Good morning becomings of and after interludes,

Over the last two weeks in the newsletter, we took a summer detour and wandered out from our ongoing series on the invention of human flight (Volumes 251 through 256) to consider some of the creative propensities in differing practices of reading (Volume 258) and the unignorable heat of summer (Volume 257).

Over these last few weeks it has become unavoidable – as we wake in the early hours of the morning, the sun is no longer there just over the horizon. The night is coming back into our early mornings and the days are getting drawn back into the night sooner. Here around the 40th parallel north on the North-West edge of the Atlantic, the season is shifting. Summer is drawing to an end – even if the high temperatures will not end. And so we are letting the rhizomic tendrils of creative inquiry bring us back into the questions that began our summer: what can we learn about creative practices from delving into the invention of human flight?

This series has allowed us to explore human creative practices without falling into the heroic mode of understanding creativity – e.g., flight was invented by someone, and that to understand the what, why, and how of it we should study closely what that person did. But, as we tested out in Volume 252, no one invented human flight. The logics of heroic narratives is leading us astray. It's the wrong question and the wrong approach to both understanding and engaging with creative processes.

Alternatively, by taking a broadly ecosystemic perspective, we could productively avoid making it all about the Wright brothers and begin to tease out a much more distributed, entangled, transversal and emergent logic to creativity. This gave us the space to concretely delve into the processes of abstract machines, assemblages and their propensities, emergence and self-organizing systems, exaptations and transversal thickets, worlds-in-the-making, etc. – all critical and concrete aspects of creative processes.

All of this led us in terms of the story through the long pre-history of human flight and into the first few decades of flight – up to the cusp of the 1920’s. And this leaves arguably the biggest part of the story untold: how does flight go from a series of highly dangerous, barely functional, hard to replicate or scale marginal experiments into the transformative, all-encompassing world-making force it became?

Living in a high-rise in downtown Newark, on a daily basis, we watch a line of planes seemingly materialize as dots on the far horizon and slowly come into view as a line of planes each neatly spaced a few minutes apart. That line is there all day and far into the night. That's over a thousand planes a day taking off and landing. Think of the massive and astonishing complexity of this – a vast system of protocols, endless specialized materials and technologies, a legal and technical safety infrastructure, ways of being alive adapted to this – a small oyster farm on Vancouver Island making a living delivering oysters to diners at the Grand Central Terminal's famous Oyster Bar in New York on a daily basis. And “flight” is not just this airport and plane – the world of worlds became something quite different with the creative development of flying. Isn’t this vast world transforming entangled, messy processual reality – the thing called “flight”?

Where is the invention of this in the story of flight?

The Wikipedia page on the history of flight runs over sixteen thousand words and is a beautiful work of collective achievement. Of the sixteen thousand plus words, a little more than two thousand are devoted to what happened after 1918. Which is to say – the era when flight as a radical transformative way of being alive was invented gets slightly more than one tenth of the total coverage. Even the more mythic-than-actual beginnings of flight – from the Greeks to the end of the sixteen hundreds gets more in-depth coverage… And then this article ends its neat progressive narrative with a brief section of flights on Mars…

It seems that the heroic focus on a very narrow, sexy, and purportedly singular moment in time – that of the so-called first flight – is for most historians the story of the invention of flight. But what is missing is arguably the most astonishingly creative part of the whole story – the invention of the world of flight (and its contingent multiple futures).

The new, odd, and different is constantly emerging everywhere at every moment – this is one of the wondrous and challenging qualities of being alive. But almost all of the new, odd, and different does not lead to qualitatively different futures; it is subsumed one way or another back into the logic of existing general propensities.

So why and how did those small, dangerous, and barely successful first flights ever give rise to the world of flight we have today?

For us, from the perspective of creativity, the key question remains:

How does something novel gain the agency such that it can overcome the strength of what is already happening?

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Back to Narrative Structures

It is a big question, and an important one. But, like most things creativity-related, it is worth slowing down, and before delving directly into experimenting with ways of engaging this question – we need to ask a different question:

Why is this ignored?

Why is almost no one writing the less glamorous, but equally critical history of the ongoing invention of runway surfaces?

Why do our creativity stories focus on such a thin moment?

Why is the crazy and astonishing creativity story of “the invention of flight” missing from the stories we tell of the invention of flight?

The all too obvious and all too frequent answer is that flight “just became inevitable”. That “this is a clear example of progress.”

The implicit argument that is given runs something like this:

1. Humans have always wanted to move faster, further, and with greater ease.
2. Flight was the ultimate version of this possibility – we could see this all around us in the birds, insects, and angels.
3. And so when flight first emerged (via great human perseverance and creativity), it was quickly recognized for what it was.
4. And from then on, human flight in all its myriad forms became an inevitability (except for in the minds of the reactionary few who irrationally refused the inevitability of progress).

It is a story that we find repeated in the context of pretty much every innovation: The hard creative part is the initial invention, but then the rest is almost inevitable – it is the story of progress (and the fight against those who question and resist progress).

NOTE: Rarely is logic explicit; rather, like the Wikipedia page on the history of flight – it is implied by its formal logic, selection of materials, and linear approach to temporality itself. As an implicit tendency, it tacitly co-ordinates, adapts, and conscripts habits and patterns without much notice.

Let’s take a moment to critically consider this logic:

It is the logic of Surreptitious substitution: It is a story that fails to accurately recognize its “object.” It treats complex ecosystemic processes as if they were things. Flight becomes an abstract discrete “thing” – that discrete plane we all recognize – that is flight. But the messy, hard-to-grasp set of intra-woven contingent and contentious processes – that isn’t “really” flight… Ronald Reagan’s administration's destruction of Air Traffic Controllers' collective bargaining rights — that is not really “flight”...

And it is this process of treating the heterogeneous, ecosystemic, processual and contingent as if it were a discrete and singular thing that allows it to be understood as something inevitable: once “it” is invented, now the cat is out of the bag: there “it” is – just deal with it.

But notice how this logic of a surreptitious substitution of a discreet thingified abstraction for the messy processual reality (which is one we also see playing out with the “thingification” of AI) removes us and the world in general from the ongoing creative becoming of things.

Neither the world of flight, nor the world of cars, nor the world of AI is ever simply a given – it is something that must be creatively made – and done so in an ongoing manner.

And now we begin to open up a whole can of anti-creative worms…

This approach of placing creativity within an inevitability + progress narrative is a common, persuasive, and theological way of approaching the question of creativity and human history:

1. That [fill in with whatever innovation] is inherently a better and more efficient way to do something.
2. Thus it is inevitable and only a matter of time – it is just a question of who, how, and at what personal cost.
3. Such progress is inevitable.
4. There will always be conservatives/reactionaries that resist the inevitable and the progressive

The first critical thing to notice about this logic is that it is a goal-assuming approach. The goal – whatever it is (god’s plan for the world, or universal human progress) – is given in advance and placed into the future prior to the workings of history itself. This goal projection becomes a process of conscription that compels all contingent outcomes to be read as pre-given inevitabilities. It speaks from a universal view outside and beyond history: “always”, “objectively better”, “more efficient,” “inevitable,” “progress”…

These goal-driven arguments are what are called teleological arguments – telos meaning in classical Greek, end, goal, or purpose. Historically, in the West, teleological arguments were theological arguments – arguments for the existence of god, for a god that must both sit at the beginning and at the end of history:

Why is there something and not nothing? Well, there must be a pre-existing plan, purpose, goal – and creator behind it all – how else could something so astonishing come into being?

From within this logic, to understand historical human inventions such as flight, electricity, or AI, we no longer bring god into our explanations, but the teleological anti-creative form nonetheless implicitly remains.

And it is these far more mundane teleological arguments that we need to be wary of from the perspective of fully grasping the creative agency of reality. Flight, electricity, democracy, AI, animism, scientific racism, capitalism, labor and environmental laws, basic hygiene, data feminism, and Orca socialities, these are all ongoing complex contingent creative achievements. A dense, dynamic, entangled, intradependent, contingent, and emergent thicket of relational agents – human, more-than-human, and other-than-human are always involved in ongoing and contentious ways. Nothing is inevitable.

Too many of our approaches to the new are arguments that erase and deny contingency and creativity for the inevitability of a pre-existing purpose. We need to both ask who and what benefits from this, and what the consequences are for how we approach these significant ongoing creative achievements.

But, let us make no mistake, the non-linear irreversibility and emergent complexity of reality does mean that human history is not a story of inevitability. And this does mean that reality and human histories are creative histories where things could have been different and will be different.

Progress and Perspective

But what of progress? Surely we can speak of progress alongside contingency and creativity? Of course we can. But we need to be cautious about how we make such an argument and how sweeping we allow this argument to become.

From within a context (a situated perspective – a way of being alive) we can say, with caution, that something is an improvement over something else. But the values, system of judgment, and outcomes are situated and co-created alongside each other (this is the looping emergent processes of world-making). What one historical mode of being alive understands as obvious, rational, necessary, or better cannot be taken (really made) to be universal without a profound cost (this is the world damaging/destroying process of colonialism).

Additionally, the same “thing” always has a lived irreducibility, as Isabel Stengers notes, we may have “interests in common – but they are not the same interests” (I. Stengers). What is one thing that will be qualitatively different for one community than for another… Qualitative Multiplicities: We live in and of a pluriverse.

And what is good/relevant/progressive at one moment in time – well, the rest is too obvious to even say…

Creativity asks of us many forms of modesty – from a recognition that our agency is never singular and independent to recognizing that there is no clear source for any novelty – and not the least of these modesties is to be profoundly cautious about any claims for the good, the objective, the progressive and the inevitable …

From the perspective of creativity, social history is not linear, singular, inevitable or progressive. It is a history full of ruptures, discontinuities and qualitative differences. There is no one way to be alive, nor is there a final ideal future way of being alive. We are fated to live in a world of many worlds as part of a world-in-the-making.

Diversity Multiplicity Difference Creativity

While this newsletter is not intended to be an in-depth critique of approaches to creativity that rely on implicit narratives of progress and inevitability, it is impossible to come to terms with critical creative questions and practices without engaging in a critique of this logic. Too many approaches to history and histories of creativity are neatly and destructively teleological, ignoring, really denying the radical nature of creativity and contingency. This is no simple error; it is to deny that we, and others like us, and others not like us at all, have a meaningful, complex creative role in the future.

Engaging effectively with the full scope of creativity requires approaches that come to grips with histories that can fully recognize: Discontinuity, the Disjunctive, Qualitative Difference, and Pure Multiplicities.

But this is not the main curiosity that we wish to leave you with as the full moon sets, and you begin your Friday.  Our hope is that we all feel how astonishing it is to ask the question: How does something novel gain the agency such that it can overcome the strength of what is already happening? – And sense that we are asking about a big, wondrous, and less noticed aspect of creativity – all that happens after …

We are most curious about all that happens after the first plane tentatively hops a few hundred feet. For at this moment nothing is inevitable – and everything is still to be invented…

Next week we will dive into this – head, and feet first!

Until next week,
Keep Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

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