Steve article Rhythm and IC 2017.docx

Holmes, Stephen (2017). Rhythm and Intercultural Communication: Edward Hall’s and John Dewey’s Search for the Aesthetic Experience. Intercultural Communication: Strategies, Challenges and Research. Brenda Griffin (Ed), New York: Nova Science Publishers, 89-117 Chapter 4 Rhythm and Intercultural Communication: Edward Hall’s and John Dewey’s Search for the Aesthetic Experience Stephen Holmes * Corresponding author: Waldgenzweg 5, 69118 Heidelberg, Germany, Email: [email protected].* Dept. of International Business, Hochschule der Wirtschaft für Management, Mannheim, Germany Abstract This article will attend to the issues of rhythm and the aesthetic experience in the late works of Edward Hall, the founder of the discipline intercultural communication (IC), and in the ideas of John Dewey, especially in his Art as Experience. In this light, the author considers contemporary IC theory surprisingly silent. It is often too abstract and constricted (e.g., in the areas of intercultural competence and sensitivity). There is a general lack of a balanced organic unity of competence/ performance, difference/similarity, mind/body, organism/environment, space/time, inside/outside and beauty/disgust. Rhythm and other related categories like synchronicity will be considered bridges to aesthetics as a major generic category for theorizing about experience and communication. Dewey’s ideas on the aesthetic experience are to be considered more complete than Hall’s idea of rhythm but, nevertheless, these two explorations will be shown to be very commensurable. The search for interdisciplinary opportunities for possible dialogues with biology, systems and the arts is of major concern to the author as well. Finally, the conclusion will focus on the question of the consequences of this discussion for the practice of IC training, teaching and coaching. Keywords: aesthetic experience, context, Edward Hall, embodiment, experience, interaction, intercultural communication, intercultural competence, John Dewey, nonverbal communication, performance, rhythm, situation, transaction Introduction Rhythm is it! (2004) “The Warriors…passed the ball six times with so much speed that the defenders helplessly scrambled a step or two behind…. ‘A play where the flow is perfect, the rhythm is perfect,’ (Steve) Curry said. That is how he defined beautiful basketball.” (Branch 2016) * * * * * * * The prize-winning documentary film Rhythm is it! portrays an actual dance project in Berlin which included a dance performance in cooperation with the Berlin Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. The dance performers were children and teenagers recruited from some of the working class districts of Berlin. This film, including this simple title as a statement, represents best my motivation for writing this article. In effect, I want to highlight rhythm as a major, generic category for discourse about intercultural communication (IC) as a discipline. My special interest is, in fact, nothing new. Years ago both the founder of IC, Edward Hall, and the Pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey, spent considerable intellectual energy focusing on the importance of rhythm to move closer to life experience and performance. Aside from the later ideas of Hall, I have not found any evidence in the intercultural communication literature that this same motivation exists. Milton Bennett (2013) attempted to introduce embodiment into IC theory which is an important bridge to rhythm and the aesthetic experience. Also Marshal Singer (1987, 1998) years ago attempted to include the senses in IC theory. Other than these two attempts by Bennett and Singer, I have found little evidence in the IC literature of a sense of importance of including generic vocabulary in IC such as rhythm, aesthetic experience, performance and interaction. (Bennett 2013, Spencer-Oatey and Franklin 2009 as well as Burkhart 2003 perhaps are exceptions; they did in fact treat the category interaction as a major category. Seelye 1997, 287 mentions Hall’s interest in rhythm.) My reference to basketball is meant to elaborate on the film title Rhythm is it! and its relationship to aesthetics. There are a number of reasons for my quoting from a basketball context. First, aesthetics as experience does not need to be confined to the specialists in the arts and music. Playing basketball, like any activity, can be aesthetically experienced. Second, Steve Curry used the vocabulary of rhythm and flow which, supported by Edward Hall and John Dewey, are key vocabulary for describing the aesthetic experience. Finally, basketball can undoubtedly be experienced as an embodied intelligence, a balance, rhythm and flow of body and mind. Embodiment, rhythm, flow, synchronicity (in sync, out of sync), play, interaction, transaction and performance become the etic vocabulary for talking about aesthetic experience in the game of basketball and any other area of daily life, including intercultural communication. Subject and object, tool and application, efficiency and technical rationality become secondary vocabulary for the initial learning phases of any competence. Competence, however, remains an empty abstraction without performance. At the moment performance begins, in the short or long run, the performers are expected to let go and move into closer proximity to and unity with the rhythm and flow of life, with the here and now of performance. According to Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2007), a unique mixture of philosopher and dancer, a precondition to the beauty of dance is the pre-reflective letting go of the mechanical experience of the body and mind. Just be this unity in dance. Be the emergence of space/time. Be the body/mind. Competence or skill “is had precisely at the point at which the body ceases to be an object manipulated toward a given end and becomes, instead, a lived meaning or lived experience of meaningful gestures.” (21) Christopher Alexander (2005, ch. 19), speaking of the configuration and unfolding of color in architecture, expresses this search for organic unity in a similar tone. In short, let go of one’s technical knowledge of how to paint and build, also let go of the fear of the result, and just be. Let the configuration and creation process unfold, step by step, punctuated with intermittent reflection on the immediate and final vision of what one is building, mutually adjusting one’s work to the vision and the vision to the building process. In his earlier work (1979, 16), he describes the timeless way of building as “learning the discipline—and shedding it.” The thread running through these quotes and paraphrasing from basketball, dance and building is expansion, expansion of our understanding of the aesthetic experience into every walk of life, expansion of the body or mind as separate into a wider reality of body/mind in context, expansion of the narrow abstractions and injunctions concerning intercultural competence to be included in the broader experience of competence/performance. Also, intercultural sensitivity to difference can be integrated as a phase of a unity of sensitivity to difference/similarity. In terms of intercultural communication, verbal, nonverbal communication and context can be integrated into a wider human experience. A dialectical expansion of technology is also present in any discipline; first, learn the technique or discipline as thoroughly as possible, then let go of it, “shed” it. The technology, however, remains in a tacit knowledge form (Michael Polanyi) and can be retrieved again if the performer is “out of sync”. Nonverbal communication/context (without language) deserves being treated with respect; this is the predominant experience of nonhuman animals, human babies, dance, pantomime, silent movies, Quaker meetings, meditation, and much of art and instrumental music. The assumption here is that the flow of nonverbal life is deeper than language and structures. At least one renowned philosopher of language, Mark Johnson (2007), who has written considerably about embodiment and aesthetics, also