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1 Geopoetics in context
In the Introduction, we signalled our concern to develop the ensemble understanding we see as the āfourth ecologyā. This term references Felix Guattariās essay The Three Ecologies, in which he proposes a new way of thinking, an āecosophyā as he refers to it; one that avoids the philosophically rigid way of thinking that strict disciplinarity promotes, by engaging simultaneously with the three interrelated ecological fields of the environment, society and the compound self.1 In certain respects, our concerns here run parallel with Guattariās notion of ecosophy but, for reasons explained below, we will draw only sparingly on his thinking, preferring to identify our concerns with the field of a geopoetics seen through the lens of mutual accompaniment rather than one that continues, however unwittingly, to replicate the presuppositions of possessive individualism.
As individual authors, we have long experience both of making art in that variety of contexts rather misleadingly called the āart worldā. (There are, of course, many different āart worldsā: commercial, popular, museums and otherwise.) Equally importantly, we have been involved in teaching and research as part of the very different world of universities, the āacademic worldā. Living in this way ābetween worldsā so to speak, we have grown increasingly concerned about how terms like āartā, āeducationā and āplaceā are still assumed to conform to an increasingly archaic and irrelevant disciplinary understanding, one ultimately grounded in an unhelpful assumption of division and exclusion. Our sense of the problems raised by disciplinary understanding reminds us of the feminist writer Audre Lorde, who argued that using the concepts created by a system to examine the products of that same system prevents real change. The implication is that if the presuppositions underpinning concepts, taken as the tools with which we think, donāt change, then creating new terms without challenging the old presuppositions is unlikely to change anything either. This is for us the sense of Lordeās famous statement āthe masterās tools will never dismantle the masterās houseā (the title of her address at the āSecond Sex Conferenceā in New York delivered in 1979). Today, the way in which terms like āartā, āeducationā, āresilienceā and āecologyā are used too often remains at root in conformity with the values and assumptions of a global economy that, in turn, is underwritten by the presuppositions of the dominant culture of possessive individualism. It is this culture, and the economics inseparable from it that, alongside the culture of a pervasive patriarchy which Lorde calls āthe masterās houseā, currently provide the foundations upon which the dominant culture has been built.
This book starts, then, from a simple presupposition. The dominant social order (āthe masterās houseā) that has been built on possessive individualism has become so problematic, so toxic, that it is destroying not only the fabric of human society but the ecologies upon which all living things depend. This is closely linked to the way disciplinary thinking analyses the world by dividing it up and sorting the resulting divisions into categories that stress difference rather than inter-connectedness, and fixed definitions rather than fluid and changing understandings. This process of fragmentation, which has immense personal, social and environmental implications, in turn makes it too easy for individuals to disregard the consequences of their actions for other human and non-human beings. If we are to think and act in ways that address this lack of connectedness, we have an urgent obligation to find a way, if not to dismantle āthe masterās houseā, then to radically remodel it so that we can live quite differently in the world. However, it is important to acknowledge that there is no ambiguity in Audre Lordeās image. For her the tools that belong exclusively to the master are only fit for his purposes. The clear implication of her stark image is that we will need to create an entirely new set of tools if we want to create real change. That would mean entirely new forms of art and an entirely new model of education. Hers is a powerful image, and there is some truth in what she says, but it doesnāt necessarily reflect how such cultural tools are used in practice. Tools, in this case educational and artistic concepts and processes, are certainly often used in ways that sustain the power and authority of the status quo. But they can also be adapted, recombined and even radically reconfigured and then re-used for other purposes. Two examples of such changes would be Paulo Freireās educational work that informed his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Joseph Beuysā interweaving of art, education and environmental politics.2 So, while Lordeās statement forcibly reminds us that we may need to question or even abandon concepts and processes currently used to reinforce existing power structures, we may also need to transform them into new tools with which to think and work. This requires remaining open to alternative, often fuller, understandings which reject an overly literal or binary usage, allowing a translation to serve other ends. Only in this way can we grasp the full range of nuanced associations that link ideas and practices back to the paradoxes, and so to the untapped potential, of lived experience. Working with a combination of vigilance and openness, an approach we call ādisciplinary agnosticismā, is central to what we are proposing here.
