fantasy firewalls

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Sun, 07 Jan 96 19:48:14 EST

I'd be interested, Michael (G.), to hear a bit more by way of the
sorts of examples you have in mind of the breakdown of the
firewall. I have no doubt that it breaks down all the time,
locally. After all, it takes, by my accounting, quite a lot of
work to keep it in place. For me the question mainly was the
belief that one has to maintain it, and who shares in that
belief, and the practices that support and implement it, and who
does not. I think the belief, in its stronger forms, may be local
to subcultures within our community, and perhaps to social
categories (as for example by age, in my earlier note). Your
examples of the breakdown may help me see where its cult is
stronger or weaker, and I'd like to know more about that.

I can certainly understand the argument that play and fantasy
represent local worlds, ad hoc and limited, vs. a 'consensual
reality' shared by much larger groups. This view would lead to
seeing a need for the firewall in order to maintain the scale of
cooperative community activity we imagine exists in our society.
But as you probably recall, I'm not much persuaded that people in
the community do in fact share an awful lot of their consensual
realities; only that we have means of behaving as if our rather
different realities meshed for some practical purposes (one of
which is retreating to a sufficiently high level of abstraction
to paper over our differences, a strategy that works for
convincing us we agree, but not for actual practical
collaboration). And so I'm also not a believer that big chunks of
humanity, or of people in the US, or in New York, actually form a
homogeneous enough community in the relevant respects, or that
the scale of our social systems is a uniform one -- but rather
than there are zillions of little mosaic patches and interlocking
networks of connections among people and activities that amount a
big system without there being anything 'big' (ie. that widely
and generally shared) in it. One could say, with only a little
playful exaggeration, that the grand consensual reality of the
larger community is just a mosaic a patchwork quilt of local
fantasies, sufficiently articulated for particular purposes, but
not of whole cloth.

There are doubtless times in history when some one patch manages
to position itself at the center and force all the others to
articulate to it in some privileged way. But it always remains
just one small patch for all that.

The critical condition of social integration, I think, is not
that we clearly quarantine our private and local fantasies from
some grand consensual reality, but that we manage effectively to
knit our fantasies onto the patches of many of our neighbors'.
Not the firewall, but the seam. JAY.

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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU