Affective Technology @ 3QD

I’ve decided to do a three-part series at 3 Quarks Daily. The topic is affective technology, affective because it can transform how we feel, technology because it is an art (tekhnē) and, as such, has a logos. The first article is now posted:

Affective Technology, Part 1: Poems and Stories https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/06/affective-technology-part-1-poems-and-stories.html

In this first article I present the problem, followed by some informal examples, a poem by Coleridge, a passage from Tom Sawyer that echoes passages from my childhood, and some informal comments about underlying mechanism. The idea is simple. Although we do not have direct control over our emotions, that is, we cannot will them into existence nor extinguish or diminish them at all, we can manipulate them indirectly through art. In this series, at least in the first two articles, I’ll be concerned with literary texts.

The second article has a working title: Affective Technology, Part 2: Emotion recollected in tranquility. The title phrase is from Wordsworth’s well-known preface to the Lyrical Ballads:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

I expand on Wordsworth’s idea with two ideas: 1) Warren McCulloch’s concept of behavioral mode, which is a theory about the function of the reticular activating system, one of the oldest portions of the nervous system, and 2) an idea from the early 1970s, Charles Tart’s concept of state-specific learning. I illustrate this with an analysis of Shakespeare’s well-known Sonnet 129, Th’Expense of Spirit, which depicts the anguish of a man who cannot prevent himself from abusing women sexually even though he is inevitably overcome with recrimination afterward.

In the third article, Affective Technology, Part 3: Coherence in the Self, I’ll open with dissociative identity disorder (DID), in which an individual mind is fractured in two or more quasi-independent personalities. I will argue that that possibility is inherent in the structure and processes of a nervous system that operates according to McCulloch’s model. Artistic works, however, help us keep a unified personality by providing an affectively ‘neutral’ ground – the Wordsworthian space of tranquil recollection – in which the various modes can coexist.

Some of these ideas have been worked out in further detail in the following papers:

Lust in Action: An Abstraction, Language and Style 14, 1981, 251-270, https://www.academia.edu/7931834/Lust_in_Action_An_Abstraction.

The Evolution of Narrative and the Self, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 16(2): 129-155, 1993, https://www.academia.edu/235114/The_Evolution_of_Narrative_and_the_Self.

Talking with Nature in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison." PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November, 2004, https://www.academia.edu/8345952/Talking_with_Nature_in_This_Lime-Tree_Bower_My_Prison_.