What a thing is language!
2011
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What a thing is language!

What a thing is language!

Here’s something I’ve been mulling over for a long time (decades!): the “blessing and the curse” that is human language. What an invention! Making sounds together creating meanings, meanings creating and shaping and reshaping perceptions, concepts, beliefs, feelings, relationships, images, imagination…

What we have done and continue to do with, and to, language have created an infinitude of human-ness—processes, products, tools, rules, many of which are paradoxical. Two in particular occupy my waking hours.

One is the activity of otherness. It’s our language ability that created otherness (the “curse”). Here is how John Shotter, a professor of communication, colleague, and writer whose work I greatly admire, put it recently, referring to the western philosophical tradition:

…that tradition has generally assumed that there is only one way in which we make things intelligible to ourselves: as conscious subjects with minds, that we set out in a deliberate fashion to understand the things around us, cognitively and conceptually, as objects—with our life as subjects radically split off from the ‘dead’ world of objects. In understanding the others and otherness in our surroundings in this way, we only understand them ‘from the outside’, so to speak, and thus relate ourselves to them in terms of a priori categorical schematisms.

And, yet, it’s our language ability that allows us to touch the other thus created (the “blessing”). Speaking with each other responsively and relationally (Shotter might say, “from the inside”) to create meaning together and not to speak “truths” to each other is how. Engaging in and responding to the activity of speaking and the performance of languaging is how.

Which brings us to the other paradox of my musings—the activity of narrative. Our language ability makes it possible for us to talk about things, to tell stories about them. And tell stories we do—all the time, in conversation, poetry, plays, songs, dance, novels, etc. We tell them to ourselves, to people we know, to people we just meet, and to the world (trying to reach across the distance to “the other”). Narrative is a major way that we create culture, and stories are one of the main vehicles for adapting to the particular culture we are living in. We’re so societally enamored of narrative, however, that the activity of speaking, the performance of languaging, has become alien to us and isn’t part of ordinary conversation. In other words, our very language ability has come to severely limit our language possibilities.

Ironically (and fortunately) we didn’t burst from the womb as narrativists. We had to learn that there are “others” and we had to learn to speak “about” things. For the first few years of life, we speak/babble responsively and relationally, engaged in the activity of language. We perform before we narrate. Speaking as performance (performed conversation) precedes and makes possible speaking as narrative (talking about things). And once narrative begins, it pretty much takes over in most people’s lives. In much of the work that I do, as well as my colleagues who practice social therapy, we help people take their ways of speaking and listening to each other—their narratives and stories and accountings—and use them to create a new kind of conversation, a conversation that reveals the activity of speaking that the use of language to talk about keeps hidden, a conversation that is performed. We invite people to awaken the performatory in order to loosen the grip about-ness has on our ways of being in the world.

The quote from John Shotter is from his essay, “Ontological social constructionism in the context of a social ecology: the importance of our living bodies.” It appears in the book Discursive Perspectives in Therapeutic Practice, edited by Andy Lock and Tom Strong (2012, Oxford University Press). I recommend the whole book!

7 Comments
  • loisholzman
    Posted at 16:21h, 10 February

    Thanks so much, neil, for your vivid unpacking of the relationality of co-creating meaning with little children and how that activity creates a new speaker.

  • Neil Samuels
    Posted at 02:01h, 10 February

    We have to look earlier on as to the roots of this obsession and confusion. I am a Developmental therapist working with toddlers and their primary caregivers (with communication challenges, including autism, often misdiagnosed as autism). Teaching toddlers to label, i.e., “Say,____” is part of an age long myth that unfortunately still stubbornly persists, a generation to generation as far as the eye can see, diathesis (pathology) that gets us horribly “stuck” in conflating or confusing “social/communicating”as synonymous with beginning to teach a child in the age long dumb-down reductionist tradition to extract and match/label nouns – with the actual ongoing activity of two-way relating/communicating (what language actually is, in other words, a continuous dyadic co-affective engagement).

    Alas, the latter is contrary to what many, a vast majority, of speech pathologists, educators, et al. continue to attempt to teach the child (particularly when there are “delays” in communicating). “Instruction” (which is a very loaded and ill-conceived term) typically begins by “teaching” the tot to match and label objects, which is the quintessential opposite of joining with, communicating-with, relating and engaging with what the toddler is presently doing. .

