Creating A Relational Work

Creating a Relational Work Leibniz, Einstein and a Challenge to Human Services Practice by Christopher J. Kinman Everything flows, down below, “in a perpetual flux, with bits and pieces continually entering and exiting.” Deleuze (quoting Leibniz), p. 80 *** The Rhizome Network (http://www.rhizomeway.com/rhizomenetwork/) is an online project I have been working on in close consultation with my friend, colleague and mentor, Lynn Hoffman. Within this website we are endeavouring to connect together from throughout the world a wide diversity of thinkers and practitioners who see the work of human services (human services includes all such disciplines as medicine, education, social work, psychology, family therapy, etc.) from within a particular sensibility. I believe that this sensibility must not be too tightly defined, and must continually be open to further description. However, there are influences which are repeatedly seen within these approaches, these include the writings of thinkers such as Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, among others. Within this document I align this sensibility I am talking of with a wider lineage of thought that is particularly associated with two of history’s most notable thinkers of science and mathematics, Leibniz and Einstein. This lineage is contrasted with the thinking of Newton and his followers – a lineage of thought which continues to hold pervasive authority over much of contemporary life. I was led to these ideas in part through listening to a C.B.C. Ideas podcast of an interview with the physicist, Lee Smolin (this podcast is also presented as a chapter, “The Trouble with Physics,” in a recent book, Ideas on the Nature of Science by David Cayley, Editor). Smolin identifies noteworthy differences between the way that Newton, and much of modern science, perceives time and space and how Leibniz, along with his twentieth-century colleague, Alfred Einstein, experienced time and space. In Smolin’s words:

Re-Creating Relational Work

The discussion really goes back to the time of Newton, and it goes back to the debates between Newton and his followers and Leibniz and his followers... (Leibniz) had a deep disagreement with Newton about the nature of space and time, which is easy to explain. For Newton, before there’s any matter, there’s space. Space exists absolutely, and particles move within it. It’s like a bare stage in an empty theatre. The stage is there when the play is not on. Then the audience comes in, the actors come on, and they play the play. The stage directions tell them “stage left,” “stage right,” “back,” and so forth, but the stage is always there, no matter what’s going on, and positions on the stage are absolute and unrelated to the play. For Newton, space was the sensorium of God. Space was God and was God’s way of knowing what was in the world – by feeling things through their positions in space. Newton saw space that way, as absolute, and time in the same way... Now Leibniz was also very theological – he had this big project of reconciling the religions, the Christian religions, with each other – but he had a view of religion that led to a view of space and time in which there was no absolute framework. Space was only a matter of relationships between things, and without things to have relationships, there would be no space. His picture is more like street theatre. Until the actors come and start playing, there is no stage, there is no space. The actors create the space that they play in. That, we say, is a relational view of space. Smolin, Pages 347-348 It can easily be seen how Einstein was influenced by Leibniz’ thought. Einstein’s theory of relativity (which is not concerned with an absence of truths, like many seem to believe) sees truths as always embedded in networks of relationships. Objects (whether galactic or atomic) do not exist upon a preset stage for Einstein; rather they appear always in relationships with other objects, and are only distinguishable in relationship with other objects. For example, E = mc2 is not so much a mathematical equation as it is an eloquent and insightful descriptor of interaction, it describes relationship, and it opens up a way of distinguishing the world through relationship. Without objects in relationships, and without networks of relationships, and without all of this in movement, there is no truth, there is no energy, there is no space, and there is no time.

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Re-Creating Relational Work

A Newtonian Path to Human Services Work Newton’s perspective has not only influenced worlds of the physical sciences, it also can be seen to have clear influences on the way people are to be treated and engaged with, and on the way human service work is to be understood and practiced. 

In the Newtonian perspective people are knowable and predictable.

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And working with people can be clearly and confidently prescribed in accordance with sound scientific knowledge.

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In a Newtonian worldview set entities are distinguished and can be (and must be) studied in separation from a wider context (the wider context and relationships are seen as obstacles creating interfering variables which contaminate the purity of research and intervention).

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This leads to a view of human services work that is reliant upon the distinguishing and reification of entities, whether a given entity is an individual, an organization, a community, or any other agreed-upon distinction. Relationships play second fiddle to the distinct entity.

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Human services work is the process of acting upon such clearly defined entities toward a predetermined desired end.

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Particular disciplines emerge (such as psychology/psychiatry, medicine, social work, organizational consulting, etc.) with each discipline researching and working primarily upon one of these discrete entities.

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Re-Creating Relational Work

A Leibnizian/Einsteinian Path to Human Services Work Human services work from a Leibniz or Einstein point of view can look quite different from a Newtonian perspective. 

First of all, there are no discrete entities separate from context and relationship, other than those which humans create within their own engagement with these entities (and even these entities cannot be separated from relationship).

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Everything exists in relationship and in motion, including the work we engage in.

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Human services work is not a work of intervening in the lives of people, communities or society at large.

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It is a work of engagement with networks of relationship, an opening up to larger territories of influence, including realms of which we might not currently have much acquaintance with.

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Such a work is not so much about healing, and certainly is not about fixing.

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This is always a work of creating. The distinctions we make are not eternal, are not pre-evident, instead they are forged in the midst of life and relationships. And the actions we take are also not predetermined, but are created in response to the complexities of rhizome relations.

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Our work is not just one of engaging with people in the creation and recreation of lives and relationships, but even more so, a second-order creation – that is a work of creating contexts, creating ecologies wherein the creating of lives and relationships can occur.

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This work always occurs in the midst of specific, singular, unrepeatable events of relationship. These events can never occur a second time.

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Re-Creating Relational Work 

As Lynn Hoffman suggests this work creates a sense of “more safe, more free, and more alive.” It is about “Aliveness.”

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This work is not an action of a professional upon a client; rather it consists of diverse acts of creation coming from and returning to complex and shifting webs of life and relationships.

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Such work necessitates not only engagement with vast domains of thought, ideas and disciplines, and not only engagement with people and relationships with people, but it also calls for engagements with nature and physical spaces, and with the potential array of living relations which emerge therein. ***

For with Leibniz the question surges forth in philosophy that will continue to haunt Whitehead and Bergson: not how to attain eternity, but in what conditions does the objective world call for a subjective production of novelty, that is, of creation? Deleuze, p. 79 *** Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press. Smolin, L. (2009). The Trouble with Physics. Ideas on the Nature of Science (Cayley, D. Editor). Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions.

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