There are many different models of change.
Those who are concerned with human change at all its various levels – individual, biological, historical, political, economic, social – (all of which are, without doubt, interrelated in complex and intricate ways) must at some point wonder whether human beings haven’t always been pre-occupied by change.
One of the earliest philosophers in the West (here, of course I am talking about those who managed to record their thoughts in writing), Heraclitus (he who pointed out that we never step into the same river twice) considered the essence of reality to be change. He considered fire to be the fundamental element in the becoming and passing away of all things. But in the aeons of human time before his lifetime (he lived 2500 years ago) people may have always been aware of different kinds of time.
The advent of the awareness of death as an individual event, the movement that brought about our need to make a ceremony around death, the recognition of planetary time in the menstrual synchronicity that is a significant and unique fact of women’s biology (which some anthropologists e.g. Chris Knight claim to be the key factor in the origin of human culture), the recognition of the relationship of human lifetime to other periodicities, (such as vegetation growth) all may be capable of being historically instantiated from the paleo-ethno-graphic record. These moments may mark developmental stages in the evolution of the species like the advent of agriculture or indeed that of industrialism.
Consciousness of change presents itself sometimes as a strange partial denial of death in the so-called ‘advanced’ industrial societies. In our political discourse there is an obsessive presentation of the benefits and necessity of change. This seems to demonstrate a common knowledge that things cannot remain as they are yet it defends rigidities and the maintenance of the status quo. Almost by repeating this idea, and thus taking possession of it, the old order can use it like a mantric prophylactic against change. The same process applies to the idea of sustainability.
Though there is no objective way of verifying it, the perceived discontinuities in lifestyles and life conditions experienced from one generation to another in our world today is a massively significant factor in contemporary humanity’s story. This is to some extent measurable through the amount of transport and travel taking place. It is discernible in displacement and human migration. Experiences of rapid enrichment and impoverishment and growing economic inequality are indirect indexes of the experience of change. Also material conditions, landscapes, built environment, resource availability are changing in ways that are directly related to productivity or the efficiency of human tools.
Paulo Freire bases his work on the observation that our contemporary world is characterised by relationships of oppression and domination. It is for this reason that he ascertains that liberation is the emerging action. This characterisation would mean that change is often imposed on people and that people are not in the majority of instances (this is impossible to verify) in control of change and are responding to it rather than initiating it.
So it seems that there may be considered to be two aspects of change. One aspect is material change, an outer objective change, a change in circumstances or conditions; the other is the response to change and this, at first sight, seems to be an inner process, one of assessment and then adaptation and engagement. It can be noted that the adaptation and engagement may well be action that, in turn, changes material circumstances.
Over the recent days while we have had the Olympics in our city we have been constantly told by the media that the winners of medals have been ‘making history’. It has been an obsessive and almost desperate refrain. Whatever one’s enthusiasm for the various sports might be, whatever level of admiration one has for the whole organisation of the spectacle, and of the achievements of the athletes, the personal commitment and the collective endeavour, this idea of history may stick in your throat. The political strategy, satirised by Juvenal in his observation about governing by means of ‘bread and circuses’ (panem et circenses literally, ‘bread and games’), is similar to the division of the state apparatus in Louis Althusser’s work into the repressive and the ideological and the more colloquial twin strategy of the ‘carrot and the stick’, was played out during the London Olympics with full orchestration and repetitive thematics. The reduction of history to the inscription of names on a kind of roll of honour is like history as a list of Kings and Queens. It perfectly eclipses and obscures the process whereby people may change the social and political structures in which they live. Like ‘change’ and ‘sustainability’ the repetition of ‘making history’ through sheer acts of verbal exhaustion comparable to a mantra, can numb sensibilities and actually obstruct the real process that is named.
Is it difficult to distinguish between the initiation of change and the response to change? Do the apprehensions, beliefs, values that we inherit form the material circumstance that we cannot change? When Marx formulated his idea that ‘men make their own history not in circumstances of their own choosing but in those handed down to them by the preceding generations’ can we easily distinguish between that which we can determine and that which is determined for us? Of course all the available wisdom tells us that this can not be resolved by theory or intellect but only in the course of action.
