Virginia Kenny .com

World Cup fever

Why does it feel so natural to enter into a global event via television?

Humans coming together through a television event is just another step in the process of people adapting to new circumstances while the human mind remains the same. We survived by evolving the group mentality and this called for sharing know-how and feelings.

Sport, as we know it, was a phenomenon of nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization. About half the population of England was under 20, 60% were unmarried and many of them were on the move. Eric Midwinter (Fair Game, 1986: 23) reports these and many other interesting social details, including an the average age that ‘hovered around 26.’

Throughout the early nineteenth century, cultural globalization was moving up a gear: if people weren’t migrating overseas, they were moving to the cities for work. They no longer lived in the familiar community where they had been reared and where their families might have lived for generations. They worked hard for 6 days a week and had little leisure; but there was the deep human need for solidarity with a like-minded group. The very idea of organised sport took on during this time of dislocation: the word first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary of 1863 as a noun referring to an organised game. The Football Association itself also dates from 1863.

Like all creativity, various football codes appear to have arisen spontaneously from within groups that need a physical and emotional way to express shared experience. The same need has led to a new experience of belonging and communal engagement accessible through mass media presentation of local and international sports competitions. These competitions are now possibly the major experience of communal belonging in modern life and mass media play a positive role here, even though valid criticisms can be levelled at their influence and presentations.

The symbolic space of sport is a modern expression of belonging, where people can enjoy common ground and act out emotions shared with others as we see them doing in the football stadium symbolic spaces . They go away, whether energised or disappointed, steeped in visceral contact with belonging.

Team games mimic tribal loyalties. They deal with vestigial fear of the outsider, so containing potentially dangerous rivalry between neighbouring groups. Identifying with a team and with other people in its successes and failures can provide a powerful, though partial, substitute for community identity and self-image. The symbolism deployed to build and maintain team spirit among supporters may seem facile but there is evidence that team affiliation brings positive energy to community, particularly when the local team wins a game. Even half-hearted team supporters know this from personal experience. And Germany has proved this convincingly through the 2006 World Cup, because they feel there is a new community of pleasure and pride in patriotism.

This may well be a test of how enduring one-off sporting triumphs can be(whether as successful host nation or champion) in intensifying the euphoria of belonging within the group.

Virginia Cotterell Kenny is the young scientist who wanted to grow up and design jet planes but later needed to understand why words are so rich in meaning. As the university psychology syllabus seemed preoccupied with rats rather than words, I studied English Literature and, being multidisciplinary by nature, ended up as a cultural historian.

My most inspiring science teacher from school rescued me just before I could get seriously caught up in university teaching. He took me on as his assistant in a long-term educational research organization; and so began an exciting few decades in policy development, management and governance. This included stints managing an enquiry into post-secondary education, being principal of a university college, vice-president of an institute of technology and deputy-chancellor of a university.

People and committees bring me great pleasure but, being a thinker and writer by nature, I find that nearly everything turns into research. This is often prompted by others’ questions, as my explanations seem to help some people make sense of things. And, having put up an argument, I have to work out whether my answer was well-grounded or not!

In process of answering one of these requests, I made a connection that turned into the project that has occupied me for most of the past decade. Suddenly I realized that the pattern of imagery that had prompted my post-graduate research was recurring in a distorted form in modern organizations under stress. Some aspects of my research in testing this hypothesis can be checked out on this site.

The photograph of me is really of the partly-concealed cat searching for fieldmice as I stride down the first fairway with a golf club for our grandson. He is learning to putt on the par-3, 9-hole golf course my husband created around the cottage, built for his grandparents a century ago www.martinsfield.kennymoy.com.au. We have hosted many social, collegial and charity tournaments there over the years.

Symbolic spaces have high survival value. The brain physiologist J. Z. Young claimed that the artist’s ‘work … is closer than that of any other labourer to meeting the continuing long-term needs of man … [because] the most important functional activities of the human brain are symbolic (his emphasis, 1978, p. 250). I believe we should be building interest in how and why the history of human community is the story of the symbolic ordering of experience—through play, custom, ritual and arts—to produce safe spaces in which to increase each member’s hold on consciousness. This period of rapid blending of cultures in globalization is the moment to be making sure that our education system helps people realize that the survival of either a local or a global community depends on its ability to juggle with symbols—its ability to engage in aesthetic activity at every level of performance.

Nancy Munn coined the term symbolic space. In her 1969 study of the Australian myth of the Wawilak sisters and the Rainbow Serpent, she suggested that symbolic spaces ‘provide the means for adjusting interior experience through external, societal forms’ (Spencer, ed., p. 200). In saying this, she is placing symbolic spaces at the centre of the experience as being human, as the container that transforms symbols into experience, behaviour, or knowledge.

Brains work on electrical impulses. Thought itself, as Geoffrey Bateson realized when he was studying cybernetics, is like a circuit flowing to the negative pole of not-knowing. Our not-knowing initiates the need to know. Primary perception takes place in the senses, such as the eye, ear, or body itself; the second step is the making of a neuronal contact (which we would recognize as the formation of a word or conceptualization) that represents the sense-perception in the brain itself (Torey, 1999, p. 39). We seek to bridge the gap: the gap is between the external world and the symbol by which it is lodged in the brain as meaning: ‘meaning, like play, resides in the space between “/” of the statement and analogue we supply’ (Berman, 1981, pp. 150-151).

The gap is probably of great importance to mind function and creativity. Symbolic space seems to depend on a tension set up between two kinds of perception (Turner, 1969). And as Munn notes of another kind of gap: we should be paying particular attention to ‘symbols as mechanisms which regulate the orientations of actors to each other and to common situations’ (1969, p. 200). Symbolic spaces, as mental structures of one kind or another, are what she calls ‘transformers’ that help group members share a conceptualized meaning.

The god-like joy we experience from our sparks of creativity is achieved through taking cognitive control of a relationship between bits of brain-code in a performance that can be repeated, whether in our own mind or by passing it on to someone else’s. We have told and retold of this magical process since the time of Archimedes, whose triumphant eureka of insight has echoed down through the generations from the moment he shouted it as he raced from his bath—one of the first Westerners to know that their thoughts were generated by them not by the gods (Jaynes, 1976). As far as we know, these early thinkers were the heroes of conscious knowing in the Western tradition, the first to recognize what it feels like to gain some ground from not-knowing.

At kindergarten, Martin was a bit different from the other 4-year-olds. When they counted to 100, he stopped at 4.

After he began painting the Union Jack while humming ‘Rule Britannia’ the Director reminded me that young children need free expression. I assured her that this was his free expression.

A few days later he was found alone, sitting on a chair while everyone else was outside playing in the sand. The concerned teacher asked what he was thinking about and was surprised to be told: ‘I was thinking that four fours are sixteen.’

We don’t create in a vacuum. Even a small child can set up a virtual space filled with familiar symbolic material; it is then a symbolic space. That is where we play.

Thinking is play and it also takes place in a virtual space. Martin needed to explore the meaning of number. He was not satisfied with the accumulative ‘and’ of counting. He needed to move beyond ‘1 and then another makes 2’ to the purpose of learning their names.

To play with his idea, he set up a space rich in symbolic material that he had already mastered. He obviously understood the way 4 can be manipulated because he was drawn to the visual tension between the three superimposed crosses of the Union flag. He instinctively chose repetitive humming of a (linked) theme with subtle 4-measure phrasing.

This is how we think. It could have been the play of thought in anyone of any age:

1. Martin reproduced existing symbolic spaces by painting and humming.

2. By rigorously co-opting these tangible representations from the social imagining, he held his space intact against the distractions around him.

3. Within that space he could observe anomalies, conceptualize his idea, then test its validity.

Today's quote is from A. N. Whitehead in his 1927 lectures at the University of Virginia:

The human mind is functioning symbolically when some components of its experience elicit consciousness, beliefs, emotions and usages, respecting other components of experience. The former set of components are the symbols, and the latter set constitute the meaning of the symbols.

At the moment, I am bench-testing my own definition of symbol as:

a perception hardwired to carry a physiological charge.

The quick simplification of this is:

a synaptic ping.

• Globalizing Psyche

• Nicholas Humphrey

• John Kay

The paper below was delivered at the October 2002 annual conference of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia: Blurred Boundaries: Australians and Globalisation: Negotiating Our Way, at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, and published in the Conference Proceedings, 2003.

Abstract

The social imagining is still anchored in a real territory to which we, as a group, belong. The territory connects us in unseen ways and our experience of this connectedness is more visceral than rational. Globalisation can be seen to loosen the territorial hold and produce multiple forms of belonging centred on the individual. The power of the brand-name (whether commercial or political) represents a cultural shift—the isolation of the individual cut off from the imagining of group meanings and identity. Meanwhile, the underlying cultural-survival programming for belonging to a group remains active though ignored. This pattern can be identified from cultural evidence as having cropped up regularly as an issue to be paid attention at times of radical change in Western history. Its three dimensions that shape the ethical space of individual belonging and the institutions of society are: authorisation for occupation of territory (or role), the way shared knowledge is used and the legitimation of limits. An obvious challenge to the thought-numbing brand-name, in politics as elsewhere, is to use the ethical space of our territorial belonging to debate the nature of authorisations, individual and group responsibilities, and limits imposed by the global context. This paper is drawn from a book in preparation on globalisation as a cultural phenomenon about which we have extensive cross-disciplinary knowledge that can be applied in practical ways to hold society together.

From belonging to brand name: globalisation and the redefining of shared territories

Globalisation means change and quick social response times. My argument here is that, with boundaries blurred, the moment has come to discuss our social programming for belonging so that we can negotiate a way forward during globalisation. The challenge now is to turn knowledge into know-how.

I am dealing here with globalisation as a social phenomenon. The current rate of globalisation is so fast that the natural process of social evolution cannot keep up. The social imagining of who we are is still anchored in real territory, even though globalisation, as a social process, has been going on since the beginning of human society because, as a species, we cannot resist the 3Ts of trade, technology and travel.

Read the whole paper...