Microattunement Part 2: Sites of Learning — The Self
Our heritage of instrumental individualism means that our professional activities and the education systems that produce them are mostly oriented toward the mastery and performance of facts, concepts, processes and tasks — and scarcely at all towards relationships. As atomised individuals, what matters is personal achievement. Skilful self-presentation — in an interview, in a meeting, in writing, in a cv, or on Facebook — is a dominating goal. How we act towards one another in our everyday encounters is considered to be much less important. So it’s left to familial guidance or — when things go wrong — to remedial interventions like school discipline and counselling.
For these reasons our teaching and learning practices around understanding and developing the skills of relational being are rudimentary and unsystematic. Without this understanding, we flounder. We can spend years trying to ‘find ourselves’ in the midst of others.
In the next part of the essay we’re going to lay out a landscape of relational interactions following the sequence laid down in Microsolidarity. So we’ll start with one person, the Self; next consider the relational possibilities between two people in a Dyad (the ‘partnership’ in Richard’s diagram); and then look to group dynamics at three levels: the team or Crew; the larger group or Congregation; and finally the largest group of all, the Crowd. And because the sequence is fractal, and each level contains all of the previous levels, we’re dealing with relational challenges of increasing complexity. Historically, we’ve addressed increasing human scale with methods of decreasing sensitivity and subtlety. At the top of our existing scale of association (whole populations) human relations are weaponised by totalising phenomena like coercive force, autocracy, money, celebrity — and now data. Can we now seize the opportunity to change this pattern?
The Self as a Site of Learning
A confession: in pushing beyond individualism over the past twenty-five years, I have rejected the domain of self-help, and the whole industry of individualised self-development, as an arena of delusion and disappointment that is incapable of sustained societal change. Influenced particularly by the work of John Shotter, I argue that we don’t understand ourselves and our relationship to the world by gazing inward, but by instead by turning outward. By paying attention to and taking seriously the perspectives of others, we discover points of navigation for ourselves. Since self-understanding is relational, we come to know our social selves by swimming in the society of others and recognising and coming to terms with our similarities and differences.
However in this essay I find myself drawn towards the Self not as an atomised, separate entity, but as part of the social landscape. While the work of learning about ourselves takes place in the midst of others — in a relational setting — we also have to consider what we have to learn about ourselves. And two big missings are apparent when we spring onto the stage in our present-day individualised, supposedly grown-up, task-oriented world.
First, the physical: our instrumentalised encounters and exchanges tend to minimise the use of our bodies as sensing instruments. Second, the metaphysical: our purpose-directed, resume-oriented identities cover up our ability to make peace with our self as a multiplicity of contingent selves.
Our Bodies as Sensing Instruments
Our Enlightenment heritage has privileged our thinking selves and our brains as the seat of consciousness and the principal organ of our relational being. We have attributed our mastery of our planet to the relative size of our brains compared with other species. Helen Philips states the following as orthodoxy in New Scientist (2006):
The brain is the most complex organ in the human body. It produces our every thought, action, memory, feeling and experience of the world.
On this view, when we come together we meet as minds, and our tasks are to analyse data, to develop abstractions like models, concepts and ideas, and then to speak them into existence using words that are stored in our brains. And indeed, this brain-centred, denatured conduct is typical of much of organisational life. From the idea that people are mostly just thinking machines, it’s a short step to imagining that artificial intelligence is ultimately capable of supplanting human intelligence.
But popular metaphors of people as machines and computers are highly misleading. It is clear that we are much more than brains — they play a significant part in, but do not by themselves produce our actions, memories, feelings and experience of the world. Indeed, our understanding of the body is still expanding. A new set of insights from recent discoveries in neuroscience around the gut-brain connection is supporting a much more de-centred view of cognition and human response. The longest nerve in the body — the vagus nerve — joins our brain to our viscera in such a way that we are recognising our stomach as a ‘second brain’, with hitherto unrecognised functions. As just one example: the “gut-brain axis” has a sensitivity to location that enables us to remember where we ate a particular meal, because the gastro-intestinal tract stimulates the brain’s memory centre.
The introduction of mindfulness and related practices at work and in schools represents an increasing shift towards bodily awareness. Such practices include an invitation to pay attention to each part of the body in turn, and to notice and regulate the breath, the the heart rate, and the flow of thoughts and feelings. This is important settling work, enabling people to reduce busyness, stimulation and anxiety in order to become calm, centred, and present to their immediate surroundings.
