If creativity has anything to do with radical novelty. It is the enemy of knowability. Knowability compiles reality by sedimenting past experience into present generating habits. A habit is a synthesis of experience that confirms a pattern.
Its hallmark is predictability, the reflexive wager that things will always unfold in a certain way given consistent parameters, that the universe is dependably ordered. The patterns of habit enable us to navigate our environment. They respond to the unconscious organizational weight of our perceptions, produce the expectations that give us traction on complex situations, and draw boundaries of intelligibility which, depending on the specificities of the habit in question, can be as extensive or as claustrophobic as the operation of its synthesis. At their outermost limits, habits are fundamentally spatio-temporal operations, formed via deployment in the present of actualities extracted from
the past and, when anticipation is involved, an extrapolation of the past and the present it is instantiated in, into the future. They are therefore backward looking, and their logic is a comfortably linear one, in which past causes manifest present effects. Inside a habit, everything is ostensibly intelligible, because something like it has happened before. materials are limited to that which already exists. Although they can be seen as a specifically human characteristic, habits, abstractly understood, are composed on all levels of being, inorganic and organic, as well as psychological.
A habit is, therefore, not just something imposed on an already organised notion of reality, it organises reality in every instant, gathering diverse, heterogeneous elements together into a specific rhythm, a little piece of space-time, an object, a territory, a temporary fortification against the forces of the new. Habits may organise reality, but they are also inherently fragile, for there is always something that threatens to break them up. A weakness in security, a hole into the future. If they weren't, nothing would change. The absolutely unknowable perpetually threatens
to break habit and the source of unknowability lies in the temporality of the future. True novelty is synonymous with the unprecedented, the unrecognizable, and the sometimes catastrophically unpredictable. It always involves some level of risk. Grasping novelty in this way itself requires the shedding of a habit, the human tendency to anthropomorphise agency. Freed from this tendency to ascribe its operation to unique, intentional human agents, creativity appears as an impersonal force belonging to time. It is paradoxically identifiable by its unrecognizability, by that which it disrupts being unable to anticipate it.
Because it is coincident with the future, it's characteristic of novelty that it arrives before any qualitative judgement can be levelled. If the new is moralised, it's only so in retrospect, hence its inherent ambivalence, as a civilence, manifesting simultaneously as potential and as threat. Two kinds of forces in recent history serve to exemplify the amoral duplicity of the new. The forces of art and the forces of war. I'm out.