Words grow like plants

Gerardo Petsaín Sharup, Cosmovisión Wampís

They find a niche where they have a function that allows them to persist. They live from energy drawn from the sun and the ground. On the burnt grounds where the amazon once flourished, the soybean grows and takes its nutrients from the soil. Say it is picked and packed into a refrigerated container, and a plane or perhaps a ship brings it to a different country for processing. It becomes a product. It is packaged again. After a long journey through factories and distribution centres, the soybean product is mediated to you by all the materials and stories woven together in the concept and physical place of a supermarket. Now at last the soybean gets to sublimate itself; fulfil its life’s destiny – albeit not to flower and bear fruit; it passes your lips and makes acquaintance with the grinding power of your molars. 

This is the soybean’s transition ritual into a new society with a logic of its own, or perhaps many logics interacting: the subsistence and desires of each of its cells and particles. Cast into neat rows, the epithelial cells of the intestinal lining function like a port, taking in the imports from far overseas. The delivery from the Amazon forest grounds is sent on its merry way through the body’s distributional infrastructure.  Our soybean is deconstructed into building materials and fuel. Through the red canals of the internal inferno the fuel flows on its way back up to the site of the original transition, where the tongue and lips now propelled by its fire shake and obstruct the air flow coming through the lungs and past the larynx. Fricative then resounding and approximating, a bilabial stop is followed slightly later by a nasal sound: soybean, says the mouth. 

Depending on what mouth and what context, the air vibrations may have different effects. The sound travels into the tables and the teacups as much as it travels into a present ear. In what seems fast to us but an eternity to a mouse, the nerve nodes attached to said receptacle dissect the sound sequence. Soybean? A host of associations are called up. Memory drawers made up of nerve cells full of encoded references for textures, flavours, contexts and historical and geographical understanding are activated, some of the information even pushing its way into the consciousness. We are in luck: this person understands English and they have had tofu before. The sound sequence seems to have successfully transferred a concept from one human body to the next. Although the listener’s experiences with soybeans occurred in rather different settings from where the speaker has encountered them, and although there are many separate but alike entities which are referred to in this way, they both appear to agree about what part of the universe is worthy of this name. And so the word has yet again proved its usefulness at being used as a shorthand for the pulse from the lea of its mother plant.

Just as the plant is one iteration of a tradition with a long history, similar to but not the same as her many ancestors, so the uttered word is one instance of a “family” of very similar utterances which are however each entirely unique in their own right – not just each context being different from the next (each sentence, page, situation) but in spoken language the voice onset, vowel fronting and the shape of the mouth cavity all resulting in something as singularly matchless as a fingerprint. And yet we can understand the word as belonging to a family of such words just as we can recognise a hydrangea as being a hydrangea.

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?