty years old (SE 22: 238–
48). In it Freud broods on guilt as a paralyzing impediment to a past pleasure.
He also presents guilt as casting a long shadow into the dubious future as a
fateful emotion. Thus for Freud the emotions ‘‘belong’’ not just to the past but
also to the future. See the chapter ‘‘Reading Freud’’ in my Aging and Its
Discontents for a discussion of ‘‘Acropolis,’’ aging, and guilt (26–51).
12 During this period the politicization of anger was not confined to feminists.
See Peter Lyman’s excellent essay ‘‘The Politics of Anger: On Silence, Ressen-
timent, and Political Speech.’’ Lyman comes to similar conclusions, identify-
ing two practices that are entailed in what he calls ‘‘authentic political anger’’:
‘‘The first is self-criticism, an interrogation of one’s su√ering . . . in order to
understand clearly one’s experience and its meaning. The second is the over-
coming of the isolation of anger through the formation of political collec-
tivities that create the possibility of political action’’ (68). I have been empha-
sizing the cognitive edge of the emotions, but I am also mindful of Sandra
Bartky’s important point in ‘‘Sympathy and Solidarity: On a Tightrope with
Scheler’’ that in feminist theory there has been a consensus ‘‘around the idea
that the proper means to overcome bias is cognitive in nature’’ (177). As she
writes, and I agree, what is sought ‘‘is a knowing that transforms the self who
knows, a knowing that brings into being new sympathies, new a√ects as well
as new cognitions and new forms of intersubjectivity’’ (179).

246 Notes to Chapter One

13 As Boler points out in Feeling Power, Woolf ’s analysis is ‘‘an exemplary exam-
ple of tracing the genealogy of an emotion’’ (203).
14 In Ahmed’s chapter ‘‘Feminist Attachments’’ in The Cultural Politics of Emo-
tion, there is a section devoted to ‘‘Feminism and Anger’’ where she takes
issue with Wendy Brown’s influential argument in States of Injury: Power and
Freedom in Late Modernity that a feminist politics based on pain and anger is
limited because it can only be reactive. I agree with Ahmed that ‘‘a politics
which acts without reaction is impossible’’ (174).
15 In Killing Rage (1995), a collection of essays by the black feminist bell hooks,
the rhetoric has shifted from anger to rage, with rage retaining a cognitive
edge. As hooks writes, ‘‘Confronting my rage, witnessing the way it moved me
to grow and change, I understood intimately that it had the potential not only
to destroy but also to construct. Then and now I understand rage to be a
necessary aspect of resistance struggle. Rage can act as a catalyst inspiring
courageous action’’ (15–16). I find it fascinating that in Wounds of Passion: A
Writing Life, hooks, like Freud and Woolf, also recounts a fantasy of threaten-
ing to kill (she chooses a gun) one of her professors (he is white), an experi-
ence of rage that at the time threatened her (132–33).
16 I borrow the term ‘‘clusters’’ from Carol Tavris’s Anger: The Misunderstood
Emotion.
17 Raymond Williams, ‘‘Structures of Feeling’’ (132).
18 In this chapter I can only refer briefly to feminist pedagogy in the context of
the mid-1980s. But I do want to note that there is an extensive literature
theorizing pedagogy in terms of the emotions. In addition to Boler’s Feeling
Power, see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History and Michalinos Zembylas’s ‘‘Witness-
ing in the Classroom: The Ethics and Politics of A√ect.’’ All of these texts
stress the potential of the classroom to become a community, and all employ
the tropes of trauma and witnessing as well as stress the possibility of trans-
formation. If Felman and Laub engage trauma through Freud, Zembylas
draws on the Deleuzian theory of a√ect. See also David Benin and Lisa Cart-
wright’s essay ‘‘Shame, Empathy, and Looking Practices: Lessons from a Dis-
ability Studies Classroom.’’
19 See my essay ‘‘Tribute to the Older Woman,’’ in which I critique the two-
generational view of psychoanalysis.
20 See Lynn Worsham’s essay ‘‘Pedagogic Violence.’’
21 See Brenda Silver’s wonderful remarks in Virginia Woolf Icon, where she points
to the conservative media uptake on angry academic women that greeted the
very public and angry retirement of Carolyn Heilbrun from Columbia Univer-
sity’s Department of English. Kathleen Helal returns to the question of Woolf
and anger in an essay that begins by quoting the ‘‘angry’’ scene in the British
Museum. She argues in ‘‘Anger, Anxiety, Abstraction: Virginia Woolf ’s ‘Sub-
merged Truth’ ’’ that in A Room of One’s Own Woolf ’s relation to anger is

Notes to Chapter One 247

 predominantly ‘‘anxious’’ (78) and that, more generally, ‘‘as a feminist subject,
anger has become increasingly di≈cult and impossible in that it has continued
to produce anxiety and abstraction, even among feminists’’ (78).
22 I should note that the overall tone and trajectory of Srivastava’s essay belies
her qualifying use of ‘‘some’’ (as in ‘‘some white feminists’’ and ‘‘some of the
deadlocks’’).
23 In Speaking from the Heart: Gender and the Social Meaning of Emotion, the psy-
chologist Stephanie Shields coins the term ‘‘meta-emotion’’ to mean ‘‘think-
ing about one’s own and others’ emotions’’ (9). While in The Transmission of
A√ect Teresa Brennan focuses on the negative a√ects, her argument about the
process of understanding is relevant; she writes that ‘‘any faculty of discern-
ment must involve a process whereby a√ects pass from the state of sensory
registration to a state of cognitive or intelligent reflection; this does not mean
that the process of reflection is without a√ect, just that the a√ect is other than
the a√ect that is being reflected upon’’ (120). This is relevant to the sequencing
of the emotions, as I understand it, and to understanding how an emotion
might serve as an antidote to an explosive or nagging intensity.

two
against wisdom
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘‘Against Wisdom: The Social
Politics of Anger and Aging’’ in Cultural Critique no. 51 (spring 2002): 186–
218.
1 In The Change Greer theorizes two broad periods in an adult woman’s life—
the reproductive period and the reflective period that succeeds menopause—
as well as seven stages, of which menopause is the fifth (56).
2 There is of course also a history in the West of the periodization of the life
course as well as a history of the metaphors in which the life course has been
cast. See Thomas Cole’s The Journey of Life.
3 For a brief discussion of De Senectute, see Helen Small’s The Long Life, 7–12.
4 With the exception of Theodore Roszak’s America the Wise: The Longevity
Revolution and the True Wealth of Nations and his Longevity Revolution: As
Boomers Become Elders (an updated version of America the Wise) I know of no
other similar books written in the twentieth century in the United States by
people not dedicated to a career in gerontology. If old age came for Hall on the
event of his retirement in his seventies, and for Friedan on the occasion of her
sixtieth birthday party, what rallies Roszak to a consciousness of aging? Roszak
begins Longevity Revolution by citing his near-mortal illness as his initiation
into aging and as providing the inspiration for his vision of the potential of the
elderly to transform the United States. This surgical experience assumes such
importance in his life that I understand it as an illness narrative in miniature or
a micromemoir of a critical turning point in his life—namely his entrance into
the territory of old age (and he was only fifty-seven).

248 Notes to Chapter One

 5 We see this also in Erik Erikson’s book-length essay The Life Cycle Completed: A
Review. Erikson, who has a fine sense of historicity, writes that old age—in the
sense of the massification of old age (this is my term)—was only discovered in
the 1960s and 1970s.
6 An index of our heightened consciousness of aging is that Social Security has
come to be associated almost exclusively with transfer payments to people
sixty-two and older, when it also provides a safety net for people with dis-
abilities and to children whose parents have died.
7 As James Hillman writes in Emotion: A Comprehensive Phenomenology of Theo-
ries and Their Meaning for Therapy, ‘‘There are emotions appropriate to what
tradition calls the stages of life in so far as there are di√erent symbols e√ective
at di√erent moments of life. . . . The child knows little of pity, of mercy, or of a
father’s holy rage’’ (255).
8 For comment on this film, along with aging in general, see Anca Cristofovici’s
Touching Surfaces: Speculative Photography, Temporality, and Aging.
9 ‘‘The scalings-back’’ of disgust, Miller writes in The Anatomy of Disgust, ‘‘that
attend middle and old age are more a function of a general loss of a√ect; they
represent a giving up in the losing battle against physical deterioration, a
general sense that less is at stake, that the game, even if not nearly over, has a
determined outcome’’ (15).
10 See Munnichs’s ‘‘A Short History of Psychogerontology.’’
11 Henry Fuller opens his review of Senescence this way: ‘‘In the poignantly
personal Introduction to his latest work Mr. Hall wonders if he will not be
found ‘depressing’ ’’ (150). Although Fuller observes that Hall in fact has a
‘‘gallant spirit’’ that is inspiring, it is telling that he opens the review on the
note of depression. It is as if depression is a subject that both cannot be
avoided and is condemned.
12 This is one of the strategies of Alan Pifer in Our Aging Society: Promise and
Paradox. He refers to what he calls the third quarter of life, which implies a
life expectancy of one hundred years. A cultural consensus is emerging that
one hundred years of life is our due. Among the many examples is Gloria
Steinem’s statement that she plans ‘‘to reach a hundred’’ (283).
13 It is hardly a surprise that Hall writes of old age predominantly from a male point
of view. He associates women with domesticity and motherhood, and he sees
women, whose function in life depends upon their sexual attractiveness, as aging
earlier than men; if senescence—the second half of life—begins for men in their
early forties, it commonly comes earlier for women in Hall’s account.
14 Later in Senescence Hall writes that the old do not form a class but rather are
‘‘hyperindividualized’’ (172).
15 I find it fascinating that a contemporary reviewer of Senescence singled out for
disapproval both Hall’s attitude of discontent and his remedy for it. In ‘‘The
Last Half of Life,’’ a full-page review of Senescence that appeared on 28 May
1922 in the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, Maurice-Françis Egan
describes the book as ‘‘melancholy’’ and concludes that Hall’s problem is one

Notes to Chapter Two 249

 of his own making. Hall made the mistake of devoting his entire life to work,
to conducting his life at an energetic rhythm that Egan finds unnatural to old
age. ‘‘An old man who can be gently idle has every chance of being a happy
man,’’ Egan writes, chastising Hall; ‘‘When one is old one needs so little’’ (7).
16 The most influential definition of the American jeremiad is given by the
literary critic Sacvan Bercovitch, who characterizes it as ‘‘a mode of public
exhortation . . . designed to join social criticism to spiritual renewal, public to
private identity, the shifting ‘signs of the times’ to certain traditional meta-
phors, themes, and symbols’’ (xi). I am referring to the historians Thomas
Cole and Andrew Achenbaum, both of whom describe Senescence as a jere-
miad and emphasize the mood of depression in the opening pages, thus
leading them to devalue his anger.
17 One of the most important contributions of The Fountain of Age is Friedan’s
insistence that many older people, under the influence of the model of old age
as a long and disastrous physiological decline, mistakenly regard themselves
as objects of continuing or imminent care and thus in e√ect give up their
future; she cites research showing that seriously debilitating heath problems
for the most part only occur in the short period right before death.
18 The ‘‘longevity revolution’’ was coined by Robert Butler, to whom Friedan
gives much credit for inspiring her to write The Fountain of Age.
19 Friedan is a feminist and so we should not be surprised that gender is the
most important analytical category in The Fountain of Age. In terms of socio-
logical variables, illness would be the second most important category; race,
class, and ethnicity do not enter her discussion in any major way.
20 Key to The Fountain of Age is this passage from The Feminine Mystique: ‘‘A
woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days
into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years
in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of
suicide. For that future half-century after the child-bearing years are over is a
fact that an American woman cannot deny’’ (293).
21 In her biography of Friedan, Judith Hennessee informs us of Friedan’s leg-
endary narcissistic temper. But for Hennessee, ‘‘The fine-tuned fury that gave
The Feminine Mystique its compelling power was gone, replaced by optimism
and uplift’’ (273).
22 I take the term ‘‘social su√ering’’ from the medical anthropologist Arthur
Kleinman. In The Change Greer analyzes menopause in similar terms. ‘‘The
irrational certainty that the womb was the real cause of the ageing woman’s
anger or melancholy,’’ she writes in The Change, ‘‘e√ectively obscured the
inconvenient possibility that she may have had genuine grounds for protest;
women on the other hand obligingly internalized their own rage and pro-
duced a bewildering array of symptoms’’ (2). But Greer also focuses on the
expression of rage. ‘‘We are only dimly coming to a recognition that the anti-
social behaviour of demented old women might be an expression of justifiable
rage too long stifled and unheard,’’ she writes (137).

250 Notes to Chapter Two

23 As Friedan writes in The Fountain of Age: ‘‘To look at people over sixty-five in
terms of work, health, and productivity would be to treat them like full people
again, not just objects of compassionate or contemptuous care. It was in terms
of work that the issue of the personhood of women was finally and fully
joined—and the women’s movement was born’’ (199).
24 In The Life Cycle Completed, Erikson reconsiders his theory of human develop-
ment and associates the final and eighth stage with grand generativity, draw-
ing on the analogy with grandparenting. In Insight and Responsibility, Erikson
defines the task of the eighth and final stage as the achievement of wisdom,
which was the outcome of the successful struggle between integrity and de-
spair: ‘‘Wisdom, then is detached concern with life itself, in the face of death
itself . . . . If vigor of mind combines with the gift of responsible renunciation,
some old people can envisage human problems in their entirety (which is
what ‘integrity’ means) and can represent to the coming generation a living
example of the ‘closure’ of a style of life’’ (133–34).
25 Reviews of Friedan’s book, for example, single out her recounting of going on
an Outward Bound expedition as exemplary of her idea of adventure in old
age. While the reviewer Nancy Mairs finds this exhilarating (New York Times
Book Review, 3 October 1993, 1, 28), Mary-Lou Weisman, in a caustic piece,
considers Friedan’s optimistic attitude ridiculous (New Republic, 11 October
1993, 4949–51).
26 In ‘‘The Development of Wisdom across the Life Span,’’ V. P. Clayton and
James Birren, defining wisdom as ‘‘the integration of general cognitive, a√ec-
tive, and reflective qualities,’’ find that while the older people in their study did
not link their older age with wisdom, younger people did associate growing
older with the development of wisdom. I would argue that notwithstanding
this association of wisdom with old age on the part of younger individuals,
which may in fact simply be a stereotype of old people, wisdom is not trans-
lated into a meaningful value on the level of society.
27 Ernest Burgess has called attention to what he has aptly termed the ‘‘roleless
role’’ of the elderly.
28 See Margaret Gullette, ‘‘On Dying Young.’’
29 In this view I counter what not a few people in critical gerontology are advocat-
ing. See Achenbaum’s essay on late-life emotionality, Harry Moody’s The Five
Stages of the Soul, and Ronald Manheimer’s ‘‘Wisdom and Method: Philosoph-
ical Contributions to Gerontology.’’ See also ‘‘Aging, Morale, and Meaning,’’
where Bertram Cohler adopts the following skeptical definition of wisdom:
‘‘The so-called wisdom achieved in later life consists of the ability to maintain
a coherent narrative of the course of life in which the presently remembered
past, experienced present, and anticipated future are understood as problems
to be studied rather than as outcomes to be assumed’’ (119–20). I should
acknowledge that in At Last, the Real Distinguished Thing: The Late Poems of
Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams, I consider how wisdom is represented in
the form and substance of the late poems of these great American modern

Notes to Chapter Two 251

 poets. My point there is not so much that these men themselves were wise, or
that they advocated wisdom in general as the salient criterion of a social role
for older people, but that they were able to create compelling fictions of wise
old men in their poetry.
30 Here is another example of the cultural reflex of invoking wisdom to justify
increasing life expectancy. In a feature story by Susan Dominus entitled ‘‘Life
in the Age of Old, Old Age’’ that appeared in the New York Times Sunday
Magazine on 22 February 2004, a middle-aged molecular biologist responds
in this surely unpersuasive way to his teenage son’s caustic query, ‘‘Do we
really want all these geezers fighting for resources, destroying the environ-
ment?’’ ‘‘I think society benefits,’’ he says. ‘‘People who are mature are major
contributors to society—they’re around longer, they have cumulative wisdom
and I think progress will go faster’’ (26).
31 As Haraway writes in Simians, Cyborgs and Women, ‘‘Feminist objectivity
means quite simply situated knowledges’’ (188).
32 In her wonderful essay on midlife memoirs on both sides of the Atlantic,
Isabelle de Courtivron contrasts the responses of Anglo-American and French
authors to that great divide in terms of emotion—activist anger versus elegant
resignation.
33 The term ‘‘a√ect script’’ comes from the psychologist Silvan Tomkins. See his
chapter ‘‘Anger-Management and Anger-Control Scripts’’ in The Negative Af-
fects: Anger and Fear. Tomkins understands an a√ect script as a succession of
a√ects over time, a pattern that is repeated over the lifetime of an individual. I
am using the term not in the sense of an individual life but in the sense of a
larger cultural pattern, a cultural a√ect script.
34 As Silvan Tomkins provocatively puts it in Cognition: Duplication and Transfor-
mation of Information: ‘‘Cognitions coassembled with a√ect become hot and
urgent.’’ He also posits the reverse: ‘‘A√ects coassembled with cognitions
become better informed and smarter’’ (7).
35 I take the notion of an emotional response being symmetrical (or not) to its
context from the critical race theorist Patricia Williams in The Alchemy of Race
and Rights, 46.
36 See Rosemary Hennessy’s description in Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities
in Late Capitalism of the process of disidentification, one that draws on a√ect
and is similar to the experience that Barbara Macdonald narrates. As Hen-
nessy writes, ‘‘This is the ‘excess’ that is often ‘experienced’ as an inchoate
a√ect of not belonging, of not fitting in or not feeling at home within the
terms that are o√ered for identity. The process of disidentification can zero in
on the a√ective component of this misrecognition and invite consideration of
the ways it is named and routed into emotions (of shame, denial, resentment,
etc.) that can naturalize the existing categories. Disidentification invites the
renarration of this a√ective excess in relation to capitalism’s systemic produc-
tion of unmet need’’ (231).
37 I am suggesting a distinction between rage as a visceral response to an event,

