Emerging Futures: Vol 247 - Concepting the Creative Networks

Good morning becomings of worldings tipping towards novelty,

It is summer where we are – hot sun, and so trips to the ocean and the mountains are becoming more regular. Adventures are taking us slowly further afield from New England to Bulgaria. We hope that you too are able to venture into creative becomings – wherever you find yourself.

This week, we are finishing our mini-series on key concepts for worldmaking. Last week we focused on the network of concepts directly associated with worlds and worlding – from worldmaking to worldblind. This week we are moving outwards in the key concepts that make worldmaking possible. These key concepts can be found in three distinct networks of concepts – those clustering around: assemblages, affordances, and enaction. This newsletter will take each of these clusters one at a time.

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Ongoing Action

The three key concepts that conceptually catalyze our worldmaking approach are Enaction, Assemblage, and Affordance. A very simple way to approach these three concepts is as answers to three deceptively simple questions:

What is creative action? Enaction

What arises from creative action? A virtual field of Affordances

What is creatively active? An Assemblage

While we need all three of these concepts together – no one of them takes precedence over the others – writing and reading will inevitably place these in sequence. And so as you read the following experimental exploration of the concepts of Enaction, Affordances and Assemblages – keep in mind that none can take precedence or even exist without the others.

Each of these key concepts is part of a dense network of related concepts. To give a sense of the web of concepts creatively extending and feeding back into each of these key concepts, we are going to present each as a network of concepts:

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ONE: The Enaction Network of Concepts

Enaction / Enactive Approach:

Enaction is the creative process by which a living being actively and collaboratively brings forth its own world through ongoing skilled activity under precarious circumstances.

All actions, from the smallest and most mundane to the strange and experimental, participate in the ongoing co-creation of a meaningful domain – and not just carry out a task.

The prefix "en" signals that the action involves both the causing of something and the putting of something into something. *En-*action signals that action is both world-producing and of an ongoing world/worlding. While activity does potentially complete a task, it is also always more than that: it co-constitutes a self and a world simultaneously. Self and a meaningful environment (a world) are co-emergent and co-determining processes where one cannot be without the other.

The Enactive Approach developed as a critical alternative approach to the question of “what and where is cognition?” It is an approach that critiques the assumption that cognition is an internal representational process by which an organism gains an understanding of a world that is “out-there” and radically distinct from it. The Enactive Approach to cognition argues that consciousness and experience are not brain-bound constructions but emergent properties of a living body in an ongoing active co-constructive relationship with its environment. Living is ongoing worldmaking – worlding.

See also: Enminded, Waymaking, Worldmaking, Ritornello, Affordances, Assemblage

Waymaking

Waymaking is a metaphoric way to conceptualize the ongoing creative nature of worldmaking – the enactive practices of worlding. Paths, much like worlds, must be made. The poet Antonio Machado writes beautifully of this:

Wanderer, your footsteps arethe road, and nothing more;wanderer, there is no road,the way is made by walking.

This is especially important in regards to creative practices: The radically new, before it is brought into existence, is a “nothing” – it does not exist even as a virtual possibility. As such, it must be co-emergently brought into existence via collective creative activity. The metaphoric processes of waymaking help us sense this.

Life and all activity always exceed the executing of pre-formed plans (virtual possibilities). Rather, there is an emergent co-creative dance between a dynamic environment and agent that co-creates the path, the subject and the world in the process of walking it into becomings.

The way, world and subject are mutually co-creating rather than discreet pre-existing givens: Waymaking, worlding, and subjecting.

Enminded / Enmindedness

Enminded / Enmindedness is how, where and under what conditions does agency, cognition or sense-making arise? Classically, the study of cognition proposes that this arises in the brain (see Brain-in-a-vat, below). The Embodied approaches to cognition argue that cognition is always necessarily embodied, embedded and extended (and the Enactive approach takes this further by arguing that the living being actively and collaboratively brings forth its own world through ongoing skilled activity under precarious circumstances). Both the Embodied and the Enactive approaches conceive of cognition in a more distributed, intra-dependent and emergent manner – but they still implicitly place the brain at the center as the origination/center. In essence, it is the brain that is embodied, embedded and extended. But this treats emergent processes as essentialist (which is a category mistake). Rather than considering the mind/brain as embodied, we should understand that a specific relational configuration (an assemblage) becomes emergently enminded. Thought, consciousness, and experience emerge as properties of the whole distributed relational event. Enmindedness is not located at a fixed point; it is "where it is" depending on the context and activity.

