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

The scope and reach, in-here and out-there

Landscapes of material engagement, power(s) and zones of reach in activism

Landscapes in-here, out-there. Left: as near as my camera can get, is infrastructure in-here, as encountered in the teeming street market in Ballaró, Palermo. Not the heart-mind, but perhaps once the material habitations of heart-mind in some of our fellow mammalian beings. As we normally would say: guts and lights. Right:  infrastructure out-there. Again, an approximation: because infrastructures per se are huge and ultimately unknown, tacitly and practically defined by whatever connects with-and-within them, evolutionary, over horizons and beyond intentions. This image shows tokens of intentional infrastructures in Granada: saneamiento, abastacimiento de agua, bomberos. One of our modernist delusions – most notably in the field of digital materials – has been to kid ourselves that infrastructures, even if made from steel and concrete (let alone instantly re-writeable algorithmic infrastructures of software code and so-called artificial intelligence), can be made thus and made to operate thus. They are wild, self-assembling, wilful, secretive, mycelial, tentacular, bottomless.

This is part 2 of Melancholy territory, activism in deep time and life in the collective – Dancing a living economy. In that title I name melancholy territory, deep time, and life in the collective, and I present them as three kinds of landscape in which living – thus, activist living – can be conducted. Fleshing out these notions now in this paper . . . I understand these three kinds of landscape to be, respectively aesthetic, material and cultural. Sometimes I refer to them, for brevity, as §1 (#material)/§2 (#cultural)/§3 (#aesthetic).

Note: § is pronounced 'landscape'

Aesthetic

Aesthetic §3 names the landscape comprising what is experienced and engaged ‘in-here’, most of it in the preconscious. You might call it emotional, or affective; some like to say spiritual. But I choose ‘#aesthetic’ to identify something especially significant about the forces of emotion and affect and the preconscious: their push and pull, their towards and away, their impulses to appropriate and to annihilate. They constitute our powerful in-the-moment responses of attraction/identification/embrace or repulsion/disaffiliation/distaste. Thence – firing together, wiring together, recurrently, unceasingly – they constitute (as kamma and sankhara, Buddhism would say: mental dispositions, as someone like Antonio Damasio would say) our repertoires of likings and dislikings, affiliatings and Otherings, wantings and denyings, acceptings and refusings. Aka Self. Processes and events in the aesthetic landscape of human existence constitute relationship-in-the-world at the deepest (preconscious, forceful, recalcitrant) level.

There are many families (ways of being-and-doing) within the grand space of the aesthetic landscape, and the melancholy territory of my title exists as one natural family of forces and relationships that can constitute a field for the living of a human life.

It’s unfortunate that humans generally, activists not excluded, are not that good at handling this kind of in-here scope and diversity.

We seem to prefer to pretend that our own de facto affective habitations – like the waters that fish swim in – are the aesthetic universe (while those of the Other are not really viable or even acceptable places to live). I’m talking about personality types, structures of feeling, the bubbles or houses of mirrors and echo chambers that we live in, wilfully deafened to the all of the voices.

Thus, the capacity to inhabit and to bring mutual recognition between various fields in the aesthetic landscape is a deeply significant politics. I have come to regard my own habitation in melancholy territory as an asset in the political work of moving towards pluriversal coexistence, and out-from-under hegemonic aesthetic formations: capitalisms, patriarchies, colonialities, extractivisms, enclosures, genocidalisms, epistemicides. Supremacies. There’s a lot of them about, in a ‘modern’ world of ‘autonomous’ Selves.

