by Nora Bateson
It is impossible to separate my experience as a daughter from my experience as a mother; it is also impossible to separate my cultural identity from my professional, personal, or social selves. All of those contexts are simultaneous, but reveal vital differences in the knitting together of my transcontextual life. Parts and wholes do not sit still when they are outlined through different contextual boundaries.
Reductionism lurks around every corner, mocking the complexity of the living world we are part of. It is not easy to maintain a discourse in which the topic of study is both in detail, and in context. The tendency is to create categories, and to assign correlations between them. But an assigned correlation between a handful of ‘disciplinary’ perspectives, which we often see, does not adequately represent the diversity of the learning fields within the context(s). The language of systems is built around describing chains of interaction. But when we consider a forest, a marriage, or a family, we can see that living entities such as these require another conceptual addition in their description: learning.
If not parts and wholes, what is a symmathesy comprised of?
Shifting our understanding of the make-up of the conglomeration of interactions that form a living entity so that we are not defining parts and wholes is the first step in our understanding of this new term. After all, the ‘parts’ or vitae in a living entity are also learning from each other within the context of interrelationship with the external environment. As such they are hardly distinguishable as ‘parts.’
Why is the term ‘part’ no longer fit for purpose? If we see the context (whole) as produced by its components (parts), confusion arises: we find that the outline of the context is scalable and, in fact, that there are multiple contexts, rendering the notion of parts hard to define. I am not suggesting that our inquiry should be conducted only in terms of wholes. There are boundaries. It is easy to see the boundaries of our bodies, cities, or the oceans, as ‘parts’ of the world. But often our drawing of these boundaries is based upon arbitrary lines that are convenient for our description.
The habit of conceptualizing in this way creates confusion at another level: how we see the interactions and interrelationships. If we perceive that the functions of living ecologies are the effect of processes taking place between parts and wholes, we tend to assign agency to parts. We divide the ecology in order to label it and specify the ‘functions’ of the processes that give the ecology life. The drawback to this approach is that the focus centers on the bits and their ‘roles’ while losing sight of the contextual integrity. Agency implies that parts can be separated from wholes and exert individuated action. In symmathesy thinking, the idea of agency should be treated as a paradox that necessarily resides between the existence of the organism as a unique entity, and the simultaneous impossibility that this entity can be decontextualized or in any way uninfluenced by its contextual interactions. This is because the formation of the ecology in question is necessarily evolving within its context, not its parts. If an entity exists within a continual process of communication with the many influences of its contextual settings, the individuality of purpose of that entity is inextricable from the interaction. It still has a bias or epistemological perspective that is unique but, at the same time, not individuated.
In a human context, the notion of an identity that is ever truly independent is impossible to outline. None of us can be separate from language, culture, interaction with nature, food, air, social relationships, education, familial relationships, epigenetic history, and so on. Though it is tempting to claim ‘I’ as a territory, each of us has more than 70 billion organisms in our bodies all of which are responding to temperature, sugar balances, hormonal changes, emotional changes, and so on. The particular accumulation and arrangements of those influences are unique within each of us, but we exist inside a larger set of variables at all times. What then is agency? Increasingly, studies are revealing that the microbacteria in our guts have a greater than expected influence on our desires, socially, as well as in terms of food. Mood, memory, cognition, and health are all indistinguishable from contextual relationships. That does not mean we are not responsible for our actions, it means our responsibility extends to larger contexts than our own skin.
What triggers the particular wherewithal for one sibling to become an activist while another becomes a business person? The way in which contextual and multi-contextual interactions inform our responses to the world around us would appear to be another version of will or agency. Perhaps this is more about the unique arrangement that each person learns to live within. Proclivities and aversions, aptitudes and challenges all form an aesthetic of learning and mutual learning that we might call ‘character.’ Are we our character? Are we what is in our skin? Our family? Our culture? Our language? Our diet? Our muscle system? Our monetary worth? Where are the edges and where in the complexity of self does our independence lie? As I mentioned above, there are paradoxes here to be noticed. Perhaps these paradoxes should not be solved, but instead allowed to co-exist.
We are, and we are not. We are individuals, but we are also not separable.
In non-human contexts the illusion of agency is perhaps easier to perceive. The mutuality that any living organism is existing together with (its symmathesy) is part of its continual formation and learning. The context is not inside any of the vitae, rather it is created in the interaction. Where is the culture of a city? Is it in the history? In the language? In the religion? In the environmental constraints? It is not locatable in any of these ‘parts,’ yet all of them are integral to the cohesion of the symmathesy. ‘Vitae’ invite us to think in terms of the ‘parts’ being alive, and not simply cogs. At the same time the ‘whole’ is best thought of as another interactive symmathesy in the next larger context. In the example of the human body, it is habitual to think of our organs as parts of the whole, but each organ is in fact contributing to a contextual interaction. The ‘function’ of the ‘parts’ is indistinguishable from their interaction (the ‘whole’) that is always learning. Their mutual interaction in turn becomes the immanent viability of the entity in a contextual evolution (learning).
