Worlding Indexing & goose
Worlding Indexing & goose
notes how others use the word 'worlding': an environmental scan of the usages
This is following up from world/empire/civilisation which was a comparison of those nebulous things. Each nebulous in their own way, such that they do not overlap very well into a cute Venn diagram. For example Empire is nebulous in extent rather than concept. Empires are narcissistically certain they are the one. Nothing nebulous about that, but because of that, any particular empire is very unclear where their borders are. They often deny they have them at all you see, in space or in time because they are the one.
Google ngram
I’ll start with some google ngram searches and see how we go. I’ll use default google ngram settings unless otherwise mentioned.
So how much is worlding, or even, world-building used, compared to world.
Not much.
How does world-building compare to worlding? It is used more.
I find this hard to believe, but there you go.
Gerunding
Looking at the gerund “worlding”. What is interesting is that it is in fact used as a noun more than the infinitive verb.
Searching after some definition
The worlding. What is that?
see also: Mapping the gap: Why don’t you use more definition? Beginning to define my usage while gapping-up the maps of us. Matt Carney & me.
I did a google search today and discovered someone had done the same search and recorded it in 2019 as a pdf, via worlding808.wordpress.com This is a gamers’ world-building context: worlding worlds in which many worlds fit.
When I do the search today (2024) I get a lot more “post-colonial” definitions. At which I nod my head. Personally I think ‘post-imperial” would be a better term, with the acknowledgement empires are always with us. Post-colonial then?? this is a weird place to be really, post-where-we-are-locally-[sad]-today. This is actually a type of globalism, whether it encourages a global arena of hate or a post-imperial world peace is another matter. Certainty Russian imperialists prefer the former even as they pretend to be a poor put-upon country and not a failing empire with a last-chance at chaos-surfing into dominance (they have a narcissist dictator, there is no alternative.)
Heidegger pops up a lot in both, who I have never read. Not even secondarily very much, and then it was mostly Derrida way back in my early 20s. When I dipped into reading Derrida I had read nearly none of those texts he deconstructed. So I’ll leave that for another lifetime despite the infection that perhaps has happened. (See later post Thrown into being Heidegger: to world versus welten.)
So then there is this one:
Worlding noun: the act or process of bringing a people, culture, nation, etc., into a global sphere of influence, especially the sphere thought of as dominated by Western countries.
So they too might become empires? Or what exactly? (Enslave others like the west has done and is now failing to do? Rise up from covert/victim narcissism and narcisstically attack anyone showing weakness with the psychopathy one is entitled to? Because <insert ethno-religio-imperial~tech identity/victim politics/legalism-of-the-jungle here>.)
Empires are always with us, what are you going to do about that? Become one ? (there is no alternative).
A bit better
Worlding by Helen Palmer and Vicky Hunter 16 MARCH 2018 on newmaterialism.eu and we get back to Donna Haraway, a definite inspiration in my own journey.
What is a worlding? What is an –ing? Does the addition of a suffix –ing denoting the verbal noun phrase shift the world from a being to a doing; to a gerundive and generative process?
The performativity of the noun that repeats itself as a verb or gerund; the world's worlding, is the setting up of the world. Worlding is a particular blending of the material and the semiotic that removes the boundaries between subject and environment, or perhaps between persona and topos. Worlding affords the opportunity for the cessation of habitual temporalities and modes of being.
The notion of 'worlding' arising from non-representational theory provides a useful lens through which process of human-non-human enmeshment can be considered.
Good as it goes, though I am trying to move more into poetry than text-machinic hand waving. Of course I too am failing but you know, I carry on.
Cottagecore = I gooseherd therefore we goosethink.
Also I don’t think non-human means what they think it means. But then I am much more cottagecore than (cottagekink, or kinkcore, or corekink) looking for a gerundic niche, which is possiblly (danger/danger) mere identitarian voqueing. (When we mistake the rebel’s identity-dance of difference as an emblem of trangressive justice).
I’ll put the rest of their website on the to-be-read-pile.
My definition of worlding
For me worlding is what we each do individually, alone and not, in reference to each other, and the world we create/manage that arises, both emergently and by directives, [co-create] which at base is driven by the moral worlding urge, which does not care about details nor about the outcomes, nor the outcomes success (of either empires nor souls which seek to corral/control/command all of the above).
Now, to read after I post this
From last week on my to read list/pile, as it still hanging out as a tab in one of my multi-tabbed browser like an unread email… :
Bakewell-Stone, Petra. “How Can We Co-Create a Better World?” Academia Letters, January 1, 2021.
https://www.academia.edu/50807789/How_can_we_co_create_a_better_world.
Not even read the abstract as yet.
Hmm, co-god? Might be an issue there, but co-create has a better blame/credit ratio.
Google Ngram references
Jean-Baptiste Michel*, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, William Brockman, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden*. Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science (Published online ahead of print: 12/16/2010)
Yuri Lin, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden, Jon Orwant, William Brockman, Slav Petrov. Syntactic Annotations for the Google Books Ngram Corpus. Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics Volume 2: Demo Papers (ACL '12) (2012)
See also: