Half Encoded: Language as One Strand of the Double Helix
Using language to talk about language is a challenge.
I mean to talk about “language,” and yet — I don’t even know what that means. Spoken language? Body language? Sign language? Written language? Computer programming language? More than human language? Interspecies communication? And I’m sure there are more versions of language I haven’t even thought of! Assuming you choose one of those languages to focus on, you now have an endless array of intersections to examine: How does [spoken language] relate to [interspecies communication]? How does [written language] relate to [class]? How does [body language] relate to [sign language]? What is accomplished and what is lost in translation—when we use one type of language to express the meaning or sentiments originally conveyed in another?
The more I try to use language to discuss language, the more this whole endeavor starts to feel like playing with a helical spring – a slinky. These ideas spiral into one another — fluid, interlocking, and cohesive. Each circle looks like a separate unit until you see how it runs into the next. These concepts are fun to wiggle and wobble around, feeling the push and pull of different arguments and feelings. And yet, in all the wiggling and wobbling, the stretching and snapping, the spirals and fluidity, I can’t help but sense the brittle edges, keeping my speech, and therefore my thinking in a, yes, flexible, but bounded structure. If I stretch too far or too hard or too fast, the slinky bends, snaps back, or even breaks.
When a slinky bends, meaning can be lost, like when I use the word “collapse” with someone at the grocery store to refer to much more than my conversation partner realizes.
When a slinky snaps back, people can be divided: for instance, the word “confederacy” evokes pride for a great-grandfather’s history in Southern Appalachia for some, reverence for the celebrated Haudenosaunee Confederacy for others, and horror for the thinly-veiled code of “pro-slavery” rhetoric for others, still.
When a slinky breaks, our language might have us say an ecosystem is “developed,” which implies the ecosystem is “developing” or perhaps evolving into a more mature version of itself. What the word actually means is that the many intricate relationships comprising an ecosystem are replaced with pavement and new apartment buildings; the word “develop” connotes growth and evolution even as the pavement will smother many species on that land for years to come.
Thus, when the slinky of language lets us down in these ways and more, it can limit our ability to communicate, even as we attempt to re-story and re-world.
Here, I think it’s helpful to examine the slinky a little more closely.
The slinky was invented in the early 1940s by Richard T. James, a mechanical engineer puzzling over how to improve sensitive ship equipment. It’s shaped like a spring, a helix. Springs do some things well: they absorb movement, and create tension, and those qualities make them useful. But springs really shine at moving in only two directions: up and down. Bouncing a pogo stick, clicking the business end of a pen out of its casing and back in again. Slinkies showcase the flexibility of that spring structure with more multi-dimensional flexibility, and with additional fragility. As I considered slinkies far more closely than I had at the age of 7, I kept coming across the word helix. And as soon as I zoomed in on “helix,” sources like the Britannica Dictionary encouraged me to look into the double helix – the structure of DNA – the structure that holds the genetic information of so many beings.
(I’m aware that my slinky might be bending precariously for some of you right now: isn’t DNA the genetic code for all beings? I’m holding space, here, for the beings Robin Wall Kimmerer introduced me to in Braiding Sweetgrass, to whom the English language doesn’t usually grant animacy: rocks, bays, rivers, and the like. They may not have “DNA” as understood by the biology textbooks I grew up reading, but why should that mean they don’t deserve the label of animacy? Of being a being? I’m trying, here, to bend the English language slinky into the shape of the grammar of animacy. And when I hold the English language slinky in this shape, not all beings have a double helix DNA.)
I’ve spent all these words comparing language, and its bounded, often brittle style of flexibility, to a slinky. What am I doing traipsing around with concepts like DNA now? Well, a slinky is a single helix. DNA is a double helix. Held side-by-side, language looks like just half of what holds the instructions -- half of what is encoded.
As long as we’re spiraling around in these metaphors, let’s keep stretching this. If language is a slinky, only a single strand to the stable, life-propagating structure of the double helix, then what is the second strand? What, when intertwined with language, makes our signifiers and how we use them stable, robust, and reliable?
Could it be listening? Perhaps. Let’s see (or say/hear) what this pairing might reveal about language and its power in our lives.
Language and Listening | Speaker and Listener
At its core, language seems to be concerned with communication. If you have nothing to communicate: joy, concern, the location of the nearest fresh water, the compatibility or fitness of your genes, you would have no need for language – for a system of communication.
And so perhaps language’s first partner is the receiver, the listener, for the listener interprets language.
For those of us living in the United States – the efficiency-obsessed imperial core – many of us have forgotten how to listen – or have had very little practice doing it in the first place. Spaces of true listening might even be dismissed. And personal listening deficits seem to recreate themselves at a larger scale in our society. Big language problems ensue.
Like a spiraling helix of a slinky, this point is best understood in loops.
Loop 1: Electoral Politics
The speaker-listener relationship hijacked by binaries | A weakened framework of discourse for the body politic
The United States’ political duopoly and the myriad problems both parties are complicit in creating, maintaining, or ignoring, demonstrate the breakdown of listening in our culture at a systemic level. Most political “issues'' are broken into oversimplified binaries meant to divide us, and to encourage huge swaths of our population to “other” fellow humans.
For some issues like abortion, “pro-life” and “pro-choice” are held up as two sides that, when taken together, represent a “complete, holistic” debate of one philosophy against the other – one right, and one wrong. This framing is convenient for the duopoly, for it makes it easy for many in the United States to stake out which side of this misleading and inflammatory binary they stand on, and claim moral high ground over anyone who disagrees with them. But later when policy is implemented, real lives are impacted. Real agency is lost. Issues like abortion use bad-faith premises to pit United States citizens against one another – tearing apart families and friendships – in the name of winning another election. Our opinions and votes are just pawns in a political chess game. Our families, friendships, dignity, and health become collateral damage.
Policies involving genocide, war, and foreign affairs often pit people in the United States against people living on other lands. Listening has proven to be incredibly weakened in these contexts. The genocide happening in Palestine right now is particularly illustrative. One of our greatest tools to assist us in hearing, understanding, and listening to one another, especially in emotionally charged conversations, is empathy. Empathy is an enabler of nuance. It is possible to both fight for a free Palestine and to stand against anti-Semitism. It is possible to anguish and fear and ache for the tens of thousands of hearts who have broken or ceased beating in Palestine while also holding the pain and loss for the thousands of fearful and broken hearts in Israel. In fact, we must hold these complexities within us, for systems of oppression are interlocking. To truly liberate Palestine from systems of oppression, we will need to liberate everyone else, too. This is at least part of what we mean when we say we pursue collective liberation. But of course, the day-to-day discourse of this so often takes the form of the false dichotomy. And so while this urgent conversation is constrained by false binaries (and, in this case, a lot of inhumane political decisions made for the sake of oil and wealth), citizens of the United States are pitted against other citizens of the world, and each other. We are left unable to understand our friends on these issues, much less someone on the other side of the world with a different perspective from what our binary side of the conversation has taught us to believe.
The many ecological emergencies blazing across the globe are often ignored. And those that get some actual air time, like climate change, have fallen victim to the same binary, politically motivated schemes: do you even accept that climate change is happening? Or not? And in these cases, the citizens of the United States are pitted against the multi-special citizens of the living world. If we can’t understand what our human neighbors are saying about politics, how can we hear the river, the spring peeper, the mouse, the carpenter bee, or the tulip poplar? If our human conversations in English are leading us so far astray, it’s no wonder our communication across species is so feeble.
In United States politics, at least, the duopoly has stood up a mirror of itself in how we are able to speak and listen to each other. Our speaking and listening capacity has been hijacked by the false binaries inherent in a duopolistic system.
It is convenient for the duopoly that we so often feel like we can’t talk to one another. I know when I talk to someone with a particular news source they really love, or a collection of views I happen to disagree with, it can literally feel like entering an alternate reality. Language doesn’t serve us when it has been so weaponized by larger forces that it feels like our neighbors are speaking a foreign language.
