I think about belonging a lot, and I also think about its inverse—maybe that’s alienation, aloneness, or disconnection. I understand these kinds of things in the sense of how they feel—how it feels to belong, and how it feels to be disconnected or alien to a place or people. Perhaps my interest in this comes down to a history of having felt disconnected in contexts where by all available logics I should belong, maybe because I was socialized to belong, because I belonged at one point, because of the sincere efforts of others to enable my belonging. I’ve written a lot about failing to feel I belong to various communities, to the military and its various sub-cultures, failing to feel I belong at gatherings or in conversations, etc… This is something I’ve often attributed to neurodivergence or depression—that pathology which has affected much of my life—but I believe that feelings of alienation or aloneness often stem from what I’d call incoherence between internal and external ecologies…

Put simply, in order to belong, how I am must be coherent with where I am.

To frame that from only one direction (the individual fails to belong through their failure to cohere with context) strikes me as misguided.

It is worth noting that depression could be understood as both upstream and downstream of disconnection and feelings of isolation. A depressed person is more likely to feel isolated. They are more likely to act in ways that perpetuate their isolation. And a person who feels isolated is more likely to suffer the symptoms of depression. The precursor is a product is a perpetuator (Cyclical Psychodynamics).

Thousands of times

The question has crossed the lips of my mind

Why they say “we” while I’m inclined towards words like they and I and theirs and mine

Tillandsia, resting among branches belonging to a tree

only until some breath of wind or weather dislodges me

Words are a poor instrument for the topic I’m taking on, but that’s never stopped me from attempting these sorts of things.

In the opening to ‘Outline of a Theory of Practice’, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discusses how culture is sometimes described as a map—an analogy employed by outsiders who have to find their way around a foreign cultural landscape within which those “native” to that culture can navigate fluently. I do like the idea of culture as a topology within and across which some can navigate fluently (insiders) while others might struggle (outsiders), but Bourdieu is critical of the map analogy, and states that no amount of documentation by an outsider could actually capture with useful fidelity what it takes to navigate a cultural field. He quotes Poincaré who suggests that this topology of culture can be understood as a “system of axes linked unalterably to our bodies, and carried about with us wherever we go”.

So when we talk about those who can move fluently through a culture, we’re not talking about someone who possesses something separate from them, like a map, which could be installed in them like software, which could be offered and acquired by someone else. It is “linked unalterably to our bodies”—Culture is a product of something inside us, a part of that internal ecology, and its relationship and interaction with the external ecology.

This could be framed as the difference between something being objective and something being intersubjective.1

• An objective thing’s truth and qualities exist outside of any individual’s perception.

• A subjective thing’s truth and qualities are defined by an individual’s perception.

• An intersubjective thing’s truth and qualities emerge from the relationships between multiple people’s perceptions.

  • E.g. a relationship is a dynamic and evolving negotiation between our various positionalities, feelings, and subjectivities.

This framing jives closely with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus—internal schemes of perception and behavior structured by society, structuring society, structuring that internal ecology of ours, motivating us to maintain and restructure it through the offering and withholding of social and cultural capital in one another: Behave as we expect people like you to behave and you will be extended these types of capital which allow you to fluently operate here. For more on that, I wrote a bit about the withholding of connection and belonging on the basis of social categorizations in the essay “Connection as Contingent”.

Perhaps those for whom a culture’s norms and strictures feel coherent and relatively frictionless, who can therefore navigate fluently, could be said to experience belonging within that culture. They have a high degree of what Bourdieu refers to as “feel for the game”—his description of how our socially structured habitus enables us to operate successfully within society. This description also feels to me like we might operate socially on the basis of muscle memory or embodied cognition rather than conscious calculation (another reason to reject the notion of culture as an objective, abstract map of the territory).

Perhaps belonging can come about when I am sufficiently colonized by and for a given context—when the intentional external shaping of my internal ecology makes me inwardly coherent with the schemes of perception and practice (habitus) being shaped and enforced here.

My failure to belong might stem from a stubborn persistence of my internal ecology—a chronic failure to be sufficiently colonized into fluency (is this neurodivergence?)

But this description so far only accounts for one direction of the relationship— intersubjectivity means that the things we relate to also relate to us—and it doesn’t account for those people who will very successfully operate within a social context only to reveal years down the road that they have been suffering inside the entire time—their fluency could be said to be dramaturgical (another concept from Goffman), and inauthentic to their actual inner life.

Belonging isn’t just a matter of how well I adapt myself to context. It is also a matter of how well the context adapts to who and how I am.

I am not at all convinced that any preconceived topology can simply be installed in an individual.

I’ve said that I feel I belong when the context I occupy is coherent with my internal ecology, an ecology made up of systems and senses and cognitive difference and values and perspectives and history and a whole lot of other things, many of which can’t be captured in anything other than how it feels to be in my body and mind. Many of which can’t actually be captured in words.

But it is also a failure of that external ecology to adapt so that it is coherently connected with me. And coherence between parts and wholes isn’t just good for the parts…

A group of friends or a team might experience fluency and belonging with one-another, and when a new person joins, there should be an exploratory evolution to find a new fluency. Belonging for certain members might get lost and need to be found again. This is not simply a matter of socializing the newcomer to the intersubjective ecology already organically grown between the individuals (installing it like software or simply enforcing its strictures through the withholding of positive connection until the new member adheres). It is also a matter of that ecology being receptive and responsive to the internal ecology of the newcomer. As members change, the culture of a group necessarily changes.

I think we might have been misled into believing there is such a thing as a specifiable target for an ideal culture. We might be able to define rough attributes of an ideal culture… design criteria perhaps such as “adaptive to characteristics of the people within it”, but for the most part, cultural targets are defined on the basis of those things which feel most coherent to the inner life of the advocate (unless that person happens to have foundational values of non-imposition or pluralism). A culture that prioritizes belonging necessarily, by design, tempers the tyranny of dominant groups (who usually get most of the say in social norms), and in the process creates what to some might feel like the tyranny of expectation—to make space, to live with a culture emerging from intersubjectivities rather than their own subjectivities (which are often grounded in purported objectivities (such as bio-essentialism or claims of religious truths).

I was thinking about this idea of the topology of culture being something which can’t be accurately or usefully mapped, and it brought to mind the fact that when one attempts to change culture in the interest of increasing that sense of fluency and belonging for those currently living as outsiders trapped within, any attempted shifts to foster inclusion and belonging for those on the outside will feel to many who currently belong as having their fluency stolen away. Having their belonging stolen away.

Belonging can of course be fleeting, and those “axes linked unalterably to our bodies” from which a culture emerges will respond to shifts in the dynamics of the system.

And people will strive to prevent that natural and intentional evolution of things as that ecology of culture responds to be coherent with the ever-changing ecologies of those who occupy it, because such shifts feel to them, very reasonably, as departures from the way that things “should be”. Feeling often precedes logic. These things felt obviously coherent to those who moved fluently within them for decades.

This illustrates how cultural shifts play out in intergenerational conflict. The old guard, to whom the old ways feel perfectly natural because they are coherent with their own internal maps of culture, will always scoff at kids these days, if and when they fail at the task of colonizing those kids’ internal ecologies.

Sorry y’all—you really didn’t stand a chance against the internet, nor against those who have been using it for decades for the mass intentional shaping of our inner lives. For more on that, see this (particularly the second half):

Belonging can be fleeting because we are always changing, and the environments we occupy are always changing. This “system of axes linked unalterably to our bodies, and carried about with us wherever we go” links to such a system in others’ bodies as well, insofar as we relate to them, and these aren’t things we necessarily have control over. Some of them are things we have to accept.

In the brief exploration of Taoist concepts in the essay “Pain Will Be”, I alluded to the concept of a “true nature”:

I would reject the suggestion that true nature is unchanging, like some platonic ideal. I think that it describes the way a thing actually is at present, in and of itself, in contrast to how we imperfectly understand it through language and categorizations. There is a true state of a thing which perhaps can’t be articulated but can be detected and considered…

in how a person’s thriving/flourishing is or is not present

in a person’s sense that they belong or do not belong in a particular context

senses unmeasurable and uncapturable perhaps with the imprecise tool of language— information that occupies the body and those parts of the brain which process things outside of that which can be labeled, reduced, or really very well captured at all in a big clunky pile of words like this.

I used the word fluency a lot in this ramble, following Bourdieu’s example (though he wasn’t exactly talking about belonging). I like that word for the same reason I like Wen’s statement there about Zìrán—the path of least resistance. It offers up the sense that there can be a place in which our belonging is a matter of natural, predisposed coherence rather than the product of violent brute force to shape these ecologies.

Well if I’m gonna have to be who I am in order to belong,

I suppose task number one is to figure out who the heck I am…

thanks for reading :)