Democracy in You-yuan Society─the Double-Description of "Structural Action" and "Awareness of Action".
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Liu, Ting-Kang
Abstract
Abstract
The attempt of this thesis is to complete a double-description of two heterogeneous contexts—Democracy and Buddhism. How to double-describe the two seemly irrelevant concepts? How is it different from the”sociological relationism”? The strategy of writing this thesis is to create an intermediate concept, you-yuan society, as another social imaginary, which communicates with the existing symbolic meanings of democracy. You-yuan society explains the approach we apply to weave a story: we not only consider the content of the story, but also the format the story being told and the possibility of going in and out from the story. You-yuan society that focuses on the storytelling format enables us to re-observe the modern social imaginaries. This also involves how we consider self, communication, action, collective motility etc..
First of all, self is an aggregation of many contiguous phenomenons. The relationship between two selves is not just a simple relationship between atom and atom. Instead, it is linked by the storytelling format. Therefore, the key here is recursion, rather than relation. We can never observe the “objective” reality “mindlessly” (without using our mind); therefore, our observations involve coding. Stories are the base of coding. We bring our own stories, in which even a simple action like opening a door can have deep meanings. With our own stories, we carry the memories of the past, as well as the expectations of the future. Recursion happens when a new piece of information changed the original linkage in our stories, from where the stories from page one became completely different. In this thesis, we are trying to further consider the action approaches of going in and out stories.
Secondly, “direct communication” is impossible. Communication involves the sensory threshold that receives different meta-information. This sensory threshold marks the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness. It is not consciousness or unconsciousness itself, but the meta-dimension or meta-information of consciousness and unconsciousness. Based on the Buddhistic language, we call this meta-dimension awareness. Awareness starts with “observing how ourselves observe”, and focuses on how to switch from thinking of substantialism to thinking of relevance. This thinking of relevance is called dependent origination in Buddhistic terms. You-yuan society converts the daily-used term “you-yuan” and the observation of the Buddhistic “yuan(dependent origination)” to a tool to observe the transformation from intermediate to format. This enables us to further examine the format of “democracy in you-yuan society”, and to communicate the many imaginaries of “democracy as the theatre”.
Thirdly, action is the projection of stories. Without stories, we can not know what an action is. This includes the unit of the action, the way the actions link, the relationship between action and time, and the start and termination of actions (it can also extend to the question of whether these are start and end of actions). The possibility of going in and out stories makes us aware of the impacts of the actions outside of the stories. We understand better the two semantics of action, “action/structure” and “karma/nivana”, which are also two types of “stories of stories”. They involve in how we face the meta-dimension of stories. In contrast to “action/structure”, “karma/nivana” is telling stories about “how to wake up from a story”. The actions the parity of “karma/nivana” projects are “ awareness of action”. What we are trying to understand is, how “awareness of action” as a way of description construct double-description with the commonly discussed types of actions in the context of democracy (that is, structural actions). Through the differences between informations provided by the two sides, double-description constructs another message in a different logic. This new type of message offers an extra dimension of observation.
Fourthly, based on the parity of “action/structure” and the semantics of action, we can understand the imaginary of “collective motility” which is crucial to democracy. The concept of “structural actions” illustrates that social structure is based on the accumulation of human actions. Therefore, changing the structure via collective human actions has its absolute legitimacy. Nonetheless, when “collective motility” encounters the deconstruction of “imagined communities”, how do we replace the “single description” with “double-description”? This thesis is an attempt to bring out the image of “theatre” – acting in the stories while being able to getting in and out of the stories. Democracy as a stage means that the “reality” in democracy is “the observed reality”, instead of the reality as it is. Just like the metaphor of theatre, we shuttle between “democracy as a theatre” and Buddhistic “life is a theatre”. In the theatre of democracy, we observe our own actions that construct the reality we believe. In this sense, we examine the political meanings of “second order observation”, the concepts of “ding” and “hui” in Buddhism, and the social meanings of actions of “zhi” and “guan”.
Subjects
Democracy
Buddhism
Double-Description
Dependent Origination
You-yuan society
Modern Social Imaginaries
Structural Action
Awareness of Action
SDGs
Type
thesis
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