252 Notes to Chapter Two

 and an intelligent rage or anger that is informed by analysis and reflection on
the context and thus calls for that response, a distinction that is echoed in
Margaret Gullette’s Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the
Midlife where she draws a line between anger and a ‘‘higher’’ anger (232).

three
racial shame, mass-mediated shame,
mutual shame
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘‘Traumatic Shame: Toni Mor-
rison, Televisual Culture, and the Cultural Politics of the Emotions’’ in Cul-
tural Critique no. 46 (fall 2000): 210–40.
1 As the less ‘‘mature’’ emotion, shame has been implicitly understood to be
less worthy of study. Across a wide variety of disciplines in the past fifteen
years, however, there has been an explosion of interest in the emotion of
shame. In the process shame has been decoupled from guilt and put to all
kinds of cultural uses, some of which I will explore in this chapter. For im-
portant work on shame, see the philosopher Bernard Williams’s Shame and
Necessity, the cultural studies critic Elspeth Probyn’s Blush: Faces of Shame,
the psychologist Silvan Tomkins’s work in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan
Tomkins Reader, the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron’s La Honte: Psychanalyse
d’un lien social, the literary critic Gail Kern Paster’s The Body Embarrassed:
Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England, and the historian
Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South.
See also Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Shame: A New Perspective on Her Neglected
Fiction by Lev Raphael, who argues that ‘‘shame is a touchstone for under-
standing Wharton herself ’’ (2), and Andrew Gordon’s ‘‘Shame and Saul Bel-
low’s ‘Something to Remember Me By.’ ’’ See Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis,
Shame, and Writing, edited by Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark, which fo-
cuses on literary scenes of shame; their excellent introduction considers the
work of many important theorists of shame. For a consideration of shame and
class, see Rita Felski’s ‘‘Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower
Middle Class.’’
2 The emotion of anger might be said to be the ‘‘counteremotion’’ of shame. I
draw the notion of a counteremotion from Yanhua Zhang’s Transforming
Emotions with Chinese Medicine in which he shows how ‘‘treating emotions
with emotions’’ is a time-honored Chinese practice (72), with one emotion
serving to overcome another emotion. Within this cultural system, anger is a
stigmatized emotion and the emotion of sadness is understood as one that
overcomes anger.
3 See Elizabeth Abel’s Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, 86.
4 I should add that Sedgwick herself o√ers a commentary on the contextualiz-
ing limits of her own essay. ‘‘Queer Performativity’’ appeared in 1993. In her
book Touching Feeling: A√ect, Pedagogy, Performativity, which appeared ten

Notes to Chapter Three 253

 years later, there is another version of her essay, and in it her claims for shame
have undergone a marked shift. We are no longer in the 1990s when ‘‘queer’’
was such a potent term. Instead Sedgwick opens her essay with an evocation
of the loss of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and although at this
point in time she still sees shame for some people as a ‘‘structuring fact of
identity’’ (64), one that can’t be excised by dint of the cultural slogans o√ered
up by identity politics, her tone is thoughtful, not high-spirited, and the power
of shame as transformative is vastly circumscribed.
5 In ‘‘Shame and White Gay Masculinity,’’ Judith Halberstam makes the bold
point with great clarity of thought that gay shame—associated predominantly
with white men—has been romanticized and in large measure cannot account
for the experience of today’s youth. She thus historicizes the meaning of
shame, arguing that the constellation of shame and pride is reductive of this
experience. ‘‘Shame,’’ she argues, is ‘‘a gendered form of sexual abjection;
it belongs to the feminine, and when men find themselves ‘flooded’ with
shame, chances are they are being feminized in some way and against their
will’’ (226). She also makes no apologies for using shaming in an academic
context as a tactic ‘‘in the struggle to make privilege (whiteness, masculinity,
wealth) visible’’ (220).
6 In The Transmission of A√ect Teresa Brennan writes about the ‘‘dumping’’ of
a√ects, of which this is an instance: Cholly projects his negative energy out
and onto Darlene. As Brennan explains, ‘‘a√ects have an energetic dimension.
This is why they can enhance or deplete. They enhance when they are pro-
jected outward, when one is relieved of them; in popular parlance, this is
called ‘dumping.’ Frequently, a√ects deplete when they are introjected, when
one carries the a√ective burden of another, either by a straightforward trans-
fer or because the other’s anger becomes your depression’’ (6). But what is
dramatized in The Bluest Eye is more complex; Cholly can project his hatred
onto her, but he can’t rid himself of his humiliation because he himself is the
recipient of the hatred of the white men.
7 Today of course many people pop pills to relieve their depression, with our
consumer culture selling happiness in the form of Prozac and other anti-
depressants. Swallowing other people’s resentments and contempt is a form
of what I call emotional pollution. In Dorothy Allison’s wonderful novel Cave-
dweller an instance of this is dramatized; two young girls grow up with their
grandmother, ‘‘swallowing her sour resentments and seething distrust of any-
thing she could not bleach or scrub or bury in lye’’ (95).
8 In The Bluest Eye there are exceptions to this rule, the most significant being
the three women—China, Poland, and Marie—who live in the apartment right
above the Breedloves. Working as prostitutes, these worldly, smart women
allow no one to intimidate them. They are described with admiration by
Morrison as women who ‘‘hated men, without shame, apology, or discrimina-
tion’’ (47). Although a novel is open to multiple interpretations, it is a con-
tained world. Thus I do not want to be misunderstood as insisting that The

254 Notes to Chapter Three

 Bluest Eye is paradigmatic of the experience of racial shame. Of the myriad
accounts that present counternarratives I will refer here only to one, which is
drawn from the work of the critical race theorist Patricia Williams. In The
Alchemy of Race and Rights she recounts an incident that enraged her (she was
not buzzed into a store in New York’s Soho during the Christmas shopping
season by a young white male salesclerk). ‘‘I was enraged,’’ she writes. ‘‘At that
moment I literally wanted to break all the windows of the store and take lots of
sweaters for my mother. . . . I am still struck by the structure of power that
drove me into such a blizzard of rage. There was almost nothing I could do,
short of physically intruding upon him, that would humiliate him the way he
humiliated me’’ (45). Her rage, she writes, ‘‘was admittedly di√use, even self-
destructive, but it was symmetrical’’ (46). Thus, like Barbara Macdonald, the
sequence of emotions is shame-rage (or more precisely, humiliation-rage)—a
rage that becomes a wise anger.
9 In the case of Pecola and Cholly shame is gendered along predictable lines.
Here the work of the psychoanalyst Michael Lewis on emotional substitution
in terms of gender is helpful. He argues that shame, when it is not acknowl-
edged, is likely in women to find expression in depression; in men, in anger
and rage.
10 See Linda Dittmar on the politics of form in The Bluest Eye.
11 In Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, J.
Brooks Bouson, drawing incisively on the opening of The Bluest Eye and on
Morrison’s own view of her novel as ‘‘the public exposure of a private confi-
dence,’’ argues that the reader is potentially drawn into traumatic shame (26);
my emphasis is not on identification but rather on the elegiac tenor of the
prose itself; both of us share an interest in the narrative structure of The Bluest
Eye. Morrison’s words can be found in an interview with her by Mel Watkins
in 1977. See also Jill Matus’s excellent chapter on shame and anger in The
Bluest Eye in her book Toni Morrison.
12 In ‘‘Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpre-
tation,’’ Elizabeth Abel correctly cautions white feminists to be self-conscious
and self-critical in relation to reading African American texts and to African
American criticism of them. What is the fantasy (if there is one) that is played
out in my essay? I would say it’s the fantasy of understanding, one that
underwrites what is generally understood, and often vilified, as a liberal poli-
tics. Consider also Barbara Ehrenreich’s thoughtful comments on shame in
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America; it is shame, not guilt, that
people should feel in regard to the scandal in our country of those who are
called the ‘‘working poor’’ not being able to make a living wage. As she writes,
‘‘The appropriate emotion is shame—shame at our own dependency, in this
case, on the underpaid labor of others’’ (220–21).
13 I thus bypass what was misleadingly referred to as the Monica Lewinsky story.
See Juliet Flower MacCannell, ‘‘Politics in the Age of Sex: Clinton, Leader-
ship, Love.’’

Notes to Chapter Three 255

14 See Jennifer Steinhauer, ‘‘Agent Sherri Spillaine: Marketing the Controver-
sial,’’ International Herald Tribune, 12 April 1995.
15 See Ron French, ‘‘Jenny Jones Witness Lays Out a Chilling Tale as Trial Be-
gins,’’ The Detroit News, 15 October 1996.
16 See Frazier Moore, ‘‘Television Talk Shows Face a Key Question: Have They
Gone Too Far?’’ Milwaukee Journal, 12 March 1995, A1, 23.
17 See Dina Al-Kassim’s essay ‘‘Resistance, Terminable and Interminable,’’ which
deals with political resistance and the humiliation of being captured by the
media.
18 The aclu praised Jewell’s testimony as powerful. See ‘‘aclu Joins with Rich-
ard Jewell in Calling for Investigation of fbi’s Handling of Atlanta Olympic
Park Bombing,’’ news release dated 30 July 1997. From the Web site of the
American Civil Liberties Union (visited 12 September 1997).
19 See Bailey’s introduction to The Truce, 10, 11.

four
liberal compassion,
compassionate conservatism
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘‘Calculating Compassion’’ in
Indiana Law Journal 77.2 (spring 2002): 224–45.
1 Linda Diebel, ‘‘No Miracles for Bush in tv Debate,’’ Toronto Star, 16 October
1982, A1. See also Nancy Mathis, Greg McDonald, and Tony Freemantle,
‘‘Campaign ’92,’’ Houston Chronicle, 16 October 1992, A16.
2 The rhetorical history of presidential pain and empathy has also repeated
itself. In the 6 March 2006 edition of the New York Times the columnist Paul
Krugman, under the heading ‘‘Feeling No Pain,’’ had this to say about Presi-
dent George W. Bush: ‘‘We’re living in a time when many Americans are
feeling economically insecure, but a tiny elite has been growing incredibly
rich. And Mr. Bush’s problem is that he identifies so totally with the lucky,
wealthy few that in unscripted settings he can’t manage even a few sentences
of empathy with ordinary Americans. He doesn’t feel your pain, and it shows’’
(A25).
3 ‘‘On the Trail,’’ Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 31 October 1992, A6. While
George Bush might not have won the election on the platform of compassion,
he was nonetheless known as a man who was often moved to tears. See Mary
Chapman and Glenn Hendler, ‘‘Introduction,’’ Sentimental Men: Masculinity
and the Politics of A√ect in American Culture, 1.
4 This is clearly seen in five cartoons published in the New Yorker between
November 1995 and June 2001: Mick Stevens, ‘‘We used to feel your pain, but
that’s no longer our policy,’’ New Yorker, 20 November 1995; David Sipress,
‘‘Well, I guess this means we’ll have to start feeling our own pain again,’’ New
Yorker, 22 January 2001; Mick Stevens, ‘‘Let me through. I’m a compassionate
conservative,’’ New Yorker, 9 August 1999; J. B. Handelsman, ‘‘I like that—

256 Notes to Chapter Four

 ‘compassionate predators,’ ’’ New Yorker, 1 November 1999; and B. Smaller,
‘‘Maybe the compassionate part will kick in during the second half of the
Administration,’’ New Yorker, 4 June 2001.
5 Bumiller, Elizabeth. ‘‘The Bawler in Chief: Real Men Can Cry.’’ New York
Times, 30 November 2003, 4: 2.
6 The rhetoric shifted from compassion to that of hope in George W. Bush’s
State of the Union address in January 2006, with the phrase ‘‘a hopeful
society’’ providing a refrain. See the transcript of the address, as recorded by
the New York Times on 1 February 2006 under the misleading title ‘‘We Strive
to Be a Compassionate, Decent, Hopeful Society’’ (A20–21).
7 What Lauren Berlant writes in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City
about the right-wing Reagan revolution, continued in the George Bush years,
applies here: ‘‘This brightly lit portrait of a civic arm of sanctified philanthro-
pists was meant to replace an image of the United States as a Great Society
with a state-funded social safety net’’ (7).
8 Since the publication of Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture
in 1977 and Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs in 1985, a fierce defense of
the sentimental in literary and cultural studies, including film studies, has
emphasized the association of the sentimental with the feminine, notwith-
standing much research that has sought to explore the intersections of the
sentimental with race and ethnicity. But recent scholarship has shown that the
man of feeling has in fact a long history. See Mary Chapman and Glenn
Hendler’s Sentimental Men, a collection of essays that traces the antecedents
of masculine displays of a√ect in various domains, including presidential
politics. See also Julie Ellison’s Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American
Emotion, where she brilliantly argues that we can understand the political
attraction of today’s sensitive men in terms of eighteenth-century male icons
who displayed both sensibility and emotional reserve.
9 I greatly admire Sensational Designs, and it seems altogether apt to me, given
my interest in professional a√ect and sequencing of the emotions, that Tomp-
kins’s impulse to write her book, as she tells us in A Life in School, was her
experience of being moved to tears by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and being angry that
such feeling was proscribed in literary academic circles at the time. ‘‘Then and
there,’’ she writes, ‘‘I decided to fight for that book. To fight for my tears, and
for the legitimacy of my reactions to literature all across the board. . . . It was
this anger, the anger of someone whose intellectual position grew out of her
own life—that enabled me to write a book that called for a changed canon of
American literature’’ (107–8).
10 See the excellent collection of essays edited by Lauren Berlant under the title
Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion.
11 See Martha Minow and Elizabeth Spelman’s ‘‘Passion for Justice.’’ See also
the collection of essays edited by Susan Brandes under the title The Passions of
Law. If in 1987 Lynne Henderson argued for the introduction of empathetic
narratives in the courtroom, more have joined her in recent years. Indeed in

Notes to Chapter Four 257

 the very first sentences of the first paragraph of her introduction, Brandes
refers to compassion three times and to sorrow twice.
12 Toni Massaro in ‘‘Empathy, Legal Storytelling, and the Rule of Law: New
Words, Old Wounds’’ o√ers a sharp rebuttal to Henderson, arguing that the
focus on empathy ‘‘represents a hope that certain specific, di√erent and pre-
viously disenfranchised voices—such as those of blacks and women and poor
people and homosexuals—will be heard, and will prevail ’’ (2113).
13 Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. No. 05–
908. Supreme Court of the U.S. Opinion IIA. Web site of the U.S. Supreme
Court (visited 28 June 2007).
14 Although my primary purpose is not to critique Nussbaum, I do want to point
to Megan Boler’s excellent chapter ‘‘The Risks of Empathy’’ in Feeling Power
where she takes up Nussbaum’s essay (in addition to Nussbaum’s book Poetic
Justice), by making the strong point that the unwelcome implication of Nuss-
baum’s model is that ‘‘fear for oneself ’’ is the ‘‘agent of empathy’’ and that the
reader is problematically positioned as the judge (159). Like Henderson, Spel-
man, and Berlant, one of Boler’s main concerns is the relation between empa-
thy and action; she theorizes a reading practice that would not be passive but
rather inspire responsible action, one that is at minimum emotionally self-
reflexive. In e√ect she argues for the cognitive edge of self-reflexive emotions.
Like the narrator in Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, she asks us to reflect
critically on our own reading emotions and to analyze our own resistances to
texts. As an example she o√ers ‘‘irritation,’’ about which she suggests that it
might ‘‘indicate the reader’s desire to avoid confronting the articulated pain’’
(169).
15 With regard to this scene in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Elizabeth
Alexander in ‘‘ ‘Can You Be bl ack and Look at This?’ Reading the Rodney
King Video(s)’’ makes this important point; the appeal to white women read-
ers is for them to reject the perspective of a spectator and assume the position
of a witness to injustice (89).
16 The scholarship in literary and cultural studies on sentimentality in Ameri-
can culture is vast. I single out two books here—Elizabeth Barnes’s States of
Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel and Shirley Sam-
uels’s edited collection The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimen-
tality in Nineteenth-Century America—as well as the essay by June Howard en-
titled ‘‘What Is Sentimentality?’’ which o√ers a broad view of sentimentality
by reaching back to eighteenth-century Great Britain and reaching out to
other disciplinary perspectives on the emotions ranging from anthropology to
neurology.
17 Berlant’s essay ‘‘Poor Eliza’’ was published in the influential special issue of
American Literature edited by Cathy Davidson and entitled ‘‘No More Separate
Spheres!’’ As Davidson shrewdly points out, sentimentality is often ‘‘wielded
as a weapon to control the expression of emotion, sometimes in women but

258 Notes to Chapter Four

 far more often in men’’ (456). The gendered binary of separate spheres is an
example of what we could call retrospective emotional standards.
18 Although I have focused on texts by four women I don’t mean to imply that
men haven’t contributed to the exploration of the power of the narrative of
social su√ering in moving people to fight for social justice. Consider the
exemplary essay by the late Richard Rorty, ‘‘Human Rights, Rationality, and
Sentimentality.’’ His position is unequivocal. ‘‘We are now,’’ he writes, ‘‘in a
good position to put aside the last vestiges of the idea that human beings are
distinguished by the capacity to know rather than by the capacities for friend-
ship and intermarriage, distinguished by rigorous rationality rather than by
flexible sentimentality’’ (18). How do we convince someone to do the right
thing for another person? The best way, he counsels, ‘‘is to give a sort of long,
sad, sentimental story which begins ‘Because this is what it is like to be in her
situation—to be far from home, among strangers,’ or ‘Because she might
become your daughter-in-law,’ or ‘Because her mother would grieve for her’ ’’
(19). In keeping with Rorty’s pragmatism, this is surely a pragmatic view of
the moral deployment of what I have been calling the literary emotions, and it
is one I endorse.
19 Qtd. in Marvin Olasky, Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does,
and How It Can Transform America, 219.
20 ‘‘Transcript of President Bush’s Message to Congress on His Budget Pro-
posal,’’ New York Times, 28 February 2001, A14.
21 See the philosopher Karen Jones’s essay ‘‘Trust as an A√ective Attitude.’’
Jones argues that trust has both cognitive and a√ective elements and that
central to trust is the spirit of optimism, one that is akin to hope; her paradigm
is interpersonal relations, one in which ‘‘trust is an attitude of optimism that
the goodwill and competence of another will extend to cover the domain of
our interaction with her, together with the expectation that the one trusted will
be directly and favorably moved by the thought that we are counting on her’’
(4). See also Susan Miller’s Trust in Texts: A Di√erent History of Rhetoric in
which she understands ‘‘the essence of persuasion’’ as the ‘‘willingness to
cooperate’’; ‘‘If understanding persuasion depends on reviving pre-Cartesian
acceptance of emotion as always at its center, even if for some quite regret-
tably,’’ she writes, ‘‘it further requires recharacterizing trust, our emotional
consent’’ (146).

