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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 179! Sympathy Is the New Empathy...
Good morning resonant attunements of encounters,
This week, we are writing early in the week as we are about to begin a week-long intensive on green worldmaking. As you open this email, the full moon will still be up in the early morning sky and we will be grabbing a coffee somewhere on the edge of Central Park with a very international cohort of forty changemakers about to kick things into high gear.
The challenge for creativity is always this immensely difficult issue of, “How do we sense the new?” Over the last four weeks, we have explored and detailed the complexity of this challenge from many different angles. As we have outlined it there are four main challenges:
This puts us all in quite a challenging situation – to say the least! But, it is not that we are in a hopeless situation. There is much that is very practical that we can do once we fully recognize the situation for what it really is.
In last week’s newsletter we listed things we can both do – and equally importantly not do – that will help us to be receptive to sensing the new. Let’s remind ourselves of what these are. We have edited these and distilled them further:
Start by remembering that our minds were never locked in the head – they have always been out in the world:
But the challenge remains – yes, we can give up on seeing ourselves as the source, put aside brainstorming, and we can push, poke, and perturbate things – but is this by itself enough to sense the new – the aberrant?
It isn’t, – if we are not changing how we feel and sense itself. Our contention is that we can only sense the new in the experience of being “pulled” by the new.
Our modern subjectivity (Cartesian Subjectivity) is one of having a subjective experience of sensing that we (in here) sense what is “out there.” We are active and the “stuff” out there is passive – awaiting our gaze and action:
With this sensibility, there is a clear divide between the active and the passive, the subject and object, and the human and world. But we need to radically change that very very basic feeling. We need to feel the pull of things. Not simply that the world “out there” is dynamic – but rather that it is active. And further, we need to feel this as the pull of an ongoing encounter – rather than an internal subject confronting an external world. In this, we are shifting how we feel about the world around us from something we are just “in” – to an ongoing event that we are “of.”
Here we are not talking about having an intellectual understanding of this – which is also relevant (and easier to achieve). But if we have not transformed our basic aesthetic sensorium towards being alive in an active world that is pulling us into futures dynamically – then sensing the new will always allude us. If we are the sole authors of our experience, our actions, and our thoughts and the world is merely a backdrop – the stage to strut and fret upon – then we will never sense the new – for it begins in the pull of encounters that begin far beyond the self.
The term, and more importantly, the feeling of being “pulled” is critical to sensing the new. When we feel how we are being pulled by an experience we can feel that the activity is not coming from us but “elsewhere.” It is also not coming from one discreet thing “out there.” And it is also not not coming from us – we are part of “it.” The “event” – the totality of the experience is what is pulling us. Surfing provides a great study of this experience: you are being pulled to join with a wave. And to surf is to feel this pull. It involves a participative resonance with what is “in the making” – and very just “out there.”
While surfing is an exemplary experience of feeling pulled by life-in-the-making, we are always being pulled – this experience is not unique to creative practices. Habits and practices are always pulling us – the issue is feeling it as that.
The smell of the coffee pulls attention to reach out towards it, and the cup elicits grasping – to feel this as our experience…
The opportunities for action that fill our world pull us (affordances). They are continuously pulling us forward into already ongoing actions. And from one action to another in an ever-ongoing flow of living. And this is experienced at all times as a form of non-conscious bodily sensing. Being pulled is a fundamental part of being alive.
To be “pulled” is to feel. We are feeling and responding to these pulls all the time at a non-conscious level (sense-making).
Now, the challenge here is that it is easy to equate “feeling” with emotions and even empathy as it is generally defined. While the emotions often accompany these non-conscious feelings – they are not the same.
Experiencing the emotional state of boredom, for example, might accompany a creative experience where you are not being pulled into action by the habitual propensities of the moment but by others that are quite hard to sense whatsoever. You consciously experience this as boredom. But the boredom you feel is not the same as the pull.
