Decolonial Philosophies and Complex Communication as Praxis

Abstract

Coalitional communication is a dwelling amidst non-dominant differences that requires introspective, complex communicative philosophy and practice. My concern is with differentiation in hierarchies. They are understood and shaped by colonial modernity. They are historical logics and practices of settler colonialism, enslavement, and citizenship. My perspective is feminist, decolonial critiques of modern, capitalist social systems. The analysis is grounded in communicative philosophy in intercultural contexts where folks intend justice and equality. For example, in political democracies, localized social alliances actually harm one another being hegemonic by taking routes of familiarity through structures of linguistic and practical cultural systems. Communicative projects of liberation across oppressions (with monologic and single-axis perceptions) tend to miss intersections of our raced and gendered experiences. The result is unintelligibility among us. In this state, one can sense in the body the space of the liminal—with both a communicative impasse and opening. Rather than aligning liberation and domination in the impasse, I describe the creativity of liminal space as a communicative opening. The opening is a recognition of multiplicity and a refusal to assimilate each other’s lived experiences into familiar, complex codes of habituated thought and action. Examining communication hostilities in oppressed–oppressing relations is a necessary condition for coalition. Thus, coalitional communication is a call to engage a full sense of listening to one another as relevant. Ways that decipher codes and signals of resistance come to constitute the project of creating relevant intelligibility together. Praxis as critical, dialectical, and intersectional thinking is part of this method.

1. Introduction

Let’s face it, I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar”, Sapphire” and “Earth Mother, “Aunty”, “Granny”, God’s “Holy Fool”, a “Miss Ebony First”, or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.

—Hortense Spillers [1]

Literally, philosophy can be translated to the love of wisdom. Now, if wisdom requires, at the very least, knowledge, and knowledge involves cultural production, then, wisdom is, in part, culturally produced. If our wisdoms are informed by our episteme, its reason and belief, then philosophy is also a situated phenomenon. Communicatively, philosophies engage cultures in critical dialogue, forming concepts in language toward the project of sharing wisdom. Here, I am concerned with the sharing of wisdom in coalition with others for whom philosophy—its particularities as tied to land, experience, and expression—has historically been devalued in the global conversation. In such conversations, folks are removed, detached, or severed from their familial and cultural heritage by modern colonial expansions. Territorial, economic, and epistemic, the expansions brought about in colonial modernity came with particular hegemonic practices of race and gendered hierarchies of thought and perception in the production of social space [2]. This includes Black, indigenous, and immigrant folks from the global South, the Caribbean, Latin America, Southern Europe, and territories that are not nations but lands, and people provincialized and severed from historical, cultural connections by imposition of particular nation states of the global North. I have the conviction that theory is inseparable from practice in the phenomenology of communication in thinking, knowing, and becoming wise—and wise otherwise. I seek a method that encourages communicative, philosophical dialogue; a communicative decoloniality that is necessarily a critical, intercultural dialogue [3].

Sometimes, in our everyday lives, things are moving so rapidly. Speaking in a post-pandemic context, on many grounds we are seemingly, “forced… to visit a digital transformation faster” [4]. According to McKinsey and company, globally speaking, this digital transformation aged us by an average of seven years [5] [in many cultures, seven is an unlucky number and it is thirteen that is coded as lucky]. They suggest digital, remote interactions are the largest category of development [5]. Concerned with commerce and trade, this transformation is one positioning us toward global citizenship, increasingly so as a financial privilege more than a human right. Yet, with all this quickness in transformation, a united global critique of its many communications is not occurring at the same rate. Nor are competing articulations and expressions of those who might be left out or left behind in the production of its knowledges and wisdoms.

Today, in the seemingly sped up temporality of the global internet and the world wide web, we encounter most representations, both images and linguistics, as productions of nation-states. Historically speaking, these organizations are recent inventions that, in their governance, institute official languages and unofficial representations to demarcate a distinct identity and often with significant effort1. They are not static entities, but sprung from imperial, colonialist organizations that change over time and are influenced by a variety of internal and external forces.

With particular media and advertising space abundant to disseminate images and linguistics touted as ‘progress’ and ‘development’, much representation is driven by the colonial history and dominant teloi of the West [6]. Globally speaking, since the early modern slave trade, the current literature and media we have to understand the modern, colonial gender system are racist and sexist ideologies and their enactments [7]. In philosophy, literature, and the image of colonial Modernity, folks were racialized and gendered since the early slave trade of the transatlantic region to the Americas in 1492. In an article on European colonialist literature, scholar Abdullah JanMohamed describes his findings about colonialist writers writing on the topic of ‘Africa’ for ‘European’ audiences [8]. He suggests that “…since the European audience has no direct contact with the native, imperialist fiction tends to be unconcerned with the truth-value of its representation… it exists outside the dialogic class discourse of European literature” [8] (p. 63). Here, productive communication exists for its capacity to facilitate exchange of information that can proliferate and be commodified. The system governing nationalizing, colonialist fiction includes the nature of its audience. He continues:

Colonialist literature is an exploration and a representation of a world at the boundaries of “civilization”, a world that has not (yet) been domesticated by European signification or codified in detail by its ideology. That world is therefore perceived as uncontrollable, chaotic, unattainable, and ultimately evil. Motivated by the desire to conquer and dominate the imperialist configures the colonial realm as a configuration based on race, language, social customs, cultural values, and modes of production [8] (p. 64).

Where the identities of people are confounded by and made invisible from within the system and its modes of production, there is incoherence. Engaging this hegemonic knowledge and its modes of production, we become embodied connectors of the structures that move in systemic racism and gender violence [9].

Under the guise of diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice, hegemonic representations globally and locally are, themselves, diverse productions of social organizing, co-organizing, and co-opting resistant representations—especially where those resistances gain in force bending, breaking, and transgressing the seemingly fixed structures of meaning. The fact is that there are a multitude of representations, in image and linguistics, designed to encourage a modern thinking alongside current and formerly colonial ways of life and life-ordering of the lifeworld in and across local and global productions and reproductions of people and wealth [2]. In these dominant and hegemonic representations, under the guise of progress and development, difference is recognized, but as a fact for use-value. Difference in this frame is a matter of the cosmopolitan—in the surety of one’s own cultural values and perspectives more than an engagement with alterity.

Faced with an incomprehensible and multifaceted alterity, the European theoretically has the option of responding to the Other in terms of identity or difference. If he assumes that he and the Other are essentially identical, then he would tend to ignore the significant divergences and to judge the Other according to his own cultural values. If on the other hand he assumes that the Other is irremediably different, then he would have little incentive to adopt the viewpoint of that alterity: he would again tend to turn to the security of his own cultural perspective [8] (p. 64).

In this model of engagement, the colonial national does not expand with cultural alterity.

Socially organized from within political, economic, and geographical locations, national and global representations are a process of semiosis embedded in relations of meaning across language, thought, and culture. They are architectural, linguistic, and epistemic webs of representations produced and reproduced from within various hierarchies and dualisms and they accumulate as power moved by people in a structure of historical culture. As structural, they organize the ‘seen’ in perception, recognition, thought, and action. They are dialectical phenomena whereby, as individual people and groups, we avow and ascribe identities in political and cultural locations.

In the “meeting ground of investments and privations” with the “rhetorical wealth” accumulated in the everyday world [1], we are met with strategic efforts at what Salikoko Mufwene calls “social fragmentation” that use language and representation and belief of their superiority to stratify populations into a hierarchal system [10]. In these strategies, identity and divergence are taken as dualistic rather than dialectic. I am interested in thought and action when we are in the stream of power of hegemonic social currents and intersecting locations of identity, and in social spaces where we might experience or inflict horizontal hostilities that result from structures of colonial relations [11]. I am concerned here with the personal injuries we might inflict in our absences of knowledge about each other as a form of “structural violence” [12]. While imbricated phenomenon, structural hostilities are marked differently than the personal, where intent to use or injure might sometimes be easier to decipher [12]. Additionally, I believe if the particular organization and communicative modality of people are not transformed in these meeting grounds that are the everyday lives of people, in representation and interaction, alongside the big digital transformation efforts, then we are appealing to the numbers question in relation to our differences and risk reproducing what Anibal Quijano names the “colonial matrix of power” [13] with exclusivities in our daily relations and tactic coalitions.

My analysis is about coalitional communication, a dwelling amidst non-dominant differences that requires introspective, complex communicative practices and philosophies and resists familiar interpretations, monologic understandings, and single-axis analysis of relations of identity and difference. Speaking to the question of our intelligibility as communicators and how it is we can come to know each other outside of dominant, socially fragmenting systems of meaning and representation that constrain our efforts to be seen, I consider communicators as beings who live in semiosis at the intersections of a multiplicity of confounding identities. In the “afterlife of colonialism”, we communicate our experiences with signs, images, words, and stories that, inasmuch as they are ascriptions of imperialism and colonialism, restrict meaningful expression, making recognition of one another difficult. Rather than looking for recognition from the imperialist/colonialist top-down, I am interested in building amicable space among and within the marked differences. In the “rhetorical treasury”, around the concept ‘woman’ and its multiple markers of alterity, as Spillers identifies, I ask, “To what degree do we partake in this rhetorical treasury?” How do language and culture influence our communicative philosophical efforts with one another where we intend justice and goodness? Unintelligible to one another in spaces of justice, we cannot settle in the experience of a communicative impasse [11].

Following the work of María Lugones, I take up the concept of liminal space where “liminality is both a communicative opening and a communicative impasse” and consider complex communication and coalitional, philosophical conversation to be had [11]. Taking the philosophy of decolonial, complex communication seriously, I move forward in the project of how we decipher resistant codes in coming to a deeper knowledge of ourselves and one another in our solidarity projects. I take an ethical stance as I seek collaboration in the effort to produce new linguistic tools that express creativity and resist privations and investments of our contemporary race and gender systems.

Situated thick in complex and differential environments of coloniality, across different cultures just as much as within a culture, we need intercultural communication in our coalitional effort to communicate and resist our relations of dominance and transgression so that we can come to better understand one another. As long as misrepresentations are maintained in the coloniality of power [13], how can we be seen?

Taking the method of decolonial, complex communication seriously in the liminality of social spaces where folks struggle to find a place and relevance within philosophical discourse and literature, I move forward in the project of deciphering resistant codes through engaged listening and coming to a deeper understanding of ourselves and one another in solidarity and liberation projects.

First, from a critical standpoint, I review the problem with the modern, colonial understanding of communication as strategic. Second, I describe a semiotic understanding of communication while addressing questions of language and culture and encourage a philosophical disposition of pluriversality and deep listening as we engage communicative philosophy. Then, I conclude with the contention that to achieve a coalition, we must question the way in which we form knowledge in the deciphering of each other’s resistant codes and engage the enquentro in depth with an understanding of various elements of communication—listening, thinking, and response—as already relational phenomena [14,15,16,17]. As Emmanuel Levinas writes regarding the face of the other that calls me out, while one can choose the manner and style of response, one does not choose whether response happens. In listening and responding deeply, we engage in relational craft against the grain of the dominant teloi of the West. It is an art to critically cross cultural borders in the immediacy of our lived experiences. As we build together communicative philosophies, we are shifting the geography and body politics of thought and action in the spirit of difference. No more is difference taken on the road as familiar tourism as a sampling—a flight of difference or a curation of popular reels. Difference, rather, is taken as an inherent value where the differential is seen as potentially creative of knowledge, recognition, and is coming to be seen. I engage with decolonial thinking here as an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and phenomenological methodology that figures obscure, confounding space such that tactical strategies of the unintelligible disrupt the historically situated, strategic hierarchies of meaning and value that are materially embedded in our modern and contemporary socio-political practices.

2. Problematic and Thematic

2.1. Part I: Representation in the Strategic Theory of Communication: A Review of the Critique

Engaging the critical theorists of the Frankfurt school, Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Adorno, one can understand how communication might constrain the ability to traverse cultural, political borders just as much as it can empower those emancipatory efforts, effecting a one-dimensional society produced by the powers of elites [18,19]. Jurgen Habermas, critical of communication and debate in the public sphere takes the communicative as an important mode of the coordination of human life as he considers “the establishment” [20]. When the structures of our lifeworld are colonized by power and capital, he suggests, there is a reification of thought and action in the “public sphere” [20] [Habermas’ idea of the particular speech act as a communicative ideal is regulative of the public sphere understood as deliberative]. Critical theorists showed us that epistemologies of communication understood as a science of sending and receiving messages through channels and mechanisms that move in linear, two-way modalities are problematic2, and they suggest that to perceive society in this one-dimensional way hides the social, political, economic, and territorial productions of the elites of particular institutions and establishments [18]. Such critics suggested that the lifeworld is the very site of communicative action and if we leave the representations and assumptions of the status quo at the door as we engage our communicative efforts, they will have more efficacy—at least if we are going for communication as consensus [20]. On these accounts, strategic action is the movement of the organizing elites in the effort to reify our habits of thought and action and must be counterposed to communicative action that is more tactic and creative among the demos as the ‘we’ of a more radical democracy. While the critique is a good one, in as much as the focus of such communication is in large part standard national language, the strategic or instrumental use of language is inextricably linked with an orientation of understanding that produces and reproduces from historical and cultural bodies of knowledge (episteme) as reifications. That is, knowledge and their philosophies produced there are provincial, but purport to be universal truths.

Building a shared understanding and place where we intend to edify each other as we engage various projects, we need a critical understanding of communication as linked phenomenon with epistemology; that is, if we want to know the other and be known, not for use value but for intrinsic value. The modern, colonial strategic understanding of communication as universal, critics contend, is problematic as it hides phenomenon of difference, dampers imagination, and acts in a way that is ‘parasitic’ in the public sphere. The critical school showed us that communicative philosophies are provincial and exchanged between multiple world systems. In this sense, critical theorists begin the study of communication by questioning the very knowledge base from which we perceive one another before we might even meet. They took knowledge as, in large part, a production or social construction and suggest coming to the communicative encounter with conscious, careful analysis and advocate that a serious deconstruction is necessary before we come to understand one another [21,22]. Yet, as critical theorists call for a deconstructionist approach, they do so from within the familiarity of the center and not from the margins of difference. They do not, therefore, easily accommodate our seeing the multiple intersections of difference.

Strategic communication is a thing of information giving by using signs and sign systems of meaning to construct a message coded by a sender to a decoding recipient. In this scheme, communication is unilateral and there is a presupposition of a transparency of understanding and perception. There is the sense as though communication offers us access to a reality already there: knowledge of the object or other in the sense of ‘truth’. Interculturally, it goes across language and sign systems, and nothing will be lost in translation; one can accomplish their goals of acquisition. In the United States, for example, institutions, establishments, and schools of thought regarding communication as a separable field of study began with Western business travelers of the 1950s and 60s. This was a time when global air travel for capital production saw big growth3. Inasmuch as goals for these folk were in forming corporations and maximizing profit across national borders in order to “close the deal”, a particular form and content of communication was devised.

Communication as a strategy of information exchange is effective for commerce, tourism, and some ways of constructing a museum4. Precisely because it does not see a larger frame of context and complexity, there is an insufficient understanding of response modes. Given the other is a tool, use-value, this strategic view leaves minimal room for communication as creative. As a strategy of hegemony, it is familiar to “the many” (heard sense), and it hides differences as it runs under the “powers that be”. This is too weak an understanding of communication for coalition specifically because it is pre-calculated for profit, dense with agenda, and does not easily permit openings in the engagement of communicative space creatively or differently. Its communicative space is not porous, but compact. It rather appreciates if difference does not permeate its structures and the flows of power remain just as they were banked on.

If you take communication in this sense, then difference anywhere along the channel, within the recipient, and around the area’s phenomenon are contents of the experience that may or may not interfere with the sender’s goal. The other is interpreted and perceived in the use-value sense as the sender approaches each person in each encounter already closed to any creativity of the encounter. Furthermore, as the sender moves unilaterally with the message, difference is often conceptualized in terms of disorder, interference, nonsense, and noise. Here, communication is successful if one eliminates noise and profits from the exchange, more so if both parties come to that belief. With this communicative framework, it is easy to reproduce and reinforce structures of power fixed in the modern, colonial bourgeoisie public. This is not a model of communication sufficient for communicative openings across differential experiences amidst unintended hierarchies of the familiar.

As we take up familiar systems of representation and knowledge in our communicative philosophies and enact them in our everyday lives, when there is an unintelligible difference in the immediacy of our engagements, we are often stumped. There is a sense of gridlock, as we often perceive a barrier in the presence of different logic and meanings than what are familiar to us. Sometimes we are too quick to point to ‘the weird’ as we recognize difference and dismiss its creative capacity in learning the ‘why’ of differential behavior and perceptions of behavior. Additionally, we often see things such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, race, culture, or disability as the point of communicative failure, rather than as a perceptual lens for interpretation.

While many persons dwell in the dominant, normative structures with minimal resistance, if one has experiences that yield a different, non-normative sense of things, one’s logic may or may not be perceived and recognized as valid or sound5. In the communicative relation, we misrepresent each other in the immediate experience as our reception of data in a structured world is always already a perception, a response, and from an intentionality [14,17,24]. Sometimes, in the communicative relation of difference from the status quo, or lost in confusion there, a dominant and familiar world of sense becomes a normative law for action even where it does not fit.

