Finding Muße at / for / through the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing
My writing style is often meta, situational and with elements of institutional critique, hence this was inevitably part of my process of doing a residency, mainly by questioning what doing in this context actually means. I had just read Jenny Odell’s ‘How to Do Nothing’[1] and her take on guiding your attention to what is essential had a huge influence on me and how I approached finding a residency.
I looked at what was often required as part of residencies and how it felt more like admin and business tasks rather than what I would deem as enjoyable. Phil Clegg talks about how the ‘language of managerialism’ has made its way into educational and creative institutions rebranding what we do in business terms. [2]
For example, reading the 38 page ‘Writers in Residence’ guide by the Arts Council England an onslaught of managerial language comes your way: ‘
Manage, tasks, plan, project brief, develop budget, deal with issues, act as an advocate, strategic and practical elements, evaluation, risk assessment, legal requirements, organising, contracts, equipment, book time of another person, fundraising, aims and objectives, dual goals, criteria, administrative burden, publicity, SMART approach – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic.[3]
This sounds a lot like my day job and I wanted to find a way for my residency to be distinctively different from my job. Hence, I took inspiration from Herman Melville’s book ‘Bartleby, The Scrivener’, where an industrious law clerk suddenly and without giving a reason declines work tasks with the words: ‘I would prefer not to’.[4] Admittingly his ongoing preference of ‘preferring not to’ led to his ultimate demise. I simply would prefer not to work in the context of managerial language for my creative residency and have my time taken up with soul destroying admin tasks. Instead I made a list of words that would describe the environment and the way of thinking that I wanted to bring to my residency: Time for reading, time for research, time to think, silence, calm, contemplation, peacefulness, no obligations, no expectations, being, writing, drawing, fun, art, wellbeing.
I realised what I was describing in that list can be expressed by a single word in the German language: Muße.
The German concept Muße (loosely translated as ‘leisure’) signifies freedom from the pressure of time. Muße does not mean the wasting of time, but on the contrary a free and meaningful dwelling in time beyond any purpose-driven rationality or utility or pressure to achieve.[5]
It describes a state of mind that is hard to achieve in lives full of obligations and distractions, and yet for us as writers ‘[t]he structuring of time and space to one’s needs and values is part of the invisible tools of creativity.’[6] But the invisible is hard to evidence or quantify.
Plus, there is no single direct translation for Muße in English, a fact which I find particular intriguing. It is often translated either into leisure or idleness yet neither word really captures its full meaning. For example, the philosopher Josef Pieper states
[t]here are things that we cannot do ‘in order to…’ or ‘so that…’. Either we do them not at all or we do them because they are right in saying that a lack of Muße makes for illness. But just as certainly it is impossible to attempt to engage in Muße for health’s sake.[7]
I have to admit that I changed that quote slightly. While it says Muße in the German original[8], in the English version it is translated as leisure. But Muße is not really the same as leisure. And what does it mean when something that is, according to Pieper, so essential to our wellbeing cannot be precisely named in English? This became the core motivation for my residency: I wanted to give the gift of Muße. I wanted to research it, make it visible and put it in relation to the terms that it interlinks and overlaps with such as leisure, idleness and education.
I approached the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing at the University of Brighton, because they included a focus on the following:
- Research that directly benefits the wellbeing of individuals, innovating in a wide range of practices where the arts improve people’s lives.
- Fostering novel, vital, creative modes and methods through which a range of health and wellbeing issues are investigated and brought to public benefit.
- Refining academic understanding of how and why the development of arts and wellbeing interweave.[9]
I felt I could research Muße in this context and offer up my findings for the benefit of the research community as well as staff and students in the University. It also meant that trying to introduce Muße back into my own life I had to take risks and actively move away from the way things are done. My project brief could not be a project brief as advised by the Arts Council England. It had to communicate the moving away from a norm in form and language and not take too much time of the reader:
Luckily enough the CAW said yes and was prepared to work with the vagueness I was proposing.
Yet not surprisingly one of the first questions that came up early in a tutorial was: “But what would you actually do?” Another way to phrase that question would be: But what would be your practice-based examples? My argument is that we are so busy filling our time with activities that can be evidenced and, even worse, quantified, that we lost our nerve of pursuing something that might not be able to be officially evidenced or quantified at all.
