reflection - 270907

theme of control

"People typically feel in control in their normal surroundings and less in control in strange places."

(Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the flesh. New York: Basic Books. 1999. p. 276)

there is a relationship between self control and environmental familiarity - also between controlling one's actions and controlling oneself

control = self-control / ease / comfort / security / well being / assuredness / etc

What do environments do to help people maximise self-control (and not), whilst also controlling them? (Banks, for instance, may be more controlling, while malls less so in respect to directing movement and allowing/disallowing activities)

Self-control vs environmental control - when and why do people willingly give control over to environments? - when they want something - and when they have no choice, i.e. when they are forced

Being in one's normal places of residing compared to new locations - in normal places of residing, the space is an extension of body and self - not so in new and unfamiliar places (until, that is, these become familiar) - the feeling is of being 'inside' own space, and an 'outsider' in unfamiliar space (paralleled to being inside and outside of one's own body - i.e. varying states of self control - e.g. the 'stoner' is 'out of it' or 'off their face')

key themes - inside and outside (insider and outsider) / ratios and relationships of control between self and environment (when and how do these align and when are they misaligned?) - these are all about movements adjusting to and being adjusted by spatial factors that generate states of being willingly or unwillingly a part of the environment, where self control and identity/independence is facilitated (enhanced, encouraged, modified, influenced, maximised) or thwarted

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how movement is helping my reflective processes

~ when I am typing I often give myself a structure where I do 5 minutes at the keyboard broken up by 5 minutes improvised movement in the small space of my room – I am religious with it, I watch the clock for both activities, and alternate between them – my rationale for doing this is because I want to access contributions that my moving body can make to my investigation – because the theme is ‘embodied meaning’, I want total body movement to make an equal contribution and have equal status to my concentrated thought processes and typing hands – I also want to make sure that everything I am writing can be tested, explored, understood, and applied to movement, particularly as I’m working on choreographic outcomes further down the track – so when I get up to improvise, sometimes what I am writing about directs the movement and gives it intention and meaningful-ness – by making it meaningful I am looking for more meaning – which is a demand I am making on my moving self, a demand that at times gets a bit demanding in forcing movement to provide or supply its hidden gems – surprisingly however, the pressures of expectation (the pressures of pressure – the oppressions of pressure – the demands of pressure – the pressures of demand), don’t interfere and movement often (seemingly nonchalantly and in its own unhurried self-contained way) delivers, even if inside itself it may find the methodical regularity of the demands unspontaneous, forced, and tiresome – this is about a relationship of control where the mind is placing prescriptive demands on the body for it to deliver some appropriately insightful response – sometimes it pre-attaches value to movement, by specifying its focus, and restricts or conditions movement’s discovery of its own response values to a question – it’s an area where the body’s wisdom is doubted somewhat – however if moving is its own kind of thought, then it doesn’t need the accompaniment, rationale, guidance (like a blind person being led), or direction (or doubts) from the mind, ALL THE TIME – the difference, in me, between moving from a thought-centred way and in a non-thought centred way mostly affects my spine and pelvis – vertical spinal equilibrium, which is a natural state, comes into play when I don’t think – if I want my spine to move more I have to activate thought and remember to use it – this is about equilibrium’s connection to thought-led movement vs un-thought-led movement (movement thinking itself) – this also applies to the way my pelvis anchors itself spatially and has to be ‘remembered’ and freed of its habitual functionality and stillness in respect to balance and as the base point or ground of spinal verticality – thought-produced off-centred movement and un-thinking equilibrial movement have completely different energy/effort states, the first is more extreme than the second I find –– of course ‘thinking’ movement in order to free it is often only an initial stage, the process is like taking a toboggan up a hill and then giving it a push, after that the effort is taken over by the sled’s own momentum and minimised to responding to the contours of the slope – the same with movement, after the initial push, it freely transgresses its own confines of its own accord – un-restricted by prescriptive conditions, non-directed movement responding to its own preferential mechanisms, is at times minimal and to my mind initially uninteresting and banal, but this lack of interest disappears when unexpected insights are invariably elicited and produced – an example is the young ‘flapping arms’ man from my Chichester street footage – I was doing non-directed movement after I had been writing earlier in the day about Lakoff and Johnson’s statement that controlling one’s actions equates with self-control in its widest sense, and about environmental familiarity and unfamiliarity producing ‘insider/outsider’ feelings, and my movement was very banal and simplistic – I was just in a low energy vertical state flapping my arms and kicking my feet when the image of the ‘flapping boy’ floated into my mind and my body instantly showed me how to understand his action in respect to the location and the discussion about control (which I’ve now added to my analytical sociokinetic data), and how prescribed activity in this particular public environment is flexible in what it allows, but is monitored carefully – so thank you moving-self – the organic eyes of onlookers become environmental eyes that insert themselves into the masonry (and quite literally too with the growing numbers of inconspicuous surveillance cameras) – embodying architecture by giving it sight

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