Re: affectivity in education

Judy Diamondstone (diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu)
20 Feb 1998 22:36:41 -0000

It is good to know that there are many others begging
for better discriminations of affect, but discriminating more or less
angry or arrogant or depressed or needy or xxx doesn't preclude the
judgments (angry = bad; happy = good). Whatever the discriminations
are, they are in the service of some representation/representor.
Perhaps we need a critical-reflexive topology of affect? No
representation of other without the other's representation of you.

Gentler and subtler characterizations? Or practice in
reflexivity... Or -- or? ?

- Judy

At 02:26 PM 2/20/98 -0500, you wrote:
>
>Pleased and a bit surprised by the extent of, mostly positive, reaction to
>my long post on this topic (off list as well as on).
>
>My swipe at applied cognitive psych was not meant as an intellectual
>observation (there is much good work done), but as a political one.
>Researchers indeed cannot afford not to be eclectic in their methods and
>concepts; I wouldn't _exclude_ anything, fire-breathing Feyerabendian that
>I am! :) But I'm also not averse to political alignments and taking sides
>on issues of where we think the agenda, often covert and perhaps even
>invisible to practitioners, of a disciplinary tradition is leading in
>practice.
>
>A perhaps more Vygotskyan take on the Piaget point about not having a
>science of affectivity: it does make it much more difficult to engage in
>self-regulation and self-reflection if you don't have more than a loose
>folk-terminology to engage the power of language in dealing with the
>diversity of our human feelings. On the other hand, I am not quite so
>single-mindedly in favor of keeping our emotions strictly 'under control'.
>I would rather see the power of a scientifically extended and
>well-theorized semantics of feeling employed to liberate people from the
>ideologically functional myths and mystiques about emotions. Most of these
>seem to take the form: Emotion X is bad in circumstances Y. Morally bad,
>leading to guilt and suppression of the feeling. These taboos and
>repressions are strongly grounded in the limited and limiting folk-taxonomy
>of emotions. If you've been taught that it is wrong to feel "Anger" in
>certain circumstances, the issue may ultimately be whether it makes sense
>to have a single category like "Anger" at all. There must be many quite
>different feelings that all get lumped as Anger, and many of these may be
>analyzable mixtures of very different 'feeling atoms' or primary feeling
>'primitives' of both physioligical and semiotic types.
>
>My recent ideas about generalizing semiotics more to include non-categorial
>modes of meaning, more 'topological' or meaning-by-degree in continuous
>variation along multiple dimensions, might lend themselves to a less
>reductionistic, or 'atomizing' approach to a semiotics of feeling. I agree
>with Diane that you don't want simple rulers for describing fuzzy clouds.
>But today we have fuzzy set theories and topology and many sorts of guides
>to how to more gently and subtly characterize matters of these sorts.
>
>Oversimplifying taxonomies are a very common strategy or means of
>ideological control, as for example with notions such as dichotomies, etc.:
>male/female, masculine/feminine, straight/gay, middle/working-class,
>White/Black/Yellow, African/Asian/European, child/adult, etc. Notions like
>masculinity, say, or sexual orientation, or social class, or ethnicity, are
>very complex multi-dimensional matters of degrees of participation,
>identification, etc. in many different and often in principle independent
>respects (cf. Bourdieu in _Distinction_). Like the insidious race
>categories, all these few-term category systems lack serious scientific or
>intellectual justification if you skeptically critique them. And all of
>them have historically served oppressive ends. While these simplistic taxa
>may sometimes promote political solidarity, needed for oppressed groups,
>they also play into the hands of hegemonic ideologies of divide and conquer
>(and especially of constructing phoney shifting majorities in just such a
>way that dominant groups can always count themselves in the majority, but
>all other groups can be excluded now and again on some count or other, as
>convenient, to keep them in their place).
>
>The same intellectual revolutions needed to subvert notions like race
>categorization or gender stereotyping apply to all of these systems. And
>they would also provide, I suspect, just the right kind of approach to
>better understanding our feelings, and how social forces try to use
>ideologies about feeling to control us against our interests and the
>interests of larger wholes.
>
>JAY.
>
>---------------------------
>JAY L. LEMKE
>
>CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
>JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
>---------------------------
>
>
>

Judith Diamondstone (732) 932-7496 Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183