stage two: anger

Bill's post this morning got me thinking a bit more about anger. I've been thinking about anger for a while now because I've been wanting to understand the effects of teachers' angry responses to plagiarism. Here's an excerpt from an upcoming article on that very subject.

Anger, like all emotions of subordination (e.g., shame, bitterness; see Worsham, “Coming”), must be understood rhetorically, for it is a response initiated by the actions of others.

The rhetorical characteristics of anger focus our attention on the ways in which anger participates in—affects and is affected by—social relations. Anger, which Nietzsche defines as “the pathos of subordination,” is a response to a perceived insult (Walker 359) or the feeling of being dominated (Lyman 61). The insult to which anger is a response is perceived as a “violated expectation of justice.” This sense of justice, according to Peter Lyman, is both collective and individual: “It is an appeal to an absolute standard of justice; it is an appeal to a community to hold the violator responsible for the violation, and to punish him or her” (61).

Jeffrey Walker explains that anger is unlike other emotions of subordination in that it requires one to believe “that appropriate revenge is possible.” If one cannot believe that revenge is possible, Walker writes, “the particular form of pathos that results cannot be anger but must be a different state—humiliation, perhaps, or shame or fear, or something else again….” (359). Further, anger is pleasurable for this very reason. The resolution of anger—punishment or revenge or both—is understood, according to Walker as “approvable, honorable, public action” (364). This is so because the response to anger functions to defend, in Lyman’s terms, a society’s “mores and sacred values.” (62).

These group mores and sacred values likely contribute to one’s belief that one has the right to be angry, that one’s anger is justified. True, as Naomi Scheman explains, “One can acknowledge the reality of an emotion while believing that it is in some way illegitimate. And to acknowledge that one’s feelings are legitimate—sincere, not self-deceptive—is not necessarily to take those feelings to be justifiable” (177). But it is also anger’s object hunger (Scheman 178) that contributes to one’s ability to persuade oneself that one is legitimately and justifiably angry. As Scheman notes, “if there is no one and nothing to be angry at, it will be harder to see oneself as really angry” (178). Lyman notes that this object hunger runs deep: “The depth of the irrational compulsion to assign responsibility and impose punishment, to find a cause for one’s pain and impose pain on it, is apparent to anyone who has ever kicked a chair after tripping over it” (62).

We might summarize these points by saying that anger is a legitimate and justifiable response to what one has been persuaded is an insult that violates one’s sense of moral justice and the sacred values of one’s community. Anger by definition includes the assignment of responsibility and the possibility of revenge, which is pleasurable because it is sanctioned by the community whose values have been violated. Central to an understanding of anger as social rather than individual, as political rather than neutral, is the notion that one must be persuaded to be angry, that what one is feeling is legitimately anger, and that that anger is justified.

The angry responses Bill's talking about function in these very ways. We need to believe there's an object for our anger and that revenge is possible. Because Cho is dead, we cannot exact revenge on him, so we shift our anger to the media, to school officials, to the campus police chief, to the gun laws, and on and on. I'm sure it's only a matter of time until we shift our anger to Cho's family. This is not to say that we're not angry with Cho, but that that anger gets us nowhere. Our sacred values have been violated and in order to protect those sacred values, we must be angry. If we're not, somehow it means that we don't care. We're not strong if we're not angry.

Personally, my anger has been directed almost entirely at the media. And one of my students told me yesterday that Dr. Phil actually had something smart to say the other night, 30 seconds before his interview ended. He told reporters at CNN that we need to stop interviewing these kids. Anyone who has even the slightest understanding of trauma knows that Dr. Phil is right. Of course, we never should've begun interviewing these kids. But stopping now, that would be a good first step.

Lyman, Peter. “The Politics of Anger: On Silence, Ressentiment, and Political Speech.” Socialist Review (1981): 55-74.
Scheman, Naomi. “Anger and the Politics of Naming.” Women and Language in Literature and Society. Ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman. New York: Praeger, 1980. 174-87.
Walker, Jeffrey. “Enthymemes of Anger in Cicero and Thomas Paine.” Constructing Rhetorical Education. Ed. Marie Secor and Davida Charney. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 357-81.
Worsham, Lynn. “Coming to Terms: Theory, Writing, Politics.” Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work. Ed. Gary A. Olson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002: 101-114.