The doctor says she expects my aging mother to die in a few weeks or few months.  Because my mother is so far gone, and nothing will really cure her, she suggested I call up a hospice organization.  She has cancer pressing on three organs.  Although at the moment she is fairly comfortable, the doctors predict this will not last long.  The hospice people, I was told, will come to the house and help.

Good, I thought.  We need help.

Today one came.  She was an hour and a half late so I could not be there myself although another family member was with her.  I thought I could talk to the hospice person  on the phone tomorrow.

But  I learned later that the hospice people decided my mother  did not qualify for the program because she had not given up all medical treatment!  She is taking an antibiotic for an incidental infection, for example.  But she has decided not to have surgery, chemotherapy or radiation treatment.  The medical treatment she will have will probably prolong her life, make her more comfortable, but it will not cure her.  This was decided because it seemed clear that in her fragile condition (she is 88) she is not likely to survive these "cures."  All the hospice people have to do is let her accept treatment for non-central or collateral illnesses.

But, no can do, at least until I try to force the system.  Outside after the hospice woman  left my mother this woman said, "I believe this kind of half-way treatment just prolongs the process and makes the patient more miserable.  The hospice program cannot support it."  However, we were told, my mother could use the services of the Visiting nurse's group.  However, for that she needs to be willing to do everything possible to cure her disease.

Now, imagine the woman that she is talking about sitting there smiling and laughing, playing a game of cards in the evening, even hamming it up for a camera and a family photograph.  This is the life that the hospice people would cut a few days shorter in order to live up to a decontextualized rule that one must either give up medical treatment or go all the way with medical treatment, doing everything one can in order to cure the disease.  They are thinking in terms of categories.  Everything must be one way or the other.

When will our culture have a more postmodern medicine?  One more tailored to the individual context?  Why must we confine ourselves to conforming to these decontextualized rules?   Why must we continue to letigimate our action by appealing to such metanarratives?
 
 

This concept of legitimation is an important concept for Lyotard.  Let's study it a moment.

Here is where Lyotard  shows us the importance of legitimation.  Towards the end of his most famous text, The Postmodern Condition,  he says:
 

And one might ask: What other kind of legitimation is there?

The answer is that the traditional form of legitimating  is by appeal to a grand narrative (or metanarrative). Lyotard says:
 

Lyotard says:

It legitimates a statement by creating binding laws in a local,  provisional, or in other words, a negotiated way.  Although such laws are local and provisional, they are, within their framework, binding..

It is as though someone might say locally, "But I thought we agreed that we could not call people by their first names."  And someone might answer, "I think we agreed that we would not call them by their nick names.  Right folks?"  If it is agreed to locally, then it is the rule that binds, even though this binding function is local and provisional.

Why do we agree to let local rules bind us?  Because it will generate ideas to do so, and that is our postmodern paralogical quest.  Lyotard  says:
 

Why do people do this?  Why do they negotiate the rules?  Because they are agnostic about the legitimacy of the general and universal rules.  But if they do not have any rules, then their conversations will be barbaric and without usefulness.  And because paralogy is satisfying.  It constructs for us a kind of social bond in which we can assist each other in gaining clarity about our chosen topics.
 
 

I am asking myself: What is the relationship between Lyotardian paganism and the  notion of "performance" as suggested in the writing of Newman and Holzman?

Sometimes, at least, "performance" is a kind of mastery that does not require us to be guided by rules (criteria).  (I am thinking of someone who plays music by ear.  Tom Strong may have suggested this analogy for "performance".)  But if one learns to play by ear, or to improvise, one is surely thereby being pagan in this Lyotardian sense -- for isn't "playing by ear" just another way of saying "playing without deliberately and consciously following rules of playing"?

Can we, then, learn to perform therapy by ear?  And thus be pagan therapists?  Therapists who know how to perform therapy even if they are not consciously following a set of rules that guide them?
 
 

Why is that our conversations seems to gravitate towards a war of words?  Maybe Lyotard has an answer.  He says that in agonistics, that is when people war with their words:
 

Is it not so?  If it is so, then in modernity one can only win by having an enemy who will perpetually battle to conquer you, and in which there is no final victory between you.

Can there be paralogy without agonistics?  I think there can be, but I have far from proven my case.  It all depends on whether people are engaged by the process of paralogy -- and even if they are, not all are, and even among those that thrive in paralogy, we do not yet know quite how to produce it.

Maybe it requires the threat of agonistics?

Although we have no guidelines when we are pagan, we do make value judgments. What do we gain and what do we lose in making judgments that are based on explicit criteria?
 

That is what the postmodern world is all about.  Most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative.  It in no way follows that they are reduced to barbarity.  What saves them from it is their knowledge that legitimation can only spring from their own linguistic practice and communicational interaction.

122.  A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not 'command a clear view' of the use of our words. --Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity.....

203.  Language is a labyrinth of paths.  You approach from 'one' side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.

Up until today, I think my own major question has been whether or not Newman and Holzman claimed to have the one best system of therapy by saying that all other forms were bad or useless.  I have another few questions that are emerging now, however,  as a result of my discussions with Judy Weintraub, Katherine Levine and Tom Strong.

