Emerging Futures - Volume 189: Who’s in Control – Creativity?

Good morning beings who are becoming novel ecologies,

We hope you had a wonderful Earth Day last Tuesday and felt the earth in you, on, around, and of you at every moment. The biodiversity of our bodies and immediate environments is astonishing, as is the complexity of environmental and tool construction happening across all life.

It was great to hear from many of you about your cooking experiments from the One Ingredient Recipe we shared in last week's newsletter (and that we co-developed during our WorldMakers live event last week).

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We had some really interesting discussions. One thing that came up in a few conversations in regards to our onion experiment was that many of you wanted to know: what was the dish that was made in the end?

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The answer is none. Why? The connecting of experimental practices to fixed ends (e.g., it is going to be a “dish” called lunch) stops the experimental processes from being open events and feeling our way into the durations of open events. There is a necessary surrender in creative practices to the radical openness of the event. And this surrender is not just to processes and becomings that exceed the linear. It is also a surrender to processes that also exceed any and all identity. To project forward a final end point can have a pragmatic value, but should never be taken as a given. We never made “anything” because for u, this particular event is ongoing. The experiments are finding their own way into our lives.

This can sound nebulous and unsatisfying. So much of human action involves strong forms of intentionality and identification – we want something to be something that does something in some specific way. But this has little to do with an open, emergent approach to creative processes. We need to reconsider how we give in to the process itself. We need to reconsider “surrender” as a critical part of creativity.

‍Surrender can sound like a passive process. But it is highly engaged, active, and experimental – for us, “surrender” is a complex, engaged, active, and even analytical practice. 

Questions of surrender involve larger questions of control. 

This week we are still interested in technology and tools, but we want to shift the focus and scale with a simple question:

‍When something novel is emerging – who is in control?

‍Who can we say is rightly the author?

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Authors and Plans

This might feel like a detour in answering these questions about agency, authorship, and control directly. But let’s start by thinking about evolution and how it works, at a very simple and high level of abstraction, for a minute.

If you have the conditions of a living being that can reproduce with variation in the context of depending upon a limited and varying environment, then the process of what Darwin termed natural selection will be set in motion. Then add that these living beings can interact (co-evolution), and also change the environment in the process (niche construction) – and now things get quite interesting. The outcome of all of this is astonishingly creative – it is, speaking quite broadly, us – and it is the world all around us. Evolution. 

So, what is evolution? It is the configuration of processes – a technology – by which living beings change in relation to an equally changing environment. Now, with this example of a powerful creative technology, we are not interested in getting into the details of how evolutionary processes work. Rather, we are interested in how this example can shed light on questions of control and agency in creative processes in general. 

Looking at evolution from this perspective, the first thing we can say is that these processes are open-ended, without an end goal, without an author, and not caused by anything in any one part of the system. 

Where is the authorship, then, in terms of this process? The processes of natural selection, co-evolution, and niche construction described above simply come about when a set of conditions is met. And when these are met, a process is set in motion. That is it. There is a time before these conditions are met – the very early days of the Earth's existence. But when these conditions are met, the process kicks into creative action. There is no author needed.

Think about how interesting this is – this stable configuration of processes is not a discreet thing like a business plan that must be shared, understood, and carried around and referenced by all the participants. Nor is there any grand architect, visionary or even practical manager coordinating this process and keeping all of the ever-increasing and diversifying participants in line. Nor do any of the participants need to know that they are part of this “game”. All that needs to happen is that a set of conditions needs to be met. 

Now it could seem like there still must be something like a recipe involved to guide this process: get these ingredients, add them in this sequence, and you will have this great outcome: evolution. And that while none of the participants necessarily need to know this recipe or even that they are following a recipe, the recipe needs to be somewhere.

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So, where is this recipe? Is it in the DNA of the participants? Without getting lost in the scientific debates about what exactly DNA is and does, we know that it does not have a recipe or plan for evolution in it; rather, it simply helps in the production of offspring with variations. It participates in one process, but it is not the source or guide for the whole process. Variation of offspring is not evolution.

And this is the critical thing for us in regards to answering our questions of authorship, agency, and control: in this profoundly creative process (technology), there is no recipe in the sense of an instruction document that is being followed by the participants. So what is there that guides this process, and where is it if it is not invisibly housed inside the participants? 

What guides and sets this creative process in motion is housed in the configuration of the relations between the specific processes. The configuration and nothing else are what authors and guides the process. 

The technical term for this is that the guiding logic is “immanent” to the relational configuration. It is not something other than and in addition to the component processes and their configuration. It is the configuration that guides the configuration. The “recipe” is nothing more than the outcome of the relations themselves – it is not anything separate from it. 

