PhD Research Week 50

“The Perverts Guide to Sustainability” (after watching “The Perverts Guide to Ideology”) "The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is a 2012 British documentary film directed by Sophie Fiennes and written and presented by Slovene philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek.  It is a sequel to Fiennes’s 2006 documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Though the film follows the frameworks of its predecessor, this time the emphasis is more on ideology itself. Through psychoanalysis Zizek explores “the mechanisms that shape what we believe and how we behave”."

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUKbhKV7Ia8 w=500] During the course of my research I will inevitably reach high points of saturation with the sustainability business.  In the journey of trying to define what sustainability actually is, beyond a word, it is a belief in a way of living. It is inevitable to come across what I have called ‘sustainability porn’ or ‘green porn’ everywhere.  My own definition of sustainability, how I see it in my everyday, how I will define it in my research, should come from personal experience as a living being in the world.  This is why I will compare market-led approaches to, more authentic, more bottom-up, more grass roots approaches. That is the "sustainability" that I am interested in this project, and trying to understand how the essence of social innovation initiatives are more real, more authentic, transparent, and deploy a greater passion for their principles.  Green-washing seems to now be a term which is fairly obsolete.  It is not that mass market corporations are not working to meet sustainability targets and reducing numbers.  They are.  And that has taken sustainability and branding to a whole new level.  But lets face it, when MacDonald's switches from red to green, that's just as porn as it gets.