KCC Two-Day Workshop, November 14^th -15^th 2003, with Tom Anderson and John Shotter

Exploring Living, Bodily, Spontaneous, Responsive-Expression:

the Chiasmic Structure of Social Life in a Post-Cartesian world

Day 1:

Short joint introduction (TA and JS): (9.30-945): ... the crucial role of our spontaneously responsive bodily expressions in our lives together.

1^st session (9.45-10.45am): Tom Anderson: (video)... spontaneously responsive bodily expressions in psychotherapy.

•              Reflections of the gathering (10.45-11.00am)

Break (11.00-11.30am)

2^nd session (11.30-12.30pm): John Shotter: Setting out the general background:

•              Why living change is special: qualitative changes - unique events

•              Meetings: beginnings

•              Reflections of the gathering (11.50-12.10am)

•              Chiasmically organized processes: precise, dynamic intertwining (‘orchestrations’), not a mere merging, mixing, or blending, but the creation of new ‘relational dimensions’

•              The creation of ‘third agencies’: ‘presences’ out in the ‘dialogical spaces’ between people

Lunch (12.30-1.45pm)

3^rd session (1.45-2.45pm): John Shotter and Tom Andersen: The dialogically- or chiasmically-structured nature of all expressively responsive, living, human bodily activity:

•              Dialogically- or chiasmically-structured phenomena occur only in meetings

•              First reactions – just as only oak trees grow from acorns, and only chickens from eggs, our ‘first reactions’ in our meetings are the ‘seeds’ only from which events in the meetings can grow

•              Reflections of the gathering (2.05-2.25pm)

•              The involvement obligations and ethics intrinsic in our meetings

•              Chiasmically organized: binocular vision (Bateson, Merleau-Ponty) as a paradigm... looking over a visual field... seeing as a the picture before us ‘wants us’ to see... the creation of new “relational dimensions,” i.e., depth

Break (2.45-3.15pm)

4^th session (3.15-4.15pm): John Shotter: Cartesianism and ‘Why have we not noticed these things before?’:

•              We are only a thing that thinks.

•              Bodies are perceived only by the intellect alone.

•              Reflections of the gathering (3.35-3.45pm)

•              The search for a method for obtaining certain knowledge.

•              No emergence, no growth, no development – a dead, mechanical world.

Day 2:

1^st session (9.30-10.45am) Tom Andersen and John Shotter: Why these differences matter:

•              The idea of a chaismically structured reality demands a radical change in what we mean by physical reality – a change in our ideas of space, time, matter and motion [and indivisible time-space, and a living matter capable of physionomic, expressive changes].

•              Why thinking in terms of “separate elements of reality” becomes impossible

•              Reflections of the gathering (9.50-10.10am)

•              What is important are the attitudes, stances, adopted at the beginning of meetings (Jaakko Seikkula: Open Dialogue)

•              Words and ways of paying attention ... Wittgenstein (1953) on seeing “aspects”

Break (10.45-11.15)

2^nd session (11.15-12.30) Tom Andersen: The relevance of these issues in treatment situations

Lunch (12.30-2.00pm)

3^rd session (2.00-3.00) John Shotter: Professional accountability, responsibilities, and ‘justificatory rhetorics’

•              Accounts versus theories: An account is an aid to perception – works on puzzling or vague events to enable us to justify them... accountable action is legitimate action.... how we justify ‘systemic’ ideas to sceptics..

•              Theories take what already makes one kind of sense to us, and suggests that its real nature is hidden from us.

•              Reflections of the gathering (2.20-2.40pm)

•              Accounts are to do with constitutive expectations, i.e., with orienting us toward future possibilities.

•              Why our current forms of outcome evaluation are of no help to us.

Break (3.00-3.30)

4^th Final session: plenary