Mapping the Upheavals of Emotion: Revisiting the Historical Structures of Emotions in Modern Society

Modern emotion is born from anxiety and agitation. This study focuses on how emotions are suspended in the processes of modernity and modernism, along with the materialization, secularization and intensification of sensory cognition. On the one hand, the concept of emotion is situated within a framework of time-space configuration, examining the chronological boundaries of modern emotion as defined by Norbert Elias, and re-evaluating the productivity of emotion and sensitive mankind. The historical structure of emotion represents the abstract and concrete transformations of modern society, suggesting that emotion can be understood as a form of cultural cognition and conceptual consciousness. On the other hand, this study attempts to present an emotional landscape of anti-civilizing processes with the concept of Carnivalesque as an example. Specifically, Carnivalesque develops a structure of emotion that contrasts with the Process of Civilisation. Drawing on the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, this paper reconsiders the subversive significance of emotion in the face of social change. Carnivalesque, as a representative of collective emotional experience, can be regarded as embodying society with creativeness and productivity. The transformation from the Renaissance to the modern world represented a transformation from the 'open body' linked to the public world through ritual and revelry to the 'closed body' of the personalized modern consumer world. Carnival esque is not an end in itself, but a means of navigating the tensions between closed/open or integration/disintegration, in which the temporary elimination of subjectivity serves not only as a substitute response for daily life at the individual level, but also a rejection of history and a denial of historical process at the macro level.