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Re: [xmca] Emotions and Culture

Well, Eric, this does seem to take us back to High and Low, doesn't it?
I like Tolstoy's point that art is continuous with everyday life, that it is too easy to exaggerate the difference between a good everyday flower arrangement, a professional artistic one, and sunflowers painted by van Gogh. Or between the spontaneous wit that succeeds beyond our expectations and the crafted wittiness of literary dialogue. There are many differences, but not, I think, a qualitative dichotomy.
Russell is also right that mathematicians appreciate a beauty and an emotional value in great mathematics that is very like what people feel about art. But obviously the feeling is different, and comparing it art is just a rhetorical means to affirm its very great value. Russell's own poetic comparison here, that in both we feel "more than Man" belongs to a particular cultural discourse, a sort of secularized religious discourse. Russell himself was an outspoken atheist, but I think he wanted to affirm that within the cultural values of humanism there was still room for something transcendental, though art, poetry, and mathematics.
In all these cases, if there is perhaps a common element of "higher", it is, I think, that they all involve our having intense feelings about the "virtual", the imagined, the semiotically called- into-"being", as opposed to the feelings we have through our interaction with the everyday concrete world, which do not require that we have culturally refined and elaborated capabilities of both understanding such abstractions or projections and imaginations (what I call the irrealis layered on top of the realis, the IF that builds on the THAT) and feeling strongly about them.
So in that sense there is some basis for a difference of Low and High in cognitions and feelings, though maybe we want to call it Basic and Elaborated, or Realis and Realis-plus-Irrealis, and just note that the former is more tightly bound to the here and now, and the latter freer to imagine what is not here-and-now. The former comes earlier in ontogeny, the latter later and sometimes not very much at all. The former is more uniformly developed by all of us, the latter much more unevenly so. And the role of culture, while important in the former, may be even more preponderant in the latter.
But even this dichotomy of convenience can and should also be subverted by a better understanding of just how the irrealis capabilities arise from and remain anchored in the realis ones. Surely this was the grand task that Vygotsky had set himself, and which we continue to pursue? 

JAY.


Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Dec 7, 2009, at 7:31 AM, ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org wrote:


From Wikipedia:
Many mathematicians derive aesthetic pleasure from their work, and from mathematics in general. They express this pleasure by describing mathematics (or, at least, some aspect of mathematics) as beautiful. Sometimes mathematicians describe mathematics as an art form or, at a minimum, as a creative activity. Comparisons are often made with music and poetry. Bertrand Russell expressed his sense of mathematical beauty in these words: Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty ? a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as 
only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the
exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.[1]
Here is what Tolstoy wrote about aesthetics in his "What is art?" essay: 


We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in
theaters, concerts, and exhibitions; together with buildings, statues,
poems, and novels. .. . But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with one another in life. All human 
life is filled with works of art of every kind?from cradlesong, jest,
mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensib to church
services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all
artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings but only that part which 
we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special
importance. This special importance has always been given by men to that part of this activity which transmits feelings flowing from their religious perception, and this small part they 
have specifically called art, attaching to it the full meaning of the
word.[12]

Is one of them right and the other wrong?  In the dialectic there is a
place for both opinions.  Does this mean emotions the emotions of
mathematics is different than that emoted from religios experiences?

eriuc




Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
12/06/2009 09:38 PM
Please respond to ablunden; Please respond to "eXtended Mind, Culture,
Activity"
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu> 
       cc:
       Subject:        Re: [xmca] Emotions and Culture


Try subtracting dualism from our understanding of mental
life as cognition/emotion. All mental life has both a
physiological substrate and meaning (intention, teleology).
True of emotion as much as cognition. What it is in the
object perceived which is beautiful or fearful is perhaps
different from understanding 'coldly' what its cause is or
its value to human life, but really, when you think about,
you cannot draw any kind of line here.

Andy

Jay Lemke wrote:

Andy,
Thanks so much for this great synopsis. I'm looking forward to reading 
the LSV myself if Achilles does get an OCR version out to us all.
And I'm very happy that I agree with all the points LSV makes, at least 
as far as your summary relates them!

It does seem really obvious after thinking about for a while that the
"higher" emotions (finer, more elaborated, subtler, "later" ...) are
both grounded in the bodily feelings and go substantially beyond them, 
both in feeling and meaning.
What really intrigues me is just how LSV might have imagined the ways in
which meaning is an integral part of emotion. It's certainly true, but 
it's the How's that I want to understand more.

JAY.


Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Dec 6, 2009, at 3:58 AM, Andy Blunden wrote:


*Vygotsky on the Teaching About Emotions*

After all these years I at last got around to reading Vygotsky's
'Teaching about Emotions'. So far as I know, this and the lecture on
the development of emotions in Volume 1, are all that is available in 
English of Vygotsky on the emotions.

It is an amazing article. For 170 pages, Vygotsky is like a tiger
circling the hunter, preparing to attack, circling and circling:
ranging from Descartes to James and contemporary writers and back
again, he brings out the contradiction and dualism of descriptive
psychology and explanatory psychology, centrifugal or centripetal
sources of emotion, higher and lower emotions, causal or intentional
explanations, physiological or intentional descriptions, natural
scientific or theological approaches, etc., etc. It is a protracted
immanent critique of the teaching about emotions from Descartes to his own time, allowing each voice to speak against the others, or itself. 
Occasionally, Vygotsky notes something with approval or makes the
occasional characterisation of his own, but generally every system is eventually drawn into contradiction with itself. We are left with only 
the barest hints of a way out. This is the only case I know of an
immanent critique which does not conclude or follow up with a
transcending proposal. Dated 1933, I can only conclude that Vygotsky
died before he could complete the exercise. It does read like someone 
trying to solve a puzzle. It is not polemical; it's like thinking

aloud.


So, people like Achilles and Mabel who are working on emotions along
Vygotsky's lines have a marvellous and challenging task before them!
Not just completing Schubert's unfinished symphony, more like writing 
Shakespeare's 'Elizabeth I'.

One of the surprising things, to me, was that Vygotsky says, in
effect, that the entire history of the teaching about emotions is
contained in Descartes. Those who came after picked up one side or
other of Descartes' dualism, but soon or later found them forced back to some kind of dualism. Spinoza gets a mention, and is credited with 
some correct criticisms of Descartes, but given how much others make
of Spinoza on emotions, and how much we know Vygotsky admired Spinoza, 
he has surprisingly little to say about Spinoza. Also, in the entire
article there is only one mention of words, so anyone who thinks that 
Vygotsky reduced consciousness to word meaning must be mistaken.
Because what Vygotsky is discussing is not just emotion, but really
the whole history of psychology.
As I say, I don't think Vygotsky actually comes to a conclusion, but a 
few points can be made I think.
1. A science of the emotions worthy of the name must be able to deal
fully with the 'higher' or 'finer' emotions - like the satisfaction a mathematician feels on completing a theorem or the pain of a composer 
whose arpeggio is not quite right - and yet must be explanatory; if
limited to descriptive psychology (like a phenomenology of the
emotions) it cannot claim to be science.
2. The physiological substrate of emotions (adrenalin, blood pressure, 
tightening of muscles, etc), including body chemistry and motor
functions, and the associated sensations, are _diffuse_ in nature, and 
can only give a limited range of qualities to emotional experience,
compared with the infinite range of emotions known to literature. Both great joy and great sadness can be associated with tears and shaking; 
both anger and fear include heightened heart rate.

3. The perception of these 'peripheral' changes are merely
supplementary to the experience of emotion, not essential and
certainly not the _substance_ of emotions as claimed by James.
Vygotsky seems satisfied that an emotion can be experienced with no
measureable changes in the relevant peripheral functions. (I don't
know if the idea of 'brain maps' of the body has any impact on this.) 

