Structured Visions

The notion of the ‘paradigm shift’ originates from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that science does not progress in a linear fashion: if new evidence comes in that upsets an established paradigm, it is described as an anomaly and often explained away as human error or flawed research design. When enough new evidence comes in – that is, too much to be explained away – a crisis ensues and a new paradigm emerges.

‘Paradigm’ is a word that’s used in linguistics as well. It’s used in relation to the term ‘syntagm’. Syntagms are linear sequences of language – a string of words in a sentence, for instance. A syntagmatic analysis of the sentence I love broccoli might focus on the order of the words in that sentence. It might also look at ways in which that word order can be changed or added to and still produce a meaningful sentence in English. Add an auxiliary verb and a negative particle to the sequence and the sentence becomes negative: I do not like broccoli. Change the sequence using a cleft construction to alter the focus of the sentence: It’s broccoli I love. Add an auxiliary, change the word order and bingo! You’re Yoda: Love broccoli I do.

If syntagmatic analysis looks at the linear sequence – the ‘horizontal’ structure of a string of words, then paradigmatic analysis goes vertical. Imagine, for instance, a column of words or phrases that you could use to replace the final word in I love broccoli. I love cabbage. I love carrots. I love Tina. I love democracy. I love tree toads with big ideas. All the constituents in the broccoli slot share something with the word broccoli – they’re all nouns or noun phrases.

My research focuses on how close analysis of the grammatical descriptions of people’s social worlds can reveal new ways of thinking about social structure. In times of crisis, when the safe, dependable social structures seem no longer to be in place, descriptions of social worlds can reveal poignant new visions. Consider this courageous conversation between a little boy and his father after the Paris attacks last week. The boy explains to his father that they’ll have to move house because ‘there are bad guys’. His father’s response here represents a syntagmatic shift: ‘there are bad guys everywhere’. It’s a shift at the level of the sequence – a linear shift – he adds the adverb everywhere to his son’s remark, and his son doesn’t seem very comforted.

It’s the paradigmatic shift that changes the vision of the social structure.

‘Daddy, they have guns’.

‘They have guns. We have flowers.’

Now the shift is a shift in paradigm: the guns slot is replaced with another choice, flowers.

One piece of evidence is not enough to shift the paradigm, it would seem from the boy’s response.

‘Flowers don’t do anything’, he says.

‘Flowers are for fighting against guns’, says his father.

Now it’s the son’s turn to shift the paradigm: he replaces fighting with protecting.

‘Flowers are for protecting.’

And the paradigm keeps shifting:

‘Candles are for protecting.’

Let’s imagine a world in which flowers and candles – and the love and solidarity they represent – protect us from the world’s fear. Heartfelt thanks to Angel Le and his son Brandon for providing us with that vision.

Download Episode 19: Paradigms.

Social structures are like spider webs – interlinked strands of assumptions about the social world that form conceptual networks to support us as we navigate our daily lives. What would be the effect of exposing social structures as oppressive or unjust? On the one hand, we might feel completely unsupported and ungrounded, like Boris the spider probably felt when I ripped through his carefully crafted web-home in the corner of the living room. On the other hand, we might feel a moment of poignant, freeing clarity, like an 8-year-old who learns that her classmates are lying when they tell her she’s ugly.

What  convinces us to participate in oppressive social structures, especially social structures in which we’re the ones who are oppressed? Karl Marx put it down to ‘false consciousness’: in a capitalist system, the working classes will continue to be ruled by the dominant classes as long as they cling to false ideas about how the system isn’t so bad, after all. For Marx, changing the world requires that people (a) recognise the ways in which these false ideas present an upside-down view of the world and (b) to take action through unification and revolution.

In this episode I speak about the value of prioritising imagination over immediate action when it comes to social change. Doing the research for the book I’m writing now has shown me that when people describe their troubled social worlds, their accounts reveal hints about alternative structures – desires for new, transformative social structures. Doing this work has brought to my attention the need to study these hints carefully, to engage in the work of re-imagining social structure, and to allow action to be led by these new visions of better social worlds.

Download Episode 18: They Lied to Us.

All this talk of social structure and how it could be better: does it match your own experience? Last week I talked about a social structure that is divided along gender, and requires boys and men to behave in one way and girls and women to behave in a different way. But I can hear you saying: ‘But Jodie, I never felt constrained in that way! I was a girl and always wanted to roughhouse with the boys.’ Or: ‘I was a boy and liked to paint my fingernails.’ ‘It was never a problem. Every individual has a choice.’

