Modeling A Conscious Evolution: The Role of Reflexivity in Film and Sustainability

Achieving sustainability is rapidly becoming our society’s greatest challenge. As Buckminster Fuller says in Critical Path (1981), “Humanity is in ‘final exam’ as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe.”

How does this boundary-crossing social movement coincide with other trends in art, particularly filmmaking? And how do art and the sustainability movement relate to evolving consciousness?

Release: I cannot claim to be a scientist, but I do claim to be an inquirer.

Introduction

Recently, I had the pleasure of holding a pre-interview with Aleco Christakis, co-founder of Institute for a 21st Century Global Agoras and cybernetician/social systems thinker extraordinaire, for Sust Enable: The Metamentary, my feature-length experimental documentary about the meaning of sustainability. I was excited to speak with Aleco about his understanding of sustainability in terms of human organizations. He was excited to speak with me, however, about the content of my film.

“The Metamentary, huh? What a good name. Did you think of that?” he asked. I conceded that I had, but with some embarrassment, commenting that it was only an unwieldy working title. “You do know what meta- means, don’t you,” he probed. I asked him to enlighten me.

“Meta- comes from the Greek word for beyond. It was first used to describe metaphysics, a field of study that went ‘beyond physics.’”

“Your film is so exciting because it is trying to go beyond documentary. No?”

I was floored. What did Aleco mean? What does it mean to go “beyond” traditional filmmaking? What would that look like, and why try? This essay is an attempt to reconcile emerging movements and social trends with a parallel movement in cinema, and to explore how my own film, Sust Enable: The Metamentary, may contribute to this socially and creatively significant moment in time.

How Does Consciousness Evolve?

What is the hallmark of a sentient being? What differentiates human consciousnesses from other life forms? In what ways is human consciousness an evolution of consciousness in general?

These are some of the questions addressed in Douglas Hofstadter’s boundary-smashing literary fugue on meaning between forms (and indeed, between minds), 1989’s Godel Escher Bach. Still a classic, many who have read it will remember it for its fascinating explanations of how learning, meaning, and creativity occur, using a special style in which careful exposition is paired with narrative examples that embody the concepts discussed.

Hofstadter holds that all learning--whether done by a human or by a computer--consists of essentially the same process. Forming analogies, using symbolic language, and an increasing capacity for reflexivity (self-reference) are hallmarks of a developing consciousness. Then halfway through the book, Hofstadter delivers a shockingly anti-climactic climax. After painstakingly building his case for how the human brain understands anything at all, reinforcing Turing’s theories about critical size, he suddenly reveals that once a certain level of complexity of associative connections is made within a brain, the brain becomes self-aware.

"...This does not elevate consciousness or awareness to any ‘magical’, nonphysical level. Awareness here is a direct effect of the complex hardware and software we have described. Still, despite its earthly origin, this way of describing awareness--as the monitoring of brain activity by a subsystem of the brain itself--seems to resemble the nearly indescribable sensation which we all know and call ‘consciousness’. Certainly one can see that the complexity here is enough that many unexpected effects could be created" (Godel, Escher, Bach, pg. 388)

It’s a tremendously intriguing claim. No matter whether it’s a brain or a computer, once a certain level of complexity is reached, the entity becomes aware of its own processes (by creating a “self” subsystem within the complexity of symbols it utilizes to understand the world). This is what distinguishes humans from animals--the knowledge that we exist--and this is what amplifies our pleasure and our pain--our deductive knowledge that we will, in all likelihood, die. One could argue that the purpose behind Buddhist spiritual practice and transcendental meditation is to abide in that “meta-cognitive” realm, by directing one’s concentrated attention to one’s own processes, simply observing but not identifying with the emotions, thoughts and sensations that pass through the body. The underlying faith is that nourishing one’s awareness in this way provides inherent, if unpredictable, rewards.

So when we talk about our hope for “evolving consciousness,” is this intrinsically but mysteriously rewarding process what we want? What we relate to? What we mean?

Life As Cognition

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela of the Santiago School of Cybernetics are known for one of the most elegant descriptions of consciousness I have ever come across: “Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with or without a nervous system.” This statement is called the Santiago Theory of Cognition, and it is considered a “direct theoretical consequence of the theory of autopoesis,” developed by the same team. This definition of cognition suggests that a perpetual communion between an organism and its environment crafts the organism’s living body. A brain is just a secondary expression, like a concentrated node, of the process of living. Cognition emerges from living--an orchid is stunningly beautiful because that is a survival technique, just as a cheetah is stunningly fast because that is a survival advantage for its niche. All of these characteristics can be considered as cognition from the perspective of the special environment in which they evolved.

There is no separation between an organism, situated in an environment, and its mind. Moreover, self-awareness or meta-cognition emerges from a critical mass of complexity between connections. With these two definitions, is it possible to observe the process of cognition and intelligence on the scale of human group arrangements and societies? Social physics has already determined that an individual acts very differently when considered as an individual versus when considered within a group’s mentality or decisions. Is there “cognition” in our social movements?

Now is there self-awareness?

Meta-Cognition and Awareness on the Societal Scale

Achieving sustainability is becoming our society’s most urgent movement. It is impelled by a newly globalized understanding of the planet. We now know what our parents’ society did not--that there are no “externalities,” no “away”... hard distinctions become tenuous in light of our new interconnectedness, and our global communications have become nearly instantaneous.

This is where we are at... simultaneous to this emerging perspective (and not separable from it), we are now gaining a perspective on global ecological degradation. It is our generation’s challenge to dig in and engage with the real world in applying our growing understanding. It is our task to comprehend, interpret and achieve sustainability in our human societies.

To achieve this grand goal, unprecedented in human history, we must avoid the very real urge to insulate ourselves with virtual stories, games and perpetually “on” media technology. Media can be one of our most powerful tools in inspiring this call to action, but it is also a potent tool to distract us, to relieve the stress of a complex and confusing reality through entertainment. Media can be used healthfully, to inspire, illuminate and connect, but it can also be used as a drug of escapism. And if we become fully addicted, this time, it might even be fatal.

Another seductive but misleading element in the global debate about the meaning of sustainability is the urge to see this movement as a push toward “universality” in human experience and society. While we may sense ourselves moving towards a globalized awareness, and possibly hinging on a historic moment of society-level self-awareness, we must pause to ask ourselves: will it be like a “tipping point,” or will it be an ongoing process merely increasing in complexity? Will it be like a push towards a universal “one mind” consciousness among all disparate humans (thinking like a colony thinks rather than the way individual ants “think”, for example)... or does our burgeoning awareness require a push for a broader level of tolerance of conflict, of multiplicity of experiences and perspectives, of coming to accept that we may never again be able to claim we know something to be 100% true? How does conflict and reflection relate to cognition?

No matter what the actual transformation looks like, we may be nearer than ever to meta-level consciousness, provoked by our critical survival need to address the issue of ecological and social sustainability.

So what kinds of social processes would stimulate and facilitate emergent awareness of this kind? If the mission is to achieve some kind of “shared perspective” on the state of the dynamic global ecosystem and our relationships to it, what would improve our efforts to do so?

Art as a Driver of Consciousness

Advances in art have always predicted social trends and in many instances, catalyzed social transformations. That is largely because the role of art is to use a creative medium to share experiences. Art is just another term for material expression, expression of human experience and emotions. The sensation one has when deeply connecting to or admiring a work of art is one of shared value or shared emotion--often indirect, and often inarticulable, this capacity of art is yet why great works of art are accessible to people’s internal experiences across cultural and social boundaries.

Works of art both “lock in” a culture’s values and trends, and a particular medium’s history, while simultaneously expanding future possibilities. Art reinforces a culture’s values within the time of its creation, which means that, in subtle ways, it “closes off” creative innovation by establishing a particular medium’s language for communicating again in the future. This language is subtly influenced by a culture’s social values. Go see a movie this week and consider what each element of its story tells you about what your society values and what it disdains. What makes the “good guy” good, and the “bad guy” bad? Where does the humor come from? And, to take it even deeper, were certain plot points or moments orchestrated to make you feel a certain way? In actuality, your entire moviegoing experience relies on a shared “movie” language that assumes a whole lot about you, your experiences and what matters to you. In this way, films “lock in” and reinforce cultural assumptions about what is true.

At the same time, art also facilitates growth through allowing people to share emotions, to relate to one another, to break out of our solipsistic boxes. Our emotional connection to certain works of art tickles the sublime in us, arouses our sense that there is shared truth, shared beauty, and hence a common reality between us. Fundamentally, consciousness is expanded when we share. Meaning arises from interaction between organisms, not from within the container of one organism. Learning (cognition) arises in the communication between an organism and its environment (an environment which is made up of other organisms).

If it’s true that the environment and the organism mutually construct one another’s identity--like our human impact on the global ecosystem--then they both equally deserve consideration as distinct figures that are yet reliant on one another for existence; they are interrelated systems, not isolated objects, and they are both important figures. This concept has been explored in “figure-figure” art, where the subject (thematic content) of the art seems to engage the medium in the construction of its meaning.

