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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Vol 127! On the Propensity of Things...
Good morning, fields of becoming,
What a week! Now that it is spring, we have finally had a real snowfall. It is still something to behold. Perhaps fifteen centimeters – six inches. To be outside in the thick of a real snowfall is a wonderous thing. As it piles on the ground, you equally feel as one with the environment in a very particular manner.
Our weeklong green innovation and changemaking deep dive begins today, and we have been busy preparing. It is going to be a really special week with our international crew. We’ll begin in Central Park, spending our first day exploring, via museums and other activities, how “nature” is not a framework that we can take as universal. For us, ecological changemaking begins from a deep sensing that there is more than one world (and nature only plays a role in one of them) and that other worlds are possible—worlds without nature or even our logic of humanness...
But, going deep into that discussion is for another time… (and perhaps a future newsletter).
Being super busy has sadly meant fewer (almost none) LinkedIn posts. Our apologies; this is something we find deeply rewarding, especially the discussion. The outcome of all this work is a number of new projects. We have much great news to share about these upcoming programs and activities, but we are going to wait until the “i”s are crossed and the "t"s are dotted (as we like to say), which will be very soon – so stay tuned!
Last week, we were reframing agency in the creative process away from the individual and their ideas. Our example was the process of boiling an egg:
To boil an egg – one becomes subject to the process and all that this entails.
To “become subject to” a process is to allow the creative agency of the whole event/process to radically shape you. This concept of “the process shaping you” – e.g. creating you – e.g. having a creative role… is not meant as a metaphor or some vague new-age platitude. The process of attuning yourself to a kitchen and cooking – even something as “simple” as a boiled egg—means quite literally that certain muscles build differently, certain movements develop, and become second nature. Agility transforms. The total event of egg cookery is choreographing you. It is reconfiguring and recalibrating your sight, hearing, feeling, and smell into new possibilities and action loops. Nerves rewire, and even the expression of genes will vary.
But, all along, we imagine we are still the creative agents. We are responsible for whatever happens. That is the great illusion, and the great betrayal. Quoting from last week:
“While we clearly have a subjective sense of independent agency, this agency is an illusion. And an unhelpful one at that. There can be no agency apart from the action of a dynamic, active ecosystem. Agency is not an inherent feature or property of anyone or anything. There is no agency distinct from action, and no action distinct from a dynamic ecosystem. Agency is always the emergent product of ecological engagement.
The fundamental mistake the heroic approach to creativity is making is to see the world as passive and that humans are both above and outside of things, relations, processes, and events. Did metal have nothing to say in the creation of the pot? Did the self-organizing flows of crystallization of molten metal passively await an external and fully imposed process of forming it into the shape of a pot? What of the egg? What of the relational creative processes that allows it to congeal with the right application of heat?
This mistake of denying the agency of the event is an easy one to make when one approaches reality from the perspective of fully established patterns and outcomes. For one, the total process of making boiled eggs is well established. Making a boiled egg can feel like it is just a question of having an idea and then executing an established plan that will reliably give you a seemingly predetermined outcome. And from this conclusion, it is a short step to articulating all creative processes as: ideate, plan, and impose.
But this reading backward from the outcome of a highly formalized ecosystem and process as a way to understand how anything actually comes about is precisely what gives rise to this illusion of independent human agency and the impositional heroic model of creativity.
Creative processes and any useful understanding of them – must read the process forward. And to read the process forward is to start in the middle. It is to start not with the heroic author but with the relational dynamics of an ecosystem.
In the diagram below, this process of following the “middle” is represented by the light blue arrow of emergence—it comes out of the active relational dynamics of the whole and feeds back transformatively through each aspect of it—the assemblage, taskspace, the tools, the self, and the outcome (which itself loops back into the ecosystem):
Here is our question for this week: How do we stay in the middle? What is in the middle? And how do we become “of” creative processes such that we escape the illusion that we are the agents of it all?
The first way to understand the middle is via relations: Things are very much relational, and their possibilities emerge from and of a relation.
In our egg example: a pot is only a pot in relation to heat, what is in it, and a user. Then these relational dynamics as a whole affords certain possibilities. From the perspective of creativity, things are defined by their space of relational possibilities.
So, how do we stay in the middle? The first answer is “focus on the relations" —and how they determine the logic of what they are in relation to. E.g., the pot is a “pot” because of the dynamics of cooking—nothing more and nothing less.
This brings us immediately to what we left out last week: if one does not truly “read the process backwards,” then one never directly decides to make an egg.
Think about it, say you happen to be in a basic kitchen with a working stove, a pot, some water, and an egg, but you have never cooked an egg. Does this circumstance lead directly to a boiled egg? No, of course not! So, given these circumstances, how do we come to the boiled egg?
Is it that someone had to have the idea?
This is the default position for so many in the creative field: you can have all the pieces in place—the pots, water, stove, etc.—but by themselves, nothing will happen—someone has to come alone with an idea.
But are things by themselves mute? Does nothing really happen until someone comes along with an idea?
Now, of course, things are not going to gain an actual human voice any time soon and speak: “Make a boiled egg, goddammit!”
But things are not mute; they do speak; it is just a very different form of "speech.”
Before getting into what and how something might speak, we need to establish “who” is doing the speaking. The speaking is not coming from one object; it is not the pot that is speaking. What is speaking is the whole relational event. The speaking arises in the process of doing. The middle is speaking...
Obviously, it can sound strange to talk about processes like "speaking.”
So, what exactly do we mean when we say “that the process speaks”? Speaking here is a useful analogy for how the relational event (by which we mean the active assemblage of pot + stove + water + person + egg) has an agency that pulls one more in certain directions over others. Events whisper… Again, “whisper” conveys the sense that events have a propensity.
Speaking… pulling… favoring certain outcomes over others… whispering… = propensities…
Let's return to our kitchen: We have water, a pot, a stove, and an egg. In this example, envision that you are in the kitchen and have a basic familiarity with it. But your familiarity is nothing special, and you have never had an egg.
The “event” of this kitchen is "cooking," and cooking in this context is something that tends towards the application of heat (this is the propensity of the assemblage in the larger historical context). The process of heating is something that has already drawn you into its patterns over the years. You are, so to speak, already choreographed by its patterns and processes: cooking = heat. This pulling you towards heat and heating is a whispering of the event.
Now, in these circumstances: an egg is introduced.
What is it? You don't know.
So, you hit it. It cracks and oozes onto the counter. What a mess! You try tasting it, but it is not that appealing. Slimy with little flavor. (As a note: notice – you are mainly feeling; there are no big ideas here, you sense things: “it's messy,” “it's oozing,” “it’s slimy”...)
You have a hunch: perhaps heating will change it—the stove is calling to you—this is not you having a grand idea—a world changing idea! Just the embodied patterns of a historical dispositif/apparatus...
Your embodied habits are following it: filling a pot, putting it on the stove, and turning on the heat. It is not an idea, nor is it really “your” agency; this is just what you do as part of being of this historical approach to cooking.
It is worth noting: that at every step, relational dynamics are making certain directions more likely than others. At each step, emergent opportunities for action emerge: if water goes in a pot, what about the egg? So an egg goes into the pot.
The egg is in the water on the stove, and it is all getting hot.
What is happening in the egg?
You get curious, and a feeling arises: “Let's fish it out.”
You look around for something to do this—it takes a moment. But you find a spoon, and out it comes. It is very hot; your fingers are quick with their advice: let it cool!
But you are curious: what has happened inside this hard shell?
You whack it, just like before. Now what happens?
Now, any number of things could happen, depending on how long it was in the water.
How exactly it comes out does not matter for this story. Let’s just say: it is runny but cooked.
This means that something has happened by adding heat over some length of time. And you feel this upon opening the egg:
“Huh! That is different! It is more solid. And the taste is also different—more distinct.”
Excited, you try repeating the whole cooking process again. But this time you are not going into it blind; you are repeating the process, knowing that you “discovered” a process of transformation (from liquid to solid).
