In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on August 3, 2008

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

“The Scottish Play”, Act 5, Scene 5

To pleasant songs my work was erstwhile given, and bright were all my labours then; but now in tears to sad refrains am I compelled to turn.

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

In a sadly under-read monograph entitled Reality Construction in Society, Burkart Holzner introduced the concept of “reality shocks”, “the unanticipated feeling of unreality arising in situations of extreme disappointment or extreme success, or in situations in which the social support for our interpretation of reality is withrawn, or in which we are confronted by entirely meaningless events.” (page 11). I would suggest that these types of events have become increasingly common over the past 40 years and our reactions, both as individuals and as groups, to them are coming to increasingly define social and inter-social relations.

In an earlier post, I used the distinctions between via negativa and via positiva to highlight epistemological stances towards “reality” and noted that

Our personal ethical systems derive from our epistemological stance, our modes of operations, our views of “reality” and whatever symbol system(s) we use to express them – our personal “grounds of being”.

That was fine inasmuch as I was discussing ethical systems at the time. But the concept of “personal grounds of being” has a lot more utility, and in ways that are frequently not thought of.

Each one of the components I identified as being part of a personal ground of being – epistemological stance, mode of operations, “views of reality”, various symbol systems – is also a component of what Holzner (p.15) calls a “meaning structure” (sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not…).

The meaning structures of everyday life define the world in which we are confident and in which we are at home. When we are confronted by their limitations, anxiety arises, either in the sudden panic of a crisis or in the nagging, persistent anxiety that something unknown is drastically wrong. Each one of the severe reality shocks represents such a crisis in which we experience the limitations of our meaning-structures.

Holzner was coming at the problem of meaning structures and how people react to their disintegration, from phenomenology, social psychology and symbolic interactionism. When I first read his work, I came at the problem of reality shocks from a slightly different angle, i.e. symbolic anthropology and ritual studies. In particular, while I liked Holner’s formulation of reality shocks, I felt they needed to be expanded along several lines, to whit,

• What role (if any) is played by “ritual specialists” (aka “experts”) in resolving reality shocks? and
• What patterns of resolution appear at a species level (i.e. across cultures and time)?

Back when I was doing my dissertation on the career transition industry, I examined both of these questions in the context of how people reacted to job loss. These days, I have a somewhat more nuanced understanding of how to approach them.

On the first question, I find myself referring to the work of Charlie Laughlin and, in particular, to his paper on the Cycle of Meaning. For Laughlin, the cycle of meaning is the process of integrating knowledge, memory and experience.

According to this cycle, a society’s cosmology is expressed in its mythopoeic symbolism (myth, ritual performance, drama, art, stories, etc.) in such a way that it evokes direct experiences in alternative phases of consciousness (see Figure 2). The experiences and memories that arise as a consequence of participation in the mythopoeic procedures are in turn interpreted in terms of the cosmology in such a way that they verify and vivify the cosmology. A living cycle of meaning would seem to be a delicate process, and one that requires change or “revitalization” (Wallace 1966) over time in order for meaningful dialogue to continue between worldview and experience.

While I like this model, I would argue (and I suspect that Charlie would agree), that what comprises a “society’s cosmology” gets increasingly vague and/or fragmented the larger a society is, the more groups it incorporates and the more change it has to deal with. He goes on to say that

The social construction of knowledge and individual experience are indeed involved in a reciprocal feedback system the properties of which may be changed by circumstances in such a way that the link between knowledge and experience may be hampered, and even lost. In other words, a religious system may become moribund due for some reason to the failure of the dialogue between worldview and direct experience.

Now, this idea of a reciprocal feedback system is, to my mind, absolutely crucial. This feedback loop is what binds individuals to the group by “explaining” (erkennen in Dilthey’s terms) direct experience or, in other words, by putting experience into a context. But what about reality shocks? Well, within the cycle of meaning, there is a “ritual specialist”, a shaman or expert, who serves to act as a guide to the contextualization of direct experience by providing them with an explanatory framework. As a general class of experience, however, not all reality shocks have ritual specialists to explain them and provide that context.

This brings me to several alternate sources of explanation for reality shocks, of which I will consider two, although there are others. First, I would suggest that we social movements can act as if they were ritual specialists even when thee is no direct, one-to-one, intervention. Second, I would argue that non-human artifacts (books, art, music, etc.) can operate as if they were ritual specialists. I believe that these two “as if” sources us a similar mechanism:

• they provide a language to describe the “something unknown” that Holzner talks about, and
• they contextualize that “unknown” by
  1. validating it as “real”,
  2. validating is a “shared” with others, and
  3. placing it within a linguistic frame of reference.

Let me start with a simple example of this. The same year as I started my doctoral fieldwork (1993), the Australian band Midnight Oil released a song called Truganini. One of the things that intrigued me was that I found out about the song from two different sources (I hadn’t listened to Midnight Oil before then):

• one of the participants in the career transition program I was studying told me that it really captured what he was feeling even though he didn’t know most of the references, and
• my wife said “Hey, listen to this… it reminds me of what you are studying”.

Needless to say, I listened to it.

The song (minus the Oz specific references) really does capture a large amount of the emotional tonality associated with job loss. At the same time as it captures that emotional tonality, it also validates it both by expressing it (i.e. sending the message that “you are not alone) and by framing it in the Goffmanian sense and providing an explanatory context (look at the significatory placement and use of the Union Jack). While the overt political message contained in the song is Oz specific, the emotional tonality is not.

One of the most intriguing things about music, as an artifactual “ritual specialist”, is that it actually does not require an overt political message that makes immediate sense; at least as long as the emotional tonality of the music does so. For example, consider the rather (in)famous song, The Preacher and the Slave by Joe Hill.

The emotional tonality of the song all centers around around feelings of “betrayal” and “hypocrisy”; of being in a terrible situation because of the actions of groups who claim to be looking out for “us” while they line their own pockets.

Artifactual “ritual specialists” can merely serve to validate and channel feelings, they do not, in general, serve as the foci for social movements although they definitely enhance them. Consider, for a moment, the example of the Singing Revolution in Estonia.

In general, what is required to turn contextualized, emotional understanding into social action is a social movement. Social movements serve to (re)define “problems” and to present “solutions” to these “problems”. In a broader context, some social movements “revitalize” components of a society’s cosmology by identifying both a “problem” and a “solution”. These “problems” and, often, their associated “solutions”, then often compete in the broader social environment for resources (media access, definitional control, “power”, etc.). By offering both of Dilthey’s required components of scientific explanation, verstehen (empathic understanding) and erkennen (explanation or context), social movements provide a venue for social action or, in other words, they channel and focus both “motivation” and “meaning”.

We can see these dynamics operating in many areas of the world today across a wide variety of different, and disparate, “problems”. For example, Mark Levine’s recent work Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam deals with how Metal is shifting the perceptions and the terms of discourse of the “problems” facing Islam today (see here for a review).  At the same time, and minus the musical background, we see such diverse groups as al Quaida, the Human Terrain System and the Network of Concerned Anthropologists engaged in struggles for definitional control of particular problems.

But seeing these dynamics and engaging with them is another matter.  All too often, people choose to echo Boethius’ sentiment (quoted at the start of the post) and sit on the sidelines.  It is simple, and emotionally satisfying in a nihilist way, to play the spectator while Nero fiddles and Rome burns.  It is much harder to say “This is where I stand” and act on it.

Category: Anthropology, Epistemology, Ethics, Music, Mythology & Narratives
Tags: Ethics, Social Movements