Material

Material §1 names the landscape of #material relations and processes that proceed, de facto, without any mediation of consciousness or affect ‘in-here’, simply because these are the forms that material stuff takes and the relationships that can exist within and between material entities as material entities per se. Flowers flower because they are internally organised to do flowering, and in relationships with their environments that are (at one time or another) conducive to, not inhibiting of, the flowering process. Gravity gravitates stuff. Food nourishes or rots. Life of this or that kind commences, flourishes, wanes, ceases. Stone emerges in geological processes, fractures, weathers, sinks. Etcetera. Our continued existence as human individuals and as species is constituted in the material landscape, the persistent (or disrupted) organised forms and distributions of material means of subsistence and wellbeing: fields, farms and foraging spaces, houses, foodstuffs, fabrics, beds, tools; air, rain, rivers, meltwater, soil, compost; vehicles, devices cabling, roads and tracks.

These are economy: the ’real economy’ of human existence. Our continued existence as human beings (thus, as cultural and aesthetic beings) likewise is constituted in the material landscape: the capacities of arms or legs, opposable thumbs, lungs, frontal lobes, amygdalae, brainstems and vagus nerves, gut biomes, endocrine chemistry; etc etc.

The time within which human existence exists is the ‘deep time’ of my title. It includes the times before material organised as humanoid beings came into existence, and after the species will have ceased to exist, and the times when other species exist and persist in the absence of humanity. In this material landscape we are less than a dot: a self-opinionated, fantasising and absurdly pumped-up out-of-scale, out-of-kilter, materially-forceful dot! A dot within material frames that are current, and incalculably more powerful and enduring than a human frame: atmosphere, climate, ocean, biosphere, earth, cosmos.

These days, deep time stares us in the face as these regimes casually bite back and assert their material actuality in the face of human fantasy and forgetting; #deepTime looks out of the mirror at us before breakfast!

Humans once were much better at existing in deep time, dot-like, evanescent, amidst flows and dances of other kinds of powerful stuff; in civilised collectives, an epidemic of grandiosity has possessed our fantastical minds. It might be that the capacity for this kind of relationship has been rendered almost extinct, reduced to isolated pockets of aesthetic and cultural diversity (indigeneity, ‘traditional’ cultures – including some of the oldest ’spiritual’ formations, like the sangha of Buddhism). Thanks, modernity. Which is to say, in some sense, ‘us’: moderns.

As Vanessa Machado de Oliveira acknowledges (a woman of indigenous parentage), in Hospicing modernity, there is no-one who is reading her, and hardly anyone she might be in conversation with, who is not pervaded by the virus of 'modern'. Although . .

. . some of us are 'in-and-against the modern', attempting with the utmost balance and grace to hang five on the cusp of an Other-than-modernity, a materially 'post' modernity, a more-than-modernity.

To be sure, this is very cultural and aesthetic. But the force that I particularly want to impart to this habitation is material; the persistence of our material living, in the embrace of the material Earth; and a proper relationship, as material beings, with materiality per se. And then, in the cultural and aesthetic landscapes, we would be in a relationship that Buddhism calls tathåtå: the heart-lifting embrace of the suchness of everything.

Cultural

And #cultural? Cultural §2 names the landscape of (conscious, knowingly intentional) knowing and capability, in the individual and in the collective: the organised means and processes of seeing and saying, organising and sharing vision, planning and executing, sustaining and cultivating, facilitating and resisting, communicating and committing to durable memory and media, recognising and responding in-and-through organisation and genre.

The life-in-the-collective of my title is the ever-ongoing choreographing and weaving and reweaving and unweaving of ‘we’: always-plural formations of ‘we’ in past, present and future relationship with the ‘us’ and the ‘I’ in the we (living, dead or yet-unborn), and the engagements with stuff in the world (both in-here and out-there) that makes us this ‘we’ rather than that one. We are a ‘we’ because we engage and organise and communicate (in our own ways, and for some of the time) in relation to ‘the same’ stuff in the world, even if its presence in our living turns out to be different in different persons’ living. We are ‘we’ because we believe there is something out there (or in-here) that matters to ‘us’, all. The cultural landscape is fundamental for activists – organisers – because it is the field of #formación: the generating and sustaining of formations of skilful intention, in distributed collectives.

Three landscapes generate scope, challenge, power(s)

Living (activist living) can not only be conducted in all three landscapes, it inescapably is conducted in all three, all the time. There is no material relationship for us, without aesthetic relationships (we are emoting and desiring animals, binding ourselves to and opposing ourselves to other assemblages of material and other ‘we’s). There is no cultural relationship without material relationships (our tools, our media, our infrastructures, our built environments, our durable forms of organisation aka institutions and genres of practice), no aesthetic relationship without (sustained) material existence – an ‘economy’ and an ecology of means – and (dependent) cultural organisation, aka society.

The challenge for activists is to enact all these relations, substantially differently than they presently, historically, hegemonically are, in relations with one another as material, cultural and aesthetic organiser-maker-weavers, and across sufficient scope, with wise intention: in-here and out-there. I figure this as ‘making a living economy’ because I mean to foreground the provisioning of material means of subsistence and wellbeing, and habitation in the materiality of life and Earth. In deep time, in fragmented society and in material transition, the scope called for is way beyond ‘the ordinary’.

We are in extraordinary times, calling for extraordinary choreography in the dancing of the weave of lives, in the embrace of the earth.

I hope it’s obvious that aesthetic, material and cultural are tags for quite distinct forms of practical relationship, with-and-in the material worlds of ‘in-here’s, ‘here’s and ‘we’s. The habitation of each of these landscapes calls upon distinct kinds of skill, capability, insight and organisation. It’s thus unlikely these will be found in any single person or formation, and thus the name of the game has to be association, federation, pluriversality and (to anticipate a little) #commoning.

Moreover, the scope of practice, or the reach of actions, differs in the different landscapes. Some actions may seem ‘small’, intimate and in some sense immediate: in-here. Some actions may seem enormous and profoundly intractable or unperformable: in deep time, over the horizon of knowable, inhabitable regions in geographical space or in generational time and consciousness. Somehow activisms must today be enacted across the entire range, skilfully, in appropriate practical modes (in landscapes, with landscape-specific skills and means) and with appropriate ambitions and expectations. This is perhaps another (response- and capability-oriented rather than problem-oriented) way of framing the ‘poly-crisis’.

Mobilising the combined scope of four zones of proximity and reach

As an activist committed to the formation (formación) of capacity ‘beyond the fragments’ and over all kinds of horizons, I find myself framing an (apparent) hierarchy of scopes, in terms of four ‘zones of reach’ in activist practice. I use them in defining the remainder of this paper and its follow-up papers, so here is a sketch of how the framing works.

Note: The symbol ¿ is pronounced ‘zone’.

Zone ¿1 – In-here . . is a #zone of reach constituted by practices that are centred in relations in the aesthetic landscape; but necessarily – because they are material practices – conducted also in material and cultural landscapes. I understand this zone of reach to be a sphere of care work, in the intimate and powerful emotional commons. In terms of proximity, this may appear to be the zone of ‘the closest’ and most moveable or motile stuff.

Zone ¿2 – Here . . is a zone of reach constituted by practices that are centred in relations in the material landscape; but necessarily – because they are material practices – conducted also in aesthetic and cultural landscapes. I understand this zone of reach to be a sphere of subsistence work, in the ‘place based’ commons of here-and-now material means of subsistence and wellbeing, which include not only everyday food, drink and shelter but also wild nature in its furthest reaches (the icecaps? the deep oceans?) and the digital (‘the Golemic’) in its most arcane and esoteric mysteries. Nevertheless, much of the time, ‘here’ is the most obvious and most enduring landscape (the most obvious kind of community or collective), in life and in activist organising. The reality of the other landscapes is however perhaps no less .

Zone ¿3 – We . . is a zone of reach constituted by practices that are centred in relations in the cultural landscape; but necessarily – because they are material practices – conducted also in material and aesthetic landscapes. I understand this zone of reach to be a sphere of formación work, in the trans-local, historical cultural commons of shared and mutualised objects of common concern. ’News from elsewhere’, reporting from past present or future, is a practical basis of ‘we’, as are language itself, all the means of communication and organisation, including media and ‘educational’ venues. Especially important are the emergent 20th century politicised practices of facilitation and cultivation of vernacular capability (in opposition to mandatory participation in professionally administered education) which can be understood as ‘tools for conviviality’ (Illich’s term, Freire’s practice, institutions like Highlander College).

Zone ¿4 – Region –. . is a zone of reach constituted by practices that are deeply intractable because they are in some other region of time or geographical space which runs ‘over the horizon’ of peer-to-peer collaboration or directly knowable community. The characteristic or dominant relations of the practice might be in any §landscape (or very probably, in all). It’s their ‘beyond reach’ quality that makes a class of them. I understand this zone of reach to be a sphere of stewarding work in the field of commons-of-commons, in deep time. In terms of proximity, this may appear to be ‘the most removed’. In terms of the grandchildren’s grandchildren it may be where the greatest gifts remain to be given.

Above, I wrote ‘apparent hierarchy’ because none of the zones is actually any bigger or smaller than any of the others. All the ‘the same size’, which is the size of a human consciousness. All of them roll, in rotation, to the top of the stack of awareness. Each of them is a stretch. This kind of scope is what activism must aspire to?

None of the zones is actually any bigger or smaller than any of the others. All the ‘the same size’, which is the size of a human consciousness.

Power(s) – It matters, that each zone of reach is a sphere of power of different kinds. Quite distinct forms of relationship and capability and sensitivity are implicated in un- and re-making plural powers: in care work, subsistence work, formación work and stewarding work. The struggles that these powers imply include class as well as many other associational forms: contra- and post-capitalist, contra- and post-patriarchal, contra- and post-colonial, contra- and post-anthropocentric, in pursuit of dispassion and equanimity in the face of almost intolerable complexity and triggering.

Quite distinct forms of relationship and capability and sensitivity are implicated in un- and re-making plural powers.

In passing, and as we move to a close in this paper . . . There is a question of really deep time. In Buddhism and other ancient belief systems for example, there is maha kulpa: a recurrence of ‘great cosmic periods’ within which, for example, a mountain would be worn to nothing by the infrequent brushing of a a silk handkerchief; in cosmology, there is Mount Meru

Well, no, in living and working in the deep time of ¿4 Region we don’t need to go there! Human time-in-the-world, skilfully and attentively remembered and rewoven in story, will do: ’news from elsewhere’ . . the imaginative and empathic but humanely grounded reach over the next (and the previous) horizon is sufficient . . and then the next, and so on: regenerative, evolutionary, contingent; located always in movement and (material) existence here and now, remembered and refigured (across horizons in geography and generational time) in we, animated and seeded in-here and in the pluriverse of in-heres.

Closing . . . It’s worth re-stating what my ambitions are, in this paper and in the Methuselah papers. I’m not aspiring to a handbook or a theory of activism (least, a theory of everything!). I simply need to have a more well founded sense of What step next?; at this time; in the orbit and the duration of this person’s life; in which landscape(s)? With years shortening, crisis deepening and clock ticking, this kind of assessment is called for. Along the way it means I also have to explore Why or what activism? (plural modes of engagement and commitment), How activism? (pattern language(ing) as a form of memory in activist practice) and Where activism? (locations in society(ies) and in a life, and relationships between practices in locations: both pluriverse and solidarity). The usefulness of ¿zones of reach is to mobilise that frame in achieving focus and scope, in and across all these practical and urgent explorations and engagements.

A more well founded sense of What step next? . . at this time . . in the orbit and the duration of this person’s life . . in which landscape(s)?

The next part of this paper is Exploring in four phases. It outlines how I’ll take forward the exploration flagged in these introductory papers in four phases, each oriented around one the four zones of reach, thus:

And the final part (in another week or so) Patterning this paper 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.

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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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Contact and comment:
– 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).