By Eric Santosa
This is an Introduction to Cultural Psychology Part 3. click here to go to part_1, part_2, part_4, part_5
In discussions with friends on marketing communication I often say that we're not selling products. What we are selling is the story behind it. When people buy the story they will buy the product. I am saying that it is imaginations which the story delivers that people buy. It is similar in politics when we say what a party is selling is the ideology. When people buy your ideology, your imaginations, they will vote for your party. These expressions reflect the importance of two landscapes of human experience for explicating how people may be able to buy certain imagination, a story or ideology.
Practice and Consciousness
Paul Ricoeur describes these two landscapes as "being in history" and "the telling about it." Sequence of events or human actions in the "real world" occurs concurrently with mental events in the mind of the protagonists involved. The first is the landscape of practices and the second, of consciousness. The example of Indah and Martha that we find in my earlier post illustrates a complex interplay between the two. Just look at how absorbing the story of Martha for Indah that she almost forgets herself having a lunch appointment with her friend. When Martha is telling her story it has captured the landscape of Indah's consciousness that she forgets her being in history. It is as if Indah gets sucked and is jumping into Martha's life. Indah is indeed buying the story of Martha. If Martha were in a role to offer an elixir for preventing divorce, chances are that Indah would buy to prevent her paradise lost. In the context of media and creative industry in general, having products, services, performances or communications that may be able to have similar effects like the story of Martha is the paradise of every enterprise.
Let's take a look closer to these two landscapes. Telling may not be the right word to describe the essence of the landscape of consciousness since it is only one of the things that human is doing involving the second landscape. Essentially it may be more accurate to name "the observing on it" When Indah is in the classroom activity system with the kids for example she is doing a storytelling practice telling a fairy tale for them, while at the same time observing on her own doings and their effects on classroom environments. In such situation she does not tell anything about what she is doing in classroom. Only in imaginary settings where a narrator with an omniscient eyes and ears telling reports of what she is thinking and doing would we have a live "telling about it." If Indah put an effort to tell herself what she is doing like a narrator's voice-over while she tells the fairy tales definitely it would confuse the kids listening. We can imagine Indah making such narrator's voice-over when she is doing a cooking class for the kids or a cooking TV show for a food channel. In many other occasions her consciousness does not do the telling about her own practices.
This particular scene of Indah telling fairy tale to her kids is involving a quite complex interplay between the landscape of practice and of consciousness. Humans have the capacity of self reflection, that is, going beyond or transcending the landscape of practice into the landscape of consciousness to inspect or scrutinize their own doings and their effects on environments. Humans have the capacity to go back and forth, transcending to and descending from the landscape of consciousness. They are able even to make reflection, transcending on their own consciousness ad infinitum. This is the hallmark of human intelligence that may differentiate them from other species in animal kingdom. Human capability of knowledge, of having sense of self, of having stories, imaginations and at the end having the ability to build civilization rest upon this capacity.
To explicate the interplay we need to differentiate two basic categories related to the two landscapes. In the landscape of practice we may differentiate between linguistic and extra-linguistic practices. For example Indah's cooking activity may involve mainly extra-linguistic practices when she is using her cooking tool for manipulating the cooking materials. The cooking activity may involve linguistic practices when she is describing to the kids how to cook, or when she is doing a kind of self talk about the dish she would like to make. Leontiev refers to this as internal activities which in certain activity system like cooking go together with external activities in a coordinated way to achieve the objective of making certain dish. In contrast storytelling is the kind of activity that involves more linguistic practices. It certainly involves extra-linguistic gestures like when Indah moving her hands to animate the action figures of the tale, or when her mouth producing utterances. In contrast to cooking in which her hands function to manipulate the cooking materials, in storytelling her hands moving and mouth uttering to make gestures as symbols or icons to signify the sjuzet and dramatic pentad of the fairy tale.
While she is doing the practice of storytelling she is able to monitor her own practices and the effects they have on the audience. It is as if she can transcend or go beyond herself and gaining access into the landscape of consciousness. In this landscape correspond to what we find in the landscape of practice we may differentiate between practical versus discursive consciousness. Following Anthony Giddens with his Structuration Theory, practical consciousness refers to knowledgeability which results from the monitoring of "being in history" that very often may be hard to explicate into words. This knowledgeability consists mainly of images that may function as icons and indices in Peircean sense. Discursive consciousness in contrast is knowledgeability that involves symbols which may be more easily elucidated in words or utterances.
Thinking and imagination as symbolic practices
Observing on "being in history" is not the only thing human can do in the landscape of consciousness. They can do practices in the landscape of conscious like they have in the landscape of "being in history". Thinking is a kind of practice that is purely symbolical which is conducted in the landscape of consciousness, the product of which is imagination. Just like cooking practices in "real world" thinking is a practice which uses symbols, indices and icons as signifier tools to produce more complex signifieds, the imagination, which when reproduced may become complex signifiers. This is the process of iterated signification which is described by Peirce and Saussure's semiotics.
