Pull yourself together

The decision: you've been in the office since eight. You've actually been productive for a change... things are happening, they're clarifying. Rows and rows of numbers are turning into tables and graphs and making sense.

And what's even better is the knowledge that you have NO PLANS for the night. You are going to leave work at four, go home, maybe have a little or nap or finish off that Junot Diaz book you've been reading.

And then your email pings. Ghassan Hage is speaking tonight on 'ethnography and political emotion'. It's on your campus. It's at five. There's no excuse other than the evening of nothingness you'd been looking forward to. So, reluctantly, you go.

OK - enough of that. Like anything could come between me and my shameless intellectual crush. Hage was exploring 'political emotions' through his own reactions to recent Israeli-Lebanese conflict, and the reactions of his research interviewees; Southern-Lebanese diaspora Muslims in Australia, the US and France.

And as usual, he was musing on a different level to most of what I encounter. I'm not going to rehash it all here - keep an eye for publications coming out of this stream of thought.

One thing that struck me, though, was his discussion of the way humans deal with emotion. He discussed the Lacanian notion of 'fragmentation'; the idea that as we develop as humans we struggle against an early sense of being 'all over the place'. Our emotions become part of an ongoing project to develop a coherent sense of self, to be whole in our sense of who we are and where we fit in the world.

For Hage, the colloquial encouragement to 'pull yourself together' is connected to this - and our feelings, emotions and reactions link in to how well we are doing in this project to be whole. Or perhaps, how well we are able to acknowledge and accept that this fragmentation is part of what being human is about; to deal with knowing we aren't whole.

He argued that there's a sense of shame about not being 'together' or being publicly, openly seen to be struggling towards 'togetherness'.

And drawing the discussion back to the discussion of conflict and political emotion, he discussed how racism might be seen as a deliberate attempt to shatter a person's self of symbolic 'self', to get in the way of a person's attempt to be whole. And for the 'racist', as an attempt to pull themselves together through the very act of racism; gaining a sense of power over oneself and one's environment, over the very things that give your life meaning.

I've probably done Hage an injustice trying to think through this tiny portion of his paper here; but something about this really makes sense to me, in a first-academic-impression kind of way.

I'm going to think about it some more... feel free to join me.