Call this ACTION LEARNING!: October 2008 Archives

This post distills a series of thoughts from reading three different texts: The Heroic Model of Science (Chapter 1, Telling the Truth about History by Appleby, Hunt & Jacob, 1991); The Talmud and the Internet by Jonathan Rosen (2000), and an Interview with Ilan Stavans by Richard Birnbaum (@ 2003).

Three threads are primary: language, interaction, and science. "Language" is engaged theoretically and in practice, particularly the practices of interpretation. Although the references in the three selected texts refer mainly to written translations, I extrapolate 'down' to in-the-moment generation of understanding in everyday talking with each other, based on cooperation or agreement between people about meaning. I also extrapolate 'up' - or at least 'over' - to the interlinguistic skills that are most obviously evident in simultaneous interpretation. As to interaction, there are numerous levels from the microsocial to the macrosocial and the temporal to the ephemeral. The history of science is significant because of its influence on how people in western countries learn.

Why these three texts, beyond the coincidence of reading them more-or-less at the same time? Appleby, Hunt & Jacob (hereafter AH&J) investigate "what sorts of political circumstances foster critical inquiry" (p. 9). They write specifically in regard to the discipline of history by "examin[ing] critically the relevance of scientific models to the craft of history" (p. 9). I borrow their analysis as a way to explore the relevance of scientific models to other disciplines, particularly communication and the intersection of communication with political economy (especially governance), management (the organization of business), and culture (identity, ritual, and social relations).

AH&J challenge relativists and skeptics, sometimes lumping them together as postmodernists, arguing that in some ways they can "leav[e] the impression that the linguistic conventions of science have less to do with nature and more to do with the sociology of the scientists...in this way they have confused the social nature of all knowledge construction with the self-interest of the constructors, forgetting that all social beings participate in the search for knowledge and sometimes do so successfully" (emphasis added, p. 8-9). AH&J offer definitions for "skepticism" and "relativism," showing how these attitudes form the substance of conflict with another historical attitude, that of religious absolutism. Tensions among these attitudes form the roots of the culture wars we see in the U.S. today.

"We view skepticism," write AH&J, " as an approach to learning as well as a philosophical stance...skepticism can encourage people to learn more and remain open to the possibility of their own errors" (p. 6-7).

Relativism, a modern corollary to skepticism, is the belief that truth is relative to the position of the person making the statement" (p. 7). There is an important nuance to this definition: truth is not directly relative to the person, rather, it is relative to "the position of the person." (Note: "modern" means the idea of relativism wasn't around when the initial fight took place between the skeptics and the religious. "Relativism" is an outgrowth of that fight.)

Religious absolutism is "the conviction that transcendent and absolute truth can be known" (p. 15).

All of these stances can be overdone, hence AH&J propose a standard for knowledge, i.e., for what we believe to be true:


The last phrase, it seems to me, is most crucial. If we are interested in democracy and social justice - meaning a fairness for groups of people of varying types - then we must find ways of producing and valuing broad social, political, and economic structures that are acceptable to everyone, even those whose self-interests differ from our own.

Jonathan Rosen, in a section about the ways Judaism and Christianity have borrowed from and influenced each other through the ages, writes about "open fearlessness, that willingness to assimilate outside cultures into your own without worrying that they will corrupt your beliefs" (p. 83-84). One of the anchors he poses for the Jewish religion is the collective realization, a very, very long time ago "that only words were durable" (p. 79). The Talmud, he argues, "is a sort of cathedral built across the ages and spanning all the earth - or perhaps I should say it's a Temple, or at least a translation of one, built out of words and laws and stories" (p. 81).

I want to make three points simultaneously: language as a power with literal force; the "extraordinary religiosity" (according to AH&J, p. 50) of early (and at least some contemporary) scientists; and the inescapable fact that scientists today are the inheritors, intellectual descendants, and cultural products of the heroic science born of the Enlightenment. Certainly I am. I want to both rescue and continue the project of "truth with a purpose: the reform of existing institutions" (AH&J, p. 41), while seeking to escape or alter additional repeat performances of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century culture wars.

Power of Interpretation:

Language is key. Rosen's parallel between the Internet and the Talmud speaks to a proliferation of heterogeneous meanings that suggests an antidote to "the nature of books never to be quite right and of words always to elude our grasp" (p. 54). The refusal of words to mean one thing only, and to mean only that one thing always and forever, is precisely the juncture where understandings are forged or splattered. Words are durable while truth about what the words mean remains elusive. Rosen's desire "to embrace contradictory traditions" (p. i) seems similar to AH&J's focus on "the interplay between certainty and doubt" (p. 10). This enables Rosen to keep faith with "the business of life [which] is to learn, not to know" (p. 33). For AH&J that interplay "keeps faith with the expansive quality of democracy" (p. 10). Learning, democracy, science, and faith are inextricably intertwined: language is their confluent expression.

This is why Ilan Stavans can assert with conviction: "I find translators, in many ways, to be the real protagonists of culture . . . Translators are the underpaid heroes of culture." Translators - and interpreters - are always in between. Rosen explains how the Talmud "devised a culture intended to be a kind of middle term between extremes - between destruction and new creation, between the dead and the living, between God and man, between home and exile, between doubt and faith, between outward behavior and inner inclination" (p. 131).

Interpretation is a form of communication that has to work within and between "the chaotic contemporary forms of communication that," Rosen explains, "are so often accused of diverting us from what is true. The chaos and the incongruities, it turns out, are part of the truth" (p. 119). On that basis he compares the "interrupting, jumbled culture of the Internet" (p. 10) with "a page of the Talmud" (p. 19): "all those texts tucked intimately and intrusively onto the same page, like immigrant children sharing a single bed" (p. 10). "Those portions and their accompanying readings," he continues, "swim in a sea of commentary . . . so large that it seems at times to expand [like the Internet] to include everything" (p. 30).

Language in History:

Before elaborating on Stavan's thesis, let me summarize the discussion of language and its role in history provided by Appleby, Hunt & Jacob, because they present the discipline of linguistics in the creation of heroic science as an equal partner to the discipline of science. "The Enlightenment," said to begin in 1690, "set the terms of the modern cultural project: the individual's attempt to understand nature and humankind through scientific as well as linguistic means" (p. 39). Concurrent with the emergence of sciences and history as disciplines, "the European philosophes also developed new approaches toward old languages and texts. Reading old documents, indeed reading any document, is never as simple as it looks. Even picking up the local newspaper you ask, well, why did they run that story? Or, I wonder what party that journalist has joined?" (p. 37)

The discipline of linguistics began with criticism of written texts, called hermeneutics. It didn't take long before "the language in a text, the words on the page, became too important to be left to clerical interpreters" (AB&J, p. 38). The Christian Bible was, at the time, the standard of absolute knowledge; it came under particular scrutiny. Ironically, clergy had originally invented hermeneutics, using the Bible as the reference point for all kinds of statements of absolute truth concerning the world and time. Now, AB&J continue, "The words had to be enlisted in the enterprise of creating wholly secular and scientific learning, but with consequences for ... the present generation" (p. 38).

Stavans says, "Using language as a category is a way to say who we are in front of a mirror." He goes on to illustrate how words change meanings over time, illustrating how the evolution of meaningfulness is what goes on socially, among and between people. When you, or I, use language - when we talk or write - we are "saying who we are" to ourselves.

When I wrote earlier that I am cut in the vein of heroic science, it is because I recognize how I think and talk in those terms. AH&J present a range of descriptions:

"Diderot described the follower of the Enlightenment as an eclectic, a skeptic and investigator who 'trampling underfoot prejudice, tradition, venerability, universal assent, authority - in a word, everything that overawes the crowd - dares to think for himself, to ascend to the clearest general principles, to examine them, to discuss them, to admit nothing save on the testimony of his own reason and experience'" (citing Diderot's article on eclecticsm in the Encyclopedie (1751), p. 39).

I am not an ideal type, but there is certainly a resemblance. How about this: "a new kind of person...hard to govern, suspicious of authority, more interested in personal authenticity and material progress than in the preservation of traditions, a reader of new literature, novels, newspapers, clandestine manuscripts, even pornography, all especially produced for an urban market" (p. 40). This description hardly marks me special, rather it describes today's average western person. To wit, "a new cultural type who could be a pundit, prophet, fighter against tyranny and oppression, original thinker, elegant writer, sometimes pornographer, reader of science, host of salons, or occasional freemason" (p. 35).

The average western person today, as well as trained scientists and elites, however, is also subject to the culture wars that are the legacy of the original, historical figures of the Enlightenment who "battled with clergy and churches and at moments risked martyrdom" (p. 18). "In the culture wars of the present generation, language, with the many uses and abuses that can be attributed to it, has figured prominently in the arsenal of weapons" (p. 38). Today, continuing the trend of the Enlightenment when secular hermeneutics turned the scientific method on the Bible, all words are related to other words.

Bringing attention to the action of simultaneous interpretation draws notice to the fact that people are always and forever engaged with interpreting. Whether our languages are the same or different, similar or unfamiliar, we must interpret the meaning of what is conveyed. We assume a certain ease of understanding for many reasons, such as habit, agreement, perception, and tradition. These background reasons presume certain conditions, such as use of the same language, or familiarity with a common culture. If these conditions are not in place, our attention becomes more attuned to the presence of potential difference. If these conditions are present, however, we proceed normally, as if there will be no problems with understanding. Most often this is the case, and we communicate without conscious awareness of the amount of interpretation occurring in the background. Nonetheless, it is not going too far to say that without interpretation there is no communication.

The presence of simultaneous interpretation between two languages, then, merely accentuates processes that are already occurring. Once we decide to keep the fact of constant, continual interpretation in mind, what matters is not the matter of interpretation itself, but the frames of reference that inform the interpretation. Remove the actual interpreter, and this remains the case: what any one of us aims to communicate is sensible - as we intend it - only within the terms of our particular frame of reference; likewise, what is understood by others is only sensible as they receive it - which may or may not be within the same frame as our own.

Rocio pressed me hard the other night, wonderfully so, on the matter of my own frame of reference. I often find it quite difficult to recognize the assumptions of my own logic; so I appreciate questions that make me wonder. According to Stor Gendibal, one of the protagonists in Isaac Asimov's Foundation's Edge (1982, p. 128):

I must admit to Rocio's observation that I am trying to make sense of Europe's multilingualism from a basis of experience in a monolingual culture. I am from the U.S., with its fanatic emphasis on English. It is true I am impressed with the fluidity of Flemish-speakers (in particular, as most of my interactions this past month have been in Antwerp) to switch from Dutch to English with nary a blink. This includes, by the way, not only indigenous Flemings but also Moroccan immigrants and German transplants. Rocio's questions are important: am I overreacting because of my own distaste with monolingualism in general, or the spread of English in particular?

Yet, I also know a different America because of my work as an American Sign Language/English Interpreter. My thinking is rooted in a bilingualism that matches European multilingualism, and perhaps goes farther, as translations between spoken and signed language involve not only a shift in grammar (linguistics) but also a shift in modality (sensory perception).

Last week, Tumbleweed questioned another element of my frame of reference. My work as a signed language interpreter suggests that the critique I suggest is possible regarding the system of spoken language interpretation at the European Parliament is based upon comparing different types of interpreting - a logic that may or may not be valid. Just as I need to be reminded how much my thought has been shaped by the dominant monolingual culture, I need to continue to explore the divisions created between "conference interpreting" and "community interpreting." There are historical, professional, and economic distinctions between these types that are, in my view, indicators of class and power rather than of literal difference. In either venue, the action of simultaneous interpreting is the same: difference is maintained.

These questions go deep. They touch upon the danger of my biases being too much in the way. Rocio gave some great examples of how the perceived differences are huge between, say, a Spaniard from Valencia and a Spaniard from Catalonia - until one travels to France; or, say, the differences between an American from Texas and an American from New York, until one travels to Indonesia. If the settings are culturally close but not identical, one is aware of the distinctions, only. But when the context is broadened and the basis of comparison is shifted, then those distinctions of a close-close type vanish in the larger contrasts with people who are even more different.

As we observe a globalizing economy (try to) turn culturally distinct places into uniform amalgamations of everywhere and nowhere, and worldwide media establishes norms of ambition for peoples of all kinds, it may be that languages are the best preserve of substantive difference. The action of simultaneous interpretation is to resist a totalitarian logic of similarity - a logic that assumes we communicate better if we use the same language: a monolingualist logic. By virtue of its presence and use, simultaneous interpretation enables a medium of communication that can generate a field of social equality built interaction-by-interaction upon the constant recognition and continual presence of difference.

The pressure to use English is intense.

There are so many reasons.

Ah yes. There is the idea (of multilingualism, of the right to speak/read/write in one's mother tongue - or at least their official national language), and then there is what people do regardless of the ideal (notion, concept, belief, commitment) that the words of "the idea" point toward.

July, 2006, I opened a Facebook Group (Interpretation: An Action Learning Set) to facilitate some of the logistics of this research project. I received an email in response to the invitation I sent friends:

"Hey, what's this "interpretation" group?

Tell me more before I commit."

"All I really need," I answered, "is a translation of my research invitation into your national language, so that I can send it to all the relevant MEPS." The conversation that ensued was informative, to say the least. The extent of the questions and doubt caught me by surprise: nearly everyone asked why, nearly everyone expressed a reason - or two or three reasons - against it. (Conform.) I have to keep explaining myself (it is like a political campaign). Most friends eventually come around to seeing the point, but doubt is nearly always held in reserve: " . . . there's the practical level." Another criteria is marshalled that supercedes (supposedly) the original logic, point, or value, discouraging and weakening implementation.

Most of my arguments with friends to date have been based in communication theory, but there is also EU law:

"Therefore each citizen of the Union has the right, "[to] write to any of the institutions or bodies referred to in this Article or in Article 7 in one of the languages mentioned in Article 314..."

There are some layers of irony here, no? I am not a citizen of any European Union country, yet I am trying to apply an ethic that has been believed so strongly - or understood to have such utilitarian value - that it has been institutionalized into law; and am being told (essentially, repeatedly) not to bother. (Conform!)

Here we are, in the European Union's Year of Intercultural Dialogue. Without neglecting the initiative's achievements . . . are there really only words in one language by which such "dialogue" can be accomplished? If only one language is being used, can whatever communication that happens even qualify, potentially, as dialogue? Di = two, logue = word. Two words, two different words (or more), are necessary.

Thankfully, and due to extraordinary efforts from friends, their families, friends of friends, and their families (!), I presently have seventeen translations (of twenty-three).