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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 188! Technology and Everyday Creativity...
Good morning, beautiful day,
This “Day” – You are the event-in-becoming that we participate in.
Some days, it feels like we really should be greeting the day itself when we greet each other. The creative event that is individuating is not us per se but something else – the day, or an economic rupture, or the coming of spring, or a cherry blossom falling… I do think we are getting at this when we talk about the weather – there is a collective feeling out of the moment we are in and of.
In any case, at each moment we are consciously or unconsciously welcoming many events, at all sorts of scales, into an open becoming. And doing so, there is, perhaps, a knowing that who we “are” and who we will become is because of them.
There are all sorts of compelling studies on just how our personality, rationality, and subjecthood is deeply enmeshed with our context. A famous example is that Judges will deliver more lenient sentences if they are sitting in a more comfortable chair. These are trained, highly deliberate professionals who understand the gravity of what they do, and they are actively co-shaped by a chair. Think of how much the unfolding day creatively participates in who we are.
In Japanese, there is a saying, Nichinichi kore kōnichi – the literal translation would be: day-day this today.
Which can sound quite odd in English, until you learn that in Japanese, you repeat a word for emphasis, to stress the uniqueness, distinctness, and specialness of what is said. So “day-day” could mean something like “special day” or “important day” or even “unique day”. So we could also translate Nichinichi kore kōnichi as:
Today is a Special Day – or Today is a Unique Day.
But Nichinichi (Day Day) also means “every day” or “each day” so Nichinichi kore kōnichi also and equally means:
Each day is this today.
Now the repetition takes on a different and far more ambiguous meaning: just how is each day “this day”?
There is no one way to answer this question – each day will be different, like any other day. And then how is every day like this day? The question brings to the surface a recognition of the ongoing creativity of each day in ways that defy an answer.
And being without an answer, we are awake to the question staying always with us in each day.
I like the tension between these two interpretations.
But, of course, we could bring the two together (which is what I suspect happens in everyday speech): Every day is like this day – a unique day. But nonetheless, all the questions remain.
In the end, I prefer the literal translation of “day day this today” because of the wonderful repetition: day day… day. Days repeat. Everything repeats. Loops upon loops. But what exactly is looping?
It is not the literal same day that is looping. And in “Everyday is like this day – a unique day” – the statement suggests the only thing that repeats is difference: this day is a unique day. There is only difference and repetition.
Every day is difference.
But days are not the only loops we are part of: Every “_________” is also difference differing.
“Difference differing” – this is another way of articulating what a creative process does. It is an event of “difference” doing the active and creative work of differing. This can be a hard thing to sense in our everyday lives. Where is the uniqueness of each day, when we can look ahead at our actual calendars and see what the next week's portends to hold, and see a predictable pattern stretching out into a known sameness? From the mundane to the extreme, every day can seem more of the same and very little of any difference. So where is the “special day” – the “different day” in each day?
So where is the “special day” – the “different day” in each day?
It is there in each day. In remembering that each day is in-the-making – and despite what your calendar suggests, it must be created. And as something created, the day is always open to differing. One important way to sense this is to deeply reflect on those moments when we realize that things are not as stable as we might have imagined. COVID, or a seemingly laughable orange man descending a golden staircase over a decade ago, certainly makes it clear that each day could be a very different day. As each day is made as a seemingly stable loop, radical differences are haunting every stable configuration at every moment. Things could turn, swerve, and leap into novel possibilities at any moment.
Another way to sense that creative processes of difference differing are alive and well in each day, is to put oneself at the center of some mundane activity and radically slow down – STFD!
Seriously – speed, or better said, the “closed-time” style of speed, is what makes the same repeat so effectively. The speed of closed-time is what we do when we practice our actions in a backwards fashion. We begin by considering “what exactly am I expected to achieve in this unit of time?” The pre-determining of the end outcome and the numeratization of time produce a habit of “best practices”. This is the algorithm of repetition of the same. It is more a style of speed and time rather than something that could be called “speed” – as in speeding up in opposition to “slowness”.
