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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 145! Unexceptional Ubiquitous Ongoing Creativity...
Good morning ubiquitous and unexceptional creativity-as-an-extended-all-encompassing-process,
It was Juneteenth on Wednesday this week – for us in the US it is an important day to celebrate the hard fought victory to end Chattel Slavery, reflect on its structural legacies, and continue the fight to end all forms of slavery in the US.
We are also in a massive heat wave (like many many parts of the globe). We are clearly shooting well past 1.5 degree above pre-industrial averages we have been trying to avoid globally. But here we are.
And we need to ask – where is the corporate creative ambition to actually take this on?
How are the charming patented and exotically named methods of creativity and management actually participating in a meaningful change? On this very hot morning we need all of our creative engagement more than ever.
In our modest worlds – Iain is still in the thick of moving – downsizing and degrowth are hard – but never mind that – just rearranging a bookshelf is an astonishing challenge. The joy is also there: in rearranging a household one is co-making a new environment. This is niche construction, the making of taskspaces, and the redesigning of how one is extended, embedded and enactive. All of which plays profound roles in how affordances and local propensities might creatively emerge differently. (Parenthetically, Iain reports that one the great joy of this move is the “silence”:
“...the sound experience, which I prefer to all others, is the experience of silence, and the silence almost everywhere in the world now is traffic… If you listen to Bethoven or to Mozart you see that they are always the same. But if you listen to traffic you see it is always different…”
John Cage (it is worth a listen to Cage’s full thoughtful meditation of “silence” – and very helpful in regards to this newsletter – please click on the above link).
Back at the Lab… We are still in the thick of similar taskspace engineering at the MIX Lab – it is just happening at a slower more institutional speed. But we are working on new environments and new affordances just the same: Creativity is environmental…
Additionally – we are busy preparing for a summer of teaching teachers new practices for making creativity a fundamental and all encompassing aspect of the k-12 classroom with our long-time friend and collaborator Andrew Harrison – who is the latest member of our Emergent Futures Lab team. For Jason and I, It is great to be evolving as Emergent Futures Lab – and it is more than great to be officially working with such a dear friend and visionary collaborator.
NOW: We have some great music on the early morning turntable under the setting full moon – Still House Plants – as it is now time to collect our notes, discussions and thoughts from the week:
So – back to our larger speculation that we have been slowly developing over the last few weeks: Can we leave causality behind as our sole basic way of understanding and engaging with creativity?
In volume 142 ( “After Causality”) we introduced this topic, and over the last two newsletters we added to this: Volume 143 (“Towards a new sensibility for creative engagements”), and Volume 144 (“Creativity and Enabling Configurational Agency”).
This question: “Can we leave causality behind?” can on first hearing sound like an absurd question – especially if we claim to be interested in the question of “how” to be creative and innovative. How we do something – anything, is afterall seemingly a causal question:
“If we want a creative outcome we should do this and that…”
And this is the language of so many creativity experts and innovation consultants – they are all offering a clear causal method. And here Design Thinking is an obvious example:
Importantly in all of these approaches “cause” is synonymous with “explanation”. Both what creativity is and how one does it are synonymous with a clear causal logic: Ideate, Plan, Make.
So – why would anyone ever want to leave causality behind?
Well, we need to slow down…
– Stick with us on this:
causality is a general sensibility – a sensibility of “this leads to that” – it is not simply a clear logical explanation – it is far more expansive than that. As a sensibility it is a set of practices, habits, tools and environments that has shaped every aspect of how we sense, feel and act (and it is one that goes back to the classical Greeks). It is not a universal sensibility as the work of Francios Jullien and others have shown.
This set of environments, practices and concepts has made us in general deeply linear. Of course one can nuance this – but the sensibility of causality is still direct, linear and clear. We can talk of all sorts of nuances: “system causation” or “non-linear causation” – and while these do significantly transform causality – but as an implicit sensibility we are still in the world of “this causes that” – whatever the “this” is and whatever the “that” is. And our first question has to be: does this sensibility serve us in a world where everything is profoundly entangled, relational and ultimately different from anything such a causality was supposed to explain?
The sensibility of causality is also closely interwoven with the long standing Western obsession with goal, and ends – with what the Greeks called telos. With causality it is never simply that “this will cause that” – but also “this will inevitably lead to that.” And the “that” is a meaningful goal.
In this sensibility – there is always a goal. There is always a presumed outcome. We want to get somewhere and not somewhere else. We want an outcome – a future that is more creative than the past – and usually in very specific ways – just think of all the futurists out there!
There is always a “something” – no matter how vague that is posited as an end: We are going “somewhere” – it is not totally open ended. It could be a utopia desire or a dystopian despair – but there is a telos connected to a causal logic. But how can this be creative? How can we be engaged in a process that will lead to something genuinely new if we already have posited a goal?
In short, when we look into this logic of teleological causality – it betrays its origins in a closed, idealistic and clockwork universe: This will lead to that end…
But what if there can literally be no explanation in relation to the “how” of creativity?
