The Irony of Continuous Innovation

Laying around in the previous long-form blog from back in 2007 there’s a few articles I wrote on innovation.  Hindsight and time are powerful teachers, and some things that felt urgent at the time -in the great scheme of things- become irrelevant with time:  the difference between importance and urgence. There’s however a few topics that keep coming back, and we seem to never totally master, perhaps because they an ingredient of the very fabric of what makes us humans.

Wake to a new day striving for perfection knowing  it’s a battle you’ve already lost, but you have to go out there and fight it anyway. Innovation is one of those matters where many people have many things to say every day, never totally mastering it, and few are truly prepared to shed some light and make some progress in the field of ideas.

Just so that I  provide some context on the subjects I’ll be dealing with in subsequent and unevenly distributed posts in the coming months, here’s a mostly unadulterated  repost of my first attempt in talking about these matters.

Repost follows:

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I’ve posted about Lautréamont before, and how he perceived progress back in 1870, but really… that’s hardly an original thing to do, we could name quite a few others who have been inspired -oftentimes blinded in fascination- by the brilliance of his sayings.

It’s not without a great deal of irony that us technologists/artists/scientists/geeks turned entrepreneurs look back for inspiration in the great revolutionaries of our history when what we’re actually after all the time is gradual, creative destruction, an evolutionary approach to growth through mutation.

Ideally, continuous innovation, or innovation as a process instead of periodical big-bangs would be the perfect approach, to satisfy both a conservative sense of self-preservation and the imperious need for renewal we’re always trying to realise.

Professor VJ, in his great post “The Renewable Tradition – Part III” very evidently agrees with me when quoting Lautréamont, but he goes much farther to say :

As we sit at our Death Terminals and wait for the next big bang of creative potential to immerse ourselves in, we cannot help but wonder: “Is there another way out? Which way is out? This way? This? How do we move beyond the newness of a tradition typecast as being avant-garde but always trending toward the ‘innovative’?”

and he quotes:

Sukenick:

Innovation bears the same relation to the mainstream as does a concept car to a factory model. Or even better, a hot rod to the mass production version. The former comparison stresses the experimental aspect of innovative work; the latter stresses the excitement, the extra intensity, the pure thrill that comes with the riskiness of high stakes.

Rings so true to me. Professor VJ then goes on to try to identify patterns of possible innovation processes (though he doesn’t get to name them this way, or ellaborate on a systematic approach to identifying them)

In other words: remixologists who play with innovative genres are practicing forms of extreme writing. But here the term “innovation” also brings to mind other terms like “technocapitalism,” “market timing,” “fashion statement,” etc., in that the further you can push the envelope, the more entrepreneurial your writing gesture may be, especially in relation to the way one employs new media technologies that challenge the concept of writing to its core. Could it be that the degree one is more likely to find ways to create measurable value to their embodied praxis using new media technologies is directly correlated to the more attracted they will become to the latest innovations being invented in the commercial marketplace?

In the end he leaves us without a clear conclusion, apparently without venturing to offer an opinion, or definitive statement of any kind… which nevertheless still works well for me as some food for thought. So he borrows Suckeniks voice again to say:

Obviously there’s no progress in art. Progress toward what? The avant-garde is a convenient propaganda device, but when it wins the war everything is avant-garde, which leaves us just about where we were before.

There’s no progress in art. There’s no progress in its implementation techniques.

That’s the field of technology. All art has always been preceded by some form of technological advance.

But art is not the same thing as ideas. Art is one possible form of implementation of someone’s ideas, so let me say it:

There can be progress in the field of ideas.

This “remixology” Professor VJ talks about works its magic at implementation level, taking elements from disparate works of art.

But borrowing elements of art, is not the same thing as borrowing the ideas that drove someone to create them.

You could end up borrowing the symbol, but not the context that gives it a meaning… or giving it another meaning entirely.

I’m going well out of bounds there, but interestingly semiotics is one field where the Situationists felt at home (another “revolution”)

And guess who did the Situationists quote ? Well, Debord referred to Lautréamont too, of course.

Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed. Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.

…

Lautréamont advanced so far in this direction that he is still partly misunderstood even by his most ostentatious admirers. In spite of his obvious application of this method to theoretical language in Poésies (drawing particularly on the ethical maxims of Pascal and Vauvenargues) where Lautréamont strives to reduce the argument, through successive concentrations, to maxims alone–a certain Viroux caused considerable astonishment three or four years ago by demonstrating conclusively that Maldoror is one vast detournement of Buffon and other works of natural history, among other things. That the prosaists of Figaro, such as this Viroux himself, were able to see this as a justification for disparaging Lautreamont, and that others believed they had to defend him by praising his insolence, only testifies to the intellectual debility of these two camps of dotards in courtly combat with each other. A slogan like “Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it” is still as poorly understood, and for the same reasons, as the famous phrase about the poetry that “must be made by all.”

Apart from Lautréamont’s work–whose appearance so far ahead of its time has to a great extent preserved it from a precise critique–the tendencies toward detournement that can be observed in contemporary expression are for the most part unconscious or incidental; and it is in the advertising industry, more than in a decaying aesthetic production, that one can find the best examples.

So how do we stop awaiting for innovation to happen unconsciously, incidentally, publicitarianly ?

Nurture and embrace continuous innovation, instead of mere decaying aesthetic production.

The irony is that, again… we will find some clues on how to achieve the holy grail of evolutionary development in the works of revolutionaries like Lautréamont and the Situationists.