Emerging Futures - Volume 157: Hope after Imagination, Futures after Backcasting

Good morning novel beings out of season,

This week we have been celebrating John Cage’s Birthday – it was September 5th, 1912 – quite some time ago. But his effects are felt in all aspects of our practices – especially this week and in this newsletter.

With his birthday in mind we listen to some favorite works (his “Sixty-Two Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham” – a love poem to his life partner is a personal favorite ), we also reread his writings (the wonderful book of interviews recorded near the end of his life with the poet Joan Retallack—Musicage), and performed one in our own way (Variations III—perhaps the most interesting work he composed—for us—where every aspect is open). It is really worth getting a hold of and performing. 

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Faith!

There is something fundamental to Cage’s approach that fits this newsletter's topic of radical hope. Cage was absolutely adamant in regards to what constituted an experiment: 

‍“It is not an experiment if you know what will happen next.”

While this might sound like an easy criteria to meet, it is not. To not know what will happen next requires a radical, highly developed, distributed emergent process.

And Cage was equally radical in regards to why you would do anything:

‍“I am composing things not because I have something to say, but to hear things that I have never heard…”

Again, this is absolutely no easy task… A creativity that lives up to this criteria is by necessity both profoundly ambitious and disciplined.

But more than just discipline, one must have an astonishing faith in the possibility of the radically new and that it can happen!

Here, in Cage’s practice, there is an ethics that puts a radical hope into an enactive way of being that creatively refuses what has been thought, imagined, or done—and trusts an enactive process that will potentially allow the new to come into being beyond knowing and certainty.

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How Did We Get Here?

Let’s back up a bit. Last week in the newsletter we took you with us to a conference we attended in August: “European Forum Alpbach." There we joined the conversation in a panel about the importance of imagination for our future. 

And the way they presented imagination—for us this felt deeply problematic: It was a strong idea of imagination where we “need to clearly envision alternative"futures"—futures that we could “backcast” in the present—but, as we said last week:

‍“ …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?...

They were in this panel drawing on a Romantic visionary tradition that paradoxically, as Cage pointed out, denies the possibility of something new actually happening. 

We continued in last week:

‍“…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…”

And we proposed the need to go in another direction with imagination:

‍…We need an alternative “imagination” tuned to the vague, to the not clear, and to the not distinct. We need an “imagination” that is close to what is felt and sensed in an embodied, embedded, and extended nebulous sensation. A vague imagination that leads to further probing and playing… and what leads to a sensibility of “know-how” rather than a clear “knowing what."

We ended last week's newsletter with a call for a reconsideration of “hope” – and even faith as a key aspect of creative practices:

‍“...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…”

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Hope? Innovation?

Now hope and faith are not usually things that show up in discussions of creativity and innovation—especially in the context of business or even the context of green innovation!

Innovation, creativity, and changemaking are commonly framed as practices that can be undertaken in a rational, if somewhat eccentric, manner.  Nothing to do with “faith." And especially in regards to changemaking, it should be a rational practice that looks to best practices and knowable goals and outcomes.

This was something that came up in the panel discussion. One of the audience members, near the very end of the discussion, spoke out to say:

‍“We don’t need “imagination"—we k know what the issues are, and we know what the answers are—what we need now is action… Why are we even talking about the imagination?”

For us, this immediately brought to mind Greta Thunberg’s powerful damnation of hope:

“I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day, and then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

And this was something that we also heard in our seminar on Emergent Green Changemaking. Our seminar was explicitly focused on developing practices that did not impose a future backwards logic of linear solutionism on the present. We had taken time to go through a number of case studies that demonstrated how the desire for the direct implementation of linear solutions on complex ecological issues inevitably led to making matters worse. And we had workshopped and collectively developed alternative co-emergent approaches—but still there was a pent-up desire for silver bullets: 

‍“We know the problem, we can clearly imagine a better future, and we can lay out a rational plan to get there – so why will this not work?!!!”

