Daniel Harris and Stacy Holman Jones
Sage Journals. Volume 28 Issue 5, June 2022
First published online January 25, 2022
This article advances a manifesto for a posthuman creativity studies that highlights the emergent, collective, and ecological aspects of creativity, offering propositions that problematize any individualist or human-exceptionalist approach to the field. We attend to a range of extra/ordinary affects, encounters, and modalities for expanding creative possibilities in the 21st century. Beginning with a recognition that creativity must be rewilded from its current capture in economic and educational discourses, we argue for more sustainable re-engagements. In the specificity of these encounters, we manifest 10 commitments to posthuman creativity as the foundations for a more dynamic and more-than-human creative agency.
Manifestos are, as Steven Marcus (1998) writes, are performative—a form of action writing that accomplish something in their very creation and public proclamation. Natalie Loveless (2019) invokes the action-driven practice of manifesto-making by referencing her mentor, Donna Haraway’s (1985, 2003) The Cyborg Manifesto and Companion Species Manifesto. Haraway (2019) describes these works as visions of “a feminist universe of creativity, an experiment . . . [and] as a mode of eros that is committed, cathected, and sustaining” (p. x). However, Loveless (2019) offers the caveat: “or perhaps this is a love story, filled with the ambivalence that constitutes all stories of love” (p. 15). We agree that love, like creativity, is always ambivalent, and that both love and ambivalence seem perfect places to start in any discussion of creativity.
Glaveanu et al. (2020) also turn to the manifesto form to mark “a conceptual shift within the field” (p. 1) in creativity studies, highlighting a socio-cultural approach. Through their set of 12 propositions, the authors urge attention to the relational, to social justice, and to the interdependent social, psychological, and material nature of creativity. Glaveanu et al.’s manifesto remains undeniably humanist, yet they acknowledge that contemporary human life will inevitably “coexist with multiple forms of anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic artificial intelligence” (p. 2). We build on those dual foundations in this speculative (and fluid) call to creative attention.
No relationship, artistic act, or creative impulse ends in a perfect version of the original idea, complete and satisfyingly resolved. Yet that does not diminish creative work in any way. Drawing on the ethics, love, and aesthetic commitments of what it means to embody and embrace posthuman creativities, this manifesto responds to the need for a more expansive and nuanced creativity, beginning with a rejection of the bifurcation of human versus nonhuman creative agency. Haraway continues to urge us away from all things “anthro,” even current attachments to understanding our moment as the Anthropocene, and even, in part, away from the “posts” (including posthumanism, which she prefers to be replaced with compost). These contradictions and tensions joyfully inform the commitments outlined in this manifesto, another iteration of an ecological response to the need for global belonging, climate and racial justice, as well as the timelessness of a sustainable creativity that returns human creativity back to its origins as always natureculture-emergent (Haraway, 2003).
Emergence recognizes the recursive cycles of “decay, making, repair, re-making and growth, which are inextricable from the ongoing forms of creativity that stem from everyday contingencies and improvisatory human activity” (Harris & Holman Jones, 2019, p. 4). We think, with Erin Manning (2011a), that “even without laying hands on the work, the work was never passive, never still” (n.p.). Indeed, the active movement of creativity lends itself to manifesting; from the Latin manu festus, meaning “struck by hand,” a manifesto for creativity studies must be a “striking gesture” that calls us to do things differently (Hanna, 2014). So, we begin with an attention to the ways in which all creative work is
lived in a synesthetic interplay that [is] mobile and complex, propositional across registers. And we [find] that it [is] here, in an approach more ecological than interactive, in a veering from implicit demand, from implicit expectation, that the work began to create play. (Manning, 2011a, n.p.)
Australian artist Patricia Piccinini (2021), in her Melbourne exhibition A Miracle Constantly Repeated, weaves together human, naturecultural and technological through creative making that “explores humanity’s relationship to technology and the environment through hyper-real sculptures and video and sound installations” (n.p.). Her work embodies the intersections between a more-than-human creativity, consciousness, and politics.
Thinking with Piccinini, Haraway, Loveless, and others, this essay manifests the possibilities of an ecological creativity liberated from the orthodoxy of human epistemological labor. Following the contributions of these thinkers and building on Harris (2021) earlier version of a posthuman creativities manifesto, we aim to show not only the need for a more expansive creativity studies, but the now and how of a relational, fluid, and wild creativity studies than current commodified understandings admit or allow. To that end, we continue to evolve our manifesto in event-ful coagulations, ever-changing fluctuations; like creativity, always open and responsive to the conditions.
