March 9, 2023 • 30 mins
In this conversation with cognitive scientist and philosopher Hanne De Jaegher, we explore interruption in the context of participatory sense making – how we understand the world and ourselves is affected by inter-individual coordination. Participatory sense-making relies on the capacity to flexibly engage with your social partner from moment to moment. It involves emotion, knowledge, mood, physiology, background, concepts, language, norms, and, crucially, the dynamics of the interaction process modulates the sense-making that takes place. How we navigate and participate in these “spaces between” may be our most sophisticated form of knowing: love, a never-ending balancing act. We touch on implications for scientific objectivity, neurodiversity, and dementia. And how this sense-making framework is interrupting cognitive theory, moving us from thinking about self-in-isolation to self-in-connection. From individualism to love, really. In this framework, interpersonal communication and connection can be seen as a series of interruptions, as we perceive, engage, learn, adjust, and through experience develop our sense of self-in-relation.
To learn more about We Interrupt this Podcast and to suggest people we should talk to and topics you think we should explore, please see our webpage at: https://www.weinterrupthis.com or contact us on twitter at @HaakYak.
You can find more about Hanne on her webpage at www.hannedejaegher.net, including links to papers and videos. If you’d like to dive right into enactive cognitive theory, a good place to start is her 2007 paper with E Di Paolo, Participatory Sense-Making: An enactive approach to social cognition, published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences and her 2021 paper Loving and knowing. Reflections for an engaged epistemology published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:04):
Cognitive science and psychology start from this idea of a universal body and mind.
It's not universal at all. And learning that we are not universal,
I think that's another of the interruptions of that kind of science that opens up new ways of learning.
Hi, welcome to We Interrupt This Podcast.
(00:25):
I am Laure Haak, your host
In this conversation with cognitive scientist and philosopher Hanne De Jaegher, we explore interruption in the context of participatory sense making --
the capacity to flexibly engage with your social partner from moment to moment.
It involves emotion, knowledge,
mood, physiology,
background concepts,
(00:46):
language norms, and crucially the dynamics of the interaction process itself modulates the sense making that takes place. How we navigate and participate in these spaces between may be our most sophisticated form of knowing! We touch in this conversation on implications for scientific objectivity,
(01:07):
neurodiversity, and dementia,
and how this sense making framework is interrupting cognitive theory,
moving us from thinking about self in isolation, to self in connection.
From individualism to love, really.
In this framework,
interpersonal communication and connection can be seen as a series of interruptions as we perceive,
(01:27):
engage,
learn,
adjust, and through experience,
develop our sense of self in relation.
So, my name is Hanne De Jaegher or De Jaegher,
depending on where you're pronouncing the name.
(01:51):
I'm a philosopher and a cognitive scientist and also co-director of a community interest company,
a charity in the UK that organizes and provides dialogues and coaching and mentoring for and with autistic people.
It's a majority autistic-led organization outside of the UK.
Also, I teach in Spain as a philosopher.
(02:11):
Hanne, thanks for joining us.
I wanted to take a little bit of time at the beginning here to ask you and have you explain what interested you about interruptions?
Yeah,
where to start.
It's so complex and multi layered.
I never had thought before your invitation about interruptions.
(02:33):
But as soon as I started thinking about my work through this lens of interruptions,
both interruptions and my work made sense differently.
So insight was gained from this invitation immediately.
So in my work,
I investigate how people make meaning together what I call participatory sense making.
I work in cognitive sciences and philosophy.
(02:54):
Cognitive sciences,
of course,
include psychology and neuroscience and linguistics.
And I collaborate with people in those fields.
The idea of participatory sense making started as a kind of dissatisfaction with the way psychology thinks about how we understand each other,
which is very much in the head,
trying to figure out another person's intentions.
(03:14):
But with the assumption that another person's intentions are not visible to us.
So we have to figure them out from what we see a person doing.
For instance,
if I would see you now crossing your arms and leaning back a little,
maybe I might interpret that as beginning to be disinterested or questioning, maybe in a negative sense.
But in this psychological view on it,
you interpret or try to figure out other people's behavior in this way.
(03:38):
But what is missing in that is the connection between people.
So connection or interaction or contact or, in a metaphorical sense,
touching each other if you like is totally absent from that picture.
And so you have to bridge a gap.
Participatory sense making starts in the middle, if you like.
It starts from the in between, in the sense that there are two pillars to this concept.
(04:00):
One is that individuals who are engaged all of us now in this interaction, or maybe also listeners, you're engaged immediately with what is going on.
And there are two elements to that.
One,
is that something is at stake for all of us here,
something matters to our identities as we are doing this conversation.
For instance,
in this kind of conversation,
(04:20):
I speak differently than when I'm talking to my husband.
We use different language.
The playfulness is different in these different interactions,
the kinds of interruptions that you feel you can make for instance,
could be very different as well.
And so we,
we come to interactions with things that matter to us and that are at stake for us.
And this determines to an extent our behavior.
(04:41):
And the other element of participatory sense making theory is that when we get together and do things together,
like speaking or dancing or cooking or shopping or gardening or whatever ,an interaction emerges between us.
And this is something other.
It's a third thing that emerges as a dynamical process between us.
(05:01):
It also self organizes,
tries to maintain itself, if you like, and we get pulled into this process or pushed out of it sometimes.
And maybe I can give an example to illustrate that.
So the autonomy of the interaction process or the way interactions can take on a life of their own,
you can see it when, for instance,
(05:22):
imagine you're walking in your office building to your office through a corridor, and someone is coming from the other side and you just want to go to your office and the other person, I don't know,
wants to go to the kitchen or something, and you,
you're just walking. And at some point you meet and you,
you end up in the middle, standing in front of each other.
