Positionality,
Fugitivity, and Epistemic Humility
2021
introduced me to new working vocabulary around personhood, the pursuit of
knowledge, freedom, culture, and socialization.
I will first explain three terms.
Then I report a summit where these surfaced in context and were experienced
by three colleagues and me.
Positionality
The
term Positionality came to my attention attending the Indigenous Lifeways
Religion and Ecology Summit hosted by the California Institute of Integral
Studies [CIIS] March 2021. Almost all the presenters were of indigenous or
mixed ancestry. Each began by stating
her or his name or names in different languages, place of birth, ancestry,
places they have lived, worked, studied, origins and features of their
ancestors. With each place named, a
unique cluster around the person becomes visible of time, geography, ecology,
and social structure.
Truth
and Reconciliation processes – begun in South Africa in 1996 after the end of
apartheid -- perhaps began this trend of
paying public attention to social
atonement. Current inheritors of social
systems thus grapple with the centuries-old crimes attendant upon
colonization: murder, enslavement,
torture, abuse, theft of land and resources, invasion, occupation, and
cover-ups. Residue of these crimes lingers in ongoing social, legal, ecological,
economic, educational, and health systems.
Positionality,
with its conscious orientations of self in the context of nature, time, and
society, might be a next iteration of land acknowledgement. Individuals in the
past few years often include land acknowledgement when they introduce
themselves to new groups. This gesture
has merit as an attempt at public respect, perhaps a hint of atonement. Pronouncing correctly the name of the
original inhabitants of the land on which one is standing has become common
practice at the beginning of public events in some countries.
Positionality
– where all attendees have an opportunity to describe themselves as originally indigenous
to places and inheritors of social origins -- is a more complex step toward
creating a new level of social ceremony conscious of these systemic legacies. Such a practice indicates the willingness of
all people attending to situate their gathering together truthfully and comprehensively.
The whole group begins with each person stating their positionality – no
response or feedback is given. Learning others’ realities in their own words
would be a helpful way for a class to begin, or a working group – people who
will have a significant interplay with each other for a duration of time. Symposia, conferences, colloquiums are ideal
incubators for such new practices, since they are dedicated to learning and
sharing new trends and research.
The human body constitutes a live geography, as does the
spirit and the identity that abides within it. To live one’s genius is to
dwell easily at the crossing point where all the elements of our life and our
inheritance join and make a meeting. We might think
of ourselves as each like a created geography, a confluence of inherited
flows. Each one of us has a unique
signature, inherited from our ancestors, our landscape, our language,
underneath it a half-hidden geology of existence: memories, hurts, triumphs and
stories in a lineage that have not yet been fully told. -- David Whyte *
Applications
of Positionality:
(1)
Two colleagues and I gave a workshop for the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher
Training in March 2021: “Gathering
Ancestors and Children of the Future to Create a New Treaty for America”.
We asked each participant to
prepare in advance a three to five minute statement including: (1) the history
of your current home and its previous occupants for the last five hundred
years; and (2) your ancestors’ origins, when and how they came to Turtle Island. We invited them to render this in an art
form.
My
drawing [below]. The warm buff-red-green
colored “heart” surround represents the indigenous caretakers of the Great
Lakes region where I was born and grew up; the slaves and their descendants are
the dark stream entering the continent from the south and east -- Africa and
Caribbean. Irish and English ancestors crossed the Atlantic -- green red and
blue lines, landed on the seaboard and gradually headed inland.
(2) Aonghus Gordon of the Ruskin Mill Trust in UK presented
to the World Social Initiative Forum 26 March 2021 a version of positionality for
Europe, where colonial and slave conditions were not overt factors: the Spirit
of Place Audit or Genius Loci. Contact
me for more information or consult The Field Centre website: www.thefieldcentre.org.uk.
* David Whyte, from “Genius”,
in Consolations: The Solace,
Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, 2015.
FIFE and DRUM
Come
follow the fife
both
merry and sad
to
forest alive with ferns
and
falling moss.
Old
time companions
walk beside, behind
and
leading ahead
a
woman
one
time a slave
and
here a mage
singing aa lo no ouu
the
dead are with us,
Assembling
to
a drum
now here hear now
be here now hear
warriors
from all wars
with
painted faces
weep while
dancing
down
pain
of killing
fear
of death.
Dance
on forest floor
the
woman’s rage
the
slave’s rage
the
serf, the stolen
boys
and girls
the
throngs of poor
fear
of the hunted
fever
of the hunter.
Take
us far,
thunder
drums.
Dissolve
denial,
melancholy
fife.
Play
on, dance on.
Morning
we march.
Written 23
March 2001
Fugitivity
I
first encountered the word “fugitivity” listening to interviews with Bayo
Akomolafe, Nigerian-born psychologist [https://www.bayoakomolafe.net]. My starting understanding of the term was:
active repudiation of “the Man”, aka
white patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism and their systems.
Franz
Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and
Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968) were such repudiations. Both men’s biographies are revelatory. Fugitivity
is a name for an updated stance people of color might take in 2021. In Angel Acosta’s words, fugitivity is “an invitation to get lost, work in the
dark.”*
Shawn
Ginwright applies “salutogenesis” to counteract the pathological in urban education.
Angel Acosta’s work builds broadly on that of Ginwright. Bayo Akomolafe’s fugitivity adds the
dimension of instability, where breakage and cracks open to other ways of
being. Continually at crossroads where
tactical choices arise, the fugitive develops the skills of a trickster. The fugitive is both monster and victim in
flight from the intolerable system, and now has the option to create a personal
sanctuary, become the shaman to heal from failure, illness, despair.
Going
back to the 60s and 70s , the era of the
civil rights movement and Black Power, French thinkers in philosophy,
psychiatry, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, literary and art criticism, were
creating the white-bodied application of fugitivity: deconstruction. The trend changed
academic discourse and culture forever. I
personally did not catch up with this scholarship until the late 80s. My 1990 essay “Penelope’s Labor” [posted here December 202o] is an example of applied deconstruction. I borrowed words from other scholars -- like cogivertigo and verwindung -- to describe
the changes one goes through critiquing consensus reality -- thought, language, signs and symbols.
Listening
to Bayo Akomolafe speaking with Angel Acosta, I realized for the first time
that a person of color today who critiques the structures of society and
epistemic and metaphysical descriptions of reality may become not only a
deconstructionist, but would do well to become a fugitive one. The scales of urgency
and trauma are tipped so heavily; “run for your life!” Trauma is fundamentally tethered to human
life, says Akomolafe, beyond human power, and has both destructive and creative
power. Integrating trauma with existing
paradigms may re-entrench them. So if
one is strong, resilient, and pliant, fugitivity is the wiser road.
In
2020 and 2021 case after case of intolerable racism – increasingly visible through
the internet -- broke open awareness in huge numbers of white-bodied people. Questions and controversies rippling from this
upheaval continue to challenge educators, school districts, political
campaigns, all levels of government and civic engagement. Fugitivity adds the heightened vigilance of
flight to moral ethical repudiation and the tasks of deconstruction of white
supremacy and its residue everywhere.
I hope to compare Bayo
Akomolafe’s ideas on fugitivity and trauma with Wetiko, which I wrote about in
my last post, Liminal Weaver 30 December 2021.
*Angel Acosta’s Asynchronous
Conversations during the Healing Centered Education Summit 7-11 Oct 2021; one
with Shawn Ginwright, and one with Bayo Akomolafe.
Epistemic Humility
The
acknowledgement that one’s knowledge and understanding are always incomplete is
a good place to start understanding epistemic humility. Not all teachers, scholars, leaders,
authority figures practice this virtue.
Some fields of inquiry inculcate consciousness of one’s attitudes and
behavior; others omit self-observation.
I
first heard this term in early 2020 from Daniel Schmachtenberger, who published
a position paper “The Consilience Project:
Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century” 30 March 2021
[https://consilienceproject.org].
“The stance of epistemic
humility is proposed as core to a new ethos for digital media in the 21st
century. It is the core of a new ethos
of learning…an ethos of learning involves public commitments to deeper
principles of epistemology and communication…..
Schmachtenberger
defined epistemic nihilism as “a
diffuse and usually unconscious feeling that it is impossible to really know
anything.” Whereas epistemic hubris insists that “some form of knowledge can in fact
clearly and definitely explain and predict those things most important. Indeterminacy of the science around certain
complex issues is denied.”
Neither hubris nor nihilisim allow for learning. If you already know, you cannot learn. If learning is impossible, because truth is
irrelevant, then learning will also be ruled out as a nonstarter. Learning requires an attitude of epistemic
humility, which threads the needle between hubris and nihilism, and puts us on
a steep and narrow path out of the growing darkness of the perfect storm. Epistemic humility differs from nihilism
because it does not claim that facts and truths are impossible or irrelevant….
