What is evil?

In the postmodern Western world, evil is something that has become almost robbed of its ability to horrify us. Increased global communication and knowledge inure our responsiveness with a daily news diet of ‘evils’. In entertainment, with many of the anti-heroes of TV being serial killers or sociopaths, we’re becoming increasingly desensitised to what evil historically evoked. ‘Hollywood’ continues to push us to empathise with the villains across many different dimensions. Of course, the implications are broader than just entertainment; it’s not just the definition of evil that we erode – it’s what good means.

From a semiotic perspective, I’m interested in the way we depict evil in contemporary culture. How have these depictions evolved and what are the underlying structures, codes and signs that form the conventions that are being used.

I suspect that the majority of people that read this don’t know what it’s like to be evil or even how to think a genuinely evil thought. Paradoxically, most of us could describe or recognise what evil looks like. The leading author of these perceptions is Hollywood, who has from the beginning commoditized evil and presented back to us our base fears and dreams wrapped in relatively consistent symbolism and myths. In the process, our tolerance has increased and appears to continue in increasingly gory depictions. What does this say about the way we see evil?

A ‘quick’ definition of Evil

Before we look at how we visualise Evil, the real focus of this post, I need to take a step back and define what is evil? The OED defines evil as being ‘profoundly immoral and wicked’. Immoral is used here in the sense that you don’t conform to the accepted standards of morality. Morality simplistically, is the distinction between good and bad behaviour: right and wrong. This is of course a socio-cultural definition – where these conventions are socially defined and shared.

What is evil to one at one time, becomes good at another time to somebody else. Menicus

Evil is relative. To be provocative, this relativity leads to some conundrums of definition; for example, we might consider cannibalism as immoral but it isn’t essentially evil to everyone. In different cultures, cannibalism has been an accepted part of social behavour. The Asmat tribes of West Papua, ate their enemies brains ritually in order to gain a name and worthy place in the tribe. However, since it’s such an established taboo in western culture, it is often a trait of the worst evil we depict. Although, we are still put in a situation by Hollywood where Hannibal Lector has become more human over successive films and still conducts one of the most heinous crimes: murder and cannibalism.

From a postmodern perspective, the old binary-opposition of Good and Evil are no longer relevant, these referents have eroded to meaningless. A simplistic explanation is that this is due to the decline of religion as the dominant and only frame of thinking. This means the theological perspective of a Manichean battle, between the cosmic forces of light-and-dark, is no longer as influential in how we understand our lives. Although, it is important to recognize that this does continue to guide many contemporary narratives and cultural symbolism.

‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’

Edmund Burke

In the fourth century AD, St Augustine of Hippo furthered the churches understanding of this cosmic battle by semiotically defining evil as the absence of good. Today this view of good and evil is still prominent in the modern Catholic churches teaching; Pope Francis in his first homily said ‘“Whoever does not pray to God, prays to the devil.” This might suggest two-thirds of the world’s non-Christian population might be more familiar with evil. Politically, George W Bush, identified an ‘Axis of Evil’

that was largely commented on as an anachronism in the modern world . Modern politics is defined on more strategic rationales than perceptions of good or bad. However, this throw back to WW2 shows the deeper metaphor of good-and-evil in our thinking.

The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
Alexandre Solzhenitsyn

A Kantian philosophical perspective on evil is that humans have free choice, suggesting that evil is something that comes from within us. Increasingly, we have learnt that evil is something we are all capable of. In one of modern psychology’s more infamous experiments, Stanley Milgram showed that humans will hurt others if an authority-figure tells us to. A decade later this was confirmed by Phillip Zimbardo through the Stanford Prison Experiment which shows that anyone can act ‘evil’ under the right circumstances’ without necessarily being evil. In a study conducted at the beginning of 2014, by Stanford Prison Experiment showed that personality predicts your obedience in a Milgram paradigm. The surprise from this study indicates that people that are normally friendly and agreeable are those that acted the worse – given they don’t like to upset others. Those that are more anti-social or independent are more likely to challenge authority. Watch out for the friendly nice people.

More philosophically, the postmodern perspective on evil has been discussed by Jean Braudrillard, who in his particular prose states:

the real problem, the only problem, is: where did Evil go? And the answer is: everywhere — because the anamorphosis of modern forms of Evil knows no bounds. In a society which seeks — by prophylactic measures, by annihilating its own natural referents, by whitewashing violence, by exterminating all germs and all of the accursed share, by performing cosmetic surgery on the negative — to concern itself solely with quantified management and with the discourse of the Good, in a society where it is no longer possible to speak Evil…

Today, evil is more often defined by moral claims based on rational foundations, rather than on religious precepts. Since WW2 we have become more aware that anyone is capable of evil – so evil could look like any of us. So, why does it look so different in popular culture?

Visual Semiotics of Evil in Popular Culture

Where I started with this thinking was a comment I read while looking at brains and intelligence in the modern era – an earlier post. The post had commented that ‘all the evil smart people in movies are bald’. I was curious at the suggestion that intelligence was linked to baldness; and from there to evil. I had come at it from a different and more anthropological perspective. Having researched the symbolism of hair, this cultural connotation is not one that I would have connected.

I have a different hypothesis of what Hollywood is representing, and will outline my hypothesis here. I am not trying to talk to all representations of evil by Hollywood (I’m using this term as a shortcut to popular culture). There are many examples like Nazi’s, Horror films, serial killers, etc that I shall leave to another day. This is a focus on heads, thinking and evil.

There has long been a natural association of a prominent brows and intelligence, from Socrates to Freud.

Intelligent thinkers

If you look at the depictions below you find it’s true that whilst there are bald villains, it is just as easy to find bald heroes.

good and bad thinkers

(If you don’t know some of these, most will be defined below).

In fact many of Hollywood’s strongest action men favour shorter hair:

I talked about hair symbolism in an earlier post. We tend to see long hair as being wilder, unrestrained sexuality and uncivilised – think of Samson, Hercules, Tarzan, etc. We associate shorter hair with discipline and restricted sexuality Hallpike (1969);

“(long hair) is associated with being outside society and that the cutting of hair symbolises re-entering society, or living within a particular disciplinary regime within society”.

He equated the cutting of hair with social control – if you are in the army or are a convict you have short-hair, symbolic of discipline. It’s likely that the convention that military men wear their hair in shorter styles (less likely someone will grab it in a battle) and this is the symbolism that is being evoked here. So while they may not be immediately goody-two-shoes, the man-of-action characters use short hair to signify discipline and strength.

The mythic start of Evil

There is still the connection of intelligence and evil to be explored. While I have discussed the evolving meaning of Evil in modernity, its roots are firmly from religion. This is clear when we look at the variety of narratives and symbolism that are prominently told in Western culture.
This story starts at the beginning, in Eden, where the first sin was for Adam and Eve to eat the apple.

This was fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, not as some call it the Tree of Evil (also the bible doesn’t say it was an apple). If ‘ignorance is bliss’ or as Orwell in 1984, suggested ‘ignorance is strength’ then the inversions are that ‘knowledge is evil’ and ‘knowledge is weakness’. Knowledge opens us to temptation and ultimately corruption.

If we take up Orwell, this is an inversion of the Latin aphorism attributed to Francis Bacon scientia potestas est ‘knowledge is power’. We tend to believe that power is not something that humans control well. One of the most famous testaments to this belief is the American Constitution that was written with the express purpose; to limit the possibility of Tyranny, through the separation of powers

Baron Acton, famously said:

‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you add the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority’

We tend to find it easy to see a correlation of power and corruption – the influence of evil. The driving theme of shows like House of Cards  It’s easy to think of the spiritual and moral corruption of the intelligent man; we believe that they should know better than to make Mephistophelean deals. It’s also why we tend to view men that serve without corruption with such reverence. Historically, the Roman General Lucius Quinctius Cincinnati was admired; he was famous for being given total power of Dictator and he gave this up twice when the threat to Rome was over. However, the default is to assume the worse of our leaders, perhaps from what we recognise in ourselves.

The conception of corruption and holding onto power are interesting ones when we think about how these are visualised. It’s informative to separate these out and explore them separately in how they are represented.

Visual metaphors of thinking

Visual conventions often follow the metaphors that we think through to understand the world:

A ‘“Metaphor is a tool so ordinary that we use it unconsciously and automatically… it is irreplaceable: metaphor allows us to understand ourselves and our world in ways that no other modes of thought can.” (Lakoff and Turner 1989: xi).

When we think of our brains there are two metaphors are very influential.

The first metaphor is that the brain is a vessel – a container that we fill with knowledge. This goes back to Greek Mythology, e.g. Zeus got a headache so bad he had Hephaestus hit him on the head with an axe, and from this sprang Athena. She was a Goddess of intelligence and war; of which Zeus in his divine magnificence was overflowing.

‘the human brain is unique in that it is the only container of which it can be said that the more you put into it, the more it will hold’ Glen Doman

When we emphasis this visually, villains like Lex Luthor are shown with larger heads. The important point here is that the emphasis has nothing to do with a lack-of-hair; the message is that this person has a larger and more prominent head – a bigger brain.

The second metaphor that is important here is the brain and memory are a muscles that you should exercise (the brain isn’t a muscle)

“The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.”

Carl Sagan

The internet has many articles that talk about making your brain fitter like a muscle.  Sites like luminosity use this metaphor as an extension of their brand identities, using words like ‘training’, ‘challenge’ and ‘track your progress’ . It’s a gym for your mind.

Why this is important is that when we move into the science fiction depictions of intelligence, common themes are enlarged heads and throbbing veins to fuel these enormous brains.

As was iconically depicted in the original Star Trek with the Talosians.

Talosian – star trek

 “I have the same goal I’ve had ever since I was a girl. I want to rule the world.”
Madonna

 

What do Evil Thinkers want?

We tend to think that good people look like we do. In fact, the more evil you are, the more those non-human characteristics are accentuated.

Since we struggle to identify with the drivers of power, we believe there is a correlation between evil and insanity – what good and sane person would want to be all-powerful? Megalomania – wanting to rule the earth – are the characteristics of evil, narcissism and self-aggrandising people. An inflated ego we tend to expect an inflated or swelled head. Look at who we label evil in History: Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and Stalin. In fact, movies, novels and comics are stuffed full of intelligent evil characters all consumed with the same mission: to rule the world. Most of them appear to be slightly or madly insane.

In the 2014 film 300 Rise of an Empire, we see the origins of a Persian Emperor, who after being corrupted by power, is hairless and consumed by desires of world domination. His transformation is to look decidedly less human.

Why does evil look less human?

This convention might have come from a more religious frame of thinking. Perhaps representative here is Augustine of Hippo, thinking through Mathew 7:18 ‘A good tree cannot bear evil fruit’

When, however, a thing is corrupted, its corruption is an evil because it is, by just so much, a privation of the good. Where there is no privation of the good, there is no evil. Where there is evil, there is a corresponding diminution of the good. … If, however, the corruption comes to be total and entire, there is no good left either, because it is no longer an entity at all. Wherefore corruption cannot consume the good without also consuming the thing itself. … Whenever a thing is consumed by corruption, not even the corruption remains, for it is nothing in itself, having no subsistent being in which to exist.

A corrupted body looks more death-like. In fact, if we look at how life and death are depicted in Judeo-Christian traditions, it is only good and life that we see healthy living imagery.

While the Grim Reaper is influenced by Chairon as the boatman, Virgil describes him:

Terrible in his squalor – Charon, on whose chin lies a mass of unkempt hoary hair; his eyes are staring orbs of flame; his squalid garb hangs by a knot from his shoulders. Unaided, he poles the boat, tends the sails, and in his murky craft convoys the dead

This theme of corruption is used by Dostoyevsky in the start of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ by which he introduces the ‘breath of corruption’, where the saintly body of Father Zossima starts to smell. This defies the expectations that someone good and saintly would remain pure.
It’s a consistent theme in Hollywood that human bodies can’t contain evil in the form of demons or devils. The Exorcist, Constantine, End of Days, The Devil’s Advocate all show the Devil searching for a body that won’t corrupt when possessed in the mortal world. The shared theme here is that evil looks like death.

A Typology of Depicting Evil

So we can summarise this thinking so far, in three points:

1. Evil works through knowledge – this started with the first bite of the apple. We are born innocent and blissfully ignorant. Knowledge is what potentially leads us to evil.
2. We depict smarter people through enlarged or more prominent heads – since brains are containers, the bigger the container or fuller the container the smarter a person must be.
3. If knowledge corrupts us – then a hypothesis is that we are still following religious symbolism that tells us that evil corrupts living things.

Using this as a schema, we can look at popular culture again and identify four types of evil from a semiotic perspective (I’ll explore these in more detail below):

Typology One: Cerebral

Starting with the human dimension, the cerebral human who is an evil-thinker:

This is the Evil antagonist or protagonist that tends to have an emphasised head. If we look at Dr Evil above as a deliberate Austin Power’s parody, it’s the bald Blofeld he’s mimicking not the Blofeld with hair.

Cerebral Evil Conventions: magnified pate, empowered poses, glossy skin – light =bright, emphasised eyes (perception), maturity but age is not always a factor.

A movie that is instructive here is seven, where we see the bald villain ‘John Doe’ (a dead man) played by Kevin spacey, corrupting people through the seven deadly sins. Illustrating that knowledge is at the root of most evil within us.

Typology Two: Preternatural Evil

Preternatural refers to something that is outside or beside what we would consider natural. What we find here are human characteristics that are outside of what appears natural but on the edge of being believable: larger and enhanced cranium, increased and prominent veins. Sometimes we are witness to enhanced cognitive abilities: intelligence, ESP or mind powers.

The most literal story telling here is that of Hector Hammond from the film ‘Green Lantern’. Here we see a nerdy introverted scientist infected with alien DNA, who gradually develops meta-human abilities: telekinesis and telepathy. The transformation is not only in his powers but in the very physical transformation. His brain swells like a muscle and this power corrupts him to megalomania and murder.

Visually, what we see are the container and muscle metaphors being stretched. Heads are larger and there are often veins pumping, and frequently we see corpse like bodies. Perhaps, related to these symbolic axes suggested here is how Albinism is used by Hollywood.

Albinism in Films

There is a ghoulish trope of bureaucrats that are deathlike in automated cities or situations; often with roles that are hard to comprehend. It probably needs too much explanation of why a repetitive and robotic job might make you less-human. However, there are a range of evil characters, whose evilness appears biased to their appearance. To the recent Costner film ‘3 Days to Kill’ where the pretense of masking this convention is dropped to just call the lead villain ‘The Albino’. He’s also smart, morally challenged and controlling.

Perhaps the outlier here is the movie Powder, where the hero looks like an albino and plays to the symbolism identified here. He looks more cerebral and his head, like a muscle, pulsates with veins. However, while it’s a convention of linking intelligence with evil, just becoming more intelligent doesn’t always imply that you become more evil.

Preternatural Evil Conventions: magnified pate, enlarged head, veins, empowered poses, pallid skin = near dead, eyes are usually red (signifying supernatural in mythology), erratic megalomaniacal psychology.

Typology Three: Supernatural Evil

Here we are in no doubt that there is less humanity in these characters. They are generally more two-dimensional characters that appear controlling and interested in ‘order’ in the pursuit of what we – as the audience- would call morally ‘evil’. Often with these characters we are shown an ‘Eden’ version to see what we have lost – they are a medieval morality tale. Marvel introduces us to the pre-gamma exposure ‘Thinker’, Prometheus starts with an Adam for the Aliens, Megamind is a child before learning his animosity, whilst Anakin Skywalker is corrupted to the dark side, etc.

All of these characters appear human but are differentiated by non-human skin or technology. They also demonstrate supernatural abilities that set them apart from mere mortals. Characteristically, it is giving in to the dark-side, anger or hurt, which gives them access to these powers.

Supernatural Evil Conventions: magnified pate, enlarged head, veins, empowered poses, usually non-human skin colours, megalomaniacal and narcissism psychology.

Typology Four: Spectral Evil

These evil characters appear radically dehumanised – usually with transparent or partial skulls. Here we find the corruption of sin fully evident with dehumanised, denatured and partial corpses frequently employed. In Harry Potter, Voldemort becomes more ‘death-like’ as the series progresses, facially looking less human. Flukeman and Darth Maul evoke the death mask in different ways. Red Skull or Johann Schmidt (the Nazi Evil mirror to Captain America), the power of the super soldier serum literally makes him look like the Devil is a signifier that he lacks the morality of Steve Rogers (and the American Flag).

Perhaps in a strange casting coincidence, the Red Skull was played by the Actor Hugo Weaving in the role of Johann Schmidt (Smith) – The name of the man who became the Red Skull. Undoubtedly typecast for the very cerebral physiognomy that has been identified in this article. Previously, he was Agent Smith in the Matrix Trilogy, who bares more than a passing resemblance to the evil bureaucratic albino’s discussed above. Recalling that the viral mechanism of reproduction as a ‘software program’ that Smith uses is to corrupt another by plunging his heart into another and replicating himself.

If Neo is the messiah (Latin for ‘New’) within the Matrix, then we can see Agent Smith as the Devil

And He was asking him, “What is your name?” And he said to Him, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” Mark 5:9

This is why we see Agent Smith learn to become Legion. It’s why we see crows as the bird of death and carrion announces the devils presence

Death and evil are linked in this type of allegory.

We find the spectral face of evil as a central part of the Hobbit, that Bilbo and Sméagol are both Hobbits. They are two sides of the same coin. It is the corruption of the ‘one ring’ that transforms Sméagol into Gollum. If Hobbits live over 100, Gollum is about 600 years old and looking undead by the time the ring is destroyed: Pasty, hairless, skeletal with six sharpened teeth.

Spectral Evil Conventions: enlarged head, veins, corpse like features, skeletal, radically dehumanised.

Although, we do need to recognise that there are prominent figures in science fiction that appear spectral that are not necessarily evil.

The OA of Green Lanterns, the Watchers and the Collectors of Star Trek are more morally ambiguous than evil. There appears, for the authors of these stories, a deliberate attempt to delimit these characters from our system of moral that leaves them free of our systems of ethics because they are concerned?? with higher order concerns (ironically often framed in Manichean frames).

The more dead you look, the more evil you are

In a way, what we are saying is that there is a direct correlation between looking more deathlike and evil. The test of this hypothesis is to be able to show it in reverse, as a narrative technique.

In all four of these cases the characters leave morally ambiguous or evil lives. Teal’c served a mad alien that thought he was a god committing terrible crimes in his name; Delen had fought a war against humans; Seven-of-Nine had turned countless humans into Borgs; Neo had lived a life feeding humanities enemies with energy. Looking more human is a sign of their moral redemption and return to being good.

The dominant thought here is that we depict the worst time of evil as being more death like. This might be explained through the psychoanalytic theory of abjection by Julia Kristiva. The frequently cited example is seeing a corpse and feeling revulsion or nausea as it reminds us of our own materiality and mortality. At the same time we are drawn to it but also repulsed. Kristiva states it is ‘not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. Evil, as immoral behaviour, is disruptive to order and identity within social systems. The most effective signifier of this evil is death.

While it’s a controversial theory, Freud identified the death drive or ego instincts which he posited was the opposing force of Eros drives: which is about survival, sex, propagation. In this case, it does support why we would associate evil with death in how they are depicted. There isn’t space here to explore it but the current Zombie fascination as a face of evil is an example of this. Noting that in 2013 film ‘Warm Bodies the cure for death was ‘eros’ through love.

So while, Hollywood does use characters that have hair and don’t, it’s not the absence of hair that signifies evil, it’s the prominence of the skull. The common thread shared by these evil depictions is that their origins are in the first sin: the bite from the tree of knowledge. Knowledge might be power but we fear its corruption and we visualise this literally.

Postscript: Women

Of course, the attentive reader would have noticed that this entire discussion is about men. This is partly because the starting thought was about prominent craniums. Since it’s not a biological norm, there are fewer examples here.

In GI Jane, Demi Moore’s character shaves her head to fit into the Military symbolism of order and control. We find the same symbolism employed in V or Vendetta and Alien. There is a theme in all of these films that the shaving of hair de-sexualises each of these characters. Star Trek’s Borg Queen evokes the evil of Borg necrotic flesh closest to the male convention of evil. Her character, Lieutenant Ilia of the first Star Trek film and Dren from Splice ,contrary to conventions, have very sexualised roles in their stories from having no hair, and are depicted in erotic connotations. All three though are dehumanised and make morally ambiguous choices.
In the next post, I will focus more on the conventions of how we depict evil women outside of these examples.

The Semiotics of the Doppelgänger: the Double in Popular Culture

One of the themes from the last blog I wrote on ‘evil’, was the nature of how this is depicted in popular culture from a semiotic perspective. This started out with a Kantian perspective, that evil is something that all of us have the capacity to do – we have free choice. This potential dualities of our natures is one of modern storytelling’s great themes. However, as Milica Živković warns, ‘the motif of the double seems to resist narrow catagorization and definition’. In fact this topic almost feels like wrestling with a serpent, since its expressions appear so protean in popular culture.

However, I find the use of one expression of this duality interesting; that ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ has become a common allegory for good-and-evil in popular culture. However, many times I’ve seen it used, the authors don’t appear to fully understand this story. Often, there are many other types of ‘doubles’ that might fit better. To create a picture: It’s used to describe investment market, as a personified ASX– and who said that you shouldn’t personify gambling or investments; to discussing the relative merits of the media ; a protein as Jekyll and Hyde that effects cancer growth; an entire new generation of youth; to the stigma of schizophrenia where might be misleading , to volleyball coaches, to a disgraced football player  who is a ‘carnivore’; to paedophiles as Jekyll and Hyde that no one identified.

I can understand the cultural shorthand of using a popular story to communicate a duality of character. However, there are more suitable types of duality or implications for not understanding the meaning precisely. It’s informative to look at how we use the double in popular culture, how it creates meaning, and in particular, how ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ is different from some of the other ways we represent the duality of our natures in the modern world.

Starting at the beginning: the mythic twin

As with most of the more pervasive symbolism in Western Culture, the origins of the double or doppelgänger (I’ll just use double going forward) are mythic. Many belief systems and religions share an origin story of two beings who are often twin-brothers. In Zoroastrian mythology, the twins Ahriman and Ahura Mazda who are good and evil are locked in an endless cosmic battle. In Norse mythology, two of the earliest beings create the world, this is through Odin Killing the giant Ymir, then using this giant’s body to create the cosmos, he tosses Ymir’s dead head upwards to create the sky.   In Castor and Pollux’s story, they form a constellation in the sky; when Castor dies Pollux shares his immortality so they can stay together. Less cosmically, the ‘twin’ creation story is also present in how peoples and cities are created. Cain killing Abel out of anger or jealousy, as a result he was cast out and becomes a ‘city builder’ . We find a similar story in the founding of Rome, where Romulus killed his brother Remus.   There are numerous examples from mythology of what creates an understanding of good and evil or the ‘evil twin’ as a double. Although this idea of the mythic double is broader than just an evil twin, there are: mythic doubles, rival brothers, lovers, soul mates, scapegoat and sacrifice, that all speak to an archetype of universal duality.

Perhaps a less-mythical explanation for these early twin stories might have been to explain succession problems if a king were blessed with many healthy children. For example, A Grimm Brother’s tale of King Aistulf goes:

The following legend is told about King Aistulf, who ruled the Langobards in the middle of the eighth century: It is said that his mother brought five children to the world in one hour’s time. The king only wanted to let one child live, and he said, “The child that takes hold of my spear shall live. The other four shall be set out!” One child reached out for the spear. The king named him Aistulf and allowed him to live.

Twins would have been a much trickier succession problem, especially if both were to survive. This is also the central theme to ‘The man in the iron mask’ or ‘The prince and pauper’ by Mark Twain. However, both of these stories still speaks to the idea that one of the twins is evil in some way, echoing many of the older mythical narratives.

The Double in modern culture

Some of the modern era’s great writers have written novels with the double as the central motif: Mary Shelley, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Poe, Byron, Stevenson, Wilde, Kafka, Lovecraft, Borges, Calvino and Eco. Misao Miyoshi suggests that the double was an important transference from Gothic to Romantic literature:

 This characteristic theme of the romances suggests a central concern of modern writers to document the dualism by examining particularly the disjunct passion and reason which have remained, pretty much throughout the modern period, alien to each other like the two sealed and separate chambers of the Gothic personality…The romance declined at the turn of the century, but the dualism that was its principal motif was taken up by all the major Romantic poets

It was Tzvetan Todorov who observed in everyday life that there are some events that appear to happen due to chance, without explanation we invent supernatural beings as the incarnation of an ‘imaginary causality for such events’.  Which is similar to the Voltaire aphorism ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’. Since we seek causality, even for our own behaviour, the way that we have tried to explain our darker-thoughts has been through a wide range of motif’s.

A common trait of this type of ‘double’ story is that it offers a different perception on reality. This view is discussed by Pilar Andrade

But the double can also be contemplated from a different perspective, because it breaks,

 

as the Romantics knew well, our usual perception of reality. With the presence or appearance of another self or “other,” some important doubts emerge questioning first the identity of this double (who are you?), but also and as a counterpart, the very self-identity of the original (who am I?) and of his/her perception of reality (is what I am seeing real? Is it imagination, hallucination?).

 

Thus, the double questions one of the three basic rules of logic: that of the non-contradiction. It makes evident that (being A the original and B the copy) the proposition “A is always equal to A and different from B” is incorrect. An exact copy of a human being works with another proposition: “A is always equal to A and equal to B.”

As Romantics discovered, a conscience splitting shakes the well-built system of rationalism, introducing new mental patterns, and with them, a new world to decode: the world of modern fantasy. Modern fantasy burst into nineteenth century fiction and continued in the twentieth century and is still prevalent in our age”.

What is a Doppelgänger?

It was Jean Paul (Richter) in 1976, who employed the first use of the word Doppelgänger in his novel Siebenkäs. The word means ‘double-goer’ doppelganger to refer to people that see themselves.

‘With Descartes’s division of the world into cogito (mind) and res extensa (everything outside the mind, including one’s own body), the doppelgänger began to take on haunting, uncanny qualities in literature, as the body became a gesticulating machine mocking the ego. The equivalence between the two halves of the doppelgänger was therefore no longer based solely on physical attributes, but also included the relationship between the body and the mind.’

The relationship of mind and body has been a key fascination in modernity. This is also what a ‘self’ means and the role of culture on our behaviour. As Milica Živković discusses:

In a progressively secularized culture dialogues of self and the double are increasingly acknowledged as being colloquies within the self: the double has become an aspect of personal and interpersonal life, a manifestation of unconscious desire…It points to the basis upon which cultural order rests tracing the unseen and the unsaid of culture: that which has been silenced by the symbolic, rational discourse.

 

Many dual and disintegrated bodies in modern literature violate the most cherished of all human unities: the unity of ‘character”, drawing attention to its relative nature and its ideological assumptions, mocking the blind faith in psychological coherence and in the value of sublimation as a “civilizing” activity.

 

Like its mythical predecessor, the double in modern literature desires transformation and difference. By attempting to transform the relations between the imaginary and the symbolic, the double hollows out the real, revealing its absence, its great other, its unspoken and its unseen

 

Cognitive Metaphors that evoke the Double

In our modern psychologically-aware lives, a stable and integrated mind is a necessary requisite of modern culture and society. Anyone that belongs to Twitter or Facebook can see lengthy lists on what you can do to be happier or to identify neurosis you didn’t know you have yet.

To not be ‘sane’ is either a quirky affectation or something very undesirable. In a previous post, I talked about the metaphor for understanding the brain as being a vessel. When we are not ourselves, we talk about the vessel being broken. When we are not mentally stable we start to ‘fall apart’; we use language like ‘being broken up’, ‘going to pieces’. We need to ‘take yourself in hand’, ‘pull yourself together’, or ‘get a grip on yourself’.

Carl Keppler takes this further, though not his words, he talks about our minds being outside the vessel  . Suggesting that someone that does not act normally is ‘not himself’ or ‘out of his mind’ or ‘beside himself’.

Keppler also goes on to suggest, as an explanation for aberrant behaviour, that we also talk of being possessed by someone else. This can also be a more objective fear. Some people are not concerned that they are doubles, but that others might be doubles. In its more severe form this is known as Capgras Syndrome: characterized by a delusional belief that a person has been replaced by an imposter. Related to this is the belief that other people are changing their appearance: Fregoli Syndrome is the delusional belief that one or more familiar persons, usually persecutors following the patient, repeatedly change their appearance.

Clearly there is something deeper here that is resonating within us from a psychological perspective of double:

‘Duality inspired both terror and awe whether that duality be manifested in a twin birth, or in a man and his shadow, or in one’s reflection in water or in a mirror, or in the creation of an artefact resembling the exterior self’

Psychological implications of the Double

From a psychological perspective, I’m going to be concise within an extremely well discussed area. There is such an abundance of Freudian and Jungian discussion on the topic that I’ll leave it to more curious readers to find out more. There are some aspects that I do need to cover.

There is a tendency for Doppelgangers to be used as a motif of evil

‘Doppelganger characters tend to be associated with evil and the demonic; thus one can infer that the Doppelganger presents a notion of the subject/subjectivity that is defective, disjunct, split, threatening, spectral. With the rise of psychoanalysis, such epithets are taken to indicate a tendency toward a sense of failure or loss of the sense. Thereafter, the Doppelganger has been commonly viewed as an aberration, the stencil of a symptomatology of the self.’

Abrams on the Doublehas connected some of the Gothic themes in narratives to those from the Bible. Referencing the children of Adam, like the prodigal son, waiting to be absolved of their sins. This is a journey of ‘alienation’ and followed by ‘reintegration’. This is similar to the Doppelganger or ‘double walker’ in English that wander in atonement for their modern Faustian sins in stories, e.g. Frankenstein searching for his monster (to be discussed in more detail below). This has been linked by Aya Yatsugi to the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ in mental development, where children see their images in mirrors and recognise what they are.

Although, the dynamics of wanting to catch this ‘other’ are usually fraught from a psychological perspective on doubles

Often the conscious mind tries to deny its unconscious through the mechanism of “projection”, attributing its own unconscious content (a murderous impulse, for example) to a real person in the world outside; at times it even creates an external hallucination in the image of this content.”

The Jungian perspective on the double is different, as Živković on doubles details:

Unlike Freud, Jung sees the Self as complexio oppositorum, where good and evil are simply complementary opposites, each a necessary condition for the existence of the other. In his doctrine of the shadow he defines the double as neither good nor bad, but as “a replica of one’s own unknown face.” It acquires a demonic aspect only because one side of the personality is repressed and subordinated to a faultless and absolute good.

This was explored in the scene of Star Wars where Luke goes down into the marsh (subconscious) while training with Yoda and battles Darth Vadar, finding his own double, his own shadow.

Živković goes Jungian perspective on the Doppelganger

Jung defines the double as a manifestation of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss and points to its main function: to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints. Never ceasing to express the desire for unity with the lost centre of personality, never losing its transcendental quality, the double in modern literature expresses itself as a violent transgression of human limitations and of social taboos which prohibit the realization of desire.

 

As a manifestation of a forbidden desire, of everything that is lost, hidden, or denied it points to the basis upon which cultural order rests, for it focuses on the possibility of disorder, that which lies outside the law, that which is outside the dominant value system. It is in this way that the double traces the unsaid and unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, made “absent”. It threatens to dissolve dominant structures, it points to or suggests the basis upon which the cultural order rests – the unified individual. The “other” has been categorized as a negative black area – as evil, demonic, barbaric – until it is recognized as the unseen of culture.

What is the cultural ‘unseen’ that we find expressed in popular culture?

Typology of Doubles in Popular Culture

Understanding the psychology behind the use of the double is informative because not all of the doubles that we find in popular culture speak through the psychology of the Doppelganger. In seeking to contextualise the use of the ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ motif, there are some 16 dominant forms of doubles that can be identified. I’ve put these into the table below, but I’ll define these in more detail with examples below.

There are four broad groups (there are some overlaps with some of the more creative stories):

1. Physical Doubles – Doubles that physically look similar to the original
2. Reflection Doubles – Doubles that are reflections rather than being physical duplicates
3. Transformation Doubles – where the one person might have double selves
4. Narratology Doubles – where narratives use doubles to build characters or insights

To review these in numerical order

Typology: Physical Doubles

Of these, the ‘Evil Twin’ is the most developed storyline. The Evil Twin, in three of the examples below, is clashed with Type 9: Evil versions from another universe. As much as we tend to perceive a doppelganger as being an evil shard of ourselves; likewise alternative universes must be negative reflections on good characters we know.

This has also been used in advertising to mixed reviews, the infamous Ford SportKa ads

Although, it should be noted there are some attempts at reversing this with ‘good twin’ story lines. Dave and Moon over Parador are both movies that show look-a-likes being better than the politicians they are doubles for.

The use of clones is an interesting one since they are often used to speak to our own sense of ‘horror’ if we found we were not an original. We find that Hollywood has spoken to all of these aspects of being cloned.

Multiplicity, is one man’s attempt to clone himself so he can experience more and ‘be in more places at once’. AeonFlux is a futuristic society where cloning and genetic manipulation are societal norms. Moon involves a clone that doesn’t know of his own place in the universe.

In recent years the theme of identity has been explored in the context of multiplicity, challenging the ‘nature or nuture’ arguments.

Orphan Black shows us the one person who has grown up in many different ways because of the environments in which she grew up in; nurture is very influential. The inverse of this was Josh Whedon’s Dollhouse, where the central character was one character that had multiple identities imprinted on to her: her nature changed each episode.

Who is the real person is a common theme of the Doppelganger in films. Also, pushing the question of ‘Am I the real me’? In a memorable Twilight Zone episode, a young Bruce Willis plays a man that finds a Doppelganger increasingly taking over his life.

Typology: Reflection Doubles

As discussed above, reflections are a source of identity and also horror for us. Hollywood has long played to this sense of fear. To borrow from Nietzsche, ‘if you gaze long enough into a mirror, the mirror will gaze back into you’.

From a semiotic perspective, we find the reflected Joker-card from a standard deck of cardsbeing a consistent visual-device to express the reflections or duality of nature in general across this entire typology.

Typology of Doubles: Transformation & Narratology

Mental Transformations don’t have to be only one person appearing like they have two personalities. There have been more dramatic characters that share the one skull. Gollum in Lord of the Rings often appears to have dueling personalities that squabble over what to do with Frodo. In Batman, Two-Face literally has a physical marker of his two identities – even though the transformation is more mental than physical.

The two Narratology doubles are the more complex of these four. Counterpoint Doubles are usually written in a way that we understand both characters better through the relationship and connectedness between them e.g. Dr Frankenstein chases his monster as his Faustian sin. Counterpoints can also be discussed as an objective-double – as in Vertigo where the woman is observed from the wheelchair as an observed double, but still a double to John “Scottie” Ferguson’s immobility.

Prefiguring is a narrative technique where one event evokes or seems prescient of another. The sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham is seen as symbolic for the sacrifice of Jesus as the Lamb. Historically, Caesar would evoke Alexander as an example of his own progress. In a visual sense, this poster for Episode I does a chilling task of prefiguring a different ‘double’ for Anakin Skywalker.

A film that exploits many of the dualities that are presented here is ‘The Prestige’ by Christopher and Jonothan Nolan, based on Christopher Priest’s novel of the same name (skip to the next section if you haven’t seen this film yet).

This has a series of ‘doubles’ at work:

• The two lead magicians: one blue-collar, the other white-collar reflect each other inversely.
• Hugh Jackman’s character uses a pseudo-double to create an illusion
• Hugh Jackman’s character learns to ‘clone’ himself
• Christian Bale’s character has a hidden twin, they both share the one life but have inversed personalities.

Physical Transformations

This leaves the discussion of the physical transformation, which started this analysis: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. From a structural level, there is something occurring here that is closer to the Jungian analysis of Doppelgangers that interests me. If these dualities are a fascination of modern writing, it’s not just an issue of good and evil. A hypothesis is that this particular story resonates so well because it challenges another aspect of modernity – what it is to be civilized.

The cultural signifiers of being civilized during the Gothic and Romance eras were to be more gentile or white collar. In some ways, being strong suggested you were stupid. While this might appear a simplistic observation, in Tolstoy’s time Russian intellectuals grew their fingernails long to indicate socially that they did not do manual labour. George Orwell, sums up this stereotype in Animal Farm:

“Boxer is the strongest animal on the farm, “an enormous beast, nearly eighteen hands high, and as strong as any two ordinary horses put together [...] he was not of first-rate intelligence, but he was universally respected for his steadiness of character and tremendous powers of work”

This focus on civilization provides us with a matrix detailed below; where the conventions are being stupid and strong and someone weaker is more intelligent.

Before analysing some ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ stories across this matrix, there is another important characteristic to recognise. That is that all of these stories have some type of catalyst that causes the transformation. In Dr Jekyll’s case it is his special formula. Although, we should note that Dr Jekyll was already drinking a lot of wine – the underlying story might have been as simple as him being an alcoholic. It is definitely a symbol of being civilised, where “all intelligent reputable men, all judges of good wine” is a marker of this elite social group. In contrast, when the police raid Mr Hyde’s room ‘”a closet [...] filled with wine” which suggests a lack of sophistication and appreciation; this volume of alcohol hints at a hidden problem in his closet.

However, the presence of a catalyst is what separates the ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ stories from other types of doubles. While these characters have something inside to be unleashed, there is also an aspect that the catalyst takes control from them. Then there is a battle to be the dominant identity.

This is not to suggest that all characters in stories that take a transformative-catalyst turn into some reflection of their shadow.

Asterix and Obelix by René Goscinny, show all the aspects of a Counterpoint Double with a catalyst that doesn’t unlock some evil persona. Even getting his magic potion from Getafix, we see Asterix gain the strength of his friend Obelix (always strong from falling in the cauldron as a baby). Together they are the same character, Asterix is usually weaker and smarter, Obelix more stupid and strong. It is the potion that makes them equals and one.

If the matrix is functional then we should be able to find the reverse effect in stories, Jekyll and Hyde makes you strong, wilder and less-intellectual or wise. Then making yourself weak should give you wisdom or intelligence. This is what we find in many religions where being ascetic or undergoing trials that take you close to death provides divine insights.

The Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Motif

We can look at the matrix introduced above with this in mind:

We find the Emperor from 300: Rise of an Empire transformed by his bath in the Holy waters and emerge stronger, evil and deranged. Bilbo and Gollum are Counterpoint doubles but in many ways they are intended to be Jekyll and Hyde, simultaneously, as they struggle under the influence of the ring.   We see Breaking Bad’s Walter White, who is dying of cancer, slowly change into Heisenberg: ‘Walter is the good man who decides to become a bad one’. Literally moving from white to black, again it is drugs that are at the centre of his transformation.

One of the Marvel Universes’ longest and most popular characters is the Incredible Hulk:

Here we have the classic transformation of the weak/intelligent man turn? into the mindless monster. Here we find the same story as with Jekyll and Hyde, instead of a formula of his own devising, it is Gamma radiation that creates the transformation. Bruce Banner is usually depicted as a man trapped in the beast’s body. The trigger for the transformation is ‘anger’, as the Hulk says, ‘the angrier I get, the stronger I get’.

In another of Marvels social experiments to challenge social stigmas, they lifted the veil on parental abuse. If there is a dark place within the mild mannered scientist, is was his upbringing – the source of his rage.

A more traditional version of the Jekyll and Hyde story is in one of Batman’s many doubles: ManBat. Dr. Kirk Langstrom, a scientist that experimented on himself transforms himself into a Giant Bat, trying to replicate their sonar powers. He loses control of the transformation into a Manbat on more occasions, and is not restored to humanity until Batman captures him. Perhaps, suggesting he is a counterpoint-double to the more brutal side of Batman himself, who constantly has to show restraint.

Concluding Observations

Referring back to the introduction of this discussion, the public use of ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ to describe a wide range of different behaviours (finish your thought). There is another alternative, in that people can just have an alter-ego.

An alter-ego, when used for the same person, refers to a role or persona that is taken on by an actor or an individual. Clark Kent’s alter-ego was Superman; Batman’s alter-ego has Bruce Wayne. These are essentially masks or parts of a person that they present to hide or divide parts of their lives. We talk about wearing different hats in different parts of our lives.

The question is that when we use ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ as a descriptor for criminals and other people’s questionable behaviour, are we not, from the implication it is out of their control, pre-excusing their behaviour? Sometimes people have hidden immoral or darksides; this is not a repressed or uncontrolled part of themselves – it is usually something tightly controlled and indulged.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a pressured response to being civilized; these characters let out their more primitive and wild natures. They became more bestial and less of a man. A consideration is that these days, Hollywood is reflecting back the inverted story: the wolf that pretends to be the weak/intelligent civilized man.

 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Mathew 7:15

Why are we still a-maze-d by labyrinths?

With a diverse range of permutations, the Maze is a symbol that has been with humanity since the pre-historic era. So pervasive is the labyrinth within human symbolic communication, it is impossible to think of a human era where it was not a deep structural metaphor that has guided human thought.

Why talk about Labyrinths? My response is a semiotic one; there appears to be a juxtaposition of the meaning behind the symbolism that is being expressed across postmodern culture. I’m interested in how the meaning of this symbol is changing and why? The labyrinth and maze appear to be experiencing a resurgent popularity; it’s interesting to explore what is driving this engagement.

A modern renaissance of the Labyrinth?

Only a couple of months ago, Robert Morris unveiled his new triangular labyrinth. A very postmodern take on the Labyrinth where the confusion is amplified by the transparency of the design rather than obscured by high walls.

More recently, the opening of the ‘National Building Museum in Washington D.C.’ ‘Big Maze’

In 2013, Mark Wallinger celebrated the London Underground’s 150^th Anniversary by placing a labyrinth in each of London’s 270 Tube stations: ‘A reminder that no matter how busy the Tube may get, there’s always a way out’.

In 2010, Franco Maria Ricci, the publisher behind Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, created a seven-hectare maze at Fontanellato – the world’s largest maze.

More broadly, in the USA it has been suggested that there has been a wider upsurge in interest in labyrinths, with more than 1000 labyrinths having been built in meditation garden settings, at retreat centres, churches, hospitals and prisons in 2011.

How old is the Labyrinth Symbol?

The Labyrinth is one of the oldest symbols of humanity, probably dating back to 2500BCE and most likely even older. It’s also a motif that we find across many cultures and continents. As a symbol that evokes Carl Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ as we find the same symbol speaking to similar meaning, across different discontiguous cultures and unrelated time periods.

Why is this symbol still popular?

To answer why this symbol is still popular, we need to recognise that we need to disambiguate the meaning between a Labyrinth and Maze. The two words are often used interchangeably in conversation. And it is here that there is the most interesting aspect of discussing the symbolism of the Labyrinth today.

A maze is not a synonym of a Labyrinth, in many ways it’s an antonym

A Labyrinth is an apparently random and convoluted party that is unicursal in nature. A maze is an intricate network of paths which is multicursal and usually designed as a puzzle.

Modernity appears to have lost something of what they symbolise of the labyrinth. It is this feature of what the maze vs labyrinth means in our modern western culture that is interesting to explore. In order to understand what has changed, it’s important to quickly review the changing meaning of the symbol from its first appearance.

The two words for similar looking symbols mean very different things. From an etymological perspective, the word Maze is believed to come from a Scandinavian word for a state of bewilderment or confusion . This is where our word ‘amazing’ comes from. Whereas the etymology of Labyrinth likely originated from the ancient greek word labrys, a double-headed axe used by the Minoans on the island of Crete. Thus, labyrinthos may mean “house of the double-headed axe.” (the Minoan connection will be discussed more below).

The Maze/Labyrinth is one of the most resonant archetypal symbols of humanity and found across most cultures from different starting points. At its most simple, it could be explained by the simplicity of its pattern. To draw a simple one, all you need to do is weave a vermicular route, repeatedly from a centre, and you can create a rudimentary Labyrinth. A artistic comparison would be a ‘marigold’ pattern created in different cultures which use protractors or compasses in art; or pyramids from anyone that notes the form of sand dropped into a mound.

However, this rational explanation of illustration doesn’t explain the consistency of symbolism that is associated with the motif across different cultures.

“[across the] world been associated with all aspects of human life. It has been used as a symbol of fertility and birth, as well as one of purgatory and death. It has religious and meditative importance in Hindu, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist and Shamanic rituals [Conty 2002]”

It is possible that its symbolic strength comes from being analogous for our own mind’s structure

The complicated structure of the labyrinth also mimics the biological structures of the human brain, and so another possibility for the endurance of this myth is our unconscious recognition of this building’s elaborate construction and its remarkable similarity to our own anatomy.

However, before discussing the use of the symbolism of this motif, it’s worth discussing a different possible origin of the symbol itself. This is a consideration that is often overlooked in discussions, largely due to the influence of the Cretan Labyrinth and the Minotaur.   In culture, the inspiration of the creation of a symbol is not necessarily the same as it signification at a later time.

Dancing Instructions or identity map?

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

George Bernard Shaw

What are these patterns depicting? If we are encourages to walk them, they are guided paths. Paths that we routinely step though are related to terpsichorean rituals: to dance. Dancing is something that has transcended the secular and religious in many early cultures

‘in its more primitive sense, a religious act or ceremony by the aid of which men co-operate with the gods for their own advantage or for the mutual of both…In short, a pantomime or imitation of these magical processes is engaged in the by the dancers and this is regarded by them as either as a strong hint to the gods to take the necessary magical action to ensure rain or growth, or as assisting them in the process…It does not explain the rite or give any reason to it, it narrates and describes it only’ (Spence 1979:2).

At this time the belief-systems often had a different conception of the cosmos and of death from today. There was no heaven and hell, there was this life and an afterlife. It was believed that there were supernatural doorways between these ‘realms’. Mythical trees such as the Norse World Tree were such portals – these are axis mundi (world pillar). Associated to this, there are a range of animals called psychopomps which had the ability to cross this threshold; usually animals associated with carrion such as crows, raven, wolves, etc. Since Shamans often talk of crossing over to the otherworld to gain wisdom and knowledge, it’s not surprising then that we find early Shamanism rich with dancing and music rites (Ellis Davidson 1976).  . The rites to get to the other world often involved intoxicants, dancing and music. This connection back to the axis-mundi can be seen in Siberian traditions, where the wooden-frames of their drums that create the music are claimed to have come from the world tree (Hatto 1970).

This symbolism continued, recalling that in later Christian Traditions, in a popular account, Christ is crucified on the branch of the Tree of Life at the centre of the universe in Jerusalem. The ‘Dream of the Rood‘ which was recorded on the Anglo-Saxon 8^th C Ruthwell Cross. This was very similar to Odin being hung from Yggdrasil the world tree, as well in a more shamanistic story. Here we see the primacy of a central pillar and the afterlife to the universe being very influential on symbolic thought.

Many terpsichorean rituals involve symbolic dancing moves that speak to memorized patterns. Learned by rote, these patterns would be recorded as routes or trails – a map.

‘Mazes would naturally be associated with the initiated, and they would be trodden or danced through; both initiation and treading, dancing or riding are, as we have seen, regularly associated with mazes’ C & W Russell (1991).

The implication of this is that if you learn a pattern in this life, when you pass to the otherworld, as scary and unknown that it is on the otherside, you can repeat the dance to find your way to your kin. Mazes functioned as a primordial supernatural GPS. If you know the maze in advance, you defuse the only real threat on the way to the centre, disorientation.

This connection to the otherworld can be found in other cultures as well.

This is where it gets difficult to work out what comes first, the chicken or the egg, or in this case: the dance or the depicted steps? Later in time, it’s clear that the symbol was guiding the way that they were walked or danced. In pilgrimages in Christian traditions ‘walked the Labyrinth’.

Steps on pilgrimages used penitent crosses, which functions as meditation stations. It is likely that early Christian labyrinths symbolised mental and physical ‘maps’ or contemplation.

The designs evolved as well, with a tradition of octagonal labyrinths differing from the traditional labyrinth.

It has been suggested that these unique octagonal shapes reflect the baptismal fonts that were in the churches. These were eight-sided to symbolise Christ’s resurrection on the eighth day.  (for why this is the 8^th day and not the 3^rd is discussed in depth here ).

Additionally, there have been connections made between Labyrinth dances and the Renaissance era dances . It’s not a focus here, but the rich traditions of Garden Mazes and architecture that use labyrinths as the foundations for their designs. While the discussion above revolves around dancing, equestrian jumping mazes also fit into this discussion

Types of Labyrinths

More technically, Umberto Eco has identified three types of labyrinths:

1. The Linear Labyrinth– a continuous line that wraps around itself. He identifies the nature of a unicursal maze: ‘the thread of Ariadne which the legend presents as the means (alien to the labyrinth) of extricating oneself from the labyrinth whereas in fact all it is the labyrinth itself’.

2. The Mannerist Labyrinth – multiple paths, some dead ends that engage the traveller with choices. This is often tree-like and there is usually one right path.

3. The Network Labyrinth – ‘a network is a tree plus an infinite number of corridors that connect its nodes. The tree may become (multidimensionality) a polygon, a system of interconnected polygons, an immense megahedron’.

The linear, is a traditional Greek labyrinth; the Mannerist is closer to what would colloquially be called a maze; and the network has more modern implications, which shall be discussed below.

The Mythic Story: The Labyrinth of the Minotaur

A lot of the western symbolism about the labyrinth derives from the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. There isn’t scope within the current discussion to explore every aspect of this mythography. There are many points of departure that are ripe with meaning in this story.

Cropping the story, Crete’s Queen gave birth to a monster called Minotaur. Minos, the king of Crete, commissioned Daedalus to create a structure to contain the Minotaur. At the time, Crete from its position of regional strength, demanded tribute from other nations like Athens (to feed the monster). Theseus, a Prince of Athens, was amongst the tribute. Ariadne fell for the prince and helps him to navigate the labyrinth with a golden thread and kill the Minotaur.

In versions of this story, ancient Labyrinth all have a centrality; they are unicursal with a way in and a way out. Those that look to this Greek tradition have a monster at the centre.

‘The Cretan labyrinth-design…has no blind alleys. Every part of the figure has meaning, and even when a path is apparently going in the wrong direction, it leads to the centre’

With this focus on the centre, this evokes another type of archetypal symbol.  It’s informative to think here of a Jungian psychological understanding of figures that have centres. Figures that conform to this symbolism are called Mandorlas. Again, this symbolism is found across every culture: Hebrew, Tibetan, American Indian, Celtic Irish, it is global in its expression.

The Mandorla or Kylkhor means ‘centre-surround’ in Tibetan. It is a symbol of transformation which encompasses the totality of an individual’s reality around a central axis.

‘Carl Jung recognised the mandala as a universal image of wholeness and a fundamental image of the self that appears in most cultures in many different forms.  He became increasingly interested in the appearance as expressions of wholeness.’

The reflective nature of this thinking is something that can be found in Zen Gardens in Japan

The Map of Andrea Ghisi’s Laberinto, illustrates this journey to the centre and elevation. Here the central figure tries to navigate out of a maze to an elevated place. Pillars are often symbolic of raised consciousness.

The journey of the labyrinth is analogous to our own journey, in the process of self-individualisation through our lives

‘One of the oldest images of the mystery of life, death, transformation and return is the labyrinth (the individuation path is also like a labyrinthine spiral) in which we fear to loose ourself. …The labyrinth is one of our oldest of symbols; it depicts the way to the unknown centre, the mystery of death and rebirth, the risk of the search, the danger of losing the way, the quest, the finding and ability to return’

Marie Von Franz explained this connection of the labyrinth in relation to our subconscious

“The maze of strange passages, chambers, and unlocked exits in the cellar recalls the old Egyptian representation of the underworld, which is a well-known symbol of the unconscious with its abilities. It also shows how one is “open” to other influences in one’s unconscious shadow side and how uncanny and alien elements can break in.”

The Minotaur from the Underworld

It is in this unconscious shadow aspect that we meet the Minotaur. Although, Umberto Eco makes a strangely entertaining suggestion that there has to be a Minotaur in his ‘Linear Labyrinth’

‘there has to be a Minotaur, just to make the experience interesting, seeing that the pathway through it (setting aside the initial disorientation of Theseus, who doesn’t know where it will lead) always leads to where it has to lead and can’t lead anywhere else’.

However, this does significantly downplay the psychological and mythical importance of the Minotaur.   Daedalus created the Labyrinth to hide the Minotaur from society. This is our repressed, dark and even evil side.

As for what this monster connotes, the Minotaur is most commonly viewed as a symbol of destruction. When Theseus slays the Minotaur, he metaphorically kills death, and so the monster represents evil personified, a dark and terrible beast. According to myth, the labyrinth was built to hide the Minotaur, this aberration of nature, to hide the scandalous evidence of its birth.

The similarities between the labyrinth and Dante’s Hell, with its concentric rings guarded by Lucifer at the centre, are abundantly clear. The two figures are often depicted as beasts; here the Minotaur getting the torso of a man.

If we look to Dante we can see this in the way he talks

“Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straightway was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell what that wood was, wild, rugged, harsh; the very thought of it renews the fear! It is so bitter that death is hardly more so. But, to treat of the good that I found in it, I will tell of the other things I saw there./ I cannot rightly say how I entered it, I was so full of sleep at the moment I left the true way;…”

This theme was recently explored in the movie Inception.   The story involves various dream states; one of the characters is Ariadne or the architect (the same named heroine that gives Theseus the Golden Thread to escape the Labyrinth).

In more Jungian terms Ariadne is the main character’s anima; as much as Beatrice was for Dante in navigating the 9 Circles of Hell. From a Jungian perspective the anima, is a contrasexual archetype of a male’s psyche (the female equivalent is an animus). Engaging with the anima, is an important part of the individuation journey, opening men up to emotionality, creativity and relationships. In stories, we find that women often appear to men to help them through the labyrinth, these women are anima.

Robert Graves in discussing the nature of heroes journeys and stories suggested that all heroes journeys to the otherworld or Hell are really labyrinth myths. It is a convention that many mythical heroes go to the otherworld (representative of their subconscious) in order become ‘heroes’. This is the role of Ariande to Theseus as she helps him overcome his ‘minotaur’.

There is a connection between these conceptions of the labyrinth, with the darker part of the subconscious, with the underworld as Hell. This can be manifest to the shadow of where we live.

‘In Les Miserable, by Victor Hugo, this underworld to the city is described: as ‘a dark, twisted polyp, [...] a dragon’s jaws breathing hell over men’. …. The labyrinth, in accordance with the theriomorphic isotropy of negative images, tends to come alive, in the form, say, of a dragon or ‘a fifteen-foot long centipede’. The ingesting, a living sewer, is linked to the image of the mythical, devouring Dragon….Babylon’s digestive apparatus’.

This symbolic connection of Hell, the Great serpent and the Labyrinth was also perceived by Eugene Ionesco as representing the opposite of Paradise. If goodness is order, evil must be disorder. The straight path or the maze.

‘Here’s a maze trod indeed, through forth-rights and meanders’

The Tempest, Shakespeare

The Labyrinth’s Life Line: The Thread

 “Labyrinths have many meanings. Two of them stand out: the fear of getting lost and the pleasure and challenge of exploration. These opposing meanings, not uncommon in symbols, explain partially our fascination with them”.

Having explored some of the psychological and mythical dimensions to the symbol, it is informative to expand this discussion to the Labyrinth as a journey. As something we might walk.

There is a big difference between the labyrinth and the maze, which was discussed above. However, they both involve the willingness to get lost upon entering. However, Penelope Doob points out that one rewards persistence, and the other, memory and intelligence. One forces you through a set journey, the other deliberately seeks to confuse and frustrate.

The way that Theseus is able to navigate his journey was through Ariadne’s gift of the Golden Thread. Interestingly, the meaning of the word ‘thread’ is from the old English ‘to cause to twist or turn’.

Gilbert Durand believes that the thread and labyrinth together are a ritual conveying the idea of difficulty and the danger of death in seeking our destinies.   It is a testament to the maxim; high-tech problems need low-tech solutions. Here a simple thread acts as a way of defusing a complex maze.

Morrison in writing about the metaphoric role of the thread states:

‘This thread acts as an agent of inscription, of writing one’s way through the maze. Keeping track of the choices one has made in the past, the decisions and pathways travelled, allows one to be located in the present‘

This aspect of the thread being a temporal marker might start to suggest what the modern attitudes to the labyrinth are. Coming from a different perspective, Alan Dix in discussing cyberspace states (my emphasis):

The potential dynamics of a system are inherently branched and non-linear. Scenarios are important because our experience however branched and complex within space, is always linear through time. We live a single thread of life, not a multiplicity of potential paths. This is why it is easier to browse a simple history list for a hypertext than a more complex representation. Mazes are synonymous with complexity, but strangely enough early mazes were essentially linear: they had one spiral or convoluted path.

What is the Modern perception of the Labyrinth Today?

Perhaps a consideration here is on how the straight thread vs the disrupted thread corresponds with the way we think today. In discussing the Greek way of thinking, Bruno Latour has suggested that the Greeks thought in terms of straight threads and deviations as being different modes of thinking. One represented the continuation of history, the other perhaps more disruptive.

1. The straight path was of reason and scientific knowledge.
2. The clever and crooked path was that of technical knowledge.

He believes that the myth of Daedalus is that all things deviate from a straight line.

Within a more postmodern frame of thinking, we need to consider what a labyrinth suggests to us today. Broadly, postmodernism is driven by our interest in self-transformation through culture, language, aesthetics, narratives, symbolic modes and literary expressions and meanings. However, it is also defined by being fragmented, discontinuities, pluralities, chaos, instabilities, constant changes, fluidities and paradoxes that define the human condition. In some ways, the straight-thread is modernism: continuities, progressions, stable and ordered. There are concrete objectification and part of larger continuous narratives. Postmodernism represents a disruption to this journey.

Psychologically, if the labyrinth journey of old was a journey to a centrality. This is analogous to our journey within to individualisation or self-actualisation. Symbolically, in this journey we seek to confront the shadow parts of our ‘self’ represented by the Minotaur. Walking or contemplating a labyrinth, in gardens, art or stories is a way of evoking this experience. When considering the re-engagement with this symbol, could it be that in a postmodern world we seeing this as an increasing need here? Compton suggests that our lives are not working; we are troubled or want to feel our way to a dilemma is when we engage with the labyrinth. Asking is ‘The thread running through this is the desire humans have to be whole and no longer fragmented’.   Is the increasing appeal of the labyrinth a subconscious desire for us to have a better sense of our centre in a fragmented world where the constant drive to individuate leaves some with a feeling of ‘standing on nothing’.

Speaking of the labyrinth as an archetype in a (post)modern world, Morrison beleives:

‘Even if we dismiss labyrinths as irrelevant, child’s play, or just smart design, the idea of the labyrinth remains incredibly relevant to the world of the mind, our interiority. The labyrinth serves as a useful metaphor for reading, writing, creating, thinking, perceiving, and for life itself. Psychologically, the labyrinth is an archetype that still moves us and describes life for us in some essential way’.

The Labyrinth in Popular Culture.

This discussion has focused on the origins, psychology, symbolism and the ways that the labyrinth/maze dichotomy has changed over time. How do we engage with the labyrinth today? To explore this it’s informative to look at how we are using it in popular culture. This could be across many different expressions of culture; so I’ve chosen two types of storytelling, one long and one very short. I’m going to use Movies and Advertising to explore this theme. Although, this analysis could have been just as interesting looking at literature through the works of Borges or Umberto Eco’s ‘Name of the Rose’ – they just tend to be less visual.

Eventually everything connects – people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.

Charles Eames

Labyrinths in Films

From a mythic level, the Greek myth of the Labyrinth and monster is still very much in vogue. Most successfully, it’s the mythic foundations of ‘The Hunger Games’, where young people are offered as tribute for the entertainment and needs of the monster (the state). They have to fight in an arena (labyrinth) to escape.

Very similar to this is the soon to be released “The Maze Runner”, where young people with no memories have to form teams in a maze to escape.

Several big budget films over recent years have used a plot of heroes being challenged by a constructed maze.   In Aliens vs Predator predators create an automatic maze to allow them to hunt the ultimate prey in the arctic. Resident Evil uses the layout of Racoon City as a labyrinth. Here the underground city is controlled by a sociopathic Artificial-Intelligence called Alice and the survivors are hunted through the maze by a genetically engineered monster. Harry Potter portrayed a less grim use of the maze, although it still resulted in the death of a central character.

The labyrinth has also been a central theme to Star Wars, where Luke and Han enter the Death Star ‘Maze’, find their anima in ‘Leia’, battle the monster in ‘Darth Vadar’ and leave triumphant. It is this part of the narrative that marks a more self-confident and independent Luke Skywalker emerging.

The Star Trek take on this theme was a clever inversion though the Borg Cube. While the Borg (a hostile cybernetic race) live within a maze, if you enter this maze you don’t find yourself, you lose your sense of identity to the collective. The Borg assimilates and shares a collective-intelligence though their collective; this hive mind coalesces through the Borg Queen. The reverse of an anima role, she takes identity by force rather than guiding you to self-actualisation.

This darker aspect of the Maze has been used in horror movies over time. The horror film Saw shows the ‘Jigsaw Killer’ create elaborate mazes and challenges to ‘educate’ the abductees of their true natures. Brutally violent, the franchise takes the challenge of the labyrinth to the next level. It does present an interesting take on a unicursal labyrinth though, since the route is always the same. The choices presented are not different directions but different solutions through life-threatening puzzles.

The film that helped pioneer the technological and modern maze was the 1997 Canadian film Cube, where different ‘participants’ are moved like rats through a maze across different challenges.

These films also start to introduce the dimension warping potential of a maze. There has been a strong influence on the virtual nature of mazes by Escher. Douglas Hofstadter’s ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid’ explores the ‘strange loop’ of self-referencing objects and their logical contradictions.

Josh Whedon’s ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ successfully plays with themes of the mythical Minotaur, ‘strange loop’ mazes and modernity. Again, we see a group of young people within a maze, fighting for survival.

Last year Prisoners (2013) was released with mazes at the centre of the story line. Interestingly with the lead Detective named Loki (Viking God of magic and illusion related to the meaning of maze in Scandinavian); speaking to themes of hidden truths and the need to seek answers at the centre of the mystery. The storyline revolves around abducted young girls, alluding back to the anima conception discussed above from a Jungian perspective.

The more intense thriller/horror film that uses the labyrinth as a central theme is “The Shining”, where the journey is metaphorically to his inner Minotaur as his sanity unravels.

A different and more mythical telling of a young girl’s journey and growth was Guillermo Del Toro’s 2006 Pan’s Labyrinth. A complicated tale that merges reality with the mythical, it tells the story of Ophelia’s rebirth through the labyrinth.

Interestingly, in Guillermo Del Toro’s other movie ‘HellBoy’, the labyrinth is used to bring back to life the source of Evil, Rasputin. A blood sacrifice by Rasputin’s acolytes starts the magic to pull him back from the realm of hell. Here the Minotaur, Hellboy, is a ‘good’ horned demon who is literally the key to the labyrinth (the door to Hell).

Labyrinths as Games

Many of the films above evoke the experience of the labyrinth as a game. This might be a game with mortal consequences but the idea is that the ‘the winner survives’. This is most likely a natural evolution of garden mazes as a form of experiential entertainment. This grew in popularity in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. There are many famous examples from Villa d’Este, Tivoli, Italy to the Imperial Gardens, Peking, China.

At its most simple, ‘snakes and ladders’ is a maze based game where the decision making, within the maze, has been put into the hands of the roll of the die. Originating in India, this has remained a popular board game in western cultures.

It’s not surprise that many of the most successful early videogames are labyrinth and maze based – all with their own Minotaur’s. This theme of knowing/learning the right path is a central part of the current generation of games. Perhaps a topic for another post, the role of labyrinths in video games has been discussed in depth by Steffen Walz.

Labyrinths and Mazes in Print Advertising

Print advertising is interesting because it has such a small amount of time to communicate its message. This means it has to leverage existing understandings, rather than trying to create complicated new ones. The result of this is that semiotically we can perceive many shared-understandings of the Labyrinth/Maze symbol.

A dominant code is that the Maze is a barrier to mobility. Mobility is a central theme of modernity. Car brands speak of their vehicles as magical vehicles that render the maze passable.

Interestingly, these ads also frame modern living and urban cities as the labyrinth. Earlier, the symbolism of the underbelly of cities as a negative labyrinth was discussed. If we personify cities as people, they have a dark subconscious as well.

• Audi ‘Now it’s easier to get in’
• BMW ‘Find your own way out’
• VW ‘Designed for the City’

Skoda and Renault have both positioned their GPS systems as the ‘golden thread’ for navigating this urban maze

Related to this, DHL knows navigation and time-efficient delivery

For a fire-retardant brand, they suggest the opposite; the realities of time and navigating are the proposition to stock their product for the protection in your house

This metaphor that urban living is a maze has been spoken through different ways.   The Salvation Army has suggested that we are making this complexity for ourselves.

City Harvest juxtaposes want with elite food addressing hunger

The maze is again used by anti-smoking campaigns to speak to challenges of breaking free

If some brands are speaking to barriers, the health industry uses the maze as a frequent visual metaphor for easy alimentary journeys.

Oral-B used a classical labyrinth to illustrate that, like the Golden thread, it could help you get to the right spot.

The reverse of this is also true in healthcare, where the labyrinth is used as a metaphor of containment

Durex has used different executions of the Maze to suggest containment. Although, the visual message of the first ad seems to be at odds with what they are selling. Yes it takes longer, but the sperm still gets through?

At the end of the path

When we consider the use of the labyrinth in movies, many appears to reflect many of the dystopian themes that I have discussed in early posts. Where we see the negative use of labyrinths, they are not being used has their historical symbols of spiritual renewal or rebirth but as metaphors of a complicated modern life to survive. There are a couple of themes here. Firstly, walls are perceived as barriers – this evokes our lives of challenges. Secondly, we live busy lives with broad expectations ‘instant gratification’ and anything that expects us to slow down and think are ‘irritations’. Movies reflect back the myths that we want to resolve, so while this might appear negative, the labyrinth is a powerful psychological symbol to make us think about how we overcome these challenges in life.

In advertising it is difficult to see the labyrinth; it is mostly the maze that is used. Many ads in this space appear to suggest that we perceive our urban lives as complicated, confusing, constraining and needing a lot of attention. They don’t reflect back the labyrinth’s journey to the centre; they suggest more a desire to get out of the maze or find a way to bypass it.

It’s clear that the different meanings labyrinth and maze are still experiencing some confusion today. The start of this discussion was the global trend in labyrinths that we can physically immerse ourselves in an experience. Interestingly, this is closer to the primordial purpose of the symbol.   Our needs in a fast moving, more abstract and fragmented world to experience something where we are both challenged but lead to a sense of getting to the deeper part of an experience, rather than just have our frustration reflected in a maze. Perhaps in the continuing postmodern project, we are all looking for a golden thread to follow.

City Living Today

Cities and urban life are being increasingly discussed in the media, internet and society. These are topical disputes as to what our cities should look like, what experiences we should expect from them and who should be controlling this. This is of importance because where we live influences how we perceive ourselves and how we experience our lives.

We have evolving into an almost exclusively urban ape. For 99 % of the history of humans on earth, there were no cities. 1% of all urban-spaces are larger than 100,000 people but accommodate 63% of the world’s population. Others have suggested that we’re now at a point where over 80% of the global population live in cities . Paul Wheatley describes global civilization as moving into a third phase of urbanisation – where all cities will effectively merge into one:

 It seems inevitable that by the end of the twenty-first century a universal city, Ecumenopolis, will have come to comprise a world-wide network of hierarchically ordered urban forms enclosing only such tracts of rural landscape as necessary for man’s survival.

With many studies pointing to a correlation between population size and city density, this trend is only likely to accelerate into the future . As this process of conurbation increases, many societal and cultural battles are starting to take place on this broader stage that includes the city itself – since this is where most of us live. City life was once so aspirational, what has changed?

“But for Western Europeans in the second half of the twentieth century, struggling to create a post-industrial urbanism… Dr Jekyll is losing control of Mr Hyde. Cities are seen as unpleasant, noisy, polluted and raw. We highlight the squalor, not the vibrancy, the discomfort not the liberation. These bleak images are smothering centuries-old visions of towns as civilised, sophisticated and gracious—everything we mean by ‘urbane’” Landry, et al.

Who is in charge?

The primary focus to be discussed here is how cities are engaged with in Western culture. Why are they such pinnacles of cultural status? Why do we have a love/hate relationship with cities?

Cities are very topical. For example, in London, at the same time that the Shard is gaining attention as its spire redefines the skyline; London’s previous architecture celebrity, Norman Foster’s London Gherkin, is up for sale. This is contributing to a more serious political discussion emerging as to what the nature of the London skyline should be, with “over 200 tall buildings, from 20 storeys to much greater heights, are currently consented or proposed. Many of them are hugely prominent and grossly insensitive to their immediate context and appearance on the skyline”. . What a city looks like both communicate and ‘constructs’ a lot about the social and cultural life of the people living there.

Across the Atlantic, there have been different conversations about city skylines, with the NY Port Authority claiming to own the NYC Skyline: telling a store to destroy its NYC Skyline-Themed plates. Ownership of a city skyline does appear strange, considering they are constantly changing. Skylines reflect the evolving character and needs of their populations. Across the US, there is an emerging discussion as to what the Millennials will want for their cities as they grow in economic influence. Studies suggest that they want to live differently, favouring variety and options, with good public transport.

“Generally, the size of rental and condo apartment units targeting people in their 20s and 30s is shrinking while the list of amenities tailored to them — electric-car charging stations, music studios, yoga studios, movie theaters and vegetable gardens — is growing.”

This raises questions as to who decides what a city should look like? Do cities grow organically or do they look exactly as planned? How do changes to cities reflect how we perceive ourselves and our communities? What does your city suggest to outsiders about you?

How do we feel about our cities?

What is interesting about cities is that most of us take them for granted; although we’re largely negative about them when prompted. I’ve discussed in other posts how the mood of post-modernity is to be fascinated by nature and rejecting of  many aspects of our modernity project. Here our cities remind us of our ‘industrialized’ fears evoking how de-humanised we feel in a postmodern age.  The power structures of city life appear to suppress individuality.

‘The deepest problems in modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces’ George Simmel

Robert Park, the urban sociologist, reflecting on the process of city-making stated:

“man’s most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself’

From a cognitive metaphoric perspective, we think of cities as ‘containers’. They are urban islands seperated from the outside world. However, while there is consensus they are containers; rather than think of them as mixing-pots of vibrant cultural exchange, the common default is that they are cages. Think of advertising; we talk of the weekend ‘getaway’ or ‘escape’

The trouble with a cage metaphor is that you’re constantly trying to escape it. As Lily Tomlin observed,

“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you‘re still a rat.”

If we have re-made ourselves as city dwellers as Park suggests, how is humanity different from before? There are three things to explore here:

1. How do the origins of cities inform how we think about them today?
2. Why do we identify so strongly with cities?
3. What is the experience of cities that is causing such a disconnect?

Where did cities start? Why do we understand them as we currently do?

‘The concept of ‘city’ is notoriously hard to define’. Gordon Childe

How we relate to cities today is still very much influenced by how our ancestors first started to live in this way. Mythically and symbolically, the origins of cities can be found in our need to orientate ourselves to the universe. If we look at the early rituals and symbolism that guided a city’s development, it can inform how we see the role of cities today.

The first skylines were created by natural features on the landscape, in the form of trees or rocks.   These created locus around which early societies could organise themselves. As Irwin (1990: 47, his emphasis) says

‘Throughout the whole ancient world the building of sacred monuments was first and foremost a rite by which man sought to identify himself with the source of the cosmic order’.

Semiotically, the first graphical representation of this was a simple cross: vertical tree on a horizon line. This evolved to be a cross under the sky – a cross in a circle. By the fourth and fifth centuries, we find this a popular symbol in use across the entire Roman Empire  While there are obvious crucifixion symbolic considerations, the cross symbol was in broader use e.g. in Greek accounting at the time .

Another important symbolic association were the urban and geographical associations that are linked with the cross in a circle.  This cross motif was used to orientate settlements and demarcate religious and secular boundaries.  This was how all urban settlements were organised at this time and how surveyor’s guidelines were laid out as a process.

Rykwert describes the process:

It is a starry circle representing the sky which is quartered as the augur quartered his diagrammatic circle.  … The purpose of drawing the diagram was to set the general order of the sky in a particular place, (1976: 47).

What is important here is that the earliest settlements and habitations were organised around us.  The cross-in-circle symbolises our personal location in relation to the cosmos.   This is a statement of personal orientation when we are within these structures.  Think of a legend on a map or a compass that we hold – these are designed around this symbolic frame.

This was not just a Roman tradition. A hieroglyph from Egypt called nywt  (Budge 1971: 34) that means ‘village, town, city’.  Rykwert (1976: 192) illustrates this character nywt as a vertical cross ; he suggests that the cross-in-circle connoted a city in the Roman empire. This shouldn’t be a surprise considering that the Roman Empire created the two greatest cities of Rome and Constantinople and this symbol is associated with both.

The origins of the word urban can be found in this symbolism. The word urbs was derived from urvum ‘ the curve of a ploughshare’ or urvo ‘I plough around’, and orbis ‘ a curved thing’ ‘a globe’ ‘the world’.  ‘The word for city immediately provoked the association with ploughing’ (Rykwert 1976: 134).  This should not be a surprise since the first cities were agricultural centres.

Christ has often been connected to ploughing symbolism in early Christian art (Milburn 1988: 1-7)from parables in Mathew 13 and Luke 8.  Connected to this are the accounts of the founding of Rome and Constantinople whose boundaries and layout are both described by John the Lydian as being cut into the earth by oxen yoked to a plough (Burch 1927: 129).

Christianity built the first two great urban cities. However, Saint Augustine suggests a third, that there are two holy cities, Rome which symbolizes all that is worldly, and Jerusalem (the city of heaven)

Jerusalem was believed to be at the spiritual centre-of-the-cosmos, as much as in the secular world ‘all roads lead to Rome’. Constantinople was established as the second Rome; it was Constantine’s city for the eastern empire and the first to adopt the cross-in-circle as a symbol

Over history, it has been a decreasing trend to name cities after their founder. Rome was named after its fratricidal wolf-weaned King Romulus; Constantinople, after the first Christian Roman emperor Constantine; Caesarea was named for Caesar; Washington DC for George Washington; Stalingrad for Stalin. We now live in an era that is less interested in historical narratives; hence, the origins of cities are less important today.  We are more likely to personify the collective shared character of cities.

Other ways we perceive cities as people

If the founders above are based in history, other origins are non-secular.There was an older tradition for many cities to be named after guardian deities; perhaps the most famous is that Athens was named after Athena.

Greek gods such as Hermes were frequently associated with market places in many cities, but many other Greek Polis (city states) adopted individual Gods. This could be very literal; the Palladium was a statue of Athena Pallas which was also known as ‘The Luck of Troy’. This was believed to have protected in turn, Troy, Rome and Constantinople over periods of time. The Palladium was moved from Rome to Constantinople by Constantine in a political move that indicates the primacy of his new Roman capital. The protection of this statue was thought to explain the fall of Rome while Constantinople thrived.

To some extent, the Vatican’s association with St Peter, when compared to Venice adopting St Mark as its patron saint, can be seen through this lens. Later Britannia was used by the British Empire as a personified spirit that was borrowed from Roman times.

This mythological dimension has been explored more creatively by Warren Ellis, who founded a new type of superhero called ‘Jack Hawksmore’ – the God of Cities. Much of Ellis’s writing reflects sociocultural and trans-humanist themes. It does address an interesting gap in modern mythology.

Historical founders, spirits, religious personages and deities all created a rich heritage for us to think about cities as living people from when they were first constructed.

Our Personification & Identification with Cities

While we don’t think of cities being under the protection of a deity anymore, that doesn’t mean we don’t think of them as living beings. These conventions of deities primed us to think of them as responsive entities. From a semiotic perspective, we use a lot of anthropomorphic metaphors to discuss cities. We talk of the heart of Europe, transportation arteries, head of state, the fitness of the economy, crime as sickness, certain cities turn their nose up at others, the city that never sleeps, etc. We perceive cities as organic and living beings that we are part of.

This is not a new association; the Old Testament often uses the body as a metaphor for the city, such as Jezebel being a metaphor for the corrupt city Babylon. There are many modern examples of somatic symbolism in literature. One of the more famous visual examples, is the cover of Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 Leviathan –where society is literally depicted as one body.

We still talk about the head-of-state as a shortcut to the body politic? These themes of the interchangeability of us and our cities has been explored in modern art, such as that by Dan Mountford or Alpha-Tone .

We also find the reverse of this with architecture expressing more anthropomorphic themes. ‘The Dancing House’ or ‘Fred and Ginger’, by architect Vlado Milunić in co-operation with Frank Gehry, Prague, Czech Republic almost defies reality to create the impression of two dancers.

This is also a consistent theme of the metaphoric work of Nigel Coates the architect

Perhaps the most tragic and traumatic societal illustration of this metaphor was the September 11 destruction of the Twin Towers. George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, in defining ‘Metaphors of Terror’ describes the attack as:

‘The devastation that hit those towers that morning hit me. Buildings are metaphorically people. We see features—eyes, nose, and mouth—in their windows. I now realize that the image of the plane going into South Tower was for me an image of a bullet going through someone’s head, the flame pouring from the other side blood spurting out. It was an assassination. The tower falling was a body falling. The bodies falling were me, relatives, friends. Strangers who had smiled as they had passed me on the street screamed as they fell past me. The image afterward was hell: ash, smoke, and steam rising, the building skeleton, darkness, suffering, death’.

More widely, this metaphor of buildings as people should be familiar to most Americans, with an anthropomorphic representation of buildings on their Dollar Bill. This is the reverse of the great seal, which illustrates the ‘Eye of Provenance’. A building that is anthropomorphized with an eye.

Recalling that in architecture, the central mandorla or  central round window on Churches such as at Notre Dame, Paris have been likened to being the ‘Eye of God’.

“The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous.” (Psalms 34:15)

 

 

More broadly, this might explain the trend for Ferris Wheels to be found in most larger cities. The most famous examples are called ‘eyes’. This is more than just that they offer views, it’s also that they look like eyes on the personified city skyline.

A more negative role of this symbolism are the Eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, in ‘The Great Gatsby’.

These are thought to symbolise the loss of spiritual values in American? and the growing commercialism. “But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.”

 

 

Destruction and cities.

Our identification with cities as a metaphor of a shared body is so strong, that the loss of cities has profound impacts on how we think about our communities and personal identity. Historically, the destruction of Delft in 1654 had a significant impact on 17^th C Europe

‘On Monday, 12 October, 1654, shortly after half past eleven in the morning, one of Delft’s gunpowder stores exploded and destroyed a large part of the city. This painting by Van der Poel shows the terrible damage caused by the explosion’.

This explosive power had not been experienced before this time. The significance of the paintings is that cityscapes were a relatively rare form of painting at the time. These paintings helped draw attention to skylines as an art form.

If we look at the second world war, it was the tactics of ‘carpet bombing’ urban centres that left an indelible scar on the face of Europe. The brutal and deliberate targeting of urban centres by both sides of the war are detailed by Anthony Beevor is disturbing detail.

Hollywood and Popular Culture appear obsessed with destroying our major cities; it takes little effort to find movies that all result in the destruction of the city. In this case, NYC as the world’s Modern Capital, is often the target. Why do we want to see our cities destroyed as entertainment?

One of the reasons that the idea of cities and buildings be destroyed resonates because of its drawing upon older symbolism. If we look at Tarot Cards, this meaning is encapsulated in the tower card

Tarot cards are useful reductions of archetypal psychological imagery. If we look at the imagery, what we see are two people thrown from a tower that is being struck by lightning. In main effect? is for the crown of the tower to be knocked down. This scene has different interpretations but most agree that the people had crowned it king, suggesting it was the ultimate authority. Also, that by living in the tower they were cut off from other people (being in an ivory tower). The lightning strike returns them to the ground but does not harm them. Finally, the lighting has different interpretations from an act of God to something more symbolic; Carl Jung suggests that lightning represents ‘a sudden, unexpected, and overpowering change of psychic condition’.

As a story, this scene evokes the building of the Tower of Babel of ancient Mesopotamia. Here King Nimrod erected a tower so tall that he would be able to enter directly into heaven. This was struck down by God, and caused the multiplicity of language as a punishment. Also, simultaneously creating work for generations of semioticians, linguists and people working in cultural fields.

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Genesis 11:4–9

Images of the Tower of Babel have many permutations. All appear to represent the first ‘Skyscraper’- a building that scraped the heavens; close enough for God to smite it down.

This was the inspiration of the Fredersen’s headquarters in the 1927 movie Metropolis; the central tower is believed to be based on the Tower of Babel.

More modern versions of the Tower introduce new themes.

Interestingly, Andreas Zielenkiewicz work, starts to introduce the Labyrinth that I discussed in my last post . The fallen tower, without a crown, resulting in a literal maze for those left still standing. The confusion of communication.

A striking image I referenced here in this post, The Map of Andrea Ghisi’s Laberinto, illustrates this journey to the centre and elevation. Here the central figure tries to navigate out of a maze to an elevated place. Pillars and towers are often symbolic of raised consciousness. This scene also evokes the process by which landscapes were ‘surveyed’ by both religious and secular authorities, discussed above through the imagery of the cross and circle.

Part of our morbid fascination with seeing cities being destroyed appears to be a bit of cultural self-loathing. I’ve discussed before how the postmodern era is characterised with a fetish for the pre-modern age. Many of the Hollywood stories take away modernity by some supernatural or ‘act of god’. We appear fascinated to see what will happen if we were forced to reboot how we live.

It’s informative that many of these dystopian films end with the pairing of man and a woman, usually alone. Ending the story with a modern day ‘Adam and Eve’ to start humanity again. This same symbolism is present in the ‘Tower Card’; a man and woman that are ejected from the Tarot Card, tumbling to the ground, to start again wiser than before.

The underbelly of the city

Zielenkiewicz’s use of the maze is interesting in the context of building a city. In the Bible it never used the term ‘Tower of Babel’, it suggests that Babel is the city. One of the aspects of the Labyrinth is that it is often used as a metaphor for the underworld. There is a connection between these conceptions of the labyrinth, the darker part of the subconscious, with the underworld as Hell. This can be manifested to the shadow of where we live.

‘In Les Miserable, by Victor Hugo, this underworld to the city is described: as ‘a dark, twisted polyp, [...] a dragon’s jaws breathing hell over men’. …. The labyrinth, in accordance with the theriomorphic isotropy of negative images, tends to come alive, in the form, say, of a dragon or ‘a fifteen-foot long centipede’. The ingesting, a living sewer, is linked to the image of the mythical, devouring Dragon….Babylon’s digestive apparatus’.

This symbolic connection of Hell, the Great serpent and the Labyrinth was also perceived by Eugene Ionesco as representing the opposite of Paradise. If goodness is order, evil must be disorder. The straight path or the maze. This is also reflected in the way that Dante’s Hell is described as being a labyrinth. Italo Calvino, talks to this aspect of cities:

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.  There are two ways to escape suffering it.  The first is easy for many:  accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it.  The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension:  seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities

Looking semiotically at advertising today, I was able to show that we express a lot of the negativity of modern city life as a maze – evoking the hell aspects of this symbolism. It also presents the city as a cage to be escaped. This sense of the underbelly of the city being ‘hell’ has been explored in countless Hollywood films http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/starring-the-subway, something that is well celebrated.

Perhaps a film that unites many of these elements was Mimic. An overview of the plot unites many of the themes discussed here: To fight a disease, we genetically tamper with cockroaches that kill the illness. However, the genie is out of the bottle, and these bugs continue to evolve; to the point where they live in the under city, coming above surface only to hunt humans for food. Again suggesting conclusions about modern humanity: that it doesn’t understand the implications of the science it uses.

Skylines as the Face(s) of a City

If we can easily define the underbelly of a city, what does the skyline mean? In starting this discussion, many of the disputes about cities are about how they look. Why do we care what they look like?

“looking at cities can give a special pleasure, however commonplace the sight may be,”

Kevin Lynch

The aesthetic considerations of skylines are an important aspect to their nature. It’s not just the size of a skyline but their complexity that speaks to a comparable measure of civilization. The complexity of skylines does appear to contribute to their appeal.

The aesthetics are subjective and do create different emotions

“People can point out specific visual features or attributes in an environment that create pleasant feelings and distinguish those features from other environmental attributes that evoke negative emotions”

From a purely utilitarian perspective, we use skylines to navigate our way around cities. Although, this perspective is isovist , in that we can only see the visible space from a certain space, not the entire skyline at once (sentence doesn’t seem finished). This is why it’s really easy to get lost in a foreign city. It’s an important definition because it also illustrates that skylines change with new buildings, dominating and obscuring others, and why this is such a hot topic. The space between buildings creates a sense of density of a city.

By seeing a skyline this ‘tends to lead to the idea that a skyline conveys information about the ‘whole’ city. If we are an integral part of our cities, doesn’t the skyline say something about us an individuals?

The Skyline as the ultimate cultural status symbol

Earlier I alluded to the city life being a ‘rat race’, this is not just within the city city-against-city. Increasingly, as the economic playing field is being leveled across global economies, this is becoming important. There is a constant jockeying between the old and new world to have the most desirable cities. There are many annual lists that rank the great cities of the world or here

‘Then again, we do compare cities: it’s is part of social life, a form of life. We compare cities, frequently, typically, and in many ways. The comparison of cities remains a popular activity’. Alan Blum

It is believed that there is, to some extent, a competitive city-race occurring on the global stage

The competitor cities of New York, Frankfurt and Tokyo loomed large as the detailed London plan articulated the potential for supporting strategic elements of London’s economy. And the dynamism of Asia’s urban skylines arguably stretched London’s horizons upward as the previous Mayor responded to the sense of a fading urban image by changing planning regulations to allow tall buildings … the geopolitics of huge buildings is just one of the ways in which China is announcing its global ascendance

We compare cities because we are urban apes; status-performance is a central driver of our personal and social behavior.

“A skyline is the chief symbol of an urban collective. It testifies that a group of people share a place and time, as well as operate in close proximity and with a good deal of inter-dependence,” (Attoe, 1981, p. 1).

 

 

For nearly 80 years, the skyscraper was largely an American-only phenomenon and seemed to symbolize the energy, enthusiasm and optimism that characterized the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The desire to measure up in a Freudian competition is seeing a rise in the tallest buildings being dominated by Asia in 2013. Asia now represents 45% of the 100 tallest buildings

A key consideration here is that we inherit cites as much as we contribute to their future growth. As much as the current generation grows the city, we move around a city, which in part was designed for our ancestors.

At the same time, there are places where competing narratives of a people – their history, values and identities – are being fought out in the very fabric of the city itself. There are many people in modern democracies who do not recognise themselves or their pasts in their nations’ capitals, sometimes despite the strenuous efforts of city planners and political leaders to represent the nation in this way

When we consider the anthropology of a city, it is something that is collectively created rather than being the product of one mind or physicality

Thus the city does not exist in an individual’s mind or ‘out there’ as an objective physical landscape but as a collective entity that gathers people’s emotions and memories, mixes them with architecture and elicits distinctive practices and ways of being.

Is part of our negativity about cities the sense that we are not part of the collective voice that defines a city?

Can we engage more? What is the best way to interact with a city?

Michel de Certeau discussed in detail how to ‘read’ a city.  From a semiotic perspective he talks of the city as being an ‘immense texturology that ‘lies before one’s eyes’. He contrasts the pedestrian vision of a city against the almost godlike ‘eye’ view from being on a skyscraper. He challenges us in the way that we relate to a city by positing that walking is a postmodern means of resisting the large city power structures. In walking a path of your own choosing, you are making your own reading of the city.

We can’t escape from some aspects of the skyline though. Some features dominate in a way that we cannot exclude them from our vision. The polarising effect of the Eiffel Tower on Parisians is well documented, perhaps most amusingly by Roland Barthes talking of Maupassant

‘Maupassant often lunched at the restaurant in the tower, though he didn’t care much for the food: It’s the only place in Paris, he used to say, where I don’t have to see it’.

The danger in this discussion is that, like people we know, we don’t always notice the smaller changes: ‘“landscapes are like the books which we constantly look at but rarely read”

What is a city?

‘What is the city? How did it come into existence? What processes does it

further; what functions does it perform; what purposes does it fulfil?’

Lewis Mumford.

Andrew Irving identifies a multiplicity of city types:

It is a foundational diversity that is responsible for bringing the many different types of city into being; the discursive city, the mythical city, the physical city, the poetic city, the underground city, the late-night city, the working city, the women’s city and the men’s city. To this list we might also add Low’s categories … the ethnic city, divided city, gendered city, contested city, de-industrialised city, modernist city, postmodern city, fortress city, sacred city and traditional city

If we think through these metaphors of cities, it’s clear that cities can unite around a shared narrative amongst its denizens.

Cities need a story or cultural narrative about themselves to both anchor and drive identity as well as to galvanise citizens. These stories allow individuals to submerge themselves into a bigger, more lofty endeavour. A city which describes itself as the ‘city of churches’ fosters different behaviour patterns in citizens than a city that projects itself as a ‘city of second chances’.

Although, when we talk of a shared narrative, perhaps Roland Bathes was correct in seeing this more as an active discourse

The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants; we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it. (Barthes,1967:168)

In discussing urban reinvention and the future of cities, Charles Landry suggests

Urban reinvention is not only about physical change and creating new economic sectors, it is in essence a cultural project as you have to bring the population with you and engage them in your renewal story…

Living in a Modern City

“All the world’s a stage” William Shakespeare.

From a perspective, while there is a shared discourse within a city, it has also been suggested that cities can be experienced in terms of either reading or being experienced. One way of looking at the experiential aspects is as a performance; where the environment is a stage set with props, and individuals use this setting to engage with the wider social audience. This was a frame for the city that Lewis Mumford described as ‘a theater of social action’.

Many urban theorist have been positive on? the role of ‘cultural economies’ or ‘experience economies’ in the future development of cities and their communities

‘All cities need to gain recognition and to get onto the global radar screen in order to increase their wealth creation prospects and to harness their potential. Creativity, the cultural distinctiveness of place, the arts and a vibrant creative economy are seen as resources and assets in this process… The best cultural policies combine a focus on enlightenment, empowerment, entertainment and creating economic impact.’

Richard Florida has published many works discussing the role of the Creative Class and its impact on city development and demographics. If we personify cities, there is also a need to think of the cultural ecology of a city. As Paul Makeham states

In a broader sense the physical spaces, architecture and design of cities comprise myriad performative qualities including tension, irony, intertextuality and self-reflexivity; as Edmund Bacon observes, one of the ‘prime purposes of architecture is to heighten the drama of living’. Indeed, cities as a whole can be understood as sites upon which an urban(e) citizenry, in the ‘practice of everyday life’, performs its collective memory, imagination and aspiration, performing its sense of self both to itself and beyond.

 

We can see this in emerging art forms focusing on urban connectivity and ecology, as has been conceptualised and explored by contemporary artists like the UK based artist Stanza

 

 

End of the Street

The biggest shift in cities, aside from their size and sophistication, has been from being? historical or religious to being ‘corporate’ skylines. There was a corresponding focus of the role of cities, from being a ‘fortress’ and place of refuge in war, to being a modern city that owes its existence to the market place it grew up around.

While the discussion above has discussed the collectivising nature of cities in forming a common identity, Gunter Gassner correctly warns that ‘in our contemporary society without a meta-narrative, without one ideology and one religion we can agree on, the idea of representational city-images is doomed from the very start’.

The 21st century will be a search for meaning, as many have noted. In a primordial sense meaning is transmitted through stories that tell us who we are and where we are going. Charles Landry

This has left David Harvey to ask

‘the astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred years means, for example, that we have been remade several times over without knowing why or how. Has this dramatic urbanization contributed to human well-being? Has it made us into better people, or left us dangling in a world of anomie and alienation, anger and frustration? Have we become mere monads tossed around in an urban sea?

If we think of how we refer to tall buildings as ‘skyscrapers’ that dominate the landscape, this evokes the imagery of the Tower of Babel. The related myth to that of the Tower of Babylon is the Story of Icarus flying too close to the sun. In both, the protagonists are burned by seeking knowledge that is restricted. Even Prometheus tells a similar tale of punishment for seeking divine knowledge.

As our cities continue to rise to the sky, how does this sit with the current pervasive themes of anti-modernity? Perhaps this is the challenge to town planners and architects. Perhaps a consideration as we move towards a Ecumenopolis – a planetary city – is what metaphor we want our cities to evoke. Cities defined by the skyscrapers evoke status competition and allegories of Babel.

Architect Bjarke Ingels is designing a revolutionary new zoo – Zootopia – for Denmark.  His vision is

“You’re seeing more and more that the distinction between the city and nature … is blurring more and more,” he says. “It becomes more relevant to make sure that the other life forms can actually cohabit successfully with us…I really do think that if you can make great zoos, where so many different species can live in close proximity and harmony, you really can make great cities,” he says.

Sounds like a great vision for some tired rats in a maze.

The Semiotics of the Bird Cage

The birdcage as a symbol and metaphor has been used across many human cultures. Moving from when we lived in hunter-gatherer societies until ultimately we took it with us into new urban environments. It’s a remarkably culturally pervasive symbol and it’s easy to draw many transcultural and historical comparisons.

The focus of this investigation is primarily how we use the birdcage motif in modern western culture. However, in order to understand the ‘birdcage’ we also need to understand the broader context of cages in society. Furthermore, looking at how we semiotically use the birdcage in communication; from a psychological perspective to explore the cage as a container-metaphor that forms how we think.

For anyone that read my last post on our love/hate relationships with cities, they might see a continuation of thinking here. I was interested in ‘rats in a maze’ across the last two posts I’ve made as an analogy that people use to explain modern living.   The end point of my last post the new Danish Zoo, Zootopia was a concluding observation –in some ways it is a reversal of the traditional zoo model. While this has centralised viewing similar to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon Prison, it doesn’t evoke the ‘always observed’ nature that that design intended or the lack of natural environment that many contemporary zoos have. This is a cage-less design for the animals (although we walk into a cage to see them).

Do we think we’re caged?

If you do any type of qualitative projective work with people that live in cities, you get similar analogies and metaphors peppering their language, in how they talk about living in cities or moving through them. This is not to suggest that everything they think about city life is negative, but that the compounding effects of struggling to maintain individuality and a sense of independence amongst so many people results in some consistencies in urban experiences. Being one of the masses, within the condensed nature of city-living results in direct comparisons to things we cage in order to express how they feel about their lives: ‘I feel like a rat in a maze’, ‘we’re stacked like battery hens in my apartment block’ or ‘cities are getting crowded, we’re like sardines in a can’.

“A shopping cart flipped upside down forms a cage that I use to protect myself from consumerism.”

Jarod Kintz

If brands reflect back our dreams, aspirations and fears, perhaps a quick look at two campaigns for leading brands might be informative here. They both revolve around the idea of freedom; firstly, there is the iconic Harley Davidson campaign ‘Live Cage Free’. Hop on your horse and escape.

Merrell’s ‘Let’s Get Outside’ – if only bills were wings…

I’ll explore some other advertisements further in, but it is surprisingly easy to find examples of the ‘cage’ as an advertising metaphor; reflecting that not being ‘caged’ is both resonant and motivating.

The use of the birdcage is not limited to advertising. E.g. it’s interesting to reflect on a recent installation art piece in Sydney, Australia, where birdcages were hung as part of a street-scape art project. While the goal was to ‘source innovative and exciting ideas to temporarily transform our City laneways with engaging artworks and inspiring ideas’, this juxtaposition appears to be evoking the exact opposite – caged life and an absence of freedom or naturalness in the city.

Reading forward

This discussion has two parts:

1. Looking more broadly at the cage from a psychological and historical perspective.
2. Semiotically looking at what the ‘birdcage’ as a type of cage means in Modern western culture – this is primarily by decoding its use in advertising.

Why do we feel caged in the modern world?

Warner (1994) has suggested that there are two main discourses of modernity: the discourse of Liberation and the discourse of Disciplinization. The ‘modernity project’ focuses around ideas of liberty, plurality and individual autonomy. He defines this discourse as:

The modern condition, it is often held, is characterized by freedom and democracy, and it is safeguarded by institutions that are based on the same principle of free aggregation. The most important of these institutions are the democratic polity, the market economy and the autonomous pursuit of truth, called science. While this has been the master discourse of modernity, an alternative, critical interpretation quickly emerged, counterposing the image of disciplinization by modern institutions to that of liberation.

The cage as a metaphoric symbol speaks to the disciplinisation of freedom. My observation of the cage metaphor is by no means original. In 1930, Max Weber, the sociologist, coined the term ‘iron cage’ to refer to the increased rationalisation inherent in the development of Western capitalism societies:

‘Puritanism has played a part in creating the ‘iron cage’ in which modern man has to exist – an increasingly bureaucratic order from which the ‘spontaneous enjoyment of life’ is ruthlessly expunged. ‘The Puritan’, Weber concludes, ‘wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so’

George Ritzer believes that modern society has taken this a step further, discussing Weber’s ‘iron cage’ he believes:

A society characterized by rationality is one which emphasizes efficiency, predictability, calculability, substitution of nonhuman for human technology, and control over uncertainty…. The model of rationalization, at least in contemporary America, is no longer the bureaucracy, but might be better thought of as the fast-food restaurant. As a result, our concern here is with what might be termed the “McDonaldization of Society.”

Whilst there are benefits to the ‘predictability’ and ‘specialisation’ of what is available to a society, this uniformity also rubs against discourses of freedom and self-expression.   Rationality leads to efficiency as a goal, and that in itself becomes an increasingly pressured goal that we have to live up to. In the process of rationalisation we feel dehumanised – which is what cages do psychologically.

When we think through cages, the ‘cage’ is a container-metaphor

So, if we accept that humanity might feel ‘caged’ in ways by the success of our modernity project, this raises psychological considerations. It’s interesting from a semiotic perspective to understand how and why we use cage symbolism, more specifically, the birdcage. Taking a step back, all cages can be defined as container-metaphors.   The role of metaphoric thought is defined by Lakoff and Turner:

A ‘“Metaphor is a tool so ordinary that we use it unconsciously and automatically… it is irreplaceable: metaphor allows us to understand ourselves and our world in ways that no other modes of thought can.” ( Lakoff and Turner 1989: xi).

Not all metaphors are equal, some stick in our minds with a more ‘natural fit’:

Not all metaphors, however, are created equal. Some metaphors are not so easily modified or manipulated to serve rhetorical purposes. Within the broad universe of metaphors, some seem more natural than others—almost as if they are not being “chosen” at all.

A container-metaphor evokes a sense of a ‘vessel’ – this is one of these pervasive and sticky metaphors. We use this type of metaphor on a regular basis across a wide range of thinking, e.g. When we talk of arguments, it is in terms of containment: “Your argument doesn’t have much content,” or “Your argument is empty,” or “That argument has holes in it,” or “That argument won’t hold water,” etc. If arguments can be either hot-or-cold, Zoltán Kövecses has been able to identify that ‘English, Japanese, Chinese, Hungarian, Wolof, Zulu, Polish, and others, possess the metaphor an angry person is a pressurized container to various degrees’. So, the way we make sense of the world, with some contextual cultural differences, is the same irrespective of the language used. This is not just how we perceive negative emotions; more positive emotions such as happiness or love are also evoked through the container-metaphors across both eastern and western cultures. Cross culturally there appears to be a common usage by different cultures of the body as a container for our emotions. We can talk about societies as being contained, eg. when we think of a happy society, they are in harmony and tranquil; when they are not they are at boiling point. This suggests that some of the potency of the cage as a container-metaphor is that it connotes a very emotional and visceral response in our thinking.

When we look more specifically at cages, as a specific variation of container-metaphor, there are many different types. Given that in this investigation I’m primarily interested in the birdcage, I’ll only briefly discuss some ways that cages are used in different contexts.

Cages have both restrictive and protective functions in how they are used. The more dominant meaning is restrictive: ‘A structure of bars or wires in which birds or other animals is confined’. Cages restrict freedom in the way that they limit movement. However, cages are different from other types of imprisonment in that they allow both the imprisoned and keeper to see each other.   The imprisoned is permanently aware of what is on the other side – the allure of freedom.

Paul Duro, in discussing the rhetoric of frames as a meaning construct in our thinking makes the point that ‘frames’ create their meaning, as much in what they contain but also in what they keep out. The protective cage is something that keeps the danger on the outside of the cage.   Perhaps the most sensational version of this is the shark cage; to something more accessible such as an electric light bulb cage, or even the human heart within a rib-cage. All of these illustrate that cages can be defined by what they keep out, as well as what they restrict within.

“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”

Ray Bradbury

When we talk of political boundaries, the cage is a frequent metaphor. Graeme Morton, et al explores the concept of Scotland being a gilded cage in its development; the cage has been linked to discussions on British immigration; it has been used by Rashid Khalidi as a metaphor for his story of the Palestinian people; or in Australia for the credibility of political promises. There are many more examples from political narratives, the consideration here is that we can see both the protective and restrictive aspects of the cage symbolism through these examples in how we talk about society and politics. How we talk about our societies collectively can be contained within the cage metaphor.

Main types of cages we find today

Cages still connote animals as a primary thought. There are many active causes that argue for the more humane treatment of domestic, commercial and zoo animals. Global attitudes towards caged animals are not the same; there has been an increasing trend to perceive cages as negatives in the Western world.

When we think of caged animals, it was the Roman Empire that set the standard for caged fighting-matches as entertainment. The colosseums were spectacles of cruelty that involved caged animals and men.

This tradition of cage-fighting survives today in a more relatively pantomimic form in professional wrestling:

‘Cages are one of the oldest form of enclosures used in professional wrestling. According to some historians, the first Cage Match of any kind took place on June 25, 1937 in Atlanta, Georgia. This match took place in a ring surrounded by chicken wire, in order to keep the athletes inside and any potential interference out of the action.

The WWE has four types of ‘cage match’ competitions – each with their own rules, customs and myths. Although, it’s clear that some of the Roman traditions continue with illegal underground fighting still occurring today, e.g. fight fans were paying $300 a night to watch men fight in illegal cage matches around Melbourne, Australia in 2013.

Incarceration

“Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.”

Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

The word jail or gaol has its etymological roots in the Latin cavea ‘cage’. However, we don’t use the word cage, as this is out-of-step with a more redemptive and progressive society that believes in the rehabilitation of its prison population. Calling a jail room ‘cells’ draws a comparison to the monk’s cell, a place for contemplation and improvement. Although, the word cell does derive from the Latin for room- ‘cella’, the role of churches in jails does suggests this association.

There is still a tradition in judicial systems of referring to a defendant’s cage. M. Cherif Bassiouni has suggested that the reason for these originated from the middle-ages, ‘The original rationale for doing it was the fear that criminal defendants would attack or intimidate witnesses or judges’. Or from another perspective, a way of saying guilty till proven innocent.

Perhaps the cruelest use of the ‘cage’ was in a practice known as Gibbeting, where the offender was hung in an iron cage to die and be testament, through example, to the rule of law. This was famously part of the comedic introduction to Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.

One of the most famous political use of this punishment was in Münster, Germany, where the gibbets still hang in the centre of the city today.

As part of the reformation responses across Europe, the gibbets were the mortal punishment of the Anabaptists Leaders:

The rule of the Anabaptists arose as a result of the radicalization of the Reformation movement in Münster. In March 1533, Münster had become a Protestant city, and now found itself under attack by the Catholic Bishop, who was also its established temporal ruler. In the course of the conflict, the radical Anabaptists gained ever more support; in February 1534, they won the majority on the city council and declared Münster to be the “New Jerusalem”.

 

The siege around the city became ever tighter, and no outside support materialized, so that finally, through treachery and after several failed attempts, the Bishop was able to retake the city on 24 June 1535.

The three iron “cages” suspended from the tower of St. Lamberti held the mortal remains of the leaders of the Anabaptist movement who were executed on the Prinzipalmarkt on 22 January 1536 after undergoing prolonged torture.

The authoring-group Luther Blisset/Wu Ming tells a gripping narrative of this event in their collaborative historical novel Q.

The final English use of this gibbeting was in 1832:

1832 — August 3, William Jobling, for the murder of Nicholas Fairless. The body was gibbeted on Jarrow Slake on August 6, and at night on the 31^st it was stolen and secretly disposed of by some persons unknown.

Today incarceration of living people is big business almost industrialised in some nations. The US has more than 2.2 million people behind bars and this is increasing. At the end of 2012, ‘There are 4,575 prisons in operation in the U.S., more than four times the number of second-place Russia at 1,029’.

Earlier this year a New York artist turned his rooftop studio apartment into a jail cell, offering ‘inmates’ an incarceration experience for $1 a night.   As an accommodation offer, it is somewhere between penal-tourism and a unique Airbnb experience.

The artist accounts that:

‘Most of August is already booked and September seems to be filling up fast. The artist says his latest piece, which is meant to double as a psychological experience, represents how he felt when he arrived to the ‘states as an immigrant because in his mind, everyone is living in a cage’.

 

A short history of the Birdcage

‘God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved birds and invented cages’

Jacques Deval

It appears that we have always had a fascination with birdcages or perhaps, birds-in-cages. One of the earliest bird ‘cages’ was built the Paquime Indians, Casas Grandes River, of the Pre-Columbian Puebloan community that around 900-1340AD who were breeding scarlet Macaws, with a dedicated house to this function. The early Greeks, Romans, Byzantium all have examples of birds-in-cages in literature and on pottery.

‘We have started to confine in prison the animals to which nature had allotted the sky’

Pliny

By the time of the Roman Republic there was an increasing trend towards status displays of collection amongst the aristocracy. The role of caged-birds and status is something that continues in birdcage symbolism to today. Frederick Jones believes that caged birds in houses was something that was uniquely Roman:

from the late Republic on, there is Roman evidence for the caged-bird as a feature of domestic interior ornament in both prose and verse, in a diversity of genres, and there is also a limited amount of evidence from Roman art. This phenomenon is something new and distinctively Roman, as was the toga, the genre of verse satire

Moving into the 13^th Century, we can find bird cages in fanciful scenes, in MS Bodley 764

Richard Randall believes that ‘The interest in strange and colourful birds and animals in medieval western Europe was an expression of the fascination with the unusual, with monsters, with the weird and exotic’. At this time, they increasingly are mentioned as part of the costs and accounts of castle inventories through Europe.

Birdcages continued to be a status symbol through the 17^th and 18^th Centuries in both the West and East.

One way of thinking about their presence is that they did speak to the worldliness of their owners. Although as accepted status-symbols, their presence might have been motivation enough, like many cultural trends. Most paintings of the time show them as objects of prominence and note within compositions. In a world without radio, it might have been a way of creating a different ambience in a house.   It’s also likely that there were more practical reasons to have birds in cages, outside of aesthetic considerations. They were also a portable larder ‘Bird cages were hawked by peddlers along the streets, as were the birds themselves, and cooks kept birds fattening in them outside their larders’.

Birdcages are a global art form; it is easy to identify many different traditions of early birdcages:

There are many sites dedicated to the more modern forms of bird cages on the internet; so many that it’s not necessary to labour this discussion with examples of their pervasiveness across cultures here. Although, we can make two miscellaneous observations on their role:

1. Firstly, that many western cultures have largely stopped keeping birds in cages for food on a personal level; while this is still a tradition in the East. This might impact on how Western cultures perceive the birdcage as a status item more than a practical one.

2. Second, that their use as a ‘canary in a cage’ functioning as a mine alert for toxic gasses stopped in 1986.

This is not to suggest that we no longer cage birds. The United Nations estimates that there are more than 21 Billion chickens on the planet today, with the vast majority of those being in cages.

The allure of exotic birds is part of a billion dollar illegal business today.

“The illegal wildlife trade is now the fourth most lucrative transnational crime after drugs, arms and human trafficking. It is estimated to be worth between 10 and 20 billion dollars each year.” Prince William, 12 February 2014

Although a lot of this trade is for harvested body parts of animals for largely Asian markets of ‘natural remedies’. Many countries such as Australia and South American nations struggle to control this illegal trade in birds.

What does a Bird Cage symbolise?

Across many belief-systems and religions, the bird is symbolic of the soul. So a caged bird speaks to an unhealthy inner life or soul. This was a thought that was expressed by Carl Jung, in evoking a sense of the caged spirit:

‘”What use now is his lofty perch and his wide horizon, when his own dear soul is languishing in prison?”’

This sense of lost freedom is close to the dream analysis of birdcages, where the bird is symbolic of our inner freedom; when we give freedom to the bird in our dreams we feel lighter. When we think of birds, many of our idioms speak to their freedom: free as a bird, bird’s eye view, early bird gets the worm, et al or etc?. Although, Frederick Jones believes that even a caged bird is connotative of ‘freedom’:

‘The bird, even when caged, remains a symbol of freedom and a stimulus for thinking about the relationship between freedom and human society’.

Why Birds?

Do birds convey a special symbolism here? While I’ve been focusing on a Bird Cage, there are also established traditions of Butterfly cages or farms or Fish Cages. However, there does appear to be a natural connection with birds that lends themselves to cages in the cultural record.

The reason that birds resonate so strongly has been explored by Leonard Lutwack:

“…of all wild animals, the bird has always been closest to humankind because so much of its life can be readily observed and appreciated. Flight and song make birds exceptionally noticeable in every sort of environment…the very attributes that make them familiar to us, flight and song; still retain an air of mystery that sets birds apart from other animals. [This] familiarity and transcendence [has] given birds a wider range of meaning and symbol in literature than any other animal.”

Perhaps it is this identification with them that has led to more architectural forms of cages – suggesting they are like people. Although, this also reflects a projection of our own urban living – that our houses are cages, as discussed above.

A central consideration, is that this close human connection does appear to be driven more by the sounds they make than the appearance of birds alone. In Southeast Asia, we can see cultural festivals that celebrate this nature of song.

It’s not just song, as a social-animal, we have a particular fascination with the only animal that can ‘talk’ like us.

Which has been a common theme of humour in popular culture

At the other end of ‘high’ culture, Mozart had a special relationship with an inspirational pet starling. On 27^th May, 1784 he purchased his starling and three years later buried it with much pomp and ceremony.

Mozart’s starling was a European Starling. This was a bird that Shakespeare revered for their voice and song; as a result 200 were introduced in the 1890’s to support theatre productions in NYC. Escaping their cages, their population in the USA exceeds 200 million today.

The human qualities of the bird can also be seen in how we describe collectives of different species of birds. Those that are more renown with human like voices or thinking have more human like and emotional descriptions: a parliament of owls, a party of jays, a pitying of turtledoves, a brood of hens, a company of parrots, a colony of penguins, a charm of finches, an exaltation of larks, a congregation of plovers etc.

The Semiotics of the Bird Cage Today

To summarise this discussion, cages resonate with us because they speak to the main discourses of modern life: freedom and discipline. We use container-metaphors across a wide range of thinking, many of these emotional. Cages evoke a sense of either restricting our freedom or of protection. Birdcages have many possible connotations but we can make some observations:

1. There is a heritage of birdcages being associated with social status displays – particularly around the idea of collecting amongst the social elite.
2. Birdcages are symbolic of a loss of freedom for the bird but also a frame of appreciation of their natural wonder.
3. They contain birds that are symbolic in their own right and humanity has a long tradition of projecting meaning onto our feathered friends.

When we start to look at the use of the birdcage in modern western culture there are some very distinct themes. Most of these revolve around the adoration of the pretty-bird as an object of status.

There is also a strong association of the female gender with birds. So, from a feminist perspective, birdcages are symbols of oppression.

“Animals often become explicit or implicit vehicles for commentary on the issues, because of the ease in which they are metaphorically associated with certain human groups, especially those that seemed to share their subordinate, dependent status”

Louise E Robbins

Women in Bird Cages

There are many brands that replace the ‘pretty bird’ with a model in the cage as an object of desire. They employ the cage as a frame to their projected status and desirability; and at the same time symbolically evoke the glamour and attractiveness of the bird.

Clearly, the bird as a metaphor for femininity is very present here. The slang for women in many western cultures is ‘chick’s’ or ‘birds’. While this can be used positively by women as in the ‘Dixie Chicks’, it can also be derogatory by men as dismissive, ‘chick flicks’ or ‘chick lit’. Overly mothering women are referred to as ‘mother hens’. It is idiomatic to use animals as analogies, ‘women eat like sparrows, men eat like pigs’. In French, the slang for prostitute is grue which means the bird Crane –both having one leg up waiting.

In fact, the term we use for alcoholic drinks where young men and women court is called a cocktail. There are many possible origins of this word, with origins believed to be in Britain and the USA, from being the cocked tail of a horse, to the ‘cock tailings’ of the stop cock of a cask. Another explanation is that the Cocktail originating from a Cockerel chasing tail.  That we think of women as birds can be seen in fashion – especially high-end fashion – since birdcages are status symbols for the wealthy from Roman times. If we look at the history of fashion, we can see that women’s fashion has looked more ornithomorphic amongst more elite social groups on both sides of the Atlantic. This might have contributed to the origins of this social

There is, of course, a subtext here that early fashion involved literally caging women. These ‘crinoline’ dresses were cages that appear in the 1840’s, with up to 8 petticoats over them. They apparently illustrated people of a particular social mobility.

Today much of the ornithomorphic fashion trends centre on ‘fascinator’ head pieces as highly stylised headdress evoking the plumage of birds. This can be observed ethnographically at the Lexus Marquee – The Birdcage – at Australia’s Melbourne Cup.

Of course, the irony here is that in nature, it is the male that gets all dressed up and works hard for the female’s attention; and it is the female that is either ‘drab’ or natural depending on your perspective.

Birds as Prey

There are numerous ‘comedic’ routines about ‘thighs’ and ‘breasts’, through these poultry associations, that frame women as objects for male consumption.

Or more negatively through images that evoke the cage dancers – women as commodity.

This theme of the enslavement of women in cages has a long history, the tawdry movies from the 60’s and 70’s were examples of this.

We also find this thinking in mainstream advertising.  The men’s fashion brand ‘University Row Manhattan’ had a range of advertisements in the 60’s that suggested that successful men had captured women – these are so stereotypical chauvinistic and sexist they almost appear appears to be satire today.

The origins of this type of thinking might have come from the exotic promise of pleasure palaces for the princes in the mysterious east. Where the Harems were called the ‘Golden Cage’ filled with attractive ‘birds’. The origins of the idea of ‘the golden cage’ filled with beautiful and exotic women at the beck and call of men come from confused understandings of the Ottoman Harems.  It’s also possible to consider the Geisha traditions within this sphere – although they are not necessarily sexually subjugated as the women of Ottoman harems.  That different cultures have all developed similar conceptions of women/birds in cages speaks to a shared underlying container-metaphor at work.

Bird Cages are also used to evoke the singer the chanteuse, which historically performed for men.

Alternatively, the bird cage has been used to suggest a time of liberation and growth (although still in relation to men)

However, the cage does still evoke a sense of confinement with no way out, as is illustrated in this powerful anti-prostitution campaign that alludes to the gibbet cage.

Fashion and the Birdcage

It’s interesting that the fashion world turns an indifferent eye to much of the negative birdcage imagery.  Clearly, there is still an allure and magic to evoking the ‘pretty bird’. The rare, exotic and beautiful creature that is on display – the eternal quest to be desirable. This must be resonating with the consumers of these fashion trends as well.  In fact, in fashion it’s easy to find ‘cage’ imagery across many platforms.

Although there is differentiation and awareness of symbolism here. The message of both Louis Vuitton and Dolce & Gabbana is that their products are the beautiful objects of desire  to collect and not the woman. This speaks more broadly to the theme discussed above that birdcages are frames for objects of status.

Chanel as Case Study

Of all the luxury brands, Chanel has made the most frequent use of the birdcage metaphor and symbolism (they have many other modes of advertisement). One of their most famous campaigns was with the young Vanessa Paradis, perhaps not ironically depicted as a paradise bird; where the actress and singer is literally ‘l’esprit de Chanel’. The cumulative effect of the ad is to evoke connotations of glamour, French culture and style that many competing luxury brands try to associate with their products. Here, the ‘bird’ as a siren of attention, where with a dab you can be transformed to seduce others with your style and sexual appeal.

http://youtu.be/sGtmjZ9Yuj0

This symbolism has been used in how they have evolved their brand iconography.  They have produced jewellery that speaks to both the positive and negative facets of birdcage symbolism: liberation and being caged. Although, a more charitably interpretation is that instead of being caged, is that they are the focused object of desire.

Some of the more recent ads appear to be challenging the more negative side of the objectification of women in cages. Here the woman cannot see that she is already an object of beauty and is free of the cage. Although, the frame she is in still suggests luxury and a golden cage.

Another campaign that appears more negative and evokes the idea that this article started with, is that our apartments are the cages we seek to escape from, especially from the heritage of their use of the birdcage. Again the ‘frame’ of the advertisement is that the model is one of luxury and wealth.

Closing the Cage: Conclusion

If we look at the concept of the Birdcage in terms of what meaning it creates, we can use a semiotic-square to map the meaning axes of being caged. This provides us with four articulations of the cage.

We can look at some of the advertising that is used here to populate this semiotic square

What we find is that all four articulations of meaning are present in modern discourse. There are some considerations here. Since we think in container-metaphors, we think of our modern lives in terms of being through the two modern discourses: freedom and discipline. The tension point being how ‘trapped’ we feel in the modern cities we engage with.

When the birdcage is treated as a symbol that evokes the verb of being caged (or negation of) we find that it speaks to modern life. The positive is not to show the cage but being outside of the cage.

When the birdcage is an independent symbol, it has a main connotation of being a frame for something beautiful, rare, glamourous, stylish, popular, colourful and entertaining.   However, these are characteristics that are very feminine in nature. We therefore tend to see two main expressions of this:

1. The birdcage as a frame for focusing attention on the woman as desirable and glamorous.

2. The birdcage as a frame that objectifies woman and limits their equality.

The question is, with the fashion industry so consistently using this symbol, how is it framing how we perceive women in society?

Perhaps the fashion industry are successfully performing a version of the Thaumatrope trick developed by John Ayrton in 1825; it’s an illusion that the bird is in the cage and I’m looking at the wrong side of the issue.

“I am no bird; no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will”

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Emerging Metaphors for the Human Body

Metaphors are the cognitive tools through which we understand ourselves and the world (Lakoff and Turner 1989: xi). One of the primary metaphoric resources is the human body. Probably, since we first became self-aware, we have been fascinated with our bodies: psychologically and culturally.

“Man is the measure of all things”

Protagoras

It might be a generalisation but when we use the human body as a metaphor for an individual, these tend to be synecdochal in function. This term is where one thing is used to refer to a related thing, e.g. we talk about the head of a class. On the other hand, when we talk about a collective of people, we tend to refer to them as a body or persona. Hobbes Leviathan is a famous example of this collective being envisioned as a whole persona. I’ve discussed this collective imagery as metaphors for social groups, cities and nations more extensively in an earlier post

Thinking through our Bodies

We can easily take a quick tour around our body to see how it influences how we conceptualise our reality though figures of speech:

• Head of the class
• Up to your eyes in trouble
• A nose for mystery
• Don’t give me lip
• Keep a stiff upper lip
• Chin up
• Stick your neck out
• Shoulder the burden
• Keep at arm’s length
• Up to your elbows
• On the other hand
• Get something off your chest
• My heart feels like its bursting
• I’m breathless
• Feel it in my spleen
• Don’t have the stomach for it
• She doesn’t have the guts
• He’s being a dick
• Shake a leg
• Best foot forward
• Dip a toe in
• Etc

This is a rich field of human enquiry and there are many studies that look at how we understand the world through our bodies. This makes sense given how psychologically aware of a sense of self and our bodies. It’s how we make sense of the world from childhood.   Sigmund Freud observed

“The ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body.”

In a brilliant summation Daniel Benveniste states:

Symptoms and the sense of reality are built out of the reified metaphors of the body.

From an open ear to an open mind; from a penetrating penis to a penetrating argument; from a receptive vagina to a receptive community; from a unified body and a unified

culture to the construction of monotheism; from excretion to repudiation; from urination to getting pissed off; from the naval to the center of the world; from dismemberment to postmodernity, over and over again the metaphors of the body are projected onto and into the world

So much of our use of this metaphor is reflexive and unconscious that it is invisible in many ways that we look at the world.

This can be reversed with this anthropocentric vision also affecting the way that we interpret what we see in the world. This is called pareidolia – were we see faces in patterns. This is a thematic form of apophenia, were we see patterns in random data.

Cultural frames for metaphors

In my last post I looked at the specific example of the heart as a container-metaphor. What we find is that from a transcultural perspective, the idea of emotions, especially anger as a liquid under pressure within a vessel, is common in both western and eastern cultures. However, there are differences that are found in different cultural contexts. As Mark Johnston, states:

‘most human concepts are defined and understood only within conceptual frameworks that depend on the nature of human experience in given cultures’.

This has been elaborated on by Toril Swan

‘Cultural models, then, and cultural conceptualizations enable us to share understanding within a culture, founded in common frameworks and categories.

 

In recent years a great deal of evidence has been amassed to suggest that the human body is indeed a very important source for language or linguistic expressions. Firstly, as has been shown by numerous authors, terms for body parts frequently become grammatical words (e.g. back as preposition in English). Secondly, the body is of course an important source of metaphors, a basis for dealing with cognitive concepts, among these spatial concepts, concepts having to do with personality traits, and so forth.

Culture is not static and neither is time, so differences in metaphors take form and are utilised across time and space.

Changing Semiotic Frames of Cultural Reference

We use cultural artefacts and knowledge of the day-to-day to explain our bodies – we adopt what is familiar to explain our worlds. While some metaphors appear to be almost universal and unchanging, such as ‘emotions in a vessel’, my ‘heart is bursting’ or ‘I’m so angry I’m boiling’. Others appear to change reference to keep up with the times.

There are many ways to explore how advances in technology are reflected in how we use the human body as metaphors. The dominant metaphor to explore is the body-as-a-machine metaphor.

If we look at it historically, the most famous introduction of this metaphor was by Descartes (1648) who compared the human body to a machine. Descartes was influenced in this thinking about Greek philosophers such as Aristotle.   Louis de La Forge, a commentator of Descartes work, explains the comparisons of natural objects to machines:

[A] body composed of several organic parts, which being united, work together to produce several movements, of which they would not be capable if they were separated. I call organic parts all sorts of simple or complex bodies, which being united together are able to help through their structure, shape, movement, rest and location, in the production of the motions and functions of the machine of which they are parts

Descartes metaphor has been highly influential, e.g. Julien de Offray (1709-1751) published ‘Homme machine’

What is interesting is that this metaphor remained influential in guiding the thinking about physiology through the 18^th and 19^th Centuries. Although, the body-as-machine metaphor has been challenged as misleading about how our bodies function. To challenge Descartes is seems uncertain as to whether the metaphor was lost from his work, we seem to talk less  that the body is like a machine and more that that the body is a machine.

Body as machine in Popular Culture

It’s a very common metaphor that we find literally reflected in our fascination with automaton, robots and androids. If we perceive our own bodies as machines, then machines must be close to humanity?

Data on Star Trek, the Next Generation, spends his entire life seeking to become more human like in an endless Pinocchio-esque quest for humanity. The narrative counterpoint to this is the presence of the Borg, where humanity is transformed to being more machine-like. As we see Data developing meaningful relationships and emotions, the Borg represent the shadow of the machine – individuals that are taken into the collective who lose their individuality. Seven-of-Nine, in the Voyager series, struggles to regain a sense of their humanity from the collective machine.

Hollywood presents us with never-ending variations of ‘tin men’ looking for their hearts

We can gauge the relevance of this metaphor in the modern world through the engagement with the basic plot of Marvel’s ‘Iron Man’ franchise. Here, Tony Stark struggles with the effects of becoming more machine-like in combination with his own flawed humanity. The machine elements of his body are literally poisoning his heart – his humanity. His genius makes him more machine-like in his awkward social relationships; his journey through the trilogy is to discover a more grounded humanity.

It’s very easy to see the mechanised perception of our bodies in sporting ads and magazines. Here the usual messaging is to break the machine down and rebuild it with individual exercises:

As can be seen more literally in this advertisement

The desire to be an Iron man or machine is common in body building culture

The body-as-machine metaphor in Advertising

Of course, advertising finds some challenging ways of illustrating this

In terms of training regimes

If we are machines, this also re-frames how we think of food and drinks as fuel

This is an ad for Lion Club energy drink that takes it full circle.

Mechanical machine to Computers

The big consumer technology trends are the wearable-technology that allows for the ‘quantification of self’.   These allow us to refine exercise and activity in visual displays that remind one more? of car dashboards.

Scientists are already creating ‘Human Exoskeleton, The ‘Body Extender,’ Is ‘Most Complex Wearable Robot Ever Built’. This appears to be a technology trend that will only increase over the coming years.

Computer metaphors are changing and can be seen how we reference our brains over time.

We used to think of a mechanical brain as ‘the cogs are moving’, ‘you can hear his thoughts ticking over’, which are now replaced by the idea that we need to ‘reboot’ in the mornings, and that we get mind-viruses like computers through memes, etc.

While these mechanistic understandings of our bodies are dominant, there are natural metaphors as well.

While I’ve focused on a dominant metaphor for the human body as a machine, this is not the only way we perceive our bodies and their roles. We often think of our bodies in terms of botanical figures of speech:

• We talk of our progeny coming from our seed
• We sow our wild oats in youth
• Children sprout up from nowhere
• Our relationships are deep rooted
• We nurture budding relationships
• Love blooms
• Beauty is something that is in full flower
• Conditions are ripe, and opportunities are there to be harvested
• We give people withering stares
• There are different branches of the family tree

However, these natural botanical metaphors appear to have taken a back step in a faster paced and busier modern lifestyle. A hypothesis is that the more we live in our increasingly urban environments that are denatured by exclusion; these metaphors for our bodies are decreasing in immediate relevance. As technology is increasingly becoming a dominant cultural environmental factor, our metaphors appear to have been upgraded.

Are there New Emerging Metaphors for the Human Body?

The discussion so far has focused on the metaphors that we currently use. What is interesting is that a new and emerging metaphor for the human body is both natural and speaks to a collective sense of body.

Over the last couple of years there is an increasing range of literature and studies that focuses on the human gut as a colony of many different organisms. It is believed that up to 70% of the entire immune system is located in the gut. Martin Blaser has recently published a book that links many of the modern health ailments to the ‘missing microbes’ that our diet and antibiotics cause.

Welcome to the wilds of the human microbiome, where for hundreds of thousands of years bacterial and human cells have existed in a peaceful symbiosis that is responsible for the equilibrium and health of our bodies. Now this invisible Eden is under assault from our overreliance on medical advances including antibiotics and Cesarian sections, threatening the extinction of our irreplaceable microbes and leading to severe health consequences …contributing to the rise of what Blaser calls our modern plagues: obesity, asthma, allergies, diabetes, and certain forms of cancer.

This rise in prominence is talking about our ‘gut flora’ through probiotics and prebiotics that create a beneficial environment for good bacteria. The metaphors we use have to change to help us understand that we are not one organism. The gut is swarming with about 100 trillion bacteria, or flora, which outnumber human cells in our body 10 to 1. This is more than you might think:

‘The 1.5 kg of bacteria that live inside our bodies, mainly in the gut, are crucially important to our health. Apart from playing a role in digestion, they are also involved in the development of the immune system and the neuronal system and in the onset of certain diseases’.

This is not some benign relationship. A new study carried out has indicated that the bacteria in your gut could govern your dietary choices and eating behaviour. Dr Carlo Maley in the study stated that ‘Bacteria in the gut are manipulative’. This means that types of bacteria that live in your gut have a preference for certain types of foods. They send signals to your brain directly. The implications of this are that if you have the wrong microbes, they might be signalling for unhealthy foods.

As this knowledge of the ‘gut’ disseminates, there will be increased advertising and messages about ‘inflammation of the gut’, ‘constipation’ and ‘bloating’ which are key signs of gastrointestinal unbalance. Semiotically there will also be experimentation in how to talk about this – people react in different ways in talking about living creatures in food. Clotaire Rapaille in looking at the differences between American and French attitudes towards cheese, points out that the French see cheese as a living organism with bacteria you can see and smell and is allowed to breath in cloche; whereas American cheese is dead and kept in refrigerated like corpses in a morgue. Although this might be changing, there is an abundance of articles on the net promoting live-cultured and fermented foods as beneficial for your gut. New trends in brewed teas such as Kombucha or drinks like Kefir are growing as a result.

In fact, recent studies have shown that the more microbes you are exposed to, internally and externally, the healthier you are:

“… if you’ve got a rich rainforest full of bacteria living inside and on you, [and] don’t have any spare real estate, it [the pathogen] can’t settle on you and it can’t propagate and you won’t get sick.”

Human Body as Colony?

Words like colonies sound like infections but microbiomes sound greener and more consumer- friendly.

There are some comparisons that can be found: fish tanks, soil in gardens and our intestines are all vessels that hold communities of bacteria that are necessary for the health of their environments. Are our bodies like ecosystems?

If we look to nature, there are some very interesting ‘communities’ that appear to be single organisms.

One of the more famous examples is the Portuguese Man-of-War or Physalia physalis

The Portuguese Man-of-War is not a jellyfish – it’s not a single organism but a colony of many different organisms. This type of animal is called a Siphonophore:

Siphonophores belong to the Cnidaria, a group of animals that includes the corals, hydroids, and true jellyfish. There are about 175 described species. Some siphonophores are the longest animals in the world, and specimens as long as 40 meters have been found. The majority of siphonophores are long and thin, consisting mostly of a clear gelatinous material. Some deep water species have dark orange or red digestive systems that can be seen inside their transparent tissues. Siphonophores are exceedingly fragile and break into many pieces under even the slightest forces. Many siphonophores are bioluminescent, glowing green or blue when disturbed. All siphonophores are predators, and use their many tentacles to capture crustaceans and small fish.

They come in many different and alien designs

A final Digestif

What will prove interesting is to what extent this growing knowledge has on how we refer to our bodies. I started this discussion with the observation that we tend to use the whole body to speak to a collective of people. Single bodies are usually used as personifications for a group of people – to project a shared persona or identity.

Considering our modern technological trajectory and the pervasiveness of the ‘mechanical man’ metaphor in culture, how will this new narrative of our bodies as host for a symbiotic culture change, with these health issues and benefits become better known? Can a somewhat narcissistic ape refer to themselves as a collective identity?

The semiotic shift from running your body as a machine that needs tuning and fueling is dramatically juxtaposed to a metaphor of a garden that needs nurturing and maintaining.  It will be interesting to see  over the next few years if this metaphor flourishes or withers in barren cultural relevance.

A Semiotic Model of Life and Death

The mysteries of life and death are the bookends of our lives; as a result we find their influence through every society and culture.

‘The symbols of death say what life is and those of life define what death must be’ (Warner, 1959: 320).

In my last post, I looked at metaphors for how we conceive our bodies and think through our bodies symbolically. This raised the question of how do we think of our bodies after we die, not just when we are alive.    The following analysis revealed some interesting meaning-structures that frame the way we think about our lives through the context of life and death. There are some deep structural-oppositions that are present across many cultures that can be semiotically modeled, providing a way of looking at our journey from birth to death.

“A human burial contains more anthropological information per cubic meter of deposit than any other type of archaeological feature” (Peebles 1977:124).

Whilst I don’t want to get too side-tracked into discussing burial traditions, it’s useful to very briefly and very broadly contextualise this discussion. The archaeological record points to the importance of mortuary rites and inhumations over the last 100,000 years.   The ritual importance from the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic of artefacts and tools in graves suggests a cross-cultural belief in a life after death. We might be able to revise this even later; recently a 350,000 year old pink stone-axe was found in Northern Spain. It was found in a funeral setting and the archaeologists have hypothesied it could have been ‘the first funeral rite of human beings’.

The roles that burials play in society are complex. Influential here, Robert Hertz from an anthropological perspective has suggested that there is a first and second funeral after death. Simply, the first funeral’s role is to get rid of the polluting, decomposition and sorrowful aspects of the death. The second funeral is focused on the initiation of the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ into the realm of the ancestors. As a general structure, many funeral and mortuary practices appear to follow this understanding today.

Death rituals also guide and are guided by social and kin organisation:

Every burial that archaeologists excavate resulted from a complex sequence of practices that were initiated, not with the death of the person or persons who were interred, but long before, as their social identities were shaped and their individual experiences linked them to others through webs of kin and non-kin relationships. Burials are thus complex intersections of processes of formation of social identities.

It is likely that social identities that were maintained in life, suggest the same status in the afterlife: ‘People who are treated differently in life will be treated differently in death’ (Peebles 1977). This suggests that there is a correspondence between the complexity of societies and the form that burials take. As a result, it’s also believed that the types of grave artifacts are then representative of the authority and status of the living. Although, funerals and graves are mainly for the living, Lloyd Warner, has defined their role as

‘The cemetery is an enduring physical emblem, a substantial and visible symbol of the agreement among individuals that they will not let each other die’.

The anthropology of death and burials is fascinating and the scope of its research is impressive. The brief outline above serves to illustrate that while in modern society funerals and burials can sometimes feel less central to our ‘secular’ beliefs, they have been an integral part of how society and cultures have evolved. From a symbolic perspective, the key themes here are the idea of the first and second funeral: the end of the mortal body and the belief in an afterlife. This provides a structural symbolic-opposition that enables a more semiotic conception to be revealed.

Complex Mother

While I have titled this post Cradle to Coffin, there is a more elementary step that I really could have started with, which was was womb to grave.

And said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither

Job 1:21

Anyone who has studied archaeology or anthropology would be well versed in the cross-cultural symbolic connection of the womb and the grave. Mircea Eliade has written of the human mother as a symbolic surrogate for the telluric Great Earth Mother.

The mythical birth of Sun Wukong or ‘the Monkey King’ in Chinese and Indian traditions evokes this symbolism. Wu Cheng’en’s story tells us of a magic stone on top of a mountain, influenced by the heaven, earth and sun: ‘It developed a magic womb, which burst open one day to produce a stone egg about the size of a ball.” The story of his birth is continued: ‘Like animals, the earth produces an egg, which is fertilized by the semen of the blowing wind.  In giving the stone life, the wind makes Wukong immortal because he always has wind, or breath, within him’.

While Peebles warns of the ‘naive interpretations’ …of innumerable ‘explanations’ of burial customs by authors trying to practise palaeopsychology … [in reference to]…’foetal’ positions in graves [and other artefacts]. The cross-cultural consistency of foetal positions in burials does point to some shared and clear symbolism, e.g. as can be seen in this Aztec burial, of the Tepanec, from about 700 years ago.

The symbolism here in terms of the afterlife does suggest a more natural and familiar analogy. Simplistically, many belief-systems lead us to believe that when we die we are reborn again, in another form, in another place. The egg-and-chrysalis are analogous to womb-and-tomb.

Life and Death as a Container Metaphor

As I discussed above, the starting point for this discussion was a previous post on container-metaphors. A more detailed discussion on the role of metaphors for psychology and semiotics is covered across these posts. In brief, ‘metaphor allows us to understand ourselves and our world in ways that no other modes of thought can.” ( Lakoff and Turner 1989: xi). Container-metaphors are a very sticky type of metaphor. We use them cross-culturally to refer to our bodies as vessels for emotions. When we talk of emotions, a person has spirit. More broadly we believe they are also symbolic of vessels for different conceptions of ‘self’ or the ‘soul’.

We start our lives in a container and we end our lives in a container. We all start in a womb and end it today in a coffin or cremation urn. The same symbolism that we find 100,000 years ago is continued today in many different cultural expressions. The one constant through this entire span of time are our mothers’ wombs. If this is taken as the starting point for the creation of a semiotic model, we can provide a structural model that accounts for all types of burial in anthropology, mythology and even science fiction.

Moving Forward

There are two parts to explore moving forward.

1. The first is the introduction of the semiotic modelling with examples of the key meaning oppositions.
2. The second is to think of cultural examples, from antiquity to today that can illustrate and verify this semiotic analysis.

Semiotic Square of Life and Death: Container Metaphors

The model I am going to use is a semiotic square that was developed by Algirdas Julius Greimas, which is a simple way to map out complex underlying structural meanings.

These axes can be defined – recalling the labels used here are from a container-metaphoric perspective:

1. Womb – clearly the womb is the starting point of life. It is that which ‘creates life’.
2. Cauldron – If we think of witch stories, they ‘eat life’. Hansel and Gretel are fattened up to be boiled in either the Cauldron or Oven, is a symbolic corruption and contriety of the life giving womb.
3. Coffins – sarcophagus in translation means ‘flesh eater’. This is the contradiction of the womb which grows new life and flesh. The difference from the Cauldron is that it doesn’t eat living flesh.
4. Vessels – there are many pots and jars that are used in burials that preserve body parts for the afterlife. The contradiction: If the cauldron eats life, the funeral vessels preserve bodies. This is the sub-contriety of the coffin.

This model also reveals some deeper structural themes:

• Womb – is about wet growth – the umbilical fluids supporting life
• Cauldron – is wet decay – water is the element of decay
• Coffin – is about dry decay – we desiccate in coffins
• Vessels – about dry growth – moisture is removed from organs in mummification.

The correct challenge to any such modelling is, does this model hold water? To explore this, I’m going to explore each of the four container-metaphors here in turn. I’m also going to be eclectic in my examples, mainly because I’m interested in both ancient and modern expressions of culture and where they align.

Semiotic axis: Womb

This should be self-explanatory. However, if we broaden the discussion to womb-symbolism, in terms of ‘creates life’ it easy to find examples in the ‘cradle’

There are many mythical stories from Moses to Hercules, where the hero is protected by a man made ‘womb’ in the form of a cradle. To more modern versions are the incredible humidicribs which are technological wombs; to the fantastic in the origins of Superman, in a custom space-cradle Kal-el was sent to earth.

The technological womb is not always positive. In the Matrix trilogy, the artificial wombs were a form of enslavement.

Semiotic Axis: Cauldron or Oven

The symbolism of the cauldron, as the favourite vessel for ‘witches’ to eat life, is a consistent theme across folklore and mythology. The Latin origins of the word literally mean ‘hot bath’ which fits with the wet/decay meaning axis.

The associations here of the dark-womb aren’t always supernatural, there are also many examples of being ‘boiled to death’ as a punishment across different cultures. It was a punishment that was legal at the time of Henry VIII, being passed as an act in 1531.   There are different cultural examples such in the Sikh example of ‘On the 9th November, 1675 A.D., the Qazis ordered that Bhai Dayal Dass be seated in a cauldron of boiling water’ ends with the description ‘His flesh separated from his bones and his soul merged into the Supreme Being’.

There are also links that are more literal to the symbolism, suggested here where the unsubstantiated claims that African ‘cannibals’ boiled missionaries in steel pots have flourished in popular culture. Cannibalism is a very literal form of eating life.

This is, of course, referring to the specific ‘evil’ use of the cauldron. There are positive symbolic associations with the cauldron, which position it a direct symbol for the power of the mother’s womb. The Grail in Arthurian Legends, as the cup of life, has a heritage in being known as a cauldron of life. This suggests that cauldrons could be seen as ‘wombs’ in more positive and life giving symbolic frame. Another example is from the welsh text Mabinogi, the second branch tells of a magical cauldron that

‘…the peculiarity of the cauldron is this: a man who is killed today and thrown in the cauldron, by the next day he will be as good as he was at his best, except he will not be able to talk.’

The cauldron then has two symbolic faces, both of which are linked by the symbolism of being a source of life or something that eats life. The symbolism here continues through different examples that speak across the wet/decay axis of meaning.

Semiotic Axis: Coffin

The coffin is probably the easiest to understand, in the context of symbolism. If the womb is a living and life giving ‘wet’ environment, the coffin is a dead and drying environment. If we think of how we think of aging, it’s a journey from elastic, fresh, subtle skin to dry, wrinkled and cracked skin – it’s a process of desiccation to the bone. I looked at some of the implications of this symbolism in an earlier post. If we recall Robert Hertz definition of the first funeral above, the role of the coffin is to separate and demark the corruption and pollution of the dead.

It is interesting that Dracula myths, in their many tellings, present the inverse of this.

They present the ‘holy’ undead with a refuge from the life giving daylight, which they need to hide from in their coffins. Although, the novel Dracula still ties the life force of the vampire to mother earth:

‘There, in one of the great boxes, of which there were fifty in all, on a pile of newly dug earth, lay the Count! He was either dead or asleep, I could not say which—for the eyes were open and stony, but without the glassiness of death—and the cheeks had the warmth of life through all their pallor; the lips were as red as ever. But there was no sign of movement, no pulse, no breath, no beating of the heart. ‘

We can see the consistency of this symbolism in the etymology of the word coffin, which derives from the Latin cophinus which means basket. The modern French couffin means cradle.

One of the most prominent phobias, speaks to the negation of the coffin – life.  Taphophobia is the fear of being buried alive, and it is a persistent theme in movies and literature.

Semiotic Axis: Vessel

Of all the four axes, the ‘vessel’ shows the most diversity in culture. The reason for this is that it symbolically evokes the second funeral, the possibility of the afterlife.

From the model, the ‘vessel’ is in meaning-opposition to the cauldron. If the cauldron eats life, the vessel prolongs or regenerates it.

The etymology of the word cemetery comes from the Greek koimeterion and the Latin coemetrium, both words for sleeping chamber. Framing death as sleep, was common in the Bible, eg. The Old Testament in Daniel 12:2 describes the dead as “those who sleep in the dust of the earth,” who later “shall awake” through being resurrected. Sleep and dreams have long been associated with the spirit or dream world across many cultures. Living on into the next life is a form of resurrection after death.

There are many cultural expressions of this. Perhaps the most famous in antiquity were the Canopic Jars of the Egyptians, from about 700BC, which preserved the organs of the dead for the afterlife.

This is a powerful theme in religion which almost universally speaks to the promise of a life after this one, eg. The Life of Jesus speaks across many of these themes. He was born from Mary, into a manger (a form of cradle). The manger scene prefigures his resurrection from the Cave of Calvary – a womb symbol – transfigured through this rebirth.

From a very different tangent, this is a theme that is a very popular one across science fiction.

The series Stargate follows loosely the myths and religion of ancient Egypt. In their story telling, the sarcophagus of the Goa’uld (evil aliens) regenerate and prolong the lives of their human hosts. The medical bays in Alien perform a similar function. In Star Trek Enterprise the medical bay directly evokes the Christian symbolism – if you look at the entrance, you can see the cut-out of the Ringed-Cross the symbol of Christs resurrection.

In the film Cocoon, the role of the ‘vessel’ is more multi-faceted.

Here we see aliens returning for lost comrades. They have preserved their lives by remaining dormant in vessels – that look more like organic eggs (wombs).   When they are in their natural forms they look like souls, suggesting they have already made the journey to the otherside.

Of course, one of the most unique variations on these themes is that of Dr Who.

The Tardis is a regeneration chamber for the Doctor, a Time Lord. The story integrally links the Tardis to his life; the Tardis is his source of regeneration…currently rebooted Dr Who to the impossible number 13.

It seems easy to find examples of the ‘magical’ or ‘science fiction’ expressions of this meaning axis. So, I’ll finish on an archaeological example that can illustrate many of these themes. Amongst the finds of the Neolithic settlements in the Republic of Macedonia, there are some amazing figurines with a very specific symbolism. These come in a wide and diverse range of design but all share the same characteristics of very feminine torsos, where the house represents the part of the body where the reproductive organs are.

Goce Naumov, believes that:

‘On one of the example, the belly is represented in the state of pregnancy, suggesting the figurine symbolically bears the embryo where the house is placed…It can be concluded that in the Neolithic, the house was conceived as a space with exclusively feminine features and symbolic functions – conception, incubation, birth and growth. Consequently, we can interpret the burial of the deceased (in foetal position) inside the house as a metaphor for the fetus in the womb’

Furthermore, it appears that the oven (cauldron) and woman’s body were perceived as being analogous

In that context, the hearth and oven had symbolic meaning with the same metaphoric function as those organs of a women’s abdomen which stimulate the conception and development of the embryo. Food was prepared near these structures, created, and afterwards through the cooking, baking or roasting process, was transformed into sustenance in a changed form and character. The shape of the Neolithic ovens, their power to modify and also their radiant heat, can also suggest a semantic relationship to the key features of the women’s abdomen. Some anthropomorphic models of ovens indicate that during the rites, they were perceived as human body or as mythic figures with human features

Naumov notes that more broadly: ‘Placing dead infants in symbolic ‘wombs’ occurred not only in the case of houses, ovens and bags, but also in vessels’. There does appear to be a symbolic equivalence between pots and wombs across different cultures e.g. Similar practices can be found across eastern, western and southern Africa.

What is interesting about the anthropomorphic / architectonic vessels is the use of the house as a symbol here. There are close parallels of these house-vessels from Hungary to modern Israel. Nikos Čausidis suggests that the house symbol itself is a type of container-metaphor that is analogous to the womb:

‘The uterus represents the first-prenatal spatial experience of human beings. Even after birth, humans experience the house as a womb in which they are enclosed, protected, warm, nourished and safe. The house, in the same way as the mother, protects them from the unpleasant and uncomprehending outer world. The house becomes a model for understanding the universe

In the creation of the semiotic model of this thinking, I’ve chosen a couple of meaning axis names that some might challenge. For the ‘cauldron’, the way that I got there was by thinking through the archetypal psychology of the mother. We find that in myths and folklore, her shadow is the witch. Amongst many other characteristics, witches eat babies and children. If mothers create and nurture life, then the anti-womb must be about eating or destroying life.

One of my favourite witch stories comes from this region, are the stories of Baba Yaga the witch.

Now deep in this forest, as the stepmother well knew, there was a green lawn and on the lawn stood a miserable little hut on hens’ legs, where a certain Baba Yaga, an old witch grandmother lived.

 

If the house can be seen as a metaphor for a womb; then this symbolism, like the cauldron, should have an evil version that is about eating life. A hut that walks on chicken legs as the home of an infamous witch, might foot the bill. It also provides a further insight to how the model can be challenged and evolved

R.I.P.

For something that is as quintessential to the human experience as ‘the power of life and death’, it is not surprising that we have developed some complex symbolism and semiotic structures for expressing it.  What is interesting when we consider the diversity of thought in in the vessel-axis, is that as secular and de-religioned as man has become, we are still fascinated with the idea of prolonging life or challenging ourselves to whether there is an afterlife.

Why are we taking the super out of the supernatural stories: is this just another postmodern symptom?

There has long been a casus belli of modernism and postmodernism to try to explain the religious, spiritual and supernatural, to find the rational explanation for events. While there is nothing new in this observation, it is however, interesting to observe the evolution of story tellers that are weaving tales in 21^st Century popular culture.

In 1917, Max Weber introduced modernity as the cause for the “disenchantment of the world”. He held the view that the traditional world was being eroded by the ‘modern’ processes of rationalization, secularization and bureaucratization. What we lost as a result were magic, the spiritual and animistic – as sense of the supernatural. The implications of this were that:

‘…. Principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted’.

Stuart Hall defined the resulting modern society as:

‘Modern societies are therefore by definition societies of constant, rapid, and permanent change. This is the principal distinction between “traditional” and “modern” societies. Modernity, by contrast, is not only defined as the experience of living with rapid, extensive, and continuous change, but is a highly reflexive form of life ….’.

The changes in how we perceive the world were substantial. Gregory Smit observes that this shift in thinking was:

‘The unprecedented transformations of the modern age are an indication that ideas have consequences. Ancient traditions were left behind in favour of a world that we projected for ourselves as the product of conscious human choice. Freedom, emancipation, liberation and self-determination became the watch-words of the age’

Discussion Overview

There are two parts to this discussion, if you wish to navigate:

1. A discussion of what is driving the modern secularisation of storytelling
2. An analysis of the secularisation of the supernatural from films and TV

Part 1: PoMo the Clown

It’s somewhat disconcerting that many academics that write about postmodernism start off with the caveat that postmodernism is next to impossible to define. It’s this type of ephemeral dialectic that has left it as a signifier of the arcane; the near ultimate trump card of the journey-man philosopher.

Postmodernism is the cause to the symptom I want to talk about. So, I’ll briefly discuss this in a cultural context. Part of the conceptual trouble is that the term post-modern suggests a chronology. However, Theodor Adorno correctly observed that ‘Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological category’. To this point, Matei Călinescu makes the interesting suggestion that modernism and postmodernism can be occurring at the same time, “The clash between the two modernities’:

“Two conflicting and interdependent modernities – one socially progressive, rationalistic, competitive, technological; the other culturally critical and self-critical, bent on demystifying the basic values of the first.”

Without getting too side-tracked, it is the effect of postmodernism on culture that I want to focus on. How postmodern story telling is different from the (pre)modernist traditions.   The effect of this shift in thinking has been defined by Jean-François Lyotard as postmodern society being characterized by the disappearance of the ‘grand narratives’ or ‘metanarratives’ of modernism, such as Marxism or the belief in the Enlightenment project of linear progress. These grand narratives are replaced by ‘language games’ that involve linguistic and symbolic production. This thought is developed to a sharp point by Terry Eagleton:

‘We are now in the process of wakening from the nightmare of modernity, with its manipulative reason and fetish of the totality, into the laid-back pluralism of the post-modern, that heterogeneous range of lifestyles and language games which as renounced the nostalgic urge to totalize and legitimate itself’.

David Harvey observed that postmodernity privileges heterogeneity; the result of this is a discourse which is increasingly characterised by fragmentation and indeterminacy. Leaving many with the shortcut that if it is confusing, it must be postmodern then?

The Emerging Secular Frame

If culture has been reorientated to challenging the ‘metanarratives’, one of the most prominent targets is that of religion. This role of secularity in modern society has been investigated through a vibrant debate of secularisation-theory:

Secularization theory has claimed that most or all forms of religion are in the process of vanishing from the world and are being replaced by secular institutions, beliefs, and subjects

Frank Lechner has detailed the implications of this thinking:

Where once a sense of the sacred marked the landscape itself, where social order used to be visibly embedded in sacred order, architectural relics attest to a profound change: the vanishing of the supernatural from the affairs of the world, the waning power of religion to shape society at large. In landscapes and architecture, secularization has become visible.

Secularization also describes the world the West has gained. In this world, culture is marked by pluralism: religious faith takes many forms, and meaning has many nonreligious sources.

Even when they make their way into popular culture, supernatural notions thereby lose any sacred aura. In this world citizenship requires no religious attachment, and society sets no rules for religious conformity. Secular events shape the rhythm of public life; publicly significant religious occasions tend to lose their transcendent content.

This ‘demystification of all spheres of life’ is the symptom of what Max Weber was observing in 1917, of the “disenchantment of the world”.

Secularization as a theoretical basis has been challenged and some have tried to increase its relevance by making its application more contextual.   Alternatively, by clarifying ‘secularization is most productively understood not as declining religion, but as the declining scope of religious authority’. Another explanation is that ‘secularization’ is marked by the decline in individual religious practice’.   The impact of this change in context away from the individual, is defined by Luckmann,

“The more the traces of a sacred cosmos are eliminated from the ‘secular’ norms, the weaker is the plausibility of the global claim of religious norms”

When we think of how we experience the spiritual today, there is also the nature of disambiguating between religion and spirituality. Paul Heelas makes the point that:

‘With secularization theory very much dwelling on the decline of religious tradition in “Western” settings, the challenge is to develop alternative explanations—explanations that specifically attend to the growth of New Age spiritualties of life’

He cites the growth of a range of contemporary spiritual practices from Yoga to Reiki, but cautions that ‘ Compared to the “real thing”—religious tradition—New Age spiritualties of life are impoverished, vague, attenuated, and quasi-spiritual, if not secular’. He makes the point that while there is frequent discussion of church attendance being in decline, other spiritualties of life are growing. There even appears a preference to be ‘spiritual’ over being religious – that being less structured speaks to the key themes of freedom in postmodern identity.

Even in a postmodern experience, the consistency of human imagination and spirituality suggests that this is something deeply connected to our collective psychology. Jonathon Haidt, in his influential work on Positive-Psychology, ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’, discusses ‘Divinity with or without God’, identifying sacredness and a spiritual side of psychology as being necessary for happiness.

Dis-enchanting Story Telling

If we come back to the issue of ‘disenchantment’, Michael Saler, from a sociological perspective, has defined the impact of modernity:

‘In its broadest terms, maintains that wonders and marvels have been demystified by science, spirituality has been supplanted by secularism, spontaneity has been replaced by bureaucratization, and the imagination has been subordinated to instrumental reason’.

Daston and Park are stronger on this point as active rejection of the ‘marvelous’ for a longer period of time:

‘Central to the new, secular meaning of enlightenment as a state of mind and a way of life was the rejection of the marvelous’

The secular drive can be illustrated by a recent loose-quote by Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and a proactive secular thinker:

‘I think it’s rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism’

More moderately, Claire Chambers makes the valid observation that it’s not as simple as prohibition:

‘Stories are crucial to culture and shouldn’t be prohibited but nor should they be installed as secularist totems, as some New Atheist writers try to do. It’s perfectly possible to be sceptical of magic while still believing in the enchantment of stories.’

The Supernatural and Fantastic in Popular Culture

When we look at film and TV today, there is a rich canvas of science fiction and fantasy. It is possible to counter the premise of this discussion, that we are more enamoured with the marvellous and enchantment as our executional ability almost matching our most vivid creative imaginations. In the postmodern world  Jean Baudrillard, has made the observation to this point that the sense of real and unreal becomes tenuous – reality collapses into hyper reality. One of the implications of the post-modernistic interpretations of culture is the fragmentation and merging of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture into a form of ‘aesthetic popularism’.

‘Stories may not actually breathe, but they can animate… Stories animate human life; that is their work. Stories work with people, for people, and always stories work on people, affecting what people are able to see as real, as possible, and as worth doing or best avoided’. Arthur Frank

Many of the supernatural tales that we are exposed to today originate form a melange of different literary and oral sources. Frank Zipes makes the point that story telling started when were first able to speak and socially communicated stories were the vehicle.

It’s useful to briefly review the role of fairy and supernatural tales that rub Richard Dawkins the wrong way.    Frank Zipes illustrates that many story types: religious, patriotic, fairy tales all have more in common than differences. The exception being that fairy tales tend to be secular and are not based on a prescriptive belief system or religious codes. Fairy tales started in 1500’s as brief, secular narratives that were new in expression. Interestingly, these stories tend to incorporate poor protagonists that, in the face of trials, demonstrate the character of royal heroes. Bruno Bettelheim, makes that observation that many start with the ‘hero’ being subjugated by antagonists that think little of him and his/her abilities.   They also tend to be very urban in settings. Zipes makes the observation that the fairy tale hero is often a seamstress or tailor ‘who has numerous adventures and encounters with the supernatural in pursuit of a ‘new world’ where he will be able to develop and enjoy his talents”. As an aside, it’s interesting that Harvey Cox, in the Secular City, linked secularisation with the process of urbanisation. Fairy tales often present a juxtaposition of the secular and supernatural. It is a function of stories and myths to provide us with a vehicle to overcome contradictions in society and culture.

Fairy tales are often employed by postmodern writers, as is defined by Lisa Fiander:

‘One is always tempted to identify a postmodernist impulse in a writer’s borrowing from fairy tales, whatever the writer’s nationality; the shiftiness of those narratives and their association with folktales—an older, oral form of storytelling— makes them attractive to fiction writers interested in exploring postmodern challenges to realism’

This ‘borrowing’ from older stories and genres is an observation also made by Lyotard in discussing science fiction, that:

‘…postmodern nostalgia tends to downplay the critical tendency of science fiction, preferring instead to make the recycling of older texts in the genre as the crucial a feature of the genre as any. In a cultural climate of pervasive nostalgia, it becomes difficult to separate science fiction’s critical capacity from other similarly unreal genres- science fiction, particularly on television, becomes a set of familiar tropes rather than the practice of extrapolation and cognitive estrangement from the real world’.

Part 2: Taking the super  out of supernatural tales

In the last few years there has been a tendency within science fiction for writers to find a secular and mundane explanation for many of the traditional supernatural tales. Many of these tales started off as folklore and fairy tales and have become cultural phenomenon in their own right. This appears to be mirroring a postmodern attitude on the secular or mundane explanation for the supernatural. I’m not suggesting that all supernatural stories are being demystified or disenchanted on mass; the dominance of the Harry Potter franchise is proof of this (however, the very Muggle-ness of Harry’s childhood speaks to this tension of worlds). Every week Hollywood appears to produce a new TV series that involves some millennial war between Vampires, Werewolves and other magic denizens. However, it is possible to identify a new subgenre of the mundane supernatural.

Since it’s a supernatural number, I’ll limit my observations to 10 examples, however, there are many more.

1.      Secularised: Zombies

The most obvious example here is the current Zombie mania

Here the Voodoo and occult origins of the zombie, withand their supernatural role originating from the enigmatic Baron Samedi, Loa and Lord of the Crossroads.  In the modern frame, the secular explanation of zombies is contagion by a virus.  Like many other postmodern stories, it is often man that is the cause of the viral contagion.

2.      Secularised: Dracula and Vampires

Likewise, the new TV series ‘The Strain’ explains vampires as a form of parasitic infection. This is very different from the unholy origins that Bram Stoker imagined from the original. While many of the plot elements remain similar, Chuck Hogan and Guillermo Del Toro’s approach re-imagines the reality of the vampire through a more scientific lens.

3.      Secularised: Frankenstein

Frankenstein, as the ‘modern Prometheus’, is a story warning of many of the themes of modernity that have been discussed above.

Victor Frankenstein seeks to mirror the power of God in creating Adam from death – a very supernatural theme. Prometheus in Greek myth is punished for stealing fire from the heavens; so Dr Frankenstein is punished for stealing the life force or ‘lighting’. What we tend to find in modern versions of this story is the same plot of losing control of his creations, either in the science or technology needed to create these other sentient lives. The abuse of technology by man is constant through all of these stories.

4.      Secularised: The Mummy

The mummy is a tricky supernatural tale to look for parallels to, since it’s specific to Egypt. The attempts in the Mummy Movie trilogy, to extend the Egyptian curse origins to China were lacklustre.

However, at a plot level, the idea of an advanced race with a founding culture, monumental architecture and suspended in a ‘sarcophagus’ was central to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus as an origins story for his Alien Quadrilogy. There are several ‘mummy’s’ in this one film amongst the humans and the aliens if you think through how they travel (not wanting to totally destroy the plot).

5.      Secularised: Ghosts

Ghost stories remain a perennial favourite, especially after Hollywood found a ready source of plots in Japanese cinema.

The more secular versions of ‘ghost in the machine’ tend to be about human consciousness transferred into a computer, so that the individual lives on in the digital computer world.

6.      Secularised: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

As with Frankenstein, this supernatural tale draws on the impact of when it was first written. I have written extensively about this theme as a ‘Doppelganger’ story in an earlier post.

What we tend to see in new versions of this story is a psychological explanation for Mr Hyde. Originally it was a ‘magic potion’ that unlocked the supernatural bestial, Mr Hyde. Modern versions of these stories are inversions, where the face of evil is hidden within – the psychological face of sociopaths, psychopaths and sadists.

7.      Secularised: Gods

There is an increasing trend to demystify the gods of mythology.

Perhaps the show that has pushed this boundary more than most is Stargate. It started with the premise that Egyptian Gods were really technologically advanced parasitic-aliens. Then it introduced explanations for other gods in our culture, such as the Asgard, who look like many alien ‘grey men’ that are recounted in abductee stories. The Stargate series ends with a cosmic battle between a new race of omnipotent beings that have transcended our plane of reality but have ultimate power here. Their almost godlike powers are presented as being beyond known mythology.

More recently, a different telling of Asgard has been brought to the big screen by Marvel through the Avengers and Thor franchises. Here the blend of technology as magic is deliberately self-aware. In Thor, the characters Erik Selvig and Janes Foster discuss this:

Erik Selvig: I’m talking about science, not magic.

Jane Foster: Well, “magic’s just science we don’t understand yet.” Arthur C. Clarke.

Erik Selvig: Who wrote science-fiction.

Jane Foster: A precursor to science fact!

In the Avengers, the nature of divine nature is addressed more directly, postmodern style:

Natasha Romanoff: These guys come from legend. They’re basically gods.

Steve Rogers: There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.

[Captain America leaps out of the Quinjet]

 

8.      Secularised: Supernatural Plagues

If the Gods exist, then their wrath is manifest on the world.

The Biblical plagues as the wrath of God are the motivations to the plot of many films with religious story lines. In the mundane versions, we see the same global implications wrought by humans on themselves through losing control of modernity. They usually revolve around variations on ‘flood’ narratives – natural events that are ‘extinction level’ events.

9.      Secularised: The Ordained Knight

In medieval times, stories accustomed us to the knight winning a magical sword, with which, to fight the evil of a community. These swords came from magical beings such as the ‘Lady in the Lake’ or were blessed by religions.

We are still telling stories that ‘god’ endorses our hero’s; these are demigods that live in both worlds. Greek gods live as half-humans or half-Olympians; King Arthur lives on Avalon the mystical isle.

In modern storytelling, we don’t get bequeathed magical weapons, we ‘engineer’ them. Iron man, as the archetypal ‘tin man’ is a human construction. Batman’s powers are written in opposition to Superman’s powers, in that he trains himself to preternatural skills and augments these with technological.

10. Secularised: The Monarch

The tenth of these secular versions of the supernatural needs a bit of introduction since we have become distanced from these thoughts by the process of modernisation. One of the advantages in the pre-modern age was that as a ruler, you controlled history. There was collusion between the secular and religious castes to affect a belief that God had ordained a particular families coronation. This was more common in Roman and Egyptian times, where ancestry to a god was a common claim by the core aristocracy. We see a similar pattern of endorsed monarchy in Judeo-Christian times, with many aristocratic families being able to demonstrate impressive religious endorsement. If you are religious, it’s hard to argue with your ruler if God has endorsed their rule.

Previously, deities bestowed their gifts and favour on individuals so they could rule. House of Cards, throws this literally on its head (and its logo). Frank Underwood is Machiavelli-on-steroids; he is secular to the bone living without apparent morality. Every action he takes is through the manipulation of his human skills.

The mysterious end

Michael Saler suggests in this area that:

‘Fictions become one importance source, and mass culture, as the dominant purveyor of fictions, has become a locus of enchantment equal to that of modern science. (The emergence of “science fiction” as a distinct genre in the twentieth century is emblematic of the importance of these two areas for modern enchantment.)Western elites long defined mass culture and its enchantments as inherently irrational, fit only for the childlike hoi polloi, but historians have demonstrated that elites themselves participated in mass culture because it offered enchantments that appealed to their reason as well as their imagination.

Most of us have friends and associates that could be called either high and low-cultural resource individuals. It’s a generalisation, but most of the high have indulgent vices in the low; also, that many in the low admire and find aspects of high culture aspirational…just inaccessible.  Most people appear to enjoy a sense of the supernatural even if the enchantments are only a momentary suspended disbelief.

This discussion has attempted to bite off a lot of popular culture and explore the secularisation of supernatural storytelling within a postmodern frame. This has been though an analysis of current thinking on the implications of postmodern thinking and also what secularisation means within this context.

To illustrate this thinking, ten examples of where mundane explanations for supernatural themes have been uses in recent film and TV storytelling have been used as examples where the drivers behind postmodernism are present:

1. Zombies
2. Dracula and Vampires
3. Frankenstein
4. The Mummy
5. Ghosts
6. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
7. God
8. Supernatural Plagues
9. The Ordained Knight
10. The Monarch

Of course this sub-genre is likely to continue, perhaps a version of Rumpelstiltskin who uses a ground breaking 3D printer or Rapunzel being a victim of hypertrichosis.

That we are seeking to define and understand the universe in more mundane and secular ways is evident, the question is, what do we lose? What is wrong with a bit of mystery, if we don’t project an author onto its presence? Is the issue that we are driven to want answers too much?  A world without the mystery that the supernatural brings feels a big monotone, the other meaning to the word mundane is not secular but boring.  Taking the super out makes the supernatural natural and familiar.

To some questions there are no answers, to some answers there are no questions

Buddha.

The Semiotics of Cutlery: A Dinner Table conversation over 8 Courses

1.     Appetizer

Hunger is a universal human drive. Every day, we wake to rumbles with the physiological necessity to eat. Functional as this is, as a species we take great delight in eating. Food solves our alimentary needs and appetite drives us to seek out different food experiences; as Socrates advised ‘the best sauce for food is hunger’. Food involves a very sensorial experience, using all of our senses. How we eat is very personal and at the same time influenced directly by the social and cultural environments in which we live. In an increasingly globalised world, with such a diverse buffet of foods, recipes and cuisines there is a something almost surprisingly elementary about the uniformity of cutlery.

What we eat is not just about our biological needs, it is also instrumental in how we think about ourselves. So anything that we eat with, as utensils, will be very semiotic in nature.

“To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.”

François de La Rochefoucauld

I’ve been focusing lately on changing trends in food, diet and eating, and drinking behaviour. To inform my next post, I was looking for a semiotic explanation of cutlery that we use for eating and what meaning is inherent in the choices we make. What are the different ways that we manipulate our foods? Does this change the meaning of the food? Who are using these different techniques? How are they different? How are the distinct forms of eating utensils more-or-less appearing in the cultural record? While I’m primarily interested in cutlery that we use to eat with, there is some interesting crossover into the kitchen domain here. The following eight courses focus specifically on these questions.

2.     Soup Course

That different cultures eat meals differently has been observed by nearly everyone from the layman to academic, the adult to the curious child, and the gourmand to the gourmet.  Even if you are locked within one culture with no outside cultural interaction, we find there are different social expressions of cuisines that indicate class and other social structures. Why particular cultures favour one particular way of eating over another is testament to an endlessly fascinating diversification of such a physiological animal need. How we eat as a cultural and social expression of this is just as appetising to degust.

As a more civilised ape, collectively sharing the same physiology, it stands to reason that anyone could have made an observation on this topic. As a result, I will leave it to Jerry Seinfeld to start this discussion on cutlery. As he expresses in this bit, his confusion with Chinese culture through their choice of eating implements. (video embed on website)

3.     Fish Course

Why do we use different tools to eat with? Without wanting to cast too wide a net on this topic (since I’ll widen the topic in the next post); we can role-play a primordial mindset as a starting point.

Essentially, we have a choice of eating with our hands or using specialised tools as tool making animals. Although there is no reason that we need cutlery at all. If we consider why we would eat by hand, we can reasonably expect eating behaviour and rituals will revolve around the types of food and methods of food production that are available.

From a Western perspective, eating by hand can appear to be breaking a social taboo. Oprah famously demonstrated a modicum of cultural ignorance expressing: ‘’I heard Indian people eat with their hands still”; suggesting a wide held Western belief that eating with cutlery is more ‘evolved’ or at the least more civilized than eating by hand. Contrary to this many meals from India to Ethiopia, Mexico to Indonesia are still eaten by hand. Surely Oprah has eaten a hamburger before?

Cooking with fire is what unites cuisines. It is a common theme in mythology that fire is what set man on their path from more savage times. The theft of fire is as a common mythical theme across Mediterranean, Indian, Pacific and American Indian belief systems, to name a few.

In Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. In the full story, prior to this theft, Prometheus tricked Zeus at Mecone into accepting the less-prime cuts of a sacrificial Ox in order to help man by reserving the prime cuts for food for eating (considering the relative cost to a tribe of killing domesticated animals). This trickery was followed by the subsequent theft and gift of fire to help with the cooking and digestion. In hindsight, it is strange that we don’t honour Prometheus as the Patron God of the BBQ today; although, obscured as it is, the Olympic torch is a mythical memory of Prometheus’ sacrifice memorialised every four years.

In an earlier post I discussed how the biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham suggested that it was the use of fire in cooking that allowed for additional calories to be easily digested by early primates, resulting in a direct escalation in human evolution (I also discuss the alternative hypothesis for human brain-size development in the post). There is evidence that primates have been eating cooked foods from approximately 1.9 million years ago. A cave in South Africa has the claim of the oldest extant evidence of a ‘barbecue’ (although this doesn’t necessarily mean they had the means of fire production yet).

Wrangham draws links between the evolutionary process and the development of cultural forms of cooking, suggesting that our social and eating behaviour has been influenced by our evolutionary biology:

…while cooking gave humans dietary flexibility, it also constrained our species into being creatures adapted to diets of high caloric density, prepared around temporary food-piles, and committed to the control of fire and the social relations that were therefore necessitated. Cooking may be cultural, but current evidence suggests that its effects have fed back into our biology, and have thereby created constraints that importantly shape and define our evolutionary biology.

This hypothesis also suggests that inventing and evolving how you cook would have been a competitive cultural advantage. At its most simple, piercing a piece of meat or vegetable on a stick appears to be the starting point for cooking in a fire.

The natural learning from this type of behaviour would have been the awareness that fire makes both wood and stone harder (we have to allow some evolutionary time for those calories to increase our big brains to work this out). There are examples extant of fire-hardened spears from the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic (ca 350,000 BP); evidence of fired-stone tools can be dated to 164,000 years old. These experiments likely led to the further evolution and experimentation with cooking utensils and cutlery.

4.     Entrée Course

Claude Lévi-Strauss, in an iconic structuralist approach, introduced the ‘Culinary Triangle’ as a model of understanding the deeper underlying relationships of cooking and ‘fire’. Culture is transformative and also a movement away from the raw and natural state of ingredients. Fire as an agent uses air or water to transform ingredients into cooked meals. Fire here, as in the Prometheus myth, is symbolic of civilization and progression. Edibility codes have a place of prominence as they stand on the boundary of ‘nature and culture’.

5.     Palate Cleanser

This model informs us of the other binary opposition of cutlery, hot foods that need to be ‘enclosed’ by a utensil. It’s obvious that it’s difficult to eat, or is to drink a soup without such a utensil.

This can also be seen in the etymology of the two main cutlery forms here: knife and spoon. The word cutlery derives ultimately from the Latin cutellus for knife. The English origins of the word come from the 13^thC French coutelerie which means ‘cutting utensils’. The word spon (spoon) is from the old English ‘”chip, sliver, shaving, splinter of wood”, which later took on more a culinary scooping meaning. If we think of a contemporary food here, a taco chip is a spoon in how we eat with it, but also in a shared meaning of the word spoon here.

Therefore, the primary binary-opposition that we might find for utensils and cutlery will be either:

1. Penetrate/Cut – those that are used for ‘Air’ cooking transformation
2. Enclosure – ‘water’ cooking transformation utensils.

Interestingly, there is a Freudian, phallic, dimension to this opposition. Simply, men penetrate but women enclose. Thinking from a more symbolic perspective, there is a parallel here to thinking of the Sword or the Chalice. This is the masculine and feminine symbolism that is found from Tarot cards to the Arthurian knights on their quest for the Holy Chalice. Thinking back to Levi Strauss’s Culinary Triangle, the roles of air and water are central. In Tarot, the Suit of Swords is connected to the element of air; the Suit of Cups with water. From a more mythological level and within belief-systems, while not exclusively so, many masculine gods (sword) are sky or air gods and feminine (enclose) goddesses are associated with water.

More broadly, Levi-Strauss has raised frequent identifications between sex and food. These underlying structures work in a ‘linguistic’ fashion, with marriage rules and food taboos sharing similar metaphor structures.   This understanding of food and relationships has been identified and subsequently explored more broadly in later sociological studies.

If we look in a cursory manner what knives and spoons look like – this appears to be visually semiotically encoded as well.

There is a tendency for knives to reflect more masculine forms; phallic, colours and materials. In comparison, spoons feel more feminine; organic, ‘womb’ like, and are made from different coloured materials. Another consideration here is that if your purpose is to cut, you need to be a different material than something that scoops.

It’s possible to think of the spoon association with bowls and baking, evoking mother and the womb. In comparison, the knife domain is often a more masculine performance role, e.g. the ritual in cutting the Turkey or ruling the BBQ. Although, it’s important to recognise that current foodie-trends continue to blur these gender and cooking definitions.

6.     Main Course

From a semiotic perspective, we can look at cutlery through this primary opposition of cut/enclose. This can, at the very least, shed light on the forms and uses of long neglected and indispensable treasures of our kitchen draws. The model I am going to use is a semiotic square that was developed by Algirdas Julius Greimas, which is a simple way to map out complex underlying structural meanings. The focus here is not so much on the depicted utensil as a sign-vehicle but the relationships and meaning underlying these utensil classes.

Here we can look at how meaning is represented across the binary oppositions of cut/penetrate to enclose/scoop.

7.     Fingerbowl

It is possible to think of many other variations as alternatives for the meaning-forms above, e.g.:

• A BBQ spatula that has a pronged and bladed side could be an alternative for the Splayde;
• Standard tongs could replace Chopsticks;
• Lobster tongs could replace the Spork.
• Alternatively, modern novelties such as the Chork or the Spife fill these meaning dimensions with arguable success.