And then you move to the other side and the other person moves to the other side as well in the same moment.
(05:46):
Yes.
And this kind of dance emerges between you where you trying to get out of the coordination
actually keeps you in it.
And so this is illustrating,
we give it as a basic example of,
of how interactions take on a life of their own and pull you into their organization and then you have to do something to interrupt that.
(06:07):
So even though you were on your way,
so something comes along and you have no choice but to engage in this interaction.
And then yeah,
there's a task for you to interrupt it.
But this might open up another new interesting thing because maybe you laugh with your colleague about this happenstance and then you get talking about how your weekend was.
(06:27):
And so yeah,
the interactions can take us up in certain ways as participants.
And this is the basis of my work.
The other piece of this, Hanne, is that this isn't just in one person's head in another person's head.
You're actually, in the language that you use in some of your papers, exchanging matter between these two people in the interaction.
(06:48):
And so that in between space becomes --
it doesn't become it is. That we have to now somehow come to this place where we recognize that in between space, and that exchange of matter and energy between people, as something both outside of ourselves,
but also part of ourselves.
(07:08):
And I love reading your work because it specifically calls that out.
I think there are some other contexts in which that in between space is becoming perhaps more and more visible in some Indigenous knowledge and dreaming contexts.
For example,
where one's environment is as much a part of an interaction as oneself is.
(07:32):
I'm wondering if you can go a little bit deeper into how what you're doing is actually changing how cognitive scientists are approaching their work.
So my work I think is interrupting this way of doing cognitive science or thinking about the mind and how we understand each other actually very much through what I learned from and with autistic people.
(07:52):
Since I was a child,
my parents,
they both worked with autistic children and their families, and also autistic adults.
One of the things that I really learned from that is that there is a kind of spectrum of thinking and of being, and we all are on this spectrum.
And we can, I think imaginatively, move towards each other and try to understand each other more than we think if we would were to follow the the guidelines that come from psychological approaches to what neurodiversity is or to what autism is.
(08:24):
So psychological theories, in a Western colonial way,
try to understand difference by trying to control it and making a theory of it and putting that onto the phenomenon that they're seeing,
which is in this case,
an autistic child,
for instance.
Which is already a horrible way to put it as a phenomenon over there that creates distance between people. And actually,
(08:45):
if that is the way we think, it makes it difficult for us to communicate and to interact because we are trying to interpret this difference,
that in principle,
we cannot know.
And that's a,
a specific ontology and a specific approach to how to interact with each other that I think is really wrong.
And we have to stand on a different ground,
which is that we are all continually becoming and co becoming in difference.
(09:10):
But these differences between us are approachable and they are ongoingly changing as we move towards each other and try to understand each other.
There may be aspects of another person's way of thinking that at first you don't understand,
but you can approach it from different perspectives and the other person will interact with you and that changes you.
(09:31):
The approach I work in is the enactive approach.
It has a long history in the work of biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.
I think one difference as well between how cognitive science and also other scientists have tried to control
their objective study, is that in this enactive approach,
the scientist changes also in the act of doing this kind of research, and that's fully part of the whole circulation of, or spiraling, or however you might want to call it.
(10:01):
So we are changing all the time as well.
One of the challenges from the,
oh I'm gonna say prototypical scientific viewpoint as the objective observer --
that's one of the things your work challenges, in saying that as a scientist,
as a researcher,
we are part of this system and we are learning as we go along and we cannot in any way, be an objective observer.
(10:24):
We can set up the way an experiment is carried out.
But if we don't learn in the doing of that experiment,
then, what are we doing it for?
What kinds of critiques, commentary, challenges do you encounter as a researcher?
(10:47):
You're more of a theoretician, and in some ways a philosopher, in talking about just what you said (10:47):
we are learning as we do this research and our point of view changes as we're doing it.
How does that come up in conversations about your work and quote unquote conformity with the scientific process?
(11:07):
Good question.
What I find most challenging in a way is that sometimes people ask me to -- they used to not so much now,
but maybe 10 years ago or so,
they used to ask me, please explain this,
but then on the cognitivist old-fashioned ground.
So explain why don't we have representations in our head, and then stay on the cognitive ground to explain that.
(11:31):
And I thought no, I don't want to do that.
There are people who do that and it's great that they do it.
But I have work to do on this enactive ground.
So leave me alone with those.
I mean,
I don't want to answer those questions.
I don't have time for it.
I need to develop the,
the enactive way of thinking.
That's been a learning for me, not to be interrupted.
(11:51):
And actually a therapist I was seeing at that time told me when people are trying to do that,
it's kind of a perversity in a way,
to pull you away from your track.
And sometimes you have to stay on your track.
In a way, you could almost think that this approach is totally fluffy or too,
everything changes all the time.
So maybe nothing matters.
(12:11):
But I actually think it really does matter that we're very careful about staying within this way of thinking and developing what we have to develop here, rather than being seduced to thinking in the old ways again.
Because actually, also there is a responsibility that we have in relation to setting up an experiment or setting up a theory or,
or a way of thinking.
(12:33):
We determine the world in part by doing that.
And we have a responsibility to keep the world open to different ways of changing and transforming that are inclusive and abundant in a good sense, rather than restricting what people can do.
So, both staying on this enactive ground in order so that there can be more understanding of transformation together.
(12:54):
So there's a kind of paradox in there, or an ambiguity.
But that's also I think basic to how things are. That it is paradoxical and contradictory and strange, sometimes.
