Eco-Words [1 ed.] 1032560002, 9781032560007

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ECO-​WORDS

How many words do we use in a day? How many of them are actually necessary to convey the flow of our thoughts? And how many could we do without, if we were to fast, abstain from using words? This book examines the power of words. It explores the links between communication, language and identity, arguing for a certain gravity to the practice of speech, for offering only meaningful words to the people we talk to. We are the words we hear and utter, we are the words we think, and Anna Lisa Tota invites us to use “eco-​words” to change the world we live in: “This book is a proposal to myself and to you, dear Reader, an invitation to change together: while you read and while I write, bridging the temporal and spatial gap that separates us and makes it impossible for us to help each other”. This volume will appeal to readers interested in the everyday practice of communication. It will also be useful to scholars and students of sociology, emotion, memory, body studies, philosophy, aesthetics, communication studies, psychology, and linguistics. Anna Lisa Tota is Vice-​Rector of the University Roma Tre in Rome, Italy and Full Professor of Sociology of Communication and Culture at the Department of Philosophy, Communication, and Performing Arts in the same university. Among her publications is the Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies (edited with Trever Hagen, Routledge, 2016).

ECO-​WORDS The Ecology of Conversation

Anna Lisa Tota

Designed cover image: Freepik Images First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Anna Lisa Tota The right of Anna Lisa Tota to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Published in Italian by Einaudi, Torino 2020. Ecologia della parola: Il piacere della conversazione British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Tota, Anna Lisa, 1965– author. Title: Eco-words : the ecology of conversation / Anna Lisa Tota. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023026027 (print) | LCCN 2023026028 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032560007 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032559995 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003433316 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal communication–Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC BF637.C45 T673 2024 (print) | LCC BF637.C45 (ebook) | DDC 153.6–dc23/eng/20230731 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023026027 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023026028 ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​56000-​7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​55999-​5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​43331-​6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003433316 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

To my students, future citizens of the world.

CONTENTS

Foreword Preface to the English edition Acknowledgements One  The quantum self and the power of words 1.1  Introduction: some erroneous assumptions and preconceptions  1 1.2  The process of signification is a creative act  5 1.2.1  The question is my mirror, the answer is my portrait  8 1.2.2  The overly sensitive ear syndrome  10 1.3  Communication systems  11 1.3.1  “In the name of the father”: revealing invisible loyalties  14 1.3.2  Which communication systems?  15 1.4  “I speak, therefore I am”: the discursive formation of identity  16 1.5  The quantum self  19 Two  Between conversation and reality 2.1  Introduction: on the quality of conversations, and their relationship to reality  25 2.2  “The map is not the territory”  29

x xv xviii 1

25

viii Contents

2.3  A quantum theory of experience  31 2.3.1  On antifragility  34 2.3.2  On resilience  35 2.4  “When saying is doing”: performative utterances and self-​fulfilling prophecies  36 2.4.1  “Loving the knotted vine”: the definition of the situation in education  39 2.4.2  Words that make you sick  41 2.4.3  What about Harry Potter? The quality of words in the world of magic  43 2.5  Words that change the world  43 Three  “The words not to say it” 46 3.1  When ideas get sick  46 3.2  Pathological forms of communication  48 3.3  Names are omens: is a word enough to lose one’s identity?  57 3.4  Metacommunication and double bind  60 3.5  The Aristotelian syllogism and the grass syllogism  64 Four  Body language 67 4.1  The body speaks  69 4.1.1  How the body remembers and forgets  71 4.1.2  Clever bodies: the mind-​body dualism  72 4.1.3  Other conceptions of the body  76 4.2  The “space-​time of the body”  77 4.2.1  The restlessness of trauma and the problem of intergenerational transmission  79 4.2.2  The unspeakable language of the family’s body  81 4.3  Pauses and silences as ways of speaking: the intensity of the body  85 4.4  The politics of gaze  87 4.5  The language of emotions  89 4.5.1  Emotions and memory: alchemical transformations  93 4.6  Placing people in their own biography  95 Five  The language of space 5.1  The spatialisation of identity  101 5.1.1  The Fiat 128 and the Sunday ritual  102 5.1.2  Uncle Gerardo’s cellar  102

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5.1.3  Cousin Luigi’s stable  103 5.1.4  My great-​grandmother Lina’s small and large kitchens  104 5.1.5  Caterina’s desk  106 5.2  The “extended self” and the boundaries of one’s identity  107 5.3  Model User: space as a text  109 5.3.1  When space speaks  111 5.4  “Genius loci” and the identity of a place  112 Six  Sustainable past 6.1  Biography as a form of storytelling  117 6.2  Toxic past and sustainable past  121 6.2.1  Insane spaces and places  121 6.3  What if plants could talk?  122

116

Afterword Bibliography Index

126 128 136

FOREWORD

Loyalties. They’re invisible ties that bind us to others –​to the dead as well as the living. They’re promises we’ve murmured but whose echo we don’t hear, silent fidelities. They’re contracts we make, mostly with ourselves, passwords acknowledged though unheard, debts we harbour in the folds of our memories. They’re the rules of childhood dormant within our bodies, the values in whose name we stand up straight, the foundations that enable us to resist, the illegible principles that eat away at us and confine us. Our wings and our fetters. They’re the springboards from which our strength takes flight and the trenches in which we bury our dreams. (Delphine de Vigan, Loyalties, 2018) He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know. (Laozi)1

How many words do we use in a day? How many of them are actually necessary to express and convey the flow of our thoughts? And how many could we do without if we were to fast, abstain from using words? This book is not in praise of silence. To write more than 200 pages just to claim that it would better to be silent would be a real contradiction. Nevertheless, the question posed by Laozi is crucial: speech and wisdom do not always proceed at the same pace. Often it seems that words behave as if they were on a conveyor belt, as if they were an end in themselves. How do we learn to speak and when? At school we are taught grammar and how to analyse

Foreword  xi

a sentence logically. We learn orthography, but an important part of the knowledge connected to speaking and listening is passed on tacitly (“the so-​ called invisible loyalties” mentioned by Delphine De Vigan). The aim of this book is to return a certain “gravity” to speech, and for this reason it proposes to speak less, to alternate words with silent pauses so we may listen to the flow of thoughts and feel their quality before deciding whether to express them. Indeed, “speaking well” means “thinking well”. Mahatma said: Your thoughts should be positive because they will become your words. Your words should be positive because they will become your actions. Your actions should be positive because they will become your habits. Your habits should be positive because they will become your values. Your values should be positive because they will become your destiny. A lot of wisdom is expressed in only a few lines. To be able to speak and think well is an essential condition in order to be free and authoritative citizens of the world. It is also a necessary condition in order to promote peace, not conflict. In this historical moment all disciplines should contribute, whether or not in the field of humanities: faced by such complex and ongoing transformations, scholars in social sciences must speak out. This book tries “to do” what it says: in this sense, it is a militant text. It is a complex book, though it aims to be simple, because it intends to be accessible to all, including to those who perhaps have less time or opportunities to listen. It is a small wicker basket containing information on how we communicate daily, concise proposals for those who wish to speak well and listen even better. Nothing in it is strictly original, rather it is a patchwork, like those our great-​grandmothers used to make: concepts and traditional theories are sewn together, scraps of precious and colourful textiles, with the same technique. This book embroiders concepts, it weaves words, it offers the reader katas of verbal defence (and attack, if necessary), but above all it tries to provide the reader with a brilliant pair of glasses to see better and at a distance. The following pages do not contain strategic recipes that teach how to manipulate, convince, or influence others. On the contrary, in order to speak well and listen better, what the book suggests is to eliminate control and manipulation altogether. If we wish to be spoken to with meaningful words, then what we suggest here is to start offering meaningful words to the people we talk to, because what we offer we will receive in return. It is like finding the “right” channel on the radio: the channel of mutual respect. Why is it so important to avoid pathological forms of conversation? Because, as we will see, we literally are the words we hear and say. The discursive flow we are immersed in constitutes our subjectivity. If we stop and think about it, how is it possible to preserve our self-​esteem if we are constantly exposed to speakers who refer to us as “stupid”? It might be

xii Foreword

possible, still, we are forced to deal with the definitions we are given by others. Speaking with others is like dancing, and dancing is always more pleasant if we do not step on each other’s toes. The relationship between identity and words has a very long history, it takes shape at a specific time in our life with a ritual, one that can take various forms depending on our religion, culture, or society. In our own Western culture, for example, the link between identity and words is established by baptism, which announces the birth of a new member to the community. I remember the moment my son was baptised as if it were yesterday. I experienced it like a gift, because he was baptised by three priests who celebrated the rite together: a humble and wise priest from a little village in the mountains who has transformed climbing into a spiritual practice for himself and the community, and two Jesuit priests who are ethically and intellectually outstanding and acknowledged as having greatly contributed to Italian culture with their thinking and works. We stood in the tiny church made of wood and stone and at a certain point Father Silvano Fausti said: “I give you God’s ear, because we are the words we hear”. That is when I understood for the first time the real meaning of baptism, as the rite that initiates the process that shapes our identity. Symbolically, by acquiring his own name, my son became a unicum and a sacred custodian of the words he would hear from that moment on and pronounce in the future. Baptism marked his social birth, one that occurs after physical birth.2 This book is dedicated to those who have heard inappropriate words during their childhood. In this sense, the book intends to be restorative. If “bad words” have been heard during childhood, the process of adulthood requires the restoration of a certain competence, that of “speaking well” –​as if it had been taken away. It consists in starting from how we speak in our daily life: are we aware of the consequences of what we say and the possible harm we cause? We cannot change the way others talk, except by changing our way of interacting. This is a simple common-​sense observation. If you are tired of words being shouted at you, if, as subjects, you yearn for more profound conversations, you will find these pages useful. Finally, half of this book belongs to the person writing, the other half, to quote Montaigne, belongs to the person reading. Indeed, the quality of what is written also depends on the quality of the reading. In other words, this book can teach nothing but what the reader already knows or is willing to find out on her or his own. For the reader it starts where it ends for the author, after her conclusions. The agreement the book proposes is to try “to be the book”, experience it: this means not merely writing it, nor merely reading it. This book reminds us that we are the words we write, as well as the words we hear. In this sense, to write a book, as well as to read it, is always also a subversive act. It is about redefining a new subjectivity, together: one’s own.

Foreword  xiii

Books can sometimes change the life of the writer, as well as the life of the reader, on condition we are committed to listening. The following chapters deal with a variety of issues: they provide the reader with a basket, like the wicker baskets once used in the countryside. The reader is therefore invited to fill this basket with all the concepts and the useful ideas that will come to mind while turning these pages. The first chapter describes some models and theories. It helps to outline a framework, which will help articulate the conversation between the book and the reader. The second chapter deals with epistemology, with the delicate relationship between saying and being, reality and narrative. The third chapter helps to identify various forms of pathological communication and is primarily devoted to the Palo Alto School and Paul Watzlawick.3 Are we really able to govern and understand the quality of the communicative processes we take part in? This chapter offers a series of katas that may be useful for readers to defend themselves in everyday life as well as in karate; in fact, words can be stones and may seriously hurt those listening. Violence is not only physical, it is also verbal, as many psychologists have demonstrated. The fourth chapter reminds us that speaking does not mean using words only, that complex conversations also involve our bodies. In particular, the expression of our emotions is often entrusted to our body language. This chapter considers the contribution by Gurdjieff4 and other scholars who analyse the way in which our body and our emotions speak. The fifth chapter explores the language of space and stresses that, in a pragmatic sense, no conversation can take place outside the “here and now”. The language of spaces can be so strong it is sometimes louder than the voice of people trying to speak inside them. The sixth chapter looks at how biographies can be used as narrative instruments and investigates issues linked to a toxic and, alternatively, a sustainable past. Finally, it posits multiple forms of pollution: acoustic, verbal, visual, and environmental. We are not always aware of how many toxic substances we take in in our daily life. How can we defend ourselves from these verbal and visual pollutants if we are not able to recognise them? It seems a beneficial process of mithridatism allows us to develop cognitive and emotional antidotes, by daily ingesting very small amounts of poison. However, are we sure these doses are really so small? This book invites readers to be vigilant and, above all, to defend themselves. Finally, the book is an invitation to silence. As an old Danish saying goes: “If men (and women) have two ears but only one mouth, it is because they should listen more than they speak”. Postscriptum It took me almost two years to write this book –​from the moment I thought of the initial project until it was concluded –​two years in which I was also interrupted by a series of things I had to attend to, as required by academic life. The leitmotiv of these two years –​should a leitmotiv be found –​was a

xiv Foreword

form of partial aphasia, which sometimes literally prevented the person who is writing to speak. It was as if by impeding speech my body were constantly reminding me of how partial and limited all discursive positions are. In the course of time I interpreted the absence of voice as a silent warning and a constant and silent invitation to be humble: I am one person among many, on a voyage like many –​we are all part of the same flawed humanity. This partial aphasia is also what prevented me from shouting. The following pages are soft whispers, kind proposals, and gentle invitations. Trying to keep away from all forms of arrogance, they remind readers that the person writing was for some time, long before they arrived, speechless … Notes Laozi 2009. 1 2 The concept of “social birth” is evidently inspired by Sudnow’s concept of social death (Sudnow 1967). 3 Watzlawick 1976; 1981. 4 Gurdjieff 1960; 1964.

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

Three years have passed since this book came out in Italy with a major publisher (Einaudi), in 2020, with the title “Ecologia della parola. Il piacere della conversazione” (Ecology of Words. The Pleasure of Conversation). It was followed by the second stage of this journey, entitled “Ecologia del pensiero. Conversazioni con una mente inquinata” (Ecology of Thought. Conversations with a Polluted Mind), published in 2023, also in Italian and with the same publisher.1 Now I feel it is necessary to change the title of this first volume and call it “Eco-​Words. The Ecology of Conversation”. In fact, what has happened is that the second stage of this journey has influenced the first, enriching it with new content and understanding, even for me who wrote both volumes. A book is made of living matter, as are the thoughts and words that composed and compose it. So now, with this new English edition, I have the rare opportunity to look back as an author and retrace my steps to add, improve, and edit. The concept of eco-​words appeared –​its contours slowly emerging in the background –​while rereading these pages, translated by Emma Catherine Gainsforth (whom I thank wholeheartedly for her precious work). While going over the English translation this concept acquired a new consistency which, as such, required further elaboration. In this case the end brought about a new beginning, as if the book were not articulated linearly but circularly. It was not only necessary to recognise and deconstruct toxic words, defensive kata and various forms of symbolic pollution, in order to offer a pleasant, beneficial, and nurturing conversation, but a new awareness had to be provided as well, according to which eco-​speaking is possible and even useful. But how to define the concept of eco-​words and how to distinguish them from toxic words? Here I will attempt to offer a definition

xvi  Preface to the English edition

of this concept, which will not however be a linear one, as perhaps some would like, but rather a circular one: that is, I will attempt to paint a fresco of the concept as if I were holding a paintbrush, taking pauses between brushstrokes and listening out for any suggestion that might come from you. What follows is therefore the “defining fresco” taking shape. Eco-​words are all those words, phrases, and expressions that do not reflect any pathological form of communication. They are uttered with the intention of not judging negatively or discrediting the other; on the contrary, they carry an authentic, sincere, and pure intention. Eco-​words are words that rebuild the silent but vivid connection between our subjectivity and the knowledge of the world. Eco-​words are alive, vital, nourishing, they produce happiness and well-​being wherever they are present. They have the capacity to create deep understanding and produce well-​being in the person speaking and in the one listening at the same time. Eco-​words are always embodied, which means they always both require and impose their corporeity on the content they are expressing, their being a product of the body, in and about the body. Yes, the fact is that words being uttered seem to be heard in a sort of magical dance by all the cells in our body and in the bodies of those listening. These sequences of eco-​words are, above all, sounds capable of creating real micro-​cosmogonies. As we speak and listen, it almost seems as if present, past, and future were constantly coming undone and being recombined, as if, while we speak, these words were contributing with their shimmering sonorities to unravel one future scenario and forge another one in an ongoing alternation. Eco-​speaking therefore also means following the principles of deep ecology illustrated by Arne Naess2 2005 and consciously taking responsibility for the effects of what we are saying or hearing. I realise that offering you, dear reader, a clear and simple definition of this concept I am describing with a neologism is far from simple. However, if the definition is a difficult one, it is much easier to outline the pragmatic criteria useful to distinguish between eco-​words and toxic words and conversations: the former makes us feel good, not superficially but deep down at the level of our soul. When words are inscribed in the body, they question us and then, only then, are we able to comprehend the quality of their resonance. Perhaps this quality can be described with the neologism I am proposing, but there is also a long tradition of thinkers and scholars, pioneers who paved the way we will follow in the pages of this book. In short, to know whether we are using eco-​words or listening to them, it is helpful to see whether they meet certain criteria, principles, or so-​called rules that enable good communication. It is enough to breathe deeply and listen not to what the convoluted thoughts of our mind suggest, but to the deep feelings our body presents us with. It is useless to devote endless pages to partial explanations of what our body, when we listen to it with respect, already knows. So you will forgive me if I do not take on the theoretical challenge and venture into a long and detailed

Preface to the English edition  xvii

list of precise criteria. The point is that I do not think this would be helpful for the journey, the one this book suggests we embark on together using the pragmatics of everyday life. I believe that the complexity of life, which we experience daily, greatly exceeds what any list can offer, especially if it is drawn up individually. After a lifetime dedicated to study, academic life, and to my radiant students, I have come to the conclusion that perhaps it is true that authorship as a concept does not exist. I believe that in these pages I have collected words and thoughts that come from us all and happily put them together, hopefully in a rather magical synthesis. For this reason, dear reader, I suspect that if you are patient enough and continue reading this book, at some point you will realise that we may have written these pages together. In fact, it is as if life itself were dictating them one after the other, as my fingers type hurriedly trying to write down and give a precise and intelligible form to what is whispered into my ear and to what comes to mind: thoughts, words, phrases heard somewhere else, in another space and time, that now resurface like drifting figures, ready to come forward and be revealed by the keys of this keyboard. Perhaps this is why sometimes I seem to forget almost everything I have written. I reread it with that same interest and curiosity that I usually experience when reading what has been written by another person. I hope that this book of “mine” will give all of us the opportunity for many eco-​conversations. Villadeati, Basso Monferrato, April 24, 2023 Notes Tota 2023. 1 2 Naess 2005.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all the people who over time have conversed with me, offering to me new points of view and original suggestions which have subsequently converged in the following pages. In the last decades I have been in touch with, and have learned a lot from the works of, many colleagues. The list is very long, but among them I wish to remember at least Diane Barthel-​ Bouchier, Barbara Czarniawska, Tia DeNora, Alexandra Délano, Ron Eyerman, Gary Alan Fine, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, John Foot, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Mark D. Jacobs, Jan Marontate, Christopher Mathieu, Jeffrey Olick, Juan Antonio Roche Càrcel, Barry Schwartz, Robin Wagner-​Pacifici, Olga Shevchenko, Philip Seaton, Graciela Trajtenberg, and Vera Zolberg. I know that the list should be longer and I am sorry for all those who I am forgetting. A special thanks to Lia Luchetti for reading the first draft of these pages. I thank my publisher and, particularly, Emily Briggs and Lakshita Joshi for supporting this project from the beginning and helping me with precious suggestions. I thank my son Mattia for our wonderful conversations and for sharing his gaze on the world and his joy of living with me. Finally, I thank my male and female students, who have taught me a lot with their passionate questions. These pages are dedicated to them.

One THE QUANTUM SELF AND THE POWER OF WORDS

When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new. (Dalai Lama)

1.1  Introduction: some erroneous assumptions and preconceptions

What happens when we talk and listen in everyday life? Can we say with certainty that we are aware of the processes taking place? Probably much less than we are willing to admit. The Dalai Lama suggests to us a kind of “general rule”: the importance of silence in each conversation and in all the social interactions we are involved in during everyday life. Silence is a precondition for better listening and for better understanding. There are a number of erroneous assumptions about communication that we can try and correct together. Let us briefly see what they are. First erroneous assumption. It is generally assumed that talking basically means exchanging verbal content, information about the different states of the world that interest us in a specific moment. Is this really the case? And if so, why is it that sometimes, following a conversation, we suddenly feel a weight on our chests or a sense of discomfort, without clearly understanding why? Indeed, when we speak and listen, sound flows from and to us forming streams which correspond to certain meanings, generating a series of emotional and cognitive reactions. Conversation is primarily a movement, not a static act: when we speak and listen we literally construct worlds, we are not simply exchanging verbal content. As we shall see, during a conversation the identities of the interlocutors taking part are mutually shaped, and the DOI: 10.4324/9781003433316-1

2  The quantum self and the power of words

nature of the relationship that binds speaker to listener is also defined. In this sense, taking part in a conversation means accepting challenges and always requires a certain amount of courage. Second erroneous assumption. Especially when we speak (but also when we listen), we tend to assume that our interlocutor understands exactly what we wish to communicate and, conversely, we think that what we understand corresponds exactly to what our interlocutor wishes to tell us. As Stuart Hall1 pointed out a long time ago, things are actually very different. Things are much more complicated than they appear to us at first sight. The third erroneous assumption is a corollary of the second. We tend to think that communicative processes only work if misunderstanding is eliminated. On the contrary, misunderstanding is an unavoidable and essential part of all complex communicative processes. Instead of trying to ignore, exclude or minimise misunderstanding, it is better to deal with it and laugh about it when something goes terribly “wrong”. Misunderstanding, in fact, is what turns every communication process into a worthwhile adventure, with its surprising, hilarious, painful, or unexpected outcomes. Even the most seemingly neutral communicative exchange can acquire totally unexpected meanings: for instance, if I ask a passer-​by: “What time is it?”, he may think that I wish to know the time, that I am trying to distract him so that my accomplice can steal his wallet, that I wish to chat him up because I am interested in him or that I am actually going to ask for money or for a favour. Depending on the context, on the interlocutor, on shared past history, this same message lends itself to a very wide variety of interpretations. For example, if I were to ask my partner this same question, having previously asked for a wristwatch as a gift that I have not yet received, my request might seem like a gentle reminder, a way of telling him I would like to have the watch he promised. He might reply with a smile: “You really do need a watch”, while in fact I might just want to know whether we are late for an appointment. A fourth erroneous assumption is to think that what we communicate depends mainly on the words we use. In actual fact, we speak with our body, hands, movements, gaze, posture, voice inflection, pauses, and interjections. Fingers nervously drumming on the table say more about us than anything we say with words, while trying to hide how nervous we actually are. In fact, when we listen to a message, we are well aware that we lie much more easily with words than with our bodies. So why is it that when we are the ones speaking, we pretend this is not the case? Fifth wrong assumption. “To be interesting and intelligent, one must have something to say”. This assumption is completely false. In fact, sometimes the opposite is true: the words of people who talk all the time tend to be shallow, because talking all the time makes it impossible to align communicative systems and thus to communicate effectively. Why does a

The quantum self and the power of words  3

pause, a silence lasting more than a few seconds cause us embarrassment? The reaction is cultural: there are countries where different languages are spoken and where, unlike what happens in Italy, silences and pauses are not “banned”. In Finnish culture, for example, silence is considered an integral part of conversation. If I keep silent, it is because I am prepared to listen. It does not mean that I am stupid; on the contrary, it means I am reflecting, and that when I finally speak, I will have something relevant to say. This assumption is culturally determined with reference not only to the nation of origin, but also to whether one’s place of origin is urban. The idea that fluent conversation expresses one’s manners seems to be more common in cities than in the countryside. Not long ago, I believe it was a Saturday afternoon, in a small town in the Monferrato area, in the north of Italy, I became absorbed by the sight of a group of retired gentlemen sitting at a table in a bar. What struck me was that they were all sitting around the table but no one was speaking. There were six men, just sitting there, not exchanging a single word –​they merely looked around. This situation of enduring silence would have been unbearable for me but they were not at all embarrassed. On the contrary, these elderly gentlemen seemed perfectly at ease, as if a silent conversation were taking place among their bodies. They sat there in a circle reminding each other that they were friends, simply reinforcing this relationship of solidarity and friendship day after day, in the course of those silent sessions: they were simply there. That was what counted: being there, not the words they exchanged. None of them were particularly well educated, although none were illiterate. They did not even read the paper, which was made available to customers on the table next to them. The TV in the bar was turned off. In short, they did nothing at all: they simply sat there. Sixth erroneous assumption. Words do not count, only actions. However, words, like thoughts, are actions, though of a different kind. What makes them different? To use a metaphor, we might say that what differs is the intensity and density of the matter composing them and that for this reason, while the consequences of an action are immediately visible, the effects of a word and, a fortiori, of a thought, require more time to become visible. To believe that thoughts –​which are essentially words uttered in our minds in silent conversation with ourselves –​have no effect on reality does not help, because this assumption deprives us of an important part of our ability to be free. Obviously, thoughts, words, and actions cannot be considered as being entirely equal, but neither can we exaggerate their difference to the point of convincing ourselves of the irrelevance of words and thoughts. The little power acknowledged to words (and the almost non-​existent power attributed to the flow of thoughts) may well be a consequence of the process of Entzauberung der Welt (disenchantment of the world), as described by Max Weber.2 Indeed, in a world governed by magic, words count. If a witch

4  The quantum self and the power of words

casts a spell on someone, this person turns into a mouse or a monstrous being. In a world governed by magic, no one would ever dream of saying that words do not count, because magic connects words and actions. Words are performative utterances, in the sense proposed by John Langshaw Austin.3 Another erroneous assumption concerns the way we focus on what is being said in a conversation. Listening, in fact, does not mean being subjected to hypnosis. Conversing is a bit like dancing the tango: one has to rely on the flow, on the movement of the other, but not as a “deadweight”. In fact, it is in gentle resistance that our presence manifests itself. When we converse, we must exercise vigilant attention: we must know how to be immersed but also detached, focusing also on what is happening in the space outside this conversation. It is important that “the conversation system” in which we participate remains an open system. A good example of this is a situation we are all familiar with: we have all happened to observe a traveller on a train who is paying so much attention to the person he is speaking to on the phone that he appears to be detached from his surroundings, the carriage in which he is travelling. This haughty gentleman does not realise he is raising his voice while sitting in a silent carriage; neither does he realise that he is talking about sensitive and private matters in a context where dozens of people are listening to him. He appears to be trapped inside a space capsule located somewhere else, in a space he is not sharing with the rest of us. However, his body is sitting just a few metres away, bothering us with its indecent absence. This traveller converses inside a closed system, as if hypnotised by the flow of words, “glued” to his interlocutor, entangled in the flow of words, almost stunned by them. He does not seem able to exercise his faculty of being aware both of the conversation and of what is going on outside it. He cannot be voluntarily inside and outside what is happening. Ultimately, he is at the mercy of this other and also of us all. The last erroneous assumption concerns emotions. Perhaps also as an immediate consequence of the disenchantment process mentioned earlier, we tend to ignore our emotions or, rather, we tend not to pay attention to how they are conveyed, how they work and how they can be transformed. Generally, we go about our daily life like automatons, entering situations and being overwhelmed by the emotions we encounter. We allow ourselves to be trapped in anger, in joy or envy, mistakenly thinking we cannot help it. Now, consider the following social experiment: one morning you leave your house and try to maintain a state of focused tranquillity for a few hours. Now imagine you run into a neighbour who is angry because he has quarrelled with his wife: he will be furious with you for some trivial reason. Annoyed at having been insulted for no reason, you will respond in a similar way: you will also become furious. That is how it works. But what kind of people are we –​George Ivanovich Gurdjieff would ask –​if we are not even capable of deciding for ourselves what emotions we are willing to experience on a

The quantum self and the power of words  5

particular day? Is it enough to run into someone who is out of his mind to grant him the power to take us on a journey through a series of emotional territories of his choice? Who is in charge here, our neighbour, who has a quarrel with his wife? Are we not in command of our emotional states? The problem is that emotions stick like glue: if we do not know how to handle them, they stick to us and invade us like a large colony of bacteria. Who teaches us how to communicate and/​or transform emotions? Emotions are flows of energy, they are like the waves of the sea. If we decide to go into the water when the sea is rough, we do not just jump in. Rather, we need to somehow make contact with the waves, “listen to them”. These are not esoteric precepts: any averagely skilled surfer or windsurfer has learned this the hard way by being hit by the waves, and because of this has become quite good at it. The anger of others must also be “stroked and listened to” while carefully keeping a distance, just as one does with a powerful wave. Other people’s emotions certainly cannot be ignored, especially if the person in question is passing near us, but what we can do is be aware of the fact that these emotions belong to another person and that they are not necessarily our own. Secondly, we can decide what we want to do with them. In other words, there is always an alternative and, even if we only realise this retrospectively, we might say better late than never. The process of transforming emotions is, in fact, an alchemical process which, incidentally, can be accomplished in an atemporal space, which means also decades after something has happened. Let us open a brief but important parenthesis here: it should be noted that this characteristic of the emotional substratum (i.e. its timelessness) is what has allowed all kinds of therapists to make a fortune: it is in fact possible to also transform an emotion linked to a traumatic event that occurred during childhood forty years later, and thus literally transform the meaning of what took place in our psyche. We will return to this aspect at length in chapter four, but here it will be enough to stress that emotions seem to overwhelm and dodge the laws of linear time, bypassing them right and left, like breakers. This is why traumatic emotions tend to ignore the fact that they originated in the past, at a certain point in our biographical timeline (e.g. in our earliest childhood, when we were four years old) and continue to overpower us today, as if time had frozen and we were still the children of yesterday. Trauma suspends time, transforming space and our own identity. The time and space of trauma follow their own laws that interrupt the flow of consciousness. In general, the laws governing emotions follow autonomous paths which need to be considered. 1.2  The process of signification is a creative act

How often do we get the wrong end of the stick? The process by which we attribute meaning to what we hear in everyday life and the ways we do this

6  The quantum self and the power of words

far surpass the imagination of the smartest interlocutor. Misunderstanding is part of all communication.4 Imagine the following dialogue between husband and wife:5 she is driving the family car and he says: “Hey … the traffic light is green!” The many responses she might give and the underlying signification process that generates them vary along a very wide spectrum. 1) The wife might respond: “Do you want to drive?”, or: “You’re so rude. Do you think you’re a better driver?” In this case the wife is responding to an intention she attributes to him, as she feels his intention is to offend her and belittle her skills as an expert driver. In this case she ends up confirming (with her opposition/​rebellion) the stereotypes concerning the way women drive that are widespread in Italy. 2) The wife might reply: “Listen, I’m not blind. I can see very well, better than you actually”. This is a variant of the previous answer: in this case she feels that his intention is to discredit her as a person who may well be able to drive, but can no longer see very well. If the couple in question is elderly, then this type of response is credible. Both answers start with the assumption that the husband is judging his wife. 3) Suppose, instead, that the husband utters this sentence because of his own state of mind, to express a personal need: “I’m in a hurry. I want to get there as soon as possible”. In this case the response might be: “Are you in a hurry? Are you late?” The answer would be neutral, i.e. it would not assume the husband’s intention is to offend. 4) However, there is also another possibility. The wife might reply: “Are you in a hurry also today? You are always doing this! You should stop nagging everyone around you!” In this case the wife does not believe he wants to offend her; the idea that her driving skills might be inadequate, that she has poor eyesight, does not occur to her; on the contrary, it is she who intends to offend him. In fact, in order to discredit him, she might say: “You’re always in a rush for no reason, all you do is bother those around you”. 5) The wife might even want to offend her husband by saying something ironic like: “Thank goodness I have you. I don’t know what I would do without you”. 6) The wife might simply smile and reply: “Thank you!” and continue driving at the speed she wants and ignore her husband’s remarks, whatever his intention might be. No answer can be considered as being universally right, because all answers depend on the context, the circumstances, and the individuals involved in the dialogue. What interests us here is to look at how the same sentence, the exact same sequence of words, can lead to different interpretations and therefore generate very different responses. Clearly, the husband’s remark is not uttered in a void, it will fit into a sequence, a relationship with a history and an identity, which will heavily influence the type of answer that follows. In this sense, daily conversations intersect with one another, they form a sort of dance: the words we say and hear form sequences, stories, habits, they consolidate beliefs and identities. The streams of words we say and listen to trace paths in the ground, invisible paths that grow into trails and dirt

The quantum self and the power of words  7

roads, and over time they become so consolidated they eventually look like paved roads. If we keep on hearing words that are wrong, that do not correspond to us at all, we become other than ourselves, we alienate ourselves to the point we no longer recognise ourselves. We do this to meet the expectations of others, of that hypothetical other who is constantly judging us, but who does not, however, correspond to any particular individual. It is the “other” that resides inside us: we have literally imagined and invented it and it only exists in our heads. It is an external model, a kind of yardstick used to measure and weigh, which we use to scrutinise our own behaviour and thoughts. An inner monster that plagues us and all those around, demanding we throw ourselves to the wolves, giving it all our thoughts, ideas, and words. We feed this monster day after day, even though it generates only destruction and pain, psychosis and illness. Was it not simply a matter of attributing meaning to a sequence of words? Is that not where we started off? The fact is that the act of giving meaning is very powerful, it can nourish or destroy, it can free or enslave. Giving meaning is a potentially revolutionary act in itself, as it fully expresses the sense of our free will. However, in order for it to be such, the act of giving meaning requires taking on responsibility, it requires seeing oneself reflected in the words of the other –​in these words I see myself, I see my history, my strength, and my wounds, and I acknowledge the only answer I decide to give as intrinsically “mine”, knowing that this answer is my portrait, just as the question is always the unfinished painting of my interlocutor.6 Clearly, there are many possible answers and a number of portraits to choose from, as we have seen in the hypothetical dialogue between a husband and a wife that takes place in a car. Annotation

It was a cold winter morning; the sun was bright; it was the kind of day we only have in January. I was driving with my ex-​husband in Basso Monferrato along one of those country lanes that make us feel at peace with ourselves. I was totally absorbed: I was contemplating the light transfiguring the landscape, the mist covering the hills that rendered everything so magic; every now and then a bell tower emerged from the fog, an indication of a village in the distance. I was so absorbed and grateful for the beauty I was being offered that I did not realise how slowly I was driving, almost at walking pace. There were no cars on the road. Only my old car, which seemed to be plodding along in such beautiful surroundings. Suddenly, my ex-​husband said: “Shall I get out and push?” I burst out laughing and replied: “That’s so funny!” I could have replied: “Are you in a hurry?” or used any of the other variations already considered. However, the answer is my portrait and that is the answer I chose to give on that day.

