The Japanese Crane
© June 2010 Mukesh Williams
There is a saying in Japan that the tsuru (crane) lives for one thousand years while the kame (tortoise) for ten thousand. Both symbolize longevity and endurance. The crane is a strong and elegant bird which also represents honor and loyalty in Japan. It travels far and wide looking for food. It is believed that if someone folds one thousand cranes he can fulfill any wish.
The red-crowned Japanese crane is a migratory bird and is also called the Manchurian crane. It has a total population of 2700 in the world. In Japan where most cranes live, their population went down in the nineteenth century. In 1920 their number was recorded as 20. In Japan new protection measures including artificial breeding in winter has once more increased the population of cranes to 1200. The cranes feed on deep water marshes and often wander into dikes and agricultural fields foraging for food.
In Japanese tradition cranes are believed to bring prolonged existence and good fortune. They are therefore usually associated with weddings, family crests, tea ceremonies and traditional dresses. It is quite common to find cranes woven or crafted on kimonos, obis, temple wood carvings, chinaware, teapots, cups, stone and calendars. One of the Second World War Japanese victims Sadako Sasaki popularized the idea of folding one thousand cranes to fulfill a wish.
There is a legend in Japan of a crane wife symbolizing gratitude and skilled perfection. Once a young man freed a captive crane and in return she turned into a beautiful woman to marry him. Her only wish was that he would not look into her room at night what she was doing. Every night she would weave beautiful kimonos that everyone wanted. One day her husband out of curiosity peeped into the room and discovered she was a crane and was using her feathers to weave those beautiful kimonos. The story has different versions and one of the most popular ones is that of Osamu, the poor sailor and Yukiko the crane wife. Osamu takes care of a wounded crane that returns to him as Yukiko and weaves a magic sail that helps the couple to become rich temporarily. But one day he peeps into her work and she flies away.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
DISCOURSE ABOUT FOOD, MIDDLEMEN AND METAPHORS
FOUCAULT ON GREEK, CHRISTIAN, POSTMODERN CONCEPTIONS OF FOOD
© June 2010 Mukesh Williams
In Use of Pleasure Foucault explores the overarching discourse on food, the body and pleasures as a function of subjectivity and argues that the Greeks were quite preoccupied with the process of eating and yet their ethics emphasized the mastery of the self over appetites, pleasures and passions. The ethical substance in the Greek episteme was aphrodisia or the “acts, gestures, and contacts that produce a certain form of pleasure.” Aphrodisia were forms of pleasure associated with eating, drinking and sex. Though they are natural they need to be moderated. However early Christianity began to see a dichotomy between the carnal and the spiritual. It started to deny the natural appetites. Most of the modern scientific discourse about food and health was created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries out of the Christian religious and philosophical preoccupation with gluttony, indulgence and excess. This food and health discourse entered the social organization of home, school and hospital emphasizing nutrition as moral in nature. Children are often told to eat healthy food and avoid junk food and chocolates. Obesity is therefore occasionally referred to as moral laxity or degradation.
MIDDLEMEN
We should do away with middlemen that may enter between philosophers and their readers. Middlemen often adulterate food and convert accident into cuisine.
NIETZSCHE ON WORDS AND ORIGINAL ENTITIES
Nietzsche argues that though we use words to describe “original entities” and celebrate metaphors in poetry and rhetoric there is no clear one-to-one correspondence between metaphors and things. He writes,
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, 1873).
© June 2010 Mukesh Williams
In Use of Pleasure Foucault explores the overarching discourse on food, the body and pleasures as a function of subjectivity and argues that the Greeks were quite preoccupied with the process of eating and yet their ethics emphasized the mastery of the self over appetites, pleasures and passions. The ethical substance in the Greek episteme was aphrodisia or the “acts, gestures, and contacts that produce a certain form of pleasure.” Aphrodisia were forms of pleasure associated with eating, drinking and sex. Though they are natural they need to be moderated. However early Christianity began to see a dichotomy between the carnal and the spiritual. It started to deny the natural appetites. Most of the modern scientific discourse about food and health was created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries out of the Christian religious and philosophical preoccupation with gluttony, indulgence and excess. This food and health discourse entered the social organization of home, school and hospital emphasizing nutrition as moral in nature. Children are often told to eat healthy food and avoid junk food and chocolates. Obesity is therefore occasionally referred to as moral laxity or degradation.
MIDDLEMEN
We should do away with middlemen that may enter between philosophers and their readers. Middlemen often adulterate food and convert accident into cuisine.
NIETZSCHE ON WORDS AND ORIGINAL ENTITIES
Nietzsche argues that though we use words to describe “original entities” and celebrate metaphors in poetry and rhetoric there is no clear one-to-one correspondence between metaphors and things. He writes,
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, 1873).
Monday, June 14, 2010
Master Discourse
The Power of Master Discourse
Four Statements of Michel Foucault
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions."
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play)."
© 2010 Mukesh Williams
From time immemorial human beings have been fond of telling stories to each other. They have imagined their fears, anxieties, dreams, and have expressed them through words into a composite whole. From childhood to old age we are influenced by stories. We reject some stories as untrue and we accept some stories as true. There are, however, stories we accept tacitly without even analyzing such as “everyone must work hard” or “we are always progressing towards a better future.” Michael Foucault was the first thinker to unravel the power of such stories and their impact on our lives. He called these stories narratives and divided them into master narrative, minor narrative and counter narratives.
MASTER NARRATIVES
Master narratives are most powerful. They are the controlling discourses of modern societies, discourses such as self, ego, gender, class, race and nation. Though they are mostly imagined and constructed through language and signs they in due course acquire a social sanction and legality hard to refute or deny. They provide enormous benefits to the individual when they are followed and punishment when infringed.
Master narratives tell us that we are separate individuals and that our interests are often in opposition to others. The games we play when young teach us to win and take all. We are told not to help others in a competition as it breaks the rule. Winning in life matters and this is further reinforced by T.V. programs where winners are celebrated. We love competition. Our perceptions and language does not connect us with nature and with others but instead separates us from them. We do feel that love gives us happiness.
DERRIDA AND THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
Derrida tells us about the power of language. Language reinforces the separate self. It represents everything including ourselves as objects. Language uses signs and signs define objects against each other. White is understood against black. Our first personal narratives define boundaries through personal pronouns such as I, me and mine. These pronouns are different from you and yours.
