You know how you ought to feel

It seems clear that Internet and Smartphones have played a major part in the change, of no return, regarding media and modes of communication. Social networks online, web pages, digital diaries, blogs; all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, are showcases for opinions and feelings. Photographs uploaded from mobile phones that go all round the world. Illicit videos, that force resignations.

Without going any further, the blogosphere and what has been achieved through it (anybody with any doubts should ask Mubarak), places in a preeminent place the anonymous individual, the opinion of the citizen in the street, free to state information, fears and feelings. Free to provoke adhesions or detractors, to generate links…and emotions.

In a near future they will probably laugh about how we use it, but at the moment, it seems undeniable that we have reached a level of technology where all sorts of devices allow us to communicate through multiple channels. We are slowly perfecting the medium, but it seems the method resists us. Why, if not, do the feelings and emotions, that render us totally inept at emotional communication, persist? Ah, “emotional”… was that not the adjective that united to the word intelligence could convert a fool into a genius, or an intellectual into an idiot? Loaded with emotional intelligence. Or, with none at all. Technologies aside, in the terrain of emotiveness, we are allowed to return to the cave, often, hiding out where it most suits us.

What codes are hidden behind our emotiveness? Why, damn it! just why, is it still so complicated to communicate about questions such as sexual identity, guilt, compassion, embarrassment, anxiety or fear? “You know how you ought to feel?” …Yes… are you sure? To a greater or lesser extent, we find ourselves continuously exposed to revising what at one point we considered to be givens. Can we know how we ought to feel, but, what if we don´t feel like that? And what if we don´t enjoy ourselves like others say they do? What if we have fears, which others don’t have?

How do deal with intimacy and what do we consider it to be; what is exhibitionism; what are our anxieties; what makes art “emotional”; how can one classify the unclassifiable; how to feel in front of a work; how to assimilate the unknown; how to react to it; what do we exclude and what do we include; what levels of sentimentality do we tolerate and what not? Dearest individual of the 21st century, do you really know how you ought to feel?

In the Workshop with Eloy Fernández Porta, carried out last week at A*DESK we talked, amongst many other things, about subjects such as; the Syndrome of Luhmann-Groening; the crisis of identity or the vertigo of gender; the courtesy that we invent in the face of situations where certain reactions are expected of us; catharsis and audacity. Next Wednesday, on 5 December, at A*DESK there is a session open to the general public.