Difference-making from a Cybernetic Perspective: The Role of Listening and Its Circularities

Take as a premise that listening (and its circularities) becomes an essential practice for making a difference in the world and represents a critical concept in the design of a participative-dialogic society. The speaker-respondent circularity turns listening into a conversation. Participants set aside their habitual or socially prescribed ways of interacting and explore other ways to be present. This perspective on listening and difference-making suggests an alternative (not mutually exclusive, yet distinct) approach to the human attribute called consciousness, from one characterized by purposiveness to one focused on presence. I claim that the idea of a participative-dialogic society as desirable is so alien to prevailing ways of thinking about the world and how it works (and must work) that it would be dismissed as “anarchist” if openly promoted—that is, it implies an alternative to the reward-oriented hierarchy approach to the design of economic and social systems that dominates societal structures world-wide. By advancing the idea anyway, I expect to make a difference. With anarchical intentions in mind, I propose listening, thinking, and designing kinetically (in contrast to kinematically). Listening and its circularities replaces, or at least offers an alternative to, reward-oriented hierarchy as a way of thinking about difference-making in the world. “...one should bear in mind that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new system of things...” Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, The Prince Introduction: Listening and Its Circularities The ideas in this paper arose from the theme of the annual conference of the American Society for Cybernetics held August 9-15, 2011, in Richmond, Indiana, USA: Listening. I latched onto the theme from my long-standing interest in conversation and from the speaker-respondent circularity in conversations that could not happen without listening. I refer the reader to a paper by Ranulph Glanville on Listening (1999) that further stimulated my thinking. 1 Prepared for the American Society for Cybernetics Conference on “Listening,” Richmond, Indiana, USA, August 9-15, 2011. 2 Indiana University East, Richmond, IN 47374, USA. Email: [email protected]. 3 From the conference description: “As a subject, Cybernetics informs circular or recursive systems, and listening provides a key to circularity in human systems, allowing us to respond in appropriate manners, possibly leading into new territory, generating new ideas and creating choice. This is cybernetic circularity