Approaching the World Through Musical Philosophy

Music is a good tool for exploring landscapes, narratives and scenes because it is open to interpretation and has much more expressive power than spoken discourses. This is why I began exploring how music could be made use of in describing or philosophizing on situations and courses of events. Here is my first composition:

Yesterday I went to a job interview, and this tune can be thought to describe how events unfolded.

On Social Casting

The society can be thought as a stream which constantly offers different roles which individuals then fulfill. Hofstede et al. (2010) present the idea like this:

We can approach this role-selection process through the concept of social casting. Casting itself can be defined like this:

Casting
1. The act or process of selecting actors, singers, dancers, models, etc. to a production.
2. A manufacturing process by which a liquid material is poured into a mold, which contains a hollow cavity of the desired shape, and then allowed to solidify.

Thus, social casting can be defined as follows:

Social casting is the process of a social system in which individuals are offered roles that they seek to fulfill, into which they are put or collectively selected.

The concept is a key in understanding many different social phenomena, such as social exclusion, deviance and awkwardness. Social exclusion can be thought to occur when an individual refuses or is prohibited from fulfilling the offered roles (such as that of a settled spouse or an employee) for one reason or another. Deviance describes this phenomenon from a viewpoint that presupposes more active efforts from the individual. Awkwardness can be understood as the feeling of confusion before social casting takes place. Imagine a rebellious teenager in a family party. E.g. when s/he says: “Celebrating birthdays is stupid.” this is followed by the feeling of awkwardness, which results in casting the teenager a role of “a teenage rebel” – this is necessary to release the social tension in the situation.

Relationships are built and roles cast continuously in the communication, so individuals are also able to actively transform their roles through conscious effort.

While social casting takes place in small-scale situations like that mentioned above, it also happens in big transitions such as finishing primary school, graduating from a university and getting employed. In addition, social casting occurs in elections where individuals are selected to fulfill the roles as heads of social bureaucracies (parties, local governments, national governments and organizations).

In each of these occasions the role of the individual changes: from child to teenager, from young person to adult, from student to employer, from citizen to leader. The shift from one role to another is constructed in language in many ways:

“You are not a child anymore, you shouldn’t need me to support you financially.” (child-adult)
“As a student, you must take responsibility of your own studies.” (pupil-student)
“You should know, you’re the one who just got his Ph.D.” (undergraduate-employee)
“I have a family now, I can’t just go travelling around the world.” (single-settled)
“I don’t want to be at home with the kids all day long, I want to build a career of my own.” (housewife-career wife)
“A party leader cannot have a personal blog.” (citizen-leader)

All of these notions are followed by a feeling of confusion/disappointment, which results in the individual either accepting the proposed role or one seeking to redefine the role/relationship. Social casting is never a permanent verdict. Relationships are built and roles cast continuously in the communication, so individuals are also able to actively transform their roles through conscious effort.

The Tyranny of Everyday Life

You have to do something for a living.
What are you going to do when you grow up? Pick one thing.
Find a job, earn money, buy things, that’s just how it works.

Everyday discourses surround us everywhere with all their depressingness. They seek to incorporate each individual to existing structures. This means they don’t offer creative solutions or encourage finding one’s own way.

On the other side of the fence are the utopian discourses that are concerned with questions such as “What should be done?”, “What is good life?” and “What do I want to achieve?”. Everyday life seeks to extinguish these reflections because they are a threat to its banal existence. At the same time they are its lifeline; without dreams and goals everyday life is nothing but boring repetition without any point.

Perhaps democracy prevailed over tyranny in speeches, but how come we are still dictated by the banality of everyday life? At the same time major problems of the world remain unsolved.