The algorithms and habits of closed-time backward developing practices can happen at any speed. But what the advice of “slowing down” does on a practical level is that it opens us up to noticing new subtle cues in processes to where they could go in other directions to unknown ends.
“Slowing down” as a practical suggestion for how to bring creativity into your daily practice is ultimately not about a particular speed – it is about a change in the style of how we engage with time. Slowing down is about an approach to time as “open”.
It is important to realize that the reason it feels like tomorrow will be just like today and that “each day is not a unique day” is because we, as a society, have done enormous work to put in place processes that will make it so. But these creative achievements of the production of repeatability are themselves contingent processes situated within and dependent upon a very dynamic open field of forces. We know this from events like COVID or when we in our daily practices pause the habits of “closed time”.
When we operate in the style of closed time, it is like we have a recipe in our bodies of how an event should – and will go. We know the goal – what we wish to make or achieve. Then we ascertain what the steps, conditions, and tools are to make it happen. And then we can finally say what the exact necessary quantity of time will be.
These types of events fill our days such that we intuitively move into them, know their necessary duration (“Hey, we need to meet on this – it will take five minutes, then we can quickly do that and wrap it all up in thirty minutes”). We are enacting one recipe, or routine, after another all day long…
Thus, the advice to “slow down” is also advice to ditch the recipe and recognize that our experience of the now and the future has been profoundly shaped by its enactive logic.
We are always reminded “not to confuse the map with the territory. ” Which is certainly good advice. It is easy to confuse models with actualities. We witness this all the time with business consultants who use approaches derived from the complexity sciences: “Reality is composed of five domains: Complex, Complicated, Chaotic, Simple, and Disordered – and because of this, this is how you should act…”. Confusing the map for the territory is a form of what Edmund Husserl termed "surreptitious substitution,” where we are mistaking an abstraction for fundamental reality. Maps and models are tools – technologies that help us creatively experiment with the real, but they do not represent the real, nor are they the real.
A less well-recognized, but very much related problem, that we would argue is perhaps more problematic in relation to creative practices, is confusing the recipe with what might happen.
The recipe is that magical combination of a clear end goal and the thin rules explicitly parsed as context-free steps to get you there. In addition to the steps, a recipe will tell you the time needed, the tools, materials and infrastructure.
Now, the power of the recipe is that it does work. And this is a remarkable thing. But we need to ask what allows this to be possible? It requires the careful making of a zone where no surprises are possible. And this is an astonishing achievement.
Think of this in relation to a modern recipe for baking a cake. It will list ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar, baking power, etc.). It will list tools (oven, mixer, spatula, etc.) as well as times, temperatures and steps. But let's just take the first ingredient: eggs. For this recipe to work the eggs need to be pretty much the same size. And this is no easy task. To get an egg to be the same size requires a complex set of regulatory bodies, agreements, measurement tools, labeling, chicken raising practices, sorting systems, etc. But that is only the eggs! Then we need to get flour to have a consistent gluten level – what should that level be? That has to be ascertained and agreed upon. Now we can have something like “baking flour”. And to make this thing, grains have to be broken apart into distinct components and measured, added to, remixed and stabilized across a global farming infrastructure. And that is not all that this recipe needs: ovens need to have a stable temperature – in a system that produces heat, stops producing heat, loses heat and then adds heat… pretty crazy! Now only with all of this in place can your recipe work…
When we have a recipe, the common rejoiner to the question “will it work?” is “yes ... all things being equal.” But make no mistake – to get all things to be “equal” is a massive creative undertaking. And it is one that is so successful in how it has transformed our environments, products, tools, ways of sensing and abstracting that we now implicitly take endless recipes to be reality. Classical economists like to term all of this as “externalities,” and far too often we follow suit in our own ways – as if we could put these aside!
Think about how much of our daily lives is lived via embodied recipes nested upon recipes. We live via recipes far more than via habits – by full on step by step patterns of “best” practices tightly connected to fixed units of time and highly shaped environments. Our tools, whether they be five part complexity models, or hammers come to us as recipes with properly stabilized contexts:
“for this – do that with this”
Just to be clear, while we are being very critical of this form of recipe in the context of understanding creative processes – that we live lives in environments safe for recipes is not inherently bad. Far from it, these practices are astonishing achievements that can be both effective and highly comforting. We want pilots to follow recipes with agreed upon tools in highly regularized environments.
But what happens to our subjectivity when this modern logic, with its robust recipes, with their thin rules, purpose built tools- environments take over more and more of life? This is the real danger of modernist surreptitious substitution in relation to creativity: we no longer notice that every moment is an open moment in an open event. That even in the most stable of seeming contexts – it is one small shift in configurations away from a difference differing in a way that could open things up to being swept into a vastly different and new becoming.
I think we, in our modern world of strong routines, fixed patterns and clear recipes, become in danger of losing the sensibility for the possibility that “each day could be a different day” – that each moment could swerve in interesting ways.
“Each Day is a Special Day” becomes far too often a mere platitude. But how can we live this day differently?
Over the last week in our WorldMakers online community, we have been discussing and exploring these topics in quite interesting ways. We have had long asynchronous discussions on the complex relations between mastery and creativity, the role of rules, and how to understand very differing forms of rules, as well as how games produce differing forms of agency.
Parallel to these discussions, each week there is a community experiment – an exercise that we can all participate in. This last week the exercise involved cooking and specifically a recipe for “cooking without a recipe” (an appropriate paradox!). Here is the exercise:
Recipes are reliable technologies—they help us produce predictable, nourishing results. But when we push, prod, and sense where they might take us, they can also lead us to unexpected places. This exercise invites you to sense novelty as it emerges, setting aside the ideate-plan-make model, in favor of sensing the new as it emerges.
Make a dish using only one ingredient (e.g., an onion).
Additionally, each week we have a live online event. This week’s event was on “Everyday Creativity,” and we all situated ourselves for the event in our kitchens and played a variation of “The One Ingredient Dish” game together as we reflected on both what was happening and related emergent topics.
One of the interesting stories that came up about recipes and what was happening as we slowed down and paid attention to the open unfolding of cooking processes involved Zeno’s famous paradoxes.
Zeno, a classical Greek philosopher, had a series of paradoxes about movement and time. Imagine, he said, that you are running across a field to get to the other side:
“Now, before you can get all the way across, you have to run halfway... – And before you run halfway, you have to run half of that. So now you are only a quarter of the way across the field… But even before you get a quarter of the way across the field, you have to run half of that – and half of that – and half of that… “
Based upon the logical truth of this, Zeno claimed that you cannot actually move.
The great modern West-Asian philosopher of time, Henri Bergson, loved this story because it allowed him to offer a profound and important alternative:
Imagine, he said,
“…you shoot an arrow at someone in the distance. It makes no sense to say the arrow has to travel a fixed distance first, that could be called “half-way” – it either travels all the way and hits the person, or it does something qualitatively different. If the arrow only travelled halfway, it would be because it, for example, hit a flying bird! – And that would be a totally different event!”
Measurement can only come after an event has happened. For example, say the arrow hit and killed the person. Now we can talk about when this event began and when it ended. But what if that first arrow only lightly wounded the person, and they fired back an arrow? Now it is a very different event with a very different continuity. To say, as Zeno wants to say, “halfway” is to presume in advance that you know what will happen. You are mistaking the recipe for reality.