Moving from an Embodied to an Enminded approach to cognition, agency and sensemaking also allows one to recognize that this is a distributed collective process that happens at differing scales. Cognition “in the wild” (as Edwin Hutchins frames it) is best understood to be a distributed relational emergent process that can involve one or many agents in the process – as well as specific environments, tools, practices, etc. We can see that an aircraft carrier, a jazz ensemble, a crowd, a team, or an individual can individuate in an enminded manner. In this manner, at any one time there are many individuations developing overlapping shifting scales with the same participants shifting in, out, through, and across multiple experimental ways…

Brain-in-a-Vat

Brain-in-a-Vat is a philosophical thought experiment in which a brain is surgically removed from the body, placed in a nutrient vat, and connected to a machine that provides electrochemical stimulations that mimic the stimulations the brain would receive from embodied worldly active experience. The question: is this possible, and if so – would the brain notice any difference? This analogy has been used by brain-bound approaches to consciousness to argue that consciousness is a computational algorithm running in the brain and, as such, is nothing more than a sequence of transferable code. This logic is also critical to the assumption that AI is intelligent (and for tech-bro fantasies of consciousness uploading and living forever).

Ultimately, this thought experiment is a fantasy based on a fundamental misunderstanding of consciousness as the internal manipulation of data as a representation of an external and separate environment. But as the Enactive approach to consciousness has compellingly argued, cognition is best understood as a form of active sensemaking by which a living being actively and collaboratively brings forth its own world through ongoing skilled activity under precarious circumstances. Thompson and Cosmelli's paper Brain in a Vat or Body in a World? provides the detailed critique.

See also: Enaction, Worldmaking, Affordances

Ritornello

Ritornello is a concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus to elucidate the process of worldmaking – worlding. In music, a ritornello is a recurring passage — a return and variation. A Ritornello describes the looping quality of habitual embodied activity: the small repeated circuits of daily life that stabilize and return, providing the rhythmic scaffolding within which improvisation and novelty become possible. It gives a richer sense to the active experimental logic of waymaking and worlding.

See also: Waymaking, Worldmaking, Affordances

This brings us to our second key set of concepts for worldmaking – those of affordances:

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TWO: The Affordance Network of Concepts

Affordance

Affordance - It would be hard to overstate the importance of the concept of affordances for understanding and engaging in the creative processes involving the living.

An affordance is the relational possibility for action that arises from the interaction (enaction) between an embodied being's specific abilities and features of an environment (the specific skilled being, their practices, tools, and context relevant features of the environment collectively comprise an assemblage). Affordances are neither in the organism nor in the environment alone — they emerge from the ongoing relation. What we sense as direct experience (including perception) is a series of affordances. Affordances extend into our conceptual and imaginative environments – all of cognition/sensemaking involves affordances – including so-called higher-level cognition.

Because differing creatures are distinctly embodied and distinctly skilled, the sensed lived environment they directly experience will be qualitatively distinct. A water-strider will directly experience water as the potentials for action that a tensile surface offers, whereas a bacterium will experience the very same water as offering potentials for action in the context of being pushed around by a series of “marbles” – while a skilled human swimmer will experience the very same water as offering buoyant liquid potentials for action. Experience is thus always perspectival and of affordances that are connected to our relational embodied skillful actions in and of a specific environment.

The creativity of the living always involves the co-creation of novel fields of affordance possibilities.

Transjective

Transjective, As a living being, what we directly experience is neither purely objective (simply "out there") nor purely subjective (invented in our heads). Rather, it is transjective — arising through the relational interaction of a skillful embodied being with its environment. This concept is intimately connected to Affordances. Direct experience is transjective because direct experience is of affordances – the possibilities for action arising from the relation between a skilled agent and their environment.

Perspectival (Experience as Perspectival)

Perspectival (Experience as Perspectival) - experience is always situated – one cannot have a view “from nowhere”. All knowing is ultimately grounded in enactive (e.g. worldmaking) experience. And all experience is transjective – arising out of a skilled way of doing things in a transformed and transformative environment. For living beings, our reality is actively perspectival, not because each organism has a unique subjective experience, but because each organism is shifting into distinct assemblages that give rise to specific fields of potentialities that they can come to actualize. Perspectival experience stabilizes into a field of similar potentialities (a worlding) via the coordination of assemblages as an apparatus/dispositif.

Common Interests

Common Interests - Isabelle Stengers has developed a critical multi-perspectival more-than-human approach to the social and political question of what is “in common”? Rather than grounding a politics in a commonness tied to the establishment of a shared underlying universal sameness (human nature, the ability to feel pain, identity, etc.) – Stengers articulates a creative relational logic of shared qualitative differences. These are, as she says it so beautifully, "interests in common which are not the same interests". Such a logic is based in both a qualitative difference (“not the same”) and a shared matter (“interests in common”).

Distinct species of living beings (and distinct human worldings) might share a common condition – but what shows up as our direct experience will not be the same actuality. If “water” is what is common, then to a water-strider this water shows up (affords) as a tensile surface, while to a human it co-emerges (affords) as a supportive liquid. “Water” is a common interest, but it is literally not the same water. Change the relations, or any aspect of the relata, and what emerges as a worlding will be different. This practice resists both universalist positions ("we all want the same things deep down") and relativist positions ("because of my unique subjective experience we have nothing in common"). It is the condition of genuine ethical encounter across worldings.

Comportment

Comportment is the living as active, embedded and embodied relational beings have a “stance” towards the co-emergent environments they participate in co-creating. A stance is a type of disposition or comportment towards specific emergent possibilities for action (affordances). Such a comportment is a pre-reflective portrait of our world and worlding. Our comportment, or pre-reflective patterns of deeply embodied behavior, is our general bearing towards the things of our world – what our world relationally and co-emergently affords. It is how we show up to situations before we think about them. The stance, posture, and orientation precede explicit knowledge and deliberate choice – often it has an ontological quality that we do not ever put into words.

It is a key practical entry point into the question of worldmaking: if we want to understand how we or anyone is “of a world”, we need to pay attention to the comportment that world produces in us. An example: The comportment of someone for whom all beings are alive (an animist) will comport themselves differently when walking across the floor of a house from someone for whom the floor is inert material “stuff”. We learn modes of comportments before we learn anything about what they might mean (how our mothers hold us, how others first interact with us, etc.).

See also: Enaction, Affordance, Assemblage

Pluriverse

Pluriverse is from the perspective of a reductivist science, it is argued that one can have “a view from nowhere” – that one can see all reality – the universe – explicitly for “what it is” objectively.

But to have an experience of any form is to be an enactive being who is situated such that they are of a co-emergent worlding. An enactive affordance-based approach to reality is not universal – it is not a meeting of the universe. We directly experience not the uni-verse (a singular objective reality underlying all experience) but a pluri-verse — a dynamic, co-creative, intra-looping multiplicity of qualitatively distinct real worlds. One environment, many worlds. The pluriverse is not relativism (everyone has their own subjective view); it is a positive ontological claim: many ontologically distinct worlds are simultaneously real, produced from the bottom up by the relational entanglements of differing beings.

Nor is the pluriverse simply a set of differing views on one underlying reality – for our actions change the environment – and change other beings. We are co-creators – co-transformers of “interests in common which are not the same interests” (Isabelle Stengers)

This brings us to our third key set of networked concepts for worldmaking – those of assemblages. A worlding is the mainly invisible regularities to a way of being alive that cannot be explained by some invisible source of “regulation” – be it genetic, human nature, biology, or the imposition of social powers (ideology). What needs to be explained is “how are there contingent broad regularities to a historical group's direct experience without it being regulated.”

As we argued last week, the key to beginning to answer this question – without resorting to some form of reductive essentialism is: emergent process arising from relation dominant networks (e.g. assemblages and their related network of concepts) and it is to these we turn to next:

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THREE: The Assemblage Network of Concepts

Assemblage

An assemblage is the extended relational network of context-relevant aspects of the environment, tools (physical and conceptual), taskspaces, embodied habits, practices, multi-scalar systems and others that are always a co-constitutive part of action. An assemblage is the smallest “unit” of life – not the discreet organism.

An embedded living being in intimate active collaboration brings forth its own world through ongoing skilled activity under precarious circumstances (enactive worldmaking). Out of the active relational dynamics of an assemblage emergently arise an “agent” and an “environment” via a co-constituting processes of differentiation. While the co-emergent agent and environment in this process come into being as different – they are not separate or separable.

“An assemblage is the first and last word of existence. I do not exist, and then enter into assemblages. The matter of my existence is my very participation in assemblages. I am not gifted with agency, the possessor of intentions or initiative. Animation, agency, intentionality… belong to the assemblage as such.” (Isabelle Stengers).

An assemblage is not a fixed network – rather it is open, mutable and changing as actions change. The assemblage is “relation dominant”, heterogeneous, multiscalar and includes countless others. Agency – the co-emergent virtual space of possibility (affordances), is, broadly speaking, best associated with the assemblage rather than any agent or agents in the assemblage. Agency and intentionality are emergent instantiations (enmindings) of points in a field of potential affordances that arise in conjunction with the individuation of a subject.

Apparatus / Dispositif

Apparatus / Dispositif is the immediacies of lived experience (walking, grasping, touching, sensing) are, as James Gibson so aptly put it, “regular without being regulated” (e.g. explicitly fully determined from the outside). Assemblages are co-ordinated and fall into regularities that hold across multiple scales such that what we directly experience and what we know has a collective consistency. How is this?

