Inside processes: Transitory understandings, action guiding anticipations, and withness thinking

Abstract

"To talk and to think, not about process, but in relation to it, is not easy. \nMany brilliant writers and thinkers in the recent past have helped us to \nthink about process from the outside, about processes that we merely observe \nas happening ‘over there’, but few have helped us to think in terms \nof our own, spontaneously responsive involvement in ongoing processes \nfrom the inside. Yet practitioners need a style of thought and talk that allows \nthem uniquely to affect the flow of processes from within their own \nunique living involvements with them. Crucially, I will argue, this kind of \nresponsive action and understanding only becomes available to us in our \nrelations with living forms if we enter into dialogically-structured relations \nwith them. It remains utterly unavailable to us as external observers. \nI will call this kind of thinking, thinking-from-within or “withnessthinking,” \nto contrast it with the “aboutness-thinking” that is more familiar \nto us. In articulating its nature, I will draw on the work of Bakhtin and \nWittgenstein, along with Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty, and Polanyi. Central \nto it and quite unavailable to us in aboutness-thinking, is our subsidiary \nawareness (Polanyi, 1958) of certain “action guiding anticipations” and \n“transitory understandings” that become available to us within any ongoing \nprocesses in which we happen to be engaged, such that we can always \nhave an anticipatory sense of at least the style or the grammar of what next \nmight occur." (author's abstract)

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