Symbolism

Gender as a structure of binary opposites has been the most potent of all symbols of differentiation. Since the earliest beginnings of civilization, since the most ancient and simplest cultural elaboration, difference has been symbolized in compliance with the tenets of gender difference. Gender therefore may be defined as the symbolic elaboration of biological difference.

SYMBOLIST THEORY

Symbols signify what something is and what it is not, for it is the function of a symbol to express a polysemy, to contain and to convey ambiguity. Therefore a symbolist approach to gender is particularly able to grasp the ambiguity of gender relations.

The invention of the symbol is a creative act that rests on the ability to see a thing as what it is not (Castoriadis 1987). Symbolic understanding is therefore generated on the borders of ambiguity, where being and nonbeing merge, where the indeterminate is about to transform itself into the determinate, and where possibilities are latent or emergent.

For example, in Chinese culture the yang-yin symbol represents the dualistic distribution of forces between the active, masculine principle ("yang") and the passive, feminine one ("yin"). This distribution is symbolized by a circle divided by a sigmoid line indicating the dynamic interpenetration of the two principles. The light half of the figure is the "yang" force and the dark one the "yin" force, but each half contains a small circle of the opposite shade symbolizing that each principle contains the germ of the other. This symbol is a cross-section of a helicoid structure that links opposites and generates constant movement—a metamorphosis through contrary positions and situations. The vertical axis at its center constitutes the "mystical center" where there is neither turbulence, nor impulse, nor suffering. The three levels of signification are therefore present in this symbol, just as they are in other Hindu or Hebrew symbols that elaborate sexual difference as separation and inseparability.

As set forth by Juan Eduardo Cirlot (1971), symbolist theory is based on the following principles:

1. There is nothing that does not matter. Everything expresses something and everything is meaningful.
2. No form of reality is independent. Everything stands in relation to something else.
3. The quantitative is transformed into the qualitative at certain essential points which constitute the signification of quantity.
4. Everything is serial. Seriality includes both the physical world (the spectrum of colors, sounds, shapes, landscapes) and the spiritual world (virtues, vices, sentiments).
5. There are correlations of situation among different series, and of meaning among series and their constitutive elements.

Take, for example, the symbol of the sword. First there is the object in itself, stripped of every relation; next is the object in its instrumental function; finally is the object in its symbolic function to denote a general meaning, one which is often ambivalent and allusive. The multiplicity of meanings is never chaotic, however, because it moves to a shared rhythm. Thus the sword, iron, fire, the color red, the god Mars, the Rocky Mountains, are interconnected and meet in a symbolic direction of equal siginficance: the desire for psychic determination and for physical destruction. These symbols unite with each other; they call upon each other because of the inner affinity—the shared rhythm that enables connections to be established among the diverse levels of reality.

Rationality and emotionality clearly belong to that continuum of symbolic values that delineates gender: the male, the rational, the public, activity, separation, thought, the mind, hardness, coldness, and the vertical, as opposed to the female, the emotional, the private, receptivity, connection, sentiment, the body, softness, warmth, and the horizontal.

In contemporary society the symbolic fabric is much more fragmentary, complex, and chaotic than it was in traditional societies. Bureaucracy has exalted legal-rational thought. As Barry Turner argues, it has institutionalized an organizational society and a "rational, linear, denotative style of thought which thins out the symbolic density of cultural meaning arrays, which are then further fragmented by the prolific and sometimes incestuous transformations which we daily inflict upon all kinds of symbolic representations" (Turner 1992, p. 63). The difficulty in understanding symbolic representations stems from the nature of the symbol, which is so much the significans as to be indeterminate and constantly to defer its significandum, and which requires an indirect language, one that establishes relations and conserves transformative power.

For example, two symbols of gender relations—the sexual contract and the alchemic wedding—can denote, respectively, the opposition and the transformation that the gender relation may bring about as the male and female reciprocally define each other. The image of the contract and that of the wedding are symbolic representations of the separation and inseparability of the genders. It is the dialectic between these two images that produces the symbolic order of gender that sustains a specific cultural form.

