Dustin Messex
ENGL 3090A
Dr. Rick Carpenter

Connecting the Dots

“Our age is retrospective. It builds on the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticisms. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

     Reality is both communal and individual, fiction and truth, a continuing evolution of ideas that are explained and shared with others through coherence systems, where narratives are reconstructed by individuals within a society.  These narratives are retold and mutate over time and collectively these narratives form reality.  Reality in this sense can be seen as an illusion or image created through the desire to communicate and interact with peers and the environment.  From birth each individual human has a unique experience of the world around them—that is to say that everyone’s experience of the universe is a subjective one. Two individuals can perceive the same stimulus and derive very differing opinions or descriptions about what the stimulus is and what it means.  However, there are many similarities as well that the two individuals may find that allow them to come to some mutual agreement about the object or stimuli.  It is this ability to reach a common ground that I believe is the most integral to human society as well as human progress.  

     Human beings, through the phenomenon of cognition possess the ability to observe with their senses, the world around them.  We take in surrounding data and then measure and reason through it to make connections between the stimuli perceived.  This leads to the formation of thoughts.  As our brains take in the perceived senses, imprints are left on the brain as neurons begin to arrange and network themselves in a manner as to organize the data and store it for later processing.  This process gives us the ability to make connections and find similarities and differences between other stimuli in order to form basic thoughts.  These thoughts enable us to interact with our environment, and leads to the formation of more advanced and complex ideas—ideas like language, creation of tools, domestication of plants and animals, and harnessing natural processes for personal benefit.  A certain utterance becomes a signifier linked to a signified which when the connection is made forms a sign, which transmits an intended idea.   It is only through making this connection that ideas are able to be both created and transmitted between humans.  These signifiers could be gestures, body language, verbal utterances, signs or drawings, or writings.  No matter the medium, from the point of birth we begin absorbing and processing the data about the world around us and continue to make connections to improve our ability to interact with our environment.  

     If it were not for the ability to transmit ideas and share data and experiences with other individuals, then at the point of death all of the information that the individual had gathered over his or her lifetime would be lost.  To get around this problem we have created means of communication; grunts, gestures, words, drawings, writings, etc., ideas are transmitted on to other individuals and the idea is able to be stored in the minds of more human beings.  For example: One individual, through observation, learns that by collecting clay and bricking it and allowing it to dry he can form a material that is suitable for building that is superior than that of say wood and straw.  Other individuals within his community would observe his method and try to replicate it if the idea proves to be superior.  This process of replicating the idea may also lead to mutations.  It is important to point out that the idea of creating clay bricks formed by the individual would not be an original one—the idea does not belong to the individual.  First someone had to reason the idea of building structures, then observations about the properties of clay had to be made; countless ideas which were not in the mind of the individual at birth, but instead gathered and stored in that individual’s mind are all arranged in a manner that allow the individual to come to the thought of creating clay bricks.  In short, the idea is not “original” and cannot be attributed to the “creator” as his or her invention, but instead a collection of information about the environment which came to yield a new idea.  This idea can then be spread through others observing the practice, or the individual promoting the idea to others through language and communication.  As others perceive this then new idea, their brain along with all of its collected data and experiences are able to process it and mutate the idea into other new ideas.  Humans, as social creatures, are constantly borrowing from the collective knowledge of their society and at the same time adding new data to the pool of information that the society possesses.
Importantly, however, is that there must be a system or network in place that is able to communicate ideas between individuals—a common ground if you will.  Discussing coherence systems in Twelve-Step Teleology authored by Warhol and Michie, they assert that “Life stories follow “coherence systems,” or “systems of assumptions about the world that speakers use to make events and evaluations coherent”” (328).  We create these narratives to explain our lives, our identities, and our past.  However, they are both reality and fiction at the same time.  “A powerful master narrative shapes the life story of each…to constitute a collective identity…[o]stensibily cutting across lines of gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, race, social class, religion, and nationality” (Warhol & Michie 328).  They choose to put this concept in the context of A.A. narratives, however this idea applies to all narratives used in constructing an individual’s identity within a community as well as cultural identity.  This is how culture and society are able to exist—through the existence of coherence systems.  Individuals within a community learn what is expected of them and how they should construct a narrative given the situation. “[T]he more one hears and internalizes the structure of the master narrative in the infinite iterations that get played out…the more one will be able to reconceive one’s own story to fit that narrative” (Warhol & Michie 329).  The community creates a system and proliferation of ideas spreads from there.  

     With the importance of transmitting ideas established and how this transmission can occur we can now look at human society and progress on terms of availability of narratives or information.  The first and probably most basic form of communication is gestures and audible noises.  Soon however, to store information in a more permanent manner, creation of symbols, pictures, and eventually written language was developed.  Written language can then be reproduced and spread in a more efficient manner, and also provide a way to more permanently store the information for later generations.

