Part 3 Summary of Findings, Conclusions and
4.4 Critical Emotional Reflexivity and Affective Dissonance
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blame and despair … are probable outcomes’ (Clifford 2014:12). In this way, ‘the focus on their own character recommended by virtue ethics … [is] potentially damaging to the professional and service user alike’ (Clifford 2014:12).
In sum then, the development of virtues appears to require principally just communities or societies in relation to which individuals can define and develop their virtues. Yet, the literature reviewed up to this point suggests that such principally just communities or societies do not exist. Still, communities of practice can develop reference points for individuals seeking to deepen their understanding of the requirements of justice and looking for support and fortification in their efforts to respond justly to apparent incidents and structures of injustice. This is how I read Tronto’s (1993:30) assertion that ‘much is required of individuals and their community in order for moral life to exist’. Or, in the words of Young (2011:92):
Responsibility [for justice] … falls on members of a society by virtue of the fact that they are aware moral agents who ought not to be indifferent to the fate of Others and the dangers that states and other organised institutions often pose to some people ... If we see injustices … being committed by the institutions of which we are a part, or believe that such … [injustices]
are being committed, then we have the responsibility to try to speak out against them with the intention of mobilising others to … act together to transform the institutions to promote better ends … (Young 2011:92; highlights added).
What Clifford’s (2014) critique of virtue ethics points to, is that as individuals engage one another in response to the kinds of structural processes of injustices in which they are implicated, there is a need for criticality, reflexivity and mindfulness of everyone’s inherent interconnectedness and interdependence.
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language practices, discourse and text (Cvetkovich, cited in Pedwell and Whitehead 2012:115). This shift in interest includes increased attention to ‘emotions, feelings and affect’;
a preoccupation that has been associated with feminist thought more generally. According to Kristyn Gorton (cited in Pedwell and Whitehead 2012:115-116), feminism is ‘a politics suffused with feelings, passion and emotion’ and is especially concerned with ‘the way feeling is negotiated in the public sphere and experienced through the body’. In this context, affect describes ‘visceral forces beneath, alongside or generally other than conscious knowing’ … [and] signifies potential: a body’s capacity to affect and be affected’ (Gregg and Siegworth, cited in Pedwell and Whitehead 2012:116). Attending to these states, processes and dynamics opens up an important source of understanding what it means to be in the world. Feelings signify not only what happens within individuals, but affect refers to the intensities or energy forces which happen between them, and reveal crucial ways in which structural forces and contextual factors work through relationships to impact people’s sense of self, agency and so on. At the same time, feelings shape the ways people respond to affect, by way of relating to other people, the structural processes of which they form a part. Citing Patricia Clough, Pedwell and Whitehead (2012:117) put it this way:
Theories of affect and ‘the deployment of affective capacity’ are valuable at this conjuncture
… ‘to grasp the changes that constitute the social and to explore them as changes in ourselves, circulating through our bodies, our subjectivities, yet irreducible to the individual, the personal and the psychological.
In the remaining section of this chapter, I briefly review Hugman’s (2005) discussion of the ethical relevance of emotions, as it creates an important link between ethical discourses in social work on the one hand and affective turn theories and relevant feminist debates on the other. Thereafter, I consider Zembylas’ (2014) notion of critical emotional reflexivity and Hemmings’ (2012) proposition of attending to affective dissonance as two available options for relating and knowing in ways that address some of the risks attributed to an over-reliance on individual virtue (see Section 4.3). Both Zembylas’ (2014) and Hemmings’ (2012) ideas are rooted in a critical, feminist relational tradition and sit well with the work of Young and the political ethics of care considered in Sections 4.1 and 4.2. Hence, they provide a suitable holding frame for analysis of the data generated in this study. Affective turn theorists have devoted much attention to teasing out the differences and connections between feeling, emotion, and affect (Pedwell and Whitehead 2012). However, engaging with these intricacies
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is beyond the scope of this chapter and may not be necessary to meet the objectives of this study. Where quoting others either directly or indirectly therefore, I simply retain the language used by the cited authors. Where I use my own voice to interpret and link different authors’ ideas, I use terminology as follows: I speak of affect to denote the relational aspect of feeling, and of emotions to denote feelings as observable by actors within themselves, knowing however that I may not always be able to distinguish neatly between the two.
