Connected to what?

Human’s, culture, objects, spaces, world, other. These are all things that we look at when people study culture, yet the one thing seeming to constantly pop up is the concept of ‘connection’. People connecting to each other, to objects, to animals, how they connect, how they don’t connect. We are constantly bombarded with the ideas associated with the relationship people have to anything and everything around them. Even then, one particular link can span across a huge range, such as objects. Bourdieu (1984) looked at objects as social markers, Marx’s saw objects as a commodity and means of capital, even Saussure’s linguistic knowledge, helped to understand objects as material culture (Woodward 2007). But what I am noticing more often than not, are the negative connections we make. Mucke (2008) writes in his piece on momentum, about the relationship between idea and subject, looking at the way in which people associate ideas with meaning and how these can be changed, relatively easily, if one has the right tools to do so. Understanding that it is almost impossible not to make links between something and something else, can be coveys through examples of intertextualtiy or intersubjectivivity, meaning the combining of ideas in text or subject. So really it’s the transfer of knowledge from one area to another.

If we look at the concept of otherness in relation to connection or the flowing of ideas, the focal point of most theoretical perspectives is how we are ‘not’ something or the ‘difference’ between something and something else. But why is that? We understand that difference helps to define what something ‘is’ by what it ‘is not’, and this is important, both internally and externally (Wise 2011). Yet it seems that with the constant defining and redefining of how we are ‘different’, also comes across as a justification of one’s own sense of self. So we are constantly pointing out what is different so that in some backwards way we figure out where we fit in. This could stem from the ideas of separation throughout the world as people become more and more individual on a global stage. This urges the concept that through otherness we are thus redefined, for example by ‘not’ being male, white, and young, we are therefore defined as being something else. So in a way it is the constant connection we have to defining ourselves, that gives us some inkling to who we are and where we stand, bringing us to the idea that it is perhaps what is ‘not’ said that helps us the most. Or is this simply too involved? What about heading back to basics? 

So if indeed we do live within a society, dominated by the fact that there are considerably strong ideological forces at play, within the binaries of our culture, the way in which we engage with others must reflect on us as performers on a global stage. The concept of connection, on an external level must therefore be influenced by globalisation. Globalisation as stated by During (2005) is a “master term used to name, interpret and direct the social and technological transformations of the contemporary era.” It conveys the idea that humans are overcoming all different boundaries, including geographical and technological, the more physical boundaries, yet mentally in some cases it seems like people could indeed be taking a step backwards. Keeping to our houses, rooms and computer screens, delving deeper into worlds within worlds, where reality seems likely to bend. So could the next step be to stand again outside, so that we gain an objective view of ourselves, and what it is that we do, living within the world that has been create around us.