Content and labels

 

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The newspapers printed an anecdotal story many years ago in which, just prior to an increase in the price of postage, an elderly lady bought a large wodge of first class stamps. Unfortunately, in those days the Post Office were printing the stamp with a value, 17p if recall correctly, not with the words ‘first class’. Buying 17p stamps when the next day the price of a first class stamp would be 19p was going to gain her nothing except the inconvenience of buying 2p stamps to post a letter.

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Presently, the Post Office label the stamps with a statement, i.e. ‘first class’, indicating the level of service you’d get if you stuck one on an envelope and the lady’s efforts would now make perfect sense. The stamps now represent content. You’re buying a service, provided you use it, when you buy a first class stamp. Previously you were buying a label, a document like a £5 note, which tells you nothing except the amount of currency you exchanged to receive it.

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It is rare that an object which has meaning in a social or cultural context can be transformed from a representation of a label to one of content. Here is another curious example. One morning the commuter trains into London were not running well, a not uncommon problem. A friend of mine recalled hearing the following announcement (or something very similar) –

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‘We regret the late arrival of trains this morning. This is due to staff difficulties. The 08:36 will arrive at 08:45 and before the 08:16. We apologise for any inconvenience.’

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Both trains covered the same journey. For the commuter, the term 08:16 was a label. It gave the train to London a title, nothing more. For the 08:16 to arrive after the 08:36 was bizarre and meaningless. For British Rail, pre-privatisation, it had content. It included the number of carriages, it’s condition and the specific staff who would man it.

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Another quirky example of confusing labels with content – Putting the clock back or forward one hour. So many people seem perplexed by it. Is it going to be lighter or darker? Am I going to miss a meeting by turning up an hour late or look stupid by being early? It’s almost as though the hours each have a content of darkness or light, that they somehow own the routine activities that we place in them each day and if one changes the clocks, we might miss the hour that we so treasured before. Instead, all we have done is change the label. The point in time that yesterday we called 4 pm, we are now going to call 3 pm, if it’s winter or 5 pm if it’s spring. So the gloom of a November evening is just as gloomy but we have given the hour in which it occurs a different label.

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These are superficial, inconsequential examples of potential conflict between labels and content. But the issue goes far deeper than that. The confusion between the two concepts can guide us through life and colour or even create our opinions and often we don’t even realise what we’re doing. Racism, or more specifically, colourism, is based almost entirely on a consideration of the label with a disregard for the content. A person’s skin colour is all some people need to see before they form an opinion.  Entire peoples can be written off simply by mentioning a nationality. Prejudices can become institutionalised, sometimes encouraged by government, wars are declared and millions lose their lives.

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There is a distinction that needs to be made between race and colour. The colour of a person’s skin can be treated quite blatantly as a label. Indeed, even for a person who has no prejudice, it is a label. She can see that the stranger before her has, for example, a very dark, or very pale skin. She knows nothing about him and is able to treat him with all due respect. The colour of his skin will have no effect. For others, that skin colour is all they need to see before they create their own content about his way of life, his views and about the danger they perceive by being near him.

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There are many people who suffer prejudice but do not have a different skin colour from those who are prejudiced. The label is then more subtle. It is no longer possible to recognise the ones you are supposed to dislike while walking down the street unless they have a particular dress code or hair style. If the label you are supposed to get riled over is, say, Eastern European, you won’t even have a dress code to assist your prejudice. You may have to rely solely on the label without ever knowingly meeting one who represents it. Indeed, meeting one could even endanger your prejudice because that would mean discovering some of the content, what sort of person they are, and that could be quite acceptable.

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Another major but less dangerous example of obsession with label is fashion. Many people, it seems, determine what clothing style they like and dislike by being told by magazines and fashion houses what they should and shouldn’t wear. Even the buttons on a pair of jeans can dictate whether you should buy a pair and if you do, what time of the day you should wear them.  And buying them with a guarantee that they’re torn? Well what can one say?

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Labels keep the commercial world going. We buy so much as a result of the label. Houses and cars are huge expenses but so much of our decision making process is geared to what it looks like and not what it can do or how useful it is. I know of a family who would not buy a house because the wife did not like the colour of the doors. TV programmes are built round the notion that if you place a vase of flowers on the table, change the curtains and freshen up the walls, and a host of other things that have virtually no relevance to a potential new owner, you will sell your house more quickly. 

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There are some bizarre retail markets. Many people will not buy cheap perfumes. If they dislike the odour and it doesn’t suit their skin that would seem perfectly reasonable. But it can often be the perfume’s very expense that makes them attractive when combined with the ‘label’, that is the name of the perfume and its manufacturer. One suspects that if the price were reduced, some manufacturers would sell fewer products.  

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Another clear and harmless example is gifts. One could buy your nephew a book but is it not an improvement if you wrap it up so that he can unwrap it? Most people find the unwrapping of a gift, no matter how small, is half the point of receiving it. It is pleasant to receive a bottle of wine when guests arrive for a dinner party and even more so if they have presented it to you in a wine bag with corded handles. In all these examples the content is enhanced by the label.

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Labels can be very subtle and it can take some thought to expose them for what they are. In Africa many villages live at a subsistence level and scrape by. Others manage to rise up the commercial ladder by running a modestly successful business. So they need to show it to their peers and the labelling begins. Off comes the mud, straw or leaf roof of their home and on goes one of corrugated iron. This shows permanence, that they’ve arrived. But it produces chronic condensation because it does not breathe, and in the rainy season you can’t hear yourself think for the noisy drumming above you. But no matter, the label – what it shows others – is more important than what it can and can’t do.

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I once met an African who had been given a pair of sun glasses of expensive, classy and cool manufacture. He would not remove the label from one of the lenses. Better that his friends could see what he was wearing than that he could see through them.

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Europeans are no different. I am embarrassed to admit that, during the fashion dictats of the seventies when everyone was into coloured bathrooms, and particularly into avocado, I bought a new house and insisted that the bathroom be of that sickening pasty green. We could have had one of a range of colours and the avocado was twice the price (I wonder why). Within a year or so it looked as old as me and never looked clean.

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More recently, the fashion habit has been to modernise your kitchen with expensive worktops. Without wishing to discuss the pros and cons of various finishes, I hear many examples of work tops, that almost doubled the price of the new kitchen, being replaced, or at least regretted, because they were so impractical. If we’re doing some social climbing, we should all be aware that what something looks like may have no bearing on how well it works.   

I was often told as a child that one should never judge a book by its cover. Ironically, this is one example where there is some justification in doing just that. Publishers would much prefer to give the potential reader some idea of what’s on the pages by indicating that on the outside. If there is a crudely drawn couple on the front gazing into each other’s eyes you know you’ll find a cheap romance inside. Authors who get major sales usually have their name printed larger than the book’s title qualified with ‘best selling author’. Whether they can write well is, of course, another matter. But taking the maxim of judging books by covers as a symbolic generalisation as to how the world works, I would have thought that that ought to be diametrically opposed to the truth.