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

Melancholy territory, activism in deep time and life in the collective – Dancing a living economy

Right: The melancholy territory and life in the collective of eXtinction Rebellion Buddhists, Quakers and other faith communities, in a silent meditation action in the centre of London. Inviting participation in Love and grief for the Earth. And left: carbon, doing (above ground, on land) what it does, magnificently, manifestly, apparently without effort, in deep time: a beech, a community of beeches, soil.

This paper needs to extend to a lot of scope: indeed it will extend to a succession of separate blog posts. It’s very personal – which is fine: starting and ending in ‘the personal’ is a principle in the Methuselah papers. But I need here to be starting from some aspects of my own commitments and ‘character’ which many might say were odd, or minority, or unworthy, and there’s thus a risk of writing something that might seem minoritarian and individualist. The bigger challenge then is to thread this exploration into a recognition that an entirely general set of issues – concerning activist life in the collective – are at stake; and that some perceptions of character and identity that are extremely common – hegemonic – are ill-founded, needing to be displaced in coming to (practical) terms with our places (individual and collective, species-wise) in the present crisis, and the contributions that activisms might wisely be seeking to make to whatever may eventuate. So: a lot of scope!

A note on ‘the personal’. I use the term to refer to what goes on ‘in-here’, in a person, in the moments, as a life is laid down step by step, day by day, warp and weft, relationship-by-relationship, room-by-room, event-by-event, residue-by-residue: one epiphany at a time. I’ll distance myself from any idea that ‘the person’ is at the centre of things: what’s real are not persons, but lives, and their interweavings (eventually, and largely tacitly, woven and laid down, continuously emergent and contingent). ‘People’ are lived by lives, rather than vice versa. This is the historical, materialist, relational understanding. ‘We’, ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ are more real than ‘I’.

‘We’, ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ are more real than ‘I’.

From this start-place, I'm exploring actionable ways in which the personal can be inhabited as political, to constitute a pivotal aspect of activist engagement and also a zone of activist capability that is held within a pattern language.

Exploring versions of (relationships with) ‘the self’ is a pivotal topic below. But this paper is an exploration of the personal offered in public, and is thus public (collective) in basic intention and not individualist; certainly not – in its commonplace sense – Self centred. Rather, communitarian, pluriversal. It’s a call to the formation and skilful cultivation of the ‘we’ in each of our plural affiliations and movements; to courageous and skilful engagement with the powerfully public, out-there force of in-here; and also – fingers crossed – it’s a voice projected out across regions in geography and generational time. ‘The personal’ – and this particular figuration of what’s personal, perhaps idiosyncratic, certainly limiting, in this activist’s living – is offered as an engagement with the materiality of existence, of our present selves and equally of our grandchildren’s grandchildren, and of all species, in the collective, right ‘here’: in lives lived in this moment, in the total material embrace and endless and unceasing material dance that is the earth, and life on earth.

We’ll do this without personification of the earth too! The material world is certainly full of actors and actants, but – do I have to say this! it seems I do – the earth, although living, is not a person! I’m not going to write an animist or shamanistic invocation. Materialist rather than spiritual-ist, for sure: it’s material all the way down! Indeed, if we need to settle what ‘self’ signifies here, we can say that this paper is about the relationships of self-organising material and self-organising, affiliating people (activists), living responsible and un-hubristic, un-anthropocentric lives.

Starting with the personal

So, what’s the personal in this activist’s life, that might be minoritarian and might seem to militate against a life in the collective?

I call it ‘melancholy territory’. It’s a limited capacity to be in – and tolerate being in – groups, crowds and communities of co-presence and co-inhabitation. It’s a tendency to be overwhelmed under quite ordinary loads of emotional traffic, at levels of intensity where many might not even feel that something emotional was going on. It’s a defensive resistance to demands and expectations for ‘spontaneity’ and ‘right here, right now’, of kinds that often are taken to be touchstones of activist commitment: mass actions, the show of hands, voting with our feet, public actions on the street and in the square and ‘on the cobbles’, face-to-face pulse-raising confrontation and congregation. It’s a seeking of the quiet place and the back room, the breathing space and the head-space, the one-to-one and the deep relationship mediated by the page. It’s a rejection of (an avoidance of, a generous moderation of) the worship of ‘passion’ and outpoured emotion, of an impulse to ‘massiveness’, and of a belief in the intuitive rightness of the multitude as a value rather than an unfortunate pragmatic consideration. This is central in many activist traditions. I think of the Italian autonomistas for example, Toni Negri (who I admire) being a typification.

Seeking the quiet place and the back room, the breathing space and the head-space, the one-to-one and the deep relationship mediated by the page.

A life which turns out to be being lived in melancholy territory can be brought to (momentary, but not infrequently rather complete) collapse in very ordinary circumstances. A Self may not show up for minutes, hours or sometimes days at a time, and relationship – with almost anything and anybody, in-here or out-there – is unavailable: until . . life resumes, capacities for relationship are restored, expansiveness becomes again possible, joy (joyful being-in-presence-with) can be inhabited. While it happens, it’s a living death. You might easily imagine: it hurts and wounds, both self and Other. You might equally imagine: an inhabitant of melancholy territory would have a lot of motivation to acquire and to propagate means of stepping-out from there/here Would make ‘em ‘an activist’, for sure! Root and branch, 24/7. So: central, in what I’m calling attention on to in this paper, is active, skilful (re- and also dis-) engagement with what occurs in-here.

Quite a limitation on life in society (and on life)! How on earth can a person whose biography is of this kind aim or claim to be a socialist, a humanist, warm-hearted, generous, empathic, or a contributor in the collective! To explore, in further linked papers. But it needs to be said, right here: this is ‘a person’; this kind of life – in melancholy territory – is real and very many people are party to it (inhabiting it, or living intimately right next to it); and it is, for sure, a human life. There can be no doubt, a melancholic is 100% human, and their contributions to human life are 100% human too.

It feels odd, that it should feel so uphill to have to argue this in such explicitness and depth. But in our necessary activist engagement with the more-than-human, in deep time, we need to engage also all the human, not just ‘the nice bits’ or the approved stuff, or the de facto norms. Taking a cue from ecofeminisms, ‘all the actors’ need to be recognised to have voices. We melancholics are just as passionate (!) as card-carrying street-fighting extrovertists and spontaneists: about the capacity for life of our beloved children and grandchildren, about the systematically engendered sufferings of present humans (an endless mission of rescue from present harm is simply not enough!), about the violation of natural lives and beauties on every scale in every species and landscape, and the wilful and profoundly offensive ugliness of absurdly powerful hegemonic – yet in some grotesque and degenerate sense ‘human-ist’ (more precisely, anthropocentric) – regimes of material, cultural and aesthetic power.

‘All ‘ the actors need to be recognised to have voices.

One benefit of a minoritarian, marginalist existence in melancholy territory is that it ceaselessly gives an education in the range of ‘all’ the voices, when so many of the ‘normal’ (extravertist? gregarious?) ones are experienced, mundanely, to be so profoundly Other and blindly uncomprehending of what existence is like ‘here’. We have a persistent sense of difference, rather than alikeness.

Maybe, then, the melancholy existence is a great training for life in a pluriverse! Maybe we melancholists know more – or at least, know other, an expansion of ‘ordinary’ relationship and consciousness – about people than people ‘ordinarily’ do? We do, indeed, take ‘all the voices’ – and all the powers of all the voices, in-here and out-there -very personally. To heart. Our brains hurt. We hear them rushing up on us like stream trains, yet again, and feel on our cheeks the slipstream of near misses.

Time for a break. In first draft this was a single continuous paper with several sections but friends have said that chunking it smaller makes for more digestible reading of what is admittedly complex and odd stuff. So this paper is the first of an introductory subset. The papers to follow in this subset are:

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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– Email: blog AT conviv.mayfirst.org
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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).