We recognize that contemporary creativity studies understand, in Haraway’s (2004) words, that “there is no border where evolution ends and history begins, where genes stop and environments take up, where culture rules and nature submits” (p. 2). We acknowledge that nothing is outside of natureculture, including creative agency and creativity studies. Creative agency is alive in its unknowability, if only we can stand the discomfort. Attending to discomfort, in fact, is one powerful reminder that
I am co-constituted by my membership in these ecologies, my affective relationships, and collaborative processes with them, and that myself as I understand it at this place, and time, and awareness, is a co-production with them. So the notion of “creative agency” and “creative ecologies” are inextricably interconnected. (Harris, 2021, p. 21)
In exploring the question of “where are ‘we’ in queer ecology” (Harris & Holman Jones, 2019, p. 95), we think with Jane Bennett’s (2010) articulation of lived (human) experience “straining forward toward the event” (p. 32). Our understandings of all ecologies are queer. For Bennett, agency and anticipation are intertwined, never resolving, never arriving. For nonhuman others, creative agency is not tied in the same way to language, but can exist as a straining-toward without need for articulation or langue. This notion of creative agency can urge human experiences of creativity toward a more-than-articulation, an agency that is experienced beyond-expression.
Creativity has its own affective agency, independent of human action or intent. Creativity can be understood as
a force, like love, or gravity, or electricity, that moves through but is never contained by or within. . .By beginning to see the creative agency in all things, events, organisms, and impulses, humans must reconsider our parasitic relationship to creativity and our compulsion to control and profit from it. (Harris, 2021, pp. 17–18)
The notion of creative agency is also aligned with some common concepts in posthuman and new materialist theory. Nick Fox and Pam Alldred (2015) encourage a “conception of agency not tied to human action, shifting the focus for social inquiry from an approach predicated upon humans and their bodies, examining instead how relational networks or assemblages of animate and inanimate affect and are affected” (p. 399). These considerations are reflected in growing legal recognition of the “personhood” of nonhuman entities, including rivers, mountains, and other natural elements. Neimanis (2014) says,
the point is not to imbue water with human agency (which would be anthropocentrism in yet another guise), but to rethink agency in a way that does not begin (or end) with the human. (p. 7)
Agency beyond the human is central to the concerns of this manifesto. In this way, posthuman creativity studies contributes to a larger move toward de-centering humanist orientations from attention to worldly moves and affects. Human agency (and creativity) is always present in posthuman creativity studies, but not the center of it.
We recognize that posthumanist orientations are interested and invested in problematizing the bifurcation of human and nonhuman nature as part of a larger feminist project of challenging the naturalization (and subjugation) of otherness, while at the same time developing an ethics and politics that would challenge human exceptionalism (Neimanis, 2014, p. 15).
A posthuman approach to creativity studies does not prioritize human “culture” over “nature” or see them as separate. It recognizes, in Astrida Neimanis’ (2014) words, that
human beings . . . are hardly removed or separate from the biological, ecological, and otherwise material milieu we call “nature.” We, too, are dirt made flesh; iron made blood; water made tears, sweat and urine. (p. 16)
We are, all of us, creative collaborations with and of the specificity of our histories and environments. Zoe Sofoulis (2002), a student of Haraway’s in the 1980s when The Cyborg Manifesto (1985/2006) was written, describes the manifesto and the cyborg it introduces us to as celebrating a different vision of “a new kind of fractured subject, for whom partiality, hybridity and lack of a single, smooth identity or wholeness did not imply death, but on the contrary invoked the possibility for connectedness and survival beyond innocence in an impure world” (p. 57).
Jack Halberstam (1991) describes Haraway’s cyborg as “a coded masquerade . . . that become[s] lived realities” (p. 449). Sofoulis counters Halberstam and Haraway’s cyborg with eco-feminist Stacey Alaimo’s (1994) articulation of the cyborg as a “witty agent,” where “the Wily coyote and an artefactual nature seem more effective agents for an environmental politics” (p. 149), although Alaimo does not articulate just how such politics are meant to happen.
