YouSaid · the spoken record

Kübra Gümüşay

lines on the record: 55
first: 2022-07-04
most recent: 2022-07-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Are very bored of that. And I do believe that to think that this is what people want is to dumb down your audience and to assume that they can't navigate through complexity because this has nothing to do with your level of education, formal education, obviously, has nothing to do with that. Every human being is able to navigate through complexity because this is what we do throughout our everyday lives to dumb down people is an insult, to only do these kind of formats is an insult to the public. We should at least try more constructive, productive debates. And then I'm sure we will see that this will get an audience through time and it will change the way we debate.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like people can still keep doing what they're doing. But I'm not going to forbid them to have these distractive debates. But I would very much advocate and ask for creating spaces where you can witness public thinking, where you can witness people with expertise who are willing to doubt themselves, willing to listen to one another, willing to contextualize their perspectives. We can see new ideas emerge while you listen to people, while they're talking to one another. As a contrast to what we are, you know, these slapstick shows, these spectacles, we're so used to. I mean, at the beginning of each program, most of the times know what people are going to say, know what people are going to respond to. And I would say that a lot of people...”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On national TV and our mainstream programs because people have to see and witness how a productive discourse looks like because we do imitate, we learn through imitation before we become users of tools. We first learn how to imitate. And if we don't witness that kind of productive discourse anywhere in our lives, we will not be people who live by that. And so this is what I would advocate for and I would say that most spaces are not incentivized for that.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the internet, what happens is with every provocation this person collects new sets of new eyes onto itself and a lot more attention with their revocation, attention, attention with every provocation. And unfortunately we mistake attention for relevance. And all of a sudden we then end up being in a public discourse where you have very loud voices that have no expertise whatsoever, no legitimacy to speak on a certain matter whatsoever other than having an opinion and having a lot of people just, you know, react to it. So I would say these spaces are not well equipped for that. That doesn't mean it's not possible. I'm just saying it's not incentivized to have that kind of discourse. That is also why I would advocate to create these spaces ourselves either in our neighborhoods, in schools, at universities, but also”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or able in any way to progress. And I would say that these platforms are not designed to allow that kind of progress to happen. Quite the contrary, these platforms are designed to provoke, to engage intensely and most engagement is caused, as studies have shown, and as these algorithms have now been coded towards is through provocation. And what happens is, say if we were in a restaurant and someone would enter this restaurant and just, you know, start yelling at people, we would react to this person, but not to sort of give this person attention, but to show that we don't accept that kind of behavior and that restaurant. And then at one point, either this person would leave. Or the restaurant manager would say you either comply with our rules or you leave.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is in no way truly who we are, but only the fraction that we feel we're allowed to show. And so having no sense of time and space, then also robs us of our sense of development and changing through time because a tweet you've sent out 10 years ago is like you've said it now because there's no sense of time. It looks like you've just said it. The moment you read it, it's like you've just said it in that moment. So what I'm advocating for is not only tolerating mistakes. What I'm not advocating, because a lot of people are like, oh, we need to have a culture of tolerance towards mistakes. I think what we need to understand is that we are inherently dependent on mistakes to create a great understanding of what there is. Without mistakes, we will not be allowed.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's an interesting question because when we look into those spaces, right Twitter, Facebook and these different social media platforms, what they do is they rob us of our sense of time and space. So we become this very narrow down version of ourselves because we have to time-wise and space-wise sort of reduced to one identity. When in fact in our daily lives we are different, right? Within a day we can be happy and sad, joyful and extroverted and introverted. We speak differently depending on the spaces we speak in with our children, our parents, our friends, our colleagues, etc. And the internet creates this very solid identity that is”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And seek to know what happens at the fringes of society, at the margins of society before things escalate, before problems escalate to the point they can't be solved anymore. And then find out what happens at the margins and then build society and build structures and build policies around the fringes and then move to the center, what you would have is a more holistic approach to society and you would also avoid It would always be a marker of oppression.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was working with some government officials and trying to find out how to act in a way because I was asking myself, okay, what is my task as a writer, as an intellectual, as an academic? Obviously, or rather, not obviously, but sadly, my task seemed to be to wait for the government to do mistakes that were preventable to then write essays about how they've done stupid things and then be applauded for that. So I wondered, can we help to prevent certain mistakes from happening? So we did a lot of work on this. One of the things that I came to learn is that if people in charge and power understood their role as being servants of society and seek out”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To that marker of difference that structurally oppresses them. And then they form a group identity around this to lobby against the structural forms of oppression that have been based on this. So when we look at all these different groups who we deem as people who create fractions or disrupt society or disrupt our sense of unity, what they actually do is prove that it's an illusion of unity, it's an illusion of oneness and to create true unity, you have to understand, not only understand our differences, but also create structures that allow our differences to be carried within our system. So during the pandemic, for instance,”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“perspectives we then you can use this as a tool to bring people together because what happens in our respective societies at the moment is that obviously governments need to be pragmatic so what they do is they create the illusion of a norm of people in society and build structures around this healthcare systems educational systems etc etc what then happens is that because it doesn't encompass all the people in our societies people are structurally excluded and are then forced to name their differences as markers of identity and difference not because they that particular identity is necessarily important to them but because this is what excludes them society so they have to refer”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And how we are dependent on one another and dependent on humanity. The moment we deem our individuality to be the end of this world, the moment we live with the illusion of our horizon to mark the end of the world, yes, individuality will turn into a destructive power, into even a form of oppression, where we've universalized this very limited perspective. But if we use individuality as a training to see complexity and multifacetedness and ambiguity, and if we use it to also understand the connectedness that there is, if we train our brain to understand, to contextualize information.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And collective action. It might sound contradictory to ask for individuality and to advocate for individuality when this very neoliberal approach of we are old individuals and as long as we work hard, we'll all make our way through this world successfully and this lack of solidarity leads to I would say most of the problems we are facing in today's world. only superficially this is contradictory because when I advocate for individuality I am advocating for self-consciousness and for one's beauty and complexity and multifacetedness but embedded in this world and embedded in our societies and understanding our interconnectedness”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's one of those beautiful sort of thought games that allow you to walk up to your horizon and then try and look at the world through your eyes in hope of discovering something new that was already there. And then maybe you can put this into language and introduce it. Thanks for bringing us back to language. I can see how you're thinking about all of these issues. There's always sort of entangled in these questions around language. I want to come to a point that you make in the book about our need to move beyond what you called old-fashioned notions of collective identity. So obviously it's a book that's very much interested in self-fashioning and self-expression, particularly for people who've been denied the space to do that. I guess I'm interested in how those ideas of fabs self-fashioning fit alongside more progressive ideas about collective identity.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“your family, your religion, instead of wonder about whether penguins can fly or why trees grow upwards, it can become a very Ask yourself Is there any emotion, any phenomena, any feelings I have experienced, seen or perceived that don't have any word in any language that I know of?”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Might not in any way be true, but then we are living in the illusion of we are the same when in fact we're not so learn how to look at the world through radically different eyes is I believe a beautiful pursuit since it does allow us to have a great understanding of the world. And I think you're suggesting that we need to be willing to make ourselves uncomfortable in order to do that rather than sort of staying in oppositions and projecting. We need to be able to do something more radical. And also I would advocate that for some people it is a radical act to learn how to look at the world through your own eyes because when you are up in a culture when you are being looked at when you from a very young age are trained to answer the questions of others about your hair your skin.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eyes and to look at myself through their perspective. And I could understand certain things that I did not understand before it can really widen your horizon. And I'm not saying that we should all learn how to look at the world through hateful people's eyes. What I'm rather advocating for is to create our own tools and bridges to look at the world through someone else's eyes rather than just trying to impose our perspective onto someone else because this is also what this need for this desire for proximity as a tool of empathy does because we don't want to leave our perspective and impose our perspective onto others which”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We think in order to be respectful or to behave, to generate justice, we need to be able to empathize with everybody and how this might be problematic given that empathy is so dependent on similarity and proximity. Yes, and I think the beauty of developing one's own tools of empathy is to stretch yourself to a point where you might be able to reach a point where you can look at yourself. So to me, one of the trainings I involuntarily did was when I was confronted with hate. And I really did want to understand why they would view me in a certain way and certain manner, and it was a painful process, but a very beautiful process at the same time because I came to see the world through very different.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they still are not satisfied with the answer. So you give another answer and another answer and another answer. And at one point you end up saying he or she gives me financial stability, which is definitely not the reason why you are with your partner, but you end up saying that because in that language that is the only satisfactory answer that will make someone else understand it and then they will say and you will be for a brief moment maybe a relief that they finally understood you just to realize that you've given an answer that is not accurate. I was also thinking about this in relation to empathy and maybe they're also being a pressure to make one empathize with the other, if you like and the way that empathy is such a sort of strong currency in our cultures where”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or to make everything completely transparent. I mean, this especially becomes a problem when you translate into a language that is not well equipped for what you want to translate. So if you want to translate religiosity into a secular language that does not have the is not well equipped to encompass that you end up changing what you want to translate in a fundamental way. So the example I give in the book is like trying to explain to someone who doesn't understand the concept of love why you are with your partner and then you give all these different explanations because you don't want to just translate but you also want to be understood and with that expectation what happens is that you give one answer and it's not really sufficient for this person.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Progressive and democratic, and how do we sometimes misuse these two to legitimize entire wars? I would say that naming and categorizing is a very powerful tool and unfortunately often misuse as a form of oppression. I'm wondering if we could come back to one of the things that we started talking about earlier, which is the idea that maybe some things can't always be translated or shouldn't always be translated. There's a great moment in your book where you're asking what things are lost when they're translated into purely secular language. And I'm fascinated in these questions about these questions because I sort of philosopher of religion by training. But I think there's something incredibly powerful about resisting the pressure to translate everything.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you think we are so fixated on categorizing things? I mean, historically, this is how we created dominion, right? This is how our respective countries felt legitimized to travel into other places on planet Earth and call these places theirs simply because they gave those places a new name by ignoring the perspectives of those people who lived there before, of indigenous people, by naming we have created power over nature and other human beings and we do that to this day. In academia our knowledge production is a tool of power over others who is deemed free, who is deemed”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I'm advocating for is not to say, okay, everyone has to be labelled so that they can feel how it's like to suffocate and those labels. But what I'm actually advocating for is to understand that those labels are just tools like those words we use when we describe nature. We use different colors. And these color names, right, they are just names we use to describe certain parts of the spectrum of colors because we also know that you can have very elaborate discussions on whether color is green or blue or whether it's orange or yellow. So these tools aren't simply tools.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of a sudden, instead of doing what he wanted to do, he is now busy trying to prove that he is not like those negative stereotypes around his category that he's not sexist, not racist. All of a sudden, simply because now he's being labelled, he leads a different life instead of being an individual, he's not busy, trying to prove that he's not what they think he is. So for the first time maybe in his life, he experiences what it feels like to suffocate in a glass cage, and he only experienced that though in that very room, so physically and time wise limited, only in that brief moment, that small space on this planet Earth, he experienced something that all of the other people I had shared the stage with didn't know any different for their whole lives.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because now, maybe for the first time in his life, this person who has been regarded an individual was suddenly seen as a representative of maybe then I intervened and explained what had happened in this room. This person, this old white man, all of a sudden, maybe for the first time in his life, experiences what it feels like to stand in front of another person, and then a wall is being pulled between you and this other person, and this person is unable to see you anymore. You speak, but you can't be heard. Maybe for the first time in its life he knows what it feels like to be seen as the representative of. All of a sudden, instead of doing the things he wanted to do, he is now busy trying to understand what the other people he is now being put into the same category are doing, why they are doing this, trying to produce knowledge around this, trying to explain himself”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who profit it most from this law, from this act since they would if they were subjected to ageism, be quite successful in their claims and would get sort of at court were quite successful with this and that they highly benefited from this anti-discrimination act. And people in the audience were quite appalled by this because they didn't think of that particular group when discussing anti-discrimination act and then someone raised their arm. It was an old white man and he expressed his discomfort about the way people were talking about old white men in this room and then the discussion got even more heated and I sat on stage and was quite amused to see a new element.