This is not a Report

By Peter Doran 

There is a story about the painter J.M.W. Turner. As Turner returns home one evening from his work on Hampstead Heath, a local resident approaches him and asks to have a look at his painting, his day’s work. After surveying it for some time the resident says, ‘Mr Turner, I have lived in Hampstead for forty years but I have never once seen a view on Hampstead Heath like that.’ Turner replies, ‘No. But don’t you wish you could?’ 

In his The Great Derangement (2016), the celebrated Indian novelist, Amitav Ghosh, observes that the Anthropocene, especially climate change, presents a challenge not only to the arts and humanities, but also to our common sense understandings and beyond that to contemporary culture in general. The challenge derives, in part, from the fundamental practices and assumptions that guide the art and humanities: 

To identify how this happens is, I think, a task of the utmost urgency: It may well be the key to understanding why contemporary culture finds it so hard to deal with climate change. Indeed, this is perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense - for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination. (2016:9) 

Ghosh reminds us, for example, that culture generates desires - for vehicles and appliances, certain kinds of gardens and dwellings - that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy. For example, a speedy convertible excites the consumer not because of any love for metal and chrome nor because of an abstract understanding of its engineering. It excites because it evokes an image of a road arrowing through a pristine landscape and the consumer associates the car with freedom, with mediatised memories of figures like James Dean and Peter Fonda, Hollywood road movies, and sophisticated advertising. Ghosh points out that the artefacts and commodities that are conjured up by desires are, in a sense, at once expressions and concealments of the cultural matrix that brought them into being. (2016:10) He adds: 

This culture is, of course, intimately linked with the wider histories of imperialism and capitalism that have shaped the world. But to know this is still to know very little about the specific cultural activity: poetry, art, architecture, theatre, prose fiction, and so on. (2016:10) 

As Turner intimated to his interlocutor on Hampstead Heath, the function of the artist can be to invite the onlooker to revisit the familiar, to embark on a journey of unconcealing what has been hidden in plain sight in the most familiar landscapes, as well as, and perhaps as the necessary precursor, for reimagining the social. 

In this paper we are introducing an early intervention planned by WEAll’s hub for the island of Ireland. The intervention is designed to identify, mobilise and excite emergent conversa- tions about alternative ‘social imaginaries’ to counter dominant economic narratives across the island [and the world], drawing on the genius of cultural actors and their networks. We envisage a special and distinct role for cultural actors-activists as animators of social reflexivity and socio-ecological change as the cornerstones of the wellbeing economy.

In the words of Cornélius Castoriadis, ‘what is required is a new imaginary creation of a size unparalleled in the past, a creation that would put at the center of human life other significations than the expansion of production and consumption, that would lay down different objectives for life, one that might be recognized by human beings as worth pursuing’. (Castoriadis 1996, p.143). Castoriadis understood this change as a revolutionary challenge to the psycho-social structure of people in the Western world in particular, in their attitude toward life, in their imaginary, implying an abandonment of the capitalist imaginary with its pseudo-rational and pseudo-mastery of the world in pursuit of an impossible dream of infinite expansion of material production. Alongside economic transformations this will demand deep democratic changes, including a decentralisation of democratic power and the transformation of the modern state in favour of participative models of grassroots decision-making. 

In fact, the changes will probably go much further. Changes in the structure and trajectory of democratic institutions may be essential dimensions of the transition, but it is increasingly apparent that, for the Western mind and institutions, the shifts in the dominant narrative will run deep: disrupting notions of linearity, constructions of duality, and temporality, to name a few. Overarching challenges will be shaped by a post ‘Euro-modern’ sensibility informed by decoloniality and a push back against the entrenched monocultures disseminated by the institutions of ‘Whiteness’. 

Our work on the island of Ireland invites a special inflection of the global work on the ‘wellbeing economy’ given our peculiar European and colonial history. Our work can, for example, be described as an act of knowledge-sharing, rooted in solidarity with the Global South and pursued as a dimension of post-development work, drawing from two formative legacies of the island’s histories and socio-ecological transformations: Our European identities and coloniality. By coloniality we do not refer to the obvious infrastructures and impositions of colonialism but to the traces, signatures, subjectivities and languages that remain the legacies of the island’s formative experience as a petri dish for colonial interventions. 

The underlying vision of WEAll Ireland is the conviction that the dimensions of a wellbeing economy or economies are already emergent, globally and on the island of Ireland, and must come to fruition through a social movement that is grounded in our own local experiences while networked and supported in a dialogue with a global movement dedicated to shifting the dominant economic narrative of capital or neoliberalism. Our challenge, confronting planetary emergencies that are both social and ecological, is to courageously name and offer analyses of dominant economic narratives associated with “capitalism” and “neoliberalism” and their precursors in modernity - including coloniality and patriarchy – and to bring a new visibility and coherence to emergent counter- narratives and practices across the island. 

The Wellbeing Economy Hub Ireland1 initiative was launched in late 2020 when two Irish charities, the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (Feasta) and the European Health Futures Forum (EHFF)3 and I joined with Social Justice Ireland and Cultivate: The Sustainable Ireland Cooperative4 to form an island-wide hub. I was introduced to the Feasta members and the EHFF by our friend and co-founder of the global Wellbeing Economy Alliance, Katherine Trebeck, after parallel discussions about founding an Irish hub in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. 

While members of the steering group bring generations of policy work and engaged scholarship to the steering group of the Irish Hub, we are also inspired by radical voices of leadership in Ireland, including that of the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, who has committed a series of speeches to calls for a new economics designed to respond to the depth and scale of the planetary emergencies. Higgins has, for example, told an OECD conference that “new ideas are, thus, now required and, even more, their communication to citizens – ideas based on equality, universal public services, equity of access, sufficiency, sustainability. New ideas are fortunately available in the form of an alternative paradigm of social economy within ecological responsibility, but they must find their way on to the public street.” 

Narrative as Invocation 

In his book, Invoking Ireland (2005) (Áiliu Iath n-hÉrend), John Moriarty (1938-2007), the Irish poet, philosopher and mystic from the County of Kerry, drew from his immersion in the world of Irish and global mythology to alert us to a schism or rupture between what Western humanity has become and how humanity might still choose to live. His writings and stories were delivered from a place called otherwise, a parallel ‘Ireland’ called Fódhla. 

Moriarty’s ‘dreamtime’ points to an approach to narrative, language and the imaginary that is distinctive and characteristic of indigenous cultures. Machado de Oliveira notes that indigenous storytelling can manifest in ways that are different from how it manifests in modernity. She explains: 

….stories are not human-made tools of communication that aim to index the world into language, or to word the world. Instead, stories are entities that visit and move things in the world, in nonlinear time; they are stories that world the world. 

The multiple stories of other worldly beings recorded at the National Folklore Collection (NFC) in Dublin – beings often described as intelligent, powerful and sentient – are often invitations to honour kinship and practices of reciprocity. They invite reverence and an honouring of our mysterious entanglements with the hiddenness of the worlds around us, invite us into moments of enchantment. The tellers can be lost for words when asked if their stories are ‘true’ or if they are dealing with the realms of ‘myth or reality’.  

Machado de Oliveira comments: 

Instead of ‘Is the story true?’ or ‘What does the story mean?’ – questions that come from the expectation that stories will describe reality and convey a fixed meaning – the approach to storytelling [illustrated here] invites us to ask, ‘What is this story trying to move?’ and ‘What does it do over time and to time itself?’ The story of the small sentient beings at a very basic level may be trying to move us into a more respectful relationship with the land, with forests, and with other forms of life. The evocation of unseen manifestations of relationality may move us to consider how we are related and accountable to what is unknowable, things that are not visible or imaginable within and around us. 

For the popular Irish writer and broadcaster, Manchán Magan, the figure of Amhairghin reveals a language that not only reveals things but calls them into being. ‘While empirical facts, rational thinking and measurement seem to have been a major concern for the past few centuries, there is something bigger. There is something bigger about myth: it is about human beings finding meaning in the world. We do that through creating stories.’ 

Amhairghin’s words are a gift to ourselves from the ancient past, grounding us to this land but also hinting that we are connected to all things in nature. Long ago we understood this, we understood the world as happening, as emergence, not as things… 

Mangan ponders that some of the older and oddest words in the Irish language poke at the embers of old fires once thought to have died out, possibly because the ancient language is based on an awareness that sound is an energy – a vibration capable of carrying and transferring information within it. 

Moriarty contends in his writings that there is still enough of Dé Dannan in all of us that we can sometimes hear and see beyond the coarse world of European modernity to the more subtle world or imaginaries conjured up in the ideal of Fodhla. 

Narratives and Power: Stories That Move

For Vanessa Machado de Oliveira[1] modernity is not a corrupt project of the West that needs to be defeated and replaced with a more righteous and virtuous non-Western alternative, but rather something that is now (unevenly) part of all of us, conditioning the ways we experience reality. Situated alongside the term ‘coloniality’, modernity for Machado de Oliveira, cannot be understood in isolation from its association with processes of appropriation, extraction, exploitation, militarization, dispossession, destitution, genocides, and ecocides. 

Coloniality refers to the enduring manifestations of colonial relations, logic and situations – even after the official decolonisation of formal structures of governance. It represents a global hegemonic form of power that organises bodies, time, knowledge, relationships, labour, and space according to economic parameters (i.e. exchange value) and to the benefit of particular groups of people, with or without formal colonisation. For Machado de Oliveira, many indigenous peoples see the manifestations of colonialism as symptoms of a deeper and older form of violence that happens at ontological and metaphysical realms – the realm of “being”: 

This deeper, older violence is the imposed sense of separation between ourselves and the dynamic living land-metabolism that is the planet and beyond, as well as the theological separation between creature and creator. This imposed sense of separation, or separability, is based on human exceptionalism, the idea that humans are a superior species that deserve to conquer, dominate, own, manage, and control the natural environment. 

Human exceptionalism is also the basis of anthropocentrism, which places humans at the centre of, and as the most important entities in, the world. 

She describes a process of ‘wording the world’ as a chief characteristic of modernity/ coloniality: 

If the primary orienting project of modernity/coloniality is to control and engineer reality through objective unequivocal knowing, this process can only happen through fixed categories of meaning. Knowledge production in this context focuses on certainties, objective descriptions, and moralizing prescriptions. This reflects a desire to index the totality of the reality of the world in unambiguous language that can describe it objectively. 

For Machado de Oliveira, ‘wording the world’, drives the privileging of meaning within modernity/coloniality, with the privileging of the search for meaning and the valorization of that which is deemed meaning-full, while ignoring that which is deemed as meaning-less. 

‘This obsession with meaning overrides other sensibilities…’ 

Importantly, modernity/coloniality have the capacity to imprint the wording of the world as the only possible [uni-versal’] relationship with language, meaning, knowledge – and, consequently – with the world. ‘It also imposes its own meanings as neutral and objective representations of reality. This power to define reality is inseparable from colonial power and the multiple forms of violence of colonialism and coloniality. Many critics refer to this process as epistemic or cognitive imperialism. 

Translations

As Machado de Oliveira comments, there is an ongoing process of mis-translation that results from the epistemic or cognitive closure that results from the modern tendency to colonize our relationship with language itself, or ‘wording of the world.’ She notes that within modernity/coloniality, being is defined by reason and it is the certainty of knowing through description/prescription that anchors the security of being. Macado de Oliveira believes that most critics of modernity overlook the implications of this ontological trait, resulting in an active misrepresentation of alternative worldviews – alternative ways of being in the world – as mere variations of the process of wording the world of modernity. This restriction of the pattern of translation makes it impossible to communicate a relationship with language that is not about describing or constructing reality. 

This mis-translation is constituted by a series of disavowals or ‘constitutive denials’ – identified by de Oliveira, including a denial of the limits of the planet and of the unsustainability of modernity/coloniality and its associated imaginary, including the incompatibility of the earth-metabolism with exponential economic growth, consumption, extraction, exploitation, and indefinite expropriation. Other constitutive denials associated with this dominant imaginary include denials of systemic historical and ongoing violence that are associated with modern lifestyles, their comforts and securities; the denial of human entanglements with the wider living metabolism that is bio-intelligent; and a denial of the magnitude and complexity of the problems faced by humanity, and the tendency to posit simplistic questions/answers instead of facing root causes and complex predicaments. 

Social Imaginary 

De Oliveira’s work is important in the context of our consideration of the role of the ‘social imaginary’ and the wellbeing economy because she shares – with other intellectuals – a conviction that modernity predetermines what can be heard, what can be deemed real and possible, indeed what can be imagined as desirable and ideal, and how we are supposed to feel, behave and communicate within these parameters. And here’s the rub: this constitutive conditioning of the modern subject operates faster than thought itself; in other words, it operates faster than thought itself as it structures our unconscious. 

To illustrate how this conditioning impacts on and frames our cognitive dispositions, Machado de Oliveira offers Sharon Stein’s ‘CIRCULAR’ exercise, which identifies eight embedded or expected intellectual, affective, and performative dispositional patterns that modernity has imprinted in our unconscious and that it rewards. These will be particularly apparent to those working in the academy. She notes that ‘These patterns may prevent us from sensing,relating and imagining otherwise, but since they are perceived as normal and natural, there is virtually no incentive to notice them or to interrupt them. In fact, for you to be functional and intelligible within modernity, you have to use them.’ She explains: 

Within modernity’s framework of legibility, it is difficult to invite people to see the problems with these patterns. That is because generally, in order to get people’s attention, we must present problematic patterns as obstacles to modernity’s progress. However, when we do this, there is a tendency to respond by trying to transcend these patterns in search of moral purity, political authority, or (collective or individual) advancement – each of which is deeply rooted in modernity’s frames. 

It is therefore not simply a lack of information that leads to the reproduction of colonialism, including within efforts to decolonize, but also enduring affective investments in, and desires for, the continuation of its promises and pleasures. Thus, Stein suggests that any pedagogy of decolonisation needs to address, with both critique and compassion, common circularities that emerge in efforts to make change that nonetheless seek to retain or restore the following colonial entitlements and desires:

 • Continuity of the existing system (e.g. “I want what was promised to me”)

 • Innocence from implication in harm (e.g. “Because I am against violent systems, that means I am no longer complicit in them”)

 • Recentering the self or majority group/nation/etc (e.g. “How will this change benefit me?”) 

• Certainty of fixed knowledge, predetermined outcomes, and guaranteed solutions 

• (e.g. “I need to know exactly what is going to happen, when and where”) 

• Unrestricted autonomy, wherein interdependence and responsibility are optional (e.g. “I am not accountable to anyone but myself, unless I choose to be”) 

• Leadership, whether intellectual, political, and/or moral (e.g. “Either I, or my appointee, is uniquely suited to direct and determine the character of change”) 

• Authority to arbitrate justice (e.g. “I should be the one to determine who and what is valuable and deserving of which rights, privileges and punishments”)

 And finally, Recognition of one’s righteousness and redemption (e.g. “But don’t you see that I’m one of the ‘good’ ones?”

1. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, 2021, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, California: North Atlantic Books, pp.17-18.