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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 174! Sensing the New...
Good Morning sensing-perturbating-environmenting loops,
This morning the newsletter is coming from planes, boats, snow, rain, and wind. Iain is traveling between Montreal and Northern Vancouver Island (the planes, boats, snow, wind, and rain) while Jason is hunkering down in the cold-blowing winds of New Jersey.
With the beginning of a new year, we wanted to kick things off with a new series on:
How do we sense the new?
We are quite excited about this series as it takes on one of the most challenging aspects of engaging with creative processes. And we hope it fits this moment in the year when many of us might have made a New Year's resolution to try something new (Iain is planning to spend more time in the ocean trying to sail, and Jason is trying to slay his arch nemesis, Sugar!). This series will fit well with such activities as they all involve the delicate process of developing a new sensorium – a new practice of ecological attunement – a new aesthetics and perhaps, just perhaps a new subjectivity or selfhood (hopefully!).
Sensing the new, which emerges as the very vaguest of feelings accompanying novel activities involving the work of different ecological attunement, is inherently very difficult. It is especially difficult for those who are highly skilled in the activity that one wishes to disrupt. In our practice as creativity and innovation consultants, it is a difficulty that we have witnessed firsthand working with highly skilled clients at every scale on every kind of project. This series will draw from these experiences, and many of our own experiments from over the last couple of decades in practice.
Being attuned to sensations – simply noticing the immediacy of the ongoingness of the world as we participate in it, is already hard as we necessarily live in, of, and with abstractions (we wrote about this last fall in Volume 160). Sensing the new, the odd, the perplexing, the different runs antithetical to the smooth flow of everyday life. We sense (see, feel, move) in the midst of everyday ongoing purposeful activity. And this is what we want to happen – we want to be at home in a world. Things should work. We are at peace. And it is because of this that sensing any difference whatsoever is one of the hardest human challenges.
A brief example (Iain):
I was taking the ferry from Vancouver to Vancouver Island yesterday. It is a long two-hour crossing. And late on this winter afternoon, there were few people on board. I had found myself a prized window table and I could work and just look out in the fog of the Salish Sea. I’m always hoping to see Orca’s but mainly it is the sea itself and the odd bird and boat.
Yesterday was a grey day with fog at twilight and from the beginning of the trip I saw various larger boats slowly emerge from the fog – dark shapes with vague profiles, that then slipped past us at some distance.
Well into the journey, when I glanced up from work, I noticed another large boat emerging and I kept working. I could feel it moving closer out of the corner of my eye. And when it got closer I looked up at it. I had the briefest moment of shock or puzzlement as I saw the boat become what it was: the outline of an Island with a couple of houses.
The important thing is not that I saw the wrong thing. Judgments of right and wrong don’t really help in regard to this. It is not that I was lazy or unaware, or not paying attention, or incurious. What matters is that we recognize that this is how we move through our everyday activities effectively. We live abstractly – below the level of conscious choice. At every moment we are non-consciously categorizing what we sense. This is all happening in very general nebulous embodied context grounded and action-oriented ways: relevance, direction, objectness, general category…
This embodied habitual non-conscious abstract conditioning is what lets us effectively move, act, and do. Try moving around for a moment: get up, walk, sit, pick up something.
Do it in a fast, fluid, and “natural” way.
Notice now how you did not need to consciously sense, consider, determine, and then act. And how absurd that would be! You moved without a thought and the floor “afforded” pushing against, standing, walking, and stopping. The counter afforded support and orientation. Your hand reached for and pushed off the arm of the chair simultaneously as your back straightened, and a leg extended.
We act in our everyday lives in and through embodied lived sensorial abstractions. None of this is conscious – e.g. it requires us to think about it, rather it involves “know-how” (versus “know-what” – explicit active conceptual consideration). These embodied sensorial abstractions involve “affordances” – the technical term for the specific possibilities for action our habitual attunement and entanglement with our environment give us.
It is worth slowing down and parsing out some of these concepts. We are always of a local environment (what Roger Braker in the 1960’s called a “behavioral setting”):
This setting of our activities – our kitchen, office, bathroom, Instagram, etc. shapes, or gives rise to our subjectivity which in turn transforms and entails our environment. The relational configuration of tools, environment, and embodied habits (the “setting”) is creative and enabling/stabilizing. Our lived experience of sensing and doing is much like the mythical dragon eating its tail – looping through an ever-stabilizing dance of active environment and active subject creatively co-making and co-stabilizing each other:
And what is being created between the individual and the environment in this looping of our ongoing co-creating activity is a landscape of affordances. This is a key aspect of our tacit, embodied, non-cognitive, and extended ways of doing and sensing: this environment affords us these opportunities for this meaningful action. A world of specific general possibilities opens up (is co-created) between us and our surroundings:
We can do things, feel things, sense things as things – as meaningful things. Ways of walking, talking, cooking, and touching emerge and stabilize into the specific aesthetics of a way of life (a world). (This is astonishing and worth pausing on at length).
