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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 270! Of Events / Of Creativity...
Good morning becomings in, of, and with
Last night we finally had an opportunity to become part of the first great fall storm in our immediate region with torrential rains, winds, lightning and thunder thickening the atmospheres. Roads became lakes, clothes became sponges, and skin became a wild landscape of rivers and waterfalls. These words, we hope, still carry the charge of this liquid and tempestuous becoming
In the thick of the rains, while walking home, the poet Basho folds back into the moment via faded memories: “rain like a running dog pissing…”
Coming home and peeling off the wet layers, I look it up – wet fingers finding the book:
A rolling cloud – like
a dog pissing on the run–
dense winter showers
Yuku kumo ya
inu no Kake-bari
murashiure
(translated by Sam Hamill)
Writing of storms – It was also a week when we finally had a chance to experience the sonic storms of the great Keiji Haino and Loren Connors in person at the new raw Blank Forms loft deep in the Lower East Side. Happily, our electric sensory aliveness will never return to a state of “before.”
But, more to the point of our time with you – our astonishing community of active and responsive readers: What a fascinating and interesting two months we have had experimenting with the question: what is an event?
And its echoing question:
How can the event catalyze a radically different orientation to creativity and reality?
This week and next week we are bringing this series on reality, creativity and events to a conclusion (for now). The speculative direction of this eight-volume experiment (Volumes 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269) has been to creatively participate in a radical reorientation of how reality and creativity are approached in very broad terms. Putting the propositional lure a little too bluntly: reality and creativity are not two things – one that exists and one that occasionally happens to it. Reality is, simply put, ongoing creative processual events.
What does this mean?
Over the last six newsletters we have experimented, tested, pushed and probed into this question from diverse perspectives:
But this experiment hasn't been confined to the newsletter. This fall, Jason and I have worked to develop a more robust experimental integration between the Worldmakers community of creative practice (especially with our weekly virtual in-person live events) and the development of the newsletters. In our live events, we have had discussions with John Protevi and Erin Manning, as well as workshops on the agency of place and co-emergent processes that have all informed the newsletter’s development – and this has then looped back into the online discussions. Something very special is developing. And this series is a great reflection of this highly collaborative and profoundly distributed emergent dialog.
Perhaps the most telling example of this is that what we initially wrote for this week’s newsletter was a summary of the thirty-plus key concepts that have emerged for us from this six-week experiment.
But then yesterday happened…
Yesterday morning (for us in North America) Yulia Bogdanova led, from Berlin’s stormy evening, a workshop: Sensing the Future Moving You. (Yulia has a really great newsletter and podcast: Breath of Life – both of which are very much worth following).
And suddenly, our jumping into the kind of summary that could feel like something fully AI-generated left us sensing that something was missing. Jumping from our experimental newsletters to a final newsletter of “key concepts” felt like too big a leap – a leap that risked making things feel either far too philosophical or far too close to yet another soul-numbing PowerPoint of best practices.
We came to sense that for such a potentially radical reorientation to mean something – it needs to be, as Yulia’s workshop exemplified – visceral and tangible – immediate and intuitive – exemplary and speculatively open…
And so this week we are co-evolving with the unfoldings of our own collective and experimental lived experiences, actively pivoting our practices…
We need to come back to this question:
What is an event – and: how can the event catalyze a radically different orientation to creativity and reality?
For us, we can think of no better experience to get a grasp on this than that of being in the same place as someone else – but experientially being in/of a totally different world. But the richness of such an experience might not at first be obvious – so let's work our way slowly towards such an experience.
Let’s start with a favorite story and the simple contrast between two perspectives it affords. Let's work backward and start with the contrast:
A Contrast: The First Perspective
Consider a body of water, say the Hudson River near the top of Manhattan. If we were to ask, “What is it?” From a standard perspective, we might start by saying how wide it is, what it is composed of – differing amounts of salt and fresh water moving at certain varying speeds, with some trace chemicals, various species of fish and other life, moving through a certain rock composition. If necessary, we could go into details – say, for example, the composition of the water: mainly H2O, salt, trace chemicals, and microscopic forms of life.
To this we could add some history – both geological and ecological. And then from this solid objective grounding we could move on to how people have used it and what it means to them over time. Perhaps you swam in it as a child, or you paddled in it, or you fondly remember walking along its banks… We could collect historical songs, poems, private journal entries and personal letters that reference how the Hudson was subjectively experienced.
Notice how this approach moves from the objective to the subjective and from the general to the particular and back again. It assumes reality is composed of things – some basic stuff – atoms (for the lack of a better term) and, depending on their composition and how these are built up and further arranged – such that everything objectively follows: H2O, salt, life, mountains, fish, algae, and much besides, etc.
To this objective layer we add our subjective human experiences and feelings: how we experienced and feel about water – there are our memories, and our engagements. And from the combination of the two we might get creative – designing a new boat, writing a beautiful poem, or deciding to settle near the banks of the Hudson…
Let's start far from the highly abstracted experience of atoms, trace chemicals, and H2O – in an actual potential event: you engaging with the river…
The Hudson River just north of Manhattan – it is a dynamic event that has so far unfolded over almost three million years during which it has radically shifted its course – and as you meet it (as an equally rich becoming – the specific bio-enculturated astonishing being that you are) things get interesting: Today you and some friends are doing some fall cliff jumping with wetsuits, neoprene booties and toasty mitts. The jumping is nothing too crazy and something you are all quite skilled at, having lived in the area since childhood. As you jump in from about fifteen feet, the salty water breaks your fall, and after plunging below the surface, you are quickly brought back up, and you all float around laughing. For you, it is nothing special – just another year’s fall ritual plunge. Now consider a differing event: a human, similar to you, diving into the same river from 500 ft. It’s the same water that met your skilled being objectively as a liquid, and which graciously slowed your attuned jump down, and then brought your active body gently back up to the surface – now this same water meets a body just like yours as a solid surface, and the objective consequences are shocking – bones shatter on impact with a violence that is terminal.
So – How do we explain this?
It is the very same water – nothing whatsoever has changed about it. In fact, the two events could happen simultaneously: the jump from fifteen feet into a very liquid river and the plunge from five hundred feet onto the very solid surface of the very same river. In one event it is an embracing liquid, and in the other it is a radically unwelcoming solid surface. Importantly, this is not a subjective shift – you cannot imagine it to be otherwise. For you, in each relational event – this is what it is – liquid or solid. And the moment you jump: you are “of” it.
So back to the question, how do we explain this situation of the “same” context but two very, very different events?
What matters here is the specific dynamic relational configuration of each event: in this case it’s your specific kind of body + your specific skills + the specific river context – which relationally creates a specific objective and subjective space of possible becoming. That is the event – or rather the configurational coming into relation of many distinct ongoing events (you, the practices of diving, the river, etc.).
What is both objective (e.g. the liquidness and solidness of the river water) and subjective (e.g. the ways we sense these qualities) is creatively co-emergent of the same dynamic configurational event.
This is what it means to be “of” a creative event – and to be clear – this is all reality… Reality is no mere collection of discrete things.
Importantly, this particular varying relational configuration of two very differing human jumpers and their vastly discordant objective (and subjective) experiences are not the only possibilities. This is not the only event – or the only perspective: at the very same time a water-skimming insect will meet the river as a tensile surface, and the tiniest of bacteria meets the river as marbles bouncing it around. The number of actual and potential events emerging from this creative configuration is open and potentially infinite. But it is critical to note – this openness cannot be confused with a radical relativity for any specific being who is of a configuration – the configurational event is enabling, stabilizing and ultimately constraining of the lived space of possibility.
A note on “the same”: to be clear, the whole problematic approach that conceives of reality as composed of two discrete realms (the objective and the subjective) is entangled with this concept of “sameness”. If what anything and everything “is” is dynamic and relational, then nothing is the same. Here it is worth returning to Isabelle Stengers:
“An assemblage [configurational event] is the first and last word of existence. I do not exist, and then enter into assemblages [events]. The matter of my existence is my very participation in assemblages [events]... I am not gifted with agency, the possessor of intentions or initiative. Animation, agency, intentionality… belong to the assemblage [event] as such.” (Isabelle Stengers).
Stengers moves the discussion from “sameness” to "interests in common which are not the same interests". This is a critical distinction. Something is shared – an “interest” – a “concern” –, but it is not the “same”...
The liquidness or hardness or tensility is very real, and it is not “in” the water molecule – or “in” anything else. Rather, they are relational creative achievements of events.
Let’s pause on this. And as outlandish as it might strike you – it is worth reading again and really pausing at this point:
What is real is not “in” anything – rather it is the creative configurational achievement of an event…
Our hope is that this claim and this scenario begins to deeply unsettle your established sensibilities –so much so that you can no longer begin by describing the objective conditions of reality and then add to these fully distinct and fully subjective experiences of these objective conditions.
This approach of the bifurcation of the objective and the subjective cannot come to terms with very real circumstances – very real and very creative configurational logic of events. That the Hudson River participates at the very same time in becoming a liquid and a solid and much besides should give us pause.
What is “primary” – what is a very real matter of life and death is the creative outcome of a configurational event. And none of it will be found in any one “thing” – no matter how deeply you can peer – sure you can spend billions of dollars and get down to levels far beneath that of the atom – down to muons, gluons, quarks and eleven-dimensional strings – but the very real emergent lived experience will never be found there. Both what is “objective” and what is “subjective” emerge from the middle of processual, relational – configurational events. The discrete and unchanging “is” must give way to the becoming of a processual configurational becoming…
Experience is not something added to the discrete objective givens of reality – it is reality. Subjectivity and objectivity are both creative processual configurational achievements that both arise from the middle. The totality of the event gives rise to how those participating in these events sense, feel, act & know. How we feel is not subjective (e.g. in us alone) nor is how things are objective (e.g. in them alone in an unchanging manner). This "bifurcation of nature” is a dangerous and profoundly misguided illusion.
The conversation near the end of Yulia’s workshop turned towards embodied experiences: first the distinctions between snowboarding and skiing. These are much like our jumping into water example: the same “context,” but the participants are “of” radically distinct configurational unfolding emergent events. It’s not a subjective distinction – and switching from one to the other – from skiing to snowboarding requires a creative reconfiguring of attunements, ways of sensing, skills, habits and concepts. In each you become “one” with vastly differing worlds– or events. Vastly differing qualities come into presence with each. And vastly differing concerns recede with each.
This then led into a discussion of ocean sailing: The contrast was between Polynesian navigation and Western navigation practices. While it is the “same” water for Polynesian sailors and Western sailors – it is certainly not the same ocean. The configurational events give rise to very distinct modes of subjecting and objecting – modes of being “of” events. Adjacent activities – worlds apart.
We can, and should, extend this logic across all experience. But to do so we need to not begin by habitually prefacing experience by slipping in “subjective” prior to experience: “subjective experience”. Experience is the co-creative achievement of an event – and the co-created event gives rise simultaneously to both the emergent processes of the specific (or specifically mutually constrained) potential objectivizing and subjectivizing of experience.
To take seriously that reality and creativity are not two things – and that reality is, simply put, an ongoing creative processual event requires that we extend the emergent dynamic configurational creative logic of events across all experience – without the denigration to mere “subjective experience” – that terrible condescending of “well, that is your experience…”
This could, as feminists have made clear for over a century, begin with something as simple and obvious as recognizing the qualitatively different emergent creative configurational experience of a woman walking down a street in Manhattan, hanging out in a bar, or going home to that of a man. They are “in” the same context, but “of” very distinct events – none of which is reduced to mere subjective experience.
Or it could begin with a Yanomami person living of a forest and that of a forester:
“The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it… The xapiri spirits who come down from the mountain to play on their mirrors in the forest will escape far away. Their shaman fathers will no longer be able to call them and make them dance to protect us. … Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.” (Davi Kopenawa)
Now extend these distinct configurational processual event experiences to other perspectival becomings – how does a forest or a river become in these contexts?
As we came to the close of Yulia’s workshop, another member of the community, Katrina Donald, reminded us: “Presence is a practice.” Engaging-Sensing, and engaging-feeling-knowing the givenness (of the actuality of the event) are intrawoven & co-emerge from the same event – from the same entangled and distributed practice. We are of the active practice of ongoing configuring.
As we come to the end of this newsletter: what is most interesting for us is that this approach allows us to move away from the concept of a pre-existing subject moving into differing contexts & looking out at a distinct separate pre-existing objective world. Our subjectivity is the creative achievement of a dense relation of events that is also giving rise to what is experienced. We are of events, and we (as does everything) come creatively into being through, of, and as further events.
The question of shifting how we sense, feel, do, and know differently becomes one of experimentally co-creating novel configurational processual events (out of and with existing ongoing events) – it is an ontogenetic question and not simply an epistemological one (which is to say it is not just about knowing but always very much about being and becoming….
Until next week,
Keep Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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