Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 150! Creativity’s Other Name...
Good morning dynamic groupings that become individuated,
It has been a wonderful week of work. Right after we left you on friday morning at the end of our last newsletter, we went into the “city” (which is really a suburb of the city of New Jersey, as our friends at Dense Magazine like to remind us). We were there to do a workshop at the Met Museum with our friend and wonderful colleague Özgen Bağcı and a very inspiring group of international educators.
We firmly believe that curiosity as a practice is critical to skilfully engaging creative processes. But so much of how we talk about creativity places it deep within the hidden recesses of the head. And if the radically new will always exceed what we can ideate, say, know or represent – then we need an alternative approach to curiosity.
Curiosity begins in our bodies and how our bodies skillfully actively attune themselves to their dynamic and responsive surroundings. We are always only thinking-in-doing. And, of course, this doing is a dialog. It is a dialog that includes our shoes, social forces, gravity, stones, gestures, and our gut microbiota. Such dialogues are no easy matter. The attunement process is and has been millenia in the making.
This dialog goes most often unnoticed, and in our world focused on ideas, images, and the head, we most often actively pass over it as inconsequential to “real thinking." But all thinking—and all curiosity—is an embodied distributed collective activity.
One place you can really see this form of embodied attuning dialog most clearly is in rock climbing. If we think of how a very skilled rock climber might move up a very hard cliff face, we could be forgiven for imagining graceful fluid movement—something similar to a highly skilled dancer—flowing across holds toward the top. But what we actually find is something quite different—and far more interesting. With each move to actively figure out how to (as a body in motion) come to grasp a new hold, there is a complex resetting of the body – the hips might turn in one direction, a knee might bend down in a very awkward manner, and a foot might go out far on the wall just for momentary balance. Sometimes one needs to reorient the body a number of times in between moves. A climber is not flowing on a hard route but finding novel correspondences and letting an appropriate movement style emerge as a form of embodied thinking. This often looks like stuttering—going backwards or sideways to go forward. It is never “the only available action is the next right thing” – there is such invention in this attunement. Propensities are invented through active attunement. We like to say: “The fully engaged form is the teacher." Here is a good video example – it is best to start it at minute 4:33 and watch Ryuichi Murai climb this very short route (after over a year of working on attunement), and then go back to the beginning of the video and watch the total process. It is a really powerful example of how long, sustained, and how sensitive such an embodied curiosity can be.
Another important example of this thinking in moving is found in how indoor rock climbers prepare for competitions. At the beginning of a competition, all the climbers are allowed to “look” at the routes for a very limited time. They all rush out and start making all sorts of gestures. No one stands there, just looking with their eyes. Their bodies shift—arms, legs, and hips—moving across postures—actively thinking into a moving attunement. This is embodied curiosity (here is a video; just watch for twenty seconds beginning at minute 21:33). It is not the standing back, arms crossed, of an all knowing expert. Nor is the grazing-moving of a mall goer (whose actions are not that different from a museum viewer's drifting-moving-gazing). This is an active, embodied curiosity that brings forth from the moving, connecting body to new concepts and actions. Thoughts are developing from a deep history of doing, being catalyzed by the moment of meeting a climbing problem.
In tune with this ethos, our goal at the Met was not to “look” at “art." First, it was not about art. Why? Most of what interests us at the Met museum is not what the people who made the things we are engaging with would ever call or understand as art. Art as a term and as a concept is very much a totally anachronistic approach to much of the museum's contents. For example, a christian altar—something that was, to the people of its time, holy—with powers to assist in salvation is transformed in a contemporary museum into a “sculpture of the european middle ages” noted for its humanistic renderings.
This is especially true when we approach things from an embodied perspective: In a very real sense, you cannot “see” a Christian Altar while standing or with one's eyes open. You can see art gazing from afar with your arms on your hips. But that is the end of an embodied curiosity...
So we spent the day moving, falling, kneeling, sitting, and squatting in careful response to works—to allow an enactive curiosity to emerge and lead us slowly into a way of letting thinking emerge with and between our bodies in responsive movement and the forms that compelled them.
One of the encounters (things) that we spent quite some time coming to a resonance with was the “Rock in the Form of a Fantastic Mountain” (see drawing below). It was what we would, at first glance, understand as a highly weathered, naturally occurring rock that had been selected for display. This piece is part of the genre of “scholar's stones." And these come from Chinese aesthetic traditions, where the making and the made co-exist. Scholars Stones are rocks that have been shaped by various forces (including, in very modest and mainly indirect ways, humans). It is clear with such objects that one cannot say “who” made them. Was it the weather? Then what about the rock? How did it form? What was the role of volcanism? And what role, at various points, did humans play? But even the “it” the givenness of this stone is not fixed; it has not stopped weathering and changing just because it entered a museum. To come to resonate with this form is to feel with its long history of coming into form (plate tectonics, volcanism, weathering, human shaping) and to feel forward into its ultimately unknowable unmaking and remaking otherwise.
As part of the tour, we continued to explore Buddhist and Daoist traditions of “creativity without a creator” for some time. And our being with this mode of being alive led the conversation to the point where we could ask: Is all creativity ultimately without a “creator”?
That was an important moment. Our answer is: yes, absolutely.
Our workshop went on to many other encounters, actions, and conversations, – with us all eventually watching the turtles in central park over a glass of wine.
But this question of how to understand that “creativity is without a creator” continued to animate our thoughts and conversations far beyond Friday.
And it led us to post a short meditation on this question on LinkedIn this week:
Creativity is always without a “creator."
Everything is created—from clouds to iPhones to hands and political systems—and each of these is a great creative achievement and ongoing process. But in none of them will we find a creator. It is not Steve Jobs or Thomas Jefferson, or an all knowing god.
The pernicious habit that creativity needs a creator has long haunted the Western tradition and has led to a creativity industry focused on making individuals become the Creator.
Creativity—novel difference—arises spontaneously from the middle of the configuration of things. And these things could be the encounters of geological or political processes.
In creative unfoldings, encounters between many unlike processes attune, find resonance, and configure in ways that creatively enable the new to emerge and continue. We can, with skill and care, also attune to these processes, feeling our way into the dynamic propensities emerging, and in doing so, we become an active helpmate to the new.
But we will never be doing this alone; it will always be a collaboration—a collaboration that extends far beyond just humans. It is also a collaboration that has a “mind” of its own. Here too, the configuration itself is more than and different from the participants and will move in new emergent ways that will transform all of the collaborators.
And we will never be the first; we will be joining ongoing processes—events that stretch back and forward in time. Nor will we be able to know in advance with certainty what will emerge. The configuration, of which we are a part of – and which is transforming us, has a profound creative agency of its own.
We don’t need to learn how to become “creative” or become a “creative” – and certainly not a “creator." Those dreams of heroic, god-like independence and individualism. We need an alternative approach to living and the world around us. We can start from the realization that the world is always creative in ongoing ways. That this is happening at all registrars – from human to non-human via the creative enabling dynamics of the configuration of things. And we are fully part of this in intra-dependent ways. We are neither alone nor passive, but active participants in this process without end.
The useful skills are those of attunement, resonance, probing, care, open experimentation, actively feeling propensities, ecosystemic collaboration and co-composition, reading the dynamic configurations, affordance building, vitalistic co-ordination, surfing emergences, etc.
When it comes to the making of the new (creativity), we are most certainly not gods, but we might just become skillful helpmates.
What was interesting in the discussion that followed from this piece – and also during our conversations at the Met—is how hard it is let go of the feeling that things can be possessed—the feeling of “I did this” – that “I made that." That there has to be a “creator” behind every creation. That it is my agency, my truth, and ultimately my identity that participate in my creations. But did any of us do anything alone? Is the rest of reality silent and passive when we act? Do our actions actually begin with ourselves?
Think for a moment about your bodies; they are not even composed of one species. Most likely, by cell count, you are more than half bacteria. Are these bacteria just hanging on for a free ride? It turns out that they play a significant role in the creation of our moods, among other things. The “I” that feels, thinks, laughs, and cries is one that emerges out of a collaboration with others—from microbes to pop stars. We at our core are a collective emergent intelligence.