It is important to recognize the validity of this sentiment. Ecologically, things are not good. And all of the metrics are pointing in the wrong direction. Here in the US, at our last presidential debate, both candidates celebrated peak oil and the massive increase in fossil fuel drilling in the US and committed to continuing these policies. This is insanity. And Greta Thunberg is correct in saying that “our house is burning down."

We all have every right to be outraged, profoundly frustrated, and damningly critical of all of our political and corporate actors . We personally fully empathize with Greta Thunberg, our frustrated students, and the angry participants in this discussion on the importance of the imagination for changemaking. 

But, there is something profoundly important and different with “hope” that takes us elsewhere than Thunberg's condemnation—and that has critical implications for creativity and any form of changemaking. 

The hope that Greta Thunberg is critiquing is a hope as a feeling—a feeling “that things will get better,” a feeling that “things will work out." She is very right to be critical of this hope as a feeling—it is a hope against complacency. 

Now there is another problematic form of hope. This is the form of hope found in our German Artists presentation of “Utopian Imagination” (we discussed this in last week's newsletter). This is a “hope for” – a “hope for” a certain specific imagined outcome. It is a hope that has an object. And as such, it is also tied to a specific, known future. Such a future, to the degree it can be imagined, is, as we argued last week, a conservative future—a future that is ultimately nostalgic and reactionary. And this could not have been more clear in this artist's presentation of nostalgic wide Parisian boulevards without cars, wide green spaces, and infinite cyclists and walkers quaintly promenading. It is certainly not a Cagian future that leaves open other novel emergent and unknowable possibilities. 

It is a hope that is connected to a specific desire and want—in such a hope there is a clear expectation, wish, conditioned optimism, and even fear built into this vision of hopeful imagination. 

And yes, these two conjoined forms of hope—the “hope for” a certain outcome and the feeling of “hope that things will improve"—lead to a profoundly conservative—even nostalgic complacency. 

But is this the only way to think of hope?

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Hope Faith Ongoing Creativity

After the end of the panel discussion on Imagination, we were talking with the moderator, Caroline Paulick-Thiel (who did an excellent job moderating). I brought up the limitations of imagination and "backcasting,” and while she was sympathetic and understanding of our argument, she was adamant that imagination was critical. 

Her adamance stuck with us long after the forum ended.

Let's turn to perhaps the greatest philosopher of hope, Gabriel Marcel, and his “Sketch of a Phenomenology and Metaphysics of Hope." In this astonishing work, Marcel makes a clear distinction between forms of “hope for” and an absolute or unconditional hope. “Hope for” is the hope of the imagination—the conditional hope for a specific outcome. This is not the hope that interests us. And importantly for Marcel, this form of hope does not encompass all of hope. 

In contrast to a “hope for” – an unconditional hope is not a hope for anything. It does not have a goal. And Marcel explicitly argues that a hope that gets pulled into the imagination—into fantasy—is a hope that moves away from the unconditional. Hope must transcend the imaginary. It has to, as Cage argues, be open to the genuinely new—the emergent possibility of a creativity (without source) that exceeds the knowable, predictable, and the imaginable.

And this is what struck us in Caroline Paulick-Thiel’s insistence that the imagination was critical—there was something absolutely critical in her insistence. Not in the insistence of the imagination per se, but in the insistence that there must be something.

What is this insistence? For us, it is an insistence to have faith in that which is beyond what can rightly be expected. And while we would argue that this has nothing to do with the imagination in the classical sense of the term, we would also insist that we cannot give up on a hope that is an active practice and not just a feeling or a “hope for." For us, as Marcel argues, a radical hope is more a way of being than a feeling or an imaginary outcome. And this is what is necessary—and what we felt in Caroline’s insistence that there must be something…

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Becoming Unconditional

We need unconditional hope to be creative whatsoever. It is an experimental hope. Perhaps we could call it a Cagian faith…

Here, hope, like creativity, is an enactive and emergent open practice. It is not a feeling. And it is not fixated on an outcome. It involves deliberately and actively refusing the known—the given. And for us, this happens via a process of disclosure and “blocking." This is not something that can be left up to chance – rather, it is a learned, developed, tested, and ever-evolving practice (and one of the key focuses of our seminar at the Forum). 

