rattus rattus’ blog

Sustainability is everywhere. Like viability it is a static concept of concepts, ever changing views, values, and notions. No living system, that is no autopoietic system, has ever been or is unsustainable unless one calls the living dead.

Why am I adding my skeptical bits? Asking why is the quest for criteria, and vice versa, whenever one is applied we cannot but take sides. For then being asked to justify our appropriation, reason and cause shall even up the actual impudence, or exorbitance. Choose yourself.

What makes me hope are the many paradoxical aspects of Sustainable Development. And some researchers are well aware of them. What are we missing? Might the paradoxes seen in Sustainable Development blind out the paradoxes of life itself? Please, sustain paradoxes.

Speaking of autopoietic systems the code of sustainability, this ultimate criterion, is sustainability itself. In order for sustainability to sustain it needs to incorporate change (contrary to its ongoing externalization). Indicators indicate, criteria of sustainability decide. Each and everything considered unsustainable shall be cut off. The price of precious diversity.

Oh, the pleasures of ethical concepts.
Pregnancy of a fucked up mind.
Bound to sustain.

paradoxes

are

paradoxes

There are probably many aspects to the double bind illustrated in “It hurts me, too“. Here is what it boils down to for me:

Someone says: Never do I want to hurt anyone.
Someone else replies: By this you do. The way you are hurts.

Finding particular reasons is left as an exercise for my dear readers.

Of course there is right and wrong,
but you can’t tell one from the other.
Thus, there is no right and wrong.

If someone says you are wrong
you are not
and neither is someone
nor me.

In his comment on Trust not truth, Michael points us to Jenny Holzer‘s Truisms, see for instance the long list of truisms or Jenny Holzer’s on-line edition Please Change Beliefs. Many truisms are wonderful examples of self-referential lies or nontrivial trivialities.

Fortunately, people living in Vienna currently can see street posters with texts of Jenny Holzer in the central districts. They are part of the exhibition Jenny Holzer XX which is still shown at the MAK until September 17, 2006.

More of Jenny Holzer:

• Jenny Holzer @ äda ‘web
• Jenny Holzer @ artsy.net
• Inflamatory Essay
• Pictures: At Flickr and at Google

A friend of mine, after we had been together for about 3 years, once wrote to me:

Why do you react like I am playing an important role in your life? I don’t know but I guess there must be a reason. Anyway, the way you are hurts me, and it puts me off.

I don’t know either, but I think we can call this some painfully sad words. I am afraid, they can make even a liar cry for the hidden double bind. If someone who we do not want to hurt tells us that we do
we are cursed.