Conclusion
Jumping In

If you read enough scholarly books, you discover there’s a formula for the concluding chapter. First, you summarize all the preceding chapters, making the links clear from one to the next. Second, you anticipate your critics’ responses. What will they disagree with, and what will be the substance of their critique? (You then respond to them pre-emptively.) Third, you explain why any of this matters. You answer the eternal question: So what? Who cares?

I’m going to break from this formula, although I will address those concerns soon enough. Instead, I want to come back to a key idea in structuring this book, what in the introduction I called an epistemology of jumping in.¹ It brings together cultural translation, communication theory, and what they help us do.

To do that, I want to start with two stories.

Story one. When I was in late elementary school, I bought a television for my bedroom. I asked my parents if I could, and they—underestimating my resolve and willingness to delay gratification—said I could if I saved my own money. So for two years, I saved my allowance, rarely spending any of it, until I had $80. I bought a five-and-a-half inch black-and-white TV that got four fuzzy channels. I loved that thing, far more (I’m sure) than my parents would have liked.

One day the on-off switch began to falter. It would turn on, but you’d have to hold it just right, or it’d flicker off again. At first I could live with it, but it got worse and worse. Soon I couldn’t watch it at all. My dad said we could fix it. I asked him how, and he said he didn’t know—we’d open it up and figure out it. I was pretty nervous—I saved up for two years to buy that thing, and he didn’t even know how we’d fix it? He reassured me: once the case was open, we’d have the tools we needed to diagnose the problem and fix it.

What choice did I have?

So that’s what we did. It turns out that for a split second, each time you turned it on the switch was carrying too much current. We put in a switch that could handle more current, and the TV worked for another fifteen years.

Story two. During the first week of my first year as an undergraduate at the University of North Dakota, I walked into the International Centre, where the study abroad programs were housed, and I knocked on the director’s door. “Hi,” I said, reaching out my hand. “I’m Kyle, and I want to study in France.” (I get straight to the point when I’ve made up my mind.) “Okay,” the director said. “Here are some programs. Where would you like to go?” I signed up to go to St. Étienne, a town about an hour from Lyon in southeastern France.

So it was that a year later, at age nineteen, I boarded an airplane bound for Paris, where I’d take a train to Caen for a three-week intensive language course, before finally heading to St. Étienne. I got to France and immediately made an alarming discovery (figure 33): my French classes in high school and university had not prepared me in any meaningful way to talk with French people. As eager a learner as I was, I wasn’t prepared for how fast people talked, or for the fact that no one talked like they were in a textbook. (I mean, why would they?) Still, I had to eat, and for that, I had to talk. I also had to buy train tickets and ride buses and move into my room in the residence hall. I didn’t have the tools I thought I had, but I clearly couldn’t choose to do nothing. Hunger is a great motivator—I had to talk, even if I didn’t know the words.

These two stories have something important in common: they’re about acting even when I lacked the confidence to act. They’re also about learning confidence through that process. In short, they’re about the epistemology of jumping in—a way of coming to know the world by engaging in it and making mistakes.

What I mean is this. We base every decision on partial or incomplete information, not just the ones where the limits of what we know are clear, as in my two anecdotes. Still, even though we can’t know everything about a situation, we’re often faced with a choice. We can’t choose to do nothing. (Even a choice not to act is a choice.) We learn to swim by jumping in, so to speak. In the process, we discover two things. First, we get a clearer sense of what we don’t know. We find the gaps in our knowledge, the voids we need to fill. Second, we find that by acting, we begin to fill in those gaps.

Of course, jumping in always comes with a risk—we might be wrong, we might misread a situation, we might misjudge what we need to do. This is a common experience when we study abroad in a language that’s not our own: we miss the unspoken cues that signal complicity or irony or humour. Everyone’s laughing, and we don’t know why. Here, too, we run a risk in not acting—we can be wrong in inaction just as much as in action. When we encounter a void, it can be difficult even to gauge which option is riskier. Do we laugh along, and risk perhaps hurting someone’s feelings, or do we stay quiet, and make people feel awkward? Or do we smile feebly and hope someone will explain what’s going on?

