Re: Creative, Traditional, and Catastrophic Arrangements

Paul Dillon (dillonph who-is-at northcoast.com)
Thu, 9 Sep 1999 09:34:24 -0700

Bill,

Eva's paper "Contact, Community, and Multilogue" pointed out that one of the
great values of the academic listservs is to provide a "safe place" where
people can put out half-baked ideas. But she didn't really dwell on how the
critical processing of these half-baked ideas fit into the notion of "safe".
Somehow it reminds me of the currently popular notion of "compassionate
conservative"--a normal conservative says: "Get a job!", a compassionate
conservative says: "Here's the help wanted section of the want ads." But I
feel I must express a great frustration concerning your response to my
comments on your post about your childhoold experience of "catholic school"
education.

To my mind it seems that the currently fashionable, widespread use of the
word "ecology" is not very useful for furthering our understanding of
anything at all. I don't think your invocation of Bateson is valid for
reasons I will give below. My dictionary gives two definitions. The
second is "the
totality of relationships between organisms and their environment", the
first is the branch of science that deals with that. Nowadays, probably as
a result its political valence, the word has sprung up to cover the widest
range of phenomena. But like any word that gets extended too far, it seems
to lose all meaning. I quite simply fail to see how the word has any
meaning in the following: "the ecology (1) of the schooling played out in
our uniforms, in the playground, in the convent, in the church, in the
concrete blocks and the steel I-beams, in the statues and altar, in the
boys, in the girls, and in the nuns." Surely you can't mean to say that
what you described here was a description of the complex web of organisms
and environments that makes up a parochial school. In reality, your post
described how one little boy perceived his school environment. It included
none of the reciprocal perspectives that minimally would go into a
description of the totality of relationships between the organisms and the
non-organic environment. Certainly the nuns' relationship to this
environment was different and their behavior, constitutive in itself of that
environment, wasn't organized around the descriptions provided from the
perspective of one of the little boys in the school.

What changed when the school fire happened? You described what changed for
one boy for whom the fire occurred at a certain time during his own life
cycle and whose meaning was framed within that "organism-specific"
perspective. The "we" of "liberated us from this ecology" clearly includes
only a portion of the organisms in the system: minimally you and maximally
other boys who felt as you did, probably not the girls and definitely not
the nuns. I even wonder about the very meaning of a phrase like "liberated
us from this ecology."

Your post returned repeatedly to the moral framework: bad boys/good girls.
If you pointed to any specific relationship between environment and organism
it was to the relationship between the constructed environment and that
partial moral framework that affected the behavior of part of the organisms
in the system. I
responded to that issue which is a common experience and provides another
illustration how spaces serve to structure meanings (texts if you want).
And yes the spaces that structure the system are not limited to the
classroom seating arrangement. But these other arrangements maybe are
probably oriented to the "other agenda" that I pointed to in an earlier
post on this, not to the "different seating
patterns for different subject areas" that Mike posted sometime ago.

As to Bateson and Lang (I'm assuming you're referring to R.D. Laing who
collaborated with Bateson on the development of the double-bind theory of
schizophrenia), I don't think either of them clearly developed the notion of
the mediation of environment as part of their approach. Both, especially,
Laing seemed to work within an almost Sartrean framework of subjectivity and
intersubjectivity. In Bateson's classic "The Logical Categories of
Learning and Communication" there are no mediating artefacts at all and the
entirety of the learning process is conceived as internal to the organism
that is learning. In fact Bateson's use of the word "ecology" doesn't
resemble at all the definition you have given. He wrote that he used
"ecology of mind" or "ecology of ideas" to refer to "How ideas interact."
Bateson was ultimately a weird hybrid, an existentialist Russellian--it
isn't even clear that his analyses of codes and meta-codes could be easily
fit within a framework of "instrumentally mediated action."

Paul H. Dillon