I Will Not Die an Unlived Life

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching ÂŽfire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible;
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my signiÂŽficance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

- D. Markova
I Will Not Die an Unlived Life

1. Ken Wilber vs. Albert Ellis and Annie McQuade vs. Frank Visser @ kenwilber.com/blog

2. Outraged comments on ~C4Chaos' Zaadz blog entry referring to (1), Annie McQuade responds

3. Wilber strikes again: "What We Are, That We See"

4. ~C4Chaos reports and lots of people 'spill their interior beans'

5. The blogosphere erupts: Matthew Dallman, Ebuddha (1, 2, 3), Michel Bauwens, Geoffrey Falk, Tuff Ghost, DASHH, and probably lots more.

6. Frank Visser responds

7. And Wilber explains his intent: Recognizing the Shadow (1, 2, 3)

Then I read this comment over at Deep Surface, and it really hit me:

As a Wilber "minion," I'd like to suggest that perhaps this kind of dis-identification with his theories was exactly the kind of shadow element his provocation post was designed to bring out. He specifically asks in his follow-up,

"How many perspectives can you include? It's a simple challenge. A challenge to: what altitude are you, what are your own levels and lines, and most of all, what are your shadow elements? So, if I may respectfully suggest, look at your response to that first blog and ask yourself those questions."

Some of us may have shadow elements that include an unhealthy identification with Wilber and his work. Wouldn't this be a perfect example of Wilber's theory in action - using it to transcending and include Wilber and his own work?

I positively love this! I'm not going to go into all of it again, I learned my lesson in (2) and (4), but this quote really nails the potential of what Wilber's doing here. If you're up to the task, why don't you stop screaming and yelling in the blogosphere, simply stop for a moment, and 'take this opportunity to look within - look at your own angels and your own demons'.

You skillful bastard! I'm with you though, I get the message. I'm up to the challenge and I'll do my part. Thanks Earpy ;-)

‘Holacracy' refers to a structure of governance resulting from a synergy between the ideas on sociocracy and Ken Wilber's work on holarchies. Sociocracy was developed mainly by Kees Boeke and Gerard Endenburg in the Netherlands. Its global website defines the sociocratic method as "a way of producing and leading organization on the basis of equivalence in decision making through the principle of consent". I first came across it while looking for a subject for my graduate thesis. I read the book on sociocracy and participated in a sociocratic thesis circle consisting of my thesis coordinator, other students writing their thesis and Gerard Endenburg, who is a professor at the University of Maastricht, where I study international business.

More recently, I was sent an interview with Brian Robertson, President and CEO of Ternary Software, a company organized around the principles of sociocracy. In this article, Robertson combines his understanding of Wilber's work on holarchies with the ideas of sociocracy, to arrive at what he calls ‘holacracy'. These ideas turned out to be very relevant to a conversation I'm involved in, concerned with the design of the organizational structure of the Dutch node of the Center for Human Emergence (the story of which is told over at Peter Merry's blog, here on Zaadz).

From what I had seen of it so far, I had a feeling that sociocracy seems to be leaning a bit too much towards consensus-based decision-making. Living in a country that has taken consensus to its extreme in political decision-making, I am acutely aware of the limitations of it. As such, I intended to write a critical article on sociocracy and holacracy, but in the process of re-reading and reflecting, I hit upon some partial assumptions and projections of my own. I'm glad I did, because it turns out that a conversation around Robertson's version of sociocracy might well be an interesting and fruitful investment of time! (Apparently, the Integral Institute is also considering adopting holacracy [source: Integral Visioning, Robertson's blog].)

The four main tenets of sociocracy, and therefore of holacracy, are:

1. Decision Making by Consent: Consent is a method of decision-making whereby the arguments presented in discussing a decision are of paramount importance, and the result of the discussion is that no one present knows of a paramount reason to continue discussion before proceeding with the proposed decision.

2. Circle Organization: The organization is built of a hierarchy of semi-autonomous circles. Each circle has its own aim, given by the higher-level circle, and has the authority and responsibility to execute, measure, and control its own processes to move towards its aim.

3. Double-Linking: A lower circle is always linked to the circle above it via at least two people who belong to and take part in the decision making of both the higher circle and the lower circle. One of these links is the person with overall accountability for the lower-level circle's results, and the other is a representative elected from within the lower-level circle.