part two
structures of feeling, ‘‘new’’ feelings
1 In literary criticism today it is considered virtually axiomatic that changes in
social structures will generate new feelings. See, for example, Sianne Ngai’s
Ugly Feelings where, taking the twentieth century as her canvas and philosoph-
ical aesthetics as her guide, she writes that ‘‘the nature of the sociopolitical

Notes to Part Two 259

 itself has changed in a manner that both calls forth and calls upon a new set of
feelings—ones less powerful than the classical political passions, though per-
haps more suited, in their ambient, Bartlebyan, but still diagnostic nature, for
models of subjectivity, collectivity, and agency not entirely foreseen by past
theorists of the commonwealth’’ (5). Ngai focuses on what she calls dysphoric
a√ects, including irritation, envy, and paranoia, and although she insists they
have a diagnostic dimension, she doesn’t stress the cognitive nature of these
feelings which have little in common with anger, for example, often linked
with politics and action. What she calls a√ects have more in common with
what I refer to as intensities rather than to psychological emotions. ‘‘My
assumption is that a√ects are less formed and structured than emotions, but
not lacking form or structure,’’ she writes, referring to them also as ‘‘ambient
a√ects’’ (27).
2 Although outside the scope of this book, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention
the provocative genealogy of feeling Alan Liu traces in The Laws of Cool:
Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information—the industrial feeling of the
Ford era of automation, the postindustrial feeling of service-with-a-smile, and
the feeling of ‘‘online cool’’ associated with what he calls the age of network-
ing. ‘‘Cool on the Web,’’ he writes, ‘‘is a heady brio, gusto, rush, thrill, feeling of
information’’ (231). But paradoxically, as he observes, there seems to be so
little feeling in the feeling of information. ‘‘The heart of the problem lies in
determining whether the cool ‘feeling of paradox’ is in fact a structure of
feeling at all rather than, equally intuitive, a lack of feeling’’ (231).

five
sympathy for nonhuman cyborgs
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘‘A Feeling for the Cyborg’’ in
Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, edited by Robert Mitchell and Phillip
Thurtle (New York: Routledge, 2004), 181–97.
1 Consider Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living by the inimitable Richard
Doyle. It virtually pulses with rhetorical life. Arguing that the oppositional
boundary line between organisms and machines (with alife—artificial life—
being one of his prime examples) has been definitively ‘‘smudged’’ (121),
Doyle identifies several nonsubjective a√ects including panic, surprise, and
anticipation. But his mordant wit is leavened by a comic good nature, and in
the chapter ‘‘Simflesh, Simbones: At Play in the Artificial Life Ribotype’’ Doyle
casts himself in the role of the ‘‘attentive and caring electronic biologist’’ who
is linked a√ectively to SimLife alife creatures through play characterized by
‘‘frustration, surprise, and especially laughter’’ (53). On anticipation, Doyle
writes: ‘‘While ‘anticipation’ is, of course, an a√ect that has been available to
hominids for some time, uploading seems to install discursive, material, and
social mechanism [sic] for the anticipation of an externalized self, a techno-
social mutation that is perhaps best characterized as a new capacity to be

260 Notes to Chapter Five

 a√ected by, addicted to, the future’’ (134). See also Brian Massumi’s Parables
for the Virtual where he singles out the boredom that may be experienced
following hyperlinks on the Web, writing that it ‘‘often comes with a strange
sense of foreboding: a sensing of an impending moreness, still vague’’ (140).
He contrasts this activity with Web surfing, which ‘‘like its televisual precur-
sor, zapping, is oddly compelling’’ (141).
2 In ‘‘Notes on the Technological Imagination’’ Michel Benamou divides what I
call the first wave of technocriticism in the 1960s and 1970s into techno-
phobes (desperate and anxious, with Jacques Ellul as an example) and tech-
nophiles (happy and hopeful, with Marshall McLuhan as an example). See
also Pierre-Yves Pétillon, who writes that in ‘‘American fiction, all the way
down to the rocket, one is faced with that two-fold aspect of the machine: thrill
and fear—heralding what: a new dawn or the crack of doom’’ (45). With regard
to cyberspace, Sue-Ellen Case in Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture,
similarly writes, ‘‘Critics swing between articulating the wish for ecstatic tran-
scendence and crying doom’’ (233).
3 Here is McClintock describing her work with chromosomes, as quoted in
Evelyn Fox Keller’s A Feeling for the Organism: ‘‘I found that the more I worked
with them the bigger and bigger [they] got, and when I was really working
with them I wasn’t outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I was
right down there with them, and everything got big. I even was able to see the
internal parts of the chromosomes—actually everything was there. It sur-
prised me because I actually felt as if I were right down there and these were
my friends’’ (117); her feeling for the organism she describes as ‘‘real a√ec-
tion’’ (117).
4 A wealth of prose fiction narratives and science fiction films could constitute
the archive for this chapter. I have purposely chosen two texts that continue to
be well-known cultural references up to the present day (A Space Odyssey and
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? along with Blade Runner) as well as two
lesser-known texts, one a film (Silent Running) and the other a recent novella
(Like Beauty).
5 As Hartwig Isernagen observes in ‘‘Technology and the Body: ‘Postmodern-
ism’ and the Voices of John Barth,’’ ‘‘The borderline between the animate and
the inanimate has obviously fascinated the Western imagination for ages. It is
particularly the borderline between the machine and the human that has
during the last three centuries become permeable in both directions, as the
power of machines was allegorized as (quasi-)human or even (quasi-)divine at
the same time that animals and humans were treated as or even actually
reduced to (quasi-)machines. The robot, which has straddled the threshold all
this time, has most recently fueled this fascination in extraordinary ways, as it
has metamorphosed itself into the computer’’ (563). I would add that the
computer is metamorphosing again into the robot.
6 See John Johnson’s superb essay ‘‘A Future for Autonomous Agents: Machinic
Merkwelten and Artificial Evolution.’’ We have reached a point, Johnson insists,

Notes to Chapter Five 261

 when ‘‘research in evolutionary robotics seems to be readying itself to leap over
the ‘complexity barrier,’ as von Neumann called it. When it comes, this leap
will not only initiate a new phase in the evolution of technology but will mark
the advent of a new form of machinic life’’ (474–75). Like others, Johnson
places the emphasis on cognition. Such a development, he writes, ‘‘would
allow us not only to evolve robots that could walk out of the laboratory to pursue
their own agendas, but also to understand how cognition itself is an evolution-
ary machinic process, distributed throughout multiple feedback loops with the
environment’’ (475). In My Mother Was a Computer Katherine Hayles notes the
developments in a√ective computing—what she calls ‘‘emotional computing,’’
a term I much prefer—although she does not expand upon this theme; ‘‘with
the advent of emotional computing, evolutionary algorithms, and programs
capable not only of learning but of reprogramming themselves (as in program-
mable gate arrays), it no longer seems fantastic that artificial minds may some
day achieve self-awareness and even consciousness’’ (191–92).
7 This is a notable instance of what J. P. Telotte in Replications: A Robotic History
of the Science Fiction Film finds in many science fiction films. ‘‘Nearly every
image of the robot, android, or cyborg as menace or monster,’’ Telotte writes,
‘‘seems balanced by similar figures cast in harmless, helpful, and most re-
cently, even redemptive roles. . . . In these films that ‘primal urge to repli-
cate’ . . . ends not calamitously but with an a≈rmation of the human spirit and
a suggestion that our technological likenesses are not so much our replace-
ments as our extensions, not really our mismeasure but in some way an expan-
sion of the human measure’’ (190). The computer hal, of course, plays both
roles over the course of A Space Odyssey.
8 Haraway, qtd. in Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the
Century, 252.
9 Isabelle Stengers, ‘‘Les généalogies de l’auto-organisation,’’ 99, qtd. in Jean-
Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanism of the Mind, 154. See Dupuy’s book for an
excellent account and critique of the development of cognitive science.
10 There is a vast literature dealing with Dick’s classic text that takes up some of
the themes I deal with here. See Alice Rayner’s excellent ‘‘Cyborgs and Repli-
cants: On the Boundaries,’’ where she privileges the ability to develop critique,
not the development of the emotions in Blade Runner. In Feeling in Theory:
Emotion after the ‘‘Death of the Subject,’’ Rei Terada, whose concern is to o√er
readings of poststructuralist accounts of emotions (this is simplifying her
complex study), concludes her book with a short commentary on Blade Run-
ner, in which she understands the role of the emotions far di√erently than do I
here. For her, emotions in the replicants are precisely a sign of the under-
standing that subjectivity—that is to say, a unified subjectivity—is an illusion,
but that emotions exist nonetheless. As she writes of one of the replicants,
‘‘We assume she has had feelings before, but reserving the sight of her tears
for this occasion dramatizes the fact that destroying the illusion of subjectivity
does not destroy emotion, that on the contrary, emotion is the sign of the

262 Notes to Chapter Five

 absence of that illusion’’ (156–57). In Wetwares Richard Doyle devotes a few
pages to Blade Runner; needless to say, they are priceless (123–24).
11 The action takes place in 2021 in the novel. Blade Runner, the film, is set in
2019. The human capacity for empathy is one of the themes of the science
fiction writer Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, where it takes the form of
the syndrome she calls hyperempathy.
12 See Kenneth Ford, Clark Glymour, and Patrick J. Hayes, eds., Android Epis-
temology, xi. Herbert A. Simon in his essay ‘‘Mind as Machine’’ in Android
Epistemology explicitly makes the point that a√ect and cognition interact. In-
deed as early as the 1960s Simon had insisted that cognitive models of mind
needed to include the emotions; see his ‘‘Motivational and Emotional Con-
trols of Cognition.’’
13 In this the film departs sharply from the novel. I can only speculate that
between 1968 when the book was published and 1982 when the film was
released, a cultural shift occurred, thereby rendering more acceptable the
representation of replicants as indistinguishable from humans on emotional
grounds.
14 Qtd. in Fred Kaplan, ‘‘A Cult Classic Restored, Again,’’ New York Times, 30
September 2007, 5: 12.
15 David Nye argues that the technological sublime is ‘‘one of America’s central
‘ideas about itself ’—a defining ideal, helping to bind together a multicultural
society’’ (xii-xiv).
16 Speaker for the Dead was originally published in 1986; Card’s ‘‘Introduction’’
was published in the edition released in 1991.
17 See Deborah Lupton’s ‘‘The Embodied Computer/User’’ in which she also
notes that ‘‘the ascribing of emotions to pc’s is a discursive move that empha-
sizes their humanoid nature’’ (105). ‘‘The overt reason for portraying com-
puters as human,’’ she writes, ‘‘is to reduce the anxieties of computerphobia
that many people, particularly adults, experience’’ (107). A decade later ‘‘com-
puterphobia’’ is a thing of what seems the distant past.
18 Sony’s Aibo Entertainment Robot, a dog-like machine, was discontinued in
January 2006. This was, Eric Taub reported in the New York Times on 30 Janu-
ary 2006, ‘‘sad news’’ (C4). Aibos can bark and walk; the latest version can
recognize some one hundred words and has a vocabulary of one thousand
words. ‘‘I love them,’’ a person who owns forty of them is quoted as saying; ‘‘I
think of them as dogs’’ (C4).
19 See Horst Hendriks-Jansen’s ‘‘In Praise of Interactive Emergence, or Why
Explanations Don’t Have to Wait for Implementation’’ where he pointedly
draws on the interaction between a mother and her baby to suggest another
model—one of situatedness and interaction—of artificial life. See also Steven
Johnson, Emergence.
20 See Norimitsu Onishi, ‘‘In a Wired South Korea, Robots Will Feel Right at
Home,’’ New York Times, 2 April 2006: A4.
21 See the philosopher Don Ihde’s Technology and the Lifeworld where he elabo-

Notes to Chapter Five 263

 rates a theory of a phenomenological account of human-technology relations.
‘‘The relationality of human-world relationships is claimed by phenomenolo-
gists to be an ontological feature of all knowledge, all experience,’’ he writes
(24). ‘‘Whatever else may enter the analysis of human-technology relations,’’
he insists, ‘‘I wish to retain the sense of materiality which technologies imply.
This materiality correlates with our bodily materiality, the experience we have
as being our bodies in an environment’’ (25).
22 Similarly, in his discussion of uploading and anticipation, Richard Doyle in
Wetwares remarks that ‘‘this may seem to be a literary a√ect provoked by an
overdose on science fiction’’; provocatively, he concludes that ‘‘the frenzied en-
counter with a contingent future’’ is resonant with ‘‘new markets and forms of
finance capital’’ (134). See also Robin Marantz Henig’s ‘‘The Real Transform-
ers,’’ New York Times Sunday Magazine, 29 July 2007, 28√, in which she de-
scribes her socialization to sociable robots through literature, film, and televi-
sion.
23 Cynthia Breazeal, ‘‘The Art and Science of Social Robots,’’ Simpson Center for
the Humanities, University of Washington, 2 March 2007. See also her essay,
coauthored with Rodney Brooks, ‘‘Robot Emotion: A Functional Perspective.’’
24 Breazeal, qtd. in Beryl Korot and Steve Reich’s Three Tales, a documentary
digital video opera on three twentieth-century decisive technological devel-
opments.
25 In the words of Hershman Leeson, qtd. in The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman
Leeson, edited by Meredith Tromble, ‘‘Agent Ruby is a self-breeding autono-
mous artificial intelligence Web agent shaped by encounters with users. She
is thereby part of both the real and the virtual worlds. Ruby converses with
users, remembers their questions and names, and has moods corresponding
to whether or not she likes them’’ (92). All of the films I have discussed are
gendered predominantly male. Hershman Leeson’s marvelous films Conceiv-
ing Ada and Teknolust are gendered female.
26 Sandra Blakeslee, ‘‘Cells That Read Minds,’’ New York Times, 10 January 2006,
D1, 4.
27 V. S. Ramachandran, ‘‘Mirror Neurons and the Brain in the Vat.’’ Interest-
ingly, Ramachandran remarks that research has shown that children with
autism don’t possess a mirror neuron system, which may account for some of
the symptoms of autism, including a lack of empathy.

six
bureaucratic rage
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘‘The Bureaucratic and Binding
Emotions: Angry American Autobiography’’ in Kenyon Review 17.1 (winter
1995): 50–70.
1 There are of course memoirs portraying experiences of the bureaucratic
emotions—specifically with regard to illness—that are written from the first-

264 Notes to Chapter Six

 person point of view. See, for example, Eric Michaels’s Unbecoming, an aids
diary edited after his death. During his illness Michaels is hospitalized in
Australia, showing that the United States does not have a monopoly on such
experiences.
2 As Goodnight explains in ‘‘The Personal, Technical, and Public Sphere
of Argument: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation,’’
‘‘ ‘Sphere’ denotes branches of activity—the grounds upon which arguments
are built and the authorities to which arguers appeal. Di√erences among the
three spheres are plausibly illustrated if we consider the di√erences between
the standards for argument among friends versus those for judgments of
academic arguments versus those for judging political disputes’’ (216).
3 I am writing predominantly from the point of view of those ‘‘outside’’ a bu-
reaucracy. But what I call bureaucratic rage has also been leveled by busi-
nesspeople at the government at tax time. As noted in ‘‘Squaring Accounts
with Uncle Sam,’’ a piece by Jill Fraser that appeared in the New York Times on
10 April 1994, ‘‘For successful businesspeople, tax filings generate a wealth of
emotions—much more often than not the negative ones. . . . If some execu-
tives respond with rage, however, others say they are simply resigned’’ (3: 29).
4 Ralph Blumenthal, ‘‘Finding Meager Help in a Sex-Complaint System,’’ New
York Times, 27 November 1992, B7.
5 See Christopher Dandeker, Surveillance, Power, and Modernity: Bureaucracy
and Discipline from 1700 to the Present Day, 2.
6 See Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
46.
7 See the sociologist Andrew J. Weigert’s book Mixed Emotions: Certain Steps
Toward Understanding Ambivalence for a consideration of ambivalence as a
structure of feeling (although he does not use Raymond Williams’s term) that
characterizes the institutions of modernity as well as, more generally, the
condition of modernity. In his cogent reflections on bureaucracy, he writes
from the point of view of someone inside, not outside, the institution. Draw-
ing on the work of Robert Merton and E. Barber, he observes that ‘‘in large-
scale organizations, the contradictory demands of regularity and creativity can
result in a kind of bureaucratic pathos. The unrequitable demands for em-
pathic personal concern versus rational universalistic detachment pose acute
problems and generate deep tensions’’ (41). Consider this anecdotal case. In a
piece in Time magazine titled ‘‘O≈cers on the Edge’’ that appeared on 26
September 1994, the journalist Nancy Gibbs reports on the suicide of a police
o≈cer. A twenty-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department is quoted
as saying, ‘‘Dealing with the bad guys is why I became a cop. What gets you
down is the bureaucracy.’’ Gibbs provides this context: ‘‘In his o≈ce in the
l.a.p.d.’s Northeast division, which includes the grimiest stretch of Holly-
wood Boulevard, the computers are antique, the shotguns routinely fail dur-
ing practice and the cars in the lot are monuments to budgetary restraints: the
odometers read 132,000 miles, 136,000, 148,000’’ (62).

