autotelic

I was looking through Csikszentmihalyi's book for a succinct definition of what 'autotelic' means, but he teases out the concept throughout his work.

dougbelshaw.com 2009

Zhuangzi intimates that the flow-like experience can extend beyond the specific act of butchering to become a continuous state this is similar to Csikszentmihalyi's concept of the "autotelic personality".

Lance P. Hickey, Ph.D.: ‘Flow’ Experiences: The Secret To Ultimate Happiness? Ph.D. Lance P. Hickey 2011

Zhuangzi intimates that the flow-like experience can extend beyond the specific act of butchering to become a continuous state this is similar to Csikszentmihalyi's concept of the "autotelic personality".

Lance P. Hickey, Ph.D.: ‘Flow’ Experiences: The Secret To Ultimate Happiness? Ph.D. Lance P. Hickey 2011

Zhuangzi intimates that the flow-like experience can extend beyond the specific act of butchering to become a continuous state this is similar to Csikszentmihalyi's concept of the "autotelic personality".

Lance P. Hickey, Ph.D.: ‘Flow’ Experiences: The Secret To Ultimate Happiness? Ph.D. Lance P. Hickey 2011

Rejecting the autotelic meaning offered in the narrative in and of itself, these readings become attempts to bind it to an "objective reality" which, in a postmodernist view, does not exist.

Notes on Strange Fiction: Postmodern(ism) Hal Duncan 2008

If we read it simply as a pataphysical narrative, a fourth reading is possible, a reading that is not metaphysical but not entirely autotelic -- one in which, regardless of the context we project onto the events, it is understood as having something relevant to say as regards actual human relationships, about empathy and the lack thereof, about alienation and our capacity for cruelty.

Notes on Strange Fiction: Postmodern(ism) Hal Duncan 2008

Blowing up those bridges then, considering the film as a purely autotelic artwork, it is quite possible, I'd argue, to read the work as dealing wholly with symbols and the relationships between them: a deserted Metro station; a flick-knife; a murder; a deserted tower-block; a wife; a police commissioner; a strangler; and so on.

Notes on Strange Fiction: Postmodern(ism) Hal Duncan 2008

This is to say that narrative is essentially an act of figuration: its function is not to represent, but neither is it wholly autotelic; rather it is figurative, a crafting of idiom at a level higher and more abstract even than extended metaphor, at the level of stories -- which exist to revise the code, in Jakobson's terms, to establish new mappings between code and context.

Notes on Strange Fiction: Narrative's Function (1) Hal Duncan 2008

The autotelic text is a game of symbols, an artifice of ironic detachment, ludic or cynical, embodying an intellectual delight in the game for its own sake or an emotional disaffection in the absence of certainty.

Notes on Strange Fiction: Postmodern(ism) Hal Duncan 2008

By reading BUFFET FROID as part of the postmodernist project, it seems to me, we close off these "totalising" interpretations and leave only one valid reading of the text: as an autotelic artefact of darkly comic absurdity, the ironic distance of its vision the only tenable response in a postmodern era.

Notes on Strange Fiction: Postmodern(ism) Hal Duncan 2008

In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi pointed to a welder named Joe Kramer as an example of the “autotelic” personality – that is, someone who readily gets into a flow state at work, which then becomes an end in itself.

Your work is not your god: welcome to the age of the burnout epidemic Jonathan Malesic 2022