[Xmca-l] Re: Thought and language as oscillating and pulsing [or not]

[mike cole]

​Annalisa -- The way you have posted your note leaves me clueless about why
you are addressing me, or what it is that I wrote that you are addressing.
We certainly agree that emotion and cognition are mutually constituted.

Clue me into the message that gave rise to these thoughts and suggestions.
mike

​

On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 3:59 PM, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I would like to offer (with kindness, not adversity) that I don't think
> this is exactly right, mike, that meaning infuses the structure of motor
> and perceptual activities, because we have not included affect here. The
> body isn't a machine that just acts in activity without feeling.
>
> We know for example from Damasio that affect is required to reason, which
> means we sense and feel *before* we reason, if it is allowable for me to
> connect sensing with feeling and affect. Did Vygotsky know this? Or Shpet?
>
> I wonder why there hasn't been more climbing on board of Damasio's work.
> This seems to be a huge discovery.
>
> It is my sense (!) that sensing is not solely perceptual, but references
> memory as well. Learning and memory-making have important connections to
> affective experiences.
>
> Is it possible that Vygotsky was using "sense" as a way to discuss
> thinking with the body, but with feeling, in the moment of NOW as one faces
> one's environment? That these impressions are made in a unique manner that
> pertains only to the person. In other words, the process of
> structure-creating is phylogenetic, the scenario in which this process
> takes place is ontogenetic, and therefore the resulting manifestation is
> particular to the person and one's environment? We all have faces with
> certain properties: two eyes, a nose, a mouth, cheeks, etc., yet the face
> itself is unique to each person, despite family resemblances.
>
> If this is so, it could explain experiences of "race" or "gender" without
> there actually being a location for these experiences of "race" or "gender"
> in the body (explained genetically, for example). In this way, the
> experience is experienced by the experiencer at the moment of the
> experience. It is not pre-programmed, not totally.
>
> Let me try this way: because I have a female body, I will not feel danger
> any differently than other humans in a war zone of bullets flying, but I
> may feel danger differently walking down a dark street that a man may not.
> So it's because I have a female body, but not because I have a female body,
> that I have these experiences. And yet on a given night I may not have this
> experience at all walking down a dark street, because on that particular
> night, I feel completely safe.
>
> If affect were not important, then I could not have these experiences that
> I experience. It is this disconnect (removal of affect from the equation of
> being myself) that perhaps is something along the lines of the
> double-consciousness that African Americans experience (as Paul has
> explained), but I certainly do not want to speak for African-American
> experience, just that in my imagination, I can see connections and
> parallels.
>
> This dualism (the split of thought and affect) can only be eradicated when
> we reunite the affect (which actually has never been separated in
> experience, but is separated out in the manner of propaganda functions, a
> reality that is not really real, along the lines of C'est ne pas un pipe
> and yet, here is a pipe). I believe that this is the antidote, to remove
> the confusion by looking for wholeness in thought and affect. It is a
> removal, in order to unite.
>
> Because we have 450 years of Descartes to face, it is a slippery endeavor.
> Meaning: this isn't easy if we look inside our own culture which has no
> means for filtering this out. This is why I offer it may be useful to look
> to the East because I don't believe there is the same urgent project to
> separate mind from body. This is my sense. I could be wrong. Those people
> in the East are people too, after all, aren't they? :) What can be learned
> from comparing and contrasting? I'd think a lot!
>
> Isn't it true that otherness can only arise by removal of affect?
> Furthermore, isn't it possible to rationalize the unethical once the affect
> has been removed? These are questions I would invite further exploration,
> if there is interest.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Annalisa
>
>
>
>


-- 
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object
that creates history. Ernst Boesch.