Here it is useful to bring back the diagram of aesthetics and groundedness and connect it with the above diagram:
Every way (or style) of being of a world has an aesthetic (a tacit embodied sensorium). Being of a world creates an embodied, tacit way of sensing and scope of sensing/feeling – being affected.
There is a strong connection in everyday life between recognition, our habits, our environment, and our sense of being at peace – being at home in a world. When we talk of “Sense-making” this is what is meant (which is something very different from the endlessly trademarked and argued overuse of the term by business consultants of all stripes).
This is what was at play with Iain seeing islands as ships…
… and if you remember, we introduced this difficulty in Volume 170: How the Past Perishes Is How the Future Becomes, with a discussion of gorillas being invisible while being in plain sight.
Let’s return to the conclusion of one article we presented on this phenomenon of what is commonly referred to as inattention blindness:
“...what we're thinking about — what we're focused on — filters the world around us so aggressively that it literally shapes what we see. So, Drew says, we need to think carefully about the instructions we give to professional searchers like radiologists or people looking for terrorist activity, because what we tell them to look for will in part determine what they see and don't see.” (From NPR report).
Now, it is not that this conclusion is wrong, rather we would put the emphasis far more strongly on the environment, tools, and embodied habits rather than on “what we are thinking about.” Thinking only comes much later into the picture. How we sense, feel, and attune at an embodied tacit level comes first. What we are thinking builds upon – emerges out of stabilized grounded habits and an established way of sensing (an established grounded aesthetics).
Well, this is where things get tricky. The new has the added difficulty in that if it is radically new – then it is something that has never been experienced, seen, or sensed before whatsoever. And this leads to the real issue: being novel, if it is even sensed at all, it will almost always sensed as what is already known.
For creativity, as we noted in Newsletter 170, it is never enough to start with how things are and just look for the outliers who might notice or sense differently. Too much is already in place and assumed. A world, a subjectivity, an aesthetic sensorium – a way of being alive (along with its tools, practices, habits, concepts, and environments) is stabilized. and ultimately it takes the subject – us – to be a given. But, from the perspective of creativity, we cannot take our personhood and how we sense reality as a fixed universal given.
The new has to be made alongside the making of new ways to sense it – which requires the unmaking and remaking of the subject (us), how we sense, and our environment. This is a question of creating new forms of ecological attunement via the making of novel worlds.
And this creative worldmaking involves practices of collectively disclosing what exists, and then deliberately and actively refusing/blocking key aspects of it.
It involves disrupting who “we” are – as bodily embedded and extended intra-subjective sensorial beings. Such a disruption is not an “expansion of the self” – to embrace such a logic is to fall back into a developmental approach to innovation – and ultimately a false universalism and reduction of difference to one world. The “we” becomes other. The “I” becomes other – in attending to the perishing of habits, practices, tools, and environments. Making is unmaking.
So – How does one do this? How does one sense the new? There is much still to unpack (which will be the content of the next couple of newsletters). But, we want to give you an experiential feeling for this process.
Sensing the new begins in actively (or accidentally) “deterritorializing” our way of being:
This can happen via an accident or forces outside of our control or we can do this quite deliberately: If we block certain tools, aspects of our habits, or environment in a rigorous fashion we push ourselves out into a zone of active perplexity:
We are without the stable things we recognize, uncertain of how to act, and the meaning of what we sense. (This will only be to a certain degree…) But in these uncertain moments of practice we will experience the sensations of perplexity, horror, unease, disgust, and stupidity…:
These are the sensations that accompany the tentative emergence of novel environments, habits, and tools.
And when we experience these sensations we react in ways that most often bring us back – reterritorialize us in our existing sense of self and world. We meet these sensations with the practices of correction, improvement, and re-stabilization:
And remember this is when we sense something odd at all!
But what could happen if we were to actively develop the collective ability to be actively and experimentally at ease with these sensations? Can we take the sensations of disgust or horror as a sign of a difference worth engaging? What if stupidity, disgust, terror, wonder, perplexity, oddness, absurdity, horror, unease, and boredom were taken as the necessary tacit sensory aesthetics of a creative practice?
What if understood that being actively attuned to the ecology of this sensorium of unease was a necessary aspect of a practice of deterritorialization and novel co-creative re-territorialization (and novel re-subjectification)?
This week pay attention to how you feel. Not the big emotions – but the minor sensations – the embodied mood and tone of everyday experience. Feel how this tone shifts your body in motion. How affect accompanies action.
Try small experiments in blocking habits, practices, tools, and environments. Notice your embodied affective feel. The key is not to judge how you feel, but to get better at noticing your base sensorium, your base embodied aesthetic way of being. And then to notice how shifting activities (the blocking) will shift it. Notice how active attunement is in these moments. And notice how the feel of things pulls you back into existing patterns.
Try to actively follow vague and odd sensations, and actively and experimentally welcome boredom and disgust. We find cooking is a great space for these kinds of experiments of novel attunement to what is becoming in making a novel path in the walking…
Well – it is time for us to experiment with a breakfast perplexity – we hope that you can as well! That is it for this week – have a wonderful curious and odd week sensing otherwise.
Till next week,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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