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Welcome to Emerging Futures - Volume 181! The Assassins of Creativity - The Yeah Yeah Yeahs...
Good morning experimental dwellers between the tacit and the explicit,
Last weekend was one of our favorite regional events of the year, and that is the Jersey Art Book Fair. Now you could easily mistake this for a niche event only for a small subculture of “art book lovers” – and fall into the “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah – I get it, a cool art fair – I’ve been to those!... super niche… but not much going on that has to do with organizational innovation.”
But that would be a real mistake. The astonishing thing about artbook fairs is that they are a highly diverse, highly compressed, highly experimental, fast and low cost ecosystem of innovation that has little to do with what one would consider to be “art books” (those big coffee table monographs on famous artists). Rather, one finds every possible use and experiment with the book happening in service of various worldmaking experiments. And because of this they are an ideal space to observe and study ecosystemic creativity in action. Much of what we wrote about in regards to institutional ecosystems for creativity in Volume 163: Wright is Right, Wright is Wrong can be found at an artbook fair such as the Jersey Art Book Fair (if you get a chance to check one out in your region it is well worth it).
We have learnt so much about how ecosystems are creative by engaging with this world of experimental books (especially the world of zines – those cheap, fast punk rock pamphlet experimentations). But it is not one thing – the book or zine by itself, rather it is the whole of the event – its feedback loops, emerging niches, tangents and propensities that give rise to innovation.
And wandering the halls filled with tables from various small presses and makers, picking up one strange and totally unique object after another, talking to people, observing the patterns, attending the workshops and after parties gives one a chance to really explore the practices of sensing the new.
Which is ideal – for this is the penultimate newsletter in the series, “How do we sense the new?” Next week we will do a comprehensive review of the past nine newsletters and “put a bow on it” as Jason likes to say! Last week we laid out one way to navigate this emergent feed-forward process in quite an explicit fashion. This week we have one last area of this topic we wish to entangle with – that of how the new is preemptively assassinated. Now that might sound a bit over the top – but here the killing of creativity will prove to be the most mundane of acts – and this is precisely what an assassin strives for – to be invisible.
A couple of weeks ag, the great conceptual artist Mel Bouchner died. Now, this week as obituaries are being published, one of the images of their work that is being featured in many of these obituaries is from their “Blah Blah Blah” series. It’s a large painting with those words.
Blah
Blah
Blah
Bouchner was interested in the phenomenon that happens in conversations when we say,
“You know what I’m saying, so blah blah blah”
It is both a phrase and a practice in which we already assume everything is known and that nothing needs to be said – and we preempt the experiment of speaking with a “blah blah blah…”
He, and this work, came up as Andrew, Jason and I were discussing this newsletter and its theme of the prememptive destruction of the possibility of the new – which we like to call the “Yeah Yeah Yeahs” – and it could just as easily have been called the “Blah Blah Blahs”.
The “Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs” are a great band and a terrible shorthand phrase used to opt out of the possibility of new by positive or negative preemptive dismissal:
“Yeah Yeah Yeah – I get it, let's jump to the next topic”
“Yeah Yeah Yeah – that's just ….”
What is interesting is that Bouchner himself was interested in more than this dismissal of the possibility of something novel/interesting happening in this series. Perhaps unintentionally he said something quite critical and illuminating for creativity in his explanation for the motivation behind this series of paintings:
“...what you are hearing or saying is in fact meaningless, it’s simply blah blah blah. It’s about the emptiness, the endlessness and the darkness of the discourse”
The interesting and critical thing about the new is that when it first emerges – it is meaningless, empty and forms in a positive darkness.
But diving into this will get us ahead of ourselves. So let's slow down and return to the first meaning of the Blah Blah Blahs:
For us, Bouchner’s work is a powerful reminder of the two ways that the new can be “assassinated”:
In this habitual reactionary practice of dismissal – “yeah yeah yeah – I get it!” – the new is never given a chance – before we can even begin to open ourselves to the possibility of sensing anything at all – the door is closed: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah – that’s just…
The “Yeah Yeah Yeahs” is certainly something we all do – but hopefully none of us are making a career out of it (though there are many curmudgeons out there that do)!
The real issue is how this practice is folded into institutional behavior. It is something many of us have experienced amongst leaders, experts, curmudgeons, managers, gatekeepers, and the C-Suite. And here it is no less than the assassination of creativity.
This claim, that the new does not exist, can seem absurd – especially coming from innovation consultants! But it is a critical concept to grasp to properly engage with an emergent approach to creativity. It is also one of the key concepts that has underpinned our whole series on “how do we sense the new?”:
The new does not exist in some fully realized immaterial form prior to it coming into being.
The qualitatively new begins as the slightest of deviations from what exists and it only becomes something else – a difference that makes a difference by our co-create engagement with it. The new comes into being as a “path made in the walking”. There is no ”thing” there that you could point to, or communicate. There is no “aha” vision that reveals the new as fully formed immaterial idea in the head of the heroic creator. Creativity is not discovery – creativity is co-creation and co-evolution. And as such it is an extended process that involves the iterative looping process of active sensing, following and co-making of a novel world in a step by step feedforward process.
And because the new first emerges as the slightest of differences – this is why the preemptive shutting down of engagement is best understood as an “assassination”.
One of the most famous of these “nothing to see here” moments Yeah Yeah Yeahness was in physics at the turn of the 20th century when the famous British physicist Lord Kelvin proclaimed,
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.
