Poiesis: The relational / holistic paradigm shift emerging in our times
Image: Mining foreman R. Thornburg shows a small cage with a canary used for testing carbon monoxide gas in 1928. From Wikimedia Commons: Public Domain
1. We are living in a time of breakdown which may well become a time of breakthrough.
2. At the core of both of these -- breakdown and breakthrough -- is the emerging and worsening failure of an overarching ontological paradigm or worldview which most saliently manifested in recent history as what we generally call modernity ... in a Western cultural-historical moment which we call 'the Enlightenment," which importantly included early modern science.
3. Enlightenment / modern / western culture is rooted in an ontological worldview which emphasized the discreteness of individuals (individual people) as much as the discreteness of "things" (objects).
4. While relations between individuals and things (objects) was fully acknowledged within this modern, western, Enlightenment worldview, that worldview (paradigm) stopped short of acknowledging the fundamental nature of relationality, resulting in a conception (and experience) of self and things as more fundamentally discrete than as relational in their core and essence. The result I call "object ontology" -- a worldview in which the self and the 'things' (objects) in the world were perceived, experienced and 'understood' primarily in terms of their being separate, discrete, apart, segregated.
5. Though relationship (relationality) was acknowledged in this ontological paradigm, nevertheless the core of the ontology underlying modern psychology, politics, economic theory, social relations (and governance/government) and formative modern science was the image of things and individuals as discrete and separable / separate.
6. The emergence of various more holistic and relational systems sciences, including ecology and some versions of psychological and social theory have resulted in the initiation (but incompletion) of a paradigm shift at the root of our culture -- its worldview, cosmology, paradigm and ontological orientation. Culturally, we are thus dwelling in what some have called "a space between stories" (a place between worldviews and ontological orientations). That is, we've not arrived where we are headed, and we have little recourse to the previous orientation, worldview or paradigm.
7. We're living in a time between worlds (worldviews), in which the old familiar world is in some sense 'dying', while a new world is 'being born'. This is disorienting. It's often painful and difficult.
8. It's a time of incipience, of threshold, of nascence and liminality. Perhaps we are in some sort of birth canal in cultural evolution?
9. The social, economic and political frameworks of the contemporary scene embody and express (and perpetuate) separation, segregation, fragmentation, dis-association, dissociation, alienation -- and with these an arrangement of most everything into hierarchical forms of relationship.
10. This way of social life, born of a now dying worldview, are being experienced by many of us as traumatic -- meaning that they result in a form of pathos which is felt as overwhelm. Are we going through a collective birth trauma?
11. The holistic / relational ontological paradigm would have it that relations exist not only between individuals, things, objects..., but equally within them. The world is being revealed to us not as a collection of discrete 'things' and 'objects' but as a radically holistic (whole!) pattern of relations. Everything is turning out to be a pattern of relations and processes in which nothing exists independently or unchangingly. Relationality and process are beginning to define all things and objects, all individuals and societies, cultures -- everything. Relation and process is calling us forth, inviting us to acknowledge our essential nature as participants rather than observers. Alienation is giving way to participation.
12. Meanwhile, the 'canaries in the coal mine' (some individuals) embody (partly) an extraordinary tacit knowledge which we long to make explicit and which we (perhaps sometimes even desperately) wish to live -- to embody in culture ... in the form of politics, psychology, history, economics (etc.), all of which, too, are undergoing a death/birth process.
13. We want to live in a world in which the relational / holistic ontology and worldview are felt, experienced and lived as an emerging/emergent culture, in which what is tacitly felt for us begins to become explicit -- but not only as ideas, discourses, theories ... but as felt and lived social reality.
14. But we cannot do this without sharing our process in relation. It's implicit in the emergence that we can only fully and truly live (feel, know, enact, be) the emergent relational self in relation, in process... within a culture where what is incipient, tacit, liminal... can ... dance.
15. The 'dance' is a dance of relations, of process, of courage (the courage of giving birth, of being born), of faith, of leaping, of poetics (poiesis), of ethics and aesthetics -- of everything. A dance of Life. A dance of being together rather than apart.
16. The unknown is -- slowly -- becoming known. The known is becoming unfamiliar and strange. The tacit longs to speak in its own poetic voice--as dance (embodied), as being, as belonging. The death longs to become a birth.