How (not) to move forward

Going from creative paralysis to confusion is progress. Or is it?

Doodles by the author

I have been prone to creative paralysis. Case in point: by my own planning and announcement, I would have posted the first instalment of this newsletter eleven months ago. For most of twelve months, I’ve spent countless hours collecting ideas, staring at near-empty pages both on screen and on paper, and generally working myself up about this side of the research project. In brief episodes of flow, I wrote no more than three or four paragraphs of actual copy, in total. Ironically, it is the very observation that I have succumbed to creative paralysis while trying to write about creative progress which has helped me finally move forward with this newsletter.

Here is the reason. One of the questions I ask in my research is: To master the magnificent creative challenge of transforming societies towards sustainability, what can we learn from the practices and experiences of creative professionals? The question draws an analogy between creative processes in the mind and life of individuals and in whole societies. If we accept this analogy for the time being, what about that all too common experience known under such names as writer’s block, artistic inhibition, or creative paralysis? Can societies suffer from it, as individuals can? And does it make sense to say that what we’re experiencing collectively in the face of impending social-ecological catastrophe is that agonising inability to find our creative flow? If so, then conducting research and writing and overcoming this blockage could be a way not just to do my job and add to our understanding of social change but also to help myself stay in the flow. And that would be very welcome.

But what draws me on even more is the apparent oxymoron or self-referential looping of this framing, or indeed, its irony. How cool would it be if these ideas worked out and the thing that held this project back turned into the spring that propelled it forth on track? (Did I mention that I also prefer thoughts that rhyme?)

Philosophical research

By now you may be wondering: “If this is supposed to be a research newsletter, then does me bullshitting with my friends count as research as well?” To which I would respond that it might. So before I introduce my research questions and gesture at some tentative ideas, let me briefly explain how I situate this research project in terms of methods and disciplines.

First, it may be helpful to sketch the practical setting of my work. As a researcher, I’m attached to a four-year project sponsored by the European Commission through its Creative Europe programme. Our project, The Big Green, promotes sustainable development with the cultural and creative sectors, or so I’ve tried to summarise it. My research questions (more on them below) unfold what I take to be the three core aspects of this agenda. But our project as a whole is not primarily about research.

Yes, two of the fourteen organisations in our consortium are universities. In one case, though, it is more accurate to say that we collaborate with Hațeg Geopark, which happens to be managed by the University of Bucharest. In the other case, our colleagues at the South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences do contribute research on best practices and green policies for the cultural and creative sectors. And my employer, the independent Sustainable Europe Research Institute Germany, is responsible for that part of the project that is labelled, simply, “Research”.

But the other dozen or so partners in The Big Green are organisations in arts, culture, and environmental advocacy who use their project funds to do what the Creative Europe programme is mainly for (I think): creating and supporting cultural works and events while developing innovative ways to do it. Frankly, while “Work Package 10: Research” may have made the funding application look better, most project participants probably didn’t start out expecting much from it.

It didn’t help that I proposed to do philosophical research, not empirical social science or psychology (as in using questionnaires to gauge the effect that a “green” cultural event has on the audience’s environmental awareness). The coordinators of our consortium, at the independent Hungarian culture non-profit Pro Progressione, had worked with empirical researchers before. In contrast, what was “philosophical research” even supposed to mean? (Then again, I’ve since learnt that “artistic research” is a thing, too. So how bad could it be, really?)

In practice, here’s what I do: I collect and study the relevant literature – mostly online, from my desk at my flat in Greifswald, northeastern Germany. I visit places and events and talk with people to understand what they do and how they make sense of it. So in that sense I do, in fact, conduct some empirical research. I like to fancy myself a kind of amateur social anthropologist who focuses on qualitative information, as opposed to quantitative data.

But what matters in the end is the ideas, however I come by them. As a philosopher, I take the liberty of using any empirical method I need, or none. If I can contribute some useful insight, inspiration, or intellectual tool just by analysing concepts, constructing arguments, or developing a theory while lying on my back and staring at the ceiling, then that is fine as well, though typically less fun. In my experience, a big part of such creative processes occurs through interactions with other people.

Which is, by the way, why bullshitting with your friends can turn out to be a contribution to research and human understanding. It worked for Socrates. And against this background, I hope you see how writing a newsletter, conversing with readers, and generally making this project an exercise in public philosophy can be, not just a form of outreach, but part of a research strategy.

