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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 177! Emotion and Unlearning the Embodied Lies of Creativity...
Good morning curious becomings without indifference,
Years ago, I was working on a project in Nome that focused on First Nations food ways and developing new approaches to health/well being (Iain). We had gone out hunting and foraging with the community, and then we had collectively prepared a meal and were finishing eating it. I was sitting down and talking with one of our Inupiat collaborators, and they said, “You know, in your world only one animal speaks and it is bad.” He was referring to the snake from the Christian story of Adam and Eve. Then, after a short pause, continued, “But, in our world, everything speaks…”
We say this as we begin the Year of the Snake – there is much deeply problematic craziness happening all around us socially, politically and environmentally – but let’s not blame the snake!
For us, beginning this year focusing on sensing, and emotional states in these tumultuous times is no mere coincidence. How we feel matters… – but how we engage this equally matters – not all sensing is the same…
It’s week four of our deep-dive into “how do we sense the new?” Over the last three weeks, we have been looking into some of the key emotions and moods associated with creativity and innovation – from disgust to perplexity and boredom (You can jump back to where we started in Volume 174). Now in week four, it is a good moment to pause and reflect on the why:
Why focus on how we feel in relation to creativity?
A big part of the answer is simple: If something is radically new and different you will not be able to directly recognize it as such via explicit forms of cognition. This is because our more explicit forms of cognition are inherently conservative. Rather, we sense the new – we feel the new in quite vague ways.
Thus the key question we have been exploring over the last three weeks is: what are the real emotions and moods that emerge as we experiment with creative processes? Or put another way, what do we really feel during our engagement with creative processes – especially in the early stages?
And yes, we understand that as soon as anyone starts talking about the “real” anything, we should all be suspicious. But, the thing is, we get so much about creativity wrong in our Western approach to the practice. We’ve made it human, mind-focused, and hyper-individual – to the detriment of being able to actively engage with ongoing creative processes that are worldly, more-than-human, contingent, collective, and emergent. And because of this – it is worth talking about what is “really” going on.
A big part of the problem with the false hyper-individualization of creativity involves painting a very compelling but wholly wrong picture of what creativity feels like – which is to say: how we sense the new.
With the emotional valence of creativity, we have been barking, so to speak, up the wrong alley.
The false picture is the one you will find in stories of scientists and artists. Think of these cliches:
You can pick any Hollywood movie that involves creativity or invention and you will see this heroic fabulation and its particular individualistic tonal emotional landscape of creation play out (Last spring, for example, we focused in the Newsletter, on the purported story and Alan Turing cracking the secret German codes during World War II and in the process inventing the computer as told in the well made but profoundly factually challenged movie, The Imitation Game).
The emotional tropes involved in how we tell these stories repeats with such a cliche regularity that not only can the likes of Walter Issacson make a career of telling the exact same story over and over again while simply substituting the name of the ersatz hero. But more importantly these kinds of stories have become both how we want to hear of creativity, and how we self-report our own experiences of creation.
Marc Levinson, in the introduction to a wonderful book on the invention of the shipping container (The Box) writes this of the purported inventor of the shipping container and the reader's response to the true story:
“Many aspects of the response to The Box were startling, but perhaps the most unexpected concerns a widespread stereotype about innovation. In his later years Malcom McLean, the former trucker whose audacious scheme to create the first containership line… was frequently asked how he came up with the idea of the container. He responded with a tale about how, after spending hours in late 1937 queuing at a Jersey City pier to unload his truck, he realized that it would be quicker simply to hoist the entire truck body on board…
The story of this “Aha!” moment does not appear in The Box, because I believe that the event never occured… I suspect the story took on a life of its own, as decades later, well meaning people asked McLean where the container came from…
To my consternation, though, I quickly learned that many people quite fancy the tale of McLean’s dockside epiphany… The idea that innovation occurs in fits and starts… has little appeal. The world likes heroes…”
This experience of people clinging to demonstrably false narratives and their feelings is something that we also experience in our own work with clients frequently. We would argue that it goes far beyond simply that we generically all “like” or prefer heroes – we are now of a landscape that has been built bit by contingent bit into an ecology of concepts, storytelling forms, embodied habits of sensing/feeling, ways of working, and even the layout of offices that foster, inculcate and co-create these patterns to be what we notice, engage with and ultimately feel (this infrastructure is what is best understood as an apperatus or dispositif). How we sense, feel, and respond in deeply embodied ways to salience is co-created by our problematic cultural infrastructures that get creativity and sensing wrong.