All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
Interestingly, this famous and unfortunate phrase is incorrectly attributed to Lord Kelvin. He never said it. Luckily, unlike many of the phrases attributed to various public figures – this one was said by someone! It is a paraphrase of what the American physicist Albert A. Michelson said in 1894, "it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established".
The full quote is worth reading as it contains most of the key attributes of this process of preemptive refutation/assination of the new:
“While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.”
Now shortly afterwards the great creative acts of the development of Quantum Physics began and radically revolutionized the very ways in which we approach reality. Certainly something far different than the work of looking “in the sixth place of decimals”...
The mistake is to imagine that we live in a world where “knowing” is a type of activity of discovery, and that it operates similar to the discovery of an unknown island, where once we have mapped the island we might be able to accurately say “the future truths… are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals”. But, the production of knowledge is a creative act of making, not discovering. And those that claim to have the final word, or be the proper adjudicators of what counts and what does not count are attempting to pre-emptively close off the very possibility of sensing the new. – and ultimately the co-emergence of the new.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher of creativity, was especially sensitive to these practices of foreclosing the possibility of the new. For him, the great exemplars of this problematic logic in western philosophy were the followers of Wittgenstein. But as you read this example, you will immediately recognize people, organizations, and schools in your spheres that operate precisely in this manner (we certainly do!):
“I don’t like to talk about that… For me, it’s a philosophical catastrophe. It’s the very example of a “school”, it’s a regression of all philosophy, a massive regression. The Wittgenstein matter is quite sad. They imposed a system of terror in which, under the pretext of doing something new, it’s poverty instituted in all grandeur… There isn’t a word to describe this danger, but this danger is one that recurs, it’s not the first time that it has happened. It’s serious, especially since the Wittgensteinians are mean and destructive. So in this, there could be an assassination of philosophy. They are assassins of philosophy.”
We have all met those who, with some accuracy, continuously pass categorical judgements. They feel that they are performing an important service – and in some way they are. To call out the wrong matters. But it also shuts down experimentation. If any and every creative experiment had to prove its value or “truth” in its nascent stages of emergence – then nothing new would ever exist. The new will be wrong before it is right. It will be boring and unimportant before it is interesting and significant…
The practices of
The Expert…
The Curmudgeon…
The Contrarian…
The Manager…
The Administrator…
The Technocrat…
are all practices that are relevant and have a place – but they are also a two-edged sword – we too, when we play these roles, can far too easily slip into becoming the assassins of the new.
One of the most important things that can be done to combat the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is to have those who are in these positions experience in a fully immersive manner the process of emergent distributed non-ideational creativity. For us (Emergent Futures Lab) we do this with organizations via a series of workshops in which we as a group produce a qualitatively novel creative outcome without ideation – and then unpack this experience to develop a new set of shared practices, terminology, embodied habits, HR protocols, environments, durative processes, and critical artifacts. We find that without a shared embodied experience of such an emergent process, key figures will always fall back into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. This is especially true of members of the C-Suite who feel that they might appear weak or come up short if they are involved in such experiential emergent creative activities. As such, it is paramount that they participate fully.
Let’s recap:
The new does not fit, it cannot be easily recognized, and when sensed it is never what we expected.
The new is perplexing, messy, embarrassing, disturbing, aberrant, untimely, and most often unrecognizable.
Every day the new is killed by a thousand small blows that erase difference to keep the world running as it is:
“What does it mean?”
“I get it”
“This is too messy”
“This is not relevant”
“This is disturbing others”
“Rules are here for a reason”
“How would that even work?”
“This is not what we asked for!”
“I don’t understand”
“That is boring”
“How does this fit with our mission?”
“Why bother?”
“That's just going to turn out this way…”
“We need to be focused on”
“We already know this works”
These are all reasonable questions and assertions.
But the new speaks to new values, new reasons, new ways of being alive – new worlds.
To judge it – to demand that it be reasonable and to ask it to conform to the logic of the existing… it is game over.
The Assassins' tools are endless, banal, invisible, and unassailable.
The new is weak – always too weak to make any reasonable claim.
In the face of the reasonable, the new has no good answer – how could it?
The new is nothing – nothing when it first emerges.
The new emerges as the slightest of deviations – the slightest of swerves – the slightest of aberrations.
The new is a vague difference that only asks the unreasonable – that we actively follow it.
The new is nothing until we join the collective process of active and experimental emergence.
For the new to become significant is work. We make the new only by walking the path into existence. The experimental journey begins with a willingness to leave the known, to voyage with difference at the helm.
Where will it lead? We cannot know. We trust the process. Welcome whatever comes next.
Will it become a difference that makes a difference? We cannot assess this. We have faith that it might. Be open to the experimental work of making difference transform into a “difference that makes a difference”.
Will any of this trouble and pain be worth it? We cannot know in advance. We have hope. Bring joy to the perplexing, messy, embarrassing, disturbing, aberrant, untimely, and most often unrecognizable.
The new calls for an “unreasonable” trust, faith, hope, and openness. It is something, nothing, and no one has no right to ask, except that we know:
Other Worlds Exist
And:
Other Worlds are Possible.
Let us actively celebrate this with our actions.
Remember:
To demand the new announce itself is to kill the new.
The new can not be censored – only the known can be censored.
The new is killed one reasonable blow by one reasonable blow.
But that does not have to be what we do!
We can choose to:
Keep Difference Alive
Make New Worlds
We can learn to actively sense and experimentally follow the novel towards a skillful, careful co-emergence with “whatever comes next”...
Till next week – let’s avoid the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and actively and experimentally keep difference alive,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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