Part IV: On the Act of Change-Making
Forces that maintain these limiting narratives come from various sources, including ourselves. Whether aware of it or not, we are all participating in history every day — not just through notable actions, but through the language we use, the generalizations we perpetuate, the stories we tell ourselves, remember and create. This is history. Some people work to unravel the convictions underneath these often subconsciously ingrained assumptions, questioning what is being told, who is telling it, seeking what is being left out. Further, the creation of new stories is a tool for meaning-making often utilized by a few yet rarely exercised by the majority of humans. Humans — you, me, us, we — have the ability to imagine alternative futures. We have the ability to exercise self-reflexivity. To exercise symbolic language. To exercise these lovely opposable thumbs. To create our imaginations. These narratives and stories about the future that gain traction will determine the kind of futures that become more likely.
During a time of crisis, such as the one that is being collectively experienced (note, the year of writing is 2020), it is easy to fall back on familiar command and control ways of being and doing. But, it is important to not retreat from the freedom to self-determine who we are and how we wish to live. In exercising this inventiveness, there is much to learn from the artwork of James McKay, manager of a centre for research in renewable energy at the University of Leeds.
McKay develops his art from sessions working with schools, community groups and researchers, grounding his process in the notion that ideas are limited when they are just in people’s heads or in text. There is a need to sketch them out. While grappling with these visions, it proves difficult to make practical issues and systems which may feel quite boring/dull (i.e food, waste and water systems) exciting. McKay starts from photos of real places and then tries to work out what it would look like if new technologies/concepts were inserted into that landscape. In this way, creating recognizable artwork that incorporates failures, changes and disruptions as expected rather than painting utopia’s and detailing perfection makes it easier to start to see that there are things that are tangible, credible, achievable and that we can imagine ourselves in.
There is a difference between addressing the need for an imaginative citizenry and the practical opportunities for this to be activated and normalized. There are countless initiatives categorized as transformative and disruptive civic innovation. These are spaces that have pushed beyond the dominant narratives. Spaces that are actively taking bold action, prototyping and exploring novel possibilities and approaches.
To connect bottom-up and top-down change, more spaces must be created within communities for their imagination to be genuinely incorporated into policy. In this cultural and political moment, however, the dominant means of policy-making is not cohesively informed by the realities of complex living systems. Decision making is often mechanistic and reductionist, presuming a linear, additive, cause and effect relationships. Complex systems, in which we are a part, are more so composed of emergent and transitional behaviors, hard to trace nonlinear interactions and nested feedback loops with multiple casualties, interactive effects, and space and time discontinuities. Our conventional language is not matched to the reality of these systemic interactions. Repeated narratives lack the language to express these relationships, structures and behaviors and therefore the ability to perceive, understand and work with this complexity, as reflected in top-down “knowing best” institutions that close off the possibility of understanding other perspectives.