Feeling beyond the logic of conflict
by Alan Rayner and Yvonne Aburrow
Detachment, conflict, and the rationalistic abstraction of the ‘individual self ’ (Yvonne)
For centuries, rationalistic thinkers have insisted on the abstraction of content from context, such that the ‘baby is retained whilst the bath water is discarded’. In order to be studied ‘scientifically’, the subject must be isolated from all variables other than the ones that the experimenter desires to observe. This is the essence of the experimental method. But the enthronement of abstract Rationality goes far beyond the scientific realm, extending into popular discourse, for example, in the ways in which we justify our actions to ourselves.
Descartes famously uttered the rationalist dictum, Cogito ergo sum, and insisted on the separation of mind and body now referred to as the Cartesian split. This detachment of self from self, and consequently self from other, leads inevitably to conflict. Conflict between self and other, reason and emotion, rational and irrational.
The rationalist view regards everything primarily in terms of Euclidian geometry – we are all separate entities surrounded by empty space – mere points of awareness in a void. In this view, space is something that is outside us, and separates us from each other. The body becomes an object for the mind to control, and other people become objects in empty space – objects we can manipulate and control. The extreme form of this view was expressed with tragic consequences in nineteenth-century imperialism, and it can still be heard in the rhetoric used to justify modern imperialistic adventures.
A major tenet of rationalism which is frequently taken for granted is the notion of objectivity: the idea that it is possible to stand outside any given situation and comment upon it without being involved or affecting it in any way. However, even at quantum level, the observer affects the observed, and this is obviously true in the social sciences, where the presence of an authority figure has been shown to affect the outcome of the activity, because the subject tries to second guess what the observer wants them to do (Walkerdine, 1988). The history of anthropology is littered with examples of the anthropologist influencing the society under observation.
Another consequence of the rationalist view is the notion of reductionism – that everything can be reduced to its smallest indivisible unit, the monad or atom. The problem with this procedure is that you may be able to extrapolate from the workings of a complex system to predict the behaviour of one of its constituents, but you cannot deduce the behaviour of a complex system from the behaviour of its isolated elements. In astrophysics, this is known as the Three-Body Problem: “The problem of determining the motion of three celestial bodies moving under no influence other than that of their mutual gravitation. No general solution of this problem (or the more general problem involving more than three bodies) is possible.” If even an apparently simple problem like the behaviour of three planets moving under the influence of mutual gravitation (a single variable) cannot be predicted, it is hardly likely that we will be able to predict the outcome of a complex social interaction from the behaviour of isolated individuals.
In order to maintain an illusion of control, rationalists ignore the obvious conclusions that can be derived from Relativity, and continue to regard the individual as a monad, unconnected with its context. The notion of the individual as an entity-in-its-own-right, a Ding-an-sich, leads us to quantify the rights and responsibilities of each individual, assessing them “rationally” and to weigh them against each other. This quantitative approach, where the will of the majority always outweighs the needs of the minority, inevitably leads to conflict.
Similarly, the assumption that the norm of any group can be determined statistically has led to the oppression of minorities (e.g. homosexuality was only removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1974). Anyone who deviates from the norm is regarded as dysfunctional, even if they are perfectly content with their lot. A better model for determining psychological health is homeostasis or equilibrium (which can be briefly summarised as “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”). The use of probability and statistical models is rationalism’s attempt to paper over the cracks resulting from the unpredictability of complex dynamic systems.
Postmodernism has rightly criticised this rationalist-reductionist view of the individual, but the conclusion of many postmodernists appears to go to the opposite extreme, implying that there is no such entity as the self. Because we are all subjected to the conflicting currents of various discourses and social contexts, the self vanishes in a miasma of artificial constructs. Because we can dissect a person’s utterances and discern the influences of various discourses, whether academic or popular, scientific or artistic, some have argued that people merely occupy a position in a complex nexus of social interactions, and have no self-identity at all. Content is effectively seen here as entirely and unilaterally dependent on socially constructed context - such that ‘the bath water is reclaimed and analysed whilst the baby disappears down the plughole’.
Inclusionality, an ecological philosophy of immersive relationships, takes an intermediary view, questioning not the reality of self-identity, but rather the realism of a purely objective definition of self as a discrete and consequently independent entity. Of key significance here is the way that we perceive space and boundaries. This perception depends fundamentally on how we Place ourselves, and consequently understand the reciprocally coupled, mutually transforming relationship between content and context - baby and bath-water combining co-creatively together as a complex and ultimately unpredictable identity. Which is what Alan will tell us about now…
Immersion, Attunement and the Inclusional Togetherness of the ‘Complex Self’ (Alan)
About 30 years ago, I painted two pictures whose meaning wasn’t fully clear to me at the time:
Slide: “TROPICAL INVOLVEMENT” (above)
This painting, made in the exuberance that followed completing my final undergraduate
examinations in Natural Sciences, depicts the dynamic complexity of living
systems. A turbulent river rushes between rock-lined banks from fiery, tiger-striped
sunset towards unexpected tranquility where it allows a daffodil to emerge
from its shallows. A night-bird follows the stream past intricately interwoven
forest towards darkness. A dragonfly luxuriates below a fruit-laden tree,
bereft of leaves. Life is wild, wet and full of surprises.
