Emerging Futures - Volume 143: Towards a New Sensibility for Creative Engagements

Good morning beings of the event of morning reading,

Last week we left you with a big question: could we step away from causality? And framed this with question with quite a provocative quote from François Jullien:

“The idea of causality… has so dominated European thought that we have not emerged from this framework and explanatory regime, which acts as a powerful lever, especially in the realm of physical knowledge, in a way that remains unsuspected until our modernity…  what if this had no other justification than our “habit” alone?”

Obviously, as he notes, this is only a provocative quote if you (as we do) come from a historical context that has been shaped by the habits, tools and environments of causality as a practice. But – why not ask this question:

‍Is the reason for our deep entanglement with causality as a framework justified beyond being a habit?

Further can we ask:

‍Do we need a causal framework?

‍Are there other ways of engaging with action and change that do not utilize causality?

Jullien is drawing upon the historical resources of Chinese and East Asian traditions to make this argument, for these are traditions that have a framework other than causality. He terms this “propensity." And draws upon the language of “disposition,” “inclination,” “configuration,” “discernment,” etc. to suggest a way to actively move out of a causal framework (this work shares much with the work of Roger T. Ames and Mercedes Valmisa that we have referenced in the past). 

Why does this shift matter in regards to creative practices and processes? For us, our approach to creativity involves a radical critique and shift away from a human centered, idea driven, essentialist, and causal approach to creativity—in short, “the God model." The God model of independent ideation and then willing it so is very much the implicit operating model of most of the creativity and innovation consultancy landscape today. 

This approach gets everything wrong about creativity: Creativity is not a human attribute but an ongoing worldly phenomenon. 

And it is one that we can skillfully participate in, but we are neither the authors nor the controlling agents of its emergence. The God model is a causal model of the most transparent form: the innovator ideates and then makes it so. Thus, if we are interested in change and how change comes about, it requires us to consider how we extricate ourselves from a causal framework with all of its tools, techniques, logics, and environments—in short, its mode of being alive.

‍

This approach to creativity is part of a long “essentialist” approach to understanding action and change that is part of causality. The assumption in this approach is that for something to happen, there must be a cause, and that this cause comes from a deep and singular source. Last week in the newsletter, we discussed this logic: 

‍

To begin to step away from causality as a Copernican transformation requires a fundamental shift in practices, habits, tools, environments, ways of acting, and feeling. In short, it is a change in "sensibility,” or how we sense.  

‍

It is important to see that a change in sensibility is not about “simply” changing how one thinks. It is not about staging and engaging in a formal debate at the conclusion of which we would all now agree upon a new and correct idea. If only change operated in this manner! 

The term sensibility is wonderful, for it gets at sensing, feeling, and a quality of being alive in a specific, ineffable manner. A sensibility is not something that can be put into words (or at least not very easily). It is very broadly an aesthetic question of practices. For it is what we do as a specifically embodied being, with certain tools in a specific set of environments that creatively affords us what can be felt, sensed, seen, and known (we are co-creators of this). It is in this sense that Whitehead means “beauty is wider and more fundamental notion than truth." 

Sensibility is our enactive sense-making that is always co-emerging from the middle of practices, tools, others, and environments—in short, the ongoing work of worldmaking – worlding. 

‍‍

Stepping Away

Now it is not like we have not been involved in this shift away from causality for quite some time. The problems, limitations, and questions have been circulating and developing over the entire modern era – stretching back into the 1600’s. The contemporary practices of the Complexity Sciences, Enactive Cognition, Complex Adaptive Systems,  and the recent developments in Evolutionary Theory are all part of this shift. 

We have new concepts of emergence, system causation, enabling constraints, etc. And in the West Asian (formerly known as Europe) philosophical tradition, we can see aspects of this in the works of Lucretius, Spinoza, Liebniz, Hume, and Nietsche. And by the late 1800's, it came to the forefront in the work of William James, Henri Bergson, and especially Alfred North Whitehead. Simondon, Stengers, Deleuze, Latour, Barad and others continue these traditions into the present.

‍

But, even as the terminology, concepts, and practices have shifted, our sense is that we are very much still part of a problematic causal tradition. 

As a quick but important aside: here, in making this claim, we are very much exploring and speculating—we are very much evolving our own work and all of our collective work. And in this project, we are very interested in how we can bring you, our readers, into these speculations. So, please don’t take what we write as an answer, but as an area we can explore and experiment in collectively. We certainly do not have an answer to this question: Do we need a causal framework? Or what might come after such a framework if something should or could... 

Our sense is that even in the complexity sciences, those that draw upon it are very much still of this historical mode of causality, and that this is not that helpful. We can see this in the now ubiquitous set of organizational consultants who wish to divide the world into four neat ontological quadrants ranging across forms of causality, to “non-linear” causality, to the recent work on constraints (notably the great work by Moreno & Mossio, Deacon, and Juarrero) – and even much of our own work. It is all perhaps more work of repair and modification of a framework that we do not need to hold on to… 

So how do we move on?

‍

There is a wonderful painting by Paul Klee of the angel of the future: Angelus Novus. In the painting, the Angel of the New is being swept by strong winds into the future. But the angel is not facing forward; they are not facing the future. Rather, the angel is being swept into the future backwards. And this is very much our existential condition – we are always being swept into a future, but we can only see and know backwards—the past. Even when we do look forward, we read the new as the past—this is especially true of futurists. We come from traditions, and we are the creative propensities of well established ecologies. And so it is no accident, and ultimately no criticism, to say that we are still drawing upon causal traditions that perhaps do not serve us. 

Nonetheless, our intuition is that they do not serve creative practices or engaging with the very pressing crisis we face in the present. 

Next week, we will start by taking on what is considered by many to be the most promising of the new approaches to causality: the logic of "constraints.” And as ever, we really appreciate all of you who reach out in various ways via email, zoom, in person etc. to continue this work as a genuine conversation – together we are making the path in the walking and weaving.

So till we talk or next week—whichever comes first – love your configurations!

Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

+++

📈 P.S.:  If this newsletter adds value to your work, would you take a moment to write some kind words?
❤️ P.P.S.: And / or share it with your network!
🏞 P.P.P.S.: This week's drawings in Hi-Resolution
📚 P.P.P.P.S.: Go deeper - Check out our book which is getting great feedback like this: