emotion and ...

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Sun Nov 10 2002 - 20:08:11 PST


I am a bit behind in reading and responding at this point, but will at
least try to get in on the systems, processes, and SemEco discussion soon,
I hope. Maybe also on the video, depending ...

Just a note back to the theme of emotion and cognition, which was not
really what I was trying to re-unite ... as Mike says, putting back
together what was never separated is not much of an achievement ... though
in our TEACHING I do think we do a service by undermining the dichotomizing
discourses and offering a more unitary alternative ...

Nonetheless, what my real agenda is in this is a cross-fertilization
between semiotic (or more broadly formalistic, structuralist, "scientific")
approaches to affect/emotion and phenomenological (bodily, felt,
experiential ...) approaches. In my part of the academic world (i.e.
outside the humanities), the semiotic (by whatever name) is dominant, and
this makes it all too easy and facile to show the integration of, say,
cognition and affect, because this is done by formalizing our accounts of
the affective, which does fit them then neatly onto the cognitive ... but
at the cost of losing what the affective really ADDs to the phenomenology
of our being-in/with-the-world.

We do this not just because it is easy, but also because it is SAFE. The
phenomenology of affect is a very dangerous zone. Once we operate there we
have to consider our OWN emotional commitments and fears. We inevitably
wind up very nervous about the validity of theoretical discourses in
general. Our own academic practices are called into question. We have heard
this here a number of times from some of our more passionate, and
mischievous, gadfly friends. We are pulled toward it here lately when
people make or quote poetic meanings ... and we have to wonder again how
the registers of our academic discourses limit the kinds of meanings WE can
make ... and come to terms with our sense that in discussing matters of
affect and emotion, of feeling, this is a particularly acute problem.

So you might say that what I am after is not just another academic
discourse that neuters feeling, but a different kind of practice that does
not need to, that does not sacrifice the uses of theoretical and semiotic
analysis (or perhaps in this case, of synthesis, of production), but finds
ways to make meanings about feeling that also evoke our feelings
(delightful and apprehensive) about meanings.

JAY.

PS. Oldtimers will know this, but others might like to look at Nietzsche's
famous "Birth of Tragedy" essay, esp. the first part, for a similar
discomfort and intellectual agenda ...

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
---------------------------



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