Continuing the conversation about the shift

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.  

Local and in Person, Represented and Global - From a Conversation with my Friend Louis

The sacred is one thing that interests me increasingly. The sacred is in one sense something very ordinary--something that all indigenous peoples seem to have a direct relationship with. Yet it is something that we moderns have lost touch with. At the fork in the road between older, indigenous ways of living and modern western rationalist ones, the west left the sacred behind.  Sacredness is a key issue that comes up in the recurrent face-offs between western development and indigenous peoples attempting to preserve their lands and ancient ways of doing things. The sacred, I believe, comes into appearance when people can embrace a certain type of “human limitation” that the west believes it escaped with the invention of writing and the technologies that this invention made possible. 

The “fork” in the road, I'm theorizing, occured when we went down the path of thinking that written language could fully capture “reality,” that the real could be “represented.” This fork in the road, according to the story I am piecing together from many different authors and personal experiences, can be located with Plato and the invention of the modern alphabet (see W. Ong, E. Havelock and I. Illich). The modern alphabet, invented around the time when Plato emerged, made it possible to de-localize or detemporalize language from in-the-moment oral speech through lasting representations; and this, in turn, made it possible at a whole new level to set up agreements, laws, models and representations as "truths"guiding or shaping how people related to their actual in-the-moment experiences over wide expanses of distance. This occurred in many forms: laws and policies could be promulgated across larger expanses of terrain much more readily and with much greater "standardization" than before possible.  Thinkers and scientists, as well as engineers and artisans, could now across great expanses of distance develop and work on the same problems together, etc. 

Writing is probably what made it possible for Plato to imagine an “ideal” conceptual realm that existed outside of time.  It is what made it possible for science and technology to set up a domain for thinking that is outside of in-the-moment experience, and instead located in a lonely Cartesian three-dimensional “space,” void of everything, and where everything can be generated by mathematics — leading to computer modeling (representation) of everything. This "space" of the represented, including prominently “computer modeling,” is the space we have been increasingly living in for a very long time. Our world is becoming more “virtual" by the minute. 

The great shift that is happening with the end of Western metaphysics, as it was announced by Nietzsche, can on one level be seen as our loss of total commitment to the Platonic divide between ideal-real and temporal experience, which I am equating with the divide between what can be “represented” and shared independently of local time and place, and what cannot.  

One thing that has happened today is that this “shift,” talked about by more thinkers everywhere, has become “news” -- which means that everywhere there is talk about a shift that is really all pseudo-shift. That is an unfortunate complication. (It's also related to the very topic we are discussing. Two people who are using the same "language" -- i.e. the same words -- seem to be talking about the same "thing"; but a little direct experience can soon show that in fact they are not.) 

If the fork in the road of which I'm speaking involved both a cultural commitment to truth as certainty of representation, and if going down this path at the same time involved a leaving behind of the sacred, then how does a re-contextualization of the representational within a larger picture include a new relationship to the sacred? That’s one way of posing the question.  Heidegger’s claim that modernity was characterized by a “withdrawal of the gods” speaks to the same thing, I believe. And I think it’s in line with Heidegger’s thinking to say that, with the west's reconceptualization of truth as “certainty of representation,” the west put human beings -- as the ones who make the (artificial) representations -- in the center in a new way. We set up the human subject as the ground and arbiter of Being, Heidegger might say. We took the "path of objectivity," in Maturana's terms. 

Once consequence of taking this path is that it gave rise to a class of expert "scientifically trained" professionals in the world, the masters (or priests) of representation, who have lorded it over all the “uneducated” of the world, usually put on a pedestal by the "uneducated" themselves. (These professinals include the economists and bankers who control economics based on their expert representations; money itself is a token, although not a representation – and this is probably one of the reasons that modern economists can’t “think” what money really is — they can only describe its current functioning in highly-sophisticated ways, because they are kind of like journalists and scientists who are limited to depicting what is "objectively," and so can’t generally tap the font of creativity that requires going into the imaginal realm, or that comes only when we can think of things in terms of dynamics and consequences and goals. Anyhow, this is going off track.) 

So what happens when we go beyond truth as certainty of representation as the only or the primary way of creating human consensus? 

We start to step off the platform of the representing subject. (For Arendt, this is the platform of homo faber.) And we start to valorize the platform of the vulnerable, experiencing subject.  We start to open ourselves to the unknown and to the mysterious, instead of only validating our (aggressive) procedures for knowing. 

When we open up like this, it’s like extending our arms and letting in the sky. All experience becomes legitimated, and our capacity to relate grows hugely. (We honor even the "uneducated for the capacity that they possess, a capacity that escapes the narrow criteria of valuation that the west has held to for centuries.) All of this opening up, letting in a wider expanse of experience, can have its scary components. What I expect we may discover: What will most hold us together in the overwhelming expanse is our proximity to one another and to local place. I.e., in some sense what will come to matter to us much more once again is our local community. And we will discover that our capacity for healthy local relations -- to our neighbors, to our friends, to local flora and fauna and geography, to our local civic experience -- will be the grounding source for health across wider expanses.

