Responding to strategic dilemmas of governance: explore absence rather than consensus?

Reintegration of a Remaindered World (Part #10)

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Visuals] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx | Refs ]

The design principles of tensegrity have been presented as offering vital clues to ordering the strategic dilemmas -- effectively Deacon's "constraints" -- which were evident on the occasion of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), as presented separately (Configuring Globally and Contending Locally: shaping the global network of local bargains by decoding and mapping Earth Summit inter-sectoral issues, 1992).

With respect to the challenges of collective global governance,  Deacon's remark (cited above) may be of wider systemic relevance:

... have we been looking in the wrong places for clues? ... I believe that in order to overcome this stalemate we need to pay more attention to what is intrinsically not present in everything -- from life's functions and meanings to mind's experiences and values... Constraints reflect what is not there, and the more constrained something is, the more symmetric and regular it is.

Ironically in the case of global governance, this suggests the merit of exploring what is "not there", rather than desperately seeking to give form to "agreement" and "consensus" in practice -- which are so evidently absent  (The Consensus Delusion, 2011; Using Disagreements for Superordinate Frame Configuration, 1992). Consistent with Deacon's point is the fact that the most symmetric, regular forms are those associated with the polyhedra basic to tensegrity (Towards Polyhedral Global Governance: complexifying oversimplistic strategic metaphors, 2008). Tensegrity is fundamental to the management cybernetics insights of Stafford Beer (Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity, 1994). Appropriately, in the light of Lao Tzu's reference (above) to "thirty spokes share the wheel's hub", Beer's approach is based on the three-dimensional icosahedron -- with thirty edges configured around an empty "hub".

Especially intriguing are the manner in which "absence" and "emptiness" are designed into such structures and is indeed "central" to their organization. Valuable insights, consistent with Deacon's argument, are also offered through the mathematics of q-analysis, namely the theory and application of mathematical relations between finite sets (Ron Atkin, Multidimensional Man; can man live in 3-dimensional space?, 1981). Atkin has applied this to the analysis of communication patterns within complex organizations, as summarized separately (Social organization determined by incommunicability of insights, 1995). This has the considerable merit of providing formal recognition to "absence" as a "hole" in the geometry of communication and comprehension.

The case for exploring the absence of agreement, rather than on the increasingly desperate dependence on achieving it, is reinforced at the present time by the continuing shambles of climate change negotiations (Kristin Palitza, Comprehensive Agreement Beyond Reach in Durban, IPS, 7 December 2011) and by the evident shambles of the quest for effective agreement regarding an orderly global financial system.

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Visuals] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx | Refs ]