Extract from "Zones of sustension"
In April, VAS Verlag published the book "Sustainability and the arts: a new frontier", in which a text of mine appeared. Here is an extract from this text - if you are curious to read more, you can get the book from me at a slightly reduced price compared to going straight to the publisher.
Sustension: sustainability
meets immanence
Sustainable development was meant to meet the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs[1]. Sustainable
development focuses on the relations between actions or events and their
outcomes within and across systems (such as ecosystems). Most definitions of
the term and of sustainable development focus on future outcome of present
action, thus giving the impression that a processual and dynamic focus rules.
This focus, however, is not an evental focus, but a focus on effects,
production, and outcome. In short, sustainability comes to deal with relations
within an exchange, rather than with mutuality and co-becoming. The discussions
on sustainability take place around a core of measurability and proof, which in
itself may be questioned as to its own sustainability. Is the truth regime,
within which sustainability is discussed, not itself part of the system which
may be questioned? How do we move beyond this truth regime that seems to
constantly renew itself, drawing in any opposition in its perspective? What
other ways of thinking sustainability are capable of displacing the focus
towards the dynamic of the immanence of the world as a vibrating insecurity,
rather than the effects of systemic exchange of goods or entities?
The Bruntland definition focuses on the needs of the
present. Furthermore, in the systems approach, this implies the needs of the
actors involved. This represents an understanding of the sustainable as the transcendent,
(imagined or calculated) perceptions of the future, guiding actions in the
present through some kind of reflective process leaning towards rational
choice, even if this may be a rather complex choice process. What is needed to
make sustainability conjugate with the concept of eventality is a vision of the
sustainable as immanent in the movements of change, rather than as an external
corrective to their processes. This reflection will show if there is something
to gain from such a conjugation of the sustainable and the evental.
The second problem: rather than describing an immanence of
change, sustainability describes a transcendent and immutable order (whether
from an economic, environmental or social point of view). The most common
definitions describe sustainable processes as being able to run indefinitely
without jeopardising their own future existence. The danger of this perspective
is that it traps the sustainable within the order of self-preservation. Yet a
complex of systemic diagrams such as capitalism does not operate through
self-preservation, but through perpetual re-invention, creation, and
transformation[2].
This does not insinuate that capitalism is sustainable – it merely shows that
it has a high degree of capacity for adapting to and adopting change processes.
This capacity has a high cost, as the particular outcome of anything entering
the zone of eventality with capitalist eventalities is that alterity is numbed
and stiffens in the encounter with the immense complexity of the capitalist
secular system[3].
The task then is to formulate a sustainable concept of eventality, and the gain
of such a concept would be to express an image of sustainable culturality.
Another gain lies in avoiding concepts such as ‘the good
life’ or simply the ‘good’ in relation to the sustainable. It is important to
avoid focus on the ethics of encounters or relations. This direction, rather
than solving the issue, stiffens it within struggles of definition of good
relations, good actions, or simply of the value of the culturally good vs. the
efficient or economically good or even vs. ecologically good[4]. However, we may also see in the search today
to define “good work life” or simply “good life” an attempt to describe the
liveable environment. This could come close to the evental understanding of the
sustainable that shall be explored here.
The liveability of the evental must be at its highest (and
lowest) in the zone of tension itself (see section on eventality). This is
where the openness towards complexity (understood as the simultaneity of orders
of existence: actual, virtual, and potential) is at its highest. However, this
is also the most vulnerable zone, in which one or more dimensions may conflate
and be destroyed altogether. Thus, not all eventalities present conditions that
are favourable to sustainable processes, it seems. Surely, the zone is always
one of ‘permanent tensions’[5],
but this should not be mistaken for a battle ground. Tensions come out of the
co-existence of difference, as in the unfolding of the complexity of the actual
and the folding of the simplicity of the virtual. Thus, we must distinguish
between tensions that are co-creative without being destructive and i.e.
innovative tensions, which are totally different processes and rather brutal
ones, as shown by Schumpeter and many others ever since. Creative destruction
is a very good description of unsustainable tensions, building on the desire to
bury diversity and replace insecure potentiality with rewarding actuality.
The term we need to install here is one of sustension.
This neologism indicates the balance in the zone of tension, in which the
vibrations present in the zone are not replaced by closures towards neither the
virtual, nor the actual. In other words, sustension is a tension in which the
real remains as full as possible, encompassing the highest complexity of
diverse forms without destroying them. In sustension, the outcome is not the
future, but the synchronicity of the past, the present, and the future. It is
not an ordering of action between the three times, nor is it an expression of
potentiality as the highest possible force of the present over the other two.
