Trialectic

Pasted from Blog post needs formatting to template Illustrations are in the linked blog posts but need redrawing

Practice

Tke two familiar things, the dichotomy, and a third element, an Aleph (to reference Borges). The third element needs to have mystery, ambiguity or more critically something that cannot be resolved other than by radical rethinking and possible radical different actions.

Provisional set of four types. In each triad people position ‘things; in a balance between the three extremes and ideally without knowledge of where other people have placed them – them we look at the pattern overall. The triads are displaced by 45º and should be rotated in practice as a way of disrupting pattern entrainment

The standard dichotomy

This is the two-column table in which an idealistic future is contrasted with a rejection of the past. To this, we add a third time, namely an aporetic statement (scroll back to my three posts on creating aporia for ideas here) which by its nature makes it difficult to put things into the two categories. It might be as simple as some aspect of evil which people thought was OK, so if I contrasted scientific management with agile (a lot of people do this) I might put apprentice approaches to management and expectation of lifetime loyalty as the aporetic statement.

The hypocrisy dichotomy

There we have the difference between espoused (what people say) with enacted (what people do). To this, we add a this which is the question ’What was enabled’ which makes people think about what the affordances were. I may have wanted to carry through on promises but the circumstances had radically changed and it just wasn’t possible. Life changes and we may have been unrealistic, this triggers the group to think about that aspect.

The design dichotomy

In some ways the closest to Soja. The dichotomy is between where we are and what we can imagine, so we add to that methods to get people to transform how they think about that, Future Backwards as a method does this in a different way in that it makes the hyper positive and hyper negative pathways realisable through an Act of God or an Act of the Devil. Here I mean it more in the sense of creating a different space, mystical in nature, from which the difference between reality and imagination gets confused. Some of the aesthetic forms of aporia could do this.

The second chance

Apologies, but the Catholic in me couldn’t resist this one. Given a bifurcation between Heaven and Hell the ideas of Purgatory and Limbo always seemed attractive and the latter always had more interesting people. This is a peace and reconciliation intervention that seeks to identify pathways to redemption and the way in which learning can be achieved, that doesn’t have to be suffering by the way. I almost called this one the Dante Gambit but resisted temptation.

Theory

Underlying ideas

• Lefebvre, with a heavy focus on dialectic, distinguishes between objective (espace percu), conceived (espace concu) and lived space (espace vecu) the last being a dialectical result of the interactions between the first two.
• Foucault’s heterotopia has a mystical element to it, a sense of the disturbing but transforming other that stands (this is my interpretation I think) which is a dialectical resolution of the contrast between Utopia and Dystopia
• Borges talks about the Aleph as a point in space that contains all other points – there are mathematical and cabalistic aspects to the word as well.
• Soja sought to bring all of that together, along with Feminist writings in his idea of the Thirdspace in which “everything comes together, subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and unconsciousness, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history” It is a different way of thinking and acting.

THere he link here to the idea or the Trinity in western thinking – and of course all the above authors come from that tradition, is no surprise. But there are also links to Daoism and various non-Judea-Christian forms. As it happens I am also reading Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem at the moment (wonderful ideas terrible writing but that may be the translation). Then we get to the triple point at the heart of Cynefin and it looks like there is something to the number three as well illustrated by this quote from Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad:

It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed.