Thinging in symbols
A few undisciplined remarks to the article
"How we confuse symbols and things",
written by Paul Lutus,
lutusp@arachnoid.com.
These remarks were written by FÁBRI Péter, Hungary.
e-mail: fabripeter@mail.datanet.hu
http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Alley/1703
Dear Mr. Lutus,
it is Christmas Eve and I have just finished reading your excellent essay on confusing symbols and things. Christmas itself being such a confused series of events (I mean confusing feelings with ritualized acts) I found your essay very convincing, especially tonight.
I would even enhance your list. My favourite example is the press. Every day I open my daily paper I think of the funny proportion of events. I mean, it is very likely that events in the world are equally proportioned to every single day we live. The paper I read is published every single day, it is comparatively equally thick every day - surely this means there must have happened about the same amount of events yesterday and the day before yesterday, etc. All of us know this is not the fact. The fact is that the paper must be sold. It would be too complicated to publish a thin paper on Monday and to publish a thick one on Tuesday - what about subscribers? Not to speak about a boring day - what if an issue wouldn't come out at all?
In a way this situation is hopeless. The paper itself is a symbol - or, rather, a heap of symbols. It symbolizes that the world goes round - everything is in order, the daily paper has arrived. It symbolizes the idea (not the fact!!) that the events may be collected under the same headlines every day: home politics, economy, culture, etc. As McLuhan saw it so clearly, the media is the message. The paper is the text. As if the map were the territory.
On the other hand, the web (and e-mail, etc.) may re-structure the world of news. People will choose - they already have more freedom than they had a few years ago to choose among news and among types of news they are interested in. They may download the news they want and they are not compelled to deal with an enormous amount of information that is useless for them, This way they may deal with the thing instead of the symbol. If they want. For these "things" are still symbols - they will show their real face if we look at them with clear eyes.
Reading my former lines you may have felt the essence of my first remark. I think, there are different levels of things (facts) and symbols. What is a fact? There are "facts" collected by opinion polls and there are facts felt on our own skin (example: "this is hot").
Theoretically (never in practice) we can build a system in which something that is a fact (a thing) on one level becomes a symbol on another level. (We may call it a thymbol, showing this way that it has got at least two faces.)
(This is paralel to what happened with Greek myths: first, they made up a rather complicated system of beliefs, based upon vague facts and old stories, then they became the material for epical poems, in which poems they were restructured - a poem is a structure - then these poems themselves, in which the myths were already well organized, supported the material for the Greek tragedies (the old structure being dissolved, a new one took shape). These tragedies in turn became the basic material of dramas written in the XXth century, etc.)
Tolstoi's War and Peace is full of symbols (e.g. words which themselves are symbols). However, the pure existence of this novel is a fact in the history of literature (and that of mankind). This way a pile of symbols (this novel) became an existing thing.
Conclusion: the only thing that I missed in your essay was to emphasize that symbols are basic tools of mankind. Our very existence depends upon them. We became what we are because we use symbols and so we are able to deal with a huge amount of facts at the same time.
Our thoughts, all the signs we use in our human life (words, pictures, traffic signs, Chinese characters, etc.) are representations. So while I agree with you when you speak about confusion, I suggest to you to think about the prosperous use of symbols.
One more question. Did you ever think about the strange opposition between the capacity of a computer's memory and a human being's memory? For a computer, a text carries a very small amount of information. Computers don't associate (at least not as much as people do), so text means a low-level information for them. On the other hand, a colour image carries a huge amount of information for a computer, especially if it moves. Computers are very slow when memorizing moving colour images.
People, however, are very quick in memorizing moving colour images, and they are rather slow when memorizing texts. A text may carry very much information for us. It may be high-level information for us. Try to collect your associations connected to this only line: "To be or not to be." You may have connected moving images, memories of people you sat together with in the theatre, some "facts" of Shakespeare's life, some actors' name, etc.) Texts for us act as hypertext. Images don't always do that.
I don't have a theory about this opposition, I only wanted to point out, what a strange relationship there is between different forms of representations. Which is the symbol and which is the thing?
Last but not least, let me thank you your beautiful essay. And let me use a set of symbols:
Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!
Budapest, 1997. December 24.
(Fábri Péter)
ALICE
CURRICULUM
FLÓRA
MIKLÓS
GREETINGS
KRISZTA'S CURRICULUM
THE LIVING MASK
THINGING IN SYMBOLS
Editing this page I used Arachnophilia. However, Arachnophilia is able to edit much more complicated pages. I am a beginner in editing HTML.
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