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.