A Method of No Methods

In Black Skins, White Masks, Fanon writes something to the effect of "I leave methods to the botanists and the mathematicians". Except he wrote in in French.

Everyone has a method of working. Fanon's point was to not get too caught up in making or following a method, but being flexible enough to do what each separate situation requires. Perhaps botanists and mathematicians need rigid rules because their objects of study remain stable, but for those of us that work with people, there is hardly a subject-object relationship, and no one situation is ever the same as another.

Let's take my church. We had a meeting about choosing leadership about two weeks ago (it takes me a long time to think these things over). I don't know how the process used to go, but right now, the church is transitioning into having a structure of voting membership. Because we are in a transitionary period, the rules that we laid down as a church didn't really work, so we had to change them. Flexibility as a guideline.

Guidelines are helpful. They give us a starting point, let us know what has worked in the past, and remind us of the convictions we want to hold on to. But, for those of us that work with people, the people are always more important than the process, and our method must reflect that.