We Need a New Psychiatry

   Louis Menand’s article “Head Case,” in the March 1, 2010 of The New Yorker asks,  “Can Psychiatry Be a Science?”

     There is no simple answer to that question.  Freud’s whole life was devoted to making psychotherapy into a science.  The immediate fragmentation of his work into multiple schools gave an indication of how fraught with ambiguities such an effort is. To make psychiatric treatment a “science” requires definitions of diseases, their origins, etiology, diagnosis and treatment that are as materially based as those applied to the treatment of physical diseases.  Instead, psychiatric efforts are dogged by ambiguity, litanies of expanding “syndromes,” some of which supposedly relate to the same “disease.” The derivations of these syndromes, as collected in the “manual” of psychiatric diagnoses, called the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), turns out to be more indicative of social norms than “material” conditions of disease. 

     This is no surprise.  Anyone who is familiar with the termination of persecution of witchcraft or of the wider acceptance, in some circles, of the deviant behaviors of artists, for instance, knows how social norms shape our perception of what constitutes a mental “disease” or “disorder.”  Of course, the increased diagnosis of ADD, for instance, indicates a (compensatory? – we always need our demons) shift toward increasing ascription of deviance and less toleration of disruption to the machinic processes we think of as being normal.  For the philosophers, Foucault’s Madness and Civilization speaks exactly to this issue (while his The Birth of the Clinic speaks to the social basis for the identification and treatment of what we now call disease – creating two moving targets in this discussion). 

      I see the whole discussion as stemming from a huge category mistake.  Grant that the medical diagnosis of physical diseases has merit and is effective – a proposition that also seems to be contested by holistic and homeopathic orientations.  Medical treatment of physical tissues is made possible because physical tissues are relatively stabilized into somewhat machinic, repetitious sequences and relations (still vast, not fully demarcated or understood) for which triggers and modulators, if not effective blockers, can be found. 

       Treatment by pharmaceuticals or surgery or rehabilitation is effective within prescribed ranges.  By contrast, psychic processes are completely relational and self-generating, differentiating and auto-stabilizing from moment-to-moment.  Even so-called “normal” behaviors are set in motion by complex, variable and only partially stable (within a range of internal and external limits and thresholds).  Thus, there is no firm basis on which a “disease” can be labeled (other than neuronal dysfunction or atrophy or over –production) in a way that is analogous to physical disease.  This is a largely mistaken route engendered by an over confidence in the materiality of the “mind-brain” connection. 

     This overconfidence is precisely the “affliction” that quantum mechanics and relativity and their offspring overcame in the realm of physics.  Freud’s model suffers from exactly the classical presuppositions of materiality, action/reaction and absolute space that marked the (Newtonian) physics of his time.  

The model of self-organization, the model of psychic/somatic self-generation and ordering holds great promise for re-orienting our comprehension of the mind, just as quantum physics offered whole new vistas of comprehension and engagement with the physical world. In this model (see Theren and Smith, Stuart Kauffman, Varela or Kelso, for example) there are no fixed mental parameters, only the massively collective self-organizing dynamics of self-forming engagements.  

     If Freud had the self-organizing model to appeal to, for instance, he could have cited the drive of the psyche to generate new awareness out of free flowing energies (in language and in abundant physical connection) as being constrained into certain channels, instead of having to defend “material” forces (Newtonian point-to-point constellations of motion) such as libido, sex drive and even the death instinct. 

        Instead of contemporary “anxiety” or even “depression” we might be able to embrace highly differentiated modes of engagement of an organism grappling with radical self-organization on more or less moment-by-moment bases, as opposed to “fixing” a body of machinic processes that is “supposed to” behave in prescribed ways.  From there, we could engage in ameliorative actions that all parties work through so as to foster the greatest expression of those energies, without stigma, without drugs, but with genuine prospects for “health” of that being, We could engage with each other as beings living their ways into ambiguity and community. 

       This would be a new psychiatry, a generative one for all involved, to be sure. 

       We have far to go.

Crazy Times in Exo-Memory

    In the spirit of Louis Black, here is a news story that for sure fell between the cracks: according to an article in the New York Times, Feb 28, 2010, “Week in Review” (p. 3),  a fiction writer has copied huge passages from another author into her novel and still calls her work “original.” Another fiction writer cited in the article is unapologetic about wholesale appropriations, while another is “creating” a whole book that consists only of such quotations. This is really taking Tom Lehrer’s idea “plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize and always call it research” to another level.

    My reaction: a qualified, “go for it.”  This may actually be a positive turn in the creative endeavor.  Here is why I think that:

    Maybe the human “exo-memory” is now becoming more and more being freed from ownership, and is now more open for engendering more expansive human creativity. 

    Exo-memory includes all our cultural productions and artifacts, but it entails much more than that.  It comprises the actual contents of the memories of individuals, peoples and humanity itself – memories that used to be locked up in individual minds, conveyed only through creation narratives or in the secret rites of peoples. Humans have evolved in concord with their abilities to place objects that encompassed “meanings” for the people out into the external world.  These objects started as tools and artifacts, then became words and narratives, then icons, and then moved into writing – commandments, narratives, poems, dramas and histories, and then philosophies.

    As Leonard Shlain points out (The Alphabet versus the Goddess), great shifts in the sense of what it is to be human, and how to order human life correspond to developments in being able to disseminate this vast and expanding and enriching trove of externalized memory to wider groups of people. Merlin Donald, the evolutionary cognitive scientist, also marks the onset of the truly human “mind” as occurring when humans were able to place symbols and artifacts out into the public as means of defining a people (Origins of the Modern Mind). After at least 5 millennia of concerted effort, with the advent of the Internet, our collective exo-memory is “out there,” ready to be plumbed, dispersed, proliferated and launched into creative futures.

      What is new in these authors’ claims is that purely human “artistic” activity -- tied neither to material observations of nature nor to divine pronouncements -- is now seen as providing constituents of genuinely creative engagements. Human creativity is now placed right there, at our fingertips, in just human form, as just a fiction or a “fact,” or an image, forming a new, tentative, provisional and risky platform for the next engendering. 

      Using purely human productions as a basis for presenting “creative art” is not without precedent:  Warhol and Duchamp were already casting every day objects into modes of presentation (on canvases and pedestals) and contexts of display (galleries and museums) that was once reserved for works aspiring to “high art.” These icons of “pop” art were presented as paradoxical, ironical and interrogatory; they posed a challenge to weary, exhausted, secularized experience.  Maybe, by claiming these authors’ compilations of existing writings described as original works, help us ask different questions: are we adequately sensitive and awake to the creative powers the human endeavor encompasses; and are we ready to embrace the vanishing, ephemeral, useless quality of these powers as all we have?

     Let’s face it, as the music industry and the publishing world are experiencing first hand, the proliferation of creative works, spilling out beyond the reach of the gatekeepers has changed our relationship to human creative efforts. And the dangers of the liberated proliferation of human expression are also apparent. The web echoes and amplifies suspicion or ignorance-based rants; these pathologies become entombed in halls of mirror websites and cable channels where they become rarified and rendered more amenable to death-dealing extremism (as holy writ, as is the case in much of the internet-spawned nut cases that collect in religions cults and tea party- like political movements).  Sadly, as Shlain points out, this kind of infantilism with new media goes hand in hand with the proliferation and freeing of exo-memory into ever-wider populations.

      But…, maybe., despite these inevitable slippages and dangers, maybe this new mode of “originality” in literature marks a different kind of “listening” to each other than has occurred before. Previously we trusted the words of each other only if there was some “divine” element to it, or if the words had been “blessed” by being in accord with a set of prescribed principles or marks of “genius.”

      Publishers squirm, or feel a death rattle coming on. What this plagiaristic, derivative creativity means for copyrights is anyone’s guess.  But then the private appropriation  (or the institutional variant of this) of art has always been a (necessary evil) barrier to a more expansive and more encompassing sense of the human

And so…, maybe…, despite these dangers, maybe… these developments harbor the potential to mark another great shift in the enrichment and deployment of human exo-memory, in its comprehension and use – on a par with the fusion of writing and the printing press: maybe we now are appreciating how the human endeavor provides the landscape and material, the energy and the trajectory for shaping our destiny as a species. 

     Perhaps it marks the realization that we humans live at our best, when we bootstrap.  We are at our best, not when repeat received wisdom or codified, given “natures” but when we hearken to our own creativity and listen for the freshness and vitality that is brought forth thereby.  And then, take what we have heard in order to generate the next endeavor. We get to take our conversations as invitations to our aspirations and creativity, right there, right where we are, right with our most challenging of acquaintances and our most generative of friendships.

     …maybe…

My Books

Blog Friends,
My books are available on Amazon.Com.
Access them by author:  Michael H. Shenkman
or title:
The Arch and the Path:  The Life of Leading Greatly
Leader Mentoring:  Find, Inspire and Cultivate Great Leaders.

Older books that might be harder to get, but that are still listed include:
The Strategic Heart: Using the New Science to Lead Growing Organizations
Value and Strategy: Competing Successfully in the Nineties

Also available on request:
Mystics Among Us -- my recent publication on mentoring and appreciating the new mystics who work right at our sides and whom we sometimes undervalue.
This publication is still in draft form and is free to those who request it.

Entrusting, Breakout Creative Style

The philosopher Heidegger proclaimed "we are only what we entrust ourselves to be." (The Essence of Truth, p. 58). 

I thought about this statement during a recent conversation with a friend and colleague in our "breakout creative"  project.  She felt that it was important to acknowledge where a person was in their lives and probe for what that present state of things offered.  I countered that it was the role of the breakout creative project to  help people to get beyond where they are now, to appeal to their aspirations, and to show them their readiness, the readiness they now embrace, for taking their next bold steps. 

The breakout creative is that kind of person who never settles into the everyday, and instead takes up on their yen and yearning for a more vital, encompassing, expansive and generative human endeavor. And our job in this project is to help people entrust themselves in order to live that way to the fullest extent they can.

I have met many such people in my professional mentoring work.  They aren't famous and they aren't all brilliant or even competent in all aspects of their lives.  Most don't write books and many have failed relationships in their pasts.  But they all exhibit one thing: an indomitable faith-for the generativity of life. They feel this so strongly that they risk success and fortune so that more people can be freed from their fears and self-limiting stories.  And they realize that to make such a risk pay off, they have to do the work of a breakout creative every day:  study in their fields, labor hard to expand their grammars and vocabularies to reach the new and touch the old, find new avenues of expression and new friends for support.

