[MD] French ingredient in the soup of sentiments

[Margaret Warren]

Arlo,

I think your writing is wonderful. Very clear & concise. 

I also love your use of the comparisons of the latin culture and the 
'argument' metaphor.

I see all of your points clearly and would add to the last paragraph with
some hopefulness perhaps about youth, the internet, open source and free
content. 

I do see a lot of people younger than I striving to redefine themselves
against
these metaphors. I know entire groups of friends all around the age of 25-35
who
tend to have a much more open mind about their relationships. In fact as a
group
of about 5-10 people living in a city, they live, perhaps in separate houses
but basically 
in a tightly knit group that spends enormous amounts time with each other.
They
see each other many times throughout a week. All go to movies together, eat
most
meals with each other, barter for babysitting, bicycle repair, rides to
work,
music lessons, barter skills at graphic design for skills at computer
programming, 
they trade jobs back and forth and such. They don't tend to throw out
personal intimate relationships that didn't work, they just transition them 
to another state of being. They actively look for their relationships with
each
other to become more dynamic and specifically not to contain any
capitalism-driven
metaphors. They look to remove money from the exchange with each other as
much 
as possible. It's an interesting approach. I think there are some authors
out there
now who are writing about these trends. People waiting longer to get married
because
their relationships with small groups of friends are so much more satisfying
and 
they put a greater importance in having families that understand this
lifestyle 
and also fairly easily grasp the idea of not bringing the concept of
'ownership' 
into a marriage. 

A rebellion to the privatization metaphor is also the popularity of a social
life 
in a virtual space such as the 'myspace' phenomenon. People have thousands
of 
'friends' in a virtual world. Even here, on the MD, we've expanded our
interactions
even if it's virtual. Yes, we might all be sitting by ourselves in our own 
private homes, but the internet has created this increasingly 'public' world
where we
all have our profiles, art, discussions and such. In this world, content
yearns
to be free. So what happens to copyrights and profit earned from the
creation 
of the content that is on the internet.  Not only does content yearn to be
free in the internet environment, but there's a little less room for
predjudice. Unless you put your image on the internet, no one has to know
your color, gender or religion to hire you to do a job, or buy
merchandise from you on e-bay. The whole business model is changing 
very rapidly and there are dynamic events happening constantly in this
arena. The
music industry giants are paddling as fast as they can and hiring as many
young
hippie geeks as they can to help them figure out a new strategy. Open-source
software and free content makes me think that we are going to HAVE to find
new ways
to support each other, much like my friends I talked about in the previous
paragraph...
where bartering knowledge somehow becomes a primary component of these new
systems. 

Here is an interesting new term I ran across in an on-line art dictionary -
I mentioned it
in a post a while back, but here's the definition:

culture jamming and culture jammer  - Culture jamming refers to forms of art
and other activities involving social agitation. Culture jammers take a
number of sociopolitical issues as their primary focus, including media
literacy, consumerism, television addiction, television violence, pollution,
North American social laziness, use of sweatshops, and various hazards of
corporate dominance of media, government, and daily life. The term was first
used in 1984 by the San Francisco audio-collage band Negativeland, but the
concept dates back to the suffrage and avant-garde movements of the early
20th century. Because they often employ photomontage and other techniques
employed by graphic designers, and they take stances in defiance of the
status quo, their works often resemble the anti-art of the Dadaists, as well
as various works by Surrealists and Situationists.

Quote:

    * "Culture jamming is about jamming the signals that put us in this
trance in the first place. It's about creating cognitive dissonance,
disseminating as many seeds of truth to as many people as you can, with the
ultimate goal of toppling existing power structures and changing the way
we'll live in the twenty-first century."
      Kalle Lasn (contemporary Canadian, born Estonia), a leading figure
within the culture jamming movement since the late 1980s.

Interesting stuff...Has anyone read 'Pattern Recognition' by William Gibson?
Very interesting book about the aversion that the quote 'gen x'ers' and
beyond
have to mass marketing...