8  The quantum self and the power of words

That morning I could also have been offended, imagining that my ex-​ husband was questioning my driving skills. What were his real intentions? Indeed, this is what it is all about, the way I jump to conclusions based on what I think his real intentions are: “My interlocutor wants to offend me, so I feel offended”. However, we must also ask ourselves: are his intentions really so relevant? If I give another person the power to define our social interaction, I will always be “at the mercy of others”. Ultimately, why should knowing his real intentions be so important? A healthy pragmatics of conversation leads me to choose to decide what his intentions are and, above all, it implies that I effectively prefer those most favourable to me. This is an effective defensive kata that allows me to dodge the attack, simply because I prevent it from taking place. I deconstruct the meaning of the sequence of words before it acquires its definitive form. I deconstruct it with my laughter. I ignore it and turn it into what suits me best. I am not saying that this promising recipe works all the time: for the most serious offences, it probably does not. However, in many cases it is an available option and must be taken into consideration. I remember two colleagues I met early on in my career: the first was a respected scholar, we could say he was a man of integrity: my colleagues nicknamed him “I hate, therefore I am”, creatively rephrasing the famous Cartesian line. From our point of view, Mr “I hate, therefore I am” was extremely rigid in his way of interpreting and defining the social interactions he was involved in: he would never ignore a remark he thought was rude, nor would he make up with a colleague he had disagreed with –​years later he could still remember the smallest details. I had another colleague who was an esteemed scholar and a woman of power. She was the exact opposite: she seemed to be as resilient as rubber –​I have never met anyone else with such qualities. She was never offended, simply because when someone did something that might have seemed wrong she would take no notice, and this meant she was immune to all possible offences. At a certain point, due to a sudden turn of events, she found herself occupying a very powerful political position, and also in this new role, the way she skilfully avoided being exposed made her impenetrable. If, for example, someone decided to force her to a long and unnecessary wait, as a way of trying to discourage her, she would respond with a charming smile, she would relax and say: “How nice it is to be able to take one’s time. Please, don’t hurry. I’m not in a rush today”. This would take her interlocutor by surprise, who awkwardly realised they had been defeated before they had even started. 1.2.1  The question is my mirror, the answer is my portrait

Giulio is a fifteen-​year-​old boy who attends a classical high school, with a focus on humanities, in Milan. He continues to address one of his classmates,

The quantum self and the power of words  9

Federico, with insults: he repeatedly calls him “faggot” in front of his classmates. Federico, also fifteen, does not think he is homosexual, even though, not having much experience, he is not even sure about his sexual identity. Federico is deeply hurt by Giulio’s words, and cannot simply ignore him, also because if he does, the bully only becomes more insistent. Giulio keeps asking Federico: “Are you a faggot?” His tone is very aggressive and, as if this were not enough, he makes fun of him in public. He uses details of Federico’s clothes to confirm his hypothesis (his designer shoes, his cuffed jeans). What is happening to Giulio? Federico is a very handsome boy and thinks he could work as a model in his free time. Probably Giulio is attracted to Federico. So Giulio is experiencing an attraction for his handsome and elegant classmate. He comes from a very conservative upper middle-​class Milanese family, perhaps he has heard some adult (his father or grandfather) use the word “faggot” with a derogatory meaning. At home he must have picked up that being homosexual is a horrible sin, something that deserves mockery and discrimination. When he is with Federico (the fact that Federico is attractive makes Giulio a potential homosexual) his reaction is aggressive: “Are you a faggot?” Giulio’s question is in this sense a mirror that reflects his own fears of being homosexual. The situation becomes complex, as Federico, for his part, is not completely sure of his heterosexuality. Federico has never heard any adult in his family call anyone else a “faggot”. This word is offensive to him, because he has openly homosexual friends whom he respects and looks up to. Federico’s answer is his portrait: “Your behaviour is rude and unpleasant”, he tells him, trying hard not to insult him in turn. What could Federico do to stop having to put up with these comments and help Giulio understand that his behaviour is wrong? Indeed, it is actually Giulio who needs help: “Are you a faggot?” means “Does the fact that I am attracted to you mean that I am homosexual and therefore, according to my father, I am a ‘faggot’? Do you have the power to turn me into a homosexual?” This is the real question. Obviously, Federico cannot openly tell Giulio this, even though he is intelligent and mature for his age and perfectly able to understand that this is the real problem. The situation escalates because Federico, who is annoyed and offended, increasingly ignores Giulio and behaves indifferently. Giulio, however, cannot stop on his own, because his is a cry for help. He has a problem (he is attracted to his handsome and elegant classmate) and, not knowing how to deal with it, creates a problem for his companion. What is a possible solution to this problem? We cannot change another person’s question, but we can modify our answer, if we understand that more than one answer is possible, and take responsibility for the one we decide to give. “What is his problem?” “What is my problem?” If placed at the beginning of a conversation, which presents itself as potentially disastrous for us and our interlocutor, these two simple questions could spare us a lot of trouble and save a lot of energy. We need to remember that there are no “necessary”

10  The quantum self and the power of words

answers: in a conversation there is never only one route to follow, no path is obligatory, and this means we can experiment with alternative sequences, we can innovate. The answer we choose to give is literally our portrait because in hindsight we sometimes find that it also contains an answer to the question: “What is my problem?” Obviously, this does not apply to all kinds of communicative exchanges, but only to those in which there is a representation of us and/​or of others at stake, which is more often than not. 1.2.2  The overly sensitive ear syndrome

Friedemann Schulz von Thun7 reminds us that some people have a kind of tendency to interpret everything they are told as a comment, an assessment of their abilities and/​or qualities. Clearly, what is said to us may well imply this, however, it is as if in some cases a person’s psychological wounds, fragile identity, and insecurity make him or her more vulnerable (touchy, for example), as if everything taking place around these people had the shape of a knife. This type of person seems to be in such existential pain and seems to go around with a deep wound that almost magically ends up “attracting” sharp and piercing words. When conversing with such an interlocutor, it is difficult to step out of the prefabricated role that he or she constantly forces us into. As an example, Schulz von Thun presents an extreme case.8 One person says to an acquaintance: “Nice weather today!” and the other replies: “I know you think I’m a superficial person, but the fact that the weather is the only topic you think we can talk about is just too much!” Or: “In my opinion you are really good at your job”. Reply: “You say that only to comfort me”. Schulz von Thun9 coins the expression “one ear longer than the other” to speak of this particular dynamic underlying reception: people hear in an altered way, because they hear with an overly sensitive ear. What should one do in such cases? It depends. If we are the ones responding like this and we finally realise it, we have a problem to solve and must learn to be increasingly aware, to the point we finally become able to stop playing the role of eternal victim –​a role we are actually indulging in. If, on the other hand, it is another person, it is very difficult to intervene, indeed sometimes we even risk making the situation worse. However, knowing that a person habitually adopts this mode of response (i.e. suffers from the “overly sensitive ear syndrome”), we must make an effort to mentally tell ourselves, whenever we interact with him or her, that “in no way do we intend to offend this person”. Which means: we can avoid the bickering, the feedback, let it go. We can stick to our knowledge that this person has a problem, which is more or less serious, and which therefore deserves our respect. We may visualise him or her as someone who has badly injured a leg or an arm and keeps banging this injured limb, also by running into us who are standing there motionless. Or we might imagine this person walking around with one shoulder much lower than the other, which makes it impossible to stand up straight –​this person is in fact carrying an

The quantum self and the power of words  11

enormous crate of heavy wood on this shoulder. There is no point in getting angry and asking this person to stand up straight: either we manage to help him or her remove that crate of wood or the communication will carry on in a distorted way, the same as his or her posture. This metaphor means that when we talk to a person, we are also encountering their problems and their wounds: to see them we must practise listening and, above all, we must not be entirely engulfed and focused on our own wounds, or we will end up dealing with these only. Let us consider another example also provided by Schulz von Thun.10 A father comes home from work in the evening, he goes into his son’s room and says angrily: “What a mess! Your room looks like a pigsty!” The son has two options: he can say to himself: “See, my father thinks I’m unworthy, he thinks I’m bad and that I’m a burden”. Or he might say: “Poor guy, he must have had a bad day and now he’s taking it out on me, which is not fair”. Which version would you prefer for your child or yourself? There is another type of overly sensitive ear syndrome, which is just as interesting and complex: when someone talks to us, this person is often trying to make us do something. This is not necessarily manipulation; however, a conversation often implies a request. Some people have been forced to such an extent to take care of others since childhood (they had a single mother, a sick sibling, younger siblings to look after) and as adults they interpret everything that is said to them as a request to “do something”, so they do it, even before they are specifically asked to do so. For example, if you talk to such a person and say, “It’s hot today!”, a likely response will be: “Shall I open the window?” Or, when asked: “Is there any juice left?”, the likely response will be: “I’ll make you some more right away”. There is an indirect way of asking for something that sounds familiar to these people. This indirect way of formulating a question has an advantage: as the question is not formulated directly, it offers the interlocutor the possibility of not granting a request, without having to respond with a denial, which would probably create embarrassment. However, insofar as the request for action is implied but not formulated openly, i.e. it is hidden in the question, the person asking can also avoid thanking and returning the favour. Once again, there is no right recipe for all situations: we have to observe what happens and understand what a single occurrence means for us, at that precise moment and in that specific context. 1.3  Communication systems It is said of psychologists that they explain what everyone already knows, but using a language that is incomprehensible to everyone. (Friedemann Schulz von Thun)11

Under no circumstances will the following pages explain what everyone already knows, using incomprehensible words. Let us leave behind that kind

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of scientific language which, instead of explaining, excludes and categorises its interlocutors according to their ability to understand the abstruseness it exhibits. The concepts and distinctions proposed below will serve to lead the reader along a reasoned path, to understand more (not less) and to see more clearly. The answers provided will not always be unequivocal, the kind that make us feel comfortable, because communicative processes are complex, not comfortable. The term “communication” derives from the Sanskrit root com, later to be found also in ancient Greek and Latin. Looking at the etymology of a word allows us to reflect on the thoughts that gave rise to it and to highlight possible semantic changes and/​or shifts in the original meaning. The ancient Greek word for communication is ἐπιϰoινόω, while in Latin we find the root cum together with munis. The original definition of this word, at least as it was used in Greek and Latin societies, refers to “making something common”, also emphasising the sense of function, duty, sharing. Nowadays, in Italian, as well as in English, the term communication seems to have moved away from its original matrix to allude mainly to some form, more or less complex, of transmission. In German, on the other hand, the original meaning seems to have been better preserved: die Mitteilung is composed by mit (with) +​ Teilung (where Teil nehmen an means “to take part, to participate in”). “Communication” is a very broad term, as it refers to a number of concepts. We can define communication as the process through which a sender, using a set of expressive codes, formulates a certain message (encoding) and entrusts it to a certain channel. In turn, the receiver must decode (a task that implies transcription, interpretation, and possible feedback) to appropriate this message. Formulated in this way, it might appear to be a simple process, while in fact it is not. One of the first and much debated questions concerns the intentionality that must always accompany the communication process: according to some scholars, when this intentionality is lacking it is useful to distinguish between communication (which is always intentional) and information (not intentionally transmitted). According to this distinction, the social class of the interlocutor (which, for example, one is able to infer from the clothes a person is wearing) would not be communication, but information. Other scholars have instead argued that we always communicate.12 We can also differentiate the term “communication” from the concepts of social interaction, dialogue, and conversation. The first concept is the broadest: it is a pivotal concept in social sciences. The definition proposed here, far from being the only one possible, is rather an operational definition: a sort of temporary pact between author and reader useful to understand each other when using this term. Thus, we can say that social interaction (a term that in sociology is often associated with “social relation”) implies a cooperative and/​or conflictual relationship between two or more social actors

The quantum self and the power of words  13

who influence one another’s actions. It is usually agreed upon that a social interaction requires a mutual focus between those interacting, an intentional action, and a certain duration in time, as well as co-​presence in a physical and/​or virtual space. Can one interact socially without communicating? The question is controversial and risks dragging us into erudite, but tendentious and very meaningless disquisitions. However, we can state that while the concept of social interaction emphasises acting, that of communication emphasises a particular form of action: one linked to the verbal and non-​ verbal expression of a flow of thoughts. It should also be noted that the concept of dialogue is broader than that of conversation, because a dialogue may be a conversation that takes place in everyday life, but also a literary or philosophical dialogue, for example. This book deals specifically with conversations, i.e. face-​to-​face dialogues –​they may also be conducted over the phone or be virtual dialogues; all the same, they are still conversations. Another important distinction to consider concerns the number of people we are talking to. In most European languages, we distinguish between the singular and the plural, as the need for and importance of distinguishing between doing something alone or as a group is inscribed in language, even though the ancient Greeks would have suggested that the issue is actually more complex than that. As we know, the Greeks believed that the difference between a group made up of two people and one made up of three was so important it required a specific form, the dual. Western culture has lost the ability to make such subtle distinctions, and we are no longer able to grasp these relational nuances, except in very specific cases, such as romantic relationships. The same can be said for English, which used to have a second-​ person singular pronoun (thou) distinct from the plural. Today it is no longer possible to say whether “you” is singular or plural unless one is provided with context.13 The observations contained in these pages mainly refer to conversations involving a small number of people or very small groups, although some of the characteristics mentioned can also be found in public communication. When we speak, we use many different communication systems simultaneously, despite the fact we pretend to be expressing ourselves only through the verbal system. We may think of when someone says: “I haven’t said anything!”, meaning this person takes no responsibility for having insulted or mocked another person. Of course, this person has said nothing using words, but has in fact expressed something with a glance, a sarcastic smile, or by uttering an inaudible interjection. We speak (i.e. express our thoughts or dress them up with words) using: the verbal system; the intonational system (literally the tone of voice); the paralinguistic system (the interjections we use in our speech); the proxemic system (the way we use spatial distance); the kinesic system (which includes facial expressions, eye contact, body posture, movements of the hands); and the haptic system (the way we communicate

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with touch, by touching another person, for example, by shaking hands with someone). In a slightly different way, also the clothes we wear say a lot about us, as does our hairstyle, the way we decorate our body, the objects connected to our identity. Even the way we eat and the food we choose say something about us and play a part in our conversations. Of course, this is a very extensive list, which broadens the concept of everyday communication, but it will prove to be useful, the same way a pair of sturdy glasses allows us to see much better than before. Evidently this concept of communication, as it has just been defined, becomes uncomfortable at times, because it forces us to take responsibility for everything we potentially communicate. As mentioned above, some scholars believe a distinction must be traced between the concept of communication (which always implies intentionality) and that of information (e.g. my accent offers another speaker information about my social status, my region of origin, etc., but in a non-​ intentional way: therefore it should be classified as information, not actual communication). This distinction may be useful in correcting a concept that seems to be too broad, as we have just seen. But the point is: how are these systems of signification combined in our conversations? Which one do we listen to when they conflict, when they convey apparently contradictory messages? How do we “hop” from one system to another, without stumbling? How do we decide which system to entrust the expression of our thoughts to? Suddenly, this simple and banal action, one we perform every day, all the time, “talking to others”, has become so complex we begin to wonder whether it actually takes a miracle for it to work. Above all, we wonder: how will we continue talking to others (myself after writing this book and you after reading it)? We will have to follow the wise suggestion of David Hume who, after documenting the complexity of the concept of cause and effect, wrote that in real life one must stop philosophising. This means that when speaking, one must stop thinking about communication. However, keeping these pages in mind, having read and written them, might function as an antidote to the venom that some conversations will attempt to spread in the future, or to the venom we might happen to spread without intending to when we speak. 1.3.1  “In the name of the father”: revealing invisible loyalties

These pages will help us break down communication clichés, linguistic routines we learn and resort to unconsciously: I am referring to the way we use catchphrases, without consciously thinking about what we are saying, the way we tend to speak exactly as others expect us to. Who are these “others”? If we stop and think about it, these “others” are actually a nobody: someone who lives nowhere, only in our mind. Can we get rid of them? At what cost? The fact is that if we get rid of them then we must think, we must be present.

The quantum self and the power of words  15

It actually feels good, it is not tiring: it is like opening up a slight crack that soon turns into a hole –​like when the earth around an opening starts to collapse and suddenly the walls begin to crumble. After eliminating the first clichés, the rest seem to come away on their own. The empty words that we have heard all along, and repeated to ourselves for years, suddenly become incomprehensible: they no longer belong to us, they are all of a sudden empty. They form the invisible “loyalties” Delphine de Vigan14 speaks of: some of the words we hear in childhood form a layer covering thoughts and beliefs that we have actually never even fully understood; we embraced them at an age when it was not yet allowed to say no, to be free, to have an opinion of our own. Every time we repeat these words, every time we reaffirm them, we are also accepting the values and beliefs they entail, but the voice whispering them in our minds, the voice articulating them in our daily lives is not the adult voice of today, but always and once again the voice of the child of yesterday, the same child who listened to these words and got used to them in childhood. These streams of words pass through us without our permission, or at least without our adult gaze actually stopping to look at them, and can lead us to construct racist, sexist thoughts, stereotypes, to choose mean words, formulate superficial judgments, even insult or swear. Why are they so powerful? Why do they elude our surveillance? The reason is that these words were used by the people we trusted for years, and by listening to these words we learned to obey. This is not praise of disobedience, nor an invitation to systematically betray one’s family and cultural traditions. On the contrary, it is merely a matter of restoring the exercise of surveillance, of suspending the gaze of the child of the past and replacing it with that of the adult of today. It is about taking a closer look at our loyalties and deciding whether it is really worth it. It is about deciding what bad words we want to use and doing so in our own name, rather than “in the name of the father”. It is about walking new paths: thinking new ideas, using new ways to express them, which is like walking down a new road instead of the one that has already been decided. It means practising to become smarter, to be an Einzelgänger, not in the sense of being alone, because there is no loneliness in being with oneself, but literally in the sense of being “one who walks alone”. 1.3.2  Which communication systems?

As mentioned earlier, the communication systems we use are: verbal, intonational, paralinguistic, proxemic, kinesic, and haptic. However, these different abilities are not distributed equally among all people. It is therefore important to know what kind of communicator we are and behave accordingly. It is quite easy: do we struggle when talking about important issues over the phone? In this case we probably have a lot of kinesic, haptic, and proxemic skills, and when we cannot use them we feel conversations are

16  The quantum self and the power of words

much more demanding. We are not at ease when talking on the phone, simply because we cannot see our interlocutor (unless it is a video call), we cannot interpret the spatial distance, we cannot see how far he or she is standing, we cannot touch his or her hand as a form of greeting. In the opposite situation we prefer to write a long letter to address a difficult situation rather than face our interlocutor in person. In this case we are very good at using the verbal system and know that writing a letter will be more effective. On the other hand, those who are good at public speaking must master the use of the intonational system very well: a speaker who is unable to use the intonational system effectively is usually monotone and tends to bore the audience. Moreover, as an adult it is very difficult to intervene on one’s intonational system, because it is acquired during childhood. This is one of the reasons why it is more difficult for adults to become fluent in a foreign language: we usually master only the languages whose intonational system was familiar to us as children. It is useful to draw a kind of cartography of one’s communicative abilities, not so much to try and improve them or to practise the weaker ones, but rather to make the best use of what we can already do. Especially when we see a complex situation on the horizon, it is better to try and be the “home team” and choose the communication medium that best enhances our specific communication skills. 1.4  “I speak, therefore I am”: the discursive formation of identity

We are the words we speak and the words we hear. When we communicate, it is as if we were exchanging Lego bricks with our interlocutor, which we then use to build a house, i.e. to represent our identity. The relationship between language and identity has long been investigated by sociology, psychology, and social psychology. George Herbert Mead15 is credited with one of the most significant contributions on the formation of the self, which focuses on the role of language and social interaction. During conversation, we communicate to others what we think of ourselves and of them: these are real expectations, “identity claims” that we exchange with our partner. In social interaction this type of exchange is constantly taking place: each interlocutor confirms or does not confirm the expectation the other has. As Erving Goffman16 would say, the flow of sounds, words, and movements shapes an always unfinished portrait of our identities. Who are we? Where do we come from? What do we want? What are we worth? What are we good at? A significant part of the information we provide in a conversation paints a portrait of ourselves that the other person can see and, in turn, it serves to approve (or disapprove of) the portrait our interlocutor submits to us. It is not always easy to believe that what we think and say about

The quantum self and the power of words  17

ourselves (including all those phrases we routinely use to boycott our projects and abilities) sticks to us like glue and literally becomes part of our portrait in spite of ourselves. How can we change this? Can we stop having a bad opinion of ourselves? It is worth trying, because we really are the thoughts we think, the words we use to express them, and the words we listen to in return. There is another aspect that must be considered: not all thoughts, not all words and not all actions have the same ability to construct our identity. There are thoughts, words, and actions that weigh more than others, that are better than others at securing the representation of our self “forever” or, at least, for a very long time. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann17 have documented how this reality construction process works. The theoretical line of research called constructivism18 has documented how the meanings we produce literally shape what we perceive. However, ex post these meanings appear to be external and autonomous: as Georg Simmel19 explained, they become objectified. In other words, subjects construct the meaning of a situation, but because they are unaware of their ability to construct this meaning, they will subsequently tend to perceive it as external and autonomous, as something that is out there and that exerts a constraining force on them: reality (the meaning of which I myself have helped to construct) is like this and it imposes itself on me. This also means there is always a gap between the meaning we attribute to reality and reality itself, there is an empty space. Representations are always partial. Imagine a blanket that is too short: all our definitions of reality, of a situation, of a person, are like a blanket that is too short. This gap is spatial, temporal, cognitive, and semantic. This idea is important for our conception of identity, because it reminds us that no identity can be reduced to a definition or an action. Yet, this is exactly what happens on a daily basis and, returning to the question considered above, there are actions, words, and thoughts that have the capacity to saturate the process of formation of the self faster than others. We could define this capacity as an index of identity saturation: there are words that, when entering into play in the formation of a subject’s identity, have the power to secure, to close up this gap as if they were made of silicone. Let us compare, for example, the trajectory needed to go from the action of stealing to the social definition of “thief” with the one required to go from the action of killing to the social definition of “murderer”. In the first case, in order to irrevocably stabilise the definition, it is necessary for the action to have been repeated over time and to have involved objects of a certain value: how many of us have stolen an apricot from the neighbour’s tree or a plastic shape from a playmate at the beach? This does not mean we have been socially defined as thieves, even though we have stolen at least once. There are actions, on the other hand, that have a very high saturation index, because they are viewed very negatively by society: if I commit the action of killing once, I become a murderer. Again, there are many variations

18  The quantum self and the power of words

in the process of constructing a social definition: if I am a policeman on duty, I may have killed to save the victims of a kidnapping, or, if I am at war, I may, as a soldier, have killed to defend a territory or civilians from the enemy. The trajectory that goes from “you stole” to “you are a thief” is very different from the one that goes from “you killed” to “you are a murderer”. Thus, there are actions that have an irreversible performative quality with respect to identity: it is like descending a slope and never being able to go back up. It is as if some actions had an almost carnivorous character: they literally eat the entire self, invade one’s entire subjectivity and take over any other possible definition of the subject. Consider at least two other examples: “you are a paedophile” and “you are a rapist”. Here, again, the index of identity saturation is very high, in the first case even more so than in the second. The seriousness of the action committed leaves such a deep semantic mark that it becomes unchangeable: it is an action with an indelible social character. In the Expositions of the Psalms,20 St Augustine states that one must love the sinner and hate the sin. This distinction between identity and action has been discussed by Christian doctrine throughout the centuries, leading to various interpretations by theologians, philosophers, and scholars from different disciplines. The point is that this distinction is a fundamental cornerstone for practising an ecology of speech. Consider the distinction between the expressions “you lied” and “you are a liar”: an ethical and semantic world separates the two. The first recognises that a given action is a negative one. The second expression, on the other hand, reduces an entire person to his or her action, provided it has been repeated a certain number of times. The action socially sanctioned through our words is a real act of semantic cannibalism: once the subject has been given this definition, nothing else remains. The person in question is, as it were, crucified and will be forever marked by what happened in that very short time in which he or she told a lie. If we stop and think about it, the expression “you are a liar” is highly inaccurate, unfounded, and even irrational: it could be supported only if it were true that every time this subject has spoken, speaks, and will speak, for the whole duration of his or her life, he or she has lied, lies, and will lie. But since we cannot know this, “you are a liar” is a misplaced, unfair, and harmful accusation. In the Manifesto of Non-​Hostile Communication21 this principle is listed among the distinctions between ideas and people. Of course, just as a person in his or her entirety cannot be reduced to a sequence of actions, neither can he or she be reduced to an idea: “you are a racist”, “you are a homophobe”. It may seem difficult to agree on this point. But how often do we make this mistake, this confusion between an idea or an action and a person? Also in the case of trauma victims, this principle is fundamental. Once an NGO worker who dealt with women subjected to genital mutilation told me: “The woman you are about to see has undergone mutilation, she is not mutilated”.

The quantum self and the power of words  19

1.5  The quantum self

The Quantum Self is the title of a famous book by Danah Zohar and Ian N. Marshall.22 In it they argue that it is possible to rethink and redefine the concepts of consciousness and subjectivity starting from the most recent theories advanced by contemporary physics. The authors also hypothesise that the universe itself has an extended consciousness we can come into contact with.23 This is a fascinating theory that prompts us to question the theories of subjectivity we usually refer to in the social sciences. This type of approach hypothesises that all living things are interconnected; secondly, it suggests that living things might also have an extended intelligence and consciousness. In a certain sense, quantum mechanics displaces us: it forces us to reconsider our somewhat narrow views of subjectivity, time, space, the separation between subject and object, between inside and outside. In short, it poses a series of fascinating questions that make us question our ideas and beliefs about the world. Now let us try an exercise in sociological imagination –​one inspired by Charles Wright Mills.24 Let us imagine a quantum theory of everyday life, subjectivity, and events, and that the organ able to perceive how the world is constructed is not the mind, but the body.25 Let us imagine that the mind is like a camera that takes pictures of what has already happened: the mind, in other words, is never on time,26 it behaves more like an old carriage that always gets to the scene when things are over. Our thoughts are reproductions of what has already taken place, not of what is about to happen. Thoughts and words are children of the past, generated by a kind of orientation, an inner disposition. The individual is like a machine advancing along a temporal path selecting a series of options, but contrary to what is generally believed, in the making of reality –​the process of co-​ producing reality the body takes part in by feeling –​time is not linear but circular: present, past, and future are simultaneously available, it is possible to be here and elsewhere, inside and outside. According to this particular mode of feeling, subjectivity is a continuous mode of becoming, an ongoing transition between “form and life”,27 a movement in which the formation of the “here and now” always includes the projection into the future and the representation of the past. This conception of time, in which there is only the “present of the present”, the present of the past and the present of the future, was described by St Augustine: What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know. … If we can conceive of a moment in time which cannot be further divided into even the tiniest of minute particles, that alone can be rightly termed the present; yet even this flies by from the future into the past with such haste that it seems to last no

20  The quantum self and the power of words

time at all. Even if it has some duration, that too is divisible into past and future; hence the present is reduced to vanishing-​point. … What is now clear and unmistakable is that neither things past nor things future have any existence, and that it is inaccurate to say, “There are three tenses or times: past, present and future”, though it might properly be said, “There are three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things”. These are three realities in the mind, but nowhere else as far as I can see, for the present of past things is memory, the present of present things is attention, and the present of future things is expectation. If we are allowed to put it that way, I do see three tenses or times, and admit that they are three.28 This conception is similar to the one that understands the ego as formed by a stream of perceptions (to quote David Hume’s well-​known intuition), according to which the continuity of the ego is constantly being constructed and reconstructed by the mind; a liquid identity, as Zygmunt Bauman would say.29 The Polish sociologist, in fact, admirably grasps the uncertainty characteristic of liquid modernity and emphasises how this new instability causes a crisis of identity. However, the quantum self does not question this crisis, its starting point is not stability as a necessary condition. It is as if the acceptance of a constant flow turns us into acrobatic surfers, capable of falling and getting back up again, aware that the real game is in this wave, not in the ex-​ante planning of any future trajectory. The theory of the quantum self throws the subject into the abyss of world-​consciousness, forcing it to participate in something much larger. Of this process we grasp the constant flow, the restlessness of all events.30 Which makes it necessary to refer to a quantum sociology of events: I’m calling for a quantum sociology of events, analogous to quantum mechanics in physics. Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of the dual particle-​like and wave-​ like behaviour and interactions of energy and matter. Within this branch of physics, everything –​including light and matter –​is made up of small, indivisible chunks called quanta. In some conditions, these chunks behave like particles, and in other conditions they behave like waves, without really being either.31 For analytical purposes, such an analogous approach to events would allow us to grasp events in their movements and trajectories and in their stabilizations in forms and objects: movement and stability; particle and wave; continuities and discontinuities; form and flow.32 In this constant flux in which we are wave and particle, “form and life”, the self is a field of synchronic and diachronic possibilities, in which past, present, and future are pliable and can be shaped by our thoughts, they can

The quantum self and the power of words  21

be re-​signified. It might seem that the subject thus becomes omnipotent, though this is not the case at all. Indeed, the subject merely becomes free to accept responsibility for what it is, it is not omnipotent. On the contrary, the subject defined in such a way renounces control, as it becomes a field of possibilities and is aware that it can only express inner dispositions, preferences that may realise themselves only belonging to that specific field. The subject, rather than being unique, is a set of instances, forces, and synergies that dance uninterruptedly, between waves and particles, by means of thoughts, words, and actions. Time seems to collapse, the body becomes a temporary dwelling, the self an intention, a disposition that takes shape and reshapes itself over and over again. The boundaries between inside and outside become blurred, as they do not fit the mode of being of waves. In this perspective, it is the constant capacity to reposition that literally constructs our uniqueness. The quantum self is perhaps also liquid, but not uncertain, because it experiences no nostalgia for a lost certainty. It is not a “second best”; rather, it is the common acceptance of the human condition. This is why conversations (including silent ones we have with ourselves, that is, the flow of our thoughts) take on a fundamental role: it is also the intensity and the way we feel towards the streams of thoughts and words that cross us that help shape the field of opportunity we are, what we become. When, on the other hand, the “I” becomes stiff and solid … I am in the bar having breakfast. It is what I do every morning, it is a small ritual to start the day. It is nice to be asked whether I want “my usual” by the bartender who sees me every day and recognises me. I smile and answer yes. Included in the price of breakfast is the fact that my uniqueness is acknowledged: every morning, no matter what season, I go there to remind myself who I am: there is someone who knows what I want for breakfast. It is a bit like asking to be liberated from the anonymity that the big city I live in tries to force upon me. Here I am, once again, claiming to be someone special: I am someone whose preferences are remembered. The bartender knows this and along with the cinnamon cappuccino I also get my little daily dose of individuality. There is a lady standing next to me: she is about sixty-​ five or seventy years old, she probably does not look her age. She is rather elegant. Seeing her enter, one of the bartenders says loudly, with a smile: “A large coffee and a brioche with jam for Teresa”. Mrs Teresa frowns. She eats her breakfast in silence, sitting at a small table. When she goes to pay, she tells the cashier: “The bartender must not call me by my first name. I am a lady. I am a grandmother!” The cashier is embarrassed, I am too. I smile, trying to cheer the bartender up while he is being told off by the cashier (who is also the owner of the bar) for his allegedly rude words. What has just happened? Something has gone wrong. Along with her large coffee, Mrs Teresa received too much individuality that morning: being called by her first name was perceived as a violation of her intimacy, as a lack of respect. The

22  The quantum self and the power of words

bartender, for his part, went too far: instead of a small dose of individuality, he offered Mrs Teresa a relationship of familiarity, which was rejected. The lady is irritated, the cashier embarrassed, the bartender humiliated. Clearly Mrs Teresa responds and reacts with a deformed ear syndrome: her identity claim of “being a lady” falters under the blows of a morning greeting from a bartender, perhaps a little intrusive, but certainly inoffensive. She reacts badly and not even directly. She could have said something ironic to the bartender (“Hey, what’s that you said?”), but she lacks the formidable Roman accent, the mocking boldness of the Romans that alone would be enough to check her clumsy interlocutor. In this circumstance Mrs Teresa is a prisoner of particles: she is not able to flow and become a wave. A small miscommunication probably opens up a wound that has to do with her own identity, something that has happened to her somewhere else. In fact, Mrs Teresa is the first to doubt that she deserves respect; hence all that is needed to threaten her being a “lady” is a banal and negligible communicative blunder, perceived as being a dangerous threat from the start. This is why she asks the cashier-​father to intervene and defend her. But in doing so, she does not realise that the offence, if there ever was an offence, was created by her own rigid and static definition of the situation. One wonders: “But Madam, can’t you dance?” The way to get out of this situation is never to enter it: to remain in the position of external observer on hearing the bartender’s remark, which might be somewhat too confidential. Who is he saying this to? To himself or to me? Why is he saying this? Maybe this morning he feels lonely as a bartender and as a human being standing behind that counter? Does he need some attention from me or someone else? Does he want me to know that he can remember my name because he wants someone to remember his? Maybe this morning he also needs someone to make him feel he is not just an anonymous person in this enormous city … I would like to run after her and say: “Madam, wait: the bartender did not mean to offend you, he just wanted to be ‘seen’ by you, to be acknowledged in his uniqueness by someone. He just wanted to step out of his role for a second, the time it takes to say your name. Why did it hurt so much?” But Mrs Teresa runs off with her disappointment and, when I turn round, she has gone. … Perhaps the terraces of this garden overlook only the lake of our mind. … KUBLAI:  … and however far our troubled enterprises as warriors and merchants may take us, we both harbor within ourselves this silent shade, this conversation of pauses, this evening that is always the same. POLO: Unless the opposite hypothesis is correct: that those who strive in camps and ports exist only because we two think of them, POLO:

The quantum self and the power of words  23

here, enclosed among these bamboo hedges, motionless since time began. KUBLAI:  Unless toil, shouts, sores, stink do not exist; and only this azalea bush. POLO: Unless porters, stonecutters, rubbish collectors, cooks cleaning the lights of chickens, washerwomen bent over stones, mothers stirring rice as they nurse their infants, exist only because we think them. KUBLAI:  To tell the truth, I never think them. POLO: Then they do not exist. KUBLAI:  To me this conjecture does not seem to suit our purposes. Without them we could never remain here swaying, cocooned in our hammocks. (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972) Notes 1 Hall 1980. 2 Weber 1919. 3 Austin 1962. On performative utterances see Chapter Two. 4 Hall 1980. 5 The example is given in Schulz von Thun 2014, although here it is freely reinterpreted by the writer. 6 Umberto Eco has developed the strongest theory so far, based on the Model Reader and Model Author (Eco 1979). 7 Schulz von Thun 2014. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 See the Palo Alto School. 13 We may think of a language such as Chinese, in which the verb is not conjugated when changing from the singular to the plural: when in jokes the Chinese protagonist says “I go, he go, we go” there is a basis of truth. In fact, in Chinese, the verb not only does not change when we conjugate it in the second person singular or plural, it does not even change in the present or past tense (“I go yesterday”, “I go tomorrow”). The different ways in which different languages, spoken in different countries, express the difference between the singular and the plural offer us food for thought on how they allow those who express their thoughts in those languages to think about the relationship between the individual and the collective. The same can be said about the relationship between past, present, and future. As many scholars have pointed out, the language we speak provides us with the kind of clothing we use to dress our thoughts. Many authors think different thoughts (literally writing different books), depending on the language in which they express themselves. 14 De Vigan 2018. 15 Mead 1934. 16 Goffman 1959. 17 Berger and Luckmann 1966.

24  The quantum self and the power of words

8 Watzlawick 1984. 1 19 Simmel 1900. 20 St Augustine 2000. 21 http://​parol​eost​ili.com/​manife​sto. 22 Zohar and Marshall 1990. 23 Other authors have also gone in the same direction. See, for example, the possible connections with the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious (Jung 1969) and of morphogenetic field (Sheldrake 2004). 24 Mills 1959. 25 The obvious reference here is Merleau-​Ponty 1964. 26 McCraty 2016. 27 Simmel 1908. 28 St Augustine 1997, pp. 295–​301. 29 Bauman 2000. 30 Wagner-​Pacifici 2010. 31 According to one physicist: “Their behavior depends on how much ‘stuff’ (other chunks) is nearby. If a chunk is very isolated from everything else (e.g., a lone electron in a cold, dark vacuum), then it behaves like a wave. If there’s a lot of stuff nearby (e.g., an electron in a metal), then the chunk’s position gets ‘localized’; you basically know where it is. That means the chunk behaves like a particle”. (Personal communication, Leon Maurer. See Wagner-​Pacifici 2016, p. 26). 32 Ibid., p. 23.

