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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 241! Which Worlds?...
Good morning ( ),
What is a world? And how could it matter today to concern ourselves with such a question?
After the last eight weeks of speculatively weaving this terrain into an emergent form, let's try to directly consider two questions: What is a world? And: Why do we have a world but know that we don’t?
Yes – we get it, this second question can seem like a very odd question. But we hope that by the end of this newsletter, its relevance might resonate purposefully with your experiences.
Let's loop back into last week's newsletter to help us get some purchase with the term world as it applies to us “humans”.
To answer these two questions, we first need to come to terms with the word: worlds.
The reality of words is that they circulate effectively in very different contexts, working with radically distinct meanings in very different ways. And part of using words effectively is experimentally getting a grip on how they work in these very different ways:
– And it can be used to describe an all-pervasive and very broad quality of experience shared by a densely intraconnected group of people.
And while the word “world” is being used in all of these cases, it is working in profoundly different ways in each case. We can see this by the meaningful synonyms that could be used in each case:
When we speak of worlds and worldmaking, our interest is only in the latter. To help articulate the difference between the first three uses and the fourth, we introduced the terms Ontology and Ontogenesis into the discussion last week. Ontology literally means the study of being (from Greek: ontos = being + ology = the study of). And ontogenesis is the ongoing processes by which modes of being arise, stabilize, and transform. We hope that you sense the rich resonances between world and being/ontology, and worldmaking/ontogenesis.
Ontology introduces the question in a new manner: What is “being”? While we are familiar with “beings” in our normal everyday lives. We come across them as all the things we interact with: cars, people, rocks, concepts, feelings, gestures, plants, this newsletter, water… – these are all beings of various kinds. But what is meant by “being”? First being is not any of these beings – being is not a discrete thing. Rather, “being” points towards something more nebulous, and all-pervasive about experience: the astonishing quality that things show up as things whatsoever.
This quality of experience should strike us as astonishing – really astonishing. Consider: I am sitting on a moving train as I write these words, sun on the back of my hands warming them from the cold morning air, and as I turn my torso and look out the window – what do I see? Is it a blur of unformed colors pressing against the insides of my eyes? Do I have to engage in some strenuous effort to turn this smear of colors activating my retina into a coherent image? No. I just see things directly as things – houses, roads, sidewalks, trees, backyards, a small brook flowing… Things showing up as things. It is not that I need to think about any of this in a focused, effortful manner – there is no strenuous work of decipherment – a coherent, complete world simply and directly shows up.
I’m sure there are water-striders in the meandering brook the train just raced past. And I am equally sure that they have the very same astonishing experience – that things show up as things – it is just that what is showing up for a water-strider is not the liquid of a meandering stream, it is not the clean, refreshing water I bend over to drink when hiking along this brook, nor is it the purifying and cleansing water of Abrahamic rituals. Rather, it shows up for the water-strider as something qualitatively different: a moving tensile surface composed of a multiplicity of unique affordances.
Being and world are two words for this primordial quality of all experience. Perhaps these words do not feel right – sure, but this is as much a reflection on the fact that we pay almost no attention whatsoever to the question of why and how things “show up as things”. It is very much not part of our everyday lives or the Western historical practices of inquiry. In the West, we have any number of knowledge disciplines to inquire into specific beings: Chemistry for chemical things, Biology for living things, Religious Studies for religious things, Political Science for political things – but almost nowhere do we inquire into why and how we come to have the immediate experience of things whatsoever.
To consider this question seriously – is more primordial than any scientific inquiry – it is a question of something already woven and emergent: what entangled creative processes allow things to “be” whatsoever such that they could be studied?
But in saying that this is “primordial” does not mean that it is the ground from which everything springs forth, it is not what underpins a reality – it is not a mystical source. Rather, it is the emergent quality of experience that is always already there, ubiquitous, and all-pervasive.
David Foster Wallace speaks insightfully of this by way of an analogy: how impossible it must be for a fish to understand water because it is so “of” the water – that for it there is nothing beyond it. This analogy, while limited, can give us a taste for the difficulty of sensing a world and even simply – what is meant in this context by “world”. How can we even sense things we are so fully in and of that they just are what it is to be? Why, we might ask, even introduce the term “world” – when there is already the term “reality”?
