eine kleine pedantry

A little note to myself about the emotions. Remember, o readers of mine, that I would like comments, if you have any, about the 'negative' and 'positive' emotions.


In the early modern period, there were three points of view that determined the discourse of the passions. Firstly, there was the medical view, based on a system of four internal humors. Second, there was the characterological view, which projected a gallery of different human types: the miser, the jealous man, the hypocrite, the clown, etc. A disposition and a role, from this point of view, were tightly bound. And thirdly, there was the religious view, which impressed upon the emotions a certain moral order. As the social foundations for this three fold view changed - as a new system of production and a state assisted free market arose - the discursive modes changed: for instance, the Galenic physicist gave way to the physiologist, just as – as a creator of character types – astrology gave way to physiognomy and various proto-anthropologies, and the church gave way – to an extent - to a whole, competing set of institutions – businesses, the state, political movements, etc. – but the threefold structure remained.

the fall of the zipless war - a heartfelt lament

In Revelations, the Lord says to the Laodecian church: "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of My mouth.” After reading Michael Ignatieff’s apologia for his pro-war beliefs in the NYT Magazine this Sunday, LI'd recommend that the demiurge try projectile vomiting with the liberal hawks.

The essay is full of the kind of witless, quoteladen prose by which Ignatieff rose under the wing of his mentor, Isaiah Berlin, from one edition of Bartlett’s quotations to the other. Now, Berlin’s moderation in all things often led to essays that said all things, or quoted all the people who said all things, before drifting to a crashingly inane point – but there was a glint and edge in his best essays, for instance about the Romantic tradition in Russia. Ignatieff is a different story. His learning is mostly balderdash, and his reputation has been garnered in that easiest of places to gain a reputation, the international human rights whinefest.

He was just the type to pump the war before the invasion. I have a vague memory of another NYT Mag piece. He, George Packer, Peter Beinart – the pro-war liberals do sort of melt into each other like the tigers little Black Sambo let race around the palm tree, gradually turning themselves into butter.

After making a cliched and pointless contrast between theoretical academics and practical politicians, Ignatieff gets down to the business of the day: blaming somebody else. Ah, but in his fingerpointing, he does want us to realize what a tenderhearted little peebrain he is. Turns out he was moved to the depth of his dancing shoes by the cries and whispers of the Iraqi exile group. Another one! We’ve already heard this record from Beinart, but Ignatieff adds his own evil drop, from his dessicated, self-centered murdering motherfuckin’ heart:

“The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.

I made some of these mistakes and then a few of my own. The lesson I draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my emotions. I went to northern Iraq in 1992. I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds. From that moment forward, I believed he had to go. My convictions had all the authority of personal experience, but for that very reason, I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying and in matters of ultimate political judgment, nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of justification through cross-examination and argument.”

Of course, a little present day context might be called for here before I comment on this fucked up, shitty, self-serving piece of garbage. Here’s a story (it is also on the AP) in the Guardian, getting of course no play whatsoever in the American press, about the electricity and water situation in Iraq at the moment:


Aziz al-Shimari, an electricity ministry spokesman, said at the weekend that power generation nationally was only meeting half the demand, and there had been four nationwide blackouts over the past two days. The shortages across the country were the worst since the summer of 2003, shortly after the US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, he added.

Power supplies in Baghdad have been sporadic all summer and now are down to just a few hours a day at most. The water supply in the capital has also been severely curtailed by power blackouts and cuts that have affected pumping and filtration stations.

Kerbala province, south of Baghdad, has been without power for three days, causing water mains to go dry in the Shia holy city of Kerbala, the provincial capital.
Hazim Obeid, who sells clothing at a Kerbala market stall, said: "We no longer need television documentaries about the stone age. We are actually living in it. We are in constant danger because of the filthy water and rotten food we are having."

And here’s a story about about Iraq’s refugees, from – of all sources – the Houston Chronicle:

It is the silent face of war. The crest of refugees that was predicted before the Iraq invasion began in 2003 did not really develop until last year, after a sharp surge in sectarian fighting that followed the February 2006 bombing of the Askariya shrine, a revered Shia mosque in Samarra, Iraq.

