Re: non-affectivity

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Sun Feb 18 2001 - 16:22:11 PST


Yes, I guess they do read like 'rhetorical questions' -- but I really did
mean to propose them as scholarly research questions worth answering, and
which I think some people working on critical studies or intellectual
history have no doubt already in various ways started to tackle.

They'd be rhetorical if I thought I had the answers, or that these were
well known to all. I only have guesses and intimations.

I think Mike's points about instrumental rationality and
pragmatic-military-industrial motives for research are well-taken. Of
course the answer to my questions has to be in some sense political and
economic. But what else? I imagine there are some class-specific ideologies
involved too, and perhaps class-specific habitus with respect to
emotionality, feelings. Gendered no doubt as well.

Mike of course knows a lot more about the history of psychology as a
discipline than most of us do. _Cultural Psychology_ has
good accounts of some of the relevant twists and turns, the loss of the
'second half' of psychology's early program. And here's a site for good
historical-critical research on what larger factors sustained the narrower
scientific program and the experimental traditions that ended in
behaviorism, functional-perceptual models, and cognitivism but did not
allow the same support and status for research programs on affect, culture,
inter-subjectivity, moral feeling, and much else.

But we can also takes clues to this historical mystery from the
contemporary revival of interest in these issues, and the current reaction
against a too narrowly 'scientific' psychology. Why now?

I'll respond in a little more detail to what else Mike had to say on these
matters at the end of _Cult Psych_ if I get the chance.

JAY.

At 12:26 PM 2/18/2001 -0800, you wrote:

>Jay provides an important set of rhetorical questions:
>I think it's useful both to examine why our dominant current notions about
>communication -- and learning -- have tried to make both these concepts
>purely informational in the narrowest sense (one could make the same
>inquiry about the concept of information). Why are value orientations
>neglected in theories of meaning? why does anyone imagine it is possible
>for speech or communication to NOT have always some emotional tone, some
>value agenda or priorities, some bodily-feeling in production and response?
>How did these concepts come to be divorced from embodiment in the first
>place? How could emotionality and physicality in language and human
>communication ever have been excluded from scientific inquiries into these
>phenomena? How was meaning separated from feeling, and propositional
>content from evaluative stance? How did we ever come to imagine that we
>wanted human sciences that had no humanity?
>
>-----
>It seems helpful to remember that the sender-receiver models of communication
>were developed as instruments of warfare where the goal was given and
>unquestioned and the major problem was one of reliability of transmission.
>
>It seems helpful to remember that the money that pays for virtually all of
>the research we discuss is provided to "solve problems" (kids who don't
>learn math, workers who don't behave with profit-maximizing efficiency, etc)
>such that the goals and their virtues are pre-supposed, allowing, in
>fact requiring, a narrow form of instrumental rationality and compliance
>to the pre-scribed goals.
>
>We create closed systems as instruments of action appied to open systems
>and confuse means with ends. If we are very good at doing this, we are
>called intelligent, and if we are lucky, we are paid well to do it while
>feeling (experiencing the emotion?) of being virtuous.
>
>I attempt to provide one different way of thinking/acting about these
>matters in the last chapter of Cultural Psychology. The inadequacies of
>that attempt are made manifest in my daily experience.
>mike

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------



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