Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 153! On the 100 Best Books for Innovation...
Good morning experimenters of rituals and encounters,
We just passed the 150 issue mark of writing our newsletter a couple of weeks ago. That is almost three years of writing, diagramming and being in dialogue with you. For us, three years and 150 issues is not, per se, a major milestone that we wish to dwell extensively upon. Rather, for us, what is exciting, and what 150 suggests, is that this experiment will continue and continues to evolve in surprising ways. We are looking forward towards further horizons:
What might all emerge when we speculate that we are writing and reading collectively towards 500 issues?
How can we, as a community, shift the what and how of engaging with creative processes further?
What else is possible?
This is ultimately our big interest – we are interested in being part of a cultural shift with you around creativity and life.
Another creativity is possible!
The other wonderful thing about these numbers is that they point to a long-term shared practice of writing and reading – a practice that reminds us that all reading and all writing is a collective project. In worlds where everything is moving very fast and lives are lived in “summary mode” – pausing every week to read a newsletter on the same topic grounds all of us in a slower, tangential, exploratory, and even aberrant set of speeds.
There is an important quality to the forms of reading activities (and writing) that we most appreciate, and that is that they implicitly ask us to imagine a long life.
Starting the encounter of reading a book implicitly imagines days, if not weeks of reading. We can already feel in the thickness and weight of a book—hours, weeks, and perhaps years.
Now, with online reading, we are confronted prior to reading with clear chunks of time that our digital devices tell us in advance: “3 minute read” – information that corresponds perfectly to our lives lived in summaries—the world reduced to crisp, universally salient units of relevance—the new habit of querying of AI “just tell me what matters"—a life of knowledge with all the superfluous bits removed.
But this quantitative world of clear chunks of time and information is not the only way time could come to live with us—or change us through our reading lives—when we welcome books and newsletters into our worlds.
Just picking up a book today can feel like a shock in what it announces in regards to time: “Hello, I am one hundred hours!” – to which I often feel, “Well, I don’t have a hundred hours! – I am so sorry…”
…but, nonetheless, the book comes home with me. Why?
Books and newsletters are asking us to invent time—to produce another time. To open up a door into an adventure of unknown duration and scope. Creativity indeed…
In reading long forms like books and multi-year newsletters, a different form of time silently comes to greet us in the early morning light or the dark of night—those stolen/created moments that we take to be with—and of reading. This is a qualitative time—a time that is not reducible to a pre-definable quantity—there is no “100 minutes or hours." An encounter with reading is a beginning of a becoming. In beginning to read, we open ourselves to the possibility of an encounter that could make a swerve appear at any moment and carry you into the unknowable new – this potential emergent swerve is what comes along as an aberrant friend when reading and writing begin their journeying with you.
One of the great joys of reading is that the text does not disappear when we finish reading. This allows for practices in which nothing is just read fully in the moment; we go back to things, usually many times. And equally importantly, nothing is just read as a discreet activity—weaving through reading is puttering, living, talking, writing, probing, and experimenting. Reading is a force of action. Not a knowledge injection.
Often, what we read only comes into sympathy with our lives much later. Texts are put down, some barely started. They go back on the book shelf. Or they are tagged in some app for later. Many books are bought and end up lost in some corner of the book shelf without ever being really opened for years – potentially forever.
“Such a waste!” “If you are not going to read it, why keep them?”
“If you have already read it and know what it says, why keep it?”
But those questions and the assumptions behind them are puzzling; it is as if books could be thought of as discrete units of bottled insight or knowledge. We keep books precisely because they are not something that can be used up—because they are not bottled information.
The bottled knowledge approach fails to recognize that the new haunts every object and every occasion.
Books, texts of all kinds, and reading as things and encounters exceed use, purpose, and meaning. We do not know what they could do. It is not something that can be known.
The ongoing and open-ended nature of reading and writing—that there are always infinitely more things to read and more things being written—is our pleasurable reality. We are in Cantor’s world of larger and smaller subsets of infinities—and ever-enlarging infinities—as paradoxical as that might sound. Such is this encounter with the text.
