What is a 'voice'?

A complexity and emergence rumination

I’m part of a small writing group that was set up as an Unpsychology magazine initiative. One day the question of voice came up, and I wrote down some thoughts…

Something wants to come through you. What is that?

That is your voice, the thing that wants to speak using your cellular container.

Is it you? Well, yes, and no.

It is not the self, or the ego.

What wants to come through is an emergence¹ from the flows that pass through you, that eddy around your container.

Flows of culture, language, memory, conditioning, convention, impressions, influences; they continually move through you because you’re open to your environment and alive. Sometimes something just appears within you, or onto some paper, or as a tune in your head, and you have no idea where it came from or why. It’s a mystery.

Another mystery is how a person somehow holds a sense of themselves together in the midst of these flows. Holding it together is not quite the right expression though, because it takes no effort of consciousness or will – a sense of self is itself a continuing emergence, which is needed for the system to survive and thrive as a system; constantly adapting and reforming itself, always in motion.

This is the lifeforce moving through a human.

As humans we often interfere with what wants to come through with our thoughts, our desires, our egos, our inherited sense of what should be. ‘When you force it, you block it’; we try to sidestep what wants to emerge because it may not suit our idea of ourselves or our plans, or it feels too frighteningly unknown to our shaky nervous systems. When that happens, we can short-circuit and lose our sense of direction.

Art is simply what wants to pass through you. A raindrop on a branch. Articulating an injustice. Words that form without trying. It doesn’t have to meet any standards of meaning or interest, especially those that come from outside of you.

Why not forget all those prescriptive ideas about art and set down your feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you like?

Haruki Murakami

Most of the time, your psyche does its best to get in the way.

You kill your dream because you know that to engage with a dream is to completely attune yourself to your body, your purity, your strength, the force of your will, and also your greed, your impatience, your lust, your grief.

You kill your dreams because you know that enduring these forces is hard work. Dreams require hard work, every single day, and the work doesn’t end until you’re dead.

Build your dreams to last, Heather Havrilesky, 6.6.25

Sometimes there’s interference from cultural ideas about what is and is not ‘allowed’. Inherited ideas about art, in its widest sense, can choke an emergent whisper before it even opens its mouth.

Maybe it would help to rethink what art actually is…

Maybe the artist’s role now is not to ascend above the world, but to be its attentive participant. Not to justify the self, but to remain open. Not to disappear into the work, but to let the work emerge from the flux. That may not look like genius. But it might look a lot more like life.

The Artist’s Role in a Fragmented World, Blackbird Rook, 20.5.25

I wrote a longer post about these ideas in March this year:

The strange pull of what you love

All images by Tamsin Haggis

1. Emergence refers to unexpected properties which arise from complex adaptive systems in a way that can’t be tracked back to an single cause or reason through any observable cause/ effect linear process. It’s a tipping point thing; at a certain moment, a change takes place - an anthill suddenly collapses, a swarm of birds changes direction, a group suddenly align in harmony, an idea appears where before there was nothing….There’s no way to explain exactly why the thing happens, but it has an adaptive function, in that the system benefits from what occurs.