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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Creative Achievements & the Lure of Adventures Beyond Subjugation...
Good morning active experiments of enactive self disclosure,
Our approach to creation and creativity is broadly speaking constructivist and more-than-human.
A constructivist approach is one that recognizes that every thing is created and always in-the-making. By every thing we mean everything – from facts to feelings to subjectivities to abstractions, to bodies, to objects, to social movements, to mountains and oceans – are all created. Some things, like TikTok and capitalism, are of a very recent creation, and other,s like quark-gluon plasma, date back to early in the first second after the Big Bang over thirteen billion years ago. Creation is everywhere and everywhere ongoing – and most of it has little to do with us.
The second point – that not only is everything created, but it is always and forever still “in-the-making” – is an important and often overlooked understanding in relation to creativity – it takes enormous creative effort to keep things the “same”.
There is only becoming – ongoing making – creating. It is a process that irreversibly flows into an as yet non-existing future. What is stable is in-the-making and what is radically changing is in-the-making.
To say that creative processes are more than human is twofold:
1. To understand that most creativity is not human – from the big bang to mountains, galaxies, whale societies, ant farming, and the forming of metals, we witness a creative universe. We are surrounded by, embedded within, emerge out of, and are intradependent upon the vast teeming universe in-the-making. Far too often, we blindly take creativity to be just about us.
2. Creative processes are more-than-human is that our engagement with creative processes – what we can call human creativity – is necessarily more-than-human. Here, “more-than-human” should be understood as more-than-just-human. Our creative practices do not arise fully formed like Athena springing forth from Zeus’s head. No, they emerge from and in dialogue with ongoing non-human processes. Think of how corn came into being: a people formed a deep collaboration over generations with a grass to co-emerge into a corn becoming of mutual intra-dependence. We collaborate with forests and tools to co-emerge into a world-in-the-making of wooden furniture. These collaborations and mutual becomings of more-than-human creativity define all human life. We are, after all, more than half non-human creatures – our bodies are composed of myriad fungi, bacteria, viruses, and insects. All of whom collaborate in the creative processes that give rise to our digestion, moods, metabolic regulation, and immune system. But it does not stop at our bodies, we necessarily are of our tools, environments, communities, and infrastructures. Our achievements are the achievements of entangled more-than-human collaborations.
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Now for some of you alarm bells might be going off. Not because of our claim that human creativity is more-than-human – but because we are claiming that facts – truths are created. And in this moment when science and truth is under powerful reactionary attacks it would be reasonable to worry that we are offering an easy relativism. But, let's not go so fast. Yes everything is constructed and in-the-making. The sciences construct scientific facts as one part of what they do. The construction of facts takes considerable effort over long periods of time – spanning generations, it involves countless people (as well as many non-human actors) doing countless tasks. Ecosystems must be built and maintained and these consist of vast infrastructures of research, publishing, education, physical tools, and spaces etc. This work and the outcomes are achievements – some of which can be rightly claimed to be objective within a given context (as the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright says of electrons, “When you can spray them, they are real”). But – the astonishing more-than-human creative effort needed to get to this “when” should not be skipped over.
That facts are constructed does not invalidate them or make them relative (afterall let’s not forget that everything is constructed). Much like knowing that a chair is constructed does not mean it is not a chair – in both cases (if in very different ways) it is a question of the quality of the construction. And we judge facts collectively via a testing of precisely this – its construction and applicability. Research is reproduced, peer reviewed, challenged, revised, and stabilized. But, it too is always in-the-making – new curiosities, needs, and unintended possibilities arise and alternative approaches (paradigms) emerge.
Facts, as well as abstractions, practices, and collective ways of being alive are all creative achievements. That they are all constructed does not make them false, relativistic, or subjective. But it does make them intra-dependent on a world and relevant to that world. And, as the philosopher of creativity, Gilles Deleuze loved to point out,
“the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness).”
And what is being explained is the how and why of its creation. How and why in a world at a historical moment it mattered and certain things were constructed – it is always a question of disclosing the logic of practices and processes of creation.
In bringing this up we do not want to return to the “science wars” of the turn of the century. Rather we are interested in ecologies of worldly creation, construction and their achievements.
So what does the careful construction of an abstraction, or a practice (and its ecology), achieve? What they achieve is that they afford us a novel way of sensing and engaging with the environment – so as to enact a unique way of being alive (a world).
Last week we looked at one of the great creative achievements of the contemporary Far West Asian tradition: the proposition that all production – creation and creativity, involves a “Heroic Approach to Creativity” – which Marshall Sahlins sums up as:
Creativity fundamentally involves “the imposition of form upon inert matter by an autonomous subject… who commands the process by a pre-established plan & purpose”.
Now, some of you might be confused – “aren’t you very critical of this approach? So why are you now calling it an “achievement”?!?!”
Alfred North Whitehead says this wonderful thing about propositions, he says that they are “lures for feeling” and they should not first be judged as either correct or incorrect depictions of reality. “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than true,” he famously says. By calling a proposition a “lure for feelings,” Whitehead wanted us to sense how a proposition can pull us into a creative adventure. Propositions are speculative. They ask us to consider: what new modes of being alive are possible if… They aim to open us up to transforming who we are, what we could sense, and what worlds we could make. Propositions are not the source or even cause of what follows – they are lures for feelings.
Our generally West Asian ways of being alive have co-evolved and co-emerged with a series of lures that emerged from and drew us into a powerful heroic mode of creativity in a process that goes back at least to the classical Greeks. And the development of this as a vast and all-transforming ecology is an achievement. It is an achievement that has afforded us a unique way of sensing and engaging with the environment, and through a co-evolutionary dance with the ecologies that this logic is immanent to, we have come to enact a unique way of being alive (a world). It is a way of being alive that privileges a universal human subject, individualism, deep interiority, direct causality, and intentionality, and in doing so has given rise to us.
