[lit-ideas] Re: New Program in Psychoanalysis and Culture

JW:
To make another metaphor, one that's intended as metaphor, not as biologically determinative, maybe "Culture" (with a capital C) is like DNA.
Oh goody!!! A metaphor fight! Here's mine: culture is a recipe for cooking-up a life. "Cooking-up" is, of course a metaphor for dealing with the ingredients at hand. The "ingredients at hand" is a metaphor for something like -- (1) all the values imbued in you by your loving or unloving parents -- it makes a difference in how bitter the meal the dish turns out, as Irene will testify -- as well as by all your preachers and teachers and Mrs. Grundy; (2) your weird neighbors; (3) your own particular physical and psychological needs; and (5) social circumstances. Most of us tend to not trust ourselves enough to throw out the recipe and start from scratch. The ingredients are there -- that's all we really have to work with. OK, then, we go with the comfort food meal. But occasionally someone will come along with some strange ingredient and add that in. And that changes the whole taste of life. Those who like it, repeat it, those who don't either kill those who change the recipe or learn to live with the difference. Ergo Baskin-Robbins. 

Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message ----- From: "John Wager" <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 9:44 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: New Program in Psychoanalysis and Culture
The difficulty with the spaceship analogy is there aren't any other spaceships around, and we can only be in one at a time. But we're never in just one culture; we breathe in many cultures all the time. No one may escape "culture" but NONE of us is trapped inside a single culture, anywhere. To make another metaphor, one that's intended as metaphor, not as biologically determinative, maybe "Culture" (with a capital C) is like DNA. We all swim in it; our own is usually pretty stable, but we are porous to other forms. We can transfer some of our genes into other creatures, and those creatures transform some of their DNA into us. But DNA is NOT the same as a particular species; it's the common bond of all species. "Culture" is the common bond of all people, even though specific sets of DNA seem to look like they are only present in a particular place and time. Species="a" culture; DNA="Culture." We live both in "a" culture and "Culture." 


Torgeir Fjeld wrote:


Mike Geary commented:

    How does that happen if we are nothing more than our culture?  How
    does an individual ever begin to stand outside her culture and act
    contrary to it, even subversive to it if we are nothing more than
    our culture -- which is a tenet or mine, btw.
let's say we're on a spaceship travelling through outer space. while we fly around there are engineers working on the spaceship, repairing and improving, as it were. that's culture andcultural change -- perhaps there is an element of negation to repairing? 

-tor

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Mike Geary"
    To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
    Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: New Program in Psychoanalysis and Culture
    Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:09:26 -0500

    DW:
    >>Regarding culture, I remain unconvinced, to be polite, that
    anyone stands outside of culture.  I have as liitle respect for
    the most agreeable Humanist that merely regurgitates the ideas of
    his guru as I do for the autocrat that is capable of not a whit
    less.<<
     I agree with this totally, wholly and completely.  But
    then cultures do change, don't they?  How does that happen if we
    are nothing more than our culture?  How does an individual ever
    begin to stand outside her culture and act contrary to it, even
    subversive to it if we are nothing more than our culture -- which
    is a tenet or mine, btw.  This is a question that has long plagued
    me.  Cultures, of course, are never monolithic.  They are
    invariably composed of disparate peoples with disparate needs
    thrown together through historical events.  But, given time, out
    of that disparateness comes a way of living together which I would
    call a culture.  And I think this coming-together can and must
    happen planetarily -- I like the term "planetarily", but that's
    probably just my homeboy culture -- if we people types hope to
    progress into the next millennium. Mike Geary
    Universe



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