believes that the nonverbal is deeper than language. In the metaphor of map (language and thinking) and territory (the flow of life and experience), which was the key metaphor in discussions found in the work of Gregory Bateson (1972), Korzybski (1994/1933), Edward Hall (1983, 131) and much earlier in the work of William James (1916), the territory is deeper and broader than the map, and it includes the map. The map may be an “as if” of the territory but it can never be the territory. Edward Hall believed that the nonverbal communication, including context, is deeper, often out of consciousness, and more tacit than verbal, human communication. From an evolutionary point of view it is also deeper, moving back to the beginnings of life, long before the rise of human beings as languaging and art, music and tool producing organisms. Hall, who had originally written about intercultural space and intercultural time, had to find a way to bring them back together in their original organic unity of performing in the here and now. He finally states in Beyond Culture (1976, 119) that “all situational behavior has a temporal and spatial… dimension.” In other words, time and space are dimensions of the same unity of experience. In my view, this is quite consistent with his becoming more concerned in his later works with the experience of rhythm, synchronicity and dance in communication and life. Such unity as an experience can be carried over to the dimensions of competence and performance in intercultural communication. One central question for intercultural trainers, teachers and coaches is how a reexamination of Edward Hall’s ideas with the intention of bringing them closer to an organic unity can help our professional performance in intercultural communication? My abbreviated answer—most of my answer will be in the Conclusion--to this question is the following: In this reexamination we will discover an increasing concern for the performance in addition to the competence dimension of communication. As mentioned above, shedding the mechanical side of learning skills is necessary to reach the unity of space/time, rhythm, synchronicity (in sync and out of sync), and dance. Rhythm becomes a key facilitating idea for training, teaching and coaching and, furthermore, these become embodied performances. My references to Dewey and other sources (ex. from the arts, music and biology) are actually meant as a support for Hall and as indications as to how to move on. In this light, another central question is how we can use the ideas of John Dewey and these other sources to integrate the aesthetic experience into IC as a discipline? Dewey, one of the most remarkable Pragmatist philosophers of the first half of the 20th Century, developed a theory of rhythm and the aesthetic experience in his work Art as Experience (1934). This discourse about the experiential organic unity of body/mind, organism/environment, space/time, inside/outside and beauty/ugliness is meant to help make IC’s theory and practice more coherent, systematic and closer to everyday reality of performance. As an important additional result, value becomes more integrated into the whole experience, including the experience of theorizing. The main difference between Dewey’s and Hall’s explorations is that Dewey’s ideas on rhythm and aesthetic experience are more complete; he achieved this by integrating them into a broader theory of the situation, experience and inquiry. Lack of Embodiment in Intercultural Competence Before we continue to explore these issues, I would like to give a short review of what I tried to do in my last article which appeared in Contemporary Pragmatism (Summer 2016). In that article, with the help of the ideas of John Dewey, I tried to repair the fractured theoretical character of intercultural competence as a sub-discipline of IC. I argued that intercultural competence was fractured because it is only half of the reality of competence and communication. Competence is a potential; if it stands alone as an abstraction, it is empty. If it stands together with performance in the here and now, it can be full and alive. This I learned from Dewey. Dewey used the vocabulary of potential and interaction in experience. Experience always has a sense of the “I can (“we can”) and “I am doing” (“we are doing”), tending toward an organic unity. (By “organic unity” I mean the organism’s tendency to perceive the whole and to search for equilibrium.) While IC uses the term competence and occasionally one can recognize the term interaction, they need to be brought again back together. Without the here and now—and William James would add this—there is no interaction and without interaction there is no possibility to correct mistakes, therefore, no possibility to learn, resulting in zero competence. Adding performance to our concerns as IC trainers helps us to open up a pathway to a dialogue with the specialists from the arts; it gives life to our discipline. One concept which is extremely close to intercultural competence is intercultural sensitivity. In my article (2016, 258) I maintained that intercultural sensitivity to difference tends to be reified in the IC literature and training; there is a widespread bias against sensitivity to similarity. Even if there is a tendency in the West to place too much emphasis on expected similarity, this does not change its status as organically unified similarity/difference. In the meantime I have found one textbook by Michael Prosser (1985, 15-16) that agrees: “…it is inherent in the study and effective practice of intercultural communication that we learn and apply a potential balance between the two opposites, similarities and differences.” Milton Bennett (1998a, 2013) proposed that intercultural communication is concerned with sensitivity to difference and monocultural communication is concerned with sensitivity to similarity, assuming a kind of neutrality. My answer is that there is no neutrality here. There is a bias built into this distinction in that people whose style of communication is monocultural are guilty of enthnocentrism. Being evaluated as monocultural is certainly not to one’s advantage when applying for a job or being considered for promotion in a globalized company. Furthermore, even if we accept sensitivity to difference as a major event in IC, the event itself is part of a broader situation whose construction has to be shared with other organisms. Constructing a situation—or what Hall (1976, ch. 9) calls a situational frame--is always a co-construction by more than one organism in communication and this situation is always shared; i.e., similarity and discernment work together in an organic unity. Depth and the Senses In his even earlier work which he co-authored with Edward Stewart (1991, chapter 2), Bennett undertook a serious analysis of the senses, perception and cognition. As he moves toward thought and language, he points out that there is a Western philosophical assumption—I would call it a bias--of depth. Above the surface of consciousness are the senses and below it is perception, moving deeper to cognition and language as well as other more complex symbol systems. This understanding of depth in our thinking is quite helpful in understanding Western mindsets. I maintain that the Pragmatist philosophers recognized this deep Western bias and turned it on its head. The surface is the cognition and abstractions of complex symbol systems. These are maps in the map/territory metaphor. The territory is deeper, broader and more chaotic. It is the river or the flow of life, stream of consciousness and perception. The senses, of course, are the source in closest proximity to this ever moving territory, are therefore deeper than thought and symbols, and more accessible to the experience of feelings, beauty and ugliness. Antonio Damasio’s (1999) neurological view of emotions and feelings is quite commensurable with this Pragmatist view. Emotions are disturbances from the organism/environment that have not yet been perceived. As clarity of experience emerges, they become consciously experienced as feelings. Emotions are deeper and unconscious; feelings emerge from emotions and become conscious. Bennett evidently does not view this deep Western thinking habit as some sort of universal. In his thoughtful comparison of the American and Japanese communication style, the Japanese deeper pattern is analogic and more dependent on the nonverbal than in the West. I infer from this that the Japanese pattern is closer to the sensual and perceptual and, like Dewey and James, does not imply a bias against the senses. Bennett’s and the views of Dewey and James, on this point, are commensurable. Bennett’s later work (2013, 42-49) stands somewhat alone in his attempt to integrate the body (embodiment), interaction, context and construction of boundaries of the organism into the discipline of intercultural communication. This article is meant to continue with Bennett’s exploration by revisiting the roots of our discipline, i.e., the ideas of Edward Hall, and by playing with additional potential of what Dewey would call generic categories (e.g., rhythm). The Need for a Unity of the Senses and Motoric Worth mentioning, however, is the work of Marshal Singer (1987, 1998), who based his theory of IC on the five senses as forms of perception or discrimination which serve as good docking points for a dialogue between biology and cultural anthropology. The senses are given biologically, while the various, particular emphases on one or another of the senses are more related to what human organisms learn from their culture. For example, in southern France one can experience a culture at the market place which highlights the visual, taste and smell. In another culture or subculture, like the classical music tradition in Germany or Austria, listening may be more pronounced and cultivated. What is missing in Singer is the lack of a unity of the sensor-motoric experience (including the five senses, feelings, kinesics, proprioception as well as the sense of balance in the organism). The categories experience and situation are also needed to bring his theory closer to practice, interaction and performance in the here and now. (One expert in intercultural communication, Michael Paige 1993, has consistently used the category of the intercultural experience which would indicate his being at least aware of the work of John Dewey.) A good example of the necessary organic unity of the senses and the motoric is the case of Evelyn Glennie (2003). Evelyn Glennie is a renowned Scottish, deaf percussionist. In a workshop she held in Monterey, California, she maintained and demonstrated that she listens with her whole body, even though she is deaf. She could still open up her whole body as a listening, performing organism. Her case can only be understood if we conceptualize the senses and motoric as a united organic system. If the ear drums do not vibrate, then the whole body and her drums vibrate, allowing her to “listen”. In fact, her example became very political. In this same workshop she told a story about her applying for a music academy in Great Britain when she was a young aspiring musician just out of school. The academy administration first balked. They just could not imagine how a deaf person could become a serious musician; after all, she had to use her ears to hear what she and the other musicians were playing. Finally, after some convincing they accepted her and not only that. The result was the passing of a law in Great Britain that performance was the only criteria for acceptance into music academies and orchestras. (I often give this as an example of deep, ethnocentrism in Western society based on the false assumption that hearing or listening can only be performed through the ears. Another example of a deep blind spot was our lack of recognition that American Sign Language of the deaf is a language. From the French Revolution up to the late 1950s, we could not understand that a grammar could be spatial and not necessarily related to speaking through our mouths. See Sacks 1990 and Schaller 1991.) Not only is the assumption of the unity of the sensor-motoric missing in IC (including Bennett’s, Singer’s and Paige’s explorations, as well as those of Watzlawick and other systems thinkers), the pre-reflective and aesthetic experience as major categories are also missing. If we assume that the aesthetic experience is a major source of embodied value, then this is a major gap in IC theory. And, surprisingly, the beginnings of an exploration in this direction have already been made in the ideas of Hall (IC), of Gregory Bateson (systems) and of the mature Dewey in 1934 (Pragmatism). The Need for More Exploration Why have we not followed up on their explorations? I can only guess that we have found ourselves caught in a deep bias against the aesthetic and religious experience, also against what William James earlier in the 20th Century called “pure experience”, the acceptance of which constituted one of Dewey’s basic assumptions for Art as Experience. James’ idea of “pure experience” (2008/1912, ch. 2) could also be the target of another bias, quite prevalent in the scientific community, against the meditative experience in which the barriers between body and mind, organism and environment, inside and outside, etc. tend to disappear. The meditative experience is also very close to James’ idea of consciousness as primarily an affair of breathing. (2008/1912, 17) James tended to use vocabulary and metaphors from the arts, especially in the last part of Principles of Psychology published in 1890. He had suffered from depression as a young man because his father forced him to study the sciences rather than the arts. In order to cure his depression he spent time in various European spas. Having come from a wealthy New York family who had a second residence in England, money was not an issue. During his life in Europe he had the opportunity to learn about art, especially in France. This experience, along with his many discussions with his famous brother Henry, who was very well versed in the arts, seems to be the background for James’ sympathy for the arts. However, he did not develop a theory of aesthetics. Twenty-four years after James’ death in 1910, Dewey, strongly influenced by James, finally developed such a theory in 1934 in his work Art as Experience. (Loerzer 2014; Shusterman 2011) One other contribution to Dewey’s theoretical development in the direction of embodiment, experience and aesthetics was the influence on his life by Frederic Matthias Alexander in 1916. Dewey had had a life crisis around 1914-1916. According to Bloch (2004, 106), “Before 1914, Dewey, brought up during the American Civil War, which had devastated his family, had expressed strongly pacifist views; but when the first World War broke out, he argued passionately in favor of the allied cause, a stand which alienated colleagues and students and contributed to a personal crisis in his life.” Dewey was helped out of this crisis through his practicing body work—now called Alexander technique—under Alexander’s supervision. Dewey continued to practice the Alexander technique into his later years, apparently helping him to develop and integrate his ideas of the body/mind and the aesthetic experience more effectively into his own philosophy. The experience of his own body helped him to avoid the trappings of intellectualism. Why Aesthetics? Why focus on aesthetics at all? Many students and colleagues in my last two years before my retirement could not understand why aesthetics could be important to business and organizational development. My reply is that it is easier to argue for embodiment through the path of the aesthetic experience. Once embodiment is established, it is easier to integrate theoretically the aesthetic experience with the experience of value. Religious experience would be another source of value, but for the vast majority of the history of humankind there has been no serious distinction between aesthetic and religious experience. There was also normally a direct connection to function (a spear with beautiful markings on it). A final source of embodied value would be that which biologists study