Discussing the book with Weintraub and Levine has brought up the question of what Newman and Holzman mean by "performance."  Do they mean, as Judy suggested, simply doing things?  Is everything we do a "performance?"  That makes a kind of sense.  We do sometimes use the word "perform" in that simple way.  Or do they mean for the term to have the connotation that Levine and I noticed, connotation that says we "perform" when we do things in ways that do not come naturally (as when we perform in a play).

My reading of End of Knowing suggests to me that these authors want to connote the later.  That is, they want the word "performance" to contribute some of the quality of "play acting."  A number of passages suggest this, for example:
 

I also had new question that came out of my discussion with Tom Strong.  Strong is observing a conversation I am having with Steve de Shazer in another forum in which we heard de Shazer say that he eschewed theory, or rather "Theory".  Moreover, further discussions are suggesting that de Shazer is taking an almost anti-intellectual posture.  Anyway, Strong was wondering if there was not a hint of this anti-intellectualism in End of Knowing.  His questions made me wonder. Are Newman and Holzman also anti-intellectual?

But turning just a few pages past the passages above I read these authors giving me relevant passages, suggesting to me, at least, that they are not anti-intellectual.  First they said that their reading of Vygotsky is Wittgensteinian.  Then they go on to say:
 

So, I suspect that Newman and Holzman are not against philosophizing in the spirit of later Wittgenstein.  Probably, de Shazer, in spite of how he looked to Tom and me today, feels much the same.
 

 133. There are different philosophical methods like different therapies.

Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.  Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventer's paralogy.

It has come to my attention that a number of people who regularly read PMTH NEWS are not members of the PMTH listserv.  This is fine.  However, if you want to join you might like to glance at a link that will tell you what the PMTH listserv is about.
Click here to learn more about the PMTH list.

When you join PMTH I recommend you do what I failed to do recently in joining another list.  Listen for a while and get a feel for the social climate here.  It will assist you, perhaps, to look at a page that has information on many of the the frequent posters.  It will make their postings more personal for you, for many people find it disorienting to try to read lots of posts from people they do not yet know.  To reach the page that contains information on the different , click here.  When you get to this page, you might consider bookmarking it.  Notice that the list contains many people who are not on the PMTH listserv, but the PMTH subscribers are clearly marked.
There are also many PMTH subscribers whose names are not on this list.  At present there are over 80 subscribers to the PMTH list.

Also, although this listserv caters to therapists and others who are interested in thinking about how to do therapy in a philosophical way, we do enjoy personal or clinical posts from subscribers.  Don't hesitate to post this kind of note.  And do feel free to ask questions, too.  The general mood at PMTH is concerned to assist newcomers  in becoming part of our process, or as many people here say, part of our paralogy.
 

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This is latest of a series of articles that have appeared in PMTH NEWS contrasting constructionism and constructivism.   (For links to prior articles click here.) I believe learning to make this very difficult distinction will help us see our way to construct better lives.  I invite you to work on it with me.  I am taking it one step at a time here.

What we discovered so far is that social constructionists argue for the importance of keeping the distinction, while critics of postmodernism (e.g., Barbara Held) treat them as both the same.

Maybe I have discovered a reason why this distinction is so difficult to maintain.  I think sometimes people use the word "construct" to mean "construe" and sometimes they do not.  Look at the quoted sentences below. and see if you can see it.  Ask yourself in each case if you can replace the word "construct" with the word "construe" (or "construction" with "construal" if that's required).  If you can, then I think you will have identified an author who does not distinguish between constructionism and constructivism.  And if you cannot make this substitute, then I think the author would claim more affinity with social constructionism.

Check out a couple of excerpts and see if the word construe (or its variants) can replace the word "construct."
 

But what about the following case:
 

If it seems that way to you, too, this is why I think this is:  In the earlier quote the authors were talking about a passive process of the mind shaping self experience.  In the later quote the authors were talking about doing something to someone else - so that that the person contrued experience differently.

But isn't the distinction between constructionism and constructivism  a thorny distinction?  It reminds me of Diana Cook's recent review of ambiguity.  To make matters worse, what is to keep a single author from using the term both ways at different times?  Still, it seems to me there are two senses of the term "construct" here and one means "construe" and one does not.

This makes me want to study our own Jerry Gale's work (who seems more like a constructionist to me)  and also Peter Rober's work   (See the article below.)  Sometimes I think Rober is a constructivist and sometimes he seems a constructionist.  Maybe he is both.

I wonder what they think about themselves and each other.  Do they "construct" their identities as constructivists or constructionists.  (And,  how do you think I used the word "construct" in that case?  Tricky, huh?)

Cooper, S. H. & Levit, D. B.(1998). Old and
    new objects in Fairbairnian and American
    Relational Theory.  Psychoanalytic Dialogues,
    8;(5), 603-624.

de Amorim, A. c. & Cavalcante, F. G. (1992).
    Narrations of the Self: Video Production in a
    Marginalized Subculture.  In McNamee &
    Gergen, K. J. (Eds.)  Therapy as Social
    Construction.