Category Archives: Libraries & Librarianship

Make It All Up

res obscura


Iain McGilchrist

Epistemology establishes how we understand reality, what we believe the world to be made up of. If library directors do not have a way of knowing what is, how are they to know how to act in a time of crisis? (Phenomenology, Aesthetics, and Planning for the Artful Library Director, Kenneth Warren, 2014)

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Opposite Squaredance

Stephen Calhoun, American Public Library

For the fourth year in a row, I was happy to work with Wadsworth Public Library’s fine staff on their staff day. We did a three phase exploration over the afternoon. First, we did a Taoist Walk in two snaking, quiet, single file lines. Second, we owned up to and affirmed one half of an opposite, taken from an inventory of polarities. Finally, we did some down-and-dirty scenario solving, where intradepartmental groups trained their expert attention on three very complicated, real-world scenarios.



From the squareONE: experiential toolmaker page on my work with libraries.

Working solo, or in partnership with Daniel Slife, squareONE formulates a brain trust focused on supporting leadership, and vitalizing visionary goals in public libraries.

We support leadership and ambitious organizational goals by helping build sustainable human capacity in organizations.

Our approach can be distilled: we use deeply intentional experiential inquiries to help leaders and staff and stakeholders interrogate the core propositional bindings, mission, and history of the institution. Then, we work to help the leadership and staff reinvigorate and reintegrate these necessary core bindings, build sustainable new initiatives, recommit to a collaborative culture focused on lifelong learning and care.

squareONE’s unique capabilities are the result of joining together Daniel’s expertise in daily, practical and humanistic institutional leadership in the public library, with Stephen’s innovative skills in guiding transformative learning.

Our developmental tools are not like those found in normative organizational and leadership development. Their fundamental appreciative thrust is directed toward leveraging self-awareness for the sake of sustaining and strengthening the library’s mission. Nothing ever gets pulled off any shelf. Everything is purpose-built and fit to address mundane and audacious objectives.

Alignment matters. To be aligned with squareONE’s approach, a public library has to be dedicated to the classical view of the American Public Library. This view broadly holds the library to be a civically engaged institution devoted to supporting the emancipatory power of the book, the written word, culture, lifelong learning, and, above all: devoted to deep care for the community and its citizens.

squareONE stands opposed to the turning of the American Public Library into a vending machine of services, for which the book itself is a receding resource.

contact: Stephen Calhoun (216) 269-5568


I began working with libraries in partnership with the late Kenneth Warren in 2014. Mr. Warren hired me and asked me to create an anthropology portfolio at Lakewood Public Library in 2005. I worked there until late in 2006. 

 

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Resisting the Climate Change for Libraries

The thought of a future without libraries compelled me to make a documentary addressing their decline. I wanted to show that libraries are symbols of social equality that were built initially by the working class to educate and improve their children’s lives and the country as a whole.

Author Jeanette Winterson says that “libraries are doing more education work than ever. Libraries and literacy cannot be separated”. She protests strongly against libraries being classed as “leisure”, alongside sports centres, and says they should instead be part of the national education budget. Poet, activist, filmmaker Greta Bellamacina, The Guardian, UK

IN4tuity‘s model for the social cybernetics of the deep, (or noetic,) public library.

phenomenology: experienced inquiry in the lifespace

praxis: learning rooted to inner/outer experience and awareness

pragmatics: keen sense of solving problems, living through challenges, orderly analysis (and meta-analysis)

psychoenergetics: caring feel, the vibe of the institution, the vibe of the contexts, crucially: the vibe of the actualized commitments

(IN4tuity named the consulting partnership, with the late Kenneth Warren (1952-May 21, 2015,) This was the model that underpinned our focus on supporting the humanistic library.)

(source) Lakwood Observer

(source) Lakwood Observer

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IN4tuity Goes Back Into the Retort

IN4tuity-31

Working in partnership with Kenneth Warren, squareONE formulates a brain trust focused on supporting leadership and visionary goals in public libraries. We support leadership and ambitious organizational goals by helping build sustainable capacity in organizations.

Our approach can be distilled: we use deeply intentional experiential inquiries to help leaders and staff and stakeholders interrogate the core propositional bindings and history of the institution. Then, we work to help the leadership reinvigorate and reanimate, or reconfigure, both the necessary bindings at the core, and build sustainable new initiatives. IN4tuity‘s unique capabilities are the result of joining together Kenneth’s long expertise in daily, practical and humanistic institutional leadership in the public library, with Stephen’s innovative skills in guiding transformative learning.IN4tuity‘s developmental tools are not like those found in normative organizational and leadership development. Their fundamental thrust is directed toward instantiating self-awareness via praxis. Nothing ever gets pulled off any shelf. Everything is purpose-built and fit to address mundane and audacious objectives.

Because of the passing on of my dear friend, colleague, partner in IN4tuity, Ken Warren, on May 21, 2015, IN4tuity will not in the future be working in the areas of public library leadership development or strategy. IN4tuity has been subsumed by squareONE:experiential toolmakers. squareONE: experiential toolmakers, when aimed to support the mission of public libraries, provides experience-based staff development and assistance for serendipity-based and strategic curation.

(July 27, 2015) I have pulled the plug on the stand-alone IN4tuity. Its web name and web site expire on August 8.

This post captures the language of the project, etched onto the web site. IN4tuity lasted from February 2013 until May 2015. Ken and I spent probably something like 500+ hours discussing libraries over the past six years and especially between December 2012-and August 2014. Ken hoped to renew humanistic librarianship in the digital age, and, I hoped to assist him, and, inspire library staff to transform themselves into learning advocates. Hmmm, I guess this joined two revolutions!

Transcendently bittersweet.

ABOUT
KENNETH WARREN

Kenneth Warren is an ethical and innovative library professional, public intellectual, communicator, editor, scholar, and writer. From his beginning as a children’s librarian at the Waco-McLennan County Public Library in Waco, Texas to his twenty five year directorship at Lakewood Public Library in Lakewood Ohio, his extensive experience can deliver deep and pragmatic insight into the challenges of practice and service that face public libraries and their directors.

With an archetypal way of listening to communities and libraries, Warren is a cultivator of administrative judgment and an exegete of humanity’s typological inheritance. First and foremost, he believes that the director is authorized to strive for a better and deeper articulation of the community’s regard for the library through a planning process that carefully honors structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. He is convinced that memories and stories about library experience are important ways of passing on knowledge and sustaining the legacy of the library as a public good.

In his view, planning is an order of remembrance and story-telling that seeks to incorporate the people’s experiences into how the director understands the world and acts upon it to bring forth functional and generative service. Whether the call has been to amputate, conserve, extend, innovate, preserve, or restore what underpins the library, he will stress doing so with as much intelligence and respect for the community’s aspiration to care and know as possible.

His distinctive accomplishments span building programming and construction, children’s service innovations, psycho-demographic applications to community-building and collection positioning, staff development, public library outreach strategies for local knowledge-creation, place-making initiatives, and social capital formation. His sources in administration theory include: Larry Terry – Leadership of Public Bureaucracies: The Administrator as Conservator; John Giannini – Compass of the Soul: Archetypal Guides to a Fuller Life; Ralph Hummel – The Bureaucratic Experience; Frank Hern – Moral Order and Social Disorder.

Warren is the founder and editor of House Organ, a letter of poetry and prose. With Fred Whitehead, he co-edited and introduced The Whole Song: Selected Poems: Vincent Ferrini published by University of Illinois Press. BlazeVox recently published his selective history of American poetry: Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980-2012.

STEPHEN CALHOUN
An auto-didact learned and skilled in the fields of adult learning and development, experiential learning, social cybernetics, analytical psychology, neurophenomenology, and organizational anthropology, Stephen Calhoun is also, for over forty years, a hungry library rat.

Stephen is an innovative designer of experiential tools aimed to fuel questioning, exploration and discovery. His unique and often playful experiential tools are focused on deepening: inquiry, organizational learning and self-awareness. Because his approach to assessment and development is interdisciplinary, Stephen is also a keen analyst of human systems and resources.

As principal of squareONE:experiential toolmakers, he has been engaged with the field of adult development since 1995. In 2013, he was named one of the four global learning partners of LearningFromExperience, a consortium founded by David A. and Alice Kolb. He is a member of the Experiential Learning Community of Practice. He has created tools for, and worked with, consultants in leadership and organizational development.

(As a philosopher of lifelong and experiential learning, and an enactivist facilitator, Stephen’s outlook is primarily informed by the precedents of Gregory Bateson, William James, Carl Gustav Jung, Thelonious Monk, David A. Kolb, Paolo Freire, Jack Mezirow, Karl Weick, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Kurt Lewin, Marian Woodman, and Franz Boas.)

Stephen’s scholarly research focus works to uncover and decipher the complexities of serendipity and pseudo-serendipity in adult development. He is, apparently, the only researcher who currently approaches this growing field from the perspective that conjoins cybernetics, phenomenology, and ethnography. There are, of course, important contentions about the power of serendipity in the space of the library.

I see the lifespace of the public library to be a complex, dynamic ecology of human interaction, noetic exchange, and heart-rending service and care.

A library provides helpful mediation for human aspiration. Libraries change lives forever. It is straightforward for me to understand that a library can be at its core the magnanimous humanitarian heart of a community. Its blood is interaction, learning and experience, is, in short Praxis.

TOGETHER

Ken and Stephen partner to provide consulting and development capacity that is radically differentiated from the norm simply by virtue of their collective intelligence, deep mutual experience, and the powerful synthesis contained in their joined interdisciplinary skillfulness.

They founded IN4tuity to actively take a stand in support of the public library as a site of heart and soul, of eros and logos, of learning and human development. Their argument on behalf of the humanitarian library opposes the neoliberal idea that libraries are mainly information and service dispensaries. Their mission and IN4tuity’s potential for transformative impact is anchored to this argument.

IN4tuity’s effectiveness obtains an ideal and powerful match with like-minded leadership.

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Friendship: A Schema for Depth and Learning

Mandala

I have been reflectingintuiting over the past six weeks on my relationship with Ken Warren, and, the nature of active creative sustained depth-full relationship. This has been, is, almost a prototype of grief framed by bittersweet finality. This is both a ‘hard’ thing and a very good thing.

As I grapple with a phenomenology of deep relationship, very little of what I have been shaping over the last few weeks is inflected by interactions brought up and out from an ongoing relationship. I have been focusing on the unique qualities of my relationship with Ken. The implicit irony given by conceptualizing without solidarity is not lost on me at all.

FRIENDSHIP-HIERARCHY

This schema depicts one view of generalizations oriented to a foundational perspective. In turn, it is taken from the most basic interpenetrating levels, levels identified and discussed by Ken and myself. This schema represents the hand of deep relationship oriented to co-creative exploration, taken from the unique fingerprint of our relationship. Every deep relationship expresses a unique fingerprint.

In my view, the hallmark of deep exploratory relationship is that it is relationship founded by the transformation of instrumental relations into core depth orientation and action. Deep relationship is noetic.

Deep relationship is ironic in several crucial senses. First, such relationships demand what I term ‘open time’ orientation for the sake of turning away utility, and turning toward exploration. This further means that deep exploratory relationships are not mainly normatively useful. Secondly, exploration itself requires ‘heuristical’ flex within the open time modality; and this is instigative of the negotiation and transit and transfer of meanings, and the recursive chatter which soon enough finds any granted perspective to be ‘ironic’ in the given relation to some other perspective.

Ken and I cycled through this second aspect precisely in the way that the, his, foreordained could encompass both traditionalism and naturalism whereas, my notional contingency would encompass both fortuity and emergent spontaneity. We discovered early on that the spirited verticality is entangled ironically with soulful horizontality. This crossing, so-to-speak, constituted the background frame to our wandering, experimentation, and exploration.

Third, the introduction of a profound ludic element to the core orientation is clearly ironically situated in the way playing around pulls time out of its linear contour, and, amplifies the timelessness of the first order intrinsic motive; which is to assert here how play is motivated by virtue of play being enjoyable for its own sake. This is a baroque way of describing the experience of combinatorial flow in our relationship.

“Wow, I can’t believe we’ve been hanging out for four hours!”

Stephen Calhoun, experiential toolmaker

Deep Relational Matrix per Warren/Calhoun

(email me if you want the Warren-Calhoun Matrix in pdf)

In my idiosyncratic and syncretic phenomenology of profound friendship,  essential qualities of deep relationship are placed in the order of this matrix. The matrix proposes that such relationships possess qualities and dispositions of these types. Those qualities and dispositions in the flux of relationship are dynamic, whereas the apparent square form of the matrix is stable.

