Non-binary possibilities of creative agency

Abstract

In this short essay I draw on the works of Maxine Greene, Donna Haraway and Anna Craft to reject traditional dualisms and binaries, in favour of proposing a possibility studies that is driven by an activist creative agency, in which thinking and doing are entangled and activated across multispecies contexts, and across multiple temporalities. I call readers to action in living potentially harder but more fulfilling, interconnected and sustainable lives and work, as these three philosophers do, through an emergent possibility studies with the ability to radically change education, scholarship and research, through ‘wide-awake’ hearts, minds and relationships.

‘Difficulties will be created everywhere, and the arts and humanities will come into their own’ (Greene, 1977, p. 124).

In her essay ‘Toward Wide-Awakeness: An Argument for the Arts and Humanities in Education’ (Greene, 1977), Maxine Greene talks about making life harder, not easier, as a goal for educators and philosophers. Now, nearly 50 years later, I imagine an emergent possibility studies as one which is productively entangled within trans-disciplines, multi-species, non-binary orientations, actions and dreams. Making things harder is not an ordinary goal of either education or academic research, or the thought-creation most scholars and public intellectuals say we are concerned with. But making-harder offers many opportunities, among them the potential to explore more sustainable, empathic and creative ways forward rather than the ameliorating, consuming obsessions with which most so-called progress is concerned today. Through this perplexing lens of Greene’s and my own, I see possibility studies as never more urgently needed than today.

Like the veracity of infinite non-binary and transgender spectrums, making things ‘harder’ might require more struggle, but reflect more the truth of existence than convenient foreclosures. As Barad (2012) has repeatedly shown through a feminist physics and philosophical lens, nature itself is far more queer than humans have been willing to recognise. The last half of the previous century and the first two decades of this one have shown us in unmistakeable ways that what appears to be progress is often a utopian fantasy. In practical terms, possibility and fantasy are rarely the same.

Glăveanu reminds us in his manifesto editorial here – evoking both Wijnberg (2019) and Dickens (1859) – that we are perhaps (once again) living in both the best of times and the worst of times; a season of both light and darkness; an age of wisdom and foolishness. Possibility thinking has always been needed. One only has to think about post-war Europe to see that future orientedness has always been required in moving forward. What distinguishes our time, perhaps, is an emerging global community in which the determinants of that future lay somewhat (if not firmly) within our hands. Whether humans and our compan species choose to take up the mantle that has, in prior epochs been relegated to deities, for example, remains to be seen. But certainly the human conversation reflects a growing awareness of unprecedented agency in our ability to sustain or destroy the earth and its inhabitants.

The enduring possibility of lived experience is that we feel, think and encounter opposites and conflicting tensions, which are nevertheless not necessarily binaries or dualisms. The very definition of the word ambivalence describes this presence of conflicting views or desires at the same time. From Rousseau’s (increasingly challenged) nature ‘versus’ culture dualisms (in Bardina, 2017), to Haraway’s (2003) natureculure refusal of that binary to lead us into more-than-human composting (rather than posthuman) expansiveness, this exciting new journal makes yet more space for thinking with the more-than as an activist act rather than a utopian dream. As Haraway’s rejection of the ‘post’ in posthumanism leads us to the speculative possibilities of composting, we too can feel that by attuning to the composting nature of natureculture, possibilities for emergence and regeneration become limitless and self-seeding. Haraway (2016) has now famously rejected the concept of posthumanism and has turned instead to what she calls the need for a ‘compost society’ in which the human/animal divide is anachronistic. Instead, she suggests humus and composting or compostist as a more accurate orientation to becoming-with processes in nature and culture.

In the next section, I link Haraway’s composting to Maxine Greene’s notions of wide-awakeness and ‘what if?’ inherent in philosophy and creativity studies. In section three, by using ‘possibilities of kinship’ to move beyond the ‘post theories’, I explore how possibility studies might offer a way forward that is neither utopian nor dualistic. Lastly, I draw on the scholarship of Anna Craft to imagine creative agency as the engine to an activist possibility studies.

Maxine Greene’s ‘what if?’…

Similarly, a turn to Maxine Greene’s notion of ‘aesthetic education’ has potential for new ways of thinking with – and about – possibility in our times. Greene urges us to conduct artistic and educational work in much the same way we encounter other people: with openness, with curiosity, just the same whether that is a colleague, a friend, a student, or an artwork. She calls this ‘the readiness for fresh illumination, in the willingness to see something, to risk something unexpected and new’, (Greene, 2001, pp. 53–54), but it’s also a way of life. After all, Greene was not just an educator, but a philosopher too.

