affectivity in education

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Sun, 22 Feb 1998 18:21:26 -0500

Very interesting comments from Robert/o and Diane on affectivity. Some
reactions.

The Montessori practice does seem to not only problematize feelings but to
legitimate making them explicit, taking them seriously, and most obviously,
trying to put them into words so that we can engage with others ABOUT
feelings as well as directly expressing feelings. It is this verbalization,
the creation of a vocabulary of meta-affectivity (talk about feelings vs.
talk that shows feelings) which allows the critical reflexivity about
feeling that Diane and Judith were concerned with. It is classically
Vygotskyan (cf. Luria) in that it then allows distancing, reflexivity, and
self-control. I am not against these practices, which are empowering, but I
am also cautious that they may still represent a bias in favor of
controlling feelings, and in my cultural context that amounts more or less
to repressing feelings in public settings (and often in private ones, too).
But the Montessori practice as described is certainly an improvement over
the usual one.

Diane also raised some interesting questions about both 'emotional
primitives' in the sense of both 'atoms' and 'origins'. I've said I'm
skeptical about 'atoms' insofar as it means typological-categories that
become naturalized or reified; feelings are too topological for radical
category classification. But language pretty well insists on some such
approach, and so I favor a more multi-dimensional system of
characterization in which there can be a bigger space of possible
combinations of feeling-features rather than the very constrained options
of our folk-vocabulary and cultural ideologies about what 'the' emotions are.

On the other hand, regarding an analysis from 'origins' or from some notion
of 'generative kernels' for emotions; this is an attractive possibility.
The idea here might be that in infancy we have biological dispositions for
feeling-states and feeling-flows that DO NOT necessarily map one-to-one
onto any particular culture's emotional categories. As we develop
bioculturally, there is an interaction between learned meanings about
emotion types and situation types, etc. and biological dispositions,
emotional habits, indeed emotional _habitus_. So we learn to actually feel
the emotions our culture recognizes, to misrecognize other feelings and try
to fit them to these types, we have feelings that clearly challenge and
violate the typology (and which are thus harder to talk about in ways that
make sense to ourselves or others), and bio-physiologically we not only
develop habits of feeling certain cultural recognized ways, but we come to
have more differentiated kinds of feelings, each of which can be traced
back to some of the infancy feelings.

Obviously there is also a lot of individual variation on these trajectories
of feeling-development, mostly but not entirely within the range of what is
usual in our culture. I do not want to take the Freudian line that early
emotional experience is strictly determinative of later development
(because each later development arises emergently out of larger dynamical
systems beyond the individual), but I would apply the general developmental
principles according to which development tends to be cumulative and early
forms provide the basis for more differentiated later forms.

One way towards a topology of feelings is to look at
feelings-in-development, on the ontogenetic time-scale, and try to see,
within and across cultures, what the range and dimensions of
differentiations are from the (presumably more universal) early biological
feeling repertory. How, in effect, do feelings become 'emotions'? and how
does the potential diversity of the one compare to that of the other?

JAY.

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JAY L. LEMKE

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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