There are some innovative modern hybrid interpretations such as those offered designer Candace Kita

Or simplification with this modern-design twist on chopsticks called Rassen

8.     Dessert Course

While I’m going to talk more about the cultural differences of food consumption and what this communicates in my next post, at a very general level there are conventions to how we understand the cultural performance of eating different cuisines.

This overly simplistic grid does illustrate that as stereotypes the east/west cuisines do lend themselves to utensils and implements that are either left or right of the semiotic square. This appears to be more specific for eating than for food preparation. Obviously, it’s harder to cut something in a bowl.

Contrary to Oprah’s understanding, eating with our hands is still a big part of both non-western and western eating behaviour. What is interesting here, which I shall pick up in the following post, is recognising a less-delineated understanding of what a kitchen is. There are established food taboos that Levi Strauss and other writers such as Mary Douglas have focused on in creating a strong sense of what is right and wrong in culture and the implications of this meaning. Western attitudes towards hands being involved in eating are inflamed by our almost puritanical war on germs across all parts of our society. It’s a difficult task to reconcile our hands being intermediaries between our food and mouths.  Therese Saint-Paul suggests this fear might be one of the factors behind the rise of cutlery:

In Ancient Greece and Rome, guests would lie on couches and eat with their hands. The invention of the fork and the habit of sitting up straight at a table not only indicated a change of perspective towards food in the late Middle Ages but also distance between people. The fork was, at the beginning of the Renaissance, a cultural reflex of distancing from food destined to others (perhaps a reflex of protection against contagion from the plague in the fourteenth century). This also paralleled the growing social movement towards individuation and isolation.

In different cultures, awareness that the role of right and left hands eating are prescribed for different chronological points of the meal, might contribute to this. Even though in reality, just behind a wall of the kitchen, trendy and haute cuisine techniques from the most complex epicurean feasts to the simple salad are often ‘handmade’:

Consider massaged kale salad, the dish that, two years ago, had people rolling up their sleeves and getting intimate with their salad bowls.

Realistically, the notion of a kitchen is a western luxury when you live in a one room house. In this different world, the notion of food preparation also extends to the eater to finish a dish themselves in their hands and interestingly, with considerable more autonomy. The fussy western chef looks down on those that seek to season a meal for themselves.

Digestif

In finishing off this last course, we can reflect that most of the cutlery we eat is divided by two central roles:

1. The cutting or culinary dissection of what is on our plates to easier eating sizes.
2. The enclosing of the food with a tool to make it easier to eat.

Interestingly, the opposition is less about knife and fork or fork over knives, and more about fork and spoon when we look at the function they perform.

Both of these tend to correspond to foods that are eaten either dry or wet, which suggests the types of cutlery that is required. Broadly we can surmise that the availability of different types of foods has been instrumental in the development of different cutlery on a cultural level. As Jerry Seinfeld notes, this does not mean that a given culture wasn’t aware of the alternatives; there are other considerations at play here, to be discussed in the next post.

Since I started this post with Seinfeld, I shall finish on the final course with another Seinfeld clip that illustrates how embedded and codified these conventions are in western thinking. (video embed on website)

Bon Appétit

Food for thought

It was one of the pioneers of French gastronomy writing, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who penned the now famous observation:

‘Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are.’

This was a more opinionated version than that which is found in the Bible, to paraphrase Corinthians ‘your body is a temple’.  On the other side of the world Buddha was providing similar advice: ‘keep the body in good health’. This insight presents as a human truism; it is reasonable to surmise that from the beginning of time, primordial man would have been able to link good food with health (I know this does not reconcile evolution with the current obesity epidemic).

Importantly, there is a difference between recognising that what you eat is what you are and that what you eat constructs who you are. We symbolically consume identity through our food and drink choices – more specifically, by what we don’t eat or drink.

Eating is an intensely personal act. What we eat communicates to others our beliefs, cultural and social backgrounds and experiences. In the western world, testament to how we think about who we are, increasingly we join fashionable dietary tribes, where we temporarily graze within before moving onto greener fields. Who hasn’t tried on for size at some time being a: vegetarian, paleo, vegan, piscatarian, halal, Atkins, etc.; or my favourites, those that just hold their knife and fork high and find momentary solace in being a flexitarian?

All of these dietary choices have something in common; they are all opposed to being an omnivore. As apes, even very civilized ones, we are omnivores. In its broadest term, an omnivore will eat anything. Uniquely perhaps amongst animals, while we can digest the two main food groups (animals and/or plants), we have choice. All of the dietary-tribes above are defined by their rejection of some aspect of ‘everything’. There are many reasons why we exclude foods from our diet, from basic health needs to deep cultural and religious beliefs.

What is interesting is the role that food plays in constructing our identities. This is across psychological, anthropological thinking, and also semiotically, in how the meaning is expressed. Something that all humans share is also something that we use to differentiate ourselves on a daily basis.

‘Food is our common ground, a universal experience’.

James Beard

Different ways of cooking the topic

It’s easy to think when reviewing literature on eating that there are too many chefs in the kitchen. Many disciplines have their leading thinkers in the subject area and there is a tantalising array of papers to look at. With this in mind, I’m going to stick to some of the papers that are more topical to what I’m currently looking at. Even a quick and cursory exploration is useful to contextualise how food relates to identity.

Food is a highly condensed social fact

Arjun Appadurai

Thinking through Food

It is elementary that food is more than something alimentary. Semioticians have likened the use of food in society and culture to language. As Roland Barthes, suggests

‘When he (modern consumer) buys an item of food, consumes it, or services it, modern man does not manipulate a simple object in a purely transitive fashion; this item of foods sums up and transmits a situation; it constitutes an information; it signifies’.

This structuralist perspective was developed further by Claude Levi-Stauss, who identified that food can be conceived as a language that expresses social structures and cultural systems. He posits that food “must not only be good to eat, but also good to think (with)”. I have discussed some of his influential approaches in the preceding post.

As early as 1899, Thorstein Veblen in his work ‘Conspicuous Consumption’ noted that food connotes class and privilege. Subsequent studies have painted this picture in deeper relief. The sociologist Norbert Elias identified the symbolic meaning of foods performing a significant role in determining social power and status relationships. Likewise, Pierre Bourdieu has suggested that social stratification and class are defined by taste. In an influential series of works Mary Douglas has looked at food as eating codes that define an individual’s place within a society and serve to actively maintain social order.

We find that the structure of society closely correlates to the nature of status foods:

Ethnographic research has revealed that an emphasis on quantity of food and elaboration of common staples is found mostly in societies without strong social stratification, while an emphasis on quality and style is characteristic of societies with institutionalized forms of social ranking. In the former context the consumption of luxury foods is used primarily to create or enhance social bonds, in the latter to create or enhance exclusivity and distance.

Jack Goody provides further insight about the social organisation of food. He has been able to illustrate that societies where there is little lifestyle difference between members, special occasions are characterised by the quantity of food. In comparison, in hierarchical societies where you tend to find sub-cultures, it is typical to find quality and foreignness in food as the differentiators of status.

A characteristic of societies with social equality is that there tends to be a more equitable distribution of food. It was the improved availability of food that was the main driver of the evolution of haute cuisine and fine dining, as the upper-echelons of society moved to further differentiate themselves from the masses. High status foods are characterised by rarity, cost, labour time, prominence of animal proteins and non-nutritional meanings and associations. At the same time there was shift towards individuality and the separation of classes, which resulted in eating innovations such as tables and cutlery.

This presents another paradox in how different cultures perceive eaters. Body image, in relation to food, is a way of creating more social meaning. Where there was a shift away from status-meals defined by quantity, in cultures where there is an abundance of food thinness is associated with privilege and status. Whereas, we find that in societies where food is scarce, there is the perception that being overweight is a status marker.

Political use of Consumption

‘Food can be used to mark and create relations of equality, intimacy or solidarity or, instead, to uphold relations signalling rank, distance or segmentation. This can be illustrated by looking at the use of food to communicate different types of class through consumption’.

Arjun Appadurai

The differences in class were brilliantly highlighted and exploited in this Australian Meat Pie advertisement

Another example of this was in the broadcast on NPR’s ‘Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell me’. Where the hosts of the show comment on a shared insight to NPR’s audience:

PETER SAGAL “But first, great news: according to a new study, listeners to NPR News are better informed than people who get their news anywhere else. This is true. They asked everyone a series of questions about things, and NPR listeners got more of the questions right than say cable TV news watchers. Of course, the questions were a little slanted”.

KASELL: “To the best of your knowledge, which wine pairs best with a Prius?”

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=153730322&m=153730311

Adrienne Lehrer discussed how this symbolism is co-opted by politicians to bolster their ‘working man’ appeal. This has left the American voters with a quadrennial entertainment watching potential leaders of the free world struggle with some of the messiest foods that are even called ‘sliders’. Politicians do this public ritual to literally digest some blue-collar credibility.

Pierre Bourdieu makes the observation that ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’. He points to the denial of ‘lower’ forms affirms those that have ‘taste’: ‘That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences’. Politicians can step into the majority’s lives by sharing this daily bread and breaking these codes by stepping off the culinary podium.

This concept of food being a social marker of class is not limited to the western cultures; it is also present in eastern cultures. Food:

“… was elevated at an early period [in China] from necessity to art, from sustenance to elegance; the subsequent high cultural status assured that food would remain a key ingredient in the language and structure of literature and art”.

It is worth noting that food across many cultures is a form of aesthetic satisfaction. Speaking to all of our senses, food words have become powerful metaphors in how we think about the world. Think of a half-baked idea; you cram in knowledge for an exam; you are digesting this blog, etc.

Ethnic and Cultural Symbolism of Food

Sidney Mintz has shown how these symbolic meanings change with different cultural, ethnic and class considerations. Food, geography or place and identity are intertwined from a symbolic perspective. Wenying Xu makes the important perspective that food is one of the ways that we engage with, and understand, other cultures:

‘’Food operates as one of the key cultural signs that structure people’s identities and their concepts of others’.

Bell and Valentine go into this definition in more detail, stating that national identity is linked to food:

“The history of any nation’s diet is the history of the nation itself, with food fashion, fads and fancies mapping episodes of colonialism and migration, trade and exploration, cultural exchange and boundary making”

Ethnographically we find that ethnic identities are expressed and maintained through dietary choices. The food that we eat can strengthen ties to your ethnicity on a day-to-day basis and it can also reflexively reinforce a sense of identity when you are in another culture. English seeking fish and chips in Greece, Australians hunting for Vegemite on Toast in Asia, and Americans looking for burgers everywhere, are examples of this identity reinforcement on holidays.   While I’m focusing on food here, coffee, tea and alcohol are also used in similar ways.

While not a focus here, it should be noted that in the fluid global world of exchanged culinary traditions, foods are constantly reimagined and reinvented to suit the local culture. Often these can be cultural definitions; consider the similarities and difference between the croque-monsieur to a toasted sandwich; a meat pie to a beef wellington; or Japanese tempura to Portuguese battered fish. You don’t have to be the originator of a concept just to have a unique version that bonds a group of people. Consider the Cronut as a recent invention that speaks to NYC but blends donuts and croissants from different cultures, unified in a glaze of American sugar.

The Geopolitics of Consumption

“The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they feed themselves.”

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Food can also speak to a political identity on a cultural level. Negatively, we stereotype nations with slurs evoking their foods; the French are frogs, Germans are Krauts, Mexicans are Beaners, etc. However, we also hold in high reverence the influence of cuisines from around the world and what they contribute to the global table.

The presence of McDonalds in Moscow is symbolic on a broader scale, representative of the ‘triumph of capitalism over communism’

Noting that America’s recent thaw in relations with Vietnam has led to ‘A McDonald’s doorman gesture during the opening ceremony of the country’s first McDonald’s restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City on February 8, 2014’.

How has individual consumption changed?

“Identity can be defined as the individual’s identification and belongingness to particular social groups on the basis of differences socially sanctioned as significant”

Aviva Shuman

In a more global world, cultural and ethnic boundaries are increasingly becoming more permeable. Food in particular is available in more ethnic diversity. Here, Anthony Giddens has suggested that food should move from a consumption model at a social group to one that reflects the individual consumption:

A paradox seems to emerge from this debate: it appears to conclude that diets become more different at the same time that they become more similar. One way of reading this paradox is the shift from ‘model’ to ‘style’. While ‘consumption model’ is a concept that refers to a social group (a community, a nation), style refers to the individual behaviour. The individual, in his/her food consumption behaviour, loses any reference to any objective belonging, to a family, a social group, a class, a community. He/she is driven only by his/her subjective choice, of an ideological, hedonistic nature. Style choices are negotiated among a diversity of options, in a plurality of contexts and authorities (Giddens 1991: 5)

This speaks to the societal shift from social classes that are defined by birth or later the type of job you have, to a post-industrial society where individuals are defined by ideology or by what they consume. This thinking is related to what Ulrich Beck defines as the individualisation process of reflexive modernity.

The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character . . . only in the era of modernity is the revision of convention radicalised to apply (in principle) to all aspects of human life. . . . (Giddens)

Beck believes that self-identity is determined more by lifestyle where people are presented a diversity of choices in all areas of their lives. Beck’s conception is that the self is not a passive identity that is determined by external influences. The self is a reflexive project sustained through the routine development and sustainment of a coherent narrative of self-identity: our biographies (Giddens). Scott Lash identifies that in this context ‘individuals must innovate rules in a bricolage of their own identities’. However, while we are more likely to identify ourselves as being individuals, as creative as we get, it is our social interaction that regulates this sense of identity. Identity without context is meaningless.

The current foodie culture and diversity of foods in western cultures has made food a much more democratic facet of modern societies. As a style, it is something that consumers are increasingly food-literate and empowered to comment on. As the food critic, Frank Bruni observes

“Food is an aspect of culture that, because everyone necessarily participates in it to some degree, is more egalitarian than, say, ballet, or opera, or even theatre. It’s easier and less intimidating to join the fray and weigh in with an opinion”

Contributing to this are the swathe of entry points into the world of food for the modern consumer: celebrity and contestant cooking shows, foodie magazines, websites and food festivals. Here everyone is invited to voyeuristically or personally participate in a range of foods that we might never eat. Like sports, you don’t have to play to be a member of the club.

Monkeys eat anything?

Food choices are central to the evolution of humans from apes. One of the most useful perspectives here was proposed by Claude Fischler, who introduced the concept of the ‘incorporation principle’. He starts by defining that humans are biologically omnivores. Being an omnivore is a paradox, in that we need novelty and are driven to explore new foods, but are also fearful and reluctant to try new foods because they represent a risk.

The ‘incorporation principle’ is defined:

‘To incorporate a food is, in both real and imaginary terms, to incorporate all or some of its properties: we become what we eat. Incorporation is a foundation for identity’.

Furthermore, on a broader level:

‘Thus, not only does the eater incorporate the properties of food, but, symmetrically, it can be said that the absorption of a food incorporates the eater into a culinary system and therefore into the group which practises it, unless it irremediably excludes him.

Food taboos, a favourite theme in anthropology, operate at this level: in order for a species to be defined as taboo, it must have been already implicitly classified as food. If the forbidden food were not edible, there would be no point in forbidding it’.

The incorporation principle is another way of saying: who you are, is what you eat.

When we consider the social role of food, it is important that societies do influence and teach us what we can and can’t eat: ‘‘social factors may be particularly important in influencing the development of preferences for foods’ (Rogers and Blundell). An example of social food taboos was documented by Mary Douglas who detailed the taboos and social factors that influence the preparation of meat in the Bible that differentiates the ‘people of the book’.

Eaters Remorse

“Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless.”

Zygmunt Bauman

Food choices for an individual are not fixed, naturally they develop and change over time; they are informed by many different personal preferences, resources, identity needs and socio-cultural factors. One of the prominent trends of modern western societies is the shift towards ethical consumption in the form of artisan, organic, local etc.

Our food is safer and our diets are more diverse than ever before; production methods are becoming increasingly sustainable, clean and efficient; and we are constantly becoming better at protecting biodiversity.

Louise Fresco

Bisogni, et al. have suggested here that diet and identity are mutually constitutive. However, an ethical issue arises from the contradiction in the continued success of industrialised food economies of societies to also achieve the individual goal of ‘ethical’ shopping. However, while many consumers’ mindsets might project into this way of thinking, this is not supported by what is selling in the marketplace.   Mass produced food is selling very well.

These are muddied waters though. When big retail chains are selling organic products, this line is becoming increasingly blurred and confused, leading some to question if there are really ‘alternative’ ways of eating.

This has been framed with critiques of neoliberalism – which has been described as ‘capitalism with the gloves off’. Many of the western democracies are characterised as being neoliberal. Neoliberal governments by definition have been consistently retreating from the basic needs provisioning and regulation of some areas; correspondingly corporations and NGO’s have been filling the gaps.

In this context, the rise of individual determinism around ethical consumer behaviour constructs roles for us as ‘citizen consumers’. Here we have the ‘freedom’ to vote with our money; to balance the competing ideologies of self-interested consumerism with social and ecological citizenship. There is a dissonance when we are not in balance here. Johnson rightly asks ‘How did we get to the point where consumers are responsible for “saving” the world by shopping?’

Slavoj Žižek’s has framed this type of behaviour as a ‘pseudoactivity’ where our behaviour is not to ensure change but to ensure that the status quo is maintained; it’s a way of postponing the moment when we really have to think about doing something. He suggests this, like other behaviour such as recycling, are just ways of restitution for our collective crimes.

Reflecting on this Discussion

“Food makes the eater: it is therefore natural that the eater should try to make himself by eating”

Claude Fischler

It is relatively easy to see there is a degree of consensus that food is more than something that fuels and sustains us. Food is important for constructing and sustaining our identities, social boundaries and cultural differentiation. Moving forward, the interesting thing to keep an eye on is our use of food as reflexive behaviour to changes in society and culture. New trends and subcultures are likely to arise as we continue to experiment collectively with our own individual identity recipes.

If we are eating ourselves into identity, an exploration of one of the oldest food taboos is informative to end on. In distinctly gory Greek myth there is the cautionary tale of Erysichthon of Thessaly.

A king of Thessaly ordered Demeter’s entire grove of trees to be cut down and in the process, one of her dryads (guardian spirit) was killed in the felling. Demeter responded to the Dryads curse by entreating Limos (the Greek version of famine) to plague him. The more he ate the hungrier he got. In the end he eats himself through hunger.

Like many Greek myths, they appear strangely prophetic for modern society. Many of our contemporary ‘ethical’ shopping behaviours are to construct a vision of ourselves, as Erysichthon, before the grove was cut down. We are obsessed with the pre-modern past in contemporary culture. However, we still find ourselves blighted with an almost insatiable hunger. Perhaps a concern is that Žižek is right and we are the pseudoactivity of consuming ‘ethical’ choices, which is not a meaningful to solution to modern consumption contradictions. We fear empty calories in a healthy diet; perhaps for our identity projects we fear empty-symbolism just as much. It is hard to construct identity on illusions.

Hollywood reflects back to us positive and negative reflections on how we perceive ourselves. Following the discussion that food is as much about the consumption of meaning as nutrition, it is informative that we fine Zombies everywhere as themes in literature, movies and TV.

Zombies are the antithesis of the entire premise of this blog – you are what you eat. As Zombies, you don’t die, you exist dehumanised; you lose your freedom, personal sovereignty, individuality, existing in alienation as a parody of the modern condition, indiscriminately consuming with no purpose.  A thought for food.

 Some anthropological perspectives on eating: east or west

You are what you don’t eat.

Food is central to our sense of individual and social identity. We consume our identities through the food choices we make; what we incorporate and exclude from our diet helps to frame our social and cultural lives. The inverse of this is true as well; what other people eat is one of the ways that we understand their identity and what social and cultural groups they belong to.

‘Food operates as one of the key cultural signs that structure people’s identities and their concepts of others’ Xu

To some extent, my previous post defined the role of eating with identity. For those that have not yet had the time to digest this, I’ve been talking about the role of food from both the traditions of what we eat with in the form of cutlery, and that what we consume contributes directly to our personal and social identity.

Claude Fischer makes the important distinction that we have “invented” cuisine. As omnivores we can eat many different foods, but a cuisine is a shared set of rules that ‘helps it assert its diversity, hierarchy and organisation, but also, at the same time, both its oneness and the otherness of whoever eats differently’. Therefore, cuisines are highly semiotic with underlying structural meaning and many symbolic connotations.

“The history of any nation’s diet is the history of the nation itself’

Bell and Valentine

In the modern world, culinary-tourism is one of the ways that we explore other cultures. It’s also logical to infer that we all contribute to cultural-identity through our decision and that culture provides the context from which we make decisions.

“An individual’s cultural background shapes what he or she eats, the manner in which the food is consumed, when it is appropriate to eat, and the significance of the food being consumed” Barbara Miller

There are national foods which are clear ‘signs’ of a culture; there are iconic dishes that have become stereotypical expressions within the global culture.

We symbolically consume identity through our food choices – more specifically, by what we don’t eat. Meaning for an omnivore comes from restriction rather than acceptance. Many national cuisines are organised around what foods or preparations are taboo, e.g. Mary Douglas in a pioneering study illustrated the deeper structure of exclusion in the different rules that are present in the Bible around food; also a subject area taken up by Seth Kunin. This is discussed further by Claude Fischler:

“Cuisine is not so much a matter of ingredients, transformed or not, as of classifications and rules ordering the world and giving it meaning. The foremost classification is of course the one which divides the universe into what is food and what is not.

Food taboos, a favourite theme in anthropology, operate at this level: in order for a species to be defined as taboo, it must have been already implicitly classified as food. If the forbidden food were not edible, there would be no point in forbidding it”

These edibility codes are so powerful because they stand at the boundary of ‘nature and culture’. What makes an ape a civilised human?

Other ways of looking at meaning oppositions and taboos in food

What we do tend to find are systems of oppositions that are organised around social or cultural identities. Social cohesion is often created by exclusion rather than inclusion – ‘we’re not like those people’ is easier than defining what you stand for.

Semiotically this is expressed at a structural level in a whole series of oppositions through society and culture. An example here is illustrated though the pizza traditions of New York and Chicago. While the pizza tradition owes its origins to Italian immigration, in a relatively short period of time the New York thin crust is set in opposition to the Chicago Deep-dish pizza.

Each type of pizza have their own traditions and rituals of toppings, condiments and eating styles. Something that Jon Stewart as an NYC resident frequently rallies against.

(Embedded Video)

These points of difference can also just be in how meals are presented as courses:

“The French eat salad after the main dish, the Americans rigidly before; the English, to the disgust of both, put it on the same plate as the (cold) meat”

While these internecine culinary battles are entertaining to map out, sometimes these conventions of identity can also bring re-assurance. Ethnic food preferences become identity markers when one goes abroad. When you travel through the Mediterranean you see food outlets offering food tailored to the English; though South East-Asia Aussie friendly café’s proudly display signs saying ‘vegemite’ here.   A few Australians that I’ve spoken with that haven’t enjoyed this polarising smear have been converted, out of homesickness, to eating the iconic spread whilst overseas.

Eastern and Western Food

(The above graphic is from the brilliant Yang Liu Book on the difference between east and west)

Lately I’ve been interested more broadly in the differences between Western and Eastern food traditions. There are several considerations in moving forward:

• When you say ‘western’, it’s as limited and stereotypical a statement as saying ‘eastern’. With this is mind, I’ll take a leaf from my last post and talk about east and west in generalised terms.
• In discussion, Western culture is a vast mixing pot of cultures which makes some comparisons more tenuous against more established and consistent food traditions.
• Western or eastern understandings of each other’s cultures are influenced by restaurants. Restaurants can seek to act as a source of cultural translations or they can be sources of authentic cultural experiences.
• What do we really know? Some of these local ethnic food traditions are often thought to be authentic, such as General Tso’s Chicken or Fortune Cookies, but are not. So what is authenticity when we speak of cultural traditions?

If we’re all more sophisticated apes, are our senses culturally different?

There isn’t scope here to explore aspects of every sense used in eating. So, it’s informative to take a brief look at the experience of food through one facet of our visual sense. Focusing on colour can assist in highlighting some of the many cultural differences that have to be accounted for.

Firstly, it is worth noting that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that from a linguistics perspective, there are certain thoughts of an individual in one language that cannot be understood by those who live in another language. While challenged, it is accepted that language can have a slight or moderate effect on the senses.. The reason this is worth noting is that not all cultures have the same number of words for the colour spectrum. This might influence the way that cultures react in this area.

Semiotically, we are encoded to view the same food materials in different ways.  Furthermore, there are different cultural associations with colours. For example, the recent Kuro Burger was a hit in Japan but was met with consternation and fascination in the US.

This was explained by Eva Hyatt in an interview:

There are definite cultural differences in color meanings and associations between the U.S. and Japan. Here we associate black with death (unlike the Japanese, who associate white with death) and might think that black food is molded or spoiled (i.e., dead and inedible), or else associated with the flavor licorice.

The Japanese, on the other hand, are used to eating black seaweed, fermented black bean-paste-based foods, black walnut powder, squid ink, and a lot of gray, muted-colored foods, so a black burger bun and cheese would not seem too alien to them.

In fact, they reserve subtle, soft grays, blacks, and muted hues for packaging for their own local Japanese-made foods, and associate bright, loud, primary colors (reds, yellows, oranges, blues) with foreign, Western food packages, whose people they consider to [be] brash and loud.

Research has demonstrated that the relationship between visual perceptions and food colours are very close. Importantly, people prefer food colours that match their memories. It’s also clear that even subtle shifts in colour can affect perceptions of taste, smell and flavour.

Some of these colour perceptions are what you would expect from nature; red being associated with sweetness in ripe fruits, and green unripe fruits suggesting tart or sourness to the taste. This association with colour speaks not only to the link between flavour identities but also of intensity. Garber et al. (2008) point to the influence in new messages from marketing in creating a link between blue colouring and raspberry flavouring over a relatively short period of time, indicating that we can, as consumers, be reprogrammed. There are other category conventions in snack brands, such as purple meaning salt and vinegar, green meaning chicken, and blue meaning plain salt. When new brands play with these codes they lead to consumer irritation since they impact on navigation.

“To the extent that we are what we eat, and what we eat has been influenced by advertising, advertising has helped determine what we are, physically as well as emotionally”

Arthur A. Berger

Do we know what we are eating?

The influence of colour on taste can come from elsewhere in the eating experience: ‘the brain integrates visual input (such as color), not only from the food itself, but also from the container, packaging or plateware from which it is being consumed’. This is clear from the Kuro burger example that is discussed above, where the eastern and western connotations of colours created different understandings of what the food experience would be like.

A consideration here is that even when we are in charge of all our senses, we are often fooled by context and labels. Edward Dolnick has documented a series of studies where one sense can over-ride our sense of what is real.

“…news of the great fish fraud broke recently, New York’s elite restaurateurs rushed to defend their sushi. Phony labels on the red snapper? Knock-off tuna? Not to worry. Top chefs can’t be fooled, they insisted, nor can their customers. “It is impossible to mislead people who have knowledge,” declared Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin”. But they were.

Recently in an Australian Craft Beer Festival an overt mainstream beer won a craft beer prize in different clothes, exploiting the same principle that the tongue follows the mind.

East and Western Tastes

Before looking at some of the interesting differences between east and west cuisine, it is worth staying on the sensory level for a moment.   Recent research has been able to look at the chemical differences of eastern and western food tastes. This is important because your palate is trained from an early age to certain flavour expectations.

A recent study by Ahn, et al (2011) looked at why western and eastern foods taste differently. The study has suggested these differences come down to chemistry. They found that Western food seeks out ‘food pairs’ with matching chemical tastes. Whereas, Asian food is the opposite of this pairing – the aim here is to avoid pairing ingredients that share flavours. The more flavours that two ingredients share, the less likely they are to be used in Asian cuisine. Whereas, thirteen prime ingredients (butter, eggs, milk, etc.) appear in 74.4% of North American dishes. The co-occurrence of the more common ingredients is illustrated below.

The logic behind food pairing is guided across many Asian cuisines by a belief that within a meal there is a need to balance the forces of “yin” and “yang”. Foods are considered to have cold or hot properties, and foods of both types are often served together in balance for good health.

Key differences between east and west cuisines

The following is a summation of some of the key differences of western and eastern cuisines. There are many more, however, these are representative of the four stages of making a meal.

Ingredients

One-third of all the food that is eaten today across most cultures has been treated by some kind of fermentation. A key difference between east-and-west is that the west has never fermented beans. Paul Levy discussing the work of Sidney Mintz:

It is essential at the outset to notice that, while Western diets include a good deal of fermented dairy produce, especially cheese – of which we have a staggeringly large variety – pickled fish, meats and vegetables, and cereals (just think of the hundred-plus single malt Scotch whisky brands, and thousands of beers and wines), “the lack of fermented legumes in Western culinary traditions seems slightly puzzling at least”.

Eastern culinary cultures also make use of fermented cereals, vegetables and foods of animal origin. Fermented legumes may seem simply to be a bonus, until we explore exactly what they are, and begin to realize that they are central to the cuisines in which they feature.

These barriers continue to be broken down in a global market; we can see fermentation traditions being co-opted, e.g. Yamazaki single malt whiskey won the 2014 world awards with:

Whisky expert Jim Murray awarded a record-equalling 97.5 marks out of 100 to Suntory’s Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013, hailing it as “near indescribable genius” in his comments in the forthcoming 2015 World Whiskey Bible.

A much older fermentation borrowing is Worcestershire sauce, which is a variation on a Indian fermented fish sauce (anchovy) recipe that are valued in eastern cooking.

In western diets we tend to store and purchase frozen goods. Whereas, many eastern products are stored by being pickled, removing the need to keep them refrigerated.

In shortcutting meals, a western approach is to buy frozen meals for convenience; eastern practice is more to buy food that has been partly prepared. Shopping for food in the western world is largely a solitary one (mums won’t forgive me saying this), but in comparison, buying the daily food in many eastern cultures is a communal and social active process. ‘Street Food’ is a more regular part of life.

Eastern cooking tends to be based around vegetables and grains; whereas Western traditions are focused around the protein, with vegetables and an accompaniment. This has influenced the evolution of supporting cutlery, as discussed previously.

Cooking

There are some significant differences between western and eastern cooking practices:

1. Western cooking is measured and is relatively technical; Eastern cooking is more based on intuition and the ‘rule of thumb’.
2. Eastern cooking can start with a live or whole animal – often involving the butchery of the animal at home. Western cooking outsources the butchery. Western cooks struggle to know where their cuts of protein come from, whilst eastern cooks are more conscious.
3. Cooking implements reflect this difference. Eastern food is cut up into pieces that can be manipulated with chop sticks. Western food is often cut with a knife and fork so that it can be eaten.
4. There are ‘flavour principles’ that Rozin, et al. has identified that certain olfactory and gustory complexes of a given cuisine; for example the flavour-principles of garlic/tomato/olive oil in Italian food or Sweet/Sour/Chilli in Thai food.
5. Eastern cooking is generally more concerned with aesthetics than Western. In China, the notion of mei-shi (lit., beautiful food; i.e., gourmet food) is almost a household word. Foodie culture has only relatively recently been mainstreamed in the West. It can be argued that in the arena of luxury food, this is not true for all of Western cooking. Although as Cutler, et al. has stated ‘while verbally projecting an image of culinary hauteur, many Americans are also cooking less and eating processed food more’.

Setting

In western cultures, eaters are organised around tables and we sit in chairs. In eastern traditions, eaters will sit at group level or at tables. In the Western setting the individual will often eat from their own plate – the setting distancing us from other eaters.

Cutlery is also a way of distancing the eater from their food, compared to eating with one’s hands. There is also a much more delimitated space between the kitchen and the eating area in Western meals.   In eastern meals often you sit around the cooking pot.

In Eastern traditions, the setting is communal; here the host shares the meal amongst the guests. The function of the shared meal is to bring people closer through sharing a common dish. A more complex form of this symbolism is the Catholic communion ritual is communal – it demonstrates membership to a community of believers through symbolic food and drink. In eastern eating traditions, likewise, the individual fits into the eastern setting, reinforcing the role of unity and family.

This can be compared to the modern western life where the isolation of meals is a common theme, as explored by Matt Braunger in this skit:

(Embedded Video)

Eating

A difference that most people would have experienced through a Chinese banquet or similar meal is that Western meals come out in a sequence, whereas eastern meals are presented all at once.

The cutlery that is used by the different cuisines is the most noticeable part of the two eating traditions for many people. Competency with a chopstick speaks to the ‘foodie’ and well-travelled westerner.

There are more shared condiments in Eastern traditions, whereas the consumer drive in the West is for condiments that speak to your individuality.

Another significant difference is that cold drinks are served with western meals, and hot drinks are served with eastern meals.   For Eastern traditions, this is how they perceive the harmony of the ingredients that are being eaten.

Conclusion

“Food has a constant tendency to transform itself into situation”

Roland Barthes

It is easy to pull apart the stereotypes of the more communal sharing of meals of the East against the more formal, individual and denuclearised Western meal. In practice, meals still perform an important shared social experience that creates bonds in all cultures.   However, particularly in the west, the concept of lifestyle has become much more of a prominent identity marker of individuality, making particular food choices one of the ways we formulate and share our identities in the modern world. Many today belong to dietary tribes of Paleo, Vegan, Omni, etc. as additional ways of creating our identities and demonstrating membership to ways of living.

What is interesting is that as the globalisation project continues to develop, many of the boundaries of the regional cuisines are getting more blurred. Hybrid and fusion cuisines have introduced new ways of cooking and are trending back to authentic recipes, now that palates have been trained.

Food is still nutrition and this is leading to some big changes from a physiological perspective. E.g. the Japanese have been growing taller from their changes in diets; to the extent that subway doors have had to be made taller. This has been attributed to the high protein western diet. In the 1960’s and 1970’s ‘Early researchers discovered that children born in the U.S. of immigrants were generally taller than those who were born in other countries’. A consideration is that there are health concerns that are closely linked to these physiological changes.

Perhaps in an increasingly global world we should reflect on what influence we take from different food cultures. The western diet has many critics:

In the United States and most Western countries, diet-related chronic diseases represent the single largest cause of morbidity and mortality. These diseases are epidemic in contemporary Westernized populations and typically afflict 50–65% of the adult population, yet they are rare or non-existent in hunter-gatherers and other less Westernized people.

Studies such as the China Study, by T. Colin Campbell have also identified differences between western and Chinese diets and correlated these to chronic disease and increases in cancer rates.

The question is, is the culinary influence going the right way in a global world? East or West?

Why write about Justice?

Looking back, Justice and Injustice have made frequent headlines over 2014, in fact for most of the last decade. Whilst I’m not in the legal profession, I feel qualified to have an opinion, as I’ve being lawful across the span of my life (maybe Gladwell is right and having been lawful for at least 10,000 hours we are all more than laymen here). Like most people, I live by laws that I’ve never directly had a hand in writing. Perhaps this might identify me as a dutiful civic sheep, compared to the shepherd, sheepdog… or a wolf. Though ultimately, living in a democracy, we have the choice to vote in lawmakers that can change laws, to reflect how we think society should be organised. I don’t believe you have to be an in-law in order to have an opinion, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Upon reflection, I’ve travelled the world and seen different versions of ‘justice’ and ‘law’; I’ve lived in relaxed countries and more authoritarian ones. I’ve experienced cultures that challenge some of my foundational thinking about what human rights and Justice are; and been flummoxed at societies that appear erroneously litigious, e.g. urinating standing up is illegal after 10pm.

The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.

Sigmund Freud

A hypothesis is that over the last decade there has been significant erosion as to what justice means. There have been seismic shifts in the cultural and social fabric of the western world. Within the postmodern swirl of activity and change, it is the norm to challenge the establishment, the old dogma and the ‘grand narratives’. Enthused and enabled by social and technological changes, modern society continues to push and challenge many boundaries, with positive and sometimes questionable effects. These have been across nearly all spheres of modern life: religious, social, racial, cultural and political dimensions.

Within the very broad subject of Justice, I’m interested in the changing stories about justice that are told in popular culture. Historically, Justice was seen as being black or white, good or evil; there are now shades of justice and morality that dominate the ever-popular genre of law and crime. From a semiotic sense, what are the underlying structures behind many of these legal stories we tell? How are these changing in relation to an audience that is living in a rapidly changing world? (How) Is this changing our perceptions of justice in a modern world?

This is a big topic, so I’m going to break it into two posts:

• This part will focus on the symbolism of Justice and the structural aspects of Justice stories in popular culture.
• Will look at how perceptions of law enforcers are changing with popular culture as a result.

What is the symbolism of Justice?

The more laws, the less justice.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Where do we get our symbolism of Justice from? What Justice is, has been a consistent topic of discussion from the earliest times. Is Justice is part of law or a moral judgment about the practice of law? How we talk about Justice and injustice can shed some light on contemporary perceptions.

The symbolism of law, like many western institutions is influenced by my different cultural and religious sources. We can look first at our common laws. If we reflect, many modern democracies share the same philosophical foundations of jurisprudence from the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments. Even if you don’t believe in ‘God’, most modern western countries are living in a society based on beliefs descending from these ancient religious laws.

In a more secularised society, many have commented that the Decalogue has become less relevant and harder to interpret within modern times. Consider this; does the following description remind you of anyone? That you swear occasionally; don’t consider yourself religious; work hard, often over weekends; love your sport; struggle to see your parents as much as they would like; have wondered too-hard-and-often why people find the Kardashians or George Clooney attractive; believe you pay too much tax; and wonder why your neighbour has a better house than you, considering they are really rather ordinary? Allowing for a little bit of poetic license, loosely, you might have broken 9 of the 10 commandments. Murder is the only religious and social taboo that we won’t cross (well depending on your perspective on the death penalty, maybe some do).

The penetration of the Decalogue for much of the west comes from its central role in the early Roman Empire and the codification of laws by the Emperor Justinian and following legal normalisation that followed. The Corpus Juris Civilis or Codex Justinianus was issued between 529 to 534 AD. These efforts of a common code of law created a more stable and sole source of law across the effort: introducing the significant innovation of culturally transferable jurisprudence. If this was the historical reality, the image of the wise judge and the role of the interpretation of law come from the bible in the image of the wise King Solomon.

It’s worth noting that, Solomon’s famous legal ruling to cut the child in half is a clever evocation of the Justice with its sword and scales (discussed more below). His ruling instructs that law must be mediated by wisdom and the understanding of human nature.

Justice and injustice over the last decade

Since my starting hypothesis is that perceptions of Justice are changing, it’s important to look at western-democracies and the prominent news stories over the last decade. What we see is the increasing erosion in the absolutism of law. I’ll only list a few examples here, there are many more (depending on your political leanings some of these might be over-or-under stated as examples of justice or injustice)

On both sides of the Atlantic, lawmakers have been shown to be breaking and stretching the law. Bill Clinton managed to mangle the very definition of what a legal lie is. The Gulf War raised many challenges to concepts of international justice, e.g. the American Government claimed that lacunae or gaps-in-law amount to the non-prohibition of an action, therefore not making certain behaviour illegal. English MP’s and law lords were shown to be stealing from the public purse through their expensive claims. There is the lasting public perception of the increased tensions between the 1% and the rest of us, exasperated by the lack of criminal charges against individuals for the GFC. In the religious domain, the Catholic Church has been criticised for its criminal handling of child abuse by ‘one in 50’ of its priests. More recently, maybe not that surprising to the citizens of many nations, shadowy government departments have been illegally surveilling each other and their own citizens. In fact, it’s almost too easy to find examples where the law has been ‘broken’ though exigent circumstances or fuzzy loop holes. It’s almost expected that some new political neologism will obfuscate behaviour that previously would have been unsanctioned. All of this is cumulatively creating an impression that injustice balances out justice; where Justice should balance out the law and criminality.

What are the mythical origins of our conception of Justice that influences its use in popular culture?

To understand Justice in popular culture as something separate from law, it’s important to realise that we humanise and identify with the concept of justice intuitively. We seem to have an innate sense of what we consider fair, just and right (although this varies by culture and over time). While law is discussed in the abstract, it is perceived as being something that is written down. Justice is personified – we give Justice a human face to match our own.

In order to understand our perceptions of Justice, it is worth looking at some of the ways it has been conceptualised and symbolised. Please excuse the brevity here – I’m going to focus on prominent themes; it would be very easy to go into a deeper discussion.

Greek and Roman mythology is as influential as the Bible in our understanding of law and justice. Moreover, many of this early Greco-Roman mythography remains relevant and influential in how we understand many concepts of law within society and culture today.

Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant.

Henry David Thoreau

Since primordial times, humankind has linked the enforcement of laws and Justice with the cosmos. This is the cosmological opposition of order to chaos, which is at the heart of many belief systems; order, chaos; dark, light; good, evil; etc. is the macrocosm to our own legal needs. This can be illustrated in early Egyptian beliefs. Ma’at was both goddess of balance, order, law and justice but also responsible for the order of the stars and the seasons. Ma’at and her brother Thoth (also responsible for science, magic, writing and judgement) were jointly responsible for balancing Ra’s boat in the universe; they were also jointly responsible for the judgement of the dead. How we live our lives as mortal beings were contextualised with the universe being in balance. Justice that is sanctioned and endorsed by religion has the aspect of everlasting judgement and importance; every action we make has eternal implications.

Later, the Greco-Roman traditions were more complex in highlighting different aspects of law and Justice (showing am influence of the older Egyptian belief systems). The Greek meta-conception of Justice was divine so we find other deities having roles here. Astraea, in Greek myth, was the Greek Goddess of Justice, who fleeing humanities dark side, ascended to the heavens to become the constellation Virgo (noting that Ma’at was a stellar goddess as well).   Another leading related deity here was Themis, a Greek titan who represented ‘divine’ or ‘natural’ law. Her daughter with Zeus was Dike, who represented custom or law, judgement and conventional laws. Her symbols are the scales and are associated with the constellation Libra. Dike’s Roman counterpart was Justitia who was similar, but more typically wore a blindfold. In discussing these myths, depending on the time, there are many inter-related stories and properties. There are many other legal demigods and spirits that performed legal role, such as the Furies. However, the focus here is on the personification of Lady Justice as the figure used most commonly today.

Modern Traditions of this Symbolism

Many remark justice is blind; pity those in her sway, shocked to discover she is also deaf.

David Mamet, Faustus

In a symbolic form, Lady Justice appears in modernity in varying forms of the same theme. Justice is female; holding the scales of justice in clothing that evokes the Roman era, holding a sword of her power. She can be shown as being more or less maiden-like depending on the influence from either Astraea or the more mature, Themis. The main contemporary difference is whether she is shown blindfolded (connoting impartiality) or not.

This ‘blindness’ has been a theme through popular-culture.   There have been various different permutations of this theme. Back in the 90’s, there was the short-lived TV series ‘Dark Justice’ with its signature call-to-action ‘Justice might be blind but can be seen in the dark’. In this story, the Judge is also a rebellious vigilante by night. Dispensing justice of a night, for criminals that aren’t found guilty by jurisprudence in his court room.

[embedded video]

There were other series such as: Blind Justice where ‘NYPD Detective Jim Dunbar returns to work after being blinded in the line of duty’.

These shows were heavily influenced by the Marvel character ‘Dare Devil’ also known by his alter ego, Matt Murdock

Created by Stan Lee and artists Bill Everett and Jack Kirby in 1964, Matt Murdock wears a ‘Dare Devil’ costume to patrol the ‘evil’ that is present in ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ New York. As Matt Murdock, he lost his sight in an accident as a child that gave him ESP ‘sonar’ powers.   Seeking to avenge his father’s murder by criminals, during the day he fights as a blind lawyer for justice as a defense lawyer, and at night he is a vigilante that fights evil more directly. This plays on this tension of Lady Justice being blind, innocent, but also holding the sword of action. Many of the Dare Devil story lines revolve around moral dilemmas, situations where an individual’s interpretation of law is stretched and challenged.

Are Justice and Law mutually exclusive?

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

Aristotle

When we look at the use of the structural meaning-axes of ‘Justice’ we can see there are consistent uses of meaning. There are degrees to which we behave within the law (or outside of it), that structure many stories that are centred on the law.

Much of modern depiction of Justice in popular culture appears to revolve around the tension of Justice and Jurisprudence. Often questioning the ‘letter of the law’ as something very different from the ‘spirit of the law’. Justice has a qualitative dimension that functions beyond the written law; as the practice of law has been defined as an interpretative practice. From a moral perspective, Justice can be defined as operating without a written law.

Justice, n.

1. Administration of law or equity.
2. Maintenance of what is just or right by the exercise of authority or power; assignment of deserved reward or punishment; giving of due deserts.

Oxford English Dictionary

From a legal perspective, Justice and law appear closely related. However, in more lay terms, there is a perception that laws are inflexible whereas Justice is meant to be about what is right or wrong. This sets up a tension ‘Emotion is unalterably opposed to reason and thus to Justice itself’ (Pillsbury). Perhaps in frustration with a legal system that has too many perceived bias, unfairness and inconsistencies, many rally behind the Old Testament sentiments of ‘lex talionis’:

‘But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.’ Exodus 21-24

In modern narratives, the rational application of Justice is often juxtaposed to the emotional demand for exacting justice that verges on revenge. It is this tension that is a core component of many modern crime stories that I shall explore more in the following post.

A Semiotic Structural Model of how we use Justice in Narratives

At a structural level, there are two axes of meaning when it comes to Justice Stories:

1. Those that follow the law and those that are criminals
2. Those that are within the system and those on the outside

Within this model of justice we can identify four quadrants of meaning:

1. Lawful: Those that enforce the law and justice of the majority (or governing elite)
2. Rebel: Those that resist the law or the rulers; defined as criminal behaviour they still are beholden to laws they recognise in who they rebel for (this is a social dimension).
3. Anarchist: Those that refuse to accept any perception of laws; they act outside of legal systems and conventional morality.
4. Corrupt: Those that are unlawful; they are usually within the enforcement of laws but are acting for personal gain.

If we look at the history of the crime genre, the first two examples are established icons of storytelling. The final two are relative newbies to popular culture.

What we see are two phases of storytelling across this matrix in modern narratives:

The first Phase focused on the direct binary-opposition of Good with Evil: Lawful with Criminal. There are a range of TV series that balance out the forces of Law and Order or CSI (hyphenate a city here), that present stories about the balance of the battle of good and evil. I’ll discuss these series in more detail in the second part of this topic in a separate post.

What we are seeing is that the second phase is becoming the more frequent way to tell crime stories. While not totally replacing traditional stories of an almost Manichean perspective on the battle of law vs crime, these stories are changing our perceptions of the protagonists and antogonists.

The second Phase has two story arcs.

1. Corruption Stories: There have been a series of corruption storylines such as Black Rain , The Shield or Shawshank Redemption that have focused on the tension between Corrupt Law officials and the Lawful.

1. Legal Rebel Stories: More recently, as we the audience have descended into a modernity-malaise where the system is broken, we have seen stories focusing on ‘rebel with a cause’ narratives. The battle is by the morally correct individual that is framed as fighting against the inertia of an almost totally corrupt system. A system that appears incapable of curing itself.

We can explore this through a wide range of examples of stories that invoke a sense of Justice and Law.

Batman: Story Structure

One of the giants and originators of this story arc, is the ‘Batman’ mythos by Bob Kane

Here we can see the role of the ‘Dark Knight’ representing the meaning-quadrant of ‘enforce law/criminal’ which is the opposition to a corrupt cop. Likewise the law/enforcer, in Police Commissioner Gordon, is opposed by the anarchist criminality of the Joker. When writer’s talk of Batman and the Joker being different sides of the same coin, that coin is in how they relate to law as both being not-legal. Batman fights to protect the innocents from an impotent system; whilst the Joker is almost post-moral thought the intensity of his insanity. Together, Batman and Gordon are a different reflection on being a ‘detective’ for good from within and outside of the system.

Star Wars: Story Structure

This structure of Justice can be applied to more multi-generational telling of stories, such as George Lucas’s Star Wars triple-trilogy.

The models above shows how different generations of the same story are represented through individual and collective protagonists across these dimensions. In the first trilogy, the focus is on Luke, Yoda, the Emperor and Han Solo. In the Second trilogy, the collectives are the focus: the Empire, the nascent Rebellion, the Senate and leadership of Senator Palpatine, the collective corruption figure headed by the Hutt (Jabba Desilijic Tiure).

Person of Interest: Story Structure

A more modern telling of this story can be seen in ‘Person of Interest’. Here the mythical spirit of ‘Justice’ is replaced by an artificial intelligence. This omniscient computer system can predict crime by observing everything we do. Built to recognised threats to a post 9/11 world, the computer remains motivated to communicate all crimes to one of its creators, perhaps suggesting digital morality. Interestingly, it identifies potential victims blindly by numbers (evoking Lady Justice).

Here we see all four articulations of Justice expressed through this meaning matrix. The good cops opposed to the corrupt police, collectively known as HR. The former lawful protagonists of the story are ex-CIA and fight against the corruption in the CIA and criminal world.

Arrow: Story Structure

If we think through the perspective of the righteous vigilantes of the Batman mythos, new series like Arrow (Green Arrow) still evoke similar dimensions of meaning around Justice. This is an interesting version because Green Arrow’s origins are a very obvious modern telling of the Robin Hood story. In many ways, Oliver Queens’ genesis was a more fun reflection of the Bruce Wayne and Batman storyline. Both are Billionaires, both have sidekicks, etc. However, the current TV series is as dark as the Batman storylines.

Hannibal: Story Structure

Over the last decade, there has also been the emergence of the serial-killer genre where these anti-heroes, as protagonists, mix-and-blur what the ‘antagonist’ really means within these narratives. I’ve used Hannibal here, but Dexter follows almost the same structure.

Some Judgements

Is it just a reflection of the post-modern mood that we don’t trust the establishment? Or, is the story telling we are seeing influencing our growing mistrust of the law and their ability to deliver Justice?

If we look at the current storylines, we see that there is a tendency for the starting point to be the assumption that the entire system of Justice is so broken that only a morally-minded individual can attempt to cure the corruption from the outside, rather than from within. Good cops are rare, isolated and ineffectual in a world of corruption or ineptitude.

What we see is that there is a call-to-action within these stories for all of us to act as individuals to make a change; that one person can still effect change. They evoke the much quoted thought

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke

This type of message resonates on a more mythical level. Bob Cane was influenced by Zorro to write Batman, and Green Arrow in Robin Hood are revolutionary figures. These types of literary archetypes speak to a deeper mythological role of seasonal change. In seasonal springs, this is the triumph of spring over the entrenched winter; the spring prince challenging the winter king. This is Robin Hood challenging Guy of Gisborne, representing the old and stagnant order, being replaced by the new order.  All of the modern crime stories evoke the need for revolution.

This raises two questions – if popular culture is a reflection of realpolitik

1. Is it just fiction or do we believe that the lawful side of society is contaminated by the ‘corrupt’?
2. Do we think only the rule-breakers or system-challengers are those that can fight for the laws and justice of the majority?

In a post-Snowden and Assange world this raises some interesting questions about how change will happen in an increasingly ‘by-default’ authoritarian world as technology seamlessly enters every part of our lives. If increasingly, our stories have are shifting to themes that the system must be fixed from the outside, what does this say about the coherence of society? Does explain the rise of new political parties, defining themselves as not being part of the establishment? Perhaps the question is not how long will Lady Justice be blind, but how long we are willing to keep the blinkers on for?

Vigilantism and Justice in modern society

The last few years haven’t been good for law-enforcement agencies in Western countries. There are many examples of both police and public failures of trust. While relationships are strained, in practice, the vast majority of law-enforcement are commendable civil servants; as are the majority of citizens who appear to respect the police and the service that they provide. However, increasingly, our law enforcers are not held in the same esteem that they once were. It is interesting to ask, why? What has changed these perceptions?

I started becoming interested in the influence of popular culture on our perceptions after a conversation with a friend where I was criticising the dilution of the law through many aspects of modern storytelling. For example, I stated that many TV shows have fallen into the habit of the coercing cooperation through unsanctioned threats of violence, rape and death that will happen in jail, rather than the existing legal penalties. It is easy to find examples of this from TV, on the long running Law & Order franchise, to films like the Siege. If the trump card in these stories is what criminals will do to each other, rather than what the system will do to them, in some ways this can be seen as passively endorsed criminal behavior.

What does this suggests to the audience? That law enforcer’s lack conviction of the legal system they are part of? Is there a need for more persuasive penalties than we currently offer? This is a curious discourse for many countries that have dropped the death penalty as part of the legal system, but in our stories we often read or see the combined threat of our legal system’s penalty plus the threat of unsanctioned violence or death. This could be another symptom of the postmodern condition; having de-fanged the threat of eternal punishment from religion, do we need a hyperbolic threat in the near future to motivate lawful behavior?

I know that some reading will point out that it is easy to separate entertainment and fiction from reality. Don’t we all agree to suspend disbelief about these approaches to law because it makes for some exciting storytelling? Rationally I agree, however, I suspect the cumulative and consistent framing of law enforcement is starting to shift perceptions in the western world.

This is the second part of some thinking about the law in popular culture that I have been writing about. While the previous post focused on the nature of Justice, this post is focused on those that enforce the laws. A hypothesis explored in the previous post, and expanded here, is that popular culture is framing the way that many in western cultures perceive the law, the legal profession and our law enforcers.

There are many crime story themes, structures and tropes from a semiotic perspective that frame the way that we think. The continued experimentation and development of these narrative elements is resulting in a continuing shift in public perceptions about law enforcers. The following presents an exploration of some of those that appear more influential in contemporary storytelling.

There are two parts to this discussion:

A: Justice and Vengeance – who wields the sword of Justice in popular culture?

B: Perceptions of Modern Law Enforcers in Popular Culture

Part A: Justice and Vengeance – who wields the sword of Justice in popular culture?

Good, Evil and the Law

Continuing a thought from the preceding post is that Justice is something that is not necessarily moralistic. However, we tend to perceive the perception of law in moralistic terms.

In very general terms, this positions most perceptions of law-enforcers around four quadrants of meaning:

1. Good/Law: The guardians or keepers of the law – those that enforce the law.
2. Evil/Law: We recognise that corruption is part of law-keeping – where individuals might partake in the abuse of their power for personal gain.
3. Evil/Outlaw: Criminals act outside of law; they are not part of the civic body.
4. Good/Outlaw: There is a grey area where people break the law for good reasons, e.g. being a whistle-blower.

It is in the enforcement of law that we see the ‘grey’ areas present in the Good/Outlaw quadrant that are most informative about society today. This is a contradiction that can be perceived in different ways. While the opposing quadrant of Evil/Law is more black and white, the Good/Outlaw quadrant is potentially good or evil depending on your starting perspective. The recent actions of wikileaks or Edward Snowden have been discussed from different sides of the media ring as being either criminal or heroic. The actions of vigilantes are likewise discussed as being those of a person delivering Justice or an individual taking law into their own hands.

Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.

Samuel Johnson

A righteous murder?

There has been a consistent drive across cultures for extra-legal justice, driven by the relatable need of the victims of crime to want or seek their pound of flesh. In the Old Testament this comes from a law of ‘Lex Talionis’ or ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ – justice that is balanced as by Justitia.   Considering the drive to ‘take the law into your own hands’, there are many belief systems that have deities seeking to limit this drive directly. By making justice a divine responsibility, this defuses the need for continuing reciprocal feuds. So it is easy to find many cross cultural examples; in Egyptian mythology, Sekhmet is seen as the goddess of vengeance as ‘she who mauls’. In Greek mythology, Nemesis was the goddess of divine retribution and revenge; Adrestia was the goddess of revenge and retribution; and the Furies or Erinyes were deities of vengeance. In Judeo-Christian contexts, the right to balance the scales of justice for those that don’t appear to be punished enough, there is exclusively the province of God. In many cultures, belief systems provide a consistent restraint on this primordial impulse of humankind for revenge. In a modern and more secular world we don’t have this omnipresent constraint.

If we look at the way that Justice (as an outcome of Jurisprudence) vs Vengeance can be understood in contemporary stories, it can be mapped across the following meaning dimensions.

Here there are more personal vs societal implications of justice. Additionally, there are differences in the humanism involved in capital punishments and the arguments for both sides. This can be illustrated easily by looking at popular culture.

There are four themes for story telling around these dimensions:

1. Punitive-Justice: “Judge, Jury and Executioner” – there are two prominent trans-Atlantic examples in Dirty Harry or Judge Dread of Megacity One in 2000AD comics. Both men unilaterally dispense of justice on the spot as they see it.
2. Corrective-Justice: Heroes like Superman and Daredevil live by moral codes of non-lethal force. They apprehend criminals but are also known for dispensing looser-justice on occasion where there are grey areas.
3. Corrective-Vengeance: A darker space; anti-heroes like Batman seek vengeance for their personal tragedies. With little restraint, just short of death, they apprehend criminals for incarceration. More recently, the horror series SAW explores a serial killer that illuminates through corrective vengeance that includes grisly murders.
4. Punitive-Vengeance: The vigilantes that take the law into their own hands and operate outside of the law. Frank Castle in Marvel Comics, a devout catholic ex-military who turns homicidal crime fighter after his family is killed by drug dealers. In many ways, denouncing God to take vengeance into his own hands.

A vigilante is defined by the OED as:

A member of a self-appointed group of citizens who undertake law enforcement in their community without legal authority, typically because the legal agencies are thought to be inadequate.

Vigilantism appears to rise when there is a perception that the system is no longer functioning. When NYC was struggling with high crime rates, Berhhard Goetz, in 1984 shot four men and was dubbed the ‘subway vigilante’. This is one of many examples that can be found globally. These accounts involve a citizen taking justice into their own hands.

In popular culture, most vigilante stories are influenced by the crimes that create, define and drive them. Many are variations on the influential Batman story, recognising that Batman was influenced by earlier vigilante stories such as Zorro, The Scarlet Pimpernel or Robin Hood. Batman was a definitively more urban, modern and darker psychological telling of this original story. A modern interpretation of the Batman story is serial killer, Dexter. It is easy to see the many similarities between these two characters:

Dexter is a modern version of Batman in a society that is looking for a different kind of hero to challenge the evil we perceive around us.

The vigilante remains a favoured theme by Hollywood and its audiences, there are many variations on this subject

Part B: Perceptions of Modern Law Enforcers in Popular Culture

No one likes to be told what to do

Law Enforcement gets a bad rap, after-all, who likes to be caught doing something they shouldn’t? They are the human face of often black-and-white rules that subjectively appear unfair, like parking tickets, etc. Additionally, being part of the establishment, police are often perceived as being the arm of the ruling classes. Often, when there is societal discord, this paints them as the agents of oppression, rather than the guardians of the law.

When annoyed by them, we tend to think of law enforcement in derogatory terms, such as ‘pigs’.

Although, the origin of the word was more positive when it was first introduced, it has overtime become more derogatory. The first English Constabulary were called ‘Bobbies’ or ‘Peelers’, after Sir Robert Peel that commissioned their service. The OED cites the use of the word in relation to a ‘Bow Street Runner’ in 1811 – the location of the first headquarters, these police where attached to the Bow Street Magistrates office. The continued association of police with ‘pigs’ have led to popular culture icons such as Chief Clarence “Clancy” Wiggum from the Simpsons, characterised by his piggish behaviour in being stupid, lazy and prone to gluttony. Al Jean, a creator, has admitted, the porcine nature of Wiggum is a ‘conscious pun’. The Simpsons did not create this stereotype but they have helped to reinforce it.

To be balanced, popular culture has also shown a great deal of respect and appreciation for the sacrifices made by law enforcers. A notable example was after the tragedy of 9/11

Is there an ability hierarchy in Modern Law-enforcement?

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.”

Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

As social apes, we are wired to be personally and socially competitive. This introduces hierarchies into many facets of society and culture. As a result, we are wired to expect hierarchies in society and culture and draw conclusions from these associations. Stories introduce and frame our law enforcement agencies as hierarchical organisations. There is a consistent message of elitism, true or not, in the way that Hollywood tells its crimes stories. For example, we can look at the main branches of law-enforcement on two sides of the Atlantic.

An implication of this model suggests that the visible arm of law-enforcement are not the best and brightest, just the able and willing. While I don’t believe this distribution of talent is true, I do believe this is a frequent message from contemporary crime stories. Think of a TV show or film where the person went down this on this model, it isn’t framed as career diversification or development, it’s never a promotion. How many times do we see detectives demoted to being beat cops, e.g. in Lethal Weapon 3, Riggs and Murtaugh were put into beat cop uniforms as punishment, demoted from detective Gold to Silver badges. In simplistic terms, in Hollywood, not wearing a uniform is a promotion in law enforcement. Does this imply that the law enforcement officers we do see in uniform are not the best? There are increasingly less uniform cop shows on TV which would contribute to this impression.

It is possible the recent surprise by some American commentators at seeing a paramilitary response to several situations in 2014 is related to this model. This was not just a reaction to a more militarised America and a belief that domestic police were now over weaponised. Some commentators at the time were discussing these paramilitary cops as playing out some dream of being soldiers. Seeing people we don’t think of as being elite dressing up as elite soldiers can create some concerns.

From a different perspective, this can be seen in a review of the Video Game, BattleField Hardline, Chris Plante opines:

Battlefield Hardline moves the Battlefield series from international battlegrounds to a realistic domestic setting: As tricked out police, the player in Hardline uses heavy weaponry, armor and vehicles to kill criminals in Los Angeles. Despite the move, the series’ fetishization of military weaponry, gear and lethal combat remains.

Cops and soldiers are not the same thing. They serve different purposes. Soldiers often serve in war zones, in direct conflict with our nation’s enemies. The police serve in our cities, protecting and policing our nation’s civilians.

And so Hardline is an uncomfortable role play within a role play: the player pretending to be a cop pretending to be a soldier.

With over a decade of living through the ‘war on terror’, the traditional roles of policing are evolving to meet a different type of threat. As much as there has been a change in policing, there has also been increasing light shed on the less-visible parts of a countries law-enforcement.

Stupid is as Stupid Does

Another way to consider how popular culture shapes the way that we perceive law-enforcement is how these stories solve the need for narrative-tension. Without a tension, something to correct or resolve, stories are merely passages of words. Without tension they lack the emotional resonance that we identify and engage with.

Stories use different tensions to create different dimensions of tension and suspense. In crime stories, a frequent trope is that of the system getting in the way of the ‘good’ cop. This is done in many different ways. At a broad level, we are shown law-enforcement with different levels of intelligence on a regular basis depending on the protagonist. For example:

The police in Law & Order are all competent crime fighters but are frequently frustrated by the different layers of bureaucracy often holding our heroes back from making their case. In Bones, FBI Booth is paired with a forensic anthropologist in a classic IQ/EQ tango, where intellect-vs-insight misunderstandings often create the tensions.

However, in some stories the police are framed as ‘fools’. In Dexter, the police are framed as being unobservant, as we see their ignorance of the bleeding-obvious through the eyes of a serial killer. In movies like Beverly Hills Cop, the grounded Axel Foley shows the naïve soft cops of Beverly Hills everything from proper detection to how to insert a banana in your exhaust. The implication here is that we are shown that not all police are equal on a very regular basis.

Writers often use the different branches of the law to create a tension due to who caught a case and whose jurisdiction the case falls to. In American series, a very frequent tension here is between normal police and the FBI.

In the film franchise Die Hard, feet-on-the-ground, yippie ki yay, recalcitrant NYC cop John McClane, is contrasted with the arrogant, sunglasses-at-night, FBI agents. You’re left in no doubt which branches of law-enforcements are fools; actually, the criminals in the film factor the rigid thinking of the FBI into their plans. In contrast to this, the long running serial, Criminal Minds, often hits tensions with local police enforcement who resent their taking over of the crime scene.

The net effect is that we are asked by different crime stories to believe that both the FBI and normal police are ‘fools’ and ‘smart’. Watching any show, we look for insight in the expectation of this dichotomy. With films like the Blues Brothers 2000, amongst many others, depicting them as unthinking lemmings, is it any surprise that we might question police actions?

[embedded video]

Mythic Considerations of Crime Fighting

‘There have been times when a danger upon the world…required the services of singular individuals’.

“M” in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

A further consideration is that some stories introduce crime fighters that operate outside of the normal legal system. A convention in some crime stories is that the system is not capable of dealing with all threats. This is the space where we see vigilantes or self-appointed heroes arise.

It is a rich theme of mythology that heroes arise when societies need them. The mythical heroes of the current age of storytelling are the ascendant comic heroes, who are now dominating the big screen. Marvel is believed to be releasing 3-4 superhero movies a year, planned up to 2028; not to mention the small screen series that are emerging like Game of Thrones, Flash, Gotham or Arrow.  Historically, heroes take many forms from Hercules, Sampson and Sinbad through to Captain America and beyond.

Why do we need mythic heroes? We can look deeper at the role of myths in storytelling, Claude Levi Strauss view was that

‘…myths help people overcome a contradiction they seen in the world by providing another contradiction, one that is soluble, into which the first can be absorbed’.

The idea that our police force is either corrupt or incapable of dealing with all of societies needs are contradictions that are being thought through in our contemporary stories.

Types of Heroes in stories

“For where might and justice are yoke-fellows – what pair is stronger than this?”

Aeschylus, Fragment 209

Heroes, come in two main types: Brawn and Brain. Following the conventions that have been discussed above, many of these stories are about heroes that operate within the establishment or on the fringe.

1. Physical / Establishment – These shows celebrate the alpha male taking down the criminal through a hunting metaphor. The rebooted Hawaii Five-O is a show that savours its criminal flight and takedowns. The show celebrates the fitness of its key actors taking down criminals through every imaginable square foot of Hawaii scenery. A couple of decades earlier shows like TJ Hooker were similar hunting and catching shows.
2. Physical / Non-establishment – These are shows where they are physical but are outside of the usual police establishment. The film SWAT shows the development of an elite paramilitary unit, compromising of misfits who come good. Although, aspects of shows such as Nikita (any of the three main versions) fit into this quadrant.
3. Mental/Non-establishment – The many Sherlock inspired shows fit into this quadrant. Intellectual assistance by a preternaturally gifted individual in deduction: Sherlock, Elementary, Mentalist, etc.
4. Mental / Establishment – Rise of the nerds. The true hero of science has its many faces in shows such as CSI, NCIS. The supporting characters are brought to the front assisted by ever-receptive detectives that wait for their instructions.

These basic meaning quadrants of Brain/Brawn or Establishment/Non-establishment can be found in many different forms. They can also be found working within the one narrative. For example, the movie, The Untouchables

Here the story was structured around these four narrative quadrants (historically there were ten men in the team that Ness led). In the real world, Elliot Ness was a fan of Sherlock Holmes and there are indications he tried to imitate his methods, which is why he is in the mental quadrant, even though he is educated to the physical by Malone across the movie.   In the film version, the team were successful because they operated outside of the legal system in many ways; they were a force that society needed from the outside – a mythical hero. Hence, George Stone was a rookie and Malone a cop, being punished for not fitting in was walking the beat to retirement. These are both officers that are not part of the corrupt police force of the time. Ness and Wallace were agents who operated outside of the system being FBI agents.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

Terry Pratchett

An analysis like this cannot attempt to cover all story permutations, so I am deliberately leaving aside comedy. From a thinking perspective, if we take Sherlock Holmes, it’s easy to find the more humorous examples of this in Peter Seller’s ‘Inspector Clouseau’. One of the most parodied crime fighters is James Bond 007, by characters such as Get Smart or Austin Powers; the IMDB lists 241 ‘spoofs’

Closing Comments

It is a convention that the sword of justice is wielded by the government of the day. In earlier times, the restraint on those looking for vengeance was tempered by the fear of divine retribution. In increasingly secular times where legal systems appear, at times to be blind to public opinion, popular culture has been a voice for this dissonance.  Occasionally vigilantes have taken the law into their own hands.

A consideration here is that the continuing evolution of our crime stories frame law-enforcement and justice itself as sometimes ineffectual, leaving criminals less intimidated and good citizens in doubt that they will get the Justice they desire.

The way that we tell stories about our law-enforcement officers does appear to frame them in several less-than-positive ways. In summary, some of the main ways are:

1. Within popular culture, law enforcement is generally shown through relatively negative frames of thought.

2. With recent history showing that law enforcement practices of western democracies are not infallible. In some cases, there appears to have been the conscious bending of laws in the pursuit of vengeance over justice.

3.  They raise questions over the quality and capabilities of all branches of our legal system.

As a result, if the earlier vigilantes were acting on the more physical sphere of taking justice into their own hands, there appears to be the emergence of a new class of modern intellectual-vigilantes. Wikileaks, Richard Snowden and even the Anonymous Hacking group are all prominent examples of this.

The emergence of such extra-legal forces suggests that the current legal system is struggling to deal with all of the changes of the modern world. Individuals are taking their concepts of justice and applying it outside of law that are representative of the broader community consensus.

A question to consider is whether popular culture is merely a reflection of this reality, a harmless imaginative exercise that has no real influence; or an evolving anthology of stories whose meaning and structures are slowly eroding confidence in the legal system. We’re a long way from the days that Police arrested criminals by telling them to “stop”.  If our elite law-enforcement doesn’t wear uniforms, their unsanctioned counterparts in justice don’t either.