For those considering the resonance of agency and creativity, Bruno Latour’s (1992) notion that “agency is not confined only to humans in sociotechnical systems” (in Sofoulis, 2002, p. 60) gestures toward more-than-human creativities. Haraway (1991) stresses that boundaries are not predefined, but instead materialize in social interaction, a notion more recently (re)advanced by new materialists and others. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “machinic assemblages” and “striated and smooth space” share aspects of Haraway’s thinking and map onto the core “creative ecology” (Harris, 2016; Harris, 2018) model of approaching creativity studies. Taken together, these understandings of agency, boundaries, assemblages, and space instantiate a creativity that reaches beyond the singular, to acknowledge the ecological system or assemblage of human, nonhuman, atmospheric, and other collaborators in any creative event.
The network is, therefore, by a creative ecologies approach in which techno-networks are just one more actant in an ever-expanding ecosystem of inter-dependent actors or elements. But The Cyborg Manifesto, like other creative ecologies, is a product of its time, or what Sofoulis calls ideas “combined to produce a kind of mutant love child in the form of cyberfeminism” (p. 64). Thus, while the notion of the cyborg was not new even in the 1980s, Haraway saw it as a rich metaphor for the excitement and anxiety of late-20th-century technological culture change, as creative ecologies is now. Or, as Sofoulis says, “The Cyborg Manifesto was well placed to give some focus to expressions of hopes and fears about the emergent technoworlds” (p. 66). Similarly, we argue that part of the necessity of an ecological approach to creativity studies in this moment lies in the need to adequately include a critical approach to posthuman and geopolitically diverse agencies, and a move away from human-centered neuroscientific-only perspectives that continue to dominate into the third decade of the 21st century.
Finally, The Cyborg Manifesto “acknowledged the pleasures and desires we hold in relation to the nonhuman entities that are part of our lifeworld, and the sociotechnical and material-semiotic hybrid entities and plural identities we might form with the nonhumans” (Sofoulis, 2002, p. 67). Haraway’s orientations and political commitments led her to propose her cyborg manifesto as a more hopeful (if utopian) vision of emerging technologies, and similarly here we argue for the radical power of the relational and ecological to help vision a more expansive, and less commodified, creativity studies for the 21st century.
We reject definitions of creativity based on use-value in favor of posthuman creativities. In Staying With the Trouble, Haraway (2016) agitates for “action and thinking that does not fit within dominant capitalist cultures . . . collectives capable of new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning . . . ” (p. 51). And Glaveanu et al. (2020) remind us that “creative outcomes are not only new and appropriate for a certain task; they can give meaning and even joy to our existence” (p. 1). New practices of imagination that rely on such affective interventions cannot be accomplished wholesale or instrumentally. Rather, a “common liveable world must be composed, bit by bit, or not at all” (Haraway, 2016b, p. 40). Creativity beyond use-value invests in the sustainable, the modest, the incremental. It attends along the way to how creative scale and form matter in our efforts to make new worlds, aiming for a “better-enough way of doing things” (Loveless, 2019, p. 102). Focusing on the compositional work of how rather than the product(ivity) of what we create is what “makerthinkers” term research-creation, a practice that draws together “political art practice and interdisciplinary humanities” to develop “an old/new way forward” (Loveless, 2019, p. 13).
Manning (2015) explains the mechanics of research-creation as “new forms of knowledge [that] require new forms of evaluation, and even more so, new ways of valuing the work we do” (p. 53). The same could be said of creativity in contemporary education. Manning’s (2015) four propositions about art (as research-creation) can be readily applied to posthuman creativity studies:
1. If “art” is understood as a “way” it is not yet about an object, a form or content. 2. Making is a thinking in its own right, and conceptualization a practice in its own right. 3. Research-creation is not about objects. It is a mode of activity that is at its most interesting when it is constitutive of new processes. This can happen only if its potential is tapped in advance of its alignments with existing disciplinary methods and institutional structures (this includes creative capital). 4. New processes will likely create new forms of knowledge that may have no means of evaluation within current disciplinary models. (pp. 53–54).
For Manning, such boundless experience “can be taken into account only if we begin with a mode of inquiry that refutes initial categorization” (p. 54). How often in creativity studies do we begin with a refutation of categorization, or even an acknowledgment that this is the baseline condition for creativity to flourish? The challenge is to the create the conditions “to work in an ecology of relation” (Manning, 2011b, n.p.) in which a kind of more-than creativity can emerge organically. This more-than work is how we move creativity studies beyond use-value evaluations and into the relational, affective, and incremental work of composing a common, liveable, creative world, bit by bit.
We reject the focus on products and embrace the Whiteheadian turn toward “a production of novel togetherness” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 21), as a basis for expanding the inherently relational aspects of creativity. We reject the narrowing aperture of “creative innovators” and expand into creative becoming-with, and thus into the politico-personal desire to connect, to move, to change. The creative-relational is outlined by Jonathan Wyatt (drawing on Massumi), as a
Desire is the creative-relational gesture that means we can’t not go beyond ourselves, can’t not spill out, can’t not become caught up in the im/possiblities of life’s excess. (Wyatt, 2019, p. 42)
It is ultimately more sustainable for human and nonhuman beings to celebrate that which is unable to be apprehended and perhaps even unintelligible, and use these differences to help build understanding, resilience, and curiosity rather than fear and separation. Creative entities, processes, and relational encounters powerfully and positively expand and enrich life, and remain at the center of peaceful co-existence across diverse species and atmospheres.
For Piccinini (2021), creative artmaking is the most potent means of moving thought beyond the binary, and relationality beyond the use-value:
Think of ideas like nature and culture, male and female, black and white, human and animal . . . [it’s] not that these dichotomies don’t exist, or that the two sides aren’t different. The problem arises when culture attaches the idea that one side of this pair is better than the other. We do that a lot, and that is a real problem because it’s both untrue and unfair. It also denies that there are usually just as many commonalities as differences. When we put “mother nature” on one side and “people” on the other, we make it harder to realise that when we hurt nature, we hurt ourselves.
What does that mean for creativity? How might creativity abuse nature and because of that action, hurt us? One way we hurt nature and ourselves through use-value approaches to creativity is by seeing, as Piccinini puts it, some people, programs, institutions, and things as “better” manifestations of creativity than others. We only have to think of the “genius” model of creativity, which is founded on the notion of human exceptionalism, meanwhile leaving out “nature” altogether. A commodification approach to creativity is always going to narrow the possibilities of creativity and creative-relational expansion, as well as retain a view of nature as supplying the raw materials for commodified creative work (Harris, 2014).
We propose a consideration of a non-binary understanding of “natural” and “human” creativity as naturecultural creativity in a non-hierarchical and interdependent, relational way. It might begin to expand vision, curiosity, and collaborative approaches then to things like, “a glacier’s long-term memory; the social promiscuity of bodily fluids; the river writing the canyon, in a slow-motion, cursive script. All of these processes attest to creativity, culture and ‘language skills’ before or beyond something called the cultural human” (Neimanis, 2014, p. 17). And yet, we note that Haraway (2008) has never been on the “post” train:
I never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist. For one thing, urgent work still remains to be done in reference to those who must inhabit the troubled categories of woman and human, properly pluralized, reformulated, and brought into constitutive intersection with other asymmetrical differences. Fundamentally, however, it is the patterns of relationality and, in Karen Barad’s terms, intra-actions at many scales of space–time that need rethinking, not getting beyond one troubled category for a worse one even more likely to go postal. (p. 17)
So why bring Haraway into a posthuman creativities manifesto? Because she has laid the foundations of multiplicity, relationality, and interspeciality that we need so urgently now. Haraway (2019) also gives us the term sympoiesis, which means “making-with. . . sympoiesis does not wait for single actors or authors” (p. 572), or worlding-with. Sympoiesis is Haraway’s expansion of the older term autopoiesis, and she offers it to underline her argument that nothing makes itself: all—including any sense of self we create—is made in-relation-with. She articulates this as Sila, or “connectedness to everything, about situated relationality and interdependence” (2019, p. 574). Relationality is at the core of all of Haraway’s philosophy, and creativity is the central tenet of her understanding of relationality and interdependence.
We believe a creative ecological approach to the study and doing of contemporary creativity is the most effective way forward which prioritizes sustainability (in all its manifestations) over individual, national, or industrial exceptionalism, human over nonhuman exceptionalism, or educational exceptionalism over fostering holistic and lifelong learning approaches.
