Wir können uns nicht in sie finden
"If a lion could speak, we couldn't understand him" (Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, könnten wir ihn nicht verstehen). Wittgenstein writes this sentence in his Philosophical Investigations (part II, xi). It appears in a sprawling, fragmented reflection on understanding other life forms. It appears right after a longer passage where Wittgenstein distinguishes two forms of understanding people "in foreign lands with completely foreign traditions." It is possible that I speak the other's language fluently, even that I understand the language that the other uses in their own inner dialogues; and I still do not understand the other: "Wir können uns nicht in sie finden" (literally, we cannot find ourselves into them). Wittgenstein leaves one of philosophy's most profound insights in two short fragments: that there are two modes of "understanding," one of them is about the other's language or symbolic expression; one about "getting" the other, understanding what is at stake for them, what matter to them. Just understanding language does not guarantee understanding stakes. Xenolinguistics has never understood this fundamental difference. The entire enterprise is obsessed with searching for alien symbolization, when what they should really obsess about is: even if you could speak the alien's language fluently, you would not understand what drives them.
I. The Fantasy and Its Ground
There is something quietly comic about the Voyager golden record. Launched in 1977, it contains greetings in fifty-five languages, a selection of music ranging from Bach to Chuck Berry, the sound of wind and surf and a mother's first words to her newborn, mathematical and scientific diagrams, and images of human anatomy arranged with careful dignity. It was assembled by a committee of distinguished scientists and humanists, reviewed and approved by one of the most celebrated scientific communicators of the twentieth century, and sent into interstellar space as humanity's calling card to any intelligence that might one day intercept it.
What it does not contain is food, sex, pain, hunger, childbirth, defecation, illness, or the relentless metabolic labour through which human beings actually sustain themselves from one day to the next. It contains no record of what humans need in order to continue existing, no indication of what would destroy them, no image of the biological processes on which everything else depends. It is a document produced almost entirely at the level of symbolic articulation — a curated self-portrait of the species composed by and for the symbolic class, representing humanity as the symbolic class would wish to be seen. As a record of what is actually at stake in human life, it is virtually empty.
This is not a criticism of the individuals who assembled it. It is a structural diagnosis. The Voyager record is what happens when intelligent, well-intentioned people attempt to represent their species to an imagined alien audience without any theory of what makes human life possible in the first place. Absent such a theory, they default to what is most easily represented: symbols, numbers, images, music — the products of the most flexible and most detachable of human mediations. The ground of human life, the metabolic and reproductive stakes that organise everything else, disappears into the background, unremarked and unrecorded, precisely because it is so fundamental that it has ceased to appear as anything in particular.
The Voyager record is xenolinguistics in miniature. It encapsulates the core assumption of the entire field: that communication between intelligent species is primarily a problem of transmitting symbolic content across the gap between different coding systems. Get the code right, build the right bridge between symbol systems, and understanding will follow. The message is all that matters. The ground from which the message emerges is irrelevant.
This article argues that this assumption is not merely incomplete but structurally inverted. Language does not emerge despite the metabolic and reproductive ground of life; it emerges because of it, under specific conditions, as a solution to specific coordination problems that the metabolic and reproductive ground generates. Understanding what those conditions are, and what they imply for the possibility of communication across radically different forms of life, requires a thoroughgoing revision of what linguistics itself takes itself to be studying. That revision is what Living Value Theory makes possible.
II. What Language Is For
The dominant model of language in linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and popular imagination alike is what Living Value Theory calls transactive dualism: the view that language is a code through which already-formed subjects transmit information to one another. A speaker encodes a message, a channel carries it, a listener decodes it. Communication succeeds when the decoded message matches the encoded one. The entire project of formal linguistics, from Saussure's signifier-signified relation through Chomsky's generative grammar to the transformer architectures of contemporary AI, is built on variations of this picture. It is also the picture that makes xenolinguistics appear tractable. If language is code, then alien language is simply a more difficult code, requiring more ingenuity, more computing power, and more time.