Similar processes occur when we are reading and writing. When Indah is reading fairy tale books in her preparations for the class the book provides her with signifiers that she uses as tools to reconstruct narratives in her own consciousness. Likewise writing is a practice similar to storytelling. When Indah tells the fairy tales she is producing signifiers for the kids to help them reconstruct the narratives as signifieds in their own consciousness. Conceived of from this approach a movie can be seen as a very complex set of signifiers involving symbols, indices and icons both visual and verbal which presents a higher order signifieds to the audience's consciousness.
When Martha is telling her story to Indah after class session with the kids, she is reproducing a product, a set of signifiers of imaginations on her own life that performs certain functions for her interests. We may perceive this process similar to news reporting: Martha is telling about her "being in history". It's not that the second is merely representational of the first, like orthodox journalism would have it, that news papers merely report sequence of events objectively as a matter of facts. Students of narrative since Aristotle in his Poetics have recognized that Mimesis is not merely the art imitates life. It's not merely an innocent platonic representation of reality.
Paul Ricoeur says that Mimesis is a kind of metaphor of reality. "It refers to reality not in order to copy it but in order to give it a new reading." These new readings, the imaginations are imbued with interpretations that help people like Martha to realize her fabula. Again, they are not merely innocent representations of reality. They serve to realize certain interests for the actor in the light of its fabula. The structure of her imagination is build in accord with certain sjuzet and dramatic pentads which in relation to fabula may form a kind of hermeneutic circle. These new readings function to help humans to structure themselves and their life. They function on the one hand for human to understand past events, and their current existence, and on the other hand reconstruct possible scenarios of the future. In other words stories and the imaginations behind it have strategic and tactical functions to help humans maneuvering their life, and they are reconstructed using packaged signifiers given by their culture.
So, when Martha tells her story to Indah it's not like an innocent news report. Martha comes to see Indah with one objective in mind: to get Indah help to solve her problems with Raka. This is conducted tactically in two steps. First of all she tells the story of Raka with his problems to get Indah understand the situation and how she could help him. In the second step Martha tells the story of her divorce, how she then becomes a single mother. The function of this step is twofold. It is to justify her action, making excuses for her inability to handle Raka, and at the same time to get Indah moved and motivated to help. The divorce story has the strategic function for Martha to achieve her objectives.
It's not that as if Martha consciously try to exploit Indah in this case. Martha maybe truly sincere in telling her story. Being a single mother to survive she could not adopt a good mother fabula with paradise lost sjuzet. Adopting a more warrior-like fabula with becoming-tough-mother sjuzet makes more sense for Martha to continue her life, the reason why she allows herself being unable to become a good mother. Earlier when the divorce has just happened her fabula might be different, and she might still adopt this paradise-lost sjuzet. In this context telling her divorce story to family and friends might function to position herself as helpless victim, being dumped by her spouse. The story might function unconsciously to induce anger towards her spouse, and at the same time to induce pity for her from family and friends.
Telling her story to Indah is like Martha is offering a product, a package of signifiers that Indah may buy. Indah buys the story and adopts it for her own interest. Again, the way Indah understand the story of Martha is not like innocent listening of reports. Presented with a package of signifiers from Martha, Indah reconstruct the story in the lights of her own fabula. Martha may not present her story in the way of paradise lost sjuzet. Despite that Indah may understand it as paradise lost. Her currently active sjuzet may be that of transformations-for-becoming good mother. The paradise lost sjuzet is activated in Indah's consciousness as sub-junction that may possibly happen to her. What has been the reality of the past for Martha becomes a possible subjuncted reality for Indah, a threatening one that she may not all this time consider as a possibility. This maybe one of the reasons why the story of Martha is absorbing her very much that she almost forgets herself having appointment with a close friend at Pondok Indah mall.
The story of Martha for Indah may have functions very similar to women magazines which present real life stories from their readers like for example "Oh mama oh papa" in Kartini magazine years ago. The title "Oh mama oh papa" itself functions as signifier for the target audience which induces a paradise lost sjuzet in the readers' imaginations. Who maybe the potential audience of this rubric? From our cultural psychology approach those who would buy are the one which consider paradise lost sjuzet as threatening subjuncted reality, or those whose active sjuzet is domestic paradise lost looking for another more hopeful subjuncted paradise. It may need research to affirm this guess. Chances are people like Indah whose active fabula and sjuzet are transformation for becoming good mother may be more likely to buy the magazine. In contrast people like Martha for whom the divorce story has been the reality of the past may not buy such magazines.
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