If we look at the principle of investment in capitalism (as in Boltanski &
Chiapello’s description of capitalism), the paradox is that investment is
something that could lead to the expansion of sustension. But only as long as
it does not claim its return – and as long as this claim does not, as it does
in fact in actual capitalism, dictate the focus of investment and its
limitations. The focus on return is a focus on sustaining one potentiality
only, and its presence in the scope of investment renders this destructive from
the start. In other words, the main difference between sustension and
capitalism is the lack of strategy. Strategy always implies a calculation of
gains vs. losses (cost vs. benefit), and the fundamental perspective is that of
the zero-sum game. In sustension, strategy and zero-sum is replaced by
immanence and potentialisation. Sustension is about increasing potentiality
through increasing the capacity for complexity, not about defining the results
of competitive action.
In sustension, two fields are found: on the one hand, the tension
of the double multiplication of de-composition
and de-totalisation. On the other, there is the field where sustension
allows for a second-order virtuality; a virtuality of the zone itself in its
immanence. Sustension is the co-existence of tension and virtuality in a form
that operates within life as it appears in an evental assemblage presenting
itself in time and space. Sustension is not a presentation, nor is it a
representation. It is a way to explain the sustained tension in itself, its
immanent field, in which the bonds to the systems that enter it are suspended
(suspension being, of course, an aspect of the term of ‘sustension’). To the
extent that one might define relations as sustainable, they contain a
sustension that is not reduced to one-sided potentiality or excluded from an
event that has passed (‘taken place’). In sustension, the existential expansion
is the opposite of the intentions of e.g. competing individuals in a race or
struggle for dominance, as in the relations of competing producers in capitalist
competition. In sustension, the change process is a mutuality that precedes the
will of the individual and the gain of one actor over the other. The subject of
sustension is the tension itself and the change that it installs in the vectors
that touch upon it as a border of their existence. This border is not an
outside, as suggested by Foucault in other cases, but an inside: sustension is
the mutual inside; the collectivity that joins what comes before individuation
and provides a common ground for life to develop. As mentioned above,
sustension is not strategic; it is another form of anticipation that does not
operate through a single mind, but through intertwined complexities. This
condition is purely contingent, as may be seen out of its fragility in history.
It does not persist per se; nor does it pass into anything else. It expresses
itself in a tension that may be sensed by the world in which it works; maybe it
only shows itself to us through what will be termed collective intuition
here.
As sustension is a form that precedes individuals in a
logical or existential sense, its existence also depends on the presence of
chronotopic settings in which to be voiced. When one individual actuality
out-edges others in competition or battle, sustension is reduced to a minimal
level. It would probably be going too far to suggest that sustension seeks to
increase its level – that would make no more sense than to say that the sea
longs for the beach or the earth longs to rotate. Sustension is a way to express
the mutually reinforcing tension created when collectivities form, in what is
not a void, but a different base for action and reaction on its surface. This
does not answer all questions – an obvious one is if this places sustension
within the reach of a kind of collective voluntarism or common will. Or, on the
other hand, if it places it outside, installing it as a kind of superhuman
force to which we should learn to open ourselves along the lines of new age
philosophy. This question will be explored a bit more in the case discussions.
As long as sustension prevails, all the actualities and virtualities that have been decomposed into it are part of its zone of tension. This means that they share a common insecurity and fragility, which in itself seems to be the cause of much violence and abrupt flight. This is not a description of a “world of pure justice” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999: 583), nor of any other pure state to which we should compare the complex and mixed systems of capitalism. Nor does it claim to install a system at all, in fact. It merely described a tension whose primary characteristic is to offer the field for creation, without destroying what enters it, but merely locally suspending it. What sustension does to the theory discussed here is that it offers to point attention towards a way of understanding collectivity as preceding individuality from an emerging field of forces, rather than being the product of the will of individuals.
[1]
Bruntland Report (1987)
[2] Deleuze & Guattari (1980); Boltanski &
Chiapello (1999)
[3]
This does not seem to count for the encounter
with religious orders, which is hardly surprising: the religious complexity of
capitalism being practically non-existent, any advanced religious system will
keep most of its complexity outside of the evental encounter and thus be able
to cope with the challenge of being sucked into the eventality.
[4] Tisdell (1988)
[5] Boltanski & Chiapello (1999): 583
