The repressive politics of emotional intelligence (2023)

The answer is Goleman, who seems as oblivious to social injustice today as he was then. For him, the problem is moral decay and "emotional malaise", the price we pay for living "modern lives" riddled with "postmodern dilemmas". The introduction raises many questions, but the rest of the book chronicles more mundane forms of discontent that result from a lack of emotional intelligence: unemployment, divorce, depression, anxiety, boredom. How do you handle skirmishes with your coworkers so that no one wastes precious hours of the workday complaining, sulking, passive-aggressively emailing, or crying in the bathroom? How do you argue with your spouse so that no one raises their hand or threatens to walk away? "Those who are at the mercy of impulse, those who lack self-control, suffer from moral deficiency," writes Goleman. "The question is, how can we make our emotions smart and bring courtesy to our streets and care for our community's lives?"

It is beginning to be understood why the concept of emotional intelligence has gained such wide acceptance. It's not a characteristic or even an attribute, but rather a level of moderation. It's a collection of practices (assessment, feedback, coaching, meditation) for monitoring yourself and others in a way that combines the promise of complete self-fulfillment with the dangers of total social deprivation. Despite all its fair proclamations about what the modern world is all about, its objectives are simply conservative: encourage people to stay in school, obtain a stable job, commit to their jobs, have families and keep them intact to maintain and create to your children. repeat the same cycle of productive activity.

In other words, emotional intelligence is a self-help doctrine deeply committed to the preaching ideology of neoliberalism. The word 'neoliberalism', with its critics and countercritics, has been so casually used that it has almost lost its meaning, that it is worth turning to a definition by Michel Foucault, one of the first theorists to discuss the term. In a series of lectures delivered in 1979 - a few months before Margaret Thatcher took office in Britain and a year before Ronald Reagan was elected president - Foucault described neoliberal ideology as applying an economic model to "every social actor in general, as he or she marries, for example, or commits a crime, or raises the children, nurtures them, and spends time with the children.” Each of these actions could be seen to have certain costs and benefits, certain risks and rewards, which, when properly calculated, would lead to an “optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends”.homo okonomius, committed to the pursuit of absolute personal freedom and reacted to changes in his environment with rational self-interest. He remained "blind" to anything outside his own interest, Foucault claimed.

In popular psychology, such blindness is elevated to the first principle of the craft, so as to obscure the connection between the psychic and the political. The genre's preferred narrative style is the parable. A fascinating example of human behavior is taken from a newspaper article or research paper. Stripped of the social and historical details that might give it depth and complexity, it provides an easily digestible lesson about good and evil, or, in Goleman's case, the productive and unproductive attributions of emotions in the "underground economy of the psyche."

The method inevitably leaves its mark, and reading Emotional Intelligence one begins to suspect that Goleman's examples tell only half the story. For a book whose ultimate goal is to urge people to flatter themselves to their peers or to be a little less noisy at their weddings, an impressive number of chapters contain accounts of whimsical murders and occasional violence. A father, inexplicably armed and overcome by his evolutionary fight-or-flight instinct, shoots his daughter to death when she jumps out of a closet to scare him. A paroled heroin addict turns into "bananas", as he later put it, robs an apartment and kills two young women. A famous student stabs his high school physics teacher in the neck, giving Goleman dramatic proof that a high IQ and good grades do not determine success.

If you check Goleman's sources, you'll soon see a pattern in what was left out. The father who shot his daughter? At that time, in 1994, I was living in West Monroe, Louisiana; The state had the highest poverty rate in the country, and city residents told reporters they couldn't even visit a mall without fear of being mugged in the parking lot. The deputy chief on duty that night, who was interviewed by the Associated Press after the shooting, said it shows "how scared people are in their homes these days". The heroin addict who killed the two girls? The example is older, from 1963, and a more familiar story than Goleman lets on. The heroin addict, who was white, was not caught for over a year, while police arrested a young black man, George Whitmore Jr., and extracted a confession from him; The Supreme Court later called the case "the most striking example" of police coercion in the country. What about the boy who stabbed the physics teacher? He was a Jamaican immigrant living in South Florida who allegedly attempted suicide along with his teacher. A judge found the boy temporarily insane due to "his obsession with academic excellence" and his belief that he would rather die than not attend Harvard Medical School. For him, elite American higher education was still the key to the good life.

Start inserting cities and dates to fill in the gaps in the story, and Goleman's diagnoses just seem wrong. This flaw is inherent in the self-help genre, whose premise is that the capacity for change is always within ourselves. Goleman promises to show his readers how to break free of the brain's "emotional hijacking" by biochemical fluctuations, the body's unconscious tendency to activate its own "neural wire." This language, with its references to terrorism and home invasion, encourages readers to stay alert and continually monitor their reactions to align them with accepted rituals of emotional expression.

It is a vision of personal freedom paradoxically achieved through constant self-regulation. "Emotional intelligence" envisions a world made up of little more than a series of civil interactions between boss and employee, husband and wife, friend and neighbor. The only thing that unites people, as Foucault said, is the "instinct, feeling and sympathy" that underlie their mutual success and their common "disgust for the unhappiness of individuals" who cannot control their inner lives.