such as the physiological, adaptive responses to the needs of the human organism, for example, expressed in homeostasis. Aesthetics as the embodied experience of beauty and disgust can be a basis for dialoging with the biologists who are concerned with evolution. All organisms discriminate; discrimination implies value which is embodied in the organisms’ adaptive responses to their changing environments. Gerald Edelman (2006, 30, 64) views biological adaptive value as the result of an implicit bias in the discrimination process as well as in the organism’s need to constrain this same process. In explaining what he means by the principle of reentry and circuits in the brain, Edelman draws on the music metaphor: “The net effect of the reentrant traffic is the time-locked or synchronized firing of neuronal groups in particular circuits. This provides the coordination in time and space which would otherwise have to be assured by some form of computation. To help imagine how reentry works, consider a hypothetical string quartet made up of willful musicians. Each plays his or her own tune with different rhythm. Now connect the bodies of all the players with very fine threads (many of them to all body parts). As each player moves, he or she will unconsciously send waves of movement to the others. In a short time, the rhythm and to some extent the melodies will become more coherent. The dynamics will continue, leading to more coherent output. Something like this also occurs in jazz improvisation, of course, without the threads.” (2006, 30) In short, Edelman is describing rhythm and coordination which can serve as a bridge to the aesthetic experience as well as to Dewey’s philosophy in general. Hall did not use the generic category of coordination but rhythm he did use, starting in Beyond Culture and finishing in The Dance of Life. Furthermore, the aesthetic experience, like any experience, can only take place in a here and now situation; William James would add a specific this. Here is the connection to the previous discussion of the importance of including performance in the organic whole of competence/performance. One way of overcoming the mechanical dualism of subject and object is to add time to it. The words “add time to it” can, of course, be misleading because the deeper flow is already a unity of space/time. My language use of adding one idea to the other simply expresses the fact that I can abstract twice from the flow and add these abstractions together. This is the moment when letting go of the opposites such as space/time, subject/object, inside/outside and tool/application can lead to a flow, or at least tend successfully or not so successfully toward an equilibrium. Perceiving and participating in rhythm is the desired result. One way to loosen up frames--which is not only of concern to the systems researchers but also implied in Hall’s chapter on the situation in Beyond Culture--in a human organism’s behavior is to let go and let the rhythm take over one’s body/mind or organism/environment. If we follow the disciplines of improvisation in jazz, dance and theater, the principle of integrating mistakes into the whole is what success is all about. Embrace the mistake. Embrace the enemy, e.g., in the martial arts. Paraphrasing Evelyn Glennie (2003), embrace one’s drum in its “raw” experience. Become one with the raw experience of one’s instrument. Expand the whole body to listen. (Chen and Starosta 2005 is the only IC textbook which takes listening seriously as a phase of communication performance.) According to Sheets-Johnstone (2015, 1966, 19), dance, for example, always involves a unity of space/time. She maintains in her search for a phenomenology of dance: “One cannot speak of being at a temporal moment without speaking at the same time of being at a particular place at a particular moment. Space and time, whether objectively constituted or as lived, are never actually separate structures.” When Hall uses the metaphors of rhythm, dance, and synchronicity in communication, I maintain, he is doing what Sheets-Johnstone is assuming about dance. He is taking his life work on intercultural space and time and trying to find a way to bring these back together where they belong. The attempt to make rhythm, dance, and synchronicity into major categories is at the same time an attempt to move beyond metaphor by assuming they are actually basic, generic vocabulary—or perhaps more basic metaphors--for understanding communication and experience and thereby integrating value through the aesthetic experience. The industrial, mechanical principle of technical perfection is the opposite of rhythm; however, since a machine can never run completely perfectly, certainly not forever, it can also be experienced as beautiful, if I assume that imperfection is needed for beauty. Let us take as an example some people’s admiration of the beauty of old cars. Old cars fit into a larger context which as a whole may be beautiful and the machine is only a part of it (for example, an old sports car being driven along a beautiful coastline by a beautiful woman). Whatever we experience on such an intense level, this experience is a play between whole and parts; the whole is the coastline and the ocean; the part is the car and sitting in the car is a beautiful woman. Pivoting back and forth between wholes and parts and back to wholes is what Dewey called transactions. He feared that the term interaction is too easy to reify, even though for most of his intellectual life he used this term, as did his good friend and colleague George Herbert Mead. (Much of social psychology and some interculturalists use this term also as a major category and they credit this use to George Herbert Mead.) The aesthetic, religious and biological sources of value are based on experience (including the experience of needs) and on the adaptation pressure on the human organism in a changing environment. The traditional, Western discussions of value are more focused on cognitive and behavioral utilitarian principles or on imperatives. My working assumption for now is that these principles or imperatives are ultimately a result of aesthetic or religious experience and of the often subconscious but also conscious, social and biological needs of the human organism. Principles and imperatives being a result does not make them less significant; they lead to and reflect rule-making for the construction of institutions, all of which fulfill a deep human need of a social order with injunctions and limits. When I use the term aesthetic experience, I also mean the experience of disgust, ugliness and pathology. There is nothing more socially ugly than the crimes in the Third Reich or the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. In other words, there are limits to the claim that the experiences of beauty or ugliness are relative and subjective just as there are limits to the claim of a perfect objectivity. The aesthetic, critical question would be what we human organisms can learn from these awful experiences. Edward Hall’s Idea of Rhythm During the beginnings in the 1950s to the 1970s of the discipline called intercultural communication (IC), its founder Edward Hall was more interested in the theory and practice of intercultural space and time. By practice, more specifically, he was primarily concerned with designing and conducting training for the simple fact that in the 1950s the US Government had been paying him to develop intercultural training for people going overseas. As a consequence, his earlier work (1959, 1969) focused on intercultural dimensions of space and time as these are embedded in the aspects of intercultural verbal and nonverbal communication, which are then united in intercultural contexts. Today, intercultural communication teachers and trainers seem to have only appropriated Hall’s vocabulary of personal space, monochromic/polychronic time, and high/low context culture. Hall’s ideas as a total life exploration seem to be on the way to being forgotten. One of the main purposes of this article is to suggest the urgency of taking his exploration more seriously