4. Elections by Consent: People are elected to key roles exclusively by consent after open discussion (this is not a democratic majority-vote election!). Most notably, the election process applies to the representative elected from a lower-level circle to a higher-level circle.

(Taken from the interview with Brian Robertson)

The essential difference between consensus and consent is that with consensus, everyone needs to agree, ‘whereas consent requires that no one know of a reasoned and paramount objection to making the decision'. Consensus is necessarily personal, involving emotions and ego-based politics, while consent is impersonal, considering the functional value of the decision. While the meaning of the words consensus and consent is very similar, in my view the main difference is in the quality of the interactions. When engaged in from an egocentric or ethnocentric position, the interactions will get personal and outcomes will, at worst, serve one person or faction, and at best be a compromise. However, when interactions in the circle take place at the worldcentric level, individual positions are no longer fear- and ego-based, but serve ‘the whole'. Again, this is my interpretation of things - Robertson also discusses these issues in his interview.

Without going into too much detail on the principles of sociocracy and holacracy themselves, I'd like to mention the following strengths of this system, as I see them:

- taps collective intelligence

- more adequate in light of increasing complexity, interdependency and speed of change, human need for self-actualization, and pathological effects of existing structures

- facilitates conscious evolution of the organization (in the Top Circle)

- scales horizontally and vertically (organizational span and developmental depth)

- bottom-up empowerment, rather than top-down control

However, there are still two issues on my mind, one more fundamental and one to do with Robertson's use of holarchies. The fundamental issue I see has to do with the difference between consensus and consent. As I see it, the long-term success of the sociocratic method hinges critically on people's capacity to take an impersonal, worldcentric stance. Robertson mentions that possible attempts at sabotage or stonewalling decision-making are prevented by the principle of consent, and that it actually helps one figure out where such attempts are coming from and address the root issues. I agree that this is possible, and this is proof of sociocracry's potential. However, it presupposes that people are willing and able to recognize and address their root issues. That takes a lot of courage, and I know I don't succeed as often as I'd like to. I don't think sociocracy/holacracy is for everyone, and I don't think it's 100% foolproof. I'd love to hear (different) opinions on this!

The second issue I have with holacracy is more specifically tied to Robertson's application of the notion of holarchy to the organizational structure. While he recognizes the need to distinguish between individual and collective holarchies, he goes on to confuse them anyway. The individual holarchy of atom, molecule, cells, etc. is clear enough (if not, I've explained this in another post). However, as an example of a collective holarchy, he mentions teams to departments to companies. This is where I don't agree. When you move to a higher level in a holarchy, it implies that the higher level transcends and includes the lower level - that's why it's called a holarchy. Transcendence implies a qualitative transformation, emergent properties, novelty.

Moving from a team to a department to a company, in my view, is not transcendence. It's not a qualitative transformation, and therefore it's not a vertical holarchy. Wilber has commented upon this in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (p. 50) where he considers the common confusion of horizontal communion, or self-adaptation, and vertical self-transcendence:

Some writers, such as Koestler, lump together self-adaptation and self-transcendence and refer to them interchangeably, because both embody a type of "going beyond". But apart from that similarity, the two are different in degree and in kind. In self-adaptation or communion, one finds oneself to be part of a larger whole; in self-transformation one becomes a new whole, which has its own new forms of agency and communion. [...]

As Ilya Prigogine puts it, the various levels and stages of evolution are irreducible to each other because the transitions between them are characterized by symmetry breaks, which simply means that they are not equivalent rearrangements of the same stuff (whatever that "stuff" might be), but are in part a significant transcendence, a novel and creative twist.

(Emphasis in the original)

While I agree that there is a developmental holarchy (e.g. Piaget's preoperational to concrete operational to formal operational cognitive development) that can and often does to some extent coincide with the organizational hierarchy, I don't agree that the organizational hierarchy from team to department to company is itself a holarchy. However, since they do often coincide to some extent, this problem is not insurmountable in practice. A more problematic use of holarchies occurs when Robertson jumps to the industry level and likens the company to an individual and the industry to the collective, claiming that this is a different holarchy altogether:

Just like a human maintains its own dominant monad even while a member of a company, so too do companies maintain their own dominant monad even while a member of an industry. An industry is a collective of individual companies just as a team is a collective of individual humans (and an industry is also an individual in its own right, just like a company, but in a completely orthogonal way to the individuality of its membership).

