Hello,
Another week down and it’s… September? *checks notes* Yep, definitely not still March. I’m trying not to throw my hands up and say, “Well, that’s all for 2020, I’ll try again next year.”
Luckily, I have uni keeping me occupied.
This week we looked at globalisation.
It’s a big topic and like most big topics, the further you dig into it, the more abstract the academic language becomes around it.
For the uninitiated, academic language can seem either like new absolutes or go right over one’s head. Most of the time, however, academic language just gives academics a framework to work within when they communicate with each other. Complex ideas need specific “signifiers” — words — and academics spend their lifetime parsing their own vocabulary. In the humanities and social sciences, this can seem to a casual observer like, well, wank. A lot of it can be. Academia is not immune from applauding the biggest egos, from patting itself on the back, and forgetting how to communicate its new ideas to those who haven’t ‘done the reading’. But the intention isn’t to isolate and confuse, no matter what certain politicians would have you believe.
The intention is to better understand the world we live in, including how human societies function.
What frustrates me is how academic frameworks seem to trickle down into everyday talking points and lose their complexity.
This is not the fault of how academics communicate these ideas, nor how the layman understands them, but how in English we struggle to modify ‘verbs’ with ‘adjectives’, and find it easier to allocate a noun as a descriptor.
What do I mean?
Consider how people don’t tend to say, “She said something racist” and instead go for “She’s a racist”. The latter here is much more condemning than the former. If she said something racist, then it’s possible for her to say something that’s not racist in the future. If she’s a racist, we’re led to believe that anything she implies or says outright from now on is racist.
Notice how this can be destructive, especially in a child’s formative years. Labelling kids ‘stupid’, ‘mean’, or even ‘smart’ can seep into how they identify themselves, and make navigating the expectations of others and of themselves difficult, often well into adulthood. Rewarding or disparaging others for what’s deemed innate to their selfhood, rather than for their actions, can lead to greater misunderstandings when two people talk about Big Ideas, like those covered by social sciences.
So, globalisation. (haha)
Academia likes a label, too.
This week, I read about four different takes on globalisation, according to George & Wilding (2002). They label these takes as agents: the ‘Technological Enthusiast’, the ‘Marxisant Pessimist’, the ‘Pluralist Pragmatist’, and the ‘Sceptic Internationalist’. Of course, as I was reading I started thinking “Gee, which one am I?” George & Wilding go on to state that they are none of the above, and that they will take a ‘Political Economy Approach’ to globalisation. Note how the authors grant themselves the freedom of academic distance? They will verb (‘approach’), others just are.
Then, in the lecture we were given a table showing what differing political agents ‘think’ of globalisation: the ‘neoliberal’, ‘globalist marxists’, ‘conservative nationalists’, ‘social democratic sceptics’, and ‘social democratic globalists’. If your eyes glazed over, don’t worry. The point is, politics is never just ‘left’ versus ‘right’. People’s political beliefs and/or engagement exist on a spectrum. The problem these days is how social media, the media, and politicians exploit the assigned identity of others to drive a wedge between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Beware anyone who paints with such a big brush.
The above political labels are signifiers of complex ideas, and ideas put into political action. What I struggle with is how our language can’t handle not then labelling the agent of action as having these ideas as innate to them. We say “Hitler had a lot of fascist ideas and implemented them, therefore Hitler was a fascist”, which, let’s be honest, is a nice, easy conclusion to make. However, I’ve been thinking about the greater implications of language on identity and how it can restrict growth and understanding of each other. This is not to say Hitler wasn’t fascist in his beliefs, but what do we get from the term ‘a fascist’ other than an innate trait that makes us feel better for not possessing it? Really, we are all capable of supporting fascist ideas. We are all capable of hurting each other. We are all capable and culpable.
This week Max and I finished watching the new HBO show, ‘I May Destroy You’ by actor/writer/director Michaela Coel.
It blew our brains out of our skulls. One of the best shows I’ve seen. (We watched it illegally, but shhh. Keep your eyes peeled for legal viewing options.) The show follows Arabella, a young Black writer, who gets drugged and raped one night out. No spoilers: as she comes to dealing with her trauma, there is a slight semantic change in how she describes her assailant: she calls him her ‘raper’ rather than ‘rapist’ — granting him the agency of verb-ing instead of an innate quality from birth.
The overarching theme of the show is that we are all capable of destroying each other, and that nowadays the idea of ‘radical empathy’ is too hard for many to sit comfortably with. Indeed, it is one of the hardest things for us to do.
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Oh, and I’m probably more of a Pluralist Pragmatist when it comes to globalisation. But the jury’s out, really.
Now that I’ve waffled on long enough:
Every Indigenous Nation Sung Like ‘Yakko’s World’
11 Levels of Self-Portraiture
Is Success Luck or Hard Work?
This channel does great media analysis, including this one on Coco (2017)
That’s all from me this week.
Until next time!