When the Language Turns the Thing Around

What happens when the words we use to understand a thing begin to prevent us from understanding it?

I have taken up this question in earlier writing, through the literary code breakers, through Shakespeare, through the language of science, and through the twelve-thousand-year habit of mistaking our arrangements for the laws of nature. It belongs here because we cannot change our thinking while leaving unexamined the language which gives that thinking its shape. We may think we are asking a new question while the words have already supplied the old answer.

By inversion I mean more than an inaccurate word. I mean a turning around of the relationship: the instrument takes the place of the purpose; the description takes the place of the thing; the person doing the living becomes a passenger in an account of their own life. The words can remain perfectly respectable. They may even contain enough truth to keep us from noticing what has been turned around.

Education offers a plain example. Reading, writing, and thinking can help a person earn a living. But when earning a living becomes the whole purpose of education, a useful consequence has taken the place of the capacity which made it possible. We begin asking what the student can produce before asking what the student can understand. A person may become more useful to an economic arrangement without becoming better able to judge that arrangement. Calling this preparation for life does not settle which part of life has been prepared for, and which part has been left out.

This is not an argument against earning a living. It is an argument against allowing the economic engine to stand for every engine a human being needs. A household does not run on income alone. Neither does a mind. Neither does a civilization become civilized merely because it has learned to produce more.

The difficulty is that an inversion can become so familiar that the correction sounds unreasonable. We are not only learning words. We are learning what may be asked in them.

Kuhn in the 1960’s tightened my thinking and without him none of these ideas would exist. He helped me recognize that a scientific account carries more than its individual statements. It carries expectations about what will count as a problem, what will count as an answer, and what the people working within it will notice. A word can be entirely at home in one arrangement of thought and become troublesome when the arrangement changes. That trouble is not always evidence that the new question is foolish. Sometimes it is where the old language has reached the edge of what it can carry.

The literary code breakers approached that edge from another direction. James Joyce worked on the language itself, changing its familiar arrangements until another movement of the mind could be read. Thomas Pynchon, a novelist with an engineer’s attention to systems, placed the reader between paranoia, where everything seems connected, and anti-paranoia, where nothing seems connected. Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman who wrote The True Believer, examined how a person could surrender their own judgment to a collective certainty. I have written about these men as literary engineers because their work changes what language lets us notice. What I take from them is the opening of the question, not an obligation to think or write as they did.

Note. For James Joyce’s systemic disruption of grammatical architecture, see James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939). Thomas Pynchon’s engineering-derived paradigm of informational systems is classically developed in Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking Press, 1973), where the central tension between paranoia and anti-paranoia acts as a structural axis. For Eric Hoffer’s socio-psychological diagnostic on how people surrender their own judgment to a collective certainty, see Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951).

Their code breaking is not the solution of a secret alphabet. The code is also in the familiar sentence, in the expected explanation, in the conclusion we have learned to recognize before we have examined how it was reached. A reader can understand every word and still miss what the arrangement of those words has made disappear.

Shakespeare makes that difficulty visible in Hamlet. When Hamlet says, “I know not ‘seems,’” the difference between appearance and what is lived is already at work. The court can recognize the outward signs of grief. Recognizing those signs does not give it possession of the grief. I take that distinction into this inquiry, rather than treating Hamlet’s refusal as a verdict that every appearance is a deception. The question is what happens when an appearance is accepted as sufficient, and the person within it no longer has to be encountered.

In Quantum Constructionism I take up this problem directly in the chapter on dangerous speech and the Techno-Hamlets. Here it returns with a different task. We need to see how an inversion changes the direction of a life before we can understand why changing our thinking costs so much.

Consider what happens when we call a human being merely the output of a mechanism. Mechanisms matter. Without the working body, there is no human life in which this question can be asked. But a description of part of the work can be promoted into an explanation of the whole, and the person who perceives, learns, chooses, and changes their surroundings can disappear from the sentence. The account then tells us that choosing is an illusion because it has already removed the chooser from what it is willing to describe. That is not a question settled. It is a question made difficult to ask.

In The Twelve-Thousand-Year Habit I place two inversions beside one another: the genetic account mistaken for the living organism, and the production of a formal proof mistaken for the whole work of mathematical understanding. The point is not that genes cease to matter or that a proof ceases to be a proof. The point is what we have allowed either one to stand for. When an instrument becomes more powerful, we may finally see the difference between what it produces and what we wanted it for.

Engineered intelligence makes that difference immediate. It can give us writing without our having worked through the thought, an answer without our having recognized the question, and the appearance of understanding without our having acquired it. It can also help us read what we could not previously read, compare what we could not previously hold together, and return to a question with more ground beneath us. The same instrument can make either course easier. Calling both courses intelligence does not remove the difference between them.

This is where shape, direction, and thermodynamics have to be written together. Language gives an arrangement to the thought: what is related, what is separated, and what has been left outside the account. That arrangement helps determine the direction in which we proceed. The proceeding happens through living bodies and working machines, with real physical expenditure. Attention, learning, and obligations bring further costs which cannot all be expressed in the same measure. A saving in one account may be a loss in another. We have to ask who is doing less work, who is carrying more, and whether the work removed was the very work through which understanding would have grown.

I do not want to replace one automatic language with another. Turning every accepted statement upside down would merely give us a new habit of accepting statements. Sometimes the familiar account is adequate. Sometimes it needs a small correction. Sometimes it has placed the whole relationship backwards. The question has to meet the thing itself, and what we propose in its place has to carry the work the old account failed to do.

That is why this subject belongs to education, and why it belongs early in a life. A child cannot be guided toward choosing well by adults who have stopped examining what their own words permit them to choose. The adult has to remain in the experience too. There is no exemption for being the teacher, the scientist, the writer, or the person who supplied the answer.

Humans must change or face the consequences. Changing our words can be part of that work, but a new vocabulary can also conceal that nothing has changed. The question is not whether we have learned to say the thing differently. It is whether the changed language brings us back into the relationship, where we must understand, choose, and pay.