Craft Australia Research Centre
presents The Ecological is Political, written by Peter Hughes and presented at the NeoCraft: modernity and the crafts international conference held at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada in November, 2007. The aim of the conference was to further critical thinking, theory and history in relation to the crafts.

In the course of the last decade, it has become clear that the twenty-first century will be dominated by environmental issues. Global warming is now widely discussed as the major threat to humanity and has served to bring the environment to the fore, uniting previously disparate and localised concerns; bringing them to the attention of the mainstream press, as well as to that of economists and politicians. The future, it becomes increasingly apparent, will be an ecologically constrained one. What place can the crafts have in such a future, and what contributions can they make to meet the challenges presented by it? The answer to these questions lies in 'objects,' or, more precisely, in the relationships between people and objects.

The ecology of consumerism

Environmental problems are often discussed as technical challenges, with an emphasis on the need to find non-polluting energy sources and ways of extending limited resources through recycling and efficiency. At the extreme end of this approach are suggestions for global eco-system engineering- for example, adjusting the constituents of the atmosphere by measures such as creating massive algal blooms to absorb greenhouse gasses. Such proposals threaten to render the entire planet an artefact, sustained exclusively for human interests by a massive technological infrastructure. Thus, while much research and intellectual energy has been devoted (often unwittingly) to finding ways in which continual expansion of consumerism can be maintained, there has been very little in-depth criticism of it as a particular mode of production and consumption, especially with regard to the particular relationships between people and objects that underpin it. There can be no doubt that the production of consumer objects lies at the heart of the present environmental crises: the extraction of materials is degrading ecosystems all over the world and the use of energy in manufacturing and transporting goods is polluting the air and contributing to global warming. Disposal of the by-products of manufacturing presents increasing problems of toxic waste while the 'out of sight out of mind' option of landfill has become untenable in many places.

When consumerism has been questioned, it has all too often been in simplistic terms: as a form of delusional behaviour involving the mass brainwashing of the populace through advertising or, more judgementally, as a manifestation of simple, old-fashioned acquisitive greed. Such assumptions are based on a distinction between so-called real 'needs' and false 'desires' which proposes that knowledge of an underlying and immutable, and indeed undistorted, 'human nature' will enable us to limit ourselves to our supposed real needs. In a related and coinciding tradition of thought, twentieth century Functionalism sought to escape the fetishisation of objects that increasingly characterised early consumer societies by appealing to rationalism and technology as the true basis for architecture and design in the new industrial era. By so doing the early twentieth century modernists sought to free individuals from the fetters of mere objects for the pursuit of 'higher' spiritual or intellectual interests. Thanks to postmodernism and deconstruction, we now see human beings and human societies as much more complex and interdependent, and such essentialist arguments seem either narrowly moralistic or hopelessly idealistic.

In his 1987 book, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism the sociologist Colin Campbell attempted a more nuanced account of the origins and mechanisms of consumerism. Campbell argues that consumerism cannot be based on simple greed and the need to accumulate as it is characterised, above all, by the tendency of individuals to divest themselves of the objects that they once so urgently desired. It is this transience of attachment that Campbell explores, ironically finding its roots in the very Romanticism that has been the principal source of many critiques of industrialisation. For Campbell the engine of consumerism is the 'autonomous imagination' which allows human beings to gain pleasure from imagining a future realised through the acquisition of commodities as much as, if not more than, from their actual acquisition. He argues that the origins of this imaginative power lay in a growing sense of an autonomous self - the self as subject standing against the external world as object - that involves the mediation between the two by the self-conscious consciousness. He then links the evolution of an autonomous consciousness that has the power to imagine things that do not exist-and that maybe unlike anything that yet exists-with the rise of the novel and of the acceptability of daydreaming in eighteenth century Britain. According to Campbell, the deliberate manipulation of the consciousness by individuals for pleasure through the deployment of the imagination means that modern consumerism is not actually about objects, but rather about ideas and emotions.

