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Published in Human Systems 9, 1998, 167-185.
TRANSCENDENT STORYTELLING:
ABILITIES FOR SYSTEMIC PRACTITIONERS AND THEIR CLIENTS
W. Barnett Pearce and Kimberly A. Pearce
ABSTRACT
Systemic practice is often described as joining with clients to co-construct new stories. While novelty might be the primary desired characteristic, systemic practitioners have principled preferences for certain kinds of stories. However, these preferences are usually expressed in terms of the content of the new stories. We propose exploring the differences among forms of storytelling. Are some forms of storytelling systemically preferable ways to hear, tell, and live stories? The LUUUTT Model is introduced as a heuristic for joining the grammar of a client; one distinctive feature of this model is the centrality it gives to storytelling. Two stories -- that of the development of CMM and of the strange, evolving relationship between Kim Phuc and John Plummer -- illustrate four forms of storytelling that we call literalist, symbolic, social constructionist, and transcendent. Transcendent storytelling requires of and confers upon the storyteller a distinctive set of abilities that are consonant with the systemic perspective. This paper calls for an attention to storytelling as part of the work of systemic practitioners, offers some analytical distinctions among these four types of storytelling, and identifies some limits of "social constructionist" storytelling for systemic practice. Finally, we suggest that helping our clients acquire the abilities for transcendent storytelling increases their capacities to co-construct more complex, rich, and productive social worlds. We invite correspondence with others who are working with forms of storytelling.
TRANSCENDENT STORYTELLING:
ABILITIES FOR SYSTEMIC PRACTITIONERS AND THEIR CLIENTS
W. Barnett Pearce and Kimberly A. Pearce
About 40 years ago, Gregory Bateson introduced himself at one of the Macy Conferences as “an angry man.” He was angry, he explained, because he had been exploring patterns of family communication that limit, twist, or distort social worlds and thus the personalities of the children who live in them. About 30 years ago, Abraham Maslow began one of his books by juxtaposing two pictures with a question as a caption. One picture featured a group of babies at play, healthy, unselfconsciously absorbed in their activities and full of promise; the other was of a group of commuters in a subway, with vacant expressions and tired faces, staring into space. The caption read: “What happened?”
In a similar way, we observe patterns of communication in communities, organizations, families, and in politics that are distorted and which distort those who participate in them. We sense the gap between the potential for ways of being human together and the realities we achieve, and see patterns of communication which are institutionalized in families, organizations, and government as a constraining factor. Like Bateson and Maslow, we bring a set of value judgments to this perception and, again like Bateson and Maslow, we are not content to be outraged; we want to do something to improve the social worlds in which we live. Our focus is on abilities for storytelling; specifically, on the abilities required by and created in transcendent storytelling.
We think that the phrase “joining clients in the co-construction of new stories” is one that most systemic practitioners would accept as a useful description of their work. In this paper, we claim that systemic practitioners usually want to create new stories having certain characteristics, and that it is useful to attend to the form of storytelling as well as the narrative features of the stories told.[1]
As systemic practitioners ourselves and as long-time observers of others, we have noted directional preferences about some of the narrative features of the stories that our clients tell. This preference is not inconsistent with neutrality (or irreverence, curiosity, or the not-knowing position) toward the content of the clients’ stories. No definitive list of these new characteristics should be expected, but some hints of these preferences are readily available. New stories should move “from blame and labeling to positive connotation and contextualization, from linearity to circularity” (Seligman, 1997, p. 14); they should be future-oriented, dreaming, imagining, and appreciative (Lang and McAdam, 1997); and they usually feature directional shifts in time, space, causality, interactions, values and telling (Sluzki, 1992). We suspect that any regular reader of this journal could extend this list. These preferences are expressed both during a consultation (e.g., when the consultant reframes the clients’ story in this direction) and after a consultation (e.g., if the clients’ new story has some of these characteristics, the consultants feel more confident that the client will be able to function better.)
But there is another useful way to think about the stories by which we live. In addition to the content (such as, Mrs. Green murdered Colonel Mustard in the Drawing Room with a Candlestick), and narrative features (such as identified above), there are forms of storytelling. Storytelling involves aspects that actors and public speakers call “presence;” it includes rhythms, rhymes and prosody; it involves the energy and amount of “connection” between storyteller and listeners; and perhaps most importantly, it is a part of the relation between the person telling the story and the story told. This last characteristic is sometimes called "congruence" or described as "credibility." We have an additional nuance in mind, which might be called "enmeshment," or the extent and the manner in which the storyteller believes the story, and the story circumscribes the storyteller's world.
