Everyone is welcome to share ideas and experiences and everyone’s contribution is important. We create the future together!

If you are interested to present something or have ideas for the event that you would like to share please let us know. There will be some space for seminars and also open space where everyone who would like  can share and lead a dialogue/conversation or activity in the spirit of the metaphor of systemic revolution are welcome to do this.

The event will be held in Cambridge at the Cambridge Professional Development Centre Foster Road, Cambridge, CB2 9JL. The fee will cover the rent of the venue and everyone is recommended to book their own hotel. We will be able to recommend places close to the venue and if you would like to stay close to other systemic friends.

The e-mail address to the virtual office is summer2012@systemicgathering.org

More information will follow soon!

Date:    Friday 12 and Saturday 13 of October 10.00am – 4.30pm

Registration and coffee from 9.30am for prompt start

You are welcome to attend one or two days

Venue: The Brockway Room, Conway Hall

25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL.

Cost:     £35 per day including tea & coffee

Working within a Systemic-Social Constructionist Approach, Adriana will introduce key CBT principles and techniques. Through detailed examples from practice we will address combining Systemic and CBT approaches and when and how to select one or other approach in practice.

DAY 1:

• Creating a context for working with these two approaches
• Tenets and techniques of CBT
• Using CBT to address Phobias  

DAY 2:

• Using CBT to enhance systemic practice
• New ideas for Hypothesizing
• Useful tasks for clients to undertake between sessions
• Different punctuations on relational problems
• CBT with Anger Management

• For flier and to book a place email
• systemic-cbtworkshop@hotmail.co.uk
• Systemic CBT Workshop Flier

Click above for further information and the booking form.

Self-Other-Reflexivity:  How our bodily responses and professional and personal stories affect conversations

Saturday 9^th June 2012, 10.00am – 4.30pm, Conway Hall, London £35

Self-other-reflexivity involves the to-and-fro process in conversations, giving us skills to explore the usefulness or otherwise of ‘common sense’ assumptions, ‘grand narratives’ and professional or personal prejudices.

When we meet another person we respond with our whole being: physically and emotionally as well as becoming entangled in mutually influential stories. But we are not equal: professionals are in positions of power and have more influence on people who come to us for help than the other way round.

Reflexivity shows the importance of exploring how people’s stories resonate with our own narratives, knowledge and experiences, rather than focusing primarily on clients’ stories. We can use these resonances to form a bridge between us.

In this workshop we will explore with Fran and Mark how these approaches invite us to use rigor and imagination, courage and playfulness and appropriate humour. How willing are we to accept the invitation, take risks, make mistakes and challenge our dearly-held ideas?

Fran will share some of the theory-practice from her book Reflexivity in Therapeutic Practice and Mark will describe how he uses reflexive questions in his work with foster carers.

Mindfulness Workshop 2: Exploring the Connective Path of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy

Here’s more information: http://www.senspero.com/courses.html

http://www.systemicgathering.org/2011-gathering/2011-pictures

You are warmly invited to a workshop facilitated by

Karen Partridge

entitled

The Medicine Bundle

Honouring stories of hope and belonging in doing therapy together

Friday 9^th September 2011, 9.30 to 4.30

The Brockway Room, Conway Hall. 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL.

Nearest Underground: Holborn

A Medicine Bundle is a sacred belonging in Native American culture in which objects and artefacts are gathered together to symbolise the spirit of the tribe. We will explore the construction of a medicine bundle as a metaphor for the process of therapy and the contents of the bundle as a means to honour valued stories of self and relationship in the construction of preferred futures. During the workshop Karen will share her bundle with us and you will have a chance to begin to construct your own.

Karen is a consultant clinical psychologist and systemic psychotherapist currently working at the Tavistock  Clinic, London and in private practice.  Karen trains and supervises health and social care professionals across a wide range of settings and client groups. She works with children, families, couples, individuals and staff groups in hospitals and in the community. Karen’s interests include discourses in training and supervision, reflexivity and positioning, art, music, Buddhism, mindfulness and the application of systemic ideas in organisational contexts.

Cost £35 for the day including tea & coffee

To book your place please send your cheque with your name, work context and email address to Miriam Richardson, River House, Bromham Park, Bedford MK43 8HH

Please indicate if a receipt is required

Please contact ClaireBarber-Lomax@talktalk.net with any  queries you may have.

We hope you can join us and look forward to seeing you

]]> http://www.systemicgathering.org/2011/07/new-friends-of-kcc-workshop-9th-september-2011/feed/ 0 http://www.systemicgathering.org/2011/07/gergen-confluence-and-his-turbulent-relational-ontology-the-constitution-of-our-forms-of-life-within-ceaseless-unrepeatable-intermingling-movements/ http://www.systemicgathering.org/2011/07/gergen-confluence-and-his-turbulent-relational-ontology-the-constitution-of-our-forms-of-life-within-ceaseless-unrepeatable-intermingling-movements/#comments Sat, 23 Jul 2011 10:22:03 +0000 John Shotter http://www.systemicgathering.org/?p=559 Continue reading →]]> “Let us envision, then, a process of relational flow in which there is both continuous movement toward constraint, on the one hand, and an openness to the evolution of meaning on the other” (Gergen, 2009, p.46).

“What we traditionally view as ‘independent’ elements – the man with the bat, the bags, the men in the field – are not truly independent. They are all mutually defining… Alone they would [all] be virtually without meaning. It is when we bring all these elements into a mutually defining relationship that we can speak about ‘playing baseball’. Let us then speak of the baseball game as a confluence, a form of life in this case that is constituted by an array of mutually defining ‘entities’” (Gergen, 2009, p.54).

Introduction: On the way toward Relational Being

Our basic way of being in the world, it seems to me (and to Ken Gergen too), is to be constantly in motion, we live continuously in the midst of change. The image – of our living our lives while embedded in the turbulent flow of a number of intermingling activities – has clearly been in the (sometimes acknowledged, and sometimes unacknowledged) background to Ken Gergen’s thinking for really quite some time. Long ago, in his paper, Social Psychology as History (Gergen,1973), for instance, he noted that: “Unlike the natural sciences, [social psychology] deals with facts that are largely nonrepeatable and which fluctuate markedly over time. Principles of human interaction cannot be readily developed over time because the facts on which they are based do not remain stable” (p.310). Indeed, in the introduction to a volume collecting his early works together (Gergen, 1993), he commented: “The vast body of psychological theory to which my [early] studies were directed seemed strangely alien – mechanical, lifeless and all too coherent. Most problematic was the romance with fixedness, with a view of human action as reliably determined by a relatively fixed set of internal dispositions, mechanisms or structures… [Whereas] I was struck with the degree to which my own actions were embedded within local and ever-changing contexts” (pp.xi-xii).

In other words, Ken took it then, as he has done so off and on ever since, that, ontologically, the very nature of the realities within which we live our lives and have our identities are of an unstable and continually changeable nature. If there are any stabilities within them, they are of a dynamic kind, like the eddies and vortices occurring within a ceaseless flow of intermingling activities If this is so, then quite what the task of an academic psychology can be – if it cannot be that of discovering the already fixed inner mechanisms determining our behaviour – becomes something of a puzzle to us. What can it teach us that we don’t already know?

In The Saturated Self (1991), a later but what we can now see as an interim book, the puzzle intensified. For in it, he noted with concern that: “With the multiplication of relationships also comes a transformation in the social capacities of the individual… A multiphrenic condition emerges in which one swims in ever-shifting, concatenating, and contentious currents of being” (1991, pp.79-80). In other words, it has now, seemingly, become impossible for us to join up all our lived experiences into an integrated, harmonious, bounded whole – as in E.C. Escher’s drawings, every attempt leaves us with an unbridgeable gap and a strange feeling that there is ‘a something more’ that always eludes our grasp: “The argument is not that our descriptions of the self are objectively shaky, but that the very attempt to render accurate understanding is itself bankrupt… Whatever we are is beyond telling” (1991, p.82). Thus he ends this book by leaving the multiphrenic self with the task of encouraging forms of dialogue that “breakdown existing structures of language and enable disparate discourses to commingle” (1991, p.257).

