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<TITLE>Re: [OSList] The Tyranny of Structurelessness</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Hi!<BR>
I just want to add another perspective on “structures”. It’s about the structures of oppression that is so hard to be aware of, especially if you are looking from the angle of a privileged position. I think Marylin Frey, a philosophy professor and feminist, describes it very well in this quote:<BR>
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“Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.”<BR>
from <I>Politics Of Reality – Essays In Feminist Theory</I> (1983) <BR>
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/Pernilla<BR>
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Den 2015-10-10 14:44, skrev "Harold Shinsato via OSList" <<a href="oslist@lists.openspacetech.org">oslist@lists.openspacetech.org</a>>:<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Hi Michael,<BR>
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This is an inquiry that I enjoy and which I keep spinning around. It seems crystal clear to me that the topic of tyranny has value and sheds light. And it's also paradoxically true that the right/wrong victim/perpetrator narrative disempowers and lays blame. It relieves responsibility.<BR>
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Holding these two contradictory truths at the same time let's me wonder how I contribute to tyrannical power structures (flows), and how I can learn from them, or help them flow into something else.<BR>
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The Tyranny of Structurelessness essay was introduced to me at the Agile 2012 conference in Texas by an agilista cognoscenti, who also half jokingly called Agile a "liberation theology". It popped up for me again by a young attendee at WOSONOS 2013 in Florida, before the difficult and disorienting process of choosing the location for 2014 in Serbia, who advocated a formal consensus process created by the Food Not Bombs activist, C.T. Butler.<BR>
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I love OST for how it tends to plant and nurture responsibility in communities and organizations, and at the same time, the beauty of Open Space Technology seems to be mostly hidden under a basket.<BR>
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I don't see a closing to the inquiry questions you raise any time soon. The questions are likely more permanent than any experiments we try. But the questions have led me to explore authority in "The Power of TED", Group Relations, Dr. Christopher Avery's work on Responsibility, C.T. Butler and formal consensus, and Sociocracy. But, no final answers - if there could be such a thing.<BR>
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Harold<BR>
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On Oct 8, 2015 3:23 PM, "Michael Herman via OSList" <<a href="oslist@lists.openspacetech.org">oslist@lists.openspacetech.org</a>> wrote:<BR>
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> i love this bit about bucky the verb, harold.<BR>
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> what i don't understand about this tyranny business is that it sounds like somebody, the system or some people are doing some other people wrong. alternatively, that somehow -- naturally or maybe just unconsciously or unintentionally -- winners and losers, ins and outs, are being created. i can't tell if the suggestion is that this is a malicious thing to be defeated, a natural thing to observe, or some kind of problem to be solved. <BR>
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> leaving aside those instances when people do truly horrible things to others, how does this tyranny story square with the core open space story that each of us is ultimately responsible for our own experience, we all have two feet or some equivalent and need to use them for ourselves? <BR>
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> how does this essay inform your practice of opening space? or participating on the list? if everything in the essay is true, what should the next wosonos invitation process look like? can we put this in practice terms? what is one to do in the presence of tyrannizing structurelessness? what has anyone done in the past, in those instances you've seen, that made some positive difference? <BR>
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> --<BR>
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> Michael Herman<BR>
> Michael Herman Associates<BR>
> <a href="http://MichaelHerman.com">http://MichaelHerman.com</a><BR>
> <a href="http://OpenSpaceWorld.org">http://OpenSpaceWorld.org</a><BR>
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