CMN 457, Spring 2003
Lect #11: Krippendorff (1995) “Undoing Power”
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“Philosophers merely interpreted the world ... the point is to change it”
Karl Marx, 1845 (1978:7)
‒ This essay speaks into power - not about what the powerless lack, [or] the powerful have too much of, and in terms of which empowerment would mean appropriating it from Others.
‒ It explores some of the entailments of talking and of conceiving our world in these rather monological terms.
‒ In the course of this examination, an understanding of power arises that is tied to being in dialogue with Others and involves the bodily experiences of languaging. Here, empowerment means something altogether different.
Doing Ordinary Languaging
‒ Since it is impossible to write about what happens in your reading, for example, I will start by offering to walk with you through a common but far too little practiced experience.
‒ But we are far apart in space and in time and so, I have to imagine your reading while writing. In my internal dialogue with you, I am inviting you to imagine glancing over the advertisement pages of a newspaper, like the New York Times, where you might find this portrait of an Indian.
> Figure about here, no number, no caption <
‒ I think it is fair to say your seeing is not literally caused by a physical stimulus, by what the ad page and the image “is”. You did not sense the page, then figure out what each detail represents, and finally talk about what you selected for attention, rather, the “causality” of your seeing comes from your active reading, from our joint participation in a discourse.
‒ Your accepting my invitation was your choice. It then focused your attention. It primed you to look for something affording what you understood me to say it is. In other words, it was your reading that brought forth what you are now seeing.
‒ If this explanation seems unconvincing, perhaps because you’ve been told so many times and are always telling yourself “people may lie but not what I see in front of my eyes” - like a camera that takes pictures of the objects it faces, - I am inviting you to look again, but this time at the eskimo. At the eskimo?
‒ I know, my request troubles a whole cluster of foundational and highly rationalized epistemological commitments: our belief in being able to rely on observations to settle ontological disputes, our ability to distinguish between reality and illusion, our customary reliance on optical metaphors to explain human perception which lead us to such ideas as cognitive representation, information processing, the communicational notion of coding and many more.
‒ If you haven’t got it yet, here is my suggestion: Don’t look at the Indian’s eye, forget his nose and mouth; and focus instead on the lower part of the image. Look for someone’s shoes pointing away from you.
‒ If this proves difficult, at least put yourself in an artist’s shoes and explore how it was drawn, or look, like a printer might, for production defects.
Four conclusions:
However far you were willing to go into such re-visions, I want to draw four conclusions from the experiences I can only imagine you have had.
1) Not easy to break out of a way of seeing:
‒ We tend to see the (for us) obvious, the expected and the familiar.
‒ Your reading primed you to see a human face and you most likely did. At that moment, you allowed yourself to be locked into one way of seeing, into one single uni-verse, and this excluded or blinded you to see any other uni-verse.
‒ Without considerable effort on your part to break out of this self-confinement, you would have neither experienced nor missed alternative ways of seeing, much less imagined that equally sane people could simultaneously be in altogether different universes, without ever knowing this of each other.
‒ This is a quite remarkable fact that most common sense accounts of communication and of power conveniently ignore. Seeing, I might add, here appears as a relational experience and might be called more appropriately “being-with,” although this being-with is of a rather simple kind.
2) What is ‘out there’ is important but not primary: a way of seeing is constitutive:
‒ Your ability to shift from one way of seeing to another, your experience that being in one universe overrides, extinguishes, and excludes being in another, completely absolves the unchanging physical properties of the image from being the primary cause of your seeing.
‒ This experience pulls the rug from under any objectivist metaphysics.
‒ To be fair, we can’t simply deny the so-called physics of the above image, but this is nothing other than the account of yet another way of seeing, offered by a standard physicist, perhaps aided by in-themselves-blind instruments, but not therefore the only one (description of the universe) that counts.
‒ It would be difficult to imagine, at least for me, how any one way of seeing or being in a universe could cause another way of seeing or being in another universe.
‒ While this experience goes against objectivist claims and might be embraced by post-modernist conceptions, it does not license solipsists either.
‒ In fact, the non-arbitrariness or “reality” of our seeing shows up in the difficulty we experience in trying to get out of one universe and into another.
‒ Some such shifts require more efforts, some less and some are simply not afforded by any kind of being-with. The “real” does not lie in what is, but in the experience of constraints on alternative ways of seeing.
3) Words re-call many (multi-verse), but, tend to privilege one:
‒ Looking back on the re-visions we experienced, re-cognizing the universes we visited and could be bringing forth again, it would make sense to say that we do live in a multi-verse that is constituted in the possibilities it affords.
‒ Sadly, instead of celebrating this insight, we tend to privilege one universe at the expense of all others, for example, by submitting to the exclusionary view of physics, and dismissing all our experiences that are inconsistent with this view as imperfect, unreliable, biased, imaginary, unreal, mere interpretations, etc.
‒ By focussing on ontology rather than language, this view also leads us to inscribe our experiences into the stimulus image, claiming it as being ambiguous (leading to confusing perceptions), it as being an illusionary artifact (intended to deceive us), it as being a mere representation (that can be either true or false - the “real uni-verse” always being what it is), etc.
‒ This is a response to what Richard J. Bernstein (1992:17) calls the “Cartesian anxiety” or to what Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1987:16) call the “temptation of certainty.”
‒ Belief in a singular uni-verse, in one ontology for everyone to livbe in, essentially denies our own experience.
4) Ways of seeing: joint accomplishments:
‒ Perhaps most importantly, your ability to shift from one universe to another also is a joint accomplishment.
‒ We (you and I) virtually (because we are not co-present) collaborated in creating these experiences through languaging.
‒ As I already suggested, had you come to this image accidentally, you would have seen it in whichever way it would have appeared to you. It is your reading, my writing and our longstanding dialogical involvement in language that made the difference.
‒ The point is that languaging, the process of people co-ordinating their voicing and listening, their writing and reading, their feelings, their doings and their being with each other, virtually says things into being, brings forth ways of seeing.
‒ Languaging is a social process in which we jointly construct realities for each of us to occupy and talk into.
‒ Evidently, languaging can open our “eyes” to alternative ways of seeing and create new ways of being-with Others. Power is just one example we shall now explore.
“We see the world as much through our words as through our eyes” (Vygotsky).
UNDOING POWER:
Karl Marx’s 3 tricks for ‘doing’ power:
1. ABSTRACT.... Extract or separate ideas, etc. from the individuals and conditions giving rise to the ideas
2. SYSTEMATIZE... Find an order of pattern in them
3. MYTHOLOGIZE... Invent an agency responsible for the pattern – the Spirit of History, say, that we all fall victim, or just talk of the mysterious ‘thing’ we call POWER.
Undoing these moves:
1. RE-DIALOGIZE... Re-locate the issues back in the interactive relations existing between actual people, i.e., stop talking of POWER as a general thing and look at the specific details of the interactions between us.
2. DE-SYSTEMATIZE... Look again at the actual concrete circumstances within which the interactions take place, look at the actual words and actions used, the responses to them, etc..
3. DE-MYTHOLOGIZE... Move from metaphors to descriptions of the actual concrete circumstances involved, the actual people, and the actual surroundings.