Midterm - On Social Text...

"Each of us is constantly—every day—faced with a social text. We move through it, we read it. Through this text, and through reading it, we communicate with others, with the wider society on the one hand and with nature on the other. At the same time, we are all part of a social text. Not only do we read, we are also read, deciphered, made plain (or not). We are both subject and object, indivisibly (first, object; the social text encompasses us and we have to see ourselves as encompassed; then, subject; because we decipher and read the text from within, in that we see ourselves inside it, never entirely outside it)."

The social text we are both, subject and object to is unavoidably part of partaking in a society. We navigate through it everyday in the form of stereotypes because simply, it takes too long to get to know anyone on a personal level; thus, we naturally approach everyone with preconceived notions. We place people into categories and judge them, unwillingly and unavoidably, and they do the same with us—not necessarily in a malicious way or even, as a sign of a lack of education (in many cases), but rather, it is part of reading the social text we have always been exposed to.

There are signs and signifiers, as Lefebvre says, that allow us to reach these judgments and conclusions. “Clothes and manners signify. The spectacle of the street thus trains the eye and stimulates the faculty of observation. Think how many women, getting right inside (without knowing them) subtle system of signs, are able at first glance to categorize another woman assessing her shoes, stockings, hairstyle, hands and nails, jewelry and general appearance! A detailed analysis of the social text would pick up these partial systems of signs and significations, which are meshed and intertwined like the columns of a newspaper.” The imagery Lefebvre uses here of these signs being like columns of a newspaper show how everyone’s actions and way we dress reveal certain qualities to others. This is the social text. Just as we reveal qualities, we also read qualities due to these same signs that are redundant, since we don’t find “new” categories of people everyday, but rather we tend to categorize people in the same categories we have already established.

Even in literature, we find ourselves guided through the story by redundant archetypal figures. Just like in social text, these characters in written text allow us to grasp the broad overview through assumptions without having to know everything detail of these characters. Through these archetypes the characters are made plain, which is what reading social text does for us.

If we did not have these clues found in the social text, our social roles would be too vague and communicating with others would be difficult.