Make a Mistake, but Please... Make it Twice (at Least)

Pictures taken in Porto, Portugal

We are made with opposable thumbs -- we can grasp, we can make, we can assemble. We have facial and respiratory structures which enable us to form words, which in turn enable us to grasp seemingly impossible, yet-unseen worlds. We are naked and vulnerable, leading us out of sheer necessity to relationship, to the making of friendships, the forming of families, villages, and endless other sustaining connections.

Those processes of life which enabled us to emerge as a species clearly insist that our movements in life will be to create things. We are creators.

We make ideas, technologies; we create concepts and contraptions; we tie together thoughts and things, we form connections; we create machines, that is, we create things which create things, which in turn create other things; we make difficulties, we create answers; we create friendship, we form families; we make hate, we make love; we create worlds, innumerable possible worlds.

But, every creation is a crap-shoot. Most attempts at creating don’t result in desirable outcomes. For one of the things we make, one of the key things we make is the mistake. We are able to create meaningful things because we persist, pure trial and error (with plenty of error) not because we knew how to get it right in the first place.

This is not just people who operate by trial and error. Think of nature, most all of nature. Think of the dandelion, hundreds of seeds which drift away to “unproductive” futures – most every dandelion seed fails to produce a future dandelion. Nature repeatedly builds mistakes – multitudes of mistakes – into the essential processes of life. Think of sperm: millions are produced yet typically only one has the luck of fertilizing the egg, and usually even that one doesn’t make it. Sex is the classic example of the non-efficient, apparent wastefulness of nature. The production processes of nature are built upon the very requirement of mistakes, and mistakes by the bushel-full.

But, just for a moment let’s leave what we consider as nature and let’s enter human realms, social realities which are plainly impossible for us to overlook. For in this societal plane questions emerge. For example...

Why do we feel such shame these days when we make a mistake?

Why does our very fear of making mistakes so impede us from even initiating creative attempts?

Many reasons, I’m sure, but let me offer one in particular.

We have developed systems of education which inform us that mistakes are not only undesirable they should be responded to with strict punitive measures. We pass or fail on the basis of the number of mistakes we are able to prevent. Science class asks us to perform an experiment, not so we might find ourselves surprised at the results, but so we can learn the necessity of doing it right, doing it flawlessly, evading mistakes from the very first go at it. Actions of judgment are rigidly directed toward the elimination of mistakes. Repeatedly and overwhelmingly education teaches us that mistakes are that enemy which must be evaded or destroyed at all costs.

We learn over and over again the supposed destructive nature of mistakes, and we learn this in so many contexts -- workplace, media, family, and many other relationships.

Yet the idea that mistakes are to be evaded is evolutionary nonsense -- against the very flows of the alive! The eradication of the mistake is a concept destined to destroy the life-given, and life-sustaining impulse to create.

What can we do?

Through this march of trial and error (more accurately -- trials and errors) we call “creation” let’s go out of the way to celebrate those things which we produce, let’s affirm each others’ creative productions. At the same time let’s honour our mutual evolutionary legacies which enables us to create in the first place -- for perhaps never before in history have we needed a splurge of abundant and diverse creative endeavours as we do now.

Simply put... let’s create, and in the process let’s make mistakes -- let’s make many of them.

From System to Rhizome: A Change in the “Creating Concept”

The images in this posting are all of rhizome organisms

Guest Posting: by Lynn Hoffman

I have said before that I write according to the rain barrel principle. About every ten years, I find that my rain barrel is full, and I begin to think about putting its contents into a book of stories. The beauty of this is that I don’t have to write in a formal way, but as though I were telling a friend about a trip I have taken. And there is much that I am excited about. For one thing, my colleague Chris Kinman and I have begun to use a new master metaphor for the fields of social betterment. Taking inspiration from the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari , we propose a shift from the System metaphor for human services to a Rhizome metaphor. Unlike the System, which derives from engineering and technology, the Rhizome idea offers a botanical image, tied to the natural world and having an affinity with human themes and ventures.

“Rhizome” also allows us to escape from a common linguistic trap. As Harry Goolishian and Harlene Anderson reminded us, as long as you use terms like “systems” or “structures” to describe social data, you become prey to the illusion that such units can be seen as “functional” or “dysfunctional.” Having created a “problem,” the next step is to look for a solution. This is the unhappy result of the structuralist, or noun-based, worldview that has gripped our descriptions of society’s troubles for the past few centuries. We use the phrase “Terrorists” (bad) as opposed to “War Against Terror” (good), in the same way that we say “dysfunctional” family (bad), “functional” family (good). Then we are on the slippery slope of having to “do something” about it.

In their critique of helper bureaucracies, Deleuze and Guattari compare the Rhizome to the Tree. The Rhizome has no up or down but lives in an eternal middle. It is famous for the way it repeats itself. All it does is to put out an underground root or aerial shoot and it re-appears in another place. Some rhizomes are viewed as pests, like crabgrass, others are valued like iris or daffodils, but they are hard to kill. Stamped out in one yard, they just sprout up in another. They continually create new “plateaus” or “assemblages,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it, from an inexhaustible horn of plenty.

