(Note this is verbatim per the film and therefore is complete with "And ... " sentence starts).
Whether at the micro or macro level, we know that reality consists of flows of ongoing creation and differentiation of various phenomena.
Flows bearing natural matter, processes, and tendencies that produce individual living things and beings.
And that form and continuously shape natural environments.
And flows too of human practices of knowing, being, and doing in the world.
Scientific human practices that observe material objects and that seek causal explanations, associations, and possibilities of prediction.
And social practices that examine humans and group behaviour and outcomes using constructed identities and categories.
And together, these natural, scientific, and social flows mutually constitute our reality.
A reality that is always being made.
And although we are mostly unique creations of this always becoming human-in-nature agencial reality, we share many common experiences.
Real experiences made of a fusion of mostly unobservable sensations and feeling states, like the notes forming a melody in a song, and that flow in sensed not clock time.
Common experiences which often share certain origins, forces, conditions, and capacities, as well as observable consequences.
Especially when these experiences are negative, repetitive, or stuck, and then become more disposed to risk, disease, disability, discrimination, and displacement.
To understand the origin and persistence of common and especially undesired real experiences, we must go beyond common “cut-outs” of the flowing co-constituted reality that are often used today.
Cut-outs that are typically placed around individual humans, around bodies, around minds separate from bodies, around our brains, and around observations of human behaviour.
I argue we must place a wider cut around whole embodied or human-in-nature real experience.
And we must use this cut as our primary referent or phenomena of interest.
And going wider still, we can set a broader frame of experience ecosystems.
An open frame with loose boundaries placed around the more-than-human interactional flows of creation that run through it, and that generate common contexts of real experience having similar content and expression.
And by working within an experience ecosystem frame, we ask now not just “what is” questions but questions about the formation, differentiation, and repetition of a chosen context of real experience.
And so in this time of pandemic crisis, of rising chronic disease and mental illness, and increasingly lost hope, I argue we need a new more radical empiricism.
An empiricism that starts and ends with real experience and that is practiced via the wider frame of experience ecosystems.
One that understands experience as an ongoing production of social, cultural, material, spatial, and bodily interactions and that emerges in a human-in-nature agencial reality.
One that elevates affect, feelings, intuition, and empathy alongside science and rational knowing, and that values them as valued means to respond to our fluid and unobservable experiences in the world.
One that overcomes our false binary ideas of agency and structure, of nature and culture, and even space and time.
A more transcendental empiricism that enriches us with much deeper insights into the intensive conditions and sedimentations of real experience.
And fundamentally, a framework that helps us to interactionally create the experiences that we desire ….
… along with the organisations, capabilities, services, and technologies that are necessary to enact them...
... repeatedly, sustainably and with real impact.
W A T C H F L O W