categorizing emotions

“Experience? Whaddya think I had? I mean, why is it doctors and nurses and husbands always seem to think they know more about this maternity business? Don’t you think a mother learns anything in that little room they wheel ‘em into? Or is that just a kindeygarten class? Let me tell you something, I picked up quite a little experience in that room, and it wasn’t outta books either. Experience.”

I couldn't agree more, Stella. For someone who’s always touting “lived experience” over post-hoc categorizations, that’s just a great quote. This isn’t just about street smarts vs. the ivory tower, it’s more about looking at the actual embodied lived event instead of diagrams and charts telling us what that event is supposed to be. A male doctor could study childbirth his whole life, writing tons of articles and supervising tons of studies, but he can still never have that singular embodied experience. He can “know” theoretically and even through observation what childbirth is, but he can never “know” that event through embodied experience.

Sonora: “Even the term "emotional" is an insult in our culture”—I couldn’t agree more—before and especially ever since Descartes’ mind/body split, our Western world has promulgated the idea of a nice and tidy separation between Reason and Emotion, a side-effect of believing in a split between the Mind and the Body (though recently thinkers are trying to get past this—Damasio and Ledoux through neuroscience, the Deleuzians through theory)—the long result of which is a valorization ranking “Thinking” over “Feeling” (as if the two could ever really be cut off from each other).

Mara brings up Hansen’s questions: “How do films construct what we remember of them? How does this memory change over time in relation to immediate effects of identification?” I don’t think really any theorist has addressed the issue of a film changing its meaning for the viewer over time; yet I don’t know of any viewer that holds the same opinion of a film each time that they see it. We have even often an idea of a film before we see it—usually from previews, little snippets engineered by the industry to try and make us want to come see the film—so we have, at the very least (1)the pre-seeing idea (which also includes conversations with friends and readings of reviews, and also the name of the film, especially if it's a "Great" film, a film we know we are supposed to appreciate), which may or may not greatly influence (2) the actual initial embodied viewing-event, which is followed immediately by (3) our thinking about that event—“What do I think about that film I just saw?”, which is our Reason categorizing after-the-fact our experience, which categorization often is the result of conversations with others—“What did you think of that one scene?”, “I dunno, but I hate that actor, I hate every movie he does,” "I have to think a little more before I decide what I think about it," which may or may not be followed by (4) our thinking about the film a week later, which may include (4a) reading about the film, (4b) applying theory to the film, or (4c) talking about the film with others, or (5) our seeing the film again, which may occur (5a) at home on the television or computer screen (either while we're in a darkened room, or maybe while we're doing other stuff) or (5b) again in the theater—whether it is weeks or years later in a “remastered” version, each of which stages may take place over a span of many years in many different spaces with many different companions or strangers--- watching the film in a large theater in the city, watching it in an old movie-house in the country, watching it in a non-English speaking country—compare a sixties radical watching Godard’s La Chinoise back then and watching it now—compare watching a film with friends who all love the movie with watching it alone in an empty theater—--watching a children’s movie in a theater filled with laughing and screaming little voices versus watching a “serious” movie in a “serious” theater with solemn adults. Each of our viewings is suffused with all of our past seeing-events which does not mean that it is controlled by those past events—“Oh, I remember this film, it sucked,” "Well, try it again," “Oh, have I seen this before, I’m not sure?” “Oh, you’re watching Jules et Jim with Ted? He loves that movie, he’ll be talking the whole time you’re watching it,” “I was buying popcorn, so I was walking to my seat during the first five minutes,” “I fell asleep because it was so boring,” and so on—I’m sure we could think of a million examples demonstrating that each viewing experience is a singular event--I'm sure also that many of us have films that we come back to time and time again--how often or ever is our experience of those films the same?