There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.
—Michel Foucault
It’s quite clear. I’m out of my mind. Temporarily retreating from sinkholes and mudslides, washed away[1] highways and rapid snowmelt-driven raging rivers, from baffling water-“use” hypocrisies and fascistic land-“use” codes, from the fragrant spring-blossoming orchards,[2] I now find myself in Las Vegas.
For this month’s installment in my Mother Pelican ongoing series, I interrupt my story of friction, beauty, and coalitional justice with an Interlude. Connecting my past few articles addressing tiny-home affordable, creative housing with bioregional, regenerative practices and anarchist-collective commitments and passions[3] that challenge the horrors and seduction of international textile commerce, I explore how each and every object in our lives tells a story: the connective tissue between housing and clothing, stupefying waste and pollution, environmental racism and greenwashing embedded in our shelters, our self-expression, our habituated obedience to industrial “civilization.” This time in Sin City…
The Arrival
From my high-desert home of sage and juniper to palm trees[4] and astroturf—vast tracks of dry land; vast tracks of electric-power grids, I’m a guest presenter at the University of Las Vegas’ INGENIUM Creatives, a Creativity Think Tank and Anti-Conference Conference. A goal of this inaugural anti-conference conference is to
celebrate divergent thinkers and seek to provide and promote a space where useful ideas, solutions, and collaborations within a global audience will flourish. We intend to advance the cultural and practical landscape of Creatives in all disciplines of Industry, Science, Communication, and Art and to help tackle the newest frontiers of ingenuity and ethics;…focus on ‘possibility thinking’ and scrutinizing the origins, nature, cultivation, importance, and preservation of creativity.[5]
Sounds good. but what happens when socialized norms are so deeply ingrained in us that our imaginations contort our perceptions of “reality,” our capacity to think, to act? What happens when our imaginations become more threatening than “reality”—eradicating the potential of the possible? How does the construction of desire render our imaginations impotent, our capacity to breathe, dream, and think so profoundly distorted by normative hierarchies in which we are complicit; and, how can we theoretically and practically co-create our collective emancipation?
I offer an invitation to challenge our global metacrises—interlocking systemic oppressive infrastructures. My intention is to open the possibility to redefine normalcy—activating our epigenetic potential for a cultural paradigm transformation. Given the cultural context of Las Vegas, my offer is particularly challenging. Las Vegas as the stereotypical den of iniquity is the quintessential city for this kind of exploration: a hot bed of “what if” that attracts people who want to take a risk, let it all hang out, enter fully into the unfamiliar.[6] However, this unfamiliar, this as if of a participatory universe is not necessarily rooted in profound compassion, mindful gratitude, and a vivification of our interconnectedness. Rather, in the context of escapist, extreme excess manifested in rampant acquisition (the stereotypes of Las Vegas as a den of iniquity, “risking it all” implies the underlying imperative to win. Victory is essential—a self-perpetuating cycle of renormalizing the status-quo of entitlement (hyperconsumption, hypermaterialism, hyperindividualism).
Living with Integrity vs. Living for Victory
In Robert Kenner’s “Merchants of Doubt,” the 2014 documentary film on the tobacco industry and climate-crisis disinformation, former South Carolina Republican Congressman, Bob Inglis (2015 recipient of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for his stance on Climate Change), reminds viewers that climate-crisis denial is hyper convenient because US citizens/ consumers “want to believe that the science is not real.” Suburban homeownership represents this panic-denial: “You mean the way I am living is wrong?!”[7] Although originating from the same root of capitalist-ethnocentric entitlement, far more dangerous than climate deniers are those who accept the fact of our climate crisis while refusing to take personal responsibility and political action:
To act politically is to reject probability assessment as a ground for action (since it could inspire no action). …The more people who tell us that a radical [lifestyle] reorientation is ‘scarcely imaginable,’ the less imaginable it will be. Imagination is a pivotal faculty here. The climate crisis unfolds through a series of interlocked absurdities ingrained in it: not only is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, or the deliberate large-scale intervention in the climate system—what we refer to as geoengineering—than in the economic system; it is also easier, at least for some, to imagine learning to die than learning to fight, to reconcile oneself to the end of everything one holds dear…[8]
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As in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, we fight. We use our imaginations because we have to, not because we will win: “This affirmation of life by way of a sacrifice and combat with no prospect of victory is a tragic paradox that can only be understood as an act of faith in history.”[9] And, not only history, but living with integrity. We refuse to accept the normalcy of US ethnocentric, consumer-culture. We reject what in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt unravels as the systemic violence-of-the-everyday as society’s normalizing immoral behavior. We remember that the original title for Dr. King's “I Have A Dream Speech” was “Normalcy No More.”[10]
When we choose to only hold corporations accountable and depend on policy change as the singular solution to our destructive industrial economy, we bypass underlying roots of not only of institutionalized racism and climate chaos, but how these roots are intertwined. Transnational neocolonialism maintains its power because we see ourselves as powerless individuals disconnected from larger interpenetrating contexts. We are in fact complicit in this perverse catch-22. Through relentless deregulation and market fundamentalism, Margaret Thatcher's normalization of TINA, “there is no alternative,”[11] represents the power of neutralizing the social imagination. Social change is impossible when our culture's evolution is based on infrastructural dependency on systemic forms of oppression. We celebrate our privatized entitlement through obsessive material accumulation (of land-as-property, for example). In the midst of this solipsistic normalization, we are taught and embrace the convenient justification that we have no power anyway (“it's only a drop in the bucket”); conveniently industrial capitalism assigns blame to the individual for climate catastrophe. And in turn, we ironically relinquish our individual and collective agency.