What is this action? One substantial definition of it is given by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition when she analyses human activity into three categories: work, labour and praxis and defines the last of these as being the ‘history-making’ action. Another idea of what it might mean is suggested by Freire when he draws a distinction between a ‘banking’ idea of knowledge where facts are accumulated and an ‘active’ knowledge, acquired in the course of changing the world. Something similar to this is implicit in Augusto Boal‘s definition of the ‘spectactor’ although in both these last two examples the idea of action is closely connected to the question of knowledge and meaning, but this makes more obvious something that Arendt is driving at in her definition of praxis, since for her praxis is action ‘in the public realm’, a space defined by its ‘publicness’.
This also brings the idea of ‘change’ close to that of ‘action’. This is why we have presented mappa mundi as being in favour of activism. In fact our ideas about change are defined by movement towards or away from activism. The online interactive space that the project provides is comparable, from this point of view, with the ‘aesthetic space’ of theatre described by Augusto Boal (in his book The Rainbow of Desire) and the ‘public realm’ described by Arendt (in her book The Human Condition). For Freire this process is connected to that of ‘naming’. Bear in mind that his work derives from methods developed during work on literacy.
Marx‘s view of what composed the ‘circumstances’ which people do not choose but in which and, in a sense out of which, they make history was connected to what he described as the natural history of humanity, the relationships that human beings created in the course of transforming elements of the earth into things that they could use and/or consume. It was the basic interaction of humanity’s production system with the material world that gave rise to social relations. Read John Lanchester’s wonderful review of Marx’s work for the London Review of Books
There is no simple formula that can lead from an analysis of a given mode of production (even if one accepts that these can be analytically distinct!) to a given social structure. Marx’s view that this relationship was transmitted and worked out through class struggle is convincing if the definition of class can be refined by taking account of both a common relationship to the apparatus of production and the organisational capability of expressing a collective interest. OCCUPY’s assertion that they are 99% versus 1% can be illuminated from this perspective.
Marx dedicated his main work Das Kapital to Charles Darwin yet there seems to be immediately noticeable differences in the models of change that are presented in their work. In a simple reading of Darwin’s work, applying evolutionary concepts to human development there seems to be an obscurity around the role of consciousness and human design capability. If evolutionary change is transgenerational and is determined by sexual selection of required adaptive characteristics to environmental exigences it is easy to reduce Darwin to a simple determinism. You can see how Darwin’s work can give rise to science fiction (and operationally programmatic!) fantasies about super races.
Within the perspectives offered by psychoanalysis both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung give different versions of change. Implicit in Freud’s definition of neurosis and his theory of repression and sublimation, also in his later descriptions of civilisation in terms of Eros and Thanatos and in Jung’s development of the theory of the collective unconscious and how this was structured by archetypes, are implicit images of human change. Although these ideas have implications for social organisation the operational space of psychoanalysis is the intersubjectivity characteristic of the relationship between the analyst and the analysand. It is the participation of the analysand in their own therapy that makes this process an ‘activisation’. The relational structure of the dialogue involved is comparable to Freire use of the dynamic interplay between the educator and the educated.
Though it is not always easy to see, in psychoanalytic practice, how this work of transformation at an individual level relates to collective and social change, it is interesting to notice, for example, in the work of the transition network how the movement of the individual involved in transition is likened to that of someone trying to rid themselves of an addiction (See Chapter 6 of The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins now republished as The Transition Companion) because dependency on an oil-driven economy is likened to other forms of habitual dependences.
Jung’s study of alchemy with its description of a conjoined inner and outer journey that takes the spiritual traveller through the darkness into the light echoes the sense of religious convertion typified by St Paul’s blindness and subsequent renewed sight. Models of change are articulated through metaphor and imagery and it is not a co-incidence that a crucial stage in the fourfold movement of change described by Joanna Macy is from ‘Honouring the Pain’ into ‘Seeing with new eyes’. The fullest and best written description of this process is in the book, Active Hope, that she wrote with Chris Johnstone, whose principal work as a psychotherapist is working with addiction.