And this process of going from liquid to solid now pulls you towards cooking the egg longer (or shorter). Now, when you crack it, it does not ooze at all; the shell falls away, and the egg gives a little bounce.
“Huh!” You are drawn toward picking off the shell – you really have little choice. And soon in your hand is a messy, slightly fractured, disfigured, but whole cooked egg...
Let’s pause and step back: What has happened so far? We could diagram these experiments out as a simple two dimensional field diagram, with the X axis being temperature and the y being time:
You did three experiments. The first egg was cracked open at room temperature. Then we used water, more heat, and a bit more time. And the third experiment was roughly at the same temperature but for a longer time.
An oozing egg, a soft egg, and a hard egg—it is interesting. Something is happening, and you are getting a knack for experimenting with and of this assemblage. The whole process of experimentation has drawn you in.
Curious, you cook more eggs—many more eggs: longer, shorter, hotter, cooler, and everything in between, and a few somewhere else. Most experiments don’t succeed. But eventually, the possibility of endless potential variations seems to settle into a pattern:
You discover: the consistency of the egg does not change evenly: at certain temperatures and times, it qualitatively changes from runny to “soft” and from “soft” to "hard.” From your perspective, you feel quite proud: you have discovered the boiled egg!
BUT – here is the thing:
The moment that the egg was conjoined with water + pot + stove + heat – this virtual potentiality was there.
You did not invent the “hard boiled egg," even if you might have been the first to actualize one. The invention is not yours or anyone else's. The boiled egg is the virtual possibility of the total active assemblage:
If anything or anyone can claim to have invented the boiled egg – it has to be the assemblage – the middle of the assemblage!
We first introduced this concept of a “virtual field of potentiality” a couple of weeks ago in Volume 125:
When you hold together an assemblage in a certain relation dominant form the emergent process constrain the assemblage to move towards certain patterns over others. Another way of speaking about this is to say that the assemblage has certain “propensities” (The “virtual field” and the “propensities” are the same).
The assemblage of kitchen + pot + water + person + stove + pot + egg as a relational whole shaped by emergent processes has propensities that move towards certain ways of actualizing a cooked egg over others.
What is this “field”?
First, let’s be clear: The existence of this field is very much real, and we feel that this is why innovators often talk of “discovering” something more than creating it. When you joined the assemblage of kitchen + pot + water + egg, the virtual space of potentiality was already there; you did not invent the boiled egg, rather, you explored this virtual field via experiments in an open manner such that a certain form of egg cooking was "discovered.”
While we like this term, discovery – it can give a wholly wrong sense of what the virtual is. Discovery can conjure up the “age of discovery” when, for example, Polonesian voyagers sailed across the massive Pacific Ocean to discover pre-existent physical islands such as the Hawaiian Islands. That is discovery.
But, when you explore a virtual field of potential, it is nothing like sailing an actual sea and discovering pre-existing islands. The virtual field of potential does not exist in an analogous way to actual things. It does not have a location, and it is not separate from the emergent processes of the assemblage that gives rise to it. It is fully immanent to the assemblage. This means any change to the assemblage and the field will shift, potentially transform qualitatively, and potentially totally collapse. Working in the middle with the emergent virtual is very hard; nothing is given.
The virtual lives in and of the emergent non-linear relational dynamics of the assemblage. It is not some essence hidden deep in the egg, nor is it some transcendent, immaterial, unchanging universal truth about cooking (or anything else). No, the realm of the virtual is of this earth, and of the actual particularities of the assemblage – it lives in the very, very delicate middle. And this middle, like much of what is real (relations, constraints, emergent processes, etc.), is not a material thing – but a virtual potential (we went into this in more detail in Volume 125, and even earlier in Volumes 114, 115, and 116).
