Swarm Intelligence as a Prosthetic Capacity

Prosthetic Assumptions

During the American Civil War (1861-1865), the battlefield injuries of soldiers were usually devastating. As a consequence of the grisly wounds caused by modernized weapons technology, combined with outdated military strategies and understaffed (or grossly underqualified) combat casualty care, amputations proliferated. The best field surgeons of that day could remove a mangled limb in ten minutes and earned themselves the dreaded monicker of “sawbones.” Those with wounds only to their extremities were far more likely to survive the carnage, so much so that in 1862, as an incentive to wary new volunteers and conscripts, “Congress passed the Great Civil War Benefaction, a law that guaranteed an artificial limb for every soldier or sailor who came home so disabled” (Murphy, 2001, p. 34). In so doing, they were at least promising maimed veterans the semblance of wholeness. However, according to Charles Garoian (2013), the body, or body of knowledge, is never actually complete. The ideas and images that constitute us, those that are in body or embodied, are also ever disembodied—in flux—given both the limitations of our finite corporeal reservoirs and the constant insinuation of new ideas and images as a consequence of life’s experiential encounters. Moreover, when poorly managed, these insinuations can be injurious—amputating us from past, present, or future possibilities for the sake of assembling a serviceable identity, and all too quickly foreclosing our ability to interface with and critique “the social fragmentations and sedimented practices of academic, institutional, and corporate power” that parse and disambiguate us (Garoian, 2013, p. 6).

However, to be critical is to be political, and for critical citizenship to flourish, the assembly of identity must always remain subject to displacement and prosthesis as the a priori condition is perpetually supplemented by the subsequent. This is the process of growth and identity construction in the midst of the contemporary clash of generative social spaces wherein identities are constructed not only but “from personal experience, from interpsychological detritus, from cultural debris, from popular residue” (Rolling, 2004b, p. 72). In this writing, prosthetic development and identity construction is argued to be a simultaneity—a de/re/constructive process, alternately deconstructing and reconstructing the texts of identity, wherein identity is understood as an open space of interpretive action, “a text, or a text-analogue, which in some way is confused, incomplete, cloudy, seemingly contradictory—in one way or another, unclear” (Taylor, 1976, p. 153). If so, identity is also then a differential space, a “space of possibility where prostheses can operate” (Garoian, 2013, p. 18).

Theorizing the assembly of text-analogous body parts and new possibilities for identity construction through prosthetic intervention requires three assumptions about the human corpus. The first assumption is a suggestion by Benedict de Spinoza that “the human body is radically open to its surroundings and can be composed, recomposed, and decomposed by other bodies” (Gatens, 1996, p. 110). In other words, neighboring and aggregate bodies operate to prosthetically augment the mass and energy of the human corpus, which is inherently a social entity. Spinozist philosophy understands the body and mind as one whole substance working in concert, prosthetically, not in a split duality. Other bodies exert a gravitational pull upon ours, either attracting or repelling us but always changing our axes of orbit around other bodies, the ebbs and flows of our life story, and our social inertia as we hurtle together through our common experience. Thus, ways of knowing are also ways of embodying knowledge and the means for physically becoming that knowledge. Knowledge is embodied, for example, as exalted know-ledge, carnal knowledge, world-weariness, knowledge from the ivory tower, or simply knowledge of our impending mortality. We witness a stir of echoes in the charting of our own evolution and in one other’s changing frames—echoes of identities once known and not yet known, either retained as eroding prosthetic attachments or entertained as new prosthetic possibilities.

Carnal knowledge is not limited to that which is sexualized—other behavioral activities inscribe themselves into the fleshly reservoirs of our braced, beset, and timeworn bodies. And as our knowledge is a many-embodied thing, we learn by sharing other bodies of knowledge; in a sense, we retain old bodies and body parts and compound them together with those newly prosthesized as in a dance hall of spinning integers and the exponents that multiply them. My body and its ability to apprehend new knowledge is not contained within the physical boundaries of my skin and skeleton; our bodies are positioned amid a stir of echoes, rapprochements, and affinities that proliferate their development in association with other covalent bodies and their multiple intelligences.

Thus, to know and recognize one’s other bodily configurations in any given moment is to rewrite the modern essentialist discourse of identity and select an alternative pathway to rote acceptance of prescribed identity scripts featuring “the rugged individual.” Not only are we not alone—we are extra-individual and purposed to influence one another. In a subway car hurtling through the darkness at the height of rush hour, the other riders share my body’s mass and acceleration. We are on the same journey; in that moment we share the same impetus and inertia. Our velocity is configured together, a mutual equation. We share the same manufactured air; if the air conditioning is broken, as is often the case, we share the same distress. And yet, depending upon who gets on at the next stop and who gets off, the constitution of our collective identity is certain to change.

At the opening of the doors at the next station, bodies mill and shift; my own body repositions to fill the breaches, following the movement of other bodies, forced into new positions by the press of the boarding throng, mimicking some bodily gestures, adapting to others, and rejecting some encroachments altogether. My body is simultaneously a prosthetic for those bodies pressed immediately against me, just as it is for those at the farthest end of the car connected only by the rippling continuum of bodies between us. Jolted along the railcar’s subterranean journey, I dance haltingly with both presences and absences. Until the doors open again, we struggle to stabilize against successive waves of imbalance as our bodies are tossed at each sudden jolt around the next bend of tracks. While avoiding the spread of rancor generated in response to elbows tossed inadvertently into rib cages, and shoe heels compressing the bones of stepped-upon toes, my body nevertheless seeks to preserve its place within this prosthetic social action. For those few minutes we, in concert, constitute a single ridership hurtling toward our arrival at the 148th Street terminal. For those few minutes, we increase our totality in a purely carnal arrangement, a prosthetic pressing of the flesh on public transportation.

A second assumption is the position of Thomas Hobbes who argues that, “by art is created that great leviathan called a commonwealth, or state, in Latin civitas, which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural for whose protection and defense it was intended” (Hobbes, 1968, p. 81). We are constituted in proximity—simultaneous and contiguous, yes, but also prior and subsequent; by extension, over time and distance, the artifice of the commonwealth is artfully stitched together from the bodies of the many. This “metaphor of the ‘artificial man’ has been important in modern political narratives,” in many cases serving the common good in the constitution of republics but in other cases perpetrating ongoing social injustices especially where the exclusivist construction of a local body politic is skewed to have “political and ethical consequences for those whose bodily specificity bars them from this representation” (Gatens, 1996, p. 97). Understanding that Hobbes uses the word “art” in reference to any man-made artifice that imitates God’s natural creation and institutes a governing plan and design—Hobbes presents the premise that through active citizenship the individual acquires the means and the skill to prosthetically manipulate the local social corpus toward a preconceived objective, and vice versa.

In the policies that govern nation-states and the finely honed artifice of political rhetoric and gerrymandering, an individual may be voted or appointed the power to annex the power of the collective either as an elected official or appointed as its ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary. On the other hand, the state may acquire the power to prosthesize the labor, votes, and/or taxable incomes of its citizens—or even to conscript the fighting age populace into mandatory military service—in order to serve either the public good or simply the prevailing national interest. In republics, the prosthetics of power may be persuaded; in totalitarian conditions, it is more likely to be wrested under threat of collective suffering or individual harm. Hobbes refers to the discourses that create the artifice of the representative commonwealth, the citizen, and the politician as “the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of the body politic were at first made, set together, and united, [which] resemble that fiat, or the let us make man, pronounced by God in the creation” (Hobbes, 1968, pp. 81, 82). In so doing, Hobbes also pronounces humankind as the prosthetic body, limbs, and hands of an otherwise incorporeal God and offers a reflection on the godlike power often obtained by those who control the prosthetic devices helping to ambulate our great nation-state leviathans to and fro across the civic landscape.

Finally, a third assumption about the human corpus draws upon a passage from Spinoza’s Ethics quoted in Moira Gatens’ (1996) Imaginary Bodies, arguing that the imagined relational effect upon one body by another is perpetually constitutive in the construction of an individual identity even in the face of physical evidence that the prosthesized body part—whether small or large, solitary or cumulative—is not constituted as it presently appears. Spinoza offers the example that

when we look at the sun, we imagine it to be about 200 feet away from us. In this we are deceived so long as we are ignorant of its true distance; but when its distance is known, the error is removed, not the imagination [since this imagination is] not contrary to the true, and do[es] not disappear on its presence. (Gatens, 1996, p. 146)