Typology given by the functional primes: A(nalytical) | E(xperiential) | I(ntoxicating) | C(ombinatorial)

In noting this, a relationship may be broadly typified. For example, Ken and my relationship was in the main Combinatorial, and its type in order was much of the time, C(IEA) The subdominant quality is an inferior quality, so our Combinatorial relationship could be very impractical. Although I have yet to conceptualize the dialectical primes and secondary polarities given in the matrix, it seems readily apparent that the basic oppositions are given in the pairings, C<>A, and E<>I.

Additionally, right now the rough appearance suggests the typology of the Analytical Psychology T/F, N/S, unequivocally associates with the relational primes:

COMBINATORIAL <> INTUITION
INTOXICATING <> SENSATION
EXPERIENTIAL <>FEELING
ANALYTICAL <> THINKING

Alas, all this is worked out without my favorite colleague and friend and co-explorer’s contemporary contribution. Our inquiry had begun to stir  into these elements the liberated psychoastrology and the experiential learning theory of my colleague David A. Kolb.

Still, Ken was very jazzed by our recent inquiries coordinated by our mutual sense that some of the deep noetic structures of organizations, such as public libraries or suburbs, were literally secreted in the profound dyadic relationships of persons in those kinds of communities.

(My considerations here are surely novel in their relation to what is a very small normative literature about depth-in-relationships–found within the scholarship about management.)

One way to work with these ideas is to imagine a controller for your close relationships and then conjure how you sometimes manipulate its regulatory dials.

Intentional control regulates relational dynamics and core 'co-performance'

Intentional control regulates relational dynamics and core ‘co-performance’

Let me know what you discovered in playing around with the dials!

Magician

The Matrix itself could be larger, and more robust. Because our own relationship comprised our principle laboratory, in our collaborative deconstruction of my promethean puer, and of Ken’s anima problem,  over the last year or so, we discovered a lot of shadowy elementals, darkened aspects, impersonal inversions, and hidden unconscious facts. Ken termed these occulted aspects. Those aspects obviously figure into, and would augment, the organization of the fuller set of generalizations of the qualities and dispositions of deep relationship.

 

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Friendship: Negative Capability, Unfinished Impositions, Irony

Stephen Calhoun, fine artist, Cleveland Heights, Ohio

The Caller, Stephen Calhoun (2013)

Loss of a person, of a close frriend or of a family member, presents a challenging process which won’t let go as it impels me through its requisite travail.

At the same time, the outward conventions of concern and courtesy basically allow for a restoration of human contact in the collective terms of concern and courtesy, and, sure, in the terms of grief and mourning.

These expressions are helpful, even as the expressed kindnesses and concerns seem to me to reach around the really bare, and profoundly forward-pitched facts. Of course, I would do the same thing, in approaching somebody’s loss, in approaching a ‘death in the family.’ Except, at the same time, I would be always holding back my usual, or my habitual, curiosity.

I would reign in my researcher’s soul.

What is actually going on?

I previously mentioned, or I think I did so, that in the weeks between meeting Ken for the first time and our second meeting, he reported to me that he had read my entire web site and blog. At the time he made this report, I didn’t know really what kind of ‘reader’ was Ken. Still, I was very impressed because he had begun what we came to call, ‘the forensics;’ and I had begun the same process. Furthermore, apparently, we shared this similarity, we both knew more data is better than both a little data, and, the thin positive capability through which a little data and bad guesswork are joined together.

Gone! Okay, what is actually going on with you Stephen? This is the question that can be addressed to me.

I do bring in, and try to warmly receive, the heartfelt substitutions for this non-obvious question. Oh, it was not a non-obvious question to Ken. When my mother passed away in early 2012, he asked me,

“What is going on?”

And, he kept asking. I’ll miss his researcher’s tenacity! If somebody doesn’t ask me this question, he or she is missing the boat. I’m not missing it, I’m in it.

I have put much of the actual goings on ‘with me’ in the aftermath of my loss, ‘out there,’ here, on my blog. (This blog is iteration number three, begun five months after meeting Ken in the fall of 2004.)

To review:

1. Shocked!

Friendship
2. the LOVE BASIS
3. COMBINATORIAL questing
4. active DECONSTRUCTION
5. the ANIMA PROBLEM
6. interlude: what you don’t know, give into
7. interlude: process and reality
8. NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, Irony

Ken would have appreciated why the number of posts is eight. Hey, I’m throwing out clues here!

