The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions

by William M. Reddy

The Navigation of Feeling critiques recent psychological and anthropological research on emotions. William M. Reddy offers a new theory of emotions and historical change, drawing on research from many academic disciplines. This new theory makes it possible to see how emotions change over time, how emotions have a very important impact on the shape of history, and how different social orders either facilitate emotional life or make it more difficult. This theory is fully explored in a case study of the French Revolution.

Genres: History, Psychology, Nonfiction, Emotion, Academic, Sociology

396 pages, Hardcover

First published November 28, 1997

Reviews

[Adriana · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this work, William Reddy elaborates a theory of emotions that aims at bridging the gap between the available directions in emotions studies research, namely in the fields of cognitive psychology and cultural anthropology; his argument is that, by making the universalist thesis on emotions and the constructionist antithesis converge, the (cultural) historian or the critical-thinker can use emotions in understanding the mechanism of historical change. Reddy firstly picks up the psychological relation between emotion and cognition and aims at identifying the universal ways into which cognitive activities contribute to the determination of emotions, and then carries on into investigating the validity of the constructionist theories for an accurate identification of the emotions’ provenience.

The two conceptions of emotions - universalism and social constructivism – supply evidence for Reddy’s own proposition of a theoretical framework, linked to J. L. Austin’s speech act theory. Cognitive processing becomes, in Reddy’s theory, an act of translation, thus avoiding the subjective/objective typical Cartesian dualism preferred by psychologists and also escaping the poststructuralist claim that everything is discourse. The types of utterances which define the “precondition to the existence of the meaningful speech” are neither constatives (linked with universalism), nor performatives (linked with constructivism); they are called ‘emotives’, self-managing and exploratory emotional expressions which translate into words the messages delivered through various nonverbal codes and types of language. For the process of translation, psychological methods prove to be useful in understanding the way in which conscious choices of activation of thought material are being made by the individual. The process of activation and attention can interfere with the mental mappings and with the deep goal relevance of thought material; therefore the ongoing task of translation is subject to error. Reddy not only defines emotions as reflections of the complex translation tasks which can reflect only part of the activated thought material, but he also conceptualizes the “disaggregated” self, whose disunity comes from the constant presence of signifiers in need of translation (Reddy 95).

Emotives are used for quantifying emotional suffering in order to gain an overall perspective of a community and to be able to extract the normative emotives which indicate the degree or kind of social suffering. As emotives are unexpected renderings and explorations of one’s feelings, they are not shaped by a dominant political, philosophical or social discourse, and can offer an authentic input of emotions, while altering the activated thought material of emotion.

Reddy's framework is a particularly useful tool in analyzing the events leading to social, cultural and political change seen, at a psychological level, as a transition from one emotional regime to another. The case study he discusses is the French Revolution, as an example of change from an oppressive emotional regime and collective desire of emotional liberty.

[Michael Meeuwis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read as an account of what a particular sort of speech act--one involving a statement about one's emotional state--can do, this is I think a valuable book. I like Reddy's willingness to write that emotions are beyond our ability to finally define them--in fact, they represent an overflow of language--but that we can nevertheless make use of these unsteady vessels. In this account, we make statements about how we feel in order to "navigate" particular social situations: specifically, by representing ourselves to others in a particular way but also to convince ourselves that we feel or believe particular things. So this form of speaking doesn't only make things so at the level of the social, and so exterior; but also, simultaneously, makes things happen within ourselves. So we announce our emotional states in part because we think they will make us feel particular things--we don't ever know precisely what's going to happen, but we sort of guess. A particular historical situation offers various templates for these sorts of statements; we activate what statements are available to us in order to try to do the most efficacious thing.

I don't know that this idea is as radically incompatible with postructuralism as Reddy indicates, although his survey of postructuralism feels thorough to me. But his historical work from primary sources is extremely thorough, and left me believing that an emotional regime available in a particular time and community might actually be as strong a determinant of one's interior-and-exterior life as Reddy asserts.

[Eyan]

For my thesis work, this is a work that came before much else and many current scholars of emotion quote Reddy, necessary to read his work for myself.

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very complex book. In the first part Reddy reviews an array of psychological and anthropological studies on emotion. the second part of the book reviews the history of France during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in terms of his conclusions in the first part of the book. Using the historical material to argue for his preferred anthropo-psychological perspective helped me see a different facet of the period-- the importance of sentimentalism in influencing the course of the French Revolution. It was, however, difficult for me to accept the dominant role he gives to emotions and his dismissal, or at least lack of consideration, for other perspectives on the history of the period-- economic issues, class issues etc. I was intrigued by his suggestion that emotional styles changed following the Revolution. He seems to suggest that this change emotions being less trusted and more likely to be pathologized. In this regard I was particularly interested in the important role he gives to Philippe Pinel's changing views on emotional effects of the Revolution. But I digress into my own interests…

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Paige]

review of his more recent book, The Making of Romantic Love, at History of Emotions blog: http://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.u...

[Highlyeccentric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deserves special mention for being personally useful to think through as well as academically interesting.