Two aspects of Campbell's argument are important in the present context. The first is that consumerism despite being characterised as 'materialist,' is not about actual things, but rather ideas and the ideal. This has become increasingly apparent in recent years with the rise of the 'brand.' Modern corporations no longer see themselves principally as manufacturers of objects, but rather of images and the elaborate structures of associations and emotions, or brandscapes, that they build around them. The second is that Campbell demonstrates that consumerism is intimately bound up with what it means to be a human being in industrialised consumer societies. In such societies, consumer products are in the first instance a medium of being, a reflective means of structuring the internalised self in relation to others and the world. They constitute a rich language in which utopian dreams, historical nostalgia and the equal pleasures of knowledge and utility operate in conjunction with that most powerful of forces, aesthetic pleasure. To question consumerism is to question our very identity as imaginative beings and, understandably, is usually met with hostile resistance.

Campbell's argument notwithstanding, the broader negative effects of consumerism cannot be ignored. Those concerning the environmental consequences have been noted earlier; of equal moment however, is what I will call the political dimension of contemporary consumerism. As the central driver of economic expansion, consumerism is also a source of social, economic and political power. It has enormous momentum and is bound up in a complex of economic and social interdependencies that are global in their extent and, in all probability, beyond immediate human control. At a deeper level, consumerism constructs particular types of relationships between people, between people and objects and between people and the world that are highly problematic.

The politics of made things

Consumerism not only threatens to destroy the natural world as we know it, but it also undermines the artificial world that humanity builds for itself as a home and shelter from the indifference of nature. The philosopher Hannah Arendt provides a useful framework within which to analyse these developments in her 1958 account of the evolution of the distinctly modern human condition. Arendt begins with the traditional distinction between the vita contemplavita, the life of the mind, and the vita activa, the life of action. Arguing that the former has been all but totally sidelined in the modern world, she focuses her analysis on the latter, which she divides into three distinct aspects. These are labor, work and action. Labor is that aspect of human activity that supports biological life; it is the metabolism of the human organism with nature. Labor is without end and produces no lasting objects. It is also essentially private and, to use Arendt's term, worldless. It is worldless because labouring does not produce a common space or realm in which individuals are revealed as unique before others. In contrast work fabricates lasting objects that cut across the endless cycles of nature: "against the subjectivity of men stands the objectivity of the manmade world, rather than the sublime indifference of untouched nature" (Arendt p.137.) This world in turn constitutes the physical basis of the public domain in the form of architecture, laws and objects that provides the platform for action. Arendt's action is speech and action within the public domain. It is the ground of human plurality, in which each individual is revealed as unique before his or her fellows.

Arendt argues that industrialisation and the division of labour has eliminated work altogether and made labor the universal condition of humanity:

The industrial revolution has replaced all workmanship with labor, and the result has been that the things of the modern world have become labor products whose fate is to be consumed, instead of work products which are there to be used. (Arendt p.88.)

In industrial civilisation, she argues, productivity lies in the 'human-power' to produce rather than in the things produced. The things themselves are devalued as mere by-products of the process. Arendt's characterisation of the human condition points to the political implications of consumer culture as it undermines both the public domain and humanity's capacity to make a home for itself in an indifferent natural world by converting the artificial world into another indifferent world, one of endless production and destruction that leaves no trace and no memorial. The destructive potential of technological power was noted by the British social critic, John Ruskin in the mid nineteenth century. On having viewed Paxton's vast glass and steel exhibition hall built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, Ruskin observed that the countries of Europe would soon be "disencumbered of their memorial marbles" and future generations "freed from the paralysis of precedent and the entanglement of memory...", its population free "in the fullness of ephemeral felicity to dispose itself to eat, and to drink, and to die". (Ruskin Vol. XII, p. 428)

Ecology and the studio crafts

The historical origins of the studio crafts coincide precisely with technological industrialisation and the rise of consumerism. This is no coincidence. At the quickening of consumer culture in Britain in the last half of nineteenth the century, the Arts and Crafts movement arose as a reaction to a threefold problem: the tendency for industrial consumerism to undermine the world of artifice; the loss of a broad enfranchisement in the making of that world that had perhaps only recently emerged as an imaginable possibility; and the sharp distinction that the division of labour brought between the hand and the mind, the material and spiritual, the maker and the designer.

The history of the studio crafts has seen a sometimes conscious (and often unconscious) resistance to the erosion of the world. When Arendt contends that

The man made world of things, the human artifice erected by Homo Faber, becomes a home for mortal men, whose stability will endure and outlast the ever changing movement of their lives and actions, only in as much as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of the things produced for consumption and the sheer utility of things produced for use. (Arendt, p. 173)

she places the fabrication of 'world-making' things beyond 'sheer utility,' in the sense of what we would normally call functionalism, and beyond usefulness in exchange. In this she echoes the words of the Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), who tellingly used the word "neglected" to describe unadorned buildings. Alberti wrote "there can be no greater security to any Work against Violence and Injury than Beauty and Dignity." (Alberti, p. 113) Though apparent opposites, consumerism and functionalism share a tendency to devalue the materiality of objects, in the sense of their concrete particularity, and to reduce them to idealisations. As a result, in both cases the material object itself becomes a valueless container for abstractions. In the case of functionalism, these comprise the use of the object, whatever it may be, as a tool. It is required to perform its function as perfectly and quietly as possible and its presence is physically or visually minimised. In the case of consumerism the object stands in for a much more elaborate and complex set of ideals but, because these are fluid and can easily be transferred to other objects, it is no more valued in and of itself than is the mere instrument.

The environmental philosopher Freya Mathews argues that: "The modern desires to make the world over in accordance with abstract design not only in order to improve on the original, to progress beyond the given, but, at a deeper level, to possess the original, to encompass it fully, in the way that we can encompass the ideal" (Mathews, p.194). For her, a disregard for reality, for the concrete and particular, is the defining mindset of modernity. From this comes our persistent drive to remodel the world according to our desires as well as our consistent dissatisfaction with it. Consumerism, especially the hyper-consumerism of the present, is in this sense the apotheosis of modernity, converting all things into ideas, the inevitable failure of which, when made material, precipitates a restless desire for more, different things.

This is not an atmosphere in which the crafts can thrive. The cheapness and sheer multiplicity of industrially produced goods, many made to a high standard of design and manufacture has been mentioned with increased frequency as a threat to the crafts. In the last thirty years they have responded in two main ways. On one side the crafts have sought the safe haven offered by the 'fine arts'. On the other, craft has been disregarded in favour of "design," and the making has been increasingly left to others. Against the contemporary developments outlined above-and in the light of present ecological problems-the crafts' founding critiques of modernity's fundamental polarities, those separating the body and mind, the spiritual and material and the manual and intellectual, could have a renewed resonance.

While the utopian idealism of the crafts has been much criticised, it is also here that its 'world-making' potential has been preserved. In a lecture on the future of architecture William Morris characterised art as "man's kindly struggle with nature" (Morris, p.51.) In so doing, he acknowledged the destruction of nature inherent in fabrication, while suggesting that artistic intent could temper the disregarding, destructive extremes of instrumentalism that Hannah Arendt ascribes to homo faber, the personification of her realm of work. The other aspect of Morris' thought that has resonances with Arendt is his desire to extend the opportunity for creative work as broadly as possible. Extrapolating from Arendt's analysis, this could be seen as a broadening of the franchise with regard to 'worldmaking', whereby the power to determine the shape of the world of artifice that is humanity's home falls more immediately within the grasp of those who live within its local and concrete particularity. Arendt argued that modernity has taken humanity's 'world' away by reducing all work to labour and all objects to processes. In consumer societies the world of artifice has devolved into a bricolage assembled from components offered up globally by trans-national capitalism that is less and less diluted by local production and less and less mediated by local concerns.

In Morris's particular historical moment-comparatively early in the history of consumerism-a democratisation of the world of artifice through craft was a radical idea that had become imaginable because of industrialisation and its concomitant social upheavals. While Morris and others thought there was much to be gained from knowledge of history, they were not really suggesting a return to an idealised pre-industrial past. Rather, they argued for an, admittedly utopian, future of unprecedented political and material self-determination. In this they imagined a future in which Arendt's realms of work and of action had been collapsed into one another: a world that recognised that the power to determine the form of one's artificial environment was a form of political power and its loss a form of disenfranchisement.

Clearly, the crafts have changed considerably since the nineteenth century, and in the process have lost much of the political enthusiasm that inspired Morris. The current ecological dilemma, however, may provide a renewed relevance for his politicised craft. In the twenty first century humanity will need to find an alternative to consumerism that will provide the basis for a rich and meaningful material existence. This is particularly true if we are not to aspire, or submit, to either unachievable austerity or a future dominated by global eco-engineering of the kind that will be required to sustain the continued growth of consumerism. This is no simple problem and its solution will probably take the form of many small adjustments and mutations over a considerable period of time.

