There are many ways of understanding and interpreting life. One, rather academic, way is to regard lived life as social phenomena; something we do together; something that unfolds between us as we take part in various social practices. A social ontology allows us to focus on what we do, what is conventional, what is normal, what is mundane, and how all of this unfolds as part of the social. It also allows us to acknowledge that social practices only exist as long as they are performed, as long as they are meaningful, and as long as people participate in them. With this, the other side of the coin also exists; performance can stop, meaningful things can become nonsensical. If we listen to Wittgenstein, meaning, meaningfulness and normativity comes to be through our language, so meaning manifest its way through the way we use language. Meaning becomes when we share words, narratives, pictures, symbols, in particular ways. Meaning is essential to social practices. Social practices are essential to the carrying out of social life, we can assume. If social life has to change; if we have to consume differently, if we have to value things, concepts, ideas and beings differently, we may need other ways of sharing words, narratives, ideas, pictures, symbols. We need to enable the becoming of different meaning, of other meaning.
I will take these ideas as point of departure in my SCORAI Blog posts, by making use of creative writing as way of creating new and other narratives of futures, of sustainable life. I will use fiction, science fiction and poetry to explore possibilities for making way to talk about life and consumption differently. To try to distill new ways of thinking about life and normality. Can other, unknown types of normalities be born in this way?
All of this is new to me, so it will also be a learning process for me. I am thinking about how Dr. Louise Banks in Arrival changes herself and her concepts of time (which comes into being) as she decodes and learns an inherently different and, to her, completely unknown language, with unknown symbols, unknown structures, and unknown ways of interpreting them.
Not that I aim to (or in any way would be able to) create a new and unknown language. But I believe that new ways of imagining and talking about futures are essential for the futures to come into being.
I am already looking forward to your reactions and feedback.