Disciplined Emotions: Philosophies Of Educated Feelings

Educational Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 203-227

  Boler, Megan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0347297943     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1997.00203.x     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. Critiques of rationality, which emerge strongly within feminist and poststructuralist contexts, are articulated in response to different philosophical legacies and frequently directed at concepts of Cartesian ego or Kantian reason. The narratives that empower this thinking self are critiqued as disembodied, universal, and autonomous, falsely divorced from social or political influence.
2. See for example, Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, eds., Feminist Epistemologies (New York: Routledge, 1993); Jane Flax, Disputed Subjects: Essays On Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1993)
3. Jane Flax, Disputed Subjects: Essays On Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1993)
4. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo, eds., Gender/Body/Knowledge(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology. Metaphysics, Methodology, mill Philosophy of Science (Boston: D. Reidel, 1983); Carol Pateman, The Disorder of Women (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ed. and trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); and Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Rout ledge, 1993). For feminist poststructural treatments of education
5. Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo, eds., Gender/Body/Knowledge(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989)
6. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
7. Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology. Metaphysics, Methodology, mill Philosophy of Science (Boston: D. Reidel, 1983)
8. Carol Pateman, The Disorder of Women (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989)
9. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ed. and trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); and Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Rout ledge, 1993). For feminist poststructural treatments of education
10. Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Rout ledge, 1993). For feminist poststructural treatments of education
11. see for example, Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy," Harvard Educational Reviews 9, no. 3 (1989)
12. Patti Lather, Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1991); Mary Leach and Megin Boler, "Gilies Deleuze: Practicing Education Through Flight and Gossip," in Naming the Multiple: Poststructuralism and Education, ed. Michael Peters (New York: BerginandGarvcy, forthcoming).
13. Mary Leach and Megin Boler, "Gilies Deleuze: Practicing Education Through Flight and Gossip," in Naming the Multiple: Poststructuralism and Education, ed. Michael Peters (New York: BerginandGarvcy, forthcoming).
14. For an introduction to sociological feminist challenges to these dualisms
15. see for example Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987)
16. Barbara Laslett, "Unfeeling Knowledge: Emotion and Objectivity in the History of Sociology," Sociological Forum 5, no. 3 (1990- Ann Game and Andrew Metcalfe, Passionate Sociology (London: Sage Publications, 1996).
17. Another approach to the discourses of emotion might take the form of an analysis of the histories of moral education. Work by such philosophers as Nel Noddings, whose introduction of "caring" reshaped the field of moral education, exemplifies the shifting discourses that allow insight into models of the self, and the relationship of knowledge practices and ethics, which underlie educational theory.
18. The topic of emotional literacy has been popularized through the best-selling book by Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1995). The recent trends of neurobiological accounts of emotion and moral behavior can be found in such books as Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion. Reason and the Human Brain (London: Papermac, 1994)
19. Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, and Andy Clark, eds., Mind and Morals: Essays on Ethics and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). My recent research, interviews, and on-site observations of leading emotional literacy curriculum, provides updated evidence of the rapid increase of such institutionalized curriculum since the publication of Emotional Intelligence. An umbrella organization heads up the research-funded aspects of this work
20. In recent years one finds an increasing number of diverse perspectives in Educational Theory, which offer poststructural and/or feminist accounts in varying degrees relevant to emotion and power relations.
21. See for example, Zelia Gregoriou, "Derrida's Responsibility: Autobiographies, the Teaching of the Vulnerable, and Diary Fragments," Educational Theory 45, no 3 (Summer 1995);Educational Theory 45, no 2 included essays by Audrey Thompson and Andrew Gitlin, and Deborah Britzman, which addressed a variety of debates in feminist and queer pedagogy, and the limits of "critical thinking"
22. see also Leslie Roman, "Spectacle in the Dark," Educational Theory 46, no. 1 (Winter 1996).
23. ERIC is the Educational Resources Information Center, a database used in libraries to cover education and related fields. My search was conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995, the ERIC listing 1966-present. The term with the greatest number of references is "self-esteem," 7920 entries; followed by self-control, 7122; desire, 3131; fear, 3020; aggression, 2531; empathy, 1944; anger, 1019; pleasure, 712; guilt, 544; optimism, 444; joy, 375; shame, 163; and envy, 26.
24. Increasingly one finds psychology redefinitions of intelligence to include "social intelligence." Yet a recent anthology on this topic, Personality and Intelligence, ed. Robert Sternberg and Patricia Ruzgis (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), has a final chapter tacked on almost as an addendum, which critiques all of the previous essays for neglecting the topic of emotion.
25. The overlap of behavioral psychology and ordinary language philosophy is an interesting one: if language and languages games, in the Wittgensteinian sense, are part of behavior, then the scope of behaviorism widens beyond the narrower sense typified by the work of Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949). Feminist philosopher Sue Campbell, whose work I discuss at the end of this essay, advocates an "expressivist" theory of emotions, and the relationship of her radical account to behaviorist accounts suggests interesting overlap between the social sciences and philosophy.
26. There are many women philosophers who approach emotions within the analytic tradition, less informed by feminist theories of difference and who elect to publish less under the rubric of "feminist" philosophy (such as Hypatia: Journal of Women and Philosophy, and collections such as Feminist Ethics,). Their work has been widely influential in putting emotions back on philosophy's map in provocative ways.
27. See for example: in the collection Identity, Character, and Morality, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amelie Rorty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990)
28. see Barbara Herman on Kant and Annette Baier on Hume; Patricia Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry Into Emotional Justification (New York: Routledge, 1988); Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, "Explaining Emotions," in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Lorraine Code, "What is Natural About Epistemology Naturalized?" American Philosophical Quarterly 33, no. 1 (January 1996): 1-22;andKaren Jones, "Trust as an Affective Attitude," Ethics 107 (October 1996): 4-25.
29. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, "Explaining Emotions," in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Lorraine Code, "What is Natural About Epistemology Naturalized?" American Philosophical Quarterly 33, no. 1 (January 1996): 1-22;andKaren Jones, "Trust as an Affective Attitude," Ethics 107 (October 1996): 4-25.
30. Lorraine Code, "What is Natural About Epistemology Naturalized?" American Philosophical Quarterly 33, no. 1 (January 1996): 1-22
31. andKaren Jones, "Trust as an Affective Attitude," Ethics 107 (October 1996): 4-25.
32. In their highly useful edited anthology of "classical readings," Cheshire Calhoun and Robert Solomon list "ten problems in the analysis of emotion." These are: what counts as an emotion; which emotions are basic; what emotions are about (in tentionality); explaining emotions; the rationality of emotions, emotions and ethics; emotions and culture; emotions and expression, emotions and responsibility; and emotions and knowledge.
33. See Cheshire Calhoun and Robert Solomon, What is an Emotion? Classic Readings in Philosophical Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 23-40.
34. Goleman Emotional Intelligence, ix.
35. Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice (New York: Beacon Books, 1996).
36. See for example, A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Peter Smith, 1946), R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952); and C.L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New York: Natural History Press, 1944).
37. R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952); and C.L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New York: Natural History Press, 1944).
38. C.L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New York: Natural History Press, 1944).
39. Errol Bedford, quoted in Calhoun and Solomon, What is an Emotion? 268.
40. The European tradition has a long history of reading Marx and Freud alongside one another. For example, as Michael Peters pointed out to me, Andre Breton precedes the work of Eric Froinm and Herbert Marcusc with the "Manifesto on Surrealism" (1924), in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Roscmont (New York: Anchor Foundation, 1991) which undertakes such a project. Sartre draws on psychoanalysis in Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), an essay on phenomenological ontology written to address negation and the relationship of self and other. In Michel Foucault's very early work Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), he debates the risks and benefits of existentialism against psycho analysis for theorizing the modern subject.
41. See for example Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (New York: Noble and Noble, 1938)
42. Maxine Greene, The Dialectics of Freedom (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988)
43. Martha Nussbaum, "Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion," Social Philosophy and Policy 13, no. 1 (1996): 27-58
44. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
45. One of the most glaring examples of the continued ignorance of feminist work occurs with respect to Gayle Rubin's 1975 essay "The Traffic in Women," in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), in which she takes on Marx, Levi-Strauss, and Freud in an essay that continues to mark a radical reconfiguration of socialist feminism. Yet in anthologies of cultural studies, which offer genealogies of these three thinkers, Rubin's seminal piece goes unmentioned. For discussions of Marxism, feminism, and radical feminist histories of consciousness-raising
46. see for example, Alice Echoes, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)
47. Catherine Mackinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
48. and Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl And Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
49. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
50. Seem, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
51. In a chapter of my forthcoming book, Feeling Power: The Fate of Emotions in Education, I examine feminist poststructural educational theorists in relation to the topic of emotion. I argue that many of these texts are circumscribed by the Marxist and/or psychoanalytic paradigms and discourses. As a result, most mentions of emotion are subsumed to a language of "desire" or the "unconscious," and miss any systematic accountof the politics of emotion as they shape educational dynamics. Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell note in their recent article "En/gendering Equity,""[a] though one would be hard pressed to find many pedagogic policies or practices predicated on poststructural conceptions of gender, it is worth considering how these might take shape," Educational Theory 43, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 352.