Many things can be known, and they can be known with
humility. This implies a broad commitment to recognizing possible limitations
and errors, while remaining open to continued learning. Humility differs from
hubris because it does not claim to know absolutely and definitely, but always
leaves questions on the table, with open invitations for more. This kind of humility implies a commitment to
appropriate methods and rigor; it is a commitment to not just the right intent
but also the awareness that the right capabilities and technologies matter.
Learning comes to be understood as part of knowing, and that means having a
posture that allows us to learn together.
That simply can’t be done in a mood of “post-truth” nihilism, nor from
the stance of already knowing and doubling down with polarizing hubris.
Innumerable
public figures demonstrate epistemic hubris and suffer the consequences. Jordan
Peterson comes immediately to mind.
Several in-depth studies in recent years will lay it out.
“An Epistemic Thunderstorm: What We
Learned and Failed to Learn from Jordan Peterson’s Rise to Fame” is a
consummate report from Jonathan Rowson, who interviewed Peterson several hours
and read his work extensively. Peterson’s
academic preparation in clinical psychology, a highly computational field where
metrics are always key and determinant, is at odds with the fields in which he
lectures and writes: theology, mythology, philosophy, and literature. [https://integralreview.org/issues/vol_16_no_2_rowson_an_epistemic_thunderstorm.pdf] Rowson:
… the root of the nerve
goes deeper still. Much of Western intellectual life, including some of the mistrust
between the sciences and the humanities, stems from an unresolved tension
between two paradigmatic approaches to knowledge. Underlying many of the
debates Peterson is involved in, is a broadly modernist either/or mentality:
defining to exclude, reducing to explain, and narrating as if there was one
story, and they are up against the both/and insistence of postmodernism, in
which ideas are fuzzy edged and cross-pollinating, context is critical, and
values and stories are plural. This is the underlying skirmish in which
questions of gender fluidity become not niche but emblematic – are you either a man or a woman, or can you, somehow, be neither or both?
Peterson’s broader
loathing of postmodernism stems from treating it like a discrete cultural virus
requiring mass inoculation, rather than a diverse and divergent set of ideas
that one might learn to live with and sometimes through. He has a tendency to
argue by shutting down both/and complexities and doubling down on either/or
rhetoric; some things are true and others are false, and science is our guide.
“No! Wrong!” he is fond of saying. Those with both/and sensibilities say that
truth may be scientific and objective but it is also subjective and relative,
and power and culture are also our guides. The either/or sensibility neglects
context and perspective and uniqueness. However, in its insistence on its own
exclusive truth, postmodern both/and self- righteousness subtly contains the
either/or it purports to transcend. That is why “it’s all relative” is an
absolutist statement, and Blake’s celebrated line “to generalize is to be an
idiot” is, by definition, an idiotic thing to say.
The challenge is that
both claims remain somewhat true. The truly inclusive approach – the real
“both/and” – contains “either/or” and “both/and.” Perspectivism of that kind is chastened
objectivism, in which we forgo the immaturity of mad relativism but insist on
putting perspective at the heart of realism. We learn from relativism but don’t
submit to it; we have a both/and perspective but don’t lose our either/or
discernment or resolve. That kind of perspective is the cultural pattern waiting to manifest, but it is palpably lacking in Peterson and in most reactions to him.
In
January 2018 Shuja Haidar summed up mistakes Peterson made in his reporting and
analysis of late 20th century philosophy in his best selling
self-help book 12 Rules of Life.
https://viewpointmag.com/2018/01/23/postmodernism-not-take-place-jordan-petersons-12-rules-life/
Daniel
Schmachenberger’s Consilience Project, with epistemic humility as a core ethos,
sees the human being as evolving. In
Jonathan Rowson’s words:
… the human being as a
process of human becoming. We are developmental processes that adapt, evolve,
and transform in response to an evolving set of cultural expectations that both
shape and are shaped by human development. This developmental perspective on
life offers not just a new psychology but a new biology and a new epistemology,
and ultimately a new ethics and politics; it is a view of life….