Radical hope is, in this way, an orientation—an orientation away from the given, the imagined, and the known. First, it requires a critical historical and anthropological orientation:

‍“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)

And it requires the orientation of a creative process of both active letting go (blocking) and experimenting in an unconditional manner. This is where we cautiously and respectfully part ways with Greta Thunberg, futurists, and those wishing for a speculative “backcasting” response.

Radical creativity involves, on one hand, refusing the given, the known, and the imagined. And in doing so, it involves a practice that refuses to be overcome by despair or wishing for any knowable/imaginable outcome.

Radical creativity is a practice of unconditional and unconditoned hope. It is a bond and communion with open, emergent creative processes. It calls to an “us"—that calls from beyond ourselves, beyond what we know, beyond identity, and far beyond our expectations.

Gabriel Marcel has a wonderful phrase for this unconditional hope and creativity—he says, “I hope for you in us."

It is not a hope for myself—it is not an “I hope for this," which is the hope of the imagination and futurists. To say “I hope… in us” is to shift hope to a practice—to, in Cages’s terms, an experiment. It is to put faith in “us"—and  “us” where we can do something that exceeds what we can imagine and know… and ultimately we will make a new “us.".

And to put the other—the “you"—at the center of this hope is to radically displace identity—and any form of fixed grounding of hope, action, and the future. To put an other—an open and undefined “you” at the heart of action and creativity—is to put a world to come that exists beyond the self at the core of creative practices. 

In our seminar, we transformed Marcel’s “I hope for you in us” to “I hope for you/us in creativity." This modest experimental shift was a deliberate choice: we wanted to experimentally collectively develop a practice where a genuinely new “us” could emerge that would ultimately change the “I."  

(And here creativity enters the realm of faith— a faith that transcends any specific desire or desiring whatsoever).

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Surprise Wonderment

The question of radical creativity is always one of a creative faith and a hope – that is unconditional and refuses both despair and nostalgia. We are not trusting in any knowable outcome. But we are willing to enact hope as a practice and as a way of being. 

It is something that we do (we do not “have” or “possess” it). Hope is not a feeling, not a direction, nor a goal; rather, it is a collective care for a practice that is absolutely beyond the imagination: radical creativity

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To “Welcome What Comes Next”

Part of a faith in radical creativity is a willingness to acknowledge that we absolutely cannot imagine the new in advance. 

It is absolutely something in contradistinction to the world of Greta Thunberg and the demand for clear action: 

“I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day, and then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

This demand is understandable and perfectly rational. But it is also misguided. It is unrecognizing of complex causality, especially in human contexts. 

But more than that, it reduces hope to a feeling and a “hope for." And hope and creativity are not reducible to this. Both hope and creativity begin where the capacity to imagine, predict, and know ends.  To be hopeful is not a feeling but an active, experimental enactive practice—a way of being alive. We, in contradistinction to Thunberg, want you to hope; we do not want you to panic; we want you to recognize our house is on fire; and still, we want you to have both a radical hope and a radical faith: we do not have the answer; our solutions will not work directly; but we can experiment collectively in ways that can lead us beyond what we know towards worlds worth having that we cannot as yet imagine. 

It is a practice that, as Gabriel Marcel says so beautifully, involves a practice : “I hope in you for us” – and this “us” is an us still to come—it is an experimental us that includes multiple worlds and multiple worlds to come. 

Radical creativity rests upon an unconditional hope and faith in experimental practices that involve an “us” that far exceeds humans—and even what we might consider animate beings—for a “you” – an “other” that goes beyond any of us towards  worlds to come.

Well – what a beautiful place to pause for the week: unconditional hope… Till next week – keep experimenting unconditionally…

Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

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