Notes to Chapter Six 265

8 See ‘‘Final Take,’’ New York Times, 7 January 2006, B5.
9 As with my consideration of statistical panic, I am here placing the accent
on negative impersonal encounters. We can all point as well to the good
Samaritans that populate bureaucratic institutions.
10 N. R. Kleinfeld, ‘‘More Than Death, Fearing a Muddled Life,’’ New York Times,
11 November 2002, A1, 17.
11 See Vivian Sobchak’s ‘‘Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get
Out of This Century Alive.’’
12 See Paul de Man’s influential essay ‘‘Autobiography as De-facement’’ (1979).
De Man’s insistence that the distinction between autobiography and fiction ‘‘is
not an either/or polarity but . . . undecidable’’ (921) was intended to produce
the e√ect of collapsing autobiography into fiction (and decidedly not the other
way around).
13 The notion of the ‘‘autobiographical pact’’ we owe to Philippe Lejeune, for
whom it is critical that the name of the author be ‘‘linked, by a social conven-
tion, to the pledge of responsibility of a real person’’ (11). Lejeune is pre-
eminently clear that autobiography is related both to a practice of writing as
well as to a practice of reading; ‘‘It is a historically variable contractual e√ect’’
(30). Thus for him trust is a key e√ect of autobiographical reading. This may
help explain the media furor that erupted in the United States in January 2005
over the revelation that James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces (a book
marketed as a memoir) had fabricated many of the details of his story. In But
Enough About Me, Nancy Miller deftly sums up the reasons for our culture’s
voraciousness for the memoir: ‘‘It’s the well-worn culture of ‘me,’ given an
expansive new currency by the infamous baby boomers who can think of
nothing else; it’s the desire for story killed by postmodern fiction; it’s the only
literary form that appears to give access to the truth; it’s a democratic form,
giving voice to minority experience in an antielite decade; it’s a desire to assert
agency and subjectivity after several decades of insisting loudly on the frag-
mentation of identity and the death of the author. It’s voyeurism for a declin-
ing, imperial narcissism. It’s the market’’ (12).
14 Thomas Couser also makes this point in Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability,
and Life Writing, 9.
15 Couser makes a distinction between autobiographical illness narratives, which
are first-person accounts, and illness memoirs, which are second-person ac-
counts. Writing about aids diaries, Chambers refers to these second-person
memoirs as ‘‘dual autobiographies,’’ for ‘‘the writer who records another’s
death from aids is himself infected and may go on to record his own living out
of the same scenario’’ (7).
16 ‘‘Most anthropological studies of death eliminate emotions by assuming the
position of the most detached observer,’’ Renato Rosaldo notes, telling us that
his own personal experience of loss was required for him to come to an
understanding of the powerful rage that the Ilongots described as central to

266 Notes to Chapter Six

 their grief out of loss (15). In his essay ‘‘Grief and the Headhunter’s Rage’’
Rosaldo also takes up the question of positionality by elaborating in particular
on the category of age.
17 See Miller’s But Enough About Me, 2.
18 See Joseph Cady’s essay ‘‘Immersive and Counterimmersive Writing About
aids: The Achievement of Paul Monette’s Love Alone,’’ which is a companion
piece to Borrowed Time. As Cady writes, ‘‘Love Alone is dominated by explicit,
intense, and unembarrassed statements of painful personal feeling, which, in
both their frequency and intimacy, are perhaps the book’s most powerful
literal representations of the devastation of aids’’ (247).
19 I am deliberately emphasizing the impersonal nature of the institution of the
hospital. But if Monette unleashes his contempt for interns, he is lavish with
his praise for others—the technicians and the receptionists—and he astutely
understands how reciprocity builds hope. ‘‘Even on bad days,’’ he writes, ‘‘we
tried to be up for them, the receptionists and technicians, for their morale was
as much at stake as ours, and we had to help each other’’ (276).
20 In the introduction I observed that in the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury in the United States we see a general redistribution of the emotions in
terms of gender. In Borrowed Time grief, explicitly identified with women, is
appropriated by Monette as his natural emotional habitat. In several telling
passages he identifies with the grief of women. On a cross-country flight he
looks up to see Anne Bancroft in the film Garbo Talks and he breaks into tears.
‘‘Supermarkets are bad for grief; any widow will tell you,’’ he remarks else-
where (93).
21 In ‘‘Paul Monette’s Vigilant Witnessing to the aids Crisis,’’ Lisa Diedrich
discusses this scene and the ‘‘a√ective force’’ of the address of Roger to Paul as
well as Paul ‘‘to’’ Roger, a scene also elaborated in Love Alone as well as in Last
Watch of the Night.
22 Jane Gross, ‘‘Prevalence of Alzheimer’s Rises 10% in 5 Years,’’ New York
Times, 21 March 2007, A14.
23 When Roach goes to the bookstore to see what she can find on Alzheimer’s
disease, there was nothing there. Today we can point to many doubled-over
autobiographical narratives, including John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris and Elinor
Fuch’s Making an Exit as well as Deborah Ho√man’s wonderful film Com-
plaints of a Dutiful Daughter (1994).
24 I refer here to Elizabeth Bruss’s influential Autobiographical Acts: The Chang-
ing Situation of a Literary Genre.
25 See Felicia R. Lee, ‘‘Raising Reality-tv Stakes, Show Plans to O√er Medical
‘Miracles,’ ’’ New York Times, 17 January 2006, B1, 8.
26 See Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Cheryl Hill Lee, In-
come, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005.
27 See Robert Pear’s ‘‘Health Care, Vexing to Clinton, Is Now at the Top of Bush’s
Agenda,’’ New York Times, 29 January 2006, A1, 18.

Notes to Chapter Six 267

 seven
statistical panic
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘‘Statistical Panic’’ in di√erences
11.2 (1999): 177–203.
1 See Justine Coupland’s ‘‘Ageist Ideology and Discourses of Control in Skin-
care Product Marketing.’’
2 The counterpart of this would be statistical hope. A couple having di≈culty
conceiving a child who are ‘‘given’’ a 3 percent chance of succeeding may
imaginatively count themselves among that lucky 3 percent. Similarly, many
of us speak of winning the lottery, which is a statistical improbability of astro-
nomical proportions (not to mention an impossibility when one doesn’t actu-
ally buy into the pool).
3 See the section ‘‘Statistical Persons’’ in Mark Selzer’s Bodies and Machines,
where he understands the correlation between the visible and the calculable in
terms of a model of realism and naturalism. Selzer’s emphasis, unlike mine,
is not on statistics as a science of probability.
4 See Anne Kavanagh and Dorothy Broom’s excellent study ‘‘Embodied Risk:
My Body, Myself ?’’ in which they distinguish ‘‘corporeal risk’’(that is, who a
person is rather than what they do or what is done to them) from environmen-
tal risk and lifestyle risk (442). It is the notion of corporeal risk that I discuss in
this chapter through the narratives of cancer and Huntington’s disease. For
Kavanagh and Broom corporeal risk is located in the body and presents dif-
ferent kinds of challenges, including ‘‘the simultaneous presence of disease
now and possibly in the future; the necessity for medical surveillance; a ten-
dency to exacerbate the Cartesian split between body and self ’’ (443).
5 See Sandra Gi√ord’s important essay ‘‘The Meaning of Lumps: A Case Study
of the Ambiguities of Risk’’ in which she distinguishes ‘‘two distinct dimen-
sions’’ of risk in a medical context: ‘‘a technical, objective or scientific dimen-
sion and a socially experienced or lived dimension’’ (215), with the clinical
context bridging the two. As she explains: ‘‘To the patient, risk is rarely an
objective concept. It is internalized and experienced as a state of being. These
di√erent dimensions of risk as understood and experienced by epidemiolo-
gist, clinicians and lay women—further blur the already ambiguous relation-
ship between health and ill-health. This ambiguity results in the creation of a
new state of being healthy and ill; a state that is somewhere between health
and disease and that results in the medicalization of a woman’s life’’ (215). In
this episode of Chicago Hope the kind of ambiguity that Gi√ord so discern-
ingly identifies is not represented.
6 In 1999 the Mayo Clinic released a study that reported on the results, thus far,
of what is called a bilateral prophylactic mastectomy in 639 women. It was
concluded that the drastic operation reduced their chances of dying from
breast cancer by 90 percent. Out of that figure eighteen women’s lives were
saved—but that means that 619 women had the operation performed need-

268 Notes to Chapter Seven

 lessly! See Christine Gorman, ‘‘Radical Surgery,’’ Time, 25 January 1999, 83.
In 2000 the New York Times reported the findings from a long-term study that
included women with genetic defects in the genes brca1 and brca2, which
constitutes the highest risk for developing breast cancer (56 to 85 percent); it
was found that a bilateral prophylactic mastectomy reduced their risk by 90
percent. See Denise Grady, ‘‘Removing Healthy Breasts Found E√ective in
High Cancer-Risk Group,’’ New York Times, 4 April 2000, D7.
7 Note that the character from Chicago Hope was in fact shopping for a surgeon.
As Robin Bunton, Sarah Nettleton, and Roger Burrows argue in their intro-
duction to The Sociology of Health Promotion: Critical Analyses of Consumption,
Lifestyle and Risk, ‘‘At a cultural level ‘healthism’ has become a central plank of
contemporary consumer culture as images of youthfulness, vitality, energy
and so on have become key articulating principles of a range of contemporary
popular discourses’’ (1). Consider this example. In 1997 it was reported that a
recent study revealed ‘‘cholesterol-lowering drugs could help even healthy
middle-aged people with ordinary cholesterol levels reduce their risk of heart
trouble by more than one-third’’ (‘‘Cholesterol Drugs Shown to Cut Healthy
Group’s Risk,’’ New York Times, 13 November 1997, A13). The drug, named
Mavacor, costs about $100 per month. Who paid for the research? Merck and
Company, the maker of the drug. See also Jackie Orr’s powerful analysis in
her chapter ‘‘Panic Xanax’’ in Panic Diaries (213–74) of the collapsed relation
between research regarding the presumed medical condition of panic dis-
order and the global marketing of a drug in the 1980s and early 1990s by the
company Upjohn. The medical model of psychiatry, one driven by statistical
predictability based on huge data sets—and thus on huge markets that are
created in the process—underlies the emergence of the category of panic
disorder.
8 Melodrama is, as Lynne Joyrich shows in Re-Viewing Reception: Television,
Gender, and Postmodern Culture, ‘‘a privileged forum for U.S. television, prom-
ising the certainty of clearly marked conflict and legible meaning even as it
plays on the closeness associated with a feminine spectator-consumer’’ (64).
9 Most women will never get breast cancer. As Jane Brody summarizes in
‘‘Coping with Fear: Keeping Breast Cancer in Perspective,’’ New York Times, 12
October 1999: ‘‘The ‘1-in-8 women’ statistic is accurate, but only if you live to
85. And as you get older and remain free of cancer, the 1-in-8 figure starts
dropping because you have already lived out many of the at-risk years. If, for
example, you are now 70 and still cancer-free, your chances have dropped to 1
in 20’’ (D6).
10 See Mary Russo’s powerful essay ‘‘Aging and the Risk of Anachronism’’ in
which she discusses Gillian Rose’s work, in particular Love’s Work: A Reckon-
ing with Life, in the context of aging.
11 I am alluding to a silly short piece that appeared in the New York Times Sunday
Magazine on 8 August 1999. Under the title ‘‘Living Dangerously: The Odds,’’
a list of nine di√erent risks are taken from Larry Laudan’s book Danger Ahead:

Notes to Chapter Seven 269

 The Risks You Really Face on Life’s Highway. We learn that the odds that we will
crush our finger with a hammer are one in 3,000, that our doctor is really not
a doctor are one in fifty, that our next meal will come from McDonald’s is one
in eight, and so on.
12 See Matthew Wald, ‘‘F.A.A. Seeks to Reduce Air-Turbulence Injuries,’’ New
York Times, 30 December 1997, A12. See also David Patch’s ominously titled
story ‘‘Invisible Streams of Danger Can Lurk above the Clouds,’’ Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette, 30 December 1997, A7.
13 Within the domain of the market, predictability is itself a commodity. Uncer-
tainty itself has a price, one that is attached to what are called securities; more
predictability means less risk. But within the domain of our own lives the
calculus of risk can produce not security but panic. There is also an erotics of
risk—namely the desire to test oneself and to succeed against the odds, to beat
the statistics, as in sports, for example, or in gambling. On the banal level of
everyday life, there is the hope that we (meaning ‘‘I’’) will win the lottery.
There is a romance with risk. See also Adriano Sofri’s essay ‘‘On Optimism.’’
As he writes, ‘‘If Pangloss were living today, he would be a professor of
statistics. This confirms the irresistible tendency of statistics to optimism.
Because figures, even sad ones, are consoling. If they promise happiness and
progress, they regard me. If they point to misfortune, pain, and death, they do
not regard me. They are averages, precisely, hence abstractions, hence they
always leave room for an exception for someone—that is, for me’’ (767).
14 See Diane M. Stuart’s statement before the U.S. Senate on 19 July 2005.
15 Michael Power discusses what he has termed the ‘‘audit society’’ in terms of
a√ect. ‘‘The audit society,’’ he writes ‘‘is the anxious society in which perceived
regulatory failure must be continually overcome and the mission of regula-
tion re-a≈rmed. In the context of this permanent dialectic, audit is a crucial
political technology. The ‘fact of audit’ reduces anxiety or, more positively,
produces comfort. . . . And yet, paradoxically, the audit society is also one in
which visible failure of audit is the norm and in which there are extensive
investments in audit activity irrespective of their demonstrated substantive
e√ectiveness’’ (307). Power submits that ‘‘the ‘audit explosion’ has occurred
at the threshold between the traditional structures of industrial society and
an emerging ‘risk society’ ’’ (307) and that the audit ‘‘is part of the new ‘cos-
metics of risks’ ’’ (313). I would suggest that while the audit is a social practice
performed by various regulatory agencies, individuals have learned to audit
themselves in terms of what I have been calling their financial and epidemio-
logical futures; the auditing of our individual statistical futures has been
internalized. See also the work by Ulrich Beck as well as Mary Douglas and
Aaron Wildavsky’s Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and
Environmental Dangers.
16 The train has often been taken as the exemplar and embodiment of the
emerging culture of urban modernity. See Leo Marx’s The Machine in the
Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America and Wolfgang Schivel-

270 Notes to Chapter Seven

 bush’s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the
Nineteenth Century.
17 Elizabeth Goodstein o√ers a genealogy of boredom in her brilliant study
Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity. She argues that the bore-
dom that emerged in the nineteenth century was associated with a malaise in
the wake of the loss of foundational meaning, one that registered ‘‘the democ-
ratization of skepticism in modernity’’ (10), while today boredom is associated
with the body, as I myself suggest in this chapter on the statistical body. If as
Goodstein shows, the boredom of modernity is ‘‘a form of reflective distance
that becomes a new attitude toward experience altogether’’ (3), that reflec-
tive distance is collapsed, I would suggest, in postmodern media culture.
Goodstein remarks that the feeling of boredom that circulated in nineteenth-
century Europe is ‘‘less a new feeling than a new way of feeling’’ (3). This is
how I understand sympathy for nonhuman cyborgs, bureaucratic rage, and
statistical panic—less as new feelings than as new ways of feeling those feel-
ings or as new sites for those feelings.
18 I am indebted to Patricia Mellencamp’s High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal,
Age, and Comedy for calling attention to this passage in Simmel’s essay ‘‘The
Metropolis and Mental Life.’’ See High Anxiety for a brilliant and often hi-
larious discussion of the ways in which television is a machine for producing
anxiety. If the processes of calculating and quantifying are critical to the mod-
ern mind, as Simmel insists, we should not be surprised that a learning
disorder, named decalculea, has been identified for those who have di≈culty
learning how to deal with numbers.
19 Similarly, in Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice Peter Miller makes
the point that accounting, a predominant means of quantification, is itself a
technology.
20 In ‘‘Accommodating Merchants: Accounting, Civility, and the Natural Laws of
Gender’’ Mary Poovey argues that women, whose writing was deemed unruly
and excessive to the order required by a smoothly operating commercial sys-
tem, were systematically excluded from participating in the work of double-
entry bookkeeping. See also her History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowl-
edge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society.
21 Importantly, in The Taming of Chance Hacking distinguishes between the
ways in which the attitudes toward and uses of numerical data di√ered in
eastern Europe (citing Prussia) and western Europe (citing France and Brit-
ain). Hacking traces the sea change between the statistical fatalism of the
1830s to statistical indetermination in the 1930s, a shift due in great part to
developments in quantum mechanics.
22 Mary Ann Doane has argued that statistics and early cinema were responses
to the contradictions of modernity at the end of the nineteenth century and
the turn of the twentieth century; as she writes, ‘‘Statistics . . . constitutes a
form of reconciliation of law and contingency, as well as of the individual with
the increasing centrality of a concept of the masses’’ (129).

