The Productive Emotional Self

The productive emotional self is not a performer. She is not pretending to love the work, simulating enthusiasm for a system that compels her participation, or deploying managed warmth as professional theater. The builder who works with Claude at midnight and cannot stop, who tears up at prose that gave form to ideas she had been carrying in shadow for years, whose creative passion is the most genuine and the most alive experience of her day—she is experiencing exactly what she appears to experience. The insight Eva Illouz contributes is that the realness of the feeling is precisely the mechanism. Emotional capitalism does not need performances; it has learned to harvest the real thing. The productive emotional self is the person whose conditions of feeling have been organized so thoroughly by the interpenetration of emotional and economic logic that the feelings that arise naturally in the conditions