The Politics of Languaging

                As we watch our democracy try to work through its experience with the pathogen named Trump, I think it is a good time to reimagine what politics is.  We’ve tended to think of the political in strictly institutional terms.  That is, we tend to focus on legislative chambers, laws and policies.  Politics has become an abstraction and distraction for many.  A lot of folks have just given up on it all together. In the current situation, it’s hard to argue that they shouldn’t.  But at its core, politics has never been about the buildings and the office holders.  At its core, politics is the coordination of our lives together, how we bring each other and the relationships between us into being.  It’s about creating an imagined order that can define, inspire and sustain us.

                When politics becomes too big and abstract, it tends to lose the connection to daily live for many people.  Most people don’t live their daily lives on that kind of platform.  Daily life is about relationships, and politics should be, too. This big, abstract view of politics has led people to think that everything runs itself, that their voice or action doesn’t matter.  It also encourages us to make large, often misguided, solutions and not individual action and responsibility the basis of the political.  Our politics has created a static view of our political institutions, a view that is inherently conservative and one that grows increasingly out of touch with reality.  We are stuck with a lot of late 19^th century institutions and protocols that no longer reflect our political reality.  In fact, the Republican Party no longer even pretends to value democratic practices, such as fair elections and majority representation.

                One corrective path would be a radical revisioning of current institutions using the same tools, which mostly come from the Enlightenment, to create a new, rational or ‘scientific’ compact.  This approach has the appeal of seeming like ‘progress’ and retaining the political aesthetic that is now familiar to us. The problem with this approach is that it just set up a new horizon of institutional failure.  Given the accelerated rate of social, economic and cultural change, we are likely to reach that horizon in much less time than it took to create the current misalignment between politics and reality.  Unfortunately, this seems to be the most likely and most popular political direction.

                The alternative is to create a more radical sense of democracy, perhaps best captured in the work of John Dewey.  For Dewey, democracy only worked as an ongoing process, which continuously built new possibilities out of the problems and failures of its practice.  It is not a democracy that builds monumental domes to house legislators as much as it is democracy of dialog and practice.  For me, it is a politics of languaging, of the continual and active process of bringing forth a world we share with others.  Our politics moves at the pace it does because it was designed to let people on horseback convene at distant locations.  It was designed to reflect and protect the agrarian nature of our culture.  Neither of those conditions apply to our current crisis.  A politics of languaging is fluid and adaptive, making it easier to both anticipate and recover from inevitable failures.  The goal is to learn and adapt, not to solve.

                A politics of languaging also recognizes that solutions often have a fractal structure, that is, local conditions are variable and what works in one setting may not work in another.  Knowledge, as Dewey recognized, is created out of specific conditions by a specific set of people engaging with each other.  The idea that experts or think tanks can craft policy for people they don’t know living lives they can’t even imagine is absurd.  We can still study and learn from other people and situations – the goal isn’t a new sort of tribalism – but we also have to be open to the variability of application.  We have to engage our own circumstances and our own neighbors.  If we want to make the commitment to a new form of democracy we have to do more than manipulate the system that is already in place.  We have to start dismantling it from the inside – while in flight. 

Trumped

                As the investigation into the multiple charges against Trump and his family and associates builds to a crescendo, (spoiler alert: he’s guilty), people are starting to talk about the end game of the Trump presidency.  That is a huge mistake.  The assumption is that the ‘rule of law’ will now prevail as the justice department and legal system take up the numerous charges (can anyone even keep track anymore) that will lead to indictments.  Normally, this would be the end of this sad little vignette, and the bad guys would shuffle off, stage left.  Normally.  We can’t count on normal anymore.  We are now living in a governmental crisis that is far bigger than Trump and his corrupt but bungling cronies and kids.  While we’ve been caught up in the tabloid machinations of Trumpism, American democracy slumped into the corner and died.

                It was killed by a Republican congress that allowed two years to go by without a whiff of accountability.  The evil wizard (there’s always gotta be an evil wizard) in this story is Mitch McConnell.  What he’s been doing while we’ve been laughing at SNL parodies of the man is confirming the most incompetent and conservative slate of judges in the country’s history, and doing it faster than ever before.  Those judges will now decide the fate of the legislative moves in states like Michigan and Wisconsin to steal power from incoming Democratic governors.  Those judges will decide if the charges brought against Trump are legitimate.  Those judges are not going to rule in our favor.

                Mitch has known all along that Trump was dirty – Mitch knows dirty when he sees it – and he knows that the clock will run out on this charade.  While we’ve been waiting for hero to ride in and sweep the maiden off the track in front of the oncoming train, Mitch has been supergluing her to the track.  From the beginning, congressional Republicans have been planning for the end of Trump and how they can stay in power.  It’s obvious they will not provide oversight.  It’s obvious they no longer care or believe in democracy or representative government.  They only believe in power and money, and they’re about to play one final hand.  They aren’t worried about elections – Hell, they steal elections and deny people the right to vote regularly. 

