A thought on “cognitive estrangement” pt II

Last post, I mentioned returning to cognition. Here it is.

Spiegel’s fantastic breakdown of the facets of how an estranging effect is worked upon an audience by the formal and stylistic devices of a text throws out cognition entirely.

My goal is to unpack how, when, why, cognition is a useful tool in terms of comprehending the effect of estrangement.

Cognition is heavily mediated by emotion. Emotion is heavily mediated by what one has been socialized into perceiving as a natural or unnatural response, according to the society’s dictates on what counts as “good” or “bad” behavior. This, of course, is then highly mediated by individual differences as well as ‘innate’ primate responses. The body is aroused, and then the  arousal is processed and interpreted. Matsuda and Kitayama point out that arousal in Western cultures tends to be interpreted subjectively, whereas in other cultures, the interpretation tends to be inter-subjective.  The West also has a causality bias. That is, in the West, when we are aroused, we take complete responsibility for the body-feeling and that shows up in how we interpret the emotion and assign it a cause. When we feel stressed, we tend to interpret it in terms of individual responsibility (or in shifting away from individual responsibility, hence the prevalence of the blame-game in our culture.) Intense emotions tend to need to be assigned a cause as part of the process of reconciling them, and we tend to assign a cause in terms of our individual reality (either by taking responsibility or by ascribing responsibility to events in our memory). I.E. I’m so messed up because my parents did x while we were kids, and now I can’t help feeling this way. (the blame game).

Of course, recent shifts in psychology in particular in terms of mindfulness, are attempting to shift people away from this mode of thinking, teaching distancing cognitive behaviors to help people realize that emotions are but one facet of reality and that they don’t have to over-identify with them.

Keeping in mind this is highly generalized.

What does this have to do with SF? Well, I think it is important to look at emotional appeals as part of the stylistic/formal devices of a piece of text in more detail than the lovely umbrella term “estrangement” allows for. Granted, estrangement does a fantastic job creating a useful flexible generalized term to encompass the variation of audience response.

One way to do this is by setting up a taxonomy of “emotional intelligence” for central characters as part of investigating how literature develops empathy, or as part of acknowledging that most readers read in order to identify with the main character in some way shape or form.

Another way to do this is to examine how characters are set up as constrained by the emotional weight of certain key beliefs, and how those affect decision making (logic is constrained by emotional beliefs).

Another way to do this is to historically situate a text, looking at how it uses formal elements in its response to the structure of feeling of its time. Is it reflecting it, refracting it, denying it, etc etc etc.

 

Empathy, or it’s scientized name, Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

With the rise of EQ in the corporate world, and affect studies taking off in the academic world, it’s beautiful to see the relationship between self, world, intellect and emotion get re-drawn in an empowering way.

As we begin to make cross-cultural comparisons, and as the tools of sociology and psychology become more sophisticated, we in the United States have a new opportunity to truly understand what emotion is. Earlier in the century, our sense of emotions was clouded by Victorian uber-rationalism and decourum, as well as clouded by the sciences’ blindness to the idea that their tools might imperfectly measure a thing (for instance, Darwin’s defining of emotion by facial expressions, whereas recently scientists have uncovered a new chemical process happening in the brain relating to emotion that had previously been unobservable).

Understanding emotion was also hindered by the Western subjectivity bias. In other words, we have overvalued the role of the individual in the process of emotions arising, existing and transmitting. We have interpreted the process of perceiving emotion in terms of cognition, in terms of the Ego, which is only a fraction of our ‘self.’ In reality, our ‘self’ is much more complex and fluid than our Ego, yet we persist in believing our Ego to be King, to be lord and master of the self.

Emotions are bodily, and they are inter-subjective. We feel our feelings within our bodies, not our minds. Emotions arise from bodily response to stimuli. The stimuli can be from our environment (a conversation, a landscape, a career, a person, etc) or from our Ego. Due to our subjectivity bias & misunderstanding of the Ego, we regularly falsely interpret our bodily signals.

This shows up in one major pattern in our society: we train ourselves into guilt and shame complexes because we misunderstand the emotional process.

Think about it this way.

Coffee stimulates the nervous system. The nervous system is responsible for regulating the chemicals that produce anxiety. Those sensitive to coffee will exacerbate their nervous systems.

Exacerbated nervous systems trigger signs of anxiety within the body. The mind, the Ego, because it is a control freak thanks to Descartes and the culture that birthed and reveres him, takes those anxiety signals, disconnects them from coffee, and then has it’s way with them.

The mind makes the stimulus of coffee the slave of whatever beliefs it feels in need of reinforcing. Those beliefs are generally ones of limitation, we love to think about how we are not good enough, we continue to cling to Christian notions of ‘living in sin’ even as we detach from overt Christian narratives.

Due to our individuality biases and Christian framework (yes, even if someone rationally lets go of Christianity, they are still operating out of a culture that’s steeped itself for millenia inside this worldview of being born into sin), our minds think it best to mash the peas of bodily anxiety to the potatoes of our imperfections.

If we think we need to feel bad about being lazy, an afternoon cappuccino might just help us feel terrible. Ruminating on one phrase in an email from a boss might just help us feel terrible. Not just what we ingest physically, but what we ingest from how we relate to the world creates and reinforces how we perceive ourselves.

THAT, the need to reinforce beliefs (i.e. I am not working hard unless I am stressed) is often why we turn to coffee in winter and the middle of a semester or major undertaking–we need some help sometimes producing enough stress-chemicals to support our Ego’s beliefs about the self.

This is more than just coffee though. We intake all kinds of information from our environments. Because we only grapple with emotions with our minds, we never stop to internally investigate the root cause of an emotion. We must assign them a cause that derives from a reason. Conceiving of the self as mind alone gives our ego too much sway. It allows us to feel justified living unhappily, to keep the carrot always in the future and the stick constantly swinging.

This is how each of us create our own dystopian life. This is how each of us accepts a system that is sick. If we are sick and pale with grief, what strength do we have to create a better world? If we are constantly battling the pain we create for ourselves, we never have time to really tackle the larger problems.