Craft in the twenty-first century

There are a number of contemporary developments in environmental thinking that strike a chord with some of studio craft's longest standing traditions. Ecological philosophers exhort us to turn away from the ideal and embrace the concrete and particular. They also ask us to think in terms of the interrelatedness of things rather than the isolated categories and polarisations that characterise Enlightenment thought. Crafts practitioners have long valued their direct engagement with materials and the development of an intimate working knowledge of their particularities. Their work can be seen as more a collaboration between maker and materials than as being characterised by the systematic and ruthless imposition of the will that is required for high volume industrial production. In addition to this intimate relationship with the world through materials, the crafts have long valued relationships between design and making, between maker and purchaser/user and between their practice and the traditions that proceed them. At the very least, by engaging directly with materials and arriving at an accommodation with them in the interests of achieving a particular concrete outcome, crafts practices serve as a reminder that the world was not made specifically for humanity.

Bioregionalism is a key response to environmental degradation and resource depletion in contemporary ecological thought. It seeks to minimise resource consumption through the encouragement of life practices that draw upon local materials and energy sources. This has obvious advantages in the reduction of energy use by reducing the transportation of goods and materials over long distances. More importantly, bioregionalism requires that individuals and communities husband resources that are derived from their immediate environment to ensure their sustainability. This is reflected in two aspects of crafts production: sparingness and flexibility in the use of materials. In pre-industrial craft production there is an economy in the use of materials and energy that stands in contrast to both industrial production and much contemporary crafts practice. Because the crafts entail a direct and immediate engagement with the material world, they are also enormously adaptable. Crafts practice involves looking. Looking at the particular qualities of materials and working with them, sometimes remaining within the comfortable envelop of tradition and at other times extending their inherent possibilities to new limits. In contrast, industrial production favours the reduction of materials gathered from far and wide to uniform consistency so that they can be fed into mechanised processes with predictable results. Large-scale industrial production gives us MacDonald's and Ikea, the uniformity of which can be relied upon all over the world. Small-scale production, for better or worse, gives us something altogether different.

Bioregionalism is implicit in the 'slow food' movement, which seeks to engage directly with the particularities of local agricultural produce, the food made from it and traditions associated with it. Since its origins in the 1980s various other 'slow' movements have blossomed, including the Slow Cities and Slow Travel movements. These champion a considered and directly engaged relationship with life in contrast to the systematic uniformity and idealisation of 'fast' food and of the 'fast' products of consumerism. The crafts have long championed slow and considered making as a source of beauty arising out of the unique conjunction of maker, materials and circumstances. Crafts objects stand as unique in a world of mass produced multiples. The Slow Cities and anti-car movements that are gathering pace around the world do not address themselves primarily toward the problems of noise and air pollution, but rather toward the destructive effect of the car system on our streets, cities and countryside. Their literature calls for a slower approach to life and the re-crafting of our streets on a more human scale that provides amenable spaces for social interaction. In the future, the crafts could have an active role in this re-crafting by turning their attention to architecture and public spaces in addition to objects for private use.

Recently, the concept of 'emotionally durable design' has been promoted by a number of design theorists. This approach acknowledges at the outset that the design and manufacture of products is one of the major contributors to environmental degradation, with the world's resource use growing at 20 times the rate of population growth over the last 50 years (Chapman, p.3.) The source of the problem, however, is not located in a lack of physical durability, but rather in a lack of emotional durability, an inability for people to form lasting bonds with objects. Jonathan Chapman suggests contemporary techno-centric 'eco-design' focuses on the symptoms of consumption driven environmental degradation and fails to address the deeper roots of the problem. Although he focuses on product design, with an emphasis on technological devices, a number of his suggestions for developing emotionally durable products have powerful resonances with the traditions of crafts practice.

Emotionally durable design has always been important in the crafts. For instance, Chapman emphasises the need for products to have narrative content and that this content be both layered and partially open-ended to enable the user to co-contribute to it over time. Narrative has always been important in crafts production, arising out of the intentions of the maker and the physical uniqueness of craft objects. It appears at a number of levels, including the implicit narrative of production visible in the object and its materials and the inclusion of explicit narrative content in the design of objects. Crafts objects also generate narratives that accumulate and cohere in them as a result of the user's engagement with them over time and as they assume a place in their life stories. Chapman also suggests that designers consider product lifetimes and design them to age gracefully; the signs of wear adding to, rather than subtracting from, their appeal. While it cannot be said that all craft objects are designed with this intention in mind, it is certainly true that most crafts practitioners see their work as lasting beyond their own lifetimes, cutting across the biological cycle of life and death that Arendt describes and lasting, in Morris' words "somewhat beyond the passing day." (Morris, p.245)

