Spectrum of Woo

I have weekly conversations with a group of craftspeople who make their living through craft. It is striking how different the approaches toward business and making can be. The past couple weeks, I've been trying to talk through some feelings of incongruity I’ve had with my work for several months. I often get a sense that my need to earn an income and my ideas about ‘what’ and ‘why’ I make certain objects are at odds. Sometimes it all flows, while other times there is friction. Things don’t add up. As I’ve talked about these ideas, they get pushed and prodded by the group for more clarity. The back and forth, trying to make things more coherent inevitably makes the issue more clear to myself.

Our most recent talk lead me to this concept of a Spectrum of Woo. It’s a spectrum of all possible craft identities one can choose to glom onto. On one end of the spectrum is full-on woo-woo. Making is magical and full of deeper meanings. On the other end of the spectrum is pure rational pragmatism. Making is a means to an end. Cold, calculated, process driven. Maybe the descriptors are a bit off, but you get the idea.

All of us makers will find ourselves somewhere on this spectrum. Some will attempt to delineate and categorize portions of the spectrum. Some will add value judgments to different positions on this spectrum. Some will acknowledge the differences in positions with a ‘different strokes for different folks’ attitude. Some might be so captivated by their own position that they are blind to the existence of the rest of the spectrum. Some may never think about it all. Probably everyone (certainly myself) has a little bit of all these relationships to the Spectrum of Woo within them.

I see a commonality with all the positions. No matter where you are on the spectrum or how healthy (or unhealthy) your relationship toward its differences, I see a tendency to find yourself a little niche (whether through chance, experience or earnest thought) and become hardened to its ideal. There is often a group of like-minded people ready and waiting to reenforce the ideal with a good ol’ fashioned circle jerk.

I get it. It feels good. I’ve been there and probably will continue to revisit and reassess. It feels like you have things figured out and can just get on with the doing. You have direction.

Even if you find yourself breaking free and exploring new territory on the Spectrum of Woo, the tendency to harden to the new paradigm seems to remain. ‘I can’t believe I used to think ‘x’. Everything feels so clear now that I believe ‘y’. I can move forward again having been validated by my new ‘y’ peer group.’

This kind of stuff might work for a lot of people a lot of the time. It felt like it was working for me. But it seems inevitable that at some point the stuff of reality isn’t going to match the ideal. A sudden, real world need for pragmatism might rub against an ideal of finding flow. Or an ideal of strict adherence to best business practices might road block what could have been a life-enriching mystical revelation. A real uneasiness can build up as these inconsistencies accumulate.

So why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we pick a lane and make up reasons we need to stick to it? I think it might have something to do with authenticity. There seem to be pressures (external and internal) to build cultural capitol by being authentic. You want to be the true, bona fide, genuine version of the craft identity you’ve staked out for yourself. I’m growing suspicious of these attitudes. I get the feeling that authenticity masquerades as a clear path forward, but might actually be obstructing a truer clarity. What if we throw this identity based authenticity out the window?

Let’s consider code-switching, the concept from linguistics where people might change the language, tone, accent, jargon, etc. (consciously or unconsciously) within a conversation for a wide range of reasons or rationale. It’s common to extend the idea beyond language, as a helpful way to think about how people act differently in different situations with different people. You probably act differently when playing with your kids vs. talking to your boss vs. hanging out with friends vs. spending time with your spouse vs. taking a class vs. teaching a student vs. talking to a cop vs. eating at restaurant vs. traveling in a foreign country.

It’s as if you are a different person in each situation (or I’ve heard compelling arguments that you literally are a different person, if a person is only the contents of consciousness in a present moment). Most of the time, we readily accept this phenomenon without judgement. It often plays out in such mundane ways that we give it zero thought.

So why is it that we appear to hold ourselves to a different standard when it comes to how we relate to our craft? Why do we tell ourselves to maintain a consistent way of thinking and acting within our work, to maintain a consistent craft persona? Does it have to do with being concerned about authenticity? Is authenticity worthy of our concern?

If we did give more thought to the ways we code-switch in day to day life, we might realize that any of those personas are available to us at any time. They may tend to run on automatic, prodded along by circumstance, but they don’t have to operate that way. Some are almost surely healthier or more advantageous toward achieving changing goals. What would it look like if we gave ourselves permission to code-switch within our craft work, code-switch within our own thinking? As different goals and life situations presented themselves, what if we allowed ourselves to try on completely different ways of thinking, without any feelings of guilt that we weren’t living up to our authentic craft identities?

There are times (like right now) in my work/life where I need to focus quite a bit on just making money to help support our family. There are other times when our bills are paid, we have comfortable savings in the bank, everything is running smoothly, family is happy, no medical emergencies, no car troubles, etc. Does it make sense to be running the same code/persona/craft-idenity in both situations?

Pragmatism is no-doubt in order when it comes to making money, but is it necessary to maintain that same pragmatism as the pressure to make money eases? In the gravy moments, why deny ourselves an alternate persona, an alternate way of seeing our craft? Would it be so bad to eat a weed gummy and allow yourself to contemplate how our craft medium is sunlight transmuted into the physical by sentient plant life? Or spend a whole morning thinking about the intersections of art and craft? Or think about how our tools and materials deepen our connection to a history rooted in the place we live? Would allowing such thoughts preclude you from getting back to biz the next day, the next moment even?

Likewise, if your jam is living in magical mystical land most of the time, is it really so bad to just do the work? Even if you can’t find the flow, or just aren’t feeling it that day? Or to make money? Does it mean you’ve lost the magic, or burnt out? Does it make you a sell out? Would just doing the work preclude you from tapping back into a deeper meaning the next day, the next moment, or the next month?

We probably already allow these kinds of flexibility in our craft life more than we admit to ourselves. I don’t think I’m running the same code/persona when I’m carving a production run of spoons vs. designing a new chair vs. posting to Instagram vs. writing on Substack vs. meeting with a gallery owner vs. teaching a class vs. splitting a log. But I get the sense that a lot of us tell ourselves that’s all the same craftsperson operating from a singular craft perspective, a singular place on the Spectrum of Woo. And it’s just not true.

This is all new to me. I certainly haven’t integrated into my work in any meaningful way. But at least I’m beginning to maybe find where this nagging feeling is coming from. I hope it opens me to more ideas, more ways of thinking to try on without besmirching my true, authentic craft identity ;) Or maybe I’m just hardening into a position that’s staunchly anti-hardening.

This framework I’ve put forward has generally focused on the stories we tell ourselves about our position within craft. I think the same concept can be expanded to help think about how craft relates to art. At a gut level, most of us would probably put art on the woo-woo end of the spectrum, and craft on the more grounded, worldly end of the spectrum. Again, I think it’s a lot murkier than that. I think we might have something to gain if we could be more honest with ourselves in how we fit into that spectrum too. More to come on that.

And on The Spectrum of Wu, I’m somewhere in the RZA, GZA, Ghostface Killah camp, and I’m not budging.