Multiple Description and Interfaces
I described earlier our research with the IBI (International Bateson Institute), where we engage in a process of inquiry centered on the search for relational data, which we call ‘Warm Data.’ The IBI aims to devise and design research methodologies that use multiple description to illustrate how interactions in complex systems interlink. These multiple descriptions increase our ability to take into account the integrity of multilayered living systems, to think about multilayered ‘interactions,’ and to respond at a contextual level. Revealing the inter-weavings of complex systems needs a research method that can encompass the many contexts in which the system forms interdependency. As a result, these studies are also transcontextual.
The complexity of this sort of inquiry is daunting. If we are to study, for example, the way in which food impacts our lives, a multi-faceted study of ecology, culture, agriculture, economy, cross-generational communication, media, and more must be brought to our research in a linking of interfaces that together provide a rigorous beginning place from which we may better understand what is on our plates. From that beginning position our inquiry into eating disorders, poverty, hunger, and the dangers of GMOs can be approached in another fashion altogether. How do these contexts interface with one another?
IBI research is necessarily reported and presented using multiple description. Within this process we become acutely aware that, in our multiple description of living ecologies, the notion of parts within a system breaks down. When we engaged our multiple descriptions of either the ‘system’ or the ‘parts’ we found we were limited. We need not look further than our own hand for an illustration of this. What is a hand? Is it the thing at the end of your arm? A violinist has memory and ongoing learning in her hands. A sculptor has another sort of learning in his hands. We each have handwriting that is alm
ost but never quite consistent. We know the touch of our partner. A deaf person uses the hand to express language. We gesture, we stroke, we sense, we know, we learn through our hands… So what is a hand?
The hand is a ‘part,’ but it is alive and integrated into larger contexts of living and learning, or symmathesy. It is important to the use of the concept of symmathesy to think about the boundaries and ‘parts’ of living things as interfaces. The outlines we draw around ‘parts’ (like a hand or a kidney) are useful to us as arbitrary separations that conveniently contain our study within limits we can manage; but these outlines more aptly serve to indicate areas of interaction, transmission, and reception of information. The skin of my body provides what looks like a boundary around me, but ‘I’ extend well beyond the container of my flesh, both biologically and socially. Touch, temperature, expression, health, embarrassment, and so much more information is transmitted through the skin. The same can be said of the edges of a forest. While those boundaries may look like where the forest ends and another landscape begins, a great deal of interaction between animals and plants will take place at the margins. In this sense, the boundaries are vital interfaces for communication and learning.
This is a rigorous endeavor. The pull of our old ‘parts and wholes’ thinking is difficult to escape, but the vistas from which we can begin to view life anew with these concepts reveal possibilities of richer inquiry.
Models need Remodeling
A signature depiction of a ‘system’ as generated through systems theory and complexity theory is the modeled imagery of boxes and arrows representing an arrangement of parts and wholes. Sometimes these illustrations also include arrows to denote ‘process.’ But, from the perspective of symmathesy, we see that dire errors are made whenever we diagram living systems with the usual boxes and arrows. In fact, I would go so far as to say that there is no model or diagram that can effectively illustrate the learning within the context.
Symmathesy does not fit into these ‘boxes and arrows’ descriptions. The mutual learning in the context is not visible through boxes and arrows or concentric circles or any geometric designs. In a push against the cultural inclination to use engineering diagrams to discuss the complexity of life, symmathesy must be illustrated either through life itself or through symbolic representation that communicates at multiple levels (e.g. art).
Our existing forms of explanatory process and the meta-messaging of the ‘report’ of those explanations repeat the mechanistic patterns and the logic that is normative within them. For our purposes—illustrating and expressing the presentational communication of symmathesy—caution is needed to avoid the traps of thinking in terms of blocks. Thing-i-fying in our studies will derail our ability to perceive the symmathesy. Consider the challenge of graphing one’s own learning within language, culture, family, community, society, etc. The process is so multilayered and broadly spread through us all that description requires a wider language.
Art may be the only way to truly describe living complexity. Why? Because living entities exist in interaction over time. They are learning continually and any direct defining of the ‘parts’ of a learning context would necessarily be temporally limited and likely obsolete by the time it was made. Even if the structure of the organism is kindred in pattern to others of its type (like a heart, in the case of a body, or a reed in the case of a riverbed), the viability of the organism is critically dependent on its ability to live vis- à-vis the other living organisms in its conjoinment. In other words, the organisms all have to change. They all have to learn.
Part II: The Word in Meta-Communication
The words we use to describe living things carry meta-meanings
Symmathesy is a word that directs perception to the larger, learning interactions of variables in a context.
For decades the word ‘system’ has played its part in communicating the notions we are trying to describe. So why change it now?