Hugman (2005:48) points out that while most ethical traditions did not regard emotions as a reliable source of ethics, many of the chief concerns for social work and other caring professions are ‘objects … not only … of the intellect, but of the variety of emotions that enrich our lives and from which we gain meaning’. Indeed, Young (1990:5) asserts that ‘reflective discourse about justice’, originates in ‘calls’ and ‘pleas … upon some people by others’ rather than being motivated ‘by curiosity … or the desire to figure out how something works’. This implies that social justice in particular is a matter which is deeply intertwined with feeling, and with relating affectively. Bob Mullaly (2010:283) makes this connection even more explicit, asking:
What would drive a person to take on such an onerous commitment to literally change the world as we now know it? The answer, I think, is to capitalise on a feeling that most social workers concerned about social injustice … possess: anger.
He concludes his thoughts on the issue with the following advice to social workers: ‘Maintain the rage (but use it wisely)’ (Mullaly 2010:284, brackets and italics in original). In other words, responding critically, reflexively and justly to their enmeshment in structural processes of injustice might well require social workers and other practitioners of care to attend to affect as a matter of necessity.
Hugman (2005) structures his arguments concerning the relevance of emotions to ethical deliberation and practice around the feelings of compassion and its impediments, including shame and disgust, envy and resentment. Drawing on the work of Lawrence Blum, Martha Nussbaum, Andrew Tallon and Maureen Whitebrook among others, he claims that feeling ‘is as much a ground for the will as is reason’ and constitutes that faculty which translates what people ‘understand to be important’ into their moral compass, thus generating a commitment to realising their moral preferences (Hugman 2005:49). Exploring how affect works to connect structural and personal spheres of human interrelation and interaction, can
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open up new spaces for caring and for potentially just responses to the plight of Others.
Hugman (2005) uses several examples including those of compassion, envy and resentment, to illustrate his points. Compassion, he contends, is based ‘on a belief that one’s own life possibilities are similar to those of the person who is suffering’ and requires both ‘emotional engagement with someone who is vulnerable’ and ‘acting on that emotion’ (Hugman 2005:52). And while it is in the context of specific situations and in relation to particular encounters with concrete Others that this affective engagement arises and takes shape, compassion also entails an overall orientation, which directs the practitioner towards compassionate action as a matter of principle. Envy and resentment, on the other hand, are rooted in an inability or unwillingness to ‘accept the realities of Others’, thus blocking opportunities for compassionate engagement with those whose life trajectories and possibilities appear to be profoundly different from one’s own, while shame and disgust arise from a ‘rejection of weakness, uncertainty, decay, death and so on’, thus pointing to ‘hostility to poorer sections of society … and resentment of ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees’
(Nussbaum, cited in Hugman 2005:53; highlights added).
Hugman (2005) sees the relevance of emotion in ethical thought and practice in its intermediary function, that is, the ability to translate into human action and interaction. As such, to engage reflexively and critically with one’s own affective responses is not an end in itself; it is not merely about building a virtuous ‘self’ as an aesthetic project, nor is it only about engaging in relationships that are free from negative emotions. The point is rather that the actions, interactions, and inactions of practitioners correspond with a myriad of complex, even contradictory feelings that they may have in relation to the situations they find themselves in and in relation to the people with whom they are connected. At the same time, these actions, interactions – and inactions – also signify the viewpoints, thoughts and attitudes with which they are intertwined. If however affect is a substantive part of what forms and reveals human interconnection, then to observe, acknowledge and critically reflect upon their various emotions must be a necessary part of the attempt of caring practitioners’
to make sense of the impact that structural forms of injustice have on themselves and the ways in which they respond to the plight of Others. In this way, attending to one’s emotional responses might be the key to acting differently – and maybe responding more justly – in
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situations in which alternatives might previously have seemed elusive. Such a critical, emotionally aware approach might make it ultimately possible to –
Render an account of ethics in practice that is concrete, grounded in action but which at the same time reveals ethical meaning that is applicable beyond the specifics of the individual situation (Hugman 2005:61).
