Beyond Cynicism: Accounting for Reflexivity
Posted: April 24th, 2009 | Filed under: Cybernetics on the Prairie, I'll Learn You |
My friend Dick Keyes describes cynicism as an act of “seeing through,” of claiming to perceive the real heart of things, the true motivations behind another’s actions. The cynic proudly and selfishly presumes to know another’s heart, even in the quest for truth. In this light, critique without cynicism looks ever harder. I recently discovered some help for this problem within cybernetics.
My institutional home, the University where I work, has been pushing one interdisciplinary initiative after another since I arrived in 2002. These funded efforts are charged with catalyzing research and teaching that nobody knew they needed, new forms of scholarship and teaching. I especially have in mind those that pay special attention to the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration between practitioners of art and science. This is something in which I have a stake, both as a citizen who hopes for more from his home, and as a researcher who often works in these extra-disciplinary domains.
These initiatives have been largely frustrating to me. They typically lack in attention to precedent and context, their missions are framed as if no one had ever thought of such new connections before. They also typically fail to acknowledge where the production of new knowledge or experience is a contentious enterprise - that producers struggle not only against their environment or the spectre of anonymity, but also against competing definitions of value and worth. Indeed, many producers struggle against differing definitions of value and worth that benefit from the support of great political and economic power.
So my cynical self, my “seeing through” self, is quick to read each new lauded event as first an exercise in protecting turf and eliminating dissent. I see selfish motivations, and doubt the interest of these parties in actual discovery, in learning or even in beauty.
My suspicions are founded in language. Here are some examples of mission statements from such efforts in my own host institution:
The xxxxxxx Initiative seeks to transform, re-envision, and enrich human experience by developing new models of University activity through high-potency blending of Education, Research, and Public Engagement. While the University of the 20th Century treated these mission components as relatively independent, the 21st Century University must recognize their inherent inter-relatedness. Transforming the University through unifying these three components will be a primary goal.
XXXXX is committed to fostering interdisciplinary creativity and making a significant cultural impact through coordinating transdomain connections that bring art, science, humanities, and engineering into a powerful synergy for research, creative expression, and education.
This goal of the xxxxxxx Project involves facilitating collaboration within the arts and between the arts and sciences to result in interdisciplinary innovation in the arts and sciences leveraged by advanced technologies.
Most of this language is worthy of a Dilbert comic - buzzwords abound, words say nothing. But Dilbert is a miserable piece of art, and so I’m prodded again to leave cynicism behind. Cybernetics will help me.
A cybernetic view invites examination of an institution as an organism, a growing, complex system of interdependencies, rhythms of stimulus and response. Cyberneticists might also propose that this “self-organizing” system is implicated in still larger self-organizing systems. Within each system, at each level, complexity eventually produces something like self-awareness, or memory… or even consciousness.
If I apply this approach - despite some misgivings about the “self-organizing” bit - then texts such as those quoted above look a little different.
A chief characteristic of these texts is that they say little through speaking the obvious. They mirror back to the institution its own ideals, and present only the best parts. A cynic would describe these folks as deploying the right words at the right time to win approval and funding. A cyberneticist might instead describe these texts in terms of an organism’s late stages of development, when sufficient complexity produces self-consciousness and auto-expertise.
In other words, through deploying the right words at the right time, these efforts demonstrate great intelligence about what words are needed. Like the proverbial “good-test-taker” who might not be the best student in class, these efforts are smart, but they lack in wisdom. They are reflexive, without being sufficiently reflective.
Reflexivity is an asset, an intelligence, a necessary part of consciousness. But this reflexivity, this self-accounting, will then lead to some application. Perhaps the humble critic disagrees with this end or application, where the cynic doubts even the agent’s reflexive skills. (”I know you better than you know yourself.”)
To describe the builders of Babel as vain is not to presume to know their hearts, to “see through” their actions to their true motivations. The builders of Babel demonstrated great expertise and knowledge, but they worked to a clear end - the protection of their own reputation and power. They lacked for valued reflection about the ends and purposes of their efforts - or, perhaps put more strongly, they reflected on their own efforts using the wrong values.
“Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” Genesis 11:4
Today’s builders of Babel proclaim: “Our financial situation is precarious! We have a lot of competition! We better find a way to work together and speak the same language so as to save ourselves from oblivion.” It takes reflexivity to organize to such an end; it takes reflection to ensure that self-preservation is not the only end.
As a co-director of an interdisciplinary initiative in engineering education transformation (www.ifoundry.illinois.edu) I might be expected to take umbrage at this post, but I find myself largely in agreement with the basic claim that many interdisciplinary initiatives use the the right language, but are insufficiently reflective to actually achieve much in the end.
The first sin of complex interdisciplinary initiatives is to describe some desired, largely utopian outcome, usually in a step one-two-three plan, without deep reflection upon the conceptual and organizational reasons why the system has evolved to its current place.
Thereafter, the utopian planners seek funding and some kind of topdown authority to implement the plan, usually in isolation from the rest of the system, achieving some sort of result that can appear to be “progress” in a limited sense.
Finally, the utopians wonder why their “progress” does not transfer, scale, or sustain itself when it is not immediately taken up by the their colleagues, the organization, or, for that matter, the larger world.
The cybernetic metaphor of the post essentially gets it right. As someone who has worked with artificial evolutionary systems for almost 30 years, thinking about how complex systems evolve and change is extraordinarily helpful for the proper design of complex interdisciplinary initiatives. Without core understanding of the conceptual roadblocks to change, organizational roadblocks to change, and an understanding of the evolution of complex systems, interdisciplinary initiatives often turn into the mere “reflexive” mouthing of the right words with almost no lasting changing or effect.
Thanks for the reflection, David - that’s great to hear, especially from someone with experience close to the heart of these efforts. In case I don’t make it clear in my post, it’s not interdisciplinarity itself that tempts me toward cynicism - I expect that my most valuable contributions to an institution like ours will be outside of traditional domains.
I’d also love to learn more about how more recent studies of complexity and systems could add to my forming hopes and doubts about cybernetic thought.
[...] Hamilton has an interesting post over at complexfields.org here. He argues that complex interdisciplinary initiatives say the right things, they are reflexive, [...]
As a rhetorician, I appreciate your attention to instrumentalist approaches to language. It strikes me that the statements you quote are not only characterized by a kind of transparency (as you point out) but also by an accumulative habit. They add phrase on phrase, rather like a cybernetic system might add part after part, unit after unit, without attention to symmetry, elegance, wholeness, etc. So, at one and the same time, the statements are reflective of the institution (as you note) and reflective of nothing but a kind of perpetual urge to quantitative expansion.
What would the reflexivity you call for really look like? Here’s what comes to my mind:
A British sociologist named Steve Woolgar published an edited collection a while ago called “Virtual Society?” (He reportedly had to fight with Oxford University Press in order to be allowed to use the question mark in a book title.) The book resulted from a big multiple-researcher government grant about information technology in the UK. At the start of the first chapter he published a statement about the coming “massive” transformations and the need for the academy respond. It had a lot in common with the kind of institutional language you highlighted in your post.
Then he revealed that the beginning of the chapter was in fact taken verbatim from his grant proposal to secure the funds, then he went on to critique the hyperbole of his own grant proposal and the institutional structures that required him to write it.
If that’s the kind of thing you’re after. I can’t wait to see your next institutional proposal. Sign me up.
That sounds perfect Christian - I’ll add one more thing, taken from von Foerster’s pages. In my new institution, we’ll only apply for funding for projects we’ve already completed.