We have been enculturated and habituated in deeply embodied ways to expect, want and need certain feelings to be present for an experience to be understood as “creative.”
We are habituated, attuned, and cued to practices, environments, dispositions, and emotional states that are great for heroic modes of creation:
The problem is, as we wish to demonstrate in this newsletter, this approach has nothing to do with how sensing and emotions work, how we actually sense the new, or the feelings associated with creative practices!
Far too often when we think about creativity and what it “feels like,” and its emotional tone, we believe it is full of wonder, excitement, and positive curiosity. The picture that is painted is of a lone individual experiencing something close to an ecstatic experience of wonder.
This image of the experience of creativity is one where the individual – really their “mind” – is the source of creativity. And in the creative moment there is on one hand the feeling is one of being on fire. And on the other, the feeling of what is holding us back: the negative emotions of self doubt – where we have internalized the criticism of others.
It is a picture of the lone individual, in an elevated state trusting themselves – their internal ideas and feelings, and fending off a world of others.
The problem is that creation is simply not heroic nor does it actually engage with this emotional logic. In essence, we have developed a system of feeling/attention/attunement for fictions about creativity.
We started this series in Volume 174 by looking at a related aspect of attention and attunement: focusing on “Gorillas” and inattention blindness (how what we see emerges from stabilized habits grounded in carefully shaped environments, tool practices, and concepts). While inattention blindness is a state where we don’t see what is new and right in front of us, with the internalization of the fictions of heroic creativity we have developed an emotional attunement to not sense when the new is emerging right in front of us.
We, in writing this long-running newsletter, have over the years focused on many of the critical aspects of dismantling this problematic human-centered, individualistic, brain-focused, heroic ecology of creativity (what we often refer to as the “god model”). And we have worked hard to build an alternative approach to engaging with creative practices (one that is far more distributed, and emergent). But in all of this, one aspect we have not directly focused on in-depth is how this is felt – the affective emotional tone of the creative experience.
The feeling of creative experience is critical because emotion and attention are intrinsically joined (in creativity).
How? In all our activities, we are pulled and drawn in deeply embodied ways toward things, practices, possibilities – and affordances. We are drawn to see/feel what shows up for us (as culturally enacted, embodied, embedded, and extended beings). This sense of being “pulled” – of feeling affordances, is a deeply embodied feeling. It is deep in a way that does not involve calculative thinking (which comes later, building upon and emerging out of this more primordial feeling-sensing-doing).
This feeling of being pulled is what we have been loosely referring to as “emotion.” But, the more accurate term is “affect.” While there are important ongoing debates about what is an emotion (and what is a mood), for our purposes we can define the emotions as being specific feelings we have in relation to specific events (e.g. disgust, boredom, etc.), and moods are more all-pervasive feelings (e.g. world-loss, perplexity, discomfort) that are not reducible to one event. For example, in Volume 175 we discuss boredom, and in Volume 176 we discuss world-loss. Affect is more general and far deeper (emotion and mood build upon it.) Affect is usefully defined by Giovanna Colombetti as the general, all-pervasive, “primordial” sense that we are never indifferent to what we experience. To be alive is to care – to live with and of things mattering. Affect is the tone or mood of care that while it shifts and varies in important ways accompanies all experience. It is a primordial aspect of being of a world in the making under precarious conditions (e.g. the creative act of being alive).