It this frame, one is necessarily in a resistant location inasmuch as a representation stands as a misrepresentation. A misrepresentation easily yields a misrecognition; not being ‘seen’ in the communicative relation and missed in each other’s worlds of sense. Difference can be understood as a resistant force to the familiar, positively, en la differánce, or otherwise than being [14,21]. This is not noise and not yet feedback in its response, and it need not be the point of communicative failure, the reaching of a relational abyss in the absence of reasonable meaning.

In “Individual Autonomy and Social Structure”, intercultural anthropologist Dorothy Lee illustrates the notion that difference can be understood as resistant to the status quo but as a way for communicative openings, rather than acceptance of communicative closures [25]. Underscoring the importance of difference, introspection, and awareness of perceptions of behaviors in recognition of alterity in her study, she finds that both behaviors and perception of behaviors are culturally informed phenomena. She illustrates how behaviors and perceptions of behaviors are culturally moved by belief.

Lee acknowledges that differences in behavior and the perception of those differences are often cultural in relation to an individual/group dialectic. Writing about one of her student’s analyses regarding notions of “familial care”, she retells the student’s story of their experience encountering a Native American mother and baby. The student noticed the child’s hair was long, uncut, and hanging past the child’s eyes, almost to the point of discomfort. There was no immediate understanding for the student of the behaviors as different from what she was used to in the immediacy of the intercultural relation. Coming to understanding in solitude, the student would have concluded, this is a parent who did not prioritize time to cut their child’s hair. Upon further observation and through intercultural dialogue beyond language and familiar codifications of meaning, she learned it was not the case that there is a lack of familial care. Rather, there was a difference in culture concerning what is ‘care’. For the mother, to cut the child’s hair without the child being of age to ask for the cut is understood as violation of the development of the individuality of the child in relation to the group. Within a different system of meaning, in the immediacy of the student’s experience, there was confusion, and her first interpretation was a miss. Without study, her tools in the immediate encounter enabled only the perception of behaviors unintelligible as care. From this, Lee concludes:

When I study other cultures, I find a different codification, I get a different glimpse of reality, from a different starting point. I find other, equally self-consistent systems of symbolization, with diametrically opposed principles of validation of experience. Thus I am enabled to some extent to go beyond my own finite view; I am enabled to see my culture as one of many possible systems of relating the self to the universe, and to question tenants and axioms of which I had never before been aware [25] (p. 2).

In the misperception, misrecognition of the other as an uncaring parent, the anthropology student was met with resistance. Rather than a quick and easy perception of cultural difference as simply weird or ‘wrong,’ assimilating the mother into familiar structures of representation and recognition, she goes for interaction, consideration, and suspension of judgement and begins to form an understanding and new knowledge (epistemé) about the actions of the parent in mediated coalition. Making sense of another’s actions as perceived and lived by the other means to look for cultural explanations across philosophies that would otherwise seem to be natural perception—an inherent, organic aspect of one’s personality. Lee writes:

These instances exemplify a belief so deep that it apparently permeates behavior and decisions, and operates without question or reflection or conscious plan. It is a belief so internalized as to be regarded as almost an organic ingredient of the personality. The individual, shown absolute respect from birth and valued as sheer being for his own uniqueness, apparently learns with every experience to have this same respect and value for others; he is “trained” to be constantly sensitive to the beginnings of others [25] (p. 7).

The strategic model of communication is monologic and restricting, and is a hinderance to our broadening of perceptions. It is not sensitive to the other’s beginnings and prevents the creativity of a communicative opening of something new to come about in difference. To be sure, it recognizes the fact of difference, but difference as noise, an obstacle to a mission or agenda. There is a fault here in observation and the way in which we perceive when our differences of culture are seen as an interference, a barrier, and a result of an ethnicity, gender, sex, race, or bodily ability rank, ordered and seemingly fixed with meaning. Paradoxically, we see culture as barriers for intercultural communication when we are abiding by the dominant, strategic model.

In the rush of the contemporary and hegemonic superficiality of the cosmopolitan, communication is conjoined in the figuring of our perceptual lens of interpretation as both from within a culture and politics. Here, I take philosopher and literary writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o on culture as a lived, total phenomenon. He writes:

Culture, in its broadest sense, is a way of life, fashioned by a people in their collective endeavor to live and come to terms with their total environment. It is a sum of their art, their science and all their social institutions, including their system of beliefs and rituals. In the course of their creative struggle and progress through history, there evolves a body of material and spiritual values which endow that society with a unique ethos. Such values are often expressed through the peoples song, dances, folklore, drawing, sculpture, rites, and ceremonies. Over the years these varieties of artistic activity have come to symbolize the meaning of the word culture [26] (p. 4).

This notion of culture is similar to what anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in his research on culture and ‘the gift’, referred to as a “total social fact” [27], and to what Anibal Quijano considered a “practical totality” in his criticism of the “reductionist vision of reality” in modern colonial epistemologies [28]6. In culture, to the degree that language “is a both a tool for communication and a carrier of culture”, as Thiong’o writes, then language, its grammar, logics, and rhetoric, shapes our perception of reality and our living of life. As cultural phenomenon, we often see language as only a communicative tool or its barrier, even from within the same linguistic system. Sometimes, folks from the same language system cannot understand each other and resort to screaming and fighting. On the other hand, folks from two different languages might well take the time to understand one another. Some folks even “fall in love” and build a language together from their two tongues, as with exogamous cultures (i.e., the Amurdak) or folks who marry across national boundaries and territories linguistically marked (i.e., a German and Russian, or the Palestinian couple in the Gaza strip)7. So, it is neither language nor culture inherently that is the barrier to communication. While language cannot do without communication culturally, the communicative certainly carries on without language.

More than a science of strategy, communication is an art of connection. Moreover, to the degree that we use concepts and expression to build understanding and consensus from within a language and sign system, it is an act of cultural production and reproduction [31]. As we engage a philosophy of forming new concepts so to meet with one another in our understanding and recognition, we carry the complexities of historical culture into the communicative project.

Cautioning against binary understandings of difference where one is devalued in relation to the other in a representation of hierarchies, theorists of difference [8,11,15,16,17,21,32] suggest an awareness of the differential as a simultaneous, multiple, and overlapping dynamic of dialectics. They ask us to see divergence and differential phenomena beyond binaries of modern, colonial dualisms such as public/private, man/woman, or black/white.

2.2. Part II: Communication as Semiosis: Thought, Perception, and Action

As this article aims to highlight the ethical challenges faced by theorists and practitioners of anti-racist, decolonial, indigenizing, and Creolizing solidarity projects, it considers socio-political structures as moved by people from locations of identity made invisible in our everyday, embodied relations amidst intersections, overlaps, and multiplicities. This is a tactic communication aware of intersections, overlaps, and multiplicities. In a system of binary understandings of humanity, philosophies and communicative relations are experienced as problematic when you occupy both locations of a binary, such as black/white, feminine/masculine, this nation/that nation, able bodied/with disability, or when you occupy none in their purest sense8. Being seen is a type of recognition that requires complex communication in research projects, pedagogical endeavors, and in regular past times when the binary is hierarchized and one’s location is devalued.

Knowledge and perception about our relationship with others are not fixed truths, they are hypotheses assembled and deciphered through signs, symbols, gestures, and other units of communiqué. They form in particular systems that represent phenomena and objects and portray meanings that are then accepted by society in consensus and understood when communicating to one another in universal or semi-universal language systems.

Signs and symbols are historically embedded in cultural traditions, and most linguistic systems are fairly stable and resistant to immediate change [33]. We see this most especially in written form where the shared traditions and rules that govern and control language seem relatively unchanging over time—passed down from the previous generation. As semiotic philosopher and linguist Ferdinand de Saussure writes:

No matter what period we choose or how far back we go, language always appears as a heritage of the preceding period. We might conceive of an act by which, at a given moment, names were assigned to things and a contract was formed between concepts and sound images; but such an act has never been recorded. The notion that things might have happened like that was prompted by our acute awareness of the arbitrary nature of the sign. No society, in fact, knows or has ever known language other than as a [cultural] product inherited from preceding generations, and one to be accepted as such [34] (p. 71).

As a cultural process of semiosis, communication is a perceptual engagement with signs, sign systems, and their meanings in our building of knowledge as an interpretation of the world’s phenomena. As semiotic, it means that neither knowledge about our relations nor our understandings of them are absolute9. Meanings are not given by divine deity or magic. Rather, they are produced and mediate our human consciousness. So, while a sense of heritage might in one regard provide a basis for communication within a community, it may also promote discommunity.

As semiotic, communication is an ongoing process of interpretation and sense making involving both the immediate and mediate consciousness understood dialectically. In relation to the immediate consciousness of experience, there is a dynamic disposition, what phenomenologists understand as intentionality, that is not yet a historicization or solidified interpretation, and it is in the absence of knowledge where there is ambiguity [35,36]. In moments of ambiguity, good or bad, one does not ‘know’, and therefore must act on belief or take a “leap of faith” amidst the unknown; absurdity [37].

As semiotic, communication involves thought as relational and active in the forming of belief. Not the isolated thought (cogito) of self-extant, Cartesian origin points; rather, as Charles Sanders Peirce writes in “How to Make our Ideas Clear”:

When I just said that thought is an action in that it consists in a relation, although a person performs and action but not a relation, which can only be the result of an action, yet there was no inconsistency in what I said, but only a grammatical vagueness. From all these sophisms we shall be perfectly safe so long as we reflect that the whole function of thought is to produce habits of action; and that whatever there is connected with a thought, but irrelevant to its purpose, is an accretion to it, but no part of it… Thus, we come down to what is tangible and conceivably practical, as the root of every real distinction of thought, no matter how subtile it may be; and there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice [23] (Ch. 3, p. 30).

Thought is already a practical, communicative engagement as it is both active and relational. Where we are not met in the social, across communicative philosophies and relations therein, we approach our dwelling in the familiar and our belief without doubt, and stuck in the familiarity or fixation of belief, we do not share in thinking.

In the immediacy of our experience of the unintelligible, doubt is generated. We have no knowledge and experience difficulty, questioning the formed beliefs upon which we act—whether they are on good grounds rather than not so good. We experience doubt as characterized from within, “uneasy and dissatisfied states from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the states of belief. […] The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our actions” [23] (p. 9–10). Doubt is a cognitive, communicative phenomenon experienced in the liminality of social spaces as an “irritation” or motive in the struggle to attain a state of belief—to “engage in inquiry” [23]. In these spaces—the unknown—the doubt of belief—one comes to understand that, “what is to be believed at last is independent of what has been believed hitherto” [23] (p. 130). There is not enough evidence for belief in standard logics that form the structure of the status quo when we experience a kind of ‘void’ in consensual meaning, where there is a break in communication, and where we might injure one another when we do not see the bridge that is her back10.

To be sure, perception of difference is not a void of belief. The existing, problematically fixated thinking is, in part, culprit in the perception of difference as either ‘not true’ or not of value; null. The ‘void’ is not empty. All space is relational and full of meaning—whether or not a particular perceiving, thinking, believing and acting being can decipher the infinity of meanings and goings on there. Even if a void were perceived as empty—as in a void space between me (as known) and alterity (as totally unknown; as total otherness) and one believes is that the space between them is impossible to traverse—it cannot possibly be “experienced” as empty because they are in fact relationally construed from the moment of being called into existence (as meaningful). It is problematic when one comes to a relation with pre-formed beliefs and ideological visions that inform perception, interpretation and serve as motive for action. Presuppositions, among other things, function as connectors to the system. As habituated, sedimented, the machinations of dominant culture make it difficult to encounter each other. There is a misunderstanding of the other where at the perceptual moment one does not connect as a result of misinterpretation because one is fixed in the refusal to re-think.

Voids are not the containers of spaces waiting to be discovered, invented. Rather, are active and changing phenomenon. They are rich with the ambiguities and tensions in liminality. As liminal, their spaces, in general, are marked by transgression. Not necessarily chosen, but from the structure one is fixed there or escapes into there in recognition. They are not empty but active with semiosis even as a semiotic transparence is not immediately possible. They are experienced as unknown against the more impermeable rock of the dominant structures of logics within the system. In dominant systems of the social, there is felt a compacted mass and moving alternatively to their structures and logics is felt as oppressive—the solidity of identity being oppressed in the liminality of space. In terms of porosity and permeability, it is hard to move within such a strategically designed system. When one is removed from generational knowledge systems, heritage and culture that are more organic, necessary for resistance and revolution, the strength of identity is denigrated11. As Thiong’o asks when French and British colonizers wrote African literature from colonial languages and perspectives, “What were they doing to the children12?”

From the perception of dominant logics, voids are invisible as objects in themselves13. Rather, they appear as eerie, monstrous, forlorn, spaces of emptiness that are inherently unintelligible. In this frame, communicative acts from differential perceptions are interpreted as non-sense, without logic or reason. Between the structures and their logics there is not an absence of sensory data but of understanding. As we take up the data into a schema of thought, data we are aware of and data we are not aware of, we become connecters to various systems and histories just as much as resistors. We take belief, active and relational, as a base for behavior and move our will into action.

Communication concerns openings and closures in social spaces. Comfortable embodied openings are with stipulative logics and tactics of meaning equally valued. Yet, where thinking is closed, beliefs fixed, dominant logics are hardenings of a bourgeois public and often with bad ambiguity. Here, the void as limen is experienced as “power in its dominating face” [9] On the underside of power is minimal ease of movement. Rather thought structures and their perceptions appear as fixed; closed. One has minimal backing; such as a stipulative word left out of the lexicon where other words have their written rules for meaning and interpretation and it would take a committee of folks over a period of time to institute a change—its identity, or word story, solidified.

The openings and closures that happen among logics and liminal spaces are not a phenomenon of opposition, but relational. As structures of meaning and liminality, they guide movement of the those passing through. Where there is unintelligibility, it should not signify an impossibility of inter-cultural dialogue or else be dismissed as irrelevance to understanding [40]. Communicative openings involve understanding what is being said just as much as they require that one, as Ofelia Schutte writes, “must relate what is being said to a complex set of signifiers, denoting or somehow pointing to what remains unsaid. It is because of this very important (open-ended) dialectic between the said and the unsaid that the principle of incommensurability in cross-cultural communication assumes considerable importance” [40] (pp. 55–56). Yet, as various logics inform our perception, they can fix our perceptions of others, generating constraints on our communication. We do not hear the unsaid. With adequate porosity and a coalition of the limen, passings might be so that they create enough force and the dominant logics give way to new permeations. Logics are then transformed, shifted, bumped down or out of the larger system—but, sometimes, they are still standing strong.

A liminal void is not a space folks want to be in because it is a problematic space of invisibility and unintelligibility; often with violent consequence. One is not here willy-nilly. It can be quite lonely in the limen. The meaning structures do not offer support, resistance there looks like rebellion, and we are faced with a communicative impasse. By looking at the self as resistant in isolation, one sees resistance from the perspective of the status quo—where one sees rebellion. It is not a simple matter of the self and the void; the self and an absence of logic or reason—the self who is engaging in rebellion as psychosis (a malfunctioning in collective reason in the madness of pure solitude [37]). Rather it is the self being creative, the aesthetic in care of the collective, or communicative openings that enable possibilities of being seen in the void—of coming into sense with another. One is meeting with presence in the void—the meeting itself is not sufficient for a communicative opening, but a start.

Communicative openings in systems of oppression are not automatic. So, I want to begin by understanding the opening in two primary ways: first, as phenomena involving the self as resistant and, second, involving the other as resistant and their recognition [11]. Seeing each other as going against the grain is a step in the project of enabling or movement or the ease of movement by creating enclaves of meaning and belief that make sense in one’s lived experience. It is to assert in community oneself (family, heritage, culture, location, etc.) as authentic and to recognize one is always already moving against the grain as it is set up in the very structures of normativity and difference where they are understood as binary, oppositional, and hierarchical. In order to come out of the limen into visibility with an other(s), the historicity that leads us to the spatiality of the encounter is critical. It is important, then, that we engage learning and listening in critical intercultural dialogue with others [3] as we develop new concepts to better communicate. No one arrives to a communicative event with the exact same experience or understandings of their experience [41]. In a system marked by oppression, then, it is already an ethical, philosophical act to dwell in communicative openings with others also moving against the grain of the system.

2.3. Part III: Complex Communication: Intersectionality and Liminal Recognition

It was two decades ago María Lugones wrote, “I do not see enough theorists, activists, and popular educators devoted to this question of barriers to coalition, in particular, the communicative side of the issue” [42] (p. 76).

Speaking to the question of our intelligibility to each other as communicators and how it is we can come to understand each other and our experiences outside of dominant systems, in this section I articulate Lugones’ concept of liminal space as intersectional space and describe a notion of complex communication and the conversations to be had among folks who are, as she writes, “always in need of legitimation” [42] (p. 152). In so doing, I describe three characteristics of complex communication: a recognition of multiplicity in the production of intelligibilities, refusal to assimilate others into the familiar, and rejection of epistemic transparency.

If one takes cues for action from epistemic structures that form from dominant categories of meaning, then individual perception is often aligned there. One is legitimized as one is backed by particular power systems of the status quo. As legitimate, signs and codifications, thinking and behaving are enacted in the body in socio political orders and spaces with ease. In ease there is the perception of naturally or divinely ordered progression and, in this mode, one perceives oneself as context free, unshakable, and certain. Anyone “subject to the hazards of perception in a racist and sexist society are hardly a context-free-solid”, and, as Lugones writes, “I wonder whether context-free-solidity doesn’t come together with a willingness to lord one’s culture over others” [42] (p. 153).

