Definition of Worlding

What is Worlding?

Synonym for world making.

In the modern west a consensus has developed across the sciences that humans are deep down the same the world over — we all have the same essence and needs— we all have the same unchanging essence. And that while we are differing culturally, this is only in how we “view” the same unchanging reality or world. 

The problem with any model that assumes we are all deep down the same — is that it cannot come to terms with actual differences – and from the perspective of creativity, it cannot come to terms with new emergent qualitative difference. For example, such an essentialist perspective would explain a culture that holds that rivers and mountains are also people as either “superstitions” (e.g. mere “beliefs” to be overcome), or as elaborate “metaphors” that are not meant in any literal sense. What such a perspective misses is that the unique practices, forms of embodiment, concepts, tools, habits, and environments that are part of this way of being gives rise to more than a unique way of seeing – they give rise to an ontologically unique world. We call this assemblage a world (here the concept of affordance is critical).

We should not conflate worlds with “worldviews." Nor should we conflate reality with worlds. To do so is to confuse change-in-degree with change-in-kind – and to reduce creativity to mere variation. It is impossible to engage with qualitative change (fully half of creativity) if we do not have a model of difference that is willing to recognize difference in kind and not just in degree. Any and all forms of universalizing creativity or design practices are ones that ultimately do not adequately come to terms with difference in kind.

Other worlds exist, and yet other worlds are possible. 

A world is:

• A specific relational way of being alive (an assemblage) that gives rise to implicit and explicit practices, concepts, and environments that shape who we are, how we act, and how we sense and know. 
• Ongoing relational processes that give rise to our most basic concepts, and practices via emergence. 
• The assemblage is an ecology of relations between humans and non-humans that generate what the anthropologist Philippe Descola calls ‘schemas’ – or  “deeply internalized…cognitive and corporeal templates that govern the expression of an ethos."
• Our daily actions in specific environments with specific tools (physical and conceptual) make and remake a world. In this way, a world is not reducible to a “worldview." We call this process “worldmaking” and the outcome a “world” (a word of caution, it is easy to speak of outcomes — but worlds are not static — worlds are always worlds-in-the-making (e.g. “worlding”).
• Most of what makes up a world cannot be fully explicated or reduced to abstractions. Most of what makes up a world are practices that involve specific bodies in specific environments doing specific things
• Worlds are not cultures — or at least not in the modernist sense of the term. 
• Neither is a world a mindset — a worldview. This puts far too much emphasis on ideas, subjectivities, and the mental. 
• Nor is it a paradigm — it is more general, ecological, and more generative.
• Ultimately, it is profoundly hard to recognize that we have a world for we are so “of” our world (and not simply “in” it).

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For more, Worldview, worldmaking for innovation.