{"id":311,"date":"2014-01-06T16:29:27","date_gmt":"2014-01-06T16:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/environmentalfuturesdialogue\/?p=311"},"modified":"2024-10-09T15:43:14","modified_gmt":"2024-10-09T14:43:14","slug":"311","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/environmentalfuturesdialogue\/2014\/01\/06\/311\/","title":{"rendered":"The WMC Event: from tumbleweeds to concept maps – Reflections from Chris Groves"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bringing together arts practitioners, social scientists and the occasional philosopher to discuss the relationships between arts practice, social science and sustainability at the Millennium Centre was an enterprise full of contradictions. What was particularly striking for me was that the arts performance by Claire Blundell-Jones (<\/span>http:\/\/www.claireblundelljones.co.uk\/<\/a>), <\/span>Tumbleweed<\/i>, that book-ended the first day, already enacted for me a dialogue between art performance and social science, by placing in the middle of the performance the conference attendees who assembled in the freezing Cardiff Central Station car park to walk down to the Millennium Centre on the morning of the first day. The route chosen by Claire and Simon Whitehead took us through Callaghan Square, crossing to Bute Street where we encountered Claire and her tumbleweed, before crossing under the Queen Street \u2013 Cardiff Bay rail line onto the eternally windswept Lloyd George Avenue.<\/span><\/p>\n

Callaghan Square is in the middle of the \u2018central Cardiff enterprise zone\u2019 (http:\/\/enterprisezones.wales.gov.uk\/enterprise-zone-locations\/central-cardiff), which Business Wales intends as an attractor for business to drive economic growth. Within Cardiff Council\u2019s development plan for the next two decades, we find a space of future possibilities that centres around \u2018ICT; Energy and environment; advanced materials and manufacturing; creative industries; life sciences; and financial and professional services.\u2019 (Deposit Plan (<\/span>http:\/\/www.cardiff.gov.uk\/objview.asp?object_id=27295<\/a>) [PDF], p. 27), as part of Cardiff\u2019s participation in an anticipated general return across the UK to economic growth. To make this future possible, it\u2019s proposed that the city needs spaces like the Square to be an attractive location for high-value services like legal and financial services, offering what is described as \u2018modern Grade A accommodation\u2019 office space. Where the Valleys fit into this story is not clearly laid out \u2013 but offices will always need cleaners\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Together with the Bay, as examples of redevelopment that can only be described as \u2018iconic\u2019 (because there are few other words suited to latch onto their blankness), the Square serves as a symbolic fetish for the bureaucratized magical thinking of urban development. Along with Lloyd George Avenue, the high road down to the Bay, the Square can only embody the promise of development by being an evacuated non-place, constructed over what existed there before, the old Sea Lock Pond \u2013 the very end of the Glamorganshire Canal that helped generate a previous trajectory of growth for Cardiff in the 19th<\/sup> century. Claire notes on her website that the tumbleweed is instantly recognisable yet always \u2018out of<\/p>\n

Through looking \u201cout-of-place\u201d they can act as a visual metaphor for internal struggles and conflict; feeling emotionally, socially uncomfortable or alienated from others. Overall, tumbleweeds often connote awkwardness and tension<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

http:\/\/youtu.be\/oHr4AIiHVyY<\/p>\n

Her performance during our transit to the WMC emphasized for me the vastness, blankness of the non-places through which the first part of our walk took us, drawn together around the tumbling tumbleweed. The minimalist certainty of these spaces is mirrored in the arc of the grand story of the future they have marked out: the 25-year schedule of repayments it will take to cover the \u00a3189m price tag of the PFI project for the building of Lloyd George Avenue.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"wmc<\/a>Previous events organised as part of the EFD project had produced a set of focal ideas to which speakers invited to our WMC event had been asked to respond. For me, the issue of uncertainty that lies at the heart of ideas of sustainability (what might a sustainable or unsustainable future look like? What should we do about it?) is a central preoccupation \u2013 both sociologically and philosophically. How do people make sense of this uncertainty, and make it liveable? What ethical and political significance does the persistence of this uncertainty have for us? In what follows, I lay out some reflections arising from the two days of discussion we enjoyed at the WMC in early December, taking my initial impetus from the dialogue between social science and art made manifest, at least for me, in Tumbleweed<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The role of stories in interpreting the future \u2013 and what pasts they come from, what protagonists and antagonists they feature, whose desires animate them and are acted out and satisfied in them \u2013 is a key concern of social science research concerned with the future. The \u201csociology of expectations\u201d, for example, has examined extensively how the stories we tell about the future shape our sense of who we are and what we can do here and now, and thus affect social reality in the present. The sociology of risk has explored how the strategies that institutions have developed for making decisions in the face of a more or less quantified future have attained high degrees of social acceptance, reshaping what counts as legitimate knowledge about the future.<\/p>\n

Between sustainability (and the possibilities set out at the WMC event by John McGrath for understanding it as an outcome, as a practice, or as an ongoing \u2018slow crisis\u2019) and unsustainability (as catastrophe, as comfortable habits, as the enjoyments that accompany familiar practices), we see-saw within the uncertainty of the future from a desire for invulnerability towards difficult acknowledgements of our vulnerability and frailty. In either case, we tell ourselves different kinds of stories about the past and the future. Seduced by a desire for invulnerability in the face of uncertainty, we focus on large-scale, top-down stories. These take many forms, depending on who the narrator(s) is\/are and what they believe themselves to be capable of.\u00a0 Some plan for and control the actions of others and unexpected events, to create a space of security about us in which nothing unpredictable is allowed to happen. There is even security of a sort to be found in narratives of inescapable impending disaster \u2013 the security of being able to withdraw from the hazards of action.<\/p>\n

Viewing the future as infinitely malleable, as something within our power to be managed or constructed, is a perspective that unites the evacuated spaces of central Cardiff and the Bay with the observation that, as we now are responsible for changing the Earth\u2019s climate and in effect ushering in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, we must manage the earth\u2019s systems \u2013 for at least as long as we continue to pursue dreams of GDP. In either case, we see our destiny as wedded to a quest for control and the widening of an imperium of expert knowledge. The future becomes emptied (Adam and Groves 2007), populated only by performance metrics of one kind or another \u2013 ranging from GDP figures to parts-per-million of CO2<\/sub>. \u00a0By emptying the future in this way, the stories one tells can mandate all manner of potentially destructive actions and interventions here in the present, as the past (like the Sea Lock Pond underneath Callaghan Square) is overwritten and reduced to dispersed traces.<\/p>\n

Stories about the past and future told from the top down tend to strain towards the position of a scientific observer become bureaucratic manager. When vulnerability is acknowledged, however, we tend to place ourselves in the positions of a participant, open on all sides to change, to being injured, to grief and distress as well as joy, rather than imagining ourselves to be in the manager\u2019s chair. The theme of \u2018homing\u2019, as developed throughout the EFD project events, invites us to reflect on what is at stake in these stories, as our attachments \u2013 to people and places \u2013 shift and change as we journey through the world.<\/p>\n

In the process, how do we relate to nature? If we are not to be its managers, then what are we? Are we thoroughly submerged in nature \u2013 or inside it and yet somehow outside it at the same time? And based on our identity, what should we do? As one of the oldest questions in Western philosophy runs, how do we want to live?<\/p>\n

References<\/b><\/span> Adam, B. and C. Groves (2007). Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics. Leiden, Brill.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bringing together arts practitioners, social scientists and the occasional philosopher to discuss the relationships between arts practice, social science and sustainability at the Millennium Centre was an enterprise full of contradictions. What was particularly striking for me was that the arts performance by Claire Blundell-Jones (http:\/\/www.claireblundelljones.co.uk\/), Tumbleweed, that book-ended the first day, already enacted for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2572,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-blogs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6mDP6-311","meta_box":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/environmentalfuturesdialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/environmentalfuturesdialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/environmentalfuturesdialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/environmentalfuturesdialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2572"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/environmentalfuturesdialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/environmentalfuturesdialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":376,"href":"http:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/environmentalfuturesdialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions\/376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/environmentalfuturesdialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/environmentalfuturesdialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/environmentalfuturesdialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}