#9  Languaging and Existence 

                As I said in the last post, we bring the world into existence through languaging.  We know what we know through the process of languaging and we coordinate our behaviors around the imagined order that we create.  The next step in an epistemology for cyborgs is to own the things we bring into existence.  We can’t pass them off as trivial or inconsequential, and we can’t underestimate how much the act of knowing is tied up in the act of languaging.

                What I want to focus on here, beyond the inherent instability of language, is how languaging puts us in touch with existence – or at least it has the potential to do so.  A lot of what we communicate is static – it perpetuates a shared order that can seem very solid and immutable.  When we language in these conditions we stand totally in the domain of what is known.  We assume that what has already been coordinated is adequate and sufficient and there is nothing new that we learn.  We are not destabilizing the word games or social context we find ourselves in.  I think probably most of our languaging falls into this category.  It can be dull or playful, but it isn’t disruptive.  It confirms the patterns and assumptions that make it possible for us to share space with others without too much anxiety or fear.

                Sometimes, however, languaging takes us out of the realm of the known and forces us to balance what we know with what we don’t know.  It forces us to practice patience and humility as we coordinate new behaviors and construct a new order.  In these cases, languaging is no longer habitual or programmed.  We are forced to see the role we play in making what we want to say.  My contention is that this is what intelligence boils down to – the ability to shape existence through languaging, including silence.  We learn only when we are forced into new associations and understandings, even if what we understand is the ritualist nature of our ordinary behaviors. 

                Sometimes the biggest obstacle to doing this is what we already think we know and the categories we use to know it.  In a society with so much ambient stimulus, it’s impossible to pay attention to everything all at once.  To survive our daily routines, we construct linguistic and conceptual frameworks that allow us to easily and quickly categorize and normalize what we encounter.  If we couldn’t do this, none of us would make it through our day without going insane.  The point is that unlike a Buddhist landscape painter on a mountain top who can open themselves up to emptiness, we are continually assaulted by messages.  This is even more of a problem when the ubiquitous noise of machine intelligence is added to the mix.  Cyborgs have to seek space to think or meditate; they can’t just walk out the cabin door.  The constant barrage of languaging keeps us constrained because we have to process and respond, leaving very little time for play and imagination.

                I think we have to stop thinking of knowledge as what we do when we process the already known and start thinking of knowledge as that which we create when we put one foot into the unknown.   This isn’t an expert driven process.  None of us are experts of the unknown.  It means letting down the protective shields we carry around with us and let ourselves think new thoughts.  As Kuhn pointed out, even if the sciences new ideas often appear this way and through the tedious replication of existing theories.  If we want to learn we have to let go, which is counter intuitive in a culture that places so much emphasis on correctness and memory.  It’s no coincidence that teachers often attack the grammar and syntax of an idea they aren’t prepared to face.  If the language can be constrained, so can the ideas.  The same mechanism is at work in the explosion of standardized testing.

                Thinking of knowledge in that way might work in a culture where change is slow, but in the world of cyborgs that is hardly the case.  Before we rush ahead with what we think we know, we need to try to think in the unknown and with people that aren’t normally part of our languaging circle.  The idea that expert knowledge created in isolated language games involving only people who are experts in the field will save society has proven to be an abysmal failure.  We know what we can language – not just with words – and we can only share it with people who help us create it.  We don’t have much time to figure this out.  As it becomes more and more obvious that ‘reason’ was a daydream of the Enlightenment that will not sustain a society ripped apart with fear and that the institutions we thought were immutable are crumbling as we speak.  Humility and wonder are part of this journey.  Knowing is not memory = knowing is exploring.