Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 126! What Came First – Creativity or the Egg?
Good Morning, becomings of an early spring or a late fall depending on which pole of the earth you find yourself in proximity.
It is that time of year again (and again) – newness is in the air: A very happy new year! Tomorrow is another new year, 4722 by the Chinese Calendar – and the year of the Dragon. We hope that it is a creative one for you.
In other festive news: this coming from the eccentric corners of the John Cage world: John Cage’s composition Organ2, As Slow As Possible, is being performed in a church in Halberstadt, Germany, over a 639-year period. It is in its twenty-third year of performance, and this last week, it had its first significant change in sound in two years.
With the start of each new year, where we take a moment to reflect on our lives and our creative practices, it is equally important to reflect on how we are socially creatively engaged. Much is happening globally that requires us to be actively engaged with great courage and innovation: remember that other worlds are possible – organize, participate, support, boycott, and invent collectively new ways of being alive – it is never just about ourselves or economics.
This week, we are going to do what we promised last week:
“Next week, we will introduce human examples and add more concrete details (and nuance) to this approach.” So, this newsletter is all about developing a concrete human example of the ecological emergent nature of creativity.
But before we jump headfirst into this, let's step back and remind ourselves of the bigger context: Over the last few newsletters, we have been developing an argument for an alternative approach to creativity. We began from the very famous and entirely untrue story of how the creative genius of one man (Alan Turing) cracked the German secret codes during World War Two and almost single-handedly shortened the war by years. This ubiquitous myth of heroic creativity is powerfully told as a “true story” in the movie The Imitation Game (well worth watching to understand the power of this myth). This story makes a perfect case study for us, both because it is such a compelling retelling of the heroic individualistic mind-centered myth of radical creativity, and because there is so much documentation of what really happened.
What really happened? What was the actual creative process?
We have been slowly unpacking this over the last three newsletters. But why so slow? Well, our real interest is not in disproving this historical fable or critiquing one Hollywood movie – five minutes on Wikipedia does that astonishingly well in regards to the facts of the matter. Our real goal is to develop a new way of Understanding, Visualizing, and Activating the Full Scope of Creative Processes. And this takes a little more time…
If you wish, you can go back to the previous newsletters (123, 124, 125) to review the whole development of this argument. But, to keep things moving forward, we have summarized the larger argument down to three key points.
So, what is the actual creative process?
Let's take a moment to visualize this in a simple manner and remind ourselves of the key concepts and terminology that we are referencing in these three points.
Last week, we used this diagram (and the example of birds – crows, to be specific) as a way to visualize the creative process. Let's take a moment to unpack it:
This process “begins” at the bottom of the diagram:
Now, as we said last week – this diagram is highly abstract.
How can we relate this to our actual individual lives?
Our favorite example to introduce this is cooking. For most of us, pretty much every day we are involved in the creative processes of cooking.
Now, while Jason and I both love cooking – we are by no means the most creative of cooks (though we do try). And this is important to our story: Creative processes don’t just lead to radical outcomes – all activity, even the most prosaic, involves creativity.
What do we mean by this? Think about how each event that makes up our lives must itself be made. Everything, no matter how banal and mundane, must be created. Here, we are connecting creation in the sense of everyday making to creativity (in the sense of making something new and different). What is the connection between mundane creation and creativity? Each act of everyday making is very much an act of making something new – even if it is only indiscernibly different. Still, with every action, something new and different comes into being. A key part of our argument is that by understanding the creative nature of our modest everyday incremental creativity first, it gives us a clear way to approach the question of “how can we be radically creative?” latter.
Now, aside from making toast, nothing could be simpler than boiling an egg. Let’s use this example to engage with the process and diagram we laid out last week. To start, we are going to ignore the upper part of the diagram (and the virtual field of possibilities). Our focus this week is going to be on the lower ecological part of the diagram:
There are six key aspects to this part of the diagram of the creative process. The numbers in the diagram correspond to the description below:
Now, let's go from the abstract logic of the above diagram to our creative routine of boiling an egg. We can map every aspect of the process of boiling an egg in essentially the same diagram:
Again, the numbers in the diagram correspond to the numbered points below. The creative act of boiling an egg can be understood as a six-step process:
Now, one could argue that this story of creativity, while perhaps overly complicated, sounds both quite reasonable and actually not very different from the heroic story of creativity.
Why is this? One could reasonably argue: “Of course, if one wishes to boil an egg, many things are required. But, as with the boiled egg – with each of these things: the pot, the stove, the sink – was it not someone's creative invention? At every turn, someone is doing the original work of inventing.”
So – How then does this ecological and emergent approach actually get us away from heroic creativity?”
What is critical to answering this argument is that all these distributed processes (the pot, water, stove, boiling, etc.) are not ones that simply “support” the activities of an independent subject doing what it wishes to do. Rather, they are processes that constitute the subject and the very possibility of a boiled egg.
To leave behind the heroic individualistic approach to creativity, we need to understand the constitutive (i.e., creative) role of ecosystems and their processes in the production of both the possibilities of our actions and our very selves that act. Our ecologies make us as they make our possibilities.
The critical mistake is to both assume that there is an autonomous subject and that this subject independently directs the creative process. But if there is no autonomous subject directing things, what is going on? How does anything happen?
When we get really close to what is happening as we actually boil an egg, we will see that there is a flow of energies within and between various very different things: Eggs in shells lowered carefully with a spoon into water that is in an aluminum pot on a stove at a certain temperature. All of this moves as a relational system: Here on the stove, energies are moving through relational processes, and as they do, they are being transformed into agency.
