Partiality in discourse and language (Part I)

By Rodrigo Cáceres Riquelme

This essay is an attempt to reflect upon what it means for descriptions in language to be partial. It is something I have had to come to terms in my own experience, so perhaps telling my own story is the best way to introduce this topic, and I will add academic references as we move along. In my first five years of university I was formed in orthodox neoclassical economics, which basically meant getting accustomed and familiarized to this theory's many standard equations, calculus, graphs as well as the overall theory with its central concepts of 'utility', 'maximize', 'optimize', 'surplus', 'consumer', 'endowment' 'firm', 'profit', 'cost', 'natural resource', 'human resource', 'productivity', 'economic growth', 'market', 'market failure', 'extract', 'demand', 'supply', 'externality' and so on. 

At the time, this set of concepts and the narrative they put together seemed to me as fitting exactly with the world I lived in: news and media were concerned with growth statistics, industries were extracting resources and selling them abroad, consumers were worried about purchasing commodities at the lowest price, etc. In other words, I thought that this theory was directly describing the world as it is. My economics teachers were literal about this when they made the distinction between positive and normative aspects of economics. The positive (or objective) aspects were the conceptual, mathematical and graphical descriptions of economic exchange dynamics. On the other hand, the normative aspect were supposed to denote how each of us values specific kinds of income distributions, but this was merely a place for subjective opinions, secondary to the descriptive role of economic theory.

The thing that for me did not fit in this theoretical construct was my growing exposure to scientific articles about the global ecological crises: destruction of rainforests in the Amazon and Southeast Asia, rapid global heating due to heavy use of oil and coal, climate breakdown, ocean acidification, soil destruction, massive death and extinction of living species, the recent consensus on the shift of geological era from the Holocene towards the Anthropocene, etc. In other words, it seemed as if the logic of this neoclassical economic construct was completely opposed to the logic of the Earth systems, and driving us to global catastrophe.

My reading of Stibbe's Ecolinguistics (2015) brought great clarity upon this issue. It turns out that discourses and theories such as the neoclassic economic theory are always partial, in the sense that they are models that incorporate and commit to a limited set of concepts that highlight certain aspects of what occurs in the world. When discourses do so, they implicitly erase all aspects of what they do not take into consideration. In other words, highlighting something in a discourse necessarily implies downplaying other things.

The problem is that since discourses are positive, all that is erased and downplayed by them remains invisible. For example, if somebody says 'economic expectations are finally rising' it is going to hide the fact that, in general, economic growth is based on the pollution and destruction of natural habitats somewhere on the planet. 

Stibbe's technical take on the limited scope of theories and ideologies is through the dual concepts of salience and erasure. What is salient is anything that is brought forth by a certain discourse, which implicitly assumes that it is important or worthy of attention. What is erased is all which is downplayed or not considered by a discourse, which implicitly means that it is irrelevant or not worthy of attention. 

We should consider salience and erasure as the two sides of a same coin: the salient side is the one highlighted by words and the erased side is the one that is 'forgotten' by the choice of words that is used. Decolonial theorists are implicitly doing this when they talk of the 'dark side of modernity' (Mignolo, 2011) referring to the hidden side of the coin: neocolonialism, destruction of ecosystems, marginalization and genocide of indigenous communities. These hidden aspects are contrasted to the positively charged concepts on the apparent side of the coin: 'development', 'science and technology', 'objectivity', 'rationality', 'modernize', 'economic growth', etc.

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) provide a very simple example to explain this partial nature of descriptions:

A categorization is a natural way of identifying a kind of object or experience by highlighting certain properties, downplaying others, and hiding still others. [...] To highlight certain properties is necessarily to downplay or hide others, which is what happens when we categorize something [...] we focus on certain properties that fit our purposes. Focusing on one set of properties shifts our attention away from others. For example:

I've invited a sexy blonde to our dinner party.

I've invited a renowned cellist to our dinner party.

I've invited a Marxist to our dinner party. 

I've invited a lesbian to our dinner party. 

Though the same person may fit all of these descriptions, each description highlights different aspects of the person. Describing someone who you know that has all of these properties as "a sexy blonde" is to downplay the fact that she is a renowned cellist and a Marxist and to hide her lesbianism. (p.163)

We could do a similar example by examining a sentence like 'developing natural resources will promote economic growth in the region'. What is presupposed in this kind of description is that nature is not literally nature anymore but becomes a particular case of the 'resource' category (as in human resources, natural resources, learning resources, etc.). Resources are things that humans use for their benefit, we think of resources in quantitative terms (as in abundant, scarce, depleted) and we do not think of resources in qualitative terms. This resource aspect necessarily downplays the idea that nature is full of living beings with intentions, desires and their own environmental conditions that impact their health.

In other words, what occurs is that in every kind of theory (it can be economic, sociological, psychological, etc.) there is an implicit commitment to the concepts that articulate the theory together. And when people commit to a certain theory, they commit to those concepts, they think with them and do the kinds of actions that are inferred from those concepts. In the case of neoclassical theory, the commitment is to speak about nature only as one specific kind of resource (natural resource) that is to be used and exploited for human purposes.

This partial nature of language and discourses has far reaching implications, because it means that socially legitimized theoretical constructs such as neoclassical economics function as habit reinforcing machines, they reproduce cultural habits and beliefs by transmitting (through university education in this case) a partial system of concepts to describe the world.

Stibbe (2015) and myself have explored the implicit beliefs in this economic construct: the belief that humans are independent from their natural environment, that humans are self-interested and competitive, that humans are the only living beings that have psyche, that humans can only achieve wellbeing through purchasing objects, that the wellbeing and health of living beings and ecosystems is irrelevant, and the narcissistic belief that the natural world exists for humans as an endowment to be used to fulfill any kind of human purpose.

The self-fulfilling character of these theoretical constructs arises from the fact that if people (as I did at one point in my life) accept the neoclassic conceptual system as valid or real, then they act according to the rules of action that arise from its theoretical (and mathematical) logic: promoting industrial development, ecosystem destruction and pollution, creation of unnecessary and addictive products for consumers, etc.

More generally, it means that we collectively act according to the theories that we accept as valid. The implication is that if these theories fail to adapt to our ecological circumstances and to the logic of the natural systems where we are embedded, then we naturally lean towards self-destruction out of a lack of adaptation to our circumstances.

Slavoj Zizek's metaphor that conceptual systems or ideologies are glasses fortunately will make this issue even clearer. Zizek explains that "According to our common sense, we think that ideology is something blurring, confusing our straight view; ideology should be glasses which distort our view, and the critique of ideology should be the opposite, like you take off the glasses so you can finally see the way things really are. This is precisely the ultimate illusion, ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves, ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world, how we perceive each meaning and so on. We, in a way, enjoy our ideology".

This metaphor is productive in several aspects. First, it captures the idea that when one gets used to wearing glasses, one forgets that one is wearing glasses. In the same manner, with theoretical constructs like economic theory people tend to forget that the economy is just a partial and imaginary construct.

The metaphor also captures the idea that glasses will always direct the focus on a specific subset of aspects of what occurs while, at the same time, they will fail to consider the aspects that are outside its frame (because they are blurred). In the same manner, the economic construct fails to consider the eco-logic of the living network of beings that we share this planet with. Since it is only focused on their utility for human purposes (as resources), the lives and wellbeing of animals, plants and fungi are taken to be irrelevant and it does not matter if they are destroyed.

This metaphor accounts for the idiom 'to look at the world with a new pair of glasses'. The semantic transpositions underlying this metaphor are that ONE PAIR OF GLASSES IS A SPECIFIC IDEOLOGY; that DIFFERENT GLASSES ARE DIFFERENT IDEOLOGIES; the metaphorical entailment that changing glasses will make you see things that you could not see before because of your previous glasses' mode of focus.

I have examined elsewhere the use of a 'different pair of glasses' in an Indian community where the local forest is considered as kin or family: in this context there is a deeply affective relationship with a forest, which leads the locals to actively want to protect and defend this forest from industrial logging. ‘‘We would protect the forest as we would protect our own child from any danger" (Singh 2013, p.194). "Now, this (forest protection) has become a passion, an addiction. Even on getting beaten-up or crushed, we won’t leave the forest" (p.195).

The contrast is clear: if one thinks of the natural environment as an object to be exploited and used for human purposes, then there is no real concern if that environment is destroyed. In contrast, one can also think that the natural environment is one's family, which provides food, wood and shadow. In this case, if that environment is threatened to be destroyed, people will actively want to defend it from destruction because they have a deep attachment and love out of their consideration as kin or family.

As a final comment, I would like to emphasize the utility of the glasses and the coin metaphor in order to think about the partiality and limited focus of descriptions and theories in language. Thinking with images, as Lakoff and Johnson (1999) have shown, is one of our most productive sources of meaning.

Part II of this essay continues here.

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References

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought (Vol. 28). New York: Basic books.

Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.

Singh, N. M. (2013). The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India. Geoforum, 47, 189-198.

Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge.