One from the myriad of things that people often use to signify their identity is the clothing. To some certain extent, interchanging the word /clothing/ with /costume/ would seem appropriate. In the last article, I mentioned something like “the rhetoric of the costume,” so let me elaborate this rhetoric thing.

The things that people wear could perhaps symbolize their identities, but it works only if the person wearing the outfit understood the symbolic meaning of the outfit at least to oneself. Most of the time, especially when the outfit was a mass-produced one, people don’t have the means to select which thing to wear. So they just buy it and wear it as chance permits.

But you know that that was a wrong notion. People aren’t that smart, but there’s always intentionality and selectivity when one’s buying a clothing or two. Perhaps they don’t think behind the apparent face value, but they decided to buy something over the basis of their own personal aesthetic judgment. So let’s think further to this rhetoric of costume.

There are several properties people would consider when judging a particular apparel: cut, shape, color, details, texture, and pattern. The six would then combine and form a gestalt prägnanz, and this prägnanz would be superceding what we would customarily call /style/. I’ll elaborate further, but let’s just say that the style of the clothing is just a factoral part to the sum of the sign.

Why people chose a cut and not another was due to one’s intention in forming a dialectical illusion between one’s openness and one’s closure. This –of course, would relate with the cultural view of body parts before it would make any meaning at all. Second, there’s the need of one to show off an aspect of one’s body and to hide another. All in all, it’s about the tension between nudity and closure, tension between the primal instincts and the humanity. The shape of the clothing would also be crucial. One may need to hide an extra fat here and there, and to create yet another illusion of a perfect body shape. And in truth, it’s quite interesting to see how people viewed nudity as a myth for innocence and ‘being utterly myself.’

The two, along with color, details, texture, and pattern would work hand in hand to create a complete illusion of one’s desire. So there you buy something, and you’re thinking what’s the gestalt you’d like to generate in wearing them. You mix and match the shirt with the pants, and add some details to them. This is just where the process of rhetoric took place. Even people who just wear anything they could reach their hands on, are doing a rhetorical process too. They don’t do that intentionally, but they do it nonetheless.

Problem is, just how literate people are when it comes to the rhetoric of the costume? With all the fashion magazines out there, with so much idols showing off in TV, I guess people are more literate than I expect them to be. Only if they’re not copycats, that is. With the currently mindless mob we have in Jakarta, I don’t think it’s appropriate to call them fashion literate.

And when it comes to fashion, there are just so many things to consider. The ethics and mores, norms and social constraints, all of this would collide with the need to actualize oneself and shouting one’s identity out loud. Another process of rhetoric would take place. Only this time, there would be some dialectic –if not negotiation, with the codes.

So, let’s return to style. In rhetorics, the style would be the tenor to all the vehicles used. How you  wear what you wearwould be a synecdoche to your own identity. A synecdoche that would only be understood if there are excessive regularity in the society. So, simply put, your style represents the social group you belong to.

Without a sufficient regularity in the society, your case would be considered a deviation, instead of an intelligible synecdoche. That’s the problem with fashion, and all mass-culturally developed things. You need anabundance of regularity and acceptability so that people would be accustomed to your style.

But what about the individual fashion style, then? Well, first and foremost, it signifies a factorality to which group one belongs to. Most of the attribution would be derived from the labels and extension classes people saw from the group, and not necessarily from an individual –except if one has enough magnitude by being a public figure or an idol.

And, sadly, the combination of apparels one wear doesn’t signify one’s identity significantly. It’s all a matter of elocutio that people don’t heed. People expected one to wear a particular style and to conform with that. Extra deviations would render oneself as mismatched, except if the combination’s good enough that it would contribute to the higher group.

So fashion’s all about style, instead of one’s identity. So how does one’s identity be communicated through the costume one wears? By the degree of deviations from one’s fashion group, of course. Commonsensically, there are just so many independent accessories that people doesn’t classify as a part of a particular class or designation or group.

Rings, metal accessories, caps, all with their own attributes, gestalts, and extension classes. They’re the color of your overall tonality and mannerisms. And there are other things that people doesn’t expect to see in contiguity with one’s outfit. I mean, what would you say about a man with a used condom jutting out from his pocket?

But it’s quite sad to see that one’s style couldn’t reflect one’s identity that much. What I say up above had shown that it’s only in the details –and not the style, that people would recognize deviations that signified one’s identity.

There are degrees of openness, there are degrees of closure, there are degrees of intimacy, there are just so many variables, and people only heed about the overall style and gestalt. That’s just sad, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s because the abundance of details to perceive, that people resorted to the gestalt and not each and individual variables of costumes.

So I guess it’s futile to speak of other things, since people only valued the gestalt of the costume, and not the details. In the semantic analysis, people would only value between conforming to …(name a fashion style here) and deviating from …(name another fashion style here) or something like mismatched/not mismatched, stylish/not stylish, cool/not cool.

Overall, one may perceive a symbolic meaning in wearing a certain apparel in a particular style that contributes to one’s individual identity. But it doesn’t necessarily communicate significantly with the general audience. People wouldn’t see the rhetoric inside the combination whatsoever, people wouldn’t see the rhetorical contiguity of silver and iron, people wouldn’t ever care about anything imprinted if it’s not big enough, eye-catching enough, or if it’s imprinted on the pectoral side.

And oh yeah, as a genuine sertificated fetish pervert, I found that the rhetoric of bra as also interesting, though it’s more out from females’ personal pride of having a goodlooking breast over anything else. It’s interesting to see boobs, but not so much that I would start rambling on why girls wear padded bra instead of laced bra.

So as I conclude, the symbollic meaning of one’s clothing is just too personal to be communicated a priori. It wouldn’t communicate one’s identity but it would pose quite something to create an illusion of personality. Just like costumes do, it enhanced one’s appearance, but not one’s identity.

