Mis/Understanding: the agonistic and integrative role of dissent in social life

“As such, ‘there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word. As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s.” (M. Bakhtin: The Dialogic Imagination)

Introduction
Thank you to IETM and the organizers for having invited me to share with you my experience on the concept of Misunderstanding from the perspective of someone outside of Europe.
Given that what we are now experiencing is an extraordinary moment, perhaps a Renaissance moment, I want to begin by first acknowledging the stress of the Present, try to get a hold of it and identify its trends and impacts on our Planet, Bodies and Mind. And by doing this, I want to step back and look at the larger trends of globalization with its underpinning misunderstandings that are threatening the stewardship of our collective future. If you can make the intuitive leap Planet, Bodies and Minds maybe significant to the thematic threads of the conference Art, Economy and Policy as they are definitely tangled.
I am looking at this theme “Misunderstanding” from a multidimensional lens of five intersecting realms of history, culture, politics, structures of power and the individual. These relational, interdependent and dynamic dimensions I suggest are formative to how we deal with difference, identity, mobility and issues of communication across boundaries.
I foreground Mikhail Bahktins idea of the dialogic imagination that sees linguistic structures as systems of behaviour where our words are fingers that can touch or push away, open or shut down the imagination. And I point to Donna Haraway’s research she is the chair of the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California. She wrote her dissertation on the functions of metaphor in shaping inquiry in developmental biology in the twentieth century and who suggests drawing from biology, that certain preconditions such as metaphorical thinking and imaginative empathy are prerequisites to more complex knowledge of the world and in our context of the ‘Other’ and therefore of ourselves, or vice versa.
I propose that misunderstanding which is often about difference, tensions and power struggles in everyday life is a process essential to the deepening of the democratic project. That misunderstanding can be the catalyst for sharing experiences that others do not share and therefore provides the dialectical space for us to agree or disagree – an energetic feedback loop for the extension of reality and new possibility.
And finally I suggest that it is up to the creative individual to provide this leadership and come to terms with the risks involved – because it is a give and take process that subverts mutually tolerated rituals of avoidance. As Mary Anne DeVlieg has talked about in her welcome of stodgy habits of mind that we need to sharpen and as my friends Monika and Scott have proposed: “being open to cultural difference entails the inherent risk of radical transformation of the language and structures by which we recognize ourselves”. So it is not an easy progression but one that is inevitable as restructuring is now a constant and fluid shifts of who gets to define the terms are up for grabs.
As you may know I live in Canada which is a Huron/Iroquois word, meaning village, this village is the second largest country in the world with one federal, ten provincial and three territorial jurisdictions, and 31.6 million people spread across its vastness, this population is only 4 times the size of Switzerland. Canada is a country of deep diversity, the pressures of which have challenged dominant narratives of nationhood. From the outset Canada has lived with difference has been confronted by its Aboriginal Peoples, by Quebecois nationalism, by regionalism and by its highly engaged culturally diverse communities.
Unjust official legacies of Indian residential schools, Acadian displacement, the Chinese head tax, Black segregation and Japanese and Ukrainian internments during two world wars tarnish the Canadian landscape. These misunderstandings of dominant ideology have shaped a tradition of dispute, resistance, negotiation, accommodation, appropriation and co-option as part of the national psyche.
In Canada intercultural value clashes or misunderstandings have been and are mediated by an operative frame of legislative and constitutional anchors that “manage” and equilibrate difference through a national rights framework. This frame recognizes the advancement of individual rights alongside minority collective rights. As such the current guiding principles of Canada’s political institutions are not based in some set of “shared values” but rather by the goal of providing a framework that will be “neutral” with respect to controversial questions of value and aims to foster mutually beneficial co-operation.
An example of this is a ban on turbans in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that was challenged in 1990. The Canadian government based on human rights legislation struck down the regulation and Sikh Mounties now are allowed to wear their turbans as part of their uniforms.
In the arts across Canada, the period of the 1980s and 1990s was characterized by vibrant cultural race politics that transformed who defines and controls cultural value. My work during this time has been both at the municipal and federal level where I have acted as a bridge between the funding bodies and the wider culturally diverse artists and organizations. My responsibilities were to build capacity for these artists by developing policy and programs that were more responsive to different aesthetics, genres, generations as well as to addressing gaps in infrastructure, networks for dissemination, showcases for work and administrative tools. This is my local context. But I would like to move on to the Global.

Planet/Body/Mind
In his 1990 Nobel lecture In Search of the Present the Mexican poet Octovio Paz suggests that we are witnessing the Twilight of the Future where all the rules that have guided us for the past 200 years are being rewritten and all the roles are being redefined. It is the end of one cycle and the configuration of the next.
He writes: “For a long time I have firmly believed that the twilight of the future heralds the advent of the now. To think about the now means first of all to recover critical vision”
So l would like to raise the bar by asking us to look at our Now: the elusive Present where according to social theorist Zygmunt Bauman we are in a period of liquid modernity. A period whoÂ’s principal driving forces are characterized by a quantum and infinite universe of immeasurable complexity. Where rapid scientific and technological expansion has collapsed time and space. And issued us into an era where our daily living is controlled by speed, our ways short-circuited by lack of time and our solutions defined by multiplicity. To get a sense of the acceleration we are living from 1800 to 1900 it took one hundred years for knowledge to double, today knowledge doubles three times per year.
It is also a moment in our history where the hi-tech power and greed of globalizationsÂ’ ambition involves the relentless colonization of the public by the private. An exterritorial political economy whose instruments are conflict, deregulation and polarization to ensure a structuring of insecurity and fear so that nothing stands in the way of profit. Here in Europe you many not feel this as viscerally as I do living as a neighbour to WorldÂ’s largest economy and failing super power.
In the past few weeks we have been bystanders to free markets so free and unfettered that they are in free fall. This mutating capitalist order is as we speak in the process of realizing the ultimate magic trick of entirely downloading their liability to the public sphere while uploading public money to keep their speculative addictions going.
What Naomi Klein calls Risk Free Capitalism or the Socialization of Risk and the Privatization of Profit. Having replaced the laws of history with its own laws the market is now devouring its own tail. At the same time as this is going on - over the next twenty years the world’s economic centre of gravity will shift from the West to the East. By 2025 China the world’s new super power in waiting is likely to have the world’s second largest economy. Recent evidence of this is in the British Prime Minister’s lobby of China and the Saudi Arabia to release funds to the International Monetary Fund so that it can inject ‘liquidity’ into World markets by shoring up bankrupt nations like Iceland, in exchange these countries will have their powers on the world stage expanded.
A time also when due to the negative consequences of free market fundamentalism our ecological footprint is exceeding the carrying capacity of the earth. A process that is creating geopolitical problems with regard to fresh water and food for a majority of the world populations, US intelligence estimates that in 2025 1.4 billion people in 36 countries will not have access to water for drinking or food. Closer to home disruptions and strikes relating to costs and food are occurring here in Spain and France and I believe the cost of food in Spain has increased by 20-40%.
And then there is climate change!
These contextual underpinnings of the contingent status of our Planet brings me to this question as it relates to the theme of misunderstanding: In a era of high stakes what are our roles as artists / creators / producers do we have enough of a grip on the Present so that we can evade co-option and navigate globalizationÂ’s slippery slope. A slope between the titillation of globalization as it commodifies cultures and the deeper understanding and resistance required for cultural pertinence? For interdisciplinary networks that can respond to complexity, And for the critical visions that will help us get a handle on the shape shifting Now?
In the book Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples Resistance to Globalization, Jeannette Armstrong, Canadian aboriginal writer and educator tells us that from an Okanagan worldview of identity we human beings are the earths’ capacity to dream. The Okanagan word for body literally means “the land-dreaming capacity”. So in our dreaming what will the shape of the art world or world in this next century depend on? What are the new structures that can reconcile the profound shifts we are experiencing?
Perhaps these are all very large questions obviously fraught ones that I am sure every one of you is struggling with. Possibly I could have told a story instead but in this period of speeding reconfigurations it is us the linked people in this room who are at the centre of a new cycle, a new conceptual age; participating in multi and inter and hybrid ways to create yet another culture. A new story with a new value system whose images and symbols could provide the leadership that will reconnect us from within and without and define a complex and ethical ethos of interdependence. With all its tensions, limits and infinite opportunities. The face book generation is already there in some ways but the infrastructure and critical vision to support them is shaky. Are we caught in our misunderstandings, our dichotomies, our disunities and fears, are we working from the full capacity of our human cognitive potential?
In an article last week in the Globe and Mail, Richard Florida whose latest book is the Flight of the Creative Class says that since 1980 the creative class in America has grown to 40 million and created 20 million new jobs that is one third of the American workforce. This fact alone is creating a shift in social values in the mainstream of public life where talent, tolerance, self-expression and diversity are prized.
Finally I would like to end by sharing two snapshots one from a scientist the other from an artist both related to misunderstanding and understanding that have touched and excited me deeply. The first is taken from a very inspiring TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk by brain research scientist Jill Bolte Taylor called: My stroke of Insight. She is a neuroanatomist who has devoted her life to understanding mental illness through mapping the micro circuitry of the brain and who suffered a massive stroke and studied it as it happened over four hours.
A lot of what I am going to say is taken directly form her. In her talk she says that if you work with the human brain it is obvious that the two cognitive minds of our two cerebral cortices are completely different and separate from each other. For those who understand computers she says we can think of the right hemisphere as functioning as a parallel processor and the left hemisphere as a serial processor. And while they both communicate with one another; because they process information differently each of our hemispheres thinks about different things, cares about different things and she suggests even have different personalities.
To directly quote her:
“The right hemisphere is all about this present moment, right here, right now it thinks in pictures and it learns kinaesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, sounds like, smells and tastes like and feels like.
I am an energy bean connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are all energy beans connected to one and other through the consciousness of our right hemisphere as one human family.
My left hemisphere is very different it thinks linearly and methodically and it is all about the past and the future. It is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and starts picking out details, details and more details of those same details. It categorizes and organizes that information and associates it with the past, all we’ve ever learned and projects into the future all of our possibilities. The Left hemisphere thinks in language, it is that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to that external world. But perhaps most important it is that little voice that says I am and a soon as that voice says to me I am I become separate from the energy flow around me, separate from you.”
At the level of the creative individual we need only start with ourselves to recognize the fragile complexity of our interdependence and rootedness in the tissue of human relationships. In order to deepen the democratic project, metaphorical imaginations are essential to making empathetic connections and communicating experiences that others do not share. “Across-the species” abilities to communicate and reach mutual understanding with the aim, as Bauman puts it, “of ‘knowing how to go on’, but also knowing how to go on in the face of others who may go on - have the right to go on - differently.” (Bauman, In Search of Politics)
The title of this talk is Impure Sutras, those of you in this room who have heard me speak before know that I have said we cannot confront the plurality in the world if we are not able to confront the plurality of our own identities, our idea of the Self and our culture.
I would like to close with this 3 minute video by Akram Khan on the making of the his work Bahok a collaboration with the National Ballet of China – when I saw the work I was struck by the pertinence of its content, the power and beauty of its execution. It is a compelling example how artists are choosing to work together to create a new global culture for the Now where no one hemisphere of the brain dominates or misunderstands the ‘Other’.

See it on YouTube