In contrast, living with integrity means committing to the possibilities of alternatives. It means transforming taken-for-granted social norms so that alternatives are no longer marginal. It means there is no victorious arrival point. We are in a constant state of collaborative adaptation.
Below is the description of what I share with the Ingenium community:
My manifesto workshop/exhibition breaks down socially-constructed categories that falsely divide art from daily life, politics, work, family, and creative-risk taking. By challenging illusory dichotomies, I offer embodied practices that integrate contradiction and multiplicity. I believe a culture of creativity must include an embodied sense of the absurd that elides normalized boundaries between the personal and political.
Rather than reiterating a critique of our society’s current state-of-emergency, my commitment to revealing socio-political enmeshed relationships expands possibilities for creative citizenship. Relational thinking, uncertainty, and the fluidity of perception generate a pedagogy of reciprocity and dialogue. My workshop addresses the potential of dialogic, coalitional thinking, and decision-making. Collective consciousness becomes a paragon of radical democracy, not as a unifying discourse, but as a counterhegemonic embodiment of peace and justice. It offers strategies in ecological intelligence that embody resiliency rooted in “creativity in crisis.”
By understanding the interconnections between our personal lives and global politics, we can collaboratively create more efficient and just alternatives to the Anthropocene in our everyday lives.
The workshop combines visual and oral storytelling: 1. My story of my eco-art installation repurposed performance-based school bus tiny home and 2. My photographic work in the context of ethnic, sexual, and economic differences. These stories will include corresponding photographs/ video of new work from 2020-present) and analog photography/ video from 1992- 2019) along with participants committing to a series of self-inquiry activities based on Abraham Joshua Heschel’s declaration: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ...Get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” Through discussion and individual writing, they will address the implications of Rabbi Tirzah Firestone’s exploration of a deep mindfulness as a shared purpose in which “we are brought together to grow beyond ourselves. ...In order to be fed, we must feed the world around us, or our system collapses.” Participants will share how to learn from and potentially cultivate a variety of bioregional practices as a form of devotion to creative-ecological living.
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1. For example, one personal example of living ecological thought is how my family and I built our home, how we animate the embodied energy of each object and the space they create by combining them. This is a deliberate commitment to local and global creative nonviolence. When people consider the objects and the space / place they share sacred, nothing is taken-for-granted. We embody radical amazement—infusing awe throughout our daily interactions. Animating our embodied energy allows us to shift our relationship to consumer-waste culture's everyday violence—creating a bridge between infrastructural change and individual-collective accountability.
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2. Both proverb and parable, my self-portraits explore the collision between our natural environment/ more-than-human ecosystems (worlds not mediated through industrial capitalism), melancholy, the play of human creativity (such as aesthetics forms like music) and human-body vulnerability. Swallowed by nature and digested through a cinematic sense of the absurd, my body performs collective creative risk-taking. Characters in my images become hybrids of machine and animal that populate dream-like worlds. Through a hyperbolic, carnal visual language, these polymorphic bodies engage in enigmatic ceremonies—the vulnerable body becomes a membrane between sensuality and restraint, surrender and resistance, purpose and the unexpected. I arrange space, objects, and bodies (including my own) in such a way that blur the lines that separate them. This luminescent excess inhabits both the domestic and the animalistic. Within my photographic work, the abject, grotesque, or disarrayed body of the other / the bisexual / unfamiliar / abject / deviant / immigrant / socially inappropriate female / monster is intended to dislocate pre-determined categories of identification central to fossil-fuel economies of alienation and extraction.
When we are clearly attuned with the space and objects around us, we witness what is already here, how it can be used in surprising ways. Like the physicist and cosmologist, Stephen Hawking’s idea, everything we need to know is already within us just waiting to be realized, Leah Sha’rabi, the Mizrahi mystic, declared that “Everything you see has a spark of holiness in it that is waiting to rise up. It wants to be free, like a person in prison who longs to be rescued.” We can co-create a multiplicity of moral imagination.
My counter-hegemonic workshop offers participants contradictory cartographies not as a catalogue of answers, but as opportunities for them to recognize the value of re-“discovering” their innate capacities to think beyond the habitual. Through readings and discussion, readers will have the opportunity to exercise their potential for what Paulo Freire referred to as “becoming the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” (Pedagogy of the Heart, 53).
If we were to support both institutional and popular educational systems that encourage intersection, ambiguity, and collaboration, we could potentially generate a participatory democracy rooted in the collective and individual psycho-anatomy—one that embraces inherent contradictions of modern technology and its bio-political applications. By challenging how we internalize binaries and taxonomies, I investigate lived empathy, not a unified merging which dissolves into an amorphous normativity, but the fluid exchange of autonomy and interconnectedness. Theoretical investigations converge in an embodied practice that thrives on diverse perspectives and experiences.
[2] In my upcoming Mother Pelican installments, I will continue to explore the details of land and water politics from a bioregional, regenerative perspective.
[3] For example, involving local labor, local fibers, local dyes, Fibersheds challenge fast fashion, textile tyrannies, and convenience-consumer industries: an embodied technology (techne = to weave) witnessing and acting from our embedded interconnectedness.
[4] The keystone species Mauritia palm was considered the “tree of life’...the perfect symbol of nature as a living organism” (Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, The Lost Hero of Science. London: John Murray, 2015: 74).
[11] “There is no alternative” originated with nineteenth-century liberal political, theorist Herbert Spencer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars,
and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please
contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
or
via her websites, Cara
Judea
and
Zazu
Dreams.
See also this article: Social
ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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