coprovisation and co-providing
Similar to Timothy Morton’s notion of “the ecological thought,” coprovisation promises to spread “like a virus… infect[ing] other systems of thinking and alter[ing] them from within” (Morton 19). It is an exercise in relational thinking which valorises interconnectedness and reciprocity. And like “the ecological thought,” its very articulation becomes a type of praxis as its conceptual applicability to various different fields of knowledge itself demonstrates the relationality of all thought and action.
The etymology of improvisation comes from the Latin in- and provisus (provided, foreseen), therefore suggesting that the improvised is also that which is unprovided. So not only is “coprovisation” a clever pun which removes the egotistic “I’m” from improvisation, but it also—perhaps unintentionally—proposes that we should co-provide. The concept of co-providing would recognise that knowledge does not trickle downwards; that knowledge is not provided to or for us. While the ideologies of colonialism and frontierism present Man as having overcome nature, and discourses of environmentalism inverses this mythology to argue that rather “nature provides for us,” coprovisation instead posits that the creation of knowledge is an immanent process that we are a part of. In other words, co-providing and coprovisation would involve nonhierarchical reciprocity, flat ontologies, and a critique of privileged sites of knowledge.
It is about recognising that ideas such as “Nature” or the “Environment” will not provide us with answers no matter how much we use them to search for immutable truths. (It’s interesting to note how postcolonial nations have become particularly interested in the Indigenous knowledges of First Nations peoples in recent years given our ever worsening confrontation with the Anthropocene. Indigenous peoples are now valorised as having unmediated access to Nature’s secrets that will save us from climate catastrophe, which is, of course, a subtly racist discourse which equivocates indigeneity with primitivity.)
However, while the original chapter suggests that coprovisation attempts to reverse improvisation’s “tendency to lack foresight,” I would disagree and instead argue that this is improvisation’s most valuable affordance. This is why from the Latin provisus I take “provided” instead of “foreseen”; because the issue with improvisation is not its lack of foresight, but instead its misunderstanding of what actually sustains it. Improvisation never comes unprovided (despite what its etymology suggests). It does not come from nowhere. Rather, it comes from everywhere at once. Improvisation is about allowing the body to be radically open and completely receptive. If coprovisation is “an act of foresight and manifestation,” then all it can do is preconfigure the future and make claims about what the future should be.
Instead, if we take coprovising to mean co-providing, then we can embrace the unexpected and allow immanence to take hold. Brian Massumi articulates this point perfectly:
[I]n a very real sense the body is always-already obsolete, has been obsolete an infinite number of times and will be obsolete countless more—as many times as there are adaptations and inventions. The body’s obsolescence is the condition of change. (109)
Works cited:
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual : Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, 2002.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, 2010.