Much of what one is doing when experimenting with the virtual is stabilizing an assemblage into certain relational states. With our eggs, for example, we monitor the water temperature and the length of time we are cooking; we also might prick the “bottom” side of the egg, and upon removing the eggs, we might plunge them into an ice bath to halt the cooking process. We are involved in countless tasks of sensing, changing and stabilizing the relational whole of the assemblage via various changes in things, processes, tools, environments, etc.
This process of stabilizing is an attunement process of developing active feedback processes. Attunement means that we are changing ourselves and our senses (often via technological extensions) so that we can hear what the assemblage as a relational whole is telling us. Because of these transformations, we probe and identify expressive signs of meaningful transformations in the process. We are learning to listen. The process comes to speak more and more clearly.
In experimenting, we are moving backwards and forwards: on one hand, we are attuned to and caring for the assemblage: organizing, developing and stabilizing it in certain efficacious relations, then checking the experimental outcomes as cues to further potentialities, which are then looped back and used to adjust the assemblage.
This backwards and forwards dance is the dance of co-emergence and co-evolution of us, the assemblage, the field of potentials, and actual outcomes. It is a looping dynamic that involves us as embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive beings – not just as disembodied directors and ideators. We play a thousand small roles in tens of thousands of relational dynamics that develop propensities.
The great historian of science, Ian Hacking, had this to say about experiments in the sciences (but it equally holds true for our example of experimenting in your kitchen with an egg). He uses the term “phenomena” to describe the outcomes of experiments. And it is useful to think of our egg outcomes, such as a quasi-soft boiled egg, as a “phenomena” in his sense of the term:
“Most experiments don’t work most of the time. To ignore this fact is to forget what experimentation is doing. To experiment is to create, produce, refine and stabilize phenomena... But phenomena are hard to produce in any stable way. That is why I spoke of creating and not merely discovering phenomena. That is a long hard task. Or rather there are endless different tasks... Perhaps the real knack is getting to know when the experiment is working. That is one reason why observation, in the philosophy of science usage of the term, plays a relatively small role in experimental science.”
(From: Representing and Intervening).
It is a wonderful passage, with so much to dwell upon at length. But as a way to come to the conclusion of this newsletter, let’s focus on those last two sentences as they give us hints at an alternative image of the human role in creativity:
Perhaps the real knack is getting to know when the experiment is working. That is one reason why observation, in the philosophy of science usage of the term, plays a relatively small role in experimental science.”
How does one know one is on to something, when one is in the thick of the back and forth processes—"the"endless different tasks”?
Ian Hacking rules out the idea that the role of the creative individual is someone outside and merely observing, directing, and ideating:
“That is one reason why observation, in the philosophy of science usage of the term, plays a relatively small role in experimental science.”
Here, it is important to note that he is speaking as a researcher who is looking at what experimental scientists are actually doing (versus what they say they are doing).
His conclusion is that: “The real knack is getting to know when the experiment is working…”
It is very interesting that the focus of Hacking as a historian of scientific discovery – is not on the “discovery” or the moment of discovery. He concludes that this is far less important than “getting to know” (e.g., attuning oneself) or “when the experiment (as a whole) is working.”
He is referencing the work of the back and forth of co-shaping an assemblage such that it can give rise (eventually) to a stable novel phenomena (such that it creates new phenomena). This is what we need to focus on. And this is the play of the middle: working across the assemblage, the emergent field of possibilities, and the actual outcomes—and their looping towards variations and an expanded field of possibilities.
But, as we conclude—let us not forget—as he emphasizes—this whole system is a creative process—the phenomena—the outcomes are not just “out there” awaiting discovery—whether this is a soft boiled egg, a bacteria, or the solution to the German secret codes:
“That is why I spoke of creating…and not merely discovering phenomena...”
And again, it is critical to remember, no one individual is doing this creating; the agency lies with the dynamics of assemblage—an assemblage that incorporates humans and non-humans into a relational whole—and that is what is doing the creating.
Well, till next week, stay with the middle—hopefully a hugely enlarged and activated middle. And stay experimental—in the Ian Hacking sense of the term! Next week, we will go more into how to push your experiments further from this perspective.
Keep Your difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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