[...] the human mind is dependent for its objects to a great degree upon channels or means that are not under its own control. It is thus dependent on the thousand channels and means by which objects are introduced to it. But we need here only instance that wonderful assemblage in the human body. These organs which we term the senses, one or the other of them, convey to the mind its first object and afterwards all the new objects about which it acts. (Day 1876: 15)Cognitive channels. Kroeber and some other anthropologists wrote about the cultural function of phatic communion, that it includes the aspect of relating to another person through your mutual relations to cultural events, signs, and texts. There are some quotes about how people used to read each other the news, and this made me think about Facebook feeds, and how social media is a sociocultural infrastructure of sorts, one that facilitates digital news sharing, for example, instead of face-to-face interaction. I wonder how different our "faceless" sociocultural entanglements are from those of pre-networked people. Some lady in late 1920s was equally excited about romance novels, and how the relationship patterns of our imaginations could be contrasted to those of real peoples. I'm not sure if anyone has bothered to summarize that kind of literature, though I know there must be quite a lot in journals like College English or in those interpersonal relationship journals from the late 1990s. Eh, I'd like to acquaint myself more with late 19th and turn-of-the century thought, especially obscure philosophy from archive.org - there's a lot of good stuff hidden in black and yellow.
The quote reminds me of one from Geertz. Not the following, which I found by Googling.
ReplyDelete"Man depends upon symbols and symbol systems with a dependence so great as to be decisive for his creatural viability and, as a result, his sensitivity to even the remotest indication that they may prove unable to cope with one or another aspect of experience raises within him the gravest sort of anxiety..."
(But that one seems interesting too, cf. "Religion as a cultural system".)
A bit more sleuthing:
"I want to propose two ideas. The first of these is that culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns--customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters--as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms-plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call "programs")--for the governing of behavior. The second idea is that man is precisely the animal most desperately dependent upon such extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms, such cultural programs, for ordering his behavior."
From the "Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man". (Similar themes are reiterated in the above-mentioned essay.)
It occurs to me that it could also be useful to search Geertz's book for "affect"...
Also, regarding the "channel" keyword:
ReplyDelete"Craik has even suggested that the thin trickle of water which first finds its way down from a mountain spring to the sea and smooths a little channel for the greater volume of water that follows after it plays a sort of model *for* function. But models *of* --linguistic, graphic, mechanical, natural, etc., processes which function not to provide sources of information in terms of which other processes can be patterned, but to represent those patterned processes as such, to express their structure in an alternative medium -- are much rarer and may perhaps be confined, among living animals, to man."
From "Religion as a cultural system".