Banter 40: How do we impact and reach each other despite Différance?

Sunday, September 16th at 7pm

at Chris Holdhusen's house 

Summer ending means banter restarting.  While I'm sad that the season to "singest of summer in full-throated ease" is passing, and crestfallen to see "the true, the blushful Hippocrene" go, I'm really looking forward to seeing you all amid cool, earlier-darkened autumn evenings (Keats).  Though we usually pick a topic as a group, I'm going to be presumptuous and just pick one this time to get the ball rolling along again.

The varying deeper conversations I've been having the past few days have all revolved around perceptions, assumptions, bias, intentions, the unspoken, the unedited, he said/she said, the ways language falls short or nails it just so, modes of operation, vantage points, personality types, love languages, communication styles, levels of analysis, levels of intimacy, and all the ways that we each operate with seemingly different or amazingly similar processors as those around us.  This tricky navigation with others is pressing with political divides, of course, and the country is ripe for figuring out how to navigate our differing m.o.'s there.  As well, with our closest friends, dating, partners, family relationships, and work relationships, how often or how steady do we grow in that navigation, and how often do we muddle through mostly unchanged since our first chat, defaulting back to our own modus operandi vs. adopting aspects of the modus operandi from the one across from us? 

How is it that we ever manage to communicate a message clearly outside of our own interior landscape, in fact?  Derrida's "Différance" may come in handy in taking a look at how language's limitations play a significant role in this (though a good PhD lit. friend recently said of him, "Derrida can kiss my derriere").   The Baker/baker paradox might be fun to peek at too.

Then there are the more popular-sourced, mass-marketed 

• 4-6 communication styles (video): 
•  the five love languages, 
• the sixteen personality types or the big five,
•  the four+ learning styles, and so on.  Try out identifying yourself in each of these links; they are mostly more satisfying than consulting your horoscope.  Get curious about the differences from those closest to you, and how this plays out in the dynamic.

And, of course, where did all of these influences and patterns come from?  Who brought you into being an analytically-expressive communicating, quality-time loving, ENFP, visual learner, and why were you not consulted?  Differing cultural and historical/generational context can create one set of communication barriers, yet even within a family system where contexts are very shared, communication barriers are frequent. 

For those of us who mistrust emotion in favor of logic, or vice versa, there is Jon Kabbat Zinn's (MBSR) and other mindfulness practitioners' concepts of being aware that neither the emotions nor the thinking can be relied upon or viewed as much more than passing clouds across an otherwise vast, calm sky of the truer self; this truer self can observe the mind's ways and the ways of the emotions with some objectivity (metacognition), especially developed through practice.  Does metacognition have a love language or personality type or is it a blank canvas?  What does spending time in a state of metacognition do for relationships?  

What does identifying our own communication/personality/learning/love/perceptual languages do or have the potential to do when engaging with others? Does much change happen for our modes of thinking/loving/expressing if we study the different modes to think, to love, to learn, to express, to be mindful?  Or does winging it with the skills acquired via family upbringing, cultural/historical context, and other random influences have similar results in the end, due to the deep psychological wiring of our m.o.? 

It always helps me to sidestep thinking that anything we feel/think/do is very specific to humans; we are not somehow feeling/thinking/doing in ways that are vastly different than our mammal affiliates feel/think/do.  Consider how a grizzly bear moves through its habitat and how it deals with coming across other bears; or, consider dogs at the dog park, if bear behavior is not your strong point.  They navigate all sorts of personality styles, body language styles, mannerisms,  love/loyalty/mistreated traits, learning styles, pack dynamics, etc. as they sort each other out at the doggie park.  Consider too what teeth shown and direct eye contact mean to a dog, vs. what they have come to mean to humans; yet, we still have to override the mistrust of the stranger or new person in our territory, just as the dogs do in the dog park via their initial tentative approach, followed by "meh," "yikes," or "yay, let's play!"  

As mindfulness gets at the idea of the mind being thinking/emotions crossing like clouds across a sky, there is a cognitive psychology concept that purports that mind is not separate from the body.  Take a look at the idea of "embodied mind" from UK/Euro cognitive psychologists. The concept of the "embodied mind" or "embodied cognition" holds that the nature of the […] mind is largely determined by the form of the […] body.  The aspects of the body include the motor system, the perceptual system, the body's interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the ontological assumptions about the world that are built into body and brain" (Jarman Lab).  

To further break from the human-centric, take a listen to this On Being episode:  https://onbeing.org/programs/katy-payne-in-the-presence-of-elephants-and-whales/

I hope you'll take these loose threads and find something cohesive to weave with them.  You folks in the group who are not long-winded, and meandering in your approach, I did my best to pin down - what is our topic?! - via the subject line:  How do we impact and reach each other despite Différance?  This could be phrased as:  How do we navigate the modus operandi x2 (or levels of analysis, or levels of emotion, or personalities, or barriers in place...) within a relationship to arrive to shared, barrier-reduced exchange?  For those who meander too, the body of this blog post is for you! 

After you've made sense of your approach with this topic, spend some quality time with the linked throughout the above post.  If you want to add materials, please send those my way by early September & I'll add them to the blog post below.  Then let's meet and discuss the ideas at hand on a mid-September evening, despite Derrida's disbelief that we ever could find cohesion or clear conveyance of anything based on language, as if there even is such a thing as cohesion or meaning anymore (post-structuralists, bah!).   Derrida can kiss your derriere too, if you'd like.