This is following up from world/empire/civilisation which was a comparison of those very 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.

While the world is everything or just the halo around an introspective introvert. And civilisation is a word used to avoid using empire, because it does not fit.

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.

Worlding is not used much. And, how does world-building compare to worlding? Worlding is used more. I find this hard to credit.

Gerunding

Drilling down into gerund “worlding” now into its verb usages versus noun usages. What is interesting is that it is in fact the noun form is used more than the infinitive verb.

Searching after some definition

The worlding. What is that exactly?

See also: Mapping the gap: Why don’t you use more definition? (substack) 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?? What's that?

This is a weird place to be really, post-where-we-are-locally-[sad]-today. This post-world  is still actually a type of globalism, whether it encourages a global arena of hate or a post-imperial world peace is another matter. Certainly 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 go at chaos-surfing into dominance (they have a narcissist dictator, there is no alternative.)

Heidegger pops up a lot in both post-X, 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 (or substack.)

So then there is this post-colonial definition:

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).

Really do not like that worlding defintion, it is like one an emo incel might come up with.

A bit better

Worlding by Helen Palmer and Vicky Hunter  (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 cannot go on so 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 a possible (danger/danger) of 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 (late 2025 not yet read).

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, or coherence or chaos, 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.

Ngram on "co-create"? Why not?

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, previously world/empire/civilisation (substack) and following on from this post Thrown into being Heidegger: to world versus welten ( substack). 

See also my other Posts on the world, worlding.