The professional actress has a modest say over how the stage is assembled, the props selected, and the other characters positioned, as well as a say over her own presence in the play. This is also true in private life. In both cases the person is the locus of the acting process. But something more […]

In our daily lives, offstage as it were, we also develop feeling for the parts we play; and along with the workaday props of the kitchen table or office restroom mirror we also use deep acting, emotion memory, and the sense of “as if this were true” in the course of trying to feel what […]

There are two ways of doing deep acting. One is by directly exhorting feeling, the other by making indirect use of a trained imagination.5 Only the second is true Method acting. But in either case, Stanislavski argued, the acting of passions grows out of living in them. People sometimes talk as much about their efforts […]

To show through surface acting the feelings of a Hamlet or an Ophelia, the actor operates countless muscles that make up an outward gesture. The body, not the soul, is the main tool of the trade. The actor’s body evokes passion in the audi­ence’s soul, but the actor is only acting as if he had […]

He who always wears the mask of a friendly man must at last gain a power over friendliness of disposition, without which the expression itself of friendliness is not to be gained—and finally friendliness of disposition gains the ascendancy over him—he is benevolent. —Nietzsche “Sincerity” is detrimental to one’s job, until the rules of salesmanship […]

Feeling as it spontaneously emerges acts for better or worse as a clue. It filters out evidence about the self-relevance of what we see, recall, or fantasize. The exact point at which we feel in­jured or insulted, complimented or enhanced, varies. One flight attendant described her “anger” boundaries as follows: Now if a man calls […]

To consider just how a company or any other organization might benignly intervene in a work situation between the stimulus and the response, we had best start by rethinking what an emotion or a feeling is. Many theorists have seen emotion as a sealed biological event, something that exter­nal stimuli can bring on, as cold […]

Men are estrangedfrom one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made; one makes an instrument of himself, and is estranged from It also. — C. Wright Mills One day at Delta’s Stewardess Training Center an instructor scanned the twenty-five faces readied for […]

A nineteenth-century child working in a brutalizing English wallpaper factory and a well-paid twentieth-century Ameri­can flight attendant have something in common: in order to survive in their jobs, they must mentally detach them­selves—the factory worker from his own body and physical labor, and the flight attendant from her own feelings and emotional labor. Marx and […]

In describing the private and public face of an emotional sys­tem, and showing how it works, I have drawn on empirical samples from various distinct parts of it. I could have sam­pled more parts of it—by studying nurses or lawyers or salespeople, for example —as I hope very much someone will do. Or I could […]