Coining the concept of critical emotional reflexivity,Zembylas (2008, 2014) discusses in detail what should be entailed in attention to one’s emotional responses, and what ends it could serve. He defines reflexivity as ‘the practice of changing one’s life in response to knowledge about one’s circumstances’ (Zembylas 2014:211). While forms of reflexivity in which focus is limited to the development of individual skills, abilities and competencies might lead to important questions being elided (see Section 4.3), critical attention to affect might serve as an important backstop against this danger. Practitioners could ask, for example, how they are socialised into feeling about certain issues in specific ways; how such feelings can condition their responses to particular incidents of injustice and the experience of being implicated therein; and how institutional contexts and power relations pre-structure the process of reflection itself. Short of asking these kinds of questions, practitioners might find themselves encouraged to keep negative feelings in check in ways that render them pliable instruments that support and stabilise unjust institutional regimes rather than working to recognise, attend to and act upon moments of emotional disquiet.
Zembylas (2014) offers a more detailed and complex account than does Mullaly (2010) of the role of affect in just practice. With Margaret Archer, Megan Boler and Mary Holmes, he argues that because ‘the reflexive self is formed by emotional relations to others’, feelings must be recognised as having more multifaceted functions in the promotion of social justice agendas than merely to help practitioners ‘form and maintain commitments to … [their] projects’
(Holmes, cited in Zembylas 2014:213). Critical emotional reflexivity requires communities of practice – held together by participants’ commitment to ‘criticising’, ‘holding accountable’, and where necessary, ‘exposing one another’s bad faith’ (Young 2011:170) when interrogating their own and each other’s positioning within regimes of social injustice, and when exploring how to use available but as yet overlooked openings for just practice. At the same time, such communities of practice would need to be characterised by sufficiently critical friendships (Bozalek and Matthews 2009) in order for participants to feel safe enough to try and disentangle how their feelings, thoughts, attitudes, perceptions and actions
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correspond with the contexts within which they occur. In the words of Zembylas (2014:217- 218):
Critical emotional reflexivity … draws attention to the subtle and nuanced ways in which emotions, power relations and reflexive processes are entangled … how emotions are implicated in the production of certain regimes of truth … [as well as] exposing how socialised emotions inform the way in which one … has been taught to see and act (or not to see and act).
What Zembylas (2014:217-218) hopes to achieve with his propositions is to provide practitioners with a ‘tool’ to –
- Initiate and sustain ‘alternative subjectivities and relationalities’;
- Enable ‘a conception of … reflection as a relational struggle for change’;
- Draw attention to and provide a holding frame for engaging with the ‘complex, often contradictory emotions’ in providers and receivers of care which ‘may either support or hinder the pursuit of more subversive … practices’;
- Create ‘opportunities’ for social workers and other providers of care ‘to adopt a critical stance into their own role and influence’;
- Facilitate the analysis of how social workers and other providers of care ‘are taught to feel the world through an ideological lens’; and ultimately –
- Render visible ‘the potential for social action and transformation’ that is embedded in particular situations as practitioners translate their ‘critical emotional reflections into relationships that lead to better or more just … practices’.
What, then, might these transformative subjectivities and relationalities look like? What impact might the kind of emotional labour proposed by Zembylas (2014) have on social workers’ and other caring practitioners’ relationships with Others? Hemming’s (2012) in- depth exploration of the intricate interlinking between being, experiencing, relating, feeling, knowing, and acting offers some helpful pointers in this regard. One of her starting points is a critical review of the concept of empathy, which can be extended to the notion of compassion discussed above. Hemmings (2012:151) finds the idea of empathy helpful in challenging ‘the opposition between feeling and knowing, self and other’. However, she is concerned that an ethics of empathy relies too heavily on ‘the reflexive capacities of the empathetic subject as the primary way of resolving difficulties of misrecognition or hostility that attend intersubjectivity’ (Hemmings 2012:152). Importantly, the Other might not want
‘to be empathised with’, may resist ‘the terms of recognition’, disagree with what the empathiser considers ‘significant in the empathetic encounter’, or ‘may already consider [the
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empathiser’s] position as part of the epistemological terrain rendered problematic by their own experience (Hemmings 2012:152; cf. Young 1997).
