I've been reading about technologies recently and how they subtly influence and frame our lives and experience of our lives. It's scary stuff to become more aware of it. That so much of not just what we see and learn, but also how we see and learn is influenced by various technologies that go almost totally unnoticed in our daily lives. Here's a quote to exemplify:

"The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout" (From Graham/Marvin: Splintering Urbanism)

I think this emphasises it very well. That what we really rely on, and become so dependent without even knowing it, can only be appreciated when it is taken away.

The reason I posted it here is I immediately drew a connection between that and the spiritual, nebulous, liminal underpinning to our lives. Often is is only when these are challenged or threatened that we can become aware of what we normally don't even notice, even though we completely rely on them for the very way we exist and may be totally unaware of it.

Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, but there seems to me another connection between the way technologies infuse the way we experience and the way the spiritual underpins.

Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience

This excellent wee book by Liz Shove has had my mind a-whirring recently. In it she talks about the way we consume energy. It's a much wider definition of consumption than I'm used to, more than just what we buy, also what we use.

She claims that we don't actually consume energy, or anything else (washing machines, air conditioning, fridges) rather what we consume is one of comfort, cleanliness or convenience (or some combination of these). What we think we consume is just the means of our acquiring and using one of these three C's. More than that she claims that global standards of C, C & C are converging towards some global norm, and also that as this happens demand for evermore comfort, cleanliness and convenience is being ratcheted up.

It's a very persuasive argument. She talks at length, for example, about the change we have undergone in impressions of what is the suitable level of cleaning we need to have, to be socially acceptable. How this has changed from an annual bath, to the Sunday bathtime, to now having a daily shower been seen as the 'norm'. This obviously has great impact on our demand of environmentally significant resources, in this case water and the energy needed to heat it.

It's a very useful book for me, when thinking about how do we shift away from the very Carbon intensive lifestyle that we in the UK lead. What we need to focus on, is not the surface levels of consumption, fridges etc. Rather it is the deeper underlying need of comfort, cleanliness and convenience that we, as social creatures, desire.

As our demand for these is increasing (not least because demand is being created for it in us through advertising, marketing, etc.) what is needed is either some way to achieve the same levels of comfort, cleanliness or convenience without demanding so much of our environment, or some way to step-out of such escalating demand we see in our society, which Shove doesn't mention.

There are no answers here, but there is a full analysis of many of the deeper, tacit factors in our gross over consumption. For that Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience is well worth a read.

doxic and heterodox

I've been reading an excellent book, Comfort, Cleanliness & Convenience, which has a wealth of concepts and ideas surrounding how our energy practices - the habits and behaviours associated with the way we use and consume energy - can change and come about.

One interesting passage reflects on how might deeply ingrained routines come to be challenged and altered. This is of interest to me not just in terms of people changing their use of energy to a less environmentally demanding habit, but also other habits we just unquestioningly go along with. It doesn't have to be just religious experiences that alter our behaviour to a more healthy alternative.

Shove - in C, C & C - uses Bourdieu to offer one explanation as to how this comes about. Bourdieu describes two realms. One - the doxic - is unconscious, where we take-for-granted and exist in habits and common sense. The other - the heterodox - is where rules and ways of conducting oneself are explicit, contested and manipulated.

The argument is that for us to radically alter our behaviours the doxic realm is brought into the realm of the heterodox, where our unconscious thoughts, beliefs and biographies (the things that make us act the way we do) can be seen more explicitly and then challenged and, perhaps, altered. before they then slip back into the doxic realm, becoming again unquestioned habit.

There is no mention as to how this may be done, either through psychoanalysis, meditation, shamanism or some other deep soul searching. What is interesting though, is in the quest to alter our blind practices of using energy that we habitually follow. It appears here that any change (or transition) to energy practices that are less environmentally problematic, cannot be done through more information, or new technology alone. The change rather, needs to come about at a deeper, doxic, spiritual even, level.

Something to think about.

Derrida (again)

"One shouldn't complicate things for the pleasure of complicating, but one should also never simplify or pretend to be sure of such simplicity where there is none. If things were simple, word would have gotten round"
~ Derrida (1989)

Adam's article

A friend has had an article published in the latest issue of Resurgence. It's a good read, concerning many of the issues I want to focus more on in my PhD.

http://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article2757-Where-Spirit-Lies.html

It's encouraging too to see someone who's done the same course as me getting published. Maybe, if I keep putting the effort in, my writing will get as good as this one day!

Casimir Pulaski Day

My brother sent me this link today & it has been refreshed plenty of times as I sit here and attempt to type PhD notes.

Although we occasionally have our musical differences my bro and I, he's spot on with this recommendation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGEMx3TKxNc&feature=related

How would Derrida understand ‘sustainability’?

At first glace, a silly question. What on earth does deconstruction, or dead French philosophers who spent their lives in literary theory or in the post-structuralist stratospheric cerebral world, have to do with that most vogue of political touchstone issues - the green.

Maybe it is a silly question, but it is one I believe there is mileage in. Although, I haven’t found anything that Derrida has written specifically on this topic, can we seek to apply the principles of deconstruction to sustainability? Or can we ensure that deconstruction is sustainable?

Again and again in deconstruction, we run up against a brick wall, Derrida repeatedly reminds us of the folly of principles. That as soon as anything becomes anywhere close to a principle, a standard, belief, a law even. That is that very point at which deconstruction becomes, or ought to become active. Taking root, seeking to disturb and dislodge prior assumptions and universals.

Probably the best book I've yet read on deconstruction is (not by Derrida for sure!) Jack Caputo's Deconstruction in a Nutshell. In he attempts to explain what deconstruction is in a nutshell (duh!), before realising that deconstruction is all about nuts and the breaking of nutshells to get to the nuts.

So, even if we could pithely define what deconstruction is all about, that definition would then need a whole deconstruction to act upon it. It seems that undefinability is built into the very concept.

Into the fray, we have sustainability, a concept we also have yet to define.

It’s a rather widely used term these days. The anthropologist Malkowski talked about the ‘phatic’ meaning of words. For a word to become phatic, it is over used so often, and use in so many different contexts, that it loses all point of referent in meaning. The word becomes phatic, essentially rendered meaningless. Granted this, sustainability is generally used to connote some variable on the ability to sustain. To keen going, to hold up. In environmental terms, it basically refers to ‘how much we can get away with’. To keep society going, whilst always questioning where we need to question and reappraise the demands we exert on our surrounding environment.

So, both terms 'sustainability' and 'deconstruction' are equally hard to define, but for different reasons. Maybe we can begin to broadly see the connection between the two concepts?

But is this so in practice? Are the issues linked in the realm of the tangible? Well, no. So much of sustainability, and Green activism is about principles, and ways of carrying out ones actions in accordance with some higher authority. Zizek’s point here is perhaps useful to bear in mind. He talks of the transition from religion to ecology as the ultimate arbiter of our morals/decisions. Where in Derrida’s writings he heralds the return of the transcendent (the waiting, messianic and ‘to come’, the hote even), can we then talk of the sustainability being such a transcendent/other in our decisions, or ability to act?

Sustainability is that which seeks to sustain. To keep up with. To carry on society, without undermining the natural basis upon which that is built.

One of Derrida’s lesser known points about deconstruction is that it is life-affirming. It seeks to unsettle and dislodge laws and precepts that can become stifling and staid. Life, as we all know, requires, nae implies, movement. Death, is that condition at which no further movement is possible. Sustainability likewise, seeks to keep ‘on the move’, to enable the conditions under which life can live in full abundance, both across space and time. So sustainability, like deconstruction, seeks to keep institutions, societies and people fully alive. They both seek to unsettle that which can stifle life.

Both are also concerned with continuation. They’re much more Trotskyite than Leninist, if you'll pardon a wee far left analogy. The act of deconstruction is certainly not ‘once and for all’, neither also is that of sustainability. Both are ongoing processes, daily slogs, where one is called to wake up, shake up to the realisation that we have far more agency that we though possible, and that life to the full is a readily graspable option. Although, also recognising that once that is grasped, we need to go through the whole deconstructing/sustainablising process all over again. Trotsky over Lenin, continual revolution.

Deconstructing sustainability

Or, sustainable deconstruction.

Following on from some interest in playing around with some ideas concerning Derrida & sustainability, below is an extract from a talk I gave this week having some fun with the concepts.

Enjoy!