Analogies for discourse as plant growth and memory

 

On rereading the theoretical framework of my sugar packet thesis (N.B. I will look for the actually finished version and re-upload it later on) – I’m finding it a lot less woke than I felt when I was writing it. This is in that sense a good thing, that it shows I’ve definitely continued learning since graduating in 2016.

The framework starts by comparing definitions of discourse, which is initially kind of boring but which blossoms in a nice conceptualization of discourse that I still support:

Discourses can stay stable or they can change. A discourse is not a unitary, monolithic “thing”; it consists of all the separate instances and utterances that make it up. Each gesture, posture, picture, object etc. reaffirms or changes existent discourses. The discourse does not exist without the individual utterances, as much as the utterances are meaningless without the discourse: discourse can be seen as the structure of meaning precedents within which new expressions gain and promulgate meaning. The expressions themselves then become new precedents, based on which future expressions can create new meanings.

One thing to note about this concept of discourse is that in every action many different discourses are present simultaneously. Every object in one’s surroundings is the result of a long line of production actions, conversations, development of people's skills; one's body itself is an accumulation of all the discourses it has encountered; the action which one is doing is an interaction with these discourses. The built environment and the other people close by too, are results and part of many intersecting discourses. They have a material existence, but this cannot be seen separately from its semiotic existence.

Next in the chapter I am grappling with a concept of power, starting with some originality of thought by finding that each act or utterance is necessarily a choice for one thing and not for many other possibilities, thereby strengthening or re-empowering the expectation/habituality of this word, object or action as fitting in specific contexts and not strengthening the potential for other possibilities to be adapted in discourse. It’s a good start but it can still be taken a lot further. I am bemused now to find how lightly I touch on the actual violence with which certain narratives are protected and enforced and other suppressed in society – instead dwelling on hypothetical examples of everything else you could call a dog and the dissemination of polka dots. Somehow I managed to write a discussion of power that is hardly critical at all.

Definitely I do agree with my past self that it is good to look at the interaction of the micro workings of power with the macro level; the everyday reiteration and re-enactment of norms being guided by and contributing to a bigger image. There is a large body of normative heritage, the deposit of social expectations built up over millennia: vestiges of e.g. patriarchy, imperialism, religion, racism, but also probably some arguably positive things like transferred values about the joy of celebration, good food, nature, love and care. (I would also count transferred knowledge and skills as part of the normative heritage, though they seem to be “norms” of a different kind: experientially based testable knowledge-norms about successful ways of interacting with materials and other people; physically internalized knowledge of how to move when for instance tatting lace or dissecting a frog.)

I am reading a strange book at the minute which is called De evolutie van het cognitieve vermogen, written under the apparent pseudonym Alias Pyrrho. It contains no references and there is no explanation of what institution the author forms part of; under what “author”-ity are they writing these claims? Fittingly, the book considers the way new knowledge is accepted and internalised.

Sommige kennis is feitelijk en onverbiddelijk hard, andere kennis is zacht of onvolgroeid. Zacht is geloof of de aanname van het waarschijnlijke; onvolgroeid is kennis die (nog) niet ondersteund wordt door een raamwerk van andere kennis waarvan de waarheid vaststaat. Daarom is zachte en onvolgroeide kennis kwetsbaar. (…)

Hoewel de zintuigelijke waarneming het richtpunt is voor feitelijke kennis in vergelijk met wat historisch is vastgelegd, valt het vermogen te kunnen zien en beoordelen wat dit waard is, onder de macht van de subcultuur: de acceptatie van evidenties binnen een sociale of wetenschappelijke gemeenschap. (…) Een filter waarin de hang naar gerespecteerde acceptatie groot is, waardoor we liever de macht van het culturele gelijk mijden, dan dat we de confrontatie aangaan. Kennis is noch vrij van waarden, noch vrij van sociale acceptatie.