When is a choice not really a choice? When none of the options you’re choosing from are particularly desirable. The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, for instance, gave children the choice to have one marshmallow right away, or wait 10 minutes and get two.

But what if I want something other than marshmallows?

Or what if I want to enjoy my marshmallow now and spend the next 10 minutes doing something other than sitting in agony, waiting for more marshmallows?

I explore in this episode the tension between the idea of the individual, who goes through the world making choices and the idea of social structure, whereby choices seemed to be constrained. I mention the notion of the community of practice again, and talk about the various ways people can engage with, or adapt to particular communities. This week I propose the idea of a new type of social structure in which individuals would not be required to adapt to social structures. Instead, social structures would adapt to individuals – and recognise the possibility for transformation that each individual offers.

Download From Paperclips to Marshmallows: False Promises of Individual Choice

I’ve been talking a lot about recognisability in social structures. Closed social structures divide up the world into particular categories such that it becomes impossible to think outside those categories. What doesn’t ‘fit’ within those categories, or identities, or ways of being, or ways of feeling are rejected, ignored or simply not allowed to exist.

How might it become possible to think beyond the structures that structure thought? We’d have to think more than we can think. ‘A thought that thinks more than it thinks,’ writes philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, ‘is a desire’. To imagine new possibilities within a structure requires moving beyond thought, into a different realm of experience.

But is it appropriate to call that realm of experience desire? Desire is a loaded term – just ask Banarama and U2. In fact, it is sexual desire that is at the heart of that compelling social structure in which human beings are divided into two – and only two – distinct groups: males and females. As part of this dividing practice comes the requirement that sexual desire only occur between the two groups, and not within them. This requirement starts early. Indeed, I remember participating in heterosexual matchup games – which boy do you like? which boy are you going to marry? which boy are you gonna chase on the playground? – from about the age of 5.

How do social requirements about desire shape social structures? I share some discoveries from my ethnographic study of a women’s field hockey team (detailed in my book, Language, Sex and Social Structure).  Anxious about the fact that there were lesbians on their team, the heterosexual women I spoke to made a point of distinguishing the hockey team from other university women’s teams, like rugby. There really aren’t that many lesbians in women’s hockey, I was told. Women’s rugby is where the real ‘problem’ is. One of the ways they depicted women’s rugby as a problem is by portraying rugby players as having desire for women. Hockey players might have sexual encounters with other women… but they don’t desire them (which by implication would mean they’re not really gay).

Clearly a desire that is entirely shaped by a closed social structure isn’t really a desire at all – or is it? It’s certainly not the type of desire that Emmanuel Levinas was writing about. What would it be like to experience the Levinas form of desire: to think beyond the thinkable, to imagine new possibilities for being?

Download Blank Boys and Blank Girls.

When I was teaching conversation classes in France I invented a game designed to encourage students to speak more English to each other. Each player started with 12 paperclips, and they’d have to forfeit one each time another player caught them speaking a language other than English. The goal was to acquire as many paperclips as possible by catching out fellow players.

The response to the game was devastating. The students became so obsessed with accumulating paperclips that everything else – compassion, fun, openheartedness, wit – lost their value.

The ‘Paperclip Game’ is an illustration of how a closed, or ‘totalising’ social structure works – in such a structure, only certain defined terms are meaningful, and thus valuable.

What, then, would an open system look like? French scholars Emmanual Levinas and Jacques Derrida offer some clues in their writings on the ethical importance of responsibility to the other. To accept responsibility for the other means to avoid the temptation to see the person before you in terms of the values and meanings determined by the social structure you’re operating within. If you’re playing the Paperclip Game (in whatever form the Paperclip Game is taking at a particular moment in your life), responsibility to the other might mean seeing your fellow players in terms of something other than how many paperclips they have.

Responsibility to the other means thinking beyond the Paperclip Game, thinking beyond recognisability, thinking beyond all of the structures that structure thought itself. We’re in the realm beyond thought now, says Levinas. ‘A thought that thinks more than it thinks,’ he writes in Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity, ‘is a desire’ (Levinas 1987, p. 56).

In a dialogue with Giovanna Borradori about the events of September 11, 2001, Derrida explains responsibility to the other in terms of hospitality:

Pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other. I would call this a hospitality of visitation rather than invitation. (Derrida 2003, p. 128-9)

In this episode I explore the idea that responsibility to the other also means making space for those ideas one is not yet capable of imagining. Closed social structures put limits on thoughts, concepts, values. What would an open social structure look like, one where there is space to desire as-yet-unimaginable ideas and ways of living?

Download The Paperclip Game.