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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 124! New Portraits of Creativity and the Self...
Good morning, friends of the rain,
It's wet out there – and this is just wonderful!
Some people pay a lot to go on challenging adventures into far-flung stormy mountains or aboard sailing crafts that take them on ventures far out into the tumultuous North Atlantic – but come late January, when we are on the western edge of the northern Atlantic – the winds are strong and the rain constant, so just getting on ones bike is a glorious adventure. Who needs the far-flung expedition? It is a joy to wake up and on hearing and seeing the rain – knowing that on this morning, a beautiful adventure awaits.
How can we be worried about a little rain? What is our morning shower but rain?
And, not to forget, we are, after all, just over half water.
Deliberately getting wet is, as Dianna and Mark McMenamin suggest in Hypersea, just part of the necessary consequences of life moving out of the oceans. For life to have creatively evolved to be able to come on land, it had to encapsulate the ocean inside of itself. Our life on land is an interconnected symbiotic assemblage of ways of internalizing the vast oceans. We are walking sacks of a neatly packaged ocean. Our salt tears we taste streaming down our cheeks, brought on by the strong winter winds as we bike in the rain, are nothing less than the salty ocean still flowing through us after hundreds of millions of years…
Rain, and this rainy season – however we approach it – is a wonderful moment. And to be able to step outside as watery bodies (and watery ecosystems) and feel the rain and wind – this is a wonderful gift.
Now, this early morning, as we sit inside, the windows are open, the rain falls inside ever so lightly on the wood floors, and the records of Kazuki Tomaokawa are spinning…
“ビッショリ汚れた手拭いを
腰にゆわえてトボトボと
死人でもあるまいに
自分の家の前で立ち止まり
覚悟を決めてドアを押す
地獄でもあるまいに
生きてるって言ってみろ
生きてるって言ってみろ
生きてるって言ってみろ”
Translated:
("A soaking wet, dirty towel
Tied around your waist, dripping
You’re not exactly dead
Standing in front of your house
Trying to make yourself push open the door
It’s not exactly hell
You’re alive, say it now!
You’re alive, say it now!
You’re alive, say it now!”)
The week was a hugely busy one for us. Many projects are underway, and we are in the thick of preparations for workshops, lectures, and other engagements – the spring and summer are already quite full.
It was also a great week for conversations – both in person and online. Often, people will tell us that they are impressed by how much we read (when, in actuality, we read only a modest amount). What really enables our own creative practice is not so much our reading – rather, it is conversations.
Every week, we will have 10-15 conversations with colleagues (new and old) globally. Most of these have no other purpose than friendship, shared curiosity, open exploration, and the conversation itself. We always find that things really happen in this vast world of ongoing creative processes when one says yes to pretty much everything in relation to the possibilities of dialog.
But, it would be remiss of us to leave the impression that conversations are first and foremost between people as we launch into this next series in our newsletter. Living is conversation. The dialog is vast. Chairs, bones, muscles, impressions, the rain, the keyboard, concepts… Lest we forget – these are our ever-present creative conversation partners as well.
Last week in the newsletter, we introduced – o, to be more accurate, we reintroduced the topic we were focused on last fall: how do we gain a meta-view of creative practices – and how can we best visualize these.
(And what we want to visualize is the conversations – the dance, the braiding of creative dialogues that are between, across, and within the muscles, rain, shared jokes, habits, tables, and oceans that make us and creatively make more than us…)
This week, we are going to review some of this (so you do not need to go back to the earlier newsletters). And push these concepts further.
BUT… just for reference, here are some links to how all of this evolved:
Let’s take a moment and remind ourselves how the historical models of Western creativity put the emphasis on the individual and what is inside that individual – their ideas. This gives rise to an approach that is focused on:
This mythology was front and center in the movie that we have been discussing over the last few newsletters, The Imitation Game and its glorification of Alan Turing, but it is also central to pretty much every retelling of a human innovation story. They begin with an individual, focus on their uniqueness, reference some internal quality of that person as the source of their creativity, and then put it in an adversarial context (them against the idiots).
Now, there is no doubt that human creative acts require individuals, and they require many acts of thinking. But, equally obviously, this alone does not get us to creative outcomes. So this week, let's start here with the individual and their thinking. The first key question for us in relation to human creativity is, “how should we understand the individual?” Is it enough to talk about the brain? – Or what is in the head?
Who and what is a thinking individual when they are engaged with creative processes?
Both thinking (cognition) and creativity are ecological processes. They are not “in the head” – they are intersubjective, embodied, materially extended, and environmentally embedded. Thus, to talk about an individual is to talk about an extended relational network. This network – what we refer to as an assemblage, loops through the body, practices, habits, tools, and environments.
(As somewhat of an aside, this process of “individuating” as an individual human is not that different from other forms of individuation – such as events (a riot), a movement, or a species… these are all dynamic, emergent ecosystemic processes).
For some, this claim is going too far, and it constitutes the very denial of the individual. But, just to be very clear on this point – we are not interested in denying the self – not even in a quasi-buddhistic sense.
There very much is a self – it is just that the self is far more distributed, dynamic, intrasubjective and ecological than we tend to understand ourselves to be. The self has no fixed and stable essence, and it is certainly not reducible to a brain.
Now, all of this could lead you to wonder – is this some arcane, esoteric armchair philosophers debate with no bearing on the practical and applied work of innovation? Nothing could be further from the truth. How we understand and engage with the self does matter immensely in relation to creativity. The classical Western approach reduces the space and locus of creativity to the internal realm of the genius. And we see this reflected in the most commonly recommended techniques that are suggested to augment human creativity. These are all pretty much limited to developing individual ideational flexibility – from lateral thinking training to abductive reasoning coaching… But if this model of the individual (and creativity) is wholly wrong from the perspective of the contemporary scientific approach of Enactive Cognition, then it behooves us to begin to build up a very different and far more effective approach to engaging with creative processes as what we are: embodied extended intra-subjective embedded and enactive beings of a specific historical world.
For us, a key tool in this project is to develop new ways of representing this more accurate and relevant portrait of ourselves. We would begin to draw the self in this manner:
Now, this representation is something most of us would recognize as the self – a discreet individual entity – just drawn in an odd, highly abstract diagrammatic manner using eccentric terminology. But this first drawing presents a very partial and highly incomplete portrait of our individuality. It is a good start, and it grounds us. But we need to add two more key aspects before we can talk about anything like a reasonable portrait of the self in relation to creative processes. Let’s quickly add these two elements and then unpack their importance.
1. We need to add other humans. As autonomous individuals, we are inherently intra-subjective:
In our diagrammatic portrait above, we represent this intra-subjective dimension of the self by adding one other self. To show more (multiple selves and communities of others, etc.) at this point would give us a far too complex and confusing drawing. But, nonetheless it is important to recognize that “intra-subjective” here means far more than just one other individual.
(A quick word on this term “intra” and why we say intra-subjective and not inter-subjective. Intra denotes the being “of” or being “within” something, while “inter” denotes the being between two things. As individuals, we are not simply between others – we are “of” our relation to others – we are made by these relations.)
Why is this important? Is it not the case that we as individuals always come to be in dialogue with others? What is different?
What we wish to stress is that you do not begin as a singular individual and then enter into relations with others. You begin intra-subjectively – of others (your mother and other caregivers, for example). And from this, you develop your individuality in new intra-subjective manners. You are never not intra-subjective.
To fall into the myth of individual vs. the social and understand the social as something that comes after the individual (and is composed of many distinct individuals) – is to radically misunderstand what it is to be a self and part of a collective. There simply is no human self separate from and prior to our relation to others. Our selfhood emerges from, with, and within a creative dynamic of others.
Let's now add our third dimension: the environment. Given the complexity of our environments, we are going to do this in two steps (again, we are sketching this portrait at a very abstract level). First, let's consider our most immediate environment. For this, we use the wonderful term coined by Tim Ingold: a taskspace.
2. By taskspace, we mean (1) how we are transformatively extended by the tools we use, from language to hammers and TikTok apps, and (2) how we are embedded in specifically constructed landscapes (a task-relevant space). These landscapes are always nested – think of how we move through our houses from one specific task space (the bedroom) to the next (the bathroom).
But, an understanding of the role of the environment in the co-construction/co-creation of the self cannot end with the articulation of a taskspace.
Taskspaces are embedded in larger physical and conceptual dynamic (processual) environments:
The larger environment of social systems needs to be taken into account in all of its historical specificity. We use the term that Michel Foucault gives for this larger environment: Apparatus:
“What I'm trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements."
The Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben usefully extends the definition in more enactive directions:
"I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. … the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones, and—why not—language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses—one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face."
An apparatus, is thus the actual relation dominant network and its emergent immanent logic. It is what one could properly call the apparatus of worldmaking – of making a specific historical world and way of being alive.
What does this portrait/visualization help us sense (so far) about the self in relation to creative practices?
First, we can anticipate an immediate rebuttal: all you have done is place the classical idea of the individual more carefully in its full context – but it is still just an old-fashioned individual! How does adding the context really change things – especially in relation to creativity?
It is a fair question.
Our answer, in a nutshell, is that environments – ecosystems don’t just support the independent workings of the agents within them. Ecosystems or assemblages play a far more constructive and creative role in producing the agents that act with a form of autonomy within them. It is important to see that what would normally be understood to be “external” – merely the “context” – and defined as things that simply “support” the ongoing cognitive or creative activity that is happening “in” the head/brain are in fact critical “internal” aspects of this ecology of the self – and as such they are critical, creative agents in the making of us as potentially “creative” agents within a system.
This is why last week in the newsletter, we drew on the work of John Protevi, who has argued that the specific social systems, such as the vast network of groups, systems, and tools that worked in an integrated fashion to creatively crack the German codes during the second world war, had a creative emergent logic that arose from its constituent components. And this emergent logic was ultimately 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 is more correct to say that the ecosystemic processes invent their subjects rather than the other way around.
Here, understanding what is meant by emergence is critical. Relation dominant networks, such as what we have been describing as what the individual is enmeshed in, give rise via non-linear processes to emergent outcomes that are distinct from and irreducible to their component parts. But the logic of emergence does not end there – additionally, emergent processes have the capacity to shape/make their component parts (what is termed system causation). Put simply, the tightly integrated networks that we are all enmeshed within have the causal capacity to creatively form us.
Here is where it gets most interesting: We are in a paradoxical situation where we can shape our environment, and in turn, our environment shapes us. And the paradox emerges in that there is no beginning to this process: we who are creatively shaping our environment are already the creative outcomes of the environment shaping us!
Further, it is not just one loop that is in play – it is not just “us” and an “environment." We need to consider the following in relation to creative processes:
– And here we are sketching a portrait in broad and very loose brush strokes – closer to Hakuin Ekaku than Jeff Wall. Ultimately, the specificities of “context” are radically creatively determinate.
Coming back to where we started, our thinking and our creativity do not sit inside the head – rather, they emerge from the middle of the dynamics of the system (of which we are very much an active participant – but one who is also the creative outcome of the system).
Creativity is thus an activity that is always and only practiced “from the middle." It is a “worldly” practice and not an internal private process.
For us, given our long problematic Western history of an internalized subjectivity and creativity, it is quite useful to be provocative: thus, we could often put it this way: “We are not creative – the ecosystem is creative."
Obviously, this could lead to new confusions if we do not recognize that
(Perhaps a better image would be of the snake giving birth to itself as it consumes itself?)
To recognize the creative agency of the paradoxical ecosystem-self dance that is without beginning or end, and where everything happens in and of the middle, is to shift the focus of creativity from making individuals and their “brains'' more open-minded, better lateral thinkers (etc.) and other such internally directed individualistic activities. These are all charming, enjoyable, and perhaps somewhat useful activities. But what creative processes require of us is a shift towards distributed relational practices – we need to strategically participate in the co-shaping of active ecologies that give rise to qualitatively novel outcomes – outcomes that include new and different versions of ourselves.
To conclude, it is important to recognize that this is a shift to paying attention to what thinking and creativity have always been – embodied, extended, embedded, intrasubjective, and enactive. What is different now is that now we can actively acknowledge and actively participatively embrace this reality – others matter, tools matter, habits and practices matter, ways of feeling and sensing matter, environments matter, processes matter – not because they will “support” “our” special and unique individual creativity but because they are creativity – and they will make us differently as they give rise to different futures from the middle…
Well, this rainy morning has emerged from the night. The day is upon us. It is time to pause and close the windows, dry the floors, let Kazuki Tomokawa finish, and prepare to hop on the bike and head uphill to the first conversation of the day. We wish you a glorious, distributed, emergently creative week. Stay in the middle, and next week, we will pick up the story from where we have left it and go further into emergence, the potentialities of the new, and how we can really push systems.
Till Volume 125,
Keep Your difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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