The Free Market of Desire

Hello! ;) I’m an exceptionally beautiful sporty cat with f cup real breasts and gorgeous body.. I’m looking for 100 % fun to my life, without commitments. I’m busy and I won’t even bother to maintain friendship with the man I’m looking for. The arrangement I’m looking for is sex, when I want it… I’m really insatiable when it comes to sex, actually one could say that I’m a nymphomaniac… I want sex all the time and I enjoy when the man enjoys. [...] My appearance turns heads wherever I go and I have pictures that I’ll naturally show you before we meet, so you will not be disappointed… ;)

The guy I’m looking for is really handsome, not just in his own opinion but also according to many women… I’m pleased by so called “pretty boys”… Your appearance has to be on the level of a model… I hope that you are muscular, but a normal body will do… You also have to be well equipped… I have where to choose from and I don’t want to be with everybody, so I’m only looking for the best. ;)

As the contemporary society distances human beings from their own thoughts and needs, it becomes more typical to interpret basic needs of love and appreciation as a need for sexual pleasure. This creates a “free market of desire” in the society: people upload pictures to advertise themselves in online services and social media to fulfill their need for physical intimacy and social acceptance. The sexual imagery that emerges helps to feed the imagination of less social people who have difficulties in finding partners.

Sexualization of everyday life is the act of breaking free from the traditional restraints that used to control the appearance and sexual behavior, but it also symbolizes diminished social power, or even complete disinterest in traditional social frameworks. In this process good looks and sex becomes a commodity among smartphones and plasma tv’s.

This affects traditional relationships as well, as sex becomes a tool of exchange; “If you behave well, I will reward you tonight.”

Understanding discursive resources and narratives

Reading Tony Watson’s Sociology, Work and Organisation (sixth edition) inspired this model where I have tried to clarify the relationship between individual life path and cultural/societal context.

Let’s imagine a setting where an individual is thinking about his/her future career. The culture offers various different discourses:

• “Work is important for making money, and money is what you need for living.”
• “Work should be challenging and rewarding.”
• “Friends and family should be at the center of life, not work.”
• “People are so busy working they forget about real pleasures of life.”

Different and often conflicting cultural values are incorporated to the discourses. Each individual learns their ways of thinking and acting from these discourses based on their own life goals and adaptation to the available roles in the institutions in the society (such as parent, director or worker).

There are various discursive resources that are available in different contexts. (We could actually imagine education as a sort of initiation to them.) They are what, to quote Wilson, “people can use in various ways to create their own interpretations and understandings of the world”.

Individuals produce narratives that are “accounts of events in the world which are organized in a time-related sequence”. The narrative is used to frame individual’s efforts in order to create understanding of the subjective life experience. Narratives also affect individual learning, since they create sense of “what I am and what drives me forward”.

Contraception and biopower

How come issues such as contraception, abortion and gay marriage constantly come up especially in the American political discourse? Why is contraception a political issue in the USA but not in Finland?

Foucault has presented a framework for understanding these discourses in his concept of biopower; I understand it as the form of power that seeks to penetrate to the intimate sphere of sexuality in order to gain control of the human body and close relationships.

Biopower can be positive or negative; negative biopower seeks to restrict behavior and positive aims to induce it. Also, a third form of institutional biopower could be thought to emerge in cases where the definition of intimate institutions (such as marriage or family) is under debate. The basic tactic of this power is to claim involvement through monetary transactions from and to the state. The state can e.g. encourage making children through incentives, or it can attempt to limit condemned sexual behavior through fines.

The biopower discourses in the USA exist because of the country’s large-scale democracy and culture wars, which mean common understanding isn’t pursued any longer. This results in the permanent multitude of opinions.

Finland does not have such discourses because of the smallness and homogeneity of the culture. There is not enough cultural space to form such movements, which results in feelings of awkwardness towards them.

This is also why there is not much news coverage on the US debates in Finland. They seem weird and incomprehensible – something that can only be understood from an American perspective.

Understanding the dynamics of human systems

After listening to a podcast about Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, I became interested in micro-physics in regular interactions where power is used in the everyday level.

Human systems typically include four types of interactions: conflicts, unified interactions, crises and separate interactions.

Systems typically have many of these interactions going on at the same time: there are forces that collide with each other, forces that unify and forces that separate the actors.

Conflicts and crises are defining moments in the interaction process: based on the skills, requirements and valuations of the actors, the system can either move towards stronger unity or deepening separation.

We could imagine an everyday conversation that shows these various interactions:

Jack and Maria are sitting in the break room. Jack is reading an article about happiness in work, Maria is reading a women’s magazine.

Jack: I think our workplace could have a better working atmosphere. [opening the interaction from an initial state of separation]
Maria: What do you mean? [conflict]
J: Often I’m faced with excessive criticism instead of constructive attitude. [building the conflict]
M: You’re totally right, that happens quite often.[unity] I think it has to do with the managers, they often seem out of touch from the practical work. [unity, separation]
J: Well, to some extent, yeah. [unity] But I think all employees are partly responsible for the atmosphere, not just the bosses. [crisis]
M: I guess you have some truth in that. [unity]

Maria’s first reply shows the structure of a conflict: it isn’t necessarily a “big argument”, but asynchrony between the participants’ thoughts. Typically unity is built towards others, as can be seen in the way Maria says managers are to blame.

What is important to notice is that these various “micro-interactions” take place in the communication process all the time. No state is problematic in itself, but they all require communication skills to direct the process towards a desired state.

There are typical phrases that emerge in the different phases:

Conflict:
“What do you mean?”
“What is your point?”
“Why did you do that?”
“Do as I say.”

Unity:
“You’re right.”
“We’re all in this together.”
“What should we do?”

Crisis:
“In my opinion you acted stupidly.”
“I disagree with you on this.”
“Why are you neglecting me?”

Separation:
Polite co-operation with minimal interaction.
Silence.

If we were to combine this with the different system types thinking, the defining factor would be “what the emerging unity is like”. The equivalences could go something like this:

Closed system – strongest dominates
Open system – majority dominates
Random system – no-one is responsible
Synchronous system – everyone is responsible

What is privacy?

From the regeneration of publicity point of view the vast amount of privacy talk (Facebook privacy this, online privacy that) becomes apprehensible. It can be understood as the existential struggle of the private sphere in an era where there is less and less private things but where the old hierarchies still prevail.

The concept of private has changed. Privacy nowadays means not my personal privacy, but me and my close friends privacy. The access is once again a defining aspect, as gut feeling gives the impression that the “self” needs to be protected from the invasion of hostile publicity such as nosy bosses and inquisitive mothers-in-law. In other words, the war of all against all is alive and well.

Privacy is the only weapon of the individual in this grueling war in which allies are few and far between – and the few friends one has can turn into enemies in one discussion.

In the battle, the defence move is to start seeking that one special person with whom one can hang out, to whom one can tell one’s secrets and ideas without being suppressed by hostility. And even that is not enough: mismanage a breakup and be sure to get ready for a revenge.

So, the age-old question remains: What is the solution to war?

It is: Start being virtuous. Forget privacy and tell everything about yourself right in the open – share your ideas and disclose your criticism just the way children do before they become adults. Don’t mind the mean people, mind your own business.

No excuses. Be bold.

Andrew Morrow: Large War Painting, 2003-2004, oil on canvas.

Of taking offence

Taking offence is the counterattack of consciousness. At the moment of being offended the person is freed from the restrictions of friendly behavior in order to perform the ultimate move: to say

What you said offends me. Will you apologize?

By demanding an apology one puts oneself above the other person, considering one’s emotional responses as the superior guide of morality.

On the society level, this phenomenon is tightly tied to the concept of flower-hat lady, who is

a good-natured fool who teaches others how to live by sharing naive and moralistic advice.

The flower-hat people live by the truthiness principle: everything that I feel is right must be right, and whatever is wrong is wrong because I feel it’s wrong. In practical terms, the only thing that separates good or bad deed is whether doing it offends someone. There is no discussion, no need to argue, because

I am right and you are wrong, now stop protesting and do as I say.

For the flower-hat mind, everything that doesn’t offend anyone is justifiable. In other words: no act is justifiable.

Feelings in the discourse

Contagion
financial firewall
panic on the financial markets
vital 8 billion euro installment
a surprise boost
play a greater role in financial firefighting
painful austerity measures
the tough message

I wonder who gets to frame the discourse. Whoever came up with terms such as “contagion” or “financial firewall”? Or “panic” or “painful austerity measures”?

These concepts represent the “emotions running wild” mentality; they actually block rational thinking when filling the language with deeper meanings like

risk
safety
threat
life-and-death
joy
sacrifice
pain
tough

As long as feelings are not brought up in the discourse explicitly, they hide under seemingly objective and rational speech and prevent any attempts to solve the issues.

So, better start talking about emotions! A good way to start is “I feel that you…”.

And to respond: “Oh, is that so? My opinion is that you…”

It could go on with: “Really? I never thought of how you felt about my actions.”

“Well, same here.”

Silence.

“I guess that is the reason why we were fighting.”