Replying to McGowan’s questions and some of his comments in this post.
“…Marx’s idea of systemic ideology and the notion of collective consciousness: does our brain determine our being?, or does our being determine our brain?”
I had a hard time swallowing this brain vs being part just for the word choice. First, the use of the specific word “being”. I thought of the word as a state of existence. My being, your being—‘to be’ something as opposed to nonexistence. If I’m understanding his question right, ‘brain’ is suppose to represent the individual, and ‘being’ the social person falling in line with ideology, does he mean that we validate our existence based on society or ideology acknowledging it? It irks me, but somehow it makes sense. I wanted to say that we all have different states of being (or realities!)—I am a being in my own head, I am a being within Rollins College, within America, within my Hispanic heritage—but then realized all of these have their ideologies.
And then ‘brain’. I HAVE to get into the mind vs brain argument. Was it just failure to be specific or did he genuinely want to use the physicality of ‘brain’ to represent the individual? I guess if the mind can be affected by ideology, something as reliable as predetermined chemicals and electrical signals have to substitute for absolute individualism (then again, damage to the brain, learning, and memory can change synapses, so WHO knows…)
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