All Politics is Interactive
We live in a world of individual actors. We live in a world organized and controlled by social structures. Social structures can be oppressive, and as individual actors some of us seek to struggle against them.
The relationship of individiual actor to structure is most centrally this: the structures do not exist anywhere except in the minds of the individual actors.
Unless it is even more centrally this: the thoughts, perceptions, and understandings of individual actors are, if not utterly defined by the social structures in their heads, then at least strongly shaped and channelled and interpreted by them.
Since the social structures that we wish to change exist only inside of people's heads, we are -- by definition -- trying to change individual people, trying to modify the contents of other people's heads. That's where the social structure lives. So -- again, by definition -- we have a critical perspective on the mindset and attitudes and belief systems and types of awareness that are in other people's heads. We are constantly making value judgments and evaluations about which portions of what we see and encounter in other people's heads is harmful, a part of the social problems we're trying to change, and which portions are either a part of the solution we're working towards or have new insight and awareness that might be part of other efforts, seeking other solutions, perhaps seeking to modify the contents of our head accordingly.
We are uneasy with being judgmental, or with being judged by others, and we often find it awkward and difficult to reconcile acceptance and kindness and general love for our fellow comrade sufferers with our ongoing need to change what needs changing.
All the nouns that refer to social structure and social institution are verbs and adjectives as well if you turn them to a different angle. Formal patterns of interactive behavor make up organizations, laws, plural composite entities of any sort -- society. A dance is a structure -- it is made up of rules and routines, form and shape and timing. Yet the dance is also composed entirely of dancers dancing. The behavior has a certain quality, a 'danciness', if you will, that makes it different from other ways of moving or other structured physical interactive behaviors, a different that allows us to recognize it as a dance (and as dancers dancing) as opposed to (for instance) football games (and football players playing).
As anyone who has been in the position of teaching a new dance can tell you, the possibility of the dance is dependent on having a shared set of rules and expectations and notions and concepts, a shared blueprint explaining to all the dancers how to dance. Even if the notions are spread spontaneously (and yes, this can happen, does happen, sometimes), the spread must take place somehow. And there's a final critically important element, in addition to a set of notions about how to do the dance and the fact of sharing it -- the dancers must be aware that the other dancers also share these notions, so that they will have the expectation that the other dancers will indeed be doing their part in the dance.
So that's social structure: it's all in our heads, collectively speaking; and it requires that what's in our heads is shared and expected to be shared as a collectively agreed-upon reality.
Social change: there is enormous, perhaps infinite, possibility for social change, since social structure exists only in our heads, but the following things must occur if social change is to occur: new notions of how to interact must be conjured up in a consistent pattern, they must be communicated so that they are shared notions, and the communication must saturate to the point that we have the reasonable expectation that the individuals we encounter share an awareness of the new pattern.
Behaviors take on a political impact because of political context. There is often not one dance and its moves that are within people's awareness, but several, and while sometimes someone will announce what dance we're about to do, it transpires at least as often that the dancers convey with their opening gestures and positioning shifts which dance they prefer, and they take their cue from what seems to be the sense or the primary direction opted for in the room at the time. So there may be an old way, a set of behaviors that are part of the previous structure, and also a new way, with modified behaviors that make up part of the new strucutre, and the dancers are familiar with both.
The gesture, the word phrase used or the nuance of expression, become politicized in this way. "You said 'handicapped' here, and I think we want to say 'disabled' instead", someone may suggest. It's not limited to language by any means, but language is a key space in which we see it occur. Things that we say take on political impact that has little to do with any intrinsic harm or rightness about those terms and phrases but because of the larger patterns that they are components of, the larger world-views and understandings and patterns of behavior that they come to symbolize or represent to us. A person may be affronted over your use of "service recipient" where they prefer "client", affronted in ways that sometimes exasperate people who focus on the item or element directly objected to, not realizing the extent to which it's not the item in and of itself that is problematic, but that it tends to be a component of a larger structure, a way of looking at or thinking of something that isn't the only way, and in an area where social change is being attempted or desired. The person expressing their affront may lose track of this fact as well.
Everyone on the dance floor has a responsibility for our moves. All the dancers want a degree of predictability and pattern, and where there are multiple possible patterns there are choices to be made, and we are responsible for our choices. At the same time, we are all caught up in many many dances we can't afford to sit out, and at any given time there are many dancers who have some notions of how the dance could go differently but who haven't communicated those notions to you yet, so you don't know the new possible pattern.
How many dancers must have a new dance in their heads as a shared notion before their movements on the dance floor can actually constitute a new dance that others can join?
One of my college professors often spoke of the attitudes they'd had in the 1960s: "Most of our students don’t engage with course content as political. When we were students ourselves, we took over administration buildings and the police were sent in, and we printed our own manifestos and taught our own alternative classes in the hallways. Teaching the truth about the Vietnam war and race and how the people who write the textbooks take money from the corporate conglomerates that benefit from the war. But this is a different era."
It was a time when there was a widely shared notion, a notion so widely shared it was expected of you that you shared in it, that those who were seeking social change were a critical mass and that its success was inevitable.
So add that to the pile: that social change itself, as a real fact, is a part of our mindset, and that we expect everyone we encounter to have that same awareness, along with its attendant responsibilities.