One of my colleagues put it -- Elena Cuffari,
who is a co-author on our book,
Linguistic Bodies.
She said, it's a paradoxical practice of letting be without letting go.
(13:18):
And this paradoxical practice also,
it gives you a kind of license to play in a way.
So the discomfort,
once you accept it and understand it or begin to,
maybe it also can become a comfort again in some way or,
or because you then maybe gain a capacity to move between discomfort and comfort.
(13:39):
It gives more possibilities for moving with each other.
It's interesting the letting be way of thinking,
on the one hand,
it feels really distancing:
let it be,
it's what it is.
But what you're talking about,
it's more interactive.
What do you really mean when you say letting be,
(13:59):
letting be without letting go.
Can you dig into that a little bit more?
So letting be is definitely not a non-engagement.
It's actually based in engaging.
I got the concept from Kim McLaren,
a Canadian philosopher.
And also there's a lot in phenomenology,
people have written about it.
Heidegger has written about it.
(14:20):
What I mean by letting be is, when you encounter someone and you're interested in that person, they have their being and you have your being and you relate to each other.
There's interest and relation,
you have no choice but to let the other be over there,
their own being,
but your interest in them already makes a change to them in a way.
(14:44):
So there is this, in the engagement between beings and in relation to each other,
they become, as well, and they become something else.
So it's a kind of balancing act between different beings, which always also entails change.
I think the art is to not over determine or underdetermine the other.
(15:08):
Overdetermine would be coming with a preconceived idea of what this person is or how they are,
and underdetermining would be stopping the relation.
Too much respect in how to understand something else, means also that you won't understand it well,
because you keep too much distance and that's dangerous as well or that's something to be avoided,
(15:29):
And then again, we come to the discomfort because it's uncomfortable to
encounter something that you have too much respect for.
I'm gonna go back to neurodivergence and this spectrum and talk a little bit about interacting along the spectrum of neurodivergence.
(15:51):
In reading your work, the way that your work helps to create a framework for all of us to interact better with each other,
to listen to each other and letting another person be,
but also acknowledge there is that really awesome energy that's exchanged as you're interacting with someone.
(16:12):
In my head, and certainly your writing comes off as a very different way of,
of interacting with autistic people.
It's saying how can we find ways of interacting because they are there.
We need to find a way to bring that energy together.
(16:33):
Listening to autistic people and reading their writings is,
is a starting point that's super important. That's basic.
And also maybe not putting so much emphasis on high level cognitive skills only,
like maybe savant skills or so, that speak to the imagination so much.
(16:55):
What I think is basic is that, a kind of hypothesis if you like,
that autistic people might move differently,
have a different organization of their body and brain.
That means that they have different rhythms of interacting with the world.
For instance,
there's research that shows that when something loud or impactful happens close to you, that a neurotypical person would direct their attention sort of smoothly in one go, temporally I mean,
(17:21):
immediately react to a loud noise, for instance.
Research shows that autistic people react in a more jerky manner to that, like one movement and then a few movements smaller and smaller in reaction to that loud noise.
So that's a very basic bodily way in which we encounter the world differently.
And once we become aware of more of those,
(17:43):
I think it opens up ways to understand each other better, because we also learn --
I'm neurotypical --
learn about our ways of understanding the world perceptually and that that's kind of specific in a way.
Therefore, it might be different for different people.
That's another element to cognitive science.
Cognitive science and psychology start from this idea of a universal body and mind,
(18:06):
which is really basically a Western industrialized,
middle aged, and so on.
So it's not universal at all.
And learning that,
that we are not universal is,
I think that's another of the disruptions or interruptions of,
of that kind of science that opens up new ways of learning.
We are taught to revere mathematicians and,
(18:27):
and people with high cognitive functioning, whatever that means.
You're arguing something different.
So the highest forms of human knowing are thought to be language, in a kind of old fashioned way of understanding language, or mathematics, or planning, or categorizing things.
But I think that our most sophisticated knowing we can learn about through our experience of loving.
(18:54):
And loving here, I mean
something not rosy or romantic.
More, the tension between your being very interested from a core part of yourself in something, driven towards something from your core bodily being, to something that's different from you.
And so something that you want to be close to, but are always also unavoidably in tension with.
(19:17):
And so, in love relationships,
it's the kind of tension between being yourself and being in relation, and things can pull in very different directions.
And so that tension, I think also characterizes knowing.
Most of our or all of our forms of knowing originate in that tension,
which is something that we experience very bodily.
(19:38):
A way to illustrate it could be approaches to dementia, for instance.
One element of dementia understanding in a traditional sense, is that people with dementia are losing their emotional skills.
But that is based on an idea that you can test emotional skills by asking people to sort pictures of people showing emotions into the category of these emotions.
(19:59):
And when people stop being able to do that,
the thought is they're losing their emotional skills.
But when you know a person with dementia closely,
you have experience of sitting with them, maybe on a bench watching the garden, and looking at the birds and reacting to that immediately and sensing each other's interest or being moved by something that you're doing together.
(20:22):
And that is this tension between being yourself and interacting with this person who is different or even the person who is changing in front of you.
Because person with dementia, you're kind of losing.
My father had dementia.
I was losing my connection with him.
He was changing.
And yet we were also still sharing so many things.
It's those capacities that we need to, as doctors or people who write guidelines for dementia care,
(20:49):
need to understand that that's basic and central to it, so that we give people who experience those things in their life,
trust and confidence in their relation, rather than giving them guidelines that actually make them think we can't have relations anymore.
I think all of us have experience in one way or another with dementia.