On the topic of context and individual and social dialectics, born into die Lebenswelt of coloniality’s underside or else foreign to the socio-cultural, national systems in ways that are historically or immediately devalued, one comes against them as observed and misread, out of context, missing the marks of solid identity14. In his articulation of the crisis of modern, European sciences and “mathematicization” of the lifeworld, Edmond Husserl illustrates how with its method, we are often unable to see the complexity of lived phenomena [43]. For example, critical of Galileo’s physics as regards ‘progress’ in the face of the infinite in relation to knowledge, Husserl writes that knowledge is oriented in practical life as it is based on predicting occurrences (induction) in experience:

We can say that all life experience is based on foresight, in the sense of induction. In the most basic way, the certainty of being induces (orients) every simple experience. Things ‘seen’ are already more than what we ‘really and actually’ perceive them to be. Essentially, seeing, recognition is the self-having/Selbsthaben that is one with [the experience of] intending before something (Vor-haben), intentionality (Vor-meinen). All Praxis with its projects implicate inductions, except that the ordinary, explicitly formulated and ‘proven,’ validated inductive recognitions (the foresights) are ‘artless,’ juxtaposed to the artful ‘methodical’ ones, in the method of Galilean physics, in its ability to achieve into the infinite (the unknown) [43] (p. 51)15.

Designed for the purpose of progress, ad infinitum, Modern mathematical science, Husserl argues, measures the lifeworld (die Lebenswelt) and dresses it up as objective knowledge, as the actual and true nature of the living environment as though without intentionality [43]. In this context, taking for ‘true’ what is actually a method designed for particular purposes of progress in our predictions, one is stiff between structures of communication, and movement within the environment is difficult and treacherous. It is as if one is out of context within a context, “walking illegitimately” [44].

Yet, in this space, exactly because it is invisible to dominant systems, there is possibility for visibility. Walking illegitimately has resistant purpose. [44] That is, the collaboration with others toward legitimacy and authenticity in making meaning with others also marginalized in this communicative context. Interested in this possibility, Sarah Hoagland questions how we animate or resist animation of dominant logics and how we might:

…come to see each other through difference and negotiate various means of engaging, how we build complex connections, at least in significant measures, away from dominant framings, …enact our relationality and develop community. Do we walk legitimately, finding each other along state-sanctioned discourses and structures, reading each other through dominant interpellations even while chanting inclusivity? Or will we travel illegitimately? And what facilitates this? [44] (p. 255).

With the asymmetry of our relations, only in connection with another dwelling otherwise than being we find the possibility for creative, communicative openings [14]. As we turn away from the face of power and respond differently to the face of the other, we encounter each other. In larger rings of solidarity and cultural specificities, we do well to remember the extent to which we are intersectionally situated and our “liminality is both a communicative opening and a communicative impasse” [7] (p. 78).

Liminal space is one that exists with openings and barriers to communicative philosophy as an outcome of relations troubled by dominant knowledge, perception, and structures of reality. It is a space contextualized and unknown in relation to dominant meaning systems and the manufacturing of borders and in-betweens of identity. Within the limen, one moves with resistant sense against the layers of “social stratification” levied by the dualism of the European Renaissance16. As our unintelligibility to each other in the unknown and unfamiliar as an ongoing phenomenon of difference, resistance is connected to the impasse.

That strategic communication, as a monologic understanding of things, created a sense of instability is enduringly and systematically shown to us in the writings and artistic expressions by women of color as women made invisible from within the narrower senses of identity. From this work we learn that with an intersectional understanding of our cultural and social situatedness we have a stronger sense of the reality of things.

In relation to communicative philosophies, this exploration of coalitional communication begins with the belief that the other is ‘real’ as in Humberto Maturana’s sense of ‘something other’ than dominant representations [45]. This communicative framework presupposes that to move in resistance in coalition, rather than in isolation, requires a broader understanding of our own situations. That is, it requires a knowledge of and coalition with and among not just our ‘own people’, but people differently oppressed [7].

To forward a communicative praxis grounded on recognition of each other as real and as occupying liminal sites in our realness across a host of differences is to reject the totalizing either/or, figment or foreigner. To reject, for instance, the idea that “Women are from Venus and Men are From Mars” [46] as an excuse to never understand what the other is going through or how they feel, to never be able to understand the other’s location or historicity as if the other were totally foreign. Among and across groups, “by understanding ourselves so narrowly, we are in collusion with the dominant logic of conquer and divide and succumb to the logic of fragmentation” [42] (p. 154). Sometimes it is the structures of domination that make our finding the time difficult where we are compacted in oppressive, overlapping systems of a modern and contemporary bourgeois public—our roles as caretakers and service workers preventing the fullness of living, temporally speaking. The logic of fragmentation is a problem.

Coalition here is a tactic to prevent social fragmentation. It is coalition understood not as a new conglomeration of power players, rather, in a sense that sees “deeply into the social”17 and recognizes the intersection of oppressing forces as of real intelligence and critical for epistemology. Coalitional conversations, “sing of potencia not poder—‘power with, not power over’—to anchor us in feminist ideas and actions as we navigate overlapping crises…”18. In coalitional conversations, from the liminal space of intersectionality, one moves outward to other affiliative groups also understood to be resisting. The move outward is marked by a communicative opening as a moment of recognition.; a being seen.

For example, when critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote her piece on intersections and the framework of invisibility at work in the United States legal system theoretically and practically speaking, she created a communicative opening for legal scholars, practitioners, and researchers [47]. Crenshaw’s critique of the single-axis model of interpretation and perception of people in relation to race and gender identity before the United States Court system, for example, describes a phenomenology of intersectionality and articulates a liminal space, as a space of invisibility, from within existing contemporary frameworks of anti-racist policies and engagements that intend justice but often work against our own attempts to see one another. In so doing, she addresses women’s movements that seek justice in matters of all forms of sexual discrimination and anti-racist movements that seek justice in matters of all forms of racial discrimination. These are horizontal relations inasmuch as power is moving laterally overall and not a vertical relation of power as for instance an individual or small group before the national Court. In either relation, horizontal or top-down, Crenshaw urges a rethinking as she understands thought as relational and active phenomenon:

I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating “women’s experience” or “the Black experience” into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast [47] (p. 140).

Crenshaw argues here against the established analytical structure and the single axis method of interpretation that often forms the structural basis of judicial court communication. As the court intends justice, broadly construed, a reliance on a single axis framework for analysis and judgement, in effect, undermines social justice. Addressing social identities and justice in the workplace, Crenshaw shares her examination of the lived experiences of Black women in the workforce of private companies in the United States. Each case is particular in her examination, but what they have in common is that each involve the courts operating on a single, categorical analysis as regards the social identities of race and gender in the workplace. As Crenshaw argues, thinking and judging from within a single axis framework, one is erased in the conceptualization, identification, and remediation of social discrimination.

In particular, her analysis of DeGraffenreid v. General Motors a seniority-based workplace system, five women in the United States filed a gender discrimination charge against General Motors alleging that the company’s seniority system was discriminating against Black women. Even while they presented significant evidence that the majority of people laid off from the company were Black women, and that General Motors had a past history of this discrimination, the company’s legal representatives argued strategically that while the company did not hire any black women prior to 1964, they did, in fact, hire women. The court, thus, ruled that there was no gender-based discrimination and their case was dismissed. It was true, the company had not failed to hire “women workers”, even while none of the women hired were black. Using white women as their historical base for judgement, led the court to the concealment of the particular gender discrimination each of the plaintiffs were experiencing as black women. After dismissal of the case, the plaintiffs might think to refile the claim on the grounds of racial discrimination, but it was shown that the company also did not fail to hire “black workers” prior to the period in question, even while none of the Blacks were women.

Crenshaw illustrates how the court would not recognize the particular intersectionality of discrimination faced by Black women as the language of the law is structured by strategically contending that a separate analyses for race and gender is the precedence for justice. She writes, “Discrimination against a white female [was] the standard sex discrimination claim; claims that diverge from this standard appear to be some sort of hybrid claim” [47] (p. 145). As the claim of unfair hiring practices came to the court, the adjudication revealed how the court’s narrow view of discrimination as based on a single category of analysis is problematic. On the grounds of gender discrimination, the court centered white women’s experiences with the company. In doing so, it sidelined the challenges faced by the women bringing the claim as both women and Black—inseparably, phenomenologically so. In the anti-discrimination doctrine and policies meant to protect, we see an inability or failure to deliver justice from an institution designated to offer justice.

One of the limitations of anti-discrimination law’s remedial scope and normative vision is the refusal to allow a multiply-disadvantaged class to represent others who may be singularly-disadvantaged19. Crenshaw explains that, “Judicial decisions which premise intersectional relief on a showing that Black women are specifically recognized as a class are analogous to a doctor’s decision at the scene of an accident to treat an accident victim only if the injury is recognized by medical insurance” [47] (p. 149). This analogy underscores the difficulty of an explicit recognition of ‘Black-women’ as, in the eyes of the law, a distinct class before providing relief or justice remedies to other Blacks or other women.

Crenshaw’s argument against the single axis method evidenced in the U.S. Court System highlights the conceptual erasure of the lived experience of Black women at the intersection of dominant identity categories of both race (black) and gender (women). Taken as separate, single categories independent from each other, the women’s experiences were not seen. Socially, legally constituted in such a fashion from within a space of invisibility and erasure, they were positioned in liminality—unintelligible to others in the system and sometimes to themselves. To be sure, this is theoretical erasure. That is, the erasure is only from within the dominant discourse and epistemological frame of reference and meaning. From the epistemological frame of the established analytic structure and their systems of meaning, one is not recognized. Relying on a single-axis model fails to capture the complexity of experience and effectively erases folks from the dominant discourse. In focusing on a single dimension for strategy, one overlooks the richness of identity as multiple, simultaneous, and intersecting and reinforces our tendency “to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience” [47] (p. 139).

As monologic in a phenomenal lifeworld, the single axis, strategic model and method of communication measures and reproduces structures of knowledge that do not accommodate the hidden and cannot make sense of the unintelligible. Crenshaw calls for us to “look beneath the prevailing conceptions of discrimination and to challenge the complacency that accompanies belief in the effectiveness of this framework… [and] develop language which is critical of the dominant view and which provides some basis for unifying activity. [Where] The goal of this activity should be to facilitate the inclusion of marginalized groups for whom it can be said: When they enter, we all enter” [47] (p. 167).

In the space made unintelligible from within dominant knowledge structures, whether one is being there alone or with others, there is no communicative transparency as constitutive of the space. Not only from the system are we unintelligible, but also from each other in resistance to that constitution of the self. In the effort to self-constitute and become intelligible to each other we leave the liminal space experienced as eerie or monstrous in order to create new concepts, meanings and constitutions.

We create language in a community of experience. And, there are many variations of language in relation to individual and national identities and their overlapping meaning systems. In creating new terms as we speak, we embody a linguistic system and we engage this in community with others. Highlighting the relationship between language, culture, community membership, and personal identity within the variety of dialects and meanings present in “languaging” that can be repetitive or creative, Gloria Anzaldúa considers the use of decolonial, rhetorical techniques such as “code-switching” in her discussion of Chicano Spanish. She looks past the strategic, monologic communicators who criticize these resistant codes as “watered down” variations of the Standard and describe her use of Chicano Spanish as a “mutilation of Spanish” [16] (p. 79).

Code-switching as that which disrupts the normative tradition is not a new phenomenon of resistance. It existed across cultures historically. In his examination of modernity and the Renaissance philosophy of language, Walter Mignolo explains that in the premodern, classical tradition of ancient Greece, there was more value given to rhetoric and the spoken word. With colonial Modernity and the Renaissance project, however, this comes to change along with the construction of early modern states and nation-states. In this revolution but towards the building of the empire, for kingdom and crown, the spoken word was devalued as primacy was given to the written word and writing grammars. As a technology, this was a political tool that transformed the dynamics of communication in and across cultures globally [15]. We know the hierarchy of order from within this framework is that the Spanish men of letters were working with two presuppositions: a belief in the superiority of alphabetic writing and a belief that culture lacking alphabetic writing systems means lacking enlightenment, reason, and history.

Mignolo illustrates two senses of resistance during colonization of the Americas by Spain. During the Renaissance project, as the men of letters labored to write grammars of Amerindian languages and histories of Amerindian memories (the narratives in letter, books, and truth), there was actively resisting communities that would see creation of Amerindian resistance as successful, at least, with disruption and a discontinuity of the classical tradition. Concerned about the Spanish colonization of American Indian languages in the Americas and its outcome on culture, memory, and history, Mignolo does not suggest that, interculturally, the outcome was a unilateral one, illustrating the limits of any attempt to universalize language, culture and memory. More semiotically, it was one that was actively resisted and shaped from both sides. American Indian folks and Spanish men of letters as they engaged the work with real interpreters and translators in face to face relationships on a land and over some time, changed and influenced one another.

As with many colonial and post-colonial histories, in the particular modern, colonial history of the Americas, there was not a simple replacement of one language system by another. In his account of the phenomena, Mignolo is “Interested… in the discontinuity of the classical tradition (implied in the spread of Western literacy) [as] manifested in numerous and varied acts of resistance” [15] (p. 303). Mignolo shows how Amerindian resistant and creative uses of the colonial language to their benefit, transformed the colonial language itself. What results from resistance to formal rules of grammar and interpreted meanings by way of code switching includes the cultural traditions and ways of thinking of the Amerindian. Evident when the Spanish men of letters appropriated a spoken word or two of the Amerindian into their use of Spanish (i.e., although this is in relation to British colonialism and American English more so than American Spanish: moose, squash, succotash, etc.).

In intercultural communication, at the level of people to people differently than person to person, cultures and their languages are transformed by the multi-or pluricultural engagements they experience. There is no total replacement of one culture by another; one person by another. Rather both take each other up even amidst imbalances of power that systematize and perform erasures of cultural memory and histories and their resistances. Amidst these histories, “histories of blood” as Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls it [39], a violence is already being resisted; one arrives with a resisting disposition to the encounter but also with a little bit of the other in them.

In relation to intercultural communicative histories, Anzaldúa’s nos/otras is helpful here to counter the idea of one culture imposing itself on another into a totality. Rather, she draws the analogy that we have our hands in each other’s pockets:

So it goes both ways; it is more an exchange between both sides. I have a term that is called nos-otras, and I put a dash between the nos and the otras. The nos is the subject “we”, that is the people who were in power and colonized others. The otras is the “other”, the colonized group. Then there is also the dash, the divide between us. However, what is happening, after years of colonization, is that all the divides disappear a little bit because the colonizer, in his or her interaction with the colonized, takes on a lot of their attributes. And, of course, the person who is colonizing leaks into our stuff. So we are neither one nor the other; we are really both. There is not a pure other, there is not a pure subject and not a pure object. We are implicated in each other’s lives [16] (p. 243).

Anzaldúa’s rejection of dichotomy in favor of dialectics underscores her understanding of the borderland as a liminal space. In its conceptual sense, the limen is the rejection of dichotomizing–the abject matter of the system not so easily measured by modern science20. Here, in the liminality of the border, one occupies a split as historicity and culture and resists the dichotomy of subject/object present in a system where oneself is objectified in representation. It is important to Anzaldúa as one is communicating oneself, it is a performance of creations and recreations in liminal space.

From the modern to the contemporary nation states of today, the colonization of language is always, simultaneously decolonization, as the standard language is always the unwanted object of subversiveness. Especially in the spoken sense, language, in word and story, is as a vehicle for communication of culture, its tradition and transformations, and it is a tool for communicative philosophies and decolonization in the coloniality of the contemporary, everyday world. In the thought of the Pueblo as a theory of language, so well described by Leslie Marmon Silko [48], interculturally speaking, words as stories still applies. The “emergent quality of storytelling in languages that are spoken” means those modes are more easily recognized as “alive” and “connected to place” [47] (p. 58). In this understanding, each individual has creativity in interpretation and transformation of the story. In the retelling, one becomes a unique contributor to social-cultural knowledge. One has a share in making meaning in the individual/collective experience. This emphasizes the individual’s connection to history, ancestry, and to others socially situated. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson shares the epistemology of Nishna in Nishnaabeg thought as the notion that folks are in part responsible “to make the meaning for their own creation and their own life” in the community [49] (p. 290). Here, we have a sense of the multidimensional participation in a communicative system that helps to convey the notion, amidst participation in the communal, that one is creative. With structures, yes, but not so impermeable as to restrict movement. One is understood to create new interpretations in the mode of telling just as in the content of the told (gesture, expression, vocals, etc.) as one builds toward communal understanding with “creative force”21.

I return to an emphasis on the location of beings denied status as epistemic creators and as beings empty of culture where we understand ourselves in a system as otherwise than the normative. Where we find difficulty in celebrating our ancestors, and by no means an issue of desire but communicative system that must be traversed (seeking an understanding of who our grandparents are or why they did what they did). When we see one another as beyond the confines of social structures of normal interpretations of our behaviors and perceptions of behaviors as culturally informed, we are not governed by dichotomous thinking and we come to the unfamiliar with a possibility for deep, creative impulses that understand formations of identity against the grain of modern power in community; we see the why of resistance.

