{"id":11002,"date":"2020-08-25T13:26:08","date_gmt":"2020-08-25T18:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=11002"},"modified":"2020-11-27T22:35:49","modified_gmt":"2020-11-28T03:35:49","slug":"emotional-practices-part-2-affective-construction-the-triune-self-the-art-of-joyful-deliberation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/08\/25\/emotional-practices-part-2-affective-construction-the-triune-self-the-art-of-joyful-deliberation\/","title":{"rendered":"Emotional practices, part 2: Affective construction, the triune self, & the art of joyful deliberation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In part 1 of this article<\/a>, I compared two recent books, each of which proclaims a \u201cnew paradigm\u201d in the scientific study of emotions and affect: Lisa Feldman Barrett\u2019s \u201cconstructivist\u201d <\/em>How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain<\/a> and Stephen Asma\u2019s and Rami Gabriel\u2019s \u201cbasic emotions\u201d-rooted <\/em>The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition.<\/a> In part 2, I relate each of these to recent social-scientific writing on \u201caffective\u201d or \u201cemotional practices\u201d and to a few key sources of my own efforts to articulate a \u201cphilosophy as a way of life,\u201d that is, a contemporary <\/em>ask\u0113sis<\/a>: specifically, to Spinoza (briefly), Gurdjieff (at greater length), and Shinzen Young (whose mindfulness system I used as a basis for my own, presented in part 2 of <\/em>Shadowing the Anthropocene<\/a>). I end with an extended practical exercise that brings these strands of thinking together.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\"This<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Starting definitions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Affective and emotional practices are studied by social scientists, so it might be useful to begin with a few of their definitions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Monique Scheer\u2019s definition of emotional practices is rooted in a Bourdieauian understanding of social practices. Scheer defines emotional practices<\/a> as \u201chabits, rituals, and everyday gestures that aid us in achieving a certain emotional state.\u201d They are \u201cmanipulations of body and mind to evoke feelings where there are none, to focus diffuse arousals and give them an intelligible shape, or to change or remove emotions already there.\u201d Emotional practices can be individual or collective, but it may be more fruitful to think of them as \u201cdistributed,\u201d which means that they are \u201ccarried out together with other people, artifacts, aesthetic arrangements, and technologies\u201d (Scheer, \u201cAre emotions a kind of practice<\/a>\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Margaret Wetherell defines “affective practice” in her impressive volume Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding<\/a><\/em>, as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In affective practice, bits of the body (e.g. facial muscles, thalamic-amygdala pathways in the brain, heart rate, regions of the prefrontal cortex, sweat glands, etc.) get patterned together with feelings and thoughts, interaction patterns and relationships, narratives and interpretative repertoires, social relations, personal histories, and ways of life. These components and modalities, each with their own logic and trajectories, are assembled together in interacting and recursive, or back and forth, practical methods. (13-14)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Just as social scientists can study affective and emotional practices as they are found in society, so can individuals make a study of their own practices, witnessing their connections with affective \u201cflows\u201d that permeate, percolate, pulsate, and run through their bodies, connecting them to other bodies (people, things) and to routinized and habituated movements, rhythms, and relational complexes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wetherell follows Ian Burkitt in seeing that \u201can emotion, like anger or fear, is not an object inside the self, as basic emotions research assumes, but is a relation to others, a response to a situation and to the world,\u201d a \u201crelational pattern\u201d that is \u201cautomatically distributed and located across the psychosocial field\u201d (24). Burkitt argues that \u201cfeelings,\u201d which may be \u201cpre-conceptual\u201d and \u201cineffable,\u201d \u201care not expressed <\/em>in discourse so much as completed <\/em>in discourse.\u201d \u201cWhat may start out as inchoate can sometimes be turned into an articulation, mentally organised and publicly communicated, in ways that engage with and reproduce regimes and power relations.\u201d (24)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wetherell writes that<\/p>\n\n\n\n

during a burst of sharp emotion, the body pumps out a wide range of somatic signals. Many of these are initiated in the brain stem and driven by the autonomic nervous system (ANS), such as changes in blood flow resulting in blushing or blanching, changes in heart rate and in breathing rate. There are changes in the muscles as expressions drift across the face: smiles, frowns, various forms of wrinkling and twisting. Other muscles work on posture and stance, modulating relaxation and tension, and producing the visceral clenching or calming of the guts. Within the brain and central nervous system (CNS), chemical transmitters make connections across neural synapses and pathways. Neural circuits begin to fire, rapidly conveying information.<\/p>

These physical changes are accompanied by qualia <\/em>or subjective feelings, along with other cognitions, evaluations, images, memories and appraisals of the situation. Typically, sharp bursts of affects are also action-oriented. They constitute a strong push to do something — flee, remonstrate, appeal, move closer, etc. (29)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Affective processing, she continues, \u201cis multiple and parallel.\u201d \u201cIt is less like the unfolding of a prepared script and more like emerging forms of coalescence or partial and temporary settlings.\u201d (29-30) \u201cIn affective activity,\u201d she goes on, \u201cbody landscapes\u201d or \u201cbodyscapes\u201d are \u201cconstituted and reconstituted, assembled and put together, moment to moment.\u201d (30)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this can be taken to be the activity of the emotional “body<\/a>,” which while it interpenetrates with the sensory-moving and mental-cognitive “bodies,” is also its own partially autonomous<\/a> thing (and consists of further, semi-autonomous mixtures of things). The question for me at least, following up on Part 1 of this article, is whether to see physicality, affectivity, and cognition as making up one blurred, dynamic, and interactive unity — as suggested by the constructivist view — or if they are better conceived as thickly interwoven but semi-autonomous<\/em> force-fields or centers. Is anything lost if we take away the distinctiveness of each of the three from the totality of all of them? Let’s examine this question a little more directly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"This<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The triune brain as explanation and as evocation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I mentioned in Part 1 that Paul MacLean\u2019s general idea of the \u201ctriune brain<\/a>\u201d is these days considered to be scientifically flawed or at least misleading. Brain evolution has not been linear and additive, with some species evolving further or \u201chigher\u201d up a \u201cladder of evolution\u201d while others have stopped at an \u201cearlier\u201d or more \u201cprimitive\u201d level. All organisms evolve; they do this as they adapt to their surroundings and conserve their adaptations through differential reproduction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What MacLean arguably got right, however, was the homologies<\/em> between broad classes of organisms. In this sense, I believe it is more accurate to speak not of \u201cthree brains\u201d or even a \u201ctriune brain,\u201d but of primary, secondary, and tertiary \u201cmental functions\u201d or \u201cregisters.\u201d There is a logical ordering to these in that the primary ones are more or less shared across a much wider span of species (practically all vertebrates), the secondary across a distinctly more limited span (primarily mammals), and the tertiary across a very specific subclass of the latter (mainly humans). By \u201cmental functions,\u201d I mean functions that are part of the cognitive-affective apparatus or nervous system by which humans experience the world around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this should imply that \u201csecondary\u201d or \u201ctertiary\u201d functions are not found in very different species, including non-mammals. The distinction between the three registers is not meant to be objective or universal; rather, it takes the human brain and nervous system as its baseline and works from there. Thinking of these three sets of mental functions as \u201cinheritances\u201d\u2014respectively, vertebral, mammalian, and hominid inheritances\u2014can help us recognize that they are historically shaped and shared. As inheritances, they don\u2019t so much determine<\/em> our behavior as enable<\/em> it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s recap these in a little more detail than I presented earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n