So let's drop these two rather old-fashioned words into a context, an environment, and watch them work their way through it. Let's watch them find their place and role in this ecosystem, and along the way, I think we will learn more about the words and more about the ecosystem as both the terms and the ecosystem express themselves through their interactions with each other. One image that I like for this is DNA. The DNA of each term will unfold and express itself both through the activities and tensions of its own internal structures and resources and through its interactions with the structures and resources of the ecosystem within which it exists. This is a dynamic process. Along the way, we also learn more about Morin's approach to complexity thought.
Starting a study with a local situation is, by the way, an important aspect of Edgar Morin's method. In his article "Complexity, Methodology and Method: Crafting a Critical Process of Research" for the open journal Complicity, Michel Alhadeff-Jones provides an overview of Morin's "paradigm of complexity" in 11 principles. Alhadeff-Jones is attempting to provide a compact, coherent theoretical framework for "researchers looking for a ‘method’ in order to critically conceive the complexity of a scientific process of research" (19). The first principle he lists is "promoting interpretations starting from the local and the singular" (21). This makes sense to me. If you want to drop into a study and explore it from the inside-out, then you drop into a singular locality, a very specific place and time. As a scholar of English, I would normally drop my two words into a text or collection of texts to see how they behave, but I'm choosing a different context. I'm dropping revelry and reverence into the 2020 Southern Humanities Conference, an interdisciplinary, scholarly community with which I have been associated for about 20 years.
This is convenient for me. First, I am attending the upcoming #SHC20 — held in Baton Rouge, LA, in early February, 2020 — and the theme of the conference is Revelry and Reverence, so the two terms under scrutiny here will be prominent within the activities and proceedings of the Conference, and I will be there to engage, observe, and take notes. The Conference is why the two terms are on my mind.
Second, I have a history with SHC. This also figures into Morin's complexity method. Too often, scientific research captures a snapshot, freezing an otherwise living, evolving system (be it an atom, a book, an animal, a conference, or a galaxy) into a static image by which we can delineate elements and relationships. While a snapshot can reveal useful information, it also destroys the living thing. Alhadeff-Jones says that complexity asserts the value of "recognizing and integrating the irreversibility of time and the necessity to include history in any description or explanation" (21). I can bring some of the history to bear in my analysis. I cannot, however, be objective about that history. I'm part of it. I also cannot be objective about this study. Again, I'm part of it.
Dropping into the singular local to study a system (a conference, say) radically changes the role of the observer. In classical science, the observer stands to the side of the observed system with the intention of being as objective as possible so that she can record what is actually happening without disturbing it. Dropping into system, however, destroys any possibility of that objective, outside stance. In fact, as I read more and more complexity studies, I'm coming to believe that an outside, objective stance is largely a fiction — a useful fiction at times no doubt, but a fiction none the less. Starting with quantum physics, modern science is learning that observed, measured behavior is different behavior. When we look and measure, then we perturb the phenomenon observed and measured. As the double-slit experiment demonstrates, observed and measured photons behave differently than photons that are not observed and measured, and as any parent can attest, observing your children changes their behavior — sometimes for the better, too often for the worse. The observer becomes part of and entangled with the observed. This seems to be the case for all phenomena.
This predicament is made even more complex by the observer bringing to the observation all of their own limited, too often flawed resources and capabilities: belief systems, biases, technological supports, knowledge communities, writing habits, manual dexterity, visual and mental acuity, quickness of reflexes, energy stores, and so forth. We cannot see it all, and even the use of methods, techniques, and equipment cannot prevent us from selecting what we can see. We know that if we expect to see something, then we increase the odds that we will see it.
So I am studying the behavior of two terms within a conference to which I belong and with which I have a fairly significant history. I will tell the conference in the presentation I'm scheduled to deliver that I am observing and measuring the conference. This will change what people do, certainly, and that may change how the conference unfolds. Moreover, I will observe and measure with my own biases, strategies, techniques, and resources, limited and flawed as they are. And I will write my findings from my particular point of view.
How am I to cope with this overwhelming, local point of view? Morin says that we cope with the limitations and capabilities of our local, entangled point of view by recognizing it and making it part of the study. In other words, we include our own learning in the process of learning about the system at hand. We must allow our methodologies to emerge as a living, dynamic interaction with new phenomena, and we must dance differently with each new dance partner and tune. As Alhadeff-Jones says, we must embrace "the principle of relationship between the observer/designer and the object of study" (21). To do so, removes the certainty of an established theory and methodology. It challenges the certainty that we seek as observers of reality. Alhadeff-Jones summarizes it this way:
The paradigm proposed by Morin suggests challenges rather than solutions. The critical stake associated with it requires therefore being able to tolerate the continuous negotiation between order and disorder. It also involves rethinking constantly the organization legitimizing one’s own statements. Considering the lack of a granted method to cope with the challenges he raises, Morin’s position is grounded in a radical uncertainty. It depends on a permanent process of self-reflection bringing researchers to continuously examine their doubts, their ignorance and their confusion. (22)Finally, SHC is changing its leadership this year. This can be a crisis in organizations, and though I do not anticipate a crisis for SHC, I do think the transition can open opportunities for both revelry and reverence. We are a small conference, and most of us know most of the others, certainly those who have participated over the past number of years. A change of leadership is likely to have enough tension and friction, however friendly, to expose the boundaries and limits at work within the Conference, and to my mind, the terms revelry and reverence capture nicely a point of friction and tension that can emerge as the conference transitions to new leadership.
Which brings me to Morin's concept of dialogic and my next post. Later.
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