From a relation-dominant enactive perspective, the answer is one that involves the co-ordination of assemblages. A dispositif or apparatus is Michel Foucault's term for the co-constructive relational web of heterogeneous practices — discourses, institutions, architectural forms, laws, embodied habits, tools, environments — that together co-produce the kind of subjects we become.

Dispositif, the original French term, has a distinct range of meanings that the English “apparatus” does not quite capture: deployment, layout, device, construct, apparatus, and organization.

An apparatus involves the co-ordination of multiple assemblages via relations of power, practices and actions… “[A dispositif] provides a context, framework or, even, a structure within which individual instances of behavior, pieces of knowledge and acts of resistance find their place and meaning” (Stuart Elden).

In an interview on his work of this period, Foucault has this to say about the concept dispositif: "What I'm trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements."

See Also: Epicycle, Assemblage, Abstract Machine, Taskscape, Emergence, Configurations

Dependent Co-Arising (Pratītyasamutpāda

Dependent Co-Arising (Pratītyasamutpāda) is the Central Buddhist philosophical concept for how all things come into being relationally. Nothing has an independent existence, an independent essence, or radical autonomy. Everything that exists exists in, of, and as an intra-dependence of conditions and conditioning – in short, it is relationally constituted. And conditions/conditioning in turn depend on other conditions that dynamically loop back into the web of intra-dependent dynamic relations. There is no final or original condition or cause – it is a web of co-constituting, co-transforming relations.

Buddhist philosophy is soteriological – it is interested in identifying suffering and bringing it to an end. The cause of suffering is the act of holding onto (grasping) an ontology of independent essences. The self, like all conditioned things, does not have an independent core that then forms relations; it arises from and continues through relations.

Where relational theories (networks, assemblages, emergence, etc.) are recent developments in Western philosophy (West Asian) – they are a key aspect of a far longer and richer tradition(s) in South Asian and East Asian philosophical traditions.

Emptiness (Sunyata)

Emptiness (Sunyata) is a key Mahayana Buddhist concept related to dependent co-arising (Pratītyasamutpāda). Often mistranslated/misunderstood in some Western approaches as “there is no self” or nihilism. Sunyata is the realization that the self has no fixed, essential core — not a loss but a creative and experimental liberation from essentialism. Self and thingness are not absent; it is everywhere creatively emerging via consequential relationships (the process of relational individuation). This constitutes a paradigm shift from fixed essences to dynamic relations. The self is not “lost”; it is something other than what was assumed.

Individuation

Individuation is the ongoing creative processes by which an aspect of a particular organized relational system becomes a distinct entity within that larger processual network. Individuals, systems, organizations, processes, trends, movements, groups, etc. all emerge from, change, and persist as individuations arising from relational networks (assemblages). Where concepts like individual suggest both a radical separation, wholeness, and uniqueness – individuation as a concept gives us a way to consider how all things come into being, persist, and transform. We have shifted from a search for the fixed and essential to a creative question of how any form that is distinct individuates (is an emergent achievement of a dynamic configuration).

With the processes of individuation, the boundary between "self" and "environment" is not a fixed line but an emergent property of the density of mutually determining relations. Importantly it allows us to consider on an equal footing how individuals, groups, organizations and cultures are all equally processes of individuation – without resorting to the linear, essentialist and additive logic of: individuals are the given, and then they come together via by choice or force to make up groups – but the individual is always there at the beginning and at the end (think of the role the individual plays in the classical western political theories of Rousseau or Hobbes).

See also: Assemblage, Emergence, Creativity

Niche Construction

Niche Construction is a concept widely adopted from contemporary evolutionary theory. The early approach to evolutionary creativity was that living beings adapted to fixed outside circumstances – and those that adapted best survived. And that life spread and diversified via the discovery and adaptation to ever more and more environmental “niches” (unique environmental spaces/conditions). Survival was premised on the creative changes (either via adaptation or exaptation) of the creature alone. This approach can be summarized as a “problem posing – problem solving” methodology – the environment poses a problem and the creature’s self-transformation “solves” it (a very common framework in Creativity as well).

More recent developments in Evolutionary theory have challenged this paradigm. Creatures do not simply change themselves to meet a niche – they change the niche, and in turn this niche transforms them. Beavers are exemplary in this regard – by building dams they make a novel aquatic environment that suits themselves, and as they do this environment has changed them (in a mutualistic dance of co-evolution with countless other species including the trees they are eating and building with). This is a creative practice of worldmaking where worlds are not given but creatively made (ontogenesis). And it is a creative process of “problematization” – the invention of a novel question, approach, and conditions.

Well – that’s a wrap for the week and a wrap for our three-part mini series on concepts for worldmaking! We hope that this mini-series and these conceptings can help, pragmatically and experimentally, in the development of your own modes of engaging with creative processes.

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

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Emerging Futures - Volume 247: Concepting the Creative Networks

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