Tavistock Institute office space, 63 Gee Street, London | 1 pm- 2.30 pm GMT
Once again, we’ll bring dreams into the workspace.
Grounded in our practices and the story of our collaboration with the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, Juliet Scott, Bongsu Park and myseld invite you to join us in an inquiry that touches upon the power of dreams and their potential to change how we think about ourselves and the wider world.
This is also an invitation to explore the significance of the artist’s presence in organisational ecologies, including processes of archiving and translation, taking dreams and social dreaming into the digital realm.
The lunchtime talk is in dialogue with the current exhibitionSocial Dreams, Social Matters: Artistic Affluence in Social Dreaming, in which we bring together different practices inspired by social dreaming. The exhibition, taking place in the office space of the Tavistock Institute at 63 Gee Street in London, critically explores the generative and performative nature of dreaming, connecting the richness of artistic responses with the theory and practice of Social Dreaming – a radical exercise in sharing, associating to and working with dreams.
It was such a joy to reconnect with friends and colleagues after the holiday. But I was saddened to witness how many of us are filled with apprehension to start the new academic year. The holiday hasn’t been short, but the pandemic weights on everyone’s shoulder, and there is so much to do.
I have an antidote: Inject creative practice into your work.
When I designed my workshop Creative Writing for Academics, I noticed how injecting creativity into our research and writing practice yields power. It brings fun and joy into our work. It unleashes energy to write. It connects us with our intimate stories. And it brings us in touch with the profound questions that inspired us from the start.
Yet making space for creativity isn’t easy. And this is why I keep offering these workshops:
To make space for you to experience a moment of writing where hands-on exercises not only boost your writing practice, but also make you experience your research and writing in a fresh, honest, and relational way.
Join us! During this two-session-workshop, you will invite sensory details on the page, turning your research into a vibrant text where data, concepts, and theories become characters who take you on a whole new journey.
It was in London, on a Monday afternoon. It was still before the lockdown kept us all in confinement, and so we were sitting in an office at university, having an honest face to face conversation about work; about life with work; about the fact that although it might be true that “an unexamined life is not worth living,” it is f***ing hard to live when examining our lives. And that Socrates may have wanted to acknowledge that.
“There is one more book,” he said towards the end of our conversation. “It’s a strange book. It might be the weirdest book I know. It’s even weirder than de Sade or Nietzsche. But I’ve read it over thirty times, and each time I read it, I learn from it. I think it’s time you start and read it. When you’ve read the first couple of pages, let me know, and we’ll meet again.”
Photo by Matthew Hamilton on Unsplash
We said goodbye, and I ordered the book. Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, by James P. Carse. Little did we know that a couple of weeks later, we would all find ourselves confined. And that thinking of life in terms of finite and infinite games would become a strategy for turning those walls into bridges.
The book arrived quickly. I read; I kept reading; and by now I’ve already read parts of the book a couple of times. For instance, I’ve re-read it while waiting to be virtually let in to do a job interview. I’ve re-read it when thinking about creativity as method in the social sciences. And I’ve re-read it just for the pleasure of re-reading it. It is a strange book. A collection of propositions that offer a vision of life as play and possibilities. Megalomaniac? Perhaps. But I’d rather say profound, intuitive, and thought through to some greatest details.
Since meeting again face to face will have to wait, here are some bits and pieces that I would have thrown into our conversation. To be continued. How could it be different when being introduced to playing for the sheer purpose of continuing the play?
***
The book’s departure point is elegant:
“There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
A seemingly simple proposition, whose elegance nonetheless competes with equations such as E=MC2. Simplicity at its best, holding tremendous powers, for better or for worse.
In the game equation, two things unite the two kinds of games: in both cases, no-one can play a game alone; and in both cases, no one can play who is forced to play. Whoever plays, plays freely.
What differentiates both games, in the most basic terms, is that while the infinite game will always go on, the finite game will come to an end when someone has won.
This was already enough fuel for me to run for some time. No-one can play a game alone. Whoever plays, plays freely. An infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing to play.
I sensed that the trick was to interpret life in view of these two game-strategies. And I realized that in too many areas, I had tricked myself into the rules of finite games. I had tricked myself into believing that I had to win that game. That I had, for instance, to clearly decide in which discipline I would continue working. That I had to decide whether I would continue to run an academic career or try something else. That I had to fix it all, with clear terms, clear targets, and clear ambitions. But I’m not interested in winning. I’m interested in learning. I’m interested in discovering. I’m interested in the poetic space. I’m interested in the silences. In the in-betweens. In the stories that connect that which has been disconnected. And so, the finite game strategy didn’t trigger the right assets for me. Instead, it kept me into a loop, contained within boundaries that I craved to transgress. What our conversation sparked was the possibility of finding ways to transgress those boundaries without destroying the whole thing.
“Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.”
What I sensed was that the trick is to try and see where the infinite games are waiting to be played. Not everything can be an infinite game, but in many situations, the option is to the player. So, the trick is to shift, where possible, from a finite game mentality, to an infinite game mentality. It’s not about relegating our ambitions. It’s about seeing those ambitions from a different angle. With the infinite game mentality, the gains are no longer a disciplinary identity. The gains are no longer the articles that I want to have published. Nor are the gains the next job I will manage to secure. Instead, the gains become first and foremost the conversation. The genuine conversation. The conversation that makes me write these articles in the first place. The conversation that these articles may spark. The conversation that happens just because we felt like having a conversation. Whoever “we” may be.
Photo by Mihai Surdu on Unsplash
From the infinite game perspective, the gains become the process of creation, and ever more so, the process of co-creation. And who says creation says messy process. Creation comes with many silences, and with many in-betweens. Creation comes with a lot of rough edges, with unfinished sentences, with unfinished thoughts. Creation is working with raw material. It is working with sounds—noise even—instead of words; it is working with threads instead of material; it is working with muds instead of bricks. But during the creative process, words emerge from the noise and become stories; threads become materials, which become cloths, or a kite that flies the winds above the horizon. During the creative process, mud does become bricks, and bricks become shelters, and bridges. The essence of creation is to play with boundaries while finding meaning in what we do. Be it in telling the forgotten stories of unknown citizens. Be it in highlighting the affective essence of institutional rules, showing paths where emotions flow like water, connecting the personal with the public, the rational with the affective, the juridical with the political, the poetic with the scientific. But also, the essence of creation is to embark on a journey with unknown destinations.
“The only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end.”
Now, it does happen that energy runs out, and that what once was a shelter becomes a wall, a fence, sometimes a prison. But the game goes on. And so, it’s about finding the bits and pieces that will make this whole into a meaningful whole. Beyond disenchantments. Beyond doubts. Beyond vengeance. Beyond anger. Beyond fatigue. Beyond resignation. It is about finding the spark in the machine. That tiny little bit of electricity that can move loads, turning the wheels, getting us on the move of discovery and admiration, bringing laughter on the table, there where seriousness threatened to take over.
“The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous. … The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.”
The finite play for life. The infinite play of life. The difference lies in a tiny preposition. One letter difference. But that one letter may turn, in time, a wall into a bridge.
And yet, although the finite game mentality may be somewhat closed and confined, the two elements that unite it with the infinite game mentality may be the bridge between the two. One never plays a game alone. And whoever plays, plays freely. In these times of confinement, where mobility and social connections are being reduced beyond our will, the finite game mentality may help to cope with the load of our new daily life. For instance, dividing a day into realistic tasks is a finite game. It is serious business. It is playing within boundaries. But winning that game is joyful, and enables the other game to continue, too.
“Finite games can be played within an infinite game.”
Photo by Bee Balogun on Unsplash
Perhaps, the trick of playing the infinite game is to identify where playing a finite game within the infinite game will open the horizon instead of closing it. In view of continuing to play the infinite game, we all play an archive of finite games. Each of them being a game in themselves. Played with some others. Played freely. Played with rules known prior to playing the game. And ending when someone has won. And each of these games participates in the infinite picture of the ongoing game of life. It’s a matter of perspective. The finite game is a step. The infinite game the path.
Finite games can help bring things closer to home. They can be a call to action—for instance: write a little every day, no matter what; spend at least one day a week researching the archive. They can create moments of connections—for instance: engage in a job opening procedure, for the sheer pleasure of connecting. They can make space to practice creativity, in whatever form. In the end, finite games can be that spark in the machine. The threshold that allows one to move from a finite perception into new horizons of play and possibilities.
I remember
the time just before my first piano lesson. I was nine. My father is cellist, and
he was playing sonatas with a wonderful pianist. A young woman, short hair, soft
hands, eyes that were full of life. She rode a motorcycle. I found her one of
the most fascinating women around. I loved her to be around, but I also felt
very shy to address her personally.
