Reflections: Emergence and submergence
Reflections: Emergence and submergence
At various points this summer I had moments where I could step outside time and see clearly what had been going on in the last two years leading up to the point in the early summer when my energies ran out in a slow burn out. There was a moment on the hiking trip in Thy when we first arrived at the coast and the waves, the wind and the sky hit me. Another when I was playing with Atsa and she waved back at me for the first time. Reading David Abram and feeling different pieces of my worldview slowly coming together. Staring out the window at the clouds beneath me on a trip across the North Sea. It was like my spirit slowly lifted itself out of chaos and I gradually slipped into a lighter, freer place where my thoughts were unbound and I could look at the world as new. There is a Rilke poem that I have recently come back to which describes the sense of getting unstuck in time and falling out of my own bounds which I'm hinting at here:
I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am waiting.
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.
And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.
I remember feeling like I had walked away for long enough to want to come back, the prospect of turning my attention back to the research and revisiting all the material I'd gathered felt exciting again. Coming back has been both good and hard. I had quite a strong, physical reaction to returning to the office. It was like my body and my mind was being squeezed back into a shape they had been struggling to break out of. But I also took up the thread with some of the people I'd been working with and felt the enthusiasm for my project return as I slowly worked my way back into it. One good thing about having moved so fast in the spring was that I got a lot of stuff done. Looking back at it I can start to see connections that were previously hidden. Over the last two months I have focussed on wrapping up my fieldwork and have had a chance to make a couple of final journeys before I retreat into reflection and analysis. The last journey was to the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) and the Emergence Summit, which provided a perfect opportunity for reflecting on the fieldwork as a whole.
Emergence has been a central theme in the last eight months both in the way I came into conversations and the way that I approached those conversations. The thread between the various conversations also began to unwind itself in unexpected ways, only in hindsight could I see how one encounter was deeply connected to another and how both pointed directly toward the next one ahead of me. In my last entry for this diary I asked: “Emergence is what happens when things come together and fall into place. What triggers this falling into place?” This question is thoroughly intriguing and I expect that the answers we come up with will differ between us, we all have our own ways to sniff out serendipity. But this summer it also became increasingly clear to me that my trigger points all begin with loosening my grip on the world, surrendering my intellect to otherness, easing out of control mode and letting myself be guided by a deeper connection to what I am doing. Growing strong in the beauty you behold. I suspect that this is akin to the difference in psychology between reflective and flow states of mind.
I recall something Tony Dias wrote about emergence: “If control is an illusion and intention is an expectation of control then action without intention is NOT a step away from effectiveness, but the path towards merging our actions with conditions as they exist.” The moments where I can sense the whole, the beginning and the end of my thesis, the totality of the conversations, the reading and the thinking, are exactly those times where I don't force my intention on it. In a reductive, rationalist environment there is a strong risk of being perceived as unscientific, flaky, or, worse, unmethodical when you say anything like this. Science needs its control groups! But as Tony points out, acting without intention does not mean acting ineffectively or chaotically (or not triangulating findings). It simply means refraining from imposing a preconceived idea on the outcome of an action – a keystone of the scientific method. And most importantly, it opens up the door of emergence, it calls into presence the connections we would otherwise be blind to. Connections which hold the potential to widen our perspective by offering the data we were not looking for and which will turn our understanding on its head. There is a really strong and urgent need to reclaim rationality from expectations of control.
The Emergence Summit was in many ways an embodiment of the science of action without intention. For all the wants of conferences with grand mission statements it encouraged us to intuit our way around the summit. The key to this is fairly obvious: trust in the insight that when you bring creative, open-minded and clear thinking people together, something unique is going to arise. In this setting the idea that you can impose a preconceived agenda seems almost ridiculous. This insight has been lacking in most of the conferences I have been to in academic settings. Perhaps academia could learn something from the arts here. I've often wondered why it is that the basic insight within the arts into creativity – that you have different periods of nurturing imagination, productivity and relaxation – is almost completely missed out within academia. Anyone who has ever reflected on the creative process will tell you that you can't turn that into periods of productivity, productivity, and productivity without seriously affecting the quality of the output. After I came back from CAT I received an email from one of the other participants which mentioned Rilke, Knud Rasmussen, Gregory Bateson and ecological aesthetics all in one. Talk about emergence!
Having come back from the Emergence Summit to the office, it feels like I'm at a threshold. Finishing my fieldwork I'm entering a new phase in my research. Now I've got to tease out all those connections I've made and build a coherent story around them. With one year left of my PhD it is increasingly clear what has to be done to round off this circle. This also means that I have to come to terms with what is possible in a year. I've got to 'get it done' but I've also got to 'let it get done'. I'm not in control of how these strands are working their way into a coherent whole, it is out of my hands. But listen! That doesn't mean that it is not going to get done effectively.
Summer has turned in on itself and broken into shorter and wetter days. Those moments over the summer where I caught onto the beginning and the end of my project resound in a faint echo. It feels like I've entered a diving bell and I am catching a last glimpse of a rough sea before being submerged into the depths. I've got to read the currents well to reach my destination, but I've got the right kind of training and I've already learnt the most important lesson. I can hear a voice whispering in the distant waves: “with the silence of stars I enfold your cities made by time”.
14/09/2012