Heather+Curry

Heather Curry Position Statement

“The Curtains are on Fire”: Discovering self and community through the lens(es) of Complexity Theory

“Buddhist practice has trained me that the edge that feels like breakdown is the edge you have to lean gently against. I have fallen back from it a thousand times, refused to grow. What we might call a mature practice gives one little more than the ability to hang on a minute longer on the verge of annihilation. I think of myself as a bat on the curtains, resolving to hang. The curtains are on fire” Mary Rose O’Reilly, //The Love of Impermanent Things: A Threshold Ecology,// p. 209

And so I find myself at the end of this term, breathing in smoke while the curtains are ablaze. I wish for the comfort of home, which was never really all that comfortable to begin with, and was in a state of upheaval when I stumbled across the opportunity to join this initiative. But memory is a trickster, a slippery and mischievous thing, and my retrospective goggles are fogged with a peculiar fondness for something that never was. Home was, as you all know by now, Women’s Studies. The trajectory of that path, while not as neat as I’ll present now, began with a sense of outrage about the medicalization of women’s bodies, then moved into the more complex realm of gender constructs, then into the interlocking systems of oppression that inform the experience of “woman,” then into gender as an organizing principle on a global scale, then into a spiritual understanding of feminism as a practice rather than an identity, as a means by which to connect rather than seek shelter. You see the tendency to offer a timeline? It’s a lie, of course. I couldn’t lay it out so neatly if I were honest at all. These insufficiently described phases are mutually informing and, often, concurrent processes—interlopers and vagrants, shacking up on each other’s couches and so forth. But there is that sense of home; however messy it may be, it’s my mess. I enter complexity theory and find the state of affairs—the order or lack thereof—discomfiting. I’d like to arrange the bookshelves, but I have only the vaguest notion of how. I’m “alone, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.” I’m being melodramatic, but there is that familiar dis-ease, a sense of straying too far from what I know, and also, lest it get lost in the maze of concerns and confusion, the thrill of something new.

In light of this discomfort, the following work is the product of my own “phase transition.” It began as a personal diatribe about complexity, my spiritual path, my feminism, and the incongruities I’ve encountered this past four months. It has become something else entirely, as such things often do. Much later than I would have liked, I hit my intellectual groove, and began perceiving the ways in which complexity could inform feminist theory and feminist theory could inform complexity. Shortly thereafter, I discovered an article by Sylvia Walby, published this month, which spoke to a great deal of my concerns about how the language of CAS addresses reifications of inequalities, those incredibly potent echoes, in systems. But that’s another project for another time, so let me start here and note that this work in its entirety is insufficient.

I’m going to own up to a few elements of self first: I have soft edges; I value good metaphor over the elegance of models (in fact, I have to wear a bib to get through parts of //Hidden Order//—I’m sorry if that’s complexity sacrilege); I use words like “heart” and “love” and “soul” shamelessly; I loathe confrontation, even though I see the value in it; I have felt, particularly in the introductory phase of this new theoretical relationship, like complexity resembles Buddhism with the soul sucked out of it. As we delved into the language of management and organization theory, I wondered if I had made the right decision, or if I was stumbling too far from the spiritual excavation I had yet only begun. I’d gone from reading Mary OIiver and Pema Chodron, Krishnamurti and Thich Nhat Hanh, to, yes, Bill McKelvey and John Skvoretz. If experts in their respective fields, I believed I could not engage in the world they present: a world of relationships—conversations, flows of emotion, momentary dramas—boiled down to red and green dots, or one in which something as potent as “transcendental foresight” is used to anticipate shifts in consumer trends, a world void of poetry, void of magic. It’s not that complexity theory doesn’t have those voices—god knows complex adaptive systems are rich with it—but I am hearing them in a whisper. So I’m trying to find my voice in this business of complexity, trying to find poetry in a world of acronyms—SNA, ABM, CAS.

//I wrote this December of last year, at the end of a what can only be described as a tectonic shift in consciousness, one I wasn't prepared to accept or really articulate. The subterranean changes are, for me, the most uncomfortable. I can't see them as they're happening, can't hold onto, with any clarity, what ideologies are grinding together or crumbling away. I can't even perceive my attachments or entrenchments until after I've already begun releasing them (usually to pick up another set... ah, such is my struggle for wholeness and consciousness).

I would love to see complexity theory vocalize more readily and audibly its roots in contemplative practices and traditions; the threads are so apparent, and I suppose I still balk at the tendency for the hard(er) sciences to discredit spirit or soul (or whatever word one applies to these less tangible matters) as belonging to the province of the soft-headed. Buddhism seems particularly compatible to me with both complexity and organic sciences... but that's not really the focus of this work, and it's still far too embryonic in my own mind for me to delve into without belying my relative ignorance of theories and traditions to which I've only fairly recently been exposed. Regardless, I feel it important to "own up" to the deck I'm holding. This work is a whole lot of "owning up."//

I can only begin from where I am, and the next step in locating myself as is to articulate the list of identities and what worlds they grant me access to. Mother of a small child—this one is the most consuming and nourishing. Initially, I was heartened that this status was seen as an asset rather than an inconvenience to be worked around. My companions in this drama, this co-evolution, were not merely accommodating or polite—they engaged actively with Otis when he was present. I even enjoyed that spark of recognition in speaking with Jen Marshall. Though I perceive her to be far more composed than me, there were times when I saw and felt that harried, verge-of-exhausted look (perhaps I’m displacing here…), and thought, “Ah, I know you.” To be able to share my fears of the changes we’re facing as a family, the chaotic state (I have leapt over the edge several times now) of my mind and heart as mother, student, and “communiplexity team member” (blue uni-tards—we need them)—this space for process and openness has been indispensable. And by the nature of our focus in the county teams, this identity is the one most frequently activated, but there are often moments when it is not the costume I wish to wear. There are other voices that wish to be heard: feminist—both activist and budding scholar; writer; practicing wild woman; daughter of divorced parents… this is an ever-growing list. Each year adds to my collection of identities.

While writing this “position statement,” some of those voices emerged, and I gave them free reign. That’s peculiar phrasing—as though I don’t live them all concurrently, as though they aren’t mine at all. Ah well, we’ll roll with it for now.


 * Memoir from a Vaguely Disfranchised Daughter**

I apologize for any self-indulgence in the following writing. When I was nine, I discovered that what I wanted “to be” was a writer, and I have, until the past few years, stayed the course. Whether or not I am a “good” writer, is, of course, not the issue; the issue is that whoever else I am, the compulsion to write creatively is always bubbling beneath it all. So I’m going to indulge that self and write. In the spirit of relationship, this is a piece of my history. The relationship I have with my father informs my rules of engagement with other agents in the system. I haven’t yet fully reflected on how these not-so-simple rules shed light on the simple ones. The verdict’s still out on that one. I must be heard; I must establish an open line of communication; I must have as much transparency as possible; I must be able to freely acknowledge emotion.

Allison calls them, “the ghosts in the nursery.” And though he meant it quite literally, I recall a folk idiom uttered to me by an old friend, “You got a witch riding your back.” I’ve referred to them less evocatively as the family hand-me-downs, those patterns of interaction handed down through the generations like wedding china or a bad piece of “art”—you don’t like doves and grapes, not so big on still-lifes with pears, but they’re yours now, regardless. And so you wrap them in newspaper and store them somewhere out of the way, and you take them out for rare occasions when you’ll see people who will be pleased by their presence. They take up too much space, the newsprint activates your allergies, you have to lug them with you for every move—they are an albatross.