He and I agreed on a great great deal, although as I have tried to make clear, Ken was entangled by his enthusiasms, whereas I am mostly afraid of my own; (so, I trained myself to be a fallibilist.)

Also, I feel as if I need to be careful. But, it isn’t also true that anybody should feel he or she is to be a second fiddle. Heck, go for it. Life is unpredictable. And, you’re unlikely to figure out in advance when your last breath is steaming down the tracks.

Close relations are my second highest value–and are so for reasons I’m able to express. Ask me. Go for it.

Stephen Calhoun, fine artist, Cleveland Heights, Ohio

The Green Man (Stephen Calhoun

Ken and I spent a lot of time deconstructing what to us–to maybe only us–was the single most bloody problem in the ‘scape of modernity, (that:) the fundamental problem is relational incapacity, not deficits in rationality or critical thinking.

Note, the structure goes from Shock to Negative Capability. It goes from oh no, shit! to soul!

Yes, it was terrific and quite medicinal, perhaps even karmically medicinal, to feel really extremely thoroughly known by Ken, yet, I’ve mapped out the foundation to be: going from the LOVE BASIS to the COMBINATORIAL. Ken and I were sensemakers, this is what we did over many thousands of hours. Why?

What is actually going on?

Why? …such a good question. We never discussed explicitly dialogical recognition (Charles Taylor,) yet when we together took up the cause of the noetic public library we sorted out a deep congruence about the micro problems come to coalesce around the macro problems of–within the pragmatics of praxis in a library–reification, instrumentalism, objectification, dehumanization, and, well, how it is, apparently, easy to rip the fucking heart of a library out of its cavity, and place in this cavity a bunch of 3D printers.

Similarly, most societal problems at the scale of the kind of civics citizens actually can effectively practice, are initiated in the first order by the atrophy of the human ability to actively know one other. Ken and I understood our diagnosis would deconstruct this order of knowing. Then, for the sake of reanimating the civic heart and civic capacity for making sense, we worked over how in a city or in a library how citizens might collaborate on a new, deeper (3rd) order of interpersonal and intrapersonal knowing cum relationship.

In the light of the ideal of authenticity, it would seem that having merely instrumental relationships is to act in a self-stultifying way. The notion that one can pursue one’s fulfilment in this way seems illusory, in somewhat the same way as the idea that one can choose oneself without recognizing a horizon of significance beyond choice. Authenticity a picture of what a better or higher mode of life would be, where better and higher are defined not in terms of what we happen to desire or need, but offer a standard of what we ought to desire. (Charles Taylor)

Ken and I spent zero time slapping each other on the back when we discovered, for example, we both were familiar with Paolo Freire. It was all matter-of-fact because it is who you are, not what you know, and, so, study for the love of the quest. Train first! Deploy, drill down, together stick our hands in the muck.

What is actually going on?

When we turned this around, our critical chops came to meld Ken’s learned Saturnian thrust with my edge-seeking Promethean swing. Ken possessed this aspect, one that was like the boy with a hammer, the boy who would swing his hammer at everything; and, I, an actual complexed puer, possessed a kind of penetrating Apollonian cynicism, and, also I, a Batesonian, was able to stand back a bit. (Well, I didn’t want to get accidentally rapped by the hammer.) Yet, when we got going. . .

we’d cover stuff very very quickly. ‘Marx was not even a horrible psychologist, yet Russell was on the money in noting Marx was a Christian heretic.’ ‘Jung only had an inkling that he had birthed a psychology and its daughters from his lapsed Lutheran brow, and that his psychology’s wider applications were somewhat covertly undermined by this creation story.’ ‘There are short paragraphs in the Tibetan Canon, or the best haiku, which could right now replace and improve every word Ken Wilber has ever scribbled.’

‘cover’ doesn’t mean getting it correct.

Ken, by the way, fulfilled the demands of authentic relationship with many many people. He and I were in a synergistic profoundly complementary relationship, and spent no time gratuitously or otherwise aggrandizing how great was our relationship, except we did once briefly consider some of the contingencies and fortuities and errors which had to slowly collapse, like a holy wave function organizing its effective reality, or ‘reality,’ and do so over two lifetimes, all for the sake of being able to efficiently and cleanly deploy together the practical and/or explosive tools our dialectical instigations, spontaneous poetics, and channeled intuitions, came to evoke and muster.

Did it help our effort that we happened to have both traveled through some of the same ideational and metaphysical lands? See: Interlude #3 tomorrow.

Nevertheless, our learned congruency was like a picture pasted to the jig pieces of a puzzle. With time, and it still is going to take time no matter what, two people working together can piece the puzzle together without having to refer to the ‘parted’ picture on the surface of each piece.

What Ken and I disagreed about: particular ramifications. For example, the ramifications implicitly of this perspective:

Ken, you should just give up trying to trick me.

Ken respected where I could not go. I had occasion to remind him earlier this year that “such respect then leads irrevocably to my Promethean liberation of Astrology and Psycho-astrology,” (and how I came to amputate various fixities from their thin causal relations.)

I had planned to take him (this summer) through The Reduced Bateson Set. (Oh well.) We had begun to recast some of the developmental fixations in learning theorizing and in specific theories, like the theory of my friend, David Kolb. Obviously, to where the action learning of our entwined dialectical picking and drumming would have led to, is about as unknowable as an unknown could be.

I had submitted a Cube-O-Probe, as a visual poem, to House Organ. Ken rarely specified the ways in which our workplay was influencing his numerous other projects. But, he was a boy with a hammer! He took his set #2 of Cubes and fearlessly interpreted their message on behalf of astrologers, poets, and nieces.

Kenneth Warren
One deep congruency we arrived at, we came to right at the beginning. Love basis.

Another lesser, and vital congruency, brought forth one of the essential fundamentals able to support our mindful and creative travels: as it happens, an exquisitely sensitive humane esotericist breaks bread with a mercurial edge-seeking flatlander because the whole cause of inverting assumptions and sometimes having to mulch them is shared and equally served by two radically different sensibilities–except for, as Rumi noted, our “fleshy hearts.”

We traveled and never went anywhere. We made a road trip to the Target in North Olmsted for the sake of a veteran who had just rented a crib in Lakewood but didn’t have a bed.

h/t Lakewood Observer

h/t Lakewood Observer

We made a bunch of trips to Wadsworth in support of our fellow traveler, Daniel and his public library.

“Ken, would you please try to keep at least one hand on the wheel?”

YoungFrankenstein

When I had reason to remind Ken that I am, by disposition, a “deep ironicist,” he told me this assertion perplexed him. I told him,

“Come on Ken, you’re the one who titled me, Dr. Puck.”

Then, I explained to him what imperatives are driven by chops, negative capability, good/bad fortune, large collections of devices and heuristics, multitudes of perspectives, plus the ability to rappel down to the “meta,” and, I went on,

“then there are also all those just-in-time intuitions blowing into your scheme like neutrinos stream through the material world, except you and me grab at ’em and we bring the intuition back alive, from wherever was its ‘wild,’ and you stick ’em to your wall, They always seem to stick.”

“Yeah, Ken, your sort of an ironicist too.”

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Friendship: The Cut, and Combing the Matrices

Stephen Calhoun, fine artist

Archi for Kenneth Warren (S. Calhoun, 2010)

In the upper right hand section of this collage is a vertical white line. Actually, up close, it looks like somebody took a knife to the art work. This vertical line is very critical to the capture of an essential quality of Kenneth Warren, and it carries over to our friendship.

He and I had two interchangeable terms we employed to describe this essential conception: (1) the cut, (2) the amputation. The conception refers to what is taken away, plus, as a consequence, what then is the new result.

All amputations are revolutionary. -Ken Warren

MAtrix template-Warren-Calhoun #3 Love

Warren-Calhoun Matrix #3

One of the principal patterns Ken and I utilized when we workplayed together was for me to leverage whatever were his intense enthusiasms of the moment–and Ken fueled himself by combusting momentary enthusiasms–as seeds for what Ken called learning devices. This particular pattern is grounded in our combinatorial intuitions, in which Ken’s foreordained particular enthusiasms would be integrated with my intuitions focused on practical ways to evoke spontaneous learning/insight.