That attack dimmed hopes for Sunni-Shia reconciliation and spawned a wave of vengeful attacks. A second attack on the remains of the mosque in June destroyed its two minarets, setting off fresh reprisals.

Fleeing to Syria

This type of killing is new in Iraq. Saddam was a Sunni Muslim who made sure that Sunnis held power despite their minority status. When challenged, he used brutal methods, including mass murder, to suppress Shias, Christians and Kurds, but there was little of the vicious, street-by-street fighting seen between the groups today.
The result has been a mass departure of those with the means to flee. So many Iraqis have crossed into Syria that the U.N. processing center at times seems like a small city, with its own taxi stand and vendors selling sweet mint tea and freshly baked bread.

" We are getting people from all levels of society, including people who were wealthy and those who had nothing but the clothes on their backs,"said Korvis, whose staff interviews Iraqis when they arrive.
Syria has been denounced by President Bush and other world leaders for sponsoring terrorism, meddling in Lebanon and crushing dissent, but U.N. officials generally praise President Bashar Assad's government for helping the refugees.

"The Iraqi children have access to the Syrian public schools, and that's an amazingly positive step," said UNHCR spokesman Sybella Wilkes. U.N. officials also are grateful that the Syrian government has kept the border with Iraq open to refugees despite the huge number of people coming in.”

This is just so we keep in mind what the suggestions of motherfuckers like Ignatieff have led to.

Now, let’s go back to the ‘practical’ question. I’ve done this so often it is like playing scales, but since LI’s viewpoint still seems to be a minority, we will bore our readers once again with the obvious.

In the months leading to the invasion of Iraq, two things became obvious. One was that the U.S. really wanted to exercise unilateral power over Iraq in the occupation. The other was that the Bush administration was seriously, by a magnitude of 10, underestimating the cost and human resources needed to occupy Iraq. Shinseki pulled the rug out under any pro-war position by simply calculating the standard figures for the occupation of a country the size of California, with the population of 27 million. These aren’t really mysteries. He came up with 400,000 troops to make the occupation even possible. This wasn’t a prediction that the troops would successfully squelch any insurgency – rather, it was the minimum needed to secure the country. To secure a country means not only diminishing or annihilating violence, it means securing the infrastructure – that is, making sure that the country doesn’t starve, that the power flows, that the sewage system works, etc. Now, given that base figure, one can come up with costs. In the run up, Glenn Hubbard came up with a 200 billion dollar figure. However, that was a figure gotten from using a Rumsfeldian troop base, about one fourth Shinseki’s figure. So multiply Hubbard’s figure by four and you get a pretty good cost estimate – 800 billion dollars.

Okay. Now, why is it that those people who were pro-war never approached these figures with a ten foot pole?

Well, children, there is an easy answer. These motherfuckers wanted a zipless war. And they want further zipless wars, as per the advisors of Hilary and Obama, busy writing up tough scenarios in which more U.S. soldiers would be involved in more witless conflicts.

In a zipless war, the population of the most heavily armed and likely liberal aggressor – the U.S. – is called upon to invade numerous countries and occupy numerous territories – all of course in the name of human rights. The problem is this: this kind of thing could actually be noticed by the population of the U.S. The population might question the rightness of continuing such an over the top, immoral policy leading to mass murder, starvation, and endless misery for generations. In particular, they don’t like casualties and they don’t like paying a lot of money. The latter is the main drag on liberal hawk aggressiveness, in fact.

So, what to do? Why, what you do is you devise a war that doesn’t cost too much, is techno pretty – plenty big bombers! – and that impacts mainly on the segregated and isolated volunteer army section of the country. You treat that army as basically the president’s mercenary force. Then you go on tv and lie, lie, lie. You write articles and lie, lie, lie. Being part of the motherfucker corps of honchos, there is no down side – you’ll never have to live with dysentery, or watch your daughter limp around without a leg, as per this video. Nah, if things go wrong, you can say it is all because you have such a big motherfucking heart. Cause you are just the nicest motherfucker who ever advocated mass murder.

