The psychical framing of intention within the making/creating of a reductive tracing of the phenomenal world would seem to be critical. What is the intention of an image, for example? Is it as fundamental as the intention of God in the creation of the world? Or can it be explained away as merely an artifactual process of the techno-social system that one happens to be embedded within? Clearly one intention is to use the artifact to say “Look what I saw!” And, so, the process should never be undertaken when there are others around, as they are already experiencing the phenomenal world, albeit from another point of view. Although this suggests that the artifact is used in the presentation and validation of one point of view with an other. (This presentation process and its outcome may also fast-forward root into the resonances arising from the juxtaposition of those two differing POV’s). Is this the sole, core reason? Or is there something else? Is there more to it? This juxtaposition (though more complex and intertwined than that word suggests) is a form of dialogue in that extended sense of the energized interaction of the Self and the Other. hmmm.

Arrive at CLUI mid-afternoon, after a slow and cold morning with a walk among the juniper and the outcrops of limestone there in the Goshute Mountains, looking for something, not sure what. The final 100 miles is on an empty road, northbound with the dominant paleo-shoreline of the ancient Lake Bonneville appearing (everywhere) tracing an almost-human-alteration-looking bench line at the elevation of 1,555 m (5,100 ft.) feet above sea level — Wendover is at 1,308 m (4,291 ft.), that is, deeply submerged in a conceptual Lake Bonneville. More on that later. I will have to walk portions of the shoreline at some point. Matt is there at the residency compound so we immediately launch into a conversation that is broad, but specific in its range of subjects. There is the organization of CLUI itself, I am tremendously curious about it as a social entity and how it survives (and thrives) in the relatively hostile (to culture-orgs) environment of the US. Then there is the location here, as Matt takes me on a two hour driving tour of the facility and the town, I am really amazed at the depth and richness of the relationship he (and the organization) has fostered with this place.

We end up at a great Mexican restaurant, The Salt Flats Cafe, at the Blair exit (#4) off I-80. Have to go there again, the chili rellenos were quite good.

Mills, using the key word, power, sketches out the relation between the individual and small groupings of people and their often problematic relation to those exercising power within The State. It is the terms abuse of power and exercising power which are most intriguing. What do they actually mean? I believe they are derived not from abstracted political relationships, but rather actualized movements of energy, deflected through socially-constructed pathways of relation, that may be read as the substance of the social system itself.

Power is yielded to some and stripped from others in a social system. It is apparently concentrated in the hands of some, and depleted from the reach of others. The State is one operational field or framework for the circulation or movement of power: the social system actually is the cumulative expression of re-configured energy flows. The State can only be the sum of energy expressed by the individual participants in it. When the participant in a social system is measured, the next reasonable step is that the results of that applied metric are used to place that individual within a scalar array of productive potential within the equation of state. All of this is predicated on the actual framework of what a social system is — a way of establishing a set of relations of power between individuals. (Back to the architecture of the continuum of relation — where the minimum granular unit, the individual, is in array with a certain number of other individuals in immediate relation. These minimum units of relations are replete with complex flows of individual life-time/life-energy: body energy expressed to maintain viability, needs filled by necessity.) Abuse of power is the routine deflection of flows of those energies in the service of maintaining some minimum order beneficial to a subset of individuals in a social system and conversely detrimental to the viability of others.

A democratic state should not be about anything else but the active facilitation of the viability of all participants, without exception. All concentrations of power should be directed in the service of this ideal, and great effort should be made to minimize the degree of concentrations of power with subsets of individuals of the system. That is, individuals must not surrender their autonomy to wider-scale State-sponsored reorganizations of power flows. [hehe, this sounds like an anarchists credo or at least a libertarian view of State -- with the qualification that it should be undertaken with deep thought and consequent action in the field of human obligations as opposed to human rights.]

All of this is not to say that there is a simplistic mathematical formula by which the State might be circumscribed, although this is often done. As with any abstracted model of complex systems, the State can be re-presented to varying degrees of accuracy. (The current obsession with The Market, as a hyper-simplistic model of the abstracted relations going on between nine billion people globally is a good example of the usefulness and the uselessness of such models — how well does this model circumscribe what is actually going on between peoples in the world? The unquestioned belief that the activities of the Market accurately indicate the status of relation and suggest ways to alter the character of those relations is both true but also very, very false.)

The ‘people’ who exercise the power, are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised, and the ‘self-government’ spoken of, is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power.

… the practical question, where to place the limit — how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control — is a subject on which nearly everything remains to be done. All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be, is the principal question in human affairs; but if we except a few of the most obvious cases, it is one of those which least progress has been made in resolving. No two ages, and scarcely any two countries, have decided it alike; and the decision of one age or country is a wonder to another. Yet the people of any given age and country no more suspect any difficulty in it, than if it were a subject on which mankind had always been agreed. The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. This all but universal illusion is one of the examples of the magical influence of custom, which is not only, as the proverb says a second nature, but is continually mistaken for the first. The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others, or by each to himself. — John Mills, “On Liberty”

The confusion of the two nature’s and the consequent operation of the social system based on the results of this confusion is probably a chief factor in the inhumanity displayed within and at the edges (of power) of social systems predicated on such mistaken conceptions.

Mills does not examine the actualizations of energy that are the instruments or carriers of inter-personal exchanges of power. In order for his ideas (the liberties of thought) to be properly mapped back onto reality, they need to be connected to or mapped across the activated and dynamic matrix of flow, imho. This, combined with an exploration of the dynamic of human expressive activities where collective discourse and exchange takes place and where one becomes “capable of rectifying his mistakes by discussion and experience.” This process of change arrives “not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted.” Enter the widened definition of dialogue, where the sharing of life-energies/life-times becomes the matrix for change.