52. I am thinking here specifically of Scheman's "Feeling Our Way Toward Moral Objectivity," in May et al., Mind and Morals, 231-36. Other philosophers have recently taken on the topic of emotion:
53. See Helen Longino, "To
54. See Feelingly: Reason, Passion, and Dialogue in Feminist Philosophy, in Feminisms in the Academy, ed. Donna Stanton and Abigail Stewart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) and Morwenna Griffiths, Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1995).
55. Daniel Prescott, Emotions and the Educative Process (Washington, DC: American Council of Education, 1938).
56. Oxford English Dictionary, Id. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 557.
57. See Julian Henriques, "Social Psychology and the Politics of Racism," in Changing the Subject, ed. Julian Henriques et al. (New York: Methuen, 1984)
58. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s,"Cultural Critique (Winter 1989-90).
59. For examples of different analyses of the history of science
60. see Walter Feinberg, Reason and Rhetoric: The Intellectual Foundations of 20th Century Liberal Educational Policy (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975)
61. Donna Haraway, "Sex, Mind, and Profit," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991); Henriqties, Changing the Subject; Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
62. Henriqties, Changing the Subject; Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
63. Francis Sclirag, "Learning What One Feels and Enlarging the Range of One's Feelings," Educational Theory 22, no. 4 (Fall 1972): 382-94.
64. Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion, and Will (New York: Humanities Press, 1963).
65. See for example excerpts from Irving Thalberg's "Emotion and Thought," in Calhoun and Solomon, What is Emotion? beginning on 296.
66. The distinction between cognition and feeling in this quote exemplifies both the difference between the conceptual and sensational theory, as well as the mind/body binary. "In both Freudian and Rogerian therapy," writes Schrag, "the client typically becomes aware of emotions which he considers objectionable if not abhorrent. What is abhorrent is not the visceral sensations the client feels but the thoughts and desires which are the cognitive basis of the emotional experience," Schrag, "Learning What One Feels," 387.
67. For a wide range of essays on this topic
68. see Perspectives on Self-Deception, ed. Brian McLaughlin and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
69. Philosophers of emotion often distinguish "moods" vs. particular emotional reactions. Schrag introduces the distinction between "dispositional" vs. "occasional" emotions to assist an explanation of self-deception. For example, could I be angry and not know it, and later come to realize I was angry? Dispositional can refer, for example, to a background emotion of hating one's father, which explains a motive for certain behaviors. Here Schrag turns to the psychoanalytic notion of unconscious to explain a disposition that the subject is not consciously aware of: consciously, I admire my father; unconsciously, I detest him. Conflicting emotions can also be explained on this account.
70. Schrag, "Learning What One Feels," 388, 391.
71. Maxine Greene, "Countering Privatism," Educational Theory 24, no. 3 (Summer 1974): 209-18.
72. The anthology Critical Literacy: Politics. Praxis, and the Postmodern, ed. Colin Lankshear and Peter McLaren (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993) represents a range of critical theorists in education. In this anthology, critical literacy is infused by "postmodernism," though its basic moorings are quite unchanged. Critical litcracy is defined in the anthology as "transformative praxis," seeking to cultivate a "critical" rather than "naive" consciousness. Jürgen Habermas represents the tradition of critical theorizing, while Paulo Freire is heralded as the father of praxis. Barbara Bee's essay "Critical Literacy and the Limits of Gender" demonstrates die limits of a Marxist critique for the purposes of analyzing gender. Working with poor and workingclass immigrant women in Australia, she stumbles on the difficulties posed not only by capitalism, but of gendered relations of the nuclear family and compulsory heterosexuality. "Within] the structural arrangement of the nuclear family], women are unable to unite and take action 10 change matters because their struggles for liberation are played out behind closed doors, away from the public gaze," Lankshear and McLaren, Critical Literacy, 121.
73. I discuss this in "License to Feel: Teaching in the Context of War," in Articulating the Global and Local, ed. Douglas Kellner and Ann Cvetkovich (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996).
74. Greene, "Countering Privatism," 213, emphasis added.
75. Roger Simon addresses the difference between wishing and hoping, within a politicized analysis related to Greene's challenges to powerlessness; Roger Simon, Teaching Against the Grain (New York: Bergin and Carvey, 1992)
76. Kathleen Woodward provides several critiques of desire's overuse in contemporary discourses
77. see Kathleen Woodward, "Introduction," special issue on the emotions, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture (Winter 1990-91)
78. "Anger...and Anger: From Freud to Feminism," in Freud and the Passions, ed. John O'Neill (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). The literatures on critical pedagogy and literacy are replete with examples of "desire" or the "body" standing in for the emotional terrain. McLaren and Lankshear reveal discourse's implication in the body and in "desire," while leaving out any mention of emotion: "Discourse...is often hidden and implicit. The discourses that police the body, shape desire, and mobilize consent will necessarily have a direct and discernible bearing on the process through which ideologies develop into specific teaching and learning practices." Lankshear and McLaren, Critical Literacy, 11.
79. Greene, "Countering Privatism," 215.
80. One finds myriad examples of feminist theorizing which is echoed by critical theory, yet consistently overlooked. In Critical Literacy, praxis (rather than c-r) is employed to name one's own world, and assumes that "knowledge presupposes transformative action." Charlotte Bunch writes, in a feminist foreshadowing of poststructural language, that "[t]heory thus both grows out of and guides activism in a continuous, spiraling process." Charlotte Bunch, "Not By Degrees," in Learning Our Way, ed. Charlotte Bunch and Sandra Pollack (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1983). Bunch's essay was originally published in 1979.
81. R.G. Oliver, "Knowing the Feelings of Others; A Requirement for Moral Education," Educational Theory 25, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 116-24.
82. I address the risks of this romantic faith in empathy in Megan Holer, "The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism's Gaze," Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (1997).
83. Oliver, "Knowing the Feelings of Others," 123, emphasis added.
84. Ann L. Sherman, "Two Views of Emotion in the Writings of Paulo Freire," Educational Theory 30, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 35-38.
85. Frederick S. Ellett, Jr., "Research on Emotion: How Can it Be Done?" Educational Theory 36, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 115-124.
86. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin. White Masks (1952; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1967).
87. Calhoun and Solomon, "What is an Emotion?" 17.
88. Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination (New York: Routledge, 1990).
89. Fanon, Black Skin, 116.
90. Campbell, "Being Dismissed: The Politics of Emotional Expression," Hypatia Journal of Women and Philosophy 9, no. 3: 46-65
91. Lynne McFall, "What's Wrong with Bitterness?" in Feminist Ethics, ed. Claudia Card (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991).
92. Campbell, "Being Dismissed," 48.
93. See Boler, "Taming the Labile Other: Disciplined Emotions in Popular and Academic Discourses," in Philosophy of Education 1997 (Urbana, III.: Philosophy of Education Society, forthcoming).
94. In 1979, Charlotte Bunch urged feminists not to take the "easy way out" by accepting existing theoretical paradigms. In her essay "Not By Degrees: Feminist Theory and Education," she writes: "When the development of feminist theory seems too slow for the changes that we seek, feminists are tempted to submerge our insights into one of the century's two dominant progressive theories of reality and change: democratic liberalism or Marxist socialism. However, the limitations of both of these systems are increasingly obvious. While feminism can learn from both of them, it must not be tied to either because its greatest strength lies in providing an alternative view of the world." Similarly, fifteen years later Haraway suggests that feminism "can draw from a basic insight of critical theory...as we have learned it from Marx, the Frankfurt school, and others...the social and economic means of human liberation are within our grasp. Nevertheless, we continue to live out relations of domination and scarcity... The study of this contradiction may be applied to all our knowledge ... The critical tradition insists that we analyze relations of domination in consciousness as well as in material interests," Haraway, "Sex, Mind, and Profit," 23. Haraway addresses the feminist frustration with Marxism, humanism, and psychoanalysis expressed by those feminist theorists trying, in the early 1980s, to delineate a "feminist version of objectivit.
95. I explore the work of Gilles Deleuze in relation to emotion in an essay titled "Affecting Assemblages," presented at Deieuze: A Symposium, University of Western Australia, Perth, December 1996.