Download Envisioning a Socially Sustainable Future: Models

Envisioning a Socially Sustainable Future: Models, Narratives, Art
Over the past year and a half, INSITE researchers have been developing an analysis of the
Innovation Society and pondering the question of its sustainability – not only with respect to
its impact on the environment, but with respect to the social transformations and resulting
conflicts it engenders, within and between its own Euro-American heartland, the emerging
BRIC nations, and the vast areas of the world that do not share in the cascades of new artifacts
it generates or the underlying values that support it .1
Increasingly, it is becoming evident to us that the Innovation Society is a Ponzi scheme: the
processes through which it generates its cascades of new artifacts lead inevitably to
endogenous crises, which are playing out on ever-larger spatial and ever-faster temporal
scales, with ever-graver consequences for the health, security and well-being of human
beings, their societies, and the planet Earth.
Of course, if the Innovation Society really is a Ponzi scheme, it will eventually crash. The
question is: what role will we, collectively, play in determining what comes next? Can we take
an active role in constructing a socially sustainable alternative – or will we be a mere cats’paw of destiny? The answer is far from clear. The very categories and concepts we have
available to think about how we might go about doing so are deeply embedded in the
Innovation Society ideology and the languages of modernism, science and technique in which
that ideology is rooted. These categories and concepts impose limits to what we can imagine
– about the kind of society we would wish to live in, and about the dynamics through which
such a society might be brought into existence. After all, not so very long ago, many thinkers
believed that the immediate post-Cold War versions of “free market capitalism” and
“representative democracy” constituted an economic-political system of such efficiency,
generative capacity and resilience as to mark the End of History!
Since 2011, INSITE has been facilitating an on-going, international discussion around these
questions. Building on two workshops in January and March 2012,2 we will how host a
working meeting October 15-16 in Venice focusing on the question: how might we go about
envisioning a socially sustainable future? We will start with a simpler question: what does it
mean to “envision a future”? What tools can we bring to bear to do so? To get the discussion
going, we briefly describe here three modalities for envisioning futures, the uses of (and
relationships among) which we plan to explore at the meeting: models, narrative and art.
1. Predicting the future with models?
One of the pillars on which the Innovation Society rests is a strong belief in the power of
science to foresee the future. This belief equates science with prediction – and scientific
progress with the capacity to generate ever-better predictions about what the future has in
store for us: whereas once upon a time, human beings anxious to know their destinies trusted
in magic or priest-craft, now we can rely on mathematical models running on
1
For background on the concepts alluded to in the first two paragraphs, browse papers and articles on the site
www.insiteproject.org -- especially D. Lane, Complexity and innovation dynamics
(http://www.insiteproject.org/paper/complexity-and-innovation-dynamics/), D. Lane, F. Addarii, C. Sigaloff, S. Van der
Leeuw, Innovation and sustainability (http://www.insiteproject.org/article/innovation-and-sustainability/ ), and S. van
der Leeuw, Is the Innovation Society sustainable? (http://www.insiteproject.org/article/is-the-innovation-societysustainable/)
2
On the themes Mobilizing Civil Society to Construct a Socially Sustainable Future and Innovation, Society,
Complexity: A Dynamics of Detecting, Solving and Creating Problems. You can download reports of both workshops
from the INSITE website.
supercomputers, supplied with endless streams of calibrating data, to guide us as we navigate
into the (erstwhile) unknown. On this view, the key to envisioning the future is to provide
enough scientists enough funds to develop the right models and data sources, and the models
will spew out descriptions of possible futures that depend on what course of action we
commit ourselves to now, in the present. Obviously, policy makers (and when necessary, the
general public) must have access to the output of these models, interpreted by their scientistcreators, so that those policy initiatives that lead to the most desirable futures may be
implemented. Note the clean separation here, so typical of modernism, between matters of
fact and matters of value: the scientists and their models provide the facts about the
(possible) future(s), and the policy makers apply their conceptions of social values to
determine appropriate action. The notion that there are accessible3 facts4 about the future
dissolves the problem of “envisioning the future.”5
There are several issues that need to be raised with respect to the idea of envisioning-thefuture-by-predictive-model-building. The first has to do with what we might call scientific
humility, an attitude well expressed by the great 20th century physicist Eugene Wigner:6
“The world around us is of baffling complexity, and the most obvious fact about it
is that we cannot predict the future. Although the joke attributes only to the
optimist the view that the future is uncertain, the optimist is right in this case: the
future is unpredictable. It is, as Schrodinger has remarked, a miracle that in spite of
the baffling complexity of the world, certain regularities in the events could be
discovered.”
