life

This article is based on a lecture, "Planetary Consciousness and Possible Future of Culture", originally commissioned and produced by the Prince Claus Fund for its 25th Anniversary Festival: 25 Years 25 Hours. Cover: Chanté Schatz/University of the Witwatersrand.

In this lecture in memory of Prince Claus of the Netherlands, I would like to share with you a set of reflections on what a new cultural agenda for our time could possibly look like.

Let me do this by using personal recollections.

After several years spent in Europe and in the United States of America, I had decided in 1995 to return to Africa to serve the continent. That is how, in 1996, I found myself in Dakar, Senegal, as the head of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA).

A few months after arriving in Dakar, I received an invitation from Prince Claus requesting that I come to The Hague, because on the occasion of his 70th birthday, the Dutch government had graciously offered him a gift of 25 million Dutch Florins (also called Dutch Guilders, Dutch currency replaced by Euro in 2002, almost 12 million euros), and he wanted to use this gift to establish a fund for culture and development.

By the time the Prince Claus Fund was established, most European countries had widely acknowledged culture as a legitimate category of public action. In fact, since the 70s, experts in various fields had started to analyze the impact of cultural factors on the development process, and in their attempt to mainstream culture in development practice, various international bodies and international cooperation agencies had begun to assert that development and culture went hand in hand, but the majority of the institutions involved in research and development funding had a fundamentally utilitarian conception of culture. In most instances, culture was taken to be an exogenous constraint, rather than one of the realms of everyday life. It was not, in other words, considered for its own sake; rather, its value was solely derivative. Its primary functions were to alleviate poverty, reduce inequality, and promote social cohesion, and it was on these grounds that culture was to be integrated into public action and public policy as a whole, whether in the field of education, health, the environment, or, for that matter, tourism.

In most instances, culture was taken to be an exogenous constraint, rather than one of the realms of everyday life.

But by the 1990s, the cultural sector was no longer entirely free of the laws of the market. It was subject to innumerable contradictory imperatives in the name of development. To the extent that the idea of an autonomous arena of cultural production was increasingly under attack, and many people sought to subjugate artistic creation entirely to economic and financial and developmental priorities, reacting against this impoverished vision of culture and associated attempts to reduce it to custom, to cultural heritage or traditions. Critics such as Arjun Appadurai began then to emphasize its liberatory and utopian power. For Appadurai in particular, the social, economic, and moral realms were inextricably linked in understanding the determinants of human well-being and in interpreting well-being itself in terms of a person's capabilities. Amartya Sen, for his part, provided much of the intellectual rationale for the movement toward a more holistic vision of development.

I tell you about all of this because Prince Claus had then decided to gather around him a small group of intellectuals, artists, and figures from the world of development to help him design what was to become the Prince Claus Fund for culture and development. Three of us came from Africa. There was one person from Cuba. The rest were Dutch. We spent the morning revisiting some of the debates about the links between culture and human well-being, culture and capability, culture and freedom. In the afternoon, we went around the table, gathering ideas about the extent to which culture was, in fact, an end in itself, how it was a constitutive factor in how life was or could be valued. So various proposals on how best to shape the fund, how best to define its goals were also discussed.

Now, during the many breaks between sessions, I learned that Prince Claus had spent part of his childhood in the former German Colony of Tanganyika (now the mainland part of present-day Tanzania). His attachment to Africa clearly dated back to that time in Côte d'Ivoire, where he had worked in the German diplomatic services during the post-independence period. He had traveled to other parts of the continent and had spent much of his life reflecting on the ethical basis for engagement in a society by an external agent, reflecting on the relationships between external agents and domestic partners. I was struck by the place Africa held in Prince Claus' reflections on the role of culture in development and his interest in the dilemmas resulting from colonialism. He spoke about Africa as if somewhere in its unexplored depths Africa held the deepest roots of what might be called general creation. And I think he was right, because despite the rape of colonialism, is something of the old pre colonial animist metaphysics remained.

...in pre-colonial African systems of thought, culture was not primarily about identity, about heritage, about custom. Instead, it was defined as the never-ending weaving of relations and correspondences between beings and things, liberating if you want, the power of germination. So, from the perspective of African animist metaphysics, culture functioned as an energy believed to govern vital phenomena.

Evidently, Prince Claus had retained one or two things from his Tanganyikan childhood to start with, the fact that in pre-colonial African systems of thought, culture was not primarily about identity, about heritage, about custom. Instead, it was defined as the never-ending weaving of relations and correspondences between beings and things, liberating, if you want, the power of germination. So, from the perspective of African animist metaphysics, culture functioned as an energy believed to govern vital phenomena. So perhaps during his time in Africa, Prince Claus had also learned that individual humans are defined first and foremost by their vital energy and ability to resonate with the many living species that inhabit the universe—plants, animals and minerals included, and as anthropologist Germaine Dieterlen explains, every category of being and thing is in correspondence with all others; I'm quoting her, rank by rank, and with all parts of the human body, itself considered as a whole; and in return every part of the entire universe projects into a human being and into other beings.

So perhaps during his time in Africa, Prince Claus had also learned that individual humans are defined first and foremost by their vital energy and ability to resonate with the many living species that inhabit the universe—plants, animals and minerals included (...)

So over the course of that day, Prince Claus asked more than once whether the fund should be dedicated solely to Africa. In the face of lukewarm response to this proposal, he continued to insist that Africa be prioritized as a sphere of the action of fund. On several occasions, he returned to the importance of languages, of multilingualism and translation for both the production of thought and the development process at large. He was also equally interested in discussing the conditions of possibility of endogenous development trajectories, especially in countries where colonialism had somewhat interrupted historical mechanisms. So to his mind, the task of culture was to foster the flourishing of such possibilities and to contribute towards the establishment of a better balance between nature, the environment, and humans. This equilibrium, as we know, had been disrupted by the industrial miracle, a miracle that led to the exploitation of resources to the benefit of a single corner of the planet.

On the topic of development, I was intrigued by the importance Prince Claus ascribed to water. Again, the relation of water to life is a key element in African cosmogonies. As divine seed, water is not only a material resource, but it is also considered a part of the vital energies. These energies can dry up, especially when the conditions of collective and communal use are not met. Prince Claus' insight regarding the importance of water predated the climate crisis, as many voices celebrated the victory of capitalism over sovietism.

Then it appeared he had his own distinctive concerns. Purely for him, productivism would lead to a dead end. The Earth was damaged, and the burning issue was how to revive it and to foster such regeneration. He believed it would require a decentering of thought. It would require new concepts and new moves for generating culture anchored in concrete territories, and such was the task he foresaw for the fund.

Prince Claus' insight regarding the importance of water predated the climate crisis, as many voices celebrated the victory of capitalism over sovietism.

25 years later, most of the intuitions he had are still, it seems to me, valid. Prince Claus left us on October 6, 2002. Since his passing, the fund has come a long way, but it seems to me that today it must bring into being, once again, the kind of progressive action that he envisaged. It must re-examine its place and function in a world split asunder by new fractures. It must do so by imagining a new cultural agenda for our time, and concern for the planet, concern for the emergence of a new planetary consciousness must be at the heart of this new agenda.

They must be at the heart of this new agenda, partly because two questions that confront us today will haunt us for most of this century. The first is the question of the possible future of life, and the second is that of the possible future of culture itself, that is, the future of reason and the future of freedom.

I say this because not so long ago, the term culture used to refer to objects and signifying systems whose function was to hold things together, to hold them together by assigning them deep meaning and moral worth. Things material, like artifacts, things immaterial, like say, language itself, or for that matter, other products of the imagination. But as we enter the 21st Century, culture is, or must increasingly be understood as what counts as life, the forms relations take, something I would like to call general creation.

(...) concern for the emergence of a new planetary consciousness must be at the heart of the fund's new agenda.

We are called upon to grapple with these very urgent issues of the possible future of life, the possible future of culture, the possible future of reason and freedom, this urgent issue of the general creation we are called upon to grapple with these issues at a time when at least in Africa and other parts of the Global South, culture is in crisis. Art is in crisis. But although art is in crisis, art is still capable of providing an incomparable and inexhaustible source of productive energy from various forms of writing, from various forms of constituting archives, various forms of performing, identity of thinking, and of remembering. In fact, conceptual innovation, in particular in the visual arts, has become a source of inspiration for a variety of truly vibrant texts. True in a vast continent such as Africa, a lot is still not fully documented. A lot is still invisible. In reality, a lot may never be realized. In any case, so much has already been lost that will never be recovered.

