Ed Weick wrote:
[snip]
Those cats are
just like people, and people are like pussy-cats, 10% conscious and 90%
unconscious, and it's the unconscious part you have to worry about!"
[snip]
I heartily agree. One example of the unconscious part would
be a stock trader making a killing in the market. Another
example would be a teacher grading a student. Of course
it is *theoretically possible* for the trader to have
reflected on the social structure of
buying and selling things, and for
the teacher to have reflected on the social structure of
formal education in our society, on the symbolic meanings
these rituals embody for the various role participants,
andto compare these ritual forms with
how a social world can be organized in very different
ways (the comparative anthropology of one's own
social milieu, the archeology of one's own present,
etc.)....
An example of consciousness:
I was struck by a story in the NYT a while ago, of a tribe
in Africa where the elders decided to inventory all their
social customs (including, in this instance, ritual
genital mutilation of children, etc.), and then they
reviewed all the customs and decided to keep the
ones that still seemed useful for their society
as a whole in the 20th century,
and to discard the ones that did not seem helpful any more.
Imagine our capitalists doing a similar inventory of
the economic rituals in our society (including the renting
of persons, AKA wage labor), and professors doing an
inventory of the pedagogical rituals of our society
(including, e.g., failing students, using graduate
students as cheap lab labor, etc.), and these persons
deciding to keep the things that still seemed
useful for our society as a whole in the 20th
century, and discarding the the things that no longer
seemed helpful?
Contra Marshall McLuhan, I doubt that artists are
the antennae of the species, since they generally believe
in the art market. To debunk somebody else's
ritual customs is not consciousness: there is only
one way a person can be conscious, namely, to
be reflectively aware of what they themselves
are doing *right here and now*.
Resources to help persons become conscious include the
work of a few persons such as the sociologist Erving Goffman,
who elucidate what people are really doing when
they habitually (unconsciously...) keep reenacting the
social rituals they were childreared and schooled to
accept as "natural" and to perform as "just what one does
in the situation".
In plain sight, the best hiding place of all
There is more to the surface than meets the eye.
Everything obvious is begging to be questioned to see
what is being "put over on us". A sign one is recovering
is when one finds one's colleagues,' one's family's and
one's own behaviors as weird as some aboriginal hopping
around with feathers on and making loud noises
(OK, they aren't feathers: they are a "Today's Man" suit,
and the aboriginal is doing his weird gyrations
on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange: he's no
shaman, or yes he is: He's a stock trader!).
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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