Languaging an Imagined Order #8

                If there is one sentence that could sum up the last several decades of critical analysis, it would be something like ‘the signifier is not the signified.’   That is, we cannot rely on language to represent what exists, only the differences in signifiers.  As much as folks tried to ‘systematize’ what language and other orders of signs mean and how they work, there is always an instability that exists outside the system(this is true with systems that use numbers, too, but that is another post)  Bakhtin described a view of language that moved both toward a structured usage and away from it at the same time.  Language can be made to serve an imagined order, but only for a while.  Eventually, the languaged order has to morph, it has to change through the languaging of changing beings.

                It is Maturana that uses the term languaging.  He defines it as ‘the coordination of coordination of behaviors.’  That is, we are not describing a world which is ‘out there,’ so much as we are making the world through our actions, including languaging, with others.   In the same way that action and non-action are expressions of intelligence, so are languaging and not languaging.  We tend to talk about the bodily intelligence of athletes and mechanics as instinct instead of intelligence, but their actions demonstrate an intelligence within a particular frame or structure.  Why shouldn’t languaging work the same way?  In wisdom traditions, the master often does not speak, or does so in cryptic and parsed phrases.  Because we have mistakenly thought that language describes something, we have poured or energy and time into saying more and more about the thing we’re trying to communicate.  I think that is problematic in at least two ways.

                The first is that more languaging does not create more clarity.  In fact, given the instability inherent in all semiotic systems, the more we flail about in them, churning up more and more instability, the more we are changing and destabilizing what we say.   In the process we trivialize the words or products and move further away from and not closer to the intended message.  Wisdom traditions produce fewer words and those words have to count for more.  A good example of over languaged orders is academic writing.  In science and academia, we produce billions of pages of ‘new’ material every year.  We are hardly producing more clarity.  Some of it is no doubt brilliant and can be used by others in a very small discourse community to create more valuable insights, but the majority of us do not partake in the conversation and most of what is produced doesn’t rise to this level.  As things become more specialized, more people retreat to an imagined order they can understand and participate in, no matter how dangerous and unrealistic that order may be.

                The second reason our assumptions about explaining are problematic involve imagined orders.  Because language creates instead of describing a world, languaging is always already compromised by the rift between imagined orders.  No culture has ever produced the level or amount of technical data or intellectual publication as ours.  Unfortunately, a lot of people we assume will be able to access it not only don’t, they reject it.  They are interpreting the world through the imagined order not using language to understand a preexisting order.  That means that talking to someone who has ordered the world differently will not produce agreement.  If their imagined order includes a God that would not allow the concept of evolution or climate change, presenting evidence of either is unlikely to change their mind

                Machine intelligence only intensifies the problem.  By making languaging a computerized function, we have created even more and even more useless information.  Meanwhile, the assumed commonality of the order we share falls further and further into fragmentation and disorder.   Intelligence in the age of cyborgs requires rethinking our connections to language.  Having the right answer or explanation matters little if it is not based in a shared regime of languaging.  If we want intelligence to be meaningful and culturally valuable, we have to back up and build a coordinated set of behaviors instead of assuming one already exists.  We have to use more foundational checks, and we should probably learn to write poetry and parables. 

My Secret Crush on Betsy De Vos

                It’s hard to figure out exactly which cabinet member of the Trump administration is the worst.  While there are cabinet heads who have more power and have the potential to do more harm, my personal choice is Betsy De Vos.  It’s hard to imagine someone less prepared to lead a department or less knowledgeable about the mission of the department than Betsy – whenever I say that I get a bad feeling about leaving out Ben Carson.  But it’s hard not to side with someone who spent 200 million on bribes and could only get a 50-50 split on the vote.  The point being that I have no argument with how bad she is, but there is still a part of me that loves the fact that she is the Secretary of Education.

                When was there ever a ‘good’ Secretary of Education?  Obama, in spite of his many accomplishments, pretty much whiffed on picking a good one.  In fact, the Federal focus on education has brought nothing but harm to public schools.  We have created a bureaucracy of dunces who have overmanaged and over-regulated public schools.  I understand the need to set standards for learning and to make sure that every child has a good school and a good teacher, but that has hardly been the result we’ve achieved.  Instead of moving forward with the things we know would help children learn, we have created a series of mandates that have drained local budgets and provided little in the way of results. 

                Ever since A Nation at Risk was published in 1983, education has been a national issue.  The report spearheaded a conservative campaign to attack and delegitimize public education.  Teachers became the whipping boy of this effort, and have seen their autonomy and economic situation deteriorate since then.  A national department of education became the clearing house for every one size fits all placebo that would ‘solve’ the problem.  To be fair, there has been progress on helping students with special needs, but even that progress has come at the expense of other educational initiatives. 

                The bad things that started in the 80’s really became toxic with Bush’s  No Child Left Behind program.  NCLB, based on faulty evidence and under resourced proposals, ushered in a new age of blame and recrimination.  If teachers were bad before, they now became literal unionized (never leave out the unions when attacking teachers) monsters, sucking our schools dry with their contract demands and intentionally leaving students to rot.  NCLB introduced us to the advent of corporate sponsored assessment, where we perfected the process of turning nonsense into data.  Instead of real, valid local assessment, we started testing children at ridiculously early ages using instruments that were not valid and reliable.  Furthermore, all these ‘tests’ did was to replicate the existing economic stratification in our society.

                There are several things wrong with this.  First there is no ‘standard’ of achievement for young children being subjected to these tests.  We are creating ‘false positives’ everywhere we look by turning results well within the normal range of development and achievement into ‘failures.’  Second, almost all of these ‘failures’ are occurring in poor and minority students (imagine that).  Rather than enhancing the potential of these students we are suppressing it by taking the bogus test scores and using it as an excuse to subject them to the most mind numbing and draconian form of education imaginable.  What this means is we have blamed schools, and not devastating economic inequality, for the problems these students face.  Third, we have turned our public schools into a ‘market’ for corporate greed.  Text-book and testing companies and an army of paid consultants have made a fortune feeding and entrenching an inhumane and indefensible national educational policy. 

                We need smaller and more diverse schools, schools that develop local assessments and experiment with different forms of assessment that match the specific students they serve.  We need schools that value and empower teachers more than they do administrators.  Teachers need to be able to control their own work, and they need to be able to collaborate.  None of that will happen as long as there is a Secretary of Education who works for a presidential administration that plays politics with schools.  Let the last Secretary of Education be a clown, someone who makes it abundantly clear that the system is bankrupt.  Let Betsy be Shiva (gender differences aside) in our national dance of education.

                So, if we meet on the street and the topic of Betsy as Secretary of Education comes up, I’ll be right there with you.  I’ll match you horrible detail for horrible detail about her performance.  Just know that somewhere in the back of my mind there is a little voice that is saying ‘you go girl.’