Let’s imagine that real innovation comes at the cost of the individual. Or it at least involves a temporary destruction of what most defines the individual: the individual ego, or what we ordinarily call identity.
Let me explain.
First of all, word of warning: if you are not interested in, or at least curious about, the challenges involved in being an innovator, please do not continue reading. At best, what remains will bore you to tears. At worst, it will make you feel crappy.
And let’s say, for argument sake, that an individual is a self who has assumed a role, and that role is specific to the context in which that self finds itself. In other words, we are brought into this world, are socialized into accepting particular beliefs, sets of values, languages, and other conventional modes of behavior. Before we even begin to have the tools to ask ourselves what it is we might want, we have a multitude of rules we need to begin to follow, assumptions we need to begin to hold, and so forth. We need to know that we defecate in one particular place rather than another, and that some things are okay to eat, while others are not, and with good reason. Hence, the individual.
The individual is a fictional persona – the gloved hand, not the hand itself. Perhaps there is never a hand without a glove, and no one glove that it wears for every context, but many. We all know how become different people in different contexts, how our friends bring out a different person than our boss does, and how our spouses and lovers, perhaps our most intimate friends, may bring out a most vulnerable, perhaps most true likeness to whom we feel we really are.
But even that self, the most intimate and credible of all selves or collections of selves, is in part a construct of our language and the social conventions we integrated, most unconsciously, throughout our entire lives.
These roles we occupy, mostly unaware, are no more real than the characters of a Harry Potter story, or Madame Bovary. Yet we take them for real, even create a sense of consistency that blinds us to the fact that we are these many things, not one, and this blur around them we generate in order to do so, we make into an imaginary skin that holds the whole thing together.
What more, some of the social conventions we have accommodated, have tattooed into the fabric of who we take as ourselves at our very core, are assumptions regarding the production and consumption of goods and services in our community, everything from the economics of paying for our sins, to how we go about seeking retribution or payment for the work we are hired for.
A person who innovates is a person who, conscious or not, will break from the default construct, and form fictional selves that are, at least at the outset, perhaps a bit absurd, irrational, in the context one has come into being within. That person has found new reasons for doing things, and to some degree, a different reason for living. She has found a line of flight.
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.
—Wallace Stevens from The Man with the Blue Guitar
To be continued…