Sustaining Sustainability

I cannot do away with the thought that the notion of ‘sustainability’, in order to achieve its greatest effectiveness and consistency, beyond a mere concept or political stance, must be articulated in full deployment as discourse in itself. If we aim, effectively, at producing and reproducing particular and lasting (or ‘sustained’, isn’t it) approaches to the understanding of and interaction with our physical, socio-cultural, and historical spaces, we may well need the assemblage of conceptual as well as practical forces. I don’t think, moreover, that a notion of sustainability can be sustained, anyway, beyond/outside an encompassing discursive framework that constructs, sustains, and validates it; it often implies much reorganization of our familiar modes of understanding and acting with and towards the world(s) we encounter.
I cannot insist either on the desirability of a discourse of sustainability on the ground that it is somehow more true or valid than other possible approaches or practices. Truth-value, in the sense of consistency with an ultimate, ‘real’ truth, is known to be a null and ultimately irrelevant criterion in discursive analysis. Validity, on its part, is relative to positions and interests. Instead, I only propose it, or engage with it, simply because it seems to me convenient, or effective, or desirable to make sense of and engage with the events and phenomena I encounter in the specific local and historical circumstances I find myself in (and I suppose there is also a degree of similarity in experience for significant numbers of us). Ultimately, even, I sympathize with it because it allows me to sensibly map my specific historical experience in configuration with the values that I find most productive in providing a framework for the acts and practices I engage in. In the last instance, it is a personal pragmatics what steers our engagements: no universal principle existing which can reduce discursivity to a unanimous truth, values – the specific values constructed, promoted or validated by given discourses, whatever they may be – define our potential scope of discursive selection and engagement. Values are our node of attachment to discourses (insofar we can be conscious of them) by providing, on the one hand, a scaffolding for the articulation of ‘sense’ and understanding and, on the other, a substrate for lasting – sustainable, even - affective investment.
For, indeed, it is affective investment what the choice of a ‘set’ of presupposed and unquestioned because fundamental, principles, from among many possible other discursive ‘sets’, would require; no ultimate truth or reason coming to the rescue. If I were, then, to outline the reasons of my pragmatic and affective (if they can ever be separated) investment in what I see as the discourse of ‘sustainability’, they would relate, thus, to what I see as the adequacy of its tacit principles to sensibly articulate the events and phenomena of our contemporary worlds and organize productive, and for me desirable, modes of action.
Tentatively, these are what I see as the fundamental, even if not expressly articulated, principles of a notion of sustainability as it permeates the diverse ways in which we engage with it in current economical and socio-political policies and practices. That is, here follows what for me are (or what I would like to be) the cultural-discursive premises of a working discourse of ‘sustainability’.

- Complexity and Connectivity are constitutive principles of the ‘world’, as we encounter it. Moreover, dynamicity and change are its primary forces. All these notions emphasize the localized and historical character of all processes and come to substitute the long-gone dream of universalism.

- Uncertainty, therefore, becomes a permanent circumstance. Projections, predictions and order are more a matter of tentative approximation. Uncertainty and doubt are not a measure of disorder, but rather, the order of things…

- Balance (environmental, social, economical, political) becomes an irrelevant, and perhaps impossible, notion. Livability may be something more worthy of striving for – an attainable goal.

- ‘Sustainable’ modes of thought and action are invested in an acute awareness of Consequentiality. Much grounded in the ‘Butterfly effect’ model, all actions (or apathies) and postures, whether aware and deliberate or not, are implicated in partly predictable and partly unpredictable networks of consequences.

- Implication in consequences is, thus, an a priori.

- With implication as originary condition, Responsibility is a precondition of all agents. Whether we acknowledge it or not is irrelevant: we don’t embrace responsibility (although that is what an effective discourse of sustainability should produce), but responsibility embraces us.

Butterfly Wings and Transgenic Bacteria: Elements for an Ethics of the Sensible

Having presented a particular ontology of the Sensible, that plasmic substance between material and metaphor which seems to characterize the dynamic world of meaning and engaging relationships we experience, I feel compelled - or compromised, or responsible for, which is all the same and brings me to my point - to elaborate on the ethical consequences of such an ontology. After all, in order to be pertinent, theory must, at some point, embrace practice.

I will return here to a brief summary of my proposal as a way of recalling the relevant aspects of this notion of the ‘sensible’. Fundamentally, this concept of the Sensible implies a world where concrete, ‘material’ encounters have as opaque a presence as do the abstractions of our conceptual and metaphorical worlds. Moreover, materials and metaphors are here hybrids themselves, both emerging in the condensations of physical and abstract forces and are intricately intertwined with one another in dynamic cycles of exchange. Their distinction, if not at all arbitrary, could be perhaps conceived of as a difference in direction or orientation. For convenience and understanding we could propose that while materials are entities that circulate from the concrete to the abstract, and back, metaphors begin their cycle in the abstract, circulating then towards the concrete and back. On their own, materials, on the one hand, and metaphors, on the other, seem insufficient to account for the broad chromatic scope of our (human?) experiences. The historical debate between arts and sciences, each claiming ground in one of these encountering poles, certainly bears testimony to this. Together, however, materials and metaphors seem able to engulf, if not the entirety of our world of experience, at least a very extensive and powerful part of it. In constant mediation between modes of intellectual and sensorial apprehension, the Sensible, as I have proposed to call this viscous substance, has an immersive presence and preponderance. Sensible entities assemble in continuous realization, that is, in their dynamic actualization as products of necessary action and intervention. I have proposed the groping, sensing, working hand - as an alternative to the omniscient eye or mind which in modern times have become so representative of knowledge - as emblematic of this model of the Sensible.

Yet, beyond the temptation of assuming that such a model, being, after all, a metaphor-material composition, can already in and of itself be consequential, I realize that, without complementing materials-metaphors, it may not acquire a sensible opacity, but remain a diluted conceptual liquidity. Theories require practice and practices require theory.

I have found in the developing field of bio- and vivo-arts a domain of practical theory and theoretical practice which appears to be very self-consciously akin to this order of the Sensible. Deeply implicated in the exchanges between arts and sciences, the conceptual and the concrete, physical and symbolic effects, practice and politics, this field seems an open ground where the realization of materials-metaphors and metaphors-materials is constantly at stake. No less emphatic in the interventional, manipulative and inescapably implicating mediation of the ‘hand’ - as artists, as scientists - bio- and vivo-arts seem also to be invested in the ‘logics’ of ‘realization’. Bio- and vivo- artists (and scientists!) seem, thus to already have been exploring in practice the domain of the sensible. Yet, and perhaps even more intriguing, bio- and vivo-arts seem, by virtue of their specific modes of intervention, to become inextricable from politics. Having already gone the way of the metaphor-to-material in my previous paper, I will, in the following, and by the hand of two bio-art works, probe the way of the material-to-metaphor in search for a practice of the Sensible. For this purpose I have chosen the works Nature? By Marta de Menezes and the “Transgenic Bacteria Release Machine” performance, part of the GenTerra project developed by Beatriz da Costa in collaboration with the Critical Art Ensemble.

Realization

The piece Nature?, by de Menezes, is a project developed in collaboration with researchers from the Section of Evolutionary Biology of the Institute for Evolutionary and Ecological Sciences, at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. Having come in contact with researchers studying the factors that affect wing-pattern variations in butterflies and their evolutionary significance, by directly intervening in the butterflies wing-pattern development, de Menezes decided to explore these techniques to the construction of living artwork. De Menezes selected exemplars from two butterfly species, Bicyclus anyana and Heliconius melpomene and by means of microcautery and tissue grafting, altered, at the pupal stage, the development of the visual patterns of one wing out of each exemplar, leaving the other wing to develop naturally. As a result, de Menezes obtained unique, asymmetric butterflies which reflected, simultaneously, natural and altered wing-patterns. De Menezes is emphatic in her use of natural materials (grafted live cells) to create works which are “entirely natural, yet not designed by nature.” Her intention was, furthermore, to “explore the possibilities and constraints of the biological system in the butterfly wing to express concepts relating to our perception of shapes,” (2003: 30) thus, also investing her live material with perceptual, symbolic and metaphorical import. Experimenting with multiple pattern changes and novel techniques, de Menezes’ work also contributed with unexpected results that were, in turn, taken into account and study by the team of researchers in the Leiden laboratories. This served to emphasize yet another point of de Menezes work: the assertion that collaboration between artists and scientists not only benefits the arts but also the work of science.

