Emerging Futures: Vol 246 - Concepting Worlding

Good morning wildly concepting beings of novel incipiencies,

It is week two of our micro-series on key concepts for world-making.

Last week, we presented an embedded overview of these concepts in the context of a discussion of how world-making and creativity interweave via an extended logic of emergence. And this week, we are going to lay out these same key concepts related to worldmaking in a direct glossary-like fashion. Next week, we will experimentally explore the key support terms.

Experimentally exploring these counterintuitive challenges of creativity + emergence + life was the principal focus of the last newsletter, which we did at some length – and so we will not go further into this today. Suffice to say, given how odd and directly challenging this is to how we currently engage with change-making processes, to do things differently, we need to develop new understandings, collectives, skills, practices, environments, and tools. And one key set of tools is conceptual ones. We need to both put aside certain tools/concepts and develop new tools/concepts

For us, words find their meaning in how they are used – what they can do when connected to experimental practices. We are always torn when we write these “glossary” newsletters, for we are not interested in fixing the meaning of words, but rather in developing novel practices that loop through the production at the edges of language in concepts. Given this, perhaps it is worth staring right here:

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Concepting:

Technical words and their definitions are not neutral representations of some pre-existent fixed outside reality. For us, they are active, creative conceptual tools that connect to other tools, practices, environments, and when they work well, they participate in giving rise, emergently, to a field of intra-connected affordances. This is far less an activity of definition construction and dictionary maintenance and far more an ongoing practice of lived concepting.

In ongoing experimental activities, we feel our way collaboratively into the emerging new and in the process old abstractions give way to novel practices of abstracting the felt into the tools for stabilizing conjoined sensations, practices, and emergent worldings.

This is concepting.

Making-feeling-thinking loops back into itself via evolving intra-woven abstractions, skills, environments, physical tools, novel problematizations, and virtual fields of affordance potentialities.

Alfred North Whitehead spoke of concepting as the development of new abstractions/propositions, which he spoke of as “lures for feeling.”

This is our hope in bringing forth the pragmatic worldmaking concepts:

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Worldmaking (general):

Worldmaking is, for us, both a key concept and the term we use for the general approach we take to engaging with creative processes. As such, it is both part of the web of crucial concepts: world, worlding, worldmaking, worldblind, worldloss, world-denying, etc. – and the pragmatic term for the form of creativity that all living beings engage in.

The beauty of the word – worldmaking – is that it is quite explicit. When asked, “How could one speculatively define the creative processes that the living participate in?” – the answer we would give is “worldmaking.” What is being made explicit in this conjoined term is (1) the ongoing conjoined activities of making and (2) making is not a piecemeal practice but making is the making-of-a-world.

Let’s take a moment to say more:

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Worldmaking:

World-making is what all living beings are inherently doing all the time. Life is an ongoing, entangled activity – living. And living as an activity is a form of change-making – of creativity – for no activity is impactless.

In all activity, change happens – and all change involves the new. Living is inherently involved in creative processes in richer ways than this – life is ever becoming otherwise – tipping in novel trajectories. The active processes of living are creative change-making processes that are open and ever co-creating a self-exceeding space of potentiality. Life and living are an ever self-exceeding adventure.

The living are fated to be neither in ultimate control of what sustains nor is deleterious to their life. And so out of inherent necessity, living will actively reach out beyond itself, and those things pulled into its circle will transformatively loop back through life. And in this way, the smallest unit of life is this assemblage becoming a self-environment.

The condition of the ever ongoing creative changemaking of living is rendered more precarious because they can and will die. Living is, quite simply, the ongoing creative activity of a life going on and going beyond itself – that is done under precarious circumstances in an open, and highly dynamic creative context.

For them, as finite beings not in control of the essential circumstances of their lives, their actions are always actions where something for them is at stake. Because something is always at stake – meaning, making and life are always intra-woven. One does not arise without the others. For living beings, sensing, evaluating, and doing are always present and intimately conjoined. This inherent “meaningfulness” or value is not immediately explicit – nor does it ever need to become that – it arises as something felt – the always present, directly sensed valence of experience. In this manner, the ongoing process of living brings forth – co-creates a meaningful domain (a world-in-the-making).

