CONCEPT TO SEE:

MEANING AS A SYMBOL ENSEMBLE PROVIDING INFORMATION

A very simple example provides a good starting point for understanding the inherent complexity of meaning, and the genesis of culturally hazardous behaviors.

This example of a potentially culturally hazardous behavior demonstrates how a “simple” mechanism rapidly is transformed into a complex activity in the pursuit of personal goals.

When setting out to buy a used car it is common to feel a surge of hope that a very good car at an exceptional price will be available. It is also a universal experience to feel doubt and worry about the risk of purchasing a car without knowing about its history and true condition. Solutions are few, but include a look at the car’s odometer in order to determine how many miles it has traveled. An initial sense relief at finding a method for reducing risk gives way, however, to the realization that the odometer might have been tampered with.

The smell of a peach is a direct signal that the fruit is nearby. An odometer provides indirect signals, signals that are symbols, a representation of something, but not the thing itself, and indicating a meaning that we accept. In this instance meaning is a symbol ensemble providing information.

What occurs when the odometer is tampered with? The symbol as representation remains, but the symbol as meaning is altered. We ask how much of the meaning remains.

If there are 209,000 miles on the odometer, and it is changed to 188,000 miles, we might say that the symbol as meaning is distorted. With luck, the 21,000 mile distortion will have a favorable psychological effect (bringing the mileage under the mystical 200,000 miles), but no significant effect on the condition of the car.

On the other hand, if there are 390,000 miles on the odometer, and it is changed to 188,000 miles, we could say that the symbol as meaning is destroyed. The 202,000 miles difference represent more than half of the mileage on the car, and the true 390,000 miles is enough mileage to make a buyer concerned enough to not make the purchase.

We depend upon meanings in our lives; yet, meanings can be altered, manipulated by others to their advantage. The distortion of meaning is more common, and typically more effective and “safe” as a tactic, but the destruction of meaning is not rare. The distortion or destruction of meaning is, in fact, common, but hidden because it usually occurs within an individual, for whom this is either so automatic as not to be recognized, or recognized but accompanied by a personally accepted rationale.

A TASTE OF LIFE

When he changes the odometer mileage, is he correct that this change is an acceptable behavior, because it is “trivial” and “no one is hurt”? The answer depends upon his intricate interactions with the victim, “observers”, and their cultures. We can be sure, however, that meaning is more complex and malleable than expected. The potential role of meaning in our lives and in our cultures now includes obvious dangers and is transformed into an immediate practical concern.

VOICES

The Chinese script has the same advantage with historical distance as with geographical. The largest single reform of the characters occurred a little over two thousand years ago. Educated Chinese can read the poetry and literature of an period in those two thousand years with equal ease and in its original form. In the West we are limited to about a quarter of this span. To enjoy anything much before Chaucer requires a specialized training.

The nature of the script and of the language also has a profound effect on Chinese methods of expression. Just as the characters on a page are stable, self-contained symbols, unaltered in shape by other characters around them, so too are the words of classical Chinese. Each is unsusceptible to changes of gender, to considerations of singular or plural, to past present or future tenses, to agonies of choice between accusative and dative, and most of them can be noun, adverb, adjective or verb at will. Each sits alone in its sentence (to which there is no full stop), influencing its neighbours and being influenced by them only as a result of the order in which they are placed. This is something profoundly different from the right grammatical fabric of a European sentence. If a European writer is a weaver, a Chinese one is more like a jeweler.

One result of this lack of connection, or of a sentence being mae up of a series of separate images, is that a statement of any complexity is much more ambiguous in Chinese than in a European language, a fact which has undoubtedly contributed to the Chinese reputation for being enigmatic. A sentence needs to be interpreted almost like a poem. An American scholar, the translator of many classical Chinese texts, once composed an English paragraph to give some impression of his unpunctuated and largely monosyllabic originals:

Sky spans     high earth bears up     beast herds teem there

Winged flocks fly by     four seas close round     ten streams race on

so too kings reign     lords aid     men plow     wives spin

good sires rear sons     good heirs serve sires

The potential for poetry in such a language is obvious, even in a paragraph in no way intended to make that point. The very density of images and monosyllables seems even to suggest a peculiarly modern form of verse, like Gerard Manley Hopkins’s spring rhythm in such lines as

.   .   .   each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name.

But a Chinese eye, accustomed to making the connections, would not find the paragraph as dense as this.

Bamber Gascoigne (1973/2014). The Dynasties of China. London: The Folio Society, pp. 10 11.

Knowing of Chinese ambivalence, I did not expect his departure to affect our party that evening or China that spring. I had forgotten that death prettifies. True in any culture, this is especially true in a culture rooted in Confucianism, which accepts form, the more malleable, in lieu of content. To Confucius, the consummate realist, proper conduct, the more knowable, was the measure of man. To ask mere mortals to discipline their thoughts as well as their actions would be asking too much – form would suffice. And so Chinese embraced ritual, the ultimate form. Mourning being the ultimate ritual, Chinese mourned extravagantly. Even in the era of the consummate ideologues, who measured man, above all, by his thoughts, they continued to do so.

Bette Bao Lord (1990). Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 5.