Notes for a Starfish Federation (3)

8/14/2019 Notes for a Starfish Federation (3)

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Notes on a Starfish Federation

Lynn Hoffman

1. In the beginning was the Deed

Wittgenstein believed that communication started as a form of action. He says: Inthe beginning was the Deed. He distrusted words, comparing language to aflybottle, which the poor fly trapped inside it (us) cannot see: One thinks that oneis tracing the outline of the things nature over and over again, and one is merelytracing round the frame through which we look at it.

Gregory Bateson, another communications pioneer, was also fascinated by actionforms. In this category, he placed areas such as dreams, religion, art, play,fantasy, humor, and animal communication. These have no simple way to indicatethe negative. For instance, an otter distinguishes playing from fighting by thehardness of the bite. So-called schizophrenic communication had the same

problem. A person with this label might say something but then disqualify it by abehavior, or act in one way but make a disclaimer. A good example might be JayHaleys story of a Mothers Day card that a person in a mental hospital gave hismother with the words: To One Who Has Been Just Like a Mother to Me.

These ideas backed up the Bateson groups invention of the double bind, in whicha statement on one level (e.g. Come closer) is qualified by a covert reversal (e.g.gestures meaning the opposite or Forget what I just said). Feeling that the termnonverbal was too weak for this complicated category, I decided to call it theUnlisted Languages. As a move in the same direction, I welcomed RichardBaldwins term for the consulting process, Esthetic Action.

2. From Construction to Dialogue.

Bateson didnt separate the individual from the context, but focused on theinterplay of parts within the relevant ecology. Perhaps this is why he never adoptedthe concept of the family system. He usually distrusted noun-like entitiesbecause it was so easy to see them as dysfunctional. For the same reason, heopposed the idea of counting double binds. Not only was this reductive of thecomplexity family therapists face, but it amounted to what he called anepistemological error.

Paul Watzlawick, a member of the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, favoredWittgensteins frame theory. This view came to be called Constructivism, which

held that our knowledge of the world is constructed by the nature of our sensorybiology. For this reason, we can never know what the world is really like.Watzlawick offers the story of the pilot who steers his boat at night through a rockychannel as an example of a kind of negative knowledge. The only way he knowsthat he steered the boat correctly is that he didnt hit a rock.

Kenneth Gergen rescued us from pure Constructivism by proposing SocialConstruction Theory. We dont just cognize as individuals isolated by our nervous


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systems, but are influenced by a penumbra of ideas from social entities like family,community and culture. Thus Gergen talks about a community of knowers. LikeWittgenstein, he saw abstract concepts like gender as a frame through which we,the knowers, see the world, and held that what we see reflects that frame.

This position still leaves us with some unit (the individual, the family, the

community) at the center, filtering knowledge through a sensory, cultural or politicalset of optics. The philosopher-philologist Mikhail Bakhtin took a leap out of thatenclosed bubble when he compared monologic to dialogic thinking. RefiningBakhtins idea, philosopher John Shotter held that the first position, the position ofthe expert, was one of aboutness, and that the second, based on the inclusion ofthe other, was one of withness. Looking for emphasis on relationship, he feltthat giving pride of place to the knower was limiting, because it ignored thedialogical connectedness between one creature and another..

3: From System to Rhizome:

I first began to see that the word System had become limiting through myconnection to Christopher Kinman, who devoured postmodern philosophy like egg-drop soup. He seemed to be searching for descriptions that would express thechanges wrought by our increasingly Internet-abled world. In the work of the twoFrench philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, he found an unusual basicmetaphor represented by the botanical group called Rhizome, as opposed to theentrenched metaphor of the Tree. Deleuze and Guattari used the wordarborescence to describe the hierarchical view implicit in the Tree analogy, andmade an impassioned case for strategies that undermine it. They say:

In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchicalcommunication and pre-established paths, the rhizome is an acentered, non-

hierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizingmemory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states.

And later: Animals can also, in herds or packs, be rhizomes: Rats are rhizomes.Burrows are too, in all their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, andbreakout. And again: You can never get rid of ants because they form an animalrhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed.

The title of Deleuze and Guattaris second book was One Thousand Plateaus. ThePlateau was the unit that for them replaced terms like the System. With Bateson asbackup, the writers say: A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning orthe end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word plateauto designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region ofintensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point orexternal end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example: mother-child sexualgames, and even quarrels among men, undergo this bizarre intensive stabilization.Some sort of continuous plateau of intensity is substituted for (sexual) climax, war,or a culmination point.

In regard to language, Deleuze and Co. take issue with Noam Chomskys linguistic


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tree, saying: A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, notonly linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural and cognitive: there is nolanguage in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects,patois, slangs, and specialized languagesThere is no mother tongue, only a powertakeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. Language stabilizesaround a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by subterranean

stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.

Other snippets: Were tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots,radicals. Theyve made us suffer too much. And again: Many people have a treegrowing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more grass than a tree. The axonand the dentrite twist around each other like bindweed around brambles, withsynapses at each of the thorns. Finally, a slogan: The American singer Patti Smithsings the bible of the American dentist: Dont go for the root, follow the canal.

4. The Starfish Analogy

It was at this time that I discovered a book by Ari Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom,

called The Starfish and the Spider. These writers were techies who came from anInternet background, and their book offered a new set of contrapuntal structures.

The Starfish can lose its arms and new ones will grow back. Cut it into pieces andnew little starfish will appear. But the Spider is built along hierarchical lines. Cut itshead off, and the entire organism will die.

