I think I deluded myself the other day. The idea I presented doesn' t deal with the issues I set out. Indeed it is actually a peculiarly individualist scheme, denying as it does the possibility of trans-human structures and patterns of behaviour. I was despairing for a couple of days, thinking:
1. Had I been naive enough to submit an individualist's charter whilst not even perceiving that that was what it is?
2. Am I then thrust back to the confrontation between social and individual as the language we are forced to use if we want to speak of what it means to be a human in a community?
You see the second point is the one that is more worrying - what if there is no escaping from this duality, where the interface is murky at best? It's the social equivalent of being presented with the results from the Young's slits experiment...we would be both and but neither individual or society (particle and wave) are connected in a direct fashion. I admit it's kind of elegant but I couldn't bring myself to accept defeat so readily.
The schema of networks, with the physically located person as the node where the self emerges is attractive but it is, at best, incomplete. Even if I can be described as this thing here amongst these others it still doesn't account for the fact that these others have common meaning with me or that a framework exists that predates me and will survive me (in one form or another) which is relatively insensitive to my existence.
What is missing? What does this incompleteness look like?
I think it looks like time. I think in focussing on the physical location, on the network as it is, the implicit assumption is that time is standing still. I may as well have said, "I am this thing here now..."
The extension then is to describe us in terms of space and time, because that is really where we are located. Our coordinates are fixed by time. After all, maps are drawn by time, not space.
If we allow ourselves to be described across the stretch of time then we can see that relationships, even at the smallest level will follow patterns, will develop along certain lines or grooves. As the matrix of relationships grows these patterns not only grow with them but as they bed down, get repeated and carry with them the meaning we communicate to one another they come to embody the ideas and meanings themselves. This does sound superficially like memes, but it's not the same. For me the genetics of culture is as much nature as it is nuture. There are many cultures but many fewer behavioural axioms that cultures are built from - it's the fact that we are all members of many cultures, many networks that makes it appear more complicated, more diverse. Don't get me wrong, life is diverse, but perhaps not as incomparable as we might tell ourselves.
The fact that the grooves our relationships carve can influence others with whom we are only tangentially connected is fascinating but mainly because we are here demonstrating that patterns of behaviour and thought that arise amongst groups as small as two can influence many more or long periods of time after those originators have exited the system.
It is time that is the key to linking the superstructures within which we allow our lives to be guided and those lives we are living. It is the play of our lives through time that creates these superstructures in the first place. These structures do exist in their own right, but only from moment to moment as the relationships of people renew them. In that sense I would propose that the fundamental, irreducible factors in humanity are relational; networks of critical self-other reflection which not only permit the self to arise but allow meaning beyond the instinctual to come into being via its communication between ourselves.
Cool.
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