Step 12: performative knowledge processes
A number of things are going to fall into place all at once in this step and in the next two. Here is a list of the main ingredients:
Brian Burkhart’s jazz analogy, and its shared ground with Spinoza’s ideas
Vine Deloria’s non-binary take on the relationships between sacred and material, and between individual and whole, and how they interact
Viola Cordova’s analogies, and their shared ground with the findings of quantum theory and with Leroy Little Bear’s elements of philosophical unity in diversity.
—> Can you remember what the above ideas were about?
—> Off the top of your head, what do you think Indigenous conceptions of performative knowledge processes are going to have to do with them?
In the contemporary West, we usually talk about “knowledge” as “the thing known”. We don’t usually talk about knowledge as process, although the example of Ella Fitzgerald and her band above shows that we are able to relate to it: knowledge and reality developing together as part of our co-creative activity is something that happens here, too, even after 500 years of our trying to convince ourselves that it doesn’t.
Thinking about knowledge as process raises two preliminary questions.
Firstly, how are performative knowledge processes different from embodied cognition? And secondly, how are they different from simply becoming better and better at finding the one best way to work?
The first question comes from a way of thinking that looks at knowledge as fairly static. This is fair enough, for some things: the formula for Newton’s apple hitting the ground below isn’t about to change overnight. Neither is the way a chef chops a carrot once they have learnt how to sense the right moment to push the carrot forward towards the knife: embodied cognition is as valid as a concept as Newtonian physics is.
The trouble is, though, that in our co-creative world, not all knowledge will stay as it is! Take Ella Fitzgerald and her band above, for example, when she forgot the lyrics to Mack the Knife. She and the band learnt and created a whole new way of doing the song together. Neither their new way of doing it nor their knowledge of how they could go about it can have existed before.
Embodied cognition, such as a chef chopping that carrot, works for some things, and it is not enough for others, much the same way as Newtonian physics.
The second question - of whether and how performative knowledge processes are different from a continuing quest to find the one best way to work - is in one way different from the first question. In another way, there are similarities between them.
It is different from the first question because a quest to “find” the one best way to work acknowledges that knowledge doesn’t have to be static: it lets the chef become better at chopping that carrot over the years. It is similar to the first question in another way, though: it assumes that there is one way to work which can be called “the” best way to work and applied to all chefs and all their respective carrots, universally. It is quite possible that some things really are like that (solving Rubik’s cube?), but the point made by Indigenous conceptions of performative knowledge processes is that in a living world, not everything is going to be. The point made by Indigenous conceptions of performative knowledge processes is that in a living world, our best option is to remain responsive to the other living beings around us - because if we don’t, then co-creative activity stops being co-creative. It would be like someone piling in to hand out sheet music to Ella Fitzgerald and the band and telling them to start again from the top, this time with more precision, please.
John Dewey and Jacques Ellul are two helpful Western stepping stones to understanding what is going to be meant when Indigenous authors introduce their thinking on performative knowledge processes below.
—> Can you remember where to go if you are looking for exact references? Step 1 and step 2 will tell you where they are.
John Dewey talks about our “doings and undergoings”, as entire creatures, when we interact with the world. We become active and do something that affects those around us (“doings”), and we are also affected by them (“undergoings”). His crucial point is that we don’t end up in the same place at the end of any of these interactions: at the end of any of these interactions, both we and our partners in interaction are going to be a little bit different from the way that we were at the beginning.
Jacques Ellul’s work, on the other hand, concentrates on what happens if we don’t allow Dewey’s “doings and undergoings” to take place. Ellul’s use of language is idiosyncratic, and it must have caused his translator some headaches: he uses the term “technique” for a sociological (not just technological!) phenomenon of ever-spreading standardisation, and of ossification following in its wake. Ellul thinks it all started quite innocently with things like Frank Bunker Gilbreth’s efforts as a time and motion expert (of Cheaper by the Dozen fame). Gilbreth, at the start, only wanted to work out an easier way of doing a bricklaying job. Not many of us would take objection to that. What went wrong, then, according to Ellul, is that we didn’t see that there was a tipping point coming: now, efficiency and standardisation are no longer about making any particular job easier. Rather, they have spread to a degree that often leaves us little choice but to go with an option that we know perfectly well isn’t going to help anyone: we may know perfectly well that the option is useless, but to do anything else has become impossibly difficult because it would make an entire machinery grind to a halt which we have all come to rely on.
Here is a recent example that Ellul would probably have used if he had still been with us. ONS statistics on bus driver deaths in the UK in the early days of the Covid pandemic are a sad reminder of how sole reliance on due process can produce dire outcomes. The UK could have ended up mourning fewer of our bus drivers if our processes for enabling people to self-isolate when necessary had worked - or if it had at least been possible to do anything about it when it became known that they didn’t work. It didn’t take long for it to become clear that the processes didn’t work: 60% of isolation payment claims were unsuccessful, so that bus drivers ended up taking vast numbers of people to work who couldn’t afford to stay at home when they needed to. Then - and this is the crucial part that Ellul would have been interested in - nothing changed even once the problem of failing claims had become common knowledge. Due process continued to be followed, even once we knew that it wasn’t actually working.
Ellul, if he was still alive, would argue that it is the spread of immovable standards and efficiencies which is responsible for this: once processes and efficiencies become streamlined and standardised to link up with other processes and efficiencies, it can become almost impossible to adapt any one of them, even when everyone knows that this is needed. Adapting one process means potential disruption of other processes around it. Soon, the fact of any individual process’s being non-disruptive to the machinery of other processes around it becomes more important than whether it actually achieves anything. The co-creative element of Brian Burkhart’s jazz analogy has been taken away.
PRATEC, in the Andes, on the other hand, describe a responsive way of learning from experience: they emphasise the difference between custom and habit, and they explain that with custom, we can combine building on existing experience with remaining responsive to each other.
Shay Welch is an example of an Indigenous philosopher who has written about the dynamics of this responsiveness, and she has built some bridges between Indigenous and Western ways of talking about it.
First of all, Welch acknowledges the role of kinaesthetic empathy in co-creative learning processes (for example, with the help of mirror neurons). Within this, she is open to the possibility that there may be shared ground between mimetics and usen. (Viola Cordova talked about the wind nilch’i above, as a concept of an energy suffusing everything, and she explained that nilch’i and usen are related concepts.) In other words, Welch is saying that there is once again shared ground between something which contemporary Western science thinks of as a brandnew discovery, and something which Indigenous worldviews have treated as part of their universe for as long as they can think.
Shared ground is not the same as equivalence, though! One crucial difference is that when the contemporary West talks about kinaesthetic empathy, then empathy is pretty much where it stays. We get the non-verbal message on how someone else feels. Full stop. For Welch, on the other hand, kinaesthetic empathy is only the beginning!
Welch uses the example of dance to illustrate her point. On the one hand, dancing can be about connecting with things that are already there: for example, Welch sees dance as a tool for research because of its pull on our unconscious. Just as smell can help us remember something that we can’t yet put into words, so, in Welch’s book, will dance. But that is not all there is to it! Above all, Welch talks about dance as storytelling, and storytelling is a living process which is about dynamics in Leroy Little Bear’s manifesting more than it is about static objects in the already manifest. When Gregory Cajete or Shay Welch write about story, it is in the sense of experience with a familiar dynamic sparking a new iteration. The story lives on as the recipient - in Welch’s case, the audience - forms their own relationships with their own personalised learning from and with it. The new iteration thus co-created and learnt then becomes part of the community’s body of experience, as well.
Dance, in Welch’s sense, is about shared becoming: the above means that a successful dance performance will be one that is with the audience as much as it is for the audience, because - just as a story told verbally - it won’t just aim for the audience to have a sense of the dancer’s experience, but also a sense of what it may mean for an audience member as they write their own next chapter back into the community’s ever-growing repository of shared experience.
In other words, we are back to Brian Burkhart’s jazz analogy. This time, Ella Fitzgerald and her band have cast their net even wider: their improvisation on Mack the Knife and their audience’s response now feed off each other, alongside its feeding off the players’ responsiveness to each other, and the audience can expect to leave the concert hall in a new state, too, compared to their state when they entered it.
For sporty readers, team sports may be an additional stepping stone to relating to what is going on. Every time a medal-winning crew comes off the water after an Olympic rowing final, computers are already beavering away in the background, working out what speed a crew will need to achieve in four years’ time in order to win that medal then: the same performance will no longer achieve it and, in any case, change will also come in as new crew members do. Every outing over the four years that follow will be about drawing on experience which is already there, and at the same time about transforming this experience into something new and unique. Most of what goes on won’t be able to be put into words. Crew members will feel their shared strokes, day in, day out, and every time they sit down and talk about what they have done, it is in the knowledge that their post mortem of their outing is already a bit five minutes ago: the next outing will necessarily bring new shared becoming.
None of this is to say that there is no place for formally learning to row. Of course there is: it is why the crew members are now good at it. What this step does say, however, is that once a bank of basic rowing skill and fitness is there, it is ever-ongoing responsiveness and attunement which are going to be needed.
The examples of Shay Welch’s dance, of Brian Burkhart’s jazz, and of rowing boats clocking up the miles together as they co-create their unique rhythm for the next Olympics, have shown again that we can’t look at all relationships as exclusively causal, nor at their members as entirely separate once their attunement becomes real. The examples have also shown that to the extent that attunement does become real, reality and knowledge in relation to it become capable of developing as one. Ella Fitzgerald's and her band’s improvisation on Mack the Knife wasn’t there before, and no one could have known about it. Their playing and their knowing happened together.
I think the hardest step for the contemporary West may be the step of allowing the same non-verbal attunement to happen with non-humans that we so readily accept between humans in jazz bands and between humans in rowing boats. Chie Sakakibara has described it between Indigenous humans and whales, and their experience of dealing with Western institutions has been one of ongoing struggle.
There is also the - for the contemporary West - often knotty question of the sacred to think of! Both Vine Deloria and Spinoza located the sacred right here, in this world, in our web of relationships as we acknowledge our inability to know it all, and as we try to pluck up courage to let attunement and mutual responsiveness do their work. This is not to say that any one author can tell us what the sacred is all about: if the network is too complex for us to grasp - and we have seen that it is - then no one can tell us that!
Step 13 and step 14 are going to look at some ideas about the sacred next, bearing in mind that the most crucial point is going to be that we can’t fully understand what we are talking about.