Warsan Shire

There is something more lasting, more threatening, more monstrous than the figure of a fire-breathing enemy in the distance: and that is the abstracted notion of enmity itself. I am not speaking of enmity as a state of being at odds with another. I am speaking to the heart of the modern project and its account of selves as independent entities in constant, inescapable friction with ‘not-selves’. This colonial notion of enmity has its effects in failing to see the fault lines that pressure us into assuming that difference means separation, and intimacy, sameness. It is denying the significance of my entanglement with you, and participating in the modern obscenity of total independence.

You see, it’s not just that those we label ‘Muslims’, ‘refugees’, and ‘primitives’ are like us in stunning ways – it’s that they are the very condition that make ‘us’ possible. I cannot fully account for myself if my account leaves you out of its logic. As such, in a game of sides, the greatest thing suffered is the loss of the other side. As America enacts nationalistic walls and ‘America First’ borders to ‘save’ those within from the monsters without – the supposed enemies skirting the boundaries – and as people boldly take to the streets to protest and insist on the decency of being hospitable in a time of painful dispossessions and widespread homelessness, may our work be disciplined by the humility of recognizing that this is not an effort to redeem those lingering at the airports. This is not even about bringing more people in. There is much more at stake than a seasonal, charitable feeling of inclusiveness.

Borders are not merely lines that mark where things end and others begin, they are substantiating practices of identity-making and world-building. They are how things come to matter, and how others stop mattering. We are just as involved in this vast conspiracy about what home means, how power is distributed, how bodies are marked, and how stories become meaningful.

This whole saga is about reworking our practices of being at ‘home’. This is about meeting the hauntings that have been repressed by our modern claims to transcendence, and staying with their ghostly moanings and stirrings long enough to know we are just as undone. Those severely affected by Trump’s signature are heralds of the very conditions that we all now live in; they are critiques of our complacency and doctrines of arrival. We may not notice it but we are subjects of this modern eliding power, of shopping malls and their claims on what food means, of giant pharmaceutical interests and their investments in what health means or does not mean, and of regimes of discursive power that deify human interests over and above non-human becomings.

I suppose our work would take on more powerful tones when we see that this is not merely about letting people in; it is about meeting the estranged other in all her fascinating strangeness, in all her monstrosity, in all her wounded Samaritan-ness, and pausing long enough to be met, to be struck, to become a with-ness to the leaking truth: that we are all in this together.

The post On Muslim Bans, Borders and What Home Means appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This summer, I met a man who told me about his permaculture work. He was particularly proud that he was living outside what he termed ‘the old story’ where he didn’t need to depend on ‘old tools’. He told me, with an air of authority, that he didn’t use phones, had no use for money or Twitter, and was doing his best to live off the grid. He felt he was ahead of the curve, and that eventually the rest of the world would catch up with him.

A few years ago, I might have stood in his exact same spot; “the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house”, I would have said, nodding my head, and blinking slowly, with the self-righteous assuredness that closed me up to other perspectives. In writing, in speech, I was on a quest to discover the ‘new’ – shining in the lofty distance, removed from its morbid entanglements with the familiar. I imagined a world where formal education (and its project of colonial subjectivization), colonialism, racism, sexism, religious exclusivism, corporate fascism, ageism, phallic techno-utopianism, and the anxious notion of a world in progress…gliding through innocent space – like Latour’s arrow of time – would no longer exist. As such, I was quite taken by apocalyptic prophecies and end-of-the-line stories, promising a Golden Age after the fiery wrath of the old had been extinguished by its own toxicity. A new story.

When I read the accounts of people walking out of ‘old systems’, I felt deeply inspired to take leaps of my own. But leaps into what? What did the new look like? How could I know for sure that what I occupied was in fact an unadulterated space, unapologetically new, not just a regurgitated iteration of an old friend? In short, at what point does the old stop and the new begin?

***

These questions weren’t strange to me: I had been here before. As a young African Christian who was brought up in one of the most vivaciously charismatic hotbeds of Pentecostal Christianity – what with its virulent insistence on exclusive practice, keeping oneself holy, fighting off the devil, and keeping oneself ‘rapturable’ – I was unduly concerned about the ontological status of my faith. Apart from answering the pastor’s ‘salvation call’ every Sunday (you know, just to be sure that I had received enough of a supernatural dose of forgiveness for the effect to be real), I distinctly remember praying to God one day, asking to be gifted with an apparatus – which I imagined as a sphygmomanometer-like tool, similar to the ones my sisters and I played ‘doctor’ with when our parents were out. We were always fascinated with the silvery fluid bobbing up and down the glassy column of the box, seeking…straining…yearning for accuracy. Watching its mercuric dance, stimulated by the squeezing of the bulb, along with the tightening grip of the cuff on my arm, lent itself to an ideal of (and pilgrimage for) certitude that would define most of my life. So I prayed for a faith-sphygmomanometer: I wanted to be relieved of the angst of not knowing whether I measured up.

As much as we would like to laugh at the idea of a faith-measuring device, measurement is no small matter. In fact, measurements are how things come to matter – or how things stop mattering. By measurement, I do not refer merely to the set of practices some scientists are known for: pouring bubbly purpled things into other glass jars with strangely coloured liquids, creating perverse admixtures. I am not even honing in on something distinctly or solely ‘human’ (but this is an issue for another essay, not this one). Karen Barad writes that measurements “are agential practices, which are not simply revelatory but performative: they help constitute and are a constitutive part of what is being measured”[1] By that she means that the world is fundamentally entangled – in an utterly orgasmic self-enacting perversity of touch. The commonplace idea that the world entails already made things, with discrete boundaries and a priori values, bouncing off each other in a soup of interactivity, is summarily deconstructed by quantum theory. By popularizing the concept of intra-action, Barad compels us to notice that phenomena, not ‘things’, are the units of the physical world, where a ‘phenomenon’ is a mangled knot of multiple threads with no distinct shape or determinate measure. Things gain definition (and therefore boundaries and properties) only within the context of ephemeral relationships or intra-actions.

What then is a ‘human’? A ‘plant’? The ‘environment’? Some religious and quasi-scientific interpretations of the world would invite us to look with-in to find an answer: the soul makes us ‘human’, and therefore places us across an unbridgeable chasm from the rest of the world. Empirical science reacts to this and insists we look with-out, in the distant (and yet pressingly close) and unimpeachable principles of motion and the deterministic laws of the world. In very recent times, what with cross-cultural trends, haptic involutions in technological ‘innovation’, and other shifts that are difficult to characterize, the impulse has emerged to look with – in the spaces between.[2] With. Quantum theory at least disturbs the idea that there can be a decidable answer to any of those questions, since the identity of a thing is not an essence or property of the thing, but a co-emergent phenomenon.