The ability to increase the precision of our thinking in this realm is hopefully aided by this new distinction, in its metaphor, implication, and inferences. Words say more than they spell. The great anthropologist Margaret Mead used to stick her tongue out when she spoke. I am told she claimed she was “tasting the words.” People with synesthesia hear colors, see music, and feel sensations around words. The transfer of perceptions into one another like colors into music, tastes into words, emotions into smells (and so on), provides a natural cross-referencing of information. Numbness to the flavor and the sensation of words is common in what we think of as normality. Symmathesy, as a term, changes the flavor of the thoughts and theories we can generate about life, placing them inextricably in relation to each other, and in a state of constant learning.
Perhaps we all have the capacity to increase our synesthetic perceptions. I do not believe that anyone is really immune to the potions that words spill. A word is more than a mere combination of letters and sounds. The potency of words reaches the substrata of all of us. Words carry culture and history; they form and confine our thoughts. Words matter.
To discuss the sort of things we want to discuss here—things like families and cultures, ecologies and organizations—we have to care about the words we place on the page, and the words we shape in our mouths. We will live in them, and our stories will be decorated with their upholstery. The intellectual and emotional acreage of our domain has a periphery of worded fences. They hold us as we hold them. To stand by our existing words, in systems and complexity theory, limits the development of our ideas—the words are inadequate. So often the word for something or someone is a box, an outline, a set of limits—a tightness that isolates the ‘subject’ from its context. The vocabulary of this field of inquiry funnels us in, and hacks into our epistemology with sneaky inferences.
When we think of systems, what do we perceive? How do we describe what we perceive? How do we think?
The patterns of the mechanistic lens have enchanted us through every aspect of our lives. The range of this affectation includes education, politics, medicine, business, marriage, parenting, and our relationship at all of these junctions to the biosphere we live within. The stench of machine oil is everywhere as parts and wholes are geared towards ‘function’ in clicking and clanging bits that leverage the pattern into position. It ‘WORKS.’ Or, when it does not, we say it has become dysfunctional… i.e. the cogs are bent, and the thing can’t turn.
Part III: What is Learning in Symmathesy?
Since the term symmathesy pivots on the idea of mutual learning, we need to consider carefully what we mean by ‘learning.’ What is learning?
Most common definitions of learning involve the acquisition of knowledge within a progression of stages relative to physical or intellectual development. By contrast, in our terminology, learning has been stretched to include the entire living world as a context of learning—as a symmathesy composed of symmathesies. Learning has also been stretched to include much of what we think of as adaptation and even addiction. Of course, the living world itself is made up of living worlds. Learning in symmathesy is the perpetual processes of positioning and repositioning, calibrating, shifting, and responding to responses within contexts of multiple, simultaneous interactions. Here, the term ‘learning’ is closer to co-evolution, though I am hesitant to invite the connotations of ‘improvement’ that the word evolution carries. Learning in symmathesy does not imply bettering or progress. Likewise, the terms ‘adaptation’ and ‘co-adaptation’ signal a notion of fitting in, or alteration, as organisms adjust to one another. This is closer to the learning within symmathesy, but still differs in that the interaction between them over time is seen here as contextual mutual learning which continues and does not ‘fit.’ Here are some of the characteristics of learning in symmathesy:
Contexts: Learning in symmathesy is contextual, even at the smallest scale. The interrelationality within which any living thing exists, presents contexts of both internal and external interactions. For example, my survival
depends on the internal workings of my body (the nervous system, digestive system, circulatory system, and so on), my external relationship with the biological world (for air, water, food, etc.), and all the other interactions in my life. But these are not independent of each other. The ‘loving’ or ‘mean’ things that someone says at breakfast have an effect on blood pressure, digestive process, and cognitive (implicit or explicit) understanding of identity within a culture. The same sort of interdependencies exist in a forest. Though the nodes of receipt and transmission of information may be more difficult to assign, the processes necessary to the continued life of the forest are woven into the contexts of the relationships between the micro-organisms, the flora, the fauna, the climate—as well as the internal processes of each tree, the extension of its roots, the transportation of its sap, the photosynthesis in its leaves, and so on. In either of these examples, the living organism must position and reposition itself within its context of variables and interrelationships in order to survive. What is more, the society I live in is located within a larger, shifting field of countless variables, as is the forest around the tree we spoke of. The contexts are variables that are learning together.
Calibration: Learning in symmathesy is an ongoing process of calibration (precise and continuous adjustment) within contexts of aggregate, interrelational variables. This calibration does not require conscious involvement. The learning that any living thing must continue within (if it is not to become obsolete) is a wide-angle process of receiving and responding to information. This information is sensed as difference and is received from simultaneous multiple interactions. (Gregory Bateson referred to this definition of information as the “difference that makes a difference.”) Complexity does not divide itself, and therefore life requires calibration within multiple streams of information and interaction. In order to do a simple task, such as walk across a room, a staggering calibration must take place. (If you’re carrying soup, it’s even harder—as described in the chapter called ‘The Fortune Teller.’) Likewise, our forest tree registers the direction of the wind and sun, and the context of the forest it lives in. These will influence the tree at every scale, and their effects will even be visible to us in its shape as the tree calibrates the growth and placement of its branches, and the pathways of its roots, for example. Learning is the process we are referring to here as calibration within variables of interrelationship.