affectivity in education

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Fri, 20 Feb 1998 14:26:40 -0500

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