Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 136! Speculation, Qualitative Novelty, and Judgement...
Good Morning more-than-cognitive speculators,
It has been quite an important and moving week – The Haida Nation approved an agreement with the Canadian Government that recognizes its title to the lands of Haida Gwaii (a set of over a hundred islands off the west coast of Canada marked on maps for a brief period as the “Queen Charlotte Islands”). This is a great moment that has been a long time coming. Obviously, the Haida nation always knew that it had title to its own lands, but to have it finally recognized by Canada is the beginning of something quite new. It is a recognition that other worlds exist. And that other traditions of governance are possible.
I (Iain) remember vividly being on the same courthouse steps in 1991 in Vancouver when the Gitxsan Wet’suwet’en Elders came out of the court and responded to the BC Supreme Court Judge, Chief Justice McEachern, who delivered a verdict to their similar land claims case stating that they did not have a “reliable” history, actual institutions, and that they lived a life that was "nasty, brutish, and short” and thus could not claim to be a nation.
“It would not be accurate to assume that even pre-contact existence in the territory was in the least bit idyllic. The plaintiffs’ ancestors had no written language, no horses or wheeled vehicles, slavery and starvation was not uncommon, wars with neighbouring peoples were common, and there is no doubt, to quote Hobbs, that aboriginal life in the territory was, a best, ‘nasty, brutish and short,’”
It was a very painful moment. Now, thirty years later, while the work of change-making is long and ongoing – this moment is worth celebrating and supporting.
On our modest corner of things, we are writing this newsletter on the train back from Philadelphia, where we were facilitating a workshop: “Radically Innovating in the Face of an Unknowable Future,” at Rowan University with our frequent partner in creative crimes, Mina Zarfsaz:
Next Monday, we will be doing a workshop on innovation for start-ups in emerging markets – a challenging topic—with our friends and colleagues Helga Pattart and Niklas Weichbold at Techhouse in Vienna.
In this gap between these two events, we are feeling like it is time to take a nap—perhaps to write a little less this week. To let the rhythm of tracks and the rattling of the train as it shakes around the bends of the terrain lull us into dreams.
But, before slumber has its way, here is what we are thinking returning from this workshop:
Our workshop was on how we could develop the capacities of engaged experimental speculative judgment for innovation.
Now, speculation has most definitely become a buzzword. But that should not dissuade us from this wonderful word and its possible practices:
Isabel Stengers in Reclaiming Imagination: Speculative SF as an Art of Consequences, and others, notably Steven Shaviro (here is a great review he does on this topic), powerfully develop the importance of speculation as a key experimental tool, which has informed our practice.
That said, a valid worry is that the rich possibilities of speculation as an innovation practice can easily be reduced to a type of futures market logic. Much of the work in innovation that talks of “futures” and speculation can often seem like little more than a nightmarish vision, similar to the futures market of hedge funds. Here, all possible futures are known and up for sale—one hedged against the next—so whatever happens, the current winners will be the future winners.
But that is not the “speculation” that interests us. We are interested in practices that very much counter and rupture these trajectories. We are interested in the radical speculations that experimentally get us to the lived reality that other worlds exist and that new worlds are possible.
We are interested in how speculation can become a critical experimental tool in a process of co-emerging with forms of the new that exceed what we can imagine, pre-determine, and bet on (those seemingly known futures of speculative markets).
We are curious about how might speculation be an experimental activity that both exceeds or circumvents cognition and surfs its flights to give us new capacities of creative judgment.
Last week in our newsletter, we wrote about the “blocking” process as a critical innovation technique. In the newsletter, we offered a sketch of this technique to stress the importance of blocking the known and experimenting with unintended capacities in a co-emergent process that leads towards the qualitatively new.
Because of our interest in stressing the co-emergent process, we left things at a very general level, and did not focus on conceptualization processes. This week we want to go further into the details to give a sense of the experimental speculative give-and-take of what one might call “non-cognitive” experimentation and “abstract speculation” (that is very much conceptual and cognitive):
Let’s dive into where we began last week:
In an innovation process concerned with the qualitatively new, one begins by engaging with an “area of interest,” and in this engagement, one begins to disclose the existing intended purpose of things:
From there, the “blocking process” begins—we can simply block some level of function or purpose and begin to use things in ways that move in unintended directions (exaptation). And this is how we showed things last week in a three step process of (1) Engage and Block, (2) Experiment to develop unintended capacities, and (3) select and co-opt the most “interesting” of these:
But this focus on the unintended leaves out a key aspect of these early experiments—and how one should pay attention to and evaluate the outcomes of these early experiments.
How does one select the “most interesting”?
A key aspect, that we did not highlight last week, of one's early experimental engagements is to iteratively reveal, via blocking, more and more of the actual underlying logic of your area of interest:
As you speculatively reveal (via iterative blocking experiments) what the key existing processes, habits, and environments are, then and only then can one subject these judiciously to the same blocking process.
Why and what is “judicious”? Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in one of the most interesting books for reframing creativity and invention, A Thousand Plateaus, say, “Never believe that a smooth space will save us." Here they are contrasting the smooth and the striated. Striations are the things that give something a fixed form and logic; these are the things that we are experimentally blocking. But to try to block everything is to fall prey to hubris. The goal is not the dream of “infinite anythingness,” – that is a dangerous illusion. It is always necessary to “keep a piece of land"—to judiciously, iteratively test, block, and probe. To experiment, not everything can be blocked. Never fall for the all or nothing… We are testing and probing: what happens if…? We are seeking to be changed—to make a new path in walking.
And this process loops, iteratively disclosing unintended (exaptive) possibilities to be followed and existing logics to be blocked. Then we engage in judicious blocking. And it is this dual process that gives rise to the possibility of speculative judgment.
What is speculative judgment?
The key question that makes a judgment speculative is that it asks in the midst of an experiment:
“Is this novel unintended capacity worth following?”
How would one know? One cannot know this. Why?
Because its value cannot be determined in advance of what it might actually lead to. One has to co-emerge over some length of time with this unintended capacity in some particular context to make such a determination. Thus, one finds oneself inherently in a speculative position; one has to make a judgment from non-knowing.
How does one do this? Here, one can decide to follow what seems most interesting.
But what is “interesting”?
What is interesting is not what one likes or dislikes, feels good or bad, or is right or wrong. We need to experimentally put aside such judgments—the “judgements of God." (Deleuze writes brilliantly on this in the wonderful essay “To have done with judgment” in the collection: Essays Critical and Clinical.)
Rather, “interesting” is a form of speculative judgment that is made based on evaluating:
“What will potentially take us further away from the logic of what we are blocking?”
You are actively and experimentally asking: “Will engaging with this unintended capacity take me away from the known and what we are blocking?”
The speculative judgment is speculative; there is no way to prove it, but it is nonetheless a grounded judgment. How? It is informed by your experiments; it is never a pure thought exercise:
Your probes and experiments are never benign; it is critical to remember that you have been transformed by the doing. Part of this transformation and experimentation is the building of new practices, habits, and environments that emerge from the conjoined process of blocking (which involves an active dismantling) and following the unintended capacities (as novel affordances). You, and your environment have changed – and it is this difference – and your critical recognition of this difference is what grounds your ongoing speculative judgments. You are consciously, speculatively, and experimentally keeping an emerging difference alive.
Next Week: Speculation and Thresholds
Last week in the newsletter, we ended by focusing on the process of how these experiments are moving towards a novel co-emergent qualitative threshold:
“In all of these experiments (with which we are co-evolving) they are asking: “have we now crossed a qualitative threshold and developed a novel/disruptive approach to our matter of concern?”:
Next week, we are going to focus on the unique speculative techniques that can be used to engage with this key event in the qualitative innovation process.
Till then, we are taking a nap, the alarm is set to wake us before we find ourselves far north of the Hudson River, and the bike ride that will take us the last bit home will give us a chance to embrace the night—there is a moon somewhere up above in the clouds…
Stay active, experimental, speculative, and support other worlds—existent and still to come…
Till next volume 137,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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