Haraway (2008) directly addresses Piccinini’s work as representing “dynamic ecologies” that are “opportunistic, not idealistic” (p. 288), and which are always in flux, always adapting and remaking themselves creatively and interdependently. And even Glaveanu et al.’s (2020) anthropocentric manifesto asserts the need to move beyond individual capacities and human exceptionalism in the study of creativity. Indeed, they call us to “move beyond focusing on the individual alone, isolated from his/her social, material, and cultural context . . . an invitation to integrate and (re)interpret its concepts, methods and findings within a wider, socio-cultural framework” (p. 4).
Haraway and Glaveanu et al. are not alone in calling for an ecological approach to creativity studies. Rosi Braidotti (2013) rejects the need for enforcing boundaries or binaries between racialized, gendered, and sexual bodies, leaning instead into the creative affordances of bodies in-ecology-with technology, assemblages that can result in “an egalitarian blurring of differences” (p. 109) and increase ecological interactivity. Simone Bignall and Daryle Rigney (2018) remind us that “posthumanism recognises the rightfully limited powers of human agency” (p. 166), which we extend to theorize the powers of nonhuman agencies. And for Myra Hird and Kathryn Yusoff (2018), “the politics of life and nonlife, we might argue, are fundamentally contaminated (or made anthropogenically incoherent) through bacterial agency” (p. 272). Thus, the boundary—and the creative workings—between all life and nonlife matter is permeable and constantly in motion. But the scale too is blessedly open, once we can begin thinking in more-than-human ways.
Regardless of scale, “the lifelong development of creativity cannot be conceived outside of self-other relations”; and beyond singular creative-relational encounters, “society itself—that is, building, maintaining, and constantly renewing our communal life—should be regarded as a field of creativity” (Glaveanu et al., 2020, pp. 2–3). Creativity changes the way we relate to the world around us. We extend their logic beyond the human into the ecological, environmental, and more-than-human; the increasing urgency that science and philosophy tell us is now accelerating the disciplinary, geopolitical, and cultural silos persistently and falsely segregate us.
We must let our curiosities motivate explorations of creative ecologies and worlds-in-relation. Curiosity facilitates “arguments and stories that matter to the worlds we might yet live in,” as Haraway argues (2003, p. 3). This curiosity, like creativity, is relational and interdependent. It is not hierarchical and paranoid, looking to exert explanatory dominance by discovery, the “Aha!” move of humanist social science seeking to uncover the “stupidities of others by reducing the field of attention to prove a point” (Haraway, 2016, p. 126) or “snapping at the world as if the whole point of thinking and being is to catch it in a lie” (Stewart, 2017, p. 196). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2002) termed this orientation to thinking, making, and critique paranoid; it is anticipatory, mimetic (committed to replication), supported by “strong” (generalizing, even totalizing) and pessimistic theory determined, above all, to avoid surprise and pleasure. “Paranoid” approaches to creativity are reductive and suspicious, seeking to scale down creativity to the quantifiable (and marketable) by searching for negative effects, placing faith in exposure and falsification and seeking the “doable and teachable” (Stewart, 2017, p. 143).
By contrast, creative curiosity is invested in expanding, even “inventing” the creative capacities of all involved through encounter and embodiment of “what was not there before” (Haraway, 2016, p. 127). Creative curiosity is practiced by cultivating the ability to
. . . find others actively interesting, even or especially others most people already claim to know all too completely, to ask questions that one’s interlocutors truly find interesting, to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to retune one’s ability to sense and respond—and to do all this politely!. . .[This] politeness does the energetic work of holding open the possibility that surprises are in store, that something interesting is about to happen. (Haraway, 2016, p. 127)
In the sense of holding open possibility for surprise, creative curiosity is a reparative practice that seeks pleasure, holds together contradiction, is interested in the local and specific, invested in plentitude and amelioration and motivated by love (Sedgwick, 2002). Curious creativities are thus both constitutive—they make us (we don’t make them)—and propositional—they compose worlds and relations “not available before” (Haraway, 2016, p. 128). So, to use Loveless’ (2019) formulation, doing posthuman creativities research is not simply to ask questions; it is to let our curiosities drive us and allow them to ethically bind us; it is to tell stories and pay attention not only to “which stories we are telling and how we are telling them, but how they, through their very forms, are telling us” (p. 24). And, we would add, are showing us.
