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uh...individuals are social creations. what the idea of individual has meant has varied wildly over time. among the most atomised conceptions of the individual comes from cultures infected with christianity, which reduces human life to some drama between the individual, bearer of a soul, and some god character. but even there, social relations and their importance in defining what an individual is vary considerably. this seems pretty obvious.
why people differ within shared frames of reference? it probably follows from the fact that even as our patterns that form us and our relation to the world are social, we also have memories that are imbricated with psyches that are able to combine and recombine social patterns/signifiers---and create new ones. we vary because life is open-ended and we adapt and create it as we go---within parameters that are socially instituted.
and most social patterns are complex, and are amenable to multiple levels of interpretation--so combining the creative ability of psyches with the complexity of social parameters (norms, ways of staging/framing the world, notions of what the world is, etc.) things are pretty amenable to divergences.
if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be having this conversation. it's not obvious how to move to a register of talking about social forms in general. nor for that matter is it obvious how critique is possible if the above (or something like it) isn't the case.
even the most rigid ideological systems provide materials for their critique. stalinism, for example, because it sat atop the marxist tradition (and a bunch of others) generated a LOT of critique both passive and active. christianity provides both justifications for social inequalities and the materials for quite radical critiques of them. traditions--the textual cores (because that's the frame within which we, collectively, roll for the most part) are complicated and internally contradictory. which is a good thing. and social norms/patterns etc. derive from and refer back to broader traditions.
maybe this is still pretty abstract....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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