Dear College, Colleagues across the Curriculum,
and Linguists, Fiction-ists, and Transcendentalists:
IN a SCHOOL SETTING, it’s a challenge to get and hold
attention, dear students and colleagues, without a grade-gun
to force compliance—so many competing obligations reinforced
by the rigor of COURSES with their regulating and governing
agenda of aims, goals, measurable and assessable outcomes.
Never the less: it’s un-postponed joy to be trying: jiggle dance,
clip-art, foolishness rushing in to clown and caper and provide
counter-pointto the seriousness of credentialed study.
Below is a sampling of an article John Barry (economist and
business colleague) sent me on DIALOGUE, written by David
Bohm (quantumphysicist, as if that might encourage respect in
a post-modernn, post-literate, neo- oral age)
http://www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/bohm_dialogue.htm
It speaks to what I try to do in class, and I admit it’s a mission
impossible—acknowledging it as such, I tell myself, is pre-requisite for
possibility.
I would use the word DIALECTIC rather than “dialogue.” Dialogue
as a let’s-get-on-the-same-page connotation, whereas “dialectic” is
oppositional and needs to sustain conflict in order to generate the
possibility of emerging values and phenomenal. But the spirit
of Bohm’s article is close to my heart and to liberal art.
I’ve indulged in marginal commentary, response and
reaction to his good words—always for the sake
of argument.
&&&&&&&&
Dialogue, as we are choosing to use the word, is a way
of exploring the roots of the many crises that face humanity
today. It enables inquiry into, and understanding of, the
sorts of processes that fragment and interfere with real
communication between individuals, nations and even
different parts of the same organization. In our modern
culture, men and women are able to interact with one
another in many ways: they can sing dance or play
together with little difficulty but their ability to talk
together about subjects that matter deeply to them seems
invariably to lead to dispute, division and often to violence.
In our view this condition points to a deep and pervasive
defect in the process of human thought. [[Not a defect,
I claim: a given. Suspend judgment. To call it a defect
skews the process of observation and description as
if there were something wrong and un-human-natural
about dispute, division, and violence.
How can anyone understand a phenomenon if they’ve
all ready framed it as mistake? Imagine Jane Goodall’s
effectiveness as primatologist if she’s projecting her
good&evil bias on her chimps. NO such thing as a bad
monkey, in Jane Goodall mode, at least. Theoretically.
In Dialogue, a group of people can explore the individual
and collective presuppositions, ideas, beliefs, and feelings
that subtly control their interactions. It provides an opportunity
to participate in a process that displays communication
successes and failures. [[This is true if the “dialogue”
issustained. The subtly of the control is only revealed
as the players wince and writhe and feel viscerally the
threats, and observe themselves shifting into offense/
defense and home land security tactics. We are, in an
important descriptive sense, meat puppets.]]
It can reveal the often puzzling patterns of incoherence that
lead the group to avoid certain issues or, on the other hand,
to insist, against all reason, on standing and defending
opinions about particular issues. [[Such revelation is
apocalyptic —tearing away the veils of denial and
cover-up. You can imagine how painful this is.
Impossible, really, without an overall shared
frame-work or environment that justifies and
encourages this kind of cerebral/affective
Gold’s Gym work-out.]],
Dialogue is a way of observing, collectively,
how hidden values and intentions can control
our behavior, and how unnoticed cultural
differences can clash without our realizing
what is occurring. It can therefore be seen
as an arena in which collective learning takes
place and out of which a sense of increased
harmony, fellowship and creativity can arise.
[[There’s no way the exposure of how hidden
values and intentions can control our (meat
puppet) behavior and how unnoticed cultural
differences can clash without our realizing
what is occurring demands a shared awareness
and appreciation for how disruptive and
demoralizing such work is. Imagine a rugby
match that wasn’t called rugby, didn’t have
the overall frame of Good Game going
on? It’d just be a battle royale, right?]]
Because the nature of Dialogue is exploratory,
its meaning and its methods continue to unfold.
