Farewell to Barnett Pearce

Barnett Pearce was one of the most remarkable human beings I have met in my life. The first time that I saw him, he was attending the Final Oral Review of Jane Peterson's PhD dissertation as a committee member. I was struck by his presence, and while most people in the room seemed (at least lightly) upset by Jane's uncovering conclusions, Barnett seemed to remain present and engaging. Who was this man?

A year later I find out as both Keith Melville and Fred Steier mention his work with CMM as possibly interesting for my own doctoral journey. Two coincidences make one synchronicity, so I play tag with Paula and Petrina who have an appointment with Barnett and meet him face to face for the first time.

Now, a good two years later, and after a long struggle with cancer, Barnett has just passed away, leaving his family, his friends, and his colleagues with a deep and confusing mixed feeling of suffering and love. Let me share my brief account of learning from and with this beautiful human being.

Barnett, in concert with a large and tight network of colleagues and friends, developed CMM: the Coordinated Management of Meaning. CMM is a communication theory and practice that lets its users take a communication perspective. Taking a communication perspective means that we do not only look at what communication means, but specifically look at what communication DOES.

Communication, for those who take this perspective, is action and is consequential. Every act of communication is part of the creation, maintenance, and evolution of our social world. According to CMM, our relationships, selves, and social structures like families, organizations, and institutions, cannot and do not exist without the daily interactions of communication. Once we take this communication perspective, we can see how we are both governed by, and empowered by communication. At our best, in each moment of making our world through communication, we can balance the logical force at play, to integrate the wisdom of the past, with our vision for the future. CMM provides a coherent set of methods and tools to visualize, analyse, and design communication from this communication perspective.

CMM is important, because it gives us practical and analytical tools to work with that help us to actively improve our creative communication. In Barnett's words, communication should help us evolve "forward" and "upward," (Pearce, 2007, p. 9) evolving to our better social selves. One way of doing this (as he would put it) is through the use of his innovative communication tools. In over 40 years of research and practice, CMM has become respectable with both scholars and practitioners.

Learning CMM starts with a small step - for example attending a seminar in which CMM is practiced - but has huge consequences: once you become aware of communication as action, and the social world as largely constructed, you can't go back. (Well actually you could, but who would really want that ;-). CMM offers heuristics to model and analyze speech acts, episodes, dynamic hierarchies of contextual meanings that both influence and are influenced by the stories we create; the daisy, a model to look beyond the narrow self to explore what other voices play out in a story LUUUUT a model to visualize the tensions between stories told and stories lived, and how the untold, untellable, unheard, and unhearable stories in between stretch and determine our sense of relationship, etc. etc.

Most striking about Barnett was how he himself reflected, or better, embodied, his own work. In the seminars I had the joy of joining, where he taught us the basics and the advanced of his method, he was always present, living his own story, and thereby immersing us into it in ways that indeed changed our social worlds. From my perspective of a jazz-life improviser, he provided me with the minimal structures to practice and design improvised conversation. And he has helped me grasp how I can start practicing the improvisation of better social worlds in my work and life.

Thank you Barnett, farewell, and to be continued...

Pearce, W. B. (2007). Making social worlds: A communication perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.