The Ties that Bind
Sources of cultural Identity
Frameworks to Evaluate:
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory is a framework for cross-cultural communication, developed by Geert Hofstede. It describes the effects of a society's culture on thevalues of its members, and how these values relate to behavior, using a structure derived from factor analysis. The theory has been widely used in several fields as a paradigmfor research,[citation needed] particularly in cross-cultural psychology, international management, and cross-cultural communication.
Overview[edit]
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory is a framework for cross-cultural communication. Hofstede developed his original model as a result of using factor analysis to examine the results of a world-wide survey of employee values by IBM between 1967 and 1973. The theory was one of the first that could be quantified, and could be used to explain observed differences between cultures.[citation needed]
The original theory proposed four dimensions along which cultural values could be analyzed: individualism-collectivism; uncertainty avoidance; power distance (strength of social hierarchy) and masculinity-femininity (task orientation versus person-orientation). Independent research in Hong Kong led Hofstede to add a fifth dimension, long-term orientation, to cover aspects of values not discussed in the original paradigm. In the 2010 edition of Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind [1] Hofstede added a sixth dimension, indulgence versus self-restraint, as a result of co-author Michael Minkov's analysis of data from the World Values Survey. Further research has refined some of the original dimensions, and introduced the difference between country-level and individual-level data in analysis.
Hofstede's work established a major research tradition in cross-cultural psychology and has also been drawn upon by researchers and consultants in many fields relating to international business and communication. It continues to be a major resource in cross-cultural fields. It has inspired a number of other major cross-cultural studies of values, as well as research on other aspects of culture, such as social beliefs.
History[edit]
In 1965, Hofstede founded the personnel research department of IBM Europe (which he managed until 1971). Between 1967 and 1973, he executed a large survey studyregarding national values differences across the worldwide subsidiaries of this multinational corporation: he compared the answers of 117,000 IBM matched employees samples on the same attitude survey in different countries. He first focused his research on the 40 largest countries, and then extended it to 50 countries and 3 regions, "at that time probably the largest matched-sample cross-national database available anywhere.".[2]
This initial analysis identified systematic differences in national cultures on four primary dimensions: power distance (PDI), individualism (IDV), uncertainty avoidance (UAI) and masculinity (MAS), which are described below. As Hofstede explains on his academic website,[3] these dimensions regard "four anthropological problem areas that different national societies handle differently: ways of coping with inequality, ways of coping with uncertainty, the relationship of the individual with her or his primary group, and the emotional implications of having been born as a girl or as a boy ". In 1984 he published Culture's Consequences,[4] a book which combines the statistical analysis from the survey research with his personal experiences.
In order to confirm the early results from the IBM study and to extend them to a variety of populations, six subsequent cross-national studies have successfully been conducted between 1990 and 2002. Covering between 14 to 28 countries, the samples included commercial airline pilots, students, civil service managers, 'up-market' consumers and 'elites'. The combined research established value scores on the four dimensions for a total of 76 countries and regions.
In 1991, Michael Harris Bond and colleagues conducted a study among students in 23 countries, using a survey instrument developed with Chinese employees and managers. The results from this study led Hofstede to add a new fifth dimension to his model: long term orientation (LTO) initially called Confucian dynamism. In 2010, the scores for this dimension have been extended to 93 countries thanks to the research of Micheal Minkov who used the recent World Values Survey.[5]
Finally, Minkov's World Values Survey data analysis of 93 representative samples of national populations also led Geert Hofstede to identify a sixth last dimension: indulgence versus restraint.
Dimensions of national cultures[edit]
Power distance index (PDI): "Power distance is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally." Individuals in a society that exhibit a high degree of power distance accept hierarchies in which everyone has a place without the need for justification. Societies with low power distance seek to have equal distribution of power. [6]Cultures that endorse low power distance expect and accept power relations that are more consultative or democratic.
Individualism (IDV) vs. collectivism: "The degree to which individuals are integrated into groups". In individualistic societies, the stress is put on personal achievements and individual rights. People are expected to stand up for themselves and their immediate family, and to choose their own affiliations. In contrast, in collectivist societies, individuals act predominantly as members of a lifelong and cohesive group or organization (note: "The word collectivism in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state"). People have large extended families, which are used as a protection in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.
Uncertainty avoidance index (UAI): "a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity". It reflects the extent to which members of a society attempt to cope with anxiety by minimizing uncertainty. People in cultures with high uncertainty avoidance tend to be more emotional. They try to minimize the occurrence of unknown and unusual circumstances and to proceed with careful changes step by step planning and by implementing rules, laws and regulations. In contrast, low uncertainty avoidance cultures accept and feel comfortable in unstructured situations or changeable environments and try to have as few rules as possible. People in these cultures tend to be morepragmatic, they are more tolerant of change.
Masculinity (MAS), vs. femininity: "The distribution of emotional roles between the genders". Masculine cultures' values are competitiveness, assertiveness, materialism, ambition and power, whereas feminine cultures place more value on relationships and quality of life. In masculine cultures, the differences between gender roles are more dramatic and less fluid than in feminine cultures where men and women have the same values emphasizing modesty and caring. As a result of the taboo on sexuality in many cultures, particularly masculine ones, and because of the obvious gender generalizations implied by Hofstede's terminology, this dimension is often renamed by users of Hofstede's work, e.g. to Quantity of Life vs. Quality of Life.
Long-term orientation (LTO), vs. short term orientation: First called "Confucian dynamism", it describes societies' time horizon. Long-term oriented societies attach more importance to the future. They foster pragmatic values oriented towards rewards, including persistence, saving and capacity for adaptation. In short term (?) oriented societies, values promoted are related to the past and the present, including steadiness, respect for tradition, preservation of one's face, reciprocation and fulfilling social obligations.
Indulgence versus restraint (IVR): The extent to which members of a society try to control their desires and impulses. Whereas indulgent societies have a tendency to allow relatively free gratification of basic and natural human desires related to enjoying life and having fun, restrained societies have a conviction that such gratification needs to be curbed and regulated by strict norms.
Differences between cultures on the values dimensions[edit]
Putting together national scores (from 1 for the lowest to 120 for the highest), Hofstede's six-dimensions model allows international comparison between cultures, also calledcomparative research:[7]
Power distance index shows very high scores for Latin and Asian countries, African areas and the Arab world. On the other hand Anglo and Germanic countries have a lower power distance (only 11 for Austria and 18 for Denmark).
For example, the United States has a 40 on the cultural scale of Hofstede's analysis. Compared to Guatemala where the power distance is very high (95) and Israel where it is very low (13), the United States is in the middle.
In Europe, power distance tends to be lower in northern countries and higher in southern and eastern parts: for example, 68 in Poland and 57 for Spain vs. 31 for Sweden and 35 for the United Kingdom.
Regarding the individualism index, there is a clear gap between developed and Western countries on one hand, and less developed and eastern countries on the other. North America and Europe can be considered as individualistic with relatively high scores: for example, 80 for Canada and Hungary. In contrast, Asia, Africa and Latin America have strongly collectivist values: Colombia scores only 13 points on the IDV scale and Indonesia 14. The greatest contrast can be drawn comparing two extreme countries on this dimension: 6 points for Guatemala vs. 91 points for the United States. Japan and the Arab world have middle values on this dimension.
Uncertainty avoidance scores are the highest in Latin American countries, Southern and Eastern Europe countries including German speaking countries, and Japan. They are lower for Anglo, Nordic, and Chinese culture countries. For example, Germany has a high UAI (65) and Belgium even more (94) compared to Sweden (29) or Denmark (23) despite their geographic proximity. However, few countries have very low UAI.
Masculinity is extremely low in Nordic countries: Norway scores 8 and Sweden only 5. In contrast, Masculinity is very high in Japan (95), and in European countries like Hungary, Austria and Switzerland influenced by German culture. In the Anglo world, masculinity scores are relatively high with 66 for the United Kingdom for example. Latin countries present contrasting scores: for example Venezuela has a 73 point score whereas Chile's is only 28.
High long term orientation scores are typically found in East Asia, with China having 118, Hong Kong 96 and Japan 88. They are moderate in Eastern and Western Europe, and low in the Anglo countries, the Muslim world, Africa and in Latin America. However there are less data about this dimension.
There are even less data about the sixth dimension. Indulgence scores are highest in Latin America, parts of Africa, the Anglo world and Nordic Europe; restraint is mostly found in East Asia, Eastern Europe and the Muslim world.
Correlations of values with other country differences[edit]
Researchers have grouped some countries together by comparing countries' value scores with other country difference such as geographical proximity, shared language, related historical background, similar religious beliefs and practices, common philosophical influences, identical political systems, in other words everything which is implied by the definition of a nation's culture. For example, low power distance is associated with consultative political practices and income equity, whereas high power distance is correlated with unequal income distribution, as well as bribery and corruption in domestic politics. Individualism is positively correlated with mobility and national wealth. As a country becomes richer, its culture becomes more individualistic.
Another example of correlation was drawn by the Sigma Two Group[8] in 2003. They have studied the correlation between countries' cultural dimensions and their predominant religion[9] based on the World Factbook 2002. On average, predominantly Catholic countries show very high uncertainty avoidance, relatively high power distance, moderate masculinity and relatively low individualism, whereas predominantly atheist countries have low uncertainty avoidance, very high power distance, moderate masculinity, and very low individualism. Coelho (2011) found inverse correlations between rates of specific kinds of innovation in manufacturing companies and the percentage of large companies per country as well as the employment of a specific kind of manufacturing strategy. The national culture measure of power distance is positively correlated with the ratio of companies with process innovation only over the companies with any of the three types of innovation considered in the country (determinant of correlation: 28%). Hence in countries with higher power distance, innovative manufacturing companies are somewhat more bound to resort to process innovations.
The quantification of cultural dimensions enables us to make cross-regional comparisons and form an image of the differences between not just countries but entire regions. For example the cultural model of the Mediterranean countries is dominated by high levels of acceptance of inequalities, with uncertainty aversion influencing their choices. With regard to individualism, Mediterranean countries tend to be characterized by moderate levels of individualistic behavior. The same applies to masculinity. Future orientation places Mediterranean countries in a middle ranking, and they show a preference for indulgence values.[10]
Applications of the model[edit]
Why is it important to be aware of cultural differences?[edit]
"Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster."[11]
Despite the evidence that groups are different from each other, we tend to believe that deep inside all people are the same. In fact, as we are generally not aware of other countries' cultures, we tend to minimize cultural differences. This leads to misunderstandings and misinterpretations between people from different countries.
Instead of the convergence phenomena we expected with information technologies availability (the "global village culture"), cultural differences are still significant today and diversity tends to increase. So, in order to be able to have respectful cross-cultural relations, we have to be aware of these cultural differences.
With this model, Geert Hofstede shed light on these differences. The tool can be used to give a general overview and an approximate understanding of other cultures, what to expect from them and how to behave towards groups from other countries.
What are the practical applications of the theory?[edit]
Geert Hofstede is perhaps the best known sociologist of culture and anthropologist in the context of applications for understanding international business.[citation needed] Many articles and research papers refer to his publications,[citation needed] with over 20,000 citations[citation needed] to his 2003 book Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations[12] (which is an updated version of his first publication[4]). The five dimensions model is widely used in many domains ofhuman social life,[citation needed] and particularly in the field of business. Practical applications were developed almost immediately.[citation needed] In fact, when it comes to business, promoting cultural sensitivity will help people work more effectively when interacting with people from other countries, and will participate to make sure transactions are successful.
International communication[edit]
In business, it is commonly agreed that communication is one of the primary concerns. So, for professionals who work internationally; people who interact daily with other people from different countries within their company or with other companies abroad; Hofstede's model gives insights into other cultures. In fact, cross-cultural communication requires being aware of cultural differences because what may be considered perfectly acceptable and natural in one country, can be confusing or even offensive in another. All the levels in communication are affected by cultural dimensions: verbals (words and language itself), non verbals (body language, gestures) and etiquette do's and don'ts (clothing, gift-giving, dining, customs and protocol). And this is also valid for written communication as explained in William Wardrobe's essay "Beyond Hofstede: Cultural applications for communication with Latin American Businesses".[13]
International negotiation[edit]
In international negotiations, communication style, expectation, issue ranking and goals will change according to the negotiators' countries of origin. If applied properly, the understanding of cultural dimensions should increase success in negotiations and reduce frustration and conflicts.[14] For example, in a negotiation between Chinese and Canadian, Canadian negotiators may want to reach an agreement and sign a contract, whereas Chinese negotiators may want to spend more time for non business activities,small talks and hospitality with preferences for protocol and form in order to first establish the relationship.
"When negotiating in Western countries, the objective is to work toward a target of mutual understanding and agreement and 'shake-hands' when that agreement is reached – a cultural signal of the end of negotiations and the start of 'working together'. In Middle Eastern countries much negotiation takes place leading into the 'agreement', signified by shaking hands. However, the deal is not complete in the Middle Eastern culture. In fact, it is a cultural sign that 'serious' negotiations are just beginning."[11]
International management[edit]
These considerations are also true in international management and cross-cultural leadership. Decisions taken have to be based on the country's customs and values.[15] When working in international companies, managers may provide training to their employees in order to make them sensitive to cultural differences, develop nuanced business practices, with protocols across countries. Hofstede's dimensions offer guidelines for defining culturally acceptable approaches to corporate organizations.
As a part of the public domain, Geert Hofstede's work is used by numerous consultancies worldwide.[16] But only 3 of them are regarded as partners and have Hofstede's full support with regular contacts.
The American firm ITAP International Inc. and its ITAP International Alliance propose full-service consulting based on Hofstede's approach using the Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™[17]
Similarly, itim International, headquartered in Finland offers culture and management consultancy, training and coaching.
Itim focus[dead link], in the Netherlands and Finland, concentrate on change consultancy at organizational level.
International marketing[edit]
As in communication, negotiation and management, the five dimensions model is very useful in international marketing too because it defines national values not only in business context but in general. Marieke de Mooij has studied the application of Hofstede's findings in the field of global branding, advertising strategy and consumer behavior. As companies try to adapt their products and services to local habits and preferences they have to understand the specificity of their market.[18]
For example, if you want to market cars in a country where the uncertainty avoidance is high, you should emphasize on their safety, whereas in other countries you may base your advertisement on the social image they give you. Cell phone marketing is another interesting example of the application of Hofstede's model for cultural differences: if you want to advertise cell phones in China, you may show a collective experience whereas in the United States you may show how an individual uses it to save time and money. The variety of application of Hofstede's abstract theory is so wide that it has even been translated in the field of web designing in which you have to adapt to national preferences according to cultures' values.[19]
Limitations of Hofstede's model[edit]
Even though Hofstede's model is generally accepted as the most comprehensive framework of national cultures values by those studying business culture, its validity and its limitations have been extensively criticized.
In a 2008 article in the Academy of Management's flagship journal, The Academy of Management Review, Galit Ailon deconstructs Hofstede's book Culture's Consequences by mirroring it against its own assumptions and logic.[20] Ailon finds inconsistencies at the level of both theory and methodology and cautions against an uncritical reading of Hofstede's cultural dimensions. Hofstede replied to that critique[21] and Ailon responded.[22]
The most cited critique is McSweeney.[23] Hofstede replied to that critique[24] and McSweeney responded.[25]
Questionable choice of national level[edit]
Aside from Hofstede's 5 cultural dimensions, there are other factors on which culture can be analyzed. There are other levels for assessing culture. These levels are overlooked often because of the nature of the construction of these levels. There is sampling discrepancy that disqualifies the survey from being authoritative on organizations, or societies, or nations as the interviews involved sales and engineering personnel with few, if any, women and undoubtedly fewer social minorities participating (Moussetes, 2007). Even if country indices were used to control for wealth, latitude, population size, density and growth, privileged males working as engineers or sales personnel in one of the elite organizations of the world, pioneering one of the first multinational projects in history, can not be claimed to represent their nations.[26]
Individual level: cultural dimensions versus individual personalities[edit]
Hofstede acknowledges that the cultural dimensions he identified, as culture and values, are theoretical constructions. They are tools meant to be used in practical applications. Generalizations about one country's culture are helpful but they have to be regarded as such, i.e. as guidelines for a better understanding. They are group-level dimensions which describe national averages which apply to the population in its entirety. Hofstede's cultural dimensions enable users to distinguish countries but are not about differences between members of societies. They don't necessarily define individuals' personalities. National scores should never be interpreted as deterministic for individuals. For example, a Japanese person can be very comfortable in changing situations whereas on average, Japanese people have high uncertainty avoidance. There are still exceptions to the rule. Hofstede's theory can be contrasted with its equivalence at individual level: the trait theory about human personality.
Variations on the typologies of collectivism and individualism have been proposed (Triandis, 1995; Gouveia and Ros, 2000). Self-expression and individualism increase with economic growth (Inglehart, 1997), independent of any culture, and they are vital in small populations faced with outside competition for resources. Entitled individuals in positions of power embrace autonomy even if they live in a “collective” culture. Like the power index, the individualism and collectivism surveys scatter countries according to predictable economic and demographic patterns (Triandis, 2004)[full citation needed], so they might not really inform us at all about any particular organizational dynamic, nor do they inform about the organizational and individual variations within similar socio-economic circumstances. Individual aggregate need careful separation from nation aggregate (Smith et al., 2008). Whereas individuals are the basic subject of psychological analysis (Smith, 2004), the socialization of individuals and their interaction with society is a matter to be studied at the level of families, peers, neighborhoods, schools, cities, and nations each with its own statistical imprint of culture (Smith, 2004). S. Schwartz controlled his value data with GNP and a social index, leading to his proposal of differentiated individual and nation indices of itemized values (Schwartz, 1992; 1994) for cross-cultural comparison. The assumed “isomorphism of constructs” has been central to deciding how to use and understand culture in the managerial sciences (Van de Vijver et al. 2008; Fischer, 2009). As no individual can create his/her discourse and sense-making process in isolation to the rest of society, individuals are poor candidates for cultural sense-making. Postmodern criticism rejects the possibility of any self-determining individual because the unitary, personal self is an illusion of contemporary society evidenced by the necessary reproductions and simulations in language and behavior that individuals engage in to sustain membership in any society (Baudrillard, 1983; Alvesson & Deetz, 2006).[26]
Organizational level[edit]
Within and across countries, individuals are also parts of organizations such as companies. Hofstede acknowledges that "the […] dimensions of national cultures are not relevant for comparing organizations within the same country".[3] In contrast with national cultures, embedded in values, organizational cultures are embedded in practices.
From 1985 to 1987, Hofstede's institute IRIC (Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation)[27] has conducted a separate research project in order to study organizational culture. Including 20 organizational units in two countries (Denmark and the Netherlands), six different dimensions of practices, or communities of practice have been identified:
Process-Oriented vs. Results-Oriented
Employee-Oriented vs. Job-Oriented
Parochial vs. Professional
Open System vs. Closed System
Loose Control vs. Tight Control
Pragmatic vs. Normative
Managing international organizations involves understanding both national and organizational cultures. Communities of practice across borders are significant for multinationals in order to hold the company together.
Occupational level[edit]
Within the occupational level, there is a certain degree of values and convictions that people hold with respect to the national and organizational cultures they are part of. The culture of management as an occupation has components from national and organizational cultures. This is an important distinction from the organizational level.
Gender level[edit]
When describing culture, gender differences are largely not taken into consideration. However, there are certain factors that are useful to analyze in the discussion of cross-cultural communication. Within each society, men's culture differs greatly from women's culture. Although men and women can often perform the same duties from a technical standpoint, there are often symbols to which each gender has a different response. In situations where one gender responds in an alternative manner to their prescribed roles, the other sex may not even accept their deviant gender role. The level of reactions experienced by people exposed to foreign cultures can be compared similarly to the reactions of gender behaviors of the opposite sex. The degree of gender differentiation in a country depends primarily on the culture within that nation and its history.
The bipolar model follows typical distinctions made between liberal or socialist political philosophy. Although liberal economies value assertiveness, autonomy, materialism, aggression, money, competition and rationalism, welfare socialism seeks protection and provision for the weak, greater involvement with the environment, an emphasis on nature and well being, and a strong respect for quality of life and collective responsibilities. Masculine societies happen to include the most successful economically during the period of Hofstede’s study (USA, Japan, Germany) with the successful feminine societies having either smaller populations, less economic scale and/or strong collective and welfare philosophies (Scandinavia, Costa Rica, France, Thailand). The masculine-feminine dichotomy divides organizations into those exhibiting either compassion, solidarity, collectivism and universalism, or competition, autonomy, merit, results and responsibility. This dimension is eurocentric and sexist (Gilligan, 1982).
Mechanical vs. Organic Solidarity
In sociology, "mechanical solidarity" and "organic solidarity" refer to the concepts of solidarity as developed by Émile Durkheim. They are used in the context of differentiating between mechanical and organic societies.
According to Durkheim, the types of social solidarity correlate with types of society. Durkheim introduced the terms "mechanical" and "organic solidarity" as part of his theory of the development of societies in The Division of Labour in Society (1893). In a society exhibiting mechanical solidarity, its cohesion and integration comes from the homogeneity of individuals—people feel connected through similar work, educational and religious training, and lifestyle. Mechanical solidarity normally operates in "traditional" and small scale societies.[1] In simpler societies (e.g., tribal), solidarity is usually based on kinship ties of familial networks. Organic solidarity comes from the interdependence that arises from specialization of work and the complementarities between people—a development which occurs in "modern" and "industrial" societies.[1] Definition: it is social cohesion based upon the dependence individuals have on each other in more advanced societies. Although individuals perform different tasks and often have different values and interests, the order and very solidarity of society depends on their reliance on each other to perform their specified tasks. Organic here is referring to the interdependence of the component parts. Thus, social solidarity is maintained in more complex societies through the interdependence of its component parts (e.g., farmers produce the food to feed the factory workers who produce the tractors that allow the farmer to produce the food).
The two types of solidarity can be distinguished by morphological and demographic features, type of norms in existence, and the intensity and content of the conscience collective.[1]
|
Mechanical vs. organic solidarity[2] |
||
|
Feature |
Mechanical solidarity |
Organic solidarity |
|
Morphological (structural) basis |
Based
on resemblances (predominant in less advanced societies) |
Based
on division of labor (predominately in more advanced
societies) |
|
Types of norms (typified by law) |
Rules
with repressive sanctions |
Rules
with restitutive sanctions |
|
Formal features of conscience collective |
High
volume |
Low
volume |
|
Content of conscience collective |
Highly
religious |
Increasingly
secular |
Socio-biology vs. Cultural Selection
Sociobiology is a field of scientific study which is based on the hypothesis that social behavior has resulted from evolution and attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context. A branch of biology that deals with social behavior, it also draws from ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, population genetics, and other disciplines. Within the study of humansocieties, sociobiology is very closely allied to the fields of Darwinian anthropology, human behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology.
Sociobiology investigates social behaviors, such as mating patterns, territorial fights, pack hunting, and the hive society of social insects. It argues that just as selection pressure led to animals evolving useful ways of interacting with the natural environment, it led to the genetic evolution of advantageous social behavior.
