“You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”- Buckminster Fuller

Ruth Gordon: In recent years there’s been a global awakening to the momentous choice humanity now faces: do we cling to the old system and choose extinction, or create a new system that grants us a future worth living?

Movements such as Standing Rock, Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future are giving voice to the widespread longing for a tenable alternative to capitalism – our urgent need for new, regenerative ways of living: systems of life that use clean renewable energy, restore ecosystems, and re-position human beings as nurturers of social networks that enable us to be caretakers for the Earth.

In Fridays for Future, the weekly youth strikes kick-started by Greta Thunberg’s solo action of protest, a new generation are questioning the apathy of the societies they’ve been born into, marching under the slogan “System Change, Not Climate Change.” They are loudly demanding that we wake up, pull ourselves back from the brink of catastrophe, and put our energies into co-creating a system of life that can avert climate disaster.

The success of Extinction Rebellion, “a revolution of love, deep ecology and radical transformation,” is partly due to the ways in which their vision of building such a regenerative culture guides their methods of organization. It was the integrity of their commitment to nonviolence and the functioning support systems that emerged among members that made it so difficult for the police to make arrests during the recent ten days of protest in the UK.

Those who thronged the streets were nourished by the actions they took part in, which were creative and joyful. This led to results, with the UK Parliament declaring a climate emergency. It remains to be seen whether this will really influence decision-making in the UK, but it’s further proof that nonviolent action sustained by networks of real solidarity can create change.

Standing Rock set a precedent for this form of holistic activism. It was one of the most diverse mass political gatherings in history, hosting such historic scenes as US army veterans asking forgiveness from Native American elders. Its unique power to gather together Indigenous peoples, environmentalists, spiritual seekers and ordinary Americans was a tribute to the depth of intention at its core – people took a stand for life itself, for the water, for the sanctity of the Earth. It showed how a global cry of outrage can be transformed into a healing convergence for life.

Although President Trump’s executive order to go ahead with the pipeline was eventually passed and the camp violently evicted, the story did not end there. Resistance continues at Standing Rock, and its example has inspired many other water protectors to stand up in movements around the world. But how can we create a worldwide and permanent shift to regeneration in every sphere of life?

What could a regenerative culture look like?

In 2017, when members of the Tamera Peace Research and Education Center in Portugal heard about the resistance at Standing Rock, they accompanied the protest with prayer and reached out to its leaders in solidarity. This exchange led to the initiation of the annual “Defend the Sacred” gatherings, which foster a network of exchange and support among activists, ecologists, technologists and Indigenous leaders who share the vision of creating a regenerative cultural model as a response to the global crisis.

Tamera is an attempt by Europeans to restore community as the foundation of life, with the vision of seeding a network of such decentralized autonomous centers (known as Healing Biotopes) right across the world. Creating solidarity between diverse movements and projects requires deep investigation of the human trauma that so often creates conflict and derails attempts at unification. This is why Defend the Sacred gatherings focus on healing trauma through consciousness work, community building, truth, and transparency. The goal is to create bonds of trust among people that are so strong that external forces will no longer be able to break them.

The leaders of the gatherings know that we can’t create a regenerative culture solely by trying to ‘smash capitalism.’ Instead, we need to understand and heal the underlying disease that generates all such systems of oppression. This disease can be described as the Western sickness of separation from life, or “wetiko,” as it was named by the North American Algonquin people. Martin Winiecki (the gatherings’ co-convenor) describes it like this:

“‘Wetiko,’ literally ‘cannibalism,’ was the word used by the Indigenous peoples to describe the disease of white invaders. It translates as the alienated human soul, no longer connected to an inner life force and so feeding on the energy of other beings.”

Wetiko is the psychic mechanism that keeps us trapped in the illusion that we exist separately from everything else. Within the isolated selfish ego, the pursuit of maximum personal gain appears to be the goal and meaning of life. Coupled with the chronic inability to feel compassion for the lives of other beings, violence, exploitation and oppression are not only justified, but appear logical and rational. If we resist only the external effects of wetiko, maybe we can win a victory here or there, but we can’t overcome the system as a whole because this ‘opponent’ also sits within ourselves. It is from within that we constantly feed and support this monstrous system.

An important part of healing wetiko relates to healing our interracial wounds. It’s significant that Defend the Sacred was initiated in Portugal – the place from where so many perpetrators of genocide and slavery in the Americas and Africa set out. A new path towards a nonviolent future will emerge from creating spaces where we can acknowledge our violent past and gain insight about what we have done as a collective. Such spaces offer the possibility of finally stepping out of the futile pattern of oppression, guilt and blame.

Tangible visions of the future.

In a recent co-written book, Defend the Sacred: If Life Wins, There Will Be No Losers, participants in the gatherings offer a mosaic of short essays that present their shared vision, along with many different ways to put it into practice. These include ending fossil fuel dependence, healing natural water cycles in cooperation with ecosystems and animals, transforming economic structures from systems of extraction to systems of giving, re-centering the voice of the feminine, creating a planetary network of solidarity and compassion, and anchoring everything in spiritual connection with the Earth as a living organism.

Supporting the transition away from fossil fuels, some members of the group are developing decentralized alternative technologies based on solar energy, while others are creating open source blueprints that enable people without specialist knowledge to construct simple plastic recycling machines all over the world.

Continuing the work of Standing Rock, the last two gatherings focused on thwarting oil drilling threats in Portugal, and each included an aerial art action in which participants used their bodies to form giant images alongside messages to “Stop the Drilling.” These actions strengthened the growing resistance in Portugal to fossil fuel extraction, which won a significant victory in October 2018 when the oil companies involved announced that they were voluntarily withdrawing all plans to extract oil in the country.

The group is also working on an approach to climate change that goes beyond the mechanical question of carbon reduction or balancing inputs and outputs, to one that views the Earth as a living whole whose ‘organs’ all need to be intact for life to flourish. A key part of this approach is the widespread restoration of ecosystems through creating Water Retention Landscapes (a method of sculpting the land to help it absorb and retain rainwater where it naturally falls). Such landscapes heal natural water cycles, which in turn can rebalance the climate and protect forests from the increasing risk of wildfires.

Another central aspect of the group’s work is to create social systems that both support the revival of feminine power and reestablish a basis of mutual support between the masculine and the feminine. Since overcoming patriarchy cannot be achieved by simply demanding change, this means creating forms of human co-existence that do not replicate patriarchal structures, but, as Monique Wilson puts it (another contributor to the book and coordinator of One Billion Rising), instead allow women to rediscover solidarity and “remember their abilities to heal, to teach, to create and to lead.”

Imagine what would happen if all the separate movements for climate justice, racial justice, ending sexual violence and developing new forms of economy could unite around a shared spiritual center, just as they did at Standing Rock. Imagine if, drawn together by their love of life and their commitment to protecting our home, the Earth, they could come together to articulate a shared vision for a future that is more compelling to people than remaining in the current broken system. This is what our planet needs now.

To join this year’s Defend the Sacred gathering from August 16–19, please click here.

For more information on our new book, Defend the Sacred: If Life Wins, There Will Be No Losers, please click here.

Reprinted from opendemocracy. You can find the original post here!

Featured image: Aerial art action during Defend the Sacred in Portugal, 2018. | Tamera Media. All rights reserved.

The post If life wins there will be no losers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“78 Reasonable Questions to Ask about Any Technology” is from the book “Turning Away from Technology” by Stephanie Mills and originally derived from 76 questions that were written by Jacques Ellul.
A great video commentary by Jacques Ellul called “The Betrayal by Technology” can be found here.

A print version (PDF) of these questions can be found here.

Ecological

• What are its effects on the health of the planet and of the person?
• Does it preserve or destroy biodiversity?
• Does it preserve or reduce ecosystem integrity?
• What are its effects on the land?
• What are its effects on wildlife?
• How much and what kind of waste does it generate?
• Does it incorporate the principles of ecological design?
• Does it break the bond of renewal between humans and nature?
• Does it preserve or reduce cultural biodiversity?
• What is the totality of its effects, it’s “ecology”?

Social

• Does it serve community?
• Does it empower community members?
• How does it affect our perception of our needs?
• Is it consistent with the creation of a communal, human economy?
• What are its effects on relationships?
• Does it undermine conviviality?
• Does it undermine traditional forms of community?
• How does it affect our way of sensing and experiencing the world?
• Does it foster a diversity of forms of knowledge?
• Does it build on, or contribute to, the renewal of traditional forms of knowledge?
• Does it serve to commodify knowledge or relationships?
• To what extent does it redefine reality?
• Does it raise a sense of time and history?
• What is its potential to become addictive?

Moral

• What values does its use foster?
• What is gained by its use?
• What are its effects beyond its ability to the individual?
• What is lost in using it?
• What are its effects on the least person in the society?

Aesthetic

• Is it ugly?
• Does it cause ugliness?
• What noise does it make?
• What pace does it set?
• How does it affect quality of life (as distinct from standard of living)?

Practical

• What does it make?
• Who does it benefit?
• What is its purpose?
• Where was it produced?
• Where is it used?
• Where must it go when it’s broken or obsolete?
• How expensive is it?
• Can it be repaired? By an ordinary person?
• What is the entirety of its cost, the full cost accounting?

Ethical

• How complicated is it?
• What does it allow us to ignore?
• To what extent does it distance us from effect?
• Can we assume personal, or communal, responsibility for its effects?
• Can its effects be directly apprehended?
• What ancillary technologies does it require?
• What behavior might it make possible in the future?
• What other technologies might it make possible?
• Does it alter our sense of time and relationships in ways conducive to nihilism?

Vocational

• What is its impact on craft?
• Does it reduce, deaden, or enhance human creativity?
• Is it the least imposing technology available for the task?
• Does it replace, or does it aid, human hands and human beings?
• Can it be responsive to organic circumstance?
• Does it depress or enhance the quality of goods?
• Does it depress or enhance the meaning of work?

Political

• What is its mystique?
• Does it concentrate or equalize power?
• Does it require, or institute, a knowledge elite?
• Is it totalitarian?
• Does it require a bureaucracy for its perpetuation?
• What legal empowerments does it require?
• Does it undermine traditional moral authority?
• Does it require military defense?
• Does it enhance, or serve, military purposes?
• How does it affect warfare?
• Does it foster a mass thinking or behavior?
• Is it consistent with the creation of global economy?
• Does it empower transnational corporations?
• What kind of capital does it require?

Metaphysical

• What aspect of the inner self does it reflect?
• Does it express love?
• Does it express rage?
• What aspect of our past does it reflect?
• Does it reflect cynical or linear thinking?

Photo by kleuske

The post 78 Questions to Ask about Any Technology appeared first on P2P Foundation.

My new book Team Human, launches today.  I’ve never written to everyone in my address book before, but this is by far the most important publication of my career: a manifesto arguing for human dignity and prosperity in a digital age.

Autonomous technologies, runaway markets and weaponized media seem to have overturned civil society, paralyzing our ability to think constructively, connect meaningfully, or act purposefully. Yet the root causes for our collective disempowerment are based on some very old, false ideas about competition, individuality, scarcity, and progress. We needn’t embed these values in the digital landscape of tomorrow. They are obsolete. We must stop optimizing human beings for technology, and start optimizing technology for us.

It’s time we reassert the human agenda. And we must do so together – not as individual players  – but as the team we actually are. Team Human.

I would be grateful if you purchase this book, which also supports the Team Human podcast.

Video republished from Ted.com

The post How to be “Team Human” in the digital future appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It is a techno-utopian and deeply anti-human sensibility, born out of a little-known confluence of American and Soviet New Age philosophers, scientists, and spiritualists who met up in the 1980s hoping to prevent nuclear war — but who ended up hatching a worldview that’s arguably as dangerous to the human future as any atom bomb.

I tell the story in my new book, Team Human, because it’s one I have yet to see documented anywhere else. I pieced it together through interviews with some of the people involved in the Esalen “track two diplomacy” program. The idea was to forge new lines of communication between the Cold War powers by bringing some of the USSR’s leading scientists and spiritualists to the Esalen Institute to mix with their counterparts in the United States. Maybe we all have common goals?

They set up a series of events at Esalen’s Big Sur campus, where everyone could hear about each other’s work and dreams at meetings during the day and hot tub sessions into the night. That’s how some of the folks from Stanford Research Institute and Silicon Valley, who would one day be responsible for funding and building our biggest technology firms, met up with Russia’s “cosmists.” They were espousing a form of science fiction gnosticism that grew out of the Russian Orthodox tradition’s emphasis on immortality. The cosmists were a big hit, and their promise of life extension technologies quickly overtook geopolitics as the primary goal of the conferences.

Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption.

The cosmists talked about reassembling human beings, atom by atom, after death, moving one’s consciousness into a robot and colonizing space. The cosmists pulled it all together for the fledgling American transhumanists: They believed human beings could not only transcend the limits of our mortal shell but also manifest physically through new machines. With a compellingly optimistic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too gusto, the cosmists told America’s LSD-taking spiritualists that technology could give them a way to beat death.

Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption. The stuff robots and computers could reproduce was the best stuff about us, anyway.

The idea that lit up the turned-on technoculture was that technology would be our evolutionary partner and successor — that humans are essentially computational, and computers could do computation better. Any ideas that could be construed to support this contention were embraced. And so Stanford professor René Girard — whose work had much broader concerns — was appreciated almost solely for his assertion that human beings are not original or creative but purely imitative creatures. And, even more thrilling to future tech titans like Peter Thiel, that the apocalypse was indeed coming, but it was the humans’ own damn fault.

No less popular to this day are the “captology” classes of Stanford’s B.J. Fogg, who teaches how to design interfaces that manipulate human behavior as surely as a slot machine can. According to the department’s website, “The purpose of the Persuasive Technology Lab is to create insight into how computing products—from websites to mobile phone software—can be designed to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.” Toward what? Toward whatever behaviors technologies can induce — and away from those it can’t.

As a result, we have Facebook using algorithms to program people’s emotions and actions. We have Uber using machine learning to replace people’s employment. We have Google developing artificial intelligence to replace human consciousness. And we have Amazon extracting the life’s blood of the human marketplace to deliver returns to the abstracted economy of stocks and derivatives.

The anti-human agenda of technologists might not be so bad — or might never be fully realized — if it didn’t dovetail so neatly with the anti-human agenda of corporate capitalism. Each enables the other, reinforcing an abstract, growth-based scheme of infinite expansion — utterly incompatible with human life or the sustainability of our ecosystem. They both depend on a transcendent climax where the chrysalis of matter is left behind and humanity is reborn as pure consciousness or pure capital.

We are not being beaten by machines, but by a league of tech billionaires who have been taught to believe that human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. We must become aware of their agenda and fight it if we are going to survive.

Image from Wikimedia Commons – New Planet, by Konstantin Yuon

The post Russian Cosmism and how it informs today’s religion of technology appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Toward an Ecological Civilization: A talk given by Jeremy Lent at the Parliament of World Religions, Toronto, November 2018Part of a panel of talks organized by David Korten, in collaboration with Francis Korten, John Cobb, and Matthew Fox, on the topic: “Toward an Ecological Civilization: A Path to Justice, Peace, and Care for Earth”Jeremy Lent’s book The Patterning Instinct (2017) investigates how different cultures have made sense of the universe and how their underlying values have shaped history. 

Further information on Ecological Civilization

More info: https://www.jeremylent.com/

The post Toward an Ecological Civilization appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this interview, Claire Milne, Inner Transition Coordinator for the Transition Network, discusses the addictive qualities of digital technologies, how we can make peace with them in our own lives, and how to repurpose these technologies for the transition to a more just, caring and ecological future.

On 20th November, Claire will join Gaia Trustee Philippe Sibaud at 42 Acres Shoreditch in London to launch Gaia’s new report Wh@t on Earth: How digital technologies are severing our relationship from ourselves, each other and our living planet. Book now!

Tell us about  your role at the Transition Network?

The Transition movement is about celebrating the wealth of our communities; it is a community-led global initiative to achieve spiritual growth and ecological, social and political change. I am both the Inner Transition Coordinator and I hold a role called Nurturing Collaboration. My roles are basically around the inner dimension of Transition and designing for collaborative culture.

Your work is in large part collaborative and reaching out to external organisations. Is there a place for digital technology in your work in Inner Transition?

I feel like although it [digital technology] plays a role in eroding deeper relationships I also feel like it’s playing, in some respects, very positive roles in connecting people at levels of scale that would otherwise be very difficult, if not impossible. So being able to collaborate beyond the local level – at the regional, national and international levels – is very helpful.

Like with anything, if we are able to be in full choice we can have a healthy relationship with digital technology and it can play a healthy role in our life. Then it starts to get more complicated because, you could equally say that hard-core Class A drugs are not wrong, because at the end of the day it’s about our relationship with them. But what we know about Class A drugs or even technology is that the way they interact with our neurobiology [has] the potential to be hurtful at the physiological and psychological level. Then it becomes more complicated because what we’re being asked to do is recover from addiction.

What part does technology play in the Transition Network’s ideal envisioned future?

I find it really helpful to ask the question: ‘is the world that I’m longing for and that my life is dedicated to in part creating screen based?’ The answer is really clearly no.

But another a part of me recognises that at the stage that we’re at, there is a need for some degree of that relationship with digital technology to enable that scale of change that is required in order to bring about transformation. And at the same time to have the depth of psychological and spiritual transformation that’s needed for us as a species, to survive, there is equal need for us to have times in our lives that are free from digital technology.

That comes back to the reality that technology has this addictive quality and therefore the creative tension that we’re all being asked to navigate at this point in history is how can we relate something that is so crucial to the transformation of our world in a way that doesn’t fall into encouraging that addiction.

And the degree to which we’re addicted to technology is seriously high, and plays out to the identity politics that were already there. The degree to which we are addicted and to what we are addicted to is correlated to the ideas we hold about what will make us lovable and feel like we belong and feel like we’re good enough. Technology just completely feeds into that, and that’s why at a psychological level it’s addictive.

In identity politics at the moment, there are certain aspects like the ‘work ethic’ that plays a big role in burn out. This core belief within us, seen as the capitalist protestant belief, that for us to be good enough – for us to be accepted by the tribe, for us to be loved – we need to be productive and we need to be good at stuff. It’s very clear that technology feeds that. It feeds this idea that we can be superhuman, we can get even more done, we can work 24/7. Social media feeds into identity politics, around what we look like and celebrity status and all the phenomena around getting likes. This is all about that addiction to looking good that feeds into these identity politics.

And I say this with compassion because it’s very easy to slip into a sort of persecutory tone, but the reality is that these are deep wounds and they’re painful and we develop behavioural strategies to protect us from feeling the wounding of believing we’re not lovable and don’t belong. These behavioural strategies have been really amplified and codified by technology.

We are at a tipping point in terms of the ecological damage that humans are causing to our living planet. We have so much knowledge about our impacts, but are arguably more disconnected from Earth than ever. Do you think digital tech is playing a role in that? Can we revive that important connection with the Earth in time before our crises totally overwhelm us?

On a good day I’ll feel like that’s possible and on a bad day I think that that’s just an absolute joke. And I don’t think anyone has the answer.

It comes back to that question: is the life I’m longing for screen-based? And I realise that’s not answering your question. I think that maybe what is important is being able to sit with the not knowing. Too much is unknown to know whether that depth of inner change is possible.

Because we cannot control what is happening, we can make a difference and make interventions. So whatever happens, we need to learn how to navigate challenging, precarious situations in the physical world. So the greatest privilege, and I think human right, is access to support around inner resilience: education around emotional intelligence, and inner resilience.

If we can be in choice around how we respond to things and in choice around how we respond to addictive substances like technology, then we have freedom. For me, the inner dimension of change and the inner dimension of transition are all about liberation from the ego and the superego, and the destruction of patriarchy and capitalism.

So ultimately, the future of the Earth and our interdependence with the other-than-human world is dependent on us liberating our egos from patriarchy and the conditions that then leads to the destruction of the Earth and other beings, because it is leading us to this state of disconnection, disillusionment and separation.

Do you see a correlation between technology and patriarchy?

I think it’s really important to look at the role that our relationship with technology is playing in coping with trauma. Because I think for a lot of people, connecting via technology enables us not to have to feel that trauma.

Connecting through technology really colludes with that dissociated state that comes with trauma. If we’re not in our bodies and in our hearts, then we can’t meet other beings from that heart-felt, emotional place, we’re just two heads meeting.

That dissociated state is what is very characteristic of a lot of society because there’s this sort of low-level trauma that’s just across the board, and I think that technology really speaks to that. A lot of the population are sort of drawn to connecting via technology because it protects us from feeling the pain and limitations around relationships.

Is there any practice that you employ to feel that reconnection with the Earth?

Well, an interesting one for me is the sit spot. And I work with the sit spot in two ways. There’s the kind of well-known sit spot where you go out and you find your spot in nature and take your attention 50% with yourself and 50% with your peripheral vision, which as a regular practice just allows this deepening of connection to the other-than-human world.

But the tune-up on that would be the inner sit spot. So bound out into the world to find your sit spot, and then practice the inner sit spot, whereby you go in to your inner world. It could take the form of a body scan or all sorts of mindfulness practices, but there’s something really beautiful about the combination of that classic sit spot out in the world and then combining that with an inner sit spot to make sure you are in connection with yourself as well.

Join Claire Milne, Philippe Sibaud and Gaia to launch the Wh@t on Earth Report and delve deeper into these reflections on 20th November, at 42 Acres Shoreditch, London.

Photo by docoverachiever

The post Is the world you long for screen-based? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the lead up to the Open Coop 2018 conference, Richard Bartlett and Natalia Lombardo (Loomio, Enspiral, the Hum) will join me in hosting an action-oriented workshop on Commonspoly at Newspeak House, London.

Commonspoly is a hacked version and critique of the game Monopoly, where the goals are to first re-municipalize private goods and then turn them into Commons. Rather than compete against each other, players must overcome ingrained training and ‘rational’, self-interest maximizing behaviours and instead learn how to cooperate to create a commons-oriented locality. It’s also great fun to play and a good challenge.

We’ll be playing with several boards simultaneously, which will make for a lively game. Apart from enjoying a fun and thought-provoking board game, we’ll also be chatting about commoning, radical politics, collaboration and much more in the context of the game.

The workshop is free but places are limited!

Please sign up by simply commenting on this post or writing to contactATp2pfoundation.net.

It will be held on Sunday the 22nd of July at 1:30 PM at:

Newspeak House, 133 Bethnal Green Rd, London E2 7DG, UK.

Also at Newspeak house: Join Richard and Natalia the previous day (Saturday July 21st) for a Masterclass on Decentralized Organizing.

Want to learn more? Watch the video or read the text below, reposted from Commonpoly’s website:

About Commonspoly

Hi there, we hope you had a safe journey, welcome to Commonspoly’s utopia!

Commonspoly is a free licensed board game that was created to reflect on the possibilities and limits of the commons as a critical discourse towards relevant changes in society, but to do it playfully. This game is an ideal device to introduce commons theories to groups in a pedagogical and enjoyable way. But it’s also great for boring, rainy afternoons!

And another thing, Commonspoly is an attempt to repair a misunderstanding that has lasted for more than a century. Back in 1904 Elizabeth Magie patented The Landlord’s Game: a board game to warn about, and hopefully prevent, the dangerous effects of monopolism. Years later she sold the patent to Parker Brothers, who turned the game into the Monopoly we know today: a game that celebrates huge economic accumulation and the bankruptcy of anyone but you.

Commonspoly turns the basic features of the traditional game upside down in an effort to imagine a possible world based on cooperation instead of competition. But is it possible to play a board game where the players have to find ways to work together, not beat each other? Well, the cycles between financial crises are shortening, global unemployment rates are skyrocketing, ice caps are melting, and we all have that hard-to-explain, creepy feeling… In this game, it’s a race against time and every player’s help is more than welcome! It’s not all bad news – we have some powerful, community-based tools to use in this struggle against the apocalypse. Let’s get down to business: we have urban, environmental, health and knowledge-based common goods to preserve!

We are working on a new version, which is going to be available this summer. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions: [email protected]

The post Learn to Play Commonspoly: London, Sunday July 22nd @ Newspeak House appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“What is, then, a philosophy of relation?

Something impossible, as long as it is not conceived of as poetics.”

 – Edouard Glissant

The World as Consciousness

Near Sant’Andrea, Italy, the sea laps onto the slabs of rock that form the edge of the island of Elba. The waves, smooth as fish bellies, slate gray, white, and aquamarine, shatter into liquid fragments on the rock. In the distance lies Corsica, barely visible in the haze, under a fan of fingers of light. The water that strokes the stones, the boulder rounded and worn away, the wind tousling one’s hair, the birds blown by and lost again, come together in a dance. We are commoners of a commons of perception from which our own experiences, our own identities and those of the world emerge.

Our identities arise through that which we are not: through impressions and touch, through sensory exchanges with that which is stone and water, molecule and light quantum, all of which somehow transform themselves into the energy of the body. All life, from the very beginning, derives from solar energy that is given to all. Our existence in an ecosphere suffused with life is part of a vast commons even before individuality can be perceived. Each individual belongs to the world and is at the same time its owner, owner of the rough stone speckled by the waves, ruffled by the wind, stroked by rays. All perception is commons, which is to say, the result of a dance of interdependency with the world. The world belongs to us completely, and at the same time, we are fully entrusted to it. It is only through this exchange that we become conscious of it and of ourselves.

