sustainability, a reflection_koefoed january 2012

8/3/2019 Sustainability, A Reflection_Koefoed January 2012

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On sustainability in relation to culture, cities, transdisciplinarity, transculturality and

transformation

Let me make a quick apology inspired by Jan's last remarks: I will express myself a

little bit idiosyncratically here, but if I sounds like I am making generalizations, thisis just a matter of trying to find the words with the force to express what I think. It

is all expressed from the point of view of my outlook, my experiences, my

philosophical reflections, and the many encounters that inspire me every day. And

all that I say is always limited, in time, in space, and in matter. Now to the

substance.

The first point that I would like to make is about the concept ofsustainability itself.

I have found two points important to make over the past years, both of them haveturned out to be increasingly relevant in my own work and in general (in my humble

opinion of course). The first point is about the relation between survival,

transformation, and open systems. I know that I am not alone in my thoughts here,

but let me make them here without reference, you can get them if you like. It is

important to underline these relations, and the best way I have managed to express

this is by defining sustainability as: the ratio between the enhancement of emerging

life potential and the disappearance of existing systems or elements. This is a ratio

that is expressed in a medium, consisting of time, space, and matter, including all

the other effects of those elements (speed, for instance, or movement, is expressed

as matter moving through matter in a given time, as we know from physics). These

are not isolated from each other, so when we try to understand the relations that

make up sustainability, we must understand them in a time-space-matter continuum,

in accordance with what Einstein and quantum physics taught us. This is crucial, for

it means, what environmentalists have come to learn as well, that we cannot isolate

problems and expect to solve them through the compartmentalisation of thought or

analysis (say, by looking at culture as an isolated phenomenon). But it also means

that we cannot transfer solutions from one case to another through reduction, as all

complex adaptive systems (systems containing systems and evolving through mutual

adaptation processes) possess their own totality or continuum. Attempts to reduce

and simplify and transfer solutions from one case to another lead to more or less

disastrous effects over time. So, what I am I saying: we must always look at the

context and time-space-matter continuum that we want to understand as potentially

sustainable, as a whole, as a continuum, as connected with all other continuums in

the universe and as a whole that must be treated as a singular event in itself.

This is a paradox, one might say, but this is taught and inherited by experience and


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reasoning, not by logical exclusion and deduction. And yes, I am of course willing to

bring in references, right now I am writing from my head and body, so the books,

reports, and web sites are left aside.

Back to the relation: since this continuum, let us take a neighborhood, consists ofmyriads of CAS's or forms of existence, there will be countless relations of

disappearance and emergence going on all the time. So the relation between them

can not be simplified as a dialectical one. Or at least only in the sense that it is a

highly complex form of dialectics then, one in which visible as well as invisible,

recognized as well as hidden forms of life ad movement are interacting on many

different levels all the time. Identifying the potential for sustainability is not a simple

task, yet there is an element of intuitive work that is called for by the factors of

complexity and materiality (Stofflichkeit): because all of these relations andinteractions take place in a continuum, I will claim also that the investigative gaze or

sensitivity is also part of this continuum and one can develop such sensitivity, like

when Hatto walked and toured from one gallery to another in Berlin last fall, forcing

his sensitivity to become more and more open to other forms of connections and

other powers of relations, that he had not expected before hand. This is linked to

the constancy, if there is any, of the overall sum of interconnectedness in the

universe, which the Buddhists recognized many centuries ago. But not everything is

equally interconnected all the time in any given continuum. And one of the factors

that can block for sustainability is the destruction or haltering of connectedness in a

continuum (in Vesterbro in Copenhagen, a part of the regeneration process was the

building of a fence across streets and courtyards, to protect the newcomers from the

drug-addicts that were still lingering.. this was highly detrimental to sustainability in

the neighborhood and reflected a general mistake in this particular part of the bigger

area of Vesterbro that still makes life around Halmtorvet stale and stiff, even though

the square is surrounded by smaller centres and communities with high levels of

energy and creativity, to mention one factor). This does not always happen

deliberately, although it is often the result of isolating strategic decisions, as the

case of the Everglades in Florida is a witness of. Why is this so destructive? Simply

because sustainability is defined by sustension, the concept which I have come to

use to express the ratio mentioned above, a concept which expresses itself through

eventalities or events of transformation, change, movement, etc., In these sustensive

eventalities, we can see the enhancement or the staling and destruction of the

capacity of a continuum to uphold a mutually beneficial relation between all that

goes into the overall processes of transformation in any given continuum. Of course,

when we look closer at the continuum, we will also see that a factor such as the


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speed of transformation, the amount of matter, energy, ideas, resources, bodies, etc,

that enter, circulate, and leave the continuum, varies extremely. This is one of the

other reasons why experiences are hard to transfer (except in a theoretical or

philosophical form or, importantly, through experience leading to sensitivity and

capacoty to handle and accept complexities such as those of a continuum ofhumans, inhumans and non-humans.

What about that nebulous concept ofculture, how do we work with it in a way that

doesn't constantly lead to having to choose between the narrow (culture as in

culture industry) and the broad (anthropological culture) definition? We must ask

first: why choose? Why not go about it in a different way, saying for instance that

it's really all about changing mindsets, changing habits, changing the ways we work

and think and play, which then must be both big and broad, because thetransversality of culture will enter all aspects of society and in this sense has to do

with the organization of creativity, not necessarily in Florida's or Landry's or

Binachini's sense of it, but still an organizing of the creativity that is present in any

continuum, whether it lives in the humans themselves or in between them or

between them and their spaces and places and things. So culture is also about

economy, in the sense that economy has long since inhabited culture and made

creativity an economic assett. And if economy is about organizing resources and

that way, it can conquer culture and through that allocate creativity and its

outcomes, dictating through political economy what creativity is valubale and what is

not, etc then we can also go the other way and see how economy can be

changed by organizing creativity within economy itself, and challenging its

assumptions through philosophical courage and through creative action. Culture is of

course also about how we relate not only to economy as in money, but also how

the wisdom and knowledge of the household the continuum is also about stuff,

about things, about places and buildings, houses, as well as roads and traffic

planning etc. They all matter to culture, as culture is so much about matter, about

how we relate to each other and ourselves and the matter inside and between us.

Jane Bennet speaks, as a child of Spinoza and Deleuze, of Vibrant Matter, and thi

way things are made part of culture, like Hatto's plastic bottle on the beach on

Rhodes. So economy has to be re-organized, and the movements we see like OWS

are part of this, they lead to a lot of work about sharing, but also to a lot of

reproduction of assumptions about justice and power that is not always very

productive. Anyway. I have written many other words about culture, and in a way

this is maybe the least interesting word as such to deal with here. But as I have

written elsewhere, Cultura21 is all about trying to understand what Cultures of


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sustainability are all about and how we can get beter at getting closer to something

like that. Here, cities play a crucial role and function as obvious frames for working

with cultures of sustainability, just like they give back so much through the

unpredictability of the ind of vibrant exponentiality that you can only find in urban

settings: something takes off, like urban gardening, or like the re-occupation ofempty spaces, and suddenly it's all over, because the city is also about a lot of

people living next to each other and inspiring each other. The greatest enemy of

cultures of sustainability in the city is perhaps the inhibition and control of

movements of inspiration, ad the ways in whcih politics and political economy can

create deep rifts between people groups of people, and institutions, in the urban,

closing off the flows and trying to create islands of accumulation, of capital, of

power, of ownership. The greatest force of the city lies in its difference and

multitude, but this also has to be stimulated, not by isolation, but by inter-breedingand cross-pollenation. Sometimes 'from above', sometimes 'bottom-up', or just

transversally. This leads to even more diversity, especially when it is not forced into

a particular model of growth that has monopolization as its main goal.

I have mentioned things; one of the reasons for this lies in the concepts of the

transcultural. There is a link between sustainability and transculturality, r a series of

links. One is that the trans-cultural comes about through the emergence of visions,

values, languages, etc, that go through and beyond the differences between cultural

confinements. But this is not something that takes place through nothing on the

contrary, transculturality (and transdiciplinarity with it) always works through

dispositifs, as Foucault used to call them. Dispositifs are always on the one hand

based in culture, but can also become recipients of transculturalizing or

transcultiating movements that can draw and stir and provoke and lead humans to

change their ways and learn in new forms and matters. Therefore, dispositifs are

central and just like disciplinary borders are kept up by dispositifs (like the

institution of double-blind-review or the evaluation of newcomers by their older peers,

rather than by institutions and people from the outside), the same goes for the

cultural, when art or even belonging is defined through regulatives, chronotopes, and

institutions that work to reproduce the same and harness the new. Thus, there is a

need to call into question very specific dispositifs, such as public spaces, empty

buildings, traffic flows, or new architecture, or education systems, knowledge

platforms, and the inclusion or exclusion of artists and cultural innovators in the

flows and lives in the city.

To me, there is one very important difference between the concept of sustainability


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in Our Common Future from 1987, and the one that I think one will find and that

can be understood and nourished and developed in urban contexts today: this has

to do with the difference between equilibrium and disequilibrium, between balance

and transformation. Sustainability is, as far as I can understand it, much more about

imbalance or about processes taking places far from equilibrium, than it is aboutbalance and harmony. This is different than what a lot of people will say, I know,

but my argument is both philosophical and historical. Philosophically, disequilibrium

necessitates a constant focus on the bodies that are out of equilibrium, to avoid that

they simply fall or end up in the simplest outcome: war, which is the closest one

can get to the opposite of sustension. And culturally, one can hope to be able to

stimulate and strengthen the understanding that two bodies out of equilibirum are

better served by helping each other through the processes of tranformation, than

they are by fighting each other, as this will only increase the pressure and ultimatelylead to a lot of sustensive potentiality getting lost. Wars are economially potent, but

so is co-creation, and there is no reason why we should go on serving the

economy of war, which has never really been to the servie of the city. Only the city

then of course needs to come to a new understanding of migrations, as these

modern forms of nomadic life are, like capital flows, a source of resources for the

city, but one that has often been seen as a threat. The historical argument is that

we are in the middle of huge and deep processes of transformation, and as the

philosopher G nther Anders once said, maybe it is not so much about creating

change, as about trying to understand what it does to us and learn to live within

(the complexity of) transformation, in order to see how they might become more

sustensive or sustainable.

(to be continued..)

sustainability, a reflection_koefoed january 2012

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