Good morning becomings verging into an event’s becoming of a fundamental encounter.

It has been an interesting week experimenting with the event of a creative shock:

“Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.” Gilles Deleuze

This week in our community of practice, WorldMakers, we hosted an astonishing discussion with the multi-hyphenated experimental philosopher Erin Manning (educator-artist-designer-ecologist-writer-more-than-human collaborator…). At some point in the very alive discussion, they spoke of how the problematic contemporary style of creativity enacts a way of being that begins in an imaginary future and moves forward abstractly from there – but in doing so never touches the actual of the present. And that this problematic ecological creative process produces an event that is “strangled before it can gestate” (or produce the conditions for genuine novelty to co-emerge).

This ecology and style of a creativity “starting in the future and moving forward” is one that excludes, and thus has no sense of, the present.

But, for Erin, there is the possibility of an alternative style of becoming-creative: one that experiments with a speculative and pragmatic value of collaboratively asking/sensing/perturbating of the present towards “what else is possible?” It is a style of creative practice that takes as its concern the question: how could an experimental pragmatism of “figuring things out”  co-emerge in such speculative ways as to allow for “a novel world opening up.”

These questions really hit us hard in a great way – a type of shock of a fundamental encounter – and this animated us as we returned last night to finish experimenting with the writing of this newsletter:

Experimentally Backwards-Forwards

Part of experimentally coming to terms with a fully immanent reality that is on-goingly emergently creative in the present – is the relevance of developing an alternative ecology, habits, practices and processes to fully engage with it on its own terms.

But there is a profound existential challenge to doing this: and this is that we cannot come to anything “fresh” – we cannot simply put aside, bracket out, shrug off, or twist out of what we have ecologically become.

We are always already beings-of (or more accurately becomings-of) a specific lived ecological co-creative history. We are all of distinct, wide, relationally rich, dynamic and complex historical events-in-becoming. Our sensibilities, habits, practices and identities emerge out of and loop back into robust existing agential ecologies. Put simply, at a very general level, the mainly regular patterns of how we act, sense, feel, and think do not arise spontaneously from us alone. An ongoing lived entanglement of dynamic infrastructures (assemblages) is co-creating us.

To be alive means there is no way to be “outside” of this reality of being co-creatively “of” an ongoing complex worlding. And any “alternative” must meet us where and how we are – without a personal judgment.

(In response to this reality, Erin offered a very helpful experimental and speculative proposition to define art. Art involves the experimental production of the enactive ecological conditions such that new ways of sensing-feeling-perceiving might emerge…)

This logic of a creative engagement with the present suggests that our human types of creative practices all involve being able to participate in the more-than-human ongoing relational creativity that is always already ongoing – in and around us (of the present).

But, to be able to participate effectively in the ever-present unfolding of a creative event that opens us up to a real qualitatively novel pull (that could afford the co-emergence of the new) – we need to experiment in two seemingly contradictory directions at once:

1. We need to get an enactive grasp on the complexity of being-of a dynamic relationally ongoingly co-creative reality, and…
2. We need to equally get a lived grasp on how we are enactively of a problematic, dynamic, creative, and ongoing worlding process that co-creates how we sense, feel, and act such that we do not sense this pull of emergence – such that we are already in an artificial projected future moving forwards abstractly.

Understandably, these two directions are often separated:

• We do need to learn to understand and effectively engage with a reality that we are coming to realize is quite distinct from our Newtonian linear essentialist approach. Currently, much of the experimental seeking of this new knowledge orbits the logic of “complexity” or the Complexity Sciences (an understanding of reality as dynamic, relational, differential, recursive, non-linear and emergently creative).
• But the unique problem with this separation into two distinct endeavors (critiquing the present and developing a co-creative emergent alternative) is that the very co-creative logic of complexity makes this impossible! A complexity perspective proposes that reality is an ongoing co-creative relational emergent process. Being of such self-reinforcing loopy (recursive) processes means that we are never neatly outside of an existing relational loopy emergent process (a historical ecology – a world). And how we sense, feel, and engage with complexity/emergent creativity is also an emergent outcome of a historical ecology (a very situated and distinct way of being alive (worlding)).

The only way elsewhere is through.

But this “way through” is profoundly non-linear: The only way towards the emergence of the new is through a recursive (loopy) experimental practice that is also creatively pulling us back as much as it is co-emerging in novel directions. The edges of our sensing-doing-knowing the new are always also of a sensing-doing-knowing of the existing.

We are co-creatively pulled into a future-in-the-emergent-making, while looking back.

And this is why, as we explored in last week’s newsletter, strong forms of denunciatory criticism are not that helpful. We all have one (very active) foot in the old, so to speak.

