In 1999 I invented the New Society for Universal Harmony (http://thenewsociety.org) and ever since I’ve used the lens of history—and humor—to explore utopian longings, dystopic aftermaths, and the sciences and technologies that inform them. I work with diverse media in all of my projects, incorporating performance, photography, film/video, multi-screen projection, installation and fiction writing. Recently my explorations have focused on ecology, on cultural myths, and on the unstable boundaries between humans and animals. I create narratives around these various forms of life. (Please scroll down and click to page 2 for all projects dating before 2014. )
My utopia page has information about New York politics, activism, and the websites of some utopian friends. I teach in the MFA Fine Arts Program at Parsons The New School For Design. Visit www.lenoremalen.com for further info and archives. View CV Lenore Malen 2017
“Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,” {Margaret} said. “This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won’t be a movement, because it will rest upon the earth. E.M. Foster Howards End (1910)
VIEW FROM MY WINDOW — NOHO, NY
These few words about the future of our planet are taken from the introduction to a panel I organized at the Rubin Museum annex in 2018.
How to Live?
If there’s one thing I want to say it’s this: We mustn’t blame ourselves as individuals for the state we’re in. We’re constantly admonished or told to live less wastefully, less materially, to live differently and this is precisely what the speakers here are doing. It’s critical. It has enormous ramifications. and the speakers here are at the forefront of this. And many people would be very happy to join in a collective effort to change their lifestyle, even radically.
In the past when things got dicey people turned to spiritual traditions, but many of us have not been raised that way — though these traditions are always alive. Today we talk a lot about striking a balance between detachment and radical engagement. It’s what you need to do when you’re in the forefront of social action.
But let’s not forget whose been driving the train ever since the 1980s when the reality of climate change was first introduced into the US Senate. On June 23 l988 climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute For Space Studies James Hanson told the senate that greenhouse gases had been dectected and were/are changing our climate. 30 years, why on earth haven’t we fixed this?
I just read an interesting small book by French /philosophyer/anthropologist/ sociologist Bruno Latour. It jived with a lot of what I’ve been thinking. I want to put out some of his ideas intermingled with my own. (There are other voices saying much the same thing., T.J. Demos comes to mind.)
The public he says does not fully realize that the issue of climate change denial organizes all politics at the present time.
Latour suggests with a kind of ferocious lucidity that all politics in the West, he states have been organized around the denial of climate change and that the narrative of climate change denial, the systematic effort to deny it’s existence began around the late l980s and he says it that was in lockstep with l990s financial deregulation. He sees deregulation, capital re-appropriation, and climate denial as a single historic situation.
Think for example, of Exxon Mobil in the l990s knowing fully about climate change but massively investing in the frenetic extraction of oil. People in power— in finance, in business, in politics, have heard these warning loud and clear have continued to hear them for very long time.
Whether you believe that this is correlation or causality, regardless, you can’t understand the politics of the last 50 years unless you put climate change and its denial front and center. Latour speaking as a European says that the “ruling classes” stopped purporting to lead and instead began to shelter themselves from the world, from the random hazards of existence. I might put it this way in the west the utopian dream and near belief that all of humanity could benefit materially from industrialization and education and globalization ended during that period for these certain groups. (But it’s also paradoxical because today there is less starvation world wide than before. That’s a different panel.)
Latour talks about the casual complicity of republicans in our congress. Think of their support for climate deniers. And while far fetched could it be that Trump’s urgency to build that wall is also insurance against future migrations during a much warmer period when everyonewill be migrating north. Think, Think we must says Donna Harraway talking about Hannah Arendt and the thoughtlessness of Eichman but in the context of climate change. Now the stakes are higher, even higher if that’s possible.
December 12, 2015, the Paris climate agreement was signed but no one could agree to its terms. On July 1 2017 Trump announced that he would cease all participation in the 2015 Paris agreement because it would undermine the US economy.
Today we are all in migration All of us human and non human animals, find ourselves deprived of land. Nature has become territory. There is no earth capable of sustaining the great acceleration that began after WWII. That’s the bad news.
We need to find a new way, but maybe we can still at the brink. Now there are small signs of something new in Congress. On February 7 2018 we saw the beginning of the Green New Deal, a package of climate change and socioeconomic initiatives. O emissions by 2030, a request for proposals. It’s something, It changes daily, we know seems to be changing almost daily and taking a back seat to this National Emergency we have here. I haven’t been closely following the Ocasio-Cortez — Pelosi power issue but the initiative will survive.
Getting back for a moment to Latour ever the skeptic Latour now decries modernization and globalization and he attempts to dismantle them as ideas. They have failed us, he says. Everything global is very far away, an abstraction, external to the social world, indifferent to human beings. In contrast Latour proposes the term terrestrial, which means the local, the earthbound, but without it’s perjorative, class driven, seperativist connotations.
But actually it’s not so far from Brexit and the irony would not be lost to him. But also think of the defeat of Amazon in Queens.
It’s really, really interesting to me how all this dovetails with recent ideas put forth by Sylvia Federico in her book Reenchanting toe World” Feminism and The Politis of the Commons and with Donna Harraway’s new epoch the Cthulucene, beyond the anthropocene, the capitalocene, Making Kin in the Chthulucene and even Jane Bennett, or so it seems to me. http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene and many more.
More than an intellectual intervention or lip service it may be the beginning of a tidal wave of activism that coming to the West.