14b. Birds as Well as Quadrupeds, Flying as Well as Creeping Things

Against Clarity: Answer Words and Circles of Communication

[Previously]

Here, in some light, Sunday morning reading, we look at a poor student who struggles in English class because he’s trying to do what he’s been told.

Okay, so what if we bring this down to the individual level? How would all this stuff about bird names, question-killers, and curiosity stoppers apply to someone who has trouble with writing? Take Matt, for instance. Matt has always had the same problem in English class. He thinks he’s got it covered, but his teacher always wants more.

“I like to get to the point,” Matt says.

(Translation: “Get off my back.”)

He doesn’t feel dumb when messing with computers, but in English class, he struggles, suffering, he believes, from writer’s block. When asked to write about it, he comes up with things like this:

Having completed high school and going through two years of college, I have learned a great many things. Some academic and some social. My learning experiences in high school were different from those I had in college. My experiences were very different but both were very important.

His teachers have often reacted to his writing by talking about things like “the main idea,” “audience,” and “supporting details.” They use words like “general” and “specific,” “context,” “organization,” “sentence variation,” “thesis statement,” etc. “Transitions,” Matt has learned, are a big deal. And being unclear is downright unforgivable. Also, the paper should “flow.” This means, he gathers, that his essays do not flow. (That’s because they get to the point!)

All the English class talk just sounds like distant, rolling thunder to Matt. He tries again:

The writer must give the reader the whole picture. He must be precise and he must be explicit. The writer should educate the reader. He should not be vague. He should not give just part of the picture.

Matt wants to be agreeable, and he prays his teacher will be satisfied with that. Matt’s teacher wonders what it is that keeps Matt from applying what he seems to know about writing (i.e., a writer must give the reader the whole picture). Matt mentions readers but never asks the Gordon-like question, “What does ‘reader’ mean?” Meanwhile, his teacher, who needs to take a step back from the problem, seems at a loss and may be too close to the present first-year English essay art. Bakhtin, though, was not. In this passage, he talks about “the listener and his answer,” which may help.

The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Framing itself in the atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word.

What if while writing you imagine being in a living conversation with your readers in which you anticipate future answer words, where words are dynamic, part of a dialogue rather than a communiqué, where questions are cultivated, not killed? For Bakhtin, the message is constantly in motion, being rewritten or co-written by the listener and the answer words. Here, communication is not one-way. It’s not even two-way. It’s what he calls “dialogic”—more like an explosion of unanticipated chain reactions. Thinking of readers as listeners who answer helps you to anticipate possible responses, which alters what you will say as you are writing. Your imagined listeners are your co-writers in this sense. This clears the way for the writing to move in unanticipated directions.

Here is Bakhtin being a little less than clear on the subject:

If we imagine the intention of such a word, that is, its directionality toward the object, in the form of a light, then the living and unrepeatable play of colors and light on the facets of the image that it constructs can be explained as the spectral dispersion of the ray-word, not within the object itself . . . but rather as its spectral dispersion in an atmosphere filled with alien words, value judgments, and accents through which the ray passes on its way toward the object: the social atmosphere of the word, the atmosphere that surrounds the object makes the facets of the image sparkle.

Now there’s some Dinner Party Math for you, some Pedagogy of the Imagination. Words come alive through association, what Bakhtin calls “social atmosphere,” not through definition. “Now let’s look at the word and see what it’s doing,” Mr. Feynman might say. Writing with this in mind helps you to recognize the social atmosphere created by readers’ potential responses to your words.

Baby Talk

In The First Idea, Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker speak of a kind of listener and their answer when discussing childhood language development. A key aspect of language acquisition and cognition both for individuals and in Homo sapiens’ evolutionary development, they say, is what they call “circles of communication” where gestures, emotions, and sounds are responded to, which in turn promotes additional responses. Even before a child has words, she learns that the listener will answer and that answer will require a response as well. This is how a child learns to read expressions, tones, and gestures and anticipate how her own will be read:

When an organism is involved in a continuous flow of back-and-forth communication, it is constantly sampling subtle variations in its environment . . . Each time the organism responds, it also changes that environment ever so slightly. As it changes the environment, the organism creates variation that it must then process. In higher-level biological systems, that is, the primate and human brain, this continuing exposure to sudden variation challenges the organism to discriminate more subtly among these variations. Each more discriminated perception leads to a highly altered response that in turn alters the environment further, resulting in a cycle of increasing differentiation. For this to occur, however, the organism must be involved in a continuous flow of co-regulated communication. Only a continuous flow permits a continuous sampling of subtle variations.

