Brandon Marcus

Many intellectuals and journalists nonetheless do disbelieve it, insisting that “no one tells me what to write.” Very true; ideological control is much subtler in capitalist societies than it was in communist ones. Usually, in fact, it is not overt control at all; that is, not one person or group laying down the law for another. It is, rather,... See more

apperception in the meaning developed by Wilhelm Wundt, a pioneer of scientific psychology, to denote attentive perception and the integration of sensory inputs into existing mental structures and experience. It was the relation of senses, mind and world that concerned Boas.

We become attached to psychological and cultural habits, which are physiologically and neurologically engrained from our earliest age, and hence difficult, albeit not impossible, to break in our individual lives, and by extension in societies.

He demonstrated in empirical detail how our cognitive appraisal of experience is culturally inflected and mediated, and varies according to language, sociocultural setting and historical period, and how it was only by knowing our conditioned, filtered worldview, which he called ‘ Kulturbrille ’, or cultural lenses, that we could reflect upon it.

But humans are cultural by nature: our universal physiology integrates cultural variations. Each individual is born into a world of words, values, histories and affects, which participate in constituting our subjectivity, our cognitive and normative frame of reference, and our emotional landscape.

And while we experience emotions within the self, they are always about something in the world, including myself – private life, a public state of affairs, or a work of art (art itself, I suggest, is the intimately processed made public through collectively developed forms and historically contingent modes of expression). What we feel is also... See more

Tarde contended that the ‘crowd’ – as a heterogeneous group of individuals, which can be joyful or brutal but dissolves with geographical distance – differs from the ‘public’, a dispersed, like-minded collective with shared cultural references, which historically came into existence with printing, and became established in modernity with the advent... See more

Imitation and counter-imitation constitute the core of society, ensuring its cohesion, discoveries and innovations, just as habits underlie individual, everyday lives, Tarde argued in The Laws of Imitation (1890),