4. Emotions are intentional, in the philosophical sense, i.e.,
directed at something in the objective world. (Thomas Scheff includes 
what an emotion is directed to as part of his categorization of
emotions too, e.g., other-directed or self-directed or
object-directed.) And words like teleological and will come into
Vygotsky's text, but he does not explicitly introduce striving as part 
of the essence of emotion. But it seems to me, it is hard to see how
affect can be independent of meaning in relation to a person's
striving or desire. And that is outside the person.
5. It seems that Vygotsky wants to include _meaning_ as an irreducible 
part of emotion. If the silhouette of a woman engenders an emotion,
then that image and all its associations are part of the emotion, not just an external stimulus for a feeling; the grief of a woman over the 
death of her son cannot be separated from her whole consciousness of
her son and his death, memories, etc., all of which impart qualities
to the emotion This means that an exclusively physiological
explanation of emotion is absolutely ruled out. Jay's point about
emotions being to some extent shared is supported here by Vygotsky, I 
think.

I suspect that because of the various kinds of visceral phenomena
associated with strong emotions and shared with the animals, there has 
historically been a tendency for thinkers to abstract emotion from
other, 'cold' or 'higher' modes of consciousness. The more so I
suspect that all such speculations are the work of a class of people
for whom calculation not passion is the norm. The whole ethos of
intellect versus animal passions, etc.

Vygotsky wants I think to put these pieces back together, to accept
that certain extreme perceptions engender modes of response in the
body appropriate to the perception, and these produce affects which
_accompany_ a perception and add further quality to the affect. It is 
as if the categorizing impulse that drives positivist (abstract
empirical) science, in its effort to tear the subject apart, tears
affect away from apprehension, and then goes about categorizing
affects, and seems to believe that because of this act of cognition,
there must be, in the subject itself, an abstraction of causes. But
all perception is also affect, isn't it. There is no such thing as
purely intellectual perception or intention. To understand grief, one 
does need that perception of powerlessness and depression, but also
the disorganization of consciousness which loss of a person close to
you brings. Vygotsky mentions the difference between fear of a ghost
and fear of an approaching bear. There is a difference. And the
difference lies in the object of fear, and cannot be separated from
consciousness as a whole and it structure.

............
For those who have high speed internet, Achilles has created a PDF of 
images of the text which is at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1933/emotions/emotions.pdf (65Mb) 
but Achilles has also OCR-ed the text and is currently correcting it
and it should be available at the same location in a few days.

-----------------

Achilles Delari Junior wrote:

Hi, excuse-me,
It's only to share a little  information. Some time
ago, Anton provide us a copy from the text from
Vygotsky, Samukhin an Birembaum about Pick's Disease  - and it had
important influences from
Lewin and others. That two Vygotsky's collaborators
studied in Germany, I guess, as did Zeiganik. There
are something about the problem of that they
call the "affective systems" of two patients...
It is from 1934, and was not translated yet.
Thank you, nothing to detour the discussion, only
an information about Vygotsky and Gestalt in
clinical settings...
Best.
Achilles.

From: liliamabel@hotmail.com
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: RE: [xmca] Emotions and culture
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 07:16:28 +0000


Hi, Larry.
Just for the records, I am really not interested in relational
gestalt theory neither psychoanalisis. I will not change that in my 
thesis, much less at this stage. I define myself as a Gestalt
psychotherapist, because I have a paper that says so, and it is the 
way in which I make (or theoreticallycan make) a living. I use art
(but I do not have a paper that says that I am an art-therapist or
an artist :).
Theoretically speaking, and that is how I understand what happens in my practice, and in all the other practices of which I participate, what I know a bit is Vygotsky. Just cause, I do not like those other 
labels, sorry.
Cheers,
Mabel




Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2009 22:07:07 -0800
From: lpurss@shaw.ca
Subject: Re: [xmca] Emotions and culture
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu

Hi Jay
Yes, your summary of emotions at different time scales seems to be 
in "sympathy" with my perspective. I've welcomed the opportunity
from the CHAT community to find out what I "think" and "feel". Mabel 
Your interst in relational psychoanlysis and Gestalt theory is
shared by others.
I googled "relational gestalt theory" and found many references to 
Gestalt theorists who are bringing relational theory into their
practice.
A general question for the CHAT community on the contrasts between 
"genetic" and "stage" theories of development. If genetic implies
emergence and greater complexity whereas stages imply transcendence from one epistemology to a radically "other" stage why is Piaget's 
"genetic epistemology" theory describe various stages?
This contrast in perspectives seems to have profound implications
to how we view development.

Larry
----- Original Message -----
From: Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>
Date: Wednesday, December 2, 2009 8:31 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] Emotions and culture
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>


Mabel and Larry focus on what I think is a key issue in
understanding emotion. First, that emotions are generated in time, 
as a process. It is a process in which we ourselves are ACTIVE,
and not, as in some folk theories taken over into psychological
models, merely reacting to external events and conditions. Second, 
its genesis takes place over multiple timescales. There is the
very short term, moment-to-
moment, rise and fall of various feelings, their layering onto one 
another, the transitions from one to another. Then there is a

longer-
term tendency, closer to the mood of the "moment" (which is a much longer moment than the first timescale), which may define a trend 
in the progression of our feelings. And this in turn is coupled
more into the situation and setting, who else is there, what is
going on, what is the activity and the goals that we are engaged
with. Then further, there are still longer term scales, over
months or years of our lives, which merge more into social
processes and the expectations of the culture and subcultures, the 
communities we operate within.
I very much like the idea of ethnographic neuroscience, and I wish there were more neuroscientists who did! but they are not trained 
in this way, and it requires a collaboration at least. It is so
much easier for them to study only short-term, isolated,
laboratory- controlled events as they appear in their neuro-
physiological correlates, which makes sense if they imagine that
they are looking at universal processes, which occur in the same
way every time.

But of course they don't, and how they appear is very context
dependent. At least we know this is the case in terms of how they 
feel to us, and how they emerge over the shorter and longer
timescales of relevance. It would be very interesting to know what 
is the same and what is different across cases and events, in
different situations and settings, for "the same" emotional
response. This will, I think, be on the agenda of the neuroscience 
of a decade or two from now.

JAY.


Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Dec 1, 2009, at 1:58 PM, Mabel Encinas wrote:


Hi, Larry and all.



Thank you very much Larry, for having introduced Stern. I am

not

into psychoanalysis. I am a Gestalt psychotherapist, and

maybe

because this perspective emphasizes the 'here and now', I

realised

that I had to discuss the present moment, and the

performative

making sense of the situation when I faced the challenge to

analyse

my videos about classroom interaction. Also, I discuss

the

difference of actions that seem intentionally loaded, with

others in

which intentionality is quite contestable. My research is

based in

microanalysis. For being able to study emotions, I decided to

study

Vygotsy's understanding of emotions. Also I found in this

analysis

of video (I did not interview neither the teachers or the

students

about their emotional experience, although I did had

long

conversations with the teachers), that in order to

understand

videos, there was important to find 'whole' situations in

which

emotions were first of all 'evident'. The segments then were

from

about 1 to 4 minutes long, and I then describe them in

depth,

including drawings of the interactions. I study this excerpts

as

developmental in terms of emotions. I already said that the

metaphor

I use is that I study certain threads without taking them away

from

the tissue. In my descriptions, I present the richness of the

tissue

and I relay in the concept of context that weave together

(Cole,

1996). I discuss how emotions emerge and impact the situation,

and

how this impact 'informes' in turn the sense that individuals

keep

making of the situation instant after instant.



My conclusions are more about the way in which emotions can

be

studied, and I pose questions to neuroscience, as I see Stern

does!