Beyond Humanism

A new self-understanding that aspires to supplant modernity is currently developing. It is still in a state of flux, unformed in many ways. But often, it can be discerned as a struggle by humanism to overcome the limits of Enlightenment rationality. It questions the separation of the world into a sphere of humans and a sphere of things that consists of natural resources, animals, objects and ideas. Humans are no longer to be at the center – but the idea of nature as an independent order is also rejected.

Proponents of this type of thinking have given it various names – “Anthropocene,” “Posthumanism” and “Metahumanism,” among others. What they all share is an attempt to reconceive the relationship between humanity and nature, thus articulating the human in a different way. The proponents of this project – for example, the Italian philosopher and writer Francesca Ferrando – see “an urgency for the integral redefinition of the notion of the human” (Ferrando 2013:26).

This quest will shift completely our understanding of ourselves and of the world we are part of. As a consequence it will also imply a reordering of the realms of politics and economics. If we do not see the world any longer under a duality of “human actors” and “natural resources,” then the boundaries between that which is being distributed and those who are using it become blurred. In such a world, socioeconomics can no longer pursue only the goals of just and fair distribution because “producers” and “consumers” are often the same people. We can already witness this in the many commons now arising, and in those that have always been there and are now being rediscovered.

In other words, in the epoch of the Anthropocene and the posthumanist thinking it entails, a new metaphysics of “householding” is emerging, revealing how exchanges of matter and metabolites – and human meaning – are deeply intertwined. This is an astonishing opportunity to escape the dilemmas of modernity and to reimagine our ontological condition. It might be compared to the great transformation occurring at the beginning of the Enlightenment period.

Seeking a new concept of what is human, numerous thinkers are doing away with the separations between humans and “nature,” “nature” and “culture,” and body and mind, which have dominated our self-understanding since the Enlightenment. New propositions are challenging these dualisms and, in turn, undermining the worldview that has given rise to the neoliberal “free market” economy and the biological ideology that all organisms strive to be “efficient.” The old conceptual barriers that thwarted a more benevolent relationship between humanity and the rest of the living world can now be overcome, or at least the terms of the relationships can be shifted.

Today, we are not only in a time of economic or social upheaval, but also in a crisis of self-awareness; the very metaphors we use to describe our role in the world are inadequate. This crisis of normative perception and thought offers the rare opportunity to achieve a more balanced relationship between humans and the earth than was possible with thinking that presumes a human/nature separation. But our crisis today could also result in the opposite, namely, a more commanding, coercive vision of human dominance. Will a new form of anthropocentrism, a new toxic utopia, emerge from the current competition between perspectives? Will this worldview ultimately dominate natural history by comprehending the biological solely as an object of technical creativity? Will it treat the human as a derivative version of the cyborg – a perspective that some representatives of Anthropocene thought seem to believe? Or can we instead develop a comprehensive ontology of creative aliveness?

It is imperative to go beyond Enlightenment categories of thought to recover those currents of humanism that earlier, rationalizing streams of the Western world banished. It is equally important to evaluate some important new perspectives that contemporary thought are able to add, drawing upon co-creative perspectives in biology, anthropology and poetics. To date, theories of the Anthropocene and Posthumanism do not sufficiently include the perspective of creative aliveness; this is the diagnosis of this essay. These theories still follow mainly the notion that the world can be accurately understood as a body of inert physical matter, or, that it needs human stewardship as a controlling agent or a “gardener” (Marris 2013) to fully reach its creative potential.

This essay challenges this belief by recovering the dimension that has been forgotten since the Enlightenment and has not yet been rediscovered in the Anthropocene – the radical philosophical practice and perspective of the commons, without which the relationship of humans to reality cannot be understood. I argue that reality, from which we are descended and through which we experience and engender ourselves, is itself a commons that must be understood and connected to as such.

The commons of reality is a matrix of relationships through which aliveness is unfolding in ecosystems and history. It conveys the aliveness of biological and human communities from a perspective of metabolic dependency, exchanges of gifts, and the entanglement of actors within their vectors of activity. Living participants bring each other into being by establishing relationships (metabolism, predator/prey relationships, social ties), thus producing not only their environments but their very identities (Weber 2014).

Thus, the commons describes an ontology of relations that is at the same time existential, economic and ecological. It emphasizes a process of transformation and identity formation that arises out of a mutuality that is not only material, but also experienced. For humans, then, this ontology produces meaning and emotional reality. This process also encompasses what has recently been described as “conviviality” – “an art of living together (con-vivere) that allows humans to take care of each other and of Nature, without denying the legitimacy of conflict, yet by using it as a dynamizing and creativity-sparking force” (Alphandéry et al 2014).

In the following pages, I will attempt to describe a perspective of reality based on connecting all humans and all other creatures. I seek to shatter the familiar categories of “culture” and “nature,” which are invariably seen by moderns as separate and distinct. The two realms are in fact one, if we can recognize that reality is founded upon aliveness as the critical, connecting element. Aliveness is not limited to “nature” or “culture.” It is intrinsic to all social and biological systems. It has an objective, empirical substance and a subjective, tangible dimension, and it is always interweaving dimensions of matter with perception and experience (Weber 2013).

It is therefore essential that we elucidate a self-understanding of the Anthropocene from this perspective – an ontology of the commons. After all, without this perspective to complete the picture, the Anthropocene – the new epoch characterized by the dominance of human beings – would disregard a core attribute of reality. To distinguish the necessary new perspective from the technical rationality of the Enlightenment, I refer to this emerging perspective as Enlivenment – a theme that I explored in a previous essay (Weber 2013). Enlivenment is an ontology of aliveness, of coming to life, that is at once physical and intangible, and scientific and spiritual. It calls people to live in an unfolding natural history of freedom and self-realization.

The Anthropocene Hypothesis as a Commodification of the Creative

How, exactly, do the many, burgeoning posthumanist interpretations of our time fail to grasp the cosmos as a creative reality? Let us begin with the Anthropocene. Today, climate researchers assume that humans have become the defining biogeochemical force on Earth since the year 1800, more or less, and that the Holocene era, the phase that started with the last Ice Age, has ended (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000:17-18). Today, we are living in the “epoch of mankind,” the Anthropocene. This hypothesis, of course, is not only a scientific finding about the history of the climate: it is simultaneously a cosmological statement about the status of human beings, one that eliminates the familiar division of reality into a sphere of human activity and a sphere of nature.

It is this variant of the Anthropocene hypothesis that is increasingly affecting our deliberations on how to achieve sustainability. Its focus is frankly solipsistic – how should we humans deal with other animals and plants, and what changes should we make to our economic system? But this view lacks a critical element – an account of the more-than-human world as a living reality. The Anthropocene hypothesis may help us overcome thinking that pits humans against nature, but it fails precisely in that endeavor as long as it celebrates humans as the masters of nature. Anthropocene thinkers often enthusiastically annex the planet into the sphere of culture in what appears like a philosophical equivalent of globalization; reality is re-cast to ratify the triumph of human beings over the natural world.

To be sure, our earlier concepts of “nature” are obsolete, but not in the sense that they would have to find their place in the human world. Rather, the Anthropocene is misguided because it projects human methods for solving problems onto a cosmos that is still not understood. It speaks from within the mindset of human power. Sustainability pioneer Wolfgang Sachs observes, “At first, the term ‘Anthropocene’ expressed the diagnosis of anxiety. Ten years on, it meant power of authority” – a methodology of domination (personal communication, July 21, 2014).

If we consider “nature” to be formed predominantly by culture and technology, the Anthropocene consummates the colonialization of elemental nonhuman creative forces that Western culture has dreamed of for centuries. In other words, Anthropocene thinking is proving to be a new, more extensive iteration of enclosure. To advance narrow human purposes, it not only seizes control of self-organizing creative forces in nature (e.g., genetic engineering, nanotechnologies); it also seizes the self-organizing wild creativity within us.

Admittedly, it is hard to determine who is to blame for this habit of thinking, which is so deeply anchored in the self-understanding of the West as to be utterly invisible. We are not talking about a particular discourse, but the very foundation of our concept of reality. Forms of thinking and feeling that deviate from this sense of reality are hardly possible. Or they are considered “unscientific” and thus unserious. This subtle cognitive form of enclosure occurs with the best of intentions. Since the early modern period, the “Bacon project” has sought to achieve the separation of humans and resources. This is the quest for total self-empowerment of mankind that began with the British Renaissance scholar Francis Bacon’s “novum organon” (Schäfer 1993). This project was intended to improve human life and keep death in check. The logic and appeal of this worldview remain very much in force today. In the realm of ecology, for example, humans often regard “nature” as an inert physical Other – or they may consider themselves stewards of natural systems and their functions, which are essential for our survival.

Yet this arrangement paradoxically deepens the gulf between what is human and the rest of the world. In the end, such a stance tempts people to conceive of everything nonhuman as a soulless physical resource. From here, it is only a small step to its actual transformation into a commodity, a saleable good that can be used however we wish. Once we adopt this orientation toward the world, all further enclosures seem as necessary and desirable steps. Every physical enclosure of wild and emotionally unbridled reality can be traced back to this separation of living entities from the living context of which they are a part – a separation that neutralizes the generative power of life itself.

This dynamic can be seen in the enclosures of commons in sixteenth century England, the patenting of the human genome and in the sterile, proprietary seeds produced by gene patenting. Such outcomes are the inevitable physical expressions of a conceptual dualism, as it were, that elevates a narrow human instrumentality over the essential wildness of reality.

Dualism as an Invisible Colonialization of the Soul

This dualism is not a mere abstraction; it has been the driving force separating humans from the experience of creative vitality. It also lies at the heart of the historical Enlightenment idea that the world can become a habitable place only by means of reason, which itself is the basis for the logic of the market that also differentiates between actors and things. All of these phenomena have the same roots and are the consequence of an enclosure that is initially imaginary. The liberal market system, which makes a distinction between resources (which are traded) and subjects (who trade or who want to be supplied with things), is the product of this dualism. Dualism has appeal because it is a method for asserting control by dividing the world in two: an inanimate sphere (“nature”) that is to be dominated and a sphere of human subjects ordained to assert control.

From this perspective, there is no difference between enclosure, commodification, and colonialization. All three not only attack living systems that have no single owner, they at the same time trample on the psychological and emotional identities connected to these resources. They are all attacks on “aliveness” itself – a capacity of life that is unavailable and incomprehensible to the dualistic mind. Therefore, they are also attacks on reality. In this vein, political scientist David Johns (2014:42) observes, “Colonialism is nowhere more apparent and thriving than in the relationship between humanity and the rest of the earth.”

Actual action thus is always preceded by a tacit enclosure sanctioned by the deep assumptions of the mind. Enclosure usurps the categories of existence and disparages the concept of aliveness as well as the dimensions of experience linked to it. The practices of conceptual enclosure preemptively deny the existence of an unavailable Other, making it impossible to conceptualize and honor real, subjective experience. This Other is not only “nature” or a person from a foreign culture; it is the experience of a dimension of reality that can only be lived and not captured by rational conceptualization. This Other is the domain of physically experienced reality that precedes all conceptualization and colonialization: it is the bliss when we watch the sun rise or see a beloved partner or a young dog, or the dimension of meaning in a piece of work that benefits everyone and not just ourselves. It is the domain of what Manfred Max-Neef catalogues as “human needs” – the existential dimensions of healthy relationships to self and others (Smith & Max-Neef 2010).

Enclosure occurs through a type of thinking that ignores creative processes and the meanings of emotions, both of which originate in the body. Enclosure instead subordinates these feelings to “rationality,” “stewardship,” empiricism, discursivity and control. Such thinking culminates in the idea that “nature” and the body themselves do not exist, but are solely artifacts of culture. In modern culture, it is considered naïve to believe that “nature” can be experienced as a domain of creative unfolding, or that there is a perceptible kinship of being alive that is shared by all living things and which can be experienced. This reality is denied by our cognitive frameworks and language, resulting in what amounts to mental and spiritual enclosure. This colonialization of our innermost essence inescapably results in an “empty self,” as biophilosopher David Kidner (2014:10) predicts. This de facto “empty self” is indeed diagnosed by many as a current psychopathological “civilizational narcissism” that marks our times.

In humanity’s resurgent obsession with treating Earth as a raw, inert resource (e.g., geoengineering to forestall climate change, synthetic biology to “improve upon” nature, etc. ), the Enlightenment is pushing one last time for sovereignty over the cosmos. Here the Anthropocene is completely identical with Anthropocentrism. The old notions of human superiority, control and technical mastery are concealed by equating humans and “nature,” putting them on an equal footing. Even a sophisticated theorist such as Bruno Latour falls for this category error when he reassures his readers, “The sin is not to wish to have dominion over nature but to believe that this dominion means emancipation and not attachment” (quoted in Shellenberger & Nordhaus 2011). Since people are in fact connected in relationships (with the Earth, with each other), the fallacy lies in attempting to dominate what embraces them in ways they do not understand; they are blind to reality and prone to act destructively.

