Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 161! Creativity: A Detour into Differences that Make a Difference...
Dear concrete abstract becomings of unfolding events,
It is week three of our series on creativity, organization, and organizations. This week is a bit of an important creative detour. In the process of writing last week’s newsletter, we came to realize that we needed to say more about abstraction and its critical importance to (and difficulties for) creativity. So, we are still on track with this series on organizations + creativity, but this week we are doing a bit of the important laying of the groundwork so that we can come to organizations with fresh abstractions and a renewed curiosity for “what an organization can do."
We feel that abstractions are worth the creative detour, and we hope that you will feel the same!
Before we co-develop with this week's adventure, let's do a quick review:
Last week in: Volume 160: Organizations of the World Unite! (You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Abstractions!)—we focused on how our abstractions “think” about organizations.
What does this mean?
Simply put, there is a very clear and consistent pattern to how we classically describe what an organization is and how it works. First, it is seen as a “body with organs." Which is to say organizations as understood to have a clear inside and outside (it is a discreet body), and the inside is composed of discrete single-function units (departments or “organs”):
And the functions of each organ/department are organized as a “living"being"—there are higher organs that control and direct (much like the brain might)—e.g., the "C-suite,” and there are planning and production units/organs, etc. that give it a “down and out” structure:
This model is obviously an abstraction, and there's inherently nothing wrong in principle with that. But it is this particular abstraction that is problematic. We can get a sense that this abstraction is not helping us engage with the actualities of organizations by the simple fact that this “body with organs” model that we use to describe organizations and how they function is identical to both how we frame individual’s and their agency, as well as creativity.
We called this the “triple-headed god-model”:
The problem is, as we have shown in previous newsletters, that we know that this is not how humans operate, nor is it how creative outcomes emerge—and, as we hope to make clear in this and subsequent newsletters, it is certainly not how organizations function in regards to creative processes. Thinking is embodied, extended, embedded, and enactive—it is not something that happens “in” the head. Nor does the mind/brain “direct” the body. Nor are organs monofunctional (for example, we now know that the gut participates in regulating emotions).
These abstractions, rather than tracking how these things actually operate, perfectly track the “god model”:
A model that Marshal Shalins terms our “triumphant western model of production"—one that is hyper-individualistic and involves the “imposing of form upon inert matter by an autonomous subject (whether god, individual, or [organization]) who commands the process by a pre-established plan and purpose” (see his wonderful introduction to Beyond Nature and Culture and his profound and scathing The Western Illusion of Human Nature—NOTE: we review these works and others in our bibliography).
The problem with this approach is first and foremost that it ascribes to individual powers, attributes, and actions that are actually the emergent result of a diverse organized assemblage operating in a non-linear manner:
And as such, this abstraction (the god model in all of its instanciations) in actuality takes us away from being able to effectively engage in the realities of our selves, our agency, creative processes, and organizational logics.
And this was the main point of our first newsletter on organizations: Volume 159: Organizations and Creativity: It’s not what you think. Here we stressed that everything is organized; nothing comes alone or has some internal predetermined essence—not the individual, not the organization, and certainly not creativity. To say “everything is organized” for us means that everything is the emergent outcome of a relation dominant dynamic assemblage. And organizations (groups) and their creativity are very different from that of an individual (which is already very different from how it is classically portrayed).
You might think we are overstating our case here on how pervasive these particular abstractions are (the god model and its variants). But our critique of them does not originate in literature review of critical anthropologies of the west (as much as we enjoy the work of Marshall Shalins, Marilyn Strathern, and Eduardo Viveros de Castro). Not at all; rather, it comes from our first-hand experience of working with individuals, groups, and organizations on creativity.
Here is an example: In introductory workshops focused on introducing participants to an emergent approach to engaging with creative processes, we will often begin with about an hour-long “game” that puts the participants in a truly emergent creative process. It is a process that is designed explicitly to disrupt and absolutely undermine the possibility of an “ideation first” approach (e.g., the Ideation - Plan - Make logic of the god model) taking place.
When we ask participants immediately after the game two questions: “Is the outcome something novel?” and “Is this something that you ideated or could have predicted from the outset of the game?” The answers are always: “Yes, this is something truly novel—and no, we did not ideate this." So far so good…
Then, when we then get the participants in groups to diagram out the process of “what happened,” something entirely different occurs: without fail, they will describe some variation of the god model as the process of what happened: It’s all Ideate – Plan – Make…
Now some of the diagrams might be closer to the Design Thinking variation (Empathize, Ideate, Iterate, Make), while others might consist of a set of pragmatic heuristics (“take time to brainstorm and develop a clear plan," “test your plan via trial and error," “get inspired," etc.). However it exactly occurs, the god model is something that we would argue has nothing to do with their actual experience and acts as a substitution for their experiences.
Now it could be that we are the ones who are wrong about the actual nature of the game—and that the game that we think is emergent and non-ideational is in fact something that could be accurately described by the god model. Because this is a possibility we cannot rule out, we deliberately bring in outside colleagues who are not familiar with our emergent games to both participate and observe the workshop (as types of anthropologists). And it is from their reports that it is most apparent that we are dealing with a clear case of surreptitious substitution, where an abstraction (the god model in this case) is taken as experience in a way that overrides the actualities of the experience they participated in.
This problematic but ubiquitous operation of substitution of abstraction for experience is certainly one of the most critical issues to be addressed if we are ever to effectively engage with creative processes. For how are we ever to experience and sense the new as the new if we are forever experiencing our experiences from the perspective of pre-existing abstractions?
This is certainly not an academic question, nor is it one that can be overcome by simply paying attention to and amplifying “weak signals,” as some of the more popular business consultants claim is the simple solution to this phenomenon.
Last week we turned to the work of Alfred North Whitehead (the philosopher who is often credited with coining the term “creativity”) to help us both diagnose this issue and find a new way to connect to experience and abstractions differently. Whitehead diagnosed this process as one of “misplaced concreteness,” and by this he meant that we are always using abstractions, and in doing so we are also continuously inverting the relation between experience and abstraction: we make our abstractions the real—the concrete—and our concrete lived experiences bend towards these abstractions.
We see this everyday when people claim they know what X “is"—Atoms, Place, Home, the Body, Gender, Human Nature—it is all abstractions. But as Spinoza put it, we cannot know what anything is capable of.
“I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. But what does this equivalence between empiricism and pluralism mean? It derives from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness).” (Gilles Deleuze)
The abstract—"the body,” “gender,” “nature"—these do not “explain” and easily slip into universals—a type of transcendent, unchanging truth that can quickly erase histories and most importantly erase—and in fact deny creativity with the ease of “it has always been this way” or “this is an unchanging universal truth.”
This move from abstraction to truth is the work of substitution—we substitute the abstract for the complexities of brute experience. For Whitehead this is most apparent in our contemporary approach to physics and everyday experience. Take for example, a piece of furniture, What is real? We now understand that the atoms, quarks, muons and the mathematical eleven-dimensional space of string theory are the “really real” and are truly objective, and in the very same operation we have made our experience of the warmth, color, feel, and solidness of tables and chairs merely “subjective." We, as a culture, are now quite comfortable saying things like “I know that the table isn’t actually green or solid—it’s mainly empty space—that's just how I personally subjectively see things… but …”
To be able to talk about atoms as objective—as more concrete than our experiences—is a profound complex work of sophisticated cultural abstraction, and it is an act of misplaced concreteness that is no different than the god model in its operation.
It is important to understand what this process of substitution is and is not. It is not just a simple experiential “confusion"—one that can be corrected by the mere act of communicating the “correct” information. This is after all precisely the problem the enactive approach to cognition runs into when it informs people that “thinking is not “in” the head."
And if that does not convince you, consider how we all know that the sun neither “sets” nor “rises”:
The difficulty of experience shifting lies in that this operation of substitution happens surreptitiously at a tacit embodied level of habits, practices, and rituals—it is not something that is available to us as an explicit knowledge operation. While all abstractions can be made conceptually explicit—they are the outcome of habits and practices that are themselves intra-woven with specific environments, actions, tools, concepts, rules, and ways of life—which are not things that can be rendered fully explicit. These are abstractions that emerge from a configuration of an assemblage (see Volume 159).
Thus, to reform, abandon, and construct new abstractions is no simple task... We need to change muscle memory (embodied habits), tools, practices, concepts and environments in a very considered fashion.
Before continuing, we need to make this explicit: Abstractions are particularly and uniquely problematic in regards to creativity. How?
We cannot live without abstraction and abstractions. All experience involves abstractions, even if only in their framing. Abstractions are forms of explicit knowledge operations. But all creative processes involve the exceeding of knowable. All creativity asks of things: what else can you do beyond your intended purpose? And in actually asking this question as an experiment, it pushes systems towards and into the qualitatively new. Such forms of newness are not simply in the world of “unknown unknowns” but are actually non-knowable.
And the qualitatively non-knowable emerges against all abstractions. Now, given that experience involves abstraction, the new emerges into experience not as the new but as something already known…
The sun rises, ideas drive creativity, thinking is in the head, organizations are bodies…
How does the new stand a chance in disrupting experience?
Perhaps the first thing is to recognize what abstractions are.
Abstractions are creative operations; abstractions are not simply accurate (or inaccurate) simplifications of a complex reality; they are operations. Operations are processes; they do things; they have an effect. The god model as an abstraction of ideation, for example, does not simplify the “authentic” messy experience of having a “hunch,” "brainstorming,” and developing an “idea." These are all already aspects of the operation... Rather, an abstraction gives to us in its “operation” a way to produce experiences by following an (implicit and taken-for-granted) process. Abstractions are creative of experience
Abstractions are tools: they allow us to experiment with reality from a specific perspective to construct experience. In this way, abstractions are neither inherently bad nor are they something that we can avoid.
In the wonderful book Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible, Didier Debase’s exceptional book on Whitehead’s approach to abstraction and reality (nature), he writes,
“It would be no exaggeration to see Whitehead’s philosophy as one of the boldest attempts to give abstractions a fundamental role in experience.”
And here it is important to stress: abstractions, abstracting—this is part of all experience. You cannot have an experience without abstraction. There is no such thing as “pure experience,” if by this we mean some form of a-conceptual, a-cultural, non-contextual, non-situated “naked” experience. Experience emerges from the middle—co-constructed by ongoing practices, habits, historically shaped forms of embodiment, specific tools and environments, etc.—that are operations of abstraction.
Experience is always in this way paradoxical—both fully constructed and more than—in excess of its history. An exceptional and unexceptional emergence. Empty and full (as the Heart Sutra and other texts of the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism develop via paradox).
Debase continues,
“Abstractions are neither representations nor generalizations of empirical states of affairs but constructions…”
Here with this word, "constructions,” we should sense how abstractions are themselves constructed—they emerge from habits, practices, and environments. It is all too easy to see abstractions as simply good or bad representations. But to do this is to ignore their creative power—that they in turn construct—and produce experience in those same environments.
And additionally, in the term "constructions,” we should sense that this is precisely the experience that was happening in our workshops on creativity and emergence. Abstractions, in this case the operations of the god model, working at an embodied level, were co-constructing an experience.
For the sake of creativity and the recognition of the new, we need to reconsider abstractions:
“Abstractions have their own constraints, their own modes of fabrication, their own ways of moving and acting. It is thus an inquiry into the mode of existence of abstractions and their function in the most concrete of experiences (of which they are not simple formal reproductions), that is fundamental to Whitehead.”