In the video interview for
Perspectiva, I asked Peterson whether a fuller understanding of development
might help us transcend our culture wars by encouraging people to reflect on
what they are subject to in their thinking. For instance, the postmodern
contention that truth is perspectival may be a necessary evolutionary stage for
a culture to pass through, and for individuals to adapt to and move beyond
before we collapse into mad relativism. He seemed to agree, albeit very
cautiously, suggesting it was rare to see that kind of evolution of perspective
in practice (Perspectiva, 2018). He is right, but I believe it is precisely the
necessary cultural evolution that the Peterson phenomenon points us towards and
improving our discussion on gender is a fundamental part of it.
Finally, a conversation between
Schmachtenberger and Charles Eisenstein in 2019 [civilizationemerging.com/media/restoring-humanity-exploring-our-connections-to-earth-each-other]
arrived at the conclusion that a two-pronged
approach -- a combination of rational cognizance plus empathetic effort to
understand the other -- is necessary for
learning socially in our present and future situations. Introspection on one’s own cognitive biases
is called for. What is a mature
relationship to certainty and uncertainty, that neither villainizes uncertainty
nor villainizes a certainty? Take a
variety of perspectives.
Rational application: Do your best to believe it -- what has to be true?
Empathic point of view – what are values and
needs met by believing this?
Charles E:
“I resist my own impulse to say “okay here’s the key thing that changes
everything else.”
Report from the Field
8 December 2021
Source
School core all attended and sponsored the Healing-Centered Education Summit,
an online event October 7th to 11th 2021 created and
hosted by Dr. Angel Acosta and team. Individual experts interviewed by Angel
Acosta, panels, ceremonies, and plenums were aired via Zoom. Most of the
sessions included Q & A and conversation with the participants. The content ranged widely over the four days
and will be referenced in much of our future practice. Participant interaction and events took place
via other dedicated platforms.
Each
Source School core member shared significant experiences with the Source School
core team, who then reflected back. [https://thesourceschool.org] Here
are reports from that process.
Rosemary
McMullen 20 October 2021:
Angel
modeled and invoked tenderness, gentleness, ease, no game-playing. He and his
team had facilitated a “healing remedy” for white supremacist scholarly
gatherings. De-colonizing and living fugitively amid the dominant dying culture
were key refrains of the Summit.
When
Angel Acosta said in the closing ceremony that there had been “so many moments
of people being broken open”, I see a variety of transformative breakthroughs,
probably as many as there were participants.
Some of the ones I can think of:
- · breaking the bonds of social
conditioning
- · white-bodied attendees
[forced to be] present in wholly new ways;
- · waking up to the truths of
historical and ongoing trauma in society and schools;
- · living “the sacredness of who
we are” in the words of indigenous elder Jerry Trueda;
- · planning how to “operate as
spiritual beings”, in the words of Dr. Yolanda Seeley-Ruiz.
Lisa Sattell 27 October 2021:
I appreciated being part of
the virtuous feedback loop: a lemniscate of limiting myself, my agency, while
immersing in other perspectives.
Angel was evaluating and
reframing the process and participants through the days.
I learned to be sensitive to
others also going through new experiences in this slowed-down well-being
gathering.
We were seeking new social
forms, co-creating the warm container where crimes, trauma, toxic residue of
old systems imprinted in us -- thinking, speaking, body language -- are in
upheaval.
The Summit thus was an
example of autopoesis, conscious self-creation.
Jennifer Chace 18 November
2021:
I lived into awareness of
“the conjoined twins of white supremacy and racialized capitalism” as
ever-present and ongoing.
The issues are so urgent we
must slow down to act deliberately. Quickness is superficial, not equal to the
moral responsibility we face. Actually
this is what children do.
I am part of an ongoing
indigenous Maine group where this also happens. The indigenous atmosphere is
quite different from the Summit when it comes to digesting toxicity. We have to live into it as we do our healing
work.
Joan Jaeckel 7 December 2021:
Two transformative processes
for me: (1) recognizing and unraveling
remnants of former ignorant lazy white-bodied days; (2) appreciating the new social arts in practice
led by people of color. They were able
to “become the other person”.
Also striking for me were the
joyful capacities so many brought forward: hip hop, “ratchedemics”, “walking
each other home.” There was a joy that
could not be suppressed -- granted the
presenters are in relatively safe spaces.
They demonstrated through generative listening their deeper
understanding and skill in the social artistic process.
Following Joan’s debrief,
Lisa invoked the metaphor of jazz, where riffing off the others is continuous
and autopoetic. Jennifer brought up a
local training facilitator of “Creating
Cultures of Connection” who has the guideline: “let the suffering speak.”
