xmas countdown: 8 more sleeps

Christmas Makes Me Cry - Kacey Musgraves

Last week I started reading The Managed Heart by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Zach recommended it highly, with the caveat that it caused a weeks-long emotional crisis for everyone they knew who read it.

(It’s fine, I’ve been doing an emotional crisis for ages.)

Professor Hochschild begins the book with an anecdote from Das Kapital about a child labourer in an English wallpaper factory, highlighting how Marx is concerned not only with the deplorable conditions in which the child works, but with how he has been fashioned into an “instrument of labour”, a fungible accessory to a mechanized manufacturing process that is indifferent to his humanity.

Considering the work of a flight attendant, whose product is not a physical item but a manufactured state of mind, Hochschild writes:

Beneath the difference between physical and emotional labour there lies a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work: the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self—either the body or the margins of the soul—that is used to do the work. The factory boy’s arm functioned like a piece of machinery used to produce wallpaper. His employer, regarding the arm as an instrument, claimed control over its speed and motions.
…
The company lays claim not simply to [a flight attendant’s] physical motions— how she handles food trays—but to her emotional actions and the way they show in the ease of a smile… For the flight attendant, the smiles are a part of her work, a part that requires her to coordinate self and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless.

Commercial demand for our emotional labour alienate us from our sincere emotional responses. This is worrying; Professor Hochschild thinks our sincere emotions serve an important signal function in helping us perceive the world. (This idea is such a core part of the modern CBT/DBT canon that I was surprised by how much it apparently needed to be defended circa 1983.) She writes that “people turn to feelings in order to locate themselves or at least to see what their own reactions are to a given event”. Alienation interferes with the signal.

How, you might ask, does this relate to a country song about crying at Christmas?

Well, a bit loosely, to be honest. But:

And I know that they say ‘have a happy holiday’
And every year I sincerely try, oh, but Christmas, it always makes me cry

Hochschild doesn’t confine her analysis to the commercial management of feeling. She discusses how we manage even private feelings according to rules such as “I shouldn’t feel so angry at her” or, perhaps, “I should feel happy at Christmas”. She doesn’t think this is a new phenomenon, or even necessarily a problem, but similar warnings about alienation apply. All this to say: maybe try to observe your feelings before they're subsumed under a seasonally-appropriate smile?

Broken parts just wrapped in pretty paper,
- Tessa
 

PS I am really only at the beginning of the book. If you want a more complete summary, Zach wrote a 4500-word review.

PPS I will admit that this song’s inclusion is maybe 30% that I thought it would be fun to write about feelings rules, 10% that I’m feeling extra melancholy this Christmas, and solidly 60% Kacey Musgraves’s phrasing. Listen to how she pulls out the internal rhymes in “every year I sincerely try” and “the ones we miss/no one to kiss/under the mistletoe”! Jeez.