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The invisible background to our lives

8/6/2015

2 Comments

 
One of my readers commented not long ago that, in my writing, I often draw attention to everyday phenomena which we take so much for granted that we hardly notice them, let alone question or challenge them. It’s a bit like not being able to see the air we breathe, or even not being aware of breathing.

For example, in this blog I often draw attention to everyday examples of the barely noticed in organisational life, such as the way many people run conferences without questioning common habits, even when they aren't particularly effective. 
 
Or here is another example from a conversation with a psychotherapist friend of mine: when I used the word ‘intersubjective’, he asked me what I meant. I tried to articulate why it was such an important word to me because it points to the way in which we are constantly creating our world together through our conversations and other interactions; so for me nothing we say is, strictly speaking, either subjective or objective. Indeed, the assumption that any observation must be either subjective or objective provides us with a small clue about taken-for-granted thinking in our society.

In recent years I have become aware of a whole body of literature that speaks to this unnoticed background to our lives. For example, over his lifetime, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu came to distance himself from the notion that the true nature of the social world lies behind or beneath the world of appearance – that it is only to be found in some kind of 'structure' (hence the term structuralism). And in his writing he used the term “habitus” to refer to the unseen ways in which we naturally classify the world, depending on the milieu we find ourselves in. 

Similarly, Henri Bortoft, in his book Taking Appearance Seriously, lays out how, over the centuries, modern science developed in a way that moved us away from experiential knowledge and towards theoretical knowledge, which provides rational explanations about the world. Bortoft acknowledged that scientific explanation has been extraordinarily successful but, he wrote, it has “shifted our attention away from the phenomena themselves”. 

Numerous other writers have addressed these questions, including Goethe in the nineteenth century, and the phenomenologists in the twentieth century. They were all inquiring into how we can cultivate our ability to notice our experience. But much of our taken-for-granted thinking and speaking today remains in the thrall of modern science.

Note: the phrase "invisible background" is drawn from Wittgenstein's writings. For more on this, see this article by John Shotter.

Related reading

Henri Bortoft (2012): Taking Appearance Seriously. 

Richard Jenkins (1992): Pierre Bourdieu. Revised edition (2002). Routledge.

John Shotter (2015): The “Background” in Wittgenstein and others. Accessible at: www.johnshotter.com/2015/03/21/the-background-in-wittgenstein-and-others/ 
2 Comments
Deborha link
11/6/2015 01:30:30 pm

Ok Alison you have provoked my thoughts ...., TO EXPERIENCE AS AN ACTIVITY requires me TO USE MY rational mind TO TELL myself to "stop and experience" or even worse "to schedule moments to experience". MY INGRAINED drive towards performance is a river current always pushing me forward that I cannot experience the water. TO "STOP" requires a calling out either from my rational mind or a friend that says "Stop" or a yoga class that says "Pause" or a disrupt that says "Halt". However you are posing that we can LEARN, and yes I believe you, to experience the current as it pushes us forward for the purpose of deciding if we want to be there? Is the end result of To Experience about having choice of our destination? Or is it purely to have joy in the being? Or need there be an end result?

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Alison Donaldson link
17/9/2015 10:41:25 am

Deborah, a very belated response, sorry... I had to think! Thank you so much for taking the trouble to comment.
I'm don't believe there is a rational mind that is separate from any other mind!.But still I can see your point that saying to yourself 'I am going to notice my experience' sounds like a conscious choice or intention. And in a way it is.
And yes, I do think we can learn to be more alert. In my experience(!), we take so much for granted and that stops us from noticing. It starts with that tiny ache in the shoulders when I am sitting at my desk for too long. I ignore it for a while, but maybe I should take it more seriously. Or to take another example, we accept what people ask us to do even when a little voice in our mind is trying to be heard saying 'I'm not comfortable with that'.
And finally, I hadn't thought about 'end result'. I have come to see life as a continuous flow with death as the ultimate end result! But if I had to say 'why do I think it is important to notice my experience?', yes, it's about being able to disrupt patterns, being able to find a voice, things like that.

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    ​Alison Donaldson is an author and writing coach, normally based in Hove, England.
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