That’s where this book is useful (or so I hope). Cultural translation and communication theory both provide tools for understanding how and where we jump in. Cultural translation—the idea that meaning is only relatively stable and that we can develop strategies for seeing the world differently (and persuading others to do the same)—is a general phenomenon, an everyday experience. Doing theory is a specific application: it consists in understanding how we use those strategies and in refining our understanding of them through observation and induction. Both are about making decisions based on incomplete information.

We’ll spend the rest of this chapter exploring that link. We’ll consider how an ungenerous critic might read my argument about cultural translation (but make no mistake—this critique is a constitutive component of my argument because without it my argument would be limp). We’ll consider the role of communication theory as an application of cultural translation, and finally, we’ll talk about why this matters. In short, it matters because, as an idea, cultural translation calls on us to examine our relations to others through the lens of ethics, and we cannot deny the humanness of the people who surround us.

Cultural Translation and the Epistemology of Jumping In

When scholars read, we do so with a well-honed skepticism. Our reflex is to doubt each claim, always making the same demand: convince me.

So as I write, I take on the role of a skeptical reader. And if I were reading this book, I’d find three main points of contention. First, my biggest critique would be that it lacks generalizable claims. It works from an odd collection of texts—I mean, really, who brings Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, Stuart Hall, George Orwell, climate skeptics, Pussy Riot, Petr Pavlenskii, Aristotle, and Donald Trump together in the same book?—but with no statistics to tell us how we might apply the claims to other populations. How do we know any of this has changed anyone’s mind, or is likely to in the future?

This observation is true, but it misses the point. I’d reply—in the academic jargon I likely share with such a reader—that this book is performative. Its structure is like that of chapter 1: it jumps into examples to encourage inductive reasoning. Consequently, my description in this concluding chapter is a metatheoretical account of that performative dimension (that is, it’s theory about theory, and it describes how this book works to talk about what it says).

More simply, I’d say that the arguments I make are not generalizable in the way that social scientists might want. They do not involve random samples, and they have no statistical significance. In fact, they aren’t falsifiable, meaning they do not have the capacity to be proven right or wrong. Instead, they rely on persuasion. They describe a logic they arrive at inductively, and they invite a response—they ask you to argue, refute, and improve. Moreover, I ask you to argue, refute, and improve. I ask you. (That’s why I welcome a skeptical reading. I’d like to have a beer with my critic so we have time to talk. My reader brings a different set of tools that will help me refine these ideas. We’ll refine them together.)

My second critique would also relate to the book’s eclectic approach. It seems to lack order. It’s spaghetti thrown against a wall to see what sticks.

To this I’d reply that jumping in is a way to act with necessarily incomplete knowledge. It’s an epistemology of contingency and action, and it requires that we think on our toes. The eclectic selection of texts reflects that idea. Sometimes we need to improvise a tool when we discover a need. We need to dig, and for that, we look for a shovel. If we don’t have one, we look at the tools we do have, we turn them around to get another view, and eventually we find one that will dig a hole (figure 34). Or we’re in a foreign country, and we don’t speak the language very well. There’s an idea for which we don’t know the word, but we don’t have a dictionary at hand, so we improvise: we mime, we draw on a napkin, we use the words we do know to describe the one we don’t. Our theoretical tools work the same way, as the parallax approach has shown. We pick them up, turn them around, and figure out which will do the trick. So eclectic, yes, but strategically so.

1. Theory is an attempt to explain our experience of the world.
2. If the explanation theory offers doesn’t match our experience, it’s bad theory.
   (2a. In the end, it’s all bad theory.)
3. We must refine our explanation to replace bad theory with better theory.³

Even if we are concerned only with what we know in the classroom, this approach to theory has a built-in mechanism for refinement, and it will eventually pull us out into the wider world. It forces us to immerse ourselves in experience—in a word, to jump in.⁴

Communication Theory and the Act of Jumping In

This built-in mechanism for refinement brings us back to an idea I introduced in the opening pages of the book, that of theory as technē, or a craft we learn by practicing, like music or art. It’s a set of skills, a way of training ourselves to be aware of our perception and experience of the world—and, more to the point, of communication. The best way to develop these skills is by using them—to jump into theory, that foreign language (as I also wrote in the opening pages), and learn them as we go.

To put that idea into practice, I structured the book to follow the three axioms. After the introduction, chapter 1 offered an explanation of one aspect of communication. To use a sign, it argued, is to transform and translate it. Words accumulate meaning as people respond to each other and take their respective responses into account. Even from one use to the next, a word doesn’t evoke exactly the same thing—a gap opens up, even if it’s slight. That idea led me to assert that this process of transformation and translation “opens up a space for a politics of invention,” as I wrote, “where we can rethink our relation to cultural others so that people we once feared can find their place in the communities we claim as our own.”

That was axiom 1 (theory as explanation). Chapters 2 to 4 tested that explanation. Of course, I mean “tested” in a different way than a social scientist. “Testing” in the humanities-oriented sense, as I use it here, means using stories or art we find compelling to help think through the implications of an argument. Thus chapter 2 reveals ways this translation can help us know the world in new ways, but also how it can loosen our grip on what we think we know. Chapter 3 helps us develop tools to persuade each other and ground our experience, while chapter 4 shows how those tools, too, can cut both ways.

That was axiom 2 (theory’s potential fallibility) and its corollary, 2a (its certain fallibility). Chapter 1 argued that cultural translation can make society more inclusive, but it overlooked the ways it can also lead to oppression and exclusion. Part of the explanation did not match our experience of the world, where oppression remains a very real phenomenon, so we had to revise it. Hence chapter 2, whose purpose was to improve the initial explanation by identifying its limits. Chapters 3 and 4 followed the same pattern. Chapter 3 proposed tools for changing people’s minds, based on the explanation developed in the chapters before it. But it, too, fell short, failing to account for the negative potential of those tools. Hence chapter 4, whose purpose—again—was to improve the explanation by identifying its limits.

Where does that leave us? We arrive at axiom 3, concerned with theory’s refinement. The preceding chapters were the back-and-forth exchange (between me and my students and my imagined readers) that helped us arrive at a clearer understanding of cultural translation and communication: we’ve replaced faulty explanations with better explanations. That effort is the impetus for the idea of jumping in, which this conclusion has developed. It’s an approach that forces us to recognize that we can’t anticipate everything we’ll encounter. We’ll have to improvise, based on the situations we encounter. That recognition is the key refinement to the theories proposed in chapters 1 to 4, a way to extend or even surpass the tool of the parallax view.

But here’s where things get trippy. My three axioms also apply to metatheory, or explanations about what theory is. They, too, can be tested and found lacking. What happens if we take a step back and treat my axioms themselves as an explanation of our experience of the world? In other words (there’s that phrase again!), what happens if we rewrite the axioms by substituting specific observations for the general ones I’ve now repeated across multiple chapters? The axioms become:

1. We operate in the world by explaining it, testing our explanations, and refining them as necessary.
2. If we do not operate this way, our metatheory falls short.
   (2a. In the end, all metatheory falls short.)
3. We must refine our explanation by accounting for those things our initial formulation left out.

Where does that formulation fall short? In the analysis in chapters 1 to 4, my focus was on developing concepts, and the explanations I put forward and critiqued served that purpose. I wanted to show how cultural translation has more than one valence: it can include or exclude, provide perspective or remove it. But we are more than merely cerebral creatures, and we deal with more than just concepts. The assertion that we can generalize my approach to talk about how we come to know the broader world simplifies our interactions with other people (who, of course, are part of that broader world). It misses a key aspect of our lives, namely the value we assign to our actions.

How do we refine this assertion? How do we account for the dimensions of experience that it overlooks? The answer lies in an idea that has been present throughout the book but has remained, until now, more or less latent. It is the idea of ethics.

Conclusion: Cultural Translation and the Call to Ethics

Communication scholar John Durham Peters reminds us of something fundamental and important to remember here: communication always involves two people.⁵ As a result, “communication theory becomes consubstantial with ethics, political philosophy, and social theory in its concern for relations between self and other, self and self, and closeness and distance in social organizations.”⁶ Whenever there are two people in relation to each other, they have to figure out how to act, and one dimension of that process is that of ethics.

The same is true of cultural translation. In its positive valence—when we use it to make society more inclusive—it implies an ethical stance and an openness toward others. If we were not open to others, we wouldn’t engage with them, instead trying simply to impose our will. (Of course, some people do take that approach. They’re not open to others, and they refuse to engage with them.) Cultural translation requires us to strike a balance between finding things in common and respecting difference. It can bring others closer but in a way that they maintain their sense of self. We have to be careful not to say “Oh, you’re just like me!” if doing so causes us to miss important ways people are different. Such an attitude might make us feel like we’re being inclusive, but if it denies people an essential part of themselves, then that feeling is tragically misleading. We can’t know others in any definitive way, any more than we can know the world in a definitive way. Instead, we jump into a relation with them and fill in the gaps as we go.

This task is not easy, especially when we are mindful of an observation I made in the introductory chapter: people—even those on opposite sides of a conflict—tend to see themselves as the good guys. We all think we’re the scrappy rebels from Star Wars, and our adversaries belong to the villainous Empire. So what is the difference between groups who use cultural translation to encourage inclusion and those who use it to oppress? It is their humility, in the form of openness to the possibility they might be wrong. The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four, for instance, makes the a priori assumption that it is right, and it uses force to impose its will. I suspect that the people who use the phrase “fake news” to enclose others in a solipsistic, perspectiveless world do something similar. On the other hand, the judge in Brecht’s poem (about the immigrant who answers “1492” to every question the judge asks) is open to the idea that he might be wrong, or the that system he represents might be wrong. His invention is not reliant on force. Similarly, Petr Pavlenskii does not rely on force. Instead, he invites people to see the world as he does, relying on the strategy of showing them how they are implicated in the system he wants to change.

How do we avoid imposing our will? Over the course of this book, I have described three dimensions of cultural translation, the first two of which are power and meaning. They influence each other: power shapes the way people talk about things, and thus the meaning they attribute to them (or the meaning those things evoke). Power can derive from social structure or from force, and its roots are in the history of interactions and resulting relations between people, in small groups and large. At the same time, meaning influences power. Its roots are related, as they, too, are in the history of interactions between people.

The third dimension is that of creation or invention, which can be playful or serious or both, a way—at least potentially—to turn meaning against power. Everything hinges on this third dimension. Everything hinges on invention. If cultural translation has anything to teach us about communication, it is this: we can open up space for others when we recognize that we ourselves might be wrong. In doing so, we address one of the critiques raised in the introductory chapter: we have taken the necessary first step for finding common ground for negotiating the meaning we make of the world. This recognition leads to a specific strategy for invention, one that can be summed up quite simply: listen first, speak second. Ask first, tell second. In this way, we arrive at an unexpected answer to the question that opens this book.

How do we change people’s minds? By opening ourselves to the possibility that they might change our minds, too.

1 Recall that epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with how we know what we know.

2 Or, if not the world, what we must pragmatically approach as “the world” if we want to avoid falling into the nihilistic solipsism of bad poststructuralism or paranoid internet echo chambers railing against all things “fake.”

3 Note how these axioms evoke something different—a richer set of ideas, I hope—to you now than they did when you read them in the introduction.

4 Sam Rocha calls this approach “folk phenomenology,” or the effort to relate our experience of the world, but without the specialized vocabulary we might develop if studied phenomenology in a formal sense. See Rocha, Folk Phenomenology: Education, Study, and the Human Person.

5 Even when I talk to myself, I imagine myself as if I were someone else, as if I stepped out of my body and am talking to someone else.

6 John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, 10.