Laura Formenti1, Linden West2
1University of Milano-Bicocca (ITALY)
2Canterbury Christ Church University (UNITED KINGDOM)
Abstract
This text seeks to illuminate the complex processes of deepening dialogue and transformations across difference in meaning-making and ways of seeing. It asks not less than everything: body, mind and soul. It requires an encounter with, and openness to otherness, including within. Our writing
illustrates the use of storytelling in an open, experimental, and reflexive process of writing-as-research, that was – and can be – a kind of royal road to increasing epistemological and reflexive sophistication, however hard the journey.
Keywords: Transformation, metalogue, dialogue, otherness.
This paper is the continuation of a project on transformation and transformative learning (Formenti & West, 2018) that brought us to explore our assumptions in a dialogic way. In a fractious, neo-liberal world, transformation and transformative learning can be beacons of hope, or mystifying, or empty concepts. Binary thinking, rationalistic assumptions and marketisation dominate this world, opposing the spiritual and material, self and other, mind and body, the socio-cultural and
psychological. Our dialogue incorporated many diverse voices; those of adult women and men,
participants in our research and teaching, and theoretical friends – pilgrims in the uncertain journey of transformation such as Dante, Freud, Jung, Spielrein, Bateson, Arendt, Gramsci, Tawney, Williams, Lonzi… - adult educators, psychoanalysts, sociologists, artists, poets, activists, and more.
We may feel disorientated. Learning to dialogue in a context of superdiversity and ongoing struggles for identity and well-being is no easy task, and yet it seems fundamental to education, to community life, to consciousness, and to transcending the fractious and destructive tendencies of a neo-liberal world as one now seeks to understand and recover from a global pandemic. In the last year, due to social distancing, online interaction and social media became more so than ever like an echo chamber, where we risk talking and listening only to people like ourselves. Closed communities shrunk unto themselves even more while gaps of communication deepened, so dialogue becomes harder. Dialogue does not only depend on our individual (in)capacity or willingness to be open to the other, and to otherness: it derives from the concrete features of our everyday life: a kind of
disembodied, solipsistic context is not a facilitating one. How can we keep dialoguing, if we cannot touch each other, or feel the tension in the other’s body, or even see what the other may be looking at?
Our worries started long before the Coronavirus. We wanted to recover inspiration from the roots of adult and continuing education, when popular and workers’ education sought to embody a dialogic spirit (West, 2016). Are we able to do the same, today? In our journey, we have drawn on the “differences that make a difference” (Bateson, 1976), composing them, using our own experience, diverse literature, and our extensive practice of auto/biographical narrative enquiry to explore the meaning of adult learning and lives. In our dialogical pilgrimage (Formenti & West, 2018), we delved into our capacity to generate deepening stories, and explored the practice of metalogue, a way of
186 writing-as-research that we used to question our perspectives of meaning in the stories we tell.
Metalogues are meta-dialogues, where the form and content of a conversation meet to generate deeper understanding. Here, we reflect on the two of us learning to dialogue and developing ideas through our difference. This form of shared writing generated rich description, eclectic understanding, and epistemological sophistication in our struggles to be and learn.
An Epistemic Exercise about Ways of Seeing Laura: How can we build our dialogue on difference?
Linden: Do you mean our difference?
Laura: Yes. Did you know that Bateson wrote imaginary dialogues between a father and a daughter in his books? It was his way to story epistemology and invite the reader to think narratively. He called them metalogues, meta-dialogues, because the content was illustrated through the process.
Linden: Mhm… these then could be the beginnings of transformative conversations.
Laura: Right. It is also about you and me talking to each other and how ideas develop through difference. A sort of philosophical dialogue, transcending the identity of the speakers. Our difference goes beyond us; it’s a difference of sight, of perspectives. We could call it a cultural difference, maybe. I am not sure. A metalogue is also an epistemological exercise about seeing, embodied by two speakers. People see the ‘same’ object in different ways, and this reveals their contexts, their life worlds.
Linden: Got it. Let’s start then. Look at this image. What do you see?
Laura: What…? Yes. Oh! I see an amazing piece of art, La Pietà by Michelangelo. It’s white, so gleaming white that it could have a light inside it. And smooth, polished, material. Makes me want to touch it, caress it. And you? What do you see?
Linden: I see something that speaks to me. It’s transcendental. Sometimes you get the same feeling in a landscape. Something beyond representation: you are overwhelmed by it. Shall I tell you the story of my first ever encounter with the sculpture? (Formenti & West, 2018, p. 27).
A dialogue can start with a simple question: What do you see? The answer reveals ways of seeing (Berger, 1972); it is redolent with our identities, a metaphor of who we are. Laura and Linden, we, are totally there, inside our specific, subjective reactions. An answer reveals our habits of
thought, values, and how we interpret the context at hand. And yet, what is more interesting is the difference in these two answers. Matter against spirit. Touching against transcendence. Two people of difference can start a dialogue.