At every moment, things could go in a different direction. This became something we focused on during cooking. It turns out it is very difficult not to project ahead, even in small increments. For example, I choose to use onions as my one ingredient. I decided to cut them up as little as possible, but rather keep them in large individual round layers and saute them:
But even with this simple beginning, I was already waiting for them to reach the next known state, “translucent”. From having cooked onions quite a bit in certain standard ways, I knew without even thinking about it consciously that if one was careful, they went from “raw” to “translucent” to “golden” to "caramelized" to “crisp”. And I was waiting in an embodied fashion for the onions to reach a known point before I evaluated what should happen next. I was closely paying attention to what the onions were doing in a deeply embodied manner: hearing, smelling, touching, seeing. I was looking for signs of what was changing. But these signs were not just neutral signs or the only signs that could be there – they were signs of a known process and a known micro goal – they were signs in relation to a desired state: “translucency”. I was also confusing the signs of these predetermined stages with the openness of the event.
Often, complexity consultants will talk about that in these situations, “the only available action is the next right thing to do”. But this is also to confuse the signs of a certain future with the openness of the event. When an unfolding event gives off a sign, or we determine what “the next available action” is, we are necessarily projecting a goal that takes us outside of the becoming of the event – which is always in a total open non-knowable excess of the known.
From other participants' experiments and the discussion, I slowly shifted my own attunement towards a sensibility of “variable continuity” and the importance of “returning to zero” continuously. We project ahead and look for emerging signs that confirm that the event we expect is unfolding. But we can shift these continuities continuously.
For example, I realized that for novelty to emerge, I needed to “cut” into the process and stop it before it reached what I had projected would be the next ‘stage’. So I just stopped the sauteing process “too soon” so it could not reach a state of “translucence” by taking the onions out of the pan. And I brought the onions back to the cutting board. The question I sensed looking at them was “Could I peel them thinner?” And in the act this became an act of shaving, which itself mutated into scraping thinner, which led to collecting an onion pulp…
There was, and is, never “the only available action”. Rather, there is an opening playing with the configuration of onion, heat, knife, pan, cutting board – and how and where I “cut” into the ongoing event process to move it “sideways” into a new unknown trajectory.
That we make this mistake, of confusing the projection with the event, puts us in good company. After all, initially Darwin made this same mistake in describing how the process of natural selection would lead to flight. He thought initially that the wing had to evolve because having it was a clear advantage to survival. And from this he explained it backwards, as a step-by-step progression to the end goal of flight: first a small partial wing, then “half a wing”, and then a full wing…
But, when challenged by St. George Jackson Mivart with the prescient question (that should sound familiar): what is the use of half a wing?
Darwin quickly realized that from the perspective of radical emergent novelty:
The early “wing” was a feathery arm that kept a dinosaur warm – it was not a “wing in the making” – no more than my onion was a “translucent” onion in the making! There was never half a translucent onion!
And that feathery arm of a dinosaur was not preordained to become a wing – it led via numerous transversal ruptures to a wide array of contingent ways of being and doing: sexy dinosaurs with long colorful feathers, tree running dinosaurs, and even ones that flew.
But even at this point the unfolding event does not stop. It is not like having a wing for flight is the final resting point – the pre-ordained “goal” of this event. Winged beings have continued to experiment with where this “wing” could transversely go – to swim (penguins), to run very fast (ostriches), to produce shade for hunting in ponds in a unique technique called “canopy feeding” (the African heron)...
There is no end. But, we are always abstracting towards known ends – even if they are tinny, tentative and we never intend to get there. We can’t fully stop this. The trick is, as we came to explore in our cooking workshop, to both feel the flow of an event and slow down time:
When we slow down time we sense a pattern-following practice emerging, recognize it enough, and instantly shift away from it. In that moment (for things are changing fast when we are cooking)we can pull things “sideways” – transversally, in a new direction.
This process of stepping out of our abstractions is a form of surrender and active following. We surrender to the open possibilities that the event could become something totally different at every moment and forever. And “surrender” because we are letting go of our ego and sense of direction, goal, and recipe for action. But as we felt in the cooking experiment, this surrender can in no way be passive. We need to be active. In slowing down time, we are actively halting processes by introducing other processes experimentally.
