PAGE IN PROGRESS What you see here is a page of my hypertext book POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. Initially empty, this page will slowly be filled with thoughts, notes, and quotes. One day, I will use them to write a coherent entry, similar to these completed pages. Thank you for your interest and patience!
Shakespeare: There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so
Milton: The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
Bergen, B. K. (2012). Louder than words: The new science of how the mind makes meaning. Basic Books.
Shared meanings - understand - "standing together under the meaning"
The difference between seeing something as a failure or as an opportunity is a matter of meaning
Gestalt psychology uses principles like similarity, proximity, and closure to explain how humans naturally organize sensory information into meaningful patterns
From Why Buddhism Is True: “And as for the depressingness: thinking of the perceived world as in some sense empty doesn’t have to strip your life of meaning. In fact, it can allow you to build a new framework of meaning that’s more valid—maybe even more conducive to happiness—than your old framework.”
Joyce, Rosemary, A., and Susan D. Gillespie, eds. 2015. Things in Motion: Object Histories, Biographies, and Itineraries. Santa Fe: SAR Press. (as explain in ch 14 of history of arhcaeology) "They argue that if the point of using the concept of “cultural biography” was to account for the perceptions of the same object by multiple users over time and space, the biography metaphor runs the risk of leading the research astray... Combining the concept of biography with that of “afterlife” only seems to complicate matters. To alleviate the troubles of such an anthropomorphic metaphor, Joyce and Gillespie propose the concept of “itinerary.” This concept is not meant to be a replacement but rather a complement of cultural biography. Itineraries are supposed to be unlimited: they unfold throughout multiple uses and semantic reconfigurations of the same object. "
Ch 13: "In museums of archaeology or museums with archaeological collections, the visitor was led from the “wild” to the “civilized” state..." "We are facing “The Museum Period” or “Museum Age” for their importance in orientation, regulation, and monitoring, conceiving narratives of hierarchical reaffirmation, social and ethnic superiority through carefully selected, exhibited, and explained objects."
Ch. 14: "As we have seen, objects come equipped with a set of meanings that tend to change over time. Some of the questions arising are, therefore, how objects acquire their meaning, what process provides a bronze tool with a particular significance, and how this significance is altered when the tool becomes part of an archaeological collection. We can go on wondering what difference it makes, semantically, to be stored in an English or in a Russian museum, in one century or another. Historians have developed two answers to these kinds of questions. According to Michel Foucault (1988), objects acquire their meaning because they are embedded in a certain cultural discourse; they are, so to say, discursive objects. In this perspective, an object is not only what society says about it but also what society makes of it at a certain time.... In the Foucauldian perspective, discursive practices are the means to transfer and enforce hegemonic norms. By encapsulating objects in discursive practices, biopower[1] can produce “docile bodies” (Foucault 1977, 145–85). These “bodies” do not need to be human. Even objects can be subjected to discipline, for example, by a certain exhibition arrangement. [“Biopower” is Foucault’s term used to indicate the complex set of practices designed to organize forms of life politically and culturally.] The notion of “discursive practices” should not be viewed as merely concerning how scientists talk or write about objects, but it percolates to include material and urbanistic structures, as Tony Bennett convincingly demonstrated in The Birth of Museums (1995). Bennett explores how public museums and international exhibitions may be understood not just as spaces of cultural and artistic education but as a disciplinary laboratory of a wide range of socially approved routines. By extensively analyzing the spatial and architectural dispositions of museums, Bennett shows that exhibition halls are organized to produce two kinds of effects on the visitor. On the one hand, museums bring forth a sense of self-discipline, which is attained by means of a series of dispositifs (to use a Foucauldian term) construed to produce self-surveillance and self-regulation. On the other hand, the layout of the exhibits is designed to lead the visitor toward the appropriation of a preconceived narrative on the subject matter of the museum. Drawing on the Foucauldian conceptual weaponry, Bennett argues that the organization of space within museums can be looked upon as discursive formations, effectively determining the expository choices resulting from precise political and cultural agendas. In this way, the history of archaeology gets involved in new levels of complexity concerning the evolution of the role of exhibitions as well as the modalities and motivations of their promotion in relation to broader socio-political contexts. Another useful concept to understand the process of meaning acquisition is “epistemic object.” In contrast with the Foucauldian perspective, here the semantic dimension of objects is shaped mainly by the disciplinary practices underlying the construction of the collections as the objects of scientific investigations of archaeologists. In other words, objects acquire, change, and possibly lose their meaning insofar as they are related to material practices (Rheinberger 1997). It must be noted, however, that not all objects are epistemically meaningful: laboratories are full of objects that serve merely as tools whose meaning does not exceed the immediate usefulness for local purposes. Rheinberger defines these as “technical objects,” and also insists that true epistemic objects are constantly “in flux” and “in motion,” i.e., they continuously evolve and, in so doing, allow knowledge to be transferred over time and space." "The notion that museum objects transmit scientific knowledge to the general public was well ingrained in the minds of nineteenth-century museum curators (see, e.g., Trigger 1989, 148–200; Díaz-Andreu 2007). For example, in European museums, it was customary to assemble archaeological exhibits with the implicit goal of making the historical trajectories (and, by extension, the cultural relations) between modern nations apparent to visitors. In this sense, collection design did not serve a purely scientific purpose but rather a larger national education program. " but "According to Conn, knowledge is constructed by visitors through an operation of contrast-and-compare of the objects displayed without any need—in fact with the explicit rejection—of any written narrative mediation on the part of the curator (see also Cova 2009 and Wendel 2011). " "In these nineteenth-century museums, narrative explanations were kept to a minimum. Once collected, accurately selected, and artfully displayed in museums, objects were intended to speak by themselves (e. g. Trigger 1989, 148–205). For lay people to appreciate similarities and dissimilarities of material of even very different origins, nothing more was required than a cunning juxtaposition. "
"In Mauss’s view, objects play a role in transforming isolated individuals into social actors by contributing to the definition of their social identity" (in ch. 14)
"As early as the sixteenth century, European powers occupied a pivotal role in the global circulation of goods. Europe was inundated by exotic artifacts from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Most of these objects were categorized as “curiosities” and generated a new craze that spread rapidly among collectors of the upper classes. At least until the late eighteenth century, learned culture “consisted chiefly of the practice of curiosity” (Pomian 1990, 60; see also Evans and Marr 2006; Daston and Park 2001). Such practices involved the accumulation and juxtaposition of extravagant items, including ancient exhibits from all around the world (Schnapp 1996, 198). In this way, and long before archaeological science was founded, cultural elites came to know about remnants of extra-European civilizations, particularly South America and sub-Saharan Africa. Once archaeology started to emerge as a scientific discipline, this disordered accumulation of items was reorganized according to doctrines about the different developmental stages of humankind. In turn, this reorganization process was inspired by a value framework that fed back to the practice of collecting. It did that by eliciting the discovery of exhibits that fitted into preconceived analogies between the developments of different civilizations or supported the supremacy and the ensuing mission of the white man. Thus, missionaries, diplomats, and explorers contributed largely to forming new collections by bringing to Europe many objects, the more extravagant and bizarre, the better (Gosden and Knowles 2001; Thomas 1994). " honor as a meaning. Fighting for someone’s honor. Honor killings. Pushkin’s duel. Film The Last Duel
Meaning of importance: cult of heroes; Lincoln is super important but it is very possible that there have been many other people who worked in their own ways to challenge injustices yet we don’t know much or anything about because their story was lost, suppressed as unimportant or less "interesting" than the story of such people as Lincoln (when we travelled to Springfield, in the city and around it it was all about Lincoln) Biological routs of meanings. Animals also have meanings (what Mary said about Max - "He does not know yet what you mean") Image from Brookfield zoo for meanings for wolves Meanings for bees; dance = direction towards food.
Like/dislike - most basic meaning shared by all animals.
Meanings are a matter of survival. They are rooted in biology. That's why noticing the meaning we operate with and questioning them is so difficult. Sometimes we can acknowledge that something is a meanings rather that "just the way things are" and still be unable to disregard this meaning.
Biological: special meaning each person has for their kids. "You mean so much to me". Meaning of importance.
Meaning of a country/nation, see "Imagined Communities" by Benedict Anderson
the role of archeology in creating meanings of nation: see chapter 29 "Archaeology, Nationalism, Imperialism, Colonialism, and the Postcolonial Turn" - archaeology was used to support the meaning of the nation which was needed after the revolutions
In archaeology: "The ecological approach rejects the idea that objects have intrinsic meanings or that they can be studied through a set of pre-established rules, to focus instead on the ways in which they are transformed and stabilized through their immanent relations... To approach Mexican antiquities ecologically means giving up the premise that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, these objects had transcendent meanings, to ask instead how they mattered and to whom they mattered at specific moments and places... the vestiges of Mexico’s ancient past were shaped as objects of interest both by local and broader regional, national, and hemispheric interests. Their meanings and uses depended on their transit through different social contexts and on the intervention of a variety of actors, from their Indigenous custodians to museum curators, government officials, commercial agents, and scholars. Finally, an ecological approach draws attention to differences in the ways Mexican antiquities were studied, classified, and displayed at different sites, uncovering their destinies as they were apprehended by specific intellectual traditions and changing disciplinary practices, legal measures, political agendas, aesthetic sensibilities, material limitations, forms of sociability, and by the physical and taxonomic proximity of Mexican antiquities to objects from other parts of the world. The three sites examined here—Philadelphia, Paris, and Mexico City—produced divergent visual and textual narratives of Mexican antiquities and of Mexico’s ancient past, which inevitably raises questions about the uses of the past for the present " Collecting Antiquities in the Nineteenth Century by MirunaAchim
ads: this is not just a refill, this is being independent (Walgreens)
Barthes’ mythologies to explain meanings
Shakespeare: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Milton: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
Meanings in animals. Mary to Sky about Max:He does now know yet what you mean.
As a kid, I loved the fairy tale by Swedish writer Selma Lagerlof titled "The Changeling" [translation into Russian]
What is unique about human beings is that we understand the world and communicate with each other symbolically. Symbolic interactionism what this means is that we see the world and communicate with each other using meanings (ideas and associations we attach to objects of reality) we seek meanings, while meaninglessness (when we cannot find a meaning) scares us [see Frankl's Man's quest for meaning] On the down side, we depend on meanings that exist in our culture/society/community, it is hard/scary for us to question meanings and see that they not natural and absolute meanings have in a sense power over us because of how hard it is for us to question them meaninglessness does not have to be bad (mindfulness meditation is about trying to step outside the meanings that surround us and be in the present without giving it names of trying to have it make sense)
The first half of the name of this project is "power of meanings" because to me, it is essential to see people as creature who see the world and themselves through ideas in their heads that are often not directly connected with reality at hand. Some of these meanings are created by people, so theoretically they have power over them. But mostly, meanings in our heads have power over us, unless we discover our personal power to distinguish between what is and how we see it.
One example - my anxiety around flying. Dealing with it requires distinguishing between how I see things, how I feel, and what is.
Humans are the species that are not afraid of fire. Their ansesstors probably were afraid, till at some point Homo Sapiens was able to attach new meanings to fire: warmth, home, protection, food...
Human being are meaning-makers and meaning-seekers. We see the world through meanings that exist in our heads (symbolic interactionism). These meanings are not natural or absolute, but they often appear for us to be. Most people do not question the meanings that they subconsciously adopt as they grow up in a certain community/culture (it is easier to question meanings of a community/culture that you do not belong do).
We can say that meanings are a form of macropower, in a sense that they are not created and maintained by any specific individual but by communities and cultures, or even the whole society. The bigger the group - the more difficult it is to challenge these meanings (for example, meaning of money).
As with other forms of macropower, the relationship between meanings and power is paradoxical. Meanings are created and maintained by people (so people have power over meanings) but meanings also impact people's ways of being, thinking, and doing things. This is not to say that some people create meanings that impact other people while not being impacted by them themselves (although this can sometimes be the case). In a paradoxical way, people can be maintaining meanings that are at the same time impacting them (and not necessarily in a neutral or harmless way). Money is one example.
In this paradoxical relationship, no individual has absolute power over any meaning (especially over shared meanings, which exist due to actions of many people); at the same time, we can at the same time assume that no meanings have absolute power over individuals.
