Re: affectivity: feelings and emotions

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Tue, 24 Feb 1998 22:25:42 -0500

Very interesting stuff there, Diane. I in no way discount the ontogenetic
experience as playing a key role in how feelings come to have meaning for
us and how they become differentiated, mixed with meaning categories, etc.
And I think you offer some stimulating speculations as well as pointers to
relevant kinds of data.

I would probably agree that rhythmicity plays a key role in some kinds of
feelings, certainly our sense of duration, probably our sense of stability
or predictability, usual and expectness, whether as boredom and banality or
as comforting count-on-it-ness. I think the observation linking maternal
and fetal heartbeats to the development of the hearing-balance sense, the
sensitivity to pressure waves, etc. is very intriguing, though I wonder if
there may not be other proto-senses in play fetally: afferent general
sensations from the whole fetal body (which afferent nerve trunks develop
first?), perhaps a kind of motion-sense. A womb is quite a bit like a
sensory-deprivation tank! but there must still be some salient
environmental changes that would impinge ...

And as I think about rhythmicity in ontogeny, of course I then also think
about it in phylogeny ... human phylogeny. We have brains that are very
sensitive to rhythmic patterns, and so have our precursors for a long
evolutionary time. This means that rhythmicity ramifies from obvious
sensory inputs like the heartbeats to become a salient feature (or
background; there is a figure-ground dialectic between rhythms and pulses)
in many kinds of experiencing ...

And phylogeny must be given its due here if only because ontogeny
recapitulates it in species-specific development at the same time there is,
gradually, more and more unique individuation in development also. So what
about the truism that SMELL is the ur-sense? what's happening to those
relevant parts of the brain in early development? what kind of chemical
awareness might the fetus have? and beyond olfactory smelling, there is the
whole range of sensitivities to enviromental chemicals, to internal
chemical balances ... There's a lot of homeostatic control in the womb of
course, but some things get through the placental barrier ... our culture
doesn't make much (positive) of smell and chemosensitivity, but it ought to
be there and have a good head start on the other senses in fetal
development (a guess based on the theory) ...

All the time scales are mixing again here.

Music to the fetus ears, beyond heartbeat, to environmental rhythmic
sounds? rhythms at least, even perhaps before pitch sensitivity?

And the data ... chest-tapping, thumping ... gestural signs that may have
more than just conventional values ... the materiality of gesture, with the
body as the semiotic _medium_ means that again other time scales come into
play beyond the here-and-now ... echoes of old motor habits, links of motor
habits to feelings. There must be a literature in clinical psychotherapy on
idiosyncratic gesture patterns as clues to psychodynamic states (i.e. to
feeling patterns), the visible tip of the inner-bodily iceberg (and volcano).

What else makes visible the flow of feelings in action? How are the
_qualities_ of action performances not merely "operations" in the
analytical sense (ala AT), but also (my terms) _topological signifiers_?
voice tones and qualities, movement manners, pacing ... there is really a
LOT to go on if one wants to find data by which to study these things even
non-introspectively.

JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE

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