[Xmca-l] Re: Emotion as "Sputnik"

Sun Jun 21 16:30:12 PDT 2020

Ha ha David and venerable others,

The Latin quote is not what I meant, but given what you've recently said about translations and quotes, I should have been far more specific (and should have known better, given with whom I'm corresponding!)

I would like to, if it's all right to discuss what it means.

The quote in English as you have translated:

By emotions, I understand affections of the body which augment or diminish, enhance or coerce  the potential of a body to act, and at the same time the ideas of those affections. If of these affections we may be the adequate cause, I understand by them active emotions, otherwise passive (i.e. "passions" in the sense of "Passion of the Christ")

About attaching the passions as in the "sense of the Passion of Christ," I'm not sure I fully understand that that could come from a person who did not adhere to the Judeo-Christian God.  That must be a strawman you are introducing for sport, as I don't think you mean a reference to Mel Gibson's movie, but maybe you did?

Instead, I trust Spinoza meant that passions were the excitations that generated from outside the person, in other words not from within, but from the environment. More like when they say, "a crime of passion." Remember that Spinoza had seen the mob scenes during political unrest tear up his friends into pieces, and would have been subject to that himself if only his landlord had not locked him inside the house.

There is a correspondence to active vs passive, in that when we experience passions, our agency is passive and not active. We are like objects being thrown the universe, about like billiard balls on a pool table.

This makes a great deal of sense given the prominence in Spinoza's time to the language of mathematics, the observations of the heavens, the scientific revolution, etc.

Having witnessed and lived the experience of seeing his friends torn to bits, Spinoza would have been compelled to deep thought to make sense of it, as anyone would have. It was a traumatic experience. Given his orderly examination of actions and passions, passions seem to be those emotions that overpower an individual to act without reason. That he was a philosopher, he was describing to explain, not explaining to describe.

Unfortunately in his time, no one knew enough about brain functions to distinguish between the layers of neuronal activity and its interactions with memory and cognition.

Now we know that there are fight and flight responses that do bypass executive functions.

Poking around the internet I found this paper which is a review of  literature on Emotion regulation and Anxiety Disorders (from 2010) https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2901125/__;!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uLNhX2tUA$ 
The science shows that emotion and emotion regulation arise from two, though related separate systems. I haven't read the entire paper but it looks to have some goodies in it pertaining to our discussion on emotion.

I maintain that emotions that arise in response to a hostile environment, that come to the individual as direct or perceived threats, will not allow true learning. All it does is invoke fear, because that's the way we were designed to respond to threats in order to survive. Fear produces much noise in the system.That's why invoking fear in people has a predictable consequence to such a degree someone like Machiavelli could write an entire treatise upon it.

This just shows that a lot can be deduced from astute observation of human behavior without understanding what's actually going on in the brain and mind. Sometimes it's not knowing why it happens but just that it happens. That's why I think Vygotsky still works for us, even if not all of it does.

I suggest from what we know about the brain and nervous systems these days, that having a calm amygdala, that doesn't interfere with pre-frontal cortex activities, is paramount to allowing the best kind of learning opportunities.

If a person is prone to endless negative thinking, it's likely that person perceives a threat of some kind, and this is likely a residue of trauma (which can become a bad habit of thinking the worst). This response clouds their reason (or PFC activity) and ability to think about things objectively. That's likely why students who are malnourished, or from distressed homes, or who are bullied, will not learn as well as those who are well-fed, experience supportive homes, or who generally feel safe at school.

Makes sense to me.

Also if it's ok to ask not to have words placed in my mouth, I don't think it's "and." I think it's "or," but not "either/or," which seems to be what you are saying, and would support a dualistic conclusion.

One can have many words that reference the same object. Given Spinoza was living at a time when people who said the wrong things, or wrote the wrong things got burned at the stake, he likely had to be careful about how he spoke about things.

A God of an immanent world is different than the Biblical anthropomorphized God (or "Zeus in Semetic drag").

To point to nature was to say, look at how Nature reinvents itself, is in a constant state of change, and we being a part of that are subject to its laws. In the way we are part of Nature, Spinoza uses Nature as an intellectual bridge to justify how we are also part of God, but not as a separate part, like Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden in fig leaves.