Notes to Chapter Seven 271

23 As Ann Kaplan and Susan Squier point out in Playing Dolly: Formations,
Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction, risk-management discourse ‘‘is
a new expert discipline that cordons o√ any real response to risk by authoriz-
ing as acceptable only those risks that lie within the parameters of scientific
rationality. Disciplinary limits and expert systems with clear borders thus
actually function to keep things running as they were before: the processes of
modernization that gave us risk can continue unshaken’’ (5).
24 See David Zimmerman’s Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fic-
tion, a study of financial panic as a contagious mass feeling from 1898 to 1913,
one that was both analyzed by writers and incited by mass reading. As he
writes, panic novels ‘‘encouraged readers to see the market as a sentimental
community comprised of individuals linked by grief or guilt’’ (8).
25 Theodore Porter refers to the probabilistic revolution in his conclusion to
Statistical Thinking: 1820–1900 (318).

coda
inexhaustible grief
1 The scholarship on the fort-da is immense, and I have found the philosopher
and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear’s thoughts on it in Happiness, Death, and the
Remainder of Life to be especially provocative (90–98). He reads the narrative
that is the fort-da through Aristotle as a prototype for the development of the
ethical virtue of courage, one that requires both repetition and creativity.
2 On D. W. Winnicott’s concept of holding, an experience that begins with the
mother holding the infant, see Thomas H. Ogden’s ‘‘On Holding and Con-
taining, Being and Dreaming.’’ Ogden argues that holding is for Winnicott
primarily an ontological concept, one that has to do with the experience of
being and the experience of time. With maturation we internalize the experi-
ence of being held by the mother. In ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ holding is
externalized, with the son caring for the mother.
3 See Pontalis’s ‘‘The (Generalized) Game of the Bobbin’’ in Windows (58–61).
4 On the string game, see D. W. Winnicott, ‘‘Playing: A Theoretical Statement,’’
in Playing and Reality (38–52). ‘‘To control what is outside one has to do things,
not simply to think or to wish, and doing things takes time. Playing is doing,’’ he
writes; play is universal and ‘‘belongs to health’’ (41).
5 Here are two more examples from narratives about older children whose
mothers are aΔicted with Alzheimer’s disease and are now living in assisted-
care facilities. In Michael Ignatie√ ’s novel Scar Tissue, this is the very first
detail he o√ers when the son takes his mother to ‘‘the institution’’: ‘‘In the
lobby, there were some old people in wheelchairs with bibs round their chins
watching television’’ (98). In Elinor Fuchs’s memoir Making an Exit, her wry
tone of dark high spirits, one inspired by her mother Lil’s very theatricality,
o√ers us this scene: ‘‘We return to find that the behemoth of a tv console has
been rolled to the center of the common room. A ragged circle of the de-

272 Notes to Coda

 mented has assembled around it in chairs and wheelchairs. The room has
been darkened for this special event. I find an additional chair and make room
for Lil amid the group, which in soft chorus is variously moaning, babbling,
and crying out. . . . I pull up a chair for myself. I seem to be the only one aware
that there’s a movie on’’ (177).
6 See my essay ‘‘Telling Stories: Aging, Reminiscence, and the Life Review’’ in
which I write about the positive valence of the feeling of reminiscence and
what I call ‘‘prospective reminiscence.’’
7 Consider the di√erence between the feeling-tone of ‘‘At the End of the Line’’
and Freud’s ‘‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis.’’ Freud’s mood of
unease reflects the breakdown of connection between a son and his father
(although, of course, the emotion of guilt testifies to Freud’s attachment to his
father as well). Freud’s mode is ruminative but ultimately analytical as he
searches for the key to this emotional puzzle.
8 As Bollas writes in ‘‘Moods and the Conservative Process,’’ ‘‘When a mood
serves to release a conservative object for experiencing, it di√ers from ordi-
nary a√ect experience in that the true self is allowed an unusual freedom of
expression precisely because of the dissociative feature of a mood as an al-
lowed for, and therefore unintruded upon, right’’ (112). In ‘‘At the End of the
Line’’ the conservative object here would be the memory of their intimate
dinner together.
9 As Winnicott explains in his important essay ‘‘The Capacity to Be Alone,’’
‘‘Although many types of experience go to the establishment of the capacity to
be alone, there is one that is basic, and without a su≈ciency of it the capacity
to be alone does not come about; this experience is that of being alone, as an
infant and small child, in the presence of mother. Thus the basis of the capacity to
be alone is a paradox; it is the experience of being alone while someone else is
present’’ (30). In ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ we could say that the mother retains
the capacity to be alone because her son is present to her.
10 Similarly, in writing about the fort-da in Windows Pontalis confesses that he
wanted to describe it, not comment on it; he also is uncertain as to his point of
view, not sure whether he was inhabiting the fort-da from Freud’s perspective
or from his grandson’s perspective (59). In ‘‘Dream as an Object,’’ which was
written over thirty years ago, Pontalis argues that if we attach ourselves to our
dreams as objects, ultimately we must give them up, detach ourselves from
them, and regard them analytically. There he was writing as an analyst. But in
‘‘At the End of the Line’’ he writes as a son, creating a dream that is an object in
more ways than one.

Notes to Coda 273

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 INDEX

Abel, Elizabeth, 84, 255 n. 12 ageism, 31, 51, 59, 67–68, 75, 77–78
‘‘Accommodating Merchants’’ aging: a√ect script for, 76–78; anger
(Poovey), 271 n. 20 and, 65–66, 68, 75–76, 191, 252
Accounting as Social and Institutional nn. 32–33; depression and, 31, 64,
Practice (Miller), 271 n. 19 67, 71, 249 n. 11; dreams and, 72;
Achenbaum, W. Andrew, 62, 250 n. 16 emotion and politics of, 5, 31, 61–63,
Adamson, Joseph, 253 n. 1 67, 249 nn. 9–10, 249–50 n. 15, 250
Administration on Aging, 60 n. 16; feelings and, 6–7, 250 n. 21;
Adolescence (Hall), 66–67 future of elders and, 66–67, 70–71,
‘‘Aesthetic of Astonishment, An’’ (Gun- 77, 250 n. 17, 251 n. 23, 252 n. 36;
ning), 213 gendered perspectives and, 64, 68–
a√ect: a√ectlessness and postmodern 69, 249 n. 13, 250 nn. 19–20; hyper-
culture, 16; capitalism and identifica- individualization and, 249 n. 14; life
tion, 252 n. 36; chain of, 104; cul- expectancy and, 64, 249 n. 12; life
tural studies and, 236–37 n. 9, 241– stages and, 248 n. 1, 249 n. 5, 251
42 n. 31; Freud on, 38–40; non- n. 24; marginalization and, 30, 51,
subjective, 140; professional, 240 67, 68, 73–74, 251 n. 27; moral au-
n. 27; retailing of, 215–16; society thority of anger and, 73–78; narra-
and, 19; theory of, 3–5, 21–25, 236 tives of, 60, 76–78, 248 n. 4; outlaw
n. 8, 236–37 n. 9, 244 n. 3, 259–60 emotion of anger and, 30, 31, 75;
n. 1; waning of, 15–16, 125, 137 rage and, 69–70, 72–73, 77, 250
a√ective attunement, 95 n. 22, 252 n. 35, 252–53 n. 37; social
A√ective Computing (Picard), 160–61 consciousness of, 60–61; wisdom
a√ective experience, 3, 29–30 and, 31, 59, 62, 64–65, 71–72, 74–
a√ective labor, 21, 23, 241–42 n. 31 75, 251 n. 24, 251 n. 26, 251–52
a√ect script, 34, 160, 252 n. 32 n. 29, 252 nn. 30–31
a√ect storm, 92 Aging and Its Discontents (Woodward), 63
a√ect system, 139, 159–63, 263–64 ‘‘Aging, Morale, and Meaning’’ (Coh-
n. 21, 264 n. 22 ler), 251–52 n. 29
Ahmed, Sara, 22, 247 n. 14 guilt and, 30, 43–45, 52, 246 nn. 9–
ai (film), 143 11; hysteria and, 4, 34–38, 245 n. 6;
Aibo Entertainment Robot, 263 n. 18 moral authority of, 73–78; oppres-
aids: illness memoirs and, 5, 177–80, sor-oppressed paradigm and, 54–55;
191, 218, 264–65 n. 1, 267 n. 18, 267 as outlaw emotion, 30, 31, 47, 54, 75,
n. 20; literal deaths of writers and, 80; as personal emotion, 50; politic-
174; mourning, activism, and, 29 ization of, 49, 246 n. 12; racism-in-
airline industry, 210–11 feminism accusations and, 56, 248
Alchemy of Race and Rights, The n. 22; rage and safeguarding, 77,
(Williams), 252 n. 35, 254–55 n. 8 184; self-reflexive thought, 57, 79–
Alexander, Elizabeth, 258 n. 15 80, 248 n. 23; shame and model of,
‘‘Alice, O√ the Page’’ (Trillin), 195, 196 83–85, 253 n. 2; statistical panic
Al-Kassim, Dina, 256 n. 17 countered by, 26; women and, 34,
Allison, Dorothy, 254 n. 7 48, 51, 58, 245 n. 6, 248 n. 1; Woolf ’s
Alzheimer’s disease, 138, 173, 180–84, dramatization of, 46–49, 53–54, 57,
191, 219, 224, 267 n. 23 175, 247 n. 13, 247–48 n. 21
Amedure, Scott, 102–3 ‘‘Anger and Authority’’ (Culley), 55
American Cool (Stearns), 16, 18 ‘‘Anger and Insubordination’’ (Spel-
America the Wise (Roszak), 248 n. 4 man), 49, 52
Anatomy of Disgust, The (Miller), 63, ‘‘Anger and the Politics of Naming’’
249 n. 9 (Scheman), 49, 52, 170
Ancients Against Moderns (DeJean), 241 ‘‘Anger, Anxiety, Abstraction’’ (Silver),
n. 29 247–48 n. 21
Anderson, Perry, 137 Another Name for Madness (Roach), 138,
android epistemology, 148 180–84, 191, 219, 224
Android Epistemology (Ford, Glymour, anthropology, 19–20, 240 n. 25, 245
and Hayes), 263 n. 12 n. 4, 266–67 n. 16
Anecdotal Theory (Gallop), 240 n. 26 anxiety: age anxiety, 63; doubling of,
anger: anthropology and, 19–20, 240 92; Freudian theory of, 45, 204–5;
n. 25, 245 n. 4, 266–67 n. 16; auto- retailing of, 167
biographical experience of, 7; chaf- Appadurai, Arjun, 210
ing emotions and, 33; clarity of, 52; Archive of Feelings, An (Cvetkovich), 29
cognitive dimension of emotions Aristotle, 59, 118, 272 n. 1
and, 46, 49, 57, 237 n. 10, 246 n. 12, Armstrong, Nancy, 22
252 n. 34; consciousness raising and, Arrival of a Train at the Station (film), 213
49–50, 247 n. 14; containment of, Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson,
30, 42–43; cultural right to, 51–57, The (Tromble), 264 n. 25
247 n. 15; emotional sequencing of, artificial life, 154
85, 253 n. 2, 254–55 n. 8; epistemo- Asimov, Isaac, 143
logical aspect of, 7; feminism and Assuming the Positions (Miller), 242
analysis of, 30, 34–35, 45–51, 77, n. 34
252–53 n. 37; feminist, 8, 23, 48–52, ‘‘At the End of the Line’’ (Pontalis), 19,
247 n. 14; gendered perspectives 219–33, 272 n. 2, 273 nn. 9–10
and, 30, 51, 111, 245 n. 6, 247 n. 15; audit society, 270 n. 15

298 Index
Auschwitz liberation narrative, 105–6 Bodies and Machines (Seltzer), 268 n. 3
autism, 18 Boler, Megan, 153, 235 n. 2, 237–38
autobiographical act, 174, 177, 189 n. 13, 247 n. 13, 247 n. 18, 258 n. 14
autobiographical experiences, 6–9. See Bollas, Christopher, 16–17, 27, 96, 136,
also illness memoirs; narratives 228–29, 231, 273 n. 8
‘‘Autobiographical Pact, The’’ (Le- Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 243 n. 37
jeune), 174 borderline personality, 18
‘‘Autobiography as Cultural Criticism’’ boredom, 14–15, 25, 138, 212–16
(Miller), 175 Borrowed Time (Monette), 5, 177–80,
‘‘Autobiography as De-facement’’ 191, 218, 267 n. 18, 267 n. 20
(De Man), 174, 234, 266 n. 12 Boston Globe, 196
Bouson, J. Brooks, 255 n. 11
Baier, Annette, 133 Bowers v. Hardwick, 114, 117
Bailey, Paul, 105 Boym, Svetlana, 232, 233, 241 n. 29
Baldwin, James, 122, 123 Brandes, Susan, 257–58 n. 11
Barber, Elinor, 265 n. 7 Breazeal, Cynthia, 162, 264 n. 24
Barnes, Elizabeth, 258 n. 16 Brennan, Teresa, 22, 23, 236–37 n. 9,
Barthes, Roland, 223 242–43 n. 36, 248 n. 23, 254 n. 6
Bartky, Sandra Lee, 94–96, 109, 235 Bridges of Madison County, The (Waller),
n. 1, 246 n. 12 122–23
Bates, Joseph, 157 Briggs, Jean L., 245 n. 4
Bateson, Gregory, 159 Brody, Jane, 210, 269 n. 9
Baudrillard, Jean, 102 Brooks, Rodney, 157–58, 161
Bauman, Zygmunt, 14, 189–90, 199– Broom, Dorothy H., 268 n. 4
200, 203, 238 n. 15, 239–40 Brown, Wendy, 247 n. 14
n. 24 Brown v. Board of Education I, 114–
Beck, Ulrich, 211 16, 117
belligerence, 66 Bukatman, Scott, 149
Beloved (Morrison), 123 Bumiller, Elizabeth, 111
Benamou, Michel, 261 n. 2 Bunche, Ralph, 116
Benjamin, Walter, 172, 212–13, 214, 215 Bunton, Robin, 269 n. 7
Bercovitch, Sacvan, 250 n. 16 bureaucracy, 170, 189
Berlant, Lauren, 110, 113, 121–24, 126– bureaucratic courage, 191–94
27, 133, 257 n. 7, 258–59 n. 17 bureaucratic depression, 169–70, 194
Birren, James, 251 n. 26 bureaucratic embarrassment, 169
‘‘Black Writing’’ (Abel), 255 n. 12 bureaucratic feelings, 136–37, 167–73,
Blade Runner (film), 141–42, 146–49, 265 n. 7
154, 261 n. 4, 262–63 n. 10, 263 n. 11, bureaucratic numbing, 189
263 n. 13 bureaucratic panic, 168–69
Blau, Herbert, 224, 232 bureaucratic rage: as a√ect and inten-
Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), 19, 31, 82, sities, 24; aids memoirs and, 5,
88–99, 104–5, 123, 254 n. 6, 254–55 177–80, 191, 218, 264–65 n. 1, 267
n. 8, 255 n. 9, 255 n. 11 n. 18, 267 n. 20; Alzheimer’s illness
Blumenthal, Ralph, 169 narrative and, 138, 180–84, 191, 219,

Index 299
bureaucratic rage (continued ) chafing emotions, 33
224; anorexia and, 193–94; author’s Chambers, Ross, 174
experience of identity theft and, 165– Change, The (Greer), 58, 248 n. 1, 250
67, 173–74; caring relationships n. 22
and, 165, 176–77, 189–90, 193; de- Chapman, Mary, 257 n. 8
pendency and, 192–93; deper- Chicago Hope (television program),
sonalized relations and, 168, 171–72, 197–99, 208, 212, 268 nn. 4–5,
173–75, 176–89; described, 169, 265 268–69 n. 6, 269 n. 7
n. 3; emotional violence and, 137, Chodorow, Nancy J., 219
168; illness memoirs and, 135, 137, Christian, Barbara, 83
173–77, 264–65 n. 1, 266 n. 15; Cicero, 59
imagined empathy and, 192; resent- cinema, 137, 197, 212–14, 270–71
ment and, 165; schizophrenia n. 16, 271 n. 22
memoir and, 176, 184–89, 191, 192; cinema of attraction, 137, 197, 212–14,
shared humanity and, 165, 176–77, 270–71 n. 16
189–90, 193 City and the Country, The (Williams),
bureaucratic relief, 169 237 n. 12
bureaucratic su√ering, 136 Clark, Hilary, 253 n. 1
Bureaucratization of the World, The Clarke, Arthur C., 141–42, 144–46,
(Jacoby), 165 154, 261 n. 4, 262 n. 7
Burgess, Ernest, 251 n. 27 Clayton, V. P., 251 n. 26
Burrows, Roger, 269 n. 7 clinical depression, 218
Bush, George H. W., 109, 256 n. 3 Clinton, Bill, 109, 126
Bush, George W., 32, 111, 125–27, 129, Clinton, Hillary, 245 n. 6
256 n. 2, 257 nn. 6–7 Clough, Patricia Ticineto, 236–37 n. 9
But Enough About Me (Miller), 239 CNN Headline News, 196
n. 23, 266 n. 13 Code, Lorraine, 192
Butler, Octavia, 263 n. 11 coevolution of species, 139
Butler, Robert N., 250 n. 18 Cognition (Tomkins), 252 n. 34
Cohler, Bertram J., 251–52 n. 29
Cady, Joseph, 267 n. 18 Cohn, Jonathan, 191
Campbell, Sue, 243 n. 39 Cole, Thomas R., 250 n. 16
Cantwell, Maria, 109 Companion Species Manifesto (Hara-
‘‘ ‘Can You Be BLACK and Look at way), 1, 139
This?’’’ (Alexander), 258 n. 15 compassion: concept of, 111–13, 125,
‘‘Capacity to Be Alone, The’’ (Win- 132–33, 257 nn. 8–9; cyborgs and
nicott), 273 n. 9 human capacity for, 147, 263 n. 11;
Card, Orson Scott, 156, 263 n. 16 empathy and, 113–14, 116–17, 192,
Carroll, Noel, 179 218, 242 n. 33, 256 n. 2, 258 n. 12;
Caruth, Cathy, 113 masculinization of, 110–11, 127; nar-
Case, Sue-Ellen, 261 n. 2 ratives and, 218, 242 n. 33; political
Cassavetes, John, 63 campaigns and, 32, 110, 111, 256–57
Cato’s Tears (Ellison), 257 n. 8 n. 4; self-reflective emotions and,

