Sustainability and the immaterial: rethinking knowledge and its production beyond the linear economy

The article speculates on the applicability of existing discourses on material sustainability to a shift in behaviours concerning the management of immaterial resources such as education, skills, and the production and dissemination of knowledge. While information products constitute a central aspect of contemporary cultural environments, our mainstream vision of sustainability seems to be enclosed in the material world. This disconnection, which defines our present production model, causes an important chasm: while we increasingly produce discourses about the importance of shifting towards circular models of consumption and production, our approach to concepts and ideas remains grounded in a linear, extractivist logic. As such, our understanding and management of the immaterial remains grounded in an eschatological paradigm which is bound to the concept of future, which, in contemporary European languages, is entangled with ideas of growth and acceleration. Developing from Guattari’s (1989) proposition of an Ecosophy, I propose an understanding of sustainability of immaterial resources, which will be narrowed down to the problem of production of knowledge and its dissemination through Higher Education. The reflection combines the idea of circular and linear temporalities, explored through the works of Bakhtin (1981), Heidegger (1985), and Koselleck (2004), alongside Zeman’s (1975) Systemic Semiotic Theory and postulates from Greimasian Generative Semiotics (Cf. Greimas 1983), interrogating how principles of material sustainability can be reoperated as tools to mitigate the imminent immaterial ecological disaster.