THE SYMBOLIC ORDER OF GENDER

The symbolic order of gender that separates the symbolic universes of the female and the male sanctions a difference whereby what is affirmed by the One is denied by the Other. As the literary theorist Jacques Derrida (1978) observes, the One and the Other draw meaning from this binary opposition, which forms a contrast created ad hoc that maintains a hierarchical interdependence. The interdependence-based symbolic order is a relational order that rests upon difference and the impossibility of its definition. Male and female are undecidable; their meaning is indeterminate and constantly deferred.

The origins of the widely used concept of difference warrant examination. Difference, as defined by Robert Cooper and Gibson Burrell, means a form of self-reference "in which terms contain their own opposites and thus refuse any singular grasp of their meanings" (Cooper and Burrell 1988, p. 95). In order to stress the processual nature of difference, Jacques Derrida (1978) coined the term différance, which in French is pronounced the same as différence and incorporates the two meanings of the verb différer: defer in time and differ in space. Male and female are not only different from each other (static difference) but they also constantly defer each other (processual difference), in the sense that the latter, the momentarily deferred term, is waiting to return because, at a profound level, it is united with the former. The difference separates, but it also unites because it represents the unity of the process of division. Therefore the symbolic order of gender accommodates two ways of conceiving gender difference: as two separate terms—male and female—and as a process of reciprocal deferral in which the presence of one term depends on the absence of the other.

Like the mystical center of the yang-yin symbol, the situated meaning of gender stays at the point of intersection between the voice of static difference and the voice of processual difference. Because of their multi-individual dimension and supra-individual duration, male and female as symbolic systems possess a static aspect, which creates a social perception of immutability, of social structure and institution. But male and female is also a social relation dynamic whereby meaning is processually set out within society and individual and collective phenomena. As Silvia Gherardi (1995) notes, the symbolic order of gender is static difference and processual difference. It is the product of their interdependence: The impossibility of fixing meaning once and for all sanctions the transitoriness of every interpretation and exposes the political nature of every discourse on gender.

Gender symbolism is an approach that does not seek to posit a subjectivity of women or men in oppositional terms. It instead reflects the essential indeterminacy of the symbolic order of gender, governed as it is by the endless process of the difference and deferral of the meaning of male and female. It introduces a concept of subjectivity in which the subject is open-ended and indeterminate except when it is fixed in place by the culturally constituted symbolic order of gender.

Symbolist researchers in gender relations have the following distinctive features:

• They are qualitative researchers who prefer to see things through the eyes of the subject.
• They are interested in gender meanings, in the process of their attribution, in how they are sustained, and in the way that some gender representations prevail whereas others disappear.
• They are participative researchers, who know that they are part of the production of meaning and of the narration of stories, as both the narrating and the narrated subject.
• They are the products of contextual understanding of actions and symbols, not only because they are inseparable but also because all symbols are value-laden and meaningful only in terms of their relationship to other symbols.
• They are wanderers among the realms of knowledge seeking to reconstruct the links among the various levels of reality created by a symbol through individual symbolic production, the collective unconscious, and artistic production: the immanent with the transcendent, the mental with the physical, with action, with transformation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.

Cirlot, Juan Eduardo. 1971. A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage. 2nd edition. New York: Philosophical Library.

Cooper, Robert, and Gibson Burrell. 1988. "Modernism, Postmodernism, and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction." Organization Studies 9(1): 91-112.

Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference, trans. Allan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gherardi, Silvia. 1995. Gender, Symbolism, and Organizational Cultures. London: Sage.

Turner, Barry A. 1992. "The Symbolic Understanding of Organizations." In Rethinking Organization, ed. Michael Reed and Michael Hughes. London: Sage.

                                          Silvia Gherardi