Gatens offers the following interpretation of prosthetic corporeality as constituted in Spinozist theoretical suppositions, which I will quote in its entirety:

Spinoza insists that this proposition holds true for all those imaginings that arise from the affective relations between my body and any other body with which I enter into a relation. Hence, his point is pertinent not only to natural science or astronomy, but holds good for my relations with bodies of all kinds, whether they be individual human bodies or corporate social bodies. The nature of my imaginary grasp of these bodies will depend upon how they affect me—do they increase or diminish my power of acting? Do they cause me pleasure or pain? Just as there is a vast difference between the sun per se and the sun as it affects my present bodily constitution (does it warm me? burn me?), so too can one distinguish between the general nature, constitution or powers of a body and the particular manner in which that body affects me. However, as Spinoza pointed out, an understanding of the nature of another body, including the powers that it possesses independently of its relation to me, does not remove the affect that it produces in me, that is, such understanding does not cancel out any imaginary relation which I may have towards it. (Gatens, 1996, p. 146)

In other words, just as seeing is believing, imagining is both the antecedent of seeing and the ghost image apprehended in memory after sight is no longer possible. The prosthetic imagination thus mediates both seeing and all antecedent re-searching of what has been seen given that not only do we see and understand through a glass darkly, but also through “lacunas, blind spots, gaps, aporias of perception and memory” as well as other “slippages of perception” representative of the shortcomings of the human sensory equipment (Garoian, 2013, p. 103). Human beings enter the world helpless, with infant cognitive functions working at a rudimentary level for many years in contrast to the prowess we will demonstrate as adults. Even as we grow, with the passage of time individuals show themselves to be susceptible to injury and bodily system failure. Under such limitations, we must figure ourselves out as we go along (Rolling, 2004a). Ultimately, by the time we are senior citizens, the body begins to accelerate in its morbidities; prior prosthetic associations disintegrate. Things fall apart. Until then, individuals throughout childhood and adulthood must perpetually reassemble a sense of identity or else relinquish a working sense of who they are in the world. In order to develop under such circumstances, our prosthetic corporeality is necessarily abetted by our prosthetic imagination.

Gatens uses the term imaginary “in a loose but nevertheless technical sense to refer to those images, symbols, metaphors and representations which help construct various forms of subjectivity” (Gatens, 1996, p. viii). Composed as we are of other bodies and imaginaries, we imagine that our anatomical proximity to other bodies affects our own composition. We imagine ourselves like those we most closely relate with; some imagine themselves as the mob; some imagine themselves the monster, some imagine themselves the hero; some imagine themselves the victim. We imagine ourselves like our mother or father. We imagine ourselves as one of our current tribe of friends. But it’s not that simple. Other imaginaries lurk nearby. Desire and the imagination of craving, a powerful imaginary that subverts all subject positionings, overtakes all rationality of relations, wrenching our bodies over to imagined yearnings otherwise inaccessible, and introducing the desirer to new affective realities. Trauma and the imagination of brokenness destroys relations, fragmenting our subject positionings, breaching our proximity to significant affective and life-affirming constitutive sources.

Human life, unavoidably, entails a large and ineradicable component which is imaginary . . . [including] the diverse powers which human bodies possess for affecting and being affected by each other. These human powers are historically and culturally variable, and one of the important means by which they may be altered is through changes in our understanding of self and others. (Gatens, 1996, p. xiv)

In summary, given these three aforementioned assumptions—that individual mass and momentum along life’s trajectories can be prosthetically augmented, that the lone individual body and the local social corpus may each acquire the facility to manipulate one another as prosthetic devices for good or for ill, and finally that prosthetic imaginings allow individuals to shape-shift and slip beyond the confines of our present situatedness in space and time—it is therefore possible to proceed in considering the greater constitutive prosthetic capacity of finding attachment to ideas and identities not initially our own.

Far More Than Spatial Anomalies

The “instability of images and ideas” here in the postmodern era is akin to the instability of identity and experience in general throughout a lifetime, requiring that “their meanings and our understanding of them are contingent,” always existing “in prosthetic relation to other images and ideas,” or, by extension, other identities and life experiences not originally constitutive of who we are (Garoian, 2013, p. 27). Utilizing prosthetics in the assembly of contemporary identity is thus an intervention into a text-analogous private space of inquiry and re-search held nevertheless within public scrutiny. A crucial apparatus for the public architecture of the individual self, the work of prosthesis and of prosthetic pedagogy is itself “a sort of relational force that draws its form from the various physical and discursive structures that define the site [or space] in which it is conceived” (Richardson, 2010, p. 22).

