Languaging Realms

                One of the things that distinguishes what Maturana says about languaging from most of the philosophical work on language in the last century is that he doesn’t reduce language to nominalism.  That is, for Maturana there is a strong force that connects languaging to what we perceive as being real.  He doesn’t believe that there is an objective world that we can just describe, but he does situate us as organisms that are coupled to an environment that sustains us.  In his words, we are ‘structurally coupled’ to that environment.  We can say and act as we wish, but we won’t be here long if what we say or do violates the sustainability of that coupling.  For Maturana, languaging is like any other operating mechanism that organisms deploy to identify and manipulate the world they are part of. 

                He is fond of saying that we only know we’re not delusional by interacting, through languaging, with the constructions, observations and behaviors of other people.  If those interactions are going to sustain an autopoiesis between organism and environment, the languaging has to reflect that.  Too often the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, perhaps best represented by Rorty, lacks the grounding that Maturana’s biological background demands.  Nothing we say or do is trivial.  We operate in these ‘realms’ of languaging bringing forth a world and coordinating both our description of the world and our behavior in it.  (I would also argue the world is itself alive, but that’s another post)  We may agree with other people in our realm to allow certain types of openness, poetry, for instance, but we also coordinate and regulate our responses to each other based on behaviors that sustain and enrich our autopoietic evolution.

                I think the tricky part is how we establish the realm, that is, how do we check on the usefulness and operational accuracy of how we have brought forth a world and coordinated our behaviors in it.  Some realms are relatively closed, reproducing a limited and fairly predictable pattern of descriptions and behaviors.  That’s fine, as long as those descriptions and behaviors ‘work’ to preserve the coupling between the background and the organism (here it might be both individual and social).  Other realms create limitations that make it impossible to sustain the coupling because they do not allow the participants to ‘check’ the responses.  Religions are one example of a realm that MIGHT operate this way, although even religions tend, over time, to track with changes to the coupling.  A fairly recent realm that accentuates self-checking is science, where descriptions are challenged and replicated before being accepted.  That doesn’t make it objective or infallible, but it does give it a greater chance to self -correct. 

                The more interesting and distressing examples are political and ideological, where ‘truth’ is manufactured in limited and limiting practices of languaging.  When people say something like, “how could they possibly think that,” they are seeing the limitations of a realm that has lost its ability to self- correct and maintain its autopoietic structure.  In short, it produces an inaccurate and ultimately fatal misrepresentation of a possible world.  Every realm ‘wobbles’ between healthy and unhealthy descriptions, but some are so off track that they threaten the sustainability of the organisms (social and individual) in the realm.  If the realm is so isolated that the people in just wander off and become extinct, that may be bad but not catastrophic.  When the realm producing this view is part of a large and technological society, it’s another thing all together.  The problem is that there is nothing outside of their realm – there is no logic or evidence that can stop or penetrate their languaging bubble and there is no critical perspective within the realm to self-correct.  When a realm like this is under stress, it becomes more and more orthodox and intolerant, making an external intervention even more unlikely. 

                I’m not sure what the right response is to this situation.  I do know that asking them to be reasonable or check their facts won’t help.  Their realm is internally consistent and it produces reason and evidence that reaffirm its conclusions.  Instead of aligning itself with other, competing, realms, it will most likely work to destroy or dominate those other perspectives.  These realms function as tautologies. Either they have to be broken apart and reconstituted, or they have to be smashed and defeated.  Not a pretty scenario.  It turns out that language isn’t such a flimsy thing after all.