symbols, rotten with perfection

i blogged about the role of emerging media in shaping a discourse in a a blog a few days ago...

tonight i wanted to briefly offer part two.

in this particular case, the "emerging cool alternative" wannabes are linked to a pretty widespread, but still pretty diffuse and developmental, movement which is most often being called "emergent" -- for some emergent church, for others emergent culture.

obviously i could spend a lot of time talking about the implications of *this* term EMERGENT -- but that is SO not the point that I want to focus on. What I think is interesting is something that happens in this cycle, but it happens so often and in so many ways that it seems worth commenting on --

the term itself -- emergent -- is not a neccessary or fated term that was needed or arrived upon as the ONLY or BEST term to use to bind together a group of people. It did, for whatever reason, though, become a term that "fit" just the right number of people with interests in common AND that gave *leeway* to just enough people who disagreed that it became a touchstone for this particular social movement.

But what's interesting to me is that its already in this position (in the case of this blog entry) where it is being used as a code to ingroup and outgroup. In other words, the term is starting to rigidify. Names have to do that, don't they? Because if they actually just stand for agreements -- implicit contracts (as opposed to articulating some kind of implicit unequivocal nature) -- then they have to bind in some way. And its particularly ironic in this case -- or in any case where a social movement wants to be positioned as counter- or radical or revolutionary. Because as soon as you find a symbol that will do for the job you have in mind, you've already started to define the death of your own movement. What was fringe is becoming central....

Russ commented on thrifting being co-opted by the preps (after this blog entry -- when will Russ get a blog?! He's such a natural! And while I'm at it -- where's the best music list for this year, Russ?). Merchants of Cool articulates the practice of coolhunting -- which is the same sociological phenomenon, only its being run by big corporations.

My blog title emerges from the writings of one of my critical forbearers -- Kenneth Burke. He loved this idea that all symbols are shot through with a future arc. That they don't just act as contracts about the way things are between us -- but that they're prophecies about the future that will be worked out between us, too.

There was a radio station in my hometown when I was going to high school that was bought out by a national chain and changed their identity to the NEW sunny fm. Only they were the NEW sunny fm for at least four years. I remember that we would debate about where they got their sense of legitimacy to maintain the term -- was it because no local stations were newer? Because the top 40 hits they played were constantly (re)fresh(ed)?

So the contract that anyone ever wanted to have with Sunny FM had expired -- long before the station did -- because the symbol that they chose to employ to constitute a public -- went rotten.

The thing is -- this is related to my musings about liminal identity, too.

I've usually tried to resist being pulled into the centre of discourse in most of the institutions that I've been a part of. I try to craft a position that's deliberately liminal -- that allows for the chaos. Such a neither/nor position is a position that doesn't risk investment in a symbol. And if you don't risk investing yourself with a symbol (like Emergent or New or Liberal or whatever...) your relevance won't fade with the insitution.

But the kicker is -- neither will you have fully established contracts with anyone -- or at least not with any "public." You're doomed to a dogma of the American Individualist -- always open to the possibility of personal reinvention, but irrelevant to what's happening on a larger scale...

Sorry to blather on...

No more theory for a few days, eh?

Peace~