We recognize that stories and the act of storytelling have material and historical force and because of this, contain the capacity to reorganize approaches to and experiences of our social-material worlds. Haraway (2016) argues that the mode of curiosity is storytelling, and that “storytellers crack the established disorder” (p. 130). Posthuman creative storytelling happens, as Lauren Fournier (2021) writes in her discussion of the citational practices of creative writers, artists, and thinkers, in “undeniable proximity” to other beings (p. 148), as well as other objects and matter. Thus, “transtextual,’ transoral, and transmaterial relationships composed in creative storytelling are performative: they are composed “within, across and beside other human beings, stories, and texts” and the writer/composer/thinkermaker acknowledges each, in turn (Fournier, 2021, p. 148). In this way, stories are emergent—they come into being in the telling and are more than the sum of any of their constituent parts.
Creative storytelling acknowledges that stories are partisan in their performativity. They are, as Loveless (2019) writes, far from politically or affectively neutral (p. 26). Stories can be dangerous in how they “produce themselves as compelling objects of belief” which shape us not only ideologically but also bodily (Loveless, 2019, p. 21). At the same time, drawing on Haraway’s theorizing of ecological and interspecies worldmaking, creative storytelling can be wonderous in its capacity to make and remake worlds. In its political and affective commitments, posthuman creativity approaches storytelling as a kind of situated and emergent love (Loveless, 2019, p. 26).
The entanglement of love and story, along with storytellers and readers/audiences comes through Sedgwick’s (2002) queer and affectively attuned concept of reparative reading, which as we note above, she contrasts with the “paranoid” reading practices of modernist and humanist inquiry. We can draw on Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative reading practices to articulate a reparative story of creativity that is not focused on measuring, evaluating, and prescribing. Both paranoid and reparative creativities are invested in narrative (Sedgwick, 2002); what distinguishes reparative creativity is its investment in storytelling as a “critical mode of affirmation” (Stewart, 2017, p. 143).
We acknowledge that crafting posthuman creativity studies acknowledges how creativity is an ethics that renders us response-able and thus, able and also moved to act (Loveless, 2019). It follows Thomas King’s (2003) call and response in The Truth about Stories: “Want a different ethic? Tell a different story” (King, 2003, p. 60). As we write above, Haraway (2016) describes the different ethic of posthuman storytelling as cultivating politeness—a curious practice of holding open the possibility of surprise, encountering other beings and situations with anticipation, and asking good questions. She notes that
good questions come only to a polite inquirer. . . With good questions, even or especially mistakes and misunderstandings can become interesting. This is not so much a question of manners, but of epistemology and ontology, and of method alert to off-the-beaten-path practice. (2016, p. 127)
This polite, humble attention to method alert is the foundation of response-able creative ethics. Through “polite inquiry,” we learn to engage what we all find intriguing and that, Haraway (2016) says, “changes everybody in unforeseeable ways” (p. 127).
Creative ethics also takes into consideration scale and the local and specific—what Sedgwick describes as “weak” theory: a practice that stretches to include only what is needed and near, rather than a story that attempts to tell, explain, or account for all within a field or domain and thus risks becoming tautological. Much of contemporary creativity, as an “explanatory structure,” can be read as tautological—it “can’t help or can’t stop or can’t do anything other than prove the very same assumptions with which it began” (Sedgwick, 2002, p. 136). And while proving these assumptions to be “true” might advance neoliberal uses of creativity, it leaves out invention and change, rendering creativity static (and so teachable) and inflexible (and so “quantifiable” as a skill or set of skills).
The “powerfully ranging and reductive force” (Sedgwick, 2002, p. 136) of “strong” creativity elides the ethics of relational response-ability. Instead, creative ethics is both selective (Sedgwick, 2002, p. 135) and situated (Haraway, 2016a). Haraway describes the local shelter and scale of situated storytelling by taking up James Clifford’s phrase, “big enough stories.” She says, “Big enough stories [are] not stories that are too big; not stories that try to tell everything, but situated stories that can collect up what’s needed here, so that it can be given”. And in Ursula Le Guin’s way of talking about it, “a shell that can hold a little water, or a few seeds; that which can somehow be collected, offered and taken” (Haraway, 2016c). This “big enough” approach to creativity makes room for discovering the “ethically crucial” (Sedgwick, 2002, p. 146) possibilities of an emergent and collectively inhabitable ecologies and futures. This aligns with Piccinini’s (2021) conception of the hybrid in scale, material, typology, and affect: “to imagine bodies that are not all organic, but exist in between the organic and the artificial. It’s kind of a cyborg thing, but not in a sci-fi way. It’s more of a reference to this philosopher named Donna Haraway who is a bit of a hero of mine” (n.p.).
So who falls within this window of tellable more-than-human? We have dedicated considerable time and energy to this question. Subjects, for example, who are plant-based or more-than-animal or more-than human, have been present with us since the beginning of storytelling. So has Piccinini (2021), who observes, “Many cultures have representations of trees in their rituals and built spaces . . . because they have always valued the role that trees play in our ecology. Only recently has western science understood how trees operate in a forest . . . connected underground” (n.p.). Joining the dots in scale, species, and all forms of difference is the work of contemporary creative ethics.
We recognize that creativity has its own life and agency, and must be released back into the wild, its cage of use-value discarded. By extending the principles of creative agency, that not all material, processual, and relational activities can or should be apprehended, and that this is a form of neo-colonialism. Creative wilding sees attempts to assess, measure, and rank creativity as misplaced and ill-informed. Creative wilding is the unbounded and unpredictable potential that stands in opposition to modernity’s orderly impulses (Halberstam, 2020). Creative wilding offers the thrill of stepping outside of order altogether, the opportunity to “beware of truth-claims, to venture, to be curious, and to tell—and to listen to—stories that might help us connect to something greater[?] Such is the power of creative wilding” (Harris, 2021, p. 180).
Nature as wild, and nature as queer (Barad, 2015). For Piccinini (2021), “part of the problem we have in responding to the climate crisis is that we see ourselves as separate from nature—above it or outside of it—not part of it” (n.p.). We might ask ourselves the same question regarding creativity studies. Do we see the commodification of creativity as someone else’s problem? As the inevitable colonization of all things? Have we conveniently split our “private” creative passions and past-times from our “real” paid work in the market culture? This manifesto asks us all to consider the long-term damage of doing so. It is not just a diminishment of our own lives. What if we were to touch—really touch—the depth of the diminishment of the planet, in this kind of approach? What if re-wilding was not our past, but our future? What if our resilient savage creativity is not “noble,” as Rousseau asked us to believe, but rather heroically raw and present in the moment? That is an urgent, corporeal creativity that incorporates all beings in and around us as part of the moment. It is less calculating, but more visceral; less plotting and more accepting. This is now. This is what’s possible, now. Not tomorrow, but now.
To do this, Piccinini says we might need to create or otherwise manifest an image of how the future could be so that we have something to work for and toward. Regarding her sculpture The Rescuers, Piccinini (2021) says,
It shows us an image of a human/animal relationship where the humans are caring for the animal. We see care and empathy but also strength and determination. We see the resilience of nature in the koala and the value of empathy in the girls. No, I’m not saying that this is how the world is. But it is how I would like to think it could be. And sometimes you have to make an image of how the future might be in order to have something to aim for. (n.p.)
How might we use creativity (even those of us not as visually talented as Piccinini), to both imagine and manifest the futures we want and need? For Piccinini, and Haraway, this future is a naturalcultural one in which empathy for other beings extends beyond the human, but importantly still includes the human.
We know that creativity has always been and always will be independent of human endeavor, and as such is beyond the dominion of human control, economies, and jurisdictions. Creative humility is grounded in a willingness to accept and admit we are only a small part of the creative ecologies around and in us, a gateway to stronger connections with others, greater tolerance for ambiguity and change, and more expansive and nuanced decisions (John Templeton Foundation, 2019) and understandings—about posthuman creativities and, ultimately, creative agency. The connections between creativity and care are well known, but as Haraway (2019) reminds us, “material play builds caring publics” (p. 568), and as such creative play is a material doing, not just a thinking. It is acting with caring agency and polite inquiry, even when such conversations and atmospheres remain absent from most educational and economic discussions.
Piccinini reminds us that humility is one gift of creative practice that can reunite us with other entities in our environments and ecologies. She reminds us that not only relationality, but attention to care and intimacy, can re-establish bonds broken historically through industrialization, colonization, and violence, as well as broken regularly through othering and domination. For Piccinini (2021),
the role that women play culturally as mothers and carers has put care on the wrong side of an important/not important dichotomy in our culture, yet care is what we need now, more than anything. What does it matter about profit, or even new technologies, if there is no planet to live on? When I make a big sculpture about care, I hope that I am saying that big sculptures don’t just have to be about important men in hats or on horseback. Maybe they can be about intimacy and care. (n.p.)
Care might provide a kind of creative glue that can re-attach us to ourselves, our companions, and our contexts. It may, as Mel Y. Chen (2012) says, encourage “opening to the senses of the world, receptivity, vulnerability” (p. 237). Care and creativity may not be obvious bedfellows, but like all well-matched lovers, they enhance one another and are interconnected in ways not always obvious at first glance. And like Natalie Loveless’ gesture toward love and ambivalence in our opening, we draw on psychologist and meditation master Tara Brach’s appreciation of Mark Nepo’s notion of “exquisite risk,” by reminding us that being vulnerable, and lovingly opening fully to life, is a creative act:
The shedding of a skin is like taking the exquisite risk. That every time we open up out of our familiar cocoon to contact a wider reality, to touch aliveness more fully, we’re taking the exquisite risk. I love it because “exquisite” connotes this kind of beauty and excellence and sensitivity and responsiveness. And risk? It’s exposure to danger and to loss. That we’re willing to let go of an old experience that gave us some measure of comfort or security or certainty, and exchange it for what’s unfamiliar and way more alive. (Brach, 2021, n.p.)
There is no more accurate description of living with creative humility. When creativity scholarship talks of “productive risk-taking,” it remains unsatisfyingly in the realm of use-value, but taking the exquisite risk of turning toward the new humbly, without any demand of product or productivity, offers the promise of being not only creative, but fully alive.
As we have noted elsewhere, “Knowledge can be helpful when it is useful. And as [Sara] Ahmed and others continue to remind us, disorientation is a powerful antidote to mastery, to surety and to colonising certitude” (Harris & Holman Jones, 2019, p. 128). Humility is required to undo the generations of colonization that continue to reverberate everywhere we care to see (and feel) it. We reconsider the agency of creativity as a force, an atmosphere, a movement, and we recommit to considering how these internal-external flows are our intentional jumping into the rush that carries us further toward a posthuman creativity studies.
We love the playful ways in which our previous work folds into this (evolving) manifesto, a “pebble, as onto the beach—ours and yours. We hope the intra-action brings you a delicious and productive disorientation” (Harris & Holman Jones 2019, p. 128). We hope too that the iterative nature of this manifesto will encourage you to take the “exquisite risk” of abandoning all need for protection from the unknowability of true creativity. Perhaps, like Haraway, this version of this manifesto can serve as a composting exercise. A tentacular network of all critters committed to “collecting up the trash of the Anthropocene . . . and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures” (Haraway, 2016, n.p.).
Piccinini has detailed the ways in which art and creativity reject binaries, but she adds “that genetic research fundamentally destroys the human/animal divide” too. The overarching theme that unites her current work, she claims, is “speculative optimism,” and that is an atmosphere we would like to leave readers with from this manifesto. Creativity—and this manifesto—continue to move, morph, and reinvent our/itselves through intra-actions and affective encounters. Creativity may, in the end, be more akin to an affect than an activity, more a relationship than an end-result. We hope in this version of a posthuman creativity studies manifesto, readers will find provocations toward a speculative optimism for creativity and also the planet. And we believe this manifesto to be true to the origins of the practice, offering up a striking gesture that calls us to do creativity studies differently, one that, in the words of Loveless (2019), “works to render each of us a little more capable, a little more care-filled, opening us onto new webs of sensorial attunement and nurturance” (p. 107). In this version of speculative optimism, we find hope, love, and possibility—the core creative skills that are perhaps less documented, but more sustainable.
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Biographies
Daniel Harris is a Vice Chancellor’s Principal Research Fellow at RMIT University, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, an Honorary Research Fellow at Nottingham University (UK), and Director of Creative Agency, a transdisciplinary research lab at RMIT University. Harris researches gender, creativity, and performance ethnography, is a native New Yorker and has worked professionally as a playwright, dramaturg, teaching artist and journalist in the USA and Australia.
Stacy Holman Jones Over the course of a 20-year career, Professor Stacy Holman Jones has developed an international reputation for leading the development of innovative arts-based methodologies, performance, feminist and cultural studies research, and gender and sexualities studies. She’s recognized for a collaborative and impact-focused research program that integrates theory and creative practice as a means of critique and transforming lives, relationships, ways of living, and communities.
Source: A Manifesto
