Ontology:Q33,29
- pronounced [F2] Human beings cannot form into A Culture 1-1-1
Core characteristics[edit]
- pronounced [P] alias (en) [string]
- Countable cultures aren't real
- Culture is uncountable, thus countable Cultures do not exist
- Culture cannot be countable because people are split into towns before towns have culture
- Social-Philosophical Systems of political economy are strictly a larger scale than culture
- Every reference to countable Cultures is really a reference to material populations, and culture only exists inside them
- anti-essentialist proposition against countable cultures
- QID references [Item] 1-1-1
- Q1337 subculture
- Q33,30 otaku
- color swatch references [Item]
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- sub-case of [Item]
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- case of [Item]
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- super-case of [Item]
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- appears in work [Item]
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Components[edit]
- model combines claims
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Use in thesis portals[edit]
- appears in work
- Q19??? MDem 4.3/3850 a-culture
Wavebuilder combinations[edit]
- pronounced [P] pronounced Wavebuilder: forms result [Item]
- (the more correct one)
- along with [Item]
- pronounced [F2] Human beings cannot form into A Culture 1-1-1
- forming from [Item]
- pronounced [F2] Human beings cannot form into A Culture 1-1-1
- pronounced [S2] Nature is a multiplication table 1-1-1
- (the more correct one)
Usage notes[edit]
This is a claim you will probably not hear very often. It came up in early MDem drafts, in association with exploring Hyper-Materialism and the concept that gaps between separate groups of people are a large factor in determining differences in local culture, political philosophy, and adherence or loyalty to large-scale political-economic systems. A lot of existing literature about groups of people had been talking about groups of people as "cultures", from progressive anthropology works describing ethical ways of studying people-groups, to "post-Marxist" models of movements insisting for some reason that labor movements were groups of people who spontaneously agreed on the same signifiers, to fantasy authors describing fantasy civilizations as "cultures" and defining their fantasy races and progressions of history based on pre-defined Cultures. In response to this, MDem 4.3 drafts explored a bold stance that really, culture did not produce countable groups of people at all, and it was possible to study the material processes of history as their own layer mostly separate from culture. This concept was linked to the notion that signifiers are separate from material reality and are at best a model of reality — for instance, if a Tory defines the term "transgender" to partly mean "conspirator intending to destroy the United States", or a Trotskyist defines "the future" to mean "all the world's countries linked into a global proletarian civilization which required Trotsky's methods to create", those signifiers are not necessarily accurate to the reality of how societies or interacting populations function purely because some individual Subject believes them. At the same time, every particular slice of traditions or practices we can describe as "culture" such as a local language or local food recipes can be considered to consist of signifiers. Every mental model of anything anybody believes or remembers is a kind of ontological model, which is to say that it can typically be expressed in terms of nested definitions of signifiers. In this sense, everyone possesses models of reality within culture and ideology, but there are always times when these models accidentally form an incorrect portrayal of some process or group of people outside them they do not understand. A Trotskyist can have the cultural understanding that orchestral music is good, and this is inconsequential, but if a Trotskyist has the cultural understanding that Black Lives Matter is dividing the single United States proletarian population, then culture can be factually incorrect, and no appeal to "signifiers" or "free will" will change that.
One upside of this approach was that it was conducive to understanding the world's populations without ever creating stereotypes. If the people of Spain are not defined by mandatory customs they have to perform to be Spanish, then nobody will be pushed to depict "Spanish people" as looking or acting a particular way versus being able to more or less be anything. If somebody assumes that stereotypes are a major factor in constructing concepts that other groups of people are fundamentally different and worthy of prejudice, then it would seem valuable to begin with a model of populations which does not encourage anyone to construct ontologies of repeatable ways that other people-groups are different. The problem with this is that real-world racists do not actually seem to create prejudices based on outward stereotypes, but more the other way around: because United States Christians don't like Irish people as a population, racists have to make up a bunch of specific distinctions of how Irish people are weird to retroactively justify it. The anti-essentialist model of populations and populational history is perfect for people who already do not cling to prejudice or actively contribute to racism, but it hits a wall when it comes to the task of actually changing the behavior of racists. To have any hope of actually counteracting the efforts of racists, it is important to understand the ways in which groups of people which outwardly manifest different forms of culture actually separate into different countries or local subpopulations.
Another major hang-up with this approach was that it simply did not function as a proper dialectical-materialist model. If populations are not defined by culture, why do other populations so quickly treat them as if they are? A proper model of the emergence of local culture must take into account how the perception of groups of people as "Cultures" is connected to the two-way interactions between living, breathing groups of people, and how this multivariable function of two groups developing evolves over time.
At this point, it is appropriate to bring in the "Trotsky model". If a third of the Soviet Union were to actually believe in a Trotskyist version of Marxism, and want an entirely different country to be constructed over the top of the Soviet Union, would this purely hypothetical Soviet Union consist of one culture of people per town or multiple cultures? It is not acceptable to simply say that culture cannot be counted, because all the people in the group of Trotskyists will consider the people not in their group to be a separate group of people, and spit out a bunch of particular generalizations about them — "Stalin-followers promote bureaucracy", "Stalin-followers promote the interests of the Soviet Union over the interests of other countries that could hypothetically become Trotskyist". The best answer is that each town containing both Stalin-followers and Trotskyists contains multiple countable cultures which are slowly differentiating into separate nationalities. It may be that these are only "countable cultures" in a strictly political sense where East Germany and West Germany can become two different Cultures purely because they consist of different political-economic structure rather than being based in any smaller-scale, more ordinary definition of culture which makes reference to local traditions, practices, language, or history. However, if political philosophy counts as a form of culture, then a Trotskyist workers' state and the Soviet Union do form different countable areas of culture. Outside the scope of Trotskyism and named Marxisms, this only becomes harder to argue against. In countries such as the United States, merely belonging to right-Liberalism or holding any number of Tory positions such as being anti-abortion, anti-immigration, or strongly "anti-crime" are all easily connected to the development of countable cultures. People with these particular "positions on political issues" tend to sort entirely away from center-Liberal voters into separate cultural populations, while elections very often hinge on people's perception of candidates as belonging or not belonging to particular cultural groups such as Catholic, Protestant, anti-racist, or "Karen". The reality on the ground is that Liberal-republicanism is some kind of ill-understood countable-culture-generating machine, and the United States constitution is a consensus about culture in addition to anything else it may be. A meta-Marxist study of the history of different populations and subpopulations is not complete without acknowledging the existence of countable cultures, whether or not they are incidental to class phenomena and historically-significant changes in populational structure. At the same time, meta-Marxism can preserve anti-essentialism through conceptualizing every culturally-defined group of people as potentially consisting of multiple smaller countable cultures which will emerge along either specifically-cultural or political lines as the population develops further.
One thing that is important to note is that the anti-essentialist proposition against countable cultures is not an assertion that people do not belong to different ethnic groups, nationalities, or identities; this assertion would make no sense. It is only the assertion that what these groups of people fundamentally are is populations which are physically separated into populations simply because they are, rather than people fundamentally being sorted into culturally-defined identities composed of signifiers or traditions before they form material populations of physical people. The reason this claim is incorrect is that signifiers arranged into ontological models can create borders between human populations, as in the case of mainstream Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism, or center-Liberalism and Toryism. The way sociologists have attempted to understand the connection between populations and Cultures thus far may not be entirely correct, but at the same time, there are clearly cases where the cultural content internal to a group can push people into separate populations.