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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 158! Too Much! (Creativity) – on the Emerging Revolution...
Good Morning Celebrants of the Autumn Full Moon,
We have been enjoying the early rising moon becoming full all this week. Sitting outside as the earth rotates away from the sun and the moon rises into the cool night air has been a special pleasure.
There is a wonderful short piece by Dogen where he comments on the Shakyamuni Buddha saying, “Thus is the moon in water”:
“Thusness of “Thus is the moon in water” is the moon in water. It is water thusness, moon thusness, thusness within, within thusness. “Thus” does not mean “like something.” “Thus” means “as it is.”
And he goes on from there… But what is critical is that instead of using the usual characters for the moon (Tsuki), he uses the character tu (meaning total/entire) and ki (meaning possibility/capacity)...
Looking overhead tonight as we finish writing –
“thus is the total possibility in water…” (and the clouds encompass it in a fleeting instant – darkness)
This week, in light of how many new newsletter subscribers we have been getting over the last few weeks, we want to take a moment to orient and re-orient our readers and community of fellow practitioners of creative processes to our small corner of the creative universe.
First, welcome to all of the new and recent subscribers. We are glad that we have found each other. We are Emergent Futures Lab – an innovation consultancy focused on the how of creativity and innovation – especially in regards to the more radical forms of creativity. We work with everyone, from individuals to organizations to communities to governments. You can learn more about us on our website.
The “we” of Emergent Futures Lab is Jason Frasca, Andrew Harrison, and Iain Kerr. And we are each glad to meet you.
This weekly newsletter is number 158 – which means we are about to enter our third year of publishing (with Volume 163). The goal of our newsletter is to go deeply and pragmatically into key topics that we feel are overlooked in regards to creativity and innovation. Our larger interest is to participate in developing a robust community around alternative approaches to creativity that move away from individualistic, mind-centered approaches towards more distributed, complex, and emergent approaches. To be able to really go deeply into key topics, we most often write our newsletters on multi-week topics—over the last couple of weeks, for example, we were exploring the problems with futurists in relation to creativity and the importance of hope over imagination in changemaking practices (Volume 156, Volume 157). We have gone deeply into key topics such as affordances, exaptation, emergence, and worldmaking – you can find these and many more in the archive of all of our previous newsletters here.
We regularly post on Linkedin – so it is good to follow our personal accounts (Iain Kerr, Jason Frasca, Andrew Harrison) as well as Emergent Futures Lab.
Our website is set up to be a resource for all things innovation and creativity. We have an ever expanding glossary, and bibliography, and you can query our site for any concept that interests you (we also use and love this feature). Additionally, you can also find a detailed overview of our approach on the website.
As the fall turns to winter, we plan to offer more online resources, from courses to other TBA surprises (we will keep you in the loop). For now, you can also find our book, Innovating Emergent Futures on the website.
Most importantly, please don’t be strangers; reach out to us; email is the best place to start. We want to make this more than a one-way exchange—we are interested in a community and a movement.
And this week in this regard, we send a big thank you to Kristin Westmore for making our week and sharing their thoughts on their own personal journey with Hope. Kristin, the music was especially moving. (We were also alerted to a powerful piece by Omar Barghouti on despair and hope in the Guardian that is worth reading all the way to the end.)
Talking about participating in developing a community—one of our missions in all of this is to develop a community around a new, more distributed, complex, and emergent approach to creativity. This week we met back up via Zoom with Jonas Torrens – a friend and collaborator from Brazil by way of the Netherlands (he joined us for our seminar at the European Forum Alpbach as our “martian anthropologist"), to discuss the importance of developing new approaches to transdisciplinary creative practices and how massively diverse such a transdisciplinary practice would need to be.
Let’s back up a bit: Our classical modern western approach to creativity has become institutionalized and generalized such that it acts as a type of discipline – “creativity studies." It has become what Thomas Kuhn might have called a “normal science” – something so ubiquitous, assumed, and taken for granted that few even realize that the individualistic human-focused and mind-centered paradigm for creativity is recent, highly contested, and profoundly limited (the best short review of how this approach developed is “The Invention of Creativity: The Emergence of a Discourse” by Camilla Nelson—and well worth reading). We often call this approach/discipline “essentialist creativity:”
Essentialist Creativity is an approach that has about a dozen core concepts/practices/logics that act in a mutually reinforcing manner (see above – we also wrote more about this in Volume 153 and Volume 154):
Speaking historically, a big part of what is challenging this approach is the emergence of both new disciplines (such as the complexity sciences), new approaches developing to old questions (such as the enactive approach to cognition), and new transdisciplinary constellations emerging (e.g. Material Engagement Theory + Ecological Psychology + Developmental Systems Theory).