By contrast, the Tree presents itself as a standing hierarchy: root, trunk, branch and crown. To aid in our understanding of expert social systems, Deleuze and Guattari have coined the word “arborescence,” which they believe describes the top-down nature of the human services industries that practitioners have to conform to. By contrast, the rhizome is a counteracting concept that brings a host of welcome notions with it: the importance of the Net and Net-making as opposed to the individual and her normative trajectory; the idea of Plateaus and Assemblages as opposed to structures and units; the idea of the “Body Without Organs” (the non-medical body); the idea of Exchanging Gifts instead of Problem-Solving; and the emphasis on Bounty and Abundance rather than Deficit and Lack.

Finally, there is a contested concept: the “Nomad War Machine.” This idea comes like a shock to people who put a high value on collaboration and find negative labels pejorative, and yet answers the need for some way to describe and honor the vital spirits of rebellion, revolution and reform.

Before going on with my story, I should mention that the term “Creating Concept” was used by Deleuze and Guattari to describe the ruling metaphor that heralds the appearance of a new domain. Clearly, they felt that the Rhizome did that for the emerging world they were dreaming into being.

By Lynn Hoffman

Look at Photographs... Not Movies...

A short poem...

Look at photographs

Not movies

Revel in words

Not stories

Think a thought

Not a theory

See a smile

Ignore goodness

Make people laugh

Forget humour

Read a Walt Whitman poem

(Oh yes... make sure to read it aloud!)

And throw away that fucking commentary

This poem plays with a series of affirmations and negations. Please... don't take the negations too seriously!

A Population Does Not Make a Community...

Photos of collaborative artwork spearheaded by Sara London, of Mexico City.

Have you ever met a population?

Have you ever engaged in a conversation with, had an argument with, made-love to a population?

Research in the social and the biological sciences has a perpetual interest in studying populations. Every day on the TV and in the newspapers you hear about research done on populations – could be studies about men, women, various minorities; or maybe studies about people within certain income brackets or who are connected to types of workplace -- the various ways to distinguish populations is endless.

Yet, generally speaking, populations are not things we encounter in daily lives, they are academic distinctions, they are distinctions which usually have to be imposed upon life. Albeit, there may be some value in distinguishing such populations, in seeing what learnings can be gained from such distinctions, but still the distinctions are artificial, they are removed from life as it is lived. We do not meet populations. We do not engage in conversations with populations. We cannot make-love to a population. We can distinguish a population, we can take action upon a population in academic ways, but we cannot truly encounter one.

Even the most basic of distinctions such as male/female describes a combination which can only, in lived life, exist together. Concepts such as men and women, boys and girls cannot make any sense separate from each other. And not only must the two parts of the male/female distinction be acknowledged together, such conjoined distinctions can only be seen within a vast network of other distinctions and parts. Male/female only exists in worlds which might also require children, houses, jobs, money, cars, animals; it also requires things such as night and day, seasons, food, air, water, soil; and it also necessitates such things as love, hate, sex, health, illness, and on and on...

However, there is a politics of populations which must be taken account of. Population distinctions take on certain political currency. People are supposed to identify themselves as belonging to a population. In fact, community is often identified with populations.

However, I argue that community is only possible because of a vast network inclusive of much diversity. Difference, not the singularity of population, is the basis from which community is able to emerge. And perhaps here comes to light one valuable outcome, one possibility which appears from the act of distinguishing populations – we are able to use these distinctions to draw out the full richness of that which we consider to be community. For community, therefore, is not made up of single populations but of a vast diversity which includes the possibilities of men and women, children and the elderly, gay, straight, transgendered, bisexual, Christians and Sikhs, atheists and religious zealots, poor and rich, healthy and ill, etc. The population distinctions only seem to approach the realm of the alive when they are recombined, brought back together into a communal place, amidst rhizome connections, thereby assisting in the creation of that untidy and boundary-less coherence we call community.

The distinctions which interest me, however, are not the institutionalized ones, not those which have been heavily politicized, but those which are created amidst our daily interactions in life, those which appear as people interact with each other, make room for one another. These are distinctions which, ironically, enable the individual to emerge into life; that is a person with numerous unique dimensions, shifting and flowing dimensions, marking spaces in the alive which have never appeared before, and will never appear before. A person is born. A person we can meet, we can talk with, we can argue with, we might even make-love to. This person comes into life amidst the endless distinctions which the communal realm can make. Through such a process an individual is created, a person emerges who comes once into this world, and will never, ever be able to return again.

Within the alive, a rhizome muddle comes to the fore, and it is within and because of such a chaotic jumble that the very idea of community becomes even possible.

Tom Andersen's Dog

By the way, this is not Tom Anderson's dog... just my dog.

I remember hearing the late Tom Andersen (Norwegian psychiatrist, family therapist pioneer) say the following words at the beginning of his presentations.

