“Reflections (polyverse)”

Well I suppose ‘happy New Year’ would be a good start, although I’m not sure it’s going to be given the present state of things.

Be that as it may, below are some notes I’ve been working on.

Introduction

Cathy Fitzgerald introduced me to the work of George Lakoff, some of whose ideas are explored below. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and political analyst, who has drawn together insights from disciplines including cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and recent neuroscience, to show how our brains develop frames in order to understand our life worlds and why, as a result, it is very difficult for most people to absorb the dramatic changes that result from our new environmental, social and psychological realities.

1. The function of ‘frames’

The significance of Lakoff’s article rests with its discussion of ‘framing’ and ‘frames’ or schemas, the “typically unconscious structures” that “include semantic roles, relations between roles, and relations to other frames”(71). These might be said to be the building-blocks that make up the mentalité of a cultural group: the collective, felt understanding that makes up the society and world in which a person lives, and determines their place within it – a worldview or outlook. Frames are what structure our thinking (and feeling) and are apparently “physically realized in neural circuits in the brain” (ibid). Words, particularly what we have referred to as ‘power words’ (‘art’, ‘society’, ‘digital’, ‘activism’, etc.) activate both their own immediate defining frame and much of the larger defining system within which that frame sits.

Lakoff insists that the fact that we “cannot avoid framing” means “there are limited possibilities for changing frames” (ibid). This is clearly a central consideration with regards to any claims to activate either ‘active citizenship’ or ‘socially engaged’ or ‘activist’ art, or indeed the supposedly radical ‘enabling’ power of the Internet. All these would need to reframe the dominant  ‘bureaucratic’ framing of the world – with its practice of “speaking as and on behalf of nobody in particular and everybody in general” (Finn 1996: 167) – which is also the framing enacted by the PR and advertising of corporations such as IBM when making claims that relate to techno-science.

Lakoff suggests that to address the problem of framing it is not enough simply to introduce “new language” – a new concept or set of terms, for example – since any innovation “must make sense in terms of the existing system of frames” and “must work emotionally”. He also adds: “negating a frame just activates the frame, as when Nixon said ‘I am not a crook’ and everyone thought of him as a crook”. This understanding of the effect of negation might have important implications for academic critique, which tends to advance arguments via processes of undermining, demolishing, or negating previous conceptual positions or understandings; an approach that, in its extreme postmodern form, becomes a framing or “state of mind marked above all by its all-deriding, all-eroding, all dissolving destructiveness” (Bauman 1992: vii-viii) – an orientation underwritten by the hermeneutics of suspicion largely predicated on the thinking of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. (An obvious exception to this tendency would be Paul Ricoeur’s ‘critical solicitude’). This might account for the fact that academic arguments usually have very little success in countering dominant attitudes and prejudices

Additionally, the academy’s emphasis on Enlightenment or ‘scientific’ notions of reason – which Lakoff cites as being dominant in public policy, science, economics and law – are undermined by what Lakoff calls: “’Real Reason’, the way we really reason”, which is “mostly unconscious (98%); requires emotion; used the ‘logic’ of frames, metaphors, and narratives … and varies considerably, as frames vary” (ibid). It is also embodied. This clearly allows one to argue that creative practices are much more ‘Really Reasonable’ than the dominant binary art/science framing perpetuated by the traditional academic position implies.

Again, what is central to our concerns here is the conclusion Lakoff draws from this with regard to issues of public debate such as climate change. The ‘rationalist’ assumption of those remaining professionals not wholly in the thrall of political ideology – those whose positions of power and authority are underwritten by their engagement in public policy making, science, economics and the law – “may believe that if you just tell people the facts, they will reason to the right conclusion” (ibid 72-73), without any regard for the need to ensure that “the facts must make sense in terms of their system of frames, or they will be ignored” (ibid 73). At present, for example, there are both massive amount of factual information about climate change and other environmental issues available and plenty of rational arguments as to how we should respond to these facts. What is lacking, according to Lakoff, are the “environmental frames” or “the (typically unconscious) conceptual structures” that people need to have in place in order to understand and act on environmental issues. This implies that the place where the concerns of socially engaged artists and active citizens should converge is in a common understanding of the need to build, and encourage action on the basis of, new framings – which Lakoff rather reductively claims are “communicated via language and visual imagery” – that are not based simply on the negation of the previous framings. As he puts it: “what is needed is a constant effort to build up the background frames needed to understand the crisis, while building up neural circuitry to inhibit the wrong frames” (ibid 74).

