Bohmian dialogue, proprioception and appreciative inquiry

Second-order Dialogue and Higher Order Discourse for the Future (Part #9)

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Bohmian dialogue: The quality of dialogue and its enhancement have been of particular importance to David Bohm as an extension of his insights as a nuclear physicist (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980). This focus has been actively developed into what has come to be termed "Bohmian dialogue", understood as a freely flowing group conversation in which participants attempt to reach a common understanding, experiencing everyone's point of view fully, equally and nonjudgmentally (David Bohm, Donald Factor, and Peter Garrett, Dialogue: A Proposal. 2002; David Bohm on Communication, Mindstructures;  On Dialogue, 1996; Changing Consciousness: exploring the hidden source of the social, political and environmental crises facing our world, 1991).

Of particular relevance to this argument is the distinction made by Bohm between "explicate order" and "implicate order". It is in terms of an "implicate order" that meta-communication might be most fruitfully understood.

Proprioception: The characteristics of Bohmian dialogue are explored by Steven Rosen in terms of proprioception (Phenomenology, Self-reference, and Bohmian Dialogue (42nd Annual Conference of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, 2003):

Now, for the kind of Dialogue of which Bohm spoke, it seems we need to relate to each other by moving in the "opposite direction" in which conventional discourse takes place. Rather than moving forward, moving out to you, authoritatively advancing my position on whatever we are discussing by simply and directly presenting it to you, it appears I must relate to you in a more circuitous, reflexive way, by going backward into myself...

Crucial to this process is our ability to suspend or slow down our own thinking to a great enough degree that we can be receptive to ourselves and to each other; to listen deeply, and mirror back to each other "a view of some of the assumptions and unspoken implications of what is being expressed along with that which is being avoided" (Bohm et al., 2002). Each participant then has an opportunity "to examine the preconceptions, prejudices, and the characteristic patterns that lie behind his or her thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and feelings, along with the roles he or she tends habitually to play."...

In sum, what seems most crucial to Dialogue is that we be able to "move backward," self-reflexively engage in what Bohm called proprioception. Â

Understood as proprioception, Steven Rosen clarifies with great insight the nature of the cognitive skill appropriate to the potential implied by the Klein bottle -- in several studies, fruitfully to be read as complementary.

For Rosen (emphasis added):

• Topologies of the Flesh: a multidimensional exploration of the lifeworld (2006 p. 47-48): What I propose here is that proprioception -- broadly understood as a mode of "self-taking" inclusive of cognition -- is the appropriate way to work with the Klein bottle, and that such a meditation is what the self-containing Klein bottle requires and invites. In thinking this Kleinian text, we must think proprioceptively, think our own thinking.
  
  Note that, when I speak of "meditation", I am surely not referring to the classical kind. Whereas classical meditation generally aims at transcending the body, the self-reversal of thinking I have in mind would seek to move back into it. The goal would be re-embodiment, reconnection with the lifeworld. But would this not require a disengagement from thought and a return to the bodily senses?
  
  What we learn from Merleau-Ponty is that thinking in fact does not entail sheer abstraction but possesses its on bodily grounding. For Merleau-Ponty, the dimension of language and thought operates as a "second flesh", a second order of embodiment:Â It is as though the visibility than animates the sensible world were to emigrate, not outside of every body, but into another less heavy, more transparent body, as though it were to change flesh, abandoning the flesh of the [sensible] body for that of language. (1968, p. 153)
  
  
• The Self-evolving Cosmos: a phenomenological approach to nature's unity-in-diversity (2008, p. 246): Proceeding in the manner of Trigant Burrow, I, the psychological analyst, aim to enter my body through my head to obtain a bodily sense of the head that is directing this analysis. Since the proprioception thereby enacted is no act of "pure meditation" that leaves thinking and language behind, it seems the process must include the appropriate mode of signification if the maximum effect is to be achieved. In the semiosis required, neither words nor conventional mathematical symbols will suffice.
  
  What is needed is that unique topological signifier that refers concretely to the "fourth dimension" -- the dimension of depth incorporating my subjectivity -- by referring to itself. I am speaking, of course, of the Klein bottle. Assuming the Klein bottle is not just taken as a signified topological object or as an arbitrarily devised, conventionally agreed upon signifier (as are most mathematical symbols), it is this body of paradox that constitutes the semiotic content of the proprioceived brain.
  
  In the proprioception of the brain that is at once a phenomenological mediation upon the Klein bottle, the analyst surpasses the brain of the particular individual to gain a glimpse of the dimensional organism's "generic brain", the "braneworld" in which the thinking function is centered. The brain thus proprioceived is no mere object of scientific scrutiny but is the sub-objectively lived brain (Drew Leder, The Absent Body, 1990, p. 113); it is the brain as a concrete universal, as the "flesh of the world" (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 139).
  
  
• Dimensions of Apeiron: a topological phenomenology of space, time, and individuation (2004, p. 207): In making the (w)holeness of Being a concrete reality, we are to read this text Proprioceptively; read our own reading; read these words about passing beyond themselves (into their prereflective roots) in such a way that the passage actually takes place. Such a reading is mediated by fleshing out this text via the dimensional amplification provided by the Klein bottle.
  
  Now the body of our text does not consist merely of lifeless, empty symbols, intrinsically meaningless signifiers that can only point outside themselves to disembodied meaning: our text is the Klein bottle. It is in cotentively reading the (w)hole in this self-containing three-dimensional text (the "blind spot" in the field of vision) that we should pass unbrokenly into its subtext. The Klein bottle's incompleteness when read ontically is at once an incompleteness in our reflecting upon it....
  
  Can we read the hole in the Klein bottle in such a way that we relax the compulsion to regard it as merely a hole, a gap in an ordinary object simply contained in space? Can we read the hole in the Klein bottle as an opening to "another dimension" and read that dimension as the prereflective source of our very own reading? Can we enter that dimension through Proprioception?
  
  It is a matter of proceeding medi(t)atively, from 'both sides at once" -- from the mediative side of the conceptual, and from the side of experiential immediacy known in meditation. The Kleinian concept brings us to the limit of the conceptual.... It is here that we can realize the intimate harmony of outside and inside, of object and subject, of the bounded and boundless. That is to say: the harmony of apeiron can be realized in full by the Goddess herself.

A more recent description of the process has also been provided by Rosen, stressing its paradoxical nature (Splitting the Atom: the paradox of Proprioceptive Dialogue, The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 2022, 43, 2022, 3).

Appreciation of meta-communication?  As a model that seeks to engage stakeholders in self-determined change, appreciative inquiry raises the question as to degree to which such "appreciation" involves engagement in meta-communication (David L. Cooperrider, Appreciative Inquiry in a Broken World, 22 April 2020; F. J. Barrett, F.J. and R. E. Fryx,  Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Approach to Building Cooperative Capacity, Taos Institute, 2005).

However, although the need to transcend the habitual focus of that method on the "positive" is argued, little effort is seemingly made to engage with the problematic dimensions of meta-communication (Gervase R. Bushe, Appreciative Inquiry is not (just) about the Positive, OD Practitioner, 39, 2007, 4; Gervase R. Bushe and Aniq F. Kassam, When Is Appreciative Inquiry Transformational?: A Meta-Case Analysis, The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 41, 2005, 2).

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