Saturday, September 5, 2015
about conceptualities of literary living
revised / edited August 25, 2017
Not yet getting to basic conceptualities here, rather “about” getting to that.
Desire of conceptual adventuring enrapts itself in thrills of The Literary. This is a moment of pathmaking—anticipating my path-to-be—through an evolving field of cognitive literary studies—my Philological prospecting?]
I want to discuss J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei’s discourse on mimesis, but here and now I’m only rendering some problems that I bring to the scene.
One problem I have is that I feel—surmise, prospect—that feeling is a concept of valuative affect (or affective importance), such that talk of emotion (e.g., in cognitive neuroscience; or talk of “emotional intelligence”) is an abstraction from lived experience (duh), which implies the complementary abstractions pursued by value theory.
Better understanding how valuation (or granting importance) constitutes what emotion means and how emotion mirrors what’s saliant is together to better understand feeling as a complex that is the primary “site” (or living conception) which enwraps value and emotion as onefold, so to speak, as “feeling.”
One feels about something, about some phenomenon, then may retrospectively abstract that into distinct (named) emotion and salient importance, generally as part of an abstract conception of “emotion” and “importance” (or “value”).
But importance isn’t primary either. We live in terms of appeals and preferrings which mirror interests brought to receptiveness. Value in feeling is often a complex of preferrable appeals: the “thing” (phenomenon) is multifaceted in its singularity. The complex of interest and appeal in importance of feeling is far from a notion of abstracted emotion.
So, conceptions of feeling are phenomenologically in a Janus-faced condition between emotion (shaped by importance in the first place) and importance (preferred appeal).
In my view, a neuroaesthetics is a wrong-headed venture at the outset (setting itself up for self-confounding). I believe that Gosetti-Ferencei might agree. Yet, of course we are feeling beauty. So, why neuroaesthetics may be self-confounding is important.
Another problem I have is understanding the profound implications of an en-activist approach to experience. We enact all experience. Things show our Selfal interest. Interest is not primarily an implication of experience. Interest is intrinsic to there being phenomenality in the first place.
Cognitive science realizes immanence of intentionality or enactive interest (a pragmatic notion, I think) when it focuses on action-in-perception and the enactive mind.
Like the pragmatic notion of intentionality, notions of understanding as “embodied” can be useful. But the notion is a retrospective abstraction from phenomenality—analytically critical against objectivist tradition, but not constitutive for feeling phenomenality, which is individuated (ontogenic), thus “embodied” just by being discernible. Regarding embodiment as constitutive may be either a bad notion of ontogenic relativity of phenomenality; or conceals (displaces attention from) the self-presencing of phenomenality itself.
I’m hoping that Feeling the Body proves helpful for distinguishing pragmatic from phenomenal issues (but I became aware of the book very recently; haven’t read in it yet.) “Embodied cognition” is a nice rhetorical response to objectivism (i.e., constitutively dis-embodied psychology). But basically, the feeling of what happens is ordinary phenomenality itself.
Last problem I have for today is understanding conceptuality. I suspect that this kind of focus will show how discourse on mimesis can be well regarded as a mode of figural analysis among kinds of tropality, which is a kind of heuristic conceptuality?—like narrative about mathematical things).
Do metonymic/synecdochic tropes (mirrors of each other?) show more semantic distance from implied conception—more Derridean différance—then metaphoric tropes? Is metaphor less of a trace of conception than irony? Is irony the self-undermining pretense of the trace, of figural adequacy?—the writing in speech?, the authorship of “authoriality,” the quote marks echoing in any inwordness?
Okay, I’m getting out of hand, too much the trace, too little the discursant.…
Inasmuch as conceptuality gains a prevailing place in cognitive “science”
(a mode of doing philosophy as much as a mode of standard science), “cognitive” literary studies might be very commensurable with other non-“Literary” endeavors of interdomainal consilience in humanities and sciences as conceptual studies (or Philology—trope it “philology21”?).