But I’ve communicated with people, even across languages before. It feels clunky, especially at first. But it is possible. In these real-life examples, when I’ve been faced with a language barrier too high to climb with my normal reliance on English words, I’ve tended to rely on more creative workarounds: a drawing, a picture, body language, assumptions of good-faith, common values, or shared interest, a sense of humor, and heaps of humility and bravely. When I timidly offer the word “búho” to describe the owl-shaped artwork my Spanish-speaking neighbor has created, he smiles, and repeats it, gently correcting my pronunciation. He offers a few sentences of English that I mostly understand. I offer a few sentences of very incorrect, basic Spanish that he manages to glean something from. He teaches me a new word. I teach him a new word. We build a bridge – maybe a rickety one – but we learn to trust each other and allow understanding to pass between us at its own pace. And we keep talking. It is slow. And yet, I think these creative workarounds, slow but human, are the path toward re-learning to listen in politics – slow trust- and bridge-building, to co-generate common vocabulary together.
Loop 2: The mainstream media
The speaker-listener relationship throttled by consumerism | Swapping listening for consumption
With few exceptions, in the mainstream media, the speaker is the media company. The listener is the reader, the watcher, the listener, the consumer. The exceptions, here, illustrate this impoverished relationship: the narrow opportunity to submit or call in with a question; the chance to be a "citizen meteorologist" and send in your photos of extreme weather and its devastating effects; the ability to comment on an article in an un- or barely moderated forum (when we all know better than to consult the comments for anything resembling dialogue).
We all know that healthy, fun, fulfilling, rejuvenating conversations involve a back and forth, an exchanging of roles – speaker to listener, listener to speaker. And in that dance between roles, one is asked to understand, process, synthesize, and check for accuracy and agreement by offering their opinion to their conversation partner. It is co-creation of vocabulary (or at least connotation and sometimes syntax), of worldviews, and consequently, of realities.
But in this context, the speaker, the media company drones on and on and on, never pausing to catch their breath or ask what we think. Everyday is a deluge of new headlines, some non-sequiturs, some continuations of real-life horror stories playing out next door or across the world. Of course the news company cares what we think, but mostly to the extent that they can craft content that keeps us coming back for more. We are, ultimately, a customer of their language. And the language of the media is inflammatory, similarly nested in binaries, and is making us anxious. In this relationship, what is the nature of our listening?
Everyday, we are told frantic, scattered stories, laden with whatever racial, socioeconomic, political biases the media companies think will most empassion you and madden you. They give you a long list of treacherous, urgent-sounding topics. And if you click on a headline, they give you a play-by-play of that topic that stirs you up, often disorients you, and manages to skim over incredible amounts of nuance, which makes this particular angle on the subject seem like the only good-hearted view one could have. They tell you that you’re being responsible for staying so well-informed. Rinse and repeat.
I would argue that, in these conditions, it’s impossible to listen well. At the most core level of why this form of listening can’t work is that it’s founded in consumption. We are never asked to respond, to form our own views, to challenge what is said (except, perhaps, in the occasional “letter to the editor” or “opinion” section, but those rarely spur or require action or accountability).
In a relationship, it would be unfathomable to never have the opportunity to meaningfully respond. But consumers are there to consume, not to listen. While we think we’re informing ourselves by “listening” to the media companies, we are actually consuming what the media companies tell us. And the volume of news pumped out makes it such that we rarely have the time, energy, or skill to sit with a particular issue to develop a unique, nuanced perspective. All our “listening” turns us into parrots at dinner parties. In fact, I can usually tell which news source someone most closely follows by the phrases they use when they pass the salt. (I bet you can, too.)
Loop 3: Content Creation
The speaker-listener relationship exchanged for livelihood | Always speaking, always listening – to an algorithm
We live in a world where “content creator” is a title, and a job – for these people, their livelihoods depend on “speaking” regularly by creating content. Everyday, they are tasked with coming up with something snazzy, sexy, sassy, smart, serious – and on brand – to say. They are tasked with competing with every other content creator and content conglomerate out there. They are vying to be one of our tired, overloaded, distraction- and information-seeking clicks. Everyday they wrack their brains for how their human selves, packaged and pruned to look like a brand, can “stand out.”
