The trap of significance

There’s writer’s block, and then there’s one of its cousins, significance block. Significance block is the kind of block where you’re unable to write/do/make anything because you’re afraid that the things you have to say don’t matter, aren’t original, aren’t novel, or aren’t significant.

In two different sectors of my working life, I’ve seen (and experienced) manifestations of this phenomenon. Teaching art and design courses, the question of novelty tends to come up in evaluation – within its professional context, is this work doing something interesting? Is it contributing? Is it, somehow, adding something to the world by existing? That’s the art and design education version I’ve seen of significance block: we ask students to contextualize their work in terms of its significance or originality in the field. In scholarly work, it’s very similar. When applying for a grant, when writing an article, when reviewing an article by someone else, the significance, novelty, or contribution question arises. Does this article add something to the literature? Does it change our understanding? Does it, in short, do something new?

In positions of assessing the work of others and determining whether or not it’s sufficiently significant, an emphasis on significance isn’t such an issue. The mechanism of significance block doesn't come up in the same way. At worst, there’s perhaps the guilt that someone has done something technically wonderful which doesn’t meet the novelty criterion. Instead, significance block comes when you’re the one doing the creation. You’re making the art, you’re writing the article, you’re developing the research agenda. You are the one responsible for meeting your own criteria for novelty, newness, innovation, significance. You also may be hoping to meet the criteria others have set for those qualities. Significance block is a response to the fear, need, or responsibility that you must bring something new or make a big contribution to a particular context, and that you might not manage.

There’s an argument to be made that significance block is a reaction to or anxiety about a useful mechanism in fields where novelty matters. In areas like academic research, there is a need to find a niche where you can do something novel, and anxiety around significance offers a handy guide for directing your work. If you’re petrified that what you’re doing isn’t of sufficient significance or originality, you’ll strive and hopefully come up with something novel. If the goal is to not replicate the work of others, to find the twist or difference that makes something new enough to be significant, then it’s at least easy to know what not to work on. This is why academics do literature reviews. And this is why many other fields do context or competition analyses. The counterpoint to that argument, though, is that it inculcates an obsession with novelty, with getting there first. And sure, maybe it’s the case that such an obsession is a useful thing to have if your goal is to push forward the cutting edge of your field. Why spend time on things that are already established when you could be hunting the next development?

When significance block hurts

In other areas, the impetus towards novelty and the desire to chase significance can cause a problem. They can lead to, yes, significance block. Let’s make it concrete. Say I want to write an explainer about a particular system or phenomenon. I want to clearly lay out how something works so that people who aren’t deeply familiar with it can understand. This is where significance block can easily happen. If I’m trained and encultured to prize novelty in my work, I can face a barrier when trying to just lay out the basics. There may be nothing novel in the content of my clear explanation, and it might even run counter to my purpose if I add bells and whistles. Say I want to explain, for example, how a surveillance camera works (or a smart garbage can, or a 3D printer – take your pick), and I want as many people as possible to understand my explanation, then I need to try to stick with the basic facts and mechanisms, which it’s possible are already well-known within my own professional circles. I need to step over the barrier of “What is this contributing that is new?” in order to achieve the current goal (and indeed the new significance) of informing a general public.

Some academics are capable of keeping the duality in their heads: striving for the new contribution when writing for their peers; explaining clearly core concepts to audiences who are not yet familiar. To an extent, we can learn this from teaching, though that’s not always the case. And teaching holds a special status – we are bringing students into a set of disciplinary understandings. When we approach more general publics, there is a refining that many struggle to achieve. I consider myself a half-decent communicator of my work and my field, but I still struggle with the desire to use some of my disciplinary jargon (It’s useful! It’s specific! It’s a shortcut!), and with permitting myself to write things that don’t have an obvious contribution aside from informing.

Significance and the attention economy

In both academia and in most creative fields, we are living in a moment of extreme churn, in which novelty and visibility can feel like the only ways to achieve success. We must all produce new and interesting work, and it must be highly-visible. If you’re an academic working with a concept like an h-index (which I won’t explain, but Wikipedia has your back if you want to know what that’s about) in a hiring process or a tenure review, the need to be cited can feel acute. It can lead to the feeling that you need to blast the promotional trumpets whenever you publish something, put your shoulder behind dissemination. Because we’re in a very fractured publishing landscape, with a huge volume of output, it’s no longer possible to rely on the old disciplinary comforts like “everyone is my field reads this journal” to assure yourself that the people you want to see your work will see your work.

Creative industries have it even worse. In design practices which require clients, being novel in a visible way can become the route to actually earning your living. The attention economy, combined with the opacity of commonly-used social media platforms, makes promotion feel mission-critical. But promotion tends to leverage yet more novelty in order to be successful. So whether you’re a graphic designer trying to catch a trend before it’s too big and too boring, or an academic trying to get your latest journal article read, one thing creative and research disciplines have strongly in common right now is the feeling that some kind of novelty, freshness, significance-from-originality is an existential necessity.

Beyond the trap of significance

With all that exposition in mind, I want to suggest a few remediations to significance block that are individual or collective, already done, and not yet done enough. The constant quest for significance can be paralyzing. We need to recognize, certainly in academia, certainly in creative industries, but I think you can probably insert your own field here as well, that making a unique contribution to a specific context isn’t the only thing that justifies the production of work. Whether creative, scholarly, or something else, if your field has a value structure which encourages a constant quest for significance or novelty, it’s worth taking a step back sometimes to evaluate the effect that quest has on your choice of subject matter (or execution) and the way you feel about the work you’re doing. As you step back and look at your relationship with novelty, perhaps think about the “why” of your contribution. Are you seeking novelty because novelty is one of the assessment criteria, or is there something more intrinsic in your desire to find the new thing? Has curiosity been overtaken by extrinsic motivators like "visibility" or "reviewer 2 said I needed to better demonstrate how my article differs from existing work"?

If it turns out that you’re seeking significance and newness because you feel it’s simply required in your field, and if you have the freedom available to do some experimentation, there are a ways to try to lighten the significance load. A first baby step is context-crossing, bringing an idea you know is not unique out of its home context and into a new one where it does have something new to add. This is the sort of thing I was describing above, when laying out the stress of explaining core concepts to an external audience. Not everyone knows the things that are basic to your field, but there’s a pretty high likelihood that other people could be interested. It might even feel rewarding to discover that what you consider basic knowledge isn't so basic after all.

More extreme than context-crossing, and something we can all aspire to, is the realization that there is intrinsic value in one’s own voice and one’s own way of telling a story. Positionality isn’t just a keyword. Creative sectors have a jump on this one, compared to academia, but we can all learn or be reminded that the objective voice is a way of hiding, and a way of trying to remove ourselves from the picture in order to make our work more universal or trustworthy. We do not always need to sit in that belief system. Becoming comfortable with the idea that your voice in itself is a contribution is a difficult step, especially if you’ve been raised in a tradition that treats the idea of “contribution” as being relational to an existing literature or corpus of work. But it’s worth a go, if you find yourself feeling stuck in the trap of significance, to take a moment to think about the value system behind these impulses, and to perhaps allow yourself thoughts, works, and directions which are significant because they are yours and you find them exciting, not because they are extrinsically new, original, or significant.