ON INNOVATION, EXOVATION, and GASES of IMAGINING
//* A PREFACE OR A START *//
INNOVATION is a dangerous thing. It takes all of the negative/negating practices of exclusion, apathy, over-consumption, exploitation, surveillance and policing, and hides them in pretty neutrals i.e. beiges, silicons, and 5% proceeds. Innovation often looks like goodness, like progress, and like a new and young and white HelpingHand. It acts like logic, which is not to say it acts logically. It is the newly encoded face of superficial care and superficial duty. It is a monolith and a momentum, a heterogeneous series of pseudo-humanistic drives that pass by largely unchecked, exhausting space and time and attention and funding and dreams in its wake.
It is misguided and misguiding, a vacation to nowhere with no vacancy for you.
BY ‘innovation’, I am invoking the managerial religion championed by Steve Jobs, the multimedia extravaganza of bullshit charity complexes, the data-surveillance nexus of government-business-social media, and the silent privileging of clean design over messy thought and care. And by invoking them here I look to call them out—as aggressors, as problems, and more generally as obstacles for any ethics or ethically-instantiated lifestyle that I would want for myself, for my loved ones, and for all of those people and things out there that I might come to love or trust one day.
BUT a dichotomy or moral truism of badness/goodness in terms of complicity/rejection of innovation as such can neither be adequate nor even helpful here. I am calling out aggregate problems and abstract aggressors, but I do not wish to attribute the same disgust I have for these ills to the folks who use the products, services, social cleansing agents, and tokens that I do not appreciate, and certainly not in one sweepingly platitudinous wag of a finger.
I do not want to introduce a new orthodoxy. I want us to cultivate a new hospitality.
IN other words, shaming folks for interpolating their bodies and embodied functions into neoliberal systems of innovative orthodoxy is not something I affectively look to do. Nor do I look to invalidate experiences within such systems that have given folks real pleasure and understanding, help and thought, or even just a site for such positivities to form. I do not want to raise my nose at folks who have (had) fewer privileges and fewer choices in terms of these systems, or folks who have (had) real eagerness in their hearts that happens to problematically conflict with what I want to see forming. I do not want to be lazily hierarchical or self-righteous.
I do not want to disdainfully reject or dismiss or invalidate anyone who saves up excitedly for an iPhone, or who buys a t-shirt advertising their aesthetic concern for a natural disaster, or who patents a $20 egg beater that looks like Gandhi. But nor do I like these things or the systems that have brought them about and/or profited from them. In fact, I am vehemently against appropriative quirk, commodified creativity and concern, and closed coding. I am sick of racism and sexism and classism and ableism and the of all the unnecessary blaming and shaming that has been naturalized in and by so many of things that I purchase, use, see, vote for, and— often times— still enjoy somehow. I am embarrassed and stifled by complicity, but I am also disillusioned with any attempt to impose my own binaries and exclusions and lazy denunciations. Rather than being self-indulgently embarrassed for others and distancing myself from confronting my own complicities, I want (us) to dig up the residual good still nesting and surviving in our confused little ethical skirmishes with the world around us. I want to become more open and decompressed and thoughtful, while also remaining fiercely critical of innovative orthodoxies (see part 1).
WHAT I am suggesting, then, is an injection into innovation rather than a futile, inaccessible, or self-righteous dismissal of it. This is not to say others’ insurrectionary mode(l)s are invalid. However, considering my own privileges and roles in enclaves of luxury, I believe that any rhetorical denial of my orientations as such would be quite farcical and bogus, not to mention stagnant and stifling.
An injection works from within rather than from outside or above; so too does my tainted yet-eager frame of thought.
I have taken to the name ‘Exovation’ to describe this injection, particularly because I enjoy how such a word is manufactured as a mutant tool against innovation, and not naturalized in its own right. It is not utopian or complete or an end phase, and its name recognizes this. As a linguistic term, Exovation also evokes an exteriorizing, expressive force that comes in direct opposition to the inwardly centralized processes of innovation, which privilege the privacy and productivity of certain makers and certain things over the generatively hospitable flows of open sourcing and open expression.
I like to ally ‘inconsequentiality’ and ‘decompression’ alongside this notion of “exovation” because of the ways in which ‘inconsequence’ is necessarily dissenting from the use, ease, and causal directionality of innovation and ‘decompression’ is necessarily concerned with the partial (non-cathartic) openings, releases, bursts, and unhingings of an ostensibly contained substance. This injection is in many ways like a vaporous vaccine, in that it may resemble a denatured or uncanny form of innovation, and may serve to render innovation less potent, absolutizing, stealthy, effective, efficient, clean, authoritative, legitimate, convincing &etc. My reasoning here is as follows: if we cannot extricate innovation as a toxic yet discrete organ from our social body, then perhaps we can inject some of its more problematic veins with ‘exovation’ and, in so doing, prompt innovation to release (through forces of decompression) some of the positive potentialities of hospitality that it has territorialized and rendered stagnant and/or harmful.
{In metaphor, then: ‘exovation’ is a playful and thoughtful injection for the purpose of deterritorializing some of the codes of living/lifestyle in the ludicrous pseudo-luxury of innovative impositions.}
{In practice: ‘exovation’ is an ever-emergent poetics of openness and dissent, leaks and embarrassments, spontaneity and hospitality; in other words, these six terms provide points of entry into a poetics of ‘ethical-inconsequentiality’.
AS I see it, ‘exovation’ is meant to be applied, cultivated, or accidentally found festering. It is a conceptual re/framing for the accumulated accidents, responses, and care somehow still hiding and surviving in the protocols of production and policing. It is a privileged rambling of data and a thoughtful fissuring of efficiency and cleanliness. It is the opening of narrative and the queering of causality and production. It is a dissenting decompression of design’s privileging of the functional and fiscal engineerings of ‘how’ over the imaginative and imprecise ethics of ‘why’ and ‘for whom’.
it is a shaking and sporadic start towards an ethically inclusive sprawl.
