“it’s all semantics”

No Comments

i guess i’m remembering the discussions i had with fellow art school inmates way back in the 70’s, but at a certain point in these discussions, someone would always come up with the disclaimer that it was ‘all just semantics’. that is, that the point over which we were arguing was not ‘real’ in any sense, but a matter of how we interpreted the meanings of the words.
nowadays, i might hear some people exclaiming instead that “it’s all semiotics”.

so the other day we attended UNSW’s school of english, media and performing arts’ (EMPA) 2nd “hall conversation” (which however, was held in a small theatre in webster) to hear three colleagues speak to the notion of “affect” as they understood the term within their discipline and research.

we linguists were there in support of peter white of media and who classes himself as a linguist, while the other two speakers were from music and theatre and performance studies. they each gave an account of how they used and viewed the concept in their disciplines, and as i listened, i felt a growing sense of unease about the divide between the treatment of affect as a ‘real’ felt somatic phenomenon of the body/consciousness that could be discussed, and a linguist’s perspective that such feelings do exist but they were beyond the purview of our analysis – or that once someone talked or wrote of such feelings then we could discuss those items of language use…

eventually peter white in his short presentation mentioned this – that is, linguists’ orientation toward the phenomena we study (i.e. language use, the grammar of that use, the meanings in context of that use, etc) as contrasted to what was classed as phenomena for their study.
and then the floor was open to questions and comments.
we already knew that we were vastly out numbered here, and that theatre and performance people, and those who ‘used’ writers such as deleuze in their own work were in the majority in the room. we were aware that the definitions on which they based their work were not of sufficient clarity for us to work with…
so it was no surprise that most of the commentary was directed towards one of their own.
but what we all became particularly interested in (as we discussed later) was more centred on the heat which seemed to be generated over the use of the terms ’emotion’ versus ‘affect’ in descriptions of afferent processes in the brain stem.

it seemed that it was very important (to one attendee in particular) that the word ’emotion’ was not used to refer to those un-labelled feelings that arise before conscious labelling of them, and that ‘affect’ needed to be retained as the term for that, while ’emotion’ should be used for those states which were then classed or labelled with language items.
discussions of the states of ‘arousal’ that babies experience before being socialised into comprehending those states would fall into this sphere of being labelled as ‘affect’ perhaps, but one should refrain from calling these ’emotions’. [something, i remarked to myself, would perhaps ruffle the neuroscientist participants of the mid 90’s conference i followed, who were not chary about labelling these pre-self-conscious states as ’emotion’. this highlighted by the very name their conference had been called: “emotion and consciousness”, its main premiss being that without emotional arousal, consciousness and other social learning in the infant could not be expected to occur.]
examples pertaining to animal consciousness, and dogs in particular, their sense of deference, shame, etc, were also brought up in the course of the hallway conversation the other day…

of course, as appraisal analysts, we use the term ‘affect’ to refer to one class of attitudinal terms that one can find in texts in general (see the appraisal website for details). but the need to carefully distinguish between the terms ‘affect’ and ’emotion’ for this group of researchers who were not linguists, was of paramount importance to (some of) them, and pointed to their need for precision in this area.
it seemed to me that for them, the term ’emotion’ carried with it too much semantic ‘baggage’, and connoted states that were recognised and labelled, as well as given some evaluative status, whereas the term ‘affect’ remained somewhat neutral in this regard. that is, it seemed that the term ‘affect’ did not carry any reference to socially dis/approved responses, but merely denoted a general class of phenomena related to bodily states.
it was this need to distinguish between two terms we had all hitherto not considered of much difference, or at least not seen how it was of significance to those directed towards the discussion of these matters, that excited our interest.

Get Adobe Flash player