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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Vol 49! On Processes: Part Two — Cutting into Processes...
Good Morning laid back processes of summering (or wintering if you are in the Southern Hemisphere). We are back from various far flung locations — sea kayaking in Maine and wandering the streets of Rome. The waning moon is high in the sky at dawn and summer is flowing rapidly towards fall.
This week we are returning to our exploration of a process view of reality and all that it entails for creativity. We began this exploration in earnest three weeks ago in Volume 46 “It’s all processes within processes”. We then took a break for two weeks (down time!).
It’s been a while, so going back to reread volume 46 because we are going to focus on enriching some of the concepts we introduced and it will help introduce or remind you of what we have covered so far. We will continue exploring this topic over the next several weeks both in our newsletter and in our daily Linkedin Posts.
In our introduction we started with how our everyday lives consist of many repeating events that can be understood as processes that repeat. This was something we visualized as loops.
Take brushing one's teeth in the morning. It is a process consisting of a set of richly connected sequential actions:
Notice how each of these actions involves things at various scales: houses, rooms, floors, sinks, a toothbrush… as well as other actions, practices and concepts also at various scales that are all themselves processes with their own duration and logic (imagine everything from advertising campaigns to the complex lives of mouth bacterial ecosystems) .
These multi-scalar processes are entangled in ways that have stabilized into one form of dynamic relations (the daily routine of brushing ones teeth). One could visualize this as a broad scale systems diagram of interacting forces, but we are going to hold off from doing this right away. These stable relations have an emergent logic that exceeds and is different from a mere collection of ‘parts’.
Once all of these processes converge and assemble the relations (the whole) begins to exert a profound transformative force on the parts (including ourselves in this case) such that a unique event is formed.
These emergent events give rise to the reality we experience
Let’s look at a different example to make this clear: Take sea water, when I am floating in it, it is a liquid. I can dive into it & it affords me a way of slowing down gradually so I come back to the surface alive. But now if i jump from a great height — say 400 feet, the ocean I hit will afford me no such a gradual welcome. The outcome will be quite similar to hitting concrete. From the perspective of falling from 400’ the ocean is solid.
The very qualities of reality we experience are relational and are emergent from events (which are parts of processes and held together by converging processes.)
We can diagram this by showing how converging processes constrain and lead to the loop of the event we are in/of – in this case brushing our teeth:
This assemblage of converging processes is not static across the whole event of brushing one's teeth. The assemblage of processes is shifting as are the logics and intensity of the relations. This is best seen by adding a third dimension to our diagram:
When we see the simple loop of our event it in three dimensions we can see that if we ‘slice’ into the process at any moment we will have a portrait of a network — a type of system diagram:
Systems diagrams generally reflect the forces at work at a moment in a dynamic process. What they fail to convey is the dynamic nature of the assemblage of converging processes. Not all of the converging processes are the same for the whole duration of an event — they are continuously shifting.
If you were to slice into this loop of process at multiple times you would see how the assemblage is dynamically transforming — new processes are coming into play and others are dropping out, as well as relations are changing, etc.
Getting a feel for the dynamics of the assemblage and how it varies in time is critical. Being able to do this across scale is equally critical — some of these processes will have a scale of hundreds or more years (think of Foucault’s or Agamben’s work on the genealogy of the structuring of the modern human and its institutions).
There is a second key aspect of process that it is critical to get a feel for. And this is the dynamics of potentiality.
At any point in time processes always have more than one potential outcome. While assemblage constructively and creatively constrain a process there is never only the potential for one outcome. Some of these are very mundane: we could have chosen a different toothbrush or Toothpaste. Say we chose a wooden toothbrush and a powder. These choices would qualitatively shift the outcome to a more environmental potential. That, and many other potential outcomes was already part of the field of potential outcomes even if I did not know about it.
This field of assemblage constrained emergent potential outcomes is best drawn as a type of topological diagram, with each potential being shown as a ‘basin of attraction’ — one of the stable potentials of the assemblage (often called ‘attractors’). Note in the diagram below that we can see the relation between the assemblage and the potential outcomes — the two are always conjoined.
These fields of potentials are stabilized by various feedback loops in the assemblage that give the event resiliency. Pushing and transforming the assemblage within certain bounds will create changes to the field of potentials and allow the event to adapt (within certain bounds).
These will also vary from moment to moment in a process. If we ‘slice’ into the loop of varying potentials we will again find a three dimensional logic to it:
Again these potentials will dynamically vary across the totality of the event. And they will vary potentially quite significantly if you make qualitative changes to the assemblage (a critical part of the creative process). We can see this by diagraming a number of ‘cuts’ into the process:
Understanding things as emergent processes changes how one approaches creativity. There are many far reaching implications to this shift to a processual vision of reality. For this week we wish to keep our focus narrow and experiential.
Shifting into a process based approach to reality and creativity we believe is best first approached by getting a good grasp on these linked concepts of assemblages, emergence and fields of potential.
This allows one to engage with creative practices across two registers of looping dynamics (1) assemblages and (2) a linked field of potentials. It is critical to be able to experimentally ping-pong between these two:
It is important to play with these ideas — test them out — feel the shifting web of assemblages as you do any task. Sense the emerging and shifting field of potentials… Note how you are actively and fluidly moving between the two registers.
This is where we will leave you for this week. But as a final parting gift to inspire your own experiments, here are some of our recent posts from Linkedin that get further into process and all of its wonders:
Over the next month or so we will add, enrich and complexify this introduction into processes and the worldly dynamics of creativity. Till then stay distributed, dynamic, intra-woven, emergent and processual!
Have an astonishing week!
Till Volume 50,
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
We’re How You Innovate
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