Languaging in the Void

                When Maturana talks about objectivity, he brackets a lower- case o, like this: (o)bjectivity.  What he is trying to say is that everything said is said by an observer and that every observation is subject to verification through languaging with others.  There is no way to tell whether or not any particular observation is valid until it is confirmed by others.  Normally this happens in language games or realms of thought, such as science.  A scientific result isn’t considered valid until it’s replicated.  A theological principle carries weight when it reaches the level of doctrine or dogma.   We are constantly checking our versions of reality against and within a series of realms of languaging.  The confirmation doesn’t guarantee accuracy, but it legitimizes the utterance within the realm.  As Jarred Diamond pointed out in his book, Collapse, one way that cultures fail is to construct political processes that do not reflect the reality they face.

                I say all this to foreground the question of what impact technology has on the critical function of languaging.  If we are ‘coordinating the coordination of behaviors’ through languaging, what happens when the medium of coordination no longer can be depended on to be ‘real?’  By now we know that the Russians ‘hacked’ the 2016 election by using bots to flood social media platforms with fake information.  There are Chinese cell phone farms that are pumping out millions of messages from fake accounts that skew everything from Google searches to Facebook likes.  In an era where more and more people depend on the internet to get ‘information,’ what happens when an increasing amount of that information is cynically and artificially constructed and abused?             How are the coordinations of languaging that construct and ground our social existence being altered in this new environment?

                This isn’t entirely new.  Governments have historically falsified information.  Fox News exists to falsify information.  The Catholic Church has been at it for two millennia, and, of course, you can’t always trust your mother.  In these cases, there were/are always counter-hegemonies that gave perspective.  There were oppositional parties, other news sources and other churches, and your friends always helped straighten you out.  I don’t really see a balancing force to this new form of languaging.  Languaging to get information used to require work and human validation.  People used to have to judge the portals they went through to find something out and judge the people who gave them the information.  In this case, none of that is true.  The technology overwhelms the inbred balances we’ve developed to deal with face to face institutions.

                My point here is not to make some Neo- Luddite rant against social media (although there are days I think that might be justified).  My point is that our political coordinations of behavior are being manipulated in ways that threaten their ability to do the one thing they are designed to do – to help us language with others to create a viable and sustainable view of the world.  The search engines and algorithms of Google and Facebook, to say nothing of the cyber-warfare of the Russians and Chinese, make languaging democratically a difficult thing to do.  It has ushered in the era of the ‘Lie’ as a political weapon.  Saying something is true is more and more the same as making it so.  As Maturana says, none of this is trivial.  There is no way forward that doesn’t confront the questions about technology and languaging.  Whether the alternatives are educational or more limited technology, we have to find a way to sort through this problem.  Maybe the end of the world isn’t a bang or a whimper, but an infinitely blinking curser. 

Languaging and Learning Redux

                One of Maturana’s favorite sayings about languaging is that it is the process through which we “bring forth” a world.  We bring forth a world because there isn’t an objective and inert ‘real’ world that we merely have to describe.  The way we describe it, language it, helps shape what it is we can know, see and say about that world.  Individually and culturally we go through a continual process changing and adapting our relationship to the material surroundings we confront.  We have what he calls a ‘structural coupling’ with that context.  That is, there are certain material conditions that must be met to sustain our continued existence.  We depend on languaging to identify, maintain and reshape those conditions.  The organism, both the individual and social, is responding to, learning about and changing the environment that sustains them.  This process is called autopoiesis.  It requires that the changes sustain the structural coupling while providing necessary or desired adaptations along the way.

                Learning is essentially autopoiesis.  It requires us to both keep what we know that still applies or is helpful while simultaneously languaging new forms of being into existence.  Looked at this way, it should be obvious that the modern project of education has failed.  There is too much preservation and not enough creation.  There is too much expert privilege and too little communal access. There is no doubt that our current system produces new ideas and technology at a rapid rate, but to participate in the change a person has to drag centuries of old knowledge with them.  We have sped up expert learning while excluding most of the population from the language games that produce it.  There is a valid argument to be made that only a limited number of people are even capable of those expert language games and access to them should remain limited.  It is true that we probably don’t want just anybody designing the next bridge we have to drive over with our family, but the expert model has estranged people from the world that we are ‘bringing forth,’ and that is dangerous. 