In Relational Being (Gergen, 2009) he calms down. We can, it seems, write and talk in relation to our own human activities from within our performing of them in a worthwhile way. The phrenetic tone of critique and bewilderment in the midst of complexity in the previous book gives way to the articulation of new ways to ‘go on’: “I do not intend this work as an exercise in theory,” he says. “I am not interested in creating a work fit only for academic consumption… The concept of relational being should ultimately gain its meaning from our [everyday] ways of going on together” (p.xv, my emphasis). For, as he now sees it, we not only can live with the incompleteness, its still-forming nature, we do in fact live within its ‘not yet finished’ nature every day without too much trouble. Indeed, the more we can become engaged, immersed in the flow, the more we can feel ‘in touch’, feel that we are ‘where the action is’; we can even come to feel ‘at home’ within the still emerging incompleteness. And the concept of relational being is itself, as he himself notes, a still open and still unfinished concept that – like a living as opposed to a dead metaphor – gains its meaning from its use in a particular circumstance, and will continue to gain its meaning in terms of its future uses.

Thus, as he suggested in his History paper, rather than seeking theories that could be ‘put into practice’ with the aim of the “prediction and control of behavior… what the field can and should provide is research informing the inquirer of a number of possible occurrences, thus expanding his sensitivities and readying him for more rapid accommodation to environmental change” (p.317, my emphasis). To this end he offers the “concept of relational being” as what I will call a descriptive concept (see Shotter, 2009), a concept which can function in Wittgenstein’s (1953) sense as a “reminder” (no.127), which can work to draw our attention to specific events and features occurring around us in the background that might be of possible importance that would otherwise pass us by unnoticed.

And this, of course, is his original starting point – from within his own embedding in turbulent situations and the impasse of the alien fixedness of psychology’s implicit ontological assumptions – but he now relates himself to it with a quite different orientation and a very different set of questions. As T.S. Eliot (1944) put it in Little Gidding: “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time” – and evidently, Ken is no longer seeking the clear answers to theory driven questions required by professional academic psychologists. Indeed, he now goes so far as to suggest: “Let us suspend the quest for conclusive answers to such questions as ‘What is relationship’, ‘what are its basic components’, or ‘How does it function?’ Let us avoid the temptation of clarity. ‘To know that…’ is the end of the conversation, and when conversation is terminated so is the genesis of meaning. And, if there is no ‘final understanding’ about relationship, then we may welcome all attempts to articulate its character” (p.374).

Indeed, here Ken is echoing Wittgenstein’s (1965) remark that such questions of the type: What is…X…?, often “produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can’t point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it)” (p.1). In other words, we are in the grip of a tendency that is inherent in the very substance-oriented nature of all Western languages – their primary use of nouns – a tendency that makes them ill-disposed to describing those realities primarily characterized by continuity, process, and becoming, and which continually (mis?)lead us into thinking that what is new for us must, simply, be made from what is already in existence. Whereas, as we shall see, each new relationship, each new meeting gives rise, as Garfinkel (1967) puts it, to “another first time” (p.9), and thus to a need to arrive at yet another uniquely new understanding of what actually is going on between us (and the rest of our surroundings) as in fact a socially crafted achievement (2009, p.103).

Thus, what is novel for us really is a novel creation, an emergent, something uniquely new that has never existed before and not just a re-arranging of already existing entities. Thus, instead of patterns and repetitions, we must become oriented in our inquiries toward uniqueness, toward the noticing and describing of singularities.

But this is not the only radical change that our being immersed in an “ongoing confluence of relating” (2009, p.304) demands of us; we now need to explore what our thinking must be like if it has to take place in a ‘fluid space’, a space in which there are no fixed and finished ‘things’ in terms of which to conduct it, but only strands of flowing movement within already flowing surroundings, with occasional dynamic stabilities here and there, dependent for their nature upon their relational embedding within the larger flow of activity constituting our overall surroundings. It is the importance of our relational embedding in our surroundings that, I think, is entirely new in Ken’s recent work – it implies a necessary unity, the inseparability of all that we pick out for study in our inquiries from its already existing (dynamic) relations to its surroundings; to repeat, what traditionally we have viewed as ‘independent’ elements are not truly independent (2009, p.54).

The ‘always already there’ ontology in Ken’s work: relational flow

I have begun this short article in this way for two reasons: (1) One is to take Ken to task for, to my mind, a misleading but often quoted comment he made about ontology in his 1994 book, Realities and Relationships; (2) the other is to bring to light both other very important observations and comments he now makes as a consequence, as I see it, of having begun to take a much more explicit ontological turn in his approach to social constructionism, along with similar observations and comments from a number of other writers. For, as Ken suggests and I concur wholly, we now have the chance – with many, many others thinking and working along the same lines – of moving into a New Enlightenment (2009, p.403), a new stance toward the original aim of the (mid-18th century) Enlightenment, that of being able to make use of our own intelligence and capacities for collaborative inquiry to better the conditions of our own lives and our living of them together.

From language as a system unto itself to flowing language entwined activities and practices

I want first to put Ken’s past attitude toward ontological issues in context: Perhaps central amongst the many transitions in the recent past and still taking place today, is a deeply changed attitude toward language use. As I see it, two major influences have been and still are at work here, both concerned to turn us away from the simple idea that ‘words stand for things’, i.e., that our main use of language is to tell others about aspects of an already existing reality: (1) The structuralist and post-structuralist tradition which began with Ferdinand de Saussure (1911/1950) and culminated with Derrida (1976), but continued in America with, among many others, Stanley Fish (1980), is a tradition within which language is treated as “a system unto itself” (Gergen, 1991, p.107); but there is also (2) a Vygotsky, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Voloshinov, Merleau-Ponty (and many others) tradition within which language use, our speakings – that is, our linguistic utterances and expressions – are treated, not as entities in themselves, but as aspects of our spontaneously responsive (and thus expressive) living, bodily activities.

In 1991, in discussing the implications of Derrida’s (1977) claim, that there is nothing outside the text, Ken wrote that: “… language is a system unto itself. Words derive their capacity to create a seeming world of essences from the properties of the system. This system of language (or of sense-making) preexists the individual; it is ‘always already’ there, available for social usage… If it is sensible, it has already been said. The most one can do is to rearrange the sayables” (1991, p.107). I have never been quite sure whether Ken was himself espousing here, or merely expressing Derrida’s views, but when later in the same book, he claims, “…words are not mirrorlike reflections of reality, but expressions of group convention” (p.119), then clearly, that was his own view at that time. It leads to what I would call a linguistic version of social contructionism, a version with a central focus on our ways of talking – which, as I see it, still leaves us with the forming of linguistic representations (portrayals, descriptions) as the primary function of our talk. Only now, instead of taking it that our representations are caused in us by the reality around us, the direction of influence is reversed: what we take ‘our reality’ to be is formed for us by our linguistic representations of it. And it is this, it seems to me, that led Ken to write what has in fact become an infamous claim with respect to constructionism:

“… constructionism is ontologically mute. Whatever is, simply is. There is no foundational description to be made about an ‘out there’ as opposed to an ‘in here’, about experience or material. Once we attempt to articulate ‘what there is’, however, we enter the world of discourse… The adequacy of any word or arrangement of words to ‘capture reality as it is’ is a matter of local convention” (1994, pp.72-73).

In other words, what the world ‘is’ for a person is captured in “the local ways of talking used in coordinating relations among people within their environment” (1994, p.74) – but in saying this, he seems to be suggesting that ontology is wholly socially and locally produced and can be analysed as such. And while this has led to a performative focus in our research studies – a focus on (to make use of John Austin’s, 1962 title) how to do things with words – it has also justified the taking a retrospective attitude to our expressions, and to finding their meaning in their finished orderliness of their words, rather orienting us toward seeking an individual speaker’s unique meaning in the situated moment of his or her using them in their utterances.

