Notes For A Starfish Federation (3)

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: “In the beginning was the Deed.” He distrusted words, comparing language to a flybottle, which the poor fly trapped inside it (us) cannot see: “One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” Gregory Bateson, another communications pioneer, was also fascinated by action forms. In this category, he placed areas such as dreams, religion, art, play, fantasy, humor, and animal communication. These have no simple way to indicate the negative. For instance, an otter distinguishes playing from fighting by the hardness of the bite. So-called schizophrenic communication had the same problem. A person with this label might say something but then disqualify it by a behavior, or act in one way but make a disclaimer. A good example might be Jay Haley’s story of a Mother’s Day card that a person in a mental hospital gave his mother with the words: “To One Who Has Been Just Like a Mother to Me.” These ideas backed up the Bateson group’s invention of the “double bind,” in which a 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 term “nonverbal” was too weak for this complicated category, I decided to call it “the Unlisted Languages.” As a move in the same direction, I welcomed Richard Baldwin’s term for the consulting process, “Esthetic Action.” 2. From Construction to Dialogue. Bateson didn’t separate the individual from the context, but focused on the interplay of parts within the relevant ecology. Perhaps this is why he never adopted the concept of the “family system”. He usually distrusted noun-like entities because it was so easy to see them as dysfunctional. For the same reason, he opposed the idea of “counting double binds.” Not only was this reductive of the complexity family therapists face, but it amounted to what he called an “epistemological error.” Paul Watzlawick, a member of the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, favored Wittgenstein’s “frame” theory. This view came to be called Constructivism, which held that our knowledge of the world is constructed by the nature of our sensory biology. 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 rocky channel as an example of a kind of negative knowledge. The only way he knows that he steered the boat correctly is that he didn’t hit a rock. Kenneth Gergen rescued us from pure Constructivism by proposing Social Construction Theory. We don’t just cognize as individuals isolated by our nervous

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.” Like Wittgenstein, 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 political set of optics. The philosopher-philologist Mikhail Bakhtin took a leap out of that enclosed bubble when he compared monologic to dialogic thinking. Refining Bakhtin’s idea, philosopher John Shotter held that the first position, the position of the expert, was one of “aboutness,” and that the second, based on the inclusion of the “other,” was one of “withness.” Looking for emphasis on relationship, he felt that giving pride of place to the knower was limiting, because it ignored the dialogical connectedness between one creature and another. . 3: From System to Rhizome: I first began to see that the word “System” had become limiting through my connection to Christopher Kinman, who devoured postmodern philosophy like eggdrop soup. He seemed to be searching for descriptions that would express the changes wrought by our increasingly Internet-abled world. In the work of the two French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, he found an unusual basic metaphor represented by the botanical group called Rhizome, as opposed to the entrenched metaphor of the Tree. Deleuze and Guattari used the word “arborescence” to describe the hierarchical view implicit in the Tree analogy, and made an impassioned case for strategies that undermine it. They say: “In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical communication and pre-established paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory 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, and breakout.” And again: You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed.” The title of Deleuze and Guattari’s second book was “One Thousand Plateaus.” The Plateau was the unit that for them replaced terms like the System.” With Bateson as backup, the writers say: “A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word “plateau” to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example: mother-child sexual games, 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 Chomsky’s “linguistic

