September 20, 2024
In this essay I want to outlne a process that has increasingly become my primary modus operandi. I call this process Dialetical Cultural Deep Insight; an inquisitive, creative approach to investigating everyday material artifacts, seeking contradictions and beauty within them. While I use the term "cultural," the primary method of this inquiry is historical, rather than aesthetic. Beauty, as I understand it, arises through the process of revealing contradictions and synthesizing the material, history, and the self who is always a product of a collective.
This process is fundamentally Marxist and dialectical. Historical understanding of cultural artifacts emerges through processes such as cultural diffusion, impermanence, and the forces of exchange and production. As cultural items circulate, their meanings shift, and their histories reflect both their embeddedness in systems of production and their transformation across time and space wthin the world system.
A model for this practice follows these steps:
Engage with a cultural artifact: This can be anything a piece of clothing, food, a musical form, or an everyday tool.
Investigate its history: Understand the historical conditions that gave rise to this object. How has it moved through time? What contradictions are embedded within it?
Trace its diffusion: Explore how the object has circulated within the global system. How has it been exchanged? What transformations has it undergone through systems of production and consumption?
Reflect on its materiality and self: Critically relate the artifact to your own positionality. How do you, as a self situated within a specific historical moment and collective identity, interact with this artifact?
Synthesize understanding: Bring together these elements historical, material, and personal to create a deeper, more complex understanding of the object.
This process might seem linear, but in practice, it is often cyclical and iterative. The movement between phases can loop back upon itself, requiring further inquiry and deeper reflection.
I propose a preliminary hierarchy of artifact types. This hierarchy reflects both the symbolic and material significance of certain objects in the daily life of an atomized individual.
First Tier:
Food, Fashion, Music, and Decorative Arts. These are the most immediately transformative materials in daily life. Clothing is a primary vector for identity and meaning within the symbolic systems of exchange. Food follows closely, deeply tied to cultural heritage, ritual, and sustenance. Decorative art, broadly understood, refers to objects that are imbued with both functional and symbolic meaning - tools like hammers and knives, for instance, which carry both utility and cultural resonance.
Second Tier:
Technology, Liturgy, and Institutional Artifacts. Technology represents a layer of mediation between individuals and the systems of production they engage with. Liturgy encompasses the rituals and spiritual practices that inform cultural identity. Institutional artifacts - laws, governance systems, and educational structures mediate power and control.
Third Tier:
Literary, Fine Arts, Political, Sexual, and Philosophical. These artifacts reside in the realm of ideology and are essential to the transmission of knowledge, power, and cultural values. However, they operate at a different level of abstraction and serve to structure the broader frameworks through which we understand the world.
Literary to me includes cinematic and photographic traditions.
Politcs to include military and business practices.
Critical to this process is self-criticism, the recognition that one's perspective is always shaped by the conditions of their time, place, and social position. To truly engage in Dialectical Cultural Deep Insight, one must constantly interrogate their own assumptions, biases, and complicity within larger systems of power. This introspective aspect allows the practice to remain dynamic, constantly evolving as new insights and contradictions emerge.
The point of self-criticism in this sense is to synthesise the self with found ideas, beyond understanding but to live within the found insights. To reintegrate material objects as products of subjects, and the unequivocal reassertion of the self as the synthesis of other subjects.
Through this practice, the atomized individual can break through the alienation of capitalist modernity by reintegrating themselves with the material world and its histories. Understanding the contradictions within cultural artifacts reveals the deeper forces shaping our lives forces that are often hidden beneath the surface. By engaging in this dialectical process, we can move toward greater clarity, both about the world we inhabit and our role within it.