The Significance of Reflexive or “Figure-Figure” Art

In Godel, Escher, Bach, before his revelation about the makeup of consciousness, Hofstadter explores the importance of reflexivity (self-reference) and recursion (when the definition of something is contained within itself) in defining meaning. His focus is drawing comparisons between the artwork of Bach and Escher. Bach is known for composing reiterating fugues that contained themselves at different scales and even encoded the name of the author. Escher is famous for his drawings that look reasonable, even realistic, but defy the laws of nature and physics (thus invoking the viewer’s total “sense of things” into conflict with the art). Escher is also known for his “tesselating” drawings, such as “Sky and Water I,” in which the form of one type of animal (birds) serves as the context for the form of another (fish). Both Bach’s and Escher’s creations, Hofstadter characterizes as “figure-figure.” In a traditional piece of art, you have a “figure”--for example, a melody--against the “ground”--for example, the medium of “music,” the physical context in which you are hearing, etc. The ground is supposed to be invisible while you emotionally consume the experience of the figure. In figure-figure artwork, the artwork draws attention to its background as another figure. Yet--interestingly--because of the way the human brain works, you can never see both figures simultaneously.

“A recursive figure is one whose ground can be seen as a figure in its own right. Usually this is quite deliberate on the part of the artist. The “re” in “recursive” represents the fact that both foreground and background are cursively drawable--the figure is “twice-cursive.” Each figure-ground boundary in a recursive figure is a double-edged sword.”

In figure-figure artwork, there is no ground, only multiple layers of meaning. (I am willing to guess that this kind of art is going to become increasingly popular, intrinsically appealing, as our sense of hard boundaries between systems--like economy and ecosystem, for instance--begin to dissolve.)

“Figure-Figure” Cinema

There’s a movement in cinema that is maybe only ten years old that I feel well embodies a new field for what the film medium can achieve. For lack of better term, I call it the “meta-storytelling” movement. What is shared among the films in this movement is an apparently intentional braiding of a film’s stylistic construction to its content matter. This might also be considered “figure-figure,” because analysis and appreciation of a film’s construction yields further depth to the meaning of its basic narrative story. Like an allegory, there are multiple layers of meaning and motivation behind every element.

Within this trend, subjective films make intuitive sense. Hedwig & the Angry Inch, Memento, Pi, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind--in each of these examples, the internal experiences of the protagonist are reproduced and simulated in the way the audience receives information in the story. (For the readers, think Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye.) But recently, some films have gone beyond just using the subjective experience of the main character to frame the story for the audience. Good examples of transcendent experimentation include Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. Synecdoche (similarly to Kaufman’s earlier screenplay for 2002’s Adaptation) actually treats the process of creating a new work of art as a hyper reflexive process of self-reference and recursion--finding meaning from within oneself and in reference to oneself--in a form and plot that resembles Russian nesting dolls. The Fountain’s literal story is interesting, but its symbolic story is transcendent--the message of The Fountain, told through its actual plot and characters allegorically, is about being freed from the haunting terror of death through accepting it (i.e. enlightenment). This message can be interpreted from the basic story, or from its lyrical weaving and symbolism.

I have observed this cinematic trend with great interest. In fact, my reading of Godel, Escher, Bach coincided with my first viewing of The Fountain in mid-2007--and I consider that phase a turning point in my development as a film artist. As an artist and an activist, equally compelled by the promises of cinematic innovation and the urgent need for social change, I am interested in how this cinematic movement can be expanded to apply to non-fiction filmmaking. This is a tricky matter. Making a non-fiction film means not having a script, not having storyboards, not having the ability to manipulate props, sound design, important lines of dialog, etc. in quite the same way that fiction filmmakers can, to tell a comprehensive story like The Fountain tells. If I want to make a film about a real-life issue in this reflexive, layered, “figure-figure” manner, I would have to discover a real life subject matter that would call for such experimental treatment in telling its story.

Sustainability - How to Tell its Story?

Consider for a moment the subject of sustainability.

What would achieving sustainability look like? As many readers will agree, figuring out sustainability will take a “paradigm shift”--a massive adjustment in values and perspective, made all the more difficult today by the “lock-in” of so many different systems of infrastructure built on soon-to-be obsolete values (for instance, huge expanses of paved roads, which assumes the existence and importance of cars, which in turn assumes the perpetual existence of petroleum.)

Understanding sustainability means challenging many assumptions and a lot of the lock-in that holds our society hostage to old ideas and prevents innovation. Also, the growing pains of this process will be widely felt, uncomfortable or even horrible. Likewise, a film that attempts to depict the ongoing social effort to define sustainability may also have to challenge a lot of film conventions that suggest that stories can only be told in conventional ways. The “meta-storytelling” trend is helping to craft a new mythology for our culture, and I think this can be accomplished in non-fiction filmmaking too.

As for the topic matter, what does the nature of sustainability look like when closely examined?

I had the unique opportunity of being forced to closely reconsider my beliefs about sustainability after a failed attempt at living 100% sustainably in 2008. On May 1st, 2008, I independently launched Sust Enable, a three-month attempt to craft a lifestyle within a “one-Earth” ecological footprint in urban Pittsburgh, which would be depicted in a web-based video episode series at www.sust-enable.com.

My express goal was “100% sustainability" in my lifestyle (which is an amusingly vague term in hindsight), but which at the time I assumed meant living within a “one-planet-Earth-sized environmental footprint.” Based on the Online Ecological Footprint Calculator, which assesses your environmental footprint “if everyone on Earth lived the same way you do,” my initial score (and the average American’s) hovered around 5 Earth’s worth of resources.# My ambitious three-month attempt, with a tinge of heroic sacrifice to boot, was an attempt to rectify that and, implicitly, to use direct action and education to absolve my role in global ecological destruction.

Within just a few days of the project’s launch, however, I noticed many things seemed to be going wrong. By the end of the three-month period, after battling poison ivy, heavy rains, weight loss, and depression, I was overwhelmed with doubts about the original idea for Sust Enable, and about what “100% sustainability” really means...

And while it’s true that there may not be any simple or absolute definitions to sustainability, my extraordinary direct experiences during Sust Enable proved to me that it’s also not entirely subjective, either. When I tried to actualize my naive definition of global sustainability on the world, the world pushed back. Since then, I’ve been committed to trying to figure out just what the world was trying to tell me.

From my processing, much of which interestingly aligns with theories emerging from a diverse range of fields including cybernetics and environmental justice, I’ve come to think that sustainability may indeed have a nature that we are just now beginning to grasp. A sustainable system may possess qualities including but not limited to: holism (it must be considered as a system not as the sum of its parts), reflexivity, recursion (being self-informing), organism-environment braiding, the requirement of diversity and the presence of evolution, plus much more that appears to be just now percolating into the collective consciousness.

Hence, thanks to these characteristics, sustainability may just be the perfect--and perfectly timely--topic for an experimental non-fiction film of this kind, exploring and challenging the limitations of the medium while likewise exploring and challenging the limitations of our typical beliefs about sustainability.

Sust Enable: The Metamentary

Sust Enable: The Metamentary asks the question “what does sustainability mean?” at all levels of the film’s construction. We ask interviewees, of course, but we also ask ourselves, throughout the process of making the film. We examine the claims of our participants regarding features shared by any sustainable system, and explore the meaning of such claims at the story’s level, the stylistic construction, and the holistic production itself within the real world (as the process of creating any film implicates people, materials, and ecosystem.) We will also try to listen to feedback carefully and adapt our process as it goes, to continually improve our own emerging understanding of sustainability.

The film’s story will examine my life for how well it naturally incorporates the various “features of sustainability.” The film’s driving question is: what defines sustainability--or can it be defined? The film is guaranteed to be rife with twists and challenges in both the narrative and the aesthetic experience, as--just like in defining sustainability--all facts and claims of objectivity are up for debate.

Our mission is to give thorough and adequate treatment to the topic of sustainability in the documentary film medium. We hope that in doing so, we will make difficult or esoteric ideas about sustainability more accessible to discussion among Americans by translating them into an artfully-told, emotionally-impacting story. We firmly believe that the more people engaged in actively determining the meaning of sustainability in terms of their own lives and communities, the more viable a sustainable world becomes.

Conclusion

To close, I’d like to share a word--and a vision--with you that I find beautiful. It’s a word that many people probably will not have heard of yet, but it’s part of a vocabulary that is currently being developed for the purpose of communicating effectively around our newly globalized perspective (the parallel process in cinema is developing new cinema language to communicate our experiences.)

“Eudemony,” a word commonly found in texts discussing sustainability, describes the relative measure of overall improvement of a complex system. We may be able to achieve a greater global eudemony--including ecological and social concerns--if we develop a deeper self-awareness of ourselves as societies, as a species, as a form of life, as a component in the biosphere, and so forth. Paradoxically, this should include a growing awareness about the limits of our human-scale perception. Eudemony does not denote harmony, consensus, utopia or equilibrium. We live in a dynamic world, and our process to define global eudemony has only just begun.

However, it is fair to say that global eudemony would be contingent on more and more of us gaining access to information about both the dynamic state of the biosphere and the content of the human noosphere. Film is perhaps one of our best tools for accomplishing this because, unlike academic literature, legal declarations, or other forms that are available only to educated people, the video medium tells stories, in a way that is most like our psychological experiencing of the world, therefore making it emotionally accessible across language, education and cultural barriers. Plus, video is becoming increasingly accessible to all types of people through high-speed Internet.

But beyond documentary film, it is critical right now for all forms of art to encourage conscious evolution by embodying and modeling the kind of transformation that needs to take place.

Will you join me?

Caroline Savery is the director and co-producer of “Sust Enable: The Metamentary,” an independent holistic feature film all about “what does sustainability mean?” based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “Sust Enable: The Metamentary” is currently seeking support to begin production. To learn more about the project, visit http://www.sust-enable.com and http://www.indiegogo.com/sust-enable-the-metamentary.