 |
|
|
|
||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
A little over ten years ago, I was mucking about, looking for truth—well, at that moment, I guess I was more looking for interesting readings for a course I called “The Logic of Structured Inquiry”—when I came across an article by Art Bochner (1981) entitled, “Forming Warm Ideas.” In this piece, which began its life as a talk delivered at a 1979 conference honoring Gregory Bateson, Art artfully synthesized a Batesonian “perspective on social science inquiry” into six "rules of thumb"1 for imaginative and catalytic thinking about the scientific study of social phenomena” (pp. 76-77):
In the 23 years since writing this piece, Art has developed a body of work that gives life to these rules, save perhaps for the latter elements of number 5. Having become more interested in “telling,” (or, better, “showing”) than “explaining,” he has devoted himself to spinning contextually rich narratives, rather than to developing explanatory principles. That Art has taken this Batesonian path demonstrates great courage. He made the point in his 1979 talk that despite the importance of Bateson’s ideas, they had had little impact on the “education and indoctrination of American social scientists” (p. 77). This wasn’t surprising, Art mused, for if social scientists were to “begin to think and theorize in a Batesonian fashion,” they risked “suffer[ing] a psychotic break, be[ing] denied tenure, or end[ing] up radicalizing scientific work on communication” (p. 77).Luckily, instead of suffering a psychotic break, Art found Carolyn, and, happily, he nailed tenure early on in his career. He thus chose doorway number three: In the last twenty five years, if not longer, Art has been busy radicalizing the field of communication, spinning warm stories that have opened the hearts-and-minds of young scholars and have inspired dialogue with older ones. Does this mean that Art has made a sizable impact on his field? This is the sort of question we usually ask when we want to “measure the amount of success” someone has enjoyed in academia, but in its present form, it is wrongly posed. As Bateson pointed out, metaphors of quantity and mass—words such as sizeable, impact, measure, amount—create muddled thinking when they are applied to the world of mind. Since Art has worked so hard and effectively to sort through the misguided assumptions of social scientists, I feel an ethical responsibility not to muddy the clarity and importance of his contribution in the very moment of honoring it. So to keep us all thinking straight (or, better, from a cybernetics point of view, to keep us thinking in circles!), I’d rather ask the question in Batesonian terms: “How has Art made a significant difference to his field?” This query more usefully and less confusingly sends us looking for indications of change rather than mythical quantitative effects. What or who has transformed in response to Art and his work? I could start with me, for I have certainly changed; or with you; or with the authors of the articles which cite him. But I think it would be more fascinating, more auto-ethnographically revealing, more cybernetically reflexive, to wonder how Art’s work has folded back to change itself. 1Some people have claimed that the phrase “rule of thumb” originates from a purported rule in English common law that made provision for a husband to beat his wife, providing that the circumference of the stick didn’t exceed that of his thumb. Legal scholars have questioned the existence of the law itself, and etymologists have established that, regardless, the phrase did not originate in legal practice.
|
