It’s just a…

Let’s start by imagining two people talking as they walk around a park.   The first person, whose name is Ned, stops walking to wax lyrical about a tree, maybe first distinguishing it from other trees by calling it an oak and then distinguishing it from other oaks by singling out some idiosyncratic features, like the particular shade of red that some of its leaves possess at this moment, or some cracks and crevices in the bark of its trunk or a branch that has an unusual and pleasing shape.   Alan, the second person, interrupts at a certain point saying, ‘It’s just a tree, Ned!’ 

I would like to suggest that there is often something downright misleading about sentences that start this way.   I would like also to note that, misleading or not, it is something that we do.  ‘It’s just a…’ exists whether we like it or not!  And if we assume, as I do, that there is no such thing as waste in nature (nature understood as everything that is, including all the things we have invented that we might consider artificial or cultural) this phrase must be doing some kind of job.  

One job that Alan’s ‘It’s just a tree, Ned!’ does seems pretty clear.   It puts an end to a potentially interminable description of a specific thing, this particular oak tree.   Ned is a lovely chap and all that and his appreciation for the qualities of nature’s gifts is praiseworthy in a way, but at a certain point Alan needs to carry on with his day.   He’s got shit to do.   And that’s fair enough.   Those things that he has to do are not going to do themselves.   At the same time that this is ‘true’, it feels similarly uncontroversial to state that, as a description, ‘It’s just a tree’ is incredibly impoverished compared with Ned’s more expansive approach.  The ‘just’ implies that the tree is the same as any other tree.  ‘It’s no big deal’ it says. No surprise. Nothing new. ‘Just’ denies the thing its uniqueness, limiting its existence to those features that precisely replicate features of other things with which it shares a name.    Having said that, even if Alan’s description had been permitted to go on indefinitely, it could never have fully delineated the tree’s idiosyncrasy.  Language in the end can only gesture towards the uniqueness of a thing that exists outside itself.  It cannot definitively capture it and pin it down.   

At the same time, no language act – or any other act for that matter – can fail to be unique, in the sense that the function of a word is transformed every time it is used again by its relationship with its context whose function is itself transformed at the same time.   So, for instance, when I write ‘tree’ right now, I do so in the context of this word’s previous use within this piece of writing.   Its meaning – or function – is obviously related to the meaning it had at the beginning of the piece but it is not identical to it.   The context within which the word means has grown, thanks to its previous incarnations and, with that growth, the word has come to mean something subtly different.    So no word functions identically from one use to the next even though in terms of its form, or topography, it looks the same.      

Similarly, the interaction of a tree and its context, its ‘treeing’, we might say, is constantly evolving and, although it might be tempting to think of there being a separate thing that ‘is a tree’ that interacts with a distinct and separate context that is ‘the tree’s context’, the tree and the tree’s context cannot exist separately.  They form a single unity.   Seen in this way, nouns themselves come to seem somewhat misleading.   They have a kind of reifying function that transforms how we experience a phenomenon, making an evolving process feel like a static separate object.   

So what? What are the drawbacks or unintended consequences of ‘It’s just a…’   Well, if the uniqueness that is being denied is the uniqueness of a human being, then there are several.   Let’s say we’re mental health professionals working with Sally and we say ‘It’s just Sally being Sally.  It’s just the way she is,’  then we are orienting to Sally as if she were a static entity rather than an evolving process in which we, as part of Sally’s context, are participating.   To the extent that we relate to Sally in this way we are unlikely to believe that we might have a role to play in enabling radical change in her life.   She just is who she is and that’s all there is to it.   Nothing we can do.   Nothing about this will prevent Sally from changing but there will be little or nothing intentional on our part about how we participate in those changes.    We can see how, here, ‘It’s just a’ is another version of the epistemological assumption that implicitly sees the thing as its own cause.  Sally does what she does because she is Sally.   Similarly, if Sally has a diagnosis like  autism, we might hear someone, attempting to explain her behaviour, say something like ‘It’s just the autism.  That’s why Sally behaves that way’.   Again, the diagnosis is conceptualised as being something located inside the person that causes her every move.   The ongoing reciprocal relationship with context is denied.   Again, this encourages the person who speaks these words to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the suffering they are seeking to alleviate.   It encourages a certain insensitivity to the unique potential that exists inside each moment of relating to the world, a kind of zoning out or shutting down.   

At the beginning of this piece we met Ned and Alan.   Ned was engaged in what was potentially an infinitely long description of a particular tree until Alan shut him down by saying ‘It’s just a tree, Ned.’   The point of this piece is not to recommend that we be less like Alan and more like Ned.   Engaging in an infinitely long description is a recipe for never doing anything apart from engaging in an infinitely long description.   If it weren’t for Alan’s intervention, Ned could have died trying to arrive at a description that definitively captured the tree’s uniqueness, a bit like Narcissus gazing at his own reflection until he died.   We need to stop talking and act at some point.   What interests me is how that decision to stop talking and act gets made and I suspect that to the extent that ‘It’s-just-a…’ is prompted by an awareness of the process that is unfolding between Alan and Ned, the less scope there is for harm to occur.   Imagine, for instance, that Alan’s words are spoken gently.   Perhaps, Ned is a somewhat obsessive character who finds it difficult to let go of the task of description for fear of missing some crucial detail.  Alan, good friend that he is, has seen him locked in descriptions like this many times before and so knows from experience that he needs to do something to enable his friend to let go.    He might be just as sensitive as Ned is to the special qualities of the tree and feel that, in this moment, continuing to talk about them is not what is needed.   His decision to intervene is based less on a rational weighing up on arguments for and against than on an intuitive wisdom built upon the accumulated experience of many similar moments he has shared with Ned.  It feels like the right thing to do.   To the extent that ‘It’s-just-a…’ is prompted by contingencies that are unrelated to the moment at hand, the more scope there is for behaviour that is insensitive and potentially harmful;  I’d go further and suggest this is especially so where the contingencies that pull for ‘It’s-just-a’ belong to a context in which uniqueness is systematically repressed and denied.   Imagine, for instance, that Alan’s words are spoken with a touch of exasperation, and that what has been uppermost in his mind as he half-listened to Ned is the need to get back to his desk before his corporate employer’s monitoring software spots that he is not working as he ‘should be’.    Maybe there’s even a part of Alan that wants to join Ned in his rather lyrical expatiating on the uniqueness of the tree and hates himself for what he cannot help seeing as his cowardly submission to the coercive contingencies being applied to his behaviour.   Maybe as he says ‘It’s just a tree, Ned’ he has a sense that these words are not really his own but the words of an employer that has taught him to see himself as a worker whose only value lies in his ability robotically to perform tasks in the exact way that the manual prescribes.   A tree is just a tree, it does what any old tree does; a worker is just a worker, they do what any old worker does.   Everything is replaceable.  Nothing is unique.  In a culture dominated by mass production by corporations, any formal deviation from the norm is seen as a defect to be rejected and consigned to the scrap heap.   ‘It’s just a…’ is a piece of language that seems peculiarly adjusted to this culture which, if it could articulate what it wants would say, ‘I want identical workers to make identical things with such brutal efficiency that they have no energy left over to consider whether they might want to do something else with their lives.  That way the corporation will exist forever.’   The corporation’s fantasy of uniformity and immortality is just that.   Nothing lasts forever.   Sameness is also a fantasy.  No two workers and no two products and no two trees can be exactly the same.   Even if we create an artificial world in which we insist that things with the same name should be exactly the same, this will not make it so.   Alan is a unique person with unique wants and needs, as all people are, and no matter how hard he tries to conform to the corporation’s demand for uniformity, this will continue to be so, even if he manages to push his unique yearnings out of awareness.   

So where does that leave us?  I think it leaves us with two broad ways in which our verbal behaviour can orient us to the world.   

The first way, and the way I am suggesting we might want to practice taking a step back from, is represented by ‘It’s just a…’ as it is mostly used.  Here, the world is made up of static entities that exist separately in space and time, outside of language.  They do not change.   The job of language is to give names to these separate things.   We relate to things by emphasising their sameness.   A tree is a tree by virtue of possessing the same features as other trees.  Sally is Sally by virtue of behaviours she always does.    Any features that fall outside the template of tree-ness or Sally-ness, are just ignored as merely contingent and therefore inessential.   Not what the tree or Sally really is.  The ‘true’ nature of things lies in their sameness.   We are in the dualistic world of Plato’s real forms.   The ‘real triangle’ is not the one we apprehend with our senses, it is the abstraction, the ‘ur triangle’, a shape with three sides – a mathematical truth.   

The second way, the way that I am suggesting we might want to move towards, is represented more by Ned’s lyricism and by Alan’s more gentle, contextually sensitive ‘It’s just a…’  Here language is part of the world like everything else and its job is not to name something that exists in some separate world; it exists as a kind of prosthesis that extends the reach of the human organism beyond what can be directly seen, heard, touched, and smelt, enabling it psychologically to explore things that are not actually physically present in the form of memories, anticipations and imaginings.     This language-ing proceeds with or without the awareness of the human organism, part of a continuous unfolding process, no more separate from the world, and no more under the organism’s conscious control, than the breathing of its lungs or the beating of its heart.  With or without the conscious awareness of the organism through which it unfolds, language orients that organism to different aspects of its process for the purpose of co-ordinating action.   Process, here, collapses the inside / outside distinction of the first orientation to the world.    Process is the continuous thinking, feeling, touching, remembering, imagining that is our unfolding relationship with the world.   This unfolding relationship is what we are.   To the extent that, through practice, we are in able to be consciously in touch with this unfolding relationship, we will achieve our full potential for growing with this world, as it really is; to the extent that we are out of touch with it our growth will be stunted like a plant that dies out of despair of ever reaching sunlight, even though that sunlight was always only ever a hair’s breadth away.