Emerging Futures - Volume 172: Celebrating Interstitial Week 2024

Greetings restful creative becomings of the interstitial space between years, 

Every day can be a candidate for being the beginning of a new year. It could be today…

We love how many differing new years days and traditions there are. From a creativity perspective it is one of our very favorite celebrations. 

And in the worlds following the Gregorian calendar we’re a few days away from celebrating another trip around the sun and welcoming all the fresh new beginnings that come along with restarting the journey - fresh and anew.

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A New Temporality Calls for a New Clock

Yes, restarting anew. It can seem like we can never start anew – that we are always constrained by history. And while it is true that we are always fully of our moment and world, creativity is a process of continuously returning to zero while being fully in and of a history. This can seem paradoxical…

Deleuze, who is arguably the contemporary Western philosopher most concerned with the question of creativity, puts it quite beautifully in an interview called “control and becoming” – and it is worth quoting at length:

‍“I became more and more aware of the possibility of distinguishing between becoming and history. It was Nietzsche who said that nothing important is ever free from a “non-historical cloud”... Nietzsche is talking about the way things happen, about events themselves or becoming. What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circumstances; the events becoming is beyond the scope of history. History isn’t experimental. Its just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history. Without history the experiment would remain indeterminate, lacking any initial conditions, but experimentation is historical…  Becoming isn’t part of history; history amounts only to the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to “become,” that is, to create something new. This is precisely what Nietzsche called the Untimely.”

(Deleuze, Negotiations)

Reality – history, is not a limitation to the full expression of creativity but its very possibility – a creative enabling configuration that is always also Untimely…

For us, it is the various celebrations and rituals of the new year that capture this ethos of creative revolutionary becoming so well! And so we celebrate and celebrate again with every differing calendar!

Now, let us take a moment to celebrate in this newsletter that the new is untimely and starts a new clock – a new temporality…

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The Untimely Gift

In all honesty, a strong part of us hopes you’ve gifted yourself the space to not read this until after 2025 begins. That would mean you’ve gifted yourself a time beyond the calendar, beside work and just outside of the demands of others. We too are participating in this untimely becoming - and so starting from now until mid January we may be replying to emails and messages from another clock. 

Gifting ourselves – really our ecosystem, untime (what others might recognize as something similar to “downtime”), is the precondition of participating in a creative becoming from which the new might emerge. And it is likely one of the best gifts we can gift ourselves (from the perspective of creativity) after a long year of deliberate work… an untimely gift we hope to share with you all throughout 2025 and beyond. 

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Always Present – Always a Shock

There is something shocking and awakening about certain quotes – that draws one back repeatedly. This is so unlike most management writings (you know what we are talking about – you might be stuck dealing with on a daily basis) – a type of writing that is best treated as Nietzsche recommended of cold baths – something to get into and out of as quickly as possible. 

For this week we are keeping it short in words and long in reflection. Here are two quotes that we came back to repeatedly this year. The first is from Ian Hacking discussing scientific experimentation, but in a manner that is truly applicable to innovation in general:

‍“Most experiments don’t work most of the time. To ignore this fact is to forget what experimentation is doing. To experiment is to create, produce, refine, and stabilize phenomena... But phenomena are hard to produce in any stable way. That is why I spoke of creating and not merely discovering phenomena. That is a long hard task. Or rather there are endless different tasks... Perhaps the real knack is getting to know when the experiment is working. That is one reason why observation, in the philosophy of science usage of the term, plays a relatively small role in experimental science.”  

(Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening)

Again this can seem like a paradox: how can we both “discover” and “create” phenomena? Is this mere relativism? It would be if it were one-sided. But part of the difficulty is that we are co-creating, co-producing, co-refining, and co-stabilizing phenomena – with the very “phenomena” in its emergence (and ours as well…). We return and return again to this quote and Hacking's work. In fact, this question of experimenting to co-produce novel phenomena will be what we focus on in our first series of newsletter of 2025 (starting mid-January).

The second quote comes from one of the key figures in the world of Enactive Cognition, Evan Thompson. Someone who we also draw upon extensively in our work. 

It is not a quote about cognition. Rather it is from an appendix he writes to one of his more important books (to us), Mind in Life. The appendix in question is a profound concise meditation on the nature of emergence (it rewards a close study). He ends it with this statement:

‍“Nature does not consist of basic particulars, but fields and processes… There is no bottom level of base particulars with intrinsic properties that upwardly determines everything else. Everything is process all the way “down” and all the way “up”...

…these processes are “irreducibly relational — they exist only in patterns, networks, organizations, configurations or webs… Phenomena at all scales are not entities or substances but relatively stable [relational] processes…” 

‍...since processes achieve stability at different levels of complexity, while still interacting with processes at other levels, all are equally real and none has absolute ontological primacy.”…” (Evan Thompson, Mind in Life)

For us, at the end of one year verging into another this is a perfect quote to linger with – powerfully anti-essentialist, process-focused, relational, multi-scalar, emergent – creative…

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Staying With

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, does an amazing job and could do quite a bit with all of our support (or any other organization or engagement you are already part of).

With that we hope these final days of December bring you moments of joy, peace, and the opportunity to reflect on the positive impact you've had on those around you, as well as a much-deserved rest.

May this holiday season offer you the opportunity to recharge your spirit, allowing you to step into 2025 with renewed energy and consistent vigor.

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Now let us wish you a happy new year. We wish all your becomings be untimely! Till a time finds us again across the ever-surprising thresholds of difference – be well!

Till next week,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

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