And if you’re thinking of something deeper than this, I guess it’s not in the context of mass-produced outfits. Designer’s clothes are designed specifically and designated to dramatically enhance one’s physical appearance. And the fact that it’s not mass produced could signify individuality better than the mass producedone.

When you think of any given thing, you put at least two objects inside your mental box: an image, and a related word. Whatever the thing you thinks of, a box of cigarette or an OmegaRaziel 001, the two objects would came to mind almost instantly. Captured from your subconsciouss mind, is the image that’s the object prototype, and the word as the label.

So, that was basically a simple explanation to how people think. Well, let’s give another example. If you think of the word /greet/, you’ll envision something like handshake, two people, a smiling face, and so on and so forth, that would became your prototype of “greet,” as you label this prototype with the verbal word /greet/. Now, let’s go back to our previous discussion of meaning, where I name this set of prototype and the verbal label as proto-meaning.

Back in the old days, communication refers to the act of sending the prototypical image and the labelling word, along with other related concepts from the source to the receiver. But as we developed our understanding, so it happens that communication was more like fusion, following some kind of negotiation between a prototype and its sycophants to another prototype and its sycophants. The end result would be a new prototype which we commonly call as /meaning/.

Or, visually put, just imagine a red specter fusing, melding, adjoining, combining, or whatsoever union-related-concepts and all its extension classes, with a blue specter to form a purple specter. Such was the co-creation of meaning.

With this paradigm, I would say that we can not communicate. We’ll just have to shut out our consciousness away from people, or in my words, we could isolate ourselves from perceptualizing what’s happening all around us. We could just not care about the world. We could just be as an ignorant as a stone, and there’ll be no alien specters of thought merging with our specters.

What we can not do, on the other hand, is not to signify. We can not not signify. By just thinking of a stone we already signify things. By saying inwardly that this article sucks, we’ve signified things. Even the simplest association we make inside our head is a signification of its own. Even mentioning the alphabet /A/ is already a signification.

This is just where semiotics takes place. We’re sign users, ladies and gentlemen. Sign is more ubiquitous than anything else in the myriad of things, mainly because a sign is a sign is a sign is not a sign. Most everything is a sign, except –of course, if you can’t perceptualize the lifeworld. But of course you wouldn’t be reading this then.

And when it comes to exchange of signs and meanings, there’s this process of adaptation. I know that you don’t mean what I mean what you mean I mean, thus I need to overlap my field of knowledge to yours, as you do the exact same thing so that ‘we could speak in the same language.’ Which is interesting, since no two people could mean the same.

So it seems that the transferability of meanings would take time. And it would be a diachronic process too since some people could cognize things fast while some do it slowly. Indeed, communication is an interesting thing when it came to humanity. This would lead to the usage of artifact-token thing. My message to you, this article for instance, is an artifact while the thing you read is merely a token. This very same article you read, is only a copy of the real article, which is only an artifact of my idea, which is a result from my adoption of the tokens from those philosophers and theorists. If that’s so, then communication equals to handing out photocopies of things.

And people fought over copyrights. We’ve been living out of pirated materials for over than the recorded history. In the light of my article, an artifact is your intellectual property, but you can’t properly call it yours because that artefact came as a result from all the ideas you pirated from people past. In this world of pirated materials, it’s rather stupid to think of such originality.

I could just draw a thing, and I could name it anything. In today’s perspective, it’s my original artwork, but in the higher perspective –the transcendental perceptualization of things, it’s nowhere near original because it was created out from my ideas. And how I think in order to generate my artwork was a result of all my perceptualization of the lifeworld, affected by the thinkers from ages past and all the things I’ve been through from all my life.

That’s just how things work, people. The only original thing in the world –if it exists, is just the Divine. Everything else is just a copied material. An inventor created wheel out from his complacent thinking over the roundness of an object. He grasped the token of /roundness/ and tinkered with it until he came up with the first artifact of wheel.

When it came to the realworld things, then I guess the fairest of all is to refer from whom did you adopt a certain thinking. But my point remains clear: without the colossi, it’s impossible for humanity to reach this far. They’re not necessarily original, but they’re doing well without all the copyright law. Besides, if everything’s right then what’s left?

Anyway, I seem to came to another thought of communication: knowledge together with the brain is just like Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Your idea is a chocolate bar. So when you talk to someone, you’re just like giving him a bowl filled with chocolates which equals to the artifact you created. When that someone took a handful of chocolates, he’s grasping a token of your artifact.

The token is nowhere as complete as the chocolates in the bowl. So that someone needs to fill in the gaps with his own share of chocolates from inside his own factory. That’s meaning co-creation for dummies. It was only after that someone has the fullness of the bowl, one could be said as understanding the meaning of something.

Sometimes, a bite would be enough to fuel the mental chocolate factory inside one’s head. That could be an equal to Erlebniz’s ‘aha!’ or that famous ‘eureka’ of Phytagoras. The temporal diachronicity of the communication process could be analogized as if that someone’s putting the chocolate inside his pocket for later consumption. And then, it’s basically the same lather-rinse-repeat thingy.

So boys will –always, be boys and girls will eventually be mothers. But before they turned to be the figure we glorify  beyond all things, they will be a mysterious figure that would fill our life with their whims and girly complications. One of the complication is when we ask them to go out for a date. They’ll be asking where would you guys go, and they’ll go through the all-so-complicated matter of deciding which outfit to wear.

Now, boys won’t understand the reason, but girls considered it important to dress up to the occasion. Most of the time, they’ll argue that they dress up to look beautiful. It’s commonsense that a girl would do more than anything to look pretty for the boy she loves. But behind all the lies, there’s a fundamental reason. They just want to be seen. Before we go further, I’ll elaborate this first.