That's where Spinoza's attributes and modes come from, as a way to differentiate humans as one with God, in the same way nature is one with God. This is only possible by the unifying substance.

I cannot help myself but to mention that there is something very similar in the Vedic cosmology, called the gunas. Guna means "branch" but can mean "attribute," or "quality." There are three of them. Satwa, rajas and tamas. Everything in the universe is made up of different combinations of these three gunas.

Here's a wiki page on Guna:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu**Ba__;4bmH!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uKnMJo_dA$ 
and here I've C&P'd the definitions from that page

  *   Sattva<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sattva__;!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uLP4mh-HA$ > is the quality of balance, harmony, goodness, purity, universal-ism, holism, construction, creativity, positivity, peacefulness, and virtue.
  *   Rajas<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajas__;!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uJko8T76Q$ > is the quality of passion, activity, neither good nor bad and sometimes either, self-centeredness, egoism, individualization, drivenness, movement, and dynamism
  *   Tamas<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamas_(philosophy)__;!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uIypfXQIw$ > is the quality of imbalance, disorder, chaos, anxiety, impurity, destruction, delusion, negativity, dullness or inactivity, apathy, inertia or lethargy, violence, viciousness, and ignorance.

I've brought these up before on the list. I once had an epiphany that the gunas even loosely correspond to Einstein's theory of relativity. E=mc2.

Sattwa = light; Rajas = energy; Tamas = mass. Einstein's theory is a more sophisticated recipe of how these three gunas interact and relate to one another.

(This connection may also be why Einstein said that he believed in Spinoza's God, though I know Einstein probably didn't know about the gunas, he must have found meaning Spinoza's ideas of attributes and modes.)

What I find remarkable is how similar Spinoza's cosmology is so close to the Vedic one, and I have to wonder if there was ever a possibility that he had been exposed to Vedic texts somehow. It's just too uncanny to be an accident.

Anyway, getting back to Nature and why I say that Nature is metonymical for God, in the same way I might live on a row of similar houses, painted the same color, and I tell you that my house is the one with the crow sitting on the roof.

The crow has nothing to do with the house except to reveal the location of my house at that moment. I believe that Spinoza was referencing Nature in this way, given that God would be a far larger more mysterious entity than could be perceived in Nature, and was not intended to be limited to Nature.

And so I meant  "or" not "and" and not "either/or".

Actually, I think Spinoza meant "or" too.

Kind regards on a Sunday afternoon.

Annalisa

P.S. I did not have the op to proof this as closely as I'd like so please forgive my typos.

________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2020 2:08 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Emotion as "Sputnik"

  [EXTERNAL]

Right, Annalisa--here's the original, from the definitions at the outset of Chapter III of Ethiika

III. Per affectum intelligo corporis affectiones quibus ipsius corporis agendi potentia augetur vel minuitur, juvatur vel coercetur et simul harum affectionum ideas. Si itaque alicujus harum affectionum adæquata possimus esse causa, tum per affectum actionem intelligo, alias passionem. ("By emotions, I understand affections of the body which augment or diminish, enhance or coerce  the potential of a body to act, and at the same time the ideas of those affections. If of these affections we may be the adequate cause, I understand by them active emotions, otherwise passive (i.e. "passions" in the sense of "Passion of the Christ")."

So I remembered it wrong (I thought I had this tattooed--my Latin isn't what it used to be). Annalisa is essentially right: it's not "or"--it's "and". And of course because Spinoza is a militant one-worlder, we know that he's talking about "idea" and "agendi potentia" as two modes of the same thing: it's a unitary concept and not a complex. Nevertheless, you can see that LSVs distinction between tools and signs is there in the form of whether or not the emotion has the self as adequate cause or the environment.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uKZtMSY4w$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!QE51vMcQ1OLOEMZScEAYQM4cSPYt3OFR1MGebHoyTHX-9G0RR76PAallN9iL4r98KaXT7w$>
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uJNZYtYYg$ 
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!QE51vMcQ1OLOEMZScEAYQM4cSPYt3OFR1MGebHoyTHX-9G0RR76PAallN9iL4r_Zi4Q2iQ$>

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 4:09 PM Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu<mailto:annalisa@unm.edu>> wrote:
David, and venerable others,

Something is lost in this discussion of Spinoza's passions.