[Some knowledge is factual and inexorably hard, other knowledge is soft and not yet full-grown. Soft is the knowledge that is not (yet) supported by a framework of other knowledge of which the truth is established. That is why soft and undeveloped knowledge is vulnerable. (…)

While sensory perception is the focus of factual knowledge as compared to what has been recorded historically, the ability to see and judge its worth falls under the power of the subculture: the acceptance of the evident within a social or scientific community. (…) A filter in which there is a strong desire for respected acceptance, so that we prefer to avoid the power of what is culturally true, rather than confront it. Knowledge is neither free from values nor free from social acceptance.]

So new knowledge is evaluated based on how well it slots in with existent knowledge both in the individual brain and in the social context of the person or in society at large. I like these descriptions because they fit well with a metaphor for memory that I often think about, where it grows in the mind like a plant. Early acquired certainties form the constituent understanding of the world that new information and modes of thinking develop out of and branch off from, using and strengthening the formerly learned and thereby forming a hardening stem. I am thinking of my Christmas cactus, of which the once soft green shoots at the bottom have now become strong hard channels for the nutritients going up to the fresh foliage at the outer tips of the branches. (Tell me in the comments about your early constituent knowledge.)

But what if your early constituent certainties later turn out to be misguided or unhelpful – as often happens? Say you were raised with rigid ideas about gender roles, poverty, class, God, STEM superiority, status – to name a few! To cut down the stem and let the cutting grow roots in new soil can be a very hard and scary process. Because the old certainties are what everything else is held up by, it destabilizes your worldview, revealing or causing insecurity of all that you hold to be true in your everyday life; pushing for a new fundament. It is a deep but rejuvenating unlearning.

What I want to think about now is how such an unlearning can (and does) take place at a much bigger scale – how can we cut down the sequoia trees of the macro vestiges of societal knowledge? At this point my housemate Frank might critically interject and interrogate my stretchy extension of the metaphor (he has done this a couple of times now and I really appreciate it – very critically tittilating.) I am aware that for one, I am severely conflating knowledge, discourse and power. I am also loosely applying the inner workings of the mind to not only plant growth but also the way that knowledge is formed in society at large. I have little basis to show that this is truly so other than that to me it has been a useful and productive analogy, and quite a poetic one.

So if we want to cut down, or take cuttings of, the tree of patriarchy, societally unlearn imperialism; is it like a plant trying to be intentional about where it will grow to next? Like a monstera trying to take a cutting of itself?

The University and the World Out There

Egon Schiele, Stein on the Danube, 1913 

 

A reflection on the class and text “From Unwanted to So-Called Expertise:

Ideologizing Sociolinguistics in Mainstream Media” by Jürgen Jaspers.

Written 21 April 2016

For the visit of Jürgen Jaspers the professors decided on a set-up whereby he would start the class by talking about his own trajectory, as tried and tested at the Mondorf conference. Some of the academics who have been asked to talk about themselves at such length in front of our class have reflected on it as saying it was somewhat unprecedented and weird for them (I would use the word onwennig in Dutch). Yet I think it is a great idea, as we are all about to launch into our post-academic or continuation-academic careers, and it helps greatly to know what choices led people to where they are. Moreover, it is interesting to see how their interests develop over time. 

The first question he tried to answer about his trajectory that I find interesting to discuss here, is: Why did he take the decision to stay in academia? He said that about ten years ago he had decided he wanted to get out of the university world. He undertook some steps to get extra education (theatre teacher training) so as to be able to find non-academic work, but then found that in doing so he was still thinking about the same academic questions. He ended up realising it wasn’t so bad in academia after all, though I didn’t fully get why he came to that conclusion – maybe he just found out the theatre world was just as bad. 

I’ve also been thinking that I want to move out of academia. I have been in some form of education or another since I was 3 or even before that in the crèche. Increasingly it starts to feel problematic – there seems to be a big gap between the university and the people not in university; there is a lot of internal competition in the university which is not per se promoting a thorough approach to science; academics are often in insecure jobs with a lot of stress; and it’s all to write studies that are hardly read by the rest of the world. (-> Jaspers said that with all of our class reading his papers, his readership was suddenly ten times as big). 

I am starting to see that the university is a system to reproduce privilege, with or at the cost of the individual researchers who are just dedicated to their topic. This is partially a linguistic point: through teaching the students the correct language and formats to write their academic texts in, certain forms of knowledge are empowered: if you write it like this it has status, it has to be taken serious. Yet as always it is a selective process, of inclusion and exclusion: the texts not written like that are not seen as valid knowledge. About this Jaspers himself said a nice quotable quote, “If we don’t produce failed students we don’t recognize the ones who are successful”. In other words, by defining conditions for success you are automatically setting up a process of inclusion and exclusion. He said another thing, while talking about how sociolinguists are seen as hippies who don’t believe in norms, namely that he does believe in “some” norms but he just wants ones that aren’t exclusive. I was wondering about that (maybe I should have asked on but I felt I’d already said a lot) – do non-exclusive norms actually exist? What is his understanding of “norms”? Because maybe it is in the basis of a “norm” that it creates a division of people who do and who do not act accordingly. Either way, it feels like it’s time for me to step out of the university and find out if everything in the world reproduces privilege, or if there are ways to stop reproducing it. 

In his text about the challenges of communication between academics and journalists, Jaspers is thinking about how an academic, as an expert on a particular issue, can take agency over the discourse on their topic and get the story “out there”, the way they think about it. Firstly, it demonstrates the gap between what the people at the university are doing and the way the outside world perceives them – or in fact the way the academics perceive the “outside world”. In this case, the “outside world” believes that Standard Dutch should be taught at schools and that youths on the street are speaking a new language out of respect for foreign newcomers. Jaspers’ story actually contradicts my point in the previous paragraph in that sense, that the journalists and the people writing letters to the newspaper and whoever else reacted are not in fact taking his text as the authority that he wants it to be. They think of him as a hippie, he says, an arrogant Antwerpenaar in an ivory tower without a shred of sense of reality. The privilege reproduction of the university is apparently not carrying over into his statements actually being taken as more valid knowledge than lay sociolinguistics. This could be an issue of the discipline itself. 

The question of how you can change a discourse as an individual is one that I think is very important. Of course every time you say something that challenges the status quo, you are changing the discourse in a small way: that opinion, that way of viewing things has now been uttered and is in that sense “existent”; there is not nobody who thinks that. But it is not micro-changes we are after: the question is how one individual point of view can be spread and become more of a mainstream view (rather than that of hippies in an ivory tower).

I asked Jaspers what he thought was the best way to promote one’s view or how to take agency over the discourse. He said the most important thing is to seek a basis of other people who agree. A micro-scale change can gather momentum, ever more people join and eventually the dominant system topples in favour of the new idea (In this aspect his ideas were clearly influenced by Blommaert and chaos theory, I thought). His example of how that works in practice, that he gave later, was that instead of talking to the journalist one-on-one, after which they publish an article (the academic is taken into the world of the press) it could be better to invite the journalist to the academic conference, where under the enjoyment of some Pain de Surprise and nice free wine, the journalist is taken into the world of academics: the whole research team is there and they all think the same way, so that the academic’s weird ivory tower assertions are suddenly the normal situation and the journalist is the outlier. 

Professor Budach also suggested ways of toppling the system: she said that rather than talk to journalists or try to lobby politicians about new approaches to sociolinguistics, she had found it more rewarding to talk directly to the teachers, who are right at the place of implementation of the language policies. When they are convinced by new ideas, they can bring them directly into practice. When politicians are convinced by new ideas (when and if), they still have to elbow their way through the hedge of opposition and checks and balances before a shred of the original idea can find its way into policy, which then still has to be communicated with those who are to implement it – exactly – the teachers – presumably already tired of so many attempts to regulate their behaviour from the top. 

In summary, this article and class led me to ponder the reproduction of privilege, the exclusionary nature of norms, the perpetuation of discourse, and ways of toppling it and replacing it with one’s own perspective. I think that’s a quare lot for two pages and will therefore leave it at this.