Morpheus introduces The Matrix to Neo: “You’ve felt your entire life that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”
Don’t many of us have a similar feeling each day as we witness a strange, bizarre world presented to us as “reality”? Is it sufficient to “critique” this world? Perhaps more radical inquiry is called for.
In The Dream of Culture, renowned anthropologist Howard Stein interrogates the shared fantasy in which we are immersed: the dream we call reality.
We urge you to read this exciting, groundbreaking book.
Culture as a Dream
This book attempts to unravel a paradox: namely, that human beings, for most of our lives, and human culture, for most of its history, strive to keep emotionally and intellectually asleep while priding ourselves on being wide awake. Just as the work of dreaming is to safeguard sleep, much of the work of culture is likewise to keep us from thinking, feeling, or knowing too much during waking hours.
Much of culture is not “like” dreaming, in the sense of poetic license’s love of fantastic simile. Nor is it mere analogy. It is day’s counterpart to night. In culture, ours is the tragic conceit to dream that we are not dreaming and to make wakefulness the most heinous sin. Dreaming together is our sensing together—consensus—in cultural groups. Culture is our dreaming while we are wide awake.
The work of culture is also the work of dreams. “Reality” is far more elusive than we dare admit. We weave our tenuous net over anxiety’s abyss with the substance of dreaming. To say this is not to stretch some metaphor or take literary license. People in groups, awake, do with their shared symbolic and ritual materials, their technology and their environment what we each do while asleep: wish what we may dare and disguise our wishes; contrive our forbidden victories and stage our defeats; attempt to master what we have found overwhelming.
If night dreaming takes place on a screen upon which are projected our unconscious wishes, fantasies, and feelings, our day dreaming is constructed and projected upon a screen we objectify and call “culture” or “society.” We project these “hopes and fears of all the years”—as the tender Christmas carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” so yearningly sings—upon and into the social symbols and institutions of politics, religion, law, cosmology, economics, and so on.
Culture as a Symbolic Object
We construe culture as an independent, self-standing entity beyond ourselves—a symbolic object to which we imagine we belong. We transfer feelings from our earliest mothering figures, families and memories to groups—in which we try to capture safety and security—to make us again feel at one with our parental nurturers and protectors.
In “culture shock” and “future shock,” the loss of culture—which represents a catastrophic crisis of identity—is experienced as object-loss. Culture (or group) is represented as a fantasized maternal object with which tribalists feel themselves to be inextricably tied and upon which they feel themselves to be wholly dependent.
Culture is experienced as a “dual unity” whose “body” the tribalist does not distinguish from his/her very selfhood. It is little wonder that tribalists and anthropologists alike commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in their conceptualizations of culture: one truly experiences his/her group to be “superorganic”—transcending the self yet part of the (symbiotic) self.
In this formulation, loss of culture is the fantasized loss of an environment that mirrors and embodies the “goodness” upon which one depends. “Culture”—experienced as an entity—is one member of a class of symbolic objects whose psychic function is to represent and perpetuate object relations that have been disrupted by death or other forms of loss. The subject of culture shock is the experience of estrangement from—loss and “death” of—culture, as though it were an object, or object representation.
Culture as Shared Fantasy
How may we account for these collective representations that give rise to various forms of reality? Richard Koenigsberg suggests that cultural ideas, beliefs and values may be viewed as an “institutionalization and social embodiment of primal human phantasies.” He proposes that we carefully comb the cultural texts for primary process imagery embedded in official culture, for those parapraxes and metaphors that make their incursion into ordinary language. For instance, in his content analysis of Hitler’s ideology as expressed in published works, speeches, and secret writings, Koenigsberg states as his methodological premise that “the frequency with which a given idea or association appears reflects the centrality of such an element within the framework of [the] belief system.”
Culture as Projection
In The Ego and the Id, Freud wrote: “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.” Extending this formulation, I argue that just as the ego uses the body as a battlefield upon which to play out, displace, and project dangers and wishes too great to incorporate into itself, the ego likewise uses society and nature as a surface upon which to project and represent itself. In Life against Death, Norman O. Brown wrote that “Human culture is a set of projections of the repressed unconscious. Like the transference, human culture exists in order to project the infantile complexes onto concrete reality, where they can be seen and mastered.”