Plates and paintings, however, can be sold in garage sales or donated to Goodwill. … [SECTION UNDER CONSTRUCTION]

Ah, families. I suppose really looking at the ties that bind threatens to undo them. I am left with a good number of questions, though, about how we comprise a CAS. Does applying the label “complex adaptive system” imply some constancy in the boundaries? And now that we’ve opened up the system to new agents—Otis, Demian, Mary (my stepmother), my nieces, etc.—is there any resemblance to what we were before? Particularly when how we relate to one another in the system is really so different than how we related ten, or even five years ago. When the “wounds” are now either healed or so faintly scarred that we don’t have to skirt around them in order to speak to one another. Once a CAS has gone through a series of adaptations so fundamental as to render it unknowable in light of its previous iterations, is it the same CAS? What’s the benefit of naming it so? (RETURN TO THIS—NEEDS REPHRASING/FRAMING)

Notes on the Relentless Becoming of Motherhood**
 * "Peace is Every”… Time You Find Yourself Screaming at 2:00 in the Morning:

It is 2:00 in the morning. Otis has been awake for three hours; this means, of course, that I have been awake for three hours. I am tired, and angry. We are lying in the dark in a futile attempt to invoke sleep. He has been pummeling me sporadically for the last hour. He thinks it's funny. I do not. I yell at him, "Go to fucking sleep!" Otis stops everything. He looks at me for a second, completely silent, and then his face melts. It doesn't crumble. It slides and slips into outright terror. He sobs. I sob. We hold onto each other tightly and I apologize a thousand times. We fall asleep with our noses running and our cheeks wet, still holding on to each other.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes that peace begins, quite simply, in us, with the breath (1991). It is first and foremost an inward process, and it can occur while doing dishes, raking the yard, grocery shopping, or during a traffic jam. Anything can sound awareness, presence (35). There are moments--many of them--in which awareness seems to be an abstract notion, a catch phrase thrown around by those who have the luxury of time. Construct or not, 2:00 in the morning is not the time for a generally sleep-deprived woman to be awake and playing.

Or is it? In trying everything my exhausted mind was capable of conjuring, I wound up ensnared in a tantrum of my own. I scared the crap out of my child, who was only doing what his body dictated. I scared the crap out of me. I wanted to kick my feet and throw my arms around and scream. But what if I had simply acknowledged my irritation? What if I had honored my exhaustion? Perhaps I would have asked for help, then, instead of lying there, feeling alone, feeling helpless, which made me all the wearier. Or another possibility, I step outside of myself altogether and, since we're going to be awake regardless, just wake up and play with him. Yes, we need sleep. Our bodies actually physically require it. But fighting the moment was not going to provide rest. Karen Maezen-Miller writes in her book, //Zen Mama//, "Sleep is one our most intractable attachments. We claw and clutch and crave it. We adorn and worship it … it is our one sovereign domain. We hide out there; we fantasize and burrow there; we think we can't live without it. You will see that you can live without it--just enough" (43). At 2:00 in the morning, I forgot that time is a construct, I forgot that sleep is not an inalienable right, I forgot to see what treasure would present itself if I could just sink into the moment and stop writing the story of my deprivation. … The meaning of a complex adaptive system comes home to me most immediately when I look at the relationship I share with my son. The voice in which I write about him is not, at this moment in time, one I’m willing to surrender in lieu of a more rigorous complexity-informed analysis, and this was part of a larger work written a year ago that proposed mothering as an orientation in the world and an emancipatory practice which is not bound to the mother-child dyad. However, I’ve revisited it during the course of this term because, although I don’t always want to be heard from that vantage point alone, I am, at all times, engaged in the act of mothering, even in absentia. I have been changed irrevocably by the not-so-simple fact of motherhood, and take Otis with me wherever I am. We are a CAS, bound intimately beyond the skin. We are in a state of constant adaptation. When I think I have learned his rhythms, when I imagine for a moment that I’ve got a handle on who he is or who I am with him, when I think I know the rules of the game, the game changes. Non-linearity seems far too weak a word to describe the lurching, leaping progress of early childhood. There is no marching steadily here. This business requires reflection, but as a component of action, since time is at a premium. It begs awareness, at the deepest level, that the past, as Weick says, is an “unreliable” map for the present or future. It is, at best, a loose guide.

We are in constant negotiation, Otis and I. Right now, he is playing with emotion. He tries on “sad” a few times a day. I am learning that I react rather than act, that I want desperately to protect him from pain, and that I, in a place I don’t tap into often, believe his sadness to be a direct result of my failure to keep him happy. And this requires me to look at what we’re creating together, to see that I might be working to anesthetize him from emotion, to be a maternal Prozac. And he, in turn, is letting me know he’s okay with sadness; he’s letting me know that he needs to run through the breadth and depth of emotion as it comes up. I will always fail to encapsulate our relationship, in terms of complexity or Buddhism or through poetry, prose, or song. I will say this, however: I have grown in compassion for those “ghosts.” I can see them hovering at the edge of sight, and they are as full of joy and regret as I am in the moment. I’ve written about the legacy of regret, that we play it out before any transgression ever occurs. It’s my effort, through my reflective ability in this family, to forge novel paths, to see those grooves of memory, guilt and regret, honor them, and relegate them to a feature of the landscape.

I am a feminist. I can embrace that identity and in the same breath, problematize it as a rooted and defended space. But I want to offer it now as a strategic identity, one that has informed my relationship with complexity theory, one that I inhabit to check any tendency toward dogmatism, since my feminism is itself multi-dimensional and at times paradoxical.
 * On Identities and Intellection: Grappling with The theory**

A good many of the questions that remain in my mind about CAS can be traced to my understanding of a number of feminist theories, in particular post-colonial, womanist and mujerista feminisms, queer theory and feminist gender theory. Additionally, I have been exploring Buddhist and other spiritual philosophies which propose a liberatory dis-identification. Herein my initial attraction to complexity theory can be located. In that it finds its roots in systems theory, I found a home in it, albeit just studs and the foundation. I’m not proficient in systems theory, but what I’ve read seems to, well, just make sense. At a gut level. An articulation of our connectedness sparked a spiritual resonance; and as for my feminist roots, they dug into the possibility of decentralized power.

Distributed knowledge—how does a feminist in the third wave not find this attractive? An epistemological wrecking ball! Power-over relies on ownership of knowledge; it depends on impeccable discretion as the guiding principle for knowledge production and dissemination. It also relies on knowledge as something generated by an individual or group of people, evidence of our successful individuation—and isolation. And so the proposition that not only would we benefit from knowledge distribution, but that, in fact, it is already taking place, that we have the map for a “democratization of knowledge” already laid out before us, is indeed appealing—particularly in a time during which intellectual property rights have been created through policy and then abused to pirate indigenous knowledge resources in a vast number of areas.

Heterarchy—what are the connections with queer theory (Butler style)? In heterarchy, authority is assumed by knowledge and function, and in my understanding of Fred’s summation (which may be only loosely related to what he actually said), the positions may remain somewhat constant in organization, but people will alternate between roles as knowledge and function dictate. Aside from “being governed by aliens,” which may certainly be the case after all, power and/or authority in a heterarchical organization resembles a “fishnet” (von Goldemmer et al). In queer theory, Butler proposes (following on the heels of sociological theorists West and Zimmerman) that the binary structure of gender, may remain relatively constant, but how people access masculinity and femininity is situational and dictated by need or potential benefit. Since Butler’s work may give the impression of a subject operating in a world void of other human beings, a world peopled by symbols and discourse alone, one can look to West and Zimmerman as further grounding gender performativity, in that they note human accountability. Gender is something enacted in //relationship// with others. It occurs dynamically in human exchange.

Weick’s work on the Mann-Gulch fire parallels the early seeds of queer theory as found in West and Zimmerman’s work, which looks at accountability as a necessarily explanatory process in how gender is operationalized and performed. Weick notes that in the Mann-Gulch case example, when the “role system collapsed,” the crew found themselves floundering between following the chain of command, out of which one agent had already stepped, and the immediate awareness that it was “every man for himself.” Additionally, when told to “‘throw away their tools,’” members of the crew faced a crisis of meaning and identity: who were they without their tools? (Weick, 636-637). Once you “drop your tools,” who do you become in their absence? What do you do when there’s no seemingly relevant self to move into?

Similarly, when enacting gender, one finds her/himself incomprehensible without the “tools” of the trade. Should any readers of this paper wish to explore what happens when a person’s gender expression is discovered to be inconsistent with what is socially presumed appropriate for their biological sex (regulatory regimes are particularly potent in institutions such as hospitals or prisons), there is a provisional “loss of meaning.” There is a growing amount of literature on the particular issues of transgendered individuals seeking medical care and how they interact in a system that cannot or does not make sense of their bodies (See Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg, for example). They have historically been publicly shamed, refused care, or ignored. Historical “myth and ritual” guide such an interaction; one believes they are dealing with a 10:00 fire, and so hit the ground with that model in mind. The practitioner anticipating the 10:00 fire, or, in this case, the consistency between gender expression and biological sex, finds her/himself unable to make sense, or possibly even see, what is actually before them, and tries futilely to wedge the individual seeking care into the (to borrow from David and to mix my metaphors indiscriminately) “sausage casings” of the known.

In this way, we can see gender itself as a CAS, one in perpetual flux. Masculinity and femininity, if the nominal properties remain the same, are very much like the GM corporation, which has changed radically at a substantive level, but maintains an externally constant identity. I’m thinking back to a discussion we had at one of the brown bags a while ago, during which one of the participants offered an anecdote about “The New Yorker.” If I recall, “The New Yorker” was bought by a large subsidiary, and it was feared that with such a radical change, the periodical would lose its “flavor.” After several months, readership didn’t decrease, and it was generally agreed that the integrity and identity was robust. I suppose a certain degree of constancy can be found in masculinity and femininity (let me clarify that I am speaking of a broadly coherent Western cultural understanding and expression of gender). This is, perhaps, best evidenced in the underlying assumptions about the link between sex and gender: the prior necessitates the latter. Regardless of progress in some social (this is still limited to only some members of the proliferate “sub-cultures” of the LGBTQ communities), scientific (e.g., feminist science—Fausto-Sterling, Haraway, to name a couple), and theoretical (the aforementioned queer theory, for one) arenas, boy-ness and girl-ness remain sticky. A good many find comfort in their easy distinctions and reliance on the boy or girl at the heart of us as the singular explanation for our differences (Venus and Mars—sigh).

I called on the trans- and intersex movements as examples when sensemaking collapses between agents, but there are more subtle moments when such a struggle is made manifest. Agents in a human CAS co-construct gender as it is to be performed in a specific moment. Two “women” approach the bathrooms, men to the left, women to the right. Though the functionality of the bathrooms is the same—toilet, sink, towel dispenser and trash can—the second woman will often wait, knowing without ever articulating it that to enter the men’s bathroom compromises the performance of “woman” in the moment. It is a breach of a subconscious contract. We are both women, who don’t know one another, who will reach an agreement in conversation with the symbols around us and others who might see us and ourselves, and we will both, for god’s sake, use the “women’s” restroom. If we know each other, we might breach the contract, but it will generally require a conversation acknowledging the breach. We self-organize on one side of the binary or the other based on the potency and familiarity of this relationship, and it is a two-way flow of information. We self-regulate, are regulated in relationship, and also act as regulator, if not consciously, by the simple fact of our presence. In a moment of innovation, as dictated by need, perhaps, or politics (a moment of clarity during which you see through the constructs), one agent might boldly breach the contract (this happens at bars, when the rules change as the grip of sobriety is loosened). In this case, the agent either forges a pathway, and others will follow as needed or desired, or the prior rules are more robust and the impact isn’t felt. I know, I know. A bathroom isn’t likely to be the locus of a power-law effect, at least not beyond a momentary change. And I could have picked any one of a thousand identificatory processes, but gender, in its ubiquity, is a (pardon the pun) natural.

