Stimulus and Cascade? A
response to Anna’s questions
Hi Anna - great! Thank you for posting these very
stimulating questions. Some thoughts in response to your first two, which
I hope might complicate them in useful ways:
Blending
I think it’s really useful to conceive of
creativity as involving the juxtaposition or merging of previously
unrelated concepts, as you propose. Are you familiar with Fauconnier and
Turner's theory of Conceptual Blending? If this is an accurate model, then
we are able to maintain a sense of the features of source domain concepts at
the same time as being aware of a new mental space that is formed which
associates them. With this in mind, I think it’s useful to begin thinking of
creativity in a networked or continuum sense (multi-dimensional, not linear)
rather than as a binary (creating art / receiving art). Of
course, one of the challenges that I'm facing in thinking about this is the
question of 'scale' - observable behavior and its relation to
brain activity.
A
collaborative act of imagination
In theatre, I like to think of a successful
performance as one in which audience members collaborate with performers
in an act of the imagination. While audience members may appear to be passive,
for the performance to be successful, they need to be active mentally and
emotionally - and this engagement also leads to physical changes (heart rate,
galvanic skin conductance, level of muscular tension, breathing patterns …).
'What
happens next?’
Indeed, one of the precepts of performance is
that we want to stimulate the audience to ask 'what happens next?’ and to
provoke conjecture about this. The conclusions of this conjecture are
sometimes confirmed, sometimes contradicted, sometimes modified. An
effective balance between these three potential outcomes over the course
of the drama is an essential ingredient of engaging the audience in the
fiction - the pleasure of ‘I knew that was going to happen’ pales if it is not
sometimes disrupted by 'Wow! I didn't see that coming!'
Mental
initiatives in the blend
So we are seeking to stimulate active mental
initiatives in audience members (narrative engagement) as well as to prompt
emotional arousal.
Evidently, in one set of mental spaces the
audience is aware of the 'paramount' reality of the performance space, other
audience members, the biographical identities of the actors. In another
set of mental spaces are the fictional environment, circumstances and
personalities of the characters. The experience becomes a 'blend' of reality
and fiction in which the audience members' imaginative activity takes place.
Engagement
through empathy
I think you're right to point to emotional
arousal as a prime pathway to ENGAGEMENT with these fictional circumstances.
This principle would hold true in your airport/mother example (daily life)
and also in an actor/audience member relationship. This then leads me to think
of some of the strands of thought in embodied cognition, particularly
those regarding mirror systems and empathy. I know that there is much debate
over the nature of mirror systems ... from a phenomenological
perspective as an actor and director it is congruent with my experience that
empathy can be aroused autonomically.
Behavior,
categories and prototype
We get in to some deep philosophical waters
when we talk about establishing authenticity in reality. In thinking about
theatre, I prefer to use the term 'daily life,' instead of
'reality,' since actors' bodies are just as real when they are on
stage as when they are doing their shopping. I think a big feature of
establishing authenticity in both sets of circumstances is to do with perceived
behaviors, and expectations of a 'normal' range of behaviors for a
particular person, and for categories of people in differing environments.
Emotional arousal ensues not only from visual triggers (remembered
face and associated memories) but also from movement patterns (posture,
gesture, facial expressions). In this regard, I find Lakoff and Johnson's
use of 'categories' and 'prototypes' helpful.
Multiplicity
of meanings
The creative 'activity' of an audience responding
to a performance is indicated by the multiple interpretations that
audience members can have of the same events, their varying perceptions of
motivations and even outcomes. And perhaps we could say that one of the
ways to distinguish between 'art' and 'entertainment' in broad terms is the
potential for multiplicity of meanings in the former, and the tendency
towards singular meaning in the latter...
Stimulus
and cascade
So perhaps it might
be useful to think of degrees of proportionality between stimulus and
cascade rather than thinking of 'active' and 'passive'? Then the question might
become -not only what differentiates, but also what are the commonalities.
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