    A co-developmental transformative or “magical process” begins to occur when adults are guided to not instruct (that is, “Johnny, say/do ___”) but instead to slow down, observe, feel, listen, take in the toddler’s pre-verbal affect activity, attribute purpose meaning to his/her activity, as indeed “meaningful” which it is (especially with toddlers with “delayed communicating”). This creates an atmosphere which is accepting/inviting, this engenders the possibility (the potential) of co-activity, co-meaning making, dyadic engagement. This is not only somewhat but completely contrary to the common practice of the image of the “towering adult” teaching, inputing, instructing, modeling, shaping down to their child to, “Say, ball”, Say, car, ” etc. Rather it is respecting and meeting the child where s/he is and emotionally attributing (framing), the core of essentials of pragmatic communicating, which is not “in the “words” but in the moment to moment adjoined pregnant pauses, variances of inflexion, intonation of voice, emotive expression (or affect) meaning to the child’s present activity – as “activity.” In other words, suggesting by framing/joining doing with the child the possibility of “co-activity.” This in turn serves to complement the child’s natural intent or affect. It engenders an underlying feeling of safety, security/trust, the possibility (from child/parent perspective) of joint “meaning-making.” In other words, from the toddler’s perspective,

    “You dear adult stranger and bigger one are not attempting to take me out of my world but complimenting my world by giving it (suggestive meaning), i.e., soothing voice, inflection, curiosity (this frequently involves various ‘wow, look at that, uh-oh! oh no! there?!’ etc) and thus inviting me to draw deeper attention, ‘re-look’ at what I am doing as an ‘activity” (i.e. bringing it to the forefront of consciousness or my emerging sense of “self-with-other”) and (at the same moment) encouraging me to share ) co-engage with you (since you are now taking interest in me, my world) as a curious potential dance/exchange of a joint co-created, co-narrative meaning making activity.”

    However, what is so important to keep in mind is that all this involves slowing, down and engaging the “non-verbal” or drawing attention to the activity – as activity, giving it viable existential meaning (and here I mean ever-changing subtle changes of facial affect of the child, looking, turning, pausing, etc.). Now, what is fascinating is that this process of affectively “framing meaning” (the opposite of reductionsitically dumbing down and extracting nouns from verbs) begins to not only engender/invite further curiosity,, interest, “co-engagement” (from the toddler’s perspective) but recently demonstrated on a neurophysiological level begins to “move” the co-Developmental process forward, for example, a “freeing up” of All or Nothing primitive limbic based responses/constant meltdowns (or subcortical dominance/preoccupation) to more pre-frontal cortex or executive functioning, what we call praxis and pragmatic verbal/communication to emerge and become part of child’s natural repertoire of nuanced rich social exchanges. In other words, and I see this with children on the “spectrum” all the time, there is not as much “restriction” (that is, All or nothing meltdowns) and thus more nuanced ideation-and co-engagement becomes not only possible but probable!

  • loisholzman
    Posted at 13:56h, 14 January

    This is indeed the issue, Vesna, that we continue to struggle with.

  • loisholzman
    Posted at 13:54h, 14 January

    Patti,
    I agree— and that it’s not only the language we have created but also the understnading of what language is that we have created that fosters DISconnection rather than connection.

  • Ramu Iyer
    Posted at 19:11h, 13 January

    In my day job, I do feel that I am judged by how much I know or have learned. Human resource managers emphasize a culture of continuous learning. This results in an “overweight brain.” There is an emphasis on delivering a crisp narrative that augments a set of PowerPoint slides being reviwed in a meeting. Some of us are evaluated by the prose highlighting our achivements in our Linked In profile. While fine print is a dash of a person’s “narrative,” it does not replace the human being representing that person.

    I find the characterization “the performance of languaging” to be very novel. This is dynamic and evolutionary (feels like “becoming” a person).

    Like most of us, I spend a bulk of my day in a real-estate called “work” where narratives are the corporate mantra. It will be insightful if I can see an example of how should I can shift spaces from a world of narratives to a “zone of proximal development” (zpd) at work.

    In my view, the urgency and importance for performative conversations is high. Since life is short, it is vital that we all co-create the continuing “performance of a lifetime.”

  • Vesna
    Posted at 17:09h, 12 January

    I agree with Patti…the language was and still is sort of alienation from the world..Beside we try, some try very hard ti improve user-friendliness and receptiveness of our speech still the language is the tool for the differentiation, more than for communication.

  • Patti
    Posted at 14:07h, 12 January

    I enjoyed your article, Lois. I have pondered the limitations of language for years as well, but perhaps from a different perspective. I have come to more of an understanding that language (words and concepts) creates our reality, and has been used for centuries (longer, sadly) to “impose” one reality over another by forcing the conquered to speak the conqueror’s language and adopt the victor’s narrative. But more problematic than even this scenario is the use of language a a tool of separation from…well, everything. Not just from other humans but that plant. That tree. That bird. That stream and ocean and moon and so on. What if all those “things” have consciousness? Are alive in their own way? What language of connection is there for us to speak? Perhaps we will evolve one day beyond words and language, those “things” of separation.

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