Change Discourse: Public and Private Worlds

No doubt, we all have our secrets, but even those are framed using the belief systems available to us through public discourse. Our lives are lived in the public domain. 

Who each of us is in the public world is very much a part of our identities as private people. If you are a woman, for instance, your personal and social identity is still largely defined by the roles you play in the lives of men.  In turn, the roles of men and women evolve with the types of division of labour required to support the economy given a level of technology. 

Women's lives throughout history were until very recently restricted to the private sphere. While it is said that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, in fact, to express any of her thoughts, women must conceive and articulate their thoughts in terms that are comprehended in a public world that has been almost entirely defined by men who had economic power.  Women's personal identities were defined through the interests and needs of the men: Mother, lover, madonna, whore... Woman means wooed by man; i.e., wife of man.  Consider also the distinction in language between matter and spirit, and the patriarchal nature of religion, and also the symbols for masculine (mind) and feminine (body). Matter/Mater... More on this later.

The default gender is the masculine. Political power (political majority) is not measured in terms of how many women there are in relation to men, or even how many women there are in boardrooms in relation to men, but that we have to relate woman's success to that of the norm, the default gender, male.

Every thought we have can be articulated, but then it has already been forged in the public discourse. Even if we keep to ourselves, our selves are more publicly determined than self-determined because our opportunities to articulate our identities to ourselves are framed and validated in the public sphere. If there's too much of a discrepancy between how we view ourselves and our public reception, we lack legitimacy and credibility (and it is assumed the fault lies with us) and we feel alienated, disenfranchised, marginalized, even crazy. 

So what is the "private sphere"? Is it the sphere dominated by women? No, it's the sphere demarcated, defined and dominated by the historical economy. The economics of the home is publicly defined, and that definition informs our expectations of the roles of women and types of discussion men will engage in about their private lives. The default reality is the public world.

Due to changes in how we produce and distribute goods, larger numbers of women have access to the public domain than ever before. But being a woman doesn't make one's talk less patriarchal. If the discourse is becoming less patriarchal, it is because social organization around the modes of production requires it, or it is because we are becoming more aware of the affect of our institutions during times of change, and more aware of the effect of the terms of discourse. We no longer see our social institutions as natural arrangements, but as historical developments and therefore we can question them.

Change Discourse

It's been a long time since I posted a blog entry on Peripheral Vision.

I've decided to contribute something a little different now - on subjects that I have been thinking about for a very long time.  I was going to open another blog, but thought that it would save distractions if I just continued here.

I should warn you that this is going to be pretty "big picture" but for all that, it is definitely not going to be abstract. Over the next few months of postings (I hope) you'll come across terms such as "narrative" and "social discourse" but let's be clear - those are not abstract concepts like "the average family" or the GDP.

Social discourse is that living sea of language that you inherit from the many cultures in which you were raised. It's the theatre of your cognition, the shaper of your experiences and what allows you to communicate a wealth of information to others by means of these mere marks on the screen, or those little puffs of air that resonate throughout the cafe. It's the window through which you look out from your inner self to the world around you. It's the sedimented history of thousands and thousands of years of human existence.  It sorts, organizes and informs your basic, habitual awareness.  It exists in the world around you. (If you still think that's abstract, you can blame that label on several trends in the evolution of social discourse ;). Social discourse or narrative is mainly about the habitual tags, labels and markers we give to all of our personal experiences in the private or public sphere. It's the channel through which things make sense to us and amongst us when we take in, think or talk about them.

Social discourse traverses generations and changes the conditions of our understanding over time. It carries a set of key connotations that have some very strong influences on our experiences. They arise from living in a natural world and the social organization demanded from a given level of technology. Social discourse influences and is influenced by the needs that a level of technology produces:  The needs that organize us around gathering, changing and distributing nature's provisions, the ideals that support that organization. The core ideas in our cognition and evaluations are:

• The definition of private versus public
• Gender, family, and reproductive relationships
• Power relationships (e.g., boss, employee; government, capitalist)
• Values (e.g., "freedom" "kindness" or "success" - what are they?)
• Human beings and our understanding relation to the planet Earth
• What we take to be real in the universe

However, there's usually a lag and some upheaval before the brain and heart catch up with the hands but now, all of our core ideas are about to change markedly .... and therefore so will our experience.