Culture

I want to return to the Poe story here and in the next couple of posts, somewhat indirectly.  Here I take up the gist of a recent book by Daniel Everett called 'Dark Matter of the Mind'. The subtitle says it all: 'The Culturally Articulated Unconscious'. For Everett, the unconscious is conceived of as dark matter:

Dark matter of the mind is any knowledge-how or any knowledge-that that is unspoken in normal circumstances, usually unarticulated even to ourselves. It may be, but is not necessarily, ineffable.1 It emerges from acting, “languag- ing,” and “culturing” as we learn conventions and knowledge organization, and adopt value properties and orderings. It is shared and it is personal. It comes via emicization, apperceptions, and memory, and thereby produces our sense of “self.” 

How might this bear on Poe and the swirls? 
Everett takes an anti-Freudian position on the unconscious. He thinks that the unconscious denotes an area of an individual mind that is beyond awareness, in the moment, and is fundamentally a cultural phenomenon. It, the unconscious, is cultural, so in terms of causality the move is from the outside in and not from the inside to the outside. Thus what is dark is something intrinsically cultural.

In the Poe story the succumbing of the sailors to the whirlpool and their death might be seen as a function of the omnipotence of their dark matter, and the survival of the sailor as the possibility of something very different. What? Well possibly a third term, or position in culture, that is an alternative to fight and flight.