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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 173! Creativity: Exhausting to Beginning Again...
Good morning new becomings,
“Being exhausted is much more than being tired" (Deleuze)
We stayed up far into the morning wandering into the icy dawn of frozen Montreal. And yes, New Year's Day – we were tired. That joyous tiredness that let us sleep late into the afternoon without a worry.
We hope that you had a brilliant dark sun of a New Year's celebration.
But why begin the year talking about exhaustion?
The question creativity asks us – when will you be done with the old?
– can equally be understood as the very practical question: When will you exhaust the possible?
For it is only on the other side of the possible that the new emerges:
“The tired person can no longer realize, but the exhausted person can no longer possibilize… He exhausts that which, in the possible, is not realized” (Deleuze)
The care needed to join creative processes in ways that allow the qualitatively new to co-emerge is an active practice of exhaustion. This is something that we in our practice most often term “blocking." What is nice about the term exhausting – is that it gives a real duration to the practice – where “blocking” can feel like a one-off action. Additionally, it gives the practice a real sense of the work involved – there is a need for a never-ending vigilance and continuous activity of refusing the known – especially in that we need to, as Deleuze notes, “exhaust that which, in the possible, is not realized." For far too often we confuse “the not realized” of the possible with creativity…
As we begin this new year, and take, for us, a last moment of “untime” – it is a week to re-enact and re-embody, re-embed, and re-extend into the sensibilities that allow us to join with creative processes – the radical forces of otherness and difference that refuse the possible. These practices call upon us to again take up the work of exhaustion. It is only within the work of exhaustion that the creative voyages find their lines of flight. The new will not be outside the old, but the outside of the old…
In the spirit of finding the outside of the old. We return one last time to the newsletters of 2024. As the holidays come to an end we have one last set of gifts: throughout the year our newsletters include many tangents, shards, and fleeting tendrils of suggestions. These often take the form of “what we are reading,” or watching, listening, attending, participating in, consuming, etc. We thought it’d be fun to collate and curate some of these whispered shards.
With most newsletters we suggest and reference many books – and often we are referencing the same books or authors. These books eventually end up on our website in our annotated bibliography (a good resource to check out). These tend to be dense works – sometimes absurdly so. But these are not the only works we love.
Alongside these Neutron Stars of creative practices, we also suggest several more tangential choices. These are no less interesting books – it is just that their voyage and their geographies are tangential to the topic of innovation. But tangents are no less critical to a creative practice than what seems like an absolute necessity.
This week as you take some downtime and prepare for the next year – perhaps you are thinking about the joy of such exodic books in your life? (Ex-odic meaning quite literally off the path (ex = off, ode = path).
NOTE: All these links are to Amazon; we do NOT recommend that you buy your books from them, but with the Amazon site you can easily read a sample there. We suggest that you look at buying any of these books used from your favorite local bookstore, Biblio (or a similar platform), or using your public library.
These are the books that sweep one elsewhere:
Deliberately getting wet is, as Dianna and Mark McMenamin suggest in Hypersea, just part of the necessary consequences of life moving out of the oceans. For life to have creatively evolved to be able to come on land, it had to encapsulate the ocean inside of itself. Our life on land is an interconnected symbiotic assemblage of ways of internalizing the vast oceans. We are walking sacks of a neatly packaged ocean. The salt tears we taste streaming down our cheeks, brought on by the strong winter winds as we bike in the rain, are nothing less than the salty ocean still flowing through us after hundreds of millions of years…
In tracing the threads of causality further out across the “Western” conceptual landscape, one quickly touches upon the related concepts that explicitly rely upon and emerge from the logic of causality: freedom, the individual, explanation, universality, potential, choice, agent/agency, will, free-will, will power, determinacy, essence, subject-object, understanding, communication, etc. (and all of their opposites). But what of this is historically contingent? Could one be of a way of life that on one hand is deeply engaged in creative processes, and has no place for causality. Here, we can suggest Francois Jullien’s From Being to Living: A Euro-Chinese Lexicon of Thought.
John Durham Peters wrote in a wonderful book “The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media” to introduce the concept of media – they are “agencies of order… containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible.” And this is how we are framing “enabling configurations” – we hope that you can hear the resonances of similar languages and approaches to creativity. The medium is creative… (and we are of the medium).
I (Jason) grew up on the beaches of Long Island. The beach is the only place I ever wish to be - reading a book and walking the shore to satisfy my lifelong quest to find a shark tooth sticking up in the sand alongside the myriad of shells that have washed up on the beach. And while I've yet to find one, I've found plenty of beautiful shells and sparkling sea glass. I've always been fascinated by their shapes and swirls, rounded edges, vibrant colors, and the smooth backs that were once the home of some of our favorite foods (Iain loves oysters, Jason mussels.) "The Sound of the Sea" by Cynthia Barne is a detailed look at seashells and their important roles as historians, currency, industrial material, and carbon absorbers. To tell the human story is nothing without including seashells and the creatures that inhabit them. A great read as you look up from your beach chair and gaze upon the ocean.
Note: One of Iain’s all-time favorite graphic novels is In the Sounds and Seas (Marnie Galloway) – a worldless journey of aching beauty.
To be human is to move and for many of us, this involves walking. Yet we take for granted the complexities, assemblages, and our embodied actions required to walk and move from one place to the next. In a society of speed, walking is the space to slow down and connect deeply with our environment, nature, and the earth beneath our feet. Walking One Step at a Time by Erling Kagge illuminates this embodied action. It reminds us of how we feel when we walk, and how our bodies are connected to our surroundings, sights, sounds, and smells. Feeling time slow down. Our mind wanders. Our thoughts crystallize. Our anger dissipates. Our resentment melted away - with every step. Erling captures the embodied enactive spirit of walking here: "The longer I walk, the less I differentiate between my body, my mind, and my surroundings. The external and internal worlds overlap. I am no longer an observer looking at nature, but the entirety of my body is involved." For us, to be deeply embodied and enactive is critical to creativity, and we need not look any further than walking.
The image and the diagram are so critical to our work. We are always researching practices of image-making and diagramming. The study (and love of ) graphic novels is a big part of this research.
One of the most inspiring works we came across in this regard this year was by Joe Sacco. Sacco, who makes a point of calling himself a comic book author, is justifiably famous for his graphic novels on Palestine. But much less well known is Paying the Land. This book which tells the stories of First Nations People in Northern Canada is remarkable in every way.
One day we will have a graphic novel on creativity – it will owe much to both Joe Sacco and Marnie Galloway (even if it never comes close to their work).
Having read everything by many of our favorite authors of speculative fiction – we are waiting for their next works to be released. Two books by authors we regularly discuss, Ray Nayler, and Adrien Tchaikovsky are exceptional:
In pretty much every conversation we have these days AI, the climate emergency and worldmaking come up. Here are a few books on these topics we recommended this year:
Co-Intelligence - Living and Working with AI
AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference
The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk
The New Science of the Enchanted Universe
Well – that's it for this week and our time-outside-of-time. Next week we recommence the regular programming… till then, keep ex-odic!
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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P.S.: Looking to connect more deeply with our work?
Have a look a our book, or hire us! Innovation workshops, corporate talks, webinars, one on one coaching, innovation facilitation, + more… Something else in mind? Great - let's chat.