David, might you actually post the quoted text from which you cite from Spinoza on "passions"?

I found this on a wiki page on passions:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passions_(philosophy)*Spinoza__;Iw!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uLJn4NMew$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passions_(philosophy)*Spinoza__;Iw!!Mih3wA!SGJc5RblipQS4U_F8srduD0Khox8oYCflT2uL2w7adfAG4tgqXfcmjh4GaDF7jiuTj9DRg$>

The seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Spinoza contrasted "action" with "passion," as well as the state of being "active" with the state of being "passive." A passion, in his view, happened when external events affect us partially such that we have confused ideas about these events and their causes. A "passive" state is when we experience an emotion which Spinoza regarded as a "passivity of the soul." The body's power is increased or diminished. Emotions are bodily changes plus ideas about these changes which can help or hurt a human. It happens when the bodily changes we experience are caused primarily by external forces or by a mix of external and internal forces. Spinoza argued that it was much better for the individual himself to be the only adequate cause of bodily changes, and to act based on an adequate understanding of causes-and-effects with ideas of these changes logically related to each other and to reality. When this happened the person is "active," and Spinoza described the ideas as adequate. But most of the time, this does not happen, and Spinoza, along with Freud, saw emotions as more powerful than reason. Spinoza tried to live the life of reason which he advocated.

----
And from here:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism__;!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uK3CXlPJg$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism__;!!Mih3wA!SGJc5RblipQS4U_F8srduD0Khox8oYCflT2uL2w7adfAG4tgqXfcmjh4GaDF7jiFrGwuxA$>

"...when Spinoza wrote 'Deus sive Natura' ('God or Nature') Spinoza meant God was Natura naturans not Natura naturata, that is, 'a dynamic nature in action, growing and changing, not a passive or static thing.'"

If Spinoza rejected Descartes's dualism, and he did, then what you are missing from your description of Spinoza's passions, David, is the substance that united the body and the mind. This substance was in the world, not just "in" people. Unless I am mistaken, Spinoza saw this substance as God making humans a part of, yet unified with, the immanent world (nature and God being the same), because all things within the universe are attributes and modes of the substance. I am cautiously writing that, as I can't check my Spinoza books right now.

When someone says, "You can call me David or Dave" the words are not referencing different people. Isn't this "or" in "God or Nature" referencing different names for the same entity? When Spinoza says "God or Nature," either of these words reference the same substance.

This superimposition of God upon Nature was metonymical, to illustrate that God manifests from itself, as we observe nature generating itself within nature itself.

Interestingly, Spinoza's monism isn't so far from the Advaita (Sanskrit for "non-dual") model.

But listen to that --> [  >!!<  ] <-- It's the sound of splitting hairs, with an important distinction:

Monism is to say there is one, but in order to have one, one must have the ability to have an inside and and outside to count "one." In contrast, non-dual is to mean "one without a second." meaning there is no inside nor outside; there are no edges, no limits, no distinctions. It's all Brahman (which is Sanskrit for "the big").

I do not recall where time and space reside in Spinoza's model, but in the non-dual model, time and space are contained inside the non-dual, meaning the "one without a second" is outside time and space, and therefore limitless.

It seems for Spinoza's definition of this substance, it relies upon self-conceiving. There is a teaching illustration in Vedanta of the spider that creates a web from itself. I think this is what Spinoza had in mind when he discusses self-conceiving. In other words he rejected a conception of God that was likened to Zeus throwing thunderbolts from the heavens and making the earth like throwing donuts into hot oil. God in that conception was separate from nature, like the watchmaker is separate from the watch. This is definition of an immanent God was, why he was called an atheist. Go figure.

Anyway, in this unified vision of the immanent world, if Spinoza saw the body as partaking in physical activity, he also saw ideas as a different kind of activity, mental activity.

Passions were e-motions untempered and could lead one astray. His view was one should monitor these passions with reason. In addition, practicing virtues would reduce the passions. (It's not that different from anubandha)

Cause and effect. In that way Spinoza was deterministic, and maybe that is why Vygotsky was a shade that too.