Ken smartly suggested my designer’s aesthetic was rooted in my fundamental frame for my collection of frames, Flatland. Flatland is neither complement or denigration. Flatland was shorthand; it encapsulates my social cybernetic outlook, my fallibilist daemon, and my insistent bias that stakes development in essential ways to ecstatic contingencies/novelties/serendipities. Flatland was what Ken surmised from my describing what I meant by ecstatic organization.

Ecstatic Organization–not a normative term–means human development for which human agency is not a first or second order predicate. This is another way of asserting development which takes place because the enactive agent has become a momentary subject of generative/chance operations. One does not command these operations, rather, the operations command–to a degree–you. In ecstatic organization, agency responds rather than initiates.

I had developed no shorthand term for Ken’s own collection of lenses. Nevertheless, we kept coming back around to “egregorics,” esoteric embeds, hermetic poetics, and the foreordained. There is this accessible differentiation between the two of us: I would articulate entanglements because an entanglement may be disentangled or unwoven, while Ken would articulate embeddedness, and so in this he would also articulate primal and prime structures and inevitable types of necessary relations.

The entanglements given by my Flatland are yang; the ’embeds’ of his foreordained outlook are yin. Entanglement is related to disentanglement, while Embed stands alone. Entanglement and Embed(dedness) comprise a dialectical pairing. Factors are entangled, features are embedded. With entanglement/disentanglement/embeddedness we have the imaginal three seeking for the imaginal transcendent fourth. By filling out the formula in this way, I have offered a short hand way to describe how Ken and I operated over the years.

This basic operational formula also was brought to near on IN4tuity‘s work in the public library space. For example, the physicality and traditional humane principles of the deep institutional public library bring forth the embedded elemental aspects, while it is the aspirational flux of the library’s human ecology that brings forth its entanglements. In essence, what IN4tuity does is support the restoration of the embedded, yin, foreordained structure for the sake of disentangling and reweaving the human aspirational ecology of the library.

Matrix template-Warren-Calhoun #2

Warren-Calhoun Matrix #2

My limitations are much more severe than were Ken’s own limitations. This Matrix #2 makes this fact clear because it expresses a quadrant I could not enter into, the upper left quadrant.

Over the last two years Ken and I accomplished three major deconstructions. It could be said: we quested after something uncertain, and we ended up accomplishing three certain deconstructions. Note: deconstructions disentangle entanglements.

First, we deconstructed my puer aeternus complex, to reveal its Promethean, (or innately rebellious,) thrust. I’ll summarize this in a future post, Friendship: the Anima Problem. (In this deconstruction the analytic content was a series of dour big dreams of mine.)

Second, we deconstructed the Psychoastrology within the confined terms given by my limitations. Paradoxically, disentangling astrology from the stars came to liberate it for the purpose of developing an experiential learning device. So, this quest produced a powerful experiential learning device, the Cube-O-Probe.

Third, we ‘deconstructively’ applied the Paychoastrology to the Experiential Learning Model of David A. Kolb. This quest remains unfinished, yet some of the findings were also incorporated into the Cube-O-Probe.

Ken and I also spent a good chunk of quality time for the sake of preparing Repairing the Opposites, Doubling Stars, Turning Swine Into Pears, a program presented at The C.G. Jung Center of the Analytical Psychology Center of Western New York in December 2014. Those preparations laid the groundwork for our designing an experiential learning devise, the Heaven and Hell Archetypal Evaluation, testing it, and, in turn, this led us to the co-counseling moment given by the first deconstructive quest.

Matrix template - Warren-Calhoun#1

Warren-Calhoun Matrix #1

Matrix #1 puts Ken and I together in archetypal terms. It’s paired with a Psychoastrological Matrix that probably is drawn up in one of Ken’s notebooks.

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Anchoring Humane and Loving Support of Knowledge Seeking and Sensemaking in the Public Library

Public Library Hierarchy of Care
Public Library Hierarchy of Care – Classes

IN4tuity ventured to a public library client on February 16. For a half day experiential learning program our design leveraged dialogical inquiry and conversational learning in the whole system of the staff to develop a Hierarchy of Care for the library.