The action of prosthesis is not dissimilar to the effect of collage. Argued to be “the most important twentieth-century contribution to the history of art, the disjunctive narrative of collage has in common the jerry-rigging research of bricolage,” described as “the improvisational dis-assembling, exchanging, and re-assembling of images, ideas, and objects in ways that they were not originally designed” (Garoian, 2013, p. 26). In his article “Interventionist Art Education: Contingent Communities, Social Dialogue, and Public Collaboration,” Jack Richardson (2010) draws from the poststructural theories of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud (2002), and the critical pedagogy and media studies work of Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005) in his ongoing effort to rethink the role of the arts in research and curriculum, society’s interactions with materials and public spaces, and the poetics of everyday experience and its indeterminacy.

Richardson (2010) brilliantly frames the art-making process as a creative and developmental social intervention, drawing its precedents from community-based art and cultural activism and intended to open up an “intellectual, and sometimes literal, space” for the intervention of alternative perspectives in public life (p. 19). Richardson further theorizes,

A successful intervention, therefore, must adapt itself to its site, reusing rather than simply rejecting or replacing social conventions. Artistic intervention, likewise, is not successful in creating new relationships if it is simply a disjunctive and disruptive presence. As such, it can be simply dismissed as an anomaly, thereby, limiting its potential to provoke alternative social exchange and the possibility of transformation and new knowledge. (Richardson, 2010, p. 22)

Such interventions remain necessary because, drawing upon Derrida, the apparent self-sufficiency of an identity text is never actually self-sufficient as it “cannot be separated” from the contiguous supplement always at the ready, that which ever seeks to intervene and insinuate itself “in-the-place-of . . . as substitute” as, namely, the prosthetic of a particular idea and experience (Derrida, 1976, p. 145). Body parts that are related or interconnected through prosthetic interventions are never fully compatible—each part is a supplement to an ever-aggregating identity that will either be accommodated in the same way as an appended computer external drive, or else be assimilated, taken in, and made to resemble the rest of aggregate body in the same manner as a cyborg. Each intervention is an extension of the prior body and body of knowledge, as well as the extant space of possibility.

Such interventions are necessary because the appearance that my identity is situated within a single and complete body and fixed in a local place and time does not hold under critical scrutiny. Identity is fashioned from encounters with new ideas and relationships, untested values, and previously unknown knowledge contents. The individual merely learns to recollect or re-cognize those experiences—recreating, customizing, abandoning, dismantling, and refining these raw materials and cross-trajectories into a self-awareness that changes its shape with time and circumstance.

Identity is never fixed, though we tend to believe it is; if it were fixed, there would be no growth. Identity is not a form in itself, but a shape-shifting arena of possibilities bounded by altering scripts making sense of the world. In fact, multiple identities may be couched in the gaps between these competing texts, bridges offering coherence amid the counterstories. In reality, because of the innumerable encounters that work to move a life story along and also to alter its trajectory, no one’s life story can remain fixed even though a most common insecurity is to name or posit oneself in any given encounter—as if saying “this is me” will preclude the presentation of a differing or shifted persona tomorrow. We are never the same person or in the same position today as we were yesterday. Thus, identity is not a given, although it is often presented to others in association with a given name; rather, identity is an idea, subject to analysis, revision, and relocation. The prosthetic intervention quickly unnames and unfetters the identity that has been precipitously foreclosed.

To unname is to undermine purported origins, to burrow between the archaeologies that constrain, to initiate and inaugurate anomalous genealogies that thrive and proliferate and die and leach new life between the layers. To unname is to give light to discursive ephemeralities that may live for just a day, but whose names are no less alive, no less legitimate in quality than the vast tectonic ecologies of foundational and constrictive archaeologies. (Rolling, 2008, p. 934)

As the prosthetic intervention unnames, it also extends the possibilities of the body or body of knowledge to take on new trajectories of meaning, new lines of flight fostering a proliferation of “micro-becomings” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 70). Whether representing a living human and relational body or a living body of knowledge, the anamorphology of that body’s signifiers are typically a distortion based on the aggregate of symbols constituting a particular social significance from a given point of view at a given point in time. Thus, yesterday’s representations lend themselves perhaps too readily to essentializations; this is how yesterday’s representations are reified as today’s misrepresentations. Rather than conceiving the acquisition of prosthetics as a form of repair for damaged body parts, prosthetic intervention as theorized in this writing is a method for enhancing and progressively developing the native capacity of the body or body of knowledge.