The concept of storytelling is hard to describe, and we see ourselves as far from finished thinking about it.[2] However, we think that the abilities of storytelling are familiar and important, even if we have not had a sufficiently developed vocabulary for describing them. For example, systemic trainers have long made judgments about whether a student needs more practice or is ready to see clients. This difference may be described as whether the student is only able to ask circular questions "mechanically," as if from a memorized list, or as a spontaneous way to join the client’s grammar. In our own consulting work, we sometimes sense a gap between the content of the clients’ new story and their ability to tell it in such a way as to lead them to act creatively into the future. While the words of a new story might be there, we sometimes wonder if the client is appropriately enmeshed. In both instances, the differences have something to do with storytelling.
Some Reflections on the Manner of Storytelling in CMM
We have acted into the situation of distorted and distorting stories about what it means to live a life and be in relation to others (that's our "review of the literature") by constructing a rather long, complex story of our own. This story is a practical theory called the “coordinated management of meaning” or CMM (Cronen, 1995, p. 231-232). In the following paragraphs, we call attention to the manner of storytelling -- as distinguished from the "content" or narrative features -- of the story of CMM.
CMM has always been "told" playfully. To the extent that it is useful to distinguish between “wisdom” and “knowledge,” CMM has always been motivated more for a desire for wisdom than a quest for knowledge, animated by questions like, “what does it mean to be a person?” “how can we live better lives?” and “what patterns of communication are most conducive to living with dignity, honor, and joy?” Perhaps wisdom is too important to treat with complete seriousness. Playfulness of manner is one way of acknowledging the “mystery” that makes incomplete all of the answers to questions such as those posed above.
In addition to a formalized deontic logic and quasi-mathematical rule models, the first book-length description of CMM made “wonder” the subject of its first and last chapters (Pearce and Cronen, 1980). Those who read this book closely surely noted the playful incongruity between our seriousness of purpose and silliness in manner when we offered three “theorems” of intentional, extentional, and reflexive wonder!
Pearce (1994a) proposed “Nine Commandments” for helping others. Why nine? Did a failure of imagination forestall “completing” the list? Or is the “missing” tenth commandment an invitation to the reader to take an authorial role? Or was the list of (only) nine part of an intentional self-mockery of anyone who would write “Commandments” for such purposes? (Note: anyone who thinks that there is a “right” answer to these questions has not understood the point and should start again at the beginning of this section.)
Some of our critics in the academic world have found fulfillment and success by pointing out that the major theoretical terms in CMM do not suffer from excessively precise definitions. The ambiguity of the terms in the titles must mean something. Pearce and Cronen's (1980) subtitle was “creating social realities;” another (Pearce, 1994a) referred to “making social worlds;” and the most recent (Pearce and Littlejohn, 1997) focused on those situations in which “social worlds collide.” If these were not vague enough, Pearce (1989) unabashedly offered a title that set a standard for being either generic or grandiose: Communication and the Human Condition. Using terms like these, a storyteller begs to be understood as playing intellectual tiddlywinks with conceptual manhole covers. (Whups, we did it again!) More prosaically, such storytelling deliberately uses clumsy and general words as a way of signaling that the story is to be read symbolically or metaphorically.
This way of telling the story of CMM -- playful, ironic, ambiguous -- stems neither from artistic choice nor quirks of character, but is forced upon CMM-ers by the nature of the story itself. CMM cannot be fully told, and the most serious (that is, literal) attempt to do so involves naming irreducible tensions.
One set of tensions is between meanings and actions (or stories lived and stories told); another is between coordination and coherence. CMM’s claim is that any resolution of these tensions is paralyzing. But those of us who have told the story of CMM have also been strongly influenced by the tensions between the realities of individuals and of social groups, or what is indexed by the hyphens in Harre’s (1984, p. 58) felicitous phrase, “persons-in-conversation.”
In part because we have been in different professional conversations over the years, we have shifted in the ways that we dealt with this tension. The first phase of the CMM project (up to 1980) focused more on the work of individuals as they construct and live in patterns of communication. Later work has started with the events and objects of our social worlds as they are (re)co-constructed in temporally-extended, unfinished patterns of communication. What we have tried to achieve, and it is difficult indeed, is to tell our story in a way that respects both sides of this tension, each of which reveals something important. For example, taking a more “social” approach usefully shows each of us being born into patterns of communication which we did not choose, as being shaped in our beliefs, attitudes and personality by these patterns, and as component parts of complex social processes which are nonsummative, circular, reflexive, and co-evolutionary. Many helpful things are “found” in this perspective, but it can obscure the ability of individuals to choose whether and how much to be enmeshed in various systems of which they are a part, their differential abilities to transcend the logics of meaning and action in which they are enmeshed, and their abilities to act as purposeful agents of change.[3]
Naming reflexive relations is another way in which we've tried to tell the CMM story literally. The most radical claim in CMM is that the many different ways of being human have a co-evolutionary, mutually causal relation to the many forms of communication which occur. This claim results from combining the systemic move of looking for the patterns which connect the stories we live and tell and the social constructionist move of foregrounding the mundane events of life. One side of this relationship is not particularly novel any more: many research traditions have documented the fact that we communicate differently because we are, individually and as members of various social groups, different from each other. But CMM makes the additional, somewhat more controversial claim that we are, individually and as members of various social groups, different because we communicate differently. And yet the real distinctiveness of CMM as a means of trying to improve our social worlds lies beyond a simultaneous affirmation of both sides of this reciprocal relationship. To “do” CMM work consists of entering into patterns of communication as a participant with a commitment to improve them. Ultimately, even naming reflexive relationships fails as a form of storytelling.
Storytelling in the LUUUTT Model
We have begun to give more explicit attention to the manner in which we and our clients tell their stories. The LUUUTT Model is a heuristic for entering the grammar of our clients. While parts of the model formalize what many systemic practitioners do, a distinctive feature is the extent to which it calls attention to storytelling. LUUUTT is an acronym for 1) stories Lived; 2) Unknown stories, 3)Untold Stories, 4) Unheard stories, 5) stories Told, and 6) storyTelling.
The concept of the tension between stories lived and stories told is familiar to many systemic practitioners. Stories lived are the co-constructed patterns of joint-actions that we and others perform; stories told are the explanatory narratives that people use to make sense of stories lived. Although most people feel the need to align stories lived and stories told, they cannot be identical, and the tension between them provides the dynamic for much of our lives. We might say that people live in such a way as to call into being those stories that they love, need, or want, and to prevent the realization of those stories that they hate or fear. It is also true to say that people tell stories in such a way as to make the events of their lives coherent.
But the tension between stories lived and told is not sufficient to guide us to the potential richness of any given communication pattern. In addition, there are unknown stories which the participants are not (currently) capable of telling; untold stories which the participants are perfectly capable of telling but have chosen not to (at least, not to some of the others in the situation); and, unheard stories which, although they have been told, have not been heard by some important participants in the situation. We suspect that a spiraling evolutionary process works, so that unheard stories become untold stories, and untold stories become, after a while, unknown stories, and vice versa.
The central feature of the model is storytelling. Unlike the others, it deals with "how" the stories are told rather than their content, narrative features, or place in the conversational interchanges.
Storytelling
We believe that stories are the basic technology by which members of the species homo sapiens (as physical entities) become human beings. Although no longer new, this is still a revolutionary idea. For almost two centuries (since the work of Immanuel Kant, 1724-1803), we have known that human perceptions are structured by the structure of the human mind. But Kant thought in terms of static categories; the newer idea is that human beings’ experience occurs in stories. Narrative structures, plots, roles, and the like comprise the templates in which we live our lives. That is, whatever worlds we know will have the fundamental structure of stories because that’s the way we perceive, think, and live.
Kathryn Morton (1984) described the ubiquity of storytelling: “The first sign that a baby is going to be a human being and not a noisy pet comes when he begins naming the world and demanding the stories that connect its parts. Once he knows the first of these, he will instruct his teddy bear, enforce his worldview on victims in the sandlot, tell himself stories of what he is doing as he plays, and forecast stories of what he will do when he grows up. He will keep track of the actions of others and relate deviation to the person in charge. He will want a story at bedtime."
"Nothing passes but the mind grabs it and looks for a way to fit it into a story, or into a variety of possible scripts: he’s late – maybe he was in an accident. Maybe he ran off to Tahiti with a blond. Maybe he stopped on the way here to buy flowers. She will keep writing these ‘novels’ until he shows up or till she finds one story in which all elements, emotional and circumstantial, blend. Then, whatever he says later, she will know what she ‘knows.’”
Not only is storytelling ubiquitous, but the quality of life depends on the richness of our stories. “No human society has yet been found in which … mythological motifs have not been rehearsed in liturgies; interpreted by seers, poets, theologians, or philosophers; presented in art, magnified in song, and ecstatically experienced in life-empowering visions. Indeed, the chronicle of our species… has been not simply an account of the progress of man the tool-maker, but – more tragically – a history of the pouring of blazing visions into the minds of seers and the efforts of earthly communities to incarnate unearthly covenants…Man (sic) apparently cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth. In fact, the fullness of his life would even seem to stand in a direct ratio to the depth and range not of his rational thought but of his local mythology” (Campbell, 1959, pp. 3-4)