On Flow

In response to this video: http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html

So I forced myself (against my will) to watch the video, and I never achieved any kind of flow. I do have to wonder if he is suggesting, in his research, that we just surrender to our own activities and give up any kind of struggle, as he seems to have little to no appreciation for the political. I also wonder about the significance of achieving the ecstatic state he describes, as it distract us from the actual conditions of the world. This is what Capitalism has been drawing us towards, evidenced in a theoretical market structure that rewards monetarily-demonstrable wants to the point of infinite. But read Infinite Jest. It isn’t a bible, and it certainly doesn’t hold truths, but the very existence of a kind of ecstasy-producing anything should not be anyone’s end goal: its a dangerous diversionary and even utopic endeavor that ends in little more than the creation of a vegetative docility. And this appears to be exactly what C-man is north-starring, which he makes abundantly clear at the end, when he describes his goal as placing: “More and more life into that flow channel”. This goal seems anything but promising to me, even dangerous, and we really shouldn’t be striving for it at all. 

Still, I acknowledge that his thoughts provide us a kind of comforting respite from contention, our own space for being ourselves and withdrawing from the world of humans (which is, by definition political) and just enjoying ourselves, which I shouldn’t criticize. But I really don’t know what the actual applications of these ideas are, and I think they just signal further withdrawal into our own personal interests and engagements at the cost of learning more about how to relate to others and deal with the inevitably political aspects of difference. 

Some questions I have: why are we studying creativity? Does studying creativity dispose of it? Can we engineer creativity? Can we engineer happiness? Should we engineer happiness? Are some people going to be able to experience flow more than others because it does require some kind of material goods for its satisfaction? And interviewing CEOs for feelings regarding success? Pretty typical. And my antithesis to TED is very material, actually; I think they promote a kind of technological and ideological fetishism. A sort of “be awed by these ideas and educated by the latest and chic-est work,” rather than “this is what is being said; let’s be critical about it.” It’s additionally troubling to me that there is something called the Quality of Life Research Center, where people are paid to study how I can have more happiness in my life. http://qlrc.cgu.edu/about.htm Do they know me? I don’t know them very well. Perhaps they’re working with an ideal-type me that they think they can study and make informed judgments about and get paid to research more and then go on talking tours and endear other people to misguided ideas about the nature of individuals and their behaviors. 

I mean, I haven’t done much other reading about him, but I’ve heard the hype. I’m skeptical both of what psychology intends to do in studying human behavior and assigning laws and tendencies and rendering it ‘determined,’ as well as with some of his particular thoughts. It breeds passivity and distracts from the real state of the human being as political and differentiated and instead replaces it with little more than empty, ecstatic ‘flow.’