Here in Jakarta, there are commonly three kind of places that you would ask a girl to go out to: malls, café, or activities center ranging from outdoor sports to hotelrooms. Most of the time, it’s either you go to the mall and start some activities there, or going to the café. Hotelrooms can wait, so does heaven or hell, if you believe.

Let’s take it you go to the mall, she’ll wear something that’s pretty and attractive. She claims that she dressed up like that so people would look at her and silently admitted what a lucky bastard you are to date such a princess. And she’ll be pleased with it, so she’ll smile all the way to heaven –or hotelroom.

In the western society, the mall would be seen as something more like a place of catharsis. Malls were designed to maintain an air of eternity where you could do anything from shopping (to shoplifting) even peeping on the unwaries while being safely guarded from the real world outside. A mall, in this perspective, is a palace of hyperreality where the real things fused with the fake things, and you couldn’t care less about it. Still in the western culture, the mall is a paradise to unleash all your primal instincts but your sexual one. The glasses, the railings, the linearity of the path, most everything was designed to keep you comfortable being whatever you want to be.

So people went to the mall to satisfy their crave of being themselves. It’s commonsense that, in the west, you don’t have the right to go wrong. People went to the mall to show the world who they are and what they want to be, or they went to satisfy their need of escapism.

But here in Indonesia, this reeking cesspool filled with all the jumbled interpretation of things, there are several misconceptions –and abortions (pun intended), along the lines. Here, the mall would be seen as a place to socialize and intermingle between the haves and the wannabes, a place to feel a bit closer to heaven –and maybe the hotelroom.

So girls would dress up to show how divine they are. Those with the money, exploit their money. Those with the curves and bodices, exploit their only asset. Those with the brains would just laugh at just how stupid people are. Those with nothing but the aspiration to be a diva, implemented their desire in their costumes. They went so outgoing and so cheerful to show how happy they are in being the figure they wished to be, albeit temporarily.

While, if boys asked girls to go to the café, they’ll dress up for something more intimate –while still maintaining that outgoing look. They just don’t want to be seen by the general mass as a withering flower, don’t they? The costume they wear would reflect just how close you are, so does her gestures and all her outward appearance. And truly, they’ll be showing off her affection if someone glanced over. They just like to be the center of attention, girls are.

So, those are what little lies I could share. As I conclude, boys wear whatever things they could get their hands on, while girls dressed up intentionally to conform the context. This intentionality could be interpreted as lies, if you like it, but you could argue in your defense. They want to be seen, they want to be admired, and they want to be whatever things they want to be. In the mall or in the café, with different context and culture, they still imposed their perception of the context in their own feminine and subtle way. Thus, they’ll be that mad if you protested about their dressing up.

And about the hotelroom, well… I couldn’t say a thing about it since I never had one that works. But I speculate that if you played your part right, and you could generate enough intimacy and openness, it won’t be that far to the nearest heaven –err, hotelroom.

And, oh yeah, don’t tell a girl that you’ll go to a mall, while in truth you want to take her to a café, vice versa. But what’s more important, is not to tell her that you planned to go to the hotelroom after all this excursion. Let that be just a tacit knowledge that brews secretly between you lovebirds.

About those girls who didn’t dress up, there are several possibilities. One, she doesn’t like dressing up. Two, she’s just ignorant. Three, she doesn’t care that much to you. Four, she’s smarter than others. Five, she just wished that you’ll buy her some clothes. Either way, this analytic forecast would only work to the stupid kind of girls who’d do anything people do. And as every forecasts, this one works ceteris paribus as well.

Most of the metaphors in the papers I read around Idul Fitri spoke of Fitrah [Purity]-theme. And indeed purity is the spirit of Idul Fitri. The fundamental idea was, after a month of harnessing one’s desire and fight all the worldly temptations, one shall regain one’s lost innocence. It’s interanimational with Natal [Rebirth]-theme in christianity, and many other religions. Before we go further to the sign-concept world, I’ll just say that I can’t really blame people for being so fundamentalist, but I think there are various ways to communicate Fitrah.

The basis of all these thoughts was the fact that somewhere in time, people decided that life sucks, and the fact that they were forced to life that way was due to some fundamental misinterpretation to the god’s will. Original sin, so it was called, colors our humanity since ages forgotten. And one way or the other, religions promised a way to get out from this comically ironic life we lived in.

That, amplified with the wish for a better life, formed the basis for most recorded and/or ignored philosophical thoughts existed today. Such things are even the teleological reason for sciences to ever exist. One way or another, one seeks the way to embetter one’s life. And somewhere in time, one decided to philosophically insult one another via one’s philosophical papers. Somewhere in time, one decided that the best way to prod the people is to call them idiots and started to treat them as such.

Where were we? Ah yes… isn’t it rather ironic –though what I intentionally mean was stupid, that insofar people only managed to add extension classes to the pre-existing concepts instead of creating new concepts? The visuals are remarkable, and the plotlines are admirable. The message, on the other hand, is just a remix of an old song. Things just gets old, people, infinity sucks.

But of course corporates wouldn’t dare to step out of the box. It’s not the creative people that’s dumb, the clients are, with all their hoarded money symbolizing the sum of all fears they kept inside their heart. Well, one might argue that in a muddy economical conditions like this, it’s rational for corporates to communicate in a well-mannered mainstream kind of way, so that they won’t fish some antipathy to their brand/product lines.

In that case, how about the ads that does nothing but putting some lebaran stickers on their ad? Perhaps my metaphor isn’t clear enough. But it’s not uncommon to see some ketupat on some car or something as the main object in the said advertising. This is what I call putting on stickers. You could really exchange the ketupat with anything from condom to a house, and the meaning would still be the same. You couldn’t really change meaninglessness into something else without the necessary resources, could you?

Brand managers should be the frontliner to all conceptual thinking that would relate the brand with the consumer. Those kind of ads would just really be detrimental to the likeability of the said brand/product. But most brand managers just don’t do that, do they? No, they’re just sitting idly and enjoying all the parcels and packages, and some even went on vacation instead of taking care of the brand in its tribulation.