Wigner claims that the great triumphs of science, especially physics, have come about because
of our capacity to isolate certain phenomena from the contexts in which we initially encounter
them, manipulate them in their isolated states (which may be purely conceptual or
“experimental preparations”), and then recognize other contexts in which they (or something
similar) occur and which are sufficiently simple that we can apply what we’ve learned about
them in isolation to generate a nontrivial, confirmable prediction about what is happening in
that particular zone of our “real” world. Such a process gives us very little purchase on most
phenomena in most contexts, characterized as these are by Wigner’s “baffling complexity”.
Wigner’s essay attempts to identify some minimal conditions where we can hope for
Schrodinger’s miracle: that is, for phenomena-context pairs about which we might hope to
predict interesting events that haven’t yet occurred. Such phenomena-context pairs turn out
to be numerous enough to help us accomplish some surprising things – like build an atomic
bomb, discover and produce an effective antibiotic, or send a rocket to the moon. They don’t
seem to have much to do with the phenomena and contexts in which the future of the
Innovation Society, “free market capitalism” and “representative democracy” will play out in
the next half-century or so.
At least to those with the appropriate technical qualifications and endowed with sufficient societal resources…
Perhaps surrounded with neatly quantifiable probabilistic boundaries…
5
At this point, if you are sufficiently skeptical and not too deeply committed to the Innovation Society and its ideology,
you might wonder whether anyone really subscribes to the beliefs described in this paragraph. If so, pick up your daily
newspaper and read the articles pertaining to the current dilemma about sovereign debt and the problem of the “spread”.
With high probability, you will find a columnist or an interview with a prestigious academic economist (maybe even a
Nobel Prize winner!) that will lay out in detail the implications of the various policy options currently under
consideration. Reading further, you will also certainly find the latest estimates for the “expected” change in Eurozone
GNPs over the next year or so. And these will all be presented as future “facts”, contingent of course on which policy
options Draghi, Monti, Merkel and company decide to implement. Elsewhere in your newspaper, you might encounter
an article that tells you how much the average temperature will rise over the next twenty years – or inform you of a
recent Swedish study according to which, because of population increase and limits on the availability of water, “we”
will all be vegetarians by 2050.
6
In his brilliant 1960 essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”.
3
4
Niels Bohr, another great 20th century physicist, is reported to have said, “It is exceedingly
difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future.” This remark is often passed off as
a (rather lame) joke – in fact, it is sometimes attributed to the master of malapropism Yogi
Berra or the humorist Mark Twain: after all, what else IS there to predict, if not the future?
However, Bohr’s remark is actually quite profound, playing on multiple meanings of the
concept of “the future.” He is said to have made his remark in response to a question raised
after a lecture he delivered on quantum physics: “What do you predict the influence Quantum
Physics will have on the world in the future?” On one level, Bohr’s jokes with the fact that
according to quantum physics, we can’t know the present state of the world with certainty –
in that sense, we are unable to “predict” the present, much less the future! The real force of
Bohr’s joke lies at a deeper level. An idea like quantum physics is likely to change many
aspects of our society and culture, from making possible the development of new kinds of
artifacts that before weren’t even conceivable,7 to changing the way we see the world and our
place in it.8 So the kind of prediction required to answer the question isn’t about whether
Event A will happen at Time T. Instead, it involves speculations about the kinds of entities that
will inhabit the “world of the future”, and what kinds of categories of description and value we
will bring to bear to interpret them, with the clear understanding that those entities and
categories do NOT currently exist, but will be constructed by human beings interacting with
one another, with their interactions mediated by entities and categories currently available9
and those to which these interactions successively give rise. How can we “predict” what we
can’t even currently describe? One can imagine that the Bohr’s response is playing on the
distinction between THIS idea of “future” (Future A) – a world whose very ontology, its
entities and the categories its observers use to describe and value it, is currently under
construction – and the notion of “future” described in terms of events that can be completely
described at time 0, which either will or will not happen at time T (Future B): it is obvious that
Future A is particularly difficult to predict – no matter how hard it might seem to construct a
model that captures the relevant system dynamics and provides a (deterministic or
probabilistic) prediction of the Future B type!
When we talk about a socially sustainable future, we are surely in the domain of a world
characterized by social arrangements that don’t currently exist – and dominant values that
are at the least very difficult for us to imagine.10 So if we try to envision such a future, we are
not likely to be able to do so through a modality that requires us to specify everything –
entities and their interaction modalities, and the dynamic that determines how entities and
their properties change through interaction – in advance. But is there such a thing as a
predictive model that DOESN’T require this?
