Hi Marc,
I'm finding much of your writing at the beginning of your letter too abstract for me to comprehend.
It seems that you're saying that our adherence to a "common" language is basically a tacit agreement, within which human beings are indirectly acknowledging their "common context" or "inherent interdependence" on each other to live. So we "create" reality, then, when we "act together," in accordance with our common context.
Reply:
Maybe you’re on the right track. I can’t totally tell for sure.
Let me try this.
Two dogs meet at a corner. They engage in all kinds of reciprocal behaviors. I sniff you while you sniff me. Let’s chase each other. Etc. They can have a great time together, communicating and interacting. When this interaction falls into patterns that the dogs repeat together, when they develop “back and forth rhythms” and fall into enjoyment of those rhythms, they are finding a kind of “agreement” that I am calling consensual coordination. A lot of these rhythms, patterns of interaction with each other and the environment, are part of the evolutionary biology of the dog.
What dogs can’t do is plan to “do this again next week.” They aren’t able to jump to the meta-level in which they start relating their ways of relating with each other. That’s what language is: the consensual coordination of consensual coordination.
Our interactions as human beings at the dog level, the level of reciprocal interactions that are not languaged, makes the second level, the human level of languaging, possible. If human beings had not spent many generations hanging out together and developing a deep historical experience of such interaction, they never would have been able to develop language. Language is rooted in, and is a way of learning from and organizing and structuring these behavioral dynamics. Maturana writes that humanness has its origins in the biology of love, which is epitomized in the loving relationship between mother and child; this relationship is seen as the original matrix through which humans, and human languaging, is born -- mother and infant (non-speaking) child engage in reciprocal behaviors, creating a strong bond and shared experiences, i.e. consensual coordinations, which create a foundation for later consensual coordination of such consensual coordinations.
This is a very different view of language from the mainstream view, which says that language “represents” things: the view that the word “tree” simply represents or signifies a “tree.” Such representing is a very small part of language, rooted in a particular human relationship to things, but for a long time we’ve thought that it was the essence of it. This made us very good at developing a certain kind of knowledge, but it has left us with poor skills when it comes to developing healthy relationships with all peoples and our natural environment.
When we talk with each other, our language presupposes a cultural context, which consists of all the regular patterns of behavior, consensual coordinations of behavior, that our bodies are enmeshed in. We are enmeshed in these behaviors, not conceptually, but muscularly and emotionally. You say “close the window” and I move. You say “I love you,” and my body responds. Language is above all about behavioral coordinations, doings, not mere “representings” that can be judged as accurate or inaccurate, correct or incorrect. Representing is only one potential function of language, and it is always embedded in a context of doing from which the action of representing draws any meaning that it has, where meaning refers to purpose and consequences for the world. Much of our knowing in the technological age has been driven by the purpose of representing -- and increasing the means of control of what is represented. Yet as is becoming increasingly evident, our technology lacks direction. We aren't sure where we are going. We don't know how to attend to the negative consequences.
Our cultural context, all the tacit, foundational reciprocal “doings” that are going on that make up the human world that we are a part of, is historical and potentially changeable. It's malleable, because its all based on historically created behaviors. But it’s also what we rely on for our sense of reality. Imagine you want to throw a ball. You focus on the target and throw. All you are aware of in your mind is the target. But in order to focus on the target, you are relying on the backs of your eyeballs — however, you don’t notice this. What you “attend to” tacitly relies on what you “attend from” (to borrow from Michael Polanyi).
When someone says something that seems to “threaten” what we rely on, our instinctual response is denial and defensiveness. I.e., if someone starts to pull out from under our feet whatever we are standing on, we immediately react with fright and the attempt to shore up the platform. For this reason, humans standing tacitly on different platforms into arguments and talk past one another; they don’t know how to construct a way of conversing where both feel secure they are working together on making a stronger happier platform. (This is what the field of understanding group dynamics is all about; how dynamics are rooted in an underlying context or level different from the presenting issues and topics of discussion or "content.")
Of course, they can’t even get into the argument unless they already share a common cultural context that allows them to converse with one another in the first place. But this common cultural context that enables them to talk with one another is tacit and in their arguing with one another they lose sight of the commonalities that they might be “working on” together.
We construct a shared world through our interactions. Most language relies on this tacit (hidden) world without being aware of it. Language brings forth what is visible and acknowledged on the basis of something that can’t be made visible, but is only felt in very murky ways and is hard to discover. In most of our languaging, we never look at or question this underlying context of tacitly constructed consensual behaviors.
The common world is constructed on two levels: tacit consensual coordination in action, and consensual coordination of these consensual coordinations through languaging. The difficult thing to do is to change the tacit level. Language by itself — without action that is perceived as risk because it threatens the tacit dimension we rely upon — can’t do it.