Again, I don't agree - the implications of this line of reasoning are somewhat dangerous, as a dominant monad has absolute control over its sub-holons (see Wilber's Excerpt C: The Ways We Are in This Together on ‘constitutive components' and ‘participating partners').

I think this use of the notion of holarchy is deeply problematic. However, it can easily be corrected and is in no way central to the strengths of the sociocratic and holacratic method, nor to most of the conclusions of Robertson's article. I would enjoy a conversation on what exactly a more healthy use of holarchies would mean for this aspect of holacracy.

All in all, I am impressed with the organizational potential of holacracy, which essentially transcends and includes sociocracy by adding some more depth and meaning, using the work of Wilber and others. I hope to continue the conversation around the organizational design of the Dutch node of the Center for Human Emergence and see if we can use the insights generated by Robertson's pioneering work to develop ourselves individually and collectively. To be continued or, better yet, to be transcended and included!

 

Yield who will to their separation

My object in living

Is to unite my avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one sight.

 

For only where love and need are one

And work is play for mortal stakes

Is the deed ever really done

For heaven and the future's sakes.

I figured if I was going to talk about the Great Chain of Being, I'd better draw up some cool diagrams like that chaotic guy is always telling me to. You may have noticed, however, that my diagrammatical skills are tainted by the dubious quality of paradox. In figure 1a, I portray the great chain as soul enveloping mind enveloping life enveloping matter. His C-ness might have put it like this: (soul(mind(life(matter)))). No wait, now that I've taken a better look at how he pulls that trick I see it's completely different. Nevermind though. The point of figure 1a is that matter is transcended and included by life, which is tee-and-ied (yes, T for transcended and I for included) by mind, which is tee-and-ied by soul. And then ultimately, soul is tee-and-ied by Spirit, which is at the same time the paper/bits on which the entire great chain is printed/displayed, being the ultimate ground of reality and all.

Now let's have a look at 1b. This is where the paradox comes in, ‘cause now matter is represented by the largest circle, while soul is represented by the smallest circle, contrary to figure 1a. Please note, however, that paradox really means ‘apparent contradiction'. Hah! It's not really contradictory, because in figure 1a I represent the transcend-and-include aspect of the great chain, while figure 1b represents depth and span. Basically the argument runs like this: since life transcends and includes matter (like molecules tee-and-ie atoms), it has more depth. It is more complex and has a higher level of differentiation and integration. However, since it takes matter to ‘produce' life, there can only ever be less of life than of matter, so as depth increases, span decreases. In the example of the atoms and the molecule, there can only ever be fewer molecules than atoms, as the former tee-and-ie the latter. This is why, in figure 1b, span decreases as depth increases.

With that out of the way, we can proceed to my main argument, which is actually about the evolution of human ways of being in the world, applied loosely to the way they have expressed this in organizing themselves economically. Along the way, it'll become much clearer what I mean by that (I hope).

Over time, ‘we' have evolved from the universe into the solar system into the lithosphere into the hydrosphere into the atmosphere into the biosphere (including the anthroposphere and ‘civilization'), now slowly giving way to Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere. Yes, I am a crude storyteller, but only because this is not the main point of it. For the first time, evolution is now becoming conscious of itself (by means of human reflexivity and awareness, allowing for some level of choice and free will). By exercising our free will, by growing what Stephen Covey calls ‘the space between stimulus and response', we can evolve consciously, in fact embodying evolution. We're pushing the evolutionary envelope, pulling the future into the present moment, which itself includes all of the past - and at the same time we're conscious of this!

This is indeed a very exciting thing, and we're only just getting started. Having become conscious of all this, we can now reflect back on our short spurt of human history and notice some patterns. In doing this, I noticed that what we're conscious of is itself evolving. Our perception, our worldview has evolved, and the ways in which we have expressed them in collective organization have, too. And this is where the great chain re-enters the story. Consider this: the dynamic relational exchange that sustains us has evolved from physical exchange to emotional-relational exchange to mental exchange, and we're increasingly seeing isolated forays into trans-rational exchange. On the individual level, this has happened many times before, but historically, humanity's center of gravity is only now starting to go beyond the level of mental exchange.

One of the most obvious ways in which this development finds expression on a collective basis, is in our economies, in the ways we organize our processes of exchange. As Otto Scharmer, Brian Arthur, Peter Senge and others note in their article Illuminating the Blind Spot: Leadership in the Context of Emerging Worlds, the business environment is shifting from more tangible to more intangible realities. I'd say this is analogous to the development from more gross to more subtle realities, as mapped out in the great chain. Business has long been located in the physical world of product-making. In the noosphere, however, we find that business is increasingly about services, about ideas and sense-making (rather than product-making), about communication and language in a globalized world where everything is connected to everything else, just like Teilhard de Chardin had envisioned (although obviously his vision was not limited to the economic dimension of reality).