These considerations surely do not mean that there is no role for models in envisioning a
socially sustainable future: we should not make the mistake of throwing out a very robust
baby with its bath water. But we should at least raise as a question for discussion just what
such a role can, and ought to, be!
2. Narratives as a bridge between past and future
Narrative is the linguistic form we use to communicate human experience and render it
meaningful to one another and to ourselves. A narrative relates a series of events with, as
Aristotle pointed out, a beginning, middle, and an end. More specifically, a narrative consists
As in fact it did – eventually ushering in the age of semiconductors, transistors and the ICT revolution
Ditto!
9
Plus of course the new ideas that constitute the current meaning of Quantum Physics
10
Even if we could put labels on them, now it would hard to see how they could ever become dominant; and then we
would have to wonder whether in the process of becoming dominant, they would become different than whatever we
mean now by the label we’d decided to use for them!
7
8
of a cast of characters, a plot that structures the events temporally, and a denouement in
which the fortunes and even identities of some of the characters change from what they were
at the story’s beginning. The characters’ identities can be crudely but usefully summarized as
“what they do and how they do it”. Plot development consists of the characters acting out
their identities in contexts that are determined by their previous actions, the actions of the
other characters, and events from the world outside – including coincidences and
catastrophes (wars, market crashes, floods…) that the narrator and listener regard as normal,
that is consistent with some implicitly agreed-upon natural or social “laws”, and beyond the
control of the story’s characters.
Narratives do not just relate, they explain. The key to causality in narratives, the
explanatory heart of a story, is character identity. A character’s actions make sense to the
listener because given who the character is and the situation in which she finds herself, no
other actions seem as credible. Of course, the listener learns about characters’ identities
through their narrated actions, so there is a circularity here, which we can resolve through
two considerations. First, the listener’s realization that a new action has in fact been
determined by the actor’s identity is retrospective, in the sense that the attribution of actor
identity to which the action must cohere is determined after the listener knows about the
action. Second, the listener has an implicit set of allowable transformations of identity, and if
the narrated action cannot be successfully integrated with a reinterpretation of character
identity by allowable transformations of the listener’s attributions of character identities, the
narrative fails, at least for that listener. So for a narrative to work,
 narrators must be able to present their stories as a succession of events in which
their characters act and interact;
 the context of these events must make sense in terms of what actors have done in
previous events and with respect to some natural or social “laws” that the narrator
shares with his listeners; and
 within these events, each character’s actions must be interpretable as a
consequence of her identity, as determined by the listener from what he has
learned about the character from the narrator – who in turn must respect his
listeners’ ideas about how identities, and hence attributions about identity, may
change over time.
We subsume these three aspects of successful narrative under the rubric narrative logic.
We seem to be asking a lot from a storyteller: to construct shared laws of physics and
society, as well as psychological theories about how identities change, is clearly too much to
do while relating a sequence of events. In fact, the storyteller couldn’t possibly do all that
work in real time; the work is accomplished, off-line, by a higher-level entity, which we can
call a narrative community. Narratives can only work within particular narrative
communities, groups of people who already share a set of narrative structures. A narrative
structure is a kind of template for narratives. It consists of a set of character types, abstract
descriptions of identities; plot elements, which consist of a set of allowable transformations
for character identity, as well as the physical and social laws that determine how contexts
may change outside of the characters’ control and what kinds of coincidences are “normal”;
and a skeletal denouement, in which the character types collect their “just deserts” – that is,
rises or falls in fortune, and the achievement of certain kinds of merited relationships with
other character types. Particular narratives instantiate one of these narrative structures, and
when narrators and listeners are from the same narrative community, the stories can be told
in such a way that all recognize early on just which narrative structure serves as their
common referent. Narrative structures are cultural facts of narrative communities. They
provide narrative with its rules of syntax. Like language’s syntax, these rules aren’t learned as
explicit rules, but are abducted from the many stories instantiating them that circulate in the
narrative community, to which members of the community begin listening as infants and
continue listening, and then telling, throughout their lives.
Within a narrative community, narrative logic implies a plot development that is coherent
with rules for character and action from one of the community’s available narrative
structures. We have seen that narrative structures specify abstract forms for a story’s
“beginning”, in terms of the set of character types whose interactions generate the story’s plot,
and its “end”, the denouement – but leave the “middle” open to many possible pathways,
constrained just by the rules of allowable transformation. Thus Aristotle’s three narrative
categories have causal, not merely sequential, relations among them, which are by no means
of equal importance: the “middle” is the bridge that connects the “beginning” to the “end”, but
to a large extent the “end” is already immanent in the “beginning”. That is, denouement and
characters are linked by narrative logic, which, as we have said, is a logic of causality by
character, mediated through context: we know that Oedipus’ hubris will inevitably bring
about his fall; that a Jane Austen heroine, separated as she is by social distance and
misunderstanding from the hero she loves, will eventually find happiness in his arms; that the
saintly martyr will receive her final reward in the other world, after undergoing horrible
tribulations in this one. Even though we can foresee in its broad outlines what the
denouement of the story will be, once we have recognized the type of narrative structure to
which it belongs, the story itself can be full of surprises, maintaining our breathless interest
all the way to the end. This is the most important attribute of the narrative form: it combines
teleology and indeterminism, leading the listener on a journey through time with a recognized
and fitting destination, without providing a detailed route map of all the excitement and
complications to be encountered along the way.
Precisely because of the links they construct between past and future, narratives can be
constitutive of experience itself – for individuals, as well as entire narrative communities, be
they families, companies, religions or nations.11 Through the process of narrative embedding,
narrative logic generates action – and thus constructs the future from the stories its
participants are telling themselves and each other. In narrative embedding, actors’ current
context are framed in terms of one of the narrative structures of their narrative community,
instantiated in remembered narratives from the actors’ own experiences or learned from
memory artifacts like books, cinema, and newspapers. The process picks out a cast of
characters from the entities in the actors’ world including the actors themselves, builds up a
plot that interprets prior events involving these characters consistently with the structure’s
allowable transformations, and associates a denouement that, in particular, foretells whether
the actors come out well “in the end.”12
Through narrative embedding, actor-narrators make sense of context, find themselves in
mid-story, and proceed to act out their assigned roles. As the plot rolls on, actor-narrators
may be surprised occasionally by what the other characters do. They understand, however, as
does any novel reader, that their current attributions of identity to the other characters must
have been incomplete. They can then modify these attributions to account for the new plottwist, perhaps drawing upon other, previously un-narrativized but remembered past events,
as long as they do not violate the allowable transformations of the embedding narrative
structure. With respect to their own roles, actor-narrators have a privileged position. Their
own actions are very unlikely to surprise them with new revelations about their own identity.
Thus, their actions tend to be comprehensible in terms of the ongoing plot they are following
11
Or the Innovation Society, which has its repertoire of narrative structures (for example: the Entrepreneur Who
Changes the World through Technology, instantiated, for example, in the Steve Jobs story, which has been repeated
endlessly in the months since his death)
12
Clearly, the process of narrative embedding is rarely conscious, nor even, necessarily, are the narratives that it
produces.
and their own self-attribution of identity. As a result, actor-narrators enact the story they tell
themselves is happening. In this way, as long as the story continues to make narrative sense,
its telling-in-action sweeps the actor-narrator along with it. Their actions, we can say, are
generated by narrative logic.
Acting thus, actor-narrators are constantly looking backwards, reinterpreting everything
that is happening in their extended present, in terms of the emerging story that they tell
themselves to account for what is going on. Their own actions follow on and extend this
continual reinterpretation, and as long as the story continues to make sense, they need not
consider exactly where they are going – the denouement of their story takes care of that – so
much as where they have just been. They are, in this sense, backing into the future.
Shared narrative structures within a narrative community are a powerful tool for achieving
coordinated action, which can make it possible for social actors to work together to construct
a future that they jointly regard as desirable – a judgment in part developed through
familiarity with instantiations of the narrative structures that they’ve heard told and retold.
Of course, there are no guarantees that the allowable transformations of a guiding narrative
structure correspond to the actual dynamics of the context in which the social actors who are
enacting an instantiation of the structure interact. The current situation in Europe, in which
our political and business leaders – supported by a large segment of the general public – enact
a story that will “save Europe” through policies that somehow favour both fiscal rigor and
innovation-led economic growth, may well be a case in point.
For many in the Innovation Society, narrative structures that feature as key characters
creative entrepreneurs satisfying the needs and desires of a society of consumers through
competition in efficient markets are so powerful that they seem to provide the only possible
pathway to a desirable future: so much so that even the world of so-called social innovation
constructs itself around such stories, flying in the face of much of what we think we
understand about the unpredictability of social transformations induced by innovation
cascades and the conditions under which these cascades increase in scale. And if it is true that
the Innovation Society as presently constituted is a Ponzi scheme – is it likely that trying to
enact its narratives for change, even if the word “social”13 is inserted in the description of
allowable projects, could possibly lead to a socially sustainable future?
Wouldn’t it be better to develop NEW narrative structures of social change to act upon,
which incorporate character types and allowable transformations that are based on a more
realistic and systemic account of the dynamics of innovation cascades – and lead to
denouements that are characterized by their social sustainability? Might we in INSITE help to
provide such narrative structures, based upon our understandings of the dynamics of social
change in the Innovation Society, as well as in other societies, in other epochs, operating in
different institutional contexts, oriented by different sets of values?
3. Art as (change) agent
Visions of the future from models and narratives are highly constrained by the logics that
govern these two modalities. For models, the logic is deductive. The modeller commits to an
ontology that specifies kinds of entities, interaction modalities and dynamic, introduces some
set of initial conditions for the variables determined by the ontology – and the state of the
modelled system at any future time can be derived deductively.14 Thus, in a very strong
sense, the future a model predicts is immanent in the knowledge gained from past experience
that the modeller introduces in the present, at the moment of model specification and the
setting of initial conditions. As we’ve seen, narrative logic also implies a form of immanence –
“On their ends and means”, to quote one currently favoured definition of social innovation…
Obviously, the system may be deterministic or probabilistic, and the derivation may be carried out in closed-form or
via simulation.
13
14
available narrative structures link denouement with character identity. Unlike deductive
logic, though, the coherence that narrative logic imposes between past and future is
retrospective, not prospective – it is revealed only through successive interpretation of
character identity in the light of what events reveal. This retrospective coherence provides a
greater opportunity to envision a future that is open to the emergence of new kinds of
entities, relations, categories and values – without abandoning the constraint imposed by a
denouement characterized by “just deserts.” That is, novelty is welcome, even expected – as
long as it can be assimilated into an interpretative framework that satisfies the requirements
of narrative logic. Which implies that the new entities, relations, categories and values will
have been assimilated into the attributions of character identity and their implications for
“just deserts” that prevailed at the beginning of the narrative.
So how can we ever get break free of the constraints of logic, deductive or narrative, to gain
a glimpse of something “really” new, which can provide a vision, obviously partial, probably
ambiguous, perhaps fleeting – of some aspect of the future that can provide a basis for a hope
in social sustainability, and which can help guide us and other social actors to actions that
might realize a world in which the vision can take form? Here we enter the domain of art.
Artists make artifacts, which can be material, informational or performative. In the
Innovation Society, art works are often indistinguishable from any other innovation,15 except
that they are in general one-of-a-kind – designed primarily to satisfy the tastes of some set of
consumers/collectors, with their success determined by how much they fetch in the market.
As a result, “art” gets reduced to whatever is sold in the “art market”, with its constellation of
dealers, critics, publicists, museums, art fairs and hype. Obviously, all this has nothing
whatever to do with envisioning the future (except the short-term future of the art market!).
But this is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is by no means relevant even now, never
mind over the last millennia, to the role that art plays in culture and society.
Alfred Gell argues in his stimulating book Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory of
Art, that what distinguishes the artifacts that he classifies as art are those that are endowed by
their creators with agency. Art works, he claims, act directly upon social actors, to change
they way these actors think, feel and act with respect to themselves and the world they
inhabit. As such, they are not merely tools, like hammers or computers, which social actors
use to transform their world; rather they act to change the kinds of transformations these
actors desire to achieve. While the artist may have intentions about just which changes her
work will effect on which social actors, the interactions between art work and others are
really out of her hands. In this sense, the art work really exercises agency of its own – agency
that might, like certain abstract designs on African shields, strike fear into the hearts of
opposing warriors; or, like Counter-reformation art, provide new meanings to feelings of
spiritual ecstasy – or, like Beethoven’s music, to the relation of individual and collectivity; or
the modernist utopian social visions of Kandinsky, Mondrian or Malevich. These artists were
explorers, glimpsing new possibilities for human feelings, actions and relationships, and their
art works were sign-posts pointing others in the directions these possibilities opened up. As
societies and cultures come to occupy the new zones of agent-artifact space, the agency of
particular works of art can change – sometimes lost entirely, sometimes taking on new
meaning in new kinds of interactions, having nothing to do with the intention of the artists
who created them.
Some artists are already hard at work trying to move beyond the Innovation Society
towards social sustainability. Can INSITE identify some of their work and interpret it in ways
that can integrate their visions with the “coherent” modalities of narrative and models to
envision a socially sustainable society? And can we try to mobilize the agency embodied in
15
A word that in the Innovation Society is generally construed to mean “new (kind of ) artifact.”
these works of art to interact with social actors in the quest to construct a socially sustainable
society – before it is too late?