Emerging Futures - Volume 240: Creativity Always Already With and Of

Good morning woven and weaving variable dynamic becomings,

(Fugue – Ritornello)

This week, we are plunging back in as a needle and thread return into cloth. We return to the stitching and weaving towards a broad and activist account of worldmaking – worlding.

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Entangled and Emergent

Over the last weeks, we have been slowly knitting together a vision of what it is to be the kinds of ecologically entangled and enminded creative beings/becomings that we are. We have used a few test cases to get at this, from Deleuze’s Tick and its world, to Bateson’s blind person and their stick plus environment.

And in these experimentations from “tick to stick” we came to a creative stability:

1. How our specific actions, bodies, and environments loop relationally through each other.
2. And thus the “smallest unit” of our selfhood does not begin or end in our brains or at the edge of our skin. Rather, we are the emergent enminded outcome of a densely woven assemblage.
3. And while many of the components of this assemblage can change – there is always a larger-than-bodily relation dominant assemblage that in totality is constitutive of who we are and what we can do.
4. The pattern of the assemblage composes a semi-stable configuration that enables and stabilizes an emergent set of propensities/affordances (or to use other language: the relational pattern “constrains” the relation dominant system to some relational outcomes).
5. These extended looping relations are constitutive of an enminding (consciousness/experience/agency) that emerges in and of the middle of this configuration.

Here, the concepts of assemblages, affordances, enaction, enabling and stabilizing configuration, embodied abilities, niche construction, and abstract machine are more than helpful.

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Perspectival and Creative

This entangled and ecological understanding of how all experience is enacted allowed us to experiment with a perspectival logic for all experience – all sensing of a reality (Newsletter 234). Our test case for this was how differing creatures may share a common environment, such as a body of water, but because of their embodied natures and particular relationally entangled practices, the water emerges as something very specific and different to each of them:

• For a person who has the body and ability to swim, jumping into water from a few feet has the experience/reality of sensing a “liquid” that affords the slowing of their dive and ultimately a floating.
• For the water-strider (a small insect), it is not a liquid at all – it is purely a tensile surface, that, with their multiple long legs distributing their body weight and tens of thousands of microscopic hairs covering their body, they skim across the surface without getting “wet” or truly ever having the possibility of sinking.
• For a Paramecium, because of its size in relation to the water’s composition of molecules, it experiences the water as a thick fluid medium (something like moving in a syrup would be for us).
• And for tiny marine bacteria, because they are so small, they do not experience the water as a “fluid” at all – rather, it is something more like very large marbles jostling them about in a random pattern of movement.

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So the very “same” water is a liquid, a tensile surface, a syrup, and a set of densely packed marbles! Now this should hit one as something quite radical and astonishing. Let’s follow the threads:

Here we have four organisms that share a common environment (water), but each organism is in and of a qualitatively distinct world…

The concept of the radical qualitative difference of worlds is critical here: the difference between our grounding and all-encompassing very real experience of water as a liquid and the water-striders’ all-encompassing and very real experience of water as a tensile surface is not a matter of degree. It’s not that the water-strider’s experience is “more about” surfaces and “less about” liquids –and ours is “more about” liquids and depths and “less about” surfaces, electrical energy – they are discontinuous and categorically different all-encompassing lived experiences.

We inhabit a “common” reality – but live in different worlds:

“We have interests in common which are not the same interests” (Stengers)

Now this “common” reality is a tricky concept that could easily be taken to be the “real real” that underpins and grounds all other “so called” realities. But this would be a fundamental mistake. Why? Even these processes are intra-twined with processes at other scales that are mutually changing each other:
“…these processes are 'irreducibly relational — they exist only in patterns, networks, organizations, configurations or webs… Phenomena at all scales are not entities or substances but relatively stable [relational] processes…”

“…since processes achieve stability at different levels of complexity, while still interacting with processes at other levels, all are equally real, and none has absolute ontological primacy.”…” (Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, p. 440)

Let’s now return to the radical insight about categorically distinct real experienced worlds: To use the language of philosophy, we can say of the Water-Strider and the Human Swimmer that each lives in an ontologically distinct world. And that these worlds contain potentially irrevocable incommensurabilities. We live in a world of sites of qualitative divergence.

Ontology. Let’s take a moment to properly introduce this term: Ontology is the philosophical practice concerned with what might ultimately exist. And to be more specific, we are approaching Ontology from a Phenomenological perspective: Ontology is the study of how any thing comes to show up as some thing.

Now this can sound like philosophical gibberish ponderously emerging from deep leather armchairs and pipe smoke. But consider our example: how does “water” show up as the lived reality (what ultimately exists) for a Water-Strider? What ultimately exists for a Water-Strider is not a liquid – it is a tensile surface composed of a multiplicity of unique affordances (relational possibilities for action based in a way of being alive). And what exists for us is not a tensile surface. That is nowhere to be found in our experience. We live in and of dynamic assemblages sharing a common reality and creatively giving rise to ontologically distinct worlds.

Let’s now return to Evan Thompson’s quote: “ …these processes are “irreducibly relational” — they exist only in patterns, networks, organizations, configurations or webs… Phenomena at all scales are not entities or substances but relatively stable [relational] processes…

The two very real phenomena of tensile surfaces and liquids are irreducibly relational phenomena – processes (looping practices) that are relatively stable because of the configuration of a dynamic assemblage.

Our experimental inquiry into Worldmaking has been about ontology all along.

