Who is right, Alfred North Whitehead or almost everybody else who is nowadays thinking about creativity? Only to be compared to the categories of the 'one' and ...
Creativity as Artificial Evolution Dirk Baecker June 2008 Creativity as Issue of the Year 2008 at Zeppelin University, and 2009 Year of Creativity and Innovation at the EU
http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/papers/Creativity.pdf
I. Who is right, Alfred North Whitehead or almost everybody else who is nowadays thinking about creativity? Only to be compared to the categories of the 'one' and the 'many', Whitehead takes 'creativity' to be 'the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact' (Whitehead 1979: p. 21). That means that it must to be found just about everywhere, as indeed it is if you take it, as Whitehead does, as "that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively" (ibid.). No synthesis of whatsoever whithout creativity being involved. Since any thing, any being, any entity is the product of some synthesis, creativity indeed must be everywhere. Yet, if you look at the talk of the day about creativity it seems to be rather that mysterious thing which is lacking everywhere where you might be inclined to look for it. Sure, there are artists singled out for their creative acts, and there is art severed from everything else as that field where creativity as a rule is to be expected. Yet, by means of distinction that makes it all the more conspicuous that creativity is lacking everywhere else, in business as in politics, in research as in education, in law as in the mass media. Else, why proposing to call 2009 the Year of Creativity and Innovation as the EU Commission just did? It surely is not meant to celebrate the rich acts of creativity and innovation Europe is featuring for some five hundred years by now if you look at European modernity's renaissance, humanism, and enlightenment laying the foundations for natural sciences and technology, capitalism and democracy, or for some two thousand years already if you look at Europe's ancient culture which invented Jewish and Christian monotheism, Greek idealism, and the Roman empire in a short time amounting to a few hundred years.
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So Whitehead's creativity as a category of the ultimate is perhaps in accordance with Europe's past, while now we are dealing with a presence which is sourly in search of the living sources of that ancient and modern inventiveness, artists and the occasional researcher being the only ones who somehow managed to keep in touch with these sources? Maybe we are about to spend some more of these dark centuries which preceded Homer's time and which constituted the "rubbish" (Thompson 1979) time between the loss of ancient culture and its rediscovery? We just have to accept another time of coming to a new maturity, looking calmly at the revaluation of values and the occasional war, which seem to be the conditions of that process of ripening? We just should not try to force it, spending our time rather with looking at other continents apparently having right now a better time? Or else should we resign into the fact that Europe's time in history has passed, giving way to first an American time, and then an Asian time, thereby perhaps completing humanity's fate, not forgetting its earliest times spent in Africa? This seems too linear a perspective. It does not count in Asian, Middle American, and Arab periods of rich cultural experience in between. It does not take the ecological turn into account, which keeps us busy right now for a good century, the occasional backlash notwithstanding, and which means that humanity tries to curb creativity back into sustainable conditions of humanity's, its society's, and its environment's reproduction. Indeed, the world is still rich in Whitehead creativity if that means that it just does not stop to combine the many into a one. Creativity is just another word for life, consciousness, and communication, all of them restlessly doing their acts of synthesis in dealing with constant decay. Yet, the world is also rich in framing that creativity, in monitoring it, in distinguishing between desired und undesired forms of it, in blocking the unwanted creativity in a way such that the wanted creativity is encouraged to happen. If creativity is the universal fact, there is also some harvesting it happening, which may exaggerate its ways and kill more of it than is appropriate.
II. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly proposed to look at creativity in the context of the selection of an innovation (Csikszentmihaly 1996). The overall frame for researching into creativity thus is Neo-Darwinian evolution theory, a theory combining three mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention (Campbell 1960, 1969), and doing without the idea of the survival of the fittest so dear to Herbert Spencer, who nevertheless should also be remembered for his
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indication of the theory of evolution being about mechanism, not about progress (Spencer 1898). This means that we are indeed dealing with at least two, if not three phenomena. Creativity has to do with variations happening, selections being chosen, and retention having to follow suit. This amounts to Whitehead creativity, in that indeed evolution is a universal and may be an ultimate fact. And it is in accordance with nowadays' talk about creativity lacking which may be respecified as a talk either about selection being so strong that most variations get blocked, or about retention being so complicated that selection gets discouraged. Evidently these two possibilities are interlinked in that complicated retention turns selection into strong discrimination. Yet, creativity is not identical to evolution, else we would not need two words for evolution, on one hand, and creativity, on the other. Creativity rather seems to mean to exploit evolutionary mechanisms with respect to enabling retention to happen. That is why it often comes with innovation, even if creativity should encompass the possibility of guaranteeing retention by negatively selecting among variations as well. To secure evolution does not necessarily mean to welcome any variation. Quite the opposite, as not least organizational evolution has amply been able to show (Weick 1979). It needs creativity to make novelty, as also Whitehead emphasizes, yet it needs creativity as well to prevent or avert novelty. Novelty should be taken as a rather ambivalent phenomenon, which in no way is principally leaning toward the necessity to welcome it. There is destructive novelty, as there is a constructive one. Thus, let us say that creativity interlinks variation, selection, and retention. It consists in not being satisfied with variation, selection, and retention being a blind process without any direction nor guarantee to it, a drift, as it were, and instead doubles variation, selection, and retention in order to make sure that it happens. Creativity is artificial evolution. That is its chance, and is its risk. Its risk is to get out of step with real evolution, and its chance is to provide evolution with new artifacts, natural, artificial, or technological, which may prove their value to be there to stay. Using a Spencer-Brown expression (Spencer Brown 1969) we code the form of creativity as follows:
