Chapter 10: Poetics of Affectivating

The process of relating to one’s world often involves the construction of higher-order signs which convey affectively laden meanings that color our environments in broad strokes. These meanings form fields which may become deeply entwined with our subjective sense of a situation, and guide our thought, feeling and action in those settings through time. For instance, the person may develop a sense of “home” in a new space, or “beauty” amidst that which is otherwise mundane or even dangerous. Though they can be formed at any point, one often becomes acutely aware of this semiotic formation process during periods of rupture in the otherwise smoother flow of daily life, where such signs may be used to create comfort within the ambiguous and uncertain, for instance during the loss of a loved one. This paper suggests that the temporal structure of human life experience greatly influences how these signs are formed, and how these fields of meaning function for the individual. I will use a microgenetic level of analysis to examine the poetic aspects of how such signs are constructed.