Is lapse the key to transformation?
We have gathered a palette of perspectives to explore the potential in lapse and ways to unearth it. We are intrigued to raise the profile of ‘lapse’ as a productive notion to benefit climate action and tectonic cultural shifts starting from personal, lived experiences.
What does lapse mean?
A momentary lapse is the corrosion of previously built sense in which lies immense possibility. It can instigate behavior change by setting a new precedent and revealing options. Shifting the perception of lapse being a derogatory and harmful occurrence to that of an opportunity to unlock flexibility and resilience, altering ingrained reactions instead of acting out of routine. Instead of stigmatizing lapse as instability and weakness, we would like to show the positive side of it which provides fertile ground for change and deep transformation.
We are not plotting a malicious Machiavellian manipulation, but rather empathy and solidarity driven collaboration based on mutual vulnerability and implying an element of companionship to support radical reflection and (self-)healing.
For this exploration, a pivotal source of inspiration has been Karolina Kucia’s work: “Lapsus 1) lapse — slip (blunder, errors, misstep), parody, mockery, inconsistency, reanimation, and personal resistance. 2) Would embrace a condition of uncertainty, fuzziness, fractalization, and flexibilization of precarious work structure in cognitive production with its possible collapses. As an event producer in the age of commodification of time, experience, and event, I decided to play with this structure and to invite a lapsus as a moment of disruption to see how we get out of there. Does a collapse produce the reinforcement or reinvention of a norm? It always disrupts consistency of emotions, production, play, drama, and interpretation. I use lapsus to experiment with cooperation, which is not based on sympathy or consensus. I chose lapsus for its sensual, emotional complexity, and immediacy, to be an occasion for alternatives in self-organizing and collective co-emergence. I would choose to search not through affirmation of any exact alternative or potentiality of alternative, but by inhabiting a state of disruption. It is in my opinion a potential and complex moment of confusion, mixed emotion, and fragility.
How do we deal with small mistakes, faux pas and misbehaviours and what happens to us, when those things happen? Do they evoke fun, shame, a sense of failure, control or fear? Where do those slips, and lapses come from? Are they unconscious, automatized reactions or social contracts? Is there a possibility of turning them into something empowering?”
A pristine term
There is a certain fatigue in the climate discourse as a byproduct of the awareness raising, and this fatigue is troublingly counterproductive to the growing urgency of the crisis.
Instead of resorting to established techniques of persuasion and gimmicky nudges of behavioral economics, we are more drawn to a humanized and opaque term encapsulating a more poetic and stimulating approach.
We see ‘lapse’ as an uncharged notion we would like to populate with a counter-hegemonic ethos. We invite you to conceptualize ‘lapse’ as a moment of losing control, being disoriented and confused. A tender state, like a raw nerve exposed, which allows interventions to topple the status quo, priorities, automatisms. The inherent vulnerability and sensitivity calls for handling with care and assuming responsibility. Any intervention conceived to target this state should be rigourously following the do no harm principle. The practice we would like to instigate around the notion of lapse is non-exploitative, solidarity laden and empathy driven.
We find it’s helpful to think of lapse as an error turned into erratum (as in correction). A non-judgemental framing of an altered state disrupting routines and business as usual.
We dream to reset expectations through the concept of lapse, taking the term out of obscurity and animating it.
Revealing and addressing an epistemological crisis
We posit that the climate discourse itself is in an epistemological crisis, in which embracing and activating lapse as an arguably enigmatic term could be a pathway to a positive flip. Moten and Harley rethink debt by the same token and offer a generative approach to the epistemological crisis dovetailing with the 2008 financial crisis.
Irit Rogoff’s work on the expanding field of art and the curatorial is highly relevant and applicable to the way we launch ‘lapse’, and why:
“The hallmark of an epistemological crisis in the way in which it interests me here is not the trading of one knowledge or one definition for another more apt or relevant one but, rather, what happens when practices such as thought or production are pushed to their very limits. Do they collapse, or do they expand? Can they double up on themselves and find within this flipping over another set of potential meanings?
Exiting from previous definitions, refusing former meanings, refusing moral inscription, refusing the easy stability in which one thing is seemingly good and the other potentially threatening, risking a capacity for misunderstanding.
An epistemological crisis seems a much more fertile ground from which to think through the notion of an emergent field.
An epistemological crisis would allow us to think not of competing interests but absent knowledges; it would allow us to posit a proposition that would say that if we were able to find a way to know this, it might allow us to not think that. So there would be the loss or the sacrifice of a way of thinking, as opposed to the cumulative proliferation of modes of operating.”
Forming a collective around lapse
This autumn, we plan to take a deep dive into lapse as a leitmotif of the narrative in COVID crisis subverting work and home and leisure. Sweeping across the entire human experience, bringing about radical yet seemingly incremental change.
The kickoff meeting of our collective embracing the cataclysmic nature of the situation — spanning theatre, dance, music, design, media, psychology, neuroscience, law — took place end of May. If you are interested in joining, please drop us a line at movements[at]climate-kic.org.
We aim to build a purposeful lapse, acknowledging that lapse is a prerequisite for happy accidents (serendipity, if you will). We need to be mindful that lapse comes in various shapes and forms: change of pace, disconnecting, disappearing and so on. It is worth noting that oftentimes we fail to see the initial instance of lapse and only recognize it when it escalates to a relapse or a collapse. We will support each other in developing the sensitivity to identify lapses to be able to work with lapses, and even induce them.