It has it all, improvisation and innovation, self-organization (people do cluster around those most robust components of a gender performance), stickiness (just think, for a moment, if you were to draw two stick figures—a man and a woman [however provisional and contested those terms might be]—what will they wear?); it evidences in language and action; it is dynamic and lived moment to moment; it is non-linear, subject to phase transitions and to power-law effects (NTS: explain further); it is iterative and recursive across multiple scales and in multiple contexts, from individual to global spheres; and it is subject to time and location. The potent thing in the CAS, though, (at least to my mind), is that it is so volatile. It exists at the edge of meaning, toeing the boundary of chaos and coherence. Here’s my poetry…


 * A note on the naming of things**

We seek out categories in order to validate ourselves, not just as an internal process, but in the flow of identity processes between self and others. Those who find themselves balancing on the fence between lands seek to make camp atop the razor-wire. A new category between categories. To claim a transgender identity, even if one does encounter the restraints and constraints of any identity, is also to claim community, history, critical mass, and a common set of experiences. Currently, there is a growing number of individuals who are joining and giving support to the //intersex// movement as well. Claiming that identity calls to attention not only the deficiencies of a binary sex and gender system, but also a history of medicine in which intersex individuals have been “assigned” a sex in order to maintain the either/or in sex and gender constructs. It need not be said (though I am) that there is a nominal significance at work—the name lends legitimacy to the identity project and lands one in a place s/he (ze) can call home. On the other hand, the manacles of a name don’t always belie the permeable boundaries of the system, nor can the name evidence the complexity of each agent, and of the agents in relationship with one another.

I’m inclined to at least wonder if the collapse of the organization could, in this case, be just what the gender theorist ordered. Once we can see that sex was determined by consensus, and that gender is only weakly linked at the surface to sex, might we open up a pathway by which we can actually see another’s humanity? I’m drifting into idealism, so I’ll return to the project at hand.

I know that this work should indicate a level of saturation, a shift toward complexity as a primary language. But it likely doesn’t, and I won’t even qualify that with a “yet,” some indication of my progression toward conversion. I do lay claim to a primary language in feminist theory, and my understanding of complexity is the merger of the two languages. This is, as Doug once said, a brokerage business, and I am on both sides of the transaction in this case.


 * Nit-picking**

Moving on for now, I was re-reading the Jackson piece, and stumbled across a couple of lines which raised some questions for me: [Stacey] wants to reinvent complexity theory by using its concepts in the service of interpretivism and postmodernism. Here lies a problem for complexity theory. If it remains theoretically underdeveloped, confused even, then its ideas can easily be captured by any paradigm. We end up with functionalist, interpretive, emancipatory, and postmodern versions of complexity theory emphasizing, respectively, order beneath chaos, learning, self organization and unpredictability. Stacey sometimes seems to approve of this, regarding complexity as ordering a variety of compatible insights in one paradigm. The problem is that there is not just one paradigm at work. We have four competing paradigms interpreting complexity theory in radically different ways. The whole thing falls apart.

I don’t know a great deal about management philosophy and theory, nor about the practice, but it seems to me that for communities, this diversity of perspective, this multiplicity of meaning, would not only evoke rich relationship, but could also be the lifeblood for complexity on the ground. I imagine it is the case that even within apparently cohesive paradigms, there are, of course, differing understandings on finer points. Why the drive for singularity? As far as community organizing goes, people often coalesce across radically different standpoints to achieve a singular goal or set of goals, and often times, the solutions are all the more creative precisely because of the widely varying paradigms.

In reading a book of essays and interviews by Studs Terkel, //American Dreams,// I recall an interview with C.P. Ellis, a white man, father of two or three, of meager means living in the segregated South (Durham, North Carolina), c. late 1960s. He joined the KKK and networked his way through the ranks of the terrorist organization. The KKK in Durham was largely comprised of poor men, whose anger at their hard-scrabble way of life could be channeled into racial hatred instead of collective rage at the power structures that benefit from systematized oppression. His economic status never changed, but behind the thinly-planked doors of the KKK, he was “the man.” People listened to him, city councilmen, attorneys, local power players, sought his political support and input about various issues. Now for the flap of wings. One afternoon, as he crossed a street downtown, he encountered a city councilman, at whose house he’d spent the previous evening. The councilman not only ignored him, but went out of his way to avoid him. Ellis says this was the epiphanic moment, the moment at which he realized, “Somethin’s wrong here.” Then the following chain of events: he expressed discontent at a Klan meeting, and was met with the same old rhetoric, in essence, “we gotta fight them niggers,” only now it rang false; he reluctantly joined a community task force addressing the racial tension in schools, and was appointed co-chair of the committee, alongside Ann Atwater, a Black citizen who was also an extremely vocal and active defender of Civil Rights; during their work together, they negotiated first a relationship of respectful disagreement for the sake of a greater cause (to ensure the safety and education of their children), and then a rich relationship founded on deep respect and admiration.

