I was fascinated by the turn Doug Williams gave things with his view of
Diana's tragedy through the question:
> is it really necessary that our play extend directly, preconsciously, into
> our own lives?
-- which I take as if to ask whether we don't still need, as in ancient
times, to _incarnate_ our archetypes, to make them first-order real for us,
and not only second-order fictions of imagination, our irrealis, etc., so
that we can thus _interact_ with them and through them as representatives
or Signs with the larger scale meanings, the mythic burdens we make them to
bear?
A recent adaptation of my Aarhus paper on cross-scale dynamics in ecosocial
systems by a volume co-author (P B Andersen) further develops my theme
there that it is through the materiality of the semiotic that we cross
scales, and he takes as a paradigm instance of this how a person or a text
can feedback to us the operations of larger institutions which mold people
(cf. habitus) and cross-compare texts over much larger-than-human scales of
space and time.
When we bid our gods ride mortal men and women, is it any wonder they die
young?
jay.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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