32. Communities As Bodies Organised By Shared Construals, Values And Attentions

Communities of users of shared construals-values-attentions emerge from social-semiotic interactions between potential users of models in a population. Bonding through shared values and attentions of specific construals of experience reinforces group identity and social identity of individuals in that group. It provides group cohesion and co-operation, creating a community of ‘us’ as an integrated ‘self’. Just as shared biological potential groups individuals as kin, as family, shared semiotic potential, in general, groups individuals together as kith, friends and acquaintances. But importantly, local bonding of ‘us’, the ‘self’, also defines the ‘not-us’ as the ‘not-self’, as the ‘other’. To bond is to exclude.[1] The self-other distinction is itself a continuum rather than a binary opposition: a scale that extends from ‘first person us’ to ‘second person you’ (those we talk to) to ‘third person them’ (those we talk about).[2]

Footnotes:

[1] Male bonding, for example, is female exclusion 

[2] Compare the 20th Century political distinction (made by the ‘West’) of the 1st World (the ‘West’), the 2nd world (the ‘East’), and the 3rd world (the rest).

ChatGPT revised:

Communities of users of shared construals–values–attentions emerge from the social-semiotic interactions between potential users of models in a population. Bonding through shared values and attentions around specific construals of experience reinforces group identity and the social identity of individuals within that group. It enables group cohesion and co-operation, creating a community of ‘us’ as an integrated self.

Just as shared biological potential groups individuals as kin — as family — shared semiotic potential groups individuals as kith: as friends, allies, acquaintances. But crucially, the local bonding of ‘us’, the self, necessarily defines the ‘not-us’ — the ‘not-self’, the other. To bond is to exclude.[1]

The self–other distinction is not a binary opposition, but a continuum. It spans from ‘first person us’ to ‘second person you’ (those we address directly), to ‘third person them’ (those we talk about).[2]

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Footnotes:

[1] Male bonding, for example, is often structured as female exclusion.

[2] Compare the 20th-century geopolitical construction: the First World (‘us’, the West), the Second World (‘you’, the East), and the Third World (‘them’, the rest).