Gear 9 : Sending out Signals.
Back in the day anthropologist, a generation or so ago, used to define society in terms or its signs and symbols. Edmund Leach argues somewhere or other, that societies communicate complex social facts about themselves by dressing them up in mythologies, which in effect codified them signs and symbols. A society whch flt its collective identity, as its difference from another group of people would then declare to a bemused anthrolplogists that it was a tribe of Bulls, wheras the others were merely goats. Symbolic metaphor expressed then very real different. Or the complex intergenerational relations and strains between generations in the one small society would to be caught up in rituals concerning beards or menstruation or motherhood. That is a signal would be established, a sing act that somehow communicated a far wider truth, and allowed a society to think big, by acting small and is doing so express a potentially big conflict through small act. To Read a sign was o allow an inexpressible and potentially dangerous) series of feelings and shift on feelings, within a single event or happening.
To catch a conflict, to allow it, or to elucidate a otherwise elusive truth was to locate that symbols within an algebra or metaphor, or else to locate as small slice of it, and cohere behaviour around that slice. Face to face communities were then thought to be the ones adept t distilling wider truths into the prism of sing and symbols. And us ( I mean the industrialized societies)? We told ourselves that somehow we had lost this ability, or else had surpassed it. We after all live in apparently rational communities, with laws that expressed conflicts, and a social order which mitigated conflict by elections and money. We had then wide scale organization that prided itself or having a rational centre. This rational heart almost deliberately rejected sings or symbols or metaphor. These were not its role. t e role was rather to define relations actually, and law that actualized its articulation.
We therefore thought of our society as it were a physical agency, and we the ingredient bought treasons in that agency. O perhaps better, our society was the place we whereas rationale ,as citizens, as the rocks or chemicals we studied It was man made reasonable. And yet of course it was never so simple. There were always other elements, other members in societies who were incapable of ‘behaving; well. That is who appeared to realize that they ought, aged citizens o behave logically. The then creates a quasi scientific symbolic algebra for such individuals. Society became then fractured into elements or groups, men and women, working class and middle class, native and migrant: the division each located on the one side the ‘rational’ true true citizen, and on the other a variant or deviant from that norm. behind all the prejudice or even the mock scientific or sociological jargon, there remains of course a nice little bit of sociological thinking here: To divide a society into the ration (middle class) and he somehow irritation others (say working class) is o create a symbol that comprehends a whole within a part. That is what is really being describe is an entire series of different experience of what life is, within society They differences are then comprehended under the rubric of an job relation, and so caught pup in the dominant stories of a time.
Thence this symbols is proactive. I does not merely capture a whole sequence of conflicts thin the one crystallize relationship it also in doing do effectively castrates the power of those conflicts o upset a society. Large societies are after all always open to the problem of myriad communities and voices. His myriad is never a problem in its (multiculturalism is great, an yet can very easily create conflict. On elements looks upon another and commending it not feels threatened or threatens (with or without meaning to). The difference we cherish is actually default to handle. Sings then fall upon us as a revelation. Perhaps the differences in culture or aspiration are merely caught up somehow within the difference between the amount we earn or else the difference between gender or geography. Nebulous difference is cogitated around difference we all share and understand, I comes ritualized.
More than that it comes caught up, and only expressed within other evolving social paradigm For example, the locate what is actually cultural complexity and difference within a job-structure (middle or working class0. I to subsume it under capitalisms orbit. Real differences therefore exist, and yet they are merely what one ought to expect under the gaze of capitalism…Or more complexly the conflict we routinely capture within gender identity, evolve as other elements of that identity evolve. For example 100 years ago or more in Britain, it was felt height status is women did not work, An entire series of moves were made then, by men and women, to create ideal where women were the home makers (something that had been impossible for the majority of societies foot the majority of human existence0. Were now in Islam women take the veil, a hundred years ago here, they retreated into he anonymity of motherhood. However this move here at least was very complex’s tied women down not only to poverties by also to a role in a whole series of there symbolic conflicts.; women were then responsible or caught up within the inter generational strains and at the duff end of money relations, and the naff end of rationality and representation A women in those became then rather easily the symbol for that group in society who are other, and can therefore be very safely, and even properly excluded from the rest of society. The hole women squeeze into (willing or no) what then a dark one. I contained or became symbolically caught within, too many other struggles, other conflicts be at all comfortable. It was then no surprise that they left it as soon as possible.
