What’s in a word

A practical understanding of postmodernist problems with language and a possible solution, with an application to personal branding.

In postmodern philosophy, one thing I was learning about was how words are losing meaning. I think it was Baudrillard saying that words are supposed to be symbols that represent real things in the world, but in the modern world, things have become more abstract. So symbols are being exchanged more and more, and so symbols are being used to represent those. For example, you can talk about learning (“I studied 8 hours today”) and you can talk about meta-learning (“I like to take stream-of-consciousness notes when I study something I don’t understand to keep my mind focused”). At first glance, this idea of meta-ideas is super cool and exciting, now I can be 10x as productive in my communication! What postmodern philosophers warn about though, is that continuing to abstract our ideas are not necessarily generating extra value out of nowhere. Sometimes the cost comes as the concrete thing that we were trying to represent in the first place. To go along with my learning example, if you go down the rabbit hole of trying to make the process of studying more and more efficient, you will eventually forget to study.

The obvious solution to that problem would be to start studying again, and to put value back into that concrete act, that all the ideas of meta-learning depend on. So what’s the point of this very, very obvious analogy? Most of the postmodernist ideas have come across actually extrapolate this problem and how it affects our capitalist society, mental health of its citizens, and huge events such as the internet bubble crash in the 90s and financial system recklessness. The invention of the internet and its parallel development of increasingly abstract financial engineering means that we operate on an ever-increasing abstracted and symbolic level of consciousness. Compare the significance of a high-five fifteen years ago, to a instagram ‘like’ today. Consider the runaway mortgage repackaging of the 2008 crash. Its been the nature of capitalism to repackage, re-abstract, and exchange whatever value it can get away with. The Nike swoosh logo has so much social currency that it instantly adds value to a lame old t-shirt. My point is that the uncomfortable and dystopian world postmodernists describe aren’t without its truths.

In my last article, I questioned why the word leadership, despite how much it means to me, when it’s brought up among my peers has always been met with an empty and cynical response, an annoying buzzword and a neutral term at best. As a word in our language, it’s fallen victim to this same loss of meaning. This is interesting (sidenote) because it makes me realize that the loss of meaning in language is probably not a modern issue, but something that has always existed. I can imagine Babylonians rolling their eyes at the politician claiming they will have a good ‘leader’. The solution in this case is to do more of the acts of service that define a leader, and do it consistently over years. It makes me think that adding meaning to language requires a different effort, and may be more expensive than the opposite process of extracting symbols and words from meanings. The latter requires a discerning and logical effort at definitions, but to add meaning to a word takes time and actions not obviously connected to the current meaning of a word. For example, maybe the current meaning of leader is more like tyrant, and to add a different connotation to that word would take the opposite of acting like a tyrant, it would take sacrifice and submission to a service, neither of those things being obviously connected to the current word.

I think this has really interesting implications with social branding, personal branding, marketing for startups. My recommendation would be to treat a brand not as a description of the team or individual, but as an oath to commit to, that will give others the opportunity to cognitively value and define the meaning of your brand for themselves.

References

Baudrillard and the meaning of meaning https://baudrillardstudies.ubishops.ca/baudrillard-and-the-meaning-of-meaning/