[TL;DR: Critical Theory piece. You have been warned.]
In the
October 27th edition of This American Life, a middle school girl named Annie was talking about the hardships of the tween years. To her, what was so stressful about the 6th-8th grades was that while she was trying to figure out who she was and who she wanted to be, she was often paralyzed with the fear of what her peers might think or say about the things she wanted to do, the things she wanted to try, or the things she wanted to wear. She told a story about how she had a pair of ankle-high moccasins that she thought were the coolest, but it took her two months to build up the courage to face the potentiality of ridicule.
I find I tend to do this with the things that I am the most passionate about. Often the things that I talk about the least are the things I'm most worried about people rejecting or misunderstanding about me. It feels that, often, the less that I talk about something the more I want to be talking about it.
Or not. I guess. It's just stupid anyway.
Whatever.
I had intended only to stay long enough to make sure that there was practice on Friday since we were hosting a city-level tournament later that weekend. So it was a delightful surprise that I happened to run into the 柔道着 dealer on my way into the dojo.
With 小原先生's help (and insistence), we had ordered a team-gi for me a few weeks ago and, though I had suspected it would be in sometime early in November, this was a few days earlier than I expected. But what surprised me the most was how happy it made me feel to see my name written in bold, black kanji-script (新納
1There was a little discussion about whether or not I should get a name plate because of the cost, but 小原 said that I'd need it if I wanted to compete or test and I, mostly, wanted one because I wanted to clearly mark my affiliation.
1) above the 市立柏 school lettering.
It has never been lightly that I take being counted among the "柔道部-Family," both in acceptance and support, but with the 柔道着 in hand, it felt real. It felt official. It felt tangible.
In the late 19th century, early-modern, Swiss linguist, Ferdinand De Saussure, suggested that, in linguistics, words are nothing more than mere arbitrary sounds used to refer to ideas and concepts that exist in tangible form in the world. So the sound "tree" only has meaning in a system where the image of a tree is conjured up in the mind of the speaker/hearer. The sound of the word is the "signifier" that points to the idea of a tree, "the signified," and together this creates the
word, or the "sign."
While de Saussure's semiological construction of linguistics as sign-signifier adequately explains the arbitrary nature (and yet abstract power) of language, about 60 years later, Roland Barthes wrote
2His writing always seemed more like suggestions than arguments.
2 in his 1957 collection of essays,
Mythologies, that de Saussure's model can be improved upon by adding a third layer to the "signifier-signified" relationship: that of Mythology.
In his essays, Barthes
suggests that in all societies, some words take on additional meaning, a greater significance than their mere "literal" signification. That, so, in France, "red wine" is not just a cool, refreshing drink to lazily sip from a wide-mouthed glass, but it is rather a representation of France itself. That when you think of "French red wine," you do not just think of an image of a bottle of French red wine, as would be suggested by de Saussure's model, but rather you would think of a romantic bottle of wine, brown-green in color with a sketch of some distant pastoral chateau for a label, standing at attention on a serious, black-painted sidewalk bistro table overlooking the Champ de Mars: liberté, égalité, fraternité; baguettes, berets, and mimes.
As a society, we have allowed some words, more than others, to represent things far beyond their literal sign-signifier relationship. They no longer represent things, but whole ideas. They no longer exist as linguistic binaries, but as the central node within a nexus of meaning; the star around which whole constellations are built and named.
I have found that I tend to give such kinds of gravitas to certain things
3And I prefer to pretend that I am not unique in this.
3. Certain songs are more than just tunes, but art that acts as a reliable conduit to transcendence. Or certain clothes have the power to make me look cool or slovenly, just by their combination (or lack thereof).
Freud would intone that this process of ascribing great, personal significance to arbitrary items as a means of satiation is called "cathexis." Jung would argue that this is a universal human trait to attempt to recreate instances of emotional and psychic stability in a world of unsurity. All humans, then, find objects and ascribe onto them ("cathect") deep emotional value as the physical embodiment of abstract and intangible hopes and desires: wholeness, belonging, understanding, control.