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By variation*, selection*, and retention*, we mean the three mechanisms of evolution simulated and used in a process of creating which at the same time makes use of the loose coupling between the three mechanisms and monitors what is happening such as to steer and fine-tune variations, selection, and retention. By variation, selection, and retention we mean the mechanisms of evolution, which work on the units being created in taking them as variations to be selected, positively or negatively, according to retentions considered possible. To be sure, the process of creativity, or evolution*, has to take this evolution acting its own selections on it at its face-value, receiving it and accepting it as some process of nature or chance, while still being able to draw information from its own observation and comprehension of it. Put into a Spencer-Brown expression the act or process of creativity at first looks much more orderly than it actually is. A closer look reveals its intricacies beginning with its first mark of variation* which must contain its random elements with respect to selection* and retention* it order to qualify for evolution, even an artificial one, in the first place. Indeed, the most difficult aspect to creativity is that it must at the same time play and be evolutionary, that is, providing for differentiation between the three mechanisms it uses and nevertheless interlinking them and positioning them with respect to each other in order to be able to harvest the fruits from their mutual monitoring. Else, creativity turns into planning. Of course, planning may by itself be evolutionary if it succeeds in separating the three mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention. The closer look reveals as well that there are three re-entries working, the first one, marked by variation, consists in re-entering the distinction of the three artificial recreations of evolutionary mechanisms into the space of distinction brought forward by it. That means that by varying randomly, selecting positively or negatively, and retaining due to some prospect of value, a thing, an event, or a process is created which only then is put to its test of possibly
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qualifying as a variation in real evolution. That first re-entry already qualifies as a loss of "complete knowledge of where we are in the form" (Spencer Brown 1969: p. 58), which means that we enter the sphere of things containing themselves and leaning on their own without of course being independent of everything else. As they draw on the world, the world draws on them. That test of possibly qualifying as variation is anticipated by the process of creation; the anticipation informs the process, which is why anticipation may be taken as the model of any relationship between a real and an artificial process, or a natural and a formal system (Rosen 1985). Yet the anticipation is just another distinction, which precisely tells you about the expectations informing a process yet still having to put them to their test as either being fulfilled or disappointed. And there are even two further re-entries marked within the form of creativity which tell us that both selection and retention mark the variation as happening as a result of variation*, selection*, and retention* having been combined, yet that only then both can do their work. Selection can only decide positively or negatively on real variation, and retention can only be applied as soon as the selection distinguishes the variation as being selected. That is why creativity is nowadays bound with art. It is only here that the process of creativity as having something artificial about it can be maintained without being overwhelmed by complexity. And it is only here that a certain ambivalence can be nourished which consists in both exploiting and negating the distinction between evolution* and evolution, so typical for creativity. Creation has both to overtax itself with respect to a world poorer without it and to underestimate itself with respect to a world immensely rich already; it has to play evolution and to submit to evolution; it has to make room for random, for criteria of selection, and for having an imaginary reality having its unaccountable sway, and it nevertheless directs the random, bends the criteria, and accounts for a reality of its own.
III. Alfred O. Hirschman speaks of the principle of the hiding hand without which no development, or creativity, in our world would come about (Hirschman 1967): Both the unsuspected threats to a project and our ability to surprisingly overcome its insurmountable difficulties are hidden to us when we enter a project. The principle of the hiding hand lets us take as a routine job what indeed will present us with the creativity of the world trying to not let it happen, and with our own creativity to let it happen, perhaps slightly differently so, nevertheless.
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Yet, routine as supported by the principle of the hiding hand is a proxy for the distinction between evolution* and evolution. We may thus mark it as being able to re-enter the whole form into itself:
We even know about the principle of the hiding hand though we luckily enough do not know about what it hides from us. So we call work the process of creativity which consists in routinely rely on evolution* to explore and watch and re-enter the possibilities of evolution. That may finally explain why both Whitehead and the worried talk of the day are right. Even in Europe work is indeed pervasive; yet it is mistaken for routine while indeed it is all busy creatively maintaining the life conditions we are lucky enough to have created these last centuries. Bibliography: Campbell, Donald T. (1960): Blind Variation and Selective Retention in Creative Thought as in Other Knowledge Processes, in: Psychological Review 67, pp. 380-400. Campbell, Donald T. (1969): Variation and Selective Retention in Socio-Cultural Evolution, in: General Systems 14, pp. 69-85. Csikszentmihaly, Mihaly (1996): Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: HarperCollins. Hirschman, Abert O. (1967): Development Projects Observed, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Rosen, Robert (1985): Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical and Methodological Foundations, Oxford: Pergamon Pr. Spencer, Herbert (1898): What Is Social Evolution? In: The Nineteenth Century 44, pp. 348358. Spencer Brown, G (1969): Laws of Form, London: Allen & Unwin. Thompson, Michael (1979): Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Oxford: Oxford UP. Weick, Karl E. (1979): The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd ed., Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. Whitehead, Alfred North (1979): Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corr. ed., eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, New York: Free Pr.
