Social-Aesthetic Strategies for a Change of Heart: The Resurrection of the World in Us

In Oxford Handbook on Mental Health and Contemporary Western Aesthetics, edited by Martin Poltrum, Michael Musalek, Kate Galvin, and Yuriko Saito. Oxford University Press, 2024.

ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the Connective Practice Approach: a redemptive, social-aesthetic practice that enables a change of heart.

This approach is of special relevance to engaging with personal and social dilemmas caused by mutually exclusive and disconnected ways of thinking and living in the world. Central features of this approach and its transformative potential are shared through ‘guiding images’, its ‘making social honey’ theory of change, and a connective imagination, ‘inner atelier’ methodology that is integral to this social honey process.

Connective practice examples described as ‘instruments of consciousness’ highlight (i) the necessity of individual insight for enabling collective insight, and (ii) the phenomenological process of bracketing or epoché for clearing the inner space, for ‘seeing what we think’, for making shifts, and for developing new imaginaries. Connecting forms of mindfulness and Joseph Beuys’ ‘social sculpture’ ideas about the ‘invisible materials’ of speech, discussion, and thought, this chapter (a) offers an expanded notion of the aesthetic as all that enlivens, (b) sees responsibility as an ability-to-respond, (c) explores capacities needed for a living future, (d) reveals the sacramental nature of connecting inner and outer work, and (e) of coming to insights individually and together as a process of resurrecting the overlooked, uncared-for, crucified world in us.

Keywords: connective imagination, social aesthetics, eco-social transformation, change of heart, thinking-together, inner mobilization, sacramental practice, social sculpture, relational capacities, freedom and responsibility.

Inner Compass - Change of Heart. Copyright: Shelley Sacks

Extract from chapter

INTRODUCTION
Social Aesthetics for Connective Practice: The Resurrection of the World in Us

“We are standing on the edge of the old world, crucified by disconnected ideas and destructive behaviours despite millennia of wondrous creations and understandings. The new world of interconnected perception begins here, in the chaos, at the edge of the old world; in the liminal zone of disturbance and possibilities.

Now we are called—for the first time in history—to engage in forms of individual and social envisioning, healing, and decision-making, to consciously decide on and shape a living eco-social future. But this is hampered by non-relational modes of thinking, fear of upheavals and uncertainties, and an inner emergency in which panic leads to standstill. In this state of panic, inner crises and emergencies are easily separated from outer crises, and disconnected mindsets in the ‘humanosphere’—which lead to biosphere and technosphere disasters are often denied and veiled. How can these veils be lifted? How can we reach the habit level in our thinking as individuals, groups, and larger collectives, to recognize and transform views that cause unnecessary suffering? How can we shift from mindsets of freedom-as-self-interest to freedom as the ‘ability-to-respond’ (Sacks, 2011a, 2011b), and from metanoia as repentance—to its original meaning in Greek—as a ‘change of heart’? How can we develop capacities for thinking, envisioning, and planning in relational, life-enhancing ways?   (Sacks, 2018; Strausz, 2018).

In the field of connective practice, we find nourishment for this task in the ‘making social honey’ process (Sacks, 2017a) and ‘instruments of consciousness’  (Sacks & Kurt, 2013b; Sacks, 2024).

Committed to consciousness as a powerful driver of change we develop ‘inner technologies’ (Sacks, 2018) for distilling lived experience and doing other forms of imaginal work, as well as social-aesthetic strategies for enlivenment, and relational capacities for eco-social transformation and paradigmatic shifts.

‘Connective distance’ is one of these capacities for resurrecting the crucified world in us and mobilising us internally to respond to its sufferings.”

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