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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 269! Beyond Process: The Five-Fold Event?...
Good Morning becomings of semi-stable shiftings of multiple stable states,
Over the last half-dozen newsletters, we have been exploring the perspective of events as a key alternative way into engaging with the complex creative processes that comprise all reality (Volumes 264, 265, 266, 267, 268). In this regard, Deleuze makes an even stronger claim: “The event is the only concept capable of ousting the verb ‘to be’ and its attributes.” Obviously – if taken as a statement of fact – it is not something that we could prove, but, if taken as a propositional lure for experimentally sensing otherwise, there is much to collectively play with…
It is certainly true that for too long Western traditions have approached reality from the perspective of the static and stable – from the perspective of “to be” – from the perspective that things just “are” and deep down always have been. There is a deep and abiding passion to speak of discrete things separate from relations and processes of becoming. From such a perspective, creativity is something that occasionally happens – a flash of lightning – a flash of brilliance – that appears for a brief moment to bring a change into the mix, and then things return to a static, discrete and stable state once again – “being” returns – with just one more discrete static thing added to the container.
Over the last two hundred years Western scientific practices have slowly – in fits and starts – come to the realization that all reality is processual – that change is the constant – that the seeming stasis is just a form of non-perceptible change. If, for example, you zoom in enough, or conversely zoom out far enough, rocks, mountains, tables, and chairs “flow.” Plate tectonics is pushing up mountains, and the freeze and thaw cycle is breaking them down… rocks and mountains will eventually become the beaches, and the deep ocean will eventually be pushed up into mountains. Standing at the top of the Rockies in a snowstorm, your tired, kneeling and hunched-over body will gaze in wonder upon an imprint of a sea shell. And in your joyous laughter of recognition, one hundred million years of flow will resonate with you. And when, with astonishing technological inventiveness, we zoom in on the same rocks at the atomistic scale – there too everything will be in motion.
Now, as many of you reading this will also sense, “processual” sensibilities and ways of worlding have long histories outside of the far west asian sphere of influence (the so-called “West”) – and this is especially prevalent in South and East Asia. Here, the sense that all things flow is neither new nor particularly noteworthy. And for those of Daoist modes of being and becoming, the Western experiment in stasis might appear as odd and curious as a Lyâxe Nakodabi person might find both the logic of being and becoming peculiar when talking about the living beings we call the rocks or mountains of the Rockies.
It must be noted: It should be more shocking for those deeply engaged in the complexity sciences that, to cite only one of countless examples, Mahayana Philosophy has experimented with Pratītyasamutpāda (intra-dependent co-emergence) for more than two thousand years prior to the mid-twentieth century development of the Complexity Sciences and the contemporary Western experimental curiosity for relations. And long before business consultants ever dreamed of paternalistically trademarking processual, enactive and relational concepts – diverse global communities co-creatively developed ways of being alive that in qualitatively different ways brought these processual modalities into unique becomings. Where are they in these experiments? (They are certainly not present enough in our own practice…)
Writing in 2018, the biologists John Dupré and Daniel Nicholson begin their important and iconoclastic book Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, with the assertion:
“There is a notable lack of substance… in the domain of the living. Let’s face it: there is no thing in biology… or, in the world. Things are abstractions from an ever-changing reality. Reality consists of a hierarchy of intertwined processes.”
From such a processual perspective, the logic of creativity shifts – it is not something marginal and rare – but rather a process that is potentially everywhere at all times.
This broad historical shift from the perspective of “being” to “becoming” – and from a creativity that is the exception to a ubiquitous creativity in Western global practices has been a gradual, uneven, complex and quite diverse act of emergence – a type of ecological transformation of a watershed (which we would uncomfortably call “complexity”).
In all of these transformative shiftings we are currently in a general phase of creative re-orientation in which we are, on one hand, testing the utility of historical approaches (e.g., Is it still helpful to understand and engage with individuals as discrete beings? Is it enough to simply generalize and extend the human-centered approach to creativity to all reality? – or do we need a wholly differing approach?) – and on the other, developing new experimental approaches that can effectively engage with a reality that is everywhere in an ongoing creative becoming (e.g. the development of an enactive approach to life, or the development of the Complexity Sciences).
The challenge is that these kinds of profound shifts are not like changing hats as the weather turns cold. We, and our modes of doing, sensing and knowing, are fully of a processual ecology of entangled and co-emergent enactive habits, tools, environments, and conceptual infrastructures such that change is never a mere shift in mindsets or changes in paradigms. Much of the broad static container-plus-thing sensibility of Being with the capital B is still effectively bubbling up in and of our processual orientations, practices and ecologies. This too is a type of event – a long-lasting, resilient and ever mutating event.
In this ecological context, the enactive process of getting our general sensibility attuned to a differing orientation is a critical aspect of this change. And, because of the emergent co-creative nature of events, it is far harder than it might at first seem.
For us, perhaps ironically, one of the challenges of such an enactive re-orientation is the question: is it really about flows? – is it really about processes?
There can be no doubt that everything flows. But as wondrous, illuminating, and transformative as this insight is, where does it leave us? The challenge is to come to grips with the fact that reality does indeed flow – but it does far more than just flow – these flows are not everywhere at all times the same – flows differentiate – individuate in novel ways, some of which stabilize and persist – and in their dynamic persisting they transversally interact with a near infinity of other semistable processes across endless scales. Yes, our categories of “things” are pragmatic abstractions, as Dupré and Nicholson argue – but they do not necessarily arise out of totally arbitrary sensing of flows – there are regularities to what is being sensed that, in looping through us, allow us to co-creatively engage with them in contextually valid ways.
Deleuze’s claim that “the event is the only concept capable of ousting the verb ‘to be’ and its attributes” is an astute intervention into this question – that reality is dynamic – this is only the beginning of things. What matters is getting an enactive sense of how patterns and regularities are co-created in the becomings of “flow.”
So what does the perspective of an “event” logic add to an approach in which everything is ever changing (a processual approach)? Our first and most immediate sense is that events shift the perspective from an ever-flowing oceanic aether to a dynamic reality populated by the endlessly co-creatively intra-acting dynamics of differentially semi-stable events persisting across multiple scales.
This initial lived intuition of things as the co-creatively intra-acting dynamics of differentially semi-stable events persisting across multiple scales is a profoundly generative one. From it we can feel our way into sensing the astonishing becoming, dynamic persistence, and highly distributed relational co-creative agency of the event of an old wooden table which we might sit at, and equally the astonishing becoming, dynamic persistence and highly distributed relational co-creative agency of the event of patriarchy.
Broadly speaking, for us, from an “event perspective,” our processual intuitions are being enactively supplemented by a co-evolving feel for relations, emergence, historicity, and difference (a five-fold event: process, relation, emergence, historicity, and difference). Let’s take a moment to weave eventing lightly into these:
Relations
If a sense that everything is dynamic and every thing flows unsettles a complacent sense of stability, universalism and stasis – then relationality gives us a way to sense how things creatively develop into stable patterns. From the perspective of Being and stable, discrete things, relations come into being as a secondary quality of lesser importance. But relations are no mere connection between stable pre-existing things – rather they are active transformative agents that make what is held in relation. And this opens an existential floodgate: “things” are not simply in relation – rather, the relation creates what it conjoins. Take the relation of love – it emerges between beings, and this relation comes to creatively transform the beings of this relation. We are not so much “in” love as “of” an active relational processual event of loving.
As we sense that everything is creatively and recursively of processual relations – we can take this much further: if we can say “every thing flows” then we can equally say that every thing is a vast dynamic relational process. Pick up a pen and put it to paper to write – a vast multiplicity of events is enactively being held together in the flows alive in your actions: oilfields becoming plastics, forests becoming papers, vast histories of the embodied "alphabetization of the mind,” minerals of the earth becoming inks flow via the meeting of gripping hands released by the evolution of an upright bipedal posture holding a tiny rolling ball moved by the specific tooth of a paper first experimentally developed by Arab craft-persons in what is now southern Spain over a thousand years ago…
(Note: we write extensively about these processual logics – our glossary is a great place to start: relations, assemblages, affordances)
Emergence
When processes come into specific non-linear configurational relations, certain emergent processes are both enabled and stabilized (“constrained”). These novel processual outcomes cannot be traced back to any direct source – and they transform (via a process of system causation or configurational enabling/stabilizing) what they emerge from.
(Note: we write extensively about these processual logics – our glossary is a great place to start: emergence, individuation, autopoiesis)
Historicity
Ultimately, multi-scalar relations change everything, and thus everything emerges historically – contingent, relational, dynamic, and emergent…
(Note: we write extensively about these processual logics – our glossary is a great place to start: dispositif/apparatus, abstract machine, feedforward)
Difference Differing
Everywhere, via contingent relational dynamics, differences are ever differing. This goes by another name: creativity.
(Note: we write extensively about these processual logics – our glossary is a great place to start: Difference, Creativity, Emptiness)
How should we approach this intrawoven active constellation of processual forces? Here we are in sympathy with Deleuze – we need to develop the practices and conditions to both actively sense and co-emerge with the new itself, and for this we need approaches that are “not the ones that reproduce the eternal, but the ones on which new creations are produced, the ones endowed with a capacity for innovation or creativity” – and for this an experimental feel for the five-fold processual-relational logic of events can stabilize and catalyze our enactive curiosities.
But something is missing. This five-fold list would be familiar to many in the complexity sciences and elsewhere. But the relational convergence of these processes is not a “view from nowhere” – it is an enactive one. And as a collectively lived co-creative experience, it gives rise to worlds. Our lived processual reality is that of a historical and situated world-in-the-making.
And this is what makes it an event: events are collectively more-than-human lived processual becomings – we are of them and not outside of them. Events make us collectively as we collectively make them. There is no generic universal becoming – it is not that everything flows in a more complex manner for everyone the same. This five-fold approach is still radically incomplete.
The enactive creative worldmaking aspect of events is the missing piece and the experimental topic for next week when we bring this series towards a processual concluding.
Until next week...
Keep Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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