2. The isssue of Hypocognition       

Lakoff’s definition of hypocognition as: “the lack of ideas we need” (ibid 76) seems to me – and not least in the light of his own argument about Real Reason (see above) – too reductive in its emphasis on ideas, a term framed for most of us in ways that privileges conscious reason over felt understanding. In my view this limits its usefulness to us in terms of our current project. I would suggest that it is more productive for us to understand hypocognition in terms of the inhibiting effects of the presuppositions that underpin the dominant framings in our culture. Why I’ll try to make clear below.

In the context of environmental concern, I would argue that we actually have, buried within our existing cultural heritage, all sorts of traces of the mentalité necessary to help us engage properly with the environmental crisis – very generally speaking this is what anthropologists refer to as ‘animism’ (I’m drawing here on Tim Ingold, Jane Bennett, etc.) and that Felix Guattari has rebranded as ‘ecosophy’. But if we wish to enable general access to this tacit animism in our existing cultural framings, we have both to foreground and ‘update’ those traces and to inhibit the outcome of the thousands of years spent constructing the framings of the Religions of the Book that served to ‘outlaw’ animist mentalités in the West and Middle East (albeit never entirely successfully). That is to say we have to understand and address the major religious/cultural mentalité and framings predicated on the presuppositions of monotheism – as a psychosocial mentalité rather than as theological dogma – a mentalité that the culture of Enlightenment science inherited in a radical secular form (Gellner 1992: 94-95).

This is why, arguably, a historical period marked by increasing concern to find new forms of understanding that can address our environmental crisis has also been marked by a rise in political fundamentalisms predicated on the framings constructed (often without any real theological justification) on the literal reading of the sacred texts of the religions of the Book – whether these take the form of a rabid Zionism; the Christian fundamentalist zealotry of the Republican Tea Party, or Islamic terrorist groups fighting for the universal imposition of Sharia Law. Within the dominant secular monotheism of our culture of possessive individualism the three most powerful framings are economic fundamentalism or capitalism – the belief that economic values are the ultimate framing – and techno-scientism and aestheticism, which as a pairing sustain themselves through a binary process of mutual antagonism that masks a mutual interdependency.

The wonderful Parlour Show Rooms people have just sent me the video link for Rob Darch’s video about our collaborative Walking In The CIty event organised by PLaCE and themselves. You can watch it at: http://vimeo.com/78562159

It’s often productive to read more than one text at a time because of the unexpected cross-fertilization that result. This has been the case for me with reading the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ Think differently, Humanitarian impacts of the economic crisis in Europe – see http://www.ifrc.org/en/news-and-media/features/european-economic-crisis/ – in the middle of working my way through Tom Finkelpearl’s What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Duke University Press 2013). The particular cross-fertilization I want to pick up on here is between observations made by Daniel Joseph Martinez – a professor of theory, practice, and the mediation of contemporary art at the University of California, Irvine – and the opening statement of the IFRC’s report. This reads:

“Creating a sense of predictability and security has traditionally been attributed to what a society offers to its citizens.

Today, as the economic crisis has planted its roots, millions of Europeans live with insecurity, uncertain about what the future holds.

This is one of the worst psychological states of mind for human beings and we now see a quiet desperation spreading among Europeans, resulting in depression, resignation and loss of hope for their future”.

I know quite enough about living with insecurity – in my case to do with unpredictability around medical responses to my daughter’s longterm illness – not to wish unpredictability and insecurity on anybody at the level of their familial, day-to-day life. However, the assumption that the function of society has traditionally been first and foremost to create a sense of predictability and security for its citizens seems to me a little simplistic to say the least and, at least in my view, needs contextualising. There are, I suggest, some very particular modern and secular assumptions at work that don’t necessarily sit very well with what we know of European history.

It’s in this context that Martinez’s observations seem particularly pertinent.

Asked about changes in his practice in the mid-1990s he refers to the importance of mutation, of being willing to see practice as “unpredictable and uncontrollable”, and of the value of this as a basis for ideas where the emphasis is on creativity in a social context as in “perpetual motion, constant flux” (Finkelpearl 2013: 70). The contrast between this understanding of creative arts practices – and as someone much influenced by Joseph Beuys’ notion of Social Sculpture we can be reasonably certain he would extend this to creativity more generally – and the emphasis, in the IFRC’s report, on predictability and security strikes me as worth exploring. After all, in the context of creative imagination it’s fairly obvious that a degree of uncertainty about what the future holds can be a useful, indeed highly productive, state of mind.

