(Image by Malcolm Lightbody, via Unsplash)
I have a feeling this is going to be a string of posts.
I’ve always cultivated the ability to hide out and do the thing I wanted to do, fully focused and without interruption. And I’m increasingly recognizing what a luxury that is, unavailable to most of us most of the time. I’d like to explore that luxury—to whom it’s offered, and to whom it isn’t. How carefully it’s built, and how easily it’s lost. How our best intentions lead us, individually and institutionally and culturally, away from that precious state.
The idea of autonomy has to do with self-determination, An autonomous person gets to make, or at least strongly participate in, decisions about their own actions and beliefs and relationships. The opposite condition is submission or subordination, subsuming our own intentions to the intentions of others, Let’s look at that from two directions.
DIRECTION ONE. About thirty years ago, the British architect Frank Duffy wrote a book called The New Office, in which he put forth a taxonomy of work types, each of which requires different characteristics for a good workplace. (I admit that I’m a total sucker for a well-crafted X-Y quadrant diagram.)
I’m a writer and not an architect, so I’ll take exception to his four clever shorthand terms for each space, but the principle makes a lot of sense.
- If you’re told exactly what to do and left alone to do it, you’re a drone. Example workspace: cubicle.
- If you’re told exactly what to do and put in a group to do it, the work of the pack is more important than the individual member. Example workspace: high school classroom.
- If you decide what to do and are left alone to do it, you’re an artist in her garret. Example workspace: writer’s desk.
- If you decide what to do and are working with others to achieve it, you’re part of the inner circle. Example workspace: boardroom.
Hang onto that, while we go to…
DIRECTION TWO. The environmental psychologist Irv Altman developed a theory that the fundamental definition of privacy was the control of information: both information about oneself going out, and information from others coming in. So having your mail snooped around in is a loss of privacy, because you’ve lost control of information about yourself; but having loud neighbors is also a loss of privacy, because you hear their arguments and their video games and their TV shows without having asked for it.
Put those two directions together and you can understand why your job sucks. You don’t get to control information. You don’t even get to decide what to think about! And it’s not just the world of endless interruptions, though that’s an enormous disrespect to our attentional autonomy. It’s more importantly that we’re constrained by the very nature of our businesses. Here are a few examples:
I worked for a business once that was part of a national consortium founded upon ten common principles. My very first research project there was truncated after a day. I’d asked my new colleagues which of the ten principles was most important to them specifically, and was told that the company’s position was that only one of the ten really mattered, and that the other nine were niceties that had no real bearing on our work.
I worked for a business once that did exactly the same four or five jobs for one county government after another. Same scope of work, same methods, same spreadsheets, same deliverables. There was no room there to ask interesting questions or to approach the problem sideways.
I worked for a business once that hadn’t the faintest idea what a meeting was for. The president called us all together once a month to give us the equivalent of a podcast; the provost did the same thing with a smaller group every week. Committees were established with no time frame and no demands for progress; we just got together and picked at the same scabs for a couple of hours every Thursday afternoon or Tuesday morning. I rarely felt like I got any work done, because I set it aside every twenty minutes to go to another meeting.
These were all low-autonomy environments that had hired us because we’d been successful in high-autonomy training. They recruited us because we’d done really good work on projects we devised and cared deeply about, and then told us that all of that individual motivation was no longer the currency of the land.
So think of this post as the preamble. Over the next few days, I’d like to think about what attentional autonomy can tell us about social class, about craft, and about education. Maybe some other stuff, too.
Herb Childress 