Nowadays Andrew, we are no longer afraid of the "in-deterministic
hypothesis". It is the natural consequence of the modern theory of
instability and chaos. And it ascribes a fundamental physical sense to the
arrow of time, without which we are unable to comprehend the two most
important features of nature..." (Prigogine)
"Inside out approach, Time and duration are visible explicitly." (Kees
Spelt, NL)
Dear Learners
An angle on being/becoming which should, of course be;-) becoming/being,
courtesy of Weick.
Karl E. Weick
What Matters Most: Powerful Theories,
The Place of the Theorist, and The Place of Values in Theorizing
Thekla Rura-Polley and Stewart R. Clegg University of Technology, Sydney
That's Moving: Theories That Matter
Before one can answer the question "what matters most", one must answer
the prior question, "what matters." But to answer the question, "what
matters," one must assume a position toward experience that makes the
resulting answer misleading. The answer is misleading because we can only
grasp and articulate what mattered previously, not what matters or will
matter. This asymmetry in understanding is described by Kierkegaard in a
journal entry dated 1843. The description reads, "It is perfectly true, as
philosophers say that life must be understood backwards. But they forget
the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards" That same focus on
the life-trailing quality of consciousness has been a touchstone for
Clifford Geertz, Hilary Putnam, William James (in Pragmatism), and Ian
Colville. But they are the exception. Most organizational theorists, as
well as most philosophers, mistake the certainty of structures seen in
hindsight for the emergent order that frames living forward. Neither group
of scholars has come to grips with the fact that their conceptual
understandings trail life and are of a different character than is living
forward. Geertz puts the issue this way: "The after-the-fact, ex post,
life-trailing nature of consciousness generally " occurrence first,
formulation later on " appears in anthropology as a continual effort to
devise systems of discourse that can keep up, more or less, with what,
perhaps, is going on".
I want to argue that one reason we theorize poorly about what matters most
is because we use discourse that makes it hard to capture living forward
with its blend of thrownness, making do, journeys and quests stitched
together by faith, presumptions, expectations, alertness, and actions, all
of which may amount to something, though we'll know for sure only when
it's too late to do anything about it. That description of living forward
should not be heard simply as warmed over existentialism. Instead, it
should be heard as a depiction of unsettled, emergent, contingent forward
living that contrasts sharply with depictions of settled, causally
connected lives that cohere after-the-fact. The compact causal structures
that epitomize our theories are artifacts of retrospect rather than
accompaniments of prospect.
If theory seldom captures what matters or what matters most, that may be
due in part to our inability to fill in meaningfully some of the gap
between the causal solidity of retrospective accounts and the
configurational fluidity of prospective quests. I want to argue that to
address that gap requires at least 3 changes in practices of theorizing:
First, we need to treat theory building as akin to essaying, for it is the
essay form rather than arguments in a deductive sequence, that comes closer
to the form embodied in living forward. The root meaning of the word "essay"
is to experiment, try out, and test. An essay is a way of thinking in which
the rehearsal and the final performance are combined and the work is not
fully formed. The essay, like the unfolding life, rejects privileging the
timeless over the historical and the universal over the particular (Adorno).
The core parallelism between living forward and essaying is captured by
Howarth when he says, "- the itinerancy of writing, its own being in motion,
generates and arranges thoughts, and they take form from their movement, not
their mass. Writers think less about writing than through it, they watch it
unfold and grasp its meaning as it emerges." ...
end citations
Would that be a nicer way to l-earn your living?
Love,
Andrew Campbell
PS Thanks to Fed Nichols for introducing me to Wieck's work
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