Emotional politics by Emelie Carlén
Swedish artist Emelie Carlén works in various ways with the concept of emotional labour. In 2018 she wrote the essän Emotional Politics to the work Lip Sync.
Lip sync is an installation consisting of a 2-channel video and audio as well as a series of sculptures. It deals with how one can track the use and normalization of female voices to emotional labour. The voices that surround us in urban soundscapes, those that navigate us through the city, give us instructions from vending machines. Those not only visible in technology but also in film where the use of the characteristic female voice has become a normalized way to create an atmosphere.
Emelie Carlén (b. 1985) is a visual artist from Sweden. Holds an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2018) and an BFA from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts (2015) with a previous BA in Art History. www.emeliecarlen.se
Emotional politics
By Emelie Carlén
To whom may be concerned,
I can move you. Not literary, but kind of. I will make your feelings move, tickle a bit here and there. Align our feelings in seductive talk. I embody a fight against your hurt ego, in my presence things get smoothed out. The atmosphere is set, I have your full attention. Game on until something slips and in a moment your whole presumption about me will shift. The act is exposed, the magic is lost; the one you trusted to bare your inner hopes for lost mommy love. This pun is too tempting not to be mentioned, buhu for you. But I got to move on, move someone else on.
There are different ways to talk about emotions, I will take them all on, or rather, I will talk about them together as one big thing, literary; The burden, joy and labour of the thing; emotion. The word emotion comes from the word 'emovere' - to move. What moves us, what makes us feel. We are meant to be moved by emotions, that's the clear essence of the word. It can confuse or direct our attention. Either you are overwhelmed by its force, or just ignore what it tries to do. The dreadful thought of being perceived as emotional, aka less rational, aka less intelligent, aka hysteric, should not be taken seriously because of emotional instability. Twist my words if you like but what I feel is felt. It is fact combined with, not flipped out hormones, but the situation from where it occurred.
I turn to you who can, or maybe more importantly, to you who can not recognize yourself in the feeling of adapting. It is a broad question of resemblance, I know, but what I want to start with is a common understanding of how to adapt. It is a norm, something repeated and executed by many other than us. To adapt is what we do out of politeness, to fit in to social groups, to protect our private selves, or just because it is asked of us. An underlying pressure to perform, to bend and reformulate for fitting into pre-customized holes. The behavioral display is the barrier between where the personal gets mixed up with labour, becoming a basic resource for a new currency; an economic value converted into emotions.
We are raised to pay respect to other people's emotions and to be aware of people around us, but truthfully the gift of caring has turned against its goodwill and become part of an economic system. What took its place is advertising talking directly to our feelings, it is through them we care. Looking back on early advertisements from 1950s, desire was premised on femininity as the subject of consumption. This is where the most recognizable usage of manufactured emotions is taking place. To speak with emotions, and by that create emotions, a language with expectations and hopes. Advertisement was early to portrait women and directing its customers of how to identify themselves. Together with cinema, an ideal presented an order of gender representations, where the female body came to mean sales.[1]
Women's entrance into labour started by her using emotions as the main tool. Her emotions became the means for her labour, or the labour became her emotions. Taking societal private norms and merging them with labour, creating an emotional labour. Domestic unwaged work became waged work, a confirmation of set gender roles. She still had to encompass with being an employee at work and simultaneously work at home. These gendered identities are closely linked to what is expected by a specific job, to do gender is treated as being a part of the job itself.[2]
When the distinction between the private and the public gets blurred out, and private emotions are used to gain economic profit, it could be called 'a successful emotional economic': how the success is measured through how much one can connect and transfer emotions to then become someone else's emotions. In this production of desire, affection is created which manipulates emotions, in which desire becomes the gap that is in need for a fulfillment.[3] This circle of consumerism are all powerful tools in performing emotions. Its potential within the aspect of labour was introduced by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional intelligence from 1995, where he presents a way of measuring emotional knowledge in a similar form as the intelligence test, IQ.[4] It was introduced in a time where focus was put onto the employee who had to be able to deal with an increasing number of clients, in a more fast-forward economy. It aimed to find a method to measure emotional knowledge, to change emotional behaviors and find ways to control them. In terms of gaining an economic profit this test ended up becoming another form of a manipulating system, where attention was not put on the individual behind the labour, but on the outcome of the employee's work. Emotional knowledge could be a source of power, instead of an otherwise regular line about social abilities, and by that give recognition to an unwaged work.[5] Instead business managements have taken over the usage of emotions, to value and measure it to rank qualifications. Skills are soaked up in a neo-liberal need for entrepreneurship, where we will all become walking CV's, a never ending labouring of the self.[6] We are constantly asked to measure our experience of the service we received, for example choosing one of four different smiley's expressing four different feelings, at the 'happy or not board' when leaving security at the airport. It is a time of ranking, where we are getting closer to a social credit system. Even if it have turned in favor for customers in the way to review this structure, it will further effect and raise even more expectations on the emotional workers, who are standing behind the pressured smiles.
