Are innovators a ‘nuisance’? Is innovation a kind of ‘nuisance’? We tend to re-describe ‘nuisance’ as something more benign – virtuous, even – in talk of ‘challenge’, ‘grit in the pearl’, ‘tenacity’ etc But when someone is a nuisance, they are also a pain in the neck. This quality of being-a-nuisance is often described (in ways which defuse the emotion in it) as ‘disruptive’. In Side Effects, Adam Phillips has an essay called Nuisance Value. In it, he quotes Richard Rorty, from his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity:
‘Interesting philosophy is rarely the examination of the pro’s and con’s of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entranched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things…it [the half formed new vocabulary] says things like, ‘try thinking of it this way’ – or, more specifically, ‘try to ignore the apparently futile traditional philosophical questions by substituting the following new and interesting questions.’
Phillips goes on to suggest
‘The nuisance effect of the entrenched vocabulary is that it makes one want to ignore it – its apparently futile traditional philosophical questions – and start replacing it with new questions. Certain vocabularies make certain sorts of questions possible.
‘Indeed the thing about a nuisance is that, by definition, it won’t leave you alone; you can’t ignore it until you come up with a way of ignoring that works. If a substitute is a constant reminder of what it is substituting for….
‘It is a nuisance when we are made to attend to something we would rather not. Clearly nuisance and the notion of resistance, of preferring not to, go together. But whether the nuisance is, to use an entrenched vocabulary, the cause or the consequence of resistance – whether we resist something because it is a nuisance, or it is a nuisance because we resist it – is never so clear.
And we tend to associate ‘being a nuisance’ with some kind of neglect or deprivation. Phillips mentions what Winnicott calls the ‘nuisance value of the symptoms’ is always a sign of hope in the child. If the child is prepared to be difficult he is at least hoping that there is a world where he can live as himself, with all his love and hate. This is part of the impulse to innovate – to be a nuisance for long enough to provoke the resistance that helps temper the resolve to change things to be as they need to be for you.
Slingshot