In this article, I outline a mode and content of thought that I believe can advance our collective learning and creative capacities, and that can be explored and deployed in contexts of everyday real or concrete and especially diminished more-than-human real experience.
I shall start with two statements that summarise my position on problems with the dominant intelligence-based mode of thought and its limited creativity - as I perceive them. This critique being the motivation for the thinking and concepts presented in the film, Flow, and the overall Umio framework.
The problems of intelligence-based thought and its content
First, I propose that we do not have the necessary cognitive capacities and pragmatic frameworks to see, think, design and act with sufficiently rich insight into individual concrete real experience, especially diminished or pathological experiences.
Second, we do not have the means to see wholly the formation and persistence of collective, similar real experiences, along with the conditions, forces, capacities and possibilities limiting or enabling their (re)creation.
These deficiencies in our capacities to see and act with impact in real experience endure because we prioritise and value analytic intelligence as the dominant model of thinking along with the cuts, categories, data, quantities, and outcomes it generates as the material constituting our reality.
A mode of thought that assumes repetition and possibilities of prediction in the behaviour of the individual material entities, objects and humans that it observes; and that provides the content of knowledge to different fields and disciplines, to problem definition, to priority setting, to innovation and design (of policy, program, service, technology etc.), to the assessment, regulation, approval and valuation of what we create, and to decisions in everyday practices.
My position is that a content of knowing stated in mostly quantitative terms using outcomes, categories and measures provides only superficial insight into concrete real experience. In fact it hides possibilities for transitioning undesired and for creating desired real experience.
How intelligent thought works and its limits in real experience
How does this rational intelligent system of knowing work? To organise the capture of data and the actions we take using it, we tend to “freeze the world” and then make “cuts” in it to define the boundaries of observation around a phenomena of interest; cuts placed around stable concepts and discrete observations of material things (matter, bodies, parts of bodies, individual human beings, brains), or cuts using constructed categories of observable properties of people, of problems, and of identity (disease, gender, race, sex, class etc.)
I argue that the content produced from this pervasive instrumental, functional, templated logic of intelligence and its data is not enough, especially when applied to the flowing embodied mind, or real experience as a qualitative overlapping set of sensations and feeling states.
Rather, intelligence offers only an encrusted, embalmed view of real experience, and via its mechanical linear assumption of repetition (e.g., of outcomes), it obscures the need, possibility, and potential for deeper understanding of the nature and formation of real experience, of differences within similar real experiences , and of the origin and persistence of real problems – of disease, dis-ease, diminishment etc. - arising in it.
Whilst analytic intelligence has helped us gain a certain mastery over nature (and afforded too many possibilities for its exploitation and degradation), the dominance of this thought process - and the functions and purpose it serves - explains why we are not capable of fully comprehending and addressing the worsening conditions of real human experience; conditions of rising mental and chronic disease, of obesity, hopelessness, existential loss, trauma, alienation, crisis, and identity-based discrimination.
For example, an intelligence founded on a fragmentary analytic empiricism obscures an arguably more compelling picture of the impacts of climate crisis in real experience, a picture that if painted can help mobilise more impactful engagements of collective interactional government, business, community, and place based actions to address the crisis. Whilst we continue to debate the evidence of the causes, impacts, forces, and trends of climate change, we fail to fully see and comprehend their impacts in real concrete experience, a failure that drags any incentive for possibilities of collective action.
When we elevate insight into real experience alongside or even ahead of a rational intelligence mode of knowing, we elevate our creational capacities to see and address the flows and forces diminishing our real experiences.
But we do not do this. The primary motive determining how we observe, measure and program our reality is to satisfy narrow functional, economic, and material desires. We lack sufficient motive to critically reflect upon our own tendencies of knowing that obscure real experience in all its dynamic concrete becoming.
Further, the tendencies of social and scientific intelligence-based practice actually constitute and distort our very own realities via the cuts, concepts, measures, meanings, identities and expressions they impart into our own experience of ourselves, as well as in our capacities to understand the real experiences of others. In short, they are agencies of our own experience.
For example, in England (the programs do not apply to rest of the U.K.), two highly trumpeted government programs were announced recently, one for social care transformation and one for “levelling up” the opportunities and potential of poorer parts of the country. In neither was there any mention of the actual conditions and possibilities of real experience, whether of care or disparity. Both emphasised material, functional and data aspects of problems, opportunity and need. Both defined a set of “solutions” that amounted to simplistic tax- and incentive-based redistributive programs, wider access to adult training and jobs, the improvement of basic quantitative quality of life measures and the equalisation of outcomes of health and social care. Neither program placed any understanding of real experience at the core of their problem definition or creation. Neither used any insight into differences in real experience or the conditions limiting potential.
As I see it, there are three interacting capacities forming a real experience ecosystem system of thought and creational worldview:
Seeing individual and collective formations of real experience in flows of their creation
Thinking and learning about origins, difference, persistence, and movements of whole real experience in agencial assemblages
Designing and enacting policy, program, technology, service, ecosystem design, organisation, strategy, innovation, systems through interactional creation via experience ecosystems.
SEEING AND BEING IN FLOWS OF EXPERIENCE CREATION
We live in a world in which natural living and non-living entities are continuously becoming via interactions of flows bearing diverse matter, energy, force, tendencies, and processes of creation.
Folded into this reality of interacting (and in a sense intra-acting, entangled) creational agencies of nature are human practices of observing, knowing, measuring, boundary-making, marking, and describing the natural world.
In the western tradition (as I describe above), typically these are empirical analytical practices that deploy a mode of representational thought that assumes repetition and possibilities of prediction and law-making in the phenomena they observe. Generally, they hold their phenomena of interest stable and then observe events and outcomes, and derive causal relations using fixed categories, boundaries, and identities of things.
But within a flow conception of an always becoming natural reality, we see that the agencies of scientific and social scientific practices of observation and knowing are inseparable from the agencies of matter and energy in nature. In fact, they both mutually constitute our actual reality (Barad, 2007).
When holding a view of reality that is co-constituted by nature and its observation by humans, we also see the ongoing flow of durations of real experience; the largely unobservable sensations, feeling states, and transitions that endlessly unfold in our embodied lives. We then see, as I wrote above, how ...
"...social and scientific intelligence-based practices actually constitute and distort our very own realities via the cuts, concepts, measures, meanings, identities and expressions they impart into our own experience of ourselves, as well as in our capacities to understand the real experiences of others. In short, they are agencies of our own experience."
THINKING WHOLE AND LEARNING REAL EXPERIENCE
To think of flows of whole real experience entangled with flows of natural matter and with flows of social and scientific practice, we must transcend presently fragmented disciplines and fields, categories, and concepts to develop a wholeness of thought. We must be especially attuned to the flowing nature of the content of real experience itself.
Like the notes and chords forming the melody of a song, or the intra-acting matter and energy producing eddies, vortices and currents forming an always-different flowing river, real experience is constituted from a mix of sensations or affectsthat ebb and flow in their force, quality, intensity, persistence, and creational possibility in our own real (non-representational) sense of time.
These affective phenomena constituting real experience arise in four inter- and intra-acting relational affective domains of flows and tendencies of affect creation – bodily-motor, social-cultural, material-spatial, and perceptual-cognitive. Each domain bears and/or produces certain affects that variously fuse and stabilise to produce distinct qualities, contents, capacities, and expressions of real experience.
In a flow model of whole experience and its thought, we can think of illness, disease, or dis-ease as a stuck or sedimented fusion of flows; a sedimentation that occupies experience in different ratios and intensities in all four affective domains. Conversely, we can think of health as a diversity in flows of ongoing possibilities of creation, not as a binary opposite to disease but as a more flowing possibility of positive being and becoming.
Forces of tendency and the structuration of interactional flows
As well as thinking of the content of actual real experience as a multiplicity of flowing affects and capacities to affect, we can think of a pre-experienced virtual yet real domain of interacting flows of energy, matter (including objects and technologies), meanings and ideas. And critically, we can discern how these flows are modulated by forces of tendency; tendencies that produce “viscosity” effects in the flows that either:
Enable flows and the ongoing creation of difference of real experience (or “health”)
Sediment flows and reduce the creation of difference leading to repetitions, similarities, tendencies, and habits in experience (or “dis-ease”)
Altogether, I distinguish six primary tendencies that modulate interactional flows of creation forming real experiences:
Tendencies of a certain belief in the reality of the world, especially of the objective separation and representation of things in the world, and of distinguishable (I argue that cannot be distinguished) properties of experience such as discrete emotions
Tendencies of ways of thinking, of methods of knowledge creation
Tendencies of modes, emphasis (e.g., on technology) and content of innovation and design
Tendencies of capital’s use or appropriation of human and machine labour
Tendencies of biopolitics or of how the state values life and experience, and the nature of its interventions in experience
Tendencies of the regulation of norms, laws, disciplines, practices, and behaviour
We might say too there is a tendency of value and (e)valuation embedded within all these forces.
Now importantly, just like the flows, these tendencies are not fixed but are also relatively fluid, heterogeneous, and unstable in different degrees. However, the more stable or stuck tendencies can sediment or silt up the different interactional flows and in doing so, reproduce certain recurring shared realities of real experience, especially in pre-disposed social groups, places, and communities.
Flow and stability in structures of real experience
By thinking of the force of tendencies acting on interactional flows, we now have a means to understand the formation of structures (or causal determinants) of experience; structures that can be defined as relative stabilisations of tendencies that sediment flows of interactional creation, and that have causal power in our real lives and experiences.
When adopting a flow and structure model view of real experience formation, we can discern enduring structures of perception; of methods for knowledge creation; of innovation or ideas creation; of configurations of human space, settings, and environments; of material designs; of social norms and institutions; of signs, codes and symbols; and of the role of capital and valorisation in shaping priorities and organisation in social and scientific practice, amongst others.
Not only can we now look inside the “black box” of structure to see their content, formation, and causal power via forces of tendency acting in and on different flows, but also, we can discern their role in the very creation of real experiences. We can explore how a combined flow and structure model of the virtual pre-experienced entanglement of entities of energy, matter, tendencies, ideas and affects actualises our own individual and collective real experiences.
We can enquire with much more clarity and confidence into questions of not only what constitutes real experience – energy, matter, tendencies, ideas, and affects of sensation and capacity - but also how similar realities of real experiences of certain qualities of feeling states – of, for example illness, loneliness, pain, of chronic disease, addiction - form, endure and sometimes dissolve.
We can examine how and why do illness, diminished or dis-eased experiences concentrate in certain social groups, places, and communities, and we can discover how to build or renew our collective and individual capacities for their prevention or recovery.
Umio flow and structure model of the origin, formation, differentiation and recurrence of real experience (copyright Umio Limited)
DESIGN AND DOING VIA EXPERIENCE ECOSYSTEMS
To build our collective capacities to prevent, modify and create the real experiences we desire – of others as well as our own - I set an open frame around a thought system of flows and tendencies for a particular context of real experience. This is the frame of an experience ecosystem.
A real experience ecosystem frame and mode of creation helps us to open and widen any context of real experience to better see, understand and modify:
the forces of production, differentiation, and repetition of that focal experience
the tendencies of belief (ontology) and method (epistemology) that influence how we determine knowledge of that experience – and the representational cuts we make around it
the limitations of current practices of innovation, design, valuation, organisation, systems of action for the real experience
the discovery of difference and of parameters of capacities to affect a context of real experience
Via the frame of experience ecosystems, our collective task is to provide more complete, more accurate, more radically empirical, and also, more useful genealogical accounts of the origin, differentiation, and persistence of real experiences.
We can now produce thicker explanations of the nature, process, and content of the becoming of our reality (of which we are a part with/in nature).
We can find novel paths to undo stuck, narrow, representationally poor, or siloed tendencies, powers and practices of observation, method, and knowing of real experience.
We can see through, beyond and transcend the boundaries of fragmented scientific and social disciplines and fields.
We can remake our research methods, measures, technologies, and services using a relational view of whole becoming real experience.
We can extend our sense of design and possibility to the creation of real experience phenomena, an extension that includes the reconfiguration of the very onto-epistemological and ethical practices by which we see, differentiate and act within real experience.
We work with a permeable cut-out of dynamic real experience phenomena, not just a static model of actors interacting with resources around a “beneficiary actor”, but a cut out that explores differences as well as transitions or movements in common real experience. A more-than-human cut out that redefines our notions of causality, structure, and agency and that replaces the dominant focus on the individual human, body and parts, intentions, and behaviour.
Fundamentally, we can inform the design of mutually reinforcing and radicalising propositions that can help to create desired, and prevent and recover unwanted, real experiences.
AN ALTERNATIVE SYSTEM OF THOUGHT
Today, understanding and addressing the limitations of our dominant intelligence-based mode of analysis and knowing is more pressing than ever, especially as we place faith and hope in ever more advanced forms of data-driven artificial and computational intelligence, in cognitive science, and in synthetic biological and genetic technologies and systems.
Whilst analytical instrumental thought has given us a degree of mastery over the biological dimensions of diseases and over nature (often to its detriment), we must elevate an alternative system of thought. One that provides insights into questions of stability and fluidity, similarity and difference, and origin and recurrence of whole embodied real experiences; a system of thought that supports deeper understanding of the formative conditions of our increasingly diminished real experiences, and that surfaces novel paths and possibilities for creating, valuing, and sustaining the experiences we all desire.
GETTING STARTED
Finally, I shall leave with some suggestions for getting started with this mode of thought.
See the content of real experience as an interactional duration of affects and affective capacities
See the virtual-real pre-experience interactional flows and forces of tendency forming structures and actualising real experience via our interactions
See beyond linear cause-outcome determinant models to question how do structures form, persist, and continue to evolve from our own tendencies of belief, method, innovation, valuation amongst others.
Reflect on your own tendencies of belief, frames or cut-outs, method, and design
Audit your current practices of innovation, design, valuation, organisation, and action against the model of real experience and the wider frame of experience ecosystems
If you have a real experience context you would like to better understand and address, why not share it with me?
REFERENCE
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.