As always don't take the below to mean I agree, it's more an exploration of what I think the thinking is saying.
The Cultural Politics of Emotion effectively argues that emotions are more like cultural traditions rather than psychological states, which in turn shape the cultures in w- ok it's kind of hard to explain, but this example from the introduction is a neat summary of the sort of things Sara Ahmed is arguing;
The example that is often used in the psychological literature on emotions is a child and a bear. The child sees the bear and is afraid. The child runs away. Now, the ‘Dumb View’ would be that the bear makes the child afraid, and that the bodily symptoms of fear are automatic (pulse rate, sweating, and so on). Functionalist models of emotion, which draw on evolutionary theory, might say that the fear has a function: to protect the child from danger, to allow survival. Fear in this situation could be an instinctual reaction that has enhanced successful adaptation and thus selection. Fear would also be an action; fear would even be ‘about’ what it leads the child to do. But the story, even in its ‘bear bones’, is not so simple. Why is the child afraid of the bear? The child must ‘already know’ the bear is fearsome. This decision is not necessarily made by her, and it might not even be dependent on past experiences. This could be a ‘first time’ encounter, and the child still runs from it. But what is she running from? What does she see when she sees the bear? We have an image of the bear as an animal to be feared, as an image that is shaped by cultural histories and memories. When we encounter the bear, we already have an impression of the risks of the encounter, as an impression that is felt on the surface of the skin. This knowledge is bodily, certainly: the child might not need time to think before she runs for it. But the ‘immediacy’ of the reaction is not itself a sign of a lack of mediation. It is not that the bear is fearsome, ‘on its own’, as it were. It is fearsome to someone or somebody. So fear is not in the child, let alone in the bear, but is a matter of how child and bear come into contact. This contact is shaped by past histories of contact, unavailable in the present, which allow the bear to be apprehended as fearsome. The story does not, despite this, inevitably lead to the same ending. Another child, another bear, and we might even have another story.
It is not just that we might have an impression of bears, but ‘this bear’ also makes an impression, and leaves an impression. Fear shapes the surfaces of bodies in relation to objects. Emotions are relational: they involve (re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to such objects. The bear becomes the object in both senses: we have a contact with an object, and an orientation towards that object. To be more specific, the ‘aboutness’ of fear involves a reading of contact: the child reads the contact as dangerous, which involves apprehending the bear as fearsome. We can note also that the ‘reading’ then identifies the bear as the cause of the feeling. The child becomes fearful, and the bear becomes fearsome: the attribution of feeling to an object (I feel afraid because you are fearsome) is an effect of the encounter, which moves the subject away from the object. Emotions involve such affective forms of reorientation.
So for example, saying "that's disgusting" is argued to be a performative act that is avowing certain things as something you wish to abject from society, while certain acts of performative grief (e.g. Dianna) become reflections of our love which in turn is shaped by what our society considers to be worthy of love, part of that being people we want reciprocity of love (which ties into nation states - you love your country because you want your country to return that love in the form of a happy life with economic opportunities and stability, it's argued).
There's a bunch of stuff about how people often shy away from discussing death and so sometimes it gets expressed in weird ways, and the impact social media has on the way we manifest grief. Every year I send a dear friend of mine a message on her birthday, updating her on things going on in my life and plans for my future, and stuff I've gotten up to over the last year I wish she could have been at because she would have loved it. She was taken from us, suddenly and far too young, a few weeks before her birthday in 2016. Why do I do it? I know she can't read those messages. Initially I think it was because people who didn't know her very well got a Facebook reminder that year to wish her happy birthday, and they were posting it on her Facebook wall. I sent her a private message because I think it all still felt unreal; I still had the present I had been planning to give her. But after that it became a way of remembering her, keeping her alive in a way (and there's that phantasm). How will I feel when Facebook eventually deletes her account or shuts down one day? Will it feel like she died again, when I go to message her and then can't? How is me sending it privately different to someone publicly posting on their dead friend's Facebook wall or sharing photos, and why do those people mourn in that public way? It's actually quite an interesting topic, although I don't trust Ollie not to mangle it. There's probably also going to be something about social media being used to signal support for mass mourning (e.g. the "Je Suis Charlie" avatars and the Ukraine flag photo filters).
There's also obviously a lot of stuff about Dianna in there, examining how the media in particular pushed certain grief narratives and caused a performative display of grief among people who created a sort of "I'm crying because Dianna died" community, and the ritualised nature of the mourning (along with impacts of Dianna's death on minority populations) and how all this ritualised mourning actually caused changes to British society and the way it viewed itself and the royals... because it wasn't really about mourning a woman they'd never met but instead about the things Dianna seemed to represent; charity, compassion, humanity, a desire for a better society, a desire for an end to warfare etc etc.