Difference is the source of dialogue: without difference, there is no need to make a
conversation. Difference is personal, biographical, and cultural. It is generated and reinforced here and now, by what is said and done. At a microlevel, our perception, emotion, interpretation of the object are features of subjectivity. Or, if we use macrolevel lenses, we recognize the action of social values, discourses, and ideologies in the construction of an object. La Pietà is a masterpiece of art; it is also expression of Christian culture; it may tell stories about women and men, etc. In fact, the metalogue goes on with stories told. The mesolevel (Laura’s favourite) is about the here-and-now of relationship: how the other’s reaction triggers, maintains or challenges my vision. It is circular: I depend on you, within a conversation.
We do not see the ‘same’ object, but does it mean that we must fight and reach the same vision? Or combine our differences in one story? Or will we learn to see the object in a more complex and richer way? Will you abandon your perception and interpretation to please the other? In these different paths there is all the history of inter-cultural contact, education, and politics.
187 Metalogue as an Exploration of Perspectives
“A metalogue is a conversation about some problematic subject. This conversation should be such that not only do the participants discuss the problem but the structure of the conversation as a whole is also relevant to the same subject” (Bateson, 1972, p. 1). Bateson created these fictitious conversations between a father and a daughter, which is interesting because he shows that
notwithstanding their gap of age, gender and experience they both learn and think, and struggle to reach some point in common. But most of the time they both do not know; they are exploring
meaning together. For example, when the daughter asks: “Why do things have outlines?” (p. 27), the father does not answer, but tries to find out what she means by “things” and by “outlines”.
He quotes William Blake “a very angry artist”, throwing ideas at people, and keeps challenging not only the meaning of words, but the daughter’s passive attitude, at the point that she weeps. And this gives her the opportunity to ask why people get angry about outlines. The metalogue illuminates the epistemological roots and intimate connections between intolerance and disconnection. It also illuminates the importance of conversation as a way to attune unpredictable beings, such as humans, one to another. So, Bateson was storying epistemology and inviting the reader to think narratively, in relationship.
Bateson’s idea, in using metalogues extensively in his writing (indeed, apart from “Steps to an ecology of mind”, most metalogues were written by Mary Catherine, his older daughter), was to show that knowledge is not an individual possession, but an emerging form, the result of an ongoing ecology of ideas, of the quality of relationship where a conversation can be seen as a whole, where individual minds create interdependency by connecting to each other, and to the world around them.
Human talk is far less about “contents” than about the message, the relationship. What is this “meta”
level, a framework of meaning? A changing context where contents are re-interpreted at any moment? Or is it a communication about the ongoing relationship: “Who am I for you, who are you for me, and what are we doing here?”.
“The attunement required of the metalogue is a certain orientation to the affectivity of language, of interaction with others” (Yared & Davis, 2014). Surely, metalogues have to do with telling stories and learning from them in relationship. They are a creative exercise of dual writing, that we initiated to explore our biographical, cultural and epistemic diversity in order to highlight the perspectives of meaning that we bring into the relationship - with the other, with the world, and with ourselves, but also with our own perspectives, and the legacy of our cultures. We need a challenging methodology, forcing us to become (painfully) aware of the impossibility of direct knowledge of the other and otherness.
Gender Issues and a Doll’s House
Laura: Linden, some days ago you were talking of Nora, Ibsen’s character.
Linden: Yes, from ‘A Doll’s House’. A very powerful play. […]
Laura: Nora became a symbol for all those women who end up disrupting given rules and roles […]
Linden: Never had theatre dared to do so much, to challenge fixed women’s roles and gender stereotypes […]
Laura: At the beginning of the play, Nora enacts the perfect bourgeois wife, but soon she realizes that she is trapped in a dilemma […]?
Linden: There is a wilder more untamed side maybe to every one of us. […] A need to escape
entrapment, to find our own way beyond a crushing compulsion to abide by society’s norms of success and respectability. […] Here I am struggling to express truer feelings in this moment, and as I think of rigidity. The rigidity of Torvald and the culture he embodies; the rigidities that Nora must escape from. The rigidities within me […] there was a Nora part to my mother as she sought to escape a culture in which women’s roles could be rigidly prescribed.
Laura: This story speaks differently to different people. […]
188 Linden: I see her as having internalized particular cultural norms but the shadow and desire must
break through the carapace if she is to develop psychologically. […] the bourgeois woman had to keep up appearances at all costs. […] the cultural construction of our masculinity and its frequently oppressive, repressive and static forms. Nora insists we all have work to do.
Laura: As a woman, born almost a century later, I still resonate with Nora. Maybe because I was my daddy’s little girl too. […] Daddy’s sweethearts have a difficult choice to make if they want to be free. I remember my own awakening, in adolescence, when I realized that dominant role models hindered my flourishing, my freedom. […] I despised, at that time, those of my gender who used seduction, childishness, and condescension […]. But lately I stopped blaming them and became more curious about the overall game. […].
Linden: And I guess thinking systemically also takes us directly to specific family structures and the nature of the game being played between men and women, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons […] Sons too need to learn different sets of possibilities: including non-hierarchal and collaborative ways of being with the other. […]
Laura: In the final conversation with her husband, Nora dreams of an almost impossible ‘prodigy’ […]
She imagines a true relationship, where ‘serious words’ about ‘serious things’ can be spoken.