My insight starts from the well-known Maslow pyramid:

Maslow

Integrates the Spiral Dynamics in the background of Ken and my appreciative, constructivist, experiential and ‘critically conscious’ (P.Freire) precepts,

Spiral Dynamics Values

and, with Ken guiding my own discoveries, synthesizes the ordered developmental categories given by the liberated astropsychology. (On this, see especially, Calhoun-2015, Glenn Perry)

The staff went to work in interdepartmental teams and identified and dialogued about their concrete experiences and learnings about care. During a group inquiry, the captures were written to the appropriate class in the customized pyramid. We ended up with a very rich, and very subtle, organizational Hierarchy of Care. And, we also added a new proven tool to our kit.

Today I squinted and visualized IN4tuity‘s fundamental thrust: to help anchor the humane and loving support of knowledge-seeking and sensemaking in the ecology of public library-in-its-community.

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The Fate of Public Libraries

LIBRARIES-DSC03523

The fate of public libraries is unknown. However, perhaps a random delivery from the Cube-O-Probe set to the Heaven & Hell four square format could induce compelling intuitions and predictive  abductions.

This capture might benefit from facilitation.

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Chiara Lubich Reformulated for Public Libraries

Chiara_Lubich-LG

“And the answer to the learning vocation is above all an act of brotherhood. Indeed, one does not enter this field only to solve a problem, but if it acts on behalf of the interest of the community, wishing her well as if it were his own. This way of living allows the librarian to deeply listen to the citizens, who know their needs and resources. This helps to understand the history of the city itself, to enhance the cultural and community heritage. Accordingly, he can understand, little by little , the true vocation of the city and looking at her safely help to chart its way.

The function of the love of reading and seeking knowledge and deepening understanding, in fact, are to create and protect the conditions that give all other loves the opportunity to flourish: the love of young people, who want to get married and need a home and a job, the love of one who wants to study and needs of schools and books, the love of one who is engaged in the enterprise itself and needs roads and railways …

Knowledge is the love of loves, it collects in the unity of a common project, the wealth of individuals and groups, each consenting to perform freely their vocation. But knowledge also raises collaboration, making needs to interact with the resources, the demands with offers, infusing confidence in each other. The public library can be compared to the stem of a flower, which sustains and nourishes the blooming petals of the community.”

A version inspired by Chiara Lubich from Essential Writings: Spirituality Dialogue Culture.

Economy of Communion web site

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Thinking About Libraries

Strategic Planning

Learners share the graphic results of Go Fish

I’m thinking about public libraries again. Kenneth Warren has engaged squareONE learning to help design and guide a strategic planning inquiry for Wadsworth Public Library. We began the interactive part of the process with a staff day this week.

It went really well both from my perspective and given the appreciative report of the library’s Director.

sq1 model

POSTER: squareONE’s model plus the Kolb Learning Styles

I created a bunch of materials for the walls. I showed them, but I didn’t tell much about them.

Context-Inquiries-Dichotomies-1

Context Inquiry-Dichotomies-2

These dichotomies reflect the result of our initial inquiry made with the Director. Cut into cards, they constitute an  evocative device for exploring questions, challenges, and routes for further inquiry.

When I think about public libraries, I’m thinking about their deep human system and how it nourishes development and education throughout the human life cycle. Of course, how a given library does so reflects the unique human system of that particular library.

When this project is completed I will have lots more to say!

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IN THE LIBRARY

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CITY THAT KNEW ITSELF BETTER THAN ANY OTHER

Today. 4pm. The Lakewood Public Library Future Tools Series

…presenting a galvanizing vision for the pursuit of transformative knowledge via the exploration of everyday urban life. Then, during the main course of the program, participants will offer their own ideas about how this knowledge could be sought, created, captured, and documented. The evenin’s program is capped off by Stephen’s comments and discussion on the process of learning and knowledge creation already initiated by the program, and, ends with his framing of the possibility about the city that came to know itself better than any other.

What would happen if residents of a small inner ring suburban took it upon themselves to collaborate together to set a WORLD RECORD for coming to know the city they live in?

questions:
1. What’s the current world record?
2. What bundle of knowledge so gained breaks this record?
3. How would the residents go about this?
4. What would if be like to actually try to do this?
5. Are there any underlying reasons besides doing this for its own sake that might vitalize and amplify this audacious attempt at civic knowledge creation?

announcement@ Listening to the City

The programs are free For more information 216.932.7566 216.226.8275

Lakewood Public Library
15425 Detroit Avenue
Lakewood, Ohio 44107
216.226.8275

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