The correction that Living Value Theory proposes is simple to state but difficult to absorb, because it cuts against assumptions so deeply embedded that they no longer appear as assumptions at all. Language is not a code through which subjects transmit information. It is one solution — historically specific, evolutionarily contingent, and structurally grounded — to the problem of coordinating life across absence. Life begins as embodied dwelling: a bounded metabolic process inseparable from a sustaining world. There is no organism first existing in itself and only then entering an environment; life begins as body-in-place, maintaining boundaries, regulating exchanges, remaining answerable to conditions that enable or disable its continuation. On this minimal ground, being-with emerges: coordinated plurality under conditions of shared risk and shared opportunity, where the fate of one body becomes bound up with the movements and responses of others. These three mediations — embodiment, dwelling, and being-with — constitute the basic architecture of animal life, and they already contain everything necessary for complex coordination, including the coordination of predators, migrants, parents, and offspring across enormous ranges of spatial and temporal scale.
What they cannot do is stabilize coordination across absence. A group of hunters moving through terrain together can coordinate through embodied attunement — through posture, gesture, gaze, and the subtle modulation of shared attention. But this coordination cannot survive the absence of co-presence. It cannot reach forward to anticipate what will happen next season, backward to preserve and transmit what worked last time, or laterally to organize action among members who are not currently together. Once the temporal and spatial scale of coordination expands beyond what immediate bodily co-presence can sustain, earlier mediations begin to strain.
This is the threshold. Not intelligence in the abstract, not sociality as such, not the capacity for thought or feeling or empathy — all of which are present in many forms of animal life without generating anything like human language. The threshold is reached when coordination must be stabilized across absent times, distant spaces, delayed returns, and persistent modifications of the environment. Multimateriality and multisymbolization co-emerged as the joint solution to this problem, because neither could solve it alone. A tool is already a symbolic object in the minimal sense that it embodies a classification, a purpose, a method of use; conversely, a symbol that coordinates action does so by referring to things that can be engaged, manipulated, and shared. Language emerges not as an autonomous achievement but as the coordination system for collective tool-making and tool-using — the capacity that allows one hunter to refer to what is not yet happening, to teach the novice what worked last year, to organize the group around a prey migration not yet visible.
This evolutionary account has a consequence that reverses the entire logic of xenolinguistics. If language emerges as a solution to the specific problem of coordinating life across absence, then understanding a language requires access not to its code but to the coordination problem it is solving. Not the symbolic surface, but the ground from which that surface emerges. And that ground is irreducibly metabolic and reproductive.
III. Metabolism and Reproduction as the Anchor of Stakes
The concept of stakes, developed in Living Value Theory through the mesocosmographic reading of Malinowski, names what must hold for life to continue. Two Native Points of View argues that anthropology has systematically developed Malinowski's demand for representational accuracy — grasp the native's point of view, render the world as others symbolically articulate it — while progressively neglecting his equally urgent demand to understand what concerns people most intimately, the hold which life has on them. Stakes are not what people say about their lives. They are what their lives depend on, what would cause their world to come apart if it failed, what is being protected from collapse in the ongoing, mostly pre-symbolic labour of mesocosmic coordination.
The deepest anchoring of stakes is metabolic and reproductive. This is not a reductive claim. It does not mean that cultural life, aesthetic experience, moral obligation, and spiritual practice are mere epiphenomena of biological function. It means something more structural: that whatever else stakes involve, they are ultimately grounded in and organised around the conditions that make life's continuation possible. Hunger, illness, shelter, attachment, vulnerability, the care of offspring, the management of threat — these are not topics of conversation. They are the conditions from which everything else that becomes a topic of conversation derives its urgency.
The evolutionary account supports this with precision. The five mediations did not emerge as a set of equally weighted domains that happened to coincide in the human animal. They emerged under metabolic and reproductive pressure, as successive solutions to the problem of maintaining coordinated life under increasingly complex conditions. Embodiment is the site of metabolic process itself: the maintenance of a bounded living process through which all other coordination occurs. Being-with deepens under conditions of shared danger and shared opportunity, intensified by the demands of sexual reproduction, parental care, and intergenerational transmission. Dwelling is the stabilization of embodied life in a sustaining world, organized by the distribution of food, shelter, and conditions of safety. Multimateriality and multisymbolization co-emerge as the joint solution to the problem of extending metabolic and reproductive coordination across absence.
This means that what language is originally about — in the precise evolutionary sense — is food, danger, offspring, and the organization of the group around the conditions of survival and reproduction. Not in a crude sense, but in the sense that these are the pressures under which the coordination capacity that language serves was selected. The earliest symbolic systems did not emerge to discuss philosophy. They emerged to coordinate hunting seasons, to transmit techniques for food preparation and storage, to mark territories and resources, to organize the care of dependent offspring, to navigate the complex demands of being-with under conditions of scarcity and threat.
The Wittgenstein correction that Living Value Theory proposes follows directly. Wittgenstein's claim that a talking lion could not be understood — because understanding requires a shared form of life — moves in the right direction but does not go far enough. What language requires is not a shared form of life in general but a shared field of concern: and at the deepest level, a shared field of metabolic and reproductive stakes. The lion and the human being do not share such a field. They do not eat the same food, they do not reproduce in the same way, they do not face the same threats or rear offspring through the same processes. Even if a lion produced grammatically impeccable English sentences, those sentences would not hook into any shared coordination problem. They would float, syntactically coherent but mesocosmically empty.
The point extends beyond Wittgenstein in a further direction. Even if the lion could talk, there may be no shared domain of concern that makes talk necessary. Human conversation becomes alive not when grammar is shared but when a common problem is pressing — a problem that cannot be resolved through immediate bodily co-presence and requires the stabilization of coordination across absence. Where such problems do not exist, language has no purchase. The capacity for symbolic articulation may be present, but it will not be recruited for communication in any deep sense, because there is nothing at stake that requires it.
This corrects a widespread assumption about the universality of communication as a drive. Humans do not communicate because they are social, or because they are intelligent, or because they have a language faculty. They communicate, in the specifically symbolic sense of coordinating action across absence, because their form of life generates problems that cannot be solved without such coordination. Most forms of animal life on Earth — including enormously complex, highly social, and demonstrably intelligent forms — never generate those problems in sufficient density to produce language. Dolphins, whales, and elephants exhibit remarkably sophisticated coordination, but it remains primarily present-time, embodied, and locally organized. The absence of human-style language is not a deficit. It is a structural signature of a different relationship between coordination and absence.
IV. The Failure of Decoding
The implication for xenolinguistics is now visible. The field has been organised around the assumption that alien communication, if it exists, will take a form that can in principle be decoded: a signal with structure, a structure with grammar, a grammar with semantics, a semantics with meaning. The SETI programme searches for signals that differ from natural background noise in ways that suggest intentional organization. The astrolanguage Lincos was designed to communicate through mathematical and logical primitives assumed to be universal. Chomsky and his co-authors have speculated that the operation of merge — the basic syntactic capacity of universal grammar — might apply to all intelligent beings, providing a structural common ground for communication. All of these approaches share the same assumption: that communication is primarily a problem of symbolic structure, and that symbolic structure can be identified, decoded, and mapped without access to the mesocosmic ground from which it emerges.
Applied to xenolinguistics, this means that even a perfectly decoded alien signal would not constitute understanding. It would constitute a formal description of a symbolic surface — a mapping of patterns onto patterns — without any access to the coordination problem the signal was solving, the metabolic and reproductive ground from which it emerged, or the specific form of absence that made symbolic reference necessary in the first place. Decoding is not understanding. It is the production of a symbolic representation of a symbolic representation, with the original stakes invisible at both removes.
