"Goleman encourages us to manage what we feel more than simply what we feign such that through developing our EI we learn actually to become more empathetic, sympathetic, positive, gregarious, etc. since these are the traits of ‚winners and stars.‛37 Here one can also observe the significance of emotional authenticity to the discourse of EI. Goleman
understands the feigning of emotions as, under many circumstances, emotionally unintelligent. He advocates that we should learn to be emotionally direct, open and honest, at the right times. This honesty in human exchanges is, he suggests, in turn premised upon the ideal of ‚self-awareness‛ — greater understanding of our own emotions; learning to recognise our ‚true‛ feelings; learning to classify and monitor
these; and so forth. In this sense, the discourse of EI evidently constitutes more than a set of emotional scripts to be per-formed irrespective of our ‚true‛ feelings. However, despite its rhetorical emphasis on emotional liberation and authenticity, the discourse of EI — particularly in relation to its emphasis on harnessing emotions for personal and professional success — equally appears to mark a continuation of processes that have involved an increasing ‚commercialisation of feeling.‛ The term ‚emotional labour‛38
has come to gain considerable intellectual currency as a referent to such processes, and more specifically as a conceptualisation of increasingly sophisticated managerialist at- tempts to engineer corporate emotional landscapes through the exploitation of employees’ emotion management in the service of commercial ends."
Jason Hughes 2010
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No. 8, pp. 28-52, February 2010
Emotional Intelligence: Elias, Foucault, and the Reflexive Emotional Self
Jason Hughes, Brunel University
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