The “Transgenic Bacteria Release Machine” performance is the result of a rather different approach. This is a performance project that involves a simple robotic game machine which holds ten Petri dishes on a circular surface. One of the ten dishes contains a transgenic sample of E. coli and the rest contain samples of mold and bacteria collected from nearby surroundings. Visitors of the performance are invited to interact, activating the TBRM. Once turned on, the wheel supporting the Petri dishes begins to spin and stops randomly after some seconds. The mechanic arm then slides down and opens one of the Petri dishes. With 10% probability the arm will open the transgenic dish. The machine indicates which sample is opened the transgenic or one of the wild samples by means of turning on a red or green light, respectively (Da Costa, 2001-2002). Designed to help understand and call attention to the environmental impact of transgenic organisms, visitors are then encouraged to engage in discussion of these issues. Adam Zaretsky’s remarks about the project appears also particularly pertinent for our discussion; he adds: “By the way, common scientific rhetoric assures us that E. coli cannot fly so the actual TBRM ‘release’ is a symbolic gesture, a mere exposure to air. Nonetheless, the public walks away with the metaphor of GMO [genetically modified organisms] release as Ecological Russian Roulette” (2005: 11). While de Menezes’ Nature? is a more artistic and epistemologically oriented work, the “Transgenic Bacteria Release Machine” performance is of a markedly social and political character.

It is here worth noting that these two interventions recur to different, and often colliding, branches of biological research and, in particular, evolutionary theory. While the “Transgenic Bacteria Release Machine” performs interventions at the level of genetics, de Menezes’ butterflies are intervened according to principles of developmental biology. While genetic intervention implies immediate, evolutionarily consequential alterations of organisms (insofar the altered genetic contents would be directly implicated in the development of the altered organisms and could also be transmitted to coming generations), alterations at a developmental level (usually at an embryonic stage) carries, at least in principle, only morphological consequences for the organism directly affected which do not enter that organism’s genetic stream. Contemporary evolutionary theory faces constant debate on the role that genetic and developmental influences, respectively, play in the outcome of evolution. Taken to the extremes, genetic determinism would claim that only genetic material is influential in evolution, while on the other, environmental determinism (never really a mainstream proposal) would claim external factors as the essential ground of evolution. However, although throughout the twentieth century, and up to now, genes have been emphasized as main determining factors in evolution, there has been increasing attention to the role of environmental circumstances and developmental influences in the evolutionary outcomes of organisms and populations. Contemporary complexity theory in biology and increasingly relevant currents such as so-called “Evo-Devo,” represent an attempt to restore extra-genetic factors their proper value in evolution. Specifically, contemporary biological theory seems to be more and more invested in exploring the conjunction of these two currents of evolutionary change (Hansen, 2000). It is tempting to point out the curious correlation of these two branches of biology with the dynamics at play in our model of materials-metaphors and metaphors-materials: genetics, referring us to abstract and invisible (coded) informational contents, seems to cast us onto the domain of metaphors that become materialized in organic forms. On the other hand, developmental biology’s implication with the morphological, immediately visual or functional dimensions of the organisms, especially with their potentiality of being assimilated into the genetic stream, reminds us of materials becoming metaphors. I would suggest that the corresponding scientific-artworks, also replicate this difference in orientation. De Menezes’ butterflies, very immediately concrete and used as epistemological instruments to call attention to abstractions of perception (in altered wing-patterns), the relationships between nature and human interventions (by retaining the asymmetry between natural and altered patterns) and as research instruments for science and arts, seem to begin the cycle in the direction of materials to metaphors. Meanwhile, the TBRM, involving a “symbolic” gesture, aimed at provoking actual actions and reactions in its audience, effects the complementary cycle in the direction of metaphor to materials, and back.

