#shc20: Reverence, Revelry, and Dialogic

Morin's concept of the dialogic is core to his concept of complexity, and it was one of the first aspects of his thought to grab my attention. It is also how I am framing revelry and reverence in this series of posts. I have used the concept several times in this blog. In a post entitled "Boundaries and the Dialogic", I say:

Dialogic is a form of thinking and talking that allows us to juxtapose antagonistic points of view without seeking to resolve them in a reductionist, Hegelian dialectic that simply moves "beyond contradictions through synthesis" ("Reform of Thought", 26). As Morin explains it, dialogic "allows us to connect ideas within ourselves that are thrown back on each other" and allows us to contemplate "the necessary and complementary presence of antagonistic process or instances." Morin gives the profound examples of Life and Death, which are as antagonistic as is possible and yet which are both bound up with the other. Indeed, Reality unfolds as the constant engagement and interaction of Life with Death, and the one does not make sense without the other, and yet they are still antagonistic.

In his essay "Restricted Complexity, General Complexity", Morin suggests that dialogic is one of the core engines of complexity itself which emerges and unfolds in the excluded third, in the tensions and turbulence between irreconcilable forces:

We return again to the logical core of complexity which we will see, is dialogical: separability-inseparability, whole-parts, effect-cause, product-producer, life-death, homo sapiens-homo demens, etc. It is here that the principle of the excluded middle reveals its limit. The excluded middle states “A cannot be A and not A”, whereas it can be one and the other. For example, Spinoza is Jewish and non-Jewish, he is neither Jewish, nor non-Jewish. It is here that the dialogic is not the response to these paradoxes, but the means of facing them, by considering the complementarity of antagonisms and the productive play, sometimes vital, of complementary antagonisms.

A and not-A. Irreconcilable antagonists, yet all the interesting stuff, all the complex stuff, happens in the turbulence between these two forces. I'm reminded here of Frost's poem Mending Wall. As two fellows meet in the woods to mend their boundary wall, the narrator insists that "something there is that doesn't love a wall." The neighbor counters that "good fences make good neighbors." The poem gives us a thesis and antithesis, and in our reductionist manner of thinking, we might reasonably expect a synthesis, but there isn't one. There is only the dialogic between wall and no-wall, and all the interesting stuff, the complex stuff, in the poem happens in the turbulence -- gentle as it is -- between these antagonistic positions. The poem leaves us with only the dynamic working out of life between two older men who meet once a year to mend the wall between themselves and thus join themselves. In Morinian terms, we have antagonism in terms of complementarity, and complementarity in terms of antagonism, with no synthesis in sight.

A few hundred years before Frost, Shakespeare captured the dialogic of life and death in his Sonnet 73:

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

Here is the interplay of life and death — totally irreconcilable antagonists — captured in the magnificent image of wood that feeds the fire that turns the wood into the ashes that choke the fire. Shakespeare neatly captures the feedback loops and recursive causations that make the turbulent fire possible and make the end of the fire inevitable. The fire dances in that tense, dynamic space between life and death. The fire emerges in the dialog between life and death — its life emerging, its death already present. Both the fire and the no-fire, the cold ashes, are already in the wood, and to understand life and Shakespeare's poem we must hold both A and non-A in our view.

In his book On Complexity, Morin says it more prosaically, though he too starts with the poetic:

We could take Heraclitus's famous words, which, seven centuries before Christ, pronounced in a lapidary way: "Living from death, dying from life." Today, we know that this is not a futile paradox.
…
In a way, to live is to endlessly die and to rejuvenate. In other words, we live from the death of our cells, as society lives from the death of individuals, which allows it to rejuvenate. But by dint of rejuvenation, we get old, and the process of rejuvenation falls apart, derails, and in actuality, we live from death and we die from life. (42)

For this study, I am framing revelry and reverence as complementary antagonisms that form a dialogic that brings life to the Southern Humanities Conference.

The Southern Humanities Council which convenes the Conference is an interdisciplinary, scholarly community which is southern, as our website explains, only in terms of its having been founded in the southeastern United States. We are open to all scholars and topics, though we usually have a focus for each yearly conference. This year's theme is Revelry and Reverence. This willingness to reach beyond the geographical and social limits of our name suggests both the revelry and the reverence at work within our organization. I want to explore that.

This 2020 conference is also notable as it will mark the transition from SHC's current and long-time executive director to a new director. Thus, the ecosystem in which I will study the terms revelry and reverence is under some stress. That can be important. In a presentation to the Seventh International Transformative Learning Conference entitled "Beyond the Heterogeneity of Critique in Education: Researchers' Experiences of Antagonisms and Limits as Transformative Learning Opportunities", Alhadeff-Jones explores the role of antagonism in educational research, especially from the perspective of Edgar Morin's dialogic. Alhadeff-Jones argues that diversity within a given system gives rise to "collective and personal antagonisms" (1) which can expose the boundaries and limits at work within the system. In fact, he says, antagonism is central to Morin's theory of complexity within systems and complexity thinking:

For Morin, the notion of "antagonism" appears at the core of a theory of organization: "[...] Organizational equilibriums are equilibriums of antagonistic forces. Thus, every organizational relationships, and then every system, comprises and produces antagonism and in the same time complementarity." (Morin, 1977/1980, p.118, my translation). Behind the apparent solidarity of a system (individual, group, institution, theory), existing antagonisms carry a potentiality of disorganization and disintegration. Such a phenomenon is constitutive of what Morin describes as a principle of "systemic antagonism": "the complex unity of a system both creates and represses antagonism." ... The organization of every active system, as long as it carries diversity and differences, suggests the creation and the repression of antagonisms, which appear through the active play of interactions and feedbacks. (3)

In this discussion, I prefer the terms friction or tension over antagonism as being a little less emotionally charged. Antagonism suggests active hostility to my mind, while both friction and tension suggests a wider range of interactions among elements within a system, not all of them unpleasant or unfriendly. Think here of a friendly soccer match, which exists explicitly to cultivate and exploit the frictions and tensions between the two teams, two players, even between a player's boot and the ball, but need not devolve into active hostility — though that's certainly a possibility as well. The players can all leave the field after a rigorous contest and still enjoy a beer together. But antagonism is the term Morin uses, and as long as we bear in mind that antagonisms do not imply active hostility. Rather, most of the antagonisms that Morin deals — though certainly not all — are natural, non-human antagonisms that do not contain a hint of active hostility. On Complexity uses the example of whirlpools created by the antagonism of flow and obstacle:

Often, in the meeting between a flow and an obstacle, a whirlpool is created, that is, a constant, organized form that unceasingly reconstructs itself. The union of flow and counter-flow produces this organized form that will last indefinitely, at least as long as the flow lasts and as long as the obstacle is there. That is to say, an organizational order (whirlpool) can emerge from a process that produces disorder (turbulence). (41)

In his presentation, Alhadeff-Jones says that complexity thought in the style of Morin approaches concepts such as "diversity" in a different manner than either traditional modernism or postmoderism:

Beyond a modern interpretation reducing "diversity" to the study of a phenomenon which could be ordered, and a postmodern interpretation reducing it to disorder and fragmentation, an explicitly complex approach invites us to understand it as a phenomenon, both ordered and disordered, organized through complementarities and antagonisms. (2)

This suggests something of what I am looking for in a study of two terms. To my mind, revelry can tend toward disorder and fragmentation, a disregard of standard organization and protocol. Reverence, on the other hand, tends toward order, coherence, and a high regard for standards and protocol. I will take an explicitly complex approach that looks at the conference through revelry and reverence to see if I can learn anything about the life and behavior of SHC. I will examine the use of both terms within the presentations delivered at the conference, but I will also look at the activities of the conference and the organization that tend toward revelry (disorder and antagonisms) and reverence (order and complementarities). My thought is that the organization may emerge from the dialog, the conversation, between revlery and reverence.