I’m really excited about this post on a whole bunch of levels.
One post on my list of posts to write is called something like “Everything is Improv”, and I feel like you captured a decent fraction of what I want to say in that post, here! Plus a ton of additional pieces that I hadn’t yet notice or connected yet. These two sections in particular felt very important:
“Another challenge here is that the part of us that feels like it’s thinking and talking is (usually) analogous to a character in an improv scene. The players know they’re in a scene, but the characters they’re playing don’t.”
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“But it’s hard to sort this out without just enacting our scripts. The version of you that would be thinking about it is your character, which (in this framework) can accurately understand its own role only if it has enough slack to become genre-savvy within the web; otherwise it just keeps playing out its role.”
This means that certain acts of meta-communication almost become kind of like breaking the fourth wall. I’ve pointed at this in Acts of Speech & States of Mind:
At Upstart, we’re never just having conversations. We’re also training ourselves to think differently. We’re a theatre troupe that isn’t just performing but also practising, which involves having the skill and mutual trust so that at any moment any of us can pull out the director’s chair and say “cut” and we go meta and start talking about the way in which we were just talking. This is a key part of being able to help each other level up in this way.
But, as Val points out, it’s really easy for this going-meta to just find its way back into the very dynamics that one is attempting to point at.
For example, have you ever tried pointing out that someone seems to be doing a social dominance move? In most contexts, that pointing-out action ends up itself being a social dominance move! Which isn’t a problem, per se, but definitely makes it hard to shift out of that particular dance and into something else.
For that to work, you need a bunch of additional shared framework/context/intent around what the “something else” is and why you’d want it, as well as proficiency in a core ~applied mindfulness skill to avoid the temptation to continue playing out the current roles. I think Looking is one way of pointing at this skill. So an act of meta-communication is often attempting to say “Look, and become the actor, not just the character!”
This breaks character, and the fourth wall, which is a really awkward thing to do if other people aren’t able to break out with you.
But with enough practice it’s doable, even to the point of being able to pretty consistently act consciously rather than just playing one’s character, and to do this with other people in a way that allows rewriting social scripts. Not easy, but learnable.
I’m really excited about this post on a whole bunch of levels.
One post on my list of posts to write is called something like “Everything is Improv”, and I feel like you captured a decent fraction of what I want to say in that post, here! Plus a ton of additional pieces that I hadn’t yet notice or connected yet. These two sections in particular felt very important:
&
This means that certain acts of meta-communication almost become kind of like breaking the fourth wall. I’ve pointed at this in Acts of Speech & States of Mind:
But, as Val points out, it’s really easy for this going-meta to just find its way back into the very dynamics that one is attempting to point at.
For example, have you ever tried pointing out that someone seems to be doing a social dominance move? In most contexts, that pointing-out action ends up itself being a social dominance move! Which isn’t a problem, per se, but definitely makes it hard to shift out of that particular dance and into something else.
For that to work, you need a bunch of additional shared framework/context/intent around what the “something else” is and why you’d want it, as well as proficiency in a core ~applied mindfulness skill to avoid the temptation to continue playing out the current roles. I think Looking is one way of pointing at this skill. So an act of meta-communication is often attempting to say “Look, and become the actor, not just the character!”
This breaks character, and the fourth wall, which is a really awkward thing to do if other people aren’t able to break out with you.
But with enough practice it’s doable, even to the point of being able to pretty consistently act consciously rather than just playing one’s character, and to do this with other people in a way that allows rewriting social scripts. Not easy, but learnable.