While some reasonably want to organize this infinite and growing set of writings via judgment into "best," most important," or "necessary,” and in doing so reduce infinity into a seemingly far more manageable and reasonable grouping:
“The 100 best books...”
or the “100 best books on (__________)”—pick your topic.
Recently, the NYTimes published their “100 Best Books of the 21 Century." They got together a wide variety of people that they and others judged to have expertise and made a selection.
Naturally, others had very different opinions. And many, in response, published their versions.
And somewhere along the way, we got asked. “Did you see the NYTimes list? What would your top one hundred best books for creativity be?”
It is a question that we often get asked: “What books do you think are the most important for creativity and innovation?”
And as fun as these lists can be for some—for us working from the perspective of emergent creative processes and the creative logic that is woven into the whole cloth of the encounter of reading—this approach brings little joy or ultimately interest.
Going down the path of selection for the best books in regards to creativity is, for us, an absurd activity. Creativity is, as an activity, engaged with the production of the conditions that would allow for the emergence of the not-yet-existing. To claim, in advance, knowledge of what cannot be known until it emerges, misunderstands the nature of both creativity and how new knowledges come into being. From the perspective of creative processes, to say what is the best or the most necessary form of knowledge is simply not possible. Knowledge of the best of what exists will not help as much as we might imagine with what does not as yet exist – and clearly, we cannot rank what is yet to come into being.
Nor should we accept the implicit assumptions in such lists of some universal common sense of the form “everybody knows that…” or “The universal consensus amongst experts is…”. Having a well-established consensus around one “center” might be great for cocktail conversations or those who cling to the last vestiges of empire, and we have encountered it all too frequently, someone quoting Yeats in a ponderous voice of authority, “The center does not hold”...
There never was a center.
There have always been many ontologically distinct worlds, and new ontologically distinct worlds are ever-emerging. To compare across worlds is a category confusion—a comparison of apples to oranges—a comparing of what cannot be compared.
Worlds are not held together by some singular essence—some center. Emergent moods, tones, feelings, sensitivities, sensibilities, and propensities are what traverse worlds and ground them in an inherently relational dynamics, but there are no centers or essences to be found.
Our curiosity and concern begins in our interest in engaging in radical creative processes, and these involve the emergence of qualitative novelty. And from that sensibility arises our interest in that many qualitatively distinct worlds exist and that new qualitatively distinct worlds are both possible and emerging.
The 100 best approaches surreptitiously jump from the particular to the universal in a way that is both dogmatic and moralizing. It is jumping from “a world” to “The World”-- while missing entirely worlds to come. It is a style of thought that relies on adjudicating from clear established existing categories that conform to one general, well-established perspective. It speaks as if it could speak for everyone. It is without modesty or a genuine qualitative curiosity for radical forms of novel difference. Now it is not that these practices of list-making cannot be useful; they can, if they are willing to engage with their inherent provincial, relative, and strategic natures. But for us, whatever their logic, they tend, in practice, to become myopic and profoundly conservative.
Thus, in regards to these lists and their approach to reading, we would argue that we need to creatively and critically “provincialize” the NY Times and other such moral voices—not because they are wrong or because everything is relative—but because they transform reading into a practice of certified content acquisition. It is all too focused on supposedly necessary vitamins and not enough on reading and writing practices of experimentation and their generation of emergent novel qualitative differences.
Our concern is to foster an experiment that keeps alive an art of reading that cannot be reduced to “correct necessary content acquisition“– or interpretation. And this is what, at a deeper level, all of these list approaches implicitly assume: that knowledge can be fixed, and reading is a good input device to get that knowledge inside the human knowledge storage device called “The brain." Hidden in this approach is the whispered chorus: “While we will discover more and improve and expand our knowledge, the center is fixed and the fundamentals will not change.”
But creative practices of reading and writing are aberrant. They unexpectedly swerve and are making new, unexpected paths in the walking.
When the image of the written text becomes reduced to a precious container holding a fixed truth, and the job of the reader is equally reduced to deciphering that truth to the best of their limited skills. And in doing this – we have abandoned the creative task of hearing the call of the new that haunts our every step, gesture, word and moment of reading.
We wish to support and develop a qualitatively different art of reading and books. One in which books, reading, and writing are fundamentally different. Not books as information and reading as deciperment. But books as sites of experimentation towards new practices, collectives, and worlds to come.
This is a case of the famous “crow-cat” image that Thomas Khun deployed to discuss differing incommensurable knowledge systems (paradigms).
Reading the same book approached from one set of practices gives us a world of truth, representation, final judgments, and interpretive deciperment – while that very same book, when approached from a differing tradition, gives us an encounter in which we can fashion the book into a tool for our own experimental journey. In reading, we are writing…
Following Khun and the “crow-cat” image, we like to say, “The opposite of a truth is not always a falsehood but another truth—and yet another truth still to come—just don’t ever think that the production of truths is easy or subjective.”
For us, all activity—whether it be reading, writing, making toast, or visiting a place—is an encounter. And all encounters are both in the middle of an existing world and at the beginning of a novel world.
An encounter is grounded in an ongoing past that, as Faulkner put it, “is not even past.” Our pasts extend into our futures. But encounters have a second face—one that is fundamentally open and experimental in a way that always verges on tipping into the new—the non-existent and thus non-knowable novel futures. Now that does not mean that our activities will always lead into the new—most often (thankfully) they do not—but they are always haunted by and negotiating the emergence of novelty.
Encounters are also fundamentally the emergent outcomes of the event of meeting. There are many agents involved that become salient agents in the process of becoming the event. Encountering a friend on the street is never just the two of you; the time of day, the context of each of your lives, the place on the sidewalk, the sun, wind, rain, and what is happening in that area of the block can all come to be relevant in ways that the context creatively produces. The active configuring creates and stabilizes a set of propensities and novel affordances that is this encounter.
And in any novel encounter, what is happening is the making of new tools. When circumstances change in unforeseeable ways, we need new tools, practices, habits, and ultimately a new terrain.
Reading is no different. Reading is also a double-headed encounter. The face of knowledge looking back and the face of novelty looking elsewhere.
How do we read to engage the novel face of reading? – We let the work change us in novel ways (and in this activity, we gain new habits), knowing there is no right way to be affected. And we then change the work into novel tools to extend these new habits. Embodied practices emerge that, in dialog with new tools, co-shapes an environment such that the encounter affords us new collective ways of being alive.
This second book—the book as an extension of novel practices—cannot be found anywhere but in the encounter. And it will never make sense as part of a list of best books!
Because of this, we approach texts less from the first perspective of “what does it mean?” and more from the second perspective of “what can it do?”. The first approach often verges towards assuming that we can know from a universal ahistorical god-like perspective, while the latter is situational—the emerging novel context has agency: “What can it do in what we are engaged with?”
Neitzsche had a wonderful approach to reading previous thinkers. He thought of their books as arrows fired by the authors that land somewhere in the middle of a vast forest floor. They were fired with a collectively meaningful intent and a direction. But now they lie there. In our collective wanderings and activities, we come across them. We can pick these “arrows” up or pry them out of whatever we find them in, refashion them, and fire them in any direction. Of course, we can try and fire them in the similar direction to the author (if we can figure this out). But as contexts change, the very same direction will come to mean something else entirely.
For Neitzsche, the book is an arrow lying on the forest floor; we can do much with it…
Over the next few weeks, we are going to experiment more with areas of knowledge, authors, and books in regards to the question of “how might a new creativity be possible?”
This modest meditation is the first of these arrows. May it become an interesting tool… Stay slow, stay with the long, sudden durations, and keep reading with others experimentally.
Till next week...
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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