The play between individual change and social change that is animated by a link between a particular production regime and its individual embodiment in characteristic personal behaviour is something that I explored in The Image of the Human. In the context of the transition movement the ‘regime’ or system is characterised by the key energy source i.e. oil rather than, as in Marx’s work, by the mode of production but the issue of causal determination is similar.
In Joanna Macy’s work she uses the spiral as an image of change wherein movement brings people back to similar positions but at higher levels of development. In Chris Knight’s work on the origins of culture mentioned earlier he concludes his key work, ‘Blood Relations: the origins of culture’, with an analysis of history that brings together the sense of cyclical movement at different levels of development with his observation of the potential return of women’s power after millennia of patriarchal dispossession. He also likens this idea of change to that represented by a spiral.
The study of entropy first undertaken in the middle of the 19th Century by Rudolf Clausius and related to thermodynamics has helped earth scientists to understand the effects of the consumption of carbon in its main mineral forms (coal and oil). The irreversibility of the use of energy has given a timeline to the production regime based on fossil fuel and scientists in interdisciplinary groups have been engaged in studies of how the move to a low carbon economy can be undertaken. One such project, Transition Pathways to a Low Carbon Economy, envisages a model of change from one energy regime to another as being driven by three spaces in the social structure each with its own logic: one, the market; two, the state and three, civil society. It images the interaction of these three ‘spaces’ in a fourth space in the centre of the triangle composed of the other three which is described in their work as an ‘action’ space where complex combinations of activities from the three spaces take place.
In the work of the Berkana Institute change is figured as the relationship between two semi-circular loops. One is the old regime that is in decline and the other, its inverse, is the new regime in development. The graphic depiction of these loops show them disconnected and the work of the Berkana Institute is focused on the space in between. See the video on Berkana’s Theory of change
This imaging of change is accompanied by a new conception of human leadership that models itself on the ‘leader as host’ in contradistinction to the ‘leader as hero’. This specification of personal qualities called forth by the current circumstances of regime change or, as it is expressed by Berkana, paradigm change (thus echoing the work of Thomas Kuhn in his exploration of the development of science) is also relevant to the earlier blog on The Image of the Human.
In Berkana’s work there is also a correlative shift in how knowledge happens. This is to do with their conception of community and how they have learnt from evolutionary biologists’ observations of resilience in ecosystems. Knowledge is created not through hierarchy but through network and this defines resilience as being brought to an entity by the multiplicity of connections of mutual interdependence.
Work on climate change has brought an analysis of what constitutes adaptive behaviour. On the one hand there has been a strategy proposal that emphasises ‘behavioural change’ and this can be looked at in terms of social practices which are parcels of connected activities. The analysis on which this work is based has been developed by UK sociologist Elizabeth Shove and is based on practice theory and the work of Theodore Schatzki. Alongside this is work that emphasises the central importance of ‘bottom up’ strategies (which implicitly, of course, still accepts this vertical model) and of local as opposed to expert knowledge. This latter work is associated with Jerome Ravetz and his work on post-normal science.
I mean only here to give a superficial list of different models of change and these are by no means the only ones. There’s more to be said about the question of knowledge and its relationship to information and change. I’ve called this blog modes or models of change and could equally have used the words ‘images’ or ‘paradigms’. I have meant to be suggestive rather than definitive. We think of change often in images and we can see that continuous change may not be perceived as change. We are aware of complex systems that are characterised by non-linear transformations but equally we know that a glass of water that gets colder and colder is undergoing change that we may only become aware of when we touch it but when, relatively quickly, it turns to ice we are aware of the quantitative cumulative change becoming a qualitative change. How we perceive this change makes a difference to our assessment of what the change involves. Equally a caterpillar that develops into a chrysalis and then, once again, relatively quickly into a butterfly is undergoing a complex change that offers us another image that might shed light on our own transformations.