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These things are being scrutinized and analysed, and those people allow that scrutiny, that kind of dehumanizing inspection to happen because they believe that at the end of this, they will be granted freedom. But at the end of this inspection, they are introduced into a new, slightly larger glass cage that has been now adjusted based on the answers they gave throughout the inspection. And some are then happy in these slightly larger glass cage and others run against those glass cage balls on their very first day. So I presented this analogy at this conference and then something interesting happened together with me on the stage was a professor of law. And she talked about the anti-discrimination act in Germany and how old white men were amongst the groups of”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the Museum of Language, curate it in these glass cages, and then they run against those glass cage walls. And because they don't fit to the category they've been sort of put into. And that causes pain. So they now only walk maximum distance to the definition of their category and degenerate into caricatures of themselves into stereotypes. Others, however, keep walking against those glass cage walls. They create cracks. Their foreheads start bleeding and they almost make their way out. But then the inspection begins. The unlabelled one to understand the labeled. Why don't you fit your catchgree and this person is now being analyzed every inch of their body there being the texture of their skin, their hair, the way they live and love”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the unlabelled can walk freely through this museum, and their privilege becomes even more evident when we look at the second type of people in this museum of language and those are the labelled labelled are the people who in one way or another are different considered to be perceived to be different than the unlabelled and the unlabeled want to understand the labelled but not as individuals but as a category as a whole so they give them a label and that label creates a category a glass cage in the Museum of Language and a definition a definition based on the things unlabelled people find interesting about the labeled and this definition defines the spaciousness of this glass cage in the Museum of Language so some people”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The book and I got into an argument because I wanted to stick to my deadline and the book came up with this analogy. And so in that time while we were debating, I was invited to a conference on justice and law. And on my way there I saw Friend, who is a lawyer and I talked to him about this and he said not only should I write it down but I should also present it at this conference. So I went there, did that and something really interesting happened. I'm going to share with you what happened in a minute but maybe quickly to roughly explain what this Museum of Language is. So the Museum of Language is an invitation to imagine language like a physical space.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So one of the other limits or threats to dialogue that you raise in the book is, I suppose, the burden of labor placed on certain kinds of people, marginalized people, to explain themselves or to translate themselves. And you give us this useful distinction between the labelled and the unlabeled, so the labeled who are people who are marginalized usually by virtue of their or perceptions of their race, sex, gender, sexuality or class, and often reduced to their label and not seen as individuals. And then the unlabeled who seem to sort of pass freely in language without being reduced to these types. In the book, I actually there's an anecdote I'd like to show if we do have the time. So I did not plan to write that kind of analogy. And, you know, like I said earlier, I wrote with a lot of questions.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It makes dialogue a disagreement straight from the start rather than us thinking, as you say, about the complementarity, I suppose, of those different perspectives. Yes, I mean, people are rightly advocating for dialogue, but you can't be in a dialogue with a person who is not ready to listen because they are so full of their absolutism. So that becomes a crucial element. Is there an understanding for one's limitedness? And if there isn't, if there is a lack of humility, you can't have a sincere dialogue.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are the alternative ways to implement peace and security in a society rather than criminalizing certain people and actions? And we don't even come to the point of asking one, two or three because we're stuck at the point of who speaks the real truth. And the very same dynamic we can see with discussions and debates on sexism, climate change, and climate crisis, as well as poverty and the economic crisis and racism. So to overcome that in our public discourse, we need to learn to contextualize and to create a space where you can only enter through some form of understanding for your limitedness. Yeah, I mean, it does seem clear that this focus on one truth seems to be rendering actual dialogue impossible.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To use it in practice, for instance, would mean if we were to debate the institution of police, to some this institution means security and peace and order and to other people the very same institution means threat, racism, murder. These very contradictory perspectives are simultaneously true. What happens in the current public discourse is that we ask who speaks the real truth unquote, so they have to each enter the public domain with absolutism and win the audience over, but we should actually do is bring these perspectives together. That means if this institution is not able to provide peace and safety and security for all, one, how can it do is it able to do it? Three.