permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

on 11/24/01 2:19 PM, John Schinnerer at eco_living@yahoo.com wrote:

> I am suggesting that all languaging
> has not merely meaning but embodiment and consequences

 I think I encountered the word "languaging" in Bateson somewhere. It's why
I find his (later) work really hard to read. Bateson's ideas, though
interesting, useful, and often novel, are not that really difficult to
grasp, except that he often doesn't use clear or standard language.  I
stumble at "languaging" and even harder at "languaging has embodiment." Does
that mean that the process of using language takes on physical form? Or does
it mean that it takes a body to make language? (I'm not singling you out for
criticism, John--your writing is clearer than most on this subject)

I gather that what is meant by "languaging" is "using language" but for some
reason Bateson (or whoever invented the word) felt that a new word was
necessary. I suppose that was to break us out of conventional patterns of
thinking, or to avoid reification by getting rid of the noun altogether.
However, gerunds--I think "languaging" is a gerund--are called "verbal
nouns" anyway, so the problem is still there, but the non-standard word
makes the problem harder to see. If he's just trying to be briefer than
"using language" then the 3-letter saving comes at the expense of
comprehension.

The disciplines of epistemology, deconstructionism, and many other fields
about "knowing" often speak in convoluted phrasings, yet when I rephrase
them into simple language, the ideas seem straightforward.
Take Souscayrous's quote from George Steiner:

> 'A semantics, a poetics of correspondence, of decipherability and
> truth-values arrived at across time and consensus, are strictly inseparable
> from the postulate of theological-metaphysical transcendence.'

I really will never be sure what that means, but perhaps it's something like
"The true meaning of words can't be grasped if we separate them from how
they transcend physical form and link us to the divine." Of course, I could
be way, way off; and with more work I could make the translation cleaner and
more elegant, but my point is, this stuff can be made much more easy to
grasp. I fear that the writers want to be viewed as deep thinkers, so they
gussy-up the language immensely, mistaking difficult writing for hard
thinking.

When I was a less experienced writer (if I may be immodest), I used to make
my writing fancy, and savored strings of adjectives. My words seemed more
poetic and respectable that way. But I finally learned you must "kill your
darlings," as some great writer said, because those flowery sentences full
of fancy words were just the ones that ruined my writing. I'm still working
on it. 

There is a wonderful old book called "The Art of Plain Talk" (by Rudolf
Flesch) that tells how to write simply, forcefully, and yet well. It helped
destroy my urge to use fancy writing.

Toby