6 - Langerian Mindfulness and Liminal Performing Spaces

Summary

One's action or performance in a specific domain may be analyzed by virtue of a wide variety of influencing factors, including social, cultural, physiological, and psychological contexts. Perhaps Lewin's Ecological Model may move in line with the same sort of analysis whereby behavior is considered to be the function of the person and the environment. In looking into the dynamics of the action, one may scrutinize the underlying conscious and unconscious structural components in espousing specific manifestation of a performance.

The hot perspective, which dates back to 1950s and 1960s, was merely interested in the unconscious elements that produced certain types of performance. Thus, any performance, based on the hot perspective, was ultimately embedded within the unconscious interactive process with idiosyncratic emotional, cognitive, and behavioral categories. It was the realization of the clandestine, cryptic, and latently unconscious elements that contributed to the configuration of specific behavioral manifestation (see, for instance, Zajonc, 1984).

An alternative perspective known as the cold approach was inspired by computer-oriented discoveries and focused on the cognitive interplay of the influencing factors of a performance. The focus from the impulsive and unconscious sedimentation of a behavior was here replaced with an interest in the analytical, computational, and serial processing of information and their implications for decision making in a performance. A search for the computational analysis of the performance and its original elements was encouraged in the cold perspective with the intention of identifying the systematic generative constituents of a performance (see, for instance, De Jaegher, Di Paolo, and Gallagher, 2010).

Both perspectives were challenged by critical approaches that indicated how each of the hot and cold outlooks overlooked some of the significant influential factors of a performance. The result was the combination of both perspectives into what was later called the warm look (see, for instance, Sorrentino, 2003; Sorrentino & Higgins, 1986). Dual process theories of social cognition examined two types of information processing that considered both hot and cold perspectives. One led to an effortful and reflective type of thinking, and the other one studied an automatic form of thinking, with each type having implications for behavior and performance (Kruglanski & Orehek, 2007; Petty, 2004).