PROJECT: Thinking Utopia – Creating Sustainable Culture
UTOPIA IS A MATTER OF URGENCY, WE ARE FORCED TO IMAGINE IT -Slavoj Žižek
It is with dire urgency that we investigate, experiment and live with sustainability if we are to adapt to the dangerous climate patterns that human interventions have woven. Cloaked in consumption, we are shielded from our social responsibility towards our future generations . Complicit, apathetic and motivated by greed, we refuse to live differently. We refuse to sacrifice the joys of excess ! But there are signs all around us, taking alarming forms. (Our polluted Gulf coast, a most recent siren)
Though these images are clear, real and are proliferated, we are stubborn. Or perhaps it is that we are not moved. Our tragedy is that we are not brave enough to face the humiliation of being powerless to our desire for material wealth. That we are not able to control the influence of a cultural ideology that tempts us to live beyond our means so that capital may grow at the expense of our collective physical survival is so shocking, that we have become numb and dumb. In this confusion we face a tremendous amount of work. We must alter our patterns and make personal commitments, applying a steel will to change paradigms of comfort and desire so that we may transform and live with the knowledge that we have made an apocalypse for our children.
So where is the hope?
It is in the fabrication of an impossible ideal of environmental harmony that we will develop our desires to be sustainable. And it is in our capacity to become less-selfish and understand ‘future’ as not being within our grasp, but in the lives of generations to come. It is being close to death that we will be forced to imagine how things could be better.
And this is important because Utopia is waiting.
As a response to modernisms notion of a singular materialist ‘progressive future’, developed as a cultural ideology organized by the linguisitic system of “the big Other”(Lacan), what is needed is a replacement ideology – a new desire!