So – let us now ask, again: What is a world?
As frustrating or pleasurable as it may sound, to address this question, as we have seen, is not an easy thing to do whatsoever. In fact, just to be clear, we are not writing from a position of authority or expertise: it is not a question that we have an authoritative answer to. Rather, we come to this question out of a long concern and deep speculative curiosity – we are moved to ask it from within the circumstances of our own lives. Here are two brief stories to help locate this concern:
About a decade ago, my partner and I participated in a sea kayaking race around a small Island off Northern Vancouver Island on the far Northeastern edge of the Pacific. It was an eccentric race that did and did not celebrate winners – it was far more about community, place, and being of the sea – prizes were, for example, drawn by lottery – you could finish last and get the biggest prize. It was in part hosted by the Na̱mǥis First Nation (the island being part of their unceded historical territories), who, after the race, invited us to a celebratory dinner in their community long house. We were welcomed by Don Svanvik, one of the hereditary chiefs who, in his greeting, contextified what it meant to be in the place of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, saying something to the general effect of “Welcome to our world, now in your world this and this are the case… but in our world, quite different things are the case…” It was an important act of diplomacy – a way of making explicit in a greeting that “we understand that you have a world and it is worthy of taking seriously, but we too have a world that is both ontologically distinct, equally real, and worthy of taking seriously”.
A second story: Around the same time, I was participating in a project involving an Inupiat community in Northern Alaska and their historical foodways. Part of the project involved collaboratively opening a community restaurant. During one early online meeting, we were all considering what to name this restaurant, and we proposed “Eat” or “Eating” – something we thought of as powerful in how it spoke to what we imagined was the basic universality of eating. What followed from this suggestion and the whole experience of working with this community so transformed us that it led us into a long multiyear journey culminating in a book, and so let's turn to this text for what happened next:
“In one of our Skype meetings with our local Iñupiaq collaborators, we asked what we imagined would be an easy question to answer: 'What was the Iñupiaq word for 'eating’?" Bernadette Alvanna Stimpfle quickly reshaped our unoriginal ideas by giving us a brilliant, fast introduction to เก็บpiatun:
The Inupiatun language does not really have a word that corresponds to "eating". While we could use the Inupiaq word nigi, which means "food", "meat", and "to eat", it is not really a discrete word by itself, nor is it used in the way we would use our word "eating".
To understand this, you need to grasp the three key differences between Iñupiatun and English. First, Iñupiatun is a polysynthetic language that joins roots to affixes (the bits at the beginning and end of compound words). This allows Iñupiaq speakers to use sentence-long words such as qiruktaàniagaqsiñiqsuq (for which we might say a whole phrase like "heading off to go out to look for firewood"). Second, the distinction between verbs and nouns is fluid. Things are actions. Third, there is no past tense. Rather, events are organized by whether they have been finished or are on-going. What all of this means is that the words "food" and "eating" are essentially never found alone in Inupiatun. You just don't say "eating", not simply because "there is no word eating", but rather it is always only one component of a larger intra-dependent action. "Eating" becomes part of elaborate sentence-long words that mean eating of a place (say a bend in the river), a season (when the salmon are running), an event (when very hungry for a particular reason), as part of a type of food (eating raw, boiled, or dry), and very often the final word is a combination of all of the above.
After working through these ideas with Bernadette, the consensus was that the closest word to eating was nibbivik, which literally means "eating place." It is both a noun and a verb, both a place (Eating-Place) and the ongoing eating of/in that place. Nibbivik has come to be used in more recent times for things like a table or a restaurant, but it still carries the sense, in everyday use-of eating "from a place". This got us more curious: if nibbi refers to meat/food (a noun) or to eating (a verb), to what does vik refer? Bernadette explained, it refers to a specific place, the "place of this or that event". The name made sense to us-"the place of eating" or "eating of a specific place". But, as our interlocutor went on to explain, vik also means "of a specific time". In Iñupiatun place and time are the same root word: there is no eating alone, no food alone, no place alone, and there is no place that is separate from time.(from Eat Your Sidewalk)
This all-pervasive experiential logic of Nibbivik is in no way any aspect of my pervasive all-encompassing sense of experience. Things do not show up for me as events – and this is only the beginning of the differences…
For many of us – and it certainly was for me – we don’t know we are fully of a world until we unknowingly cross borders… Our friend and colleague in Worldmakers wrote of this experience this way: “I believe that there is no transcending knowing that can ever be shorn of the lands of eating and migrating” (Bhavana Nissima).
What is a world? It's not an easy thing to articulate – because it is not an easy thing to sense whatsoever – in a very real sense, to be alive is to be passively worldblind. We just go on – until we unsuspectingly cross a border…
How do we meet the challenge that we have a world?
“In your world… while in our world…”
“We have interests in common which are not the same interests…” (Isabelle Stengers)
The first step is to come to terms with who this “we” might be. It is clear we can not assume that this is a universal we.
And this is where things change with a unique urgency. All worlds are not created equal, as Don Svanvik made very clear that day. Over the last five hundred plus years, the “west” has developed a mode of being-of-a-world (worldmaking) that has come into its own in the modern era: it is a form of knowing/feeling/sensing/experiencing that transcends all particulars. There is an experience available to “moderns” (as the philosopher Bruno Latour has come to call those co-created of the West) that is placeless, timeless, universal, and transcendent – ultimately actively worldblind and world refusing.
An example by way of introduction: this logic is something we can sense in how “others” are met via the western practice of “tolerance” – a “we” – meaning “we who are modern and know better” are willing, out of a “deeper and more all encompassing understanding,” to tolerate that others have historically differing “beliefs” (those of the Iñupiaq or Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw for example*)*. Western tolerance is of a unique quality: we moderns are willing to entertain that these “beliefs” might be interesting, benign, or even positive – all the while knowing that they are ultimately wrong – unless it is only meant metaphorically… “Surely nobody really believes they actually descended from a Thunderbird!”
But this practice of tolerance – along with so much of a “modern” experience is one that explains away what others live, experience, and know. It is a lived experience of: we know better… There is no tolerance in explaining away; moderns are not simply passively worldblind, but of a world that involves an all-subsuming erasure:
“The ethnographic "believe" is often an ethnocentric reality-check on what the people actually know. The pioneering anthropologist of the Sudan, Ian Cunnison, so indicated many decades ago about the East African Luapula people: "The important thing is this: what the Luapula peoples say now about the past is what they know actually happened in the past. Simply to say that they believe it happened in the past is too weak for they do not doubt it" (1959, 33; emphasis original). Anthropologists are prone to use the verb "to believe"-that the people "believe" in something—only when they don't believe it themselves. Anthropologists don't say, "The people believe curare poison kills monkeys," but they will say, "The people believe the game father makes monkeys available for hunting."
Another good candidate for oblivion is "myth," referring to the narratives people regard as sacred truth and standard European languages thus devalue as fiction…The condescension is untenable.” (Marshall Sahlins)
Today, more and more of us live in and of this modern world. It is a world that has been historically co-created as a two-part, divided reality: one where there is a “really real” out “there.” That is to say, a world where the physical conditions of all reality and all life and all living (this is the domain of physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) exist as something inert and ultimately meaning-free “out there.” And that there is a second, totally separate realm of our very human subjective interpretations of it. Thus, all of this very human stuff of beliefs, myths, perceptions exists in and of a second realm – the realm of human actions – the world of values, meaning, purpose, feeling, and expression that is added as a secondary and arbitrary supplement to the “really real”. Nature and Culture. Reality and our Interpretations. It is what Whitehead so aptly termed “the bifurcation of nature”:
“What is given in perception is the green grass. This is an object which we know as an ingredient in nature. The theory of psychic additions would treat the greenness as a psychic addition furnished by the perceiving mind, and would leave to nature merely the molecules and the radiant energy which influence the mind towards that perception." (A. N. Whitehead)
Now, as we write on April 22nd – Earth Day 2026 – the urgencies of coming to terms with this historical worldless-world and its very real consequences should be apparent. This “anti-world” mode of being is a creative historical achievement that involves creating both nature and culture and the separation between the two. It is a worldmaking that has no explicit singular author or source but can nonetheless be carefully traced in its long ontogenesis (as many have done from Chakrabarty to Foucault to Stengers…). It is, at its core, a process of radical simplification, cutting, and active erasure – the cutting of all the entanglements that have made multiple unique eco-bio-geo-social worlds possible.
It is now very much part and parcel of how we face our current realities: If what is real is ultimately just meaningless stuff out there. And if our human beliefs are useful fictions that we add to cope with this condition, then why not treat everything and everyone as a resource? Then why not mine deep into the earth and cut forests down? Then why not argue rationally for universal utilitarian best practices that explain away the possibilities of other worlds?
This situation of being in and of world-in-the-making that has given us a “reality” which organizes experience around two poles: objective nature and an ultimately subjective and separate culture – has been usefully termed by some the “meaning crisis” and others as part of the “meta-crisis”. It is a meaningful crisis to the degree that it gives us meaning if and only if we first agree that ultimately reality is meaningless. And it is part of a meta-crisis to the degree that the outcome of such a world is one of multiple fully entangled eco-socio-bio-geo disasters. We are rendered worldless on an Earth in ecological collapse.
But we wish to slow down the historical logic of “crisis thinking”. The framing and activation of the “crisis” is something that is and has been historically part of the deeply problematic modernist form of thinking and acting: “things are so bad that we must act right away – there is no time for doubts, divergences, dialogue or weakness – we, those who know best, have the answer, be quiet and let’s act”. And this too is something we have all experienced – the positive utilitarian calculus of large scale projects of dams, mines, clear cuts, and petro-chemicals – but also the large-scale projects of ethnic removals, sterilizations, universal education – and the ongoing hubris of all those (fill in the blank) who will get us all to mars, geo-engineer the atmosphere – in short save us if we only do what must be done now.
A powerful sorcery is afoot in the logic of crisis that we must protect ourselves against without ever losing sense of that we are living in times of profound active devastation of the entanglements, or without losing a sense for the shared possibility that other worlds are possible. It is a deliberative, attentive, and experimental urgency to stay with the trouble without reproducing the logic that co-created this urgency… (to paraphrase Donna Haraway).
The challenge for us who are of the universalizing practices of explaining away worlds (and we very much include ourselves in this) is that the practice of “meeting worlds in the awareness of meeting” is one that asks us to slow down and stop the practices of explaining away and to attune otherwise. It is not simply about meeting an other – but first meeting ourselves as an other: how do we come to know? Where does our experience arise from? How do we have a world?
And when we slow down to meet our experiences as situated historical worldly experiences – can we sense that we are fully and totally of a unique experience of a reality – one that is both a creative achievement, and one that could be otherwise?
And now from this – are we not compelled to ask the question with a new and very different lived urgency: What is a world? – When we have a world but experience that we don’t? And in the lived urgency of this double question, perhaps we sense that this is where creativity ever emerges anew?
“It probably goes without saying, but I had better say it anyway: what is at issue is how the immanentist societies are actually organized and function in their own cultural terms, their own concepts of what there is, and not as matters "really are" in our native scheme of things. It will become all too evident that our own transcendentalist notions, insofar as they have been embedded in common ethnographic vocabularies, have disfigured the immanentist cultures they purport to describe. Take the familiar distinction between the "spiritual" and the "material," for example: it is not pertinent in societies that know all sorts of so-called "things"-often everything there is—as animated by indwelling spirit-persons. That this difference makes a fundamental difference of cultural order is the point of the book. What passes for an "economics" or a "politics embedded in an enchanted universe is radically different from the concepts and stratagems that people are free to pursue when the gods are far away and not directly involved. In immanentist orders, the ritual invocation of spirit-beings and their powers is the customary prerequisite of all varieties of cultural practice.” (Marshall Sahlins)
I read this as my train ride comes to an end. Getting off and walking across the weed-dotted grass, my thinking goes speculatively back to that brook – what becomes the lived experience of seeing a river when it is “animated by an indwelling person”? This immediate experiential world is surely as distant as the qualitative difference between the water-strider’s direct experience and mine…
Until next week,
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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