Part one:
In response to Doug¹s summary of the intro of Butler, I will add in some comments about the nature of depression. What I will do is give a working class example of a state of feelings being identified in a work site, an anecdotal example of someone with severe depression, and a book example of states of feeling. Butler relies upon an understanding of "melancholia" which in my estimation is inadequate but a starting place to understand how feelings and consciousness might shape class politics.
I will define some terms; encapsulated emotions, socially constructed emotions, evolutionary programs of feelings, the socio-bilogical roots of evolutionary psychology.
Encapsulated means that pieces of consciousness such as vision are separate modules of the mind. We have clear ideas of this thought when it comes to the senses, such that we do not ordinarily understand that hearing and seeing are intermingled. When someone sees colors when they hear a sound this is noted as unusual and not how ordinary hearing works. It is not so clear from experience though that within seeing that 3-d vision, color, motion are all distinct modules of the brain. If one had a stroke that affected only one of those areas, we would no longer see for example motion, though we could still discern depth, or color.
In the case of emotions such as "melancholia" feelings are encapsulated from what we think of as consciousness. In other words the part of consciousness where we think words in the mind is not affected directly by feelings. We do not expect consciousness to alter perception, nor do we expect that if we think ŒI don¹t want to feel sad¹ that sadness will go away upon the thought. The emotions are encapsulated from consciousness in the sense that conscious thought cannot directly control how we feel.
Socially constructed emotions is a theory of constructing emotions in consciousness as opposed to ideas about the origin of emotions in socio-biology about how the genetic code controls behavior. For instance a typical idea about socially constructed emotions is that "love" is a product of our culture. The term being invented in Europe and unfamiliar to other cultures as the sense of romance implies. There is a Japanese emotion which has no counter part in American-European cultures; Amae.
From "What Emotions Really Are", by Paul E. Griffiths, 1997, page 101, chapter 5, "The Higher Cognitive Emotions: Some Research Programs":
"ŠSome emotions are common in one population and absent in another. The Japanese experience an emotion known as amae, which involves a highly rewarding sense of being dependent on another person or organization. Something about human development in Japan induces this feature of the psychological phenotype in a way that human development in Europe does not."Š
Transitory expressions of feelings such as anger, fear, etc. tend to be both homologous across human cultures, and homologous with respect to other animals, especially primates. We can expect these stereotyped expressions of feelings are innate expressions of programmed behaviors. Some non-emotions which are also obviously not consciously controlled are sneezes, coughs, laughs, hiccups, etc. Though the feeling of humor has a conscious component which is like that I wrote above, the socially constructed state of laughing at comic social material infuses a programmed response not socially constructed. The emotional expressions are not socially invented, but emerge from the limited repertory of innate behaviors common to human inheritance.
I reject the fundamental concepts of socio-biology. I am arguing for social constructions of emotions. Despite the acknowledgement I make here that some emotional expressions are innate, I do not accept the concept of genetic control of behavior. That is in my terms; "ruled neural algorithms" such as a grammar module of the brain.
Page 106 through 107 of "What Emotions Really Are":
"The evolutionary psychology program is the successor to the socio-biology of the 1970s. Socio-biology tried to explain human behavior using tools from population genetics and evolutionary game theory. In many cases it interpreted observed behaviors as "evolutionarily stable strategies" (ESSs)‹traits which cannot be out-competed by any mutant form. Evolutionary psychology adds to the tools of sociobiology an approach to the explanation of behavior derived from the computationalist school in cognitive science and the Chomskyan tradition in psycholinguistics. The manifesto of evolutionary psychology is Jerome Hl. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby¹s The adapted Mind"Š
A Book Example of Socially Constructed Feelings
Page 140 of "What Emotions Really Are",
"Many people find the idea that emotions are "disclaimed actions" intuitively implausible. Constructionists try to shake this intuition by describing disclaimed actions in distant cultures whose myths have no grip on us. Averill provides a particularly striking example in his discussion of a New Guinean socially constructed illness. The Gururumba people experience the state of "being a wild pig" (Newman 1964). In this state they run wild, looting articles of small value and attacking bystanders. The Gururumba think the wild-pig syndrome is caused by being bitten by the ghost of a recently dead member of the tribe. They believe that this releases impulses suppressed by society and civilization. The syndrome is treated as a disease by the tribe. The antisocial behavior is tolerated to a quite remarkable extent. The disease either runs its course or is ritually cured. Wild-pig behavior is largely restricted to males between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. At this age men are likely to be under considerable economic pressure following the acquisition of a wife. Wild-pig behavior seems to occur when a man cannot meet his financial obligations. After a display of wild-pig behavior the individual receives special consideration with respect to these obligations. Newman convincingly explains wild-pig behavior as a device by which a man can obtain this consideration without denying the fact the demands made on him are legitimate. The behavior is an action, but is not acknowledged as such either by the individual or by society. It is part of the wild-pig role that wild-pit ;behavior is involuntary."
Doug Henwood writes in his summary of Butler¹s intro:
"I think this also bears on the exchange over nationalism. Does something like black nationalism - and I'm framing this as a question not out of coyness but out of real uncertainty - suffer from using the tools of the power one opposes? Does it reproduce the same tendencies to exclude and hierarchicalize? Of course, since it's a stance of resistance to oppressive power, it's not an identical reproduction, but does this affinity harm the project from the start? Can you say the same of the various "Third World" nationalisms that ended by reproducing many of the political and economic structures of the colonizers? Ditto the USSR, in reproducing the czar's secret police and Germany's trusts and class society? Certainly there were exogenous factors at work too, like the IMF and the Pentagon (or domestically, the FBI), but were there endogenous factors at work too?"
Doyle Butler writes confusingly about feelings. But I think Doug¹s basic point is worth pursuing concerning how to understand feelings and emotions in constructing society. So I am going to try apply class experience to the subject matter of Butler¹s writing to clarify what emotions really do in our class ridden society. I will continue to use Griffiths and other peoples work to add what I think are clarifications to Butler¹s general direction of her book. In order to keep this post to some decent length I will continue this line or reasoning in a second post, where I give a work site example of socially constructed feelings, and an anecdote about an individual experience of depression. Regards, Doyle Saylor -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/19990116/88eff2c6/attachment.htm>