I. If it Doesn’t Make Sense, Don’t Sweat it
“My thoughts, such as I am aware of, are mostly observations of the world, that I have allowed to slowly and quietly settle themselves into patterns. They are not symbols of those observations. Symbols would have a better chance translating. They are also silent — no words pop in to describe them, there is no “loudness” about them, they don’t announce themselves with any kind of fanfare. I suspect to many people they would seem like an absence of thought…I have also observed words. I have seen which clusters of words attach most frequently to which situations. And that is how I use words — as imperfect translations of situations that present themselves in my mind. I use words because they are the most readily recognized way to communicate with most people…Most of what I know, I can’t say. What I do say is just an approximation of a sliver of what is in here…If it doesn’t make sense, don’t sweat it. It’s hard to get words to make sense on a topic as completely opposed to words as this one. It’s a little bit like seeing antimatter and trying to use matter in its vicinity.”
– Mel Baggs, The Fireworks are Interesting
I read this text from disabled writer and activist Mel Baggs after finding their short film In My Language, and it is like fireworks going off. Like throwing open a window in a suffocating room. Like being seen but not looked at.
It isn’t like any of those things at all though, not really. These are all the metaphors I reach for as translations – like Mel says, they are just the clusters of words, the patterns that I throw at you in the hopes that some small measure of what I mean will come across.
I have a new project: I am trying to be ok with being misunderstood. I am trying to be ok with the idea that I will always misunderstand others; and, if we are hoping to dismantle not only the master’s house, but also the tools that built it, this voracious desire for total Understanding is itself a part of the problem.
In saying all this, I am still trying to explain myself to you though, aren’t I? I am still hoping for your Understanding. I am still hoping for your Understanding because I guess I still believe that being Understood is the key to respect/safety/love/life in this world. The problem with unlearning this belief is that it is true, even though it shouldn’t be.
In this system/world[1] it is dangerous to be misunderstood because your humanity is based on your legibility to those with more structural power than you. If you will not or cannot enter into this logic, an (incorrect) Understanding will be provided for you.
Anything you cannot say can and will be used against you.
In this system it is also dangerous to be understood because whatever knowledge can be, will be co-opted and used against you. If you enter into this logic, the most intimate parts of your self-knowledge will be taken from you by coercion or force, and sold to the highest bidder.
Anything you say can and will be used against you.
II. And Yet, Here We Are Together
“Knowledge has this terrible power structure of “if I can take it from you then it’s valuable, but if I can’t then it doesn’t mean anything”…What makes us who we are, are the knowledges that we can’t translate to somebody…we assume we can translate everything and that I can know everything…it’s important that we might not understand each other. I really believe in misunderstanding or not understanding. I think it’s one of the most natural states of our being: and yet, here we are together. Here we are and living in that tension and it really is that tension where we exist as a third or a fourth entity.”
– Natalie Diaz
In the above quote from this interview, Mojave poet Natalie Diaz is referring to her experiences as a queer Indigenous woman, and the power structures she resides within which demand constant, extractive translation of these experiences in order to render her intelligible (and therefore valuable and marketable) to others. She contrasts the academy and the state’s violent and voracious appetite for “knowledge” of her with the intimacy of her relationship with her partner, where they exist together in another space of mutual misunderstanding.
I read all these books, collected all these papers and languages and diagnoses and incorrect translations because they told me that the key was Understanding myself and if I did that, and you did that, we might finally be able to communicate in a way that allows us to Understand one another. So now I have all these Frameworks and I try to use the Frameworks to Understand and I think because I have them, I should know what you’re trying to communicate to me, and that you should Understand what I’m trying to communicate to you. But it turns out, more often than not we don’t. We still don’t, and this broken promise of Understanding has only made us more strangers than we were before. Somehow it surprises and disappoints me every time. So what if we stopped? What if we just gave up Understanding as the goal? What if we started not from the hope or the expectation of ever fully knowing one another, but from the certainty of its impossibility? What if we built our relationship instead from something else entirely? What might those ‘something else’s’ be?
What if we believed our mutual misunderstanding to be the surest sign of our intimacy and entanglement?
III. Unresolvable Estrangement
Denise Ferreira da Silva writes that Understanding is central to the West’s theory of knowledge and its ethical project because Euro-western philosophy is constructed on a foundation of four pillars[2] for which Understanding is key. What (and who) cannot be understood through the frameworks these pillars provide is deemed irrelevant to knowledge entirely, labelled dangerous, useless, primitive, disordered – “no-bodies”[3], surplus[4], ballast existence[5]. This is not just an unfortunate coincidence that we might now fix by extending Understanding to more categories of people than Kant might have originally intended. As Lisa Guenther summarizes, “[Kant’s] self-determining Subject requires as its logical and material condition a category of no-bodies who are separate from itself, determinable by inexorable laws, and developmentally or sequentially more primitive than itself”[6]. The problem then, is not that the translation or Understanding is impossible or incomplete, but that in transcendental philosophy (and the societies that act from its assumptions), legibility is what determines the standard for humanity, personhood, or worthiness of life at all.
But of course, all of this could be (is) otherwise.
Ferreira da Silva argues that because they inevitably reproduce a separate, deterministic and developmentalist view of the world, these four philosophical pillars also render the truly entangled nature of our existence incomprehensible to us. As a possible way out of this thinking and towards a re-imagining of sociality, she proposes “the dissolution of the grip of the Understanding” in which “difference is not the manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement”. To illustrate how we might do this, she looks to two examples from quantum physics which suggest other kinds of relationship: quantum nonlocality and virtuality[7].
This all seems to have become even more abstract than usual, sorry. I don’t think we need to understand how Kant relates to quantum physics to know that the world the West has attempted to craft in their/our own image is brutal and unsustainable in every sense of the word, and that maybe to get out of this bind, we need to unlearn some of its fundamental premises. Let’s stick with this problem then: how to build a world where“difference is not the manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement”?
This post is part of a month long series supported by the Canada Council for the Arts exploring the topic of mis/understanding and translation of neurodivergent knowledge, asking: what embodied neurodivergent knowledge is not (or perhaps should not be) translatable? What kind of relationships might we build if we begin from the assumption that we will not be able to understand one another? What might happen to our patterns of communication, if understanding of the other is not our ultimate goal?
Some of the thinking of this blog series has been translated to the short film, Lost in the Reeds.
[1] whose name is White Supremacist Capitalist Heteropatriarchy, but that’s too much jargon and the terms change every few months anyway, so instead let’s just call it what everyone else does: Common Sense.
[2] Derived from Kant and Hegel, da Silva names these pillars as Separability, Determinacy, Actualization and Sequentiality (summarized from Denise Ferriera da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability”, 2016).
[3] Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “No-bodies: Law, Raciality and Violence” (2014)
[4] See Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, “Chapter 1: Surplus” in Health Communism (2022).
[5] Before their death in 2020, Mel’s longtime blog was Ballastexistenz, which as they write, was “taken from the historical concept of “ballast existence”, or ‘ballast life’, that was applied to disabled people in order to make us seem like useless eaters, lives unworthy of life”.
[6] Guenther, Lisa. “Abolish the World as we Know it: Notes for a Practice of Phenomenology Beyond Critique” in Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2022.
[7] “The principle of nonlocality in quantum mechanics says that quantum particles can “know” the states of other quantum particles, even at great distances, and correlate their behaviors with each other instantaneously. It is instantaneous action-at-a-distance”. http://www.quantumphysicslady.org/glossary/quantum-nonlocality/