Italian philosopher Ugo Mattei believes that even the act of dividing the world into subject and object results in commodifying both (quoted in Bollier 2014). The commodification of the spirit inevitably finds a warped expression at the real and political level. “Nature” is banished to the periphery of the human world even though it still nourishes and sustains us, produces everything we eat, and remains the wellspring of creative energy. Every separation into subject and object divides the world into two realms, resources and profiteers. This boundary is not necessarily between things and people (or between matter and creatures), but between that which is used up, and those who benefit from that consumption.

Thus, we are suffering not only because of the commodification of the natural and social world. We are suffering because our conceptualization of the world itself allows commodification as the sole way to relate to it. It is no longer possible to speak about the world in the categories of subjective aliveness. We are suffering because of the enclosure of the spiritual through myriad cultural fictions of separation and domination that falsely parse the world into an outside (resource) and inside (actor). Concepts such as strict cause-and-effect relationships, causal mechanisms, the separation of body and soul – all of them fundamental premises of Enlightenment thinking – result in our taking reality hostage. We colonize it by believing in the concept of a treatable, repairable, controllable world. Any experience that contradicts this enclosure of reality must be discounted or denied.

Yet hardly anyone is aware of the profoundly misleading taxonomic screens of our language and worldview. We can barely imagine the extent to which our view of reality is distorted by spiritual enclosure. We do not realize that the self-organizing nature of our everyday lives has disappeared from view – a dispossession far more radical than the one experienced by commoners locked out of their forests a few hundred years ago. We do not appreciate how conceiving of our own selves as biomachines has impoverished us as humans, and how treating our emotional feelings chiefly as “chemical imbalances” (to be corrected through pharmaceuticals) denies an elemental dimension of our humanity.

Cutting living subjects off from participating in the commons of reality and its mixture of practices and emotions, objects and aspects of meaning, is destructive in another serious respect: It blinds us to the nature of enclosure itself. As psychologists Miguel Benasayag and Gérard Schmit (2007:101f) observe, the overarching ideology of enclosure is an ideology of control and dominance, and a denial of enduring relationships. This systemic worldview is not simply unjust and dangerous, it brazenly defies reality. It is cruel because it violates the web of relational exchange which reality is.

Every metaphysics that separates humans from the world furtively transforms itself into an inhumane ideology. The ideology of enclosure is inhumane because it generates a hierarchy in reality, ostensibly for human benefit, by installing humanity as custodian of the rational, the protector of the ordered, the knight battling chaos. Yet reality is not chaotic. On the contrary, it simply embodies an order that we are not always able to discern. Reality is structured as a creative expression of living agents, both human and more-than-human. Its structure, however, is sometimes invisible because its systems cannot be universalized, regimented or monetized without destroying life itself.

Posthumanism as an Extension of Our Machine Dreams

A flurry of new critiques are ostensibly seeking to break away from the dualisms of the Enlightenment by using “post” in their names – for example, postenvironmentalism or posthumanism. Regrettably, they do not really come to terms with creative reality. Instead they put forward hybrid versions of human nature that exist between “object” and “subject.” But ultimately they are not rooted in the processes of the creative wild, but in technological artifacts made by humans.

Posthumanism is in fact fixated on machines. It is mostly about cyborgs and hybrid humans, and has little interest in grasshoppers, geckos or the integration of the natural and the social as we see, say, in indigenous communities’ systems of thought. With the notable exception of the influential Donna Haraway, a feminist scholar who writes extensively about human-machine and human-animal relations, posthumanism wants little to do with other species. Posthumanism is oriented toward machines because they are our species-specific creations. They are artifacts that bear witness to this special feature of ours, namely being not only biological creatures of the cosmos, but also sovereign creators, controllers and engineers. Technical hybrids – i.e., humans whose cognitive abilities are enhanced by means of electronic tools or combinations of humans and machines – represent a type of the wild that fascinates many posthumanist thinkers. But a genuine posthumanism would recognize that we must imagine the deconstruction of the machines as functional essence of what is human. The “function” of our hands, after all, is not just to pick up things, but to be able to sensitively caress a stone, a loved one’s neck, or a black poodle’s fur in the warm sun.

Posthumanism as now conceived still erects walls around a colony of abstraction. It strictly guards an enclave of rationality and shies away from the practice of living connectedness. And so except for sporadic lapses when the metaphysical fabric accidentally rips, posthumanism continues to overlook the enclosure of the living body as a place of experience, feeling and self. It fails to see itself as a vehicle for any sort of exchange with the Other. Every self-styled philosophy of emancipation is on shaky ground if it is not clear about the self-concealed enclosures of the wild that it commits against our selves, our thinking and our identities.

Recognizing the Commons of Existence: The Key to the Anthropocene

The hypothesis of the Anthropocene, namely that “man and nature are one today,” can be considered in a meaningful way only if it acknowledges a theory of reality as a commons. A concept of the Anthropocene can be fruitful only if we do not grasp it as yet another “epoch of humankind,” but as an epoch in which the living co-creative reality of ecosystems becomes the foundation for how humans perceive and experience reality.

To this end, we must recognize reality itself as a commons that is pressing forward to unfold in a natural history of freedom. This history must embrace the role of the bodies and subjective experiences of all living subjects. The point is that commons are not only entities designed by humans. They are an existential, self-created necessity of all living exchange – i.e., of life itself. As theologian Martin Buber (1937) puts it, “all actual life is encounter.” All reality, every act of perception which accesses and produces the world, is a negotiation, a creative transformation between two poles, each of which is at the same time object and actor.

Even in our absence, reality is a commons. We can approach it by shaping it according to a pattern of mutual giving and giving in return, and then witness the transformational ripples following from each act of giving. Human culture has the opportunity to shape the world as a commons as it participates in the web of interdependent living things, thus making the world more real. In the Anthropocene, this new perspective on natural history as the unfolding of freedom and depth of experience and expression should be put at center stage. This idea, not a narrow vision of human instrumentality, should explicitly guide our self-understanding and our economic and political agenda. Without such an orientation, we will continue to act destructively toward other living things and our planet.

As a philosophy and practice, commoning considers the coexistence of living things on this planet as a joint, creative process, one that increases the aliveness of the biosphere and the cultural sphere. Thinking in the categories of the commons actualizes an ontology that, while not fundamentally new in Western thinking, has been underestimated and suppressed for a long time. This ontology alone makes it possible for us to grasp the conditions of evolutionary reality in which we exist and then to play a constructive part in shaping the unfolding reality. The existential realities of the world have brought us forth as participants in the natural history of the cosmos and its social, metabolical, and existential dimensions; we in turn are continually extending and recreating this natural history.

A commons is a way of entering into relationships with the world, both materially and conceptually. It does so without the usual dualistic concepts of the Enlightenment (culture/nature, animate/inanimate, etc.) and it fuses theory and practice as one. Principles of acting are embedded in concrete, situational processes of conflict, negotiation and cooperation, which in turn alter reality and generate new situations.

All principles that animate this process are intrinsic to it and cannot come from “outside” of it. The principles do not fall into our laps, and no god, state or moral-philosophical process of any kind can posit them. At the same time, however, the process of commoning – and this is true of the commons of reality, too – is anything but devoid of rules. It follows the principles for how creative relationships arise among various counterparties and thereby create their identities, shape their bodies and determine their interests. Commoning is an ecological and evolutionary reality based on concrete interactions, which always have to mediate between the flourishing of individuals and the prosperity of the encompassing whole. In this sense, existential success always is a negotiation between autonomy and fusion. Its shape can never be codified because it is a living, dynamic process; existential success can only be lived.

In this reading, all commons are “posthuman.” Our undeniable human agency is inscribed within a living system of other animate forces, each of which is both sovereign and interdependent at the same time. In commons, humankind does not hold arbitrary sway as a ruler, but as an attentive subject in a network of relationships. The effects of (inter)actions reflect back on those acting and all other nodes, animated or metaphorical – human subjects, bats, fungi, bacteria, aesthetic obsessions, infections, or guiding concepts – are active as well. Every commons is a rhizome – a material and informal network of living connections which constantly changes as it mutates and evolves.

The innermost core of aliveness cannot be classified and negotiated rationally. It is only possible to be involved in experiences and creative expression. That is why the idea of the commons, which is fundamentally about real subjects seeking nourishment and meaning through physical, pragmatic, material and symbolical means, is the best way to describe a “posthuman” connection to the rest of the biosphere. For a commons is always an embodied, material, perceptible, existential and symbolic negotiation of individual existence through the Other and the whole. It is an attempt to echo the forms of order implied in the self-creating wild through acts of creative transformation, in response to the existential imperatives of the wild.

Each of these acts involves both self-awareness and material interactions. Each is real and metabolic in that the participants of the ecosystem are linked together through the exchange of eating and being devoured, of taking and giving, and of subtly influencing the order of the whole and being influenced by it. This process is imaginative because it is triggered by the experiences of joy, fear and other feelings – which in turn are the basis for consequential actions and material changes.

The concept of the commons helps bridge – and transcend – the dualities that otherwise structure our self-awareness. It bridges the connection between the “natural” – the world of beings and species – and the “social” or “cultural” – the sphere of human-made symbolic systems, discourses and practices – by generating an interdependent, organic whole. For this reason, conceiving of “nature” as a commons of living entities is also a way of understanding ourselves anew. It helps us see and name our biological and our social aliveness as an indivisible whole conjoined to the rest of the world.

An ontology that describes reality through the lens of the commons, in other words, makes it possible to focus on aliveness as both a conceptual idea and experience. Therein slumbers the opportunity to arrive at a new, relational understanding of ourselves and the world. Going beyond “objective” structures, algorithms, and cause-and-effect scenarios that look at observable external behaviors, we can also take account of the internal feelings of the actors (which are motive-forces in their own right), and thereby escape the sterile dualism that has crippled the Western mind for so long.

The Anthropocene can reconcile and integrate humans and “nature” only if we comprehend that we exist as agents who are continuously transformed in a process that is both material and filled with meaning – a process that experiences itself emotionally and reproduces itself creatively, and in so doing generates and expresses ever more complex degrees of freedom (in a larger context of dependency on other living systems).

In this sense, “nature” and “human” are aligned and quite literally identical. Both rely on “imagination” to produce a world and self-reproduce themselves. Our identities are rooted in the uncontrollable wild and in creative self-organization, neither of which can be entirely subject to control or “stewardship.” Such control (even when asserted through enclosure) cannot prevail ultimately because the instruments of control that we devise are themselves built on “uncontrollable forms” – wildness – which remain beyond strict control and understanding. So while humans may “dominate” “nature” in ways that posthumanism celebrates, conversely, we humans are grounded by forces of wildness that ultimately cannot be subdued and mastered through cultural control because culture relies on them as the basic principles of creation, self-organization and co-creative relations.

In regarding reality as commons, we do not resolve the contradictions of existence by reducing them to one aspect – only mind, only matter, only discourse, only market. Nor do we seek anything such as a higher synthesis – the classic, devastating response to the paradoxes of existence ever since Hegel and then his student Marx, who promised a contradiction-free, higher state of being that drove utopians mad in violent anticipation.

The mundane reality is that true being is “higher” and “lower” at the same moment. And for a simple reason: What is alive resists any and all synthesis. Inner, immaterial and experiential identity, coiled within a material body, is itself the greatest paradox. This identity, which becomes real only through a body, has no separate physical mass and occupies no space. And yet still it profoundly alters the physical world and space through a continual and self-referential process.

This dimension of living reality should follow a “dialogic” rather than a binary logic, as French philosopher Edgar Morin claims. Morin’s dialogic does not try to eliminate contradictions but explicitly seizes them to illuminate the point. Living reality is a logic of dialogue and polyphony, of encounters, conversations, mutual transformations and interpretations, in the logic of negotiation and striking compromises (Morin 2001:272). It is this stance of negotiating, adapting and enduring that has determined the way in which humans have dealt with the commons since time immemorial. It is what is called commoning.

Poetic Materialism

The Anthropocene lacks the understanding that any exchange – of things (in the economy), of meanings (in communication), of identities (in the bond between subjects) – always has two sides: an external, material side and also an internal, existential side in which meaning is expressed and experienced. Reality is creative and expressive precisely because it never lets itself be reduced to one of these sides. Since all processes are founded upon relationships that convey meanings (which all subjects experience as emotions), the most appropriate way to formulate such a reality is through the idea of poetics.

The poetic dimension is the world of our feelings, our social bonds, and everything that we experience as significant and meaningful. Poetics is at the same time symbolic and material and therefore it is inextricably linked to social communication, exchange and interactions with others and the environment. Poetics describes the world that we experience in the perspective of the first person – the world in which we are at home in an intimate way and the world that we seek to protect through political arrangements. Economic exchange, which is always a meaningful householding among living beings, also takes place in this world described by a poetic reality.

In our time, the great discourses – empirical rationality, human freedom as a rational actor, instrumental reason in economics – are being exposed as deficient, provoking a mad scramble to salvage them as coherent perspectives. The real issue of our time, then, is to activate a new language. After 300 years of Enlightenment thinking, the challenge is to redefine aliveness and humanity within it by complementing techné with the concept of poiesis. Techné means explainability, analysis and successful replication. Poiesis, by contrast, means creative self-realization – an element that brings forth reality, that cannot be suppressed, and that can never be sufficiently understood to be successfully controlled.

In the end, everything is techné in one sense – but in another, everything is also poiesis. Techné is cause and effect, control, management, understanding, exchange. Poiesis is inner goal-directedness, bringing forth oneself, giving oneself over, self-expression, feeling, and accepting. Techné is planning and sustainability. Poiesis is the “wasteful” promiscuity of creation. Life needs both. Reality is both. Creative transformation grows out of the tension of this contradiction without ever resolving it.

Perhaps one could call such a perspective poetic materialism. Any thinking in relationships can take place only in the form of poetic acts. Living relationships, however, organize themselves only among bodies which constantly transform themselves, which grow and decay. In systems in which change occurs dynamically as participants seek to negotiate and transform each other, experience cannot be expressed as a fixed identity, but only as the transient expression of one through the other – in other words, poetically.

The poetic dimension is simultaneously a modification of the individual and a modification of the whole. It becomes distinct and visible in an individual only through forms of experience and symbolic expression. In this sense, as a poetics of relationships defines the individual reality, and a poetics of relationships can be understood as a commons, reality appears to the individual as a commons. Systematic thinking joined with the lived practice of commons – commoning – are based on a poetics of relations. Their idea of exchange considers both embodied things and the existential (inner) reality of meaning and feeling. All are aspects of a “creative householding” – the ability to express and experience things, which constitute the freedom that is constantly being enacted in natural history.

The idea of understanding reality through the lens of a “poetics of relation” was first formulated by the French-Carribean poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant. Glissant calls his poetics a “creolization of thinking”: a mutual transformation and fertilization of self and other without clear hierarchies. Everyone involved has equal standing. They are actors and objects. They belong to themselves. And they can be means – even food – to everyone else (see Glissant 1997).

A creolization of thinking requires “peership” between empirical reality and feeling. All processes take place inside and outside an organism simultaneously; they are always conceptual and spiritual, but they are also always real in space and time. Taking the step across the abyss between the two cultures means understanding and reevaluating creative aliveness as the center of reality. Creative action is the experience of what is alive, as experienced from the inside, subjectively. One might call it “affective objectivity” – a universal and real phenomenon, but one that is also evanescent and resistant to measurement.

Indian geographer Neera Singh has shown the extent to which this emotive power encourages commoners to act and provides subjective rewards for their action. She demonstrates that villagers in rural India not only make resources more productive through their commoning with forests. They also satisfy emotional needs and “transform their individual and collective subjectivities” (Singh 2013). They are engaging in an active poetics of relating, in which the human affect and the “material world” commune with each other and alter one another.

It bears emphasizing that “collective subjectivity” extends beyond the human community to include the subjectivities of the living environment – the trees, the supportive vegetation, the birds, the flows of water, the “real” ecosystem elements that human subjectivities actually alter. Commoners, one could say, follow a poetic reason that has emotive substance, but also material manifestations in people’s bodies, community life and local ecosystems. The poetic moment of their action manifests itself when the living forest and social community flourish together, in entangled synergy. This is something that can be perceived by the senses and experienced emotionally through the forest’s opulent biodiversity (and yes, also measured, but the measurements will invariably fail to grasp the animating power of the human affect).

It is telling that cultures for whom participation in natural processes amounts to emotional engagement in a poetic reality, do not make the distinctions between “animate” and “inanimate” or “nature” and “culture” – dualities that are taken for granted in Western thinking. The basic affective experience of being in a lively exchange with the world, taking from it and contributing to it, is denied by the West’s worldview and language: a perniciously subliminal type of enclosure.

Singh calls the psychological-emotional engagement arising from caring for a commons “emotional work.” In the absence of this affective dimension, both subject and object lose their paired identities: those working on the land, say, as well as the object of such work, the animate whole. Geographers and philosophers are increasingly beginning to comprehend land and people as a lived reality – a factor of real interactions and an existential, poetic enactment.

If such a commons is colonialized – which today would mean to be reduced to a mere resource by industrial agriculture – the emotional needs of the people involved – belonging, meaning, identity – can no longer be fulfilled. This is precisely what has happened to our purportedly modern minds – a colonization of emotions that are denounced as backward, superstitious, unenlightened or unscientific. The emotional work of caring for a commons, however, is both an ecological necessity and a material reality, as well as it is a psychological need. Therefore the collapse of affect (belonging, meaning, identity) has material consequences. As human relationships to an ecosystem erode, so does respect for the ecosystem, and the ecosystem’s stability. A kind of ecological death occurs, in turn, one that has both spiritual and biodiversity-related dimensions. The two depend on one another and balance one another.

In other words, a healthy culture is a co-creative interpretation of nature in all its irrepressible aliveness. That is why subjectivity, cooperation, negotiation and irreconcilable otherness must not be seen as patterns that only we lay upon the world, as is currently done by most economy and culture approaches. Rather it is the other way round: Subjectivity, meaning-creation, “weak” non-causal interaction, code and interpretation are deep features of living nature. Its most basic principle comes down to the paradoxical self-realization of an individual through the whole, which at the same time is “the other” that needs to be fenced off.

Need, distance and momentary balance in beauty: Aliveness as such is a commoning process. Perception thus becomes a co-creative commons integrating a subject concerned with care for its self and its environment – which both mutually imagine, nourish and bring forth one another. In this perspective our deeper feelings are themselves a distinguishing feature of patterns of creative aliveness. They affect the perceptions of subjects and impel them to participate in a co-creative commons with their environment; subjects and environment actively imagine, nourish and engender each other.

Culture therefore is not structurally different from nature in the sense that it is only human – a feature putting man apart as incommensurate with the remainder of the world. Nature, on the other hand, is not underlying human culture in a reductionist sense. Nor can all cultural structures can be explained (socio-)biologically. The causal-mechanic, efficiency-centered approach as a whole is mistaken. Nature is based on meaning, open to creative change and constantly bringing forth agents with subjective experiences. It is always creative in order to mediate the realization of the individual through the whole. Any exchange-relationship in Nature always involves both metabolism and meaning, and in this way generates feeling. Nature is a process of unfolding freedom, tapping inexhaustible creativity and intensifying experiential and expressive depth (Weber 2015).

In this sense (although not in any superficial, reductionistic pattern), culture has to be like nature. This is an idea somewhat parallel to what philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (2013) is claiming when he argues that any art worthy of its name does not copy nature’s objects but rather follows its deep process of creative unfolding, freedom and “non-identity” – the impossibility of reducing an agent to just one substance, be that a causal mechanism or language-games. Culture is structurally not different from ecological exchange processes, but echoes them in the human species-specific creative forms. It expresses our own poetic interpretation of the ever-recurring theme of coping with the irresolvable paradox of autonomy and wholeness. That is why human culture cannot control and engineer nature as a passive, non-living object. Because we humans are implicated in the creative aliveness of nature, our culture must also honor our own aliveness as the best way to foster our own freedom and long-term survival. We must shape our selfhood according to the needs of a larger whole that is necessary to all life. Autonomy is always inscribed within a larger whole and only possible through it. Paradoxically, autonomy is possible only through relation.

Seen from this perspective, it becomes essential to adopt a first-person viewpoint as a counterpoint to the purportedly scientific perspective of “objective reality,” which is typically expressed in the third person. In the ontological reality that we are describing here, the first-person perspective is both poetic (rich with meaning, feeling and implications for identity) while genuinely objective (material, scientifically measurable). The first-person viewpoint mediates our perception with our material reality, which is only possible from the perspective of a meaning-making self (see Weber & Varela 2002 for more details). Internal, first-person insights that were ruled out by a worldview that accepts only the empirical/objective point of view – because they are not “real” in the material, physical sense – become valid. Once natural ecosystems are seen as creatively alive, it becomes necessary to complement rational thinking and empirical observation with the “empirical subjectivity” of living things, and its complement, the “poetic objectivity” of meaningful experiences. This new standpoint cannot be dismissed as a soft, vague emotion, but must be heeded as a critical genre of evolutionary intelligence.

As living organisms, we must learn to experience and describe the world “from the inside” (emotionally, subjectively, socially) while at the same time treating it as a physical reality outside of us. Poetic objectivity is a solution to the destructive dualities that since the Enlightenment have separated the human species as above and apart from “nature.” Poetic objectivity represents the missing first-person-centered perspective in human culture that must act as a complement to the dominant but partial objectivist approach.

Commoning as Partaking in Reality

This essay has so far focused on the philosophical dimensions of the challenge facing humankind, but of course, the practical test is how to bring this ontological sensibility into the world and make it real. Fortunately, the social practices of creating and maintaining a commons – commoning – offer excellent opportunities for blending the subjective and objective, humanity and “nature,” and for overcoming the many other dualisms that deny our creative aliveness.

The process of commoning challenges the dualisms upon which “the economy” as conventionally understood is based. It does this by enacting different roles than those ordained by neoliberal economics and policy (such as “producer” and “consumer,” and “investor” and “natural resource”) and by building provisioning systems that are oriented toward meeting basic needs in situated contexts, and in ways that generate a sense of life and personal integration. The point of commoning projects and policies is to restore enlivenment to the center of any economy activity, which means it must strive to reflect the shared interests of all, subjective human needs and the integrity of natural ecosystems.

This can be seen in Anne Salmond’s essay in this volume (pp. 309-329), which describes how the culture of the Māori people in New Zealand expresses “the fundamental kinship between people and other life forms….They are linked together in an open-ended, dynamic set of complex networks and exchanges.” The same idea is expressed by the notion of Buen Vivir, the idea of “good living” that people in Ecuador and Bolivia use to speak about living in mindful ways with Pachamama (“Mother Earth”), the community and one’s ancestors. Needless to say, this poses serious challenges to the “modernist cosmo-logic” of the nation-state and capitalist markets. Traditional and contemporary examples add to an endless number of human ways to relate to the Other, social and natural, and defy the artificial borders of animate and inanimate. In so doing, these forms of commoning represent identity systems “beyond nature and culture,” as Collège-de-France anthropologist Philippe Descola (2013) has it.

Such patterns of commoning are not confined to people with premodern cultural roots. Even people raised in that modernist cosmo-logic of globalized industry and commerce are building commons that nourish an ontology of creative aliveness. The permaculture network is deliberately designing and engineering forms of agriculture in alignment with ecological forces. A key principle of permaculture is “integrate rather than separate,” so that farming practices build relationships among those things that work together and support each other.¹ For its part, the Burning Man community celebrates the principles of “radical inclusion” and “communal effort” in conjunction with “radical self-reliance,” “participation” and “immediacy.”² The point is to honor the wildness within every human being while insisting upon a civil social order and sustainable relationship to the land.

The idea of working with the forces of nature and the social dynamics of living communities – rather than trying to deny them, bureaucratize them or forcibly overpower them – is a key principle of commons-based governance. It is why social critics like Ivan Illich embraced the commons as a path for the spiritual reintegration of people in the face of a dehumanizing modernity. The commons helps move in this direction because it honors “affective labor” as a critical force binding people to each other, to natural systems and to earlier and future generations. The commons cultivates identity, meaning, ritual and culture among people as they work with resources to meet their everyday needs. In the process “resources” are retransformed into things that are inflected with personal and community meaning. The artful blending of the social, moral and physical into an integrated commons is what gives the commons paradigm such durability and power. It taps into wellsprings of creative aliveness in people and in so doing engenders deep satisfaction, identity, commitment, flexibility and vitality.

It is admittedly a difficult challenge for the nation-state born of ultra-rational Enlightenment principles to engineer new types of law and public policy to recognize and support commoning. The cosmo-logic of a liberal, modernist polity has trouble understanding the efficacy or desirability of governance based on subjective feelings, locally rooted knowledge and singular historical relationships; the bureaucratic state prefers to govern with universalized abstractions and atomized individuals shorn of their histories and contexts. Paradoxically, this is arguably why the nation-state and bureaucratic organizations are increasingly losing the loyalty, respect and commitment of people – their remote, impersonal modes of governance have become indifferent to the creative aliveness that human beings need and invariably seek.

