Language and emotion (review)

I have vivid memories of my complete puzzlement at being asked, as a twelve-year-old schoolboy, to write essays analyzing the emotions of characters in Racine's and Lope de Vega's plays. My father's explanations ('You know, anger, love, jealousy') made little sense to me: how can these experiences, which appeared to me to be so disparate, possibly be grouped together as one single category, 'emotions'?

Emotions constitute indeed a complicated topic, not just for schoolboys tackling homework that is way above their heads. Difficult to apprehend and circumscribe, they challenge the methods we have inherited from Enlightenment-era positivism. It is no wonder that our intellectual ancestors marginalized them, extracting the 'cogito' from the 'sum' and obliterating the rest from their concerns. The mentalist grounding of Saussurean structuralism and the linguistics it inspired further contributed to this marginality; as a result emotions have since remained peripheral to linguists' concerns, with very few exceptions (such as Roman Jakobson). Anthropologists, in contrast, have nurtured a sustained interest in emotions, at least in the American version of the discipline, ever since the Culture and Personality School (Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir) made them one of their main topics of inquiry in the 1930s. In the 1980s and 1990s, emotions became the object of renewed anthropological attention, although this enthusiasm has since somewhat abated, as anthropologists have turned their attention away from the kinds of intimate contexts that we normally associate with emotions and focused instead on large-scale questions of globalization, history, and materiality. But this turn did not take place without linguistic anthropologists, notably Elinor Ochs, Bambi Schieffelin, Donald Brenneis, Judith Irvine, and myself, analyzing the central role that language plays in communicating, organizing, and culturalizing emotions (e.g. Ochs & Schieffelin 1989, Besnier 1990).

Grounded in linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory, James Wilce's volume takes stock of what we know about language and emotion from a variety of angles. The text is both an assessment of the state of the art, which it performs by mobilizing specific case studies at judicious moments, and a critical discussion that does not shy away from taking positions and venturing into hitherto unexplored territory. An important contribution of the book is to illustrate the fact that emotions are not just psychological phenomena but also interactional phenomena, and to demonstrate that emotions are not confined to the local, the intimate, and the personal, but are also relevant to large-scale dynamics such as public life, historical change, and global processes.

The book is organized in four parts, each divided into several chapters, some of which are very short (the shortest being five and a half pages). Part 1, 'Theory', locates emotions and language in the context of Peircean semiotics, in opposition to Saussure's theory of signs, thus taking seriously the fact that signs, linguistic or other, can operate in different ways, according to whether they are viewed as symbols, icons, or indices. The last category is particularly relevant to the analysis of emotion and language, because it does not necessarily presuppose that the sign vehicle exists before its object. In fact, indices can create their object, in the same manner that language (and its human users) can construct emotional experience. The discussion then turns to the difference between emotion and affect, and emphasizes that emotions saturate all aspects of language structure and interaction. An additional chapter in this section explores four contemporary approaches to the analysis of the relationship between language and emotion, namely through the lens of socialization, through cognition, phenomenologically, and in terms of their relationship to political economy.

Part 2, 'Language, power, and honor', explores the role of emotions and language in politics and social inequality. It provides, among other things, fascinating analyses of the manipulation of emotionality in speeches by Presidents Bush, father and son. In Part 3, 'Identification and identity', W turns his attention to ways in which language is an object of...