 this image. And as you can see, it's a line, right? Colored lines. And most of you can see, right? If not, you can show it to your neighbor. And so, the game is, what is this? Anybody propose and a proposition for what this is? So, any idea, doesn't matter? Handpaper from Tristram Shandy. Very good answer. Sort of a game spoiler there. But it's not Tristram Shandy. Indeed, it is not a psychedelic painting from the 70s. It's an handpaper. It's from Descartes Meditation 1647. It's the first edition. The reason why I'm showing this is because there's two reasons. One is that Timingold is going to talk about lines. He has a book coming out in April, which is called The Life of Lines, which is a theme he has been working on for many years. The other reason I show you this is that I also checked and apparently the first edition of the Principia Mathematica of Newton also has marbled handpaper like this. And it struck me that, just starting researching on this little piece, that 70 to 80 percent of the books of the pre-modern period or the classic period, how you call it, from the late 16th century to the end of the 19th century are texts that are circled by this kind of images, which to us seem quite psychedelic. But when I saw this, I thought Descartes saw this. What was going on in his head when he opened his own book and saw this? Newton's imagination, when, is a term similar to Descartes to sort of create a new territory for science. He saw their texts embedded by this chaotic images. So, of course, I'm not going to go into the answer, this is just sort of to open the debate and I will, without further delay, give the microphone, actually I wanted the microphone because he has one, but please welcome Jim Engel. Psychologists have a very odd idea about what creativity is. They tend to think that it's some kind of X factor, some kind of mental spark plug that some people have and some people don't, and they've devoted a lot of attention to trying to discover this factor inside people's heads. And they say that if we didn't have this spark plug, or some of us didn't have it, there'd be no culture, no history, no art, we'd be just like all the other elements. So, their view is that somehow there's something that some people, at least, carry around in their heads and they call it this creativity thing and they've been trying to figure out what it is. Well, one philosopher, kind of psychologist, who's contributed a lot to this debate, is Margaret Bowden and she says that there are two kinds of creative ideas and being a psychologist, I'm used to this kind of thing, she calls them P-Creative and H-Creative. A P-Creative idea is one where everybody else has had it before, but it's the first time you have it, so you're kind of catching up with everybody else. An H-Creative idea is one that nobody has ever had before and the idea is that somehow it's these H-Creative events that have never, ever happened before that they are what give rise to human history. So, P stands for psychological, an H for historical. Psychological creative ideas, they're the ones that you're just catching up with everybody else. The H, the historical ones, those ones make history and yet the very odd thing about this, very psychological view, is that the ideas themselves don't belong to history at all. They pop up in individual minds and so far as the psychologists are concerned, minds are completely outside history. They're things, they're inside the head. They depend on their own resources. So ideas pop up spontaneously from these individual minds. They only really become historical when they enter into some process of communication and dissemination. So if I took that view and said, then you think, well, what on earth is history? And a lot of psychologists think that history is basically a record of innovation. So each of these H historical events was something new, unprecedented. It never happened before, a new idea. You add all these new ideas up and you get history. But the problem then is, well, how do you know whether an idea is historical or not? How do you know that nobody's ever had it before? So somehow or other you've got to check through. And suppose I woke up this morning and had this fantastic idea. Nobody's had this before. Is this P historical or H historical? It has to go through the entirety of the whole of human history to find out whether anybody's had it before. And if nobody's had it, probably most likely somebody has. But if nobody's had it, I'd say, wow! History was actually made at my desk this morning. So imagine a baby. I can't think of anything more creative than the process of bringing conceiving and nurturing and bringing a baby into the world and then that baby growing up into a child or adult and so on. Can you think of a more creative process than that? If you were Margaret Bowden, you'd have to say that, wow! The baby, somebody appears in the maternity ward and it says, wow, this is model. We haven't seen anything like this before. And the parents think we must have had an H creative idea at the moment when we conceived the child. And there it is, the realization that when we talk about perception, actually, that sort of model is often assumed. You can see the child as this kind of idea, a blint in the eye, and then there it is. But really, obviously, the growth of the baby is surely created in the second sense. It's about the creation of personality in community, a person coming into being within an excess of social relations. And then the growth of that child grows up. And that growth is not just in strength and stature, of course, but in the work of the imagination and the formation of ideas, because ideas, too, have lives. I always think that ideas are not like places you visit. You go to a place and you look around and then you go away again and then you come back to it later. Again, it's a matter of somehow reading back from objects to ideas that allegedly are supposed to have motivated