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.

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.

               

               

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.