What is lost in such analyses, is the living, bodily presence of those who are speaking, their gestures, their sensings of each other’s movements, their anticipations of each other’s attempts at expression, and their continual improvisation of alternatives when first attempts fail, and so on. But even more importantly, what is also lost is the necessary unity of the already existing dynamic, spatio-temporal relations, both within what we have picked out for study, as well as in its relations to its surroundings.

As Vygotsky (1987) remarks, the difference between what he calls the analysis of a whole into its separate “elements” and what he calls “unit analysis,” is that: “… the decomposition of the complex mental whole into its elements… [gives rise to] products [that] are of a different nature than the whole from which they are derived… Since it results in products that have lost the characteristics of the whole, this process is not a form of analysis in the true sense of the word. At any rate, it is not ‘analysis’ vis a vis the problem to which it was meant to be applied” (p.45, my emphases) – they are of a different character because, in ignoring the already inter-related nature of the aspects of the process under study, the internal, living relationships of the unified whole are replaced with external, mechanical relationships between heterogeneous processes. The ‘elements’ thus arrived at are of a different logical type from the ‘aspects’ of the process under study, as namable objective entities they lack their ‘relational’ nature. Nowhere is this loss of relationality more rife at the moment in what has come to be called narrative and discourse analysis (e.g., McLeod, 1997; Edwards and Potter, 1992). It has led to a focus on the meanings to found in already said patterns of recorded words, rather than on what speakers may have being trying to mean at the time in saying them – an approach to research inquiries that, yet again, puts the power of sense-making into the hands of academic experts and takes it out of the hands of ordinary people.

This use of ‘research methods’ to convert our ongoing experience into finished products – our experience of relationships, of meetings, gatherings, institutions, and other formations in which we are still actively involved into already formed wholes, rather than leaving them as still forming and formative processes – diverts our attention away, both from the ways in which individual people’s expressions continually deviate from our already existing background expectations, i.e., in their specific variability as Voloshinov (1984, p.69) puts it, and from the ways in which our understandings in practice work in terms of our anticipations as to what a speaker is trying to say to us. As Bakhtin (1981) puts it: “The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word; it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation of any living dialogue” (p.280).

So whither, then, ontology? Within a process of relational flow, in which there is both continuous movement toward constraint, and an openness to the evolution of meaning (2009, p.46), we find that, although we cannot ignore the already specified flowing nature of our activities and the constraints this places on us by their relational embedding in the flowing nature of their surroundings, the further possible specifications of their nature within these constraints still seems to be enormous.

Situations of confluence: relational responsibility

Actions are meaningful units within practices, and practices give (seemingly) individual actions their meaning. As Ken notes, without the game of baseball, there are just bats and balls and people milling around to no purpose. Within the bounded space of the game, hitting the ball out into the field somewhere leads to a ‘score’ with different meanings according to where and how the ball lands – while scoring is something one should try to do for the sake of the team. Star players can, as individuals, of course, forget all this and pursue personal glory, their own private self-interest; but if a star player forgets his or her team in the process, he or she may in the short term get rich, but in the long term the team, and then they themselves, will lose.

Indeed, this feature of all living expressions – of ‘pointing beyond themselves’, so to speak, to a larger situation within which they now, or will in the future, make sense, i.e., of them as having intentionality in being directed toward something beyond themselves – is an intrinsic aspect of all human action in its inseparable relational embedding in a larger flow of ongoing activity. Thus the meanings of our actions cannot be assessed in and of themselves; they ramify out into the whole context within which they take place. And as we can see in the baseball example above, there seems to be a morality at work here. Ken calls it a second-order morality (2009, pp.360-365), and along with his other concepts of relational being, relational flow, and confluence, I would now like to turn to an examination of what he calls relational responsibility – the “care for relationship” (p.365) that we might take on in our search for a New Enlightenment. But what, actually, does it involve?

Crucial to our understanding what is involved in relational responsibility is what Ken calls “partial performances” (p.79, p.106, p.141), performances that we can often perform in talk alone. We can do this because, as we have already seen, our verbal understandings work both in terms of our having a shared background of linguistic understandings with those to whom we are speaking, along with locally shared anticipations of what, to repeat, “has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.280). In other words, many of our utterances propose or ‘point’ toward possible realities within which they will have their sense in the future. Thus, as Ken remarks with respect to, say, a person claiming to be depressed: “No matter how many ways a person tells you he is depressed, and no matter how many relevant actions you take into account, you have nothing to go on outside a tradition of co-action. You may heap one interpretation upon another to draw a conclusion, but in the end you never move beyond the web of your own spinning” (p.69, my emphases).

While we might (as in much qualitative research in psychology at the moment) provide countless interpretations of what people’s words mean in their everyday practices, when considered outside of a tradition of co-action – or as Wittgenstein (1953) would put it, outside the boundaries of a “language-game” – what individual people actually mean by their use of words in the situation of their usage, their own unique meaning in using them, is passed by. But as Ken notes: “Their words are actions within a relationship, and in this sense, equivalent to the remainder of the body in motion – lips, eye movements, gestures, posture, and so on. The spoken language is but one component of a full social performance. Our words are notes within orchestrated patterns of action. Without the full coordination of words and action, relational life turns strange” (p.73) – it in fact ceases to be relational and becomes once again individualistic; or in Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) terms, it ceases to be dialogical and becomes monlogical; or, in the terms set out above, such ‘up in the air’ words have their use only in a proposed world rather than in one on the way to being actualized.

For us truly to understand a person’s utterances in a practical manner, we must go beyond them as partial or preparatory performances and ask ourselves in what actual world could they be fully performed. In other words, our actions can only come fully to fruition within socially shared practices that can continue to be articulated and developed over time; to intend an action is to intend a practical world within which actions of that kind can be achieved – no corresponding world, no achievement.

This changed orientation toward the future rather than the past, changes how we judge the ‘goodness’ of people’s actions. In the past we have tried to judge them in terms of what we have called their ‘motives’, the state of mind said to be existing within them prior to their actions. But as C. Wright Mills (1940) suggested long ago (and which Ken has also long claimed): “The postulate underlying modern study of language is the simple one that we must approach linguistic behaviour, not by referring it to private states in individuals, but by observing its social function of co-ordinating diverse actions. Rather than expressing something which is prior and in the person, language is taken by other persons as an indicator of future actions” (p.904). And if this is the case, what we say are the reasons for our actions, and what in fact are the influences actually at work in ‘shaping’ them as we move forward with our lives are in fact two very different things – what we formulate and express in our ‘sayings’ are a small fraction these influences.

As we have already seen, although formed in the atmosphere of what has gone before, if our actions are to have their actually intended meaning, they are at the same time determined by what is in fact anticipated by those who will respond to what we say and do. Thus, to repeat, our actions have no meaning in and of themselves, only within an ongoing confluence of joint- or co-action can they begin to have a practical meaning, otherwise, they are simply empty rhetorical gestures toward a never-to-be-actualized future. Thus, if Ken is correct, and I think he is, it is not so much what we say are our motives that matter, as the ‘point’ of our actions, their ‘intention’, and how they can come together in a confluence with others to point toward the creation a practical world within which they can, in fact, have the meaning we intend (claim) them to have. What makes our simply talking of virtue so illusory – so much just empty rhetoric – is that there is no world, no interlocking set of practices into which its proposed actions could fit and have a ‘down on the ground of action’ influence in shaping or reshaping our practices.

Besides our talk of motives, Ken also is critical of our proclaiming our moral beliefs and values – “moralities are the problem,” he says (2009, p.358). What makes the propounding of moralities both useless and dangerous is their ‘local’ nature, their relation to ‘the way we talk of the things we do around here’, with each locale in competition with its neighbour as to the ‘overall goodness’ of it ‘values’. “It is in the multiplication of the good that we find,” says Ken, “the genesis of evil” (2009, p.358). What makes the proclaiming of one’s values so value-less is that, without also speaking of and beginning to act the practicalities of implementing a world into which one’s actions could both fit and have a significance in the lives of others, it is just so much talk. Propounding peace and love without committing oneself in some degree to the practical or institutional engagements required for their implementation – without, that is, taking on the relevant relational responsibility – is not at all to be virtuous, but to be dangerously deluded and (mis)leading.