As committed employees we no longer just work and consume, we perform according to what is asked of us.[7] This performance act is not just mental or physical work, it is an emotional one; “I use the term emotional labor to mean the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefor has exchange value.”[8] Arlie Hochschild describes emotional labour as a labour that suppresses feelings in order to sustain outward expectations, a coordination of mind and feeling, where emotions communicate information. It is a face-to-face and/or voice-to-voice contact, directed toward other people. In her description she goes into two different ways of doing emotional labour; deep acting and surface acting. Either your feelings are shaped and you believe it is your own, or you're masking your feelings with an outer appearance. It lies in living the emotions, becoming one with what your work expects you to perform. The difference in surface acting is that it is solely an act, but private feelings are kept intact. The behavioral landscape is wide of range and differs from private to public, from labour to labour, but what Hochschild tries to put forward is to link it to how one connects with these types of expectations. The ways we adapt to each other and to structures, but maybe without seeing why certain roles make us feel and experience in different ways.
Sticking to repetitious manners makes things stay where they are. It is a way to perform a recognizable way of behaving. These are inherent structures that melt into cultures. To see where it originates from, one must go back in history to find clues of present ideals. In the ancient myth Odyssey put wax in his sailors ears, bound himself to the mast, to save them from the voyage in sirens' song. Beware and watch out, the sirens will hypnotize and drag you out on dark waters. In ancient myths women often represent otherness, she who can not control herself, an opposite from a male standard. As Euripides puts it, “For it is woman's inborn pleasure always to have her current emotions coming up to her mouth and out through her tongue”.[9] The inside leaks out, a diagnosed hysteric behavior, a speaking out of your senses. These stereotypical gender differences according to sound may have its history in ancient stories and in Freudian sofas and slips, but still little attention has been put of who is behind the speaking lips. A way to confirm the very idea of how we receive voices, especially female voices, how they come to perform itself by underlining its very own existence by repeating what is already there.
The sound of emotional labour slips in to our living rooms, elevators, metros, gps, mobile phones etc. Its presence helps us navigate our daily routine, whatever our problem might be the female voice will be there to help us find our way, give guidance and support. The tongue of mothers is the language we are born with. The sound of this language is the sound of mother. The emotional one. A contemporary care giver in the form of a disembodied mother surfaces on our screens in the form of messages and mails. A personalized assistant for everyone, doing housework for our business.
The use of female voices in devices dates back to the Second World War, when women’s voices were used in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the otherwise male aviators.[10] Apple wanted to find a gender neutral voice, but ended up with Siri: gps's are equipped with a female voice said to calm drivers. Devices are programmed upon preexisting gendered assumptions and come to represent a labour of caring where women are assigned that role.
Our hearing is as much as our sight, presented with an order of representation and an understanding of gender politics. Film theory has, with Laura Mulvey as its starting point, discussed power relations between male and female actors in film history. How mainstream cinema mediates its narration through the man as the maker of the meaning, while the women figures as a symbol for his desire.[11] Media is an obvious area to point out the differences of representation of gender. The female voice is stuck in normative structures and is as fetishized as her body. Her mouth, visually present or not, is filled with an imaginary embodiment. The schematics of a Hollywood cast comes with a clear understanding of what voice belongs to what kind of body. It is seen, not only within movies, but whenever a voice is used it is gendered and its purpose naturalized, without further reflection.