Think about how radical and wonderful this is – and how far-reaching the implications of this are. If we return to our questions:

Who is in control? The configuration itself.

Who is the author? The configuration itself.

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The Nothing is the Author

“The configuration itself” – perhaps this sounds a bit too vague and even mystical. How can we understand the immanence of the agency in the configuration without getting theological? 

What is this “configuration”? It is really critical to see how simple it is: It is the set of conditions required to set a process in motion. Nothing more. 

In our example of natural selection, it is:

Living beings that reproduce with variation

• (in relation to):

An open, dynamic and limited environment

When these conditions are met, the creative process (of natural selection) is set in motion. That these two processes are brought together – are in a stable relation to each other – is the configuration. And this configuration, the relation between the parts, is what is creative. And what we mean by being “creative” is that the configuration enables a specific process to take place. 

And this set of relations in creatively enabling a specific process is also stopping the components from doing other things (falling into entropy for example). Thus, the configuration is both enabling and stabilizing. Creation and constraint go hand in hand. 

To say “configuration” is to say: a creative enabling and stabilizing configuration – it both enables the new and constrains it. 

‍What is doing the work? Which is to say, “who” is the author? The answer is a challenging one.  As the evolutionary theorist Terrance Deacon stresses, the “author” is a “nothing”. It is not a person, an idea, or a discreet plan that is the author or has agency in this context. In fact, it is not a “thing” of any kind whatsoever. What is doing the work – what has the agency is the configuration of relations, nothing else. And what “is” a relation? Can we see it? Hold it? Touch it? No. And while some relations we can feel, such as love, how do we sense or feel a relational configuration like Natural Selection? How do we grasp the no-thing that is an active something that is so fundamental to creativity?

This relational nothing is very hard to fully grasp – we are enculturated to look for and find “things” as the form answers take. We intuitively feel that there must be a “something”. But here the answer is a “no-thing” – a relation. Which is something we can neither see nor touch. The classical East-Asian philosophical text, the Daodejing, articulates the paradoxical nature of perspective really well in Chapter Eleven:

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The thirty spokes converge at one hub,

But the utility of the cart is a function of the nothingness (wu) inside the hub.

We throw clay to shape a pot,

But the utility of the clay pot is a function of the nothingness inside it.

We bore out doors and windows to make a dwelling, 

But the utility of the dwelling is a function of the nothingness inside it.

Thus, it might be something (you) that provides the value,

But it is nothing that provides the utility. 

Daodejing (Ames & Hall, translators)

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Abstract Machines

How we can best see and understand this configurational nothing is via techniques of abstraction. Abstractly, and retrospectively, we can define these configurational conditions and give them a name – “the process of natural selection,” for example. 

But they only exist as a “thing” abstractly. Gilles Deleuze is very helpful here in developing a useful concept. They term these configurational processes (technologies): 

‍Abstract Machines:

• “Abstract” because they are not anything other than the immanent relations. 
• “Machine” because they are composed of discrete processes working together. And these discrete processes have no inherent pregiven or fixed relation to each – other than that they are being brought together. 

With an Abstract Machine – no one is in control, no one is guiding things – once a set of conditions comes into stable existence, a particular process is set in motion. This process could be evolution, but is also the configurations that give rise to: plate tectonics, capitalism, household behaviors, the digestive process, dining room conversations, sense-making… 

And here we can come back to what we have been considering over the last set of newsletters: how can we think about “technology” in relation to creativity? And now we can add: technologies – the assemblages by which things happen are Abstract Machines. 

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Where Are We?

Where are we as active thinking and doing beings in all of this? We like to see ourselves as free, independent, and knowing authors of our futures. But if everything is by necessity relational, then it follows that the configuration(s) have a profound agency in both creating and conditioning the propensities of those agents within the configuration. We are not free or independent in the most radical sense of these terms. We are intra-dependent agential beings. Our agency is not god-like – there is no outside from which to plan, initiate, and direct what will happen. We are of nested configurations and their propensities. 

Perhaps this is what surrender can mean: In and of a complex context, we can actively participate in the collaborative setting up of conditions – configurations – but we cannot own or control them. In the most narrow sense, we can “author” them – but their creativity – their agency – is not coming from us, and it is not reducible to our intentions. The configuration – the nothing takes over… and the entangled dance of the configuration configuring propensities that become agents that co-shape the configuration that they (we) are of – that is also a nothing, continues…

What could be a better place to find ourselves this Earth week? 

We hope that you have a moment to follow – to surrender – to the propensities into events of slow connection with this astonishing more-than-human creative world we are of.

Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

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