by trainers, teachers and textbook writers of intercultural communication. His focus on rhythm and synchronicity in communication and life takes on increasing significance in his later work (one chapter in Beyond Culture and the last half of The Dance of Life). Hall did not develop a theory, per se, of intercultural, embodied aesthetics of communication; however, as he matured in his thinking he started to use vocabulary which is very compatible with a theory of aesthetics. He did, however, apply the metaphors rhythm, dance, synchronicity and flow systematically. His concern for architecture as a means to the creation of company cultural, aesthetic space also became more prominent. Few trainers and teachers of IC are aware that Hall and his wife Mildred (1975; see also Mozingo 2011) wrote a short monograph about the building of the new John Deere headquarters in Moline, Illinois in the early 1960s; this case study was one of the first examples of a study of the aesthetics of organizational culture and development and shows how this John Deere culture was related to the broader context of the agricultural history of the US. In short, beautiful or ugly buildings, landscaping, gardening and interior decoration communicate to people something in their bodies and minds, a feeling of well-being or a sense of horror, knowing that they may have to work in these environments for years. Buildings, landscapes, gardens and interior decoration also communicate and all of these are at least in part cultural extensions of the body. Hall (1983, 165) had read John Dewey’s Art as Experience. Dewey frequently used the generic category rhythm. In a previous article (Holmes 2016, 257) I compared Dewey’s and Hall’s understanding of rhythm: “There are also striking similarities between Dewey’s and Hall’s views of rhythm and time. Dewey’s is presented mainly in his seminal work Art as Experience (1934) and Hall’s can be found in chapter five of his Beyond Culture (1976) and later in his work The Dance of Life (1983), especially chapter nine. Hall, like Dewey, tries to generalize rhythm as a primary generic category beyond and including its use as a major category in music and dance. Hall (1983, 173) also achieves a connection to systems and cybernetics by maintaining that the negative feedback principle of Norbert Wiener is a correcting and control mechanism (ex. in steering ships). ‘If the correction is too fast, the system becomes unstable; if it is too slow, the ship wanders wide of the mark, is brought back toward the course line….’ This ‘critical correction’ he calls the ‘feedback rhythm’ and further suggests the important connection to culture. He maintains that ‘in humans this rhythm is culturally determined….’ I would correct the word determined and put in influenced because the rhythms of life for humans are involved in a dispositional unity of bodily and culturally constituted rhythms.” Notice also the connection to Norbert Wiener and cybernetics. Gregory Bateson was aware of Wiener’s work and was influenced considerably by cybernetics. His analyses of alcoholism and schizophrenia influenced systems in the social sciences immensely. Systems, mainly communicated through Bateson’s students Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson (1967), made a major impact on training and coaching in the context of family systems therapy and organizational development. Many trainers and coaches, including myself, have had a training based on systems. In contrast to his students, however, Gregory Bateson was much more interested in the aesthetics of ecology. He tried to integrate aesthetics into the more narrowly defined discipline of ecology in order to create more urgency and general public concern for environmental issues on a global scale. Bateson had to expand the common views of aesthetics beyond (but including) the specialized arts into nature as a whole. (Harries-Jones, 2005) As with IC’s neglect of the aesthetics of Hall, there is also no sign of an aesthetic concern among Bateson’s students the fact of which really upset him; nor have I noticed any attempts in systemic coaching training to integrate aesthetics theoretically. Indeed, sometimes there were attempts in my own training to integrate music and the arts creatively. But these attempts just hung in the air as if they did not need to be integrated into the systems theory. A trainer or coach can be trained in a variety of ways just like a teacher may draw on a variety of methods and heuristics to master a situation. For example, I have been trained as an intercultural trainer, a systems coach and a Dialogue Process (DP) facilitator. (DP was also influenced by systems via Peter Senge 1990 as well as by Dewey via Argyris and Schön 1996, 11, 30-31) All these methods, heuristics and skills we received as trainers, teachers and coaches can be used to master particular situations, depending on the needs of the trainers, trainees, teachers, students and particular customer organizations. Especially as a trainer, one would expect situation to be a major generic category. Hall’s (1976, ch. 9) chapter on the category situation seems to be completely overlooked by the IC discipline. A situation or sometimes what Hall called a “situational frame” is the “smallest viable unit of culture that can be analyzed, taught, transmitted, and handed down as a complete entity.” (113) Not only does Hall’s focus on rhythm and synchronicity easily connect up with Dewey’s aesthetics, his concern for the situation fits quite well into Dewey’s general emphasis on situation and inquiry. Dewey connected up situation with inquiry quite well. Inquiry would necessarily be focused on a situation which by definition implied some sort of problem or interest for the organism in its search for organic unity with its environment. In The Dance of Life Hall moves from his previous interest in intercultural space, called proxemics, to connecting up this space with intercultural time. In his proxemics research he analyzed film strips of human conversation and communication in real situations to understand the proxemics patterns. He found that with enough repetition of the observation of the film strips showing social interaction in daily life (ex. a Pueblo market place in New Mexico), a rhythm could be recognized by the observer. Along with this rhythm was a tendency toward synchronicity. The human tendency toward synchronicity he felt was closer to an instinct—like the strings attaching the musicians in Edelman’s example--but the resulting rhythm was more influenced by culture. Each culture and each individual had their own choreographies. “Three things were apparent from the beginning in kinesics (the study of body motion) and proxemics research films: 1) Conversational distances were maintained with incredible accuracy…; 2) the process was rhythmic; and 3) human beings were locked together in a dance which functioned almost totally outside of awareness.” (154) In his attempt to integrate intercultural space and time, rhythm is Hall’s key term; rhythm is the “very essence of time, since equal intervals of time define a sequence of events as rhythmic.” (153) The assumption that space and time are actually dimensions of space/time presupposes that the river of life is already continuous. This continuity can be experienced but not known because once we know it, it is no longer a flow. Language and thought help to abstract from the river. These views are typical of James’ views of pure experience of the river or flow of life and consciousness, while words, symbols and thoughts are the abstractions from the flow and at the same time part of it. While Hall tried to expand our knowledge of intercultural communication into the areas of nonverbal communication, intercultural space and intercultural time by using the generic vocabulary of rhythm, synchronicity and dance, Dewey tried to expand our understanding of the aesthetic experience (using rhythm as his main bridge) to experience in everyday life. While Dewey made situation and experience main categories, Hall seemed to be moving in the same direction. Even though Hall