The Methuselah papers – mike hales, on the resurgent power of commoning – Eldership & deep time, living economy & tools for conviviality

Exploring in four phases

Four zones of reach, four invitations from melancholy territory

Futures past. Left: not so long ago people thought the future looked like this. What d’you reckon to their vision? An Italian Futurist pram, encountered in a street in Siena, through which crusaders would leave the city at Porta Camollia, for Rome and the Holy Land. The wall behind the pram tells a better future story? Right: going back a ways . . King Ashurbanipal (Assyrian ‘King of the World’ 669–c.631 BC ) projected this as the future or, more accurately, as an eternalising present. The low relief demonstrates to all who see, how powerful the king is, twisting the tail of the lion – who seems to have other opinions. Lions were routinely marshalled for him to slaughter, proof of his divine right; his regime and dynasty fell, of course. The ruling ideologies and oligarchs today would have us adopt a similar image of their (‘our’) power and dominance over natural order. What do we reckon to their vision?

This is part 3 of Melancholy territory, activism in ddep time and life in the collective – Dancing a living economy. Here I’ll say how I mean to take forward the exploration flagged in this four-part paper, in four further phases (four papers, four invitations from melancholy territory). Each is oriented around one of the #zone s of activist reach that were outlined in the preceding paper The scope and reach – in-here, out-there . . as follows.

Drowning, in deep time | Zone ¿1 – In-here

I’ll explore challenges of living in melancholy territory and the possibility that it might look like misanthropy. Or is it rather a kind of humility, stepping out of anthropo-grandiosity, and being realistic about humans’ limitations as an odd kind of animal, and about capacities for harm, ugliness, laziness, lack of care, greed, delusion and pathological splitting-and-Othering?

If the melancholic’s sense might be one of drowning in the ocean of humans’ incessant emoting and storying, what’s the relationship between this ‘special’ or ‘local’ experience in melancholy territory, and the broad human possibility of drowning in the depth and markerlessness of an ocean of deep time: consequences of absurd, hubristic, encyclopaedist-extractivist-epistemicidal ambition in the Anthropocene-Capitalocene? Is the ‘melancholy’ relationship basically a posture of necessary humility – and perhaps, awe?

We can take this, if we wish (just one of the perspectives that we have), as an exploration of ‘eco-miserabilism’. But unlike Mathius Thaler Eco-miserabilism and radical hope – On the utopian vision of post-apocalyptic environmentalism we’re hoping to find a way of walking the walk, in the body, in the heart, in a life in the collective, rather than staying stuck in discourse-about-discourse, and sociologism.

Let’s do the materialist-activist-humanist thing, OK, rather than some kind of scholastic idealism, vague gesturing at humility in the face of ‘unknowables’, and grief at what is already lost: when the possession of ‘it’ – modernity? civilisation? safety? ‘the end of history’? consumer bliss? – was always a self-defeating delusion anyway?

We make the path by walking, there is no pre-existing signage, maybe a few trail-blazed waymarkers!

A grown-up life in the embrace of the earth | Zone ¿4 – Region

A grown-up life means leaving helpless and innocent and tantrum-prone infancy, fantastical and voracious and litle-experienced youth, melancholic age-refusing adolescence . . and weathering winter after winter, making provision for many winters to come; dancing all the time through all the seasons and returning all the time to make landfall while yet continuing to voyage on the deep waters of deepTime.

Equally, living a grown-up life means falling into the embrace of the Earth, knowing on one hand that the planet is more powerful and large than we (a person; or all of us) can comprehend and, on the other hand, that the planet – unlike a mother – does not particularly care for this person’s life or even for this species among so many; and on the other-other hand, that there is nowhere else (no Planet B) for a human being to be, but utterly (inter-)dependent in the embrace of the Earth. How may we – ex-moderns, Global-Northers, privileged dependents of globalised capital – make lives of this kind, in the wake of modern (childish) hubris, having done such a drastic and short-sighted, greedy job – in a four-hundred year fit of rage and hubris – of violently destroying previous long-lasted ways of living in the planet’s arms; and calling it progress? Have we – as ‘civilisation’ – made the capacity for eldership almost extinct?

And can we, in #deepTime, regenerate that species of existence, out of its remaining pockets of ethnodiversity, as a cross-breed with post- or meta-modernity – as Vanessa Andreotti invites us to do, for example, in Hospicing modernity, through a kind of ‘group ethnotherapy’? Looks like the global South (and the-South-in-the-North) is a place where we must look . . for visions, for aesthetics, for actions: in pluriverse? in materially altered social relations of (re)production – of everything; radically re-ontologising?

One way to respond here is as Jem Bendell does in Breaking together – A freedom loving response to collapse, in terms of freedom and autonomy: “I mean the ability to think and act as we choose, without coercion or manipulation, and with meaningful awareness of our situation and the possible effects of our choices.” An individualist, almost Cartesian (!) , framing of this kind will not do. What I ‘m reaching for – invoking, summoning into further gathering – is a capacity to respond in the interdependent, ecosystemic, mycelial, pluriversal collective – in the commons – to the reaching out towards us, of the planet’s teeming and relentless lives.

‘Individual’ actions are conditioned within the collective(s). It’s the orchestrated and broadly tacit collectives’ responses – and ‘migrations’ or wanderings-across-landscapes (and the preconscious forces – coercive and ‘manipulative’ as they inescapably are are – that collectives per se carry, and are formed from) – that must be evolved,. It’s an error to imagine explicit and discrete ‘choices’ that must/can be made, by individuals or families.

It’s a challenge of intergenerational evolution rather than ‘solutions’ that individuals (or perhaps families, or bands of vigilantes) may seek, within an individual, volitional life-history. It’s a dance, of pluriversal, distributed and (hopefully) affiliating collectives, with-and-in the enormously pluralised forms of life and habitat on earth?

Thus, it’s a matter of choreography, generated in rehearsal and mobilised in (collective) performance – in the body, and in the body of of humankind, and in the arms of the planet – rather than ‘choices’ by fearful persons?

The way to make ‘the best choice’ – to take the most elegant, most resonant, most alive path – is never fear! Thus: how to choreograph and rehearse ourselves as dancers among many species-dancers, in the life of the planet, in the heart? In the commons. Beautifully. Opening.

Delusion, self and life in the collective | Zone ¿3 – We

The relationship(s) of Self and Other (and delusions of self and other) are at the root. So how we inhabit ‘self’ fundamentally matters. We need to take a trip through some versions of ‘self’ in psychology, including ethno-psychologies and Buddhist psychology. We’ll find that the ones that seem well founded are visions of life in a collective, rolling over generations with a big view back and a big view forwards but always pivoting, on its toes, here, now.

We’re looking at eldership here.

We’re looking at eldership here, as a commonplace practice to be skilfully apprenticed in through a lifetime within a community, and as a lasting and persistent skilful collective storying and genre-ing across many lifetimes. This investigation leads us to life in the collective as life in the commons (and to the skill, genre, conceptualising and storying of stewarding commons-of-commons) and to a politics of sufficiently commoning all necessary means of subsistence and wellbeing: §material, §cultural and §aesthetic.

Dancing the living economy – Everything in the commons | Zone ¿2 – Here

So . . how to do commons? Primarily, in the zone of the real economy . .

But then also, in the other zones, also reaching, somehow, over the horizon of directly knowable community and peer-to-peer simplicity . .

The final part of this initial framing (in a couple of weeks) is Patterning this paper. It nominates some patterns – elements of an emergent pattern language – that seem to be implied by what we’ve identified in this introductory subset of papers.

Then we can move on to the main business of the thread: four papers, invoking the four zones of reach, as outlined here in this present paper.

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The Methuselah papers

Elder regions, deep time, living economy
https://write.as/papers/
This is mike hales, blogging on pattern language(ing) and language(ing) of struggle, as everyday activist practices in making a living economy. Aka the insurgent power of commoning, and the struggle for the commons of everything and for the grandchildrens' grandchildren.

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This blog is linked with some sister sites:
– The foprop frame – Pattern language of making a living economy
– A book of skill – The living and storying of an activist life
– Methuselah papers – Mirror site for the blog, in the fediverse

Book downloads are here including Living thinkwork (1980) and Location - Explorations of power(s) and landscapes of design (2016).