This is such hard work.  And yet breakout creatives entrust themselves with such a task.  

What is it like to entrust yourself with such a mission in life?  You have to feel in your bones that something else has to happen in the human endeavor if it is going to survive at all.  You have to feel that in some way, no matter what the outcome, something has to be ventured.  And there has to be the backbone to stand in this vision so that what you do can be seen, heard, touched, encountered.  Somehow you have to both entrust yourself with the talents, energies, interests and values you hold, and simultaneously you have to let go of yourself, laugh a bit at your own earnestness and let loose of what you want to give.

Then comes the scary part: You have to be willing to go public with these orientations.  Without going public, you aren't trusting yourself, you aren't entrusting what that life of yours is offering.  And you have to go public with what it is that your work, your heart and your sense of what generative brings you to.  Settling for old slogans, ideologies, religions, institutional glorifications won't do.  You have to take responsibility for putting something into play, into the public arena that can open up beyond what anyone has yet comprehended.  And take the consequences.

That is why for  breakout creatives their status quo states -- who they are, what their identities and affiliations have always been -- are not sufficient.  They entrust themselves, and look for others who do likewise, to what can only be enacted by living in the faith-for what is generative, what surpasses even them. And so they have to entrust themselves to being able to step into and grow into what is yet to be brought forth; and then they have to entrust to themselves the task of doing so, to bring forth what is to come, by their own hands.  

And for all those who do not consider themselves to be breakout creatives, but choose to stand with them, to learn from them, we see what we must make ourselves more awake to, and we learn how to do so. Maybe we can't learn to write poetry like Holderlin, or philosophy like Heidegger or Nancy or Deleuze;  maybe we can't paint like Picasso does or compose music the way Messiaen does.  But we can learn how to entrust ourselves to that faith-for the generative and we can learn how to entrust ourselves to a great task.  

Breakout creatives are just like you and me, except in one regard: they are never satisfied with where they are, who they are or what their identity and "selves" are.  They are not even curious about such things. They live to learn. 


The breakout creative project is dedicated to such learning:  learning to become awake to the living we are, the living all around us, and the call to entrust ourselves to bring forth the generativity that sustains it all. 

Mystics: Lou Andreas-Salome and Restoring the Feminine

One of the great contemporary mystic figures I have been studying is Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937). If you don't know about her, it is worth the trip to Wikipedia to find out about her.  To begin with, she was a muse, a deep companion and loved mentor to Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud.  So one could say that  these male avatars were able to do their work because of her power to inspire their greatest aspirations.  For another, her deep insights, as a writer, observer of the creative human endeavor, and mystic (a term she never applied to herself) are unsurpassed.


Lest the feminists in the readership think I am guilty of placing Salome in the category of "the woman behind the great man," I want to make clear that this is far from my intention.  I see Salome as the modern Beguine -- the Beguines are the women  in the 13th Century who founded Western mysticism.  She is every bit the courageous envisioner of the grand human endeavor as they were; her writings are just as seminal to the mystic endeavor; and her complete identification with her womanhood and the great and primal feminine potencies is seminally instructive for those who study mystics.  I recommend her memoirs, Looking Back, as well as her works on Nietzsche and Rilke, at a minimum, for any course of mystic education.


In fact, her observations on the feminine (that extend far beyond feminist political and socio-economic concerns) are my subject today.


My contention, as presented in detail in my book The Mystics Among Us:  Into the Open (working title, and soon to be published) is that mystics in the West strive to restore the feminine generative potency in the human endeavor.  By that I mean that the very notion of "generative" (see below) is an expression of feminine cosmic potency.  Most briefly, the feminine potency names that aspect of our universe that "makes way" for, enables the "enduring placing" of distinctive singularities as viable aspects of the universe.


The male potency, in this view, takes up this opening and does the work of forming those singularities, those self-organizing systems into viable entities.  While increasing complexity could not take place without the driving potency of male constellation, organization and concentration, it also could not take place if, prior to singularizing acts, the universe did not offer its feminine aspect of "generative opening." Generative opening means an opening of  dimensions so as to become more expansive, and also doing so in a way that enriches and energizes that opening, and so is able to generate the great variety of singularities (things, beings, creatures, forces and events) within it. We have sexual division in the form we do because of the character of these potencies, not vice versa.


A line in her memoirs points to her profound grasp of this dynamic: "when I wrote scholarly essays, I felt strengthened, as if I had been doing something feminine, where as in the case of anything poetic, the activity seemed masculine." (p. 108).  EXACTLY.


Her "scholarly essays" were often about the grandly encompassing aspects of the human psyche, as it took shape and formed people's lives.  Her works on Nietzsche and Rilke were mystic realizations of the forming of two different figures -- the mystic and the artist, respectively -- out of the free-flowing potencies of feminine opening generativity.  Thus, she was speaking not as a muse or a lover to great men, but as one who discerns pure potencies forming as living psychic/somatic forces among us; she is speaking as the mystic.  She is telling us, as a mystic does, how to listen to these breakout creatives who were her soul-mates so that we can step into the generatively open way.  And as we have said, this is precisely the mystic precept:  restore the feminine potency.