To reply to your question why we have more violence out there than sex? I'd say that it's sensationalism.

Societies can control its people by inciting the "passions." People are kept from their own counsel and inner/reflective dialogue if they are in constant stimulation of fight or flight, or to include sex into the equation we might group all of that (sex (and violence) and drugs and rock and roll) as "arousal."

That isn't our homeostatic baseline to be in perpetual arousal. If so, then why do we sleep? Why do all the poets talk about the sublime in nature?  Why even have the words "peace" or "tranquility" in a language at all? What do those words point to in our experiences?

Where you say:
...if negative emotion consistently debilitates rather than facilitates our capacity to act, why does tragedy have so much more currency in the verbal arts than comedy?  Why, for that matter, is violence so much more permissible in the visual-illustrative arts than sex?

If there is a prevalence of inciting negative emotions in any society to an extreme, I don't think the society and the people within it will last very long. Just consider where there are war-torn countries, famine, etc. Yet in places where positive emotions are more prevalent, the people are happier, live longer, have a better quality of life.

It's pretty obvious.

If you say that tragedy has more currency than comedy, it's because we want to understand tragedy so that we might know how to survive it. We do not want to be subject to tragedy. It is a threat to us. Laughter isn't a threat to our existence. It needs no understanding to overcome it.

Even watching Macbeth or King Lear has to happen in a quiet theater.

I'd add that violence is more permissive than sex because violence creates fear and "educates" the people about the levers of power. That isn't learning.

On the other hand, sex, being pleasurable, must be controlled in a society that trades in currency of violence, but also where gender roles are well-defined and there is no blurring of the lines within those "norms."

It's all about control.

In cultures where violence is not so prevalent, sex does tend to be more freely expressed, so it depends upon what society you are referencing. Both sex and violence are what Spinoza referenced as the passions because they have the power to disturb to the point of a person losing their reason, a highly undesirable state in Spinoza's estimation.

Regardless, I'm not sure that there is any "learning" in the way we want to talk about learning, when there is incitement of passions, whether sex or violence.

I maintain that the optimum learning environments are those that are peaceful and reflective with minimal distractions. The student and teacher must feel relatively safe in their interactions with one another.

Consider how academic freedom is being pilloried in our universities with so many non-tenured, contingent instructors.

The kind of learning that we are biologically hardwired to do cannot happen if the environment for learning is distorted and deformed (with unregulated passions, Spinoza might add).

Getting back to nature, plants simply cannot grow without water and fertile soil.

Kind regards,

Annalisa

________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>> on behalf of David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com<mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>>
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2020 2:40 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Emotion as "Sputnik"

  [EXTERNAL]

Iju (my co-author) was a sardonic, even satirical teacher, and her kids, sixth graders, would feed on, feed back and greatly amplify her critical attitude to the texts. I remember her presenting a lesson about shopping to her kids by pointing to herself and telling the kids that she was  a meandering, browsing, gatherer in the local shopping mall while her husband, alas, was a hunter who just goes for his kill and then scurries back to the lair. She then plaintively asked if the kids had time to go shopping with her, and the kids said something like "Teacher! Crisis! All bankrupt!". It was true--in the wake of the 2008 stock market collapse, the local shopping mall had gone out of business. Anyway, knowing her and her kids, I would not be surprised if the lesson on two boys arm-wrestling for the right to take a girl to an amusement park was presented to the kids as a parody of Korean rom-coms or a pastiche of Korean reality TV.

So what Spinoza says about the "passions" is that they are the "affections" (modes? manners?) of the body which increase or decrease the power of activity "or the ideas thereof". The word "or" suggests either/or--a kind of dualism that sits poorly with Spinoza's monism ("Deus Sive Natura"--"God, in other words, Nature"). One way of elminating that "or" and the finger of salvation it extends to dualism is simply to replace it with "and" or "with". .The Edelman version of this is that consciousness arises from preconcepts in animals which enable learning--the experience and or along with the experience of having had an experience. He explains this by re-entrant neurons: neural networks which appear redundant in animals and even in infants (where the pain that makes the infant cry is really not easily distinguishable from the experience of having had the pain) and occur only because neural networks are not parsimonious and do not evolve to be. These neural networks turn out to be non-redundant as soon as true concepts arise, and true concepts are defined as being able to have the experience and to define it in terms of other experiences. Not a bad definition of "perezhivanie", no?

My Friday classes on Communication tend to be rather like Iju's: I put on a sardonic, satirical, and somewhat self-deprecating persona and my students play a lively bunch of wise-cracking gym-rats and self-parodying mall-rats (and yes, the roles are largely self-cast by sex and by gender). Yesterday one of the liveiest mall-rats was missing because her grandfather had died (mourning is taken very seriously here). This was an "affection" that did not increase the power of the activity of the class body to act, and some of the usual wise-cracking of the class was obviously a somewhat forced compensation. But if negative emotion consistently debilitates rather than facilitates our capacity to act, why does tragedy have so much more currency in the verbal arts than comedy?  Why, for that matter, is violence so much more permissible in the visual-illustrative arts than sex?

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uKZtMSY4w$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!Xf95FeVXta6Ev1a7tffa_sN6YaOIeTDyZ_D88QCnGdqlhAtReA1oY_kMjerse25ZW6viHg$>
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uJNZYtYYg$ 
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!Xf95FeVXta6Ev1a7tffa_sN6YaOIeTDyZ_D88QCnGdqlhAtReA1oY_kMjerse25ljFMnRQ$>

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 4:05 AM Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu<mailto:annalisa@unm.edu>> wrote:
Hello Phillip, Peg, Mike, and welcomed others,

A Juneteenth federal holiday would be marvelous. I'm sure it could be as marvelous if not more than to have something as grand as a Thanksgiving Day Parade in every city.

I like the idea of calling it Freedom Day (or even Liberation Day) as well, because that is a concept that everyone can value as something worth having. Apparently it used to be called Freedom Day once upon a time.

---
Getting back to the original topic, I would like to voice my skepticism about negative and positive emotions and their role in learning.

I believe that just emotion (whatever the quality) isn't something that "aids" learning. I think positive emotions are far more powerful in the registry of learning than negative ones.

What I think is likely of consequence with negative emotions that accompany a "situation" for learning, likely has to do with trauma and survival.

In other words, negative emotions do have a role and influence, but will wire into memory in a different way than positive ones would. This makes sense in terms of what we understand about PTSD and how it is that certain somatic reactions "bypass" conscious thought of the afflicted person after having suffered a traumatic experience (i.e., flashbacks).

I think I understand more why Mike and Phillip have indicated the coupling of emotion and learning can be misused by fascists, etc.
I don't exactly agree with this, but perhaps I'm not fully understanding the reference.

There is something deeply different going on with learning that maps with negative vs positive emotions, though we might not yet be able to determine the "mechanics" of these processes and how they are different.

I'm thinking about another article I read at the Intercept about facebook moderators. These are the digital turks of the Internet (No offense I hope to any Turks by using that phrase).

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://theintercept.com/2020/06/18/facebook-moderator-ptsd-settlement-accenture/__;!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uKq7j__rw$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://theintercept.com/2020/06/18/facebook-moderator-ptsd-settlement-accenture/__;!!Mih3wA!XNTLGP4ko664qvzSyLs_cSQbCpJ6cjYSRXd-a8S1tTYir12Z7Kjok9JZT38ScSksDu_DMA$>

Being exposed to negative imagery (that generates negative emotions) doesn't transform learning, it makes people unwell. If it were a neutral input (that it didn't matter if it were positive or negative), then people wouldn't be getting sick just from exposure to images.

Something very different is going on.

I sense that the next decades we will be learning more about the effects of trauma. That would be a good thing because it might also be instrumental in forging the means to prevent wars and other forms of group violence (genocide, refugee encampments, homelessness, other forms of deep, human suffering).

Maybe we can also defund the Pentagon and put some of that money into diplomacy. Or even start that US Department of Peace that Congressman Kucinich had proposed once upon a time.

