How can one live with & actively honor that we are of a radically open and spontaneously creative universe?
Living with = knowing that one cannot not act & one cannot know the outcome of acts in advance.
Living with is also an active understanding that this open & creative universe irreversibly moves into the new. It is generative in ways that are qualitatively transformative & irreversible. This allows us to embrace an ongoing participatory & adaptive active curiosity.
In this we are is actively & experimentally attentive to feedback:
- positive (pushing things into different, & perhaps new, dynamic states),
- negative (stabilizing a dynamic system) –
- and most importantly feedforward cycle – this is the semi-autonomy of novel systems that have their own propensities that can channel “the more fluid feedback dynamics according to their own stable arrangements” (Tomlinson).
Honoring = is to move away from both passive & reactive stances towards a creative universe. It is an experimental & deeply engaged approach.
What could this be in practice? To move beyond a reactive stance to a non-reactionary perspective/curiosity is to move away from strong forms of identity and representation – the "is" & "is not" (representation/identity). To say “this “is” a chair” in a definitive sense is to deny that it affords any number of possibilities that are only limited by possible relational engagements – & to close off ones engaged curiosity into the reality of “what else can this be? What else is this becoming?”
Such an approach requires experimental action that begins in blocking/refusing the “is” & “is not” – a stance that embraces the creative character of radical uncertainty & non-knowing that is inherent in the given.
It is an approach that understands that meaning is a practice – an experimental prespectival/situational achievement. And that meaning is immanent and enacted. It is not a given.
This is both an aesthetic and an ethical approach to creativity that is open to creatively embracing that:
- Our human creative processes are in and of many larger and smaller ongoing creative processes. Creativity involves sensing, probing, joining, following, surfing, activating, bending, tuning, connecting, exapting, blocking, co-emerging etc. — with what is already ongoing.
- Creative Processes are inherently Processual, Relational, Collaborative and Experimental.
- Creativity has leaps, sideways movements, gaps and qualitative transformations – and on the other side of which – you will not be “you”
- Creative processes do not determine in advance the goal or solution or even problem — creative processes are emergent — what happens is irreducible and different from the processes that led to the event of emergence.
