Race & Culture, Research Paper Example

Reality is defined as a social agreement in which rules, routines and symbols are collectively accepted. We assign the use of these three items by reinforcing them through our cultural norms. Here, cultural and social become interchangeable. Humans function on the acceptance on a conscious level of these variables (rules, etc.).Social reality is a, “…collective acceptance or recognition by the individuals acting collectively…” (Searle, 1998, p. 126).Society is a collection of symbols according Structuralist theory[1]. The meaning of each symbol is designated through a shared cultural understanding. Thus, psychological laws, social norms and reality are formulated all on the understanding of symbols, and as Bermann puts it “the internalization f daily life” (1992, p. 35). The expression of these symbols is delivered and comprehended linguistically (Berger and Luckmann, 1966, p. 37). Society’s collection of symbols and signs are, “part of a continuous temporal process of interpretation” (Rochberg-Halton, 1982, p. 458). It is important to the understanding of structural linguistics to acknowledge that signs and symbols owe their root context to shared intentionality and interpretation; thus, a community is a compulsory element, propagating itself as a cultural entity; “(community) is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value” (Bredin, 1984, p. 113). Since the basis of understanding shared interpretation of reality rests with a shared understanding of a symbol’s intent through expressivity of language, Saussure’s dichotomy of language is essential to Structuralist theory. In modernity, people are being forced to be marketable “their [men and women] growth is channeled and twisted into narrow, strictly marketable, directions” (Bermann, 1992, p. 36), meaning, that a person’s identity hinges upon how well they present themselves to society’s need at that current and specific time.

Saussure understands a “general language system” (Rochberg-Halton, 1982, p. 459) as divided into two parts: langue and parole – wherein the first is accepted as language as a comprehensive system and the latter as the actual speech (Rochberg-Halton, 1982, p. 459). This is important when thinking about Marx’s “exchange value” (Bermann, 1992, p. 37), meaning anything goes in a society so long as its economical return is profitable. Since the argument of this paper rests upon Structuralist theory the former element of sign or signifier in language is more central, as Rochberg-Halton states, “…all meaning resides in the conceptual system of language and not at all in any given instance of speech or action” (Rochberg-Halton, 1982, p. 459). Marx hinges this dynamic speech and action to come from a socialist revolution (Bermann, 1992, p. 37).

Understanding the role of language as the comprehensive structure on which society and identity is formulated can best be understood more fully with Mead’s theory on mind. Mead’s theory states that the human mind is culturally formed. The ideas of culture are biologically created insofar as the mind has control over definitions and signifiers that create society’s reality;

The human animal, however has worked out a mechanism of language communication by means of which it can get this control. Now, it is evident that much of that mechanism does not lie in the central nervous system, but in the relation of things to the organism. The ability to pick these meanings out and to indicate them to others and to the organism is an ability which gives peculiar power to the human individual. The control has been made possible by language. It is that mechanism of control over meaning in this sense which has, I say, constituted what we term ‘mind’ (Mead, 1934, p. 210).

It can then be inferred that “idea is the reality” (Rochberg-Halton, 1982, p. 464). Although society is a collection of individuals, in order for individuals to cooperate in social dialogue, communication must be a shared, process. This relates to Dostoevsky’s idea of “totalitarian movements” (Bermann, 1992, p. 39) in which people agree to a shared reality of viewing leadership and freedom as a burden. Modern society is at odds with itself as it both desires to be free, and free from the mask of oppression, but it also desires to have a form of leadership in which they are told what to do as citizens. The shared reality is polemical.

The individual then requires this communicative process “…which consists in the determination of a common end through internalizing the perspectives of the others who comprise the group” (Rochberg-Halton, 1982, p.  465). Through internalizing the process of communication the deep structure of society based on shared utterance or langue births meaning and thus identity. Symbols are attributed to certain a priori interpretations. Saussure gives langue a societal understanding; the “identity of a linguistic sign” can best be constructed according to not merely a concrete or inanimate example but also on “conditions that are distinct from the materials that fit the description” (Bredin, 1984, p. 68) such as the item’s relation to other same objects in a societal system.

Communication is a pattern of cognition in relation to intentionality. Language as communication creates institutional facts (Searle, 1998, p. 133). In order to make society a comprehensive structure that’s easily understood, language must on its own become a building block in which individuals act as a whole in relation to meaning – in Mead’s generalized other the individual creates a dialogue of experience (or culturally speaking, shared frame of reference) wherein “…our experience is in the thing as much as it is in us for it is in the communicative act as a whole (including its consequences), and not solely in an individual or social subject, that meaning is located” (Rochberg-Halton, 1982, p. 466). Mind, as a social construct, is able to utter parole and be understood in the system of langue through a “generalized attitude he assumes, to make use of symbolic gestures, i.e., terms, which are significant to all including himself” (Rochberg-Halton, 1982, p. 466). Symbolic gestures maneuver modern identity by inveigling the masses through reinforcing a presumption that people do not change, “The masses are not the measure but the ideology of the culture industry, even though the culture industry itself could scarcely exist without adapting to the masses (Adorno &Rabinbach, 1975, p. 12). This  act by the cultural industry of manipulating the masses is one in which a hearer and a speaker seek a level of cooperation in order to maintain cultural meaning in society as Searle states, “The communication intention is the intention to produce in the hearer the knowledge of my meaning by getting him to recognize my intention to produce in him that knowledge” (Searle, 1998, p.145).