That seems to be the world in which we live right now. But even business (or in fact, especially business) is pushing the evolutionary envelope, and I think we're beginning to see the first signs of large-scale, trans-rational exchange on the level of soul. Business is evolving from product-making to sense-making to sensing. Flow, presence and mindfulness are the new competitive advantages. We're going ‘upstream' experientially, from looking at things ‘out there', to noting our relationships to things, to considering our ideas, our thoughts and language (services, the experience economy, the linguistic turn), to becoming aware of the present moment (the ‘inward turn'), the perceptual order that pre-exists the conceptual order (William James). Our eye of contemplation is opening up. Eleanor Rosch speaks of primary knowing. Otto Scharmer is doing incredible work on the U curve. Csikszentmihalyi has been telling us all about flow for quite a while now. And then there's the work of guys like Wilber, the increasing attention for spirituality in the workplace... Isn't it obvious?!

So, Can Big Business Save the World? Hell yeah! Big business is moving ‘upstream' into involutionary potentials, it's evolving consciously, and in fact I suspect it will be the single most important factor (though not the only one) in collectively walking the path of breakthrough, rather than breakdown, and taking yet another big step in the relative realm of Lila, the play of life. And I am deeply, passionately and detachedly dedicated to playing my part. To be continued...

In the process of writing my thesis, I have been reading a lot about the development of sociological perspectives. There have been a few major streams of thought in sociology, most of which can be labelled modern or postmodern. More recently, there have been attempts at going beyond postmodernism, although I would say that some are regressive and even progressive accounts are often very shaky. All of this has made me wonder about these orientations, worldviews, perspectives, or whatever else you'd like to call them. What follows are some thoughts, most specifically about postmodernism.

The premodern worldview holds that the world is as it is, created and ordained by God's will. With Galileo and Newton, the modern worldview claims the ability to think and act for itself, emphasizing human agency and scientific progress. Man places himself outside of nature and looks down upon it as an objective observer, a mirror of nature, merely recording what he sees, hears, smells, tastes and feels ‘out there'. Facts are lying around waiting to be discovered, and science offers a representational theory of truth: there can only be one truth and it is of universal validity.

Now there is obviously a lot to be said for this way of reasoning. Nevertheless, at some point, some of us started voicing our doubts about the deep, unquestioned assumptions underlying our modern worldview. This marked the emergence of a new, post-modern worldview, although it would probably reject the term ‘worldview' as that supposes there is one way of looking at the world. Postmodernism has come to be known for its call for relativity and contextuality. There is no such thing as one Truth, as everyone has their own truth, and every claim, all knowledge, each perspective is partial and relative to its context, rather than of universal validity.

This is a very subtle way of looking at the world, and its recognition of relativity and pluralism a very advanced stance. Still, postmodernism is often put down as being relativistic to the point of not being able to say anything at all, as well as deconstructive of existing, modern perspectives. In terms of public relations, postmodernists haven't done a very good job, as they're often seen as annoying, whining, critical deconstructivists. In many ways, this is true, but recently I started seeing there's more to it than that. The point is, if we can't fully appreciate the postmodern message, there is no way we will be able to go beyond it properly. In Wilber's terms, we need to transcend and include the postmodern contribution (which his integral approach does, and does well).

Two observations that deserve to be appreciated more fully, in my view, relate to deconstructivism and postmodernists' critical stance. Until recently, I always took deconstructivism to refer to the process of pointing out how everything is relative, thereby levelling modern attempts at building universally applicable theories. It's not that this is false, but there's more to it than that. Postmodernism's deconstructivism is a response to modernism's constructivism. While modernist scientists claim to be dis-covering given realities, postmodernists claim that this involves a process of construction, rather than one of discovery.

Scientific research generally starts with the formulation of theories and hypothesis about how the world around us might be. In the process of formulating these, scientists are projecting the existence of particular objects, laws or phenomena which are then taken as the legitimate focus of investigation. In this way, these phenomena are increasingly taken to be separate and independent of our ideas about them, to the point of taking on a ‘real and objective' existence. Instrumental in this process is our use of language, by which we draw boundaries, label and categorize the world around us. From this point on, the ‘objective reality' is taken to exist and scientists proceed to ‘accurately describe and represent' these realities.

Postmodernists have drawn attention to the ways in which our truth and knowledge are thus constructed and constituted and call for an appreciation of the assumptions and circumstances of this process of construction by following it ‘upstream'. This is what has been referred to as deconstructivism, but rather than merely paralysing all attempts at gaining knowledge by relativizing it, it aims to draw attention to the process of constructing reality. Postmodernism doesn't object to knowledge or truth in themselves, but rather objects to the ways in which we first construct them, then forget that we constructed them, and finally act ‘as if' they were independent, pre-existing, objective realities.

In that sense, the deconstructive approach is complementary to the modern worldview, because it adds an appreciation of the process by which reality and truth are constructed. However, in their efforts to complement and balance the modern worldview, postmodernists often went to the other extreme, emphasizing extreme relativity and deconstructing existing approaches, rather than complementing them by drawing attention to their constructedness. This is hardly a surprising result, as the pendulum swings of time often go from one extreme to the other. However, it has given postmodernism its bad name of being purely critical and destructive, rather than bringing something new to the table. This is where the second observation comes in (I have no idea where this idea originally came from, but I was made aware of this by Emil Möller - accidentally, serendipitously).

This observation revolves around a distinction between two versions of postmodernism, the first critical, the second affirmative. Critical postmodernism defines itself negatively, ‘merely' deconstructing existing approaches. An affirmative postmodernism, however, would take the ideas of relativity and the constructedness of reality and truth, and proceed to incorporate them in a more subtle, more encompassing view of reality, as compared to the modern worldview. This affirmative postmodernism is relativistic and pluralistic, recognizing that there are multiple perspectives and truths.

If that's true, then what is the difference between affirmative postmodernism and integral post-postmodernism? Is there a difference? I don't really know of many affirmative postmodernist theories, so it's hard to say. I could imagine that affirmative postmodernism would positively recognize aperspective pluralism, while the integral worldview would bring some good ol' vision-logic (late formal operational cognition) to the table and proceed to integrate them. As Wilber has noted, extreme postmodern relativism may lead to what he calls ‘aperspectival madness', where nothing is better than anything else and nothing meaningful can be said. Aperspective pluralism without the rejection of hierarchy could lead to the integration of the different perspectives, which Wilber calls integral-aperspectivism, or plain integral. The difference between affirmative postmodernism and integral, then, may be found in the recognition of verticality and holarchy.

All in all, I've come to understand and therefore appreciate the postmodern contribution a little more than before. Having grown up in the Netherlands, I'm intimately aware of the postmodern recognition of multiple truths and perspectives, and I can sometimes struggle with relativism and hierarchies. These questions are very much alive in me, so I enjoy considering them and reflecting on my own thinking. As always, feedback and ideas are appreciated.

"Novelty, as empirically found, doesn't issue by jumps and jolts; it leaks in insensibly ... All the old identities at last give out, for the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness warps things out of every original rut." (William James, A Pluralistic Universe, 1909)

Right on the money, William! Today, while doing some work on my thesis, I experienced exactly this. Reading, thinking, searching, wondering, suffering, thinking some more, and then all of a sudden, there's this one inconspicuous thought. And from it follows another, slightly less inconspicuous thought, and another one, and before I know it (literally!), I'm writing, drawing a diagram, thinking some more, writing again, and then I sit back and I smile. Oh yes, do I smile! Because I can literally feel it in my body: I'm on to something here. The thin veil that was blurring my vision on the central topic of my thesis, is suddenly ripped apart, torn to shreds by the strength and clarity of the insight. A flash, a flurry of energetic activity in my brain, and I'll never look upon this issue as I did before.

I'll explain, and in the process of doing so I will simultaneously make good on my promise of giving an overview of what my thesis is about. I don't suppose everyone will find this interesting, but I'll just write this on the premise of ‘whoever comes are the right people' an Open Space Technology principle loosely adapted to my current purposes ;-).

My thesis deals with what is called the ‘agency-structure debate' in social theory. Agency refers to the capacity of social actors to make a difference in the world. Structure refers to the enduring rules, patterns and institutions that provide the social context within which action takes place. Why is it a debate? Because agency allows us to influence our social context, and therefore structure (i.e. an organization) is an effect of agency (i.e. our actions). However, the argument runs the other way, too. Because social structures limit and constrain our actions, in that they influence -or in a stronger version, determine- the actions we take in the social world. That is, agency (i.e. our actions) is also an effect of structure (i.e. an organization). Common sense suggests that both are partially true, yet how is that possible? How does that work? This is the central topic with which the agency-structure debate in social theory is concerned.

And now for a ‘brief' historical intermezzo. Understanding the historical origin of the two positions in this debate helps us gain a more grounded perspective on it.

Although we take it very much for granted, our notion of individuality is historically situated. That is, even though I take it for granted that I take myself to be an individual, this has not always been the case:

"'Individual' meant ‘inseparable', in medieval thinking ... Slowly, and with many ambiguities, since that time, we have learned to think of ‘the individual in his own right', where previously to describe an individual was to give an example of the group of which he was a member." (Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, 1961)

In fact, only with the historical development of the division of labour could a true ‘individuality' in the sense in which we know it start to emerge. The division of labour, after all, gives rise to a differentiation of biography and experience which creates the sense of difference with others.

‘So what about agency?', you might ask. Let me quote Alan Dawe (1979) on this:

"In short, medieval man lived within a fixed, static, and immutable world, unquestioningly accepting it and his place in it as preordained and aware of himself only as part of his group. Moreover, the world was thus given because it was divinely authored. The medieval conception of man was of a being who was but one manifestation of divine nature and will, inseparable and indivisible from it. Clearly, when the only world view available to the closed, static, undifferentiated community of the medieval village was that the essence of and the agency behind all things lay in divine creativity and authority alone, there was no room for any conception of a distinctive human nature and agency." (For those versed in the language of Spiral Dynamics, this is the blue value system.)

And when the first ‘conceptions of a distinctive human nature and agency' did begin to rise with the division of labour, the feudal powers of the church easily repressed them. For a time. Because when Copernicus and Galileo started looking and thinking for themselves, defying the church-mediated, all-encompassing agency of God, the period known as the Enlightenment commenced (and with it, the emergence of orange, in Spiral Dynamics). And the key point here, is that there were two basic reactions against these historical developments, giving rise to the two positions in the agency-structure debate. I'll quote from my thesis-in-progress:

"The birth of the structural perspective is to be understood as a response to the problem of order following from ‘the collapse of the old regime under the blows of industrialism and revolutionary democracy' at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Nisbet, 1966). The Enlightenment celebrated the idea of progress by means of human reason and the noncompromising criticism of traditional institutions and values. At the same time, the new industrialism eroded the traditional communal bonds that were taken to be the cement of society. In light of these developments, the conservative reaction sought to restore order by constraining an increasingly fragmented and atomized society of individuals through the structure of the social system." (Diederick Janse, 2006)

Basically, the conservative reaction was that ‘the end was nigh'. It must have been a time of great upheaval and uncertainty, so it's not that hard to understand the call for order, constraint and social conformity (a blue response to the rise of the orange value system). This call gave rise to the perspective which focused on structure and constraint. Not surprisingly, the second perspective was essentially a progressive reaction to the same historical developments. Again, I'll quote from my thesis-in-progress:

"While from the structural perspective, the Enlightenment eroded and threatened social order, the agency perspective celebrates the human potential for progress by means of reason and science. ‘The dominant objectives of the whole age [i.e., the Enlightenment ...] were those of release: release of the individual from ancient social ties and of the mind from fettering traditions.' (Nisbet, 1966) Rather than being divinely ordained, history and society are human accomplishments.

Nevertheless, it was recognized that this was an ideal to progress towards, rather than the actual sitation, for the institutionalized and constraining products of the ‘ancient social ties' and ‘fettering traditions' were very real. The central problem addressed by the action perspective is therefore ‘how human beings can regain control over what are, at root, their own social products' (Dawe, 1979, emphasis in the original). The way forward, from this perspective, lies in the unceasing actualization of the potential for human agency." (Diederick Janse, 2006)

To sum up, the ‘structure' position dealt with the problem of order and focused on structure and constraint, while the ‘agency' position dealt with the problem of control and focused on human agency, intentionality and creativity.