Get a dog

Let the dog teach you
How to gently
Stroke it

What rich words! Tom would go on to discuss his own thinking in regards to this saying. He talked about a professional work where our very interactions with the people we are working with inform us as to what our own actions might be. We perhaps gain little from our previous instruction – at least when it comes to the understanding we need for our engagement with the people before us. We certainly don’t learn because we have become experts on human behaviour, not even because we have been informed about social justice and human rights. Even the best intentioned of our learnings can interrupt the beauty and power of our joint work with those human lives, bodies and relationships we are in interaction with. According to Tom we learn what to do as we are looking and listening from the midst of our own interactions with those we are in conversation with. We always learn from the middle, and certainly not from a place prior.

The people Tom was in conversation with -- they taught him. And, those we are interacting with must also always teach us.

But Tom’s words say so much more. They talk not just about work, they talk about life.

After I would hear Tom’s words about getting a dog, I would find myself wishing that he would stop right there, that he would say no more!

For -- in something akin to the spirit of a Nietzsche aphorism, or perhaps in accordance with the sensualism of a Walt Whitman poem -- in these few words Tom speaks... and we all listen.

And Tom repeats to us...

Get a dog

Let the dog teach you
How to gently
Stroke it

Have You Seen...

Have you seen the beauty
In a swarm of gnats
The late afternoon light
Transforms them
Into a universe of dancing stars

Have you seen such utter loveliness
Just off to the side
Beneath the feet
Outside of the glare
Of our prejudices

“Look, don’t think...”

Eyes, Hands and Words

The Work of Harlene Anderson

I wish to focus within this posting upon a particular person, one who I have come to deeply admire and respect, and one who over the last couple of years I have also come to call my friend.

Her name is Harlene Anderson.

Harlene is known for her pioneering work in the family therapy field, beginning many years ago with her friend and colleague, Harry Goolishian. But, in this posting my purpose is not to reiterate Harlene’s many accomplishments in family therapy and beyond -- though it would be a privilege and a delight to do that. I encourage the readers to learn of Harlene’s work, beginning with her own website, http://www.harleneanderson.org/. And of course one must read the many books and articles she has authored.

But here I wish to talk of Harlene as I see her, as I experience her in her life and work. These are my own words.

Eyes

Harlene talks much about collaboration. She writes and speaks of the Collaborative Therapies. But this collaboration is much more than words.

For one, this collaboration is an inescapable impulse evident in the eyes – and it appears in Harlene’s eyes. Connections merge into life as eyes speak and as eyes meet. Such engagements of eyes, through words unspoken, or perhaps with words, but words which dance with the unspoken, pull together many lines of community and awaken a commonwealth of collaborative becomings.

There is an unpreventable honesty in such collaborations. In this vein, it seems that Harlene’s eyes are not particularly well equipped in the ways of deception, for collaboration refuses to hide, appearing even in the silences. One could be deaf in Harlene’s presence and the movements of collaboration would still be most evident, there is no keeping it secret, it would repeatedly appear in every passage of her eyes.

Keeping close to the spirit of collaboration, Harlene knows it’s not just about her eyes; it’s about many eyes, rhizome lines connecting between looks. Not the look of the gaze as described by Foucault, but relations between countless eyes, circulating care, respect, love, the humour of living, the delights of friendship. Harlene’s eyes, and her words, become a one-among-many, one net of influences joining with a world of influences, small and large, near and distant. And, is this not the very work she repeatedly talks of, and the very joy which she cannot hide?

A democratic work! Harlene becomes a one amidst many communal becomings, but a one with influence, along with the rest of us. An irony appears here, for Harlene has often been uncomfortable with the talk of the political within our work, but in a way her own work becomes, and she becomes with her work, a certain becoming-democracy. Joining in this democratic impulse is a host of dear friends, including, of course, Lynn Hoffman and the late Tom Anderson.

Hands

It is not that Harlene talks much of hands; it’s that I see hands – moving, working, touching -- within Harlene’s ongoing interactions. Such hands are in movement upon the front page of her website. She invites people to be “inquisitive, creative, authentic, and open to the ever-present possibilities for newness in others--and in themselves.” This is a call to create, to make something specific -- to repeatedly produce ways whereby we are able to open ourselves and others to the plenitudes of life and newness.

This is a call for hands creating together. Watch what happens at those events she helps organize. A buzz of making occurs, in the meetings and out of the meetings. Many things – thoughts, relations, joys and other gifts – created together. I think that for Harlene the hands of creation and the language of collaboration are one and the same thing.

Words

We return to words. Many years ago Harlene and Harry Goolishian engaged in their own creating, and they called what they produced, Collaborative Language Systems. The landscape of therapy was forever altered. Harlene persists in talking about the way we talk together, particularly about the way professionals talk within their work. But as I watch Harlene she continually endeavours to create words, particular kinds of words – words which return. That is words returning to the movements of life, to the curiosity, the creativity, the newness and hope that life calls forth.

I invite you to read Harlene Anderson... encounter the creations and the many processes of creations she unravels. For words continue to meet eyes and hands upon her pages.