Poetry (and psychoanalysis, as a prophetic expression) are decidedly male-potency based.  Poets ferociously drive the great and diffusely open energies of the generative into a singular form. In his Duino Elegies, Rilke expresses this intense effort at constellation and singularizing as his "angels" speaking to him, driving him to words and verse and the specific, pointed, tightly formed work.  In her chapter on Rilke, she notes his "ascension of the poetical work above the poet as a man."  This is the drive of the male potency in the breakout figure of the artist perfectly expressed: Work above being.


The prophet too expresses a derivation of the male potency. The great prophets in biblical tales are men; and   the great philosophers in Greece are men (who love men).  Freud is our exemplar of the contemporary prophetic figure.  The prophetic impetus is to shape the relation and interconnections among beings (alive in the generative open made way for by the feminine) into specific bonds, ties and laws. Salome disagreed with Freud exactly because she did not see his categories and descriptions of "complexes" as rigidly as he did.


Mystics restore the feminine against this male tsunami that has overflowed Western history.  Salome's writing is dedicated to the search (more or less successful, as with all the contemporary mystics) for a way to express the co-generation of the human psyche/somatic being with the most vast and incalculable and indescribable potencies of the feminine.  Far from being the "support" of these men, whom our culture is capable of acknowledging, she drove these male figures into the most vivid of living such that generative way spoke to them.


Today, we need her instruction on how to listen to breakout creatives most urgently.  She is our teacher in opening up to our own generativity.  And breakout creatives need to take her life as a precept for being able to open to listening to other breakout creatives (mystics hearing other mystics especially -- her ambivalence toward the fellow mystic Nietzsche bears witness to this).


Part of the greatness of these men was recognizing and taking into their own beings her truly feminine, mystic way.  For us, the standard of becoming a breakout creative to begin with, is just this action:  taking the likes of Salome, voices of the generative open,  to heart as the beginning and engine of the work to be done.

Why Care About Mystics?

One of the four breakout creative figures is the mystic. The other three are artist, prophet and leader.

A sincere and insightful reader of my early drafts on mystics asked me, "Why should we care about mystics?" "Personally", he told me, "I do care, but what about others? Why should everyday folks. people making a living and going to the mall care about mystics?"

My answer is this this: Mystics are living proof that FAITH is alive and well.

I don't mean "faith" in something that exists: faith in a religious idea or in an institution or an another person.

I mean faith, all by itself, just living in a way that gives, puts something out there that is more expansive and more encompassing, more vital and worthy than anything that exists.

Mystics don't just put ideas out there. They actually live in ways that give those ideas body and soul. They set an example of a life of giving breath and space to notions that enliven the human endeavor. They live in a way that can't be possessed or owned by anyone. If you want to get what the mystic is doing, you have to live it yourself.

Name such a person, you might say. Okay. Try Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health. You can read about him in Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains. Or maybe Barak Obama, who is giving his young and vital life toward a new, more expansive and more encompassing vision of American life. Agree with his policies or not, but the point is he is living a faith toward something great and beyond himself, or what most of us can even conceive.

What makes these people mystics? They can't sit still. These are wanderers, who are not lost, and whose field of action is a whole world in need. They first and foremost have their "dream thing," as one mystic I know called it, and then do everything and anything they can to inch the world toward that dream. They deeply study and master a field of endeavor, a field that is totally compelling to them, so as to be able to bring their faith towards the dream into fruition. They are not afraid to fail; and they give their assistance without reservation, fee or expectations of a return on investment. They make a demand of you: that you break out of what you had thought was impossible (because it was uncomfortable to think it was possible), and realize the decisions you make either make life better for others, or just meet your own needs.

Why care about mystics? Because their faith toward what we, as awake, alive, creative and courageous humans, can open on to makes us feel more alive, gives us, we who are not mystics, tangible evidence of hope, and how to turn it into realities.

My book Among the Mystics: Into the Open will soon be available for download, upon request. For a limited time it will be free, in exchange for comments.

Come back to this site for updates on our progress.

Breakout Creatives on "Art of the Song" Radio

Michael Shenkman has created "prose poems" that describe each of the breakout creatives.

These were broadcast on "Art of the Song" during May and June, 2008.  This is a radio program, produced in Taos, NM, broadcast on public radio stations, that is devoted to creativity.  It's tag line is "Creativity Radio."

To hear these short audio pieces go to:

Leader:   http://artofthesong.org/tune-in/shows/show-175/

Artist:  http://artofthesong.org/tune-in/shows/show-177/

Mystic:  http://artofthesong.org/tune-in/shows/show-179/

When you are done listening to these pieces, explore the site and enjoy the art of the song.

The Breakout Creative Figures

My sole motivation is to facilitate a process in which people who deign to do so can take up a role in the process of bringing to the human endeavor more vitality, connectedness and freshness. The work envisions an opening up of our psyches to appreciate greater varieties of generative actions. I know that people are capable of epochal change: it happened in the seventeenth century, in the period called the Enlightenment, when a critical mass of great minds extricated enough people from the night of Feudal religious dogma so as to create new, secular ways of living for all. My question is how can we do this again?

The core methodology is to lay out in enough detail to be useful, the distinguishing drivers of generative creativity. We all possess certain these drivers in varying amounts. But to make the kind of impact on others lives as do the breakout creatives, it is necessary for these drivers to dominate a personality. The dirves take over the lives of the people who possess them, turn them from people who live their lives to people whose lives are being lived by the power of a vision, commitment to a new way of living, and the unshakable will to enact that way.

We have identified four channels into which generative energies have coalesced during the course of the human endeavor:mystic, artist, prophet and leader. 

When these people and their exceptional energies encounter the settled world their chaotic and overflowing energies become “grooved” or “channeled” into figurations, traditions and disciplines. The energies each of the figures experiences start out as being chaotic, to the person involved, these energies feel unnerving and unsettling. As children, they may have had trouble in school, or they may have been so bright as to eclipse their peers in imagination and intelligence. Some may have been so disturbed that they dropped out of institutional life to wander as iconoclastic nomads. Still, as they come to maturity, they picked up on stories of famous people who vaguely sound like them, or get they attracted to like-minded friends or they see people doing things that are intriguing enough to imitate. So there is an "attractive" and gravitational effect, coalescing theses talents into channels. Schools, traditions, genealogies, disciplines cluster around these channels and give them definitiion. These souls, once overwhelmed with their excess of energy, by affiliating with and within these channels, now have the means, mirrors and mentors available who can help them to make sense of their lives.

MYSTIC

The mystic is focused on the whole psyche in its most active and generative expressions. The mystic strives to keep the experience, all of it, open. The great mystics that we know of have take additional steps to put this fact of experiencing into words, or music or some other conventional form. Mystics are the ones among us who embody the pure faith-for what can come forth in our living (not faith in the fantastic or some vain institution).

It is crucial to note that the mystic may be, as Nietzsche declared, “dynamite,” one who, like Jesus, “comes with a sword,” but it is to AFFIRM, to embody faith-for that the mystic lives. The mystic’s energies are totally committed to bringi into an engagement with the existing world new and fresh energies. It is true, that to do so, amid the hardened and dense fixtures of mind and society, holes have to be bored, edifices demolished. But it is not rubble that is left. In the spaces thus opened, in the open market of unleashed energies, the mystic stands in order to have them convey a sense of vitality and freshness. And thus, the whole movement of the breakout creative, though having its destructive moment, is affirming of a bringing into the real what has yet to be fully sensed.

 All mystics dwell in the mystery; thus the derivation of their name. They wander. They are not settled, even when sitting; they do not abide, even in a home or in friendly company. Mystics literally live out of another world, of their own creation. This is the mystic world we call a “field of enthusiasm.” They create this world, project it, because their own psychic energies are so overpowering, their psychic filters and ordering processes are so rich, that the world of myriad things never gets clear for them. So they create a world that can be clear: using the capacity to dream, to symbolize, conceptualize and express, they forge a first world, out there, which they inhabit,. Then they interpret the terrestrial, mundane, teeming and frothing sensory world according to it.

But, lest we think that mystics are “space cadets,” I want to be clear: the breakout creative mystics are ferociously disciplined about their fields of enthusiasm. The mystic’s “field of enthusiasm,” a field of great constellating power that is more real to the mystic than any law or institution or habit that might have once bound them. They exert tremendous energy, discipline, and force of character and demands of expression to making this field of enthusiasm act as a force with, by, for and against that mundane world. Not only are they open, but withstand the tremendous forces of generative power that impinge on their unprotected psyches. Not only do they deny the veracity and totalizing envelopment of habit, but summon the tremendous energies necessary to remain alive in that enervated state. Not only do they deny, but they summon the will to rise from the ashes of their own annihilated beings to affirm what can only be vaguely sensed and impalpably realized. This is the essence of their faith-for.

THE ARTIST.

The artist figure centers on sensibility, that is, experience that is most directly tied to a physical manifestation of what we call our “senses” or a combination them. All artists, as do all the other figures, partake of the classical mystic figuration, thus we named artists (Holderlin, Celan, Pollack, Stravinsky) when speaking about mystic expression. Artists are first about the concrete liveliness of experiencing through sensibility, and then about expression or result. An artist may or may not have any need to produce a “work of art,” and certainly the qualification of “beauty” is not at stake for contemporary artist figures. Their attention is directed toward “the critique of material” (Heller), seeing in all that lies about around us a new way to be touched and so to touch what occurs and thus bring forth a breaking out of whatever is old and tired and well-used into a new way for the psyche to constellate and enact its energies.

Always at stake is activating perception. The great excess of this sense, (Rilke, feeling the world, and it overflows) resulting in an encounter with some sensible material or language or sound, redounds to our benefit. The artist engages in a technique because a quirk of nature or nurture has lent to this person a proclivity and affinity toward this medium. The artist feels a hunger to inhabit this sensibility, and often it is a productive habitation. When not active and engaged, this sense of the artist acts as though it were in deficit. An imbalance is created and in the great absence, the muse is awaited. Thus there is a chasm between the artist as person and the artiist in action. It is into the theater of the latter that the artist longs to be, and in this theater, inhabiting this role, that the artist comes alive. All the interviews in the world and depictions of his or her daily life will reveal nothing whatsoever of the arteous that lives in this individual.

The artist “calculates.” The artist calculates the way a gunner does, measuring space, speed, trajectory so as to hit the target. The target is exactly that slanting into experience which yields the greatest compression (and then exposition and explication) of what is occurring at that, and any, moment. The poet aims for the metaphor; the novelist, the character in a situation, the painter, the scene and its light. They combine this sighting with the precise timing of pulling the trigger: the application of their technique. And then they time the pace of release of the projectiles (their actions, animating the technique), such that through just the right spacing and juxtaposing of elements (colors, words, key strokes and tones), the completely fresh world is presented. And the expectation is that the viewer/reader/listener, whose experience is meant to open onto the worlds so evoked, will then be a witness to what has occurred. And, since it can be done, it can be repeated; and so it might take its place in the ongoing world, transforming that world.

People commonly recognize the artist by the production of interesting and engaging works. Actually the artist figures proliferate far beyond the realm of books, theaters, concert halls and museums. The artist figure is one for whom experience itself is never settled. In fact, a producer of artifacts may be anything but an artist figure. Artists produce things that emanate from personal energy, that break our experiencing out of habituated molds. 


This figure senses time slipping; he or she burns with urgency to strike. And they also labor, for as long as the calculation is salient, to bring the experience into its full and complete mode – undeniable and life breaking in itself.

THE PROPHET.

The prophet’s realm is that of relation. Following the mystic, who cuts and rejoins the discrete and many dimensions that constitute a “world,” in a decidedly spontaneous and surprising way, prophets feel the pulls and the strains, the tensions and the slackening of the sinew or gossamer by which all entities – living and not – are tied together. They have a strong sense of oneness, but they rejoice in the plurality, multiplicity, and fractal infinity of cosmic plentitude, its cornucopia. They deeply feel the pathos of the riven human condition, and stand in the world for its redemption and healing,

The prophet comes into being along with the power of the word. The artist arose with the symbol: the duration of an image that creates an arch of time over a constellation of what occurs – something small, tangible, real, that nullifies time’s passing for a while. The prophet arises with the word: that way communicating in, by and for a situation a temporal passing that is completely reliant on human actions. The prophet is the first appearance of humanity as a standard, a determinant of what can occur.

The prophet thus instigates “should,” the category of complete anticipation. The prophet opens up the realm in which we have to face each other, and so, in that communication, constantly choose the course. The prophet navigates. Nietzsche’s metaphors of the helmsman on the sea are prophetic: it is the feeling we all have in that moment in the conversation where we either take responsibility or back away. The prophet precipitates these situations. Lives for them, and does not accept the situation as a given, but floats on it, as if on a sea. The world is an oceanic flood of expectation-setting words: categories, commands, constraints and promises.

The breakout creative prophet demands that the ocean be set free again and the waters to it and from it flow; and this sea is the human community, given in language, felt in relation; demolished in whatever diminishes, detaches and isolates that flow. The price for this not occurring to the prophet is sickness, to be sure; and, in madness and murder, maybe death.

THE LEADER.

The leader coalesces around the idea of organization and therefore production. I hesitate to use those words. They are sterile and seemingly mechanistic. Indeed, alone among our figures, the leader is associated with the mundane and prosaic. The realms they occupy are thought to be in heading businesses, political organizations or various kinds of movements. All of these organizations we either need as a means of survival, or choose among as outlets for our passions of the day. While the other figures are easily avoided, not so the leader. They are thought to be our bosses, our governmental representatives, and we have to do with them every day of our lives. Hardly are the majority of this group thought of as creative. Words like “powerful,” or “charismatic,” or “corrupt” and “inept,” applied to them. Rarely, if ever, have I heard of leaders described as being “creative.”

The leader is confused with names that are more pernicious: tyrant, dictator, demagogue; or more benignly, with terms such as administrator, executive or bureaucrat. These are terms that signify a leader’s supposed power over us, and to the usually bad use of that power. Any idea of them being creative gets lost in the feelings of outrage and betrayal these leaders generate in us, whose lives they exploit or abuse.

But the leader we speak of is decidedly a creative figure, completely worthy of the appellation as are the others in our group. The people we have in mind, in direct and overt ways, apply the psychical abilities to coalesce the great undifferentiated energies so loved and called upon by the mystic, and brings them into forms that themselves are productive of more restricted, but more apparently, endlessly varied forms. They take the images of the artist and the comprehensions of pathos our relations are evoking in us and are inspiring in us, and coalesce them into collaborative endeavors that yield organizations, services and products for us all, that had only once been dreamed of in the creative realm. The leader is the true alchemist. Especially the contemporary leader of budding and “innovative” technical or social organizations that bring diverse and otherwise occupied energies into an effort that brings about new products, services and forms of relating to one another.

While the other figures are relatively alone in their creative lives, the leader, when venturing his or her creative energies, thinks first of organizing many people in the effort. 

The leader lives in "real" time, within the strictures of what exists, and struggles to stretch the instantaneous time of a vision into the secular, material work of production with real things and relations. Thus the leader lives in a tension of continual sacrifice. The body of the leader is sacrificed to the eternal incorporeality of the vision; the time of the leader’s real life is sacrificed to the long durations of society and institution and the conversion of forms of matter. The psyche of the leader is sacrificed to the greater needs of the followers and followers to be, no less the opponents of the endeavor.

Not every CEO is a creative leader, few in fact are. But, there, laboring to create vibrant organizations that buck the tide, they are. Some break through to fame, like Steve Jobs (who was resurrected after having been sacrificed); but most labor anonymously, and are usually under fire from their stockholders and board members who have far less compelling motives. Many of these leaders just bring people together to think and converse; some bring people together to make a community a home for the unwelcomed. And we do not know the names of these people.