Well, the delusion was that Rumsfeld was right, and that zipless war was possible. It seemed so sweet in Kosovo! It hovered there like some dream invite to debate serious people on the war in 2003, sponsored by the AEI and Heritage foundation, at which you’d make useful connections! A dream that did come true for many, let us not forget. Beinart is not the only one who has profited handsomely both from supporting the war and repenting the support of the war - a twofer! So excellent. But since the war turned out to be zip-full and you couldn’t put a nitwitted crook like Chalabi on the Iraqi throne and make it look all democratic as you erased fifty years of anti-imperialist struggle and hooked Iraq back into the petro-chemical cartels, why, you cast your moist gaze over the country and realize – so softly and sadly – with that feeling that you’ve been too good, just too good - that the Iraqis (sob)… the Iraqis have … failed you. You you you. You motherfucker. You’re the one whose faith has been broken. Like a child discovering there is no toothfairy. Those Iraqis, god fucking damn it, just weren’t, well, good enough for you to have extended your benevolence to. Like that bitch 5 year old girl in the video, limping around and shit. Anti-american as all get out. How can you trust people like that?

And of course you get to write an article for the other motherfuckers out there to nod their heads to. Zipless war – oh when, great World Soul, will we get the zipless war that the revolutionary contingent, from motherfucker Ignatieff to motherfucker Hitchens, can watch on tv with motherfucking pride? Life is a motherfucker.

emotion among the moderns: note to self

I'm warnin ya/
Style waits for no bitch – Kimberly Jones

Last night I was coming out of Whole Foods, stocked with beer and fish, and ran into a reader and friend of this site, and his wife. We all shot the shop shit for a while as a nice Austin day dwindled into nighttime tv all over the hillsides and through every home and street of the burbs. And this reader warned me against featuring posts with the redoubtable Wundt, since you could stick a warning on such posts – terminal boredom ahead.

But I defended myself and did my rap about the abuse of happiness essay that is growing in my head. And I figure I should get that rap down, cause, as Lil Kim says, I don’t want a flaw in my flow.

The rap goes something like this. Before the early modern period, the aspirational structure for most people had to do not with acquiring goods or changing positions, but with growing older. That structure for the feudal world developed complex roles, or what I’d call myths, appropriate to that aging process. Accordingly, the social sense of the passions was tied to the possibilities presented by this age specific, gender specific, position specific world. But in the early modern period, that aspirational structure began to come apart as the feudal system began to come apart. That you could aspire to rise or to change your position created an aspirational drift, so to speak. It was no longer the case that one or one’s family would remain in a natural position – and after the terrible famines that struck in the middle of the eighteenth century, it even became the case that people on the bottom (save for the Irish) in the developed countries would probably not starve. As the old structures became unstuck, one sees two synchronic effects: on the one hand, the old notions about the passions give way to a new way of thinking about feelings. The importance I’m giving to volupte in the seventeenth century is that it operated as an entering wedge to de-structure the ways in which the passions were socially experienced – which means socially controlled, socially interpreted, socially ordered. At the same time, the roles or mythical figures of aging were shaken up. One of the oddly unstudied effects of the creation of a manufacturing and marketing system – a production system that underlies our economies today, and underlay all developed economies, communist or capitalist, in the twentieth century – is that the older forms of age segmentation, that is, the making sense of youth, of the middle of life, of old age, according to an agreed set of tropes, roles and stories began to dissolve. This dissolution speeded up after 1870 – that is, with the beginning of the consumer culture phase of capitalism.

So, what I am doing is trying to describe dimensions of a multi-dimensional event – in particular, the symbiosis between two things: the making of happiness into a keystone emotion, a norm, and the making of youth into a keystone age segment, into a secular virtue along almost the entire length of the lifespan. Very odd things.

Looking at how the vocabulary of negative and positive emotions emerged from psychology to pursue an astonishing career in folk psychology is simply one entrance to this Castle.

From Bain to Fechner: parade of the nineteenth century dustbunny psychologists

Having done some more research on the fascinating topic of origin of the concept of the negative and positive feelings in psychology, LI has decided that our previous post on Wundt was way too hasty, too abbreviated, too brutal in the way we are handling the evidence, too bracketed from the question that we really want to answer here, which is not so much a question of who invented these terms as the question, why did they catch on? What happened, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, that people began to talk about their feelings in this way? How was this talk diffused? How did it so quickly gain a footing outside the field of psychology; a field, at that time, dominated by philosophers and lacking the institutional embedding in corporations and universities that it now has? LI has gotten ambitious: we want to turn this topic into a whole, publishable essay. And we’d appreciated attacks, hinged or unhinged, on these things. Commenters, on your marks!

To give a sense of the parameters of the question set I’m pursuing, let’s quote, once more, that remark of Carroll Izard’s:

“Scientists as well as laymen agree that there are both positive and negative emotions. While this very broad classification of emotions is generally correct and useful, the concepts of positiveness and negativeness as applied to the emotions require some qualification…”

This remark would not have made any sense in 1850, but it can now be claimed as the most banal and uncontroversial state of the case. That, in a nutshell, is what I am after here.

To get our bearings, let’s go first to what the state of the case was in the 1850s. There’s an essay on Alexander Bain by John Stuart Mill, published in the Edinburgh review in 1859, that nicely summarizes the ‘return’ of scientific psychology to Britain, after the energy of the Scottish school was exhausted and the Comtean positivists seemed to dominate the field in Europe. After praising Bain’s luminous explanation of the nervous system and expounding his defense of associationism against the apriori school – which would, in today’s terms, be the defense of empiricism against Chomsky’s rationalism – Mill remarks on the disappointing results that derive from applying associationism to the emotions. But Bain, in Mill’s view, is at least a good natural historian of the emotions:

“He has, however, written the natural history of the emotions with great felicity, in a manner at once scientific and popular; insomuch that this part of his work presents attractions even to the unscientific reader. Mr. Bain’s classification of the emotions is different from, and more comprehensive than, any other which we have met with. He begins with “the feelings connected with the free vent of emotion in general, and with the opposite case of restrained or obstructed outburst;”[*] the feelings, in short, of liberty or restraint in the utterance of emotion; which he regards as themselves emotions, and entitled, on account of their superior generality, to be placed at the head of the catalogue. He next proceeds to one of the simplest as well as most universal of our emotions—Wonder. The third on his list is Terror. The fourth is “the extensive group of feelings implied under the title of the Tender Affections.”[†] The consideration of these feelings is by most writers blended with that of Sympathy; which is carefully distinguished from them by our author, and treated separately, not as an emotion, but as the capacity of taking on the emotions, or mental states generally, of others. A character may possess tenderness without being at all sympathetic, as is the case with many selfish sentimentalists; and the converse, though not equally common, is equally in human nature. From these he passes to a group which he designates by the title, Emotions of Self: including Self-esteem, or Self-complacency, in its various forms of Conceit, Pride, Vanity, &c., which he regards as cases of the emotions of tenderness directed towards self, and has largely illustrated this view of them. The sixth class is the emotions connected with Power. The seventh is the Irascible Emotions. The eighth is a group not hitherto brought forward into sufficient prominence, the emotions connected with Action. “Besides the pleasures and pains of Exercise, and the gratification of succeeding in an end, with the opposite mortification of missing what is laboured for, there is in the attitude of pursuit, a peculiar state of mind, so far agreeable in itself, that factitious occupations are instituted to bring it into play. When I use the term plot-interest, the character of the situation alluded to will be suggested with tolerable distinctness.”[*] This grouping together of the emotions of hunting, of games, of intrigue of all sorts, and of novel-reading, with those of an active career in life, seems to us equally original and philosophical. The ninth class consists of the emotions caused by the operations of the Intellect. The tenth is the group of feelings connected with the Beautiful. Eleventh and last, comes the Moral Sense.”

These categories have certainly lost their sway with us, There is something almost camp about the emotions attendant upon hunting and novel reading, as though the British Raj were an event in the natural history of human emotion. But the most important thing is that there are no dimensions here upon which to locate the feelings. Nowhere is there any mention of positive and negative emotions, or their distribution along a continuum. Rather, we have a sort of gathering of emotions rather like the flavors in a recipe book.