A book that made a very marked impression on me in terms of mapping shifts and clashes in historical mentalités is Emma Wilby’s The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Sussex Academic Press, 2010). It illuminates, in extraordinary detail, the point of interaction between two radically different mentalités: on the one hand that of a traditional peasant culture in which vernacular quasi-pagan beliefs co-existed both with residual elements of the Catholic faith and of the new Protestantism and, on the other hand, the new social order predicated on an essentially middle and upper class Calvinism. What is particularly significant about this clash here is that each of these mentalités, which uneasily co-existed for a while, would have understood predictability and security in very distinct ways and have valued them very differently. For example, for the vast majority of the rural poor in Calvinist Seventeenth-Century Scotland one of the very few things they know for certain was that their social status would not improve in this life and that, as born sinners who found themselves within a religious orthodoxy based on predestination, they were almost certainly condemned to the fires of Hell in the next. In terms of predictability, Wilby also makes very clear the almost unbelievable predictability, monotony and restrictions of the ordinary life or a Scottish peasant at that time.

While I have clearly chosen extreme examples, I want to make the point that neither predictability nor security need necessarily be the unalloyed or necessarily obvious ‘good’ that the report assumes them to be. What we take to be predictable – be it eternal damnation or, in the case of the mentalité of possessive individualism, the ‘sustainability of economic growth’ – may be nothing more than a delusory phantom, one on which we become so fixated that we cannot imagine an “otherwise”. Arguably it was precisely because of her creative ability to imagine an “otherwise”  through a creative synthesis of vernacular and other traditions and beliefs that Isobel Gowdie was executed. The predictabilities and securities we buy into may, then, also be the means by which we are manipulated by those who hold power in a society.

Which returns us to Martinez’s points about creativity and the unpredictability of mutability.

I don’t want to labour the point here, not least because I really do not in any way wish to imply that predictability and security are not vitally important to human society and wellbeing. My point is simply that unpredictability and insecurity, particularly as these help us see through phantasmagoric worlds such as that created by the current British government (which is actively working against both the spirit and practice of all six of the recommendations of the IFRC’s report), have their place too. Particularly where they act as a spur to a creativity that allows us to imagine the world “otherwise”.

This waterfall is just over 300 metres above sea level on the Hopeburn stream that feeds into a large reservoir in Weardale, Co Durham. Walking here you quickly find evidence that the rock in falls over was once seabed.

This hard limestone is close to what is known locally as “Frosterly marble”, columns of which can be found in Durham cathedral.

Obviously I was delighted to find this on one of my “home patches’, with geological transgression on my mind as it is at present.

While we were walking in Co Durham the other morning my wife Natalie asked me how my project work with Antony Lyons was going. We then got into a conversation about language – the term ‘transgression’ in particular and related terms more generally. As our old friend the artist Simon Read often points out, the language around marine transgression is essentially military – we either ‘defend’ coastlines or we ‘retreat’ in the face of coastal erosion or flooding. However, this way of thinking seems increasingly unhelpful in terms of finding more creative approaches to the ecological issues we now face, given that man-made marine transgression is becoming a more and more serious problem in terms of the future.

What we need, I believe, is to start to think transversally, to shift our language use so that it is oriented to an attitude of cooperative adaptation and celebration. This might prepare us to make better use of what, for example, is beginning to emerge in terms of rethinking coastal management in the USA.

A recent article on natural forms of protection against the more extreme forms of storm damage in coastal areas points out that in the USA: “Coastal forests, coral reefs, sand dunes and wetlands are just a few of the natural habitats that protect two-thirds of the US coastline from hazards such as hurricane storm surges”. That is to say, a situation that can be seen as supporting plans to move beyond over-reliance on engineered solutions such as levees or seawalls. The survey to which the article refers to is designed to look at the cost-effectiveness of conservation-based protection such as wetland restoration and dune creation, along with other protective factors such as coral and oyster reefs, wetlands, dunes, seagrass beds and kelp forests (see http://www.nature.com/news/natural-defences-can-sharply-limit-coastal-damage-1.13380). This same shift may already have started in a small way in parts of the UK, where coastlines are managed by organizations such as the National Trust.

Anyway, my conversation with Natalie has got me pondering language and, for example, the link between ‘transgress’ and ‘ingress’ as relevant to our thinking about the geopolitics of climate change and to transgression in a geological sense. One online dictionary gives the following relevant definitions of ‘transgression’, of which the one around which our project is based is the third:

trans·gres·sion  (noun) – 1. A violation of a law, command, or duty: “The same transgressions should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman” (Elizabeth Cady Stanton). 2. The exceeding of due bounds or limits. 3. A relative rise in sea level resulting in deposition of marine strata over terrestrial strata.

But it seems to me that the second sense of transgression is also relevant to discussions we’ve been having about climate change, changes in sea level, and the need for adaptation. What Natalie was pointing out to me is that, although the concept of transgression appears to be very much rooted in religious thinking, when seen from a scientific perspective the results of climate change, which are too rapid to allow for adaptation, are also said to ‘transgress’ in so far as they exceed what might be regarded as ‘due bounds or limits’ – but only if we assume a world understood from a gradualist evolutionary perspective. These assumed limits are in reality unrelated to anything ‘natural’ – such as, for example, a tree’s tolerance of the saline content in ground water. They relate only to a particular human perception of what constitutes ‘acceptable’ time-scales and limits, given a particular theory of how nature should behave!

Which brings us to the related term: ‘ingess’.

in·gress  (noun) – also in·gres·sion: 1. A going in or entering – 2. Right or permission to enter. 3. A means or place of entering.

At the risk of appearing rather pedantic, it is possible to imagine starting to shift our psychological attitudes to marine transgression by, for example, talking not about either ‘defending’ coastlines or ‘retreating’ in the face of the sea’s threat to coastal erosion or flooding, but instead of accepting that, given what humans have done in terms of creating climate change, the sea will now require ingress – both as a ‘point of entry’ and as something those who have ownership of/authority for coastal management need to ‘permit’ in appropriate areas so as to avoid substantial problems in others. This kind of lateral thinking / speaking may be a small but useful start to thinking otherwise.

Antony tells me that this – about the size of a slightly squashed half football – is possibly the fossil remains of  a tabulate coral (or something similar!) This extinct coral almost always formed colonies of individual hexagonal cells defined by a calcite skeleton like a honeycomb. They lived entirely during the Paleozoic period and are characteristic of the shallow waters of the Silurian and Devonian periods. But as transgression occurred during the Devonian tabulate corals became less and less common. They finally became extinct in what is known as the Permian-Triassic extinction event. But even if it’s the fossil of a different coral, the point remains the same.

And here one is now, millions of years and 300 metres plus, sitting embedded in a stone sill in Co. Durham.

In my ongoing exchange with Antony Lyons (which is partly reflected on his web blog at http://antonylyons.blogspot.co.uk), I find myself coming back again and again to the problem of our culture’s lack of flexibility and adaptability, particularly in the face of the ecological and social implications of climate change.

The ‘why’ of this complex attitudinal situation is, at one level, very much tied up with our obsessive belief that things will soon go back to ‘how they were’ as long as everyone except the super-rich tighten their belts so that the country as a whole can return to that persistent oxymoron: ‘sustainable economic growth’. In reality, of course, we know that those who benefit most from capitalism (and that includes a very significant percentage of those in the so-called ‘first world’), now have a problem. The exploitation upon which capitalism depends has run up against increasingly intractable limits in terms of the natural world. As a result those who manage it are now hell-bent on cannibalising human society itself in order to keep the profits flowing in. In ecological contexts this belief in the continuity of the status quo is mirrored by a related belief in technological or legislative ‘silver bullets’ as a solution to all our problems- anything, that is, that doesn’t require ‘us’ personally to adapt ourselves to changing circumstances. (I find it particularly worrying when artists, academics and others in positions of cultural or educational authority – who after all might be said to be paid, however badly, to think ‘outside the box’ – simply parrot this kind of nonsense). But all this is also a product of a particular cultural mentality that is reinforced by, among other things, a blindness to the centrality of contingency, flux, and complexity. A blindness into which we are actively inducted by many aspects of our current, disciplinary-based, education system, with its singular inability to grasp the need for a thinking that draws on multiple perspectives and the experience of multiple constituencies (rather than simply the ‘professional’ viewpoint). The lack of flexibility inherent in this mentality is likely, unless addressed at every level, to be quite literally the death of us as a society, if not as a species.

I have to come clean and admit that my current levels of irritation with the narrowness, the inflexibility of academic institutions, administrative officialdom, and the status quo more generally, has been rather aggravated recently. For example, I was asked by the university for which I worked full-time for over thirty years to produce my passport in order to prove that I have the right to work in the UK. This is apparently an official requirement now I have a part-time contract in order to carry out ongoing doctoral supervision. I am told this check is a mandatory requirement predicated on government regulation. Failure to comply will mean that I will not be paid. However, I find it odd that I have regularly carried out similar occasional work for other institutions and, presumably because I am well known to them, have not been subjected to this small, but nevertheless indicative, indignity.

In pondering this example of a certain type of inflexibility (one might also call it petty-spiritedness), I come back again and again to something I experience regularly: the particular qualities, nature and power of water, both very literally in terms of flow, erosion and flooding but also, and perhaps as importantly, as metaphor. In this context I’ve recently visited, and have subsequently been thinking about (or maybe, more accurately, with?), a short stretch of river – known affectionately as Old Man’s Bottom – near Allenhead. (It’s much frequented by fishermen, which may account for the name). On a couple of occasions recently I’ve walked there with my wife Natalie and been reminded that each time we return it is not quite the same river as before. Yet its constantly changing nature and the various shifts and traces that mark this are precisely what gives me some sense of its essence as the river that it is.