by Theodore Taptiklis

With colleagues, I’ve just completed a series of experimental group practices that enable people who don’t know each other — without any special preparation or instruction — to quickly develop a new and deeper sense of themselves in relation to others, and at the same time come to understand and appreciate the different ways that those around them experience the world. The change is so immediate that it demonstrates that in the future, strangers and familiars might easily come to use their differences as resources for one another, whatever they are doing. It’s such a valuable discovery that we’re now looking to build on and extend it as far as possible across realms of human endeavour.

Beyond this promising behavioural change, our discovery is part of a movement in human understanding that is bringing many branches of investigation in the both the humanities and the sciences into a new synthesis. Our collisions and encounters with each other and the world are evidently so rich with complexity and under-used potential, that attuning ourselves to their details — with the support of all of the capacities of our human and physical sciences — is a project that offers enormous rewards for the conduct of human affairs.

This paper tumbles through some of the ideas and influences around this discovery, and sets up some ambitious proposals for how we might respond to the opportunity that is now beckoning.

I’d like to start by referencing my recent enchantment by the cosmology of Carlo Rovelli — a glimpse of a new interpretation of ourselves and our natures in relation to the world we inhabit. In Rovelli’s luminous accounts of quantum science there’s a language and a structure of insights that gesture towards what we’ve been noticing.

We don’t have a quantum theory of personhood — as though this were even possible — but Rovelli’s writings (*1a-1d below) set aside the assumptions of the doctrine of atomised individualism that still remains the foundation of social, political and economic organisation almost everywhere today. And as a result, it feels as though they underpin our efforts in strengthening our relational muscles to face a larger sense of the urgent task of our present planetary circumstances.

Being human, revisited

Carlo Rovelli is a poet, a lyrical author of understanding, and at the same time a determined and plain-speaking scientist. The practice of scientific enquiry that arises in Rovelli’s work is a constant movement of successive approximations — a reaching forward, a stumbling towards, interspersed with moments of genius and revelation that may not be appreciated until they can be correlated with other insights, quite often at a later time.

The world of quantum physics that Rovelli inhabits depends upon abstruse and complex mathematics—something well beyond my capacities. But in discussing the pantheon of illustrious forbears in the science of reality, he characterises some of the great leaps of insight as visions — powerful images, rather than formulae. And he traces the beginning of the whole story back to Anaximander, who was my hero when I was eighteen years old and studying philosophy. Gripped by the story of this Greek forbear who, grappling with the nature of the universe, saw the sky above as continuing unseen below the globe of the earth, I wrote a poem — a tribute to “young Anaximander” that I now recognise as shameless self-identification.

All of this warms me towards Rovelli — and gives me the confidence to try to express my emerging understandings in ways that may reference some of his.

From his recent Guardian article:

A good scientific theory…should not be about how things “are”, or what they “do”: it should be about how they affect one another…So quantum physics may just be the realisation that this ubiquitous relational structure of reality continues all the way down to the elementary physical level. Reality is not a collection of things, it’s a network of processes. We understand reality better if we think of it in terms of interactions, not individuals. We, as individuals, exist thanks to the interactions we are involved in.

My world for the past three decades has been the study of human interactions — or, as my colleague and mentor John Shotter preferred to call them, intra-actions. Shotter used this term to capture the notion of interpenetration: that our exchanges are not simply actions and reactions, like those in a game of tennis, but can change ourselves and the others in the room even in their formation or utterance.

My colleagues and I have been diving ever more deeply into the phenomenology of human intra-action — and what emerges as central in this experience is our relationality. So strong is our relational experience now that we have started to sense ourselves no longer as ‘things’ — as discrete entities — but as something that needs a new descriptive language. For the moment, I’ll try “fuzzy bundles of intra-acting relationships floating in an atmosphere of many other fuzzy bundles of intra-acting relationships”. On this view a new image of humanity is appearing, where the apparent solidity of the Self dissolves into a sense of each of us as a vibrating set of processes in a vast network of intra-actions with other vibrating sets of processes, including the whole of the non-human world that surrounds us. A declaration of this altered perspective is the expression No-thing of the title above.

It’s not a mystical perspective. It’s an attempt to capture an understanding based on specific observations that have entirely practical consequences. And the language of quantum physics seems helpful here— not necessarily as a direct parallel, but as a useful point of reference. Rovelli distills the foundational discoveries of quantum science into three features of the world: granularity, indeterminacy and relationality.

He explains: granularity means that the structure of reality is not continuous or infinite. Instead “there is a limit to the number of states in which a system can exist.” Smallness does not ultimately reduce to emptiness. Indeterminacy means that at the atomic level, nothing in quantum physics is predictable. The results of collisions between fundamental particles are always uncertain: “things are constantly subject to random change”. And relationality means that things cannot be described as they are, but only how they occur and how they interact with each other. Quantum physics doesn’t describe where a particle is but only how the particle shows itself to others. This sounds to me very like Heideggerian phenomenology: the idea that things “show up” for us, where we are understood as “world disclosers”.

I’ll consider here the echoes of Rovelli’s three features in our own work.

I’ll make the case for No-thing in two sections. In the first section, I‘ll set out a perspective that has arrived for us using a language that describes each element of this new view and summarises them at the end. And in the second section, I’ll lay out the description — and then suggest the consequences — of a practice that manifests this view, using as the exemplar our experimental learning sequence, Entangled Bodies.

Some notes towards a language of relationality

Our practical experiments suggest that our sense of self arises at the confluence of a number of different forms of relational phenomena. Each of these may strike and move us towards a particular relational orientation, either separately or severally. But none of these is definitive: our relational sensitivity is always open to movement and alteration. This why we are not determinate selves, but beings that are fuzzy at the boundaries. Not things, but states of being, in flux with the motion of the world.

A number of relational phenomena have bubbled up from our explorations. Because there are overlaps this is not a definitive, separated list, but a first account of movements and turnings that have made themselves felt in our work:

Encounters

Encounters are the stuff of the world. Each ‘I’ or ‘me’ lives in an atmosphere constantly buffeted by encounters. We can think of encounters as experiences of adjacency, or collisions, with ‘not-me’ or otherness. These not-me’s may be other people, other living creatures, aspects of the surrounding landscape or locality, or forces like the weather, the seasons, the movement from day to night, or the phases of the moon.

Encounters are complex events and can overwhelm our senses so that their layers are hard to untangle, and some may easily be missed. Wittgenstein observed that “it all goes by too fast”. They strike us in a variety of ways depending on our orientation, emphasising the challenge they pose to our attentiveness as they ‘come at us all at once’. In response, each of us may tune our natures to recognise some of their aspects and not others. We can experience the same phenomena differently from others by deliberate or acquired attunement.

Noticings

Noticings are ‘turnings towards’ aspects of our phenomenological experience that distinguish the characteristics that seem salient to us. Noticing is a quality or a tool of attentiveness, allowing an aspect of our surrounding circumstances to ‘make an impression’ on us. Noticing may not be deliberate, or necessarily arise during the event or encounter: we may claim afterwards that we noticed something through memory recall, or when prompted by another’s noticings.

In everyday encounters, noticings are seldom remarked. Social conventions — and a habit of diffidence about our internal lives — keep most of our noticings from view. Because they often follow one another in rapid succession, they are quickly forgotten. But if they are allowed to find expressive articulation to others, they can be remarkable sources of shared insight and discovery. Noticings are the basis for the leaps of genius described by Rovelli. Artistic expression, great and small, is created from noticings. In meetings and exchanges, noticings can be prompts for new levels of attentiveness and acuity. Noticings may be fleeting and partial, not quite graspable, even slippery (*2).

In conversation, noticings work differently from other forms of expression. They have an invitational quality — a sense of putting something forward that is unfinalised and incomplete — that leaves space for the contributions of others. They create a different atmosphere than, for example, conclusions or assertions.

Differences

Our backgrounds, our histories and our life experiences — as well as the natural variations that we express as members of our species — all combine to form selves that operate distinctively in the world. Our differences emerge in what we pay attention to and how we respond. They are the raw material for collaborating and for combining our talents.

The value of our differences is evident from the density of human experience. Since there is so much to be attended to at every living moment, no one of us can possibly address it all. Only when we attune ourselves to one another as well as to the event can we hope to deal with the immensity of worldly circumstances.

A clear sense of another’s orientation and perception can become a point of navigation for understanding our own. Comparison brings insight. But to locate ourselves and others around differences of orientation, we need a shared language. And to be able to articulate and make use of individual difference, a certain quality of open-ness and acceptance of vulnerability is required — something unusual in conventional public discourse.

Influences

The continuing movement of the world subjects the relational self to influence and change. Some influences — such as shifts in the atmosphere — may be subtle but nonetheless profound. Our own bodily changes may be drawn-out events that alter our capacities and our selfhood in ways that pass un-noticed.

Our relational selves may be heavily influenced by our sense of the perceptions of others. And how we feel ourselves perceived can be quite different from how others might feel and how they might describe their perception of us. Such cross-currents of influence can be ephemeral and difficult to resolve.