I suggest to do 'ethnographic nueroscience'. Stern (2004) says:



" Two kinds of data are needed. First, accurate timing of

brain

activity correlated with phenomenal experiences. Second, the

timing

of th analogic shifts in intensity or magnitude of neural

firing

during the same phenomenal expereinces".



I have to read more about Stern, I would like to understand

what are

the similarities and differences with Vygotsky's thought, and

the

usefulness of Stern's contribution. So far, so good :)



Best wishes,

Mabel


















Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 12:45:44 -0800
From: lpurss@shaw.ca
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: [xmca] Emotions and culture

Hi everyone
I wanted to look at another level of the discourse on

emotions.

This is to add to the recognition of the other levels such

as

institutionally and historically contexts of emotion. This in

no

way minimizes the critical importance of these levels of

process

for understanding emotion.
But, in the same spirit of discourse analysis which loos at

the

micro level of conversation I believe we expand our horizon

of

understanding by exploring the microgenesis of emotions as

the

interface between biology and culture. I have posted before

on the

position of Daniel Stern and the moment by moment generation

of

emotion. Today I want to summarize the thoughts of a DONNEL

B.

Stern to this discussion in his book "Unformulated Experience"

(p.43)When we talk about content or structure or experience

it is

not a THING at all, but a PROCESS, one that has CONTINUITY

OVER

TIME. Some processes have more continuity (organization) some

less.

We act AS IF these discrete abstractions which our folk

psychologhy

labels thoughts, memories, feelings, are REAL but they are

socially

mediated constructions that locates experience in PARTICULAR

stable

ways. Psychoanalysis is interested in how these processes

keep

reproducing experience in similar shapes or patterns

through

interpretive organizing ACTIVITY.
Stern discusses a psychoanalyst "ROY SCHAFER" who attempts

to

translate all psychological events and language games into

ACTION

LANGUAGE to recognize these psychological events as

ACTIVITY.

Schafer chooses not to take this approach because

communication

becomes awkward.

However he does elaborate the processes of REFLECTIVE

EXPERIENCE

(where we stand back from and observe our

phenomicological

processes. Folk psychology (common sense) leaves the

impression

that thoughts and emotions just arrive or leap into

existence

without the DEVELOPMENT of the thought or emotion. In reality

each

moment of experience is a process of emergence (MICROGENESIS)

a

sequence of necessary steps that must occur as experience

UNFOLDS.

Microgenesis, applied to thought and emotion develops from

moment

to moment in a process Donnel Stern calls FORMULATIND

THE

UNFORMULATED. The microgenetic lens emphasizes the

developmental

life (Dewey's "arc") of each present moment OUT OF the

experience

of the recently formulated experience. Conscious,

explicit,

liquistically articulated experience (formulated)emerges

from

activity (verbal and nonverbal) that took place in the

preceding

(sociocultural) moments. This emergence of experience

INCLUDING

THAT PART THAT ARRIVES IN AWARENESS is ORGANIC and CULTURAL

and is

a continuous dynamic process. Sometimes AFTER THE FACT the

way one

moment developed from the PREVIOUS one COMES TO OUR ATTENTION

but

more often it does not.
Donnel Stern uses the terms thought and emotion as

heuristic

devices and stress that he sees these processes as a single

process

of COGNITION (which for him is emotional-thought or

thoughtful-

emotion) Cognition is formulated as a process of emergence

within

sociocultural activity.
William Blake's metaphor "seeing the world in a grain of

sand"

captures the spirit of this inquiry at the microgenetic

level. If

this is seen as the unit of analysis it posits

identity,

subjectivity, and self-ing as emergent in moment to

moment

enactments which become organized into cultural patterns.

I hope this captures the spirit of the relational frame

emerging in

psychoanalytic discourse. They also are elaborating how the

micro,

meso, and macro levels of process develop in particulat

historical

contexts.

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