After a rather long break (due to children and life) - actually I can´t really believe it is that long since my last post, I am now posting again and hope to be posting much more often in the future. To mark the "official" start of my return to semiotics (both personal and professional), I will be attending Semiofest 2013 in Barcelona at the weekend. I am really looking forward to meeting lots of great people and talking about the weird and wonderful world of signs and wonders.
More later
I don't know about you but I often have the feeling (especially at the moment having just moved to a new country, town etc) that I am only one step away from disaster, and that it wouldn't take much for it all to come falling down on my head. But that is usually when I am obsessing too much about myself and how my life is developing. It's not really on an existential level though.
Listening to the news about the fires in California this morning on BBC World it really struck me that we are all only ever clinging to the surface of this world. Our grip is never more than tentative. It doens't take much to wipe out a town, a state and your whole life. It sounds trite but it does remind you that we are all human and that in the face of disasters that is all that really counts.
I am sure some philosopher somewhere will have talked about the importance of realising that. I know that it's a large part of the Bible: humility because none of anything that we have is owed to us. But a lot of life at the moment seems to focus on avoiding the thought.
Had a very interesting conversation today which got me thinking. I was talking to a planner in the States and was trying to describe a certain company to him. I tried words like "progressive" versus "staid", I tried "bigger on the outside" versus "small on the inside". I even tried "more like Unilever and Procter than Nike" and I still don't think it connected. And then we started talking about what sort of people it was that worked there and he said "they sound quite Middle America" and I realised that actually that was precisely what I needed as a short cut. Forget descriptive words, forget analogies, just compare things to types of people that other people know and you're away.
This is an interesting area that I've been thinking about a lot. It's got a lot to do with living in a city but also a lot to do with living in society, so I guess it applies to most of us. I'll start with the example that got me thinking about this and then expand.
I live in a block of flats which has a shared refuse room. If you want to dispose of any large items which the council won't collect, you are supposed to organise for them to pick them up. This costs money. If you don't do this, they won't collect the items. What happens instead is that the firm that manages the building then contacts the council to pick up the items and they pass the cost onto all the residents of the block (probably knowing them also with an bit added for their bureaucracy). Recently we came downstairs to find a carpet and several other large items in the refuse room. They stayd there for a long time. Despite heartfelt appeals no-one admitted that it was their carpet, so it became apparent they had been dumped.
At the same time as this realisation dawned, a skip appeared outside the outer door to the refuse room. It was from some building work that was being done on a block nearby. So one night a little elf from our block took the items from our refuse room and put them in the skip. Now they were gone and we all didn't have to pay for them to be disposed of. But of course someone pays for the skip, and they didn't pay for it to be put there to have other people's waste dumped in it.
(this is not the skip in question but it is in London: not taken by me)
So we have counter-acted an anti-social act committed against our community by committing an anti-social act against another community. Right or wrong?
Or just a case of urban ethics in action.
How would I define urban ethics? Ethics is the branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions (you can tell I got that from a dictionary). So it would seem only right that there can be urban ethics because the values relating to human conduct must be affected by living in an urban environment.
In an urban environment deciding what is right and wrong is not governed by an abstract rule of morality, instead I think it is predicated upon the understanding that it is what works best for you. The definition of "you" is the interesting case in point here. In the case of the person who left the carpet, "you" was themselves and not having to pay for the carpet to be removed. In the case of the little elf who put the carpet in the skip, "you" was the group of which he would have been a part. I think it might be interesting to consider in more important cases of urban ethics in action how we can make the "you" more inclusive.
So for example many of those interviewed about the recent spate of gun crime said that the thing was that if they weren't in a gang, their lives were much harder, even if being in a gang meant possibly having to carry a weapon and use it. If we could change their definition of what is best for them, then we might have more of a chance of stopping them getting into a mess. I need to think more about this.
Interestingly the origins of society where about moving away from what is best for me, if you agree with the theory presented by Norbert Elias in The Civilising Process . It was about increasing self-restraint due to the interconnected nature of society. I wonder if the world has become so interconnected now that it actually feels like we are no longer connected. Too much of a good thing makes it seem like it doesn't exist (but that's another thought).
I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this thought, but it really struck me recently when a gay colleague showed me photos of his current squeeze. I realised that my other male colleagues had never shown me pictures of their female partners and I started wondering why. I realised as well that I had probably never shown my male colleagues who are straight pictures of my other half. Why not...?
I first started thinking about why we shows photos at all. And it's all about pride. I'm convinced that my guy is gorgeous, very sexy and very masculine. And I want other people to appreciate that and give me recognition for that. And only the right kind of people can do that. Who are those people?
It's people who can can translate what they are seeing into the right kind of response and a response that not only is right, but also fulfills the purpose of why I'm showing the photos. It has to be the right recipient of the message or to talk in marketing speak, the right target group. As a woman if I was shown photos of a woman, I would not comment in the same way a heterosexual man would but more importantly I wouldn't be the right target group because historically I'm not on the same playing field.
It's all quite primeval and maybe I'm not saying it quite right, but it's about whether the person you are showing the photos too could have been competing for the person you got. And so are their comments valid because they know what they are talking about.
I was at our company Xmas party last night which was surprisingly good. At one point I found myself talking to a younger colleague about a bit of a professional dilemma he was in. He is wanting to move into planning and yet has found himself working as an account person. I gave him the benefit of my small amount of wisdom as to what I thought he should do. I realise now that what I was actually doing was translating the experience that I have had in my career into useful nuggets for him. ie. always sell the benefit, make it easy for your boss, decide what kind of person you want to be and be it. etc. I also realised that I was translating and interpreting situations and comments in his life for him. ie. if your boss says to you "Maybe you should think about that some more," that can mean you haven't thought enough or you should think some more because it might be worthwhile.
An ex colleague of mine was very good at this. She was able to extract herself from the detail and talk about the meta level. She could therefore explain how someone was positioning themselves in a meeting and why.
I also thought that anyone who is interested in training and mentoring might find "translation" a useful metaphor. You take something you know and translate it into someone's elses language or frame of reference.
Don't know whether my comments helped my colleague though. I was slightly inebriated and very convinced I was being brilliant. 
Modern life is a lot about waiting. I’m not the first person to notice this. But in India I realised that there is a fine art to waiting. Cultures which have probably traditionally involved a lot of waiting due to their size and structures are already better set up to “wait” than say a culture like Western Europe where we expect things to happen on time and with little inconvenience.
So for example traditional Indian dress helps you to wait better, because the sari is just one simple piece of cloth which can be used as a sheet or something to sit or rest on. A cotton handkerchief which many Indian men seem to carry can be used to cover your eyes or face, whilst you are sleeping or resting in public. Food which consists of several dishes such as a thali or Southern Indian “meal” can be more easily packed up into several containers. And not insignificantly being able to eat it with your fingers eliminates the need for a table and cutlery.
The one slightly less optimal thing that stood out to me in India which is maybe less to do with waiting, and more to do with travelling, is the paucity of rucksacks in India. I wonder (without any basis for this supposition) if it is somehow lowering your status in India to carry things on your back, for my travelling partner and I were the only ones with rucksacks – I’m of course ignoring any other non-Indian travellers.
I actually wrote my dissertation on the intersection between the public and private sphere (based on Trollope's Palliser Novels in case anyone is interested). It strikes me however that there is something much more interesting going on now with Web 2.0. It started with mobile phones and has just spread everywhere. I haven't quite worked out the theory yet. But at the moment my thinking is something like this.
There is nothing like spheres anymore because that relates to a spatial thinking which is no longer relevant.
http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2005/10/blogging-as-public-and-private.html
Instead of which the relevant metaphor is more about volition and consciousness. It's about when you want to be seen and noticed and when not. So the woman I saw brushing her hair whilst waiting at the Bus stop would chosen that that was a time when she did not want to be noticed. It didn't matter that there were people around her, she had decided that she didn't want to be part of any interaction and so therefore her actions should not be considered as in any way part of anything. The people who shout intimate things down their cell phones on the train have decided that they are not part of the social environment around them. As the post above says in a phrase I like, it's about "presence negotiations" but also about presence volition. 
I don't know how many of you are familiar with the story of the East German traffic light man? When Germany was (re-)unified, West Germany wanted to impose their systems everywhere in East Germany including on the semiotic landscape of traffic. They wanted to get rid of East German signage and introduce a standardised sign. However the old East Germans protested ... and won!! They got to keep their little man.
For me this says something powerful about signs. Traffic signs in particular are about more than just literal navigation, they say something about who we are in the way they say what they have to say. (if you see what I mean). The East German Ampelmaennchen has more humanity than his West German counterpart and I can't help feeling that this is what a lot of people from former East Germany would say about the society they lived in before the Wall came down, despite the inequities of the actual system. So no wonder they fought for their man.
http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=53&story_id=21927
Recent Comments