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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 193! Creativity: Why Are We This Way?...
Good morning desirous investments in novel worldly becomings,
This week's newsletter was written in the glorious co-shaping milieu of:
Over the last two and a half months, as spring has emerged out of winter, we have been considering ways to understand and experiment with technology in the context of creativity. For us, it has been a wonderful ten-newsletter run to take the necessary open-ended time to experiment, explore, invent, learn and change how we ourselves approach the question of technology.
This series started with Volume 183: Creativity and the World-Making of Technology. We began with tools and broken tools – looking at poiesis and techne – the making and the made as specific processes of world-making. We were following a line of curiosity that Michael Anderson summed up quite well:
“We are [embodied] social environment-altering tool users. Tools give us new abilities, leading us to perceive new affordances, which can generate new environmental (and social) structures, which can, in turn, lead to the development of new skills and new tools, that through a process… of scaffolding greatly increases the reach and [qualitative] variety of our cognitive and behavioral capacities”
And this led us to rethink many everyday creative practices from sleeping, to writing, to walking, climbing, cooking, and typing. And in the process, investigate a vast array of mundane things from pens, to typewriters, tablets, beds, alarm clocks, books, flip flops, sidewalks, onion skins, frying pans, and climbing shoes. In this exploratory curiosity, we followed the insight that no tool comes to us alone; we are always of the middle a vast integrated swarm of things:
It is hard to just jump into exploring technologies without first considering the contemporary context of how we as a culture understand technology. Far too often in popular culture, technology is thought of as simply the latest hi-tech gadget, or merely a discreet thing. This led us to consider what technologies are not.
And so for the next three newsletters, we delved into what we consider to be the three big mistakes made when considering technology in relation to creative processes:
1. Tools Are Not Discreet Things working by themselves.
And in developing this critique, we began to explore why it is more helpful to understand technology as assemblages that have certain effects and propensities.
2. Assemblages are not Subway Systems. But considering technologies to be assemblages presents its own problems – mainly the all too common mistake of understanding the networks and systems aspect of assemblages in very static manners (like subway systems) – we have a hard time genuinely grasping complexity and co-emergence:
3. Things are Not Nothing. While things and their agency are relational through and through, that does not mean that there is nothing to the thing. We took a detour along forest paths and mountain cliffs to consider the entangled agency of shoes.
And it was here that we first introduced the “strange looping” of our actions in assemblages that gives rise to us and our immediate experiences:
This theme of strange loops would continue through our next six newsletters. And the exploration of this theme became central to our argument why it is more helpful to talk of world-making (rather than, for example, ahistoric processes of “sense-making” or “way-making”) – as these fail to adequately engage with the longer cultural time scales of technological co-shaping of distinct ways of being alive.
These initial experimental probes expanded into new curiosities and explorations:
All of which brought us far beyond thinking of technology as a discreet thing – to ultimately considering how technologies operate at differing temporal scales and shape the very logic of who we are as subjects, and how we come to directly experience our selves and our immediate environment (This was most explicitly developed in Volume 192: Creativity – It’s Really Real).
In all of this, we developed and extended the conceptual tools and abstractions that we utilize in developing a creative practice that can effectively come to terms with the complex dynamics of technologies and their creativity. We both returned to and expanded on a new vocabulary for creativity: Abstract Machines, Affect, Affordances, Agency, Assemblage, Attunement, Authorship, Configurations, Effects, Encounters, Feeling, Lures, Medium, Mediator, Middle, Propensities, Propositions, Resonance, Sensing, Strange Loops, Webs, World-Making, etc.
We already have plans, starting in the next newsletter, to focus on these terms and will continue throughout the summer. We will do a series of three newsletters defining many of these terms and adding them to our ever expanding online Innovation Glossary. We will also be adding more key books that we referenced for this series to our online Bibliography.
Being a newsletter focused on all things related to creativity, it is no accident that this series on technology would eventually have to come to critically assess the bio-social technologies that give rise to us and our contemporary Western approach to creativity. Our bodies and extended minds are formed bio-culturally by our enactive upbringings; we are, as John Protevi puts it, bioenculturated.
And we in the contemporary “West” are bioenculturated as subjects of the “Heroic Model of Creativity.” This is what Marshall Sahlins defines at a high level abstraction as:
Broadly speaking, it has four key emergent effects:
[A Quick Note: see Volumes 190 and 191 – for a longer introduction to the effects and logic of the Heroic Mode of Creativity. For a good historical overview of its development, see: Camilla Nelson: The Invention of Creativity. And for a comprehensive anthropological investigation, see: Beyond Nature and Culture].
This, the heroic approach to creativity, is not something out there that we can admire or critique from a comfortable distance – it is all of us and our directly experienced world. It is a mode of being alive (of ongoing world-making) that we are all both deeply affectively invested in and involved in creatively enacting. Our lived enactive investment in it is such that it is our lived experiential reality (this aspect of affordances was the focus of last week's newsletter). We actively live in and of an assemblage that we shape and shape us to sense ourselves as the individual source of independent, immaterial ideas (forms) that can be imposed on a passive reality. This is our existential, experiential, lived reality – for us, it is, to a very large sense, “just what it is to be alive”.
Consider just for a moment how, from a very early age, you attuned the rhythms of your body's movements and gestures to imitate those you loved and who you wanted to make proud by engaging in specific cultural practices of individualizing environmental control, regulation, and shaping. We were rewarded for and took great delight in forms of imitative speech, drawing, organizing, moving, and acting long before we knew what anything meant (embodied know-how prior to abstract “know-what”).
We were from birth part of an affective ecology that rewarded and supported certain expressive individualistic and human focus propensities over others.
Consider one simple example: the rooms we grew up in. On the whole, these were human-centered – speaking generally, no mountains, whales, or trees were welcomed and engaged with in these rooms. There was a very clear separation between inside and outside. In fact, there were multiple raised doors, interior halls, and further doors and HVAC systems that kept the outside outside and the inside inside. In these rooms, you were elevated off the ground in high-chairs, cribs, beds, tables, sofas, etc. In all of this, the material was demoted over the life of the “mind” and the immaterial. The world was enacted as “outside” via many, many systems of representation: pictures, books, screens, radio, etc. Our immediate and direct experience was formed in this affordance milieu. This embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive, affective experience co-created subjects who see, feel, sense, and act like us, with strong senses of human-centered individualism living in a world of neutral stuff that supports our interior life and agential expression.
Of course, we are obviously quite diverse in our unique enactments of this broad space of propensities. But there is an overall historical specificity to our bio-cultural enactments.
Our deepest sense of self has been and continues to be enacted day by mundane day:
Loop upon affective (felt) loop, we became in our own unique manners subjects of this mode of being alive.
Consider how, when asked: What is an example of creativity? The vast vast majority of our spontaneous answers are: (1) human, (2) individual, (3) involve immaterial ideation and imagination, and (4) involve something like a process of subjugative making (few of us are asking seriously what the electric circuit or the pen wants).
Why is this? And why in other cultures and historical moments would this question not even make any sense?
We would argue that our contemporary lived sense of creativity and agency is something that the abstractions of “the heroic mode of creativity” reasonably well encompass. This way of being is an achievement of the multi-scalar, multi-temporal, heterogeneous assemblages that constitute the technologies of modern Western subjectification.
BUT – From within this ongoing world-making, we sense that things have not always been this way for all of our history or for other worlds (e.g., “cultures”). And it is because of this that creativity is always a political question and not simply a question of better or worse modes of sense-making, way-making, or even “way-shaping”.
A worldly creativity asks us to consider – and to be profoundly and actively curious about how “things could be radically otherwise” – nothing has to be this way.
Such a stance is a “constructivist” position – one that recognizes that everything is bio-eco-socially constructed. Our engagement with creative processes necessarily involves an acknowledgement that everything has been created, and thus, creativity is everywhere and everywhere ongoing. And that from within the strange loops that we can experimentally act otherwise.
Last week, we looked at the “strange loops” that create us as we co-create our environments that in turn co-create us in an irreversible and emergent manner:
This week we can be more explicit about how deeply the biological, bodily and the social are not separate levels “but processes linked in a spiralling interweaving at three temporal scales: the long-term phylogenenetic (we inherit a plastic capacity for living in interdependent niches), the mide-term ontogenetic (we develop our embodied capacities as we are embedded in practices), and the short-term behavioral (as developed bodies politic we act and react to our material and semiotic encounters)”. (John Protevi)
A major reason for this bio-enculturated emergent approach is to challenge false essentialist and ultimately bio-fatalistic approaches to understanding the creative political capacities of our ecological subjectivities in complex circumstances. These conservative and deterministic approaches always claim some unchanging core or level that every else builds upon – none of which can adequately come to terms with our complex emergent co-shaping reality. These additive (and subtractive) approaches fail to properly take into account that “when the constituents of a system are highly coherent, integrated, and correlated such that their properties are nonlinear functions of one another, the system cannot be treated as just a collection of uncoupled parts” (Chemero & Silberstein).
Who we are is not built up layer by layer – no matter how sophisticated the layering. Such essentialist approaches cannot make sense of both the “upward” and the “downward” causality of the strange loops. We are, as John Protevi argues, “biocultural beings all the way down and all the way up – the bio and the cultural are not separate levels or domains”.
Most importantly, what these approaches miss is (1) the time scales of the bio-cultural technologies and (2) how the strange loops of bio-cultural technologies give us, as worlds (cultures,) qualitatively different and distinct directly experiential worlds.
“Our bodies politic are in process: we live politically by somaticizing our socialization – that is, by digesting and incorporating material and semiotic inputs we produce in our bodies politic. The interweaving of soma and society means we cannot think of biocultural human lives as mere input/output machines passively patterned by their environment (that way lies a discredited social constructivism) or passively programmed by their genes (an equally discredited genetic determinism)” (John Protevi).
To say something like “deep down we are all the same types of human beings because we share essentially the same biologies” – is to simply and totally miss how we cannot separate out our discrete biological being from our environment, tools, and practices. The properties of our biology, environments, tools, and practices “are non-linear [emergent] functions of one another”.
Ultimately – and joyfully, creativity is a political project. Acknowledging that it does not need to be this way, is to ask a political question. And if we are willing to take on answering this question beyond playing with small personal variations in the given – we are embarking on a cultural and existential adventure in novel world-making. And what could be more necessary and hopeful and joyous than this today?
This week, remember – and be pulled into a new adventure by the reality that “other worlds exist and other worlds are possible” – till next week!
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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