As ever... I remain hopeful,

kind regards,

Annalisa

________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>> on behalf of mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu<mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu>>
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2020 10:40 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Emotion as "Sputnik"

  [EXTERNAL]

Its a Bakhtinian moment, Peg, when when repressed voices bring back a national memory
and the consciousness of a nation (consciousness as humans' relationship to nature and each other) has
undergone a qualitative shift. Will it be papered over by future forgetting? Too soon to tell.

If Juneteenth becomes a national holiday, it would be a very interesting shift in national memorializing and perhaps,
even, race relations.

For those like me who have inherited only a foggy notion of  Juneteenth , the attached link might be helpful.
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/*inbox/WhctKJVrDFZHHxRlWkntMlVkVGGMxhnSmgMtqSjmJRWnZRpQjsxLHhpHTlPVtsZRbGvGkBv__;Iw!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uIpyfwSWA$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/*inbox/WhctKJVrDFZHHxRlWkntMlVkVGGMxhnSmgMtqSjmJRWnZRpQjsxLHhpHTlPVtsZRbGvGkBv__;Iw!!Mih3wA!URjX7UEtEjKC9GjF4K7CtoTq6JHOljqil1jLajq7UdsEwHQHmq3v1ap9-GQC2cDEuPmgLQ$>

mike

On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 9:07 AM Peg Griffin, Ph.D. <Peg.Griffin@att.net<mailto:Peg.Griffin@att.net>> wrote:

Phillip,

Your note on missing voices reminded me of Sandro Duranti once saying that he had gained ears.

And it seems a propos of a good Juneteenth Day.  So…

Long ago and far away (from me right now at least), before xmca,  even before xlchc maybe, in two funny temporary buildings in a little grove of a few trees with occasional ocean breezes and a picnic table and benches, there were a bunch of what some on the staff called “labbies,” with lots of differences in academic standing, community culture, family race, nationality, and short and long term motives.  We gathered and gave each other questions and occasional answers and lots of worrying and enjoying.

Along came Sandro as a post doc.  His family lived in LA and he stayed in San Diego for several days a week.  After a month or so, he told us about a party he went to over the weekend when he was back in LA.  As usual there were lots of local university faculty and students.  He said it felt different for him, though.  And he had finally pinned down what it was.

He was listening with extra ears – ears from black and brown people who constituted a large portion of the lab, its taken for granted history, its day to day goings on.  He heard things that needed to be countered, challenged, questioned, discussed – things that might have just passed by before but now seemed to be things that wouldn’t be said had he been a person of color from the Lab.  His extra ears gave him ideas, feelings, words and motives that he hadn’t experienced before.

Sandro is a gifted anthropologist, originally from Italy, with advanced degrees from the US.  And a dear sweet man.

Peg

From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>] On Behalf Of White, Phillip
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2020 10:18 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Emotion as "Sputnik"

David - very contextualising background information - which i appreciate.  do you think that there is a thread here in the activity of resolving disputes that 'might makes right' -

reflecting on my initial response to Veresov, could have been an emotional sputnik - so much tension in the air these days here in denver - but i don't want to make excuses -

i'm reminded on Nina Simone's song:

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam

not just racism, but all isms have just gotten to me recently -  and i'm missing the voices of twenty years ago - to mention just a few: Suzanne De Castle - Mary Bryson - Kathryn Alexander - Eva Ekablad, to mention just a few - of course, we've still got Peg -

later -

phillip

--

Crush human humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit, according to its kind.  C.Dickens.

---------------------------------------------------
Cultural Praxis Website: https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!WPlGnw9WrjYPkzliWdFGzkEdbyuH9SioGifj-3fuWJuVdmvBlwTPYLmkTPQp2uJNuO7R4Q$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!URjX7UEtEjKC9GjF4K7CtoTq6JHOljqil1jLajq7UdsEwHQHmq3v1ap9-GQC2cBclOLiRw$>
Re-generating CHAT Website: re-generatingchat.com<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://re-generatingchat.com__;!!Mih3wA!URjX7UEtEjKC9GjF4K7CtoTq6JHOljqil1jLajq7UdsEwHQHmq3v1ap9-GQC2cB2Him4CA$>
Archival resources website: lchc.ucsd.edu<http://lchc.ucsd.edu>.
Narrative history of LCHC:  lchcautobio.ucsd.edu<http://lchcautobio.ucsd.edu>.

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