Good morning spooky becomings of a ventriloquism you-did-not-wish-for!

Halloween is still a week away. But as the earth and sun dance in slow wobbling ways such that the nights grow longer in our home region and the nearly full moon lingers long in the night sky – it is a good time for bonfires and stories of hauntings.

This week, in week four of our series on creativity as an event (Pt 1: Vol 264, Pt 2: Vol 265, Pt 3: Vol 266), we are experimenting with critique – its relevance, and its problematic “haunting” logic when we conflate emergent outcomes with conditioning ecosystems.

Creativity Is Haunted

Creativity is the processual becoming of the new. It is an event arising unexpectedly out of existent intra-twined ongoing processes, practices and dynamic ecologies.

The ongoing event of what exists co-animates us in unique co-emergent dancerly ways – sometimes it could be said that we “lead” and at many other times countless others – or perhaps “nothing” – leads. And in all of this we actively, irreversibly, and transformatively come to “become-of” the event's dynamic ongoing unfolding. This isn’t just “happening to us” – like some ideology being imposed upon us – we are co-creative agents in the event that co-created us to be of the event (strange virtuous loopings indeed).

But, given this, it is also not the case that we are the authors of our own actions in the sovereign way that we often deeply feel.

When we come to get a feel for the multi-scalar co-creative agential logic of events, we sense how it is not quite (or perhaps never really): “I made that,” “I am thinking this,” “these are my words” – something more emergent, more distributed, more autonomous – more wondrously spooky is going on. In our actions, it can be hard to quite pin down who is speaking, or who is thinking, or who is acting…  things move through us as we move them, in them moving us…

Be this as it may: More often than not – it does not feel that way. Take thinking, for example: I most often feel that thinking happening inside of me – in the head – in my “mind.” I’m certain that you too sense this quite often (if not all the time).

But if, as an experiment, we take seriously that all things emerge from the middle of an open, distributed, heterogeneous, multiscalar, relation-dominant event – then should we not consider that it is this event that is “enminded” – and not that my thinking is embodied?

Should I not consider that I am also of this event’s becoming? And that thinking is not something that is in me and that I control – but rather it is some thing that moves through me as part of the co-animating force of a dynamic, ongoing and ever-evolving event?

So, then, why do I – and perhaps you – feel and think in ways that are so at odds with this event logic?

Why do I feel that I am thinking somewhere deep inside my mind that is firmly located in me?

And this is where criticism can take a strange turn: Is it that I just don’t get it? Is it that I am still deluded? Is it that I just need to read more, study harder, and I will eventually get it? Do I just need to hear more crotchety critiques by great experts about why some aspect of my internalized personalized thinking is wrong? – and if their charisma is strong enough, I’ll finally get it?

Slowing down for a moment: if we are actually approaching things from a complexity perspective of dynamic non-linear co-shaping – why would the diagnosis and answer be so linear, immaterial, and individual-focused? Why is the rough form of the critical answer: learn more about why you are wrong, what is right, and how you gain this knowledge? Why is the focus still on the individual?

Instead of this critical individualizing knowledge correction focus – wouldn’t part of the answer be to consider how this creative ongoing event of, let's call it for lack of a better term, “interiorizing independent selfhood” has come into dynamic being (via distributed ecological processes), persists as a creative animating force (an event), and continuously co-shapes habits, practices, tools, environments and enactive subjectivities?

Speculating for a moment: would not the critical direction be to pay more attention to the conditions and the conditioning of the event in individuating us as the kinds of being that sense thinking as individually emanating from deep within our heads?

And continuing this speculative critical experiment: would we not try and trace the relational dynamics of the looping through our lived habits, practices, environments, tools, and their emergent agential animating of a general style of doing and knowing?

Perhaps, then, critique is less about identifying an issue as a type of immaterial abstraction – say the problematic concept “thinking is in the head” (and then directly and conceptually focus on why this is wrong) – and more an experimental lived practice of active ecological attunement that loops outward from abstractions into the specific relational and co-emergent dynamics of entangled lived environments, tools, and practices that actually give rise to these highly situated and agentially powerful abstractions?

Deleuze and Guattari, in the last experiment they wrote together, put it this way: “Where ever there are habits there are concepts” – and it is helpful to sense this: co-animating and co-animated ecological habits give rise to concepts that become part of our emergent sensibilities – which in turn co-shape the ecology of habits. Such that if we have conceptual sensibilities like, “thinking is in the head” – the reason for this is to be found in the emergent logic of a robust ecology of practice – not in my personal failings to properly identify and understand imposed conceptual frameworks.

Could it be that a practice of critique that stays at the level of denunciation and argumentation over abstractions is itself quite unexpectedly participating in an event that it is trying to escape? Could it be that the ecology of the habits of making abstractions transcendent is itself co-shaping a form of argumentation that tacitly keeps things in that processual ecology?

