non-affectivity

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Sun Feb 18 2001 - 12:26:46 PST


Jay provides an important set of rhetorical questions:
I think it's useful both to examine why our dominant current notions about
communication -- and learning -- have tried to make both these concepts
purely informational in the narrowest sense (one could make the same
inquiry about the concept of information). Why are value orientations
neglected in theories of meaning? why does anyone imagine it is possible
for speech or communication to NOT have always some emotional tone, some
value agenda or priorities, some bodily-feeling in production and response?
How did these concepts come to be divorced from embodiment in the first
place? How could emotionality and physicality in language and human
communication ever have been excluded from scientific inquiries into these
phenomena? How was meaning separated from feeling, and propositional
content from evaluative stance? How did we ever come to imagine that we
wanted human sciences that had no humanity?

-----
It seems helpful to remember that the sender-receiver models of communication
were developed as instruments of warfare where the goal was given and
unquestioned and the major problem was one of reliability of transmission.

It seems helpful to remember that the money that pays for virtually all of
the research we discuss is provided to "solve problems" (kids who don't
learn math, workers who don't behave with profit-maximizing efficiency, etc)
such that the goals and their virtues are pre-supposed, allowing, in
fact requiring, a narrow form of instrumental rationality and compliance
to the pre-scribed goals.

We create closed systems as instruments of action appied to open systems
and confuse means with ends. If we are very good at doing this, we are
called intelligent, and if we are lucky, we are paid well to do it while
feeling (experiencing the emotion?) of being virtuous.

I attempt to provide one different way of thinking/acting about these
matters in the last chapter of Cultural Psychology. The inadequacies of
that attempt are made manifest in my daily experience.
mike



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