300 Index
 258 n. 14; statistical panic and, 218. ‘‘Cyborg Anthropology’’ (Downey), 146
See also empathy; liberal compassion cyborgs: a√ect system and, 139, 159–
compassionate conservatism, 109–13, 63, 263–64 n. 21, 264 n. 22; Agent
125–26, 256 nn. 2–3, 257 nn. 6–7; Ruby character and, 162–63, 264
concept of compassion and, 125; ef- n. 25; co-emotional evolution and,
fective compassion and, 129, 130, 143–46, 262 n. 7; Cog project and,
131; economic body and narratives 136, 162; compassion and, 147, 263
of, 32, 111, 126–30, 257 n. 7; empa- n. 11; defined, 141; DINA presence
thy and, 256 n. 2; narrative of, 32, and, 163; emergence and, 154, 158,
109, 125–26; power and, 131; shame 263 n. 19; gender and, 264 n. 25;
and, 30; social su√ering and, 117–18, human-technology interaction and,
131; social transformation beliefs of, 142–43, 155–59, 263 nn. 17–18, 264
111, 122, 127; su√ering of body and, n. 22; humans and interactions with,
130; trauma and, 30. See also com- 138, 145, 155–59; ideal multicultural
passion; liberal compassion society and, 149–51, 155, 263 n. 15;
Compassionate Conservatism (Olasky), industrial robots and, 158–59; inter-
110, 127–29, 131 subjectivity and, 141–42, 143–55, 261
Compassionate Conservative (Jacobs), n. 5, 261–62 n. 6, 262 nn. 7–9,
110, 129–31 262–63 n. 10, 263 nn. 11–13, 263
Conceiving Ada (film), 264 n. 25 n. 15; Kismet robot and, 136, 162; My
confusion, 52, 53, 92, 95–97, 106, 191 Real Baby doll, 136, 158, 162; as peo-
‘‘Contagious Feelings’’ (Gibbs), 243 ple, 136, 155, 162; prosthetic emo-
n. 42 tions and, 136, 139–40, 160, 263–
cool emotion, 16–18, 20, 44, 65, 145, 64 n. 21; science fiction and, 136,
167, 260 n. 2 141–42, 261 n. 4; self-correcting sys-
‘‘Coping with Fear’’ (Brody), 269 n. 9 tems and, 159; sentient, 163–64;
Coupland, Douglas, 139, 141, 149 structures of feeling and, 163; su√er-
Courtivron, Isabelle de, 252 n. 32 ing and, 136, 142, 144; sympathy for,
Couser, Thomas, 266 n. 15 8, 135, 136, 139, 141, 146–49, 151–53,
credit service bureaucracy, 165–67, 168 261 n. 3; techno-artifacts and, 136,
Crimp, Douglas, 29, 184 163–64; Turing test and, 147. See
crowd psychology, 22–23, 243 n. 37 also technological lifeworld
Culley, Margo, 55 ‘‘Cyborgs and Replicants’’ (Rayner),
cultural studies, 5, 63, 236 n. 8, 236–37 262–63 n. 10
n. 9
Cultural Studies’ A√ective Voices D’Aluisio, Faith, 162
(Gregg), 240 n. 27 Damasio, Antonio R., 17–18, 161, 239
Culture of Sentiment, The (Samuels), n. 18, 242–43 n. 36
258 n. 16 Davidson, Cathy N., 258–59 n. 17
Cunningham, Michael, 19, 142, 151–53, daydream, prose, 229–32
154, 261 n. 4 Death’s Door (Gilbert), 233–34
Customer Rage Study, 171 Declining to Decline (Gullette), 252–53
Cvetkovich, Ann, 29, 236–37 n. 9 n. 37

Index 301
Deep Blue, 150, 162 Doyle, Richard, 260–61 n. 1, 262–63
DeJean, Joan, 241 n. 29 n. 10, 264 n. 22
DeKoven, Marianne, 237–38 n. 13 ‘‘Dream as an Object’’ (Pontalis), 273
Deleuze, Gilles, 24, 236–37 n. 9, 247 n. 10
n. 18 dreams: aging and, 72; emotions and,
‘‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s 6; Freud on anger and, 34, 38–42,
Gradiva’’ (Freud), 34, 226–27, 244 245–46 n. 7, 246 n. 8; narratives
n. 2 and, 6; ‘‘Non Vixit’’ dream, 38–41,
De Man, Paul, 174, 234, 266 n. 12 47, 53, 245–46 n. 7; technological
‘‘Democratic Social Space’’ (Fisher), 113 unconsciousness and, 144
Denby, David, 25 Dreyfus, Hubert, 160
depression: aging and, 31, 64, 67, 71, Durkheim, Emile, 22, 23
249 n. 11; bureaucratic, 169–70, Dust (Steedman), 240 n. 27
194; clinical, 218; mania vs., 138;
medications for, 254 n. 7; statistical Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
panic and, 138, 218 of 1844 (Marx), 219
Derrida, Jacques, 215 economic history, 215
Dery, Mark, 148 Egan, Maurice-Francis, 249–50 n. 15
Descartes’ Error (Damasio), 17, 161 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 255 n. 12
De Sousa, Ronald, 153, 237 n. 10 Eisenberg, Lee, 237 n. 11
‘‘Development of Wisdom, The’’ Elias, Norbert, 100
(Clayton and Birren), 251 n. 26 Eliot, T. S., 231
diasporic emotion, 235–36 n. 4 Elliott, Carl, 190
Dick, Philip K., 141–42, 146, 261 n. 4, Ellison, Julie, 106–7, 257 n. 8
263 n. 11 ‘‘Embodied Computer/User, The’’
Didion, Joan, 1–7, 24, 26, 234 (Lupton), 263 n. 17
Diedrich, Lisa, 267 n. 21 ‘‘Embodied Risk’’ (Kavanagh and
di√erence demographics, 195 Broom), 268 n. 4
digital culture. See technological life- Emergence, 154
world Emmeche, Claus, 154
‘‘Disturbance of Memory’’ (Freud), emotion: aging politics and, 5, 31, 61–
229, 230, 246 n. 11, 273 n. 7 63, 67, 249 n. 9, 249–50 n. 15, 250
Dixon, Thomas, 235 n. 3 n. 16; autobiographical experience
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? of, 8–9; background feelings and,
(Dick), 141–42, 146, 261 n. 4, 263 17–18, 239 n. 18; becoming feminist
n. 11 and, 78; blocking of, 238–39 n. 16;
Doane, Mary Ann, 271 n. 22 catastrophe theory of, 45, 178; chaf-
‘‘Doing Sixty’’ (Steinem), 75–76 ing, 33, 41; in clusters, 53; cognitive
Dominus, Susan, 252 n. 30 edge of, 81; commodification of, 21,
‘‘Don’t Lose Sight of Real, Everyday 81, 101; conscience and, 133; cool,
Risks’’ (Brody), 210 16–18, 20, 44, 65, 145, 167, 260 n. 2;
Douglas, Ann, 257 n. 8 critical reflection on, 1; cultural force
Downey, Gary Lee, 146 of, 176, 266–67 n. 16; cultural poli-

302 Index
 tics of, 2, 7, 235 n. 3; diminution of, Ender’s Game (Card), 156
16; dominant tradition and, 4; dreams Eng, David L., 235–36 n. 4
and, 6; epistemological privilege of, Erikson, Erik H., 249 n. 5, 251 n. 24
47, 97; as evolutionary strength, 145; Etiquette in Society (Post), 1–2
expansive, 33; Freud on, 3–4, 33–47, ‘‘Everyone’s Protest Novel’’ (Baldwin),
49–54, 244 n. 2, 246 n. 8; histories 122, 123
of, 8; literary, 7, 20, 95, 124, 232–33, evocative object, 27, 233
259 n. 18; meta-emotion, 248 n. 23; ‘‘Evocative Object, The’’ (Bollas), 229
narrative and, 32, 118, 124–25, 240– expansive emotions, 33
41 n. 28; neoliberal concept of, 23; os- Experience without Qualities (Good-
cillation of, 138; ownership of vocabu- stein), 271 n. 17
lary for, 1, 3, 24, 148, 233; philoso- Extreme Makeover (television program),
phers’ works on, 2, 7, 235 n. 1, 237 190
n. 10; poetics of, 3, 9, 11, 19, 98, 123, Extremities (Miller and Tougaw), 18
135, 153; prosthetic, 136, 139–40, 160,
263–64 n. 21; quiet, 33; rapid circula- fear, 243–44 n. 44
tion of, 8; regret of, 18; self-reflective, Feeling for the Organism, A (Keller), 141,
258 n. 14; sequencing of, 30–31, 85– 155, 261 n. 3
87, 238–39 n. 16, 253 n. 2, 254–55 Feeling in Theory (Terada), 262–63
n. 8; social construction of, 73; social n. 10
and historical context of, 10–11, 20– ‘‘Feeling No Pain’’ (Krugman), 256 n. 2
22, 241 n. 29, 242–42 n. 31, 242 Feeling Power (Boler), 235 n. 2, 237–38
nn. 32–33; standards of, 61–62; n. 13, 247 n. 13, 247 n. 18, 258 n. 14
strong, 33; structures of feeling and, feelings: aging and, 69; archive of, 29;
12, 237 n. 12, 237–38 n. 13; study of, 2, bureaucratic, 136–37, 167–73, 265
235 nn. 1–2; techno-artifacts and, 136, n. 7; critical phenomenology and,
163–64; theory of, 3–4; transmission 135; defined, 26; histories of, 8; nar-
of, 50–51 rative and, 19–27; new sites and,
emotional correctness, 110 135–38; power of, 219; social and his-
emotional exercise, 67 torical context of, 7, 10–11, 20, 240
emotional experience, 3, 219 n. 25; study of, 2; thought and, 234
Emotional History of the United States, feeling trap, 97
An (Lewis and Sterns), 62 Felman, Shoshana, 247 n. 18
emotional illness, 18 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 68,
emotional labor, 21, 23, 241–42 n. 31 250 n. 21
emotional loss, 2–3, 180, 192, 235–36 feminism: anger and, 30, 34–35, 45–
n. 4 52, 77, 243 n. 13, 243–44 n. 14, 247
emotional pollution, 94, 254 n. 7 n. 14, 252–53 n. 37; guilt and, 106–8;
empathy, 71, 110, 113–17, 118, 146–48, oppressor-oppressed paradigm and,
185, 192, 218, 242 n. 33, 256 n. 2, 258 54–55; pedagogy and, 54–55, 247
n. 12. See also compassion n. 18, 247–48 n. 21; periodic rein-
‘‘Empathy, Legal Storytelling, and the vention of, 60; politicized groups
Rule of Law’’ (Massaro), 258 n. 12 and, 49–51, 247 n. 14; racism

Index 303
feminism (continued ) 30, 42–43; on declaration of desire
accusations and, 56, 248 n. 22; rage by negation, 212; ‘‘Delusions and
and, 71; wisdom and, 252 n. 31 Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva,’’ 34,
Feminist Case against Bureaucracy, The 226–27, 244 n. 2; ‘‘Disturbance of
(Ferguson), 168 Memory,’’ 229, 230, 246 n. 11, 273
Feminization of American Culture, The n. 7; on dreams and anger, 38–42,
(Douglas), 257 n. 8 245–46 n. 7, 246 n. 8; on emotions,
Ferguson, Kathy, 168 3–4, 33, 34, 41, 49, 53, 244 n. 2, 246
films, 137, 197, 212–14, 270–71 n. 16, n. 8; Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
271 n. 22 4; on frozen and contained anger,
Financialization of Daily Life (Mar- 30, 42–43; Group Psychology, 243
tin), 136 n. 37; on guilt and anger, 30, 43–45,
financial panic, 272 n. 24 52, 80, 245–46 n. 7, 246 nn. 8–11;
‘‘Finding Meager Help in a Sex-Com- on hysteria and anger, 4, 30, 34–38,
plaint System’’ (Blumenthal), 169 245 n. 6, 245–46 n. 7, 246 nn. 8–11;
First and Last Notebooks (Weil), 132 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,
Fisher, Berenice, 79, 106–8 204–205; on interiorized a√ect of
Fisher, Philip, 113, 238–39 n. 16, 242 anger, 30; The Interpretation of
n. 32 Dreams, 6, 33, 38–41, 245–46 n. 7;
Five Stages of the Soul, The (Moody), on male anger, 46; ‘‘The Moses of
251–52 n. 29 Michelangelo,’’ 33, 42, 54; on
Fleissner, Jennifer L., 239 n. 22 mourning, 3, 235–36 n. 4; ‘‘Mourn-
Flesh and Machines (Brooks), 157–58 ing and Melancholia,’’ 3; on ‘‘Non
Fool’s War (Zettel), 163 Vixit’’ dream, 38–41, 245–46 n. 7;
Ford, Kenneth, 263 n. 12 on Oedipus complex, 245–46 n. 7;
fort-da, 222–23, 225, 227–28, 230, 272 on ontological nature of anger, 30;
n. 1, 273 n. 10 on pleasure, 45, 246 n. 11; on re-
Foster, Thomas, 155 pressed desire, 3–4; on shame, 39,
Fountain of Age, The (Friedan), 60, 68– 41–42, 80; Studies on Hysteria, 3–4,
73, 250 nn. 17–19, 251 n. 23 33, 35, 37, 42; Totem and Taboo, 43,
Four of Us, The (Swados), 184–89, 191 50, 246 n. 8; ‘‘The Uncanny,’’ 246
Four Quartets (Eliot), 231 n. 10; ‘‘The Unconscious,’’ 37
Frank, Adam, 236–37 n. 9 Frey, James, 266 n. 13
Fraser, Jill, 265 n. 3 Friedan, Betty, 60, 68–73, 250 nn. 17–
Fraser, Nancy, 189 19, 250 n. 21, 251 n. 23
Freeh, Louis, 103 From Passions to Emotions (Dixon), 235
Freud, Anna, 62 n. 3
Freud, Sigmund: a√ect theory of, 3–4, Fruits of Sorrow (Spelman), 120–21, 124
5, 21, 236 n. 8, 236–37 n. 9, 238–39 Fuchs, Elinor, 183, 272–73 n. 5
n. 16; on aggressivity, 35; on anxiety, Fuller, Henry B., 249 n. 11
45, 246 n. 10; autobiographical expe- ‘‘Future for Autonomous Agents, A’’
rience of, 6; Civilization and Its Dis- (Johnson), 261–62 n. 6
contents, 33, 34, 43–44, 49, 51–52, Future of Nostalgia, The (Boym), 232,
100, 246 n. 9; on contained anger, 233, 241 n. 29

304 Index
Gallop, Jane, 240 n. 26 28, 230, 272 n. 1, 273 n. 10; gen-
Garbo Talks (film), 267 n. 20 dered perspectives and, 8, 111, 233,
Garden in the Machine, The (Em- 267 n. 20; Hamlet and, 242 n. 32;
meche), 154 holding onto, 4; managing one’s,
gender: aging and, 64, 68–69, 249 181, 234; media and, 25; mood as af-
n. 13, 250 nn. 19–20; anger and, 30, fective space and, 26–27, 228–32,
34, 35–36, 46, 51, 111, 245 n. 6, 247 244 n. 45, 273 n. 8; mother-child
n. 15; compassion and, 110–11, 127; connection and, 227–28; nostalgia
cyborgs and, 264 n. 25; double-entry and, 229, 232–33; ownership of, 1,
bookkeeping and, 271 n. 20; display 24, 148, 233; reactions to, 2–3; sepa-
of grief and, 8, 111, 233, 267 n. 20; ration vs. connection and, 219–27,
history of statistics and, 216, 271 272 nn. 1–2; universal experience of,
n. 20; private sphere and, 111; public 233–44
sphere and, 110–11; textual violence ‘‘Grief and the Headhunter’s Rage’’
and, 245 n. 6 (Rosaldo), 266–67 n. 16
Gendered Subjects (Culley and Por- Gri≈ths, Paul, 73
tuges), 55 Grossberg, Lawrence, 26–27
Germany, 235–36 n. 4 Gruman, Gerald J., 73–74
Gibbs, Anna, 243 n. 42 guilt: feminism and, 106–8; Freud on
Gibbs, Nancy, 265 n. 7 anger and, 30, 34, 43–45, 52, 80,
Gi√ord, Sandra, 204, 268 n. 5 245–46 n. 7, 246 nn. 8–11
Gilbert, Sandra M., 233–34 ‘‘Guilt and Shame in the Women’s
Gilleard, Christopher, 180 Movement’’ (Fisher), 79
Gillis, Stacy, 56 Gullette, Margaret Morganroth, 63, 74,
Gilmore, Ruth, 136–37 252–53 n. 37
Glymour, Clark, 263 n. 12 Gunning, Tom, 212, 213
Go√man, Erving, 200
Goleman, Daniel, 147 Hacking, Ian, 195, 211, 216, 271 n. 21
Good Housekeeping, 196 Halberstam, Judith, 254 n. 5
Goodnight, C. Thomas, 168, 265 n. 2 Hall, G. Stanley, 60, 63–68, 249
Goodstein, Elizabeth S., 271 n. 17 nn. 14–15
Gordon, Andrew, 268–69 n. 6 Han, Shinhee, 235–36 n. 4
Gore, Al, 110 Hansen, Mark B., 140
Grasso, Linda M., 55–56 Haraway, Donna, 1, 19, 139, 141, 142,
Gray Panthers, 75 145, 252 n. 31
Green, André, 92, 104 Harding, Jennifer, 237–38 n. 13
Greer, Germaine, 58–59, 68, 75, 248 Hardt, Michael, 241–42 n. 31
n. 1, 250 n. 22 Hartman, Saidiya, 235–36 n. 4
Gregg, Melissa, 240 n. 27 Havel, Václav, 78
grief: capacity to be alone and, 273 n. 9; Hayes, Patrick J., 263 n. 12
diaspora and, 235–36 n. 4; fantasy of Hayles, N. Katherine, 139, 154, 261–62
place and, 219, 230–32, 273 n. 10; n. 6
feeling, 4–5, 24; financial panic and, health: genetics of mental illness and,
272 n. 24; fort-da and, 222–23, 227– 192; mania and, 138; normotic ill-

Index 305
health (continued ) 266 n. 15; illness in modern culture
ness, 16–17; panic attacks, 195; play- and, 137, 191–92; impacts of illness
ing and, 272 n. 4; statistical body and, 192–93; interviews and, 29;
and, 137, 195, 196 pedagogical pact and, 181–82;
health care: anger and, 191; institutions schizophrenia and, 137, 176, 184–
for, 159, 179, 267 n. 19; public vs. 92; as self-reflective texts, 174, 191,
private spheres and, 190–91, 198; 266 n. 13; su√ering and, 126. See
social justice and, 193 also narrative emotions; narratives
Heilbrun, Carolyn G., 48, 54 Ilongot people, 20, 245 n. 4, 266–67
Helal, Kathleen M., 247–48 n. 21 n. 16
Heller, Agnes, 132–33 imagined communities, 30, 31, 192
Hemmings, Clare, 236–37 n. 9 imagined empathy, 30, 31, 192
Henderson, Lynne N., 110, 113, 114–17, ‘‘Immersive and Counterimmersive
257–58 n. 11 Writing about aids‘‘ (Cady), 267
Hendler, Glenn, 29, 124, 237–38 n. 13, n. 18
257 n. 8 Inability to Mourn, The (Mitscherlich
Hendriks-Jansen, Horst, 263 n. 19 and Mitscherlich), 235–36 n. 4
Henig, Robin Marantz, 264 n. 22 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Hennessee, Judith, 250 n. 21 (Jacobs), 120–21, 258 n. 15
Hennessy, Rosemary, 252 n. 36 ‘‘In Defense of Guilt’’ (Bartky), 109
Hertzberg, Hendrik, 137 ‘‘Information Is Alive’’ (Lash), 171
Higgs, Paul, 180 information-story, 19, 126, 172–73
High Anxiety (Mellencamp), 271 n. 18 infrastructure of feeling, 137
Hillman, James, 37, 58, 63, 249 n. 7 ‘‘In Praise of Interactive Emergence’’
Hjort, Mette, 23, 243 n. 38 (Hendriks-Jansen), 263 n. 19
Hochschild, Arlie, 21, 241–42 n. 31 Insight and Responsibility (Erikson), 249
hooks, bell, 247 n. 15 n. 5
Howard, June, 258 n. 16 intensities: bureaucratic rage as a√ect
‘‘Human Rights, Rationality, and Senti- and, 24; postmodern culture, 14–15,
mentality’’ (Rorty), 259 n. 18 25, 104, 110, 171, 211, 239 n. 17; pride
Humiliation (Miller), 241 n. 29 as, 31, 138; rage as a√ect and, 24;
Hunt, Lynn, 242 n. 33 shame as, 31, 87, 100; statistical
Huntington’s disease, 10, 13–14, 200, panic as, 15, 24; structures of feeling
205–8 and, 238–39 n. 16, 239 n. 17, 259–
hysteria, 4, 34–38, 245 n. 6 60 n. 1; technological lifeworld and,
140, 260–61 n. 1
identity politics, 32, 253–54 n. 4 International Herald Tribune, 101
Ignatie√, Michael, 272–73 n. 5 intersubjectivity, 141–42, 143–55, 261
Ihde, Don, 263–64 n. 21 n. 5, 261–62 n. 6, 262 nn. 7–9,
illness memoirs: aids and, 5, 137, 177– 262–63 n. 10, 263 nn. 11–13, 263
80, 191, 218, 264–65 n. 1, 267 n. 18, n. 15
267 n. 20; Alzheimer’s disease and, I, Robot (film), 143, 144
137, 138, 180–84, 191, 219, 224; de- Isernagen, Hartwig, 261 n. 5
scribed, 9, 137, 173–77, 264–65 n. 1,

306 Index
Jacobs, Harriet A., 120–21, 258 n. 15 ‘‘Legality and Empathy’’ (Henderson),
Jacobs, Joseph J., 110, 129–31 114–17
Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Inno- Lejeune, Philippe, 174, 266 n. 13
vation, 132 Lem, Stanislaw, 144
Jacoby, Henry, 165 lesbian community, 201, 202. See also
Jaggar, Alison M.: on anger, 47, 50, 75; queer identity
on emotions, 1, 9, 78, 235 n. 1; ‘‘Love Levi, Primo, 105–6, 124
and Knowledge,’’ 1, 7, 12, 80, 97, 141; Lewis, Helen B., 97
structures of feeling and, 13, 242 Lewis, Jan, 62
n. 32 Lewis, Michael, 96, 255 n. 9
Jameson, Fredric, 15–16, 137, 238–39 Lewis, Myrna I., 237 n. 11
n. 16, 239 n. 17 liberal compassion, 109–12; action
Jenny Jones Show, The, 102–3 and, 124, 132–33, 259 n. 21; concept
Jewell, Richard, 103–4, 256 n. 18 of, 125; empathy and, 113–14, 116–
Johnson, John, 261–62 n. 6 17, 258 n. 12; power and, 123–24;
Jones, Karen, 259 n. 21 private vs. public spheres and, 32,
Joyrich, Lynne, 269 n. 8 118–20, 124–25; sentimentality and
‘‘Just Rage’’ (Phillips), 58 radicalization of, 121–23, 258–59
n. 17; shame and, 30, 32, 124; social
Kaplan, E. Ann, 272 n. 23 su√ering and narratives of, 32, 114–
Katz, Solomon, 199 17, 123, 257–58 n. 11, 258 n. 12, 259
Kavanagh, Anne M., 268 n. 4 n. 18; su√ering of body and narra-
Keller, Evelyn Fox, 141, 155, 261 n. 3 tives of, 32, 120–21, 258 n. 15;
Kill Bill Vol. 2 (film), 25 trauma and, 30. See also compassion;
King and I, The (musical), 122, 124 compassionate conservatism
Kittay, Eva Feder, 165, 192–93 life: as collaboration, 19, 239 n. 23;
Klein, Melanie, 35, 62 emotions in stages of, 34, 63, 248
Kleinman, Arthur, 131, 143, 250 n. 22 nn. 1–2, 249 n. 7, 252 n. 32; finan-
Korot, Beryl, 264 n. 24 cialization of, 10; intimacy of feeling
Kristeva, Julia, 3, 17, 19 and, 29, 219–27; rhetoric of emo-
Krugman, Paul, 256 n. 2 tions for, 30; technological lifeworld
Kuhn, Maggie, 75 and, 8
Life Cycle Completed, The (Erikson), 249
Lash, Scott, 171 n. 5, 251 n. 24
Last Thing He Wanted, The (Didion), 6 Life in School, A (Tompkins), 257 n. 9
Latour, Bruno, 159 ‘‘Life in the Age of Old, Old Age’’
Laub, Dori, 247 n. 18 (Dominus), 252 n. 30
Lazarre, Jane, 96 Life on the Screen (Turkle), 157
Lear, Jonathan, 119, 272 n. 1 Like Beauty (Cunningham), 19, 142,
Le Bon, Gustave, 22–23, 243 n. 37 151–53, 154, 261 n. 4
LeDoux, Joseph, 161 Liquid Modernity (Bauman), 189–90,
Leeson, Lynn Hershman, 162–63, 264 203, 238 n. 15, 239–40 n. 24
n. 25 literary emotions, 7, 20, 95, 124, 232–
Leftover Life to Kill (Thomas), 5 33, 259 n. 18

Index 307
Liu, Alan, 260 n. 2 103–4, 256 n. 18; pride and market-
‘‘Living Dangerously’’ (article), 269– ing of, 31, 81, 100–102, 138; trau-
70 n. 11 matic modality of, 102–5
Longevity Revolution (Roszak), 248 n. 4 Massumi, Brian, 24, 243 n. 41, 243–44
Love, Heather, 238 n. 13 n. 44, 260–61 n. 1
‘‘Love and Knowledge’’ (Jaggar), 1, 7, Mayo Clinic, 268–69 n. 6
12, 80, 97, 141 McClintock, Barbara, 141, 261 n. 3
Love of Beginnings (Pontalis), 1, 219, McLuhan, Marshall, 145
227, 233, 234 McPherson, Tara, 238 n. 13
Love’s Knowledge (Nussbaum), 240–41 ‘‘Meaning of Lumps, The’’ (Gi√ord),
n. 28 204, 268 n. 5
Love’s Labor (Kittay), 165, 192–93 media, 25–26, 100, 172, 211–12, 214–
Luhmann, Nicholas, 170 15. See also mass-mediated shame;
Lumière, Auguste, 213 television
Lumière, Louis, 213 Media Equation, The (Reeves and Nass),
Lupton, Deborah, 263 n. 17 156–57
Lutz, Catherine, 235 n. 2 melancholia, 235–36 n. 4
Lyman, Peter, 246 n. 12 Mellencamp, Patricia, 271 n. 18
Lynd, Helen Merrell, 79, 107 memoirs, 9. See also illness memoirs
Lyotard, Jean-François, 240–41 n. 28 memories, 4–5, 226–27, 273 n. 6
mental illness, 18
Macdonald, Barbara, 9, 57, 76–77, 79– Menzel, Peter, 162
80, 183–84 Merton, Robert K., 265 n. 7
Magistro, Cynthia A., 62 ‘‘Metropolis and Mental Life, The’’
Mairs, Nancy, 173, 251 n. 25 (Simmel), 214, 271 n. 18
‘‘Makeup of Memory, The’’ (Blau), 224 Michaels, Eric, 264–65 n. 1
Making an Exit (Fuchs), 272–73 n. 5 Microserfs (Coupland), 139, 141, 149
Manheimer, Ronald J., 251–52 n. 29 ‘‘Midlife Discourses’’ (Gullette), 63
mania, 138 Miller, Nancy K., 18, 175, 177, 239 n. 23,
‘‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’’ (Haraway), 266 n. 13
141, 142 Miller, Peter, 271 n. 19
Mapping Fate (Wexler), 10, 13–14, 200, Miller, Susan, 22, 242 n. 34, 259 n. 21
205–8 Miller, William Ian, 63, 241 n. 29, 249
Marcus, Jane, 48, 51 n. 9
Marshall, Thurgood, 115, 116 Million Little Pieces, A (Frey), 266 n. 13
Martin, Emily, 138 Milner, Marion, 23–24
Martin, Randy, 10, 136 ‘‘Mind as Machine’’ (Simon), 263 n. 12
Marx, Karl, 219 Minow, Martha L., 133
Marx, Leo, 213 Minsky, Marvin, 160
Marxism and Literature (Williams), 11, 21 Miracle Workers (television program),
Massaro, Toni M., 258 n. 12 190–91
mass-mediated shame: entrapment of mirror neurons, 164
ordinary people and, 31–32, 81, 102– ‘‘Mirror Neurons’’ (Ramachandran),
4; Olympic Games bombing and, 264 n. 27

308 Index
Mitchell, Claudia, 155 narratives: on aging, 60, 76–78, 248
Mitscherlich, Alexander, 235–36 n. 4 n. 4; compassion and, 218, 242 n. 33;
Mitscherlich, Margarete, 235–36 n. 4 emotions and, 80; feminine expres-
Mixed Emotions (Weigert), 265 n. 7 sion of anger in, 48, 51; ideologies
Mixed Feelings (Cvetkovich), 236–37 vs., 1, 19; information-story and, 19,
n. 9 239–40 n. 24; private sphere ex-
Monette, Paul: Becoming a Man, 180; posure in, 239–40 n. 24, 255 n. 11;
Borrowed Time, 5, 177–80, 191, 218, professional a√ect vs., 20, 240 n. 27;
267 n. 18, 267 n. 20; illness prose daydream and, 229–32; social
memoirs and, 176; on institution and historical context of, 20, 240
sta√, 267 n. 19; on mourning, 5 nn. 25–27, 240–41 n. 28. See also ill-
mood, as a√ective space for grief, 26– ness memoirs
27, 228–32, 244 n. 45, 273 n. 8 Nass, Cli√ord, 156–57
mood illnesses, 191 National Enquirer, 101
‘‘Moods and the Conservative Process’’ National Institutes of Mental Health
(Bollas), 228–29, 273 n. 8 (nimh), 18
Moody, Harry, 251–52 n. 29 Navigation of Feeling, The (Reddy), 241
Morris, Meaghan, 240 n. 26 n. 29
Morrison, Toni: Beloved, 123; The Bluest Need for Roots, The (Weil), 132
Eye, 19, 31, 82, 88–92, 97–99, 104– Negative A√ects, The (Tomkins), 252 n. 33
5, 123, 254 nn. 6–7, 254–55 n. 8, 255 Negri, Antonio, 241–42 n. 31
n. 9, 255 n. 11; mutual shame and, Negroponte, Nicholas, 157
31; racial shame and, 88–92, 94– Nettleton, Sarah, 269 n. 7
99, 104–5, 254 n. 6, 254–55 n. 8, New and Improved (Spurlock and Mag-
255 nn. 9–11; on reader’s traumatic istro), 62
shame, 255 n. 1; social su√ering New England Journal of Medicine, 196
and, 123 New Maladies of the Soul (Kristeva), 19
‘‘Moses of Michelangelo, The’’ (Freud), New Philosophy for New Media
33, 42, 54 (Hansen), 140
mourning, 3–5, 29, 226–27, 235–36 Newsweek, 196
n. 4, 273 n. 6 New Yorker, 18, 256–57 n. 4
‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ (Freud), 3 New York Times, 164, 169, 173, 196,
‘‘Mourning and Militancy’’ (Crimp), 29 211–12, 256 n. 2
Muecke, Stephen, 135 New York Times Book Review, 249–50
Multitude (Hardt and Negri), 241–42 n. 15
n. 31 New York Times Sunday Magazine, 252
Mumford, Rebecca, 56 n. 30, 264 n. 22, 269–70 n. 11
Muñoz, José, 237–38 n. 13 ‘‘Next Frontier’’ article, 196
MURDER and murder (film), 10, 13, Ngai, Sianne, 259–60 n. 1
138, 200–204 Nickel and Dimed (Ehrenreich), 255
mutual shame, 31, 81, 105–8 n. 12
nonhuman cyborgs. See cyborgs
narrative emotions, 32, 118, 124–25, ‘‘non vixit’’ dream, 38–41, 245–46 n. 7
240–41 n. 28 Noonday Demon (Solomon), 17, 218

Index 309
normotic illness, 16–17 Parents Involved in Community Schools
nostalgia, 63, 229, 232–33, 241 n. 29 v. Seattle School District, 117
‘‘Notes on the Technological Imagina- Parisi, Luciana, 236–37 n. 9
tion’’ (Benamou), 261 n. 2 ‘‘Partners, Not Rivals?’’ (Minow), 133
Nussbaum, Martha C., 110, 113, 118– Passions, The (Solomon), 75
20, 235 n. 1, 240–41 n. 28, 258 n. 14 Passions of Law, The (Brandes), 257–58
Nye, David E., 263 n. 15 n. 11
Paternalism, 124
obsession, culture of, 18, 239 n. 22 Patients Like Me (Web site), 190
Obsessional Modernity (Fleissner), 239 ‘‘Paul Monette’s Vigilant Witnessing’’
n. 22 (Diedrich), 267 n. 21
‘‘O≈cers on the Edge’’ (Gibbs), 243 pedagogic violence, 55
n. 42, 265 n. 7 ‘‘Perdre de vue’’ (Pontalis), 228
Ogden, Thomas H., 272 n. 2 Performing Lesbian (Case), 261 n. 2
Olasky, Marvin, 110, 127–29, 131 ‘‘Personal, Technical, and Public
Olson, Karen, 196 Sphere of Argument, The’’ (Good-
Olympic Games bombing (1996), 103– night), 265 n. 2
4, 256 n. 18 Pétillon, Pierre-Yves, 261 n. 2
‘‘On Holding and Containing, Being Petro, Patrice, 213–14
and Dreaming’’ (Ogden), 272 n. 2 Pfau, Thomas, 244 n. 45
‘‘On Optimism’’ (Sofri), 270 n. 13 Pfeil, Fred, 237–38 n. 13
On Private Madness (Green), 92 ‘‘Phenomenology of Anger, The’’
‘‘On the Structural View of A√ect’’ (Rich), 51
(Smith), 236 n. 8 phenomenology of technology, 160
‘‘On Waking Up One Morning’’ (Sche- Phillips, Adam, 58
man), 54–55 Picard, Rosalind W., 160–61
Opening Night (film), 63 Pifer, Alan, 249 n. 12
oppressor-oppressed paradigm, 54–55 Pinch, Adela, 21, 242 n. 32
Ordinary A√ects (Stewart), 165 pity, 118–21, 131
Orr, Jackie, 195, 269 n. 7 Playing and Reality (Winnicott), 223–
Osler, William, 65 24, 272 n. 4
Our Aging Society (Pifer), 249 n. 12 Playing Dolly (Kaplan and Squier), 272
outlaw emotions: aging and, 30, 31, 75; n. 23
anger as, 30, 31, 47, 54, 75, 80; pride Plessy v. Ferguson, 115
as, 80; shame as, 87, 97 poetics of emotion, 3, 9, 11, 19, 98, 123,
135, 153
Panic Diaries (Orr), 195, 269 n. 7 political campaigns, 32, 110, 111, 256–
panic disorder, 195, 269 n. 7 57 n. 4
Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in Politics and Letters (Williams), 14
American Fiction (Zimmerman), 272 ‘‘Politics of Anger, The’’ (Lyman), 246
n. 24 n. 12
Parable of the Sower (Butler), 263 n. 11 Pontalis, J.-B.: ‘‘At the End of the Line,’’
Parables for the Virtual (Massumi), 24, 19, 219–22, 227–28, 230, 232, 233,
243 n. 41, 243–44 n. 44, 260–61 n. 1 272 n. 2, 273 nn. 9–10; ‘‘Dream as