In this connection, a remark of Foucault’s (1982) has long intrigued me: “People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does” (pers comm, quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p.187). And clearly, as we must always act into an unknown future in our everyday affairs, this would seem a reasonable claim: we simply cannot take on the responsibility for the extensive ramifications of our actions out in the world at large – can we? Well, if Ken is right: Yes, we can!

For every claim to as to who we ‘are’ to ourselves needs to have two parts to it, not just one: (1) besides an account of our beliefs and values and why we believe them to be of importance; we also need (2) an account of the world in which it is possible for us to become whom we already believe ourselves to be. Applying this to the individualist tradition of which Ken is so critical, we find that individualists, in proposing that everything of importance to who they are, and want to become, can be found wholly within the individual person, propose a world in which, in fact, such a tradition, as such, must eventually collapse – for no one is taking responsibility for sustaining the background processes from out of which our moral values emerged in the first place. And indeed, we can now, perhaps, see how history has been driven by ill-formulated forms of life in which people’s proclaimed self-understandings – and the worldly practices they aim to participate in – fail to correspond. Many formations of the person and their world collapse because of a mismatch between the person’s self-conception and how that kind of self conceives of the larger world.

In other words, while at a superficial level, the terms within which they are formulated can each be ‘cashed out’, so to speak, in the everyday talk of the verbal community within which occur, at a deeper level, if they fail to take into account the already existing relational flow between all concerned within which these terms have their being, then, in the long term, in failing to establish a tradition of co-action within which they can be understood in practice, they will fail to give rise to what Ken calls a full social performance. Wittgenstein (1980) seems here to express something similar: “The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear./ The fact that life is problematic shows that the shape of your life does not fit into life’s moulds. So you must change the way you live and, once your life does fit into the mould, what is problematic will disappear” (p.27).

Conclusions: beyond our everyday talk to the ‘relational flow’ making it possible

Our everyday forms of talk are difficult to displace, as well as the tendency to work backwards from how we talk to what we feel reality ‘must be like’ for us to talk in the way that we do. As Wittgenstein (1980, I) remarks: “The facts of human history that throw light on our problem, are difficult for us to find out, for our talk passes them by, it is occupied with other things” (no.78) – very basically, we are interested in getting things done in an intelligible manner in our everyday practices, not at all in what makes their intelligibility possible. Thus in the past, we have succumbed to the temptation to think, simply, within the already existing categories of thought available to us in our own local circumstances. What Ken has done in Relational Being is to turn this approach around and to re-vision what, in the past, we have used as our taken-for-granted assumptions in our inquiries, as “relational achievements” (2009, p.91). Even the focal topic of psychology itself, the mind, “… is born within relationship. That we speak of an ‘inner world’ at all – an originary source of action within the head, a ‘cogitio’ lying behind language – is a relational achievement” (p.203). Such relational achievements must now be psychology’s focal topic of study.

In the past, we have likened ourselves to self-contained mechanisms, needing only an input of diffuse energy to keep our ‘cog wheels turning’, or our ‘binary digits’ being re-arranged. But now, seeing ourselves as living, growing, and developing bodies, in living, responsive contact with the others and othernesses in our surroundings, things are different. On a dimension running from plants to computers, we appear to be much nearer plants than computers.

Consider, say, an oak tree growing from an acorn: The acorn, as such, makes a negligible contribution to the material substance of the oak tree or to the energy needed to make it grow. The materials needed come from the air, water, and soil, while energy comes from the sun. These all move around in the acorn’s surroundings, clearly, in a not very organized manner. But as itself an open, living system able to ‘take in’ selected aspects of these materials, a ‘confluence’ within the acorn works to intertwine the streams of energized material flowing through it to produce a growing oak tree, that matures, produces acorns, dies, and eventually decays to return its material substances back into the unorganized flow of inanimate matter from whence it and they came.

Where, then, is the life of the oak tree? Is it in the tree itself ? No. It is in the unfolding relations of the tree to its surroundings. Similarly for us: we too live within the midst of a somewhat turbulent earth/water/air (wind) mix, as the recent spate of earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes has reminded us only too well. While it is still only too easy for us, in our ‘separatist’, Cartesian forms of thought, to think of ourselves as living in a world furnished with already-existing things – because, to repeat, they often “counterfeit immobility so well that we treat them as a thing rather than a process… the living being is a thoroughfare” (Bergson, 1911, pp.134-135). But if our living activity is truly determined by that which has not yet been achieved, but which is in fact anticipated (as at least possible) in the flow of already occurring events, then we must contemplate the possibility of a world that is still coming into being, a world within which the many different flowing strands of different activity intertwine, become entangled with each other, and then, sometimes, separate, a turbulent, not-yet-settled, dialogically-structured world, a world that is still-in-the-making.

As a result, the whole field of psychological inquiry must take on a new cast – especially if it is to take on the relational responsibility for the practical creation of worlds which sustain, rather than merely exploit, the relational flow within which the confluences responsible for their emergence occur. We must conduct our inquiries from within the midst of turbulent, flowing processes, within which the only stabilities available to us are – like the eddies and vortices that form in confluences in which two or more flowing processes meet together – dynamic stabilities dependent for their very existence upon their embedding within the continuous flow of relational activity in their surroundings.

References:

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Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.
Bateson, G. (1979) Mind and Nature: a Necessary Unity. London: Fontana/Collins.
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“Theuseus: Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,/ such shaping fantasies, that apprehend/ more than cool reason ever comprehends/… And as imagination bodies forth/ The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen/ Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/ A local habitation and a name… Hippolyta:… all their minds transfigured so together, more witnesseth than fancy’s images, and grows to something of great constancy; but, howsoever strange and admirable ” (Shakespeare, Act 5, Scene.1 in Midsummer Night’s Dream).

“We are simultaneously actors as well as spectators on the great stage of life” (Bohr, quoted in Honner, 1989, p.1).

“My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing” (Gadamer, 1989, p.xxviii, my emphasis).

Lovers and madmen may have shaping fantasies in their seething brains, and the poet’s pen can turn these forms of things unknown into shapes and give these airy nothings a local habitation and a name – that is, not just a name but also a place within a larger scheme of things, so although a bush might be mistaken for a bear and give rise (mistakenly) to a fear, it is unlikely to be mistaken for a swarm of fish or an octopus. Thus, as Theuseus sees it, the power of imagination (seemingly) to comprehend more than cool reason can, by so easily misleading us, be very dangerous. But, as Hippolyta notes, the fact that all within a group seem to see and hear the same thing is grounds for thinking that there’s more going on here than mere imaginary fantasies. The phenomena they experience could, she suggests, be the beginning of something really quite unique and remarkable, something that could grow into something of great constancy – that is, could grow, not will grow, further testing and checking is always necessary. But if she is correct, and I think she is, new thinking can begin within a group with such sensed and imagined possibilities, i.e., with the spontaneous bodying forth of forms for things previously unknown to us, in ways quite impossible for us if we begin with cognitive certainties. For such certainties can only lead us to further elaborations of things already well-known amongst us; they can never open us up to unique novelties.

However, to arrive at adequate linguistic descriptions of such as yet unknown ‘somethings’, these ‘airy nothings’ in our surroundings, further exploration and testing is clearly necessary. For giving words to such indeterminate phenomena is a major part of giving them a determinate place in our lives. To see a bush as a bear is to see it as something we need to flee from rather than, say, to cultivate. But such descriptions cannot be achieved in a flash of insight: a kind of extensive inner dialogue with such somethings would seem to be required, as well a similarly extensive outer dialogue with all those around us, if such airy nothings are to emerge as specific and substantial ‘things’ in our lives together. It is the nature of this collaborative process of emergence, and the range of other issues raised by the possible happening of such novel experiences within us and amongst us that I want to explore in the rest of this paper. Thus what is special about the approach I want to take here is the importance I want to attach to just happening events, to events that we cannot deliberately set out to cause to happen, but events that happen spontaneously to us and amongst us as a result of our inextricable immersion in a particular flow of energy occurring around us in our surroundings – a flow of energy that moves us hither and thither whether we like it or not.

Someone who thought in this way long ago was William James (1890). In his Principles of Psychology, he criticized traditional psychology for trying to work solely in terms of definite images of things (only in terms of what we would now call mental representations). About this tendency he commented as follows: “What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live. The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead… We all of us have this permanent consciousness of whither our thought is going. It is a feeling like any other, a feeling of what thoughts are next to arise, before they have arisen” (pp.255-256).

Let me repeat those last two, seemingly paradoxical phrases: a feeling of what thoughts are next to arise, before they have arisen. In other words, such feelings are not bounded entities with a clear beginning and a clear end, but, as he puts it, they are “feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all” (p.254), and as feelings still in process, so to speak, they can, as we shall see, serve the most important function of guiding us in our exploratory imaginings of the possible next steps we might take in our practical actions. They can function, James (1890) says, as “signs of direction in thought, of which we have an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever” (p.253).

This focus on a shared an ‘experience’ or a ‘phenomenon’, which at first seems to have the character of an airy nothing for all concerned as the starting point for an inquiry, is crucial to the approach I will take here. It stands in stark contrast to traditional approaches which begin with a focus upon an event formulated – in an already shared language – as a ‘problem’ within an existing system of conceptual terms provided by a model, or a theory, or a systematic ‘framework’. For, instead of it being like learning a second language – in which we must describe events which already make one kind of sense to us in another language to make another kind of sense of them – it is like learning a first language. We must learn to relate ourselves to a ‘something in our surroundings’ as the others around us do, to distinguish and to act towards it as what it is for them, as an X, say, rather than as a Y. And to the extent that these ‘somethings’ are new, never before encountered somethings that need to be uniquely responded to ‘as themselves’, we cannot be ‘told about them’ in words representative of ‘things’ already well known to us. We first need to be ‘introduced’ to them, to meet them face-to-face’, so to speak, in order to acquire some expectations as to how they will respond to a whole range of our actions in relation to them.

In other words, in learning to respond to the unique what-ness of previously unencountered ‘things’ in the same way as those around us do, we must learn to make judgments as to what that ‘something’ is similar to their judgments. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1953) remarks, “If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments” (no.242), and those around us teach us such judgments, not by giving us explanations, but simply by saying things like: “No, that’s not it, try again,” and so on, until at last they feel they can say: “Yes, that’s it.” As Wittgenstein (1953) notes, “This is simply what searching, this is what finding, is like here” (p.218).

Thus like James, Wittgenstein also begins by focussing on shared phenomena, upon often un-namable shared experiences. He describes the beginning of a set of shared language intertwined activities (what he calls a “language-game”) thus: “The origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language – I want to say – is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ [Goethe]” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.31). “I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination” (1969, no.475). “But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here? Presumably that this sort of behaviour is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought” (1981, no.541). In other words, rather than taking the traditional theoretical-explanatory approach, we shall be taking what elsewhere (Shotter, 1984) I have called a practical-descriptive approach.

What is withness or systemtic thinking?

What, then, is it like to think systemically, rather than to think about systems, to think in a kind of inner dialogue with a felt sense, the presence of a yet unknown something being there in one’s surroundings which has not yet been given adequate linguistic expression? Elsewhere (Shotter, 2006), I have described such withness-thinking experientially as follows: “The interplay involved gives rise, not to a visible seeing, for what is ‘sensed’ is invisible; nor does it give rise to an interpretation (to a representation), for our responses occur spontaneously and directly in our living encounters with an other’s expressions. Neither is it merely a feeling, for it carries with it as it unfolds a bodily sense of the possibilities for responsive action in relation to one’s momentary placement, position, or orientation in the present interaction. Instead, it gives rise to a shaped and vectored sense of our moment-by-moment changing involvement in our current surroundings — engendering in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might expect in relation to the actions we might take. In short, we can be spontaneously ‘moved’ toward specific possibilities for action in such thinking” (p.600). It is a knowing to do with one’s participation within a situation, with one’s ‘place’ within it, and with how one might ‘go on’ playing one’s part within it – a knowing in which one is as much affected by one’s surroundings perhaps even more than one affects them.

In an unpublished paper entitled Thinking about systems and thinking systemically, Barnett Pearce (MS-1998) provides a similar description as he begins to outline some of the major differences, as well as some of the useful relations that might exist, between coolly rational thought about systems from the outside, and the more animated thinking of practitioners from within the systems in which they function as, so the speak, ‘participant parts’. He begins to distinguish one from the other as follows: “The essay elaborates two claims. The first asserts that ‘thinking about systems’ is not quite the same thing as ‘thinking systemically’ and the second asserts that the ‘thinking’ involved in ‘thinking systemically’ is not only or even primarily a cognitive process but inevitably involves acting into situations… The distinction between thinking about systems and thinking systemically hinges on the perspective of the person doing the thinking. One can and usually does think ‘about’ systems from outside the system. That is, whether we might describe the thinking as ontologically a part of the system or separate from it, in this instance the thinker takes the observer-perspective. When thinking systemically, on the other hand, the thinker is self-reflexively a part of the system and takes the perspective of a participant or component of the system” (MS, pp1-2, all emphases mine). He ends his explorations by remarking that: “Thinking systemically entails abandoning many of the preoccupations of the Enlightenment. This is not a trivial matter. Richard Bernstein (1983) described what he called ‘the Cartesian anxiety’ – the fear that if we do not have absolute certainty, we have no knowledge at all. Historically, this anxiety has paralysed us, Bernstein believes, and we need not to refute it so much as to be cured of it” (MS, p.8).

Let me repeat what he says above: Thinking systemically entails abandoning many of the preoccupations of the Enlightenment, abandoning what we might call the ‘coolly rational’ approach to inquiry. But even more than this. Because, in the context of our assumed need to think rationally about the difficulties we face in our lives, thinking systemically or withness-thinking is so unusual – and because it can lead us into many really quite surprising and disoriented situations and directions – we badly need to make ourselves a bit more aware of the easily unnoticed or ignored ‘inner moves’ we execute amongst us and within us in arriving at a sense of something as being a ‘thing’ (Heidegger, 1969) for us in our surroundings. Thus, before proceeding any further, I would just like to list in note form some of these ‘surprises’, some of the ‘reversals’ in our taken-for-granted ways of thinking about how our inquiries might best be conducted:

• As ‘participant parts’ within the very systems we are investigating (see Pearce, MS-1998), rather than being theory-driven, a matter of beginning with ‘good ideas’, we must begin our investigations from noticings, from openings when a next step different from the usual next step might be taken.
• Three kinds of noticings: 1) either being ‘struck by’ an event or happening; or 2) the sensing of a qualitatively unique ‘unitary whole’ as it emerges in our slow exploration of a present bewilderment or confusion; or 3)the sensing of an ‘I don’t know what’ kind of disquiet at things not yet being ‘quite right’.
• A fourth kind of noticing – ‘incipient forms’: 4) “A community or a polis is not something that can be made or engineered by some form of techne or by the administration of society. There is something of a circle here, comparable to the hermeneutical circle. The coming into being of a type of public life that can strengthen solidarity, public freedom, a willingness to talk and to listen, mutual debate, and a commitment to rational persuasion presupposes the incipient forms of such communal life” (Bernstein, 1983, p.266).
• A fifth kind – ‘what is not being said’ (the elephant in the room): As Billig (1999) points out in Freudian Repression – in relation to the case of Herr K. (an older man rejected by his wife) and Dora (the young daughter whose father was having an affair with Herr K’s wife) – how people can use shared “dialogic routines” (p.101) to avoid raising those issues between them that would result I devastating conflicts – whereas, Freud had understood that “repression took place in the head [of individuals], not outwardly in conversation” (p.102).
• A sixth kind – ‘telling moments’: moments when ‘collective narratives or ideologies’ begin to be revealed, e.g., when people begin to say: ‘This is how we do things around here’.
• A seventh kind – disquiets: a feeling that there is still a ‘something more’ that has not yet been captured in all the articulations of ‘sensings’ that we so far produced.
• 1) An important reversal: our bodily movements out in the world are more important to us than our thinkings.
• 2) Another important reversal: what just happens to us is much more important to us than what we achieve in our wanting and doing, it provides the ‘background’ from out of which our wantings and doings emerge and into which they return to exert their influence.
• 3) Another reversal: emotions as judgments (Nussbaum, 2001)… beginning with feelings rather than calculations… the sense of a ‘something’ of importance and value here…
• 4) Yet another: (Merleau-Ponty, 1964)… it is as if what I as an agency thought I was ‘bringing forth’ begins to act in me as itself an agency to teach me a new ‘way of looking’, or a ‘new way of thinking’… a new style of painting comes on the scene, we are at first disoriented, but later we find that it has taught us a new ‘way of looking’.
• 5) Yet another: Mechanistically we talk of stimuli causing responses, yet it is the living responses of organisms that constitute, i.e., give not form but value to, the stimuli that they orient towards.
• 6) Yet another: We can build up mechanistic wholes, i.e., machines, from independently existing parts, but we cannot ‘build up’ living organic wholes (pace Frankenstein) in this manner, we must begin with already living wholes and either ‘grow’ them up into more well articulated forms, and/or “descriptively analyse” them into their intra-related aspects (the term ‘parts’ is both too spatial and too finished to be adequate).
• 7) Yet another: what Dewey (1896) calls the “historical fallacy,” in it we tend “to read a set of considerations which hold good only because of a completed process into the detailed, step-by-step unfolding nature of the process while still incomplete which led to this completed result… whereas, if this outcome had already been in existence, there would have been no necessity for the unfolding, uncertain step-by-step nature of the process” (p.367).
• Overcoming the Cartesian anxiety: Learning to think partially while still in the midst of uncertainty…. feeling one’s way forward in the present moment, in the present situation… an attitude present in poetic or allusive writing… Keats’ negative capability.
• Repositioning ourselves as ‘inside’ rather than ‘outside’ thinkers: we need to position ourselves, not as subjects regarding an objective, external world, but as participants within or inside the boundary zone between the subject/object split imposed by Descartes.
• The agency of our surroundings: the flow of activity within which we are currently at work, is also at work on and in us; we are not just in the world, we are of it.

The temptation to move ‘outside’ and to talk ‘about’ systems is pervasive in all ‘coolly rational’ approaches to social so-called scientific inquiry. William James (1890) described the fallacy to which it gives rise (but see Dewey’s comment above on the ‘historical fallacy) as ‘The Psychologist’s Fallacy:’ “The great snare of the psychologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall hereafter call this the ‘psychologist’s fallacy’ par excellence… The psychologist… stands outside of the mental state he speaks of. Both itself and its object are objects for him… The most fictitious puzzles have been introduced into our science by this means… Crude as such a confusion of standpoints seems to be when abstractly stated, it is nevertheless a snare into which no psychologist has kept himself at all times from falling, and which forms almost the entire stock-in-trade of certain schools. We cannot be too watchful against its subtly corrupting influence” (pp.196-197).

Indeed, this tendency – of both standing outside and looking back on the products of already completed processes as objects – is still so massively present in much contemporary social scientific inquiry, that Raymond Williams (1977) again, nine decades later, felt the need to make a similar point: “In most description and analysis, culture and society are expressed in an habitual past tense. The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products… relationships, institutions and formations in which we are still actively involved are converted, by this procedural mode, into formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes” (p.128)…. “If the social is always past, in the sense that it is always formed, we have indeed to find new terms for the undeniable experience of the present: not only the temporal present, the realization of this and this instant, but the specificity of the present being, the inalienably physical, within which we may discern and acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not always as fixed products, defining products” (p.128).

Thinking of language as itself a system, i.e., as a separate system for use by us in expressing our ideas or in describing ‘things’ (states of affairs) in the world — is one of our biggest mistakes arising out of ‘the psychologist’s fallacy’. We far too easily forget that we learn our language within all kinds of ongoing intra-activities, activities in which we are involved with those around us in doing something. All our activities within a particular culture are language intertwined activities, language intertwined practices. As a consequence, we need to remember – if we are not going to indulge in up-in-the-air, de-contextualized, abstract talk – that all our talk also needs to be practice intertwined talk. We need to have in mind a particular activity in a particular context as we talk, and to address our talk to our listeners as if they too are occupying this same context; for in talking to anyone, we are, of course, assuming that they are interested in what we have to say. This is what is involved in talking and thinking systemically, i.e., in withness-thinking and speaking. To contrast it with up-in-the-air talk, we could call it down-on-the-ground talking and thinking.

Two kinds of inquiry aimed at overcoming two different kinds of difficulty:
problem-solving and orientational difficulties

This need to contextualize – to give a local habitation to the words we use, particularly to those we use as the names of ‘things’ – gives rise to a perhaps surprising consequence. It means that there are two kinds of difficulties we can face in our lives, not just one. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1980) has made very clear to us, many of our difficulties in our practical lives are not of the form of problems that we can, by the application of a science-like methodology, solve by reasoning; nor are they are “empirical problems” that we can solve by discovering something already existing but currently unknown to us. They are difficulties of a quite another kind: they are relational or orientational difficulties, to do with discovering how to ‘go out’ towards initially indeterminate aspects of our surroundings with certain expectations and anticipations at the ready, so to speak, appropriate to our finding our ‘way about’ and to ‘going on’ with them without (mis)leading ourselves into taking inappropriate next steps. Where the relevant anticipations are to do with, to repeat again William James’ comment above, sensing whither we might go within our circumstances before actually going there. Thus difficulties of this second kind cannot be solved by our thinking about them within a rational framework in order to arrive at a plan which we then attempt to put into action. For a ‘problem’ can be solved only if the situation we face consists in a set of determinate entities awaiting our ‘arrangement’ or ‘re-arrangement’ of them, and this is precisely not the case with relational or orientational difficulties. Here, we face a situation which is, at first, indeterminate for us, in which we cannot at a first make out what it is that is important to us; here we must gradually feel our way forward, guided by the incipient sensing of dis-satisfactions and satisfactions as we move this-way-and-that in groping towards the final actualization of an appropriate action. In other words, such difficulties are resolved by the emergence of a ‘local best’ action, a best way forward which develops within our tentative exploratory movements as we sense and evaluate the incipient “signs of directions in thought” that they give rise to within us.

Thus rather than being aimed at reliable and repeatable results that can made accessible in some published form, so that they can be both publically criticized and tested, and thus generalized to apply in indefinitely many different contexts, practitioner inquiries have a quite different aim. They are practice-based and practice-oriented. They are concerned with our gaining a sense of ‘where we are’ in relation to our immediate surroundings, and of the surrounding field or ‘landscape’ of real possibilities open to us for our next steps. Thus, unlike the idealized and de-contextualized nature of ‘coolly rational’ research, practitioner inquiry is concerned with details in our surroundings crucial to the performance of our actions. As Wittgenstein (1953) remarks, acting in idealized surroundings is like trying to walk on ice “where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” (no.107). So rather than resulting in nameable, objective ‘things’ out in the world, the results of practice-situated inquiries come to be registered in, and to accumulate in, our embodied capacities and sensitivities.

As Bateson (1979) puts it (see Shotter, 2010), they contribute to a practitioner becoming better “calibrated” in “the setting of his nerves and muscles” (p.211) which, in practical terms, means that the practitioner can come to act automatically and spontaneously, i.e., without conscious deliberation by anticipating the direction of a client’s next steps, i.e., the ‘point’ of their actions or utterances, before their actual expression of them. In experiential terms, a practitioner must build up within him or herself, an appropriate range of action guiding anticipations (Shotter, 2005) which are continuously updated in response to events happening around them.