Recognising how we are influenced may only come from comparison with the situations of others. And understanding how we are influencing others can be equally mysterious. However, having a sense of how our gestures and utterances ‘land’ with other people has considerable practical value. What we intend and project, and what is caught and felt, may be not at all the same thing.

Tendencies

If we understand ourselves as existing in relation to the movements of the world around us, it no longer makes sense to consider our behaviours and capacities as settled characteristics. Instead, we might think of them as tendencies, reaching towards certain kinds of responsiveness in typical but not yet fixed patterns.

From this comes an idea of selfhood as a bundle of tendencies — behaviours usual for us, but still open to influence and change. Observing one another in terms of tendencies rather than certainties feels more relationally generative. To find synergy with the efforts of others, we might think of our tendencies as ‘leanings towards’, as though our instincts and habits have a kind of gravitational attraction. With enough ‘escape velocity’ we can overcome or modify their force.

Aliveness

Relational being can generate a vibrant sense of ‘in-touchness’ with the energies of the world — a feeling of heightened awareness that seems to stretch out from the self towards the distant horizon, embracing every aspect of our surroundings. It’s a bodily sensation — a deep breath of life — that’s a sharp reminder of our physical presence as an inhabitant of a turbulent planet.

Aliveness is also a sense of possibility — that our sensations of profound connection may generate movement and change. That acting on the world can come from within our own experience, and recognising how, even with its hesitations and uncertainties, it reaches and touches others. That this can be more useful than trying to operate on the world from the distant certainty of an external perspective.

John Shotter distinguishes aboutness and withness ways of speaking (*3). When we speak about something, that something is ‘over there’, separate from ourselves and immune to our feelings. But including, even centering, how we feel in our expression of something is to acknowledge our bodily existence in what is going. And this can be an invitation for others to acknowledge their feelings as well.

Entanglement

The experience of deep relationality reveals a state of being that may be best described as entanglement. It’s a circumstance that entails the re-positioning and even the dissolution of selfhood.

To be entangled is to move in step with others — to be going on together, as Wittgenstein proposes (*4). What seems to happen is that the boundaries of individual expression fade away. Instead of turn-taking, utterances and gestures tumble in on and with each other in a kind of social music, so that when there’s a pause for breath and to consider the result, it’s no longer clear who did what in its formation. Mutual respect and understanding have reached a stage where each new movement and gesture contributes to an emerging shared sensibility. It’s an exciting experience.

In Rovelli’s terms, entanglement is a process — a kind of enfoldment where separation and identity are no longer important. Where No-thing is present.

Unfinalisation

To be attuned and in step with the constant flux of the world is to recognise the impossibility of completion — that matters are never fixed and final. Unlooked-for happenings and encounters will continue to arrive and will threaten to unmake what has just been made. I like the way Rovelli puts it: “The events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English. They crowd around chaotically, like Italians.” (He makes this wry observation as an Italian himself, not as a social critic.)

But unfinalisation is not a reason for despair. Instead it’s a reminder of the power of possibility and relationality — that instead of being preoccupied with results and outcomes, it’s the creation of a continuity of shared capacities to deal with whatever arrives that is the real achievement. Using differences as resources to be able to address surprises and uncertainties is part of this process. Shotter calls this a state of “poised resourcefulness”.

Acceptance and resistance

In this view of ourselves as beings with fuzzy boundaries, bombarded by and sensitive to the unordered happenings and influences of our surrounding circumstances, there is a question about the depth of this fuzziness. How open are we to all of this chaos, and is there some kind of a core that is impervious to influence?

I am thinking of a response to this question as the ‘art of entanglement’ — a capability to be learned and honed through experimentation and experience.

On the one hand, we want to be open to positive and useful influence. We want to be open to the wonders of the world and the unfoldings of the details and glories of our natural surroundings. We want to delight in the joy of communal happenings whether these are organised or spontaneous. We want to be able to accept noticings about ourselves when they increase our sensitivity to our relational footfall and improve our ability to operate in the midst of others.

But the world is also full of negative influences: attempts at coercion and manipulation by distracting us, confusing us and overwhelming our emotional defences. Here we want to practice scepticism and resistance.

Learning the balance between acceptance and resistance is a relational challenge that can be addressed with the help of others. I am imagining our ‘fuzziness’ as a capacity that we continually work on through trial and error and engagement with others. Within it, a denser core of selfhood is formed around our values and our moral determinations. Yet even these may one day be disturbed by the events of a living world.

Appreciation

An unexpected attribute of a more deeply relational being is a sense of appreciation for the emergent capacities of other beings. Close and considered encounters, even with strangers, can reveal details of another’s responses to the world that are different to our own and feel new and astonishing.