From there I reckon Ollie's going to "unpack" the hidden secret meanings behind acts of mourning. For example, the candlelit vigils of 1980s/1990s AIDS activists were just as much about ritualised grief with the subconscious intent of trying to stave off their own deaths from AIDS as it was about commemorating the departed, and it leached into the aggressive militancy of ACT UP (this is part of the argument in Mourning and Militancy - militancy was just a form of dangerous denial, citing an ACT UP organiser "We have to realise that activism is not a prophylaxis against opportunistic infections; it may be synergistic with aerosolized pentamidine [a drug used prophylactically against Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia], but it won't on its own prevent you from getting AIDS"). This will probably also be impacted by looking at how stories of anxieties in the media of the time (women with an ex who was bisexual, healthcare workers with needlestick injuries, parents whose children are taught by a HIV+ teacher) tended to neglect to ever interview the primary victims of the AIDS epidemic, gay men, leading to further need for ritualised mourning within the community. I will be shocked if this isn't then linked to Transgender Day of Remembrance and the vigils and name readings that are done every year, and stuff like #SayHerName.
And then the denouement. Mourning isn't really about mourning someone who died, it's more a display of specific values.
Black Afterlives Matter explores how white people being performative about black people dying during the heyday of BLM ended up really making it all about themselves, and at the same time showing relatively little interest in any of the black people who died that didn't become hashtags. And it's the people we DON'T mourn that are relevant. If you felt genuine grief at the passing of David Bowie but didn't feel sad about Brianna Ghey, why is that? Why do we feel sad about the Holocaust but generally less sad about the Trail of Tears? Why did we do two minute's silence on D-Day but didn't memorialise the people dying in Gaza? It's because we do not view those groups as being worthy of the love and affection of the in-group; we view them as the outgroup that should be demeaned, abjected and ultimately destroyed. Grief is performative - it is both performed to communicate a message, while also shaping a message about how should be mourned and therefore who is worthy of life. By failing to mourn minorities we are complicit in creating a worldview that they don't deserve to be mourned and therefore their lives are not important.
Which ties up with From Shooting and Crying to Shooting and Singing. Shooting and Crying is an Israeli term for a certain form of sentiment; look at the terrible things I was made to do. Something like Waltz with Bashir or Golda Meir's statement "we can forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but we can't forgive them for making us kill their sons". It's a form of self victimisation, like the performative white people in #BLM - the terrible things I did weigh heavily on my conscience, I am the victim here; a way to reframe actions you took as an aggressor as things that happened to you. You didn't want to shoot that child but you were forced to and now you have PTSD... so it's the civilians who are to blame for that child's death, not you! A way for a nation state to sidestep processing national shame. But of late, the sentiment has changed - there's no more tears. It's just shooting while people cheer them on and even write songs like Harbu Darbu celebrating massacring Palestinians. So it's noticeably more common in Israeli culture for people to now make jokes about the murder of Palestinian children - which makes it easier to do so, because now there's not even a pretence of shame. They are not worthy of grief, they are subhuman roaches who need to be exterminated, so why would we feel bad about doing it? Commit more war crimes, Moshe! And you can say the same thing about colonialism in general, and how things like Columbus Day and Thanksgiving get celebrated in the States while
National Mourning Day goes unrecognised... or
Confederate Memorial Day is a holiday in many Southern States while
Juneteenth only got made a federal holiday in 2021 (or closer to home, how we have a
Commonwealth Day that was originally Empire Day, but we don't have a "we're sorry for the British Empire day"). A way to try and downplay or avoid national shame and therefore avoid reparations while continuing a national narrative that justifies continued acts of Imperialistic aggression. Oh and we get angry about it when questioned because of phantasms or something.
And 100% this is then going to be linked to Ollie's new pet cause, punishing NHS senior leaders. The NHS has not apologised for children dying on waiting lists for gender clinics. The NHS is not apologising for suspending puberty blockers. The NHS is not apologising for the Cass Review, or for "segregated healthcare", or for not switching to a pure affirmation model. Unless the NHS Senior Leaders are made to apologise publicly and punished appropriately, this will switch to Shooting and Singing - the UK needs to acknowledge the deaths of transgender people in a suitably ashamed and serious manner, or else there's going to be (more of a) transgender genocide.
