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When we engage with things – when we do things – we meet a creative relational reality as neither objective nor subjective – it is neither fully separate from us (objectivity) nor is it reducible to us (subjectivity). Rather, we are of it – and it is better understood as what Veraeke and Mastropietro term “transjective”.
“What is relevant to an organism in its environment is never an entirely subjective or objective feature. Instead, it is transjective, arising through the interaction of the agent with the world. In other words, the organism enacts, and thereby brings forth, its own world of meaning and value.” (Jaeger et al)
An example: If you think about the crow story – our favorite one – where they are using an intersection with a traffic light to crack nuts. The reason that we humans do not see the intersection as affording nut-cracking possibilities is because it’s not relevant to us.
Relevance makes things show up for us in the way they show up. This happens because we are precarious, specifically embodied beings that always find ourselves in a concrete environment with some general active concern. For example, we are biking down the street – now that crack, bump, or pothole shows up as relevant and significant in a new and very real manner.
This is equally true for the crow. When they have a nut in their beaks, the world looks and feels different. Now the car shows up as relevant in a new way. Now the traffic lights show up in a new and relevant manner.
Relevance is created and realized by our exploratory actions in a context. Relevance is not something objective or subjective or pre-given. It comes into being via our embedded actions. Relevance – and from it, meaning – and from this, knowledge – is all a transjective creation of an engagement.
It is highly context sensitive. It is a fundamental form of our mundane everyday creativity. It’s a creativity you sense and see when you are in the thick of some activity – how you improvise in nursing your baby, cutting vegetables, or rushing across the street in the rain. Your elbow just turns inward to cradle your baby’s head. Your knife and wrist spontaneously change angles with the softness of an eggplant. Your feet find a unique purchase on the crack in the sidewalk to push off in a way you would never have considered – or noticed. A word comes out in a new way in the middle of a deep conversation…
It is a critical aspect of creativity that cannot happen outside of action – outside of engagement. To engage with this critical aspect of creativity requires that we do things. Which is why we love the axiom from John Cage that Bruce Mau articulates so well in his Incomplete Manifesto for Growth:
“BEGIN ANYWHERE.
John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.”
What matters is that we begin – we do something. We engage. But it is more than that: for creativity, we need to show up in a very unique manner: We need to “act like crows” – we show up with a nut in our beaks in an odd context (so to speak). And now novel things begin to happen – to become relevant.
Our creative lives involve relevance, invention, and, more importantly, creative relevance switching.
Think again of our crows – cars already had a relevance to them, perhaps in how cars skillfully killed creatures that they could then pick at and eat from the relative safety of the side of the road (the glories of roadkill). And the powerlines and traffic lights also had a relevance to the crows as safe places to perch and observe roads for roadkill. The move to cracking nuts involves an experimental creative activity of relevance switching: once the crow has a nut in its beak, now the stopping and starting of cars has a new and quite different emergent relational relevance – different qualities spontaneously emerge as relevant in the midst of this new event.
See Also: Affordances, Values, Enaction
Further Reading: Volume 221
