Dark Matter of the Mind

by Daniel L. Everett

  It seems clear from these two texts that the perception of the world around us (as we saw earlier in the studies of visual perception among the Pirahãs and Americans)—whether the ability to see snakes under leaves or caimans in water on dark nights, or two-dimensional visual representations, or the simple activities of a rock concert—is not the result of a maturation of the physical perceptual system alone, but also of the content and formation of dark matter, via apperceptions and culturing.

  There is a rich anthropological tradition that looks to stories to find culture. The two stories above, from two major US newspapers, underscore the value of textual study (see Longacre (1976), Grimes (1975), Ochs and Capps (2002), Silverstein (2003), Tedlock and Mannheim (1995), Sherzer (1991), Urban (2000), and many others). In every story we tell or hear, there are built-in, assumed or presupposed values, roles, knowledges, expectations, conventions, indexicals, and so on. We exploit form, content, and culture in every communicational exchange.

  YOU TALK LIKE WHO YOU TALK WITH

  Getting back to the two newspaper reports of Woodstock, they both reflect the oft-repeated principle “You talk like who you talk with.” The philosophers Thomas Kuhn (1996) and Paul Feyerabend (2010) independently (and with different foci) argued that scientific advances are not cumulative. Rather, scientists form groups with their own dialects, based on their satisfaction or not with another group’s way of talking about the world. Journalism offers one of many examples of this phenomenon. Science another. Linguistics and anthropology others. One could take just about any period in linguistic history over the last 150 or so, for example, to illustrate the same points.

  For example, prior to the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, most linguists thought of the study of language as the study of diachronic (historical) variation and change—languages are always in a state of change. Therefore, we must understand previous states of any language under study if we are to understand the present state. Saussure claimed that the structure of a language could be meaningfully and successfully studied at any particular point in time, largely independent of the language’s historical development, and that understanding of this particular synchronic slice of language is independent of that language’s diachronic evolution. Not all linguists accept(ed) Saussure’s synchronic linguistics way of talking. But because many did, he was part of the formation of a new group, the structuralists—those concerned with talking about where language is now, not where it has been or where it is going.

  Later, Chomsky became dissatisfied with the linguistics of his student days, which he later characterized as overly preoccupied with linguistic description, ignoring the important work of theorization. His writings introduced yet another new way of talking, a fresh dialect, forms, and dialogue on language. Some linguists did not enter his dialogue or dialect and thus did not talk with him or like him about language. But for years, Chomsky’s was arguably the dialect of the majority in the field, the standard dialect, what linguistics call the superstrate dialect. Nowadays, however, this former superstrate is becoming the substrate—more and more linguists are talking in a different dialect, with different foci and different values and different forms than Chomsky’s, and that earlier powerful dialect is now becoming less prestigious—certainly less pervasive. More significant is that over the years, several of the dialects of linguistics have grown so far apart that in Kuhn’s terminology they are now incommensurable.

  Another perspective on the difficulty of cross-cultural discussions comes from the article “What Is Philosophy?” by Deleuze and Guattari:

  Philosophers have very little time for discussion. Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say, “Let’s discuss this.” Discussions are fine for roundtable talks, but philosophy throws its numbered dice on another table. The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussable problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy. All of these debaters and communicators are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves when they set empty generalizations against one another. Philosophy has a horror of discussions. (1996, 28–29; emphasis in the original)

  The authors here manage to come very close to the perspective on dark matter–imbued discourse I am advocating here. Another way of putting this is found in McDowell (2013, 465), where he cites Friedman: “Are we not faced, in particular, with the threat that there is not one space of reasons but many different ones—each adapted to its own cultural tradition and each constituency in its own ‘world’?”

  The crucial question that emerges from all of this is how everyday discourse (journalism, scientific discourse, quotidian discourse, or otherwise) is shaped by the dark matter of the background that particular cultures and individuals develop. Dark matter is formed in individuals via participation in speech communities and cultural groups, and it therefore comes to affect what we talk about, what we look at, how we look, how we talk and so on. These are in turn formed, again, by the ubiquitous phrase “You talk like who you talk with.”

  Knowledge is not dark matter per se—not even knowledge that is accessible but not actively shared by all members of community. For example, the Pirahãs have an encyclopedic knowledge of nature, while my own personal knowledge of nature, especially of Amazonian flora and fauna, is very limited. Yet I have Wikipedia and the Pirahãs do not. This knowledge—that I can consult sources of information stored outside my body—is part of my dark matter, though the information so stored is not. But the Pirahãs do not share this dark matter with me. All knowledge to them is inside their or other Pirahãs’ heads—not impersonal sources. Overt knowledge can be found inside and outside our brains, but dark matter is found only within the individual. This holds true of Americans, Pirahãs, French, and all people.