Anyway, FMP [From My Perspective] there are two main themes around Idul Fitri: The Fitrah-theme, and the Lebaran-theme.While the first excels in communicating individual achievement, purity, sincerity, to  even holiness, the latter excels in communicating the social aspects of Idul Fitrilike togetherness, family, friends, sharing, giving apologies, handshakes, and other social things includingmudik, though sometimes /mudik/ is a theme in itself. These themes are the vehicles of the tenors, and though I don’t really think that Pavarotti would drive something with “Lebaran euy!” imprinted on it’s side, it’s a fact that the metaphors revolved stagnantly around these things.

All that’s been developed is the HOW to say things, but the WHAT to say is just basically the same. It’s all about the two themes, and the sycophantic rituals following the two themes. But there’s always another side of the coin. And beyond the horizon, there’s a new world to discover.

I’m no islam, so I think my knowledge on Fitrah is inadequate. Inasmuch, I learned that Fitrah is about one’s innocence or one’s purity of heart and soul. Idul Fitri –as its name implies, is about celebrating the day where people –after a long torturous month of harnessing one’s desires, returned to their state of innocence. Like I’ve previously mentioned, this concept of Fitrah interanimated with other concepts from other religions. But let’s not go to the comparative religion section of my brain for the time being.

But the point remains that, Fitrah is not about absolutions for one’s sins. It’s just about returning one to one’s ideal state. It’s more like coming home to lay down and rest for a while when the soul is masochistically broken, forlorn, torn, and heavily beaten from all the worldly fuckups. So, Fitrah is not about having your sins deleted from the list, the notion of purity doesn’t relate that far to the notion of sinlessness.

So I think of something like Taubah [repentance] along the lines. And indeed repentance is what counts when it came to sin and absolution. It’s rather customary to speak of keeping your purity intact when life came to you with her load of random fuckups. And it’s a fundamental concept that islam came along with a special ritual of repentance. And it’s also customary for one to maintain one’s repented soul with not doing the usual delightful sins one used to do. But let’s not go further to the theologico-philosophical domain of sins and virtues, people.

Most commonplace people just won’t accept such things, right? People just want to enjoy the religious celebration free of any moral obligations. Thus, Idul Fitri was remembered in its delightful joy of having one’s pure soul and heart –free of charge, and the foods, and the celebrations. Idul Fitri grew to be a celebration, instead of a day of covenant where people promised not to make another mistake to god.

The social aspect of Idul Fitri came in thought when people greets each other and giving forgivances rather ‘freely’ –and I originally intend to put the less implicit insult here, knowing that they’ve been absolved –for free, by the one god from their sins. In this free exchange of free forgivances, people often deem that it’s wrong to do things freely, so people started to bring out foods and gifts to be shared freely while they’re freely exchanging forgivances for free. Don’t mind to count the /e/ in this paragraph.

Mudik, seen from this perspective, with all its extension classes, is just basically another form of exchanging forgivance. Of course there’s always /family/ and other more emotive aspects, but it’s basically just that. It’s because mudik is a phenomena, that people started to look to it as somekind of a myth. But originally, mudik is just mudik, another artifact of the world where things evolved by chance.

And if you think that what I’m writing here is just a tacit commonsense knowledge, then you’ve already got my message. People are just proliferating the myths around Idul Fitri, and this also happens around christmas and other religious-scented celebrations, instead of deconstructing and then revising the myths or create something new that works for the society.

To some extent, we could call this act of proliferation as an act of faith. But further down the line, we could see that this is just another sign of our laziness to think, instead of finding out new values and communicate these newly unearthed values to the general society. Further, I could generally speak that this act of proliferation is just another form of fundamentalism in our society. This fact on the advertising world happens to be coexistential and correlational with other facts from the contemporary culture. Sinetron, magazines, news, and many other messages would stop only at its underlying myth and proliferate –if not exalt, it beyond all things instead of looking out new values to replace old myths.

You could defend that myths are the underlying property of any given society, and it should be upheld. Or you could defend that people wouldn’t understand new myths without proper socialization –and proper sacrifices where its due. Or you could defend anything you could think of. But I’ll defend myself by saying: a myth, as its an underlying principle for the said society, should be the myth that works. If it doesn’t work, it should no longer be considered as such. As a fundamental basis for all other things where mastercard counts, myths should’ve been the kind of thing that would keep one from falling to deeper rabbit holes time and again.

Innovation is the word I was trying to say, before I considered it as blasphemy. It’s blasphemous enough to speak ill of one’s religion, so it’ll be blasphemous beyond all holies to speak ill of society’s fundamental myths which gave birth to one’s religion.

But, I simply wonder which upholds which. Shouldn’t it be that rules –whatever it is, were made for men instead of the other way around? Then why are we so confounded within the walls of our men-made laws? Myths, with all their extension classes, are products of our humanity. It was made by us men, even the myth that myths were created by some divine god, to ensure and maintain stability.

So what is the meaning of meaning? Well, there are several theories of meaning, but they stop on just predicting the meaning of meaning. They don’t explain the core of meaning, instead they’re giving boundaries to what would be called as meaning. Most of the theories connote the word /meaning/ with linguistical properties, but I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.

Okay, so we labelled the things we experience with words from our vocabulary, we embed verbal words to the perceptualized things we lived by. And the structuralistic perspective of meaning wasn’t that wrong as well. It’s just in the blood of it, just like it’s in my blood to be make fool out of myself. But to find the greater meaning of meaning, I think we should think further than what words could mean.

Just like pictures, for instance. Pictorial objects could communicate in a multimodal way compared to ‘mere’ words. A photograph of any given person would speak a lot more than a detailed description of his physical appearance. But of course this multimodality could be detrimental to perceptualization and meaning when the pictorial object is too metaphorical for its audience; such was the case of advertising.

