What is Configuration - or, Creative & Enabling Configurations?

‍At any and all moments reality is relational. We only find things in patterns, networks, fields and processes—nothing has any intrinsic wholly individual and independent identity or meaning. The relations that emerge between processes have agency in transformatively shaping their parts (which are also irreducible to the parts that gave rise to their emergent agency). In short, what matters is the configuration of configurations (see Emergence)

At every moment, everything is part of a dynamic system, and its full and total reality is determined by the emergent logic of the creative and enabling configuration. While this reality is often defined by the Complexity Sciences with the terms “constraint” or “enabling constraint,” neither of these adequately captures the inherent creative nature of the process (see “Constraint”). Rather, it is fundamentally a question of configuration—and what the specific configuration creates (via emergence) and then stabilizes a set of novel processes (the part that might be considered “enabled” and “constrained”). 

How might this come into play in our everyday creative practices?

1. First, we can concentrate our attention on the configurational logics of the concrete situation we find ourselves within. Our goal is to sense its logic, coherence, and current propensities: What are the creating-enabling configurations and their multiple stable propensities? 
2. This cannot be sensed abstractly by viewing things from a distance; it requires direct, active change-making engagement: experimental probing. And probing involves shifting configurations—adding and subtracting as well as changing intensities. 
3. Here we can block some key aspects of the process as part of probing. Remember, probing needs to be more active than just poking things. You cannot sense what a configuration is capable of without acting. This is the creative meaning of sense-making. Sense-making is a collaborative creative activity of making. Sensing, knowing, doing, and creating are of a piece. All knowledge, even well established knowledge, is “in the making” – things are far more dynamic and variable than we give them credit. It is embodied, felt, distributed, relational knowledge—a know-how that is slowly developing towards a “know-"what"—hunches, vague novel concepts and nascent novel ideas. 
4. One is moving from experimenting with configurations—the relational dynamics—and what they creatively enable as propensities and back to the configurations. And one is always experimenting with experimentally changing a double situation (configuration + propensities) and its effects (the consequences of its realized propensities). 

Here, the analogy to “surfing” is helpful to understanding the joining and experimenting with configurations as the fundamental practice of engaging with creative processes: 

Surfing is a creative act of making the “most” of the circumstances (propensities). Which is to say, as a surfer, one creatively makes the most of the configuration that gives rise to wave conditions and the propensities that this allows in dynamic relation to your body+skills+board etc. It is important to understand that “the most” is not a fixed limit. One is actively experimenting (probing) with changing these dynamic relations—it might be some combination of bodily capacities and skills plus the shape of the board and the techniques being developed in real time plus what conditions and location one is surfing, etc. Know-how emerges and stays within and of the context—it lives across your body-environment coupling. And it only slowly emerges into concepts. And at every moment qualitative novelty could contingently emerge to beckon—"pull"” one towards new suns...

Further Reading on Configuration (or, Creative & Enabling Configurations)

• Enabling Constraint
• Creativity is Less
• Vol 59 - Getting Constrained — Getting Creative
• Creativity: Constraints, Fields and Systems
• Creativity and Constraints
• Vol 88 - The Enabling Constraints of Creativity
• On Creativity, Constraints and Blocking
• On Constraints, Attractors and Creativity