  Business Culture

  Another interesting example of culture, the individual, and emicized dark matter—perhaps closer to everyday life for some, though equally exotic—is the (idea of) cultures of business in the United States. As noted earlier, US corporations often expend energy talking and writing to employees about the “culture” of their particular company. As an example, consider the following from the “big four” accounting firm Ernst and Young:1

  We are already proud of our people culture, and we are committed to doing even more. Our people tell us that our culture of global teaming and our focus on building a better working world make EY a great place to build their careers. . . .

  . . . We are investing in three key elements of our culture that enhance what is important to our clients and our people:

  Inclusiveness—Recruiting outstanding people is just the start. Inclusiveness means making sure all our people’s voices are heard and valued. This not only helps attract and retain the best people, but also it helps get better answers for our clients and our organization.

  Development—Our approach to development involves offering the learning, experiences and coaching all our people need to enrich their careers and deliver the best results for clients, as well as offering additional programs for current and future leaders of our organization.

  Engagement—We want all our people to feel enthused by their work and their colleagues and to be comfortable in an organization that gives them the flexibility to achieve their professional and personal aspirations. We engage our people in countles
s ways, from selecting the right people to lead major change, to taking an interest in our people as individuals, to being sure to say thank you for a job well done.

  The phrase people culture as presented here is a plausible culture. To be a real culture, however, the values stated here would need to be folded into the company’s defining knowledge, structures, and various roles. But is a statement of culture enough to conclude scientifically that a corporation actually has the culture so described?

  Think of other parts of corporate daily life that could also be included in trying to understand the culture, regardless of what they declare in brochures and websites. What are the roles of employees? Who is hired? How are they hired? What tasks and roles are most rewarded (with salaries, bonuses, commissions, stock options, etc.)? What are the relative roles of shareholders vs. stakeholders? What are the company stories in the boardroom, the washroom, parties, and the lunchroom? We cannot understand culture through questionnaires and public pronouncements alone. We must engage in intense participant observation, as in Karen Ho (2009), or in careful analysis of intended results, as in LiPuma and Lee (2004). Businesses use “culture” as an advertising or esprit de corps–building tool, but this doesn’t mean that their advertising is necessarily false nor that the culture is as the companies present it. Other considerations include how people dress; how they talk to one another; what their behavioral norms are; their conventions; how employees are trained/emicized; whether they are international or national only, and so on.

  Business is a fascinating area for intellectual inquiry of all kinds. From the mathematics behind marketing, accountancy, and finance to the cultural theory and sociology of management, product creations, company values, and so on, it is a rich source of social understanding. But business leaders often do not understand the term culture that they so like to use. To see what I mean, consider one example in the news as of late—the attempt to remove hierarchy from the roles in a business, supposedly sharing power throughout the organization, in a “culture-changing” model known as holacracy.2 In this model, managers are eliminated for the most part; the employees are structured around specific jobs, with final say, supposedly, for their part of the job.

  This “culture change” is claimed to be based on the following sharp contrasts between “normal” business and a holacratic business:

  Roles are defined around the work, not people, and are updated regularly.

  People fill several roles (serially or simultaneously).

  Authority is held by teams and roles specific to a particular job, not by a permanent management corps. This means that decisions can be made more quickly and locally, by the team doing a particular job.

  The organizational structure of the organization is regularly revised as each local team self-organizes around a particular job.

  The same rules bind all, including the CEO. Everyone knows and can easily find the rules.

  Does this model actually produce a new culture? Recall that the discovery of values, knowledge structures, and social roles—the core components of culture, in my sense—is at minimum a two-stage process. First, we interview members of a society to get their understanding of these three components. Second, we observe them, as participant-observers, to see in what ways their stated understanding agrees with their practice. In other words, what culture is proclaimed and what is actually implemented?

  In July 17, 2015, the New York Times discussed the implementation of a holacratic model by the company Zappos. But neither that article nor the proponents of holacracy know how to evaluate whether it is indeed a new culture or merely tweaking operational methods or just painting over the same wall. Holacratic change affects roles (superficially, at least, but it does not change the core of a company’s culture, namely, its core values, nor its knowledge structures. Let us say that the primary value of a company is profit. And perhaps another value is hierarchical role structures—everyone should “know their place.” Another value might be fluidity, for some jobs roles will shift. Thus the value ranking for a common company might be:

  PROFIT >> HIERARCHY >> FLUIDITY

  The ranking for a company applying holacracy would be:

  PROFIT >> FLUIDITY >> HIERARCHY3

  Looked at in this way, the “cultural shift” here is relatively minor structurally (though it might have a major impact operationally, of course). So long as the highest-ranked value is PROFIT, companies will look more alike than different. And their shareholders and stakeholders will ultimately evaluate them in very similar ways (how much profit is coming in, what the future of the company is—i.e. will I have a job—based on current profit, etc.). Moreover, the role structures are affected superficially, nowhere as profoundly as claimed. To see this, consider the holacratic model versus the non-holacratic model (figs. 5.1 and 5.2). While the non-holacratic model includes buffers—managers—between the employees and the CEO, the CEO (regardless of what the company brochure might say) is still the CEO and can still change management style or overrule employees. There is definitely a change. And it could have profound benefits for the company. But from the perspective of the theory of culture and dark matter being developed here, the difference is very slight, with the value FLUIDITY allowing in fact relatively little variation.

  Figure 5.1

  Figure 5.2

  This gets us to a more radical pair of alternative rankings that could profoundly affect a company’s culture. For quite a few years one of the central topics of business (especially as folks in business use the word culture) is whether businesses should be focused on serving shareholders or stakeholders. The shareholders are the owners of the equity of a company. The stakeholders are those who engage the company in some way—customers, managers, employees, shareholders, subcontractors, stores dependent on purchases by company employees, the environment, and so on. All shareholders are stakeholders, but not all stakeholders are shareholders.

  Let’s say that you take ten dollars from me and that you tell me that you are going to use this to purchase some candy bars, set up a roadside stand from which to sell them, and then make a profit of 15 percent per candy bar. You and I agree to be partners—I putting up the capital, you the labor. We agree to divide risk and profits fifty-fifty. While you are selling the candy, a young boy offers to clean off your display table and help find customers if you agree to pay him one dollar per day. You agree. Then, at the end of the day, you are so impressed with his work that you give him a free candy bar and an extra fifty cents from our profits. He is happy. You are happy. But am I happy? No way. Technically, you gave away my money without my permission. You stole my money.

  In this little fictional story, the boy who helped is a stakeholder and I am a shareholder. You might respond to my anger with something like “Chill out! Giving away some inventory and being generous is good for business.” I reply, “That is not for you to decide. It is for us to decide together. And what is your evidence that giving away my money is good for business? I think I am going to have to sue you.”

  What has happened? Part of my value ranking is: SHAREHOLDER/PROFIT >> STAKEHOLDER, whereas the corresponding part of your value-ranking would appear to be STAKEHOLDER >> SHAREHOLDER/PROFIT.4 Rankings can produce slight differences or major differences, depending on how high up the hierarchy the particular values sit. In any case, the idea that businesses have cultures is likely correct, based on the understanding of culture developed here, but it is on a much smaller scale than the companies claim for themselves. Given the importance of business and businesses in economically modern societies, to understand their claims and practices regarding values, value rankings, knowledge structures, and social roles is a worthwhile and important undertaking.

  Implicit Knowledge in Texts

  In the texts of the WSJ and NYT, we focused on values implicit in texts accessible via dark matter. Here I want to consider knowledge, as another form of dark matter accessible through texts. Hermeneutics is a key itself, emerging from emicized knowledge. For
example, consider a sample English text such as the following, from the New York Review of Books:

  Federal and local law enforcement agencies have revealed fourteen plots that have either failed or been foiled since September 11, 2001. It would be impossible to quantify the role the NYPD has played in this record. For example, the would-be Times Square bomber of May 2010, who reportedly had ties with the Taliban, was thwarted by a hot dog vendor who spotted smoke from a lit fuse in the parked SUV that held the terrorist’s bomb, and immediately reported it to nearby police. (M. Greenberg 2012)

  Looking very superficially at these lines, merely for illustration here, we see that they are rich with shared dark matter of cultural knowledge. Such knowledge cannot be googled for the most part, but must be learned by life in a particular culture. For example:

  1. Societies can name pre-measured periods of times and record these (calendars).

  2. Calendars are important forms of shared knowledge, allowing members of a society to temporally situate non-current events with relative precision.

  3. Some cultures quantify (keep numerical records of) social practices by various subgroups.

  4. There are people who earn income.

  5. Income can be earned by selling food to people who do not always make their own.

  6. There are nonnatural, processed foods.

  7. There are multiethnic communities.

  8. There are social subgroups that are not family, yet are smaller than the whole society.

  9. There is such a thing as a political organization.