In such community, however, there is no common origin point or transparency of our lived experiences to one another, even where we might share the ‘same’ experience, and since we are every bit multiplicious there in liminal space just as much as in more clearly dominating ones, we cannot look for a common point of departure or platform upon which to stand and enunciate a solid self. Instead, we look for differences and resistances to the status quo and begin to know each other as resistors in a coalitional limen—even if as regulative ideal. We might only note that one thing we all have in common is an inordinate amount of appetite for life.

A coalitional limen necessitates a communicative opening and some level of awareness of domination and of resistance to domination—praxial, if not necessarily articulate—that informs thought and action and develops a shared vocabulary and wisdom regarding maneuvers in dominant structures. Theorists of coalition recognize that it is possible to be disloyal to the dominator in oneself as well as be the dominated [7]. If not, the negotiation of communicative difficulties become equally or more obscured rather than resolved. A coalitional limen is one that is achieved and the achievement is both pluricultural and communicative [7]. We need to focus on the negotiation of communicative difficulties and on the characteristics of the person and people that make that negotiation possible. As Lugones argues, a coalitional limen is not something we are able to buy presupposing that the liminal site is empty of all power [7].

In the effort to achieve a coalitional limen, we must also begin to know ourselves not just the oppressor externally but the oppressor internally. Among our non-dominant differences, if we take them intersectionally, we are also oppressing ←→ oppressed ←→ oppressing. We are colluding in oppressing one another where we do not work to decipher resistant codes and engage a dialogue with other resisters beyond our own people. Lugones explains:

We can, and many of us do, take the stance of being against all oppression. We may then be tempted to say that we inhabit the limen, one that is both the result of and constituted by our placing ourselves against all oppression, not just the oppressor outside of us but also the oppressor in ourselves [7] (p. 75).

To be against all oppression, one must realize the oppression that oneself contributes to. This means that the limen includes both external and internal oppressive structures. She continues:

The spatialities and times of liminality are particular. Since our journeys to the limen are different, often at odds, often in great tension given that we are among each other’s oppressors, the freeing spaces where we attempt to chisel our own faces are not readily accessible to each other [7] (p. 77).

Communicative openings are achieved when folks are attentive in particular ways (i.e., as when one listens for resistant codes). There is no state of communicative transparency in immediate perceptions and understanding is void, liminal, borderlandish, vague, and undetermined. As we come to understanding, as the theologian Martin Buber believed, we do so amidst relationships between and among beings [51]. We move toward communicative openings when the I recognizes the You as resistant and wants to know why or seeks to learn more. It is not an I-It relation of recognition evident in strategic communication22. It is, for example, to consider in dialogue with an other the divergences in our behavior and perceptions of behavior—to recognize the why of what one perceives as ‘weird’ or ‘wrong’ behavior. But, again, neither can we presume a transparency to ourselves in our own experiences23. “To assume transparency then is to reproduce the communicative problem imposed by the various forms of power that oppress us” [41] (pp. 83–84).

How to come to recognition and understanding? In these liminal spaces, Lugones advocates for complex communication, a process that involves recognizing the multiplicity of individual identities. This form of communication goes beyond simplistic categorization and acknowledgment that people’s experiences are shaped by their diverse backgrounds. Lugones particularly emphasizes the importance of polylogic conversations in liminal spaces, as they foster coalition-building by valuing diverse perspectives [7]. The polylogic is the type of conversation we engage as we seek communicative openings in the building of a coalitional limen. It is a critical practice of communication where we find multi-cultural resistors that allow for more subversive conversation.

According to Lugones, there are three types of conversations in liminal spaces: monologic, dialogic, and polylogic. Monologic conversations are characterized by a one-way flow of communication, where there is little room for multiple perspectives. This type usually reflects more common societal narratives and lacks inclusivity. In dialogical conversation, two-way communication occurs, allowing for more exchange and interaction. Yet this kind looks for recognition only from the powers that be. As a vertical, top-down conversation, it may still be limited by the frameworks of the dominant culture24. Polylogic or coalitional conversation, however, is characterized by its inclusiveness and acknowledgement of multiple voices and perspectives. In polylogic conversations, there’s a definite effort to understand and integrate the diverse viewpoints of all participants, making it an essential tool for coalition-building in liminal spaces. As horizontal, this type of conversation fosters mutual respect and understanding, and it is pivotal for effective resistance against dominant norms [7].

In this, third sense of communicative conversation, there is recognition that one is crossing the confines of the structure and that one is taking up a different, non-dominant “unique” representation and that representation has a logic of another sort. In this type of conversation, we recognize that the other is doing the same. Lugones writes:

One’s resistant vision will become more open to and knowledgeable in other resistant logics, and benefit from the complex exchanges. Or, it may become ‘visions,’ complex fluencies, critical and creative understandings of possibilities. The cautious vision, the ‘realistic’ vision of the hegemonical construction becomes more honed. One understands its reach further and guards against its intrusions into the inner sancta of resistance. Fragmentation becomes meaningful only when its phantasmic logic is allowed to infiltrate the logic, core, spring of our connections [42] (pp. 162–163).

In this more coalitional modality of communication as complex, we characterize our relations with each other by a recognition of multiplicity and opacity and as resistant.

As a philosophical practice that grew out of critical reflection and intercultural dialogue among a community of intellectuals and activists situated decolonially in the struggle against racism, sexism and heterosexism, complex communication concerns being in the liminality of social spaces where folks struggle to find place and relevance within the dominant philosophical discourse and literature in a solid effort to cultivate an amicable understanding and practice of humanity amidst ongoing structural conditions of degradation and dehumanization. This practice of philosophy as communicative takes thought as active and relational and therefore embodied. In practice we participate in the sharing of wisdom in introspective ways that reflect upon our own knowledge systems and communicative practices. “Complex communication”, Lugones writes, “thrives on recognition of opacity and on reading opacity, not through assimilating the text of others to our own [as it] allows us to navigate the impasse in liminal spaces by recognizing multiplicity and refusing assimilation” [7] (p. 83). Understood as spatial and lived, socially from the embodied relations of peoples, complex communication is both philosophical theory and praxis that can facilitate an opening in dialogue and future understanding and action of coalition towards legitimizing each other.

3. Deciphering Resistant Codes by Listening as a Complex Communicator

There is a need to speak directly to the ways in which folks racialized in the colonial, modern gender system, even whilst practicing decoloniality and anti-racism, might also produce what decolonial, feminist philosopher Yuderkys Espinosa calls a “campo de conflicto y tensión” [53] or enact what María Lugones calls “horizontal hostilities/hostilidades horizontals” [7]. As our multiple relations are a dialectic of oppressed/oppressing phenomena, not having access to one another, and perceptions built from within familiar knowledge systems, pose a hindrance to communicative philosophies. Rather than assimilating each other into familiar structures of understanding and perception, complex communication brings together multiple voices that would not otherwise be encountered and then engages listening as a form of seeing deeply into the social. It means to do so from an understanding of the social as spatial, economic, epistemic, and political productions25. Looking from the intersection while in hegemonic reproduction of socio-economic space, the familiar consumption of concepts such as ‘woman’, ‘lesbian’, or ‘black’, are highly problematic.

Engaging decolonial and complex communication in coalition requires that we see our own, horizontal hostilities in oppressed-oppressing relations. So, rather than aligning liberation to domination, one goes for engagement with thoughtful practices of decoloniality. The goal is in search of better understandings, perhaps dissolutions of linguistic strategies, in the spirit of new, tactical ones that move creatively and multilingually in resistance to, and re-existences of, life marked by histories of imperialism and colonialism. As there is no common origin point, the goal is in building amicable, embodied spaces among and within marked differences, rather than looking for recognition from the imperialist/colonialist top-down. Closing the impasse, however challenging, is crucial if we are to collaborate well to broaden theories of ‘decolonial thinking’ to include epistemologies and languages from the global South and the wisdoms of unheard, marginalized voices harmed in political democracies where localized social alliances—as hegemonic—practice in routes of familiarity.

My argument, therefore, suggests a decolonial imperative to develop new linguistic tools and behavioral tactics as loci of creative enunciation in the resistance to violence and re-existence of the self-with-others. It involves tactical understandings of the relations of race, gender, and sex in the social, political, and ethical lives of real persons. As we maintain a recognition of opacity and multiplicity as a decolonial complex communicative method, a rejection of our transparency to one another given a perceived similar experience, and refusal to assimilate others into the familiar, we can begin to come to deeper consciousness of ourselves and one another. In this section, I explore in more depth the phenomena of listening and response as already relational and connected to the way we form coalitions in deciphering resistant codes. In coalitional communication, we do so where difference is understood as potentially creative of knowledge, recognition and coming to be seen.

Complex communication thrives on the acknowledgment of opacity and is acted out through a change in one’s vocabulary, one’s sense of self, overall way of living, and in the extension of one’s memory—with the developing forms of communication that are signaled by the reduction attempted by oppressors. Since the exclusion and denial of support in horizontal spaces is in part strategy of the early modern modalities of social organization, systems of race gender and capital, horizontal hostility often moves in our intentionality as already present in our response. Yet, the other is, phenomenally figuring, prior to my intentionality as the self is always, already a relation and the other is already more than what one ‘really and actually’ perceives them to be. Lugones writes, “In complex communication we create and cement relational identities, meanings that did not precede the encounter, ways of life that transcend nationalisms, root identities, and other simplifications of our imaginations” [7] (p. 84). Figuring new linguistic tools, concepts, and terms to resist participation in the system where it is experienced as a violence, we dismantle the master’s house, as Audre Lourde urged, with tools that are more organic than imposed.

In efforts to achieve a coalitional limen, as it is an achievement of sorts, we must engage a full-circle method of communication that is more tactical than strategic. This requires interrogating the codifications present in consciousness, expressed in thought, and enacted in the body. It means we take the idea of complex communication seriously towards the project of deciphering resistant codes and coming to a deeper sense of ourselves and one another, I add to complex communication as an ethical stance in the communal, an understanding of ‘decolonial intentionality’ as a disposition to decipher resistant codes. This disposition requires emphasis not only on the speaker or sender in the communicative phenomenon, but the listener or receiver just as much, and takes this as a simultaneous, dialectical posture of our being in the relation as we are both/and in the sending/receiving. Different from the information theory model problematized by the critical theorists of the Frankfurt school, we now understand the event of speaker/listener dialectically. It also means we engage, as critical, a self-assessment of our listening in these openings as a relational and multiple process of thinking and acting in our response as reception, attention, perception, negotiation of meaning, reflection, and recognition in communication. In our embodied relations of coalitional communication, we not only refuse the assimilation of the other into the familiar, but refuse to center the self in such a way to return to the speaking position; ongoingly so as to amass the time in unilateral conversation and dominate the space with new structures of perception not too far from the hegemonic ones.

The gatherings in complex communicative philosophical conversations are not wily-nilly encounters, stumbling upon jewels, herbs, minerals, for example, in the land of the foreign and bringing like people in for the enjoyment. This is because its communication is not a strategic maneuver for the-self or group alone. Rather it involves making stable spaces of intelligent, mindful recognitions and connections. It builds a longevity that carries the culture albeit with a modicum of transformation, given new encounters and the multiple, intercultural phenomenon of experience. It is not a “two become one” and the other is erased or annihilated as inferior in the endeavor26. Instead, as coalitional, it is a constant calling into question structures of hegemonic representation, production, and reproduction of economic and cultural political systems to the annihilation of the other. It is to be open to question, as the two young fish were when the elder fish swam by and asked, “Hey fellas, how’s the water?” And the young fish responded “Water? What is water?”27.

In the non-transparency of our unintelligibility, it is not that the persons come to the encounter ‘stupid’. As if, I’ll never know what you went through because I am not you. This is a sense of pure alterity that in hegemonic dualism will only engage the other with “arrogant perception”28. While we did not experience the same thing, we can still understand experiences at the level of cognition and produce sentiment and linkages to our own experiences in ways that understand and make the other more real. Neither is it the opposite, a totalizing knowing or transparency; the totalizing presumption that because one has tried the food or vibes with the music one already knows what needs to be known ahead of the encounter.

In complex, coalitional communication, we listen to the particularities of the saying and the said, and we come to the encounter clued-in with a ready disposition critical of our own intentionality, as complexly as that might be fashioned. We are looking for the places within where the oppressor lies; where, rather than hospitality, we express hostility. Listening, however, is not utopic. One is not going to listen as though the ears were receptors for an empty container, ready to receive a pure message. It is not a form of entertainment, and one is not off the hook to do any work. As always already a response, there’s a lot going on in the listening act as phenomena. We listen to others in overlapping contexts, with contradicting knowledges, and in multiple perceptions that move actions and behaviors and shape our perceptions of those behaviors. These are the ways we listen with attentiveness to the data. Given that we are contextualized, and often with mechanisms of reification and machination for the ease of things strategically, the ways in which we assign meaning are phenomena not entirely of our own control. Especially the assignment of meaning where we do not understand the other’s language, linguistic expressions, and perhaps less ambiguous, bodily gestures and vocals (like turning the head, pointing a finger, shouting, whispering, etc.). Receiving data or information is not sufficient to the full scope of listening. Listening also concerns attention to the data and their complexity, criticism of one’s own perception in the assignment of meaning and the manner and style of our response. When we listen as complex communicators, we encounter the face of the other as responding well.

As complex communicators, we build familiarity in listening and dialogue as we come to see each other. As we respond in listening, sometimes, we create something new. This newness is not made by the self as a mote individual, as an artist to be praised for a single-handed creation. Nor is it the same as (what could have been perceived) as the total madness of a Biblical Abraham with his plans to sacrifice/kill his son Isaac on the mountain as retold by Søren Kierkegaard29. As a creativity of the aesthetic, it is, rather, a newness that is coalitional; returning to the communal.

Listening as complex communicators, we build fluency. There is not automatic repetition, but a recurrence of sorts as we engage the communal. What happens when we listen as a form of seeing deeply into the social is that we build this intelligibility and offer stability to each other in our identities. The identity is permeable—it always will be. It is the ebb and flow of the phenomenon of intersectionality in semiotic communication as we exist in communities of people, cultures, and histories; but, as organic, contextualized, we come back to build again and the reason why is because of a people, culture, and land (terrain and territory) that would not likely be as stable in a different context30. The people in particular who live as such are doing the work of this community. Beyond just gathering, stability, backing, intelligibility, and the legitimizing of one in the lifeworld (legitimizing one, but not rigidly), we also build significance and meaning. Location is meaningful history and journeys to the limen are a significant reality that is part of oneself in the world of ambiguity.

Coalitional, complex communicative encounters among people and groups arise in everyday experiences. For example, in the writing of an article together, the performing of a sound set on stage together, the walking to the store together. In these moments and spaces, an idea happens and is celebrated as it created connection. That revel in connection extends outward and develops a repetition in action that may grow the space as amicable to one’s comfortability moving in the everyday lifeworld. Listening in such modality means we honor the liminal context in which the encounter occurs in the rich, complex sense and we honor each other in the horizon of the yet to come—in ways grand enough to sustain, but not to be hegemonic. It is to craft together a dwelling space where one does not have to fight so hard to find comfort in hospitality that is not paid for by tourism (and thus simultaneous with resentment)31, and, it is to practice there with friends, as compas (one might say). It is a spatiality that sustains in resistance to “fight the funk” so to speak of dominant, fascist, and hegemonic systems32.

Maintaining as an edict in one’s thought, actions, and perceptions of others a complex, communicative stance that transforms/shifts/builds new spatio-temporalities with one another in the liminality of the unfamiliar is imperative. It moves violent, hegemonic structures differently so that we are more probable toward building an edifying space where understanding and epistemic value are given mutually in the communicative relation. In this, we see the limen as a social threshold, where communication can open up possibilities in connection with others in thought and action complementing our ability to understand each other beyond dominant systems.

The approach here is comparative, interdisciplinary, and transnational. It encounters difference with an emphasis on interconnections as beings under the feet of, and otherwise than, the coloniality of being. Here we come to know not from familiar categories and dominant epistemologies, but from new connections in the learning/unlearning of one another. When our differences are accessible to each other, we encounter multiplicity of thoughts, ideas, and cosmologies, as well as practices of resistance to the violence of such things as racism, misogyny, and transmisogyny in the coloniality of power, even where they are enacted from within solidarity projects. It is therefore important to center others in our understanding of lived experiences of people by comparing and recovering cultural histories in the engagement of epistemic and linguistic “transculturation”33. That is to say, in coalitional communication, we engage gendered, racial identity from multiple colonial contexts and intersectional interpretations beyond the official limits of hegemonic language and linguistics.

As we call into question representations and their transgression here, their efficacy and their relation to each other, it is important to deconstruct the modem, colonial epistemic framework and enable creativity in our epistemic engagements and communicative philosophies. Now more than ever, the languages and systems that are key to our contemporary social worlds must be taken as historical phenomena linking globalization and coloniality. It is important to tie this history to our contemporary lives in the articulation of the confounding identities and unintelligibility as a way out of linguistic expressions that buy into the rhetorical wealth amidst various combinations of intersecting, hierarchical relations. As such, this must be a history that includes the perception of colonized, enslaved, indentured servants, and immigrants in active resistance to genocide, abuse, and exploitation on the basis of race, sex, and region. They cannot be separated from the inheritances of imperialism and colonialism in the modem, colonial matrix of power as a phenomenon that flows under the project of capitalism in ways that complicate efforts of coalitional phenomena such as democracy, justice, friendship, and love.