At first reading this definition of affect can seem odd – our basic feeling is one of non-indifference? To understand this requires understanding that to be alive is to have a perspective, to have something at stake to feel that things matter. We are what we do in the world we make – and in doing we are feeling this world opening and closing. Affect is this felt pull and push that accompanies even the most mundane of actions.
Here now we can understand better the phrase that is the title of this section: Affect is attention. And that when we talk of “sensing” we are always also talking about affect. Sensing is feeling. Acting, moving and doing is felt – and in our everyday mundane actions it is responded to and guided via feeling (affect) far more than in explicit forms of cognition.
Why defining affect and our primordial way of feeling as “non-indifference” might seem quite odd, and why it might also seem quite odd to intrinsically join sensing with feeling (e.g. attention and affect are always one) is because of our very thinking-centered, brain focused approach to experiencing the self, the emotions, and sensing in general. This long-standing deeply rooted Western approach is highly problematic and ultimately entirely wrong.
But prior to getting into why it is wrong it is important to unpack what this thinking centered and brain focused approach is – so that we can carefully unlearn these practices and dismantle its extended ecology that shapes so many aspects of our modern lives.
To do this we need to go back to the 1600’s and Far Western Asia (Europe). The historical beginnings of the codification of this individualized thinking-centered approach to the self are most often traced back to Rene Descartes, the French philosopher and occasional stove dweller. He was an important figure in the development of the European sciences, but is rightly most famous for developing a theory of how we sense and ultimately know the world around us.
Descartes's approach to knowledge begins with the question:
What in our sensory experience can we be certain of?
His conclusion was that all we can really be certain of is that we think. He argued that we could doubt everything we sense (that the world really really exists). And that we can even doubt that our bodies exist – it could all be a bad dream. But what we cannot doubt is that we were thinking. Everything else could be a hoax, but not that there is an immaterial mind that is thinking (and possibly subject to these delusional or accurate visions).
This leads to his famous maxim: I think therefore I am. And a view that makes very clear divisions between mind, body, and world that are still in use today (think of the popular examples from movies like The Matrix, or the Disney/Pixar Series Inside Outside – as well as debates about downloading minds/consciousness – and similar discussions.)
While few today would agree with much of Descartes actual explanation of why and how we think, sense and have a world (which all centers, for him, on the Pineal Gland connecting immaterial mind to material body – and god being good, etc.)– the basic logic is still very much dominant – and participating in shaping so much of our lives.
Lets now dig into this further: When we consider how we sense ourselves and our immediate environment, the question has been framed as:
What is the connection between the world “out there”, our bodies, and our minds (which seem to be in our bodies but not quite)?
Historically the focus of the answer in the West has been on the senses (e.g. hear, touch, taste, smell, and see) mediating between world and mind. Let’s unpack this:
Below we diagram this “Cartesian” Model (“Cartesian” as in referring to Descartes):
What is relevant to our discussion of affect and feeling is that in this approach sensing is distinct from feeling. Sensing is what our sense organs naturally do (gather data based on their logic from the outside world). Our brains then shape this into a picture. And the feeling is something we add to this as part of how our brains produce an internal picture (representation) of this outside reality. Feeling – our emotions, add “color” to our picture of reality.
Our sense organs data plus our brain's subjective synthesis allow us access to reality but only in the form of an internal subjective picture of an external objective reality. And we are stuck in this position of having to pay a very steep price for access to reality:
Our emotions, our feelings, and the affective tone is in this approach just something that we add to experience. It merely “colors” experience. As such it is also something that can be removed from experience. This is how rationality and “being rational” is understood in this approach: In being rational we are keeping our emotions out of the production of our internal representation of the outside world.
But as we have seen with our introduction of the concept of affect – this is simply not possible. Sensing is always already inherently affective… We will come back to this momentarily, but first, let us fully explicate where this problematic approach leads:
For some, this emotional subjective “coloring” of reality is a good thing: our unique individual subjectivity matters – it is what makes each of us unique, and these differing subjective approaches to reality are also what makes each culture unique.
