This Uncertainty in the Built Environment series also was a bit of an albatross: the subject matter of these posts required covering a lot of ground, and then I became very sick with Covid and the whole thing lost momentum, until finally stalling out and then just sitting there for some time. This is a huge pain in the ass: you lose your many trains of thought and coherence, and then go back to the thing to try to pick up where you left off, torn between finishing it out less strong, or tossing the thing entirely.
I was tempted to scrap this shit, but reading it over, I'm seeing that there is still some meat here, and some important themes buried within that I'll be returning to anyway. If you bear with me through this undercooked post, I'll start a little more fresh on the next one and salvage some useful concepts for working through later.
For the completionist, here is 1, 2, and 3, with 4 following just below. Not everyone has time for that though. I'll try to get the salient points across from here on out.
Previously in part 4 I painted a bit of an intense picture of what uncertainty in the wilderness looks like. More importantly, we can use that picture to analyze the current state of the built environment, and of course assess the implications of that state. This is an exercise that feels all the more pressing, considering the state of current affairs in the United States especially.
Here for many, the built environment is beginning to take on the subjective experience of a wilderness, a process that has been well underway for decades, and which is experienced at varying levels of intensity depending on the individual's social, political, geographic, and economic locations. The concept of the wilderness itself needs to be further addressed for clarification, but I'd like to save that for the next post, as I believe we have enough to directly address the subject matter alluded to by the title of this series of posts.
Now, as we touched on before, the built environment is most immediately represented by the material supports of the urban environment - used in this case in a more general sense - but the phenomena itself is more an expression of a deep need to persist and even flourish at greater timescales, and so from the built environment flows an entire evolving world of ancillary processes such as the medical system, water and energy and waste systems, food distribution, transportation, research, administration, legal regulation, and so on.
Many of these patterns seek to stabilize and maintain the many life processes on multiple levels, say on the molecular, individual, local, and collective levels, and to establish certain acceptable levels of predictability and certainty for the perpetuation of human life.
Part of the problem here is that for numerous and deeply complex historical, evolutionary, and even thermodynamic reasons, the process to achieve stability and certainty tips well over into not only flourishing and then a bid at perpetual ecstasy, but also to absolute power and domination, which is necessarily a localized process, no matter how intently its universal conceits are declared.
With such uneven patterns of development then, the historical regions of certainty and organization are always moving and shifting, and with them - and inextricably bound up with them - the regions of uncertainty and so-called chaos.
We've been meditating on this process and its nature and consequences here for quite some time, and indeed it is incredibly complex and as a result, difficult to describe as a totality, but then that is what the wilderness metaphor is for: we can provisionally collapse these processes down into the simple matters of access to food and energy and basic survival, and then the subjective experience of such things. One way to illustrate the movements of organization and stability, and their contrasting regions of uncertainty, is to illustrate the basic contrasting consequences and experiences of these phenomena.
This is getting easier to do now, because the contrast between flourishing and struggling is proceeding to such a stark and sharp disparity between classes of individuals, and then there is the growing polarization of the shrinking wealthy classes and the growing impoverished classes.
One is of a certain class, ticking off the right identity boxes in certain regions of affluence, and everywhere one walks, there is somewhere to instantly procure food, energy, transportation, what have you. You get lost, and you merely need to speak, and soon you'll be on your way.
Move over to another class, another set of identity markers, and one is regarded with puzzlement and suspicion. One loses the ability to speak, or to be seen and understood, regarded instead as a threat, and one better mind one's step. There is less certainty in the daily furnishing of food, water, shelter, and heat, which at present is increasingly being rationed in accordance with the money system, a rationing that will increasingly become more territorial as the money system is increasingly abused and broken down, as is apparent in the behavior of the rich and powerful increasingly buying up material security in the form of land and natural resources, and of national boundaries sharpening and clarifying under the increasing strain of global trade.
This uncertainty manifests all sorts of compensatory behaviors which complicate the public sphere and introduce a chaotic, shifting mass of activity that is more difficult for central powers to manipulate and anticipate. Lying, stealing, murder, social threat and domination, addiction, suicide, and so on are examples of the many alternatives available to individuals and then states abandoned to a social and geopolitical wilderness where food and protection are no longer guaranteed, all of which have profound social and political consequences that must be dealt with in turn.
The many micro-events influence the development of a macro, or structural set of ongoing forces, which produce their own micro-events in turn. At the risk of entering a particular sequence of events mid-stream in the narrative, you had a socially, politically, and economically weakening global capitalist system - which was built for the rapid movement and suffusion of material globally - take up the coronavirus that causes Covid, which rapidly moved through the global population, reproducing and evolving and reinfecting rapidly in waves, doing damage as it went.
This pandemic was able to bloom into fruition through a growing political economic wilderness in which a populace was increasingly set against itself, and the virus, doing its damage, contributed to a seizing up of global supply chains, and an acceleration of the concentration of capital, among other knock on effects, accelerating the mistrust of collective institutions and even guiding ideologies. We've been covering this growing chaos and uncertainty in the context of the decline of the West, but there are similar issues springing up globally - if in different forms - due in part to the universality of an increasingly unstable global climate.
Uncertainty and certainty are connected conceptually, yes, but they are also closely connected in practice. Where chaos and uncertainty grows, there grows with them an insatiable hunger for certainty and stability, which pursued in a concentrated and forceful matter, produces more of its opposite in well-proportioned amounts.
To make better sense of these tangled concepts in tension with each other, I'd like to address the shifting nature of the wilderness and its lessons. Uncertainty is in our present narrative closely associated with the wilderness, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. Though the identity of the concepts of "uncertainty" and "wilderness" have been useful to establish a narrative thus far, the concepts themselves will be more useful to us on a practical level when they are disentangled. Next time we can untangle those things and see what is there.
