520
FRANCIS GOlFFING
thought-or by stating it as their conviction that basic relations
are invariable (though everything else should, and must, change).
The basic relations of a society have to do with man both as
subject and object (to himself as well as others); with man's at–
titude towards the physical and symbolic, i.e. intangible objects he
produces; with the meaning to him of the images he creates, the
discourse he constructs- and here another realm of "subject"
comes into view, for it is no mere accident of language that we
speak of the subject of a painting, or a sentence, or a poem. That
entire cluster of subject/object relations has to be radically re–
investigated by anyone wishing to adumbrate a new scheme of
collective living, for it is precisely in this area that our own
societies exhibit a maximum of confusion, misconception and self–
deception.
A suggestive outline might be the following:
The individual
1.
considers itself the center of human activities.
2. engages in a number of activities, in the widest sense,
radiating out from it onto the circumference of what (again in
the widest sense) is the world of objects. (This includes the mirror
relation between the self as subject and the self as object of
contemplation, like, dislike, etc., with solipsism and narcissism
as the extreme developments of this.)
3. A rough division of such activities into five areas: subject/
artifact; subject/symbolic object (institutions, ideas, etc.) ; subject!
self (as his own object); subject/other subject (as object); sub–
ject/natural object.
4. In each of the five cases there is action
and
re-action,
though in different degrees of intensity. I should surmise that other
individuals act back upon us more strongly than lifeless objects
or ideas, and that the action/reaction relation between the self
as viewer and the self as viewed is quite as intense as that between
myself and other "selves." But this would have to be fully ex–
amined.
The main question is to what extent these processes should
(and can) be changed in Utopia, my assumption being that "all
is not well" with the present pattern. The terms do not matter:
these particular terms have seemed to me personally to afford
