Jack,
Thanks a lot for this link.2 things attracted my attention in this quote:
1. Noosphere in the title of the paper
The search for Noosphere in google produces some 10k hits. The first being:
http://www.technoetic.com/noosphere/
Quote:
No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic
affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and
constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that
passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise
than collectively."
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
(The Formation of the Noosphere, 1947)
2. Sir Geoffrey Vickers is mentioned in the text
For more on Vickers check out the really good article written by Errol
Smythe at http://mis.commerce.ubc.ca/smythe/weick.pdf. Smythe compares
Vickers with Weick both of whom have views of human organizations which do
not conform to the current (rather positivist) conventional wisdom in
Information Systems which views organizations as goal-seeking entities. For
more on this subject there's Peter Checkland's Sue Holwell's recent book
"Information, Systems and Information Systems" Wiley, 1998.
Quote:
Vickers "rejected the idea of goal-seeking as a basis for human motivation
and hence of regulation, putting him immediately at odds with the mainstream
of decision theorists. 'In describing human activity, institutional or
personal, the goal-seeking paradigm is inadequate. Regulatory activity, in
government, management or private life consists in attaining or maintaining
desired relationships.through time or in changing and eluding undesired
ones' (Checkland and Casar 1986, p.16). 'The goals we seek are changes in
our relations or in our opportunities for relating; but the bulk of our
activity consists in the 'relating' itself'' (Vickers 1983, p.33). If the
system serves to regulate its state through time then goal-seeking makes
little sense as a mechanism, if a 'goal' is taken to be an 'end'. A focus on
ends does not capture the essence of an ongoing process that serves to
regulate the state of a system over time. The important distinction is that
regulation calls for continuous processes whereas goal-seeking implies
discrete time periods. Vickers felt that the majority of human regulative
action was 'norm-seeking' and that it could not be resolved into
'goal-seeking'"
Gil
-----Original Message-----
From: Jack Park [mailto:jackpark@thinkalong.com]
Sent: jeudi, 19. juillet 2001 20:09
To: unrev-II@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [unrev-II] Cultivating the Songlines of the Noosphere
This strikes me as important to bootstrapping and to constructivist
learning, which, in some sense, is what bootstrapping is all about.
http://www.uia.org/uiadocs/noospher.htm
"The gathering of people in Budapest was effectively the first attempt to
give form and relevance to the archetypal "policy-making" encounter
explored in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi and other less known works (cf
Alan Dean Foster: Game Players of Zan). The concern was to build an
alliance of art, literature and spirituality in response to the challenge
of both human survival and evolution, whether individual or collective.
The distinguishing feature of the gathering was the manner in which
insights from the process of artistic creativity were embodied in the
organization and processes of the event -- considered as the "material"
constraining and inspiring the artistic possibilities of the moment. The
intent was to use the gathering itself to engender an "elixir of
transformation" from which wider society could benefit. This could only be
done by acting with presence in the moment to give appropriate form to
what
could be more widely shared.
The gathering acknowledged the trap of conventional meetings in which
representatives of various perspectives make presentations in an effort to
design and colonize the future of others who cannot be present. The
failure
to creatively manifest new behaviour and organization in such meetings has
been reflected in the subsequent failure of their work in responding to
the
challenges of wider society. Recognizing that a "A trap is a function of
the nature of the trapped" (Geoffrey Vickers), the transformative
challenge
was seen to lie in co-creating in the present. Instead of seeking to avoid
this trap, the meeting sought to integrate the behaviours associated with
the trap into new understanding.
Explanations of such a catalytic event are themselves misleading traps.
Any
such attempt -- as an ex-planation --effectively displaces the focus of
attention out of the grounded plane of the present moment from which it
derived both its essential meaning and its wider significance. How indeed
does art both carry the insights of the spirit and entrain more fruitfully
transformative behaviour -- and the social and conceptual organization to
sustain it?
The diversity of perspectives present in the configuration of insights
assembled at Budapest was therefore a challenge to any understanding of
what was occurring. Any understanding depended upon the capacity of the
attentive individual to integrate this diversity into a meaningful pattern
whose nature necessarily transcended those perspectives. The
transformative
effect of the gathering lay in the manner in which a participant's
awareness was entrained by the interference effects, harmonies and
oppositions that gave structure to that configuration of perspectives.
The "effect" of the gathering on wider society lay in the transformation
it
engendered in those who subsequently endeavoured to understand what had
occurred in the light of the various "products" that appeared to emanate
from the gathering. In several senses, it was the meeting itself that was
both "the message" and a transformative catalyst."
PREAMBLE
PERSPECTIVES AND SOUNDINGS
Musical perspective
Singing perspective
Dramatic perspective
Kinaesthetic perspective
Poetic perspective
Artistic perspective
Gastronomic and olfactory perspective
Humour perspective
Magical perspective
Weaving perspective
Geometric perspective
Angelic perspective
Alchemical perspective
Spiritual exercise perspective
META-DISCIPLINE: DISCIPLINING THE DISCIPLINES
SONGLINES AND INTERFERENCE HARMONICS
Aesthetic frameworks
Challenge of human survival
Substituting aesthetic organization for economic organization
Songlines of the noosphere
Aesthetics of differences
COMPREHENDING THE LANGUAGE OF PATTERN SHIFTING
Limitation of vision-based metaphors
References
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