Prosthetic interventions are also necessary because they are cumulative in force and accumulative over time, generating what philosopher Jacques Derrida defines as a surplus, “a plenitude enriching another plenitude” (Derrida, 1976, p. 144). The creation of surplus is far more than the creation of spatial anomalies in differential spaces; drawing upon the work of French intellectual Georges Bataille (1949/1991), the argument can be made that the creation of surplus is an aggregation of interventions allowing us to be more human than originally human, perhaps transporting us closer to a more posthuman condition that supersedes

a world view which believes in the absolute superiority of the human over the nonhuman, the masculine over the feminine, the adult over the child, the historical over the ahistorical, and the modern or progressive over the traditional or the savage. (Nandy, 1983, p. x)

Surplus and Swarm Intelligence

The basic premise of the unique metaeconomic theory of consumption described by Bataille (1949/1991) in The Accursed Share was that the natural social interaction between human beings generates an excess of energy that must be expended and consumed one way or the other—either toward the profitless exercise of helping one another be more human, or instead, using one another for profit, solely, and most often brutally, for personal or private gain. Prosthetic intervention and development is therefore a self-actualizing means of increasing our access to the renewing energy of countless adaptive creative transmissions, thereby increasing the stock of our humanity.

The creation of surplus is ultimately a phenomenon that is constructed through an interaction between members of a sociocultural swarm whereby our deepest and richest achievements are not the product of single individuals, but of social systems proliferating our prosthetic capacity toward the transmission and spread of ideas and behaviors that aid our collective resilience, ensuring the survival of the patterns that sustain us. The management of these myriad interactions requires a sort of swarm intelligence (Rolling, 2013), our shared capacity to behave together for the common good manifested as the production of a most generative differential space—that multitudinous theater of possibilities wherein we “create and open spaces into which existing knowledge can extend, interrelate, coexist, and where new ideas and relationships can emerge prosthetically” (Garoian, 2013, p. 6).

Just as humanity is a shape-shifting hive of cultures, each culture is a complex pattern of human behaviors systemized to sustain itself and the agents—or cultural workers—within it. The aggregation of our myriad independent and decentralized choices within this hive—the chaos of life rendered into coherent and usable patterns through the manufacture of prosthetic interventions—serves as biocultural mechanisms, or enticements, for further altering the development or direction of the collective human swarm. Swarm intelligence may thus be properly understood as a liminal, proximal, and distal zone of collective human development wherein memories and experience are made “prosthetic” in both the verb and noun sense of the word—that is, as an adaptive and potentially pedagogical capacity enabling the assimilation of supplemental patterns of behavior and thought, as well as the accommodation of the extant social archaeologies and emerging architectures that might further constitute our identities.

The activation of swarm intelligence is sustained as long as it solves the need for new direction, growth, development, or mutual benefit. Once forward momentum, growth, development, or mutual benefit is halted, even in spite of the swarm’s continued behavior, the individual actors within its collective are once again compelled toward the chaos of myriad self-determined actions in search of the next advantageous result or another line of flight toward self-actualization. Any discernible pattern of behavior will continue to disintegrate until enough individual actors are enticed to align in accord with some new prosthetic possibility.

A key to the effectiveness of this prosthetic capacity is in how it decompartmentalizes and retrofits our diverse and seemingly incompatible ideas and life experiences—allowing anyone at anytime to accommodate or assimilate the ideas and identity constructs of any other body or body of knowledge they are enticed to move into a contiguous relationship with. Those with strong exposure and those with weak exposure to a domain of knowledge, those with a tho-rough understanding of a particular set of cultural habits and those with little awareness of the same, those possessing affinities and talents within the realm of the arts and humanities and those possessing affinities and talents in mathematics and the sciences—each life experience can be prosthetically appended by another. In this way, individuals within a creative swarm learn a delicate but vital social interaction—how to freely enter differential spaces not as a disjunctive and disruptive force but rather to adjoin and to leave behind the best of themselves for others to find attachment to.

This process also suggests the vital importance of art-making and related design practices in their ability to create metacognitive prosthetic devices of the ideas and images we aggregate and harbor in mind. If deemed advantageous, the accommodation or assimilation of any one contiguous yet divergent idea or image is enough to alter the direction of an entire swarm. In 2009, Emily Pilloton wrote a book titled Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People, detailing 100 design products that empower people who are typically overlooked by commercial, for-profit designers. Pilloton’s book highlights a swarm of thinkers converging upon something very different than a numerical target. She presents a vital challenge for the new century: How can creative professionals employ their arts and design practices to make a significant contribution regarding life and death matters such as the development of potable water supplies, the proliferation and preparation of food stocks, the conservation and development of energy systems, transportation concepts, and the production of affordable and easily accessible health and safety products? What social enterprise and entrepreneurship ideas might permanently turn the tide of global poverty?

Design is clearly a practice that involves the modeling of new prosthetics for everyday living; both the arts and the sciences converge in the making of conceptual models, and it is very possible for a design to be derived as a hybrid of both arts-based and science-based inquiry. The 100 designs in Pilloton’s Design Revolution are also models of increased human prosthetic capacity when a problem in society—that is, circumstances and behaviors that are stuck, ineffective, or not working to empower people—are addressed in such a ways as to introduce some kind of prosthetic intervention into the system of behaviors that first produced the problem, while persuading others to support that transformation (Boorstein, 2004). Social entrepreneurship and responsible design principles flow from a critical-activist social behavior, which interrogates contemporary human circumstances and social contexts in continual acts of appraisal, agitation, and action.

Socially responsible designers offer creative and compelling solutions to the ecosystemic problems caused by human negligence to and disconnection from our natural environment and built infrastructure. Upon scrutiny, responsible designs and other solutions like them clearly promise the kinds of social improvements we would all do well to converge upon. Responsible designs may thus be appended to directly meet a dire need, thereby improving our capacity to collectively address our most pressing problems. However, those designs we typically develop, buy, and sell may of necessity be superseded by other kinds of prosthetics that are not sold or leased for profit, prosthetics that are the embodiment of Bataille’s economy of surplus.

For example, public memories may also be appended, prosthetically. The life experience of parents, friends, and mentors may likewise be appended, prosthetically, as stories to live by. But even more appendages are possible. Ultimately, the surplus energy described by Bataille is manifested in the human conundrum of whether to apply one’s excess energy toward the profitless exercise of helping one another be more human, or to use one another for personal or private gain. When our choice is to be or become a more contributive citizen of the world, at our most altruistic we give little bits of ourselves away because such are the actions that hold us together; we form beautifully crafted reflections of the world we’ve experienced; we inform new ideas emerging from ongoing and complicated conversations; and we transform present conditions into future questions and possibilities because such are the objects, expressions, and sacred interventions that we grasp as handholds along the way. There is no personal profit to be gained from such activity and yet each form, each bit of additional information, and each transformation in turn increases the prosthetic capacity of the entire swarm and the world we all share.

Prosthetic Possibilities Apprehended

What one can know and do, another can know and do—with unique variations that take us all . . . who knows where? First, someone makes a move—someone who is just ahead of the pack, or perhaps aligned right beside us. And then it happens. Prosthetically, contiguously, we each choose to append that image or idea to ourselves, each one adapting his or her identity and behavior in unpredictable ways. You do-it-yourself, I do-it-in-common. I do-it-myself, you do-it-in-common. But differently, whether or not we emerge from the very same differential spaces.

Operating in such an economy, we have the potential to become a creative swarm on the move—prosthetically enhanced, each of us for a time converging multiple lines of flight into a single critical mass toward a point of common interest, a mutual good, a shared goal. This is how movements start. How cultures grow. How schools of thought take shape. This is public education without borders. This is the social imagination—each one contributing his or her surplus energies in order to benefit and build up the world we share. This is creativity, human development in action—one individual being influenced and influencing the next. The origins of your next meaningful idea. Call and response. Beck and call. Call and response.