Might it be that, from a complexity perspective, it is correct to say “This is wrong” or “we should stop talking about…” – but in enacting a practice that stays at the level of abstractions – we could, ironically, be reinforcing the very practices we wish to move away from? A troubling haunting indeed…

We certainly have come to feel this haunting as we have often been co-animated by these forms of critique. (After all, we are critical of much of how we, as a contemporary culture, have approached thinking, creativity and individual agency). It is all too easy, given the ecosystemic logics of so much of our daily lives, to fall back into a kind of easy denunciatory critique – that has precisely the opposite outcome of what we are interested in experimentally engaging with...

The thing is: criticism is relevant –  it has a role – but, when practiced as an abstract art that ignores its embeddedness in and of an ongoing unfolding ecological event – and the active ecology that emergently gives rise to the abstractions it critiques – then it is far too easy for it to shift into a type of easy declamation of truths and personal denunciation of failings: no more elephants! no more icebergs! no more linearity! no more essentialism! stop with it all!  – and if you don't – what is wrong with you?

But – how is it anyone's fault to be born into this world and to have become of these ecosystemic logics?

Given how much the new – and all life is haunted by the emergent ecology of what exists and persists – criticism needs a sense of caution with regard to abstractions, a care for ecologies of practice, a humility in regard to their own agency, a compassion for the event – and all those who are of it, a curiosity for tender non-conceptualizable novelties, and a sense of joy for ongoing experimentation – in almost equal measure.

Tending to the Spirits

We, in Emergent Futures Lab, in our desire to collaboratively experiment towards novel emergent more-than-human approaches to creativity – tacitly, and often explicitly, take issue with almost everything about our culture's standard approach to creativity. And so we too can get drawn into the gravitational pull of these fraught processes of critique.

Becoming of this gravitational pull happens even without directly engaging in critique – its ecological co-animations haunt non-explicitly critical creative practices: In a very real sense, disagreement is built into the historical habits of responding to propositions. The standard definition of a proposition is “a statement put forward for consideration, acceptance or rejection.” And there is a robust ecology of practice to go along with this. So, if, for example, I make a propositional claim: “thinking emerges from the middle of an event” or “creativity is an emergent worldly event” – the negative is already there: haunting the “is”:
“thinking is not x.”
“creativity is not y.”

For anyone who has been through the Western schooling system – the full ecology to enact such debates actively haunts our embodied states and their attunement to all phrases: when there is a proposition – then there is something akin to a Pavlovian response. This is a major aspect of how thinking has been inculcated in us – we are of a propositional criticality in what might be taken to be an instinctual sense: in such an ecological event, “being critical” is what it means to think… (and even be “human”)...

In this, our present context, there is a polemic and potentially stultifying power to the “is” of propositions – they, without any intention, can be pulled into the making of polemic claims: “this is right!”  or “this is not right” – which firmly positions propositions in an ecology that both attempts to rigidly fix things (in the supposed right state/answer) and makes a clear divide between those of us who know the truth and the others who sadly do not.

Now, none of this is meant abstractly – the ecology of these practices is very concrete and ubiquitous: the architecture of spaces is designed to enact these polemic logics from chairs, to lights, to floor heights (and far beyond). The architecture of knowledge production equally participates in this (here the work of Michel Foucault on disciplinary technologies and apparatuses (a dispositif) is astonishingly interesting).

Even with the putting forward of positive propositions – there is an ever-present danger of stultifying and destroying novelty in ecological ways.

But this critical and problematic logic does not exhaust the power of propositions. There are other ecological spirits afoot. Perhaps there is another set of forces active in propositions: From an emergent/complexity perspective of creativity, there are no actions that do not have creative effects – no statement, no proposition is merely a statement for acceptance or refusal – it is always a creative act. Nothing, no matter how small, does not have a transformative impact on the state of things. Every act is a probe into the new.

Whitehead picks up on this sensibility and animates this trajectory – suggesting that propositions could alternatively be activated as “lures for feeling” – ways to be drawn into the co-creative work of the becoming of an event. From this perspective we could understand that in our contemporary historical ecology – propositions are pulled towards stasis, polemos and denunciation – but perhaps there is a way to feel and co-create towards new ecologies – new events? What new becomings – new spirits – are flitting briefly in the air as we experiment in the co-making of new sensibilities, new habits, new feelings – and new terrains?

What happens when propositions are not put forward for consideration, acceptance or rejection, but rather, to act as an experimental lure for feelings? What ecology might support and co-animate this?

The Pull of Arguments and the Delicacy of the New

The related problems and challenges for criticality and the new continue:

When something new emerges – it is not landing on a blank slate – it is participating in an already agentially full historical world. In such a context, the new emerges effectively into an ecology that co-creates it as a relational difference – a contrast: this is different from that (a change in degree vs a qualitative difference). At which point it is easy for the whole ecology of comparative critique to be immediately co-enacted (even when one wishes otherwise): now comparative and evaluative judgments that can be entertained from within the existing ecology: is this necessary? Does this do that better? Does this help me with my problem? Does this allow what I am already doing to keep going beyond this hurdle?

