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. 

What is a World?

Before we go much further, we have to answer the long-overdue question: what is a “world”? 

There are many beautiful ways this word is used in everyday speech: to speak about our planet, or to speak about civilizations (“the ancient world of Egypt”), or to speak of the skilled practices of a group (“the world of autobody repair”). And many others. How we are using the term is not any of these. 

First, and perhaps most importantly, a world is not a discrete thing. It is not an object, not even an excessively large one that you could point to. Nor is it a property – something someone could possess. But it is also not a nothing. If this all feels ambiguous and vague, that is because it is necessarily so – to reify it into the clear and distinct would be to lose touch with it.

The second important thing is not to lose sight of the fact that a “world” is always a world-in-the-making – it is an ongoing activity: worldmaking. And for this reason, “worlding” is perhaps a better way of presenting the concept of a “world” — as it emphasizes that a world is never static or fixed but always actively in-the-making, always a process. While "worlding" does sound odd, it is preferable to "world" precisely because it resists the impression that a world is a noun, a container, a given. 

A “world/worlding” is both the dynamic heterogeneous assemblages and the emergent “holistic” generally distinct way of being alive that is its emergent outcome. While this is holistic and has a very general consistency, that does not in any sense mean that a world is stable, static, singular, or closed. It is a dynamic meta-stable system that is co-evolving in an ongoing creative unfolding in incipient difference. Worlds emergently loop through the bio-geo-social.

We experience our “world” as our experience – what we directly sense, feel, know, and act upon – a “reality”. That reality is not “Reality” with a capital R – the idea that we could have “a view from nowhere” onto experience. Our reality is “a world” – and not “The World”. Such a directly experienced reality is very much real – and very much the emergent outcome of ongoing relational world-making processes.  

Our direct experience of a world-in-the-making is non-conceptual, pre-conceptual, and conceptual (both direct non-conceptual know-how and an abstracted and conceptualized “know-what”). Much of our experience (of a world) will always remain a-conceptual – it exists in the felt sense of how things are done that is simply non-conceptualizable. All thoughts, ideas, concepts, and practices necessarily depend upon this space of implicit–tacit lived “pre-understanding.” This pre-understanding hangs together in a holistic manner, giving rise to a felt sense of a life in flow. These Implicit sets of embodied practices that are of environments, ecologies, tools, practices, and mentalities (mindset), ground and support an emergent way of seeing, understanding, and engaging with reality. 

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).

Two final considerations:

The first one is in regards to scale. A world is astonishingly broad – the global west could be considered a world – in this way it is broader than a “culture” such as that of a distinct region or those that share a language. 

While we are profoundly and fully intimately “of” a worlding – no world is homogenous or singular – they are rift with contradictions and complications. Worlds are not walled off from each other – it is always more ambiguous, contradictory, blurry, mutable, and multiplicitious… 

While the contours of world can stay similar – the “west” in a real sense is a world/worlding that has existed for hundreds of years but the ontological quality of things has profoundly qualitatively changed such that we might be using the “same” concepts – human, tree, love, care, body, etc. as people in the west used a few hundred years ago – we are not talking about – or experiencing anything similar. What the human, a body, trees, love, and care have all qualitatively transformed in the ensuing years of on-going worlding. To cast our understanding back or across worlds leads to highly problematic anachronistic false understandings.

Worlding and worldmaking are two concepts closely related to two philosophical concepts: Ontology and Ontogenesis:

See: Ontology and Ontogenesis, Worldview, worldmaking for innovation.