I went back to thinking about my grandfather.
I think that tension between this person used to be this, and I want to interact with them because they were this,
(21:15):
that comes back to your comment earlier about being in boxes. That we can make those boxes a little bit more porous and,
and be in relation to this other being, not the box that we put the being in.
It gives us that much more flexibility.
(21:35):
Whether it's a person going through stages of dementia,
whether it's a person growing up from being a child to an adolescent to an adult,
or whether it's a person on some part of a neurodiversity spectrum,
throwing that box away and creating that elastic space to interact between people with that sense of deep connectedness,
(21:57):
the love,
it's really freeing.
It's a little nerve wracking when you first start because you're like,
I don't know where I stand with this person.
But when you have that,
that expectation of flexibility,
it opens up so much more for us as humans to be in relation.
And at the same time,
(22:17):
maybe also to repeat, that this flexibility isn't random or endless or ungraspable, because the flexibility is always related.
And this comes back to one of the basic elements of our theory,
it's related to our bodily constraints and needs.
Also our mental or,
or identity needs and constraints.
(22:39):
So we do have pathways of relating, and in this new way of thinking,
which is actually also an old way of thinking in a way, it opens up.
But it's, at the same time, not random.
It's related to our very bodily being.
We can't do everything.
We can't change and do everything.
But we can change more than we think we can, and we will remain being ourselves as well.
(23:04):
Losing ourselves in these new kinds of interaction might be something that people are scared of,
but we don't need to be scared of that because we are our very material bodies with this particular weight and contours.
There's in this whole pandemic,
(23:24):
such a lack of care coming from, or a lack of a caring attitude from how we are dealing with the pandemic,
which also makes it hard for us to relate to our own emotions and how difficult this actually is.
We tried to pretend that it's all fine and nothing is going on, or we're going back to normal.
But it also means we can't get in touch with how difficult this is for us,
(23:45):
also,
for our bodies.
This kind of difficulty goes really through the center of our bodies and to how we can move.
And recognizing that is something that I think we can allow ourselves to do. Because then we can move through that, rather than stopping it and being afraid of it,
(24:08):
and moving through it without learning some things that we maybe have to learn about what's really important.
That reminds me of dementia, where we're grieving for this person that is no longer the person that we knew. And we keep going through that bouncing back -- real discomfort.
Like, this is not my grandfather,
this is not my grandmother,
this is not my father,
this isn't the person I knew,
but it is,
it's just different.
(24:29):
How do we go through that grieving?
And in a way it's not even letting go.
It's, Hanne, as you said,
it's the letting be, right?
And continually adjusting that being-in-relation that we have with the other person, or being-with the other group of people, or being-with this new way of existing in this world.
(24:52):
It's hard.
And I think it also, Hanne, really challenges this notion of what you're doing with enactive theory.
This notion of individualism, where in Western culture,
particularly in the United States, we are very much about,
I'm an individual.
I can do my own thing. I declare who I am.
And how I exist in this world isn't quite able to capture that being-in-relation with other people.
(25:19):
You talk about being-in-relation,
you talk about love.
I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to read a scientific paper where you discuss love.
It's just awesome!
So much of the emotional world
and that connection isn't discussed in science because emotion is,
(25:42):
I don't know,
it's starting to come in, but it's always been put on the periphery because of, how do you study emotion?
Right?
Everyone's had this feeling that emotion is all this,
as you said,
fluffy stuff that's off on the side. You are bringing this sense of emotion into how we understand the world as individuals,
(26:03):
but also in connection.
That's a good question because I don't actually really know how to think about emotion as such, because emotion,
I have never really thought about it so much.
It's not part of my work. Love, in my definition or in the way I speak about it in that paper, is not an emotion.
It is an existential way,
(26:24):
an existential dialectic between you and the world, that's full of tension that matters to you completely,
although you're not always aware of it.
But it determines where you go, and where you don't go, and the,
the what you bump into by doing that.
So, you may come across good things that fulfill you through which you learn new things where you,
(26:49):
where you have a connection or a contact or something changes for you in a good way,
but might also change in a bad way.
You may bump into something that is to your detriment or to the detriment of the person you're interacting with.
And then it's also actually to your own detriment.
So you get hurt by hurting other people.
I think that's a corollary of this.
(27:10):
And then in a way it is related to emotion,
but maybe more in this basic sense of valence for you.
So what matters to you in this enactive approach that we have,
it's about encountering the world, in terms of what will help you keep existing,
keep living,
transforming,
becoming who you are and who you might change into.
(27:32):
So that's emotion.
I would like to bring it back to this very basic way of interacting with the world,
that's dialectic and existential and paradoxical and,
and -- even so, I'm looking at an enormous sequoia here in the lane behind our house.
Even plants do that.
Plants have to have this. Animals and humans and plants relate to the world in that way.
(27:57):
In the way of (27:57):
this is relevant for me.
So I'll go there,
I'll move towards it.
I'll take it up and then keep on becoming.
And this I should avoid, and so I turn away from it, and you will never fully learn it.
It's ongoing. We don't stop figuring this out.
Very much like a rheostat where you're constantly adjusting to the mileau around you.
(28:19):
What is good?
What do I want to engage with?
How do I learn?
How does that change my way of being myself?
But also being --
I love this context of enactive,
of really thinking about, again,
that energy that flows between us.
Just naming it and envisioning it as you're interacting in spaces is really, really powerful.
(28:43):
Well, Hanne,
our hour is up.
I have had just a really fun conversation.
Thank you very, very much.
Thank you for joining us! For more about this podcast,
(29:04):
please see our website at www.weinterruptthis.com.