But there is even more to it than this, to do with the very nature of our conduct our more practice-based inquiries:

• Genuine innovative changes in institutions and organizations are ‘deep’ changes, in the sense that they are changes in our ‘ways’ of thinking, ‘ways’ of seeing, of hearing, ‘ways’ of ‘making connections’ between events, ‘ways’ of talking, and so on ― in short, they are changes in our ‘ways’ of being someone, changes in the kind of person we are, changes in our identity.
• They are changes in what ‘we think with’, changes in how we relate to, or orient ourselves toward the situation we find ourselves to be ‘in’.
• Hence, these kinds of changes cannot be produced by following intellectually devised plans, procedures, or protocols; they cannot be done, intentionally, by people taking deliberate actions ― this is because the coordinated execution of planned actions depends upon all concerned already sharing the set of existing concepts relevant to the formulation of the plan, thus all new plans depend on old concepts – the process results in the “continual rediscovery of sameness.”
• Nor can these kind of changes be produced by exhortation, by being persuaded to change – the simply fact is: people do not know how to ‘guide’ themselves toward the desired end; they have not yet embodied the norm against which they can ‘measure’ they own achievements ‘so far’ (are they ‘on the way’ towards success or not?).

In other words, more than merely the inside/outside issue Barnett discussed above, the issues involved are to do with ‘deep’ issues – not only to do with who and what we take ourselves to be, our identities, and with whether we can make changes for the better within ourselves – but also to do with what potentialities there are latent within the relations between ourselves and our surroundings that have not yet been realized, potentialities that are not spatially ‘hidden’, as if in a locked room, but which exist as still unrecognizable possibilities amongst us. Their recognition and elaboration is the topic of my next section.

Bringing out the differences between the two forms of inquiry:
thinking about systems and thinking systemically

1) Aboutness approaches

As qualitative forms of research develop, we can now begin to discern two kinds of what I will call aboutness-approaches: more traditional theory-based approaches and now methods-based approaches .

Traditional theory-based approaches: In thinking about systems, as subjects, as agents, we actively attempt to characterize them within a system of logically interconnected theoretical propositions as objective things ‘out there’ or ‘over there’, in a part of the world separate from ourselves. Theory driven research is something we do, and it is the results of our ‘doings’ that matter; what just happens to us plays no part in the proceedings. And strictly, to count as a scientific theory, we should take care to ensure that each proposition in the theory should have:

• (1) Explicitness: A theory should not be based on intuition and interpretation but should be spelled out so completely that it can be understood by any rational being.
• (2) Universality: Theory should hold true for all places and all times.
• (3) Abstractedness: A theory must not require reference to particular examples.
• (4) Discreteness: A theory must be stated in terms of context-free elements – elements which make no reference to human interests, traditions, institutions, etc.
• (5) Systematicity: A theory must be a whole in which decontextualized elements, (properties, attributes, features, factors, etc.) are related to each other by rules or laws.
• (6) Closure and prediction: The description of the domain investigated must be complete, i.e. it must specify all the influences that affect the elements in the domain and must specify their effects. Closure permits precise prediction.

In other words, our theories must stand before us as themselves objective entities. If these requirements are not met, if our theories cannot be publicly understood and criticized, then we have mere ‘theoretical-talk’, which is hardly different from the ‘opinions- or good-ideas-talk’ of specific individuals.

But the fact is, no so-called ‘theories’ in the social ‘so-called sciences’ come anywhere near to fulfilling these requirements. Further, the very requirements of explicitness, de-contextuality, and closure, etc., work to strip out the relational aspects of all living phenomena and as a consequence we ‘lose the very phenomena’ of our central concern: how our activities come to ‘hang together’ as meaningful wholes whose ‘point’ can be sensed by other in such a way that they can come to co-ordinate their activities with ours.

Methods based approaches: In the turn away from theory-driven and theory-testing research, there is now a turn now towards a concern with methods, towards qualitative methods of inquiry. But does this turn work to move us from thinking about systems to thinking more systemically? I think not at all. For the organizing assumption, if I may call it that, of all these more methods-based approaches is still to think that there are definite processes already ‘out there’ in the world awaiting our discovery of their workings. In other words, they are again, implicitly, theory-driven. But what if, perhaps counter intuitively, specific, determinate realities as such do not exist without – or outside of – the sets of practices we use in our attempts to investigate them, including the inscription devices and the larger networks within which think of them as being located?

But what if the ‘systems’ within which we think of ourselves as being embedded are not only still open to further development, but also multi-dimensional, so that it is only when we ‘interrogate’ phenomena occurring in our surroundings within the confines of, as Karen Barad (2007) calls them, a particular “material-discursive practice” – i.e., an intra-twined set of ways of talking and ways of acting that materially affect the world within which it takes place – that events occurring in the world around us come to take on a determinate form? Indeed, what if much of the world in which we live is vague, fluid, unspecific, diffuse, slippery, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct, emotional, what if it changes like a kaleidoscope, or like the intra-mingling streams of hot and cold air in the atmosphere, or it doesn’t really have much pattern at all, then where does this leave the social sciences, with their aim of ‘discovering’ the supposed already existing orders and patterns determining our behaviour? Chasing chimera in the realization of Theuseus’ fear it would seem.

As Foucault (1972) put it in The Archeology of Knowledge quite a while ago: We face “a task that consists of not – of no longer treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe” (p.49). It is this ‘more’ that we must try to bring to light and describe in a fashion that does justice to it.

Thus what can be called thinking in the these two ‘aboutness’ approaches?: To grasp a bit more clearly what is involved here, let me examine the sequence of steps involved in both these two problem-solving approaches: 1) approaching a newness or strangeness as a problem to be solved requires us to first analyze it into a set of identifiable elements; 2) we must then find a pattern or order amongst them; and then 3) we hypothesize a hidden agency responsible for the order (call it, the working of certain rules, principles, or laws, or the working of a story or narrative, or the shaping of a practice by ‘themes’, or suchlike). We then seek further evidence for its influence, thus to enshrine its agency in a theoretical system or framework of thought. And we then go on to make use of such frameworks in our further actions.

As investigators, we ourselves remain unchanged in the process; we remain outside and separate from the other or otherness we are investigating; rather than being engaged or involved in with it we are ‘set over against’ it; in acquiring extra knowledge about it – in the form of facts or information – our aim is to gain mastery over it.

2) Systemic or withness thinking

At the heart of the difference between the two forms of inquiry, as two sides of the same coin, is on the one side, the Cartesian subject/object spilt, and on the other, the peculiar nature (disparaged by rationalists) of participative thinking. In withness- thinking or thinking systemically, one functions as a participant within the very phenomena one is inquiring into. As a result, the placement of the subject/object split becomes highly variable, a matter of placing the divide within different regions of a phenomenon according to one’s overall end in view. For, in deciding that we want to bring about a change in one aspect of our surroundings, we must leave ourselves open to being affected in an uncontrolled fashion by the rest of our surroundings, and as we turn to produce an intended effect elsewhere, we open ourselves to being affected by the very original aspect of our concern. Thus what we treat as being set over against us as an ‘object’ at one moment, becomes itself at the next an agency able to affect us.

Systemic thinking or thinking systemically: As Barnett Pearce noted above, to think systemically is to think as a ‘participant part’ within the very systems we think of ourselves as investigating. But what is it to think “participatively” in this fashion? According to Bakhtin (1993), it can only be done by “those who know how not to detach their performed act from its product, but rather how to relate both of them [both the process and product of their thought] to the unitary and unique context of life and seek to determine them in that context as an indivisible unity” (footnote, p.19). In other words, understandings of this kind need to be lived within the context of a practice before they can be described, and their descriptions need to be voiced within that practice – as, in fact, a dynamic stability within that ongoing flow of activity – if they are to come to function as ‘orienting landmarks’, so to speak, in the landscapes of possibility we encounter in our relational practices.

Investigations into what ‘we try to think with’, into how we do in fact relate to, or orient ourselves toward the situation we find ourselves to be ‘in’, can be called, following Wittgenstein (1953) and Bateson (1979), ‘grammatical’ investigations. For, as Bateson (1979) says, “all communication necessitates context, that without context, there is no meaning,… [and] contextual shaping is only another term for grammar” (p.27). Thus for Bateson, as also for Wittgenstein (1953), what we might call a ‘grammatical investigation’ entails our imaginatively ‘entering into’, so to speak, the circumstances surrounding our use of words to gain a sense of the way in which our surroundings (in an agential fashion) can influence the ‘shape’ of our utterances and other expressions. In coming slowly to resolve on a line of action, instead of immediately trying to analyze what is unknown to us into its elemental units, we can begin to move around within it, and by ‘opening’ ourselves to being spontaneously ‘moved’ by it, we can begin to ‘enter into’ an active, back and forth, dialogically-structured relationship with it – a relationship within which we can gain, if we go slowly and allow time for the imaginative work that each response can occasion in us to take place, a sense of the ‘invisible landscape of possibilities’ confronting us to become “visibly-rational” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.vii) to us.

To show what I mean here, I suggest that the next few statements are read very slowly, making use of a ‘poetic’ style of inner speech, with time taken at the end of each to imagine a particular concrete situation:

• We enter a new situation;
• We are confused, bewildered, we don’t know our way about;
• However, as we ‘dwell in’ it, as we ‘move around’ within the confusion, a ‘something’, an ‘it’ begins to emerge;
• It emerges in the ‘time contours’ or ‘time shapes’ that become apparent to us in the dynamic relations we can sense between our outgoing activities and their incoming results;
• An image comes to us, we find that we can express this ‘something’ in terms of an image;
• But not so fast, for we can find another, and another image, and another – Wittgenstein uses a city, a toolbox, the controls in the driving cab of a train, and many different types of games, all as metaphors for different aspects of our experiences of the use of language….

Having gone through a number of images, we can come to a sense of the landscape of possibilities giving rise to them. Indeed, we can gain a sense of familiarity with such landscapes, that we can come to feel confident of knowing our way around within them, and of being able to resolve on ways of going on within them. Thus the process of resolving cannot simply be a matter of calculation or decision making. It involves judgments; a moving around on the landscape of possibilities; being spontaneously responsive to the consequences of each move; and judging which one (or combination of moves) best gives rise to an attitude, an orientation that provides a way of relating oneself to the situation that resolves the initial tension aroused in one’s initial confusion – for, to repeat, we are operating here, not in the realm of actualities but of possibilities. And my purpose, of course, in asking you to speak to yourself slowly and expressively was both to arouse more extreme responsive movements within you as readers than is usual in more intellectually oriented texts, as well as to allow time for the ‘shape’ of such movements to resonate within you, thus to “remind” you of something that might be already familiar to you (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.89) – to ‘call up’ one or two or more previous experienced concrete episodes whose ‘time-contours’ are similar to those traced out in the unfolding dynamics of my utterances – for the seeing or sensing of similarities is a very basic human capacity.

And we ourselves, as investigators, as we saw above, are changed in such encounters. For, in becoming involved with, immersed in, the ‘inner life’ of the others or othernesses around us, everything we do can be partly shaped by being in response to what they might do. Thus, rather than an objective knowledge of their nature, we gain an orientation toward them, we grasp how to ‘go on’ with them in terms of the possible ways they might respond to us. Although at first we can be wholly ‘bewitched’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.109) by their ‘voice’, as our familiarity with them grows, their voice can become just one voice among the many other voices within us, and we can become ‘disenchanted’ with what they ‘call’ us upon us to do. However, we can never gain complete mastery over them – they can always surprise us, no matter how familiar to us they have become. Our constant vigilance is required; the precise words we use are important – for their grammar commits us now to what is expected of us in the future.

In other words, in more general terms, as we dwell in and move around in each new situation we face, a gradual growth of familiarity with their ‘inner shape’ can occur; we can then begin to gain a sense of the value of their yet-to-be-achieved aspects – the prospects they offer us for ‘going on’ within them. Thus, as we gain orientation, a sense of being ‘at home’ within them, we can come to find our ‘footing’, our placement or who we can be within such situations. And this, as was clear from your responses to my bulleted utterances above, can be done imaginatively, by undertaking appropriate imaginative work. And in so doing, make sense of our current circumstances by thinking with, or in relation to, certain of our past experiences. This is what I would like to call systemic thinking or thinking systemtically in such situations as these, and it is these situations – of initial disorientation or bewilderment – that we can sense (in Heidegger’s, 1979 terms) what calls for systemic thinking.

Arriving at a ‘poised resourcefulness’ in our professional practices

In the recent past, all our inquiries have been in the pursuit of knowledge, objective knowledge, knowledge that can be put into books and be of use anywhere at any time. Indeed, Descartes’ (1968/1637) dream was that by those “long chains of reasoning, quite simple and easy, which geometers use to teach their most difficult demonstrations… there can be nothing so distant that one does not reach it eventually, or so hidden that one cannot discover it” (p.41). But if our overall task in our practice-based inquiries is not to arrive at any particular factual or theoretical knowledge, what can its aim be? What might such practice-based inquiries, such inner exploratory movements offer participants who are already skilled practitioners within a particular discipline or profession? For they do not and cannot offer anything objective that can easily be pointed at and described; nor do or can they offer anything of immediate practical application. That’s for sure.

This, however, is a strength, not a weakness. For, in fact, they offer something of much more value to those of us as professional practitioners who must act in the moment, from within the midst of complexity. For they (can) work to ‘remind’ us that we in fact already function continually as a ‘centre of creativity’, with an awareness (usually unremarked upon) of a plenitude of possibilities available to us in our living relations to the others and othernesses around us in our surroundings. And in offering us a reflexive self-awareness of ourselves as living in our everyday human affairs within the midst of complexity, effortlessly, as continually dealing with uniquely new circumstances, always for ‘another first time’, they can bring to our conscious attention what we are already doing spontaneously and unconsciously.

In short, such explorations can offer us the gaining of a poised resourcefulness in our own special professional practices, an ability to go out to meet a whole range of contingencies with an appropriate response ‘at the ready’, so to speak – contingencies to do with human bewilderments, disorientations, puzzlements, feelings, emotions, and many other human disturbances that we can meet in our relations with the others and othernesses around us. Thus our living explorations and inquiries into our own ‘inner workings’, into our the ‘inner movements’ of thoughtful feelings and feelingful thoughts to which we submit ourselves in our practice-based inquiries, can thus be thought of a being the equivalent in the sphere of human encounters to the less extensive (but perhaps even more focused) ‘self-disciplines’ skilled tennis players submit themselves (in both their ‘off-court’ and ‘on-court’ practice), that enable them to become poised, ready to meet with an appropriate or relevant response, whatever is ‘served up’ to them by an opponent in the matches they play.

In other words, in Aristotle’s terms, we are aiming at phronesis, a mode of ethical reasoning conducted from within a practice in which deliberation, reflection, and judgement all play a central role. Thus, beginning with a vague qualitative sense of the particular situation we are in, as we begin to explore it, step-by-step, sequentially, we come to experience more and more fragments of it, with each movement of our bodies giving rise to each new fragment. If our bodies and brains are undamaged, we begin (in a way that, clearly, has not yet been well studied) to interrelate them all into a unitary (but still open) whole. Then, as further fragments accumulate, we come to experience the whole in a more detailed, more well articulated manner, so that eventually, so to speak, we come to know our ‘way about’ within it and are thus able ‘to go on’ within it in a more confident manner. Systemic thinking is thus not aimed at any specific end point, or finalized form of knowledge, but at our learning how to conduct such experiments in-the-moment from within a particular practice as required.

Thus my main practical aims in all the comments and notes I have provided above, are perceptual and not cognitive, are practical and not theoretical; that is, I have been much more concerned with what is involved in bringing previously unnoticed features of our activities to our attention than with trying to discover supposed, hidden, causal mechanisms of a general kind supposedly responsible for their occurrence. Indeed, my overall aim is to do with our becoming a certain kind of person, someone who is, so to speak, more ‘at home’ in human affairs, who knows how to find their ‘way around’ within them, such that at each moment, they can resolve on a way of ‘going on’ within them that all involved will be able to ‘see’ as ‘for the best’, given the resources available to them at that moment. And what makes this kind of learning collaborative learning – even though it is as individuals that we can develop a poised resourcefulness, is that it can only be achieved within our relations with those around us, we cannot do it on our own, in separation from them.

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