A 'Subjectivist' view of the "boat-people crisis"

If you remember, objectivism involves the object having an inherent meaning just waiting to reveal itself to you. How the meaning is revealed and what that meaning is, depends on the questions you use to represent the meaning that you suppose the object might have. The end result of this interaction with the object is that you reveal a particular meaning, and only one particular meaning, of the object. The ‘object’ I used as an example was the ‘boat people crisis’.

What about a subjectivist viewpoint?

Subjectivism is fairly different and somewhat similar except that the object has no inherent meaning until you impose one on it. Your imposed meaning does not come from any interaction with the object – it comes from the cultural heritage into which you were born which has already imposed meanings on objects before you see them. When you look at an object for the first time you might think that you have a ‘gut-understanding’ of the meaning of that object and thus impose your own meaning on it. But this is not the case – meanings are generally culturally pre-determined – it might just be the first time that you have actually articulated the meaning to yourself.

Now how is this helpful when discussing something like the ‘the boat people crisis’?

Keen readers will already see that if cultural heritage is how you gain meaning, how can you critique prevailing meaning? It’s a little like a gang mentality I guess. So if the predominant view portrayed in the mass media and among family and friends (include here anything that contributes to your cultural heritage) of ‘boat people’ is that it represents a "crisis", then a subjective treatment of that will be that your imposed meaning on the object of ‘boat people’ will be the same.

This is not helpful for developing a critical awareness of issues – this is uncritically accepting object  meanings at face value. Objectivist treatments ask ‘how’ questions while subjectivist treatments tend to ask ‘what’ questions and as a result, the types of 'solutions' offered by the ‘subjectivist’ treatment are limited in scope to the information provided by answering 'what' types of questions eg:

• What is the ‘boat people crisis’?
• “The ‘boat people crisis’ is typified by the almost daily arrival of boats filled with mainly Afghan and Sri Lankan people seeking asylum in Australia”.
• What do I already know about the boat people crisis?
• “I have seen on the TV that some of them have mobile phones and call 000 when they get near Australia”.
• What is being said about the boat people crisis by my cultural informants?
• “Family, friends, TV, newspapers etc – all say that the numbers of people arriving are too high”
• What meaning most closely matches what my cultural informants are telling me?
• “While I know that these people come from war-torn countries, I think the numbers of people coming to Australia and the manner in which they are coming is not good”.

You can see that subjectivism is not all that different from objectivism really. Objectivism is impossible to achieve in reality because the questions you ask (how) are subjectively derived.

So that’s a subjectivist treatment. Has that been helpful? The next post will look at a Constructionist treatment and see how helpful that might be.