Such discoveries — when they are not about opinions, beliefs or finalised assertions, but are simply about the experience of the present moment — reveal the richness of human sensitivities in ways that evoke curiosity and admiration. And appreciation is an invitation to open ourselves up to the myriad possibilities of a truly relational world.

Relational sovereignty

From deeper and considered connection with others, and careful explorations of their entanglements and invitations, comes a sense of oneself that entails a more confident navigation of arriving circumstances and a happier and more easeful entry into new and existing human relationships.

This capacity can be thought of as relational sovereignty — strong and capable selfhood in the midst of a volatile world. It’s a capacity different from leadership, that is about prominence and separation from followers. Relational sovereignty is a fluid attribute, where the orientation and the role shifts and changes according to events and the capacities of others. It’s about the best fit to the the needs of each moment, something that might entail a carefully timed offer to others — or equally, might entail deference to the capability of another self. And unsurprisingly, relational sovereignty is a capacity best practised amongst the relational sovereignties of other people.

A summary of a relational view of human experience

• In a relational world none of us is fixed and final, whether mouse or mountain
• We are more like tendencies, always susceptible to influence
• Influences bear on us from other tendencies and our own physicality
• Our tendencies are like centripetal forces that form a bundle or cluster
• Our relationality constitutes our aliveness and our entanglement
• Our relationality is also a product of our encounters and our experiences
• The influences that arise in and around us can be accidental and unconscious
• They can be generative and affirming, and also disturbing and unsettling
• The balance between acceptance and resistance is the art of entanglement
• To invite others to recognise unfamiliar and un-noticed influences is to practise this art
• Group swarming with differentiated influences makes for productive entanglement
• Now we can move together through the world as constellations of appreciative, unfinalised essences

And so to return to Rovelli and quantum science: our view of relationality seems congruent with his; our sense of unfinalisation seems like a cousin of indeterminacy; but so far, granularity remains to be discovered here. However, there’s more to say about being human and particle physics…

An arc of discovery

The film Particle Fever (*5)appeared in 2013. I saw it at the New Zealand International Film Festival, and was immediately inspired. Not only was it a great story, but I was awed by the efforts and the dedication of those documented in the movie in exploring the effects of collisions between the fundamental elements of the cosmos — and also by the scale of the resources available to their enterprise. I immediately dreamt of constructing something like the Large Hadron Collider to examine the results of deliberately engineered human intra-actions.

Several years later, I have with colleagues been building and testing a facility that we might describe as a Small Human Collider. It operates as a series of workshop sessions for groups of five invited people with ourselves as the organising scientists, with the working title Entangled Bodies.

Using an internet Zoom facility as the container, we orchestrate a sequence of intra-actions or collisions over several sessions with the members of each group. All that I have written above about aspects of relational being are findings from these experiments.

The size of the group is deliberately small because of the richness and variety of responses that we seek to observe. And to cope with this complexity, we ‘slow down’ all of the intra-actions so that the details of the group experience and the exchanges that result become more easily visible.

We rely on the technology of recording to capture short utterances in an iterative pattern of exchanges. This allows us to conduct a series of conversations about our conversation. This way we are able to explore successive layers of mutual affect together.

It’s a ‘human collider’ because the experiment seeks to engage, or ‘collide’ people as far as possible without directing the nature of the collision. All of the intra-actions form a spontaneous chain of consequences from a shared encounter.

Inside the human collider

Our practice design makes a container that is designed to settle people and ensure they are comfortable. We explain that there are no rules for how they are to respond to what happens in the session — that whatever comes up for them is valuable.

Step 1: We begin the experiment by inviting everyone to listen carefully to a short recorded conversation between two people who are entirely unfamiliar to them — the ‘provocation’. We explain that afterwards, we will ask everyone to withdraw from the Zoom chat and to each make a brief recording of their own, using WhatsApp, where they respond to the question, “What did you notice in what you heard?”\

Step 2: We gather up people’s recorded responses on WhatsApp and play them back to the group straight through, from first to last. Then we invite an open discussion with the question, “What did you notice in each others’ noticings?”

We find that immediately, significant differences of orientation and forms of awareness have appeared in the recorded responses. These differences evoke surprise and curiosity. An appetite for further exploration grows.

Step 3: We return to all of the group’s responses, and address each one separately in turn. First, we select the response and play it back to everyone again. Then we ask each other person to discuss what they have heard this time with the question, “What did you notice in this particular response?” When they have all spoken, we invite the responder themselves to speak, with the question, “What did you notice in the experience of being spoken about in this way?”

In this way we open up the discussion, slowing it down further to begin to focus on details, differences and unprompted observations as we make our way around the members of the group. Gradually, we are able to explore further questions, including

• What do you notice in each others’ noticings?
• What do you notice in each others’ noticings of you?
• What do a notice is being invited in your sense of yourself?
• What do you notice is being invited in others’ sense of themselves?

If this seems directive, in practice it is not so at all. The experience becomes one of a series of spontaneous, free-flowing exchanges, as people’s confidence in this level of attentiveness grows. Normally we are diffident about speaking directly about another person to their face. But in the safety of our container, a deeper sense of curiosity about one another’s natures is able to develop, often evoking delight, and eventually prompting appreciation for the honesty in the quirks of outlook and behaviour that are naturally revealed.

Here’s some of what happened for a recent group:

• Person C interpreted the recorded provocation in the light of their own experience with marked generosity and open-ness. The details of their experience invited disclosures of similar honesty from others
• Person R recognised the frame and meta-context of the experience, noticing how new aspects of the ‘inside world’ of the group’s experience was brought out in their conversation. This orientation provided reassurance to the group
• Person P paid close attention to the acoustics of the encounter, and how the movement of the group’s discussion was reflected in shifts in the sound of their voices — inviting others to do the same
• Person T was tuned to the emotional resonance of the exchange, saw different group roles being invited, and explored a social context for the group’s experience. This gave people a sense of how their encounter in the container might play out beyond it
• Person L was interested in the lessons for family life from the recording and the group’s response, noticing who asked questions and what they themselves were learning. Here there was an invitation beyond the details of the experience towards its potential for learning

Products of collision

From our perspective as the scientists conducting the experiment, so far we’ve seen the following:

• Relational discoveries and understandings emerge strongly in small groups in a contained setting
• The richness of human intra-action becomes clearer by slowing down the pace of exchanges
• Recording conversations and then selecting particular utterances for listening again together is a practical means of slowing things down
• The affordances of online gathering can help to focus attention and presence for this kind of multi-layered exchange
• Listening again together immediately reveals unseen differences of orientation and purpose
• Discoveries are richer and more diverse for being unguided and unprompted, arising in effect as spontaneous collisions
• A prospect of collaborative energy between the members of a group arises very quickly
• What begins is a new kind of conversational exchange in which people’s differences are spoken about with warmth and appreciation
• So group members learn how their capacities appear to others, and can start to see how to fit their strengths into a shared endeavour.

What we’ve come to understand is that a shared experience of microattunement— paying attention to carefully circumscribed intra-actions — makes room for unexpected otherness to enter into our own experience. And this effect occurs with remarkable speed.

Possibilities from here

From the outset, our enquiry has made constant use of technology. We began by recording and analysing conversations. Twenty years ago — in order to isolate and organise individual utterances, matching audio files to expert transcriptions — we had to develop our own software. Then, as we continued the work of slowing down people’s intra-actions through a practice of ‘listening again’, we found we could offset the intractability of audio files by encouraging people to record their noticings as brief (1–2-minute) responses. We learned that “less is more” — that brevity increases concentration and focus, allowing the richness of detail and the differences of orientations to be more easily seen.

In the same way, we learned that with sensitive convening, the nature of the online Zoom environment invites concentrated attention and presence. For one thing, the sound environment can be more closely controlled: we can hear each other clearly, and even better than in some face-to-face settings. Recording, listening again and conversational turn-taking all flow easily. Inside the ‘container’ there are few distractions, and the technology becomes largely invisible.

But since this work began two decades ago, technical capabilities around voice and facial recognition, transcription, translation, and pattern recognition have advanced considerably. Healthcare applications that detect bodily responsiveness from smartphones and wearable devices are now being developed, leading towards capabilities like gaze tracking, heart rate monitoring and observations of cognitive function, eg: https://www.cambridgecognition.com/images/uploads/Covid_Caregivers_poster_reduced_size.jpg.

Our enquiry so far has been about skilled embodiment: that by locating selfhood more deeply in the midst of others and the moment-to moment maelstrom of the world, we can ‘make our collisions count for more’. So our efforts have emphasised increasing sensitivity and bodily awareness in learning practices within small groups and teams.

But now there is a question: Can we enhance this enablement with the careful use of newly-developed technologies? Given what we now recognise about the complexity of human encounters, should we try to further increase our sensitivity to what is going on between us with the help of AI tools? Could technology help us to catch and use more of what is going on between us in each moment?

There are lots of reason for extreme caution here. Recent history shows that the introduction of new tools and technologies can easily outstrip our ability to understand and moderate their effects. For example, the widespread use of simplistic algorithms to direct attention based on a history of search tracking produces effects that range from annoying to dangerous.

Digital analysis is always binary — switches and markers are either on or off. But human connections and relationships are non-binary — there’s always room for uncertainty and evanescence. In our work so far we’ve been learning to avoid mechanistic approaches that might lead us to make assumptions or to direct the experience into specific pathways, rather than letting encounters unfold with all their serendipity and creativity.

Suddenly, though, there’s a frisson of a counter-view. Despite the multiplicity of our sense-organs, and the enormous complexity of the intra-actions these invite — so that relationality is the confluence of many different sense-impressions — what if our “fractal improvisational mutual communing” (as Nora Bateson puts it) is not infinite in its variety, but just the combination of a very large number of possible network collisions? Could relationality actually exhibit Rovelli’s granularity? Might there be some kind of fundamental particles of affect and intra-action? And could we discover these as patterns for learning and teaching?

We might put the question in this way: is there an ethical middle ground for synergy between inviting and predicting human behaviours? It’s a difficult question — one that belongs to many other enterprises and is already being considered elsewhere, for example as bioethics. But for our part, we might perhaps lean on difference as our animating principle. Instead of allowing the practice to develop from the predictive insight of a single orientation— like the products of Silicon Valley — continuous exposure to differences of orientation, intention and belief in our explorations might keep our initiative in balance. We shouldn’t be afraid to consider things — but at the same time to keep questioning, being critical, and advancing with caution — in the spirit of Rovelli’s science of successive approximations.

Ontologies of encounter practice

Perhaps we can proceed as follows. To use technology to enhance our collective awareness and noticing capabilities, we have to begin by guessing what is worth noticing in the first place. But these are only guesses. If we are always open to the possibility that our guesses are entirely wrong — and other things matter instead — we can learn as we go and adapt or abandon the approaches we have tried.

So we might start with our aim to improve the relational quality of encounters. And then it makes sense to consider, What kind of qualities do we want to improve?

There might be a spectrum of these qualities. And their importance may differ according to the nature of the encounter. Whatever the purpose, a crucial influencing factor is the number of people ‘in the room’ and who take part in the exchange. A taxonomy of scales is set out here by my colleague Richard Bartlett: https://www.microsolidarity.cc/essays/five-scales-of-microsolidarity

The focus of the present initiative has been at the middle of these scales: the crew or small group, including people in contained gatherings or meetings who are looking to do something together.

Here, from our efforts so far, are some first thoughts about how a verbal ontology of relational practice might be constructed:

On the left-hand side of the table are relatively straightforward practices of productive conversational behaviour — the kinds of behaviours encouraged by a good facilitator or group convener. Moving from left to right across the table are progressively deeper experiences of relationality — understandings of both selfhood and otherness — that increasingly promote opportunities for synergy between the distinctive capabilities of those present. On the right-hand side, the members of a group are so invested in the shared pursuit of their enterprise that their collaborative entanglement becomes entirely spontaneous and unremarked.

It’s worth restating that these are just guesses. For example, there might be good relational flow in a conversation where one person does most of the talking, or where others don’t speak at all. Study of real conversations will discover if these are outliers or regular examples. And generative practice will differ according to the domain of the encounter — for example at a specialised workplace, a public event, or a family meeting.

But this first guess at a generalised ontology builds on many sources — for example the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition from the 1980’s— as well as our own experiments. And a particular memory comes to mind: a Danish pre-school adviser explaining that she could judge the quality of the teaching and learning experience in a particular classroom just by the sound of the room. This points towards the likelihood that a developed ontology of relationality might eventually incorporate a wide range of non-verbal markers of human response, including the tonal features of the exchanges — that, like a piece of music, might help to understand what’s going on.

In this connection, there are some interesting lessons in the world of music from the art of sound design:

In the past, acousticians relied primarily on what was easiest to measure — things like frequencies and reverberation times…(but in) concert-hall design… this started to change in the 1990’s when acousticians began o rely more on their ears, informed by historical precedence, than their measurement devices…psychoacoustics is the study of how mood, colour, sense of place and other emotional factors affect the way people perceive and understand music (from the New Yorker, October 10th 2022)

Understandings from pre-literacy

Explorations in the deployment of human difference have led to an experience of the protocols of encounter on the Māori marae, or meeting ground. The marae is a collection of buildings and spaces designed for events and occasions where people gather for communal purposes, including visits, ceremonies and celebrations, involving a deep connection with the land and ancestry of that place.

A clue to the function of the marae came from a remark to me by Teina Moetara of the Rongowhakaata iwi at Manutuke near Gisborne. “Growing up on the marae,” he explained, “we learn to use our differences as resources for one another.”

An invitation to learn about the encounter practices on the marae came through a series of visits hosted by Teina and Ngapaki Moetara. As a group of learners, we began to understand gatherings there as a carefully sequenced set of movements between manuhiri (visitors) and tangata whenua (the people of that place, or hosts). Each move had a distinct mood and character. Together, they were designed to draw the visitors and hosts together into deeper relationship in readiness for the event’s purpose — and then (perhaps over several days) to lead onwards towards a satisfactory conclusion.

It became clear that the quality of the encounter practice is reinforced by its physical structure and its profoundly metaphorical character. Each part of the marae is configured around a specific set of activities against a background of custom and historical narratives, often illustrated by carvings, weavings or building structures.

What this means is that the sequence of activities on the marae is performed from specific localities. Over time, members of the community learn which place best suits their particular talents and orientations. Yet these places are never fixed and final: there is sufficient mutual understanding that people may substitute for one another if the need arises.

The whole is a physical and social architecture of human intra-action that has evolved in a close-knit, oral society. Respecting this pattern, we would like to explore approaches that might support a movement in today’s individualised world towards something more relational.

The metaphor of a vessel

The Māori marae exemplifies a practice of differential capability that has dimensionality: established orientations that are expressed from specific localities across a network or a landscape of joined-up activities. In our world, there are echoes of historical dimensionality in places of ritual such as parliaments, churches and courts.

But in our present everyday activities, there are no structures and few routines to guide us. Moreover, a strong physical connection to an ancestral locality is largely lost in a world of commuting, travel, migration, global reach and other kinds of displacement.

Our human collider workshops have fostered the recognition that there is a container for the activity: a sense of enclosure, within which encounters are recorded and interpreted as a preparation for dealing with events outside the container. From this has evolved the metaphor of a vessel to represent a group activity or enterprise.

Unlike the marae, the vessel is constantly in movement. We imagine it floating gracefully above a metaphorical landscape of onrushing events. It has portholes and places of observation directed both outside and inside the vessel. A different form of work is enabled from each viewpoint. Through a series of iterations, and inspired in part by Te Ao Māori, we have devised a pattern of entangled orientations that are intended as a complete whole, that makes up an example of the ‘discriminative synergy’ described in the right-hand column in the spectrum of relationality above.

To the front, the orientation is towards what’s coming up. The work is to separate out and distill the events and occurrences that are most important for the enterprise amidst the writhing tendrils of the many external calls for attention. We might call this orientation mattering.

To the rear, the orientation is to the ground beneath, as though there were a kind of sea-anchor that reaches into and trawls the soil and rocks passed over by the vessel. Here the work is to recognise the character of the historical understructure: the understandings and values that can keep the enterprise on an even keel. This orientation is called grounding.

Within the vessel, there is an orientation that reaches all around the interior and embraces everyone inside. The work here is to arrange and manage the circumstances within the vessel to nourish and sustain the physical and mental well-being of the whole crew. This is an orientation of caring.

Also within the vessel is an individually focused orientation with a high degree of acuity. The task here is to pay detailed attention to each utterance and gesture so as to detect what is present but unsaid — to pay attention to what lies beneath the surface of exchanges and bring out any important missings. A name for this orientation is diving.

Finally there is an orientation that attends to the passage and the movements of the vessel both within and in relation to external circumstances. As it moves across the vibrant landscape of the world, we imagine that the vessel leaves a kind of wake or disturbance in the atmosphere behind it. The work here is to capture this disturbance as a narrative account or story of the enterprise. Because this account stitches disparate moments of the crew’s experiences together, we might call this orientation weaving.

Our thinking is that a set of orientations may be normative: that is, they combine to make a whole that best sustains the enterprise. Within this combination, the importance of each orientation may be differently weighted according to circumstances.

Here’s a candidate image for the vessel:

And here it is as a diagram:

The potential contributions of AI

Given recent advances in voice recognition and translation, it is worth imagining some first steps towards the use of AI in furthering the verbal relationality of everyday encounters, in the workplace or otherwise.

One approach might start at the ‘flow’ end of the relational spectrum above. This would involve making judgements about which conversational behaviours are inviting and productive, either within a specific encounter domain or alternatively, without specific reference to context. For example, we could first look to encourage exchanges that feel safe and considerate.

As I understand it, we have to train an AI engine by taking a large sample of recorded material in order to encode the things that we want the engine to look for. To invite good practice, we first have to find examples of good practice and then encode for that.

So we might begin with a small set of variables (say, utterance length, turn-taking, utterance completion, tolerance of pauses), encode some conversational samples for these, and produce some test analyses.

We will then have some intriguing considerations about how to try connecting the AI engine to actual conversational practice.

In the first instance, we might work asynchronously. With a test group, a conversation is chosen, recorded and analysed. The results are passed back to the group for consideration and potential incorporation into later practice.

A next stage might be to explore real-time analysis and response. Here a running or a periodic analysis might be available to members of the group who can make decisions about whether or not to intervene to try to influence the flow of exchanges.

The possibility of real-time intervention against a running transcript of the discussion is also an affordance for a valuable aspect of our experimental practice so far — the practice of ‘listening again’ to a particular utterance to divine further layers of meaning and understanding.

All of this supposes a very different experience of conversational working than one without intervention. Real-time feedback and learning may turn out to be be disturbing, distracting, confusing and annoying for participants. Carefully staged experiments will be needed to discover what people might accept and find useful.

Directions for a research and development trajectory

Some thoughts about our next steps, either as sequential, parallel or alternative tasks, and questions these entail:

1.Discuss and consider the validity and practicality of ontologies of relational practice. Are there ‘good conversational practices’ with general application? Or does ‘good’ alter with context, and in different domains of activity? Could they form a spectrum of deepening relationality, and how could we tell if this is happening? How does this idea fit with existing research orientations around the affordances of human encounter within the social and physical sciences, and can we build on these?

We might look for contributions to these questions from a range of fields, including psychology; family and personal therapies; interpersonal skill development in hospital and medical practice; group organisation and management practices; and neuroscience and cognitive studies, as well as others like ethnology and media studies.

2.Extend our Entangled Bodies initiative towards a domain of urgent present need. Can we find a situation where the recognition and deployment of difference can build demonstrably stronger — even mission-critical — capability? One where there is scope for demonstrating the value of the intervention by comparing parallel or ‘before-and-after’ effects?

We might look for circumstances where agencies or operations with distinctive traditions and orientations are to be brought together to build better shared understanding and joined-up responsiveness. This way we could add real value through the deployment of difference. We can also build a large body of recorded conversational practice to draw on in further learning.

3.Set up an initial experiment in enhancing conversational productivity that uses AI. Can we identify a suitable body of recorded conversational material for analysis and AI training? And can we find and organise a conversational domain with willing participants for some early experiments?

There is a tempting array of sensory observations that we might explore here, including text, sound, image, gesture and other kinds of biomarkers.

Our enterprise has been directed towards the possibility of recognising and improving human relationality. But beyond this prospect lurk some more open-ended questions: What do our doings do? In our dealings with one another and the world, what happens? What matters? What makes a difference? Our efforts might contribute to their answers.

Ideally we need a professional research partner for this activity. Could we find a partner that could eventually follow this development across a spectrum of relational practices and through a variety of sensory faculties, technologies and apparatuses?

There’s a large agenda in all of this, and it might best be initiated by association with existing research and development efforts rather than as a stand-alone enterprise.

Postscript

I’ve been reading Rovelli’s writings as I’ve been drafting this piece. And I’ve just come across some passages that seem to connect us even more closely. In The Order of Time, he discusses the nature of human identity, proposing that there are three ingredients: first, that each of us “identifies with a point of view in the world. The world is reflected in each one of us in a rich spectrum of correlations essential for our survival.” This precisely is our notion of orientation.

Second, he suggests that “in the process of reflecting on the world, we organise it into entities…In particular, we group into a unified image the processes…that are other human beings, because our life is social…they are knots of cause and effect that are deeply relevant to us.” I am astonished by how closely the language here mirrors out own.

But then he introduces a third ingredient that lurks behind our typology, but one that we have not specifically named: memory. “Our present swarms with traces of our past,” he says.

“I am my thoughts full of the traces of the phrases I am writing; I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself.”

How could I not be moved by this reminder? Not that our memories exist in ourselves, but the opposite: that ourselves exist as memories? And that these are what we bring to others in all of our dealings — No-thing but our accumulated and recalled ways of being human in the world?

Wellington, 25th October 2022

References:

(1a) Carlo Rovelli (2016) Reality Is Not What It Seems, Allen Lane, London

(1b) Carlo Rovelli (2018) The Order of Time, Riverhead Books, New York

(1c) Carlo Rovelli (2020) Helgoland, Allen Lane, London

(1d) Carlo Rovelli (2020) There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, Allen Lane, London

(2) Eva Pallesen (2022) Slippery Inquiry: Engaging with the Vague and Half-Glimpsed, Qualitative Inquiry 1–7, Sage Publications

(3) John Shotter (2005) Understanding Process from Within: An Argument for ‘Withness’ Thinking, Organization Studies 27(4): 585–604

(4) Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell

(5) Mark Levinson (2013), director, Particle Fever, a documentary film by Anthos Media