What I am especially trying to push into the foreground here, is the actual sound itself, its narrator, what the voice come to represent, how these voices are being used and for what reason. how could we still use this voice without becoming the caring mother? I've choose to trace it to emotional labour since this is what these voices have become. I once made a voice over for a film of mine, it was a love letter and the critique that arose had to do with my voice being too harsh, too ignorant of what was being said. The emotional was being questioned and opposed to the rational, a combination of both doesn’t seem to align. Recently I listened to an artist explaining his work in an exhibition. It was a video, presenting a power plant with big servers, for which he had written a text converted into sound, choosing a female voice. When asked why, he simply said that this is the sound of the internet, the internet is female. When virtual assistance becomes an offer for service the internet was given a sex.
I would like to propose a new term: The female choir. Not solely as a 'choir' per se, more as a term to gather all female voices, literally. As a collected choir the voices are louder, the lips are in sync. The choir feels, it moves and acts from its emotional experience, against or with you as me too. A collective does not stand still, it moves and is created by this movement.[12] To give prominence to this emotional experience and use it as a method, is to use it as an instrument of critique on to power relations. My interest is not to keep an duality between sexes, confirming its difference would not make us get any further. But what is at stake is that this is something which is repeated over and over again, binaries keep on confirming the fragile question of this duality. She is still positioned as the emotional one, the one who cares and takes care of. Her presence creates a sexual desire which gives room for excitement and thrills, she shapes atmospheres. I am facing a male-dominated echo-chamber where the same structures are applied without any reflection of what it actually does, re-using a language of narratives where no gender equality seems to have left any trace. The coded imagery is set, he is still knowledge, she is still by his side, caring emotionally.
Why should we keep on performing identities that go in vicious circles? This is not a profit making performance I am conducting in front of you, it is a new standard, a new voice that speaks. According to Cixous the word 'feminine' in écriture feminine is not about the sex of the author, but in the way the writing is done that opposes these gender binaries.
“Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetoric, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word 'silence', the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word 'impossible' and writes it as 'the end'”.[13]
[1] Pollock, Griselda, What's with images of women?, Feministiska konst teorier, Raster förlag, Stockholm,1996 p.90
[2] Weeks, Kathie, The problem with work, feminism marxism, Duke university press, Durham and London, 2011, p.9.
[3] Hardt, Michel, Affective labor, Duke university press, Durham and London, 1999, p.96.
[4] Svenaeus, Fredrik, Känslornas kunskap: exemplet emotionell intelligens, Södertörns högskola, Stockholm, 2009, p.88.
[5] Hester, Helen, Technically female: women, machines, and hyperemployment, http://salvage.zone/in-print/technicallyfemale-women-machines-and-hyperemployment/, 2016.
[6] Power, Nina, One dimentional woman, Zero books, Winchester and Washington, 2009, p.23.
[7] Verwoert, Jan, Exhaustion and exuberence: Ways to defy the pressure to perform, What's love got to do with it?, Sternberg press, Berlin, 2017, p.206.
[8] Hochschild, Arlie, The Managed Heart, University of California Press, London, 1983, 2003, 2012 p.7.
[9] Carson, Anne, The gender of sound, Glass, irony and god, New direction books, New york, 1992, p.126.
[10] Hester, Technically female: women, machines, and hyperemployment.
[11] Mulvey, Laura, Visual Pleasure and narrative cinema,Film theory and criticism: Introductory readings, Oxford UP, New York, 1999, p.834.
[12] Ahmed, Sara, Living a Feminist Life, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2017 p.3.
[13] Cixous, Helene, Keith Cohen; Paula Cohen, The Laugh of the Medusa, Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4, The University of Chicago Press, 1975, p.886.