                I think the problem is a problem of scale.  Obviously, none of us can know everything.  We have evolved expertise in areas that take an enormous amount of specialization to master.  What we haven’t done is to ‘scale’ those advances into a narrative of common purpose.  Only a few people may know how to make an atomic bomb or execute a credit default swap, but for them to enhance or preserve the ecological and social coupling that sustains us, everyone has to know what they are and have a voice in saying that they should exist.  No one can know everything, but everyone has to know what the larger narrative is about the things that only a few people can master.  We have assumed that a few really smart people could decide things for all the rest of us.  They can’t.  We have the expertise to make more and more creative forms of plastic, but should we make any plastic at all?  Technology and expertise unchecked by a communal consensus is folly.  We have the most advanced scientific practices in history, yet more and more people are ignorant, fearful or suspicious of them.  Why is that?

                Cultures are transgenerational engines of autopoiesis.  When the narrative breaks down, they fragment into more and more competitive and disfunctional units, each trying to control narrative of the time.  Some of them are bound to very far away from the things that sustain our structural coupling with the material world.  Some of them are bound to create wild and crazy ideas about reality. (In my household, we call those people Republicans).  Because they are languaging only with people in their group, they became more and more distant from any dialogue of reconciliation.  The way we approach education will not solve this.  A better approach is to rethink the relationship between expertise and community.  People have to participate in making knowledge in order to use and trust it.  More fundamentally, they have to have a say in what knowledge is produced and how it is used.  The citadel approach to the university has outlived its usefulness.  We need a model of education that is inclusive and not competitive.  Smart people doing stupid things is no way to build a future.

               

               

Climate’s Backdoor

                For a long time now, it’s been obvious that climate change means we have to give up our dependence on fossil fuels.  It is also obvious that the financial interests of the people who own and run the companies that supply this energy are at odds with the global need to find reliable sources of renewable energy.  What I think is less obvious is how the petro dollar has given rise to much of the political nihilism that is sweeping the world.  There are many reasons that this hyper-male, right wing political movement has taken hold, but one of the driving factors may be oil.

                The global network of oligarchs, many of them Russian, who control the fossil fuel economy have formed an international crime syndicate that promotes political instability.  They are not being driven by ideology or religion, just money.  Most, but not all, of this money is generated in the oil market.  They foster instability in democracies and democratic alliances so their financial interests can go unchecked.  They have no interest in the work of governments or the welfare of the people or the environment.  If the roads, schools and legal system are in decay, it just makes it easier to move through and around borders and institutions that would normally restrict their activities and limit the amount of money they could accumulate.  In their wake, are the remnants of functional democracies that are increasingly ruled by and exist for only the wealthiest of their citizens.

                Some of the figures in this cabal are American oil magnets, financiers and politicians.  They are aiding and abetting the extraction of wealth from this country and increasing the economic inequality that is choking our democracy.  In fact, they use their vast sums of money to elect puppet politicians and promote policy designed to tip the scales even more in their direction than they already are.  Trump is both a consequence and an agent of this movement.  Actions that make no sense viewed from the normal way we look at government and policy make perfect sense when viewed from the agenda of the new robber barons.  Sometimes they are connected to each other, and other times they are just operating in random but predictable synchronicity with each other.

                This is why renewable energy isn’t just an environmental imperative.  The decentralization of energy would be the single biggest threat to this international network of oligarchs.  If done properly, renewable energy is scalable.  It can break the global monopoly of the oligarchs and restructure the economic wealth in the world.  In fact, I think it is safe to say that only by breaking that monopoly can democracy become a sustainable option for the future.  We should move away from fossil fuels for the health of the planet, but we should do it with the realization that we can also regenerate democracy.  As long as we are tethered to the economy of oil, the distribution of wealth and resources will continue to undermine the environment and our politics.

                If there is a small bright spot in this dreary connection between oil and despotism – and that’s a big if – it’s that there are people in the Justice Department who have known about this network of oligarchs and their plans for a while now.  One of them is perhaps one of the leading experts on how they operate and how they are connected.  He knows the players and the tactics.  His name is Robert Mueller.

Languaging and Learning

                One of the most profound differences in making the shift from language to languaging is what it means to the way we learn.  All of us understand how important language is to the way we learn.  Schools focus on language at every level, trying to help students navigate the habits and protocols of learning.  Most of that attention, however, uses language as transmission and not creation.  That is, schools see language as basically inert and assume the student will learn through imitation and direction to produce mostly predetermined answers.  Finding the ‘right’ answer has become the unintentional mantra of American education.  It’s a process that assumes a static and enforceable language as its base.  Languaging changes this dynamic in critical ways.

                If we see language as the medium or sense through which we coordinate the coordination of behaviors that we use to create ‘reality,’ then Maturana’s idea of ‘bringing forth a world’ starts to make sense.  When we think of languaging as a behavior and not an artifact, it becomes easier to see how sterile our constructions and assumptions about language and learning really are.  We assume students should be passive receptors of information and that they should use that information to produce results we determine.  Only the most advanced and creative people are given the latitude to use language creatively without sanction or reproach.  In many instances, language becomes an enforcement mechanism that limits access to and participation in the generation of knowledge.  We are limiting the idea and role that language plays to a single frequency and mistaking that very simplistic model for the vast resources of languaging.

                Transmission is certainly part of learning, but it is a very limited and basic part.  Neurolinguists have long known that students have to translate what they learn to their own language to move it out of short-term recall into deeper forms of cognition.  Knowing the answer to a question doesn’t necessarily mean that we understand the answer in a complex or embodied way.  We only begin to use what we know in the process of languaging – of engaging with others to coordinate our behaviors and understandings.  Information can contextualize and enrich that process, but it is never an adequate measure of what we intend or mean.  To make meaning, we have to engage beyond what we already know or perceive and try to come to an evolving and dynamic shared meaning. 

                We are, as Maturana and Lloyd Fell, who draws on Maturana in his own work, like to say simultaneously autonomous and connected.  That is, each of is unique but not individual.  To be “human” is to be part of something more complex.  Languaging is the process we use to create a world.  We encounter that world individually, but we understand it collectively.  If what we know was truly individual, we would never understand each other or be able to use our creations and interactions to build relationships, contexts and realities.  Obviously, some people are more creative and unique than others, but without a larger coordination of context and behavior they would simply be thought of as crazy (they may even write a blog confirming it).  Fell and Maturana are careful to say that we can never move everything we experience personally into a collective space, so we always have a residual component to our thoughts and feelings that is typically interpreted as our self or the individual self.  That component is real, but it is not complete without the other connections in our life.

                Languaging and learning are always played out across these boundaries.  In cultures that are mostly stable with a high degree of conformity in the imagined order, languaging and learning are stable and grounded tropes that are well defined and policed.  We don’t live in one of those.  In cultures such as our own, the border between what needs to be preserved and what needs to change is a constantly moving and extremely fragmented activity.  We are in the process of writing a new imagined order.  It is, as it always is, a messy and dangerous process.  Learning in this context is necessarily pushed to more creative and experimental forms and compositions.  We need to understand that as we face the realization that the educational system we thought was so effective crumbles before us.  We need to understand that learning is languaging and students have no choice but to use it to create a new order.

                We cannot possibly know what that order will evolve to include and define.  What we can do is to step back from our well entrenched positions and realize that we are not arguing about facts; we are arguing over different versions of reality.  I have no idea how to talk to someone who believes that Trump is doing a great job.  But they aren’t the ones writing the new order.  They are defending an order that has already died and is threatening to take everything else down with it.  We need to start letting students not just learn but make knowledge.  They need tools of imagination we don’t have.  We aren’t going to live in the world they create.  There is absolutely no guarantee they will succeed.  This is no attempt at optimism.  What it is, is an attempt at pragmatic realism.  At some point the student or child walks out the door on their own and the world becomes theirs, not ours.