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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 176! Welcoming the Discomfort...
Good Morning discomforting sensations bleeding forward into the pull of otherness,
How many times when confronted with something new to you have you felt the sensation:
“I don’t get it!”?
This happens to us all the time – especially in relation to contemporary art. And this is not necessarily a sensation that we always like!
We also, like many of you, feel like we should “get it."
In the grip of this feeling that we should “get it” we are being pulled into some of our most deeply embodied habits. The habit here is that we want to “get it.” And we would rather this happen as fast as possible – otherwise, we start to feel uncomfortable, that we might not be that smart – or that others might judge us that way. In this moment, we just don’t know what to do or how to respond – it is uncomfortable. We are lost. The bottom drops out – or feels like it just might…
In this response habit there is a jumble of negative sensations welling up as we encounter the new that all push us towards some form of “figuring it out." We want to be able to say, “no, no – I get it – this is what it is about…” We are pulling ourselves out and away from the new – before it can even get a hold of us.
Think about your own experiences of this sensation. Pause for a moment, and bring to mind a concrete personal example of just not “getting it." Reflect on it – make it vivid and relive it. What was the arch of your experience?
Now, let’s explore a concrete example together. This is one we share in some of our longer workshops and retreats. It is a work of experimental sound art by the composer Alvin Lucier in which he says what he is doing and then does this – which involves the repetition of this phrase for about forty-five minutes:
Click on the link above and play this at a decent volume. Pay attention to it and how you experience it. Try and stick with it for the whole experience – and then come back to reading this. As you listen, take the time to notice how you feel your reactions as an active bodily sensation-practice. Listening is not just an intellectual moment of disembodied introspection. This is important to recognize: all sensing and sensations are not things that just happen to us – they are embodied practices we carry out. These are habits that have both physical dimensions and conceptual dimensions: sensing, moving, engaging, thinking, seeing, feeling…
So – What happened as you listened? Can you describe the genuine sensations and reactions you enacted during the forty-five minutes?
Last week in the newsletter we discussed the critical practice of engaging boredom as fundamental to engaging with newness:
Hopefully, this helped shape your listening habits as you engaged with Alvin Lucier’s work.
This week, as we continue our series on “sensing the new,” we are shifting and expanding our focus to how other discomforting sensations are critical to engaging with creative processes.
We want to highlight a couple of habits that we have enacted at differing times when we experience the odd and the different (like this work by Alivin Lucier. Perhaps these are some of the sensations that you also felt in listening to this work…
Sometimes we can get frustrated, angry, and even righteous and judgemental:
“This is nonsense"
“Do people really think this is art?!”
“There is a sucker born every day…”
Did you feel this habit swell up? Now, obviously this music could be a pile of crap – but how would we know this so quickly of something that is new to us? We are falling into the “emperor has no clothes” pattern.
Why are we having this response? And ultimately, is it helpful?
Of course, none of us want to be taken for a fool – but why not? Where is this reaction getting us? It is certainly not allowing us to really engage with the new. It is a habit that pulls us out and away from engaging with the new. Sure we will never be taken for a sucker – but we also will never be open to the new either.
Another embodied habitual response we often experience is that of “getting it.” It is that experience where we quickly try to explain it with whatever tools we have, such that we feel we do not need to experience it any more. This is that sensation of, “ok I get it, it's really interesting because of (fill in the blanks) – but now let's turn it off and get on with things.”
What is happening in both of these habits of knowing and passing judgment, is that we are quickly categorizing experience in such a way that we can put it aside.
Why are we so attached to the very conservative practices of knowing and judging in such ostensibly creative moments? Why has the practice of judgement become second nature? Now, don’t get us wrong – knowing and understanding are important practices to develop in regards to engaging with creative processes (they are a critical aspect of the practices of Disclosure). BUT – In the face of the new – the sensation of “I just don’t get it!” – is a critical and important feeling to stick with.
It is not only ok not to “get it” – it is important.
Why? Because how could we “get it”? If it is genuinely new, there is nothing to get and there is no one who gets it!
What is critical for engaging with creative processes is developing practices of being able to experience the new as something new.
This begins when we embrace and stay with the embodied sensation of “I don’t get it." And instead of this being a part of an embodied habit of turning away, we need to train ourselves to stay with things without judgement (this is good, bad, stupid, wrong, uninteresting…) or a conceptual/categorizing form of knowing. The goal is to allow the new to gain agency – to take hold of us and shape us. And we need very different habits for this. We are retraining our embodied sensing-acting practices to be ones that can stay with the odd and let the odd affect us.
You don’t need to know what this work by Alvin Lucier “means” or what he is trying to “communicate." The radically new does not communicate or mean anything – it asks us to join it in its process of co-emergence: as it becomes something new we become something new. A shared world co-emerges in the doing– then and only then is there new meaning and new sense-making.
What does it mean for a novel shared world to co-emerge? Let’s explore this by exploring the sensations we feel when a world falls away:
Last week my phone screen broke (Iain):
I could still see the screen but I could not do anything with it. No tapping, swiping, or typing. I could see I was getting a call but I could not answer it. Luckily, I live near the store of a phone service provider – so I just walked there. I was ok with just getting a new phone. But, as they pointed out – if you cannot interact with the screen we cannot do anything to figure things out or transfer your data. So no new phone…
So what to do? I needed to look up a repair store, or figure out some hack/workaround to get my screen to work or get access to the contents of my phone. That store couldn’t help – they were just in sales. So, how would I do this? I needed my phone to do any of this. The maps app would let me locate a good repair store and then navigate to it. Searching on the internet would help me find a workaround. But the phone could not do any of this. Meanwhile, I had calls to make and others were coming in. I knew I had appointments and other things that needed attending to… But none of it was possible. My world was no longer there… I could sense it more clearly than ever, but could not join it. So frustrating…
In the end, I could go home, use my computer, figure out a workaround, and eventually get a new phone. Not a huge deal by any means. But the feeling – the visceral sensation was of a loss – a world-loss. In an instant, connections and the possibility of everyday actions disappeared. This experience – this feeling of loss, of being literally stuck, of having the ground drop out is a very important one. Again it is an experience that we could dismiss via judgment: “This just proves we are too dependent on technology” – or knowing how to solve it (“Really, you don’t know how to fix your screen using a cable and a mouse?”). And while all of that could be true, those judgments are ones that can foreclose something critical about these sensations and the importance of the experience of a tool breaking.
In this moment when a key tool breaks we really see, perhaps for the first time, how it co-makes a world – and what it is to be of a world. Tools actively and creatively bring together embodied practices and environments such that specific affordances become available to us in stable ways. And we see this really only when they stop working – we see a negative outline of our way of being – of our world in this loss.
When tools work they slip into the background and we can take them (and that we have a world) for granted and just get on with things. Now there is much more we could say at this point about tools and the work of important thinkers about tools (the work of Gilbert Simondon, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, and Martin Heidegger, for example). But that is something for another time. What matters for this exploration of how we sense the new is this feeling of loss.
How many times have you heard this:
“For creativity you need to be comfortable with uncertainty”?
We find that it is a charming nebulous phrase that is easy to passively embrace. But, being comfortable with “uncertainty” in general is not the real issue. We need to be ok with, and ultimately welcome this radically discomforting sensation of loss – of losing a world.
The loss of the ability to act. The sensation that things just stop. That we cannot do anything. That sense of “now what?!” This is what we need to get deeply engaged with.
Why?
A critical tool to produce the experimental conditions for the new to emerge is “blocking." Blocking is where we identify some critical practice, tool, or concept and refuse it in a total manner. An example would be: blocking heat in cooking but using things that “need” heat – say rice, pasta, chicken – now what?
If you dig into all innovations you will see that they consciously or unconsciously refuse some critical practice. This forces practices to go in new directions, and harness unintended aspects of things in novel ways (what is called exaptation).
What is happening in experimentally blocking something is precisely the same thing that happens when a critical tool breaks. A world ceases to be available to us. It drops away. We are profoundly at a loss. This sensation is not the same as “uncertainty” – it is far more specific, uniquely difficult, world revealing, and world stopping. It is also a sensation that we strive to habitually unconsciously correct and escape from.
But, like the experience of not “getting it” – we need to build new habits that embrace this unique sensation of world-loss as a key opening to the practice of novel experimental environmental attunement. Blocking opens up a space to see what it is to have a world while pushing us out. If we can slow down, stay with this practice of refusal without rushing to judgment and knowing (which are always conservative practices) we can allow the new to pull us into its becoming.
These are very challenging practices – they are not intellectual exercises. And like getting good at anything they require considerable fully embodied repeated practice.
The next time something breaks, slow down and explore the experience – sense fully how you have a world, and are of a world. Sense how the relational configuration of embodied practices, tools, and environments co-creates a world.
Now welcome experimentally its loss, and become ok, if not comfortable, with the sensations of world-loss. Learn to recognize these sensations and find a way to allow them to become embodied triggers for new practices. Allow a new attunement to possibilities to emerge. And as they do, be equally ok with “not getting it."
Try this out deliberately. Block things in your home world – in cooking, in furniture, and in routines. Small things are great to practice with. It is all about practicing this process and developing new habits to accompany these difficult sensations which are fundamental to how we sense the new whatsoever.
Well, that is it from us for the week – we hope that you have time to celebrate the new year – and that you can make time to experience blocked things and allow yourself not to get them!
Till next week,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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