Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 123! Creativity and Innovation Newsletter Cover Image for Volume...
Good morning ecosystems within ecosystems striving towards becoming other,
Here, it has been snowing off and on all week. Ice, rain, snow, sleet, and freezing winds…
This frozen urban landscape makes for new forms of attending to how our bodies and the environment join into surprising actions. There is a new seeing-feeling-balancing-shuffle going on. Or, to put it far more prosaically – there is a lot of slipping going on! Our center of attention has moved to the soles of our feet, and it radiates up to hips and shoulders in unexpected ways…
One experience that was really illuminating in all of this vernacular-but-avant-garde ice-inspired dancing with disaster happened a few weeks ago when we were in Montreal. On one very cold evening, we hiked up Mont Royal, it was steep and very icy – everyone was sliding, slipping, dancing, and falling (there was quite a crowd as it was such a clear evening). It was quite comical in just how many of us were splaying into new postures as we slipped downhill backwards pirouetting past each other. But then a runner just blasted through us. She was cruising downhill wearing spiked runners. With her headlamp bobbing, it was as if she was in and of another world.
And in a very real sense, she was. Her assemblage and its emergent affordances were of a differing reality. Deleuze, in a very different context (speaking beautifully about how ticks have a world (starting at 7’.35”)) gets precisely at this phenomenon. We are of a world, and too often, we can imagine that very radical things have to change (like becoming a differing creature) to experience being of a differing world. But tools, as simple as spikes for our shoes, change this world and our very beings quite dynamically. We are of our assemblages. If in doubt, the ice awaits…
Moving far from the comic in speaking of worlds, we need to turn to those that make our worlds. Over these last couple of weeks our worlds shrank in very painful ways. This winter, two very dear friends died.
Last week, our friend and colleague, Diane Ragsdale died quite suddenly. She was a great experimentalist, catalyst, activist, and philosopher of beauty in all of its fullness – in the fullness, Whitehead suggests, “beauty is a wider, and more fundamental notion than truth." She was a recent friend – we bonded over a shared love of John Cage – and an equally recent colleague of ours who was ever curious, open, and committed to the knowledge that in every occasion, something more and different was always still possible (this is a rare gift). In all of our collaborations with her she pushed us to go further – especially in terms of developing an enactive felt practice of creativity.
She played many important roles in the performing arts and arts education (this obituary does a good job of getting at how much she did). Another colleague of hers, Tim Cynova, just found, edited, and posted this recording he did with her a few years back. It is both a wonderful and moving obituary – and in it she wrestles with many of the very real questions we need to address around justice, reconciliation, and transformative change-making that should be central to all innovation practices.
Diane changed us, and we miss her deeply.
Early this January, the artist Pope.L died. Pope.L was a friend and someone we collaborated with. I find it quite hard to write about him even though we rarely saw each other in the last few years – it feels as if there is still not enough distance – for he was one of those truly rare individuals whom you could never predict what they would say. To be with him was to be part of a totally open creative activity. I hold dear and close in my memory all the challenging drink-spitting laughter and head-snapping dialog we shared. Years ago, as part of the collective spurse, we collaborated with him on the designing and fabricating of his project The Black Factory. Later, we collaborated on a writing project. He was a force, who astonishingly skillfully participated in producing the most charged of situations – bringing together the most mundane of things and actions in a way that was explosively real – power, race, absurdist humor, and your full personhood colliding. We don’t want to think of him as gone yet…
Neither of them…
Last week, we were looking critically at how creative outcomes are far too often reduced to the acts of individuals – and usually geniuses at that. Our jumping-off point was the movie The Imitation Game, which told a fabulous but totally untrue story about how one man, Alan Turing, saved the free world by his creative genius in almost single-handedly cracking the impossible-to-crack secret German codes during World War II.
We contrasted this wonderful fable with the actual history to discuss how creativity is, in reality, an emergent, distributed, and ecosystemic phenomenon. The creativity involved in cracking the German codes was not the work of one person, nor was it the work of a group of individuals – it was the emergent outcome of an ecosystem – an ecosystem that included many groups, all sorts of technologies, environmental events, practices, concepts and much besides (what elsewhere we have termed an “assemblage”). To reduce the non-linear emergent outcome of cracking the codes to one person or even one group would be to misunderstand how causality (and, in this case, how creativity) works.
This Newsletter led directly to a couple of interesting discussions during the week. One of our readers asked us about human agency:
“even if the inventions and creativity cannot be reduced to any one individual, and the outcome was a team effort – someone had to organize, manage and oversee the team. Would it not be proper then to give them “credit” for the cracking of the German codes?”
It is a very reasonable question. And it is a variation of a question we often get about the role of management in creative ecosystems. The first thing to say is that, of course, we are not denying that individuals have important roles to play and that they contribute immensely to outcomes (such as cracking the German secret codes). But to pick out any one person, event, or aspect of the situation as being “the cause” would be false. And it would be equally false to assign some kind of ranking or percentage score in regards to the importance of any one person, group or event. Neither of these is how causality works in such nonlinear complex situations. The short answer is that in a very real sense, complex systems lead in nonlinear ways to emergent practices, and these have the quality of “systems causation” or what is sometimes referred to as “downward causation” in which they (the emergent outcome) shapes their component parts.
Importantly, we need to go further in reframing human agency, in this we can paraphrase John Protevi, who argued that from the perspective of emergence, specific social systems, such as the vast network that creatively cracked the German codes, have an emergent logic that arises from its constituent components. And this emergent logic as it arises is not wholly distinct from its components – it is immanent in the components, and as such, one can say that “the individuals involved are unique crystallizations of systems, or more prosaically, we grow up in systems that form us.” (Protevi, Edges of the State). Thus, it would be more correct (and wonderfully ironic) to say that the creative processes of breaking the codes invented the code-breakers rather than the other way around.
All of this brings us back to Volume 116 of the Newsletter (which we published way back in late November). This was an important Newsletter for us, in that it laid out in some detail how one could understand, visualize, and engage with this question of a highly distributed emergent approach to creativity.
While the example that we were exploring back in Volume 116 was the Mongol War Machine, the issues are the same as the ones that arise with the role of creativity in the cracking of the German codes. And so it is to Volume 116 that we wish to return.
In Volume 116, we termed the individual genius approach – “essentialist." It is essentialist in as much as it reduces causality to one essential source (which in the history of creativity is usually the unique brain of some genius – in the case of The Imitation Game, it is Alan Turing). And our alternative ecological-emergent approach we termed an “assemblage approach” (drawing upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus).
This newsletter has a lot to say about this question of individualism/essentialism vs a distributed emergent alternative – so let’s jump back into this newsletter right in the middle of telling the story of how the Mongol assemblage of horse+steppes+stirrup+rider+compound bow creatively changed history. Here is how we answered the question of agency:
Is it not the case that someone had to have the idea of the stirrup and then make it? Here, we see a further critical distinction between essentialist approaches and an assemblage approach – and this is in regard to agency.
In essentialist approaches, agency is given to the human subject. And the agency is treated as an internal property. Unique individuals possess unique powers – this might be attributed to foundation differences in their mindset, intellectual or creative capacities, etc. But it is something essential to them. The argument is that unique individuals can see things others do not and can ideate new things where others cannot.
But, the assemblage approach rightfully understands agency to be an emergent property of the assemblage. How is this the case? It is only through the assemblage of a horse + saddle + stirrup + steppes that the potential for certain unique and new potential actions is afforded. That a horse rider could stand reasonably still or even pivot as the horse maneuvers is only possible because of the assemblage. Yes, it takes a subject to realize or even experiment in ways that would allow the novel affordances to come to be sensed. But who is that subject? Are they not already the co-shaped and the co-emergent outcome of a horse + person + steppes assemblage? And is the world that this subject meets and connects with ever actually passive? No, it too is an assemblage with agency. The Steppes have agency, the horse has agency, metals have agency… In every case, in every direction, one analyzes one finds continuous reciprocal causation of assemblages entangling with assemblages. Our very human processes of ideation are not coming from some internal source, but, like all thinking is emerging from the middle of an assemblage. Living as a horse + person + steppes assemblage gives rise to certain feelings, sensations, and hutches that emerge from the midst of activity. And these propel/compel new experimental connections…
The assemblage affords… and what it affords gives rise to novel forms of agency.
Now, we could easily translate this in the case of the Allied efforts to crack the German codes creatively. It would, most certainly, be a very different assemblage – but the logic would be the same. And we would have the same conclusion: the creative agency to crack the code was an emergent property of the dynamic assemblage.
But we cannot stop here. How is it that we understand ourselves to be such unique agents? How is it that we so deeply feel and even know ourselves to be at the center of the story? How is it that we come to extract out of the assemblage an “Alan Turing” and make him the agent and cause? It is certainly not because we are stupid or simply duped by an illusion.
Something very real about our experience allows us to put ourselves at the center. This something is the process by which dynamic processes stabilize into concrete things, and these things then “just” work. And in working seamlessly they afford us the capacity to successfully do something in a repeatable fashion such that they fade into invisibility.
Think of the difference between the women running on steep ice at night in Montreal. With spiked shoes, the ice, the trail, and even the shoes and their spikes disappear from the experience, and a sense of the flow “just running” takes over.
To experience the distributed assemblage nature of experience, we have to return to the moment when an assemblage first affords us some novel capacity. For example, in going from dangerously slipping on the ice to slipping on a pair of spiked traction devices – in this action we experience the production of a novel assemblage and the emergence of new affordances. But this experience is one that fades in action.
Let's go back to Volume 116 and further explore this phenomenon. Here we are back with the relation to how the experimental assemblage of rider + horse + saddle + proto-stirrups meets a landscape (the Steppes) – really re-meets this landscape anew because of additions to the assemblage (e.g., stirrups):
“Because of the meeting of this assemblage with the landscape a novel set of affordances emerges as potentialities ( a field of potentials is emerging). As exploration and experimentation develop, potential affordances stabilize in actions.
For example, the stirrup affords the potential of extending one's legs to raise the body away from the horse – as this is done spontaneously, it leads towards a more formalized practice of standing and twisting while riding at full gallop to become realized.
And as these affordances stabilize into practices – enabling relations develop.
These enabling relations are what are often termed “constraints." As we mentioned last week – constraints are not physical things (like, for example, a pair of handcuffs). Rather, they are emergent configurational properties of the assemblage that make certain affordance potentialities more likely than others. The stirrup + person + horse + steppes assemblage enables and, in doing so, constrains what practices are more likely (for example, it is no longer possible to slide one's body down one side of the horse).
As this process evolves in repeated action, affordances stabilize. Early on, as assemblages entangle, affordances emerge as a potential field of possible actions. They are vague and more felt or sensed than recognized and explicitly understood. As riders, we sense standing while riding as something that pulls us upright for longer and longer periods as we gallop. Then, we make changes to the parts of the assemblage to further this affordance. We train our bodies, reshape our saddles and stirrups, work with our horses differently, and ride new lines across a landscape. The pull of a future takes hold. And as affordances stabilize iteration by iteration of reciprocal co-causation, the potential field of affordances “naturalizes” into a reality – “this is what we do” – “this is what this is” – “this is what reality is."
Affordance potentiality and object become one. Affordance potentiality and activity become one. The chair becomes sitting, and the stirrup becomes riding.
From the perspective of everyday awareness, assemblages themselves stabilize, calcify, and disappear into things. The assemblage fades from recognition, and we interact with “things” – e.g., a horse as if there was no assemblage – for saddles, stirrups, landscape, and even self disappear into a seamless activity “riding a horse.”
And it is here, from the perspective of a type of everyday awareness that takes for granted the fixity of things, that an essentialist approach can emerge – and we become the central protagonists of what should always be a far more distributed, entangled, and emergent story. But the emergence of a fixity in experience does not have to be felt or understood in this manner.
But it is a hard and humbling lesson for many of us to swallow – the decentering and redistributing of our agency and very sense of selfhood: “Embodied cognitive science tells us that the processes that bring about our experience of the world, including our sense of self, are dynamic, distributed in space and time, and extend across the complex couplings of the brain, the rest of the body, and the environment. Although it may seem as if there’s a single, abiding inner self that functions as the controller of the mind, what we call “the mind” is a collection of constantly changing, emergent processes, in which we find no single, abiding, and controlling self.” (Evan Thompson, Why I Am Not A Buddhist.)
But as hard as this is to swallow, it is even harder (after swallowing our pride and giving up our pride-of-place at the center of all things) to develop a new set of habits, practices, awareness, and tools (both conceptual and physical) that work with and of assemblages, emergence, and far more distributed forms of agency. It is far too easy to fall back on some version of individual-as-creative-genius approach because of the linkages between our experience of when things work seamlessly and how we have made a world via tools, practices, concepts, and environments – in short, an assemblage in which this logic constantly emerges.
Over the next couple of weeks we are going to expand on the approach that we began to develop in the final Newsletter Series of 2023 (Volumes 114-117). This is what we promised at the end of Volume 117 – after the New Year, we would return to continue the meta-creativity series. The focus will shift to dive deep into the meta processes involved in the emergence of disruptive and transformative creative processes Our focus will be on how to play with assemblages via exaptive probing towards developing feedforward cycles.
But, right now, it has been over two months since we started this series and over a month since we paused it for the winter holidays. While this week offered a review of the core logic and rationale for this approach – it is worth going back into this series (if you have the time):
This meta-creativity series began with Volume 114: New Tools for Visualizing Creative Practices. Here, we introduced a way of visually conceptualizing creative processes and how the various concepts are all connected. Volume 115: Tools for engaging reality from the perspective of Creativity. Here, we evolved and modified the initial concepts. Volume 116: The Virtual Fields of Creativity. This is the newsletter we quoted from extensively in this issue, and it was intended to serve as a concrete example of the approach. Volume 117: Resources for an Experimental Reimagining of Creativity. Here, we presented some fun and diverse resources for the development of a meta-view of creative processes and their visualization. If you have the time and inclination – they are really worth the read (and if you are short on time, we would suggest reading volumes 115 and 116).
Well – as we close out for the week, we would just like to say that we are really excited for this upcoming series – we have been working hard on it in the background over the last few months. We have been especially focused on developing a new and better visual language, making the processes more clear and connecting all the disparate components into a coherent whole.
Till next week – enjoy your distributed emergent natures and those of all that are dear, beautiful, and significant in your worlds.
Keep Your difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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