Colin Matthews Room, Radcliffe Humanities, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG
Athletes, musicians and even computer programmers speak of the experience of a complete 'being in-the-moment', a thorough canalization of their attention towards a task, and this is described as 'flow' or 'being in the zone'. This talk focused on the psycho-cultural aspects of peak experience in contemporary life. On the one hand, positive psychology promotes this form of experience as a pure expression of the good life in which worker and work achieve a true and productive synthesis; more critical approaches see the possibility of a less benign aspect - that the zone is little more than a fiction, a management tool to extract ever greater compliance from worker subjects in the face of increasingly difficult working conditions. Is there a rapprochement between these two positions? How are we to understand the intense experience of good work and human flourishing, and yet be aware of the sometimes Panglossian, cure-all agenda of the zone?