Brafman and Beckman then told about a lucky break. They stumbled on the work ofTom Nevins, a cultural anthropologist who was writing about the SpanishConquistadores and the First Nations groups they overcame. This researcher hadfound a perfect illustration for both Starfish and Spider regimes. On the one hand,there were the technologically superior forces of the Spanish, whose goal was togain control of centralized societies like the Inca or the Aztec. If the leaders of these

societies refused to give the Spaniards the gold they wanted, they were killed, andtheir civilizations inevitably dissolved. In the fight between two Spiders, thestronger one wins.

The second group, the Starfish, is typified by the Apaches. These were looselystructured tribes whose social glue was weak. Instead of a leader, the Apaches hadNantans, who were spiritual figures and were in any case replaceable. The Apachesexcelled at the sneak and attack mode. If the Spanish tried to fight back, theApache warriors folded their teepees and melted away. They were not a monolithicbody, so the Spanish could never conquer them.

There is a point to be made here. Perhaps the reason that hierarchical civilizationsfail in conventional wars against nomadic, tribal societies is because these entitiesare like starfish. Cut off their limbs and they grow new ones. Cut them up, andtwice as many angry starfish will take their place.

But the main reason this book interested me was because it compared a rhizome-like flat world (Thank you, Thomas Friedman) to the hierarchical nature of modernsocial groups made famous by philosopher Michel Foucault. This means that wehave a hopeful alternative. For political Starfish examples we need go no further


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than Barack Obamas presidential campaign. The rhizome-like connections the Weboffers, backed by inventions like Tweeter and Youtube, represent an increasinglypowerful influence on how communication is performed. I too have come tosubstitute the image of the Rhizome for the image of the System. The Internet isitself a rhizome, and it is changing our Western world just as the Gutenberg Biblechanged it centuries ago.

4. Are Impingement Theories Useful?

Biological researchers like Alva Noe believe that our presence in the world does notfit with the depiction of consciousness as a brain in a vat. Here is a quote froman interview with him (Out of Our Heads: Why You are Not Your Brain, and otherLessons From the Biology of Consciousness. Interview by Christine Smallwood: TheNation, March 16, 2009.) Smallwood asked him: Does your work on consciousnesshave consequences for interspecies relationships, for animal rights?

Noe answers:

The classical picture of our human predicament is that were all interiorityand the world as far as we know is nothing but a source of impingement.Were bombarded with sensory stimulation, and insofar as we think we

occupy a world with an independent existence and other people, all that isreally sort of a conjecture; were trapped inside the caverns of our oneconscious mind. Im offering a different picture, where the world and othersaround us come first, and we are spread out and plugged in and implicated.Think of a row of bushes; each bush is interwoven with the other bushes, theroots reach down into the ground and entangle with each other. The picturethat emerges is were at home in the world, were of the world, the world isnot a projection or this alien thing, just as other people are not just merelyacting bodies but are present for us as meaningful and important. The

natural extension of that is to acknowledge that the species boundary is not aparticularly special boundary. When you encounter life, especially animal lifebut not only animal life, you dont hypothesize the presence of the life aroundUs. That theres life around us and that we get it and we recognize it is theprecondition of the kind of life we are.

I think this is a good statement of the difference between Web-based ways ofworking and the Language-based approaches that focus on the production ofmeaning. The former have a tap-root that goes back to Batesons vision of theworld as an ecologically connected web. The latter are centered on what Noe callsthe idea of the world as an impingement. This suggests that our knowing dependson a filtering mouth like a whales, which takes in only what its bio-psycho-socialequipment accepts. I think it is time that we challenged this statement as onlypartly true, and ask ourselves which relational approaches have already movedtoward a more connecting, web-building image.

5. Which Relational Practices Belong to a Starfish Federation?

I like the idea that we are born into an earthbound environment like a Devonshirehedge. These famous living walls are woven out of hundreds of different species


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over hundreds of years, including the animals and humans who keep and are keptby it. It is a concept that is close to Batesons example of the relationship betweenhorse and turf, each gradually changing the other and evolving mutually. In fact, itis an exact illustration for Batesons Mind-and-Nature seminal idea.

I also like the Rhizome as a ruling metaphor, with its horizontal flow-shapes and

implications of subversion and surprise. Again let me cite a Bateson phrase:Creativity is based on the random.

So which relational methods might be natural candidates for a Starfish Federation?I would include Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchins Circular Questioning,Harlene Andersons Collaborative Practices, Tom Andersons Reflecting Process,Michael Whites Outsider Witnesses, Jaakko Seikkula and Mary Olsons DialogicNetworks, Chris Kinmans Rhizome Way and the Sharevision approach of EllenLandis, Lisa Thompson, and Richard Baldwin. These views all include specificpractices of web-building which help people to feel (my wording) more safe, morefree, and more alive. Aliveness, not Health, is the basic shift of meaning here, andfor this insight I am indebted again to Chris Kinman. Other versions of these ideas

are sprouting outside my single awareness, but my occasional gift for predictionmakes me believe that I may be attached in some subterranean way to the largerenterprise. Which brings me to this passage from a really old friend, thepsychologist Carl Jung. In this passage from his prologue to Memories, Dreams,Reflections, he says this lovely thing:

Life has always seemed to me like a plant which lives on its rhizome. Thepart that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then itwithers away an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unendinggrowth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression ofabsolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives andendures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes.

The rhizome remains.

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Notes for a Starfish Federation (3)