Each object (broadly understood) can have multiple meanings, and it is theoretically possible for an individual to choose to focus on some meanings over others (to understand under which circumstance it is possible we need to take into consideration the complicated subject of free will).
Roland Barthes “Mythologies” talks about how ideologies are created when some meanings pretend to be dominant and natural.
Any object (broadly defined) can mean a variety of things, which means that it can have a variety of associated ideas in the human mind. But different people can notice or prioritize different meanings depending on their circumstances. Sometimes some people may wish to persuade other people to prioritize certain meanings (this is done through persuasion or propaganda).
From The King of the World (chapter on Versailles) ” As the King boasted in his memoirs, one of the most visible effects of his power was to give ‘an infinite value’ to something which in itself was nothing.”
Changing meanings: my perception of the film “to the right from the elevator “
“it’s god’s plan” - way to give meaning and avoid meaninglessness
To question meaning, be like Data (from Star Treck). Остранение, [Xander's demon girlfriend in Buffy]
how we can see meanings change throughout our life (example: my attitude towards color combinations, how looking at street fashion bogs changed my style )
meanings can make you commit murder: honor, duels, honor killings, Pushkin
The power of taking an insult and turning it into strength: queer, Yankee Doodle
basic meanings: approach or avoid; these meanings are maintained the most basic survival part of our brain - amygdala https://tyelabtest.org/wp-content/uploads/tyereview2018.pdf
https://www.tenpercent.com/meditationweeklyblog/building-a-refuge-from-fear "One night I was biking home along the Hudson River, a bit later than I normally do. It was getting dark, and there is a part of the path that leaves the riverside and goes into a more wooded area. It was dark, and I was seized by this terrible fear. It came so intensely, and I felt unsafe and frightened. I felt cornered, and it reminded me of those nights at home as a child... At that moment I said to myself, “You can do this,” and I brought my attention into my belly and breathed through it. It was so magical that a moment later I was able to notice that in the darkness the fireflies had come out. What had seemed scary and dark revealed these bursts and beams of light flickering everywhere inside it."
Meanings: friend said, why is it so difficult for domestic people to separate old things from memories. These things are not memory. You need to throw them away sometimes ! Me, saving dog un Minecraft
Amulets, what really helps is believing in its power, what helps is the meaning in our heads; but then we are powerless if we lose the amulet; it's better to realize that what matters is believing in ourselves, which is a power of mind (not some object that we can lose and that has power over us).
See Collecting Antiquities in the Nineteenth Century MirunaAchim in Oxford Handbook of the History of Archeology: "Starting from the premise that antiquities do not have intrinsic meanings, but acquire them as they move geographically and conceptually... the chapter reflects on the tangled, often contingent, processes by which the past matters to the present."
“Our feelings about the situation we are about to enter are developed a few thousandths of a second before we realize we are about to entering it. Why? The amygdala's job is to keep us safe. It scans the environment constantly, reading the valence codes attached to everything around us. When the amygdala senses we are about to enter a negatively valenced situation, it - to do its job of protecting us - tries to warn us or to stop us…. What I want you to understand is this. Feelings are caused, not by what you know logically about how risky a situation is, but by the amygdala's reading of the valence code your mind has linked to the situation.”
Meaning of special: maybe if humming birds were everywhere I would not like them so much because they would not be special? Maybe if rainbow were in the sky all the time, I would not care. But some things that are rare can be considered bad even if we can question whether they are really dangerous or bad for us
meaning of language; you need to be part of Conversation to understand the intended meaning (see chapter 5 of the Intro to Discourse Analysis by Gee).
Your personal power: understanding that you have some power over meanings (even thought they do have significant power over you), learning t use your power over meanings (e g, « this is not how things are, this is the way I see things »)
Our brains are made to make meanings, to draw connections, to create stories. We don't even notice how we make these meanings and create these stories. Experiment (described in Why Buddhism Is True): with people who's left and right side of the brain was separated. When they saw a word with one side, they did what the word said, but then they made up justifications that were not about seeing this word.
Also see quote from my book Media Is Us about how we became meaning-making creatures.