New words to hold the invisible world of possibility
Part 2: Symmathesy
The second of ’s three piece essay on New words to hold the invisible world of possibility, and the transcontextual background theory to explore, as she puts it, “How do systems learn?”…
In the summer of 2022, Unpsychology Magazine published our eighth issue – a collaboration with Nora Bateson and the Warm Data community. The result was a rich and beautiful journal of art and ideas, available free in digital form. We also produced a paper version of the mag – and you can find out how to get both digital and paper versions from HERE.
At the heart of the issue was a three part essay by Nora, that explains and explores these new words that “hold the invisible world of possibility”, and provide a way of beginning to understand the transcontextual world of Warm Data that she inhabits - and that she inherited from, among others, her father Gregory Bateson. We are republishing the essay here over three posts as a way of acknowledging the growing influence of Warm Data on the work and ideas of the Unpsychology project.
Award-winning filmmaker, research designer, author & educator, Nora is President of the International Bateson Institute in Sweden.
Part 2: Symmathesy
Each one of us is a crooked tree, Reaching for water and light, Bending ourselves around obstacles, Scary thoughts, hurtful moments, Darkness & thirst, Finding a way to breathe in the sun and hold the soil, Our branches are kinked and twisted,
Because that is what it took to be here,
The ways of learning to be in our worlds, Have shaped responses,
Our many experiences are speaking through every gesture. Our loves, and broken paths, a tenderness, a criticism, Learning always,
Yearning always,
In crooked beauty...
To be a home for those who may find comfort
In the asymmetry of our belonging,
A nest cradling new life,
Tucked into an old log teeming with creatures,
Learning to be in each other's reshaping.
Nora Bateson
Warm Data came about when I realized that to do the research IBI was interested in doing on How Systems Learn, we needed a new species of information. We started off with the idea that we would study How Systems Get Unstuck, which seemed at first to be a highly relevant path of inquiry. But soon, we (the IBI research group) began to notice that it was not a very good question after all. Why not? Because it turns out it takes a great deal of change to keep an aspect of any complex (living) system stuck. Think of a family with a member that is dealing with addiction; the addiction (let's say to a drug) is the stuck bit. And to stay in relationship with the person who is addicted, the entire family, friends, and work colleagues have to make adjustments in communication, timing, and day-to-day expectations. To maintain stuckness is to defer the many changes of each moment and context. That deferment does not disappear; it moves and emerges as ‘unintended consequences.’ It keeps generating ripples through the contexts. Kids have to justify their late or absent parents with addictions, partners have to make excuses, and colleagues have to cover for them. Stuckness was not the issue, even though it appeared initially to be.
As it happened, back in 2012, we went on to do a research session at a clinic that works with paralysis and terminal pain in Italy. This was as close as we could get to a “stuck system” — the body in paralysis seemed like as good an example of stuckness as we were going to find. To make a long story short, we discovered in that research that systems do not get unstuck; they learn. The stuckness becomes obsolete when there is systemic learning; it gets displaced, vaporizes, and heals.
The better question then for the research was, “How do Systems Learn?”
The idea of systemic learning can cause confusion. The culture of studying the parts of a system has warped our perception to make it challenging to imagine systemic learning. It appears that the part is learning, not the system. Evolution is one example; ecologies learn through the in-forming of multiple organisms in relation to each other. Another example, more personal in scope, that I like to use to describe systemic learning is noticing the many contexts of cognition required to learn to play a musical instrument. Where is the learning? Is it in the muscles and hands? It is in the relationship to the making of the instrument? Is it in the emotional connection with the music? Is it intellectual? Is it in the relationship with the music teacher, the family, the culture? Is it a rebellion or an obligation?
Clearly, the learning is in the combining of all of those versions. Again, combining, not combination; this process never stops. While it may be more customary to break apart the learning and study each of the various aspects where the learning is found — what happens if we ask instead how they are combining? How do the muscles, culture, emotions, intellect, teacher, family, and the making of a violin combine into the motions that produce music?
The term transcontextual is clearly useful here. Learning in one context is of different quality or characteristic than in another. Learning to read music is different from suffering a broken heart and then being receptive to the tones that communicate sentiment. Both are needed, but how would one pull them apart? I coined a word for this notion of mutual learning taking place in-between contexts.
Symmathesy.
Sym – Together (Greek) Mathesis – Learning (Greek)
Symmathesy (n) is an entity of transcontextual mutual learning. Other forms: Symmathesize (v), symmathetic (adj)
This term was needed in the lexicon of systems and complexity studies to highlight how all of life is constantly learning to be in context. A tree is learning to be on a hill; its trunk is at an angle to the hill, its branches reach toward the light away from other trees’ shadows, it grows in height according to the nourishment in the soil, and so on. The form of the tree is in-formed by the contextual and transcontextual mutual learning it is in with the other organisms it shares a hillside with. If you want the trunk to be at a 90-degree angle to the ground, instead of the angle the tree has found, the approach will be to manipulate the tree. To do so would, of course, upset the precarious balance the tree has found and other organisms living with the tree. It is better to ask, “How is it learning to be in its world?” and immediately notice how the perception moves from the tree to its contextual responsiveness. Is the crookedness in the tree? Or is it in the context?
Symmathesy. I have grown fond of this word since 2015. It has brought an under-standing, an around-see-ing, an attention-expand-ing to the study of how systems change. Symmathesy as a starting place stretches the inquiry into the contexts and detours from the pull of direct correctives. The national health system, for example, may be studied as an institution that needs corrective policies and measures. Still, when the health system is approached as a ‘system learning to be in its world,’ it becomes immediately apparent that the systems of economy, politics, family, education, history, technology, agriculture, and the ecological world are all wound into and combining in the health of a society.
The symmathesy offers us another approach that naturally asks for a response of another order. What if the changes to the health system are only possible through changes to education of family habits around food and the shifting of economic and agricultural traditions? In working with living systems, the solution is rarely direct. Attention to this “around-ing” shifts the position from which a response is configuring. If I see a crooked tree, I might be tempted to straighten its branches with string or cut them off, whereas if I see the way that tree is “learning” to be in its world, I will tend to the contexts of that ecological learning. My approach is altered wholly. With a symmathetic approach, I am not a mechanic. I am an artist; I am listening to all of the instruments in the band, I am in wide-angle receiving mode — taking in the peripheries, the tones, the nuance, responding from another cognition of the situation.
As organisms, trees, bacteria, human beings, societies, and forests are always learning, every second is in ecological movement. It follows that the responsiveness to this movement in mutual learning is an attending, not a management or control. This tending is humble and, in every instance, uniquely detailed. As such, these responses generate relationships that generate more relationships. Like a meadow, continuing to be a meadow while changing all the time.
Mutually learning together how to be in our own crooked tree selves, in the meadows of our communities, is knowing that life is not static. Time is movement; time is mutual learning. Whether or not our perception is on this movement, it is happening anyway. I never was just me, I have always been my microbiome and my history, my ideas, and my family, my community... my “self ” that is learning was never only mine.
to be continued/
Part 3 of new words to hold the invisible world of possibility – aphanipoiesis – will be published on 29th April. Part 1 – warm data – is HERE.
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Beautiful 🙏🏻