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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 156! Reconfiguring Imagination & Creativity...
Good morning distributed individuations,
This newsletter is a meditation on imagination and a faith greater than imagination. And as ever, we are approaching all of this from a perspective of emergent more-than-human creative processes…
It now seems like a lifetime ago for us – but just a week ago we were still at the European Forum Alpbach. We were there primarily to lead a weeklong seminar on innovation and Green Changemaking. After this “Seminar Week” the Forum continued for an additional week with various sessions on topics related in general to how “Europe” might engage with its own transformations.
Last week we wrote about one of these sessions that involved “rethinking facts in a post-truth world." This week we turn our attention to another key theme that emerged in both our seminar and in other discussions at EFA – and that is the status and role of imagination in creative processes.
One of the challenges in resituating creativity as a quality of reality that we can participate in is the long Western tradition. It is a tradition that has no real place for creativity, and because of this, frames imagination in a non-creative logic of “discovery."
This might be a challenging claim for those new to our newsletter and/or less engaged in the history of how creativity as a concept emerged quite late in the west (only in the mid 1800’s). Given that we have written extensively about this (here is a good starting point), not to belabor the point, here is just a brief (!) review:
The ancient Greeks developed a concept of truth that focused on unchanging ideal concepts. These concepts (ideas) were non-material forms that all existing things “copied." Thus, an existing physical chair that one could sit upon was either a good or bad copy of the ideal immaterial concept of “chair." This logic held for all things from “justice” and “fairness” to “chairs” and “napkins."
Thus, when humans made (e.g., created) something, they did it in reference to the real thing (the ideal). This meant that they were not inventing something in this world, but gaining access to something in the ideal world to make a copy of it in this world. Thus the question was not one of creativity but of gaining access to the pre-existing.
How does one gain access? For the ancient Greeks, this was via a process of gaining favor with the muses—a process of “inspiration." This tradition mutates in various ways over the centuries. First into a Christian tradition where God becomes the creator of all of the ideas (and then this physical world). With human makers then seeking to gain access to the mind of God via faith and good deeds to begin their process of making/faithful copying.
In regards to all forms of human making, this logic of “gaining access to something that already exists” gives rise to the logic of “discovery." Within this approach to making, thinkers, researchers, theologians, and makers of all stripes are not creators but discoverers. They gain insight into and uncover what was invisible to others. Here it is critical to see how this “discovery approach” is an anti-creative framework. Nothing new is being made or done. “Things"—whatever they might be—have always existed—just not in a material form—only in an immaterial ideal and unchanging form. And our role is to transform ourselves into the people who would be capable of discovering what is hidden.
This discovery model is still alive and well, first as we discussed last week in regards to the sciences, but also as we will see in the realm of the imagination.
It is critical at this point to stress that we live in a dynamic, evolving, emergent world that is irreducible to any set of fully predeterminable states, laws, or underlying principles. The abstract atemporal idealism of the “discovery approach” cannot come to terms with living systems that evolve in genuinely novel and genuinely irreducible manners.
But, back to the story… This theological model where the unchanging ideals live in the mind of God further mutates with the rise of the German Romantic tradition in the 1700’s. With German romanticism, we humans—at least the exceptional ones—become human creators modeled on the Christian God: we create the new first in our heads—in what they termed the imagination—as pure ideas. The imagination becomes an otherworldly, uncorrupted place of visioning. And it is only when the vision needs to leave the mind does it become corrupted by the world.
And this develops via various other shifts and transformations into the American Cold War model of creativity as something highly individualistic, human, and focused on personal internal ideation or imagination.
This double question of the role of discovery and the imagination in creative practices brings us to the second very interesting discussion session we participated in at EFA; this one was on the importance of the imagination for urban change-making.
The discussion began with a presentation by a German video artist who made the argument that the imagination—specifically a “utopian imagination"—was critical to our ability to make the world differently. This utopian imagination he went on to explain was about seeking and finding new uninhabited lands filled with treasures for the imagination. He quoted Oscar Wilde:
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country humanity is always landing…”
Notwithstanding that this is exactly the colonial imagination—the discovery of new uncharted pure lands—and a practice of the imagination that we might wish to avoid, the language of discovery places the imaginary on a conservative footing. In such a model, the imagination seeks and discovers what is already there. And this is the logical problem: if we are imagining something new and different, it would not be a “discovery” but an act of making.
And this gets to the critical issue for us: if imagination is tied to what we know, to who we are, and to how we currently live, how does it lead to the genuinely new?
As the artist talked, he showed a video he had made that demonstrated his logic of a “utopian imagination." The video showed modern urban settings full of cars—basically traffic jams in city centers. Then all of a sudden the power poles and traffic poles start to shake, rise up, and float away. Shortly after the cars follow, and as they do, the roads transform into bike lanes and green spaces. The look is that of a slightly shaggy formal French garden with a lot more bikes—something perplexingly familiar: This image of wide boulevards, green spaces, and sauntering citizens has been the staple of top-down planning since at least Haussmann’s cutting of wide streets through Paris in the mid 1800’s. Certainly not something any different than what most of us have already seen endless times. And then the video went on to repeat this transformation for various cities across Europe and the rest of Asia—adding a dangerous modernist universalizing one size fits all trope to the imaginary mix.
This presentation with its supporting video was certainly anything but a real argument for the importance of the imagination in opening up new possibilities.
But is this the only way to approach “imagination” and creative processes?
After this presentation on “utopian imagination,” it was the next panelists turn to present. Amallo Ambole, an urbanist and innovation expert from sub-Saharan Africa, presented on the emergent creative logic of African cities like Lagos, Nansana, and Mukuru and how communities are radically co-opting and repurposing things and even systems in wholly unintended ways.
Lagos is a city of more than 21 million people that has largely developed in an emergent self-organizing manner because of the absence of top-down order. Much has been written about this over the years that is worth researching (and beyond the scope of this newsletter).
What Amallo (and others have) stressed is that there were various forms of collective imaginings that emerged from and responded to the non-knowable and non-pre-imaginable emergent situation that became the city of Lagos. Here, imagination did not start in the heads of individuals, was then turned into plans, and then imposed upon some aspect of the urban landscape. Rather, imagination emerged in an irreducible manner from the middle of highly distributed actions and allowed a pathway into strategically supporting feedforward processes.
What was insightful in the contrast between the two presentations was that imagination does not need to be understood as:
Rather, Amallo was pointing towards an imagination that was, as we understood it more:
The important move for us is always to put the things that have been isolated from processes and placed at an artificial beginning back into the middle. Imagination does not stand on its own, godlike removed from ongoing life, proposing magestial solutions. Rather, imagination is something more like a collective feeling, sensation, or hunch that is emerging in the midst of action.
The Romantics were wrong—the more clear, distinct, and visionary we conceive of imagination to be, the more conservative it becomes and the further it is from anything to do with creativity.
Ideation does not spring ex-nihilo in the minds of geniuses—no, it is shaped—created by the contingent historical context that it emerges within. And this could not have been more clearly demonstrated than by the artist's video presentation on “utopian imagination"—his work was the transparent outcome of a very standard northern European urban planning vision.
And, for us, this is what is critical in all of this: imagination can work without the “image” or the “idea." There does not need to be a clear and distinct representation of anything for the “imagination” to work. The more fixated we are on clearly imagining something, the more conservative it has to be. Why? Clear and distinct concepts and images are the ones we know, the ones that come to us from our existing milieu. The new, the genuinely new is not something that exists and, as such, cannot be represented.
The genuinely new is emergent and happens in unexpected ways that exceed what can be clearly ideated or conceptualized.
We need an alternative “imagination” tuned to the vague, to not clear and distinct. We need an “imagination” that is close to what is felt and sensed in an embodied, embedded, and extended sense. A vague imagination that leads to further probing and playing… and what leads to a sensibility of “know-how.”
Knowing, in the sense of clear and distinct ideas (“know-"what")—that comes later, much later when we are involved with experiments to pruturbate the new into becoming.
Thus we hope for an imagination that is less an “image”-ation and more an openness to felt pull of new vectors.
As we were in the mountains of Austria discussing this topic after the session, fortuitously our friend and colleague Tom Pauly sent us a note reminding us of why a book we suggested mattered to him. He highlighted this quote:
“One of the uses of history… is to unsettle present certainties and thereby enlarge our sense of the thinkable. It is a curious property of the reigning conceptual milieu to appear coherent and inevitable to its inhabitants…
Simply knowing in principle that the way we think now is the product of historical contingency rather than logical necessity is rarely sufficient to lift the blinders imposed by history and habit. The mental world we happen to inhabit contracts the imagination to its own cramped dimensions. One epoch’s self-evidence – how could anyone think otherwise? – is another’s perplexity – what were they thinking? Vivid counter examples drawn from other times and places must often be enlisted to drive a wedge between concepts that are routinely conflated in current usage…” (Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By)
Here the “strong” imagination is properly contextified as conservative. And the important role of other practices in expanding the thinkable are highlighted (critical histories and critical anthropologies).
What Daston points towards is that if the classical imagination is conservative (“the mental world we happen to inhabit contracts the imagination to its own cramped dimensions..."), then seeing radical alternatives (from history or anthropology) expands the scope of the possible. But not by showing an alternative to follow—but rather by only factually demonstrating that other worlds have existed and do exist. The purpose is one of “faith” and not imagination: “Yes, you can be certain that this is not the only way to imagine things. Why? because history and anthropology show us otherwise…”
This approach gives us a certainty (not simply a “belief")—what one might call a form of “faith” or “hope." The certainty is only in knowing that other worlds have and do exist. It is a form of faith and a hope that if we experiment collectively in ways that refuse the given, novel possibilities can emerge that exceed the known in qualitatively new manners. It is not a “hope for” – in the sense that we are “hoping for” something specific that we can imagine. Rather, this hope activates a different imagination—a “weak” or vague imagination that operates outside of the romantic and Western tradition of the God model of ideation… A general hope and faith in difference—that things can be otherwise—but not what that “is."
This open form of faith in possibility is what tempers the imagination into leaving a space of radical, non-knowing open for the new to emerge from…
Next week we hope to go further into exploring an alternative “weak” imagination…
Till then, know what to refuse, but be open to feeling (but not “knowing”) what you might follow…
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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