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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 168! Takin’ a BLANK FRIDAY for Creativity...
Good morning well fed becomings of a lazy day,
Out in our frenzied world of capitalism, it is Black Friday, and deals are to be had. For us, it is a laid-back kind of Friday; Iain is up in Maine sea kayaking while Jason is chilling with the family in the same t-shirt he wore to the family Thanksgiving dinner (or at least that is what he promised he would do!).
And chilling it is—here on the west coast of the North Atlantic it is freezing. Snow is falling, and the dry suit and pogies are a must if one is to venture out into the tidal currents.
In the spirit of keeping things chill, we are considering today not Black Friday but Blank Friday. Which is itself a hard state to reach—perhaps too much for a chill Friday after all!
While listening to a talk on winter the other day, this poem happened (minute 9:20):
on a withered branch
a crow
has settled
autumn evening
winter
is coming
(Dogen)
How wonderful! In the spirit of lightly settling on precarious perches and keeping things light, we want to share some thoughts on how we are looking at unfolding winter in Emergent Futures Lab world:
First, we are excited to share that we have just done a soft launch of our online creativity ecosystem with a couple of classes for K-12 educators. These courses are about digital design, digitally augmented making (3D printing), and enactive creativity. This come out of our research over the last 5–6 years into how to effectively bring an enactive and worldly creativity into the spaces of learning at an early age. We will report more on this research in future newsletters. But for now, if you are a teacher of digital design or use 3D printing in the K-12 space, take a look at what we have developed.
And if you are not a K-12 teacher, rest assured that behind the scenes we are busily developing our more general introduction to worldly creativity courses and ecosystem to launch this winter (with a pre-order dropping soon). It is going to be much more than just courses; it will be a space for community and collective creative curiosity and experimentation.
Last week we mentioned our foray into the terribly named world of small peer-to-peer discussion groups (so called “master minds”). We have had a great response to this (thank you!). This is coming especially from other creativity facilitators (we have been called the “facilitators facilitators” before), and that got us back to dreaming up alternative names:
These all are not quite right—we get it—so help us out! Please, hit reply and suggest a name for this. We promise the discussions will be better than these names we’ve come up with so far! Think of this as a small, curated, facilitated, and augmented discussion group on worldly creativity. If you are interested but didn’t get a chance to express interest yet, here's the form.
Samuel Beckett’s characters would stuff their coats with crumpled newspapers to bear the winter winds, but now you would be hard pressed to find a newspaper outside of some stuffy Viennese cafe where only Thomas Bernhardt would be happy with your theft, and all that is left of either of them is in their books.
So if you are looking for other forms of insulation, books, while not as good as newspapers, have their use, especially in patching up cracks and empty window panes. Our book (Innovating Emergent Futures) being made of good paper stock is ideal: If you read it a page at a time, then tear and patch—it works!
Curious about getting it for yourself or as a gift? We are offering our newsletter subscribers 30% off. Use promo code HOLI2024 at the checkout—good till Dec 5, 2024.
We’ve got more books and holiday news: Our good friends over at Dense Magazine are about to launch Issue Two on December 7th. The issue takes as its catalyst the Patterson Silk Strikes of 1913 - and runs with this to consider labor in all of its forms. Literally, in all of its forms, from the creative labor of plate tectonics to glaciers and the work of the mighty Passaic River in the formation of the Patterson region. And from there it wanders far out into speculative considerations of possible future forms of interspecies labor practices between silkworms and humans. In between all of these, it creatively entangles with the giant art pageant that brought tens of thousands out to Madison Square Garden as part of the Strike in 1913, and then moves to Palestinian Disco, the end of silk making, and the 1970’s shirts of Patterson; and then the first North American Amazon Union and more. It is an issue that deeply, uniquely, and beautifully explores labor—which is to say creation and creativity in all of its contemporary and potentially future forms— from the perspectival/fractal lense of the silk workers strikes of 1913. You can pre-order your copies or subscribe now.
We have also been stuck in some good books:
A big chunk of our current reading is in relation to our ongoing project of revising and adding to our glossary. We have been having fun ossicalinting between experiments and books as we rewrite the glossary.
We have to admit that there is one word that has been calling out for attention and we have been avoiding for more than a year: World…
Such a mundane word. We use it all day long with little notice.
But it is a concept that is at once critical to qualitative creativity and astonishingly difficult to articulate well—and that is why we have punted it a few too many times! Over the last few weeks, we have made it our task to get it into the glossary in a creatively useful form.
This week, in preparation, we are rereading the anthropologist Marshall Sahlin’s final masterpiece, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe (Here is an enjoyable interview with him on it).
