Re: dogs
erespess@inil.com
Wed, 20 Oct 1999 16:52:13 -0400
>
>Elizabeth writes:
>
>> Okay, I'm following you. What if the dog inspires an emotion? What is
>> that? I don't mean what we call the emotion, (happy, misty-eyed, scared,
>> etc.) but the feeling itself, before we categorize it?
>
>Once you recognize an emotion, you necessarily categorize it.
Once you recognize an emotion - exactly my point. To recognize something,
it has to exist before you recognize it. Maybe later it is defined as the
word/symbol/assosiaction one has for it, but initially there was something
outside the symbol. The categorization, whether verbal or non-verbal that
comes immediately afterwards, in my understanding, is language.
>It would seem you can't both experience emotions and be aware of the
>experience without invoking the structure that precipates language
>(boring old "language" being no longer a useful term in this thread)...
>So I don't believe, as Jim suggests, that emotions precede the
>structure required for understanding them. I find it difficult to
>imagine that infants aren't happy or sad at some point before Lacan's
>mirror stage, but I also believe once we start to differentiate
>between happy and sad--presumably a necessary activity for
>"experiencing" one or the other emotion--we've done it... Difference.
>Could, then, the first act of differentiation actually precede the
>"me/not me" moment?
from another message:
>Sorry to pick, Jim, but the "sign" is defined by our man So-sure as
>the signifier / [over] the signified. It's both taken together--both
>word and sound-image as a whole.
They BECOME the same in the mind of the individual. But initially, they
are not the same.
and from another message:
>I am approaching language as the single most familiar manifestation of the
>sign >system that generates all cognition, emotion, tactile perception,
>etc...
You see, GENERATES is the problem I have with this idea. It seems that as
we grow, human experience shifts from simple experience to names for
experience. Of course infants experience emotion before the mirroring
stage. I think my thought lies somewhere in this realm - When naming
begins, do humans LOSE the abilty to experience without language? I don't
think so. Wharton's novel _Birdy_ explores this concept... the shift from
knowing (noun) to knowledge. Six Degrees of Separation also addresses the
question, "How do we keep the experience?" I have never been able to
explain my love for ee cummings before this moment, but I believe in the
context of this conversation, I can. Old edward estlin, by manipulating
language in such a way that shifts focus from denotative meaning to
connotative, operates on a level beyond the established symbols I rely on.
His work somehow seems to break up the structure in which these symbols
exist, and in the process break lose the experience. Once it happens, then
I develop a new connotative meaning for whatever words he has used, and the
experience can't be duplicated with the same peice of poetry, but his work
is so dense, and there is so much of it, that I come across that same
experience again and again. I have no idea if that makes sense to anyone
or not, and I hope to God that by attempting to explain it now I haven't
removed the possibility of it happening again. I truly beleive that there
is feeling outside of language, but as adults, we experience it very
infrequently.
I hope I have not lost anyone still reading.
Elizabeth