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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 175! Boredom is a Creative Practice...
Good morning hunches becoming subjects,
We are still spanning a continent, Iain is on the North-East edge of the Pacific and Jason the North West edge of the Atlantic. The moon has just passed full and it is now the countdown to the new moon and the Chinese New Year (January 29th).
Next year will be the year of the snake – that wonderful creature that gave up on limbs to invent new modes of being alive and sense-making. They fly, swim, slither. And they see-feel-smell-taste space in totally unique ways – In all of this they are a testament to the creative generative power of “blocking” (i.e. blocking “legs”).
They are a perfect creature to accompany this series that we started last week on “how do we sense the new?” This week we are going to loop back through this logic of sensing and how it accompanies the new.
As a brief preamble, we had a number of great conversations with newsletter readers this week about our images and diagrams – especially in regard to our current theme of “sensing." Perhaps for some, our use of images and diagrams can seem like something inconsequential – that they can be skipped over as mere “pictures."
But for us, the pictures matter, they slow us down and shift our sensibilities. To look without words is to be drawn into a different qualitative realm – a realm that is perhaps at the edge of what we recognize.
And this is a realm critical to creative discernment. To engage with creative processes we need to slow down, experience more friction, more oddness, more difference and give space and time over to “whatever” might happen next… to let things sweep us back out to sea…
That’s the logic of the pictures, but not to forget about the diagrams: The diagrams allow us to get at things not easily put into words. Diagrams are inherently both multi-directional and have an overall gestalt quality – where the written word is linear, unidirectional and additive – the diagram is something else entirely…
So, in this newsletter, we are going to try an experiment in which we put a bit more emphasis on explicitly unpacking diagrams and using drawings as we develop the argument…
Last week we focused on how our deeply embodied vague sensations are critical cues in experimental practices where we wish to join creative processes. We used a paired diagram showing both the self+environment and the feelings that accompany it (see below):
DIAGRAM #1 (above): On the left we have a simple diagram of how the self and a specific environment co-create each other – in a process that we could call “territorialization.” And on the right we have an XY diagram showing how this process of ongoing territorialization has a sensorial tone/mood or “valence” to it.
All our experiences are the outcome of this active dance of self and environment co-creating each other. Even when experience repeats or continues it must be created. And this is always an act of co-creation – it is never merely in our “heads” – it is a collaborative act of co-making of subject and environment.
When we are fully of a world – fully territorialized – the general tone of experience is of peace (see above diagram on the right). Here with this term “peace” we are not interested in big cosmic feelings, just the very normal and often unnoticed tone of daily experience when in activity things tend to disappear – recede into the background. We sit in a chair, reach for a cup, get up and things flow. This deeply felt embodied sense is one of peace…
(In a technical sense this feeling is the outcome of the relational dynamics of affordances being experienced as simply “what things are” – e.g. a chair is for sitting versus focusing on the relational possibility for the action of sitting held between our type of bodies and this form of furniture).
In this sense of peace and completeness, we lose sight that we are of a very specific world and not reality in general. Our sense is a complete feeling of “this is how things are.” – but in reality, it is of our specific world (as humans of a certain set of habits, practices and environments).
To effectively engage with creative processes we need to sense – feel how it is to be so of a world that it disappears. For it is only once we can sense this, then we can also recognize and welcome the more discomforting feelings of experimentally leaving our world.
Gilles Deleuze in a wonderful interview describes what it is to have a world by discussing how the tinny tick has a world. (One thing to note as you read this quote, when Deleuze refers to animals having a world – it is important to remember we too are animals…)
“The first thing that impresses me is the fact that every animal has a world… What is an animal world? It’s sometimes extraordinarily limited… animals react to very few things…
For example… the tick responds, reacts to three things, three stimuli, period, that’s it, in a natural world that is immense, three stimuli, that’s it: that is, it tends toward the extremity of a tree branch, it’s attracted by light, it can wait on top of this branch, it can wait for years without eating, without anything, in a completely amorphous state. It waits for a ruminant, an herbivore, an animal to pass under its branch, it lets itself fall… It’s a kind of olfactory stimulus… The tick smells, it smells the animal that passes under its branch, that’s the second stimulus: light first, then odor. Then, when it falls onto the back of the poor animal, it goes looking for the region that is the least covered with hair… So, there’s a tactile stimulus, and it digs in under the skin. For everything else, if one can say this, for everything else, it does not give a damn… That is, in a nature teeming [with life], it extracts, selects three things…That’s what constitutes a world, that’s what constitutes a world” (Gilles Deleuze)
DIAGRAM #2 (below): Creative practices involve disrupting this affective deeply felt sense of peace, balance, and flow. They involve (1) experimentally blocking, disrupting – “deterritorializing” embodied habits, extended practices, tools, affordances, abstractions, and environments that give rise to our world (see below on left). This “blocking” or refusal allows new processes to affect us and push us in novel directions. And these are felt/experienced as the vague and general sensations of discomfort (see below on right):
In these blocking experiments, our felt experience has a new affective tone which we often register as a vague general sense of unease, boredom, or perplexity. Sometimes it rises towards more discernible emotional states: perhaps horror, or disgust. Or the deeply felt but also vague and general sense of error, failure, wonder, absurdity, awe, loss…
These eleven affective states:
… are critical to notice, register, welcome and linger with if we wish to really engage with creative processes.
In creative experimental practices this complex of shifting underlying affective tones (it is never just one!) accompanies the embodied pull of experience. We are being drawn out towards the different or back towards the pre-existing.
The challenge in regards to the new and the different is that it is not already there just waiting for us – it must be co-created. And as such when we first sense a difference – even if it might later be consequential, at first it is always a weak sensation in comparison to the well developed expectations of the known. In this, the new does not only need to be co-created, it needs to overcome the powers of the given.
Consider for a moment your experience of dwelling upon these simple pictures (above and below). How long did you linger over them? How did they register affectively with you? What did you sense in relation to their progression?
Did you notice them? Did you slow down or speed up? What happened?
Perhaps you had a vague or slight sense to ignore them? Did you simply pass over them relatively quickly? Let’s explore this.
DIAGRAM #3 (below): In creative experiments when we experience the affective sensation of “boredom” we often feel a visceral urge (not necessarily strong) to leave the experimental practice. We feel a general “why bother with this” that pulls us away from the experiment and back towards what we know, recognize, and perhaps like. We can see this in the corrective looping of the diagram below:
This embodied pull of correction is quite strong. And much of its strength comes from the ongoing creative territorializing powers of existing embodied habits, practices, tools, environments, affordances and abstractions (the taskscapes or behavioral settings of our daily lives are deeply entrenched/canalized).
We feel this corrective pull far more than we are ever conscious of it. And we feel it and begin to act upon it long before we might be aware of it. It is already in our muscles and habits. Whatever slight deviation might have happened – it is gone in an instant…
The sensation is often one of “knowing” – even when we cannot know.
“Yes, I get it already, so let's stop things – it's just not that interesting – it's boring”
We all experience this sense of boredom.
In feeling, in the most general manner, bored we shift out of the novel experience. Why? When we are asked why we are stopping in these circumstances, a common reply is: “Because it is boring and it won’t lead anywhere." But – and this is really important – we objectively cannot know this. Why can we say this? Why can we be so sure in saying that “one cannot know that it won’t lead anywhere”?
To claim “that it will not lead anywhere” is to project from a present experience into the future in a way that shuts down emergent possibilities. But given that the future is radically open, and that at any moment something might cross a qualitative threshold in ways that exceed our capacity to recognize their novelty and relevance – we cannot make this judgment.
John Cage used to say:
We love this quote and often use it both in workshops and in discussions with organizational clients. While Cage is no longer with us, and so we cannot ask him how he meant it, but we take it to mean: boredom is a critical cue to the reality that something different is beginning to co-emerge with our practice.
And the reason we do not know what might emerge is because we must co-create it. A novel difference that emerges is never simply a full-blown revolutionary act. It must be followed, supported, and co-created. The novel path is only ever made in the walking of it into being…
But to be simply bored, to leave it and go back is to miss an experimental opportunity.
Given that the feeling of boredom happens, we need to make boredom a complex creative practice. And this is equally true of all of our affective states – perplexity, disgust, horror, etc. These cannot be simply treated as sensations that happen to us. These are states of becoming that we participate in making real.
What matters and makes them different from a creative perspective is that they must no longer be processes that take us back to the known. We need to actively refuse this canalization of experience. This is what takes effort, practice and real skill. To simply say “we need to be comfortable with uncertainty” is far too passive.
DIAGRAM #4: Creative boredom is an active practice of puttering, poking, probing: what happens if we go a little further? …do this a little longer? What happens if we repeat this? Or just take away that?
At the core of this practice is the slow attunement toward qualitative threshold sensing. It is an active leaving space for outside forces to move us in ways we do not yet recognize. It is a practice of subliminal novel reterritorialization. We are allowing ourselves to be open to co-emerging and co-becoming other.
Boredom Is a Litmus Test
The vague, meaningless, stupid, boring, absurd… The new haunts these sensations.
If one is unwilling to embrace boredom and these other sensations it is hard to develop a creative practice that allows for the qualitatively new to emerge.
Yes, we are all under enormous pressure to deliver creative outcomes as fast as possible. But, while we can imagine and visualize a “fast road” – it is not available to creative practices. Creativity, even when it happens in an instant, is slow. It cannot be measured in clock time. It is always outside of measurement – working in a qualitative becoming that emerges beyond recognition. And our cue to faint beginnings of this novel emergence is felt in our bodies long before it is recognized. But it is felt in our turning away from the new (boredom, perplexity, unease). And creativity asks of us to invent new practices of skillful boredom so that we stay with the uncertain and unknowable long enough…
When will that be?
No one can say until it has happened…
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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