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.