Morecambe Milieux conference here.
The programme manifests the Bay as milieux in three ways (extended version).
Milieux as a philosophy of existence: could start from its ordinary everyday meaning translated to English from French as simply the “environment” constituting the surround, niche or context that a person or organism lives in. The Bay is surely a rich and threatened environment and home for many human and biodiverse species alike. And yet another etymological meaning of the milieu means in the middle of— of being in the midst or en media res suggesting instead not an object inside something or against it, but constant mediation through an ecology of relationships with no beginning or end. In this sense, the milieu is a middle zone between organism and environment mediating the unfolding co-constitutional processes of these bodies at the same time as they make and remake each other in tandem. Milieu disappears the backdrop or the surround. Instead, all actors are centre stage within a mise en scene. Here the identities of the previous two positions soften as they are instead entangled through the generalised milieu of being. In choosing to think with milieu, representations of the world mingle with its materiality— for example how we decide to organise the world’s meaning through data sciences is shaped by and shaping of the world’s measured matter in circular ways. The milieu calls into question established orthodoxies of modernity, of nature and culture as arithmetic and the governance of uncertainty in the Anthropocene where the presumed linear relationship between information, meaning, evidence and rational action no longer appears to hold water.
Milieux of normativity is called into question as interconnected, complex and accelerating changes across society, earth systems and ecologies are destabilising the foundations of Western modernity and its systems of management and planning. Breaking from established notions of “normal” is of course an ordinary part of social, technological and political change as well as ecological regime shift. Such changes define what we might (normatively) speak of as “progress” even as historical assumptions about this concept fall apart. Questioning what is normal is also desirable, given that normalness encloses, excludes and degrades those or that which exceed or fall short of its standards often in political, divisive and violent ways. Global society is now urgently called on to leave behind normal to enact deep and profound shifts as the IPCC has articulated in “everything, everywhere and all at once”. Talk of transformation is it seems is increasingly the norm— making our contemporary milieu one of transformative urgencies. The extent to which new formations will be controlled or merely experienced is arguably the crux of existential uncertainty about the role of human agency in Anthropocene. What guiding standards and norms, ways of thinking and doing are being dislodged? And if the handrails of normal are falling away what are the implications for governance, policy as well as norms around the role of scientific knowledge, data and evidence that are proposed to shape it?
Milieux of emplacement foreground the role of place-based enquiries in reckoning with the two prior frames. Places are contingent, contextual and made through relational historical processes. They are not easily amenable to blueprints or plans from elsewhere or universal models applied— but they are also in dynamic interaction with multiple scales at once thereby complicating a clear distinction between the particular and general. A milieu of place invites the consideration of the specificity of life and experience in Morecambe Bay, where Anthropocenic effects are experienced and mediated through arrangements of bio-geophysical features, cultural values and identities, local economies, and particular vulnerabilities. This milieu— the one where lives are lived and homes are made— contrasts with the abstract space conjured through technical ways of knowing arising from master disciplines and far-away centres of power. Place is not smooth or uncomplicated, it holds differences and similarities at the same time. Places are where interconnections and complexities, attachments and meanings layer upon one another, clarifying the vulnerabilities, intimacies and responsibilities that are shared.
