Relational and Social Constructionist Consortium of Ecuador (IRYSE)
Diego Tapia Figueroa, Ph.D. and Maritza Crespo Balderrama, M.A.
“Leave life in life, revive, greet life, “let live”, in the most poetic sense. Knowing how to “leave”, and what it means to “leave” is one of the most beautiful, riskiest, most necessary things.
Very close to abandonment, gift, and forgiveness. The experience of a ‘deconstruction’ never happens without it, without love.”
(Jacques Derrida, 2003, p. 13)
We base ourselves for this series, on this thesis, from which we extract -adapting them- the proposals and invitations to a different relational position for the construction of the process of transformative therapeutic dialogue.
How are social constructionism and collaborative and dialogic practices useful for the relational co-construction of space for therapeutic training and supervision? Tapia Figueroa, Diego, Thesis (2018) for the Ph.D. with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and the TAOS INSTITUTE of the United States.
Ethics is an invitation to relational construction, to decide who we would like to be with others, and what kind of people we want to become tomorrow.
We choose to question the traditional hierarchical ways of relating, of talking; the lifestyles in which some have the power and privileges and decide how others should live. We question those hierarchies in which beliefs, theories, categories, practices, truths, and perspectives are imposed.
There are always many ways to look at a situation; one of the challenges is how we will participate in different relational contexts, seeking to understand the diversity of ways in which participants explain, interpret and make sense of their actions and discourses. Through dialogue, an attitude of curiosity about differences is promoted. Constructionism makes possible a way of being with others in the world -which is very useful- because it allows us to ask new questions that enable us to surrender to curiosity.
According to Sheila McNamee on relational responsibility and coordination of multiplicity: “… It has nothing to do with the things we shouldn’t do, but how we do them. And beyond that, it has to do with who we are in relationships. It’s the way the dominant conceptualization of ethics doesn’t let us relate to people.” (Collected in my field diary June 2015).
It is an invitation to cross the categories of duty (to be) and social and cultural prejudices, and to question ourselves about how we live with others and with ourselves; about how we choose to speak and act among others. It means that ethics is not a matter of individual beliefs, values, or principles, but a relational construction contextualized in local culture and in a specific historical time. The individual does not exist in himself, he exists as part of relationships and is created through relationships with others.
If we adhere to relational ethics, we can move forward, because we realize that at every moment, we have the possibility of coordinating our activities in new ways, which will create new meanings… being clear about respectful or disrespectful situations. (McNamee, collected in my field diary June 2015).
The meaning is in permanent movement, metamorphosis, in constant becoming. Through respectful curiosity, we contribute to those movements that generate different points of view and perspectives. Because with dialogue, we are designing possibilities to create spaces that allow us to talk reflexively about our differences, respecting each other in the relationship, and being responsive, which means, staying in dialogue.
Ethics is an invitation to relational construction, to decide who we would like to be with others, what kind of people we want to become tomorrow; and the different and innovative ways in which we can contribute so that others are in relationships with us, with others and with themselves; that is, the kind of human beings we would like to be and become.
It is an invitation to contribute to the creation of these possible futures through collaboration and to promote a constant question -to ourselves- about how and why should we transform a status quo that closes conversations; why should we promote practices that expand our dialogues and that are recognized in a relational perspective.
It is relational ethics, in which “letting live”, is accepting that others are also responsible for living without your world, your knowledge, and even without your love: in freedom.
Jacques Derrida suggests:
There is no ethical responsibility, nor a decision worthy of the name that is not, by essence, revolutionary, that is not in rupture with a dominant system of norms, even with the very idea of the norm, and therefore of knowledge of the norm that would dictate or program the decision. All responsibility is revolutionary because it tries to do the impossible, to interrupt the order of things from non-programmable events (Derrida, 2003, p. 95)
If responsibility has revolutionary ethics, it is because it innovates the dominant convention and questions, from the pretension of the necessity of that norm, the “truth” of those who claim their property. Any rupture of the dominant knowledge, discourses, and practices will entail consequences that must be assumed precisely with an ethical responsibility, which are neither ignored, evaded, nor made invisible.
The revolutionary will always be the impossible and, being so, it opens the possibilities of what could be by the creation of social acts carried out by language, which are not controlled or planned, nor programmed, but coordinated; because those who do risk expressing the unsaid, freely and openly, and, in addition, put a name to the interests that are behind every, norm are those that embody the different.
Jacques Derrida states (2003, p. 13):
To leave life in life, to revive, to greet life, to “let live”, in the most poetic sense. Knowing how to “leave”, and what it means to “leave” is one of the most beautiful, riskiest, most necessary things. Very close to abandonment, gift, and forgiveness. The experience of a “deconstruction” never happens without it, without love.
Jacques Derrida delves into the fact that we are responsible for what precedes us, but also for what is to come that is still before us. This ethical and historical responsibility places us in a field of different meaning, in the complexity of the times that are in us every time we ask ourselves a question, which is an arrow that is shot to assume what we are made of, to accept what we would like and that we could finally begin to build if we think we need other futures. According to Derrida, this is a process to receive or make emerge what is coming, which will come, under the names of another ethic, from building new political conceptions tailored to another that transform those old concepts.
A life lived, being with life and interweaving as in a rhizome of leaving, doing, greeting, giving, leads us to the generous and poetic celebration of “letting live” without rules, without colonization. Risking letting go as a responsible way of giving without the expectation of reciprocity. Free from the resentment of a meaningless no and with the ability to forgive from the opening of being. It means embodying the experience of love with the other: you don´t owe them, nor do they ask for it. It is relational ethics in which “letting live” is accepting that others are also responsible for living without your world, your knowledge, and even without your love: in freedom.
In the words of Roger-Pol Droit (2010, pp. 92-93):
This philosopher -Emmanuel Lévinas- affirmed that the mere presence of the face of the other is, for each one of us, a demand and an interpellation. Before concern for ourselves, which we all feel legitimately, ethics invites us to care for others and demands that we behave responsibly towards them… The presence of the other who is not like us invites us to hospitality and respect for what we do not understand, receptivity to what we do not expect, uncertainty, and difference. The unknown dwells among us, always. This concern for others, which is called ethics, is always the interest for the other.
After the Holocaust, the Jewish philosopher -Emmanuel Lévinas- renewed the discourse of ethics, giving it a dimension of deep human commitment in favor of the other. Its mere existence signifies a relational responsibility and challenges us from its otherness, to which we invite with respect, from hospitality, assuming uncertainty. It is the responsibility with the other, the responsibility in the construction of a relationship with the different, which allows us to embody the ethics of difference; in doing so, recognizing and accepting diversity begins the political construction of the future with those who are different. In this joint construction of multiple futures, the ethical and political possibilities of new human relationships are generated.
Ethics is related to language, though to its limits; not with what we can say, but with what is shown in what we say. We access the ethical perspective when we understand that the world is directly correlated with our language.
Following Marcelo Pakman (2011, p. 399):
And that in every ethical and aesthetic work of memory there is a poetic possibility of the emergence of an event that breaks the daily micropolitics that domesticates us. In the poetic dimension… to live again, to live longer, to understand the immediate mystery of what we are, and who we are.
We place ourselves in the place of the pragmatic social actor, who is pragmatic because he has endowed himself with his capacity to think reflexively (and exercises it), which is thinking to act. And, the totality of being is effectively deployed when social relations, acts of language, and innovative social coordination generate reflections to interweave with practices that nourish future ideas that will transform the practices of meaning-creating interlocutors.
The ethical and aesthetic are thought of as ways to connect with politics that rebel against all forms of domestication and social control. A liberating political process of poetic moments that allow us to recover our voice, that creates the conditions of relational possibility so that the multiple voices engage in these complex conversations that create a new social life, in which we can become what we as humans would like to be.
The word “ethics” is a noun indicating a type of practical exercise. It allows us to recognize the responsibility we all have in the production and maintenance of the meanings we handle. This perspective of caring for relationships supposes a new understanding of ethics, which allows us to make decisions in the face of the complex dilemmas of being with others and select those that allow us to live with dignity, equity, and justice.
In the reflection we share with Marcelo Pakman (2011, pp. 438-439):
… ethics… It is a place that is inhabited, the singularity that the poetic event entails, like the language of meaning this or that… To choose ethically and fairly –politically– is to make what is alien to us happen, making it work for a good that is often not easy to ensure or define.
In these reflections for action, which are generated from social action, and which produce other reflections, the question arises about how collaborative and generative dialogue enriches its possibilities of meanings if there are actions with others, that gives them meaning. Senses in motion, that of joint life, which is continuous ambiguity and reflective question.
Dialogue has a pragmatic dimension, dialogue is action in the world. And it is with dialogue that we can develop critical reflexivity. Dialogue opens that world by giving it meaning. Dialogue that questions each monologue, every monologue of power, that evidences its mystification and by asking the legitimacy of its unilaterality, confronts its hegemony, generating cultural and social alternatives of the desirable, of the possible.
In the words of Marcelo Pakman (2011, pp. 37-38), Argentine psychotherapist: the understanding of cultural contexts, their specificities, and particularities, which are seen and heard -felt and shared- in language, brings us closer to the possibility of the encounter with the other, with the different. It begins with the desire to know, listen, and understand; and then understand and develop conversations, made with questions, that connect and tune into local culture and specific interests.
Then begins a process of openness, by this commitment to the other -this relational responsibility- that will co-create a new culture among the interlocutors, who recognize themselves as such, who legitimize themselves in their acceptance of the diversities assimilated as the richness and as an expansion of the meanings of being together, so that the project that unites us, is built with the multiple voices of those who learn to be with the other.
It is a game -of language- that socially constructs, in cultural coordinations, the alternatives to the old ways of saying; that expands, again and again, the possibilities of creating and imagining how the conversations we want and need, will be developed to generate a culture of good treatment, that puts dialogue as the first option.
Conversing is an integrative practice, a philosophy that summons trust and respect; models relational ethics, and builds a bond. That allows the other to begin to be, to be different, as he wishes to be: with his own voice, and responsible for creatively mobilizing his own resources for a liberating social process.
What world do we want to live in, and what possibilities does that world open?
Following the reflection of Edgardo Morales, (taken from my field diary, 2014) the question is not whether something is true or not, but in what world we want to live, and what possibilities that world opens.
Morales (2014), reflecting on Gergen, states: “In constructionist dialogues, attention shifts from the individual actor to coordinated relationships.” Morales argues: “alternate futures can be imagined and designed and new scenarios and forms of relationship can be initiated into everyday life.”
It is not the most important thing that I discover something that I did not know (or, perhaps, I did not know I knew), but the opportunity to -jointly- prefigure the new relational possibilities, enhancing the capacity to interrogate ourselves with human and intellectual honesty, to sustain this search with consistency and to resist (because it is also about resisting all forms of abusive power) from imagination and creativity.
Awakening, recovering, and mobilizing our mutual capacity to amaze each other.
One of the strengths of the social-constructionist discourse is that it offers resources for action among people, the possibility of building ethical and political commitments that generate social welfare -which transforms cultural and social conditions- while maintaining active the critical reflexivity of all those who commit themselves to the interests of their communities, participating in conversations about the new horizons that their dialogues will make possible.
Contextualize the interpretations of our views and discourses, and the relationships that these discourses create; contextualizing it as a responsible way of dialoguing with differences and engaging with relationships and cultures is part of the challenges that need to be assumed to prevent improvisations, superficiality, and lack of consistency.
Dialogue is understood as dynamic interactive processes that occur in conversations, being clear that the focus is on the potential of the multiple perspectives brought to these conversations, which can be reflected and articulated, expanding the possibilities of action (…) According to the social constructionist approach, dialogue invites diversity, in which the different ways of understanding and taking on reality are always welcome (…)
In dialogue, the interest lies in shaping generative forms of connection between participants. (Camargo-Borges, 2014, p. 353).
Dialogue means a link, a connection, a movement in favor of relationships, a way of being with others thanks to conversations; opening a space for polysemy and the multiple voices, with their positions, points of view, and perspectives, to engage in these conversations, promoting critical reflection that allows choosing useful ways to act relationally.
As dialogue is an invitation to diversity, the right is recognized for each protagonist to tell their story in first person; share their resources, enter into conversation with the other different stories and learn and enrich each other with the transformative power of their strengths converted into positive and constructive resources for contextualized action that has allowed them achievements and results in favor of their communities.
SUGGESTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Tapia Figueroa, Diego, Thesis (2018) for the Ph.D. with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and the TAOS INSTITUTE of the USA.
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English translation of Bruno Tapia Naranjo.
