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Welcome to Emerging Futures - Volume 182! How Do We Co-Create of the New? (The Review)...
Good morning experimental repetitions of an unknowable new,
The appearance of faint glimmerings of the new moon mean that it is the end of the first week of Ramadan. Now for the next month for those who are fasting, the rising and the setting of the sun take on a whole new meaning. Nightfall, a new celebration.
Coincidentally, we have been reading the Iranian Islamic philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush this week as we are doing some final research for part two of our International green change-making intensive. Part two will be happening in Graz, Austria with our dear colleagues and friends at the Karl Franzen University. As part of our preparatory research we have been exploring differing approaches to the world around us (what some in the West might call Nature). And after reading an essay by Nicholas Tampio “The Politics of the Garden” which referenced Gilles Deleuze, Abdolkarim Soroush, and Islamic Gardens. We began rereading the work of Soroush. This has helped us transform our understandings of “gardens” in ways that could take us towards very different explorations of our environment than “nature”.
We shall see where this all takes us when we land in Graz! Which, if all goes well, is when this volume of the Emergent Futures Newsletter will have arrived in your inbox.
This week we come to the end of our eight-part series on “How do we sense the new?” It has been a really enjoyable series for us to write – especially with all of the great discussions that came from many of your responses (a big thank you to everyone who wrote and also talked with us – this shaped the directions that this series took, and made things infinitely richer).
This series, with its focus on sensing, touched upon so many critical aspects of creativity:
And this list only scratches at the edges of all the aspects of “sensing the new” touched up on this series. For us, re-reading the whole series as we prepared to write this final summary and overview was quite illuminating. And it changed how we wrote this final summary newsletter. So much so that we decided to forgo the usual summary and write a more poetic overview. Don’t worry – at the end of this newsletter is a summary of each of the newsletters in the series.
It is easy, all too easy to look around one and see a world complete. Tables, chairs, carpets, knives and forks, smart phones and flower pots – all complete, finished and sitting there in radiant stillness.
But all that is seemingly still, hides its movements well.
At every moment everything is always and forever “in-the-making”.
At every moment all that is, is in a process of ongoing remaking. Creation. Repetition.
Ocean currents, mountains, chairs, friendships, childhood, cells, wasp nests, political movements, skills, tablets, microbiological research, smart watches, shipping companies and roads – each of these in their own way will only persist because they are in an ongoing process of creation and re-creation.
Each a repeated cycle of making that persists.
What and how things become what they are in this process is relational – it is the work of the configuration of things: networks, systems, and processes that give rise to and stabilize things-in-the-making. Repeated cycles of stabilized configurations persisting as processes of making and self-making.
Our lives – in every aspect – are of a repeated stable configurational creativity.
The cells of your body and the bodies of all living things are being made and remade – actively persisting and actively responding – creative adaptations producing multiple stable states in an active and transformative dialog with a changing environment.
Mountains persist as the earth's plates press into each other, pushed up by dynamic processes far inside the intensely hot core which is itself triggered by the immense forces of gravity and emergent material properties.
The smart phone is updated, bands replaced, screens repaired – shifting our habits that then influence the writers of code that then change the watch…
The PaperWasps’ nest tearing and dissolving in wind and rain as new paper is added and new chambers built…
The beaver felling trees to dam rivers into lakes, making a niche that then fills in to become a swamp to become land to become a lake again…
Each of these a practice and a process of active sensing-doing – sensing the same and the different. Sensing the new and the shifting.
And within these relational processes of ongoing creation nothing repeats quite the same – nothing ever stays exactly the same. The world that these configurations find themselves within is open and full of other forces in variation. Their stability is a semi-stability. Precarious.
Habits and practices vary. Material processes vary. Systems vary.
Conditions are open and dynamic. Radical contingencies everywhere. Some variations are deliberate, others accidental, and most remain unnoticed.
This one time the wasp placing the digested woodfiber mush acts slightly differently because it is a very windy day and this means the woodfiber mush is drying differently. The nest-in-the-making is a semi-unique outcome of all of these variations. Configurations enabling a repetition of constrained variations.
Variation is the constant and everywhere: Change-in-degree.
Accompanying all making-in-variation are countless aberrations, deviations, and swerves that are genuinely novel. The wasp nest tears slightly with the wind, and it is repaired in an ongoing process of ongoing remaking. But one small flap peels back slightly in a way that makes a unique vibration that goes unnoticed… This opens up the emergent potential of a qualitatively different path to perhaps begin. A change-in-kind.
The team of microbiologists closes the lab for the holidays, but the heat is left on and a door slightly ajar… A becoming change-in-kind?
