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Welcome to Emerging Futures - Volume 180! Creativity - Sensing is Perturbating...
Good morning dynamic beings of the the becomings,
We are writing from the midst of a building snowstorm swirling around us. The wind picks up and the sun sets. The outside is blanking out into a howling.
We are also writing from the midst of the first week of our annual two-week international green change-making workshop. It has been a hugely transformative week for us: in preparation for this workshop we spent a lot of time developing a new set of canvases, group practices, physical tools, extended exercises, locations, and collaborators – and a new process by which all these components of the Innovation Design Approach can all work together as a holistic and highly integrated emergent event. We have forty participants, seventeen sites across NYC and NJ, and about fifteen collaborators. And in these seven very intense days of collaboratively learning and experimenting – some very interesting new emergent approaches to change-making have developed.
One of the most rewarding aspects of this workshop is that we have now been doing this for eight years and each year we go back and visit many of the same collaborators – each of whom is part of some very interesting environmental change-making project. and in returning each year we see how their projects have evolved and transformed in ways that simply could not have been predicted. The logic of their transformations is never linear – the twists, turns and leaps are astonishing. As one of them, Charles Rosen the founder of what he thought would be a cider house, put it today – “other worlds are possible and necessary – they just won’t be the ones you expected”.
A critical part of the first week of this two-week workshop has always been focused on the very same question that we have been exploring in the newsletter over the last five weeks:
“How can we actually sense the new in real-time in the flow of everyday experience?”
The new, as Charles was articulating, is never something you could expect. One of the participants asked him over lunch out at his farm, “Why did you choose to make apple cider and raise pigs?” His response was telling:
“Oh no. I did not choose this. It was never something I chose. This is what emerged and I followed. The apples chose me...”
Last week in the newsletter we wrote about this exact experience of being pulled by the future as it emerges:
“...When we feel how we are being pulled by an experience we can feel that the activity is not coming from us but “elsewhere.” It is also not coming from one discreet thing “out there.” And it is also not not coming from us – we are part of “it.” The “event” – the totality of the experience is what is pulling us….”
And this is exactly the experience that we want the participants to co-create and actively feel:
“This feeling of being pulled is what is called… “affect.” Affect is the general, all-pervasive, “primordial” sense that we are never indifferent to what we experience (Giovanna Colombetti). It is the feeling of being moved by experience. We are pulled by it. Why? Because something is always at stake – we care. To be alive is to care – to live with and of things mattering. Thus this pull accompanies all experiences…”
It is an experience that connects us to a world, via sympathy that is always already active and creative:
“If at a primordial level, we are feeling and being pulled in emergent ways into certain propensities – then, so too is the world.
All around us, the world is active and organizing into emergent patterns, and active forms… Matter is active – it is a process of self-organization: Weather patterns emerge. Snowflakes take shape. Minerals Crystalize. Tides go in and out. Mountains rise and oceans widen, – and apples grow, ripe, and eventually ferment…
At the heart of matter is movement… an emergent self-organizing internal movement. In this movement, there is resonance, reciprocity, attunement, and interdependence with the dynamics of other things – in a word “pull.”
Matter involves relational movement – it is being pulled into form as a dynamic response to the mutual configuration of things. Matter is matter because of its encounters… As things emerge they are pulled towards each other – they reciprocally interpenetrate. There is a resonance that emerges, configurations shift in some form of “sympathy”, and matter transforms…
And what Charles was getting at in his answer to “why did he choose to do this?” was exactly how,
“Our sensing, feeling, and responding do not begin and end with our sense organs and inner emotional lives.
Creativity involves a far larger engagement with the world and its ever-evolving creative becoming. And it is this, the interface between our movements (affect) and the movements of the world around us is “sympathy” – a being of the total pull into forming of reality as a whole…
It is a vast space of sympathy that everywhere attunes everything to all else. Between matter and systems and between systems and life and back again…
We are thus no longer outside of experience, no longer a subject standing above and outside the world – we are moved, and becoming active movers attuning to the pulls that co-create us we can become helpmates of creativities beyond the self. “
Charles, as he made clear over lunch, did not plan any of this – the radically new is exaptive and emergent – it is nowhere till it begins to collaboratively co-emerge. Because of this foresight, prediction, trend analysis, and deep knowledge of the past will not be of any direct help.
If we are blind and the abstract thinking of planning at a remove from doing is of little help — what’s left? How do we work?
What is involved in the process of co-creative sensing of the new in emergence? When we wrote Innovating Emergent Futures, we broke this process into four linked practices. And over the last couple of years, we have been revisiting and revising these practices to further get at this critical process:
The Paradox at the heart of sensing the new: Creativity is non-conceptualizable in its beginnings. So, how does one conceptualize the non-conceptualizable?
The way out of this paradox is strikingly simple: we can quite easily sidestep the paradox by realizing that creativity is the outcome of practices: before we have an idea we are already doing something or making something or engaged in something novel that we cannot explain and ultimately at this stage do not need to explain (if we could).
Much of our lives involves a tacit “know-how” — we do things — without requiring much — or even any “know-what” (complex thinking, knowing, and planning). Many of the most skillful things we do — say rolling a kayak or breastfeeding are not things we could even put into words and explain without great effort. Often when we try to think about or articulate what we do in these nuanced practices we lose our way.
Thinking — knowing what — subsists upon and arises out of a far broader world of embodied and engaged know-how. The foundations of our lives, practices, values, and sense of being are ultimately unconceptualizable — it rests and thrives in action. Changing diapers, holding hands, serving dinner, watering plants, and worrying when you see a police officer all ground our lives in ways that exceed ideation.
Innovation and Tacit Behavior
Engaged forms of play, puttering, tinkering, improvising, messing about, open experimentation, intentional stupidity, or curious observation while using novel tools in novel situations — are all common examples of how we sidestep the innovation paradox.
These are all examples of active open-ended experimental practices of making and doing: probing. Now what is critical in these practices is that we are doing two things: (1) making in a hands-on manner (at any scale), and (2) attending to the emergence of novel bodily sensations (affect) — feeling the pull of something interesting, odd or curious. This mix of open experimentation (doing) plus attending to the pull of differences that arise alongside vague feelings is a critical part of the beginning of the journey to making-discovering the new.
At this delicate early moment of early doing-sensing, novelty can easily slip away, for it is not something we can recognize -- it is too new for that — in fact, we most often misrecognize it as a mistake — an error to be corrected. The mindset of play, tinkering, puttering, and probing are helpful precisely because they do not seek to overly conceptualize or judge. It is the rush to ideate that derails the early phase of the creative process.
As we openly experiment these feelings of difference are followed and our experiment takes on a heading as a feeling evolves into vague hunches arising through the force of the experiment itself (sympathy and wayfinding).
We can break down this process of emergent wayfinding into discrete steps for the sake of analysis (in reality they are far more mixed and continuously feedback/feedforward into each other). There are two phases:
In the first phase knowing is implicit and tacit (know-how) — the knowledge is non-articulable but exists directly in the emerging habits, practices embodied skills, and vague feelings.
Humberto Manturana terms this “knowing-how without knowing-what.” In the second phase these tacit forms of knowing slowly become articulable and eventually turn into novel abstractions that can stand on their own as fully-fledged concepts.
1. Making-feeling: sensing through making: This phase is what we have focused on in the last newsletter. It is where we are blocking habits, practices, and environments such that we can let novel sensing-feeling tendencies vaguely co-emerge from within new experimental engagements-in-the-making pull us into an alternative process of becoming:
Here we are experimentally probing and joining resonances and tuning rhythms at an embodied/environmental level.
New events arise and are stabilized when possible — these both take time and emerge as new forms of time. Vague sensations of “Interesting” and “puzzling” tendencies and events are felt and might rise to an intuitive level of attention. Change is lived, but not represented (Attuned Affect).
2. Making-dialoguing: knowing with making: Active following of an emerging form/tendency and responding (in the experiment): making-thinking with the emerging quasi-object crossing one or many thresholds (of capacity and stability):
Signs act as triggers. Embodied skills, tools, and practices co-develop in a back-and-forth between things and actions. Matter/things co-evolve forms immanent to the process. What is critical is that new non-conceptual know-how is co-emerging with a “world-in-the-making” (concrete skills for repetition, expansion, and discovery). At this point, there is no clear sense of abstract knowing the new (know what). Rather there is Sympathy:
“It is feeling (sympathy) that makes things act, i.e. take on or change shape in accordance with others… Things are shaped by mutual agreement… Sympathy is always oriented. The very basis of the relation is sympathy… Sympathy occurs first; all other feelings are modulations and derivations of it. It is a felt necessity…”
And it is this practice of more-than-human sympathy that takes us out of “ the subject-object and human-world dualities” as Spuybroek puts it so well. We are no longer outside of experience, no longer a subject standing above and outside the world – we are moved, and becoming active movers attuning to the pulls that co-create us we can become helpmates of creativities beyond the self.
A novel niche is being constructed via feed-forward practices. And key to allowing this to co-emerge is that we deliberately develop ways of keeping the practice on the tacit, embodied-knowing side of the zone between know-how and know-what so as to keep the Cartesian logics at bay (see volume 178):
3. Thinking-making: making with thinking: Novel vague concepts about the thing/action emerges and flows back into the making-using-developing process:
One begins to be able to ask: what is this novel approach that is emerging?
The practice lives in and of the grey zone between tacit and explicit knowing – looping back into Making-Dialoging to stabilize embodied practices, techniques, and habits:
Novel quasi-concepts become useful & are tested, stabilized & reactivated. Nascent abstractions, theories, frameworks, and approaches are experimentally proposed & put to work/tested to push the system towards new states.
Always new tools, techniques, embodied habits, communities, and environments are being collectively developed.
4. Thinking-worlding: abstracting-worlding: Now there is a dance between novel emergent abstractions and integrated practices such that a novel niche is stabilizing as a distinct world. New forms of explicit “know-what” exist and can be deployed. These abstractions feedback (know-how) and feedforward (theories, paradigms, approaches, modes of being) into new iterations of the process. Abstraction:
Here two things are critical. One: it is critical that difference is kept alive as a qualitative difference – a difference between worlds:
The second key task is to stabilize how these practices, tools, and environments iteratively stabilize the emergent self-organizing process by looping through material self-organizing logics (and not simply staying at the level of concepts and abstractions):
How do we sense the new?
We can sum this up thus:
Creativity is a worldly ecological practice that requires context sensitive practices for sensing the new. And these practices of sensing the new are not discreet vague generalities like “seeing differently” or “becoming radically curious” – they are actual sustained multi-phased collaborative activities. And as a skillful practice they involve others, embodied habits, tools, and environments that move one from know-what to know-how and back again differently.
We have come to the end of another newsletter.
Try developing your own practices that move you through these phases and practices of sensing the new.
Where to begin? Try to live in, of, and below this grey zone dividing know-how and know-what far more in your daily life and your creative experiments.
Till next week enjoy the knowing how without the knowing what!
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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