Making Sense of Sustainability – Environmental Futures Dialogue Event, Wales Millennium Centre

To be read in conjunction with “Speaker briefing notes” for Session 12-1pm Friday 6^th December:  Keywords and Provocations

Questions:

• If we view/construct the world with these concepts, what sort of world are we inhabiting?
• What sort of subjects live in it?
• What kinds of destinies/fates are we imagining for this world and its inhabitants?

Risk and futures

Concern with/care about the uncertain future, “with the precarious and perilous character of existence”, is arguably a universal aspect of human experience (Jackson 1989, 15–17). Risk is therefore not just an administrative tool, a parameter to be assessed or measured. It is also an attitude, a practice and a kind of knowledge – a way of making sense of an uncertain future, of representing and imagining it in terms of a totality of counterfactual possibilities (Giddens 1991), as a ‘risky future’.  It is also a moral concept, a way of apportioning and distributing blame for negative events – for identifying ‘risky’ behaviour (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982).

Just like any other way of interpreting the future, however, risk deals in fictions, not facts (Jouvenel 1967). We can model or predict the future by assessing the present and quantifying the past, but until the future has become the present, we must wait for our beliefs to be confirmed, leaving a persistent gap that is ethically troubling (Haller 2002).

At the same time, these fictions that extend into the future convey emotion and affect back to the present. The risks that we view as salient for us and those we care about create spaces of possibility whose shape and character is emotionally coloured (e.g. with anger, fear, sympathy, or hope), and which shape our potential for relating to others and taking action here in the present. Fear may spur us to take responsibility for the future (Jonas, 1984) or paralyze us. Hope may create collective energy or produce utopian visions that may themselves create fear in those who see potential for injustice, exclusion or the suppression of difference within them.

Aesthetics, emotion and affect

Emotions re-order the world around us, creating meaning out of our sensual relationship to it (Nussbaum, 2001). Art intervenes within this sensual order, which possesses its own logic, to create the possibility of new experiences. But is this process of intervention purposeful or not?

We might interpret the role of art not as producing representations of what the future might ‘look like’ (this approach being characteristic of past imaginary futures, as containing particular technologies, urban forms and so on – like the 50s retro-future of flying cars, ultra-high-rise buildings and so on (Barbrook, 2007)). Instead, the artistic imagination can intervene in our settled assumptions and habits, seeking to imagine different forms of life or ways in which life could be lived – in increased simplicity, more ‘slowly’, with more deliberate interruptions and with mindfulness as a goal (Aberystwyth event).

Alternatively, we might conceive of art as a ‘counter-ethics’ that does not so much envision different alternative futures, as directly transform practices in the present, creating places and forms of life where life is lived differently, more mindfully, more connectedly. Art may recreate connections to the world and those who share it with us by, for example, providing alternatives to the dominant narratives about places and communities identified as ‘faulty environments’ (Irwin and Simmons, 1999) by politicians and the media. The arts can perhaps help invent stories that bring out other aspects of life in these places crucial to reshaping a sense of what people can do, of what futures are possible (one example being the Gurnos estate in Merthyr Tydfil, discussed at the 16 July Cardiff Philosophy Café (CPC) as a community that has been ‘officially defamed’ in this way).

In this way, uncertainty about the future could be seen as the key resource for art, with the need to re-generate within communities the confidence and capacity to influence the future providing a major role for artistic work – particularly in the ways in which it can (as with The Passion and Port Talbot) release sleeping energies within communities. A useful distinction might be made between uncertainty about the future – a state in which one may be overwhelmed by a sense of ‘riskiness’ or simply not be sure ‘how to go on’ (Marris, 1996) – and precariousness (or ‘precarity’), the condition and awareness that the rug could be pulled out from underneath you, as it were, thanks to the actions of others, at any time. (CPC 16 July)

The role of art in relation to sustainability may have to do with overcoming disconnection and the specific emotionally-inflected states of uncertainty or precarity that it can create. Unsustainable lives are disconnected, fragmented lives, with attention pulled in different directions (Aberystwyth event). Despite this, though, there is perhaps a danger in thinking of the arts as a ‘toolbox’ for ‘re-connecting’ to those around us and the world we inhabit. As Siriol Joyner suggested in her performance at the Aberystwyth event, perhaps performance is just about ‘being in’ nature, being at home in movement, forming new ways of ‘being at home’ in the world and articulating or expressing these through different media – of participating in ‘an involuntary movement that involves us fully’ (audience member, CPC 23 July 2013).

One way of thinking about what a non-instrumentalised version of art might look like is to reflect on ‘obliqueness’ (Aberystwyth event). Whereas instrumentalised art seeks to address issues frontally, in the hope of intervening directly in a given situation, oblique art tends to approach things from the side, at an angle. With oblique art, the point is not to teach or to work towards some self-evident aim or goal; on the contrary, it is to evoke and produce different possibilities of experiencing the world in and through an encounter with the materials and structures of the artwork itself. In keeping with the thinking of Jacques Rancière (2006), the paradox here is that art which eschews all direct causes, the art that seeks to serve no purpose other than itself, might just be the most useful art we possess for rethinking our relationship to the world.

Sustainability, place-making, homing

But if the arts dissolve illusions of disconnection, then do they do so in relation purely to locality, the place we are in here and now, rather than a wider, globalizing world? Are there problems with connecting sustainability, through art, to ways of life lived in particular places (Heise, 2008)? Yet attention to concrete aspects of life – in place and time – is particularly important to avoid the ‘optical illusion’ associated with fear of the future, which austerity, climate change, the possibility of energy shortages and so on may provoke. Through the lens of fear, everything looks ‘bigger’, harder to handle, unconfined within boundaries. Does a sense of place, by comparison, help creative intervention release the energy and confidence needed to live with and domesticate a risky future? Is it possible to address these issues by moving from a static notion of place to a more, dynamic and transient one, which stresses the need for practice and open-ended improvisation?

Here, concepts of ‘home’ and ‘homing’ can be important. Does art, in overcoming disconnection, create a ‘safe space’ in which creative possibilities for living can be explored without emotional or other harm – a way of creating uncertainty without risk? Perhaps this does not necessarily require a ‘home’. Just as the developmental psychology concept of secure space refers to something that individuals internalize (rather than requiring spending one’s life in the place where one is emotionally rooted), perhaps ‘homing’ rather than ‘home’ is the essence of the connection between art and sustainability. Journeying and expanding one’s ‘habitat’ may allow one to cultivate responsibility – or rather, ‘response-ability’, the capacity to feel and respond to difference, to encounters in which features of the world to which one is not accustomed might be overlooked (Aberystwyth event)