310 Index
 an Object,’’ 273 n. 10; on grief to sion and, 32, 118–20, 124–25; medi-
come, 27; Love of Beginnings, 1, 219, cal melodrama and, 190–91, 198
227, 233, 234; on ownership of vo-
cabulary for emotions, 1, 3, 24, 148, Queen of America, The (Berlant), 127,
233; ‘‘Perdre de vue,’’ 228; on separa- 257 n. 7
tion vs. connection, 224–26; Win- queer identity, 85–88, 201, 202, 253–
dows, 222–23, 229, 234, 273 n. 10 54 n. 4, 254 n. 5
‘‘Poor Eliza’’ (Berlant), 121–23, 258–59 ‘‘Queer Performativity’’ (Sedgwick),
n. 17 85–87, 253–54 n. 4
Poovey, Mary, 216, 271 n. 20 Quiet as It’s Kept (Bouson), 255 n. 11
Porter, Theodore, 217 quiet emotions, defined, 33
Portuges, Catherine, 55
Post, Emily, 1–2 ‘‘Race for Theory, The’’ (Christian), 83
postmodern culture: intensities and, racial shame: cultural change and, 97–
14–15, 25, 239 n. 17; sensations and, 99, 255 nn. 11–12; everyday life and
18, 25, 239 n. 22; statistical panic narrative of, 92–94, 254 n. 7; explo-
and, 137, 197, 208–12, 214–15 sive violence and narrative of, 88–
‘‘Postmodernism’’ (Jameson), 15, 239 92, 254 n. 6; liberal and conservative
n. 17 compassion narratives and, 30; mod-
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder els of shame vs., 81, 82; sequencing
(nimh), 18 of emotions and, 57, 97, 254–55 n. 8;
power, 30, 37, 123–24, 131, 219 traumatic and chronic modalities of,
Power, Michael, 270 n. 15 30, 31, 94–99, 254–55 n. 8
Power of Feelings, The (Chodorow), 219 racism, 32, 56, 114–18, 123, 131, 248
Pribram, E. Deidre, 237–38 n. 13 n. 22, 257–58 n. 11, 258 n. 12, 259
pride, 31, 80, 81, 86–87, 100–102, 138 n. 18
private sphere: a√ect theory and, 21; ‘‘Radical Surgery’’ (Gordon), 268–69
defined, 168, 265 n. 2; feminine as- n. 6
sociation of, 111; hypermediated rage: aging and, 69–70, 72–73, 77, 250
space and merging with, 100; hys- n. 22, 252 n. 35, 252–53 n. 37; Cus-
teria and, 37; liberal compassion tomer Rage Study, 171; feminism
and, 32, 118–20, 124–25; medical and, 71; race and, 247 n. 15; safe-
melodrama and, 198; mourning guarding anger and, 77, 184
and, 29; narratives and exposure of, Rainer, Yvonne, 10, 13–14, 138, 200–
239–40 n. 24, 255 n. 11; neoliberal 204, 217
concept of emotions and, 23; social Ramachandran, V. S., 164, 264 n. 27
transformation and, 111, 122, 127 Rationality of Emotion, The (De Sousa),
‘‘Profile of Older Americans: 2006,’’ 60 237 n. 10
prosthetic emotions, 136, 139–40, 160, Rawls, John, 193
263–64 n. 21 ‘‘Raymond Williams’’ (Simpson), 237
psychogerontology, 64 n. 12
psychological realism, 22, 242 n. 34 Rayner, Alice, 262–63 n. 10
public sphere, 29–30, 36–37, 265 n. 5; ‘‘Real Transformers, The’’ (Henig), 264
gender and, 110–11; liberal compas- n. 22

Index 311
Reddy, William R., 241 n. 29 sadness, 253 n. 2
Reeves, Byron, 156–57 Samuels, Shirley, 258 n. 16
reading unconscious, 124 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 81–85
Reich, Steve, 264 n. 24 Scar Tissue (Ignatie√ ), 272–73 n. 5
remembrance, 4–5, 226–27, 273 n. 6 Scenes of Shame (Adamson and Clark),
Replications (Telotte), 262 n. 7 253 n. 1
repressed desire, 3–4 Schadenfreude, 212
‘‘Resistance, Terminable and Intermi- Sche√, Thomas J., 102
nable’’ (Al-Kassim), 256 n. 17 Scheman, Naomi, 49–50, 52, 54–55,
Retzinger, Suzanne M., 102, 246 170, 235 n. 1, 247 n. 14
n. 8 schizophrenia memoirs, 176, 184–89,
Re-Viewing Reception (Joyrich), 269 n. 8 191, 192
Rich, Adrienne, 51 Schmitz, Jonathan, 102–3
Rich, Cynthia, 77 Schwab, Gabriele, 244 n. 46
Rise of Statistical Thinking, The (Por- science fiction, 136, 141–42, 261 n. 4
ter), 217 Screening Space (Sobchak), 146–47
risk society, 174, 203, 211, 270 n. 13 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 85–87, 236–
‘‘Risks of Empathy, The’’ (Boler), 258 37 n. 9, 253–54 n. 4
n. 14 self, as object, 136
Rizzolatti, Giacomo, 164 self-analysis experiences, 6–9. See also
Roach, Marion: Another Name for Mad- illness memoirs; narratives
ness, 138, 180–84, 191, 219, 224, 232; self-reflexive thought, 57, 79–80, 248
on health care system, 191; illness n. 23
memoirs and, 176; on impacts of ill- Seltzer, Mark, 268 n. 3
ness, 192; literature on Alzheimer’s Senescence (Hall), 60, 63–68, 249
disease and, 267 n. 23 nn. 14–15
Robinson, Mary, 74 Sensational Designs (Tompkins), 112,
Robo Sapiens (Menzel and D’Alui- 257 nn. 8–9
sio), 162 sentimentality, 112–14, 121–23, 257
robots. See cyborgs nn. 8–9, 258–59 n. 17. See also com-
Robot Stories (film), 143 passion
Roe v. Wade, 114 Sentimental Men (Chapman and
Romantic Moods (Pfau), 244 n. 45 Hendler), 257 n. 8
Rorty, Richard, 259 n. 18 September 11 attacks, 14, 61, 210
Rosaldo, Michelle Z., 19–20, 171, 240 sequencing of emotions, 30, 31, 85–87,
n. 25 238–39 n. 16, 253 n. 2, 254–55 n. 8
Rosaldo, Renato, 176, 245 n. 4, 266– Shadow of the Object, The (Bollas), 16
67 n. 16 shame, 79, 81; anger and, 83–85, 253
Rose, Gillian, 208 n. 2; commercialization of, 100–
Rose, Phyllis, 199, 208 104; compassionate conservatism
Roszak, Theodore, 248 n. 4 and, 30; confusion and, 95–97, 106;
Rules of Sociological Method, The (Durk- defined, 80; emotional sequencing
heim), 22 of, 85, 86–87, 253 n. 2; ethical model
of, 81–83; as free radical, 86; Freud

312 Index
 on, 80; gender and, 82, 84, 254 n. 5, Sociology of Health Promotion, The
255 n. 9; liberal, 108; liberal compas- (Bunton, Nettleton, and Burrows),
sion and, 30, 32, 124; as outlaw emo- 269 n. 7
tion, 87, 97; as psychological sociology of human-technology inter-
emotion, 31; queer identity and, 85– action, 142–43, 155–59, 263 nn. 17–
88, 253–54 n. 4, 254 n. 5; sexual ori- 18, 264 n. 22
entation and, 82; as social emotion, Sofri, Adriano, 270 n. 13
31, 246 n. 8; studies of, 253 n. 1; Solomon, Andrew, 17, 218
transformational model of, 85–88, Solomon, Robert, 75
253–54 n. 4 Space Odyssey, A (Clarke), 141–42, 144–
‘‘Shame and Gender’’ (Bartky), 94–96 46, 154, 261 n. 4, 262 n. 7
Shame and Its Sisters (Sedgwick and Speaker for the Dead (Card), 156, 263
Frank), 139, 236–37 n. 9 n. 16
‘‘Shame and White Gay Masculinity’’ Speaking from the Heart (Shields), 248
(Halberstam), 254 n. 5 n. 23
Shapiro v. Thompson, 114, 115 Specimen Days (Cunningham), 19
Shields, Stephanie A., 248 n. 23 Spelman, Elizabeth V.: ‘‘Anger and In-
shock, 32, 138, 212–17 subordination,’’ 49, 52; on compas-
Sick (Cohn), 191 sion, 109, 110, 113; Fruits of Sorrow,
Silent Running (film), 142, 149–51, 154, 120–21, 124; on hysteria, 245 n. 6;
261 n. 4 philosophers’ works on emotions
Silver, Brenda R., 48–49, 247–48 n. 21 and, 235 n. 1; on politics of emo-
Simians, Cyborgs and Women (Hara- tion, 49
way), 252 n. 31 Spielberg, Steven, 143
Simmel, Georg, 203, 214, 271 n. 18 Spillane, Sherri, 101
Simon, Herbert A., 263 n. 12 ‘‘Spirit of the Object at the Hand of
Simpson, David, 237 n. 12, 237–38 Fate, The’’ (Bollas), 231
n. 13 Spurlock, John C., 62
situated knowledge, 75 ‘‘Squaring Accounts with Uncle Sam’’
Smilow, Stanford, 173 (Fraser), 265 n. 3
Smith, Joseph H., 236 n. 8 Squier, Susan, 272 n. 23
Sobchak, Vivian, 146–47 squiggle game, 227
Social Security, 61, 249 n. 6 Srivastava, Sarita, 33, 56, 248 n. 22
social su√ering: compassionate conser- States of Injury (Brown), 247 n. 14
vatism and, 117–18, 131; liberal com- statistical body, 195–96
passion and, 32, 114–17, 123, 257–58 statistical hope, 268 n. 2
n. 11, 257 n. 12, 259 n. 18 statistical panic, 8, 135; action to con-
Social Su√ering (Kleinman), 131 vert, 215; as a√ect, 24; airline indus-
Society of Mind, The (Minsky), 160 try and, 210–11; anger and, 26;
society of the spectacle, 100, 102, author’s experience of, 9–10, 237
190, 211 n. 11; boredom and, 14–15, 25, 138,
society of the statistic, 197, 199–200, 212–16; breast cancer risk and, 198,
205, 208–12, 268 nn. 3–5, 269–70 201–4, 268 nn. 4–5, 268–69 n. 6,
n. 11, 270 n. 15 269 n. 9; calculus of risk and, 211,

Index 313
statistical panic (continued ) string, as symbol, 222–23, 228, 230,
270 n. 13; cinema of attraction and, 272 n. 1, 272 n. 4
137, 197, 212–14, 270–71 n. 16; clini- strong emotions, 33
cal depression and, 218; compassion structures of feeling: cyborgs and, 163;
and, 218; death and, 201; decalculea emotions and, 12, 237–38 n. 13, 237
and, 271 n. 18; depression and, 138, n. 12; epistemological dimension of,
218; health care and, 137, 195, 196; 12–14, 242 n. 32; identity politics
healthism and, 198, 269 n. 7; histor- and, 32; intensities and, 238–39
ical frame of, 197, 216–18, 271 n. 16, 259–60 n. 1; in literature, 135,
nn. 20–22, 272 nn. 23–25; Hunt- 259–60 n. 1; social formations and,
ington’s disease risk and, 206, 207; 11, 14, 53, 138; statistical panic and,
as intensities, 15, 24; media cycle 137, 197, 208–14, 270–71 n. 16, 271
and, 211–12, 214–15; medical statis- nn. 17–18
tics and, 197, 204–5; moral defi- su√ering, 136, 142, 144; of body, 32,
ciency and lack of, 199; narratives 120–21, 130, 258 n. 15. See also social
and, 138, 197, 218; oscillation of su√ering
emotions and, 138; personal net ‘‘Survival as a Social Construct’’ (Bau-
worth and, 10, 237 n. 11; postmod- man), 199–200
ern, 137, 197, 208–12, 214–15; prob- Swados, Elizabeth, 176, 184–89, 191, 192
abilities and, 195, 196–97, 205, 216, sympathy, 8, 135, 136, 139, 141, 146–49,
268 n. 3; risk society and, 174, 203, 151–53, 261 n. 3. See also compas-
211, 270 n. 13; society of the statistic sion; empathy
and, 197, 199–200, 205, 208–12, ‘‘Sympathy and Solidarity’’ (Bartky),
268 nn. 3–5, 269–70 n. 11, 270 246 n. 12
n. 15; structures of feeling and, 137,
197, 208–14, 270–71 n. 16, 271 talk show a√ect, 25
nn. 17–18; technological lifeworld Taming of Chance, The (Hacking), 195,
and, 217, 272 n. 25; tv medical dra- 216, 271 n. 21
mas and, 137, 197–99, 208, 212, 268 Taub, Eric, 263 n. 18
nn. 4–5, 268–69 n. 6, 269 n. 7 Taylor, Charles, 136
statistical thrift, 203 technical sphere, 168, 265 n. 5
Stearns, Peter N., 16, 18, 62, 136 techno-artifacts theories, and emotions
Steedman, Carolyn, 240 n. 27 of cyborgs, 136, 163–64
Steinem, Gloria, 75–76, 249 n. 12 technological lifeworld: accounting
Stengers, Isabelle, 146 and, 271 n. 19; coevolution of species
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bate- and, 139–40; history of, 140–41, 261
son), 159 n. 2; intensities and, 140, 260–61
Stevens, Wallace, 120 n. 1; organic human world and, 8;
Stewart, Kathleen, 165 perpetual emotion machines and,
stories. See narratives 137; shock of the new and, 138, 212–
‘‘Storyteller, The’’ (Benjamin), 172 16, 217; statistical panic and, 217,
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 112–13, 120– 272 n. 25. See also cyborgs
23, 124, 257 n. 9 ‘‘Technology and the Body’’ (Iser-
Strange Fits of Passion (Pinch), 21 nagen), 261 n. 5

314 Index
Technology and the Lifeworld (Ihde), everyday life, 29; feminist pedagogy
263–64 n. 21 and, 247 n. 18; intergenerational,
Teknolust (film), 264 n. 25 98; liberal vs. conservative
telephone, 219, 220–22, 223, 227 modalities of shame and, 30; mass-
television: anxiety and, 271 n. 18; femi- production of shame and, 102–5;
nine spectator-consumer and, 198, mental apparatus and, 4, 36, 96;
269 n. 8; health care and, 190; per- modalities of racial shame and, 31,
petual emotion machines and, 137; 94–97, 99, 254–55 n. 8; queer iden-
separation vs. connection and, 224– tity in childhood and, 85; sentimen-
26, 272–73 n. 5; tv medical dramas tality and, 113
and, 137, 197–99, 208, 212, 268 Trillin, Calvin, 195, 196
nn. 4–5, 269 nn. 6–7 Tromble, Meredith, 264 n. 25
‘‘Telling Stories’’ (Woodward), 273 n. 6 Troubled Guest, A (Mairs), 173, 251 n. 25
Telotte, J. P., 262 n. 7 trust, 133, 259 n. 21
Terada, Rei, 262–63 n. 10 ‘‘Trust as an A√ective Attitude’’ (Jones),
Testimony (Felman and Laub), 247 n. 18 259 n. 21
‘‘Thinking about Killing’’ (Fisher), 242 Trust in Texts (Miller), 259 n. 21
n. 32 Turing Test, 147
Thomas, Caitlin, 5 Turkle, Sherry, 157, 160
Thomas, Clarence, 117 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 144
thread, as symbol, 222–23, 228, 230,
272 n. 1, 272 n. 4 Ugly Feelings (Ngai), 259–60 n. 1
Three Tales (documentary), 264 n. 24 Unbecoming (Michaels), 264–65 n. 1
Time, 196, 265 n. 7 ‘‘Uncanny, The’’ (Freud), 246 n. 10
Tomkins, Silvan, 34, 139, 160, 252 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 112–13,
nn. 32–34 120–23, 124, 257 n. 9
Tomlinson, Barbara, 245 n. 6 ‘‘Unconscious, The’’ (Freud), 37
Tompkins, Jane, 112, 257 nn. 8–9 Understanding Media (McLuhan), 145
Total Health, 196 Utopia Limited (DeKoven), 237–38 n. 13
Touching Feeling (Sedgwick), 253–54
n. 4 Varela, Francisco J., 149
Tougaw, Jason, 18 Vehement Passions, The (Fisher), 238–
‘‘Tough Babies’’ (Tomlinson), 245 n. 6 39 n. 16
Tragedy of American Compassion video games, 25, 239 n. 17
(Olasky), 127 Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 25
Transformers, The (film), 143 Virginia Woolf Icon (Silver), 247–48
Transforming Emotions (Zhang), 253 n. 21
n. 2 virtual beings. See cyborgs
Transmission of A√ect, The (Brennan),
23, 248 n. 23, 254 n. 6 Walker, Margaret Urban, 240–41 n. 28
trauma: activism and reactions to, 29, Waller, Robert, 122–23
85; a√ect chains severed by, 96; age waning of a√ect, 15–16, 125, 137
of, 18; autobiography and, 174; con- Weigert, Andrew, 265 n. 7
fusion and, 96–97; defined, 113; of Weil, Simone, 132

Index 315
Weisman, Mary-Lou, 251 n. 25 n. 6; private sphere and, 111; re-
Wetwares (Doyle), 260–61 n. 1, 262– pressed desire in, 4; tv melodramas
63 n. 10, 264 n. 22 seen by, 198, 269 n. 8
Wexler, Alice, 10, 13–14, 200, 205– Woodward, Kathleen, 63, 251–52 n. 29,
8, 217 273 n. 6
Wexler, Nancy S., 206 Woolf, Virginia: anger dramatized and
‘‘What Is Sentimentality?’’ (Howard), analyzed by, 7, 46–49, 53–54, 57,
258 n. 16 175, 247 n. 13, 247–48 n. 21; Jacob’s
Whole Woman, The (Greer), 58–59 Room, 33, 57; models of shame and,
Williams, Patricia, 252 n. 35, 254–55 83–85; A Room of One’s Own, 7, 12,
n. 8 23, 46–48, 53, 83, 85, 175, 240 n. 26,
Williams, Raymond: The City and the 247–48 n. 21; on social and histor-
Country, 237 n. 12; Marxism and Lit- ical context of emotions, 11, 34; Three
erature, 11, 21; Politics and Letters, 14; Guineas, 48
structures of feeling and, 11, 14, 53, ‘‘Words and Moods’’ (Schwab), 244
135, 163, 237 n. 12, 237–38 n. 13 n. 46
Windows (Pontalis), 222–23, 229, 234, writing unconscious, 6
273 n. 10
Winnicott, D. W., 223–24, 227, 272 Xenocide (Card), 156
n. 4, 273 n. 9
wisdom, 31, 59, 62, 64–65, 71–72, 74– Year of Magical Thinking, The (Didion),
75, 251 n. 24, 251 n. 26, 251–52 1, 5, 6, 26
n. 29, 252 nn. 30–31 Year of Reading Proust, A (Rose), 199
‘‘Wisdom and Method’’ (Manheimer), ‘‘You’re Calling Me a Racist?’’ (Sri-
251–52 n. 29 vastava), 33
witnessing, 99, 112 youthful structure of the look, 79
‘‘Witnessing in the Classroom’’ (Zem-
bylas), 247 n. 18 Zembylas, Michalinos, 247 n. 18
women: anger and, 8, 34, 48, 51, 58, Zenk, John L., 196
245 n. 6, 248 n. 1; emotions becom- Zettel, Sarah, 163
ing feminist and, 78; grief and, 267 Zhang, Yanhua, 253 n. 2
n. 20; hysteria and, 4, 34–38, 245 Zimmerman, David A., 272 n. 24

316 Index