To doubt, to question, to say ‘enough’
An emergent lexicon for critical activism
This blog is part of the Reimagining Economics Possibilities series. This series accompanies the Neighbourhood Doughnut portfolio of work in which CIVIC SQUARE, along with many neighbours, researchers, partners and visionaries have, since 2019, been exploring large and small scale ways to reimagine economic possibilities.
The series brings together 15 commissioned works by visionaries who are reimagining economic possibility from a number of different angles. We are deeply passionate about Doughnut Economics and recognise the wealth of possibilities it unlocks, as well as its limitations. As Kate Raworth has said, quoting British statistician George E. P. Box, “all frameworks are wrong, but some are useful.” Therefore, we want to be able to stretch as far and wide as the Doughnut Economics Action Lab invites us to, seeing it as a platform to organise, whilst also encompassing a plurality of bold visions.
In this contribution, futurist and filmmaker ANAB JAIN introduces us to the practice of “critical activism”. They propose that ambiguity and doubt are central to creating equitable and regenerative worlds. Anab Jain is the founder of Superflux, a design and film studio exploring uncertainties around our shared futures.
“I dream of just, equitable and regenerative worlds. My belief is that many others want the same. It is also my hypothesis that hope is not a naive affair; persisting in hope is part of our active resistance.”
O eastern light, awaken
Those who have slept!
The darkness will be broken,
The promise kept.
It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.
I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made two hundred years ago in this city — the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
I dream of just, equitable and regenerative worlds. My belief is that many others want the same. It is also my hypothesis that hope is not a naive affair; persisting in hope is part of our active resistance. This is not to say despair or apathy are irrational responses to the news I read in the paper these days, amidst the susurrus of winter coats brushing against one another on the underground carriage. The lack of plural, functional, compelling and active vision(s) in the United Kingdom (actually England, where I currently live) is palpable. The unfolding polycrisis of economic, political and social proportions make it exceedingly evident that liberal institutions are teetering on the brink of collapse, lacking the imagination, conviction and will for change.
“For those in power, could imagination be dangerous? Could a questioning public be problematic? Could alternate vocabularies and lexicons that challenge the status quo be unwanted?”
Sifting through the latest news on the cost of living crisis in the UK, I am inundated with words like ‘austerity’ (a quarter of Brits are in the dark about what austerity is, according to a YouGov poll in 2020), ‘efficiencies’, ‘fiscal hole’, ‘triple lock’. These words form a world of sorts, through their lexicon of firm abstractions and their confidence in preserving the privilege of knowing to some and not others. Folded into these words is the subtle desire to limit the imagination of the wider public. From a very young age, school education, workplaces, and institutions instil in us a preference for answers over questions, solutions over doubt. If you ask too many questions, you may begin to question the system. For those in power, could imagination be dangerous? Could a questioning public be problematic? Could alternate vocabularies and lexicons that challenge the status quo be unwanted?
This intentionally alienating language of abstract power does little to encompass our collective experience. On the contrary, it deepens the pain of those actually living inside these words. As Ursula K Le Guin has said in an interview:
“The odd twist [with our culture] is that we become so enamoured of our language and its ability to describe the world that we create a false and irresponsible separation. We use language as a device for distancing. Somebody who is genuinely living in their ecosystem wouldn’t have a word for it. They’d just call it the world.”
This has also been explored by the critical ecologist scholar Murray Bookchin in The Ecology of Freedom, where he says “we live so completely immersed in our present that it absorbs all our sensibilities and hence our very capacity to think of alternate social forms”. Bookchin is, in a way, describing the state of capitalist modernity; the omnipresent, self-professing realism of market forces, that determines us as winners and losers according to principles of competition and extraction. Often, when we think of ‘alternate social forms’ the word that comes up is ‘utopia’, in the same way the word ‘dystopia’ is commonly used to describe how the global experimentation with free-market liberalism has turned sour. Le Guin explored a different terrain in her work; rather than these blueprints, the ‘wouldn’t-it-be-great-if’ and the ‘utopia-gone-wrong’, she wanted to explore ambiguity.
“Whilst writing from inside capitalist modernity, I want to focus on that which lives on in the cracks of it, grows out of it organically, sprouting and entangling. I want to look forward, into the ruins of the Anthropocene, its uneven landscape, its many textures and viscosities, its pluralities and multiplicities.”
In the aforementioned interview, Le Guin also touches upon the concept of ‘rebearing’ rather than ‘rebirthing’, in the context of restructuring language so as to restructure society. I take it to mean the process of taking up familiar meanings and, rather than treating them with definite destinations, approaching the journey of meaning with the responsibility of rebearing it. We are not inventing anew; we are looking at what already is as if it were new, connecting with rather than producing. As such, whilst writing from inside capitalist modernity, I want to focus on that which lives on in the cracks of it, grows out of it organically, sprouting and entangling. I want to look forward, into the ruins of the Anthropocene, its uneven landscape, its many textures and viscosities, its pluralities and multiplicities.
In some ways, to look forward is to begin breaching the false and irresponsible distance in language (of which Le Guin speaks). To repair the connective tissue of this rift that forbids new visions to emerge. The reason I started off with the quote from Le Guin is because I believe that to nourish the fragile forms of connectivity, solidarity and togetherness, to form the soil of politics of care, we must dig beneath the surface of what we find ourselves taking for granted.
There are echoes of the anarchist writer Peter Kropotkin in Le Guin’s writing. For him it was “not love and not even sympathy upon which society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at that stage of an instinct — of human solidarity”. This instinct springs out of an understanding of the various forms of oppression, those based on gender, sexuality, race, age and ability to name a few. In the political tradition of Zapatismo, this instinct is described as intuition; a sense of dignity felt in the chest that compels an ‘enough’ when faced with the injustice of the suffering of others (Global Social Theory). A world of mutual aid, as such, is built on the sediments of our histories and presents; it is a world of precarious flourishing, where unexpected alliances emerge from the debris of what has passed (Anna Tsing).
Critical activism
These alliances have something in common; the desire to unbuild walls (Le Guin). They compound a world that is fighting its way through the old order. How might we aid such alliances? I propose a humble guide-in-the-making, a lexicon for critical activism.
This emergent, in-progress, lexicon for critical activism, foregrounds the idea that many worlds can exist, and do exist with solidarity, within one world. There is an emergent mycelium of thought and action that is already composting old ideas and dreaming new worlds; this ‘patchy’ Anthropocene, as Tsing writes, is swarming with possibility. As such, I am proposing nothing new. Rather, I want to suggest a lens that many of you are already very familiar with, and that has already been put into practice in your work, which inspires me all the time.
What I wish to discuss legitimises this collective shift in our shared vocabulary — bringing these concepts into textbooks and curricula, into board-meetings and PowerPoint presentations. This lexicon does not undertake the task of “explaining our world to others, but multiplying our worlds”, as Viveiros de Castro beautifully puts it. Critical activism challenges the desire for uniformity and order that expressed itself in colonial rhetoric as the “civilising mission”. As James C. Scott states:
“A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a language, the process is not particularly egalitarian. Linguists, grammarians, and educators, some of them backed by the power of the state, weigh in heavily. But the process is not particularly amenable to a dictatorship, either. Despite the efforts toward “central planning,” language (especially its everyday spoken form) stubbornly tends to go on its own rich, multivalent, colorful way”
This quote points to an unbreakable thread that runs throughout capitalist modernity, despite attempts to suppress it; the subversive plurality and ambiguity of everyday spoken language.
For the purpose of this essay, I borrow from historian Paul Kennedy’s definition of capitalist modernity; an unrestrained form of capitalism, “further disengaged from the needs of ordinary citizens and workers than anything we have known since the nineteenth century”. He also describes it as a “predatory form […] generating ever-widening income and wealth inequalities that endanger the long term future of capitalism itself as well as political stability”. Finding myself within such a system, I cannot claim to be directly juxtaposed to it; I write from within it. For this exact reason, I embrace doubt.
“Critical activism removes the unnecessary focus on being right and knowing everything towards nurturing and embracing doubt, being okay with not knowing all the answers, being okay when others say they don’t know.”
In this capitalist modernity, we have been taught that dogma, certainty, eradicating doubt and defining solutions is a form of power. Yet isn’t ‘doubt’ a vague feeling inside oneself, that ought to be listened to? Isn’t it exactly that doubt that feeds into intuition, that can grow into the full bloom of enough? In order to know it, we must honour this doubt in our vocabulary. To quote Le Guin, this will aid us in imagining a future “where any assumption can be tested and any rule rewritten — including the rules of who’s on top, and what gender means, and who gets to be free”. To honour the living and the dead, this nascent, and here I stress again, in-progress lexicon for critical activism works as an archive of the present. It is not suspended in stasis but always living and breathing with the complexities of our everyday life. Working with it, we can hope to not only act differently, have different goals, targets, policies and decisions, but the very fabric of institutions will change; from education to finance to policy, and beyond.
The lexicon for critical activism isn’t only a shift in language; it is a change in pace, in purpose and in practice. Rather than an uncompromising dogma that is unable by design to account for its own errors, the critical lexicon moves us towards guiding principles that allow us to admit when we have gone off course in unknown waters, or familiar ones. It moves us away from a desire for certainty, that can blind us to circumstances that bring us pain at the cost of familiarity, towards contingent possibilities where our pain will be a timely guide rather than a dysfunctional home. Critical activism removes the unnecessary focus of being right and knowing everything, towards nurturing and embracing doubt. Being okay with not knowing all the answers. Being okay when others say they don’t know.
When we leave behind the logic of maximising value and its need for answers and solutions, possibilities emerge. In our own work at Superflux, we have explored these possibilities first and foremost through a focus on designing questions. As Vinciane Despret says “Attending to how we inquire matters as much as to the responses we elicit.” Practising sitting with questions moves us towards a framework that helps us imagine what it might be to flourish, as honesty ignites amid precarity, uncertainty, and instability.
“Myths are atemporal; they are as old as they are new, they have been around forever and are yet to come. They help us move past ideas of ‘new futures’ to a deeper understanding of our place in history, embedded in those countless sedimentary layers of our landscapes.”
From these frameworks, Superflux have built projects around speculative futures in conversations and collaborations with multiple different stakeholders. For our short film The Intersection, we spent time not only deep in ethnographic and foresight research, co-imagining with a group of advocates with lived experiences in activism, mutual aid and community support to represent voices that are usually excluded from such processes, including Nialah Edari, co-founder of Freedom March NYC.
In the film, society has been brought to its knees by the collision of extractive technologies, the polarising effects of dogmatism and the consequent political fragmentation fuelled by misinformation. From this deeply troubling and familiar present, we saw the emergence of new, cooperative social networks, where the tech-debris of the past have been repurposed to serve the needs of the community rather than used as a tool for extraction of resources. The outcome was a vision of alternate futures where different movements, technologies, governance and relationships celebrate cooperation and care.
InThe Intersection, we generate a series of guiding principles in this emergent world that draw on the lexicon for critical activism. Firstly, many interdependent, multidimensional worlds coexist at once. This is to say that the world is plural; it is inclusive of different voices in dialogue, rather than opposition or competition. As such, it is founded on care for one another, for all beings and the planet, and this care holds us together. This world sees diversity in perspectives as a strength, and actively welcomes divergent views to tackle common goals. Technologies within this world are non-extractive and create a greater connection to-and-with the communities they serve.
Through the commoning of culture, discourses and data, this world heals the rift of extreme inequality. Power is distributed. Finally, kinship with the land is recognised, and systems begin to work within their ecological limits.
With works such as Refuge for Resurgence and Invocation for Hope, we wanted to further explore this intimate relationship with nature. If The Intersection gestured towards a process of a “reharmonization of nature and humanity through a reharmonization of human with human” (Bookchin), these two projects explored its reverse — how through the reharmonisation of nature and humanity, we may find more equitable forms of human connection, more solidarity and more care. By forming our questions around a more-than-human politics and thinking along the lines of ecological resurgence, we have wandered into emergent mythologies. As mythologist Martin Shaw writes:
“Myth, in the way I am thinking about it, is an echo-location arising from the Earth itself. — We, with our multitasking modernity, have broken the code that holds us together. How can we reconnect with the stories awaiting us, those stories that watched us and are awaiting our return?”
