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reply to foss
vance@MAPLE.CIRCA.UFL.EDU
Sun, 23 Jan 1994 09:55:06 EDT
Preface from Foss;
Ralph Larkin had pried out of an expert meditator the details of
how one was *supposed* to *experience* the Primordial Vibration,
where said *experience* was taken for a "Direct Experience of
God." Having, with the aid of a little LSD and the use of the
meditation techniques called Knowledge, induced an "experience"
which matched in every detail the advance expectations, I was
satisfied that I'd done it; and one could see how some college
student might find the Primordial Vibration impressive.
Comment:
An experience predicated (i.e. meaningful) on an expectation of
what the experience would be. To me a wonderful example of the
association of experience and meaning.
Foss again:
To understand myself, I return to the definition of Culture as
"the mental life of society and the material products wherein it
is objectified."
Since the mental life in question must be shared in order to
exist at all, and presupposes a material life whereby the
biological organisms which share it may continue to live at all,
and all people are individuated however much they may
ideologically deny this (or affirm it to greater degree than is
objectively warranted: Tang Tsou, America's Failure in China,
1941-1950, U. Chicago Press, 1956, attributed deluded US policies
to the "incredible ideological homogeneity" of US culture, as
projected onto Chinese), culture always changes. Even should we
posit, as do structural-functionalists and those Marxists
asserting distinctiveness over time of "social formations" or
"modes of production" or both, some societal imperative to
reproduce itself, such cannot occur without interference with
*exact* reproduction: the Adaptation "pattern variable" or the
"laws of motion" of the "mode of production." In the realm of
culture, whose core is language, there is no such thing as
language without inbuilt processes of change.
Comment:
How can mental life be shared other than through mutual
expectations of the material (if the material includes the
material behavior of other people as I would argue it does)?
Thus culture, or a culture is the shared expectations people have
of events, including the behavior of other people, the
environment as in plants, animals, bombs, etc... Further, what
is it that changes, as in cultures change? Is it not the
expectations of what will happen?
Foss again:
Not so hot, try another angle. Two incarcerated psychotics,
with opportunities for dense interaction on the same ward and
shared delusional system, may indeed confect an entire emic
culture between them.
Comment:
To penetrate and "know" this emic culture the (to use Foss's
term) Explainer must discover the expectations that out two
psychotics have of each others behavior relative to both their
own (the individual psychotics) behavior or the language
(arguably behavior too) they use that is presupposed on
epectations of the other psychotics behavior.
Foss again:
But one of the very facts which constitutes them as psychotics,
that they are unable to "hack it," precludes them from attempting
fabrication of products wherein their meaning system would be
objectified, starting with macros for a print font for their
language. (Else they'd be well paid as "hackers" who may freely
go mad before VDT screens.) The exception would be low-tech art,
which the attendants might not recognize as such and throw out.
(The limiting case never occurs because most delusional systems
are minor wrinkles on the prevailing culture; most psychotic art
is so bad, its principal display is in psychopharmaceutical ads
with the implicit message, "help prevent this, prescribe X.")
Comment:
Presupposes that our psychotics can not incorporate some lasting
record of their culture (mutual validated expectations of each
other) such as knowing how to access a computer BBS as I do.
Foss again:
The meaning systems of this limiting case would *exist*, but
hardly: By routine removal of either party from the ward, the
culture with all its inventory of meaning ceases to exist.
The implication is that, instead of cultural Thingies having
an existence score which is binary, *either* 0 or 1, we have
existence scores as continuous variables, *between* 0 and 1, like
p-values. The limiting case gives existence values not
*significantly* above zero.
Comment:
But suppose our psychotics do know how to produce a lasting
record that in some way coheres with what someone else, somewhere
else expects to experience (hence the non-binary nature of any
individuals expectations relative to other individuals
expectations).
Foss again:
The next level is the subculture, especially among young
people, whose existence is ephemeral, transitory, evanescent. Or,
should it endure beyond a year or eighteen months, its content
would be so drastically transformed that "old-timers" still
hanging around from the previous year would seem, should their
fashions lag, figures of fun; and for their part would bemoan the
sad degeneracy of kids today from the Standards of the Old Days.
Comment:
If the expectations of any small group of individuals are similar
enough to a larger group of individuals who can be identified
according to some pre-determined category such as age or economic
class... we have a subculture.
Foss again:
Such changes were indeed observed in youth-ghetto and racial-
ghetto neighborhoods in the 1960s, where for example the love-
hippies or psychedelic mystics were morally uneasy with late New
Left revolutionary posturing; and both of these were aghast at
the nonconfrontational "laid-back" post-movement culture. The
difficulty with analyzing 1960's social movements, I concluded in
1968-9, lay precisely in the habituation of Explainers to social
movements which had formal-organizational cohesion, which
deposited a residue of self-monitoring information, statistical
and documentary; and a bureaucratic carcass which endured for
decades without proper burial. And as it happens, some Explainers
did indeed insist that on this account no social movements
occurred in the 1960s.
Comment:
As Graber might argue from a cultural materialist perspective,
(although possibly using behaviors not expectations of the
outcome of behaviors) did such expectations persist? For how
long? Among an (pre-determined as important by Explainers)
socially categorical group? No? Then no social movement.
Foss again:
What was true of social movements is also true, before and
since, of cultural, religious, and artistic movements, where no
social conflict may be anticipated barring the isolated gesture;
certainly none of the crescent, developing kind found in real
social movements.
Cultural, artistic, and religious movements "exist" to the
extent that they exhibit growth potential sufficient to attract
Explainers; and the material incentives of the Explaining
industry may ensure a volume of Explanatory literature not
hitherto justified by the low degree of objective existence or
unimportance of the Observed. Show me a large enough bunch of
artists, writers, and Explainers - critics and social-behavioral
scientists - and I will show you an industry. Put that in your
cyberspace and smoke it. Or, as they say on
<Leri@gossip.pyramid.com>, "Gnow it."
Daniel A. Foss
Comment:
Or show me a large enough (and rich enough) bunch of Decision
Makers (self-described as policy makers and aggregating unto
themselves the myth and artifacts-- limos, privaye gyms and
swimming pools, exclusive clubs, etc...) who are threatened by
the expectations of the potential subculture and who seek the
good offices of explainers to explain away as ephemeral the
potential subculture and who can afford to put out the message
that the potential subculture never was and you have a subculture
that never was.
There is a converse to this of course as in PC or
multiculturalism or creating a mythical threat to self-described
policy makers to prevent such a threat from ever appearing as in
the current anti-PC movement to thwart the inevitability of
American demographic changes.
vance@ufcc.ufl.edu
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