1) "Now what happens when the managing of emotion comes to be sold as labor? What happens when feeling rules, like rules of behavioural display, are established not through private negotiation but by company manuals? What happens when social exchanges are not, as they are in private life, subject to change or termination but ritually sealed and almost inescapable?"(Hochschild p19) What are we to make of this distinction between paid emotional labor and 'private life'? In today's situation can we make such a neat division? To what extent are the structures of 'private' life (e.g. the structure of the family, of friendships, sexual relationships, etc) 'ritually sealed and almost inescapable'? In today's situation are not emotional structures an all-pervasive function of power at the very constitutive level of the individual?
2) "We may well be seeing a response to all this in the rising approval of the unmanaged heart, the greater virtue now attached to what is ‘natural’ or spontaneous.” Do people (i.e. in this seminar) think that championing the idea of ‘natural’/’spontaneous’ feeling is an effective response / way of fighting against the commodification of emotion? In today’s context what / what may not be referred to as ‘natural’/’spontaneous’? Should the idea of ‘innate ‘feeling be abandoned altogether?
3) “I argue that the object of social constraint is more internal than it was, that we are controlled to a greater extent through our feelings, and less through our externally observable behaviour.” Given the situation Hochschild lays out in The Managed Heart, what value / possibility might the arts constitute today? i.e. amid the tight ontological structures of emotion that we inherit/inhabit/assume, what are place might art have in this? ... not phrasing this well ... I am simply interested in a consideration of art/the arts in today’s context, w/r/t what Hochschild is saying about alienated emotion, etc
4) If what is being lost in the commercialisation of human feeling is the feeling human (i.e. the individual), how might this be opposed? ( for example: drawing on last weeks discussion, might we work towards an idea of the commons – that is, towards an idea of individual human feeling as a common necessity which ought not to be subjected to such “ritually sealed and almost inescapable” structures? Might a ‘commons’ allow the space for the development of non-alienated individual feeling? etc