CREATIVE MUTUALITY

Mutuality and creative mutuality share many qualities; it is largely the application that is specific.

Mutuality is a more generalised but still profound feeling of caring, and being cared for, within the society and spaces you inhabit and contribute to. Creative mutuality develops when the project becomes the conductor of currents that sustain further creative engagement and a deep sense of care for the work and others involved in the project. Creative mutuality is more specific to a creative work or project by which shared acts of creation become a focus through which mutuality can flow.

Most activities undertaken to produce life are creative to some degree. In this research I am specifically concerned with participatory or collaborative practices and projects, and the design, construction and experience of spaces, and how all these forms of creation then interrelate with wider social and spatial relations. This does not negate the kind of creativity that is found in playing with children, tending to a garden or preparing meals, however the scope and scale of the works I have focussed on, and also their intention and duration, differentiate them somewhat from the creativity that entertains and occupies us during the production of life. A shared life that includes play, food preparation and tending to land are all defining activities of a commons.

24 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 186.

25 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 186.

26 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Of Love Possessed,” Artforum 48, no. 2 (2009): 180-83.

27Helmich Henson, “Analysis of the Concept of Mutuality.”

However, rather than building from these fundamental creative activities, this research takes a different vantage. It seeks to understand how the significant, enduring and sustaining aspects of those activities in life can resonate within a design and creative practice, and how, in turn, the projects and practices interested in care and connection can be folded back in to the forms of creativity that we already share in common.

Creative mutuality occurs in my project work in two forms. There are people in my life I have share mutuality with (some mentioned in this writing) and then there is a more generalised attitude which informs how I approach new situations and collaborators. My sense of mutuality has been expanded in most cases however has sometimes contracted, through the processes of making creative work with others. Specific collaborative relations have been able to take my initial orientation and develop them further. Mutuality that settles into a relationship lies in the knowledge we will be able to work in that way again. It connects our past and future, producing temporal depth (Section 4.6) within our relationship. We now have between us now a capacity that is sometimes latent, sometimes active, to manifest creative mutuality through a project. When creative mutuality appears it a current that runs through the work, keeping the work developing through holding the parties in its orbit. The work and the relations are sustained despite movement through points of perigee and periapsis relative to availability or commitments. During Small when Christine had other work obligations, when I had a new baby, when either of us were ill or tired or uninspired, the other person would, without discussion or division, carry the labour of the project. We were supporting each other but also sustaining the project; there was no need to differentiate what was motivating us; it was the project, of each of us individually, and both of us together, indistinguishable as parts, as it was all intertwined.

Developing the kind of mutuality that supports creative work, that then in turn also furthers the sense of creative mutuality, can be approached from polar directions. Existing mutual relations can be called into creative work, or through creative work mutuality can be born.

Within all these ideas is a recognition that there are mutable and immeasurable qualities that surge through us, encouraging care and investment in what we share. Mutuality is an elusive quality but has socio-political significance. The ephemeral and intermixed qualities cannot easily be translated into market values, and so have been systemically set aside or devalued. Bollier points out we are so steeped in ‘market culture, we sometimes have trouble understanding that a system based on non-economic forces can be powerful in its own right.’²⁸ For creative participatory practice that has become mired in the experience economy, this shift opens, rather than fixes its position. When creative practice adopts an attitude of commoning it begins to construct more direct and authentic access to affect and mutuality. The process of shifting from one mind set to another in any discipline is more easily internalised when it is explicated through a lived experience. Creative collaborative practices can, if they desire, then extricate themselves from being embedded in the experience economy and instead contribute to constructing their own frame works of value.

The affective characteristics found in mutuality make creative collaborations generated through mutuality very different from other forms or work. It allows for more complex and non-measurable components to enter the equation when forming relations or working with others.

Aron explains, ‘mutuality refers to commonality and sharing that may be quite different in form, quantity or degree for each party.’²⁹ Mutuality cannot be imposed or implemented, meaning it is impossible to insert into a training manual or the experience economy. An outlook of mutuality does not calculate or incur a debt for what is owed, but focuses on what can be shared.

Collaborations that incorporate or are based on structures of capitalist exchange, prioritise symmetry and equality, and ideally manage the relationship as a trade balanced across varies modalities between all those involved. As symmetrical exchanges are the basis of any commercial market, collaborations can be easily developed, maintained and organised using the capitalist transaction exchanges as a model. Sharing with capitalism the same transactional basis and framework makes collaborations much more easy to co-opt (as discussed in Section 3.4) in order to extract capital or other kinds of value. Cultivating a sensitivity for multi-directional influence means mutuality can occur even when there is an asymmetry in power.³⁰

28 David Bollier, Silent Theft:

The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 32.

29 Aron, A Meeting of the Minds, xi.

30 Kieffer, Mutuality, Recognition, and the Self, 23.

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Collaborations often reflect the same values as commercial exchanges as it is difficult to invent new systems that don’t reproduce the structures of those that already surround us. Asymmetrical arrangements between people are often framed negatively, easily dismissed as either paternalistic or exploitive.³¹ Mutuality in commoning differs from existing systems of exchange that are more usual in collaborations, in that mutuality is specifically able to sustain dispersed, asynchronous or asymmetrical input. Collaborations can certainly develop mutuality but as it is not central to the tenets of collaborating it is not tended to, or sought, with the same intention and care a practice with commoning processes. Collaborative or participatory creative projects that are seeking to find distance from the conforming or instrumentalising characteristics of commodifying systems and transactions can be guided by commoning processes and potentially find creative mutuality emerging from, and making, the work.

An experience of mutuality rarely describes the entirety of a project or interrelationship. What is important is that when those involved have an aspiration for mutuality within all their interactions, and the projects are explicitly striving for mutuality and are able to recognise, nurture and value its emergence, there is a likelihood of it occurring. Like infants engaged in forging their world through intimate interactions, the emergent understandings expand with experience and over time. By recognising the validity of sensorium that are marginalised by market rationalism, and then seeking experiences such as commoning that allow these to grow, it is possible to develop a consistency within the ways we relate to others and to the spaces we inhabit, both directly and more universally, that privilege mutuality rather than self interest.

Creative mutuality is often elusive and fleeting, but by seeking it and being guided towards it, creative mutuality is still able to shape and influence the relations within and around the work.

Chapter 5

31 Kieffer, Mutuality, Recognition, and the Self, 23.

Fig 4.24 Window credits and messages to the audience.

A movement of commoning through highly commercial space as both a creative producer and a participatory creative practitioner with Picture Yourself.