The Overlap of English and Sociology: Signals Everywhere

In Downs text, he discusses how humans can turn anything into a signal (461). In one of my sociology classes last week, we discussed the idea of how humans have a Social Construction of Reality. This is, we subjectively attach meaning to experiences and thus, a sense of reality is developed through these attachments.

As I was reading Downs and Fish for this week’s post, I was simultaneously taking notes on a Word Doc so I could easily reference anything particularly striking. As I read about Downs’ idea on 461, I paused to take notes on how what he was saying intertwined with what my Social Problems class had said earlier. I typed an example about the color red. My exact thoughts were

Ex. The color red is just a color. But, it has different meanings dependent on the situation. For example, on a shape with eight sides, it typically commands one to stop. On faces, it can mean embarrassment, exasperation, or exhaustion.

After finalizing my thoughts on that part of 461, I read on, only to laugh silently at myself as I continued. For only a few lines down, Downs had also utilized one of the same examples I had thought of: a stop sign. Not only that, but on 462, Downs discussed how human beings make connections to everything, which is exactly what I had done just a page before. I connected English, rhetoric, and signals to Sociology, Social Problems, and the Social Construction of Reality.

Red = stop. Green = go. What does this mean?

I continued to do this – connect different aspects of rhetoric – throughout Downs reading. When Downs briefly discusses how eye-witness testimonies aren’t reliable because the mind fills in what we should have seen, not what we actually saw (462), my mind automatically jumped back in time to senior year of high school, where I had learned about an experiment where people watched a person go down an alley and “disappear” (there was a trap door so the person seemed to vanish into thin air). However, because our mind fills in the blanks and makes sense of things that do not, those witnesses made up different stories to interpret what had actually happened, such as there was a ladder the person climbed or a door they went through. No one wanted to admit – and their brain would not let them believe – that someone could simply disappear.

After having breezed through Downs’ writing and making connections of all sorts, I continued on to Fish’s piece, where my feelings of triumph vanished as quickly as the people in the alleyway. After struggling through, there is one concept, in my mind, that connects the two texts, which is the idea of humans having a Social Construction of Reality.

Fish discusses J.L. Austin’s concept of performative utterances. This notion is that the meaning of a statement “depends on the context in which is produced and received” (131). Further on, Fish discusses the idea of Critical Self-Consciousness (137). In his words,

Critical self-consciousness is the ability (stifled in some, developed in others) to discern in any “Scheme of association,” including those one finds attractive and compelling, the partisan aims it hides from view; and the claim is that as it performs this negative task critical self-consciousness participates in the positive task of formulating schemes of associations (structures of thought and government) that are in the service not of a particular party but of all mankind.

This Critical self-consciousness is basically the idea that a person is self-aware, which can be very high in some people and very low in others. But, in almost every human being, there is a sense of self-awareness. Through this self-awareness, we construct our own idea of reality, leaning on the values we hold highest, different experiences we have undergone, and the meaning we attribute to those experiences. Thus, it is that in order to create a Social Construction of Reality, we must have critical self-consciousness, and by having self-consciousness, we unknowingly and unwillingly, but nonetheless, create a Social Construction of Reality for ourselves.

Both Fish and Downs – though maybe not directly – suggest the idea of a Social Construction of Reality and how it only occurs through our perception of, as Downs calls them signals, and as Fish calls it, critical self-consciousness. Whatever name is attributed to it, it’s the idea that because people have some kind of self-awareness, we brand objects/things with a certain meaning dependent on the situation. The meaning of this particular object or thing (like color) changes from one situation to the next because of the greater context and our past experiences with it.

It is evident, at least to me, that this Social Construction of Reality is true, everywhere, and that it only furthers the connections we as humans like to make. I couldn’t even get a few pages into reading an English professor’s text on rhetoric without my mind automatically jumping to the subjects of Sociology and Psychology in order to make connections to (hopefully) deepen my understanding of the subject at hand.