In order to be successful in this career, it is likely important to “listen,” but only in a limited capacity: it’s important to listen to your fans and “speak” about what they are interested in. After all, with no fans, you have no following, and therefore, no income. Here, there is rarely time or technology to capture particularly rich feedback. Views and likes and watch rates become a form of listening. A 3D human experience – lying in bed with a cold watching the TikTok video your sister sent you, reading the article your boss sent you at midnight last night, procrastinating paying your bills with just one more instagram post – is collapsed into another set of binaries. Did they watch it, or not? Did they click “subscribe” or not? Any richness that is salvaged is usually found in a tumultuous comments section with high praise and haughty haters. Sifting through the comments is a form of listening, taking note of themes people liked, and trying not to let that hurtful comment about how your hair looked today weigh too heavily on you while you plot your next piece of content. Listening in this form is flat and serves as a feedback loop for more snazzy, sexy, sassy, smart, serious content rather than collective reality-building.
It’s also likely important to “listen” to your critics, but this kind of “listening” is largely helpful as a way to defend yourself and dismiss your critic with a straw man argument. Learn just enough about what someone is saying to dismiss them as quickly and handily as possible. And, if the dismissal can be full of anger and hate, all the better, as you’ve noticed that content tends to do well, anyway. (After all, the chaos machine subsists on outrage.)
All that said, content creators may actually be some of the keenest listeners our culture has right now. But who are they listening to? They are tasked with cracking the mysterious algorithmic code that will loose their content on the masses and allow their content to be monetized. Content creators are listening to whether the algorithm thinks they are attractive, whether they are choosing likely-to-be-popular formats, whether they are using the right hashtags, whether they are adequately “nurturing” their posts, and a dizzying array of other metrics, each different depending on the platform. They do all this intent listening in the hopes of falling in the good graces of the invisible hand of the algorithm.
To a large extent, anyone looking to make a livelihood through the internet faces these same dynamics. Have a small etsy shop? Get ready to listen to hundreds of hours of podcasts in an attempt to learn how to play the algorithm’s game. Trying to be a TikTok star? There are content creators around letting you know that they know the secrets to the algorithm. Decline to listen to them at the peril of having fewer folks listen to you.
I suppose the hardest part about all of this is seeing the care, time, and energy so many people are putting (or are compelled to put?) into listening to a machine rather than to the humans who will be listening to (or consuming?) their stories, their tips and tricks, their top 10 mistakes kombucha home brewers make. Rather than creating connections between humans, we develop intimate relationships with the wants and needs of an algorithm whose sole purpose is to maximize profit for a tech company billionaire and that company’s shareholders. (And our real human-to-human social relations often get neglected in favor of pitfall laden parasocial relationships.) We must figure out how to stop listening to machines (and to the influencers who sing and dance to the rhythm beat out by those machines) and start listening to each other.
Loop 4: Our interpersonal relationships
The speaker-listener role in our relationships | How stepping into bravery may be the way to protect the last stronghold of listening
With ubiquitous parasocial relationships and digitized interactions, I think most of us have been there: typing a snarky comment to win, once and for all, the latest Facebook (or Instagram or TikTok or…) fight we’re having with a might-as-well-be-a-stranger. The keyboard our sword, the screen our shield, we feel emboldened to speak out with, often, minimal consequences.
But when it comes to our colleagues, our friends, and our families, even a digital interaction feels more tender. The stakes are higher in these relationships. This may be the last-stronghold of the speaker-listener relationship, although my hunch is that it’s often severely eroded, even among our closest people.
Among these close people in our lives, it’s harder (though, sadly, not impossible) to turn their 3D human lives into a 2D reflection. We know that they contain multitudes, and we see them carry pain and joy and love and anger all at once. We care for them, and we want them to care for us. We love them, and we want them to love us. In these reciprocal relationships, the speaker and listener relationship is sacred. It is here that we can learn about one another, and build those shared realities together.
Being in authentic, mutually nourishing relationship with another human is hard work. Pick your favorite quip about how much work marriages are as just one illustration of this. The hard work of being in relationship is made even harder by a lack of good, realistic models for what the speaker-listener relationship could look like in healthy, reciprocal contexts. Instead, most of us carry around fragments of opinions from media we happen to consume, we wearily place ourselves on one side of the false binaries offered to us, and we reel when our fragments and binaries don’t align with the fragments and binaries those we love are carrying around in themselves.
In order to really listen to those we love, we have to empathize. We have to listen hard. We sometimes have to speak to better listen – by asking a hard but important question. We have to watch how they respond to our actions. We have to remind them that we are strong enough to weather even their strongest emotions. We have to grieve with them. We have to laugh with them. We have to be with them. This is listening.
As adrienne maree brown shares in this podcast interview, “now is the time” to have the relationships you want. It is scary to act on this advice; it often means confronting people, letting that tension and discomfort exist between you and your loved one, rather than internalizing it. It requires trusting in the relationship in order to deepen trust. But stepping into our bravery in our interpersonal relationships is one of the primary tools we have to help protect this sacred DNA of the speaker and listener.
Loop 5: Ourselves within the living world
The speaker-listener relationship in our own bodies within the living world | Reconnecting with the living world, and by extension, ourselves
I’ve recently learned I’m really bad at listening to my body. For instance, my body tries to communicate that she’s full. And I often promptly ignore her – plowing right through another handful of crackers. I ignore my body and what she is telling me with ease. I trivialize her needs, forcing her to stay awake longer than she likes, and waking her up before she is well-rested. I do these things for a variety of reasons: junk food companies have me addicted to their processed snacks; I stay up late because I always have and it’s a hard habit to break; I wake up early because I have to work.
After 20-some-odd years of ignoring my body’s needs (I imagine I didn’t ignore these needs, at least not as often, in my early years), it’s no wonder overriding and trivializing my body’s needs feels easy. I don’t want to be seen as lazy. I want to make straight A’s (even long after anyone’s giving me grades). I want to be seen as “successful.” I want to appear “responsible.” Blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, my body keeps pleading, everyday.
“Please,” she whispers, “listen to me. Rest. Play. Move. Sing. Live.”
But it can feel so hard to hear her over modernity’s shouts:
“Do more! Be more! Be hotter! Be healthier! Learn more! Work harder! Win!”
And I wonder why the speaker-listener relationship is so degraded.
I hardly listen to my own body: she has had to resort to injury and illness to get me to slow down. How on Earth, then, could I expect to hear what anyone else is really saying?
I’ve spent a lot of time in this post analyzing human language. The focus on human language feels almost misplaced given the intricate languages of the rest of the living world. Mycelial networks. Dolphin language. Bird language. Lightning bug language. The babble of a brooke. The honk of a goose. The buzz of a mosquito. The howl of the wolf. Language.
When we trivialize what our bodies are saying, and can’t seem to agree on a reality with our neighbors, learning to hear and understand and listen to the languages of the living world may feel like a tall order. I am only just learning (or re-learning?).
My best tips so far involve curiosity, awe, and stillness.
When my stomach makes a noise, I try to think, “body, you are wise. Tell me, what do you need.” When my cat meows, I say out loud, “Show me what you need.” When I force myself to sit still, to rest, and to try to listen to my body and to the beings around me, I start to think maybe I can hear those beings whispering back, “Thank you for starting to listen. We have been longing to deepen our relationships with you.”
And maybe that’s a starting point for how to rebuild all the pieces of our speaker-listener relationship. The single helix of language is far too fragile to serve us in this world of complexity. We will need to heal our capacity for listening.
Beyond the Double Helix
In a culture as obsessed with speaking – and feeling heard (which isn’t the same as being listened to) – as ours, it’s no wonder language first felt like a slinky to me. The fragile single helix was slinking and moving out of control, taking on the form of the plastic branding of the consumerist culture we live in. What looked like a single helix was actually a broken strand of DNA, the helix of speaking, expression, language ripped from its pair: listening.
Looking back, though, my hunch is that there are likely lots of interesting pairings beyond “speaker-listener” that may help to stabilize our freewheeling notion of language. I could have just as easily written this post about the relationship between language and culture. Language and silence. Language and community. Language and context.
Perhaps, then, pairing language and listening was only the first twist of the helix. (Or for those looking for a really biologically robust metaphor, perhaps language and listening is just the first base pair in our DNA of communication.) There are so many more relationships to turn into this newly-forming multi-spiral. But having used a lot of (written) language already, I’ll leave thatmetaphorical exploration for another day.