A further Cardiff Philosophy Café on 23rd July was organised by the AHRC “making sense of sustainability” network to take forward creative and collaborative explorations on this topic through promoting events and involving performance artists, social scientists, and members of the public in environmental futures dialogue.
At this event the topics of emotions, the future and uncertainty – that were initially considered at the 16th July café – were pursued further by considering the café-style discussions as a potentially rich source of locally and globally relevant narratives that people and communities can create, drawn on, and mobilise to help them think though intractable social issues such as sustainability. Narratives are personally engaging, cultural resonant sense-making resources that make it possible for people to engage with one another at the level of ideas, while also bringing to the surface discussion of the feelings – and strength of feeling – that might arise in the process about matters of (environmental) risk, uncertainty and the future.
Narrative inquiry is one approach within interpretive social science research that makes it possible to investigate the interpretive circuits in which people’s beliefs, perceptions and concerns about risk and uncertainty, and the associated feelings or affects they generate, circulate. Scientific knowledges are part of these circuits too: but interpretive social science does not simply raise questions about what people may or may not know about risk and its uncertainties (with the attendant problems of assuming a public in knowledge deficit). Interpretive risk research is interested in the effects of what might be called risky knowledges: i.e. the effects – good or bad – that are bought into being when world-making agents put to work their knowledge and feelings about risk, uncertainty and futures at different times and in different places, through their own narrative accounts and stories, and through the medium of the protagonists (voices or speaking subjects) who are involved in those stories.
In our “creativity café” an initial arts performance started proceedings though creating an encounter for the audience with an embodied, linguistically and visually rich “told story”. The performance had a strong focus on world-making and put into circulation a portrait in words of contemporary fears generated in the context of risk knowledge.
As an audience/public participation event, the encounter was necessarily situated/located , framed/mediated, contingent and dialogic i.e. it involved performer and audience in meaningful exchanges of thoughts, ideas and feelings, embodied forms of knowledge, imagined (dis)connections, and affective flows – all mobilised in the space(s), time(s) and specific situation they found themselves in. It took the subsequent café-style discussions and plenary feedback session to be able to trace through, and elaborate on, some of the tangible and intangible meanings and affects that were engendered by the performance, and its immediate effects in the café setting.
Pertinent questions arising encapsualting the interests and activities of the network are many:
- How did the performance/told story resonate with the audience, and engage them with the topics of emotions, futures, and narrative in sense making about sustainability? Were efforts made at representation, was there a clearly communicated message? Did it work to evoke artworks’ obliqueness, and sensate, experiential knowledge?
- How attuned was the performance to an inspirational role for the arts? How were possible harms and future uncertainties performed, narrated and subsequently talked about? How did it contribute to making sense of the intractability of environmental risk problems, and contrasting discourses of sustainability?
- What kinds of spoken feelings and affective engagements did the performance and discussions set in motion? Did it suggest anything about the role of the arts and performance in narrative creation, and for practicing sustainability?
- Did it invite an exploration of connections and disconnections made by the audience with the artwork?
- How might social scientists understand their participation in the event that would not be possible as part of their usual research methodologies and public engagement methods? Is there something to be said about melding a concern for sensing (embodied performance) and sense-making (what is gathered from listening to the café discussions and subsequently interpreting, writing and reflecting)?
- Deleuze’s idea of empiricism is that encounters matter but are not translated into knowledge, and that catalysts and turning points are created. How satisfactory is this account? Are there ways of practicing aesthetics that are pedagogical?
- Do emotions sustain or erode the ability to act? Is it easier to believe in a despairing future? Why and how might engaging with our feelings about uncertainty, futurity and environmental risk be important for sustainability research and risk scholarship? Is a focus on emotions and futures useful for imagining the kinds of transformations that are necessary to meet the demands being made on people and the planet in view of the rapid pace of environmental change?
The initial performance
The opening performance was given by Rhodri Thomas and his two colleagues, Carolina Vasquez and Chris Young. They presented the first 10 minutes or so of a dramatisation about the conditions of contemporary of modernity that they are currently working up for the Scenofest/World Stage Design Festival, which will take place at The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, in September 2013. The inspiration for the dramatisation was a poem called “Who’s Afraid” by Susan Richardson which Rhodri read out at the start of his performance. The performance also used images of art works including some by the visual artist Pat Gregory. Images were shown as background slides to Rhodri’s spoken address to the audience drawing upon poetic language and humour.
The performance amounted to a fairly direct invitation to the audience to think about fear and the observation that “we are all fearful, even if we don’t know it”. This is what Rhodri had to say about modern fears. They are “more slippery and sly” than “more potent and hearty” ones that characterise times past when “peasants lived in a well of meaning …involving elements of misfortune …. For peasants “it was hell to them or, if all else failed, they had God”. Modern fears, as with the wolf in “Who’s Afraid”, arise from being “trapped in a world of too much consumption and choice…yearning for distant light and a forgotten past… and you do not know what”. Modern fears “are more subtle, insidious, nameless”. They are the “manufacture of our own minds”, “reflect our own vulnerabilities”, and are “the fertile compost from which fear can grow”.
The performance also involved a commentary that developed from ideas arising from the poem. As modern subjects we have a particular relationship to change which is “ever present but where we can be fearful of the emptiness this brings”. Our relationship to the environment is one that sustains us because “it is not outside us but is everything to us. So if we screw it up we are dead!”
Another part of the commentary put the voice of the authority of science firmly in question: “We don’t need detailed knowledge of how our environment sustains us; it has been around for years. We don’t need a degree in environmental science to know that. ….But do we do anything about it? No. We avert our gaze. Some do look and know, but in ways that reflect a creeping unease, as if we are a doomed civilisation. Despite our immense capacity for doubt, we are caught in the grip of global and latent fear – of the credit crunch, reliance on technology etc.”
As the performance reached its dramatic heights, the future is discussed as depicted in the film 28 Days Later about crazed, energetic, bloodthirsty monsters involved in a “hideous orgy of consumerism”. Zombies infected by feelings or rage against other people are unleashed to kill and consume them.
Prompted by his reading of the meanings set in train by the film, Rhodri’s questions for the audience were “so why is there such a marked insistence in contemporary society on such downward spiralling dystopias?” And what can the film help us to think about in terms of daily living seen in the light of such possible futures? “The zombies want to eat our brains, but what if they wanted our vegetables?” How would we defend our own homes and allotments against such zombies? Just as the film 28 Days Later plays on our fear of other people, should our fears of the future be focussed on societal collapse, ordinary people with no restraint and with empty bellies, since people only need hunger and fear…..
Introduction to/framing of the café discussions
After the performance, the audience was asked to discuss their ideas about the kind of futures they would like to see, and the kinds of narratives that might help them deal with their feelings about uncertainty. They were also asked, as they articulated their own stories about the future, to consider the protagonists (both human and non-human) who might be involved and how the possible futures they envisaged might come about
Commentary and reflections on the event
The Philosophy Café blog by Chris Groves depicts Rhodri’s performance as the film maker and environmental activist Taliesin Blyth in the following way.
“Our fears …are stimulated by the people we share our planet with. It is others we fear most, he suggested, and the prospect of the anger and hostility that comes from fear. Emotion, with its roots in our evolutionary past, emerges as a key protagonist in Taliesin’s story. Humour, in which his monologue is also rich, is one response to fear and negative emotion more generally that preserves a sense of agency, of being able to do something that takes us beyond paralysis. But is this enough?”
The blog also gives an account of how the event proceeded at the café tables and plenary discussions. The blog takes as its reference points philosophical positioning of two extreme kinds by Stephen Emmett and K. Eric Drexler for whom the future is (in the case of Drexler) well on course towards a global catastrophe or (in the case of Emmett) will benefit profoundly from a new world of possibilities arising from the transformative powers be believes in for the economy and technology portrayed as “the engines of abundance”. These two extremities, though, do not characterise the views communicated either in Rhodri’s performance or in the café discussions since they “like most of the stories we tell ourselves about our collective future belong somewhere in the messy middle of this continuum”.
An account is opened up of the “messy narratives in the middle” starting with the observation that “it is clear that the kind of end-date focussed story told by both Emmett and Drexler held little attraction for the majority of the audience members”, setting up a contrast with what people focussed on instead : “on the stories guided by particular values (such as equality, non-violence, respect and so-on) that took on the role of protagonists, moving people closer together and building connections of care and responsibility”. An analytic account is then built, in the manner that is characteristic of interpretive social science, from this initial starting point in observing what matters to people, in order to develop an argument based on a perceived distinction between ‘what’ and ‘how’ in relation to their views of the future.
“The future, some suggested, instead of being characterised in terms of what it could be like (this characterising earlier ways of imagining the future, as containing particular technologies, urban forms and so on – like the 1950s retro-future of flying cares, ultra high rise buildings and so on), should be described in terms of how it could be lived – in increasing simplicity, more ‘slowly’, with more deliberative interruptions (with the switching off of lights on Earth Day being cited as an example) and with mindfulness as a goal.”
The argument that is built towards invokes the café participants’ non-utopian and non-catastrophising perceptions of how to “take care of the future”.
“Taking care of the future was seen as something to be undertaken, not necessarily, through grand projects but through placing oneself in the moment, in order to free oneself from anxiety and fear, emotions that incite defensive reactions, and lead on to ‘rein in’ ones’ creative, courageous and care giving impulse. Some suggested that the pathway to a better future lay in building non-violence through dealing with close relationships and the conflicts or resentments that arise within them, in the belief that such efforts will do more to change societies (and how people deal with ‘bigger’ issues) than grand visions. Indeed utopian, end-state focussed stories may themselves create fear in those who see potential for danger, injustice or exclusion within them”.
So what comes next?
The above commentary and incipient analysis offers what one might call an intellectual provocation arising out of an intense, investigative mode of engagement by the author with an event that involved academics and artists speaking with, and listening to, members of the public. Yet, questions remain about how to move from these suggestions about how to take care of the future as part of wider circuits of sense-making, how they should be explored in research, and their implications for research partnerships involving arts, science and policy.
At the Aberystwyth event, the question was asked “who is given the megaphone?” It is as relevant to pose this question about the Cardiff café. Once social scientists have developed ideas – and provocations – from attentively listening to the public, then a difficult task begins of reflecting and deciding upon the adequacy of the research narratives that have been produced, and the part they should play in subsequent meaning-making and world-shaping activities.
Within post-modern social science two sets of questions need to be asked about i) researcher openness and generativity and ii) the regulatory, truth-making power of research narratives. How research narratives fit into wider interpretive circuits of meaning making is an issue that necessarily comes into view, as do questions about the possible need for counter-ethics (based, for example, on our embodied relationships with the world), and practices inquiring into the intelligibility of certain narratives and why they might be able to gain traction among members of the public at particular points in time.
It was important that the way our event was framed prioritised creating an ambience of respect for the worth and dignity of those who were present at the event. In this way, the approach we followed invoked the working principles and practices of interpretive risk/qualitative social science research. It was also informed by attentiveness to, and awareness of, philosophical positioning and social, political and ethical critique.
But how did this play out in terms of appreciating the aesthetics of sustainability as conveyed through the compositional qualities and integrity of artworks? How to make sense of the diversity of the approaches taken by the artists in their performances at our various events?
As Taliesin Blyth, Rhodri Thomas did, indeed, have a clear message that he sought to convey through his performance. It was about the ways in which it is important and possible to engage people with their fears as contemporary citizens of a threatened world, albeit that more emotions will also need to be brought into play. Only by naming the fear is it possible to find a way out of its grip. The message emerged out of conversations held prior to the event with the AHRC network organisers about why social scientists have come to view communicating highly emotive matters of risk and uncertainty that are threatening to the public as troubled and troubling.
At the 16th July event, Gareth Clarke also spoke about the ways in which his community arts performances have clear purpose based on the role he embraces in his work for the arts in enabling community action aimed at improving the lives, environments and prospects of local people.
We need to reflect further on these more directly value(s)-based approaches, alongside the more obliquely communicative, generative ideas and performance practices that are at the heart of works by artists such as Simon Whitehead and Siriol Joyner. This would seem to be important if we are to develop our discussions regarding the role of feelings, emotions, and affect as they play out in and through time, in narratives articulating what matters to people (e.g. about naming threats to the places where they live, sustaining life, making connections), and within the wider interpretive circuits that are also effective means by which futures take on an effective reality in the present.
We have yet to fully work through ideas that are important to our arts-social sciences network about the need to focus on issues of presence, embodied performance, spatial and temporal extensions of environmental sensing, and circuits of interpretation and meaning making as a ways of approaching questions of risk, uncertainty and sustainability.
- To what extent does shifting the focus of inquiry in environmental and sustainability study from home to “homing” provide an answer? Can this explain anything about the prevalence of dystopic views of the future (and associated affects of bleakness, and despair) and/or equivocation/ambivalence about utopias?
- Why is it also important to engage with questions about the role of mundane, everyday routines (of anticipation and expectation, comings and goings, gathering and dispersing), historical resonances and potentials (of only half-forgotten people-environment connections, memories of destruction)? Does mundane practice obscure or contribute to people’s environmental attunement and awareness? What of joyful experiences of having to re-view what has become mundane – moments when the familiar becomes unfamiliar – moments of unknowing?
- It is important to think about the possible fragmentation, as opposed to the coalescence, of place-based and other value based identities among members of the public/audiences at our events.
- How to introduce a concern – outside dystopian/utopian thinking – for possible transformations in contemporary forms of environmental subjectivity?