(...) culture is, or must increasingly be understood as what counts as life, the forms relations take, something I would like to call general creation.

We might never witness what I could call a truly finished and completed work of art, not even in a museum. This is why, in truth, the question of restitution will never be resolved. Yet, as we can see in the field of music, for instance, what appears as repetition, in fact, is always a variation and recombination. Music, for that matter, is arguably the most important site of artistic innovation in Africa. New musical forms keep emerging, some of which are the result of unexpected combinations between visual and sound-based, texture, and performative elements. And this is partly because music as such is first and foremost an event.

I have to talk about an event, I have to highlight the fact that in African ancient systems of thought, an event was something that only emerged or only happened at a particular moment in time, it emerged only to disappear almost as soon as it arose. So in this sense, an event was something of the present. However, it could only constitute itself as an event by its relation to other events that it was not. It could only constitute itself as an event, in other words, within an interplay of references, thus, its singularity. So an event produced the concrete present in which it operated. That's the point I would like to make. This being the case, the function of the work of art was precisely to grasp the event at the very moment of its disappearance, that is, at the moment it constituted itself as a new actuality. It seems to me that African music captures these dialectics, these dialectics of memory and expectations, and it does so better than any other art form. This is why African musicq is so adept at generating all kinds of unexpected associations. This is also why it can be defined as an interactive bridging experiment, and that is what we need for our times.

A central quality of African contemporary art is also its strong reference to the present, of course, as I have just argued, in relation to music, but also its non-linear understanding of time. It is true that in the works of a number of contemporary African artists, time is still taken as a sequence of past, present and future, but time is also increasingly taking the form of remote synchronization, endowed with animistic and increasingly ecological features, while art itself is, without any doubt, becoming a key element of African society's self description. This we can see in the ways in which works of visual art, for instance, now understand themselves, not only as part of a process of performance, but also as an intervention, documentation, or re-enactment. In some instances, this process can be broadened by a literary or once again, musical dimension, and this we can also see in the manner in which acts of translation incorporated into the very genesis of many works of art and in the ways such works of art combine both words—images and sounds, both texture and visual artistic elements.

Combine all of that into a kind of community of interfusion and mutual freedom, which all lead me, then, to the question of the future itself, of futurism, if you want. Here we are, of course, well aware of what a number of critics have been putting forward, I would argue, at least since the mid-80s. Recently, critics such as Cornelia Bond have argued that paradigmatic forms of contemporary art can be characterized by what she calls the realization in a particular present. In other words, what she's saying is that contemporary art, and here I have to quote her, "no longer understands itself as the historic avant-gardes were understood", meaning as the harbingers of future time. As we know, the futurists wanted to basically abandon the status quo, they wanted to rush ahead of their own time to celebrate a new beginning. In order to do so, each generation of futurists needed to constantly call into question the then-prevailing concept of art. Each generation needed to overstep the limits to engage in one or another act of transgression. This required, among others, finding for oneself what could possibly be the driving forces behind renewal, and what compositional principles could possibly bring this renewal into being. So somewhere, we have inherited a concept of artistic or general creation as the precipitation of raptures, as the establishment of new beginnings. The difference between today and yesterday, in this regard, seems to me, lies in the belief that, as a social oppression, creation occurs exclusively in the present, in the art form's own time. So the moment, and here, I agree with a number of other critics, the moment we are in, can be characterized as dominated by radical empiricism, a kind of empiricism which itself is fostered at least in part by the transformations of capitalism in our age.

Now you'll ask me, what is radical empiricism? What has it done? I think it has resulted in the flattening of styles and of genres. Of course, new forms of artistic activity might be spreading, but they are no longer artistic movements as such. One of the reasons for the absence of artistic movements is the death of genealogical descent. What we have today is a multiplicity of co-existing forms of depiction, if you want, these depictions are done via installations, via performances. Yes, you have conceptual art, land art, relational art, appropriation art, art videos, art documentation, sound installations, time sculptures, site and context-specific interventions, which might take many different forms, acoustic choreographies, for instance, participative forms of performance and opera exhibitions. And these exist alongside each other, but they are no longer placed within a sequence of historical narrative or periodization, thus simultaneity of multiple forms of depictions, but hardly any transgression.