We can claim that “my identity is mine, as is my agency," or that “this is my creation," but in doing so, what are we missing?
Here we want to make a very strong claim: What we are missing is creativity itself. What do we mean by this?
Creativity is a question of creation and creating; it is a question of making. And everything is made—everything is created and constructed by some set of processes, systems, forces, logics, etc. And this creation does not stop; the making and the made co-exist (they are not sequentially discreet). We were made, and we continue to be made. And everything that is made is made by many other things (other than themselves) configuring into some form of entity that is always more than itself. Everything is an ongoing collective creative project.
Too often, we put the individual prior to the collective or in opposition to the collective. We talk about resisting the “herd mentality"—that we need to maintain our “independence." But the hard, complex reality is that we are not gods outside of creation. We are beings, like the scholars stone—of and in this world. We are a herd. Our agency is not ours alone, nor is our identity or even our physical being. We are always of and with others.
There is nothing mushy, cosmic, or new age about this. It is not to say we don’t exist, or we are all one, or that some cosmic force is shaping everything. That is, to stay within this logic of essence, individuality, and identity.
To understand creativity well is to critique the very concept of identity and individuality as a given. And to ask with a genuine curiosity: how did this come into being? How did this individuate?
Thus, it is not that individuals and individual things do not exist. Far from it. Individual things exist—individual people, individual social movements, individual tornadoes, individual revolutions, you, me – these all exist because they have been individuated and continue to be individuated by some specific set of creative processes.
The question to ask, from the perspective of creative processes, is not “who am I?” or “What is my truth?” —but rather “how did I come to be?” and perhaps more importantly: “How can I become otherwise?”
To do this is to step back with humility, enter the stream of becoming, and be open to the reality that everything is made and in the making. But it is not a passive humility; it is an active humility – as we recognize processes we can attune to them and work with and of them. We do not have radical autonomy or radical agency but we are not bereft of agency or identity; it is just never ours alone. But that is a beautiful thing—in that we can participate in the making-beautiful of making—in short, creativity.
Over the last two weeks, we have been adding key terms to our tool kit: Two weeks ago it was ten terms: Creativity, God Model, Innovation, Ideas, Difference, Creativity Paradox, Change, Change-in-degree, and Change-in-kind. And last week it was four: Agency, Enaction, Sense-Making, and World-Making.
And this week it is one: Individuation. We do not think we are overstating our case: Creativity’s other name is individuation
Individuation is a term that Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) introduced to give a name to the process by which disparate forces working across very distinct registrars come together to give rise to the emergence of something distinct. No individual thing simply pre-exists. All things individuate: ideas, processes, humans, species, tornadoes, social movements. The (creative) question is how.
The fact that reality is composed of processes does not mean that it is all fluid and amorphous. Processes progressively individuate. All creativity involves novel individuations—novel ontogenesis. In technical terms, an individuation “is the integration and resolution of a distributed and differential systems, that is, a system in which multiple processes interact such that qualitative changes in the behavior of the system occur at singular points in the relation to their rates of change” (John Protevi).
The logic of integration and resolution of distributed processes is key. We, for example, as humans, individuate via the integration and resolution of bacteria, social forces, tools, environments, cellular processes, rituals, dynamics of embodiment, etc. This process is ongoing; individuation is ongoing; it is not a process that comes to an end: The making and the made always co-exist; they are not sequential. That we have a stable sense of identity is because of the ongoing stabilizing dynamics of how we creatively individuate as human individuals.
It is important to sense that there is an integration of individuations. Given the distributed nature of such processes, we are of a world-in-the-making.
Creativity is the invention of novel processes of individuation and the stabilization processes of those individuations. Given that individuations involve distributed and differential systems, it is always a collective, collaborative, emergent process in which there is no way to assign a final authorship. All creativity is without a “creator” and all living is multiplicity that becomes individuated in ways that exceed and add to the multiplicity.
Well, fellow creative individuations, glorious groupings, swarms, heards, and multiplicity converging towards identity, be beautiful by individuating beautifully at multiple registrars! Till next week...
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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