There is no I in Self

This post takes as its entrance point chapter six of Natural Discourse in which Dorbin and Weisser introduce the subtopic of emotion and take the position that it is a constructed response, and not a reflection of an inherent self (161), to suggest that greater attention to it, emotion, will move us closer to an integrative world view (158). Citing Damasio through Wilson, which is to say citing a neuroscientist through a sociobiologist’s lens, Dorbin and Weisser make a claim for ecocomposition by seemingly diminishing the importance of primary emotions — the nearly universal and genetically coded biochemical reactions to experience that has allowed our species to survive its environment by producing quick reactions to threats, rewards, etc — by conflating it with secondary emotions, which amount to cognitive points of departures of emotion through the manipulation of thoughts and feelings. Enter rhetoric. Rhetoric here being defined as seeds to communique that serve the ontological totality by influencing how its audience defines and assigns meaning to emotion by offering principally narrative-centered methods of cognition and/or through its complacency in defining the possible (conventionally acceptable) mental associations for individual and collective experience. Or what Dorbin and Weisser, perhaps naively, or perhaps something much, much less innocent, name an integrated worldview. Rhetoric, at its core, asks one to enter into a negotiation; to “select certain streams of information over others” (161). It is what Dorbin and Weisser, through Wilson’s ironic appropriation of Damasio’s neuroscience, argue for what seemingly amounts to akrasia. This is accomplished through the encouraging of a self-absorption of one’s own sentient biochemical reactions to a force that disallows what Yusoff terms an opacity of future. And although admirable that Dorbin and Weisser encourage non-rational thinking by advocating for increased recognition of emotion so to develop a better knowledge of the world, they stop short of acknowledging that its dialect with body and environment will almost invariably veer into the realm of the rational, and thus convince those who have thrown their “self” (as in, the only irrepressible revolutionist: their imaginations) into the fire of Warren’s governmentalbilty, a more personal version of Foucault’s governmentality. What remains, now that “self” has been integrated into another’s world view (curiously a product of their imagination), are vessels — as in a more infected, so to speak, version of what Haraway would call cyborg — to be more easily, and further, exploited.