WorldMakers
Courses
Resources
Newsletter
Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 227 - A Manifesto for a New Creativity...
Good Morning oceanic beings flowing in currents of entangled becomings,
This newsletter was completed this week from the middle of the Salish Sea – taking the evening ferry from Vancouver Island. Enveloped in thick mists, tracking the early setting sun and welcoming rain showers. The background all-encompassing soft rumble of the engines meeting the ocean slowly vibrates its way into every cell and disappears from awareness as we leave harbor and head into the looming offshore fog. I’m writing by the starboard windows, with one eye for the screen and one reserved with hope to catch a glimpse of the multigenerational matriarchal pod of resident Orcas.
It’s been years since I last saw them. Then we were running along the top of a sea cliff on Cortes Island as they rubbed themselves along the same cliffs just below the water line. An intergenerational corkscrew of twisting whales flashing white patches and then gone.
Being on the ocean, there is enough to see, even if the Orca do not surface. Soon, there is nothing to see. Every two minutes, the foghorn sounds a long three-second blast to the invisible potential others sharing this void with us. And so the world shrinks to millimeters on the far side of the windows. A grey dimensionless zone. Neither quite day nor quite night, just an infinite even blankness transitioning almost imperceptibly to a deep inky blackness as the early winter night arrives.
As the world shrinks to the ferry interior. It’s people watching, and between the regular sounding of the fog horn, people overhearing…
As darkness grows with each sounding of the fog horn, I am listening to two groups of strangers who have slowly moved to share the same table and life stories… kids show up from elsewhere, and then grandkids… Trading stories about jobs, kids, travels…
Speaking of hearing… It has been great to hear from a few of you – sharing your favorite manifesto’s, key creativity phrases, and even your own full blown manifesto’s. What was most heartening to read was how consequential manifestos were to you and your engagement in creative practices. We could not agree more.
Andrew, Jason, and I recorded a podcast this week for our WorldMakers community – talking about the manifestos we shared in the last newsletter. We talked for about an hour and recorded almost half an hour – but it felt like we could have just kept going.
The role of three forms of manifestos – what we call the Orienting, the Internal, and the Public manifesto form a critical aspect, for us, of the feedback and feed forward loops of collaborative experimental making, doing, and novel concept development that is so critical to human engagements with creative processes.
This week, as promised, we are sharing the first version of an Orienting Manifesto for Creativity that we have been thinking about and playing with for a while in various forms (some of the saying and quotes will be familiar to readers of our book: Innovating Emergent Creativity. Please take it as a series of propositions – lures toward feeling and acting differently.
As an orienting manifesto, it is not project-specific – but rather provides a general orientation to a way of engaging with creative processes in general. It is also not a document unique to us – it draws upon many sources and influences (which we try to point towards in the actual document).
For us, it is a working document. Please read it in this light – what would you add, change, remove, or articulate differently? Cross things out. Add things in. Let us know what you would change… And as Sister Corita Kent said, there will be new rules next week!
Creativity is not solely the purview of humans. Creativity, the processes by which the production of novel differences happens, is a general quality of all reality.
Everything that exists are processes of becoming – from atoms, to mountains, to life, to concepts, to communities that must be created and creatively maintained. These creative processes dwarf and extend far beyond the human in awesome and endlessly astonishing ways. We live in a complex, spontaneously self-organizing emergent creative reality that will always exceed us.
Our human creativity thus involves a skillful joining with, and an acting as a helpmate to reality’s already ongoing creative processes.
Too often we divide reality into the active and the passive – the changing and the unchanging – the creative and the uncreative.
But everything involves process and change – everything involves ongoing creative processes. Even that which seems to stay the same is the ongoing outcome of astonishing creative achievements. This is what it means to say creativity is everywhere. Just think of the billions of dollars spent to keep our hair the same color. Or the astonishing creative acts of care used to keep a premature baby alive. There is as much creativity at work in staying the “similar” as in radically qualitatively changing.
Yes, everything everywhere is changing. But clearly not all change is the same. Speaking very broadly, there are two forms of change: Change-in-Degree and Change-in-Kind. Most change (and most creativity) is of the former variety (this is also the focus of most logics and techniques of creative processes). Change-in-degree is continuous, incremental, and quantitative. It involves variation. Change-in-Kind on the other hand, is disruptive, discontinuous, and qualitatively different. The challenge for those engaged in working with creative processes is that Change-in-Kind requires unique and distinct approaches that are qualitatively different from those used in Change-in-Degree.