I had
decided for a long time already that I wanted to play the piano, and it was
without a question that she would become my instructor. When the school year
would begin, I would start with private lessons. During the summer, I would
join the two-weeks chamber music retreat that my father organized for children,
in the middle of the mountain area where we were living. I still see her approaching
me one late afternoon, after their sonata rehearsals. I don’t remember what she
said exactly, but I remember it was about me and her becoming pupil and teacher
of one another. And I remember becoming very shy, to the point that I might
have given her the impression that I was not really into this.
I was. I
had been for years already. And it was just the beginning.
Since then,
playing the piano has become one of my most precious moments in life. Almost everything
else has changed in the twenty-six years that separate today from that summer. But
playing the piano has remained. And as the years passed by, I started to realize
that playing an instrument yield many a lesson for doing our jobs and for being
humans.
Before anything
else, playing an instrument requires concentration. In that concentration,
technique finds precision to the extent that it can almost be forgotten. But as
soon as the concentration breaks, technical weaknesses take over to the
detriment of the play. Playing an instrument thus means training one’s ability
to concentrate, which has served me many a times. It has served me when
teaching, when reading, when writing, when brainstorming. The faculty to
concentrate is a gift: it is one of the best tools we have to make space
where we first see only chaos. In that space, meaning can emerge.
Autonomous Artists Anonymous
Playing an
instrument also goes hand in hand with an intense training in listening. And
that goes deeper than it seems. On the surface, we listen to the notes that we
play: the melody they form, the harmony they carry, the rhythm that propels
them forward, or that let them linger. To hear all of this properly already
requires training and perseverance. And suddenly we start to hear more: we start
to hear the details in-between: the silences without which the music would not
sound; the interstice between the notes, forming in themselves melodies, harmonies,
and rhythms. We start to hear the pulse of the piece, precise and steady as the
heart of a living creature. In that listening, we enter the realm of music in
all its magnitude, leaving behind the daily chores, our worries, and our
ambitions. Listening makes us live the moment in all its dimensions, and that
is a skill that has enriched my life and the relationships within it. From family
to friends to students and colleagues, I have noticed many a times how much
listening helps when things need attention. Listening allows emotions to be
there, but to be there at rest. Listening creates a space of consciousness in
which we connect to better understand, leaving space for the unexpected.
Above all,
playing an instrument comes with a practice of knowing that has nothing to do with words, books, or
encyclopedia. The knowing that we do through music
has to do with being present. From the very first note of the simplest
technique exercise, making music comes with a kind of devotion and intensity
that is kind of unique. The body takes over in a matter of concentration that
not only makes it possible to play a possibly technically difficult piece, but that
also makes it possible to use flows of energy and flows of emotions as if these
were words, sentences, and stories.
Just as language,
music is all about communication. When I play a piece, I always see a story unfolding.
It can be a simple bedtime story, but most often, it is a whole journey. I traverse
magic forests where I meet trolls and giants. I hear thunderstorms and raindrops
merging with the glittering of the sun. I hear people dancing of joy, sadness,
or anger. I sense fear, regret, and hope, their relation and their separation.
Most of
all, I sense the depth of respiration in which multiple layers of life connect
with one another. It starts with the very physical sensation of my own breathing,
the air moving through my lungs and filling up my belly; it grounds me in its
quiet rhythm of in and out; and it provides me with the necessary stability to perform
the technical rhythms of my play. Somehow, becoming attuned to the physical rhythm
of breathing also opens the door to sensing the rhythm of life: from the banal
flow of people and things in my direct surrounding, to a much bigger and diffuser
reality. Sometimes, it even seems as if I can begin to sense the loop of time
at a scale that is much bigger than a human life, and maybe even bigger than
humanity. Sometimes, the scale is no longer about human breath, but about the
breath of magma, of stones, of mountains, of rivers, of oceans. In music, the
scales of million and of the infinitesimal cohabit.
Photo by Kimberleigh Aleksandra on Unsplash
And yet, playing
music is one of the most sober experience I know. Without practice, no music. And
practice has nothing to do with the grand sonata that we eventually want to
play. Practice is about repeating a series of notes over and over again, in
order to find the physical sensation that will allow to eventually play the
notes with musicality. For an amateur like myself, we are not talking here
about ten times. Not about fifty times. It’s about hundreds of times, sometimes
even thousands. It’s incredible what it takes to find the right balance between
tonicity and relaxation. Without tonicity, the music cannot take off. Notes won’t
be precise, and the rhythm will disaggregate and wither away. Without
relaxation, notes will sound hard and dry, and it won’t take long before
muscles stiffen and slap your body with cramps.
In that
practice of repetition lies a life lesson that I find both humbling and
sobering. Humbling because music is infinitely bigger than what I will ever be
able to express in words. Sobering, because with patience, practice and repetition,
we can train our body to make music. One note after the other. If we
find the discipline to repeat those notes, we can reach the beating heart of
the grand sonata, and with it, feel, just for a moment, the whole cycle of
life.
The best thing about receiving a prestigious
scholarship such as the Marie Sklodowska-Curie is without doubt the vitality
that comes from Virginia Woolf’s credo: “A woman must have money and a room of
her own if she is to write.”
ARoom of One’s Own was often on my mind in the past years, when I was meditating about my urge to write more, and my urge to be financially independent. I had decided to work less to be able to write. But working less meant earning less, and I experienced how quickly creative energy recedes when the space to write has no official space to be. I published articles, I published a book, but somehow, the joy that comes with writing kept escaping me. I felt like a fish out of water, gasping for air, trying to swim in an environment where swimming had been turned into springing. I was a resilient fish, I kept springing, but my goodness what was I tired.
Receiving this scholarship was the unexpected gift that
enabled me to re-unite writing with work. There was my water. I felt like a
whale finding its way back to the ocean, after having evaded the danger of the
shore nearby. I’m sure those around me could spot jets of joy escaping as I
rolled my senses in the comfort of my new habitat.
My own room is not a room set in stone. I’ve noticed
that I work best when being in transit—I might be a real fish in the end—sitting
at new places where nothing belongs to me, except for my writing gears: a
laptop, a notepad and a pen. Libraries, cafeterias, coffee houses of all sorts.
I do return to places I liked. Together, they form a network of power sockets
feeding my creative energy. They connect the different cities I live in
(Amsterdam, London, Paris), providing me with ephemeral anchors in the sea of
images and ideas that inhabit my inner life. The lack of belongings makes me
focus. I just sit, and let my senses submerge my thinking. My concentration
arises, my tong starts moving (I always mumble when writing), my fingers tingle
and press the keys. Images become words; words become images. In those moments,
I feel intensely connected.
The room of my own may be especially my own by the
fact that I’m not owning it. But the money makes more of a difference than I’d
perhaps like to admit. I’ve always told myself that living the bohemian life
had its benefit too. Knowing how to cook a delicious diner with just a couple
of ingredients found in the house that evening. Try the pasta with slowly
caramelized garlic and paprika, a couple of parmesan chips and some pepper.
It’s comfort food in disguise. But the lack of financial independence was a
constant reminder of those power relations through which women have been
belittled, infantilized, and kept in the custody of financial dependency. I was
earning the wage of an intern, working more than twice the number of hours for
which I was being paid.
I remember a conversation with a friend who asked me
what kept me from doing the things I dreamed of doing. I then realized that
being paid like an intern makes you feel like an intern, regardless of
education and experience. The lack of financial recognition made me feel numb.
It cut my wings down.
Don’t get me wrong, being an intern can be wonderful.
It can give you the space to discover and try things out. Acting like the
empresario you always wanted to become. Drafting your first contract while you
dream of becoming a legal expert. The thin paycheck that comes with it, can,
when well timed, make you feel like you are flying because you never
experienced earning your own money. I have experienced the joy of the intern,
but that was 15 years ago. Life moved on. I settled, had a child, earned a PhD,
published, organized conferences, taught for years, managed teams of lecturers,
bearing the responsibility to fix whatever had to be fixed. So, instead of
feeling my world expanding by means of sheer discovery, I now felt it shrinking
behind the wall of shame that came with the reality of not seeming to be able
to make a living out of my own skills.
Being financially safe—and to be safe, one must be independent—is a key to unlock spaces of creativity. When money is there, space can be created in whatever way suites. I feel the water around me, and my senses attune to the webs of connection I’m about to traverse. I do not know where this journey will end, but one thing I know for sure: the ocean has many stories to tell. I’m all ears, ready to catch them and offer them to you. Stay tuned.
