feeling, appraisal, becoming

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Mon Nov 11 2002 - 22:19:44 PST


My deep thanks to Alfred for his thoughtful discussion of the
phenomenological unity of cognitive and emotive, esp. in relation to the
more observable (if not so easily interpretable) timescale of the infant
encountering similarity and difference, in the process of coming-to-discern
some repeatable quasi-order or structure in its experiencing.

What particularly struck me in Alfred's account was the interpenetration of
the un/desirable, the un/usual, and the un/important, as our adult
categories might interpret the shifting attentionality and affect we see in
the infant's body language. It struck me because, as Alfred used it to show
the unity of feeling and conceptualization in process, it showed me also
that several of the key, semantically distinguished dimensions of
evaluations (aka appraisals of states of affairs in functional grammar) all
co-participate. This is interesting because it offers a way into a deeper
understanding of the fact that there are about six or so such dimensions or
modes of appraisal.

Functional semantics has repeatedly identified these basic evaluative
dimensions (desirability, normativity, usuality, warrantability,
importance, seriousness, and a couple of grey areas around
comprehensibility, capability and emergentness). But we don't have an
ur-evaluation from which these are differentiated, or a sense of why they
are differentiated, or why we have just these and no others. Early
development often provides such clues; our participation in a cultural
meaning-system develops in ways that tend to move from a few precursor
meanings/feelings, toward a more complex and differentiated, but still then
inter-related set.

Could it be that we see in early attentionality and the emergence of
structure-discernment, which means discernment in our experiencing of some
sort of expectable typicality, the basis for the evaluative dimensions?
That we need all the dimensions, and just these dimensions, in some system
of relations to each other, produced in developmental time/experience? That
this is somehow near to the core of what it means to make meaning and have
feeling as aspects of one and the same dynamical experiencing? This would
indeed be both a phenomenological and a semiotic account, if it could be
articulated. It seems to be exactly what Alfred is designing his semeco
conceptual tools to enable us to do. The semiotics comes from the semantic
categorial dimensions and their distinctions, the phenomenology from the
meaning/feeling process in experience by which these
dimensions/distinctions must come about developmentally.

I cannot do the synthesis yet, but the elements do all seem like the right
ones. There is what we are drawn to or which we avoid (+/- desirable).
There is what is repeatable, recognizable, expectable (+/- usuality),
interpreted in relation to what is taken to be important, significant in
experiencing (+/- importance). These in turn become somehow the basis for
our notion of what is "true" in the sense of more or less likely and
probable (+/- warrantability), what is "real". At the same time there is
also an element of playfulness in the process for the infant, some smiling
and later laughing, which is not just pleasure or the sense of
desirability, but also the oscillation between intense engagement
(seriousness) and a delight which is also somehow distancing, or
second-order (humorousness). Our serious academic culture always
underestimates the importance of play and humor in development, learning,
cognition. This leaves Normativity, the should/must dimension (deontic
modality in traditional semantics) ... again there is a certain romantic
idealization of the autonomy and freedom of the infant in learning, when in
fact the infant is totally dependent, and the process of socialized
sense-making is a matter of life-or-death, the social-environmental
constraints/affordances acting very much along the lines of the required
and the forbidden. So all the key elements are present. They are all in
intimate inter-action in the activity and experiencing, more or less as
Alfred describes it.

Of course to use all these differentiated semiotic/semantic terms is to
impose the adult cultural system on the experiencing of the infant, just as
we describe proto-language in the terms of the adult grammar. What we need,
as Alfred always says, is an account of the becoming, the evolutive
differentiation of these dimensions in and through the process of being
in/with the rest of the infant's social-ecology. Where to start? Presumably
from the biological, from some sense of attraction/avoidance,
pleasure/displeasure, initiative/constraint ... is the root a triad
perhaps? Three proto-dimensions or aspects of the more or less unitary
experiencing that differntiate eventually into six adult dimensions? A
triad, for the usual Peircean reasons, that you get more dynamical
evolutive impetus from the instabilities of a three-way interaction ...

Or am I pushing the evaluative/appraisal/feeling side too much? am I
missing a proto-cognitive, or what I would call a proto-ideational element?
Or does the ideational, as I have long suspected, derive secondarily from
the interpersonal-attitudinal, or what at the proto-developmental stage
might be called the interactive-affective? Can we get from this a potential
account of the emergence of cognition itself?

Recognizing that there is no such thing phenomenologically as "cognition"
in isolation, only what we culturally call that aspect of our experiencing
that deals with relations among "phenomena" (recognizable and later
nameable "structures" in Alfred's terms), as distinguished, eventually, in
development from the prior (I hypothesize) experiencing of affect-imbued
relationality with "personifieds", i.e. with aspects of the "environment"
(not yet fully distinguished as such for the infant) that have the
qualities that for the adult are retained only by persons, not things ....
i.e. we model the world of things after our primordial experience with the
world of people, though in the early stages we have no basis for
distinguishing our toys, our toes, and our mothers as being in different
categories of beings.

I am talking here in terms of infants, following Alfred's example, though I
am not an expert on this literature, and have not done much first-hand
observation of the phenomena that Alfred summarizes. But I really mean such
an account to apply throughout life, for we are always still infants and
children in respect of radically new learning. When we first discern some
quite new kind of structure or pattern in the dynamics of our experiencing,
when in our experiencing there first emerges some new sort of order or
useful/delightful/frightening expectability ... we are again, I think,
recapitulating the primordial interactions of the meaning/feeling triad in
its becoming toward the multiple triads and sextets of fully articulated
accounts of what we are seeing, knowing, feeling ... i.e. what makes sense
in terms of the more fully differentiated and structured semiotic resources
of a language and other semiotic resource systems of the community.

At least I am intrigued by the possibility of seeing things in this way ....

JAY.

---------------------------
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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