Are You Experienced?

In recent Daily Improviser articles, I’ve been exploring the concept of mastery, defined by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan (in their book The Three Laws of Performance) as “nothing between you and the thing you’re dealing with.” Zaffron and Logan say that mastery is the key to attaining our highest levels of performance.

The achievement of mastery would seem to require cutting through our biases, assumptions, conditioned responses, and received cultural wisdom in order to directly experience the reality before us. As I’ve noted, though, I’ve been wrestling with the question: Is such a state possible?

Not at all, says Steven Pinker. In his book The Blank Slate, Pinker describes the efforts of the 20th Century modernist and postmodernist movements to achieve the goal of exposing people to “fresh, raw experience.” Through their use of dissonant, incongruous, and unsettling forms and their derisive attitude toward “beauty,” modernism and postmodernism were intended to “strip away the false sense of routine experience and interpretive framing, and to make us experience nakedly and anew the immediacy of reality through our peeled and rejuvenated senses.”

However, by citing recent research in evolutionary psychology, Pinker casts doubt on our ability to tap into direct experience.

“Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social construction…. We can no more turn [our innate organizational systems] off and get immediate access to our sensory experience than we can override our stomachs and tell them when to release their digestive enzymes.”

In addition, Pinker notes, our innate organizational sense does not stop at helping us apprehend the physical structure of the world.

“It also colors our visual experience with universal emotions and aesthetic pleasures. Young children prefer calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests…. Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones, and two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing and appreciating narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play.”

Pinker would seem to question whether we really can attain the “nothing between” state of mastery when we interact with others:

“When we perceive the products of other people’s behavior, we evaluate them through our intuitive psychology, our theory of mind. We do not take a stretch of language … at face value, but try to guess why the producers came out with [it] and what effect they hope to have on us.”

In my previous article, I noted how performance improvisers – people who supposedly do tap into direct, in-the-moment experience – themselves use forms such as catchphrases and archetypal scenes to “come between” them and their performances. Pinker’s observations about the findings of evolutionary psychology would appear to provide even further doubts about our ability to strip away everything between us and reality in our pursuit of mastery.
 
But I wonder if Pinker doesn’t go a bit too far in criticizing the creators of “upsetting” art for attempting to shake people out of their complacency. For example, I believe that atonal works such as John Coltrane’s Ascension do challenge the listener to reexamine his entire concept of music – and to question long-held assumptions about the nature of art and creativity in general. Certainly in my own case, such musical encounters helped me to hear with new ears and revealed virgin territory for my curiosity to explore – exactly the type of “stripping away” of assumptions that I believe the mastery concept contemplates.