The Hidden Transcript

[CoryJames]

James Scott points out the existence of this ubiquitous yet relatively undocumented subject.

Brief Background.

Scott claims, (accurately, I think), that power disparity is a constant. In every situation, every human interaction, there is a person who is subordinate and a person who is in power. In many cases, and this is where it becomes more clear, entire populations and communities are subordinated by an individual, but more commonly a group.

In each of these interactions, but again, more noticeably in situations of great disparity and oppression, the subordinate, (and in some ways the oppressor too), have a public and hidden transcript. The public transcript is the way we act and speak in the presence of those who have power over us, and the hidden is the fantasy, so to speak, that we imagine to ourselves or discuss with our comrades who are in a similar situation.

An obvious, daily example could be the manner in which students behave the SECOND that a teacher leaves the room, or the way that when talking to our boss or superior we employ flattery and demean ourselves, yet the second we are out of their sight and earshot we tell our co-workers what a dick he/ or b word she is.


What are you experiences with this phenomenon? What is your most brutal hidden transcript? Have you ever been pushed to far and revealed it? If so what happened?

 

[EvilScientist Trainee]

That's a something that seems to happen with everyone, but that it's so entrenched in the social aspect of life that we didn't bother to take it into discussion.

I'm not open with my transcript. In my class, there's a teacher that uses somewhat outdated methods of teaching. While she's in the room, they all behave politely and friendly. But the second she's absent, they start criticizing her.

I do not engage into this very oftenly, but there are times where I find myself doing so. The nature of the relationships themselves don't allow us to be open with these persons about how we feel about them.

But i'd say that there's a spectrum to this kind of interaction, one extreme being too honest and the other extreme being phony.

 

[CoryJames]

The spectrums are just a result of people exercising their agency in the social construct.

 

[EvilScientist Trainee]

Oh yeah, I forgot to keep agendas in mind. I kind of loathe them.

Just as a note, your examples pretty much nailed most of occurrences of the hidden transcript. How did you got into contact with this theory?

 

[CoryJames]

I had to write an essay on how those sorts of hidden transcripts effected events in the holocaust and after in not a trial of Adolf Eichmann who was kidnapped from Argentina and brought to Jerusalem and eventually sentenced and hung.

 

[EvilScientist Trainee]

Now that you contextualized it, it sounds like a very powerful social mechanism.

Is this hidden transcript what's behind critique to people in political positions? I just don't get how one person can determine the fate of many. Let's say, why do soldiers crack down rebellions that they agree with? The power of the authority is something unthinkable, but not unbreakable.

How did the transcript effected the hollocaust (If it's not an annoyance)?

 

[EyeSeeCold]

A basic instinct of survival. Some are more consistant, some are more shifty, either way, eh.

 

[Stoic Beverage]

I had one math teacher in Jr. High that I despised. I had/have more disdain for her than any other teacher to date. She had to leave the classroom around 5 times a day during our period, and about a month into the year, I couldn't restrain myself and made a declaration. She left, then I stood on a desk and proclaimed "Every moment Hutchens is out of the room, we shall have a SuperCrazyUltraMegaFunkyDanceParty!" Everyone stared, but then one kid started going "oontz-oontz-oontz" and everyone started yelling and dancing.

I sat in my seat and read a book. Every time that teacher went back into the room, no one would still be sitting but me. Seeing as the entire class was doing it, she didn't punish any specific person, so that continued the entire year. One of my prouder moments.

 

[Bird]

Now that you contextualized it, it sounds like a very powerful social mechanism.

Is this hidden transcript what's behind critique to people in political positions? I just don't get how one person can determine the fate of many. Let's say, why do soldiers crack down rebellions that they agree with? The power of the authority is something unthinkable, but not unbreakable.

How did the transcript effected the hollocaust (If it's not an annoyance)?

I think without authority our species
would fail to exist.


This is not to say instantaneously, after
time.


But then I think, we'll always establish
some kind of authority in order to prevent
this. We're hard-wired to survive. This is
something we have come to rely on and
something that has helped us to progress
so much. If we break one authority one
[power of authority] will ultimately just be
inserted in the previous' place.

 

[CoryJames]

The hidden transcript effected the holocaust in many ways, but not always the ways you might expect. If you asked most people where the power disparity was, they'd likely say the "Germans" were in power and the subordinate were the Jews. This is basically true. However, one of Scott's points was that "the more brutal the oppression, the "thicker the mask", or the more that is kept out of the public transcript. This can be seen today in North Korea. People literally barely have any agency, and can't do anything based on what they really want.

People sometimes ask, why did the Jews just go like sheep to the slaughter. Why didn't they fight back? In comes another of Scott's observations. Domination, the maintenance of the power disparity, is usually reinforced through several mechanisms. One is the establishment of "formal assumptions about superiority and inferiority. Think about the "scientific" research about the inferiority of the Jewish race and the superiority of the Aryan. Also, domination is reinforced through demonstrations of authority, such as rape, beating and murder. While this may not happen to each subordinated individual, the knowledge that it could is still there. Think about the whippings of african slaves, and in this context, the ability of any German soldier to beat, rape, or kill almost any Jewish person.

