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| I was impressed, last night, with the Chief's interest in the son "I am see a new day." This isn't very good, but before we leave, we need a good one. I went back and tried to get "Kawangware" in it and it went like this:
I can see a new town; A new town, rising tall, Kawangware, of Nairobi Tis a sign on behalf of all. |
| We're interested in the methodologies that occasion rapid and profound social change on the local level. And we'll employ those methods as they have been refined up to the moment. It's probably occurred to you that political change is rarely, if ever, a profound change. It, of course, sometimes is rapid. But if you take the triangles of the social processes that are before you, and see the three dynamics of society - economic, political, and cultural (and, as you know, many sociologists use the term "social" for culture, I prefer the word "culture") you'll probably observe that profound social change is always socioeconomic. You're not going to have in a community profound change that is simply social, nor are you going to have profound change that is simply economic; they must go together. Therefore, we're going to be concerned this week with socio-economic change. You'll probably also notice that the ordering structures of a community take care of themselves when the social dynamic is alive and moving into the future and when the economic is alive and moving into the future along with it. |
| Now the methodologies that we're going to use begin with what we call The Operating Vision. I like the word "the local vision" or I like better "the existing vision," but the term "operating vision" is very descriptive, because man is consciousness: he exists only out of vision. For most of us as individuals, that operating or personal vision or screen is unconscious. We do not stand at attention before it. I do not mean to use "unconscious" in the sense that four-fifths of us are always in the realm of the unconscious. I use "unconscious" as a term in relation to that which can become conscious when one brings intentionality into being, or when one becomes a self. This same thing is true of a community. | |
| One of the most astounding things to me in the Twentieth Century is the awareness that selfhood is a matter of standing outside of your web of relationships and taking an attitude towards them. This is so simple that it is hard to believe that this insight has only come into broad consciousness in this century. The illustration that I use is that every time I show up in awareness I am married to one lass by the name of Lyn. That's a relationship; that's part of my temporality; that's a part of my fate. But my marriage is not that relationship, not by one long sight. My marriage is standing outside of that fateful given, every time I wake up and take an attitude toward it - that is my marriage. And that's where selfhood is. Now the same is true in a community. A community has a web of relationships that define it, but that's not the community. The community is the relationship the community takes toward itself, or its web of relationships. Now, what I mean by the local and the practical vision is the latent part of that attitude that you take toward that fate. | |
| The second most important thing the twentieth century has discovered in relation to anthropology, or the image of man, is that this awareness only takes place in community. But I think in the years ahead we're all going to be astounded by the consciousness that indicates what happens to a self is what has to happen to a community; that is, to become intentional in life is to selfconsciously take that attitude toward your relationships. Community development begins by enabling a community to consciously take that attitude toward its givenness. And out of that comes the future. That's what I mean by local vision. But few communities in the world are awake, are aware, have selfhood in the sense I'm talking about. What we are going to be dealing with this week is this dynamic which is held in the local vision. Because it is latent, because it is unselfconscious, it's like nobody in town could clearly say what that vision is, any more than you likely could say what the vision is in the community where you live. | |
| Where do you look for it? Well, of course, it's in the symbolism; it is embedded there. It is embedded in the style. It is embedded in the social structure. It is embedded in the hopes and the dreams and the fears and the anxieties of the people. It is embedded in the architecture and in the care of space and in the way time is understood and used. You probably have noticed that that array of buildings over there, in terms of artful lines, is absolutely out of this world, absolutely out of this world! This tells me something deep about Kawangware that I suspect Kawangware does not know itself. What just a little bit of effort would do over there is, to me, absolutely astounding. Their hopes, dreams, visions, are what I see when I look across there at those buildings. |
| Today we are out to get ahold of that local vision in order to render it into a rational model. This we will do tomorrow in the plenary session, out of the data and the reflection of the five teams that are going to operate today. That's the first step in rapid, profound, social change on the local level. |
| The second step is what we call the Underlying Contradictions . Now we're going to talk about all of these things separately, so I'm going to hasten this. We'll come back and talk about contradictions. The important thing to understand, first of all, is that you are out to discover what deters the actualization, the realization, the incarnation of this local vision, What are the deterrents? What keeps it from coming into being? | |
| Now a contradiction is not a problem. As a matter of fact, you're going to discover contradiction is not a negative category; it's a creative category. Any future comes to be by whosoever is riding on the back of the contradiction into the future. |
| Now, to get ahold of the contradiction, the underlying contradiction, I believe you first of all have to deal with the subjectivity yourself. As you move through the community and as you reflect, what just frustrates you, what just irritates you? And then you have to flip that into the realm of the objective; and then you look for obvious blocks. | |
| Now, a contradiction, in one sense, doesn't even exist. What you really do is to get ahold of the outer rim of the whirlpool or the whirlwind, the center of which is not. That center is your contradiction. This is why you never can see a contradiction head on; you always see it out of the corner of your eye - because the first 486 things we say is the contradiction, in not the contradiction. They may point to and relate to the underlying contradiction but you haven't arrived yet. You only spot that contradiction after you whirl these evidences that something is deterring, in a profound sense. These are hard to finally say. |
| The significant thing is, in our day, we are clear that the teleological approach to social change, that is dealing with goals, never did create the future, never did occasion social change. You could put goals up around the walls from now on and nothing happens. In our day, we see that man always attacks the contradiction - we do it self-consciously now - that once you get the contradictions to the local vision, you can thrown the local vision in the waste basket because now you have got that which is the one important thing in your focus relative to occasioning social change. |
| Today we are going to be dealing with the local vision. Tomorrow and a part of the day after that, you're going to try to discern the primal, the underlying contradictions to that vision and from then on we work with the contradictions. That enables us to go to the next step which we call Practical Proposals. The Practical Proposal is something between a strategy and a tactic that has to do not with resolving the contradiction, but releasing the contradiction toward creating the future. At this point, one has to embrace his guts and risk. Here you have to release all the creativity that you have. You almost have to begin wildly in terms of possible solutions. Later, you can get your feet down on earth. What you're after is the practical, but not necessarily possible - if you can stand such categories - immediately seemingly possible ways to get those contradictions working on your own side, so to speak. We will be dealing with that on Wednesday and a part of Thursday. | |
| Practical proposals themselves never accomplish anything. I might say that once you get your practical proposals, you can throw your contradictions away and you work with these. Only when tactical systems relative to the actualization of those proposals are built do you begin to even move toward that which really occasions the social change. Once you have your tactical systems built, you then throw away your practical proposals. We often like to say that no soldier ever died in his goals; and no soldier ever died in his practical proposals; he only dies in executing a tactic. When people ask me what is the difference between you people and other Community Development Organizations and they're a dime a dozen around the world - after I say we're a not-for-profit community development outfit, I say, secondly, that we are not concerned with planning primarily; we are concerned with actuation and our methodologies are all geared, not to ways of conceiving, but to the means of doing. Our focus is upon tactics. |
| Then after you get your tactical systems, in order for these tactics to move you have to render them into what we call actuating programs. These are crucial; but there is a sort of gap here. You always do your tactics. The programs organize them in such a way that those tactics can be implemented. The actuating programs enable you to organize the local forces that are going to do the tactics. A little bit more tangential, but not less important is that these actuating programs allow you to make the cost estimates of the project, and therefore, enable the necessary funding of any kind, whether it is public or private sector, local or from beyond the community. That is basically the function of the programs. Now our consult will stop here. How much of this we get into focus will depend on how we do getting around to that point. |
| The last stop in social change is timelined implementaries. Now a consult does not need to do this, first; in one sense it can't do it. The implementaries are the specific tasks that the forces who are going to do the project have to do to carry out the tactical systems day by day. This, I think you can understand. Therefore, the actuating forces themselves are the only people who can do the timelined implementaries. After those of us in the consult have packed our bags and gone on, this is the job that the local people themselves who care and are concerned about the project have to do. | |
| A very important thing happens when you get to this point. You are back to the local vision. By this time the local vision has undergone radical alteration, just period. And for a community that remains dynamic, then, the job starts all over again. When they get back around here, the local vision will have changed; then you start all over again. And, thus, historical time, dynamical time - if that isn't redundant - happens, or the future constantly comes to be. |
| Today and half of tomorrow we are going to be dealing with the Operating Vision; on Tuesday and Wednesday with the Contradictions; on Wednesday and Thursday with the Practical Proposals; on Thursday and Friday with the Tactical Systems. At that time we will see how much time we have left or move on to the Actuating Programs. This is our movement during the week. |
| The daily schedule is on the board. We will operate as a consult - as a whole - and as a consult divided into five or so teams. The emphasis has to be upon the team and, you will notice, that most of the time you are within the team dynamic. The consult operates toward coagulating and gestalting and rationalizing the data and the reflection of the teams so that you are doing one thing and not five. |
| Each morning at breakfast we will meet together as a consult. This will be a time of breathing. After a break we will come back and have a plenary session. The hours I have on the board are simply rough guidelines. The teams don't need to follow these at all. We hope that our plenaries will not take three hours either. This, however, gives you a rough feel after the day, divided into three periods of work, three hours apiece, and then two hours for breakfast, lunch and dinner, including breaks. A team will organize its own time. |
| Today the whole time will be spent in the field as team with tonight spent together for a work session. In the afternoons, the teams are in the field, depending on what the teams need to do. They may be in work sessions as they are most evenings. |
| We had our opening celebration last night. It could very well be on Saturday afternoon we might have a celebration again. Then it just might be good for us to have an informal celebration on Wednesday evening. Of course the consult is free to alter that in any way that it chooses. Some of it will be determined on how fast we move in these steps toward rapidly occasioning the socioeconomic development of Kawangware. | |
| Joseph W. Mathews | |