My husband’s nephew and his wife are coming to visit tonight, and I was — as I usually do — practicing in my head possible dialogues that might spin out. Doing this today actually helped me formulate something I’ve been trying to say for a long time. So, I was imagining them asking me, since we’d be showing them around our small house and my big office in it, what it is I actually do.
Here’s how I thought I’d answer it, and what spun out from that about where I am right now. (This is part of me finding my voice, in a wider frame than I’ve been working in until now. More on that below/later.)
What fell out of me spontaneously as an answer to the question is this (and it was the first time it came out like this. It certainly helps — me at least — to speak/think in dialogue):
What I do is to experience and to work on understanding the complexities of relating and interacting. And, through my conceptual and experiential work on this, to come to insights to share with the world, in writing, in theorizing, and in direct dialogue with people through research, teaching and consultancy.
And here are some of the thoughts that went on after that, in relation to maybe publishing or starting or continuing a newsletter:
I have been a very precise thinker — or a thinker very interested in and concerned with precision (though always starting from experience, which to some people is perhaps anathema to precision!). I have introduced and innovated conceptual frameworks for understanding intersubjectivity: all that we do together and how we understand one another, ourselves, and the world together.
For quite a while, and in some sense since I was a child, this work has always been about application and practice as well. I think that shines through in my academic work. But I feel it’s time to do this: to be in practice from within, around, and about participatory sense-making more and more.
One element of that is to find my voice, in and through and for different ways of moving forward with this work. I’d like to do that in a much more improvisational, ground-up way than I’ve ever done before.
I feel a strong pull to improvise, to begin1 improvising. (And even, Bobby McFerrin’s Spontaneous Inventions are “playing” in my head as I’m thinking, talking to myself, to you, here.)2 I could call what I’m doing now “spontaneous interventions,” which is how I just misremembered the title of McFerrin’s album. In any case, improvising…
I’ve been writing for a long time, and I love it. My academic writing has found a lot of uptake, in many different ways, from collaborations to applications to testing across a truly wide range of fields and people and communities across the globe.3
But, and, writing is also incredibly hard, and especially going from the many academic strictures on writing to a much more direct communication, is done, I’ve found, on a very long route of translation and transformation. It’s not at all an easy or straightforward thing to do. Not for me in any case.
I’ve been trying to inch my way from academic writing to writing for a broader audience for a while now, and I’m as fascinated as anyone by the ecologies of newsletters all around. I’ve felt some pressure from people around me, close to me, who think I perhaps should or could write a newsletter too. But somehow that hasn’t come out of me yet. Though I’m writing, I’ve written, but somehow I’ve not been ready yet to commit something to the world in that way.
But maybe I’m ready now. I’ve been improvising in speaking-recording, and out of that has come this little note. It’ll be a beginning of something — let it be a beginning of something.
Several themes are in the air, on lists, already written or recorded, and about to spontaneously erupt, announce themselves, be invited.
In any case, thank you, Hannah and Tim, for inspiring this post, and prompting, fully unbeknowst to yourselves (as of yet — I may tell you about it later), this opening into the world of something entirely spontaneous, and yet in several ways committed.
— Paradoxical practices of being in relation: only being able to say something, alone, to an unknown audience, because of having to prepare family’s visit by thinking up dialogues beforehand. Ooof…. one of inter-being’s’ complexities. —
1 Of course, I’ve always improvised. Speaking is improvising, living is improvising. This will be a theme in a coming offering, for sure. See also Linguistic Bodies.
2 And, Jo Bervoets, you saw and felt this already some months ago now, and pointed me to the film about Keith Jarret’s Köln Concert — concert which I love, film which I have still to see!
3 I’m just still often in awe of that… Grateful for it… Not sure how to really relate to it. This, what I’m doing here, is also a testing, an experiment, an improvisation in that, in relating to the work that has come before, my work, others’ work — and in working on from it, seeing where it can go next, for me, as well as in interaction, collaboration, and so on.
There’ll be elements forthcoming in this direction: community building, courses and workshops, consultancy,… I’ll keep you posted.
hanne de jaegher 