Hurt feelings

Although I disagree with Eva Illouz's emphasis on narrative, her discussion of emotional style under contemporary capitalism is helpful. She points out the way

the therapeutic narrative consists precisely in making sense of ordinary lives as the expression of (hidden or over) suffering.

And, she explains:

the therapeutic model is 'good for' addressing the volatile nature of selfhood and of social relationships in late modernity. It is 'good for' structuring divergent biographies, providing a technology to reconcile individuality with the institutions in which it operates, for coping with the disruptions that have become inherent in modern biographies, and perhaps most importantly, for preserving the self's standing and sense of security, rendered fragile precisely by the fact that the self is continually performed, evaluated, and validated by others.

Illouz provides insight into the functionality of testimonies to experience. Such testimonies can create social connections, empathy, ties to others. They can provide one with a sense of authority, authorizing one to speak and reconfiguring the very grounds from which others experience.

Patricia Williams, in her brilliant The Alchemy of Race and Rights, describes a deployment of experience.  I  can't remember it so I am going to make one up.

One person says: your voting to restrict membership to whites is racist.
The other person says: your saying that was racist hurt my feelings.

The second person displaces the political import, the claim to justice, in the first person's claim by turning the question to one of feelings, how the comment made the person feel. I wonder if the following claim is similar or not:

You are intimidating.

Is this statement really about 'you'? Or is it about the speaker and how the speaker feels? The hearer could respond with an evil laugh and say "ah ha! my plot is working!" or with something like, "don't black thongs turn you on?" By itself, the claim tells us nearly nothing. It is a statement of insecurity on the part of the speaker--which actually doesn't mean that they feel insecure or whether they are passive aggressive or whether they had some kind of past experience that leads them to make this claim. Oddly, then, it seems that a claim to an experience, by itself, doesn't even tell us anything about the speaker.

Comments

[Jennifer Cascadia]

I see the value of hearing people's experiences as primarily an epistemological one. The more I understand of other people's experiences, the better I am able to position myself in the world. I am able to understand better what my own experiences mean if I can relate them to the depths and intensities of another's experiences. I tend to ignore statements of the sort, "this makes me feel like that," because I do not see them as having a clear relation to anything empirical. They might. But it is not clear what that relationship is, unless the person goes so far as to spell out the relationship for me.