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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 178! Creativity Has No Red Pill...
Good morning active resonating attunements,
We hope that you had an adventurous week testing new habits of sensing.
Last week things got long, dense, and philosophical – we needed to go there (and we appreciated the positive feedback and discussions we had with many of you – thank you for reaching out.) Today we are going to keep things simple, add some examples, and end with an experiment we can all do during the week.
Last week's newsletter concluded with our challenge in regards to creativity that we live in and of a world that has been co-created such that we experience our lives, and the lives of others, as being hidden, private, and internal:
It is, frankly, an insane position to be in: How did we come to feel that we are somewhere inside of our heads?!
The profound challenge of this state of things is that we take it to be quite simply how it is to be alive. We just experience our lives and the lives of others as ultimately removed, internal and private affairs. And because of this the world of others becomes only knowable via explicit inference (deliberate empathy) or explicit dialog (we live primarily or exclusively in the world of “Know What”).
What this culminates in, is that we experience our everyday reality as a very particular problem – an existential problem of being profoundly and deeply removed and disconnected: we feel that we are “in here” and that the world, and others, are “out there”:
The “in here” is somewhere in our heads or brains. And the “out there” is everything else… Such a small world we have made for ourselves!
Once we embody this emergent ethos as “reality” it pulls us in a deeply felt manner towards framing all creativity questions as experiences that begin with us in our private internal minds:
It is a very small step from Descartes “I think therefore I am” to:
“To create is to think differently.”
And from within this ethos, it just makes intuitive sense to one that we should sit around and brainstorm.
All of this leads to the type of common answer that is given when we ask the question: how do we sense the new? The modern (and Cartesian) answer is that it will be some private thought emerging from the depths of the self when the internal conditions are right.
For example: Yesterday we did a workshop on How to Experiment (we have written in more detail about such workshops in Volume 132). It’s a workshop we colloquially and fondly refer to as “Fuck Prototyping!”.
It’s a fast, messy, and fun workshop that begins by defining an area of interest and then proceeding to disclose its underlying logic. From this, we “block” as much of this underlying logic as we can:
In this particular workshop, we used cups as what we would try and radically disrupt.
Things started off great: We all had coffee cups in front of us, we used them, and from this embodied engagement we came up with a very complete list of all the salient aspects of “cupness” from form, to purpose, to bigger meaning.
We then turned this list into a “contract” of what we were not going to do (the “blocking”).
And this is where things always get interesting: One participant just looked at the list, shook their heads in a combination of shock and frustration, “I’m Lost!.” You could see it in their expression and body – they were frozen – really locked up.
Now, as we have stressed over the last few newsletters, being “lost” is exactly how we should feel. It is a profoundly important aspect of sensing the new. We need to be welcoming of this feeling. But as we all talked about this feeling of “being lost” as a group what became clear was that the frustration and this sense of being “locked up” was different from simply “being lost.”
It was a different very specific feeling: they felt frozen because there was simply nothing left to ideate/brainstorm with. It was like we took their minds from them. Everything we could think about was blocked. This was experienced by everyone as some form of “now there is literally nothing we can do because we are “mindless”…”
And this is what we mean when we say that in our modern Cartesian embodied sensibility it now simply makes total intuitive sense for us that “creativity begins in ideation” (in the mind, in the brain, inside us…). At this moment in the workshop, they could not sense that anything else was possible. It was a feeling that as one of them described it: “their minds had been stopped”.
Now we went on to jump directly into a highly engaged and unique process of making. Things got messy. There was a lot of laughter and befuddlement. And in short order, all of this led to some pretty radical new approaches to “cupness” emerging – without ever pausing to ideate in any discreet manner.
In the end, when we discussed the new designs and what we had accomplished as a group, there was a palatable sense of shock in the room. It was visible in everyone's body language – the group really felt that something very strange and unexpected had happened. The shock emanated from the fact that they did not ideate. This was an out of body experience – or better said, out of the head experience.
The experience that there was a creativity that did not begin and live “in the head” felt genuinely unnatural, quite unnerving, and ultimately really hard to process (in a good way).
This experience is to be expected when we are all so much of a way of life that makes us sense and experience reality from “in here” – that we are somewhere inside our heads trying to make sense of the “out there.” We live in ideation.
Now, from a historical analysis of human creativity, we know that brainstorming and ideation are not how things start. Speaking broadly, all human creative practices are worldly – they emerge in an untimely manner from an assemblage that is irreducible to any one person’s supposed internal spark (A good book to look at for some of this research is: Understanding Innovation through Exaptation – now, while it is a good book, it is quite dry. A more enjoyable read that covers one clear example is The Box which we mentioned in the last newsletter).