-------
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in early 2022. Stay tuned for further details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
comments at Dreamwidth -- https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/81545.html#comments
The relationship of individiual actor to structure is most centrally this: the structures do not exist anywhere except in the minds of the individual actors.
Unless it is even more centrally this: the thoughts, perceptions, and understandings of individual actors are, if not utterly defined by the social structures in their heads, then at least strongly shaped and channelled and interpreted by them.
Since the social structures that we wish to change exist only inside of people's heads, we are -- by definition -- trying to change individual people, trying to modify the contents of other people's heads. That's where the social structure lives. So -- again, by definition -- we have a critical perspective on the mindset and attitudes and belief systems and types of awareness that are in other people's heads. We are constantly making value judgments and evaluations about which portions of what we see and encounter in other people's heads is harmful, a part of the social problems we're trying to change, and which portions are either a part of the solution we're working towards or have new insight and awareness that might be part of other efforts, seeking other solutions, perhaps seeking to modify the contents of our head accordingly.
We are uneasy with being judgmental, or with being judged by others, and we often find it awkward and difficult to reconcile acceptance and kindness and general love for our fellow comrade sufferers with our ongoing need to change what needs changing.
All the nouns that refer to social structure and social institution are verbs and adjectives as well if you turn them to a different angle. Formal patterns of interactive behavor make up organizations, laws, plural composite entities of any sort -- society. A dance is a structure -- it is made up of rules and routines, form and shape and timing. Yet the dance is also composed entirely of dancers dancing. The behavior has a certain quality, a 'danciness', if you will, that makes it different from other ways of moving or other structured physical interactive behaviors, a different that allows us to recognize it as a dance (and as dancers dancing) as opposed to (for instance) football games (and football players playing).
As anyone who has been in the position of teaching a new dance can tell you, the possibility of the dance is dependent on having a shared set of rules and expectations and notions and concepts, a shared blueprint explaining to all the dancers how to dance. Even if the notions are spread spontaneously (and yes, this can happen, does happen, sometimes), the spread must take place somehow. And there's a final critically important element, in addition to a set of notions about how to do the dance and the fact of sharing it -- the dancers must be aware that the other dancers also share these notions, so that they will have the expectation that the other dancers will indeed be doing their part in the dance.
So that's social structure: it's all in our heads, collectively speaking; and it requires that what's in our heads is shared and expected to be shared as a collectively agreed-upon reality.
Social change: there is enormous, perhaps infinite, possibility for social change, since social structure exists only in our heads, but the following things must occur if social change is to occur: new notions of how to interact must be conjured up in a consistent pattern, they must be communicated so that they are shared notions, and the communication must saturate to the point that we have the reasonable expectation that the individuals we encounter share an awareness of the new pattern.
Behaviors take on a political impact because of political context. There is often not one dance and its moves that are within people's awareness, but several, and while sometimes someone will announce what dance we're about to do, it transpires at least as often that the dancers convey with their opening gestures and positioning shifts which dance they prefer, and they take their cue from what seems to be the sense or the primary direction opted for in the room at the time. So there may be an old way, a set of behaviors that are part of the previous structure, and also a new way, with modified behaviors that make up part of the new strucutre, and the dancers are familiar with both.
The gesture, the word phrase used or the nuance of expression, become politicized in this way. "You said 'handicapped' here, and I think we want to say 'disabled' instead", someone may suggest. It's not limited to language by any means, but language is a key space in which we see it occur. Things that we say take on political impact that has little to do with any intrinsic harm or rightness about those terms and phrases but because of the larger patterns that they are components of, the larger world-views and understandings and patterns of behavior that they come to symbolize or represent to us. A person may be affronted over your use of "service recipient" where they prefer "client", affronted in ways that sometimes exasperate people who focus on the item or element directly objected to, not realizing the extent to which it's not the item in and of itself that is problematic, but that it tends to be a component of a larger structure, a way of looking at or thinking of something that isn't the only way, and in an area where social change is being attempted or desired. The person expressing their affront may lose track of this fact as well.
Everyone on the dance floor has a responsibility for our moves. All the dancers want a degree of predictability and pattern, and where there are multiple possible patterns there are choices to be made, and we are responsible for our choices. At the same time, we are all caught up in many many dances we can't afford to sit out, and at any given time there are many dancers who have some notions of how the dance could go differently but who haven't communicated those notions to you yet, so you don't know the new possible pattern.
How many dancers must have a new dance in their heads as a shared notion before their movements on the dance floor can actually constitute a new dance that others can join?
One of my college professors often spoke of the attitudes they'd had in the 1960s: "Most of our students don’t engage with course content as political. When we were students ourselves, we took over administration buildings and the police were sent in, and we printed our own manifestos and taught our own alternative classes in the hallways. Teaching the truth about the Vietnam war and race and how the people who write the textbooks take money from the corporate conglomerates that benefit from the war. But this is a different era."
It was a time when there was a widely shared notion, a notion so widely shared it was expected of you that you shared in it, that those who were seeking social change were a critical mass and that its success was inevitable.
So add that to the pile: that social change itself, as a real fact, is a part of our mindset, and that we expect everyone we encounter to have that same awareness, along with its attendant responsibilities.
-------
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in early 2022. Stay tuned for further details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
comments at Dreamwidth -- https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/81545.html#comments