Similarly to Hugman (2005), Hemmings (2012:152) draws attention to the fact that ‘affects … also force us apart, or signal the lack of any real intersubjective connection’ but she offers a more intricate appreciation of negative feelings than merely regarding them as blocks to ethical practice. To this end, she reminds her readers that,
The essential relation to the Other through which the self is constituted is riddled with the desire for domination as well as connection … A focus on empathy fails to address … the enjoyment of authority and judgement that remains with the one who empathises (Hemmings 2012:154; highlights added; cf. Bauman 1993).
In other words, social workers and other practitioners of care are not just placed passively within unjust structural arrangements but might also participate actively in structural processes of injustice – even when they did not consciously chose to do so, or indeed had made a conscious choice not to do so. This might be one of the key reasons why a simple injunction to promote social justice is so difficult to translate into practice, and which is why attention to one’s affective responses is a prerequisite to addressing this challenge.
Furthermore, being placed in complex and contradictory positions is likely to be experienced as imbued with emotional tensions in that there is a probable misalignment between what one feels one ought to do, and those things that one actually does. Hemmings (2012) refers to this as an experience of affective dissonance; and it is this that she identifies as the hinge around which more just ways of relating, and opportunities for just practice, might be moved into sight. Such experience of dissonance can morph into feelings of anger (Leonard 1997;
Mullaly 2010), rage (Ahmed 2004; Mullaly 2010) and passion (Braidotti 1991, 2006) and the attendant forms of resistance to which they might give rise. Additionally, feelings of dissonance can give rise to imagination of a world that could, and should, be different from what it is at present. In this way, Hemmings (2012) claims that affective dissonance has the capacity to ground alternative values and a different way of knowing. Persons feeling this way may develop a desire to share their experiences, perceptions and feelings with those who have similar experiences, perceptions and feelings, to engage around these and, perhaps together, to begin to consider what could be done to work towards such realities as might seem more just. It is for these reasons that Hemmings (2012:151) refers to politics as ‘that which moves us’ and affective dissonance as that which ‘has a politicising potential’.
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However, to the extent that injustice is defined in terms of people’s differential access – or indeed the denial of access – to material resources, representation, recognition and voice, it can hardly suffice to have a conversation between likeminded people who find themselves in similar or at least comparable social positions. Instead, it seems necessary to ensure that an engagement with Others flows from one’s experience of affective dissonance, but without making one’s own experience the ‘primary basis’ for this engagement (Hemmings 2012:155).
To this end, Hemmings (2012:151) stresses the importance of being mindful that the kind of
‘knowing differently’, ‘knowing different things’ and ‘knowing difference’ to which affective dissonance potentially gives rise can be transformative only if this knowledge is understood as –
Created through struggle between dominant and marginal voices and perspectives and … conceived of … as emerging from conflicts of interests within an uneven epistemic terrain ...
Difficulty and difference are understood as constitutive parts of knowledge, and making sense of these becomes a question of value judgements among divergent positions (Hemmings 2012:155).
In contexts that can be considered structurally unjust, two responsibilities seem to arise. To the extent that practitioners feel relatively voiceless and powerless in relation to the contextual conditions of their work, they would be required to attend to how their feelings might prevent them from acting upon such structural injustices. And to the extent that practitioners are more powerful and placed in socially more recognised positions than their service users, they would need to make a conscious effort to create such conditions as would allow their Others, their services users, to speak. At the same time, practitioners would need to remain mindful that this is only an offer that could be taken up, rejected, or even resented by those to whom it is made. In the process of such engagement, says Hemmings (2012:150)
‘individual experience[s]’ of affective dissonance could turn into shared experiences of affective solidarity on the basis of which a ‘collective capacity’ for action might develop. I return to the notion of affective solidarity in the concluding chapter of the thesis.