The failure of animal communication research illustrates this with uncomfortable clarity. Decades of rigorous work with cetaceans, corvids, great apes, and other highly intelligent species have not produced anything like translation. Not because the signals are too noisy or the researchers insufficiently skilled, but because the question is misdirected. Asking "what does a whale mean?" treats whale communication as a symbolic surface available for decoding. Living Value Theory redirects the question: how does the whale recursively mediate its multisensorial, relational, and symbolic being? What coordination problem is its vocalization solving? What is at stake for it in this specific acoustic environment, with these specific others, at this specific moment in the reproductive or foraging cycle?
These questions do not have easy answers. But they are the right questions, because they begin from the ground rather than the surface. And they have a decisive implication: the failure to decode whale communication is not a technical shortfall awaiting better methods. It is a structural signal that cetacean coordination does not take the form of detachable symbolic content that can be translated into human categories. Their communication is not a code we haven't cracked. It is a form of coordination-across-absence whose specific metabolic and reproductive ground we do not share, and whose symbolic surface — to the extent there is one — is therefore opaque to us not because it is encrypted but because we are not inside the stakes it is organizing.
If this is true of whales, with whom we share evolutionary history, biochemistry, embodied experience of gravity and temperature, and the basic mammalian template of social life and parental investment, it is true to a degree that strains comprehension of extraterrestrial life evolved under entirely different conditions.
V. The Malinowski Loop at Cosmic Scale
Two Native Points of View develops the argument that anthropology has systematically prioritized representation over stakes — the careful rendering of how people symbolically articulate their world over the more fundamental question of what is at stake in their lives. The trajectory runs from Malinowski's founding charter, which contained both demands but allowed the representational one to crowd out the coordinative one, through Geertz's narrowing of significance from consequence to meaning, through the Writing Culture moment's deepening of the representational turn, to the logical endpoint of Course's recent work, where the only thing seriously at stake is the anthropologist's own relationship to the impossibility of representing without violence.
This trajectory is not a story of individual failures. It is a structural consequence of what happens when symbolic articulation is treated as the primary object of inquiry. Multi-symbolism, as Discovering the Five Mesocosmic Mediations establishes, has no intrinsic failure mode. It can continue elaborating, complexifying, and self-reflexively examining its own operations indefinitely, without any internal signal that it has lost contact with the mesocosmic reality it was originally designed to illuminate. Representational anthropology became, at its endpoint, an extraordinary symbolic system for examining its own symbolic operations, with the actual coordination of human life increasingly remote from its concerns.
Xenolinguistics enacts the same trajectory at cosmic scale. It begins with a genuine and important question: is there other intelligent life in the universe, and if so, could we communicate with it? It then immediately narrows this question to its representational dimension: how would we decode such communication, what symbolic structures might be universal, what mathematical or logical primitives might provide common ground? The coordinative question — what would we actually be coordinating, what shared stakes could make such communication necessary and substantive — is either not asked at all or dispatched with brief optimism (surely intelligent beings will have similar interests to ours).
The Malinowski parallel is exact. Malinowski demanded both that anthropologists represent the native's point of view and that they understand the hold which life has on the native. Xenolinguistics demands, implicitly, both that we decode alien communication and that we understand what is at stake for alien beings in their form of life. The first demand has received enormous technical elaboration. The second has been progressively set aside, because it is harder, less tractable, and less amenable to the symbolic methods the field employs.
The consequences of this narrowing are visible in the field's characteristic failures. SETI has been searching for signals for more than sixty years without success. The standard interpretation is that this means either alien civilizations are rare, or they communicate on frequencies or through methods we have not yet considered, or they are not broadcasting in ways we can detect. Living Value Theory suggests a different interpretation: we may have been looking for the wrong thing entirely. We have been looking for symbolic content — for structured signals that resemble, in some formalizable respect, the products of a communication system. But if communication systems emerge from specific metabolic and reproductive coordination problems under specific conditions, then there is no reason to expect that other forms of life would produce the kind of detachable symbolic content we would recognize as a signal at all. They may be coordinating perfectly well across their own forms of absence using symbolic or proto-symbolic systems that bear no resemblance to the structured transmissions we are scanning for, because their coordination problems are nothing like ours.
