A lot of questions about affect, mind and the body: the result of too much literature at the same time? In need of sorting…

Can we get negative and positive emotions actually installed in our body? Is it actually possible to em-body and in-corp-orate negative and positive emotional states in our body-brain tissue; i.e. embodying emotions as part of our being? The processes of “patterning the viscera” that Damasio terms the “somatic markers hypothesis”? Sarah Ahmed writes about how orientation matters in terms of orientation mattering. Cold bloody materialism it is. In a good way. Could it be that the feelings that correspond to and impel particular bodily responses have gotten into the affective repertories of bodily expressivity; i.e. the somatic repertories accompanying for example activism, including a variety of culturally and discursively identified symbolic indexes used for communicating them verbally, as well as discoursing about their value? Some researchers even suggest the possibilities of a positive dialectics between affect and discourse, such as when a rational understanding of, say Håkan Juholt or Obama, over time becomes emotionally part of our relationship towards him/her and underscores the way we respond to Juholt/Obama. The discursive positively feed into the affective, and vice cersa. For example, if we feel a direct aversion against Juholt/Obama, this could develop into a discursively and rationalized understanding of this aversion based on arguments, knowledge et cetera. It is a mind blowing circle it is! Nevertheless, research continues to propose that feelings – or better, “feelingly” – is the way we, as humans, ordinarily go about our lives – if not a particular situation calls for our necessarily rationalised discursive reason to come forth and become the primary way we orient towards our environment. So, feelings, not reason or representation is primary (cf. Damasio; Gallager; Protevi; Massumi et cetera). This is, of course, hard for academics to accept, belying our particular tendency to stand back and reflect on everything and not just – as Nike suggest – “just do it”. When coping at our best we see the world feelingly, as Jasper suggest (Shakespeare, King Lear); not rationally, “reflectingly” or “mindedly” in the narrow sense of the words. Can we access body and affect, the corporeal and affectivity through mediated discourse? Possibly, as indexes of body and emotion states, but still, as fixed (signified) not lived (movement). Could the physiology that “noses” in the perfume industries (Latour) or civil society activists (Protevi) see, recognize, and feel actually be the embodiment and manifestation of something that is primarily mental-emotional states; i.e. embodied affective cognition?  Connolly suggests the term “affect imbued thoughts” and “proto-thought” for similar processes. Could it be the way the person is running his or her brain that ultimately creates the physiological symptoms and expressions; i.e. what Damasio terms somatic markers that causes the brain to call out particular patterns of neuro-activity once stabilized into stable structures? What if it is through the process of habituating the typical state of mind about particular behaviours, expressions and emotional repertoires, for example in activism and its critics, that actually drives and causes the state to become, as it were, “inscribed” in a person’s body?  What if experiences of activities or a particular categorized state of being such as paranoia or emotional relationship to “normative discourse”, such as activism, social inequalities and the famous example of “why poor people don’t steal”, and all the positive and negative emotions associated with it, actually gets into the person’s physique? These questions suggest a different model about how to think about subjective experience. But, importantly, what these questions share is a focus on the individual level of experience. From a socio-cultural, historical and power sensitive perspective, we need to add how individual subjects necessarily are socially embedded and how this fact contributes to our understanding of the embodiment of particular subjectivities. Could it be that because our mind is connected to our bodies through our central nervous system and because our mind communicates to all parts of our bodies— that the outer behaviour occurs; subjective experience and somatic repertoires, bodily comportments, and sensibilities are co-constitutive or, rather, co-existent and different “perspectives” but same? Style and taste, judgement and etiquette are part of a connected repertoire of habituated embodied embedded being. But, the structure of our minds and our outer behaviour is dependent on our accumulated experiences, whether perceptional information or through feeling states. And, these experiences are dependent on social processes and socio-material environments, providing the individual with input, norms, values, objects, artefacts and environment; i.e. “set ups” (Latour). That mind can embody emotions is obvious in the most basic (innate?) of all our mind-body functions, the fight/flight arousal syndrome (cf. James) but paradoxically inverted in situations of “proto-empathic identification” where we attribute subjectivity to bodies and movement repertoires – pre-subjective mechanisms of neuro-order size works to inform mind; you don’t have to be in actual danger to set it off; you don’t even has to face a living intentional human being to attribute it with subjective experience, intention or emotion states (mirror neurons will take care of that for you, Gallager).  All you have to do is think, remember, or imagine or encounter a situation that include something fearful, empathic or disgusting and movement occur. Your body will oblige.  It is “wired” to respond.  Your mind or consciousness will emerge. It is, well maybe, hard wired? Possibly, all of our emotions can and do become embodied in certain areas of our body?  Recent research suggest that the patterning or habituation of response can become so incorporated that it becomes “body memory.”; it becomes part of our embodied being – the way we tend to affectively attach to particular issues, objects, entities et cetera -, our embodied affective cognition and being in the world, our sense making apparatus. That is, the body “remember” how to run the pattern.  The neuro-pathways have become organized so to speak so that they have a readiness for certain responses. Bourdieu would be proud to include this as part of his habitus concept as a particular way of judging, experiencing and being in the world, and Latour would gladly include it as part of his “learning to be affected” theory about how the body learns to be affected through encounters. It is the accumulation of affect, emerging through or the result of repeated encounters, being registered as affection, the accumulated experience of affective readiness that corresponds to an idea of an embodied and embedded subjectivity. But, this perspective rests solidly on an open view on how bodies learn to be affected and embody particular affective embodied cognition repertories.

See also:

Embodied simulation: From neurons to phenomenal experience

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