For me, I felt this most strongly in the moment I took the onions out of the pan at a moment that felt far too soon. But it had already happened in the cutting of the onions – I stopped cutting them before they got fine enough to cook evenly. The big curling pieces I put in the pan could not cook evenly, and when I took them off, I could suddenly sense all these differences in how some areas were cooked, others charred, and yet others raw. And this then opened up for me a new pathway to cut the onion following the levels of cooking. Then scraping, peeling, mushing…
The activeness of slowing down time and cutting into processes to make these transversal leaps is a form of experimental playing with the configuration of the assemblage and environment. It is a constant rearranging of what tools to use and in what way. What else can a knife do? What changes when cooking is done on a cutting board? What happens when the onion peels do not go in the bin but in the pan?
And this became itself a fascinating experiment and discussion. The same cut of meat cut differently, will be tough or tender. Wine can taste acidic because of the thinness and sharpness of the lip of the glass or because of a change in pH of the wine (and many other relational practices). Oranges pulled into sections will taste different than those cut in horizontal slices. Eggs don’t stick in a pan because it is “non-sticky” – but because of how you arrange the heat of the pan, the amount of oil, the type of preparation, and the temperature of the eggs. All pans are non-stick if you get the configuration right. The “stick” is not in the pan. It is in the “skill,” which is to say, an understanding of how to experimentally configure the relation towards different event horizons.
The new is equally relational – configurational.
Gilles Deleuze, in a wonderful and quite challengingly odd book, “The Logic of Sense,” talks of two forms of time:
The time of Chronos: this is the regular time of neat divisions into seconds, minutes, and hours – the time of measurement. It is the time of recipes, known identities, and clear goals. It is the form of time we recognize as time. And it is the form of time that only makes sense after events have stabilized (just like recipes only make sense after…).
But, the problem is that measured time is what we now take time to really be. This is an act of “misplaced concreteness” where we are mistaking the abstract for the concrete. The problem from the perspective of creativity is that we miss that there is a second form of time.
There is a second form of time – and that is our “lived time” or what Deleuze calls “the time of the event”, which he names the time of Aion (from the Greek). It is a temporality that precedes and gives rise to the time of measurement. This is the time we entered during our cooking experiments.
This distinction between measurable time and the time of events is hard to see in our highly regularized lives with clocks, calendars, schedules, and best practice routines/recipes operating at every moment in the day. Now our technologies are telling us how fast and far to walk, how long to sleep for “optimized” performance. Doctors advise us on precise measures of calories, vitamins and minerals. When can we pause in our daily lives and ask - is this the recipe we want to follow? What other events are possible?
While for almost all of us, we cannot just step out of everything and move transversally at every moment. But it would certainly help from the perspective of creativity to develop new rituals that allow us to experience Aion – and the radical openness of events. Cooking is an ideal space to develop these in our daily lives. We encourage you to do this – try the game we played in WorldMakers. Email us your results – how did it change you? We would love to hear.
The origins of the phrase Nichinichi kore kōnichi do not lie in Japan, but in China, with the early development of Chan Buddhism (what in Japan would come to be Zen Buddhism). The Buddhist teacher Yun-men, who developed a form of teaching/learning via paradox, had one hundred of his paradoxical statements written down in what was called “The Blue Cliff Record.” Here is number six:
"I am not asking you about the days before the fifteenth of the month. But what about after the fifteenth? Come and give me a word about those days."
To which he answered:
"Each day is a unique “today”…"
Something that sounds so trivial – but is both so profound and so hard to enact…
We leave you in this wondrous excessive openness with a poem by Saigyo:
Scaling the crags
where azalea bloom…not for plucking
but for hanging on!
the saving feature of this rugged
mountain face I’m climbing
Have a beautiful day – and week – and event – being of what is uniquely co-emerging and unfolding beyond what could ever be prefigured.
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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