Friday 5 February 2010

Money

Money is not just bio-survival tickets. A better term perhaps could be socio-survival or symbol-survival tickets. Money is of course a symbol created by societies that aims to aid the exchange of goods between people within an organised and complex symbol-based society. For people to act out the roles required by a symbol-based society, money is necessary for the delegation of these roles. Without money people would have to resort to traditional ways of survival and symbol-based social roles would simply not be feasible. Without money a complex society would not be able function, and symbol-based social constructs would not flourish such as science, religion, technology, philosophy, etc. It is no surprise then that money attains social status and is a necessity for survival within a society. Within a symbol-obsessed society money is needed to satiate the constant demand for new symbols to adorn the walls of its symbolic buildings and infrastructure. The term bio-survival ticket is inaccurate (even if it has a better ring to it), because money is not only necessary for the survival of the biological part of humans, but also social and symbol survival. Bio-survival can be achieved with or without money and society but social roles and symbolic constructs cannot be achieved without money or society. Bio-survival is perhaps the lesser part of the role that money plays within a modern society as it gives access to so much more. The fact that a symbol such as a bio-survival ticket is needed to sustain (symbol-based) culture survival is only to be expected. If humans could feed solely on symbols they would, yet something is lurking beyond the veil of symbols and once we find it as a society together, the need for symbols and money will be eradicated. (Until then, we either have to accept the current condition and try to make the best of it using existing symbols to lift society out of the vicious circle it finds itself in, or abandon society to live a strictly bio-survival based existence. Blablabla.)

Post-symbolism

A post-symbolic or super-symbolic existence is the next step in evolution of culture. An information based society is the obvious transition towards this, as traditional symbols are replaced by informational constructs or super-symbols. Humans instead of interpreting and sharing their inner symbolic worlds with external symbolic constructs they start to device informational codes. This movement towards a code-based existence means that the new currency will eventually become information. As new codes are being devised, ancient natural codes are understood and decoded. Communication still remains linguistic but it is gradually progressing from laryngeal to informational and language becomes a code to be deciphered and programmed rather than a mere exchange of social symbols. As language becomes a code it loses grammatical structure in the traditional sense and no longer communicates symbols but data. A post-symbolic society is not occupied with the creation and perpetuation of symbols but with the underlying structure of things including symbols, society, mind and matter. This of course leads to the programming and metaprogramming stages that we all aspire to reach.

1 comment:

  1. This ties in nicely with a concept I was trying to communicate with one of my tutors the other day. Fears such as "literacy is failing (or at least evolving in a more progressive view) with the rise of texting" are already decadent, as the question becomes: what form or code will language evolve to. I mentioned the fact that the acquisition of language in the future will actually be a translation exercise of traditional language to this new code. But eventually we'll skip the middle man and just move onto code. This is definitely visible in the new curriculum. ;)

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