| Evidenced / quantifiable | Non-quantifiable |
| Meetings | Reading |
| Talks | Thinking |
| Questionnaires | Musing |
| Phone / video calls | Goodwill |
| Emails | Fun |
| Social media posts | Enjoyment |
| Marketing / content creation | Muße |
The left side of this table lists the evidence that we are busy; that we have done the work. We use these items as proof or account or justification of our activities. But is there really more value in these acts of busyness than there is in the non-evidenced acts? How many people would look at this list and think: “Ah, I wish I had the time to just sit and read.” And this is my point exactly: What happen to us that we cannot control our own time anymore? As Josh Cohen points out: ‘Passion and desire have become inextricably bound up in our minds with doing, so that the notion of a passion for inactivity or slowness, for ‘preferring not to’, is barely intelligible to us.’[10] This is also happening in education where
[s]tudents must not be idle but utilise every opportunity to do something ‘worthwhile’. These unwritten expectations assume a particular kind of student who has the time to undertake placements, negating the presence of other responsibilities (such as part-time work or childcare) that constrain this capacity.[11]
The irony of this is that Muße in its origin is linked to the idea of school and learning.
‘[…] Muße in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English “school”. The word used to designate the place where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means “Muße”. “School” does not, properly speaking, mean school, but Muße.’[12]
Again, I have replaced the English translation into ‘leisure’ back to Muße as those two are not the same thing. There is, of course, the academic field of leisure studies, which can cover a vast array of themes such as culture, health, sport, tourism and outdoor recreation and somewhere embedded in it is a link to Muße as well as to education.[13] For example, self-directed learning ‘constitutes a distinctive component of leisure, when the latter is conceived of as a major domain for experiencing freedom.’[14] Hence, my practice on my residency was to actively reclaim my time and work against all the reflexes that come in telling me I should be ‘doing something’ that refers to the quantifiable list and instead gently move towards the non-quantifiable one – towards Muße.
I was also inspired by the artist Maria Eichhorn. For her exhibition ‘5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours’ at the Chisenhale Gallery in London she sent all gallery staff home on full pay and kept the gallery shut and stopped emails to the staff inboxes for that period of time.[15] The staff did not have to record what they did with their free time, give feedback afterwards or any additional task that would require them to commodify their time off. ‘At the core of her latest work is the idea she is gifting the gallery and staff some time, as much as a break. The concept of free time and our striving for a mythic “work-life balance” are worth consideration.’[16]
I wanted to keep my “residency-life balance”, while at the same time creating an output that people could voluntarily come to, if they had the time and if they felt that it was worth giving some attention to. Since the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing is not an actual brick and mortar centre but a community that puts itself together out of researchers and collaborators that contribute to it and offers up its findings on the CAW website, I wanted to respond to it by creating a Muße website. It is in the form of texts, snippets, quotes about Muße and terms in relation to it. One of the challenges I had when creating the site was that I continuously had to stop any impulse to allow areas for comments, audience participation, a live conversation of topics discussed. The urge of adding an element of activity is so ingrained in us and seems to be a way of validating something that in actual fact does not need to be validated any further.
Because so much of the research the centre does indirectly relate to Muße, I felt it was valuable to make that link more visible. For example, Duncan Bullen, the current director of the CAW, writes in his own research that focuses on drawing practice that when
[w]orking with boredom in an experimental sense, as part of formal mindfulness practice, you may encounter how much of one’s time is focused on desire, a quest for excitement and newness, or merely the ever-present ‘to-do’ list.[17]
I am also touching on boredom in relation to Muße on the website and want to read this as a short example of my creative writing:
Muße in relation to boredom
There is a difference between ‘how to do nothing’[18] and ‘having nothing to do’[19]. One is trying to not get caught up in the artificial busyness of life, while the other is struggling with boredom due to a lack of resources or inability to concentrate. Hence, if busy people suddenly stop what they are doing, they might not experience Muße but boredom, which is ‘the arch-enemy of wellbeing’[20]. As Blaise Pascal pointed out: ‘… the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. … That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle.’[21] This ability to stay quietly in a room without feeling bored or restless is also an aspect of Muße.
In terms of my creative writing, it becomes obvious that it does not differ from the tone of the overall presentation. In fact, there is a question whether the references in the creative writing example should sit separately or should be embedded within the presentation footnotes morphing everything into one and blurring the lines of where the presentation ends and the creative writing begins. It means that this presentation also doubles up as a piece of creative writing. It is included on the website and can be seen as a link and framing device for the overall work. Which means I am currently addressing two audiences at once: On the one hand the MA Creative Writing cohort while holding this presentation live or you, the reader, that stumbled across the website and made it all the way to this part of the text.