There we have show notes,
links, and other episodes,
Contact me on Twitter @HaakYak to recommend topics or speakers for this series.
I look forward to hearing from you!
This podcast was produced on the traditional lands and waters of the Menominee, Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples.
(29:27):
I pay my respects to Elders, past and present
and to emerging and future Indigenous leaders.
It is a gift to be grounding and growing this work within these beautiful forests and waterways.
Thank you also to Emma Levinson for her Interruptions artwork featured on our website,
and to Alan Huckleberry for allowing us to use Bartok's Melody with Interruptions from the University of Iowa Piano Pedagogy video recording project. Segue is “Mysterious String Quartet” by Shane Ivers of Silverman Sound Studios.
Cognitive science and psychology start from this idea of a universal body and mind.
It's not universal at all. And learning that we are not universal,
I think that's another of the interruptions of that kind of science that opens up new ways of learning.
Hi, welcome to We Interrupt This Podcast.
(00:25):
I am Laure Haak, your host
In this conversation with cognitive scientist and philosopher Hanne De Jaegher, we explore interruption in the context of participatory sense making --
the capacity to flexibly engage with your social partner from moment to moment.
It involves emotion, knowledge,
mood, physiology,
background concepts,
(00:46):
language norms, and crucially the dynamics of the interaction process itself modulates the sense making that takes place. How we navigate and participate in these spaces between may be our most sophisticated form of knowing! We touch in this conversation on implications for scientific objectivity,
(01:07):
neurodiversity, and dementia,
and how this sense making framework is interrupting cognitive theory,
moving us from thinking about self in isolation, to self in connection.
From individualism to love, really.
In this framework,
interpersonal communication and connection can be seen as a series of interruptions as we perceive,
(01:27):
engage,
learn,
adjust, and through experience,
develop our sense of self in relation.
So, my name is Hanne De Jaegher or De Jaegher,
depending on where you're pronouncing the name.
(01:51):
I'm a philosopher and a cognitive scientist and also co-director of a community interest company,
a charity in the UK that organizes and provides dialogues and coaching and mentoring for and with autistic people.
It's a majority autistic-led organization outside of the UK.
Also, I teach in Spain as a philosopher.
(02:11):
Hanne, thanks for joining us.
I wanted to take a little bit of time at the beginning here to ask you and have you explain what interested you about interruptions?
Yeah,
where to start.
It's so complex and multi layered.
I never had thought before your invitation about interruptions.
(02:33):
But as soon as I started thinking about my work through this lens of interruptions,
both interruptions and my work made sense differently.
So insight was gained from this invitation immediately.
So in my work,
I investigate how people make meaning together what I call participatory sense making.
I work in cognitive sciences and philosophy.
(02:54):
Cognitive sciences,
of course,
include psychology and neuroscience and linguistics.
And I collaborate with people in those fields.
The idea of participatory sense making started as a kind of dissatisfaction with the way psychology thinks about how we understand each other,
which is very much in the head,
trying to figure out another person's intentions.
(03:14):
But with the assumption that another person's intentions are not visible to us.
So we have to figure them out from what we see a person doing.
For instance,
if I would see you now crossing your arms and leaning back a little,
maybe I might interpret that as beginning to be disinterested or questioning, maybe in a negative sense.
But in this psychological view on it,
you interpret or try to figure out other people's behavior in this way.
(03:38):
But what is missing in that is the connection between people.
So connection or interaction or contact or, in a metaphorical sense,
touching each other if you like is totally absent from that picture.
And so you have to bridge a gap.
Participatory sense making starts in the middle, if you like.
It starts from the in between, in the sense that there are two pillars to this concept.
(04:00):
One is that individuals who are engaged all of us now in this interaction, or maybe also listeners, you're engaged immediately with what is going on.
And there are two elements to that.
One,
is that something is at stake for all of us here,
something matters to our identities as we are doing this conversation.
For instance,
in this kind of conversation,
(04:20):
I speak differently than when I'm talking to my husband.
We use different language.
The playfulness is different in these different interactions,
the kinds of interruptions that you feel you can make for instance,
could be very different as well.
And so we,
we come to interactions with things that matter to us and that are at stake for us.
And this determines to an extent our behavior.
(04:41):
And the other element of participatory sense making theory is that when we get together and do things together,
like speaking or dancing or cooking or shopping or gardening or whatever ,an interaction emerges between us.
And this is something other.
It's a third thing that emerges as a dynamical process between us.
(05:01):
It also self organizes,
tries to maintain itself, if you like, and we get pulled into this process or pushed out of it sometimes.
And maybe I can give an example to illustrate that.
So the autonomy of the interaction process or the way interactions can take on a life of their own,
you can see it when, for instance,
(05:22):
imagine you're walking in your office building to your office through a corridor, and someone is coming from the other side and you just want to go to your office and the other person, I don't know,
wants to go to the kitchen or something, and you,
you're just walking. And at some point you meet and you,
you end up in the middle, standing in front of each other.
And then you move to the other side and the other person moves to the other side as well in the same moment.
(05:46):
Yes.
And this kind of dance emerges between you where you trying to get out of the coordination
actually keeps you in it.
And so this is illustrating,
we give it as a basic example of,
of how interactions take on a life of their own and pull you into their organization and then you have to do something to interrupt that.
(06:07):
So even though you were on your way,
so something comes along and you have no choice but to engage in this interaction.
And then yeah,
there's a task for you to interrupt it.
But this might open up another new interesting thing because maybe you laugh with your colleague about this happenstance and then you get talking about how your weekend was.
(06:27):
And so yeah,
the interactions can take us up in certain ways as participants.
And this is the basis of my work.
The other piece of this, Hanne, is that this isn't just in one person's head in another person's head.
You're actually, in the language that you use in some of your papers, exchanging matter between these two people in the interaction.
(06:48):
And so that in between space becomes --
it doesn't become it is. That we have to now somehow come to this place where we recognize that in between space, and that exchange of matter and energy between people, as something both outside of ourselves,
but also part of ourselves.
(07:08):
And I love reading your work because it specifically calls that out.
I think there are some other contexts in which that in between space is becoming perhaps more and more visible in some Indigenous knowledge and dreaming contexts.
For example,
where one's environment is as much a part of an interaction as oneself is.
(07:32):
I'm wondering if you can go a little bit deeper into how what you're doing is actually changing how cognitive scientists are approaching their work.
So my work I think is interrupting this way of doing cognitive science or thinking about the mind and how we understand each other actually very much through what I learned from and with autistic people.
(07:52):
Since I was a child,
my parents,
they both worked with autistic children and their families, and also autistic adults.
One of the things that I really learned from that is that there is a kind of spectrum of thinking and of being, and we all are on this spectrum.
And we can, I think imaginatively, move towards each other and try to understand each other more than we think if we would were to follow the the guidelines that come from psychological approaches to what neurodiversity is or to what autism is.
(08:24):
So psychological theories, in a Western colonial way,
try to understand difference by trying to control it and making a theory of it and putting that onto the phenomenon that they're seeing,
which is in this case,
an autistic child,
for instance.
Which is already a horrible way to put it as a phenomenon over there that creates distance between people. And actually,
(08:45):
if that is the way we think, it makes it difficult for us to communicate and to interact because we are trying to interpret this difference,
that in principle,
we cannot know.
And that's a,
a specific ontology and a specific approach to how to interact with each other that I think is really wrong.
And we have to stand on a different ground,
which is that we are all continually becoming and co becoming in difference.
(09:10):
But these differences between us are approachable and they are ongoingly changing as we move towards each other and try to understand each other.
There may be aspects of another person's way of thinking that at first you don't understand,
but you can approach it from different perspectives and the other person will interact with you and that changes you.
(09:31):
The approach I work in is the enactive approach.
It has a long history in the work of biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.
I think one difference as well between how cognitive science and also other scientists have tried to control
their objective study, is that in this enactive approach,
the scientist changes also in the act of doing this kind of research, and that's fully part of the whole circulation of, or spiraling, or however you might want to call it.
(10:01):
So we are changing all the time as well.
One of the challenges from the,
oh I'm gonna say prototypical scientific viewpoint as the objective observer --
that's one of the things your work challenges, in saying that as a scientist,
as a researcher,
we are part of this system and we are learning as we go along and we cannot in any way, be an objective observer.
(10:24):
We can set up the way an experiment is carried out.
But if we don't learn in the doing of that experiment,
then, what are we doing it for?
What kinds of critiques, commentary, challenges do you encounter as a researcher?
(10:47):
You're more of a theoretician, and in some ways a philosopher, in talking about just what you said (10:47):
we are learning as we do this research and our point of view changes as we're doing it.
How does that come up in conversations about your work and quote unquote conformity with the scientific process?
(11:07):
Good question.
What I find most challenging in a way is that sometimes people ask me to -- they used to not so much now,
but maybe 10 years ago or so,
they used to ask me, please explain this,
but then on the cognitivist old-fashioned ground.
So explain why don't we have representations in our head, and then stay on the cognitive ground to explain that.
(11:31):
And I thought no, I don't want to do that.
There are people who do that and it's great that they do it.
But I have work to do on this enactive ground.
So leave me alone with those.
I mean,
I don't want to answer those questions.
I don't have time for it.
I need to develop the,
the enactive way of thinking.
That's been a learning for me, not to be interrupted.
(11:51):
And actually a therapist I was seeing at that time told me when people are trying to do that,
it's kind of a perversity in a way,
to pull you away from your track.
And sometimes you have to stay on your track.
In a way, you could almost think that this approach is totally fluffy or too,
everything changes all the time.
So maybe nothing matters.
(12:11):
But I actually think it really does matter that we're very careful about staying within this way of thinking and developing what we have to develop here, rather than being seduced to thinking in the old ways again.
Because actually, also there is a responsibility that we have in relation to setting up an experiment or setting up a theory or,
or a way of thinking.
(12:33):
We determine the world in part by doing that.
And we have a responsibility to keep the world open to different ways of changing and transforming that are inclusive and abundant in a good sense, rather than restricting what people can do.
So, both staying on this enactive ground in order so that there can be more understanding of transformation together.
(12:54):
So there's a kind of paradox in there, or an ambiguity.
But that's also I think basic to how things are. That it is paradoxical and contradictory and strange, sometimes.
One of my colleagues put it -- Elena Cuffari,
who is a co-author on our book,
Linguistic Bodies.
She said, it's a paradoxical practice of letting be without letting go.
(13:18):
And this paradoxical practice also,
it gives you a kind of license to play in a way.
So the discomfort,
once you accept it and understand it or begin to,
maybe it also can become a comfort again in some way or,
or because you then maybe gain a capacity to move between discomfort and comfort.
(13:39):
It gives more possibilities for moving with each other.
It's interesting the letting be way of thinking,
on the one hand,
it feels really distancing:
let it be,
it's what it is.
But what you're talking about,
it's more interactive.
What do you really mean when you say letting be,
(13:59):
letting be without letting go.
Can you dig into that a little bit more?
So letting be is definitely not a non-engagement.
It's actually based in engaging.
I got the concept from Kim McLaren,
a Canadian philosopher.
And also there's a lot in phenomenology,
people have written about it.
Heidegger has written about it.
(14:20):
What I mean by letting be is, when you encounter someone and you're interested in that person, they have their being and you have your being and you relate to each other.
There's interest and relation,
you have no choice but to let the other be over there,
their own being,
but your interest in them already makes a change to them in a way.
(14:44):
So there is this, in the engagement between beings and in relation to each other,
they become, as well, and they become something else.
So it's a kind of balancing act between different beings, which always also entails change.
I think the art is to not over determine or underdetermine the other.
(15:08):
Overdetermine would be coming with a preconceived idea of what this person is or how they are,
and underdetermining would be stopping the relation.
Too much respect in how to understand something else, means also that you won't understand it well,
because you keep too much distance and that's dangerous as well or that's something to be avoided,
(15:29):
And then again, we come to the discomfort because it's uncomfortable to
encounter something that you have too much respect for.
I'm gonna go back to neurodivergence and this spectrum and talk a little bit about interacting along the spectrum of neurodivergence.
(15:51):
In reading your work, the way that your work helps to create a framework for all of us to interact better with each other,
to listen to each other and letting another person be,
but also acknowledge there is that really awesome energy that's exchanged as you're interacting with someone.
(16:12):
In my head, and certainly your writing comes off as a very different way of,
of interacting with autistic people.
It's saying how can we find ways of interacting because they are there.
We need to find a way to bring that energy together.
(16:33):
Listening to autistic people and reading their writings is,
is a starting point that's super important. That's basic.
And also maybe not putting so much emphasis on high level cognitive skills only,
like maybe savant skills or so, that speak to the imagination so much.
(16:55):
What I think is basic is that, a kind of hypothesis if you like,
that autistic people might move differently,
have a different organization of their body and brain.
That means that they have different rhythms of interacting with the world.
For instance,
there's research that shows that when something loud or impactful happens close to you, that a neurotypical person would direct their attention sort of smoothly in one go, temporally I mean,
(17:21):
immediately react to a loud noise, for instance.
Research shows that autistic people react in a more jerky manner to that, like one movement and then a few movements smaller and smaller in reaction to that loud noise.
So that's a very basic bodily way in which we encounter the world differently.
And once we become aware of more of those,
(17:43):
I think it opens up ways to understand each other better, because we also learn --
I'm neurotypical --
learn about our ways of understanding the world perceptually and that that's kind of specific in a way.
Therefore, it might be different for different people.
That's another element to cognitive science.
Cognitive science and psychology start from this idea of a universal body and mind,
(18:06):
which is really basically a Western industrialized,
middle aged, and so on.
So it's not universal at all.
And learning that,
that we are not universal is,
I think that's another of the disruptions or interruptions of,
of that kind of science that opens up new ways of learning.
We are taught to revere mathematicians and,
(18:27):
and people with high cognitive functioning, whatever that means.
You're arguing something different.
So the highest forms of human knowing are thought to be language, in a kind of old fashioned way of understanding language, or mathematics, or planning, or categorizing things.
But I think that our most sophisticated knowing we can learn about through our experience of loving.
(18:54):
And loving here, I mean
something not rosy or romantic.
More, the tension between your being very interested from a core part of yourself in something, driven towards something from your core bodily being, to something that's different from you.
And so something that you want to be close to, but are always also unavoidably in tension with.
(19:17):
And so, in love relationships,
it's the kind of tension between being yourself and being in relation, and things can pull in very different directions.
And so that tension, I think also characterizes knowing.
Most of our or all of our forms of knowing originate in that tension,
which is something that we experience very bodily.
(19:38):
A way to illustrate it could be approaches to dementia, for instance.
One element of dementia understanding in a traditional sense, is that people with dementia are losing their emotional skills.
But that is based on an idea that you can test emotional skills by asking people to sort pictures of people showing emotions into the category of these emotions.
(19:59):
And when people stop being able to do that,
the thought is they're losing their emotional skills.
But when you know a person with dementia closely,
you have experience of sitting with them, maybe on a bench watching the garden, and looking at the birds and reacting to that immediately and sensing each other's interest or being moved by something that you're doing together.
(20:22):
And that is this tension between being yourself and interacting with this person who is different or even the person who is changing in front of you.
Because person with dementia, you're kind of losing.
My father had dementia.
I was losing my connection with him.
He was changing.
And yet we were also still sharing so many things.
It's those capacities that we need to, as doctors or people who write guidelines for dementia care,
(20:49):
need to understand that that's basic and central to it, so that we give people who experience those things in their life,
trust and confidence in their relation, rather than giving them guidelines that actually make them think we can't have relations anymore.
I think all of us have experience in one way or another with dementia.
I went back to thinking about my grandfather.
I think that tension between this person used to be this, and I want to interact with them because they were this,
(21:15):
that comes back to your comment earlier about being in boxes. That we can make those boxes a little bit more porous and,
and be in relation to this other being, not the box that we put the being in.
It gives us that much more flexibility.
(21:35):
Whether it's a person going through stages of dementia,
whether it's a person growing up from being a child to an adolescent to an adult,
or whether it's a person on some part of a neurodiversity spectrum,
throwing that box away and creating that elastic space to interact between people with that sense of deep connectedness,
(21:57):
the love,
it's really freeing.
It's a little nerve wracking when you first start because you're like,
I don't know where I stand with this person.
But when you have that,
that expectation of flexibility,
it opens up so much more for us as humans to be in relation.
And at the same time,
(22:17):
maybe also to repeat, that this flexibility isn't random or endless or ungraspable, because the flexibility is always related.
And this comes back to one of the basic elements of our theory,
it's related to our bodily constraints and needs.
Also our mental or,
or identity needs and constraints.
(22:39):
So we do have pathways of relating, and in this new way of thinking,
which is actually also an old way of thinking in a way, it opens up.
But it's, at the same time, not random.
It's related to our very bodily being.
We can't do everything.
We can't change and do everything.
But we can change more than we think we can, and we will remain being ourselves as well.
(23:04):
Losing ourselves in these new kinds of interaction might be something that people are scared of,
but we don't need to be scared of that because we are our very material bodies with this particular weight and contours.
There's in this whole pandemic,
(23:24):
such a lack of care coming from, or a lack of a caring attitude from how we are dealing with the pandemic,
which also makes it hard for us to relate to our own emotions and how difficult this actually is.
We tried to pretend that it's all fine and nothing is going on, or we're going back to normal.
But it also means we can't get in touch with how difficult this is for us,
(23:45):
also,
for our bodies.
This kind of difficulty goes really through the center of our bodies and to how we can move.
And recognizing that is something that I think we can allow ourselves to do. Because then we can move through that, rather than stopping it and being afraid of it,
(24:08):
and moving through it without learning some things that we maybe have to learn about what's really important.
That reminds me of dementia, where we're grieving for this person that is no longer the person that we knew. And we keep going through that bouncing back -- real discomfort.
Like, this is not my grandfather,
this is not my grandmother,
this is not my father,
this isn't the person I knew,
but it is,
it's just different.
(24:29):
How do we go through that grieving?
And in a way it's not even letting go.
It's, Hanne, as you said,
it's the letting be, right?
And continually adjusting that being-in-relation that we have with the other person, or being-with the other group of people, or being-with this new way of existing in this world.
(24:52):
It's hard.
And I think it also, Hanne, really challenges this notion of what you're doing with enactive theory.
This notion of individualism, where in Western culture,
particularly in the United States, we are very much about,
I'm an individual.
I can do my own thing. I declare who I am.
And how I exist in this world isn't quite able to capture that being-in-relation with other people.
(25:19):
You talk about being-in-relation,
you talk about love.
I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to read a scientific paper where you discuss love.
It's just awesome!
So much of the emotional world
and that connection isn't discussed in science because emotion is,
(25:42):
I don't know,
it's starting to come in, but it's always been put on the periphery because of, how do you study emotion?
Right?
Everyone's had this feeling that emotion is all this,
as you said,
fluffy stuff that's off on the side. You are bringing this sense of emotion into how we understand the world as individuals,
(26:03):
but also in connection.
That's a good question because I don't actually really know how to think about emotion as such, because emotion,
I have never really thought about it so much.
It's not part of my work. Love, in my definition or in the way I speak about it in that paper, is not an emotion.
It is an existential way,
(26:24):
an existential dialectic between you and the world, that's full of tension that matters to you completely,
although you're not always aware of it.
But it determines where you go, and where you don't go, and the,
the what you bump into by doing that.
So, you may come across good things that fulfill you through which you learn new things where you,
(26:49):
where you have a connection or a contact or something changes for you in a good way,
but might also change in a bad way.
You may bump into something that is to your detriment or to the detriment of the person you're interacting with.
And then it's also actually to your own detriment.
So you get hurt by hurting other people.
I think that's a corollary of this.
(27:10):
And then in a way it is related to emotion,
but maybe more in this basic sense of valence for you.
So what matters to you in this enactive approach that we have,
it's about encountering the world, in terms of what will help you keep existing,
keep living,
transforming,
becoming who you are and who you might change into.
(27:32):
So that's emotion.
I would like to bring it back to this very basic way of interacting with the world,
that's dialectic and existential and paradoxical and,
and -- even so, I'm looking at an enormous sequoia here in the lane behind our house.
Even plants do that.
Plants have to have this. Animals and humans and plants relate to the world in that way.
(27:57):
In the way of (27:57):
this is relevant for me.
So I'll go there,
I'll move towards it.
I'll take it up and then keep on becoming.
And this I should avoid, and so I turn away from it, and you will never fully learn it.
It's ongoing. We don't stop figuring this out.
Very much like a rheostat where you're constantly adjusting to the mileau around you.
(28:19):
What is good?
What do I want to engage with?
How do I learn?
How does that change my way of being myself?
But also being --
I love this context of enactive,
of really thinking about, again,
that energy that flows between us.
Just naming it and envisioning it as you're interacting in spaces is really, really powerful.
(28:43):
Well, Hanne,
our hour is up.
I have had just a really fun conversation.
Thank you very, very much.
Thank you for joining us! For more about this podcast,
(29:04):
please see our website at www.weinterruptthis.com.
There we have show notes,
links, and other episodes,
Contact me on Twitter @HaakYak to recommend topics or speakers for this series.
I look forward to hearing from you!
This podcast was produced on the traditional lands and waters of the Menominee, Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples.
(29:27):
I pay my respects to Elders, past and present
and to emerging and future Indigenous leaders.
It is a gift to be grounding and growing this work within these beautiful forests and waterways.
Thank you also to Emma Levinson for her Interruptions artwork featured on our website,
and to Alan Huckleberry for allowing us to use Bartok's Melody with Interruptions from the University of Iowa Piano Pedagogy video recording project. Segue is “Mysterious String Quartet” by Shane Ivers of Silverman Sound Studios.
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