VI. The Impossibility of Cosmic Esperanto
The dream of a universal language for interstellar communication — whether Lincos, mathematical primitives, or the logical structures of universal grammar — rests on an assumption that Living Value Theory identifies as one of the deepest expressions of symbolic overreach: the belief that symbolic systems can be designed to operate independently of the mesocosmic ground that gives them traction.
Every symbol achieves its purchase by referring to, organizing around, or mobilizing persistent things — hearths, caches, tools, paths, prey, offspring. Symbols gain their traction precisely because they can refer to and organize around material things that persist. Conversely, material things become socially operative because symbolic systems can coordinate action around them. The two mediations are not parallel developments; they are two faces of a single capacity to externalize coordination into persistent forms that carry meaning across time.
This means that there is no such thing as a freestanding symbol — a sign that carries meaning independently of the material and embodied ground that gives it traction. Mathematical abstractions appear freestanding, but they are not. They are the product of a species with specific embodied sensory capacities (vision, spatial orientation, manual dexterity), operating in a specific material world (bounded objects, countable discrete entities, spatial relationships), organized through specific being-with configurations (the transmission of technique across generations, the coordination of complex collective tasks), and facing specific coordination problems (the management of resources across time and space). The universality that mathematics appears to possess is real within the shared mesocosmic ground of all humans. It is not demonstrably universal beyond it.
The hope of xenolinguistics is that mathematics will provide a bridge precisely because it is the most detached, the most formally self-sufficient, the most apparently independent of any particular embodied or environmental ground. But this appearance of independence is itself an effect of the enormous shared mesocosmic background among humans. We do not notice how much of the mathematics we have produced is shaped by the specific mediational architecture of the human mesocosm — our embodied spatial cognition, our tools of inscription and calculation, our social practices of teaching and verification, our material world of bounded countable objects — because we all share that architecture, and shared background is invisible.
Beings whose embodiment, dwelling, being-with, and multimateriality diverge radically from ours might not converge on anything recognizable as number, quantity, or logical relation in our sense. They might not recognize our mathematical representations as about anything at all. And we would have no way of knowing, because we have no access to their mediational ground.
The point is not that communication is theoretically impossible but that it requires something the symbolic approach cannot provide: entry into shared coordination, access to common stakes, participation in the same field of what must hold. Without that, even a formally correct exchange of symbolic structures would remain what Discovering the Five Mesocosmic Mediations identifies as pure L3 activity: the production and manipulation of symbolic representations that are internally coherent but ontologically disconnected from the mesocosmic reality they would need to track to be genuinely meaningful.
The universal translator of science fiction is not just technologically naïve. It is, as Living Value Theory argues, ontologically incoherent. There is no code outside of recursive mediation. Translation is not the mapping of one code onto another. It is the achievement of sufficient shared mediational ground that the same coordination problems become recognizable from both sides. Without that shared ground — without, at minimum, overlapping metabolic and reproductive stakes that generate comparable forms of absence and comparable pressures toward symbolic coordination — translation has no foundation to stand on.
VII. Misunderstanding as the Only Honest Beginning
The recognition that communication requires shared stakes rather than shared code leads to a revaluation of misunderstanding that runs directly against the assumptions of xenolinguistics. The field treats misunderstanding as a problem to be solved: a gap in decoding competence, a mismatch between symbol systems, a technical failure awaiting better methods. Living Value Theory suggests something different: misunderstanding is not a failure of communication but the honest starting point of any genuine encounter across a real mediational gap.
When beings with genuinely different metabolic and reproductive stakes, different embodied sensory architectures, different dwelling conditions, different material worlds, and different symbolic systems encounter each other's communications, misunderstanding is not the obstacle to understanding — it is the evidence that there is a real difference to be understood. Perfect translation that somehow bypassed all of this would not be understanding at all. It would be the projection of one mediational structure onto another, the imposition of one coordination system's categories onto a different one's stakes. This is precisely what anthropology has done, at its worst, to the humans it studies. It is what xenolinguistics would inevitably do to any aliens it encountered.
