Re: [xmca] Historical transformations, the body, and feeling whole (again?)

[Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>]

Yes, your post suggests a further direction that I didn't adequately attend
to in my previous post. Applying Bakhtin's insights about words and
language to the study of feelings, we could say that our feelings are only
half ours; they are shot through with the intentions of others (i.e.
peoples and times and places).

-greg

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 1:04 AM, Elinami Swai <swaiev@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Greg.
>
> I read your post with interest because for many years I have been thinking
> about feeling and how we have come to interpret it, or how someone else can
> interpret another’s feeling. Especially now, feeling has come to be linked
> with one’s gender, race, class, or age, and therefore, has become
> subjective, not real. We have come to isolate ourselves from feeling, and
> if one feels at all, should find some expert to interpret it, not the
> ‘object’ of that feeling (which can be anything from oppression, illness to
> death) but the feeling itself. So, I agree, we have reduced feeling to a
> symptom of something else. We shun from feeling. I have not read Illich,
> but I have always struggled to understand why we have failed to relate the
> feeling with its ‘object (s).’ This failure, I tend to think, impedes us
> from understanding or trying to make sense of, or discourse about many
> sources that create misery in human life.
>
>
> Elinami
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 8:43 AM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com
> >wrote:
>
> > So I came across this interesting little bit about writing history in an
> > essay by Ivan Illich:
> >
> > "The art of the historian consists in the interpretation of traces and
> > texts of those long dead. In
> > the course of my life as a medieval historian, something has
> fundamentally
> > changed in this task.
> > Before a recent radical transformation - roughly, in actio and passio -
> it
> > was possible for the
> > exegete to relate substantives and verbs to activities and things that
> lie
> > within the circumference of
> > his own sensed experience. After this radical transformation, that
> capacity
> > is lost. This watershed,
> > separating the historian from his object, becomes particularly clear when
> > the experienced body is
> > the subject of historical writing. Dr. Barbara Duden presents this
> > convincingly in reference to body
> > history of the experience of pregnancy. I myself am made dizzy. How
> deeply
> > the ways of speaking
> > and experiencing have been altered in the last two decades!"
> > (from Illich's "Health as one's own responsibility. No!").
> >
> > I thought that this touches interestingly on recent questions about
> > historical transformations, mediation, and ties them to matters of the
> body
> > and feeling. This transformation that he seems to be talking about is a
> > transformation into a hyper scientific-rational (someone, please, a
> better
> > term?!) way of understanding the world, and, of course, one's body as a
> > part of that world. I took a look at what I could find of Duden's 1993
> > book, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn, and
> > found it a fascinating premise - that women experience pregnancy
> > differently (and more distantly) now then they used to.
> >
> > I wonder if Illich's timeline may be off by a little, two decades hardly
> > seems like enough time for such a transformation, but maybe as part of
> > something larger and on a longer timescale.
> >
> > Anyway, Illich's main point is that the current discourse of health (as
> of
> > 1994, but surely true today) alienates people from their bodies, from
> > death, and thus from life itself. And I happen to be reading a short
> story
> > right now about the Death of the other Ivan Illych (by Leo Tolstoy) and
> it
> > seems that this is also precisely Tolstoy's point - that Illych is faced
> > with thinking about life and the possibility that his life, which had
> been
> > lived "*comme il faut,*" may not have been the proper way to live when
> one
> > truly confronts the reality of death. But whenever his thoughts turn to
> > this possibility, Illych avoids it by focusing his efforts on the ill
> > performing organ, possibly a floating kidney. His doctors also treat him
> > primarily as an organism, as a puzzle, and not at all as a man that is
> > going to die.
> >
> > I won't tell you how it ends, but I do wonder about the problem of
> > *feeling*and what all this means for discourses of
> > *feeling*. have we (i.e., the social sciences) lost feeling to scientific
> > discourses such that our feelings are no longer experienced as *felt* but
> > rather as mere "symptoms" of some underlying (i.e. "more real") physical
> > reality ("I'm sad today - must be because my dopamine levels are low").
> >
> > How to take feelings back from reductionist science and make ourselves
> > whole once more?
> >
> > -greg
> >
> > --
> > Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> > Sanford I. Berman Post-Doctoral Scholar
> > Department of Communication
> > University of California, San Diego
> > __________________________________________
> > _____
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> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Dr. Elinami Swai
> Senior Lecturer,
> School of Curriculum and Teacher Education
> College of Education
> University of Dodoma
> P.O.Box 523
> Dodoma
> Tel: 225-26-2310002
> Fax: 255-26-2310005
> Cell: (255) 065-322-8353; (255) 076-722-8353; (255) 078-722-8353
>
> http://www.odyssey360.com/books/beyond-womens-empowerment-africa-elinami-veraeli-swai--exploring-dislocation-books/9780230102484
>        ...this faith will still deliver
>        If you live it first to last
>        Not everything which blooms must
>        wither.
>        Not all that was is past
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-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Sanford I. Berman Post-Doctoral Scholar
Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego
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