     There are direct correlations between complexity of society and the information or narratives that the society collectively possesses and shares.  There is also a direct correlation between complexity and technology.  For instance, first we have gestures and words, then written language, then the advent of paper and pen, then the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, TV, and the internet.  Each of these technologies or abilities were generated as society collected more information about the world, then an individual or perhaps group of individuals within the society took the available information and generated a new idea.  Arjun Appadurai expresses that “the everyday social life of communities throughout the world has created new resources for the workings of the imagination at all levels of the social order” (231). These generated mediums allow for faster and more efficient transmission of information between individuals which lead to more creative capability within the society for even more technological progress.  It is also interesting to point out that progress in communication technologies available to mankind seem to come at an exponential rate.  After a new faster form of communication is generated, it is usually followed by an explosion of new ideas and inventions. This is, as Appadurai continues, “[e]xpressed most strongly in patterns of consumption, style and taste, the imagination is no longer a matter of individual genius, escapism from ordinary life or just a dimension of aesthetics”  (231).  This is because individual experiences and information about the world are able to be transferred to others more quickly than before.  The ideas can quickly become part of the collective consciousness of society via mediums such as the internet and other mass media sources.  Furthering his argument, Appadurai explains, “[imagination] is a faculty which informs the daily lives of ordinary people in myriad ways: it is the faculty which allows people to consider migration, to resist state violence, to seek social redress, and to design new forms of civic association and collaboration, often across national boundaries” (231).  Research available after a February 2009 press release from comScore, a prominent source for research on digital information, shows that “Americans conducted 13.1 billion searches at the core search engines” (comScore).  Before the internet and the vast amount of information available to its users, as well as search engines to find the information, who or what was answering these 13 billion questions a month? The questions may have gone unanswered or may not have even been asked in the first place.

     The internet connects individuals to one another in a way like never before.  Social networking sites such as FaceBook and Myspace, video websites like YouTube, search engines such as Google and Yahoo! all aid in the spreading of new ideas, and do so on a global scale.  On the topic of globalization, Appadurai observes that “we are functioning in a world that is fundamentally characterized by objects in motion.  These objects include ideas and ideologies, people and goods, images and messages, technologies and techniques” (230). Ideas spread and proliferate throughout the world faster and more efficiently than ever before.  The byproduct of this ability is growing complexity of global society as well as greater technologies being invented at faster and faster intervals.  More data—more narratives—are available to each individual user of the internet than ever before and the availability of this information makes mutation of ideas into new ideas faster and more efficient.  All of the data combined forms a body or corpus of knowledge that shares the properties of that of an organism.  It exists as a collection of narratives, forms created to share some idea or express some thought to another.  In From Work to Text by Roland Barthes, Barthes posits that “the Text…refers to the image of an organism which grows by vital expansion, by “development” (a word which is significantly ambiguous, at once biological and rhetorical); the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory systematic (an image, moreover, close to current biological conceptions of the living being)” (903). Once an idea is created and spread throughout a culture or society it becomes animated in a sense.  People of a community may choose to borrow parts of an idea, or change the idea completely, and these mutations continue with or without the “author’s” permission.

     Since our reality is constructed through narratives, and these narratives are both real and illusory we can say that reality itself is both real and illusory.  There is no doubt that if one does not eat then he or she will eventually die of starvation.  However, the type of foods that the individual eats, the ceremonies followed in preparation, and the rituals performed during the dinner, etc. all are culturally constructed and exist only if they are in the minds of the individuals of the culture—they are fantasy.  Culture and society are continuing narratives of fiction.  They guide us in how to live our lives based on how others have, however they should not consume us.  I believe that this is what Ralph Waldo Emerson was trying to make his readers aware of with the Transcendental movement.  We should not limit ourselves to the narratives of the past, but instead remain active and build on these narratives to form our own reality.  As the collective body of narratives continues to expand and the narrative of human life continues we should take these notions into consideration.  Realizing that our reality is a shared imagination constructed through narratives and understood by one another through coherence systems, perhaps people could become more understanding of one another, have a better understanding of themselves, and be enabled to bring forth ideas to society without the fear of ridicule.
 
Works Cited

Appadurai, Arjun. "Globalization and the Research Imagination." International Social Science Journal 51 (1999): 229-38. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Odum Library, Valdosta.

Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text." Trans. Richard Howard.

Becker, Casey. "ComScore Releases February 2009 U.S. Search Engine Rankings." ComScore, Inc. - Measuring the Digital World. 13 Mar. 2009. ComScore. 09 Apr. 2009 <http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2750>.

Emerson, Ralph W. "Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson." Home page for Oregon State University. Oregan State University. 09 Apr. 2009 <http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/nature-emerson-a.html>.

Warhol, Robyn R., and Helena Michie. "Twelve-Step Teleology: Narratives of Recovery/Recovery as Narrative." Getting a Life Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Pr, 1996. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Odum Library, Valdosta.