She has in mind a transformation, then, that is not only individual. It entails a different positioning for both of them, in relation to each other. A ‘prodigy’ where separation is a necessary step to open new possibilities. […]
Linden: Doors slamming can be frightening as well as liberating. […] Slamming doors is a kind of metaphor of shaking us to our foundations. Teaching us, me, of work to be done. A lifetime’s work, that is still going on. […]
Laura: Yes, life is not linear. We can come back, and repair what was broken. Is Nora’s story then an example of transformation? […] (Formenti & West, 2018, pp. 96-100)
How can a man and a woman talk about gender and say such intimate things? We refer to Ibsen and Nora, and then we talk about mother-son, father-daughter, man-woman relationships, and we try to use our lived experience to make sense of the dilemmas of freedom and self-respect. We include among our influences our parents and what they gave to us: they enter in our ways of seeing, in my and your thoughts, and in our talking. The context is implicated in the act of meaning and revealed by it.
A Tale of Two Cathedrals
Linden: … I was muttering to myself about the commercialised display of flesh in a fashion show… I saw something unexpected: the face of one young woman looked tired, and I could see pimples…
Laura: … agencies specialize in the transport, allocation, mobilization and marketisation of this human flesh. It is horrible, especially if you think that we are building walls against other fugitives. As a mother I wonder… who sees them? Who cares for them? Are they happy? Are they learning, and if so, what?
Linden: [at the Duomo, the Cathedral in Milan] … women in head scarves, in the Orthodox fashion, holding their children’s hands… Four Orthodox priests took over.
Laura: Are you sure? That’s not possible! The Duomo is a Catholic church.
Linden: Wait, wait. Yes, I am sure… ‘Oh they have come to worship at the nail from the one True and Holy Cross…’… The faces of some of those worshippers seemed awe struck, and the sense of reverence was, well, frankly moving...
Laura: … I do not know what to think about it. It is pagan… totems and rituals… The awareness of being part of a larger whole, the feeling of transcendence… The boundary between religion and magic… sanity and madness…
Linden: … some ways of knowing are richer and deeper than others. Like the metaphors of the
189 Christian story, once we get beyond the pomp and pomposity of the Church... dealing with inner chaos: finding a structure, imbibing a story as given. It was the same with Communism;
maybe with many other isms too. They abolish uncertainty and give us a home; a false and ultimately self-defeating prison of a home, but a home nonetheless. I am also thinking of the divine finding space in the ordinary… I fail to see the divine in a shopping mall, but maybe I am missing something… (Formenti & West, 2018, pp. 272-274.
Here, storytelling revealed forms of blindness and unawareness, but also the clash of social and value frameworks, or the seductions of capitalism and how de-sacralization brings a loss of meaning
(Bateson & Bateson, 1987).
Conclusions
Four cultural objects - Michelangelo’s La Pietà, Ibsen’s drama A Doll’s House, and the two Cathedrals of Canterbury and Milano – became “evocative objects” (Bollas, 2009) in different moments of our pilgrimage. They were helpful to start a philosophical dialogue transcending our individual identities, and the anxieties or conflicts generated in encountering profound difference in the other. Our difference goes beyond us; it is a difference of sight, of perspective. We could call it a cultural difference, but culture is too often constructed as a fixed, static object, which we need to challenge. Culture is in fact constantly built and negotiated in dynamic flux.
Writing a metalogue is an epistemological, aesthetic and ethical exercise about seeing and meaning, embodied by two (or more) speakers who do not see the ‘same’ object but are able – at least in principle - to name it: naming to each other reveals the cultural frameworks, context, worlds where we are immersed. Relationships are enveloped in the here and now of the meso, between us, within this place where we are, with Michelangelo or Cathedrals. The object has no ‘inherent features’
since a few differences out of several are chosen as relevant and become part of multiple interactions, which are complex and potentially beautiful and ‘true’. Such an artistic, dialogical, thoughtful, critical, embodied and ecological imagination lies at the heart of adult transformative education.
Writing these metalogues was an open, experimental and reflexive process of learning, deepened by being open to each other and otherness, including within. By combining description (“what do you see?”) and epistemological reflexivity, we came to see our world, and self, in new ways. The question for us all is when and in what conditions can we create such transforming conversations?
References
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Ballantine Books.
Bateson, G., & Bateson, M. C. (1987). Angels Fear: Towards an epistemology of the sacred.
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Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. Penguin.
Bollas, (2009). The evocative object world. Routledge.
Formenti, L., & West, L. (2018). Transforming perspectives in lifelong learning and adult education. A dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan.
Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative dimensions of adult learning. Wiley & Sons.
West, L. (2016). Distress in the city: Racism, fundamentalism and a democratic education. UCL Press.
Yared, A., & Davis, H. (2014). Talking in circles: interview, conversation, metalogue. Journal for Artistic Research, 5. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/57214/572930
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