An example: The simplest bacteria’s actions involve an intimately conjoined sensing and evaluating – they are collectively sensing/feeling-doing-evaluating into incipient possibilities – a felt moving towards what is felt as positive and felt moving away from what is felt as negative. From this example, we can see how living is an ongoing sensing plus doing/making as one fully fused activity. From this perspective, it would be accurate to say that “Sensemaking” is the activity of life.

But this way of understanding life is incomplete. That life is sensemaking under precarious conditions is too narrow an understanding of living. The question is: what are they making in sensing-making? What is the outcome of sensemaking?

Let us try to give a general answer to this: The living in their collective activities inherently change their immediate environment, and their immediate environment is equally directly changing them in a dense web of non-linear emergent feedback loops. They are becoming who they “are” in creative dance with an active environment that is equally becoming more relationally “what it is.” In this looping process, they are both becoming more-and-more inseparable and more-and-more unique. What is evolving and emerging is a co-made and co-making “world.” And to say this in a more exact manner: what has co-emerged is an ever ongoing creative process of worlding in which both environment and self are the emergent co-creative achievements of a-world-in-the-making. A world-in-and-of-the-ongoing-making without end.

A couple of important notes: The context of living is always with and through other living beings who share the same environment, but are of differing worlds. A further example: The bacteria, because of its size in relation to the molecules of water, directly experience water as being bumped around by larger hard spheres. While the Water Strider (a long-legged insect that skims across the surface of the water) directly experiences the water as a tensile dynamic surface that their legs are glued to, while a human with the embodied skills to swim will directly experience the water as a thin liquid that surrounds and supports the body. The same general environment, but each of a relationally distinctly enacted world. This extends further into the intimate, co-created specific intra-dependencies of all creatures – consider how humans are composed of over 60% other creatures.

There is much much more to experimentally explore here to begin to get a pragmatic/creative grasp of worldmaking as an overarching approach to the creativity of living’s becomings. Let’s continue:

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Emergent Worldmaking:

So far, this explanation of ongoing worldmaking can seem quite straightforward. But the concepts of worldmaking quickly become quite odd and counterintuitive as their intimate intraweaving with complexity and emergence is explicated. The ongoing creative processes of livingness are both complex (in the technical sense of this term) and emergent. For us, one cannot speak of worldmaking without speaking of emergence. To be more explicit, we should be calling our approach to the creative practices of the living: Emergent Worldmaking.

And when complexity, emergence, and worldmaking meet as entangled creative processes – the practices, concepts, and lived intuitions challenge our most basic assumptions about causality, our selves, creativity, and agency.

Complexity: Perhaps a word needs to be said directly about “complexity” before we go further. In daily speech, complex and complicated are usable pretty much interchangeably. But “complexity” in the sciences points to all the cases where richly interacting heterogeneous systems give rise via self-organizing processes to emergent global behaviors. Such systems are adaptive, non-linear, and emergent.

Examples of this are livingness, cognition, the behavior of crowds, and ecosystems; in fact, viewed from a certain pragmatic perspective, everything that involves livingness involves complex emergent systems. In these situations, what might appear at first glance as “complicated” – a vast mess of things – habits, practices, environments, bodies, brains, tools becomes “simple” – in this case: cognition – e.g., me simply feeling like it is time for another sip of coffee. For us, in our work, we prefer to simply speak of emergence in regards to the phenomenon and keep the term “complexity” for the interdisciplinary sciences that experiment with it: “the complexity sciences”.

The long and short of all of this is that there is a radical rupture in how we engage with creativity, livingness, causality, individuality, agency, groups, and reality in general because of an understanding of emergence, and the complex behaviors of non-linear systems.

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World/Worlding:

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.

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:

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Ontology:

Ontology is the philosophical study of being. Our approach to ontology is informed by a phenomenological perspective: as an experimentation with the question: how does any thing come to show up as some thing whatsoever. Not the study of what kinds of things ultimately exist but the more primordial question of why and how things show up as things at all. This primordial experience is an emergent creative outcome of ongoing worlding.

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Ontogenesis:

Ontogenesis is the ongoing creative process by which distinct modes of being arise, stabilize, and transform. Worlds/Ontologies are not fixed in stone — they are the ongoing dynamic creative achievement of assemblages in activity (worlding).

The ongoing dynamic development of a distinct way of worlding – Ontogenesis is the creativity we live in our daily lives. The dynamic regularities of our mode of living are neither an invisible fixed prison narrowly constructively constricting our experience into one form, nor is experience a free-for-all of radical individualism. The concept of ontogenesis keeps what might feel like a fixed world, that the terms world and ontology can suggest from becoming a new essentialism. The focus becomes on the ongoing creative genesis of an emergent worlding that is always in-the-making, and that can always be otherwise.

Bifurcation of Nature:

Alfred North Whitehead's term for the problematic creative achievement of the western metaphysics of Science (as an Apparatus/Dispositif). The extended practices of the modern scientific Dispositif bifurcates reality into two distinct domains: an objective, physical realm of basic “stuff” – the so-called building blocks of the universe – and the universe of subjective, meaning-laden, human experience (from sense experience, to values, aesthetics, and ethics). And in this logic, only the basic building blocks of reality are really real – the rest is a type of useful fiction given our universal objective human nature. An example: The grass is objectively just molecules, but what we experience – the greenness of the grass, the smells, the coolness to touch, the emotions and values – this is a psychic addition we create that is not “out there” – not really real. This leads to a type of meaning crisis where value is exiled from reality itself.

In this logic reality is a given which we can know objectively, while how people and cultures might experience and value this objective reality is ultimately subjective – a question of belief: “you believe that the grass is green… and you might also believe it has a soul – but that is just your beliefs, the green you see is just in your head, no where else – and these beliefs and experiences have nothing to do with the hard facts about reality…”

This highly abstract creative production of a view from nowhere is a very sophisticated achievement that requires enormous systems and efforts to move out of direct experience to create such a worlding (see: Apparatus/Dispositif). But direct experience is both primordial – gives rise to abstractions – and cannot be taken out of the looping process of abstraction (see: Worldmaking). Meaning and value are inherent in the practices of living. These abstractions and processes key to a scientific metaphysics are of a worlding and not a view from nowhere – they are the achievements of a specific mode of being alive (worlding) that cannot claim a precedence over others.

This bifurcation metaphysics is the root of a form of the modern global West's worldblindness and world-denying logics. And they are a key part of the reason that creativity, meaning, and experience get systematically expelled from the world and reduced to human, ultimately individual subjectivities.

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Explaining Away:

The practice of apparently acknowledging the importance and reality of something while actually dismissing it. In this context of creativity as worldmaking, it refers specifically to the practices of a Western Scientific metaphysics (see Bifurcation of Nature) that explains away experience, values, and distinct ways of being as mere beliefs, subjective experience, folk science, or culture – all of which can be truthfully and completely explained properly via alternative objective scientific measures. For example, religious beliefs are a mere expression of an evolutionary psychological need for group cohesion in early societies that is no longer necessary.

Such an explaining away is world-destroying and is deployed in ongoing political projects of development and universalization. The creative ethical question is: how can we creatively participate in making a world where many worlds can thrive, and new worlds can be co-created?

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World-Blind / Worldblindness

The normal and general condition of being embedded in one's historical collective mode of being alive (a worlding) such that one cannot perceive it as a world and not the World. It is the quality of emergent direct experience that, in everyday life, it is simply experienced as "reality," as the way things are.

Worldblindness is also an aspect of everyday creative practices where one does not sense that what one is making is more than a solution to an existing problem, but rather it opens up the potentiality of qualitatively novel ways of being alive (e.g., the smartphone was designed to simply be a better phone).

There is a danger when worldblindness is conjoined to a set of practices that involves a World-Denying logic. This form of active worldblindness is a quality of modern Western universalism: a world that not only cannot see it too is a historically contingent worlding, but actively explains other worlds away in concrete practices of transformative erasure.

Ontological Politics:

The recognition that worldmaking is not merely a useful neutral creative technique or anthropological form of mutual understanding – but a creative aesthetic/ethical/political project. Who gets to have their world taken seriously as real? Whose worlds are explained away as "beliefs," "myths," or primitive misconceptions? How can worldings meet as worldings worthy of being taken seriously? Ontological politics is the name for this creative project in which worlds are allowed to exist, matter, affect each other, and transform into new worlds.

In Isabelle Stengers' formulation, the global West has developed an apparatus that does not recognize worlds and actively destroys them.

Ontological politics asks: what would it mean to take the ontological plurality of worlds seriously as a creative ethico-aesthetic commitment?

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Well, that is all from us for the week – keep experimenting and concepting towards the possibility of new worldings.

Until next week - keep difference alive,
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

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