Because creativity is everywhere and everywhere ongoing – there is never a pure “something from nothing” type of beginning to anything. We always find ourselves and everything in the irreducible non-decomposable emergent middle.
There are no pure beginnings, blank slates, or perfect autonomous ah-ha moments of totally unique revelation.
Middles are collaborative. Middles are relational. Middles are always more-than-human even when human.
That said, the qualitatively new emerges from the middle of an entangled thicket of influences without being reducible to any of them. The radically new emerges from a history – but is not of its history.
We live in an ongoing, processual, dynamic, creative world. We are of this ongoing stream. And when we consciously begin a creative endeavor – rather than it being an absolute beginning, it is a carefully negotiated process where we re-enter the already creative ongoingness of reality – but from a different experimental active perspective.
Creativity asks us to take on the perspective of an emergent novel difference, and the practices of co-creating with and of a difference that will make a qualitative difference (it is not about you).
It does not matter that much where we begin. What matters is the how. We need to trust that the new, the different, and the interesting will both emerge and evolve as we strategically engage with creative processes.
Often, far too much effort is put into beginning with the perfect “idea”. In doing so, we incorrectly assume that creativity is a linear process of ideating, planning, and then making. But reality is far too complex for this to ever be the case.
Trust the process: things will evolve, radically change, and emerge iteratively from ways of joining and probing ongoing worldly creative processes. Novel problems worth having will be created by the process. The political philosopher and activist Angela Davis put it this way: “I don’t know how else to talk about this other than to encourage people to experiment… I think that the best way to figure out what might work is to simply begin doing it…”
The challenge of being of the middle is that we are always already both a part of and an outcome of historically developed ecologies. Alfred North Whitehead, an important early Western philosopher of creativity, put it this way: “As we begin so shall we go.”
The great difficulty for experimenting towards the new is that we meet an already organized ongoing reality that is patterned systemically in a way that gives rise to a series of invisible stable propensities. We need to slow down and disclose these patterns, logics, tools, environments, embodied habits – and the stable propensities they give rise to.
“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening,” Marshall McLuhan
A key aspect of engaging with creative processes is refusing to continue being organized in certain ways. Creativity requires that we strategically and actively disclose and block existing uses, practices, and logics to leave room for the qualitatively novel to emerge in the unexpected.
A key question is always: What ecologies, activities, concepts, and conversations should we stop participating in?
The groundbreaking writer of speculative fiction, Ursula Le Guin, said that “the only thing that makes life possible, is the permanent intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
In our complex reality, the only thing that is certain is that what will happen will exceed what we expect in totally unexpected ways. We cannot predict what will happen next – not because we lack the skills, but because the future does not yet exist – it is open, contingent, and surprising in how it actively comes into being.
We need to embrace and work with the reality that the encounter with the emerging and always surprising future will make us otherwise.
To “leave space for the unexpected” is then both critical to engaging with creative processes and being at home in the universe.
But, the “leaving space for the unexpected” requires an active and experimental practice of refusal. We need to block the existing and the known at an ecosystemic level. It is only then that the new can move us experimentally elsewhere (see above).
To recognize that the universe exceeds prediction is to embrace that agency is not something that we uniquely possess. Our intentions alone do not determine what happens – we are always in an open collaboration with materials, processes, and environments that collectively have an agency that exceeds us.
This is not a bad thing if we are interested in the new and different. The experimental composer John Cage famously said, “It is only an experiment if we do not know the outcome…”
The question is, how can we welcome what comes next?
For creativity begins in surprise: “I thought I had reached port, but found myself thrown back out to sea,” Gottfried Leibniz
Too often we talk about creativity as the unknown, the invisible – something we discover – but while this intuition moves in the right direction, it is also profoundly misleading. The radically new is not simply already existing but simply unknown – it is unknowable because it does not yet exist. Creativity is not discovery. Creativity is not a voyage into the unknown. These metaphors are far too passive. The new must be made:
“Wanderer, the road is your footsteps, nothing else; you lay down a path in walking” (Antonio Machado).
How do novel things emerge? The poet Antonio Machado said it so beautifully: the path is not something that exists, but is invisible to us. No, in creative processes, the path must be made? How – by walking it into existence.
So much of our contemporary discourse on creativity is focused on “breaking all the rules”. And again, like many suggestions, it is half right. We do need to disclose, block, and break existing rules, practices, and habits. But this, by itself, is not enough: We have to invent new rules, tools, practices, and environments.
Why? Rules are first and foremost not “negative” – they are creative, constructive, and enabling.
The desire to simply “break all the rules” is a fundamental misunderstanding of the creative and generative logic of limits (what we prefer to call “configurations”, and others “constraints”). Limits are productive, and new limits (rules) produce new fields of possibility. One only needs to think of games such as chess. What makes the total space of possibilities in chess possible? It is the limits of a set of pieces, a limited field of play, and a limited set of actions possible by each piece. Rules act to both keep differences alive (block a return to the old), and are generative of a field of novel possibilities that far exceed the known – or even knowable.
Creative processes can involve the production of radically new features, capacities, and purposes. But what – and more importantly, where are these located?
Evan Thompson suggests a helpful analogy to bird flight to understand and answer this question: Where is flight located? Is it in the feather? Or the wing? Is it in the brain?
Flight is not in any thing. Flight is an emergent relationship that is held between bird, air, thermals, the landscape, and much else. And likewise new features, capacities, and purposes are to be co-created in the production and stabilization of new enabling configurations.
This is equally true of the human capacity to be creative. Creativity is not found in you. It is not a thing located somewhere in the brain.
This also means that creativity is not beaten out of you by school – it was never in you!
Obviously, human creative capacities require bodies and brains – but like all capacities, it is an emergent relational quality. It requires that we collaboratively make and stabilize the right configurational processes of people, practices, tools, and environments.
So much of the contemporary Western literature on creativity is focused on Ideas, and that creativity fundamentally is about beginning and following a powerful novel idea. But if something is radically new – there will be no words or images for it – you will never be able to “ideate” it. Ideation – and even the imagination are far more conservative than we acknowledge.
New ideas and imaginings emerge from novel actions. They emerge via experimentation, iteration, and feedback systems.
OTHER WORLDS EXIST & OTHER WORLDS ARE POSSIBLE
We are collaborative, active, embodied, embedded, and extended beings who, via our creative collaborative actions, make worlds and keep worlds alive. “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns,” the radical author of some of the most insightful works of fiction, Octavia E, Butler writes.
What does it mean to be of a “new sun”? It means to be of a new world – a new way of being alive. Human engagements with creative processes are ultimately always involved in this project – we are always already engaged in world-sustaining or world-making practices:
“There is no work of invention that does not call on a people who do not yet exist,” Gilles Deleuze
Creativity does not happen alone – nor will it leave you untouched. Creativity emerges from collectives – and makes novel collectives. Creativity is in the business of inventing new problems worth having for worlds worth making…
The creative journey is ongoing. We are changed by it. We will not meet the same realities again. The context matters. What worked in one experimental context will not work the same way in the next. You will need to change approaches, techniques, and methods. Once you have used the “ladder” – or any set of tools, practices, or methods to co-emerge with and stabilize a novel way of being – put it down. Put the ladder down. Leave it behind. It is not a universal tool. Next time you will need something else.
This newsletter was completed this week from the middle of the Salish Sea – taking the evening ferry from Vancouver Island. Enveloped in thick mists, tracking the early setting sun and welcoming rain showers. The background all-encompassing soft rumble of the engines meeting the ocean slowly vibrates its way into every cell and disappears from awareness as we leave harbor and head into the looming offshore fog. I’m writing by the starboard windows, with one eye for the screen and one reserved with hope to catch a glimpse of the multigenerational matriarchal pod of resident Orcas.
Difference – pure difference – a qualitatively new and incomparable difference is continuously coming into being – and is at the heart of all creative processes. Our world is one that steadily incorporates such differences into “the similar” – the known, the recognizable, that which fits and has a known utility – and moves with existing organizational logics. Novel differences-in-kind are not recognizable, knowable, or conceptualizable when they first emerge as what they might become. Creative processes interested in the qualitatively new are only as effective as the processes by which they can “keep difference alive”.
Differences: it is to be curious about, love, care for, support, and be changed by qualitative differences that can make a difference – that exceed knowing and understanding – this is what a radical creativity asks of us. It is both a difficult and a wondrous challenge. Keep difference alive.
Well, that is version one of this manifesto. Please take it as a series of propositions – lures toward feeling and acting differently. They are not the final word – nor even the first word.
We would love to hear your thoughts on this manifesto – please email us if you feel so compelled.
Next week, we will take a more expansive look back at the many more context-sensitive lists of propositions we have written over the last two hundred plus Newsletters. Have a wonderful week walking new paths into becomings.
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
+++
P.S.: Loving this content? Desiring more? Become a member of our online community → WorldMakers.