In such cases, words are easier to use in symbolizing and perceptualizing things [that’s why we made taglines, you idiots. Taglines were made to conjure an image of theme and synchronicity to our illustrations], and we’ve been taught for a lifetime to use words to refer the things we perceive, those were the reason why our verbal literacy tends to be higher than our visual literacy.

Add to those, the fact that we perceive things visually instead of verbally. I mean, we see things more than we hear things. I’m not saying that we’re more hallucinational than dellusory, but that’s the fact: we perceive the things in our lifeworld more through our eyes more than our ears. Even the written words need to be read through our eye before we could perceive them in our consciousness.

It’s rather pointless trying to point out the primacy of pictorial objects to verbal objects for they’re complementary instead of contradictory, but there are just things that verbal communication can’t do, like giving mental images for something as illusory as a midnight rainbow over a waterfall. You could explain exhaustively, but you can’t make them see what you aesthetically see.

All in all, I think to understand the meaning of meaning, we should think of it in a more visually perceptual aspect instead of merely linguistical. It’s only after the visual perception that we could start calling names to them.

So let’s return to the meaning of meaning. For me, the meaning of meaning is how we think about the things we perceive. It’s not necessarily consensual, instead it’s so personal that there wouldn’t be any consensus aside from the fear of dissonance. If you personally think that this writing is complicated, that’s your meaning of this writing. If you think this article doesn’t worth your while, it’s your meaning. But if your peergroup said that this article was something near to genius, you’ll think further out of your fear of dissonance before you’d start to call this article as stupid.Or perhaps just because you don't know any other things to name this.

But of course, by the time you say this article is something, you need to know the things that were symbolized by that particular something. In other words, you’ll need to understand the dennotative, connotative, symbolical, and contextual meaning of the word before you could start using the word to name things.

That would explain my hatred against the mindless mob that used words without understanding their attributes and class-categories. Instead of understanding the meaning and experiencing the perceptualization of it, they just give a new meaning to the word. It’s practical, and it leads to the fuckedup world we live in.

Generally, that’s just what people do in their spare times. Giving out new connotations to a well-established system. That’s one of the things Mead had thought during his time, and that’s one of the things that created this perceptual confusion of the lifeworld. When a new concept was embedded to any given word, it takes time to integrate the new concept and more time to socialize it to the greater public. It takes so much time that over time, complicated concepts such as religion degraded instead of being properly experienced.

On the brighter side, this reinterpretation gave room for the dynamics of meaning. We would, then, be abled to perceptualize things differently. We could find new ways to dream by re-contextualizing the meaning of things to us.

And by defining meaning as what people think about the things they perceive, I still give some room to the dynamics of meaning. People see things, people people hear things, they experience things, and they learn [if and only if they're abled] of things. Somewhen, those experiential knowledge would enrich their verbal rhetorical finesse. Sooner or later, they'll start stabbing each others' heart with mere words.

So, it's been quite an exhaustive article. But I hope you could understand my perspective of meaning. Let's just forget about Wittgenstein, Goodman, Dilthey, Husserl, Hegel, Heidegger, Peirce and those modernday philosophers. As one of the luminous beings, I have all the godgiven properties they have.

So here’s the thing, with my little knowledge on marketing and brand communications, I learned that the process of Positioning is quite intertextual with the concept of Persona in psychology andGoffman’s dramaturgical perspective. Hermeneutically thinking, it doesn’t really matter who you are or what you are, as long as the general audience perceptually acknowledged you as someone you want them to see. 

And as far as every role-taking things went, it takes a large amount of ritualization in positioning. You really need to ritualize things in order to have the audience viewed you. Just like an actor rehearsed in every breath he took. If you’re making a lie, you’ll have to mythify things so that your lie could be seen as the truth.

In truth, Positioning is about having the general market doing just that. It doesn’t really matter what the product really is, it doesn’t matter whatever defects and fallacies the product has, as long as the market see it as something good. That’s just a plain lie, considering the capitalistic nature of our contemporary world.

Such a thing really work wonders to me. As soon as she learned of my concepts around love, she’s just ritualized it in daily basis so that I could finally correlate her with the concept of love. In the end, I finally could say that she is love.

But how to take such things to the capitalistic world? De facto, marketers don’t really care for such intimate relationship. All they care is just the sales and their gain, they don’t really care much for all the things it take for one to ritualize oneself and become an iconico-symbolical referent. But this kind of practice, IMFHO, would really work magnificent wonders on the product.

When I, as one of the general market, viewed a thing as an iconico-symbolical referent to –let’s say, love, I would do practically everything within my reach to have that thing in my arms. That’s just logical, though its extent surpassed every possible and probable extent of rationality. And wouldn’t that contribute a lot to product/brand equity and sorts?

And, as she showed me, it doesn’t take much to position herself as the door to love. All she need to do was to learn of my concepts around love, and the willingness to materialize such concepts. Whatever things she spent on me, she called it an investment, and I couldn’t agree more. In my case, the product was exalted to symbolize the mythical concept it desires.

So I guess the consumer oriented model of marketing would really need this kind of approach. Marketers should really need to learn of their potential target markets and find out about their concepts of things before they go out and start selling miscellaneous things. Basically you just can’t be something the market want you to be if you don’t know what they want you to be.

As for the general principles of it, I know that you expect me to write it down, but I can’t just spill out my tips and tricks on business without proper retribution. :D But one thing for sure, it starts with understanding the basic principles governing your subjects.

I believe that it’s time for something less heavy than comprising a speculative future for humankind, or perhaps not. One thing for certain is that I’m in my writer’s block, and I think I need something lighter than the sci-fi thingy, and still satisfy my need for showing off. And after several futile attempts in writing something, I came to rediscover a lyric for the song I rarely heard. Somehow I saved it inside the folder that was forbidden for me to open.

It was a song by Barry Manilow, a not so unfamiliar singer for today’s youths since his songs were quite popular and evergreen. Most of you must’ve heard Mandy or Can’t Smile Without You before, and those with more knack to the old songs, there’s also I Made It Through The Rain, I Write The Songs,Copacabana, and more.

I’m not trying to be melodramatic, but it’s a fact that Manilow’s songs are colored by his personal life. His marriage, his dog, his divorce, and most everything that’s around him. It’s quite Edward Elgar-ish [you surely remember the Enigma Variations, people] to transform a story of the day’s life to some music score.

Well, if I’m correct, Manilow was once a Broadway accompanist, playing piano accompanying those auditioned broadway wannabes. I guess that’s what added those musical overtones to his music. If you’d only pay closer attention, you’ll feel the near-theatricalquality of his songs. All those articulated emotions, the joy and sadness, the meeting and the parting, all those chorus in the background… and with such qualities, it’s impossible for me not to fell for his melancholic songs.

Allright, enough with the background. This particular song I’m talking about was something that sounds pretty personal. It has the same theme of presenting a personal song to the loved one, just like Elton John’s “Your Song,” except for the already separated part.

And I think it’s beautiful, for someone that’s been parted for some times, still remembered you as the way things were. With such memory intact, of course there’s this realization that things aren’t the same anymore, but the heart is really slow to learn. Where mind decided to label it as old lovely near forgotten memory, the heart decided to keep the love as the way things were.

And I think it will be beautiful if someone that I used to love, someone that had colored my days past, sung a very personal song for me. I never experienced one, though, none of my ex-girlfriends ever sung with me –save singing for me. But I know how it feels, even though I prefer to hide it beneath the mask of indifference.

And yet…

This One's For You

This one will never sell,
they'll never understand,
I don't even sing it well,
I try, but I just can't.
But I sing it every night,
and I fight to keep it in,
'Cause This One's For You,
This One's For You.

This One's For You wherever you are,
to say that nothings been the same
since we've been apart.
This one's for all the love we once knew
Like everything else I have,
This One's For You, oh.
This One's to say that all I can do
is hope that you will hear me sing
cause This One's For You oh

I've done a hundred songs,
from fantasies to lies,
But this one's so real for me
that I'm the one who cries.
But I sing it every night,
and I fight to hide the tears,
Cause This One's For You,
This One's For You.

This One's For You wherever I go,
to say that nothings been the same
since we've been apart.
This one's for all the love we once knew
Like everything else I have,
This One's For You oh

I've got it all,
it seems, for all it means to me,
But I sing of things I miss
and things that used to be.
And I wonder everynight
if you might just miss me too,
And I sing for you
I sing for you.

Following the catastrophic wave of cosmic rays which we later called as the flood, humans evolved –or rather, mutated, into a new species. We still bore the same physical appearance, but something inside has changed radically. We were biological beings before the flood, breathed on air and fed on other biological creatures. But after the flood, we were turned to half-cosmic beings. We lived by consuming cosmic energy alone.

We no longer need oxygen, or any kind of food to sustain ourselves. The universe provided us with an abundance of cosmic energy. All the electromagnetic emissions sustained our cellular processes in a mysterious way. All that we know was that we were abled to do things we used to consider as impossible.

It’s so strange that rational science couldn’t explain it well. And when rationality failed, people looked to another way. Religions. We’ve been living in a secular way for a long time, and yet, religious notions are still hidden inside most of us. These people returned to the mysterious ways of religions to make peace with their new selves.

It was peaceful, for some time, until people began to point their finger and blame others for what had happened. The core problem of this religious mark lies in the fact that each and every religion has degraded too long for people to understand their mystical tradition in comprehending the unexplainable. Half-understanding is bad enough, but blind adoption was far beyond irrationality.

It was known that religions had been the source of many bloodsheds during our early life on earth, three of them were the bloodiest of all: Christian, Islam, and Jew. It’s almost ironic how these three religions came from the very same proto-religion: the aramaic worship of a single and sovereign god. But the worst irony came from the fact that every religion claimed to be the bringer of peace and order.

After the third world war on earth, the United Nations –an archaic form of world government practiced on pre-galactic earth, took drastic measures to ensure secularism in every living culture that existed there. Unfortunately, the act started another world war; the fourth, the bloodiest, and the last world war on earth.

It was a war between heathens and philistines, so they said.  Islam against the rest of the secular nations. It’s a common knowledge –back then, that Islam was made as a set of norms and laws for both social and religious functions. Most of the Islamic people –collectively called as moslems, deemed secularization as an act of the heathens.

With the religious conflict poisoned our worlds once more, people decided to cleanse the society. They put blame on our materialistic and secularistic condition. They claimed that this mutation was some sort of chastisement –an archaic form of punishment, as they said it, from god. Some people decided to take advantage of this uprise and started another war. 

At first, the war tolled us most of our technologies, but as it grew larger, the war brought us closer to extinction closer than ever. Then the war shifted its direction. Before, it was an act of cleansing the secularistic heathens, afterwards, the war was cleansing the society of its religious plurality. It seems that religious beliefs, summed up with desperation, could turn a simple man to a mere mass of hatred and anger, so volatile that he could do inhumane things of destruction based on a whim.

But the war was, in truth, simply an added factor to our core problem of infertility. The flood changed our genetic codes, and that change brought us infertility. There have been no births –natural or engineered, for almost two century as the religious war ravaged the worlds and destroyed several systems.

With our number decimated from over a quadrillion to slightly lesser than a million, the war finally ended with a truce. There has been too many casualties on every side, that none willed to risk any more casualty. Then, what’s left of the government decided to embrace what’s left of us.