Additionally, from the enactive approach to cognition, the sense that thinking is happening in “the head” is mistaken. It is a form of “misplaced concreteness” (See Volume 161). We are not disconnected from the world around us: our experiences arise from the middle of our embodied, enactive, and affective ongoing engagement with our world:
We are not stuck peering out from the depths of our brains. The mind is not em-bodied rather the active body in and of a world is en-minded. Loop by nested loop we are co-making – co-creating an inherently meaningful world, ourselves, and how we think from the middle.
We are doing, feeling, thinking – sense-making as one worldly and ongoing embedded and extended participatory creative activity.
This ongoing worldly life and our primordial feelings are shared. The problem is not “how do we connect with the outside world?” Or “How do we let the world in?” We are always inherently intertwined. Rather the contemporary problem is: how do we make a world in which we will sense our intra-connectedness as intra-connectedness?
[A QUICK NOTE ON NAMES: It is important not to get hung up on names and histories here. While we mention here and in the last Newsletter Rene Descartes – it is not important to remember Rene Descartes (who first articulated this “Cartesian” logic). Nor is it important to know about the exact details of how this approach took shape. What is important is recognizing this logic and that this is to a large degree the world that we now must navigate.]
Our very real contemporary problem is that this Cartesian logic is not a discreet thing. It is not a neatly containable idea – it’s probably best to not even call it a model. To go back to the most Cartesian of all movies: it is not something that taking a pill, Matrix-style, will make us finally see reality “as it really is.”
We have, see and sense a world as a World because of our embodied experiences that emerge from a way of being alive that we are always co-making – not because of us intellectually “swallowing” some ideology.
We cannot get out of anything by taking the red pill because we are always the emergent outcome of a set of practices, habits, tools, concepts, abstractions, taskspaces, and environments (an apparatus).
We cannot simply take off the Cartesian world “view” as we would a pair of glasses – because it is not a “worldview”, it is not an ideology and it is not a pair of glasses – it is our emergent embodied lived reality. This was the cause of the deeply embodied shock of our workshop participants – it was not that something was being revealed, rather they were being deterritorialized – their experience was pushing at their way of being of a world.
What is required is the experimental and creative transformation of a set of practices, embodied habits, tools, concepts, abstractions, taskspaces, environments, and aesthetic sensorium. To work out from the profoundly debilitating Cartesian way of being alive requires unlearning, descaffolding, dehabituating, and the dismantling of environments – as we develop new embodied habits, practices, tools, environments, abstractions, and aesthetic sensorium.
And this broad and all encompassing “deterritorialization” that is required is not going to come about because of understanding alone there is no pill for it – no glasses we can simply remove. What we need are new habits and ecosystems – a radical reterritorialization – and getting there, as we suggested last week – that is one of the great adventures of our times…
How do we develop a way of sensing from the middle?
We need to challenge at an embodied level of sensing-feeling-acting ten key aspects of the Cartesian Apparatus and how it pulls us towards:
The key is that we do not need to challenge every aspect of our current reality and how it feels all at once. But we need to begin by noticing how these logics show up nearly everywhere. And how comfortable we feel in these practices. Then, as we notice how we are being pulled back into their loops, we can begin to try something else bit by bit.
Here is an experimental practice we would like to try with you this week:
Here is an example of this in practice (Iain): I chose to focus on number eight: The clear and distinct over the vague. I spent a day noticing how much of my daily life involves this – there is no moment where this was not present. I won’t bore you with the details – the list was long. But in going through the practice of noticing and journaling I could feel how much all of this is embodied, habitual, and entangled with tools, and environments. It became very real and not at all abstract. This is important. The practice of noticing, and journaling is not something that can be skipped (it is not an intellectual exercise) – we are training our bodies.
The one moment for me where the” clear and distinct” was less present was in cooking dinner. I rarely end up sticking to my plan – something different usually emerges. So this is where I focused on developing a more rigorous experiment. And this is what I came up with: making dinner could not begin with any sense of outcome whatsoever. It had to begin with a genuinely randomly chosen item from the fridge. I developed a simple grid overlay drawing of the fridge, numbered each square, and used a random number generator to choose a square and then selected whatever was in that square to begin the cooking process. It’s been fun.
Today, the system chose for me an onion as the starting place… I’ll let you know next week where it took me. For now, I have no idea – I’m going to just have to follow it: action responding to the onion informing the body environment shaping the mind, looping into further action in sympathy with what is happening. It's going to be a week of letting the engaged active form be the teacher – posture, gesture, stance, responsive action, attunement, and feeling-in-movement taking over. Welcoming the vague and emergent…
Try this practice with us this week. Email us with your notes, experiments and experiences – we would love to learn from you. We will share things in the next newsletter.
Till next week – take joy in the deterritorializing and reterritorializing of the senses and habits!
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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