Ancient. Classes for the Spring 2020 semester began this week. I’m teaching Women in Antiquity (#womenancient) again, and a grad seminar on Roman Intellectual Life (#romanintellect). Here are the syllabuses for each of them:
Modern. Intellectual and artistic life is often figured as solitary. And, yes, parts of it often are. There has to be time where you’re working on your craft, reading and studying and developing. There has to be practice. But the idea that there is one genius at work, a unitary soul, one which doesn’t rely on or need the presence of others feels fundamentally wrong. There is a social aspect to all of this. And an emotional one. In The Sociology of Philosophies (1979), Randall Collins consistently pairs thought with emotion in his analysis of how socio-intellectual networks form. There are at least three things which Collins suggests are needed for an intellectual interaction: 1) present individuals physically assembled; 2) shared focus and awareness of that shared focus; 3) shared emotional state, or mood.
We could really push back against the insistence that individuals need to be physically assembled (“face-to-face”); interaction rituals take place on the internet every day, where the embodied nature of human interaction is tested and extended. But an important part to linger on here is the function of emotion in creating intellectual as much as social structure. Awareness and self-awareness play a role, and emotions are a processing tool that allows mutual understanding and self-reflexivity.
Collins suggests that focus and emotion have a role to play in the empowering of actions (and texts/objects used in such action) and individuals alike. Ritual actions are “charged up” via repetitions which are needed to give them meaning; if they aren’t replenished in a timely manner, then they lose their significance (consider: going regularly to a therapist; to yoga; to a place of worship; to Latin class). Engaging in social actions regularly insists on their significance, and on the very significance of social interaction regardless of the activity; i.e. going to yoga is as much about communing with your social network and mutually affirming the significance of that shared focus as it is about the technical or spiritual actions involved.
Just as social actions need to be regularly “charged up” in this way (via repetition), so too, Collins suggests, do individuals need to be “charged up” emotionally. Collins writes (p23) that intellectual “encounters have an emotional aftermath”; an individual whose emotional energy is replenished is thereby empowered with charm and leadership capability, but an individal who is not emotional “charged up” will become demoralized — passive, depressed. The sliding scale of emotionality, Collins suggests, strongly impacts the individual’s ability to engage in the socio-intellectual structure which creates these emotions in the first place; consider: a beginning yoga student who feels alienated in their practice and does not feel adequately supported by their teacher; or a Latin student who is not given the emotional space to make errors by their instructor. Motivation is an extension of emotional state, and emotional state in intellectual networks consists in a relationship to the social structure (and hierarchy): the yoga studio; the Latin classroom.
Interestingly, the theory of motivation and emotional energy in relation to the creation and development of community is a significant feature in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. In this game, you are a “professor” (of war), tasked with developing the skills of a group of students, each with their own personalities, desires, and talents. While you train your students, you must pay attention to their “motivation level” – the students individually have a bar with four “charges” of motivation, which you spend in distributing skill points. When student motivation is low, you can replenish their energy with a range of activities: share a meal with them, have tea with them, return lost items, answer their questions after class, etc. etc. This is actually a rather sophisticated reflection of a solid pedagogical theory: students will not progress and not level up unless you create an environment in which they become emotionally replenished.
Internet.
- Brecht Vandenbroucke: “we all tried it” (perfectionism).
- alison zai: “LET’S FOCUS!”
- Lisa Hanwalt has also been reading Jenny Odell.
Excerpt. Randall Collins (1979/2002: 21): “Intensely focused situations penetrate the individual, forming symbols and emotions which are both the medium and the energy of individual thought and the capital which makes it possible to construct yet further situations in an ongoing chain.”
Daily Life. Over the last two weeks I’ve been cycling as much as possible. I remembered that I had a copy of Eleanor Davis’ You & a Bike & a Road (Koyama Press 2017) and read it again the other evening. It’s a moving memoir of a solo cross-country bike tour. I remember following along on twitter back in 2016 when Davis posted updates as it was happening.
o pietas animi 