In that way, tchotchke objects like souvenirs become representations of vacation experiences, luxuriant jewelry is allowed to become symbolic of a loving relationship, and mundane, monotonous uniforms an outward expression of fellowship and inclusion.
Thusly, Jung (and Freud) argue that, while people are the recipients/victims of larger social myths--archetypes which are written onto us forcefully, without our consent--since we are the ones who ascribe value onto things at the personal level--we write our names onto things we find to claim meaning and value--we should have the power to control them.
So it is with that understanding that, despite (or because of) the immense waves of joy that washed over me when I received the tightly packaged heavy cotton gi, mere hours later I felt silly. Silly to think that something so objectively meaningless and so arbitrarily assigned should bring me this kind of happiness when inclusion was already secured. Silly to think that I had given such a meaningless thing such power over my feelings. But most silly to think that if I had given such a meaningless thing such great power to make me happy--that it was merely returning to me the happiness that I was giving to it in the first place--then how come my life isn't that happy of my own accord more often?
Maybe it's because of the unsurity of the "Incommunicable Distance" between people; the idea that one can never truly, accurately communicate an idea or a feeling to anyone else so that when you hear an idea or a feeling being communicated to you, you can never really know if it's accurate, let alone true. And maybe it's as simple as cathexis allows us to pretend that we truly understand and know things which can never really be known by providing us with a tangible nexus for our focus. Or maybe there is a very real aspect of investment and return: that what you get back from cathexis is never just 1:1, but magnified and emboldened by the distance traveled.
When phrases like "arbitrarily assigned" come up in regards to "emotional response," my first impulse is to do away with the emotion. To bury it in a tome of linguistic analysis. To scoff at my feelings as the result of a momentary weakness and lapse of critical judgement, like some sort of academic, critical-theory hipster.
And while I understand that impulse towards iconoclasm, especially for those people whose lives are often shaped by the weight of the mythologies that are written, forcefully, onto their bodies
4Whether that be abstract with things like sexism or heteronormavie expectations, or much more literal with the stealing or ascribing of family names.
4, I'm always hesitant to move into deconstruction because I do think that there's great value, and perhaps beauty, in social and personal mythologies.
I think as long as we are cognizant of the arbitrary nature of their meaning and every body is allowed agency to negotiate the framework of the constellation of meaning, we can use mythologies to enrich our lives with an ever-increasing complex of integration that constantly asks us to reframe ideas and systems of knowing through juxtaposition and conflict.
The risk we run is when we allow our mythologies, personal and social, to become non-negotiable, or disenfranchise certain bodies from any such negotiation. When we promote mythologies--which are always discordant and irreconcilable--into the realm of the sacred, disparate narratives must be discarded and then negotiation becomes impossible. To move from the mythological to the sacred, as Jean Baudrillard would add decades later, is to elevate the signifier far above the signified, creating a sign with no more attachment to its referent in reality. It moves from a sign (a symbol referring to something real) to a simulacra, something that points to an idea that has never and can never truly exist in the world, such as ideal forms of being. Or Disneyland. Or religion
5Though some would argue all three of those things are the same.
5.
When mythologies lose their real-world referent, the sacred, then, becomes its own ultimate ideal. The methods of accessing and achieving satisfaction from cathexis become ritualized and codified. The sacred dictates for itself that there is a way things should be because that is how they have always "should have been." There is no longer just "French red wine," but there is "French Red Wine," and with that, ways that French Red Wine can and should be approached, assessed, tasted, treated, served and savored.
To me, I want to say that it's not about controlling or hedging against cathexis. To not see "arbitrary" and think necessarily "insignificant." Rather I would prefer to recognize and exert the immense privilege of my agency in negotiation, in understanding the arbitrary nature of my own personal mythologies, with the goal being to get the most depth and richness out of it as I possibly can. The reticence, then, is in the fear of emotionally enshrining these things into the realm of the sacred.
Then the next step after that is to build up the nerve to actually wear the thing.
Then not get blood on it.