So far, so good. During a period of over a century, sociologists have been trying to get a grip on this issue by analysing which of the two positions was ‘right', or more recently, how both could be right and what the relationship between the two is. To date, they haven't agreed on a satisfactory way to deal with it. In part, this is because the debate is not just theoretical, it's also normative; it deals with different views of human nature. Another reason for the lack of consensus, however, is that the issue is heavily intertwined with a few other fundamental debates in social theory, such as individual-society, subjectivism-objectivism, voluntarism-determinism and creativity-constraint. Many accounts fail to distinguish between them, and as a consequence, the agency-structure debate is more like a Gordian knot than a ‘mere theoretical issue'.

My thesis aims at ‘cutting the Gordian knot' by taking a processual perspective. Well, that's the pretentious-optimistic version of it, at least. More realistically, I'm trying to make a contribution by showing how most of the existing approaches to the issue are based on a logic, or a way of thinking, which emphasizes stability over change, substance over process. There have been calls in sociology to make sense of the debate by incorporating time and process, only the metaphysical foundations of most approaches are unable to deal with time properly. This follows Henri Bergson's argument that the logic underlying most of modern science is heavily indebted to the Parmenidean philosophy, emphasizing the permanent and unchangeable nature of reality. Rather than seeing motion and change, it sees a trajectory of points, a series of static snapshots.

By drawing on the work of Henri Bergson, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Ken Wilber, I'm trying to outline a processual approach to the agency-structure debate. This processual approach owes much to Heraclitus, who said ‘panta rhei' - everything flows.

Until today, I thought I could do this by showing the interplay of agency and structure to be two aspects of the process of time. Structure would correspond to what Wilber calls ‘the karmic inheritance of the past', while agency would correspond to the creative novelty of the present. For more background on this, have a quick look at this earlier post, where I outline this in more detail.

I thought this would shine a different light on the whole action-structure debate, by showing how the past constrains us and the present allows us to change and create, to the extent that we're conscious of our habits of the past. However, although I believe this is true, I haven't been entirely convinced that this would really address the depth and span of the issues at stake in the agency-structure debate.

Until today. Because like I said at the beginning of this post (it's been a while, scroll back if you need to ;-), the veil that blurred my vision was finally ripped apart today, and I have a clear view of what's at stake now.

In a nutshell, I was basically reframing the debate from the horizontal dimension into the vertical dimension. Horizontal and vertical here refer to Wilber's use of it. For him, reality unfolds holarchically, which means there are different levels of unfolding, where a higher level transcends the lower levels, while at the same time including them (like russian dolls). Horizontal refers to the dynamics at one level: intra-level. Vertical refers to the dynamics between levels: inter-level. For more on this, pick up A Brief History of Everything, by Ken Wilber (that's the one I usually recommend as an introduction into his integral model).

What I came to see today, is that there is a horizontal and a vertical dimension to the agency-structure debate in social theory. Now disappointingly, this sounds very logical and obvious. However, I have been looking into this for months, I'm very familiar with Wilber's work, and I couldn't see this. I've tried seeing the horizontal and vertical components of the debate, but it just wasn't clear to me as it's so blurred and intertwined with all these other debates. The crucial point is that the agency-structure debate as it is known in social theory, needs to be unpacked into two debates. One deals with the vertical aspects, the other with the horizontal aspects. Simple enough. Here's an overview.



Horizontally, Wilber distinguishes between agency (N.B. this is a different use of the term ‘agency' than in my thesis, strictly speaking!) and communion. These are like yin and yang. (Wilber's version of) agency is about wholeness, stressing identity and autonomy. Communion is about partness, stressing relationship, conformity and dependence (in their positive senses as well). You'll probably have noted that agency is slightly more masculine (not male, but masculine), while communion is slightly more feminine. On the horizontal level, then, the agency-structure debate refers to wholeness and partness, autonomy and conformity. This makes perfect sense, as this is the closest to what most approaches have addressed when dealing with the agency-structure debate. That's why I'll probably use those terms for the horizontal dimension of the unpacked debate.

Vertically, Wilber distinguishes between self-transcendence (evolution) and self-immanence (involution). Transcendence occurs by means of increasing differentiation towards higher levels of complexity, while immanence occurs by means of increasing integrations towards higher levels of integrity. As explained in the post I linked to earlier, these also relate to the past and the present in a Whiteheadian manner. This is the crucial link to the agency-structure debate, not in its horizontal sense, but in the vertical one, relating to the inheritance of the past and the creative novelty of the present moment, building on the past but also going beyond it. Obviously I can't use the words ‘agency' and ‘structure' to refer to this, too. However, that's not a big problem, for some sociologists have argued that the agency-structure debate is ‘really about' creativity and constraint.