This does not mean that everything remains unchanged, but as I'm saying, we have a hard time finding out where transgression is actually occurring, and what it could possibly mean in our contemporary context. So a situation of repetition, repetition, without difference, unfolding from moment to moment, instant by instant, in the present. So I would like to suggest that the question of the future of life, of the future of reason and freedom, the future of culture, is re emerging at a time when the distinctly human can no longer be taken for granted, at a time too, when humanity seems to have come to the realization that unless there is a significant adjustment in how we conduct our lives, parts of the earth are likely to become inhospitable in the near future.

Indeed, many are wondering how we should inhabit anew and share as equitably as possible, the planet whose life support system has been so severely damaged by human activities as to be in dire need of repair. So in view of the deep state of fragmentation in which the planet finds itself, some are asking, how should we remember it? Remember, meaning in this case, putting back together its different parts, reassembling it, reconstituting it as an integrated system, a system in which humans, non-humans, physical, chemical, biological components, oceans, atmosphere, land surface are all interlinked.

Indeed, many are wondering how we should inhabit anew and share as equitably as possible, the planet whose life support system has been so severely damaged by human activities as to be in dire need of repair.

Interlinked in a grand gesture of bio symbiosis and mutuality, it seems to me, that is the core cultural question of our time. And these questions of habitability, of biosymbiosis, of sustainability and durability, these questions of the interlacing of human history and the earth's history, these are far from abstract concerns, in fact, ongoing, long term, planetary environmental changes have only further dramatized them, and there is little doubt that they will be at the center of any debate on the future of life and the future of reason and the future of culture in this century. They will be at the heart of any of these questions, because humanity has become a Telerik force, the new power relations currently forming at the planetary level are essentially the result of the industrial exploitation of the world.

So the key practical, biological, ethical and esthetic questions of our time all relate to the future of Earth and to what connects us, what compels us, what transforms us as living beings, among beings, since one and the same life circulates in all bodies. Domination, be it of humans, of fish, of cows, of pigs, or of nature, can be said to be ethnically indistinguishable. It is clear that the most fundamental cultural question today and in the near future is how to reconstruct a habitable Earth, one that will make possible a home where we all can breathe. So a new understanding of what it is to live on the same planet with other living beings should be the priority for any new cultural agenda, question of how to take care of the earth, how to repair it, and, above all, how to share it, since sharing it is one of the conditions of its sustainability.

So a new understanding of what it is to live on the same planet with other living beings should be the priority for any new cultural agenda, question of how to take care of the earth, how to repair it, and, above all, how to share it, since sharing it is one of the conditions of its sustainability.

These issues can no longer be deferred. So it's a matter of no less than developing an ecological intelligence to allow us to learn how to make space for life, how to live with, not against life, and this new cultural agenda must be forged at a point when the shock of neoliberalism is being felt everywhere, more than ever before, in every place on Earth, social order is oriented towards the maintenance by all means necessary, of inequalities at unprecedented, historically high levels. We are caught in a logic of acceleration, while increasingly the dynamic of capitalism is driven by the ideology of technology, notably via artificial intelligence and robotics.

At the same time, we come to realize that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity. This does not mean that it no longer has any influence on the way of the world, or that we should discount it now, but Europe can no longer live in the illusion that it can dictate the course of things alone. This is not only the case for the economy, or for military and technological power. It is also true in the spheres of culture, the arts, and ideas. So it seems to me, the new cultural agenda we are advocating for must start from the position of what the late Edward Lee San called Le tu monde, the whole world woven from entanglements and relations between its many different homes, and the greatest obstacle to its coming to fruition is an ignorance so unaware that it becomes pure nativism trying to pass as universalism. And battle against this form of ignorance requires that we leave the self and open ourselves deliberately to the possibility of multiple pathways and crossings, for only the trial of the journey allows us, each time from different worlds, to look together and sometimes to see as one.

So it's my pleasure. My pleasure to have contributed to the 25th birthday of the Prince Claus Fund, and I would like to conclude this lecture in memory of Prince Claus of the Netherlands by calling once again, for a borderless world, because it's not enough to recognize the plurality of cultures and bordering is the other stake in the new cultural agenda. Thank you very much for your attention.

You can watch the full lecture, "Planetary Consciousness and Possible Future of Culture: Achille Mbembe" | 25 Years 25 Hours Festival here:

Conceived and created by Achille Mbembe

Artistic Director: Keng Sen Ong

Producer: Fariba Derakhshani

Digital production: XSaga