Culture and society curtail our construction of an autonomous, free self. Though we use out skills, accomplishments, possessions and appearance to create ourselves in opposition to others, it leaves us dissatisfied as we feel we can do better or worse others can do better than us. Master narratives do not clearly define a referent to us which is in the final analysis no other than ourselves. On the one hand we are separate from others and on the other we are intrinsically connected to others. We depend on others for warmth, sustenance and support. Our DNA is connected to others. Our cells do not compete but cooperate.
THE DISCOURSE OF INDIVIDUALITY
Individuality is of recent origin. Before the eighteenth century, pre-modern Europe did not see individuality in a positive light. The medieval world saw a preordained hierarchy of kings, feudal lords and church functionaries running the world. This divine worldview was rigidly enforced and you did what your status allowed you to do. Your position in society was predetermined. If anything individual identity worked against you. The eighteenth century writers brought in reason and tried to decenter the master narrative of European aristocracy. The age of democracy developed the concept of the self and gave right to everyone to acquire power. Individualism became more powerful and began to involve creativity, autonomy and a unique personality. But events in Europe such as the Holocaust and existentialism revealed that we cannot escape our moral responsibility and freedom of choice. Even in mature democracies we find that our liberty and freedom are curtailed. Money and politics undermine democracy.
We believe that our understanding of a separate self is associated with notions of freedom and happiness. The notion of individuality though linked to free society and democracy has been forged in the fire of bloody revolutions which in turn has been influenced by counterrevolutions. Though we feel we are free individuals but we fail to create the world we envision. We also believe that competition is healthy. Freud legitimized the idea of the ego and our selfish motives. We feel that everyone must serve us and our needs. When we are infants we just live to satisfy our needs, functioning within an id. Gradually we develop a superego which stands for society. If we can successfully negotiate between id, ego and superego we can lead a healthy life; we can self-evaluate ourselves and self-improve ourselves regularly. The Freudian narrative continues to explain our separate selves as given and legitimate.
Foucault shows us that the ego narrative creates a psychological discourse that both limits and manipulates our freedom. Advertising, marketing and business strategies use methods to create desires and then force us to fulfill them. We think that we are free agents making informed choices. When we imagine ourselves as egos we see everything as an accessory to be used and do not find happiness in connecting with nature or others. Though we do not like to be called egoistic or selfish but in truth we are. As long as we believe that our self is separate from others we cannot but be self-centered.
The master narrative of the ego which is just an imagined idea sees others as objects either helping us in our goals or hindering us. We try to control others, denying them identity or personhood. We understand ego narratives to encompass group identity such as social cliques, tribes and nations and then construct our own sense of superiority and other’s inferiority. At the center of these identities are mental constructions comprising of words. We can create a world, which conforms better to our goals and aspirations.
GENDER ROLES
Gender is the fundamental expression of the ego narrative. Though gender undoubtedly has biological base it is predominantly cultural in nature. Gender generates different responses in people and a lot of it is inherited through language and socialization. We treat boys and girls differently. We hold boys facing outward and girls facing towards us, telling them how they should play their roles in society. Boys will find a place for themselves in the outer world, girls in the inner world. Blue blankets are for boys, pink for girls. Guns and tools are for boys; pretend jewelry and dolls for girls. The feminist movement beginning in the 1950s with Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique defined new gender roles for women. The slogan personal is political took women out into the market place and led them to self-actualize themselves. The Feminist movement of the 1970s tried to show that gender roles were more cultural than biological in nature. Women now acquired the foresight to become lawyers, scientists and teachers.
Obviously males and females are different but culture defines their roles more sharply. Most cultures spend more time in gender socialization. The master narrative tells us that males are expected to dominate women. Boys are therefore allowed to be aggressive, they are persuaded not to cry or be sissy. Women need love and companionship. The problem is that men too need the same. Western literature is filled with the heroic figure of the solitary male hero who seeks to conquer the world alone. We are told that only men face the problem of bonding with other males. Women by nature find it easier to bond with others.
The female narrative grows upon the notion that the feminine ideal embraces the male ego and, therefore, is the very opposite. Hiding below the feminine pursuit of beauty, pleasure and love for baubles is the feminine ideal of service, cooperation and communication. Early in life girls are taught to be cute, speak cheerfully and act caring. The stories told to girls and the games they are expected to play deal with romance and motherly love. They play with dolls to learn the art of mothering and later in life read romantic stories to find a prince charming. From their seniors, such as mother, sisters and friends, they learn to be seductive and by the time they are ready to marry they have become adept in playing psychological, domestic and sexual roles.
We often do not recognize that sexual morality and reproductive function embrace a created language of gender. There is no hierarchy in morality or biology. Male and female both work together to give birth to a child and there is no hierarchy in reproduction. The narrative of dominance does not help us to understand the intimate and the erotic in human relationships. The ego prevents us to participate freely in the emotions of ecstasy, wonder and beauty.
The female narrative also includes a separation of self and belief in order to win in society. Though women do not usually resort to violence they compete quite aggressively to become desirable as a woman or a mother. They also look for success by wearing alluring clothes and wanting an expensive house. They also compete with men in workplace and can ‘play the game’ of currying favor with their boss with equal finesse.
The Victorian model of morality and sexual ethics had once placed strict social control on the behavior of men and women. Promiscuity in men and coquetry in women were reproached. Though sexual behavior per se was freed from social control in the twentieth century we still feel sexual repression. Our heterosexual bias still plays a big role in determining our sexual preferences. We still have not been able to accept same sex love or other sexual relationships which we consider ‘abnormalities.’
SOCIAL CLASS
Social class constitutes another category of the master narrative. It believes in the survival of the fittest in society and has given greater preference to self-interest than to altruism. Biology however teaches us that cooperation amongst proteins is the key to the survival of living organisms. Our knowledge and belief teach us that we should take as much from nature as we can. The belief that our lives are separate from our surroundings allows us to take everything. Altruism is seen as a foolish thing. Only recently we have come to realize that nature is hitting back at us through global warming and climate change.
