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 21^st 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 21^st 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 20^th 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 7^th to 11^th 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.”