names and symbols, has enabled the lion’s share of our advanced civilization. But in our love of and reliance on language, we tend to confuse the name with the thing named. Bateson often quoted the mathematician and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who famously said, “The map is not the territory.” The menu is not the meal.
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The general and president Ulysses S. Grant was not the sort of person we would expect to find in an exploration of art, improvisation, and philosophy. But as he was dying of throat cancer in 1885, he spoke of the relationship between consciousness and his diminishing body functions. He said, “The fact is, I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.” He came to see his body and mind as more of a process than a thing. Grant’s was a view of death, a time of obvious transition, but the rest of day-to-day life is like this too; we’re simply not as conscious of it. R. Buckminster Fuller, riffing on Grant’s statement, said, “I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of Universe.”
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Christopher Small, a musicologist strongly influenced by Bateson, suggested that people fundamentally distort music by treating it as a thing; he wanted to get rid of the noun music and replace it with the verb to music, or musicking. Musicking is the real-time activity of grabbing instruments and playing, singing, writing, hearing, tapping on kitchen utensils, dancing. At the moment of listening to a concert, recording, or broadcast, people are linked in participation with others near and far, including the performers. Musicking reframes song as an activity taking place in a particular time and context; it is a process.
Music (or art, literature, theater, science, technology) is often treated as a collection of works arranged on a historical timeline. The scores are regarded as having not only an independent existence but a higher existence than the performances. In the classical music world, history stretches out like a clothesline, with sheets of music notation hanging from it. We sometimes call sheet music the music, whereas it is just a symbolic representation, a helpful aid to communication. The noun music also implies an abstract Platonic entity somewhere up in the ether, where the perfect interpretation exists. We treat the notation or the abstraction as more real than reality. Beethoven’s music becomes a mental deity. But in reality Beethoven’s music, represented on paper, is the archaeological relic of Beethoven’s musicking, a warm human creating, writing, playing, singing, raging in frustration, scratching out notations he didn’t like and writing more, exploding in joy. The editing of a composition, a book, or an architectural drawing is similarly the interactivity of a warm human body in space and time, though the end result may look like a solid object.
Small reminds us that the worlds of popular music likewise turn experiences into objects, and into interchangeable commodities. And so it is in many areas of life. Teaching becomes a curriculum validated by standardized testing, another thing to be attained. Anything we might do can be reified as a thing or lived as a process. Thus, we need to engage those present-tense, active verbs as antidotes to thingness: improvising, musicking, teaching, playing, creating, being.
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In the 1970s Augusto Boal (the first professional improviser to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize) taught a round of theater workshops in Northern Ireland, which at that time was still violently torn apart by sectarian strife. Participants played scenes drawn from their daily lives. Ethnic politics, distinctions between who’s in and who’s out, seemed inescapable, even though these were people who had volunteered for this type of open and shared experience. Boal described how he could virtually see Protestant or Catholic stamped on each person’s forehead. Yet each side could play, as drama or comedy, with the common concerns of family and survival in a tough society, the personal problems that everyone shares. “We should not stamp the name of people’s religions on their foreheads, instead we must try to see the person. To see people without captions!”
How wide the Gulf & Unpassable! between Simplicity & Insipidity.
— William Blake
The phrase “thinking outside the box” arose from a famous problem in cognitive psychology, in which you are shown nine dots arranged in a grid and asked to draw four lines that connect all nine dots, without lifting your pencil. There are a number of solutions, all of which require drawing lines that stick out beyond the imaginary boundary of the square pattern. Quite often we restrict ourselves by seeing the square-that-is-not-there and don’t even think of allowing our pencil to venture into the space around it. “Thinking outside the box” came to refer to thinking, behaving, or perceiving that is not conventional, that is not hackneyed, stereotyped, or robotic. But after being used for years, it has become a hackneyed, stereotyped, robotic cliché. It is a self-canceling message.
Creativity. Innovation. Vision. A generation ago these words were charged with meaning. Now they have become rancid, insipid, and banal. Overuse, and deliberate misuse as marketing buzzwords, have rendered them into cheap commodities with a limited shelf life. When something is described as “cutting-edge,” you just know it’s going to be dull. Christopher Small’s verb musicking, a freshener of our ideas, attitudes, and enjoyment as participants and listeners, has been adopted to an increasing degree by scholars. But there is always the danger that, like any name of an idea, it can turn into yet another dead buzzword, joining our collection of prefigured responses.
Creativity, innovation, improvisation, the very substance of life and learning, devolve into commodities, whether through the trendy marketing lingo of corporations and political actors or the hegemonic obscurity of academic critical theory. Whole industries have sprung up around the idea of creativity, selling it in seminars. Even an activity as ephemeral as improvisation can be commodified and packaged. We invent words like “performativity” and then study them as though they were substances.
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The wonderful word gobbledygook was coined in 1944 by the Texas businessman and politician Maury Maverick. In a memo to his employees, he banned “gobbledygook language.” “Anyone using the words activation or implementation will be shot.” His reference was to the turkey, “always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity. At the end of his gobble, there was a sort of gook.”
Sometimes I feel that habits of language and thought would benefit from going onto an underground conveyor belt, to return to daylight after a century. That is why I love Keith Johnstone’s use of an archaic word, chivalry, to describe how improvisers at their best accept, build on, nourish, and amplify the ideas and imagery developed by their partners. A similar approach is often described as “yes, and . . .” — perhaps the most generative rule of improvisational theater. But “yes, and . . . ,” repeated ceaselessly, has become a platitude ready for the glue factory. Chivalry seems like such a quaint word in these postmodern times that it is ready for some fresh duty.
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When he was in school, my son Jack brought home a fairly typical English assignment concerning a piece of fiction the class had read. The teacher asked what “qualities” a character “possessed” — bravery, creativity, duplicity, and so on. We have this way of talking as though creativity or bravery were a thing one could have. Perhaps it is a fluid, such that one person could have seven ounces of it and another could have nine liters. The nouns are all right in themselves but tend to guide our thoughts to the idea that a human being is a bag with an inside and an outside and that the bag contains a collection of items or qualities. In actuality, the actions that we call creative or brave or loving or competitive are relational. Every human activity takes place in context, in a certain time and setting. We all know of people, in real life or in fiction, who are brave at one moment and cowardly at another, people who are imaginative at