Dear Jay,
I,too, have been struggling on focussing more of affect. First, because it
came up as an important issue in collaboration, see Chaoter 5 in Creative
Collaboration, then the article we wrote on "The Gift of Confidence" in
Wells and Claxton. But I am now thinking of being a little more systematic,
conceiving of affect as the interpersonally and socially mediated
development of simple, basic emotions (such as fear, pleasure, etc.) This
would provide a parallel to some of Vygotsky's notions about cognitive
development. The idea is raw, but I would love to get a response as to its
potential,
Vera
----- Original Message -----
From: Jay Lemke <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Monday, November 04, 2002 9:06 PM
Subject: RE: Dialogue and Activity >>> SemEco
>
> Alfred is a treasure. Even moreso when I think again of absent friends
from
> earlier iterations of this discussion ...
>
> I hear a good deal of phenomenological sensibility in Alfred's discontent
> with the divorce of abstract categories and concrete experience. I
resonate
> also with his focus on the evolutive nature of
> experience-in/through-systems, which I call the dynamical, though of
course
> for complex systems (we agree entirely about why they differ in this from
> electrons and atoms) the dynamical is what I always seek a word like
> "evolutive" for ... though I usually settle for something like
> "developmental" ... systems that can't know where they can go until
they've
> got there, systems that surprise us, and themselves ... the generators of
> diversity (g.o.d., a poor pun from immunology), the making new.
>
> Alfred and I, and I think many of us, share a desire to codeploy the
> semiotic and the phenomenological, the dynamic and the systemic. My latest
> fascination is with the re-integration of affect into meaning-making
> systems, recognizing that the only way we know systems is by being part of
> them, and this is also the only way we can know ourselves. Feeling is an
> important quality of our experience of dynamic inter-activity in-systems
> (or in-networks), it can be a guide to insight, and it is also a cultural
> touchstone -- like the other dichotomous concept-pairs Alfred mentions --
> of how far we have to go to re-imagine our basic view of science.
>
> What stood out for me in Alfred's most recent message was the judgment
that:
> "What's crucial ... for us, is what a structure we
> can discern can do in connection with other structures."
>
> Again we have to take this dynamically, evolutively, in the context of his
> previous point:
> "the basic question we have to find
> answers to is how do the structures we can discern or infer come about."
>
> Becoming. Connecting. Seen and felt from the inside.
>
> I like "discerned" as a word for seen-meaningfully. Halliday likes
> "construed", for much the same usage. DIscerned adds the sense of
judgment,
> and that is a quality too much hidden away in the ideology of science.
> Science, like everything, is grounded in good judgment. Discerning is also
> a kind of judgment; discernment.
>
> I wonder, Alfred, as you write more about evolutive systems in our
semiotic
> ecology, if you have any advice about how to talk more usefully about
> affect, feeling, and judgment?
>
> Admiringly, JAY.
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> Educational Studies
> University of Michigan
> 610 East University
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
> http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
> ---------------------------
>
>
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