Paradigm Shift - A Letter to My Sister - Thoughts in Progress

Western thinking has long been based on the belief that reality could be represented conceptually. Plato, an acknowledged founder of the western rational tradition, proposed that concepts (ideas) were the ultimate reality, located in the heavenly realm of Truth, in opposition to the realm of matter, error and illusion: mere earth. 

Our commitment to this paradigm is shifting. Perhaps starting with the Pragmatists in the U.S. (R.W. Emerson, C.S. Peirce and the culture that produced them) and Heidegger in Europe (who, through Nietzsche, was influenced by the Americans), a widening wave of thinkers is realizing that “reality” cannot be reduced to concepts. This is because any thing that we distinguish in words can only emerge as a thing or concept against a larger background that itself in its essence remains unwordable, a background that yet preexists as a condition for the possibility of forming any such concept or words. 

For example, if I point out a “tree,” if I distinguish the concept “tree,” I imply and presuppose the whole world  in which the tree is embedded, although all of that wider context remains in the background when I foreground the concept or object “Tree” in my languaging. We can "chase" the background by talking about it, but we can only do so through words that themselves always function only through their relation to an ever-tacit background. (This background has been called the "tacit dimension" by Polanyi, the "implicate order" by Bohm; I believe Heidegger may have called this context "world" on some occasions, although I'll have to check up on that.) 

Aside: In naming this “background” (tacit dimension, implicate order, world, context), I do not mean to refer to an external reality independent from our experience. The background refers to the wider experiential context from out of which and against which we generate words and thoughts — while the notion of experience may imply some reality “external" to our experience, we have no access to such. Instead, we as human beings are able to explain any of our experiences only through other experiences, i.e. through the coherences that we discover among our diverse experiences (as Humberto Maturana has put it). So it does not make sense to refer to an objective “external reality." 

Instead, rather than through an objective external reality, we create a common world -- i.e. a world that we can communicate in and act in together -- by coordinating our behaviors with one another in our daily living together through the coherences that we discover in our experiences with one another, which means by discovering “agreements" both through establishing habitual patterns of non-verbalized consensually-coordinated interaction, and in also developing -- on the foundation of this non-verbalized world of consensual coordinations -- express shared agreements and understandings through our conversations or languaging. This accounts for our sense that "reality" is something we rely upon, rely upon together, have a feel and sensitivity for, experience on the level of shared culture, and not as something we simply "think." 

However, under the longstanding belief that, with sufficient (scientific-technological) rigour, reality could be captured in words and representations (models and the like), the west has created a complex array of specialized disciplines, each more and more isolated from each other and removed from common sense and from ordinary understanding. 

What we are starting to realize is that what is omitted from the thinking and languaging of each of these specialized disciplines — the wider context from which they have distinguished themselves — is in fact the radically common world, the common context from which they developed and that holds them all together! And it is this common world that our specialized forms of discourse, all the professions and university departments are unable to think! As a result, common sense has been decaying precipitously in the world, and, because we are unable to think what we are doing relative to our common context, human harmony, scientific, political, economic and cultural, is threatened. 

What the world needs to do is to rediscover the portal through which we can approach the future together, which portal I sometimes refer to as the generation of the commons (where I mean "commons" in a very broad sense). This means that our expert professionals in every discipline need to rediscover their link to the commons, and through that alone, to one another. By and large, we have trained our experts and leaders to pride themselves for the very distance they have achieved from the "merely common," the ordinary, the lay mind. "Progress" has been conceived, partly, as progress away from pejoratively "common" ignorance. "Educated" people have been valued over the supposed "uneducated" commoner. "High tech" excites more peole than low or no tech. And so on. But to rediscover the commons is to rediscover and re-experience our universal commonality as ordinary human beings, and it is only in this rediscovery that we can give meaning and direction, and collectively benefit from, the insights and learnings of all our separate disciplines. 

We are starting to move out of an age that believed “truth” was the “correct or incorrect” representation  of an external reality, a notion of truth that makes us very judgmental beings, too often acting under the supposition that there are right and wrong answers to everything and often pitting us against one another and ourselves. 

A shift is happening as we begin to reconceive the purpose of “reason” and thought as that of bringing people into harmony with one another and nature (our common context), not merely through writing and other forms of representation (media, books, ideologies, sacred texts, etc.), but in actual in-person acting and living together. All thinking is doing.