One aim of this book is to suggest to the reader some of the tools we believe are necessary to do this, which we see in terms of a new, open-ended geopoetics that we equate with Bruno Latourās conception of a Terrestrial politics. At its core, a responsibility of individual accountability is established. It can be argued that an even fuller assumption of responsibilities will be built upon the recognition that the contradictions and shifting relations between the three ecologies of culture, the environment and the individual are often successfully articulated by works of art which, like a good teacher, encourage us to recognise the fluctuations and tensions between them. Of course, the practices of art and education are also economic and political activities, with all the complexities that can flow from that, but this does not negate their importance as means to evoke understandings that oppose or resist the values of the dominant, economically driven, culture. It is important, then, that we avoid adopting dogmatic or factional positions regarding the value of different creative approaches. This is something artists often find difficult to do. If weāre involved in āsocially-engaged art practiceā, for example, we need to remember that painters may have interesting and relevant things to show us, just as we need to remind ourselves that not all socially engaged projects are interesting or relevant. Above all, we need to keep in mind that tension and paradox are as central to the creative arts as they are to our lives.
That being the case, we need to identify a paradox central to this book. On one hand, both art and education are manifestations of what is often claimed for them; namely, that they are vehicles of independent thought, discrete forms of cultural activity and semi-discrete domains of activity that contest given values. But they are also what they often pretend not to be: ābound up with values of the status quo and the ideological system that sustains itā.3
Consequently learning, whether in an institution, by reading a book, or engaging with art, can be both a process by which we are further conditioned into the knowledge, patterns of thought and values privileged by the dominant social order and an opportunity to question the presuppositions that underpin that knowledge, those patterns and values. We find this difficult to accept because the heritage of the three monotheistic Religions of the Book (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) leads us to believe that we act productively by making judgments based on predetermined and fixed notions of what is ārightā and āwrongā. But as compound or ensemble selves, we need to learn to live and work with paradoxes and contradictions in a world that is a lot less clear-cut than religious or secular dogma and ideology suggest.
A book like this inevitably raises questions about the links between language and exclusion, as we suggested briefly in the Introduction. If we want to engage with as broad a range of readers as possible, we need to use accessible language, not least to combat the use of hyper-specialist professional, technocratic, or disciplinary terminologies as exclusionary. But, equally, we need to draw on, and put in play, new ideas (and new tools) if we want to facilitate alternative possible ways of living and working. We have tried to use as language as clearly we can, without shying away from the new ideas we find necessary to go beyond the disciplinary status quo. We recognise that this approach risks displeasing everybody, with professional artists and academic specialists seeing us as simple-minded popularists, and general readers as obscurantist. It is a risk we are willing to take in adopting a new approach. We can only hope that readers will be sympathetic.
The issue of language comes up as soon as we think about place, often taken as synonymous with what is static, given and bounded. Edward S. Casey points to an issue of fundamental importance when he reminds us that:
if a position is a fixed posit of an established culture, a place, despite its frequently settled appearance is an essay in experimental living within a changing culture.4
The question of ecologies of place central to this book is related both to Caseyās thinking and to practical changes in, for example, the architectural practices of Critical Regionalism and its subsequent developments.5 This shift to sensing ourselves as always placed dynamically (rather than merely positioned) in the world, also requires us to question what it means to āknow our placeā in terms of the various ecologies that make up our worlds. Although the political geographer Doreen Massey is dismissive of Casey, largely due to his use of the philosopher Heideggerās thinking, much of what she writes about space chimes with our understanding of place. For example, its being produced by interrelations and interactions that generate: āthe possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous pluralityā, and being best imagined as āa simultaneity of stories-so-farā.6
Thinking about āourā place in these interrelated senses requires that we question two dominant current presuppositions. First, we need to question the supposition that what makes an individual unique is her or his difference and separateness from others. Second, we need to question the idea that human society is something distinct and separate from the ānaturalā world. Ecosystems, whether at the level of micro-habitats or bio-regions, are (almost always) open; that is, sustained by a continual flow or flux of energy and matter across the semi...
