Isn’t content also context? I ask him. Your experiences, your circumstances, the time you live in? Consciousness isn’t free-floating; it’s enmeshed. That is true, he says, but you know, I believe that the modern diaspora – that so many of us find ourselves somewhere else, migrants of some kind – global, multicultural, less rooted, less dependent on our immediate history of family or country to shape ourselves – all of that is preparing us for a looser and freer understanding of ourselves as content whose context can change. Nationalism is on the rise, I say. He nods. That is a throwback. A
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