Human dialogue, therefore, although it has its distinctive life in the sign, that is in sound and gesture (the letters of language have their place in this only in special instances, as when, between friends in a meeting, notes describing the atmosphere skim back and forth across the table), can exist without the sign, but admittedly not in an objectively comprehensible form. On the other hand an element of communication, however inward, seems to belong to its essence. But in its highest moments dialogue reaches out even beyond these boundaries. It is completed outside contents, even the most personal, which are or can be communicated. Moreover it is completed not in some “mystical” event, but in one that is in the precise sense factual, thoroughly dovetailed into the common human world and the concrete time-sequence. — Martin Buber; Gregor-Smith, Ronald (Translator); Friedman, Maurice (Introduction by). Between Man and Man. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 1947. p 5.

It is that essence that is what passes in the continuum of relation that all human encounter actualizes itself. It is the same essence, that something that Schrödinger posits as negentropy, the tendency towards which is a unique characteristic of life. This is the essence which is not objectively comprehensible. It is recognized when the engagement which is the genuine dialogic instance is explored in all its intricacies (after the fact), or simply observing other humans engage. People-watching without pretension or preconception will bring a profound understanding of encounter. On the surface, dialogue is judged by its linguistic content; even more abstract engagement is measured to the metric of knowledge or even base information transferred.

The tendency of life towards negentropy is sourced in the human-to-human encounter. For without this encounter, life would, literally, cease, in the case of the reproductive encounter. But isn’t it such that any human-to-human encounter affects change on both the Self and the Other? Change that may not immediately be recognized as creative, but none-the-less is essentially creative in that it is the site of change, evolution, growth, transformation.

What then is that precious something that contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happening – call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy – or, as you may say, produces positive entropy – and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy – which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help produce while alive. — Erwin Schrödinger

A Believing Humanism: Gleanings, Martin Buber (Credo Perspectives Series)
Edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen, Touchstone, 1969 ISBN-13 9780671203443

What of the experience of an opening, an open, dialogue? Re-creating that experience of presenting the Self to a random collection of Others. Or to a single Other. I keep thinking of identifying, finding an Other who would be willing to have a series of dialogues that would be re-produced for the purpose of mapping out the initial space wherein the model (as script) is to be constructed. The script being a primary resource for a 60-80 hour workshop (which would never be used because the workshops are open systems and have to leave a script behind soon after starting). It would merely point in the direction for certain issues (resourcing them), giving a framework that is an optional (inspirational) component for the process. As a multi-modal hypertextual object within a social networking space, it would imitate/mimic the knowledge-flow features of a more traditional teacher (and little or nothing else — memesis of a teacher being a fundamentally antithetical concept regarding outcomes of learning!). Fundamentally, the workshops are about attentive presence, that crucial realized, actualized, and embodied facilitation process. You had to be there. (So, back to the conundrum of being and not-being when documenting, re-producing life.)

Memory — especially the memory of human encounter — is the tangible, real resonance between the Self and Other, arising through the movement of energies. Memory is a re-configuration of the energy-field that is called body; it is a dynamically persistent re-configuration of the Self. This re-configuration requires the movement of energy between the Self and the Other. I’ve been thinking about you a lot. That is the minimum requirement, and, perhaps is the only requirement, as it is the essence of the process of encounter. It is the encounter, and the flows that are the event of encounter (the Light coming from the body of the Other, the sounds emanating from them, their cumulative presence) which precipitate change in the Self. The only further commentary might come from a qualitative exploration of the flows, and the possible blocks to flow that are ever-present in relation. This view of communications does not fall easily into the traditional phenomenological tradition of communication theory. And indeed, most theories of communication that I have run across are tightly focused on language and meaning rather than any acknowledgment of a real and tangible exchange of energies that occurs in any human encounter (even when subject to the relative intensities of mediation which, in fact, are simply the presences of different forms of energy pathways imposed by cultural conditions (both internal and external to the encounter)). [burbling parenthetic expression, uff]

Hunting in the communications area of social research, doing a basic review of various theories of communications to focus in on what might be a useful jumping-off point. I’ll need one that is anchored, but also with some degrees of freedom to map the important new characteristics of my broader definition of dialogue. Craig and Muller’s survey of the field of communication theories (seven by their count) is a helpful text, allowing me to zoom into the phenomenological area of inquiry (anchored by Buber and people influenced by his committed I-Thou dialogical approach). More on that shortly. I’ve got 15 books out from the library already, and have made more than 200 entries in Zotero… yikes, how to cope with all that material! Still generating a internal process methodology that brings at least some impression of progress on a daily basis.

Theorizing Communication: Readings Across Traditions, Robert T. Craig (Editor), Heidi L. Muller (Editor), Sage Publications, Inc; 1 edition (April 5, 2007) ISBN-10 1412952379

It’s a pity that I didn’t previously know this book and that the editors were at CU-Boulder in the Communications Department. That would have been a nice coincidence, and perhaps if I get up there sometime in the long-term, I’ll drop them a line.

The most daunting challenge is the difficulty of mind-mapping all the disparate sources. I’m thinking a big wall with sticky notes might be good. That technique has served me well in workshops situations. Howard has been using some mind-map software (think Minority Report data-space interface), but I find them too clunky. In theory that would be an excellent way to map and interface with the substantial data-cloud that will eventually accrete. But on this old G4 PB running Firefox, the Java scripting seems to dog the whole machine, consuming the CPU and rendering the machine worth-less.