                What happens when, in spite of overwhelming evidence, the Republicans refuse to impeach.  It’s entirely possible that Mitch will never even bring it to the floor.  They have backed themselves into this corner of trying to run a democracy as a minority, and they have no choice now but to see if they can make it stick.  Their party is beyond appeal to decency or democratic principles.  They lose if they play by the rules, and Mitch never plays by any rules but his own.  There will be an uproar – they know that.  There will be protests – they know that, too.  They don’t care.  Their survival is based on ignoring the law; it’s the only play they have left.  They believe that the rest of us don’t count.

                When Mitch makes his move, he will be leaving electoral politics behind.  He can no longer count on winning what he needs that way.  He and the judges he put in place will suspend the normal process of governing in favor of a Senate controlled and court enforced rule.  The only man who could stop this is the Chief Justice – you want to bet on that.  I always felt that in a normal political cycle Trump would lose in 2020 – the votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in the midterms support that.  To me, the question that arose on the day Trump took office is whether on not there will be an election in 2020.

The Linguistic Turn

                One of the questions facing any attempt to develop a deep epistemology based on embodiment is how to frame the question of language.  In some form or another it has dominated 20^th century philosophy.  Rorty, barrowing the phrase from Bergmann, claimed philosophy had taken a ‘linguistic turn’ in the last century.  Now, a hundred years out from Saussure and his work on semiotics, the question is where does that turn lead, “Lincoln county road or Armageddon,” to quote Dylan.   The question of language illustrates just how flawed our cultural framework of working with language, mind and thought are.  Language, through a particular use of language, becomes an object in itself, something to be studied and dissected, with language, of course, as a linguistic phenomenon of importance.  I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get a little dizzy.

                As I’ve written many times before, I prefer Maturana’s use of the term ‘languaging.’ Whenever I use that term, I find people have a hard time understanding it. Some have an intuitive feel for what he’s trying to say and some, perhaps most, just think my spellcheck is broken.  For Maturana, language isn’t a ‘thing,’ it is a biological function of being human.  Fish swim.  Humans language.  As such, it is incorrect to say we ‘use’ language and more accurate to think of us existing in language.  One of the things he often says is that we do not use language to describe a world that already exists but to bring forth a world with others that we then treat as real.  This is not mere nominalism.  In the way philosophers tended to deal with this issue, language was a spare part in the dynamic between thought and mind.  The world had been discarded a couple of centuries earlier.  For embodiment to occur, we have to reframe our relationship to language – we have to embrace languaging.

                Maturana would never settle for the notion that the world we create is merely language, because that would mean that the world and language were separable, and they’re not.  It makes more sense to me to think of language as a sense – just like the other senses – that both connect and restrict our experience of the world with others.  It is a malleable interface through which we manifest and imagine our interactions – or as Maturana puts it , “coordinatations of coordinations of behaviors.”  Cultures do this in different ways.  Some of Maturana’s earlier research is in how color is formulated differently in different cultures – we see what we are trained to see and expect to see.  As Saussure said, the signifier is not the signified, but Maturana makes a further point.  It is true that the signifier is open, but once it becomes a signifier, it now has consequence.  We can say anything, but when we are languaging, what we say has significance and is no longer simply arbitrary.  That is, it can never revert to nominalism.

                This dynamic is ongoing.  Bakhtin said that language was constantly being pushed and pulled by what he called centripetal and centrifugal forces.  We are both expanding and restricting language to find a balance between stable and unstable messaging.  We have to adapt the language to represent what is changing (what is alive), but we have to stay close enough to established form and meaning to make sense.  If we have a strong preference for elegance and closure we would become math majors.  If we were more concerned with imagery and the vatic potential of language we would be poets.  If harmony and rhythm were our focus we would be musicians.  If we lacked any discernable interest in any of this we would be social scientists.  The point is that languaging is part of the vibration and frequency of living and not an external abstraction.

                The final point that Maturana makes about this is that it is far from trivial.  In the nominalist turn in postmodern thought there is a strain that reduces everything to simply trying to be clever.  It’s fine to use language to be playful – being playful is one of the coolest things about being human.  But languaging, even in its playful moments is also profoundly important.  In many wisdom traditions the only thing prior to the word is the breath.  Once we breath, we speak and bring our world into being.  It makes a difference how that happens and what possibilities are available to us in that creation.  A deep epistemology always grounds us in that joy and that responsibility.