In this question it is important to sense that “explanation” is implicitly synonymous with “the absolute truth of why this happened.” With causality we are fated to always be searching for the full and total truth: did this cause that? How exactly did this cause that? Why did this cause that? – But to what end in a complex world?
And with this we arrive at another integrally connected sensibility to the causal approach: we are classically (again going back to the ancient Greeks) far more interested in “the truth” than in the pragmatics of effective “conduct.”
Why is this? Why the long historical obsession with clear causality – and a clear “truth” – and a clear singular origin? Why all of this even though this clarity is something we cannot ever achieve for the complex things that really matter to us! But the approach nonetheless betrays a disdain for effective pragmatic conduct (“manipulation”) over clear (if totally fictitious) explanation – e.g. “persuasion.”
A Creative Time Out
Let's pause for a moment. Our interest at Emergent Futures Lab and in this newsletter is in creativity and innovation. And the contemporary assumption in regards to creativity is that creativity is rare. And that as a rare phenomenon it needs to be explained via a clear causal explanation so that we can all become this rare thing: creative. There is an existential need to know: what is the causal process so that I can follow it and become this rare and critical thing: creative…
But – here is the reality: creativity is NOT RARE.
Creativity is everywhere, and active at all times. Creativity is a fundamental unexceptional ubiquitous aspect of all reality. There is nothing exceptional about creativity. At every moment something is being created. Cells are being created, black holes are being created, volcanoes are being created, new rap lyrics are being created, new species are being created, conflict is being created, and new forms of social organization are being created…
Now you might argue that none of these creations are necessarily “creative” in the sense that nothing necessarily qualitatively new is being created each time a cell is being created or a plant grows. But here you would be wrong – there is always some difference. No repetition of a process leads to exactly the same outcome – difference emerges everywhere. And these differences all have the qualitative possibility to be disruptively different.
Additionally what matters is that none of these is reliant exclusively on some form of human ideation for its existence.
So: Creativity is not exceptional. Creativity is not unique. It is the most unexceptional quality of reality – period. But our approach and general sensibility is to treat it as if it was rare and exceptional. Why is this disconnect so vast?
Now here is the thing: the concept of causality we have inherited from the classical Greeks – primarily Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle came from an era that was focused on defining clear causality and that did not have a place for creativity. Plato famously thought of the human goal to properly copy the ideals. Now, while we cannot get into this in this newsletter – we have written extensively on this in previous newsletters.
Ultimately what matters in the context of this discussion is that we should bring to every explanatory causal model the question of “unexceptional creativity”:
Is there a genuine place for ongoing ubiquitous universal all encompassing creativity in this model?
Now we would argue that most – if not all – conceptual approaches to causality and contemporary management do not take creativity to be ubiquitous. Take a moment to look in the indexes of the modern classics of the Complex Adaptive Systems literature – from the important work of Alicia Juarrero to the recently published: The Atlas of Social Complexity you will find next to nothing on creativity as a ubiquitous quality of reality. And certainly nothing that suggests that everything ultimately must be created – and be continued to be created.
Why is this? Our historical causal logic never had a place for creativity. From the perspective of West Asian intellectual traditions (e.g. the European sphere of influence) the regime of causality has been a defining feature for more than quite some time. The long standing ethos is that both “everything needs an explanation” and that “everything can ultimately be explained” by tracing things back to an unchanging universal source.
The Western tradition is: Everything has a why. And this “why” excludes an actual place for creativity.
If we go back to the classical Greeks and especially Aristotle who perhaps did the most to develop the western sensibility towards causality at the exclusion of creativity we can see this most clearly. For Aristotle, to “know” was quite fully and totally equated with knowing the “cause” of something. And the cause was the unchanging source, the ground, the universal principle.
As a source it is ultimately placed outside of the thing it seeks to explain – in an ideal, static and predetermined final cause. So while for Aristotle there are four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final) – the cause that mattered most, the final cause, was one that was outside of things, predetermined and static. As something outside, static and pre-determined – it was not anything that could spontaneously emerge in a radically creative sense. Thus, causality as a concept, emerged in the West in the absence of any reflection on a place for creativity.
Aristotle has two examples of this anti-creative causal process involving a predetermining final cause: that of a potter making a container and that of an acorn becoming a tree. Now quite clearly for anyone who has ever made anything on a wheel or with clay – Aristotle never actually physically made anything. Making anything in clay or with a wheel is a contingent creative process where the outcome is irreducible to the charms of material, formal, efficient, and final causality. The Aristotlian logic of making (we cannot say creativity) gives rise to a model of production that is the “god model” where an autonomous agent imposes a form on a passive material towards some seperated and pre-established end. And if we were to designate it a model of creativity it would be one that always already had an end defining the process prior to beginning:
“It is a heroic model of creation involving the imposition of form upon inert matter by an autonomous subject, whether god or mortal, who commands the process by a pre established plan or purpose.” (Marshall Shalins)
But – is this logic of a predetermined end (the final cause) really valid? Is the final end of an acorn to become a tree? As Roger Ames so wonderfully comments from a Daoist perspective: an acorn equally becomes a healthy squirrel… or nut oil for frying or a musical instrument… Creative processes will always exceed final causes. We simply cannot know what something could become in advance of experimentation. Causality – that every thing has an ultimate why will eventually come crashing against the shores of “a rose has no “why” – it blooms because it blooms…” (Angelus Silesius). There is no predetermined internal “why” in the acorn that must make it a tree and not a squirrel.
