Process Arts,
Culturopoesis,
Healing Friction, and
Guardianship of Peace
“In his book Inter Views, James Hillman remarks that instead of being the founder of a school of thought, he sees himself as the member of a community of people who are at work re-visioning things.”
from the acknowledgment with which
Thomas Moore's begins Blue Fire
As densely stated as possible for refinement and substantiation as we go along, the 20th Century brought with it the awareness of several deep shifts. One result of industrial urbanization is the accelerating, global extinction of relatively self-sufficient, village-size communities containing inescapable, long-term relationships[i]. Like no other structure communities, as defined here, can provide a container for both the desired and dreaded changes that accompany human life. This fading connective potential has been shown to deepen and reinforce the individual and group experiences that lend meaning to being human. The need for the kind of meaning associated with place and community persists and becomes progressively acute as the Industrial Mind[ii] promulgates and dwells in literalized abstractions, as though humanity were reducible to refined components or producible as an efficient mechanism. Human beings seem to be moved by this process to identify less with being rooted in familiar ground (literal and metaphorical place, work, family, body, etc.) and more in abstract idea spaces like The Market, Family Values, Globalization, The Environment, War on Terror, and many more. This creates greater exposure and vulnerability to a kind of self-perpetuating mythic structure at works in individuals and groups at the level of epistemology, ontology, and volition. Words often used to describe this mythic complex of influences include: “memes”(Richard Dawkins), “metaphors we live by” (Lakoff and Johnson), and “mythicity”(Gould).
A recent shift of awareness happened in contact with the way industrial memes become a matter of social doctrine and underlie a previously unimaginable facility in fabricating and distributing not only concept based products but also product serving ideas. Vast ability now exists to convert life energy into the development, manufacture, and circulation of almost any thing and idea, from conception and comodification, to advertising campaigns and distribution networks, to the collection and retention (holding the attention and volition) of populations who learn to depend and insist upon on the idea or thing, as well as incipient ideas and things which will of necessity resemble it.
I will refer to this production cycle using its own metaphors, when possible, and will often borrow the mitts, flame, and caliper from this “idea foundry”[iii] in order to re-grind a well used lens, a way of seeing through, by reshaping familiar words. For example, I will use affixes and plays-on-words to refer to the shift from industry, in the sense of any purposeful activity, to industrialism, an abstraction into doctrine, “–ism” coming from the Greek suggesting the act, state, or theory of anything. Following the abstracting movements of industrialism, for instance, might lead to consideration of “industriality” – the quality or state of being within the culture shaped by the doctrine, and then to “industreality” - the submersion of the doctrinalizing process by ubiquitous theoretical usage until the “real” is defined industrially. I create or use others’ neologisms not simply to catch the mind’s eye but as a way of opening and working an idea-complex which reflects not only a shift in observable behavior but also the accompanying inescapable change in word-ideas.
A wave of change followed the industrial revolution as an entire spectrum of vocations, “Process Arts,” were born which draw attention to and educate about how we do what we do, including and informing what we produce. Following the rise of governmental bureaucracy and urban population growth since civilization began; the place of the Manager became prominent, whose entire responsibility is related to other people’s production. The modern workplace now knows the ubiquitous presence of another subset of managers who function at large, temporarily rooted like so much of post-industrial society, given titles like “consultant,” “facilitator,” and “coach.” As the place of work and place of home become in many ways conflated, counselors, mentors, advisors, and therapists all begin to have overlapping areas of interest and expertise for better and for worse. Any of these professionals may move into process artistry, from simply influencing life and work management, when their practice develops a self perpetuating autocritical discipline, “challenged all along the way to rethink, to re-vision, and to reimagine…nothing short of a new way of thinking,”(1) which returns again and again to the way all relationships are built in depth -- tending the quality of interaction. In this realm the experience of creative production undergirds human understanding and the capacity for both suffering and joy in the living of life, independent from and related to what is produced between birth and death. Lay and professional practitioners of these arts tend the influential interdependence of form (existing empirical structure), frame (theoretical environment – or idea space), and function (tangible applications and intangible consequences). The Process Arts are at very least fundamentally implicated in the practice of depth psychotherapy, the modern visual, liberal, and performing arts, organizational management consulting and development, social, civic, and spiritual activism, coaching, mediation, facilitation, and cultural study and criticism. Even die-hard traditional approaches are now fundamentally changed in that they employ additional levels of process awareness and conscious practice. More and more people are making an art form of crafting the layered choices and shared assumptions underlying the understanding of co-creativity itself. This shift in culture is so wide that the world as a whole is changing to mirror its shape. Culture is thereby being made more consciously. Borrowing a neologism from my field (mythopoesis – see below), I call this Culturopoesis. In his work on the culture of psychoanalysis, James Hillman frames this process as “a work of imaginative tellings in the realm of poesis, which means simply ‘making,’ and which [he] take[s] to mean making by imagination into words.” His work, and this work “more particularly belongs to the rhetoric of poesis, by which [he] means the persuasive power of imagining in words an artfulness in speaking and hearing, writing and reading”(H.F. 3-4). Drawing on the approaches of David Miller, Wolfgang Giegerich, Greg Mogenson, and other “post-jungian” thinkers, I will add to that word work its natural extension into action, literal bodies and choices, and the co-creation of the concrete world.
The culturo-poetic shift makes it clear that (post)modern persons are co-creating overlapping, interrelative micro- and macro-cultures by consciously and unconsciously constructing the narrative environments within which reality generating choices become concrete. On one hand, deeply connective stories and images are literalized and functionalized to market, sell, and distribute ideological products. Cases in point include Hitler’s “Final Solution” mirrored in recent “ethnic cleansing.” On the other hand, psychological and mythological studies are being interrelated to make space consciously for personal and corporate biography, group process which includes all possible participants in a given sphere of influence, the cultivation of understanding beyond the collection of information, and calling for global needs to be fully expressed and received in a welcoming of deeper, more “soulful” individuality and interdependence. A result is the building of Community on purpose.
Intentional community is no longer unique to literally cohabiting activists. Beyond and including initiatives like co-housing and kibbutzim, this powerful idea is bringing soul and spirit together in workplaces, militaries, religious groups, families, warring factions, and schools. Process-level methodologies and practice groups are arising around the world with Community-on-purpose in mind. They are finding that the core focus for creating this kind of culture has to do with the deep hearing of participants’ stories and the processing of conflict earlier and with growing capacity and facility in order to hope for Peace, referred to here using the term neo-shamanism in the way outlined for the western “seeker” by Daniel C. Noel, and developing the idea of a new monasticism, as imagined in the work of Thomas Moore.
This redefinition of Community, as being made on purpose, is supported by the redefinition of peace itself. Rather than framing peace as the absence of conflict, here I speak of Healing Friction—doing conflict well rather than avoiding/eradicating it, and changing and being thus changed by this fiction of friction. I propose that professionals who identify this practice of peace as their deep desire and vocation might benefit both from identifying themselves publicly as Guardians of Peace and from working together in ways suggested herein to forward the practice of this kind of community, such that it can and will be adapted and lived wherever it is learned and the Process Arts are practiced.
[i] According to University of Veracruz researcher Mario Pérez Monterosas, Veracruz and Chiapas (Mexico's largest coffee-growing state) form part of the latest migratory region. Between 1995 and 2000, some 800,000 people left Veracruz. Pérez Monterosas reports that Veracruz has been steadily climbing the ladder in the list of the states that contribute to the migrant population in the United States. In 1992 Veracruz was in 30th place, by 1997 it had risen to 27th, in 2000 it held 14th, and by 2002 it had become the fourth-largest sending state in the nation.(a) Before this wave started, emigration from Veracruz's coffee zones to the United States was so scarce that a 1994 survey registered only one township--Misantla--with cases of migration to the north, and there were only twelve.(b) http://www.counterpunch.org/navarro12152004.html a) Mario Pérez Monterosas, "Las redes sociales de la migración emergente de Veracruz a los Estados Unidos," Migraciones internacionales, Vol.2, Núm 1, Enero-Junio 2003. b) Odile Hoffman, "El andar investigando historial de un proyecto de investigación sobre cambio sociocultural y crisis cafetalera," Ciesas-Orstom, 1994 .
[ii] Wendell Berry, The Agrarian Standard, Orion Online (Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society, 2002).
No comments:
Post a Comment