tree,” saying: “A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages…There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. Language stabilizes around 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: “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, radicals. They’ve made us suffer too much.” And again: “Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more grass than a tree. The axon and the dentrite twist around each other like bindweed around brambles, with synapses at each of the thorns.” Finally, a slogan: “The American singer Patti Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don’t 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 an Internet 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 and new little starfish will appear. But the Spider is built along hierarchical lines. Cut its head off, and the entire organism will die. Brafman and Beckman then told about a lucky break. They stumbled on the work of Tom Nevins, a cultural anthropologist who was writing about the Spanish Conquistadores and the First Nations groups they overcame. This researcher had found 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 to gain 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, and their civilizations inevitably dissolved. In the fight between two Spiders, the stronger one wins. The second group, the Starfish, is typified by the Apaches. These were loosely structured tribes whose social glue was weak. Instead of a leader, the Apaches had Nant’ans, who were spiritual figures and were in any case replaceable. The Apaches excelled at the sneak and attack mode. If the Spanish tried to fight back, the Apache warriors folded their teepees and melted away. They were not a monolithic body, so the Spanish could never conquer them. There is a point to be made here. Perhaps the reason that hierarchical civilizations fail in conventional wars against nomadic, tribal societies is because these entities are like starfish. Cut off their limbs and they grow new ones. Cut them up, and twice as many angry starfish will take their place. But the main reason this book interested me was because it compared a rhizomelike “flat world” (Thank you, Thomas Friedman) to the hierarchical nature of modern social groups made famous by philosopher Michel Foucault. This means that we have a hopeful alternative. For political Starfish examples we need go no further

than Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The rhizome-like connections the Web offers, backed by inventions like Tweeter and Youtube, represent an increasingly powerful influence on how communication is performed. I too have come to substitute the image of the Rhizome for the image of the System. The Internet is itself a rhizome, and it is changing our Western world just as the Gutenberg Bible changed it centuries ago. 4. Are Impingement Theories Useful? Biological researchers like Alva Noe believe that our presence in the world does not fit with the depiction of consciousness as “a brain in a vat.” Here is a quote from an interview with him (“Out of Our Heads: Why You are Not Your Brain, and other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness.” Interview by Christine Smallwood: The Nation, March 16, 2009.) Smallwood asked him: “Does your work on consciousness have consequences for interspecies relationships, for animal rights?” Noe answers: The classical picture of our human predicament is that we’re all interiority and the world as far as we know is nothing but a source of impingement. We’re bombarded with sensory stimulation, and insofar as we think we occupy a world with an independent existence and other people, all that is really sort of a conjecture; we’re trapped inside the caverns of our one conscious mind. “I’m offering a different picture, where the world and others around 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, the roots reach down into the ground and entangle with each other. The picture that emerges is we’re at home in the world, we’re of the world, the world is not a projection or this alien thing, just as other people are not just merely acting bodies but are present for us as meaningful and important. The natural extension of that is to acknowledge that the species boundary is not a particularly special boundary. When you encounter life, especially animal life but not only animal life, you don’t hypothesize the presence of the life around Us. That there’s life around us and that we get it and we recognize it is the precondition of the kind of life we are.” I think this is a good statement of the difference between Web-based ways of working and the Language-based approaches that focus on the production of meaning. The former have a tap-root that goes back to Bateson’s vision of the world as an ecologically connected web. The latter are centered on what Noe calls the idea of the world as an “impingement.” This suggests that our knowing depends on a filtering mouth like a whale’s, which takes in only what its bio-psycho-social equipment accepts. I think it is time that we challenged this statement as only partly true, and ask ourselves which relational approaches have already moved toward 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 Devonshire hedge. These famous living walls are woven out of hundreds of different species

over hundreds of years, including the animals and humans who keep and are kept by it. It is a concept that is close to Bateson’s example of the relationship between horse and turf, each gradually changing the other and evolving mutually. In fact, it is an exact illustration for Bateson’s 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 Cecchin’s “Circular Questioning,” Harlene Anderson’s “Collaborative Practices,” Tom Anderson’s “Reflecting Process,” Michael White’s “Outsider Witnesses,” Jaakko Seikkula and Mary Olsons’ “Dialogic Networks,” Chris Kinman’s “Rhizome Way” and the “Sharevision” approach of Ellen Landis, Lisa Thompson, and Richard Baldwin. These views all include specific practices of web-building which help people to feel (my wording) “more safe, more free, and more alive.” Aliveness, not Health, is the basic shift of meaning here, and for 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 prediction makes me believe that I may be attached in some subterranean way to the larger enterprise. Which brings me to this passage from a really old friend, the psychologist 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. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.