The Political Taxonomy of Words

Indy Johar

How can we design for a planet that is more than human? This question motivated the Planetary Retreat organized by 10x100 and Horizon 2045 at Diversity Lab in Berlin in June 2023. Its primary objective was to establish the groundwork for a pioneering design standard, one that prioritized the cultivation of a reinvigorated planetary intelligence. We invited a unique group of thinkers and practitioners working in policy, governance, engineering, advocacy, design, and the arts to share their insights to this effect.

In this talk, Indy Johar, architect and co-director of 00 and Dark Matter Labs, delves into the intricacies of the political taxonomy of words, focusing on how the conceptual frames we use shape our perception and structure of the world.

This transcript is based on the original audio recordings of the retreat, with minor edits for clarity and length.

I’d like to really get in lock with this problem: the political economy of the words that we’re using and how we’re using them.

This is situated from the point of view of London. So it is not universal, nor will it be universal, but it’s situated from that perspective. What I’m very interested in is not the material world, but the implicit order, and deep into the implicit order at the level of language, the language we’re using to describe the world, and language not as just narrative forms but actually conceptual frames to which we structure and see the world.

And in this conversation, I wanted to talk about some felt words^{Figure 1} which I think represent people’s realities—certainly in the conversations that I’m part of—and what they mean. One was just a genuine feeling of being diminished as a human being. And it’s something that I’m kind of holding onto personally—it’s not other people’s words. I feel diminished. I think the world is diminishing us as human beings. What does that really mean? Individuated to the point of being isolated as a tactical device and a kind of organizing device. What does that mean? Entrapped within an illusion of choice. A theory of choice that’s constructed, but is largely an illusion, and is actually a greater sense of entrapment in our worlds around us. It’s actually a result of a whole bunch of [issues]—house prices, healthcare costs, [and such around us]. All these things are tools of entrapment.

Everyone talks about degrowth, the kind of well-to-dos. Actually, the feeling is: I’m living in fucking degrowth already. What are you talking about? I’m living in a constraining world. The indignity of labor,^{Figure 2} we’ve had a whole thesis of the dignity of labor as a mask, which masks the actual indignity: that we use 13.5 billion years worth of evolution to basically pick up rubbish from one place to the other or hold the door open. That is the fundamental indignity of being human. What does that really mean? Actually, we’ve disguised the indignity of labor with a kind of nice flowery language. There’s a deep indignity in there. What does that really feel like? Being a Bad Robot? We treat humans as poor robots, malfunctioning robots. The conception is that actually you should be a robot. And we feel unaware of statistics and realities like this [figure].^{Figure 3} This is the gigatons of cattle, by way, that’s pigs, that sheep, that's all the wild animals in the world, all of them, zebras, everything, that’s there. So actually, the Anthropocene feels like words but I don’t feel this. I don’t fully understand the scale.

Systemically living in war,^{Figure 4} a war both towards me or with the environment around me, a war to future generations, actually reconceptualizing the present as not a peace but as a systemic war.

And the power of frames. I was recently going somewhere and I watched Interstellar. And Interstellar always blows me away. It makes me cry, it’s one of the few films. I like this quote from the movie^{Figure 5} that asks us: How are we constructing our worldviews? And what are the implications of the world views we construct? A political economy of words? What is this political economy?

I think we often use words as isolated things, but don’t look at the shadow of those implied words.^{Figure 6}

Degrowth, conceptually, I understand the academics of it. But it also implies finite games and net zero sum games, which means that the end-goal of any form of degrowth—structural, total, societal—will lead you to war. Because the only way for me to get something, if you have it and there’s no new, it’s just me taking it off you. And that will create the pathways of systemic violence.

Sustainability of what? Sustaining the now? Sustaining for whom?

Now, it is humans that are destroying the planet. The carrying capacity of the planet is 1 billion. So what does that mean? We get rid of 7 billion people? Are we legitimizing the death of 7 billion people? Is this the invisible narrative behind these words? Environmentalists (like David Attenborough and others) have been using language like this, which has a shadow implication.

So how do we start to break free from what I think is a sense of deep entrapment? Whether it’s breaking free or making free. Again, running at the back of my mind is this kind of flowering wand. Is it about breaking? Is it about unfurling a new type of freedom? What does that mean? What is the language of a Great Peace to animate against the Great War we’re in? A kind of a third path between the powers that be. How do we construct a language of a Great Peace, which is a fractal peace—my peace in my world—but also a global peace that creates a new frame?

I feel like I’m living in an illusion of choice. People are telling me climate change is a choice. It’s not a choice; it’s a duty.

But what does the landscape of duty look like, and the economy of duty look like, and the attributions of duty look like? I think we create these false theories of the axis between hope and fear, or choice and duty. Maybe there’s a different type of axis we need to put on the table now.

A theory of a new growth, a growth which isn’t our material economy growth but growth of our care capacity as a society, our complex cognitions, our empathy. There is [already] a capacity for [this] growth: our ecological systems. How do we build the capacity of that new growth? What does this look like? How is this rooted in a new freedom? How is this rooted in recognizing that you can't contract into complexity, you have to care into complexity, because of the unknown consequences? What does that mean for reimagining becoming human and humane? That’s a journey. So how do you reroute that into that? How does that allow us to think about a planetary scale consciousness^{Figure 7} and a new language frame around that, that allows us to possibly talk about love? What I’m looking at is how to create a new political handbook for tomorrow and the language frameworks for that.

Thank you.