Emerging Futures - Volume 155: Creating Truths and Imaginations (Part One)

Good morning becomings in seasonal transitions, 

August is ending in this calendar, and the fall is coming into a vague feeling. This year the transition is more disconcerting and unsettling. While I feel the expectations of fall in how my body and this part of the earth meet in feelings—cooler temperatures, the oncoming of wonderful rains, intense gray days of moving skies, and the changing of leaves. I also sense how profoundly the larger weather patterns are shifting. Now, the sense each morning is that tomorrow could be hotter than today. That summer is expanding and transforming. Perhaps this year the transition is less seasonal but into the realization that the weather is itself transitioning in a way that is deeply felt in the body. An unwanted creative collaboration between many of our political-industrial-ecological systems and the planet. 

This week is a week of geographic transitions for us. For the last couple of weeks we have been traveling and working abroad, first in Glasgow, then Stuttgart, and finally for the last ten days we have been high up in the Austrian Tirol in the small village of Alpbach. This alpine valley has been hosting a coming together of differing perspectives for discussion and collaborative research since the end of the Second World War under the title: European Forum Alpbach.

Many interesting people have participated over the years, from Paul Feyerabend to Saskia Sassen and Gregory Baetson. But that was in other years—and in perhaps very different worlds. The old photos are of small groups of mostly men in suits sitting outside on folding chairs in fields. Now it is big—a massive ecosystem that springs into being and takes over the valley growing out from a modern convention center tucked into the base of a mountain. And the formal conversations certainly do not seem so convivial, far-ranging, or intimate. Now the presentations were mainly important people miked, holding forth “conversationally” with each other while the mere mortals acted as silent witnesses.

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Our Words Did This

This newsletter was going to be a continuation of the last couple of newsletters that have been experimenting with the question, “How should we engage with the fields of knowledge useful to an emergent approach to creativity?”

And over morning coffees, train rides, and late evening glasses of wine, we wrote this exact newsletter. Then, when it was time to add the introduction, aberrant movements began: We thought that this introduction should just be a short reflection on our week in Alpbach (something like you see above). But the words were not content to become and remain a brief and disposable introduction—they pushed us into further conversations, longer mountain walks, more writing, and soon the newsletter was otherwise. The swerves of activity had pushed us back out to sea, and a new path was made in the writing. The introduction became the newsletter—in fact, two newsletters. 

Over the next two newsletters, we are going to experiment with the creative processes involved in the production of facts and imaginations. These experiments stem from our participation in two discussions: one on “truth in a post-fact world” and the other on “the importance of the imagination for changemaking." They are equally deeply shaped by the week-long seminar we led on “Innovation and Green Changemaking." 

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Other Swerves

…before continuing—a quick apology: we had technical difficulties with last week's newsletter—first images disappeared that should not have—and then some of you just got garbled text when we resent the newsletter. If you did not get to read it properly with the relevant images/diagrams (there were four), you can now find it on our website. 

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Creativity – Facts – Imagination

“What really exists is not things made, but in the making.” ~ William James

‍“Everything must be put to an actual test and evaluated not for what it “is” – but what effects it has." ~ A. N. Whitehead

Two questions:

Why, on one hand, are we so scared of admitting everything is created—including facts? 

Why are we so convinced that imagination is the engine of creativity?

Over the next two weeks we will be experimenting—or, in Whitehead's words, “testing"—these two questions. First this week with the creative processes involved in the complex achievement of facts. And then next week with a reconsideration of imagination.

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Creating Truths (For Example)

The focus this year at Alpbach were two themes. The first was “The Moment of Truth." 

The “moment” of truth. This title was intended to focus us on the uniqueness of this moment where truth is being radically transformed by new media processes.  

Let's go slow. Francois Jullien points out the west is historically predisposed to see everything historically significant in terms of "events,” "precipices,” "revolutions,” and “crisis.”  The west for Jullien (a sinologist) has a Christian-inflected sense of time as revolution and rupture. Think of the coming of Christ—life changes in an instant. There is a clear before and after. We frame many things this way—the coming of Trump, for example (and now the second coming of Trump). The issue for Jullien is that in personifying and singularizing complex transformations as a decisive moment of ruptures, we lose the ability to understand the invisible transformations that led up to, what now feels like, a rupture. 

“The moment of truth” as a framing device of the forum and its constant repetition of a rhetoric of absolute crisis certainly had this problematic feel. A good example was right at the beginning of the forum. In one of the opening speeches, we were exhorted with expletives to “do in” (our term as theirs was more violent) those who did not believe in the rule of law, democracy, or human rights… 

And the second theme was #believeineurope. For us, we are far more sympathetic to the position of Chakrabarty when he argues that we need to “provincialize Europe." For us, this begins with the creative reframing of Europe from being seen as a continent (which it is most certainly not) to a modest, highly entangled region of West Asia. 

But that aside, it is this first word “believe” in this second theme that is more interesting to us. As it was presented to us, we are entering a forum to engage the decisive moment of Truth and Belief. The absolutely objective and the apex of the subjective. 

‍‍What does any of this have to do with creativity? 

Good question. The short answer is that at Alpbach—but not only at Alpbach—at many events we attend where changemaking is the focus, we find that there is a profound blindness to the actual scope of creation, making, and creativity that is always already a fundamental part of our reality. And in this call to capital “T” Truth and capital “B” Belief – we could see this very scenario of demoting creativity unfolding.

Here is an example: we attended an interesting and very lively panel discussion on “truth in a post-fact world” where the presenters were mainly interested in debating relativism (the French philosopher of Deconstruction, Jaques Derrida, is still being considered the crisis inducer!), how we discover “common ground," and how science has the key answers in “facts."

Now obviously Derrida has next to nothing to do with how our so-called post-fact world was constructed. “Common ground” cannot be simply assumed to preexist. And facts are far more complex than such naive rhetoric assumes. The frustrating part is that these discussions, no matter whether they are tedious or full of brilliant insights, are painfully beside the point.

The issue is one of making—and the profound difficulty of creating any outcome whatsoever. We have to return to the quotes from James and Whitehead:

• it is not about the made (facts) – but the making
• it is not simply what it is (identity) – but effects – what it does (again making)

These forms of debate skip over the very question of how anything came into being:

‍A post-fact ecology must be created and maintained. And such an ecology does not spring into reality because of a French philosopher! Nor does it just come from human intentions. How do technologies participate, for example, in ways that go beyond the intentions of their makers? What is required are the critical tools to ask historical questions of specific creative processes. In short, what are the complex, more-than-human creative processes involved in the emergent production of lies, facts, and common ground today? 

Now this might seem an odd usage of the term “creativity” to talk about how facts, a post-fact world, and common ground were constructed. And it would be if by “creativity” we meant something that happens solely in the heads of certain great individuals. For clearly none of these things were pulled fully formed out of anyone's heads. But creativity is an emergent systems process—it is never reducible to the contents of anyone's head. As networks of unlike things are brought into stable patterns, novel propensities emerge—this is the creativity that we need to focus on. 

The question is, by what genealogical processes can we come to understand how things came to be the way they are?

But in sharp contrast to this, at this panel discussion, “facts” were presented as things that science simply “discovers” and society either messes up or follows correctly and gets things right—e.g., we either “believe” in science or we do not. 

“Lies” in this discussion on the post-fact world were things politicians we don’t like say and do (we learned that only Donald Trump and Victor Orban really lie). 

And “common ground” exists like an elusive hidden treasure that we must all work to “discover." 

Now, just to be clear, we have no interest in adjudicating which politician lies the most or when the lying started—neither of which will really help us get a grip on the emergent propensities and logic of our “post-fact” worlds. 

Rather, the frustrating part of these kinds of discussions from a complexity + worldly creativity perspective is that in all of these cases—whether it is in regards to "truth,"  "facts," “common ground,” or "lies," the discussion ignores that all things must be (carefully) made—created—and that this making is (1) very difficult and it is (2) a creative process of making.

‍Let's Start With Facts

It is, as Isabel Stengers, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and many others in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have tried to show—facts are a great achievement—that they are very hard to co-produce. It is a profoundly creative process. Now, this could sound like we are advocating for an all-corrosive relativism—"everything is just a social construction!." 

And, to be fair, this is the usual way of dividing up things: we, as a culture, have come to consider “knowledges that are created” as being subjective – mere beliefs. While things that are properly discovered “out there” are objective—the real “facts."  Such that when anyone talks about “constructing facts,” they are immediately taken as a relativist who is reducing facts to beliefs.

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We need to put aside this logic. Everything is made; there are no “discoveries." The language of “discovery” is entirely the wrong language. The critical debate should not be between unmade facts (so-called discoveries) and the proper subjective manufacture of their interpretation (what can then be considered a well-founded belief). Rather, it should be a debate about how any and all things are made—and what it means for something to be well made. Facts, just like lies, need to be well made to work, even if the processes in each case are quite distinct. 

The trouble with the language of creativity and making is that it almost always feels too human, too intentional, too idea and planning driven. We are still implicitly channeling the god model of creativity. We need to put aside these assumptions to sense how making and creativity pull in tools, diverse phenomena, ways of circulating, environments, etc. as active participants in making. 

The second issue with the language of making and creativity is that it can make it seem like the outcomes correspond to the intentions of the makers. But with most things, and especially things like facts—when they are well made, they are independent of the process of making.

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Before getting too specific into how facts can be well made, it is important to say something about the sciences in general. Often they are taken to be engaged in developing a true objective picture of reality wholly separate from lived experience. From this perspective, fact and reality must correspond:

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And when there is no way to determine correspondence —the contents of our heads are mere “beliefs” – or simply superstitions:

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But we are not removed from reality, imprisoned in an internal subjective world trying to gain access to an outside world via the limited data of our senses to form shaky internal representations. We are fully entangled and co-forming within and of a specific historical on-going reality: 

‍“We are [embodied] social environment-altering tool users. Tools give us new abilities, leading us to perceive new affordances, which can generate new environmental (and social) structures, which can, in turn, lead to the development of new skills and new tools that, through a process... of scaffolding, greatly increases the reach and variety of our cognitive and behavioral capacities." (M. Anderson)

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Ultimately, the sciences are not in the portrait business; facts are carefully constructed abstractions that have been produced to help us do various things (travel, imagine, heal, wonder, track, etc.). To take the abstraction as reality is to engage in a dangerous act of surreptitious substitution. Speaking plainly, it confuses and substitutes a very useful map-as-tool with the territory.  Remember also that the territory, aka reality, is not somewhere “out there"—separate from us—but always already fully entangled with life and our ongoing situated sense-making. 

Additionally, we need to ask about the effects of the argument that science discovers objective facts that give us access to an objective reality separate from human experience. The effects of such an approach are that it works to sideline community engagement in both the production of knowledges and how they are acted up. What is needed is a renewed realization that, as the authors of the wonderful book The Blind Spot point out, “that experience is ineliminably present everywhere in the sciences... Science rests upon how we experience the world. There is no way to take us out of the story.” 

For us, as those interested in creative processes and changemaking, the problem with the ideological naturalization of the sciences into a highly accurate reporting system is not simply that it conflates map and territory—rather, it is that it totally elides the hard complex and creative work of making facts, common ground, and even post-fact ecologies. 

To make a fact requires the hard collaborative work of stabilizing, isolating, and abstracting phenomena. 

‍‍Who is one collaborating with? 

Well, first the messy quasi-phenomena themselves, as well as other researchers, tools, environments, and much besides. This work of stabilizing and abstracting requires the creating of very specialized environments with very specific equipment—think of Galileo’s inclined planes and special balls. And these are connected to abstract idealized spaces that cannot exist under normal circumstances, e.g., Galileo’s speculative frictionless environment. These environments, tools, practices, concepts, interpretive models, and frameworks are connected via journals, texts, and shared experiments to a dynamic community of other practitioners in self-correcting/evolving feedback loops to make what Robert Crease calls the “scientific workshop." 

“Inside the workshop we sequester phenomena, protect them from outside influences, subject them to our specialized devices, and thereby manufacture new phenomena.”

‍How is this not something we should rightly consider a creative process?  

And in this very unique creative process, the agency of possibility emerges across the relations between materials, tools, environments, quasi-phenomena etc. Ian Hacking gets at the active creative aspect of experiments in the sciences really well:

“Most experiments don’t work most of the time. To ignore this fact is to forget what experimentation is doing. To experiment is to create, produce, refine and stabilize phenomena... But phenomena are hard to produce in any stable way. That is why I spoke of creating and not merely discovering phenomena. That is a long hard task. Or rather there are endless different tasks... Perhaps the real knack is getting to know when the experiment is working. That is one reason why observation, in the philosophy of science usage of the term, plays a relatively small role in experimental science.” (From: Representing and Intervening).

In all of these cases, we need to focus on what is being made, how it is being well made, and if there is a qualitative difference that has emerged in what is going on. 

Now, our goal is not to outline how facts come to be constructed such that they gain autonomy. Bruno Latour in Pandora’s Hope does this far better than we could:

“Facts are fabricated; we make facts… Of course the scientist does not make up facts—who has ever made up anything? This is another fable… I do not deny that people have minds – but the mind is not a world-creating despot that makes up facts to suit its fancy. Thought is seized, modified, altered, possessed by non-humans, who, in their turn, given this opportunity by the scientists’ work, alter their trajectories, destinies, histories… Scientists know in practice that things have a history too; Newton “happens to” gravity, Pausteur “happens to” the microbes. “Intermingle,” “bifurcate,” “happen,” “coalesce,” “negotiate,” “ally,” “be the circumstances of” : these are some of the verbs that signal a shift in attention…” (B. Latour)

We are leaving the god model of creation and mastery behind. And this allows us to move towards a far more reciprocal, negotiated, distributed, and co-emergent model of creation and creativity. It is one where we share a sense of care for the processes of making, a care for the ongoing processes of making things well. This is the activity of creativity. It is one in which we attune, join, resonate, and negotiate towards new ways of being alive collectively. 

To do so well, we need to move from the language and processes of “discovering” to ones of careful collaborative making.

It is not that “we must discover common ground"—rather, we need to make common grounds worth having. 

It is not that we need to refute lies and the “post-fact” world by doubling down on the absolute objective, unconstructed truth of the sciences—this has already backfired in disastrous ways. Rather, we need to understand how these two practices (post-truth plus unconstructed facts) have been developed as two sides of the same coin. And we need to develop another civic culture of the sciences in which making—creativity—is not feared but understood. A civic culture that begins from the lived experience of “reality does not consist of things made—but in the making.” It is also a reality in which we have the modesty to see that there is not one world but many—and that other new worlds are possible.

This is the creativity we are interested in and wish to collaboratively champion. It is one in which we are far more entangled with and of a non-reductive active reality. 

Well, we leave you here for the week; next week we will connect this to new ways of experimenting with "imagination," also coming out of a discussion we participated in at Alpbach. 

One last word: we could not end without acknowledging all of the amazing participants in our highly experimental seminar, as well as all those we met and talked with at length; and finally, Sebastian, Jonas, Florian, and Elisabeth. Something amazing happened in the middle—thank you all!

Till next week, keep up the careful collaborative, more-than-human work of creativity.

Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

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