Individuals, Society and Success: How does national mood infiltrate personal mood?

Our collaborator, performance poet Luke Wright, writes:

Performance poet, writer and broadcaster
Luke Wright

 

"I used to knock around with a bunch of poets and creatives in Liverpool. This was over ten years ago, just after Liverpool won its bid to become the European Capital of Culture. Suddenly there was a lot of money floating around and my pals were as keen as anyone to get a little bit of it to help them run their poetry events. 

Over the next few years they got increasingly exasperated as the powers that be spent the cash on projects that didn’t feel very cultural at all. “Future generations will marvel at the great paved spaces we have created!” the poet Nathan Jones drawled sarcastically.

We’re frequently told that public money sunk into big urban projects will not only generate billions of pounds but be good for public morale. But just how true is that? Can we ever really quantify public morale? Are these “great paved spaces” there for the happiness of the people that pass through them everyday or the glory of the leaders who put them there?

How far does national mood infiltrate personal mood? I remember walking through Chelsea after England beat Argentina in the 2002 World Cup. It would be fair to say the result was unexpected and strangers were high-fiving and beeping their horns at one another. The mood of the whole day lifted but across the city bills laid unpaid, friends fell ill, relationships ended. When it comes to personal success is there such a thing as society? 

I don’t have the answers to all these questions, probably nobody does. But I’m looking forward to working with some people whose answers will be a lot better informed than mine. I want to take these ideas and use them to inform the story of three teenagers living in East London when the Olympics were ‘won’ by Britain. How did Britain’s success in its bid to win the Olympics and then our athletes success in the games themselves affect their own successes and failures in life?"

                                                                        

 ***

Luke is currently on tour with his most recent solo show 'What I Learned From Johnny Bevan', which won the Fringe First award for new writing at Edinburgh last year: http://www.lukewright.co.uk/

The Power of Personal Narratives: the Successful Potato Farmer

sites.google.com/site/goblinpotato/potatoes

It is a classic triumph over adversity tale. A humble potato farmer from Herefordshire, dismayed that supermarkets rejected potatoes that were not 'cosmetically perfect', finds a lucrative niche in the market for posh crisps and high-end gin. The serial entrepreneur is now a multi-millionaire but it wasn't always so.

In a narrative that storytellers would salivate over, the engaging elements of local hero William Chase's tale include: a versatile vegetable, a messy divorce, bankruptcy, running far far away to exotic lands (well Australia), and a triumphant return.

The underdog then risked all in the form of a substantial bank loan, took on an evil giant (aka Tesco), and won- a la David and Goliath, and now his gin and crisp businesses reach towards the stratosphere.

Such stories can have a powerful motivating impact on others. Referred to as recovery narratives in mental health care, personal stories convey hope by demonstrating how individuals can move from trauma and despair towards their goals.

One of our goals is to assemble a multi-dimensional, multi-media repository of 'success' narratives that will illuminate the concept, explore what works for whom, and involve the public in telling their own stories. 

As Mr Chase says 'People love stories, the real stories behind things'. 

www.chasedistillery.co.uk/gin/

Workshop on Success: A Brief Report

On 18th September at Senate House in London we met some of our collaborators for our proposed research project. It was a great day in which we explored ideas and experiences.

What is success?
We started discussing the meaning of the word "success" (etymologically linked to the Latin word for succession, and thus a term with a strong temporal and causal component) and how the residency would serve as to critically analyse everyday conceptions of success as tied to individual achievement, fame, power and competition. Success demands not just competition but cooperation, and changes our perception of ourselves and the way other perceive us. Any meaningful examination of success requires also a reflection on failure. Our own interest in success comes from its relationship with health: how does doing well relate to being well?

Polarities
Apart from success and failure, we are interested in character and context, practices and structures, individuals and communities/organisations, internal and external, public and private. How do we achieve success, and what does it do to us once we have it? Several themes emerged from the discussion, including snatching success from the jaws of defeat; experiencing failure after being a success; failing in one domain while succeeding in another; performance anxiety and corporate psychopathy; and failure as necessary, as a useful and important aspect of growth, creativity and innovation.

Why I Keep Thinking about Collections...

Reading Room, Wellcome Collection

Last night I braved the tube strike to visit the Wellcome Collection, and I spent some time in the Reading Room. I’ve always loved libraries and bookshops, so it’s perhaps no surprise that I feel very at home there, but there’s something more going on. Ever since early in this project I’ve become hooked on this idea of collections, archives, libraries – there’s something here for me, but what? I have proposed that as part of the project we create a digital archive of all the ‘Stories of Success’ we come across during our residency – these may be oral stories, videos, texts, or other media; drawings, photographs, objects etc. They may be collected from members of the public (perhaps with the help of storytellers, SparkLondon), from our empirical work, or from our collaborators themselves. But my interest in collection seems to even go beyond that.

Is it to do with memories? Helen Paris, from Curious, (see separate post to follow) told me about a collaborator of hers, a dancer, who made a piece about how our memories for places can be held in a bodily library. I’m interested in the intersection between bodily memory and narrative memory, and wrote about this in my PhD research on guilt. I know some of our collaborators will be working with dementia, and that Victoria has done a lot of work in this area, so there are links here. Perhaps memory and memorialising are becoming more important to me as I get older. Do I see this project as such a precious opportunity that it must not be forgotten? Am I keen to remember? And to ‘re-member’; to embody this conceptual work and make it real, tangible.

Is it about storage and legacy, or a need to create something tangible for posterity? Something that can be shared, and that can transcend time? Am I feeling the urge to hoard ideas, less then become suddenly scarce? Maybe I want to create a perfect collection, tracking down every possible variation until I have a complete set... I do feel that if we were given two years to explore success we should create something that endures; that has duration; that lasts beyond the two years. On Tuesday, Michael and I noticed that we need to think about the sustainability and the legacy of this project for the new application form – but it’s more than this. It feels almost like a moral responsibility or an compulsion for me. We (Michael and I) were discussing how having a significant piece (actually several linked pieces) of empirical work gives us a strong grounding for our work, from a disciplinary perspective, but will also provide us with material that we can revisit well beyond the life of this project. And that hopefully others in our group, and beyond, can explore too.

Or is this interest in collections actually more about multiplicity? This feels most likely. The reading room contains many different perspectives on mental health, for example, some from the service-user movement, some critical psychology, some mainstream, some from psychiatry etc. etc. Voices that wouldn’t normally be heard together. All these multiple voices are allowed to coexist in a library. In an exhibition (and also in the reading room), exhibits in different media are allowed to rest next to one another. Objects from different centuries, continents, peoples, and of different ‘values’ can sit together. The audience/reader/viewer is treated as an intelligent and curious individual who has the capacity to take on board multiple viewpoints and to stitch them together in their own, unique ways. It feels like there are increasingly few spaces in our world where such multiplicity is celebrated.

I think it is this – the multiplicity – that specifically interests me about the idea of collections, libraries and archives. Perhaps too often I surround myself with people who think like me – providing the familiar, the comfortable. In my discipline, my view of the world is fairly marginalised, so it’s perhaps no wonder that I find others like me, and we club together to create a safe ‘home’ for ourselves. However, this intellectual ghettoisation is very limiting. I feel more inspired by the conversations I’ve had with artists this summer, than by any journal article I’ve read. I’ve suddenly remembered how reading non-scientific literature, looking at artwork, and going to the theatre is more than just an enjoyable activity, but can feed directly into my research.

Perhaps with this project we can 1) create a collection of people. Perhaps this is the very special and unusual thing - a chance for people who wouldn’t normally share space to meet, talk and create. I strongly believe that if you put interesting people together in a room, interesting things will happen. Of course, we need some structure, outcomes and milestones, but we must allow for flexibility and spontaneity too. And so then 2), through cross-pollination, and sparking off each other, we can generate a collection of ideas. Maybe one equal to any library or museum collection.