But, today it is worth asking critically of our achievements – what are their effects now?
What are the effects of the Heroic Model of Creation today? What does this world afford us today?
It is very tempting for us to rush to judgment at this point:
“Look what our hyperindividualism and obsessively human-centered focus has wrought!”
– and to point towards our present situation of polycrisis as an outcome of this logic.
It would also be equally reasonable to also question the factual validity of the Heroic Mode of Creativity – after all, we were just arguing this very point at the beginning of this newsletter – that creative processes are not individualistic or even human – they are far more distributed, and without a singular source.
Yes, it is fair to say that today we do need to move out of this way of being alive – we do need to feel the pull of very different adventures – ones that lure us far away from individualism, linear causality and treating everything as a resource. But our worry is that what can happen at this juncture of critique is that we can very rapidly jump to a new proposition without ever fully recognizing how actively and creatively what we are in and of – continues to make us and our world.
So while the negative effects of the achievement of the Heroic Mode of Creativity are plain to see in this moment – let's slow down. We cannot effectively engage in the long adventure of collective and creative change making if we do not unpack how this abstraction, the “Heroic Mode of Creativity” is immanent in and of a vast ecology of technologies, techniques, subjectivities and environments. It is not simply this statement or this abstract logic that is driving us to enact its problematic logic. To believe this is to fall prey to the practice of surreptitious substitution (making the abstraction the real).
So how to proceed? We need to return to what we have been developing in our five part series on technologies (starting with Volume 183 and continuing into this Newsletter). The Heroic Mode of Creativity is a technology. And as such it is an assemblage. And just like our description of the technology of a bedroom in Volume 185…
…we can talk about this approach to creativity similarly. If we look at either of these technologies more generally, we can see that as an assemblage – a technology consists of eight integrated logics:
Now, if we come back to our problematic achievement of the Heroic Mode of Creativit,y we can see that – speaking very broadly – it is the immanent emergent non-linear effects of the network. (With the critical caveat that the network gives rise to the emergent effects and they in turn transform the network… The dragon is always eating its tail in a strange loop of co-creation.
Because we are always in and of the strange ouroborian loop – the work of critical disclosure is always two-fold: (1) understanding the network (the body of the dragon) and (2) tracing how the emergent effects transform the network (the head that eats the tail):
Let’s take on the tracing of this in two steps. It is easiest to begin with the emergent effects, as they are most often already explicated in experience as concepts, logics, ideas, or even mindsets. And then in the next newsletter we will turn to explicating the ecology of networks (see above diagram). (Obviously the neat and clear demarcation between these two aspects of an assemblage is purely pragmatic.)
It is important to keep in mind as we move further into this task of critical disclosure: Marshall Sahlin's description is a profound abstraction. He and Philip Descola (whom he is referencing) are writing from a place far along in the ascending spiral of abstraction. There is no one sentence definition that will capture the multiplicity of effects that encompass this mode of creativity. What makes it up is a far more diverse and partially overlapping integration of related but distinct effects. Nonetheless we can begin to get a good grasp of these by tracing out four main strands of these effects:
The Heroic Logic of Creation has at a very abstract level a four part logic of emergent effects:
1. The Subject is the Source: -- The emergent effects – the opportunities for action from this constellation are felt as:
2. The Creator is Outside of what is Created: The emergent effects – the opportunities for action from this constellation are felt as:
3. Form is Independent, immaterial and precedes making: The emergent effects – the opportunities for action from this constellation are felt as:
4. Matter is Passive The emergent effects – the opportunities for action from this constellation are felt as
:
If we could be allowed a moment of unguarded criticism of the Heroic Mode of Creativity it would be this: It is a model of subjugation. And to the degree that modern creativity is of this approach: We have turned ourselves into little individual monotheistic gods on earth striving to impose our sovereign intentions on a world made to simply welcome our truth. And this logic has become something we desire, take joy in – and tacitly enact as a culture. We honor and emulate far too many little gods – from Steve Jobs, to Wilber Wright to Thomas Edison to your favorite artist or heroic environmental crusader…
Now the puzzling thing is that on even the briefest of reflections most of us would agree that none of this is true – creation and creativity does not happen this way. So why is this still a default in relation to creativity? The most common answer we hear is that this is because we are all taught that this is what creativity is. And while that is certainly in part true – we need to go further with our answer.
And this is where our discussions over the last few weeks about configurations, Abstract Machines, assemblages and technology comes in: we have to move from considering only the effects (as discreet causal abstractions) to considering the role of the network. Too often we mistake the effects for the cause (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness):
– but we need to remember effects emerge from relation dominant networks (configurations).
Rather than chase after erroneous causes (abstracted effects treated as causes) we need to ask: What is the ecology of practices, tools, concepts, embodied habits/desires, environments, institutions, and infrastructure that participate in the emergent creation of these effects?
We need to understand that our necessary process of abstracting out from emergent effects helps us to engage effectively with effects and networks – but they should never be mistaken for the causes.
The deeply problematic Heroic Mode of Creativity is very much an ecology – a relation dominant network that we are both in and of. And we very much need to participate in the making of alternative ecologies. We need to dehabituate, dismantle, de-trigger routines, environments, tools and practices.
Next week we will turn our attention from disclosing the effects to disclosing the ecology of the Heroic Mode of Creativity. For it is only then that we can effectively begin to experimentally co-emerge with novel embodied routines, feelings, hunches, intuitions, environments, tools and practices…
Have a beautiful week swimming in our more-than-human spontaneously creative seas far from the Heroic shores…
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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