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Ontogenetic and Worldmaking

Importantly, this form of creative engagement is neither about how we know or can judge opinion from facts universally from a “view from nowhere” (that is not possible), nor is it about simply competing subjectivities (you see it this way, and I see it differently). It is a question of something more woven: what entangled creative processes allow things to “be” whatsoever?

But here we need to continue to stress what is most radical about all of this: What is radical is that ontologies (how “things” become what they are) don’t fall from the skies – they don’t simply exist – they are not just “there”. Worlds are made from the bottom up by precarious beings, which are embodied in specific ways that are always already fully reciprocally entangled with an environment such that they change it as it changes them. What they experience, sense, and perceive is actively and creatively relational – not simply “out there” nor simply “in their heads.” A world “shows up” – really comes into being because of the active production of relations between what they are, what they do, and in the environment they do it. Ultimately, we are never dealing with ontologies as a world fixed in stone, but the ongoing creative entangled processes of ontogenesis.

An ontology is not the ground from which everything springs forth, it is not what underpins a reality – they are nothing mystical. What exists emerges via relational intra-woven practices and actively loops back into practices in a strange and virtuous circle. It is an ongoing ontogenetic process: change the body of a Water-Strider or the composition of the lake water in a way that makes a relevant difference, and the world of surfaces is no longer – some other world emerges.

And if we zoom out, what we directly experience is a world in a reality where many other worlds exist simultaneously… we live in the condition of a genuine creative and dynamic qualitatively differential but shared pluriverse, not a static, fixed, and singular universe. And this requires of us a very different ethics – we are not caring for one world, one reality full of discreet stuff – but both for many worlds that are ontologically different from ours, and the ever-present reality that new worlds will come into being.

This upcoming week, on April 22nd, is Earth Day: we are ecologically extended and entangled looping beings that are of differing intra-dependent worlds. How can we meet this moment differently? What are the necessary creative tools of worldings that do not explain difference away?

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A First Coda: Worlds and Human Sociality

To do this well, we must turn the attention to us: these entangled becomings that “human.” And here we have to admit: when it comes to “us” – we have left the most critical aspect of all of these weavings wholly absent. We did this quite deliberately – given the common perceptions of human individualism and the pervasive sense that who we are is something found within the limits of the skin – and more likely the limits of the brain – it is helpful to begin with the entangled loopings of solitary ticks, birds, water-striders, and the odd solitary human swimmer.

But what we have left aside is not a small thing: it is that the constitutive role of others in our experience is fundamental to our most basic experiences of being alive and being an individual. Humans do not begin as solitary individuals that then, for various reasons of pragmatic individual survival, come together to form communities. No, only those who could conveniently forget being born and the act of gestation could arrive at such an absurdity.

We are never anything but fully socially intrawoven beings. Our “independence” is the contextual outcome of various ongoing and irrevocable forms of sociality. We all began our lives literally as an other – as our birth mothers. We are not simply in the womb – we are cells of our mothers. Then slowly, we became a fully dependent extension in the womb. And at birth, the long process of collaboratively enacting mutual intra-dependent separateness (our contextual individuality) began. This was done in a field of many caregivers and many stable, historically specific configurations of socially formed caring. What we have been implicitly building towards is that we must extend the logic of the tick and the stick:

“…enactivist view, if there is a dynamical coupling to others or to tools in joint action, then there is no line that cuts the organism off from these other social and environmental factors” (Gallagher, De Bruin & Newen).

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A Second Coda: Landscapes, Affordances and Worlds

Our lives are organized. There are distinct coordinated ecological patterns of behavior shared by a historical and ecologically intratwined situated sociality of humans and other-than-humans. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins liked to quote Leslie White: “No ape can tell the difference between holy water and distilled water”. But this is equally true for us: holy water emerges for those who have come collectively to skillfully inhabit a rich landscape of affordances that give rise to such propensities. Just like the surface tension of water – holy water is not simply “out there” – it is an equally profound emergent achievement of an assemblage.

Holy water is as real as anything for those “skilled individuals in the context of a rich landscape of affordances that is shared with the other individuals inhabiting the same niche” (Rietveld, Denys, & Van Westen). Ontogenesis. Worldings… (And because of this – between our dynamic creative worlds there are equally potential incommensurabilities….)

“When the Javanese say, “To be human is to be Javanese.” Geertz, who reports it, says they are right, in the sense that “there is no such thing as human nature independent of culture” (Sahlins).

BUT – don’t mistake this for a “subjective” difference – no – the achievement is that this is real. Let us, for the sake of a musical refrain, return to Evan Thompson: these processes, such as the emergence of holy water or the surface tension of water, are “irreducibly relational” — they exist only in patterns, networks, organizations, configurations, or webs… All phenomena – such as holy water or quarks or the liquidness of water at all scales are not entities or substances but relatively stable [relational] processes…”

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A Third Coda – Back to Enminding

“Cognition is affordance-based, where affordances are always relational (between the cognizing subject or some form of life and the possibilities offered by some entity or complex of entities), and where entity may be some physical part of the environment, another person who can provide information or opportunity, a social or cultural structure, or even something more abstract, such as a concept that, with some manipulation, offers a solution to a problem. Such approaches transform the question about cognition into questions about the nature of affordances, about whether cognition is extended or extensive, about what precisely we mean by coupling… and so forth.” (Gallagher, De Bruin & Newen)

Have an astonishing week being creatively of a world – acting in ways that allow for a passionate divergence of ways of being alive to thrive, diverge, and care across and with difference:

“We have interests in common which are not the same interests…”

Until next week,
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

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