As Hannah Arendt once said: There is a sense in which the brilliant expert physicists who created the nuclear bomb knew what they were doing in order to create an unimaginably destructive weapon, an extraordinary feat of engineering; but there is a deeper and wider sense in which they did not realize what they were doing.  The essence of science is not scientific. The essence of technology, as Heidegger said, is nothing technological.  Scientific-technological thinking that is committed to the notion of truth as certainty-of-representation is itself a doing, but what science and technology are really doing remains unthinkable to science and technology; this comes into appearance only when we consider science/technology within the wider context in which they are embedded, as are considering it here: One thing scientific-technological thinking is doing, as presently instituted, is fragmenting the world ever more while delegitimating what most fundamentally gives coherence to a beloved and fully human world embedded in a beloved nature. 

C. S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, held that the “truth” of any proposition is in its consequences (not merely in its presumed correctness or incorrectness).  Hence, for example, if the consequence of some people being republicans and some being democratics is constant fighting and failure to take shared responsibility for the world, then the “truth” of the republican and democratic propositions is not in the ideological “correctness” of either side, but in the dynamic of fighting that they are producing.  

One dream of science was to harmonize the world by establishing objective truth that would compel everyone to agree (this is arguably the underlying non-scientific rationale that provided a context for science).  To carry out this purpose, science put all its hope in truth understood as certainty of representation, and counted as “real” only what could be objectified through representation. This led not only to the fragmentation of the world into specialized professions and jargons as described above, but also to the rigorous exclusion of emotion, so-called "subjectivity," the felt experience of “the now,” etc., from the domain of scientific thinking -- except to the degree that could be objectified and captured in representations. This exclusion was concomitant to the exclusion of the wider, always inherently uncapturable context within which we live, whose relational richness and complexity will always by definition exceed the capacity of human beings to think it, rationalize it, capture it in representation, from the thoughts that we accredit.  

As humanity wakens again to its dream and opens again to this wider, uncapturable context in which we are embedded, the great mystery in which we find ourselves and which exceeds us, we will hopefully adopt anew — in new ways and old — a common quest.  

As humanity opens in this way, we open again to the incomparable gift that has been given us, wider than the sky, greater beyond all comparison to the things of our own making. 

In completely unexpected ways, we open to the quest of harmonizing with one another and with nature.

We open again to what is called the spiritual, the domain of consensual resonance from which being-together in harmony emerges. In completely unexpected ways, we open again to the sacred. 

Antichrist (2009), a film by Lars von Trier

After my favorable experience watching Lars von Trier's Melancholia (see here), I decided to watch  another von Trier film, Antichrist (or, as represented in the title cards, Anti Chris♀). 

The film includes some very intense and disturbing sexual violence, very graphically depicted, including excrutiating genital mutilation shown up close. It's not for the faint of heart. I found myself on several occasions averting or wanting to avert my eyes. It’s unusual to see a director willing to go this far. The graphic intensity makes it hard for me to recommend the film to anyone except certain select friends. I can't imagine anything more opposite to your generic "date film." 

I’m trying to assess what the film overall means for me.

I'm intrigued on many levels, not least because of the medieval sensibility the film seems to achieve in its present-day refiguring of the Adam and Eve allegory.  

The plot is simple: A husband and wife, the unnamed characters "He" and "She," travel to a remote, isolated cabin deep in the woods -- a place they call Eden. There the husband, a trained psychotherapist, intends to heal his wife of the disabling grief and pain from which she suffers due to the death of their young child. 

Through the interactions between the couple and the mysterious surrounding natural environment, in an atmosphere evocative of horror films, the story explores and intensifies a deepening divide or conflict between He and She. The conflict variously manifests as one between intellect and emotion, control and chaos, human and nature, "normality" (to choose an intentionally ambiguous term) and incomprehensible evil. The dramatic exploration leads to ever darker places, and eventually brings the conflict to a horrific head. 

In the end, there is a kind of resolution to the threat (I'm being vague here only because, in this instance, I'm choosing not to give away the ending). More precisely, the circumstances come to an apparent end through terrible means, but the deeper conflict, I believe, remains unresolved, with no solution evident. Indeed, the film arguably figures our Judaeo-Christian civilization as trapped within a repeating cycle of sin, dramatizing western humanity's failure to escape a profround historical, and possibly ineluctable, entanglement with evil.

As I have construed it, the film and its ambiguous epilogue leave us with several daunting questions: e.g., Will this cycle continue? Is the conflict depicted absolute, rooted in nature, or of our own making? Where is the locus of the evil? of patriarchy? of misogyny?  What comes next in the human story?  Can we rewrite, not just in words but through redeeming historical transformation, the tale of what happened in the Garden of Eden?

In AntiChrist, I think, von Trier dramatizes a dark human conflict with deep roots in our culture, going back at least as far as the stories told in our most sacred western text. It finally leaves its viewers in the excruciating position either of finding a resolution, despite no apparent way forward, or of remaining in its condemning grip and conceding its unbearable irresolvability.

In Melancholia, as I see it, and as I suggested in my earlier review, von Trier explores related and analogous conflicts, albeit differently, and ultimately locates and valorizes forces of potential renewal.

The films are coherent with one another. Only, the emergence of hope and a provisional new way forward came later.