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

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Greg
The question of "feeling whole"  or "grounded" seems intimately connected
to historical ways of orienting to emotions. Bahktin's insights that words,
language, and feelings are only half ours is a fundamental re-orientation
of perspective to how we see emotions NOT as PREVIOUS to expression
but rather  embodiment WITHIN  expression.
Philosophical hermeneutics is also engaging with this dialogical
re-orientation which explores this alternative perspective that
"expression IS feeling" rather than "expression OF feeling" as if feeling
is an entity or essence or some "thing"  which exists prior TO expression.

Science, as orienting to PREVIOUS causes [as reasons for] has a bias to
search for "causes" prior to expression. This bias searches for "causes" of
"behavior" while hermeneutical descriptions explore "conduct" as
expressions that are half ours and half others.  Conduct from this
perspective requires RESPONSE which is NOT DETERMINED IN ADVANCE
[antecedent determination is a behavior interpretation] but rather response
is the expressive moment or "creative act" developed within the "gaps"
existing BETWEEN others expressions and our response [as conduct]
I would also draw attention to the centrality of "gestures" to ongoing
feelings within communication.  It has been stated that approximately one
third of our brain is devoted to "facial recognition" [see Mike Cole's
article on saccadic eye movements].  Facial recognition therefore must be
central to ongoing "primary" intersubjectivity prior to language
acquisition.  Images are FORMED within the gaps of saccadic eye movements
prior to language acquisition.  Language use within ontogenetic
development constitutes "hybrid" personalities which  develop
 within biological and cultural processes and imaginal processes transform
as language is aquired.  However, the dialogical "conduct" ["creative acts"
expressed within conduct] remain dialogical.  Science as one "type" of
conduct develops more "distanciation" and therefore the ability for
elaborate "re-presentations" of previously expressed emotionally vital
conduct [half ours and half others] and therefore allows for "types" of
self-mastery and self-assertion. However re-presentation is NOT reality
[res= things] and mistaking re-presentation and labelling it "behavior" is
a category mistake that confuses "actuality as conduct" with "behavior as
re-presentation" and then EXPLAINS this "behavior" in antecedent terms.

Greg, as I understand your thread, we are at a turning point in our
"devotion to scientism" [as theory and models; not as techne]
David K reminds me of the central "good" of science in understanding our
place in the world.  I fully agree that science "as techne" is central to
development.  However, I'm suggesting that when science as
techne colonizes theory and practical wisdom then the models or metaphors
which generate imaginal ways of understanding our sociality become
one-sided. Particular personality or character stances in the world which
negate our primary dialogical embeddedness with others lead to notions of
"behavior" as expressions OF our pre-existing  individual feelings rather
than feelings as emerging and coming INTO existence as "creative acts".

Larry
On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 8:26 AM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
> > > __________________________________________
> > > _____
> > > xmca mailing list
> > > 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
> > __________________________________________
> > _____
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Sanford I. Berman Post-Doctoral Scholar
> Department of Communication
> University of California, San Diego
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca