Against Self-Capture

Situational v. Categorical Thinking

(Storm Thurgerson)

Please send us your most recent bio. How would you like to be introduced?

These are questions I am asked daily as I answer emails about speaking engagements, podcasts, events, and workshops.

I have a quirky bio from years ago I can copy-paste, updated with my most recent books and projects. The worst is when I’m not even asked to self-define, and someone introduces me as an “eco-philosopher” or “activist” or worst of all, as a poet. And then, recently, with the publication of my memoir about chronic illness, the epithet Disabled or Chronically Ill inevitably crops up.

Cue me running to the forest while pulling my clothes off article by article, screaming like my four-year old self, “I am NOT a human girl. I am the fastest animal in the world. I am a CHEETAH.”

We live in a culture where our ability to self-categorize is intimately connected to our ability to turn ourselves into a brand, to make money, and to survive. I also think the classificatory impulse is a basic cognitive strategy for navigating complexity and opacity. We are assaulted by information. We cannot reliably function if we do not attempt some sort of heuristics. If you can flatten a complicated social situation into categories, you can potentially keep yourself safe. Where is the danger? Who is the predator? Danger. No danger. Power. No power. Where do I orient?

But this attempt to self-categorize, while a useful tool, has been canonized above all other modes of being and relating. We live for titles. For epithets. For diagnoses. For the crown of expertism.

How would you like to be introduced feels to me like someone holding a pin over my butterfly wings, asking, “How would you like to be fixed to my specimen board for future examination? How would you like to stop flying?” In medicine, this is demonstrated by the “nocebo” effect of listing bad side effects or prognoses attached to a diagnosis. Once these titles have been gifted to you, it’s hard not to live them out. The nocebo effect is just as powerful as the placebo effect. I’ve been given a list of bodily symptoms and told “This is you”.

Do I really want to live under that zodiac?

Alternatively, it feels like an invitation to exert power over some audience or group of people. I am the speaker. The expert. The Person In Charge.

Nope. Nope. Lately, when asked to introduce myself, I find myself speechless. Then I attempt to subvert the temptation to self-capture – to pin my wings.

“I’m not an expert. I’m a lover. I just love what I write and talk about.”

As a lover of the history of orality and literacy, I am curious about how literacy and identity are intimately braided. Struggling with these ideas, I returned to one of my favorite and foundational texts on the subjects, appropriately titled Orality & Literacy by Walter J. Ong.

I’ve written and taught about how the movement from oral culture to textual culture create conceptual shifts that now underpin the idea of hierarchy and human supremacism. Oral cultures believe knowledge is a verb, breath exchanged between beings, resurrected bodily and communally each time in needs to be asked. Housed in stories compelling enough to remember. Oral cultures understand the truth needs to change each time it is spoken again. That it must evolve. Literate cultures can pretend the truth is pinned to a page. Static. It doesn’t respond to questions. It doesn’t change over time. Literate cultures can surely disseminate massive amount of information without the community tending that oral cultures necessitate. But the information they hoard is often non-relational and brittle, never adapting to changing circumstances, often lapsing into dogmatism. Ong writes:

“The fact that oral peoples commonly and in all likelihood universally consider words to have magical potency is clearly tied in, at least unconsciously, with their sense of the word as necessarily spoken, sounded, and hence power-driven. Deeply typographic people forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to be assimilated to things, ‘out there’ on a flat surface. Such ‘things’ are not so readily associated with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection… Oral folk have no sense of a name as a tag, for they have no sense of a name as something that can be seen. Written or printed representations of words can be labels; real, spoken words cannot be. ”

Typographic/textual people think of names as things or labels, Edenic in their taxonomy, representing a human ownership over that which it names. If you can name a thing, you can capture it. You isolate a word on a page, a cow in a pasture, a plant in a glyphosate-blitzed monocrop, a person in a cubicle, a jail cell. You can think of a person not as a verb in a long syntax of unfolding community, but as an isolated and depersonalized object.

A.R. Luria who did extensive fieldwork with the illiterate (that is, oral) and mostly oral areas of Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the Soviet Union between the years 1931-1932 and published his research in 1976 in the book Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, showed that oral cultures can be characterized as “situational rather than abstract”. They care less about the abstract, platonic “tree”, and much more about a specific tree in a specific place, rooted into meaning and relationship. A great example of this is how a literate culture attempts to translate Homeric Greek, language originally transmitted orally. Amymon, a word used to describe Aegisthus is typically translated by literate cultures as “blameless” but the word actually means something very different. The literal translation is “beautiful-in-the-way-a-warrior-ready-to-fight-is-beautiful”. A wealth of context and specificity live in the words of an oral culture where nothing can be hoarded on a page without the mnemonic aid of relationships and situational relevance.

Luria and his associates gathered data by interviewing people in relaxed tea houses, weaving their inquiry into the organic context of a long conversation. One of the first things they noticed was that largely oral cultures did not truck with abstract shapes. There is no such thing as a platonic circle for them. A circle must be something real and experienced in their lived world. Concrete objects and beings took the place of abstract shapes. A circle was the moon. A square was a mirror or a door. Unlike a literate interviewee, when presented with a list of words and asked to organize them, they did not sort the words in classifications, but rather wove the words into a situation or a story. They saw the situational relevance rather than atomizing the words into islands of abstraction. They represented situational rather than categorical thinking.

Weaving relationship and meaning between ideas and beings would seem to me to be a positive skill. And it is one we have forgotten how to do in a culture that prizes our ability to self-conceptualize as something uprooted of context.

In Luria’s field work every attempt to get a definition of something was resisted: “Why should I tell you what a tree is? Everyone knows what a tree is.” Why define when the world and real-life context was infinitely present and available?

But I think the most interesting finding of Luria’s investigation into primary oral culture was that “self-evaluation modulated into group evaluation.” Luria observed that whenever he asked an oral interviewee to engage in self-analysis, they would experience difficulty. He observed that self-analysis like we rely on in literate cultures requires “a certain demolition of situational thinking. It calls for the isolation of the self, around which the entire world swirls for each individual person, removal of the center of every situation from that situation enough to allow the center, the self, to be examined and described.”

My favorite example is when Luria asked a 38-year-old man from a mountain pasture camp “What sort of a person are you, what’s your character like, what are your good qualities or shortcomings? How would you describe yourself?” The man answered after much deliberation. “I came here from Uch-Kurgan. I was very poor, and now I’m married and have children.” When asked further about his shortcomings he expanded into “we” discussing farming issues with wheat yield, giving up the “I” entirely. When asked again what he thought of himself, he answered for the entire community, “We behave well – if we were bad people, no one would respect us.”

This trend cropped up repeatedly across Luria’s field research. The “I” could not be sustained and dissolved back into the lived reality of community entanglements.

In the precious few classes and workshops my health has allowed me to teach in the past year, I’ve found myself asking people to introduce themselves not through self-capture, but through ecological and sensory context.

What being is part of your world right now? Introduce yourself as a smell? As a plant? As a verb?

Pileated woodpecker. Multiflora Rose. The silver-flip quiver of aspen leaves before a storm blows in.

I don’t want to define what a tree is. Each tree is different. I don’t want to self-define and stop becoming.

The I cannot be sustained. It pretends that a self can survive without a we, without a community, without a constant updating of our ideas of truth.

Today I am the We of the Hudson Valley tipping ecstatically into summertime, when the flowers stop their staggered utterances and begin to interrupt each other. Peony blossoms exploding any sense of floral order. Hummingbirds dipping their beaks into trumpet flowers.