Beginning our reflections on the ‘Making Sense of Sustainability’ event last week, John Barry shares his reflections on the events ‘Keywords and Provocations’.
If we view/construct the world with these concepts,
what sort of world are we inhabiting?
What concepts are we playing around with or thinking and feeling through and beyond?
Anthropocentric arrogance? Respectful detachment? Fearful appropriation?
Celebratory breakdown? Transitioning and transformation ?
Being not having? Being not doing?
Lightening candles rather than cursing the dark?
Digging where we stand?
Home, homesteading
But also the trauma and complications of history, power, pain, oppression etc.
Of the construction and reconstruction/founding and refounding,
of ‘home’
a decolonisation imperative in the case of my home,
my place.
Describing the world in particular ways
is prescribing and bringing that world into being
or preventing another world
from coming into sharper focus.
A slower, more local, sharing world,
beyond conventional economic growth
from ‘buildings, banks and boutiques’
to ‘libraries, Laundromats and light rail’.
Beyond/different to the myth/imperative of undifferentiated economic growth
as a permanent feature of the economy
A more civic/political world
‘green republicanism’
and stress on the common good
and the commonwealth,
a green/ sustainable republic,
a republic which includes the more than human?
A less opaque world
reconnecting production and consumption ethically and ecologically…
A re-politicised, re-ethicised common world
without politicising and ethicising all life
a post but not anti-liberal world
Is this possible to also be a ‘post-metaphysical’ world?
The art of living in a world of limits.
What sort of subjects live in it?
Human and other
more than human subjects;
plurality of subjectivities
Sensuousness and corporeality
Affecting and loving,
caring citizens
as opposed to or in addition to
passive consumers?
Resilient, knowing and mindful inhabitants,
‘denizen’ and ‘dwellers
in the bioregional land’,
with cosmopolitan sensibilities
Survivalists?
Post-Apocalyptic humanity;
Pioneers in new ways of living
and being in the world;
A story-telling humanity,
a mythic or post-mythic human subject;
How do we honour and express our ‘storied residence’?
Embodied and ecologically embedded human subjectivities
sustainable and resilient subjectivities;
Generosity and gratitude
reconnecting with one another
and the more than human world
through food and rituals of being grateful.
Also more public commemoration
without religious ceremony
Earthy humour
rewilding our language,
humanising relations through humour,
subversive, life-affirming potential of humour,
diffusing tension,
pricking pomposity,
as well as touching on the ways
in which humour perhaps is rooted in a positive orientation towards death
Toughness and tenderness
‘holding tender views in tough ways’
A stress/return to virtue and character?
ethics as about character
not or in addition to rights and utilitarian calculation?
Resilient characters that recognise and respect and acknowledge
death, suffering, illness
as woven parts of the human condition
and contributions to a flourishing human life
To have a ‘good death’ as something to be desired
not avoided….
What kinds of destinies/fates are we imagining for this world and its inhabitants?
One of open or closed possibilities?
less unsustainable,
less resilient,
less possibilities open up
Hopeful ones in sense of ‘radical hope’
Digging where we stand,
re-inhabiting place,
transforming space into place
Destinies/fates
sense of lock in,
closed futures
What does ‘home’ mean
for a species that no longer has or needs a natural niche
and is the one species
(perhaps with rats and cockroaches)
nature did not specialise?
Imagination and creativity
play,
slack
and redundancy
More free time
and more labour?
Knowledge
or love of the world?
Is it true that people cannot bear too much reality?
An erotic/life affirming angle at which to stand to the world
the rediscovery that perhaps the great mystery is not death
but life
Poetry,
life affirmation,
imagination and creativity
at the end of the world as we know it…
but then the end of the world as we know it
is not the end of the world.
“Oh lightening bole, oh quickening glance,
who can tell the dancer from the dance” Yeats