It needs to be taken record that it was during the war that we unearthed our new ability. With our metabolisms based entirely on cosmic energy, we were abled to channel the excessive energy. Records about such things originated from the early pre-galactic millenium. The archaic concept of life energy, chi, and sorts wasn’t unknown in our historical records, though its existence was arguable to the point that it’s considered fictituous. But as now we lived with it, we learned to channel it and turned ourselves into a walking weapons of mass destruction.

And yet, such knowledge only brought more grief. We might be evolved physically, but our minds remained the same. In order to preserve what’s left of us, we decided to ask our Altarian brothers for their technological support. But they rejected, in consideration that their sovereignity would be endangered, were we had both our cosmic superiority and their technological support.

A part of us reacted radically and, in desperation, attacked an Altarian outpost. This attack had been an overture to the following war that almost had us eradicating the Altarian culture. Luckily, our Arcadian brothers intervened. And ended the war before we commit a xenocide. This time, due to the notorious destruction and effects, they penalized us with galactic isolation.

This regretted imprisonment turned out to be our salvation. Barred from the rest of the galaxy, we found enough time to introspect and solve our problems. We developed a new art of creation, where a creator would focus his thought and channeled the cosmic energy to materialize and manipulate something out of empty air. We also developed a new culture that suited us.

Later, everyone learned how to create anything they want and need. Apparently, one didn’t necessarily need to understand the fundamental principals and processes. One only needs to will something to happen, and let the cosmic energy be channeled to let the will materialized. With such a great power, we understand how we no longer need trade. Everyone was sufficiently –no, abundantly, satisfied; and the problem of scarcity was forever erased from our history.

Following the spectacular implement, we consented in making a regulation to maintain the balance. Everyone participated in creating and evaluating each article of the regulation, and so we have ourselves a new constitution to serve us.

The constitution decided to limit and monitor the use of creation. Everyone must obtain a permission to create anything –even to procreate, since the procreation must be based on will and power as well; and the possession of created objects were strictly controlled by a board of watchers. They were people who volunteered or elected to dedicate their time in monitoring the power usage over a period of two standard years.

With our relatively small number, the purest form of democracy could be implemented. Each and everyone could submit an idea for a regulation, and then others would vote to accept or reject it. The adherence to existing regulations were monitored by a board of watchers as well, and violations were judged by the society.

We no longer need any policemen or any military forces, since each and every one was a walking weapon of star destructions. Rate of criminality were reduced to a near zero, since the core problem of human insatisfaction has been well controlled.

It also needs to be noted that it was during the isolation that we transformed our worlds into pastoral worlds. With practically nothing needed, we tend to satisfy our laziness. Factories atomized, corporations died, people lived. Everywhere in human worlds, the planets were returned to its natural condition, and terraformed planets were transformed to create a beautiful villa planet.

And so, after five centuries of attonement, we returned to the galaxy with a new culture and with a new name. We’re no longer Homo Sapiens Sapiens, instead we proudly bore the name of Homo Sapiens Neogenis. And the curse was finally being seen as a gift to a new stage of humanity. It was a gift to enable us in doing things that our predecessors could only dreamt of.

It’s so absurd that it might be seem like a divine comedy, in fact, perhaps life is a divine comedy. For throughout the ages, the bloody history of humankind has been colored by weapons of mass destruction. People had grew to believe that the end will come by a misfire of a nuclear missile, or an anti-matter beam. But it seems that fate decided to go for something else.

It hasn’t been for any devices men have ever made. No, no weapon could do anything so radical as it has been. Perhaps god decided end our futile wars with his own device. None have ever foreseen it, except perhaps the gifted ones, the psychics. But we all know how we can’t trust their visions. Most of those are nothing but fantasies of the dreamers.

It’s not one of those alien attacks. The military forces had driven them back, thanks to the mass drivers and the anti-matter weaponry. We’ve been living peacefully inside our blue planet along with some of the aliens who grew to love our beings. There have been speculations that the contact device were fallacious, and instead of sending messages of peace, it has been shouting warcries to alien civilizations. But that was just a false speculation.

The aliens came because of our technology. It’s true that we’re not as advanced as they are, but it seems that our technology emitted a strange signal to the outer space. These aliens are merely curious about our civilization with our strange signals. It’s basically our fault if we didn’t admit them peacefully back then. It seems, we are the most bloodthirsty civilization in the known space.

After earth joined the galactic council, and our planet being reclaimed, our civilization had grown to literally reach the stars. Before galactic era we fought for some little area in a small planet, but now we’ve been successfully colonized more than a hundred worlds. All attained peacefully, though it doesn’t mean that our bloodthirsty nature has subsided.

Just after a century of relative peace, another war broke out. Someone by the name of Rufus Vasilli grew tired of the government and decided to revolt. Little did he know that his little earthly revolution against the United Nations had started an interplanetary war among earth and the colonies. And with our current technological stage back then, the destruction was more than just massive.

It went literally stellar with more than thirty planets and seven star systems destroyed. And to think that our technology was nowhere near as advanced as the Mirai, save for the Arcadians –our oldest brother in the evolution chain. Our technology was primitive, yet we managed to achieve such a stellar level of destruction. Could we be proud of it?

Our only galactical achievement was, perhaps, our level of procreation. Galactic evolution science had proven that it’s a proof of our youth in the galactic family tree. Just as we see rats who doubled their number in every passing year, such were we being seen from the aliens eye. At most, we’ll live until our hundredth year. But our older brothers lived longer and bred lesser.

It’s amazing how the galaxy grew to accept us and our childish attitude. I guess it’s because they’re simply being an older brother. They helped us in developing our wisdoms, our values, and most everything we own. And perhaps it’s quite nurtural that we follow their examples and trying to peacefully coexist with them.