What does “agency” mean in this context? Agency here means that the relational state of the whole system (human + environment) gives rise for specific emergent opportunities for action (affordances). The individual is not independently determining or ideating these opportunities. The opportunities for soft, medium, or hard boiling are co-created by the total state of the system.
In this regard, the egg is not something that is directed or ordered from the outside (by the chef) into a final form: “egg becomes the perfect boiled egg!”. Rather, the continuous reciprocal tuning of a system (which includes the egg and the chef) to a certain dynamic state, coaxes an egg towards an emergent threshold of moving into a congealing process.
The process is expressive and active – for example, if the water boils too strongly too soon, the egg will jostle against the pot, cracking and leaking. This will not become a boiled egg, no matter how strong the will of the chef. To cook an egg – or anything for that matter – one must attune to, attend to, and follow emergent signs and system propensities.
What does it mean to “attune” – if not to change oneself?
To boil an egg – one becomes subject to the process. And to “become subject to” a process is to allow its creative agency to shape you. This is not “just” a super vague and general shaping of ideas or sensibilities. Muscles build, movement and agility transforms. Sight, hearing, feeling, smell, and action collectively reconfigure themselves. Nerves rewire, and even the expression of genes will vary. Becoming a chef involves submitting to becoming subject to being created at a cellular level by the event of cooking.
The thing is – we want to retain agency – especially “creative” agency. As creatives, we want to believe what we are taught to believe – and that is that “we orchestrated this," and we are ultimately responsible for the creative outcomes. We want to believe that we invented the pots, the pans, the kitchen, the purpose of it all – and most obviously, that some particular creative human is responsible for this boiled egg. But are we?
While we clearly have a subjective sense of independent agency, this agency is an illusion. And an unhelpful one at that. There can be no agency apart from the action of a dynamic, active ecosystem. Agency is not an inherent feature or property of anyone or anything. There is no agency distinct from action and no action distinct from a dynamic ecosystem. Agency is always the emergent product of ecological engagement.
The fundamental mistake the heroic approach to creativity is making is to see the world as passive and that humans are both above and outside of things, relations, processes, and events. Did metal have nothing to say in the creation of the pot? Did the self-organizing flows of crystallization of molten metal passively await an external and fully imposed process of forming it into the shape of a pot? What of the egg? What of the relational creative processes that allows it to congeal with the right application of heat?
This mistake of denying the agency of the event is an easy one to make when one approaches reality from the perspective of fully established patterns and outcomes. For one, the total process of making boiled eggs is well established. Making a boiled egg can feel like it is just a question of having an idea and then executing an established plan that will reliably give you a seemingly predetermined outcome. And from this conclusion, it is a short step to articulating all creative processes as: ideate, plan, and impose.
But this reading backward from the outcome of a highly formalized ecosystem and process as a way to understand how anything actually comes about is precisely what gives rise to this illusion of independent human agency and the impositional heroic model of creativity.
Creative processes and any useful understanding of them – must read the process forward. And to read the process forward is to start in the middle. It is to start not with the heroic author but with the relational dynamics of an ecosystem.
In the above diagram (redrawn below), this process of following the “middle” is represented by the light blue arrow of emergence – it comes out of the active relational dynamics of the whole and feeds back transformatively through each aspect of it – the assemblage, taskspace, the tools, the self, and the outcome (which itself loops back into the ecosystem):
And this brings us to the real problem with the heroic approach to creativity – it is not that it rests upon a series of illusions. After all, illusions and self-deception can be pragmatically useful for all sorts of outcomes. No, the real problem is that it profoundly divorces us from the possibility of actually becoming an active participant in the whole of the creative process. To place ourselves outside and above the process – and to render the world mute… – that is a tragedy – we have alienated and divorced ourselves from what we are permanently and inherently a part of – this dynamic relational world… via the hubris of will, authorship, and domination.
To place ourselves outside and above the process – and to render the world mute… – that is a tragedy – we have alienated and divorced ourselves from what we are permanently and inherently a part of – this dynamic relational world… via the hubris of will, authorship, and domination.
How do we stay in the middle? How do we “re-enter” the stream? How do we become “of” creative processes? This is both an existential question and a methodological question.
Next week, we will turn to the methodological aspects – especially in regards to how creative systems produce and engage with the “virtual,” – which is to say, the inherent potentiality in the emergent configurations of ecosystems.
For this week, we end with the existential question. With the beginning of a new year – this Year of the Dragon, perhaps it is time for a change? Perhaps we can transform our sense of ourselves as author, originator, and form giver?
“The body of the dragon concentrates energy in its sinuous curves, and coils and uncoils to move along more quickly. It is a symbol of all the potential with which form can be charged, a potential that never ceases to be actualized. The dragon now lurks in watery depths, now streaks aloft to the highest heavens, and its very gait is a continuous undulation. It presents an image of energy constantly recharged through oscillation from one pole to the other.
The dragon is a constantly evolving creature with no fixed form; it can never be immobilized or penned in, never grasped. It symbolizes a dynamism never visible in concrete form and thus unfathomable. Finally, merging with the clouds and the mists, the dragon's impetus makes the surrounding world vibrate: it is the very image of an energy that diffuses itself through space, intensifying its environment and enriching itself by that aura.
The dragon is one of China's richest symbols, and many of its most essential meanings have served to illustrate the importance attributed to “shi” in the creative process. Tension at the heart of a configuration, variation through alternation, inexhaustible transformation and animating power: all are aspects embodied by the dragon as it surges forward, and all are features of the method at work in Chinese aesthetic creation.” (Francois Jullien The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China.)
A happy Year of the Dragon – may the dragon, merging with the clouds and the mists, make the surrounding world vibrate – till next week...
Keep Your difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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