And for others who are worried that subjectivity and the emotions distorts a clear picture of reality, the sciences provide the tools necessary to ascertain a correct correspondence between the picture in our heads and the real world.
From this logic, in the West we have divided up our practices along a problematic subjective vs objective axis:
With the arts, culture and ethics being on the subjective internal side, and the sciences being on the objective external side.
We then place ethics, politics and other pragmatic disciplines (the art of the practical) in between the two to come up with a type of tripartite division of ways of knowing:
These combined practices, tools, environments, and embodied habits of the sciences, the arts, and the practical disciplines could be understood in totality as how we have come to “make sense” of things (they constitute our modern Western apparatus/dispositif). And how we have in the West historically developed a vast complex infrastructure of subjective practices (morality, religion, and the arts), and objective practices (the sciences, logic, and rationality).
Thus the term “sense-making” could be applied to these specific historical and situated ways of knowing. These are after all the ways and tools by which we “make sense” of reality. There are the subjective practices of the arts, the transcendent or pragmatic tools of ethics, religion, and politics, and the empirical/factual tools of the sciences.
All of these are ways in which we do make sense of things – but only at the cost of being removed and abstracted out of reality…
This approach also gives rise to our problematic historical practices of creativity across these three realms:
For us, the question is: what if the underlying assumptions of this approach are false? What happens then to all of these ways of knowing and creating?
If it was not already clear, we want to be quite explicit: we believe that this approach is fundamentally wrong and that we cannot go on as we have done. And this is especially true in regards to the senses, the emotions, sensemaking and creativity. None of this will effectively help us sense or engage with the new…
The logic of mediation, correspondence via sense organs, the dividing of reality into the subjective and objective, the brain producing internal representations as the basis of thinking, the division of the arts and the sciences, the so-called “non-overlapping magisteria” of science and religion (as Steven Jay Gould termed it) is wrong. But what exactly is wrong with all of this? The senses and sensing just don't work this way whatsoever.
Let’s start simply, and use the sense of sight as our example. The purported “sense organ” of sight are the eyes – but do the eyes see? Not really.
In the Cartesian framework the model is that the eyes supply data to the brain and the brain makes an image. So, even here, sight is not the property of the eyes. But let's not move so fast to acquiesce to equating sight with something the brain does with sense data from the eyes.
Seeing is rather an activity that a situated living being does. The first basic mistake the Cartesian approach to sensing makes is confusing an activity with a thing (in this case the general capacity of one bodily organ). And activities has neither an essence nor a beginning – they emerge from the middle – and they live in the middle.
Practically speaking, what this means is: to see we need to move, touch, hear, consider, discuss, manipulate and perhaps even smell and taste. Seeing cannot be insulated from the other senses, they work holistically. The senses always work together as part of an activity. Sensing does not come about via the discreet activation of singular sense organs and their connection to the brain.
Just to make this very clear – it is not that moving or touching “informs”, “augments” or “improves” seeing – rather, without these other activities/senses there is no seeing whatsoever. The eyes and brain alone will actually not give rise to images. There is fascinating research into this that shows that if the eyes and the body are immobilized and held totally still, we will fail to see anything.
Brian Massumi, in a wonderful essay that is well worth reading, “Chaos and the Total Field of Perception” reports on an early 20th-century experiment to get at “pure perception” (i.e. what the eye plus brain does alone). The subjects were fully immobilized and their eyes were physically constrained from all movement (in what sounds like an awful process). And instead of discovering the true “essence” of sight, the subjects reported that their visual fields went “blank”:
Massumi reports:
“One of the most striking anomalies that appeared was that subjects in whom pure vision was produced found it extraordinarily difficult to express what they saw “in terms usually associated with visual phenomena.” After prolonged exposure (ten or twenty minutes) subjects would even report difficulty sensing whether their eyes were open or closed. Vision would “blank out.” Pure visual experience resulted in a complete absence of seeing.”
Perception – seeing turns out to be a complex fully embodied and extended activity.
In stasis, we cannot see. Seeing is an activity.
With our eyes and brain alone we cannot see. We need to move as a sensing body in an environment. There is no clear divide between “inside” and “outside.” The eyes are not “mediating” – and the “brain” is not “representing” the “outside.” We are always in and of the middle of embodied, embedded, extended, enactive and affective activity.
Let’s remember that to be alive means that we are co-creating a perspective in a dance with our environment in a way where we are never indifferent. So to speak of “activity” is not to speak of the type of moving that a robot or a weather formation might do. Activity is something else entirely. And in seeing we are active – moving both our eyes and body in already meaningful ways – and this is what allows us to see whatsoever.
And this needs to be stressed: mere “movement,” alone does not count as activity. To treat it, or any other sensing activity in a reductive “single organ plus brain makes internal representation” model is to lose sight of how sensing is an entangled and emergent embodied worldly activity. And what “activity” encompasses: Activity is a fundamental quality of life. All living beings (systems) are creatively adapting with some level of autonomy in ways that make their reality meaningful under precarious circumstances. And in this, we care – things matter. Emotion – affect is not something added that just colors experience. Affect is not something we can “remove” to be more rational. It is integral to all activity.
Sensing is activity, and activity is sensing. Let’s remember that activity/sensing is never generic. Tornados and hurricanes can be said to be “active” – after all, they have an identity, and work in self-organizing ways to maintain their existence over time. But living beings are active in a very different manner. Being alive is being active and this form of being active involves inherently having a perspective – caring. Tornados and hurricanes form, maintain an identity, and are active – but unlike living systems, they are indifferent to what happens to them. We are not.
All living beings care – and as such have some minimal form of cognition. Things matter to them. The simplest single-cell bacteria move towards food and away from what might harm it. It is not “thinking” in the way we are thinking. But they are active/sensing as precarious beings in ways that are meaningful (enactive). And this sensing, like all sensing, always has an affective tone to it. This affective tone is a pull that accompanies all action. This is sense-making at its most basic. And our very human sense-making begins and emerges from this activity (despite what any of the myriad confused charming trademark-obsessed management consultancies might claim about their brand of sense-making).
To be alive is to be active, and to be active is to be of a world – a meaningful world. A world that you creatively co-shape. Thus all living beings have a point of view and a world – and are inherently always already engaged in creativity.
You were never “outside” the world. You were never sequestered “inside” the mind. Feeling was never something you could simply remove from experience. And creativity is not a practice you can simply add to experience.
You, as an active living being, were always of a world that you were affectively co-creating: sense-making…
The Cliff Hanger…
Yes – we are going to end here. Right in the middle – maybe just a little before the middle…
This is not to leave you in suspense about our “answers” or alternatives to the larger Cartesian apparatus. But to give us all time:
The apparatus of the Cartesian (God Model) has created a way of being that has walled us off from the middle. It has sequestered us falsely in an immaterial “mind” reliant on a falsely abstract mediating body, within a supposedly inaccessible reality.
We need time to dwell with this. We need to slow down to work our way out of this deeply problematic logic. We have to radically reconsider our investment in the arts, the sciences, rationality, subjectivity and how we feel. We have to find a way to walk away from heroic individualized modes of subjectivity. And to make a new path in this walking away – this is no easy task.
Take time this week, slow down, and “sit” with all of this. Go for a walk, go dancing with those you love, get cooking, go bouldering, swim in the sea, get political… and let other senses grow from the middle.
The unlearning, descaffolding, dehabituating, and dismantling of environments – the general deterritorialization required is not going to come about because of understanding alone – we need new habits and ecosystems – a radical reterritorialization – and getting there – that is the adventure.
Have a wonderful adventurous week!
Till next week,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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