Have we become the White Rabbit? The experience of Time in the Postmodern Era

1.     Talking to the hands

There has been a spate of articles about time recently, many of which seek to encapsulate social and cultural changes through abstract conceptions of time.   Time is an immeasurable topic to attempt to talk about. On the one hand, it has been discussed by so many disciplines, from so many perspectives; on the other, less visibly it forms how we semiotically engage in discourse on a daily basis. From a socio-cultural perspective, the cultural production of all meaning occurs across dialectical and systematic dimensions of space-and-time.   When we think of how time changes meaning, it is either synchronic (occurring at the same time) or diachronic (changing over time).

I’ve been interested in some of the dominant and residual ways that we talk about time – in that how we talk about time is a bellwether to our changing relationship with time today. The focus here is to limit this discussion to ‘time running out’; the current western obsession with being busy, time poor and always struggling to meet deadlines. While an opaque mantra of modern life is the pursuit of work/life balance, this can be contrasted to the very modern obsession on time running out; with the demands of modernity taxing even the most reasonable of lifestyles.

You must not think linearly. The water in these fountains doesn’t. Nature doesn’t; nature knows nothing of time. Time is an invention of the West.”

Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

   The White Rabbit

A pervasive literary evocation of the fear missing a deadline is that of the White Rabbit. The White Rabbit racing against the hands of the clock, with his head literally on the line. Lewis Carroll started his story of a young girl’s journey to adulthood; with the juxtaposition of the effect of time on the nervous and elderly rabbit, against the exuberant and innocent youth of Alice starting her life’s journey. The white rabbit in many ways is a metaphor for the modern bureaucrat worn down by time and the relentless pressure of time.

The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

In contemporary society, people don’t generally believe they are busier than the preceding generation, they believe they are ‘constantly on’ and connected to others across more parts of their lives; and that the world itself is moving faster. If we think about the difference of Pre-WW1 life, 90% of the population had an income that came from agriculture; in the following years this situation has reversed with explosions in urban living. Live has moved from the seasonal clock of agriculture to measuring our days by the movement of seconds.

What is the nature of time?

Time is a notoriously difficult concept to understand.

Zoltan Kovecses

The modern understanding of time is almost always anchored in the present, past and future. It is perhaps relevant here to draw the distinctions and meaning present in ‘time’ in the two ways that early Greek philosophy perceived time.

Time can be understood as an all-encompassing concept (synchronic) versus a more segmented and differentiated concept (diachronic) conception, fit into the standard discourse of modern society and culture. Current society understands the Chronos model – the causal relation of different modes of time, rather than perceiving time as an interrelated constant.

Science fiction, as always, often explores these deeper concepts in easier ways. In Star Trek DS9, Captain Sisko tries to explain our perception of time against a race of aliens that live in an Aion conception of time where they perceive all time simultaneously.

[Embedded video]

Metaphors of time.

This thing all things devours;

Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;

Gnaws iron, bites steel;

Grinds hard stones to meal;

Slays king, ruins town,

And beats mountain down.

The Hobbit

The metaphors that we use to explain time guides our perception of reality. In practice, we use many different metaphors to explain time in language. George Lakoff (1993:228) explains,

“We do not have detectors for time. Thus, it makes good biological sense that time should be understood in terms of things and motion.”

Our understanding of abstract time is most commonly understood via space and is biologically determined.  Some common metaphors are:

• Time is a precious resource – it is a currency ‘every moment is precious ‘or a gift to be savoured’ or ‘spend your time wisely’, ‘don’t have the time to give you’, ‘you are wasting my time’, ‘invested a lot of time in the project’, etc.

• Time is movement – it is a river or stream we need to navigate, but also that time is something we move through, like water, through our lifetime; it is like an arrow that has been released and can’t be stopped; ‘time flies; it is a race where you are constantly running against the clock; time goes by fast.

• Time is a thread – representing the linear nature of time, also the idea that fate spins these threads of destiny.

• Time is a predator – like the Hobbit riddle above; is a devouring relentless force, also expressed that time is a storm that is destructive; alternatively, time is a thief and takes life from you.

• Time is fleeting – it’s a moment, there is only the now, the present moment.

• Time is a prison or trap – not being able to escape from the present.

• Time has a horizon – it has a past, present and ending, ‘the end of days’.

Since we tend to think of time from the perspective of Chronos and not Aion, this involves perspectives of space and time: ‘Future times are in front of the observer, past times are behind the observer’ and ‘One thing is moving, the other is stationary; the stationary thing is the deictic center’.

From a cultural level, it’s important to clarify that these examples are representative of English metaphors and there are cultural differences. For example, time is a horizontal concept in English, whereas in Chinese, time is considered a vertical concept. Although, across different languages a constant is that time is conceptualised as being one-dimensional, such as ahead/behind or up/down, rather than in multi-dimensional or symmetric terms such as shallow/deep or left-right.

In discussing the relationship of the space-time-continuum, Boroditsky observes

Aspects of time that are extractable from world experience (temporally bounded
events, unidirectional change, etc.) may be represented in their own right. However,
there are many aspects of our concept of time that are not observable in the world.
For example, does time move horizontally or vertically? Does it move forward or
back, left or right, up or down? Does it move past us, or do we move through it? All
of these aspects are left unspecified in our experience with the world. They are,
however, specified in our language – most often through spatial metaphors. Whether
we are looking forward to a brighter tomorrow, falling behind schedule, or proposing theories ahead of our time, we are relying on spatial terms to talk about time.

Boroditsky’s conclusion is that

‘That space and time share enough relational structure to allow spatial schemas to be
used as easily as temporal schemas to organize events in time… It appears that abstract domains such as time are indeed shaped by metaphorical mappings from more concrete and experiential domains such as space’.

Time as a finite resource

Michael Olmert has suggested that clocks and even more mundane indexical devices such as toothbrushes, are devices that allow for larger populations to exist in areas of urban concentration by making individuals more ‘orderly’. Without time you can’t coordinate large population densities. Most cities are defined by their clock towers that often act as an ‘axis mundi’ as the central focus for the settlement. Our societies literally and figuratively revolve around the clock. While this is a spatial observation, this can also be a temporal one for generations. Yuri Lotman, defines our cities as

‘… a mechanism, forever recreating its past, which then can be synchronically juxtaposed with the present’. (Lotman 2000: 195)

It is in the heart of modern urban living that time is being understood in different ways from the past. Stuart Hall makes the observation:

Modern societies are therefore by definition societies of constant, rapid, and permanent change. This is the principal distinction between “traditional” and “modern” societies. Modernity, by contrast, is not only defined as the experience of living with rapid, extensive, and continuous change, but is a highly reflexive form of life ….

A hypothesis is that in the modern world we perceive time as a precious resource that runs out too quickly. There is a consistent analogy between the human span of years and the hourglass, from the ancient Egyptians to daytime USA pulp culture.

[embedded video]

It is possible to see how this hypothesis could have influenced changes in western society over the last fifty years. This has largely been driven by the influence of American culture on the world stage. Over this time span, the American perspective on ‘living’ has skewed:

• Youth is more desirable than age
• Attitude is superior to collective wisdom of age and experience
• Quick action is desirable to contemplation
• Extroversion vs introversion (in that youthfulness is often more extroverted)
• Simplicity over complexity.

Thinking that a precious resource is running out, frames your mind to focus on what you are losing, not on what you are gaining.

Feeling the pulse of time

It’s worth taking a moment to pause, to think of the impact of time as experienced through our biology. We might think of time through metaphors but is George Lakoff correct in saying that we do not have receptors for time?

Many of us talk of our body clocks, biological clocks, body age or circadian rhythms

Circadian rhythms are physical, mental and behavioural changes that follow a roughly 24-hour cycle, responding primarily to light and darkness in an organism’s environment. They are found in most living things, including animals, plants and many tiny microbes. The study of circadian rhythms is called chronobiology.

Here, the human body becomes the mechanical device to measure the impact of time. The metaphor of a clock evokes comparisons of broken or disrupted time experiences, where we talk of shift work, all-nighters, parenting babies or the impact of jetlag. In discussing the roll of the circadian clock, Akhilesh Reddy, from the University of Cambridge, said that this has a role from algae through to human beings:

“We know that clocks exist in all our cells; they’re hard-wired into the cell. Imagine what we’d be like without a clock to guide us through our days. The cell would be in the same position if it didn’t have a clock to coordinate its daily activities.

Joseph Campbell, in discussing the mythology of time, noted that a healthy resting heart beat is 60 beats a minute – one beat a second. He was suggesting that our bodies are influential in how we conceptualise time. We think through time experientially through space as an interrelated metaphor, but the experience of time appears to be fundamental to our DNA.

An observation made at the beginning of this article is that our era is characterised by a perception that we are not busier than other generations, but that life is moving at a faster pace. This is driven by a whole range of factors (explored in some of my other blog posts), but technology is a significant factor here.

Biologically, running out of time, when you ‘burn the candle at both ends’, is the solution many make in the face of increasing and diverse life demands: to gain more time you need to get less sleep. The loss-of-sleep has led to medical governing bodies increasingly identifying sleep-debt as a major contributor to ill health. Looking at a selection of recent articles:

• Losing just 30 minutes of sleep a day could lead to life-shortening obesity and Type-2 diabetes: ‘people who lose 30 minutes of sleep every night during the week are 72 per cent more likely to become obese and suffer related health problems’.
• The health effects of sleep aren’t just about how much of it we get but also about when we get it. And a more evening-driven schedule, the researchers found, could be less healthy than a morning one.
• Treating Sleep Issues in Military May Ease Other Health Issues
• Lack Of Sleep In The Black Community Is Causing Major Health Problems
• The average person now spends more time on their phone and laptop than SLEEPING, study claims

Our understanding of the role of sleep is only starting to be understood in terms of its full implication for physical and psychological wellbeing.

‘Time Is Running Out’ Symbolism

If we are organising ourselves around time in our daily schedules, battling around the perception that we don’t get as much time as we need, at a macro-level, we can see the same symbolism being played out on collective social and cultural levels.   Often we use the symbolism of clocks as a way of evoking the progression of more abstract concepts. I’ll talk through four examples briefly here:

The Molecular Clock of Evolution

The molecular clock is perceived as an essential tool for the study of evolutionary biology, molecular ecology and conservation genetics.

For the past 40 years, evolutionary biologists have been investigating the possibility that some evolutionary changes occur in a clock-like fashion. Over the course of millions of years, mutations may build up in any given stretch of DNA at a reliable rate. For example, the gene that codes for the protein alpha-globin (a component of haemoglobin) experiences base changes at a rate of .56 changes per base pair per billion years. If this rate is reliable, the gene could be used as a molecular clock

The molecular clock works as a conceptual hypothesis for estimating evolutionary timescales – rather than being something that is ticking.

The Cosmic Calendar or Clock

The Cosmic Calendar is a method to visualize the vast history of the universe in which its 13.8 billion year lifetime is condensed down into a single year. You can see Carl Sagan explain its purpose directly, from the past.

The Millennial Clock – Millennialism

From a cultural perspective, most western cultures were wrapped up in millennialism in one form or the other in the year 2000. This milestone number in the year 1000, 2000 and no doubt 3000 evokes a lot of spiritual projection. In the year 999AD, there was a belief that a ‘Golden age’ or ‘Paradise’ would start from start from the commencement of the next era? a religious belief was driven by Revelation 20:1-6.

For the more secular world, this sense of something important happening with our calendars’ milestone was encapsulated in the hysteria around Y2K. After years of dismissing cults with their doomsday predictions, the world blinked and bought into a myth that a computer-bug about time coding could take away their technology.

More recently, the embers were fanned when clocks will get an extra second on June 30, 2015 to account for the fact that it is taking the Earth longer and longer to complete one full turn—a day—or, technically, a solar day. Even though this has occurred 25 times since 1972.

Doomsday Clock

Perhaps the conceptual clock that has had the most impact on the pre-millennial generations is the Doomsday Clock. A frequent shadow of the cold war, this is something the younger generations have not grown up with.   For example, to quote a conversation at Reuters on the topic:

“Where are the Watchmen when you need them…”

‘That’s exactly what I thought! Was surprised when I first saw the graphic that the “Doomsday Clock” was a real thing :)

The clock illustrates a countdown to possible global catastrophe (e.g. nuclear war or climate change). It has been maintained since 1947 by the members of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Overtime, the various global threats have moved how close to midnight the world has come:

The doomsday clock is currently set at 3 minutes and counting. Their dashboard explains the factors that go into setting the clock

Out of time

“Alice: How long is forever?

White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Perhaps to revisit the allegory of the White Rabbit, his stress was created by the technology that he was carrying with him. His understanding of time was directly due to his need to keep running and monitor his every step of his journey with his pocket watch, perhaps a prophetic vision of how many of us live our lives. This is from the way we understand our movements through a day but also in how we measure more abstract concepts such as the Doomsday threat.

Ironically in the Matrix, a dystopian ‘contemporary’ world where technology is the bane of humankind’s existence, it is the White Rabbit that offers Neo his first step to understanding and ultimately leaving the Matrix.  Especially if you read the last panel from the Doomsday Panel Analysis above ‘Preparing for more cyber conflict’ and ‘the killer robot problem’.

Increasingly, every minute of the day, plotted in cloud-based calendars and prompted to action by our smart phones. These devices are now merging to a new form of enumeration of our active/time through the quantification-of-self innovations.

As an experiment, I spent a few days asking people politely for the time. This seemed to confuse many who were incredulous that I wouldn’t have a watch or a mobile. The second observation is that more than three-quarters of the people read the time from their phones, not from a watch. The question is whether the watch hands measure time or now only represent our need to keep moving.

What is our continuing fascination with immortality? Increasingly there are new films, TV series and books that have living-forever as a central theme.   In an increasingly secular world, stories and myths about immortality are shifting from the spiritual immortality, to the promise of living forever.

To set the context for this inquiry, postmodern society has been characterised by the disappearance of the meta-narratives of modernity. We no longer collectively buy into ‘grand narratives’ such as Marxism or the Enlightenment projects of linear progression that suggest logical paths of ‘teleological determinism’ – which can be paraphrased as ‘everything happens for some reason, and contributes to some good’. Our resulting world is one that is characterised by more protean and fragmented meaning: self-determinism, individuality and independence have become the goal of western culture.

The jury is out on how this modernity project is progressing, I’ve explored the darker side of modernity and post-modernity across several posts here. Gregory Bruce Smith provides one of the sharper critiques of society today:

‘… Our faith in human reason and its ability to transform the world has been severely tested by our experiences in the Twentieth Century….   We were told that our past was merely the necessary means by which we arrived at our truly human present; but as our past traditions faded we came to feel anomie and rootlessness and longed to reinvigorate our fading customs.

As the rational, secular world we longed for came to pass, we felt alone and longed for new gods, occasionally accepting vulgarized old ones from panderers as better than nothing. At a time when we are supposed to be spontaneous, self-creating beings we see impersonal bureaucracies everywhere, and an ever tightening technological web encompassing us, complete with impending shortages, ecological imbalances, noxious industrial residues, decreased privacy, a shrinking, overpopulated world’.

One of the most influential socio-cultural shifts over the last century has been the reversal of societal focus from the veneration of our elderly to the idolatry of youth. There are many contributing factors that have driven these changes, from the decline of the nuclear family in the west to the impact of America as the dominant global exporter after World War 2. This self-identified young nation (in opposition to Europe) communicated this ‘youth culture’ with its commercial clout. There are many other contributing factors that have contributed to our youth-centric consumer-culture.

Having written recently on our postmodern obsession with time running out, this prompted a question of why are we hanging onto time so tightly? It’s not cliché that younger people think that they are bulletproof, perhaps epitomised by James Dean who opined ‘the only greatness for man is immortality’.

‘I’ve got a lot done since my death’

Clive James

In this postmodern era that focuses on the development and primacy of the self, is the way that we think about age changing the stories we tell about age? Much has been written on the social-and-cultural impact of the generation tsunami known as the Baby Boomers. Their influence is having a direct effect on many of the stories we are telling within society about age and aging. Is it possible to identify what parts of society are tailoring messages to a generation that aren’t as willing to slip silently into old dotage as much as their predecessors were?

What is of interest here is how these deeper narratives and semiotic structures are influencing the discourse on aging in modern western-culture from films, literature and advertising. Entire genres that dominate today’s popular culture are conveying these themes. Moreover, this generation has also become a driving force behind focuses of science and health.

This is the first of a two part exploration on this topic. In order to establish a picture of what is driving societies focus on immortality:

1. Firstly, it is important to look at the mythology and symbolism that has guided the development of today’s immortality stories.   Is this the ‘past’ we are moving beyond?
2. Following this, a semiotic analysis can offer a deeper understanding of some of the structural themes that are the foundations for contemporary discourses on aging

While there are spiritual aspects to the pursuit of immortality across most belief systems, I’m interested in the mortal and secular realm and how these dynamics are influencing modern western culture.

Death is the beginning of immortality

Maximilian Robespierre

We’ve always been on a quest for immortality: the mythology of living forever.

To start at the beginning, immortality has been a quest and fascination for humanity since the earliest written records. It’s useful to briefly review some of the key mythology and themes, which are the foundations for many of the stories that we tell today. The first written (extant) ‘story’, the Epic of Gilgamesh, of Mesopotamia c.2100BC, has a central theme of the pursuit of immortality.  Since then, the quest for immortality has remained a consistent theme in storytelling across many cultures. The following is an overview of some of the key mythic themes that are in use today.

‘Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths’

Joseph Campbell

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Before the modern Superfruits, fruit of many kinds have long been a source of immortality. In Greek and Roman mythology, Heracles steals a golden apple of immortality from the Garden of Hesperides. These golden apples grew on the ‘Tree of Life’ and were the source of Olympian immortality. There is a similar story in Norse mythology of golden apples that grow at the base of Yggdrasil – the world tree – which were cared for by Iðunn, the Goddess of eternal youth. It is believed that these were likewise the source of Asgardian immortality.  On the other side of the world, there is a similar story in the Chinese epic ‘Journey to the West’ where Sun Wukong, the Monkey King steals and eats the ‘peaches of immortality’ and becomes immortal.  Judeo-Christian and Muslim cultures has the apple as central to one of its pivotal starting narratives, the casting out of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as a consequence of eating the forbidden fruit; outside Eden they were condemned to mortality. It is believed that while the apple in the Bible is fruit from ‘the tree of knowledge’, this later became merged with ‘the tree of life’ symbolism.

Eight glasses of water a day. Many stories revolve around the idea of water as the ‘elixir of life’, originating from a source font: the ‘fountain of life’. Herodotus, the early historian, was one of many that introduced this symbolism to the Greeks:

The Icthyophagi then in their turn questioned the king concerning the term of life, and diet of his people, and were told that most of them lived to be a hundred and twenty years old, while some even went beyond that age- they ate boiled flesh, and had for their drink nothing but milk. When the Icthyophagi showed wonder at the number of the years, he led them to a fountain, wherein when they had washed, they found their flesh all glossy and sleek, as if they had bathed in oil – and a scent came from the spring like that of violets. The water was so weak, they said, that nothing would float in it, neither wood, nor any lighter substance, but all went to the bottom. If the account of this fountain be true, it would be their constant use of the water from it which makes them so long-lived.

In Alexander the Great Romances, there are stories of Alexanders quest for the Water of Life that appears influenced in the telling by contemporary Indian mythology. Much later, Ponce De Leon, the Spanish Explorer who in 1513 accidentally discovered Florida, was reputed to have been exploring in search for the Fountain of Youth (although this is not historically accurate).

The liquid doesn’t have to be water; there are other liquid sources of immortality. Ambrosia as the drink of the Gods of Olympus in Greek etymologically means ‘of the immortals’, which is linked to Nectar in some Greek stories. Similar liquids can be found in Hinduism which were called Amrita or Soma. The Gods Indra and Agni both gained immortality by drinking Soma.

We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the Gods discovered. / Now what may foeman’s malice do to harm us? What, O Immortal, mortal man’s deception?

Rig-Veda: 8.48.3

The word we use today, whisky, has its origins in meaning as a Gaelic translation of the Latin for distilled alcohol ‘aqua vitae’ or ‘water of life’.

Another elemental source of immortality was fire or light. An influential symbol here is the phoenix, a mythical bird that cyclically rises again from the ashes of its predecessor. The bird is closely linked to Solar symbolism and the new day. In early Christian symbolism, phoenix symbolism was linked to the resurrection and immortality of Jesus. This light symbolism is tied to announcing his birth and his second coming. In literature, the use of fire was how ‘She’ in Rider Haggard’s novel of the same name, maintained her immortality. In popular-culture, this is also how the longevity of Dr Who has been explained as he regenerates through the bright time-stream at the heart of the Tardis.

Immortality was believed to be achieved through contact with sacred artefacts. Perhaps the most famous is Sir Galahad, which achieves immortality in achieving the Holy Grail. A theme that was central to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indiana’s father is saved by drinking water from the Holy chalice.

It was the focus of Alchemy to seek to find the philosopher stone that could create the ‘Elixir of Life’ such in the iconic Mutus Liber:

Mutus Liber, one of the most famous alchemical works, consists of fifteen engravings which demonstrate a man and woman performing a sequence of chemical processes. The book contains no text, which is why it is known as the “Mute Book.” Alchemists could read and follow the instructions in the images to create the Elixir of Life, which is said to promote good health, longevity and even immortality.

Mythical and Symbolic dimensions in immortality stories

If we review this mythology there are some consistent themes. The most common aspect here is that immortality comes from something that is either consumed or we drink. This makes intuitive sense on a physiological level since good nutrition has long been linked to longevity, just as malnutrition has been with death.   Not surprisingly in modern society, a consumer-culture, many of our stories relate to consumption, rather than fire or religious symbolism.

How stories speak to immortality is influenced by two primary dimensions.

A common Jungian dimension on life symbolism is the opposition between the ‘mother’ and ‘the witch’. These are consistent themes in contemporary stories of immortality.

Witches live a long life because they eat the life of children. I’ve written about this vessel-metaphor symbolism in more detail previously from more of an anthropological perspective. Reminding ourselves, this is also the basic divide of the biological world; you are either plant or animal, create your own food or eat others.

The second dimension to consider is that of the influence of Greek Mythology

On the one hand, we have the elevation of the hero to the status of God and immortal; as Heracles at the end of his life joins the Pantheon at Olympus. There are many other examples of heroes who become demi-gods across numerous different belief systems.

Juxtaposed to this is the fate of Tithonius who was destined to remain alive forever but to age like a normal person. It could be said that a continuation of this theme in Christian mythology from the 13^th century might be the tales of ‘the wandering Jew’, who on taunting Christ at the Crucifixion was cursed to walk the earth till the second coming.

Perhaps the myth of Tithonius is something to consider deeper because it is more achievable with emerging modern science.

If we look at the impact that many years has had on the long-lived in popular culture – what are these writers telling us? In the Hobbit, or Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s elf’s left the Middle-earth from the weight of immortality, that cumulative sense of loss that was too heavy to bear seeing such frequent death. Dorian Gray is variously portrayed, most recently in Penny Dreadful, where he is constantly looking for anything that will alleviate his boredom.   Dr Who in recent times falls into a deep melancholy of fearing to get close to others since they don’t survive forever. The 80’s hit Highlander has a race of immortals fighting in a timeless battle, but the mortal loss of friends and their aging are the real constant pain. A notable Hollywood version of the Tithonius myth was in the 1992 comedy ‘Death Becomes her’, where two of the female leads become immortal so they don’t age but like Tithonius, this does not make them invulnerable, just ageless. In this, the Bruce Willis character learns this lesson, and embraces his later years of aging naturally with a passion.

A graceful and honourable old age is the childhood of immortality.

Pindar

Mapping Immortality stories in popular culture

If we look at these symbolic dimensions as a matrix we get the following quadrants

We can use these mythic-axes to look at contemporary story telling.

Quadrant: Ageless/Creates Life

This quadrant is illustrated with Gods in movies but is also occupied by other supernatural creatures that appear to be out-of-time such as Elves and other mythical creatures. These creatures true to the mythology of different belief systems maintain their longevity through natural means.

Quadrant: Ageless/Consume Life

This quadrant is the opposite of the previous, instead of being naturally long-lived; these stories revolve around the theft of life from others.   Vampirism is a very popular genre at the moment in Hollywood – appearing almost everywhere.

It is worth noting that the idea that your life is sustained from others has been reinterpreted in recent years in novel ways, from the planetary mysteries of Jupiter Ascending to the commercialization of life-force in ‘in time’.

Quadrant: Aging/Consumes Life

Stories in this quadrant tend to revolve around the postponing of aging through the consumption of others or their life-force.

Charlize Theron’s psychopathic killer in a Snow-white twist reverses ageing through killing younger women (with a nod to apple symbolism in the story). The Zombies in Walking Dead decay progressively as the season’s progress in real time; this is only abated by eating fresh flesh. I’ve included Dorian Gray in this group since the he offsets the cost of his youth, against the decay of his painting.

Quadrant: Aging/Creates Life

Here we find characters with preternaturally long lives or extended youth. In recent times, this area shows the true magic and mythologising power of Hollywood through pseudo-realism, as it breathes new life into latent careers. Dubbed the Geriaction genre – we’re likely to see more of it as Baby Boomers see a positive reflection of their own potential.

For example in Red, we watch a 60 year old Bruce Willis perform moves that John McClane would envy nearly thirty years ago. The Expendables of Sylvester Stallone 67, has become a successful global franchise that dusts off 80’s stars and puts them front and centre of action Hollywood. In ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ we see Judi Dench and others play credible romantic leads. While at 80, Dame Dench might have regrettably forgone the action genre of James Bond, she still remains active in the romcom genre.

Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Susan Ertz

Everything comes to an end

There is no doubting that the more positive messages of some of these films shed light on ageist stereotypes in society and are acting as positive forces. However, what is the cumulative message are we communicating? There is a difference between wanting to have a full life and wanting to live forever. While films like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel humanise a lifestage, the majority of Hollywood and popular culture are dominated by stories that stem from the premise that the only way to maintain youth is to steal it.

It’s a truism that Hollywood reflects back part of modern society. Perhaps it’s not surprising that some luxury skin creams are made with components derive from human placenta, as we innovate in increasingly diverse ways to ward off aging. Additionally, there is an increasing global problem with illegal organ theft and trade. Are vampires and zombies genres normalising the idea of a more parasitic and extended human life?

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver

Mahatma Gandhi

As stated at the start, this is a two part discussion. The second part to this discussion will focus more on the semiotic dimensions that are influencing advertising and societal perceptions. Also, if the dominant narratives are about extending life at any cost, is this reflected in contemporary science and medicine?

“Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used “to tell” at all.”

Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics

Getting long in the tooth

This is the second part of an analysis of concepts of ageing and immortality in modern times.   The first part looked at the mythology of immortality, its prominence as a central theme of the first written story in history to its rise to dominance within Hollywood storylines.   Over time there has been a shift in how we look at immortality, from it being the provenance of deities and mythological races that are immortal because of eating and drinking magical fruits or drinks, to the contemporary obsession with eating another’s life to be immortal, fantastically brought to life through vampire and zombie genres. The contemporary narrative has shifted from immortality being out of reach, to something you can gain by consuming life. Humanity already appears to be open-minded to the extension of our lives through ethically challenged skin creams made from human placenta or more radically the expanding illicit trade in human organs.

There are two parts to this discussion. Firstly, to explore some of the metaphors that frame the way that we think about aging. The second is to look at some of the semiotic structures that underpin a contemporary discourse on aging, focussing on advertising within this discussion.

Metaphors for Aging

Metaphors are the cognitive tools through which we understand ourselves and the world (Lakoff and Turner 1989: xi). Not all metaphors are created equal, some stick in our minds with a more ‘natural fit’. Some metaphors are not so easily modified or manipulated to serve rhetorical purposes. Within the broad universe of metaphors, some seem more natural than others—almost as if they are not being “chosen” at all.

There are many metaphors of time, which have been discussed previously. There are three time related metaphors that are most commonly used when thinking about ageing. All of these are very sticky in the way that we talk about getting old.

Time is Movement

A dominant expression here is in terms of time ‘fleeing’, as in tempus fugit. We talk of ‘the time has long since gone when…’ or ‘time is flying by’.

That time is a Resource

We talk of ‘time is money’ or ‘time is a commodity’. We also talk about ‘wasting time’, ‘you’re running out of time’, is that ‘worth your while’, ‘how much time do you have left?’, ‘he’s living on borrowed time’, ‘I lost a lot of time when I was sick’.

Time is a Thief

Related to the above is the metaphor that time is a thief. Here, more directly, we talk of time taking away our precious resources: our youth or loved ones. As the Poet John Milton, writes.

       How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,

Stol’n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!

My hasting days fly on with full career,

But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th

Ageing is a Battle

This all frames our lives as something which is declining from youth, figuratively the hourglass that is running out. It suggests that fighting age starts to sound like a ‘kill or be killed’ scenario. Although, when you consider even the nature of time, it’s probably closer to what Ovid called tempus edax rerum, ‘time, gluttonous of all things’.

Aging is also referred as a disease or a curse, both of which involve battle-mentalities to address. For any readers who are thinking this is all sounding a bit bleak, the previous post did discuss the positive frame that aging ‘is a privilege’, ‘a natural process’, ‘a state of mind’, ‘a social construct’. A hypothesis is that advertising is an appropriate ‘text’ to analyse to develop an understanding of the balance of positive and negative messages about aging in social-discourse. Advertising can debatably be seen as a ‘reflection’ of society’s values, at least to the extent that we collectively and commercially endorse messages, images and values that resonate.

Semiotics of Ageing

Semiotics seeks to shed light on how meaning is created, and how meaning is understood. Emerging from structuralist traditions, answering questions on meaning can be developed by understanding the deeper structures within cultural communication.  Charles Saussure identified that “Concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive characteristics but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system”. The most important relation is that of the binary opposition.

How we talk about ageing is a semiotic function. The basic primary opposition at work here is that you are either, young or old. A semiotic square maps meaning based on relations of contrary, contradictory and complementarity axes.   This suggests that we think-through life stages as:

Semiotics of Ageing in Advertising

We can also map the meaning that is present in how we talk about the process ageing through the discourse of advertising.

The metaphor of the battle against aging indicates that there are two main discourses:

1. Defensive positioning – where ageing is framed as being natural, that you can protect against.
2. Offensive positioning – where the battle is to eradicate signs of ageing, with promises of rejuvenation.

Reversing Ageing

Many products are competing to offer magic formulas that will reverse the ageing process. This appears to have been around since the beginning of advertising

Today there are still brands that are speaking to this ‘battle’ with calls to ‘defy’ aging. Offering ‘instant’ solutions (enumerated consumer perceptions not a brand communication but recorded in the ad) through to the effects of aging that speak to the fear of flaws that need to fixed.

Others go as far as to suggest that they transform more than your skin

Stopping Ageing

Other brands, suggest solutions that can halt the effects of aging. Even through showing a virtual mirror to youth in another person, this Vital appears to perhaps be suggesting magic as well. Like speaking to a mirror, ‘mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?’

Some advertising evokes the symbolism of the ‘fountain of youth’ or the transformative symbolism of energy in making you immortal. Both brands in the examples below evoke science and DNA aesthetics to persuade the browser of the efficacy of their ‘regenerating’ or ‘reactivating’ properties.

While there is a gender bias to advertising in this area, this does not mean that men are immune to the same concerns and seductive promises.

The Japanese brewer, Suntory, has just launched a beer with collagen peptide as one of the ingredients to ensure youthful skin.

“Japanese brewery Suntory released a collagen-infused beer this month that promises to make the drinker more beautiful. The Telegraph reports that the beer, called “Precious,” is being advertised with the tagline, “Guys can tell if a girl is taking collagen or not.”

Slowing Ageing

Brands that speak through this space tend to speak more to internal change – it’s what you eat that slows ageing. Interestingly, this evokes the mythology discussed in my last post, where food has been linked since our earliest records with the promise of a longer life. A consideration here is that the central message of antioxidant narratives speak to a McCarthyistic ideological battle: that we must defeat the ‘free radicals’ to live a safe and prosperous life.

Age Progressing

There are some brands that are actively speaking to aging as being a natural progression of human experience – that women should be recognised ‘au naturel’. These advertisements come from a more moralistic perspective that aging gracefully is desirable.

Dove has had a powerful and contrary campaign to other messages in the category, stating in its copy ‘too many wrinkles to be an anti-aging ad’ … but this isn’t an anti-aging ad. This is pro-age, a new line of skin care from Dove. Beauty has no age limit.

Ageing into the future

‘Aging, or senescence, is the major cause of suffering, disease, and death in modern times’.

João Pedro de Magalhães

I started this first part of this discussion with the observation that the Baby Boomers will fundamentally change the way that we talk and think about age. Astrid Stuckelberger explains

The composition of our society is changing. The proportion and absolute numbers of older people are increasing worldwide. The elderly population has already exceeded the child population (below age 15) and by 2050, for every child there will be two elderly persons.

This shift, which has come to be known as ‘demographic transition’, has far-reaching consequences. Old people have different expectations then younger generations and with each generation of older persons comes different ways of life.

Up to now, society has been oriented towards youth, but this trend is changing: the growing number of people who are now classified as senior citizens is a powerful force for change

Aging is a hot topic at the moment. Already societal expectations are evolving; middle age is now believed to last until 74. Alan Walter, a professor of social gerontology, as stated that

“Our conceptions of ‘old age’ are hopelessly out of date because of population ageing…For many people, 70 is the new 50 and signifies the quiet revolution that has taken place in longevity”.

Dr Alex Zhavoronkov, director of the UK-based Biogerontology Research Foundation think-tank believes he will live to 150 based on recent advances in science. Others in the field are more optimistic, Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge University researcher, who heads the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) project believes that within 25 years we might discover the secrets to living longer if not forever.

There might be reason to be optimistic. De Grey heads the Methuselah Mouse prize for breakthroughs in extended aging in mice. The purse of the M Prize, as it is called, recently grew beyond $1 million. There is also the Palo Alto Longevity Prize

The Palo Alto Longevity Prize (the “Prize”) is a $1 million life science competition dedicated to ending aging. Ours is one of a growing number of initiatives around the world pursuing this goal—the more shots on goal the better. Through an incentive prize, our specific aim is to nurture innovations that end aging by restoring the body’s homeostatic capacity and promoting the extension of a sustained and healthy lifespan.

There are questions about how these innovations will be framed in the near future. Will they be framed as a positive movement or sold through our fears? Dr Alex Zhavoronkov points out that the toughest ‘level of ageing to address is psychological aging’. Will the mind follow the body? The Greeks had a fair warning about seeking to be immortal in the myth of Tithonus – what is the value of immortality if your body or mind continues to age. Many of our stories, ancient and contemporary, revolve around the boredom of an eternal life. Are we ready for immortality?

‘Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter’

Mark Twain