Summed up, it rings pithy. But I think two things emerge for me in the telling: first, we see in C.P. Ellis’s story a CAS at work. The KKK is its own CAS, a self-organizing structure that, although a mimesis of hierarchical structures, in fact maintains a great deal of flexibility among the so-called “rank and file.” But that’s an entirely different case study for an entirely different project. C.P.’s engagement in the social stratification of Durham allows us to see the town as a CAS. We have one agent with a rather myopic and ill-informed vision of the system in which he is operating. And then, the whoosh of wings, and the system begins to gain shape. He sees not only his immediate environment, in which he is confronting his own precarious position just above the “bottom,” but scales outward, to see class oppression, to see how the resources of the poor are being exhausted by the wealthy, across racial constructs, which have been erected as a diversion tactic. Racial tension was at the proverbial boiling point in Durham when C.P. Ellis and Ann Atwater forged their uneasy partnership. Second, we see a system in which the two agents made a stronger collective precisely //because// of their differences. //(STILL WORKING THIS ANECDOTE)//


 * Worries and troubles**

I want to address a theoretical thorn: we are proposing complexity theory prescriptively. In fact, Agar writes, “Instead of old-fashioned systems with their command-and-control, homeostasis-maintaining approach, complexity calls for self-organization and emergence” (89). I cannot shake the feeling that there cannot be a “calling” for what simply is. Are we peddling gravity? CAS aren’t something to work toward, they simply are, and they //are// in great abundance. As is my habitual insistence, I’m inclined to wonder about the possible dangers of applying a value construct to something which, in and of itself, is not value-laden, does not require a set of values in order to be.

Clearly, though, the sellable element of complexity is the understanding and illumination of a CAS in order to promote beneficial growth and evolution, as well as to gain clarity about operative power, and how it generates. At first, I was drawn to complexity because it seemed to articulate a decentralizing of power, but then noted that in fact, this isn’t the case. It’s not a call to action, it’s an observation. Power, if power can be said to be information, let’s say, is already decentralized, but a disparity occurs when a hierarchical system is overlaid onto a CAS, such that those at the top are unaware of what occurs at the ground level due to the absence of rich feedback loops.


 * Provisional Conclusion**

I could not have imagined, when I embarked upon this journey—to create a position statement—that I would find it such a huge project, with so many possible directions. This is an extremely insufficient work at this point, and I will continue to give it flesh and blood and breath over the next week. I apologize to all of you for the delay and for the mess this currently is. As a synthesis, it lacks cohesion and coherence, but both are forthcoming. Thanks to all of you, on the other hand, for your courage in posting your position statements and for your insights.


 * Thoughts to which I must return (these are just notes I need to develop)**

REALLY REALLY NEED TO WORK THIS STUFF THROUGH

I realize in reading Weick’s work that I need to expand my sense of “organizations,” or at least leap the hurdle that immediately self-erects the moment I see that word. There are several words that have such an effect on me: consumer trends, the “market,” management, flow charts, strategic planning, for example. Useful words, no doubt, but the spare utility of them gets lost in a history or collection thereof, in which I call to mind such broad issues as globalization and such immediate issues as the downsizing of sales reps in favor of an added layer of middle management at the car dealership for which my stepfather works. Clearly, those words aren’t trigger words for everyone, and they aren’t entangled in the same meanings. In fact, the words themselves are relatively neutral, so I should release them back into their appropriate functions.

“March wrote that ‘decision making is a highly contextual, sacred activity, surrounded by myth and ritual, and as much concerned with the interpretive order as with the specifics of particular choices’. Reed summarized March this way: ‘decision making preferences are often inconsistent, unstable, and externally driven; the linkages between decisions and actions are loosely-coupled and interactive rather than linear; the past is notoriously unreliable as a guide to the present or the future; and…political and symbolic considerations play a central, perhaps overriding, role in decision making” (Weick, 634). “Thus, in the words of Morgan, Frost, and Pondy, ‘individuals are not seen as living in, and acting out their lives in relation to a wider reality, so much as creating and sustaining images of a wider reality, in part to rationalize what they are doing. They realize their reality, by reading into their situation patterns of significant meaning” (Weick, 635).

Weick goes on to note that the smokejumpers acted on an historical construction of the fire; they made sense of the fire by fitting it into a pattern they had seen before, the “10:00 fire,” and when it became apparent to them that Mann Gulch did not match what they had prepared themselves for, the decision making process failed them, based, as it was, in “myth and ritual.” Weick’s observation and intuition do link up with my spiritual understanding, and with what we’ve called the “ghosts in the nursery.” Wisdom and liberation are found and are most potent when one strips themselves of habitual sense-making and sees what is immediately before them. An awareness of the grip of the past and how it translates your present vision is critical, but that may be the primary wisdom of the past. I’ve said before that in the CAS of a marriage, you must be able to find each other as you are now, to see who you are together right now. Relating to each other as you “always have,” through patterns and habits which are now anachronisms means you lose the ability to make sense of where you are. What has historically been a minor irritation is now the basis of a three-day fight. Like the Mann Gulch fire, you might believe you are dealing with a 10:00 fire, but in fact, this one, due to the radically different conditions from previous fires, is much more explosive. You’ve changed in relation to and in relationship with your partner. Unto yourselves, you are individual CAS, but with permeable boundaries, and then you comprise a CAS together.

Quotes from Mary Rose O'Reilly, whom I consider to have the most astute poetic sensibilities I've been exposed to; her writing is both spare and rich, and I hope the reason for its presence here is apparent even before I more fully make the connections as I see them:

“For much of this summer, Robin and I worked in the animal nursery of the wildlife center feeding baby rabbits, animals who confidently slouch in a web of connections…When we lift a rabbit out of the nest to feed, it struggles; sometimes it utters a piercing scream out of proportion to the sock size…Rabbits miss the furry pile of brothers and sisters; they have no idea they aren’t each other until the horrible moment of separation: //they do not know they are not each other”// (O’Reilly,147). While the veracity of this statement can’t be solidified—conversations with rabbits are hard to come by in a language most humans can understand, though I imagine a good many who spend time with rabbits would argue the point—the vision of the writer is telling. “The soul gravitates to the lessons it needs to learn and it never makes mistakes” (66).

“Miracles happen, in my experience, on the edges of time zones, on the border of the woods, in the void between perch and free fall” (O’Reilly, 154). Parallels the ideas expressed by (find source) writing that the most creativity happens at the edge of chaos. “The beautiful, fancy word for this space is //liminal,// the Latin word for ‘threshold.’ Maybe there are even bigger miracles over the border. I suspect there are, but I have not been there” (O’Reilly, 154). Agar—to achieve perfection is to die. (Check to make sure it was Agar). Also, Weick’s piece on jazz improvisation fits well here.

“Somebody wrote of a Christian community that we are like climbers on a mountain. Why are we tied together? So that the strong ones don’t go home” (178). Weak ties, loose couplings.

Like Mann Gulch and Weickian sensemaking, “By contrast, TV and its pundit culture smother us in endless permutations of recycled ideas: the nobility of the fire fighters and police officers at the World Trade Center, how like Pearl Harbor, the mantra of supporting the troops. With all this repetition of thoughts about thoughts, at a certain point no one will dare say //it was not anything like Pearl Harbor, at all.// Creative response—response to the present moment, not some other moment—becomes almost impossible.” (184).

“You are something the entire universe is doing.” (Watts). I quote this ad nauseum, and will likely continue out of compulsion.