The new is thus always in the unfortunate position of being enacted as a supplement and fix from within a robust existing ongoing ecology of practice. Supplements and fixes – that already have places waiting for them in the lineup of TED Talks, supplementary workshops, augmentations of branded models, and rewildings of what exists.

Note: we contrast this, as a propositional lure, with the practices of emergent newness being approached as an open dynamic non-comparative and as yet unknowable becoming – e.g. a potentially qualitatively different event (a becoming-different-in-kind).

Getting Pulled Into Problems Not of Your Making

We are certainly not immune to these ecologies and their enactive/creative gravities: Our work in this newsletter is a good example of this tacit pull of what we are experimentally moving away from:

Zooming out, it would be fair to say that we are part of a movement away from (e.g. quite critical of) a historic immaterial transcendent essentialism (an ecological movement that has defined – and continues to define much of the now globalized western traditions of understanding and acting). This is a multi-century experimental shift away from separating the immaterial from the material, the real from mere appearance, the mind from the body, and the observer from the observed. Whitehead diagnosed this problematic ongoing event that we are in critical response to – as the "bifurcating of nature.” We can sense it in emergent abstractions and the habits of this problematic event that are everywhere: in how we sense thinking to be in us, in how we search for essences behind phenomena, how we separate ourselves from reality, how we want an origin as a source, how we conflate abstractions with their sources – and all the logics of glasses, frames, ideologies and mindsets that supposedly sit between us and the real.

As lovers of the kitchen, we have a fondness for naming this “the onion approach” – after its desire to peel off what is considered superfluous layer-by-layer to get down to the unchanging essence.

So what happens in this event’s ecology with alternatives? In our case, we (Emergent Futures Lab) often, for pragmatic reasons, start to lay out an alternative by developing a contrast to existing abstractions and practices.

What exists in the space of current logics of creativity is the proposition: “creativity is some thing found in the human, – it is individual, and in the head”. In short, an essentialist argument, a type of onion that we need to get to the core of…

And we take this on via an experimental contrast that works by building layer by layer towards something else: first: thinking is not (just) in the head: feel how you are embodied and this loops into your thinking – Then we develop how we are extended, then embedded, and then enactive, then we move on to how the world is inherently creative, then emergent, then…. – we are adding one transformative supplement (or layer) after another…

We see a similar logic in the arguments of Embodied Cognition, Enactive Cognition – and most importantly in many approaches to complexity that begin with what we currently understand: the clear linear and obvious,  to which they add layer by supplemental layer: the logic of the complex, and then the logic of the complicated and finally the chaotic…

But what is the implicit structure of all of these alternative approaches? Here too is an onion – it's just that we are now going the other way! Instead of reducing to the center, the essence – we are supplementing and correcting that center. How the onion haunts us too!

We too are being tacitly pulled into the active co-creative forces of existing ecologies. We need to be doing a better job of actively and experimentally asking: What ecology might support and co-animate alternatives?

What if There Were No Windmills?

Our curiosity is for both:

1. How existing abstractions act as ecologically embedded lures for feelings (ones that problematically lure us towards onions.) They are leaving us tilting at windmills: no more elephants! No more icebergs! – they are ones pulling us ecologically towards becoming good critics, relevant experts, and upstanding gatekeeping denunciators (despite all of our best efforts).
2. And how novel speculative propositions could still act critically – but act less as “the new truth” and more as lures for novel practices, processes, habits and ecologies in the making that exceed the existing and the knowable.

Can we begin from an ecological and existential sense of adventure: yes, we do need to be critical – but our north star is that we cannot know what the future will become separate from our co-creative collective more-than-human experiments in the making of the future – walking it into becoming one experiment at a time (but always conscious that these practices must resist being tacitly pulled back into the surprisingly robust ecologies of the ongoing event of the present).

Can we, propositionally remember, that it is the novel event in its becoming that is co-creating us to be agentially of it – as Erin Manning, our guest next week in WorldMakers, puts it:

“Novelty abounds, a novelty spurred by the complex of self-enjoyment, appetition, mentality. Think mentality as the events thinking-feeling… a feltness in the thinking resonant at the edges of experience. Each occasion dances with this not-yet, its becoming always in counterpoint with the more-than of its will-have-been.

This is not to say that creative advance is active all the time under all circumstances… As soon as a process falls into general categories, its capacities for creative advance are stunted, for general categories do not think. Creativity is always in the dynamic details of the process. These details are played out at the level of the emergent occasion, in the constellation of the event… They are the event’s more-than. This is where the thinking-feeling happens, in the in-act of the event’s outdoing of form, in the in-act of the event's outdoing of simple location. Movement-moving.”

Erin joins us live in WorldMakers next Thursday, October 29th, to experiment together with a question at the heart of her work: how do we, who are always more-than-one, take up change collectively? We would love for you to participate with us. Join WorldMakers and take part in this live event and every one that follows.

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

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