Light is a particle in a delayed-choice double slit experiment, and a diffractive wave in a different iteration of the double slit test. Asking what light ‘really is’ is beside the point. It depends on the measuring apparatus with which we produce the phenomenon. There is no ‘really is’. A specific book is only 14 centimetres long within a measurement intra-action ‘with’ a ruler, and not prior to that sensuous encounter. Its 14-centimetredness is not ‘out there’, waiting for the right tool to find it out, seeking a home among the many numbers that line a column of numbers, like teenage mercury. Accuracy is therefore not a matter of aligning the finite with the infinite, or insisting that the temporal correspond with the fixed, as it is about awkward encounters and inaudible gasps – about form arising and collapsing into a soup of things, and not even in a way that leaves the duration between these seemingly double events intact or untroubled. Accuracy does not mean we cannot speak about objectivity. Conditioned by Cartesian ideas, we are used to thinking about objectivity in terms of ‘something outside’ or ‘what is – no matter who looks’, but objectivity is not synonymous with exteriority or stability. To point out that the world is entangled is not the same as saying there are no things, but that things derive their discreteness and difference within the context of intra-acting relationships, not prior to that encounter.

In short, this strange affair of entanglement haunts ontology as the study of ‘what is’. Little wonder, Derrida, concerned with spectres and ghostly figures and things ‘out of joint’, suggests that we speak of ‘hauntologies’ instead – where identity is always in the making, always ‘to-come’, always partial, neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive, and never “completely constituted prior to experience”[3].

How ‘we’ measure the world enacts the world, and excludes other complementary worlds from mattering. The world is a constant deconstruction and reiteration of itself. Every moment, every morsel, every critter, every gesture, every unseemly movement in the dark, is ‘part’ of a palimpsest of bodies and stories, or body-stories (or material-discursivity) that enacts the real. If I were to pay homage to my formative Christian years, I would now say that the project of creation described in Genesis is still unfinished, in part because it is still ongoing, but – more profoundly – because the very notion of an endpoint, of a finish line, of a tape to cross, is also up for reconfiguration. Still to come.

***

And so by way of quantum deconstructions, queer light, ghosts and Christian quests for certitude (with the colonial undertones of wanting to be approved by a foreign standard!), we return to (or re/turn!) the concept of the new or, to be specific, how the new is co-enacted and performed.

Our times are shot through with unwieldy, but nevertheless consequential, desires and hopes for justice – and these yearnings mark our bodies in very material ways. My wife and I, parents to a three year old magical creature – our daughter Alethea-Aanya, still struggle with what education ‘means’, or rather how to comport ourselves in a nurturing way with a little girl who mostly prefers the pale face of a phone to the lyrical greenness of the plants in our balcony. When we left our teaching positions at the university, we did it – like so many other younger people today – wanting to live a life in keeping with our authentic quests for presence in a very complicated world. We no longer had much faith in the educational system and its colonial heritages of story-eliding, language-banishing, method-homogenizing and knowledge-sterilizing practices. Rising in stature as young PhDs and widely published authors on an infrastructure of legitimized snobbery no longer excited us.

Our disenchantments with institutionalized public education soon metastasized, flowing with tentacular promiscuity, touching everything else, and infecting our visions of economics, of politics and even science. Soon, we came to believe there was something wrong with the world – maybe not an evil lurking in its veins, but something just as fundamental. We had lost our way, and we now inhabited a story that didn’t serve. A story of economics in which meaningful things no longer counted, and only the things that could be counted were meaningful. Where work suffocated our deepest interests and affinities. A story of politics that was established on the patriarchal dominance of the few above the many.

We wanted justice. We went to the Himalayan Mountains to join our voices with an unschooling community of alternative education practitioners that insisted on many streams, instead of a mainstream. We co-founded an initiative to spark the proliferation of radical political imaginaries, economic alternatives and new educational pathways. All the while, the vagaries of being immersed in many streams of thick thought opened us up to different conceptions of the sacred, many of which were jarring to us at first, but eventually became part of our rapid experiential furniture. And, even though the academic world in the so called Global South felt like a Fanonian ordeal – black people doing their utmost to polish their white masks – we kept having conversations in the intellectual spaces we once called home, debating systems change theories, localization, and strategies for scaling up (or, as we later revised, scaling down).

In many of the conversational circles that I was personally privileged to enter, there was a palpable feeling of betrayal – something akin to what old apartheid-era South Africans feel today when they look back on the early histories of the ANC, Mandela’s party, and then contrast that with its present metamorphosis into the party of power-hungry elites. People are asking: when will we inhabit a world where people matter, and not just giant corporations? What would it take to live in a world that truly respects the environment, not as resource or mute other or dead background to the drama of human becoming, but as ally? Will our crazy dreams of a greener world where technology blends seamlessly with the temporalities of soil and sky ever see the light of day? A world where diversity thrives so abundantly that contemporaneous binary racial tensions between whites and blacks are eviscerated by the impressive multiplicity of colours between? Where officials are held accountable for their actions, and where work isn’t about ascending a ladder of escalating consumption but about chasing your affinities? Where women can thrive with just as much levity as men, without that levity rendered as reprehensible lasciviousness?

Godot hasn’t come. The Gordian knot is still as knotty as ever. Excalibur remains lodged in Apollonian stone.

The new story seems to be taking its sweet time coming.

While I take issue with the ubiquity of the phrase ‘a new story’ – especially when it is used in singular form (in the same way that I hesitate to speak of the ‘Anthropocene’, because it seems to treat ‘mankind’ as a homogeneous group, making everyone everywhere equally responsible for the alteration of biophysical landscapes), it does have its utility. For all its New Age obscurantist suppositions (including the universalism at work in its framing), it serves as a rallying point for increasingly globalized concerns about the world and our place in it; it also serves as a holding place for the belief that our troubles are somehow all connected and not as incongruent as we think. In my experience of its popular use, the ‘new story’ contains the uncontested anthropocentric idea that humans are solely burdened with the responsibility for change, and that we are to blame for where we are as a species. At the very least, speaking about ‘a new story’ challenges our ways of seeing the world – inviting us to ‘connect the dots’, ‘lean in’, and ‘recognize our collective agency’ to contest exploitative powers…which is ironic, since ‘the new story’ itself (or rather, the ways we have come to speak about ‘it’) seems to be produced by very particular ways of seeing the world.

What is at stake here is an accounting for what is brought to the foreground and what is, as a result, excluded (or made invisible) in our enactments (measurements) of ‘the new story’. Without attempting a historical analysis of some sort, I think it is noteworthy to point out that the usage of the term ‘the new story’ is co-emergent and produced by certain ‘regimes of visuality’. Consider our circumstances: because we are immersed in digital media and daily traffic in the commerce of images – whether on the internet, taking a selfie, or recording one’s tourist experiences with a phone’s camera app – the conditions of seeing are radically different from what they used to be a mere 30 years ago. The very ontology (or identity) of seeing has changed. To borrow that American cliché, with regard to visuality, they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

The same is true about how we process information. The agential influences of technologies like Google have so shaped our cognitive activity that Emmelhainz, borrowing from the work of Franco Berardi, writes that “at the core of the Google Empire is the capture of user attention in order to translate cognitive acts into automatic sequences. The consequence of this translation is the replacement of cognition with a chain of automated connections, effectively automatizing the subjectivities of users.” In today’s app-saturated society, if you want something done or seek something, you enter the appropriate search criteria and an automated response offers feedback. And we repeat this process to find directions, make purchases, conduct research, organize our to-do lists, and even make friends. This dependence on computerized systems to navigate everyday tasks disrupts the idea that the mind is some kind of pure quality ensconced in the human brain, behind human skin. The ‘parity principle’ of the extended mind (by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers) states that “if, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is … part of the cognitive process.”[4]

Further still, Emmelhainz argues that it is not just that images are now an indispensable part of our lives, it is that we now see the world in the reductionistic terms of images. “Aside from the fact that images and data are taking the place of or giving form to experience, they are also transforming things into signs; welding together image and discourse, images have inaugurated a tautological form of vision. With the widespread use of photography and digital imaging, all signs begin to lead to other signs, prompted by the desire to see and to know, to document, and to archive information.”

This optical shift has real consequences. Susan Sontag writes that “taking photographs […] is a way of certifying experience, [but] also a way of refusing it – by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”[5] It means we approve as ‘real’ only the picturesque and – given our attendance to cognitive linearity – only those ‘things’ that are amenable to plot conventions or orthographic/narratological imperatives.

Since seeing is just as much a matter of taking into consideration as it is about taking out of consideration – an exclusionary dynamic, if you will – accounting for the ways we speak about and yearn for ‘the new story’ necessarily raises new questions about what we are leaving out of our frames. I would argue that this sequentialization of thought and reiteration of visuality as photogenia, inaugurated by the ongoing digital alteration of our landscapes, are at work in the co-production of the more popular ideas about ‘the new story’. As a manifestation of these constraining conditions, the ‘new story’ discourse

1. coincides with the logic of developmental linearity and its implicit promise of gratification down the evolutionary-historical line
2. makes invisible the agential contributions of the more-than-human world in how the world materializes
3. leaves intact classical assumptions about the nature of nature (and time and space) – especially the idea that we inhabit a single Euclidean temporality where the past flows into the future, or that we can speak with any sense of finality about the ‘old’ and the ‘new’
4. feeds an imagination and yearning for a pure, totalizing (or complete) response to current challenges – while eliding the mutuality between supposed binaries

I feel these are important to note. Encoded in the performance of ‘new story’ discourse is a postponement of the sacred and a stabilization of justice. In place of living in the incommensurability of the present, we live forward…denying the old, the contemporary, the now, its work with us. But rather than speak about a ‘forward’ – as we are wont to doing if we take ‘new story’ talk at face value – we might as well speak about an awkward.

“Not upward or downward, backward or forward, but awkward. Awk-wards: a vector. The (now obsolete) word awk means out of the way, strange, even sinister in nature and disposition. As an adverb, awkward suggests an action in the wrong, or at least a tangential direction. It evokes disjuncture, discord and incompatibility. Things have gone awry. As an adjective, awkward describes the unfamiliar, the clumsy and the unskilled. It conveys embarrassment, inconvenience and risk. To be awkward is to be ill at ease, uncomfortable or untoward.”[6]

More specifically, awkward suggests “a recalcitrance or obstinacy to human aspiration and endeavour”. The world we live in is fragile, negotiated between multiple agencies, non-linear, thick and perverse. Like a teenager at the frothing edge of her awkwardness of flailing limbs and coming-to-age features, she is always unexpected…visibly unnerving…never fitting the models and maps we seek to discipline her into. This is as much a vibrantly ‘accurate’ redescription of the world according to quantum theory – shot through with ‘visiting’ philosophies from indigenous non-western worlds. The world is awkward, out of joint, showing up partially (since identity is always exclusionary or complementary), and never not broken. Therein lies its magic.

We cannot brand the next. Which is to say that the identity of a new story isn’t pre-set, merely awaiting its approximation or the right assemblage of words to activate it. The ‘new story’ is indeterminate. It’s not even a matter of not knowing what it is; it is not that we are uncertain about it and that with more information we can trace out the contours of a new world that works for many rather than a few. Uncertainty is not the issue here. Indeterminacy is. In this context, the ontological status of ‘the new story’ is still being made and always to be deferred.

The ‘old’ is not an ‘other’ of the ‘new’, any more than light is ontologically separate from darkness; the ‘old’ haunts the ‘new’, innervates the ‘new’, conspires with the ‘new’ – so that to add darkness to darkness is to produce light. The old is the generativity of the new, and the new is the generativity of the old. The old is how the new grounds itself in the ‘previous’ and how it experiments with the possible. We need the old – even the villainous old. As quantum field theory suggests, nothing is not new, even the old. Drawing tenuous connections from scientific experiments that queer the nature of matter to socio-econo-political conditions like neoliberalism might seem farfetched. But that is exactly what quantum theory disrupts – the idea of scalar distinction where ‘small things’ have their own logic that has nothing to do with the goings and comings of ‘big things’.

The implication of all this is that we cannot ‘walk out’ of systems as such, since boundaries aren’t fixed in the classical sense. There is neither a prelapsarian return to the garden of Eden nor a label that can subsume meaning in a final sense. As such, the notion that the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house is, ironically, an enactment of the master’s invisible narrative. What’s hard at work here is a story of difference that equates it with separation, or a matter of an ontology that starts off with things having pre-given boundaries and already determinate properties. The master’s claim to ownership is as unfounded and as hasty as the slave’s testimony of freedom at last.

***

After all is said and done (well, not quite all – but you get the point), the ‘new story’ offers a fragile, haunted, valuable discursive site for the assembly of common aspirations and common projects committed to reconfiguring social systems for ‘justice’. For a ‘better’ ‘future’.

Yes, those commitments are ordained and threaded through by particular ways of seeing that often exclude the awkwardness of a more-than-human world where linear expectations are risky ventures; they are silent about the indifference of the world to the tenets of anthropocentrism; they do not engage the sensuous entanglements between old and new – thus, leaving the ‘old’ behind in a puritan attempt to ‘start from scratch’; and, they make invisible the agency and intelligence of matter due to ideas about the predominance of language (and story). And yet, there is a lot more room for play here…right here in this site of yearning and justice-seeking. There is room for a different ecology of questions exploring fragile emergence.

Instead of merely asking how we can unilaterally bring about a new story, we can listen to the invitation of the wilds to open up to the fragility of map-making projects. We can gather round a set of inquiries that bring us to investigate the contours of our seeing and the textures of our knowings – and, as such, the world we are co-performing with many, many others. We can wonder about the contributions of stones to world-making, and embark upon quests to eavesdrop on the gossip of trees.

If this feels like navel-gazing work, especially in these times when critical action is called for – if this feels politically stultifying – I would suggest that it feels so because our visions have created an anorexic self, and then set it against the uncharted muteness of a world outside it. Perhaps new topographies of responsiveness and radical political imaginaries might emerge when we co-enact the self as dispersed, distributed and strange – layering and infusing soil, cloud, rivers and stranger.

A new story? Why set the bar so low? Why deny ourselves the spontaneity of the unexpected?

[1] Karen Barad, ‘What is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice’, [100 Notes, dOCUMENTA]

[2] Astrid Schraeder explores the fascinating case of Pfiesteria piscicida, the ‘fish killers’, which defy known taxonomical arrangements that have persisted for similar micro-critters. Their life cycles are confusing and complex, queering the distinctions between the organism and its surroundings. In ‘Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the Fish Killer): Phantomatic Ontologies, Indeterminacy, and Responsibility in Toxic Microbiology’ [Social Studies of Science 40, no. 2 (April 2010), pp. 275-306].

[3] Irmgard Emmelhainz, ‘Images do not show: The desire to see in the Anthropocene’ (p.133). Chapter in the book ‘Art in the Anthropocene’: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies’ (Edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, 2015)

[4] ‘The Extended Mind’, an essay by Andy Clark and David Chalmers

[5] Irmgard Emmelhainz, ‘Images do not show: The desire to see in the Anthropocene’ (p.135). Chapter in the book ‘Art in the Anthropocene’: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies’ (Edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, 2015)

[6] Jamie Lorimer, ‘On Auks and Awkwardness’, Environmental Humanities, vol. 4, 2014, pp. 195-205

www.environmentalhumanities.org

The post The Burden of the New Story appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I write you because things have indeed fallen apart. While this unspeakable insurgency of despair might goad us into rushing into the next ‘organizational moment’ – the itch to hit them back or do something – I want to invite us to slow down and pay attention to the stark grief that haunts us now. She stares us in the face, this repulsive visitor. If we must survive, we must return her gaze and let her do her important work with us.

I am a Nigerian living in India. But like most people on the planet that tuned in to the surrealism of the 2016 American presidential campaigns, I woke up to the shocking news that Donald Trump was not only beating Hillary Clinton on election day, but that there was a frightening possibility he could win. And then that distant possibility, once laughably out of the question, became a gut-wrenching reality-to-come. Hillary’s ‘blue wall’ fell to the man who promised to build more; the media people stuttered as their once pristine cast of glossy pundits groped for words; the Mexican peso fell. And in one fell swoop, it felt like America, the so-called home of the brave was exactly that: a place dyed in fear, where braveness would now be required to keep on living.

Ever since Donald Trump became the 45^th president of the United States, the internet has been flooded with articles attempting to make sense of this story-bursting, crystal-ball-shattering moment. Politico published a piece with a title that must have resonated with many people around the world: “How did everyone get it so wrong?” The London-based Independent insisted that “Donald Trump would have lost US election if Bernie Sanders had been the candidate”, while Thomas Frank opined on the pages of The Guardian that “Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there”. Across the fractured landscape of YouTubia, self-professed Trumpists – also surprised by their fortune – laughed at liberals, mocking the ‘feminazis’ that thought Hillary Clinton – an admittedly troubled candidate who didn’t seem to have a message beyond insisting on her entitlement – would simply waltz into the White House.

I will not attempt to pry open the cadaver of this moment – it is probably the case that no post-mortem analysis is good enough to assuage our feelings of shock. What happened is not reducible to a single causative factor or a decidable ‘active ingredient’. The world isn’t that simple. I will however state, in the spirit of full disclosure – the kind of radical honesty we probably need at this time – that I secretly wanted this to happen: I was so invested in the idea of a Sanders presidency (and so mortified by what was obvious to me as an establishmentarian attempt to stifle his voice) that I became possessed by a schadenfreude I couldn’t easily exorcise. I understood the dangers of a potential Trump presidency, but decided even that was better off to the inertia of the neoliberal status quo as embodied by a Hillary Clinton regime. That argument is not easily maintained in the face of the orange predicament we now find ourselves in.

In an all-too-real case of “be careful what you wish for”, I find not relief but a painful sympathy with many who had hoped that the morning of 9^th would somehow usher in a more tolerant America. A more beautiful country. A country that cares about its many colours and contours. Now because of Trump and the energies he has activated, minorities are probably less safe. At a time of unprecedented racial tensions and phallic exhibitions of gunmanship, some folks are already dreading their next brief visit to the shopping mall, knowing that the streets are now being painted red with hate, white with racial acrimony and blind nativism, and blue with the authoritarian aloofness of a candidate who promised ‘law and order’. The new America.

It is to these vulnerable ones I write. Those of you that care about diversity, about the environment, about the beauty of queer sexual orientations, about indigenous lands and their right to thrive, and about policing practices that have led to the deaths of many black men and women.

Without pre-empting Donald Trump or falling into the trap of disillusioned punditry – and yet with a keen awareness of the likely consequences of his presidency – I ask: how do we respond to this? What do we do? How do we recover? What opportunities are presenting themselves to us to work for (with) a caring world? At the time of writing this letter, there is news of revolt on the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and other American cities. People are protesting the rise of Trump. People are angry. Around this same time, famed documentarian Michael Moore has suggested concerned Americans should ‘fire the punditry’ and ‘take over the Democratic party’. It is impossible to answer the question of what a ‘right’ response is, or to speak as if one is situated outside the swirl and flow of things. I do however want to invite you to try doing something less spectacular…something small, for it is my opinion that with Trump, the seeds of a ‘new’ politics may yet be planted.

When I was growing up in Christian Nigeria, I was taught to think of my life only in terms of its ‘greatness quotient’. I was conditioned early to yearn for prominence. Fame. Fortune. Legacy. Success. ‘Awakening the Giant Within’. Getting to the top. Lasting forever. Those were resonant memes in my developmental years. The figures of Mandela, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, and Jesus were placed before me as aspirational objects. If I did not do all I can to increase my ‘greatness quotient’, my life did not really matter.

I suspect this story is not uniquely mine to tell. We live in a world that places priority in the ‘top’ and discountenances the ‘bottom’. The condition for living a life of meaning and purpose was moral probity: the stunning city of bigness only admitted those who walked the straight and narrow way, I was told.

Well, if all that held true once, November 8 was a spectacular repudiation. Donald Trump, ill-prepared, a self-decorated humble person, and one who had said awful things about women, attained the highest office in America – his face beamed on to the Empire State Building in New York amidst the pomp and pageantry that defined his life. The Joker won…and nothing adds up anymore. Punditry is broken. Polls are broken. The sure-banker firepower of celebrity is broken. Virtue is broken.

Trump strolled to the grand stage up in the front and wrecked it, but in so doing he inadvertently ‘gave’ us permission to inhabit the aisles – to rearrange the entire room. By becoming president, Trump disturbs the idea that the top is worth reaching – not because he is so vile that his new position as president denigrates the office, but because his unprecedented campaign and quest for power shakes us loose to recognize that where we stand is a thick place, sewn through and through with voices and potential and power.

The stunning revelation of these times of upheaval is that ‘winning’ is defunct, and new relational modes are desperately needed: the red tape, the raised chair, the grand stage, the green room, and the white house are not the interesting, glorified objects they once were. The emperor has lost his clothes. This whole idea that greatness is some end goal to be achieved by the morally pure, the experienced, and the hardworking, has itself been reworked. And we are left with an awkward coming to terms with the fact that life isn’t a highway but an ecology of small things and ordinary becomings.

The way forward is thus awkward – or rather, there is no clear algorithm on what to do now except perhaps, among other things, to pay close attention to these twists and turns, these rabbit holes and tricky terrains. To take a critical look at the material details of our lives outside of the lenses of identity politics. An immaculate straight line was never ‘there’ to begin with. We are left with these small lives the media pretends doesn’t really matter until you achieve celebrity status; we are left with the first stuttering words of a politics that invites us to the incommensurability of our small hours, and – in place of our fascination with distant power and oh-so-shiny things – urges an attention to our bodies, our relationships, our communities, our hidden miracles, our own stories, and our own knowings.

Let me spell it out…what I suggest we can do. Please understand that I do not offer these points with any confidence in their stability or with any sort of finality. I offer them sensing that this moment could very well be that bright spot in the middle of a shadow, affording us an opportunity to co-create a politics that does not terminate with concession speeches – a politics that is not tied so stubbornly to single candidates and anorexic voting lines. I sing the songs of other places of power:

• Embrace the fact that the world is larger than our plots:

The plot of a story is both its gentle guiding hand and its suffocating grip, helping it move along but also blinding it from realizing that life is bigger, sterner, and more promiscuous than its logic. I could have sworn that with Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, the world was finally stepping into an age of deeper justice and beauty – that evolutionary moment we all await. His ‘failure’ to clinch the nomination was a chastising moment for many keen followers of the American primaries. I slowly came to terms with the fact that the world is not beholden to my liberal fantasies. Simply put, the map is not the terrain. The world stretches far and wide beyond our blind spots, our analyses, and our convictions about what justice looks like.

• Let grief do her work:

Globalizing society hardly has any place left for grief. When we get uncomfortable, we are urged to pull ourselves together and get back on the wheel. I reckon that today’s grief has something to teach us; there is a genius to its workings that allow a shift in how we relate with the world. I do not mean that we should all sit down and hold hands. I do however feel we can acknowledge that we are in a mess, and adjourn the quest for a palliative solution for the time being. Perhaps instead of counting down to 2020, or calling on Michelle Obama to run for office, we can use these days to investigate the edges of our politics. I believe grief disciplines us for this slow kind of work. What is at stake here is more than a liberal agenda, it is how we see the world and therefore how we maintain power structures that no longer serve our fondest hopes.

• At least for the moment, nurture a suspicion for shiny objects:

We have become a photogenic people – attracted to the spectacular, repulsed by the unseemly. We live in cosmetic pixels. With selfies, Instagram posts, televised news that seems more committed to graphics and bloated soundtracks, and the ongoing digitization of relationships, our lives have been reduced to images – and we are forgetting the art of living in the spaces between those images. We are thus habituated to a regime of visuality that defines what is real to us – and silences/excludes other voices from mattering. Perhaps the reason why most people were shocked by the news of Trump’s win was because they were contained by narratives and material conditions that forced a certain view about America. But then the terrain met the map. We need a new set of eyes.

• Find the others:

When things break, we are afforded an opportunity to make reconfigurations. This perhaps is a good time to investigate the contours of our relationships with others, with those we love, with our neighbourhoods, with the strangers who breeze past us in a blur of inconsequentiality. American politics is premised on fixed identity categories – that Democrats and Republicans are essentially two aspects of an adversarial binary. To a large extent, each side sees the other as a noxious blight on the face of the country. The first moments of ‘healing this divide’ is the recognition that even evil has a story, that those persons who hate black people, or curse at ‘the gays’, didn’t just spring out from the earth, fully realized and fleshed out. In a sense that often escapes us, we are unfolding, hyphenated aspects of each other. None of us is on the side of ‘good’. Donald Trump and the people that support him are just as much a product of the same media-infused, economically imperilled, people-denying politics that have created us. In a game of sides, the greatest loss we suffer is the other side. Let us leave room for the outlier, for the strange, and for the unexpected. We are not as ‘sorted out’ as we think we are.

• Notice the ground upon which you stand:

I like to say that falling could very well be flying, without the tyranny of coordinates. Technically speaking, falling objects are actually the gravitational pull of attraction between objects. I won’t succumb to, or insist that, we are being ushered into a more glorious paradigm of politics…I cannot make that claim. There are however sympathies between place and feet, between our stories and our contexts, that call on us to participate in the sacredness of where we are. What attracts you now? What questions matter to you? What performances of place are pressing themselves upon you? What do you do every day? Where do you come from? Does that question make sense? A friend, Eric Chisler, put this sentiment this way: “Remember the earth. Remember your ancestors. Remember your four-legged, winged, crawling relatives. Remember life. Your life, your way of living, that is the only activism you’ve ever had. Use it. Make your existence a ritual that honors everything your body and words touch. The times are troubled and you are needed. Wake up—notice the consequence of every action and non-action. You are needed. You are needed. You are needed.”

• The confusion about what to do next is redemptive:

If you are still confused about what this all means, how anyone could vote for Trump, what the future holds and how to respond to this proto-crisis of sorts, count yourself among the lucky ones. Confusion and uncertainty are how multiple agencies negotiate directionality – and this ongoing process is important. Even inertia isn’t determinately still. We must slowdown in these times of urgency, and allow other agentic forces to reshape us.

It might be the case that within the specificity of your own context, you know what to do. That’s great. March on the streets. Print BLM tee-shirts. Learn how to plant your own food. Investigate your ancestry. Or open a gift shop and invite passers-by to get free hugs. Out of the logic of our emergence, new moments are distilled and new activisms become possible. We must be humble enough to recognize that the ‘right thing’ to do is almost always known in retrospect, and that justice is always justice-in-the-making.

• Small lives matter:

Finally, don’t beat yourself up for not saving the day. Even if some archaic policy were conjured by the White House, annulling president-elect Trump’s win, it still wouldn’t do much to address the politics that made him happen. The fight is not so much with Trump as it is for a new way of meeting our own selves – a way of speaking with those we consider ‘other than us’. In short, we must turn to each other, for it is in the smallness of our embrace that new worlds burst into life.

All considered, would it have been great to have a woman president? Yes. That would have assured many of their place in the world and told them that they are valued and needed and worthy of love. And yet, that message finds a more interesting home now that we have lost our way…now that hope seems faraway.

The politics that knocks on our doors right now doesn’t have to wait for the next four years. Let your campaigns of sacred enlivenment continue.

Welcome dear friend and thanks for reading. If you’d like to receive new articles and announcements about my projects via email, join me here.

Cross-posted from http://bayoakomolafe.net

Photo by aftab.

The post On Trump: An Open Letter to the Brokenhearted appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I’m here to speak about serious stuff. About capitalist enclosures, environmental degradation, escalating poverty and an economics of despair, shopping malls and other gentrified spaces, and exhausted, thirsty people in Pakistan lined up behind a lone tanker making its first and last supply of water for the day. Perhaps the best way to begin, then, is with a hearty story – a story about a tortoise, his gourd and his quest for wisdom.

Growing up in Nigeria, I was immersed in folktales about thieving spiders, rewarding encounters with water spirits, and lengthy moral-of-the-story moments. I can’t remember when I first heard of the many tales of tortoise’s escapades. Tortoise’s adventures were as ubiquitous and as familiar to us as the ‘Golden Arches’ are familiar to, well, everyone. In one of his stories, tortoise sets out to gather all the wisdom of the world together – to strip the spider of his web-weaving expertise, to take to himself the sun’s ability to rise in the morning, to deny the mighty eagle the immediacy of his knowledge of flight, and to teach the tree how to grow. It’s an improbable quest, but he succeeds: all the animals and beings in the world consciously give their knowledges to this master trickster figure, and tortoise stuffs all of this into an earthen gourd.

Now he must preserve it, and keep his new treasure in a place where no one would expect him to. The tortoise, jealous for the gourd and its world-shattering contents, ties it to his neck, places the gourd right in front of his eyes where he can see it, and proceeds to climb an iroko tree; his desire is to hang it at the very top of the mighty tree, and camouflage it in its leaves. He doesn’t get very far because the protuberant gourd gets in the way and doesn’t allow his little limbs to clasp the tree. The tortoise tries and tries again and again, but keeps falling. Along comes a witless passer-by, the grasshopper, who in the spontaneity of the moment offers an offhanded remark, “You know you could just swing the gourd around your back”, and she goes away.

Tortoise suffers what to us must be a redeeming episode of cognitive dissonance: he realizes that his preoccupations with preserving knowledge and containing the world, and his apparent success at actually doing it, cannot explain grasshopper’s insights. Knowledge does not come from maintaining relations of exteriority with the world, but with situated, material engagements with its ongoing complexity. Realizing his error, tortoise eventually scrambles up the hardwood tree, and unfastens the leather skin he has tied around the gourd’s mouth, thus ‘releasing its contents’ back into the world – or so he supposes.

So you might say, in a way, the African communities that ‘occasioned’ this story and its prescient insights had already examined the business/philosophical model of Google and found it wanting.

But apart from an onto-epistemology of ‘not knowing’ – which means we can only know the world partially, because knowing is not ‘knowledge of the world’ but practices that are constituent in world-making (a co-constitutive negotiation with non-static others) – there is much more that a diffractive re-reading of this folktale brings into focus: namely, a queering of the fixed boundaries between the human and nonhuman, and a resituating of the commons as commoning or as the situated practices of a collective that always includes the more-than-human.

Today, as capitalist enclosures of corporate ownership and state-approved extermination invite social upheaval, as new strategies for contesting exclusion open up, as the orifices of neoliberal monoculture shudder with new energy, the promise of the commons glimmers in the near distance. This promise of a world that works for the many and not a few is what animates the Natives now fighting Enbridge and the Dakota Access Pipeline project in North Dakota; it is what textures the iridescent glow of computer screens on faces as digital programmers in India, in Nigeria or in a certain Ecuadorian embassy, hack the boundaries of information access. In a way, we are marching round the walls of Jericho, and those walls are falling.

But in the falling, old concerns and old habits of seeing remain resolutely present – much in the same way the French revolution might have gotten rid of kings and the bourgeoisie, but did not contest the thrones they sat upon, or the conceptual edifices that occasioned elite rule. It is the same with the discourse on the commons: rupturing ‘superstructures’ only give more room for the same ‘substructures’[2] to be elaborated differently. Patrick Bresnihan[3] tells us that the most influential perspective on the commons is concerned with the rules, principles and insights we can adopt in governing access to ‘common pool resources’, a desire which in turn is motivated by what one might call the ‘tragedyist’ assumptions of liberal epistemologies – that ‘individuals’ need to be regulated or we risk overexposure to limited resources. Another perspective on the commons, one which feels alive in the framing of this particular aspect of the conference on P2P cultures, demarcates between the material commons and the immaterial commons, between nature and culture, which entrenches human activity (in the latter) as productive and creative, and stabilizes nature as something merely to be protected or preserved.