What genuine encounter across a real mediational gap might look like is something that science fiction has explored more honestly than xenolinguistics has. The Heptapods of Arrival do not transmit information through their ink-gestalt writing; they operate with a different relationship to time, which means they inhabit a different form of dwelling, which means the stakes organised around past, present, and future are configured differently in their coordination. The Ariekei of Embassytown can only speak truth as they directly experience it, which means their being-with operates through a different symbolic architecture, requiring a different kind of shared presence for communication to occur at all. The plasma ocean of Solaris coordinates with the astronauts not through language at all but through the reconstruction of their deepest embodied memories — not communication in any symbolic sense but an intrusion into the metabolic and relational ground of their coordination.
Each of these fictional cases points toward what Living Value Theory identifies as the only genuine common ground available across radically different forms of life: not shared code, not shared grammar, not shared mathematics, but the structural fact that recursive beings — beings capable of registering misalignment and attempting to re-establish coordination — face a world that does not simply accommodate them. All recursive life is, at its most basic, oriented toward what is not yet settled, not yet resolved, not yet stabilized. This is askability: the capacity to be unsettled by conditions and to attempt a response, prior to any particular symbolic form that response might take.
Askability is genuinely universal in a way that grammar is not, because it is not a property of symbolic systems but of recursive life as such. Any being capable of registering misalignment — any being for whom something can go wrong, something can fail, something can press against the current state of coordination — participates in askability. But this universal ground is at the same time extraordinarily minimal. The fact that two beings are both unsettled, both oriented toward what is not yet resolved, provides a common structural position without providing any common content. Their forms of unsettledness might be so different — arising from such different metabolic and reproductive stakes, operating through such different mediational architectures — that the recognition of shared askability would produce not conversation but the mutual recognition of profound strangeness.
VIII. Why We Have Nothing to Talk About
The deepest implication of this argument can now be stated. Even if contact occurred, even if some degree of symbolic exchange were achieved, the question "what would we actually say to each other?" would remain radically open. And the honest answer is: almost certainly nothing, in any sense that would be recognizable as meaningful conversation.
Human conversation becomes substantive when it is anchored in shared stakes. The most alive conversations — the ones where language becomes a genuine medium for something rather than a surface exchange — are those in which a common problem is pressing, a common difficulty requires articulation, a shared tension needs to be resolved or at least named. This does not require that the stakes be identical. It requires that they overlap sufficiently that the same field of concern is active for both parties.
Among humans, this overlap is so pervasive that it is invisible. We share metabolic needs, reproductive biology, the basic architecture of embodied sensory experience, the fundamental conditions of dwelling on the same planet under the same physical constraints, and the basic being-with configurations of social life. Even across enormous cultural differences, these shared conditions provide a common ground of concern that makes substantive conversation possible. We can argue about justice because we both know what it is to be harmed. We can discuss beauty because we share embodied sensory architectures. We can grieve together because we both face mortality.
With aliens whose metabolism is radically different — who do not eat in our sense, do not reproduce in our sense, do not face illness or aging or death in our sense — this common background would not exist. We would not share the basic coordinate system of stakes from which human language derives its depth. We might achieve formal symbolic exchange: patterns matching patterns, structures mapping onto structures. But there would be nothing at stake in it, on either side, that would make it more than a curiosity.
The Voyager record, one more time. What it communicates perfectly is exactly what xenolinguistics assumes communication is: symbolic content transmitted across a gap. Images, sounds, mathematical relationships, the coordinates of the solar system. What it does not communicate, because it has no method for communicating it, is what it would take to understand any of it — the metabolic and reproductive stakes from which the symbolic content emerges, the coordination problems it is solving, the specific form of absence that makes human symbolic life necessary. An alien receiving the Voyager record and successfully decoding every symbol on it would know more about human L3 and L4 activity than any current human institution knows about cetacean communication. They would still have no idea what it means to be hungry, to want, to fear, to grieve, to love, to age, to die. They would have received the surface without the ground.