Our existing conceptual actions (our modes of doing-thinking) tend to be the most conservative aspects of a creative practice (representation, which is so critical to thinking and imagining – is by its very nature conservative). A co-emergent and co-evolutionary creative ecological practice is loopy – and criticism needs to also become aware of its experimentality: it is in service of the recursive co-creation of the new (after all it can’t do anything but make the new).

Our existing abstractions and concepts of creative practices – say those of the complexity sciences will always be of a past emerging into novel unknowable futures. And as such, they, as much as everything else, require continuous experimental open transformation (an experimental immanent critique).

We would posit that such experiments are, from a complexity/emergent creativity perspective, not fundamentally about “getting it right once and for all” – but are rather probes into the co-creation of novel futures that are relevantly different from the past.

Complexity’s Becoming-Complex

From a complexity perspective, then criticism needs to become a “minor” art (art here meant in the old twelfth century sense of a skillful ecological practice (we still use art in this sense when we talk of things such as the “art of baking”)). A minor experimental practice is a way of participating in co-creation of an unknowable-in-advance newness that inflects such practices cautiously away from the inevitable looping-back into the existing. In short, such an art would help us experimentally bend our co-creative loops a bit more towards what might be a relevant adventure in becoming collectively otherwise (and a bit further away from creative practices that project forward from an imaginary/conservative future).

NOTE: How minor (and major) is used here is not a question of scale, rather it is a question of distinct operational logics: a minor art is an immanent experimental practice for the co-emergence of the new – while the logic of a major art involves practices of fixing, stratifying, representing, identifying, codifying, enclosing, etc. (here we are following the work of Deleuze and Guattari in the development of these terms – see A Thousand Plateaus).

Perhaps, one of these experimental probes needs to be one that perturbs our existing enactments of Complexity as a circumscribed zone of reality (eg non-linear and emergent behaviors are only to be found in a limited set of circumstances in the wild) – and allow for the experimentation towards a broader sense of a reality that is everywhere complex (relational, dynamic, loopy, non-linear, co-creatively emergent, etc.)?

This “circumscribed complexity” is something we should expect (the same way we should accept and work from the existing logics of creativity). After all, it is one that is very much beholden to existing and historical ecologies that give rise to more linear, mechanistic, and individual human-centric styles of sensing-acting-knowing. In this context, the creative and experimental challenge is, as Ana Teixeira de Melo sees it, that if the complexity sciences  “...continues to unfold in a “restricted mode,” the new ‘normal science’ of complexity may become trapped in modes of [enaction] that are inappropriate or inadequate for developing effective means to [co-emerge with] the complexity of [nature-culture] systems towards positive change.”
~ (from Performing Complexity)

Styles of Movement: Bending the Loopings

So how can we co-emerge with a creativity beyond these existing ecological logics?

A speculation to follow: Might it not “start” directly and humbly with sensing our living as a relational moving in a moving relational historical ecology that always exceeds itself?

This dynamic living ecology (world) that we move in and of is composed of creative events that have settled into dynamic but stabilized processes (individuations): A world of subjects and objects, stable processes and paths. These are emergently composed of, and loop actively back into distinct historically emerging heterogeneous assemblages. And these assemblages are entangling dynamically and transformatively with other assemblages (in a bri-collage of countless exaptive connective loopy transversal processes). Some of these are just emerging, others perhaps a few hundred years old, and others far older. These form a dense thicket (transversal exaptive bri-collage) of transformative co-shapings that never resolves neatly into one overarching form or logic.

Life is lived “of” a vast looping semi-stable dance more than anything else.

A dance is an “event” that has both an ecology of practices and an emergent general feel to its immanent historical movement “style”. There is, for example, a dance style and ecology to the “expert”, as there is a dance style and ecology to the contemporary soccer player, or to the “creative” who projects abstractly forward from an imaginary future….

Or, to put it more helpfully (from the perspective of creativity): there is an event dancing that has a coordinated movement style + active ecology. The event is of “experting”, or “soccering”, or “creating...”

The danced dynamic ecology co-creates the subjects (the expert, the soccer player, the creative) and the objects (in the case of “experting”: the knowledge, receivers, fields of expertise, etc.). An event eventing (dancing) works via a counterpoint process to bring into being “subjectings” and “objectings” as semi-stable becomings.

Complexity, Creativity and Becoming-Soccer

Let’s experiment further with one of these “events” to get a grasp on the double-sided creativity of an immanent event:

The event of soccering:
Here there is a specific ecology in dynamic relation: the field, the goals, the lines, the players, the referees, the ambient environment, the rules, habits, practices, the ball (each of which is itself a semi-stable integration of differential variations within an emergent movement style).

