Science, Systems and Subtle Interaction

I set up this blog first and foremost as a point of contact for those people who may be interested in joining a research project in which we work face to face, addressing the dynamics of grace and estrangement - in an immediate and personal manner.

Within my own field of vision, however, this is intricately bound up with my longstanding commitment to develop a much broader practical and theoretical perspective. This entails the best marriage I have yet encountered, between a truly scientific sensibility and the person-friendly perspective which helps us take charge, collectively, of our own pattern of life. Another heroic attempt at such a marriage was made by Robert Pirsig, in his Zen and the Art of MotorCycle Maintenance, and Lila, but for various reasons (see my other blog at http://lila-q.blogspot.com) I feel my own attempt is truer to the spirit of science and also to the spirit of human reality⁽¹⁾

I would like to put this material within reach of any friendly bloggers, so I am including some key links here. The practical perspective that I offer, is strongly consequential upon the radical move I have made, of bringing systems theory and lived reality into intimate relationship.

To understand how this works, however, we need to make a broad distinction between systems theory, and systems sensibility. Systems theory is a broad technical discipline in its own right, which seems to proceed perfectly happily in the Asperger's-Syndrome "boy world" of machines, calculations, decision and control - seemingly walled off from the hot, sweaty, emotional domain of everyday living. Systems sensibility, by contrast, is implicitly a personal thing: depending on intuition, felt sense, and vague recognitions of something important that cannot - certainly can not at will - be put into words. I associate this sensibility primarily with the work of Professor Stafford Beer; so far as I know the term was coined by him, but the words (if not the true concept) have spread far and wide since Beer’s work had its first flowering

Stafford Beer represents the high point of the emotionally intelligent systems thinking, which was on the rise in the decades from the Second World War to the early 1970s. (There has been something of an eclipse of his work and influence more recently, but I suspect that the cause of this is largely to do the vagaries of cultural fashion.) The focus of his method is the intelligent cybernetic modeling of any form⁽²⁾ of human enterprise. From this complex and demanding method⁽³⁾ I am selecting some key principles, which will help to ground - and to provide orientation for - the delicate structure which we are going to build together.

You can find a discussion of the array of existing methods, which I see as having an essential resonance with my own work, on the following link.

A remarkable feature of our own method, is that it centres so faithfully about our personal standpoint: our personal commitments, our feelings, desires, and preferred ways of getting along together. In this sense it is more down-to-earth and personal than the practical methods I refer to on my main web-site, but so far as its domain of application is concerned, it is more general, and in effect more abstract.

To understand this paradox, we need to know the technical background and reasoning, some of which can be found at this link, but for which the underpinnings are scattered through various locations on my web-site, especially the section on systems sensibility. This technical understanding is not essential for the actual practice, but it is indispensable for understanding how and why the method works; it will also be an aid for making sense of the delicate choices we have to make in the course of our practice.

NOTE 1. The attempt to bridge the gap between scientific and everyday reality was also a primary concern of the twentieth century philosophers A.N.Whitehead, John Dewey and Justus Buchler. In other words, Robert Pirsig was by no means the first person to address this issue.

2. In Diagnosing the System for Organisations (1985) Beer declares that the approach is relevant: "whether you are interested in a firm, an international conglomerate, a social service, a consortium of like-minded people, a government department, or a national economy." One of Beer's distinctions was to be invited as a consultant to the entire economy of Chile, under the only Marxist government to be democratically elected in the history of the world. Between the years 1971 and 1973 he devoted his main professional energy to this project. Following the CIA-inspired military coup and subsequent imposition of a military state under General Pinochet, Beer was invited to return and provide his services for the new regime - which request I am given to understand he politely declined.

3. A proper understanding of Beer's approach requires an apprenticeship to the cybernetics and underlying mathematics. This would also need to be combined with practice in the detailed modelling of some real-world enterprises. The interested reader is referred to Beer's own corpus of writing, which gives by far the best accounts available, of this work.

The Bones of It

I still need to put a lot of detail out, about these various "layers of method" and how each one works in its original context.

But there's also the question of what is at the core of this - what is the central insight, or something like that? The trouble is, over the months I have kept coming at this from different angles, but each time finding myself writing a different account altogether.

By calling the blog "Configuring Grace in the Now" I think I am nailing down a useful pivot point for starting to think about this. I'm hinting at the need to find a more graceful way of being. ("Graceful" in this context includes the ability to fall flat on one's face, if one falls at the right moment. It counts as "graceful" if it contributes to the forward movement of the entire situation, which of course depends as much on how people respond, as on the manner of my actual falling.)

This state (or this movement) of grace has to have several dimensions to it, according to my best understanding. It is simultaneously a way to be in the material world (which means perhaps doing real things, or at least expressing real things "out in the open"), but also to be with each other in such a way that our individual doing also feeds the collective creation in the moment. And thirdly, and at the same time, to have a compassionate and graceful being-with-myself. I see this as 3 simultaneous aspects of the one world I seek to inhabit with others.

So if a clear-cut way of working emerges from this research situation, it will be unique in its commitment to address simultaneously our being in the world, our being with each other, and our being with ourselves. That might seem like an impossible degree of multi-tasking, but I think if we have a shared commitment in that broad direction, and the willingness to proceed somewhat by trial and error, we become active real-time resources for each other, so that we spontaneously find ourselves helping each other towards the desired state of being / interacting.

I am trusting that those various background methods (the process work, the clowning, the willingness to improvise and take risks together etc etc) all help to push in this same direction - and I think they really can do this. Please come and help me find out if this is true.

Welcome to this blog

I don't know if this is the right title for what we are doing, but anyway I decided to reserve this blog space for communication amongst the group of people who are possibly available for our next weekend of research / exploration over the edge.

I am currently looking for a venue in Sheffield where whoever is available, can meet for a weekend in January or February next year. Let me know if you are interested in coming, and want to help us choose the date.

At our gatherings in October 07 and April 08 we have been creating a tuned-in way of working together which transcends the agendas we arrive with and moves into a shared creative improvisational space - from where we hope to discover all sorts of possibilities and opportunities.

As I said before, it is work that combines elements from Process Work, Community Building, Clown Improvisation, Feldenkrais Method and Focusing. We have only done it twice in the space of a year, but I have a strong sense of it shaping into a unified and coherent method - that will repay many times over the time and energy that we commit to it.

I think this blog can work better than a string of addresses in an e-mail, but in order to make posts you have to sign up for it, and it will be good if we can all find a way to receive an e-mail alert whenever anybody posts to it. I will continue to provide information through the old-style e-mail list until the blog is up and running, and seems to be working for everyone.