These popular perspectives about the commons are occasioned by the sticky ideas that nature is something apart from culture; that nature is ‘resource’ that never really surpasses its dimensions of instrumentality – or of being a mere background – to the world-making practices of humans; that agency is properly human (and that the way it shows up is as ‘choice’ or human subjectivity); that knowledge of the world (often valorised in manifestoes and compulsions to ‘correct practice’) can be total if the right mediating conditions are present; that the generativity of nature (or its ability to reproduce) is not to be considered as creative labour or productive (just as the life-giving gift-work of women are not considered part of the economy and are elided by a corporate culture that pretends to sustain the whole), and that – all of these taken into consideration – the commons is therefore a human achievement…and the question of who gets what, when and how, or how to ensure equitable access for a larger population than neoliberalism could account for, is really going to be settled by the intricacy of our maps and models and management regimes. By the same logic of anthropocentrism.

Like the tortoise, I am learning otherwise.

Working as an ethnopsychotherapeutic researcher years ago, I was committed to exploring what for our present purposes you might call the psychological or wellbeing commons. In Nigeria, there are – as at last count – no more than 8 sparsely equipped, government assisted, regional psychiatric outfits and some moribund laws designed to facilitate protection for those who present with mental disturbances or need psychiatric care. At the time of my ethno-clinical research, there were escalating calls for government to throw more money into healthcare, and some even insisted on the need for a privatization of healthcare delivery – arguing that with competitive edge, the landscape of mental healthcare delivery would receive the political equivalent of a shot in the arm.

Motivated by the idea that our approach to the healthcare commons was entangled with deeper epistemological issues and worldviews, I decided to study Yoruba indigenous practices with caregiving. At first, my initiating questions were concerned with finding more efficacious means to the same outcomes that would have been celebrated by western psychology (meaning ‘recovery’, ‘sanity’, and ‘wellbeing’). As such, I was caught up with investigating how these healers and elders defined healing and oriented themselves in relation to their clients and their families and what they wanted help addressing. My central question was “What are the stories these healers tell, and how do these stories improve upon western narratives about healing and recovery?”

I expected to find well-established nosologies and diagnostic paradigms identifying and isolating patterns of psychopathological behaviour; I expected to meet well-formed answers to questions like ‘what do you do when a patient presents with auditory hallucinations?’, but what I encountered was an ‘in-the-moment’ aliveness and vulnerability. If I could create a mishmash of responses and reduce all the stories I was told to a phrase – which is not something I would ever want to do – that phrase would be “it depends”. I encountered non-reductionistic, descriptive, and situated knowledges that were just as sophisticated in their account about mental health. Instead of speaking of ‘illness’ as something that can be isolated and treated successfully based on our diagnostic systems, they spoke of mental illness as the effects of wind, as stepping on an eyelash, eating at the wrong time of the day, or having a person curse you. Their categories were spontaneous, with one healer telling me that there were mainly 3 types of sicknesses and then deciding later on in the interview that there could be as many as 30. This ‘not-knowing’ wasn’t a result of indifference or ignorance, but a situated embodied recognition that there were many other agencies impinging upon and crafting the outcomes of a healing encounter – or even the way one could speak about behaviour.

Mind you, their skillsets (which often attracted more traditional western-type psychiatrists to understudy) were highly developed, passed down from generation to generation, and yet a shrug of the shoulders was often the outcome of their work – which is not simply to be interpreted as benign resignation, but more as sacred recognition. From those interviews, I thought I’d get a new story that could carve a surer path to a psychological commons, one that sidestepped the frantic concerns about bed-spaces and poor psychologist-client ratios in the country. Instead I came out with a gasp – an eloquence of a different sort, one that reinforced what vital materialists, post-anthropocentric and feminist performativists like Haraway and Barad are speaking about, and one which reshapes our understanding of the commons…not as a boundaried thing that pre-exists the particular relations that bring it about, or the ways we speak about it, but the ongoing embodied practices and mutual negotiations of boundaries that constitute ecologies of care and exclusion.

This is the more-than-human commons that Bresnihan identifies as “a messier, entangled world…[that is] not simply ‘accessible’ to technical knowledge but unfolding, and thus changing, through practical engagements that tie humans and non-humans together (and thus shapes them) in different ways; not a reasoning liberal subject but a subject caught within a mesh of reciprocal relations that must be negotiated, usually imperfectly.”

In the same way Niels Bohr and Karen Barad, queering the Cartesian ontology of fixed things and static givens, have said there is no ‘thing’ as light as such, only the apparatus or phenomenon or ‘assemblage’ of agencies and ongoing relationships that produce ‘light’. Using insights from her study of Bohrian physics-philosophy, Barad comes to the conclusion that the world is substantiated by relationships, not things (relata do not precede relationships) – and that it is only in the specific context of particular entanglements that boundaries and properties are negotiated. As such, there are no things, only things-in-the-making. This immediately calls into question the old Cartesian assumptions that situate the essence of the human within the human. But stepping back from this representational logic, we can notice a more troubling and deeply rich account of the discursive practices, the scientific traditions, the ecological and biopolitical frames, and the ethical matterings that need to be accounted for before we could speak about the human. This decentering of the human figure, this composting, this coming down to earth, undercuts the liberal humanist frames with which we valorize the commons as a sphere of natural resources to be protected or preserved.

One might also say that there is no commons as such, or that the commons is indeterminate and difficult to characterize; one might say there is only a commoning, a material-discursive doing that brings to our attention the myriad performances which constitute this more-than-human world. ‘The commons is not a resource, it is a cat-cradling activity through shared capacities. Recalling my earlier use of the metaphor of bringing down the walls of Jericho, one might say that the difference between liberal humanist epistemological framings of the commons and this quantum leap and queer vision for commoning is that in one story, the Jews brought down the wall of Jericho – end of story, while in another vision, where the significance of the agencies of nonhuman counterparts are not elided or made invisible, it was the ferocious blast of sound energy, the marching, the rebellious pounding of sandaled feet on ground, the time of day, the yearnings for place, the narratives of divine intervention, the materials of the wall, and even recent archaeological excavations and scientific readings that produced that event.

To practice the commons, which we always do whether we like it or not, is thus to queer our notions of agency, causality, knowledge and identity – and spacetime. We are dealing with no less than the composting of the humanities, or the dissolving of the figure of the human – a trend Rusten Hogness called ‘humusities’. We are coming down to earth, and this coming down to earth is not a coming down to romantic visions of the commons, it is not a revival of premodern notions of recovered edens. Not an incontrovertible restoration of ‘indigenous vistas’ in the sense some New Age groups are calling for a return to ‘what we really are’, as if that could be teased out from the myriad tensions and polyvocal eruptions that make up the world. It is a meeting with, a becoming-with, a sympoiesis, a recognition that we are always part of a grander becoming, and that commoning is not even about human survival or pre-made linear futures.

If one must deal other preposterous figurations to the table, I would call our moment a pagan insurgency. I imagine the conquest of Judeo-Christian and later Enlightenment thinking: the boundarying of the divine in sacred enclosures, and the simultaneous demonization and disenfranchisement of nature as mere resource or obstacle to be surmounted on the path of progress. Now, it seems, those enclosures are under siege and our walled off choir songs are being haunted by near-distant lurid tunes and drumming and noises that disturb the convenient harmony we seek. The halo is too small a circle to account for the profuse and preposterously ravishing enchantment everywhere.

Now, as cognitive psychologists are finding out, those qualities we attributed solely to humans or approximate species – thinking, remembering, feeling, intentionality – are now thought best as intersectional (or intra-sectional!). So thinking is intra-thinking, feeling is trans-affective, and free will or choice is an edited snapshot of a more-than-human murmuration or larger movement – or an exclusionary process central to how we perpetuate an autopoietic or stable sense of identity/self. To put it mildly, and to borrow the language of the times, we are at war but it is a war we must ‘lose’. The veil is pierced. Well, the tale is more scandalous than that: we were never pure to begin with. Never human to begin with. This is not a question of re-joining nature – this is a question of recognizing we are nature in its ongoing complexity.

I think the lines in the sand are being redrawn, and with this redescription of the world as non-anthropocentric, as material-discursive, as polyvocal, negotiated, imperfect, partially encountered, fragile, dispersed and everywhere already enchanted, the potential of commoning is in “shifting our attention away from anthropocentric accounts of world-making towards the situated relations and knowledge practices that characterize the commons as an ongoing, difficult, and more-than-human achievement. In this account, what is shared, by whom, and how, are not questions that can be settled by institutional regimes or techno-scientific expertise…What is shared, who is sharing, and how it should be shared, are not just ‘technical’ questions that can be resolved through the application of more detailed knowledge about the bio-economic interplay of the resources and resource-users.”[4] In a sense, we are not witnesses to the machinated outcomes of our well-oiled regimes of control, we are with-nesses, not outside the rolling, toiling, tearing, regenerative agency of the world we suppose we can cure from a distance.

It is here that I want to consider, in conclusion, the question of inclusive activisms and what the practical import of redescribing the commons as a multi-species, multi-agential, mycelial, messy, nonlinear, collective, ecopoetic, performative, imperfect, non-teleological, queer act of negotiating boundaries and territories and reimagining care or questions about survival. What to do with it? What does it mean for emancipatory politics and our visions of a more just future?

There is widespread acknowledgement that this ethics of intersubjectivity, of intra-action, of commoning – if you will – is political stultifying. There is an ambivalence at the heart of this redescription. It is not clear where to go when directions themselves are now queer…or if we expand the commons to be more than human, not just peer to peer, but particle to particle, parasite to parasite, and place to place. The resolute linearity we can chart out from where we are to where we would like to be now encounters obstacles and riddles along the way, and we are no longer in charge of our destiny. Perhaps it is helpful to echo Deborah Bird Rose’s comment: “[t]here is nothing ’natural’ about the continuity of life on earth, nor is continuity a process which can be taken for granted”[5] In short, dissolving the astral figure of man means sophisticating an ethos of limits – limits not only to what we can do, but also limits to what we can know and how to think about the future. A thicker ‘we’ is and has always been at play, and the image of the technocrat tinkering with nature’s levers eases away to honour a startling, still-in-the-works portrait of more-than-human happenings that – if we are to take Ivan Illich’s suggestion – are often best characterized by awed silence.

As such, it is not clear what ethical imperatives shine in our posthumanist context. An invitation to be humble? A curiosity about nonhuman others? A reimagination of our broader political structures along ecopoetic and biosemiotics lines? New enclosures? Bresnihan writes that “it is important to pay attention to the novel material and discursive practices that are opening around the commons – producing worlds in commons, shared worlds, that have an immanent power, an internal logic, that are radically different to the value and knowledge practices of capitalist production and liberal, techno-scientific regulation (as we have known them).” He affirms that “what is clear…is that the re-invention of the commons, understood as the making of new subjects and “values that are grounded in material practices for the reproduction of life and its needs” will be necessary for any future, emancipatory politics”, and that this does not mean “a ‘return’ to a ‘pure’ pre-capitalist time, nor even a valorization of subsistence while wealth continues to be accumulated…”

This is what informs and animates my work with curators on ‘the emergence network’ (www.emergencenetwork.org) – not so much the articulation of a different activism or the creation of a giant manifesto for inclusive activism, but a vocation to lean into the specificities, to cultivate power-with not power-over, to cultivate new ways of responding with the world.

This ethos of sympoiesis of less than linear futures (or ‘becoming-together-with’) brings us to acknowledge the liminality of our tragic and (simultaneously) stunningly hopeful circumstances. Perhaps in resituating ourselves in postures of curiosity, we queer the liberal humanist ideals that motivate our presents practices of commoning, and allow for new possibilities, some of which may be conducive to our flourishing, to thrive. This is not the same as throwing one’s hands in the air, as if to say nothing matters, it is saying what matters is more interesting than our present frames of analysis could account for. It is saying that there are wilds beyond our fences and cultivated crop monocultures. It is saying there is wisdom in surprising places. Just ask the tortoise.

[1] This talk is heavily indebted to Karen Barad’s insights on intra-action and agential realism, and – more specifically – ’s excellent paper ‘The more than human commons: from commons to commoning’.

[2] I do not presuppose a predetermined distinction between sub- and super-structures; this is just by way of elaboration.

[3] The More-than-Human Commons: From Commons to Commoning [an earlier version of this article appeared in Space, Power and the Commons: The Struggle for Alternative Futures. Kirwan, S., Dawney, L., & Brigstocke, J. (Eds.). New York: Routledge, 2015]

[4] Bresnihan, Patrick [The more-than-human commons]

[5] Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: attentive inter-actions in the sentient world. Environmental Humanities, 3, 93-109.

Photo by aresauburn

The post Pagan insurgencies and com-post humusities: Re-visioning the commons as ‘commoning’ in a more-than-human world appeared first on P2P Foundation.