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.

Examples

                After retiring, I wondered what it was I was supposed to be doing.  When I was teaching, it seemed like I was contributing something small but tangible to the struggle for a better world.  Absent that, it was unclear to me what I could contribute.  I like the freedom of reading and thinking what I want instead of having other people dictate what I have to respond to.  I like spending more time talking and hanging out with the people I choose to instead having to interact with people I really didn’t care much about.  I liked being retired, but I still wondered what I should be doing. 

                Working my way through the idea of deep epistemology has helped me reframe that question somewhat.  I no longer think of it as what I should do, but how I should be.  At this point, it seems to me that like older men in some Buddhist traditions, my true goal is to work on myself, not for any reward or external affirmation, but because the benefit of age is reflection.  In my working life, my mental reflexes were too amped up to be truly reflective.  Like most men growing up in this culture, I was set on solving problems and doing battle with those who opposed the way I saw the world.  There was never a shortage of either of those provocations.  I judged my contributions to the situation by winning and exerting control.  I suppose that is what youth demands – or at least my youth demanded it.  I tried not to be a complete jerk, and, in my telling of it, at least, my battles were mostly trying to speak truth to power and injustice.  Power and injustice always seemed to win.

                From the perspective of retirement and deep epistemology, I see things differently.  I can be calmer now than I was before.  I still care as deeply about the outcomes, but they aren’t really my outcomes anymore.  Accepting my age means accepting a different role.  I think people who still want to direct things in their 70’s and 80’s are missing the point, not because they don’t “get it,” but because they are wasting their hard earned perspective on moment to moment chaos.  (Of course, it helps that nobody really cares what I think anymore).  Reflection is so lacking in this culture, where the pressure is to act and react instantly.  The way I see it now, our job – or at least my job – is to be an example of virtuous and mindful action.  I want to set aside being clever and aggressive for the opportunity to learn how to be an example of the things I always said I believed in.

                In cultures that have some sense of filial piety, they value age for the perspective, perhaps even the wisdom, it brings.  At the very least, we should be in a position to reflect on what we’ve seen and done instead of just reacting to the next stimulus in an endless stream of new stimuli.  One of the cultural consequences of deracinated and disembodied consciousness is that we lose our sense of mortality – not in some mawkish or fatalistic sense, but as the grounds of our being in the world.  Time is only meaningful to living things.  The gift that time bestows on us is to see what is important and what isn’t.  It is important that we reconnect to our bodies and the rest of the living universe. 

                I don’t plan on being a good example all the time, nor do I expect to overcome my rash and impulsive nature.  Cut in front of me in line and I’ll give you a demonstration.  But I can be an example of becoming to those who care or want to notice.  I can’t open a web site to market it or make money off it, but I can make this phase of my life richer.  Maybe I can help as part of a larger conversation about how we reimagine democracy and virtue.  I can at least listen and wait for a pause in the action for a chance to share what I know.  If that doesn’t happen, I can wait some more.  When I was a kid, I wanted to be a wizard.  That ain’t happening, but the disguise of wizards is often playing the role of an old fool. I’ve got that one down.

The Day Before the Revolution

I’m writing this before I know what the mid-term elections will bring.  I think it’s important to see this day as a day in a process and not as either a victory or a defeat.  Nothing is going to magically restore whatever fantasy we used to have about America.  We have seen the ugliness beneath – not very far beneath – the glossy surface of our democracy.  The hatred and stupidity that have been exposed have always been there.  If you are privileged enough not to have noticed until now, count yourself lucky.  The real issue, no matter what happens in today’s election, is realizing that tomorrow is not a destination, it is a small step in a long march toward sanity.

In Ursula LeGuin’s short story, “The Day Before the Revolution,” the main character, Odo, is revolutionary leader who has struggled her whole life just to make the smallest inroads into the corrupt power of her society.  In the day covered in the story, she laments her futility, her frustration and the unrelenting task of change.  She suffers a stroke and dies that day.  The revolution bearing her name started the next day.  We have to be prepared to see ourselves as Odo, as servants to a cause we may not fully witness or realize.  In MLK’s famous line, we may not get to the mountain top. 

Our job as we wait results is to prepare, no matter the outcome, to get up tomorrow and continue the struggle.  The forces that we oppose are never going surrender on their own – they will never relent.  We must be prepared to take either a defeat or a modest victory as just another step toward more organizing, more resistance and more hope.  This isn’t a game.  The way we tend to cover elections is more like a sporting contest than an act of civil engagement.  We must stop that.  We have been delivered a great gift, the chance to see what could go wrong, a chance to see just how soulless the future could be.  Despair is the most certain way to waste that gift.  Pessimism is not an option.

We have the challenge, but also the privilege to live in a moment where we can do something important, even remarkable.  We can take the soaring rhetoric and false narratives of our history and transform them into something better – not perfect – but better.  We have the government we have because it suits too many of the people in the country.  We are here because we don’t value families and education.  We are here because we don’t take of the environment, and we are here because we have commercialized the very idea of existence.  We have to “be the change we seek.”  We have to be better.

We need to help each other take the next step.

Extended Embodiment

                One of the features of a deep epistemology is that intelligence is ‘embodied,’ meaning that it involves all of our senses and emotions and is not just a product of the deracinated functions of we call our ‘mind.’  Deep epistemology always situates us within our experience of the world instead of isolating the act of knowing from the organism that experiences it.  Embodiment is a fairly well known concept and is frequently utilized to help overcome the mind/body split that dominates and restricts much of Western philosophy.  What I want to suggest is that we need to extend our ideas about embodiment beyond our individual bodies and even beyond our concepts of human consciousness.  What I’m proposing is an extended embodiment that recognizes that the body, the source of experience and intelligence, is never just and individual organism.  We are autonomous and somewhat unique, but we are not a singular entity.

                As Maturana makes clear, we are constructed by and connected to the world we bring forth with other people through the human act of ‘ languaging.’  Only in contact with others are we able to see meaning or value in they way we encounter and experience the material world.  That world does not impose its ‘beingness’ on us, we – and it is always a we – bring it into being and consciousness by interacting with others.  For Maturana, this is never mere nominalism.  He defines ‘languaging,’ as”the coordination of coordinations of behaviors.”  In other words, ‘languaging’ is never just naming, it is always the coordination of names and meanings with others in an attempt to share and shape our experience.  Thus, the body is always already a construction we share with others.  Even in Des Carte’s meditations, he is never really there alone.  He is always accompanied by the language of his culture and the thoughts of previous philosophers.  To have an embodied sense of intelligence is inherently to have a social sense – a multiple bodied sense – of intelligence.

                Our bodies are in the world in ways that are not explicitly human.  We construct a world through ‘languaging,’ but that world is not just a fantasy.  We are alive in a world that is also alive.  We are made of the same ‘stuff’ that it is made of, so if we have consciousness, why doesn’t it?  Embodiment can’t be fully understood in human terms.  It also has to account for the reality of the rest of the living universe we inhabit.  This is not the same as transcendentalism, where there is a ‘human’ power or consciousness in nature.  It is a more fundamental realization that consciousness is greater and more diverse than the more limited concept of human consciousness.  Our bodies connect us to that sense of consciousness.  We are connected in the awe we experience in nature.  We are connected in the love of puppies and the fear of sharks.  We are connected to the vastness of space.  Embodiment that ignores these connections to only concentrate on the technological or digital spaces we have created is cut off from a critical source of experience and moral action.

                Extended embodiment is a grounding.  It gives depth and integrity to our experience.  It is a recognition of both the limitations and finality of our existence and the limitless expressions of spirit that sustain us.  Moral action and deep intelligence can never originate in individual consciousness.  Every action, thought and word is connected to every other action, thought and word.  In Maturana’s way of putting it, nothing is trivial.  An extended embodiment makes those connections and their consequences manifest.  It is the source of our sense of rhythm, harmony and beauty.  It is greater than God.  Without it, all of our thoughts, creations and actions are in vain.  

Moral Action

                One of the things that a deep epistemology has to account for is moral action.  Just as knowing can’t be reduced to the abstract rational intellect, moral action does not grow out of abstract principles of morality.  Morality is not a principle or theory, it is a concrete and relational element of our daily experience.  Because of this, morality is less concerned with consistency and adherence to an ideal sense of the good than it is with variations of relationships and situations.  Moral action isn’t sustained by platitudes or pronouncements but by the concrete associations of people trying to act intelligently in specific situations.  Like fractal constructions, morality may have one organizing principle one day and another principle the next.

                The melding of Greek philosophy and early Christian theology around Plato’s ideal of the good has inverted both the direction and construction of a moral dimension.  That mashup creates a world where the ‘good’ already exists and every action is a poor attempt to realize it.  We live in a cultural context that tries to impose a definition of morality independent of our lived experience.  In a deep epistemology, morality is created in the opposite direction.  Rather than starting with an idea of what is good or moral, the goal is to build the good and moral out of the specific and contemplative actions we take every day.  It might be helpful to think of it as an ecology that is based on billions of small acts that sustain the evolving of higher and more complex forms of moral actions.  If the billion small ‘bacterial’ acts disappear, so do the larger structures that depend on them.

                From the perspective of a deep epistemology, it makes no sense to talk about laws or principles as the source of a moral life.  Morality is lived and not articulated.  Its presence is only obvious by outcomes it creates, not by the labels it claims.  We build the potential for a moral life in the relationships we engage in.  Most of these relationships are with other people, but we also have relationships with non-human fields of reference, such as the environment.  If actions at the ‘bacterial’ level lack just and moral outcomes, no constitution or system of justice will evolve.  All morality happens at the level of individual responsibility and resonates within the relational constructs we share with other people.  It is not enough for the individual to claim a moral purpose, it can only emerge in the context of relationships with others that we are always already a part of.

                To me – and I claim no academic validity for this comparison – it seems that this is the root insight into the Buddhist idea of the Bodhisattva, the one who is enlightened but stays to work with the rest of humanity and the world.  We may see the way and know what to do, but only in action with others can we bring forth a world that is attuned to what we see.  Knowing and moral action live at the connecting point of our divided nature, linking autonomy to connectedness.  We are always operating in this paradox.  We can never be just one or the other.  Without autonomy there is no insight and reflection.  Without connection there is no avenue of expression or realization for insight and reflection.  We can experience this paradox as a dissonance or as a harmony, but we can’t escape the paradox.

                Maturana is fond of saying that no act of ‘languaging’ is trivial.  With every word and action we are building and/or destroying a world.  There is no free lunch.  We are always challenged, no matter what we think we know or what we have already done, to know and do more.  The context of our relationships and the actors we share them with change.  Sometimes our roles are well defined and sometimes they are vague at best, but our responsibility is the same.  ‘Know thyself,’ sounds to us like a call to individual awareness.  It is not.  In the context of its utterance, it is a call to a deeper knowing that connects us with not just our self but the conditions and relationships that bring that self into being.  Deep knowing is moral action.  Moral action is deep knowing.