Slide: “ARID CONFRONTATION” (above)
This painting, made when depressed after a year of postgraduate research,
depicts the limitations of unempathic, analytical methodology. At the end
of a long pilgrimage, access to life is barred from the objective stare
by the rigidity of artificial boundaries. A sun composed of semicircle and
triangles is caught between straight lines and weeps sundrops into a canalized
watercourse. Moonlight, transformed into penetrating shafts of fear encroaches
across the night sky above a plain of desolation. Life is withdrawn behind
closed doors.
Clearly, there are some very different feelings underlying these images. How are these feelings related to viewpoint and hence to perception? What is being perceived differently? And how does this difference in perception affect concepts of self and other and the potential for conflict between the two?
If we study the ‘arid confrontation’ picture, there are some familiar signs of the mechanisms and consequences of objective detachment.
- The Pilgrims are ‘external observers’, isolated from the object of their quest, which they view unilaterally rather than from all round, from eyes placed on the front of their faces.
- The observers are excommunicated from nature by an artificially imposed, static boundary - a fixed frame of reference - by means of which they can compare what they see going on outside with the position of their own inner self-centres.
- The canalized water in the space between subject and object is stationary.
- The world of the excluded observers is a fearful, devitalized wasteland.
So, the discernment that comes with the imposition of distance between subject and object, and the resultant exclusion of other from self, has the effect, when used as the sole means of perception, of schism, immobilization and abandonment of living space and relationship. A world comes into view of bodies as discrete entities, which can only be moved by external force, and whose movements are plotted as trajectories through empty space framed by Cartesian co-ordinates in absolute time. A world inhabited by what Einstein and Infeld described as ‘two frightening ghosts’. The Newtonian world that still forms the backdrop for the majority of modern mechanistic thought.
If we now re-view the ‘tropical involvement’ picture, the following features are apparent:
- The imagery is of vibrant, vital, dynamic relationships in which every movement reciprocally changes the configuration of spatial possibility for every other movement.
- Everything is intimately involved - reciprocally coupled - with everything else; there is no dislocation of ‘self’ from ‘other’ and the presence of the artist is implicit in the making of the picture.
- There are distinct boundaries and features present, but these are in constant flux, and new possibilities are forever emerging from their interactions in the common space that permeates around, through and within everything.
- The water within this common space is not canalized - artificially contained and motionless - but rather is riverine, contained by shifting banks that mediate the dynamic relation between stream and landscape, co-created and co-creative, both shaping and being shaped by the river’s flow.
As it happens, this picture actually relates to a very special stage in my childhood in Kenya. This was a stage that I guess we all pass through to some degree, when I was beginning to make distinctions between the world within and around my skin, but had not yet hardened these distinctions - under the influence of adult intervention - into severance of one from the other. At that stage I used to go down to the Nairobi River and watch the movements of its flows and cascades and associated life forms, not all of which were benign. Then I went to School and the magic was lost in the imposed, discrete logic of the three ‘Rs’, although the memory of it lingered, inspiring a life-long quest to rediscover it.
It is this transitional view, which combines the ability to acknowledge distinctness with a profound sense of immersion in and inseparability from the world, which consciously or unconsciously has always underlain my work as a biologist. And it is this view that provides the basis for what we call an ‘inclusional’ concept of self as a complex dynamic relationship between inner and outer spatial domains. These domains are mediated by permeable, dynamic, co-created, co-creative interfaces or boundaries that, unlike depth-less Euclidean plane surfaces, are complex, holey transitions linking one depth or region of space with another, over scales ranging from sub-atomic to universal. In other words, the geometry of nature, and of the self, is non-Euclidean - a kind of ‘nested holeyness’, which I tried to represent in the following painting and poem:
Slide: “THE HOLE IN THE MOLE”
I AM the hole
That lives in a mole
That induces the mole
To dig the hole
That moves the mole
Through the earth
That forms a hill
That becomes a mountain
That reaches to sky
That connects with stars
And brings the rain
That the mountain collects
Into streams and rivers
That moisten the earth
That grows the grass
That freshens the air
That condenses to rain
That carries the water
That brings the mole
To Life
As may be apparent from this image, I continue to see riverine form both as a valuable metaphor and an actual description of the ‘complex self’ as a dynamic embodiment of inner or individual or local space with outer, collective or non-local space. And we see this form whenever we look at life as an ever-unfolding, enfolding presence, rather than in freeze-framed snapshots giving the illusion of discrete individual entities.
Slides of Riverine Life Forms
Verticillium colony
Foraging Hypholoma
Magpie Matrix
Ant Delta
Wildebeest delta
Tree branching
Ivy River
Far from being the calculating machines beloved by those seeking ‘artificial intelligence’, life forms are embodied water flows. Simply by ‘tuning’ the ‘holeyness’ and consequent permeability, deformability and continuity of their inner-outer boundaries, these forms can change pattern and process as they create and respond to changes in their dynamic context. They differentiate outwardly when and where there is external plenty, and integrate inwardly when and where there is external shortage.
Slide: Integration/Differentiation Mandala
When space and boundaries are seen in this way as connective and coupling
rather than distancing and dislocating, the tendency for conflict with objective
other is superseded by acceptance of the necessary togetherness of inner
with outer in complementary relationship, each ‘breathing space’ from
and into the other. This relationship necessarily embodies light and dark,
constructive and destructive processes as the source of creativity, renewal
and diversity in our living space. It feeds life with death. But the conflict
that arises from the inverted perspective of our human objective detachment
from nature feeds death with life. Perhaps if we can restore our sense of
immersion in a space that permeates around through and within our complex
selves, we can feel our way beyond the abstractive logic of conflict.
Slide: Loving Error - End piece with no commentary
