It would be nice if learning didn’t involve dissatisfaction, but in my experience at least, it usually does. If I were to qualify that, I would add that it involves dissatisfaction and being moved, both being poles (perhaps) of sense. I am making sense of visual-material methods, and their application in public sector (health and care) contexts.
My prompt for this post is both dissatisfaction and being moved, each coming from a different place, and both useful stimuli for learning, as it happens. I start with the dissatisfaction, which is probably unfair, because it’s not dissatisfaction with the actual work on visual-material methods, but a feeling that something - however briefly - stagnated. I know I’m being unfair to myself, but hey, you have to work with what comes up. Over the last two or three years, I have been delighted to work in a range of public sector contexts to develop visual-material approaches, techniques and methods. You might have seen some of these moments:
...but I have become attuned to the exact moment when it seems like I am reproducing them. When I start to reproduce, or even face the prospect of this (which is more likely the case) my research-creation feels stale. I have an in-built alarm for reproduction, that is, churning the same stuff out. I can’t do it in teaching or research. That is not to say I am a creative genius, only that I function best when I am driven by genuine curiosity, in relationship with others and where there is a prospect of something new emerging. I got the feeling of reproduction from my contribution to a particular online meeting. Nothing big, just the sense that I was performing as expected, going through the motions, running the agenda. That started a sense of dissatisfaction.
Anyway, moving from the unnecessary self-blame, I found some counter inspiration, as I returned to a magnificent book written by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi and first published in 2014 - Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience.
In this book, Manning and Massumi cover lots of ground, including insightful reflection on the development of the SenseLab project, initially based in Montreal, Canada. Here, I use it as a reflective provocation for my own work, not to duplicate it, but to see what patterns of diffraction might come about as I throw my own experience in its way. My aim is to destabilise any sense of routine, reproduction and predictability in my work, so that my research, writing and teaching practice can remain fresh, useful and new. Not perfect.
So, I start with the material I have just re-read in Thought in the Act, and in particular in Part 2: Propositions. I am not (right now) interested in a review or summary, I am pragmatically crashing myself into this work, to see what resonates and catalyses. The only context you need without reading the text is to know that Manning and colleagues, based at the Society for Art and Technology (SAT) in Montreal, sought to discover what a form of research-creation could look like if it was based on interactions that avoided the paradigm of ‘communication’ or ‘application’, associated with the reproduction of outputs and transmission of passive content.
What they developed, through collaborative success and failure of artists and philosophers, was a research-creation alternative to this communication/application paradigm normally associated with academic or creative ‘centres’. I simply note some of the features that hit me on this reading, starting diffractive patterns in my own practice. You will pick up some of their shorthand, but also a sense of their work, which I follow with some concluding thoughts:
* The collective wanted to explore new forms of collaborative interaction.
* They asked: what “Initial Conditions” are necessary to enable emergence.
* They wanted their events to be just that, not delivery of pre-determined conclusions. Events as collective thinking that game rise to new thoughts through new interactions on-site.
* The technique of research-creation replaced those of ‘communication’ or ‘application’ (as previously noted).
* Events needed to bring something new to participants’ practices on the level of “techniques of relation”, or techniques for joining their practices to another. Such techniques of relation were focused on catalysing and modulating interaction between members. This was recognised as a domain of practice in its own right.
* To achieve this, the diverse collective (not their term) developed “enabling constraints” which were opportunities for creative participation in their events. These constraints conditioned interactions as opposed to “framing” them. Enabling constraints “modulated” the event as it moved through its phases.
* Interestingly (as I have found), the group found that simply “letting things flow” as unconstrained interaction lacked what was termed “rigour”, “intensity” and “interest”. Conditions were needed to promote “co-generation of effects”. These included asking participants NOT to present already-completed work, and for participants to read the same philosophical texts as a primer.
* Participants were encouraged to prepare what came to be termed “platforms of relation” elements of (intra) activity which could later be organised in relation to others, forming the structure of the workshops. Activities would focus on initial conditions, enabling constraints and “strategic incompleteness”.
* Activity in groups resisted the traditional “reporting” task that small groups are so often asked to do. Instead of description or “reportage”, participants were encouraged to focus on sharing work in “capsule” form, retaining performative force so that they “activated” further actions, and did not passively describe progress to other participants.
* Practically, events were carefully planned, including the experience of entering and settling in - they talked about a “hospitable estrangement” which would “disable participants’ habitual presuppositions” (p.98) without deconstructing participants attachments to role, status and so on too quickly.
* Failure, importantly, was seen as a generative force - acting as a prompt for participants to explore the limits of what can be thought / created in particular contexts.
* After playing with disrupting participants expected contributions (in order partly to generate something new), the group considered what could be done with incomplete ‘platforms for relation’ that were stopped, or not put into action. Thought was put into how such elements could be disseminated, and focused on the concept of the gift, and later, emissaries from groups as activity became distributed geographically.
* The idea of having a “process seed bank” emerged later. This was less about the content of an activity, as it was considered that an “events’ relational force cannot be reproduced. It remains, always, a singular movement” (p.115). As such, processes were things that set initial conditions, modulated interactions as events unfolded and had what was termed “velocity” and an “arc”, like Paul Klee’s lines, which could be “iteratively reactivated” to different effects.
This is a list of what was useful to be, what connected and the material (as I say) that I ‘crashed myself’ into, to see what diffractive patterns emerged. I noticed the tension in my practice between constraint and enabling, and liked the idea of enabling constraints. I noticed that when I felt tired, stuck in a rut, or disconnected (easy enough in COVID-19 times!) from people, I ended up over-structuring, or relying on bureaucracy. I have to remain present and connected in order to keep the creative tension. I liked the way that the SenseLab paid attention to process, and carefully built in explicit agreements and techniques to reflect philosophical principles.
My work has a different context. I span boundaries of art/philosophy and social care/health and working class communities. How did this material meet my dissatisfaction? Reading about the work of SenseLab, I felt hope, and interest in, the ability to use structure, techniques, incompleteness. I liked the idea of groups or people interacting (possibly at a distance, given our new normal), and activating or continuing what others start. I felt relieved that my contribution was not to be the expert in content (seductive, as I am familiar with the content) but to balance those initial conditions, ongoing enabling constraints and the ‘back and forth’ of becoming together within diverse and distributed communities of interest, place or experience. I saw much that resonated in my work with others, but felt prompted to write out a draft - incomplete - manifesto of sorts, that could be taken up with others and would connect to a toolbox of techniques and tools.
Onwards.