That we favor the tree over the squirrel is a sign that our sensibilities are for a predetermined causality over an open ubiquitous and unexceptional worldly creativity. Unexceptional ubiquitous creativity and causality (as it has been developed in the west )are like oil and water.
So how do we move away from this? Now “leaving casualty behind” is also a logic fully in keeping with the Western tradition of messianic ruptures and dreams of pure revolutions. This also does not interest us. We are not interested in a pure and total break from causality.
Rather it is a question of a “divergence” – and not opposition or pure refusal.
And this leads us to wonder if there is not something “next to” but different/divergent from causality – rather than something that indulges in our historical fantasies of pure refusal? Taking a cue from the work of Fred Moten – perhaps there is a sideways move away from causality – a “para”-causality?
Sitting next to but divergent from causality allows us to move back and forth – to “respirate” – to circulate in and out of the logic of causality – sometimes closer and sometimes further… but never simply wedded to causality as a defining reality.
What would such an approach to creativity look like?
Last week we intimated at such an answer: we discussed how creative processes have an emergent, creating-enabling configuration that shapes things by creating the contextual space of possibility. And we offered a very simple example of the toilet bowl and the flushing of water:
What is key to first stress about this situation: it is an unremarkable creative situation. The second key thing to notice is how it is creative: It is not that there is a creative spark “in” a water molecule. There is nothing in any water molecule that “tells” it to behave this way. And equally there is no commanding force coming from the outside that tells the water molecules to behave this way.
What we have is an environment that is creative. How? As flushing sets in motion a configurational shift into a new set of relations. And this new configuration creatively coordinates processes in such a manner that an emergent creating-enabling configuration develops that shapes the contextual space of possibility.
The particular and unique relations between the water molecules, temperature, the energy gradient of flushing, the volume shape and materials of the toilet bowl, gravity, etc. come together in a specific configuration to creatively enact a new form of order to emerge (the whirlpool), and they “hold” the possibilities of the water molecules to this pattern (as long as the conditions of the configuration are met).
We could term this “enabling configurational agency.”
And this “enabling configurational agency” is the ubiquitous non-exceptional creative agency of all environments.
Generalizing from this situation: Everything is always in and of some relational configuration. And all of these configurations have a non-reductive context sensitive open creative agency. Configurations are creatively enabling every outcome. But not in any directly causal manner – configurations are too complex and sensitive to be reduced to this.
Putting Down the Ladder
“My propositions serve as elucidations… when one has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (One must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after they have climbed up it.)” Wittgenstein
The term “constraint” is perhaps most illuminating in this regard. Since the 1930’s it has slowly emerged as one alternative to causality.
What is a constraint? First, it is important not to think of it as an object—a straight jacket for example. Rather, it is an emergent relational property of a system that moves it towards a particular statistical pattern of organized possibilities. Our example of the toilet bowl flushing is often used as an example of an “enabling constraint” – the situation both “enables” a behavior (the whirl pool) and “constrains” the individual water molecules to this pattern.
What is most importantly missing in the term constraint and even with the term “enabling constraint” is the fundamental creativity of the disposition of the configuration. The water molecules are not being merely “enabled” to take on a universal pre-established ideal form. Nor are they being “constrained” in the sense that this is imposed upon them from the outside, as if they were ever separate from some relational configuration.
Not at all; they are a fundamental creative player in a fundamentally creative situation; they are creatively agential in a situation of immanent co-construction. The concept of constraint – despite of how it is defined – continues to suggest a causal and non-creative condition. Constraint does not suggest creativity rather that the water molecules are subject to an outside causal force—the constraint. It make it seem that some “thing” is acting upon something else. But this is not the case. All the aspects are part of a configurational dynamic that is creative. Constraint, as a term makes sense if you are approaching things from the perspective that creativity is both rare and a disruption to order.
But neither is true – creativity is an unexceptional ubiquitous quality of reality and it spontaneously generates order on an ongoing continuously constructing basis via the enabling configurational agency of the context. It is always a question of the creative potentials of the situation that we are in and of.
When we shift our sensibility to focus on reality from a creative, dynamic, configurational, emergent and inherently relational perspective where creative agency is always only of and in the configuration then “constraint” seems like a less than useful holdover from another sensibility and world. And so does our larger all encompassing logic of causality. For us living in and of a creative world asks us to be para-causal – to move horizontally some distance from this approach, and to see that it is not a sensibility that is necessary. Causality is not us, rather it is just a resource that emerged from a profoundly non-creative tradition that could be deployed on occasion…
Next week we will explore how we live in and of a world of ubiquitous unexceptional creativity – the question of worldmaking. Till then – love the creativity of the configurations you are of creatively!
Till next week
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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