The Cultural Commons and Small Talk Part2 by risa
Or: Gimme your Gestalt
by Risa Dickens.
this is a response to, and extension of, Part1 by Yohei, just so you know.
There is a certain way we have of blocking out new information, and I agree that it has something to do with that gestalt moment of comprehension/assumption. I think it’s a natural, and probably defensive, brain trick: we see a piece of the carpet’s pattern and our mind assumes the rest, even though logically we might allow, if we gave ourselves the time to question and imagine, that the portion we can see might be a tiny detail in a wider and more astonishing complexity.
In conversation it seems to happen like this: You mention something wide and deep and dear to your heart. The other, your interactant, seems to almost cut you off. With a knowing nod, and even a kind of subtle hooding of the eyes, they say- “Well, and…” and contribute their summary. Their understanding of your tangled knot of concepts and realities gets filtered though a whiskey or two, or a casual environment, or all their own more pressing and painful thoughts from the day. And I’m injured and irritated by the shallowness of this moment of communication. And they are injured and irritated back, I imagine, by all the things I don’t know about what they know.
At it’s best, Small Talk, and gossip, allow us to trade tiny bits of perspective into whole other worlds, and then they prompt us to find out more, or to open up a little space in our brain for that new piece of logic or experience.
At it’s best, networking happens without the need for false and pushy performances of professionalism; it can happen without the need for that grimace-making word ‘networking’. It can happen that you laugh, and allow the conversation to move beyond the boundaries of your own theories and knowledge, and forget that you had something you wanted to teach your interlocuter, and then are surprised by the whole ecology of things they’ve seen and done and been a part of.
And then you’re hooked on each other in some small chemical way,
and all those pathways of likes and sympathies and memories and traded bits of information
are also networks.
Leave a Comment