Seminar: The justification of anger: re-reading feeling rules through Boltanski and Thévenot

Abstract

Flam (2005) argues, that in struggling for social change, social movements reject attachment to existing institutions, practices, and normative patterns and in doing so, emotions play a central role. Social movements reject cementing emotions that uphold the existing structures with which they are discontent, and both offer their members ways to detach from these emotions and alternative counter-emotions (Flam 2005). Looking at social movements through the lens of cementing and counter-emotions is fruitful, because it allows the micro-level analysis of emotive practices to be connected to larger structures. However, counter-emotions are not just accepted by movement participants. Because counter-emotions challenge the dominant normative order, counter-emotions may require justification. Justification is core to the role of counter-emotions in political processes because justification places emotions in an interpretive framework that provides it with legitimacy and direction (Ost 2004). It is common to approach legitimation as a matter of either ideology or taken-for-granted ideas that downplays the reflexive agency of actors (Hansen 2017). Approaching the legitimation of counter-emotions as a matter of justification, I instead try to unpack the resources that actors use to reflect on, evaluate, and critique practices, emotions, and policies. The pragmatic sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) is particularly useful in this regard. Boltanski and Thévenot have emphasized how actors in their everyday lives have the capacity to judge and critically evaluate objects and situations according to a plurality of normative measures of worth (orders of worth). The approach of Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) is focused on cognition in the sense that they focus on argumentation. However, Boltanski and Thévenot indicate that the different orders of worth have implications for the management of emotions, but they do not elaborate this. Inspired by Hochschild’s (1979: 559) seminal work on feeling rules as ”the social rules according to which a feeling is or is not deemed appropriate to a situation” I have re-read Boltanski and Thévenot’s economies of worth highlighting implications for feeling rules for each measure of worth. Combining the insights of Boltanski and Thévenot with extant scholarship on feeling rules (Hochschild 1979) and emotion management in social movements (Flam 2005), opens for a broader analysis of how people justify counter-emotions when struggling for social change. This framework moves the analysis of feeling rules from a focus on norms imposed on social actors to a focus on the logics used by social actors themselves when navigating the social world. The approach of Boltanski and Thévenot is highly useful in this regard, because their emphasis on justification places focus on the agency and reflexivity of the actor and makes it possible to unpack the critical repertoires of the actors. These theoretical insights are applied to a case study of expression of anger of Danish participants in the social movement Victims of the jobcentre.