Culture is trapped inside subjectivity
Culture is trapped inside subjectivity. The only window frame in which culture exists, the only thing greater than it, that engulfs it, is subjectivity. And yet! And yet, the reigning message of culture is: I am larger than subjectivity. I am that which extends beyond the inner and transcends it totally. The subjective truly believes this and begins to undermine itself, to think less of itself than of the world in which it lives, and less of the world and more of the rules than govern it, and less of the rules and more of the basic axioms. Culture is a machine which divides things into smaller things in order to tell things apart, to discover nuances and subtleties between things. The subjective, and the unconscious, uses the language of symbol, which sees similarities between things. This is like this, this is connected to that. The idiom of psychosis is the idiom of subjectivity. When something is subjective it is considered to be “weak” by culture, “a subjective argument”, a subjective truth.
I think it is good to remember that culture is not the master of subjectivity, nor is subjectivity the master of culture. However, as a way, a method, for subjectivity to reclaim some power for itself, it seems to be (paradoxically) good to think of it in these dualistic terms: culture is trapped inside subjectivity. Culture has nowhere else to exist than in the experiences of people. It doesn’t exist outside of the experiences of people, despite its constant claims to the opposite. Subjectivity exists within the world, but the world exists within subjectivity. Once again, the snake bites its tail. That seems to be how I’m ending my posts lately.