-----Original Message-----
From: moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org
[mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org] On Behalf Of Arlo Bensinger
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 3:51 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: Re: [MD] French ingredient in the soup of sentiments


Margaret/SA,

I think you are right on regarding the pervasive adoption of the "monetary" 
metaphor in our lives. I trace this back the publication of The Wealth of 
Nations, as a "Kulturbarer" of its time, in the transition from 
"aristocratic metaphor" to "mercantilistic metaphor". The adoption of the 
financial metaphor, as both the driving "force" of progress, and the 
re-evalution of humans as "resources" in the quest for wealth, had profound 
effects on social relations vis-a-vis the framing of the dialogue.

It was this, I'm convinced, that Pirsig is getting at when he says in ZMM, 
"And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of 
what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of 
dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability 
to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his 
own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of 
understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a 
part of the world, and not an enemy of it."

The role of "conceptual metaphor" in framing not only our perceptions but 
the way we interrelate (intra- and inter- relation) is well documented in 
the literature. For example, "argumentation as war" is a pervasive metaphor 
in typically Anglo-cultures. However, many Latino cultures frame 
"arguments" not was "war" but as "dance". So, while in English you'd say "I 
won that argument", or "When the argument got intense, I brought out the 
big guns", this would make no sense translated into other languages that do 
not use the "argument is war" metaphor. Typically, these cultural metaphors 
are "invisible", we adopt the referential usage without ever realizing the 
governing metaphor.

George Lakoff, one of my favorite authors, is represented in Wikipedia with 
this, "A less extreme, but similar, claim is made by George Lakoff in 
'Moral Politics'. Lakoff claims that the public political arena in America 
reflects a basic conceptual metaphor of 'the family.' Accordingly, people 
understand political leaders in terms of 'strict father' and 'nuturant 
parent' roles. Two basic views of political economy arise from this desire 
to see the nation-state act 'more like a father' or 'more like a mother'."

Another strong metaphor in our culture is "time". Pirsig address this in 
the Afterward to ZMM. "This book has a lot to say about Ancient Greek 
perspectives and their meaning but there is one perspective it misses. That 
is their view of time. They saw the future as something that came upon them 
from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes. When 
you think about it, that's a more accurate metaphor than our present one. 
Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, 
even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who 
really can forget the past? What else is there to know?"

In recent times, the mercantilistic dialogue has become even more 
pervasive, influencing such statements as "I have a lot invested in our 
relationship" (as you noted), and "This was a good way to spend my time" 
(can you "spend" time?). Money, as I've said here for quite some time, has 
become the dominant factor in Western Culture. Nothing is as important as 
"money". Profit is King. God is not dead, God has transmuted into Dollars.

Finally, you should also notice the "privatization metaphor" and its 
effects on our interactions with the world. Since the mercantilistic 
dialogue has taken hold, the movement has also been towards "private" and 
away from "public". Things must be "owned" to be "of value". Indeed, it is 
ownership that connotes value. Over the past several decades, we have (as a 
whole) increasingly moved from primarily engaging in "public spaces" to 
primarily engaging in "private spaces". Think about how many hours per day 
you spend in private space. We move from our private homes, to our private 
cars, drive to our private offices, eat in restaurants where privacy is the 
norm (ever been to a restaurant in other culture? you might find that 
third, unused chair suddenly being filled by a "stranger"), and we retreat 
to our private homes for the night. Even in typically public spaces we are 
demanding private activity. Taverns, for example, used to be areas of 
mostly public dialogue, now they are filled with dozens of "private
dialogues".

Anyway, you are right to notice and be concerned about the 
capitalization-driven metaphors, and how they influence over time both our 
inter- and intra- conceptual frames. It drives the overconsumption, near 
pathological need we have to consume, and the dehumanization of everything 
from the workplace (people are nothing but resources) to our relationships. 
Its sad.

Arlo

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