This is the 10/10 argument. Not that alien life cannot exist, or that communication is metaphysically impossible, or that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is worthless. The argument is more precise and more devastating: xenolinguistics has been organized around the wrong problem. It has treated communication as primarily a challenge of symbolic decoding when the deepest challenge is entirely different. It is whether two radically different forms of life could ever share enough of the metabolic and reproductive ground from which language emerges that the same coordination problems would press upon them, the same forms of absence would demand symbolic stabilization, and the same field of concern would make talk necessary and substantive.
The probability of that, given everything evolutionary biology, anthropology, and Living Value Theory tell us about why language emerged at all and what it requires to function, is not zero. But it is far smaller than the probability of successfully decoding a signal. And it is precisely the probability that xenolinguistics has never bothered to assess, because it is not a question about symbolic structure. It is a question about shared life.
IX. Toward an Honest Xenolinguistics
What would a xenolinguistics look like that took this argument seriously?
It would begin not with signal detection but with the evolutionary analysis of the conditions under which symbolic communication emerges. It would ask not "what symbolic structures might be universal?" but "what coordination problems generate the need for symbolic reference to absence, and under what metabolic and reproductive conditions do such problems arise?" It would study, with genuine rigor, the range of coordination solutions that life on Earth has produced and the conditions under which none of them required anything like human language — not because the life forms involved are less complex or less sophisticated, but because their coordination problems do not generate the need for symbolic stabilization across absence in the same way.
It would take animal communication seriously not as a set of codes awaiting better decryption but as a set of coordination systems whose relationship to metabolic and reproductive stakes must be understood on their own terms. The failure to "decode" whale communication is not a technical failure; it is a profound datum about the nature of their coordination and the conditions under which it operates. Understanding that datum — not transcribing it, not decoding it, but understanding the coordination problem it is solving — would be one of the most important advances in understanding what language is and what it requires.
It would be honest about misunderstanding. The Malinowski lesson applies directly: just as anthropologists have spent a century refining their methods of representational accuracy while progressively neglecting the question of stakes, xenolinguistics has invested enormous technical sophistication in the problem of decoding while neglecting the question of what would make a decoded message about anything that matters. An honest xenolinguistics would treat misunderstanding not as a failure of method but as the primary datum — the evidence that real mediational difference exists and must be respected rather than engineered away.
Above all, it would be honest about its speculative character. As Two Native Points of View argues in a different context, some things matter precisely because they are protected from representation. The stakes of another form of life — the hold that life has on alien beings, to adapt Malinowski's language — may not be available for representation at all without distortion. An honest xenolinguistics would hold that possibility at its centre, rather than assuming that successful decoding would dissolve it.
The cosmos may contain other recursive beings. They may register misalignment, attempt repair, orient themselves toward what is not yet settled. In that minimal sense, askability may be a shared condition. But the specific forms of absence that make symbolic communication necessary, the specific metabolic and reproductive stakes that anchor the concern which makes language substantive — these arise from evolutionary histories, environmental conditions, and coordination pressures that we cannot assume to overlap with ours in any significant degree.
We are already surrounded by radically different forms of life on this planet, forms that are recursive in the relevant sense, that register misalignment and attempt to re-establish coordination, that produce vocal and gestural and chemical communications of extraordinary complexity. We have spent decades attempting to decode these communications. What we have learned is not how to translate them. We have learned, slowly and with considerable resistance, that translation was never the right question. The right question was always: what is at stake for them, what coordination problem are they solving, what form of absence makes this communication necessary?
Until xenolinguistics learns to ask that question — about cetaceans first, then about whatever might be sending signals from elsewhere — it will continue to search for messages in a space where the preconditions for messages in any meaningful sense may simply not exist. The Voyager record is out there, carrying humanity's best symbolic self-portrait into the void. It contains almost nothing of what humans actually need, fear, want, or grieve over. If it is ever received and decoded, the beings who decode it will know that somewhere in the galaxy a species produces music and mathematics. They will have no idea that we get hungry.