Two BETWEEN CONVERSATION AND REALITY

2.1  Introduction: on the quality of conversations, and their relationship to reality

From Father Giovanni’s story in Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men:1 Faith cannot be given to a man. Faith arises in a man and increases in its action in him not as the result of automatic learning, that is, not from any automatic ascertainment of height, breadth, thickness, form and weight, or from the perception of anything by sight, hearing, touch, smell or taste, but from understanding. Understanding is the essence obtained from information intentionally learned and from all kinds of experiences personally experienced. For example, if my own beloved brother were to come to me here at this moment and urgently entreat me to give him merely a tenth part of my understanding, and if I myself wished with my whole being to do so, yet I could not, in spite of my most ardent desire, give him even the thousandth part of this understanding, as he has neither the knowledge nor the experience which I have quite accidentally acquired and lived through in my life. No, Professor, it is a hundred times easier, as it is said in the Gospels, “for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” than for anyone to give to another the understanding formed in him about anything whatsoever. I formerly also thought as you do and even chose the activity of a missionary in order to teach everyone faith in Christ. I wanted to make everyone as happy as I myself felt from faith in the teachings of Jesus

DOI: 10.4324/9781003433316-2

26  Between conversation and reality

Christ. But to wish to do that by, so to say, grafting faith on by words is just like wishing to fill someone with bread merely by looking at him. Understanding is acquired, as I have already said, from the totality of information intentionally learned and from personal experiencings; whereas knowledge is only the automatic remembrance of words in a certain sequence. In this passage, through the words of Father Giovanni, Gurdjieff sets out a distinction between knowledge and understanding. Where the first is merely bound up with the intellect, the second is connected to the intellectual faculties as they are connected to the accumulation of experience. In other words, in line with this perspective, knowledge that does not take into account the role of feelings and emotions as they are experienced in daily life –​and which is unable to interact with them –​would be a stunted form of knowledge. It is worth remembering that the relationship between knowledge and experience is a classic theme, one which has spanned both traditional sociological thought (notably in the work of Walter Benjamin), as well as contemporary reflections, in various forms.2 We may think of the studies on the relationship between doubt and what we take for granted (from the sceptical notion of έποχή elaborated on by Edmund Husserl, to the phenomenological reflections of Alfred Schütz3), or theories concerned with the relationship between experience and everyday life.4 But let us return to the words of Father Giovanni, through which Gurdjieff offers us something significant: Not only is it impossible, even with all one’s desire, to give to another one’s own inner understanding, formed in the course of life from the said factors, but also, as I recently established with certain other brothers about ministry, there exists a law that the quality of what is perceived by anyone when another person tells him something, either for his knowledge or his understanding, depends on the quality of the data formed in the person speaking.5 This observation is followed by the famous passage in which Father Giovanni tells the story of two monks: Brother Ahl and Brother Sez. This moment also famously features in the film of Meetings with Remarkable Men, which Peter Brook made about Gurdjieff’s life: To help you understand what I have just said, I will cite as an example the fact which arouses in us the desire to make investigations and led us to the discovery of this law. I must tell you that in our brotherhood there are two very old brethren; one is called Brother Ahl and the other Brother Sez. These brethren have

Between conversation and reality  27

voluntarily undertaken the obligation of periodically visiting all the monasteries of our order and explaining various aspects of the essence of divinity. Our brotherhood has four monasteries, one of them ours, the second in the valley of the Pamir, the third in Tibet, and the fourth in India. And so these brethren, Ahl and Sez, constantly travel from one monastery to another and preach there. They come to us once or twice a year. Their arrival at our ministry is considered among us a very great event. On the days when either of them is here, the soul of every one of us experiences pure heavenly pleasure and tenderness. The sermons of these two brethren, who are to an almost equal degree holy men and who speak the same truths, have nevertheless a different effect on all our brethren and on me in particular. When Brother Sez speaks, it is indeed like the song of the birds in Paradise; from what he says one is quite, so to say, turned inside out; one becomes as though entranced. His speech “purls” like a stream and one no longer wishes anything else in life but to listen to the voice of Brother Sez. But Brother Ahl’s speech has almost the opposite effect. He speaks badly and indistinctly, evidently because of his age. No one knows how old he is. Brother Sez is also very old –​it is said three hundred years old –​ but he is still a hale old man, whereas in Brother Ahl the weakness of old age is clearly evident. The stronger the impression made at the moment by the words of Brother Sez, the more this impression evaporates, until then ultimately remains in the hearer nothing at all. But in the case of Brother Ahl, although at first what he says makes almost no impression, later, the gist of it takes on a definite form, more and more each day, and is instilled as a whole into the heart and remains there for ever. When we became aware of this and began trying to discover why it was so, we came to the unanimous conclusion that the sermons of Brother Sez proceeded only from his mind, and therefore acted on our minds, whereas those of Brother Ahl proceeded from his being and acted on our being. Yes, Professor, knowledge and understanding are quite different. Only understanding can lead to being, whereas knowledge is but a passing presence in it. New knowledge displaces the old and the result is, as it were, a pouring from the empty into the void. One must strive to understand; this alone can lead to our Lord God. And in order to be able to understand the phenomena of nature, according and not according to law, proceeding around us, one must first of all consciously perceive and assimilate a mass of information concerning objective truth and the real events which took place on earth

28  Between conversation and reality

in the past; and secondly, one must bear in oneself all the results of all kinds of voluntary and involuntary experiencings. We had many other similar never-​to-​be-​forgotten talks with Father Giovanni.6 The difference between Brother Ahl and Brother Sez prompts a series of considerations: Firstly, it alerts us to the fact that we must suspend our intellectual judgement –​i.e. practise έποχή as theorised by Husserl –​insofar as what the intellect picks up on is not the essential, but the superfluous. Relying on the intellect would cause us to prefer the sermons of Brother Sez, but in the long run those of Brother Ahl are revealed as more effective. When based on the intellect our judgement is misleading, as Gurdjieff tells us through the words of Father Giovanni. Secondly, the effectiveness of a conversation cannot be measured in the short term: a period of time is required for a message to take effect. Thirdly, high-​ quality communication is unforgettable: in other words, it travels through time like an arrow fired from the present into the future. Fourthly, the rhetorical elegance of a particular discourse does not amount to its effectiveness, insofar as it speaks to the intellect –​whereas truly significant conversation speaks to the heart and soul of the listener. Once again, Gurdjieff underlines how, in his view, knowledge that is disconnected from experience, and therefore removed from the world of feeling and emotion, remains sterile, unable to produce lasting effects in the human soul. Furthermore, a rather complex conception of the individual emerges in this passage, one in which Gurdjieff recognises –​alongside rationality –​the importance and intelligence of the world of feelings and emotions. Think about how many Brother Sezs we have come across in everyday life, whether that is in education or in professional life. How many times has a speech to a crowd or a conversation moved us to such a degree (like one of Brother Ahl’s sermons) that it has rendered that particular sequence of words unforgettable? Have we experienced conversations that are capable of bringing about profound change deep within us? Are such conversations rare? When and with whom did they happen? And above all: what are the feelings associated with them in our minds? What are the emotions we have connected to those unforgettable sequences of words? Broadening these questions can be a useful exercise for us all, emphasising the intrinsically relational nature of every conversation. In other words, if it is true that “the quality of what is perceived by anyone when another person tells him something, either for his knowledge or his understanding,

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depends on the quality of the data formed in the person speaking”,7 it is worth adding –​as Italo Calvino notes in the famous dialogue between Kublai and Marco Polo –​that the person listening hears only the words they are expecting to hear: Kublai asks Marco, “When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?” “I speak and speak”, Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It’s not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear”.8 Put another way, were we to step outside the control mindset, and accept that the meanings of the messages exchanged in conversation are the fruits of a continuous and reciprocal negotiation between participants, we might better understand how the quality of the thoughts we dress up with the words available to us –​and to which we give expression through sound –​ contributes to the quality of listening afforded to us by our listeners. This is what determines the power, intensity, effectiveness, and, ultimately, the quality of that very conversation. The quality of a conversation is therefore determined by a sum of vocal and aural qualities. Of course, this contention is so obvious it borders on the trivial –​have you ever tried standing up to speak to an audience that is busy doing other things, and therefore clearly communicating to you that they are not listening to what you are saying? It is very difficult for the speaker to stay concentrated, and their desire to speak ebbs away. When faced with a situation of this kind the most able communicators respond politely, but with an extended silence; or they address those doing other things directly, asking them to re-​join the discussion; or they scan the audience for those who are paying attention, “latching on” to the quality of their listening to compensate for its lack elsewhere. 2.2  “The map is not the territory”

Think about the fact that the words we speak cannot exhaust any form of reality: the latter will always by far exceed any of our attempts to conceive it in thought. Who knows why we take ourselves so seriously, then, when we talk. We have this need to believe that the reality of the world out there is really as we describe and represent it. And yet when we are engaged in conversation it is as if we are drawing a map –​and we know full well

30  Between conversation and reality

that no map is the territory, not even at a 1:1 scale. But we continue to forget this. The relationship between map and territory has fascinated some of the world’s most important writers and scholars. Jorge Luis Borges considers the “Map of the Empire” at 1:1 scale in his fragment, On Exactitude in Science.9 He attributes the quotation to a book that does not even exist: … In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.10 Alfred Korzybski11 made the claim that: “The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing it describes”, thus allowing us to glimpse the possibility of transformation in the semantic space between subject and reality. Well then, if we were to change the map, what would happen to the territory? Many scholars of my generation (the one born in the 1960s) grew up weaned on radical constructivism –​breaking, in other words, with the epistemological conventions of realism, and firmly believing in a theory of knowledge in which the latter no longer reflects “objective” ontological reality, but exclusively an ordering and organization of a world constituted by our experience”.12 Many years have passed since I read these texts for the first time and it has taken any number of –​occasionally painful –​experiences to better understand what that epistemological lesson entailed for us all. It meant moving from an intellectually compelling theory to a way of acting in everyday life, in which being could substitute for having, and fluidity could override the rigid solidity of every univocal interpretation. This did not just involve an exercise in empathy to shift from “my” solid, static interpretation to that of another, recognising its uniqueness, legitimacy, limits, and mutual complementarity; it meant changing perspective and allowing the course of events to guide our choices and decision-​making processes. It meant working it out as we went along –​not with the anxiety of losing something, but rather the conscious, intimate acceptance that it was easier this way. In this way, the “nos” of life might be transformed into a change of course, into useful and adventurous diversions, and the great suffering and traumas into unavoidable events that destiny has in store for us –​the very destiny we must

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continue to interact with, so that along with pain and loss it might reveal to us the resources and pathways to face up to it. Instead of the dogged struggle to transform every “no” into a “yes”, there remained the alternatives offered by these negations: at the same time as they rejected a path, they offered possibilities. Yet these were not just words or catchy slogans: they became genuine exercises of the will, a practice we could entrust our daily lives to. We moved from a conception of reality as a construction of our personal and social cognitive, perceptive, and organisational order, to a conception of that same reality as a making and unfolding of opportunities across a period of time; a time in which past, present, and future reveal themselves simultaneously, both in front and behind us. If it is true that matter flows along a path from life to death, this would nonetheless relate to our internal “software”, the only possible framework with which to experience the human condition. And yet, were we to see things from a quantum perspective instead, we might be able to transcend it. We might, for a moment, be able to live and communicate, disregarding the only lens we have to explain our human condition. From this perspective, the difference between map and territory would break down and prove less effective. We would suddenly find ourselves with a load of different maps in hand, all of which would be at once fascinating and disconcerting; there would be so many of them that they would eventually cover the entire territory, as in the 1:1 scale map theorised by Lewis Carroll in Sylvie and Bruno.13 But then what to do with the territory? Ultimately the latter would only be whatever remains after comparing the various maps: the territory would be the empty label that describes the discrepancy between the ostensibly true map (mine) and all the others that I might –​ regrettably –​recognise as equally legitimate, insofar as others have created them. The territory would be the cognitive fiction with which I tell myself that the world truly exists, irrespective of any map, though in reality I could never be entirely sure because, ultimately, without my map I could never access the territory. Alternatively, the territory may exist, but if so it coincides with spiritual worlds, as discussed in Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy,14 or theology. To stick with our metaphor: the fact of whether the territory exists is a question that pertains to the combined worlds of faith and understanding. In any event, this book aims to deal with maps, not territories. We might look specifically at how to draw maps that are convenient and useful to us, and how to learn to distinguish them quickly from those which, whether drawn by us or others, may harm us, or at the very least cause unnecessary sadness. 2.3  A quantum theory of experience

It is not that things do not flow before us; it is not that matter does not exist when we cannot see it. Rather, we can only see it through our own eyes, and if we happen to be short-​or long-​sighted we will see the world in our own

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way –​in which “our” way will depend much more on the eye we are looking with than the object we are ostensibly looking at. In this sense reality is not discovered but “invented”,15 as Watzlawick said: it is shaped and moulded by the specific quality of our looking, which sees and completes the outlines of images as it pleases. This making of reality, this way in which it unfolds before us, would give us the chance to exercise the free will we were told so much about in childhood. The following pages set out a quantum theory of experience –​a “liquid” way of looking at reality, as Bauman would put it,16 or perhaps even a gaseous one. The solid state is the one which most limits us and, insofar as it is static, does not allow us to flow easily. The intention here is to imagine the transformation from one state to the other from the very start, in order to mitigate its potential costs. While the latter is a metaphor, we could equally well translate it into an everyday example. For instance, whatever decision I take in an important area of my life, it will be a decision I have reflected on, and which has matured over time. Let us imagine I decide to move house, or change job, or the city I live in, or my partner. I may well see my decision as a hypothetical itinerary that throws a number of possible alternatives into the void. I may begin to take any number of actions along this path and, while events unfold, confidently observe the outcomes of my intentions and the actions that result from them. Let us imagine our existence as a game of chess, in which my opponent is Mr Universe. I move my first pawn and Mr Universe responds with another move. I may decide that Mr Universe is playing against me, but based on the healthy pragmatics of conversation we have drawn on more than once in the preceding pages, it may be more effective to decide that Mr Universe is playing with and for me. At this point, no intention, choice, decision, or move I make could be definite, or immutable; it would always and only be provisional –​an attempt, a suggested course, action, choice, or decision. But suggested to whom? Presumably to the Mr Universe with whom we are playing our game of chess. It would be like dancing with someone: I would not be able to make a unilateral decision as to where to go, I could only suggest, and see where Mr Universe decides to lead me. Our existence would thus be transformed into an adventurous sequence of opportunities to daydream over; paths imagined and then cast aside, unexpected roads we might venture down, as in Maurizio Nichetti’s film Stefano Quantestorie. In the film, the forty-​something protagonist Stefano finds himself thinking back to all of life’s “missed” opportunities; to the life he might have led had he not, at that particular moment, missed the train; if he had passed the exam to train as a Carabiniere; if he had graduated or married Chiara instead of Costanza. It is true that in the end Nichetti’s film also shows how Stefano can only go down one road in life –​but that very road is the product of a series of adventures, whether reckless, coincidental, or preordained; of unexpected changes, choices not made, and decisions both confused and carefully

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considered. Were we to imagine placing all of Stefano’s possible lives on a flat surface and rolling out all the various pasts, presents, and futures like a sheet (both the ones he puts into action, and those he abandons), we would find ourselves walking over an enormous area, hopping from one future to the next, and from one present to another past, much like Stefano himself does, in his imagination. Of course, everything would be possible, though not equally probable, in a quantum theory of experience. Naturally, what cannot be conceived in thought can hardly be possible, and things which are not possible are extremely unlikely. Therein the power of our thoughts, which we cannot allow to roam free, untamed in our minds, insofar as it is precisely our thoughts that delineate the boundaries of the possible, and their intensity which ploughs the furrows of the probable. This position is very similar to the “restlessness of events”17 theory propounded by Robin Wagner-​Pacifici, and her suggestion of a “quantum sociology of events”:18 Events take shape(s), are given names and codified in doctrines, manifestos, declarations, constitutions, bank closures, foreclosures and so forth. But events are also on the move, changing hands, washing over and reconfiguring diverse spaces, times, and populations. They are sometimes violent, sometimes quiescent, sometimes, apparently, in the doldrums –​as when news reporters covering war zones and standoffs often paradoxically intone, “nothing is happening here today”. I’ve argued that previous analysis has been hampered by an inability to capture and account for both the shape-​taking qualities of events and the mobility and developmental quality of events as they spread, grow, morph, or get bogged down.19 The idea is to incorporate the notion of restlessness into everyday lived experience, transforming the theoretical principle into a pragmatic approach to action and –​above all –​to conversation. The image of the game of chess with Mr Universe is one attempt in that direction. According to Wagner-​ Pacifici, another two studies have focused their attention on the malleable, multiform nature of events. The first is by Abbott,20 which analyses the concept of “turning point” and proposes a definition of reality as something which is either “discrete and categorical” or “continuous and numerical”. He goes on to say: “The social world is constantly changing and reforming itself. To be sure, large parts of the world reproduce themselves continually; much of it looks stable. But this is mere appearance”.21 The second is Knorr-​Cetina and Preda’s work,22 which identifies the difference between “networked and scoping systems” of financial markets highlighting the way, “in scopic systems, trading tends to be a form of informed tracing [of nearly simultaneous inputs and outputs] a form of following and anticipating the flow, grounded more in a structure of feeling than in modes of calculation

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[calculation previously based on coordinated networked relations of trust and time lags]”.23 Nevertheless, according to Wagner-​ Pacifici,24 both of these theories lack a mechanism to identify the “turning points”, the curves and trajectories which ensue from them, and an analytical language that is capable of understanding their forms and flows. 2.3.1  On antifragility

Over the last decade, a number of theories have emerged which intersect with this point of view –​but which refer to, or originate in, other fields. I would like to draw attention to a couple of these, in order to show how there is an almost cognitive tension between scholars, one which drives us to reflect on similar questions, albeit from different points of view. I will draw a distinction between positions that start from the subject –​or at the very least, seriously consider its point of view (as in theories of resilience, for example) –​ and those which refer primarily to the concept of event, or system (as in the quantum sociology of events put forward by Wagner-​Pacifici in 2010). Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests that we gain from disorder through the notion of “antifragility”. According to this theory, “First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble”, in order to innovate.25 He adds that what kills some makes others stronger; the fragile nature of one part of the system therefore becomes the antifragility of another. Taleb wants to subvert the idea that leaving things to chance is risky and must be avoided or at the very least reduced. Mistakes are a constituent and important part of human existence: people who do not allow themselves to make small mistakes are more likely to make bigger ones. The point is not to “not get anything wrong”, but to not make irreparable mistakes. We should not be wary of people who make a mistake, in Taleb’s view, but of those who keep making the same ones. Indeed, according to Taleb, a mistake is an opportunity to acquire more information in order to apply it to the system: Yogi Berra once said: “We made the wrong mistake” –​and for John all mistakes are wrong mistakes. Nature loves small errors …, humans don’t.26 The author puts forward a theory of action which aims to overcome, in the most resolute terms, what he defines “the teleological fallacy”:27 that strange illusion we surrender to every time we think we know exactly where we are going, where we were going in the past, the idea that “others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going”.28 As he explains: The error of thinking you know exactly where you are going and assuming that you know today what your preferences will be tomorrow has an associated one. It is the illusion of thinking that others, too, know where

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they are going, and that they would tell you what they want if you just asked them.29 Taleb proposes a theory of action based on optionality, on the ability to change how we behave and move from –​to return to the image used above –​ a solid state to a gaseous one, and then again to another solid state. Have you never become very fond of a particular environment –​be it the nice café where you have breakfast, or a favourite bookshop, or some other seemingly minor thing –​and come to think of it as an essential part of your daily life, as if you could not imagine living happily were you to lose one of those fundamental pieces? And then, invariably, it is precisely that lovely piece which you lose, and you simply replace it with a different one, albeit just as enjoyable and enriching. In essence, although Taleb makes no direct reference to it, his theory is about impermanence, and how we decide to manage it in our lives. 2.3.2  On resilience

The concept of antifragility differs from resilience:30 while resilient things can withstand and remain unchanged in the face of shocks, the antifragile prospers in disorder and improves in moments of crisis. Furthermore, antifragility is immune to any process that might foresee mistakes, and is protected from adversity: according to Taleb, it puts us in a position to be able to ride the wave of the unknown, to do things without knowing why we are doing them, and even do them well. In this definition, theoretical thinking on resilience only partially intersects with Taleb’s suggested notion. Indeed, the latter might be defined as the ability to recover quickly in the wake of illness, or change, or a series of unfortunate and adverse events. It is the very property that enables a given material to return to its original shape after being compressed, bent, or stretched. Resilience is in some way related to elasticity. Towards the middle of the 1980s, a number of researchers from various disciplines –​pedagogists, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and social psychologists –​published a series of longitudinal studies on children of preschool age that had grown up in particularly difficult conditions (their parents were divorced, they suffered from mental health issues, or there were instances of sexual abuse).31 What emerged is that some groups of children had a particular capacity to survive even in very difficult conditions: indeed, they were resilient. In some respects, we might say that thinking on resilience and antifragility appears to tackle the question of the restlessness of events from the subject’s point of view, offering a key to “riding the wave” of disorder without being overwhelmed by it. In both cases, it is the prospect of control that is being called into question: the idea that there will be linear progression, and predictable

36  Between conversation and reality

growth from the very start; that mistakes and sudden jolts forward are rare events, or can at least be kept to a minimum. However, in all of these points of view precisely the reverse happens: the notion of error becomes an illusion that defines the onlooking subject; it coincides with a mere deviation from the original plan as it was conceived in the observer’s mind, and which exists solely and singularly in that mind. Destiny becomes the trajectory of an arrow fired completely at random from the past into the future or, vice versa, from the future towards the past, which ultimately arrives to define us like some enchanted trail –​the only possible trajectory among the many that opened and closed up as we passed through. The destination is therefore the journey itself, as many writers, artists, and poets have reminded us more than once. As Italo Calvino writes: Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.32 And again: Travelling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.33 The idea, in this section, is to consider the different ways of looking at the relationship between reality, how we represent it to ourselves, and how we express it: perhaps by changing our reading glasses we might, together, be able to rediscover the pleasures of conversation … 2.4  “When saying is doing”: performative utterances and self-​fulfilling prophecies

In his theory of speech acts,34 John Langshaw Austin identifies a particular type of speech act he defines as performative: assertions that literally do something, whereby saying is doing. Performative utterances can be made of performative verbs (e.g. I forgive you, I baptise you, bless you, damn you, I promise, I swear, thank you, I’ll marry you, I absolve you, etc.), nouns (e.g. thanks), the passive voice (smoking is forbidden) or more complex locutions (please accept my apologies), etc. The British philosopher thus identifies, within the multiplicity of speech acts –​which are in themselves mere assertions, not actions –​a particular brand of utterance that has the same properties as an action. In contemporary culture, the relatively deep-​rooted conviction persists that words and actions are separate. Austin’s introduction of the concept thus marks an important change of direction. Nevertheless, in

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the more distant past –​as scholars who have studied the transition between primary oral and chirographic cultures remind us35 –​when humankind had not yet mastered a writing system, words were always actions. All linguistic acts were considered performative utterances in primary orality, and it is no coincidence that Walter J. Ong put forward the concept of word-​action on this basis.36 It is as if the separation between word-​as-​sound and word-​ as-​ action was only made cognitively possible for humankind after the introduction of writing systems, and cemented itself thanks to the ensuing process of reflexivity and introspection that writing systems contributed to generating. It is as if writing had allowed words to be objectified and projected into an outer visual field: by giving an utterance the chance to be projected into the outside world, the separation between mere utterance and action became feasible. It is extremely hard for us, living in the present and immersed in societies that have been writing for thousands of years, to even begin to understand a process of this kind: this is the result of what Ong defines as “our chirographic bias”.37 Given that for millennia we have been socialised according to the peculiar characteristics of initially chirographic and then typographic societies, we tend to believe that such peculiarities are “natural”, immutable, and not historically determined. We tend to believe they relate solely to a specific kind of society: the one in which we live. We are no longer even able to imagine other, possible worlds. Studies on technology of writing have revealed, diachronically, one part of the process that has caused us to become the way we are today. The proposition, then, is to remember that there was a time when saying was always doing, and only with the advent and dissemination of writing systems did saying become doing in only a limited range of situations: namely, the ones Austin describes in his theory of performative utterances. The point is that the change of direction theorised by Austin has limited value in relation to the theory being posited here: in its reference to a whole range of theoretical ideas and research on these subjects, this book encourages the reader to return (at least partially) to a conception of words as powerful, in which saying may not entirely equate to doing, but would nonetheless constitute a strong and valid premise, and frame, for the ensuing action. In this light, words do a lot. Perhaps not as much as actions, but rather than seeing them as less intense, I would suggest we see them as a different way of doing things. There are two distinct theories, relating to the same concept, which are fundamental in this regard. For the first we are indebted to William Isaac Thomas, one of the founding fathers of American sociology, who was a Professor at the University of Chicago until his arrest in 1918. In 1928 he co-​ wrote The Child in America with Dorothy Swaine, in which they formulated a theory around the famous statement: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences ”. The theorem became famous through the

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expression “the definition of the situation” and was subsequently reworked both in the “theory of the social construction of reality” by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann,38 and in Robert K Merton’s theory of the “self-​ fulfilling prophecy”. As a theorist, Merton notably paid close attention to the dynamics of deviant social behaviour. Imagine for a moment that, for a number of reasons, one member of a given family is constantly defined as a “delinquent”, “troublemaker”, or “untrustworthy”. This definition of the situation, adopted by the members of that family –​i.e. “One of our own can’t be trusted, is unreliable, is a potential criminal” –​will undoubtedly have consequences for the type of relationships and conversations that will be possible around this particular individual. What will be the nature of these conversations? At the very least, if we think we are going to have to contend and interact with someone who is potentially dangerous, we will not give them our trust; we will be on our guard and avoid being open, kind and accommodating. Now remove the original premise from your mind. Imagine that you are simply observing the consequences of that particular definition of the situation: imagine being faced with a listener who believes that we are potentially dangerous, treats us with suspicion, does not give us their trust, and shows themselves to be closed, distant, and rude. How do you think we will react when faced with this kind of behaviour? We will think, in our turn, that the person before us is dangerous; we will be rude, distant, and very suspicious. Et voilà, the prophecy has fulfilled itself. In essence, what we get out of a conversation –​and social interaction more generally –​is what we put into it. If we are in the mood for fried eggs, it makes sense to put some eggs in the pan, and at the end that is what we will have. Nevertheless, we tend to believe, erroneously (I am just as guilty of it) that if we put rudeness, suspicion, and aggression into a relationship we will get something else out of it when, on the contrary, we inevitably find what we put in. We despair, crying out, “I’ve been robbed, I’ve been robbed” –​when in actual fact we have robbed ourselves, by playing the wrong game. Paul Watzlawick redefined this concept as “self-​fulfilling prophecies”:39 A self-​fulfilling prophecy is an assumption or prediction that, purely as a result of having been made, causes the expected or predicted event to occur and thus confirms its own “accuracy”. For example, if someone assumes, for whatever reason, that he is not respected, he will, because of this assumption, act in such a hostile, overly sensitive, suspicious manner that he brings about that very contempt in others which “proves” again and again his firmly entrenched conviction.40 The most interesting aspect of this concept concerns the presumed temporal reversal it seems to involve. In essence, we are used to believing that, by

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virtue of linear causality, A leads to B, and therefore that the present leads to the future. Yet such linearity appears to short-​circuit when it comes to self-​fulfilling prophecies, insofar as a future event (I will be ignored again this time) leads to consequences in the present (I behave in a standoffish, irritable manner) that confirm the predicted future (I will be ignored –​and so what I had prophesised plays out in the future). In reality there is no temporal reversal: my definition of the situation happens in time T1 (the present of that future) and generates results in time T2. In other words, this definition of the situation functions very much like one of Austin’s performative utterances: when I amm saying, I am doing –​in fact I am making it happen. We owe one of the most significant pieces of research on self-​fulfilling prophecies to Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson,41 who studied the impact fake results from IQ tests had on the behaviour of elementary school teachers at the Oak School, as well as on their pupils’ performance. At the beginning of the school year the teachers were told that a certain group of children was brilliant, while the other was average. The groups were chosen completely at random, and with no consideration whatsoever for the results of the IQ tests that had genuinely been conducted. In practice, after months of student-​ teacher interaction in which the teachers consistently praised and encouraged the presumed geniuses more, the latter gradually achieved distinctly better results than the other group. The pre-​ emptive “genius” definition produced performances that exceeded the normal distribution of results along the grade curve. Once again, here was proof that saying is doing, or at least, making something happen. This type of research has significantly influenced any number of pedagogical approaches, emphasising the importance of the educational prerequisites needed to engage with children and young people. As the following pages will not be able to provide an overview of all these approaches, even for illustrative purposes, here we will allude to only a couple, in order to give the reader a general picture. 2.4.1  “Loving the knotted vine”: the definition of the situation in education

At a conference held at a Steiner school in Milan, the anthroposophist Michaela Glöckner repeated something that had been said to a child in a Swiss Steiner school: “Ich freue mich darüber, daß du genau so bist, wie du bist” (I’m so happy that you’re exactly the way you are). From this perspective, the relationship between teacher and child is represented as one free of evaluation, free of judgement. There is no external, normative ideal to which the child must conform –​like a kind of measuring stick for the soul with which to “straighten” the plant that might otherwise grow crooked.

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Massimo Recalcati calls it “loving the knotted vine”. According to Recalcati, a good teacher Isn’t someone who teaches by straightening the plant, nor someone who moves contents from one container to another according to more or less sophisticated cognitive maps or diagrams, but someone who ensures culture can exist as a possibility for Community; someone who knows how to value difference and singularity, firing everyone’s curiosity without pursuing an image of the “ideal pupil”. On the contrary, they celebrate faults and even their symptoms, along with every one of their pupils’ twisted parts, one by one. Essentially, they are someone who, above all, knows how to love those who are learning, which means loving the knotted vine.42 Of course, “loving the knotted vine” is not that simple: it requires enormous awareness on the part of teachers. First of all, it means having recognised and learned to love the “knotted vine” in oneself. School, and teachers in general, have all too readily and too often betrayed this instinct. At times, both primary and secondary schools seem to function like the measuring stick referred to above: a straight edge against which the desires, values, and inclinations of every student that has the audacity to undertake an education must conform.43 This kind of thinking links back both to Thomas’ “definition of the situation”,44 and Paul Watzlawick’s “self-​ fulfilling prophecy”.45 The right initial attitude from teachers, and their full consciousness of the –​quite literally constitutive –​importance of the words they use in their interactions with pupils, should be the sine qua non of a child’s harmonious development and their academic achievement in that particular subject. Regrettably, in our experience there is no shortage of examples that run entirely contrary to this prerequisite, and which unfortunately punctuate the daily lives of many girls and boys in both Italian primary and secondary schools. “Why, when you are so stupid, did you choose to study humanities and classics instead of going to a technical college?” Faced with a history teacher that chose to publicly humiliate a classmate after little more than a week of a classical high school, Marco felt he should stand up for his classmate, even though he had only known him a few days. He put his hand up and replied: “And you, Miss, why did you choose to become a teacher when you clearly can’t teach?” After the boy told his parents about the incident, the family decided he should change school and moved him to another classical high school. During an Italian lesson, the same teacher said to her students: “You’re so stupid you would be capable of copying an essay about your own personality off the internet”.

Between conversation and reality  41

And on another occasion: “All you can do is copy. You’re a generation of good-​for-​nothings”. At another classical high school in Milan, a science teacher said to a child’s parents during a parent-​teacher meeting: “Your son is a very shallow person, and very careless too”. In actual fact, she was commenting on the student’s performance in a written exam, equating the child’s whole identity with a single result. In this instance, the only person making superficial and careless judgements was the teacher herself. As can sometimes happen, she was talking about the student but “thinking of herself”. Indignant over this judgement of his son, which he did not share, the student’s father replied coldly: “Really, do you think so?” A long and eloquent silence from both parents followed. These are not isolated cases: we are becoming accustomed to a level of verbal violence that is unheard of, one that is largely directed at children, teenagers, and young people. This violence is made possible by the fact that we are starting from completely false premises: that words are not actions, and they therefore have no consequences. How long can we all continue in this cognitive fallacy? The consequences of this illusory belief are pernicious, given that they unleash types of conversation and streams of words that we would otherwise refrain from uttering, or even listening to. When we are the ones using language of this kind, we should immediately attempt to silence ourselves. In the event that it is someone else saying them in our presence, we might attempt to leave and separate ourselves from them. We might try to avoid these types of conversation. We might remind ourselves that silence can sometimes prove much more eloquent and effective than any word spoken in anger. Indeed, the effect of a message is always closely dependent on the emotions that accompany it. Our ability to remain aware, to listen (including to what we are feeling) and to be vigilant during a conversation may therefore be what enables us to emerge from a verbal attack unscathed. 2.4.2  Words that make you sick

Giulia is an energetic, dynamic woman, with that spare and by turns harsh beauty that recalls the traits and attractiveness of Sardinian women –​and Giulia is Sardinian, though she has lived in Rome for many years. She runs a wonderful bookshop filled with shelves packed full of books of all kinds and genres. One cold December morning, I met her on the doorstep of her shop. Giulia also has a son, a beautiful, ethereal boy named Riccardo. I remember that when my son was in the first year of nursery at the Steiner school, Giulia’s son was in the final year. Every time my eyes met Riccardo’s, whether it was entering or leaving the school, I was warmed by the thought that my son went to the same nursery and, later, the same school. Riccardo represented a larger version of my own child to me; I imagined that my son

42  Between conversation and reality

would become just as interesting, solid, ethically minded, and intelligent. In short, if someone had asked me to put together an advert for that kind of schooling, I would have chosen Riccardo’s face and person as its poster boy. That morning I met Giulia on the doorstep of her bookshop: she gave me a brief wave, as spare as the rest of her figure. I have always liked Giulia: I recognise a solidity in her hardness, and something essential in her slenderness. Our children’s paths had crossed at school over the years, and Giulia has more than once given me precious advice, telling me about her experiences with Riccardo. Giulia was and remains an extraordinary woman. And yet the words she spoke that morning would shock me to the core –​precisely because it was my very dear, respected friend Giulia saying them. She told me how, for some years, Riccardo had been suffering from severe depression. It had started after his parents’ separation; he could no longer concentrate; he did not do his schoolwork. On one occasion he had had to repeat a year, had failed to pass certain subjects multiple times, and had already changed school three times in the space of a few years. He had been diagnosed with dyslexia and had a therapist, but lately that had no longer been enough to alleviate his pain and suffering. Riccardo was also seeing a psychiatrist and was on medication. At the time of our conversation, he had just turned eighteen and was in his penultimate year of high school. When Giulia told me Riccardo was seeing a psychiatrist, I felt as though I might faint, as if something in my posture had given way. I barely managed to ask: “But if he’s struggling so much, why do you keep moving him from one school to the next, rather than changing what he’s studying? Why do you keep enrolling him at a classical high school, if he’s so unhappy?” Giulia barely answered: my question was irrelevant; she kept on like a river that has finally found an opening and gradually widens. She talked and talked and told me the story. I was struck by her words: Riccardo was depicted as a monad; there was no connection (or at least it was not focused on) between Riccardo’s suffering and the family environment in which this suffering had developed. Giulia did not question the cause of this suffering –​or when she did, she sought its cause in Riccardo himself, or in the difficult relationship he had with school, taking herself out of the equation. Suddenly she said to me: “You know, it’s like having a defective son …” What? Was she talking about Riccardo, that beautiful boy for whom my own wonderful son had always acted as a miniature alter ego? When someone would hit my son at nursery, in one of those small but ferocious fights his toddler-​classmates would engage in, Riccardo had always been the one to rush to his defence, like an older sibling who, as an only child, had decided to find himself a younger brother in life … In short, it was a genuine display of solidarity between little ones. Giulia, please do not say such things; do not even think them: words can make you sick.

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2.4.3  What about Harry Potter? The quality of words in the world of magic

This separation that we are so accustomed to, between word-​as-​sound and word-​as-​action, actually appears to be one of the side effects of a process known as Entzauberung der Welt, which Max Weber describes very effectively.46 Before the world ceased to be populated by spirits, sprites, and everything else –​before science and religion were torn asunder into separate and very distinct provinces –​words had a very different kind of status and dignity. During the Trojan War, would Achilles or Hector ever have dared not to take the words of Athena, or any other divinity, seriously? And who, among the Celtic peoples, would ever have challenged the words of a water or fire spirit, or a spirit they came across in a wood or plain? Who among the Aboriginal populations of Australia would have had the gall to deride what a shaman said? “They were different times”, you’ll say, “and different beliefs”. Of course, they were different times, but it feels like we might have missed something. I do not think it is any coincidence that Harry Potter became a bestseller the world over: there are parts of the magical world we are missing, and which our most intimate selves long for. The entire sphere that might broadly be defined as “spirituality and the transcendental” has left an unfillable gap in a collective consciousness shaped by Western rationality. In the transcendental world, words are always an event: they alternate between the creation and destruction of opportunities. They forge a path, a trail, a course stretching from the present to the past, or from the present towards the future. Indeed, the time for words is the hic et nunc, the here and now, which opens up a temporal passage that has the ability to re-​ actualise past traumas, reconfigure them, and reshape their narrative. It is capable of predicting the future, evoking it as a premonition in the present. That may be why we enjoyed Harry Potter so much: he understood this perfectly. The flow of time is a fiction –​words can transform it, bend it, and remake it according to our will. Who can say, then, that words do not matter? 2.5  Words that change the world

One night, an old Cherokee told his grandson about the battle that goes on inside us. “Dear boy, the battle is between two wolves that live inside us. One is evil –​it’s anger, fear, worry, jealousy, envy, sorrow, self-​pity, guilt, resentment, greed, lies, falseness, a feeling of inferiority. The other is good –​it’s joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith”. The grandson thought

44  Between conversation and reality

about this for a moment and then asked: “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee replied, “The one you feed”. (Old Cherokee parable) There are words that can make us sick, and others that can heal us. Based on our current perspective, we might say that all words have a performative dimension; they are all words-​as-​action and, as such, must be treated with due consideration. Among the speech utterances analysed by Austin there is one that might equate to a genuine “magic wand”, just like the ones that populate the Harry Potter series.47 It is a very simple utterance: “I forgive you”. This simple sequence of sounds may well be intrinsically revolutionary in nature. Rudolf Steiner maintained that the act of forgiveness was a premonition:48 that the person forgiving was able to foresee the compensation and repayment of the pain suffered in future lives, thus rendering it unnecessary. From the anthroposophical perspective, forgiveness is an action that comes into play to literally change the course of the karmic journey. Forgiveness changes the fate both of those who forgive and those who are forgiven. However, the latter is of little interest to us because we cannot choose or intervene in any way in the possibility of forgiveness, given that the act is always free, not owed, and not binding. What really interests us is the active choice to forgive, insofar as it depends on us. If you forgive once, you realise it is like winning the lottery, and it is entirely our choice: we can continue to forgive as many times as we like. Forgiveness does not so much free the wrongdoer as the victim: the words “I forgive you” heal us from trauma, violence, and abuse. In Catholicism, forgiveness is considered an act of faith and charity, but in actual fact forgiveness absolutely benefits those who have suffered serious pain. When we experience trauma, the present freezes: the time of the trauma is the only possible time, it annihilates and consumes everything else. It is not just about the pain we have experienced in the past, but how it is continuously re-​actualised in the present: as long as we do not forgive that past, it will not go away –​and it will continue to weigh on the present, wiping out everything else. The words “I forgive you” are the most revolutionary ones we will ever speak. We might recognise a similar power in other sequences of words that make us feel happy (“bless you”) or send a shiver down our spine (“damn you”). Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Gurdjieff 1963, pp. 240–​241. Jedlowski 1995. Schütz 1967. Jedlowski 2005. Gurdjieff 1963, p. 241. Ibid., pp. 241–​242. Ibid., p. 241.

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8 Calvino 1997, p. 135. 9 Borges 1999. 10 Miranda 1658, Book IV, Chap. XIV. 11 Korzybski 1950. 12 Von Glasersfeld 1984, p. 24. 13 For example, Lewis Carroll (1889, Chap. 7) tackles the famous question of the 1:1 scale map in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, when the protagonist meets Mein Herr: “ ‘That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,’ said Mein Herr, ‘map-​making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?’ ‘About six inches to the mile.’ ‘Only six inches!’ exclaimed Mein Herr. ‘We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!’ ‘Have you used it much?’ I enquired. ‘It has never been spread out, yet,’ said Mein Herr: ‘the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’ ” 14 Steiner 1894. 15 Watzlawick 1984. 16 Bauman 2000. 17 Wagner-​Pacifici 2010. 18 Wagner-​Pacifici 2016, p. 23. 19 Ibid., p. 24. 20 Abbott 2001. Quoted in Wagner-​Pacifici 2016, pp. 22–​23. 21 Ibid. 22 Knorr-​Cetina and Preda 2007. 23 Abbott 2001. Quoted in Wagner-​Pacifici 2016, p. 24. 24 Ibid. 25 Taleb 2012, p. 51. 26 Ibid., p. 101. 27 Ibid., p. 188. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 189. 30 Werner and Smith 1982; 2001. 31 Shonkoff and Meisels 2000. 32 Calvino 1997, pp. 28–​29. 33 Ibid., p. 137. 34 Austin 1975. 35 Goody 1977; Ong 1982. 36 Ong 1982. 37 Ibid. 38 Berger and Luckmann 1966. 39 Watzlawick 1984. 40 Ibid., p. 95. 41 Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968. 42 Recalcati 2014, pp. 112–​113 (author’s translation). 43 On the role of arts in educational settings see also Tota and De Feo 2022. 44 Thomas and Swaine 1928. 45 Watzlawick 1984. 46 Weber 1919. 47 Austin 1975. 48 Steiner 1894.

Three “THE WORDS NOT TO SAY IT”

Life is whatever we make it. The traveller is the journey. What we see is not what we see but who we are. (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 1991) Conversation changes the way you see the world, and even changes the world. (Theodore Zeldin, Conversation: How Talk Can Change Our Lives, 1998)

Pessoa and Zeldin remind us of the power of conversation, because the words that we pronounce and listen to are powerful and they can “change the world”. They also remind us that our interpretation of a message is always linked to our subjectivity. In other words, the meaning that each of us will construct in relation to a message will reflect and depend on our own values, opinions, and beliefs. 3.1  When ideas get sick

I have always thought that if Paul Watzlawick had known Aunt Pina, he might have written another book. Mind you, I have nothing against her. She is a lovely lady in her nineties with a witty, sharp humour, who almost always –​though unknowingly –​manages to say “the right thing”. She is the kind of person who lands on us full of good intentions, inevitably offends us, and leaves us speechless. That is Aunt Pina. An invaluable, and therefore, indispensable school of life. Aunt Pina is a virtuoso of guilt, a fencer who masters the art of discrediting and denigrating and never misses DOI: 10.4324/9781003433316-3

“The words not to say it”  47

a blow. However, it is the “unknowingly” that makes the difference, and understanding this helped me. As Rudolf Steiner would say, this means viewing people in the context of their biography. Aunt Pina is not a bad person, she simply repeats what she has seen others do, and does not know how to speak in any other way. She cannot because she literally does not know how to. She thinks people will respect her and listen to her only if they are tied to her by emotions and words. I do not even want to exaggerate; she is not a character from an Alfred Hitchcock film, but simply a person who speaks from her biographical position. Apart from that, she is a lovely old lady. Understanding this was my first defence kata: by keeping this in mind, in fact, I did not need to answer or say anything, I could keep quiet, I already felt better. I was avoiding combat with a kata, like the ones we practise in karate: this does not mean offending, but, when possible, dodging the blows and minimising the damage done to our interlocutor and to ourselves. People converse, they speak to us (and we speak to them) by replicating conversations they have (and we have) overheard. People rarely step away from familiar routes, reinventing and freeing themselves from the bad words they have had to listen to. In fact, becoming an adult involves choosing how to speak, being able to reposition oneself while retaining the familiar routes when what we have been shown is positive. In this sense, Aunt Pina is simply a person who suffered to such an extent she was prevented from becoming an adult: she is a sort of “youth” disguised as a ninety-​year-​old, one has to imagine her as being eternally “stuck” in the role of daughter. On a daily basis, we do a lot of listening and talking. However, for a variety of reasons, when we speak and/​or listen, we are often not present to ourselves. Whenever this happens, we create the conditions for pathological communication. It is difficult to be aware all the time, but it is possible to be vigilant so that when we are absent a kind of alarm bell goes off able to bring us back to the present. What allows us to return to our conscious self is a fraction of time, a moment of cognitive and emotional detachment: “What’s going on?”, “Is it really like this?”, “What’s he saying?”, “What am I saying?”, “Why is he so angry?”, “What’s the real problem?”, “How come I’m so angry?” The practice of detachment becomes all the more accessible the more we get used to not being overwhelmed by a situation (no matter how good or bad). This practice does not consist in feeling no emotions (which would amount to a kind of emotional freeze), but rather in feeling all these emotions as intensely as possible, but always from a certain point of view, as it were. A practical exercise, useful in this sense, might be to try and visualise a very intense emotion in the body, try to listen and understand in which part of the body this feeling manifests itself (a finger? my hand? in my chest? where?). Once the emotion has been projected onto the body, it will be easier to observe where it has not manifested itself. This makes

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us aware of the fact that no subject can be entirely reduced to an emotion. It is always possible to identify a tiny part of the body in which it has not manifested itself (“I am very sad, but my little finger is not”). It may seem like a trivial exercise and at first, especially when one is dealing with very intense and negative emotions, it might seem ridiculous and inappropriate. However, there are moments in which we should remind ourselves that practising detachment can change our life. As Pessoa1 said, we see what we are. So why not modify our gaze? There are revolutionary acts in thought and language that function as real defence kata. Like any kata, they require exercise in order to be mastered. They require us to be that kata, and to free ourselves of all those parts of ourselves that we insist on using to cover it up. 3.2  Pathological forms of communication

There are books that change our lives. I have always dreamed of writing one sooner or later, not out of vanity, but to give back what I have received. The point is that I have been fortunate enough to read many such books. One of them is Pragmatics of Human Communication by Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas, and Don D. Jackson.2 I remember reading it at university and for many weeks I was angry, I kept arguing with everyone. As soon as one of my family members approached me to talk, I would lash out using Watzlawick’s theories as a club, swinging it left and right … If, in the short term, that book caused a lot of arguments and tense feelings, in the long run it changed my ability to read the psychological violence that can be inflicted during a conversation. That book changed me forever. “You are so clever!” “Come on, did you really do that?” “You can never be trusted”. “You are a liar, a traitor, a thief, a layabout, a …, a …” “What are you wearing? Are you going to a wedding?” “It looks like you’ve just been to a funeral. Has your cat died?” “So you didn’t get the lemons?” “Aren’t you eating the rice?” “It’s always the same with you”. All it takes is an intonation, a harmless adverb, and suddenly, while listening to that sequence of words, one feels a sense of unease that remains long after the conversation has ended. Those words are razor-​sharp blades that seem to be able to sink in, as if we were made of butter. When this happens, we should remember that we are not made of butter, instead, we can decide what we want to be. In fact, a pathological conversation usually also gives us

“The words not to say it”  49

a mirror in which to see ourselves and decide what we want to be made of. Why do some accusations hurt us while others, which sound like accusations in the speaker’s intentions, somehow do not? What hurts us is also what nourishes and strengthens us. There are some basic mechanisms that generate pathological communication and that for this reason, with a view to an ecology of speech, I suggest avoiding: The reduction of an entire subject to a word, action, or thought. Whenever we reduce the complexity of a human being to a limited sequence of thoughts, words, and/​or actions, or to the actions that this person has been subjected to, we are doing something inappropriate that may cause serious harm. There are two rhetorical figures that aptly describe this way of thinking and speaking: metonymy and synecdoche. Obviously, my intention is not to criminalise the use of these rhetorical figures. However, the principle on which they operate is a partition disguised as totality (especially in the case of the synecdoche): no part can actually be the whole. A child who has told a lie cannot be called a “liar” unless we believe that the action performed at that moment (telling a lie) will be repeated in the future and forever. Is it not irrational and illogical to imagine that an action must be repeated indefinitely and always in the same way? Would it not be more appropriate to imagine a series of variations –​today I lied, tomorrow I will tell the truth, the day after tomorrow I will lie again and in three days time I will tell the truth again. What is the threshold beyond which an entire identity can be reduced to the definition of liar? Moreover, that child or individual also performs many other actions in the course of the day, of the week, of his or her life. In other words, a “liar” can also be someone who is fast, someone who is good at drawing, someone who is a great cook, and so on. The same kind of reflections apply to cases of inflicted trauma and/​or violence, or illnesses. A friend, mother of three girls who were still very young, became seriously ill and had to undergo a bone marrow transplant. She went through a very difficult period. One aspect that struck me when she recounted her experience was that after her recovery she had to face the redefinition of her identity: in other words, would she be able to go back to being the friend she had always been, or would she be a former cancer patient for the rest of her life? Would the illness stick to her identity like a stigma? And who would be responsible for this? We, who were around her and had, as it were, “frozen” our representation of her identity, being unable to transform it again, now that she was cured, unable to let go of our terror of losing her, or she who, despite being cured, continued to consider herself ill? Can one reduce an entire subjectivity to the tumour devouring it, or can one resist and consider oneself as something other than one’s illness? It is easy to settle the issue in theory, especially when one is in excellent health.

50  “The words not to say it”

The generalisation of a single event and the extension of its validity to the entire class of those events in both the temporal (“always”) and spatial (“everywhere”) domains In other words: “It’s always the same with you”. A variation of this is: “You can never be trusted”. In these sentences the adverb is a curse. A very tiny word contains a whole world. Perhaps therapists invented these words to support their annual income. Are we sure something is “always” the case, and is that “never” really necessary? And yet, generations of grandmothers and mothers –​so I include myself –​have addressed their children like this, causing a whole series of problems. What does that nasty adverb add that seems so important; why such a strong urge to utter it, to add it to our statements. It is as if every time we begin a sentence the “always” and “never” leap to their feet, inserting themselves into the sounds we make. What we are really doing is retracing the footsteps of those who came before us: like in a jazz concert, echoes of musical phrasing seem to imitate each other, like the pieces of an invisible Lego that others have made for us. It is harder to take them apart than to put the pieces together. Disassembling, deconstructing requires going elsewhere, it means trying to follow new sequences, it requires differently composed sentences, learning how to pronounce words we choose for the first time, instead of those already pronounced by others. In fact, no one can always be the same. No one can never be trusted. Comparison between subjects when it is not necessary For instance, “You are so clever!” What about the other one? Who is this other unfortunate person I have just been compared to? My son had a classmate called Clara. They attended a classical high school together. She was a very shy girl and had a difficult relationship with her mother. Whenever Clara’s mother ran into my son, she would go into an elaborate ritual that served to denigrate her daughter, which usually took the comparative form. As soon as the unfortunate girl saw her companion approaching, she would try to slip away, but her mother would grab her by the arm and hold her still. Each time, she had to stand there silently witnessing the praise her mother would lavish on my son. “You are so clever!” was perhaps the least offensive –​she would continue with sadistic determination for a few minutes. The whole performance, in fact, did not last long, also because my son was not comfortable watching his friend being humiliated like this and would try to get away. The woman, however, was determined; she would smile and ask him: “So Mattia, how is Psycho?” This is what she usually called her daughter. The incredible thing was that she would ask my son (who spent much less time with her daughter than she did), while the girl would be standing there listening to the conversation, as if she were not present, being assigned, despite herself, the role of silent extra. The conversation would continue with ferocious

“The words not to say it”  51

comments on the school performance of the unfortunate girl who, in fact, had better grades than my son, perhaps in the vain hope of being able to match or, at least, come close to one of the standards imposed by her strict mother. However, the objectivity of the grades was ignored by the woman who preferred to pursue her “black pedagogy”, creating situations that were ridiculous –​were it not for the horrible pain inflicted on the poor “Psycho”. Once, the whole class did very badly in a written Greek test. However, the young girl got a decent five, one of the highest marks. My son, on the other hand, got a miserable four. Her mother, running into Mattia, immediately complained about her daughter’s grades and when my son, happy at last to be able to defend his unfortunate classmate in some way, replied saying “I actually got a four”, her mother, without even pausing, replied: “Yes, but you’re clever”. When the comparative method is used in pathological communication it follows no objective evidence, rather, it bends evidence to support its true strategic intent: the denigration and systematic degradation of one of the two terms of comparison. Thus, the objectivity of the grades yields to the demands of rhetoric and a four is better than a five: this assertion never causes the accusatory structure to falter. In fact, this type of comparison serves to measure the gap, indeed to create it and amplify it as much as possible. The ideal place to exercise this method is the relationship between siblings: a parent uses one of the children to target the other. This produces an emotional fracture in the family structure also at a horizontal level: the humiliated sibling ends up hating the other, who has not taken any active role in this denigration process. The problem is that the asymmetry of roles makes it almost impossible to “take it out” on the real culprit, in this case the parent, and for this reason anger is directed at the other term of comparison, the only one that is symmetrically available, the sibling used in the comparison. In fact, it is almost a miracle that the young Psycho did not detest my son –​ he actually did his best to defend her, and for this reason she was silently grateful to him. In the example considered, the mother uses her daughter’s best friend to denigrate her. The choice of the two terms of comparison is never accidental: it is necessary that the other term be recognised as important and worthy of consideration also by the person being belittled. In fact, the mother in question strategically chose her daughter’s best friend to use this diminishing comparison successfully. In doing so, she could count on the fact that her daughter would be forced to recognise her claims about her classmate as positive; these seemed plausible to her. Without this original pact on the exemplary value of the person to be held up as a yardstick, the whole process would not work. Therefore, an effective discursive move on the part of the young woman in question would have been to hide her unconditional approval of her best friend. This would have forced her mother to look for another term of comparison. An alternative solution would have been to

52  “The words not to say it”

“change family”, as my son used to say with stubborn determination as a child, whenever I upset him … The establishment of an external parameter of normality It is used to force the subject in question to conform, assuming that the external parameter has an a priori validity that precedes the subject itself. It is like constructing an external yardstick over which the subject has no control. Who chooses the yardstick acquires the power to control the subject, who therefore allows him or herself to be measured. “You suffer too much”, “You are too thin”, “You don’t eat enough”, “Don’t you think you’re exaggerating?”, “You sleep too much”, “You think too much, you should act”. These kinds of statements are the antechamber to a hell trap that, when experienced at an early age in family dynamics, will appear to be familiar for the years to come, a well-​known and therefore accessible route that can easily be replicated. Any measurement on a quantitative scale of our feelings and/​ or reactions, whether voiced by an external interlocutor or by our “internal enemy”, should be viewed with suspicion or, at the very least, regarded with circumspection. Once we start going down the slope of the too much and/​or too little, it becomes very difficult to climb back up again. The husband of a friend of mine, after a period of partial separation, decided to tell his wife and their son he had a new partner. The news had a great impact on his son, then a teenager, who became terribly sad –​his sadness lasted for weeks. His father felt guilty, he felt he was responsible for the pain his son was experiencing and, being unable either to cope with it or transform this feeling of guilt, he decided to “externalise the problem”, as one does when laying off people in a corporation. With a strategic move, one clearly not very effective, he decided to solve his problem by handing it over to his son. He told him: “You suffer too much”, several times, “You’re acting like a spoilt child”. As the boy was already sixteen years old, the accusation was particularly serious and could have caused a lot of damage, hurting such a sensitive and intelligent boy, if the mother had not stepped in to defend her son saying he was perfectly entitled to suffer, laying bare the dynamics at play. Moreover, trying to form an alliance to effectively externalise his problem, while talking to his ex-​wife, the father said, with sadistic determination: “I can understand you being sad about our separation, but he really has no reason to be sad”. According to this “definition of the situation”, the ex-​wife might legitimately feel sad about his new partner, but the son had no reason to feel the same. Who said this is how it should be? Who has decided and on the basis of what? The normative quality of the external parameter is frequently internalised by the subject and, when it is particularly strict, it turns into a real “internal enemy”, capable of successfully boycotting the subject’s own projects and actions. The saying we are our own worst enemy is based precisely on

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this intuition. In particular, once internalised, the external parameter of measurement can take different forms and become an indication, for example, not only of normality and/​or deviance from normality, but also function as criteria to evaluate performance (“I’ll never make it, I’m not good enough”). If a subject, for a variety of biographical reasons, is predisposed or inclined to accept and/​or conform to an external parameter of measurement, he or she will naturally tend to place him or herself on potentially fertile ground for various forms of pathological communication. This type of person will perfectly correspond to the man without an ego described by Gurdjieff in his metaphor of the “hackney carriage”. In this passage, Gurdjieff explains his conception of the human being, and distinguishes between subjects who, in his opinion, have reached different levels of cognitive, psychic, emotional, and spiritual development: A man as a whole … is almost exactly comparable to that equipage for transporting a passenger which consists of a carriage, a horse, and a coachman. … The body of a man, with all its motor-​reflex manifestations, corresponds simply to the carriage itself, all the functionings and manifestations of feeling of a man correspond to the horse harnessed to the carriage and drawing it, the coachman sitting on the box and directing the horse corresponds to what in a man people usually call “consciousness” or “thought”, and finally, the passenger sitting in the carriage and giving orders to the coachman is what is called “I”. The fundamental evil among contemporary people is that, owing to the rooted and widespread abnormal methods of education of the rising generation, this fourth personality, which should be present in everybody on reaching responsible age, is entirely lacking in them, and almost all of them consist only of three of the enumerated parts, which, moreover, are formed arbitrarily by themselves. In other words, almost every contemporary man of responsible age consists of neither more nor less than a “hackney carriage”, and what is more, a broken-​down carriage that has long ago seen its day, a crock of a horse, and on the box, a tatterdemalion, half-​ asleep, half-​drunk coachman, whose time designated by Mother Nature for self-​perfection passes in fantastic daydreams while he waits on a corner for any old chance passenger. The first one who happens along hires him and dismisses him just as he pleases, and not only him but also all the parts subordinate to him.3 Certainly, Gurdjieff’s metaphor is complex and goes far beyond the mere acceptance of an external yardstick; however, the presence of the latter can usefully be taken as an indication of a fragile identity (an individual resembling a “hackney carriage”), which can easily be the object of pathological forms of communication.

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The manipulation of contextual information, presented as a series of objective and unchangeable facts From these alleged objective facts usually a series of consequences derive that are presented to the subject as unavoidable, even though they might be unfavourable to the subject, who is therefore manipulated. The concept of “definition of the situation” that Erving Goffman worked on4 helps to better understand this point. In all interactions speakers propose definitions of the situation, more or less convergent or competing with each other, which also function as a moral constraint: a certain interlocutor, given a certain definition of the situation, which is agreed on, will be viewed as having the moral right to be considered according to certain social criteria. The definition of the situation entails a mutual definition of the identities and roles of the interlocutors in that specific interaction. For instance, whenever a professional service is negotiated within a relational frame that can be defined in terms of “friendship”, two competing definitions of the situation arise: professional relationship/​relationship between friends. It is often the case that in the folds of this processes of mutual definition of the situation the preconditions for manipulative processes are lurking. The reduction of the other to mere silent extra, “invisible third party” This discursive practice is usually highly detrimental to the personal identity of the person subjected to it. Transforming an interlocutor participating in a conversation into a silent, invisible third party is a strategy aimed at denigrating and depersonalising the other. Yet, this practice is frequently employed. What makes it so effectively destructive? In itself, speaking of a person who is present while interacting with a third –​as if that person were absent –​is like asserting that the presence of the person’s body is not a sufficient and necessary condition for considering him or her as an active participant in the dialogue. Which in turn is like insinuating and signalling to the third speaker that that person lacks something that would entitle him or her to actively participate in the conversation. This game of threesomes usually takes place in the presence of children, the mentally ill, the severely addicted, or the elderly. An extreme example of this type of practice is reported in an essay on social death by David Sudnow.5 Two doctors, conversing with each other at the foot of the bed of a dying but still perfectly conscious patient, wonder about the state of health of his kidneys, concluding that they will certainly find out during the autopsy. Another variant of this behaviour that leads to the depersonalisation of the other, who is reduced to being a silent apparition, can be found in David Rosenhan’s6 research on schizophrenia diagnoses in American hospitals. Rosenhan recounts how pseudo-​patients who had been admitted by pretending to hear voices (a typical symptom of schizophrenia) later tried to be discharged, trying everything they could, displaying a completely normal behaviour with doctors, psychiatrists, and

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the entire paramedical staff. Despite this, they continued to be treated as true schizophrenics. A clue to this was the kind of dialogue that took place every morning during the psychiatrist’s visit: the doctor walked through the entire ward visiting patients, accompanied by his staff. On meeting the various patients, he would address them using their proper names and ask them how they felt. However, when one of the pseudo-​patients tried to answer, showing that he had the psychological and social skills necessary to engage in a normal conversation, he would be ignored by the doctor and his staff. They continued their round, making it impossible for the conversation they had started –​with their question “Good morning, Mr James how are you today?” –​to actually take place. The social conventions of normal everyday life were repeatedly suspended, indicating that this was an extraordinary place, not one governed by normality. Other examples given below are taken from everyday life. Lara is the wife of an acquaintance of mine, she suffers from a severe form of depression. On several occasions, in the most acute stages of her illness, she attempted suicide, fortunately without succeeding. Her family context and friendship relations were highly toxic and an example of this was offered to me when one day, by chance, I happened to witness the following conversation. The couple was walking down the main street of a small provincial town in Tuscany on a Sunday morning when an acquaintance, supposedly a friend of hers, approached them. Looking only at the woman’s husband, she asked compassionately: “How is Lara today? Is she a little better?” The wife smiled awkwardly, passively accepting the role of silent extra being offered to her by the words of this alleged friend of hers. The husband began to talk at length, describing in detail the psychological state of his wife who, although present, did not dare say a single word. She was petrified, frozen in the role of “inferior being” she had just been given. In the last ten years of her life, my mother suffered from a severe form of Alzheimer’s. It was so bad she could no longer recognise her loved ones, at least those she did not see on a daily basis. My father loved her very much but, despite looking after her in every way possible, he continued to talk to those who visited as if she were not there. We were all so used to this way of behaving, of pretending that she was not there, that no one gave it much thought any more. Still, my mother’s Alzheimer’s was intermittent and did not prevent her from making pertinent and surprisingly wise observations from time to time. All the same, my father, though well-​intentioned, kept on conversing like this every day, which contributed to turning her into a non-​person. In short: if someone in our presence talks about us as if we were absent, it would be better to leave, if possible, so that we actually do become absent. We should in no way show that we accept this kind of interaction, because by doing so we are “ratifying” a definition of ourselves that is detrimental to our personal dignity.7

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Other practices that induce depersonalisation There are many ways to do this, numerous ways of indicating to the observer and/​or participant in a conversation that the person we are speaking to is not actually competent enough to fully participate. For instance, the intonational system and the use of typically childish words are very widespread and effective strategies. Once, while visiting an elderly relative who resided in a nursing home in an Italian city, I happened to witness the following conversation between a nurse and an elderly lady who was over ninety, a guest in the same facility. “Well good evening dear Linetta. Are you behaving today? Are you going to eat everything up for me? Come on, that’s it. I’m going to give you some spread cheese now, the kind you like. Come on, open your mouth sweetheart”. Talking to the aunt I was visiting, I later learned that the lady in question had been an authoritative and respected headmistress of a high school and that previously she had taught Greek and Latin for many years to generations of students who still visited her from time to time. Furthermore, my aunt confirmed that Mrs Lina was fully conscious and aware, she still read scholarly books; she kept a version of the New Testament in both Italian and Greek on her bedside table and read it from time to time. I wondered what it must have been like for her to be addressed in that tone and with those words. My father was admitted to a clinic located in the centre of Milan following a severe stroke. Here he spent the last months of his life. I had agreed to this because of the quality and number of recreational activities available to patients. In particular, I had been impressed by the singing therapy and, therefore, after the first week of hospitalisation, I hurried to get him admitted. When my father was young he had sung as a baritone, he had a beautiful voice. Unfortunately, his university studies and professional career put an end to his singing. I thought that having the opportunity to sing again would be good for him. However, after the first group lessons, he did not seem particularly happy, so I decided to go and look for myself. At the time indicated on the programme, I went to the facility and took part in the lesson as an outside observer. In the singing room there were about 20 elderly gentlemen and ladies sitting in their wheelchairs. They were preparing to sing. My father was among them. He was fully dressed, he wore a jacket, shirt, and shoes, as the clinic made sure the patients were all presentable. The director, while illustrating the characteristics of the facility to me, had expressly emphasised the fact that the care they provided in no way entailed any form of depersonalisation. All patients, even the most serious cases, were spoken to using the Italian polite Lei form. However, when they started singing, I found myself in a completely unexpected situation: the songs chosen were certainly not Mozart’s Ave Verum, but neither were they normal pop music songs. They were children’s songs, with ducks waddling and quacking, and moves the singing teacher suggested they do to accompany their awkward vocalisations.

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Hardly any of the elderly were really participating, most looked completely catatonic. Only a few agreed, reluctantly, to sing. I turned towards my father who was sitting there in silence; he gave me a desperate look. These examples are only two of many cases of depersonalisation that result in the progressive loss of self-​esteem on the part of the subjects suffering it. Let us consider the following case as an example. The son of a close friend told me about the following incidents that took place during a school trip with his class. A classmate, who had a difficult relationship with her mother, phoned home and said: “Hi Mum, how are you?” Her mother hung up without saying anything. On the second day, the daughter called again: “Mum, it’s me, Giulia”. This time her mother answered: “I don’t have time right now”. On the last day of the school trip, just before arriving home, the daughter called again: “Hi Mum, we are almost in Milan”, and the mother replied: “You’re back already?” Stereotypes and unjustified generalisations A particularly pathological form of communication is based on the use of stereotypes and unjustified generalisations. Stereotypes have a social utility from a practical point of view, as they extend the validity of experiences relating to individual cases to the whole class of similar cases; however, such stereotypes are mostly based on forms of unjustified generalisations and therefore represent a significant source of pathological communication. Again, the rhetorical figure underlying this form of reasoning is the synecdoche: we exchange a part for the whole, a violent action committed by one migrant for the possibility that all migrants of that nationality may act the same way. It is not possible, nor even desirable, to eliminate stereotypical reasoning, as it permits deductive reasoning, which goes from the individual case to the whole class, which can be useful from a practical point of view. It is not a question of eliminating it, but of pointing out its limited validity, its purely hypothetical character and, of course, its poor predictive capacity. 3.3  Names are omens: is a word enough to lose one’s identity?

Nomina sunt omina, names are omens, the ancient Romans wisely said. In many cultures, giving a name signals the beginning of the social journey of one’s identity. This beginning is marked by a religious ceremony (in Christianity it is baptism). Naming, in fact, is a highly symbolic act that requires a ritual context which defines a time and space outside of the ordinary, one that is liminal in nature.8 The liminality of ritual is necessary, as the birth of this subjectivity must be established ex nihilo: the attribution of a name marks the beginning of a biographical journey as the subject enters temporality. Indeed, the name represents the symbolic enclosure inside which all perceptions, everything that will be seen and sensed, is gathered. A name,

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therefore, is what initiates a subject’s history, the necessary condition for the unfolding of a biography. A name can, so to speak, initiate the process of the formation of the self, definitively differentiating the singular from the plural, the one from the whole. One’s name, in this sense, fulfils the function of separating and differentiating the newborn from the whole. We usually say: “My name is”, but we never “call” ourselves, we do not pronounce our own name when speaking. A name, in fact, is given to us. It is what designates our identity in the eyes of others. It is a principle of classification and assemblage that gives consistency to the permanence of the self in time and space. A name has a symbolic value: it represents a person’s physical and psychic integrity. Once this sound is pronounced, it marks the physical perimeter of the psychic space that our person occupies in the world. In this sense, the act of altering and/​or mispronouncing a name can represent a violation of the integrity of a person’s identity: there is a relationship between the cacophony of mispronunciation –​especially when it is perceived by the person whose name is being mispronounced as intentional –​and the violation of the space occupied by his or her physical body and that, we might say, represents what encloses the related psychic energy. Any arbitrary tampering with the designation of someone’s identity can legitimately be perceived as an act of verbal aggression, although sensitivity to this issue varies widely depending on the subject and may also vary in the course of a subject’s life. A dear friend, knowing that I was working on this volume, told me the following story. Her name is Maria Luisa and, like all people who have a double name, she had become used to all possible variants: Maria, Marialuisa, Luisa, and even Eloisa for the more creative. For many years this issue remained a sensitive one. She still remembers, as if it were yesterday, a colleague from Turin who, noticing her irritation, kept truncating her name and using only Maria –​a rather evident form of horizontal mobbing. She stopped being friendly with him, but gradually began to appreciate the various possibilities associated with her name. She realised that no name could actually represent her completely, that whatever version of her name was used, it could only indicate a part of her identity. Today she uses the specific variants of her name as a means to classify her interlocutors: depending on how they call her, they remind her of a different phase of her life, different attitudes and feelings towards her. She told me that today, when someone gets her name wrong, she smiles, as if such a locutionary act were detached from the living space that her name, her real name, represents. This mispronunciation of her name, also when it was intended, became for Maria Luisa a mirror in which to look at the deformed face of her interlocutor, his petty need to hurt and harm, his awkward desire to harass, his inability to transform himself and the world around him. However, name-​changing is not always an intentional and aggressive act …

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Due to a series of fortuitous circumstances, a providential stiff neck led me to meet a doctor from whom I would learn a great deal in the following years. The doctor in question was of French origin and his name was Claude. By mistake, on the first day I met him, I called him “Claudio” and, realising my mistake, I blushed with embarrassment. He, however, smiled and simply replied: “You may call me whatever you want”. There is another process worth mentioning. The loss of one’s name: a devastating event capable of wiping out an entire identity and preventing the very possibility of conversing. It is typical of totalitarian regimes and of many total institutions9 to cancel a person’s name and, in order to depersonalise a person, replace it with a numerical code. Without a name, the very possibility of remembering seems to be undermined. In this regard, this passage of a poem by Primo Levi is significant: Consider whether this is a woman, Without hair or name With no more strength to remember Eyes empty and womb cold As a frog in winter.10 The power of a name and its ability to evoke both a symbolic and concrete presence is most intensely revealed when, for example, following the onset of a serious illness such as Alzheimer’s, the names of loved ones slowly begin to fade. One can see how names are classifying principles used in conversation, how their disappearance radically affects the possibilities for dialogue. One suddenly realises that talking to someone who no longer masters the art of names can turn into an adventurous action that takes us to the limits of everyday life, shattering the certainties we used to rely on. Dialogues with people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease can sometimes turn into very intense experiences: the affected person goes from appearing to us as a nice old man who is completely helpless to a wise elder from an ancient tribe with prophetic abilities. I remember the day my mother, who suffered from a severe form of Alzheimer’s, stopped recognising me. I remember it as if it were yesterday. It was December 25, Christmas Day. From then on, she would never say my name again. I felt my self crumbling before her eyes. It was an excruciating blow: I felt that her inability to pronounce the very name she had chosen for me marked the end of any possible mother-​daughter relationship. She would look at me smiling and amused and ask anyone who passed by who this beautiful lady was who paid so much attention to her. I kept telling her: “It’s me, Anna, Anna Lisa, Annalisa, your daughter, the only daughter you have. I am here. Look at me”. She would smile, having been reassured by my words and would stroke my hair. A few minutes later she would ask the same

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question: “Who is this beautiful lady?” I intrigued her even though I had no name. My name had vanished in a distant haze, but not her interest in me. I continued to be a focus of attention and attraction for her, even though she could no longer give that feeling a reason or a name. From that day, she would never say my name again, and our possibilities of communication changed drastically. All our exchanges, all our words, rested in a vacuum, no longer supported or enclosed by the boundaries of a clear and defined role: that of mother and daughter. The dialogues between us gradually took on an increasingly esoteric form. My mother had moments of awareness, and although she could not remember my name or who I was, she seemed to speak to me from another world, as if the illness had given her special access to something, as if she were capable of connecting the world of the living to that of the dead. I learned a lot from her in the period leading up to her death. There were also hilarious moments, such as the day when my son, who was about ten at the time, decided to tease his grandmother and ask her the same question she always asked when greeting us –​a sort of ethnomethodological experiment.11 That afternoon, we entered the hall where my mother used to sit in front of the terrace window. She looked up, ready to ask my father who we were, when my son turned to me and said: “Mum, who is this beautiful lady?” I was speechless, I did not know what to say. Then my mother, who had not recognised any of us for many months, except for my father, stood up proudly and, looking at her grandson straight in the eyes, said: “I am Maria Cristina and I am your grandmother”. The memory of her name had magically brought back the memory of her emotional relationship with her grandson. Calling herself by name, for a moment, she had rediscovered not only who she was but also the names of other beloved ones. After a moment of bewilderment, we all burst out laughing. 3.4  Metacommunication and double bind

Metacommunication is a fundamental part of any communication process. It literally means communicating about communication. There are many possible forms of metacommunication. We rely on it to render our messages more complex, to express emotional distance or proximity to what we are saying. Usually, we entrust metacommunication to the intonational system (i.e. when we say something with words and its opposite with the tone of our voice, for example “I am mad as hell” said with a tone of voice that communicates absolute calm) or to the kinesic system (“I am mad as hell” said with smiling eyes). Sometimes we also metacommunicate using the verbal system (“I’m joking!”, “It’s only a game”, “I’m dead serious”.) Metacommunication is not a purely human prerogative, as some scholars claim, as it is also known and practised by animals: when two dogs play and fight, they know perfectly well that they are just having fun, and when they are really fighting, they are perfectly capable of communicating their

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real intentions. This has been documented by ethological studies that look at numerous animal species; perhaps one day we will discover that plants and flowers also metacommunicate and that they are even better than us at this. The point is that metacommunication also and always entails a potential abuse with respect to any communicative exchange. The discrepancy –​and contradiction –​between what is said with words and what is said on top of these words can be such as to undermine, in the course of years, an individual’s psychic stability, especially if this happens over a prolonged period of time and at a stage of life when the ego is being formed. This theory, which has been a fundamental point of reference for the study of communicative processes, is called the double bind theory. Gregory Bateson first formulated it working with a group of scholars connected to the Palo Alto School.12 It was later completely reformulated by Watzlawick, Beavin Bavelas, and Jackson13 in their Pragmatics of Human Communication. Three conditions are necessary for there to be a double bind: a situation of asymmetry within the relationship (such that the person subjected to the double bind believes he or she has no way out, i.e. he or she cannot leave); a gap between two mutually contradictory messages that generates a communicative and cognitive dilemma; and the fact that this type of contradictory and paralysing message, being prolonged in time, creates a sort of relational chain. There must, in short, be a recurring communicative pattern. This is a well-​known theory that has revolutionised the way of thinking about communication for all those who, for various reasons, have come across it. Let us consider a series of examples, from the most classic ones proposed by the authors themselves to others drawn from everyday life. a. A mother gives her son two beautiful cashmere jumpers for Christmas, one blue and one red. The son decides to wear the red one for Christmas lunch. His mother is dismayed, she stares at him with contempt and says: “So you don’t like the blue one?” b. The social role of “mother” requires a mother to love her daughter. However, due to psychiatric problems, a mother treats her daughter in a humiliating and denigrating way, which means her actions are contradictory with respect to her supposed role, the one their relationship is based on. The mother in question may even express her love using words, thus conforming to what is prescribed by her social role. c. A man writes love letters (or emails) to the person he supposedly loves, repeatedly telling her she is the great love of his life. His actions, however, convey a message that completely contradicts the message expressed with words: he betrays her continuously; his actions and decisions show no respect for her whatsoever. d. A parent says to his child: “You certainly don’t have to respect my prohibitions”. e. Someone who claims to be a friend says: “Be spontaneous!”

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The list could go on for many pages, but at this point each one of us has already recognised at least one of these situations, a situation we have witnessed or in which we were the protagonist. In all these cases there is a dilemma, a contradiction linking two conflicting types of messages, and the person who is subjected to the double bind, like a mouse in a box being used for some atrocious scientific experiment, goes back and forth between these two options, not knowing which one to choose. The solution would actually be to decide not to choose either option, simply recognising the problematic nature of the choice being constructed and the impossibility of making a morally correct choice. However, our minds –​ and especially our hearts –​can go on forever in this double bind situation, because when we were confronted with this type of communication for the first time we were very young, we were not yet capable of thinking autonomously and of being emotionally independent. This is also the condition necessary to enter a double bind dynamic as adults: what is necessary is precisely the familiarity acquired during childhood. The latter is a necessary condition for this situation to be repeated, because it is the link with the past that causes a subject who is victim of a double bind to react as if he or she were still that boy or girl experiencing the situation for the first time. The fact that this person believes there is no way out, that he or she has no power to change the situation, no transformative power to break free from this very painful constraint, essentially depends on the fact that in this kind of circumstance and in these conditions we continue to remember how we reacted in the past, repeating a type of behaviour as if it were the only one possible. It must be stressed that a necessary condition of the double bind dynamic is that this communicative pattern cannot be isolated, but must be repeated over time in one or more fundamental relationships. A single statement does not have the power to cause significant damage. In fact, this type of communication is quite frequent in everyday life, but this does not mean it causes forms of psychic discomfort in the listener. The five examples given above could actually be emotionally and discursively taken apart with a simple reflection and/​or a witty and timely remark: a. The son might reply to his mother: “Do you really love me?” b. Faced with more of the same psychological violence, the daughter might reply ironically to her mother: “Imagine you were my stepmother”. c. The person who is supposedly loved might say to the man who betrays her: “You know, I’ve fallen in love with someone else. I love you so much, darling, but now I’m leaving you. I’m so sorry. Take care”. d. My son would reply, “Mum, what’s wrong with you?” e. “Can you?”

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Of course formulating answers like this is far from easy, but sometimes the right thing to do is show the tiger lurking behind our kindness. As our wise ancestors used to say: ultimately, he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword. From the outside, the subject trapped in a double bind situation seems to behave like a puppet, unable to make the right choice, like a marionette whose strings are skilfully pulled by others. However, those who have experienced this situation from the inside know the devastating effects of each move, the despair caused by the impossibility of freeing oneself and stopping the game initiated by our executioner. The real enemy here is only an internal one: it is the desperate child who resides within us and who cries out asking for the affection, the consideration, the love he or she did not receive. This child wants all this back, and until he or she does not realise that there is no way of having these things back –​and that, despite everything, it is possible to go on –​this child will never be an adult. The film Chocolat by Lasse Hallström offers an illuminating example of how a double bind situation can be dissolved, what words make this dissolution possible, or at least more likely. Josephine is the wife of the owner of a bar in a small village. She is one of the women in the village who come to see the chocolate shop that has just been opened by the protagonist. Her father was a collaborator with the Germans and therefore, at the end of the war, Josephine found herself ostracised by the members of the small community in which the story takes place. Her husband Serge was the only person who cared for her and was willing to marry her, but for Josephine this coincided with the beginning of a real nightmare. Serge, in fact, is a violent and alcoholic husband who beats her. When the protagonist Vianne becomes aware of the violence and psychological distress of Josephine, she tries to approach her by offering her friendship and her favourite chocolates. In a dialogue between the two, Vianne speaks of this violent husband and tells Josephine: “Serge is not the world”. The woman, however, replies: “Yes he is”. At this point Vianne could have insisted, trying in vain to explain to Josephine that she is wrong. Instead, in the film, Vianne follows a different strategy that eventually helps Josephine to become closer to her and actually get rid of her drunken, abusive husband. She says: “Well I must be mistaken” and stays by her side, without judging her. In fact, being a victim of a double bind is incompatible with a condition of full and responsible adulthood. In this case, an adult is actually someone who acts like a child disguised as a fifty-​year-​old. In part, this person feels, suffers, thinks, and acts like the child he or she was, the child that continues to live inside him or her. A friend once told me: “When we say we are fifty years old, this doesn’t mean we are no longer forty-​nine, forty-​eight, forty-​seven, etc. On the contrary, it means that we are one, two, three, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-​four … The various ages we were remain with us, one next to the

64  “The words not to say it”

other, and with our thinking and feeling we can return to the various stages of our lives at any time in the present and in the future”. It seems to me that this way of looking at our different ages is particularly interesting. In the case of individuals who have experienced double bind situations during childhood, it is as if the entire self were stuck. The passage of time, of different ages, is blocked because one age has taken over and does not want to and cannot give way to another, due to a series of traumatic experiences that occurred at that time. So this individual is stuck in his or her past: at the registry office he or she is an adult, but inside, the various ages of this person are organised according to a different hierarchy: the painful years of childhood have, as we said, taken over. The thoughts, emotions and beliefs belonging to that particular age still dictate the decisions, interpretations and actions of this adult. Although it may not necessarily be the case, this metaphorical image of a suffering child or adolescent disguised as an adult who behaves in the world as the child he or she in fact continues to be, is very effective: it provides us with a magnifying glass that allows us to depersonalise what is taking place around us. This means, once again, putting people back into their biography, as Rudolf Steiner suggests.14 In his formulation of the double-​bind theory, Paul Watzlawick15 reminds us that this type of communication, if repeated over a long period of time with people who belong to a certain age group, can cause very significant psychic damage which can lead, in adulthood, to schizophrenia. Studies conducted by the Palo Alto School in California –​the scholars cited above belong to this school –​have unequivocally proved that we are the words we hear, by showing that when using certain specific narrative patterns, words can also make a person ill. Put another way, these kinds of studies underline that words are a fundamental nutrient for an individual’s subjectivity and that because of this, great attention must be paid to both the words we utter and those to which we expose ourselves. In the case of traumatic and painful experiences, what we can learn, essentially, is to avoid answering the questions of the present with the words of the past. 3.5  The Aristotelian syllogism and the grass syllogism

A further reflection on pathological forms of communication concerns some implications of the use of the grass syllogism when it is employed as a marketing strategy to sell a certain product. The syllogism to which we are accustomed is the Aristotelian one: the συλλoγισμός, as formulated in Aristotle’s Prior Analytics. In the classical example, this syllogism reads: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates is mortal.16

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However, if one proceeds by abduction and, on the basis of Bateson’s considerations,17 believes that relations must be at the centre of reflection, one can hypothesise another form of syllogism, the grass syllogism: Goats eat lettuce; I eat lettuce; I am a goat. As Silvano Arieti18 points out, this form of syllogism is extremely creative, as it allows for the connection of units that share a single characteristic. On the basis of one shared element, the possibility of an identity is constructed. This way of reasoning is typical of both severe pathologies (such as schizophrenia) and creative processes. The grass syllogism or abductive syllogism, however, thanks to its creative potential can also become an instrument of manipulation. Despite how superficial it may be, it is very effective. We may think of its frequent use in advertising. In this case the communication strategy is very simple: James Bond wears a Rolex; I buy and wear a Rolex; I am (like) James Bond. The female version is: Angelina Jolie wears Dior perfume; I buy and wear Dior perfume; I am (like) Angelina Jolie. Of course, I am not, I remain exactly the same person I was before, perhaps with a nicer watch on my wrist and a more seductive perfume. The construction of this identification based on a single shared element is a fallacious cognitive process and, at the same time, an infallible marketing strategy. The abductive syllogism and the grass syllogism are certainly not pathological forms of communication per se. However, when they are made to serve corporate marketing and market strategies, they become particularly effective forms of communication, capable of manipulating the representation that potential buyers have of their own identity. Notes 1 2 3 4

Pessoa 1991. Watzlawick, Beavin, Bavelas, Jackson. 1967. Gurdjieff 1964, pp. 1093–​1094. Goffman 1959.

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5 Sudnow 1967. 6 Rosenhan 1973. 7 As proof that any possible instruction on how to communicate always needs to be contextualised, consider the story told to me by Teresa, a student of mine. She had already graduated in engineering and then enrolled at the DAMS of the Roma Tre University, a faculty specialised in the arts, to pursue her passion for theatre. After listening to my interpretation of the discursive practice of speaking in the presence of someone as if this person were invisible, she told me that in her family this practice was quite usual, although in her case it took on a completely different and even antithetical meaning. Her mother used to do this whenever she was in the presence of Teresa’s husband, that is, her son-​in-​law, not out of disrespect, but on the contrary to show her respect, to show how highly she regarded the “esteemed professor”. When Teresa and her husband were invited to lunch on a Sunday, the dialogues between her and mother would be somewhat hilarious. Her mother would ask Teresa, standing in front of her husband Luigi who was listening: “Does Luigi eat pasta?” and Teresa would have to ask her husband and then answer her mother. This would last throughout the meal with Teresa acting as a sort of transmitter for the communication going on between mother-​ in-​law and son-​in-​law. In this case the mother-​in-​law wished to express her utmost respect to her son-​in-​law. 8 On liminality see Turner 1982. 9 On total institutions see Goffman 1961a. 10 Levi 1976. 11 See the reflections by Garfinkel 1952, 1963, 1967. 12 Bateson, Jackson, Haley, Weakland 1956; Bateson 1972. 13 Watzlawick, Beavin Bavelas, Jackson 1967. 14 See Steiner 1894, 2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2012. 15 Watzlawick 1984. 16 Aristotle 1989. 17 Bateson 1972. 18 Arieti 1990.

Four BODY LANGUAGE

Illness is a conflict between the personality and the soul. We have a “runny nose” when our body does not cry. Our throat is sore when sorrow cannot be communicated. Our stomach “burns” when anger is not let out. Diabetes “invades” us when loneliness hurts. We put on weight when dissatisfaction is too tight. A headache is “depressing” when doubts become too many. Our heart is “too slow” when the meaning of life seems to be lost. Our chest “tightens” when we are enslaved by pride. Our pressure is “too high” when we are imprisoned by fear. Neurosis “paralyses” when our inner child acts like a tyrant. A fever “warms” us when our defences exploit the boundaries of immunity. Our knees “ache” when pride does not bend. Cancer “kills” when we are tired of living. How does silent pain speak to us through our body? The disease itself is not bad, it warns us we are on the wrong path. (Alejandro Jodorowsky, La trampa sagrada: Conversaciones con Gilles Farcet, 1991) Alejandro Jodorowsky (1991) argues that the body talks to us. When one refuses to listen to its words, then one will become ill. Illness, according to him, depends on a potential misunderstanding between the mind and body, on their reciprocal misalignment, as if the language of the body were more

DOI: 10.4324/9781003433316-4

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suitable and fit to express, shape, and interpret the desires and the movements of the soul. In virtual worlds, you can face challenging encounters –​with scoundrels and wizards and spells –​that you know for sure will work out in the end. Or you can die and be reborn. Real people, with their unpredictable ways, can seem difficult to contend with after one has spent a stretch in simulation. (Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 2015)1 As Turkle underlines, the fundamental difference between communication in virtual worlds and communication in the real world is the presence of the physical body: there is a materiality that cannot be eliminated, demagnetised, or made to evaporate. In fact, physicality changes everything, because it is what allows us to enter the game. We are certainly not claiming that one form of communication is better than the other, but that they are radically different and that physicality greatly influences conversations that take place in the offline world. We tend to think we communicate using mainly the verbal system, we acknowledge the role of the intonational system, but we seldom consider the communicative dimension of our kinesics system and, more in general, the haptic system. Yet, many expressions recur in language that should remind us of the fundamental role played by bodily communication, such as “speaking from the heart”, “smiling with one’s eyes”, or “to have a bee in one’s bonnet”. In 1958, Alexander Lowen published a famous book from which I drew inspiration for the title of this chapter. The pages that follow are dedicated to the pioneering work of this brilliant scholar. The body speaks and speaks to us, but are we willing to listen to it? Alberto Melucci argues that illness always carries a message from the body, one we are not willing to listen to.2 The body, therefore, speaks with us and to us, but it also speaks to our interlocutors, and, in this sense, it says a lot about us. There are professions that distance us from the body and others that bring us closer to it. We may think of people who practice a sport at a professional level, of theatre actors, of a rolfing massage expert or a chiropractor, a surgeon or a midwife witnessing the miracle of childbirth or, again, of the director of a funeral home who deals with the miracle of death. There are other professions that are viewed as being socially more humble, but no less dignified, in which the body is so relevant it forces one to take it into consideration, in a manner that is unknown to urban subjects in an intellectual profession. We may think, for example, of someone who works as a maid or a bricklayer, or as a caregiver for an elderly person who is no longer self-​sufficient, and is confronted on a daily basis with the decay and decline of a body dealing with illness, old age, and all the fluids that such a situation entails. What kind of physicality do these professions involve? How

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will the bodies of people in such different professions speak? I have always imagined that what happens to writers is also true of other people with different jobs: they see the world through the lenses and glasses provided by one’s frame of mind, the mind and the gaze also constructed by a certain professional and scientific culture. So again, what do the bodies that seem to be dragged silently along the streets of our cities tell us? Some years ago I used to travel across Milan and Rome using the underground. I had to do this also in summer, when bodies speak not only through their posture, facial expression, gestures, the distance at which they stand and orient themselves in the space, but also and above all with colours and smells. To quell the boredom of those journeys I invented a game: I carefully observed the faces of the people travelling in my carriage and tried to imagine their lives based on the small details I observed on their faces, their movements, the words they used while speaking on their mobile phones. I was struck by the greyness, the sadness, the scarcity of light in those tired faces, their desire for sleep in the morning or rest in the evening. However, what struck me the most was the “indecent” absence of all those bodies. As soon as I noticed this in others I would try to look composed, make contact with the various parts of my own body by asking them how they were, where had they ended up. That is, I tried to do something about my own “indecency”. It was as if we were all pretending that by keeping quiet and avoiding contact with the people in the carriage, we were not saying anything to each other. On the contrary, a number of silent conversations were going on, but in a language that is not taught in traditional language schools and that only a few people can interpret. Who knows what the little fingers with the red-​ painted nails of the lady sitting in front of me were saying to the feet in the sandals of the girl who was sitting next to her … Were they perhaps speaking a language unknown to me? And how were my mind and gaze able to participate in these silent conversations? In fact, when we look at someone, one glance is enough to sense a lot about the other. So where does all this information come from? And is it possible that although we believe we communicate with words, it is in fact our bodies that do most of the talking? 4.1  The body speaks

The thickness of the body is the sole means I have to go unto the heart of the things. (Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, The visible and the invisible, 1968)3 When we meet a person for the first time, we are literally overwhelmed by a myriad of information that has to do with the way she places herself in space, her posture, the way she moves or stands still, the gestures of her hands and

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fingers, the way she tilts her head, her facial expressions, eye contact, her way of dressing. In short, everything she does offers us clues that allow us to form a first impression. It is no coincidence that a popular proverb says: the first impression is the one that counts. As if everything that follows were covered, clothed, and hidden by streams of words. And with words, we know, one lies more easily. When the physicality of the body comes into play, lying becomes a professional exercise. In fact, all it takes is a small contraction in the face, a fleeting wrinkle in the eyebrows, fingers drumming nervously on the table and the authenticity of the words uttered by our interlocutor is suddenly questioned. Generally, we know that in everyday life it is better to trust what is expressed through non-​verbal forms of language rather than words: whenever an inconsistency or a contradiction emerges between what is said by the different systems, instinctively we attach more importance to what is expressed through body language. Following the publication of Alexander Lowen’s book, manuals of non-​verbal communication have increased tenfold, producing more or less exhaustive lists, and more or less significant tables, filled with detailed information and instructions on how to interpret other people’s body language and sometimes even one’s own.4 Here I do not intend to offer the reader more lists, from which we might then feel compelled to distance ourselves, at least partially. Decades of communication studies –​ starting with Stuart Hall5 – have unequivocally proved that communication takes place in the intersection between the coding and decoding activities of the subjects interacting and that these are strongly influenced by countless factors that render them necessarily multiple and plural (an important factor being the role played by the context in which messages are encoded and decoded). One wonders: how come, when we see a winking eye or a certain posture, someone’s neck thrust forward, we tend to forget about this plurality and are inclined to believe that the body speaks in a language that is more or less unambiguous? Certainly, there are fixed patterns in body language and patterns that are more or less widespread. However, this fact should not generate fallacious and undue generalisations. Can the silent words that our bodies exchange when they meet really be reduced to lists and tables? Is this not a strange game of the mind, which believes it is possible to reduce everything to the verbal system, even what, in fact, is expressed through something else? It is the same contradiction in terms that we encounter when we want to “talk about silence”: we can certainly do this, but we will also be aware of the limitations that our own way of proceeding presents us with. In the following pages we will look at a specific conception of the body, of its ability to remember and speak, especially in the case of repressed traumatic events; of the ineffability and the mystery that binds some of these processes; of the language of emotions and their special way of traversing bodies; and, finally, of the body language par excellence: silence. We will, once again, start with everyday experiences.

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In 2008, I happened to attend a seminar in Tuscany on sensitive dance, a particular form of dance that involves a series of movements made in nature, which promotes and renews contact with one’s inner self (in that case we had to dance between and on olive trees). The residential seminar involved continuous contact throughout the day with a group of about 20 women who mainly did not know each other and came from various Italian cities and countries around the world. The seminar was very demanding: it involved a series of exercises in contact with the earth. They reminded one of real shamanic rituals, aimed at shedding light on the deeper dynamics hidden in the folds of the participants’ unconscious. Throughout the day, from six o’clock in the morning, we performed these exhausting exercises, then ate meals together and finally went to sleep in large communal rooms. Even the showers were shared. The residential situation was very spartan. Towards the end of the fifth day, a truly unique phenomenon occurred: 18 women out of the 20 participants (so almost all the women of childbearing age) had their period. Obviously, for many of them their period was several weeks early. One of the people leading the seminar told us he had seen this phenomenon occur on countless occasions: it was as if the dancers’ bodies ended up talking to each other and their respective physiological processes synchronised. To everyone, including myself, this phenomenon appeared to be totally unexplainable. 4.1.1  How the body remembers and forgets6

Memory studies have long ignored this issue and are mainly focused on the study of individual memory as a mental activity. For many years, the assumption that the body could remember was completely neglected and only recently has a renewed interest in this area taken shape.7 The hypotheses proposed here are: that the body –​so not only the human mind –​is capable of remembering; that in the process of remembering and forgetting, body and mind are often interconnected; and that, because the body is able to remember, it is also able to speak of such memories, often linked to traumatic events, using its own language.8 Since the 1980s, following the publication of the works of the neurologist Oliver Sacks,9 a large amount of evidence has been gathered on the body’s capacity to remember and its intelligence. Sacks described the cases of several patients suffering from “phantom limb syndrome”: an amputated limb was still remembered by the body, and the patient could still feel pain in that leg for many years after the amputation. According to Sacks, this capacity of the body to remember its leg can be very useful when implanting a prosthetic limb. Another well-​known case, described by Sacks, concerned a woman named Christina, whose body had entirely lost the ability to perceive itself. Her body could no longer coordinate its own parts: Christina could

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move a hand or a foot only by looking at it. Christina described herself as a “disembodied” woman and this situation caused her a great deal of pain. Her case documents that the body can not only remember but also forget. In the process of forgetting, the body seems to be independent and autonomous from the mind. Christina could see her limbs with her eyes, and she could speak about them, but her body could no longer recognise them. Another example of bodily memory is that of traumatic past experiences and repressed memories: we may think of the memories of sexual abuse retained in the body or of other kinds of violence experienced during childhood and stored for a long time in an individual’s unconscious. There are several case studies in psychology that describe the re-​ emergence of such traumatic memories at the conscious level, how they resurface after many decades of amnesia. However, not only in pathologies but also in everyday life, there is evidence of the body’s capacity to remember. Let us consider the ability of the body to remember specific sequences of movement. If someone tries to play a tune on the piano for the first time after many years, at the very beginning they will experience some difficulties, and if they try to “remember” it at all costs, it will probably be impossible. But if they just let their fingers move on the keyboard, a sort of miracle will take place: they suddenly remember how to play the tune. Hands and fingers just “do it themselves”, somehow independently of conscious thought. This is the conclusion that David Sudnow reaches in his Ways of the Hand, in which he tells us that only when his mind stopped trying to direct his fingers did the jazz music he was playing become really beautiful. As long as the mind interfered, his hands acted clumsily. It was as if his hands knew how to play by themselves. In this case, it seems that the fingers can remember better than the mind. The same may be said in relation to sport activities. In many cases, we have the experience of being able to perform sequences of movement that we seem not to remember with our mind. Where is this memory stored? Is it possible that the body remembers what the mind forgets? In the last few years, several scholars in the field have begun to investigate the possibility that the body can in fact remember and forget. For example, Teresa Koloma Beck10 has studied how the body can reflect our social past, by analysing the consequences of war on body practices in everyday life. Heike Kanter11 has studied how bodies are portrayed in artistic practices, while Sophie Merit Müller12 has analysed the body’s memory in relation to ballet. The main issue addressed by these studies is the interconnection between social conditioning and individual identity in the construction and formation of bodily memory. 4.1.2  Clever bodies: the mind-​body dualism

Where are memories stored: in the mind, in the body, or in both?13 How and to what extent is Descartes’ dualism between mind and body able to

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operate as a basic assumption? Several scholars have recently highlighted the importance of body knowledge,14 derived from the notion of multiple intelligence.15 If the body’s intelligence can be acknowledged, will it also be possible to prove that the body itself can remember and forget? Several experiences in everyday life seem to suggest that indeed the body has this ability. As already mentioned, by remembering sets of movements we can frequently verify that our mind forgets what the body can easily remember, but only if we agree to stop “thinking about it”. This aspect is particularly evident in the case of Gurdjieff’s sacred movements. One can follow the sequence of movements in a dancers’ group only if one stops thinking about what the next movement is. The only way to dance the sacred movements is to follow the flow of communication among the dancers’ bodies in the group. During these sacred movements one experiences the inability of the mind to do what the body can do. The mind is always lagging behind, movements are too complex to be thought of as a sequence; the mind cannot keep up with the movements of the body. In the summer of 2013 I was in Centeno (a hamlet in Tuscany, Italy), where I took part in a residential seminar on Gurdjieff movements for the first time. What I listened to and the sacred movements sessions I attended during that seminar left an impression on me that would change my understanding of the mind-​body relationship forever. We danced for a few hours in the morning and continued every day until late afternoon, always in a group. None of us could see the sacred movements we were performing in their entirety. As participants, we only had a partial vision. Like in a magic drawing our arms, our legs, and our heads traced magic circles and geometric shapes in the air, but often we got it all wrong. Margit, our movement teacher, showed us the sequences to be performed, which were simply sketched out by her. She gave us very little information, as if it were not necessary to see more, and what we had to perform remained completely uncertain, as if suspended in air, incomprehensible. However, no one seemed to notice, no one asked for further explanations. In the front line there were the most experienced dancers, on their movements the movements of the whole group depended. I was trying to hide, standing in a central line, out of sight: I felt constantly inadequate, incapable, unable even to understand what I had to do. The movements changed constantly, they became increasingly complex. It seemed their main aim was to succeed in eliminating any possibility of controlling our bodies with our minds. And, indeed, over time I discovered (also by participating in many other seminars) that this was indeed the case. The mind had to freeze, so that we, dancers, could experience its fallacy. My mind was fighting, as I was used to scientific reasoning, to the supremacy of thought over every other aspect of my life. But that afternoon, all of a sudden, I was confused: the movements were not that difficult; however, their combination in geometric shapes was complex and variable, and this made them impossible

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or, at least, so it seemed to me. Suddenly I literally went to pieces: I stood there motionless in the middle of the group of dancers, an obstacle to the movements of the others who ran into me. I was terribly embarrassed, I could no longer go forward, or back. I finally burst out laughing, realising that the other solution, crying, would have been far worse. I felt Margit’s stern gaze on me and immediately realised I had to pull myself together. The days passed and the movements inexplicably became more fluid. A form of resignation had taken over: at least in the sacred movements, it was clear to me that for the time being I had no chance to excel and for this reason I began to let go. I performed those movements, forgetting at times what I was doing. I began to realise that the more I let myself be carried away by the movements of the group, the more I annulled myself in them, the more everything became simple and fluid. Suddenly I could go with my head to the left, with my right knee to the right, hands up, while reciting a sequence of words I had learned by heart, even though I did not know what it meant, all of this without making any mistakes … my body moved as if on its own. My mind was no longer blocked, but simply suspended. The body was in the flow. My body seemed to talk to the dancer in front of me, I followed her as if in a trance, without wondering what the next movement I had to perform would be. It was as if every form of mental communication were suspended. I began to feel intense emotions, I was immersed in an inner state of listening and lightness, difficult to describe in words. The movements began to speak to me. In some moments, truly magical, I was those movements and I could feel a very deep strength and emotion in my chest, almost as if tracing those strange figures that seemed meaningless to me had the power –​as if they were a series of interlinked keys –​to open a kind of safe inside my soul, a precious treasure chest containing profound and new sensations. As the sessions of sacred dances continued, the emotions I felt became more intense. I began to understand why those movements had been considered sacred, I began to feel the emptiness inside, sinking into nothingness while the group’s movements enveloped me. I felt I was being swallowed up, as if these movements were capable of momentarily suspending my individuality. It was like being part of a large flock of birds flying compactly, drawing beautiful shapes in the sky, which none of the birds, however, could ever see in their completed form. During the same seminar, in the dance sequence dedicated to women, we had to perform a small gesture with our arm, as if we were putting a shawl around our neck. It was a simple and natural movement, the forearm and right hand wrapped around the neck holding an imaginary and precious shawl. It was a beautiful gesture. We were dancing in a place that once had been a small church, now probably deconsecrated. By the time we finished it was evening and the temperature had dropped. I took my shawl and spontaneously made that same gesture again to wrap myself in it: for the first time I became aware of how customary and immanent this gesture was.

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Wrapping it around my neck, I sensed the presence of the women who had preceded me throughout the centuries: a profound feeling of sisterhood with all the women (sisters, mothers, daughters) who had over the centuries done the same. That simple act had just revealed to me something eternal, as if all those women were right there in that moment, with me, repeating this very gesture they had done for centuries. I performed the sacred movements of women in another seminar. That experience was also very intense. For days I tried to perform a small movement of the hip, part of a seven-​step sequence. It looked easy, but every time the group got to that point of the sequence I got it wrong. Always at the same point. The movement was easy, but for me it was impossible. My recurring and seemingly incorrigible mistake in fact prevented the group from performing the sequence of steps correctly and concluding it. Being aware of this, my anxiety increased. I peered in vain, from time to time, at Margit, hoping for a sign. One late afternoon everything changed: we reached the fateful point in the sequence and all of a sudden it was as if I pressed an old switch. I performed the hip movement easily and continued, sliding directly into the next phase of the sequence. It was then that I felt a tight knot come undone in my throat: tears were silently falling down my cheeks, without me being able to understand the reason. I looked at the ground in embarrassment, afraid someone would notice. I felt Margit staring at me and looked up: she was smiling. Sacred movements offer, among other things, an experience that reduces the role of the mind and its control over the body. In everyday life we often tend to consider the mind as the intelligent master and the body as its servant. However, many experiences that include profound contact with the bodily dimension seem to suggest the opposite to be true: the mind surrenders to the intelligence of the body. Another issue to consider is what kind of body we have in mind. Usually, the idea we have of our body is taken for granted and consists of the following statements: firstly, the mind has control over the body; secondly, we tend to speak of the mind as an entity separate from the body. This distinction is closely associated with Renè Descartes and the so-​ called “mind-​ body problem”: cogito ergo sum. The mind-​body dualism refers to a particular way of thinking about this relationship. It originated in the theory that Descartes16 developed in the Meditations on First Philosophy. According to Drew Leder,17 Descartes’ philosophy on the mind-​body problem was strongly influenced by his biographical experience: Descartes, in fact, became seriously ill. This painful experience would provoke in him the desire to escape his body, leading him to diminish the role of the latter. According to Descartes, mind and body are distinct entities, and the mind can exist without the body. The idea that “I think, therefore I am” is often connected to a disembodied conception of the mind, viewed as an entity completely divorced from the body. It has

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also been argued that the separation of mind and body in modern capitalist societies has led to a sharp division between physical and mental labour,18 implying a subordination of the first to the second. However, the supremacy of the mind over the body is viewed very differently when we consider gender and ethnicity. For example, some feminist scholars have pointed out that women’s bodies are seen as different: according to Genevieve Lloyd19 these are conceived as being inferior to men’s bodies and minds. Furthermore, female bodies and minds are more closely related compared to men’s. This depends on certain experiences that seem to entail a more natural contact with the bodily dimension in the case of women (for example, childbirth, breastfeeding, and menstruation). Hence the gendered construction of the mind-​body relationship has many implications. However, the idea of mind-​body dualism is very widespread and the ability of the mind to control the body tends not to be questioned, except in very specific circumstances, such as when in daily life we fall ill, or we suddenly do something that breaches social rules on how we should behave with our body in public (e.g. when an adult stumbles and falls awkwardly in the street). In all these cases, we seem to briefly lose control of our bodies. In these situations, we are forced to recognise that control of the mind over the body is nothing more than an illusion. It does not work in reality. Our bodies can be independent from our flow of thoughts and even from the ideas that we have of our own bodies. In the case of serious illness, we may experience being at the mercy of our body and the fact is that a different conception of the mind-​body relationship is necessary to understand these extreme experiences. Indeed, reflecting on the ecology of words, we cannot ignore the fact that words are only ever spoken. A disembodied thought that does not take its corporeity into account and is not based on it, can only be a limited and limiting way of thinking, a partial and reductive point of view. Behind every word there is always a subject and behind every subject there is always a body, in the absence of which no word is possible. 4.1.3  Other conceptions of the body

Many of the considerations made so far could lead us to agree that it would probably be useful to construct a more articulate conception than the one we traditionally refer to. The physical conception of the body is usually taken for granted as the only one possible, but there are millions of people around the world who do not share this limited conception. For example, Chinese medicine refers to a different conception of the body: the energy flow plays a key role in keeping the body healthy. In India, Ayurvedic medicine emphasises the importance of the chakras in healing processes. Similar conceptions are also widespread in Europe: for example, the anthroposophical one proposed

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by Rudolf Steiner20 and the one elaborated by Georges I. Gurdjieff.21 A relevant contribution, in this sense, is that of Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, developed by his phenomenological approach. Körper, on the other hand, is the term that Edmund Husserl22 uses to describe the body-​subject or body-​ representation: i.e. the body occupying a certain space and corresponding to certain measures, the body as res extensa, reduced to a mere measurement of certain qualities (e.g. weight, height, etc.). This description applies to anybody, the human body as well as that of other living beings. However, precisely because this definition applies to anybody, it cannot correspond to the specificity of the body that one is. The lived body corresponds to the experience that Husserl calls Leib, when one feels one’s own body from the inside. There is a continuous dynamic tension, a continuous movement between the lived body and the body-​object. The Leib is always on the point of being inverted in objectification (Körper). This process has been described by Merleau-​Ponty23 as “reversibility” and it refers precisely to the dynamic tension between the two types of body identified by Husserl.24 The concept of Leib and, above all, Merleau-​Ponty’s later reflections provide the path to overcome the mind-​ body dualism. In The Visible and the Invisible,25 the French philosopher speaks of a condition shared by humans and the world: in addition to the concept of “flesh of the world” he introduces the concept of “chiasm”. The subject, as well as the world, is not reduced to a visible dimension: there is an invisible dimension surrounding the subject (and thus also the body) and reality as a whole. With the term “chiasm” he defines the relationship between visibility and invisibility, thus stressing the inherently inextricable nature of this relationship. Therefore, when the body communicates, remembers, forgets, or acts, how do the visible and invisible interact, as they have been theorised by Merleau-​Ponty? In the process of encoding and decoding messages, does this invisible dimension intervene or is it totally absent? If we could assume that such a dimension also intervenes and shapes communication processes interacting with the physicality of the “flesh”, perhaps a more effective theoretical framework would be available to the understanding of the phenomena and processes that seem to be completely inexplicable. 4.2  The “space-​time of the body”

When we think of the body, we are used to thinking of it in a linear dimension of time, which originates in birth and culminates in death. This conception is the one that allows us to place the subject in its biographical trajectory. However, although fundamental, this way of thinking about time has been challenged by certain philosophical currents, such as phenomenology, but also by scholars of sociology of time,26 who consider the linear conception of time as a social construction or a cognitive construction of our mind.

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Returning to the mind-​body dualism, the linear conception of time seems to be adequate in the case of conscious memory (i.e. the memory of the mind), as stated by Rollin McCraty.27 However, there is another kind of memory, the body’s memory, which seems to correspond to an unconscious memory. This kind of memory requires, in order to be understood, another concept of time: the hypothesis of a “space-​time of the body”.28 According to this view, linear time is a social construction and also a scientific construction (derived from Newtonian physics) that cannot be viewed as the “sole mode of experience”. The body, in fact, introduces another experience of time where past, present, and future are interconnected and unfold before the subject simultaneously.29 There are several techniques with which to enter this other mode of experiencing time that may be called immanency: yoga exercises, martial arts, various kinds of meditation (water meditation, walking meditation, Vipassana meditation, etc.), dance therapy, sacred movements, breathing practices, sensitive dance, family constellations. In many of the practices mentioned the body represents a door through which to enter a condition where time is suspended, where the past is the present and the future, in which the latter unfolds like a sheet before the subject. Immanency corresponds to what Buddhist monks call the “eternal present”. They achieve this state of consciousness through meditative practices. From the perspective of immanency, the past can be viewed as bodily present, as being incorporated in the present state of the body, a sort of tacit knowledge or passive mode that affects what we feel, what we think, how we react to events, what we remember and what we forget. From the perspective of immanency, the linear conception of time, usually taken for granted in everyday life, seems to become partially reversible: the past embodied in the present –​through the unconscious memory of our body (perhaps connected to the invisible Merleau-​Ponty speaks of) –​can be transformed and seems to share some of the characteristics of particles (as theorised by quantum physics): it has more to do with the distribution of probabilities than with solid events. This past seems to exist as present and it appears that it can be transformed: following these considerations, the change of the past into the present can change the past itself and, consequently, the future. In fact, far from being esoteric reasoning, this is what happens in any successful therapeutic process, when a subject, by transforming the meanings attributed to painful events, which took place in her or his childhood, for example, changes the present effects of those past events and therefore the past events themselves. Consider the case of a young person, the son of an alcoholic father who, after successful therapy, manages to redefine the father figure and reconsider the violence suffered, also by taking into account the serious reasons that led this father to become an alcoholic. That means, once again, placing a subject –​in this case the father fi ­ gure –​in his biography, gradually understanding what made him become what he was. Hypothesising the

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existence of a space-​time of the body as an additional dimension –​echoing the reflection of Merleau-​Ponty30 –​may help us better understand how the body communicates. 4.2.1  The restlessness of trauma and the problem of intergenerational transmission

When considering body language, a specific reflection on the way the body speaks of the trauma and violence suffered may be useful, especially when these have not surfaced in the conscious dimension of memory, but have inscribed themselves into bodily memory. A typical case is that of trauma suffered during childhood. An effective sociological theory that considers the biographical trajectory of this type of events is the “theory of the restlessness of events”.31 In fact, it offers a dynamic idea of traumatic events, according to which an event cannot be considered to be over once and for all, as an event literally consists of both the series of actions that took place in the past, as well as the successive representations and/​or narratives of that event from the moment it occurred until the moment in which the observer is placed (i.e. now). Trauma, also when experienced in childhood, leads a life of its own in its latent phase, if it does not emerge and become the content of conscious memory, and in its manifest phase, in all individual and collective memories (and all their forms of objectification). This characteristic of events and, in particular, of traumatic events has an effect on their infinite malleability, as events can be folded and reshaped in multiple ways. To understand a traumatic event, Wagner-​Pacifici explains, we must first understand its mobile nature, the way it takes shape and is only provisionally objectified and, ultimately, its intrinsic and unavoidable restlessness.32 In one of her contributions, the American sociologist proposes a paradigm shift in the direction of a quantum sociology of events.33 As mentioned above, this theory is particularly effective in understanding both the biographical trajectory of traumatic events in the case of individual subjects, and the future trajectory of these events, which concerns the next generations. In particular, the issue of trauma transmission from one generation to another is analysed by Gerard M. Fromm, who claims that what overwhelms us and what we are unable to name is passed on to those closest to us. Our loved ones are called upon to carry the burden of what we cannot carry: They build upon the idea that what human beings cannot contain of their experience –​what has been traumatically overwhelming, unbearable, unthinkable –​falls out of social discourse, but very often on to and into the next generation as an affective sensitivity or a chaotic urgency. … The transmission of trauma can be the transmission of a task: for example, the task of repairing a parent or avenging a humiliation. One task of

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transmission might be to resist the dissociation of that heritage and to bring its full, tragic story into social discourse.34 But let us go in order and first consider what may happen to the body of victims of severe violence when trauma is such that it is unspeakable and, therefore, exceeds what conscious experience can deal with. If a part of the trauma exceeds what can be represented and narrated by the victim it becomes invisible, i.e. it flows, disappears into the unconscious part of memory. This part cannot be narrated by the victim with the linguistic codes available. What happens, therefore, is that this part –​rendered fleeting and invisible by the absence of words to describe it –​cannot actually be remembered, but becomes a kind of silent presence in the victim’s life. However, because it exists, we must ask: where is this invisible memory inscribed? Can we assume it has been incorporated? Roberta Culbertson analyses the relationship between memory and silence precisely in relation to the bodily dimension that such a relationship acquires: The survivor most often, nearly invariably, becomes silent about his victimisation …. This silence is an internal one in which the victim attempts to suppress what is recalled (so as not to relive the victimization countless times), or finds it repressed by some part of himself which functions as a stranger, hiding self from the self’s experience according to unfathomable criteria and requirements.35 According to Culbertson, the language through which trauma is told in the body of victims becomes that of an intermittent silence, where unexpected bytes of memory suddenly turn on, in a surprising and completely unexpected form, disturbing the victim’s daily life, as if trauma possessed an independent life that goes on inside the body of the subject, able to be activated at will. Reactions to threats and pain become mysterious and unexpected: the way the bodies of these subjects talk about trauma –​because this kind of language is incomprehensible for those whose bodies have not experienced something similar –​becomes destabilising and enigmatic: The demands of narrative for their part operate in fact as cultural silencers to this sort of memory, descending immediately upon an experience to shape notions of legitimate memory, and silencing the sort of proto-​ memory described. We lose sight of the body’s own recall of its response to threat and pain, and of the ways in which it “speaks” this pain, because this wordless language is unintelligible to one whose body is not similarly affected, and because without words the experience has a certain shadowy quality, a paradoxical unreality.36

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Once violence has slipped into invisibility, being wordless, it turns into a silent but vigilant presence. Its blurred vision is as if trapped in the folds of the present, without being able to flow into the past, as it is not representable or speakable. This violence, which cannot be properly remembered by the victim, but only perceived as a presence, then begins to shape the present by imposing its form, despite being itself unknowable. This portion of the past, precisely because it is fleeting and invisible, becomes so cumbersome that it reverberates on the whole of the present, bending it to its own needs, like a fragment of subjectivity detached from the rest, which reclaims its place inside the system. Because it is relegated to invisibility in physical space, as a direct consequence, trauma seems to spread in space and become a real emergency for the victim, overpowering and subjugating everything else to itself. The only available codes of the language of trauma –​unknown to anyone who has not gone through this sort of experience –​are those of the body. This is why this language can be understood only by reading the bodies of the victims. Indeed trauma speaks, or rather, is spoken by an unspeakable language. 4.2.2  The unspeakable language of the family’s body And the Air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside. (Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, 1997)37

When trauma becomes unspeakable, according to Fromm’s hypothesis, it falls “outside social discourse” and, therefore, onto the shoulders of the next generation, as it corresponds to the part of experience that has remained trapped in the folds of the present: this invisible past “which cannot pass”38 not only overwhelms the victim’s psychic dynamics and his or her biography, but is destined to settle permanently in the memory of the family system, going from one body to the next as a disturbing, invisible, and cumbersome presence. To try and imagine the paradox of this cumbersome invisibility one can by analogy think of one of those situations in everyday life where there is something unsaid between two people –​something terribly important for one of the two interlocutors that the other, however, forbids speaking about. In these kinds of circumstances, it invariably happens that the person who is silenced no longer knows what to talk about. There would be a number of topics, equally important and available, but what now appears as impossible –​what has been confined to invisibility –​overrides everything else with its threatening presence, literally preventing the conversation from flowing. This oxymoron, far from constituting a mere rhetorical device that shapes the way a story is told or the form of a conversation, here seems to

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acquire a paradigmatic value, that of an unquestionable inner law governing the relationship between the invisible dimensions of trauma in physical space and its dimensions in the invisible realm Merleau-​Ponty speaks of.39 It is as if the two must somehow correspond to each other. The problem of these unspeakable and invisible traumas that are passed on like a dark burden from the generation of the fathers and mothers to that of the sons and daughters, is described by memory studies scholars who have sometimes observed how the second generation of survivors of severe forms of trauma (e.g. detention in a concentration camp) displays its symptoms despite not having had any direct experience of its violence.40 In other words, these hidden and invisible –​or at least unspeakable –​pieces of trauma seem to be able to transit from one generation to the next through a mysterious communication system, as if these mute and violated bodies were talking to each other, claiming the prohibited right to be seen. A significant and somewhat “disturbing” contribution –​compared to more mainstream studies on intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories –​is that by the French psychoanalyst Anne Ancelin Schützenberger,41 according to whom the memory embodied in an individual has to do not only with the biography of that individual, but also with the biographies of all her/​ his ancestors. In this sense, it seems that traditional beliefs in this regard should be reconsidered. Also, it seems it is necessary to observe the family and social dimensions operating in bodily memory. Already, the pioneering work by Maurice Halbwachs42 –​ The Social Frameworks of Memory –​has explored this direction, which could be further elaborated and extended to consider how individual and family memories are incorporated, in particular the unspeakable and silenced ones. Especially in the cases of memories of severely traumatic events, it seems memory continues to be passed on from one generation to the next in the form of an invisible inheritance connecting the family system, profoundly influencing the present and the future of its descendants.43 In the film A Serious Man, written and directed by the Coen brothers, the short and paradigmatic story that opens the film could also be considered as a reflection on the transmission of highly traumatic events between different generations. It is a short Yiddish story written by the Coen brothers as an introduction to Jewish culture. It narrates an episode in the life of the couple Dora and Velvel. One evening, the latter meets a man who helps him and who later turns out to be Traitle Groshkover, Pesel Bunim’s uncle, a distant relative of theirs. To thank him for his help, he invites him to dinner, he proposes they eat soup together, but once they get home, his wife Dora starts to suspect that Traitle Groshkover is actually a dybbuk, i.e. an evil spirit –​of the Jewish tradition –​who has taken possession of Traitle Groshkover’s body after his death. Indeed, Dora has received news that the latter died three years ago; moreover, this relative clumsily refuses to eat the soup saying it is too late –​a

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strange excuse, which for Dora definitely proves his true nature: “In fact, dybbuks do not eat”, she says. Faced with this relative who knocked at their door, Dora is now entirely convinced it is a dangerous dybbuk, to the point where she decides to kill him. She strikes him dead before her incredulous husband, who says he “is a rational man and does not believe these things”. The next story, which constitutes the actual plot of the film, is about the life of Larry Gopnik and his ordeals. Basically, all sorts of things happen to him and the poor Larry despairs in the vain attempt to understand why the divine plan is so against him. The film lends itself to multiple readings: it is an existential reflection on human destiny, on the origins of good and evil in family systems and biographies and, why not, a reflection on how the next generations might find themselves having to “recycle” the damage done by the previous ones, if we choose to believe that Dora, Velvel, and Larry Gopnik are somehow connected. As mentioned, Ancelin Schützenberger offers a reflection on the effects of highly traumatic events on the next generations. She analyses the cases of patients who suffer from “anniversary syndrome”. This syndrome consists of descendants having accidents or becoming seriously ill on the anniversary of when an accident and/​or illness happened to an ancestor. Some of these historical or family coincidences could be better understood as reactions to anniversaries, which, like an anniversary syndrome, we could explain as an expression of the family and social transgenerational unconscious. Certain people get anxious or depressed every year at the same period, without knowing why, nor do they remember that it is the period marking the anniversary of the death of somebody close –​a parent, a relative or a friend –​and they remain unable to establish a conscious link between these repetitive facts. As if by chance, numerous people have surgery on the anniversary date of the death or accident of a father, brother or relative ….44 The number of surprising, unexpected coincidences found by Ancelin Schützenberger is so high that it is difficult to believe they are purely random, merely coincidences: in fact, the coincidence rate seems to exceed their normal distribution in the Gauss curve. According to the French psychoanalyst, there must be some forces at work capable of tacitly reminding the descendants about these dramatic anniversaries, able to cause their occurrence in the present of these biographies. Taking up Carl Gustav Jung’s idea45 of a collective unconscious, she hypothesises the existence of a transgenerational unconscious, in which such memories, although invisible at a conscious level, continue to live on and operate. Traumas are thus relived from one generation to the next on their anniversaries. The most disturbing aspect is that the patients studied by

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Ancelin Schützenberger during therapeutic sessions knew absolutely nothing about such accidents that happened to their ancestors: in practice, they relived the same traumas on the same date, without being aware of the nature of these traumas, nor the dates on which they occurred. Where is this memory stored? And what kind of memory is it? The psychoanalyst adds that, when these dates are revealed to the family system (through a detailed documentary analysis of family genealogies and histories), these dynamics that have been repeated generations apart dissolve as if by magic. The most interesting aspect for the purposes of what we are looking at concerns the location of these memories and the way they are transmitted: usually, when referring to family memory, one tends to think of conversations, stories, everything that is passed down verbally from father to son or from mother to daughter. However, in this case the unspeakability of trauma prevents its narration: these events fall outside the family discourse.46 Many years ago I attended a family constellation seminar, the method developed by Bert Hellinger47 to transform family traumas. I was in Borgo Pignano, near Volterra. During the seminar a young woman suddenly revisited the trauma of the death of her father’s sister (her paternal aunt), who had been killed by a bus at the age of eleven while riding a bicycle. At the beginning of the seminar, all participants were asked to draw on a blank sheet of paper their family genealogy. Subsequently, I noticed that on the sheet drawn by the woman in question the name of the murdered aunt was missing –​she was “invisible” in the family system, probably because of the amount of suffering her death at a very young age had caused her parents (the grandparents of the woman attending the seminar). During a break, she told me that in fact, although she bore her aunt’s name as a middle name, she knew almost nothing about her biography and no one in the family had ever spoken to her about this aunt. It is as if Aunt Elisa had vanished from family accounts –​her death, which the other family members did not believe to be accidental and which had occurred in a distant country, represented a trauma so painful it became unspeakable: it had disappeared into the family’s unconscious memory. During the seminar, it was painful for this woman to relive this family trauma and suddenly she told the group she had never really understood why she had been so afraid of cycling. Although she loved to ride, she feared for her own and her family members’ safety. Somehow this almost obsessive fear, far from being unreasonable, might have originated in the past, but not in the young woman’s past, rather in that of her grandparents. What seemed to speak in this case, rather than the individual body, was the familiar body. This case is emblematic because it seems to highlight, once again, the persistence of symptoms far beyond their origin and, above all, generations later. Such persistence (in this case, fear of cycling) seems to function as a signal indicating that there is something trying to be admitted back into the

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social discourse, as if an invisible witness were being passed on from one generation to the next (together with the debts to be settled and credits to be collected). As if from one generation to the next a silent conversation were taking place between the bodies of the ancestors and those of the descendants, as if we were living in the present with all our predecessors behind us. The transmission of highly traumatic past events, when conditions are such that they become unspeakable, seems to function in the same way as the inheritance of an immaterial legacy, which turns out to be a burden –​a past burden weighing on the present. The illusion that what is not said ceases to exist is thus revealed as being totally wrong. The transition from the realm of the invisible and unspeakable to the world of words is what transforms this legacy: it goes from being a threatening pattern looming over the present to a solid foundation on which to build future projects. 4.3  Pauses and silences as ways of speaking: the intensity of the body Sometimes it is better to remain silent and appear stupid than open your mouth and remove all doubt. (Oscar Wilde) Conversation needs pauses, thoughts need time to make love. (Theodore Zeldin, Conversation, 1998)

In Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful, one of the riddles that comes up in the conversation between Dr Lessing and Guido Orefice is: “If you mention my name, I cease to exist. Who am I?” There are many forms of silence that can be classified depending on the intentions of those who remain silent. In fact, as Paul Watzlawick has claimed,48 it is impossible not to communicate. We can abstain from uttering words, but we communicate all the same. In a conversation, silence precedes the act of taking the floor –​this silence corresponds to the space in which thought takes shape –​and silence follows the end of a sentence –​which in turn represents the space in which the sounds we have uttered continue to vibrate, leaving an echo of what has been said in the surroundings, inside us and in the listeners. Silence is also woven and intertwined with our words: it is what separates them from each other, giving them intensity and depth. Nothing is more significant and eloquent than when a speaker who is standing before a large audience waiting to listen to him decides to keep silent for a few seconds –​taking the time necessary to articulate his thoughts in the most appropriate way. This is not an intellectual trick or a trivial strategy to attract attention. Whatever the space in which this silence is located (before, during, or after words), it functions as a sounding board, an intensifier of what we wish to say. In this perspective, shouted words, words used like sticks do not usually prevail; rather, it is whispered

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words, words one can hardly hear, that are usually stronger. There is an intensity to what we say that is one with the intensity of our presence in those words. As we speak, are we thinking about something else? Are we immersed in our intention? Do we believe in what we are saying? If we do not, why on earth should others believe in it? Are we sure that the words we are uttering are in line with what our body is saying? Thus, silence is not the place of embarrassment, of discomfort and the unspoken, but rather the place in which we refine the impression we wish to make with our words. An intense silence can say a lot about us and our intention to speak. Silence also offers a space to those talking to us for listening. Of course, this is not the only form of silence, the one we usually experience. Today, silence is often considered inappropriate, a symptom of a lack of ideas. If one is silent, it seems one has nothing to say. In many cultures, the art of conversation requires one to keep talking. It is no coincidence that in Italian we have the expression sostenere una conversazione, which literally means to hold and to support a conversation: conversing is burdensome, it is an effort that must be endured and this effort is required by the conventions of politeness. Thus, words flow and mingle and are governed by a subtle art: the ability to converse, for example, was necessary in order to be admitted to the most sophisticated salons. Until a few decades ago, in fact, this art was an indispensable quality for any woman of noble origin.49 The salon –​or the English parlour –​was the stage where one’s subjectivity would be performed and where one’s expectations of family life were achieved. Our everyday life is scattered with silences, which speak very different languages. It is up to us to choose which ones to enter into dialogue with and how to relate to them. These reflections serve to point out the intense communicative capacity of silence, to challenge the widely held notion that fullness, not emptiness, is what really counts –​according to this view, emptiness is simply what is missing in what is full. The real problem is that the two are inextricably connected; it is emptiness that literally allows fullness to acquire a shape. In other words, it is the pauses and silences that determine the rhythm and depth of a conversation, not necessarily the words that make up the conversation. The work of philosophers and artists offers a great many reflections on silence, but also and especially that of famous musicians such as, for example, John Cage. We may think of pieces like Waiting or 4’33”, which contain a sequence of silences (tacet). In fact, John Cage believed that absolute silence did not exist, because even when standing in the anechoic chamber of Harvard University he could still hear the sound of his own blood circulation.50 Cage’s reflection reminds us that absolute silence does not exist, indeed we all constantly hear the flow of our thoughts. In fact, it is this silence that gives us the possibility of listening to our inner voice, that allows us to approach –​or perhaps to come close to –​the mystical experience of silence and the depths it is able to designate.

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The meaning of silence is socially and culturally construed: there are social settings in which silence is required, which help to define, or at least try to define the spectrum of possible meanings that silence may have. Silence is also culturally construed: there are, in fact, very different types of silence. The silence of the mafia, for instance, is one of death –​it is the code of silence –​ that in no way can be compared with an inward kind of silence that we have mentioned in these brief considerations. 4.4  The politics of gaze

“Don’t stare”: when I was little, my mother insisted on teaching me to lower my gaze, not to scrutinise others in search of their hidden truths, as if I were almost able to look at them through an X-​ray. And yet, I never really learned how to do this. Still today I become “entangled”, stunned, fascinated by a detail, a colour, a facial expression, a flicker in someone’s gaze, a wrinkle in an eyebrow, a crease in a scowling face. So I stand there motionless and absorbed, until something or someone forces me back into the space where my forward motion began. It is as if I became enchanted looking at others, as if I underestimated the ability of my gaze to pierce and uncover, as if I thought I was invisible and could observe the world around me at will. For many animal species, to stare and/​or look straight in the eyes is a sign of potential aggression, defiance, and danger. We are taught to lower our gaze so as not to challenge, to conceal our interest or our real feelings. The politics of gaze, like language, is gendered. In many cultures, looking straight into the eyes of someone is a male prerogative: the female is expected to lower her head, so that the gaze can be directed diagonally, from the bottom up. The gaze is essentially political, as it defines and structures power. It is no coincidence that we use the expression “to look down on someone”: the way gazes are mutually positioned literally shapes the symmetry or asymmetry of the relationship that binds us to an interlocutor. When a role is intrinsically asymmetrical, this asymmetry is often inscribed in physical space and symbolised by a difference in height: we may think of the platform on which the chair of the professor is placed (certainly not necessary for her or him to be seen, but necessary to inscribe in the space of the classroom her or his supremacy over the students and to mark a vertical pedagogical relationship), or the throne of the sovereign. The top and bottom symbolise the positive and the negative: “Your Highness”, for instance, used for royals. What is above has in many cultures more value than what is below. This is why in many cultures a woman looking straight into the eyes of a man is viewed as being impudent. The woman is supposed to look away first. She does not scrutinise, but turns the other way. She looks sideways, as if learning how to interpret the moods of the opposite sex, as her own future may depend on

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him. It is a subaltern gaze she was taught, one that requires a lifetime to be deconstructed. The gaze is also literally the yardstick of all things. We may think of all those daily situations in which we should be standing at a certain distance, but there is a physical obstacle that forces us to accept a form of proximity that exceeds and conflicts with the definition of that relationship. The obvious reference here is Edward Hall’s theory of proxemics.51 According to him, the physical distance between people describes and helps to define relationships. Imagine this scholar going around university campuses holding a yardstick to measure the distance separating students: during his research observers probably took him for a madman. However, it is thanks to Hall that we can now analyse the problem we all have in lifts: I arrived at the accountant’s office. The office is located on the seventh floor of an old building. I hate this lift. I hate old lifts, they are small and very slow. It takes ages to reach the seventh floor and the space is cramped. And a real nightmare when there is another person in it. I looked around nervously. There was no one waiting to go up. I pressed the red button. The lift arrived. I opened the door quickly and rushed in, hoping to close the door behind me as soon as possible. Suddenly from behind the hallway a gentleman emerged and stood behind me, he also wanted to get in. I did not even have time to find a plausible excuse to leave him on the ground floor: he was already closing the two small wooden doors. The ascent from the ground floor to the seventh floor began. I pressed the button indicating the seventh floor, hoping he would get out before me, but he was actually going to the eighth floor. The lift was very small, we were both embarrassed. I looked at my shoes nervously, then I began staring at the lift buttons, as if they might come alive and suddenly become a source of who knows what inspiration. The gentleman, travelling with me, noticed my embarrassment, it was sticking to him like the flu virus. Suddenly, with a clumsy movement of the head, we looked at each other, and our embarrassment only increased. We both lowered our gaze abruptly: he took refuge in improbable emails on his mobile phone (perhaps something urgent had arrived in the last five minutes?), while I started going through my bag looking for an object, any object. Suddenly, as we neared the fourth floor, I had the brilliant idea of starting a conversation: “Nice weather today!” “Yep”, he replied, relieved. “I wonder whether it will rain again tomorrow”, I added, also relieved. He replied gratefully: “We’ll see in the morning. Have a nice day!” We had reached the seventh floor and I could finally get out. How can Hall help us understand what is going on in the lift? Applying the theory of proxemics, we understand that the physical distance the lift forces us to is not adequate to represent the social relationship (of estrangement) that connects the two subjects in the lift. This discrepancy, which is immediately reported by the discomfort of both,52 can be remedied

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in the following ways: by distancing the two subjects, so that they are placed at a distance that corresponds to the relationship of estrangement –​but this is impossible unless you get out of the lift, which can only translate into not making eye contact, so looking away. In fact, since what counts is eye contact and since the distance between the two interlocutors is cognitively defined by the distance that is observed and measured by our gaze, it is enough to look at the buttons –​pretending they are rather interesting –​or check one’s phone for messages: one is immediately relieved of this feeling of embarrassment, as the aforementioned discrepancy is momentarily solved. However, there is at least one other possibility available to the two interlocutors: in the impossibility of modifying the physical distance separating them, one can decide to change the nature of the relationship by transforming it from a “relationship of total extraneousness” to a “relationship of partial extraneousness”, for example by starting a conversation. There are many strategies available; the point is to understand the causes of the embarrassment and discomfort experienced by the two interlocutors. There are cities in which a great number of skyscrapers has made this problem rather frequent. It is certainly no coincidence that in many of the large lifts connecting the various floors of a skyscraper, people choose to stand forming horizontal rows parallel to the door, giving their backs to other people so as to completely avoid eye contact. The analysis of this specific proxemic case has allowed us to highlight the cognitive function that eye contact has in our daily lives: if we closed our eyes, in fact, we would be able to stand much closer to a stranger, precisely because what matters is not distance itself, but perceived distance. 4.5  The language of emotions

We usually know very little of emotions.53 Generally, there is no one at school or at home to teach us what to do when we experience an emotion. Mostly, this type of learning, which is also indispensable for a happy adult life, occurs tacitly, i.e. “in the name of the father and the mother”. In other words, we learn to recognise and express our emotions by silently observing what people around us do. Let us try and reflect on how we react to sudden anger, frustration, joy. If we think about it carefully, we likely realise that we tend to express these feelings in a similar way that our parents did, or the adults who played an important role in our primary socialisation process. However, this does not necessarily constitute a positive fact because the direct consequence of this is that when recognising and expressing emotions, systemic errors in the family system will very probably also be reproduced. In 1985, an American psychotherapist published a book that changed the life of many women: her name was Robin Norwood, and the book is entitled Women Who Love Too Much. Among the many brilliant insights the small volume offers, one in particular struck me, despite the fact I was only twenty

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when I read the book. According to Norwood, the problem of some women is that as children they learned to recognise and label a fundamental emotion –​ love –​the wrong way. If, for example, in their family system there was a violent father who beat the mother/​wife and his children indiscriminately, from his position of father, who then –​once the beatings were over –​declared his love both to his wife and his children, these girls and boys learned to label love using the wrong Post-​it note so as to make the impossible contradiction possible (I love you and I will beat you) and protect the positive image of their father. In other words, every time they experienced terror and anguish (what one normally experiences when being beaten by an abusive father) they were convinced they were being loved, i.e. I love you and I beat you became I beat you =​I love you. One can only imagine the consequences of this system error: the adult woman, who as a little girl used this erroneous and defective Post-​it note,54 will suffer from a very serious form of emotional imbalance: the more she experiences distress and fear, the more she will think she is being loved by her partner. On the stage of the Sanremo musical festival, on February 14, 2013, Luciana Littizzetto55 recited a monologue on love against violence that made history at that festival: We who are naive often mistake everything for love, but love has nothing to do with violence and beatings. Love is like slaps and punches as much as freedom is like a prison. We in Turin, who resent royalty, say it’s like going from risotto to shit. A man who hits us does not love us. Let’s get that into our heads. Let’s save it in our hard disk. Do we still want to believe he loves us? Good. Then he loves us BADLY. That’s not what love is. A man who beats us is an asshole. Always. And we have to realise this right away. With the first slap. Because a second one will come, and then a third one and a fourth one. Love makes us feel happy and fills our heart, it doesn’t break ribs and doesn’t leave bruises on our face … Do we think we have seven lives, just like cats? No. We only have one. Let’s not throw it away … It was certainly a very important speech in that context. However, those of us who have encountered a woman “who loves too much” also know that appealing to her rationality is not effective, precisely because there is a wrong label behind everything and it is as if the woman in question were caught up in it. However, Littizzetto is effective, as she tries to deconstruct this Post-​it note: “Love makes us feel happy and fills our heart, it doesn’t break ribs and doesn’t leave bruises on our face”. Systemic errors in the family system may occur not only in the identification of emotions and their corresponding labels, but also in their expression and transmission. What do we do when someone, for example, verbally attacking us out of the blue, spills all of his or her anger on us? We usually get angry in turn, believing that keeping

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quiet and/​or avoiding the situation would be cowardly. We have seen this happen many times with our parents. But is it really useful to behave this way? According to Gurdjieff we should not be at the mercy of the emotions of others; rather, we should be able to decide what moods we wish to spend our day in. Imagine leaving home one morning in a state of peace and relative joy and then encountering an angry neighbour –​whose anger has to do with something that has happened elsewhere. Of course, as soon as she or he sees us, she or he lashes out furiously, happy to be able to unload this heavy and uncomfortable burden of angry energy. How should we react? Should we fall into this anger and become angry in turn? Five minutes earlier we were in a blissful state of mind; is it really enough to bump into the first person who passes by to get carried away and be dragged into the state of mind that she or he has decided for us? And is this really the response of an adult person capable of self-​determination? Would it not be far more interesting to try to oppose this, not by being aggressive like the other (this in fact would not be opposition, but sharing), but stubbornly refusing to enter this state of anger and deciding that this emotion is not going to affect us? This kind of response is much more difficult and must be practiced, but it offers a real vantage point. It shelters us, it removes us from the quarrels of others, especially when they are forced upon us. About ten years ago, I became very passionate about the theories of Gurdjieff. For a long time I studied everything I could find; his thought certainly had a great influence on me. Just at that time, one morning I was on the train from Milan to Rome to lecture my students: it was about seven o’clock, I had not had breakfast and the only thing I could think of was coffee. I hurried to the bar carriage and ordered one. I wanted it so much I did not see the queue of passengers waiting to be served. With my request I stepped in front of three people. The gentleman in the front line started shouting furiously, saying I was rude, that I was a lout. Suddenly his aggressive tone of voice woke me up and brought me back to the present, on my face an expression of incredulous happiness appeared, as I thought: what would Gurdjieff do? It was an opportunity, now I could try my hand and put into practice what I had read. It did not seem real, I was overjoyed. Unfortunately, my smile was visible and the angry gentleman became even more furious. He decided to raise the level of his verbal aggression: while I continued to apologise and put myself behind everyone, repeatedly saying I was sorry and offering to pay for his coffee to right things, the tone of his voice and the insults increased dramatically. From being rude I became a real “ass …” and later, when I timidly said: “But it’s not healthy to become so angry, you will develop an ulcer. Try to breathe, it’s really not worth it. You see I’m back here, I’ve apologised, now I’ll offer you a coffee”, the gentleman replied: “You b*tch … you think you’re buying me with a coffee? Women like you think they have the world at their feet. Now I’m going to teach you

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how to stand in line”. I kept my distance, I focused on my breathing, I was as alert as my cat, making sure his verbal violence did not turn into physical violence. I was ready to run. At that point something totally unexpected happened: the bartender who had been smiling with embarrassment the whole time, communicating his solidarity, intervened in my defence by getting angry in my place and surrendering to the state of mind being forced upon us. The two began to insult each other, while I felt even more sorry for what was happening, gesturing to the bartender trying to tell him he should stop, not defend me (which was honourable on his part), not “get angry with this person in my place”, that is, stop accepting the way this emotion was being imposed upon him by his interlocutor. Eventually I turned away, feeling sorry for what had happened, reflecting on how to improve my capacity to remain in the state of mind I had chosen for myself. During that period, all sorts of things happened to me. The experiments with this “non-​acceptance of other peoples’ anger” continued, as in the following case. One day I was in the lobby of my apartment building. On the ground I found a bunch of keys. Worrying they might get lost, I decided I would pick them up and hand them over to the concierge with the recommendation he put up a sign. However, once I arrived at the gatehouse the concierge was not there, so I decided to go home, I could put up a sign myself, saying that the keys were in my possession. As I walked up the stairs to return to my apartment and get a piece of paper and a pen, I met a neighbour of mine who lives on the top floor. In 20 years we had exchanged many “Good mornings” and “Good evenings”, but without ever really talking to each other. He was a very reserved and very nice gentleman. That morning, however, when he saw his bunch of keys in my hand, he had a fit. He started screaming like a madman, calling me a thief, saying that I should have never taken his keys and that he would report me for theft. I was taken aback and, besides thinking “Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff”, I tried to imagine what could ever have happened to that kind gentleman, what could have possibly turned him into this fury standing before me. I tried everything possible to calm him, I kept addressing him with a reassuring tone of voice, explaining that I certainly did not want to “steal” his keys, especially since there was no indication of who the owner was, and the keys would have been of no use even if I had wanted to use them. While reassuring him, I tried to make my way past him to reach my floor, but the gentleman continued to obstruct my passage, preventing me from leaving. I did not know what to do but I did not want to treat him badly. I knew he had a disabled child he dearly loved. I knew he must have been a really good person and I did not want to hurt him in any way. Suddenly I had an idea: I stuck my chest out like a turkey, I inhaled all the air I could and, moving both arms upwards to accompany the sound I made, I let out the most powerful scream of rage I was able to make: a kind of “ahhh”, something in-​between

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“now I’ll show you what I can do” and “there’s a monster standing behind you, let’s run”. I was counting on the surprise effect, also because a shout like that was totally at odds with my usually very peaceful manners. Meanwhile, my ex-​husband had arrived. He had seen what was going on from a distance and had hurried over. When I let out the shout, the gentleman stood there shocked, he stepped back and I was able to get past him. My ex-​husband and I ran into my apartment after handing the keys over to the man. At that point my ex, as if reprimanding me, said: “What were you thinking? The man has a fit and you play the part of an ethnomethodologist?”56 A few months went by before I ran into my neighbour again. I wondered what I should do and say. I felt like smiling, I was proud of my very successful scream. Instead, I forced myself to stop smiling smugly and looked up, I simply greeted him. My neighbour replied with a slight nod as if nothing had ever happened. In many everyday situations, I have noticed that emotions are contagious, sticky. That when we pass by someone who is expressing an intense emotion, it is like being drawn into that same state of mind. It happens, for example, with states of sadness and profound distress: if we spend time next to a very sad or depressed person, after a while we risk slipping into this same sadness, instead of being able to cheer or comfort the person. This of course does not mean it is better not to comfort anyone anymore and keep a distance; it does mean, however, that anytime we approach someone who is expressing an intense emotion it is important to recall the particular nature of emotions: they are easily transmitted, they drag us along, unless we are able to observe them as they pass through us. 4.5.1  Emotions and memory: alchemical transformations

Another characteristic of our emotional substratum is also particularly relevant: its inherently timeless nature. Emotions seem to ignore our linear conception of time: they seem to work differently. For example, if something traumatic happens or if we feel we have been treated unjustly, the emotion connected to those words or events sticks to us. When we think of an event, even though hours, days, or even years may have passed, the emotion is still there, intact, waiting for us: a kind of loyal friend who never abandons us. This does not apply only to negative events, but also to positive ones, also in this case emotions stay with us. It is as if they were located outside linear time. Each time they are triggered by an intense event, they tend to “contaminate” the event itself with their timelessness, taking it with them, away from linear time: in fact, we still remember everything, as if it were yesterday, not that long ago. Is it not true that when we experience an intense emotion of joy connected to an event, it will act as a “fixer” in the time flow of this event? Emotions compare to memory the way lime compares to bricks: they seem to behave like Post-​it notes, capable of fixing both positive

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and negative events in our memory. Of course, this is merely a hypothesis, to be confirmed, also in the light of contributions from other disciplines. However, it does seem that emotions have more to do with immanency than with a linear conception of time: emotions always pertain to the present of present things, to cite the well-​known definition given by St Augustine (already quoted in the first chapter). When an emotion approaches an event, for example a traumatic event, after some time, when the event is over, it is past, the emotion connected to it remains in the present, in a certain sense attached to the trauma, keeping it active in the present. It is something therapists are familiar with. Therapists, in fact, exploit this characteristic of traumatic events to change the meaning and the emotions associated with past events in the present, thus helping their patients feel better. Analysts have a sort of “therapeutic obsession” for things that took place in their patients’ childhoods. This is because in the present of the present, a past event can be accessed through the emotions with which it was experienced. If these emotions produce distress and pain, they can be transformed into the “here and now” and this transformation also changes the past. Those who had a difficult childhood and complex relationships with their parents, and are lucky enough in adulthood to be able to place these parents in their biography (they are able to form a deep understanding of the reasons that led them to behave in such a way), will experience something very peculiar: those same events, the ones that cause severe distress when they are remembered, tend to fade with the time and the emotions of pain and sadness are gradually replaced, first by melancholy and then by a feeling of empathy. One is no longer able to recount them in the same way, the way they were experienced in childhood and remembered for many decades into adulthood: the painful memories persist, but they are mediated by a feeling of empathy. It is a real alchemical process. Perhaps one day someone will discover that it also has effects on our biology. Forgiveness, in this perspective, does not only have religious and ethical implications (from the point of view of the public sphere) and moral ones (on a private level): forgiveness is an irreversible act of alchemical transformation that benefits especially the recipient, but to an even greater extent those who perform it. As mentioned in the previous pages, Rudolf Steiner said that forgiveness is the outcome of an act of foreknowledge, as if he who forgives were already able to see the next karmic state of balance and because of this vision were able to forgive, rendering it unnecessary to actually seek the compensation this balance would require. This is certainly an original point of view on forgiveness and also a very esoteric one for the purposes of this book. What is important here is to highlight the gap that seems to exist between linear time, in which we experience the passing of events, and the timelessness of emotional processes. It is precisely because of this gap and the fact that emotions, especially if they

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are very intense, seem to live on in the present, that it is always possible to transform them, because this transformation takes place in a temporal limbo where linear time is suspended, and for this reason it affects also the past. It might seem paradoxical and impossible, but the hypothesis put forward here can be illustrated with a metaphor: we can imagine two tracks running parallel (immanency and linear time): emotions create a bridge between the two tracks, thus making it possible to switch from one to the other. What changes on one track also affects the other. This is not a quantum version of the story of Harry Potter, but an exercise in “sociological imagination”, obviously to be verified. If this test were to provide positive results in the future, it would follow that the process of transforming emotions should be rightly viewed as an alchemical process that takes place in a timeless space, so also decades after –​a reasonable amount of time for a biographical trajectory. 4.6  Placing people in their own biography

In the first chapter, we argued that “the question is my mirror, the answer is my portrait”. In fact, our questions and our answers say a lot about us, about our desires, our expectations, our past disappointments. There are times, however, when we can formulate questions and answers regardless of our biography, when we can really listen to our interlocutor. These are magical and revolutionary moments, in which we finally see the other. When one manages to do that, one also manages to place one’s interlocutor in one’s own biography. It seems like a simple and harmless action, but this is not the case: this action, in fact, though small, has the ability to bring about a sea change in our daily interactions. Sometimes one answer is enough to reveal an entire biography. The owner of the dry cleaners in the street where I live is Chinese and her name is Ami. Her age is indefinite, she smiles all the time and is kind to everyone. I usually observe her with great interest because, despite dealing with the strangest requests from her customers, she always has a polite answer for everyone and, above all, she never shows any sign of hesitation. The expression on her face never betrays anything, her impassivity is typical of the Asian culture. On her face one will never see a thunderstorm, there are no storms on her face: from the outside the sun is always shining. One Saturday morning, I went into the dry cleaners and found there was a queue of at least 15 customers waiting; some were even standing on the pavement outside the shop. This was not unusual on a Saturday: after all, it is the day people get these kinds of chores done. When my turn was coming up, the customer in front of me held up three garments: crumpled, they were in really bad condition. I found myself thinking that more than one dry cleaner

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needs a dumpster. Ami, in fact, inspected them carefully, before accepting them, fearing they were torn. She finally accepted them and placed them on a very high pile of clothes. When she was about to turn to me, I was the next customer in line, the gentleman in question asked her aggressively: “Can you please staple the tags onto the individual items now, so they don’t get lost?” I was beginning to lose my patience, like the rest of the queue of customers behind me. But Ami very calmly replied: “Of course, I’ll do that right away”. All of us –​except Ami, probably –​thought the customer’s rudeness was unacceptable, because with this request he was insinuating that Ami was not good at her job, while in fact Ami never loses anything –​she actually helps us, Italian customers, find our garments every time –​very often –​we lose the receipt necessary to pick them up. Ami did not react to the provocation, indeed a second later she smiled slightly and very politely asked him, with her distinct Chinese accent: “Have you been to a dry cleaners where they lost your clothes?” When she speaks, she sounds like the heroine out of a comic strip. On that occasion she managed not to say: “a Chinese dry cleaner”, which in that context would have been almost normal for all of us who were looking on in astonishment. The customer, a man in his seventies, replied: “No, that is not the reason. But these garments –​the ones that, in my opinion, should have been thrown away –​belong to my parents and if I lose them I will be scolded”. Notes 1 Turkle 2015, p. 7. 2 Melucci 1996. 3 Merleau-​Ponty 1968. 4 Our intention here is not to criticise these manuals; some are actually of great interest. 5 Hall 1980. 6 An earlier version of this paragraph was published in Tota and Hagen 2016, pp. 458–​472. 7 Hahn 2010; Haag 2013. 8 Tota 2014b, Tota 2016. 9 Sacks 1985. 10 Koloma Beck 2013. 11 Kanter 2013. 12 Müller 2013. 13 In offering this consideration, we do not intend to ignore the well-​ known argument put forward by Norman, according to which most of our knowledge is not stored in our minds, but in the surrounding world: people rely on the position and arrangement of objects, on written texts, on information other people have, on the artefacts of society, on information transmitted in and by culture. Certainly there is a lot of information out there in the world, not inside our head. (See Norman 1988.) Here we are only suggesting to add to what Norman says on the mind/​body distinction. 14 Keller and Meuser 2011. 15 Gardner 1983.

