[This post is a preface to the Draft Enterprise Model post.]
As with my Résumé/Manifesto, the Draft Enterprise Model is an older piece of work (from June 2007) that I’d be just as happy never to see again; but I think it at least helps to give a more comprehensive impression of my background and intentions.
This one is especially useful because I managed to include more references and sources than I normally tend to. The way I like to work is to blaze ahead forming original ideas (I always learn something new when I write); then I go out looking for things other people have said that might support or contradict them.
But I usually don’t return to my old ideas: I consider them results that show me how I’m performing, what’s working well for me, what I might need to improve, etc. – the way athletes assess their performance. When I occasionally do return to old ideas, it’s usually with the same attitude that athletes review old game tapes. Reviewing past results helps reveal performance weaknesses (which might affect future work, not just a given piece); it helps me adjust my mental habits, composing rules and theories that I can master intuitively, applying them to different situations, going over them in my mind until I don’t have to think about them any more. Then the next time I find inspiration, I can blaze ahead again – generating new results – restarting the whole process.
At first glance this practice might seem too narrow-minded or disregarding – paying little attention to other people’s prior work – but that isn’t the case at all. I don’t just study my own past results, I study other people’s results just as carefully. The process oscillates between freedom and discipline, and even within the free mode it oscillates between freedom to create and freedom to discover. While I’m composing, I’m not encumbered by other people’s ideas; while I’m researching, I’m not encumbered by my own ideas. It’s all about seeing clearly what is actually in front of me.
I’ve done this for a long time now, deliberately trying to master the practice since 2002, and having used the method naively for as long as I can remember. Along the way it has introduced me to (and forced me to respect) a greater range of ideas than most people even realize exist. I don’t find any ideas that radically change my perspective or worldview: I’ve already seen life from all the angles. (I know I’m exaggerating, and I now that – like my statements the other day – this may seem like an immodest or arrogant thing to say. But I don’t think it’s bragging to call attention to an actual effort I’ve made. Other people have degrees and awards to speak for their labours; I’m compelled to be a little more vocal on my own behalf.) I became familiar with so many ideas because I spent the better part of a decade deliberately trying to prove myself wrong – every single day – and I was wholly devoted to that task, almost exclusively.
This approach isn’t pure skepticism; it is rather like what Carol Dweck describes as a “growth mindset,” or what Jacques Barzun calls (from a broader social and historical perspective), “spirited pessimism.” As historian Daniel Boorstin explains his own, similar attitude:
I am, then, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist. If our mission is
an endless search, how can we fail? In the short run, institutions and professions and even language keep us in the discouraging ruts. But in the long run the ruts wear away and adventuring amateurs reward us by a wonderful vagrancy into the unexpected.
That perfectly illustrates my intentions for Open Conceptual: it’s a kind of fluid enterprise that keeps streaming freely over all of the ruts, eroding, levelling, softening, redefining our conceptual landscape. Of course, it can’t just wash everything away; it remixes everything, rearranging and resolving, or as the kids say, “mashing-up” the structures and contours underlying the many diverse disciplines.
Now, it might seem that I’ve gone from ideas that were becoming clear in June to ideas that are even more ambiguous and vague; it might seem like the past two months have been counterproductive. But this is just another cycle of oscillation; this is another period of rearranging and resolving. Each time around, my reach grows broader, my appreciation grows deeper, my descriptions become more precise, my references become more suitable, and the overall organization becomes more intuitive – my creativity and discovery become more free.
But the way to cultivate freedom is not freedom itself, it is discipline. Over time, as familiarity and proficiency increase, generating capital in the form of knowledge and competence, it becomes prudent to invest that liquidity into something more solid: theory.
At some point (like the point I’ve reached within the past few months) it may become apparent that your basic attitudes and ideas aren’t going to change very much – you’ve already done enough work and research that it’s safe to settle into some kind of pattern or system. Or to put it more urgently, it’s inevitable that you will eventually settle – whether or not you do it explicitly and intentionally – so it’s a good idea to do it deliberately. This way you at least have something articulate to work with, which allows you to more effectively monitor and evaluate the results of your ideas.
More importantly, as work and ideas become more complex, there must be some way to organize and manage them – some kind of map or architecture to help you navigate it. And it’s objectiveness facilitates communication and conciliation with other people’s ideas. When two people with explicit theories find themselves disagreeing, they have more options than to merely “agree to disagree”: they can move levers, test variables, observe differences, and reformulate assumptions. (I’m not saying they will be able to reconcile their ideas – or that they’ll even try – but that a degree of articulation is a precondition for conciliation.)
Beyond this, having an articulate theory gives you a real commodity to market. And if they’re organized well enough – into coherent conceptual networks, or systems – they may acquire a kind of life of their own, sustaining themselves apart from your own intentions and efforts. We might consider this to be the ‘aim’ of any theory – to go from being, say, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to “Darwinism,” from Karl Marx’s economic theories to “Marxism,” etc.
That’s sort of what I’m trying to do here – but I’m not trying to create an ‘ism.’ Those have tended to be too closely identified with the creator’s personality (even though creators often try to disown the ism that bears their name). I only want to put together enough of a theory so it acquires a life of its own, so that it can become other people’s theory as well, so we can work collaboratively on it, building an investment that generates financial, educational, and social capital in self-sustaining and original ways.
I’m trying to approach theorizing as a business-like enterprise. The most important thing I can say about it is that the theory isn’t an end in itself, it isn’t a totally genuine attempt to compose a “true” theory of creativity. It is a way to study the creative, strategic, organizational, and administrative processes involved in a theorizing enterprise. It’s about mastering the practice of theory.
[Go to Draft Enterprise Model]
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