It is interesting to position my writing not only in a public realm, but also specifically at my place of work, especially since I am probably more known as someone that actively gets things done rather than someone that seeks Muße. But from personal experience I can see how the time pressures on students to do things is increasing even though there often is no realistic time to do all of these tasks. And as far as I am concerned ‘doing’ without Muße creates a lot of stress and very little joy. By presenting my writing in this context, I hope that we all can think about Muße in our lives and our work. Jenny Odell points out how the rendering of our reality is based on what we choose or are forced or manipulated to pay attention to. ‘Most of us have experienced changes in rendering: you notice something once (or someone points it out to you) and then begin noticing it everywhere.’[22] My intention was to draw attention to Muße by practicing it as part of my residency and by asking how can we add Muße to our lives? Most likely not via presentations on Muße or research or making websites about it, but we can start simply by recognising which demands are unessential clutter forced upon us and to then ‘prefer not to do them’. You can get closer to Muße by crossing things of the ‘to-do’ list not by doing all of them, but by realising that many of those items do not need to be done in the first place.
Another reason why I was always fascinated with Muße is its relationship to literature as well as to my own writing process. Peter Philip Riedel looks as Muße as an ideal state of being in the works of the German writers and poets such as Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel and Hölderlin.[23] He points out how Schlegel is counter-balancing the restlessness of modernity with contemplation as a way of being by emphasising the ‘Muße-criteria of creative passivity; the willingness to receive’.[24] This creative passivity plays a big part in my writing process. Any kind of writing output is always accompanied by an extensive amount of unstructured reading and thinking. I tend to have long periods of non-writing, which I also consider as writing.
And in the sense of Muße and doing nothing I want to finish this presentation with one of my favourite poems by the writer Thomas Brasch.
The beautiful September 27th
I haven’t read the papers.
I haven’t gazed at any women.
I haven’t opened the letter box.
I haven’t wished anyone a Good Morning.
I haven’t looked into the mirror.
I haven’t talked with anyone about old times and
with no one about new times.
I haven’t thought about myself.
I haven’t written a single line.
I haven’t started any ball rolling.[25]
Thomas Brasch
[1] Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing – Resisting the Attention Economy, (New York: Melville House Publishing, 2019)
[2] Phil Clegg, Creativity and critical thinking in the globalised university, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 45, (2008) p.222
[3] Armitage, Melita, Writers in Residence, Arts Council England, (2003) <https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/writers_in_residence.pdf> [Accessed 5 April 2021]
[4] Herman Melville, Bartleby, The Scrivener, (OPU, 2018) Kindle ebook
[5] Peter Philipp Riedl, Die Kunst der Muße. Über ein Ideal in der Literatur um 1800, Publications of the English Goethe Society, (2011) 80:1, p.37
[6] Vera John-Steiner, Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) p.74
[7] Josef Pieper, Leisure as the basis of culture / The Philosophical Act, (Random House, 1963) p.71, Kindle ebook
[8] Josef Pieper, Muße und Kult, Mit einer Einführung von Kardinal Lehmann, (München: Kösel-Verlag,2007) pp.124-125, Kindle ebook
[9] Centre for Arts and Wellbeing, University of Brighton, https://www.brighton.ac.uk/caw/index.aspx
[Accessed 10 February 2021]
[10] Josh Cohen, Not Working: Why we have to stop, (London: Granta Publications, 2018), p.62
[11] Allen, K. et al., Becoming employable students and ‘ideal’ creative workers: exclusion
and inequality in higher education work placements, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34:3, (2013) p.438
[12] Josef Pieper, Leisure as the basis of culture / The Philosophical Act, p.19
[13] Denis Auger, Gabrielle Thériault & Romain Roult, A conceptual interpretation of the relationship between leisure and its foundational disciplines: A conceptual model of leisure theory, Loisir et Société / Society and Leisure, 43:2, (2020) p.230
[14] Robert A. Stebbins, Self-directed learning as basis for complex leisure, Loisir et Société / Society and Leisure, 40:3, p.377
[15] Eichhorn Maria, 5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours, Chisenhale, (2016),<https://chisenhale.org.uk/exhibition/maria-eichhorn> [Accessed 20 April 2021]
[16] Adrian Searle, Nothing to see here: the artist giving gallery staff a month off work, The Guardian(2016), <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/apr/25/nothing-to-see-here-maria-eichhorn-chisenhale-gallery> [Accessed 1 May 2021]
[17] Duncan Bullen, Practicing Presence, TRACEY, 14:1 (2019) p.12
[18] Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, (New York: Melville House Publishing, 2019)
[19] Louise Farnworth, Doing, Being, and Boredom, Journal of Occupational Science, 5:3 (1998), pp.140 -146
[20] Ibid, p.143
[21] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, (London: Penguin, 1995), p.37
[22] Jenny Odell, p.121
[23] Peter Philipp Riedl, Die Kunst der Muße. Über ein Ideal in der Literatur um 1800, Publications of the English Goethe Society, (2011) 80:1, pp.18-37
[24] Ibid, p.24 (own translation into English)
[25] Thomas Brasch, Der schöne 27. September, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980, 2nd ed.) (own translation into English)