Conceptual Blending and the History of Emotions

Fecha de publicación: 02-ago-2010 20:04:04

Presented at at Cogsci 2010. Portland, 11 Aug 2010.

Fields Made for Each Other

In the history of emotions, Barbara Rosenwein’s (2002) emotional communities and William Reddy’s (2001) emotives (historically situated speech acts for emotion) seek to combine culture, cognition, and expression to study how affective meaning is constructed throughout history.

Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) (Fauconnier & Turner 2002) provides a model of how meaning is constructed by selectively projecting materials from mental spaces, small conceptual packets built as thought and discourse unfold. Turner’s analysis (2001: 3-59) of Geertz’s study of Balinese cockfight (1972) applies CBT to the study of an emotive within an emotional community. Turner even sketches how a history of such a symbolic system could be made, taking its public actions and other components as the starting point (2001: 47-48).

Towards a Theory of Integrated Emotions.

I argue for integrated emotions. Conceptual integration works all the way from bottom to top, mostly in backstage cognition. Even basic emotions cannot be reduced to automatic physiological responses to stimuli: they are integrated experiences blending the self, cognitive models, mental imagery related to individual memories, cultural frames, conceptual templates, etc.

There are non-cognitive and non-cultural components in emotion, but there are no completely non-cognitive or non-cultural emotions. We need integrated emotions if we are to make any sense from affective experience. The fact that all emotions are integrated does not rule out different degrees of complexity, but places them in a continuum.

In order to account for cultural variation and change in affective meanings, we need systematic historical descriptions of blending processes, and accounts of how new conceptualizations emerge from existing patterns. These historical analyses have to be grounded both on the theoretical background of conceptual integration and on the methodology of the Social Sciences and the Humanities.

Applying CBT to the History of Emotions

CBT can model the complex dynamic patterns necessary to generalize over the figurative language of emotions. This network model can account for cultural variation, as well as contextual and communicative factors, which present great difficulties to other approaches studying emotion language, such as Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993).

Families of blends involving embodied schemata and emotional situations can be good candidates for these complex blending templates, since they tend to form simple narratives of emotion causation from which successful analogies emerge. These skeletal stories are suitable for many different instantiations, which vary greatly across cultures and periods. At the same time, they retain their embodied features and integration procedures, which are good candidates for universality. One example is what I call the generic integration network of erotic emission (Pagán Cánovas, forthcoming a), which can be widely observed, at least in Western literature, from Antiquity to the present.

Such studies need not be limited strictly to verbal figuration: they can include non-verbal expressions and aim at emotion concepts in general. For example, the origin of the arrows of love, arguably the most famous of all emotion symbols, can be traced back to the early archaic Greek period, and described as a cultural process that integrated an abstract cause personification network, the deadly arrows of Apollo, with the erotic emission blend (Pagán Cánovas, forthcoming b).

References

Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think. Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Geertz, C. (1972). Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight. Daedalus, 101, 1-37.

Lakoff, G. (1993). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Pagán Cánovas, C. Forthcoming a. Erotic emissions in Greek poetry: a common link between generalized integration networks. To appear in Cognitive Semiotics 6.

Pagán Cánovas, C. Forthcoming b. The genesis of the arrows of love: diachronic conceptual integration in Greek mythology.

Reddy, W. M. (2001). The navigation of feeling: a framework for the history of emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rosenwein, B. (2002). Worrying about emotions in history. The American Historical Review, 107:3, 821-845.

Turner, M. (2001). Cognitive dimensions of social science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.