Anna and Otto climb roped together. Fog and wind: they cannot see or hear each other. All they share is the rope. When Anna slips, the rope jerks. Watch how that jerk becomes a word. Three chapters, drawn metaphors and a few questions to guess. About eight minutes, no sound.
What this film is
A fiction. Anna, Otto, Pip, the guide and the club are invented. The ideas come from the biologist Humberto Maturana (1928–2021). It is my reading of one of his talks, paraphrased and simplified. The film has no voice: the lines are on screen. After each step of the story, a drawing sums up the idea. The main image is a riverbed: rain on a hillside, a few drops cut a channel, later drops follow it. A sign works the same way: it flows in the bed the earlier coordinations have dug.
Five ideas from Maturana
Language is not communication. We say people “communicated” after the fact, when their actions ended up coordinated.
A coordination of coordinations. A gesture that coordinates other coordinations, on top of them, is the smallest unit of language. A mere sequence of moves is not yet language.
Between people, not in a head. You need a brain to take part, but language happens in the shared flow of living together. It has to grow; it is not inherited.
Objects arise in language. Words come after, as comments, and carry the history of the coordinations they come from. The same word means different things in different histories.
Emotion first. Emotions set which actions are possible. Fear narrows what we see; reflection, responsibility and freedom arise as language turns back on itself.
About the climbing
The rope signal is invented for the film. So is the tug that grows lighter as it becomes a sign: it is my image for the passage from force to meaning, not Maturana's. The riverbed, the valley, the frozen river and the confluence are my metaphors too, not his. The bird scene contrasts language with inherited signals: it is a simplified illustration, not an ornithology claim. This is not a climbing instruction.
Source
Humberto Maturana and Pille Bunnell, Biosphere, Homosphere, and Robosphere: what has that to do with Business?, talk to the Society for Organizational Learning, 1998, rewritten by Bunnell in Maturana's voice.
The title follows Maturana's note that “conversation” comes from the Latin con versare, turning together.