00:0000:09,326

Myriam Van Imschoot: Today is 25 - no 26 January, speaking to Lisa Nelson in Café Beaubourg.

00:09,32600:17,140

Can you (reconstruct) what you were saying about survival (during the conference)?

The concept of survival in the culture.

00:17,14000:44,054

Lisa Nelson: I don’t know if I can reconstruct it. I was talking about concert dance and the kind of illusion…

that we stand on a certain illusion that we agree to…

00:44,05401:04,084

consensus (that) reality culture offers us, and a whole set of behaviours, and ways to compose ourselves to create this illusion of culture.

01:04,08401:10,956

What I was speaking about, when I was speaking about…

I was trying to articulate this negotiation

01:10,95601:20,805

that we are constantly making between our reflexive underlying behaviors, movement patterns

01:20,80501:50,530

to collect information from the environment through each of our senses, that we need,

for feeling safe in any environment and part of the information we need to be safe is a way

to disappear into the cultural norm.

01:50,53002:01,709

With this simple example of how we have to compose ourselves when having a conversation that I use a lot

02:01,70902:13,735

• to see and to be seen, to appear to be listening at the same time of the actual effort to listen,

02:13,73502:20,943

in the sense that if I want to really listen to you it might be distracting to look at you, but

02:20,94302:35,937

that’s not that acceptable to not take the choreographic pattern of showing our attention to each other.

02:35,93702:46,336

Also, that effort, of course I was making it desperately in this conference situation,

02:46,33603:00,824

the effort to get the thoughts in my head to my tongue. Somehow my animal is not constructed

03:00,82403:13,179

that way, through speech. I do not express myself easily through speech, so I was offering

03:13,17903:28,608

the possibility that if I really was to hold my train of thought in this conference I would do

03:28,60803:45,639

This is a landmark

much better to slow down and move my face a lot, so the thoughts get in my body.

03:45,63903:56,919

It really straightened things up. I could actually could get to the end of that sentence and repeat it.

03:56,91904:10,828

But this would not be easy if I used that technique that made me more integrated in the culture,

04:10,82804:23,213

it would be too distractive for the people. So I have to learn how to negotiate that territory,

04:23,21304:31,889

so that I don’t distract and can go along with the assumptions that the culture offers us

04:31,88904:39,108

to make some stability and in making that analogy between looking at concert dance

04:39,10804:49,317

– what are we proposing, where has the dancing gone, and how every dancer had to negotiate

04:49,31705:01,564

that territory between their motivation to dance and the proposals that are conventionally

05:01,56405:20,194

related, the proposals observer, audience, stage, that are already existing in our cultures.

05:20,19405:32,134

In many ways looking at that consensus as absolutely essential to the survival of

05:32,13405:43,608

a population and counter the doctive of the survival of the individual.

05:43,60805:59,307

The analogy is the same, we negotiate those things unconsciously all our lives.

05:59,30706:10,595

Ernst van Laserfeld, my stepfather, the epistemologist and radical constructivist who

06:10,59506:32,175

adamantly seems very purist when he refers to how the brain, the person has to construct some

06:32,17506:52,382

sense of meaning and organisation out of all of the sensorial array, and he insists that there is nothing out there.

06:52,38206:58,692

In being a physical person, living a very physical life in a physical world, not just the

06:58,69207:10,771

world out there, but the world inside the body, the existence of matter, like my body is

07:10,77107:18,069

outside my brain, if I want to look at it that way.

07:18,06907:29,194

Or it is outside my thought, in the sense of thinking in language.

07:29,19407:39,088

To deny that there is matter is very counterproductive to learning how

07:39,08807:45,781

to survive in the world.

07:45,78107:51,908

He even uses an example, this might be not true, but this is what I understood,

07:51,90808:01,286

that we also construct the ground that we walk on, and that it is a cultural consensus

08:01,28608:08,870

reality, and that without that consensus we‘d be stumbling all over the place.

08:08,87008:14,812

If your foot cannot assume that the ground is there under the next step

08:14,81208:20,797

than you would have to find another way to transport ourselves.

08:20,79708:32,235

Maybe by way of beams or something. Science fiction beams, we would never walk.

08:32,23508:40,157

But to the extent that I see that, that we trust that the ground will stay underneath us

08:40,15708:48,705

until we perceive an edge, the beginning of a step in our peripheral vision, that much I go

08:48,70508:59,634

along with it, from what our senses give us, we establish some stability in the environment,

08:59,63409:06,407

but the idea that the culture establishes a consensus that the ground is there,

09:06,40709:11,889

is a bit of a leap for me.

09:11,88909:24,109

We establish what chairs are for, you know, and in any other culture we establish our seating,

09:24,10909:36,456

what sitting is, but that there is not anything there, I don’t know what it serves to think that.

09:36,45609:42,268

I cannot quite go that far.

09:42,26810:00,359

But in terms of human behavior I can embrace that thinking that I constructed every second through my experience.

10:00,35910:09,469

In all of the analogies that come from that in this project in the last two three weeks with

10:09,46910:26,269

seven people who really came with open minds into a process that out of the seven only two had an idea

10:26,26910:36,596

of what this process might lead to.

10:36,59610:49,094

Part of the journey in looking at one’s own patterns of behavior in entering a space and

10:49,09410:58,605

looking at a space, and creating those communication tools, is a breakdown of all your

10:58,60511:03,484

assumptions about what is there.

11:03,48411:12,437

Your own constructed reality, cause it is making a tiny little microcosm of that in the room, how you

11:12,43711:21,783

know where you are, establish buts (?) stable in your environment.

11:21,78311:30,004

And in actuality what is stable in your environment is within you, which assumptions you can hold onto

11:30,00411:38,076

another landmark

and when, and which are constantly challenged and the rug is pulled up from under you.

11:38,07611:49,769

Somewhere in the course of starting to understand the idea of tuning and listening, a kind of

11:49,76912:01,336

consensus starts to emerge, just for survival’s sake and each person navigates that their own way,

12:01,33612:19,643

either by testing, pushing the limit, or by kind of a more watchful withdrawal and it’s such a complex

12:19,64312:30,695

process, everybody is reaching into everything they know but also watching themselves and deciding

12:30,69512:40,586

to risk their own pattern, basically in response to be interrupted in your pattern, and that’s very

12:40,58612:47,692

emotional at first, but there is a way in which you can tune into it and experience it,

12:47,69213:03,754

or creating a trusting environment that it is not going to be questioned on a psychological level.

13:03,75413:18,240

There is a kind of decorum that evolves over, in cycles, a decorum where someone makes a big push at

13:18,24013:34,744

the limits and everybody shuffles in how that changes their reality and then becomes more polite.

13:34,74413:51,320

A new decorum gets established by conversation, how each person perceived it or survived it.

13:51,32014:06,302

It’s very fragile, for this consensus that is a decorum, a politeness, keeps on being destroyed.

14:06,30214:21,964

It was really a rich opportunity with that many of people - we were seven - and with the languages.

14:21,96414:36,489

My language is difficult whether it is in English or not, because I really need to be precise to

14:36,48914:45,879

define the territory so that it is not a psychological encounter, but we acknowledge that

14:45,87914:56,091

this is also going on in our reports but we have very specific events that we can unravel.

14:56,09115:09,932

So it keeps putting the image outside of ourselves and giving some time to process one’s emotional responses

15:09,93215:18,754

to one’s own behavior because that’s what becomes very apparent.

15:18,75415:28,509

If you have tools that you can use to interrupt the action and also to ask for explanation

15:28,509 15:37,243

and you have to figure out when to use them, and sometimes you use them very naturally,