Page 110 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

Orchestrating different forms of knowledge 99

Bertrand Russell). And they derive from the tacit dimension of all knowledge,
as Michael Polanyi (1958: 266) sums up:

Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a
cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the
impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely
for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original,
can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.

This is why composers’ knowledge of work processes is largely informal,
meaning that it cannot be grasped in its entirety and cannot be fully repre-
sented by a closed set of rules. In the same way that the game of experienced
chess players displays strategic moves, but also has to remain flexible and
spontaneous in order to surprise and beat their opponents, so knowledge of
work processes consists of intelligible routines and habits which must remain
modifiable whenever the work situation requires it. A composer who persists
in his or her routines is “frozen”, emprisoned by his or her sphere of experi-
ence. To act based on experience is thus not always connoted positively. The
risk of slipping into routines and habits, and thus losing all potential for
innovation, is just as present (see Neuweg 2004: 344–347). The challenge for
experienced practitioners is therefore to apply simultaneously stable and flex-
ible approaches to professional tasks (see Volpert 1974: 48), to feel secure in
dealing with situations, but without ignoring their specifics and nuances, and
to know their own effective work modes and yet time and again expose
themselves to new challenges. Frequently learning more goes hand in hand
with unlearning. To sum up, we understand knowledge of work processes to
be the result of the processing of previous experiences, conscious that knowledge
must always remain mobile and subject to review.
It is logical, therefore, that “situative knowledge” refers to the adaptability
or fine-tuning of actions for contingent and imponderable occurrences (see
Brown, Collins & Duguid 1989; Lave & Wenger 1991). As their experience
grows, people can follow general practical rules in ways that are situatively
appropriate. They are thus in a position to vary their behaviour without it
becoming random. Sensory experiential knowledge that arises in actu – for
example, when we concurrently perceive, reason and act – is a variant of
situative knowledge. It is not previous experiential knowledge that is adap-
tively updated in a given situation. Rather, situative knowledge emerges ad
hoc, but not ex nihilo, and is an indispensable precondition for dealing with
unpredictable and contingent occurrences (see Böhle 2004; 2009). Composers
constantly generate and rely on their situative experiential knowledge because
there are certain problems and challenges they can only tackle through trying-out
and experimenting.
Drawing on the phenomenological philosophy of the body, the sociologist
of work Fritz Böhle (2015: 44f.) emphasises the subjectivising moments of
becoming aware of a situation: a sound can be perceived as “warm” or