Already, though, in Germany the terms of the science of feeling were changing. Heidelberger, in his biography of that very strange man, Gustav Fechner, points out that Fechner was strongly impressed by Ampere’s division of electrical current into ‘mathematical entitities”. In Fechner’s “Preliminaries to the science of Aesthetics (Vorschule der Aesthetik), Fechner imposes a similar structure on “Lust” and “Unlust”:

“Now there are many concepts and connected expressions which are related to things and relationships according to the measure of the current or immediate yield of pleasure or pain they produce, as, after the pleasure side, the pleasant, sweet, appropriate, dear, stimulating, nice, pretty, beautiful, etc., to which correspond an equivalent number of pains. We conceive both as aesthetic categories and distinguish them as positive and negative. “

Similarly, there are positive and negative practical categories, or those that yield pleasure or pain as the result of the consequences of things and relationships – giving us terms like useful or advantageous.

Fechner was an important figure in the intellectual life of the later 19th century. James Clerk Maxwell actually wrote an essay using the Fechner coinage, Psychophysik; Wundt, of course, also adopted the term.

Yet the correspondence of negative and positive quantities to pain and pleasure and the expressions connected to them did not entirely develop from Fechner’s rather simple idea. Which of course is something I will take up in another post.

PS Ah, I have spotted a mention of positive and negative qualities attached to feeling before 1850, in one of Kant’s pre-critical essays: “an attempt to introduce negative quantities into Worldly Wisdom "[Weltweisheit, an odd word for philosophy] of 1763. In the second section, he goes from considering the mathematical representation of the attraction and repulsion of bodies to Seelenlehre, considering whether ‘pain [Unlust] is purely a lack of pleasure, or whether it is a cause of the robbery of the latter, thaqt is in itself something positive not purely the contradictory opposite of pleasure, to which it is opposed in our interpretation of the real [Realverstande], and thus whether pain could be called a negative pleasure?” Kant considers cases, including the taking of a medicine that ‘tastes like pure water” but that gives a pleasant feeling to the imbiber over the expected state of health. ‘in the taste he doesn’t feel any pleasure, but the lack of it is not a pain.” Then Kant instances the story of the Spartan woman who is brought her son on his shield – the son having suffered a glorious death. “Name the degree of pleasure arising from the first cause alone 4a, and the pain a simple negation of it = 0, thus we have, taking them both together, the value of the satisfaction at 4a+0 = 4a, and thus the pleasure was not at all diminished by the report of the death, which is false.”

This does prefigure the pain/pleasure calculus of Bentham. Yet this instance lacks a sense of the continuum and direction of feelings. This is an echo of that theological premise that evil is, ultimately, the power of nothing.

libertarians, rally round! our freedoms are being threatened

LI was reading the Elle article in the NYT for professional reasons – you never know when you can use information about a magazine’s masthead changes – when we were pulled up short – or perhaps the word is socked in the jaw – by the following graf:

“The September issue includes a new column by Nina Garcia, the fashion director whose manicured claws appear on “Project Runway,” and some intriguing articles, notably Megan Deem’s critical report on Myfreeimplants.com, a Web site that connects women with men who would like to sponsor their breast implants.”

And people say that American men are uncharitable!

This put a whole new light on the current battle, by the administration, to stifle the expansion of health care benefits to kids before it threatens to make them healthy. I think a congressman from LI’s great state put it best:

“Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, said the bill embodied the Democrats’ “vision for the future: socialized medicine and Washington-run health care.”

“The bill uses children as pawns in a cynical attempt to make millions of Americans completely reliant on government for their health care needs,” Mr. Sessions said.”

Can you believe those socialists? Children, innocent children, who desperately want the mumps, measles, tuberculosis, rickets, broken bones and other minor and major injuries to either carry them off or be healed solely by the magic of the marketplace are now being forced into totalitarian healthiness by the Dems. And then, right there in an article on Elle, we see that the demographic which, by all accounts, gives the Republicans its base of support – men – bestirring themselves from the bottom of their souls to contribute to a charitable cause – breast implants – without expanding the government. The libertarian in me joins with the humanitarian in dancing around an inner tree of liberty at the very thought.

extinction beyond the zero - in the realm of the frozen erection

Three such chief directions may be distinguished; we will call them the direction of pleasurable and unpleasurable feelings, that of arousing and subduing (exciting and depressing) feelings, and finally that of feelings of strain and relaxation. Any concrete feeling may belong to all of these directions or only two or even only one of them. The last mentioned possibility is all that makes it possible to distinguish the different directions. The combination of different affective directions which ordinarily takes place, and ... influences which are due to the overlapping of feelings arising from various causes, all go to explain why we are perhaps never in a state entirely free from feeling, although the general nature of the feelings demands an indifference-zone. – Wundt, Outlines of Psychology.

In truth, the problem treated by them [the ‘psycho-physicists] is a special aspect of the problem, not its totality; they are inquiring whether, in the ‘transformation’ of pleasure into pain, and vice versa, there is, in the passage from one contrary to the other, a point of neutrality or indifference. Wundt graphically represents the phenomena by a curve: the portion of this curve above the line of the abscissa has a positive value, and corresponds to the development of pleasure; the portion below corresponds to the development of pain, and has a negative value…” Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions.

In the beginning, the emotions were neither positive nor negative. So where did the classification come from, how did it spread, and how has it become so popular? Why are we supposed to think that there is a straight continuum not only between pleasure and pain, but between ‘positive emotions’ – happiness, serenity, love – and ‘negative emotions’ – anger, boredom, unhappiness? Couldn’t we just as easily evoke a continuum between anger and boredom? Which one would then be the positive one? Which the negative? And what does continuum mean?

When Wundt graphed a ‘feeling space’ in order to develop his three dimensional model of emotions in the 1890s, he was operating under the same influence that affected Jevons, which was to the field theory of Maxwell and Faraday. Philip Mirowski’s series of books on this topic, as well as Silja Graupe’s Basho of Economics, exhibit in a critical light the price to be paid for adapting economic theory to parameters analogous to those used to discuss energy – with utility being the analogue to energy, or being a ‘field of vector potentials.” Similarly, Wundt was concerned with the ‘direction’ of feeling – not its qualitative, or phenomenological side. In 1879, Wundt founded a psychological laboratory at the University of Leipzig in order to study and measure feeling. There had already been some use of scientific instruments to evoke and register feeling. The mad Dr. Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne had used electric shock, applied to certain muscles of the face and neck, to provoke fearful grimaces in subjects. He had a certain Adrien Tournachon photograph these descendents of the medieval gargoyles. But the correlation between an expression and a mood – a way of making the mood come to the surface of the body, so to speak – was not what Wundt’s laboratory was about, in particular. Also, Wundt didn’t have a peculiar theory of the divine teleology of the facial muscles. What Wundt did have, by the 1890s, was a three dimensional model of feeling that, in contemporary psychology, has been reduced to two dimensions – valence and intensity.

You will notice that valence is an odd word, a word from chemistry. Psychology has a beggar's habit of borrowing scientific jargon to dress up commonplace notions, much as French writers used to insert a ‘du” or “de” in their name, to imply nobility.

However, Wundt’s work was not exactly on everybody’s lips. The story of how negative and positive emotions got their valance is the story of how psychology blended into the fabric of modern industrial society – whether capitalist or communist. There is some truth to the way this issue is handled in standard books on emotions, as for instance in Carroll Izard’s Human Emotions (Izard is a very influential psychologist):

“Scientists as well as laymen agree that there are both positive and negative emotions. While this very broad classification of emotions is generally correct and useful, the concepts of positiveness and negativeness as applied to the emotions require some qualification…”

Indeed. To bring out this history – which is to tell the story of how happiness became the triumphant, the keystone feeling – is to feel, deep inside the multiplex of modernity, the throb of several superimposed currents, tides, the locked routines of control and command, the layout of office spaces, the psychology of incentives, advertising, and weaponry, the never before achieved trick of getting populations to shell out good money to build the tools for their own extinction, a silent extinction beyond the zero indeed, all the while becoming happier and happier.

“Now ordinarily, according to tradition in these matters, the little sucker would have de-conditioned. Jamf would have, in Pavlovian terms, “extinguished” the hardon reflex he’d built up, before he let the baby go. Most likely he did. But as Ivan Petrovich himself said, not only must we speak of partial or of complete extinction of a conditioned reflex, but we must also realize that extinction can proceed beyond the point of reducing a reflex to zero. We cannot therefore judge the degree of extinction only by the magnitude of the reflex or its absence, since there can still be a silent extinction beyond the zero. Italics are Mr. Pointsman’s. – Gravity’s Rainbow



And that requires looking at the career of Kurt Lewin, among others. Which we will look at in our next post on this subject.

PS: Alan and I continue to debate happiness issues at his post here.

From murdoch to valences

Though perhaps I shouldn’t write it, I’m rather happy about Murdoch’s purchase of the WSJ. In recent years, the ideological hardline, which used to be confined to the editorial page, spread to the cultural page – basically meaning that the children of Heritage Foundation wanks, the Ledeen Jr. generation, were writing the reviews. And LI was not. If Fox is any indication, Murdoch knows when to narrowcast – the news and editorials strictly for the dittohead crowd – and when to broadcast – the Simpsons, The American Batchelor (now with more tits and ass!) and other assorted goodies. So hooray! Time to query those guys. I wonder if my bud Eric has survived the past four years purge…

…

Okay, in the latest slo mo episode of Happiness Triumphant, the Aristotle years, Alan has replied to me and me to Alan on his site. As I was looking up stuff in psychology textbooks, it hit me that the canonical use of ‘valence’ terms – the use of positive to denote some emotions, and negative to denote others – must have a history that LI could track. You don’t read about ‘negative’ emotions and ‘positive’ emotions in the 18th century, or before. And for most of the 19th century, emotional talk might be about noble and ignoble emotions, or it might use the old Galenic vocabulary of temperaments (which, with major modifications, LI wants to get back to), but it doesn’t conform to the valence talk that is now the psychological norm. Of course, I could imagine a psychologist saying that valence talk is about scales of intensity, blah blah blah, and is translated into vulgar negative and positive talk by self help books – but that isn’t true. This is a typical passage from the Handbook of Emotions (Lewis, Haviland Jones):

“Results revealed that the imagery of negative emotions (fear, anger and sadness) was associated with higher EMG activity over the brow muscle regions than was the imagery of the positive emotions (happiness) (178)”

And since -except if you are a Hegelian – negative cancels out positive, the co-existence of a negative and positive emotional complex would seem to be ruled out, not to speak of the attractiveness of negative emotions. Even though occasionally a psychologist will come out of the cellar, when the dogs are quietly salivating, for a cigarette break and find that, uh, we live in a world in which people pay money to go to movies to be afraid – and they do extreme sporty things too – and they join armies and shit. At this moment, psychologists summon the vocabulary to make the obvious into a delightful bundle of confusing terms.

‘Second, valence is by no means a straightforward characteristic of emotisons. Fedman Barrett, for example, in a recent study found that

“First, the desirability of a mood and the hedonic quality [valence] of a mood are related, but not identical entities. Secondly, the desirability of a mood is also related to the level of arousal the mood denotes. Thirdly, desirability components are related to the self-report ratings of mood, but the ratings also reflect the hedonic tone and level of arousal describing the internal state of the respondents…”

Another way of stating this finding might be as follows: Just as there is a goal-relevant type of emotional intensity, there would appear to be a goal-relevant type of emotional valence, what Feldman Barrett calls ‘desirability” as opposed to “hedonic tone”. Fear, for example, may be inherently unpleasant in some sense, bring about, in many cases, various intensities of ‘aversive arousal (Lang 1995). But it is also apparent that, in some instances, fear is sought out and enjoyed. Bungee jumpers, spectators of a horror or suspense film, and roller coaster riders routinely experience pleasure in the fear induced by the chosen activity.”

In this way, like Columbus discovering the New World, William Reddy, the author of those immortal words (in The Navigation of Feeling), discovers the meaning of the word “rush”. I hope you showed his discovery to his teenage kids. They would be so proud! Will miracles never cease?

So LI has taken a gander at the roots of this cumbersome conceptual framework and found – gosh! – that about the time classical economics was re-formulating itself around a physics model that emphasized equilibrium among molecules, psychologists were also absorbing the models of energetics. More in a later post.