The position of women in the home and out is a cautionary tale about what the problem with symbolic are. Claim that taking women out of the job market, and setting up an oddly bounded world called home live was one thing, the way hat orbit then become (and was caught up with a wider argument about who was rationale and who had a right to vote r to event o think was something another different. Symbols do no remain into their position, or better nebulous conflicts fro elsewhere easily become caught up within a symbolic expiating, spinning off elsewhere. To me a gesture is therefore always to be risk being highjack by another’s concerns or taken as part of another’s conflict. The with the have a rather telling phrase for his move. A debate or situation or a conflict is taken beyond itself, and read ;for what it tells us about…’ This move is made in spite of the fact that the debate is often little or nothing to do this the problem it is seen to be a part of. It becomes a mere symbols (the media modesty like to call a vehicle) for research. A nightmare that can rode this was or that is differing conflicts are crystallized or defined
The problem here is that none of this is at neutral however it might be intended to be so. For example while I think I am willing to argue that the daily Mail is not racist or homophobic, it is certainly adept at creating the symbolic thoughts (and thereafter the langaues0 hat genuine homophobes and racist use. I therefore creates a series of mental shifts were one person, one story, one little misery is taken to be symbolic of a wider (racial) story. Act so the little canvas of the day to day, and thereby transliterated endless into big stories about government oppression or else racial disharmony. H result is then that the mutual fools who read that big canvas, and do not realize its relation with the little, understand only race irrespective of whether or nor the daily Mail is peddling it. This last point is of course rather complex. The Mail is merely doing what it takes o tell paper. It making there racist while pretending to oneself that one is not, sells those papers, they then do it…
Or to put it another way the problem with understanding society in signs is that I always risks actually creating new dimensions or conflict. Take the current spat about drugs. On the one side of this is rational science. That is it is what we have told ourselves about our society’s is it is a place where we make decisions on a rationality based on reason and money The current drug laws a re a nonsense. N only do they classify the wrong drugs in the wrong places hang what cannabis does or does not do we should make alcohol and perhaps adrenalin class A drugs). More than that there is an obvious implicitly in a law which if applied would simply bankrupt the country. That is if we really did imprison everyone who used cannabis more than three times, about a quarter of our citizen would be in jail, an the country ruined. I is simply a nonsense then to have such a policy.
And yet the dugs issue is not understandable into his ‘rational’ manner. This it because drugs have become caught up in a whole series to there conflicts: he include worries about the generation, concerns about the workforce, fears of the other, concerns about health, the problem of keeping citizen docile…The list goes on. All these conflicts meet in drugs. The suppression of drugs is then a natural product society, not because that suppression is at all useful or productive. On h contract it merely produces more users and creates a partial criminality fraternity which services those user. The point I rather that if one starts to tolerate tax or medicate drugs then this melting pot of other prejudices, with nodule that allows many conflicts o meet at the same place, is lost. We need drugs conflicts because they warp real and distinct social conflict, forcing then to cohere at the same point, and become caught in government secession.
Symbolic thinking is then never simple n, never eat, and therefore always defies rationality and worse simple justice. Is the point that justice as falters in the face of overlapping complexities and the impossible to separate what would otherwise be apart. The Alchemy of the diabolic symbol is the place where many hatreds lie.
Once again if this was all, perhaps it would be innocent enough. A nice society of verities (such as one Gordon Brown really does comprehend) would be only mildly obnoxious the problem is of course that his recourse to symbolic thinking has become caught in two othering axises. One the one journalists (who have often enough a background in the arts, the 'science' of the symbol) are always allowing for new ways to express or capture or distort there society They therefore in the symbolic manufacturing process. The various hatreds or fears or habits of society are then endlessly being restructured into new nodules or vehicles.
The role of journalists is to ride those vehicles to distil hatred. On the other hand it is clear enough that modern politics is the game of symbol creation. That is deprived on the real acidly to change any thing much (politics ha become al labour defining new problems and new possible ways to underhand the world. one gain political power not through cogent policy but rather pungent oratory or at least an allowed ability to synthesize prejudice and hate to create new products(successively politicians are now students of the media, and not rationalist lawyers).
The creation of symbols, new way to pull old conflict, or better new takes on old division has become the shifting norms of our everyday lives. We look to the latest symbols ( The Daily Mails formula here is ‘ And now….’, and take sides around it accordingly, with boring precession and predictability (this is part n the conflict).Here once again perhaps his is all well and good hat is perhaps it is the only way one could orchestrate the conflicts large multilayer society. Perhaps reason was always none starter. On one level this is kind of truth. Here will need to b a place to symbols in other to enforce (or being) the appropriate level of reason to create a society. And yet if this level is being constantly defined, then it doe not matter where or not that new definition are better or worse (to where they are as I have implied above always negative), the mere shifting about is enough to make a society ungovernable. The paradigm case her eyes surely education. The entire system is dissolving under endless schemes and new ideas, and the assumption, the symbols the ‘what we are trying do here; shifts this alarming speed. The system thereof is full of dead schemes and polices based on ‘old’ assumption, and lacks order; Worse than that it in effect defies order (as order implies a steady set of symbols).
To send out single, as if one is an Indian chief, is perhaps only natural, And yet it is surely the genius of modernity hat has transformed with natural move into a chaos a behemoth of slip and hatred. A world where what one that ought one knew yesterday is forever being quietly rethrown, as new lines of conflict are dawn up, and new nodules’ or vehicles at which many tension meet are formed. The problem is of course that this creates its own paradox how does one solve a problem like symbolic thought without creating merely a new series of symbols ? a problem for our times.
