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.