With structuralism, society is a system of signs understood through a priori language. Claude Lévi-Strauss developed this theory further by expounding upon the use of language in myth – assigning myth as sound image (signifier) and concept (signified). These were further explained by Saussure’s dynamic between langue (language system) and parole (individual speech). Jakobson, expounding on this, founded the “horizontal-vertical” (Kurzweil, 1980, p. 15) both of which are used (in the case of the former) to combine words (horizontal or diachronic) and to (in the case of the latter) select words from “the available language” (Kurzweil, 1980, p. 16) (vertical or synchronic). As such, the forming of social reality is reliant upon use and understanding of language.

George Herbert Mead said that reality is a social construct, in that social psychology determines individual psychology (as cited in Strauss, 1964, p. 115). Therefore social reality only exists insofar as the ‘audience’ allows it to exist through intention and acceptance – reality hinges on collective cooperation of knowledge; “…the mind is essentially a biological phenomenon and that therefore its two most important interrelated features, consciousness and intentionality, are also biological” (Searle, 1998, p. 112). Although the basis of reality is sociological, the beginning of its function rests on a biological level; “…mind…has its focus there, it is essentially a social phenomenon; even its biological functions are primarily social…we must regard mind, then, as arising and developing within the social process, within the empirical matrix of social interactions” (Mead, 1934, p. 210). As the structuralist Levi-Strauss has stated, man as a social being also has – on a biological level –“an understanding of the invariant laws of thought” (Rochberg- Halton, 1982, p. 456). Biology is influenced and regulated by culture in the understanding that culture is a controlling variable of human behavior, as Mead states, “For social psychology, the whole (society) is prior to the part (the individual), not the part to the whole…” (Strauss, 1964, p. 121). Thus, the “wholeness” of the mind is, simply put, humans agreeing on a particular understanding of reality and its structures/symbols/functions: “…all functions are observer-relative…They only exist relative to observers or agents who assign the function” (Searle, 1998, p. 121).  The cycle of understanding a reality of fear transferred the three agencies (speaker, journalist, reader) is best explained through Mead’s theory. Through human evolution gestures and communication have become the stimuli of understanding the matrix of society. Mead states that the mind understands these stimuli through “meaning” (Strauss, 1964, p. 163). This meaning is understood in the sense that what is reported becomes reality and influences thoughts and behaviors of the social mind:

Meaning arises and lies within the field of the relation between the gesture of a given human organism and the subsequent behavior of this organism as indicated to another human organism by that gesture…In other words, the relationship between a given stimulus-as a gesture-and the later phases of the social act of which it is an early (if not initial) phase constitutes the field within which meaning originates and exists…A gesture by one organism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an early phase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, are the relata in a threefold relationship of gesture to first organism, of gesture to second organism, and the gesture to subsequent phases of the given social act; and this threefold relationship constitutes the matrix within which meaning arises or which develops into the field of meaning (Strauss, 1964, p. 163).

Through creating a social reality based on fear through the theories of structuralism and Mead’s concept of the mind, institutional realities become the paradigms of culture.Collective understanding of a culture and “assignment of status functions” (Searle, 1998, p. 131) allow these cultures to continually be recognized through collective intention or public time. Thus, governments, economies, and even languages base the knowledge of their parts on generalized acceptance of their status. Through this re-definition of culture, society is being forced to confront the idea of a shift in the paradigm of identity and what it means to be one race or another in a specific culture.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor & Anson G. Rabinbach. “Cultural Industry Reconsidered.” New German Critique 6(1975): 12-19. Print.

Bermann, Marshall. “Why Modernism Still Matters.” Scott Lash & Jonathan Friedman (eds.), Modernity and Identity. Blackwell, 1992. Print.

Kurzweil, E. “The Age of Structuralism.” Columbia University Press. New York. (1980). Print.

Mead, G.H. “The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead.” A. Strauss (Ed). University Of Chicago Press (1934). Print.

Rochberg-Halton, E. “Situation, Structure, and the Context of Meaning.” The Sociological  Quarterly23(4). (Autumn 1982). 455-476. Print.

Strauss, A. “George Herbert Mead On Social Psychology.” The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. (1964). Print.

Searle, J. R. “Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World.” Basic Books. New York (1998). Print.

Williams, Raymond. “The Analysis of Culture.” The Long Revolution (1961): 57-70. Print.

[1] Structuralism is a French theory movement in which culture/society is understood through a system of signs (signs, meaning something that stands for something else through language, philosophy, religion, etc. (take for example the cross being a symbol of Christian faith; McDonald’s golden arches symbolizing food; etc) (Assiter, 1984, p. 272-4).