introduced the categories situation and frame, he did not develop them any further; e.g., he did not connect them up to rhythm. Dewey had a more developed theory of inquiry as a framework for interaction and communication in dealing with experience in a situation. Dewey also understood the consequences of using situation and experience as major categories for interdisciplinary cooperation; through the various frames of each discipline’s perception of the same situation, a collective understanding of the whole can be constructed. For Dewey and especially for James the idea of diverse experience of a shared situation was a basic building block for a theory of cultural pluralism which was especially relevant for the history of the US at the time they were writing (women’s suffrage, founding of the NAACP, Harlem Renaissance, immigration wave from Eastern and Southern Europe). Just a glimpse at the migration and refugee issues on a global scale at present should remind us of the increasing need for developing theories of cultural pluralism in order to deal with these issues. Dewey’s Theory of Rhythm and Aesthetic Experience In order to understand Dewey’s ideas of rhythm and aesthetic experience we need to begin with Art as Experience. (1934, 22-23) Dewey assumes from the outset that the senses cannot be opposed to action; together they are a sensor-motoric system. Perception is not passive; it is an active reaching out of the organism to the environment. “The senses are the organs through which the live creature participates directly in the on-goings of the world about him.” Embedded in this participation are the qualities of experience which are always immediate. Any deep prejudice against the senses, as is common in Western societies, leads to a “narrowed and dulled life experience.” Reified dualisms such as mind and body have their roots in fear which leads to “contraction and withdrawal. Full recognition, therefore, of the continuity of the organs’ needs and basic impulses of the human creature with his animal forbears implies no necessary reduction of man to the level of the brutes.” Experience can go both ways. On the one hand, it can allow human beings with their ugly, pathological potentials to sink below the level of other animals. On the other hand, experience can be developed creatively and deliberately leading to new heights. As human beings in their evolutionary development become increasingly more complex in their adaptation strategies, “the rhythms of struggle and consummation in (their) relations to the environment are varied and prolonged, and they come to include in themselves an endless variety of subrhythms.” Space becomes a “scene” in which participation is expanded. Time allows rhythms to appear and to grow in their complexity. Rhythm arises from change and growth of the organism; “…growth signifies that a varied series of change enters upon intervals of pause and rest….” (24) Here Dewey is trying to describe the emergence of rhythm as essential for human adaptation and life. Without it there would be no duration (time/space) in the experience. There could be a mechanical recognition process but not a deliberate play with perception and action which is needed for the aesthetic experience and therefore the creation of value. For Dewey, perception and overt action are both action. The artist is engaged in the production process but she also has to be actively perceiving what she is creating. The so-called passive observer is not really passive at all in achieving the aesthetic experience which is initiated by the artist. The observer has to be active by opening up to the experience; otherwise, it will most likely not happen. My understanding of Dewey is that the organism and environment are united organically. In the adaptation and coordination process of the human organism, there emerges a rhythm of the organism in its environment, both of which are always changing. After the creation and perceiving of a situation—which is already defined as a disturbance--there is movement toward equilibrium. As this imperfect equilibrium is reached, a new disturbance (i.e., a problem or need) appears, leading the organism again back to another imperfect equilibrium. There is a rhythm of movement back and forth between equilibrium and disequilibrium—which never stops. Rhythm is connected to the flow of life (which includes the flow of thinking and consciousness) and this is what the artist, musician or dancer is interested in. She is concerned with communicating her own creation and perception to the observer. This communication is embodied, rhythmic, and in or out of sync; if it is in sync, it means the experience of beauty is the result. If beauty—understood in the broadest sense, including love--is the result, then motivation is also the result on the side of the experiencing organisms to establish values, also moral values. An experience is first perceived as a whole and then the creation emerges. During this creation process each phase relates the whole and the whole may be modified in this same process. This is what I think Christopher Alexander means when he describes the building process, namely, that at each phase of the building process the builder becomes engaged in a repeated perception exercise and reflection, followed by new adjustments, possibly of the broad vision as well as of the next step. The connection between rhythm and the aesthetic experience—the connection that Hall tacitly assumed but did not explicitly mention--is also touched on by Dewey. “Aside from the relation of processes of rhythmic conflict and fulfillment in animal life, experience would be without design and pattern.” (1934, 25) Without design and pattern there is no basis for discerning and producing beauty—nor its opposite, ugliness and pathology. And without this discerning or producing there will be no producing of rules or maxims which serve as the foundation of social organization and culture. Dewey (1934) attempted to expand narrowly defined aesthetics (such as in the arts) to the aesthetic experience as an amplified, normal experience. Any experience can be beautiful or ugly; this almost sounds banal. But in normal language use the aesthetic experience is tacitly assumed to be only a specialized experience produced by artists, musicians or dancers. Whether an experience is amplified or habitually “normal”, no matter; both are in the here and now of interaction or, according to the late Dewey, transaction. One may object and ask rhetorically “What about the past and potentiality (competence, expectation) for what is coming?” The answer is simple: The past, present and the future are actually all in the here and now, in the flow of life. Thought and language help us to separate them in our more modern view of monochronic time. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone spoke of the organic unity of space/time in dance as experience; she also spoke of the primacy of the pre-reflective in dance. Dewey’s theory of the situation, experience and inquiry supports this idea that experience is broader than the knowledge of it. When dance is consummated, then reflection as a reviewing and thinking process can begin. If it begins earlier it can get in the dancer’s way by making her movements mechanical. What about the connection between experience, the situation and inquiry, three major pillars to Dewey’s philosophy. According to Thomas Alexander’s take on Dewey’s theory of the situation and inquiry, “(n)ot only is our involvement with the world prior to a specific inquiry, it is also an involvement which is not grounded on a basic subject-object distinction at the outset. A situation is a condition for inquiry because it itself is not inquired into at the time. Aspects or features of it may come up for inquiry; aspects of features of it may be the settled outcomes of prior inquiries. But none of this makes it intrinsically cognitive. The fact that it is analyzable does not mean that it is already analyzed. It is the situation as a whole that is the condition and stimulus to thinking.” (2014, 73) My understanding of Sheets-Johnstone’s focus on the pre-reflective is here being supported by Dewey’s theory. The whole situated experience or performance is what counts. During her performance the dancer may stop and think about what she is doing; this would be an example of an aspect that “may come up for inquiry.” Some of her movements may be the product of “settled outcomes of prior inquiries”, i.e., tacit knowledge from all her techniques she has practiced for years and now performs without thinking. But the whole experience cannot be totally enveloped by the inquiry. Inquiry and analysis are options after the situated experience has been consummated. The map is not the same as the territory If Thomas Alexander is correct, then the experience or perception of the situation is a condition for inquiry. As the experience is initiated and finally consummated, this whole frame of the experience becomes a co-created situation. As the experience reaches a conclusion and the disturbance leading to a situation is relieved (or not relieved), inquiry as an option can become more prominent. All forms of exploration, e.g., in the sciences, the arts, and in everyday life (such as basketball), include forms of inquiry. The initial pre-reflective experience or what James would call “pure” experience is not yet analyzed. This pre-reflective, unanalyzed aspect of experience is what I miss in the discipline of intercultural communication. The experience of the performance of intercultural communication is embodied in the here and now. This experience then can be followed by the option of analysis or critique which become additional phases of a broadening of the experience. As in the case of art, music or dance, this analysis, however, can become a disturbance to the flow of the performance. One of my critiques of Milton Bennett’s constructivism is that he emphasizes analysis too soon. (2013, 13-16) Before we can analyze the “other” culture--or the interaction with the “other” culture--, we need to recognize or discern what it is. The experience can be extended by slowing down the process and focusing more on listening and letting go of our need to speak. Using pragmatist assumptions there is no pure, subjective culture because it is mediated through the body, which means, the experience of the other culture is always a rhythm between the embodied self and other embodied selves, objects and forces (i.e., between organisms and their environments). Self-reflexivity is made much of, and rightly so, but reflexivity, the ability to observe and understand one’s own culture deeply by understanding the other, and analysis, systematically taking the other culture’s worldview apart to discover its codes, are only half the story of situated experience. This is not a denial of the need for reflexivity and critical analysis. I am only trying to expand beyond them to give more time and space to complete the experience, which has a beginning and an end, before an analysis begins. Performance is more than competence and a premature analysis can get in the way of the performance, as the dancer and philosopher Sheets-Johnstone emphasizes again and again. When Hall maintains that the nonverbal is deeper than the verbal and should be taken more seriously in intercultural communication, he does not mean that the nonverbal and verbal are reified like billiard balls, as in the case of Hume. He can only mean that the nonverbal involves noncognitive, pre-reflective experience which is always there as an initial quality—what James would call a deep, felt sense. As the situated experience, which serves as a cue for inquiry by the organism, progresses to its consummation, cognition and perhaps language may appear. It is more like a crystalizing transaction between whole and part, and cognition is a phase, hopefully at the end of the experience; otherwise, the experience becomes mechanical, exactly that quality which Sheets-Johnstone is trying to avoid. Conclusion Consequences for IC Training and Coaching The question which we trainers fear the most at the end of a workshop or training, which someone will ask, is “So what? Why theory?” First, as we reinvent intercultural competence to include all dualisms (competence/performance, difference/similarity, mind/body, organism/ environment and inside/outside) and view these dualisms not as fractured but as organically united, our inputs in training should result in being more coherent with a better fit with our exercises. Planning will more systematically avoid biases against one side or the other of these dualisms. For example, if we plan an exercise which is more nonverbal focusing on personal space, sooner or later we should plan another exercise based on the verbal expression, thereby leading to a more balanced whole. If we plan an exercise which focuses more on experiencing the sensitivity to difference, this should be balanced with an exercise on the sensitivity to similarity. The central point is that we have to keep the situation and context in view which the organization and its individuals co-construct; this means also that there is no substitute for inquiry before the workshop which helps in its planning and performing. Performance becomes a central concern and by performance I mean the here and now of achieving what the organization expects from us and what we expect from them. This is not an easy balance. It may mean that we sometimes have to reject a contract. I remember once I had a contract at a small private business university in Berlin and to this day I think maybe I should have rejected it. The administrator became very upset when I asked if I could communicate with the students before the workshop began. He resisted almost with panic and made it very difficult for me to assess the situation of my students before I prepared my syllabus. Second, one advantage of improving our theoretical foundations, which I have tried to do in this article, is that this improvement may impress some people who understand and recognize a need for harmony between theory and practice. Depth counts and the surprise that depth may not necessarily be understood as cognitive and symbolic but rather as in closer proximity to the experiential flow of life, may make a significant impact. After all, members of an organization normally look for ways to fulfill their needs. According to Dewey, needs reflect disturbed situations and situations only disappear when these needs disappear, i.e., reach an approximate equilibrium in the back and forth rhythm of life. Third, including the body and the aesthetic experience in IC theory and practice will mean that value through experience as rhythm will be more integrated and less likely to be reified. I am not happy with the idea that values drop from heaven or from some sort of imperative. Nor do I just choose them out of some subjective, spiritual essence. Also, Bennett’s defense of ethnorelative ethics is not sufficient. Bennett (1998b, 30-31) pleads for the coexistence of “ethnorelativism” and “strong ethical principles”. My rhetorical question remains: Where do these principles come from? I plead for experience. Without experiencing beauty (which includes love) and ugliness and disgust, there is little motivation to create values and translate them into injunctions, duties, rules or limits. Aesthetic experience not only involves the experience of beauty/ugliness, it also involves the experience of the body/ mind, organism/environment, space/time and inside/outside as organic unities. The reference to the relativity of contexts is also not enough because human beings, together with other organisms and physical forces, co-construct con-texts and situations. In the co-construction process the total experience of the noncognitive (direct) and cognitive (indirect) are involved. The direct experience (without analysis and cognition) is the pre-reflective, “pure” experience or performance with its proximity to the chaotic flux or flow of the river. According to Sheets-Johnstone, this is the most important quality of beautiful dancing. The reflective, from which we construct ethical and other structures, should follow the