Negative capability: a bridge to nowhere as a bridge to knowhere?

Living as an Imaginal Bridge between Worlds (Part #13)

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Negative vs. Positive thinking: Much has been made of the need for "positive" thinking and initiatives as the primary means of enabling viable movement from "here" to "there" -- bridging across conventional obstacles. Remedies to most problematic conditions are vigorously (if not violently) asserted in that mode in reaction against "negative thinking" -- so unfortunately conflated with critical thinking (Critical Thinking vs Specious Arguments, 2001).

The fact that those advocating such positive action are typically confronted by others in disagreement is not addressed -- except to declare the others as "negative", being part of the problem rather than of the solution (Being Positive and Avoiding Negativity: management challenge of positive vs negative, 2005). Those awaiting the outcome of such dynamics are then obliged to live "betwixt and between" in a cognitive wilderness. Some consequences have been explored by Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-sided: how the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America, 2009). In that sense positive thinking precludes awareness of liminality.

The question on the ground is how to develop the survival skills to thrive in that wilderness of "bewilderment" -- "making it one's own". This recalls the original wilderness of nature as yet unfenced by conventional modes of thinking -- the experiential reality which convention is unable (by its very nature) to fence effectively. Hence the relevance of Keats' reference to "negative capability", the ability to thrive through navigating interstices and the negative spaces identified by the Japanese understanding of ma. Such possibilities feature increasingly in considerations of liminality although it is appropriate to be well-warned of any potential tendency to replicate the tragedy of the commons with respect to such a cognitive wilderness.

Certainty vs. Uncertainty: As might be expected there is a necessary irony to any archetypal battle between "positive" efforts towards certainty and any "negative" cultivation of ambiguity:

• the art of certainty involves designing out uncertainty. But as a consequence, if the efforts are excessive, uncertainty emerges unexpectedly as surprise -- with "chickens coming home to roost". Uncertainty is effectively designed out through neglecting it, notably as an irrelevant "externality". But a consequence is the strategic need to create conditions of disorientation and insecurity in order to sustain a sense of security. For example, it is felt necessary to create such conditions through a politics of fear, enhanced interrogation and the like, in order to elicit information of strategic relevance to the dependence on certainty (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, etc)
• the art of uncertainty involves designing out dependence on certainty. But as a consequence, if the efforts are excessive, this elicits dependence on forms of certainty not otherwise envisaged -- even to be understood as transcendental.

As an exemplar of the obsessive pursuit of certainty, Donald Reused, as US Secretary of Defense, formulated a now notorious poem regarding the strategic significance of the unknown unknowns, as contrasted with the known unknowns. the implications have been separately discussed (Unknown Undoing: challenge of incomprehensibility of systemic neglect, 2008). He has of course been significantly implicated in promoting the controversial enhanced interrogation required to reduce such uncertainties.

With respect to any new Renaissance, the dramatic relationship between the pursuers of certainty in relation to the uncertain has long been expressed in terms of lines from the Second Coming (1920), a poem by William Butler Yeats: The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. This was itself partly inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound -- usefully understood as expressing various qualities of "betwixt and between":

The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill

The above-mentioned cognitive wilderness and its inherent uncertainties, as associated with the "bewilderment" of "betwixt and between", highlights the challenging possibility that (contrary to conventional assumptions) uncertainty may itself increase in the decades to come in relation to certainty. Whilst the uncertainties of "nature" may indeed be reduced through the certainties of technological development, the level of cognitive bewilderment engendered for the individual and for society may well increase. It is as though the interstices and cracks of the "between worlds" of "betwixt and between" were to increase relative to the domains neatly encompassed by convention -- effectively an upwelling of uncertainty well-modelled by the unexpected nature of the flooding of rivers, the overflowing bridges, or their being swept away. In Jungian terms, the "upwelling" might be compared with an expression of the collective unconscious -- consistent with the global implications of the argument of John Ralston Saul (The Unconscious Civilization, 1999).

A global knowledge society may even be subject to the climatic "chaos" induced by a systemic analogue to the El Niño Southern Oscillation -- a quasi-periodic climate pattern that occurs across the tropical Pacific Ocean, on average every five years. The psychocultural implications of any widespread "flooding" may well be reflected in the myths of many cultures regarding great floods organized by deities to destroy civilization as an act of divine retribution. This might even be understood as a form of psychological flooding, now recognized in a context of behaviour therapy and based on the principles of respondent conditioning.

The uncertainty of "whether patterns" may be further exacerbated by the increasing significance of the unsayable and the unsaid, as Wikileaks is making increasingly evident (Global Strategic Implications of the Unsaid: from myth-making towards a wisdom society, 2003). The significance is implicit in the dysfunctional relationship between strategic initiatives and their leaders (Epistemological Challenge of Cognitive Body Odour: exploring the underside of dialogue, 2006).

Global liminality: Indicators of the strategic emergence of "negative capability" are now evident in adaptive interpretations of liminality, such as that of D. Lindsay (Organizational Liminality and Interstitial Creativity: the fellowship of power, Social Forces, September 2010). Others have addressed the possibility of "liminal strategies". More specific is the work of Sue Newell, et al. (The Liminality Associated with Project Teams: exploring and explaining some of the problems of ES project implementations. 2008) framed as:

The project space that develops to enable configuration and implementation of standard software packages is central to the success of creating a working information system. We investigate the IS project environment as a liminal space existing in-between the status quo and the new ES-enabled environment. Our analysis indicates that liminality can be beneficial to cultivate within the project team but that too strong a liminal space makes it difficult when it is time to incorporate the learning and the software back into the organizational working environment after the project finishes. We present mechanisms which can be used to create the liminal space and highlight the positive and negative. Liminal spaces can be reflexive spaces for future strategy development.

Curiously, despite the above-mentioned references to the dilemmas of "betwixt and between" in a strategic context, the potentials of development of liminal strategies and negative capability would seem to have been avoided in relation to global strategic challenges. Interesting exceptions include arguments of Maria Mälksoo (The Challenge of Liminality for International Relations Theory, 2010) and the special issue on limnality of the journal International Political Anthropology (2009). Of particular interest is the cautionary argument by Judith H. Young (The Betwixt and Between Syndrome, 2008), cited above, in her Deconstructing the Power of the Global Elite. (Global Research, 2008). This highlights the exploitative potential of the "betwixt and between" predicament as experienced globally by many..

However gobal strategic remedies continue to be desperately framed as dependent on "certainties" and the "positive" -- despite their dismal track record and their loss of credibility (Credibility Crunch engendered by Hope-mongering: "credit crunch" focus as symptom of a dangerous mindset, 2008).

The extreme certainty, with which the problematic consequences of overpopulation (as predicted by some) are declared to be ill-informed bodes ill for the future, for example. Despite the unpredicted global financial crisis of 2008-2009, the mindset is exemplified at the time of writing by the extreme surprise and horror at the disastrous flooding in Queensland. Naughty rain, naughty rivers, naughty tides -- for failing to conform to the best of scientific predictability and enlightened urban planning !? (Germaine Greer, Australian floods: Why were we so surprised by floods? The Guardian, 15 January 2011).

An earlier example was provided by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami about which warnings had been provided by the head of the Thai meteorological office -- forced to retire in 1998, accused of scaremongering and jeopardising the tourist industry. Failures of previously assertive authorities need in each case to be remedied by "bailouts" from the public -- called upon emotively (even exploitatively) to exhibit solidarity towards those whose risk-taking had been tacitly and implicitly encouraged.

As with some classic exercises in bridge construction -- caricatured as bridges to nowhere -- some strategic efforts to get from "here" to "there" might be usefully recognized as strategic bridges to nowhere. These might be understood as inadvertent cultivation of uncertainty (Spontaneous Initiation of Armageddon -- a heartfelt response to systemic negligence, 2004).

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