So Matt is right! Writing should flow. How? In the way Greenspan and Shanker say, with circles of communication, a continuous flow of co-regulated communication. In such an environment, words become Bakhtin’s ray-words.

After significant and repeated exposure to co-regulated communication, writing students may begin to see that it is under these conditions that their words may “sparkle.” Here they are engaging in what Bakhtin calls “dialogism.” As students develop a sense of listeners and their answers, what Linda Flower and John R. Hayes call “a richer sense” of what they are doing emerges. The continuously altered environment is continually making the familiar strange, making it possible eventually to question underlying systems and head in unanticipated directions.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says performance gets better or worse depending on how your skill and challenge levels match. When skills and challenges rise to complement each other, you enter a zone of high creativity. When challenge is too much higher than skill, it results in anxiety or worse. When skill is higher than challenge, you get boredom or worse. When both your skill and challenge levels rise high enough above your average levels, you are in what Cziksenthmihalyi describes as a “state of flow.” Adams describes this too, saying, “Most of us have experienced such times, sometimes at work, sometimes at play, when the process of creating something new is so captivating that it pushes our cares and worries aside.”

That kind of flow.

Developing a sense of readers and their reactions helps create this flow, where the skill and challenge levels are raised. As with the infant and caregiver and their circles of communication, challenges and skills progress in tandem and in response to the continuously altered environment. All this is just baby stuff. Before he even had language, Matt learned it—back when he was at his mother’s knee, say Greenspan and Shanker:

For example, when a 16-month-old toddler explores his mother’s ear, looking at it, yanking on it a little bit, making interesting gurgling sounds of fascination, . . . [the mother] might be fascinated with her toddler’s curiosity and signal back to her toddler a sense of pride with a warm supportive vocal tone suggesting curiosity and admiration for her toddler’s curiosity. She might also lower her head to make it easier for him to look in her ear and point to his ear as though to show him the similarity. As he touches his own ear, and then again touches his mother’s ear, acknowledging the similarity, she might show him her other ear, and so forth and so on.

In this exchange, they say, several things are happening. The child is learning that its gestures and emotional signaling will get a reciprocal response, that intentionality can produce results leading to a budding sense of purpose, and that often a response will result in unexpected consequences, such as the mother showing the other ear, which in turn may lead to new emotional reactions and gestures—all reinforcing that nascent sense of purpose and concept of self as well as building the foundation for later pattern recognition, problem solving, and gray-area thinking. For writers, the equivalent is a developing sense of readers, agency, and voice.

Interestingly, caregiver-infant interaction in the West has not always been like this. Greenspan and Shanker point out that at various periods in history, such as in Europe’s Middle Ages, childhood was treated differently than it is today. Small children were not given as much attention beyond basic human needs. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that attitudes toward children began to change along with caregiver interaction, with adults “communicating new attitudes and values to their children even before they could speak”:

According to our model of human development, capacities such as critical thinking that characterize the Renaissance could not arise from lecturing children or instilling values in them in a deliberate and conscious way. Rather, it comes from second-to-second and day-to-day interactions which create implicit mastery of this type of core capacity.

The interaction they describe here echoes Freire’s ideas for literacy. They claim that “such a renaissance occurs in the life of each infant and child through the interactions he or she has with responsive caregivers.” For the sake of argument, let’s presume Matt had a post-Middle Ages childhood with a fair amount of Renaissance-style interaction and flow. Why would he then abandon these skills in English class?

Because things are different in school. While home and social life usually consist of circles of co-regulated communication, often, too much of school life is the capital of Pará is Belém. Circles of communication are routinely short-circuited, clipped, the curves hammered straight. Our high-stakes, exam-model school system is all business with not much room for playing around. High school English class focuses on the proficiency levels required to pass standardized essay exams. In such an environment, says Bakhtin, thinking about language takes

into consideration only those aspects of style determined by demands for comprehensibility and clarity—that is, precisely, those aspects that are deprived of any internal dialogism, that take the listener for a person who passively understands but not for one who actively answers and reacts.

Stop Making Sense

Like Bakhtin, Thoreau spoke against holdover attitudes and practices, valuing complexity and ambiguity in language over fixations on clarity and the names of the birds. He strove to find ways to break free from the narrow confines of what he called “common sense”:

It is a ridiculous demand that England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and whoa, which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.

Thoreau is not being curmudgeonly here. He’s not yelling for us to get off his lawn. He’s not criticizing clarity to bolster his contrarian brand. For Thoreau, a fixation on clarity causes you to shy from the “flying as well as creeping things” aspect of language and thought. As a result, other potential meanings are lost. In the world he’s railing against, parallel lines never diverge, professors merely clear their throats and dust off their phlogiston lecture notes, and your father is still perfecting ways of making sealing wax. Dialogism, differentiation, circles of communication, and sampling of subtle variations are all lost. There are no highly altered responses that, in turn, alter the environment further. Things stay pretty much the way they are, something that hierarchical power structures just love.

Later in the same passage, Thoreau sounds positively Gordon-like, saying, “The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.” Viewing the relation between a word and its object in too narrow a way such as Bakhtin, Gordon, or Thoreau criticize, can result in the kind of writing where both the word and its meaning are diminished. Such writing leads to a kind of understanding, which Bakhtin says

constitutes nothing new to the word under consideration, only mirroring it, seeking, at its most ambitious, merely the full reproduction of that which is already given in the word . . . such an understanding never goes beyond the boundaries of the word’s context and in no way enriches the word.

Ann Berthoff says, “Meanings don’t just happen; we make them, we find them, and form them.” This process is not orderly, and it’s often far from clear, yet it’s a process that can lead beyond the false clarity of the Banking Concept and into new territory. It involves “tolerating ambiguity” and learning the “uses of chaos.” Adams describes it similarly, saying that the main inhibitors to creativity and innovation are an “inability to tolerate ambiguity,” an “overriding desire for order,” and not having an “appetite for chaos.” Adams continues,

I am not suggesting . . . you should shun order and live in a totally chaotic situation. I am talking more of an excess fondness for order in all things. The solution of a complex problem is a messy process. Rigorous and logical techniques are often necessary, but not sufficient. You must usually wallow in misleading and ill-fitting data, hazy and difficult to test concepts, opinions, values, and other such untidy quantities.

We all know compulsive people, those who must have everything always in its place and who become quite upset if the order of their physical lives is violated. If the trait carries over to a person’s mental process, he is severely impaired in his ability to work with certain types of problems. One reason for extreme ordering of the physical environment is efficiency . . . The process of bringing widely disparate thoughts together cannot work too well because your mind is not going to allow widely disparate thoughts to coexist long enough to combine.

Asimov would pounce on the “disparate thoughts” concept with his cross-connections and comparison relationships ideas. The second can opener group demonstrated the benefits of the practice of allowing “disparate thoughts to coexist long enough to combine.” Thinking of listeners and their answers opens up such possibilities for writers.

In some areas of his life, Matt can juggle disparate thoughts, but in English class, poor Matt likes things neatly folded. After all, that’s what he has been taught. So in English class, he finds himself trapped in the Middle Ages, an environment devoid of “continuous sampling of subtle variations,” leaving little room for learning to “discriminate more subtly.” All Matt can do under such conditions is to make sure things are “dressed right.” He stops himself from saying things that might interest him if he’s having trouble explaining himself or if he thinks he is being unclear. It’s safer, he believes, to keep things under wraps. If Matt tries to say more, things could get messy, and he’s been trained to be afraid of that. Messy writing is bad writing. It causes teachers to spill a lot of red ink. It causes grades to tumble like it’s 1929. So, in a way, Matt does become dumb when he writes. It’s kind of required. His teacher, too, feels dumb. He gives voluminous, oft-repeated communiqué-style comments and suggestions, but nothing breaks through. His directives just lie there, like one of Weiner’s dead birds. His words don’t sparkle.

Underneath it all, though, Matt is a good student who thinks he’s doing what he’s been told. And he suffers for it.

Notes

I originally said that this multi-part newsletter would be in six or seven parts, but I thought that was too choppy. Instead, it will be four parts total. 14c will conclude things and defiantly suggest that writers and students of writing need to be defiant, disobedient, and a bit of a pain in the ass. Also, their teachers should be teaching them the art of constructive discontent.