Apparently just over a century after the Vasilli War, another war broke out. This time, it’s between us and the Elommims. It was the largest war our history has ever recorded. It destroyed more than three hundred worlds and over a hundred star systems. The Elommims would surely wiped us off the face of the galaxy weren’t for the intervention of the Arcadians.

If the war had done anything good, it was teaching us the meaning of humility in a galactic scale. After three months of war, the Arcadians took responsibility for our survival. They’ve been practically guiding us every step, just like a foster father would do. If we ever make it to our golden age, it was because of their sincerity, not of our labor.

And now, after around four milleniums of recorded history, our doom is at hand. It’s not one of the things like the doomsayers of the past had said, nothing biblical or technological as well. And it’s true, because it had happened.

Just about twelve standard hours ago, the galaxy was being flooded by an unexpected cosmic ray. The result was devastating as well as marvelous, or perhaps I could say imaginative. The cosmic ray evolved us almost instantly.

When there’s any  discussion of comparative religion happened here in Indonesia, it turned soon to  be an ‘affectionate  intellectual discussion’  [i.e.: fight] about whose religion was right. First of all, there’s always this  notion of west against east when people was discussing of comparative religion.  It seems helpless to ask Indonesians to forget that Islam came from the west as  well. Then there’s this idea that christianity –both Roman Catholic and  Protestant, is colonialists religion. They forgot that Islam was the forced  religion of pre-colonialistic era in Indonesia.

Yes, it’s true. Back then, when kings decided to take Islam as their personal  religion, his subjects followed. It could be a willing conversion or a forced  one, but it’s not uncommon that kings instated Islam as their national religion  as soon as they converted. It happens with Hinduism and Buddhism as well.  Whatever the religion the king holds, soon his subjects will follow. Somehow, I  want to kill the VOC bastards for not doing effectively what Islamic traders  do.

Either way, Indonesia comprised mostly of Islam believers. And there’s a certain  fluctuation in its development. The bloodiest uprise happened during the  communist’s failed coup d’etat attempt. It was a dark era when people converted  to Islam just to keep their heads intact. Well, the religion is a peaceful one, so peaceful that it’s ironic to see how bloodthirsty people was back then.

It was during that era, too, when Abangan people were being purged from themajority. Abangan was a minor religio-cultural sect who syncreted Islam andnative Kejawen beliefs. Most of the militant ones joined PKI, but the bloodyislamic uprise didn't end in the purging of communist people, it purged thesyncretic Abangan adherents as well. Now the Abangan still exists, as well asother minor cults, but they're mostly unheard of.

To return to the subject, the latest uprise was at the end of Orde Baru. Its quite understandable that people tend to return to god when others failed. With such near cataclysmic chaos in the structure, religious factions formed. As we  know, there has been religious factions before, but the Soeharto’s fall gave the needed chance for these factions. With what happened now, its ironic that Soeharto’s iron fist was the cushion to dampen all those bloodthirsty people.

These new factions grew out of disappointments. The late government didn’t do  well in satisfying its subjects, it simply repressed their aspirations. These  religious factions started to dredge old discontents like the Tanjung Priok case, the disappearances of Ulamas, and even about the preambule of our constitution. Yes, we’re that vindictive, Indonesians! And to say that we’re a peace loving  society.

When these dredged materials joined with social discontents and the failing  social structure, people started to look for other solutions. Seeing how the  government sit idly in their office, people grew distrustful of them. People  started their own movement in order to form their self-imposed version of order.  FPI, FBR, Jamaah Islamiyah and their ilk was made out of such discontent. In the global scope, that was the reason behind the founding of Al Qaeda.

Even so, if we want to play dredging up old things, I’ll remind you that Islam  development in Indonesia was facilitated by the coercion of kings who converted  to Islam. The issues back then was mostly trade and matrimonial agreement with  the islamic merchants. Without such religiously weak kings, Islam won’t grew as  big it is.

Its quite a strange path of history. After the bloodshed on the dark ages of  christianity, peace was brought by secularization of society. And such thing  works, if we see our older brothers [Americans, Europeans, Japanesse and  Chinesse] who took secularization to achieve peace. Part of us Indonesians took religiousization  [is this a word? If it’s  not, then its my copyrighted word] instead.

And the religiousization was done strongly. In an urbane Jakarta, different  religions was accepted. But in the less developed areas, minority religions were  resented because of the issue of conversion. But its not uncommon to hear  churches and temples being closed down. There’s this strong tendency to islamize  everything up, because Islam is the majority religion.

So at first, it’s already a coercive thing for the king to convert his subjects  just so he could marry a cute looking foreign girl. It will grew worse when the  society forced the minority to conform to them for the sake of an experimental  social structure. And to see how Indonesian culture had grown so fond of  conformity, its ironic that we were taught that we are a heterogenous society.

We're just that heterogenous that any conformity of such scale wouldn'twork. There are just so many conflicting cultural differences we have. Even inthe cosmopolitan and urbane Jakarta, such cultural conflict still existed, asshown by the contemporary folklores.

But, looking deeper inside, all this forced conformity is just a show of desperation. Nowhere near piety,  indeed, but it seems that Indonesians are that stupid. We’re too stupid to  acknowledge how we are yearning for a social structure that works, so wecall out to  god’s promise that if you follow a religion's pretexts, thingswill go right. And since we’re that stupid to run unknowingly, we overlooked the  basic of what religion is: pretexts for peace and social functioning.

God helps only those who helped themselves. With our social ignorance, how could  we help ourselves and more, how could god help us? Even if god walks past us, do  we acknowledge him as the god we talked to in our prayers?

It’s a common thing, indeed, that those who are desperate forgot their  rationality. And seems Indonesia is so desperate indeed that we forgot ourselves. All this was the reason for me to say that being a religious is not necessarily rational. It doesn’t need to be so, dear strong adherents of Islam, if you see further ahead and think deeper beyond your doubts and fears.