Leaving Las Vegas ~ Interlude II ~ Improvising Counterhegemonies: A Lived Manifesto
Cara Judea Alhadeff
August 2023
Contradiction or Consistent?
A Las Vegas solar array and Ingenium’s IG petro-plastic mini-water bottle display in the lobby of our “Anti-Conference Conference.”
I must ask: what is the purpose of this size water bottle?!
Click on the image to enlarge.
Your brain evolved to continually redefine normality; choice only begins once you cultivate awareness.
—Beau Lotto
Why do we choose what we do?
The university caterer—another player in the UNLV Teamster Local Union that dictated much of our “anti-conference” activities—approached me from across Ballroom A. Her stern expression told me that she had spent a good amount of time preparing whatever it was she was about to rebuke me with. I prepared myself.
“I was told you tried to eat the fork.”
“Excuse me?”
I had not attempted any such thing. She repeated her peculiar indictment.
After some sorting out who was actually in charge and what the caterer’s concerns were, I realized that the confusion was due to my request to the conference organizers that there be no petroleum-plastic utensils or dishware. Highlighting greenwashing through the compostable-plastic industry, I had also discouraged them from using “compostable” dishware.[1] In spite of the ubiquitous plastic, we were told there would be edible dishware. Apparently, however, we weren’t supposed to eat the forks.
I had attempted to encourage an acute awareness of how all hegemonies are relational and how that relationality can empower each of us to move beyond binaries; becoming increasingly conscious of our capacity to harness multiple intelligences (cognitive, intuitive, emotional, corporeal, synesthetic, memory). I had hoped to collectively imagine counterhegemonic strategies through image, theory, and dance, through discussion rooted in climate-crisis data, cross-cultural storytelling, personal-political, vulnerability, body-consciousness activities, philosophical inquiry, and practical, daily accountability. I had wanted to subvert the absurd irony of performing the intersection of petroleum-addicted consumerism and grassroots bioregional movements within this particular Sin City context.
As I wrote in last month’s Mother Pelican, Ingenium Creatives focuses, among other things, on interdisciplinary “possibility thinking.” What does it mean to try to teach about and hopefully galvanize for cultural transformation in the midst of unacknowledged habituated obedience? Exploring internalized fascism in the midst of internalized fascism? In his Preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault raises questions that stimulate personal action in the context of socio-political transformation: “How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?” (xiii). Even our resistance to “what is” depends on the illusory neutrality of that isness. Neutrality is based on our complicity with the normalizing status quo. In Andrea Juno’s Angry Women, Avital Ronell warns us: “…subversion is a problem-it implies a dependency on the program that is being critiqued-therefore it’s a parasite of that program. Is there a way to produce a force or an intensity that isn’t merely a reaction (and a very bad and allergic reaction) to what is?” (128). “Thinking outside the box” simply implies operating within a bigger box (conformist assimilation).
A recent article published in a philosophy journal presented the predicament of a group of graduate chemistry students. The students had become accustomed to conducting their experiments in a virtual reality, but when they returned to real world lab experiments, they found they were incapable of coping with the multiple variables inherent in the unpredictability of our material world. Their false sense of control and habituated perfectionism left them powerless to address the actual messiness of their lived environments. For example, a beaker breaking during an experiment threw the students into a state of disequilibrium. Stripped of their capacity to think for themselves, to adapt, and to draw from their own instinct and creative responses, they panicked.[2]
This erasure of intellectual imagination is consistent with our mechanized world that resists co-existing conflicting complexities.[3] Such behavioral engineering inherent in institutionalized “habits of capitalism” (Harold Wilhite) results in the construction of desire and manufactured consent. Consumer-convenience culture reifies what Vandana Shiva calls our “monoculture of the mind.” Precisely because globally we are increasingly industrial-techno-dependent (thus unprepared to respond to the unpredictable) in order to confront an ever-encroaching biocide, we must urgently embody a cross-cultural, interspecies approach to climate-crisis mitigation.
Kimberly Wade Howard from Caldera Arts performing excerpt from Zazu Dreams about ocean pollution from Chapter Four: “...spooky action at a distance:” Einstein’s reference to quantum entanglement—essentially, how all living things—from our microbiome to the macrocosmos—are utterly interwoven. Click on the image to enlarge.
In the context of an interdisciplinary event focused on “scrutinizing the origins, nature, cultivation, importance, and preservation of creativity,” was it simply a parody to perform an excerpt from Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era,[4] my cross-cultural, intergenerational, climate justice book that challenges cultural habits deeply ingrained in our genocidal and ecocidal trajectory? This speculative non-fiction explores how we can rethink relationality, find allies in unexpected places; how we can, as Eduardo Kohn declares in his How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human, “decoloniz[e] our thinking” to embody intersubjectivity. The performance also included me dancing in front of those projected images as I explored with the audience the absurdity and complexity of our consumption-obsessed, waste-oblivious society. Below is an excerpt of that Zazu Dreams mini-performance that includes projected images from the book,[5] Middle Eastern and North African musicians, and storytellers—and data. Yes, a lot of facts:
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a swirling vortex of plastic that has gathered where ocean currents meet. When Zazu Dreams was published in 2017, the Garbage Patch covered an area twice the size of Texas; it continues to grow exponentially. More than one million single-use non-biodegradable bags are used every 60 seconds. The average US consumer uses about 1200 plastic bags per year. In the United States alone, 50 billion petroleum plastic water bottles are thrown away each year. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the world produces around 460 million tons of plastic a year. Although people use recycling as a justification for their consumer habits, globally only about 9% of plastic waste is recycled; and, recycling is also environmentally toxic and recklessly energy-intensive.
If we don't make immediate changes in the way we buy things and the way we throw them away, by the year 2050—in less than 30 years, plastic will be found in 99% of seabirds, and there will be more visible plastic in our oceans than fish. We have all heard this many times. These ideas can be overwhelming and paralyzing, or they can ignite our creativity; they can make us resolute so we can make changes collectively.
Microplastics outnumber the stars in our galaxy 500-fold. Tiny particles that we can barely see are even worse for sea life and human bodies because microplastics block our respiratory systems and bloodstreams. These cancer-causing particles absorb toxins and migrate through the food chain—poisoning fish and then humans when we eat the fish.
However, thousands of international activists are fighting big businesses by preventing them from adding plastic microbeads to their products (ranging from clothes to toothpaste and skin lotion). In 2015, The Story of Stuff Project successfully banned plastic microbeads in California and won their lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson. Their success continues to affect global markets. This is an amazing empowerment model for all of us who hold corporations accountable!
Unless we individually acknowledge and collectively confront the fact that every formal corporatized institution breeds and requires habituated obedience, we will continue to self-destruct.[6] During the Vietnam War and President Nixon's “Pentagon Papers,” whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, decried: “They [the public] hear it, they learn from it, they understand it, and they proceed to ignore it.”
We cannot afford the same voluntary inertia.
Theater of the Absurd: How do we bridge the disconnect? Challenging taken-for-granted norms while immersed in taken-for-granted norms… Almost every participant was drinking from a disposable cup even as we were discussing (and physically enacting through role play) our interconnectedness. Click on the image to enlarge.
As we performed this data through dance and storytelling, several of my fellow “creatives” continued to sip coffee and juice[7] from their “biodegradable” cups—perhaps unaware of the forever chemicals (perfluoroalkyl acids, or PFAAs, a subset of PFAS).[8] Perhaps it simply doesn’t matter? Is contemporary US society that different from the “The Truman Show” in which the billionaire televisionary exhorts: “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented with.”?[9] We seem to accept the onslaught of nightmarish realities as inevitable. Throughout mainstream discourse, the cause, the root, and the potential to shift do not seem to be distinguishable.
Within the context of the field of Human Evolutionary Energetics, the two main factors that shape our evolution are cultural innovation and storytelling. But, what kinds of storytelling? Both my personal and professional lives focus on re-interpreting "information" in order to embody and make public our interdependencies. This decoding is imperative as we educate ourselves and our children to take nothing for granted, to debate differing perspectives. When we filter “perception management” through cultural, historical, and ecological interrelationships, we can ultimately unlearn what we think we know.
However, during the Las Vegas Ingenium anti-conference conference, seemingly none of the body-mind/ art-politics/ micro-macro investigations I offered had the desired effect: collectively asking ourselves questions about our local daily life choices and how they impact global relationships.
Or did these investigations spark awareness followed by action? I was recently reminded that I may not be cognizant of the continuum of impact of my aesthetic-activist efforts; that these impacts may not be able to be measured in the moment—especially through Eurometrics. Rather than Big Data Research, we desperately need dialogue.
How do we present interwoven ecological and humanitarian crises with which are faced? How do we invite our audience (our potential allies) to come to conclusions on their own that ignite radical social-justice transformation?
As I describe what and how I performed and improvised my counter-hegemonic lived manifesto, I will play the trickster—exposing how anti-intellectualism converges with body phobia converges with solipsistic ethnocentrism; an apocalypse (a revelation that disrupts our familiar) of the integrative realms of the sensual, cerebral, spiritual, and political.
Notes
[1] In the name of people and planetary health, surrogate Band-Aids are deployed that are in fact equal to or worse than what is being replaced including bioplastics, phthalates replacements, and hydrofluorocarbons. For example:
1. Compostable disposables, also known as bioplastics, are most frequently produced from GMO-corn monoculture and “composted” in highly restricted environments that are inaccessible to the general public. Due to corn-crop monoculture practices that are dependent on agribusiness's heavy use of pesticides and herbicides (for example, Monsanto’s Round-Up/glyphosate), compostable plastics are not a clean solution. The infrastructure and politics of actually “composting” these products are extraordinarily problematic. These not-so eco-friendly products require extremely high temperatures to decompose. Such composting facilities are rarely available to private consumers. Additionally, their chemical compounds cause extreme damage to water, soil, and wildlife. They cause heavy acidification when they get into the water and eutrophication (lack of oxygen) when they leach nitrogen into the soil.
2. The trend to replace Bisphenol A (BPA) led to even more debilitating phthalates in products.
3. Lastly, we now know that hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), “ozone-friendly” replacements, are equally environmentally destructive as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
[2] Like university science departments, art departments are equally falling into the perverse entanglement of the machineries of a modern state. Enrollment for drawing and painting classes has radically dropped. Dwindling traditional art classes are being replaced by new media and design courses—too often students no longer believe they “need” the human body to study drawing or painting.
[4] Endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Karen Barad, Eve Ensler, James E. Hansen, David Orr, SHKG Humpty Hump, Thom Hartmann, Paul Hawken, and Bill McKibben among other activists, and scientists, Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era unravels the complexities of our climate crisis as it celebrates our interconnectedness through indigenous wisdom, economic, literary, environmental science, and historical resources. Zazu Dreams includes over 100 paintings of Middle Eastern and East Indian philosophers, healers, artists, scientists, and activists.
[5] For next month’s Mother Pelican, I will describe in detail this eco-political dance component.
[6] In Robert Kenner’s “Merchants of Doubt,” the 2014 documentary film on climate change 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 change denial is hyper-functional because US citizens/ consumers “want to believe that the science is not real.” The house in the suburbs represents this panic-denial: “You mean the way I am living is wrong?!” (cited in Zazu Dreams, p. 68, Endnote 264).
[9] “The Truman Show,” Directed by Peter Weir, 1998.
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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