Of This and That
Part of our addiction to causality is the need to be clear. As I write this there is a little bird on my shoulder who says in my ear that I must show how this leads to that. I want to be clear about two things:
1. That this leads to, and does not lead to, that
2. That leading to is more complex that anyone will ever be able to trace
To don the mantle of Deleuze and Guattari as they “set the terms of contemporary philosophical debate” I am both attempting to map features of the world as we live it and changing the world by creating the map. I need to refuse the notion that my experience of the world and your experience of the world have any simple relationship. I am not here to explain the truth to you, I am here to point out some different aspects of experience that sometimes connect in interesting ways. Sometimes asking for clarity invites fog.
When Nora Bateson describes the world, her key word is transcontextual. My paraphrase is: in this context of my life this happens and in that context of my life that happens. And to understand my life you must understand the way what happens in this context affects what happens in that context: the contexts have no necessary, or designed, or logical connection, they just happen to interact. To understand my love life you must understand my work and vice versa. To know why I flunked or why I was awesome at work you must understand, transcontextually, other things in my life. There is not, and cannot be, any central or master context or purpose. To say for instance the economic context is central or foundational and that there are externalities to that analysis is, frankly, pissing in the wind.
My tribe here in the West are addicted also to getting somewhere. I fell off that bandwagon somewhere along the way. The Cheshire Cat knew at least that if you don’t know where you want to get to, any route will do. Gregory Bateson speaks of the development of character in Balinese children and the “continuing plateau of intensity … substituted for climax”. That is, precisely not getting somewhere. Of course, the sum total, the net effect, of lots of small episodes of getting somewhere tends to be getting precisely nowhere fast. The Balinese are indeed some of the happiest people on the planet. Allow me to remain unimpressed by heroes and their purposes even when they declare they are saving mankind or the planet.
Deleuze and Guattari pick up Gregory Bateson’s plateau for the title of their seminal book, A Thousand Plateaus. Plateaux would have been nice. In their fabled rhizome, everything is connected to everything with no central root or tree, no logic that can decipher for us whether my love life or my job is pivotal. There just are: a raft of different places you can start, lots of different ways out and myriads of interconnected paths between. See the ginger plant in the image above. When we stop pretending there is a tree that organises stuff from roots to branches, what do we see?
How many contexts do you have in your life? Which ones affect your health, positively or negatively? Which of your friends from different contexts know each other? Would they agree or disagree about you if they met?
Of the smartness of rhizomes
Suppose I meet you for coffee and we have a meaningful exchange. The meaning of meaningful here is that we are both changed to some degree. And if I then have a meeting with an important colleague, some of what we exchanged changes her too. To go to a different sort of context, it is also true that the state of my gut biome has a major effect on my mood and hence on both those meetings. The person from my western tribe who says “I went into this meeting with this purpose, and of that purpose I achieved x, y and z” has a view of the world that largely precludes transcontextuality.
Just as there is a mutuality to the hug with a friend, and just as both our skin biomes and our gut biomes are affected, this ecosystem of a rhizome evolves and morphs in ever new ways. We have to see even apparent stasis or stuckness as an evolution of the ecosystem into a new state. There is very little in the way of good or bad in this ecosystem, because the outcomes of this move or that move are highly unpredictable, like the Tibetan story of the man with a horse. However, attempts to refute, to deny, to close down, to be deaf to, to ignore, to simplify will tend to slow down the natural rates of change and adaptation. And attempts to assert narrow purpose almost always lead to being bitten in the bum, and never learning what you did wrong.
People enamoured of clear purpose often talk of resistance to change. Of course they mean their change, sensible change, much needed change. Sisyphus was condemned to an eternity of pushing that log up a hill, whereas we elect the fate for ourselves. In order not to be Sisyphus we have to observe closely how our world works without getting entranced by cause and effect and our need to fix it. When we love a child of ours we neither give them all the material benefits we can think of or bind them too closely to our lives. We trust them to be a much needed part of a future we can’t see in ways we haven’t imagined yet.
What we do need in this ecosystem is a mixture of curiosity and awe. Fascinating things are happening all around us. If we notice we can be part of the dance. Credit goes to a colleague of mine, Paul Ellis, for pointing this out to me before I could understand. He told my son to form a jazz band and to record everything during rehearsals: then the questions is “what did I contribute?”. Meaning what did I add to the music, what did other members do with my ideas and how did I develop their ideas? Did I catch the sparks? Paul said that was the one skill in the world, to add to the music.
The evolution of the musician and the evolution of the band are not the same thing. Learning how to be part of the dance and the way the ecosystem dance adapts to new contexts are not the same thing. But unless the band develops its music the musicians must all stagnate.
Our world is deeply damaged. The dance can no longer be the dance it once was. But to think that we can choreograph a new dance is to enlist the very fallacy that led to the damage to our world. That is the lesson we are being invited to learn: to quit our hubris and connect with curiosity and awe. A mutual way WILL be found, mutually. A tree will not do, it has to be a rhizome.
The countercultural ethics of transcontextuality
Last summer Russell Gundry, Nora Bateson and I hosted a meeting we called The Ecology of Health and the Health of Ecology. Lots of excellent people came to the Bromley-by-Bow Centre and discussed what health might mean from a wide variety of different contexts. We did that on the simple premise that health is not going to get fixed by the healthcare industry. Healthcare will reform if and when a totally different set of demands are placed on it: that is, people need to understand their health differently first. I for one am clearer about that now than I was then: it is that sort of work.
There is a tribe of people who believe that the NHS, essentially healthcare in the UK, is chronically underfunded. The corollary, however, that it should be given more funding I find difficult, in fact I choke on it. The ethics of refusing solidarity with the progressive types campaigning for better funding I find difficult too. Gregory Bateson was crystal clear half a century ago that healthcare was simply a bag of tricks, useful in themselves but not adding up to a solution to anything. We are still there but much more deeply stuck in the mire.
Gregory Bateson told the Regents of the University of California at Santa Cruz that if you lose the connections between academic subjects you automatically lose all quality. This should be a familiar argument by now. The world we live in is not divided into subject areas or silos, it is seamless. When we partition the world into subject areas, that is for our own convenience: we know absolutely that the world has not been partitioned. So the quality or liveliness of our disciplines must be sacrificed the minute we lose sight of the connections between history and theoretical physics.
The bag of tricks which we have for healthcare has lost the connections if it ever had them. Until recently for instance it was not clear to anyone that the gut biome is THE major influence on mental health. To understand those connections you have to have a much more integrated model of what health is, for the actual patients in front of your eyes. There is a sense in which a bag of tricks is a rhizome, but this particular bag has a low propensity to interconnect and form new “lines of flight”. The lack of integration has some particular sites: a sense of the body as whole, ecologically connected and much more than a biomedical machine; a sense of support and treatment allowing healing rather than fixing mechanisms; a sense of the integration of medical healing in a social system that values quality of life.
Although I saw that it was not clear the connection between the gut biome and mental health, the situation is much more interesting than that. We all feel anxiety in our guts and we are all capable of suddenly voiding our bowels in the face of terror. We absolutely know about the nervous connection between various brain functions and various gut functions. And somehow our prejudice about the central control of conscious thinking prevents us from seeing that this must be a two-way connection, and our addiction to “hygiene” stopped us from seeing how we were disrupting the gut biome universally. We now cannot reconstruct how a healthy gut and gut biome are supposed to function. Some fancy trick, that.
So how could Gregory Bateson half a century ago and Nora Bateson more recently know with such clarity that health issues will not get solved by the giants (or the pygmies) of the healthcare industry? Is it not deeply shocking that the lives of patients and their families, the lives of professionals who look after them, the resources of all nations, are squandered on what is known to be hubris? On a Sisyphean venture that really does take more and more work producing less and less in outcomes? There is the real ethical question and it is not even on the table for consideration.
Deleuze and Guattari published A Thousand Plateaus in 1987. It is a difficult book but that is 30 years to understand why we need rhizome structures to address rhizome problems. The NHS becomes ever more tree-formed: centralised and mono-logical. Where is the effort in addressing that basic issue?
