WHY ARE WE HAPPENING TOGETHER RIGHT NOW?r

Sitting at the local coffee shop, waiting for a business partner to arrive so that we could discuss a project, I decided to kill time by opening my laptop to check my email. In my email was a post from a friend and in his email was a link to a youtube video of a Congolese musician.

A few minutes into the video, I feel a gentle tap on my shoulder. A stranger interrupts me to ask about the video I’m watching and listening to on ear buds. This person saw the video playing on my screen from their spot at an adjacent table.
As it turns out the stranger is interested in the african dancers that are part of the video. Inviting the stranger to join me, I share a replay of the video with her.

We strike up a conversation. It ranges over our shared interest in music and the arts. After telling her I have collected a wide variety of music resources over many years, she mentions that she is an artist for whom music and dance is a key source of inspiration. We set up a future engagement to audition media resources and to continue getting to know each other. Perhaps we will become friends.

In fact, a friendship develops and it eventually alters the course of both of our lives. There will come a time when both the once-a-stranger, and myself, having become colleagues and having undertaken together and separately further life changing projects, travels, and learning, realize almost all of what unfolded was contingent upon the pivot provided by the original encounter in the coffee shop.

What would you, the researcher have to know to determine what was necessary to have happened in the lives of both parties to this encounter in the coffee shop prior to its occurrence, so as to guarantee its occurrence?
What follows is my ‘scratch pad’ about a goal-oriented method for conducting interpersonl inquiry, and, self inquiry. It’s a wrok in progress, yet, the method of inquiry has been beta-tested in informal anthropological project work over the past few years. Fundamentally what I’m on about is how fragile the necessary contingencies are which underlie life-altering events. The lens of this method may be used to look at all sorts of events, events such as the circumstances that supported: a person meeting their spouse or most intimate partner, discovering their scholarly or research interests, hobbies, calling; what locale a person resides at, etc.

working notes…subject to timely revision; January 2009

(Pivot is configured to be the term for an event that itself is constructed out of many necessary conditions. The pivot integrates the conditions, so the event coming about is contingent on this integration of conditions.)

Years later my good friend, met as a matter of happenstance that day in the coffee shop, remarked how much the encounter had altered both our lives. To which I responded:

“You know, we might never have met that day had my business partner not prematurely returned from a trip the day before and then called an impromptu meeting. I never go to coffee shops, rarely, drag my laptop around with me. You were attracted to the video I was watching, right?

She recalled, “Yes. It caught my eye.”

“Well, I have a lot of different interests and superficial preoccupations. If I had been reading blogs or browsing online book dealers or reading the news, there we both would have been, in close proximity, yet, what ignited your interest might never have found the spark.”

“When you put it that way, because I stopped in for tea there regularly, had I chosen some other seat, then no spark, no meeting, no life changes.”

Responding to her recognition, I told her, “At the time you told me you like to sit in your favorite seat in the corner. It was available that morning–lucky for us; whereas I plopped down on the open seat nearest the entrance.”

I saw her mind churning. She looked at me intensely, “Consider the odds.”
Indeed.
My research into a possible structure for inquiry, what I term transformative anthropology,  coordinates a close and critical investigation into the Pivots, the pivotal points, and how such points integrate–usually–extremely complicated arrays of necessarily essential prior events upon which the pivot is contingent.
This story conceals the factors that were necessary for this encounter to ever come about in the first place. Normally, such factors rarely receive any attention. Yet, people will sometimes reflect on an encounter and remark, “How amazing we were in the right place at the right time!” Still, it is apparently the case in my home culture, that of the USA,that people are overwhelmingly not acculturated or ‘wired’ to be sensitive to just how fragile are the (so-called) prior events that lock together to formulate the necessary array of factors upon which the pivotal points as-it-were rest, like a house rests on it foundation.The crucial emphasis is upon: fragile and necessary.

Prior event; integration; contingency; necessity; are clarified in looking at the explicit features of the necessary foundation upon which the oivotal point/event rests.

These events can be viewed as the stuff of necessary layers. In the above example, both parties to the event, have to be in the coffee shop at the same time. Next they have to be in a proximity close enough to spark the igniting event. Why the proximity necessary to this spark, (or, more generally, the proximity that supports the instantiation of the event,) itself has come about, itself rests on another layer of more complex prior events. For example, for two people to meet in a coffee shop in Cleveland, both persons have to go to the same coffee shop for various reasons, and, both have to be in Cleveland in the first place, and this latter factor is due to a separate array of various reasons. In each cases the underlying prior events are required, are requisites as features of the foundation.

Such requisites can be unpacked and divided between local and global factors. Global factors are requisite in relation to any likely future event. Whereas local factor, built as they are upon global factors, reflect what is required to ignite the actual event, pivot. By way of example, two parties live in Cleveland, and they have the potential to meet ‘globally’ as long as the condition that they live and circulate in Cleveland is met. Still, for them to actually meet adds to this, explicit local condition (or requirements.) Although the two could live in Cleveland, yet meet outside of Cleveland, nevertheless for this event there would still be requisite, global conditions discoverable at its pertinent layer.

Because this is research anybody can do about the pivotal points in their own life, everybody may discover the specific conditions required to found the various pivotal points in their own life. As it turns out, and likely much to the individual researcher’s amazement, very often the conditions underlying pivotal points are extremely fragile. Fragile describes how sensitive the array of prior events is to having been configured differently.

In the coffee shop event, my business partner’s coming home early to schedule a casual meeting entirely unrelated in any direct sense to the pivotal event helps set in motion the necessary prerequisites. Consider then how this necessarily plugs into the array of conditions, similarly required conditions having to do with the truncation of the business partner’s original travel.

In presenting this field of my research, I always utilize a dramatic example from my own life. In 1974 I was managing a record store and on a Thursday afternoon in late June a hold-up man walked into the store, robbed it, and, placing me face down in the backroom, shot me at point blank range. A month later I was headed for Vermont to escape my paranoia about the robber tracking me down to eliminate the sole witness to his crime. My plans to go to college were suspended, and I ended up cooling in Vermont for 18 years. There I met my friends, developed my interests, met my former wife, and, from this home base, had a handful of remarkable encounters with influential persons. In short, none of this transpires unless a robber walks through the door of the record store on that balmy June afternoon. Oh, and it’s critical that the point blank shot was issued by a cheap handgun and so the bullets disintegrates and only a fragment struck me 3 inches from my spinal column.

My own example, here very briefly rendered, rests on global factors such as my parents ending up in Cleveland in the first place, 25 years prior to the fated day. It’s most powerful for people to examine their own examples. When you do the drill down into your own example, you’ll learn quickly just how complicated and fragile to requisite are in their support of almost any pivotal life event. The arrays of contigencies woven into the pivotal event reflect threads that almost always stretch well beyond and so encompass parties other than the primary parties to the event.

It is fairly self-evident that this is not a culturally conventional, let alone hard wired (evolutionary,) way of reexaming the pivotal events in the human lifespan. Why look at the human life span this way? Let’s leave this question open for the time being. I will report the reasons I’ve discovered reinforce the value of looing at my own life span from a novel perspective.

What I term the transformative anthropology had its genesis in helping to train and debrief ‘street’ (i.e. informal,) anthropological interviewers engaged in a civic intelligence project in Lakewood, Ohio in 2005. It became clear in reviewing the interview data that the community was made up of a rich variety of people who had come to live in Lakewood for various reasons. The human encounter given by the interview methodology inspired me to reflect on how unusual it must feel to interviewees to be interrogated by our team members. Then I began to examine why this was really unusual. This inevitably led me to consider what literally had to come together, to necessarily come together, to initiate the encounter between subject and researcher. I was off and running, and next considered what was required to happen prior to my own involvement in the project. The short of it was: the best man at my Vermont wedding 23 years earlier was raised in Lakewood. But it’s the long of it which is truly amazing.

The basic method of inquiry is to include all of the robust data set offered by the subject, be attentive to the data, culminate by recognizing what are the fragile requisites, and, be attentive to the ‘epiphanic’ should it arise. In a ‘lower’ sense, the epiphanic result is equivalent to researcher or research subject answering for themselves the question, ‘why is it valuable to make an inquiry of this sort?’

Notes-in-progress

A model for interpersonal inquiry
1. INCLUSION
2. ATTENTION
3. CULMINATION
4. EPIPHANY

Conceptual Levels:

Depth Psychology
concern: unconscious; hidden (tacit); inferior factors

Adult Learning:
following: Bateson/Mezirow/Kolb

transformations vua experience; modification of familiar schemes; differentiation of novel ontic data

Kolb’s learning styles diagram
kolb's learning styles diagram
The Satir Model (also Mezirow)

Satir Change Model

Satir Change Model

———————————————————————————————

Anthropology & Phenomenology:

following (roughly) conception of the subject’s self (reflexive) report about the contents of their awareness

at different scales:

[subjective]

1. theory of their own mind

2. theory of other person’s mind

3. integration and extension to:

a. interpersonal

b. small group

c. community

d. the “most attractive” large scale (examples: nation, culture, planet, cosmos)

Three Rubrics:

FOLK [psychology, anthropology]

question: Which meaningful and effective schemas and models does the subject deploy to learn, analyze, synthesize, and understand their experience and the experience of others in their lifeworld?

INQUIRY [directed to one’s self and to others; elaborated in the subjective terms given by experience]

“TAP-I”

Transformative anthropological phenomenology – Inquiry

Model of learning

Core concept: fragile contingency

Four Examples

1. Encounter on the sidewalk

2. “Narrow, rare” robust contingency

3. Actual experience of Stephen

4. Inquiry exemplified to evoke report about fragile contingencies

meta-question [frame]

What necessary and supporting contingencies did you have no decisive control over in coming to:

a. your focal point interests

b. where you reside

c. who you are partnered with

d. who are your closest friends

e. who are your colleagues

f. where you work

g. what is your particular view of yourself/other people/your community/other scales

h. what you tend to amplify

i. what you tend to discount

j. your concrete prejudices

Bowen:
Application, Acquisition, and Analysis
Application, Acquisition, and Analysis

INCLUSION
Knowing by allowing the outer lifeworld ‘in’ as it presents itself
ATTENTION
Being as aware (“doing awareness”) as possible of the sense and conceptual data of the lifeworld
CULMINATION
integrating via reflection upon the received data the evidence of deterministic contingencies of this ‘other’ lifeworld
EPIPHANY
integrating via reflection upon the fragile contingency conjunct with the moment of learning about this ‘other’ lifeworld

As it happens and as it is easy to ascertain, what people are directed toward, what they come to understand, and how they view their embodied experience within the larger world/cosmos, is produced by a combination of their own sense and choice making, and, the dynamic confluence of contingencies about which they exercise no choice whatsoever. Those contingencies are almost always extremely fragile, which is to note their qualities of novelty, serendipity, and, happenstance.

This conjunction provides for decisive and deterministic praxis. However, and perhaps this is a matter of how awareness is wired and how it evolved, the obvious facts of this aspect of fragile contingency are not usually overt as a cognitive conceptual factor.

An inquiry trained to elicit such contingencies is hypothesized to allow a praxis for transformation precisely because of the hidden nature of this aspect of necessary contingency.

draft notes SC 2008-2009

Leave a Comment

Filed under adult learning

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *