Abstract
We live in a world populated by structures – a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of material shaped and hardened by history. Immersed as we are in this mixture, we cannot help but interact in a variety of ways with the other historical constructions that surround us, and in these interactions we generate novel combinations, some of which possess emergent properties. In turn, these synergistic combinations, whether of human origin or not, become the raw material for further mixtures. This is how the population of structures inhabiting our planet has acquired its rich variety, as the entry of novel materials into the mix triggers wild proliferations of new forms.
Entre le moment où elle n’a pas encore accédé au visible et celui où elle s’est désormais trop étalée et confondue au sein du visible pour qu’on l’y discerne encore, la transformation n’offre qu’un étroit interstice de perceptibilité; c’est pourquoi c’est avec tant de vigilance qu’il faut la ‘scruter’.
On doit réinventer quelque chose…
In 1893, Antonin Dvořák, director of the National Conservatory of Music of America, composed what would eventually be known as the ‘New World Symphony’. More than a century later, on April 20, 2016, over 300 anonymous musicians who had never played together before met on the Place de la République in Paris to offer a powerful and singular rendering of the piece. They had organized spontaneously and in a very experimental way through social media in the wake of the anti-establishment movement, Nuit Debout. Equipped with headlights, clothespins for their scores (the night was windy), and their instrument – the conductor’s smartphone doubling as an illuminated baton – they feverishly played away their hymn amidst a motley crowd mobilized in solidarity against the proposed ‘socialist’ government’s reforms. There and then, thousands of people listened to the classically trained volunteer musicians, who were performing in a highly unusual setting for recitals yet a place charged historically by centuries of politicized demonstrations.
The symphony, both in its materiality (which allows music to be written, read and played through what seems like an infinite combination of art, politics and moving forces) and its affective existence (where thousands of people were affected, both analogically and digitally, in Paris and around the World Wide Web), the musicians, their instruments, the observers, the recordings, the dreary political context, the looming threat of violence by armed forces, the repeated attempts to silence, the growing turmoil and its constant re-invention – all these realities coalesced in a single event that could not be reduced to a simple sum of its constituents.
In fact, this event presented qualities of various natures: historical, social, political, anthropological, musical and aesthetical. Even the most detailed set of causalities would hardly render adequately the emergence of such qualities. The event itself proves to be a creative expression made out of multiple forces of influence (such as Dvořák’s music, Haussmannian urbanism, French politics and classical music schools), all operating simultaneously and dynamically at several levels of organization (material, semiotic or affective). New properties thus emerge at various level as well, where interactions of random and deterministic processes congregate.
In light of such complexities, this special issue of Social Science Information (in itself both the product and the production of a certain emergence) is interested in exploring how different registers of activities actually unfold. It also examines how combinations of these activities, both distinctive and indissociable, contribute to the actual emergence of assorted modalities of contemporary existences. Those activities are found in various sites, such as bison-herd migration, telluric activity, social intervention, video game design, bioart creation, mantic machines, ancient birth rituals and lucrative trade involving endangered species.
The main purpose behind this special issue is to search for another dimension, not separated from present elements, but different; one that could describe the changing state as well as the potentialities inherent to any mo(ve)ment. Therefore, we are less interested in framing what emergence is or is not, than keen to examine what emergence, as an operative concept, can actually do and how it would resonate within contemporary social sciences, both as an event and a tool to develop new knowledges.
To emerge:
To move out of or away from something and become visible; (Of an insect or other invertebrate) to break out from an egg or a cocoon; To become apparent or prominent; (Of facts) to become known; To recover from or survive a difficult situation.
Etymology:
Late 16th century (in the sense ‘become known, come to light’): from Latin emergere, from e- (variant of ex-) ‘out, forth’ + mergere ‘to dip’. (Oxford Dictionaries, 2016)
Borrowed from science and its systems theories, the concept of emergence offers an alternative to grasp not only the origins of change and the conditions of possibility for change to occur, but also what change can entail and how we can conceive of its generative abilities. Here, we are prompted to ask whether ‘change’ – or its semantic companions, ‘novelty’, ‘innovation’, ‘shift’, ‘transformation’ – could extend beyond the usual conceptual framework of ‘causality’, and if so, in what ways.
In this particular epoch of climate, political, social, even geological change, we are eager to problematize differently this crucial notion and site of investigation for social sciences. Scrutinized in labs, streets, skies, depths or even screens, change intrigues, scares, fascinates, saves and kills. People change, societies change, technologies too, as do continents, forests, oceans and species. Reality and its (dis)content change, so do research and researchers. And if change might be followed or refused, it cannot be ignored.
When conceptions of such change rely only on preconceived or post-confirmed logics, change is either about to come or already past. In this special issue, change is instead be-coming. In this respect, the issue deals with processes of generation occurring in between entities, amid human and non-human forms, among institutions, machines or practices that are not only transformed by their relational entanglements but are actually emerging from them.
Life, this emerging reality whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere
This issue thus brings together various scholars, with various perspectives, intellectual trainings, agendas, methodologies and traditions, to experiment with the very possibility of emergence(s) in research itself. In order to do so, we did not provide contributors with a specific theoretical framework regarding emergence. Rather, we invited everyone to make sense of the concept for themselves and for their research interests. The objective was to discover how emergence could be operationalized in their own work. Some liked it right away, others found it creatively challenging, but all generously offered a productive sense of emerging properties in their respective field.
From Shanghai to Montreal, through Paris, Boston, Warwick, Ottawa and Hong Kong, the intellectual and geographical lines criss-crossing this special issue remind us, beyond concerns pertaining to the current state of affairs in the academic publishing industry, that research is both an individual endeavour and a collective imperative. They also underline the fact that, beyond the traditional cleavages between one and many, a curious meshwork of emerging processes is actually at play during the whole production, be it that of a given knowledge, a shoal of fish or a gentrified neighbourhood. Both product and production, this special issue builds on every author’s work, on current research paradigms and their afferent creative practices, as well as on a call for papers, many email exchanges and phone calls, litres of coffee and sleepless nights, all coagulating along the way. Even if we tried to envision the paths of this process when we began the project, we were never able to fully grasp the way they would eventually transduce.
Each of the seven papers composing this issue reflects on how various understandings of ‘emergence’ impact – even disrupt – central concepts and tropes within the social sciences and humanities (concepts such as the individual, communities, culture, data, scales, origin or alterity, to name but a few).
Ranging from communication studies to anthropology, from biophysics to environmental studies, from geography to social intervention, the contributions build on different case studies. Here readers will learn about paramecia, rootedness, the Department of Play, object-oriented programming, antidisciplinary hacking, magnetotactic bacteria, ‘He, Who Makes Being Alive’, and artichokes with legs …
Authors Sarah Choukah and Philippe Theophanidis delve into the origins of the concept of emergence, exemplifying how such a genealogical enterprise, coupled with a productive understanding of animal flocks, can help better navigate theoretical questions (in their case, questions pertaining to communication and media studies). In doing so, they offer a new avenue to engage communication without agency, which helps us reconsider how certain realities cannot be reduced to the individuals who belong to them.
For Marijn Nieuwenhuis, the question of emergence implies relational theories, based on the idea that the interaction and communication between animate and inanimate objects are central to processes of creation. In doing so, he refutes metaphysical philosophies postulating that pre-historical force fields exist independently from the activity of relating objects. The geographer discusses the concept of emergence in the context of the materialist turn, using traditional distinctions between place and space, being and becoming, stability and change to question our own propensities to inhabit a dynamic world.
Maria Vidart-Delgado builds on a playful intervention in a low-income Boston neighbourhood in order to demonstrate how play in public space pauses everyday life and allows for fictional collective worlds to emerge. To her, play serves as a catalyst for dynamics to unfold in different modes, to reveal, disrupt or propel a complex ecology of emerging processes (including non-intended and non-desirable ones …). As an anthropologist, she shuffles traditional perspectives on ethnographical work by assessing the emergent potential of observant-participation.
Damien Charrieras and Nevena Ivanova explore the intricacies of self-sufficient and moveable systems of algorithms that manipulate database content in relation to the creative practices of video-game production. They detail ways in which the use of game engines – a toolkit that offers a set of functionalities to automatize the handling of a range of processes (graphics, sound, game physics, networks, Artificial Intelligence) – make possible (or impossible) certain forms of emergences in digital play.
Christine Beaudoin and David Jaclin interview Andrew Pelling about his scientific activities. They inquire about his peculiar lab, where bioartists, social scientists and biophysicists work together with a constant attention geared toward emerging realities. In this experimental space (whose emergence and structuration through time did not go without questions from the institution), they not only map some of the contemporary modalities of emergence understood as a scientific concept, but also raise epistemological concerns about interspecies mingling and their co-produced knowledge. Here cells, Petri dishes, bleach and plastic gloves are not regarded as constituents of a standardized regime of discovery, but instead as emerging entities enmeshed in a dynamic world of becoming.
Echoing such practices, Thierry Bardini takes us among a group of bioartists gathered in Finland who built an (ironic) bio-mantic machine. By examining the many promises of synthetic biology, he problematizes the apparition of engineered forms of life and their rather provocative (and preoccupying) nascent worlds. Thinking through the invention of programmed purposiveness, his article prolongs Sloterdijk’s ideas about ‘the more or less explicit consensus that the age in which we live constitutes an enormous experiment by the primary nations capable of deploying technologies on the subject of the unlimited increase in power and the incessant intensification of life’.
This incessant intensification is also what Perig Pitrou finds instantiated in a traditional Mexican life ritual. Calling for a programmatic anthropology of life, he shows how, unlike the concept of origin (which tends to treat the moment of appearance as a unique event), the notion of emergence bears the idea of a multiplicity of moments during which new configurations come to light. Using thick ethnographic observations of birthing ceremonies, Pitrou analyses the variety of registers where life can be biologically, socially and symbolically coded.
Taking us through the violent world of wildlife trafficking, David Jaclin concentrates on the curious case of pangolin poaching, in which the dead bodies of smuggled animals feed a multiplicity of emergent relational entanglements of money, desire and protein. While distinguishing between dynamics of concrescence and indetermination, Jaclin draws on individuating processes that actually enable individuals to emerge and emergence to individuate.
While offering a vibrant and diverse incursion into current states of social sciences research, every author contributes to this issue an original case study. In doing so, they expose a driving interest not only in change itself, but also in the conditions that allow for change to emerge and in the potentialities activated by such emergences.