Notes for a Starfish Federation

8/14/2019 Notes for a Starfish Federation

1/5

Notes for a Starfish Federationby

Lynn Hoffman

1. In the Beginning was the Deed

Wittgenstein believed that communication started as a form of action. Hesays: In the beginning was the deed. (Not the Word.) He also offered aframe theory: One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the things natureover and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame throughwhich we look at it.

Gregory Bateson, a pioneer in the field of relational research, was fascinatedby action forms of communication. In this category, he placed such forms asdreams, religion, art, play, fantasy, humor, and animal communication.

These have no simple way to indicate the negative. For instance, an otterdistinguishes playing from fighting by the hardness of the bite. So-calledschizophrenic communication also had a problem with the negative. Aperson with this label might say something but then disqualify it by abehavior, or act in one way but make a disclaimer. A good example might bethe Mothers Day card cited by Jay Haley, that a mental patient gave hismother with the words: To One Who Has Been Just Like a Mother to Me.

These stories backed up the Bateson groups pivotal idea of the doublebind, in which a statement on one level (e.g. Go away now) is qualified by acovert reversal (e.g. gestures meaning Forget what I just said). Feeling thatthe term nonverbal was too weak for this complicated category, I decided

to call it the Unlisted Languages. I welcomed Richard Baldwins term for theconsulting process, Esthetic Action, as a move in the same direction.

2. From Construction to Dialogue.

Bateson didnt separate the individual from the context, but focused on theinterplay of parts within the larger ecology. Perhaps this is why he neveradopted the concept of the family system. He usually distrusted noun-likeentities because it was so easy to see them as dysfunctional. For the samereason, he opposed the idea of counting double binds. Not only was thisreductive of the complexity family therapists face, but it amounted to what

he called an epistemological error.

Paul Watzlawick, of the MRI, favored a somewhat different view which cameto be called Constructivism. This idea holds that our knowledge of the worldis constructed by the nature of our sensory equipment. For this reason, wecan never know what the world is really like. Watzlawick offers the story ofthe pilot who steers his boat at night through a rocky channel as an exampleof a kind of negative knowledge. The only way he knows that he steered the

1


2/5

boat correctly is that he didnt hit a rock.

Kenneth Gergen rescued us from pure Constructivism by proposing SocialConstruction Theory. We dont just cognize as individuals isolated by ournervous systems, but are influenced by a penumbra of ideas from socialentities like family, community and culture. Thus Gergen talks about a

community of knowers. Like Wittgenstein, he saw abstract concepts likegender as a frame through which we, the knowers, see the world, and whatwe see reflects that frame.

This position still leaves us with some unit (the individual, the family, thecommunity) at the center, filtering knowledge through a sensory, cultural orpolitical set of optics. The philologist Mikhail Bakhtin took a leap out of thatenclosed bubble when he compared monologic to dialogic thinking. He heldthat the first position, the position of the expert, was one of aboutness, andthat the second, based on the inclusion of the other, was one of withness.Differing from the constructivists, he felt that giving pride of place to theperceiving mind was wrong, because it ignored the dialogical relationship

between one human and another.

3: From System to Rhizome:

I first began to see that the word System had become limiting through myconnection to Chris Kinman, who devoured postmodern philosophy like egg-drop soup. He seemed to be searching for descriptions that would build onthe changes wrought by our increasingly web-based world. In the work ofGilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two French philosophers, Chris found astartling basic metaphor in the guise of the ordinary botanical group calledRhizome. Here is their description of this idea:

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, betweenthings, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome isalliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb to be, but the fabricof the rhizome is the conjunction, andandand This conjunction carriesenough force to shake and uproot the verb to be.

Deleuze and Guattari use the single word arborescence to describe thehierarchical format imposed by the tree, and make an impassioned case forstrategies that undermine it.

It was at this moment that I found a work by Ari Brafman and Rod A.

Beckstrom, called The Starfish and the Spider. These gifted researcherscame from a technological background. Their book offered us a new set ofcontrapuntal structures. The Starfish can lose its arms and new ones willgrow back. Cut it into pieces and new sets of starfish will appear. Its partsare not very differentiated. 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

2


3/5

work of an anthropologist who was writing about two historical groups whichoffered a perfect illustration for both Starfish and Spider regimes. On theone hand, there were the hierarchically organized forces of the Spanishonquistadores, who easily wiped out two complex civilizations, the Aztecand the Incas. If their leaders refused to give the marauders the gold theywanted, they killed them, and subsequently the society dissolved.

The second historical group was typified by the Apaches. These were looselystructured tribes whose social glue was weak, like that of a Starfish. Insteadof a leader, the Apaches had Shamans, who had less power and were in anycase replaceable. The Apaches excelled at the sneak and attack mode. If theSpanish tried to fight back, the Apache warriors folded their teepees andmelted away. They were not a monolithic body, so the Spanish could neverconquer them.

There is a point to be made here. Perhaps the reason hierarchicalcivilizations fail in conventional wars against horizontally organized, nomadicsocieties is because these entities are like starfish. Cut off their limbs and

they will grow new ones. Cut them up, and twice as many angry starfish willtake their place.

But the main reason this story interested me was because it compared arhizome-like flat world (Thank you, Thomas Friedman) to the hierarchicalnature of modern bureaucracies made famous by philosopher MichelFoucault. This means that we have a hopeful alternative. For political Starfishexamples we need go no further than Barack Obamas presidential campaign.

The rhizome-like connectedness the Web offers, backed by inventions likeTweeter and Youtube, represent an increasingly powerful tool. I too havecome to substitute the image of the Rhizome for the image of the System.

The Internet itself is 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 worlddoes not fit with the depiction of consciousness as a brain in a vat. Here isa quote from an interview with him (Out of Our Heads: Why You are Not

Your Brain, and other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness. Interviewby Christine Smallwood: (The Nation, March 16, 2009.) Smallwood askedhim: Does your work on consciousness have consequences for interspeciesrelationships, for animal rights?

Noe answers:

The classical picture of our human predicament is that were allinteriority and the world as far as we know is nothing but a source ofimpingement. Were bombarded with sensory stimulation, and insofaras we think we occupy a world with an independent existence andother people, all that is really sort of a conjecture; were trapped inside

3


4/5

the caverns of our one conscious mind. Im offering a different picure,where the world and others around us come first, and we are spreadout and plugged in and implicated. Think of a row of bushes; eachbush is interwoven with the other bushes, the roots reach down intothe ground and entangle with each other. The picture that emerges iswere at home in the world, were of the world, the world is not a

projection or this alien thing, just as other people are not just merelyacting bodies but are present for us as meaningful and important. Thenatural extension of that is to acknowledge that the species boundaryis not a particularly special boundary. When you encounter life,especially animal life but not only animal life, you dont hypothesizethe presence of the life around us. That theres life around us and thatwe get it and we recognize it is the precondition for the kind of life weare.

I think this is a good statement of the differences between what I call theCollaborative-Reflective ways of working and the Constructivist or SocialConstructionist approaches that that focus on language in relation to

meaning. The former have a tap-root that goes back to the early days ofBatesons vision of the world as an ecologically connected web. The latterare 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 whales,which allows in only what its biological or social equipment accepts. I think itis time that we challenged this statement as only partly true, and askourselves which relational approaches have already moved toward a moreconnecting, web-like view.

5. Which Relational Practices Belong to a Starfish Federation?

I like the idea that we are born into an earth-based environment like aDevonshire hedge. These famous living walls are woven out of hundreds ofdifferent species over hundreds of years, including the animals and humanswho keep and are kept by it. It is a concept that is close to Batesonsexample of the relationship between horse and turf, each gradually changingthe other and evolving mutually. This arrangement is an exact illustration forBatesons Mind-and-Nature seminal idea.

I also like the Rhizome as a ruling metaphor, with its horizontal flow-shapesand implications of subversion and surprise. Again let me cite a Batesonphrase: Creativity is based on the random.

So which approaches might be natural candidates for a Starfish Federation? Iwould include Boscolo and Cecchins Circular Questioning, HarleneAndersons Collaborative Practices, Tom Andersons Reflecting Process,Michael Whites Outsider Witnesses, Jaakko Seikkula and Mary OlsonsDialogic Networks, Chris Kinmans Rhizome Way and the Sharevisionapproach of Ellen Landis, Lisa Thompson, and Richard Baldwin. These viewsall include specific practices of web-building in which people can feel (mywording) more safe, more free and more alive. Aliveness, not health, is the

4


5/5

basic shift of meaning here. Other versions of these ideas are sproutingoutside of my single awareness, but my occasional gift for prediction makesme believe that I may be attached to the larger enterprise. Which brings meto this passage from a really old friend, the psychologist Carl Jung. In thispassage from his prologue to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he says:

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 theunending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escapethe impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense ofsomething that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What wesee is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

5

Documents

Notes for a Starfish Federation