Welcome to Flum

Jun 8

Welcome to my blog. So happy you have found me.

My name is Pernilla Glaser. I live in Stockholm together with two kids (the others have left the nest) and more books than is advisable. More about my sons and the books to come. They have a central position in my learning about myself and the world. Well, both but primarily my sons.My practice is placed somewhere in the intersection between research, civil society and art. I support institutions and individuals in navigating complexity , being creative and creating meaningful collaborative practices.

This blog is my way of collecting thoughts and methods to play and explore in a time of grave uncertainty, and share them for further discussion.

Why Flum?

I have called the blog Flum. It is a Swedish non-translatable word that has undertook an interesting journey. The origin of the word is vague. One possibility is that it derives from the English word flummery indicating nonsense. In the 70´s Flum or the adjective Flummigt was something that was used to describe something that was cool, unusual and interesting. Since then it has made a slow but certain move over to the other side of meaning. Now it is used mainly by conservative people to describe what is perceived as knowledge and expression that falls in the category of art, interdisciplinarity and explorative practices that operates outside of the instrumental. I see the need for these practices as more vital than perhaps ever before.

“We have to learn how to think like art”

Timothy Morton

On Conversations

We need to have conversations. That is different from saying what you think in an increasingly louder voice. Stepping into a conversation is exposing yourself for the possibility to change.

In a workshop I hosted, on how to navigate challenging conversations, one of the participants came up to me when the others were deep into the first group-discussion, and with sincerity said “What is it we are doing? Don ́t everyone know how to have a conversation? Why are we practicing that?”

If we are lucky, we had a place in our lives where we have had the luxury of being listened to, a place where we could find and reimagine our language while using it. But everyone has, to various degrees also experienced the opposite. As a twelve-year-old girl in a school class I worked with expressed it; when someone listens to you is it as if a warm light spreads in your chest, but if you are not listened to the light goes out. When I think about the image she offered, I think about how being listened to makes us visible also to ourselves.

Some of the best conversations can happen with a stranger, waiting for a late bus. Or temporarily united, like neighbours during the pandemic, introducing themselves, helping each other out.

A conversation may concern the smallest object of the everyday or fly away into the barely imaginable. And sometimes the former proves to be a gateway to the latter.

When I have interviewed people about what they find significant for a conversation that they experience as qualitative, some things stand out, regardless of age or cultural context. Something is at stake, big or small, there is a leap into the conversation, an urgency – I have to tell you about, we need to discuss, I must confess, I have waited to share....

The sense of time disappears, there is only the present. And the point of arrival is a surprise to both, how did we end up here, none of us is entirely responsible or entirely unresponsible.

The school system where I and most of the people I meet in various courses and workshops have been raised is centered around the idea of a correct answer to a particular question.

A conversation can be the vessel for these entities to be exchanged. But the real power of a conversation is something different. It is the revolving, drilling movement of shared exploration. It is holding each other in an in-between-space of possibilities. It is agreeing that the fruits of the conversation can be unexpected, slowly growing and not visible for some time or explosive and instant like a sudden radical change of scenery, and that however they appear – these fruits belong to everyone involved in the conversation.

To fully access these kinds of conversations, one needs to come to a renewed epistemological agreement. Conversations are absolutely ways to access and build knowledge together. But it will not happen according to a straight line and a fixed plan. It is rather a question of reframing.

“Many political thinkers have thought that defining freedom is as “hopeless” as trying to square a circle by simply inscribe one inside the other, yet forging into those asymptotic spaces of the adventurous and incalculable is a fundamental enterprise for the human condition. It seems better to locate the experience of freedom in such asymptotic spaces than to share the circle ones and for all. Recognition of such hopelessness is a sine qua non for my thinking about freedom. It is always a form of thinking out or from an inpasse - an aporia, that is - turning obstacle into adventure in the broad sense of the word.

The adventure of freedom in this understanding is about reframing but not breaking and removing all frames. The word “frame” itself has had an adventurous past. “Frame” originates in “from” which suggests that it is made of the same timber as the object that it surrounds or that the two become codependent. Originally, “from also had a meaning of ”forward”, “ahead” and “advance”. I don't know how and why it evolved into the unfortunate direction of nostalgic introspection. Freedom frames can be unstable and unforeseen.”

Another Freedom The alternative history of an idea Svetlana Boym

From reaction to response

I have hosted, participated in, and witnessed many conversations. I have also witnessed exchange of opinion, critique and debate that not necessarily qualify as conversation, if one agrees that conversation is invested in a shared moment of moving pieces in an exchange.

One of the most fundamental shifts that enable conversation between people, two or more, is that from reaction to response. A reaction is me making myself the receiver of what the other person is saying, and prioritising valuing this using my own life as measurement. A reaction is about achieving results and establishing positions.

The Old French roots to the word Response indicates “promise in return, answer” It is the first two letters Re that makes this revisiting movement. To respond is to revolve. A response is to testify to what I have heard in the moment, without regard for if the response is useful according to other metrics. It is not about what you leave with but what you share in the present.

A quality, or perhaps more accurately, a capacity that arise from a conversation where responding has started to replace reacting, is to stand with your face in the sun and your feet in the shadow. That is, being clear and direct in what you are expressing and at the same time keeping a close contact with what is hiding outside of language. It translates as a feeling of freedom, that anything is possible and - something that I have heard a lot from participants in various conversations - you are allowed to be who you are. I understand this last statement not as a confirmation of something particular, but as an absence of regulations and limiting expectations.

“If you think about it, global warming is a heap of actions. Let's analyse it using the logic that results in the sorites paradox. One car ignition firing doesn't cause global warming. Two No. Three? No. You can work your way all the way to one billion and the same logic will hold. So there is no global warming. Or - drum roll - your logic sucks. How does it suck? It sucks by having no time for things that are in between true and false, black and white. Ecological beings such as lifeforms and global warming require modal and paraconsistent logics. These logics allow for some degree of ambiguity and flexibility. Sentences can be kind of true, slightly false, almost right.”

All art is ecological Timothy Morton

The art of listening

Most conversations happen in a non-space of assumed agreement on what it is to participate in a dialogue. We navigate according to assumptions on language, time and purpose. But there are a multitude of ways to frame a conversation and there are as many ways to listen as there are ways to talk. We might listen with an openness, consciously avoiding conclusions or a more directed listening towards what the person (s) asks for (feedback etc). We might listen in a subversive way, going against something/being critical and/or listening for what is not being said. Through our listening we can hold and support the emotional experience of someone. We can be active listeners, asking questions and offering up out ideas and potential conclusions or we can focus on a listening that is mirroring, reflecting back what is being described to us.

No matter how we listen and in whatever way we express ourselves, we want a conversation to be able to host subtleties and ambiguities.

The assumed rules of conversations tend to act a as a stress that pushes us to clean up and throw away that which we imagine don't belong. And with that we might throw out that which is most important .

It is when we can allow the conversation to be in pending state of incompleteness that we have the chance of accessing new perspectives and insights. This pending movement requires a couple of things to take place. We don't conduct explorations in our minds when we are scared. A happy insecurity, feeling slightly uncomfortable grappling for words, is one thing. But fear and intimidation does not make for a something that can hold the vague and wobbly in a happy way. Maybe it sounds like a given but the difference for an individual can be to just be allowed to express what they need for a conversation to place itself on the right side of uncertainty. Maybe it is something connected to the body and the physical space; a need to position yourself a particular way, or a you want to voice the you feel removed from the language, sad, hungry, giggly, have a song that is looping endlessly in your head, would also like to talk about something else or something else from the enormous variety of human joy, grief, pain and ambiguity.

When I hear you, I also hear myself. I hear my own thoughts, and my own pounding heart. If I listen. If we care for the space to open itself up to our exploration. If we dare to, in what sometimes is called liminality (from latin treshold) the in-between where ideas and identities can be renegotiated.

In constant impermanence liminality can be the safe zone, more credible than faked certainty.

Talking is doing

We can care for each other and our conversation in the liminal space by allowing a multitude of expressions. To draw something together or make something tangible out of clay has a double function; it acts as a gentle disturbance, a push out of the paradigm of thinking into the possibility to move between thinking through facts and language and thinking with and through intuitive play and emotions, and it also acts as a translation revealing new and other aspects and qualities of a conversation.

To speak is also a means of action. To riff on bell hooks “Theory as liberatory practice” speaking together can be unjustly positioned as something we do instead of action. But the reflection that takes place in a conversation is deeply braided with choice, agency and space for action. The visibility that a conversation brings out, even of the complex, messy and ambiguous can function as powerful engines and mandate to act because the actions stem out of an understanding of meaning and experience of participation.

To assemble a difference of experiences, professions and perspectives in conversations further assists the liminal quality in the exchange. No one is an expert or rather everyone is an expert and that allows for both the deeply personal, experienced wisdom swell as the academic and professional practice to coexist as material and references.

Ultimately the belief in the power of conversation resides on the idea that we have a lot to say, that we haven't said it all and that we between us are carrier of a multitude of alternative intelligences that can come to our own assistance in a time of crime and urgencies.

Next post;

How did I get here and what is Play

Books on my table this week:

Long Live Latin The pleasures of a Useless Language Nicola Gardini

Ordinary Notes Christina Sharpe

Art Monsters Lauren Elkin

Pernilla Glaser