These, the mystic, the artist, prophet and leader are the ones who we study here as "breakout creatives."  If we recognize them, and, whatever our creative proclivities might be, hear them, experience their sensibility, open to their experiments, and follow them, we might well bring ourselves to the brink of our own vitality and thus feel the surging of our own expression of the generative.

More F(!)AQs

Is Generativity a substitute for “Spirituality?”


No one holds “sweats” or goes on “quests” for generativity. It is a concept that is free from sentimentality and the craving for personal release from suffering or for salvation from sin.
But it is not devoid of spirituality-like connotations:  to live in face of generativity we conceive our lives ecologically as part of a multiplicity of living and non-living energies, materials, relations, histories and genealogies. Ethically, it demands a rigorous life of practice and devotion to being open to the Impossible, to choosing what can change us.
But all of this is without the expectation of blissful release or salvation that “spirituality” affords; and without the conceptual certainties that notions such as God afford, or the expectations of riches, even happiness, that offer consolation in the future for suffering now undergone.
To step into generativity means walking bareheaded in the thunderstorm, as the great Breakout Creative poet Holderlin said. The “gods” of realization may appear, but they will also vanish; they may inspire, but they will depress; and these gods are known to no one else.
One cannot look to generativity for spiritual uplift; but the work of generativity may offer unequaled joy for the Breakout Creative.


Are Breakout Creatives all Great Personages?


Yes and no. We cite people of renown as reference points and short cuts for making our ideas clearer and more useful to people sooner.
But none of the Breakout Creatives I know personally are known by the world at large. They are people that make an impression, make a difference and are deeply appreciated by many in their respective communities.
But they are not famous.
What they are is great. And by this I mean these people all live their lives with a commitment to open themselves to the demands and the peculiar joys of creativity. They all choose what can change them, so that they can thrive in their challenging lives.
But, that said, the Breakout Creatives are not “better” people than others. Many are very hard to get along with; some are unreliable in terms of everyday life; some are reclusive and others are bossy. I am not a Breakout Creative, and yet I help these people fulfill their lives by helping them build bridges among their widely dispersing energies, and to see the power and value in what they do (for no money, mostly).
We need teachers, nurses, doctors and firefighters and farmers and pilots and soldiers and executives and computer code writers, I could go on and on, just as much as we need Breakout Creatives. And we need just good, solid, caring, fair-minded and trustworthy people.
But I write about these because they are so hidden or even degraded, in our homogenized, materialist culture. By not being able to embrace and express their peculiar ways of living, these people suffer so. And because they are the progenitors of how the creative spark is initiated and propagated in our human world, they are great treasures walking, with no name, among us. While most have “day jobs,” they know they take great risks in terms of income, stability, recognition and community the more they venture full bore into their driving passion. And yet, they do. And so, yes, they are “great.” But not “better” than many of us.

Generativity and the Breakout Creatives

I look at the project of describing the Breakout Creative as a student of philosophy, working to gain to offer an understanding of their standpoints, actions and ethics. I have sought for a notion that elucidates the vital connections that distinguish the labors of the Breakout Creatives from other kinds of work in our world. Since I am writing to people in the real world, I want to offer my readers one notion that makes their effort worthwhile, that they can use, with some effort, to determine their own and others’ level of participation in the Breakout Creative endeavor.

I have settled on “generativity.”

 I use this word to refer to a state, a general condition in which “bringing into existence” takes place. I have in mind this activity on all levels of the physical (inorganic), the organic/biological, the ecological, human, social, global, symbolic and completely non-material cosmic, transcendental or infinite levels. It carries intimations of ideas such as “spiritual” or productive, but I try to stay away from those terms.

Instead, I see “generativity” as being a notion strongly connected with “health”. A healthy person is active, engaged in the world. A healthy person “loves” easily. Such a person pours out over the bounds of body or person or convention, and enthusiasm radiates from her.

On a larger scale, a healthy ecology grows, changes, and evolves internally, proliferating life forms in a way that both enriches the general ecology and preserves its integral co-development.

Health enables generativity, and so the idea of “generativity” is dependent on “health,” but does not guarantee the occurrence of generativity. Generativity is a possible, but not necessary outgrowth of health.

Generativity links together the multitudinous (but not infinite) ways and means by which health can surpass the repetitive and same old. “Health” results from the coming together of the factors that sustain and nurture a being’s vitality. Generativity issues from this by connecting these factors that exude from and reach out beyond the healthy being. Generativity names a condition of health that allows for, but does not promise the emergence of a completely new possibility.

Let’s think of a child being born in the context of an amorous and welcomed situation as a (regularized and constrained) form of generativity. I can be healthy, and a woman can be healthy. But unless there is the additional energy that brings us together and lifts our spirits to a certain level, the combination of our two healthy lives will not come together and no child will be born.

So generativity also points beyond the specific emergence or overflowing exuberance of healthy participants to the larger environment in which the tentative emergence took place: this new entity takes hold only within a setting, ecology or living being that is itself healthy enough to sustain the addition or change. Even in such healthy environments and with the robust health of the participants, nothing guarantees that the generated novelty will take hold.

The notion of the generative thus cuts: it provides a sharp line between situations in which things, thoughts, actions, influences, materials, foods can take health to the next level and those that don’t.