pre-reflective. Rituals are then understood as the culture’s attempt to reproduce the key experience which leads to the maintenance of cultural and biological continuity—in spite of death. Finally, including the body/organism in experience will help our training reach a theoretical balance with what trainers and coaches are already doing right. Just as in the origins of jazz and blues, the masters often did not have a theory as to why they did it right. This paper is an attempt to reach this balance. Nonetheless, this article is mainly meant for those trainers, teachers and coaches who feel they have a need for more theoretical support. Tools, sometimes called heuristics, are needed. I can take any tool I need to leverage the situation. Examples of tools would be various games, simulations, roleplay, critical incidents, films, handouts, charts and experiential activities. Strewn throughout these activities there is the need to give inputs. Inputs are theoretical. Theory is closely related to our basic assumptions about what is true, what is real, what is meaningful—and I add what is beautiful. Usually, at least in the daily life of the Western business organizations, the questions of beauty and ugliness are tacitly assumed to be irrelevant for the situation. There is often an unspoken assumption that these two areas do not need discussion; the company’s goal of success is enough. The case of John Deere is a counter-example, but the CEO at that time faced much resistance. Sheets-Johnstone in her concern about curriculum in schools and universities wonders why dance is left out in the cold. The implied answer reveals again a deep ethnocentrism or bias in Western civilization: Dancing means the body, the senses and interaction all of which are, at least in the West, considered chaotic and therefore superficial, the opposite of “deeper” thought and language. A further positive consequence hopefully will result from more focus on John Dewey’s generic, central vocabulary not only of experience and situation but also of inquiry, habit, rhythm, interaction and transaction. When faced with a situation which is out of sync, inquiry is the next step in order to get back into sync. Rhythm is the state of equilibrium in the organism which is either unconsciously and/or consciously sought. If it is the latter, then the organism is deliberately acting to support the movement toward equilibrium. If it is the former, a habit, then we can only hope that the habits we have learned from our culture will help us master the situation. Experience is the here and now of interaction or transaction in these situations. Transaction is also an interesting alternative to interaction, which had also become important vocabulary for Dewey’s friend and colleague, George Herbert Mead (whose ideas later influenced Jürgen Habermas immensely). Dewey, late in his life, after Mead’s passing in the early 1930s, declared his preference for the term transaction, rather than interaction, as a basic generic category. A transaction was always a relationship between whole and part while an interaction could too easily be misunderstood as a mechanical relation between people as organisms and their environments. An interaction could easily be reified; a whole/part (especially the whole in the part) relation is less likely to, especially if both whole and part are constantly moving. The organism is not some essence separate from another essence called the environment; the word is an abstracted part of the organism/environment which is the organic whole. (In hindsight, the whole-in-the-part relation is much closer to our understanding of ecosystems and fractals the fact of which has confirmed Dewey’s preference.) Consequences in Terms of Power In anticipation of a critique that my article has left out the question of power, I am including it here in the conclusion. Some trainers and coaches are quite politically active, for example, in Diversity Management. Power can be integrated into these organic unities (competence/ performance, potentiality/ interaction, body/mind, organism/environment, beauty/ugliness, inside/outside, etc.) because not all participants in communication have the same power to construct the situation. A situation can be imposed on the organism; for example, the feared Secret Police may come knocking at my door. A hurricane may blow my house away, which would be an example of a physical force or power. I may fear having no control over the situation--but I do have some control over how I respond to it; my response is also a part of the co-creation. Even a positive, aesthetic experience in a concert, film, play or dance performance can touch us deeply, implying that we are being overwhelmed by the performance which creates goose bumps and make us shiver, for example. In this case, the artist may have more control over creating the beautiful experience in the situation; all I have to do is to actively let go of my daily life control and try to be open to the experience. Letting go of control or power can be a major contribution to the co-creation of a situation or context. And of course the opposite is also true: Letting go can lead to my destruction; for example, I may have to hold my breath and freeze when confronted by real danger. 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Biographical Sketch Name: Stephen Holmes Affiliation: Retired Professor of Intercultural Communication at the Hochschule der Wirtschaft für Management, Mannheim, Germany Education: Dr. Phil. in Anthropology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany (1986) M.A. in Anthropology, University of Heidelberg (1976) B.A. in Philosophy, Linfield College, Oregon, USA (1967) Business Address: Holmes Intercultural Training, Waldgrenzweg 5, 69118 Heidelberg, Germany Email: [email protected] Research and Professional Experience: Most of my life was spent selling my services in anthropology, sociology, intercultural communication, diversity management, Dialogue Process (Glenna Gerard and Freemann Dhority), and systemic coaching to universities, business and other organizations (ex. City of Mannheim). In 2007 I was a member of a train-the-trainer team preparing and conducting workshops in Diversity Management for EU member countries plus Turkey (sponsored by the European Commission). At the University of Witten-Herdecke in Germany I spent two years co-creating a Master’s program and curriculum for Diversity Management. Throughout my career I have taught for numerous universities (U. of Maryland, Pepperdine, Witten-Herdecke, U. of Heidelberg, U. of Northumbria, Nehemiah U. in Albania, and Hochschule der Wirtschaft für Management) and trained and coached for numerous businesses (ex. Continental, Henkel) and public administrations (ex. City of Mannheim). The most influential professional experience in my life was two-years with the American Peace Corps in South India in 1969-1970 where I did my best to learn the South Indian language Telugu. I came to Germany to study in 1971. Since my retirement I have developed an interest in the Pragmatist philosophers, especially in the ideas of John Dewey and William James, and in the question how Pragmatic theory can help make Intercultural Communication theory more coherent. Much of my work is meant to support interdisciplinary exploration (ex. IC, diversity management, anthropology, Systems, neuroscience, ecology, sports and the arts). Professional Appointments: I became a full Professor for Intercultural Communication at Hochschule der Wirtschaft für Management three years before my retirement. Honors: Co-founder of the International Society for Diversity Management (Headquarters now in Berlin) Publications from the Last 3 Years: (2015) “Intercultural Communication Performance and the Body: Exploring in and beyond the Third Culture Model,” Contemporary Pragmatism 12, December, pp. 275-301 (2016) “How can the Philosophy of John Dewey Make a Contribution to the Theory and Practice of Intercultural Communication?” Contemporary Pragmatism 13, June, pp. 242-262 117 Page layout by Anvi Composers. Stephen Holmes Rhythm and Intercultural Communication 89