According to Hochschild (2003, pp. 17-18), feeling is akin to the senses that we have. Feeling arises when our bodily sensations are joined with what we see or imagine. Feeling therefore communicates information that is important to us because it leads us to discover our own viewpoint of the world. However, feeling is still incomplete at this stage because it does not yet come from an identifiable intimate space inside us. According to Hochschild, then, it is not enough to ‘have feelings’: in order to be brought into play, we must reflexively ‘experience’ our feelings, which we do when we try to ‘get in touch’ with our feeling, when we try to ‘feel our feelings’. Through this reflexive feeling of feeling, we create identifiable and codifiable
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33) believes, reflection on feeling also provides us a useful set of clues in figuring out what is real in the outside world. Hochschild’s point (2003, p. 31) is that the ability to identify a feeling does not lead people to directly express this feeling but leads instead to further reflection: people learn that they need to correct their feeling in order to achieve an objective understanding of the world. She contends that the only way we can correct our feeling is by referring to the clues that come with it. For instance, I may be angry at a child that is playing noisily on a bus, but I will not simply scream at the child for fear of being shown to have been hasty and ill-informed. So I look at the child’s mother and I realise that she is not feeling well, and has a reduced ability to take care of her child. The anger that I had gave me clues to what was really going on. I may be still angry at the child, but I decided not to act on it, on reflection, because I was misunderstanding the full social situation. Both objective understanding and self-knowledge arise, then, from the reflection on feelings and the management of …show more content…
18). Feeling rules are the standard used in the midst of emotional conversation between two parties, to inform people of what is ‘due’ in each relation, each role. Feeling rules thus determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling between those two parties. In other words, feeling rules help one decide how to feel about feelings, when in interaction with others. We will return to this idea of feeling rules at the end of the chapter, as it has a key role in Hochschild’s explanation of the way employers can intervene in the emotional lives of their
33) believes, reflection on feeling also provides us a useful set of clues in figuring out what is real in the outside world. Hochschild’s point (2003, p. 31) is that the ability to identify a feeling does not lead people to directly express this feeling but leads instead to further reflection: people learn that they need to correct their feeling in order to achieve an objective understanding of the world. She contends that the only way we can correct our feeling is by referring to the clues that come with it. For instance, I may be angry at a child that is playing noisily on a bus, but I will not simply scream at the child for fear of being shown to have been hasty and ill-informed. So I look at the child’s mother and I realise that she is not feeling well, and has a reduced ability to take care of her child. The anger that I had gave me clues to what was really going on. I may be still angry at the child, but I decided not to act on it, on reflection, because I was misunderstanding the full social situation. Both objective understanding and self-knowledge arise, then, from the reflection on feelings and the management of …show more content…
18). Feeling rules are the standard used in the midst of emotional conversation between two parties, to inform people of what is ‘due’ in each relation, each role. Feeling rules thus determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling between those two parties. In other words, feeling rules help one decide how to feel about feelings, when in interaction with others. We will return to this idea of feeling rules at the end of the chapter, as it has a key role in Hochschild’s explanation of the way employers can intervene in the emotional lives of their