But once we are settled, what next? Mindfulness works by withdrawing us from interaction into ourselves, towards a state of readiness. How do we then use this readiness for more focused and more highly attuned interaction? The argument here is that the starting point for the full-bodied use of our capacities is to pay attention to the range and capacities of all of our sense organs — so that we can make practical and systematic use of them in our dealings with the world. Let’s review them all briefly:
¶ Our sense of touch: perhaps the most basic of all our senses — and the one that babies discover as they emerge into the atmosphere — our touch depends on physical adjacency. All of our skin has touch receptors, and these are stimulated by the movement of hairs on our body, by the surfaces they encounter, and by our clothing. Touch conveys lots of information about inanimate objects and the movement of the air around us. But touching another living creature evokes a richly information-laden response, depending on the parts of the body that are involved. For example, contrast what is learned from a handshake with the experience of a Māori hongi, where noses and foreheads touch and breath is shared. How, in our working relationships, can can we use the rich feedback that bodily touch provides without violating social taboos?
¶ Our sense of smell: another that is basic for babies. We know that smell is enormously evocative for humans (and for animals like dogs is a principal wayfinding capacity). Can our sense of smell help us to tell when things are going well or badly? Are there smells associated with certain emotional states, and can we detect them? Paticular smells help to sell houses and induce people to buy things: is there an olfactory atmosphere that can improve the quality of our collaborative efforts?
¶ Our sense of sight: our marvellous facility for seeing the world around us, to the furthest horizon and in minute close-up detail, and at all points in between. But in our interactions, what are we using our eyes for? Are our heads down, with an inward gaze? Are we looking at papers or screens? Are we looking to our surroundings: to the room or the space and its qualities? Are we really seeing the world around us: its movement, its light and shadow, its character, and its influence on us in the present moment? Can we see what others are doing — how they are moving and responding to what’s going on? Are we looking at faces and noticing their muscle movements and their expressions? Are we reading the eyes of others — not just for themselves, but for their reflections of us? Can we recognise in nuances of expression and micro-movements, how we ourselves are being seen, considered and evaluated in the eyes of others?
¶ Our sense of hearing: our ability not just to hear sounds, but to detect movement, tone and mood in those around us. Our extraordinary capacity to filter out some sounds in preference to others. Especially important in conversation. Can we listen to the movement of another person’s utterance, as well as to its verbal content and intended meaning? Can we hear the momentary pauses and hesitations that offer a glimpse of the underlying work of sense-making and responding? Can we detect the changes in emphasis and rhythm of the voice that reveal the shape of the thought and its particular significant for the speaker? Can we notice and judge the moment when it is best to respond? Can we hear the background murmurs and the breathing of others that reveal their responses? Can we ‘hear’ what people are thinking without their having to tell us? Can we hear the words that are waiting to be uttered before they are voiced?
¶ Our voice as a sense-organ: we are used to thinking of our voice as a means of expression — of speaking in order to make a statement. But from babyhood, the voice is a sense-making instrument. We make sounds in order to evoke a response: to feel our way into relationship with another person. We use our voice to achieve synchrony first of all with our mother, even from inside the womb. So we can alter the sound of our voice and the character of our speaking in order to reach out and touch others in a particular way. Mikhail Bakhtin, who envisaged a unity of unmerged voices, also spoke of the answering word — the recognition that every utterance is made in the expectation of a response. Since we can choose the timbre and shape of our utterance in response to changing circumstances, how we speak in a world of other people is our most direct and nuanced form of interaction. When we think of ourselves as independent actors and authors, we tend to privilege the written word. We say “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Yet even in an interactive medium, writing is dead to the present moment. When we speak — or simply make a sound — there is an immediate echo from others present. Even their silence has meaning. So speaking is always a means of learning as well as saying.
Given all of this, it is surprising that we pay so little attention to developing the use of our voice as a sensing organ in our everyday personal encounters. We can train our voices as a broadcast medium in the art of rhetoric or performance, in singing and acting. But we learn relatively little about how our voices land with others in our ordinary exchanges. There’s a real opportunity here.
¶ Our stomach as a sense-organ: the confirmation of science about this is in some ways a crucial revelation. For a long time we have talked about ‘gut feelings’, but as something not quite legitimate or rational. However, it turns out that our viscera — all of the internal organs of the chest and abdomen — connect and process impulses between many other parts of our nervous system, and are constantly informing our brain (and hence our motor functions) what is going on with our whole body in relation to its surroundings. So when we feel things ‘deep down’ we are actually reading our environment with the most profound acuity and sensitivity. And this sensitivity is especially significant in our human relationships and interactions.
Our viscera and our stomach-brain connection let us know when things ‘don’t feel right’. The sense of unease or dread that we may experience in the company of others is a warning signal that may have a host of meanings, from existential threat to incompatible beliefs and values to the recognition of falsehood. Our conscious self may try to brush this uncomfortable feeling away. And it takes courage to try to verbalise something that is experienced as a movement or a tendency rather than than as a finalized certainty. But if we speak up about our discomfort, even before we have identified its source, we may find that others share it and can help to give it a name. So taking our body seriously in this way can become a path to shared understanding and collaborative sense-making.
¶ Our body in movement as a sense organ: the last of this list of senses is the moving body, and its response to the world as a flow of experience. To change our perspective we simply have to change our position: to get up and move around, to walk (and to run) opens up our pores and our breathing. These shifts put us into a different relationship with our surroundings and our fellow human-beings. When we move, all of our senses are stimulated to re-engage themselves from moment to moment, and so they generate a different quality of experience. Think about a conversation with someone as you are walking, compared to sitting in chairs. Flow is a form of sensing that can be experienced in other ways as well: think of swimming, or listening intently to the movement of music. In our sedentary working lives, it’s easy to forget how important it is to move our bodies in order to learn and make sense of things together.
Touch — Smell—Sight — Hearing — Voice — Stomach — Brain — Movement. What an amazing repertoire of sensing instruments we possess! And how acute our relationship could be with the world, and with each other, if we learned to use all of them properly!
The Self as a Multiplicity of Contingent Selves
When I was in my teens I had a slightly older friend with a fractured childhood history who explained to me that he would always present the same face to the world: that no matter what happened his persona would never change. More than fifty years later I can believe from what I know of him that he has kept his promise.
At the time it seemed like a strong and bold position to take. Now I wonder if it was more like a response to trauma. Because my experience is that we can’t and don’t stay the same — and that it’s not even a good idea to try.
So Richard’s description of the Self as “a tight network of overlapping identities who share custody of this body we call Me” — and his invitation to treat all of these parts as worthy of respect and compassion—forms an enfolded proposition that stimulates a lot of my thinking.
First, it is a phenomenological view, that recognises our natures as circumstantial responses to the world. Second, it steps neatly over the two-dimensional categorisation of schemas like Myers-Briggs. And third, it makes room for the dynamics of real-world habitation—an uplifting premise that each of us can be understood as a seething mass of tendencies that sometimes battle for supremacy, and at other times live in quiet and equable harmony with one another, in different patterns and combinations at each stage of our lives. These natural shifts and movements complicate our dealings with one another, and emphasise the value of developed relational skills.
What are these overlapping identities, or tendencies? I’m considering something here that combines behaviours and emotional states, but is not the same thing as either. I’m calling it a tendency, because I’m thinking of it as a kind of motivating and mobilising force. So it’s not something that lives permanently inside a person, but instead is a movement or an urge that arises from the interactions between people and their surrounding circumstances. Here are some examples and their manifestations:
¶ the belonging self: the part of selfhood that yearns for connection with others. Usually begins with family. (Has a shadow side—non-belongers can be ‘otherised’ as non-human.)
¶ the nurturing self: the tendency that’s directed towards caring for other people. Conventionally seen as a feminine trait, but is naturally available to everyone.
¶ the acquisitive self: the urge to get and own things (or people). The drive is possession and control: to extend selfhood to include objects beyond the self.
¶ the competitive self: typically means seeing the world as a race with winners and losers. But being competitive can also be an urge to excel.
¶ the expressive self: the urge to say, make or do something in relation to others or the world; to make an aspect of the self visible and available.
¶ the spiritual self: the part of the self that reaches beyond the mundane and the physical experience of the world, seeking a transcendent reality.
¶ the sexual self: from the physical capacity to reproduce, the yearning to be transported; to be possessed by intensely pleasurable bodily experience.
¶ the anxious self: the inward tendency towards doubt and self-criticism; the urge to achieve something that feels out of reach.
¶ the outraged self: the self that’s filled with anger at someone or something in the world — a sense of a massive injustice or unfairness ‘out there’.
¶ the curious self: the tendency towards restlessness and dissatisfaction; the urge to look around the next corner to find or uncover ‘something more’.
¶ the ancestral self: the aspect of self that’s inhabited by and reflects the past; that’s concerned with origins; that remembers stories and histories.
There are more selves than these. But the point of this list is first, that everyone can experience any and all of these selves; second, that they are non-exclusive, and may be experienced in varying intensities at the same time; and third, that they are powerful forces and are capable of overtaking and occupying all of our attention at certain times. They can all become extremes that take charge of our being, and can distort our behaviour and our relationships with other people.
So it’s valuable to recognise and know these selves so as to keep them in perspective and to keep them in check. It can be a challenging task — but it’s practical work, not an occasion for guilt or moral repulsion. And here’s how the two aspects of the Self discussed in this chapter fit together — part of the use of our bodies as sensing instruments is the job of recognising the selves. We can use our sensory capacities to become familiar with these tendencies in ourselves — and at the same time, recognise them in other people as well.
Where do we achieve this familiarity? We need a relational arena that’s close-up and personal, is not too complicated and can be a bounded place of safety. That turns out to be the opportunity that presents itself in a relationship with another person to whom we have an attachment.
So on to Microattunement Part 3: Sites of Learning — the Dyad
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