The ego narrative also creates an economic system based on the primacy of money and directed by self-achievement. The word economics comes fro the Greek word ekos and nomos which mean the rules of the house. House rules determine our economic relations and are therefore created by us. If we change our house rules (for example in communism) but do not change our master narrative of the ego we will not go far. Communism preaches that individuals can create their own rules through violent revolutions but since the ego narrative remains in communism, it provides a new hierarchy of corruption and economic inequality. However that does not mean that the home rule of capitalism or free enterprise is any better either.
Money decides who lives and who dies, who eats and who goes hungry, who gets education, health care and employment and who remains illiterate, sick and unemployed. Money also decides who can travel and enjoy life and who cannot. The narrative creates a moral climate that allows us to enjoy life without bothering about the poor and down trodden. The free market economy reminds us that by nature we are lazy. So greed is wonderful. The force that helps us over come our laziness is fear. Middle class fear the loss of their livelihood if they do not work hard while the upper class their position. The ego pushes us to get more in order to succeed, but still we need admiration and esteem. We acquire goods to satisfy our desire and get the admiration of others.
We rarely find democratic functioning of institutions. Instead we see people using social position and family connections to succeed. The ego narrative works against all principles of enlightenment. It works for personal gain against the common good. In terms of global relations ego gets translated into economic egoism of developed versus developing nations. Multinational organization use poor countries as a source of cheap labor and refuse bin for toxic wastes.
RACE
The master narrative of race gets linked to the ego narrative and tends to exploit others more savagely. Slavery had a great effect on the narrative of race. Africans and Europeans had a history of slavery in their own geographical regions for a long time. The development of maritime trade made possible the growth of inter-regional and intercontinental slavery. Once trading in black slaves began an attempt to justify such trade through scientific racism, eugenics or anthropology also began.
We do not just psychologically imagined Freudian egos but also biological agents looking for emotional comfort and a sense of community. Our post-Enlightenment culture reminds us through the constitutions that we are all equal—“we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Though on a fundamental level we believe that everyone is equal and that birthright does not count, we still see a different truth in the functioning of governments and social systems.
CONCLUSION
Through master narratives, especially through religious discourses and linguistic paradigms we perceive the world as a place, a terra firma, and the cosmos as the result of some first cause. We call it power, God or force. To be engaged with a subject whose subjectivity is greater than ours leads us into a reference area outside time, space, reason and human understanding. By the late seventeenth century a reaction set in against the kind of religious model. A new secular model used scientific evidence and logic to explain a new cosmology that conformed to human inquiry and laws. In Argument of the Second Epistle Alexander Pope asserted, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/The proper study of Mankind is Man.” Now the world of nature was seen as a big machine. Therefore a theory could be developed which could predict and control everything that happened in the future.
The secular model builds a moral world based on Emmanuel Kant’s notion of categorical imperative which posits a universal standard for individual behavior. Though this ethical principle keeps egoism in check by condemning corruption and deceit, it nonetheless perpetuates inequalities by allowing free competition and the victor take all syndrome. Scientific discourses teach us that nature does not function with a mind and we have no responsibility for the various problems of the world. Everything follows a certain law and we are not free to make a moral choice. Obviously all this is changing now. Both the Nobel Prize Committee and the Australian electorate are choosing people who highlight our responsibility for protecting nature. But these two paradigms are more intertwined than separate. There are post modern secularists who believe in the existence of radical evil and pre-modern religionists accepting democracy and human rights. National discourses also prevent us from seeing our larger identity as members of the planet earth.
The ego is more imagined than real. It is more cultural than biological. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre our ego depends on our consciousness and not the other way round. Both Foucault and Derrida unraveled the mysteries of the master narratives and decentered them for us. If we can change our notion of the ego and pick up other non-ego narratives can have more freedom and be happier.
Representing India: Literature, Politics and Identities
Four Statements of Michel Foucault
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions."
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play)."
© 2010 Mukesh Williams
From time immemorial human beings have been fond of telling stories to each other. They have imagined their fears, anxieties, dreams, and have expressed them through words into a composite whole. From childhood to old age we are influenced by stories. We reject some stories as untrue and we accept some stories as true. There are, however, stories we accept tacitly without even analyzing such as “everyone must work hard” or “we are always progressing towards a better future.” Michael Foucault was the first thinker to unravel the power of such stories and their impact on our lives. He called these stories narratives and divided them into master narrative, minor narrative and counter narratives.
MASTER NARRATIVES
Master narratives are most powerful. They are the controlling discourses of modern societies, discourses such as self, ego, gender, class, race and nation. Though they are mostly imagined and constructed through language and signs they in due course acquire a social sanction and legality hard to refute or deny. They provide enormous benefits to the individual when they are followed and punishment when infringed.
Master narratives tell us that we are separate individuals and that our interests are often in opposition to others. The games we play when young teach us to win and take all. We are told not to help others in a competition as it breaks the rule. Winning in life matters and this is further reinforced by T.V. programs where winners are celebrated. We love competition. Our perceptions and language does not connect us with nature and with others but instead separates us from them. We do feel that love gives us happiness.
DERRIDA AND THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
Derrida tells us about the power of language. Language reinforces the separate self. It represents everything including ourselves as objects. Language uses signs and signs define objects against each other. White is understood against black. Our first personal narratives define boundaries through personal pronouns such as I, me and mine. These pronouns are different from you and yours.
Culture and society curtail our construction of an autonomous, free self. Though we use out skills, accomplishments, possessions and appearance to create ourselves in opposition to others, it leaves us dissatisfied as we feel we can do better or worse others can do better than us. Master narratives do not clearly define a referent to us which is in the final analysis no other than ourselves. On the one hand we are separate from others and on the other we are intrinsically connected to others. We depend on others for warmth, sustenance and support. Our DNA is connected to others. Our cells do not compete but cooperate.
THE DISCOURSE OF INDIVIDUALITY
Individuality is of recent origin. Before the eighteenth century, pre-modern Europe did not see individuality in a positive light. The medieval world saw a preordained hierarchy of kings, feudal lords and church functionaries running the world. This divine worldview was rigidly enforced and you did what your status allowed you to do. Your position in society was predetermined. If anything individual identity worked against you. The eighteenth century writers brought in reason and tried to decenter the master narrative of European aristocracy. The age of democracy developed the concept of the self and gave right to everyone to acquire power. Individualism became more powerful and began to involve creativity, autonomy and a unique personality. But events in Europe such as the Holocaust and existentialism revealed that we cannot escape our moral responsibility and freedom of choice. Even in mature democracies we find that our liberty and freedom are curtailed. Money and politics undermine democracy.
We believe that our understanding of a separate self is associated with notions of freedom and happiness. The notion of individuality though linked to free society and democracy has been forged in the fire of bloody revolutions which in turn has been influenced by counterrevolutions. Though we feel we are free individuals but we fail to create the world we envision. We also believe that competition is healthy. Freud legitimized the idea of the ego and our selfish motives. We feel that everyone must serve us and our needs. When we are infants we just live to satisfy our needs, functioning within an id. Gradually we develop a superego which stands for society. If we can successfully negotiate between id, ego and superego we can lead a healthy life; we can self-evaluate ourselves and self-improve ourselves regularly. The Freudian narrative continues to explain our separate selves as given and legitimate.
Foucault shows us that the ego narrative creates a psychological discourse that both limits and manipulates our freedom. Advertising, marketing and business strategies use methods to create desires and then force us to fulfill them. We think that we are free agents making informed choices. When we imagine ourselves as egos we see everything as an accessory to be used and do not find happiness in connecting with nature or others. Though we do not like to be called egoistic or selfish but in truth we are. As long as we believe that our self is separate from others we cannot but be self-centered.
The master narrative of the ego which is just an imagined idea sees others as objects either helping us in our goals or hindering us. We try to control others, denying them identity or personhood. We understand ego narratives to encompass group identity such as social cliques, tribes and nations and then construct our own sense of superiority and other’s inferiority. At the center of these identities are mental constructions comprising of words. We can create a world, which conforms better to our goals and aspirations.
GENDER ROLES
Gender is the fundamental expression of the ego narrative. Though gender undoubtedly has biological base it is predominantly cultural in nature. Gender generates different responses in people and a lot of it is inherited through language and socialization. We treat boys and girls differently. We hold boys facing outward and girls facing towards us, telling them how they should play their roles in society. Boys will find a place for themselves in the outer world, girls in the inner world. Blue blankets are for boys, pink for girls. Guns and tools are for boys; pretend jewelry and dolls for girls. The feminist movement beginning in the 1950s with Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique defined new gender roles for women. The slogan personal is political took women out into the market place and led them to self-actualize themselves. The Feminist movement of the 1970s tried to show that gender roles were more cultural than biological in nature. Women now acquired the foresight to become lawyers, scientists and teachers.
Obviously males and females are different but culture defines their roles more sharply. Most cultures spend more time in gender socialization. The master narrative tells us that males are expected to dominate women. Boys are therefore allowed to be aggressive, they are persuaded not to cry or be sissy. Women need love and companionship. The problem is that men too need the same. Western literature is filled with the heroic figure of the solitary male hero who seeks to conquer the world alone. We are told that only men face the problem of bonding with other males. Women by nature find it easier to bond with others.
The female narrative grows upon the notion that the feminine ideal embraces the male ego and, therefore, is the very opposite. Hiding below the feminine pursuit of beauty, pleasure and love for baubles is the feminine ideal of service, cooperation and communication. Early in life girls are taught to be cute, speak cheerfully and act caring. The stories told to girls and the games they are expected to play deal with romance and motherly love. They play with dolls to learn the art of mothering and later in life read romantic stories to find a prince charming. From their seniors, such as mother, sisters and friends, they learn to be seductive and by the time they are ready to marry they have become adept in playing psychological, domestic and sexual roles.
We often do not recognize that sexual morality and reproductive function embrace a created language of gender. There is no hierarchy in morality or biology. Male and female both work together to give birth to a child and there is no hierarchy in reproduction. The narrative of dominance does not help us to understand the intimate and the erotic in human relationships. The ego prevents us to participate freely in the emotions of ecstasy, wonder and beauty.
The female narrative also includes a separation of self and belief in order to win in society. Though women do not usually resort to violence they compete quite aggressively to become desirable as a woman or a mother. They also look for success by wearing alluring clothes and wanting an expensive house. They also compete with men in workplace and can ‘play the game’ of currying favor with their boss with equal finesse.
The Victorian model of morality and sexual ethics had once placed strict social control on the behavior of men and women. Promiscuity in men and coquetry in women were reproached. Though sexual behavior per se was freed from social control in the twentieth century we still feel sexual repression. Our heterosexual bias still plays a big role in determining our sexual preferences. We still have not been able to accept same sex love or other sexual relationships which we consider ‘abnormalities.’
SOCIAL CLASS
Social class constitutes another category of the master narrative. It believes in the survival of the fittest in society and has given greater preference to self-interest than to altruism. Biology however teaches us that cooperation amongst proteins is the key to the survival of living organisms. Our knowledge and belief teach us that we should take as much from nature as we can. The belief that our lives are separate from our surroundings allows us to take everything. Altruism is seen as a foolish thing. Only recently we have come to realize that nature is hitting back at us through global warming and climate change.
The ego narrative also creates an economic system based on the primacy of money and directed by self-achievement. The word economics comes fro the Greek word ekos and nomos which mean the rules of the house. House rules determine our economic relations and are therefore created by us. If we change our house rules (for example in communism) but do not change our master narrative of the ego we will not go far. Communism preaches that individuals can create their own rules through violent revolutions but since the ego narrative remains in communism, it provides a new hierarchy of corruption and economic inequality. However that does not mean that the home rule of capitalism or free enterprise is any better either.
Money decides who lives and who dies, who eats and who goes hungry, who gets education, health care and employment and who remains illiterate, sick and unemployed. Money also decides who can travel and enjoy life and who cannot. The narrative creates a moral climate that allows us to enjoy life without bothering about the poor and down trodden. The free market economy reminds us that by nature we are lazy. So greed is wonderful. The force that helps us over come our laziness is fear. Middle class fear the loss of their livelihood if they do not work hard while the upper class their position. The ego pushes us to get more in order to succeed, but still we need admiration and esteem. We acquire goods to satisfy our desire and get the admiration of others.
We rarely find democratic functioning of institutions. Instead we see people using social position and family connections to succeed. The ego narrative works against all principles of enlightenment. It works for personal gain against the common good. In terms of global relations ego gets translated into economic egoism of developed versus developing nations. Multinational organization use poor countries as a source of cheap labor and refuse bin for toxic wastes.
RACE
The master narrative of race gets linked to the ego narrative and tends to exploit others more savagely. Slavery had a great effect on the narrative of race. Africans and Europeans had a history of slavery in their own geographical regions for a long time. The development of maritime trade made possible the growth of inter-regional and intercontinental slavery. Once trading in black slaves began an attempt to justify such trade through scientific racism, eugenics or anthropology also began.
We do not just psychologically imagined Freudian egos but also biological agents looking for emotional comfort and a sense of community. Our post-Enlightenment culture reminds us through the constitutions that we are all equal—“we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Though on a fundamental level we believe that everyone is equal and that birthright does not count, we still see a different truth in the functioning of governments and social systems.
CONCLUSION
Through master narratives, especially through religious discourses and linguistic paradigms we perceive the world as a place, a terra firma, and the cosmos as the result of some first cause. We call it power, God or force. To be engaged with a subject whose subjectivity is greater than ours leads us into a reference area outside time, space, reason and human understanding. By the late seventeenth century a reaction set in against the kind of religious model. A new secular model used scientific evidence and logic to explain a new cosmology that conformed to human inquiry and laws. In Argument of the Second Epistle Alexander Pope asserted, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/The proper study of Mankind is Man.” Now the world of nature was seen as a big machine. Therefore a theory could be developed which could predict and control everything that happened in the future.
The secular model builds a moral world based on Emmanuel Kant’s notion of categorical imperative which posits a universal standard for individual behavior. Though this ethical principle keeps egoism in check by condemning corruption and deceit, it nonetheless perpetuates inequalities by allowing free competition and the victor take all syndrome. Scientific discourses teach us that nature does not function with a mind and we have no responsibility for the various problems of the world. Everything follows a certain law and we are not free to make a moral choice. Obviously all this is changing now. Both the Nobel Prize Committee and the Australian electorate are choosing people who highlight our responsibility for protecting nature. But these two paradigms are more intertwined than separate. There are post modern secularists who believe in the existence of radical evil and pre-modern religionists accepting democracy and human rights. National discourses also prevent us from seeing our larger identity as members of the planet earth.
The ego is more imagined than real. It is more cultural than biological. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre our ego depends on our consciousness and not the other way round. Both Foucault and Derrida unraveled the mysteries of the master narratives and decentered them for us. If we can change our notion of the ego and pick up other non-ego narratives can have more freedom and be happier.
Representing India: Literature, Politics and Identities
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Utilitarianism and Utilitarian Education
© 2010 Mukesh Williams
Utilitarianism is a philosophy based on a minimalist view of human beings that explains human nature in terms of economic relations alone. It believes that the moral significance of an action is judged by its utility to people. Though it has many contradictions it was responsible, in some measure, for reforms in administration, sanitation and education. Utilitarianism promoted a theory of laissez faire and came to represent a streamlined civil service and centralized administration. G. D. Klingopulos highlights the contradiction in utilitarian thought by saying that though “in some matters, such as the agitation for cheap bread, the utilitarians were friends of the working man, in others, such as the regulation of conditions in factories, they were his enemies” (Klingopulos, 1970 30-31).
BENTHAM AND ADAM SMITH
It was difficult to reconcile the Bentham’s idea of general happiness, based on enlightened political and legal principles, and Adam Smith’s self-harmonizing economic principle of laissez-faire (minimum intervention from the law). Dickens seemed to be both a victim and a chronicler of a contradictory response to utilitarianism in Hard Times. This contradiction is evident both in his treatment of education and trade unionism.
Dickens’ polemical response to industrial growth, utilitarianism, capitalism, education, economic self-interest and trade unionism is also reflected in the novel through his representation of Coketown, Gradgrind, Bounderby, Mr. M’Choakumchild, Harthouse and Slackbridge.
COKETOWN
The redbrick Coketown is presented in the novel as soot-coated, black and savage. Its daily life is repetitive, monotonous and grinding (HT, p. 22). Both its streets and inhabitants have lost their uniqueness,
It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next (HT, p. 22).
The repeated use of the word “same” and the phrase “like one another” reveals both the tedium of Coketown and the drudgery of its inhabitants. In a prophetic vision at the end of the novel the author tells us that five years later Bounderby would die of a fit on these very streets (HT, pp. 217-8).
Everything in Coketown is “severely workful” and the idea of sameness extends to the eighteen churches of different “religious persuasions,” the jail, infirmary, town hall, school and cemetery. Its blasting furnaces become hot as hell and gas from them fills the air asphyxiating the people. In Dickens’ own words,
The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily. Stokers emerged from low underground doorways into factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals. The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoom: and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled languidly in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels (HT, pp. 85-6).
Dickens brings out the unreality of Coketown and its ominous power. It stands at the edge of doom stifling the lives of its inhabitants. Yes it’s the unreality of the town that stands out as if it seems that Dickens did not understand Coketown as well as London. The sense of intimacy, the closeness, the insider’s perspective is missing. The serialization technique and polemical confusion further limits his vision. However, in spite of the unreality of vision Coketown is definitely an ideal setting for the manifestation of a utilitarian philosophy.
SCOTTISH EDUCATION AND M’CHOAKUMCHILD
Dickens campaigned for structuring education and wished to do away with unqualified teachers in schools. He strongly felt the need to provide training to teachers. He introduced Mr. M’Choakumchild, fresh from a training college, accompanied by his wife, about to deliver his first classroom lecture. The satire, both in the choice of the name and presentation of character, seems inescapable. M’Choakumchild is after all a representative of a new school ideology. His Scottish-sounding name obviously refers to the import of trained Scottish teachers in English schools. Obviously M’Choakumchild possesses too much useless knowledge in his own conceited way. He bores and confuses his simple-minded but ignorant students. Dickens writes:
He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmology, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, M’Choakumchild (HT, p. 12).
M’Choakumchild’s “ten chilled fingers,” and his “stony way” point to the fact that though he may be extremely knowledgeable he has lost the ability to enjoy or make his innocent wards enjoy life. His hard facts stifle the imaginative “fancy” that is “lurking within” each child. Dickens concludes his sketch of M’Choakumchild by saying that, “If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!”
Through M’Choakumchild, Dickens expressed some of the popular criticism against training schools of the time. Dickens wanted training schools to instruct teachers in teaching methodology and help them to develop the intellect of children, not just impart some erudite scholarship. Educators felt that Dickens’ account of M’Choakumchild and the object lesson at Gradgrind School were only partially correct. Scuh presentation could be just Dickens’ own middle class emotional reaction to an educational system that he disliked. Monroe Engel believed that Dickens was not attacking but dissociating himself “fully and publicly from the Benthamites” (Engel, 1959 160-62).
THE ILL EFFECTS OF UTILIARIANISM
Chapter two of the novel is entitled “Murdering the Innocent” framed within one of the three sections of the book “Sowing.” The other two sections, “Reaping” and “Garnering” also come from an agricultural vocabulary—a vocabulary that describes, and sets in contrast, the mechanical world of Coketown. Klingopulos believes that the school setting and the title of the chapter help Dickens to “go beyond matters of economic theory to strike at those psychological and educational ideas, which formed the ‘philosophical’ part of utilitarianism” (Klingopulos, 1970 34). Gradgrind’s boast that he can easily reduce “any parcel of human nature” into “a case of simple arithmetic” underscores his cold intellectuality. Gradgrind’s over-confidence exemplifies the misguided belief of utilitarianism in the efficacy of their educational content and method at the primary level. Gradgrind is absolutely certain as to what the children require and the way it ought to be given to them. The vocabulary of Hard Times is loaded with this sentiment—children are passive “little vessels’ or “little pitchers” to pour utilitarian “facts” into. His approach stands in stark contrast to the understanding gained by the senses, based on feeling and mutual respect for others. The episode where Gradgrind asks Sissy to define a horse and Bitzer’s successful definition of it is an example of the twin approaches to life.
Benthamite utilitarianism argued for “the greatest good for the greatest number of people” but failed to realize it. Though few succeeded most people continued to live in grinding poverty. Dickens felt that there was more to life than just economic success. It was not just to brand the discontented and disenchanted as dregs of society and send them to prison. Bentham believed in moral principles and disciplinary institutions for the betterment of society. He campaigned for the building of Panopticon prison which allowed an observer to observe the prisoners without being noticed. Through this design Bentham wanted to bring about social and legal reform based on the concept of invisible omniscience. Foucault saw the Panopticon as a reflection of nineteenth century rule-based institutions to police the individual. The terrible discourse of state control does not result in human progress or happiness.
Works Cited
KLINGOPULOS, G. D. “Notes on the Victorian Scene,” in Boris Ford ed., The Pelican Guide to English Literature Volume 6. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970.
ENGEL, MONROE. Charles Dickens, Hard Times. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.
Utilitarianism is a philosophy based on a minimalist view of human beings that explains human nature in terms of economic relations alone. It believes that the moral significance of an action is judged by its utility to people. Though it has many contradictions it was responsible, in some measure, for reforms in administration, sanitation and education. Utilitarianism promoted a theory of laissez faire and came to represent a streamlined civil service and centralized administration. G. D. Klingopulos highlights the contradiction in utilitarian thought by saying that though “in some matters, such as the agitation for cheap bread, the utilitarians were friends of the working man, in others, such as the regulation of conditions in factories, they were his enemies” (Klingopulos, 1970 30-31).
BENTHAM AND ADAM SMITH
It was difficult to reconcile the Bentham’s idea of general happiness, based on enlightened political and legal principles, and Adam Smith’s self-harmonizing economic principle of laissez-faire (minimum intervention from the law). Dickens seemed to be both a victim and a chronicler of a contradictory response to utilitarianism in Hard Times. This contradiction is evident both in his treatment of education and trade unionism.
Dickens’ polemical response to industrial growth, utilitarianism, capitalism, education, economic self-interest and trade unionism is also reflected in the novel through his representation of Coketown, Gradgrind, Bounderby, Mr. M’Choakumchild, Harthouse and Slackbridge.
COKETOWN
The redbrick Coketown is presented in the novel as soot-coated, black and savage. Its daily life is repetitive, monotonous and grinding (HT, p. 22). Both its streets and inhabitants have lost their uniqueness,
It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next (HT, p. 22).
The repeated use of the word “same” and the phrase “like one another” reveals both the tedium of Coketown and the drudgery of its inhabitants. In a prophetic vision at the end of the novel the author tells us that five years later Bounderby would die of a fit on these very streets (HT, pp. 217-8).
Everything in Coketown is “severely workful” and the idea of sameness extends to the eighteen churches of different “religious persuasions,” the jail, infirmary, town hall, school and cemetery. Its blasting furnaces become hot as hell and gas from them fills the air asphyxiating the people. In Dickens’ own words,
The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily. Stokers emerged from low underground doorways into factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals. The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoom: and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled languidly in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels (HT, pp. 85-6).
Dickens brings out the unreality of Coketown and its ominous power. It stands at the edge of doom stifling the lives of its inhabitants. Yes it’s the unreality of the town that stands out as if it seems that Dickens did not understand Coketown as well as London. The sense of intimacy, the closeness, the insider’s perspective is missing. The serialization technique and polemical confusion further limits his vision. However, in spite of the unreality of vision Coketown is definitely an ideal setting for the manifestation of a utilitarian philosophy.
SCOTTISH EDUCATION AND M’CHOAKUMCHILD
Dickens campaigned for structuring education and wished to do away with unqualified teachers in schools. He strongly felt the need to provide training to teachers. He introduced Mr. M’Choakumchild, fresh from a training college, accompanied by his wife, about to deliver his first classroom lecture. The satire, both in the choice of the name and presentation of character, seems inescapable. M’Choakumchild is after all a representative of a new school ideology. His Scottish-sounding name obviously refers to the import of trained Scottish teachers in English schools. Obviously M’Choakumchild possesses too much useless knowledge in his own conceited way. He bores and confuses his simple-minded but ignorant students. Dickens writes:
He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmology, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, M’Choakumchild (HT, p. 12).
M’Choakumchild’s “ten chilled fingers,” and his “stony way” point to the fact that though he may be extremely knowledgeable he has lost the ability to enjoy or make his innocent wards enjoy life. His hard facts stifle the imaginative “fancy” that is “lurking within” each child. Dickens concludes his sketch of M’Choakumchild by saying that, “If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!”
Through M’Choakumchild, Dickens expressed some of the popular criticism against training schools of the time. Dickens wanted training schools to instruct teachers in teaching methodology and help them to develop the intellect of children, not just impart some erudite scholarship. Educators felt that Dickens’ account of M’Choakumchild and the object lesson at Gradgrind School were only partially correct. Scuh presentation could be just Dickens’ own middle class emotional reaction to an educational system that he disliked. Monroe Engel believed that Dickens was not attacking but dissociating himself “fully and publicly from the Benthamites” (Engel, 1959 160-62).
THE ILL EFFECTS OF UTILIARIANISM
Chapter two of the novel is entitled “Murdering the Innocent” framed within one of the three sections of the book “Sowing.” The other two sections, “Reaping” and “Garnering” also come from an agricultural vocabulary—a vocabulary that describes, and sets in contrast, the mechanical world of Coketown. Klingopulos believes that the school setting and the title of the chapter help Dickens to “go beyond matters of economic theory to strike at those psychological and educational ideas, which formed the ‘philosophical’ part of utilitarianism” (Klingopulos, 1970 34). Gradgrind’s boast that he can easily reduce “any parcel of human nature” into “a case of simple arithmetic” underscores his cold intellectuality. Gradgrind’s over-confidence exemplifies the misguided belief of utilitarianism in the efficacy of their educational content and method at the primary level. Gradgrind is absolutely certain as to what the children require and the way it ought to be given to them. The vocabulary of Hard Times is loaded with this sentiment—children are passive “little vessels’ or “little pitchers” to pour utilitarian “facts” into. His approach stands in stark contrast to the understanding gained by the senses, based on feeling and mutual respect for others. The episode where Gradgrind asks Sissy to define a horse and Bitzer’s successful definition of it is an example of the twin approaches to life.
Benthamite utilitarianism argued for “the greatest good for the greatest number of people” but failed to realize it. Though few succeeded most people continued to live in grinding poverty. Dickens felt that there was more to life than just economic success. It was not just to brand the discontented and disenchanted as dregs of society and send them to prison. Bentham believed in moral principles and disciplinary institutions for the betterment of society. He campaigned for the building of Panopticon prison which allowed an observer to observe the prisoners without being noticed. Through this design Bentham wanted to bring about social and legal reform based on the concept of invisible omniscience. Foucault saw the Panopticon as a reflection of nineteenth century rule-based institutions to police the individual. The terrible discourse of state control does not result in human progress or happiness.
Works Cited
KLINGOPULOS, G. D. “Notes on the Victorian Scene,” in Boris Ford ed., The Pelican Guide to English Literature Volume 6. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970.
ENGEL, MONROE. Charles Dickens, Hard Times. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Identity Claims and the Media
© Mukesh Williams
We all make identity claims for one reason or the other. Usually our identity claims reflect our concerns, anxieties and desires. Usually our identity claims are harnessed in our self-interest or the interest of our community, tribe or nation. A selfless identity claim is a misnomer. Though nations may be imagined, they nevertheless provide an opportunity for people to make specific identity claims (Anderson, 1991; Hall, 1997). When we have a soccer match between two countries and the captain of the winning team drapes his country’s flag around him he is making an identity claim that spectators can relate to and identify with.
IDENTITY AND ADVERTISING
Advertising also lays claim to our identity. Successful modern advertisements force us to place ourselves in the situation occupied by one of the characters and identify ourselves with what they say or do. Image advertising also works in similar fashion. Media photographs work for us if they excite our emotions of pity, anger, joy or resentment. We then indentify ourselves with them and claim them as they claim us. For example a bird covered in oil sludge, a child crying from hunger, soldiers killed in war, a volcanic eruption and so on. The picture implicates us, forces us to produce meaning in the act of looking. As we enter this fantasy world again and again we become a part of that world.
COLLECTIVE IDENTITY
People come together into a group and imagine an identity. We have many identities—such as racial, local, city, gender, national and religious—and we use different aspects of these collective identities to our advantage. Identity is therefore neither single nor fixed but constantly reconstituted and in a state of eternal flux. We give meaning to things through the use of language. At the same time we are reconstituted by those collective identities we use to define or redefine ourselves. The reconstitution and redefinition of our identities have been further accelerated by digital and mobile technologies.
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WORLD
There are different strategies to understand the way we signify, the way we represent and the way we create meaning. It is possible to divide theories of representations into three broad categories: reflective, intentional and constructionist. The first implies that meaning is inherent in objects, persons, ideas or events and language merely acts as a mirror to reflect such meaning. The Greek notion of mimesis grew out of this conception of the world where painting and drawing mirrored the real world of nature. The reflective theory of representation is therefore often termed as mimetic theory. Obviously visual arts do attempt to represent the shape and texture of objects, but they also represent objects as two-dimensional signs. Literary theory is full of it. The second theory argues that the observer, speaker or author gives meaning to the world through the use of language. Meaning therefore depends on intention. But language is a social discourse organized along shared codes and conventions and must follow a well-formulated pattern in order to be intelligible. The third premise moves away from the first two approaches and argues that meaning does not lie in objects but we create meaning using signs, signifiers, concepts and strategies. We are constructionists in our representation of the world. The material world exists per se but meaning is created through the discourse of language and linguistic practices (Hall 1997, 24-25).
MODERNITY, POST-MODERNITY AND IDENTITY
Both modernity and post-modernity have deeply affected our sense of identity—the way we constitute it and the way we are affected by it. Modernity brought in a new urban revolution in our inner psychological space and outer physical space. Both our ways of thinking and the city spaces we live in changed radically from the earlier medieval times. In the post-modern era, though the urban landscape is still present, it is the mass media that defines our sense of individuality and cultural identity. Some of the ill effects of modernity felt in urban architecture, knowledge areas and psychological spaces are reduced in post-modern world. The oppressive effects of modern city spaces and rules of behavior are somewhat lessened in postmodern city spaces where the individual becomes once more important. The process of globalization as a function of late modernity has further accelerated an economic process that connects with mass migration and reassertion of pan identities on new levels. The “cultural resonance” of postmodernism as a “structure of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams phrase, distracts us from its impact upon economic organizations, marketing and advertising (Jameson, 2001 xiv).
IDENTITY CRISIS
The notion of identity crisis is a post-structuralist idea that began to dominate the sub-discipline of structuralism from the 1960s. With the breakdown of the old world order old collective identities lost their validity. Micro level identity politics connected to lobby groups, localism and even nationalism began to dominate the identity project. The individual in the postmodern world was more fragmented than alienated (Jameson, 2001). Alienation assumed a unitary core self but the postmodern self is seen as unstable and multiple. Therefore the concept of alienation within identity is replaced by anxiety. The Internet further destabilized identity by creating a “culture of simulations” by substituting reality with virtual communities (Turkle, 1997).
The 1960s was a momentous decade. Lacan began to attack the concept of the embedded self and posited the notion of a de-centered self. The dominant theory thesis and hegemonic ideas connected with it began to give way to micro politics. By 1970s it became rather difficult to say, both on the individual and group level, “Who am I? or Who are we?” As we go into the 1980s again new groups get formed such as Yuppies and DINKS. Identity is no longer what we have learned or experience but something to be consumed and used. The consumer culture acquired greater intensity during this decade. Today it is difficult to assert an ‘authentic identity’ as postmodernism undercuts modern history, psychology and philosophy.
Works Cited
ANDERSON, BENIDICT. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991.
APPADURAI, ARJUN. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
HALL, STUART. “The Work of Representation,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Stuart Hall ed. London: Sage, 1997.
JAMESON, FREDRIC. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
TURKLE, SHERRY. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
We all make identity claims for one reason or the other. Usually our identity claims reflect our concerns, anxieties and desires. Usually our identity claims are harnessed in our self-interest or the interest of our community, tribe or nation. A selfless identity claim is a misnomer. Though nations may be imagined, they nevertheless provide an opportunity for people to make specific identity claims (Anderson, 1991; Hall, 1997). When we have a soccer match between two countries and the captain of the winning team drapes his country’s flag around him he is making an identity claim that spectators can relate to and identify with.
IDENTITY AND ADVERTISING
Advertising also lays claim to our identity. Successful modern advertisements force us to place ourselves in the situation occupied by one of the characters and identify ourselves with what they say or do. Image advertising also works in similar fashion. Media photographs work for us if they excite our emotions of pity, anger, joy or resentment. We then indentify ourselves with them and claim them as they claim us. For example a bird covered in oil sludge, a child crying from hunger, soldiers killed in war, a volcanic eruption and so on. The picture implicates us, forces us to produce meaning in the act of looking. As we enter this fantasy world again and again we become a part of that world.
COLLECTIVE IDENTITY
People come together into a group and imagine an identity. We have many identities—such as racial, local, city, gender, national and religious—and we use different aspects of these collective identities to our advantage. Identity is therefore neither single nor fixed but constantly reconstituted and in a state of eternal flux. We give meaning to things through the use of language. At the same time we are reconstituted by those collective identities we use to define or redefine ourselves. The reconstitution and redefinition of our identities have been further accelerated by digital and mobile technologies.
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WORLD
There are different strategies to understand the way we signify, the way we represent and the way we create meaning. It is possible to divide theories of representations into three broad categories: reflective, intentional and constructionist. The first implies that meaning is inherent in objects, persons, ideas or events and language merely acts as a mirror to reflect such meaning. The Greek notion of mimesis grew out of this conception of the world where painting and drawing mirrored the real world of nature. The reflective theory of representation is therefore often termed as mimetic theory. Obviously visual arts do attempt to represent the shape and texture of objects, but they also represent objects as two-dimensional signs. Literary theory is full of it. The second theory argues that the observer, speaker or author gives meaning to the world through the use of language. Meaning therefore depends on intention. But language is a social discourse organized along shared codes and conventions and must follow a well-formulated pattern in order to be intelligible. The third premise moves away from the first two approaches and argues that meaning does not lie in objects but we create meaning using signs, signifiers, concepts and strategies. We are constructionists in our representation of the world. The material world exists per se but meaning is created through the discourse of language and linguistic practices (Hall 1997, 24-25).
MODERNITY, POST-MODERNITY AND IDENTITY
Both modernity and post-modernity have deeply affected our sense of identity—the way we constitute it and the way we are affected by it. Modernity brought in a new urban revolution in our inner psychological space and outer physical space. Both our ways of thinking and the city spaces we live in changed radically from the earlier medieval times. In the post-modern era, though the urban landscape is still present, it is the mass media that defines our sense of individuality and cultural identity. Some of the ill effects of modernity felt in urban architecture, knowledge areas and psychological spaces are reduced in post-modern world. The oppressive effects of modern city spaces and rules of behavior are somewhat lessened in postmodern city spaces where the individual becomes once more important. The process of globalization as a function of late modernity has further accelerated an economic process that connects with mass migration and reassertion of pan identities on new levels. The “cultural resonance” of postmodernism as a “structure of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams phrase, distracts us from its impact upon economic organizations, marketing and advertising (Jameson, 2001 xiv).
IDENTITY CRISIS
The notion of identity crisis is a post-structuralist idea that began to dominate the sub-discipline of structuralism from the 1960s. With the breakdown of the old world order old collective identities lost their validity. Micro level identity politics connected to lobby groups, localism and even nationalism began to dominate the identity project. The individual in the postmodern world was more fragmented than alienated (Jameson, 2001). Alienation assumed a unitary core self but the postmodern self is seen as unstable and multiple. Therefore the concept of alienation within identity is replaced by anxiety. The Internet further destabilized identity by creating a “culture of simulations” by substituting reality with virtual communities (Turkle, 1997).
The 1960s was a momentous decade. Lacan began to attack the concept of the embedded self and posited the notion of a de-centered self. The dominant theory thesis and hegemonic ideas connected with it began to give way to micro politics. By 1970s it became rather difficult to say, both on the individual and group level, “Who am I? or Who are we?” As we go into the 1980s again new groups get formed such as Yuppies and DINKS. Identity is no longer what we have learned or experience but something to be consumed and used. The consumer culture acquired greater intensity during this decade. Today it is difficult to assert an ‘authentic identity’ as postmodernism undercuts modern history, psychology and philosophy.
Works Cited
ANDERSON, BENIDICT. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991.
APPADURAI, ARJUN. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
HALL, STUART. “The Work of Representation,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Stuart Hall ed. London: Sage, 1997.
JAMESON, FREDRIC. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
TURKLE, SHERRY. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
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