The concept of emotional intelligence emerged as the global economy was undergoing major structural changes, with the decline of manufacturing and the expansion of the service sector in the world's largest markets. Anyone who has visited a retail store or sat in a classroom knows that service work is a mode of production organized around communicative interactions. He puts Goffman's art of impression management - the gentleness of a salesperson's voice, the grace of a professor's gesture, the charisma of an executive's presentation - at the center of productivity. Arlie Russell Hochschild, in his 1983 book "the administered heart’ coined the term ‘emotional labor’ for this type of work. "Day care centers, nursing homes, hospitals, airports, businesses, call centers, classrooms, social services, dental offices - in all these workplaces, employees do emotional labor, willingly or grudgingly, brilliantly or poorly ,” he wrote. “The poor salesperson working in an elite fashion boutique manages envy. The Wall Street stockbroker is driving the panic."

Since most service work cannot be made more efficient by machines, the only way to increase the productivity of emotional labor is to encourage employees to demonstrate more convincing emotions, both to others and to themselves. Hochschild points out, "the ambiguity between real work but feeling disapproved on the one hand and idealized on the other" to an economic burden. Emotional labor involves minimizing that pinch and turning a superficial narrative into a deep conviction.

What appeared in Hochschild as a Marxist feminist critique of alienation among service workers reappears in Goleman as serious advice on what one must do to get ahead, or perhaps just to survive. By transforming "emotional labor" into "emotional intelligence", Goleman replaces the concrete social relationship between an employee and his employer with a vague individual aptitude. Hochschild's envious and inflexible salesman reappears in Goleman's book, now adapted for her purposes. She became irritable and depressed. "So her sales go down, which makes her feel like a failure, which fuels her depression," explains Goleman. His suggested solution is: More work, better work, more pleasure at work, first as a superficial distraction, then as a deep ointment: "Sales are less likely to slow down, and the experience of making a sale can boost your confidence." Your ability to control and channel your negative emotions will pay off both financially and morally. Besides, what choice do you have if you want to keep your job and make a living?

The emotional labor that alienates workers from their inner feelings reshapes the seemingly private domain of the self as an extension of social and corporate interests. These attacks raise the question of the extent to which each emotion originates and is uniquely one's own. Are impersonal market structures hijacking people's natural abilities for empathy and warmth? Or do people accurately replicate the smiles and lines bestowed upon them through advertisements, training programs and hospitality scripts? Only one thing seems certain: the more we experience emotional contractions as a fictional display rather than a real feeling, the greater our psychological anxiety becomes. "When work demands display, sentiment often needs to change," writes Hochschild. There are many reasons for the worker to believe the script he is reciting. He gains nothing and risks everything to claim his freedom.

While the concept of emotional intelligence keeps certain types of workers fearful and docile, it also makes the emotional lives and working conditions of off-duty workers completely irrelevant. You can see this in the limited selection of players in Goleman's success stories; Without exception, the emotionally intelligent seem to be managers, engineers, consultants, doctors, lawyers, and teachers. For him, the only relevant question is who will prevail: "the manipulative boss of the jungle" or "the virtuoso of interpersonal skills" who "leads with the heart". Its implied reader is someone capable of "letting go of the little worries: health, bills, even a good job"; someone for whom "going bankrupt" is as unlikely as "a loved one dying in a plane crash." Never mind that in some states the chance of declaring bankruptcy is one in two hundred, while the chance of losing a loved one in a plane crash is one in eleven million. In Goleman's universe, both are equally unthinkable.

Time has not been kind to "emotional intelligence" and it is now too easy a target for criticism. But it's also critical: the ideas that drive it are everywhere, and their appeal is hard to deny. After all, what could be wrong with requiring people to look out for each other and be aware of how their actions affect others?

Perhaps the best answer is to reinvent the concept in a way that shows what's behind it. Think of Emotional Intelligence and the books that grew out of it as morality plays for a secular age, performed before an audience of mostly white professionals. In a theater that admits of no light or sound from the outside world, the audience watches as poor, dirty workers and criminals are led onto the stage to shoot their children and stab their teachers. Bitten by the masked vices of anger, depression and fear, shamed by the thinly veiled virtues of empathy, mindfulness and reason, gamers have no chance of redemption. They cannot learn the lessons of emotional intelligence.

When the screen falls, the spectators turn to one another to talk in a low voice about how to teach their children to avoid that fate, how to live happily in a world in which they are obliged to be molested by the violent impulses of their will. The others. Even in the front row, they don't see that the masks and veils hide a reality in which they are no freer than the judges. Removing the mask would reveal a helplessness they all share. And it could allow the audience and the cast to stand up and be angry in the right amount, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way with the right people who have been doing it for the last twenty years. 🇧🇷 five years, he sold them some of the most seductive and quietly repressive ideas in recent history.