This dynamic, relationally co-creating ecosystem (dance) of soccering gives rise perspectivally to subjects and objects (subjectings and objectings). Subjects such as the goalie, the defenders, the midfielders, and the forwards are being co-created. And objects such as the ball, field, lines, and goals are equally being co-created.

To be a subject of soccering is to become of a dynamic relational ecology which the person co-creatively enacts (which is to say: becomes a specifically enlivened subject) – for example: the becoming-subject of a style of moving-sensing-acting of a goalie.

But this ecological process of subjecting and objecting is never fixed. Being a certain type of subject, say an “attacking forward,” is always relational to the moving logics of the game’s becoming (the event’s becoming): If, for example, the ball moves near your goal – and you are in the immediate area – no matter who you “are,” you are now dynamically en-subjected as a “defender” – and as the ball moves ever elsewhere in relation to both the space and time of this event, you as a player are becoming en-subjected dynamically and differentially many times. Being a subject is always of a relational dance (there is no subject or object “in itself”).

And if you shift perspectives and ecologies: subjects can even become objects (while still being subjects): For example, from the team's managerial perspective, a player is quite often an object of investment and expected return.

Here it is important to sense also that nothing is passive in this dynamic: the roles of “recipient” and “provoker” are both active relational roles. In the event of soccering the ball is both a provoker of actions and a recipient of actions. And such roles are themselves perspectivally flipped countless times in any actual dance. Another example: the grass field is the recipient of rain and cleats – but in this relational dance of rain + grass + soil + cleated bodies – the field is also relationally co-shaping every aspect of the event... On and on.

The Given and the Novel

What does all of this mean for the co-emergence of the new?

What seems fixed – that our current emergent ecological sensibilities, habits and practices give rise to seemingly stable subjects and objects, practices and processes – these are in fact far more dynamic, emergent, relational and processual than we might expect. The given is emergently of a complex dynamic creative event.

And the novel is also already there of this event.

We can sense the first intimations and pull of novelty in “simply” attuning to the actuality of this dynamic creative logic without falling into the habits of sensing it as fixed.

When we refuse to leap outside of the becomings of the event that we are of towards imaginary future abstractions and rather attune to the dynamics of a world in becoming that has no “bird's-eye view” – then we stay with the immanent marginal becomings where, as Erin Manning puts it, “novelty abounds.”

Here is a real question of “style” – “There is a counterpoint in infinite abundance, and we are not hearing it, let alone dancing it. Ecologies of perception are backgrounded by an overarching emphasis on general categories.” (Erin Manning). This is a profoundly well-developed enactive, ecologically robust style which tends on the whole to emergently favor:

• the clear distinction between subjects and objects
• the static and unchanging (being) over the dynamic and processual (becoming)
• the immaterial over the material
• thinking separate from and prior to doing/making
• singular beginnings and essences over how something new comes into becoming (via distributed, heterogeneous emergent processes)
• that there are answers and solutions rather than ongoing dynamic processes of lived co-evolving

To which Erin Manning experimentally proposes: “New modes of attention are needed, and persistent efforts to experience the novelty of life-living are essential to enjoying the complexity of the [creative] worldings that populate us.”

And this experimental activity is the co-creating of the possible ecological conditions for an emergent unknowable future to immanently rupture the present – for a “fundamental encounter” to be possible…

It is a collective more-than-human experimental activity that “begins” (from the middle) by taking the seeming certainties and givenness of subjects and objects as themselves emergent processes and perspectives of a dynamic co-creative event…

Until next week...
Keep Difference Alive,
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab

+++

P.S.: The question we hear most often from newsletter subscribers is: How can I participate more deeply in this work?

We have two ways:

1. Emerging Futures+ is where the newsletter becomes alive: post your comments, questions, or thoughts alongside practitioners across five continents, connecting each volume to their own work. Plus the extended audio version for a commute, join 2 live events per year, and the full searchable 260+ volume newsletter archive.

🧨 Start with a $1 trial for 7-days… Then $6/month or $60/year. Cancel anytime.

2. WorldMakers is where the newsletter gets practiced. Facilitators, educators, consultants, and researchers experimenting with emergence and change-making. In dialogue, in shared experiments, in the collaborative making of a different approach to creativity. Members have access to everything in Emerging Futures+, plus thirty-five live events a year, two weekly podcasts, bi-weekly creativity exercises, and the complete annotated bibliography.

💥 Start with a $1 trial for 7-days… Then $60/month or $597/year. Cancel anytime.