Affect and Consequences

Yet, whichever approach, both projects are profoundly characterized by the blatant manipulation that is has made them possible. Whether genetic intrusion or developmental probing, intervention is central to both works. Perhaps more than in any other kind of work, intervention acquires here an insistent visibility by being effected upon living material as medium and vehicle of art; intrusion is a fundamental aspect of these works. However, far from being itself the end of these works, as a means to a final, determined product, intervention, in both these pieces, seems rather to detonate the projection of these works into an indeterminate future in time and space. The culmination of Menezes’ work, on the one hand, is not only to be found in the completion of a semi-altered butterfly (in which case its lifespan would be coterminous with that of the work of art), but also in the questions those interventions leave behind to artists and scientists equally, and potentially, also, in consequences for the butterflies themselves (as the original research question points to). Correspondingly, the limits of the TBRM performance as a science-artwork are not bound by the immediate context of performance; instead, it aspires to disperse, airborne, with the presupposed cloud of infesting transgenic bacteria among its spectators - and presumably even their relatives, acquaintances and descendants. Whether as an originating premise (what are the consequences of altered wing patterns, or what if a transgenic bacteria dish is opened) or as the inevitable residual of intervention (the biological, ethical, social, cultural, political questions they bring to surface) the question of consequences becomes an actualizing force in the projecting spatio-temporal expanse of these works. And questions here are implicatory. In the vein of a certain, as of yet only conceptually developed SuperWeed Kit 1.0, by Heath Bunting, which, so far not being but a “construct of the mind,” became thickly present in diverse critiques and indignant denunciation (Malbreil, 2005), these projects become effective and profoundly implicatory by means of “raising the right questions.” And if, as in the extending radii of Nature?, the TBRM and SuperWeed Kit, consequences are let loose in the immersive world of the Sensible, ubiquitous materials-metaphors and metaphors-materials, the one impossible thing is to remain unaffected.

In this kind of especially ethically self-conscious art, I would like to call attention to some peculiar implications. What if, as these works of arts and sciences strive to present, consequences exceed the realm of the immediately concrete? What if, following the realization of the persistently mediating Sensible, consequences are implied in turbulent exchanges between materials and metaphors? What if, instead of finished products or exhausted consequences, we obtain questions as results? What kind of ethics would enable us to face the persistent semi-determinacy of sensible materials-metaphors? A normative, linear ethics, based on the possibility of assessing consequences at short, medium or long term and balance them against a scale of assessable benefits, or a system of prescriptive ethics that defines a priori all its constitutive entities and scaffolds all possible courses of action, seem, in any case, insufficient. The indeterminacy of these works of science-art themselves (what kind of entities are these entirely natural yet not designed by Nature butterflies, or the transgenic human-bacterial E. coli, for example), as well as the elusiveness and spatio-temporal indeterminacy of their consequences (does wing-pattern alteration have evolutionary consequences, can anybody get infected by transgenic bacteria, what courses of action will people take facing these possibilities), reaffirm the fundamental implication of unpredictability and unprescribability in this order of the Sensible. Thus, in face of the immersive character of the Sensible and of the fundamentally diffusive, epidemic ‘nature’ of questions, I propose as alternative, as I also think these works of science-arts strongly advocate for, an ethics of affect.

It might be, then, useful to recall here the scope of this notion of affect. To begin with, I would like to stress that affect, again, refers us to the question of consequences. Affect, as in the verb ‘to affect’, has intervention as its prerequisite and instantiates the realization and recognition of consequence. It is a verb that preempts the possibility of neutrality and reaffirms presence as inevitably consequential. On the other hand, ‘affect’ entails the imperative of a relationship, be it what it may, the taking of a stance vis à vis an entity or situation. This may be, perhaps, one of the best articulated aspects of affect in the works discussed. Both Nature? and the “Transgenic Bacteria Release Machine” performance are expressly designed to drive us into this dimension of affect and, more often than not, to conflicting dimensions of it. The altered butterflies awaken in us, simultaneously, the recognition of kinship in the living and a disquieting wariness towards their ‘unnaturalness’; the same way, the common reaction of aversion of visitors to the TBRM performance is counterbalanced by the invitation to engage in further, informed discussions on the matters it raises. In either case, affection is a driving force for the effectiveness of the works. Affect, after all, is the necessary sequel to the recognition of consequences and is never neutral. The presentation of consequences - that is, their becoming present as new conditions in the world - implies changes that cannot but force us to take stance; that is, after all, the meaning of adaptation.