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say elephants are thin, hairy animals, and another person will say elements are heavy, leathery animals, and all of those perspectives are simultaneously true, although contradictory. The moment one of these perspectives is being regarded or is being seen as the universal objective neutral perspective onto the world, we will not only oppress all the other perspectives, but we will also miss the opportunity to understand what there really is.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In our political discourse is that we are incentivized to pretend we have the full answer and to enter the stage with some form of absolutism. And then we encourage and incentivize people to fight and be in a battle over who speaks the real truth and then win over the audience rather than to actually truly listen. And that doesn't mean both Saidism, what I actually want to advocate for is maybe it helps to use an example from Indian philosophy, but it's also very common in many philosophical and religious traditions, and that is the image of this dark room. And in this dark room, there's a huge elephant, and then people are invited in to describe what an elephant is. And some will say elephants are soft lung animals.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When your flesh is being cut through and then we expect from those people to be calm and give reasonable responses and all of that and then civility becomes a form of dehumanization by forcing people to not react in the most human way and that is to yell, to cry and pain to show emotions. So I think that is a question worthwhile asking, is anyone lying on the table at the moment as we speak? But I've also come to understand that we should what one of the elements I saw as part of us having a destructive culture in our”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when we should perhaps step away from the table and decide not to engage, you know, what are those moments when we should do that? I think one of those moments are when we hopefully soon enough, realize that not all participants of that discourse are sitting at the table, but some are lying on the table and we cut through their flesh and analyze and wonder curiously explore their humanity by cutting through their flesh. So anytime the very existence of people are in question and are debated, these are the debates we should not engage in. And that's also, I think, one of the, when we talk about civility, everyone is asking for civility and I'm very much in favor of that, but sometimes it is impossible to speak in civility.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Department, and there's a tree, but it's quite alone, as in it's surrounded by a little fence and then there's stones everywhere. So there are no other trees close by. And for some reason, we do think we give life and we do allow things to be there when in fact sometimes we don't do the opposite and just to wonder what kind of story this tree would tell about this department and all the people passing it by and that we are being perceived by the things we deem to be merely objects. Yeah, absolutely. I mean one of the things that struck me was your book, it's a book about dialogue, but it's also about the limitations of dialogue in lots of different ways. So it's about learning when dialogue is possible and productive.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's beauty in every language, even if it's only spoken by nine people. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when I was reading that part of that book, it did make me reflect on sort of the anthropocentrism that is embedded in so many of our languages and the ways in which that informs our attitudes towards things like climate crisis. And I don't know if you know for it, but there's a Dutch scholar called Ava Meyer who's written a book called When Animals Speak, which is talking about the ways in which we assume that animals are silent, but actually we are silencing the languages that they are speaking and we need to think of new ways of facilitating communication rather than just not listening. Yes, and it has changed the way I walk through the world. I mean, just imagining right now I'm sitting in an office and looking out there into, you know, in Cambridge and I'm looking out to the front yard of the...”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this language is spoken by very few people, but that does not devalue its unique perspective quite the contrary. And a lot of privilege in today's world is connected to the audience you will gain through speaking a certain language, the money you will be able to make by speaking a certain language. And this is how we have come to value languages, not only culture and heritage, but also economic power in today's world that has led to many people, for instance. teach their children Chinese so that they might be able to do business with that part of the world. So this is how privileges also change. But this language is a beautiful example that”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“an understanding of how little I have covered with the very few languages I speak. One of the languages that inspired me most while writing this book was the language of Potawatomi, a language spoken by an indigenous tribe in the north of the US in Oklahoma and today's Oklahoma, a language whose speakers were subjected to a genocide and a language that is only spoken by very few people and at one point Robin Walmar, who is part of this group, she describes how there are only nine fluent speakers of this language. And the beauty of this language is that their grammar not only encompasses the perspective of us humans, But they have various pronouns for insects, water, mountains, plants, flowers, trees.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To your multilingualism, which is something that sort of again comes in and out of focus in the book. And I think one of the really striking things that you say is when you talk about how some kinds, some languages are more valorized than others and some kinds of multilingualism are more valorized than others. And you frame multilingualism as a reminder that there's no one particular way of naming or describing or categorizing that's absolute and that multilingualism can teach us something about what not to do with language, I suppose. I think the moment you speak more than one language, you understand that the world can look very differently and then you travel through Wales. And to me, this did create some sense of humbleness in me as in not knowing what there is still to explore.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Curiosity means to be allowed to be and then to explore from where you stand and then walk through the world and try and understand it looking through someone else's eyes and connect the dots so to me it was also very empowering moment to then say because that to me is speaking to be allowed to curiously explore rather than having to answer what others have imposed on me as knowledge I have to have simply because of the projections they have onto me so I must say I really do enjoy this and I don't want to ever give that up although I know it's a lot easier to fulfill that role of you know saying the things that expected of you to say so yeah I think curiosity is a very empowering element to anyone who is marginalized you you made a brief reference”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By writers who already know what they're going to say and just sort of write that down, whereas I have things I want to understand and this is how I approach it. And also, but I think that makes the book feel really alive. I think, you know, you can feel that when you're reading it, the sense of you're working through some of these questions and you're open to different sort of ways of navigating them. Yes, and I also really enjoy connecting dots that weren't connected before and really curiously wonder. And I think this is also one of the things that we are being robbed of in the political discourse. Only some people are allowed curiosity, some others are forced into the role of having to answer to be responsible for, to be representatives of.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and if we learn how to use it rather than just imitate the way people have been using this tool before us I think we will be able to break out of that sort of cycle and that to me was the answer to this question it is possible but it takes a lot of courage a lot of pain sometimes and maybe years and years and you might not live to see the outcome but certainly there will be some change and you talk about sort of learning about language in that way learning about how to inhabit it differently in the process of writing the book so is there something about the process of writing that that sort of sped up that that learning for you I was having this conversation with a few other writers as well because I did not write this book with answers but with questions so I'm always quite impressed”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think is a very thin but fundamental difference if we see language as a building that is ours and can be changed by all of us, although it is quite, you know, hard at one point and has walls that can hurt us, rooms where we can suffocate, we do also have the tools at hand to open doors, create new windows, tear down walls and build new extensions and work on this building so that it allows us to be and live in there and inhabit that space, inhabit that language. And that only works if we don't just imitate the movements through this building, but realize that we do have the tools to change this, that language is a tool.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm paraphrasing him, but he like merely write us before and after him was struggling with this very question too, working and writing in a language that also dehumanized people like him that did not have words to describe his experience, his perception of the world. So as an Afro American writer, homosexual writer who left the US in the sixties to live in Paris, in France and exile and he thought a lot about this question and in one text he writes about this relationship to the English language and he says yes it might be the language's fault that it doesn't carry words to carry the weight of my experience but he says it might also be my fault because I've never learned to use language but only learnt to imitate it”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things I'd like you to talk a bit more about is the way you talk about the way you think about the duality of language and this tension between language is something which is incredibly generative and illuminating and has all of this potentially in lots of different ways and can be really reductive and really limiting. And that's something that sort of weaves right through the book. I wonder if you could sort of talk us through that, maybe give us some examples. This was a question that actually was one of the guiding questions throughout the book because I did want to find out can I exist in a language I was not meant to speak in but be spoken about.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes when a book is being translated and I've done translation work before, the thoughts are also transformed and speaking and being feeled just like the perfect fit. And yes, it is a lot more active, but I think in German Sprechen wouldn't work because Sein is a more static thing than Sprechen, which would be a lot more active. So there is some coherence and the German title and some coherence in the English title. So it work really well. It's one of the wondrous things about translation.”
2022-07-04 · Intelligence Squared · On Speaking and Being: The Power of Words, with Kübra Gümüsay · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT