This is the blog post associated with the workshop I taught at a secret location in the Colorado Rocky Mountains the weekend of July 16-17. The video was published on the Meaning Is Alive Youtube Channel and can be viewed here.
What we are is beyond description. And yet the way that we are able to weave a story about what we are through language is not something to be so easily dismissed. It seems to me that people are very often engaged in telling stories or listening to the stories that others tell them. Each word, concept, image, experience, can be interpreted in so many different ways, and yet there seems to be a tendency among people to habitually interpret things in the same way so as to provide greater facility in navigating their lives--creating what I think of as thought-patterns. These thought-patterns are often systematic, and even more often, deeply integrated into the general workings of the mind, but perhaps the most pattern-like aspect of them is that they are recurring. One such pattern is "identity" or "self-concept" a useful tool that allows one mind to connect to others through common language-games, yet also a conceptual binding that locks minds into separate boxes, at times barring us from true connection and limiting the means by which one might conduct oneself.
What I think is the starting place of a lot of folk's troubles, is when one of these habitual chains of conceptual identification--an identity (which is really a type of story)--is assumed to be a default mode of being. What I mean by this is quite simply that I see people, who exist in a space of indefinable wonder, wrapping themselves up in a conceptual pattern that they don't ever look beyond. (This is not an understatement either--some people go their whole lives thinking of themselves as "man," "woman," "troublemaker," "saint," "fool," "genius," etc., and take these identities with them to their graves). When a mind holds an identity so close as to think of it as its essence, it blinds itself to different ways of experiencing life. How many fruitful possibilities have been lost this way? In the effort to define oneself, one runs the risk of reducing oneself to a definition. Supposing being-in-itself cannot be defined, this sounds like quite the slippery bind (I offer an oxymoronic name for an oxymoronic struggle).
Identity, as I said, is just one of these habitual thought patterns. The network of associated thought-patterns in which we anchor our interpretation of reality forms the background for all meaning. In other words, meaning takes place within a context.
"Context" comes from Latin "contextus," "a joining together," originally past participle of contexere "to weave together,"which is itself derived from Proto-Indo-European "com," "with, together" + texere "to weave, to make" (from the root *teks- "to weave," also "to fabricate"). When we use the word "context" today, we tend to think of it as something that we find ourselves in, rather than something we create. For example we might say that "in the context of our society, raising your middle finger at someone is a rude gesture," or "in the context of familial relations, a kiss is a simple expression of affection, whereas in the context of relating to people outside of the family, a kiss almost always has romantic implications." I could go on with examples, but what I am illustrating is the way that the meaning of a sign changes depending on the context wherein it occurs. Yet we don't tend to think about the significance of context itself, or how it changes.
The semiotic view of life is one where we acknowledge the creative role
that we as interpreters of meaning play in laying forth the context we
find ourselves in (or rather, that we weave ourselves into). We ask not only what does such-and-such thought or thought-pattern mean, but what is the significance of the very context within which its meaning takes place? This interplay of meaning and context takes place at many levels, including the individual level, the
societal level, and as some theorists (including myself) would postulate, at a biological level.1
In this workshop I will focus on this way of thinking: that we have the ability to modify our context, and we will see how this affects the life of meaning.
Say, for example, that someone were to seek education about their nation's history, and fit it into the broader context of world history. One then has the option to reflect upon one's life as it is situated in one or both of these contexts. One can see how they are related, but also how they seem to be nested in each other, such that if one is aware of the history of one's own nation but ignorant of world history, one would view their entire context differently than if they had the additional knowledge. History is indeed a particular recounting of past events, so the author of the historical texts or the teacher who introduces these ideas will shape what they mean to the student. It is quite different to learn about the history of music than it is to learn about the history of literature, yet learning about both may help one understand either subset in new and more comprehensive ways. Reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States makes for a much different version of US history than reading a textbook issued by the Texas Board of Education. What I want you most especially to notice in this example is how as we learn about history (by one way or another), the text we study becomes the center of our world of signification, as we work to understand and interpret the information being presented to us. But once we move on with our lives and focus on other things, the history we studied falls into the general context within which we operate.
Notice also that "learning" about history is not just being filled with "facts." What happens when we learn history is that we are confronted with a version of events that we must then, if we wish to relate it to ourselves in a meaningful way, interpret and situate in our lives. We do semiotics when we learn history, whether we are aware of it or not. But then at a certain point, the mind has done such a good job of integrating the history that it assumes the history it has accepted as the context in which it operates. You, your neighbor, and a person across the sea, may all have very different interpretations of history. Even you and your classmate who learned from the same texts presented by the same professor may have different interpretations. We often think of all of us as operating within one unified historical context--but what exactly is that context? It seems that it depends on what it means to you, and the "history" we know is exactly what the word's etymology implies: "an account or narrative." History implies a witness who gives an account what they have seen.
I could dig much deeper into this example, but I just used history here to exemplify a system of signs that we have all integrated into our lives, that we had to actively engage with before it was truly integrated as a context. When we learn about events or ideas we did not yet know of, or when we read different interpretations of those events, that context (which is in this example our knowledge of history) changes. In both cases, what changes actually is the significance to us of the events that we are systematically relating, including the very way we relate ourselves to those events.
Now let's step away from the example of history. Think of what else in your life you would consider contextual. You might say I do so-and-so and such-and-such as a human, as this-or-that gender (or lack thereof), in this-or-that society, in this-or-that time and place in history. We take on roles, we take on identities, we take on obligations, that are shaped or rather delimited by a context. In this workshop we'll talk about context as "the weaving together," the "fabrication," which is initially what the word came from. Think of each of our contexts as colorful quilts with intricate patterns of our weaving. And altogether we are wrapped in a vast quilt of meaning that is co-created. I would go so far as to say that "finding ourselves" suddenly in a context is an illusion, as the context has always been created by us.
Suppose you wake up in a dream, and in that dream you are somewhere that you are sure you have seen before, and there are people that you think you recognize but their faces are changing. But you think you know who they are. And as you do what you are doing, you are aware that you are doing it, and you are aware what it is that you are doing. But you don't quite remember how you got there, you're not sure how you met those people, and you don't remember why you started doing what you're doing. What happens in that dream when you start to ask yourself: "How did I get here?" "Who are these people really?" "How did we end up doing this?" Such a shift of consciousness leads you to start lucid-dreaming. When this happens to me, I suddenly start to realize that I can shape the reality around me and go where I want to go. I think something similar happens when we start to ask similar questions about what we are doing here, in the conscious state we find ourselves in now.
Do you remember what you were doing before you got here? And five years before that? And all the way back to when you were born, do you remember what happened before that? At a certain point, it seems unanswerable. What if you had lifetimes before this one that you could remember so clearly, could you think back to the beginning of the first life and remember that? It seems to me that far enough back, there is not so much difference between a dream and a reality, because in either case, you wound up there without knowing what you were doing before. Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing? Who is going to be the one to answer those questions? Who is the one who wove together this beautiful textile of our lives? Who is doing the weaving right now? I am not putting ideas into you, I am just saying words and you are interpreting these words and relating them to a myriad of other ideas in your life. At a certain point I find myself asking... am I a dreamer in a dream, or am I a dream dreaming a dreamer? Is there really a difference?
1 The way I am using the word "context" is similar in a number of ways to the use of the coinage "Umwelt" by
Thomas Sebeok and other semiotic theorists, but I do think it carries some different connotations. For the sake of this distinction and because I do not intend to be overly technical with this
workshop, I will stick to talking about things in terms of "context." I encourage those who are particularly interested in the semiotic theory that inspires my work to do some research on the idea of Umwelt and the theorists who frequently use it.↩