Re-contextualisation as devotional practice
Repairing the hidden violence of abstraction and coming back home to ourselves
When we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.1
I am fascinated by what is hiding in plain sight—the ubiquitous aspects of the world so taken for granted that they no longer register as worthy of attention. I notice the way great power is often camouflaged in what we believe to be part of the furniture—that which we use everyday—and is consequently overlooked.
One of the things that has long been a source of irritation for me—causing an involuntary contraction every time I encounter it—is the way we so often untether certain words from their context and place them on their own on a pedestal to be worshipped uncritically as an uncontested ‘good’.
This is not a simple matter of linguistic pedantry (though I am definitely guilty of that at times too, as my kids will attest!). Words are (seemingly) tidy placeholders for much more slippery concepts, and those concepts can wield enormous systemic power. And in a world where LLMs are being entrusted with more and more of our verbal articulations (the proxies we use for ‘intelligence’), we need to be paying close attention to the words we are using and how we are using them—careless slips of the tongue, pen, or keyboard, especially if repeated, can find their way algorithmically into doctrine.
Particular words that cause my nervous system to tic, when I hear them decontextualised, are “success”, “excellence”, “achievement”, and “ambition.” These words are dangerous on their own because as free-floating abstractions they can be co-opted in service of a multitude of ends. They are not ‘good’ in and of themselves, but only when stitched back into an ethical context. Yet these words have been elevated to hero-status in the progress-for-progress’s-sake world we currently inhabit (as I’ve definitely witnessed in people’s perplexed, and at times condescending, reactions when I voice my discomfort with them).
More success, excellence, achievement, and ambition do not guarantee a flourishing world2.
You can be a highly successful exploiter of people. You can be excellent at “winning” wars (aka killing people). You can achieve the discovery and implementation of a world-destroying technology. You can ambitiously produce large amounts of plastic things that sell well, break, and go straight to landfill poisoning our planetary ecosystems (including our own biology).
When you remove something—anything—from its context, it becomes much easier to manipulate. And the cognitive ease this provides has brought many rewards. It is the basis of much of the scientific method—isolate what you want to study; take it into the lab and investigate, experiment, test; master it and use it. The development of technology relies on this. But like all boons, it has a shadow side that we ignore at our peril. Decontextualisation should be handled with extreme care.
Taking something out of its context essentially severs relationships in space-time. You can do it with people too. Isolate someone from their supportive relationships and they become easier to exploit and control. Isolate a group from its cultural context—all that gives meaning and value to those within it—and you can characterise it as deficient or inferior in yours (essentially this is the basis of racism). Isolate a quote from its wider narrative and you can make an unintended meaning go viral.
Decontextualisation is a dominance move and it happens in all domains.
Back to those words. Success. Excellence. Achievement. Ambition. They’re not just words. They’re part of the conceptual operating system of a dominant and dominating supremacy culture—one that is obsessed with maintaining steep and concrete gradients of individual ‘merit’, and the self-policed caste systems and lived inequality those gradients produce. By blithely copy-pasting those words out of context, by worshipping them uncritically as ‘good’, we become unwitting vectors for that supremacy culture to spread.
Accountability to context—place, time, whakapapa, and consequence—disrupts supremacy because it is harder to dominate when you are faced with the full picture of your impacts, and you feel the cost in your own tissues. In these moments we come back home to our bodies and the interdependence that keeps us alive.
For me, re-contextualising is becoming a kind of devotional practice—an ongoing commitment to tenderly tracing the threads of connection, to bringing the space between everything back into vibrant presence, so that discernment becomes possible. In our dominant culture, where words carry a lot of epistemic weight, I want to restitch wandering words back into their worldly fabric, and hitch concepts to the contexts that make them legible3.
These acts of devotion—of tending to context—are counter-cultural4. We’ve become accustomed to the generalisable, the quantifiable, the abstract, and the speed and (appearance of) certainty they confer. It can be a lonely place to interrupt that logic and refuse the relief of reductive simplicity; you have to let go a need for belonging, speed, and praise to stay with the mess.
But everything is relational, not absolute, and coordinates of belonging matter more than we’ve been conditioned to think. This re-contextualising practice is part of the of the disruption of empire—the repatriation of specificity, the repatterning of universalising currents that attempt to draw everything into their bulldozing ambit. We can become ungovernable when we see that empire’s logic is repeated fractally, at all scales, and we practise refusing it at the scale of our own sovereignty.
We have at our disposal the perfect tools for this job, ones we’ve had since we were born. Questions are our re-contextualising super powers in a disembodied world where we have so spectacularly freed speech from its responsibility to material reality. We need to learn to use our whys, hows, wheres, whens, and what-do-you-means (activate your inner 4-year old!) deliberately and with the intention to bring free-floating abstractions back into the web of life. This takes power out of its black box and brings its responsibility and our agency home.
Success at doing what?
Success for whom?
Success over what timescale?
Success in what place?
Success as defined by whose values?
Success at the cost of what relationships, what bodies, what activities, what terrains, what futures?
And we need to remember that we too are part of this process of decontextualisation—that we have internalised a separation between ourselves and the world that empire has behaviourally conditioned us to maintain. We are not an objective observer that sits outside accountability, but an integral aspect of the system observing itself.5
Where do I yearn for success?
What has my success cost me?
What has my success cost others?
How has success conditioned me to behave?
Let questions become our incantations against indoctrination. Our spells that ward off fast-tracked indifference. Our rituals of ecosystemic repair.
To re-contextualise is to re-member, to put back in its rightful place, to re-entangle. It is a dedication to seeing the multidimensionality of all you encounter—eschewing stereotypes, projections, assumptions and blindspots that can lead you astray—and letting care transform relationships. It is a re-activation of love in an expanded field and a commitment to healing the fabric of our fractured world.
Muir, John. 1911. My First Summer in the Sierra. Houghton Mifflin, P. 110.
And I can imagine that sentence itself being lifted out of context, and exploited to characterise me as someone opposed to success, excellence, achievement and ambition.
Re-contextualising is of course so much more than simply about words, but here I’m interested in the way that words have taken on a constitutional role in our global monoculture.
It is counter-cultural to our Western worldview of Modernity, but is integral to indigenous cultures the world over.
The more I see the way these tendencies and postures play out in my own inner world, the more I feel able to face up to them in the outer world. And (paradoxically) the more agency I feel. Understanding ourselves as part of the systemic problem enables us to become part of the collective solution; moral purity is part of the separation logic of empire.