Part of Greene’s legacy is the reminder that commitment to education is more than just a belief in schooling. Education is a process of seeing anew, of remaining open in our encounters with one another, of recognising the change potential in each one of us, and our endeavours. In short, it is an openness to possibility, and indeed to the potential of possibility studies. In my community – the Creative Agency research lab at the School of Education, RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia – the words of Greene are alive and well through our commitment to aesthetic education not limited to arts alone, but to this kind of interpersonal openness, curiosity, relational creativity and newness.

For those of us using Greene’s work here in the global south, we have an advantage perhaps as we are so often required to translate or transpose her perspectives into a non-Euro/American, non-dominant national context. Here in Australia, we draw on our forebears from our own region in East Asia and our Indigenous Australian elders, as well as our Euro-American ancestors, when we approach the needs of open and compassionate, curious and creative education, research and scholarship for the 21st century. We pay attention – as Greene (2001) did, and as our possibility studies colleagues do – to ‘perception, cognition, affect, and the imagination as ways of knowing’ (p. 3). And central to possibility studies is the question explored by Greene, Anna Craft and other arts educators and creativity scholars, the ever-generative ‘What if?’. What better speculation to form the basis of research and scholarship in a 21st century field of creativity and possibility studies?

Greene’s concept of wide-awakeness is also deeply resonant with the idea of possibility studies. Her commitment to critical awareness and an aesthetic education embedded in – and emerging from, always in relation to and entanglement with – the world, is at the heart of what feels deeply alive to me in her teachings. No matter who we are, where we are living and working, Greene understood and helps us understand that through deep attention to difference, we can find allyship. I use the term ‘creative agency’ to activate Greene’s wide-awakeness and her commitment to non-binary understandings of creative relationality. Creativity is inherent in all that I do, it is not a practice separate from my core work as a performer, writer, educator, researcher, human being. Life is infinitely creative, always aesthetic. But it’s not a passive kind beauty that is about appreciation from a distance – that is about creative pursuits as activities outside of everyday life. For me, and I believe for Greene, creative agency is a kind of attunement – a noticing, a wide-awakeness that helps us to be present, be activated and alive, be acutely responsive to the events, conditions and relationships that emerge as we move through the world.

Where Wyatt (2018) and Massumi (2015) write about the creative-relational at work in all becoming-with that constitutes human and more than human life, Maxine Greene urges us toward more future-oriented imaginings, not unlike the queer futurities of Muñoz (2019) and Rousseau’s utopian education which seeks to reconcile nature and culture too (Bardina, 2017). Munoz, like Greene, focuses not so much on achievability but more on possibility, a utopia of queerness or perfection or arrival or even awakeness that is already here, but always emerging at the same time. Through a lens of the utopian, these philosophers suggest, the project might return to the doingness of rejection, of evolution, of becoming, rather than the foreclosure and boundedness of arrival.

Greene pushed to break through binaries (and all separations) between disciplines, and saw this as only possible through relational encounter: ‘If the humanities are indeed oriented to wide-awakeness, if dialogue and encounter are encouraged at every point, it might be possible to break through the artificial separations that make interdisciplinary study so difficult to achieve’ (Greene, 1977, p. 123). From the macro down through the micro of our work as scholars, from disciplinary territorialism to epistemological diversities, change (unlocking the possibilities within) requires hard, sustained and respectful dialogue and deep listening.

Like Thoreau and Kierkegaard, from whom she draws, Greene (1977) argues for a wide-awakeness that ‘has a concreteness; it is related…to being in the world’ ( p. 121), a kind of ‘full attention to life’ (p. 121) that any true critical education and critical theory demands. Wide-awakeness can be understood as a ‘heightened sense of consciousness encouraging critical awareness and deep engagement with one’s world. As individuals come alive in this way, their open-minded exploration is fueled by their development of personal agency and self-worth through their pursuit of presentness and possibility’ (Williams, 2017, p. 15). Personal agency is always creative in its emergence. Presentness, too, can be understood as a form of possibility, in which the possible is both utopian (future) and practical (present).

Remember that across the multiple ways in which Greene defined aesthetic education, quality arts experiences were at the centre of what she taught to teachers from around the US in the Lincoln Centre Institute’s 25 years of summer sessions. That is not incidental. When I have written and spoken previously with members of the Young Playwrights’ Festival, which thrived in NYC for 30 years until recently, under the instigation and guidance of Stephen Sondheim, we have noted that the context of NYC and its arts-rich culture is a central part of the experience. It matters. So too with Greene, that her notions of aesthetic education and wide-awakeness can only be achieved hand in hand with experiences of arts rich education, a kind of educational experience still under threat. Possibility studies is no different: the conditions must be nurtured for thinking, feeling and encounter where the possible is possible. This does not happen by chance, but rather by concerted and sustained effort.

Haraway’s possibilities of kinship, not the ‘posts’ of before/after

While Greene was solidly humanist in orientation, Donna Haraway offers differently expansive possibilities for allyship, kinship and working-with in the pursuit of creative relationality and agency. Haraway has repeated her rejection of ‘posthumanism’ and other binarised views of ecological solidarity which might contribute to a basis for an emergent possibility studies. If difference, as noted by Glăveanu, is inevitable, while binaries are not, then Haraway is helpful in considering the ways in which possibility might be the both/and of the ‘not yet’ and also the ‘already’.

Like both Greene and Munoz, Haraway cautions us again distraction by imagined utopian futures whose promises take us away from the urgent work of the present moment:

In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past….

This is a kind of aversive attention to ‘the possible’ that binarises it against the present, and in some cases, against the past. This, for Haraway and the others, would be a mistake. Not because improvement is not possible, or because disaster is not equally so. But because it takes the work outside of this moment, therefore draining the ‘possibility’ of this moment which exists, into a potential other moment that does not yet – and may never – exist.

It may be related to Haraway’s (2016) notion of the Chthulucene, itself a kind of queer utopia in which the mutual entanglement between multispecies is finally seen as a strength rather than an unavoidable concession to planetary threat. The Chthulucene is a kind of creative relational ecology, or at least an acknowledgement of that – a call to recognition, and action with that at its centre. For Haraway, ‘the Chthulucene is first of all tentacular multi-temple, multi-spatial, past present and yet to come…’ (Haraway & Tsing, 2015, 19:48). In describing multispecies ethnography in the Chthulucene epoch, Anna Tsing asks us to think in new ways about ‘liveability without the “capital P” progress charting our way’ (Haraway & Tsing, 2015, 11:10). In this context, any work that draws attention to the creative, non-binary nature of natureculture constitutes an emergent activist possibility studies, in its resistance to the late capitalist imperatives in which we live and to which we remain mostly enslaved.

Possibility thinking and creative agency

So what might an activist possibility studies imagine?

The creativity education scholar Craft (1999b) was one who drew our attention to possibility thinking before the turn of the 21st century through her attention to extending Maxine Greene’s question ‘what if?’. Craft (1999a) proposed ‘possibility thinking as involving two elements: first, not allowing problems or circumstances to block action, but finding ways around problems’ (p. 19), and importantly she tied this to both disposition and skill. An activist possibility studies in the contemporary academy also requires both disposition and action, and might be seen most obviously in transdisciplinary research. Unlike the still-separate project of ‘interdisciplinary’ work, transdisciplinary requires possibility and perspective-taking. Transdisciplinary does not mean one end of a spectrum encountering or moving across to another fixed end or position; transdisciplinary encourages entanglement, enmeshment, blurring of lines – just as the true expansiveness of transgender does (encompassing non-binary subjectivities). Craft (1999a) saw possibility thinking as the ‘engine of creativity’ (p. 19). I see creativity as the engine for a 21st century possibility studies, an entanglement that reclaims creativity from productivity, commodification and the kind of relentless and irresponsible ‘progress’ that Haraway and Tsing ask us to reject.

Craft highlighted the deep interconnectedness between body, mind and spirit in both the teaching/research of creativity and in making this work sustainable for the teacher/researcher/practitioner. That is, without creative self-care, fostering creativity is not possible. For Craft (1999a), this multi-level, multi-pronged work provides an irreplaceable part of ‘the context in which creativity as agency, or possibility thinking as disposition and skill, inspiration and action, is fostered’ (p. 21). From this perspective, possibility studies is driven by an activist creative agency, in which thinking and doing are entangled and activated across multispecies contexts, and across multiple temporalities. I have called readers to action in a recent creative agency manifesto which asserts ‘that creativity has its own life and agency, and must be released back into the wild, and its cage of use-value discarded’ (Harris, 2021, p. 174). If we are indeed living the value of the harder not easier, as Greene invited us to do, I have one wish for an emergent possibility studies: to assist with moving from our tranquilising consumerist heads, toward the complex but interconnected possibility of our hearts.

By taking up Maxine Greene’s call to rethink the ‘easy life’, possibility studies might help to reconsider the ways in which use value is tied to consumption, resolution and commodification. This essay has suggested some lines of thought from Greene, Haraway, Munoz and Craft that might provide ways of rethinking connection, lives worth living and stewardship. This and other critical possibility projects must first eschew outmoded dualisms, including binary orientations that serve to sustain alienation, marginalisation and death-making disregard. The act of intentional ‘making-harder’ offers many opportunities, among them the potential to explore more sustainable, empathic and creative ways forward rather than the ameliorating, consuming obsessions with which most so-called progress is concerned today.