I always felt there was something to that, but it didn't square with some of the other conceptions of the agency-structure debate. Now I understand: creativity and constraint relate to the vertical component of the agency-structure debate.

So there you have it: the agency-structure debate unpacked into, horizontally, agency and structure, and vertically, creativity and constraint. I feel truly liberated as I can now differentiate between the two and integrate them at a higher level. There will be implications for social theory, but I first need to get my head around this properly (which I've started doing by writing this piece). Hopefully I'll be able to come back to you soon with some ideas on what this actually means in practice. I'll need to do that for my thesis as well, so I'll definitely get there at some point.

I'm pretty deep down the rabbit hole where this topic is concerned, so if the above was utterly incomprehensible and has made you feel like you want to kill or maim me, please let me know about that and I'll:
1) make sure I don't get near where you live
2) make an attempt at clarifying this

I'd also appreciate it if you left a comment. I know this is expecting a lot (for me it can be), so I'm helping you out by giving you some scripted options here:
A) The length of this post freaked me out and I decided I'd never come back here, let alone read this.
B) I think I read it, but the commonly-induced effect of having gained some level of understanding, evidenced by the experience of making associations and connections, is somewhat/entirely absent - I think you killed my brain.
C) I read it, it makes some level of sense, but I'm blacking out - I have nothing to say.
D) It falls short of being KenWilberesque, but I'll grant you this [...insert text here...].
E) Pure, shining, transcendental brilliance, and here's why [...insert text here...].
F) Send me your address, I'll send you a ticket so you can come and visit me, and [we'll get married/we'll have a couple of beers and watch Baywatch (strike through non-applicable answer).
G) [...abide in the present moment and manifest your luminous creativity by inserting custom reply here...]

Feedback, suggestions, death threats, leads or gifts would be much appreciated. Thanks for putting up with me ;-)

In the natural sciences, the previously dominant mode of thinking from Parmenides to Aristoteles to Newton took the world to be a complex system of lawful cause-and-effect. The object of science was to look unto the world objectively and report the truth about the things it saw. Atoms everywhere, running around mindlessly, bumping into each other. Quantum theory took the fun out of that game by proclaiming the wave-particle duality and showing that 'things', such as atoms, were really more like relatively stable patterns, statistical regularities (and then only at the level of aggregrate phenomena). "For quantum theory taught that, at the microlevel, what was usually deemed a physical thing, a stably perduring object, is itself no more than a statistical pattern - a stability wave in a surging sea of process." (Rescher, 1996)

I'm writing my thesis on the action-structure debate in sociology, and what I find striking is that if you take the story above and apply it (somewhat metaphorically, perhaps) to the social sciences, you start seeing all kinds of fascinating things. The social sciences seem to be pretty caught up in the language of things and objects - no longer purely in the modernistic Newtonian sense, but it does emphasize stability over change, substance over process, structure over action, order over chaos. What happens when you apply some of this quantum thinking to the social sciences?

Structures, persons, organisations, ideas - these are all probability spaces, 'stability waves in a sea of process', the point of intersection between energy-potentiality and actuality-reality. Organisations are interwoven, interdependent network-weavings of energy-information, dynamic exchanges, spaces of interactional touching. Dynamic equilibria, static dynamics. Heraclitus said 'panta rhei', everything flows. The world as 'real, lived experience' flows. Our past is a huge wave, and we're riding its crest, ever falling into the future. Our past carries and constrains the present. Negative freedom: freedom from the past, from constraint, from conditions. Positive freedom: freedom to create, to act, to come into being in the present. We are ourselves probability spaces, constantly bifurcating, past or present? Will I be who I was, who I've been? Who am I? When I become conscious of the ways in which my past is in me, here, now, I become free of it. Consciously, here, now, I become free to let come, to become. There is a stimulus in the present. Bifurcation point: extrapolate from the past, from karma? Stand in the space between stimulus and response, in the present, the space of dharma - what do I do, who am I? Will I be myself or will I be my Self? The choice is mine. Yes, if I am conscious, free from what I am conscious of, free to be Self instead of self. No, I am conditioned by what I am, by the past self that is in me, by my karmic inheritance. Who have I been, who am I, who am I to be, now, and now, and now?

Ok, so I just let go of myself there for a bit. I'm just thinking out loud, trying to plant a bomb of paradoxical meaning and questions. Blow what I know, what remains is the question.

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