Voicecraft Dispatch | Conversational Alchemy
Thoughts on why Voicecraft conversations aren't really podcasts, recent releases, and an invitation.
Most of the time, Voicecraft conversations are a little different from regular podcasts.
Usually, podcasts are structured something like an interview, where the purpose is to provide the context for a guest to broadcast their content.
Instead, Voicecraft invites participation in conversational alchemy. Here, the core focus is on expression that supports the insight and capacity of the conversation itself. This is the ideal basis from which VC then wants to broadcast into the public commons: in the mode of mutual participation in understanding. This mode of participation is contrasted with the mode of consumption, and runs in rough analogy to Fromm’s having and being mode distinction, wherein to ‘have’ is to acquire, consume, grasp at the external, rather than to relate with, be with, deepen into becoming and participation with.
Therefore, Voicecraft prioritises the art of connecting and relating (while at the same time differentiating) in the process of conversation. The intention is to encourage unique contribution from participants and the field as a whole, rather than collapse into a kind of flatness of ‘agreement’ or ‘disagreement’ that fails to deepen into understanding.)
From the perspective of broadcast success, there are consequences to pursuing this mode of discourse. It’s not what the algorithm wants (which means it’s not what we’re clicking and staying with.) Take Piers Morgan’s Uncensored, a popular forum for platforming different opinions on zeitgeist subjects. Imagine truly participating as an audience member with the energetic exchanges and ‘debate’ that takes place there. That would be the wrong mode to meet what’s on the menu. Despite great shows of rage and passion, differences in perspective are always kept beyond arms length between participants, far from the heart. Nothing is taken onboard. Little is heard apart from points of vulnerability to exploit.
From a viewer’s perspective, Piers Morgan works because you don’t need to open your heart or mind in order to receive its transmission, don’t need to commit much energy to follow along. It’s a cultural product to consume, for which you pay your sacred tuppence of attentional coin. But the exchange is predictable, your chances of leaving transformed are low. At best, maybe you come to map, judge, hear talking points, watch the unfolding of a peculiar yet standard, banal yet powerful, contradiction-ridden cultural game that’s not a game, or maybe it is. At worst, you get a kick, the activation you were craving, see who gets triggered, or click away, I don’t know. It’s a spectacle for the culture war and a map-maker for consummatory attentionalism. It’s low cost bliss point empty calorie corrosion. It’s par for the course.
The kind of conversational alchemy Voicecraft aspires to is quite different. While it can in principle cover the same content, its mode of expression communicates a different signature, frequency, or affect. To stay with it, the listener might need to do some chewing too. It might open up more uncertainty than usual, might invite an authenticity of response for which there is, quite naturally, no script.
Aspirationally, conversational alchemy opens space for anyone participating in the conversation (including the ‘host’) to share what’s necessary in order to orient themselves in the conversation. Practically, this could mean voicing that one feels like they do not presently have content to contribute, even if they are deeply engaged in receiving (and thereby influencing) the conversational flow.1 To many people it is surprising just how generative this simple expression can be.
It could also mean engaging in exploratory associations with the intention to crystallise a question or orientation for seeking. Sometimes this involves trading off clarity for the introduction of an as yet untrodden or still-metabolising complexity. This can ask more energy from the listener than they might usually expect. That is, particularly if they are operating in a mode used to quick and clean consumption, explanation2 or mapping, and the provisioning of answers from the expert, teacher, or guru.
From another angle, participating in conversational alchemy can involve the unique process of opening space for the emergent feeling and emotion (quality and intensity)3 that colours perception (very often without our knowing.) By doing this, we open a channel of attunement to the mystery, and make way for an additional path by which the novel can enter conversation. It also happens to be part of the process that supports the intuition and the intellect to function in conversation—allowing perception to deepen, increasing receptivity to the appearance of energy and information not necessarily graspable or mappable according to pre-loaded thought-structures.
To be clear, this is not to de-value the importance of thinking and more linear processes of rendering visible thought-structures to communication, nor to diminish their challenge. Voicecraft welcomes and honours disagreement and explanation, which can of course contribute to generativity. In fact, coming to sufficient clarity in order to recognise interesting difference is a natural eventuation of good conversation.4 But in general, cultural and intellectual exchange often fails to participate in the clarification together. Disagreement without clarity is prone to miss the other, and either strawman, or otherwise perform an overly lossy reduction of the relevant meaning. This itself can be of great value, but only if there is sufficient time, energy, trust and relational capacity in the conversation to address it (or otherwise it can be interesting as an artefact for others to view, reflect on, or perhaps mob / polarise over.) Hence the emphasis on tending to the process of mutual learning through connecting and relating to the subtle qualities, intensities, as well as conditioning thought-structures already present.
From here, the conversational field has the opportunity to draw inspiration from this as yet un-clarified potential, and ‘pick up’ on some of the coordinates gestured at by the expression so far, drawing others further along the journey of understanding, in support of a mutual ‘landing.'5 In other words, opening loops and closing them, or weaving threads of insight in coherent cycles of return-to-the-one that add to the collective understanding can be masterful contributions. But opening loops that others later help to close can sometimes be even more helpful for the collective intelligence of the total process, and is itself part of the mastery of crafting voice together. Put another way, guitar solos that sing unique, expansive and unexpected notes and progressions while managing to bring the divergent back home to convergence are worth aspiring to. But in conversational alchemy, even if we do not nail the landing ourselves, we give others the opportunity to pick up the thread, or introduce and re-introduce others so as to take the journey onward: enriching the context, re-calibrating the return, adjusting the orbit, contributing to the craft of voice.
Really these are just guidelines, pointers toward artfulness, and far from exhaustive of what comprises true mastery in conversation.6 Here we are speaking to the potential of conversation mostly from a 2nd person perspective, treating as vague and implicit a great many 3rd person factors that condition our speech and the possibility for connection in many of the actual realities we encounter in day to day life. Furthermore, the 1st person capacities of, for example, processing the encounter with difference, or re-sourcing orientation for expression through consultation with one’s more internal relational processes, are not much emphasised above, even though they are instrumental in the total process. Voicecraft cares to be in relation with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person dynamics influencing conversation, and most who are in close relation to this project will have heard me say on many occasions that most of the magic of conversation happens before the conversation even begins, whether that be through more individual intentional preparation, or the cultivation of trust, or in the design of the context itself (to name a few elements). Part of me would prefer to sit on this than leave things half of half said. But maybe on this occasion, less than half said might be instructive toward the kind of invitation that’s on offer here and through the Voicecraft Network.
Anyway,
Below are some recent publications of Voicecraft media where different flavours of the aspiration toward conversational alchemy play out. In particular, the following conversation with
, Pamela von Sabljar and exhibits a quality of generative exchange I am proud to share. It explores the primal, cultural, and psychological dimensions of war through the interplay of masculine and feminine energies.The next conversation explores the deep philosophy of technology and design, in consideration of the needs of vitality and life. It’s for those with serious interest in thinking through the creation of structures that support thriving—and who want to incorporate more than just thinking in that process.
It welcomes Eric Harris-Braun, pioneering co-founder of Holochain and other software technologies, alongside Forrest Landry, philosopher and master craftsman. They’re joined by Voicecraft members Tom Lyons in the opening position, and the philosopher Daniel Garner of O.G. Rose. Eric’s previous appearance where we explored his philosophy of grammatics is here.
The previous main channel release to Transcendent Design welcomed Pamela von Sabljar into the Voicecraft field to explore the question, ‘What makes Men & Women Different’?
Preceding that, this conversation between Voicecraft Network members
, Simon van der Els and Tom Lyons was shared to the Voicecraft Network channel. It was invited with the light framing of conversational alchemy in mind, and each of the gentlemen involved here embody elements of that process with great artfulness, in my opinion.
Finally, for those in Melbourne, I’ll be reaching out privately in the next few days to those who have attended a local VC event before. But I thought I’d mention here that some people very close to the Voicecraft context are hosting a festival at the end of April. I’ll be speaking in dialogue with a mystery philosopher there, and other Voicecraft members are involved too. I trust it will be a deeply enriching day. I have been given a discount code to use, which you can access with this link. (It shows once you go to purchase a ticket.)
Discernment on the Way,
As Adriana does in her first expression in the conversation titled ‘Men, Women, and War’ shared above and here.
‘Explanation’ is here used with reference to
and their distinction between explanation and address.See Forrest Landry offer some illuminating perspectives on the distinctions between thought, feeling and emotion in the ‘Transcendent Design’ conversation above.
For anyone who follows Voicecraft closely, you will be familiar with the outstanding
, who has contributed a great deal to the articulation of the dynamics of conversation that Voicecraft experiments with spreading. From the relationships between 'orbiting’ and ‘landing’, to the importance of surprise, the aforementioned between relation between explanation and address, and indeed the notion of spreading, O.G. Rose has been a consistent explicator of many communicational dynamics critical to understanding the relation between humans and culture. He discusses some of these dynamics in dialogue with Simon and Tom in the ‘Alchemy of Friendship’ conversation shared above.Indeed, there’s only even been implicit hints at the meaning of ‘connecting’ and ‘relating’ here. And more and more, this language becomes coloured by cultural affect in a way I find quite discouraging.