The idea of citizen/consumers interacting with the market/state duopoly to advance their self-interests corresponds to the individual seeking to act smartly and efficiently to be a sovereign agent using all available resources to build up an identity and resilient self. When personal identity is regarded from this standpoint, it naturally follows that other subjects, human or otherwise, to whom the self becomes attached, are legitimately seen as mere resources for advancing one’s interests. Relationships in this picture become solely a means to a selfish end, a way of functionalizing the Other, rather than open-ended, imperfect processes of transformative exchange.

This may also be why so many commoners working on open networks – e.g., open source software, open design and production, open source agriculture, and much else – are outflanking markets that prize predictable financial gains over all else. Businesses may recognize the abundance that can be produced through common-based peer production, which necessarily draws upon people’s creative aliveness – but they are structurally designed to enclose the commons because of their ontological commitment to the subject/object division which is perfectly executed by money. Money is a means to objectify and separate. Putting a price on something reduces self-contained purpose to mere function. Therefore cash-based relationships generally disdain the value of “affective labor” and long-term commitments. Through its deep alliance with markets, the state generally colludes in denying the ontological reality of living systems despite the existential catastrophes that are now raining down on the entire planet, notably in the form of climate change.

The guardians of the state and “free market” would do well to admit their own structural limitations and legally recognize commons as a salutary form of governance. But as products of modernity and its cosmo-logic, the Market/State is mostly unable to participate as a respectful peer in the natural history of the planet; it is unwilling to acknowledge creative aliveness as an ontological foundation of reality.

It is telling that many proponents of the Anthropocene who interpret it as an epoch of world-gardening and technological stewardship over the biosphere – such as Shellenberger and Nordhaus (2013) and Marris (2013) – celebrate ultra-neoliberal free-market approaches as the best way to organize human interactions with the rest of the biosphere, and to distribute and allocate goods, and make sense of the world. They hail market creativity as the key force for inventing planet-healing technologies. This alone confirms that the postdualism of the Anthropocene is in fact still entirely anthropocentric; we are still enacting Enlightenment principles, but this time it hides behind a different mask.

This is why the tendency of certain sustainablity thinkers to hail “green economy” ecological economics and “green accounting” is questionable. To “factor in” natural services may be a quick, expedient amendment and it may in fact help otherwise-endangered ecosystems. Still, it deeply misunderstands the nature of our relationship with reality. As explained above, it fails to recognize that any exchange process is always and inevitably happening on many entangled, mutually dependent levels that reciprocally co-create one another, from the physiological to the spiritual. In a reality that consists of a dynamic and mutual unfolding of transformative relations, or existential commoning, that inescapably transforms both sides of an exchange, an economics and policy regime based on anthropocentric dualisms, including “posthumanism,” can never truly heal.

Epilogue: The Affirmation of Belonging

Modernity has sought human emancipation from nature by dominating it. The thinkers of the Anthropocene and posthumanism strive to put an end to this stance – but they continue (tacitly) to separate humans from the rest of reality. In contrast, the poetic materialism of Enlivenment outlined here, which expresses itself in successful processes of commoning, sees humans and “nature” as inextricably entangled in an exchange of mutual responsibilities, materially and culturally. The sharing of creative principles is both material and symbolic. It accepts that aliveness is a defining principle of nature just as for all species, one of which is Homo sapiens. The principles of exchange include physical embodiment, co-creativity with other living creatures, birth through death, mutual transformation through commoning, and the paradox that every connection is also a separation – because to connect, a separation is needed in the first place. It is a oneness achieved through the conjunction of two distinct unities. Identity is not wholeness, but “interpenetration,” as the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye would have put it.

The Anthropocene as a reconciliation of humans and nature will function only if we grasp that we are “nature” because we share aliveness with every being, and that creative aliveness is the underlying character according to which reality unfolds. We are transient transformations in a larger process defined by of material/semiotic referentialities. Viewed in this light, reality is revealed as a commons of those perceiving and those perceived, and their ongoing interactions. Its objectivity is not simply an academic discourse. Nor is it invented or constructed by human culture. Instead, reality is both a way of describing the world as it is and as a set of experiential practices. Like Aristotle’s ethical ideal of a mediation between the “wise and the many” (Nussbaum 2001), the ontology of the world is never fixed and unequivocal; it is always process, always birth, always becoming. The goal lies in participating in the enterprise of creative aliveness in order to make the world more real.

*       *       *

After the sun has set in Sant’Andrea off Elba, the thunderstorm, gray and , has moved on toward Corsica. The sea simultaneously mirrors the colors of the atmosphere and shakes them off, while its choppy suit of armor takes on every hue: turquoise, sky blue, gray, orange, violet, ultramarine. The ocean has no colors, it has nothing but energy. The ocean is the “wine-dark sea” that Homer celebrated in song, the power that enables the actualization of living things. It is a power that makes things more real and that lends itself to everyone who carries it further and transforms it.

We can overcome the misunderstanding of the Anthropocene that celebrates itself as the “era of humans.” To do so, however, we need an attitude of inclusivity, of mutual acceptance between attitudes, bodies, identities and sensations. We need the affirmation of belonging and a willingness to engage in an ongoing negotiation within a reality that we recognize as a commons. We can adapt our behaviors to its ongoing transformations and amalgamation. Since this is the inescapable existential reality of life itself, we must acknowledge that the fertile wild ultimately cannot be denied, suppressed or enclosed without a profound constriction on our own freedom.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. 2013. Aesthetic Theory. New York. Bloomsbury.

Alphandéry, Claude et al. 2014. Abridged version of the Convivialist Manifesto, http://lesconvivialistes.fr.

Benasayag, Miguel and Gérard Schmit. 2007. L’epoca delle passioni tristi. Milano: Feltrinelli.

Bilgrami, Akeel et al. 2013. “The Anthropocene Project: An Introduction.” Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Bollier, David. 2014. Think like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. Gabriola Island, B.C. New Society Publishers.

Buber, Martin. 1937. I and Thou. Eastford, CT: Martino (2010 reprint of the original American edition).

Crutzen, Paul J. and E. Stoermer. 2000. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” Global Change Newsletter 41:S. 17 – 18.

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago. Chicago University Press.

Ferrando, Francesca. 2013. “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations.” Existenz 8(2):26-32.

Frye, Nortrop. 1991. Double Vision. Identity and Meaning in Religion. Toronto, Ontario. Toronto University Press.

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press.

Johns, David. 2014. “With Friends Like These, Wilderness and Biodiversity Do Not Need Enemies.” In: George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist and Tom Butler, editors. Keeping the Wild. Against the Domestication of the Earth. Washington, D.C. Island Press.

Kidner, David W. 2014. “The Conceptual Assassination of Wilderness.” In Wuerthner et al. 2014.

Marris, Emma. 2013. The Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. New York. Bloomsbury.

Morin, Edgar. 2001. L’identité humaine. La methode, tome 5, L’humanité de l’humanité. Paris. Seuil.

Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy And Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press.

Schäfer, Lothar. 1993. Das Bacon-Projekt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Shellenberger, Michael and Ted Nordhaus, 2011. “Evolve: The Case for Modernization as the Road to Salvation.” In Dies, Love Your Monsters. Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Oakland, California. The Breakthrough Institute.

Singh, Neera M. 2013. “The Affective Labor of Growing Forests and the Becoming of Environmental Subjects: Rethinking Environmentality in Odisha, India.” Geoforum 47:189-198.

Smith, Philip B. and Manfred Max-Neef, 2010. Economics Unmasked: From Power and Greed to Compassion and the Common Good. Green Press.

Weber, Andreas. 2012. “The Economy of Wastefulness. The Biology of the Commons.” In David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, editors., The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State. Amherst, MA: Levellers Press.

———. 2013. Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics. Berlin: Heinrich Böll Foundation.

———. 2014. Lebendigkeit. Eine erotische Ökologie. München: Kösel.

———. 2015. Healing Ecology. Finding the Human in Nature. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers.

Weber, Andreas & Varela, Francisco J. 2002. “Life After Kant: Natural Purposes and the Autopoietic Foundations of Biological Individuality.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1:97 – 125.

Andreas Weber (Germany) is a biologist, philosopher and book and magazine writer based in Berlin. His longstanding interest is how human feeling, subjectivity and social identity are related to biological worldmaking and cognition. He recently published Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics (Heinrich Böll Foundation 2013), and Healing Ecology: Finding the Human in Nature (New Society Publishers, 2015).

Special thanks to David Bollier for inspiration, corrections and support, particularly for the section on commoning.

The post Patterns of Commoning: Reality as Commons, A Poetics of Participation for the Anthropocene appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I used to direct theater. I left the theater because I got increasingly dissatisfied with its reliance on stories with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Aristotle’s narrative arc with its rising tension, crisis, and catharsis wasn’t just predictable, but dangerously limiting. Things look bad, but as long as you accept the hero’s solution, everything gets solved and you can go back to sleep. Crisis, climax, and sleep – the much-too-male approach to everything from sex to religion, capitalism to communism.

I left theater for the net, which seemed to offer a more open-ended, connected form of sense-making. So I wrote about that, and the possibilities this opened for everything from economics to society. In my books, I usually tried crashing a set of myths – but then usually offer some alternative at the end. So in my religion book I smashed the myth of apocalypse and salvation, but offered an alternative path toward consensus, progressive collaboration. In another, I exposed the fallacy of hand-me-down truths, but then offered an alternative of collective reality creation. In a graphic novel, I undermined the authority of the storyteller (me) and then have a character hand a pencil to the reader as if through the page. In a book on Judaism, I smashed the idolatry that infected Judaism, but promote a new, provisional mythology of communal sense making. In my books on economics, I crash the cynically devised mythologies of capitalism and corporatism, but offer a new one of circular economics and sharing. In my Team Human podcast, I regularly crash the myth of the survival of the fittest individual, but offer a new evolutionary history of interspecies cooperation.

Better myths, like cultural operating systems, should yield better results. But if they are all myths, are they all ultimately destructive?

Even science falls into the trap. We get an idea – say, that agriculture was a wrong turn – and then “see” evidence that hunter-gatherers worked fewer hours than we did after the invention of agriculture. I have even quoted this ‘fact’ from neuorscientist/sociologist Robert Sapolsky, and others, before realizing it’s based not on science but a story.

People and institutions come to me to help develop a new myth for 21st Century, for digital times. But mythology feels more like the product of a television media environment – imagery and hallucination. The digital media environment is about fact. Memory. It all takes place on memory. That’s why we’re fighting less over who believes what, than what really happened. Where did humans come from? Are things getting better or worse? And the myths are no longer adequate. The stories are not up to the task.

I think Team Human’s job may be to find ways to work together without an overriding mythological construct. We should do something in a new way because it’s just better, on an experiential, practical, or scientific level. Growing food in a certain way – not because it’s connected to Mother Gaia, but because it keeps the soil alive. Not a metaphor. Reality.

If we are destined to think and communicate in myths – if that’s our nature – then we can at least accept that we all use stories to understand the world. Understanding another person means listening to their story – and sharing one’s own – but accepting that both are just stories. Myths are ways of connecting the dots between the moments of human experience. They create a sense of continuity and purpose, even though there may be none. Or myths may help each of us trace a path of cause-and-effect through a maze of reality that is so interconnected it would just overwhelm us to comprehend it in its entirety. We each make our own myth to explain the journey we happened to take. But it’s more of a convenience than a reality. And we can look back on our lives, and come up with a new myth to explain it. The myth is not for someone else, it’s for ourselves.

Of course we can still listen to one another’s perceptions and sense-making – and then gain some empathy for why they’re thinking and acting the way they do – without necessary believing any of it. And, maybe more importantly, without trying to get them to exchange their mythology for ours. Understanding other people’s myths, unconditionally and without being threatened by them, has helped keep me sane during this particularly tumultuous cultural moment.

So what’s Team Human’s job: to come up w a new myth? Or break them all? Whatever we decide, it should be a conscious choice.

This essay started as a monologue on TeamHuman.fm. Please come listen.

Photo by giveawayboy

The post Do we need a new myth, or no myth? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I. Commons and Worlds

Commons exist within worlds. Long before private property showed its ugly head and started to devour territories, people created what today we call commons as a principal strategy to enact their worlds. These worlds, made up of human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, material and spiritual beings and forms woven together in inextricably entangled ways, have continued to persevere nevertheless.

Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda (1984) describes how the introduction of barbwire for cattle ranching in the Caribbean Coast region of Colombia at the dawn of the twentieth century interrupted flows of people and animals, regularized landscapes and even desiccated wetlands and lagoons in some areas. Despite these challenges, the region’s people had a resilient culture and strove time and again to reconstitute their commons. They sought to recreate the sensual wholeness that Raoul Vaneigem describes as a casualty of the economy:

The economy is everywhere that life is not….Economics is the most durable lie of the approximately ten millennia mistakenly accepted as history….With the intrusion of work the body loses its sensual wholeness…work existed from the moment one part of life was devoted to the service of the economy while the other was denied and repressed (Vaneigem 1994:17, 18, 27, 28).

And so, and against all odds, and like many other people throughout the world, the Caribbean people described by Fals go on enacting a world of their own, creating with every act and every practice worlds in which the commons – indeed, commoning – still find a breathing space and at times even the chance to flourish. Commoners are like that. They refuse to abide by the rules of the One-World World (OWW) that wishes to organize everything in terms of individuals, private property, markets, profits, and a single notion of the Real. OWW seeks to banish nature and the sacred from the domain of an exclusively human-driven life (Law 2011).

Those who insist on commoning defy this civilization of the One-World (capitalist, secular, liberal, patriarchal, white) that arrogates for itself the right to be “the world” and that reduces all other worlds to nonexistence or noncredible alternatives to what exist (Santos 2002). Vaneigem is again instructive:

Civilization was identified with obedience to a universal and eternal market relationship….The commodity is the original form of pollution….Nature cannot be liberated from the economy until the economy has been driven out of human life….(From the moment the market system minimizes the fruits of the earth by seeing them only in terms of the fruits of labor, the market system treats nature as its slave)… As the economy’s hold weakens, life is more able to clear a path for itself (Vaneigem 1994).

This reality has always been evident to most of the world’s peoples-territory (pueblos-territorio).¹ An activist from the Process of Black Communities of Colombia said: “The territory has no price. Our ancestors cared for the territory with a great sense of belonging. This is why we have to create our economies not from the outside coming in but the other way around: from the inside going outwards.”² The world this activist talks about has persevered, again despite all odds. Let us visit this this world for a brief moment.

II. Yurumanguí: Introducing Relational Worlds

In Colombia’s southern Pacific rainforest region, picture a seemingly simple scene from the Yurumanguí River, one of the many rivers that flow from the Western Andean mountain range towards the Pacific Ocean, an area inhabited largely by Afrodescendant communities.³ A father and his six-year old daughter paddling with their canaletes (oars) seemingly upstream in their potrillos (local dugout canoes) at the end of the afternoon, taking advantage of the rising tide; perhaps they are returning home after having taken their harvested plantains and their catch of the day to the town downstream, and bringing back some items they bought at the town store – unrefined cane sugar, cooking fuel, salt, notebooks for the children, or what have you.

On first inspection, we may say that the father is “socializing” his daughter into the correct way to navigate the potrillo, an important skill as life in the region greatly depends on the ceaseless going back and forth in the potrillos through rivers, mangroves and estuaries. This interpretation is correct in some ways; but something else is also going on. As locals are wont to say, speaking of the river territory, acá nacimos, acá crecimos, acá hemos conocido qué es el mundo (“Here we were born, here we grew up, here we have known what the world is”). Through their nacer~crecer~conocer they enact the manifold practices through which their territories/worlds have been made since they became libres (i.e., free, not enslaved peoples) and became entangled with living beings of all kinds in these forest and mangrove worlds.

Let us travel to this river and immerse ourselves deeply within it and experience it with the eyes of relationality; an entire way of worlding emerges for us. Looking attentively from the perspective of the manifold relations that make this world what it is, we see that the potrillo was made out of a mangrove tree with the knowledge the father received from his predecessors; the mangrove forest is intimately known by the inhabitants who traverse with great ease the fractal estuaries it creates with the rivers and the always moving sea; we begin to see the endless connections keeping together and always in motion this intertidal “aquatic space,” (Oslender 2008) including connections with the moon and the tides that enact a nonlinear temporality. The mangrove forest involves many relational entities among what we might call minerals, mollusks, nutrients, algae, microorganisms, birds, plant, and insects – an entire assemblage of underwater, surface and areal life. Ethnographers of these worlds describe it in terms of three non-separate worlds – el mundo de abajo or infraworld; este mundo, or the human world; and el mundo de arriba, or spiritual/supraworld. There are comings and goings between these worlds, and particular places and beings connecting them, including “visions” and spiritual beings. This entire world is narrated in oral forms that include storytelling, chants and poetry.

This dense network of interrelations may be called a “relational ontology.” The mangrove-world, to give it a short name, is enacted minute by minute, day by day, through an infinite set of practices carried out by all kinds of beings and life forms, involving a complex organic and inorganic materiality of water, minerals, degrees of salinity, forms of energy (sun, tides, moon, relations of force), and so forth. There is a rhizome “logic” to these entanglements, a logic that is impossible to follow in any simple way, and very difficult to map and measure, if at all; it reveals an altogether different way of being and becoming in territory and place. These experiences constitute relational worlds or ontologies. To put it abstractly, a relational ontology of this sort can be defined as one in which nothing preexists the relations that constitute it. Said otherwise, things and beings are their relations; they do not exist prior to them.

As the anthropologist from Aberdeen Tim Ingold says, these “worlds without objects” (2011:131) are always in movement, made up of materials in motion, flux and becoming; in these worlds, living beings of all kinds constitute each other’s conditions for existence; they “interweave to form an immense and continually evolving tapestry.” (2011:10) Going back to the river scene, one may say that “father” and “daughter” get to know their local world not through distancing reflection but by going about it, that is, by being alive to their world. These worlds do not require the divide between nature and culture in order to exist – in fact, they exist as such only because they are enacted by practices that do not rely on such divide. In a relational ontology, “beings do not simply occupy the world, they inhabit it, and in so doing – in threading their own paths through the meshwork – they contribute to their ever-evolving weave.” (Ingold 2011: 71) Commons exist in these relational worlds, not in worlds that are imagined as inert and waiting to be occupied.

Even if the relations that keep the mangrove-world always in a state of becoming are always changing, to disrupt them significantly often results in the degradation of such worlds. Such is the case with industrial shrimp farming schemes and oil palm plantations for agrofuels, which have proliferated in many tropical regions of the world. These market systems, often built at the expense of mangrove and humid forest lands, aim to transform “worthless swamp” into agroindustrial complexes (Ogden 2012; Escobar 2008).

Here, of course, we find many of the operations of the One-World World at play: the conversion of everything that exists in the mangrove-world into “nature” and “nature” into “resources”; the effacing of the life-enabling materiality of the entire domains of the inorganic and the nonhuman, and its treatment as “objects” to be had, destroyed or extracted; and linking the forest worlds so transformed to “world markets,” to generate profit. In these cases, the insatiable appetite of the One-World World spells out the progressive destruction of the mangrove-world, its ontological capture and reconversion by capital and the State (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The OWW, in short, denies the mangrove-world its possibility of existing as such. Local struggles constitute attempts to (re)establish some degree of symmetry by seeking to influence the partial connections that the mangrove-worlds inevitably maintain with the OWW.

III. Territoriality, Ancestrality and Worlds

Elders and young activists in many territorial communities worldwide (including increasingly in urban areas) eloquently express why they defend their worlds even at the price of their lives. An activist from the Afrodescendant community of La Toma of Colombia’s southwest, which has struggled against gold mining since 2008, said: “It is patently clear to us that we are confronting monsters such as transnational corporations and the State. Yet nobody is willing to leave her/his territory; I might get killed here but I am not leaving.”⁴

Such resistance takes place within a long history of domination and resistance, and this is essential for understanding commoning as an ontological political practice. La Toma communities, for instance, have knowledge of their continued presence in the territory since the first half of the seventeenth century. It’s an eloquent example of what activists call “ancestrality,” referring to the ancestral mandate that inspires today’s struggles and that persists in the memory of the elders, amply documented by oral history and scholars. (Lisifrey et al. 2013) This mandate is joyfully celebrated in oral poetry and song: Del Africa llegamos con un legado ancestral; la memoria del mundo debemos recuperar (“From Africa we arrived with an ancestral legacy; the memory of our world we need to bring back”).⁵ Far from an intransigent attachment to the past, ancestrality stems from a living memory that orients itself to a future reality that imagines, and struggles for, conditions that will allow them to persevere as a distinct, living mode of existence.

Within relational worlds, the defense of territory, life and the commons are one and the same. This is the ontological dimension of commoning. To this extent, this chapter’s argument can be stated as follows: The perseverance of communities, commons, and movements and the struggles for their defense and reconstitution can be described as ontological. At its best and most radical, this is particularly true for those struggles that incorporate explicitly ethno-territorial dimensions and involve resistance and the defense and affirmation of commons.

Conversely, whereas the occupation of territories implies economic, technological, cultural, ecological, and often armed aspects, its most fundamental dimension is ontological. From this perspective, what occupies territories and commons is a particular ontology, that of the universal world of individuals and markets (the OWW) that attempts to transform all other worlds into one; this is another way of interpreting the historical enclosure of the commons. By interrupting the neoliberal globalizing project of constructing One World, many indigenous, Afrodescendant, peasant, and poor urban communities are advancing ontological struggles. The struggle to maintain multiple worlds – the pluriverse – is best embodied by the Zapatista dictum, Un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos, a world where many worlds fit. Many of these worlds can thus be seen as struggles over the pluriverse.

Another clear case of ontological occupation of territories comes from the southernmost area in the Colombian Pacific, around the port city of Tumaco. Here, since the early 1980s, the forest has been destroyed and communities displaced to give way to oil palm plantations. Nonexistent in the 1970s, by the mid-1990s they had expanded to over 30,000 hectares. The monotony of the plantation – row after row of palm as far as you can see, a green desert of sorts – replaced the diverse, heterogeneous and entangled world of forest and communities.

There are two important aspects to remark from this dramatic change: first, the “plantation form” effaces the socioecological relations that maintain the forest-world. The plantation emerges from a dualist ontology of human dominance over so-called “nature” understood as “inert space” or “resources” to be had, and can thus be said to be the most effective means for the ontological occupation and ultimate erasure of the local relational world. Conversely, the same plantation form is unthinkable from the perspective of the forest-world; within this world, forest utilization and cultivation practices take on an entirely different form, closer to agroforestry; even the landscape, of course, is entirely different. Not far from the oil palm plantations, industrial shrimp farming was also busy in the 1980s and 1990s transforming the mangrove-world into disciplined succession of rectangular pools, “scientifically” controlled. A very polluting and destructive industry especially when constructed on mangrove swamps, this type of shrimp farming constitutes another clear example of ontological occupation and politics at play (Escobar 2008).

IV. Commons Beyond Development: Commoning and Pluriversal Studies

The ontological occupation of commons and worlds just described often takes place in the name of development. Development and growth continue to be among the most naturalized concepts in the social and policy domains. The very idea of development, however, has been questioned by cultural critics since the mid-1980s; they questioned the core assumptions of development, including growth, progress, and instrumental rationality. These critiques came of age with the publication in 1992 of a collective volume, The Development Dictionary. The book started with the startling claim: “The last forty years can be called the age of development. This epoch is coming to an end. The time is ripe to write its obituary.” (Sachs 1992; Rist 1997) If development was dead, what would come after? Some started to talk about a “post-development era” in response to this question (Rahnema 1997). Degrowth theorists, notably Latouche (2009), contributed to disseminate this perspective in the North.

Postdevelopment advocates argued that it is possible for activists and policymakers to think about the end of development, emphasizing the notion of alternatives to development, rather than development alternatives. The idea of alternatives to development has become more concrete in South America in recent years with the notions of Buen Vivir (good living, or collective well-being according to culturally appropriate ways) and the rights of Nature. Defined as a holistic view of social life that no longer gives overriding centrality to the economy, Buen Vivir (BV) “constitutes an alternative to development, and as such it represents a potential response to the substantial critiques of postdevelopment” (Gudynas and Acosta 2011; Acosta and Martínez 2009). Very succinctly, Buen Vivir grew out of indigenous struggles for social change waged by peasants, Afrodescendants, environmentalists, students, women and youth. Echoing indigenous ontologies, BV implies a different philosophy of life which subordinates economic objectives to ecological criteria, human dignity and social justice. Debates about the form BV might take in modern urban contexts and other parts of the world, such as Europe, are beginning to take place. Degrowth, commons and BV are “fellow travelers” in this endeavor.

Buen Vivir resonates with broader challenges to the “civilizational model” of globalized development. The crisis of the Western modelo civilizatorio is invoked by many movements as the underlying cause of the current crisis of climate, energy, poverty and meaning. This emphasis is strongest among ethnic movements, yet it is also found, for instance, in peasant networks such as Via Campesina for which only a shift toward agroecological food production systems can lead us out of the climate and food crises. Originally proposed by the Centro Latinoamericano de Ecología Social (CLAES) in Montevideo and closely related to the “transitions to post-extractivism” framework, Buen Vivir has become an important intellectual-activist debate in many South American countries (Alayza and Gudynas 2011; Gudynas 2011; Massuh 2012). The point of departure is a critique of the intensification of extractivist models based on large-scale mining, hydrocarbon exploitation or extensive agricultural operations, particularly for agrofuels such as soy, sugar cane or oil palm. Whether they take the form of conventional – often brutal – neoliberal extractivist policies in countries like Colombia, Perú or México, or the neoextractivism of the center-left regimes, these models are legitimized as efficient growth strategies.