The questions

We have established that this research vessel is powered by a Big Idea that has to do with the need for creativity in sustainable development and with overcoming creative paralysis. (Powerful big ideas are allowed to be a bit airy as long as they keep us going. Personal investment helps, too.) So there’s a breeze swelling the sails, we’re moving forward, but how do we decide where to go? This is where we consult our Big Questions. Like a ship’s compass and astrolabe, they provide reference points and a sense of direction that help us stay the course, or at least keep track of where we went, as we chart these unknown waters.

I came up with three Big Questions for The Big Green. This was after we had learnt that the European Commission would fund the project, on our second attempt. We were holding online meetings among all participating organisations to get to know each other better and to exchange concrete plans for our respective “work packages”. The waters I set out to explore were what our proposal, following official language, called the “cultural and creative sectors”, or “CCS”. This much was clear. The questions that would guide me took shape without much rumination when I sat down with pen and paper (although the phrasing has since evolved).

Research questions:

1. How can the cultural and creative (CC) sectors be more ecologically sustainable?

2. How can artists and others in the CC sectors catalyse social transformation?

3. What can society learn from CC practices to achieve a transformation to sustainability?

Question 1 and 2 echo what I took to be the main concerns of my project colleagues. This was important because I wanted to do research that could be immediately interesting and useful to them, and do it in dialogue with them and other practitioners in arts and culture. Question 3 expresses my curiosity as an environmental philosopher hoping to bring home a bit of treasure, perhaps a methodology that could be transferred to other fields of practice. It was significant to me that this last question felt quite speculative to begin with, an open horizon to explore.

I brainstormed an introduction to each question in my initial literature report last year. And reviewing the related literature served to collate some ideas towards answers. Instead of repeating this here, let me take note of what catches my attention when I think about the questions now.

QUESTION 1 reflects the contemporary expectation that individuals and organisations reduce their ecological footprint, by reducing carbon emissions, waste, land use, etc., both direct and indirect. It gets interesting when we ask for more detail: How does that ambition translate into practice for an installation artist, a jazz band, a pop-up exhibition space, a regional theatre, or for an urban festival or rural artist residency, or for the interlinked systems of funding, careers, institutions, and people’s access to arts and culture as a whole?

For example, our project consortium reconsidered the role of travel. If we travelled for meetings, we would travel slowly (i.e., minimising carbon emissions), and we would spend several days composting together. So definitely no flying across Europe for a few hours exchanging presentations in a conference room. Yet many of us still take the plane to get to our two annual gatherings. As a participant who has spent days on busses, trains, and ferries to make it from Germany to places like Portugal or Latvia and back again, and many more days researching connections, piecing together itineraries, and making bookings, I can imagine that not everyone find that they have the time for it. How do we address such structural obstacles to change?

QUESTION 2 is based on the idea that arts and culture should educate people on sustainable development and push social change. Policy-makers, funding institutions, and many cultural producers themselves seem to welcome it, each for reasons of their own. For my part, I already put some distance between that idea and my research when I used the broader term “catalysing”. Over the course of the first year working on this project, I’ve certainly come across some great examples of engaged or activist art. Among them is the interactive performance Point Nemo by Reactor theatre in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, which I described in a brief case study. And I’ve seen some examples that make me only more sceptical.

So to my mind, the “how” of Question 2 is hedged with caveats: Should artists and cultural workers embrace the job of catalysing change or avoid any risk of instrumentalising art? If they choose to engage, how can they at least be æffective? And so forth. Using the example of heritage interpretation, I had a first go at related issues in a paper I gave at this years’ Interpret Europe conference. I called it “The ethics of changing others’ minds”. Shifting the focus to artists, I find it important to stress that the ethical questions that come under this headline concern not only what one does to others, such as an audience. They also concern what one does to oneself and one’s profession.

QUESTION 3 doesn’t ask if society at large can learn something from the cultural and creative sectors. It asks what we can learn. In other words, I’m certain there is treasure. Where should we look for it? My intuition is to begin with the experience of artists who create complex works through open-ended creative processes that may take a long time. For me, this general description first brings to mind examples like the writing of a great novel – or the development of a fundamental theory in physics. Which serves to remind us that creative processes are not restricted to stereotypical artists or the “creative sector”. And yet, how creatives in the sector handle such processes may teach us something special for our handling of the big challenge ahead of us, the transformation to a sustainable society.¹

At the beginning I said that I’d love to learn how to escape creative paralysis. But now I remind myself that moving is not all that counts and that we need to be careful how we define “forward”. Beware the metaphor. After all, we have been living in the age of progress, and here we are.

Confusion

I started drafting the first piece for this newsletter in mid-September 2023 during a field trip to Faro, Portugal, the seat of The Big Green partner Sciaena. On my first night in town, my local colleague Vasco had taken me along to a get-together from another international project. The next day, successfully adapting to field conditions,

I wrote an opening paragraph that dramatised a memorable turn in the previous night’s conversation. It ended – as I happened to phrase it in the rising noon heat on Faro’s Praça Ferreira de Almeida – in “a moment of moral confusion”.

That word and concept, confusion, struck a chord. To my mind, it resonated with meaning, for the state of society facing catastrophic ecological change, for the early stages of a research project, for my situation in life. I got up feeling energised by a lucky piece of work and caught a ferry to Culatra, one of the barrier islands that shield the mainland coast around Faro from the open Atlantic. The ferry took us across the lagoon, an amphibious scenery of coastal marshes, shallow open water, and half-submerged mazes of miniature islands, several kilometres wide. A confusion of land, river, and sea, I thought as I looked out on it from the top deck. A fusion of different things that, emphatically together (con-), become something new. Which can be a good thing. I decided that this is what I wanted to write about.

The following June, a few months ago, I hosted the pilot episodes of the Green Academy, an online seminar series on art and sustainable development inspired by The Big Green. Our first guest was artist-educator and researcher Jan van Boeckel. In our seminar as elsewhere, he spoke eloquently about artistic practice as a way of learning to accept and cultivate complexity, openness, and not-knowing. I’ve since been following his updates on ResearchGate (a kind of researchers’ Facebook). A few days ago, as I was struggling to bring this essay to a conclusion, Jan uploaded a book chapter he had co-authored, from 2012.² And here was a welcome reminder. Under the main title, “Inviting the unforeseen”, the chapter abstract talks about “the integration of art in (learning) processes for sustainability as a means to hold ambiguity, embrace the unknown and move ahead despite uncertainty”. In other words, art can help us turn confusion into a good thing.

Let me try this here. I outlined the Big Idea, the Big Questions and some of the context of this research project; I placed the ship on the water, main sail billowing, navigation tools ready. When the time came to lift the anchor and start exploring,³ I switched to narration with a bit of stream-of-consciousness philosophising. In place of a conclusion, I’m overlaying the mention of an awkward moment in conversation (whatever the details) with the memory of a few pleasant hours I spent on an Algarvean plaza, actually writing (including photographic proof no one asked for), with the mental image of a coastal lagoon, with that questionable explorer’s ship metaphor returning to cruise on it, with something Jan said about art and uncertainty. All of this, which I’ve been labelling philosophical research, I’m now asking you retroactively to consider as at least partially art, possibly because a research essay should have a proper conclusion (as I keep telling students). Instead of a chain of argument, I’m leaving you with a layering of motifs and the suggestion that they’re connected, that they make a pattern when you hold them against the light.

And I haven’t even got to the point of what Jan said. In that 2012 paper, which is presented as a dialogue between co-authors, he introduces a figure of speech that recurs in many variations in his 2013 book: Making art gives us opportunities, even requires us, to dwell in uncertainty, in doubt, and, yes, in confusion, imagined as a “liminal space”, a “threshold” between different environments. As Jan elaborates, citing Hollywood story consultant Christopher Vogler, there is a crucial moment in the hero’s journey “that is called ‘crossing the first threshold,’ when the protagonist enters the Special World of the story”.⁴ The protagonist is, of course, us, in so many ways. And in adventure, art-making, and other endeavours, we are often well advised to take our time on the threshold, if we can, to adjust to the transition. Let’s dwell here for a while.

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Upcoming:

• “Confusão”, an essay with a Portuguese vibe

• Five Questions with Vasco Guia de Abreu and Nicolas Blanc, Sciaena

1. Methodological note. I struggled for more than a week writing and re-writing the sections on Questions 1 and 2. Getting myself and my computer out of the house helped me pin down thoughts and sentences – and provided a welcome update on Greifswald’s café landscape. Then I got stuck on Question 3 and the segue to confusion, stuck badly, days wasting away while I stared at the screen and fidgeted fruitlessly. Then I remembered this 1 simple trick and picked up pen and paper:

2. Eernstman, Natalia, Jan van Boeckel, Shelley Sacks, and Misha Myers. 2012. “Inviting the Unforeseen: A Dialogue about Art, Learning and Sustainability.” In Learning for Sustainability in Times of Accelerating Change, edited by Arjen E. J. Wals and Peter Blaze Corcoran, pages 201–10. Wageningen Academic Publishers. – Download from ResearchGate

3. Yes, it is practicable to lift the anchor after one has raised the sails.

4. Boeckel, Jan van. 2013. At the Heart of Art and Earth: An Exploration of Practices in Arts-Based Environmental Education. Helsinki: Aalto University, page 290. – Download