The dialogical and political nature of emotions: A reading of Vygotsky’s The Psychology of Art

Abstract

A significant number of articles published in Theory & Psychology have been inspired by, or discuss, Vygotsky’s contribution to psychology. However, most of the available publications and discussions on Vygotsky overlook his theory of art and emotions and, more broadly, his view on subjectivity. In this article we offer a reading of Vygotsky’s The Psychology of Art. According to our interpretation, art is conceived in this theory as a social technique for (re)constructing life and transforming bodies; human emotions are dialogical processes, culturally and semiotically created, and historically transformed. Our theoretical perspective differs from some other interpretations of Vygotsky’s work because of its emphasis on the centrality of emotions in psychological life, and particularly on the intertwining of sociogenesis and microgenesis. Through emotions, discourse practices and cultural techniques have transformative effects on bodily reorganization ( catharsis) and subjective experience ( perezhivanie). This is discussed in relation to the political implications of a theory of emotions and its relevance for the theorization of subjectivity.

Between form and content: affective generalization in Art

“…The significance of this metamorphosis is, in Vygotsky's view, its transcendence of individual feelings and their generalization to the social plane (Leontiev, 1971, p. vii). Larrain and Haye (2020) point out that the transformation and resolution of conflicting emotions distinguishes catharsis from other emotional contagion or transmission processes in aesthetic experience. Such transformation, according to Vygotsky, is motivated by the form conflicting with, destroying, and overcoming the content: "The words of a story or verse carry its meaning (the water), whereas the composition creates another meaning for the words, transposes everything onto a completely different level, and transforms the whole into wine" (Vygotsky, 1971, pp.…”

Integrating affection, emotion, and aesthetics into a General Theory of Learning

“…Elaborating on the idea of aesthetic, Larraín and Haye (2020) claim that "with aesthetic experience, emotions become more than just bodily states: they become objects of experience" (p. 804). Every human action presupposes an aesthetic dimension as it produces future-oriented meaningful actions to be realized (Tateo, 2017).…”

“…For that purpose, we will discuss how Jack Mezirow’s (1991) transformative learning theory seeks to accomplish this integration. Starting with a critique of this effort we will propose a hypothesis of how this internal articulation between cognition and affection/emotion could occur, consistently with a processual and relational approach to human learning: we will elaborate on the General Theory of Learning (GTL) developed by Sebastián and Lissi (2016) and Sebastián et al (2021), unfolding through the work of Larraín and Haye (2019, 2020), Massumi (1995, 2002), Stenner (2017), and others, for explaining the affective, emotional, and aesthetic experience of learning. Altogether, the reader will understand one possible articulation between an epistemologically sound learning theory based on a historical–cultural constructivist approach, and the affective experience of learning.…”

“…Following their reading of Vygotsky, Larraín and Haye (2020) state that through form and imagination, discourse and sociocultural means transform the affective experience. Here, the cultural means of excellence for systematizing and transforming affection would be art, not simply by enabling spaces for expression but by organizing and generalizing them and making them available to be responded to and contested.…”