An instrumental vehicle into this dimension of affect are, again, questions. We have discussed how these projects, rather than achieving their actualization in finished products, become effective in a certain spatio-temporal expansion of its consequences, and, perhaps more accurately, in the questions of their consequences. Having questions as consequence results in the vertiginous opening up of worlds of indeterminate possibilities where our role, position and claims to our worlds are constantly cast into doubt, questions and speculation. Rather than a final period, this works end in an extending elipsis. The interesting result is that, in face of a lack of external support - deteminate answers, proven facts, prescribed courses of action - we find ourselves profoundly and personally implicated in the search for order, sense and understanding. The fundamental indeterminacy of an order of questions implicates us directly in the order of consequences. Affect, then, like questions, is directly and personally implicating. Moreover, by implicating us as individuals it also reaffirms its asymmetrical economy: affect, as empathical inclination or aversion, is a call for engagement and position-searching. It is, in itself, orientation. Like the asymmetrical butterfly wing patterns, affect is also a persistent reminder of multiple, indeterminate possibilities and of our consequential intervention in the order of things. Also, like the expanding powder cloud of spreading metaphors-materials of the “Transgenic Bacteria Release Machine,” affect, within the pervasive domain of the Sensible, is voluminous.

Ethics of Implication

Perhaps we would like to return to the competing strands of biology these two works of science-art. In reaction to Deleuze and Guattari’s biophilosophy, a philosophy grounded in the notion of “involution,” which privileges molecular dynamics as a source of evolutionary change, a position that draws to the extreme the privilege of genetics in the contemporary cultural imaginary, M. Hansen elaborates on the paths taken by contemporary biological theory, especially, in the development of complexity theory (Hansen, 2000). Although not fundamentally distant from traditional evolutionary thought, which, in fact, implicates as much genetics as the developmental consequences of the influence of environmental factors in the process of evolution, complexity theory does its part to temper the emphasis on genetic determinism that has permeated, particularly, over the last century. In this model of evolutionary change, the metaphorical-material domain of genes is as influential as the material-metaphorical scope of environmental and morphological factors. Expanding to include the visible of forms as the invisible of genes, endogenous and exogenous factors, the spectrum of change becomes volumetric. No longer bound solely to either linear patterns of genetic heredity or flat webs of morphological diversification, the simultaneous composition of these planes results in an inclusive, multi-dimensional span that is, simultaneously, radically inclusive and implicatory. Every factor, action or entity becomes potentially influential. Thus engulfing us volumetrically, implication becomes inescapable. Interestingly enough, in this volumetric expansion, it is relationships that play the supporting role. Organisms, in complexity theory, aquire renewed centrality, not as definite entities, but rather, as mediators between genes and structural realization. Much in the same way, Nature?’s butterflies and the TBRM are both ‘products and vehicles’ of a voluminous space of implicating relationships. Butterflies that mediate between art and science, nature and artifice, life and reification and cannot but indefinitely reproduce questions for science, arts, and everything between and around them, and transgenic bacteria that equally challenge all these domains of understanding in an epidemic of ‘polluting’ questions, all call for an effective, affective implication of individuals.

The linear, prescriptive ethics of a domain of completed entities, thus gives way to the immersive ethics-politics of the Sensible. In such an inescapably implicating world, I must emphasize, ethics becomes openly inseparable from politics. Materials and metaphors, as well as we, their intrusive mediators, grafting butterfly wings and turning on transgenic bacteria release machines, are its agents. As a consequence, whether we are prepared or not - as much bio- and vivo-art militantly emphasizes - responsibility for the unpredictable is only waiting to embrace us.

References:

Bridgeman, Redmond. “The Ethics of Looking.” The Aesthetics of Care? Oron Catts, ed. Western Australia: SymbioticA, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, 2002.

Bunt, Stuart. “A complicated balancing act? How can we assess the use of animals in art and science?” The Aesthetics of Care? Oron Catts, ed. Western Australia: SymbioticA, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, 2002.

Da Costa, Beatriz. “Transgenic Bacteria Release Machine.” Retrieved from <http://www.beatrizdacosta.net/machine.php> on June 12, 2007.

De Menezes, Marta. “Nature?” Ars Electronica 2000 - Next Sex (Catalogue).

________________. “The Artificial Natural: Manipulating Butterfly Wing Patterns for Artistic Purposes.” Leonardo 36.1 (2003): 29-32.

________________. “The Laboratory as an Art Studio.” The Aesthetics of Care? Oron Catts, ed. Western Australia: SymbioticA, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, 2002.

Gilbert, Scott and Fausto-Sterling, Anne. “Educating for social responsibility: changing the syllabus of developmental biology.” International Journal of Developmental Biology 47 (2003): 237-244.

Gordon, Richard. “Making Waves: The paradigms of developmental biology and their impact on Artificial Life and Embryonics.” Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal 32 (2001): 443-458.

Hansen, Mark. “Becoming as Creative Involution?: Contextualizing Deleuze and Guattari’s Biophilosphy.” Postmodern Culture 11.1 (2000).

Hsieh, Fon-Jou. “Impact of Developmental Biology on Medicine.” J Formos Medical Association 99.2 (2000): 86-91.

Malbreil, Xavier. “Manipulating Life… Before It Manipulates Us.” (Ron Ross, trans.) CIAC’s Electronic Magazine 23 (2005). Retrieved from on June 12, 2007.

Thornton, KD. “The Aesthetics of Cruelty vs. the Aesthetics of Empathy.” The Aesthetics of Care? Oron Catts, ed. Western Australia: SymbioticA, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, 2002.

Youngs, Amy. “Creating, Culling and Caring.” The Aesthetics of Care? Oron Catts, ed. Western Australia: SymbioticA, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, 2002.

Zaretsky, Adam. “The Mutagenic Arts.” CIAC’s Electronic Magazine 23 (2005). Retrieved from <http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/en/dossier.htm> on June 12, 2007.

Zurr, Ionat and Catts, Oron. “An Emergence of the Semi-Living.” The Aesthetics of Care? Oron Catts, ed. Western Australia: SymbioticA, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, 2002.

Realizing Matter

Could we somehow sort out matters of science and matters of art? That is, can we finally decide what kind of matter each one is concerned with? More specifically, are the objects of science the universal laws it strives to unravel, or the empirical bodies and events these aim to describe? And, correspondingly, are the objects of art the plastic materials it employs, or the subtle conceptual and aesthetic abstractions their use serves to detonate? We could traditionally sustain that sciences are distinguished by the persistent analytical drive that, by sectioning objects into ever smaller pieces, uncovers the fundamental, unifying principles that ideally agglutinate matter all the way up to its most massive manifestations. Arts, on the other hand, we could say, depart from the aim at specific abstractions of expression, and to this purpose summon the attention to the minute concretions of its material facture. As much as we would like to reduce this echoing resonance between material bodies and abstract expressions, it seems somehow to persist as vibrating background noise between both domains of sciences and arts. Yet we are still often inclined to grant sciences the dominion over ultimate materiality, and arts the subtle reign over expressive abstraction. Despite a confusing traffic something seems to persist in each which is repellent of the other.

In particular, it seems to be that arts and sciences, at least in their archetypical form, are at odds in accounting for experience. On the one side, sciences that retreat into the most abstract laws in order to understand matter at its most concrete, and, on the other, arts that make the most thorough use of materials in order to manifest abstractions seem to go past one another without ever meeting. One makes claims footing on actual experience from the realm of piercing intellection, the other, from the empirical realization of sensoriality. But, can we somehow reach a fuller account of experience bypassing neither of these? Can we approach this seemingly contradictory ‘nature’ of experience, “important for no other reason than that it does exist”?

In examining these matters it seems adequate to begin by inspecting materials, since they appear to have a dense presence which often serves to dampen the reverberance of these noisy ambiguities. Both arts and sciences are deeply invested in them: one as an expressive means, the other, as objects of investigation in themselves. Some have pointed out that materials are not the same as matter and that is perhaps something we should elaborate on. Cyril Stanley Smith (1981) contends that matter refers to an abstract idealization of the physical world, while materials are matter as it appears to our senses. More than a mere perceptual or phenomenological argument, what is at stake for Smith is a meeting of physical scales. Materials are intermediates that emerge at the crossing of the macro and microscopic level of structure; namely, that of molecular, atomic and subatomic particles, on the one hand, and that of macroscopic arrangements of these where no longer individual particles, but the composition of aggregates becomes structurally dominant. This is the level where relationships temper the behavior of individual entities, the level of realized matter where whatever results ceases to be accountable as the mere ‘addition of its parts’.¹ We then run into a curious kind of semi-determinacy where, while submitting to described universal laws, matter also exhausts its explanatory power. While abiding to these general laws, the very actualization of materials constitutes the reason of their displacement. Plasticity, simultaneously implying some concrete realization and a certain indeterminacy, becomes, then, the defining quality of materials. As they become manifest to our experience, at an intermediate stage between the micro- and the macroscopic, and in constant mediation between individuation and aggregation, materials have then a semi-determinate obscurity. This is implied in the very notion of the plastic, a material obscurity that, receptive to intervention, change and adaptation, nevertheless affirms its existence as an opaque massiveness that can pose resistance. Every domain of understanding which, like arts and sciences, claims to be anchored on realized experience, must therefore accommodate for this viscous liquidity. But plasticity in materials, it is worth noting, has yet other unfoldings. It not only implies a traffic between dynamic scales, but it mediates between abstract intellection and sensorial perception. As the meeting point of ideal matter and manifest structure, materials are also plasmatic, between empirical solidity and abstract liquidness. Merging both modes of understanding into experience, we could propose that materials seem to require a degree of a combined, sensible appreciation.

Then it would appear that, in the sway of plasmatic morphing, materials share terrain with metaphors, that other anchoring domain of artistic and scientific understanding. Typically, however, metaphors are recognized and valued as the quintessential expression of the freedom of art, a freedom often considered unbound, and certainly independent of ‘rational’, scientific thought. In fact, a staple criterion for their identification is how they run amiss in attempts at ‘literal’ or rational interpretations (Black, 1977). Yet, an extensive body of research has developed in response to this presupposition. In this work it is argued that the functional value of metaphors, the fact that they, somehow, make sense, can be traced back to our relationship with our bodies and with physical space. Metaphors ‘work’ because they relate to experiences empirically immediate to us.² Relations of spatiality, temporal sequence, and topographical relations are projected into diverse domains of understanding, concrete and abstract, in the construction and interpretation of metaphors. Thus understood, metaphors cease to inhabit the exclusive realm of art or of purely verbal language.³ and begin permeating our daily, living spaces as vehicles of common-place understanding. Vaporous metaphors are indeed punctured by materiality.

Yet metaphors do not only vaporize materiality, for they also condense into opaque material. Enrooted in our bodies and in empirical experience, abstracted metaphors return to matter. They take many concrete forms in word, action and experience, but perhaps nowhere they appear more ‘embodied’ than when they materialize into technologies. Writing, thermodynamic machines, armies, digital computers, textiles, liquid crystals are very material technologies born out of metaphors, which were themselves simultaneously brought to us as dense physical tools and as instrumentalized conceptual models. Metaphors again become ground for yet more concepts and more technologies. In this unsanctioned cross-breeding, all genealogy between the abstract and the concrete is forever lost. Heavy with the “traffic between concept and artifact” (Hayles, 1999), these opaque metaphors become “constitutive of determined reflections and characterizations” by providing productive models, analogies and interpretive frameworks (Kay, 2005). In the adaptation of notions, concepts and technologies from other domains of knowledge, metaphors do not effect a simple transmission of understanding from one area to the other, but rather potentiate a bi-directional, mutual reform (Kay, 2005). Metaphors infuse materiality to abstraction, but they also inject abstraction to very tangible materials. They are thus also realized. This, in any case, is the reality that builds up their momentous power in defining and altering disciplinary paradigms (Haraway, 2004). Their material thickness is so pervasive that even the postmodern world-image of radical textuality and depthlessness, threatened with the disappearance of a material world, is only made ‘plausible’ by the mediation of specific technologies (in particular, information and cybernetic technologies) that make such a world conceivable in the first place. In this cosmic confusion not only science, but also arts, as Hayles in her doubly unfolding analysis systematically affirms, are persistent actors-mediators. Where neither mind nor eyes have vantage points of view, it seems we need a hand that can sense its way...

Materializing metaphors and metaphorizing materials we return once more to, or rather, find ourselves indefinitely immersed in, the plastic, where the discriminating mind and perceiving eye seem to have lost their privileged grounding. Fully deployed plasticity requires a closer contact than either the distant eye or mind can provide. Plasticity is not only about appreciation but also about manipulation. It calls for the intervention of a sensible touch, a sensibility that is neither ‘pure’ sensoriality nor mere intellection but the merging of both. Plasticity is the project of hands that understand manipulation in its full implications. Manipulation, that is, as a license to touch, change, adapt and mold only through the acknowledgment of the opacity of a material that knows to resist. Plasticity also as that peculiar ability of materials to effect engagements with the abstractions of intellectual and aesthetic experience. Perhaps above all, the plastic logic of these morphing materials and metaphors calls for a working knowledge: the knowledge of manipulating hands that access the world through the mediation of eyes and brain.

In the plasmic exchange between materials and metaphors, not only these, but science and art themselves are viscously engaged. By the sensible hand of the seducing logic of the organon, that most fundamental of all biological terms, which appears to have been (originally?) borrowed from the vocabulary of artisans and musicians (Canguilhem, 1981), we thus complete a voyage from material to metaphor, from ‘art’ to sciences, and back...

References:

Black, Max. “More about metaphor.” Dialectica 31.3/4 (1977): 431-56.

Canguilhem, Georges. Idéologie et rationalité dans les sciences de la vie: nouvelles études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences. Paris: J. Vrin, 1981.

Forceville, Charles. “Non-verbal and multimodal metaphor in a cognitivist framework: Agendas for research.” Applications of Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations and Fields of Application. Eds. Gitte Kristiansen, Michel Achard, René Dirven and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006. 379-402.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos, Berkeley. California: North Atlantic Books, [1976] 2004.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Kay, Lily E. Das Buch des Lebens: Wer schrieb den genetischen Code? [Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code.] Gustav Roßler, Trans. Suhrkamp. [2000] 2005.

Lakoff, George. “The contemporary theory of metaphor.” Metaphor and Thought (2^nd edition), Ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Smith, Cyril Stanley. A Search for Structure: Selected essays on science, art and history. Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Press, 1981.

Political dimension of Sustainable Development

Sustainable development as a concept for action can be a strong political driver that has (may have) the ability to make politicians with opposing political views cooperate effectively.

When SD is the measure against which political decision making is set, politically unpalatable decisions have a much better chance of being put on the table. When the sense of urgency concerning SD is strong, even when all sides sense that it is not in their direct interest, they will have an incentive to cooperate and move things forward.

This hypothesis, I think not only holds on a local, regional, or national level, but also, maybe especially so for a union as diverse and imbued with his history as Europe. There is simply no logical or reasonable way to agree on important ideological issues following traditional political party lines. Nevertheless, many constituents from all political backgrounds are on the same page concerning globalizing issues as climate change, pollution, global poverty, environmental issues and food security. To bind them, they only need a common theme that completely ignores philosophical dichotomies that have been constructed in a world that was not nearly as connected (not with the same speed, anyway) as the world we live in now.

Another way of terming the greatest challenge that the world is facing is “control from a distance”. Control can be achieved through, amongst others, technological discipline, ideological discipline, logical discipline or ritual discipline. The persuasive point of SD is that it combines many of these elements into a simple coherent concept of ‘being able not only to sustain ourselves, but also those who will be here after us.” The challenge is to translate this concept into practices that are both logically consistent, ideologically tenable (killing people to control population size is not ideologically tenable), devise technology that enables contemporary society to remain functioning while transitioning into a sustainable society. The key to this challenge might be the development of a set of rituals that prepares key people to realize, actualize and carry out necessary measures that will provide the guidelines and constraints of the rest of society to follow suit.

These rituals should not be understood in their traditional semantic sense, but more as a certain set of activities that might not carry any power or effect in themselves but that nevertheless are considered to be significant and necessary for the society in which they are carried out for a continued prosperity. A simple example of such an activity is the production of a Sustainable Development report.

About Landscapes

About Landscapes is a place where we, Kate, Mayra and Frederic, can share our observations. It is in a way a spin off of our project “Landscapes,” found at www.about-landscapes.nl. This website is a collaborative project intended to challenge boundaries, fusing a diverse range of elements from distinctive disciplines into a non-linear, theoretical environment. The site takes advantage of the opportunity provided by the Internet to incorporate interactivity, texts, and images to develop a proposal that explores how different theoretical perspectives might be seen through the frame of mutating landscapes.

This blog will keep our explorations going. Each of us is currently on the move. For the next 6 months I will be in India. Mayra is returning to Puerto Rico for the summer, and Kate is criss crossing over the globe. That should give us plenty material to work with, I guess. And this will be the place to share these new landscapes with each other.