The shift from seeing large-scale societal difference as merely a question of differing worldviews to recognizing it to be one of ontologically differing worlds is a profound ethical question. And it is equally a profound question about how we should conceptualize creativity. Ethically universalizing styles of judgment erase the other. They involve a colonial perspective — they subsume or colonize (erase) ontological difference to be simply one perspective. And from the perspective of creativity, they colonize the future to make it mere variations of the present.
It bears repeating: Other worlds exist, and yet other worlds are possible. World is always plural: worlds.
If other worlds exist then innovation and creativity practices have much to reconsider. Here are some preliminary thoughts:
We cannot speak for everyone — this is both an ethical and aesthetic creative stance: there is no final external measure to judge a world — judgment is always immanent to a practice – a world (in the making).Universal practices and assumptions cannot continue: practices like Human Centered Design are problematic forms of a universalizing (colonial) practice that we need to move out of.
Innovation needs to assume an ethical principle of “Ontological Self-Determination” and creativity needs to assume “Ontogenetic Self-Determination” (This is a concept borrowed from the Brazilian Anthropologist Viveros de Castro).
That other worlds exist is an “ontological” challenge — it challenges what it is “to be” (the study of which is termed “ontology”). This challenge asks of us a new type of engaged listening — a listening that does not begin with the urge to translate, empathize, generalize, or assist (the practices of difference-in-degree). It is a far more active “listening” — for if worlds cannot be fully explicated but only understood via immersive practice — then we need to become far more engaged.
Our engagements and listening need to take on the form of alliance and diplomacy — a negotiation between differences which acknowledge that the difference cannot be erased. (A fundamental underdeveloped aspect of creativity is diplomacy — the acknowledging and negotiating of creative ontological difference differing).
Empathy cannot be a first principle or practice — it assumes too much (e.g. that we already understand what it is to experience what they experience).
Creativity begins in caring for difference — for other modes of being alive.
Creativity begins in recognizing that all of our universal terms (including creativity) are of a world and a historical mode of being alive.
Creativity is an aesthetic and an ethical project. Aesthetic in that it involves the creation of new worlds and ethical in that it involves the creation of new worlds in a reality of many worlds.
Worldmaking is fundamental to innovation, creativity, politics, aesthetics, and ethics.