Sahlins (1930-2021) was a key figure in what is called the “ontological turn” in anthropology (along with Marlyn Strathern, and others) and a powerful ethical force in academia; he was a vocal critic of the social sciences + managerial classes role in research and interventions designed to improve the "mission efficiency" of illegal military endeavors globally. Two of our favorite books of his beyond “The New Science” are How “Natives” think, about Captain Cook for example, and The Western Illusion of Human Nature (both critical to a deep engagement with the task of Disclose in creative practices.)
... back to “worlds” and reading “The New Science.” In this work, Sahlins argues for a “double anthropology” one that interrogates who we are (those who are studying others) as much as it carefully takes what others say and do seriously. It is a broad and sweeping book that seeks to make general claims about differing worlds.
One of his major claims is that most peoples, for most of history, lived in and of “immanentist worlds"—a" world where there is only one world and that all the meta-people (gods, spirits, ghosts, etc.) are in and of this one world and not in, or on, another transcendent plane of existence. These worlds are also immantist in a second sense – every thing (e.g. what we would term: plants, rocks, clouds, mountains, rivers, shadows, knives, cell phones, animals (including humans)) are “in-spirited.” Which is to say in such worlds all things possess a mind/soul/spirit of the same form as ours (what we would know as “things” are for them persons). Immanentist worlds are worlds of only subjects (there is nothing that could be understood as mere “stuff” – mere objects), nor ultimately is there anything that could be understood in our terms as a plant, rock, cloud, shadow or animal...
Sahlins contrasts immanentist worlds with transcendentist worlds like our contemporary western world. Here he draws upon and transforms Carl Jasper's historical concept of the development of an “Axial Age." The Axial Age, Jaspers argued, was the period between the eighth and third centuries BCE when major transformations across much of Asia and the Middle East gave rise to new and transcendental approaches to reality.
Transcendental, for Sahlins, points to the double reality, that on one hand the gods live elsewhere and offer humans a way to transcend (e.g., leave) this earthly plane for another world that is both immaterial and outside of time. The development of an immaterial and ahistorical approach to all reality is the second, and arguably most important, development of transcendental approaches. Because of the development of a second conceptual realm that transcends our lived and changing material world, we can know and act via universal ahistorical concepts (e.g. Humans, Human Nature, Nature, Society, Culture, Art, Matter, etc.). In addition this, the transcendental logic gives us a set of universal oppositions: Matter vs Spirit, Nature vs Culture, Human vs Non-human, Knowing vs Believing, Base vs Superstructure, Universal vs Particular, Objective vs Subjective, etc.
Sahlins is critical of anthropology and the west in general, for understanding everything from, with, and through transcendentalist practices: we are studying other people's "culture," "myths,” and “beliefs” from our perspective of knowing better and otherwise. In short, we do not recognize that our mode of producing knowledge is tied to “a world” and its practices, tools, and environments and not to “the world.” We are of a transcendentalist world...
Sahlins is not calling for a relativizing of all knowledge (that would be to simply switch transcendentalist poles from objective to subjective). Nor is he simply calling for a recognition of differing forms of knowing (what is sometimes termed “epistemological sovereignty"), which can slip back into a narrow paternalism of multi-cultural relativism. But rather for something more all-encompassing: the recognition of ontologically different worlds and ongoing practices of worldmaking.
We need to consider that ways of being alive are qualitatively different and incomparable. Worlds are not “worldviews"—cultural" lenses that see the same reality differently. Difference is fundamental. Here we cannot translate or measure differences from the universal standard (one world's provincial position).
Practices, tools, habits, concepts, structures, systems, and environments creatively give rise to a world. For us, this is a fundamental starting place to consider creativity. And one where we can sense the full extent of the gap between forms of creativity that are developmental and those that are disruptive (the difference between change-in-degree and change-in-kind).
So—that is where we are this week. Reading, making notes, being of the winter… Next week, we look forward to writing the glossary definition of “worlds” and “world-making” and sharing that with you.
Well! It’s now Friday morning as you read this, and we are taking this as a moment of “blankness"—a moment of open, unplanned, and unknowable nextness. We wish you, those close to you, a kind, caring, slow, delicate and experimental mutually intra-dependent drift into the weekend and beyond...
Before we sign off, as we are with those dear to us this week, we are also cognizant of others elsewhere who are facing very different circumstances. Doctors without Borders, whom we support, has a triple matching giving Tuesday campaign right now, and there is much they can do with all of our support (or any other organization or engagement you are already part of).
Till next week, we wish you a gentle intra-dependent becoming.
“…on this
autumn evening
winter
is coming…”
Till next week,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
+++
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