What would the crafts look like in an ecologically constrained future? Past experience tells us that it would be unwise to attempt to predict the future in any detail. It is also important to avoid clichéd simplifications. The real answers to the problems arising from our profligate use of resources do not lie in recycling or eco-engineering on a global scale. Rather they lie in a rethinking of our relationship with both nature and the artifactual that entails a respect for the given and that does not see the world as an inert mass upon which we can indifferently impose our will. Similarly, an ecologically responsible craft would not necessarily assume organic forms or use motifs drawn from the natural world, as they have so often done in the past. They would be informed by their contexts of production and reflect their place and time of making in more complex ways that will encompass the given in the form of cultural as well as natural history. Nor need the crafts follow the rural-utopian tradition that has been so dominant in the history of the crafts movement in the Anglophone world. Pre-industrial craft production was for the most part, an urban phenomenon, developing in cities close to markets and where an elite created a demand for high quality work. Urbanisation is not only an undeniable reality of contemporary life, it is also the best means by which what remains of countryside and wilderness can be protected from the relentless suburban expansion that is the historical legacy of rural utopianism.

Drawing upon pre-industrial traditions, the future might also see more robust forms of craft production and a reduced tendency to fetishise crafting itself. Indeed, the tendency to over emphasise perfection in fabrication could be yet another instance of idealisation and one in which the crafts cannot hope to compete with industrial production. Thus the crafts of the twenty first century might be less gallery-oriented and take the form of small-scale designing and fabricating workshops, retaining traditions of creative engagement in making itself and in the production of lasting objects that are both physically and 'emotionally' durable.

In an ecologically constrained future, some aspects of contemporary crafts practice would remain the same. Despite rising transportation and energy costs, high value-added products will always be transported over great distances and a wider market for some craft objects is likely to remain. Additionally, unless there is a catastrophic failure of civilisation, global communications networks will remain in place, informing practices through the distribution of images, information and ideas as they have since the eighteenth century. In a bioregional future, though, local production using local materials and for local use is likely to become more important. So too, is role of function, including decorative function, that ensures that objects retain a relevance to the lives of individuals and communities. The adaptability of the crafts means that they are readily able to respond to changing and irregular resource supplies, such as those offered by the recycling and reuse of materials. However, while these practices may play a part in the short term, their dependence on a high-volume post-consumption waste stream means that they are unlikely to figure significantly in the long-term. The emphasis, instead, would fall on the durability of made things, rather than on ameliorating the effects of industrial production. Crafts practices that use recycled materials are mainly of value because they offer a model of production that accepts the immediately available given, rather than drawing upon the anonymous raw materials supplied by the global system of resource extraction and distribution.

Conclusion

The solution to our current environmental woes lies not in the austerity of functionalism, nor in closely engineered 'closed loop' design that implicitly accepts the uncaring and transient relationship between people and objects that underpins consumerism. It lies, rather, in a realignment of our relationship to the artifactual that empowers individuals and communities to assume more direct control over the artificial world they build for themselves within the envelope of nature. The arguments of eco-philosophy, the Slow and bioregional movements, and the theory of emotionally durable design have common ground in promoting a culture of care that has at its core a critique of the idealism that underpins our disregard for nature as well as for the things of our own making. This culture of care extends beyond narrow definitions of 'nature' and entails a deep engagement with the concrete and particular, with the world as it is given, that has strong resonances with both craft traditions and contemporary crafts practice. While we may not wish to embrace the utopian totality of the Commonwealth of Craft depicted in William Morris' News From Nowhere, it may be that the crafts will play an important role in extending the ecological critique of our culture to embrace not only nature narrowly characterised by 'wilderness' and countryside, but also our cities, homes and our daily lives.

Peter Hughes
June 2008

Peter Hughes has been Curator of Decorative Arts at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery since late 1999. He has a background as a furniture maker and in art theory. His research has included an MA (Canberra School of Art, ANU) exploring the link between ornament and ecology in the thought of 19th century art and social critic, John Ruskin. His areas of particular interest is the history of ideas about decoration and ornament in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and contemporary studio crafts.

Bibliography