Because of the level of domination, the widespread societal belief that Jewish people were inferior, and the fear of the German might, the Jewish people literally had almost no agency in their public transcript, and one of the only things they had any control over was how they died, so they expressed agency through their calmness in approaching death. One of the only things they could do was choose to have a relatively peaceful and easy death, rather than causing themselves more pain and hardship in a futile attempt to escape. The Nazis' reinforced this idea of futility of revolt with their reaction to one attempt of Jewish revolt that took place in Amsterdam. They literally tortured the revolters to death. A quick death is preferable to a slow one, if death is the only choice.

The more interesting implications of power disparity were seen not between Jews and non Jews, but between the non-jewish members of the European population, namely the common Nazi population. Why did the German commoners go along with something that was so obviously horrific and terrible?

I would attempt to explain all of factors of how and why this worked, but that took me months of research and many, many pages of analysis. It also involves a lot of human psychology that cannot stretches beyond the James Scott's social psychology work.

 

[unorthographic]

i have thoughts on this, but they're not really coalescing the way i want. i tend to think that most things "hidden" are powerful in their secrecy. whether our comfort levels or survival as a species has promoted the power of the hidden, it seems to me that it affects us in so many ways that it would be fair to almost consider it human nature.

i think suburbs and homeowners associations are basically perfect examples of this. for some reason we've got whole communities of people who have given up nearly complete control of their external environment and agree to follow rules made up committees, but their hidden transcript is that this is a privilege of their status.

perhaps this doesn't fit the construct you originally laid out, but i keep coming back to it as a seriously insidious of the way in which we are so used to this disparity that we actively seek it out and change the story to be one of our own power.

and i won't even mention religious organizations - which has been suburbia of the masses for ages. oops, i mentioned it.

 

[CoryJames]

While your points have merit, and I thank you for them, they don't really fall under the umbrella of "hidden transcript" in the sense that James Scott laid it out.

Public and hidden transcripts have to do with literal human interactions, and the divide between what one says and does when interacting with a person who has power over them vs. how they feel/what they really want to say do/how they act amongst "peers", although Scott would say that even within the peer group there are still power relations.

There is really no true way to get a full grasp or a full picture with this subject because it all has to do with the perspective you are viewing it from. Take for instance a plantation.


Well obviously you have master>slaves.
But then you also have poor white farmhands>slaves
But also Master>poor white farmhand.

So doesn't that put poor whites on the same side of the equation as slaves? Theoretically it should (and it does, from the master's perspective), but from the poor white perspective, they are right up there with the master because they are white. Well that leaves the slaves perspective. They do understand that they are subordinate to both, but they understand that the poor whites have LESS power then the master, so their public transcript has a little more wiggle room in front of them than the master.

But it even goes deeper than that. Look at just the slave population. You've got power categories there too. You have overseer slaves, then house slaves, then field slaves.

There is constant fluctuation as to who falls where on the power scale, and there are countless (literally) variables, and those too fluctuate based on other variables. I'll try to list a few.


Age. Race. Appearance. Height. Location of interaction. Who is present. Who is friends with who. Which "group" has the majority present. Which group has political power. Which group has military power. Which group has public support.

I could go on, but you should get the picture. All of these things are constantly playing off of each other, and from a young age, through observation, and then as we grow up, through trial and error, we learn to constantly absorb all of the information we see and hear; reading faces, body language, tone, and word choice, while simultaneously recalling memories and knowledge, to figure out the power heirachy present in every situation, and we choose our actions and words based on these observations.

 

[warryer]

This would have been perfect for me to know of a couple years ago. At that point, I was trying to pin point certain aspects of social interactions which I had noticed but, couldn't articulate or understand what they were. This happens to be one of those things.

I have a recent example of using a "public transcript." In my engineering class we had to write a technical paper over a political issue. I emerged as leader because I knew the most people and asserted my viewpoint. I told one person in the group that I was for the political issue. A day or two later, I willfully told him the opposite ( right way ) knowing I would not be questioned because of my standing as leader and my control of the flow of information.

I am not the first person in the world to use this.... 'tactic.' Yet it feels like reinventing the wheel because these are things nobody talks about. Such a method allows for improper usage of authority. In my example, I used my position as leader so that I could avoid admitting I was wrong.

An example where I revealed a hidden transcript:

I was in middle school sitting at lunch thinking to myself how annoying my friend was being. He just kept yapping on and on and on about some nonsense. I tried to change the subject when that didn't work I figured I could wait it out. Holy fuck he would not stop so, I punched him in the mouth. It worked.

Power structure and social dynamics is something I enjoy discussing.

 

[Reverse Transcriptase]

Yay, someone rediscovered Confucian philosophy! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucianism

(One of the foundations of Confucianism is that in every relationship there is a superior and an inferior. Although two people can have multiple classes of relationships (friend, lover, parent/offspring, king/subject) where they vary in superiority and inferiority. Also, there's admission that there could be two friends where one is superior in one subject and one is superior in another.