is not a noun.
34–94–28
text + notes
by Becky FordAliquam Fringilla Massa
All my life I have been aware of not quite fitting in; connected to, yet apart from, other people. My research has been an attempt to understand myself, as well as the world around me. There are two quotes that have shaped my thinking, the first from Stromness resident and acclaimed poet George Mackay Brown:
‘It is the word, blossoming as legend, poem, story,
secret, that holds a community together and gives a meaning to its life’
(Brown, 1969:29)
The second from Russian philosopher of language and literature Mikhail Bakhtin:
…Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's.
(Bakhtin, 1981:293)
Bakhtin and Brown spoke to my desire to understand the role of language as both a tool of communication and a highly personal aspect of an individual’s experience of themselves in relationship to the world.
The ‘borderline between oneself and the other’ where meaning making takes place is characterised by movement, in the form of a constant flow of communicative potential between individuals, and between the individual and their environment. Bakhtin’s dialogism offers a way to describe this flow, with its understanding of the situated and interactional nature of communication - language as living and relational, ‘social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors’ (Bakhtin, 1981:259).
Looking at language beyond written texts and considering the context, both physical and cultural, in which meaning is made I came to see how these contexts could be understood as ecologies of meaning making. Inspired by approaches to language based on the 4 Es model borrowed from cognitive science (Harvey, Gahrn-Andersen, Steffensen, 2016) – recognition that language is simultaneously embodied, enacted, extended and ecological (or embedded) - I began describing the theoretical framework for my research as ecological dialogism.
The research for my PhD thesis, ‘Words and Waves: ecological dialogism as an approach to discourse, community, and marine renewable energy in Orkney’ (Ford, 2021), was guided by Donna Haraway’s description of a naturalcultural (Haraway 2008) world, which recognises entanglement and liminality, rejecting boundaries and binaries between the human and non-human, between nature, culture and technology. I saw this relational reality every day in my fieldwork; in the way communication was shaped by weather; in the way practical skills and knowledge of the environment were recognised and valued; in the way individuals were referred to by the name of their farm or identified by their job. This process of relational, embodied, and situated meaning making is clearly dialogical; it is the very definition of community.
The word ‘community’ appears in many areas of public discourse; in connection to the development of renewable technologies in Orkney I found frequent references to ‘The Community’, usually alongside talk of ‘Community development’, ‘Community engagement’, ‘Community consultation’ and ‘Community benefit’. But who is the community? Who is included, or excluded? Who shapes development and engagement? Who is consulted, and who benefits? While the sea defines Orkney’s physical boundaries, not everyone within those boundaries has the same experience of being part of ‘The Community’. Rather than a noun, it is more accurate to say that ‘community’, like culture, ‘is a verb’ (Street, 1993) – it is what people do.
Ecological dialogism offered me a new perspective from which to understand my own experience, it helped me to think of the community as a process I was taking part in, rather than a definition of my identity, a claim for inclusion that I had to defend against others’ competing definitions. It also helped me think about the wider questions of inclusion, engagement, consultation, and development - the relationships of power enacted between people and place.
At the heart of the process of community are the two forces which Bakhtin identifies at work in shaping language – the centripetal force towards shared understanding and collective meaning making, and the centrifugal force of individual experience and creative self-expression. As individuals within the islands engage in public discourse, they are simultaneously part of creating a shared narrative of ‘The Orkney community’ and expressing their individual identity in relation to this official version of the community. This process includes individuals challenging or presenting themselves in opposition to ‘The Community’, as well as individuals who identify themselves positively with it.
These expressions of identity through discourse can be seen in terms of a dialogical process of self-understanding. Just as an individual perceives the physical environment in terms of affordances and constraints to action, so the social environment is navigated depending on the individual’s linguistic and cultural resources, which may enable or constrain interaction and shared meaning making with others. Individual and shared identities are constantly being (re)negotiated and shaped through these ongoing interactions.
Such an approach suggests that Timothy Morton’s characterisation of ‘Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology’ should be taken seriously (Morton, 2010) - texts can be understood as landmarks in the ongoing and evolving narrative of place. George Mackay Brown described Orkney in terms of ‘the Story and the Fable’, contrasting ‘the facts of our history – what Edwin Muir called The Story’, with the role of the poet in describing ‘the vision by which the people live, what Edwin Muir called their Fable’ (Brown, 1969:11). Community in Orkney is an embodied process of interaction between people and place, with texts of all kinds forming part of the local ecology of meaning making, woven into a living ‘Orkney Tapestry’ (ibid).
Within the residency we were physically located in Orkney but continually drawing in our connections to other people, other places, and other times. We were writing ourselves into this place together using words, written and spoken, to make connections between a group of strangers suddenly sharing a physical and creative space. I was welcomed by the group of residents but my experience was not theirs, I already knew this place, if not this space (it was my first visit to Linkshouse), I came and went each day depending on the demands of family and work. I was both a part of, and apart from, the relationship building, the making of shared meaning, the storytelling and laughter – the process of community.
To the formal sessions of writing and discussion we brought our literary crushes - writers whose words we had taken and made our own. We brought moments in our lives which had shaped us, which had shaped our understanding and still informed our way of seeing the world. We brought places that were part of us - not just the backdrop for our stories, not static scenery but actors, so that Linkshouse was indeed linked, and in dialogue, with places far from Orkney’s shores.
The ecology of this new shared landscape brought together ideas and memories alive with embodied experiences. Lived moments, full of sights and sounds, smells and sensations and the emotional affects these produced, were experienced and shared again now, in this place, with this group of people. I was observing, and participating in, community as process; seeing how shared experiences, shared laughter and storytelling, revealed interdependency - expressed in acts of care in the rituals of daily life. We spoke about care, about attending, about the small moments that make place, that honour care.
Maria Puig de la Bellacassa writes about care as ‘a living technology with vital material implications – for human and non-human worlds’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017:67) - for a world in eco-social crisis there is a desperate need for the technology of care. The experience of the residency demonstrated the power of writing as a way of care-fully exploring and (re)connecting with place, which as Val Plumwood points out, is a vital survival tool:
If we are to survive into a liveable future, we must take into our own hands the power to create, restore and explore different stories, with new main characters, better plots, and at least the possibility of some happy endings.
(Plumwood, 1993:196)
The story I would want to tell is about the power of community, not as a noun to be claimed and defended, but as a living process of care for people and place.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. ed. by Holquist, M. trans. by Holquist, M. and Emerson, C. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Brown, G.M. (1969) An Orkney Tapestry, London:Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Ford, R. (2021) Words and Waves: Ecological Dialogism as an Approach to Discourse, Community, and Marine Renewable Energy in Orkney, Ph.D thesis, UHI. [online] Available at https://pure.uhi.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/words-and-waves [Accessed 02/05/24]
Haraway, D. (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Harvey M. I., Gahrn-Andersen R. and Steffensen S. V. (2016) ‘Interactivity and Enaction in Human Cognition’. Constructivist Foundations 11(2): 234–245. [Online] Available at <http://constructivist.info/11/2/234> [Accessed 03/05/24]
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Plumwood, V. (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge.
Street, B. (1993) ‘Culture is a verb: anthropological aspects of language and cultural process'. in Language and Culture ed. by Graddol, D.,Thompson, L. & Byram, M. Clevedon: BAAL/Multilingual Matters, 23–43.