This feeling of being pulled is what is called in the enactive approach to cognition: “affect.” Affect is the general, all-pervasive, “primordial” sense that we are never indifferent to what we experience (Giovanna Colombetti). It is the feeling of being moved by experience. We are pulled by it. Why? Because something is always at stake – we care. To be alive is to care – to live with and of things mattering. Thus this pull accompanies all experiences.
To be alive is to have a perspective, to have something at stake to feel that things matter. We are what we do in the world we make – and in doing we are feeling this world opening and closing. Affect is this felt pull and push that accompanies even the most mundane of actions.
Affect, being non-indifferent, sensing-caring – sensing with a primordial empathy connects us to a world. As we sense we are making changes to ourselves and our environment. This is the pull – it is co-creative. We are “canalizing” habits, practices, tools, and environments.
And this is precisely the problem: caring connects us to the given far more than the new. We non-consciously feel our way as we are pulled into canalized patterns.
The challenge for creativity is that we care. And not just that we care – rather that we care at a primordial pre and nonconscious level. Care is an inherent and always present creative aspect of all life.
So is the answer that to be creative we need to give up caring?
It would appear this way – for after all – it is seemingly in those experiences when we do not care that the new shows up…
But, the answer for creativity is not to care less. Why? Because we cannot care less – caring is simply a part of what it is to be alive. Care is part of our experience of being alive.
The problem is not that we need to care less – or even to care more, rather we need to care differently.
It turns out that the answer to the question, “How can we be pulled by the new, the different – the aberrant?” goes through the question of care. To engage with creative processes involves developing qualitatively new and experimental approaches to care.
Put simply, in creative practices we are trying to shift how we feel – such that we actively sense how we are of a “pulled” experience. And this pull is always an aspect of our primordial structure of caring (at a non-cognitive embodied habitual level). Thus we need to experiment with how we care-feel-act as a singular experience before we even know that we are caring, feeling, or acting…
And this is the challenge of being pulled by the new: we are always already non-cognitively being pulled by the existing (primordial care – life).
Sympathy with the ___________
To be able to be open to caring differently and being pulled differently we first have to understand the full scope of what and how things are being pulled.
In terms of these feelings of care and being pulled, a big part of the problem is, as we have already noted, that too much of our focus begins with the human world. But the pull of things extends far beyond the human world – and even far beyond the living…
If at a primordial level, we are feeling and being pulled in emergent ways into certain propensities – then, so too is the world.
All around us, the world is active and organizing into emergent patterns, and active forms. Matter, “stuff” – is not inert or passive. Matter is active – it is a process of self-organization: Weather patterns emerge. Snowflakes take shape. Minerals Crystalize. Tides go in and out. Mountains rise and oceans widen. Things are always in-the-making – pulling upon each other into pattern and form.
At the heart of matter is movement, not a movement from the outside but an emergent self-organizing internal movement. In this movement, there is resonance, reciprocity, attunement, and interdependence with the dynamics of other things – in a word “pull.” Matter involves relational movement – it is being pulled into form as a dynamic response to the mutual configuration of things. Matter is matter because of its encounters.
Let's begin our diagram again. But this time starting with matter itself – where we will already find those seemingly very human of states: reciprocity, attunement, and pull:
Matter is pulled: As things emerge they are pulled towards each other – they reciprocally interpenetrate. There is a resonance that emerges, configurations shift in some form of “sympathy”, and matter transforms.
These self-organizing processes are open. Nothing is ever quite the same. Variation and difference abound. There is always and everywhere the indeterminant encounter of difference. Matter too stabilizes and canalizes into more stable enabling configurations:
And from this ever-present encounter, novel attunements, and creative resonances are necessarily already present in matter. Differences can begin a feedforward process co-creating the new.
Importantly, we must acknowledge that this pull is a form of “feeling” that is already present in matter itself. Of course, it is not the same “feeling” – or care that we find with the living. But it is something. Perhaps we can term the reciprocal agency of this mutualistic pull as loosely “sympathy”?
Now sympathy might seem like an odd choice of word. After all, it is most often considered a very human feeling – a form of empathy. We have, for example, sympathy for our fellow humans who find themselves in a hard place. But, as Lars Spuybroek puts it in one of the most interesting books on things and creativity:
“Sympathy, a form of feeling-knowing operating in the interior of things”
To actively sense pull – we need a new term that connects our very human sense of pull (sympathy for others) to the active self-forming pull of the world that we are of. And this term is sympathy.
Spuybroek goes on to say:
“There is simply no use in overcoming the subject-object and human-world dualities without realizing the vast consequences for our felt relations… If one talks about things, one must talk about feelings. In my view sympathy is first and foremost an aesthetic responsibility… an aesthetic between and of all things…”
[NOTE: In this next section the diagrams are critical. If viewing on a small screen please take a moment to really look at them.]
Following Spuybroek, we are changing our felt relations so as to sense the new. And this begins by first acknowledging and sensing the active self-organizing that is at the heart of all matter. That the world-in-the-making is this dynamic of material self-sympathy (resonance, reciprocity, and co-shaping/pulling into larger patterns/states). The world is always being pulled into an order. This is design without a designer (e.g. self-organization across scales). Order is everywhere emerging spontaneously without an “organizer”:
This pull, this attunement of the configuration, happens in the the looping back of the emergent self-organizing system:
And this in turn shapes matter-in-the-making. Emergent patterns in turn creatively shape – pull – their components. The configuration in a sympathetic resonance is creatively enabling novelty and stabilizing it. Here too there are variations – differences are emerging. Some are folding back and others hover at the margins:
Now we can come back to us and the world of the “living.” Our life – all life arises out of, and depends upon the self-organizing of matter:
Life – living surfs the potentialities of self-organizing matter. Life and living depend upon attuning and following the pull of the self-organizings of the material world. Life is in a dynamic creative sympathy with a world full of dynamic agency. And in doing so it develops, stabilizes, and attunes itself to an emerging precarious identity and agency.
And here care emerges decisively. To be alive is to be pulled by an emergent identity. And in resonance with this in relation to changing world care organizes and stabilizes processes as a new and distinct loop: Self-Organizing Life (the inner loop):
Here a key difference is that self-organizing life is also environment-transforming (the outer loop)
And equally productive of difference – the fringes of the loops.
Which also loops though – is pulled by the self-organizing logic of the system that is shaping matter and life:
Now this might seem like a long detour to get at this fundamental question of “how do we sense the new” – but now we are prepared to understand the scope of sensing, attuning, and resonating that gives rise to all forms, structures, and lives.
Our sensing, feeling, and responding do not begin and end with our sense organs and inner emotional lives.
Creativity involves a far larger engagement with the world and its ever-evolving creative becoming. And it is this, the interface between our movements (affect) and the movements of the world around us is “sympathy” – a being of the total pull into forming of reality as a whole:
It is a vast space of sympathy that everywhere attunes everything to all else. Between matter and systems and between systems and life and back again.
“It is feeling (sympathy) that makes things act, i.e. take on or change shape in accordance with others… Things are shaped by mutual agreement… Sympathy is always oriented. The very basis of the relation is sympathy… Sympathy occurs first; all other feelings are modulations and derivations of it. It is a felt necessity…”
And it is this practice of more-than-human sympathy that takes us out of “ the subject-object and human-world dualities” as Spuybroek puts it so well. And it is here that we begin to actively realize “the vast consequences for our felt relations… If one talks about things, one must talk about feelings. In my view sympathy is first and foremost an aesthetic responsibility… an aesthetic between and of all things…”
We are thus no longer outside of experience, no longer a subject standing above and outside the world – we are moved, and becoming active movers attuning to the pulls that co-create us we can become helpmates of creativities beyond the self.
That is it for this week. Stay well, stay in the middle. Let yourself be pulled and feel yourself being pulled. Embrace the matters movements and matters attunements. Next week we will lay out the processes we use to foster creative outcomes in sympathy with a world's becoming otherwise.
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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