If we think of these mythologies as echo-locations, it can help us to understand the value of pausing to listen, the value of not only listening but also paying mind to the vibrations of the echo, listening with our entire bodies.
In our installation Invocation for Hope we invited the audience to do exactly this. Re-enacting the deforestation and the creation of monocultures on many swathes of land across the world, a meticulous grid of the charred skeletons of black pines greets the audience upon entry. Amongst them, is the desolate silence of a millennia of communal bonds broken in just a few centuries of human greed. Moving further into the forest, however, a different sound emerges. In the centre of the grid is a resurgent forest, whispering of a flourishing of mythic proportions, spurring forth with a life that brings fertility back into the earth, an embrace of hope in interdependence.
Ecological resurgence is thus mutually inclusive with these mythologies. Myths are atemporal; they are as old as they are new, they have been around forever and are yet to come. They help us move past ideas of ‘new futures’ to a deeper understanding of our place in history, embedded in those countless sedimentary layers of our landscapes. They are a way of narrating the plurality of voices and the interdependence of multidimensional worlds that ecological resurgence necessarily encompasses.
“Critical activism is activating our capacities for questioning, that in turn ignites in us the knowledge that things don’t have to be the way they always have been.”
Our installation work Refuge for Resurgence continued drawing on mythic folklore to imagine a world where we could see ourselves not in terms of individualistic hero-myths, but as one amongst many, assemblages in a new kind of tentacular, multi-kind, multi-species world. In Refuge for Resurgence, we built a multi-species banquet, where everything from vermin to moss have an equal seat at the table, and the hand-crafted utensils and plates that adorn the table speak of a conscious relationship between the living things that have come together at this banquet.
Moving away from the lexicon of capitalist modernity toward critical activism will help to redefine the scope of our action. Leaning into fragility, doubt and vulnerability reveals to us that the precarious and smallest of things do matter. It reveals to us that things are held together more by contingencies than by necessities, more by the arbitrary than by the obvious, more by complex but transitory historical contingency than by inevitable anthropological constraints; from this realisation our optimism abounds.
Knowing our place in history, and within the grand anthropocentric narrative of the world can have an empowering effect. It can demonstrate that what appears embedded and inaccessible is actually nascent, malleable and within the range of work we can do to and for ourselves. Critical activism is activating our capacities for questioning, that in turn ignites in us the knowledge that things don’t have to be the way they always have been. Such knowledge is already in our intuition, our instincts, our spirit and to approach it with criticality — to come to it with empty hands — (and to quote Le Guin one final time) — we will seek to ask questions rather than come up with answers.
I will leave you with a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Huge thanks to Hanna Sarsa for being my sparring partner in shaping this essay, and to her and Isabelle Bucklow for their brilliant editorial and proofreading support. A big nod of gratitude to Jon Ardern for the countless years of shared conversations that underpin our thinking and practice, and to all my colleagues at Superflux. I originally presented these ideas as a talk for the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh in April 2022.
Reimagining Economics Possibilities also builds upon CIVIC SQUARE’s Department of Dreams portfolio of work, a site to imagine bold new futures that weave together the dreams of many.
Whilst understanding, investing, and unpacking the dark matter of large scale system change, we have learned quite deeply through the practice, inspirational movements, and from imagineers and pioneers that came before us that we must also invest in the dream matter — the artists, writers, designers, dreamers and creative visionaries — those who dare to dream up bold new futures for humanity, and have the capacity to stretch our imaginations further than we ever thought possible.
Thinkers, doers and makers dreaming beyond our existing systems have played, are playing and will continue to play a central role in crafting collective visions that transcend our current reality, and radically illuminate the responsibilities we hold to future generations. This is particularly driven by practices of imagination and identity, and, when woven together with dark matter findings and interventions, has the power to create a supernovae of transformation; the thinking, relating and behaving differently required to usher in a new reality that becomes irresistible, that we can all build and craft together.
Find out more by exploring the following materials from Department of Dreams 2020–2021:
Initial Dept of Dreams Blog — May 2020
Watch Back Re_ Fest Talks — June 2020
Dream Library Launch — November 2021
The Matter of Dreams: 2020–2021 — December 2021