From our perspective, we are in the midst of a revolution in how we approach creativity. And it is a revolution that touches on much more than just creativity; it is challenging how we approach what it is to be human, how we view our place in the world, and what we consider the world to be (it is important to note that this is not necessarily a global revolution; many cultures never created or participated in the practices of essentialist creativity, as many decolonial practices have made explicit.)
As we move out of the logic of an essentialist approach to creativity, we find ourselves out of necessity in a very pluralistic moment—we need to be profoundly trans-disciplinary.
Here it is important to sense the full meaning of “trans” –as a prefix it means “to move across,” “to go beyond,” and “to be on the other side of." Thus, to seek to develop a trans-disciplinary approach is to move in new ways…
For us, we can clearly sense what we are moving beyond and to the other side of a reactionary approach to creativity (the practices, logics, tools, and environments of Essentialist Creativity.)
In Volume 154 of the newsletter, we talked about the importance of revisiting and moving across existing disciplines with new “matters of concern." Thus it is not about remaining faithful to existing disciplines—even while we utilize them—a new set of questions and concerns means that we can move across these spaces in new and highly innovative ways. Here are the five key “matters of concern” that motivate us to explore existing disciplines in new ways:
And which disciplines do we feel we need to revisit in new ways to develop a new approach to creativity? We turn to the disciplines of:
We can loosely map this:
Now, to many, this can feel like far too much to have to move across! (We sympathize…)
And to others, it can feel like a radically open and creative moment (which is how we also feel profoundly).
It is important to say that these two views are not opposed—we are in the midst of a radical and wide-ranging upheaval in which it is impossible to sense all that is going on, and equally, it is impossible to be present to all that is emerging. It is overwhelming and it is also exhilarating.
But this means that we should not shy away from the overwhelming polyphony—it is necessary. In fact, the error we often see in many potentially important works that claim to develop a new approach to creativity, such as The Atlas of Social Complexity (and they do explicitly strive to be revolutionary in how they re-orient the field of creativity), is that they are both far too narrow in their outlook, and because of this, they are unwittingly pulled back to the very things they seek to escape (a narrow anthropocentric individualism in the case of the Atlas).
A critical and self-conscious embracing of a vast range of alternatives needs to work in ways that refuse to fall back into the implicit logic of the essentialist approach to creativity.
The polyphony of experiments we need to embrace is much like the ecological need to embrace the true biodiversity of our forests.
Ecologically, on one hand, we are consciously recognizing and refusing the monocultures of our industrialized landscapes and their conceptual infrastructure—and on the other, we are moving towards new approaches to an entangled ecology.
So too with creativity—the narrow, reactionary, and debilitating human-centered, individualistic, and mind-focused approaches are practices that we can get to the other side of and move beyond. And in doing so, we find ourselves moving towards and across a new, far more diverse, creative, and emergent wilderness of practices…
And it is this transdisciplinary diversity that we wish to focus on: as we collectively develop alternative approaches to creativity, we will need to wander with, follow, and participate in the massively diverse living, growing creative underground tendrils of new practices.
Below we extend our list of disciplines that we should move across in new ways—to a list of novel practices that are developing from within existing disciplines but pushing out beyond them in as yet undefined ways. And it is in these that we feel a revolution in creativity is fermenting in astonishing, wonderous, and curious ways that exceed any discipline—and will perhaps lead to new approaches and disciplines that reinvent the total landscape of how we engage with how we are human, creative, and worldmakers.
(The one caveat we wish to add in advance of this list is that it is neither complete – which is logically impossible, nor is it intended to feel overwhelming; rather, it should feel joyous: there is so much to explore—there is so much being invented—there is so much to join and participate in!)
In a sense, this is where we are experimenting actively with others. This is where we draw our energy. This is where we are finding practical processes to help others engage with creative processes on a daily basis to make meaningful change happen—whether individually, in an organization, or in their community.
We are curious—what is on your list? What does your area of the hyper-biodiverse forest look like in regards to your curiosities for a revolutionary approach to creativity?
What feels necessary, important, and interesting for you in regards to a new approach to creative processes?
We would love it if you shared these with us—perhaps it is a photo of your bookshelves, or a diagram on a napkin, or it is a shopping list. In a future newsletter, we would like to share your insights. So, be in touch if you feel so compelled…
Well, that is it for this week—enjoy the moon!
(the rising of “infinite total possibility”)
One final suggestion: this week we came across the short autobiography of great Japanese “acid folk” musician, poet, gambler, and day laborer Kazuki Tomokawa, “Try saying you are alive” It is well worth a read (while spinning some of his astonishing discs – which were on repeat this week as we worked away on various creative projects), we could not put it down.
Till next week, keep experimenting in the vastness of possibility.
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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