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6 Descartes 1996. 1 17 Leder 1990. 18 Petersen 2007. 19 Lloyd 1984. 20 Steiner 1964. 21 Gurdjieff 1964. 22 Husserl 1960. 23 Merleau-​Ponty 1979. 24 Husserl 1960. 25 Merleau-​Ponty 1968. 26 Bergmann 1992. 27 McCraty 2016. 28 Merleau-​Ponty 1979. 29 Tota and Hagen 2016. 30 Merleau-​Ponty 1979. 31 Wagner-​Pacifici 2010. The theory of the restlessness of events was elaborated with reference to traumatic events of public relevance (a terrorist attack, a war, etc.) for which different forms of objectification emerge over time. However, this theory also has obvious implications from an individual point of view, because obviously for a victim who survives a terrorist attack (Tota 2010; Luchetti and Tota 2016), in addition to the public and collective dimensions of memory, the purely individual dimension is also very important. Secondly, if this theory offers a convincing theoretical framework for understanding events in their public dimension, this does not exclude its relevance also at the individual level. 32 Wagner-​Pacifici 2016. 33 See Chapter Two. 34 Fromm 2012, p. XV. 35 Culbertson 1995, p. 169. 36 Ibid., p. 183. 37 Roy 1997, p. 142. 38 Rusconi 1987. 39 Merleau-​Ponty 1968. 40 Santavirta and Myrskylä 2015; Santavirta, Santavirta, Betancourt and Gilman 2015. 41 Schützenberger 1998. 42 Halbwachs 1925. 43 A very important contribution to the sociological analysis of cultural traumas is Alexander et al. 2004. 44 Schützenberger 1998, p. 68. 45 Jung 1969. 46 A concept that helps to better understand these dynamics is that of “habitus” (Bourdieu 1992), although originally intended to define a different set of values and patterns. 47 Hellinger 1999. 48 Watzlawick 1976. 49 Fumaroli 1994. 50 Brunello 2014. 51 Hall 1959. 52 As noted by Goffman, far from being a mere idiosyncratic reaction, in social interactions discomfort functions as a real social marker of what has gone wrong or is not working in that specific circumstance (a sort of “oil warning light” for social interactions).

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53 Ahmed 2004; Cerulo 2010. This paragraph is certainly not intended to offer the reader a comprehensive and exhaustive treatment of the subject of the language of emotions: for this purpose an entire volume would not be sufficient. Rather, the aim is to offer a few short remarks on some characteristics of the emotional substratum that are particularly relevant in this context. 54 The term “Post-​it note” is effective because it suggests the image of a square yellow card with the word “love” placed on the wrong emotion. 55 Luciana Littizzetto is a very famous Italian comedy actress, humour writer, and prominent personality on Italian television. 56 Reference here is the breaching experiments described by Garfinkel 1967.

Five THE LANGUAGE OF SPACE

Architecture seeks the silence and the emptiness in which our consciousness can become aware of itself. (Renzo Piano, interview quote)1

Generally, when we think of space, we think of the dichotomy between full and empty, usually prioritising fullness, the objects in space, their characteristics and specific qualities. However, several traditions (from Taoism to quantum physics) have underlined the need for emptiness, necessary to give form to fullness and render it useful. In c­ hapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching, emptiness is in fact itself useful: We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the central hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-​being is what we use.2 Emptiness, therefore, is intrinsically connected to fullness, it is a necessary condition that makes both fullness and its usefulness possible. In sociological DOI: 10.4324/9781003433316-5

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reflections, one of the most significant contributions devoted to the language of space was developed by Edward Hall3 with his theory of proxemics. Hall understood that space speaks, or rather tells those who pass through it about the social relations connecting people. It is a tacit skill we normally use in our everyday lives. Imagine, for example, that you are in an empty road at night, in a dangerous neighbourhood of some big European metropolis. When we walk down a street and encounter a group of people coming towards us, instinctively, even before they approach us, we try to understand whether they know each other or whether they are simply walking in the same direction. Our deduction is likely based on the observation of the distance separating them. This distance, in fact, helps us form an idea of the relationship between these passers-​by. Edward Hall not only identified the correlation between spatial distance and the kind of relationship, but also set out to measure the various distances that correspond to different types of spatial relationships, thus realising that they are culturally determined. In other words, Hall realised that the distance which in one culture refers to a specific relationship (e.g. friendship) in another culture may correspond to an intimate relationship (e.g. engagement). This proxemic difference in cultures easily lends itself to communicative misunderstandings. Thanks to Hall’s contribution and reflection on proxemics, these can be better analysed. Proxemic analysis pivots on the difference between fullness and emptiness. Edward Hall focuses on this connection, as it is precisely the empty space separating bodies that interact that tells us something about their relationship. Proxemics also reminds us that all of us, while going about our daily lives, are surrounded by a sort of “protection bubble”: it is the space around our physical body that must remain empty for us to feel safe. Few people, except those with whom we generally have a relationship of trust, are allowed to enter our personal space without provoking a reaction of embarrassment and/​or discomfort: if a stranger comes too close and invades this space, our sensory system triggers an alarm. We feel invaded and in danger and, when possible, we tend to move away. The violation of personal space can be perceived as real violence, though the severity of this violence and the relative discomfort it causes depend to a great extent on subjective factors and may change considerably from one person to another. Consider having a conversation with an interlocutor who, during the interaction, according to us, is standing too close. What we feel immediately is a sense of discomfort, which will likely cause us to step backwards and stand at what we perceive to be the “right” distance. However, since this “right” distance is now too far for our interlocutor –​it effectively prevents him from perceiving us as being in contact with him (because we are too far away) –​ what we achieve by stepping away is actually a sudden step forward: our poor interlocutor will attempt to restore the lost spatial balance. We might say that it is like dancing a waltz with a partner whose feet are too big: it is impossible not to bump into him.

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The concept of “personal space” as a sphere we need to feel safe opens up a series of relevant questions about all those everyday situations in which a strong external limitation physically prevents us from “keeping at a distance”. We may think of a summer day spent walking around in the city, holding on while travelling in crowded undergrounds, on regional trains packed with commuters, or in a busy street at rush hour. It could be argued that we experience this violation also when we are sitting inside a car: the feeling of discomfort during a traffic jam, which we usually only, or mainly, attribute to being slowed down, might also be interpreted in the light of these considerations about the living space that everyone needs in order to feel comfortable. In this sense, we are very similar to other animal species, more than we are willing to admit: several species, as ethological studies have shown, respond aggressively to the invasion of their living space. However, the reflection on this type of space can be extended and used for an analysis of the various ways we have of using it in everyday life, depending on the characteristics of the subjects being considered. 5.1  The spatialisation of identity

The reflection on the concept of identity is central to many disciplines4 and particularly dear to sociologists. Since Mead, it has been the subject of numerous contributions: from symbolic interactionism to phenomenology, and to Goffman’s contribution5 to ethnomethodology research. An aspect perhaps worthy of being further investigated is the processes of spatialisation of identity, i.e. the way the self relates to its boundaries. There are spaces that have a particular relevance for a subject’s identity, to the point they can almost be considered a symbolic extension of the subjective sphere. These spaces are places in which the subject feels protected and whose violation causes distress and, sometimes, an aggressive reaction. They are the places onto which the subject projects a definition of his or her self and that, therefore, can be used as true identity resources, i.e. resources for the construction and definition of subjectivity. We may call this process the spatialisation of the self: it consists in a continuous projection of a portion of one’s subjectivity onto a limited portion of external space. This is not merely a representation, but a part of the very essence of our self. It is as if the subject were projecting him or herself outwards, eliminating the boundaries between inside and outside, and accepting that portion of space as a symbolic extension of his or her physical body. This is why what happens inside this space becomes particularly dangerous for the subject: any violation of this space, in fact, is experienced as happening inside, no longer outside, oneself. In the course of a subject’s life, the spaces that acquire this fundamental function are bound to change considerably. During childhood, for example, it is play spaces, a castle with toy soldiers, a dolls’ bed and the wardrobe

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containing the doll’s clothes. During adolescence this space expands and may coincide with a person’s entire room, or, for example, with one’s scooter. In adulthood this sacred and inviolable space may be a study or a desk. For the men of the generation of our fathers, who are today in their eighties or nineties, this space –​in a traditional bourgeois home –​was the library or the professional study. For the working classes it was the garage, the cellar, the car, all those spaces distinct from the house, which was the domain of women, full-​time housewives and queens of the domestic sphere, where they ruled unchallenged (a royal title for which they paid dearly, as it entailed total exclusion and invisibility in the public arena). 5.1.1  The Fiat 128 and the Sunday ritual

When I was a child, on Sundays, I often watched smartly dressed gentlemen spending at least a couple of hours in the street cleaning, washing, brushing, and polishing their Fiat 128 before going to Mass. I remember watching them from the balcony of the house, almost undisturbed. I used to hide behind the parapet and look at them from in-​between the cracks, every Sunday, performing this strange ritual over and over again. They would start from the outside, washing the car and the windows with a sponge and soap, and finishing with the wheel rims. Then they poured water all over the car and dried it. After that they polished it, they went on scrubbing, using buckskin for the final touch and in some cases even a duster. At that point they started on the interior: they dusted it, took the mats out and used a damp sponge to gently rub the doors –​still covered in the transparent cellophane fitted by the manufacturer. At the end of this complex ritual the Fiat 128 cars looked as if they had just come out of a hairdresser’s, with curls and waves, like the wives of these men who would soon be getting into these cars to be driven to Sunday Mass. It took me many years to understand what kind of passion drove these husbands to perform this ritual every Sunday –​it was indeed almost reminiscent of a sacred ritual. Those cars were not only means of transport: the care and the attention their owners devoted to them led me to think they were an extension of the subjectivity of these men. When the car was finally ready and the family got into it to go to church, the shining windows and doors had become one with the symbolic, social, and above all moral status of the head of the family, who would drive the whole family to the place where yet another Sunday ritual was about to take place. 5.1.2  Uncle Gerardo’s cellar

I remember an uncle of mine on my mother’s side who had a passion for wine. He considered himself a true connoisseur and, whenever we visited him, he would receive us in his cellar. It was huge, almost as big as the entire ground floor of his large house. He lived in Basso Monferrato, in a

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small village in the Piedmont region where there was almost nothing but vineyards. Whenever we visited, his wife, aunt Giuseppina, would wait for us smiling on the doorstep and point us to the other entrance, the one that gave onto the stairs that led downstairs. I remember the bricks of the cellar, their different colours, some blackened, the terracotta tiles on the floor, the large stones in the lower part of the walls, the vaults with small iron beams and, above all, the large wooden barrels. To access them, one had to climb a long stone staircase. I remember that part of the cellar was not paved: uncle Gerardo used to repeat to us that he “was not trying to save money on the tiles, the fact is that wine has to breathe and it’s better to have a soil floor”. It was clear that for him this was the most important part of the house. There was a distinct smell: a mixture of sour and sweet that would stick in our nostrils and stay there until the next day. By welcoming us in his cellar, he was expressing his affection. This was followed by endless explanations about this or that type of wine, about a particular vintage or a cork that turned out to be bad quality. Uncle Gerardo particularly liked counting his wine bottles: he spent hours counting them in absorbed contemplation. He knew the entire history of each one, the origin of the grapes, the year it had been bottled, what the weather had been like that summer. And yet, there were hundreds of these bottles: lined up in regal order on these shelves, they looked down on me, instilling in me an almost reverential respect. The most difficult moment was when he would ask my mother to taste a glass of wine, a very special one, that he had made using his own grapes. Out of kindness, my mother always accepted, but each time, as I watched her out of the corner of my eye, I realised from the imperceptible movements of her cheeks that the wine must have been really bad, though she never confessed this to me. Also, there was the annual invitation to join him and help him with some task. He would look at me with a solemn expression and, thinking he was doing me a great honour, he would say: “Now that you are old enough, you can come and help me while I bottle the wine”. From the height of my six years of age, I watched in terror as he proudly showed me the strange corking machine, seeking refuge behind my mother’s skirts. Each time, I would escape, hoping to be spared –​at least for another year. And every year my mother invented a new excuse so we did not have to take part in the dreaded bottling ritual, until I became old enough to simply refuse to visit my uncle. However, that cellar, its sacred atmosphere, the demijohns, the sour and sweet smell, stayed with me for a long time, long after I had reached adulthood. It was clear that, according to uncle Gerardo, a cellar could fill a life. 5.1.3  Cousin Luigi’s stable

A distant cousin lived in a mountain valley, where he took care of a dozen cows. When my son was a child, visiting him was a special event. Cousin Luigi would take us on a tour of all the stables as soon as we arrived. Clearly,

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for him, what went on inside the house was of little interest, compared to what was out there –​the stables with all the cows and their calves. Each cow had a name and cousin Luigi could always tell them apart. He would explain things in detail and invite us to help him with the milking, which was done strictly by hand. Of course, there was cow dung everywhere and my son would wait for me to turn around and then jump into the first big heap in front of him. Every time he finished one of these tours, it would take days to get rid of that stench. Yet, for cousin Luigi, this smell was so familiar it was the “smell of home”. The stables were the space where his personal identity was symbolically tested. His skill, his industriousness, even the specific qualities of his character were reflected in the dexterity with which he handled his cows, in his ability to call them by name, in the rough but careful way he treated them, lining them up in the cramped space between the wooden walls. 5.1.4  My great-​grandmother Lina’s small and large kitchens

My great-​grandmother Lina had two kitchens in her country house: one large, the other one small. None of us ever knew why and, to be honest, nobody ever thought of asking. She considered herself (and in fact was) a great cook, so perhaps one kitchen was not enough. When my great-​grandmother Lina cooked, she would run and leap from one kitchen to the other: they were not even close, in fact, they were separated by a long corridor. But my great-​ grandmother, with her bun of white hair and the black velvet ribbon around her neck, moved from one to the other with placid strides, as if she were a gazelle, stirring ingredients in small aluminium pots in this or in that kitchen. Thinking back, the strange thing was that she always cooked at the same time in both kitchens, as if she could not choose one only –​perhaps she was afraid the other would be offended. When I entered one of her kitchens, the big one or the small one, I would always stand at the door, never sure what to do, one foot in and one foot out, not knowing whether I would be allowed to enter while she was present, while she prepared all those dishes I knew were for me. In fact, apart from myself –​because of my young age she did not see me as a real intruder –​nobody else was allowed to enter. All family members, regardless of what generation they belonged to (so my grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, even my great-​grandfather) were strictly forbidden from entering that space, which opened up in the house like a sort of free zone that no one could cross. In my little girl’s mind, it seemed crazy that all that hustle and bustle, all that coming and going from one kitchen to the other, was for me. The small kitchen was full of pots, ladles, bowls of all kinds. It was like being in Snow White’s house where, at any moment, the seven dwarfs would appear and ask for a slice of cake. However, when I stood at the door of the large kitchen, I felt more

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comfortable because it opened onto the dining room, and there, in the dining room, I was the queen. My great-​grandmother would make me sit in my little armchair, looking towards the kitchen door, and then she would start her procession, carrying in small dishes: every small dish that came through the door had been prepared for hours, especially for me. There were small plates of starters, small plates of sliced meats with butter leaves rolled on the fork, home-​made potato gnocchi with sauce made with the tomatoes from the garden, rabbit stew, fresh cheese made with milk from our little goat and drained in the sink the night before, and robiola cheese with green sauce. And then there was zabaglione, tarts with strawberries freshly picked from the garden, blackberry jam, almond biscuits, and biscuits with raisins and walnuts. The most beautiful ritual was the preparation of the potato gnocchi: I enjoyed watching them being made almost more than I enjoyed eating them. There were pots with potatoes, a hand-​held potato masher with strings of potato coming out, there were surfaces covered in flour, and finally the forks that gave the gnocchi their graceful shape. Counting them was crucial: yes, my great-​ grandmother, who was proud of how good her gnocchi were, wanted to leave nothing to chance and made sure she gave everyone the exact number of gnocchi they deserved. On those occasions, I was officially admitted to the kitchen and enlisted as a helper. I painstakingly counted the gnocchi to make sure I had the exact number indicated by my great-​ grandmother; each family member was given a specific amount. I felt like a sort of heroine, I was in charge of the destiny of my relatives. I have always thought that my passion for mathematics has something to do with these endless gnocchi-​counting sessions. However, I never really understood the unfathomable and mysterious scheme governing their distribution. That kitchen, or rather those kitchens, were temples for my great-​ grandmother where she spent a large part of her life. These kitchens underwent grand and rhythmic transformations: with every meal she prepared for us, they would turn into a feast of smells and pots and pans, which then, at the end of the lunches and dinners, would accumulate in the sinks. The laborious tidying-​up phase then began: my great-​grandmother meticulously washed and dried every single item, then all the plates, cutlery, bowls, and serving dishes were placed back in the large cupboards, each where they belonged and where they would rest until the next day, waiting to be used again. The kitchen seemed to follow the cyclical rhythm of day and night. It was clear to me that the spirit of the house resided in those two kitchens and in the coming and going between the two spaces, a reflection of the life of the house, which would become alive as in a ritual when it was time to eat. The result was an alchemical transformation of those delicacies into a precious distillate of care and love, which my great-​grandmother untiringly prepared in her two kitchens as nourishment for me.

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5.1.5  Caterina’s desk

Caterina was my father’s financial advisor at the bank where he was a customer for many years. I met her when my father became ill and her affection for him marked the beginning of our friendship. Caterina was a woman of sound principles and common sense. She interpreted her work at the bank in a broad sense: not only did she provide sound financial advice, but she also gave advice on life in general. She had a special word for all customers, she remembered family details, the small and big problems people had, and with a nod, a sentence, a smile, she listened to everyone’s stories and learned about their troubles. The first time I entered her office –​or rather her glass box –​I was struck by the fact that it felt like a family environment. Caterina had meticulously transformed every little detail of her desk, so as to eliminate all traces of impersonality. She had no children, but she had pictures of her cats. She explained to me that this was also a strategy: the cats were the starting point of a conversation with many clients. There were bells, stationery covered in flowers, a scented candle, in short, things you would never expect to find in a bank. When I asked about the interior decoration of her office, Caterina told me: The management has asked me several times to remove all personal items; they also ask us to attend courses to learn how to gain the trust of our customers. But my clients trust me precisely because I let them see who I am, I let them see the familiar objects that decorate my office. It’s a bit like inviting them into my home. Caterina was right: trust is the exact opposite of impersonality, indeed trust is personal. What was striking in Caterina’s words was her awareness of the relationship between those objects and the representation of her identity. The spaces of one’s identity are all those spaces that perform the important social function of representing the symbolic arena in which a subject practises his or her definition of self. They are all protected spaces, over which a subject usually exercises a high degree of control. This control is fundamental, because in these spaces we display our own identity, the ways in which we agree to define ourselves: our ambitions, intentions, and identity expectations, even though it is not always possible to exercise total control over such spaces. There are cases in which, by definition, such control is limited and partial. Let us consider a teenage girl’s room and the possible violations of this space by her parents or brothers. A classmate of Anna, the teenage daughter of a close friend of mine, had a very difficult relationship with her mother. One day she arrived at school and almost burst into tears. Anna, who was a very sensible girl, approached her during the break and asked her what was the matter. The conversation that

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followed upset Anna so much that she told her mother about it. Her friend told Anna that before leaving the house that morning, her mother had come into her room and seeing an untidy pile of clothes on the chair –​other clothes were scattered around the room –​she started screaming and then, in a fit of insults and recriminations, had taken all of her daughter’s clothes and thrown them on the floor. Then she walked all over them with her shoes. This story, which unfortunately is true, is very upsetting. Even though, ultimately, we are only speaking of clothes, the symbolic violence is increased by the fact that such a space clearly coincides with the space of the identity of Anna’s classmate: such a violent act takes place almost inside her inner self. This is why it is so disruptive. 5.2  The “extended self” and the boundaries of one’s identity

Following Bauman, we could redefine the boundaries of one’s identity as liquid boundaries. As such, they no longer imply a discrete separation between the subject’s physical body and the surrounding environment. In a well-​ known contribution that dates to many years ago, Fritjof Capra6 compared the implications of the Quantum Field Theory to those of certain oriental mystical traditions. Capra’s hypothesis invites us to rethink the concept of boundary –​the boundary between the self and the external environment –​ which is a useful experiment with regard to what we have said so far. In the Tao of Physics, Capra documented a certain continuity between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. This continuity can be understood in the light of the Esho-​funi theory, which posits that life and its environment are one. Esho-​funi literally means that the inside is the outside. This theory was elaborated by Nichiren Daishonin, a 13th century Japanese Buddhist monk, who inspired a type of Buddhism called Nichiren Buddhism. According to this principle, although life and its environment appear as distinct phenomena, they actually represent two different phases of a single process. This principle, in other words, removes the distinction between inside and outside, between the body and the environment, between the subject and the everyday space that the subject inhabits.7 Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhist theory has striking analogies with the scientific law of the wave-​particle duality. Indeed, if we consider the relationship between the subject and the environment in terms of particles, the idea of a boundary separating the subject’s body and the surrounding environment seems to hold. However, if we consider the same relationship in terms of waves, the clear distinction between the social actor and the environment seems to be problematic, because it is reconfigured in terms of energy flows. Rudolf Steiner would say that it is no longer only physical bodies that we are considering, but also etheric and astral bodies. If a subject’s body is viewed as an energy system, the metric scale for measuring the distance between “Myself” and “the Outside” cannot be discrete, it must

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necessarily become continuous, and in a continuous scale, as we know, the distinction between the inside and the outside becomes much more complex and perhaps also more interesting. This kind of reflection invites to rethink the definitions we traditionally attribute to the boundaries of a subject’s body and identity. In fact, the clear boundaries of identity depend on a conception of the body that defines it as matter composed of particles. These boundaries can no longer be regarded as discrete if the perspective changes and particles are replaced with waves. Perhaps, in his meditations, the Buddhist monk realised something that Max Planck would theorise in a comprehensive manner several centuries later.8 It should also be emphasised that, according to Capra,9 modern physics, like Eastern mysticism, extends far beyond the limited pattern of opposing poles. Since particles correspond to the distribution of probabilities, they tend to exist simultaneously in different spaces and possess a specific physical reality that lies between the existent and the non-​existent. Atomic phenomena can only be described in probabilistic terms. Waves are probabilistic waves that describe the likelihood of finding a particle in a certain position and as possessing certain properties.10 This is the particle paradox, as one can never say that a particle is somewhere, nor that it is not somewhere. The Shakespearean “to be or not to be” adapted to the behaviour of particles thus becomes “to be and not to be”. However, this reflection on waves and particles, fascinating as it is, risks taking us too far. What interests us here is that it opens up a series of questions that allow us to reflect on a concept such as the extended self, by which we mean a redefinition, at least a partial one, of those boundaries separating the inside and the outside.11 The mother of Anna’s classmate, who steps on her daughter’s piles of clothes, shocks us with her action, as she is not just walking on her daughter’s clothes, she is literally walking on an extension of her daughter’s own identity. Those clothes, however untidy, have been entrusted with a part of the young girl’s subjectivity: they are part of her extended self. This is why that action of walking on them becomes so violent when listening to the story. The symbolic violence should be reconsidered in its connotations and linked to an extended and spatial notion of the subject: this allows us to better understand the significance of events that take place inside someone’s personal space. For a short period of her life my grandmother resided in an old people’s home, due to a series of unfortunate circumstances. If I think about it today, it was more like a total institution.12 I remember that in this dreadful nursing home she shared a room with another lady who, unlike my grandmother, had reacted to such a brutal situation by losing her mind. Her name was Gina and she was a kind and cheerful grandmother, but a little out of it. Gina loved treats. Her stay in the hospice was not temporary, she was a permanent guest. There were no friends or family members to visit her regularly, and so the opportunities to be given treats were not many. She loved sweets and chocolate

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to the point that when she was given something as a gift, she decided, frugally, to make it last a very long time. This plan, however praiseworthy, had the undesirable outcome of filling Gina’s drawers with sweets and chocolates that had been nibbled on and sucked a little at a time. Once she began to nibble on a piece, she would put it away carefully in tissues and sometimes in pieces of toilet paper she got from the bathroom. These precious wrappings were then inevitably forgotten where they were stored. Once a week, the ward cleaner inspected the drawers of the hospitalised patients. It was the worst day of the week for all of them, because all their treasures were suddenly removed and thrown away. Gina silently watched as the leftovers she had put aside for hard times were confiscated by this stranger. This would take her back to when she was a young girl. The stranger in question actually tried to comfort her with words that seemed polite. However, this way of “taking away her food” was something Gina knew very well: during the war she had learned to hide crusts of bread under the floorboards, because not even the Germans would look there … I once witnessed this mournful weekly ritual: I was only about ten years old, but I still remember it as if it were yesterday. The cleaner entered the room of the two women and quickly went to their chests of drawers and bedside tables. She held a basket in her left hand and wore thin white plastic gloves. I suddenly saw anguish on my grandmother’s face: she was a fine botanist and, even though she was in a wheelchair, she would ask to be taken into the garden where she collected and catalogued all the different kinds of leaves, flowers, and shrubs she could find. She knew them all by name, by their original Latin names. First, she would dry them on the windowsill and then put them on display in her drawers. For the cleaner, however, these were nothing but dried leaves a crazy old lady insisted on keeping. In less than a minute, all those treasures ended up in the cupboard together with the remains of nibbled sweets. When I think back to those half-​sucked chocolates kept in tissues, I can still see the grief-​stricken look on Gina’s face as she watched motionless as her drawers in the nursing home were emptied. I can see the tears that silently streaked her face and experience the horrors of war with her. They had left a permanent mark on her soul. When I think back to those dried leaves, carefully preserved and catalogued by my grandmother, I see the elegance of a great soul who, even in the painful condition of illness, had not given up cultivating her passions and claiming the dignity she deserved, using the space of those drawers, transformed into little showcases. 5.3  Model User: space as a text

Umberto Eco developed a concept that changed the way we look at texts: the notion of the Model Reader.13 If we reconsider this concept and apply it to space tout court, we derive a notion, that of the Model User,14

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which allows us to decode what space tells us as we pass through it. While proxemics helps us decode the language of fullness and emptiness and the way they alternate, to discover the tacit meanings of proximity and distance in social relationships, the Model User allows us to identify the instructions inscribed in almost all the spaces we inhabit in our daily lives, which we usually decode in complete silence. Space, in fact, loves silence, it speaks or rather whispers, telling us the stories of those who have preceded us and who have walked across these places. Spaces, in some way, with their inner organisation, contribute to shaping the kind of social interaction that takes place in them: it is precisely their articulation, the shape these spaces acquire, that renders the very nature of social interaction possible. Marc Fumaroli aptly describes this correspondence between the organisation of space and social interactions, referring to French society: “Aristocratic palaces have an interior layout that is more in keeping with social life. The ritual of dining harmonises with the regulated magnificence of these hospitable abodes”.15 Writing about conversation in France, he adds: Private architecture and furnishings are influenced by conversation: a skilful correspondence of the arts (which was perfected until 1789) harmonises the interior layout of Parisian palaces, the decoration, the furniture, the brightness, the sound, with social life. Conversation is its liveliest pleasure, and social life endeavours to facilitate and stimulate it. These rooms have nothing in common with the enchanted grottoes and the enormous salons of Italian palaces, designed for crowded receptions, or with the comfort of English clubs, made for small talk among men.16 Fumaroli skilfully captures the correspondence between ways of speaking and acting and the way space is designed, the space in which conversation and acting literally take shape. The relationship between space and users is essentially a dynamic one: if space helps to determine what happens inside it, users, in turn, tend to creatively transform the definitions that a space offers them. In fact, what we see is never merely physical space, i.e. space devoid of the social relations that take place inside it. We see places, that is, spaces articulated in and by social relations that inhabit them, make them possible and sometimes transform them. In this sense, a place is a space animated with –​or rather by –​social meaning and relevance. A place is a space that has inscribed in it its own potential use. How could I see a chair, without simultaneously seeing the social practice of sitting (and the set of social instructions on how one should sit) inscribed in its design? How could I see the physical space of a university classroom, without at the same time seeing the social space connected to it: for example, the professor’s chair and the

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identical but at the same time different chairs on which the students sit? In fact, when we walk through our everyday spaces, we see places and the instructions that tell us how to inhabit them. The Model User becomes a kind of strategic map to quickly understand where we are, what we can do there and what we absolutely must not do. Imagine getting up and walking around during a concert of classical music in a traditional theatre: this is impossible to do, as it is not provided for in the instructions on how to use this place, which are inscribed in the theatre seats. Yet, listening to Mozart while walking around would be a much more enriching experience than listening to his music sitting in an uncomfortable and perhaps even a little worn-​out wooden chair for two hours, as if paralysed. Anyone who teaches or studies at a university knows very well how difficult it is to suggest or establish a pedagogical relationship that contradicts –​or even partially departs from –​ the one inscribed in the space of the university classroom. It is very difficult to ask students to attend and discuss at a lecture, since there are hundreds of students and their individual desks have no microphone. It is even more complicated to ask them to carry out teamwork, since the seats are often fixed to the floor and all face the professor’s desk. Therefore, working in groups means getting up and sitting on the desks in order to be able to direct attention elsewhere. 5.3.1  When space speaks

In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino reminds us that a city is not so much made up of its buildings and streets, but rather of the stories of all those who have inhabited it. After all, when we are placed in a certain space, we could imagine starting a silent conversation with it in which we ask it what expectations it has of us and what potential it is willing to offer us. No space is neutral, no space is passive. On the contrary, all spaces are places with a story to tell, with instructions on how to use them that we must follow, with social conventions we must pass on. Space are alive and speak to us in a silent language, one we can learn to listen to. Ultimately, there are cultures that are better able to decode these languages. It is only a matter, therefore, of appropriating this cognitive sensitivity, readjusting it to contemporary conditions. The builders of Cluny filled the churches with monsters that entertained the plebs, but which constituted a language, they conveyed a message to the few who were able to understand it …. One had to visit Gothic cathedrals in the pouring rain: their dragon-​shaped gargoyles came to life, their coloured enamels shone, and their clogged pipes bellowed …. One must listen to them, the same way one should listen to the silent faces of the Māori …. They represent the primordial scream, the creative Word, the birth cry of the cosmos.17

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Zolla reminds us that if one knows how to listen, stones sing. In his study on the three Romanesque cloisters of Gerona, Sant Cugat, and Ripoll in Catalonia, one of the greatest ethnomusicologists of our time, Marius Schneider, assigned a musical value to the fantasy figures carved on the capitals by applying the correspondences of Hindu philosophy. He thus discovered that the series of figures, far from being random, corresponds to the exact notation of the Gregorian chants dedicated to the saints in the cloisters. The capitals are sounds carved in stone, they are a series of notes, ritual voices that sing only for those who know how to listen. Clearly not all modern spaces, the ones we move around in every day, speak such poetic languages as those of the Romanesque cloisters in Catalonia. Yet, when Sebastião Salgado photographed the Kuwait oil fires in flames during the 1991 Gulf War, was it not the arcane language of those places that made those images so evocative for all of us? Salgado allowed us to shape our gaze on those places, allowing us to actually hear, probably for the first time, those wells on fire: I have never seen, before or since, such an unnatural disaster. … it was like facing the end of the world, a world filled with blackness and death.18 Photography is one of the arts that brings us closest to the silent language of spaces, by means of the images that our gaze projects onto them. In space-​ time, words become images and sometimes also sounds. 5.4  “Genius loci” and the identity of a place

Anyone who has experienced a renovation, especially of a large and ancient house –​or at least an old one –​knows that renovating a house is an inner journey and, at the same time, a conversation with the genius loci that expresses the essence and identity of that space. There are renovations that can take decades or even a lifetime. An old farmhouse in Basso Monferrato –​in its rooms many pages of this book were written –​kept me busy for decades and still does. Ever since I reached adulthood, that house has always called me to it, requesting this or that adjustment, proposing embellishments, changes, transformations in a process of continuous evolution, with neither rest nor respite. In the difficult times of my life I have always gone back to it, to the old house bought by my great-​ grandparents that belonged to my family for five generations. For a variety of family reasons, the house literally skipped a generation, crashing on my shoulders, shaky and wobbly. I was very young and completely unaware of the burden it would become. And yet, the house saved me and rescued me several times: in times of mourning and separation, it called me to it and swallowed me up in a very real sense into its bowels. Inside, protected

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by its walls, behind the shutters, looking through the slits, I could look out undisturbed, without having to expose myself or be seen; I was always reborn. With time, I realised that renovating that house was a bit like transforming the memory of my family, soothing its suffering, healing its traumas. The surrounding gardens witnessed episodes of violence during the Second World War: partisan actions and the killing of civilians by the German army. And this is only a small part of the events that probably took place here –​the part I have learned about –​in the decades and centuries, which have soaked the earth, the meadows where I sometimes lie and fantasise. At some point in my life I started an imaginary conversation with the spirit of the house and of the place. Following the example of the ancients, I invoked their blessing and the house, from that moment on, at least in my imagination, came to life: as if it had a life of its own, as if every blow struck on its walls, every woodworm that feeds on its wood, every spider that spins its web among its beams were part of some sort of common design that presented itself to me and questioned my desire to live there, in the midst of all those mosquitoes. I learned to recognise the magnetic force of attraction which, year after year, induces me to invest all my savings in the titanic struggle against time to save the house from decline, to repair the irreparable, to support those unstable walls. With time, I have come to realise that this renovation is like striving for perfection: it represents my all-​too-​human desire to stop eternal decline, at least momentarily, the eternal transformation of all matter. It is, in the end, nothing more than a yearning for eternity, fixed and pursued with lime and a hammer in a silent and ongoing dialogue with the spirit of the place. From there, from that garden, my gratitude for existence and the opportunity to reconcile with the divine rises to the sky. The ancient Romans believed in the genius loci. According to Christian Norberg-​Schulz,19 it is the opposite with which mankind must come to terms with while desiring to inhabit a place. In architecture, the concept of genius loci has been addressed by many authors20 to emphasise a phenomenological approach to understanding a territory, analysing places and their potential for transformation. It thus represents an adversary, or rather, the interlocutor with whom our desire to intervene in the space must nevertheless enter into dialogue; it is the main reference that puts to the test all human projects of intervention and transformation. Sometimes, in fact, the intended use of a space changes, or a profound transformation in its layout and organisation takes place. Then a silent conversion between the past and the present begins, caused by a series of small and large adjustments. Architects call it “redevelopment”; when such a process involves many buildings in the same neighbourhood, it can lead to the gentrification21 of an entire urban neighbourhood, which definitively changes its physiognomy, as it becomes elegant, creative, and “trendy”. More esoteric scholars speak of the spirit of places, while sociologists merely use the term identity in a broad sense,

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expanding it and using it according to their needs. In this broad sense, the term designates an aspect of the collective dimension already described by Émile Durkheim: the collective does not correspond to the mere sum of the parts, but is characterised by a series of additional qualities, made possible solely by the aggregation of individual parts. As in an ancient recipe for a magic potion, by mixing together the characteristics of single units, the whole is formed as a totality which aggregates and autonomously generates what did not exist before. Ultimately, creation always seems to follow this process, including the procreation of life itself. In a similar vein, sociologists have spoken of the fact that the concept of identity can be extended and applied to an institution or a place. We may consider Adriano Olivetti’s enlightening writings on the spiritual life of the factory: Because by working every day inside the factory, in contact with the machines, the benches, with other people, producing something that we see going out into the world and then returning to us in the form of wage, which then becomes bread, wine and a house, every day we contribute to the vibrating life of the factory, to its smallest and largest elements, and we end up loving it, we become attached to it, and it becomes truly ours; work gradually becomes part of our soul, and thus becomes an immense spiritual force.22 When referred to places, identity seems to correspond to a process of ongoing and continuous narration, to a kind of a silent conversation that, decade after decade, takes place between a place and those who inhabit and pass through. This immense spiritual force, which Olivetti speaks of, the product of human forces, contributes to this dialogue with the uniqueness of space. In vain, great-​hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, … and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; … the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the Story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock. As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the

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lightning rods, the poles of the Bags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.23 If we stop and think, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities could be precisely this: on the one hand, the invisible networks of relationships, events, and courses of action that transform the physical space of a city –​its buildings, walls, squares, streets –​into the social space of memory, of the experiences of social actors who have lived there in the past or who still live there now; on the other hand, the silent conversations between those who have passed through it or still do and the spirit of those places. Notes 1 Interview with Renzo Piano, a very famous Italian architect, on November 22, 2010 as part of the Italian television programme “Vieni via con me”. 2 Lao Tzu 1988. 3 Hall 1959. 4 We may think of the divided self of Laing 1959, the minimal self of Lasch 1984, and the multiple self of Elster 1985. 5 Goffman 1959. 6 Capra 1975. 7 An interesting contribution on this topic is by Maturana and Varela 1984, in which they develop a conception of borders and the environment. 8 In this regard, see also the contribution of Wagner-​Pacifici 2016. 9 Capra 1975. 10 Ibid. 11 Contemporary architecture offers numerous examples of ways to reconceptualise space. The boundary between “inside and outside” gradually fades or is almost completely erased: examples are the ville-​en-​plein-​air by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and the Be-​Fun Design Projects in the Shinagawa House. A more recent example is the Living Garden designed by the architect Ma Yansong with Mad Architects for China House Vision Exhibition 2018, which presents a concept for a house of the future, in which the boundary separating indoors from outdoors has been completely eliminated thus making it possible to live in contact with nature, though with the protective shell and the safety offered by a house. 12 Goffman 1959. 13 Eco 1979. 14 Zolberg 1990, Tota 2014a. 15 Fumaroli 1994. 16 Ibid., pp. 154–​155. 17 Zolla 1955. 18 Sebastião Salgado, “Spazio Forma” exhibition, Milan 1991. 19 Norberg-​Schulz 1971. 20 Norberg-​Schulz and Norberg-​Schulz 1980; Bevilacqua 2010. 21 Glass 1964. 22 Ai Lavoratori. Discorso inaugurale alla fabbrica di Pozzuoli, April 23, 1955, p. 23. 23 Calvino 1997, pp. 10–​11.

Six SUSTAINABLE PAST

The conversations and the stories of everyday life have a profound influence on how we define and represent ourselves. As children, our biographies coincide to a large extent with the words we hear spoken about us; as adults, they coincide both with what others say about us and with the way we tell ourselves and others about our past, our present, and our future. Indeed, we are our past and, already in the present, we inhabit our future. For this reason, considering the link between identity and memory, the definition of what our past is, as has been stressed several times, is fundamental. In fact, the real connection is between identity and memory, not identity and past. We are not simply our past, we are the past we remember, the past we have in our minds. This leads us to reflect on the idea of a sustainable past. Many scholars of memory studies have questioned the idea that remembering is always useful or even necessary, therefore treating as a fallacy the idea that the act of remembering is itself always positive. Memory seems to be absolutely necessary when things have been denied or removed, when a part of the representation of the past has, as it were, slipped into invisibility and continues to generate its silent effects in the present from this latent position.1 However, in other circumstances forgetting, or remembering in a more fragmented way, may be healthy, especially for victims: it can also mean that that past has finally been left behind. Of course, in this case a fundamental distinction must be made between individual and/​or collective memories and public memories.2 In fact, if it is possible to speak positively about oblivion in relation to individual memories, the same cannot be said when referring to public memories: in this case, the only people who have the right to forget are those who suffered an injustice, while the community, civil society, and above all the state, always have the duty to remember. DOI: 10.4324/9781003433316-6

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6.1  Biography as a form of storytelling Madness comes to visit me at least twice a day. (Alda Merini, Aforismi e magie, 1999)3

What is the role of madness in everyday life? Is there an insurmountable, solid, fixed, and clear boundary between madness and illness, or are we to same extent all “madness fluid”? The famous Italian poetess Alda Merini, who was interned in an asylum in Milan (Villa Turro) at a very young age and therefore has lifelong suffered, recalls to us that madness can also be a “normal” part of everyday life. A very important contribution to better understand the interlink between “madness” and everyday life is due to Alice Miller (Alicja Englard), an important Swiss psychoanalyst who contributed to understanding the mechanisms of psychological violence and the way violence breaks down the process of formation of the self during childhood. Once again, these mechanisms take place in social relations and are literally constituted by words and actions. She spoke of the syndrome and the “drama of the gifted child”, claiming that: Later, the adult man will idealize his mother, since every human being needs the feeling that he was really loved; but he will despise other women, upon whom he thus revenges himself in place of his mother. And these humiliated adult women, in turn, if they have no other means of ridding themselves of their burden, will revenge themselves upon their own children. This indeed can be done secretly and without fear of reprisals, for the child has no way of telling anyone, except perhaps in the form of a perversion or obsessional neurosis, whose language is sufficiently veiled not to betray the mother. … But in twenty years’ time these children will be adults who will have to pay it all back to their own children. They may then fight vigorously against cruelty “in the world” –​and yet they will carry within themselves an experience of cruelty to which they have no access and which remains hidden behind their idealized picture of a happy childhood.4 This description by Alice Miller sounds like the plot of a horror film; however, it is simply a fairly widespread and common family biography. As we have said, biography is the most important form of storytelling for everyone: it is, in fact, a conversation, a more or less silent conversation with ourselves that accompanies us throughout our lives. In cases of serious psychological violence perpetrated against us during childhood, the process of idealisation preserves the image of our mother and father and their supposed love for us, but at the price of cannibalising an important part of our own consciousness. In order to remain blind to the cruelty experienced in childhood, we must

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avoid recognising the very language of cruelty, which is literally disguised by another definition: that of “happy childhood”. However, if we preclude the possibility of recognising what we have undergone, of acknowledging it as “cruelty”, we will no longer be able to recognise cruel words and actions in the future, words that are similar to those experienced in childhood, which will therefore be inflicted on us also in adulthood. Neither will we be able to recognise the harassment, the humiliation, and the deprivation that our husband or wife, for instance, will subject us to, nor will we recognise the fact that we behave in a similar way with our children, perpetuating a cruel and closed vicious circle. This avoidance therefore only serves to hang on to the illusion that we had a “good mother”. In this painful circle described by Alice Miller, the main characters “give in, so to speak, to life”: they are unable to interpret the cruelty they have endured, nor are they free to do so, and end up repeating it. In a conversation with themselves, they hide behind the idealisation of their own childhood: this seems to preserve the narrative of their biography. What really happens is that the cruelty experienced and then denied continues to be active, producing anger, depression, contempt, and other destructive feelings that turn against oneself or are directed at others, especially the weakest: children. As Massimo Recalcati has written: “When a mother looks at her child she unconsciously deposits onto her child a large part of her history as a daughter. … As with Russian dolls, the mother’s face contains the face of her mother. In every pregnancy, the future mother confronts the fantasy of her own mother”.5 How can this script be changed? How much courage and determination does it take to be able to look into the eyes of a mother (and/​or a father) and see how cruel their behaviour was? And then, it might be years later, look at the child still living in that father or mother and see the violence they in turn experienced during their own childhood, which they simply repeated as adults in their relationship with their children? When this happens, we experience the discursive nature of our biography. In fact, biographies do not exist, except as a form of storytelling. David Hume6 was indeed right when he said that “the self is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions”.7 An act of faith is needed to link the different perceptions into a continuum, it is like having a special glue for biographies that allows us to think of ourselves as continuous in time, and to see ourselves in a temporal duration. However, what we glue together can also be undone and re-​assembled to give it a new order. When a violated adult has the courage necessary to look the Gorgon in the eye, instead of being petrified, as the myth goes, he or she discovers his or her true nature and can rewrite his or her own biography. A dear friend of mine, who had a difficult childhood, once told me how her biographical narrative had been completely transformed over the years: A difficult childhood, first of all, must be revealed. For years I used to tell myself that my parents loved me very much, that I was very important to

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them. So why did they leave me with relatives so often, to go on holiday in faraway and beautiful countries without me? I would have loved to go with them. Why did they never have time for me? Why was it that when they had to pick me up somewhere they were always late, sometimes even hours late, and would leave me in uncomfortable and sometimes even dangerous situations? It is difficult to admit to oneself that one was not loved, and it is even more difficult to accept that the love we were denied can no longer be compensated. It is gone forever and this is a fact. It took me years to come to terms with this, to be able to accept that I had to give up all forms of compensation. No one would ever repay me, and the most surprising thing was to discover that I could actually survive without, because the truth is that no compensation was necessary, that compensation was actually impossible. I am an adult now. I needed that love as a child, I no longer need it now. The fact is that accepting this saved me, I gradually learned to see the true face and the kindness of the people who had been my executioners rather than my parents. I discovered that they actually did love me, but in their own way, not mine. In this sense, it was my ability to finally renounce compensation that changed everything. I don’t know how it happened: one day I simply discovered I had found peace, and since then everything has been different. This doesn’t mean I no longer remember my childhood: if I talk about it, I may become a little melancholic, but it’s enough not to talk about it. That was years ago, it seems it was centuries ago. Today what happened forty years ago is irrelevant. I’m in the present and I look forward to the future. I have noticed that since I stopped running after this compensation I no longer play the victim. The bad memories have faded. When I think of my parents, I think of them with affection and sadness, not because of what they did to me, but rather because I know how much they suffered. It seems to me that they surrendered to life, instead of transforming it. I feel pity and compassion for them. I wish I could have helped them heal their child’s wounds. Another example of biographical narrative is that of an elderly family friend whom I sometimes visited when I was a teenager together with my great-​aunt: During my teenage years, I often went on holiday to the mountains to visit my aunt Nenè, who was actually called Elena and was my grandfather’s sister, and my uncle Gianni, who had been widowed by his first wife and had remarried my great-​aunt. They put me up in a hotel every year, a sort of second home for them, and I liked going there, they were both so affectionate. The only downside of the holiday was the visits to Mrs Angelina, an old family friend of aunt Nenè who loved to entertain us for hours telling us all about her childhood. I didn’t like her stories at

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all. They made me feel uneasy, they made me feel sad. I had no interest in them at all. It took me years to realise why. When Mrs Angelina, who was almost eighty years old, spoke to us about her childhood, she talked about how badly her mother treated her, she spoke as if she were still that child. She seemed to be stuck in those memories and this made me feel uncomfortable. How was it possible for a grandmother to go on talking about her own mother as if she were still her daughter? My discomfort, which at that time I was not able to understand, was caused by the gap I perceived, even though I was so young, between what I expected her to say and what she actually said. The mother in her stories was always and still was only her mother: at the age of eighty Mrs Angelina had still not come into contact with the woman hiding behind the role of mother. Biographical narratives can be places of transformation, they can be opportunities to rewrite one’s own subjectivity: if childhood has been filled with sad and negative memories, once these memories have been brought to the surface and looked at, a person may decide to replace them with more pleasant memories. Obviously, this is easier said than done. People whose subjectivity was badly violated when they were young seem to lack the experience of love, the support and the strength that come from a “mother’s hands”,8 to use the illuminating expression of Massimo Recalcati. The hands Recalcati speaks of are those of a woman from Turin whose story is told in the film La madre di Torino by Gianni Bongioanni.9 It is a true story, which took place in Corso Peschiera in Turin, where a young mother saved her four-​year-​old son who fell from the top floor of the building and was left hanging in mid-​air: she held on to him for hours. No one noticed them for a long time, until a barman, raising his head, saw the scene and called for help. For Recalcati this scene becomes the symbol of the maternal and of what is passed on: Why have I never forgotten the mother of Turin? I try to answer that question by first thinking of how I have often felt as though I was suspended over the void just like that child, and how many times I have called from the loneliness of that void for the hands of those I loved to support me. Is this not perhaps the most radical condition of human life? Does life not come to life through the continual reaching out, holding on to and entrusting ourselves to the hands of the Other? Is mother perhaps the name that defines the hands of this first Other, which each of us has invoked in the silence of our own void? … The hands of the mother of Turin are not hands that punish, castigate or humiliate; they are not hands of anger or violence; they are not hands that hit and that we can recognize in our childhood scars.10 What happens to those who could not hang on to their “mother’s hands”?

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6.2  Toxic past and sustainable past

The representation of our past, the way we remember it, the way we think about it and talk about it can be a fundamental resource for our psychological, physical, and social well-​being and for our ability to influence the outside world. In this sense, the notion of “sustainable past” may help, meaning the representation of a past we actualise in the present and which allows us to transform traumas into a resource for the future, instead of letting them be burdens weighing on the present. The past becomes sustainable when it stops polluting the present, when it ceases to be toxic; when, in other words, its stops causing pain in the present because of something that may have happened two decades earlier. It seems impossible, but two decades are actually nothing in a biography. This means that if a child has been sexually abused or has suffered physical and psychological violence at the age of four or five, at the age of twenty-​five he or she will no longer suffer from such abuse. This is actually hardly ever the case, as the effects of such violence –​the suffering and the cognitive and emotional distortions that follow –​continue to be active also three or four decades later, when the child in question has become an adult. In this perspective, the past and the ability to preserve it cannot be viewed positively: when it is toxic, the past should be forgotten, elaborated, transformed. The past can be valuable if it is a sustainable past, when pain is remembered but is no longer present. Indeed it is not pain, but its memory. The transition from a toxic past to a sustainable past is also what transforms us into men and women who are free to choose our own biography and future. The notion of toxicity we usually refer to is actually too limited and limiting. We can extend it by distinguishing a form of verbal pollution (“we are what we say”), a form of acoustic pollution (“we are what we hear”)11 and a form of visual pollution (“we are what we see”). The combination of all these different forms of pollution is what produces toxic memories. A past that has caused devastation and pain in an individual’s soul can never be transformed into a happy past, and this would not even be desirable, as it would distort the biography of this person; however, it can become “sustainable”, it can fade in time, ceasing to destroy all alternative futures with its fierce presence. 6.2.1  Insane spaces and places

On Being Sane in Insane Places is the title of a famous study by David Rosenhan,12 compulsory reading for generations of sociologists. The study investigates psychiatric hospitals and procedures for diagnosing schizophrenia, but the title has always made me think of a much more common situation,

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namely the experience of being sane in insane places that may occur on a daily basis. When this happens, it can be useful to have developed a series of antidotes that allow one to recognise the situation, as well as to have the courage to escape as soon as possible. An insane place, in fact, is usually an institution, and –​at least for those of us who have internalised sociological thinking –​it is better not to mess with institutions: their overarching and coercive power has been extensively documented by several scholars.13 A good way to identify insane places might be to observe how polluting the conversations that take place in them are. We may imagine that such conversations produce toxins which, like fine dust, deposit and stick to the walls, to the fabric of the curtains, to the armchairs, to the furniture, and to all the objects in the room. We must imagine that the spaces we inhabit and frequent magically accumulate good and bad things, depending on what happens inside them, and that, entering one of these places, we sense everything that has settled there over time. If this hypothesis proved to be real, we could imagine what effects places have where torture and physical or psychological violence have occurred. It would be necessary to possess tools capable of transforming these places of violence into sane places. Returning from imagination to everyday life: even though we might not be equipped with such tools, we can still learn how to be aware of the places we frequent and, above all, inhabit. 6.3  What if plants could talk?

This last paragraph is a digression intended to offer a literal interpretation of the title of this book: what if plants could talk? Many scholars of communication studies believe that the act of communicating is an exclusive prerogative of human beings; others, however, extend this possibility to some animal species, referring to several ethological studies that point in this direction, and to ordinary common sense: it would be strange, in fact, to assume that only mankind is able to communicate, without providing any specific scientific evidence to confirm this hypothesis. It is not clear why the burden of proof should rest on the scholars who hypothesise that animal species can also communicate with each other, for instance by using communication systems different from those used by our species. The opposite hypothesis is equally peculiar and needs to be verified. Moreover, any one of us who has been lucky enough to share a part of his or her existence with a pet knows that a great deal of communication has occurred with it over time. The issue has infinite ramifications. In 1973, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird published a book that radically changed our beliefs about the communicative abilities of plant species.14 The two authors, thanks to their patient and exhaustive work, offer a long and well-​documented review of plant research; their findings are quite revolutionary, to say the least.

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Perhaps not for the scientific community (this research was already known to scholars and to research centres in many countries), but certainly with regard to how the plant world is commonly understood and treated in social discourse. According to the results of some of the countless studies cited by Tompkins and Bird, plants not only communicate with each other, but also have the capacity to remember, to express varied emotions with different intensities. For example, Dorothy Retallack conducted a series of experiments in Denver, starting in 1968, on the relationship between music and the well-​being of certain plant species. Below are some of the results of her research: They suggested that sound waves might produce a resonant effect in the plant cells, enabling the energy to accumulate and affect the plant’s metabolism. … Mrs. Retallack ran a series of similar trials early in 1969 with corn, squash, petunias, zinnias, and marigolds …. The rock music caused some of the plants first to grow either abnormally tall and put out excessively small leaves, or remain stunted. Within a fortnight all the marigolds had died, but only six feet away identical marigolds, enjoying the classical strains, were flowering.15 As mentioned, the experiments and the studies cited in the book are so numerous that, after reading it, one can hardly believe that there are people who still think that plants are not sensitive, cannot communicate, and cannot remember. Tompkins and Bird also mention the experiments of Jagadish Chandra Bose, an Indian scientist, who produced astonishing results in the early 20th century: Though it had been thought that plants liked unlimited quantities of carbon dioxide, Bose found that too much of this gas could suffocate them, but that they could then be revived, just like animals, with oxygen. Like human beings, plants became intoxicated when given shots of whiskey or gin, swayed like any barroom drunkard, passed out, and eventually revived, with definite signs of a hangover. … The vegetarian and antivivisectionist George Bernard Shaw, having witnessed in Bose’s laboratory, through one of Bose’s magnifiers, a cabbage leaf going through violent paroxysms as it was scalded to death, dedicated his own collected works to Bose, inscribing them: “From the least to the greatest living biologist”. … in 1923 … Henri Bergson said, after hearing Bose lecture at the Sorbonne: “The dumb plants had by Bose’s marvelous inventions been rendered the most eloquent witnesses of their hitherto unexpressed life story. Nature has at last been forced to yield her must jealously guarded secret”. [On the occasion of the same lecture] More Gallicly humorous, Le Matin stated: “After this discovery we begin to have misgivings, when we

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strike a woman with a blossom, which of them suffers more, the woman or the flower?”16 In 2015, Peter Wohlleben, a German scholar of forestry science who worked as a forest ranger for many years, published a unique book entitled The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World. Reading this book is an adventurous journey into the world of trees. Wohlleben tells us about trees that die shortly after the tree next to them is cut down, because they are connected underground in a way that forms a cycle of osmosis and mutual sustenance. He tells us of the abnormal creation of endless poplar groves in which the trees are planted in rows, something only a human being would think of doing as this would never occur in nature: these poplar groves literally line the country roads we sometimes travel along and all the trees belong to the same generation, they are all the same age. This would be an exception, an extraordinary fact in nature, since in a forest trees of different ages coexist and wisely look after each other. In a forest the older trees force the younger (and therefore the smaller) ones to grow vertically so they may reach the light as quickly as possible. Young trees learn how to compete with the other trees surrounding them. We must think of this as something that the older trees teach the younger ones, as their thick foliage prevents the younger ones from reaching the sunlight they need. In other words, with their shade, the older trees are educating the small ones, which grow vertically instead of bending over, like a loving parent who asks his or her child to sit or stand up straight. Also, the older trees protect the younger ones during thunderstorms, when the wind blows and the snow accumulates on their branches. In man-​made poplar groves, Wohlleben claims, what we see is a group of young orphans competing with each other over resources –​light, air, and water. Despite this, also in this case, Mother Nature lovingly intervenes, sometimes helping these poplars, in the absence of fathers and mothers capable of supporting and educating them: they develop a form of secret brotherhood and hold on to each other underground. Wohlleben tells us that sometimes, when cutting down a poplar grove, one discovers that the roots of all the plants are intertwined: the grove resembles a huge orphanage, and the trees seem to have decided they will live or die together. Who knows what silent conversations take place among the trees that shade our streets, who knows how these silent giants, which resemble “street children”,17 are able to comfort each other. Notes Tota 2002, 2003, 2005a. 1 2 Tota 2005b. 3 Merini 1999, p. 30. 4 Miller 1990, pp. 68–​69.

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5 Recalcati 2019, p. 43. 6 Hume 1896. 7 Ibid., p. 252. 8 Recalcati 2019. 9 Bongioanni, La madre di Torino (1968). 10 Recalcati 2019, pp. 21–​23. 11 In this regard, Tia DeNora (2011) speaks of “sonic ecology”. 12 Rosenhan 1973. 13 Douglas 1986. 14 Tompkins and Bird 1973. 15 Ibid., pp. 152–​154. 16 Ibid., pp. 94–​102. 17 Ibid.

AFTERWORD

I believe that a book’s life does not end where the text stops, and that its actual life, the one that really matters, begins at the very moment the writer falls silent. I wrote with passion, allowing myself to bring together academic language and everyday knowledge, what I have studied and what I have learned by living –​the mind with the “flesh”, to use an expression dear to Merleau-​Ponty –​so that knowledge could become fertile, reflect the life it must return to. A book such as this one can certainly afford some form of eccentricity, theoretical and methodological, which I hope readers will forgive. I have little more to add, except that I wish these lines may be of some use: to bring a smile in a difficult moment, offer help in solving a problem that has to do with communication, assist readers in looking at everyday situations from a different angle. I believe that in the act of thinking and writing I have exercised a form of intellectual honesty which has prompted me to write about what I have learned and experienced so that it might serve others. It seems that a characteristic of the human condition is learning through painful experiences, which sometimes shape us like a chisel, the kind that can cut through living flesh. All of us have experienced more or less deep grief, sorrow, suffering, disappointment. No one escapes unscathed. What does make a difference is the idea that a journey, one that has been completed successfully perhaps at a great cost, may pave the way for others as well. Somewhat like the Zen story about a teacher and his followers who meditate in the mountains trying to solve a kōan.1 After many months they succeed and descend to the valley. However, as soon as they arrive in the village, they hear the elementary school teacher in the school grounds explaining to his students the solution to that same kōan.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003433316-7

Afterword  127

This story lends itself to multiple reflections: one in particular concerns a widespread conception of interconnection, according to which once something has been meditated or expressed, no matter how much effort was required, it is available and easily accessible to everyone else. The thoughts that have been formulated and the words used to express them, especially if they are original and innovative, are supposed to function as “pathfinders” for thoughts and words that will follow. Indeed, “the real problem in life is when you can’t find the right words”,2 as a young man interviewed by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica stated some time ago. This book is written for all those who, at least once, were not able to find the right words, so they may know that according to the ancient sceptics aphasia was a virtue, so they may know that the ecology of a conversation results from the combination of words and silences, fullness and emptiness, so they may stop feeling they are alone, because in fact many people, like us, live with aphasia. We have been trained to put our monsters to sleep before speaking, we inhabit this world silently and with determination, in a dialogue with the invisible, though remaining visible, sometimes physically exhausted or bowing our head, yet our soul continues to stand upright, always able to sustain an ecological approach to thoughts, words, and actions. As Alda Merini, a very famous Italian writer and poet,3 once wrote: Before speaking with others put to sleep your secret wild beast.4 Notes 1 In Zen Buddhism, a kōan is a paradoxical story or assertion used to encourage meditation and self-​awareness. A very famous kōan, for example, is: “You can make the sound of two hands clapping. Now what is the sound of one hand?” (Capra 1975, p. 49). 2 Paolo di Paolo, Il labirinto dell’esame di maturità, in “La Repubblica”, October 8, 2018, Monday, p. 20. 3 Alda Merini (March 21, 1931 in Milan –​November 1, 2009 in Milan) was an Italian poetess, whose work earned Pierpaolo Pasolini’s and Salvatore Quasimodo’s admiration. In 1996 she was nominated by the French Academy as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. 4 Merini 1999.

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INDEX

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 23n13 refers to note 13 on page 23. abductive syllogism 65 acoustic pollution 121 action, theory of 35 always and everywhere, generalisation of 50 Alzheimer’s disease 59 anniversary syndrome 83 annotation 7–​8 antifragility, concept of 34–​5 Arieti, Silvano 65 Aristotelian syllogism 64–​5 Art of Cartography 30 Augustine, St 18–​19, 94 Austin, John Langshaw 4, 36 Ave Verum (Mozart) 56 Bateson, Gregory 61, 65 Bauman, Zygmunt 20, 32 Beck, Teresa Koloma 72 Benjamin, Walter 26 Berger, Peter L. 17, 38 biographical narratives 118–​20 biography: as a form of storytelling 117–​20; of people 95–​6 Bird, Christopher 122 black pedagogy 51 bodily memory 71–​2, 79, 82 body knowledge, importance of 73

body language 67–​8; body practices in everyday life 72; intensity of 85–​7; and memories of sexual abuse 72; other conceptions of 76–​7; physicality of the body 70; sacred movements 73; and space-​time of the body 77–​85; study of individual memory 71–​2; see also mind-​body dualism Bongioanni, Gianni 120 Borges, Jorge Luis 30 Bose, Jagadish Chandra 123 Brook, Peter 26 Cage, John 86 Calvino, Italo 29, 36, 111, 115 Capra, Fritjof 107–​8 Carroll, Lewis 31 Cartographers Guilds 30 cause and effect, concept of 14 chakras, importance of 76 chiasm, concept of 77 Chinese language 23n13 Chocolat (film) 63 clever bodies 72–​6 cogito ergo sum 75 cognitive fallacy 41 cognitive maps 40 collective consciousness, impact of Western rationality on 43

Index  137

collective unconscious, idea of 83 communication: among the dancers’ bodies in the group 73; concept of 14; defined 12; difference with social interaction, dialogue, and conversation 12; everyday 14; meaning of 12; mental 74; metacommunication 60–​4; pathological forms of 48–​57, 65; quality of 28; stereotypes and unjustified generalisations 57; in virtual versus real world 68 communication skills 16 communication systems 11–​14; kinds of 15–​16; for revealing invisible loyalties 14–​15 communicative and cognitive dilemma 61 communicative exchanges 2, 10, 61 consciousness through meditative practices, state of 78 constructivism, concept of 17 contextual information, manipulation of 54 conversation 12; difference with communication 12; effectiveness of 28; pleasures of 36; power of 46; quality of 25–​9; relationship to reality 25–​9; and social interaction 38 Culbertson, Roberta 80 cumbersome invisibility, paradox of 81 Daishonin, Nichiren 107 dancers’ bodies in the group, flow of communication among 73 decision-​making processes 30 deductive reasoning 57 definition of the situation, concept of 38, 52, 54 depersonalisation: of the other 54; practices that induce 56–​7 Descartes, Renè 75 detachment, practice of 47 de Vigan, Delphine 15 dialogues 12; face-​to-​face 13; between Kublai and Marco Polo 29; literary 13; philosophical 13; virtual 13 discrediting and denigrating, art of 46 double bind, notion of 60–​4 Durkheim, Émile 114 dybbuk (an evil spirit) 82–​3 Eastern mysticism 107 ego 53

Einzelgänger 15 emotional processes, timelessness of 94 emotional substratum, characteristic of 5 emotions: concept of 5; identification of 90; language of 89–​95; and memory 93–​5; of pain and sadness 94 Entzauberung der Welt (disenchantment of the world) 3, 43 erroneous assumptions and preconceptions 1–​5 Esho-​funi theory 107 esoteric reasoning 78 eternal present 78 Et voilà 38 events, quantum sociology of 33 everyday communication, concept of 14 ex nihilo 57 experience, quantum theory of see quantum theory, of experience Expositions of the Psalms (St Augustine) 18 extended self, notion of 107–​9 facial expressions 13, 69, 70, 87 faith, notion of 25 flesh of the world, concept of 77 forgetting, process of 72 forgiveness 94; as act of faith and charity 44 Fromm, Gerard M. 79 Fumaroli, Marc 110 Gauss curve 83 gaze: politics of 87–​9; subaltern 88 genius loci, concept of 112–​15 Giovanni, Father 25–​6; story of two monks 26–​8 Goffman, Erving 16, 54, 101 grass syllogism 64–​5 Gurdjieff, George Ivanovich 4, 26, 53, 73, 77, 91 Halbwachs, Maurice 82 Hall, Edward 88, 100 Hallström, Lasse 63 Hall, Stuart 2, 70 haptic system 13, 68 Hellinger, Bert 84 Hitchcock, Alfred 47 Hume, David 14, 20, 118 Husserl, Edmund 26, 77

138 Index

ideal pupil, image of 40 identity: boundaries of one’s identity 107–​9; Caterina’s desk 106–​7; claims 16; construction of 17; cousin Luigi’s stable 103–​4; crisis of 20; discursive formation of 16–​18; Fiat 128 and the Sunday ritual 102; “Genius loci” and 112–​15; great-​grandmother Lina’s small and large kitchens 104–​5; index of identity saturation 17; of a place 112–​15; resources 101; spatialisation of 101–​2; uncle Gerardo’s cellar 102–​3 illness, concept of 67 immanency, concept of 78 index of identity saturation 17 insane spaces and places 121–​2 intelligence of the body 73, 75 intergenerational transmission, problem of 79–​81 intonational system, use of 13, 16, 56, 60, 68 Invisible Cities (Calvino) 111, 115 invisible “loyalties” 15 invisible third party, strategy of 54 IQ tests 39 Jacobson, Lenore 39 Jodorowky, Alejandro 67 Jung, Carl Gustav 83 Kanter, Heike 72 kata 47–​8 kinesic system 13, 60 knowledge 10, 25–​8, 30, 78, 126; difference with understanding 26 Körper 77 Korzybski, Alfred 30 Lama, Dalai 1 La madre di Torino (film) 120 Leder, Drew 75 Leib, concept of 77 Levi, Primo 59 liar 49 Life is Beautiful (film) 85 linear causality 39 linguistic acts 37 liquid modernity, characteristic of 20 Littizzetto, Luciana 90, 98n55 lived body 77 Lloyd, Genevieve 76 “loving the knotted vine” theory 39–​41

Lowen, Alexander 68, 70 Luckmann, Thomas 17, 38 Manifesto of Non-​Hostile Communication 18 Map of the Empire (Borges) 30 McCraty, Rollin 78 Mead, George Herbert 16 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes) 75 Meetings with Remarkable Men (film) 25, 26 Melucci, Alberto 68 memory–​silence relationship 80 mental communication 74 Merini, Alda 117 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 77, 79, 82 Merton, Robert K 38 metacommunication 60–​4 metaphors, use of 3 metonymy 49 Miller, Alice 117–​18 Mills, Charles Wright 19 mind-​body dualism 72–​6; cognitive construction of 77; idea of 76; in modern capitalist societies 76; social construction of 77–​8 Model Reader, notion of 109 monotones 16 mother, social role of 61 motor-​reflex manifestations 53 Müller, Sophie Merit 72 multiple intelligence, notion of 73 names are omens (nomina sunt omina) 57–​60 Nichetti, Maurizio 32 Nichiren Buddhism 107 non-​verbal communication 70 normality, establishment of an external parameter of 52–​3 Norwood, Robin 89–​90 Olivetti, Adriano 114 On Being Sane in Insane Places (Rosenhan) 121 one’s identity: boundaries of 107–​9; concept of 57 Ong, Walter J. 37 overly sensitive ear syndrome 10–​11 Palo Alto School, California 61, 64 paralinguistic system 13

Index  139

partial extraneousness, relationship of 89 pauses and silences, as ways of speaking 85–​7 performative utterances 4, 36–​9 performative verbs 36 personal dignity 55 personal space, concept of 101 person’s physical and psychic integrity 58 phantom limb syndrome 71 physical violence 121 Planck, Max 108 Polo, Marco 29 Potter, Harry 43–​4, 95 Pragmatics of Human Communication (Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson) 48, 61 primary socialisation, process of 89 Prior Analytics (Aristotle) 64 proxemics, theory of 88 psychological violence 48, 121; mechanisms of 117 public speaking 16 quality of words, in the world of magic 43 Quantum Field Theory 107 quantum mechanics 19–​20 quantum physics 99 Quantum Self, The (Zohar and Marshall) 19–​23 quantum sociology of events 20, 33, 79 quantum theory, of experience 31–​6; on antifragility 34–​5; on resilience 35–​6 radical constructivism 30 Recalcati, Massimo 40, 118, 120 remembering and forgetting: body’s capacity to 72; process of 71 representations, idea of 17 repressed memories 72 res extensa 77 resilience, concept of 35–​6 “restlessness of events” theory 33, 79, 97n31 Retallack, Dorothy 123 Rosenhan, David 54 Rosenthal, Robert 39 Sacks, Oliver 71 schizophrenia 54–​5, 64–​5 Schulz von Thun, Friedemann 10–​11

Schützenberger, Anne Ancelin 82–​4 scientific languages 12 self: formation of 16; spatialisation of 101 self-​esteem, loss of 57 self-​fulfilling prophecies 36–​9, 40 semantic cannibalism 18 Serious Man, A (film) 82 sexual abuse, memories of 72 Shaw, George Bernard 123 signification, process of 5–​7 silence: code of 87; meaning of 86–​7; significance in Finnish culture 3 silent conversations 69, 115, 124 Simmel, Georg 17 situation in education, definition of 39–​41 social behaviour, dynamics of 38 social construction of reality, theory of 38 Social Frameworks of Memory, The (Halbwachs) 82 social interaction 12–​13, 38; concept of 13 social relation 12, 88, 100, 110, 117 social well-​being 121 sociological imagination 19, 95 sostenere una conversazione 86 space: language of 100; uniqueness of 114 space-​time of the body: hypothesis of 77–​85; problem of intergenerational transmission 79–​81; restlessness of trauma 79–​81; as a text 109–​12; unspeakable language of the family’s body 81–​5 speech: acts of 36; ecology of 49 Stefano Quantestorie (film) 32 Steiner, Rudolf 31, 44, 47, 64, 77, 94, 107 stereotypes 57 stereotypical reasoning 57 student-​teacher interaction 39 subjects, comparison between 50–​2 Sudnow, David 54, 72 sustainable past, notion of 116, 121–​2 Sylvie and Bruno (Carroll) 31 synecdoche 49, 57 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 34–​5 Taoism 99 Tao of Physics (Capra) 107 teleological fallacy 34

140 Index

“therapeutic obsession” for things 94 thinking, illusion of 34 Thomas, William Isaac 37 time: linear conception of 94; sociology of 77 total extraneousness, relationship of 89 tout court 109 toxicity, notion of 121 toxic past, notion of 121–​2 traditional language schools 69 transforming emotions, process of 5 transgenerational unconscious 83 trauma: anniversary syndrome 83; restlessness of 79–​81; transmission from one generation to another 79, 82 traumatic events: biographical trajectory of 79; idea of 79 turning point, concept of 33–​4 Unconscionable Maps 30 understanding: versus knowledge 26; notion of 25–​6

unjustified generalisations 57 verbal aggression, act of 58, 91 verbal pollution 121 verbal system 13, 16, 60, 68, 70 visual pollution 121 Wagner-​Pacifici, Robin 33–​4 Watzlawick, Paul 38, 40, 46, 48, 64, 85 Ways of the Hand (Sudnow) 72 Weber, Max 3, 43 when ideas get sick, notion of 46–​8 Wohlleben, Peter 124 Women Who Love Too Much (Norwood) 89 wordless language 80 words: with derogatory meaning 9; that change the world 43–​4; that make you sick 41–​2; we speak 29; word-​as-​ action 40, 44; word-​as-​sound 40 writing systems 37