What is an abstraction's mode of fabrication? What is their way of acting and moving?
What abstractions do is “cut” experience. And how they do this lets us determine how closely they track and augment experience.
to cleave
to think
to name
(Arakawa)
This can sound profoundly “abstract"—for the lack of a better term...
But it does not need to remain so: Here is a wonderful example from Gregory Bateson:
Consider a blind person and their cane. We can consider this (holistic) event with the usual abstractions that decompose it into body, tool, and world – where each of these is a totally discreet entity (e.g., the “body” ends at the skin, the stick is an inert thing— mere "stuff," and the world is “out” there.)
These abstractions do give us a sense of what is happening—we can tell a story and it will feel reasonable—describing what we see (just the way speaking of the sun “setting” does work…)
But, and this is worth trying yourself—is the stick really separate in the blind person's experience? Which is to say, when they are using the stick, do they experience the world as their hand holding a “stick” that is giving them “stick” feedback about what it touches? Do they have a decomposable experience of hand + stick + world?
Not at all; after a very short period of time (please try this), the “stick” and its actions are experienced the same way one experiences one's hand brushing against something. The body-stick-world in an instant becomes a unique holistic unit of sense-making.
For Bateson, a good abstraction would “pick out” this unit of emergent experience. Which is to say, it would “cut” it out of experience and make it an abstraction—a thing to name and think with (to use Arakawa’s language). And a bad abstraction cuts experience in ways that does not preserve its fundamental difference.
Bateson refers to what is happening in a good abstraction as sensing “the difference that makes a difference." What does this mean? While it might be OK for me, as a sighted person to consider my “body” as something that ends at my skin, to apply the same abstraction to a blind person using a stick would be to fail to recognize the “difference that makes a difference." The holism of “bodystickworld” is the proper unit of abstraction in this case.
Good abstractions need to pay attention to how practices give rise to unique differences that make a difference—and keep this difference alive.
Most differences that emerge in experience are not noticed because of the inherently “abstract” structure of experience (we always experience experience as already being about something containing something). The new and the different are experienced as a variation of the known. The qualitatively new and different in this process vanish—they become mere variation—more or less of the known. We have many, many abstractions that are exceptional at capturing variation—more and less (comparable differences). But we have very, very few abstractions that help us engage with qualitative difference—the non-comparable. We are habitually subsuming the different to the same.
“They are just more in touch with…”
“They are just more radical …”
“It is just a variation of …”
The challenge is that in this habit (operation), we continuously surreptitiously substitute normalizing abstractions for novel differences that could make a new qualitative difference prior to grasping the possible significance of the difference.
So how could we do a better job of making new abstractions?
They emerge with great care and specificity from experience.
They are tested, revised, and discarded as fits the situation.
This requires a slowing down and a shifting into a vagueness… and uncertainty—a distrustful vagueness: is this really what happened? Is this really what is happening? It is a tracing and a following. It requires knowing and refusing knowing—someone on the team needs to recognize rote patterns and abstractions and others need to be able to refuse these patterns and abstractions…
Whitehead offers a useful rule of thumb in this regard:
“Seek simplicity, but distrust it”
Here there is an operation: seek simplicity—he is not calling for a total abandonment of the operation of Occam's Razor (the simplest solution is often the best). It is still important to seek simplicity, but don’t believe just because it is simple; it is also a good abstraction. We are moving towards simplicity, but we are ever cautious about being too simplistic.
He then offers a second rule of thumb to help in this regard:
“Subtract nothing from experience.”
And here he draws upon William James:
“To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced”
Let's get really practical. How do we bring this to bear on our experiences in a helpful manner?
So what to do?
That is all the experiencing and abstracting we can do for this night and morning of writing! Remember: coax, follow, and become a helpmate of difference and keep it alive—let difference be different and make great novel abstractions to do so!
Till next week!
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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