This is the qualitatively different newness pulling – it is weak, trivial, and minor – it emerges as the slightest of deviations – the slightest of swerves – the slightest of aberrations. Nothing much, but a qualitatively different pull nonetheless.
No, this newness does not come into being announced by angels. There is no triumphant aha moment and grand revelation. And yes, most often it will be misrecognized as the normal and ignored.
It is the faint potentiality actively haunting an unintended use of a purposeful form….
It is the wide open space of possibility and sideways connections that comes from things losing their purposeful configuration…
It is the unnoticed, non-purpose impacting, and unnecessary growing at all the margins of things-in-the-making…
At some moment the different becomes a friction and the friction catches – a deviation gains purchase, a repetition emerges of an unintended – feeding forward towards the faintest of novel alternative of potentialities. Pulling into newness
(The Story So Far:) Creation is everywhere and everywhere it is ongoing.
It is a creativity almost always without a “creator” or a single point of origin.
It is the creativity of the ongoing self-organized processes of re-making what exists. This repetition is all variation and the slightest of qualitative novelty.
The world is creative. And creativity is worldly. Continuous creation.
But What of All Those Great Acts of Human Invention?
Isn’t our creativity different – don’t we imagine powerfully unique ideas that go on to change everything?
Don’t fall for the retrospective allusion that our creative acts begin as clear and distinct ideas in our private and walled off heads.
Don’t fall for the vision that we are separate from this active creative world-in-the-making. We like to tell ourselves god-like just-so stories. But – we can outgrow such entertainments.
At every moment our lives are also looping through and in sympathy with a world-in-the-making.
We, as all living beings, are non-indifferent – to be alive is to care and to care is to actively sense and adjust. Life adjusts by actively sensing-transforming self and environment as one loop.
Our non-indifference is the base felt quality or tone to our reality. Mood, tone, feeling, comportment – in a word: affect – this is not something added to experience but always already part of how we are of a world.
Emotions do not get added to and cloud rational judgements. Feeling and sensing come long before any explicit judgement.
We are not trapped inside the head, processing sense data to make an internal picture of this outside reality. This “Cartesian” illusion is an embodied and extended practice that must be deterritorialized – taken apart – and replaced with new habits, practices, tools and environments – a reterritorialization to support the distributed and co-creative nature of sensing, feeling and knowing.
So what is our process of emergent co-creation? Long before any of this newness rises to the level of clear and distinct thoughts we feel it. We attune to the pull of variations-in-the-making.
A know-how far deeper, wider and richer than what could ever be made an explicit knowing-what.
Sympathy: Action responding to form (itself in active motion), informs the body (already in motion) and the body-world in response shapes the mind (which emerges between body and world).
Enacting Curiosity: the engaged active form is the teacher (a lived encounter): posture, gesture, stance, responsive action, attunement, feeling-in-movement…
Remember: We attune into rhythms, embodied loopings, the faintest of paths becoming ever more clear and distinct – eventually canalized, sped up, and seemingly unchanging.
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.
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.
Remember: Every day the new is killed by a thousand small blows that erase difference to keep the world running as it is.
To judge it – to demand that it be reasonable and to ask it to conform to the logic of the existing is to loop back into the old world and its deeply canalized repetitions. Change-in-degree.
The Assassins' tools are endless, banal, invisible, and unassailable.
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.
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.
Remember: We are active social embodied environment-altering tool users in a world-in-the-making.
These new tools give us new abilities, leading us to sense new affordances, which can co-create new environmental and social structures, which can, in turn, creatively lead to the development of novel practices and novel tools, that through a configurational and distributed process that feeds forward transform “the reach and variety of our cognitive and behavioral capacities”
The new calls for an “unreasonable” trust, faith, hope, and openness. It is something, nothing, and no one has no right to ask that we follow its pull, except that we know:
Other Worlds Exist
And:
Other Worlds are Possible.
Let us actively celebrate this with our actions:
Let us actively sense and co-create with difference and allow emergent new worlds-in-the-making – to make us otherwise
Volume 174: Sensing the New
Volume 175: Boredom is a Creative Practice
Volume 176: Welcoming the Discomfort
Volume 177: Emotion and Unlearning the Embodied Lies of Creativity
Volume 178: Creativity has no Red Pill
Volume 179: Sympathy is the New Empathy
Volume 180: Creativity – Sensing is Perturbating
Volume 181: The Assassins of Creativity – The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Well – that's it for another week! Have a joyful week sensing and following spring as it emerges everywhere in all its variations…
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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