What is a Configuration?

Configurations – or to give them their full conceptual terminology: Creative Enabling and Stabilizing Configurations – are the dynamic relational arrangement of components—tools, practices, environments, concepts, and beings—that gives rise to emergent properties and novel possibilities. Rather than a static structure, configuration describes the active, ongoing process by which diverse elements come together to create something qualitatively different from their sum.

In more technical terms, configuration operates as what Deleuze and Guattari call an “Abstract Machine”—abstract because it exists only in relations, machine because it coordinates discrete processes working together. It’s the configurational nothing that is simultaneously a relational something with profound creative power.

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Where Does the Term Configuration Come From?

The term comes from translations of Chinese and Japanese philosophical concepts (see Francois Jullien: The Propensity of Things, Dogen: Shobogenzo, Ames & Hall (trans): Dao De Jing). And the term is intended as a deliberate alternative to the widespread use of the term “Constraint” in the Complexity Sciences (for popular examples see Deacon: Incomplete Nature, and Juarrero: Context Changes Everything).

Configuration is the relational pattern that emerges when multiple components—whether material or immaterial—organize themselves into a coherent assemblage that exhibits its own agency and creative capacity. It describes how things, practices, environments, and concepts arrange themselves in ways that generate new possibilities for action, thought, and being. A configuration is not designed or controlled by any single element; instead, it emerges from the dynamic interactions between all participants.

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What Are Some Ways to Think of Configurations in Creativity?

Think of configuration as the invisible choreography that coordinates seemingly disparate elements into a creative whole. When yeast, grape juice, temperature, and time configure in a particular way, wine emerges—a transformation that is non-decomposable, non-additive, and non-proportional. The configuration itself becomes the creative agent, not any individual component.

Configuration possesses what we might call configurational agency—the capacity to shape and constrain the possibilities available to its components. This agency is neither mystical nor mechanical; it emerges from the relational dynamics between elements. As these relations stabilize into patterns, they create feedback loops that influence how each component can act and what it can become.

Configuration might also be understood as relational architecture—the dynamic structure of relationships that enables certain possibilities while constraining others. It’s the emergent logic of how things organize themselves when they come together in creative encounter. We could speak of it as the invisible infrastructure of creativity, the pattern that connects diverse elements into a coherent creative process.

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What Are the Features of Configurations?

Features of Configurations include:

• Dynamic Stability: Configurations maintain coherence while remaining open to change. They exhibit what systems theorists call “dynamic equilibrium”—stable enough to maintain identity, fluid enough to evolve.
• Non-Linear Causation: Small changes in configuration can produce dramatic shifts in what becomes possible. The addition of seemingly minor elements can qualitatively transform the entire assemblage.
• Emergent Properties: Configurations give rise to capabilities that cannot be predicted from examining individual components. The whole exhibits properties that are genuinely novel.
• Distributed Agency: No single element controls the configuration. Agency emerges from the relational dynamics between all participants.
• Feedforward Agency: The critical dynamic in creative processes where a novel configuration emerges that stands outside the cycles that produced it, yet exerts significant influence back on those originating systems without being substantially changed by them (Gary Tomlinson).

For creative practitioners, understanding configuration shifts focus from individual genius to ecosystemic creativity. Rather than asking “How can I be more creative?” we might ask “What configuration am I part of, and how might it be shifted to enable different possibilities?”
This perspective reveals creativity as fundamentally collaborative—not just between humans, but between humans, tools, environments, concepts, and practices. The creative process becomes a matter of caring for the configuration—attending to how elements relate and experimenting with new arrangements.

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Working with configuration requires developing sensitivity to relational propensities—the tendencies that emerge from particular arrangements. It means learning to read the emergent logic of assemblages and discovering how small perturbations might open new creative territories.
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Configuration reminds us that we are never creating alone. We are always already embedded in configurations that shape what we can think, feel, and make. The art lies not in transcending these configurations but in learning to work skillfully with their creative potential—becoming, as one might say, helpmates to the new rather than heroic creators.
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See also: Abstract Machine, Constraint, Relations, Emergence, System Causality