No firm rules can be laid down for conducting a
Dialogue because its essence is learning – not
as the result of consuming a body of information
or doctrine imparted by an authority, nor as a
means of examining or criticizing a particular
theory or program, but rather as part of an
unfolding process of creative participation
between peers. [[Creative, sure, and rigorous
and dare I say excruciating? Digressive and
transgressive—stalwart pioneering toward
frontiers unknown. Not a walk in the park.
Fight-Club, the book or movie comes close
to representing. Not for every body. ]]
As we proceeded it became increasing clear to
us that this process of Dialogue is a powerful
means of understanding how thought functions.
We became aware that we live in a world
produced almost entirely by human enterprise
and thus, by human thought. The room in which
we sit, the language in which these words are
written, our national boundaries, our systems of
value, and even that which we take to be our
direct perceptions of reality are essentially
manifestations of the way human beings think
and have thought. We realize that without
a willingness to explore this situation and to
gain a deep insight into it, the real crises of
our time cannot be confronted, nor can we
find anything more than temporary solutions
to the vast array of human problems that
now confront us. [[Let it be claimed that
the willingness to explore this [[dialectical]]
situation and gain deep insight into it, has
the likelihood of attracting participants as
any x-treme sport—radical slate-boarding,
bungee-jumping, sky-diving, climbing
Kilimanjaro with aluminum prosthetic legs,
or else old-time music jamming on the back
porch, fiddling the same old same old songs
and no body cares who’s good and who isn’t
and it all sounds like plunkety- plunk and a
good time’s had by all. ]]
We are using the word "thought" here to signify
not only the products of our conscious intellect
but also our feelings, emotions, intentions and
desires. It includes such subtle, conditioned
manifestations of learning as those that allow
us to make sense ofsuccession of separate scenes
within a cinema film or to translatethe abstract
symbols on road signs along with the tacit, non-
verbal processes used in developing basic,
mechanical skills such as ridinga bicycle. [[In other
words: unconscious and semi-conscious process
is considered part of the whole thinking-going-on
often reserved exclusively for self-conscious-ego-
purposive-aims- outcomes & measurable goals
dear to the hearts of assessmentalists and quality
control-ists, the dominant pair of dimes.]]
In essence "thought," in this sense of the word, is
the active response of memory in every phase of life.
Virtually all of our knowledge is produced, displayed,
communicated, transformed and applied in thought.
[[Need we argue? Of course, OR what’s a college for?
Or how else sustain debate, dialogue, and dialectic:
that triad?]]
To further clarify this approach, we propose that,
with the aid of a little close attention, even that which
we call rational thinking can be see to consist largely
of responses conditioned and biased by previous thought.
If we look carefully at what we take to be reality we
begin to see that it includes a collection of concepts,
memories and reflexes colored by our personal needs,
fears, and desires,all of which are limited and distorted
by the boundaries of language and the habits of our
history, sex and culture. It is extremely difficult to
disassemble this mixture or to ever be certain whether
what weare perceiving - or what we may think about
those perceptions – is at all accurate. [[Start with the
notion of us as MEAT PUPPETS. Can you feeeeeel
the resistance to that characterization? THERE: right
THERE: the stalwart pioneering boundary-land toward
frontiers yet unknown. How else spot the lines of defense
that protect the borders pf bias/belief/prejudice/conviction
(our DNA or directional navigational algorithms) that
remain transparent, invisible until something—some
small IED or jab, nuance or unsubtle drone invasion
breaks thru my resistance and I feel it as slings and
arrows of outrageous misfortune: right there—the
beginning of the practice of liberal art.]]
What makes this situation so serious is that thought
generally conceals this problem from our immediate
awareness and succeeds in generating a sense that
the way each of us interprets the world is the only
sensibleway in which it can be interpreted. What is
needed is a means by which we can slow down the
process of thought in order to be able to observe
it while it is actually occurring. [[What I’m saying.
But it’s excruciating.]]
No need to beg to differ: bring it on.
xxxooo, Sam.
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