This implies a transition from One-World concepts such as “globalization” to concepts centered on the pluriverse as made up of a multiplicity of mutually entangled and co-constituting but distinct worlds (Blaser, de la Cadena and Escobar 2013; Blaser 2010). There are many signs that suggest that the One-World doctrine is unraveling. The growing visibility of struggles to defend mountains, landscapes, forests and so forth by appealing to a relational (non-dualist) and pluriversal understanding of life is a manifestation of the OWW’s crisis. Santos has powerfully described this conjuncture with the following paradox: We are facing modern problems for which there are no longer modern solutions (Santos 2002:13).

This conjuncture defines a rich context for commons studies from the perspective of pluriversal studies: on the one hand, the need to understand the conditions by which the one world of neoliberal globalization continues to maintain its dominance; and on the other hand, the (re)emergence of projects based on different ways of “worlding” (that is, the socioecological processes implied in building collectively a distinctive reality or world), including commoning, and how they might weaken the One-World project while widening their spaces of (re)existence.

The notion of the pluriverse, it should be made clear, has two main sources: theoretical critiques of dualism, and the perseverance of pluriversal and non-dualist worlds (more often known as “cosmovisions”) that reflect a deeply relational understanding of life. Notable examples include Muntu and Ubuntu in parts of Africa, the Pachamamaor Mama Kiwe among South American indigenous peoples, Native US and Canadian cosmologies, and even the entire Buddhist philosophy of mind. Examples also exist within the West as “alternative Wests” or nondominant forms of modernity. Some of the current struggles going on in Europe over the commons, energy transitions, and the relocalization of food, for instance, could be seen as struggles to reconnect with the stream of life. They also constitute forms of resistance against the dominant ontology of capitalist modernity. Worldwide, the multiple struggles for the reconstruction of communal spaces and for reconnecting with nature are giving rise to political mobilizations for the defense of the relational fabric of life – for instance, for the recognition of territorial rights, local knowledges, and local biodiversity. Struggles over the commons are key examples of such activation.

V. The Commons and Transitions Towards the Pluriverse

Economically, culturally, and militarily, we are witnessing a renewed attack on anything collective; land grabbing and the privatization of the commons (including sea, land, even the atmosphere through carbon markets) are signs of this attack. This is the merciless world of the global 10 percent, foisted upon the 90 percent and the natural world with a seemingly ever-increasing degree of virulence and cynicism. In this sense, the world created by the OWW has brought about untold devastation and suffering. The remoteness and separation it effects from the worlds that we inevitably weave with other earth-beings are themselves a cause of the ecological and social crisis (Rose 2008). These are aspects of what Nonini (2007) has insightfully described as “the wearing-down of the commons.”

The emergence, over the past decade, of an array of discourses on the cultural and ecological transitions necessary to deal with the interrelated crises of climate, food, energy and poverty, is powerful evidence that the dominant model of social life is exhausted. In the global North and the global South, multiple transition narratives and forms of activism are going beyond One-World strategic solutions (e.g., “sustainable development” and the “green economy”) to articulate sweeping cultural and ecological transitions to different societal models. These Transition discourses (TDs) are emerging today with particular richness, diversity and intensity. Those writing on the subject are not limited to the academy; in fact, the most visionary TD thinkers are located outside of it, even if most engage with critical currents in the academy. TDs are emerging from a multiplicity of sites, principally social movements and some NGOs, from emerging scientific paradigms and academic theories, and from intellectuals with significant connections to environmental and cultural struggles. TDs are prominent in several fields, including those of culture, ecology, religion and spirituality, alternative science (e.g., complexity), futures studies, feminist studies, political economy, and digital technologies and the commons.

The range of TDs can only be hinted at here. In the North, the most prominent include degrowth; a variety of transition initiatives (TIs); the Anthropocene; forecasting trends (e.g., Club of Rome, Randers 2012); and the movement towards commons and the care economy as a different way of seeing and being (e.g., Bollier 2014). Some approaches involving interreligious dialogues and UN processes are also crafting TDs. Among the explicit TIs are the Transition Town Initiative (TTI, UK), the Great Transition Initiative (GTI, Tellus Institute, US), the Great Turning, (Macy and Johnstone 2012) the Great Work or transition to an Ecozoic era, (Berry 1999) and the transition from The Enlightenment to an age of Sustainment. (Fry 2012) In the global South, TDs include the crisis of civilizational model, postdevelopment and alternatives to development, Buen Vivir, communal logics and autonomía, subsistence and food sovereignty, and transitions to post-extractivism. While the features of the new era in the North include post-growth, post-materialist, post-economic, post-capitalist and post-dualist, those for the south are expressed in terms of post-development, post/non-liberal, post/non-capitalist, and post-extractivist. (Escobar 2011)

VI. Conclusion: Commoning and the Commons as Umbrella and Bridge Discourses

What follows is a provisional exploration, as a way to conclude, on the relation between commoning and the commons and political ontology and pluriversal studies. To begin with TDs, it is clear that there needs to be a concerted effort at bringing together TDs in the global North and the global South. There are tensions and complementarities across these transition visions and strategies – for instance, between degrowth and postdevelopment. The commons could be among the most effective umbrellas for bringing together Northern and Southern discourses, contributing to dissolve this very dichotomy. As Bollier (2014) points out, the commons entails a different way of seeing and being, a different model of socionatural life. Seen in this way, the commons is a powerful shared interest across worlds. Struggles over the commons are found across the global North and the global South, and the interconnections among them are increasingly visible and practicable (see, e.g., Bollier and Helfrich 2012). Commons debates show that diverse peoples and worlds have “an interest in common,” which is nevertheless not “the same interest” for all involved, as visions and practices of the commons are world-specific (de la Cadena, 2015).

Second, reflection on commons and commoning makes visible commons-destroying dualistic conceptions, particular those between nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, the individual and the communal, mind and body, and so forth (see Introduction to the volume). Commons reflection reminds those of all existing in the densest urban and liberal worlds that we dwell in a world that is alive. Reflection on the commons resituates the human within the ceaseless flow of life in which everything is inevitably immersed; it enables us to see ourselves again as part of the stream of life. Commons have this tremendous life-enhancing potential today.

Third, debates on the commons share with political ontology the goal of deconstructing the worldview and practice of the individual and the economy. No single cultural invention in the West has been more damaging to relational worlds than the disembedded “economy” and its closely associated cognate, “the autonomous individual.” These two cornerstones of the dominant forms of Western liberalism and modernity need to be questioned time and again, particularly by making evident their role in destroying the commons-constructing practices of peoples throughout the planet. Working towards a “commons-creating economy” (Helfrich 2013) also means working towards the (re)constitution of relational world, ones in which the economy is re-embedded in society and nature (ecological economics); it means the individual integrated within a community, the human within the nonhuman, and knowledge within the inevitable contiguity of knowing, being and doing.

Fourth, there are a whole series of issues that could be fruitfully explored from the double perspective of commons and political ontology as paired domains. These would include, among others: alternatives to development such as Buen Vivir; transitions to post-extractive models of economic and social life; movements for the relocalization of food, energy, transport, building construction, and other social, cultural, and economic activities; and the revisioning and reconstruction of the economy, including proposals such as the diverse economy as suggested by Gibson-Graham et al. (2013), subsistence and community economies, and social and solidarity economies (e.g., Coraggio and Laville 2014). There are many ontological and political questions relating to these issues that cross-cut both commons and political ontology, from how to question hegemonic forms of thinking more effectively to how to imagine truly innovative ways of knowing, being and doing with respect to “the economy,” “development,” “resources,” “sustainability,” and so forth. Along the way, new lexicons will emerge – indeed, are emerging – for transitions to a pluriverse within which commoning and relational ways of being might find auspicious conditions for their flourishing.

Today, the multiple ontological struggles in defense of commons and territories, and for reconnection with nature and the stream of life, are catalyzing a veritable political awakening focused on relationality. Struggles over the commons are key examples of such activation. Moving beyond “development” and “the economy” are primary aspects of such struggles. But in the last instance .

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

References

Acosta, Alberto, and Esperanza Martínez, editors. 2009. El buen vivir. Una vía para el desarrollo. Quito: Abya-Yala.

Alayza, A. and Eduardo Gudynas, eds. 2011. Transiciones, post-extractivismo y alternativas al extractivismo en el Perú. Lima: RedGE y CEPES.

Berry, Thomas. 1999. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York, NY: Bell Tower

Blaser, Mario. 2010. Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Blaser, Mario, Marisol de la Cadena, and Arturo Escobar. 2013. “Introduction: The Anthropocene and the One-World.” Draft in progress for the Pluriversal Studies Reader.

Bollier, David. 2014. Think Like a Commoner. A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.

Bollier, David, and Silke Helfrich, editors. 2012. The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and the State. Amherst, MA: Levellers Press.

Coraggio, José Luis, and Jean-Louis Laville, eds. Reinventar la izquierda en el siglo XXI. Hacia un diálogo norte-sur. 191-206. Buenos Aires: Universidad de General Sarmiento.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings: Provincializing Nature and the Human through Andean Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Escobar, Arturo. 2008. Territories of Difference: Place~Movements~Life~Redes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Escobar, Arturo. 2011. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Second Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fals Borda, Orlando. 1984. Resistencia en el San Jorge. Bogota: Carlos Valencia Editores.

Fry, Tony. 2012. Becoming Human by Design. London: Berg.

Gibson-Graham, J.K., Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy. 2013. Take Back the Economy. An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Gudynas, Eduardo. 2011. “Más allá del nuevo extractivismo: transiciones sostenibles y alternativas al desarrollo”. En: El desarrollo en cuestión. Reflexiones desde América Latina. Ivonne Farah y Fernanda Wanderley, coordinator. CIDES UMSA, La Paz, Bolivia. 379-410.
http://www.gudynas.com/publicaciones/GudynasExtractivismoTransicionesCides11.pdf

Gudynas, Eduardo., and Acosta, Alberto. 2011. “La renovación de la crítica al desarrollo y el buen vivir como alternativa”. Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana 16(53):71-83. Venezuela.
http://www.gudynas.com/publicaciones/GudynasAcostaCriticaDesarrolloBVivirUtopia11.pdf

Helfrich, Silke. 2013. “Economics and Commons?! Towards a Commons-Creating Peer Economy.” presentation at “Economics and the Commons Conference,” Berlin, Germany, May 22, 2013. See report on the conference, pp. 12-15, at
http://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/ecc_report_final.pdf.

Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description. New York, NY: Routledge.

Latouche, Serge. 2009. Farewell to Growth. London: Polity Press.

Law, John. 2011. “What’s Wrong with a One-World World.” Presented to the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, September 19. Published by heterogeneities on September 25,
www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law 2111WhatsWrongWithAOneWorldWorld.pdf

Lisifrey, Ararat, Luis A. Vargas, Eduar Mina, Axel Rojas, Ana María Solarte, Gildardo Vanegas and Anibal Vega. 2013. La Toma. Historias de territorio, resistencia y autonomía en la cuenca del Alto Cauca. Bogotá: Universidad Javeriana y Consejo Comunitario de La Toma.

Massuh, Gabriela, editor. 2012. Renunciar al bien común. Extractivismo y (pos)desarrollo en America Latina. Buenos Aires: Mardulce.

Macy, Joanna, and Chris Johnstone. 2012. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy. Novato, California. New World Library.

Nonini, Donald. 2007. The Global Idea of the Commons. New York. Berghahn Books.

Ogden, Laura. 2012. Swamplife. People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades. Minneapolis, Minnesota. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Oslender, Ulrich. 2008. Comunidades negras y espacio en el Pacífico colombiano: hacia un giro geográfico en el estudio de los movimientos sociales. Bogotá: ICANH

Randers, Jorgen. 2012. 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Rahnema, M. and V. Bawtree, editors. 1997. The Post-Development Reader. London: Zed Books.

Rist, G. 1997. The History of Development. London: Zed Books.

Rose, Deborah B. 2008. “On History, Trees, and Ethical Proximity.” Postcolonial Studies 11(2):157-167.

Sachs, Wolfgang, editor. 1992. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London. Zed Books.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2002. Towards a New Legal Common Sense. London. Butterworth.

Vaneigem, Raoul. 1994. The Movement of the Free Spirit. New York. Zone Books.

Arturo Escobar (Colombia/USA) is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Research Associate, Grupo Nación/Cultura/Memoria, Universidad del Valle, Cali.

Photo by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

The post Patterns of Commoning: Commons in the Pluriverse appeared first on P2P Foundation.