Greetings Economists, JKS writes, Boredom is not an emotion. I also don't think it even was a word that I used initially; it was yours. I hasn't even originally been talking about what one hears coming from the stage in mass rallies, which is mostly unimportant. I turned down an offer tos peak for the NLG at the Fedb. 14 rally in Columbus, Ohio (I was visiting), no one was listening anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if a casual internet post didn't penertrate to the heart of any problem. But I don't think the problem we face is that our stuff isn't entertaining in the way that Fox TV is, whatever that way is. You have a point in emphasizing the conative, noncogniytive aspects of political communication, but the left has never been short on that -- outrage is our stock in trade. I am not satying that is a bad thing. If anything, I was suggesting that we are falling down, vias a vias the other side, on the cognitive, analyrical aspects, also their presentation. I am not sure that pursuing ! the conversation at this level of abstraction is worth while. jks
Doyle, Well this is after all just a discussion list, not a place to take seriously building the left. I'm not attacking your sentiment above. That is the fact of life about what these lists do. Given that though I want to finish my thought here. We can look at the communication problems the left has in producing work. Where the work is boring we can do something. As to your comment "Boredom is not an emotion", quoting "The Vehement Passions" Fisher, Princeton Press, 2002, page 154, "But fear and boredom, like the twentieth century's newly invented category within the passions, depression, are immobilized states in which the spirit feels inactive, incapable of motion. They are conditions in which the life energies seem injured. As immobility is a sign of damage to the body, so too the immobility of boredom, depression, or fear (which we speak of in the phrase "paralyzed with fear") directs us to a conversion of feelings or passions away from movement, toward the motionlessness of states. Whereas the passions were volatile, the states seem to have no internal ending: we speak of "interminable" boredom. Depression, fear, and boredom are all states from which the spirit needs to be rescued, precisely because within itself it knows no way out. Unlike the other passions, these seem never to be spent, nor do they lead to calm, as in Milton's line for the no longer enraged Samson, whose revenge is now complete once he has brought down the walls and killed his enemies: "Calm of Mind/All Passion Spent." "Among the most brilliant pages of Heidegger's eighty volumes of writing are the ninety pages that give ana analysis of boredom in his lectures of 1929-30, lectures now translated in the book "The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics". Clearly in the years of writing "Being and Time" and the lecture courses on which it was based, Heidegger had both fear and boredom in mind as states through which the world as a whole "disclosed" itself, to use his vocabulary. His very great analysis of fear in the lecture series just before "Being and Time" copied and spiritualized the precise terms of Aristotle's heroic analysis of courage. Deliberately moving from passions to moods, Heidegger restates fear without an object and without occasion-in the cleaned-out theological language of Kierkegaard, Angst or dread." Doyle, The general way that neuroscience talks about such moods is a 'feeling' and reserves emotion for the body. Here is something Joseph LeDoux writes in "The Emotional Brain", Touchstone Simon and Schuster, 1996 page293, ..."And the somatic system clearly has the requisite speed and specificity to contribute to emotional experiences (it takes much less than a second for your striated muscles to respond to a stimulus and for the sensations from these response to reach your cortex). This point was noted many years ago by Sylvan Tomkins and was the basis of his facial feedback theory of emotion, which has been taken up and pursued in recent years by Carroll Izzard. "While most contemporary ideas about somatic feed back and emotional experience have been about feedback from facial expressions, a recent theory by Antonio Damasio, the somatic marker hypothesis, calls upon the entire pattern of somatic and visceral feed back from the body. Damasio proposes that such information underlies "gut feelings" and plays a crucial role in our emotional experiences and decision making processes." Doyle, For the left, then where our work does bore us we have the means to address that issue in how we 'produce' brainwork. Face based communications with GPS Semantic Web systems would alter the social structure of working class organization of the planet. That applies to understanding what is wrong with Broadcast Television, front Stage presentations at mass rallies, written journals. Conversational shared information structures are important hence the recent Supreme Court case brought by Lessig in which Lessig attacked copyright laws. thanks, Doyle Saylor
