Strategies II

Strategies: the gold you bring with you to the workplace, the Kunst in the Kapital = Kunst formula. But don't fear, I'm not going to paint the scene overly rosy for ya. Strategies are a double edge sword, since they are also the habits you carry around that aren't so useful, after all. A strategy can also be the thing that wakes you up in the middle of the night terrified. Or a strategy might make you succumb to certain unhealthy or antisocial behaviors. A strategy can make you feel bad.

Or it can make you capable of amazing things. In fact, in NLP lingo, strategies are the same as capabilities.

Another thing to consider is that the sum of your strategies result in your complete life experience from day to day, they result in your beliefs, and your feelings as well. They are your world.

When little Johnny was much younger, still in high school, he had a terrible array of strategies that made him feel awful most of the time. He was living in a very gloomy and unlit tunnel made up of his accumulated beliefs and ways of reacting to the world. We don't need to elucidate the source, or the details of this tunnel, just point out that it existed, in him, or in his relationship to the world and himself. It was considered very dangerous for people with emotional state management issues like his to experiment with particular types ofpsychototropic substances, for instance, but that's just what he did. And you know what, he felt much better often afterwards, and was more interested in things around him, even things he was subjected to at school. Go figure.

But remember what I said in an earlier post: that strategies are made up of linked sensory processes, sometimes in sequence, sometimes looped or in parallel. To subtly change certain variables in one's inner sensory computations is sometimes enough to change the shape of the entire system. And the result can be so intense that it can be confused with a religious liberation of sorts. So watch out, be careful, don't dabble too much and stray from that bored and frightened little burrow you've found yourself in, or all hell might break loose.

And that's exactly what most of you have been doing. Me too, for so long, and still, quite often.

Your strategies are the gold you bring to your day job, they are what make the world go round. If I had my way, you and the rest of the world would recognize that: that you, and your wits, conscious and unconscious processes, are more valuable than all the oil fields, factories, monetary investments, ball parks in the entire world. They wouldn't be worth a damn, wouldn't be possible without you, valuating them, figuring out how to make them happen.

Remember that when you go to work each day. That's what you have to understand in order to start.

And lastly, strategies, for better or worse, are the ongoing poetry of our fictionalized selves and lives we lead.

Strategies

What is modeling?

Anyone who has seen a group of Elizabeth Bishop's drafts of a single poem can appreciate the painstaking attention to detail she took. The first draft or two may seem an unimpressive blurb scrawled out over a page of notepad, nothing like the final masterpiece at all. At some point she might even begin mapping out the beginning and ending words of particular lines, leaving the rest blank, as if she were playing some sort of word game, rather than composing them through from beginning to end, as one might expect. Over time, and many drafts, the piece begins to take shape, until wammo, all the parts in the puzzle click, and voila, we have a gorgeous gem like "One Art." But the process is nothing like what one might expect, none of the flighty spontaneity one sees in the statue of Robert Burns in Central Park's (NYC) Mall and Literary Walk. It is, in fact, quite the opposite of John Ashbery's process, or at least his process as he describes it -- the cutting of the tape of poetry that runs through his mind at all times. Ashbery claims that he will not write by hand, but uses a typewriter, because he would otherwise miss something, he moves so quickly through his lines. It's paradoxical that Bishop is one of his favorite poets, but this is what he says.

It is paradoxical too, that what Bishop was after was a representation of what she called mind in action. She actually wanted to create the sense of a mind happening across its various discoveries, perceptions, choices and distinctions in time. Such a goal might be best served using Ashbery's methodology, we might think, just as Andre Breton argued in his manifestoes about the use of automatic writing.

During the mid 1970's Richard Bandler and John Grinder learned to replicate the behaviors of some of the most successful psychotherapists at the time, including the legendary Milton Erickson, by using mimicry. Instead of reading walls of theory texts, they simply imitated the therapists' "micro-muscle movements," i.e. the barely noticable flexings of muscles below the flesh of the face, as well as gestures of the rest of the body, in time, while observing their work. They would then pretend they were the person they had observed and try to get the same result, and often, they would. Not only did they learn anatomical behaviors, as one may expect, but also arrangements of complex linguistic patterns as well.

This may perhaps be explained by mirror neurons, a kind of nerve cell discovered during the early 1990's in Italy, and now the center of every discussion from learning theory to the causes of autism.

Only after learning the behaviors did Bandler and Grinder try to figure out what patterns they were in fact using. Once they did, they began teaching others, and their students all seemed to get more or less the same results.

Grinder and Bandler called this process of learning new behaviors modeling. Later on, they developed a short cut methodology which involved tracking the sequence of a person's sensory modulatities during a thought or behavior process. For instance, someone might see a particular image (visual), to which they have a particular physiological response (kinesthetic), which they would respond to by forming particular words (auditory digital). They would map this sequence textually as V->K->A-d. These sequences could be very complex, and involve loops and curlicues, and different qualities and intensities, and often were not actually sequences at all, but coded cybernetic processes running in parallel. They would often be very contextualized, meaning you might use one particular coding to decide what was real vs. imaginary when you are sitting in your cubicle, and another when you are out for a walk. They called these grouped processes strategies.

One of my favorite ways of tracking strategies was developed by Jonathan Altfeld, an NLP trainer, who at one point used a similar methodology to develop artificial intelligence systems.

Everyone is an Artist? Yeah, Right!

It's becoming obvious to me that I don't really have the time to work on this at present, mostly because I work too much. But that's not the complete reason (or excuse), though something managing to represent completeness would be very involved. Leave it at this, that I have priorities, and many things competing for my time, not least of all a very demanding job, and most of all a family, including two wee ones. It may sound sappy for me to say that the wee ones, as well as my dearest wife Kathleen (not only the dearest but only wife), offer the opportunities for psychic combustion on the level of Shakespeare at every turn, but it's true, at least in a way. It, of course, depends almost fully on my engagement.

This is also true of work and art. When people whine at me (and believe me brothers [and sisters, as well], I'm with you on that) that their work is nothing like their art, that art is freedom and work is slavery, that work makes them miserable and art redeems them -- though they may not currently be making art because, in a way, it makes them miserable as well -- all I can offer is to say that they can try looking at things differently, just pretend perhaps, that it is different than one imagines it, since the way we imagine it is the way we imagine it.

What Beuys meant when he claimed that everyone is an artist, is to point out that a tremendous amount of creative activity takes place in our lives everyday, as is necessary to get through life, including work. And implicit in this creativity a particular style, a "style of life". You, worker bee, have little idea what you are up to. And if you were more aware, then maybe you'd have a little more respect for your efforts. Your efforts: these may be belittled by the opinions and expectations of others. But that's merely part of the game. You are an exquisite furnance of drama and activity.

Like it or not.

The Expanded Concept of Art

Joseph Beuys' Expanded Concept of Art gives us a place to start. For the time being, I am going veer around the political ramifications involved in selecting this idea as a point of departure, though, I promise you, in the long run it will be impossible to avoid. But what Beuys gives us when he states something like ART=CAPITAL (or Kapital=Kunst) is a way of looking at our everyday activities under new light. He is implying that things such as art and work cannot be as divisively delineated as we may once have wanted them to be, but that they are, in essence, the same thing.

Beuys' classes at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art often had many times the number of students that his fellow professors would allow, and this often caused him trouble with his peers and the academy in general. But Beuys relished the conflict, which he felt in some way served his purpose of expanding on the concept of art, as well as expanding the number of people that were being infected with his ideas. Art was to go outside of the studio and gallery, in fact it already had. Everyday life in or out of work is ripe with types of behavioral effects commonly thought of as "creative," though the specific behaviors were not often thought of that way. After all, everyone is an artist, in some way or another, since we all survive from day to day somehow, and that takes some clever maneuvering and revamping of our ideas, does it not?

His students, therefore, were not training to become "artists," per se, not in the typical sense. Instead they left his class and went on to be business associates, teachers, social workers, what have you. Most art teachers would consider that a great failure, but to Beuys, it was the agenda. It was social sculpture.

It would be hard to imagine all the tools Beuys passed on to his students, and what it is that they had taken with them, if anything, that others working in the same fields may not have had. But we can begin to take an accounting of our own work, and understand what we have brought to it from whatever arts we may have involved in.

Is it only a coincidence, for instance, that there are so many classically trained musicians working in information systems technology? Or is there something in the cognitive training of a musician that seeds the ability to think in the same structures needed to think in computer languages. If so, what does this begin to imply about the relationship between our art and our work, and what does it say about the possibility that work and art, instead of hindering each other's progress, may actually be used to support each other, if managed intelligently?

For those of you who have creative ambition, but find yourself working in a field that is not of your choosing, might this offer a route to think upon? To me, it does. And if it can make any difference to my work, my life and my art, it may only involve changing the intention behind everything we do.

Work is an array of decisions, conscious and unconscious, unfurling through time. Because the past does not vanish into thin air, but exists in the present, our work can be looked upon as a kind of "social sculpture" that gathers as we act.

Thoughts and operations: speech, gesture, gross movements: all particles of the artifact, but one we cannot separate ourselves from, as in the forming of external and static objects.

Well, you determine exteriority.

Work is the dance you cannot undance, or set yourself free of, by saying "I have not danced, but only tripped over myself when I was young. And now, my friends, I have this habit, this tic, which I call my employment."

How

How we work is like an artifact we engender in time, or the residual footprints on a Tapies:

What is Woik?

You should know as well as anybody.