Ellie Ragland
The computer has become a nearly universal metaphor for mind in cognitive scientific explanations of consciousness. But this metaphor results in the exclusion of any serious consideration of affectivity. In pyschoanalytic terms, affectivity is a key concept in explaining the relationship between literature and consciousness. By leaving out affectivity, cognitive scientific explanations (such as those of Bond, Shevrin, Brakel, Hertel, etc.) fail to include what most counts in lived human experience. Said another way, leaving out affect tends to make cognitive scientific theories limited and uninsightful with respect to the meaning and function of literature. Given the importance of literature, any theory of consciousness would need to account for literary experience in an adequate way. This paper argues that Lacan's later writings on the concept of the Real provide a way of adding affect to computer-based models of mind. Lacan defines the Real as a certain affective dimension in language itself. Though computer models of cognition take language in general into account, they typically tend to ignore affect. A brief analysis of Heinrich von Kleist's story "The Puppet Theater" will show what is at stake in leaving affect out of any theory of consciousness.