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Foreword
Fractured Dance
Fractured Dance,
says J. Denny Weaver, is about two conversations; I want
to write about a third. In his Preface, King describes a
journey from study in Christian settings to study at
Temple as a shift between “being in the church
looking out at the world” to “sitting in the
world looking back at the church.” True enough. Yet
on another reading, King had been educated “in the
world” long before he came to Temple and remained
“in the church” while he studied at Temple.
Indeed this duality,
which seems so much at the center of the continuing
debate among Mennonites over homosexuality, was also the
recurring tension of a book King presented to me when we
first met. On the surface, his Trackless Wastes and
Stars to Steer By can be seen as a guide to internal
conflict resolution for Anabaptist discussion groups, but
King let on that its conflicts had been—continued to
be?—his own.
The third conversation,
then, is the one that has been going on in Michael
King’s head. What makes that conversation special is
less its subject matter or duration and more King’s
uncommon ability to move the conversation forward without
losing his anchors in world and church. The method is
dialectics, and King practiced it long before he read my
favorite dialectician, Kenneth Burke. (See Burke’s
“Four Master Tropes,” an appendix to his Grammar
of Motives.) In the face of seemingly opposed ideas
or ideologies, it is tempting to opt for one over the
other, then to dig in one’s heels, find social
support, and aim to support as well the conclusion that
all who disagree are mad, bad, or sad.
Whether out of
religious conviction or secular training (or both), King
inclines in a different direction. A clue to his
philosophy (theology?) is to be found in a recent
exchange on the listserv of the Kenneth Burke Society. I
had initiated the exchange, putting forward a model of
ideal conversation not unlike Gadamer’s, which I
call persuasion dialogue.
“Such
conversations are not possible between people with power
differentials,” said a correspondent.
“Never?”
asked another. “Do you mean absolutely never?”
“Absolutely
not.” said the first commentator. “My
experience,” he said, “has been contrary to the
hopeful wish for a civil, transformative
conversation.”
King could not
categorically disagree. It is true, he said, that
“power runs through and often risks subverting any
attempts at ‘PD’; thus it must in some way be
accounted for.” King added, however, that the
analysis of power should not in itself be allowed to
become disempowering:
It is interesting
to note how often PD is never even tried because
potential participants immediately raise the specter
of power and say that it can only work in an ideal
world such as we never encounter in the
power-saturated “real” world.
I think the
challenge, then, is how to theorize power effects
without letting power analysis call all the shots. As
a personal practitioner of something akin to PD, I
regularly encounter power differentials, either the
greater power the other has or the greater power I
have, and I have found that even amid them a central
question is whether I myself, regardless of what the
other chooses to do, regardless of the power
equations which are always surely present, am willing
to listen respectfully and with some humility and
openness to the other. If I am, this not always but
frequently changes the character of the dialogue. The
other more often than not begins at least partly to
meet me. In such conversations I don’t sell out
my own position but expect the other to grant it the
same respect I intend to offer.
The key move, I
believe, is my readiness to offer the respectful
openness first, since it’s a human tendency to
meet generous listening with generosity but
suspicious listening with suspicion. The outcome is
so often more fruitful than power-foregrounding
“hermeneutics of suspicion” that I suggest,
“Try it, you just might like it”—but
hey, I’m willing to listen to why you might not!
These, I believe, are
core assumptions of Fractured Dance. Let none of
us assume for a moment that applying them is easy,
especially in the heat of a controversy like that which
divides Mennonites and so many other Christians and
religious groups over homosexuality. The usual practice
between disputants is that each talks past the other,
exhibiting what Barbara Herrnstein Smith has felicitously
called the “microdynamics of
incommensurability.” But, having worked first with
Mennonite leader Ervin Stutzman on a dissertation and
then with Michael King, I’ve learned that the
resources for peacemaking are woven into the very fabric
of the Mennonite tradition out of which King launches the
quest for understanding described in this book.
—Herbert W. Simons, Professor of Communication,
Temple University; and Coordinator, Temple Issues Forum
Fractured Dance orders:
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