them. And that is understood as the process of abduction. And that idea of abduction comes from Charles Sunder's curse, who is famously obscure about what it meant. But in simple terms, it's the same strategy that is used by a detective in which she finds that you see some clues, a bloodstained carpet. And the detective's job is then to go back, read back from the bloodstained on the carpet to an extraordinary event, an extraordinary event, say a murder. From which the bloodstained then follows with almost completely inevitability. So you have an extraordinary event. If somebody's murdered, well, actually you're likely to get blood on the carpet. So the link, once you've made you jump back to the extraordinary event, then the link from that to the material clues is kind of obvious. And the idea is all the craftsmanship treat works of art in the same kind of way. The work of art is an extraordinary object. We leap back into the creative agency of the artist and then see that the work follows with a kind of inevitability from that idea that was present in the artist's head first. So again, there's this notion of reading back from objects to ideas. But that seems to me to be completely wrong, actually, because what it misses out is the form generating potential of the material itself that the artist is working with. Usually the artist hasn't got much of an idea what he or she is creating at the time, but there's some sort of engagement with materials over a period of time out of which things tend to get formed. So in order to understand the work of art, we have to join with the artist in the movement that gave rise to it. So we have to read creativity forwards rather than backwards. We have to follow the materials in a way that's like moving upstream so that in terms of that analogy with the detective, it's like becoming criminals ourselves. We join with the murderer and follow the action through. So things in this view, like works of art or whatever, things perduate, they carry on through time. The example that I always use is my own, because I play the cello. And like most cellists, I play the suites of J.S. Bach over and over again in a hopeless and full-on attempt to get them right, which is something that the National never do, because nobody has, that you can carry on trying. But the extraordinary thing is that although, of course, Bach penned these pieces a long time ago, left a lot of attitude for the players, especially how they're done, the music itself is never finished. It carries on through all the performances that are ever done of it, so that when you start to play, it's like jumping into the river and carrying on from there. So the music itself is always present. It's always undergoing creation. It wasn't as though Bach finished it then, there it is, and now all you have to do is to perform it. It's actually that in the performance, you are continually, you and everybody else is playing it, it's continually creating this music and carrying on with it. And that means, then, that there is absolutely no opposition between creation and imitation. That every time I play, of course, since I'm copying, I'm playing the same piece over and over again, I'm going for the same walk over and over again, and yet every performance is an unrepeatable, original event. It's very much the same with calligraphy, and calligraphy is explained about this, that in calligraphy, you perform a movement, and the calligraphy then is a trace of that movement, but you can never go over the same movement twice. You can't sort of say, oh, I don't like that one, I'll go over it again. Once you've done it, you've done it. And there's no going back. Creativity in the skill practice that actually brings forth the work, not in some idea that is already fashioned beforehand. But then, that leads to the question, well, what is the role of the imagination in all this? What role does the imagination have to play in creative practice? If we reject the idea that creativity is about enacting some idea that is already been formed by the imagination, what if the imagination is not about creating advanced representations of what is to be made? And I want to argue that the imagination is not, in any sense, the mental capacity that permits the spontaneous generation of ideas, which is what the psychologists tend to think. That rather a way of living creatively in a world that is itself undergoing continual creation. I think this notion of correspondence, I don't find that helpful. By correspondence, I don't mean this, I don't mean matching, right? This matching that. I mean, things answering to one another. The model is people writing letters in the old days, as they used to. You send a letter to your friend, your friend would read it, and sit down and write it at the back, and the letters would go back and forth, and each correspondent is answering to the other. And I won't have this sense of a creative movement, as one in which persons, materials, whatever, are continually, as they're moving through time, continually answering to one another in that kind of movement of correspondence. Moving upstream. Moving upstream from things already being there, to that point at which things are just about to come. And like when you're playing the trumpet, and you're actually... I don't play the trumpet, but I can imagine it, you're bringing out this air from your lungs, you're about to blow, in a way you're right there at the very point at which that sound begins to appear. It's not already there. When you're playing, it's not there yet, really, because you're still doing all this pumping. So it's like when you're actually playing, it's like bringing yourself right up to that moment when the sound is not there yet, but it's just about to be there. And that, I think, is where imagination... It's a saying that somehow imagination moves upstream from where things are to where things appear, from talking about not what appears, but to the appearing of what appears. And in that sense, imagination leads from the front, but it doesn't yet know where it's going. I think that this wording that we have in English, longing, is a beautiful word for that. The sense that you long for things, and the longing is a lovely view of the length, like going along the line, you long for things, you don't know what they are. But you know your longing for them. And that imagining is a kind of remembering as well. It's beautiful the way that word captures the fact that all imagining, really, is remembering, and whenever we go somewhere, we find we've already been there before, and that looping around. But that's another thing. So I had this feeling that whatever we're doing, in any kind of skilled practice, we are both completely prepared, and yet totally unprepared, what leads out, and what follows behind. And the conventional cognitive science account is that mastery leads, and submission follows. The mastery is a mental mastery. You have your mental plan, and your body then acts it out. So you have cognitive mastery that then dictates the actions of the submissive body. So the mind does, and the body undergoes, and that's a sort of passive undergoing. That's a conventional view. I want to put that the other way around to reverse the temporal priority of mastery and submission, and suggest that in any kind of skilled practice, but it's going for a walk, playing a cello, whatever, submission leads and mastery follows. And that's the other way around. So that out in front is an aspirant imagination that feels its way forward. Back in the rear is skilled, prehensive perception. So that means that life is held in attention between submission and mastery, between imagination and perception, between aspiration and prehension, between exposure and attunement. And in each of those periods, the first leads and the second follows. But this sort of undergoing I've been talking about is not a passive undergoing. The trouble is that we have difficulties in expressing this in English because we are used to a distinction between the active and the passive voice. The active voice, and I do something, that's the active voice, in the passive voice, that something has been done to me. So that the active is doing the passive is undergoing. And because of this link, this grammatical link that we have in our grammar, but wasn't there in ancient Greek and isn't there in many other languages, because of this link between undergoing and passivity, we find it very difficult to express a kind of undergoing that is active. I think it's a kind of action without agency. I don't like to know, instead of saying that whenever you've got action, it must be the effect of some agency. Instead of got action, you don't have to put an agency in front of it. Because in undergoing that is active, the doer, in a sense, remains inside the process of his or her doing. That's what in grammar is known as the middle voice. And the middle voice of the verb, which was present in classical Greek, and is present in a number of other non-Indo-European languages, but which historically disappeared from English and other European languages as we use today. We've lost that sense of the middle voice of action without agency, of a creative, active kind of undergoing where submission leads and mastery follows. And I think I'm making a proposition to try and bring that back. And to act in the middle voice, I think is exactly what it means to actively undergo. It means that the performance, the things you do, is actually an act to which you submit. And then you might ask the question, well, when did it come from this act that you did? Because you didn't decide it, somehow it seemed to land on you. And I think that we have to think about actions then, not as belonging to us, as though I'm the author of this action, I had the idea that I'm going to do it, but rather actions are things that fall to us and they fall to us because of what we owe to the world for our own existence. And then the world in the future owes its existence at least in part to what we've done. So action then belongs to that flow of correspondence, each of us answering to the world, the world answering to us. And I think, well, who do these actions belong to? They don't really belong to me. They don't really belong, in a sense, they belong to history, but in a broader sense, such action belongs to life. So my conclusion is that the creativity of undergoing is the creativity of life itself. Okay. Thank you very much. That was very enjoyable and interesting. I was really struck, particularly, with the submission in mastery, which I was very happy to hear you clarify. I think maybe it's something I have hoped at thinking but not being able to formulate. I'm sorry, I don't think it's a really form question, but I suppose what I was trying to think about that when you were speaking was the impact that that then has on the reception and criticism of perhaps, for example, an individual artwork, because if submission leads mastery, then we have no original. So we have no recourse, there's no linearity in terms of the criticism of it, which I find intriguing. Yes, I haven't really thought about that one through, but it must mean that we have to think of criticism in a rather different way. I assume that there's a part of my head something that Foucault said along these lines that I can't remember the exact words, but wouldn't it be nice if we had, as he said, something like this, if we had a kind of criticism that wasn't always harking back to what people have done and whether it was good or bad or what doesn't matter with it, that actually moved along with something and opened things up even more. A kind of forward-looking criticism that joins with things and moves back. Because I think probably most criticism tends to be very retrospective. This was done, this was made, now we're going to look at it and produce some kind of assessment. They say, well, this is done, this is made, so now let's go ahead and see where it takes us and see the power of the thing we have. Enjoyable, and we've got to think about that. One of the things I was struck by, that was the talk went along, was the sense in which a lot of what we were talking about seems to be about an idea of, well, I'll take you to another example at the end, of the lone, creative individual struggling with an instrument of some kind trying to pull us to music or trying to work with material and so on. I was wondering if you said a little bit about how, given the beginning you were talking about a social line, how about my kind of strategy to think about people being creative together and working together, or do something creative for someone else? Yeah, absolutely, I think, I hope that, because I keep getting pulled off for doing this, concentrating on the lone, yes, the lone craftsperson of the lone musician, struggling with material and music and whatever it is, but I hope with this notion of correspondence, which seems to work a lot, that then you can think of a whole community of people or how many people want, answering to one another. I want to think about what if we thought about social life, never mind about the question whether that's restricted to humans or not, but what if we think about human social life carrying on and think about it rather like polyphony, where each line, or counterpoint, where each line is answering to each and every other all the time, then that would give us a better model to talk about social life and interaction. Because the trouble I have with interaction is even into subjectivity. It's that it tends to think of the between as well, here's this, here's that and everything going back and forth and it's thinking of the participants in social life at points or blocks or entities. If we think of every participant, this is about the line scale, if we think of every participant as a line, a kind of life history, it is moving in time, then we can think of the way in which these lines can only be done in the course of time. So then I think we can take this as a model to talk about social life in the land. Just because you mentioned Bergson and Whitehead and maybe the process of philosophy which I personally also find very inspiring I think that according to that philosophy and what you said today made the biggest mystery is not so much life if we agree that it is a creative flow. The difficult part is actually order. And I think that was the open question and it's still to be explored. How do we create orders? And are we editors of life which could be an interesting way of seeing it? Are we, in French, the word ordinateur, that means actually computer? She's another way of looking at things and maybe we're not so positive. So I'd like to know what are your intuitions on that? I agree with you about the problem. If you said that if we take it or agree on the basic ideas of a process philosophy then the problem is how do we explain the persistence and continuity of form of any kind? In the organic world you recognise all these different kinds of animals and plants and there they are and they seem to have a certain constancy about them which enables us to recognise that kind of animal and the kind of antler. And as you say, mostly it's written in the natural sciences and the problem has been wrongly formed. That's to say the default assumption has always been that things will stay the same and the problem is why do they change and so how do we explain evolution and the rest of it? Actually the problem is the other way around is how do we speak? And the way I've been thinking about it apart from as a heavy dose of self-organisation of theory that's formed themselves like soap bubbles, but the other I've been thinking about in terms of the contrary forces of tension and friction and again I've found that the idea of the knot is helpful because in a sense a knot is something where you've got a lot of movements and you've been tying these strings and then you've got something that sticks and it might be quite difficult to untie. So you've got a pretty fixed form and you think well how did that form come into being and how is it sticking? It's sticking there because the forces that have created it have been pulling in different directions in such a way as to create a friction which actually holds to being in place. So the way I've been thinking about it anyway is in terms of how contrary forces of tension and friction work together to make things stick for a certain length of time. But that's far from a solution and you're quite right to say that because mainly in the natural sciences the default way of posing the question has been upside down there's a huge amount of exploring to be done. In biology people are just beginning to realise that if I was going to understand the forms of organisms you've got to go into autogenesis and not look at evolution. And of course and so now they're all beginning to look at autogenesis and then they're all saying that they've made the new discoveries It's putting not a genetic first. You're right to mention biology because the last findings for example with the totic potency of the cells tend to confirm process development institutions. It's life is a differentiation process rather than the building process. Yes. I've tried to use the term rather than external divination I've tried to use this term interstitial differentiation with some of the way in which something differentiates is that from the inside information. It works quite well for because I'm an anthropologist and you think about kinship and you think about what happens in the history of households when people marry and you have kids and then the kids leave and then they form other unions with other people what happens in a household is a process of interstitial differentiation. It doesn't break up actually but it differentiates the people in it differentiate themselves from the inside.