The article about this in The Guardian the other day was subtitled ‘The true value of a gift is not how much it costs, but the story that we attach to it’ and tells us that
Conceptual consumption is what Mike Norton at the Harvard Business School and his colleagues call this; the notion that shoppers, especially well-heeled shoppers in the rich, fully sated developed world, are after ideas and stories rather than just physical items.
This popped back into my mind while I was reading the gorgeous ‘The Hare with the Amber Eyes’ by Edmund de Waal for research earlier this week. It’s research, storytellingwise, on several levels: how the teller sheds light on the effect of the story on them, telling a story through objects, coming at heritage sideways. You can tell that de Waal is, by trade, a potter, as there is something tactile and delicate about his prose and rendering of his detective work, through a netsuke collection ( a collection of small Japanese objects) that has come into his possession, tracing back his family history through the story of the collection as it passes from person to person, somehow surviving intact the fractured history of Jews in Europe in the 20th century.
Although in some ways quite the opposite of conceptual, I feel as though he is saying almost the same thing as he talks, early on, of his determination to give the story meaning rather than trivialise and anecdotalise, something so dangerously easy to slide into:
It could write itself, I think, this kind of story. A few stitched-togehter wistful anecdotes, more about the Orient-Express, of course, a bit of wandering round Prague or somewhere equally photogenic, some clippings from Google on ballrooms in the Belle Epoque. It would come out as nostalgic and thin.
All the way through the book, de Waal fights against the tendency to thinness that threatens us all as we take the easy route to gathering in the stories lying easily at our disposal and stringing them together into something that will pass muster. For this I find his book almost to be a campaign both for what deep stories are for, and how we must treasure the challenge of seeking the deeeper story, and for the way objects, archives, place become places for him that yield up clues as he spends time (much longer than he expected) getting the feel for the story under the skin.
He ends talking about the patina, both of things and of stories:
It is not just things that carry stories with them. Stories are a kind of thing too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how it works. Perhaps patina is a process of rubbing back so the essential is revealed,the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.
Both de Waal’s journey and the trivial ebay experiment in the article are small threads that gather into an inference that we mind a great deal just now about meaning right across our lives, not just in the small compartment that we allocate to private and personal. We want to touch things and be touched by them, physically and emotionally, and we want meaning to accrete over time in work settings too.
With this in mind, we’ve started working again with David Gunn of Incidental with whom we did such gorgeous work using found sound and slivers of interview to make a soundscape of a development bank during 2009. Building on this, hooking into the work the we’ve done with Clive Holtham over the years on slow knowledge and the rich role of a Situationist derive in creating a different kind of story witnessing that affects both the witness and how they then in turn engage with others. This cannot be surface work and it cannot be about creating ‘thin’ anecdotalised trivia to bring back to work. It has to go below the surface and work towards new forms of meaning and encounter in a business context that yield new possibilities and promise.
victoriaward
