Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns

by Nora Bateson

a visiting unreasonable notion can come along and unwrite the limits of our thinking. Such wonders wait with the infinitude of what we never saw in the margins of our sensibleness.

Imppssible things happen all the time

Why does the child take apart a watch? To see how it works, that is the argument. A watch however, has a mechanism that, unlike a living system, does not require a context of living, learning, changing relationships. Working watches are stabilized in their functioning. Life is not stable; without evolution there is only extinction.

Our way of seeing and perceiving is conditioned by the system we are seeing and perceiving.

The Achilles heel that I see even in some systems theories is the holdover of a metaphor that describes the rigging of life as a functional set of processes—even though these theories do this in a more complex way than many studies without interdisciplinarity in their favor.

Habitually removing ambiguity requires the simultaneous removal of transcontextual information. Ironically, ambiguity offers insight into more information than tight, arbitrary definitions can do.

But today, an appetite for bite-sized, clearly outlined definitions has trumped any appreciation of complexity in our decision-making. A yearning for the satisfaction of puzzles that fit together has made unresolvable paradoxes untenable in planning committees.

models, graphs, and charts that communicate this methodology carry ‘fact’ packaged in such a way that its authority is unquestionable. It says, “this is serious,” “this is how things are done,” and most insidious, “this is how life works.” These are deep, qualitative suggestions that speak, not to the information given, but to the relationships the recipient should have with the information.

A clarity without ambiguity is one in which we are all asking the wrong questions.

Transcontextual analysis of complex systems requires flexibility to accommodate multiple descriptions of each variable in that system. The ability to perceive paradox, and avoid the impulse to choose a path down one side or the other, is essential for our future interactions with complex systems.

Nothing stays the same, clearly. I am suggesting that change, then, is a kind of learning.

Adaptation

The primary limit of the word ‘system’ is its invocation of ‘arrangement’ (inherent in the Greek prefix ‘sys’). This, as we have just seen, relates to the way in which we have culturally been trained to explain and study our world in terms of parts and wholes and the way they ‘work’ together. The connotations of this systemic functional arrangement are mechanistic; which does not lend itself to an understanding of the messy contextual and mutual learning/evolution of the living world.

Reductionism lurks around every corner, mocking the complexity of the living world we are part of.