Scenius: genius made corporate

I hadn't come across the word 'scenius' before but I definitely recognised the concept. See here: FT.com / Life & Arts - Lightning in a bottle. And here's the definition: "Eno coined the odd but apt word “scenius” to describe the unusual pockets of group creativity and invention that emerge in certain intellectual or artistic scenes: philosophers in 18th-century Scotland; Parisian artists and intellectuals in the 1920s. In Eno’s words, scenius is “the communal form of the concept of the genius.”". It's a concept related to something I've been advocating for a good while; that we need to have zones and times when diverse people can meet and exchange ideas and insights in a relaxed atmosphere. An apparently unproductive space can give rise to very productive outcomes; but you can't predict what they would be or when they would emerge. It's about obliquity, and I have been noticing and saying how some good stuff occurs when it's not on the agenda, it's an oblique outcome and as such you can't aim at it, you can only create the conditions for it to emerge (whatever it would be) if/when it might emerge. However, the point is that it almost certainly won't if you try to force 'it'.

My interest was given a practical bent by noticing how current university pursuit of efficiency and maximising 'productivity' means that people no longer have time (or feel they have the time, more to the point) to turn up at meeting places (common rooms, for example) and linger for 20 minutes and just 'share' with others. And yet it is those times that can be, in my observation, extraordinarily productive of new ideas, cross-pollination of ideas and insights. In our own college, one of the most interesting assessments we have recently come up with was born in a moment of free-wheeling idea exchange between various of us who don't teach in the the same streams of theology. Of course there needed to be some careful thinking and work to make it into a properly defined assessment, but the idea would not have occured without a moment of free association without a defined 'productive' agenda.

The article I referenced at the start is arguing that cities are mavens of creativity because they bring people together and create 'unproductive' spaces of intellectual and creative exchange.

In this light, perhaps we could see the problem with the Tower of Babylon (Gen 11) as the idea of setting up an artefact with a monomaniacal agenda which would exclude diversity and 'freewheeling' (and we know historically that the Mesopotamian civilisations did have mythical ideologies which emphasised the idea of 'work' (well, slavery, really) -contrariwise Genesis writes leisure -sabbath- into the picture, for example). That may be the point of the 'punishment': forced diversity and diaspora (echoing 'go forth and multiply; fill the earth ...'). Given that my reading of Genesis 2 would tend to indicate that God has an interest in cultural diversity and human freedom, it would seem to run with a theme going through Genesis 1-12: God wants humans all over the place being creative and diverse.