Gentler and subtler characterizations? Or practice in
reflexivity... Or -- or? ?
- Judy
At 02:26 PM 2/20/98 -0500, you wrote:
>
>Pleased and a bit surprised by the extent of, mostly positive, reaction to
>my long post on this topic (off list as well as on).
>
>My swipe at applied cognitive psych was not meant as an intellectual
>observation (there is much good work done), but as a political one.
>Researchers indeed cannot afford not to be eclectic in their methods and
>concepts; I wouldn't _exclude_ anything, fire-breathing Feyerabendian that
>I am! :) But I'm also not averse to political alignments and taking sides
>on issues of where we think the agenda, often covert and perhaps even
>invisible to practitioners, of a disciplinary tradition is leading in
>practice.
>
>A perhaps more Vygotskyan take on the Piaget point about not having a
>science of affectivity: it does make it much more difficult to engage in
>self-regulation and self-reflection if you don't have more than a loose
>folk-terminology to engage the power of language in dealing with the
>diversity of our human feelings. On the other hand, I am not quite so
>single-mindedly in favor of keeping our emotions strictly 'under control'.
>I would rather see the power of a scientifically extended and
>well-theorized semantics of feeling employed to liberate people from the
>ideologically functional myths and mystiques about emotions. Most of these
>seem to take the form: Emotion X is bad in circumstances Y. Morally bad,
>leading to guilt and suppression of the feeling. These taboos and
>repressions are strongly grounded in the limited and limiting folk-taxonomy
>of emotions. If you've been taught that it is wrong to feel "Anger" in
>certain circumstances, the issue may ultimately be whether it makes sense
>to have a single category like "Anger" at all. There must be many quite
>different feelings that all get lumped as Anger, and many of these may be
>analyzable mixtures of very different 'feeling atoms' or primary feeling
>'primitives' of both physioligical and semiotic types.
>
>My recent ideas about generalizing semiotics more to include non-categorial
>modes of meaning, more 'topological' or meaning-by-degree in continuous
>variation along multiple dimensions, might lend themselves to a less
>reductionistic, or 'atomizing' approach to a semiotics of feeling. I agree
>with Diane that you don't want simple rulers for describing fuzzy clouds.
>But today we have fuzzy set theories and topology and many sorts of guides
>to how to more gently and subtly characterize matters of these sorts.
>
>Oversimplifying taxonomies are a very common strategy or means of
>ideological control, as for example with notions such as dichotomies, etc.:
>male/female, masculine/feminine, straight/gay, middle/working-class,
>White/Black/Yellow, African/Asian/European, child/adult, etc. Notions like
>masculinity, say, or sexual orientation, or social class, or ethnicity, are
>very complex multi-dimensional matters of degrees of participation,
>identification, etc. in many different and often in principle independent
>respects (cf. Bourdieu in _Distinction_). Like the insidious race
>categories, all these few-term category systems lack serious scientific or
>intellectual justification if you skeptically critique them. And all of
>them have historically served oppressive ends. While these simplistic taxa
>may sometimes promote political solidarity, needed for oppressed groups,
>they also play into the hands of hegemonic ideologies of divide and conquer
>(and especially of constructing phoney shifting majorities in just such a
>way that dominant groups can always count themselves in the majority, but
>all other groups can be excluded now and again on some count or other, as
>convenient, to keep them in their place).
>
>The same intellectual revolutions needed to subvert notions like race
>categorization or gender stereotyping apply to all of these systems. And
>they would also provide, I suspect, just the right kind of approach to
>better understanding our feelings, and how social forces try to use
>ideologies about feeling to control us against our interests and the
>interests of larger wholes.
>
>JAY.
>
>---------------------------
>JAY L. LEMKE
>
>CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
>JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
>---------------------------
>
>
>
Judith Diamondstone (732) 932-7496 Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183