While the term "sociobiology" can be traced to the 1940s, the concept didn't gain major recognition until 1975 with the publication ofEdward O. Wilson's book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. The new field quickly became the subject of heated controversy. Criticism, most notably from Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, centered on sociobiology's contention that genes play an ultimate role in human behavior and that traits such as aggressiveness can be explained by biology rather than a person's social environment. Sociobiologists generally responded to the criticism by pointing to the complex relationship between nature and nurture. Anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides founded the field of evolutionary psychology.
Vs.
Cultural selection theory is a scientific discipline that explores sociological and cultural evolution the same way that Darwinian selection theory is used to explain biologicalevolution. There are three obvious concepts to Cultural Selection. The three concepts are social contagion theory, evolutionary epistemology, and memetics.[1]
This theory is an extension of memetics. In memetics, memes, much like biology's genes, are informational units passed through generations of culture. However, unlike memetics, cultural selection theory moves past these isolated "memes" to encompass selection processes, including continuous and quantitative parameters. Two other approaches to cultural selection theory are social contagion and evolutionary epistemology.[2][3]
A good example of this theory is found by looking to the reason large businesses tend to grow larger. The answer includes the benefits of mass production and distribution, international advertising, and more funds for product development. These self-amplifying effects, known as the economies of scale, give rise to selection effects which have a quantitative nature, unlike the qualitative effects described by the theory of memetics.
On the whole, cultural selection theory embraces the inherent complexity of cultural change and vouches for a systemic, rather than deconstructionist, approach to analyzing the way a society's norms and values change.
The Cultural Selection theory faces many objections due to the lack of evidence to support the adaption of natural selection in the structural mechanisms of cultural systems. Major objections against the Cultural Selection Theory stem from Lamarckianism, Genotype-phenotype distinction, Common Hereditary Architecture, Biological Analogue for Cultural Units, and Environmental Interactions.[4] The Biological Analogue for Cultural Units breaks down into 3 subunits. The first is regarding strict analogues. This means that a biological unit (traits etc.) should be related to a cultural unit. This is a way for the old biological model and the modern cultural model to correlate and solidify the point. The second is regarding trait analogues. This means that some analogues are viewed the wrong way. Sometimes, one analogue is mistaken for another and often, the line between the two analogues is unclear and the distinction isn't as evident. The third is regarding virus analogue. This clarifies the point that the ability of the virus is different from the organism and the ability of both the virus and organisms should be looked at independently.[5]
Some have argued that in order for the Cultural Selection Theory to stand strong against objections, conclusive and explicit case studies are required. There needs to be empirical support to clarify the interaction between cultural systems and their environments. Crozier conducted a study on the acoustic adaptation of bird songs. This research study provided empirical evidence to support and strengthen the Cultural Selection Theory.[6]
Like Darwin's natural selection theory, cultural selection theory has three phases too; variation, reproduction and selection. Variation gives rise to a subject, reproduction is responsible for the spread and selection is based on the factors that control the spread.
Functionalism
Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviorism. Its core idea is that mental states (beliefs, desires, being in pain, etc.) are constituted solely by their functional role – that is, they are causal relations to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs.[1] Functionalism is a theoretical level between the physical implementation and behavioral output.[2] Therefore, it is different from its predecessors of Cartesian dualism (advocating independent mental and physical substances) and Skinnerian behaviorism and physicalism (declaring only physical substances) because it is only concerned with the effective functions of the brain, through its organization or its "software programs".
Since mental states are identified by a functional role, they are said to be realized on multiple levels; in other words, they are able to be manifested in various systems, even perhaps computers, so long as the system performs the appropriate functions. While computers are physical devices with electronic substrate that perform computations on inputs to give outputs, so brains are physical devices with neural substrate that perform computations on inputs which produce behaviors.
Machine-state functionalism
The broad position of "functionalism" can be articulated in many different varieties. The first formulation of a functionalist theory of mind was put forth by Hilary Putnam.[5][6] This formulation, which is now called machine-state functionalism, or just machine functionalism, was inspired by the analogies which Putnam and others noted between the mind and the theoretical "machines" or computers capable of computing any given algorithm which were developed by Alan Turing (called Turing machines).
In non-technical terms, a Turing machine can be visualized as an indefinitely and infinitely long tape divided into rectangles (the memory) with a box-shaped scanning device that sits over and scans one component of the memory at a time. Each unit is either blank (B) or has a1 written on it. These are the inputs to the machine. The possible outputs are:
Halt: Do nothing.
R: move one square to the right.
L: move one square to the left.
B: erase whatever is on the square.
1: erase whatever is on the square and print a '1.
An extremely simple example of a Turing machine which writes out the sequence '111' after scanning three blank squares and then stops as specified by the following machine table:
|
|
State One |
State Two |
State Three |
|
B |
write 1; stay in state 1 |
write 1; stay in state 2 |
write 1; stay in state 3 |
|
1 |
go right; go to state 2 |
go right; go to state 3 |
[halt] |
This table states that if the machine is in state one and scans a blank square (B), it will print a 1 and remain in state one. If it is in state one and reads a 1, it will move one square to the right and also go into state two. If it is in state two and reads a B, it will print a 1 and stay in state two. If it is in state two and reads a 1, it will move one square to the right and go into state three. If it is in state three and reads a B, it prints a 1 and remains in state three. Finally, if it is in state three and reads a 1, then it will stay in state three.
The essential point to consider here is the nature of the states of the Turing machine. Each state can be defined exclusively in terms of its relations to the other states as well as inputs and outputs. State one, for example, is simply the state in which the machine, if it reads a B, writes a 1 and stays in that state, and in which, if it reads a 1, it moves one square to the right and goes into a different state. This is the functional definition of state one; it is its causal role in the overall system. The details of how it accomplishes what it accomplishes and of its material constitution are completely irrelevant.
According to machine-state functionalism, the nature of a mental state is just like the nature of the automaton states described above. Just as state one simply is the state in which, given an input B, such and such happens, so being in pain is the state which disposes one to cry "ouch", become distracted, wonder what the cause is, and so forth.
Psycho functionalism
A second form of functionalism is based on the rejection of behaviorist theories in psychology and their replacement with empirical cognitive models of the mind. This view is most closely associated with Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn and has been labeled psychofunctionalism.
The fundamental idea of psychofunctionalism is that psychology is an irreducibly complex science and that the terms that we use to describe the entities and properties of the mind in our best psychological theories cannot be redefined in terms of simple behavioral dispositions, and further, that such a redefinition would not be desirable or salient were it achievable. Psychofunctionalists view psychology as employing the same sorts of irreducibly teleological or purposive explanations as the biological sciences. Thus, for example, the function or role of the heart is to pump blood, that of the kidney is to filter it and to maintain certain chemical balances and so on—this is what accounts for the purposes of scientific explanation and taxonomy. There may be an infinite variety of physical realizations for all of the mechanisms, but what is important is only their role in the overall biological theory. In an analogous manner, the role of mental states, such as belief and desire, is determined by the functional or causal role that is designated for them within our best scientific psychological theory. If some mental state which is postulated by folk psychology (e.g. hysteria) is determined not to have any fundamental role in cognitive psychological explanation, then that particular state may be considered not to exist . On the other hand, if it turns out that there are states which theoretical cognitive psychology posits as necessary for explanation of human behavior but which are not foreseen by ordinary folk psychological language, then these entities or states exist.
Analytic functionalism
A third form of functionalism is concerned with the meanings of theoretical terms in general. This view is most closely associated with David Lewis and is often referred to asanalytic functionalism or conceptual functionalism. The basic idea of analytic functionalism is that theoretical terms are implicitly defined by the theories in whose formulation they occur and not by intrinsic properties of the phonemes they comprise. In the case of ordinary language terms, such as "belief", "desire", or "hunger", the idea is that such terms get their meanings from our common-sense "folk psychological" theories about them, but that such conceptualizations are not sufficient to withstand the rigor imposed by materialistic theories of reality and causality. Such terms are subject to conceptual analyses which take something like the following form:
Mental state M is the state that is preconceived by P and causes Q.
For example, the state of pain is caused by sitting on a tack and causes loud cries, and higher order mental states of anger and resentment directed at the careless person who left a tack lying around. These sorts of functional definitions in terms of causal roles are claimed to be analytic and a priori truths about the submental states and the (largely fictitious) propositional attitudes they describe. Hence, its proponents are known as analytic or conceptual functionalists. The essential difference between analytic and psychofunctionalism is that the latter emphasizes the importance of laboratory observation and experimentation in the determination of which mental state terms and concepts are genuine and which functional identifications may be considered to be genuinely contingent and a posteriori identities. The former, on the other hand, claims that such identities are necessary and not subject to empirical scientific investigation.
Homuncular functionalism
Homuncular functionalism was developed largely by Daniel Dennett and has been advocated by William Lycan. It arose in response to the challenges that Ned Block's China Brain (a.k.a. Chinese nation) and John Searle's Chinese room thought experiments presented for the more traditional forms of functionalism (see below under "Criticism"). In attempting to overcome the conceptual difficulties that arose from the idea of a nation full of Chinese people wired together, each person working as a single neuron to produce in the wired-together whole the functional mental states of an individual mind, many functionalists simply bit the bullet, so to speak, and argued that such a Chinese nation would indeed possess all of the qualitative and intentional properties of a mind; i.e. it would become a sort of systemic or collective mind with propositional attitudes and other mental characteristics. Whatever the worth of this latter hypothesis, it was immediately objected that it entailed an unacceptable sort of mind-mind supervenience: the systemic mind which somehow emerged at the higher-level must necessarily supervene on the individual minds of each individual member of the Chinese nation, to stick to Block's formulation. But this would seem to put into serious doubt, if not directly contradict, the fundamental idea of the supervenience thesis: there can be no change in the mental realm without some change in the underlying physical substratum. This can be easily seen if we label the set of mental facts that occur at the higher-level M1 and the set of mental facts that occur at the lower-level M2. Given the transitivity of supervenience, if M1 supervenes on M2, and M2 supervenes on P (physical base), then M1 and M2 both supervene on P, even though they are (allegedly) totally different sets of mental facts.
Since mind-mind supervenience seemed to have become acceptable in functionalist circles, it seemed to some that the only way to resolve the puzzle was to postulate the existence of an entire hierarchical series of mind levels (analogous to homunculi) which became less and less sophisticated in terms of functional organization and physical composition all the way down to the level of the physico-mechanical neuron or group of neurons. The homunculi at each level, on this view, have authentic mental properties but become simpler and less intelligent as one works one's way down the hierarchy.
Mechanistic functionalism
Mechanistic functionalism, originally formulated and defended by Gualtiero Piccinini[7] and Carl Gillett[8][9] independently, augments previous functionalist accounts of mental states by maintaining that any psychological explanation must be rendered in mechanistic terms. That is, instead of mental states receiving a purely functional explanation in terms of their relations to other mental states, like those listed above, functions are seen as playing only a part—the other part being played by structures— of the explanation of a given mental state.
A mechanistic explanation[10] involves decomposing a given system, in this case a mental system, into its component physical parts, their activities or functions, and their combined organizational relations.[7] On this account the mind remains a functional system, but one that is understood mechanistically. This account remains a sort of functionalism because functional relations are still essential to mental states, but it is mechanistic because the functional relations are always manifestations of concrete structures—albeit structures understood at a certain level of abstraction. Functions are individuated and explained either in terms of the contributions they make to the given system[11] or in teleological terms. If the functions are understood in teleological terms, then they may be characterized either etiologically or non-etiologically.[12]
Mechanistic functionalism leads functionalism away from the traditional functionalist autonomy of psychology from neuroscience and towards integrating psychology and neuroscience.[13] By providing an applicable framework for merging traditional psychological models with neurological data, mechanistic functionalism may be understood as reconciling the functionalist theory of mind with neurological accounts of how the brain actually works. This is due to the fact that mechanistic explanations of function attempt to provide an account of how functional states (mental states) are physically realized through neurological mechanisms.
KEY TERMS
1.Ethnocentrism: is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture. Ethnocentric individuals judge other groups relative to their own ethnic group or culture, especially with concern for language, behavior, customs, and religion.
2.Cultural Adaptations : The theory of cultural adaptation refers to the process and time it takes a person to assimilate to a new culture. It is not always an easy transition. How would you feel if you could no longer read signs because they were in a different language?
3.Social Structure : On the macro scale, social structure is the system of socioeconomic stratification (e.g., the class structure), social institutions, or, other patterned relations between large social groups. On the meso scale, it is the structure of social network ties between individuals or organizations.
4. A symbol : is an object that represents, stands for, or suggests an idea, visual image, belief, action, or material entity. Symbols take the form of words, sounds, gestures, or visual images and are used to convey ideas and beliefs. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP".
5.Pluralism: Cultural pluralism, when small groups within a larger society maintain their unique cultural identities .
6.Ethnicity: An ethnic group or ethnicity is a socially defined category of people who identify with each other based on common ancestral, social, cultural or national experience.
7. Nationalism: Nationalism is a belief, creed or political ideology that involves an individual identifying with, or becoming attached to, one's nation.
8. Subculture: In sociology and cultural studies, a subcultureis a group of people within a culture that differentiates itself from the larger culture to which it belongs.
9. Enculturation : Enculturation is the process by which people learn the requirements of their surrounding culture and acquire values and behaviours appropriate or necessary in that culture.
10.Rituals : A ritual "is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence.
11.Inversion : The concept of inversion in postcolonial theory and subaltern studies refers to a discursive strategy which opposes or resists a dominant discourse by turning around its categories and re-enacting an a symmetrical relation with the terms the other way around.
12. Reinforcement : In behavioral psychology, reinforcement is a consequence that will strengthen an organism's future behavior whenever that behavior is preceded by a specific antecedent stimulus.
13. Culture Shock : Culture shock is the personal disorientation a person may feel when experiencing an unfamiliar way of life due to immigration or a visit to a new country, a move between social environments, or simply travel to another type of life.
14. Deviance: Deviance is any behavior that violates social norms, and is usually of sufficient severity to warrant disapproval from the majority of society. Deviance can be criminal or non‐criminal. The sociological discipline that deals with crime (behavior that violates laws) is criminology (also known as criminal justice).
Examples to consider
Festivals
The issues at stake in this paper namely concern the changes in the cultural identity representations of territorial landscapes as a result of increasing mobility of which tourism is but one of the numerous forms. The decision to focus on festivals and events is that: 1. Traditionally speaking, festivals and events are both the result and the signifiers of the cultural identity of spaces within which they occur; 2. In more recent years, they have increasingly been instrumented as a marketing tool in the development of tourist spaces as can be attested by the large body of tourist literature; 3. Beyond the emphasis placed by researchers on the economic impacts of events organization, there has been a growing interest in investigating their social impacts. 4. Limited attention has been paid to comparing the strategies of events organization, the way they intervene on cultural identity and the ensuing impacts on territorial development in general. Accordingly, it was decided that an investigation of regularly recurring events, which have become part of the territorial landscapes within which they occur, would be led to try and answer the following questions: 1. How do festivals and events contribute to staging the particularities of cultural identity within different spaces? 2. Are these festivals and events staged simultaneously to encourage greater mobilities to and within the given spaces and to devise better responses to the mobilities that have already modified them? 3. To what extent do festivals and events contribute to re‐interpreting cultural identity?
Sporting Events
Though some in academe would loathe to admit it, sports play a major role in American society. With this role, celebrity sport stars, such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, emerge. The year Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs, for instance, it seemed every lad in the St. Louis area donned a replica of his Cardinals jersey. Now that Big Mac is no longer a ball player—nor is he the single-season record holder for home runs, courtesy of Barry Bonds— St. Louis youths have gone on to wear replicas of the jerseys worn by the St. Louis Rams’ Kurt Warner, Marshal Faulk, and Isaac Bruce. By the time this review appears in print, in fact, the Rams may have won the 2002 Super Bowl, held in New Orleans, and new stars may have emerged. Superstars will always be a part of the hopes and dreams of both young and older people, but at the same time, the minute they no longer are able to perform at truly elite levels, they seem to disappear from the sporting landscape. This is one of the harsh realities addressed in Sport Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrity, edited by David L. Andrews and Steven J. Jackson. In their opening chapter, the editors point out that while celebrities apart from sports have been studied at length, celebrity athletes have not received as much academic attention, and thus the need for the book. The editors note that the text is “underpinned by the notion of the sport celebrity as a product of commercial culture, imbued with symbolic values, which seek to stimulate desire and identification among the consuming populace” (p. 9). Through predominantly critical approaches to scholarship, the contributors to Sport Stars advance some reasonable, contained arguments about sport celebrities. It should be noted initially, though, that while Andrews and Jackson introduce the purpose of the text in clear fashion, the nearly complete absence of communication studies cited in the opening chapter does not bode well for the interdisciplinary nature of sport sociology. In addressing the impact that sport celebrities have on both children and adults, for instance, the editors would have strengthened their chapter by discussing social comparison and learning theories, in addition to other relevant theories within the communication discipline. Limiting the discussion to primarily sociology and kinesiology articles, the editors self-impose a limit on the breadth of their chapter. One of the early chapters in Sport Stars focuses on basketball great Michael Jordan. While the chapter was written before his most recent return to the NBA, with the Washington Wizards, Mary McDonald and Andrews do a sound job of explaining the “conservative” nature of Jordan’s portrayal by American mass media. They note: By embodying the neo-liberal economics, neo-conservative politics, and moralistic cultural traditionalism of the New Right, the Nike-initiated Jordan narrative celebrated Reaganism’s racist vision of a color-blind American society. Within this mythical realm, personal perseverance was cast as the primary determinant of individual success and the socially inscribed experiences and identities associated with racism and exploitation were viewed as irrelevant remnants of the past. In true Reaganite fashion, Jordan’s humility, inner drive, personal responsibility, and moral righteousness were widely praised. (p. 26) The authors make a compelling argument that while many in the minority tend to position themselves a bit to the left of the political center, corporate America has in fact transmitted through Jordan conservative ideals. Moving to a less conservative individual, Dennis Rodman, authors Melisse Lafrance and Genevieve Rail advance the thesis that Rodman has served to satisfy racist white fantasies about the “savage” black athlete, with Rodman making frequent reference to the size of his penis and how Cindy Crawford allegedly stood in amazement at the size of his “bulge.” However, despite his penchant for outrageous public appearances, Rodman generated a great deal of revenue for not only himself, but also for the NBA. The authors explain: One has to question the fundamentals of Rodman’s subversive potential when over ten multinational corporations are involved in his alleged subversion. Most importantly, one has to query Rodman’s allegiances to multinational corporations such as Kodak, McDonald’s and Disney—multinationals renowned for their collusion with dominant discursive regimes of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Surely if these conventional corporations are willing to ‘risk’ their reputations on Rodman, it is precisely because there is very little substantive risk involved. (p. 47) As many social commentators have advised in the past, then, “follow the money.” When the press began to follow another subject of this text, Andre Agassi, they portrayed him as a prototype for the so-called “Generation X”; that is, the press considered him a “slacker” and frequent remarks were made regarding his work ethic, or a perceived lack thereof. Despite his obvious talent, it seemed, Agassi simply could not reach the finals of any major tournaments, and his attire on the court won him few friends among the more traditional tennis crowd. But Agassi managed to shift his portrayal as his career began to take shape. Following wrist surgery, he forged ahead, winning some major tournaments and leading his detractors to label him a “savior” for the slackers of Generation X. Agassi, it seemed, “lifted” himself out of a mediated downward spiral, and the press framed him much differently than it did early in his career. Tiger Woods has enjoyed positive portrayals by Western media outlets, and it was interesting to go back and read about his “Hello World” campaign and the startling age and championship statistics within it. C.L. Cole and Andrews opine that Nike has marketed Woods in at least two ways: (1) as a great golfer, and (2) as a black golfer, thus allowing the company to enhance its reputation for cultural diversity. A similar argument can be made for the emergence of Venus and Serena Williams, although negative aspects of the “race card” have been played with both Woods and the tennis stars. Black comedians have joked that the more successful Woods became in professional golf, the “whiter” he seemed to become (i.e., the focus on his mother and not his father). With respect to Venus Williams, the book offers a reminder of how a bump between two players exchanging sides of the court between games can lead to allegations of racism and bigotry toward athletes in the minority. One of the most compelling stories in this text concerns soccer great Diego Maradona. In this chapter, Eduardo P. Archetti brings to light the term “pibes,” which refers broadly to talented young athletes. Archetti argues that despite Maradona’s suspensions for illicit drug use, many fans will always forgive this “pibe” for the indiscretions of perceived youth; in fact, some fans will go as far as feeling sorry for the gifted player no matter what kind of trouble he finds. This discussion of Maradona, as well as other athletes such as Wayne Gretzky, Hideo Nomo, and Martina Hingis, as well as several European football players, offers an excellent review of globalization issues within the world of sports. Sport Stars would be a useful supplementary text in a sport sociology course, at the undergraduate or graduate level. Readers of this text would be advised to understand the terminology common to critical scholarship, in order to gain as much insight from the text as possible. On the whole, the book is a solid contribution to the field, and it is also a book on which other scholars might expand.
Cultural identity is the identity or feeling of belonging to, as part of the self-conception and self-perception to nationality,ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality and any kind of social group that have its own distinct culture, in this way that cultural identity is both characteristic of the individual but also to the culturally identical group that has its members sharing the same cultural identity.[1] Cultural identity is similar to and overlaps with identity politics. Identity politics are political arguments that focus upon the interest and perspectives of groups with which people identify. Identity politics includes the ways in which people's politics may be shaped by aspects of their identity through loosely correlated social organizations. Examples include social organizations based on race, class, religion, gender,gender identity, ethnicity, ideology, nation, sexual orientation, culture, information preference, history, musical or literary preference, medical conditions, professions or hobbies. Not all members of any given group are necessarily involved in identity politics.
The term identity politics and movements linked to it came into being during the latter part of the 20th century. It can most notably be found in class movements, feminist movements, gay and lesbian movements, disability movements, ethnic movements and post colonial movements. Identity politics is open to wide debate and critique.[1] Minority influence is a central component of identity politics. Minority influence is a form of social influence whereby a majority is influenced by the beliefs or behavior of a minority. Unlike other forms of influence this usually involves a personal shift in private opinion. This personal shift in opinion is called conversion.
Socializing agents in the 21st Century
Schools:Schools socialize children by teaching them their formal curriculum but also a hidden curriculum. The formal curriculum is the “three Rs”: reading, writing, and arithmetic. But there is also a hidden curriculum that schools impart, and that is the cultural values of the society in which the schools are found.Peers:
When you were a 16-year-old, how many times did you complain to your parent(s), “All of my friends are [doing so and so]. Why can’t I? It isn’t fair!” As this all-too-common example indicates, our friends play a very important role in our lives. This is especially true during adolescence, when peers influence our tastes in music, clothes, and so many other aspects of our lives, as the now common image of the teenager always on a cell phone reminds us. But friends are important during other parts of the life course as well. We rely on them for fun, for emotional comfort and support, and for companionship.The Mass Media:The mass media are another agent of socialization. Television shows, movies, popular music, magazines, Web sites, and other aspects of the mass media influence our political views; our tastes in popular culture; our views of women, people of color, and gays; and many other beliefs and practices.Religion:Although religion is arguably less important in people’s lives now than it was a few generations ago, it still continues to exert considerable influence on our beliefs, values, and behaviors.New media are becoming important agents of political socialization because they host a great deal of political content and require the active engagement of users. Both news media and entertainment media provide depictions that influence political socialization, such as models of government leaders and citizen action.Media Interactions:People’s interactions with media are increasingly important to the process of political socialization. The explosion in communication technologies has resulted in people communicating less via face-to-face interactions with family members and peers and more through technological intermediaries, such as the Internet, cell phones, and personal digital devices. Even teachers find it increasingly difficult to compete with the communications technologies that command their students’ attention.The Internet is a potentially powerful agent of political socialization because of the vast amount of political information available online and the fact that people actively engage with online platforms. Not only do people get information about government from news sites and blogs, they can post responses to stories and debate others through discussion forums. They also can use online media to actively take part in political processes, such as election campaigns.Young people, in particular, use the Internet to learn about and participate in politics, although older people are going online for politics at an increasing rate. Evidence suggests that young people are developing their political identities online as they learn about the differences between candidates and political parties and acquire information about issues and political events. They use social media to create collaborative online communities that organize for political causes, lobby government, and campaign for candidates. All of these activities contribute to the socialization of engaged citizens.Media Depictions:Depictions of socialization and learning experiences abound in media. News and entertainment media are especially powerful as they provide depictions that embody the beliefs and values that make up American political culture. Core American values are crucial elements of a “good story,” as they resonate with the public. Both egalitarianism and individualism are celebrated in stories in which lone, ordinary people are able to defeat powerful economic and political forces aligned against them.News Media:News media provide frequent depictions of political role models, including government leaders and citizens who are actively involved in community affairs. Politicians are often portrayed negatively, which can cause people to distrust leaders and lose faith in government. A prominent media frame portrays political leaders as constantly at odds and unable to reach civil agreement or compromise. This media frame is reinforced during elections when candidates attack their opponents unrelentingly in their stump speeches and ads.Entertainment Media:Entertainment media provide depictions of core American values central to the political socialization process. Individualism is portrayed frequently in television dramas and comedies that tell stories of average citizens taking on the political and economic systems. Politicians can use entertainment media to convey an image of themselves embodying American values. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has cultivated an image of rugged individualism and self-reliance. She reinforced this image through the reality television program Sarah Palin’s Alaska.Depictions can take the form of fictional dramas, such as Friday Night Lights’ portrayal of family life and the politics of sports in rural Texas, and sitcoms, or the offbeat view of parent-child relationships shown in Modern Family. Reality television programs such as Kate Plus 8 and Keeping Up with the Kardashians offer insights into family socialization that can invite commentary and criticism from viewers.Children’s literature and movies feature many stoic, individualist characters. The classic film The Wizard of Oz (1939) has been called a tale of self-reliance. Dorothy, dropped from Kansas into Oz by a tornado, is advised that, to be able to return home, she should go to the Emerald City and appeal to the superior power, the Wizard of Oz. On the way there, she meets up with a Scarecrow desiring a brain, a Tin Man in search of a heart, and a Cowardly Lion in need of courage. The four meet a fearsome Wizard who orders them to bring back the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West. After a series of adventures, they return victorious to the Emerald City, only to find that the Wizard is nothing but a small man behind a curtain who has created an illusion of the “great and powerful Oz.” It turns out, he explains, that he was merely a lost itinerant balloonist who, upon descending from the clouds, was declared a Wizard by the credulous people. Dorothy and her friends learn that they each had the power they sought all along.Teachers seeking to instill democratic and character values in their students have capitalized on the popularity of Harry Potter, the protagonist wizard in J. K. Rowling’s popular books. Harry has become a hero to children (and adults) who have read about his exploits. He embodies values of individualism and bravery tempered with humility. Young people can relate to Harry because in the world of the Muggles (those without magical powers), he is average and imperfect. Even among the wizards, he is not the smartest or the most talented. Yet he is able to handle extraordinary situations with bravery and skill. Harry’s heroism provides a civics lesson for readers because it illustrates the balance between the democratic values of individualism and egalitarianism. While Harry realizes that his magic powers give him the ability to distinguish himself, he chooses to include others—Hermione Granger, Ron and Ginny Weasley, and Neville Longbottom—as he fights against evil. Further, Harry does not seek public recognition for his acts of heroism.Jeffrey A. Becker, “Heroism and the Political Morality of Democracy in Harry Potter,” paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, MA, August 29–September 1, 2002.MTV’s series The Real World, which first aired in 1991, provides an intriguing look at the socialization experiences of groups of twentysomething strangers who live together for a year. The program provides insights into the effects of peers on the development of the housemates’ attitudes and behaviors. In the course of learning to adapt to new surroundings, live as a group, and find jobs, cast members deal with political issues. The San Francisco season attracted national media attention because it featured the house members grappling with the issue of HIV/AIDS when roommate Pedro, who worked as an AIDS educator and counselor, tested positive for the disease. Depictions related to subgroup relations and multiculturalism abound on The Real World. Cast members come from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, which is a source of tension in the house. Almost every season involves a black male who stereotypically is alienated and confrontational. Most of the time, this character is shown talking about the societal injustices he suffers and picking fights with other house members. These confrontations force cast members to take sides and voice their opinions about race.Media Consequences:Parents and educators express concerns that socialization of young people via mass media contributes to a citizenry that is alienated from politics and distrusts government. Many of the media messages young people receive about politics are negative. They spend little time discussing these messages with other people or discovering the ways in which they can actively engage the political world. Alternatively, young people today are exposed to much more political media content than any prior generation. This exposure can contribute to greater awareness of government and opportunities for civic action. Digital communication technologies offer people increased opportunities for taking part in politics via media, such as posting to a blog or participating in a “tweetup,” using the microblogging platform Twitter to inform people about a political event taking place online or offline.Scandal Coverage:The influence of mass media on children’s attitudes toward leaders and government has become more negative over time, as media messages focus more on personal scandals and institutional dysfunction. For the most part, young children’s initial views of politics tend to be positive. Studies conducted in the 1960s showed that children idealized the president. They considered him a benevolent leader, someone who did good things for the country and would help a child personally. Even during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, which involved a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and a cover-up by President Richard Nixon, children held strong, positive feelings about the office of the president. Children learned about President Nixon’s impeachment primarily from their parents and teachers, and not from the mass media. Media accounts focused on the political aspects of the Nixon impeachment, which went over the heads of most children. Many parents felt it was important to instill positive views of government in their children during this period of political upheaval.The situation was much different in the 1990s when children learned about President Bill Clinton’s involvement with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, predominantly from nonstop, graphic television coverage that focused on Clinton’s personal life. Young children became disillusioned with President Clinton because they felt he had not told the truth. For the first time, children’s views of the sitting president, as well as their opinions about the institution of the presidency, were significantly more negative than those of their parents. Fewer children aspired to become president when they grew up.Diana Owen and Jack Dennis, “Kids and the Presidency: Assessing Clinton’s Legacy,” The Public Perspective 10, no. 3 (April–May 1999): 41–44.Hollywood and Washington:The Payne Fund studies of motion pictures and youth, conducted between 1929 and 1933, provide early evidence that film can be a powerful agent of socialization. The studies found that people developed attitudes toward racial and ethnic groups, war, and crime based on their exposure to popular films. Audience members who saw the controversial film Birth of a Nation believed that blacks in the post–Civil War era were uncivilized and dangerous. Children who watched their favorite movie stars, such as James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, playing criminals on screen imitated their behavior patterns by acting up in school.Garth Jowett, Ian C. Jarvic, and Kathy H. Fuller, Children and the Movies (New York: Cambridge, 1996).Recognizing that film has the power to impart political messages to the public, officials in Washington have forged connections with the filmmaking community in Hollywood. The Hollywood-Washington connection dates back to the 1930s when President Herbert Hoover befriended MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, whose studio produced many of the most popular films of the era. President Franklin D. Roosevelt realized that films could influence public perceptions of the Great Depression and the United States’ involvement in World War II. Roosevelt encouraged filmmakers to make movies with optimistic messages that would generate support for government action. The defeatist ending of director John Ford’s Oscar-winning film The Grapes of Wrath (1940), based on the John Steinbeck novel, was changed to depict the Joad family persevering despite terrible hardship, due to their inner strength. In addition to prowar documentaries such as Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, Roosevelt requested that studio heads make popular films in support of the war effort. Films such as Confessions of a Nazi Spy depicted Germany as a nation out to destroy the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Anti-German messages were delivered in popular series films such as Tarzan Triumphs (1943), in which Tarzan and Cheetah fight Nazis who parachute into their jungle paradise.Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War (New York: Free Press, 1987).Immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, representatives of Hollywood’s major studios, television networks, trade organizations, and the creative community met with senior White House officials to discuss how the entertainment community could help in the war against terror by emphasizing that the 9/11 attacks were an affront to civilization.“Hollywood Considers Role in War Effort,” CNN, November 12, 2001, http://www.cnn.com. Hollywood sought to define its political role while at the same time protecting its future at the box office. The first inclination was to feature comedy and fantasy fare that would be uplifting and noncontroversial. Films featuring terrorist themes—such as the Jennifer Lopez vehicle Tick Tock, which is about terrorists planting bombs in Los Angeles shopping malls, and Nose Bleed, a Jackie Chan movie about a window washer who discovers a plan to blow up the World Trade Center—were shelved. Images of the Twin Towers were removed from films set for release, such as Spiderman. However, video rentals of films featuring dramatic action and terrorist plots increased by 30 percent in the months directly following the attacks, which gave Hollywood an indication that the public would be receptive to more violent offerings.“Commercial Response to September 11,” NewsHour Online, October 24, 2001, http://www.pbs.org/newshour. War films with a patriotic theme, such as Behind Enemy Lines and The Last Castle, proved to be highly popular, and coincidentally, reinforced the messages suggested by the White House delegation.KEY TAKEAWAYS:Mass media have become compelling agencies of political learning, as young people spend a tremendous amount of time being exposed to television, the Internet, video games, and other media rather than interacting with other people. Media messages about politics are often negative, which may lead young people to become alienated from the political process. Young people, in particular, may learn a good deal about politics from entertainment and popular media.
Semiotics: The study of meaning making
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies; not to be confused with the Saussurean tradition called semiology) is the study of meaning-making, the philosophical theory of signs and symbols.[1] This includes the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field oflinguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. The Semiotic Tradition explores the study of signs and symbols as a significant part of communications. As different from linguistics, however, semiotics also studies non-linguisticsign systems. Semiotics often is divided into three branches:
Semantics: relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their signified denotata, or meaning
Syntactics: relations among or between signs in formal structures
Pragmatics: relation between signs and sign-using agents or interpreters
Semiotics frequently is seen as having important anthropological dimensions; for example, Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon may be studied as communication.[2] Some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science, however. They examine areas belonging also to the life sciences – such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics (including zoosemiotics).
Syntactics is the branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and symbols.[3] More precisely, syntactics deals with the "rules that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences".[4]
Charles Morris adds that semantics deals with the relation of signs to their designata and the objects that they may or do denote; and, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena that occur in the functioning of signs.
Semioticians classify signs or sign systems in relation to the way they are transmitted (see modality). This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of codes that may be the individual sounds or letters that humans use to form words, the body movements they make to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothes they wear. To coin a word to refer to a thing (see lexical words), the community must agree on a simple meaning (a denotative meaning) within their language, but that word can transmit that meaning only within the language's grammatical structures and codes (see syntax and semantics). Codes also represent the values of the culture, and are able to add new shades of connotation to every aspect of life.
To explain the relationship between semiotics and communication studies, communication is defined as the process of transferring data and-or meaning from a source to a receiver. Hence, communication theorists construct models based on codes, media, and contexts to explain the biology, psychology, and mechanics involved. Both disciplines also recognize that the technical process cannot be separated from the fact that the receiver must decode the data, i.e., be able to distinguish the data as salient, and make meaning out of it. This implies that there is a necessary overlap between semiotics and communication. Indeed, many of the concepts are shared, although in each field the emphasis is different. In Messages and Meanings: An Introduction to Semiotics, Marcel Danesi (1994) suggested that semioticians' priorities were to study signification first, and communication second. A more extreme view is offered by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1987; trans. 1990: 16), who, as a musicologist, considered the theoretical study of communication irrelevant to his application of semiotics.
Semiotics differs from linguistics in that it generalizes the definition of a sign to encompass signs in any medium or sensory modality. Thus it broadens the range of sign systems and sign relations, and extends the definition of language in what amounts to its widest analogical or metaphorical sense.
Peirce's definition of the term "semiotic" as the study of necessary features of signs also has the effect of distinguishing the discipline from linguistics as the study of contingent features that the world's languages happen to have acquired in the course of their evolutions.
From a subjective standpoint, perhaps more difficult is the distinction between semiotics and the philosophy of language. In a sense, the difference lies between separate traditions rather than subjects. Different authors have called themselves "philosopher of language" or "semiotician". This difference does not match the separation betweenanalytic and continental philosophy.
On a closer look, there may be found some differences regarding subjects. Philosophy of language pays more attention to natural languages or to languages in general, while semiotics is deeply concerned with non-linguistic signification. Philosophy of language also bears connections to linguistics, while semiotics might appear closer to some of thehumanities (including literary theory) and to cultural anthropology.
Semiosis or semeiosis is the process that forms meaning from any organism's apprehension of the world through signs. Scholars who have talked about semiosis in their sub-theories of semiotics include C. S. Peirce, John Deely, and Umberto Eco. Cognitive semiotics is combining methods and theories developed in the disciplines of cognitive methods and theories developed in semiotics and the humanities, with providing new information into human signification and its manifestation in cultural practices. The research on cognitive semiotics brings together semiotics from linguistics, cognitive science, and related disciplines on a common meta-theoretical platform of concepts, methods, and shared data.
Cognitive semiotics may also be seen as the study of meaning-making by employing and integrating methods and theories developed in the cognitive sciences. This involves conceptual and textual analysis as well as experimental investigations. Cognitive semiotics initially was developed at the Center for Semiotics at Aarhus University (Denmark), with an important connection with the Center of Functionally Integrated Neuroscience (CFIN) at Aarhus Hospital. Amongst the prominent cognitive semioticians are Per Aage Brandt, Svend Østergaard, Peer Bundgård, Frederik Stjernfelt, Mikkel Wallentin, Kristian Tylén, Riccardo Fusaroli, and Jordan Zlatev. Zlatev later in co-operation with Göran Sonesson established CCS (Center for Cognitive Semiotics) at Lund University, Sweden.
Applications of semiotics include:
It represents a methodology for the analysis of "texts" regardless of the medium in which it is presented. For these purposes, "text" is any message preserved in a form whose existence is independent of both sender and receiver;
It may improve ergonomic design in situations where it is important to ensure that human beings are able to interact more effectively with their environments, whether it be on a large scale, as in architecture, or on a small scale, such as the configuration of instrumentation for human use.
In some countries, its role is limited to literary criticism and an appreciation of audio and visual media, but this narrow focus may inhibit a more general study of the social and political forces shaping how different media are used and their dynamic status within modern culture. Issues of technological determinism in the choice of media and the design of communication strategies assume new importance in this age of mass media.
Publication of research is both in dedicated journals such as Sign Systems Studies, established by Yuri Lotman and published by Tartu University Press; Semiotica, founded byThomas A. Sebeok and published by Mouton de Gruyter; Zeitschrift für Semiotik; European Journal of Semiotics; Versus (founded and directed by Umberto Eco), et al.; The American Journal of Semiotics; and as articles accepted in periodicals of other disciplines, especially journals oriented toward philosophy and cultural criticism.
The major semiotic book series "Semiotics, Communication, Cognition", published by De Gruyter Mouton (series editors Paul Cobley and Kalevi Kull) replaces the former "Approaches to Semiotics" (more than 120 volumes) and "Approaches to Applied Semiotics" (series editor Thomas A. Sebeok). Since 1980 the Semiotic Society of America has produced an annual conference series: Semiotics: The Proceedings of the Semiotic Society of America.
Semiotics has sprouted a number of subfields, including, but not limited to, the following:
Biosemiotics – the study of semiotic processes at all levels of biology, or a semiotic study of living systems (e.g., Copenhagen–Tartu School).
Cognitive semiotics – the study of meaning-making by employing and integrating methods and theories developed in the cognitive sciences. This involves conceptual and textual analysis as well as experimental investigations. Cognitive semiotics initially was developed at the Center for Semiotics at Aarhus University (Denmark), with an important connection with the Center of Functionally Integrated Neuroscience (CFIN) at Aarhus Hospital. Amongst the prominent cognitive semioticians are Per Aage Brandt, Svend Østergaard, Peer Bundgård, Frederik Stjernfelt, Mikkel Wallentin, Kristian Tylén, Riccardo Fusaroli, and Jordan Zlatev. Zlatev later in co-operation with Göran Sonesson established the Center for Cognitive Semiotics (CCS) at Lund University, Sweden.
Computational semiotics – attempts to engineer the process of semiosis, say in the study of and design for Human-Computer Interaction or to mimic aspects of humancognition through artificial intelligence and knowledge representation. See also Cybercognition.
Cultural and literary semiotics – examines the literary world, the visual media, the mass media, and advertising in the work of writers such as Roland Barthes, Marcel Danesi, and Yuri Lotman (e.g., Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School).
Cybersemiotics – built on two already-generated interdisciplinary approaches: cybernetics and systems theory including information theory and science, and Peircean semiotics including phenomenology and pragmatic aspects of linguistics, attempts to make the two interdisciplinary paradigms – both going beyond mechanistic and pure constructivistic ideas – complement each other in a common framework. Søren Brier.[36]
Design semiotics or product semiotics – the study of the use of signs in the design of physical products; introduced by Martin Krampen, a o, and in a practitioner-oriented version by Rune Monö while teaching industrial design at the Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden
Film semiotics – the study of the various codes and signs of film and how they are understood; see Christian Metz
Gregorian chant semiology is a current avenue of palaeographical research in Gregorian chant which is revising the Solesmes school of interpretation.
Law and Semiotics – one of the more accomplished publications in this field is the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, published by International Association for the Semiotics of Law.
Music semiology – "There are strong arguments that music inhabits a semiological realm which, on both ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels, has developmental priority over verbal language." (Middleton 1990, p. 172) See Nattiez (1976, 1987, 1989), Stefani (1973, 1986), Baroni (1983), and Semiotica (66: 1–3 (1987)).
Organisational semiotics – the study of semiotic processes in organizations (with strong ties to Computational semiotics and Human-Computer Interaction)
Social semiotics – expands the interpretable semiotic landscape to include all cultural codes, such as in slang, fashion, and advertising (See Roland Barthes, Michael Halliday,Bob Hodge, and Christian Metz)
Structuralism and post-structuralism in the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, etc.
Theatre semiotics – extends or adapts semiotics onstage; key theoricians include Keir Elam
Visual semiotics – analyses visual signs; prominent modern founders to this branch are Groupe µ and Göran Sonesson (see also visual rhetoric)
Pictorial semiotics[edit]
Pictorial semiotics[38] is intimately connected to art history and theory. It goes beyond them both in at least one fundamental way, however. While art history has limited its visual analysis to a small number of pictures that qualify as "works of art", pictorial semiotics focuses on the properties of pictures general sense. It has also focused on how the artistic conventions of images can be interpreted through pictorial codes. Pictorial codes are the way in which viewers of pictorial representations seem to automatically decipher the artistic conventions of images by being unconsciously familiar with them.[39]
According to Göran Sonesson, a Swedish semiotician, pictures can be analyzed by three models: the narrative model, which concentrates on the relationship between pictures and time in a chronological manner as in a comic strip; the rhetoric model, which compares pictures with different devices as in a metaphor; and the laokoon (or laocoon) model which considers the limits and constraints of pictorial expressions by comparing textual mediums that utilize time with visual mediums that utilize space.[40]
The break from traditional art history and theory—as well as from other major streams of semiotic analysis—leaves open a wide variety of possibilities for pictorial semiotics. Some influences have been drawn from phenomenological analysis, cognitive psychology, structuralist and cognitivist linguistics, and visual anthropology and sociology.
Semiotics of food[edit]
Food has been one traditional topic of choice in relating semiotic theory because it is extremely accessible and easily relatable to the average individual’s life.[41]
Food is said to be semiotic because it transforms meaning with preparation. Food that is eaten by a wild animal raw from a carcass is obviously different in meaning when compared to a food that is prepared by humans in a kitchen to represent a cultural dish.[41]
Food also may be said to be symbolic of certain social codes. “If food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across boundaries”.[42]
Food is a semiotic regardless of how it is prepared. Whether food is prepared with precision in a fine dining restaurant, picked from a dumpster, plucked, devoured, or even consumed by a wild animal, meaning always may be extracted from the way a certain food has been prepared and the context in which it is served.
Semiotics and globalization[edit]
Studies have shown that semiotics may make or break a brand. Culture codes strongly influence whether a population likes or dislikes a brand’s marketing, especially internationally. If the company is unaware of a culture’s codes, it runs the risk of failing in its marketing. Globalization has caused the development of a global consumer culture where products have similar associations, whether positive or negative, across numerous markets.[43]
Mistranslations may lead to instances of Engrish or Chinglish, terms for unintentionally humorous cross-cultural slogans intended to be understood in English. This may be caused by a sign that, in Peirce's terms, mistakenly indexes or symbolizes something in one culture, that it does not in another.[44] In other words, it creates a connotation that is culturally-bound, and that violates some culture code. Theorists who have studied humor such as Schopenhauer suggest that contradiction or incongruity creates absurdity and therefore, humor.[45] Violating a culture code creates this construct of ridiculousness for the culture that owns the code. Intentional humor also may fail cross-culturally because jokes are not on code for the receiving culture.[46]
A good example of branding according to cultural code is Disney’s international theme park business. For example, Disney fits well with Japan's cultural code because the Japanese value “cuteness”, politeness, and gift giving as part of their culture code; Tokyo Disneyland sells the most souvenirs of any Disney theme park. In contrast, Disneyland Paris failed when it launched as Euro Disney because the company did not research the codes underlying European culture. Its storybook retelling of European folktales was taken as elitist and insulting, and the strict appearance standards that it had for employees resulted in discrimination lawsuits in France.[47] Disney souvenirs were perceived as cheap trinkets. The park was a financial failure because its code violated the expectations of European culture in ways that were offensive.[48]
On the other hand, some researchers have suggested that it is possible to successfully pass a sign perceived as a cultural icon, such as the Coca-Cola or McDonald's logos, from one culture to another. This may be accomplished if the sign is migrated from a more economically-developed to a less developed culture.[48] The intentional association of a product with another culture is called Foreign Consumer Culture Positioning (FCCP). Products also may be marketed using global trends or culture codes, for example, saving time in a busy world; but even these may be fine-tuned for specific cultures.[43]
Research also found that, as airline industry brandings grow and become more international, their logos become more symbolic and less iconic. The iconicity and symbolism of a sign depends on the cultural convention and, are on that ground in relation with each other. If the cultural convention has greater influence on the sign, the signs get more symbolic value.[49]
Hipster Beards
The hipster beard is a facial hairstyle that achieved popularity among the hipster subculture in late 2005 and early 2006. These beards can take a number of different forms, but, like most hipster fashion, they blur the line between an ironic celebration of unattractiveness and an attempt to impress by looking good.In the early 20th century, a linguist called Ferdinand de Saussure tried to answer a simple question: how do signs make meaning? Why does this beard totally say “hipster”?
Saussure said that every sign is divided into two parts: the signifier (the face-fur itself), and the signified (the idea of a pretentious PBR-drinker who lives in Bushwick)
He also said signs are arbitrary. In other words, there’s nothing inherent about a beard that means hipster – the signifier could just as easily have been wearing a blanket, or having blue hair.
And signs aren’t simply labels for real things – they actually constitute reality. Japan has different signs for hipster than bushy beards. And the concept of hipster those signs create is different, too.
A key insight of Saussure is that signs make meaning through difference. A bushy beard only means “hipster” because we have shaved faces to compare them to.
Each sign we use is chosen from what Saussure called a paradigm of available options: for example, the full hipster-beard, mutton-chops, moustache, clean-shaven, braided, etc.
Once we’ve chosen a sign, we arrange it with other choices – tatts, a vintage shirt, a digital watch, etc – in an arrangement called a syntagm. Another example of a syntagm is this sentence.
Combining signs into different syntagms can radically change the meaning – a beard, some normcore glasses, and a couple of monitors makes a sysadmin, not a hipster.
This invisible structure of paradigm and syntagm is how we make meaning – which is why Saussure’s ideas are called structuralism. (Take a swig of PBR, we are nearly through Part 1!)
In the 50s and 60s, structuralism became a popular tool for analysing culture (not as popular as beards). Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used it to understand kinships and myth, while Roland Barthes applied it to photos and fashion.
But by the 1970s, some French thinkers decided structuralism was, like, totally over (even though many of them were structuralists themselves.) Post-structuralism was born!
Why did post-structuralists turn away from structuralism? Did it become too mainstream? Nope, there were some big flaws and gaps in its explanation of how signs make meaning.
One problem was that signs don’t produce one fixed meaning. Zach’s beard evokes not only “hipster” but “gay bear”, “hobo”, “Hagrid” … and so on.
One of the leading post-structuralists, Jacques Derrida, described meaning as being constantly “deferred”. Signifiers don’t point to an objective meaning – they just refer to other signs, which in turn point to yet other signs.
Derrida also criticised the tendency of structuralists to think in binary oppositions, like beard/clean-shaven. He urged us to “deconstruct” these pairs, which he called “violent hierarchies”, by upturning them and showing the interplay between them.
Meanwhile, Michel Foucault showed how meanings change over time, creating power relationships and moulding our identities. How was the bearded hipster invented? Who benefits from its invention? How does hipsterism shape how we think and act?
Another post-structuralist, Jean Baudrillard, said that signs like hipster beards don’t actually refer to real things any more. In our high-tech world, signs construct their own reality made up entirely of other signs, which he called “hyperreality”.
Judith Butler used post-structuralist ideas to think about gender, arguing that – like signs – gender doesn’t have a fixed essence. Rather, she famously said, gender is performed.
Similarly, queer theorists used post-structuralism to reject the idea of being either gay or straight. Rather, they invite us to embrace sexual identity in all its glittery diversity.
More recently, the field of animal studies is deconstructing the split between humans and animals – a “violent hierarchy” in which humans are dominant.
Post-structuralism – like the bearded hipster – has plenty of haters. And to be fair, it does have an annoying habit of being intentionally obscure. But it’s had an undeniable impact on some important social and political issues.
Some say it’s a fad whose time has passed. Others believe its insights will stick around for a long time to come, like a trusty old penny-farthing or a collection of early 80s Italo-disco on vinyl. What do you think?
Car colors
The car colours silver, white, grey, black, gold, beige, and several shades of brown, while each having experienced the intermittent prominence typical of non-neutrals, are likewise subject to fashion's more general fluctuations. However, perennial popularity for neutrals is assured based simply on their inherent plainness.
Neutral colours are popular on cars for many reasons. The vast majority of drivers expect to get years of use from one car, and so take care in choosing its colour (among its many other attributes). Conventional wisdom has long considered neutral colours to be more tasteful, timeless, flattering, and fool-proof than bright colours; this wisdom also maintains that a neutral colour can be acceptably paired with any other conceivable colour. While many people disregard much of this advice when it comes to clothing, they are more likely to follow it where important purchases are concerned, as it is much easier and less expensive to change an unfortunate shirt than it is to have a blindingly ugly car repainted a tolerable colour. Furthermore, unlike "faddish" colours, neutral colours do not run the risk of falling embarrassingly out of style far before the vehicle itself has become decrepit. Lastly, some drivers, observing conventional beliefs about colours, choose neutral coloured cars because they fear that a non-neutral car could "clash" unpleasantly against their house, with other cars, with particular outfits while driving, or even with the particular driver's skin tone.
Perhaps popularity itself helps propel certain colours' continued ubiquity. Dominant car colours tend to remain dominant, as most new cars are bought straight from the car lot, where dealers preferentially stock the colours that sell so reliably. Rental car companies also prefer neutral coloured cars and stock their fleets accordingly, likely reasoning that their customers will approve of, or at least be able to ignore, neutral colours.
Software Design
Semiotic Engineering[1][2] was originally proposed by Clarisse De Souza as a semiotic approach to designing user interface languages. Over the years, with research done at the Department of Informatics of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, it evolved into a semiotic theory of human-computer interaction (HCI).[3][4]
Semiotic Engineering views HCI as computer-mediated communication between designers and users at interaction time. The system speaks for its designers in various types of conversations specified at design time. These conversations communicate the designers' understanding of who the users are, what they know the users want or need to do, in which preferred ways, and why. The designers' message to users includes even the interactive language in which users will have to communicate back with the system in order to achieve their specific goals. So, the process is in fact one of communication about communication, or metacommunication.
Obstacles to Inter-Cultural Communication and Collaboration
Trompenaars' Model of National Culture Differences is a framework for cross-cultural communication applied to general business and management, developed by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner.[1][2] This involved a large-scale survey of 8,841 managers and organization employees from 43 countries.[3]
This model of national culture differences has seven dimensions. There are five orientations covering the ways in which human beings deal with each other, one which deals with time, and one which deals with the environment.
Universalism vs. Particularism
Universalism is the belief that ideas and practices can be applied everywhere without modification, while particularism is the belief that circumstances dictate how ideas and practices should be applied. It asks the question, What is more important, rules or relationships?Cultures with high universalism see one reality and focus on formal rules. Business meetings are characterized by rational, professional arguments with a "get down to business" attitude. Trompenaars research found there was high universalism in countries like the United States, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, and Sweden. Cultures with high particularism see reality as more subjective and place a greater emphasis on relationships. It is important to get to know the people one is doing business with during meetings in a particularist environment. Someone from a universalist culture would be wise not to dismiss personal meanderings or irrelevancies are mere small talk during such business meetings. Countries that have high particularism include Venezuela, Indonesia, China, South Korea, and the former Soviet Union.[4]
Individualism vs. Communitarianism
Individualism refers to people regarding themselves as individuals, while communitarianism refers to people regarding themselves as part of a group. Trompenaars research yielded some interesting results and suggested that cultures may change more quickly that many people realize. It may not be surprising to see a country like the United States with high individualism, but Mexico and the former communist countries of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union were also found to be individualistic in Trompenaars research. In Mexico, the shift from a previously communitarian culture could be explained with its membership in NAFTA and involvement in the global economy. This contrasts withHofstede's earlier research, which found these countries to be collectivist, and shows the dynamic and complex nature of culture. Countries with high communitarianism include Germany, China, France, Japan, and Singapore.[5]
Neutral vs. Emotional
A neutral culture is a culture in which emotions are held in check whereas an emotional culture is a culture in which emotions are expressed openly and naturally. Neutral cultures that come rapidly to mind are those of the Japanese and British. Some examples of high emotional cultures are the Netherlands, Mexico, and Spain. In emotional cultures, people often smile, talk loudly when excited, and greet each other with enthusiasm. So, when people from neutral culture are doing business in an emotional culture they should be ready for a potentially animated and boisterous meeting and should try to respond warmly. As for those from an emotional culture doing business in a neutral culture, they should not be put off by a lack of emotion.[6]
Specific vs. Diffuse
A specific culture is one in which individuals have a large public space they readily share with others and small private space guard closely and share with only close friends and associates. A diffuse culture is one in which public space and private space are similar in size and individuals guard their public space carefully, because entry into public space affords entry into private space as well. It looks at how separate a culture keeps their personal and public lives. Fred Luthans and Jonathan Doh give the following example which explains this:
An example of these specific and diffuse cultural dimensions is provided by the United States and Germany. A U.S. professor, such as Robert Smith, PhD, generally would be called “Doctor Smith” by students when at his U.S. university. When shopping, however, he might be referred to by the store clerk as “Bob,” and he might even ask the clerk’s advice regarding some of his intended purchases. When golfing, Bob might just be one of the guys, even to a golf partner who happens to be a graduate student in his department. The reason for these changes in status is that, with the specific U.S. cultural values, people have large public spaces and often conduct themselves differently depending on their public role. At the same time, however, Bob has private space that is off-limits to the students who must call him “Doctor Smith” in class. In high-diffuse cultures, on the other hand, a person’s public life and private life often are similar. Therefore, in Germany, Herr Professor Doktor Schmidt would be referred to that way at the university, local market, and bowling alley—and even his wife might address him formally in public. A great deal of formality is maintained, often giving the impression that Germans are stuffy or aloof.[7]
Achievement vs. Ascription
In an achievement culture, people are accorded status based on how well they perform their functions. In an ascription culture, status is based on who or what a person is. Does one have to prove himself to receive status or is it given to him? Achievement cultures include the US, Austria, Switzerland and the UK. Some ascription cultures are Venezuela, Indonesia, and China. When people from an achievement culture do business in an ascription culture it is important to have older, senior members with formal titles and respect should be shown to their counterparts. However, for an ascription culture doing business in an achievement culture, it is important to bring knowledgeable members who can prove to be proficient to other group, and respect should be shown for the knowledge and information of their counterparts.[8]
Sequential vs. Synchronic
Do we do things one at a time or several things at once?
Internal vs. External control
Do we control our environment or are we controlled by it?
Chronemics is the study of the use of time in nonverbal communication(Nonverbal communication is the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless (mostly visual) cues between people.). The way in which one perceives and values time, structures time, and reacts to time frames communication. Across cultures, time perception plays a large role in the nonverbal communication process. Time perceptions include punctuality, willingness to wait, and interactions. The use of time can affect lifestyle, daily agendas, speed of speech, movements, and how long people are willing to listen.
Time can be used as an indicator of status. For example, in most companies the boss can interrupt progress to hold an impromptu meeting in the middle of the work day, yet the average worker would have to make an appointment to see the boss. The way in which different cultures perceive time can influence communication as well.
Cultures are sometimes considered monochronic or polychronic.
A monochronic time system means that things are done one at a time and time is segmented into precise, small units. Under this system time is scheduled, arranged and managed.
The United States is considered a monochronic society. This perception of time is learned and rooted in the Industrial Revolution, where "factory life required the labor force to be on hand and in place at an appointed hour" (Guerrero, DeVito & Hecht, 1999, p. 238). For Americans, time is a precious resource not to be wasted or taken lightly. "We buy time, save time, spend time and make time. Our time can be broken down into years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds and even milliseconds. We use time to structure both our daily lives and events that we are planning for the future. We have schedules that we must follow: appointments that we must go to at a certain time, classes that start and end at certain times, work schedules that start and end at certain times, and even our favorite TV shows, that start and end at a certain time.” [1]
As communication scholar Edward T. Hall wrote regarding the American’s viewpoint of time in the business world, “the schedule is sacred.” Hall says that for monochronic cultures, such as the American culture, “time is tangible” and viewed as a commodity where “time is money” or “time is wasted.” The result of this perspective is that Americans and other monochronic cultures, such as the German and Swiss, place a paramount value on schedules, tasks and “getting the job done.” These cultures are committed to regimented schedules and may view those who do not subscribe to the same perception of time as disrespectful.
Monochronic cultures include Germany, the United Kingdom, Turkey, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Jamaica, Canada, Switzerland, most parts of the United States, andScandinavia.
Polychronic Time[edit]
Main article: Polychronicity
A polychronic time system is a system where several things can be done at once, and a more fluid approach is taken to scheduling time. Unlike most Western and East Asian cultures, Latin American, African, South Asian, and Arab cultures use polychronic systems of time.
These cultures are much less focused on the preciseness of accounting for each and every moment. As Raymond Cohen notes, polychronic cultures are deeply steeped in tradition and relationships rather than in tasks—a clear difference from their monochronic counterparts. Cohen notes that "Traditional societies have all the time in the world. The arbitrary divisions of the clock face have little saliency in cultures grounded in the cycle of the seasons, the invariant pattern of rural life, community life, and the calendar of religious festivities" (Cohen, 1997, p. 34).
Instead, their culture is more focused on relationships, rather than watching the clock. They have no problem being “late” for an event if they are with family or friends, because the relationship is what really matters. As a result, polychronic cultures have a much less formal perception of time. They are not ruled by precise calendars and schedules. Rather, “cultures that use the polychronic time system often schedule multiple appointments simultaneously so keeping on schedule is an impossibility.”
Co-Cultural Perspectives on Time[edit]
While the clash between the monochronic and polychronic perceptions of time can rifle the best of intentions in international settings, similar challenges can occur between co-cultures within an otherwise unified culture. In the United States, the Hawaiian culture provides an example of how co-cultures can clash. Two time systems exist in Hawaii, where the Polynesians juggle two time systems: Haole time and Hawaiian time. When you hear someone say “See you at two o’clock haole time,” that means that they will see you at precisely two o’clock. But if you hear someone say, “I will be there at two o’clock Hawaiian time” then the message has an entirely different meaning. This is because Hawaiian time is very lax and basically means “when I get there.” [2] Within the Native American community, the same relaxed concern for punctuality is dominant. Comments like "We're on Indian time, as usual" is commonly heard at many community events. Elders give calming reassurance that things "will happen when they happen" and "things happen when they are supposed to happen", implying there is a reason behind it all, even if it might not be apparent at the moment. Moreover, it is common for individuals originating in India (a polychronic country) but inhabiting a monochronic environment like the U.S., to joke about their lax polychronic habits, saying "We follow DST: Desi Standard Time."
Time Orientations[edit]
The way an individual perceives time and the role time plays in their lives is a learned perspective. As discussed by Alexander Gonzalez and Phillip Zimbardo, "every child learns a time perspective that is appropriate to the values and needs of his society" (Guerrero, DeVito & Hecht, 1999, p. 227).
There are four basic psychological time orientations:
Past
Time-line
Present
Future
Each orientation affects the structure, content, and urgency of communication (Burgoon, 1989). The past orientation has a hard time developing the notion of elapsed time and these individuals often confuse present and past happenings as all in the same. People oriented with time-line cognitivity are often detail oriented and think of everything in linear terms. These individuals also often have difficulty with comprehending multiple events at the same time. Individuals with a present orientation are mostly characterized as pleasure seekers who live for the moment and have a very low risk aversion. Those individuals who operate with future orientation are often thought of as being highly goal oriented and focused on the broad picture.
The use of time as a communicative channel can be a powerful, yet subtle, force in face-to-face interactions. Some of the more recognizable types of interaction that use time are:
Regulating interaction: This is shown to aid in the orderly transition of conversational turn-taking. When the speaker is opening the floor for a response, they will pause. However, when no response is desired, the speaker will talk a faster pace with minimal pause. (Capella, 1985)
Expressing intimacy: As relationships become more intimate, certain changes are made to accommodate the new relationship status. Some of the changes that are made include lengthening the time spent on mutual gazes, increasing the amount of time doing tasks for or with the other person and planning for the future by making plans to spend more time together (Patterson, 1990).
Affect management: The onset of powerful emotions can cause a stronger affect, ranging from joy to sorrow or even to embarrassment. Some of the behaviors associated with negative affects include decreased time of gaze and awkwardly long pauses during conversations. When this happens, it is common for the individuals to try and decrease any negative affects and subsequently strengthen positive affects (Edelman & Iwawaki, 1987).
Evoking Emotion: Time can be used to evoke emotions in an interpersonal relationship by communicating the value of the relationship. For example, when someone who you have a close relationship with is late, you may not take it personally, especially if that is characteristic of them. However, if it is a meeting with a total stranger, their disrespect for the value of your time may be taken personally and could even cause you to display negative emotions if and when they do arrive for the meeting.
Facilitating service and task goals: Professional settings can sometimes give rise to interpersonal relations which are quite different from other "normal" interactions. For example, the societal norms that dictate minimal touch between strangers are clearly altered if one member of the dyad is a doctor, and the environment is that of a hospital examination room.
Time orientation and consumers[edit]
Time orientation has also revealed insights into how people react to advertising. Martin, Gnoth and Strong (2009) found that future-oriented consumers react most favorably to ads that feature a product to be released in the distant future and that highlight primary product attributes. In contrast, present-oriented consumers prefer near-future ads that highlight secondary product attributes. Consumer attitudes were mediated by the perceived usefulness of the attribute information.[3]
Chronemics: Culture and Diplomacy[edit]
The Effect of Cultural Roots on Time Orientation[edit]
Just as monochronic and polychronic cultures have different time perspectives, understanding the time orientation of a culture is critical to becoming better able to successfully handle diplomatic situations. Americans, for instance have a future orientation. Hall indicates that for Americans “tomorrow is more important" and that they "are oriented almost entirely toward the future” (Cohen, 2004, p. 35). The future-focused orientation attributes to at least some of the concern that Americans have with “addressing immediate issues and moving on to new challenges” (Cohen, 2004, p. 35).
On the other hand, many polychronic cultures have a past-orientation toward time.
These time perspectives are the seeds for communication clashes in diplomatic situations. Trade negotiators have observed that “American negotiators are generally more anxious for agreement because “they are always in a hurry” and basically “problem solving oriented.” In other words, they place a high value on resolving an issue quickly calling to mind the American catchphrase “some solution is better than no solution” (Cohen, 2004, p. 114). Similar observations have been made of Japanese-American relations. Noting the difference in time perceptions between the two countries, former ambassador to Tokyo, Mike Mansfield commented “We’re too fast, they’re too slow” (Cohen, 2004, p. 118).
The Influence of Chronemics on Global Affairs[edit]
Just as there are different time zones, so too are there different perceptions of time across cultures — all of which can influence global communication situations. When writing about time perspective, Gonzalez and Zimbardo comment that “There is no more powerful, pervasive influence on how individuals think and cultures interact than our different perspectives on time—the way we learn how we mentally partition time into past, present and future.” (Guerrero, DeVito & Hecht, 1999, p. 227)
Depending upon where an individual is from, their perception of time might be that “the clock rules the day” or that “we’ll get there when we get there.” Improving prospects for success in the global community requires understanding cultural differences, traditions and communication styles.
The monochronic-oriented approach to negotiations is direct, linear and rooted in the characteristics that illustrate low context tendencies. The low context and individualistic culture approaches diplomacy in a lawyerly fashion with draft arguments, a mission and an idea of how they will move the process along. A monochronic culture, more concerned with time, deadlines and schedules, tends to grow impatient and want to rush to “close the deal.”
More collectivistic, polychronic-oriented cultures come to diplomatic situations with no particular importance placed on time. Rather than worry about the ticking of the clock, they are more willing to let time tick away if it means they are having a meaningful discussion and are forming strong relationships. The collectivistic culture is also high context. Rather than rely on verbal, the high context negotiator operates with a greater emphasis on nonverbal communication. Chronemics is one of those nonverbal channels of communication, and their treatment of time illustrates their perspective of time. Instead of watching the clock, they are more deeply concerned with discussing broad themes and philosophies before details of a negotiation are addressed. Above all else, they place far less value on simply reaching agreement for the sake of meeting a deadline. Rather, they place far more value on ensuring that the outcome of any agreement “is good and looks good” so that they can preserve face, as is the norm in the collectivist culture.
Understanding these cultural differences and perspectives on time can greatly improve future negotiations in the international community.
Chronemics and Power at Work[edit]
Time has a definite relationship to power. Though power most often refers to the ability to influence people (Guerrero, DeVito & Hecht, 1999, p. 314), power is also related to dominance and status (Guerrero, DeVito & Hecht, 1999, p. 315).
In the workplace, those in a leadership or management position treat time – and by virtue of position – have their time treated differently from those who are of a lower stature position. Anderson and Bowman have identified three specific examples of how chronemics and power converge in the workplace – waiting time, talk time and work time.
Waiting Time
Researchers Insel and Lindgren (Guerrero, DeVito & Hecht, 1999, p. 325) write that the act of making an individual of a lower stature wait is a sign of dominance. They note that one who “is in the position to cause another to wait has power over him. To be kept waiting is to imply that one’s time is less valuable than that of the one who imposes the wait.”
Employees of equal stature will not worry about whether they are running a few minutes behind schedule to meet with one another. On the other hand, for a mid-level manager who has a meeting with the company president, a late arrival might be a nonverbal cue that you do not respect the authority of your superior.
Talk Time
There is a direct correlation between the power of an individual in an organization and conversation. This includes both length of conversation, turn-taking and who initiates and ends a conversation. Extensive research indicates that those with more power in an organization will speak more often and for a greater length of time. Meetings between superiors and subordinates provide an opportunity to illustrate this concept. A superior – regardless of whether or not they are running the actual meeting – lead discussions, ask questions and have the ability to speak for longer periods of time without interruption. Likewise, research shows that turn-taking is also influenced by power. Social psychologist Nancy Henley notes that “Subordinates are expected to yield to superiors and there is a cultural expectation that a subordinate will not interrupt a superior” (Guerrero, DeVito & Hecht, 1999, p. 326). The length of response follows the same pattern. While the superior can speak for as long as they want, the responses of the subordinate are shorter in length. Albert Mehrabian noted that deviation from this pattern led to negative perceptions of the subordinate by the superior. Beginning and ending a communication interaction in the workplace is also controlled by the higher-status individual in an organization. The time and duration of the conversation are dictated by the higher-status individual.
Work Time
It is not likely that you will ever see a president or a high level executive punching a time clock. Their time is perceived as more valuable and they control their own time. On the other hand, a subordinate with less power has their time controlled by a higher status individual and are in less control of their time – making them likely to report their time to a higher authority. Such practices are more associated with those in non-supervisory roles or in blue collar rather than white collar professions. Instead, as power and status in an organization increases, the flexibility of the work schedule also increases. For instance, while administrative professionals might keep a 9 to 5 work schedule, their superiors may keep less structured hours. This does not mean that the superior works less. They may work longer, but the structure of their work environment is not strictly dictated by the traditional work day. Instead, as Koehler and their associates note “individuals who spend more time, especially spare time, to meetings, to committees, and to developing contacts, are more likely to be influential decision makers” (Guerrero, DeVito & Hecht, 1999, p. 327).
A specific example of the way power is expressed through work time is scheduling. As Yakura and others have noted in research shared by Ballard and Seibold, “scheduling reflects the extent to which the sequencing and duration of plans activities and events are formalized” (Ballard and Seibold, p. 6). Higher-status individuals have very precise and formal schedules – indicating that their stature requires that they have specific blocks of time for specific meetings, projects and appointments. Lower status individuals however, may have less formalized schedules. Finally, the schedule and appointment calendar of the higher status individual will take precedence in determining where, when and the importance of a specific event or appointment.
The Re=emergence Of Anarchism
Anarchism is a political philosophy that advocates stateless societies often defined as self-governed voluntary institutions, but that several authors have defined as more specific institutions based on non-hierarchical free associations.
Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and anarchist historian Andrej Grubacic have posited a rupture between generations of anarchism, with those "who often still have not shaken the sectarian habits" of the 19th century contrasted with the younger activists who are "much more informed, among other elements, by indigenous, feminist, ecological and cultural-critical ideas", and who around the start of the 21st century formed "by far the majority" of anarchists.[225]
May day demonstration of Spanishanarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT inBilbao, Basque Country in 2010
Around the start of the 21st century, anarchism grew in popularity and influence as part of the anti-war, anti-capitalist, and anti-globalisation movements.[226] Anarchists became known for their involvement in protests against the meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Group of Eight, and the World Economic Forum. Some anarchist factions at these protests engaged in rioting, property destruction, and violent confrontations with police. These actions were precipitated by ad hoc, leaderless, anonymous cadres known as black blocs; other organisational tactics pioneered in this time include security culture, affinity groups and the use of decentralised technologies such as the internet.[226] A significant event of this period was the confrontations at WTO conference in Seattle in 1999.[226] According to anarchist scholar Simon Critchley, "contemporary anarchism can be seen as a powerful critique of the pseudo-libertarianism of contemporary neo-liberalism...One might say that contemporary anarchism is about responsibility, whether sexual, ecological or socio-economic; it flows from an experience of conscience about the manifold ways in which the West ravages the rest; it is an ethical outrage at the yawning inequality, impoverishment and disenfranchisment that is so palpable locally and globally."[227]
International anarchist federations in existence include the International of Anarchist Federations, the International Workers' Association, and International Libertarian Solidarity. The largest organised anarchist movement today is in Spain, in the form of the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT) and the CNT. CGT membership was estimated to be around 100,000 for 2003.[228] Other active syndicalist movements include in Sweden the Central Organisation of the Workers of Swedenand the Swedish Anarcho-syndicalist Youth Federation; the CNT-AIT in France;[229] the Union Sindicale Italiana in Italy; in the US Workers Solidarity Alliance and the UK Solidarity Federation. The revolutionary industrial unionist Industrial Workers of the World, claiming 2,000 paying members, and the International Workers Association, an anarcho-syndicalist successor to the First International, also remain active. The Informal Anarchist Federation (not to be confused with the synthesist Italian Anarchist Federation also FAI) is an Italian insurrectionary anarchist organization.[230] It has been described by Italian intelligence sources as a "horizontal" structure of various anarchist terrorist groups, united in their beliefs in revolutionary armed action. In 2003, the group claimed responsibility for a bomb campaign targeting several European Union institutions.[231][232] During the first years of the 2000s, the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth in Spain started to evolve towards insurrectionary anarchist positions and its differences with anarcho-syndicalismbecame more evident due to the influence of the Black block in alterglobalization protests and the examples of developments from Italy and Greece. Afterwards it will receive some important repression from the state which leads it towards inactivity[233] A new generation of anarchist youth decides to establish a new FIJL since 2006. It starts trying to establish a clear difference with the other insurrectionist FIJL while defending anarcho-syndicalism critically.[234] In the year 2007 it re-establishes itself as the FIJL since it did not have news from the other insurrectionist organization, but after finding out of a communique by the insurrectionist organization[233] it decides to name itself "Iberian Youth of Anarchist Youth" (spa: Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Anarquistas or FIJA) but knwing that they are the continuing organization to the previous FIJL from the 1990s to the past.[235] They publish a newspaper called El Fuelle. In March 2012 the FIJL of insurrectionist tendencies decides to not continue[236] and so the FIJA goes to call itself again FIJL.[237]
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THIS AND OTHER TOPICS
In Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, subtitled The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939–1977), I document the remarkable resurgence of anarchist ideas and action following the tragic defeat of the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, and the mass carnage of the Second World War. Below, I have collected additional writings from many of the people who were responsible for that resurgence. Herbert Read, Marie Louise Berneri, Paul Goodman, David Wieck, Daniel Guerin, Alex Comfort, George Woodcock and the Noir et Rouge group in France were among those who made anarchism relevant again, despite its critics’ attempts to consign it to the dustbin of history.
Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas opens with excerpts from Herbert Read’s 1940 essay, “The Philosophy of Anarchism.” Read had declared himself in favour of anarchism in his 1938 publication, Poetry and Anarchism, with which I closed Volume One of the Anarchism anthology. There he wrote that he sought to “balance anarchism with surrealism, reason with romanticism, the understanding with the imagination, function with freedom.” Read was under no illusions regarding how people would react to his endorsement of anarchism. At the time, the world’s various anarchist movements were in eclipse, and most radical intellectuals supported the Soviet Union with its Marxist ideology. It was the era of “Popular Fronts” against Fascism, which the Stalinist Communists used to co-opt other forces on the left, resulting in the further isolation of the anarchists, their inveterate foes and frequent victims (see Chapter 18 of Volume One, “The Russian Revolution”).
Breakup-Ups and Break-Downs
Balkanization, or Balkanisation, is a pejorative geopolitical term, originally used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or non-cooperative with one another.
The breakup of Yugoslavia occurred as a result of a series of political upheavals and conflicts during the early 1990s. After a period of political crisis in 1980s, constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia split apart, but the unsolved issues caused bitter inter-ethnic Yugoslav wars. The wars primarily affected Bosnia and Croatia.
After the communist victory in World War II, Yugoslavia was set up as a federation of six republics, with borders drawn along ethnic and historical lines: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. In addition, two autonomous provinces were established within Serbia: Vojvodina and Kosovo. Each of the republics had its own branch of theLeague of Communists of Yugoslavia party and a ruling elite, and any tensions were solved on the federal level. The Yugoslav model of state organization, as well as a "middle way" between planned and liberal economy, had been a relative success, and the country experienced a period of strong economic growth and relative political stability up to the 1980s, under the firm rule of president-for-life Josip Broz Tito. After his death in 1980, the weakened system of federal government was left unable to cope with rising economic and political challenges.
In the 1980s, Kosovo Albanians started to demand that their autonomous province be granted the status of a constituent republic, starting with the 1981 protests. Ethnic tensions between Albanians and Kosovo Serbs remained high over the whole decade, which resulted in homogenization of Serbs across Yugoslavia, who increasingly saw the high autonomy of provinces, and ineffective system of consensus at the federal level as an obstacle for Serbian interests. In 1987, Slobodan Miloševićcame to power in Serbia, and through a series of populist moves acquired de facto control over Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro, garnering a high level of support among Serbs for his centralist policies. Milošević was met with opposition by party leaders of western republics of Slovenia and Croatia, who also advocated greater democratization of the country in lieu of weakening of Communism in Eastern Europe. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia dissolved in 1990 along federal lines.
During 1990, the communists lost power to separatist parties in the first multi-party elections held across the country, except in Serbia and Montenegro, where they were won by Milošević and his allies. Nationalist rhetoric on all sides became increasingly heated. In 1991, one by one republics proclaimed independence (only Serbia and Montenegro remained federated), but the status of Serb minorities outside Serbia was left unsolved. After a string of inter-ethnic incidents, theYugoslav Wars ensued, first in Croatia and then, most severely, in multi-ethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina; the wars left long-term economic and political damage in the region.
VS.
The Partition of India was the partition of the British Indian Empire[1] that led to the creation of the sovereign states of the Dominion of Pakistan (it later split into the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh) and the Union of India (later Republic of India) on 15 August 1947. "Partition" here refers not only to the division of the Bengal province of British India into East Pakistan and West Bengal (India), and the similar partition of the Punjab province into Punjab (West Pakistan) and Punjab, India, but also to the respective divisions of other assets, including the British Indian Army, the Indian Civil Service and other administrative services, the railways, and the central treasury.
In the riots which preceded the partition in the Punjab region, between 200,000 to 500,000 people were killed in the retributive genocide.[2][3] UNHCR estimates 14 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were displaced during the partition; it was the largest mass migration in human history.[4][5][6]
The secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 is not covered by the term Partition of India, nor is the earlier separation of Burma (now Myanmar) from the administration of British India, or the even earlier separation of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Ceylon was part of the Madras Presidency of British India from 1795 until 1798 when it became a separateCrown Colony of the Empire. Burma, gradually annexed by the British during 1826–86 and governed as a part of the British Indian administration until 1937, was directly administered thereafter.[7] Burma was granted independence on 4 January 1948 and Ceylon on 4 February 1948. (See History of Sri Lanka and History of Burma.)
Bhutan, Nepal and the Maldives, the remaining countries of present-day South Asia, were unaffected by the partition. The first two, Nepal and Bhutan, having signed treaties with the British designating them as independent states, were never a part of the British Indian Empire, and therefore their borders were unaffected by the partition of India.[8] The Maldives, which had become a protectorate of the British crown in 1887 and gained its independence in 1965, was also unaffected by the partition.
If separatism is usually a misguided project, Yugoslavia's breakup is worse: it is a disaster that is still ongoing. And as in many other cases of partition that have led to war, the negative consequences may continue to unfold for generations yet to come.
Yugoslavia had been the most successful of all the socialist countries. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Western tourists who vacationed in its Renaissance stone cities on the Dalmatian coast or its ski resorts returned home full of admiration for that country's novel attempt to combine egalitarian socialism with grassroots worker-management, some features of a market economy, and a modicum of liberty. Compared to other communist societies, it seemed pleasant, civilized, and almost prosperous.
Why, then, did it fail? This question deserves to be addressed. By identifying the mistakes that led to Yugoslavia's tragedy and learning its hard lessons, we may anticipate and perhaps even avert similar disasters elsewhere.
Vaclav Havel 1995 Commencement speech..
Mr. President, Mr. Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen,
One evening not long ago I was sitting in an outdoor restaurant by the water. My chair was almost identical to the chairs they have in restaurants by the Vltava River in Prague. They were playing the same rock music they play in most Czech restaurants. I saw advertisements I’m familiar with back home. Above all, I was surrounded by young people who were similarly dressed, who drank familiar-looking drinks, and who behaved as casually as their contemporaries in Prague. Only their complexion and their facial features were different - for I was in Singapore.
I sat there thinking about this and again - for the umpteenth time - I realized an almost banal truth: that we now live in a single global civilization. The identity of this civilization does not lie merely in similar forms of dress, or similar drinks, or in the constant buzz of the same commercial music all around the world, or even in international advertising. It lies in something deeper: thanks to the modern idea of constant progress, with its inherent expansionism, and to the rapid evolution of science that comes directly from it, our planet has, for the first time in the long history of the human race, been covered in the space of a very few decades by a single civilization - one that is essentially technological.
The world is now enmeshed in webs of telecommunication networks consisting of millions of tiny threads, or capillaries, that not only transmit information of all kinds at lightning speed, but also convey integrated models of social, political and economic behavior. They are conduits for legal norms, as well as for billions and billions of dollars crisscrossing the world while remaining invisible even to those who deal directly with them.
The life of the human race is completely interconnected not only in the informational sense, but in the causal sense as well. Anecdotally, I could illustrate this by reminding you - since I’ve already mentioned Singapore - that today all it takes is a single shady transaction initiated by a single devious bank clerk in Singapore to bring down a bank on the other side of the world. Thanks to the accomplishments of this civilization, practically all of us know what checks, bonds, bills of exchange, and stocks are. We are familiar with CNN and Chernobyl, and we know who the Rolling Stones, or Nelson Mandela, or Salman Rushdie are. More than that, the capillaries that have so radically integrated this civilization also convey information about certain modes of human co-existence that have proven their worth, like democracy, respect for human rights, the rule of law, the laws of the market-place. Such information flows around the world and, in varying degrees, takes root in different places.
In modern times this global civilization emerged in the territory occupied by European and ultimately by Euro-American culture. Historically, it evolved from a combination of traditions - classical, Judaic and Christian. “I have been given to understand how small this world is and how it torments itself with countless things it need not torment itself with if people could find within themselves a little more courage, a little more hope, a little more responsibility, a little more mutual understanding and love.”In theory, at least, it gives people not only the capacity for worldwide communication, but also a coordinated means of defending themselves against many common dangers. It can also, in an unprecedented way, make our life on this earth easier and open us up to hitherto unexplored horizons in our knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in.
And yet there is something not quite right about it.
Allow me to use this ceremonial gathering for a brief meditation on a subject which I have dwelt upon a great deal, and which I often bring up on occasions resembling this one. I want to focus today on the source of the dangers that threaten humanity in spite of this global civilization, and often directly because of it. Above all, I would like to speak about the ways in which these dangers can be confronted.
Many of the great problems we face today, as far as I understand them, have their origin in the fact that this global civilization, though in evidence everywhere, is no more than a thin veneer over the sum total of human awareness, if I may put it that way. This civilization is immensely fresh, young, new, and fragile, and the human spirit has accepted it with dizzying alacrity, without itself changing in any essential way. Humanity has gradually, and in very diverse ways, shaped our habits of mind, our relationship to the world, our models of behavior and the values we accept and recognize. In essence, this new, single epidermis of world civilization merely covers or conceals the immense variety of cultures, of peoples, of religious worlds, of historical traditions and historically formed attitudes, all of which in a sense lie “beneath” it. At the same time, even as the veneer of world civilization expands, this “underside” of humanity, this hidden dimension of it, demands more and more clearly to be heard and to be granted a right to life.
And thus, while the world as a whole increasingly accepts the new habits of global civilization, another contradictory process is taking place: ancient traditions are reviving, different religions and cultures are awakening to new ways of being, seeking new room to exist, and struggling with growing fervor to realize what is unique to them and what makes them different from others. Ultimately they seek to give their individuality a political expression.
It is often said that in our time, every valley cries out for its own independence or will even fight for it. Many nations, or parts of them at least, are struggling against modern civilization or its main proponents for the right to worship their ancient gods and obey the ancient divine injunctions. They carry on their struggle using weapons provided by the very civilization they oppose. They employ radar, computers, lasers, nerve gases, and perhaps, in the future, even nuclear weapons - all products of the world of modern civilization. In contrast with these technological inventions, other products of this civilization - like democracy or the idea of human rights - are not accepted in many places in the world because they are deemed to be hostile to local traditions.
In other words: the Euro-American world has equipped other parts of the globe with instruments that not only could effectively destroy the enlightened values which, among other things, made possible the invention of precisely these instruments, but which could well cripple the capacity of people to live together on this earth.
What follows from all of this?
It is my belief that this state of affairs contains a clear challenge not only to the Euro-American world but to our present-day civilization as a whole. It is a challenge to this civilization to start understanding itself as a multi-cultural and a multi-polar civilization, whose meaning lies not in undermining the individuality of different spheres of culture and civilization but in allowing them to be more completely themselves. This will only be possible, even conceivable, if we all accept a basic code of mutual co-existence, a kind of common minimum we can all share, one that will enable us to go on living side by side. Yet such a code won’t stand a chance if it is merely the product of a few who then proceed to force it on the rest. It must be an expression of the authentic will of everyone, growing out of the genuine spiritual roots hidden beneath the skin of our common, global civilization. If it is merely disseminated through the capillaries of the skin, the way Coca-cola ads are - as a commodity offered by some to others - such a code can hardly be expected to take hold in any profound or universal way.
But is humanity capable of such an undertaking? Is it not a hopelessly utopian idea? Haven’t we so lost control of our destiny that we are condemned to gradual extinction in ever harsher high-tech clashes between cultures, because of our fatal inability to cooperate-operate in the face of impending catastrophes, be they ecological, social, or demographic, or of dangers generated by the state of our civilization as such?
I don’t know.
But I have not lost hope.
I have not lost hope because I am persuaded again and again that, lying dormant in the deepest roots of most, if not all, cultures there is an essential similarity, something that could be made - if the will to do so existed - a genuinely unifying starting point for that new code of human co-existence that would be firmly anchored in the great diversity of human traditions.
Don’t we find somewhere in the foundations of most religions and cultures, though they may take a thousand and one distinct forms, common elements such as respect for what transcends us, whether we mean the mystery of being, or a moral order that stands above us; respect for our neighbors, for our families, for certain natural authorities; respect for human dignity and for nature: a sense of solidarity and benevolence towards guests who come with good intentions?
Isn’t the common, ancient origin or human roots of our diverse spiritualities, each of which is merely another kind of human understanding of the same reality, the thing that can genuinely bring people of different cultures together?
And aren’t the basic commandments of this archetypal spirituality in harmony with what even an unreligious person - without knowing exactly why - may consider proper and meaningful?
Naturally, I am not suggesting that modern people be compelled to worship ancient deities and accept rituals they have long since abandoned. I am suggesting something quite different: we must come to understand the deep mutual connection or kinship between the various forms of our spirituality. We must recollect our original spiritual and moral substance, which grew out of the same essential experience of humanity. I believe that this is the only way to achieve a genuine renewal of our sense of responsibility for ourselves and for the world. And at the same time, it is the only way to achieve a deeper understanding among cultures that will enable them to work together in a truly ecumenical way to create a new order for the world.
The veneer of global civilization that envelops the modern world and the consciousness of humanity, as we all know, has a dual nature, bringing into question, at every step of the way, the very values it is based upon, or which it propagates. The thousands of marvelous achievements of this civilization that work for us so well and enrich us can equally impoverish, diminish, and destroy our lives, and frequently do. Instead of serving people, many of these creations enslave them. Instead of helping people to develop their identities, they take them away. Almost every invention or discovery - from the splitting of the atom and the discovery of DNA to television and the computer - can be turned against us and used to our detriment. How much easier it is today than it was during the First World War to destroy an entire metropolis in a single air-raid. And how much easier would it be today, in the era of television, for a madman like Hitler or Stalin to pervert the spirit of a whole nation. When have people ever had the power we now possess to alter the climate of the planet or deplete its mineral resources or the wealth of its fauna and flora in the space of a few short decades? And how much more destructive potential do terrorists have at their disposal today than at the beginning of this century.
In our era, it would seem that one part of the human brain, the rational part which has made all these morally neutral discoveries, has undergone exceptional development, while the other part, which should be alert to ensure that these discoveries really serve humanity and will not destroy it, has lagged behind catastrophically.
Yes, regardless of where I begin my thinking about the problems facing our civilization, I always return to the theme of human responsibility, which seems incapable of keeping pace with civilization and preventing it from turning against the human race. It’s as though the world has simply become too much for us to deal with.
There is no way back. Only a dreamer can believe that the solution lies in curtailing the progress of civilization in some way or other. The main task in the coming era is something else: a radical renewal of our sense of responsibility. Our conscience must catch up to our reason, otherwise we are lost.
It is my profound belief that there is only one way to achieve this: we must divest ourselves of our egotistical anthroponcentrism, our habit of seeing ourselves as masters of the universe who can do whatever occurs to us. We must discover a new respect for what transcends us: for the universe, for the earth, for nature, for life, and for reality. Our respect for other people, for other nations and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are a part of it, that we share in it and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of being, where it is judged.
A better alternative of the future of humanity, therefore, clearly lies in imbuing our civilization with a spiritual dimension. It’s not just a matter of understanding its multi-cultural nature and finding inspiration for the creation of a new world order in the common roots of all cultures. It is also essential that the Euro-American cultural sphere - the one which created this civilization and taught humanity its destructive pride - now return to its own spiritual roots and become an example to the rest of the world in the search for a new humility.
General observations of this type are certainly not difficult to make nor are they new or revolutionary. Modern people are masters at describing the crisis and the misery of the world which we shape, and for which we are responsible. We are much less adept at putting things right.
So what specifically is to be done?
I do not believe in some universal key or panacea. I am not an advocate of what Karl Popper called “holistic social engineering”, particularly because I had to live most of my adult life in circumstances that resulted from an attempt to create a holistic Marxist utopia. I know more than enough, therefore, about efforts of this kind.
This does not relieve me, however, of the responsibility to think of ways to make the world better.
It will certainly not be easy to awaken in people a new sense of responsibility for the world, an ability to conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever, and to be held answerable for its condition one day. Who knows how many horrific cataclysms humanity may have to go through before such a sense of responsibility is generally accepted. But this does not mean that those who wish to work for it cannot begin at once. It is a great task for teachers, educators, intellectuals, the clergy, artists, entrepreneurs, journalists, people active in all forms of public life.
Above all it is a task for politicians.
Even in the most democratic of conditions, politicians have immense influence, perhaps more than they themselves realize. This influence does not lie in their actual mandates, which in any case are considerably limited. It lies in something else: in the spontaneous impact their charisma has on the public.
The main task of the present generation of politicians is not, I think to ingratiate themselves with the public through the decisions they take or their smiles on television. It is not to go on winning elections and ensuring themselves a place in the sun till the end of their days. Their role is something quite different: to assume their share of responsibility for the long-range prospects of our world and thus to set an example for the public in whose sight they work. Their responsibility is to think ahead boldly, not to fear the disfavor of the crowd, to imbue their actions with a spiritual dimension (which of course is not the same thing as ostentatious attendance at religious services), to explain again and again - both to the public and to their colleagues - that politics must do far more than reflect the interests of particular groups or lobbies. After all, politics is a matter of servicing the community, which means that it is morality in practice, And how better to serve the community and practice morality than by seeking in the midst of the global (and globally threatened) civilization their own global political responsibility: that is, their responsibility for the very survival of the human race?
I don’t believe that a politician who sets out on this risky path will inevitably jeopardize his or her political survival. This is a wrongheaded notion which assumes that the citizen is a fool and that political success depends on playing to this folly. That is not the way it is. A conscience slumbers in every human being, something divine. And that is what we have to put our trust in.
Ladies and gentlemen, I find myself at perhaps the most famous university in the most powerful country in the world. With your permission, I will say a few words on the subject of the politics of a great power.
It is obvious that those who have the greatest power and influence also bear the greatest responsibility. Like it or not, the United States of America now bears probably the greatest responsibility for the direction our world will take. The United States, therefore, should reflect most deeply on this responsibility.
Isolationism has never paid off for the United States. Had it entered the First World War earlier, perhaps it would not have had to pay with anything like the casualties it actually incurred.
The same is true of the Second World War: when Hitler was getting ready to invade Czechoslovakia, and in so doing finally exposing the lack of courage on the part of the western democracies, your president wrote a letter to the Czechoslovak President imploring him to come to some agreement with Hitler. Had he not deceived himself and the whole world into believing that an agreement could be made with this madman, had he instead shown a few teeth, perhaps the Second World War need not have happened, and tens of thousands of young Americans need not have died fighting in it.
Likewise, just before the end of that war, had your President, who was otherwise an outstanding man, said a clear “no” to Stalin’s decision to divide the world, perhaps the Cold War, which cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, need not have happened either.
I beg you: do not repeat these mistakes! You yourselves have always paid a heavy price for them! There is simply no escaping the responsibility you have as the most powerful country in the world.
There is far more at stake here than simply standing up to those who would like once again to divide the world into spheres of interest, or subjugate others who are different from them, and weaker. What is now at stake is saving the human race. In other words, it’s a question of what I’ve already talked about: of understanding modern civilization as a multi-cultural and multi-polar civilization, of turning our attention to the original spiritual sources of human culture and above all, of our own culture, of drawing from these sources the strength for a courageous and magnanimous creation of a new order for the world.
Not long ago I was at a gala dinner to mark an important anniversary. There were fifty Heads of State present, perhaps more, who came to honor the heroes and victims of the greatest war in human history. This was not a political conference, but the kind of social event that is meant principally to show hospitality and respect to the invited guests. When the seating plan was given out, I discovered to my surprise that those sitting at the table next to mine were not identified simply as representatives of a particular state, as was the case with all the other tables; they were referred to as “permanent members of the UN Security Council and the G7.” I had mixed feeling about this. On the one hand, I thought how marvelous that the richest and most powerful of this world see each other often and even at this dinner, can talk informally and get to know each other better. On the other hand, a slight chill went down my spine, for I could not help observing that one table had been singled out as being special and particularly important. It was a table for the big powers. Somewhat perversely, I began to imagine that the people sitting at it were, along with their Russian caviar, dividing the rest of us up among themselves, without asking our opinion. Perhaps all this is merely the whimsy of a former and perhaps future playwright. But I wanted to express it here. For one simple reason: to emphasize the terrible gap that exists between the responsibility of the great powers and their hubris. The architect of that seating arrangement - I should think it was none of the attending Presidents - was not guided by a sense of responsibility for the world, but by the banal pride of the powerful.
But pride is precisely what will lead the world to hell. I am suggesting an alternative: humbly accepting our responsibility for the world.
There is one great opportunity in the matter of co-existence between nations and spheres of civilization, culture and religion that should be grasped and exploited to the limit. This is the appearance of supranational or regional communities. By now, there are many such communities in the world, with diverse characteristics and differing degrees of integration. I believe in this approach. I believe in the importance of organisms that lie somewhere between nation states and a world community, organisms that can be an important medium of global communication and cooperation-operation. I believe that this trend towards integration in a world where - as I’ve said - every valley longs for independence, must be given the greatest possible support.
These organisms, however, must not be an expression of integration merely for the sake of integration. They must be one of the many instruments enabling each region, each nation, to be both itself and capable of cooperation-operation with others. That is, they must be one of the instruments enabling countries and peoples who are close to each other geographically, ethnically, culturally and economically and who have common security interest, to form associations and better communicate with each other and with the rest of the world. At the same time, all such regional communities must rid themselves of fear that other like communities are directed against them. Regional groupings in areas that have common tradition and a common political culture ought to be a natural part of the complex political architecture of the world. Co-operation between such regions ought to be a natural component of cooperation-operation on a world-wide scale. As long as the broadening of NATO membership to include countries who feel culturally and politically a part of the region the Alliance was created to defend is seen by Russia, for example, as an anti-Russian undertaking, it will be a sign that Russia has not yet understood the challenge of this era.
The most important world organization is the United Nations. I think that the fiftieth anniversary of its birth could be an occasion to reflect on how to infuse it with a new ethos, a new strength, and a new meaning, and make it the truly most important arena of good cooperation-operation among all cultures that make up our planetary civilization.
But neither the strengthening of regional structures nor the strengthening of the UN will save the world if both processes are not informed by that renewed spiritual charge which I see as the only hope that the human race will survive another millennium.
I have touched on what I think politicians should do.
There is, however, one more force that has at least as much, if not more, influence on the general state of mind as politicians do.
That force is the mass media.
Only when fate sent me into the realm of high politics did I become fully aware of the media’s double-edged power. Their dual impact is not a specialty of the media. It is merely a part, or an expression of the dual nature of today’s civilization of which I have already spoken.
Thanks to television the whole world discovered, in the course of an evening, that there is a country called Rwanda where people are suffering beyond belief. Thanks to television it is possible to do at least a little to help those who are suffering. Thanks to television the whole world, in the course of a few seconds, was shocked and horrified about what happened in Oklahoma City and, at the same time, understood it as a great warning for all. Thanks to television the whole world knows that there exists an internationally recognized country called Bosnia and Herzegovina and that from the moment it recognized this country, the international community has tried unsuccessfully to divide it into grotesque mini-states according to the wishes of warlords who have never been recognized by anyone as anyone’s legitimate representatives.
That is the wonderful side of today’s mass media, or rather, of those who gather the news. Humanity’s thanks belong to all those courageous reporters who voluntarily risk their lives wherever something evil is happening, in order to arouse the conscience of the world.
There is, however, another, less wonderful, aspect of television, one that merely revels in the horrors of the world or, unforgivably, makes them commonplace, or compels politicians to become first of all television stars. But where is it written that someone who is good on television is necessarily also a good politician? I never fail to be astonished at how much I am at the mercy of television directors and editors, at how my public image depends far more on them than it does on myself, at how important it is to smile appropriately on television, or choose the right tie; at how television forces me to express my thoughts as sparely as possible, in witticisms, slogans or sound bites; at how easily my television image can be made to seem different from the real me. I am astonished by this and at the same time, I fear it serves no good purpose. I know politicians who have learned to see themselves only as the television camera does. Television has thus expropriated their personalities, and made them into something like television shadows of their former selves. I sometimes wonder whether they even sleep in a way that will look good on television.
I am not outraged with television or the press for distorting what I say or ignoring it, or editing me to appear like some strange monster. I am not angry with the media when I see that a politician’s rise or fall often depends more on them than on the politician concerned. What interests me is something else: the responsibility of those who have the mass media in their hands. They too bear responsibility for the world, and for the future of humanity. Just as the splitting of the atom can immensely enrich humanity in a thousand and one ways and, at the same time, can also threaten it with destruction, so television can have both good and evil consequences. Quickly, suggestively and to an unprecedented degree, it can disseminate the spirit of understanding, humanity, human solidarity and spirituality, or it can stupefy whole nations and continents. And just as our use of atomic energy depends solely on our sense of responsibility, so the proper use of television’s power to enter practically every house hold and every human mind depends on our sense of responsibility as well.
Whether our world is to be saved from everything that threatens it today depends above all on whether human beings come to their senses, whether they understand the degree of their responsibility and discover a new relationship to the very miracle of being. The world is in the hands of us all. And yet some have a greater influence on its fate than others. The more influence a person has - be they politician or television announcer - the greater the demands placed on their sense of responsibility and the less they should think merely about personal interests.
In conclusion, allow me a brief personal remark. I was born in Prague and I lived there for decades without being allowed to study properly or visit other countries. Nevertheless, my mother never abandoned one of her secret and quite extravagant dreams: that one day I would study at Harvard. Fate did not permit me to fulfill her dream. But something else happened, something that would never have occurred even to my mother: I have received a doctoral degree at Harvard without even having to study here.
More than that, I have been given to see Singapore, and countless other exotic places. I have been given to understand how small this world is and how it torments itself with countless things it need not torment itself with if people could find within themselves a little more courage, a little more hope, a little more responsibility, a little more mutual understanding and love.
I don’t know whether my mother is looking down at me from heaven, but if she is I can guess what she’s probably thinking; she’s thinking that I’m sticking my nose into matters that only people who have properly studied political science at Harvard have the right to stick their noses into.
I hope that you don’t think so.
Thank you for your attention.
Postmodernism is a late-20th-century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was a departure from modernism. Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism.
Post-structuralism is the name for a movement in philosophy that began in the 1960s. It remains an influence not only in philosophy, but also in a wider set of subjects, including literature, politics, art, cultural criticisms, history and sociology.
Simulacra and Simulation (French: Simulacres et Simulation) is a 1981 philosophical treatise by Jean Baudrillard seeking to examine the relationships among reality, symbols, and society.
Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an original.[1] Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.[2]
...The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.[3]
—The quote is credited to Ecclesiastes, but the words do not occur there. It can be seen as an addition,[4] a paraphrase and an endorsement of Ecclesiastes' condemnation[5] of the pursuit of wisdom as folly and a 'chasing after wind'—see for example Ecclesiastes 1.16.
Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of symbols, signs, and how they relate to contemporaneity (simultaneous existences). Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that anything like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture andmedia that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible; Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Baudrillard called this phenomenon the "precession of simulacra".
"Simulacra and Simulation" breaks the sign-order into 4 stages:
The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".
The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.
Simulacra and Simulation identifies three types of simulacra and identifies each with a historical period:
First order, associated with the premodern period, where representation is clearly an artificial placemarker for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as irreproducibly real and signification obviously gropes towards this reality.
Second order, associated with the modernity of the Industrial Revolution, where distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation ofmass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities. The commodity's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the authority of the original version, because the copy is just as "real" as its prototype.
Third order, associated with the postmodernity of Late Capitalism, where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulacrum, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept.[6]
Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between reality and simulacra originates in several phenomena:[7]
Contemporary media including television, film, print, and the Internet, which are responsible for blurring the line between products that are needed (in order to live a life) and products for which a need is created by commercial images.
Exchange value, in which the value of goods is based on money (literally denominated fiat currency) rather than usefulness, and moreover usefulness comes to be quantified and defined in monetary terms in order to assist exchange.
Multinational capitalism, which separates produced goods from the plants, minerals and other original materials and the processes (including the people and their cultural context) used to create them.
Urbanization, which separates humans from the nonhuman world, and re-centres culture around productive throughput systems so large they cause alienation.
Language and ideology, in which language increasingly becomes caught up in the production of power relations between social groups, especially when powerful groups institute themselves at least partly in monetary terms.
A specific analogy that Baudrillard uses is a fable derived from "On Exactitude in Science" by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, a great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map was expanded and destroyed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. In Baudrillard's rendition, it is conversely the map that people live in, the simulation of reality where the people of Empire spend their lives ensuring their place in the representation is properly circumscribed and detailed by the map-makers; conversely, it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.
The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgment to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.[6]
It is important to note that when Baudrillard refers to the "precession of simulacra" in Simulacra and Simulation, he is referring to the way simulacra have come to precede the real in the sense mentioned above, rather than to any succession of historical phases of the image. Referring to "On Exactitude in Science", he argued that just as for contemporary society the simulated copy had superseded the original object, so, too, the map had come to precede the geographic territory (c.f. Map–territory relation), e.g. thefirst Gulf War (which Baudrillard later used as an object demonstration): the image of war preceded real war. War comes not when it is made by sovereign against sovereign (not when killing for attritive and strategic neutralisation purposes is authorised; nor even, properly spoken, when shots are fired); rather, war comes when society is generally convinced that it is coming.
Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map
Hyper reality
In semiotics and postmodernism, hyperreality is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.[1] It allows the co-mingling of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI).[2] Individuals may find themselves for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world. Some famous theorists of hyperreality/hyperrealism include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Mona Vanderwaal, Daniel J. Boorstin, Neil Postman, and Umberto Eco. The postmodern semiotic concept of "hyperreality" was contentiously coined by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard defined "hyperreality" as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality",[3] it is a representation, a sign, without an original referent. Baudrillard believes hyperreality goes further than confusing or blending the 'real' with the symbol which represents it; it involves creating a symbol or set of signifiers which actually represent something that does not actually exist, like Santa Claus. Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Baudrillard borrows, from Jorge Luis Borges' "On Exactitude in Science" (who already borrowed from Lewis Carroll), the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal. Baudrillard's idea of hyperreality was heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Marshall McLuhan.
Italian author Umberto Eco explores the notion of hyperreality further by suggesting that the action of hyperreality is to desire reality and in the attempt to achieve that desire, to fabricate a false reality that is to be consumed as real.[4] Linked to contemporary western culture Umberto Eco and post-structuralists would argue, that in current cultures fundamental ideals are built on desire and particular sign-systems.
Hyperreality can also be thought of as "reality by proxy"; simply put, an individual takes on someone else's version of reality and claims it as his or her own. For example persons who watch soap operas for an extended period of time may develop a view of interpersonal relationships (reality) that are skewed by how the writers depict the characters and situations within the show. Individuals may begin to believe that these extreme dramatic relationships are authentic and real, and they may begin to judge social relationships and situations by this heightened lens of reality.
Hyperreality is significant as a paradigm to explain current cultural conditions. Consumerism, because of its reliance on sign exchange value (e.g. brand X shows that one is fashionable, car Y indicates one's wealth), could be seen as a contributing factor in the creation of hyperreality or the hyperreal condition. Hyperreality tricks consciousness into detaching from any real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance. Essentially, (although Baudrillard himself may balk at the use of this word) fulfillment or happiness is found through simulation and imitation of a transient simulacrum of reality, rather than any interaction with any "real" reality.
While hyperreality is not a relatively new concept, its effects are more relevant today than when it was first conceptualized. There are dangers to the use of hyperreality within our culture; individuals may observe and accept hyperreal images as role models, when the images don’t necessarily represent real physical people. This can result in a desire to strive for an unobtainable ideal, or it may lead to a lack of unimpaired role models. Daniel J. Boorstin cautions against confusing celebrity worship with hero worship, “we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but who are famous because they are great”.[6] He bemoans the loss of old heroes like Moses, Ulysses, Aeneas, Jesus, Caesar, Mohammed, Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Washington, Napoleon, and Lincoln,[7] who did not have public relations (PR) agencies to construct a hyperreal image of themselves.
Disneyland[edit]
Both Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard refer to Disneyland as an example of hyperreality. Eco believes that Disneyland with its settings such as Main Street and full sized houses has been created to look "absolutely realistic," taking visitors' imagination to a "fantastic past."[15] This false reality creates an illusion and makes it more desirable for people to buy this reality. Disneyland works in a system that enables visitors to feel that technology and the created atmosphere "can give us more reality than nature can."[16] The fake animals such as alligators and hippopotamuses are all available to people in Disneyland and for everyone to see. The "fake nature" of Disneyland satisfies our imagination and daydream fantasies in real life. Therefore, they seem more admirable and attractive. When entering Disneyland, consumers form into lines to gain access to each attraction. Then they are ordered by people with special uniforms to follow the rules, such as where to stand or where to sit. If the consumer follows each rule correctly, they can enjoy "the real thing" and see things that are not available to them outside of Disneyland's doors.[17]
In his work Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard argues the "imaginary world" of Disneyland magnetizes people inside and has been presented as "imaginary" to make people believe that all its surroundings are "real". But he believes that the Los Angeles area is not real; thus it is hyperreal. Disneyland is a set of apparatuses which tries to bring imagination and fiction to what is called "real". This concerns the American values and way of life in a sense and "concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle."[18]
"The Disneyland imaginary is neither true or false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It's meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness."[19]
Filmography[edit]
Other examples[edit]
Films in which characters and settings are either digitally enhanced or created entirely from CGI (e.g.: 300, where the entire film was shot in front of a blue/green screen, with all settings super-imposed).
In A Clockwork Orange when Alex says, "It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen" when he undergoes Ludovico’s Technique.
A well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal).
Any massively promoted versions of historical or present "facts" (e.g. "General Ignorance" from QI, where the questions have seemingly obvious answers, which are actually wrong).
Professional sports athletes as super, invincible versions of human beings.
Many world cities and places which did not evolve as functional places with some basis in reality, as if they were creatio ex nihilo (literally 'creation out of nothing'): Black Rock City; Disney World; Dubai; Celebration, Florida; and Las Vegas.
TV and film in general (especially "reality" TV), due to its creation of a world of fantasy and its dependence that the viewer will engage with these fantasy worlds. The current trend is to glamorize the mundane using histrionics.
A retail store that looks completely stocked and perfect due to facing, creating an illusion of more merchandise than there actually is.
A life which cannot be (e.g. the perfect facsimile of a celebrity's invented persona).
A high end sex doll used as a simulacrum of an unattainable partner.[20]
A newly made building or item designed to look old, or to recreate or reproduce an older artifact, by simulating the feel of age or aging.
Constructed languages (such as E-Prime) or "reconstructed" extinct dialects.
Second Life: The distinction becomes blurred when it becomes the platform for RL (Real Life) courses and conferences, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or leads to real world interactions behind the scenes.
Weak virtual reality which is greater than any possible simulation of physical reality.[21]
The 2008 film Synecdoche, New York in which the life of the main character Caden Cotard is lived in the confines of a warehouse made to be the set of a play which is about his life, blurring all distinction between what is real and the simulation
The Superfiction Airline-Company Ingold Airlines
Works within the spectrum of the Vaporwave musical genre often encompass themes of hyperreality through parody of the information revolution.
Jean Baudrillard Excerpt FROM America
I shall
never forgive anyone who passes a condescending or contemptuous
judgment on America.2
Everything that has been heroically played out and destroyed in Europe in the name of Revolution and Terror has been realized in its simplest, most empirical form on the other side of the Atlantic (the utopia of wealth, rights, freedom, the social contract, and representation). Similarly, everything we have dreamed in the radical name of anti-culture, the subversion of meaning, the destruction of reason and the end of representation, that whole anti-utopia which unleashed so many theoretical and political, aesthetic and social convulsions in Europe, without ever actually becoming a reality (May ‘68 is one of the last examples) has all been achieved here in America in the simplest, most radical way. Utopia has been achieved here and anti-utopia is being achieved: the anti-utopia of unreason, of deterritorialization, of the indeterminacy of language and the subject, of the neutralization of all values, of the death of culture. America is turning all this into reality and it is going about it in an uncontrolled, empirical way. All we do is dream and, occasionally, try and act out our dreams. America, by contrast, draws the logical, pragmatic consequences from everything that can possibly be thought. In this sense, it is naive and primitive; it knows nothing of the irony of concepts, nor the irony of seduction. It does not ironize upon the future or destiny: it gets on with turning things into material realities. To our utopian radicalism it counterposes its empirical radicalism, to which it alone gives dramatically concrete form. We philosophize on the end of lots of things, but it is here that they actually come to an end. It is here, for example, that territory has ceased to exist (though there is indeed a vast amount of space), here that the real and the imaginary have come to an end (opening all spaces up to simulation). It is here, therefore, that we should look for the ideal type of the end of our culture. It is the American way of life, which we think naive or culturally worthless, which will provide us with a complete graphic representation of the end of our values – which has vainly been prophesied in our own countries – on the grand scale that the geographical and mental dimensions of utopia can give to it.
But is this really what an achieved utopia looks like? Is this a successful revolution? Yes indeed! What do you expect a “successful” revolution to look like? It is paradise. Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the US is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other. If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams – not just the political and sentimental ones, but the theoretical and cultural ones as well – then you must still regard America today with the same naive enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World. That same enthusiasm which Americans themselves show for their own success, their own barbarism, their own power. If not, you have no understanding of the situation, and you will not be able to understand your own history – or the end of your history – either, because Europe can no longer be understood by starting out from Europe itself. The US is more mysterious: the mystery of American reality exceeds our fictions and our interpretations. The mystery of a society which seeks to give itself neither meaning nor an identity, which indulges neither in transcendence nor in aesthetics and which, for precisely that reason,invents the only great modern verticality in its buildings, which are the most grandiose manifestations within the vertical order and yet do not obey the rules of transcendence, which are the most prodigious pieces of architecture and yet do not obey the laws of aesthetics, which are ultra-modern and ultra-functional, but also have about them something non-speculative, primitive, and savage – a culture (or unculture) like this remains a mystery to us.
We are at home with introversion and reflexion and with different effects of meaning coexisting under the umbrella of a concept. But the object freed from its concept, free to deploy itself in extraverted form, in the equivalence of all its effects. To us this is a total enigma. Extraversion is a mystery to us in exactly the same way as the commodity was to Marx: the commodity, hieroglyph of the modern world, mysterious precisely because it is extraverted, a form realizing itself in its pure operation and in pure circulation (hello Karl!).
In this sense, for us the whole of America is a desert. Culture exists there in a wild state: it sacrifices all intellect, all aesthetics in a process of literal transcription into the real. Doubtless the original decentring into virgin territory gave it this wildness, though it certainly acquired it without the agreement of the Indians whom it destroyed. The dead Indian remains the mysterious guarantor of these primitive mechanisms, even into the modern age of images and technologies. Perhaps the Americans, who believed they had destroyed these Indians, merely disseminated their virulence. They have opened up the deserts, threaded and criss-crossed them with their freeways, but by some mysterious interaction their towns and cities have taken on the structure and colour of the desert. They have not destroyed space; they have simply rendered it infinite by the destruction of its centre (hence these infinitely extendable cities). In so doing, they have opened up a true fictional space. In the “savage mind”, too, there is no natural universe, no transcendence of either man or nature, or of history. Culture is everything, or nothing, depending on how you look at it. You find this same absence of distinction between the two in modern simulation. There is no natural universe there either, and you cannot differentiate between a desert and a metropolis. It is not that the Indians were infinitely close to nature, nor that the Americans are infinitely distant from it: both belong to the ideality of nature, as they do to the ideality of culture, and both are also equally alien to nature and culture.
There is no culture here, no cultural discourse. No ministries, no commissions, no subsidies, no promotion. There is none of the sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage, nor of our sentimental – and today also statist and protectionist – invocation of culture. The Beaubourg would be impossible here, just as it would in Italy (for other reasons). Not only does centralization not exist, but the idea of a cultivated culture does not exist either, no more than that of a theological, sacred religion. No culture of culture, no religion of religion. One should speak rather of an “anthropological” culture, which consists in the invention of mores and a way of life. That is the only interesting culture here, just as it is New York’s streets and not its museums or galleries that are interesting. Even in dance, cinema, the novel, fiction, and architecture, there is something wild in everything specifically American, something that has not known the glossy, high-flown rhetoric and theatricality of our bourgeois cultures, that has not been kitted out in the gaudy finery of cultural distinction.
Here in the US, culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers – and in people’s minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic. This is not cinema or speed or technology as optional extra (everywhere in Europe you get a sense of modernity as something tacked on, heterogeneous, anachronistic). In America cinema is true because it is the whole of space, the whole way of life that are cinematic. The break between the two, the abstraction which we deplore, does not exist: life is cinema.
That is why searching for works of art or sophisticated entertainment here has always seemed tiresome and out of place to me. A mark of cultural ethnocentrism. If it is the lack of culture that is original, then it is the lack of culture one should embrace. If the term taste has any meaning, then it commands us not to export our aesthetic demands to places where they do not belong. When the Americans transfer Roman cloisters to the New York Cloysters, we find this unforgivably absurd. Let us not make the same mistake by transferring our cultural values to America. We have no right to such confusion. In a sense, they do because they have space, and their space is the refraction of all others. When Paul Getty gathers Rembrandts, Impressionists, and Greek statues together in a Pompeian villa on the Pacific coast, he is following American logic, the pure baroque logic of Disneyland. He is being original; it is a magnificent stroke of cynicism, naivety, kitsch, and unintended humour – something astonishing in its nonsensicality. Now the disappearance of aesthetics and higher values in kitsch and hyperreality is fascinating, as is the disappearance of history and the real in the televisual. It is in this unfettered pragmatics of values that we should find some pleasure. If you simply remain fixated on the familiar canon of high culture, you miss the essential point (which is, precisely, the inessential).
The advertisements which cut into the films on TV are admittedly an outrage, but they aptly emphasize that most television productions never even reach the “aesthetic” level and are, basically, of the same order as advertisements. Most films – including many of the better ones – are made up from the same everyday romance: cars, telephones, psychology, make-up. They are purely and simply illustrations of the way of life. Advertising does just the same: it canonizes the way of life through images, making the whole a genuinely integrated circuit. And if everything on television is, without exception, part of a low-calorie (or even no-calorie) diet, then what good is it complaining about the adverts? By their worthlessness, they at least help to make the programmes around them seem of a higher level.
Banality, lack of culture, and vulgarity do not have the same meaning here as they have in Europe. Or perhaps this is merely the crazy notion of a European, a fascination with an unreal America. Perhaps Americans are quite simply vulgar, and this meta-vulgarity is merely something I have dreamt up. Who knows? But I am inclined to suggest, in time-honoured fashion, that you have nothing to lose if I am wrong and everything to gain if I am right. The fact is that a certain banality, a certain vulgarity which seem unacceptable to us in Europe seem more than acceptable – even fascinating – to us here. The fact is that all our analyses in terms of alienation, conformism, standardization, and dehumanization collapse of themselves: when we look at America it is the analyses which seem vulgar.
Why is a passage like the following (by G. Faye) both true and, at the same time, absolutely false?
California shines out as the total myth of our times. …Multiracialism, hegemonic technology, shrink-culture narcissism, urban criminality and audiovisual saturation: as super-America, California stands out as the absolute antithesis of authentic Europe …from Hollywood to disco-pap, from ET to Star Wars, from the pseudo-rebellious itchings on the campuses to the ravings of Carl Sagan, from the neo-gnostics of Silicon Valley to the wind-surfing mystics, from the neo-Indian gurus to aerobics, from jogging to psychoanalysis as a form of democracy, from criminality as a form of psychoanalysis to television as an instrument of despotism, California has set itself up as the world centre of the simulacrum and the inauthentic, as the absolute synthesis of “cool” Stalinism. An hysterical land; focus and meeting-place for the rootless, California is the land of non-history, of the non-event, but at the same time the site of the constant swirl, the uninterrupted rhythm of fashion, that is to say, the site of tremors going nowhere, those tremors which so obsess it, constantly threatened as it is by earthquakes.
California has invented nothing: it has taken everything from Europe and served it up again in a disfigured, meaningless form, with an added Disneyland glitter. World centre of sweet madness, mirror of our dejecta and our decadence. Californitis, that hot variant of Americanism, is unleashing itself on the young of today and emerging as a mental form of AIDS. …To the revolutionary angst of the Europeans, California counterposes its long procession of fakes: the parody of science on the rite-less campus, the parody of cities and urbanism in the sprawl of Los Angeles, the parody of technology in Silicon Valley, the parody of oenology in its insipid Sacramento wines, the parody of religion in its gurus and sects, the parody of eroticism in its beach boys, the parody of drugs in its acids [?], the parody of sociability in its ‘communities’. …Even nature in California is a Hollywood parody of ancient Mediterranean landscapes: a sea that is too blue [!?], mountains that are too rugged, a climate that is too gentle or too arid, an uninhabited disenchanted nature, deserted by the gods: a sinister land beneath a sun that is too bright. The expressionless face of our death, since Europe will surely die sunburnt and smiling, with its skin lightly baking under a holiday sun.
All
this is true (if you like), since the text itself resembles the
hysterical
stereotype it confers upon California. And it is
surely easy to detect in Faye’s writing a degree of fascination
with his subject. But if we could use precisely the same terms to say
exactly the opposite of what he says, then this only emphasizes the
point that, for his part, G. Faye was not able to effect this same
reversal. He has not grasped how, at the edges of this meaningless
world, this “sweet madness” of meaninglessness, this soft,
air-conditioned hell he describes, things turn into their opposites.
He has not grasped the challenge of this “marginal transcendence”
in which precisely a whole universe is brought up against its
margins, its “hysterical’ simulation – and why not? Why should
Los Angeles not be a parody of cities? Why should Silicon Valley
not parody technology? Why should there not be a parody of
sociability, eroticism, and drugs, or even indeed a parody of the
(too blue!) sea and the (too bright!) sun. Not to mention museums and
culture. Of course all this is parody! If none of these values can
bear to be parodied, it must mean they no longer have any importance.
Yes, California (and America with it) is the mirror of our decadence,
but it is
not decadent at all. It is hyperreal in its vitality, it has all the
energy of the simulacrum. “It is the world centre of the
inauthentic”. Certainly it is: that is what gives it its
originality and power. The irresistible rise of the simulacrum is
something you can simply feel here without the slightest effort. But
has he ever been here? If he had, he would know that the key to
Europe is not to be found in its past history, but in this crazy,
parodic anticipation that is the New World. He cannot see that even
though every detail of America may be abject or insignificant, it is
the whole which passes our imagining – by the same token, every
detail in his description may be accurate, but it is the whole which
goes beyond the bounds of stupidity.
What is new in America is the clash of the first level (primitive and wild) and the “third kind” (the absolute simulacrum). There is no second level. This is a situation we find hard to grasp, since this is the one we have always privileged: the self-reflexive, self-mirroring level, the level of unhappy consciousness. But no vision of America makes sense without this reversal of our values: it is Disneyland that is authentic here! The cinema and TV are America’s reality! The freeways, the Safeways, the skylines, speed, and deserts – these are America, not the galleries, churches, and culture… Let us grant this country the admiration it deserves and open our eyes to the absurdity of some of our own customs. This is one of the advantages, one of the pleasures of travel.
To see and feel America, you have to have had for at least one moment in some downtown jungle, in the Painted Desert, or on some bend in a freeway, the feeling that Europe had disappeared. You have to have wondered, at least for a brief moment, “How can anyone be European?”
The Sims: The Sims is a strategic life-simulation computer game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. It was created by game designer Will Wright, also known for developing SimCity. It is a simulation of the daily activities of one or more virtual persons ("Sims") in a suburban household near SimCity. How is ‘The Sims’ Postmodern? Simulacrum/hypereality
Simulacrum/Hyper-reality:‘The Sims’:is a role-playing game which means you can create a character of yourself, or go create someone entirely different from yourself, e.g. James being a plump old lady. This is postmodern as you can play a different version of yourself. This is also hyper-reality as Baudrillard argued that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right.
Instantaneity:‘The Sims’ has instantaneity in it as you can cheat. For example ‘The Sims’ has money called Simoleons and you can cheat for gain §50,000 or §1000. Rather than working hard to get rich with your Sim you cam instantly be wealth in a matter of minutes.
Intersexuality:‘The Sims’ is intertextual in its aim to become real simulated life. By incorporating things like TV programmes and Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet) it tries to create its own world.
Self-Reflexivity:Your Sims can play ‘The Sims’ on there computer. This is self-reflexive. Furthermore the Sims address the camera and stare at you if they need something e.g. They need food cause they are hungry. This is self-reflexive because they know they are being controlled. Also it is self-reflexive of yourself as its meant to be a projection of yourself into the game.
Las Vegas: Las Vegas, long the casino gambling capital of America, began to go through a transformation in the late 1980s that revealed what much of postmodern America is becoming. As other parts of the nation started to compete with it by legalizing gambling, the city started to reinvent itself in the image of Disney, creating hotels that were also vast simulations and themed environments. So far, the strategy has paid off, making Las Vegas the nation's second biggest destination for tourists with some 28 million visitors in 1994, compared to 34 million for Central Florida.
Las Vegas hasn't turned itself into a clone of Disney, of course. Instead, it has created a new variation, which reveals the changes that are taking place in postmodern culture, at least within the realm of simulation and themed attractions. In place of a controlled and monitored park with well-organized forms of transportation, it offers visitors the bumper-to-bumper chaos of the Las Vegas strip, lined with fantasy buildings that bear no relation to each other, other than the fact that they look like images lifted out of the movies.
Also unlike Disney, the postmodern Las Vegas offers a freewheeling and often incongruous mix of adult entertainment and family-oriented simulation -- of Wayne Newton and animatronic dinosaurs -- that more completely reflects the irreverent and pleasure-oriented culture of contemporary America. One might say that Las Vegas has turned itself into sin city and sim city at the same time, so it can appeal to as wide an audience as possible and provide something to amuse the kids while their parents gamble.
One of the city's monuments to simulation is Luxor, a $375 million hotel and casino that is a fantasy version of ancient Egypt, presenting visitors with material images of mystery, mysticism and splendor in one of the greatest monstrosities ever built: a 36-story, pyramid-shaped hotel with a ten-story replica of the Sphinx as an entrance for valet parking. The hollow core of the pyramid is a 27-story atrium that started out with a fake river Nile at the bottom, which took visitors on a barge ride passed tableaus of ancient Egypt, (it was removed to create more space.) Meanwhile, "inclinators" -- elevators that travel diagonally, following the pitch of the pyramid -- take guests to their rooms in the upper floors.
Also inside the atrium is the attractions level, with its own interior buildings that contain what Luxor refers to, using the Disney designation, as "participatory adventures." As visitors walk into one of these interior buildings -- A Mayan-like Temple in the form of a stepped pyramid -- they find themselves in something that looks like an Indiana Jones movie. A motion simulator disguised as an elevator uses film images and special effects to create the illusion they are plunging into an archeological dig of a pre-Egyptian civilization, 1,000 feet below the the earth. Another simulator then makes it appear they are flying back to the surface, dodging particle beams and other dangers along the way
In the second of these interior buildings, visitors watch a simulation of a live talk show, in which the movie images appear to leave the screen and come toward the audience. The third originally housed the "Theater of Time," a seven-story-high screen that was used to reveal a utopian and dystopian future, allowing visitors to peer into a high-technology city, crisscrossed by flying cars, that looked like a mix between Blade Runner and The Jetsons. It has since been replaced with an IMAX 2D and 3D theater.
In Luxor, we can see many of the qualities that define Disney World but with a different twist. Like Disney, Luxor creates visual spectacles that are intended to evoke large emotions -- surprise, amazement, wonder -- rather than deep or nuanced feelings. It is the architectural equivalent of a hyperbole, inviting visitors into a world full of exclamation points.
And like Disney, it tries to overwhelm visitors with real and virtual forms of space, perspective and motion. Visitors experience the space of the atrium, which is so large it contains its own buildings. Going into the attractions, visitors find themselves in virtual spaces simulated with images as they appear to plummet into the earth and fly through the earth's interior.
Luxor employs all these effects in an attempt to evoke the sense of mystery that has always been attached to ancient Egypt, of transcending the mundane world and knowing what cannot be told. It plays to the same desire to escape the limits of life and make contact with a numinous realm that motivates people to meditate on crystals and chart the travels of nonexistent UFO's. But Luxor, like much of the rest of postmodern culture, merely simulates magic and mysticism; in the end, the only mysteries it has to offer are special effects provided by technology.
Also like Disney, Luxor is themed, offering a story line that is intended to give the visitor's experience a meaning and coherence. But Luxor, like many similar attractions, appears to suffer from an identity crisis: it can't seem to keep its theme together. In place of presenting one idea or trying to show one kind of place, it has jumbled together all kinds of times and places, which are removed from any sense of context or relation to each other. An essential characteristic of themed environments, namely that the simulations should function like the descriptions in a novel, moving the story forward, or at least creating a believable setting, has been abandoned, here, because it interferes with efforts to increase the intensity of the spectacle.
Thus, the Sphinx is the entrance to a pyramid, which contains an ancient-looking, pyramid-shaped, temple, which takes visitors to an ersatz dig of a fictional civilization before Egypt, while a simulation of a talk show goes on next door and celebrity impersonators play Michael Jackson, Madonna and the Blues Brothers or other Vegas-style shows go on nearby in Nefertiti's Lounge.
The odd mixture of themes can also be seen in the restaurants. A Polynesian and Chinese restaurant, with a thatched hut for a bar, has been named Papyrus in a transparent effort to link it to the Egyptian theme. (A "kosher-style" deli, named the Nile Deli, that Luxor advertised as being "on the banks of the Nile," has, since gone the way of the fake Nile.) Completing the mix is Millennium, a futuristic restaurant serving "Photonic Pizzas" and "Chrono Burgers."
What Luxor offers is cyberhistory, which far outdoes the more timid falsifications created by places like the Lied Jungle. It is history that has been turned into bad science fiction. It may include references to an ancient civilization but the view of the past it offers certainly isn't kosher.
Amusement Parks: I have experienced moments of hyperreality in the disney parks for sure. I think the one park that is more of a hyperreality than all the others would have to be the animal kingdom. Although not everyones favorite park, the animal kingdom does a fantastic job of blurring the lines between what is real and what is the fantasy. By placing psuedo-pens in ride queues with flightless birds or random large reptiles, you get the sense of total immersion into the animal world. Although fenced in, the enclosures come to below waist height and are easily seen by the smallest of the park guests (this is on the kilimanjaro safari queue).
Another way the hyperreality can be expressed in the Animal kingdom is the "Everest" attraction. From before you even get to it, you have to pretty much go through all of the Asia section, passing the monkey enclosure that looks like a temple with "vines" all over it. The statues of hindi and buddhist gods give you the feeling of reverence before you reach the attraction. Once on the line, you pass through a sherpa station, a musueum of yeti history that has the feeling of a homegrown and authenic mountain past.
You are forever reminded of the size of Everest from the scaling involved on the ride itself. The sounds of ceremonial bells, the smell of insensce, and the overall remote location of the attraction all add to the suspension of disbelief.
Summary for all Docs
Vaclav Havel, 1995 Harvard Commencement Speech
Currently, We are living in a global civilization, the identity of this lies technologically. Its emerged in means of telecommunication. The life of human races is interconnected in all senses including casualties. We can say it is been occupied by European or ultimately Euro-American culture as they have evolved the most(technologically). Today, It is also the sum total of human awareness and immense variety of cultures, of people, of religious worlds etc. While the world is accepting this , another contradicting process is taking place where ancient traditions are reviving and seeking new rooms to exist. Today, Every one want independence from some or the other things people fight for that with things that oppose the current civilization (such as swords, bows etc.) as well as with things that support it(such as lasers, gases, radars etc.). Ultimately, They’re denying democracy (which is the major thing they’ve been fighting for). Today’s world has also been equipped with instruments that can not only destroy things but can even cripple the capacity to live together. Thus, We need to be multi-cultural which is possible only if we accept a basic code of mutual co-existence. Today, Our world is covered with modern consciousness of humanity which has a dual nature, the thousands of marvellous achievements and the potential to do even better. The basic code or simple solution to this progressive civilization is the “RADICAL RENEWAL OF HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY” i.e. our co-science must be upon our reason otherwise we are doomed. We think that this can be achieved if we diver ourselves from esofistical anthropocentrism i.e. we must discover a new respect for what transcends us from life or reality, But a better alternative lies in being imbuing(filling with a feeling or quality) our civilization with a spiritual dimension.
Then he gives examples from his life and in conclusion he gives another real life event where he says that he was never allowed to leave his home but his mother had a dream that he would have a degree from Harvard and he received a doctoral degree at Harvard without even having to study there. He also went to Singapore and many other exotic places and realised that how small this world is and how it torments itself with countless things it need not torment itself with if people could find within themselves a little more courage, a little more hope, a little more responsibility, a little more mutual understanding and love.
Jean Baudrillard, excerpt from America
Anti-utopia (or anti-perfection) rose Europe in the 20th century. All of that was then achieved by America in the simplest radical way. America is undergoing anti-utopia (or missing of) culture, It doesn’t ironize upon the future or depend upon the future.The American way of living is the end of culture or thinking about it worthlessly. This way is vainly thought about in many other colonies, and the dimensions that utopia can give to it.
If you’re able to understand all of your dreams today including the theoretical and cultural ones then you’re understanding America and their situation, as with the same enthusiasm you’ve understood the new world. If you don’t understand your own history or its end, America seeks to give them neither a meaning nor an identity.
We are shy and understanding concept, but we can’t understand its effect until it is not extraverted (or going out from you). Like this America is a desert where culture lives in a wild state where transcripts are processed into real. This is given to them by the virgins. Americans are destroying themselves, Here there’s no transcendence of history. Here the culture which has been made real is everything. In America culture exists in space, speed, cinema and technology. In the US, there are no commissions or subsidies for it either. America is following technological culture due to which searching d=for sophisticated entertainment is tough, but there’s even larger works in high culture there. The movies there are also present with high level of culture. Lack of culture as well as vulgarity do have different meanings in America (not according to language but sociology) then they do in different parts of the world, because Americans quite simply accept vulgarity.
California if we describe it in detail would support some facts about itself while opposing the very same facts (For eg. If we take Disneyland)
After all this we can say that California (or we take America) is our decadent (for the entire world) but is not decedent at all. We can’t find the key to Europe in its history but in today’s world. The details of America is what passes our imagination, each detail might be accurate but it passes the bounds of stupidity.
The New America is in in the clash being wild and primitive as well as the absolute simulacrum but these can be said to be the first and last level of its description and there’s no second level in between them.
To see and feel America, you have to have had for at least one moment in some downtown jungle, in the Painted Desert, or on some bend in a freeway, the feeling that Europe had disappeared. You have to have wondered, at least for a brief moment, “How can anyone be European?”
Uberto Eco “City of robots” from Travels in hyperreality
As Eco explains it, his trip is a pilgrimage in search of "hyperreality," or the world of "the Absolute Fake," in which imitations don't merely reproduce reality, but try improve on it.
Not unexpectedly, it leads him to the "absolutely fake cities," Disneyland and Disney World, with their re-created main streets, imitation castles and lifelike, animatronic robots. Here, he takes a boat ride through artificial caves, where he sees scenes of pirates sacking a city, in the attraction, Pirates of the Caribbean, and he travels through a ghost story that appears to have come to life, with transparent, dancing spirits, and skeletal hands lifting gravestones, in the attraction, the Haunted Mansion.
It is in the two Disneys, where he finds the ultimate expression of hyperreality, in which everything is brighter, larger and more entertaining than in everyday life. In comparison to Disney, he implies, reality can be disappointing. When he travels the artificial river in Disneyland, for example, he sees animatronic imitations of animals. But, on a trip down the real Mississippi, the river fails to reveal its alligators. "...You risk feeling homesick for Disneyland," he concludes, "where the wild animals don't have to be coaxed. Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can."
He also discovers something else in Disney: a place that no longer even pretends it is imitating reality, but is straightforward about the fact that "within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced."
But, perhaps his most interesting perception occurs when he discovers, behind all the spectacle in Disneyland, the same old tricks of capitalism, with a new twist: "The Main Street facades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing," he writes. He similarly finds in Disney, "An allegory of the consumer society, a place of absolute iconism, Disneyland is also as place of total passivity. Its visitors must agree to behave like robots."
Additional People to investigate
Michel Foucault (French: [miʃɛl fuko]; born Paul-Michel Foucault) (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher,historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power andknowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralistand postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history of modernity. His thought has been highly influential for both academic and activist groups.
Born in Poitiers, France, to an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV and then the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness. After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced two more significant publications, The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things, which displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, a theoretical movement in social anthropology from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories were examples of ahistoriographical technique Foucault was developing which he called "archaeology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis, Tunisia, before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. In 1970 he was admitted to the Collège de France, membership of which he retained until his death. He also became active in a number of left-wing groups involved in anti-racist campaigns, anti-human rights abuses movements, and the struggle for penal reform. He went on to publish The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. In these books, he developed archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role power plays in the evolution of discourse in society. Foucault died in Paris of neurological problems compounded by HIV/AIDS; he was the first public figure in France to have died from the disease, and his partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.
The History of Sexuality and Iranian Revolution: 1976–1979[edit]
In 1976 Gallimard published Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité: la volonté de savoir (The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge), a short book exploring what Foucault called the "repressive hypothesis". It revolved largely around the concept of power, rejecting Marxist theories of power and rejecting psychoanalysis. Foucault intended it as the first in a seven-volume exploration of the subject.[120] Histoire de la sexualité was a best seller and gained a positive press reception, but lukewarm intellectual interest, something that upset Foucault, who felt that many misunderstood his hypothesis.[121] He soon became dissatisfied with Gallimard after being offended by senior staff member Pierre Nora.[122]Along with Paul Veyne and François Wahl, Foucault launched a new series of academic books, known as Dex Travaux (Some Works), through the company Seuil, which he hoped would improve the state of academic research in France.[123] He also produced introductions for the memoirs of Herculine Barbin and My Secret Life.[124]
"There exists an international citizenry that has its rights, and has its duties, and that is committed to rise up against every abuse of power, no matter who the author, no matter who the victims. After all, we are all ruled, and as such, we are in solidarity."
Michel Foucault, 1981[125]
Foucault remained active as a political activist, focusing on protesting government abuses of human rights across the world. He was a key player in the 1975 protests against the Spanish government to execute 11 militants sentenced to death without fair trial. It was his idea to travel to Madrid with 6 others to give their press conference there; they were subsequently arrested and deported back to Paris.[126] In 1977, he protested the extradition of Klaus Croissant to West Germany, and his rib was fractured during clashes with riot police.[127] In July that year, he organised an assembly of Eastern Bloc dissidents to mark the visit of Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnevto Paris.[128] In 1979, he campaigned for Vietnamese political dissidents to be granted asylum in France.[129]
In 1977, Italian newspaper Corriere della sera asked Foucault to write a column for them. In doing so, in 1978 he travelled to Tehranin Iran, days after the Black Friday massacre. Documenting the developing Iranian Revolution, he met with opposition leaders such asMohammad Kazem Shariatmadari and Mehdi Bazargan, and discovered the popular support for Islamism.[130] Returning to France, he was one of the journalists who visited theAyatollah Khomeini, before he visited Tehran again. His articles expressed awe of Khomeini's Islamist movement, for which he was widely criticised in the French press, including by Iranian liberal dissidents. Foucault's response was that Islamism was to become a major political force in the region, and that the West must treat it with respect rather than hostility.[131] In April 1978, Foucault traveled to Japan, where he studied Zen Buddhism under Omori Sogen at the Seionji temple in Uenohara.
Martin Heidegger (/ˈhaɪdɛɡər, -dɪɡər/;[6] German: [ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪdɛɡɐ]; 26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition, particularly within the fields of existential phenomenology and philosophicalhermeneutics. From his beginnings as a Catholic academic, he developed a groundbreaking and widely influential philosophy.
His best known book, Being and Time (1927), is considered one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century.[7] In it and later works, Heidegger maintained that our way of questioning defines our nature. He argued that Western thinking had lost sight of being. Finding ourselves as "always already" moving within ontological presuppositions, we lose touch with our grasp of being and its truth becomes "muddled".[8] As a solution to this condition, Heidegger advocated a change in focus from ontologies based on ontic determinants to the fundamental ontological elucidation of being-in-the-world in general, allowing it to reveal, or "unconceal" itself as concealment.[9]
Heidegger is a controversial figure, largely for his affiliation with Nazism prior to 1934, for which he publicly neither apologized nor expressed regret,[10] although in private he called it "the biggest stupidity of his life" (die größte Dummheit seines Lebens).
Being and Time was originally intended to consist of two major parts, each part consisting of three divisions.[1] Heidegger was forced to prepare the book for publication when he had completed only the first two divisions of part one. The remaining divisions planned for Being and Time (particularly the divisions on time and being, Immanuel Kant, and Aristotle) were never published, although in many respects they were addressed in one form or another in Heidegger's other works. In terms of structure, Being and Timeremains as it was when it first appeared in print; it consists of the lengthy two-part introduction, followed by Division One, the "Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein," and Division Two, "Dasein and Temporality."
Introductory summary[edit]
After acknowledging the many difficulties which accompany any attempt to summarize the book's contents, Simon Critchley offers a compressed version of the thesis Heidigger advances:
With that said, the basic idea of Being and Time is extremely simple: being is time. That is, what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death. Being is time and time is finite, it comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death, what Heidegger calls 'being-towards-death'.
Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer[2] and literary theory.[3] Since 1993, she has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is now Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory.
Academically, Butler is most well known for her books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", which challenge notions of gender and develop her theory of gender performativity. This theory now plays a major role in feminist and queer scholarship.[4] Her works are often implemented in film studies courses emphasizing gender studies and the performativity in discourse. She has also actively supported lesbian and gay rights movementsand been outspoken on many contemporary political issues.[5] In particular, she is a vocal critic of Israeli politics[6] and its effect on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, emphasizing that Israel does not and should not be taken to represent all Jews or Jewish opinion.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)[edit]
Main article: Gender Trouble
Gender Trouble was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages.[citation needed] Alluding to the similarly named 1974 John Watersfilm Female Trouble starring the drag queen Divine,[21] Gender Trouble critically discusses the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. The book has also enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring an intellectual fanzine, Judy!.[22]
The crux of Butler's argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies—is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender.[citation needed] This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as performative. The performance of gender, sex, and sexuality, however, is not a voluntary choice for Butler, who locates the construction of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject within what she calls, borrowing from Foucault's Discipline and Punish, "regulative discourses." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," decide in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural."[citation needed] Regulative discourse includes within it disciplinary techniqueswhich, by coercing subjects to perform specific stylized actions, maintain the appearance in those subjects of the "core" gender, sex and sexuality the discourse itself produces.[23]
A significant yet sometimes overlooked part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of "natural" or coherent gender and sexuality. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse.[24] The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a "natural" and unquestioned "fact," is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, unavoidably more cultural in their appearance, which can purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of a more fundamental sex. On Butler's account, it is on the basis of the construction of natural binary sex that binary gender and heterosexuality are likewise constructed as natural.[25] In this way, Butler claims that without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective.[26]
Thus, by showing both terms "gender" and "sex" as socially and culturally constructed, Butler offers a critique of both terms, even as they have been used by feminists.[27] Butler argued that feminism made a mistake in trying to make “women” a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler said this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations because it allows for two distinct categories: men and women.[13] Butler believes that feminists should not try to define “women” and she also believes that feminists should “focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement”.[28] Finally, Butler aims to break the supposed links between sex and gender so that gender and desire can be "flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors".[13] The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as a performance, not an essence, is one of the foundations of Queer theory.[13]
"Imitation and Gender Insubordination" (1990)[edit]
Judith Butler explores the production of identities such as "homosexual" and "heterosexual" and the limiting nature of identity categories. An identity category for her is a result of certain exclusions and concealments, and thus a site of regulation. However, Butler also acknowledges that categorized identities are important for political action at present times. An important idea in this work is also that identity forms through repetition of acts or imitation and not due to a certain original identity that exists prior to repetition. Imitation gives the illusion of continuity to produces identities. In the same way, heterosexual identity, which is set up as an ideal requires constant "compulsive" repetition to protect the very identity repetition has created.[29]
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)[edit]
Bodies That Matter seeks to clear up readings and supposed misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.[30] To do this, Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, a form of citationality, to work out a theory of performativity in terms of iterability:
Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance. This concept is linked to Butler's discussion of performativity. [31]
Iterability, in its endless undeterminedness as to-be-determinedness, is thus precisely that aspect of performativity that makes the production of the "natural" sexed, gendered, heterosexual subject possible, while also and at the same time opening that subject up to the possibility of its incoherence and contestation.
Charles Sanders Peirce (/ˈpɜrs/,[9] like "purse", September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician,mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.
An innovator in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, research methodology, and various sciences, Peirce considered himself, first and foremost, a logician. He made major contributions to logic, but logic for him encompassed much of that which is now calledepistemology and philosophy of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a founder, and which foreshadowed the debate among logical positivists and proponents of philosophy of language that dominated 20th century Western philosophy; additionally, he defined the concept of abductive reasoning, as well as rigorously formulated mathematical induction anddeductive reasoning. As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits; the same idea was used decades later to produce digital computers.[10]
In 1934, the philosopher Paul Weiss called Peirce "the most original and versatile of American philosophers and America's greatest logician".[11] Webster's Biographical Dictionary said in 1943 that Peirce was "now regarded as the most original thinker and greatest logician of his time."[12]
A list of noted writings by Peirce on signs and sign relations is at Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce)#References and further reading.
Sign relation[edit]
Anything is a sign — not absolutely as itself, but instead in some relation or other. The sign relation is the key. It defines three roles encompassing (1) the sign, (2) the sign's subject matter, called its object, and (3) the sign's meaning or ramification as formed into a kind of effect called its interpretant (a further sign, for example a translation). It is an irreducible triadic relation, according to Peirce. The roles are distinct even when the things that fill those roles are not. The roles are but three; a sign of an object leads to one or more interpretants, and, as signs, they lead to further interpretants.
Extension × intension = information. Two traditional approaches to sign relation, necessary though insufficient, are the way of extension (a sign's objects, also called breadth, denotation, or application) and the way of intension (the objects' characteristics, qualities, attributes referenced by the sign, also called depth, comprehension, significance, or connotation). Peirce adds a third, the way of information, including change of information, to integrate the other two approaches into a unified whole.[125] For example, because of the equation above, if a term's total amount of information stays the same, then the more that the term 'intends' or signifies about objects, the fewer are the objects to which the term 'extends' or applies.
Determination. A sign depends on its object in such a way as to represent its object — the object enables and, in a sense, determines the sign. A physically causal sense of this stands out when a sign consists in an indicative reaction. The interpretant depends likewise on both the sign and the object — an object determines a sign to determine an interpretant. But this determination is not a succession of dyadic events, like a row of toppling dominoes; sign determination is triadic. For example, an interpretant does not merely represent something which represented an object; instead an interpretant represents something as a sign representing the object. The object (be it a quality or fact or law or even fictional) determines the sign to an interpretant through one's collateral experience[126] with the object, in which the object is found or from which it is recalled, as when a sign consists in a chance semblance of an absent object. Peirce used the word "determine" not in a strictly deterministic sense, but in a sense of "specializes," bestimmt,[127]involving variable amount, like an influence.[128] Peirce came to define representation and interpretation in terms of (triadic) determination.[129] The object determines the sign to determine another sign — the interpretant — to be related to the object as the sign is related to the object, hence the interpretant, fulfilling its function as sign of the object, determines a further interpretant sign. The process is logically structured to perpetuate itself, and is definitive of sign, object, and interpretant in general.[128]
Semiotic elements[edit]
Peirce held there are exactly three basic elements in semiosis (sign action):
A sign (or representamen)[130] represents, in the broadest possible sense of "represents". It is something interpretable as saying something about something. It is not necessarily symbolic, linguistic, or artificial—a cloud might be a sign of rain for instance, or ruins the sign of ancient civilization.[131] As Peirce sometimes put it (he definedsign at least 76 times[128]), the sign stands for the object to the interpretant. A sign represents its object in some respect, which respect is the sign's ground.[106]
An object (or semiotic object) is a subject matter of a sign and an interpretant. It can be anything thinkable, a quality, an occurrence, a rule, etc., even fictional, such asPrince Hamlet.[132] All of those are special or partial objects. The object most accurately is the universe of discourse to which the partial or special object belongs.[132] For instance, a perturbation of Pluto's orbit is a sign about Pluto but ultimately not only about Pluto. An object either (i) is immediate to a sign and is the object as represented in the sign or (ii) is a dynamic object, the object as it really is, on which the immediate object is founded "as on bedrock".[133]
An interpretant (or interpretant sign) is a sign's meaning or ramification as formed into a kind of idea or effect, an interpretation, human or otherwise. An interpretant is a sign (a) of the object and (b) of the interpretant's "predecessor" (the interpreted sign) as a sign of the same object. An interpretant either (i) is immediate to a sign and is a kind of quality or possibility such as a word's usual meaning, or (ii) is a dynamic interpretant, such as a state of agitation, or (iii) is a final or normal interpretant, a sum of the lessons which a sufficiently considered sign would have as effects on practice, and with which an actual interpretant may at most coincide.
Some of the understanding needed by the mind depends on familiarity with the object. To know what a given sign denotes, the mind needs some experience of that sign's object, experience outside of, and collateral to, that sign or sign system. In that context Peirce speaks of collateral experience, collateral observation, collateral acquaintance, all in much the same terms.[126]
James Campbell Scott (born December 2, 1936) is a political scientist, anthropologist, and Sterling Professor at Yale University. He is a comparative scholar of agrarian societies, subaltern politics, and anarchism whose research has focused primarily on peasant populations of Southeast Asia.[2] Scott has directed Yale's Program in Agrarian Studies since 1991.[3]
Scott received his bachelor's degree from Williams College and his MA and PhD (political science, 1967) from Yale. He taught at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison until 1976 and has remained at Yale for the duration of his career. Scott is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded resident fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Science, Technology and Society Program at M.I.T..[4] He has also received research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1997.
Scott lives in Durham, Connecticut, where he raises sheep.
James Scott's work focuses on the ways that subaltern people resist dominance. His original interest was in peasants in the Kedah state of Malaysia. During the Vietnam War, he took an interest in Vietnam, and he wrote The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (1976) about the ways peasant peoples resisted authority. His main argument was that peasants prefer the patron-client relations of the "Moral Economy," in which wealthier peasants protect weaker ones. When these traditional forms of solidarity break down due to the introduction of market forces, rebellion (or revolution) is likely. Samuel Popkin, in his book The Rational Peasant (1979), tried to refute this argument, showing that peasants are also rational actors who prefer free markets to exploitation by local elites. Scott and Popkin thus represent two radically different positions in the formalist vs substantivist debate in political anthropology.[9]
In Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985) Scott expanded his theories to peasants in other parts of the world, and in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) he argued that all subordinate groups resist in ways similar to peasants. His first three books, as detailed above, have been summarized humorously with the descriptions "Peasants in Malaysia, peasants everywhere, everyone everywhere."[citation needed] Scott's theories are often contrasted with Gramscian ideas about hegemony. Against Gramsci, Scott argues that the everyday resistance of subalterns shows that they have not consented to dominance.[8]
In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Scott uses the term public transcript to describe the open, public interactions between dominators and oppressed and the term hidden transcript for the critique of power that goes on offstage, which power holders do not see or hear. Different systems of domination, including political, economic, cultural, orreligious, have aspects that are not heard that go along with their public dimensions. In order to study the systems of domination, careful attention is paid to what lies beneath the surface of evident, public behavior. In public, those that are oppressed accept their domination, but they always question their domination offstage. On the event of a publicization of this "hidden transcript", oppressed classes openly assume their speech, and become conscious of its common status.[10]
Scott's monograph Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) took him more into the realm of political science. In it, he showed how central governments attempt to force legibility on their subjects, and fail to see complex, valuable forms of local social order and knowledge. Scott uses examples like the introduction of permanent last names in Great Britain, cadastral surveys in France, standard units of measure across Europe to argue that a reconfiguration of social order necessary for state scrutiny, and require the simplification of prior arrangements. In the case of last names, Scott cites a Welsh man who appeared in court and identified himself with a long string of patronyms: "John, ap Thomas ap William" etc. In his local village, this naming system carried a lot of information, because people could identify him as the son of Thomas and grandson of William, and thus distinguish him from the other Johns and the other grandchildren of Thomas. It was of less use to the central government, which did not know Thomas or William. The court demanded that John take a permanent last name (in this case, the name of his village). This helped the central government keep track of its subjects, but it lost local information. Scott argues that in order for schemes to improve the human condition to succeed, they must take into account local conditions, and that the high-modernist ideologies of the 20th century have prevented this. He highlights collective farms in the Soviet Union, the building of Brasilia, andPrussian forestry techniques as examples of failed schemes.[11]
In The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Scott wrote:
... All identities, without exception, have been socially constructed: the Han, the Burman, the American, the Danish, all of them.... To the degree that the identity is stigmatized by the larger state or society, it is likely to become for many a resistant and defiant identity. Here invented identities combine with self-making of a heroic kind, in which such identifications become a badge of honor....
—(pp. xii-iii.)
In Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play from 2012 Scott says that "Lacking a comprehensive anarchist worldview and philosophy, and in any case wary of nomothetic ways of seeing, I am making a case for a sort of anarchist squint. What I aim to show is that if you put on anarchist glasses and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state from that angle, certain insights will appear that are obscured from almost any other angle. It will also become apparent that anarchist principles are active in the aspirations and political action of people who have never heard of anarchism or anarchist philosophy."
Alfonsus (Fons) Trompenaars (born 1953)[1] is a Dutch organizational theorist, management consultant, and author in the field of cross-cultural communication.[2] known for the development of Trompenaars' model of national culture differences.
David Émile Durkheim (French: [emil dyʁkɛm] or [dyʁkajm];[1] April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist, social psychologist and philosopher. He formally established the academic discipline and — with Karl Marx and Max Weber — is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.[2][3]
Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labour in Society (1893). In 1895, he published The Rules of Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology.[4] In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy.The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.
Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of thehypothetico-deductive model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of institutions, if this term is understood in its broader meaning as "beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity"[5] and its aim being to discover structural social facts. Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic;[6] that is, sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals.
He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon
Gerard Hendrik (Geert) Hofstede (born 2 October 1928 in Haarlem) is a Dutch social psychologist, former IBM employee, and Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, well known for his pioneering research on cross-cultural groups and organizations.
His most notable work has been in developing cultural dimensions theory. The five dimensions are Power Distance, Individualism, Uncertainty avoidance, Masculinity, and Long Term Orientation. He is known for his books Culture's Consequences and Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, co-authored with his son Gert Jan Hofstede.
Robert King Merton (July 4, 1910 – February 23, 2003) was an American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching atColumbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor. In 1994 Merton won the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science.[1][2] He is considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern-day sociology.
Merton developed notable concepts such as "unintended consequences", the "reference group", and "role strain" but is perhaps best known for having created the terms "role model" and "self-fulfilling prophecy".[3] A central element of modern sociological, political and economic theory, the "self-fulfilling prophecy" is a process whereby a belief or an expectation, correct or incorrect, affects the outcome of a situation or the way a person or a group will behave.[4] Merton's work on the "role model" first appeared in a study on the socialization of medical students at Columbia. The term grew from his theory of a reference group, or the group to which individuals compare themselves, but to which they do not necessarily belong. Social roles were a central piece of Merton's theory of social groups. Merton emphasized that, rather than a person assuming one role and one status, they have a status set in the social structure that has attached to it a whole set of expected behaviors.
Merton's theory on deviance stems from his 1938 analysis of the relationship between culture, structure and anomie. Merton defines culture as an "organized set of normative values governing behavior which is common to members of a designated society or group". Social structures are the "organized set of social relationships in which members of the society or group are variously implicated".[17]Anomie, the state of normlessness, arises when there is "an acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the socially structured capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them".[17] In his theory, Merton links anomie with deviance and argues that the discontinuity between culture and structure have the dysfunctional consequence of leading to deviance within society.[18]
The term anomie, derived from Émile Durkheim, for Merton means a discontinuity between cultural goals and the legitimate means available for reaching them.[19] Applied to the United States he sees the American dream as an emphasis on the goal of monetary success but without the corresponding emphasis on the legitimate avenues to march toward this goal. In other words, Merton believes that all subscribe to the American Dream, but the ways in which people go about obtaining the Dream are not the same because not everyone has the same opportunities and advantages as the next person. This leads to a considerable amount of (in the Parsonian sense) deviance. This theory is commonly used in the study of criminology (specifically the strain theory).
Chie Nakane (中根 千枝 Nakane Chie?, born November 30, 1926) is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology at the University of Tokyo.
Nakane’s work focuses on cross-cultural comparisons of social structures in Asia, notably Japan, India, and China. She is internationally known for her bestselling book, Japanese Society, which has been translated into 13 languages. In this book, Nakane characterizes Japan as “a vertical society” where human relations are based on “place” (shared space) instead of “attribute” (qualification).
Nakane graduated from Tsuda College in 1947 and then completed her graduate work specializing in China and Tibet at the University of Tokyo in 1952. In 1953-1957, she did fieldwork in India and studied in the School of Economics at the University of London. In 1959-1960, she was Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. In 1960-1961, she was Lecturer at the University of London.
In 1970, Nakane became the first female professor at the University of Tokyo, where she served as Director of the Institute of Oriental Culture in 1980-1982. She was Professor at Osaka University and the National Museum of Ethnology and Visiting Professor at Cornell University in 1975-1980. In 1995, she became the first and only female member of the Japan Academy. She is also an honorary member of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
Additional Terms
Cross-cultural communication is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavour to communicate across cultures. Intercultural communication is a related field of study.
A role model is a person whose behavior, example, or success is or can be emulated by others, especially by younger people.[1]The term "role model" is credited to sociologist Robert K. Merton, who coined the phrase during his career.[2][3] Merton hypothesized that individuals compare themselves with reference groups of people who occupy the social role to which the individual aspires.[4] An example being the way fans (oftentimes youth) will idolize and imitate professional athletes or entertainment artists.
In the second half of the twentieth century, U.S. advocates for workplace equity popularized the term and concept of role models as part of a larger social capital lexicon—which also includes terms such as glass ceiling, networking, mentoring, and gatekeeper—serving to identify and address the problems barring non-dominant groups from professional success. Mainstream business literature subsequently adopted the terms and concepts, promoting them as pathways to success for all career climbers. In 1970 these terms were not in the general American vocabulary; by the mid-1990s they had become part of everyday speech.[5] Although the term "role model" has been criticized more recently as "outdated",[6] the term and its associated responsibility remains prominent in the public consciousness as a commonly used phrase, and a "powerful presence" in the entertainment industry and media
A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. Although examples of such prophecies can be found in literature as far back as ancient Greece and ancient India, it is 20th-century sociologist Robert K. Merton who is credited with coining the expression "self-fulfilling prophecy" and formalizing its structure and consequences. In his 1948 article Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Merton defines it in the following terms:
The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.[1]
In other words, a positive or negative prophecy, strongly held belief, or delusion—declared as truth when it is actually false—may sufficiently influence people so that their reactions ultimately fulfill the once-false prophecy.
Self-fulfilling prophecy are effects in behavioral confirmation effect, in which behavior, influenced by expectations, causes those expectations to come true.[2] It is complementary to the self-defeating prophecy.
Examples abound[examples needed] in studies of cognitive dissonance theory and the related self-perception theory; people will often change their attitudes to come into line with what they profess publicly.[citation needed]
In the United States the concept was broadly and consistently applied in the field of public education reform, following the "War on Poverty". Theodore Brameld noted: "In simplest terms, education already projects and thereby reinforces whatever habits of personal and cultural life are considered to be acceptable and dominant."[6] The effects of teacher attitudes, beliefs and values, affecting their expectations have been tested repeatedly.[7]
The phenomenon of the "inevitability of war" is a self-fulfilling prophecy that has received considerable study.[8]
The idea is similar[according to whom?] to that discussed by the philosopher William James as The Will to Believe. But James viewed it positively, as the self-validation of a belief.[citation needed] Just as, in Merton's example, the belief that a bank is insolvent may help create the fact, so too on the positive side, confidence in the bank's prospects may help brighten them.[citation needed] A more Jamesian example: a swain, convinced that the fair maiden must love him, may prove more effective in his wooing than he would had his initial prophecy been defeatist.[citation needed]
There is extensive evidence[where?] of "Interpersonal Expectation Effects" where the seemingly private expectations of individuals can predict the outcome of the world around them. The mechanisms by which this occurs are also reasonably well understood: it is simply that our own expectations change our behaviour in ways we may not notice and correct. In the case of the "Interpersonal Expectation Effects", others pick up on non-verbal behaviour which affects their attitudes. A famous[according to whom?] example includes a study where teachers were told arbitrarily that random students were "going to blossom".[not in citation given] Oddly, those random students actually ended the year with significantly greater improvements.[9]
Answers to Questions that were to be considered
Is the internet a force against Balkanisation?..or something leading to it?
Today only one-third of the world’s population has access to the Internet, and, of course, the languages of this one-third dominate online. As more people gain access to the network, other languages will join in. But this is not the fragmentation of the Internet—it’s diversity through continued expansion. It’s leading to a richer representation of mankind, something to be cherished and encouraged. Moreover, it offers new possibilities to preserve some of that diversity: Enduring Voice, a joint project between the National Geographic Society and Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, uses the Internet to preserve rare languages including this interactive website .Due to different domains names on the web it is not dividing people its just bringing more and more diversity. So, no doubt its against balkanisation
Do the so called “weapons of the weak” inevitably include terrorism?
In some or the other ways the so called ”weapons of the weak” inevitably include terrorism because in this book by James C. Scott he clearly mentions many times that if the paddy production (by the farmer who’s poor) is to be doubled then he would need combines , mechanization, Equality and insurances which would lots the rich and harm the poor. And that’s what terrorism is it is the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.
Do examples such as “jaywalking, the anti-SAT movement or assembly-line slowdown[s]” show that anarchy has a place in modern society?
To most Americans the term anarchism probably invokes bomb-throwing radicals. But seen through Mr. Scott’s squint, anarchist principles are in action all around us, whether in jaywalking, the anti-SAT movement or assembly-line slowdowns — all examples, he contends, of everyday resistance to the rule of technocratic elites. “Unlike the anarchists, I don’t believe the state will ever be abolished,” he said in the interview. “It’s a matter of taming it” — through the kind of lawbreaking and disruption, he argues, that have always been crucial to democratic political change.
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