"A work of art is a weapon," said Claudio Parmiggiani. "It is never a reassuring, parlor, or decorative gesture. It is a subversive act. 'In this lies its truth, in the silence that speaks.'" If you'll pardon his metaphor, Parmiggiani is my mother's generation.
Milan's fashion week was this past week. While a nation's commander in chief decided to invade a neighboring state, stylist Giorgio Armani decided to go silent. A sign of respect for those involved in the tragedy. Armani is a class act in my fashion book, my late father's generation.
Both of my parents lived the war from different perspectives. Perspective is a useful tool to reframe what happens to you right now within a more expanded space. This reframing helps slow things down a bit. So you can catch your breath. Reality is still there, but how you deal with it might shift.
And this is useful any time you're dealing with change.
Since in this issue we talk about voice, languages, backstories and narrative, I wanted to start it with silence. There are situations when fewer or no words are more powerful. Silence is one way to make space in your thoughts.
Alas, water will not be the only
resource in scarce supply,
silence will too.
Lest you think silence passive, think again. Silence is anl act of withdrawal. The absence of sound, the pause before speaking. Could it also be a reverential gesture? Consider the distinction Rebecca Solnit drew between imposing silence, and seeking quiet. Quiet is what you are when you find a corner of tranquility. The introvert among us thrives in such environment.
Solnit also reminds us that all categories are leaky—we must use them provisionally.
Are there really only five ways to do something? Are top ten lists more useful than what comes after? Do we frame issues on matrices because those are the only possible combinations... or because that's as far as our imagination can go?
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1
ACTIVE PARTICIPANT
"In 2016, director Dean Fleischer-Camp — known for his work on the viral hit, Marcel The Shell With Shoes On — released Fraud, a “meta-documentary” composed of a series of home videos. They follow a family with a mounting pile of debts participating in a crime spree to wipe the slate clean. Though the videos that make up the film are real, the story itself is entirely fabricated: Fleischer-Camp made the film after stumbling onto an account holding hundreds of hours of home videos." True Lies ( Real Life.)
+ Fleischer-Camp was called out for it. But all he did was show people they don't have a clue on how to conduct their own research. "The feeling of engagement is not the same thing as actually engaging. 'Do your own research' is less an imperative than a strategy of flattering one’s audience: the implication is that you have done your own research simply by watching the film. Despite controlling the playback, the user is just as passive as ever." Is an independent conclusion truly as such within this system?
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2
BACK STORY
"On my 23rd birthday I panicked because I'd written nothing except journalism, and wrote a derivative play. When I was 31, Russian tanks rolled into Prague, and my wife got angry with me because I was acting English and not Czech. She was right. I didn't feel Czech. I had no memory of Czechoslovakia. I condemned the invasion from the viewpoint of everything I had inherited at the age of eight, including my name. During all that time, I had never been without a bed, or clothes to put on, or food on the table, or without medicine when I was sick, or a school desk to sit at. As I grew up I never had to put on a uniform except as a boy scout. As a journalist and writer I had never been censored or told what to write. As a citizen I never had to fear the knock at the door. The second half of the point I want to make is that if politics is not about giving everybody a life as charmed as mine, it's not about anything much." Tom Stoppard: Information is light ( The Guardian.)
++ Stoppard's testimony is valuable for shifting the point of view to different circumstances. Now, imagine we're talking about a group of colleagues working on the same project. When is the back story most important?
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3
LANGUAGE AND DIVERSITY
"Language is an element of human evolution that has a profound impact on people's ways of thinking and acting. As the journalist Gaia Vince writes in her book about evolution, Transcendence, different languages have different influences on the way people see the world. When people converse, they focus on the minds of others and pay attention to different details in different languages. Language is not just a tool for conveying information, but a bridge between meanings and contexts. Language diversity has a clear importance in cognitive diversity, which can improve collective decision-making. And certainly the ability for each person to speak in his or her own language feeds her expressive abilities more than the effort of using a second learned language." Luca de Biase on Diversity not division: language in the media ecology.
++ Language is "a bridge between meanings and contexts." Even with a small sample, at home we speak several because sometimes the shift in meaning requires a shift to another culture. Does technology facilitate multilingualism or does it inhibit it?
+ "Both birdsong and language are passed culturally to later generations through vocal learning. Geographically distant populations of the same bird species can make small tweaks to their songs over time, eventually resulting in a new dialect — a process similar in some ways to how humans develop different accents, dialects and languages. With all these similarities in mind, it’s reasonable to ask if birds themselves have language. It may come down to how you define it." Do Birds Have Language? ( Smithsonian magazine.)
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4
A VOICE FOR RUSSIANS
Environmental Economist and Associate Professor @GiesBusiness Tatyana Deryugina "Spent the last few days emailing thousands of academics in Russia. Today, I'm publishing one of the replies I've gotten as a blog post (in English and in Russian, with the author's permission). Please read it to understand what's going on inside Russia." I'm linking to the Twitter thread if you'd rather read from a screen image of the article (scroll down on the thread.)
++ Reading the post will help you understand the problem better. Note that the academic who responded is embarrassed by his truthful report, yet he feels the duty to make it. This week I've written two articles that address different aspects of the issue of narrative and personal power (below.) How is the current narrative keeping humanity stuck? Can you claim personal power?
+ " Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist." This definition is from a post and talk I gave in 2009. Could the definition (with its statement of purpose) teach us to confront it better?
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5
CITIES AND WORK
"I’ve come to see the remote-work revolution as akin to a cannonball dropped in a lake—an acute phenomenon whose ripples can warp every corner of the labor force. Let’s take a look at three major implications of this long-term shift in office work." The Five-Day Workweek Is Dying: And the implications for work and cities are going to be fascinating (The Atlantic.)
++ My take is that a company is embodied in a territory and physical proximity is something you don't want to lose. Would we be better off if this conversation started with what is possible vs. what used to be? These things are complicated, as Derek Thomson alludes to in closing.
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6
BETTER BUSINESS PRACTICE
The restoration of value begins with fixing the language. And continues with adjusting expectations. When you tell a new story, you can begin to weave into an alternative narrative. This in turn allows you to tap into a new set of beliefs. And the path that seemed unimaginable before opens up. Experimenting with Questions.
+ Personal power depends on the ability to hold and test ideas, not jumping to conclusions. Reclaiming Personal Power.
++ Are you a good fit for working with me?
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