That means that generativity transforms healthy materials and energies into being something more: they become active agents in the body, ecology, world, cosmos, that foster emergence: growth, diversity, and that bring forth mutation, change and the new. Generativity summarizes the kinds of agents, and includes all the factors – materials, energies, forces, histories, etc. which have a role in this kind of energy—that can result in newness and fresh possibility.

There we have it: generativity names the singular, and maybe strange condition of our universe, one which supports propagation, diversity and health, to the full extent that the energies available and to the full extent that these energies can be incorporated into a healthy situation.

In our work, the Breakout Creatives are those people who make generativity the very core of their lives. These people live in order to usher forward the healthy, generative, creative components in our life, those components, that is, which open new vistas of the possible for themselves, other people, the ecology in which we live, and thus the earth (and beyond).

The Breakout Creatives devote their lives to sensing, shaping, bringing themselves to and expressing the energies of the generative, almost to the exclusion of anything else in their lives.

The Breakout Creatives feel that they cannot live their lives in any semblance of health without being fully engaged in the life of being generative. Meister Eckhart must write and preach his controversial mystical sermons; Paul Celan, the poet, or Georg Cantor, the mathematician, feel they must do their work of reshaping how we see our world; Freud must reshape notion of how we relate to others and ourselves; Lincoln had to lead a nation on a grave path to another way.

Introducing, "Breakout Creatives," the blog

DesertSky11@mac.com

My goal is to explore the creative process in a new way: to see the kinds of lives that people live in order to bring the new and fresh, the iconoclastic and and subversive, the unexpected and unwelcomed in to the world.

When an ecology is healthy its elements create.

A healthy, living environment, is thus generative of change: Its vitality is measured by how much it is able to generate in terms of activity in the environment, reproduction of its (modified and adapted) species, the nutrients and material it makes available to other living things, etc. This contribution of each element in a healthy ecology is what we call “creativity.”

Creativity is thus the touchstone of health: where there is health, creativity is not only possible but it is necessary. If a creature is caged within a limited and tightly controlled environment, it does not thrive. In this way, we know that the ability to act creatively is necessary for vitality of every living thing. And, along with this, we realize that only healthy, generative environments enable and support the creativity of each of its members.

In the human arena, we have a problem. Our societies are so complex and definitive, we can hardly see what else there is. Our technologies are so omnipotent that they are limiting the vitality of everything around us. Our science is so effective that we are able to manipulate many of the forces around us to our own prescribed purposes. Our human world has become an impediment to nature’s ability to be healthy and generative, and our institutions and technologies are so pervasive that they have become an impediment to our own creativity.

We have, in other words, overwhelmed our own ability to engage generatively, creatively, and vibrantly in our world. Our creative energies are channelled into the technical-commercial realm through which we make our livings and enjoy the fruits of what is made available to us through the consumer driven market system. And, there is so much variety and choice packed into that system, only our incomes seem to pose a barrier to our satisfaction.

But the lack of generative vitality in that system is all too apparent. Let’s dispense with the litany. If you are reading this, you know what I mean. The intent of this space is to speak of the creative, to provide what we believe is a distinctive window on that essential living dimension. And we do this so that people, like ourselves, who know only too well how our current way of living saps our vitality, can choose the living, choose what can change us, in our own lives.

What is distinctive in our approach:

We see the human creative endeavor, in its modern Western form, as marked out by four types of creative “figures,” or people who have chosen to live in certain ways that have common characteristics. They have clustered around certain life ways, or “ethics” that we can name, study and learn from. And by using these “figures” as guides we can come to see how certain choices in our lives support our creative inclinations, while others don’t.

The four figures are:

Mystic. One who embodies faith-for raw and without intermediary the kinds of energies and forces at play in the world that both unleash creative life, and those that constrain, dilute and/or diminish them.

Artist: One who grasps these creative energies, and labors to enable themselves and others to individually experience them in their full efficacy as the force for generative vitality. 

Prophet: One who feels these energies at work in how we relate to each other and to the larger world -- of our ecology, society, and even to the cosmos. 

 Leader: One who uses organization of many different forces, relations, people and materials in order to put the new and the vital in play as actual things, and contexts for concrete, daily activity.

See the Blog Post "The Breakout Creative Figures" for more on these figures.

In Western culture, these are the forms around which human creative energies have clustered during the course of our history. To the extent that these people who have exemplified these figures create new ways of living that defy the assumptions, norms, rules and habits of their times marks the extent to which these people create “events” that break out, and break us out of life-draining confinement.

This work is dedicated to helping people to fully embrace the life that such figures have to lead in order to fully realize their creative mission. It is not a “self-improvement” tract we offer. We study these figures from a perspective that marks out that margin in which “break out” actually occurs. We are looking at our own times in order to see what that margin of the “adjacent possible” consists of, and what kind of creative energy, in one or a combination of several of these figures, will be needed in order to act generatively and creatively in the most global and intensively personal sense

I am now engaged in a deep study of this creative process. These pages represent works in progress, as I think through subjects, I will test them here. My main concentration is in producing a series of books that study each of the figures. I will look at each with an eye to how one lives the life of such a figure here and now. In so doing we will consider what such a figures consists of; we will trace the genealogy of this figure to see the genetic material evolving over the course of the Western adventure; and we will consider what the most contemporary avatars of each figure in order to construct a reliable mirror for our own self-appraisal.