Episode 22 You’d never catch anyone

This week I give some advice about how to control someone: give them an impossible task to do – like keeping an ice cube from melting on a hot, sunny beach. Then make them think it’s actually possible to do that task, and make sure they’re invested in doing it.

The ‘impossible task’ I’m talking about is maintaining the consistency of the self. Why is that so impossible? Because, I argue, the concept of the self can only exist within a particular social structure. When the self gets offended, when its face is threatened, when it’s trying to keep up appearances or ‘fit in’, it’s actually carrying the burden of an entire social structure with it. Maintaining the stability of the social structure is an impossible task for one small self.

To illustrate this idea, I draw upon the concept of systems that are self-referential (an idea I learned about from Amit Goswami). Here’s an example of a self-referential component of a linguistic system:

This sentence has five words.

The sentence is referring to itself. It could, in principle, refer to itself using the first-person pronoun:

I have five words.

Or, more accurately,

I have four words.

But in order to understand these last two sentences as self-referential, we’d have to understand the ‘I’ as referring to a component of the system – the sentence itself.

Similarly, we might understand the ‘I’ in everyday usage as a system referring to itself: a component of a social structure referring to itself. The problem with that idea is that it can make you feel like you have no power to change anything – no power to change an oppressive social structure.

My work is about exploring the paradoxes, disruptions and contradictions in social structure as it shows up in everyday conversations. My view is that it’s observing these contradictions and disruptions that makes it possible to imagine new, less oppressive structures.

There’s a fascinating contradiction in Ally’s conversation about women drinking pints of lager – the conversation I talked about in Episode 20. I don’t quite get enough time in this episode to discuss the contradiction – look forward to that for next week! But I do discuss the way social structure unfolds here, and the various types of self that emerge.