Book III. The Geometry of Becoming: 6. Participation

Stand at the edge of a conversation without speaking.

You hear the words.

You observe the gestures.

You notice agreement, hesitation, laughter, perhaps even misunderstanding.

Yet something remains different from the experience of speaking.

The conversation unfolds around you.

You are present.

But you are not participating in quite the same way.

This distinction seems obvious.

Yet it points towards one of the deepest features of organised reality.

Participation is not merely being present.

It is entering into relations that reorganise both participant and organisation.

We often imagine participation as an activity added to an already completed world.

First there is the world.

Then organisms participate within it.

But throughout this trilogy another picture has gradually emerged.

Participation is not something that happens inside reality.

It is one of the ways reality continually becomes actual.

Without participation, organised possibility remains only potential.

Without organised possibility, participation has nothing to actualise.

The two belong together.

This has been quietly present from the beginning.

When we questioned the idea of things, participation had not yet appeared.

Yet organisation was already inviting it.

Organisation is never merely what exists.

It is always what may become.

Participation is that becoming.

Perspective has shown us that every participation reveals some relations while leaving others in the background.

Constraint has shown us that participation always unfolds within organised possibilities.

Continuity has shown us that participation is never a single event but an ongoing organisation of becoming.

Differentiation has shown us that richer participation makes richer distinctions possible.

Only now do we begin to see participation for what it is.

Not one process among others.

A recurring geometry of reality itself.

Consider learning to play the piano.

At first every movement demands attention.

Every note feels separate.

Gradually the hands begin to move together.

The music ceases to be a sequence of isolated actions.

The pianist begins participating in an organised possibility that previously could not be entered.

Nothing has been added to the keyboard.

The organisation of participation has changed.

The same is true of friendship.

A friendship is not a collection of meetings.

Nor a storehouse of shared memories.

It is an ongoing participation in which each conversation reorganises the possibilities of the next.

The friendship is continually becoming through participation.

The same is true of scientific inquiry.

A discovery does not conclude participation.

It reorganises it.

New questions appear.

New distinctions emerge.

New possibilities become available.

Participation does not merely produce knowledge.

It transforms the field within which knowing becomes possible.

Perhaps this is why participation cannot be understood as interaction between independent things.

Independent things may collide.

Participation belongs to organised relations.

It is through participation that organisations become actual without exhausting the possibilities from which they arise.

Participation therefore has a remarkable character.

Every actualisation both fulfils and transforms possibility.

Every conversation changes what may later be said.

Every performance changes what may later be performed.

Every understanding changes what may later be understood.

Actuality does not simply occupy reality.

It reorganises it.

This may be the most important lesson participation has to offer.

Reality is not divided into a world of stable possibilities and a separate world of changing events.

Possibility continually becomes actual.

Actuality continually reorganises possibility.

Participation is the geometry through which this reciprocal becoming unfolds.

Seen from one perspective, participation actualises organised possibility.

Seen from another, participation enriches the organisation from which future possibilities emerge.

Neither movement comes first.

Each continually participates in the other.

Perhaps this is why participation has quietly appeared in every part of this trilogy.

Not because it explains everything.

But because organised reality cannot become without participating in its own becoming.

Participation is therefore not simply something that living beings do.

It is one of the recurring geometries through which organised possibility continually becomes more richly organised.

Wherever becoming occurs, participation is already there.

Not observing reality.

Helping reality become what it next may become.