Austin Kleon

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Maps of scenius

The latest newsletter is about “scenius,” which I described in Show Your Work!:

There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.

You can read the rest of the letter here.

One fun part of putting this together was matching maps of scenius with maps of neurons in the brain.

Here’s how researchers Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich put it in their paper about how our social networks act as collective brains:

Innovations, large or small, do not require heroic geniuses any more than your thoughts hinge on a particular neuron. Rather, just as thoughts are an emergent property of neurons firing in our neural networks, innovations arise as an emergent consequence of our species’ psychology applied within our societies and social networks.

And I forgot to mention this in the letter, but it matches up nicely with the stuff Annie Murphy Paul writes in The Extended Mind about thinking outside of your head.

Filed under: scenius

To wonder rather than know

Mary Ruefle, in a wonderful conversation with David Naimon:

I would rather wonder than know. It makes it more and more difficult to be alive on earth in these times, when your inclination is to wonder rather than to know.

I suppose the example that comes to mind is: it used to be if you were having dinner with people and someone said, “Who’s the fastest animal on earth?” An amazing conversation would ensue. And now someone pops their phone out and looks up the answer. And it breaks my heart….

I really, really don’t like it when people look things up on their iPhones…. I mean, sometimes, of course, I’m no idiot. The encyclopedic nature of the information that’s available is fantastic, but I would still rather wonder than know.

I think wondering is a way of inhabiting and lingering. There seems to be more dwelling. To dwell, inhabit, and linger. I’m interested in those things. And you can do that when you don’t know.

We tend to, as human beings, our impulse is, once we know, once we have the answer, we move on. So we’re constantly moving from one thing to the other. I would rather inhabit the question, or dwell. For me, that is the place I want to live in.

I have an encyclopedia at home. It never occurred to me there was ever anything wrong with it until my friend pointed out it was an Encyclopedia Brittanica from 1910 and it might be a little outdated. I still look things up in it! […]

My oldest son used to ask me questions and when I said I didn’t know the answer, he’d say, “Look it up on the Goggle!” It takes discipline, now, not to look things up immediately, but to sit and wonder…

Then again, when you do look things up, you find more things to wonder about.

Collage is thinking on the page

For me, collage is the method that gets closest to depicting how I actually think on the page. (Next closest would be drawing, or, more specifically, comics, diagramming, mind-mapping, etc.) Writing, on the other hand, is conveying to others what I think on the page. There’s a difference.

So I was quite pleased when my friend Kio sent me this excerpt from Barbara Maria Stafford’s Visual Analogy: Consciousness As the Art of Connecting:

“Whether participating in a common outer life or making sense of the varieties of inner experience, understanding occurs as the consequence of an expenditure of psychic and physical energy compelling disparate things to converge. The in­betweenness of assemblage—those body­object amalgams composed of tossed scraps, found objects, organic and inorganic remnants—embodies this stunning spectrum of relocatable patterns available to human subjectivity. Collage, as the process of transforming ephemera by cutting and pasting them into momentarily stable configurations, continues to be a particularly effective technique for capturing the chimera of consciousness in action. We literally see how the brain organizes incoming visual stimuli by witnessing how perceptual organization begins by distinguishing salient features, to recombine bits and pieces and process them unequally in the mind’s eye.”

(Emphasis mine.)

On solitude, and being who you are

Jeff Tweedy mentioned this Dolly Parton philosophy in his memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Come Back):

Dolly Parton once said that her advice to anyone wanting to be an artist was to “Find out who you are and then be that on purpose.” Or something like that. As I’ve gotten older, those are the people I find myself drawn to work with and stay close to. People who have figured out who they are and are good at being that on purpose.”

Collage, the way I do it in my notebook, is the art of making connections between two seemingly unrelated things lying around. It’s a physical manifestation of the way I think. I made this one while listening to an interview with Cal Newport, who’s out there promoting his new one, Digital Minimalism.

Newport was talking about a definition of solitude he borrowed from the book Lead Yourself First: Solitude is “freedom from inputs from other minds.” (That’s not exactly how they put it in the book, but I like the word “freedom.”) According to the authors, Kethledge and Erwin, solitude is a “state of mind,” a spiritual condition, not necessarily a physical one. Here’s how Newport explains it in Digital Minimalism:

Many people mistakenly associate [solitude] with physical separation—requiring, perhaps, that you hike to a remote cabin miles from another human being. This flawed definition introduces a standard of isolation that can be impractical for most to satisfy on any sort of regular basis. As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.

So, under this definition, you can find solitude in a busy train car or a coffee shop, or wherever. I am slightly nervous about this re-definition (it seems to me that being truly alone has a ton of value), but I am also attracted to this idea that you don’t necessarily have to be alone to be with your thoughts, you just have to be free from input.

Pete Shotton, a long-time friend of John Lennon, once talked about how Lennon couldn’t bear to be left completely alone — he always wanted someone around, even while he was writing. He’d always have the TV on or a friend around. But they didn’t need to be interacting, really. Lennon just wanted to feel another body in the room.

I’m like this. I like to have somebody else around when I’m working. I especially like it when my six-year-old comes around and we “parallel play” — we work on our own things, across the studio from one another. (I also like to have other people in the room in the form of a book. When I’m stumped when writing, I pick up one of them and start reading.)

On the other hand, I’ve been experimenting with very ways of courting old-fashioned all-by-my-lonesome solitude in my own life. Meditating by the lake. Going for long walks without headphones. I’m not sure they’re valuable to me as productivity measures. How they’re valuable can’t necessarily be measured with any kind of output or progress. These practices don’t help me be with my thoughts, they help me get rid of them. They help me empty out, drain the anxiety and rage out of my head. (Demons hate fresh air.) They let me be in my body. Without thought.

If I want to have some thoughts or do something with them, I’ll head over to my bliss station.

Thinking, after all, is not just about pushing ideas around in your head. Writing and collage are ways of thinking by pushing ideas around on the page.

Sometimes I don’t even think I can think without seeing it on the page.

And sometimes I don’t know who I am until I’m down on the page.

Oh, there I am.

Like-minded vs. like-hearted


A reader sent me a note a few days ago remarking that while he didn’t share my politics, he felt he was able to really listen to what I have to say, rather than tuning out what he didn’t want to hear. He suspected it had to do with the creative spirit, the connection you feel with another person you know is trying their best to bring new, beautiful things into the world.

I immediately thought of my friend Alan Jacobs, who writes in his book, How To Think, that if you really want to explore ideas in an environment conducive to good thinking, you should consider hanging out with “people who are not so much like-minded as like-hearted,” people who are “temperamentally disposed to openness and have habits of listening.”

I loved this idea so much it was one of the first things I asked Alan about when I interviewed him last year at Bookpeople. Here is his full response:

You know what it’s like to be around people who share your core convictions… and yet you can’t stand to be around them. In one sense, they’re your “in” group, in another sense, it’s like, “When can I leave this party?” It can be stultifying. And it closes you off to spend all your time around people who may be like-minded, but whose spirit is unhealthy. They’re just not fun people to be around.

I started thinking about the fact that back when Twitter was more or less inhabitable by human beings (some years ago), I met a number of people on Twitter, including [you], and then at one point I decided it was just getting too poisonous, but I didn’t want to lose all those friends, so I made a private Twitter account.

There’s about 100 people there. When I was deciding who do I want to be talking with on social media, I realized it wasn’t necessarily the people who agreed with me about all of my religious beliefs or political beliefs. What I wanted was people who were generous. And kind. And caring. And thoughtful. So that when I said something, they would think about it, rather than just simply react.

That’s how I chose my company on social media. I chose to be around people whose disposition and whose character I found trustworthy. So that when I’m with them, I feel good about being in their presence. And I don’t always feel good about being in the presence of people who might, you know, if you made a list of 100 core beliefs, they might line up more, but they’re just not people I want to spend much time with.

I really think that matters. If you trust in the character and the generosity of people, one of the things you can do is you can take risks in your thinking a little bit. You can say, “Hey, I’m not sure about this, let me try this idea out on you.” You can count on them giving you an honest but also charitable response. If you can find a body of people like that… you’re incredibly blessed. It’s a fantastic thing to have. Not everybody has that. When you do have it, it not only makes you a happier person, I think it makes you a better thinker, as well.

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